BALLADE, the technical name of a complicated and fixed form of verse, arranged on a precise system. An earlier form of the word "ballad," it afterwards came to be applied to an en tirely distinct kind of verse. In its regular condition a ballade consists of three stanzas and an envoi ; there is a refrain which is repeated at the close of each stanza and of the envoi. The entire poem should contain but three or four rhymes, as the case may be, and these must be reproduced with exactitude in each section. These rules were laid down by Henri de Croi, whose L'Art et science de rhetorique was first printed in 1493, and he added that if the refrain consists of eight syllables, the ballade must be writ ten in huitains (eight-line stanzas), if of ten syllables in dizains (ten-line), and so on. The form can best be studied in an example. Take Andrew Lang's "Ballade to Theocritus, in Winter," for in stance, which begins: Ah ! leave the smoke, the wealth, the roar Of London, and the bustling street, For still, by the Sicilian shore, The murmur of the Muse is sweet.
Still, still, the suns of summer greet The mountain-grave of Helike, And shepherds still their songs repeat Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea.
The rhymes of this first stanza are exactly repeated in the sec ond and third stanzas, and the refrain is repeated in the closing line of each. Then comes the "envoi," in which the rhymes of the second half of each stanza are repeated, and which is again brought to an end with the refrain. For example, Lang's bal lade ends: Master—when rain, and snow and sleet And northern winds are wild, to thee We come, we rest in thy retreat, Where breaks the blue Sicilian sea.
The ballade may be said to have reached its most elaborate and highly finished form in the 14th century. It arose from the can zone di ballo of the Italians, but it is in Provencal literature that the ballade first takes a modern form. It was in France, how ever, and not until the reign of Charles V., that the ballade as we understand it began to flourish ; instantly it became popular. Machault, Froissart, Eustache Deschamps and Christine de Pisan were among the poets who cultivated the ballade most abundantly. Later, those of Alain Chartier and Henri Baude were famous, while the form was chosen by Francois Villon for some of the most ad mirable and extraordinary poems which the middle ages have handed down to us. Somewhat later Clement Marot composed ballades of great precision of form, and the fashion culminated in the i 7th century with those of Madame Deshoulieres, Sarrazin, Voiture and La Fontaine. Attacked by Moliere and by Boileau, who wrote: La ballade asservie a ses vieilles maximes, Souvent doit tout son lustre au caprice des rimes, the ballade went entirely out of fashion for 200 years, when it was resuscitated in the middle of the i9th century by Theodore de Banville, who published in 1873 a volume of Trente-six bal lades joyeuses, which has found many imitators. The ballade, a typically French form, has been extensively employed in no other language, except in English. In the 15th and i 6th centuries many ballades were written, with more or less close attention to the French rules, by the leading English poets, and in particular by Chaucer, by Gower (whose surviving ballades, however, are all in French) and by Lydgate.
The absence of an envoi will be noticed in Chaucer's, as in most of the mediaeval English, ballades. After the 16th century orig inal ballades were no more written in English until the latter part of the 19th, when they were re-introduced, almost simultaneously, by Algernon Charles Swinburne, Austin Dobson, Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse and W. E. Henley. Dobson's "The Prodigals" (1876) was one of the earliest examples of a correct English specimen. In 188o Andrew Lang published a volume of Ballades in Blue China, which found innumerable imitators. G. K. Ches terton in the twentieth century cultivated the form with success.