In the best nursery rhymes, as in the simpler and more genuine ballads which have so close a connection with them, we find this attraction of the inarticulate—this charm of pure sound, this utilising of alliteration and rhyme and assonance, and the cunning juxtaposition now of similar, now of contrary vowels—not in a passionate, but in a frank and simple form. Many of them probably, some of them certainly, had, as has been said, a definite meaning once, and we may attend to the folklorist as he expounds what it was or may have been; but for the most part they have very victoriously got the better of that meaning, have bid it, in their own lingo, "go to Spain," without the slightest meditation or back-thought whether Spain is the proper place for it or not. In that particular locus classicus "Spain" rhymes to "rain," and that is not merely the chief and principal, but the absolutely all-sufficient thing. So, too, there is no doubt a most learned explanation of the jargon (variously given and spelt)—
"Hotum-potum, paradise tantum, perry-merry-dictum, domaree,"
at which a friend of mine used to laugh consumedly, declaring that this cavalier coupling of "paradise tantum" "only paradise," was the nicest thing he knew. But the people who mellowed it into that form, and recited it afterwards, never cared one scrap for the meaning. They had got it into a pleasant jingle of vowels, a desirable sequence of consonants, and a good swing of cadence, and that was enough. When "Curlylocks" is invited to be "mine" by the promise "thou shalt sew a fine seam," does anybody suppose that this housewifely operation was much more (it may have been a little more) of a bait to the Curlylocks of those days than to the Curlylocks of these? Not at all. "Sew" and "seam" went naturally together, they made a pleasing alliteration, and the latter word rhymed to "cream," of which the Curlylocks of all days has been not unusually fond.
Not, of course, that there is not much wit and much wisdom, much picturesqueness and not a little pathos in our rhymes. All good men have justly admired these qualities in "Sing a Song of Sixpence" and "Ding-dong Bell," in "Margery Daw" and "Who Killed Cock Robin?" I rather suspect the wicked literary man of having more to do than genuine popular sentiment with the delightful progress and ending of "There was a Little Boy and a Little Girl." But the undoubtedly genuine notes are numerous enough and various enough, from that previously mentioned and admirable thrift of good King Arthur, or rather of Queen Guinevere (from whom, according to naughty romancers, we should have less expected it), to the sound common-sense of "Three Children;" from the decorative convention of "Little Boy Blue" to the arabesque and even grotesque of "Hey-diddle-diddle."
But I shall still contend that the main, the pervading, the characteristic attraction of them lies in their musical accompaniment of purely senseless sound, in their rhythm, rhyme, jingle, refrain, and the like, in the simplicity and freshness of their modulated form. For thus they serve as anthems and doxologies to the goddess whom in this context it is not satirical to call "Divine Nonsensia," who still in all lands and times condescends now and then to unbind the burden of meaning from the backs and brains of men, and lets them rejoice once more in pure, natural, senseless sound.
George Saintsbury.
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