Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/90

CHAPTER XXVII Oral Literature BOTH literary and historical interest attaches to the songs and rhymes which pass from region to region and from generation to generation in oral tradition. They have value as social documents. They reflect not only the fading life of the past, its events, its scenes, and its heroes, but the life of the society which inherits and so often transforms them. The great body of this floating literature consists of old baUads and songs, nursery jingles, game songs, and popular satires and sentimentalities. Occasionally such material exhibits a touch of real literary genius or of illuminating imagination ; and these flashes of quality are eagerly sought for by the lover of poetry. Especially, such material affords opportunity to the critical student to study the literary instinct in its elementary expres- sion. The main interest of oral literature is historical. From it may be seen how songs and verse tales develop, how themes and styles are transmitted from generation to generation, and from one region or land to another. The mediseval ballads of England and Scotland have for their matter the adventures of lord or lady, the incidents of the hunt, clan feuds, the love affairs of the nobly bom. They are frankly aristocratic. In later British balladry, these are suc- ceeded by less ambitious pieces. Commonplace characters re- place the aristocrats, paralleling the democratization of fiction and of the drama ; and other styles succeed the minstrel style — much as Defoe's plebeian narratives, in homely setting, suc- ceeded romances of knight errantry. Both types of song have been brought to America from the mother country; but along- side this imported material, types of indigenous song have developed. A rough classification of the poetic literature orally 502