The Only True Mother Goose Melodies
The editor of the new edition of Mother Goose's Melodies knows much more about the curious history of the Boston edition than I do. And the reader will not need, even in these lines of mine, any light on the curious question about Madam Vergoose, or her son-in-law Mr. Fleet, or the Contes de Ma Mere l'Oye, which are so carefully discussed in the preface. All this is admirably discussed also in Mr. William Whitmore's paper published in Albany in 1889, and reprinted in Boston in 1892. In that paper he reproduced in facsimile Isaiah Thomas's edition of Mother Goose published first in 1785. What I want to tell, is of Mother Goose in the nineteenth Century--the Mother Goose on which the old Boston line was brought up--a line now nearly forgotten. But there were days, Gentle Reader, when an excellent body of people in this little Town of Boston grew up all together loving and loved, brought up their children here, loving and loved, and amused those children from babyhood in their own way. The centre of the baby life of this race was Mother Goose's Melodies in the dear little quarto edition, of which a precise copy is in the reader's hands.
pity, is lifted. It is here that the Shakespearean and Homeric worlds
impinge and merge, not to be separated by any academic classifications.
They meet in this sensitivity equally involved and aloof, sympathetic
and arrogant, suffering and joyous; and in this relation we see
Aristophanes as the forerunner of Shakespeare, his only one. We see also
that the whole present aesthetic of earth is based in Homer. We live and
grow in the world of consciousness bequeathed to us by him; and if we
grow beyond it through deeper Shakespearean ardours, it is because those
beyond are rooted in the broad basis of the Homeric imagination. To
shift that basis is to find the marshes of primitive night and fear
alone beneath the feet: Christianity.
And here we return to the question of the immorality of _Lysistrata_.
First we may inquire: is it possible for a man whose work has so
tremendous a significance in the spiritual development of mankind--and I
do not think anyone nowadays doubts that a work of art is the sole
stabilizing force that exists for life--is it possible for a man who
stands so grandly at head of an immense stream of liberating effort to
write an immoral work? Surely the only enduring moral virtue which can
be claimed is for that which moves to more power, beauty and delight in
the future? The plea that the question of changing customs arises is not
valid, for customs ratified by Aristophanes, by Rabelais, by
Shakespeare, have no right to change. If they have changed, let us try
immediately to return from our disgraceful refinements to the nobler and
more rarefied heights of lyric laughter, tragic intensity, and wit, for
we cannot have the first two without the last. And anyhow, how can a
The editor of the new edition of Mother Goose's Melodies knows much more about the curious history of the Boston edition than I do. And the reader will not need, even in these lines of mine, any light on the curious question about Madam Vergoose, or her son-in-law Mr. Fleet, or the Contes de Ma Mere l'Oye, which are so carefully discussed in the preface. All this is admirably discussed also in Mr. William Whitmore's paper published in Albany in 1889, and reprinted in Boston in 1892. In that paper he reproduced in facsimile Isaiah Thomas's edition of Mother Goose published first in 1785. What I want to tell, is of Mother Goose in the nineteenth Century--the Mother Goose on which the old Boston line was brought up--a line now nearly forgotten. But there were days, Gentle Reader, when an excellent body of people in this little Town of Boston grew up all together loving and loved, brought up their children here, loving and loved, and amused those children from babyhood in their own way. The centre of the baby life of this race was Mother Goose's Melodies in the dear little quarto edition, of which a precise copy is in the reader's hands.