CHAPTER VI.

BALLADS.

It may well be doubted if it be possible to write a genuine old-time ballad in these latter days, for the ballad is a poem as much the result of circumstances as an epic. Even if a Homer, a Milton, a Dante were to appear with the regularity of third-rate poetic birth, subjects fit for epic treatment would still be absentfor the wide-embracing scope of the epic leaves little room save for a select and supremely gifted few. Not indeed that I would infer, what is so constantly preached and perhaps believed now as ever since the flower of poetry first sprang from the soil of rude speech, that the day is past wherein it is possible to write a great epic poem; more than one great theme of ancient as well as more than one of comparatively recent or contemporary times awaits the new Homer, Tasso, Ariosto, or Milton, wherever such shall appear: until such appearance it will of course remain the fashion to predict the impossibility. The phase through which our minor poetical literature is passing is one wherein all attention is given to form, and form borrowed from alien literatures, by far the greater portion of it exhibiting an absence of individual and original gift, a mental ennui and emotional lassitude that are the signs of the relapse preceding the close of the brilliant Victorian

epoch. Enthusiasm is out of fashion: to have a passionate devotion to nature, to great social or religious ideals, to anything except oneself and one's personal regrets and peculiarly trying spiritual experiences in general—or to trifles of slight if any import— is "bad form." Pensive meditation on nothing particular takes the place of clarified thought and deep spiritual insight into great problems of life and nature; which after all is but natural, when thought and insight are beyond attainment. The next lustrum is not likely to bring forth much of permanent importance, or even the next decade; but thereafter new voices will make themselves heard, influences now sneered at will be at work, the polished accomplishments of our contemporary minor verse will be generally forgotten, and a larger, fresher, far more widely appealing poetic literature be ushered in with the new age.

As a great epic is not the product of any decade but depends upon special circumstances for fitting production, so a ballad meant to assimilate to the ballads of old cannot well be naturally produced in an environment like that of the present. True ballads are essentially the breath, the intenser life of a nation, and are therefore as much the outcome of general as of individual sentiment: and where ballad poetry is alien from the daily life of a people, it may safely be taken for granted that such poetry is literary and not born of natural instinctive impulse. But because a ballad of the present times cannot with propriety be given in the form of a ballad of the past, it does not follow that ballad literature of all kinds is out of harmony with modern sympathies. It is mere affectation now to write with an archaic diction which would have been

rough and crude in a crude and rough age, but the simplicity of the old folk-lore can be retained, the directness, impersonality, brevity of description, and with these united with natural language and dramatic ability, a true ballad can yet be written; not indeed a ballad full of the savour of lawless border times, but ballads of such life and adventure as might happen to any of us under suitable circumstances. This intensely simple, intensely dramatic poem of the people may still survive in that afterglow of cherished tradition which is almost reality, may still thus survive in the northwestern districts and isles of Scotland and Ireland, in Shetland, Iceland, and northern Scandinavia; but whatever else life in or in the neighbourhood of towns may be productive of, it does not nourish the lawless actions and wild freedom that were as breath to the nostrils of our forefathers.

But having dissociated the name from the stirring times of the past, the ballad can still remain a choice form for expression in more than one direction: it can be an historical or legendary poem treated with the simple directness of the old method, or it can be a dramatic lyric, dealing with imaginative creations in place of real personalities and actual facts. In whatever way it be used it must be unindividual, in the sense of betraying the writer's personality, and dramatic in its motif, for the ballad belongs neither to lyric poetry nor the drama, but has essential characteristics of either it partakes of the lyric form but is not a lyric, inasmuch as the latter is the expression of individual life, while a drama is that of the life of others. The ballad then is the lyrically dramatic expression of actions and events in the lives of others.

Of the seven published ballads by Rossetti, three belong to the historical or legendary section, three to the section of individual imaginative creation, and one stands midway betwixt these two sections. The three that more or less accurately conform to ballad requirements are Stratton Water, The King's Tragedy, and The White Ship; those that are so strongly marked by individual characteristics and by general style as to be better embraced by the freer term dramatic lyrics or lyrically dramatic poems, are Troy Town, Eden Bower and Rose Mary, and the seventh is Sister Helen.1

Reference was made to the last-named splendid and powerful poem in the first chapter, where it will be remembered its date of composition was given as 1851, and where the circumstances connected with its first printed appearance in the Düsseldorf Magazine were described. Rossetti at this time (1851) was only twenty-three, yet Sister Helen has as firm a grasp and as mature strength as anything from his pen in later life. This powerful and intensely dramatic production differs from any previous poem similar in form in having a burden or refrain varying in slight degree with each verse, the prevailing custom amongst later balladists having been an accompaniment charged with some ominous natural note such as The willows wail in the waning light, or else with some absolutely meaningless rhythmical echo, in either case varying not oftener than alternate occurrence. And in the case of Sister Helen, it must be confessed a great part of the weird charm it exercises is contained in the accompanying refrain of

1 To this enumeration should perhaps be added Dennis Shand, but as it does not appear amongst the published poems, and as the author in a sense discarded it, no notice of it will be taken.

To

two lines, varying as the latter does only in the first words of the second line. The central idea of the poem, that of a woman being able to charm away the life of the man she loves or loved by melting a waxen image of him, is not of course original, existing as the legend does in many countries; but in this ballad it has found expression such as it had never hitherto had, with an intensity of feeling, an instinctive grasp of supernatural effect, and a sustained passion of diction that will in all probability assure it its place of permanent unchallenged honour in our literature. wards the supernatural Rossetti had a special leaning, and in supernatural suggestiveness his poems afford several markedly fine instances; indeed, what I think will yet come to be considered his two chief and noblest compositions, Sister Helen and The King's Tragedy, are permeated with the supernatural element which was so akin to the inborn mysticism of his own nature. Finely conceived and worked out as was the poem from the first, it has yet undergone great improvement since its composition in 1851, the first decided gain being in the addition of what is now the first verse, which gives at once the clue necessary for immediate understanding. There is no difference between the 1870 and five subsequent editions of The Poems and the Tauchnitz version, save that the latter in the third line of the thirty-second verse reads But Keith of Ewern's sadder still, instead of But he and I are sadder still. The seventeenth verse (1870) is not in the original copy. But very material alterations indeed took place subsequent to its appearance in the Tauchnitz edition, additions which are of great gain in every way, and which were incorporated in the 1881