Introductory
I The Diffusion and Origin of American Game-Rhymes
“The hideous Thickets in this place1 were such that Wolfes and Beares nurst up their young from the eyes of all beholders in those very places where the streets are full of Girles and Boys sporting up and downe, with a continued concourse of people.”—“Wonder-working Providence in New England,” 1654.
“The first settlers came from England, and were of the middle rank, and chiefly Friends. * * * In early times weddings were held as festivals, probably in imitation of such a practice in England. Relations, friends, and neighbors were generally invited, sometimes to the amount of one or two hundred. * * * They frequently met again next day; and being mostly young people, and from under restraint, practised social plays and sports.”—Watson’s “Account of Buckingham and Solebury” (Pennsylvania; settled about 1682).
A majority of the games of children are played with rhymed formulas, which have been handed down from generation to generation. These we have collected in part from the children themselves, in greater part from persons of mature age who remember the usages of their youth; for this collection represents an expiring custom. The vine of oral tradition, of popular poetry, which for a thousand years has twined and bloomed on English soil, in other days enriching with color and fragrance equally the castle and the cottage, is perishing at the roots; its prouder branches have long since been blasted, and children’s song, its humble but longest-flowering offshoot, will soon have shared their fate.
It proves upon examination that these childish usages of play are almost entirely of old English origin. A few games, it is true, appear to have been lately imported from England or Ireland, or borrowed from the French or the German; but these make up only a small proportion of the whole. Many of the rounds still common in our cities, judging from their incoherence and rudeness, might be supposed inventions of “Arabs of the streets;” but these invariably prove to be mere corruptions of songs long familiar on American soil. The influence of print is here practically nothing; and a rhyme used in the sports of American children almost always varies from the form of the same game in Great Britain, when such now exists.
There are quarters of the great city of New York in which one hears the dialect, and meets the faces, of Cork or Tipperary. But the children of these immigrants attend the public school, that mighty engine of equalization; their language has seldom more than a trace of accent, and they adopt from schoolmates local formulas for games, differing more or less from those which their parents used on the other side of the sea. In other parts of the town, a German may live for years, needing and using in business and social intercourse no tongue but his own, and may return to Europe innocent of any knowledge of the English speech. Children of such residents speak German in their homes, and play with each other the games they have brought with them from the Fatherland. But they all speak English also, are familiar with the songs which American children sing, and employ these too in their sports. There is no transference from one tongue to another, unless in a few cases, when the barrier of rhyme does not exist. The English-speaking population, which imposes on all new-comers its language, imposes also its traditions, even the traditions of children.
A curious inquirer who should set about forming a collection of these rhymes, would naturally look for differences in the tradition of different parts of the Union, would desire to contrast the characteristic amusements of children in the North and in the South, descendants of Puritan and Quaker. In this he would find his expectations disappointed, and for the reason assigned. This lore belongs, in the main, to the day before such distinctions came into existence; it has been maintained with equal pertinacity, and with small variations, from Canada to the Gulf. Even in districts distinguished by severity of moral doctrines, it does not appear that any attempt was made to interfere with the liberty of youth. Nowhere have the old sports (often, it is true, in crude rustic forms) been more generally maintained than in localities famous for Puritanism. Thus, by a natural law of reversion, something of the music, grace, and gayety of an earlier period of unconscious and natural living has been preserved to sweeten the formality, angularity, and tedium of an otherwise beneficial religious movement.
It is only within the century that America has become the land of motion and novelty. During the long colonial period, the quiet towns, less in communication with distant settlements than with the mother-country itself, removed from the currents of thought circulating in Europe, were under those conditions in which tradition is most prized and longest maintained. The old English lore in its higher branches, the ballad and the tale, already belonging to the past at the time of the settlement, was only sparingly existent among the intelligent class from which America was peopled; but such as they did bring with them was retained. Besides, the greater simplicity and freedom of American life caused, as it would seem, these childish amusements to be kept up by intelligent and cultivated families after the corresponding class in England had frowned them down as too promiscuous and informal. But it is among families with the greatest claims to social respectability that our rhymes have, in general, been best preserved.
During the time of which we are writing, independent local usages sprang up, so that each town had oftentimes its own formulas and names for children’s sports; but these were, after all, only selections from a common stock, one place retaining one part, another, of the old tradition. But in the course of the last two generations (and this is a secondary reason for the uniformity of our games in different parts of the country) the extension of intercourse between the States has tended to diffuse them, so that petty rhymes, lately invented, have sometimes gained currency from Maine to Georgia.
We proceed to speak of our games as they exist on the other side of the sea. A comparison with English and Scotch collections shows us very few games mentioned as surviving in Great Britain which we cannot parallel in independent forms. On the other hand, there are numerous instances in which rhymes of this sort, still current in America, do not appear to be now known in the mother-country, though they oftentimes have equivalents on the continent of Europe. In nearly all such cases it is plain that the New World has preserved what the Old World has forgotten; and the amusements of children to-day picture to us the dances which delighted the court as well as the people of the Old England before the settlement of the New.2
To develop the interest of our subject, however, we must go beyond the limits of the English tongue. The practice of American children enables us to picture to ourselves the sports which pleased the infancy of Froissart and Rabelais.3 A dramatic action of the Virginia hills preserves the usage of Färöe and Iceland, of Sweden and Venice.4 We discover that it is an unusual thing to find any remarkable childish sport on the European continent which failed to domesticate itself (though now perhaps forgotten) in England. It is thus vividly and irresistibly forced upon our notice, that the traditions of the principal nations of Europe have differed little more than the dialects of one language, the common tongue, so to speak, of religion, chivalry, and civilization.
A different explanation has been given to this coincidence. When only the agreement, in a few cases, of English and German rhymes was noticed, it was assumed that the correspondence was owing to race-migration; to the settlement in England of German tribes, who brought with them national traditions. The present volume would be sufficient to show the untenability of such an hypothesis. The resemblance of children’s songs in different countries, like the similarity of popular traditions in general, is owing to their perpetual diffusion from land to land; a diffusion which has been going on in all ages, in all directions, and with all degrees of rapidity. But the interest of their resemblance is hardly diminished by this consideration. The character of some of these parallelisms proves that for the diffusion in Europe of certain games of our collection we must go back to the early Middle Age;5 while the extent of the identity of our American (that is, of old English) child’s lore with the European is a continual surprise.6
Internal evidence alone would be sufficient to refer many of the sports to a mediæval origin, for we can still trace in them the expression of the life of that period.
We comprehend how deeply mediæval religious conceptions affected the life of the time, when we see that allusions to those beliefs are still concealed in the playing of children. We find that the tests which the soul, escaped from the body, had, as it was supposed, to undergo—the scales of St. Michael, the keys of St. Peter, and the perpetual warfare of angels and devils over departed souls—were familiarly represented and dramatized in the sports of infants.7 Such allusions have, it is true, been excluded from English games; but that these once abounded with them can be made abundantly evident. We see that chivalric warfare, the building and siege of castles, the march and the charge of armies, equally supplied material for childish mimicry. We learn how, in this manner, the social state and habits of half a thousand years ago unconsciously furnish the amusement of youth, when the faith and fashion of the ancient day is no longer intelligible to their elders.
It will be obvious that many of the game-rhymes in this collection were not composed by children. They were formerly played, as in many countries they are still played, by young persons of marriageable age, or even by mature men and women. The truth is, that in past centuries all the world, judged by our present standard, seems to have been a little childish. The maids of honor of Queen Elizabeth’s day, if we may credit the poets, were devoted to the game of tag,8 and conceived it a waste of time to pass in idleness hours which might be employed in that pleasure, with which Diana and her nymphs were supposed to amuse themselves. Froissart describes the court of France as amusing itself with sports familiar to his own childhood; and the Spectator speaks of the fashionable ladies of London as occupied with a game which is represented in this series.9
We need not, however, go to remote times or lands for illustration which is supplied by New England country towns of a generation since. In these, dancing, under that name, was little practised; it was confined to one or two balls in the course of the year on such occasions as the Fourth of July, lasting into the morning hours. At other times, the amusement of young people at their gatherings was “playing games.” These games generally resulted in forfeits, to be redeemed by kissing, in every possible variety of position and method. Many of these games were rounds; but as they were not called dances, and as mankind pays more attention to words than things, the religious conscience of the community, which objected to dancing, took no alarm. Such were the pleasures of young men and women from sixteen to twenty-five years of age. Nor were the participants mere rustics; many of them could boast as good blood, as careful breeding, and as much intelligence, as any in the land. Neither was the morality or sensitiveness of the young women of that day in any respect inferior to what it is at present.
Now that our country towns are become mere outlying suburbs of cities, these remarks may be read with a smile at the rude simplicity of old-fashioned American life. But the laugh should be directed, not at our own country, but at the by-gone age.10 In respectable and cultivated French society, at the time of which we speak, the amusements, not merely of young people, but of their elders as well, were every whit as crude. The suggestion is so contrary to our preconceived ideas, that we hasten to shelter ourselves behind the respectable name of Madame Celnart, who, as a recognized authority on etiquette, must pass for an unimpeachable witness.11 This writer compiled a very curious “Complete Manual of Games of Society, containing all the games proper for young people of both sexes,” which seems to have gained public approbation, since it reached a second edition in 1830. In her preface she recommends the games of which we have been speaking as recreations for business men:
“Another consideration in favor of games of society: it must be admitted that for persons leading a sedentary life, and occupied all day in writing and reckoning (the case with most men), a game which demands the same attitude, the same tension of mind, is a poor recreation. * * * On the contrary, the varying movement of games of society, their diversity, the gracious and gay ideas which these games inspire, the decorous caresses which they permit—all this combines to give real amusement. These caresses can alarm neither modesty nor prudence, since a kiss in honor given and taken before numerous witnesses is often an act of propriety.”
She prefers “rounds” to other amusements: “All hands united; all feet in cadence; all mouths repeating the same refrain; the numerous turns, the merry airs, the facile and rapid pantomime, the kisses which usually accompany them—everything combines, in my opinion, to make rounds the exercise of free and lively gayety.”
We find among the ring-games given by our author, and recommended to men of affairs, several of which English forms exist in our collection, and are familiar to all children.12
We are thus led to remark an important truth. It is altogether a mistake to suppose that these games (or, indeed, popular lore of any description) originated with peasants, or describe the life of peasants. The tradition, on the contrary, invariably came from above, from the intelligent class. If these usages seem rustic, it is only because the country retained what the city forgot, in consequence of the change of manners to which it was sooner exposed. Such customs were, at no remote date, the pleasures of courts and palaces. Many games of our collection, on the other hand, have, it is true, always belonged to children; but no division-line can be drawn, since out of sports now purely infantine have arisen dances and songs which have for centuries been favorites with young men and women.13