Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/97

Imported Ballads 509 returned lover becomes a living lover, not a ghost ; and in some versions of The Farmer's Curst Wife, the devil disappears. Characteristically they take on modem elements, substituting the known for the unknown, and accommodating their person- al names, and their localizations. One, The Farmer's Curst Wife, just mentioned, has drifted to Texas, and has taken to itself classification as a cowboy song. The Two Brothers, in a Ne- braska version, seems well on the way toward becoming a Western song. " O what shall I tell your true love, John, If she inquires for you?" " O tell her I'm dead and lying in my grave. Way out in Idaho." Popular tradition dims the romantic elements. Lords lose their nobility and become ordinary citizens. Kings and prin- cesses and ghosts are made over into the singer's own kind of people. The narrative loses its reflection of the original surroundings, and assumes altered character. And, in both imported and indigenous pieces, serious events or sentiments are often vulgarized or made commonplace, till the originally earnest survives only in farce. The general trend is toward degradation, not improvement, by the process of oral preservation and transmission. This may be seen when there is comparison of a body of New World texts en masse with the texts printed by Professor Child. There is no improvement in the narrative element — though some theorists hold that communal preservation brings epic development — nor are artistic sequences and climaxes evolved, unless where an inferior piece crosses with a better. In com- munities where the style of English and Scottish pieces has best maintained itself, new songs assimilate themselves to this style, in rare instances, and assume some of the mannerisms of the English and Scottish ballads, like the "legacy" motive, or the "climax of relatives" — mannerisms, on the whole, of the later Old World ballads rather than the earHer. More often, how- ever, these distinctive mannerisms, when inherited, become lost. Communal preservation and re-creation, in the New World, tends, not to improve inherited ballads or to increase the presence of these ballad mannerisms, but to obscure or obliterate them.