morality, and mystery "as thick as pieces of meat in a fricasee!" His statement is richly illustrated by the ballades in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century mysteries that have come down to us. Ballades, like the triolets and the rondels more frequently employed in the mysteries, were used as adornments of the text. They were, as the subject matter of the mysteries would suggest, for the most part prayers to the deity and supplications to Mary for her intercession. A ballade prayer in the Mystère de Sainte Barbe (fifteenth century) is spoken by Origines and three companions. A ballade without envoy in which the stanzas are similarly distributed among several characters, the Magi, in this case, is to be found, too, in Le Mystère de la Passion d'Arnoul Greban. Occasionally the ballade figured as a prologue to the mystery. The prologue, whatever its form might be, was spoken by the author, by a member of the company, or by some priest not a member of the company. The purpose of such a prologue was to fix the attention of the audience, to give them some notion of the plot, or to express the author's humility. The prologue in the fifteenth-century Le Martire de Saint Adrien is spoken by a priest. Another ballade prologue is spoken by an actor at the opening of the mystery of Notre Dame de Puy by Claude Doleson. A noteworthy ballade prologue, a fifteenth-century piece of "diablerie,” introduces André de la Vigne's St. Martin and is spoken by Lucifer. These lyric passages in the mysteries were, in general, sung, or, at any rate, were declaimed to the accompaniment of music. In view of the intimate connection of the ballade formula with the puy, another circumstance in the presentation of the mysteries is here worth noting: namely, the accepted fact that, in the fourteenth century, the Miracles de Nostre Dame were acted at some puy, the location of which has not been determined. Ballades continued to be written from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth. By far the greater number of them are insignificant as literature. They exhibit the sort of ingenuity that is inconsistent with real poetry. The tricks of the ballade writers, their acrostics, their word plays, made the form a kind of intellectual game. The satirical ones are remarkable for bold personalities. François Villon alone in these three centuries produced ballades, one is tempted to say a ballade, of great beauty. These poems have for us, therefore, a social rather than a literary interest. In them for three hundred years the dominant ideas of medieval society were perpetuated. The current conceptions of love, death, and religion, the hand-to-mouth wisdom of proverbs, satire mordant and mild, the chronicle of marching events, aristocratic politics, all these subjects were accepted as within the proper scope of the ballade. Of particular interest, too, is its presence in the religious drama. So many of the mysteries are connected with puys that it is not surprising to find the ballade, itself in part a product of the puy, figuring in a number of the sacred plays. The ballade was thus considered equally appropriate for the expression of sacred or profane emotions. V THE BALLADE IN THE TREATISES ON POETRY The fluctuating esteem in which the ballade and the rondeau were held is reflected in the rhetorico-poetical treatises of which the poets and critics of France were so prolific in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These treatises not only recorded the progress of the forms and the practice of the poets who had used them, but in some cases suggested elaborate innovations or novel complications of a type already sufficiently fixed and intricate. The handbooks of poetics that multiplied in these years are very generally looked upon as a symptom of decadence. But, in the case of the ballade, it must be understood that the refinements and the intricacies suggested by pedants were not necessarily accepted generally by the poets. Rhymsters early distorted the form in accordance with the prescriptions of theorists; but Villon, a man of some education, writing after at least four of ne treatises had appeared, transcended their theory and produced the most beautiful ballades in literature. Deschamps' L'Art de Dictier (1392) contains the earliest theoretical discussion of the ballade. Its neglect in France followed the invasion of ideas from Renaissance Italy and the rise of the Pléiade. Boileau's passing reference to it in his Art Poétique (1675), shows how lightly the form had come to be held at the end of the sixteenth century. The casual mention of the ballade by this critic indicates the verdict of the French classical age in regard to this form. Between 1392 and 1673 there were thirty of such treatises in circulation, the first being Deschamps' L'Art de Dictier and the latest Boileau's L'Art Poétique. In Le Déffence et Illustration de la Langue Française (1549), which marked Du Bellay as a Renaissance man, vowed to the building up of a native style formed by classically educated taste, he inveighs against ballades, rondeaus, chants royal and other such "condiments," as he calls them, as an evidence of the ignorance of his predecessors. Before Boileau, the classical despot, disposes of the ballade as a form that owes its popularity chiefly to tricks of rhyme, Molière in Les Femmes Savantes, played (1672) the year before Boileau's set of rules appeared, embodies in Trissotin's fatal phrase the timely verdict of the seventeenth-century man of letters in regard to the ballade. Vadius and Trissotin are bandy ing compliments: Trissotin Nothing could be more charming than your little rondeaus. Vadius Nay, but your madrigals are the soul of wit. Trissotin Ballades after all, though, seem to be your specialty. Vadius Nobody surpasses you when it comes to filling up lines. They continue to outdo each other; then: Vadius The first thing you know, people will be erecting statues to you. Now there's this ballade of mine, I'd like to read it to you... Trissotin Just a minute, have you seen a certain little sonnet of mine on the Princess Uranie who fell ill of a fever? Vadius admits having heard the sonnet, but declares it to be trash of the worst kind. At this they fall to quarreling. Vadius tries to propitiate Trissotin in order that the ballade may be read aloud: Vadius Oh, it was my fault, I was distracted, or perhaps it was badly read. But to change the subject, here is my ballade! Trissotin To my taste the ballade is nothing but a faded rose; it's completely out of date; it fairly reeks of the past. Vadius Nevertheless the ballade still appeals to many people. If you mean pedants, yes. Trissotin Trissotin is speaking for his age when he says: “La ballade à mon goût est une chose fade." VI THE MIDDLE ENGLISH BALLADE In all probability, it will never be explained to our entire satisfaction why the ballade, which had met with so much favor in France and which won its way with the greatest Middle English poet, did not achieve greater popularity with Chaucer's contemporaries and successors. In England, the fifteenth-century man of letters seems to have been susceptible to a variety of French conventions, but only occasionally did he feel impelled to use the form that in France had become a favorite means of literary expression. France, indeed, had seen the production of ballades by the thousands, whereas the output in England does not exceed two hundred. A complete list of the Middle English ballades might contain only some two hundred and twenty items, but even these items would certainly include questionable specimens of the type. To Chaucer himself are attributed with considerable certainty sixteen genuine ballades. Lydgate introduced the form into the Temple of Glas, the Legend of Seynt Margarete, and the Fall of Princes. He also wrote ballades independent of his longer poems. Hoccleve seems never to have composed a true ballade, although the character of his seven-line and eight-line stanza shows how familiar he must have been with the form. Two Middle English collections of ballades are known, namely, the series that, for many years, went under the name of Charles d'Orléans, and the translation by one Quixley of John Gower's Traitié pour Essempler les Amants Marietz. A small number of ballades in print have, at various times, been attributed to Chaucer, or to one or another of his followers. Other ballades, anonymous, still unprinted, are probably to be unearthed in English and in Scottish libraries. |