NARRATIVE POETRY. The telling of a story in verse is in modern times rather ex ceptional than normal, owing to the extraordi nary rise in importance of prose fiction. But in early periods narrative poetry was the most abundant and important kind, owing to the primitive tendency to devote poetry largely to objective purposes, in contrast with the subject ive tendency of modern poetry. For the vari ous types, see under LITERARY FORMS.
Ballad.— allad.— In general this is the most primitive type of nur, iNetry, and is as sumed to have exisfedrno g practically all peoples, in many instances no early ex amples have survived. This proportionately large disappearance of early ballads is due to their belonging to the period of oral composi tion and transmission, as distinguished from that of written literature; and this oral element is the fundamental characteristic of the type. It is connected, too, with the element of song; for the primitive ballad may always be assumed to have been sung. A surviving evidence of this is the frequent appearance of a refrain, perhaps originally joined in by the whole company of persons present at the ballad singing. Closely connected with these characteristics is the com munal spirit of the old ballad: the form arises from a state of society when the individual poet is of relatively slight importance and when the content of poetry is not the experiences and feelings of the individual singer but those of the group. Hence in the ballads we do not look for individuality of style; of this their uni versal anonymity is a sign. Their language is simple, unsophisticated, but conventional, marked by abundant repetition yet by rapidity of narrative method,— in a word, the language of an age, as Ten Brink put it, whose poetry is 'oscillating perpetually between reminiscence and improvisation." Very many of the ballads, if not all, had their origin in the versifying of a real fact, gathering up mythical elements in the manner of popular tradition. Often there are many different versions of the same story, some differing only in details, others in essen tial elements, such as changes from super naturalism. in the direction of realism, or
variants characteristic of particular localities or social groups.
Of ancient ballads of Greece and Rome no remains survive, though evidence of their nature is thought to be traceable in elements of the ancient epics. Macaulay, in his 'Lays of An cient Rome,' made a brilliant but rather sophis ticated attempt to conceive the matter and spirit of ballads of the early Roman people. Of the Latin races the Spanish branch has pre served the greatest number of ballads, some of those still extant dating from the early 11th century; most famous are those concerned with the story of "the Cid," in the 12th century. Of French balladry the remains are more frag mentary. The early Germans are known to have made abundant use of ballads, and a col lection of them was made under the direction of the Emperor Charlemagne; a surviving frag ment of a "Hildebrand song" is supposed to date from the 8th century. Later, in the 15th and 16th centuries, a new era of German bal ladry developed; and toward the end of the 18th century modern scholars, led by Herder, began the systematic collection of the ballads of the race. There are also rich remains of the ballads of the Scandinavian peoples, dating from the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries; a collection was made in Denmark as early as 1591, while one of the greatest of modern ballad collections is that of the Danish scholar Grundtvig. The Slavic peoples have preserved an abundant bal lad tradition, and some of them, notably the Serbians, are to this day in the ballad-making and ballad-singing period. Of the early English ballads no remains are preserved; but there are numerous survivals of the mediwval and modern periods of ballad-making, both in Scotland and England, beginning perhaps in the 13th century and extending as late as the 18th. The Robin Hood group includes the most famous of these, — a cycle thought to have originated in the 13th century. A monumental collection of the Eng lish and Scottish ballads was made by the Amer ican scholar F. J. Child.