Ballads in Blue China | Page 4

Cross Ballade of Aucassin
Ballade Amoureuse Ballade of Queen Anne Ballade of Blind Love
Ballade of his Choice of a Sepulchre Dizain VERSES AND
TRANSLATIONS. A Portrait of 1783 The Moon's Minion In Ithaca
Homer The Burial of Moliere Bion Spring Before the Snow Villanelle
Natural Theology The Odyssey Ideal The Fairy's Gift Benedetta Ramus
Partant pour la Scribie St. Andrews Bay Woman and the Weed

"Rondeaux, BALLADES, Chansons dizains, propos menus, Compte
moy qu'ils sont devenuz: Se faict il plus rien de nouveau?" CLEMENT
MAROT, Dialogue de deux Amoureux.
"I love a ballad but even too well; if it be doleful matter, merrily set
down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably." A
Winter's Tale, Act iv. sc. 3.

INTRODUCTION

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,
aesthetic circles, of which the balladist was not a member.
The ballade was an old French form of verse, in France revived by
Theodore 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 Francois Villon has been immortalised
by a single ballade--Mais ou 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 a 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