THIRTY years have passed, like a watch in the night, since the earlier of
the two sets of verses here reprinted, _Ballades in Blue China_, was
published. At first there were but twenty-two _Ballades_; ten more were
added later. They appeared in a little white vellum wrapper, with a
little blue Chinese singer copied from a porcelain jar; and the
frontispiece was a little design by an etcher now famous.
Thirty years ago blue china was a kind of fetish in some circles,
æsthetic circles, of which the balladist was not a member.
The _ballade_ was an old French form of verse, in France revived by
Théodore de Banville, and restored to an England which had long forgotten
the Middle Ages, by my friends Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr. Edmund Gosse.
They, so far as I can trust my memory, were the first to reintroduce
these pleasant old French _nugae_, while an anonymous author let loose
upon the town a whole winged flock of _ballades_ of amazing dexterity.
This unknown balladist was Mr. Henley; perhaps he was the first
Englishman who ever burst into a _double ballade_, and his translations
of two of Villon’s ballades into modern thieves’ slang were marvels of
dexterity. Mr. Swinburne wrote a serious _ballade_, but the form, I
venture to think, is not ‘wholly serious,’ of its nature, in modern days;
and he did not persevere. Nor did the taste for these trifles long
endure. A good _ballade_ is almost as rare as a good sonnet, but a
middling _ballade_ is almost as easily written as the majority of
sonnets. Either form readily becomes mechanical, cheap and facile. I
have heard Mr. George Meredith improvise a sonnet, a Petrarchian sonnet,
obedient to the rules, without pen and paper. He spoke ‘and the numbers
came’; he sonneted as easily as a living poet, in his Eton days,
improvised Latin elegiacs and Greek hexameters.
The sonnet endures. Mr. Horace Hutchinson wrote somewhere: “When you
have read a sonnet, you feel that though there does not seem to be much
of it, you have done a good deal, as when you have eaten a cold
hard-boiled egg.” Still people keep on writing sonnets, because the
sonnet is wholly serious. In an English sonnet you cannot easily be
flippant of pen. A few great poets have written immortal sonnets—among
them are Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats. Thus the sonnet is a thing which
every poet thinks it worth while to try at; like Felix Arvers, he may be
made immortal by a single sonnet. Even I have written one too many!
Every anthologist wants to anthologise it (_The Odyssey_); it never was a
favourite of my own, though it had the honour to be kindly spoken of by
Mr. Matthew Arnold.
On the other hand, no man since François Villon has been immortalised by
a single ballade—_Mais où sont les neiges d’antan_?
To speak in any detail about these poor ballades would be to indite a
part of an autobiography. Looking back at the little book, ‘what
memories it stirs’ in one to whom
‘Fate has done this wrong,
That I should write too much and live too long.’
_The Ballade of the Tweed_, and the _Rhymes à la Mode_, were dedicated to
the dearest of kinsmen, a cricketer and angler. The _Ballade of
Roulette_ was inscribed to R. R., a gallant veteran of the Indian Mutiny,
a leader of Light Horse, whose father was a friend of Sir Walter Scott.
He was himself a Borderer, in whose defeats on the green field of
Roulette I often shared, long, long ago.
So many have gone ‘into the world of light’ that it is a happiness to
think of him to whom _The Ballade of Golf_ was dedicated, and to remember
that he is still capable of scoring his double century at cricket, and of
lifting the ball high over the trees beyond the boundaries of a great
cricket-field. Perhaps Mr. Leslie Balfour-Melville will pardon me for
mentioning his name, linked as it is with so many common memories. ‘One
is taken and another left.’
A different sort of memory attaches itself to _A Ballade of Dead Cities_.
It was written in a Theocritean amoebean way, in competition with Mr.
Edmund Gosse; he need not be ashamed of the circumstance, for another
shepherd, who was umpire, awarded the prize (two kids just severed from
their dams) to his victorious muse.
The _Ballade of the Midnight Forest_, the Ballade of the Huntress
Artemis, was translated from Théodore de Banville, whose beautiful poem
came so near the Greek, that when the late Provost of Oriel translated a
part of its English shadow into Greek hexameters, you might suppose, as
you read, that they were part of a lost Homeric Hymn.
I never wrote a _double ballade_, and stanzas four and five of the
_Double Ballade of Primitive Man_ were contributed by the learned _doyen_
of Anthropology, Mr. E. B. Tylor, author of Primitive Culture.
_À tout seigneur tout honneur_!
In _Ballade of his Choice of a Sepulchre_, the Windburg is a hill in
Teviotdale. _A Portrait of 1783_ was written on a French engraving after
Morland, and _Benedetta Ramus_ was addressed to a mezzotint (an artist’s
proof, ‘very rare’). It is after Romney and is ‘My Beauty,’ as Charles
Lamb said (once, unluckily, to a Scot) of an engraving, after Lionardo,
of some fair dead lady.
The sonnet, _Natural Theology_, is the germ of what the author has since
written, in _The Making of Religion_, on the long neglected fact that
many of the lowest savages known share the belief in a benevolent All
Father and Judge of men.
Concerning verses in _Rhymes à la Mode_, visitors to St. Andrews may be
warned not to visit St. Leonard’s Chapel, described in the second stanza
of _Almae Matres_. In the writer’s youth, and even in middle age,
He loitered idly where the tall
Fresh-budded mountain-ashes blow
Within its desecrated wall.
The once beautiful ruins carpeted with grass and wild flowers have been
doubly desecrated by persons, academic persons, having authority and a
plentiful lack of taste. The slim mountain-ashes, fair as the young
palm-tree that Odysseus saw beside the shrine of Apollo in Delos, have
been cut down by the academic persons to whom power is given. The grass
and flowers have been rooted up. Hideous little wooden fences enclose
the grave slabs: a roof of a massive kind has been dumped down on the old
walls, and the windows, once so graceful in their airy lines, have been
glazed in a horrible manner, while the ugly iron gate precludes entrance
to a shrine which is now a black and dismal dungeon.
“Oh, be that roof as lead to lead
Above the dull Restorer’s head,
A Minstrel’s malison is said!”
Notes explanatory are added to the Rhymes, and their information, however
valuable, need not here be repeated.