V The Conservatism of Children
Here, as girl’s duty is, Timarete lays down her cymbals,
Places the ball that she loved, carries the net of her hair;
Maiden, and bride to be, her maids26 to maid Artemis renders,
And with her favorites too offers their various wardrobe.
Greek Anthology.
As the light-footed and devious fancy of childhood, within its assigned limits, easily outstrips the grave progress of mature years, so the obedience of children is far more scrupulous not to overstep the limits of the path. It is a provision of nature, in order to secure the preservation of the race, that each generation should begin with the unquestioning reception of the precepts of that which it follows. No deputy is so literal, no nurse so Rhadamanthine, as one child left in charge of another. The same precision appears in the conduct of sports. The formulas of play are as Scripture, of which no jot or tittle is to be repealed. Even the inconsequent rhymes of the nursery must be recited in the form in which they first became familiar; as many a mother has learned, who has found the versions familiar to her own infancy condemned as inaccurate, and who is herself sufficiently affected by superstition to feel a little shocked, as if a sacred canon had been irreligiously violated.
The life of the past never seems so comprehensible, and the historic interval never so insignificant, as when the conduct and demeanor of children are in question. Of all human relations, the most simple and permanent one is that of parent and child. The loyalty which makes a clansman account his own interests as trifling in comparison with those of his chieftain, or subjects consider their own prosperity as included in their sovereign’s, belongs to a disappearing society; the affection of the sexes is dependent, for the form of its manifestation, on the varying usages of nations; but the behavior of little children, and of their parents in reference to them, has undergone small change since the beginnings of history. Homer might have taken for his model the nursery of our own day, when, in the words of Achilles’ rebuke to the grief of Patroclus, he places before us a Greek mother and her baby—
Patroclus, why dost thou weep, like a child too young to speak plainly,
A girl who runs after her mother, and cries in arms to be taken,
Catching hold of her garment, and keeping her back from her errand,
Looking up to her tearful, until she pauses and lifts her?
And the passage is almost too familiar to cite—
Hector the radiant spoke, and reached out his arms for the baby;
But the infant cried out, and hid his face in the bosom
Of his nurse gayly-girdled, fearing the look of his father,
Scared by the gleam of the bronze, and the helmet crested with horse-hair,
Dreading to see it wave from the lofty height of the forehead.
In the same manner, too, as the feelings and tastes of children have not been changed by time, they are little altered by civilization, so that similar usages may be acceptable both to the cultivated nations of Europe and to the simpler races on their borders.
It is natural, therefore, that the common toys of children should be world-old. The tombs of Attica exhibit dolls of classic or ante-classic time, of ivory or terra-cotta, the finer specimens with jointed arms or legs. Even in Greece, as it seems, these favorites of the nursery were often modelled in wax; they were called by a pet name, indicating that their owners stood to them in the relation of mamma to baby; they had their own wardrobes and housekeeping apparatus. The Temple of Olympian Zeus at Elis contained, says Pausanias, the little bed with which Hippodamia had played. But the usage goes much further back. Whoever has seen the wooden slats which served for the cheaper class of the dolls of ancient Egypt, in which a few marks pass for mouth, nose, and eyes, will have no difficulty in imagining that their possessors regarded them with maternal affection, since all the world knows that a little girl will lavish more tenderness on a stuffed figure than on a Paris doll, the return of affection being proportional to the outlay of imagination.
When Greek and Roman girls had reached an age supposed to be superior to such amusements, they were expected to offer their toys on the altar of their patroness, to whatever goddess might belong that function, Athene or Artemis, Diana or Venus Libitina. If such an act of devotion was made at the age of seven years, as alleged, one can easily understand that many a child must have wept bitterly over the sacrifice. To this usage refers the charming quatrain, a version of which we have set as the motto of our chapter.
Children’s rattles have from the most ancient times been an important article of nursery furniture. Hollow balls containing a loose pebble, which served this purpose, belong to the most ancient classic times. These “rattles,” however, often had a more artistic form, lyre-shaped with a moving plectrum; or the name was used for little separate metallic figures—“charms,” as we now say—strung together so as to jingle, and worn in a necklace. Such were afterwards preserved with great care; in the comic drama they replace the “strawberry mark” by which the father recognizes his long-lost child. Thus, in the “Rudens” of Plautus, Palæstra, who has lost in shipwreck her casket, finds a fisherman in possession of it, and claims her property. Both agree to accept Dæmones, the unknown father of the maiden, as arbiter. Dæmones demands, “Stand off, girl, and tell me, what is in the wallet?” “Playthings.”27 “Right, I see them; what do they look like?” “First, a little golden sword with letters on it.” “Tell me, what are the letters?” “My father’s name. Then there is a two-edged axe, also of gold, and lettered; my mother’s name is on the axe.... Then a silver sickle, and two clasped hands, and a little pig, and a golden heart, which my father gave me on my birthday.” “It is she; I can no longer keep myself from embracing her. Hail, my daughter!”
In the ancient North, too, children played with figures of animals. The six-year-old Arngrim is described in a saga as generously making a present of his little brass horse to his younger brother Steinolf; it was more suitable to the latter’s age, he thought.
The weapons of boys still preserve the memory of those used by primitive man. The bow and arrow, the sling, the air-gun, the yet more primeval club or stone, are skilfully handled by them. Their use of the top and ball has varied but little from the Christian era to the present day. It is, therefore, not surprising that many games are nearly the same as when Pollux described them in the second century.28 Yet it interests us to discover that not only the sports themselves, but also the words of the formulas by which they are conducted, are in certain cases older than the days of Plato and Xenophon.29
We have already set forth the history contained in certain appellations of the song and dance. If the very name of the chorus has survived in Europe to the present day, so the character of the classic round is perpetuated in the ring games of modern children. Only in a single instance, but that a most curious one, have the words of a Greek children’s round been preserved. This is the “tortoise-game,” given by Pollux, and we will let his words speak for themselves:
“The tortoise is a girl’s game, like the pot; one sits, and is called tortoise. The rest go about asking:
“O torti-tortoise, in the ring what doest thou?”
She answers:
“I twine the wool, and spin the fine Milesian thread.”
The first again:
“Tell us, how was it that thy offspring died?”
To which she says:
“He plunged in ocean from the backs of horses white.”
Our author does not tell us how the game ended; but from his comparison to the “pot-game”30 we conclude that the tortoise immediately dives into the “ocean” (the ring) to catch whom she can.
This quaint description shows us that the game-formulas of ancient times were to the full as incoherent and obscure as those of our day frequently are. The alliterative name of the tortoise,31 too, reminding us of the repetitions of modern nursery tales, speaks volumes for the character of Greek childish song.
Kissing games, also, were as familiar in the classic period as in later time; for Pollux quotes the Athenian comic poet Crates as saying of a coquette that she “plays kissing games in rings of boys, preferring the handsome ones.”
It must be confessed, however, that we can offer nothing so graceful as the cry with which Greek girls challenged each other to the race, an exclamation which we may render, “Now, fairies!”32—the maidens assuming for the nonce the character of the light-footed nymphs of forest or stream.
Coming down to mediæval time, we find that the poets constantly refer to the life of children, with which they have the deepest sympathy, and which they invest with a bright poetry, putting later writers to shame by comparison. That early period, in its frank enjoyment of life, was not far from the spirit of childhood. Wolfram of Eschenbach represents a little girl as praising her favorite doll:
None is so fair
As my daughter there.
The German proverb still is “Happy as a doll.”
It has been remarked how, in all times, the different sex and destiny of boys and girls are unconsciously expressed in the choice and conduct of their pleasures. “Women,” says a writer of the seventeenth century, “have an especial fondness for children. That is seen in little girls, who, though they know not so much as that they are maids, yet in their childish games carry about dolls made of rags, rock them, cradle them, and care for them; while boys build houses, ride on a hobby-horse, busy themselves with making swords and erecting altars.”
Like causes have occasioned the simultaneous disappearance of like usages in countries widely separated. In the last generation children still sang in our own towns the ancient summons to the evening sports—
Boys and girls, come out to play,
The moon it shines as bright as day;
and similarly in Provence, the girls who conducted their ring-dances in the public squares, at the stroke of ten sang:
Ten hours said,
Maids to bed.
But the usage has departed in the quiet cities of Southern France, as in the busy marts of America.
It is much, however, to have the pleasant memory of the ancient rules which youth established to direct its own amusement, and to know that our own land, new as by comparison it is, has its legitimate share in the lore of childhood, in considering which we overleap the barriers of time, and are placed in communion with the happy infancy of all ages. Let us illustrate our point, and end these prefatory remarks, with a version of the description of his own youth given by a poet of half a thousand years since—no mean singer, though famous in another field of letters—the chronicler Jean Froissart. He regards all the careless pleasures of infancy as part of the unconscious education of the heart, and the thoughtless joy of childhood as the basis of the happiness of maturity; a deep and true conception, which we have nowhere seen so exquisitely developed, and which he illuminates with a ray of that genuine genius which remains always modern in its universal appropriateness, when, recounting the sports of his own early life,33 many of which we recognize as still familiar, he writes:
In that early childish day
I was never tired to play
Games that children every one
Love until twelve years are done;
To dam up a rivulet
With a tile, or else to let
A small saucer for a boat
Down the purling gutter float;
Over two bricks, at our will,
To erect a water-mill;
And in the end wash clean from dirt,
In the streamlet, cap and shirt.
We gave heart and eye together
To see scud a sailing feather;
After I was put to school,
Where ignorance is brought to rule,
There were girls as young as I;
These I courted, by-and-by,
Little trinkets offering—
A pear, an apple, or glass ring;
For their favor to obtain
Seemed great prowess to me then,
And, sober earnest, so it is.
And now and then it pleased us well
To sift dust through a piercèd shell
On our coats; or in time ripe,
To cut out a wheaten pipe.
In those days for dice and chess
Cared we busy children less
Than mud pies and buns to make,
And heedfully in oven bake
Of four bricks; and when came Lent,
Out was brought a complement
Of river-shells, from secret hold,
Estimated above gold,
To play away, as I thought meet,
With the children of our street;
And as they tossed a counter, I
Stood and shouted, “Pitch it high!”
When the moon was shining bright
We would play in summer night
Pince-merine; and time so passed,
I was more eager at the last
Than outset, and I thought it shame
When I was made to stop my game.
More to tell, we practised too
The sport entitled Queue loo loo,34
Hook, Trottot Merlot, Pebbles, Ball;
And when we had assembled all,
Pears, swiftly running; or were lief
To play at Engerrant the Thief.
Now and then, for a race-course,
Of a staff we made a horse,
And called him Gray; or, in knight’s guise,
We put our caps on helmet-wise;
And many a time, beside a maid,
A mimic house of shells I made.
Upon occasions we would choose
The one who hit me I accuse,
Take Colin off; and by-and-by
Selected King who does not lie,
Ring, Prison-bars; or were content,
When in-doors, with Astonishment,
Oats, Scorn, or Riddles; nor forget
Replies, and Grasses, Cligne-musette,
Retreat, and Mule, and Hunt the Hare;
Leaping and Palm-ball had their share,
Salt Cowshorn, and Charette Michaut;
And oftentimes we chose to throw
Pebbles or pence against a stake;
Or small pits in the ground would make,
And play at nuts, which he who lost,
His pleasure bitterly was crossed.
To drive a top was my delight
From early morning until night;
Or to blow, single or double,
Through a tube a bright soap-bubble,
Or a batch of three or four,
To rejoice our eyes the more.
Games like these, and more beside,
Late and early have I plied.
Followed a season of concern;
Latin I was made to learn;
And if I missed, I was a dunce,
And must be beaten for the nonce.
So manners changed, as hands severe
Trained me to knowledge and to fear.
Yet lessons done, when I was free,
Quiet I could never be,
But fought with my own mates, and thus
Was vanquished or victorious;
And many a time it was my fate
To come home in a ragged state
And meet reproof and chastisement;
But, after all, ’twas pains misspent;
For, let a comrade come in sight,
That moment I had taken flight,
And none could hinder; in that hour
Pleasure unto me was power,
Though oft I found, as I find still,
The two inadequate to my will.
Thus I did the time employ—
So may Heaven give me joy—
That all things tended to my pleasure,
Both my labor and my leisure,
Being alert and being still;
Hours had I at my own will.
Then a wreath of violets,
To give maids for coronets,
Was to me of more account
Than the present of a count,
Twenty marks, would be to-day;
I had a heart content and gay,
And a soul more free and light
Than the verse may well recite.
So, to fashion form and feature,
Co-operated Love and Nature:
Nature made the body strong,
And forces that to Love belong,
Soft and generous the heart;
Truly, if in every part
Of the body soul did live,
I should have been sensitive!
Not a splendor upon earth
I esteemed so seeing-worth
As clustered violets, or a bed
Of peonies or roses red.
When approached the winter-time,
And out-of-doors was cold and rime,
No loss had I what to do,
But read romances old and new,
And did prefer, the rest above,
Those of which the theme was love,
Imagining, as on I went,
Everything to my content.
Thus, since infantine delight
Oft inclines the heart aright,
After his own living form
Love my spirit did inform,
And pleasure into profit turned;
For the fortitude I learned,
And the soul of high emprise,
Hath such merit in my eyes,
That its worth and preciousness
Words of mine cannot express.
Footnotes
1 Boston.
2 See Nos. 40 and 58.
3 See No. 21.
4 See No. 2.
5 See No. 1.
6 More than three fourths of all children’s games in the German collections are paralleled (it may be in widely varying forms) in the present volume. Allowing for the incompleteness of collections, the resemblance of French games is probably nearly as close. The case is not very different in Italy and Sweden, so far at least as concerns games of any dramatic interest. Not till we come to Russia, do we find anything like an independent usage. Taken altogether, our American games are as ancient and characteristic as any, and throw much light on the European system of childish tradition.
7 See Nos. 150-153.
8 Barley-break. See No. 101.
9 No. 90.
10 It must be remembered that in mediæval Europe, and in England till the end of the seventeenth century, a kiss was the usual salutation of a lady to a gentleman whom she wished to honor. The Portuguese ladies who came to England with the Infanta in 1662 were not used to the custom; but, as Pepys says, in ten days they had “learnt to kiss and look freely up and down.” Kissing in games was, therefore, a matter of course, in all ranks.
11 Mme. Élisabeth-Félicie Bayle-Mouillard, who wrote under this pseudonym, had in her day a great reputation as a writer on etiquette. Her “Manuel Complet de la Bonne Compagnie” reached six editions in the course of a few years, and was published in America in two different translations—at Boston in 1833, and Philadelphia in 1841.
12 See Nos. 10 and 36.
13 See No. 154, and note.
14 Ballad, ballet, ball, from ballare, to dance.
15 See Nos. 12-17.
16 Yet there is no modern English treatise on the history of the ballad possessing critical pretensions. It is to the unselfish labors of an American—Professor Francis J. Child, of Harvard University—that we are soon to owe a complete and comparative edition of English ballads.
17 In the country, in Massachusetts, Thanksgiving evening was the particular occasion for these games.
18 The feast of Flora, says Pliny, in order that everything should flower.
19 So in Southern France—
“Catherine, ma mie—reveille-toi, s’il vous plaît;
Regarde à ta fenêtre le mai et le bouquet.”
20 “On May-day eve, young men and women still continue to play each other tricks by placing branches of trees, shrubs, or flowers under each other’s windows, or before their doors.”—Harland, “Lancashire Folk-lore.”
21 The “Shepheards Calender” recites how, in the month of May,
Youngthes folke now flocken in every where,
To gather May-buskets and smelling brere;
And home they hasten the postes to dight,
And all the kirk-pillours eare day-light,
With hawthorn buds, and sweete eglantine,
And girlonds of roses, and soppes in wine.
“Sops in wine” are said to be pinks.
22 See Nos. 23, 26, and 160.
23 “In summer season howe doe the moste part of our yong men and maydes in earely rising and getting themselves into the fieldes at dauncing! What foolishe toyes shall not a man see among them!”—“Northbrooke’s Treatise,” 1577.
24 As I have seen the lady of the May
Set in an arbour (on a holy-day)
Built by the May-pole.
—Wm. Browne.
25 In Cincinnati.
26 The same Greek word, kora, signifies maiden and doll.
27 Crepundia; literally, rattles.
28 See Nos. 105 and 108.
29 See Nos. 91, 92, and 93.
30 “The pot-game—the one in the middle sits, and is called a pot; the rest tweak him, or pinch him, or slap him while running round; and whoever is caught by him while so turning takes his place.” We might suppose the disconnected verse of the “tortoise-game” to be imitated, perhaps in jest, from the high-sounding phrases of the drama.
31 “Cheli-chelone,” torti-tortoise.
32 “Phitta Meliades.”
33 Froissart’s account of the school he attended reminds us of the American district school, and his narration has the same character of charming simplicity as his allusion to playing with the boys of our street.
34 For the games here mentioned, compare note in Appendix.
GAMES AND SONGS OF AMERICAN CHILDREN