_THE DIFFUSION AND ORIGIN OF AMERICAN GAME-RHYMES._
"The hideous Thickets in this place[1] 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]