Chapter 1

Transcribed from the 1911 Longmans, Green and Co. edition by David Price, email [email protected]

[Picture: Cover and spine]

[Picture: Man playing at harpsichord]

BALLADES & RHYMES

_From Ballades in Blue China_ _and Rhymes à la Mode_

* * * * *

BY A. LANG

* * * * *

“_Hom_, _c’est une ballade_!”—VADIUS.

* * * * *

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1911

All rights reserved

* * * * *

“_Rondeaux_, BALLADES, _Chansons dizains_, _propos menus_, _Compte moy qu’ilz 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.

CONTENTS.

BALLADES IN BLUE CHINA. PAGE Ballade of Theocritus 15 Ballade of Cleopatra’s Needle 17 Ballade of Roulette 19 Ballade of Sleep 21 Ballade of the Midnight Forest 24 Ballade of the Tweed 27 Ballade of the Book-hunter 29 Ballade of the Voyage to Cythera 31 Ballade of the Summer Term 34 Ballade of the Muse 36 Ballade against the Jesuits 38 Ballade of Dead Cities 40 Ballade of the Royal Game of Golf 42 Double Ballade of Primitive Man 44 Ballade of Autumn 47 Ballade of True Wisdom 49 Ballade of Worldly Wealth 51 Ballade of Life 53 Ballade of Blue China 55 Ballade of Dead Ladies 57 Villon’s Ballade of Good Counsel 59 Ballade of the Bookworm 61 Valentine in form of Ballade 63 Ballade of Old Plays 65 Ballade of his Books 67 Ballade of the Dream 69 Ballade of the Southern Cross 71 Ballade of Aucassin 73 Ballade Amoureuse 75 Ballade of Queen Anne 77 Ballade of Blind Love 79 Ballade of his Choice of a Sepulchre 81 Dizain 83 VERSES AND TRANSLATIONS. A Portrait of 1783 87 The Moon’s Minion 90 In Ithaca 92 Homer 93 The Burial of Molière 94 Bion 95 Spring 96 Before the Snow 97 Villanelle 98 Natural Theology 100 The Odyssey 102 Ideal 103 The Fairy’s Gift 105 Benedetta Ramus 107 Partant pour la Scribie 110 St. Andrews Bay 112 Woman and the Weed 114 RHYMES À LA MODE BALLADE DEDICATORY 123 THE FORTUNATE ISLANDS 125 ALMAE MATRES 139 DESIDERIUM 143 RHYMES À LA MODE 145 Ballade of Middle Age 147 The Last Cast 140 Twilight 153 Ballade of Summer 154 Ballade of Christmas Ghosts 156 Love’s Easter 158 Ballade of the Girton Girl 159 Ronsard’s Grave 161 San Terenzo 164 Romance 166 Ballade of his own Country 168 Villanelle 171 Triolets after Moschus 173 Ballade of Cricket 175 The Last Maying 177 Homeric Unity 181 In Tintagel 182 Pisidicê 184 From the East to the West 187 Love the Vampire 188 Ballade of the Book-man’s Paradise 190 Ballade of a Friar 192 Ballade of Neglected Merit 194 Ballade of Railway Novels 196 The Cloud Chorus 198 Ballade of Literary Fame 201 Νήνεμος Αἰών 203 SCIENCE 205 The Barbarous Bird-Gods 207 Man and the Ascidian 212 Ballade of the Primitive Jest 215 CAMEOS 217 Cameos 217 Helen on the Walls 220 The Isles of the Blessed 221 Death 223 Nysa 224 Colonus (I.) 225 ,, (II.) 226 The Passing of Œdipous 227 The Taming of Tyro 228 To Artemis 229 Criticism of Life 230 Amaryllis 231 The Cannibal Zeus 232 Invocation of Isis 234 The Coming of Isis 235 THE SPINET 236 NOTES 237

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, 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.

BALLADES IN BLUE CHINA

_Tout_ [Picture: Decorative graphic] _Soullas_ _par_

_A BALLADE OF XXXII BALLADES_.

_Friend_, _when you bear a care-dulled eye_, _And brow perplexed with things of weight_, _And fain would bid some charm untie_ _The bonds that hold you all too strait_, _Behold a solace to your fate_, _Wrapped in this cover’s china blue_; _These ballades fresh and delicate_, _This dainty troop of Thirty-two_!

_The mind_, _unwearied_, _longs to fly_ _And commune with the wise and great_; _But that same ether_, _rare and high_, _Which glorifies its worthy mate_, _To breath forspent is disparate_: _Laughing and light and airy-new_ _These come to tickle the dull pate_, _This dainty troop of Thirty-two_.

_Most welcome then_, _when you and I_, _Forestalling days for mirth too late_, _To quips and cranks and fantasy_ _Some choice half-hour dedicate_, _They weave their dance with measured rate_ _Of rhymes enlinked in order due_, _Till frowns relax and cares abate_, _This dainty troop of Thirty-two_.

ENVOY.

Princes, of toys that please your state Quainter are surely none to view Than these which pass with tripping gait, This dainty troop of Thirty-two.

F. P.

TO AUSTIN DOBSON.

_Un Livre est un ami qui change_—_quelquefois_. 1880. 1888

BALLADE TO THEOCRITUS, IN WINTER.

ἐσορῶν τὰν Σικελὰν ἐς ἅλα.

Id. viii. 56.

Ah! leave the smoke, the wealth, the roar Of London, and the bustling street, For still, by the Sicilian shore, The murmur of the Muse is sweet. Still, still, the suns of summer greet The mountain-grave of Helikê, And shepherds still their songs repeat Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea.

What though they worship Pan no more, That guarded once the shepherd’s seat, They chatter of their rustic lore, They watch the wind among the wheat: Cicalas chirp, the young lambs bleat, Where whispers pine to cypress tree; They count the waves that idly beat Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea.

Theocritus! thou canst restore The pleasant years, and over-fleet; With thee we live as men of yore, We rest where running waters meet: And then we turn unwilling feet And seek the world—so must it be— _We_ may not linger in the heat Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea!

ENVOY.

Master,—when rain, and snow, and sleet And northern winds are wild, to thee We come, we rest in thy retreat, Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea!

BALLADE OF CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLE.

Ye giant shades of RA and TUM, Ye ghosts of gods Egyptian, If murmurs of our planet come To exiles in the precincts wan Where, fetish or Olympian, To help or harm no more ye list, Look down, if look ye may, and scan This monument in London mist!

Behold, the hieroglyphs are dumb That once were read of him that ran When seistron, cymbal, trump, and drum Wild music of the Bull began; When through the chanting priestly clan Walk’d Ramses, and the high sun kiss’d This stone, with blessing scored and ban— This monument in London mist.

The stone endures though gods be numb; Though human effort, plot, and plan Be sifted, drifted, like the sum Of sands in wastes Arabian. What king may deem him more than man, What priest says Faith can Time resist While _this_ endures to mark their span— This monument in London mist?

ENVOY.

Prince, the stone’s shade on your divan Falls; it is longer than ye wist: It preaches, as Time’s gnomon can, This monument in London mist!

BALLADE OF ROULETTE.

TO R. R.

This life—one was thinking to-day, In the midst of a medley of fancies— Is a game, and the board where we play Green earth with her poppies and pansies. Let _manque_ be faded romances, Be _passe_ remorse and regret; Hearts dance with the wheel as it dances— The wheel of Dame Fortune’s roulette.

The lover will stake as he may His heart on his Peggies and Nancies; The girl has her beauty to lay; The saint has his prayers and his trances; The poet bets endless expanses In Dreamland; the scamp has his debt: How they gaze at the wheel as it glances— The wheel of Dame Fortune’s roulette!

The Kaiser will stake his array Of sabres, of Krupps, and of lances; An Englishman punts with his pay, And glory the _jeton_ of France is; Your artists, or Whistlers or Vances, Have voices or colours to bet; Will you moan that its motion askance is— The wheel of Dame Fortune’s roulette?

ENVOY.

The prize that the pleasure enhances? The prize is—at last to forget The changes, the chops, and the chances— The wheel of Dame Fortune’s roulette.

BALLADE OF SLEEP.

The hours are passing slow, I hear their weary tread Clang from the tower, and go Back to their kinsfolk dead. Sleep! death’s twin brother dread! Why dost thou scorn me so? The wind’s voice overhead Long wakeful here I know, And music from the steep Where waters fall and flow. Wilt thou not hear me, Sleep?

All sounds that might bestow Rest on the fever’d bed, All slumb’rous sounds and low Are mingled here and wed, And bring no drowsihed. Shy dreams flit to and fro With shadowy hair dispread; With wistful eyes that glow, And silent robes that sweep. Thou wilt not hear me; no? Wilt thou not hear me, Sleep?

What cause hast thou to show Of sacrifice unsped? Of all thy slaves below I most have labourèd With service sung and said; Have cull’d such buds as blow, Soft poppies white and red, Where thy still gardens grow, And Lethe’s waters weep. Why, then, art thou my foe? Wilt thou not hear me, Sleep?

ENVOY.

Prince, ere the dark be shred By golden shafts, ere low And long the shadows creep: Lord of the wand of lead, Soft-footed as the snow, Wilt thou not hear me, Sleep!

BALLADE OF THE MIDNIGHT FOREST.

AFTER THÉODORE DE BANVILLE.

Still sing the mocking fairies, as of old, Beneath the shade of thorn and holly-tree; The west wind breathes upon them, pure and cold, And wolves still dread Diana roaming free In secret woodland with her company. ’Tis thought the peasants’ hovels know her rite When now the wolds are bathed in silver light, And first the moonrise breaks the dusky grey, Then down the dells, with blown soft hair and bright, And through the dim wood Dian threads her way.

With water-weeds twined in their locks of gold The strange cold forest-fairies dance in glee, Sylphs over-timorous and over-bold Haunt the dark hollows where the dwarf may be, The wild red dwarf, the nixies’ enemy; Then ’mid their mirth, and laughter, and affright, The sudden Goddess enters, tall and white, With one long sigh for summers pass’d away; The swift feet tear the ivy nets outright And through the dim wood Dian threads her way.

She gleans her silvan trophies; down the wold She hears the sobbing of the stags that flee Mixed with the music of the hunting roll’d, But her delight is all in archery, And naught of ruth and pity wotteth she More than her hounds that follow on the flight; The goddess draws a golden bow of might And thick she rains the gentle shafts that slay. She tosses loose her locks upon the night, And through the dim wood Dian threads her way.

ENVOY.

Prince, let us leave the din, the dust, the spite, The gloom and glare of towns, the plague, the blight: Amid the forest leaves and fountain spray There is the mystic home of our delight, And through the dim wood Dian threads her way.

BALLADE OF THE TWEED.

(LOWLAND SCOTCH.)

TO T. W. LANG.

The ferox rins in rough Loch Awe, A weary cry frae ony toun; The Spey, that loups o’er linn and fa’, They praise a’ ither streams aboon; They boast their braes o’ bonny Doon: Gie _me_ to hear the ringing reel, Where shilfas sing, and cushats croon By fair Tweed-side, at Ashiesteel!

There’s Ettrick, Meggat, Ail, and a’, Where trout swim thick in May and June; Ye’ll see them take in showers o’ snaw Some blinking, cauldrife April noon: Rax ower the palmer and march-broun, And syne we’ll show a bonny creel, In spring or simmer, late or soon, By fair Tweed-side, at Ashiesteel!

There’s mony a water, great or sma’, Gaes singing in his siller tune, Through glen and heugh, and hope and shaw, Beneath the sun-licht or the moon: But set us in our fishing-shoon Between the Caddon-burn and Peel, And syne we’ll cross the heather broun By fair Tweed-side at Ashiesteel!

ENVOY.

Deil take the dirty, trading loon Wad gar the water ca’ his wheel, And drift his dyes and poisons doun By fair Tweed-side at Ashiesteel!

BALLADE OF THE BOOK-HUNTER.

In torrid heats of late July, In March, beneath the bitter _bise_, He book-hunts while the loungers fly,— He book-hunts, though December freeze; In breeches baggy at the knees, And heedless of the public jeers, For these, for these, he hoards his fees,— Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs.

No dismal stall escapes his eye, He turns o’er tomes of low degrees, There soiled romanticists may lie, Or Restoration comedies; Each tract that flutters in the breeze For him is charged with hopes and fears, In mouldy novels fancy sees Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs.

With restless eyes that peer and spy, Sad eyes that heed not skies nor trees, In dismal nooks he loves to pry, Whose motto evermore is _Spes_! But ah! the fabled treasure flees; Grown rarer with the fleeting years, In rich men’s shelves they take their ease,— Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs!

ENVOY.

Prince, all the things that tease and please,— Fame, hope, wealth, kisses, cheers, and tears, What are they but such toys as these— Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs?

BALLADE OF THE VOYAGE TO CYTHERA.

AFTER THÉODORE DE BANVILLE.

I know Cythera long is desolate; I know the winds have stripp’d the gardens green. Alas, my friends! beneath the fierce sun’s weight A barren reef lies where Love’s flowers have been, Nor ever lover on that coast is seen! So be it, but we seek a fabled shore, To lull our vague desires with mystic lore, To wander where Love’s labyrinths beguile; There let us land, there dream for evermore: “It may be we shall touch the happy isle.”