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deals rather with incidents than with complete or full narratives. When we have one great collection of ballads, possessing a fixed order, and all dealing with or relating to one subject, as in the English cycle of Robin Hood, or in the Persian cycle of Kurroglou, then we have what has been called a ballad-epic; but it is really an epic too. With this view of the case you might ask if the Song of Roland might not be called a ballad-epic. It is indeed divided into a number of distinct parts, each independent of the other, arranged for singing, and having a burden or chorus. Were the term ballad-epic really admissible, I should say yes; but for the sake of definiteness we had better say no especially as the style and tone are a little too high for what we usually call a ballad.

A ballad is not to be confounded either with a song or with a lyric of any sort, although the line of demarcation may sometimes be hard to draw. A song does not necessarily do more than express an emotion, independent of any story or incident. A lyric is any poem expressing one single feeling or thought of an emotional kind, and not composed in any classic or severe form of verse.

Now let us consider the general characteristics of the ballad. The word itself gives some hint of the character of the composition. It is derived from the low Latin, from a verb signifying to dance. In the Italian ballare, Spanish bailar (both meaning to dance), the English word ball, a dancing party; and the English word, adopted from the French, ballet, meaning the artistic professional dances performed in theatres, we have the survival in modified form of the ancient low Latin verb. Originally the ballad was a song accompanied with dancing. But do not let this derivation cause any confusion in the mind between song proper and the ballad. The earliest forms of song were necessarily religious or military; they celebrated incidents. They were not really lyrics. The history of the term carries us back to very primitive forms of poetical

composition, made in the days before writing was known, and learned by heart generation after generation, each generation probably improving a little upon the oral text. It is even probable that all the great epics of all countries grew out of beginnings like this. Primitive races kept alive the memories of their traditions, of their glories and their sorrows, by song; and the songs were publicly sung on certain occasions, accompanied with religious or war-like or other dances. Not all the people would be equally capable of singing; there would be famous singers or professional singers, like what are called the ondo-tori in Japan. These would do the difficult part of the singing; but the people would join in the more familiar parts of the song. Later there would arise an orderly distinction between the parts to be sung by professional singers, and the shorter or more simple parts to be sung by the crowd. The part to be sung by the crowd eventually took in English the name of "burthen" (burden). The word "chorus," sometimes meaning the same thing, is from the Greek; but the Greek word is of dramatic origin, and strictly speaking means much more than a simple burthen. The word "refrain" (from the French) is a better equivalent for our English burthen.

Now the first characteristic of the true ballad, even in modern times, is the refrain or burthen. It may be quite impossible to sing, but it represents the survival of the ancient burthen. Nevertheless, remember that not all ballads have burthens,-though the burthen is the peculiar mark of such compositions. Furthermore, remember that many songs have a chorus or burthen, by which they very much resemble ballads, although they can not always be classed as ballads.

A second characteristic of ballads is their simplicity. A perfect ballad ought always to be so simple that everybody, no matter how ignorant, can understand it; and its emotion

ought to be of such a nature as to appeal to the heart of a child just as well as to the imagination of a man. Every approach to complexity or subtlety is a departure from the true nature of the ballad. Therefore many of the most beautiful lyrical compositions of the nineteenth century, although ballads in form, are not ballads in spirit; for they appeal only to the intelligence and esthetic taste of very cultivated people.

Most of the world's famous ballads, as representing popular feeling and a very early form of composition, were naturally written in the speech of the people, not in the language of the educated classes. So we may say that a third general characteristic of ballad composition is the fact of its being in colloquial speech, or even in dialect. But here again you must remember that not all ballads are so written, and that we are looking only at the general indications.

With the spread of education and the many social changes which have sharpened men's minds, it could not but follow that ballad writing as an art should become extinct. But this does not mean that the art itself is vulgar. Quite the contrary. It only means that the effects of education. and knowledge destroy that capacity for purely natural feeling and simple expression that characterises ballads. Educate the peasant, and you take all the poetry out of his soul. If you could educate him to the highest point, he would obtain, of course, a new poetical feeling; but the necessities of civilisation allow him time to learn only the simplest forms of education; and these are just sufficient to destroy much of pleasure that he formerly found in life. Anciently woods and streams were peopled for him with invisible beings; angels and demons walked at his side; the woods had their fairies, the mountains their goblins, the marshes their flitting spirits; and the dead came back to him at times to bear a message or to rebuke a fault. Also the

ground that he trod upon, the plants growing in the field, the clouds above him, the lights of heaven, all were full of mystery and ghostliness. Educate him, and he becomes a good deal of a materialist; for his gods vanish, his fairies and ghosts cease to exist, and modern chemistry, which he is obliged to learn something about, teaches him that the virtues of plants and the qualities of the soil that bears them do not depend upon spiritual matters at all. Furthermore, industrialism impels him to seek the great cities and abandon nature whenever he can find the opportunity. He is thus gradually drawn away from everything that inspired in former times his simple verse. At school he learns to express his feelings and ideas in conventional language; should he speak like his fathers, he is laughed at as a countryman. Yet his fathers, who knew so little, were capable without effort of writing such poetry that the greatest of our modern poets can scarcely do anything equal to them. The change is inevitable, and can not be helped. But it has been so much regretted that I doubt whether a single poet of the nineteenth century, of any real importance, has not tried, and tried in vain for the most part, to write as good a ballad as did the ignorant peasant of two or three hundred years ago. Even at random, one can name a number of such attempts made by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, Tennyson, the two Brownings, Rossetti, Swinburne. It would be folly to protest, in the face of such evidence, that ballad-literature is not worthy of scholarly attention.

A curious fact is the persistence of ballad-compositions even into our own time, and after the true art was dead. I am not now speaking about the poets, but about the common people. During my own boyhood, in London, it was still the custom to compose ballads when any extraordinary event occurred that greatly stirred public emotion-an unhappy suicide, a peculiar murder, a political incident of some unusual description. These were written in the lan

Now this may seem to you a queer question, but I think that it is a very important one. The French have solved it; the English have not. Everything depends upon the character of the book. If the book be composed of different kinds of material, it seems to me quite proper that it should be written in different styles to suit the differences of subjects. You can not do this, however, except in a book which is a miscellany, a mixture of reflection and fact. Combinations of the latter kind are chiefly possible in works of travel. In a book of travel you can not keep up the tone of poetical prose while describing simple facts; but when you come to reflect upon the facts, you can then vary the style. French books of travel are much superior to English in point of literary execution, because the writers of them do this. They do it so naturally that you are apt to overlook the fact that there are two styles in the same book. I know of only one really great English book of travel which has the charm of poetical prose, that is the "Eothen" of Kinglake. But in this case the entire book is written in one dream tone. The author has not attempted to deal with details to any extent. Beautiful as the book is, it does not show the versatility which French writers of equal ability often display. While on this subject, it occurs to me to show you an example of the difference in English and French methods, as shown by two contemporary writers in describing Tokyo. The English writer is Kipling. He is certainly the most talented English writer now living in descriptive and narrative work. The greatest living prose writer among the French is Pierre Loti (Julien Viaud), a French naval officer, and you know a member of the Academy. I hope that you have not been prejudiced against him by the stupid criticisms of very shallow men; and that you do not make the mistake of blaming the writer for certain observations regarding Japan, which were made during a stay of only some weeks in this country. Although he was here only for some weeks, and

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