The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought - Alexander F. Chamberlain (best way to read an ebook txt) 📗

once submitted to a kind of material and moral regime sanctioned by custom. Gross viands are removed from her table, and her slightest movements are regarded that they may be regular and majestic. She is expected to listen to the reading of good authors, to music and moral chants, and to attend learned societies, in order that she may fortify her mind by amusements of an elevated character. And she endeavours, by such discipline, to assure to the child whom she is about to bring into the world, intelligence, docility, and fitness for the duties imposed by social life” (518. XXXI.

629).

 

Among primitive peoples these ceremonies, dietings, doctorings, tabooings, number legion, as may be read in Ploss and Zmigrodzki.

The influence of the mother upon her child, beginning long before birth, continued in some parts of the world until long after puberty. The Spartan mothers even preserved “a power over their sons when arrived at manhood,” and at the puberty-dance, by which the Australian leaves childhood behind to enter upon man’s estate, his significant cry is: “My mother sees me no more!” (398. 153). Among the Chinese, “at the ceremony of going out of childhood, the passage from boyhood into manhood, the goddess of children ‘Mother,’ ceases to have the superintendence of the boy or girl, and the individual comes under the government of the gods in general.”

That women are teachers born, even the most uncultured of human races have not failed to recognize, and the folk-faith in their ministrations is world-wide and world-old; for, as Mrs. Browning tells us:—

 

“Women know The way to rear up children (to be just); They know a simple, merry, tender knack Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes, And stringing pretty words that make no sense, And kissing full sense into empty words; Which things are corals to cut life upon, Although such trifles.”

 

Intellectually, as well as physically,—as the etymology of the name seems to indicate,—the mother is the “former” of her child. As Henry Ward Beecher has well said, “the mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.” Well might the Egyptian mother-goddess say (167. 261): “I am the mother who shaped thy beauties, who suckled thee with milk; I give thee with my milk festal things, that penetrate thy limbs with life, strength, and youth; I make thee to become the—great ruler of Egypt, lord of the space which the sun circles round.” In the land of the Pharaohs they knew in some dim fashion that “the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.”

The extensive rôle of the mother, as a teacher of the practical arts of life, may be seen from the book of Professor Mason (113). Language, religion, the social arts, house-building, skin-dressing, weaving, spinning, animal-domestication, agriculture, are, with divers primitive peoples, since they have in great part originated with her, or been promoted chiefly by her efforts, left to woman as teacher and instructor, and well has the mother done her work all over the globe.

The function of the mother as priestess—for woman has been the preserver, as, to so large an extent, she has been the creator, of religion—has been exercised age after age, and among people after people. Henry Ward Beecher has said: “Every mother is a priestess ordained by God Himself,” and Professor Mason enlarges the same thought: “Scarcely has the infant mind begun to think, ere this perpetual priestess lights the fires of reverence and keeps them ever burning, like a faithful vestal” (112. 12).

Though women and mothers have often been excluded from the public or the secret ceremonials and observations of religion, the household in primitive and in modern times has been the temple, of whose penetralia they alone have been the ministers.

 

Imitation.

Tarde, in his monograph on the “Laws of Imitation,” has shown the great influence exerted among peoples of all races, of all grades and forms of culture, by imitation, conscious or unconscious,—a factor of the highest importance even at the present day and among those communities of men most advanced and progressive. Speaking a little too broadly, perhaps, he says (541. 15):—

“All the resemblances, of social origin, noticed in the social world are the direct or indirect result of imitation in all its forms,—custom, fashion, sympathy, obedience, instruction, education, naive or deliberate imitation. Hence the excellence of that modern method which explains doctrines or institutions by their history. This tendency can only be generalized. Great inventors and great geniuses do sometimes stumble upon the same thing together, but these coincidences are very rare. And when they do really occur, they always have their origin in a fund of common instruction upon which, independent of one another, the two authors of the same invention have drawn; and this fund consists of a mass of traditions of the past, of experiments, rude or more or less arranged, and transmitted imitatively by language, the great vehicle of all imitations.”

In her interesting article on “Imitation in Children,” Miss Haskell observes: “That the imitative faculty is what makes the human being educable, that it is what has made progressive civilization possible, has always been known by philosophical educators. The energy of the child must pass from potentiality to actuality, and it does so by the path of imitation because this path offers the least resistance or the greatest attraction, or perhaps because there is no other road. Whatever new and striking things he sees in the movements or condition of objects about him, provided he already has the experience necessary to apperceive this particular thing, he imitates” (260. 31).

In the pedagogy of primitive peoples imitation has an extensive rôle to play. Of the Twana Indians, of the State of Washington, Rev. Mr. Eells observes: “Children are taught continually, from youth until grown, to mimic the occupations of their elders.” They have games of ball, jumping and running races, and formerly “the boys played at shooting with bows and arrows at a mark, and with spears, throwing at a mark, with an equal number of children on each side, and sometimes the older ones joined in.” Now, however, “the’boys mimic their seniors in the noise and singing and gambling, but without the gambling.” The girls play with dolls, and sometimes “the girls and boys both play in canoes, and stand on half of a small log, six feet long and a foot wide, and paddle around in the water with a small stick an inch in thickness; and, in fact, play at most things which they see their seniors do, both whites and Indians” (437. 90, 91). Concerning the Seminoles of Florida, we are told: “The baby, well into the world, learns very quickly that he is to make his own way through it as best he may. His mother is prompt to nourish him, and solicitous in her care for him if he falls ill; but, as far as possible, she goes her own way and leaves the little fellow to go his.” Very early in life the child learns to help and to imitate its elders. “No small amount,” Mr. MacCauley tells us, “of the labour in a Seminole household is done by children, even as young as four years of age. They can stir the soup while it is boiling; they can aid in kneading the dough for bread; they can wash the ‘koonti’ root, and even pound it; they can watch and replenish the fire; they contribute in this and many other small ways to the necessary work of the home” (496. 497,

498).

 

Of the Indians of British Guiana, Mr. im Thurn reports: “As soon as the children can run about, they are left almost to themselves; or, rather, they begin to mimic their parents. As with the adults, so with the children. Just as the grown-up woman works incessantly, while the men alternately idle and hunt, so the boys run wild, playing not such concerted games as in other parts of the world more usually form child’s play, but only with mimic bows and arrows; but the girls, as soon as they can walk, begin to help the older women. Even the youngest girl can peel a few cassava roots, watch a pot on the fire, or collect and carry home a few sticks of firewood. The games of the boy are all such as train him to fish and hunt when he grows up; the girl’s occupations teach her woman’s work” (477. 219). The children imitate their elders in other ways also, for in nearly every Indian house are to be seen toy vessels of clay; for “while the Indian women of Guiana are shaping the clay, their children, imitating them, make small pots and goglets” (477. 298). And in like manner have been born, no doubt, among other peoples, some of the strange freaks of art which puzzle the connoisseurs in the museums of Europe and America.

Mr. Powers, speaking of the domestic economy of the Achomåwi Indians of California, says: “An Achomåwi mother seldom teaches her daughters any of the arts of barbaric housekeeping before their marriage. They learn them by imitation and experiment after they grow old enough to perceive the necessity thereof” (519. 271). This peculiar neglect, however, is not entirely absent from our modern civilization, for until very recently no subject has been so utterly overlooked as the proper training of young girls for their future duties as mothers and housekeepers. The Achomåwi, curiously enough, have the following custom, which helps, no doubt, the wife whose education has been so imperfect: “The parents are expected to establish a young couple in their lodge, provide them with the needful basketry, and furnish them with cooked food for some months, which indulgent parents sometimes continue for a year or even longer; so that the young people have a more real honeymoon than is vouchsafed to most civilized people.”

Among the Battas of Sumatra, “It is one of the morning duties of women and girls, even down to children of four and five years old, to bring drinking-water in the gargitis, a water-vessel made of a thick stalk of bamboo. The size and strength of growing girls are generally measured by the number of gargitis they can carry” (518. XXII.

110).

 

Of the Kaffir children Theal informs us: “At a very early age they commence trials of skill against each other in throwing knobbed sticks and imitation assegais. They may often be seen enjoying this exercise in little groups, those of the same age keeping together, for there is no greater tyrant in the world than a big Kaffir boy over his younger fellows; when above nine or ten years old they practise sham-fighting with sticks; an imitation hunt is another of their boyish diversions”

(543. 220).

 

Among the Apaches, as we learn from Reclus: “The child remains with its mother until it can pluck certain fruits for itself, and has caught a rat by its own unaided efforts. After this exploit, it goes and comes as it lists, is free and independent, master of its civil and political rights, and soon lost in the main body of the horde” (523. 131).

On the Andaman Islands, “little boys hunt out swarms of bees in the woods and drive them away by fire. They are also expected regularly to collect wood.” From their tenth year they are “accustomed to use little bows and arrows, and often attain great skill in shooting.” The girls “seek among the coral-reefs and in the swamps to catch little fish in hand-nets.” The Solomon Islands boy, as soon as he can walk a little, goes along with his elders to hunt and fish (326. I. 6). Among the Somali, of northeastern Africa, the boys are given small spears when ten or twelve years old and are out guarding the milk-camels (481 (1891).

163).

 

Of the Eskimo