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

circumcision, the boys roamed around the adjacent villages and stole all the poultry” (127. I. 291).

 

Modern Aspects.

These secret societies and outbursts of primitive lawlessness recall at once to our attention the condition of affairs at some of our universities, colleges, and larger schools. The secret societies and student-organizations, with their initiations, feasts, and extravagant demonstrations, their harassing of the uninitiated, their despisal of municipal, collegiate, even parental authority, and their oftentime contempt and disregard of all social order, their not infrequent excesses and debauches, carry us back to their analogues in the institutions of barbarism and savagery, the accompaniments of the passage from childhood to manhood. Of late years, the same spirit has crept into our high schools, and is even making itself felt in the grammar grades, so imitative are the schoolchildren of their brothers and sisters in the universities and colleges. Pennalism and fagging, so prevalent of old time in Germany and England, are not without their representatives in this country. The “freshman” in the high schools and colleges is often made to feel much as the savage does who is serving his time of preparation for admission into the mysteries of Mumbo-Jumbo.

In the revels of “May Day,” “Midsummer,” “Eogation Week,” “Whitsuntide,” “All Fools’ Day,” “New Year’s Day,” “Hallow E’en,” “Christmas,” “Easter,” etc., children throughout England and in many parts of Europe during the Middle Ages took a prominent part and rôle in the customs and practices which survive even to-day, as may be seen in Brand, Grimm, and other books dealing with popular customs and festivals, social fêtes and merry-makings.

In Tennyson’s May Queen we read:—

 

“You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear; To-morrow’ll be the happiest time of all the glad New Year; Of all the glad New Year, mother, the maddest, merriest day; For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.”

 

And a “mad, merry day” it certainly was in “merry England,” when the fairest lass in the village was chosen “Queen of the May,” and sang merry songs of Robin Hood and Maid Marian.

Polydore Virgil tells us that in ancient Home the “youths used to go into the fields and spend the Calends of May in dancing and singing in honour of Flora, goddess of fruits and flowers.” Westermarck seems to think some of these popular customs have something to do with the increase of the sexual function in spring and early summer (166. 30).

In seizing upon this instinct for society-making among children and youth lies one of the greatest opportunities for the prevention of crime and immorality the world has ever known. To turn to good ends this spontaneity of action, to divert into channels of usefulness these currents of child-activity, will be to add immensely to the equipment of mankind in the struggle with vice. A certain bishop of the early Christian Church is credited with having declared that, if the authorities only took charge of the children soon enough, there would be no burning of heretics, no scandalous schisms in the body ecclesiastic; and there is a good deal of truth in this observation.

The Catholic Church, and many of the other Christian churches have seen the wisdom of appealing to, and availing themselves of, the child-power in social and socio-religious questions. Not a little of the great spread of the temperance movement in America and Europe of recent years is due to the formation of children’s societies,—Bands of Hope, Blue Ribbon Clubs, Junior Temperance Societies and Prohibition Clubs, Young Templars’ Associations, Junior Father Matthew Leagues, and the like,— where a legitimate sphere is open to the ardour and enthusiasm of the young of both sexes. The great Methodist Church has been especially quick to recognize the value of this kind of work, and the junior chapters of the “Epworth League”—whose object is “to promote intelligence and loyal piety in its young members and friends and to train them in experimental religion, practical benevolence, and church work”—now numbers some three thousand, with a membership of about one hundred and twenty thousand. This society was organized at Cleveland, Ohio, May 15, 1889. The “Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavour,” the first society of which was established at Portland, Maine, February 2,1881, with the object of “promoting an earnest Christian life among its members, increasing their mutual acquaintance, and making them more useful in the service of God,” has now enrolled nearly thirty-four thousand “Companies,” with a total membership (active and associate) all over the world of over two million; of these societies 28,696 are in the United States and 2243 in Canada. Another society of great influence, having a membership in America and the Old World of some thirty-five thousand, is the “Ministering Children’s League,” founded by the Countess of Meath in 1885, and having as objects “to promote kindness, unselfishness, and the habit of usefulness amongst children, and to create in their minds an earnest desire to help the needy and suffering; to give them some definite work to do for others, that this desire may be brought to good effect”; there are also the “Lend-a-Hand Clubs” of the Unitarian Church. The Episcopal Church has its “Girls’ Friendly Societies,” its “Junior Auxiliaries to the Board of Missions”; its “Brotherhood of St. Andrew,” and “Brotherhood of Andrew and Philip,” for young men. For those of not too youthful years, the “Young Men’s Christian Association,” the associations of the “White,” “Red,” and “Iron Cross” exist in the various churches, besides many other “Guilds,” “Alliances,” “Leagues,” etc. For those outside the churches there are “Boys’ Clubs,” and “Girls’ Societies” in the cities and larger towns. The “Bands of Mercy” and the branches of the “Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals” exert a widespread influence for good; while several of the secret benevolent associations, such as the “Foresters,” for example, have instituted junior lodges, from which the youth are later on drafted into the society of their elders. There exist also many social clubs and societies, more or less under the supervision of the older members of the community, in which phases of human life other than the purely religious or benevolent find opportunity to display themselves; and between these and the somewhat sterner church-societies a connecting link is formed by the “Friday Night Clubs” of the Unitarian Church and the “Young People’s Associations” of other liberal denominations. In the home itself, this society instinct is recognized, and the list of children’s teas, dinners, parties, “receptions,” “doll-parties,” “doll-shows,” etc., would be a long one. Among all peoples, barbarous as well as civilized, since man is by nature a social animal, the instinct for society develops early in the young, and the sociology of childhood offers a most inviting field for research and investigation both in the Old World and in the New.

 

CHAPTER XV.

 

THE CHILD AS LINGUIST.

But what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light, And with no language but a cry.—Tennyson.

Yet she carried a doll as she toddled alone, And she talked to that doll in a tongue her own.—Joaquin Miller.

Among savages, children are, to a great extent, the originators of idiomatic diversities.—Charles Rau.

It was as impossible for the first child endowed with this faculty not to speak in the presence of a companion similarly endowed, as it would be for a nightingale or a thrush not to carol to its mate. The same faculty creates the same necessity in our days, and its exercise by young children, when accidentally isolated from the teachings and influence of grown companions, will readily account for the existence of all the diversities of speech on our globe.—Horatio Hale.

Some scientists have held that mankind began with the Homo Alalus, speechless, dumb man, an hypothesis now looked npon by the best authorities as untenable; and the folk have imagined that, were not certain procedures gone through with upon the newborn child, it would remain dumb through life, and, if it were allowed to do certain things, a like result would follow. Ploss informs us that the child, and the mother, while she is still suckling it, must not, in Bohemia, eat fish, else, since fish are mute, the child would be so also; in Servia, the child is not permitted to eat any fowl that has not already crowed, or it would remain dumb for a very long time; in Germany two little children, not yet able to speak, must not kiss each other, or both will be dumb.

 

The Frenum.

Our English phrase, “an unbridled tongue,” has an interesting history and entourage of folk-lore. The subject has been quite recently discussed by Dr. Chervin, of the Institute for Stammerers at Paris (205). Citing the lines of Boileau:—

 

“Tout charme en un enfant dont la langue sans fard, A peine du filet encore debarrassee Sait d’un air innocent begayer sa pensee,”

 

he notes the wide extension of the belief that the cutting of the filet, or frein, the frenum, or “bridle” of the tongue of the newborn infant facilitates, or makes possible, articulate speech. According to M. Sebillot, the cutting of the sublet, as it is called, is quite general in parts of Brittany (Haute Bretagne), and M. Moisset states that in the Yonne it is the universal opinion that neglect to do so would cause the newborn child to remain dumb for life; M. Desaivre cites the belief in Poitou that, unless the lignoux were cut in the child at birth, it would prevent its sucking, and, later on, its speaking. The operation is usually performed by nurses and midwives, with the nail of the little finger, which is allowed to grow excessively long for the purpose (205. 6). Dr. Chervin discusses the scientific aspects of the subject, and concludes that the statistics of stammering and the custom of cutting the frenum of the tongue do not stand in any sort of correlation with each other, and that this ancient custom, noted by Celsus, has no real scientific raison d’etre (205. 9). We say that a child is “tongue-tied,” and that one “makes too free with his tongue”; in French we find: Il a le filet bien coupe, “he is a great talker,” and in the eighteenth century Il n’a pas de filet was in use; a curious German expression for “tongue-tied” is mundfaul, “mouth-lazy.”

Following up the inquiry of Dr. Chervin in France, M. Hofler of Tolz has begun a similar investigation for Germany (263). He approves of the suggestion of Dr. Chervin, that the practice of cutting the frenum of the tongue has been induced by the inept name frenulwm, frein, Bändchen, given by anatomists to the object in question. According to H. Carstens the frenulum is called in Low German keekelreem or kikkel-reem, which seems to be derived from käkeln, “to cry, shriek,” and reem, “band, cord,” so that the word really signifies “speech-band.” If it is cut in children who have difficulty in speaking before the first year of life, or soon after, they will be cured of stuttering and made to speak well. To a man or woman who does a good deal of talking, who has “the gift of the gab,” the expression Em (ehr) is de keekelreem gut snaden = “His (her) frenum has been well cut,” is applied. In some parts of Low Germany the operation is performed for quite a different reason, viz., when the child’s tongue cannot take hold of the mother’s breast, but always slips off. Hofler mentions the old custom of placing beneath the child’s tongue a piece of ash-bark (called Schwindholz), so that the organ of speech may not vanish (schwinden); this is done in the