Читать книгу A History of Nursery Rhymes - Percy B. Green - Страница 6

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"O dea, si prima repetens ab origine pergam et vacet annales nostrorum audire laborum. Ante diem clauso componat Vesper Olympo."—Vergil, Æneid, Book I. 372.

"O goddess, if I were to proceed retracing them from their first origin, and thou hadst leisure to hear the records of our labours before (the end), the Evening Star would lull the day to rest, Olympus being closed."

However, granting the scientific imagination to assume a starting-point when the vast Ice Period was vanishing and language was not the test of race, but of social contact, it must be allowed that the River Drift-man was the first of his species that touched our shores, followed by the Cave-dwellers some thousands of years later; the latter man having his abode fixed to a locality, and his wanderings within prescribed limits.

He may have, this prehistoric man, this Cave-dweller, chattered like a monkey in a patois understood only by his own family; but what is more reasonable to suppose than that the Drift-men of the marshes and coastlines had only a restricted use for vocal sounds, sign-language being expressive enough to meet their few wants? Meagre social conditions, peculiar isolation, savagery, strife for life, call for no complex language, but sign-language has the authority of people living on the globe to-day, not only amongst uncivilised races, but traces are seen in our very midst.

The few examples of custom and signs given below will better illustrate the force of the statement.

"Amongst the Uvinza, when two grandees meet, the junior leans forward, bends his knees, and places the palms of his hands on the ground, one on either side his feet, while the senior claps hands over him six or seven times."

In the morning among the Walunga all the villagers turn out, and a continuous clapping is kept up to the vocalisation of a shrill "Kwi-tata?" or "How do you do?"

Two special signs for "good" are in the sign-vocabulary of the North American Indians, and are worth recording. The person greeting holds the right hand, back up, in front of and close to the heart, with the fingers extended and pointing to the left. Another habit is that of passing the open right hand, palm downwards, from the heart, towards the person greeted. A stranger making his appearance on the frontier line of an Indian camp seldom fails to recognise the true sentiment of the chief's salutation, the extended fingers on the left side meaning—

"You are near my heart—expect no treachery," a most solemn surety; while the hand sent from the heart towards the visitor seems to say—

"I extend hospitality to you."

The "attingere extremis digitis" of the Romans expressed the same temperate conduct.

But greeting by gesture and hand-clapping still live, and are discovered in the first lessons given by a mother to her babe.

"Clap hands, papa comes,"

and

"Pat a cake, pat a cake, my little man,

Yes, I will, mother, as fast as I can"

have a universal significance in Child Land. Unfortunately this survival of hand-clapping, a vestige of a habit belonging to primitive people, does not begin and end in our modern nursery.

"When I was a child I spake as a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things," is a resolve daily forgotten.

In the theatre, when our sentiment is awakened by the craft of the stage player, we show approbation by a round of hand-clapping not one whit less savage than the habit of the Uvinza grandee or the good-morning among the Walunga tribe.

"O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as others see us!"

This demonstration of feeling may have more corps d'esprit than the feeble "hear, hear" of the educated or self-restrained man, but sign-language, especially among the Anglo-Saxon race, is on the wane. Its exodus is slowly going on, lingering anon in the ritual of religions, yet in social life ever being expelled.

"It is rude to point," says the nursemaid to her little charge.

"Is it rude to shake hands, nurse?" once exclaimed a child cynic. The nurse was nonplussed. The middle-class mother answers the child's question—

"Yes, dear—with anyone in a lower position."

"That's a case," said an Irishman on hearing it, "of twopence-halfpenny looking down on twopence," or by another comparison, it is a case of one English grandee clapping his hands over another grandee's head. Still, though educational influences and nine-tenths of the coterie of society wage war against sign-language, ill-mannered men and badly-behaved children must always be with us.

"'Tis rude to laugh" is another precept of the hypercritical mother. Why? Goodness only knows!—for none but a pompous blockhead or a solemn prig will pretend that he never relaxes. But let ancient Plato, brimful as he was of philosophy, answer the question "When not to laugh?"

Indulging one day in idle waggery, Plato, on seeing a staid disciple approach, suddenly exclaimed to his fellows, "Let's be wise now, for I see a fool coming," and under hypocrisy's mask all merriment ceased.

Agesilaus in mere sport romped with his children, and delighted them by riding on a stick round the nursery, possibly singing, after the manner of many a modern rollicking nursery-loving father—

"Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross."

With men, however, kingly proclamations, laws, empires pass away and are forgotten, time obliterates their memories, but in Child Land all the inhabitants, from the tiniest crower to the ten-year-old boy, show an eager appreciation in the conservation of the pleasing lore contained in the lullabies, the jingles, the tales, the riddles, the proverbs, and the games of the nursery classics.

And what terrible critics these babies are! What a perverse preference they have for the soft jingle of nonsensical melody; blank verse with its five accents and want of rhythm does not soothe: they must have the—

"Lalla, lalla, lalla,

Aut dormi, aut lacta"

of their prototype of Roman days.

How they revel and delight in the mother's measured song of—

"Dance, little baby, dance up high,

Never mind, baby, mother is nigh;

Crow and caper, caper and crow,

There, little baby, there you go.

Up to the ceiling, down to the ground,

Backwards and forwards, round and round;

So dance, little baby, and mother will sing,

With a high cockolorum and tingle, ting ting."

Or—

"With a merry, gay coral, and tingle, ting ting."[A]