Them Yellow-Backs

THE love of poetry and music is dying, or dead, in America. This fact is admitted, deplored, and explained by various erudite theories. What no one has yet suggested is a way to replant the seed, to revive the love of rhythm which once found expression in folkballad and plantation-song. Music is recognized as a means of culture, but it is a luxury, for grand opera and Paderewski ‘come high.’

How many people do you know who read poetry for delight, and sing while they saw wood or wash dishes? Even music-loving foreigners fail to hand down their folk-poetry to their children.

The sounds to be heard in America are chiefly discords: in the cities there are the roar and shriek of the cars; in the country the ‘chug-chug’ of the corn-shredder, or the monotonous ‘click, click, click’ that announces the approach, not of Peter Pan’s crocodile, but of the manure-spreader. No milkmaid ‘singeth blithe.’ The barefoot boy, we fear, has lockjaw, — at least now he never opens his mouth to sing. Even the roustabouts on the Mississippi River steamboats no longer ‘tote’ freight to a musical cadence. Their chorus has given place to a high-collared darkey who pounds a tin piano or scares the peaceful cows on the riverbanks with the raucous echoes of the calliope.

This musical famine in the land is lamentable, and if you are inclined to hope for better times, look over the poetry in the current periodicals, or read the latest volume of verse. Nor may we expect help from the schools. Invaluable though they may be as a means of culture, sight-singing in the grades, and the study of Shakespeare and the Ancient Mariner, come too late in life to instill in our children a love for rhythm and harmony; such qualities must be cultivated from infancy. When the cradle was banished from nursery and kitchen, with it went lullaby and slumber-song. Is it possible that herein lies the true explanation of the present condition, and that a well-planned course of slumber-songs for infants would tend to remedy the evil?

A recent experience has suggested this unsuspected cause for the atrophy of the musical sense. Whether the induction be logical or fanciful, the incident is in itself worth relating.

Charlie, the chore-boy on the farm, is quick, willing, a good worker, but illiterate to the last degree. Born in Illinois of American parents, at fourteen he can barely sign his name, multiply seven by nine, and spell out the baseball news in the paper. His vocabulary is so limited that he sometimes fails to obey orders because he does n’t understand ordinary words. For a future president he is shockingly ignorant; Roosevelt he has heard of, but Taft and Bryan are empty names. His father and older brother he ‘guesses ’ are Republicans, but he does n’t rightly know. In American history he has ‘never got beyont Washington’s administration,’ because he always has to stop school in March to plant corn. The study he likes best at school is ‘etymology,’ which, he explained in answer to questions, ‘ tells you all about your body.’

Realizing his deficiencies, Charlie accepts help most gratefully, and last summer we spent many a sultry evening working examples in the greatest common divisor, or reading about the Constitution, of which he said he had never heard. One night when I told him he had better go to bed, he rose with evident relief, mopping his hot little face with his shirt-sleeve. At the door, however, he balanced a moment on one foot and hesitatingly asked,—

‘Miss Mary, have you got any more of them yellow-backs?’

With a confused notion of hornets and dime novels, I said, ‘Yellow-backs? What do you mean?’

‘Oh, them books with po’try in ’em. I read one th’ other day, — it had nice po’try. You left it out in the hammock, and I read it at noon instead of taking a nap. There ’t is now ’; and he picked up the Atlantic Monthly. Turning the pages he added, ‘This is the one I read. I’d like to read some more if you happen to have another of them books handy.’

Too amazed for speech, afraid, indeed, of scaring away the shy bird by questions, I handed him the August Atlantic.

The next morning when I presented him with two old books, Snowbound and the Courtship of Miles Standish, his face beamed even more radiantly than when I had given him a ticket to the circus, and a few days later he said, ‘I’m learnin’ some o’ them books by heart. I like ’em better even than the po’try in the yellow-backs.’

Now, how will you explain the love of poetry in this ignorant boy? Is it merely an accident? Is Charlie a freak, a reversion to an extinct type? Or is the explanation to be found partly in environment?

That question brought to light a few facts about the boy’s home. The fourth in a family of eight children, Charlie has had considerable experience in caring for the babies, especially in putting them to bed. He confided to me that ‘the quickest way to put a real little baby to sleep is to jog her while you sing.’

‘What do you sing?’ I inquired.

‘Oh, hymns or ’most anything ’ll do. I know a lot of baby-songs I ’ve heard my mother sing.’

Charlie’s father is a milkman, a reformed drunkard, who beats the drum and relates his experience in the Salvation-Army meetings on the streetcorner. His mother, a little slip of a woman, leads the singing. Brought up on baby-songs and Salvation-Army hymns, Charlie has developed a love for po’try in any form, hot or cold, even the conventional sonnet.

Dare I hazard a generalization from one instance? If all babies were hushed to sleep with song, might not the next generation be musical and poetic?