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

p. iv“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.

p. vCONTENTS.

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

p. viBallade 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

p. viiBefore 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

p. viiiRonsard’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

p. ixCameos

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

p. 1INTRODUCTION

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 p. 2nugae, 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 p. 3deal, 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.’

p. 4The 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 p. 5(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 p. 6what 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 p. 7lines, 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.

p. 9BALLADES IN BLUE CHINA

Tout

par

Soullas

p. 11A 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.

p. 12Most 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.

p. 13TO AUSTIN DOBSON.

Un Livre est un ami qui change—quelquefois. 1880. 1888

p. 15BALLADE 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: p. 16Cicalas 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!

p. 17BALLADE 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.

p. 18The 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!

p. 19BALLADE 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!

p. 20The 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.

p. 21BALLADE 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. p. 22Shy 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 p. 23And long the shadows creep: Lord of the wand of lead, Soft-footed as the snow, Wilt thou not hear me, Sleep!

p. 24BALLADE 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.

p. 25With 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.

p. 26ENVOY.

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.

p. 27BALLADE 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!

p. 28There’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!

p. 29BALLADE 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.

p. 30With 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?

p. 31BALLADE 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.”

p. 32The sea may be our sepulchre. If Fate, If tempests wreak their wrath on us, serene We watch the bolt of heaven, and scorn the hate Of angry gods that smite us in their spleen. Perchance the jealous mists are but the screen That veils the fairy coast we would explore. Come, though the sea be vex’d, and breakers roar, Come, for the air of this old world is vile, Haste we, and toil, and faint not at the oar; “It may be we shall touch the happy isle.”