_THE INVENTIVENESS OF CHILDREN._
In the days of childhood new,
When Time had years and ours were few,
Here on grassy fields at play,
Ran we this, the other way;
On this very meadow-ground
First violets found,
Where the cattle graze to-day.
_Minnesinger, 13th Century._
The student of popular traditions is accustomed to recognize the
most trifling incidents of a tale, or the phrases of a song, as an
adaptation of some ancient or foreign counterpart, perhaps removed
by an interval of centuries. It is the same with rhymes of the sort
included in this collection, in which formulas of sport, current in
our own day and in the New World, will be continually found to be the
legacy of other generations and languages. Should we then infer that
childhood, devoid of inventive capacity, has no resource but mechanical
repetition?
We may, on the contrary, affirm that children have an especially lively
imagination. Observe a little girl who has attended her mother for
an airing in some city park. The older person, quietly seated beside
the footpath, is half absorbed in revery; takes little notice of
passers-by, or of neighboring sights or sounds, further than to cast
an occasional glance which may inform her of the child's security. The
other, left to her own devices, wanders contented within the limited
scope, incessantly prattling to herself; now climbing an adjoining
rock, now flitting like a bird from one side of the pathway to the
other. Listen to her monologue, flowing as incessantly and musically
as the bubbling of a spring; if you can catch enough to follow her
thought, you will find a perpetual romance unfolding itself in her
mind. Imaginary personages accompany her footsteps; the properties
of a childish theatre exist in her fancy; she sustains a conversation
in three or four characters. The roughnesses of the ground, the hasty
passage of a squirrel, the chirping of a sparrow, are occasions
sufficient to suggest an exchange of impressions between the unreal
figures with which her world is peopled. If she ascends, not without a
stumble, the artificial rockwork, it is with the expressed solicitude
of a mother who guides an infant by the edge of a precipice; if she
raises her glance to the waving green overhead, it is with the cry
of pleasure exchanged by playmates who trip from home on a sunshiny
day. The older person is confined within the barriers of memory and
experience; the younger breathes the free air of creative fancy.
A little older grown, such a child becomes the inventor of legend.
Every house, every hill in the neighborhood, is the locality of an
adventure. Every drive includes spots already famous in supposed
history, and passes by the abodes of fancied acquaintances. Into a land
with few traditions the imagination of six years has introduced a whole
cycle of romance.
If the family or vicinity contains a group of such minds, fancy takes
outward form in dramatic performance. The school history is vitalized
into reality; wars are waged and battles performed in a more extended
version, while pins and beans signify squadrons and regiments. Romances
are acted, tales of adventure represented with distribution of rôles.
Thus, in a family of our acquaintance, the children treasured up
wood-engravings, especially such as were cut from the illustrated
journals: runaway horses, Indian chiefs, and trappers of the wilderness
were at an especial premium. These they stored in boxes, encamped
in different corners of the room, and performed a whole library of
sensational tales. A popular piece set forth the destruction of the
villain of the story by a shark, while navigating a _catamaran_. The
separated beds of the sleeping-room represented the open planks of
the raft; the gentlest and most compliant character personified the
malefactor; and the shark swam between the bedsteads.
Where sports require or allow such freedom, the ingenuity of children
puts to shame the dulness of later years, and many a young lady of
twenty would find it impossible to construct the dialogue which eight
summers will devise without an effort. It was a favorite amusement
of two girls just entering their teens to conduct a boarding-school.
The scholars and the teachers of the imaginary school were all named,
and these characters were taken in dialogue by the little actors,
each sustaining several perfectly well-defined parts. The pupils
pursued their pleasures and their studies according to their several
tastes; while their progress, their individual accomplishments and
offences, were subsequently gravely discussed by the instructors, and
the condition, prospects, and management of the institution talked
over. Thus, hour after hour, without hesitation or weariness, the
conversation proceeded, with the duo of friends for actors and audience!
Oftentimes, with young children, an outward support is required for
fancy, an object to be mentally transformed. One set of little girls
collected in the fall birch-leaves, changed to yellow, out of which
alone they created their little nursery. Another party employed pins,
which they inserted in a board, and called pin-fairies. By the aid
of these, long dramatizations were performed, costumes devised, and
palaces decorated, under regulations rigidly observed.
Such exercises of imagination are usually conducted in strict privacy,
and unremarked, or not understood, by parents; but when the attention
of the latter is directed to these performances, they are often
astonished by the readiness they disclose, and are apt to mistake for
remarkable talent what is only the ease of the winged fancy of youth,
which flies lightly to heights where later age must laboriously mount
step by step.
As infancy begins to speak by the free though unconscious combination
of linguistic elements, so childhood retains in language a measure
of freedom. A little attention to the jargons invented by children
might have been serviceable to certain philologists. Their love of
originality finds the tongue of their elders too commonplace; besides,
their fondness for mystery requires secret ways of communication. They
therefore often create (so to speak) new languages, which are formed by
changes in the mother-speech, but sometimes have quite complicated laws
of structure, and a considerable arbitrary element.
The most common of these, which are classified by young friends under
the general name of _gibberish_, goes in New England by the name of
"Hog Latin." It consists simply in the addition of the syllable _ery_,
preceded by the sound of hard _g_, to every word. Even this is puzzling
to older persons, who do not at first perceive that "Wiggery youggery
goggery wiggery miggery" means only "Will you go with me!" Children
sometimes use this device so perpetually that parents fear lest they
may never recover the command of their native English. When it ceases
to give pleasure, new dialects are devised. Certain young friends of
ours at first changed the termination thus--"Withus yoovus govus
withus meevus?" which must be answered, "Ivus withus govus withus
yoovus;" the language, seemingly, not admitting a direct affirmative.
The next step was to make a more complicated system by prefixing a
_u_ (or _oo_) sound with a vowel suffix. Thus, "Will you go with me
to lunch?" would be "Uwilla uoa ugoa uwitha umea utoa uluncha?" But
this contrivance, adopted by all the children of a neighborhood,[25]
was attended with variations incapable of reduction to rule, but
dependent on practice and instinct. The speech could be learned, like
any other, only by experience; and a little girl assured us that she
could not comprehend a single word until, in the course of a month, she
had learned it by ear. She added, in regard to a particular dialect,
that it was much harder than French, and that her brother had to think
a great deal when he used it. The application of euphonic rules was
more or less arbitrary. Thus, _understand_ would be _uery-uinste_.
The following will answer for a specimen of a conversation between a
child and a nurse who has learned the tongue: "Uery uisy uemy uity?"
"Up-stairs, on the screen in your room." The child had asked, "Where is
my hat?"
A group of children living near Boston invented the _cat language_,
so called because its object was to admit of free intercourse with
cats, to whom it was mostly talked, and by whom it was presumed to be
comprehended. In this tongue the cat was naturally the chief subject
of nomenclature; all feline positions were observed and named, and the
language was rich in such epithets, as Arabic contains a vast number
of expressions for _lion_. Euphonic changes were very arbitrary and
various, differing for the same termination; but the adverbial ending
_ly_ was always _osh_; _terribly_, _tirriblosh_. A certain percentage
of words were absolutely independent, or at least of obscure origin.
The grammar tended to Chinese or infantine simplicity; _ta_ represented
any case of any personal pronoun. A proper name might vary in sound
according to the euphonic requirement of the different Christian-names
by which it was preceded. There were two dialects, one, however,
stigmatized as _provincial_.
This invention of language must be very common, since other cases have
fallen under our notice in which children have composed dictionaries of
such.
It would be strange if children who exhibit so much inventive talent
did not contrive new games; and we find accordingly that in many
families a great part of the amusements of the children are of their
own devising. The earliest age of which the writer has authentic record
of such ingenuity is two and a half years.
Considering the space which our Indian tribes occupy in the imagination
of young Americans, it is remarkable that the red man has no place
whatever in the familiar and authorized sports. On the other hand,
savage life has often furnished material for individual and local
amusements.
Near the country place of a family within our knowledge was a patch of
brushwood containing about forty acres, and furnishing an admirable
ground for savage warfare. Accordingly, a regular game was devised.
The players were divided into Indians and hunters, the former uttering
their war-cry in such dialect as youthful imagination regarded as
aboriginal. The players laid ambushes for each other in the forest, and
the game ended with the extermination of one party or the other. This
warfare was regulated by strict rules, the presentation of a musket at
a fixed distance being regarded as equivalent to death.
In a town of Massachusetts, some thirty years since, it was customary
for the school-girls, during recess, to divide themselves into separate
tribes. Shawls spread over tent-poles represented Indian lodges, and
a girl always resorted to her allotted habitation. This was kept up
for the whole summer, and carried out with such earnestness that girls
belonging to hostile tribes, though otherwise perfectly good friends,
would often not speak to each other for weeks, in or out of school.
In the same town was a community of "Friends," or "Quakers." It was the
custom for children of these to play at meeting. Sitting about the room
on a "First-day" gathering, one of them would be moved by the spirit,
rise, and exhort in the sing-song tone common to the meeting-house.
There was a regular formula for this amusement--a speech which the
children had somewhere heard and found laughable: "My de-ar friends,
I've been a thinking and a thinking and a thinking; I see the blinking
and the winking; pennyroyal tea is very good for a cold."
A young lady of our acquaintance, as a child, invented a game of
pursuit, which she called Spider and Fly. The Flies, sitting on the
house-stairs, buzzed in and out of the door, where they were exposed
to the surprise of the Spider. The children of the neighborhood still
maintain the sport, which is almost the exact equivalent of a world-old
game whose formula is given in our collection.
We need not go on to illustrate our thesis. But it remains true that
the great mass of the sports here presented are not merely old, but
have existed in many countries, with formulas which have passed from
generation to generation. How are we to reconcile this fact with the
quick invention we ascribe to children?
The simple reason why the amusements of children are inherited is the
same as the reason why language is inherited. It is the necessity of
general currency, and the difficulty of obtaining it, which restricts
the variation of one and of the other. If a sport is familiar only to
one locality or one set of children, it passes away as soon as the
youthful fancy of that region grows weary of it. Besides, the old
games, which have prevailed and become familiar by a process of natural
selection, are usually better adapted to children's taste than any new
inventions can be; they are recommended by the quaintness of formulas
which come from the remote past, and strike the young imagination as a
sort of sacred law. From these causes, the same customs have survived
for centuries through all changes of society, until the present age has
involved all popular traditions, those of childhood as of maturity, in
a general ruin.