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One reason, doubtless, most of us can give—and I can think of none so goodis that our mothers said them to us as they danced us up and down upon their knees. To this it may be reasonably objected that mothers are unreasonable beings; but is not that their charm, as it is the charm of these indescribable snatches? Not only our mothers, but their great-grandmothers' grandmothers dandled our distinguished swaddled ancestors to the very same rigmaroles. There must be some sense, if not reason, in anything associated with the antiquity of cradles and the maternal breast and soft, crooning voice over the mystery of the dawning foolishness soon to be man.

Addison, with that humanity and common sense which keeps the Spectator so alive and near to us across two centuries, speaking of popular poetry, has this very satisfactory passage:

When I traveled I took a particular delight in hearing the songs and fables that are come down from father to son, and are most in vogue among the common people of the countries through which I passed: for it is impossible that anything should be universally tasted and approved of by a multitude, though they are only the rabble of the nation, which hath not in it some peculiar aptness to please and gratify the mind of man. An ordinary song or ballad that is the delight of the common people cannot fail to please all such readers as are not unqualified for the entertainment by their affectation or ignorance.

...

"Not unqualified for the entertainment by their affectation" is a phrase which deserves especial emphasis as going near the mark of so much literary depreciation. Aside from the cult of the "old ballad" or "folk-song," no few youthful literary persons turn up their noses at, one admits, the frequently crude and uncouth verse which gives the average non-literary man a pleasure which rather merits analysis than derision; and the fact of a poet being popular is sufficient to condemn him. So you seldom hear Longfellow spoken of by critics of poetry, though he was really an excellent poet; and the fact that Tennyson could be popular as well as write "The Lotus Eaters" and "Lucretius" is a mill-stone round the neck of his fame.

Actually, however, while it is well that man should love good poetry, it is much more interesting that he should love bad poetry-as he does with an inexhaustible appetite. That he should love verse in any form, or of any quality, is the really curious thing. Why should your housemaid's "young man" break through the trammels of prose when he writes her love-letters, and blossom into sentimental rhyme, as any one who has caught glimpses into the love literature of the proletariat knows is rather usual than exceptional. And the number of "hard-headed" business men who cut out jingles from the newspapers every day and hide them in their pocket-books is an eloquent witness to the ineradicable love of rhyming in the really human being.

But to return to "Polly, put the kettle on," and the other rhymes quoted with it, may one not apply to these "sampler" rhymes-for they belong to the sampler period the opinion of the great "Mr. Spectator," extending to them also the benefit of the theorem that "it is impossible that anything should be universally tasted and approved of by a multitude . . . which hath not in it some peculiar aptness to please and gratify the mind of man."

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"What is the "peculiar aptness to please and gratify the mind of man' that has so long mysteriously resided in "Polly, put the kettle on," "CrossPatch, draw the latch," and "Curly Locks, Curly Locks, wilt thou be mine"?

"Aye, marry, tell me that," as the First Grave-digger said, "or confess thyself."

At first sight, one has to admit that the proposition is something of a poser. One may feel the fascination of these old things, and be prepared to hold to them, from the standpoint of instinct; to believe in them, so to say, by faith; but, as with so many other precious things for which we have no other credentials than faith, so, at the first challenge, it is not easy to give reasons for our opinion that, after all, the attachment to them of so many generations is not so absurd as it may seem.

The reason I adduced above, that we have all heard them at our mothers' knee, while a good reason so far as it

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mincingly make believe to be “naughty” over the unbridled excesses of Grape

goes, and for us, and for an uncertain number of preceding generations, can only be allowed as secondary, associa- Juice, s tive; for there was once a time when these rhymes chanted to babes for the first time. The were new, and were first baby must have taken to them so that he handed down his liking to all later generations of babies; and there must have been something in them, according to Addison, for him to take such a fancy for. Then, as he grew up, apparently he still liked them, doubtless also with that associative value with his mother, and handed on his liking to

people who read Cowper drank tea in the same wild spirit. Note the orgiastic ictus on the word "all"-"we'll all have tea!" All restraints shall be thrown to the winds. All that binds us cies, the to society-the obligations, the decencies, the respectabilities-shall go. We have worn the chains too long. For once we will be free. For once we will have our fling. "Polly"-note the sudden accent in the creative imperative of one who has come to a desperate, laissezaller decision, henceforth his past, and

later generations of grown-up babies. his burned boats behind him-"Polly" And so it has gone on. Yet this could hardly have happened had there not been something in the rhymes that had a" peculiar aptness to please and gratify

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the mind of man."

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The verses, of course, have other associative values than the maternal or the nursery values. They have, as I said, the charm of "samplers," a charm which is another of the mysteries, and which, I venture to think, is not entirely association. They have the charm of quaint, Old-World costumes, dances, furniture, instruments, manners, and so forth— matters which again have a provable essential value over their association with le temps jadis. The charm of past time is so great for some of us that it easily obscures the judgment; so much so, indeed, that the horse-hair sofas we

once

despised, and even the pre-Morris wall-papers, are on the way to seem beautiful to us-which, I am afraid, is another way of saying that age is also

on the way.

"Polly, put the kettle on," for example, belongs to the great Tea Periodthe days when people read Cowper, and tea was referred to as "Old Hyson." It is the bacchanal of "the cup that cheers, but not inebriates." It is the "Back and side go bare, go bare" of the reckless tea-drinker, when "the Great Lexicographer" drank his numberless cups at a sitting, as other men drank their three bottles. It is the dithyrambic of the old maid and her select circle of "prunes-and-prisms" gallants. It is the "naughty" song of the Queen Anne and Victorian domesticities. Just as certain sterilized natures in our own period

-an end to this endless striving to con-
trol one's impulses, an end to the sham
of pretending to be better than we are-
"On with the dance, Let joy be un-
confined"-"Polly, put the kettle on

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"and"-turning to the rest of the company, as though to say that now they can all be their unregenerate selves"we'll all have tea."

As the rage of the sheep is said to be terrible, so the "dissipations" of the innocent, or the neutral-tinted, have something pathetic about them. One wonders why they should want, or trouble, to appear what they are not; just as I wondered, on my one frightened excursion into a vegetarian restaurant, why the dishes were not called by their vegetable names instead of by some name suggesting that "animal food" against which the whole institution was a protest. Why call palpable cabbage roast duck, which it doesn't in the least resemble, when good cabbage is good enough? So with tea-why those airs of pretending that it was something "worse" than it was, something the drinking of which together was like the sharing of a guilty secret?

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Sometimes, indeed, in circles—still, I must add, highly and even pompously respectable where the blood of the company ran a little redder, that something worse" was often present, either openly on the tray, or hidden discreetly behind the silver "equipage." There were no spoken words, but only a gentle furtive smile and movement of the lips, and when your tea was handed to you, you discovered it to be what sailors call a "royal." The custom of drinking rum

in your tea still prevails in Russia; it did, at least till before the revolution, and I am not too old to have forgotten its stately observance on Madison Avenue.

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But "Polly, put the kettle on" has something in it better than these, perhaps, minor suggestions. It has in it the song of the tea-kettle on the hob, which has only one match for coziness in the world of indoor quiet comfortable things, the purring of a cat on the hearth. The very word "coziness" suggests what used to be an indispensable adjunct of the tea-tray-that "cozy, a quilted, padded device, usually of flowered satin, which was placed like a soft extinguisher over the teapot to keep it warm-an heretical practice, as I remember, according to the greatest experts, being really bad for the tea, coddling "tannin" and other deleterious properties of the great Chinese herb. In my time old ladies used to make presents to each other of elaborately embroidered tea-cozies, but now, I am afraid, teacozies are only to be found in antique. shops, or carefully protected against moth and thief in the glass cases of those museums which, receiving in return so little gratitude from us, keep safe for age's memories things dear in youth, but dearer with the years.

Hinc ille lacrima! Seriously, there are few things fuller of the sense of tears in mortal things to some memories than an old tea-cozy. It concentrates a world of quiet recollections, full of a peace and a security, a sense of home that seems at the moment to have passed from the earth-if, indeed, the earth desires it any more. It suggests that tranquil hour of the day when you were allowed to come into the drawing-room, and, seated on a hassock at your mother's feet, lean your head in the mighty protecting covert of her rustling silk skirts, while overhead, Polly having brought the kettle in, she dispensed tea, cream-"lemon"

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later and "how many lumps?" to gentlemen with gray mustaches and very courtly manners, and pretty, gossipy ladies who, you may be sure, were far from being as old as you then thought them. On the whole, I think that, within its degree, no more completely satisfactory hour has been invented for human beings, so quietly exhilarating,

so innocent without being stupid, so absolutely agreeable with Horace's "golden mean," than the kind, old-fashioned hour when Polly put the kettle on and we all had tea.

I cannot, of course, be at all sure that "Polly, put the kettle on" means anything like this to others than myself, but I believe that it will mean something of the kind to no few; and it must always be remembered that in the case even of greater poems opinion is by no means unanimous.

For "Curly Locks" I am prepared to make out a different, and, as poetry, maybe, a stronger plea. We are often told, and I think there can be little doubt of it, that the weakness of modern poetry compared with that of the ancients, the poetry of Greece and Rome, let us say, is that modern poetry is so little objective, so occupied with abstractions and reflections rather than with things concrete and shaped and colored. The greatness of Homer is in his concreteness. He works, so to speak, like a dramatic sculptor in words. He realized that men loved shields with clearly embossed carvings, swords splendidly true and bright, and houses of gold and marble. He has but to name a strong or lovely object to set it before us, and it does the work of his poem with little or no help from descriptive adjectives. For Homer, as for Keats, a thing of beauty was a poem in itself. Keats, by the way, was perhaps the only concrete poet of our time. Yet there is a poem of Christina Rossetti which I propose to quote in illustration of what I consider the excellence of "Curly Locks." "A Birthday" is, of course, very well known, though I quote it partly that it should be better known, and partly that the reader should have it before him:

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a watered shoot; My heart is like an apple-tree Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit; My heart is like a rainbow shell

That paddles in a halcyon sea; My heart is gladder than all these,

Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;

Hang it with vair and purple dyes; Carve it in doves and pomegranates, And peacocks with a hundred eyes;

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