Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations [0]
Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations
by Andrew Lang
Introduction
BALLADES IN BLUE CHINA.
Ballade of Theocritus
Ballade of Cleopatra's Needle
Ballade of Roulette
Ballade of Sleep
Ballade of the Midnight Forest
Ballade of the Tweed
Ballade of the Book-hunter
Ballade of the Voyage to Cythera
Ballade of the Summer Term
Ballade of the Muse
Ballade against the Jesuits
Ballade of Dead Cities
Ballade of the Royal Game of Golf
Double Ballade of Primitive Man
Ballade of Autumn
Ballade of True Wisdom
Ballade of Worldly Wealth
Ballade of Life
Ballade of Blue China
Ballade of Dead Ladies
Villon's Ballade of Good Counsel
Ballade of the Bookworm
Valentine in form of Ballade
Ballade of Old Plays
Ballade of his Books
Ballade of the Dream
Ballade of the Southern 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