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

in history, front seats were provided for the chief Athenian priestesses. No voices of children were heard in chorus, and childhood found no true interpreter upon the stage. In France, in the middle of the seventeenth century, women appear as actors; in England it was not until long after the death of her greatest dramatist that (in 1660) women could fill a rôle upon the stage without serious hindrance or molestation; in Japan, even now, play-acting is not looked upon as a respectable profession for women. For a long time in England and elsewhere, female parts were taken by children and youths. Here also we meet with companies of child-actors, such as the “Boys of the Grammar School at Westminster,” “The Children of Paul’s,” etc. The influence which produced these survives and flourishes to-day in the fondness of high-school pupils and university students for dramatic performances and recitations, and the number of schools of gesture, elocution, and the like, testifies to the abiding interest of the young in the mimic art. This is also evidenced by the number of child actors and actresses in the theatrical world, and the remarkable precocity of the members of the profession in all lands. In England, the pantomime offers a special outlet for this current of expression, and there the child is a most important factor in stage-life. The precocity of girls in these respects is noteworthy.

 

The Child as Inventor.

Borrowing his figure of speech from the environment of childhood, C. J. Weber has said: “Die Gesellschaft ist die Grossmutter der Menschkeit durch ihre Töchter, die Erfindungen,—Society is the grandmother of humanity through her daughters, the inventions,” and the familiar proverb—Necessity is the mother of invention—springs from the same source. Isaac Disraeli aptly says: “The golden hour of invention must terminate like other hours; and when the man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of life, his companions behold him as one of themselves,—the creature of habits and infirmities,” and not a few of the “golden hours of invention” seem to belong to the golden age of childhood. Even in these “degenerate” days the child appears as an inventor. A contributor to the periodical literature of the day remarks: “Children have taken out a number of patents. The youngest inventor on record is Donald Murray Murphy, of St. John, Canada, who, at the age of six years, obtained from the United States exclusive rights in a sounding toy. Mabel Howard, of Washington, at eleven years, invented an ingenious game for her invalid brother and got a patent for it. Albert Gr. Smith, of Biehwood, Illinois, at twelve years invented and patented a rowing apparatus” (_Current Lit_., K T., xiv. 1893, p. 138).

The works of Newell (313), Bolton (187), Gomme (243), amply reveal the riot of childish variation and invention in games and plays. Mr. Newell observes: “It would be strange if children who exhibit so much inventive talent [in language] did not contrive new games; and we find accordingly that in many families a great part of the amusements of the children are of their own devising. The earliest age of which the writer has authentic record of such ingenuity is two and a half years” (313. 25). And among the primitive peoples the child is not without like invention; some, indeed, of the games our children play, were invented by the savage young ones, whose fathers have been long forgotten in the mist of prehistoric ages—the sports of their children alone surviving as memorials of their existence.

Theal tells us that the Kaffir children, when not engaged in active exercise, “amuse themselves by moulding clay into little images of cattle, or by making puzzles with strings. Some of them are skilful in forming knots with thongs and pieces of wood, which it taxes the ingenuity of the others to undo. The cleverest of them sometimes practise tricks of deception with grains of maize” (543. 221). The distinguished naturalist, Mr. A. R. Wallace, while on his visit to the Malay Archipelago, thought to show the Dyak boys of Borneo something new in the way of the “cat’s cradle,” but found that he was the one who needed to learn, for the little brown aborigines were able to show him several new tricks (377. 25).

Miklucho-Maclay notes that among the Papuans of northeastern New Guinea, while the women showed no tendency to ornament pottery, young boys “found pleasure in imprinting with their nails and a pointed stick a sort of ornamental border on some of the pots” (42. 317).

Paola Lombroso, daughter of Professor Cesare Lombroso, the celebrated criminologist, in her recent study of child psychology, observes: “Games (and plays) are the most original creation of the child, who has been able to create them, adapt them to his needs, making of them a sort of gymnastics which enables him to develop himself without becoming fatigued, and we, with the aid of memory, can hardly now lay hold of that feeling of infinite, intense pleasure.” Moreover, these popular traditional plays and games, handed down from one generation to another of children, “show how instinctive are these forms of muscular activity and imitative expression, which have their roots in a true physiological and psychic necessity, being a species of tirocinium for the experience of childhood” (301. 136).

The magnum opus, perhaps, of the child as inventor, is the lyre, the discovery of which, classical mythology attributes to the infant Mercury or Hermes. Four hours after his birth the baby god is said to have found the shell of a tortoise, through the opposite edges of which he bored holes, and, inserting into these cords of linen, made the first stringed instrument. The English poet, Aubrey de Vere, singing of an Athenian girl, thus refers to the quaint myth:—

 

“She loves to pace the wild seashore— Or drop her wandering fingers o’er The bosom of some chorded shell: Her touch will make it speak as well As infant Hermes made That tortoise in its own despite Thenceforth in Heaven a shape star-bright.”

 

CHAPTER XVII.

 

THE CHILD AS POET, MUSICIAN, ETC.

Poeta nascitur, non fit.—_Latin Proverb_.

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came.—Pope.

 

The Child and Music.

“Music,” said quaint old Thomas Puller, “is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune,” and Wallaschek, in his recent volume on Primitive Music, has shown how every nation under heaven, even the most savage and barbarous of peoples, have had a share in the work of civilization. Music has been called “the language of the gods,” “the universal speech of mankind,” and, early in the golden age of childhood, the heaven of infancy, is man made captive by “music’s golden tongue.” As Wallaschek has said of the race, Tracy says of the individual, “no healthy, normal child is entirely lacking in musical ‘ear.’” The children of primitive races enjoy music, as well as their fellows in civilized communities. The lullaby, that quod semper ubique et ab omnibus of vocal art, early engages and entrances the infantile ear, and from the musical demonstrations of his elders, the child is not always or everywhere excluded. Indeed, the infant is often ushered into the world amid the din and clamour of music and song which serve to drown the mother’s cries of pain, or to express the joy of the family or the community at the successful arrival of the little stranger.

Education in music and the dance begins very early with many peoples. At the school of midwifery at Abu-Zabel in Egypt, according to Clot-Bey, in cases of difficult childbirth, a child is made to hop and dance about between the legs of the mother in order to induce the foetus to imitate it (125. II. 159).

As understudies and assistants to shamans, “medicine-men,” and “doctors,” children among many primitive peoples soon become acquainted with dance and song.

In Ashanti, boy musicians, singers, and dancers figure in the processions of welcome of the chiefs and kings, and young girls are engaged in the service of the fetiches (438. 258). At a funeral dance of the Latuka, an African tribe, “the women remained outside the row of dancers dancing a slow, stupid step, and screaming a wild and most inharmonious chant, whilst boys and girls in another row beat time with their feet.” Burchell, while en route for the Kaffir country, found among certain tribes that “in the evening a whole army of boys would come to his hut and listen with manifest pleasure to the tones of his violin, and would repeat the melodies he played with surprising accuracy” (546. 3, 199). The meke-meke, a dance of the Fiji Islanders, “is performed by boys and girls for whom an old musician plays”; at Tahiti the children “are early taught the ‘ubus,’ songs referring to the legends or achievements of the gods,” and “Europeans have at times found pleasure in the pretty, plaintive songs of the children as they sit in groups on the seashore” (546. 35, 180, 208). In some of the Polynesian Islands, young girls are “brought up to dance the timorodea, a most lascivious dance, and to accompany it with obscene songs” (100. 62). At Tongatabu, according to Labillardiere, a young girl “sang a song, the simple theme of which she repeated for half-an-hour” (546. 31). Wallaschek calls attention to the importance of the child in song in the following words (546. 75):—

“In some places the children, separated from the adults, sing choruses among themselves, and under certain circumstances they are the chief support of the practice of singing. On Hawaii, Ellis found boys and girls singing in chorus, with an accompaniment of seven drums, a song in honour of a quondam celebrated chief. Even during supper with the Governor, table-music was performed by a juvenile bard of some twelve or fourteen summers, who sang a monotonous song to the accompaniment of a small drum…. In Fiji a man of position deems it beneath him to sing, and he leaves it to his wife and children, so that women sing with women only, and children with children.”

Speaking of the natives of Australia, with whom he came into contact, Beckler says “the octaves of the women and children at the performance he attended were perfectly in tune, as one rarely hears in a modern opera chorus, they were in exact accord.” In the Kuri dance, witnessed by Angas, a number of boys take part (546. 37, 223).

In New Guinea “the Tongala-up, a stick with a string whirled in the air, is played by women and children.” Among the Tagals of the Philippines, Volliner found (with perhaps a little Spanish influence) “a chorus was performed in a truly charming manner by twelve young girls formed in a circle, one girl standing in the middle to direct.” In the Andaman Islands, where the men only, as a rule, sing, “the boys were far the best performers” (546.24, 27, 75).

Among the Apache Indians of Arizona and Mexico, “old matrons and small children dance until no longer able to stand, and stop for very exhaustion” (546. 46).

 

The Child as Poet.

Victor Hugo, in one of his rhapsodies, exclaims: “The most sublime psalm that can be heard on this earth is the lisping of a human soul from the lips of childhood,” and the rhythm within whose circle of influence the infant early finds himself, often leads him precociously into the realm of song. Emerson has said, “Every word was once a poem,” and Andrew Lang, in his facetious Ballade of Primitive Man, credits our Aryan ancestors with speaking not in prose, but “in a strain that would scan.” In the statement of the philosopher there is a good nugget of truth, and just a few grains of it in