Preface.
I have never been able to write about what was not known to me and near. Tim Black, the Scapegoat, and most of the personages of the New Arcadia, lived on a common in Surrey near my garden gates. all of them are drawn from human models. The Romantic Ballads were inspired by my historical studies. Some persons of culture have refused me the right to express myself in those simple forms of popular song which I have loved since childhood as sincerely as any peasant. If the critics would only believe it, they have come as naturally to me, if less happily, than they came of old to a Lady Wardlaw, a Lady Linsday, or a Lady Nairn. We women have a privilege in these matters, as M. Gaston Paris has reminded us. We have always been the prime makers of ballads and love songs, of anonymous snatches and screeds of popular song. We meet together no longer on Mayday, as of old, in Provence, to set the fashion in tensos and sonnets. But some old wife or other, crooning over her fire of sticks, in Scotland or the Val d'Aosta, in Roumania or Gascony, is probably at the beginning of most romantic Ballads. Mine, of course, have the fatal defect of having crystallised too soon; they lack the patient polish of succeeding generations. But that it is, most obviously, not in my power to remedy. The only way would be for my readers to learn them by heart, half-forget them, and re-write them, omitting the non-essential. It is a necessary process; but I can only offer them in their unripeness, reminding my readers that the beautiful rispetti of the Tuscan hills, the ballads of Scotland and Piedmont, have all at one moment lacked the admirable patina which age and time alone confer.
Olmet, Cantal.
September, 1901.
