BALLADS NEW AND OLD.

THE scientific spirit, which has entered so fully into literature within these later years, if it has added to our knowledge of the ballad's technique, has tended, in the minds of not a few, to remove something of its real glamour. With a precise apprecia- tion of the nomenclature and character of communal composition, the refrain, the variant, and the broadside, there has, it would appear, almost necessarily gone a certain charm from the poetical theme. As if to counteract the effect, however, the poets have applied themselves with energy to a revival of this old metrical form, and the example set by Scott, Coleridge, and Keats was zealously followed by Rossetti, William Morris, and Swinbume, and at the present day is brightly sustained by Mr. Kipling and Mr. Yeats. The adequacy of their performance is an interesting literary question, and becomes particularly apposite from the recent publication of Swinburne's posthumous volume ; comprising as it does an important ballad section, it shows the strong fascination which the ballad had for a great poet. A Northumberland man by descent, Swinburne was favoured alike with an inbred sympathy and the literary associations which one would suppose might readily go to the equipment of -a true ballad-maker. The experiment was not, of course, his first effort of the sort. The Poems and Ballads of half-a-century ago, though at the time the perverse Hellenism and the resonant melody of the " Poems " excited chief attention, were hardly lees distinguished by their general literary excellence than their endeavour to revivify the old ballad art of the Borders.

Critical opinion is divided on the question whether the ballad can be actually refashioned, given a new power of attractiveness such as it enjoyed when it formed the most coveted part of the wares of Autolycus. On the one hand, we have Professor Kittredge declaring that " the traditional ballad appears to be inimitable by any person of literary cultivation " ; while, on the other hand, Mr. Gosse records that William Morris, when it was suggested to him that the editing of certain old ballads should be entrusted to Swinbume, flatly negatived the proposal. " That would never do," ho said. " He would be writing in verses that no one would be able to tell from the original stuff ! " The truth would seem to

be with the academic authority. Swinbume had undoubtedly the poetic gift of perception requisite for the task ; but it is not so clear that the creative eonditions under which he worked would have allowed him to reach the result believed possible by Morris. What he did achieve as a ballad-maker does not warrant the hope of his absolute success. The examples in the Border Ballads of his later years, and in Poems and Ballads ae well, lack essentials of the original ballad. The old ballad, apparently, by reason of the

writer's environment, the laws of metre which he had to follow, the mutability of poetic language—very decided in popular literary products—which undergoes change from age to age, was practically beyond satisfactory renewal. The power to re-create the ballad measure in its pristine character, in fact, it may safely be urged, has gone for over. It is different with more artificial metrical forms. Over and over again the sonnet has proved a masterpiece in the hands of our greatest poets. The rondeau, the rondel, and the ballade have been reconstructed and vitalized with remarkable skill by Mr. Austin Dobson and others. The explanation may be that all these forms belong to the kind of verse which is rather artistic than spontaneous. The ballad as a special literary form was of an age, not for all time. It sprang from the minds of the people ; the later balladist was probably one of the people, not a student. It was, almost to a certainty, early and late a folk-song,

and flourished and became a metrical curio just as the folk-melody must ever be only a sweet musical cadence of the past. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, usually appreciative in his Studies in Literature,

disparages the folk theory, and demurs to the idea of later individual singers from amongst the people. Favouring professional minstrelsy as a chief source, he propounds the suggestion that " once on a time there lived a man of genius who gave these songs their immortal impress " somewhere " between the Forth and the Tyne." Tho need for explication is saved by his avowal that " a guess is a guess."

Swinbume's Border Ballads embody an attempt to reproduce the very similitude of the traditional British ballad, and are charged with interest for that reason alone. Yet what he accomplished disappoints. The poet's natural tendency to elaborate diction, too slightingly referred to by Matthew Arnold as " a fatal habit of using one hundred words when one would suffice," was a distinct

difficulty with regard to his initial handling of the ballad form. The weakness is exemplified in " The Earl of Mar's Daughter,"

which, while obviously not proffered as an original work, discloses at any rate the poet's method of composition. Where the original poem, as printed by Buchan, gives one stanza to a description, Swinburne is content with not less than two. And dramatic as are the incidents of the ballads in the volume, the fault mentioned detracts from their force. Other points that make evident the writer's inability to catch the " fine careless rapture " of his model are the minute psychology, the preference for reflection over direct narration, and the inevitable shortcomings in metrical and verbal precision. Two ballads, " Lord Santis " and " Lord Scales," noteworthy as stories, lose their value from these untoward elements. But here Swinburne virtually essayed the impossible. A different opinion must be passed on his first ballads. Here he did succeed. His power as an interpreter of the ballad measure was signally manifested when he produced the ballads now regarded as classical contributions to English poetry. They take the safe ground of being poetically, not technically, imitative. Their art is a triumph. While not recalling the primary form, either in exact structure or in language, they so convince by the clarity and charm of their atmosphere, their romantic spirit, and their music and phraseology, that they really deserve to be looked upon as ballads in a complete

sense, and to be esteemed with the rare ballad productions of the past. No old ballad contains poetry and expression similar to those of " The Jacobite's Exile " ; but this poem is imbued with qualities which strikingly represent the early characteristics. The following stanzas may be instanced :-

" 0 lordly flow the Loire and Seine, And loud the dark Durance : But bonnier shine the braes of Tyne Than a' the fields of France ; And the waves of Till that speak sae still Gleam goodlier where they glance.

0 wee! were they that fell fighting On dark Drumossie's day :

They keep their hame ayont the faem, And we die far away.

0 sound they sleep, and salt, and deep, But night and day wake we ; And ever between the sea banks green Sounds loud the sundering sea."

Still more approximate to the inherent dramatic intensity and poetic vividness of the old forms is " The Bride's Tragedy," with the added skilful manipulation of a refrain. " May Janet " and " The Sea-Swallows " betray little inferiority to these. Over all shines indeed the beauty that brightened " the shores of old romance."

Immediate forerunners of Swinbume and some contemporaries did, and have done, much to invest the ballad with a charm, modem yet mediaeval, which has brought their achievement the greatest approval. The poetic principle of imitation in Poems and Ballads was also theirs, of necessity doubtless, not from choice, as it would seem to have been in Swinburne's case. The power to syllable men's deeds in an ancient tongue was not claimed by them, or, for that matter, expected of them. But their work is impressive and just as poetic craftsmanship. Scott's " Eve of St. John " has high dramatic value, while it may be said that his presumed restorations in " Kin.mont Willie " are not unworthy of the splendid context. Brilliantly wrought in its scheme, " The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" yet responds so adequately to the real ballad character that it may fairly be called the finest ballad in the world.

The quality of Keats's " La Belle Dame sans Moroi " is also superbly true. Dante Rossetti's most enduring work will very likely be his ballads. Endowed with an artistic sense, at once delicate, rare, and tempered with knowledge, Rossetti achieved marvels as a tentative re-creator of the ballad. His more graceful efforts belong to his early time, when he wrote " Sister Helen " and " Troy Town," these being, as far as vanished poetic conditions could be determined, individual imitations beyond the verdict of criticism. More modern than mediaeval, " The King's Tragedy " possesses nevertheless the dramatic power, intensity, and speed typical of its exemplars. Morris followed afar, but sympathetically, the early Rossetti method ; Browning, self-centred here as always, abandoned the recognized quatrain of the ballad story, but his " Herve Riel " has appropriate directness and force ; Tennyson's " The Revenge," likewise on a new metrical system, reflects epic qualities of nobility and pathos akin to those of " Chevy Chase." Again, under an entirely fresh setting, Mr. Kipling's " Ballad of East and Wed " repeats the picturesqueness and movement of the reiver legend. Mr. Yeats has deftly caught the tuneful notes of leery. Everywhere emerges sufficient evidenoe in these present- day poems to justify the belief that the intrinsic gift, if nothing more, of interpreting life as the first balladists did, is still a significant fact.

To speak of the old English and Scottish ballads is to recite a eulogy. They are universally held to be excellent in their kind ; among the widespread illustrations of the form in Europe there is nothing to equal them. The Scottish ballads so impressed Ruskin that, for the nonce perhaps, he overlooked Burns to accord them praise. The two classes include a vast amount of genuine poetical achievement ; Shakespeare himself is scarcely more various, Tragedy, comedy, love's sickness, adventure, dreams of the super- natural, religious rite, and hope, all are dealt with dramatically, intensely, and with imaginative vigour. The " pastoral melancholy " that poetizes Yarrow derives not a little from the wild deeds and the suffering spirits of a bygone day, the reminiscence of which haunts each valley. The air of its strange histories teems with fervent emotion. What humour, again, can be more desired than that of "The Heir of Line '+ and other mirth-inspiring

episodes ? And what demerit, moreover, can there be though we may know that France or Hungary has shared our laughter thereupon, or that Sinadab of Tartary experienced evil fortune and good as did the foolish heir ? The idyllic freshness of " The Gay Goshawk " and its compeers is that of the fair world itself. Thoroughly English glows the cordiality with which the balladist acclaims Robin Hood, the stories of whom far outshine in vivacity and in extent other English subjects. The reach after the super- natural in these remote narratives is a salient quality ; " Clerk Saunders," " Kemp Owain," " The Demon Lover," and others attain a weird realize ion of the unseen not approached by any modern effort. Human nature, earnest yet humorous, erring yet aspiring, subject to disastrous failure, but also on occasion happily triumphant, is throughout these living records depicted with graphic truth and immemorial attraction. Even the flotsam, such as that which Scott salved for good in Waverly, is now and then a concentration of sheer poetry-.

" False love; and hae ye played me this, In summer, 'mid the flowers ? I shall repay thee back again, In winter, 'mid the showers."

It is right by an additional word to appraise the diligent secondary workers for their generous ambition, though sometimes they may have been intrepidly speculative, to preserve and illumine the ballad. Sincere workers have they been, every man, with a single glorious aim. Percy, Scott, Aytoun, and Child (to name only a few) have benefited our romantic ideals to a degree which