It is a mistake to suppose that any one nation or people has exclusive
right to Mother Goose. She is an omnipresent old lady. She is Asiatic
as well as European or American. Wherever there are mothers,
grandmothers, and nurses there are Mother Gooses,--or; shall we say,
Mother Geese--for I am at a loss as to how to pluralize this old dame.
She is in India, whence I have rhymes from her, of which the following
is a sample:
Heh, my baby! Ho, my baby!
See the wild, ripe plum,
And if you'd like to eat a few,
I'll buy my baby some.
She is in Japan. She has taught the children there to put their fingers
together as we do for "This is the church, this is the steeple," when
she says:
A bamboo road,
With a floor-mat siding,
Children are quarrelling,
And parents chiding,
the "children" being represented by the fingers and the "parents" by
the thumbs. She is in China. I have more than 600 rhymes from her
Chinese collection. Let me tell you how I got them.
One hot day during my summer vacation, while sitting on the veranda of
a house among the hills, fifteen miles west of Peking, my friend, Mrs.
C. H. Fenn, said to me:
"Have you noticed those rhymes, Mr. Headland?"
"What rhymes?" I inquired.
"The rhymes Mrs. Yin is repeating to Henry."
"No, I have not noticed them. Ask her to repeat that one again."
Mrs. Fenn did so, and the old nurse repeated the following rhyme, very
much in the tone of, "The goblins 'll git you if you don't look out."
He climbed up the candlestick,
The little mousey brown,
To steal and eat tallow,
And he couldn't get down.
He called for his grandma,
But his grandma was in town,
So he doubled up into a wheel,
And rolled himself down.
I asked the nurse to repeat it again, more slowly, and I wrote it down
together with the translation.
Now, I think it must be admitted that there is more in this rhyme to
commend it to the public than there is in "Jack and Jill." If when that
remarkable young couple went for the pail of water, Master Jack had
carried it himself, he would have been entitled to some credit for
gallantry, or if in cracking his crown he had fallen so as to prevent
Miss Jill from "tumbling," or even in such a way as to break her fall
and make it easier for her, there would have been some reason for the
popularity of such a record. As it is, there is no way to account for
it except the fact that it is simple and rhythmic and children like it.
This rhyme, however, in the original, is equal to "Jack and Jill" in
rhythm and rhyme, has as good a story, exhibits a more scientific
tumble, with a less tragic result, and contains as good a moral as that
found in "Jack Sprat."
It is as popular all over North China as "Jack and Jill" is throughout
Great Britain and America. Ask any Chinese child if he knows the
"Little Mouse," and he reels it off to you as readily as an
English-speaking child does "Jack and Jill." Does he like it? It is a
part of his life. Repeat it to him, giving one word incorrectly, and he
will resent it as strenuously as your little boy or girl would if you
said,
Jack and Jill
Went DOWN the hill
Suppose you repeat some familiar rhyme to a child differently from the
way he learned it and see what the result will be.
Having obtained this rhyme, I asked Mrs. Yin if she knew any more. She
smiled and said she knew "lots of them." I induced her to tell them to
me, promising her five hundred cash (about three cents) for every rhyme
she could give me, good, bad, or indifferent, for I wanted to secure
all kinds. And I did. Before I was through I had rhymes which ranged
from the two extremes of the keenest parental affection to those of
unrefined filthiness. The latter class however came not from the nurses
but from the children themselves.
When I had finished with her I had a dozen or more. I soon learned
these so that I could repeat them in the original, which gave me an
entering wedge to the heart of every man, woman or child I met.
One day, as I rode through a broom-corn field on the back of a little
donkey, my feet almost dragging on the ground, I was repeating some of
these rhymes, when the driver running at my side said:
"Ha, you know those children's songs, do you?"
"Yes do you know any?"
"Lots of them," he answered.
"Lots of them" is a favorite expression with the Chinese.
"Tell me some."
"Did you ever hear this one?"
"Fire-fly, fire-fly,
Come from the hill,
Your father and mother
Are waiting here still.
They've brought you some sugar,
Some candy, and meat,
For baby to eat."
I at once dismounted and wrote it down, and promised him five hundred
cash apiece for every new one he could give me. In this way, going to
and from the city, in conversation with old nurses or servants,
personal friends, teachers, parents or children, or foreign children
who had been born in China and had learned rhymes from their nurses, I
continued to gather them during the entire vacation, and when autumn
came I had more than fifty of the most common and consequently the best
rhymes known in and about Peking.
A few months after I returned to the city a circular was sent around
asking for subscriptions to a volume of Pekinese Folklore, published by
Baron Vitali, Interpreter at the Italian legation, which, on
examination, proved to be exactly what I wanted. He had collected about
two hundred and fifty rhymes, had made a literal--not
metrical--translation and had issued them in book form without
expurgation.
Others learned of my collection, and rhymes began to come to me from
all parts of the empire. Dr. Arthur H. Smith, the well-known author of
"Chinese Characteristics" gave me a collection of more than three
hundred made in Shantung, among which were rhymes similar to those we
had found in Peking. Still later I received other versions of these
same rhymes from my little friend, Miss Chalfant, collected in a
different part of Shantung from that occupied by Dr. Smith. I then had
no fewer than five versions of
"This little pig went to market,"
each having some local coloring not found in the other, proving that
the fingers and toes furnish children with the same entertainment in
the Orient as in the Occident, and that the rhyme is widely known
throughout China.
These nursery rhymes have never been printed in the Chinese language,
but like our own Mother Goose before the year 1719, if we may credit
the Boston story, they are carried in the minds and hearts of the
children. Here arose the first difficulty we experienced in collecting
rhymes--the matter of getting them complete. Few are able to repeat the
whole of the
"House that Jack built"
although it has been printed many times and they learned it all in
their youth. The difficulty is multiplied tenfold in China where the
rhymes have never been printed, and where there have grown up various
versions from one original which the nurse had, no doubt, partly
forgotten, but was compelled to complete for the entertainment of the
child.
A second difficulty in making such a collection is that of getting
unobjectionable rhymes. While the Chinese classics are among the purest
classical books of the world, there is yet a large proportion of the
people who sully everything they take into their hands as well as every
thought they take into their minds. Thus so many of their rhymes have
suffered.
Some have an undertone of reviling. Some speak familiarly of subjects
which we are not accustomed to mention, and others are impure in the
extreme.
A third difficulty in making a collection of Chinese nursery lore is
greater than either the first or the second,--I refer to the difficulty
of a metrical rendition of the rhymes. I have no doubt my readers can
easily find flaws in my translations of Chinese Mother Goose Rhymes
published during the past year. It is much easier for me to find the
flaws than the remedies. Many of the words used in the original have no
written character or hieroglyphic to represent them, while many others,
though having a written form, are, like our own slang expressions, not
found in the dictionary.
Now let us turn to a more pleasant feature of this unwritten nursery
literature. The language is full of good rhymes, and all objectionable
features can be cut out without injury to the rhyme, as it was not a
part of the original, but added by some more unscrupulous hand.
Among the nursery rhymes of all countries many refer to insects, birds,
animals, persons, actions, trades, food or children. In Chinese rhymes
we have the cricket, cicada, spider, snail, firefly, ladybug and
butterfly and others. Among fowls we have the bat, crow, magpie, cock,
hen, duck and goose. Of animals, the dog, cow, horse, mule, donkey,
camel, and mouse, are the favorites. There are also rhymes on the snake
and frog, and others without number on places, things and
persons,--men, women and children.
Those who hold that the Chinese do not love their children have never
consulted their nursery lore. There is no language in the world, I
venture to believe, which contains children's songs expressive of more
keen and tender affection than some of those sung to children in China.