CHAPTER VII
THE BALLADE AND OTHER FRENCH FORMS
The Anglo Saxons were a hard-drinking race whose bards chanted interminable battle songs to tables of uncritical, mead-filled heroes. As a result the English language grew up without many of the finer points of verse and bare especially of all fixed forms. It was this latter lack which Austin Dobson sought to supply by imitating in English the ballade, triolet, villanelle and other verse arrangements at that time used only by the French and not very generally among them.
The Ballade
Of these the ballade is the best known, and Dobson’s “Ballade of the Pompadour’s Fan” is subjoined as one of the most popular and most easily imitated.
“Chicken skin, delicate, white,
Painted by Carlo Van Loo,
Loves in a riot of light,
Roses and vaporous blue;
Hark to the dainty frou-frou!
Picture above if you can
Eyes that would melt like the dew—
This was the Pompadour’s fan!
“See how they rise at the sight,
Thronging the Œil de Bœuf through,
Courtiers as butterflies bright,
Beauties that Fragonard drew;
Talon rouge, falbala, queue,
Cardinal Duke,—to a man,
Eager to sigh or to sue,—
This was the Pompadour’s fan.
“Ah, but things more than polite
Hung on this toy, voyez vous!
Matters of state and of might,
Things that great ministers do.
Things that maybe overthrew
Those in whose brains they began;
Here was the sign and the cue,—
This was the Pompadour’s fan.
envoy
“Where are the secrets it knew?
Weavings of plot and of plan?
But where is the Pompadour, too?
This was the Pompadour’s fan.”
It will be noticed that there are but three rhyming sounds, also that the last line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the other two and the envoy. The lines rhyme together a, b, a, b, b, c, b, c, in each stanza and in the envoy b, c, b, c. The most frequent rhyme occurs fourteen times; the next six and the “c” rhyme five. With the exception of the refrain there is no repetition of rhymes in the proper ballade. Even Dobson’s use of “cue” and “queue” is, in the strictest sense, an error.
With its difficult rhymes the ballade is an excellent school in which to learn smooth-flowing verse. If one is able to write a simple and natural ballade the ordinary stanza forms will appear ridiculously easy.
But the ballade has two bugbears: the first the refrain which refuses to come in naturally, and the second the envoy which insists on appearing as a disjointed after thought. The refrain in a good ballade makes its bow each time with a slight change in the significance and comes in not because it has been predestined for the end of the stanza, but because it is the only combination of words possible to round out the eight lines.
The envoy contains the gist of the whole matter and at the same time must be written to be read not as an appendix but as a component part of the ballade. It must always come out with a ring that leaves the spirit of the verse stamped on the reader’s mind.