Honor to Whom Honor

I

MY first dim awareness of history came from Nannie Etticoat: —

Looking from my nursery lamp to the pictured candle that gives the answer to the riddle, I had a mysterious sense of continuity with the child who heard that rhyme, watching some nursery candle flicker and diminish, longago.

I wonder how many people, wherever the English language runs, have some such memory of Mother Goose. For more than two hundred years her Melodies have been subject for controversy. One may be sure her neighbors were critical of Madam Goose of Pudding Lane in Boston as she sang her frivolities into the ears of her grandchildren early in the eighteenth century. A decade after their first appearance at Newbery’s bookshop in London they were satirized from an English rectory. The dispute is reopened year after year as the publishers’ announcements tell of new and increasingly gorgeous editions of the nursery classic and ‘Children’s Book Week’ calls for annual appraisal of the children’s mental food.

Scholars of three countries have wrangled over name, source, and date. The evidence they have unearthed seems to apportion honors fairly among the contestants, assigning the name to France, most of the rhymes to Britain, and first publication to America.

As to text, each of us has an opinion. The copy given us in our childhood has validity all later versions lack.

As season follows season, Mother Goose spreads her wings to cover a larger brood. The edition torn and extra-illustrated by the babies I know best has rhymes elsewhere ascribed to Longfellow, to Dr. Johnson, to Charles and Mary Lamb. Even The Only True Mother Goose Melodies, without Addition or Abridgement, issued by Monroe and Francis (Boston, 1833), shamelessly and joyously introduces a poem by Walter Scott. In this, ’the dear little quarto edition’ beloved of Dr. Edward Everett Hale and the New Englanders of his generation, the sonorous summons,

comes after the couplet,

The juxtaposition would have pleased Sir Walter.

The first English edition, having John Newbery as publisher and Oliver Goldsmith as reputed editor, has this title-page_ ‘Mother Goose’s Melody; or, Sonnets for the Cradle, in Two Parts: Part I: Songs and Lullabies of Old British Nurses, calculated to amuse children and excite them to sleep: Part II: Those of that Sweet Songster and Muse of Wit and Humour, Master William Shakespeare.’ From all which it will be seen that, from the beginning, Mother Goose has been not so much author as anthologist.

Questions of origin, authorship, and date of issue are academic interests. The live issue has to do with the worth or worthlessness of the Melodies themselves. Ably they have been attacked, and valiantly defended.

The most cogent argument of the attacking party is that jingles which may have supplied a need of childhood two hundred years ago ought to be discarded in a day when children have Lear and Lewis Carroll, Belloc, Milne, and their peers for entertainers. The defense answers that the old favorite is an incomparable source book, with its songs, street cries, and ballads from an older time. Handy Dandy is linked with Piers Plowman, Jack and Jill traced to Icelandic mythology, and we are told that the ‘Old Woman and her Kid’ has, since the institution of the Passover, been recited by Jewish children, to whom it was handed down from even more remote Chaldean sources.

In other words, ‘The book is bad for babies,’ says the attack. ‘It is good for scholars,’ answers the defense. Nobody pays any attention to the sentimentalists who murmur, ‘The babies love it.’ And no one, so far as I know, has said anything about its pedagogical value.

To speak of Mother Goose and pedagogy sounds so pedantic that I should expect her to fly hissing at me if I did not take refuge in the etymology that says a pedagogue is just a caretaker to lead children from home to school.

One may be sure there was no didactic purpose in the jingles. What living poem ever issued from didactic purpose? Surely ‘to amuse little children and excite them to sleep’ is reward enough. Possibly, when stricter neighbors charged Madam Goose and her son-in-law, T. Fleet of Pudding Lane, with teaching children stuff and nonsense, they offered as a sop the evidence that any baby who is letter-perfect in the Melodies has, for factual equipment before school days begin, the names of the letters of the alphabet, the days of the week, the months of the year, and the number of days in each month; and that he can count up to twenty and even add that far by twos. With that, one fancies, T. Fleet would collect his two coppers, price of that now priceless first edition, and go back to his printing. And Mother Goose would jog her grandchildren on her knee again, ‘to market, to market, a gallop, a trot,’ instinctively supplying the eurhythmies which, in our day, childhood must seek in costly schools.

II

From the beginning there have been two ways of developing the human mind: the one, induction; the other, education. Formerly the emphasis was on mnemonics. Just now we stress the value of ‘telling back.’ Can the National Education Association and all the Parent-Teachers Associations combined find a textbook exemplifying both systems as does Mother Goose? Babies often know the jingles before they can repeat the sounds, and as soon as they can talk they chant them as they go about their play.

Philosophers and psychologists, who agree in so little, yet agree in this: that the prime mental needs of human beings are association and vocabulary. Mother Goose establishes for babies, who come so naked into the world, association with environment and with the past, and she has an amplitude of vocabulary that all the younger writers of our time might envy.

When school days come, the mind moves more at ease among the kings and queens because one knows King Cole — that British king of the third century whose place in history Mother Goose has guarded. One may be readier for Malory and Tennyson because one knew in babyhood how matters stood ‘when good King Arthur ruled his land.’ I for one have never been inclined to believe the worst of Guinevere, recalling as I do her wifely thrift in the matter of the bag pudding. The clash of arms in Froissart is powerless to daunt those who recall the futility of ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men’ in the affair of Humpty Dumpty.

Oh, we are used to royalty, we nurslings (print it ‘nestlings’ if you must) of Mother Goose. We have seen the king in his countinghouse, the queen in her kitchen. We even catch some glimmer of the philosophy of history and, recalling Pussy Cat and her preoccupation with mice when she went to London to see the queen, recognize familiar truth when Horace sighs, ‘I cannot flee beyond myself.’

Nor does the bridge into the past built by the Melodies lead only to palaces and thrones. One hears of market days and county fairs. The village idiot has a name, poor fellow, and his traffic with the pieman shows how barter and sale were carried on. Lost cottage industries revive. Children clothed in shop-made garments may still watch Cross Patch spin. Briskly they echo the command: —

They learn that, before yarn can be spun, somebody must go a-shearing.

Nursery walls expand and a sense of world citizenship comes in with the Man in the Moon inquiring his way to Norwich. The babies themselves, you see, have so lately ‘come tumbling down.’ London Bridge and Gloucester. St. Ives, the River Dee, and ‘far-off Lancashire’ are terra cognita. One knows at least one Welshman and quite a bit about him. Baby spirits go dancing ‘out of Ireland, into France.’ Imagination ranges from Babylon to Banbury Cross. And into plastic minds seeps the essential truth that everywhere people are doing things of universal concern like planting peas and eating porridge.

We loyalists need not deny that most of Mother Goose’s verse is jingling nonsense, but one of the geographical group swings into the uncharted realm of poetry.

it carelessly begins. Suddenly, there is clamor and a sense of grandeur, of cathedral splendor, in the air. From Whitechapel and Old Bailey, from St. Martin’s and St. Peter’s, from Shoreditch and Stepney and Bow, the bells of London ring.

When English literature comes as a college requirement, — save the mark! — none of its verse forms is wholly unfamiliar to Mother Goose’s graduates. There is cumulative verse, dear to our ancestors and still dear to teachers and to babies. Flytings and riddles from the high and far-off times feebly survive in such inanities as ‘I’m a gold lock’ and the rest of it; in such riddles as ‘Roomful, houseful, can’t catch a dishful.’ There are lyrics like ‘Daffy-down-dilly’ and dirges such as ‘Ding, dong, bell.’

Even the scholastic definition of an epic is not mere verbiage to the mind that can revert to the Wooing of Jenny Wren and the Death of Cock Robin. Tiny actors, truly, for small auditors, but here, complete with ‘lofty theme, complex action, narrative, detail and dialogue,’ is epic in embryo, if love, loyalty, and death be epic issues. English pronunciation, too, was still within hail of the Elizabethans when the Melodies were sung, and Mother Goose agrees with Shakespeare and his contemporaries in rhyming ‘boy’ with ‘die,’ ‘again’ with ‘grin,’ ‘sparrow’ with ‘morrow.’

III

Facts, eurhythmics, history, geography, rhetoric—with all these Mother Goose is helpful. In a matter even more important, her ‘sonnets’ have become essential.

Admittedly our population is increasingly urban, our civilization more mechanistic. This generation learns the names and uses of a thousand things undreamed of when Old British nurses sang in the Old World and Madam Goose dandled her grandchildren in the New; but how are children of to-day to learn the words and ways of yesterday?

I have seen a group of city children, astonished, excited, half-afraid, chorusing, ‘What is it?’ at sight of a cow. A small boy came to a halt on his stick horse. ‘What is the matter?’ I asked. The rider answered sadly, ‘Out of gas!’

Well, Mother Goose’s children know the animals at least by name. Horse and mare; bull, cow, and calf; sheep black and white, rams, ewes, and lambs; hogs, sows, and pigs, they march along her pages like a procession at a county fair, with geese and ganders, cocks and hens, ducks and drakes, at their heels. There are dogs and pussycats and all the common birds of England and, to complete the country pleasantness, bees and beehives set among rosemary, and lavender and such forgotten fiowers as the ‘pretty maids’ of Mistress Mary’s garden.

In modern schools, intricate toys have been introduced to illustrate the basic industries. Under Mother Goose’s guidance, babies learn about how things are made and who makes them from the time they can pat a cake. Hard on the heels of the baker come butcher and candlestick maker. A crowd of craftsmen follows — tinkers and tailors, spinners, weavers and shearers, shepherds and mowers and reapers, blacksmiths and chimney sweeps. There are housewives who brew and bake, milk and sweep and ‘sew a fine seam,’ and who still have time to rock cradles and sing to babies. And to represent the arts we have fiddlers, pipers, and drummers, with dances and singing beside.

In houses regulated by thermostats, the elements may be disregarded, but Mother Goose was mightily concerned about the weather. Her nurslings hear about it all, from ‘April’s sweet month,’ through ‘ midsummer when the days are lang,’ into the ‘ misty, moisty mornings’ of autumn, clear through to ‘cold, bleak, raw days, when winter’s now come fairly.’

These are not mere names, nor idle lists of words. This is the vocabulary of English literature. To children accustomed only to garage and filling station, ‘The Village Blacksmith’ would be jargon had they not learned, before they were out of knitted bootees, how to ‘shoe the horse and shoe the mare.’ Hardly could they recognize the roof of ‘Home, Sweet Home’ without the aid of ‘A thatcher from Thatchwood.’ Pope’s Happy Man,

needs as collateral reading nowadays Cushy Cow Bonny, Willy Boy, Black Sheep, and Little Boy Blue.

Long ago Oliver Goldsmith, to whom, for all his treatise on ‘Polite Learning,’ a sonnet was just a little song, linked these ‘Sonnets for the Cradle’ with ‘Those of Master William Shakespeare.’ As time goes on, those greatest lines of English poetry may find in Mother Goose their best interpreter. There are young people in high school to-day who could hardly read the dramatis personæ of A Midsummer Night’s Dream without the aid of Mother Hubbard’s dog. Hearts touched in babyhood by the troubles of ‘robin, poor thing,’ when ‘the north wind doth blow’ vibrate to the chill Æolian music of ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind!’

It is necessary to know that, as a rule, before it is possible to realize how hallowed and how blest is Christmas when ‘the cock of dawning singeth all night long.’

No editor need interrupt the splendor of Macbeth’s last lines to gloss ‘Out, out, brief candle!’ if before the mind’s eye Nannie Etticoat flicker once again. For ah, we know, we too,