BOOKS.

BALLADS.* BALLans bear to the higher lyrical or epic poetry into which they sometimes rise, the same kind of relation which the short

uncertain trot of infancy bears to the firm light tread of manhood. It is not true, as is sometimes said, that the early poetry of a nation naturally falls into the ballad form. Nothing can be less like ballad poetry than Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Homer's Iliad. A genuine poet, into whatever age of the world he is born, will have too much tension of mind to put his most characteris tic thoughts into the proper ballad form. Ballads are in some sense the poetry of public opinion in a society where public opinion is simple, quaint, passionate, and poetic. Their pathos and gaiety, their anger, their love, and their pictorial colour- ing, are usually of the less sustained and more familiar kind which belongs to popular feeling. There is something just a little slip-shod, not indifferent, but full of that sense that it is human to enjoy or suffer, and also human to enjoy the re- cital of either joy or suffering,—about the expression of emotion proper to a ballad. Ballads spring, too, usually from a class of society that has been well broken-in to pain and want, but from that very cause has lost some of the bloom though nothing of the substance of pity and fear. In tone they usually treat human calamities less individually than as the best feelings of a kindly peasantry expressed gossipingly, yet with a simple sort of easy pathos. Take the following, for iustance, as a specimen of the tone in which the true ballad poetry treats a real tragedy :- " Loan RONALD.

"t0 where hae ye been, Lord Ronald, my son ? 0 where hae ye been, my handsome young man ? ' `1 hae been to the wood ; mother, make my bed soon, For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain would lie down.'

"'Where gat ye your dinner, Lord Ronald, my son? Where gat ye your dinner, my handsome young man?' I dined wi' my love ; mother, make my bed soon, For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain would lie down.'

" ' What gat ye to dinner, Lord Ronald, my son ? What gat ye to dinner, my handsome young man?' `1 gat eels boil'd in broo ; mother, make my bed soon, For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain would lie down.'

" ' And where are your bloodhounds, Lord Ronald, my son ? And where are your bloodhounds, my handsome young man ? ' 0 they swell'd and they died! mother, make any bed soon, For I'm weary wi' hunting, and fain would lie down.'

" ' 0 I fear ye are poison'd, Lord Ronald, my son! 0 I fear ye are poison'd, my handsome young man !' `0 yes, I'm poison'd ! mother, make any bed soon, For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain would lie down."

There is a crooning sort of pathos in this ballad, but a croon is not lyric or tragic poetry. It seems to express the way in which a nurse might croon out the tragedy to a child, with that sort of cheery rubadub accompaniment which they so often set to mournful tales. And undoubtedly it is tragedy in a rocking-chair. Of course there are many ballads with far less of that slipshod movement with which gossips retail grief or joy, and far more of the pure poetry of simple life about them, than this. Take, for instance, the following beautiful ballad on a homely tragedy enough,—a ballad which is, too, in some respects a type of a class, because it has one of those fre- quent " burdens" in which the words are used not to convey meaning, but to sunder the various layers of meaning with sym- bols of monotonous beauty that delay the movement, and come back like those refrains in the mind which mask a mood, rather than any thing distinct, either thought or feeling:— " FINE FLOWERS at THE VALLEY.

"She sat down below a thorn,

Fine flowers in the valley; And there she has her sweet babe born, And the green leaves they grow rarely.

" 'Smile na sae sweet, my bonny babe,

Finejlowers in the valley

An ye smile sad sweet, ye'll smile me dead,'

- And the green leaves they grow rarely.

" She's ta'en out her little penknife,

Fine flowers in the valley;

And twinn'd the sweet babe o' its life, And the green leaves they grow rarely.

• 1. Ballads awl Bongs of Brittany. Translated by Tom Taylor. London : Macmillan. a. The Ballad Book. A selection of the choicest British Ballads. Edited by William Alliugham. London : Macmillan.

8. Early Ballads Illustrative of History, Traditions, and Customs. Edited with Motes by Robert Belt. London: Griffin. "She's howket a grave by the light o' the moon, Fine flowers in the valley;

And there she's buried her sweet babe in, And the green leaves they grow rarely.

" As she was going to the church, • Fine flowers in the valley, She saw a sweet babe in the porch, And the green leaves they grow rarely.

"' 0 sweet babe! if thou wart mine, Fine flowers in the valley, I wad deed thee in silk and sabelline,' And the green leaves they grow rarely.

"'O mother mine! when I was thine, Fine flowers in the valley,

You did na prove to me sae kind,' And the green leaves they grow rarely.

"'But now I'm in the heavens hie, Fine flowers in the valley; And ye have the pains o' hell to area:— Arid the green leaves they grow rarely."

This is a poem, and without the sing-song of the true old ballad, yet it is unquestionably of the ballad kind. This the burden alone would show,—for the refrains which so often ring in the memory, marking a mood without expressing a thought, are after all but a popular and inarticulate device for doing what the true poet knows how to effect by the rhythm of every line and the accent Of every word. The true ballad springs from a sort of inarticu- late popular feeling, rising into a sort of familiar, sing-song, 'chanting narrative, and however much real pathos and power it may display, is always falling back in " burdens" or other popular And familiar expressions on the quasi-public sentiment from which it proceeds. For example, the use of the word "so," which is universal in ballads of almost all countries,—" the sod sae green," " his beard so white,"—intolerable in any less familiar kind of poetry,—is one amongst innumerable little indications that ballad poetry habitually relies on popular feeling to eke out its little deficiencies in expression, and does not even aspire to a complete poetic form or a sustained poetic tone.

The highest and most sustained form, however, which the proper ballad ever takes is, we think, that of Brittany, so many fine specimens of which Mr. Tom Taylor has here translated for us with a force and simplicity which leave little to be desired. Of course the ballad would not be the ballad if it were entirely lifted above the level of familiar expression,—if there were none of that ' give and take' between the singer and his audience which distin- guishes the poetry that springs out of the popular feeling, from the poetry which transfigures and glorifies it. Still granting the permanent conditions of the ballad, those of course will be ballads of the highest kind, which express the feelings of a people liable to be swept by impulses of a stern and exalted character. Probably no people in Western Europe is more liable to be ruled completely by these lofty moods than the people of Brittany, who at once profoundly religious and superstitious, profoundly domestic and passionately attached to their native land and native customs, have in them even more capacity for living on an exalted plane of ordinary feeling than any of their brother Celts, the Irish, the Welsh, or even the Highlanders of Scotland. The Breton ballads are still ballads, but they cast off more nearly than any ballads we ever read the sing-song style of gossip narrative without assuming anything of the false mysti- cism of Welsh transcendentalism. There are even ballads in this book which for nervous strength deserve to rank almost as fragments of epics, though they really are on the highest stair of the ballad poetry rather than on the lowest of epic. Take, for instance, the noble bailed on " The Evil Tribute of Nomenoo," the revenge of the Breton chief who in return for the murder by the Franks of a Breton tribute-bearer, whose head had been struck off and thrown into the scale to make up an alleged defi- ciency in the tribute-money) took sacks of stones from the Breton shore instead of the required silver, and, when it was found wanting, struck off the head of the Frank Governor of Rennes to supply the deficiency, and escaping in the night, called up Brittany into successful revolution. In the follow- ing passage the Breton whose son had been slain by the Franks makes his appeal to his chief Nomenoe :— " The aged chieftain fareth straight

Unto Nome:noes castle gate.

" Now, tell me, tell me, thou porter bold, If that thy master be in hold?

" 'But, be he in, or be he out, God guard from harm that chieftain stout.'

"Or ever he had pray'd his prayer, Behold, Nomened was there!

" His quarry from the chase he bore. His great hounds gambolling before: "In his right hand his bow unbent ; A wild boar on his backuphent.

" on his white hand, all fresh and red,

The blood dripp'd from the wild boar's head.

" 'Fair fall you, honest mountain clan, Thee first, as chief, thou white-hair'd man, " Your news, your news, come tell to me : What would you of Nomenoti?"

We come for right ; to know, in brief, Hath heaven a God,—Bretagne a chief?'

" 'Heaven hath a God, I trow, old man ; Bretayne a chief, if aught I can.

"'He can that will, thereof no doubt,

And he that can the Frank drives out—

"`Drives out the Frank, defends the land, To avenge, and still avenge doth stand ;— " To avenge the living and the dead, Me and my fair son foully sped ;

"' My garb, whose brave head did fall

By hand of the accursed Gaul.

" They flung his head the weights to square ; Like ripe wheat shone the golden hair.'

"Therewith the old man wept outright, That tears ran down his beard so white.

"Like dew-drops on a lily flower, That glitter at the sun-rise hour.

" When of those tears the chief was ware, A stern and bloody oath he aware ; "' I swear it, by this wild boar's head, And by the shaft that laid him dead, " Till this plague's wash'd from out the land, This blood I wash not off my hand ?' "

What a fresh and vigorous cartoon of the group at the castle gate,—far stronger and more life-like than even Mr. Tenniel's pic- ture, spirited though it is,—is here drawn, what nerve and state- liness beyond the ordinary dignity of the ballad in the grand couplet we have italicized ! "Jeanne o' the Flame" is even more powerful in the same style; but the style is that of the keenest national impulse rather than of the poet's fullest imagi- native exaltation. "Jeanne o' the Flame," the wife of Jean ,.de Montfort, defended Hennebont after her husband was taken prisoner, and sallied forth to fire the camp of Charles de Blois. The ferocious joy of Jeanne of the Flame in the spectacle of the burnt camp and the plain manured with the ashes of the Gaul, is grandly given and finely rendered :- " Oh I a merry woman was Jean o' the Flame, When at morn to her bower window she came, To see the plain all black and bare,

Grey ashes for pavilions fair ; And wreaths of smoke that curl and creep, Up out of every small ash-heap.

Jean o' the Flame with a smile she aware, By God, was ne'er field burnt so fair!

"'Ne'er saw I field to such profit bren ; Where we had one ear we'll have ten!'

" Still true the ancient saw is found, `Nothing like Gauls' bones for the ground ; Gauls' bones, beat small as small may be, To make the wheat grow lustilie. "

There are Breton ballads of other kinds in which the excellence is scarcely less striking, though the tension of feeling may be less. The " Clerk of Bohan " is much nearer in subject and feeling to the ordinary run of English and Scotch ballads than those we have quoted. It is a tale of treachery,—how the clerk- cousin to whom a Breton crusader has committed the care of his wife and child attempts her virtue, and not being able to succeed writes to her absent husband of the successive death of his favourite hound and horse, and finally of his child (all of which he has himself killed), ascribing the fault to the carelessness and misconduct of his wife. Tile crusader returns home in an ec- stacy of rage, killing first the wicked clerk and then his innocent wife without asking an explanation. The ballad so far has been very much like all ballads of the same kind, running on in that style of familiar narrative which both exaggerates the startling effects and gives the impression of a simple, credulous, gossip- ing origin for the legend. But the conclusion, giving the des- cription of the apparition of the murdered lady and her child and horse and hound, is in a finer and tenderer key :—

" And what did ye see in the churchyard green,

By the light of the moon and the starlight keen ? ' I saw a fair ladye, in white yclad, And she sat on a grave that was newly made. "'With a baby clasp'd her breast unto, His little heart stabbed through and through; A'dun deer-hound on her right did stand, And a snow-white steed on the other hand.

"'The throat of that hound it gaspeth wide There's a red red wound in that horse's side ; And they reach out their muzzles, lithe and light, And they lick her hands so soft and white. " And she strokes good hound and good horse the while, And smiles on both with a tender smile ; And then the babe—as jealous he were— He strokes the cheek of his mother fair.

" This sight I saw till set the moon,

And I saw but the mirk about and abo'on ; But I heard the clear sweet nightingale ring The song that in heaven the angels sing.'" The two lines describing the baby's jealousy of his mo- ther's tenderness to the horse and hound are on the highest level of ballad poetry, — above the key of exalted popular fancy, and seeming to express the lavish sweetness of some rich feminine imagination. Perhaps M. Tissot's exquisite picture of this scene aids us to realize the beauty of the poetry.

All the books we have mentioned below are very valuable con- tributions to ballad literature. Of the Breton ballads and Mr. Taylor's masterly translation we have said enough. 'The volume of early English ballads edited by Mr. Robert Bell is precisely what it professes to be, ' illustrative of history, manners, and customs," and selected for that purpose rather than for the beauty or poetry of their subjects. But for that purpose they are very well selected and very curious reading. Mr. Allingham has selected his volume of ballads on a different principle—rather for their poetry and beauty than their quaintness. And no doubt they contain the most beautiful ballads in our language. No volume could better answer its purpose, or better show the gulf which, after all, separates the true English ballad style from the imaginative level of English epic poetry.