The English Lyric 39 



lines of William and Marjorie; it would be hard to find more 

 effective irony unless one choose Edward, or some other of the old 

 songs ; though we might pair it from Kipling's Ballad of Fisher's 

 Boarding House, — 



But Anne of Austria looted first 



The maid Ultruda's charm — 

 The little silver crucifix 



That keeps a man from harm. 



For such dramatic development, the music-setting serves but 

 as an enhancing background, its monotony of motiv giving the 

 sense of unity and holding together the fleeting elements of the 

 action. If the action be close-knit and inevitable, the accessory 

 undertone is quite dispensable or may be allowed a development 

 of its own subordinately echoing the major movement, on the 

 analogue of a tragedy within a tragedy, — say Euphrania's to 

 Penthea's in Ford's Broken Heart. This actually occurs in the 

 artistic balladry of Rossetti, made possible by the substitution 

 of word for musical refrain. And as a matter of fact we find 

 in ballad development a curious disjunction of the music-form 

 from the dramatic form. The one is abstracted under the 

 domination of the singing impulse and made into a kind of song, 

 later to become ballad of metaphor ; the other, seized by a purely 

 dramatic genius, is wrought into a new drama of metaphor. 

 With the development from the music-form I am first concerned, 

 and the better to illustrate it in English I would cite its forecast- 

 ing in a Welsh form of verse. 



A favorite stanza of the Welsh bard was the triad, or rimed 

 triplet. Sometimes it was used for narrative, battle-description 

 and the like, sometimes for a kind of gnomic verse. A slightly 

 varying repetition of the first line, stanza by stanza, gave the 

 effect of refrain, and often held together very divergent reflec- 

 tions. A few stanzas may illustrate : I quote from Skene's 

 H erg est: 



The Calends of winter, the time of pleasant gossiping, 

 The gale and the storm keep equal pace; 

 It is the work of the wise to keep a secret. 



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