Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/301

Rh peoples who find, in a natural improvisation, a natural utterance of modulated and rhythmic speech, the appropriate relief of their emotions, in moments of high-wrought feeling or on solemn occasions. &quot; Poesie&quot; (as Puttenham well says in his Art of English Poesie, 1589) &quot;is more ancient than the artificiall of the Greeks and Latines, and used of the savage and uncivill, who were before all science and civilitie. This is proved by certificate of merchants and travellers, who by late navigations have surveyed the whole world, and discovered large countries, and wild people strange and savage, affirming that the American, the Perusine, and the very Canniball do sing and also say their highest and holiest matters in certain riming versicles.&quot; In the same way Aristotle, discoursing of the origin of poetry, says (Poet., c. iv. ), [ Greek ]. M. de la Villemarque&quot; in Brittany, M. Pitr6 in Italy, Herr Ulrich in Greece, have described the process of improvisation, how it grows out of the custom of dancing in large bands and accompanying the figure of the dance with song. &quot; If the people,&quot; says M. Pitre&quot;, &quot; find out who is the composer of a canzone, they will not sing it.&quot; Now in those lands where a blithe peasant life still exists with its dances, like the kotos of Russia, we find ballads identical in many respects with those which have died out of oral tradition in these islands. It is natural to conclude that our ballads too were first improvised, and circulated in rustic dances. We learn from M. Bujeaud and M. de Puymaigre in France, that all ballads there have their air or tune, and that every dance has its own words, for if a new dance comes in, perhaps a fashionable one from Paris, words are fitted to it. Is there any trace of such an operatic, lyrical, dancing peasantry in austere Scotland 1 We find it in Gawin Douglas s account of— &quot; Sic as we clepe wenches and damosels, In gersy greens, wandering by spring wells, Of bloomed branches, and flowers white and red, Plettand their lusty chaplets for their head, Some sang ring-sangs, dances, ledes, and rounds.&quot; Now, ring-sangs are ballads, dancing songs ; and Young Tamlane, for instance, was doubtless once danced to, as we know it possessed an appropriate air. Again, Fabyan, the chronicler (quoted by Ritson) says that the song of triumph over Edward II., &quot; was after many days sung in dances, to the carols of the maidens and minstrels of Scotland.&quot; We might quote the Complaynt of Scotland to the same effect. &quot;The shepherds, and their wyvis sang mony other melodi sangs,. . . than efter this sueit celestial harmony, tha began to dance in ane ring.&quot; It is natural to conjecture that, if we find identical ballads in Scotland, and in Greece, and Italy, and traces of identical customs, customs crushed by the Reformation, by Puri tanism, by modern so-called civilisation, the ballads sprang out of the institution of dances, as they still do in warmer and pleasanter climates. It may be supposed that legends on which the ballads are composed, being found as they are from the White Sea to Cape Matapan, are part of the stock of primitive folk-lore. Thus we have an immemorial antiquity for the legends, and for the lyrical choruses in which their musical rendering was improvised. We are still at a loss to discover the possibly mythological germs of the legends; but, at all events, genuine ballads may be claimed as distinctly popular, and, so to speak, impersonal in matter and in origin. It would be easy to show that survivals out of this stage of inartistic lyric poetry linger in the early epic poetry of Homer and of the French epopees, and that the Greek drama sprang from the sacred choruses of village vintagers. In the great early epics, as in popular ballads, there is the same directness and simplicity, the same use of recurring epithets, the &quot; green grass,&quot; the &quot; salt sea,&quot; the &quot; shadowy hills,&quot; the same repetition of speeches, and something of the same barbaric profusion in the use of gold and silver. But these resem blances must not lead us into the mistake of supposing Homer to be a collection of ballads, or that he can be properly translated into ballad metre. The Iliad and the Odyssey are the highest form of an artistic epic, not com posed by piecing together ballads, but developed by a long series of noble OLOLOOL, for the benefit of the great houses which entertain them, out of the method and materials of popular song. Ballads sprang from the very heart of the people, and flit from age to age, from lip to lip of shepherds, peasants, nurses, of all the class that continues nearest to the state of natural men. They make music with the plash of the fisherman s oars and the hum of the spinning-wheel, and keep time with the step of the ploughman as he drives his team. The country seems to have aided man in their making; the bird s note rings in them, the tree has lent her whispers, the stream its murmur, the village-bell its tinkling tune. The whole soul of the peasant ckss breathes in their burdens, as the great sea resounds in the shells cast up on the shores. Ballads are a voice from secret places, from silent peoples, and old times long dead; and as such they stir us in a strangely intimate fashion to which artistic verse can never attain. 1em  BALLANCHE,, a distinguished French philosopher of the theocratic school, was born at Lyons in 1776. His health from infancy was extremely delicate, his nervous system was weak, and he was frequently sub ject to hallucinations and mental disorders. This weakness was much aggravated by his experience of the horrors con sequent on the insurrection at Lyons and the siege of that town, during which he and his mother were compelled to take refuge in the country. His education seems never to have been very complete ; but he was early imbued with ideas on the construction of society, which naturally sprang from the events of the revolutionary period. His first literary effort was an epic poem, describing the occurrences at Lyons ; this he never published. In 1801 he wrote an essay Du Sentiment considere dans la litterature et dans les Arts, a work which shows very well the defects as well as the merits of his style and manner of thinking. It is essentially unsystematic ; and the few good ideas contained in it are expressed in language so figurative that it costs an effort to discover what is really being said. Ballanche, indeed, was essentially unsystematic and unscientific, and seems to have had no conception of what is truly required in a philosophy. His style is not external to the thinking, but is undissolubly connected with it ; strange thoughts and bizarre expressions arise together. His next great work, the Antigone, a prose poem, pub lished in 1814, was the fruit of long and quiet meditation, and was received with great favour by the brilliant literary society surrounding Chateaubriand and Mme. Recamier, into which Ballanche had been introduced. From this year, 1814, dates his serious effort towards a speculative reconstruction of society, an exposition of the palingenesis of social order. He transferred his residence to Paris, where he continued to live in communication with the few thinkers who had like philosophical tendencies with himself. In 1817 appeared his Essai sur les Institutions 