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

The analogy between the place and effect of rhythm, music, and poetry in the life of the child and in the life of the savage has been frequently noted. In his recent study of Rhythm (405 a), Dr. Bolton has touched up some aspects of the subject. With children “the habit of rhyming is almost instinctive” and universal. Almost every one can remember some little sing-song or nonsense-verse of his own invention, some rhyming pun, or rhythmic adaptation. The enormous range of variation in the wording of counting-out rhymes, game-songs, and play-verses, is evidence enough of the fertility of invention of child-poets and child-poetesses. Of the familiar counting-out formula Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, the variants are simply legion.

The well-known lines of Pope:—

“As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came,”

receive abundant illustration from the lives of the great geniuses of song.

Among primitive peoples, if anywhere, poeta nascitur, non fit. In her article on Indian Songs, Miss Alice C. Fletcher says: “Children make songs for themselves, which are occasionally handed down to other generations. These juvenile efforts sometimes haunt the memory in maturer years. An exemplary old man once sang to me a composition of his childhood, wherein he had exalted the pleasures of disobedience; but he took particular care that his children should not hear this performance. Young men sing in guessing-games, as they gambol with their companions, tossing from hand to hand a minute ball of buffalo hair or a small pebble, moving their arms to the rhythm of the music.” This, and the following statement made of the Omaha Indians, will hold for not a few other savage and barbarous tribes: “Children compose ditties for their games, and young men add music to give zest to their sports”

(445).

Dr. F. Boas says of the Eskimo of Baffin Land (402. 572): “Children tell one another fables and sing short songs, especially comic and satirical ones.” The heroes of the Basque legend of Aquelarre are thus described by Miss Monteiro (505. 22):—

“Izar and Lanoa were two orphan children; the first was seven years of age, and the latter nine. These poor children, true wandering bards, frequented the mountains, earning a livelihood by singing ballads and national airs in sweet, infantile voices, in return for a bed of straw and a cupful of meal. Throughout the district these children were known and loved on account of their sad state, as well as for their graceful forms and winning ways.”

Mr. Chatelain, in his recent work on African folktales, says of the natives of Angola: “No Angola child finds difficulty at any time in producing extemporaneous song.”

Dr. Gatschet, in his study of the Klamath Indians, gives examples of many songs composed and sung by young people, especially girls; and many other Indian tribes, Algonkian, Iroquois, etc., possess such as well. When Darwin reached Tahiti, his arrival was “sung by a young girl in four improvised strophes, which her fellow-maidens accompanied in a pretty chorus”; and among the song-loving people of the islands of the South Sea, the poetic talent develops quite early in both sexes. Among the aborigines of Peake River, in Australia, when a youth—at puberty—has undergone the ceremony of tattooing, and, his wounds having healed, is about to return to his fellows, “a young girl selected for the purpose, sings in her own way a song which she has composed, and, amid dancing, merriment, and feasting, the youth is welcomed back to his family and his kin” (326. 11. 241). Throughout the Orient woman is a dancer and a singer. India has her bayaderes and nautch-girls, whose dancing and singing talents are world-known.

The Gypsies, too, that wander-folk of the world, are famed for their love-songs and fortune-telling rhymes, which the youth and girlhood among them so often know how to make and use. Crawford, who has translated the Kalevala, the great epic of the Finns, tells us, “The natural speech of this people is poetry. The young men and maidens, the old men and matrons, in their interchange of ideas unwittingly fall into verse” (423. I. xxvi.). Among the young herdsmen and shepherdesses of the pastoral peoples of Europe and Asia, the same precocity of song prevails. With songs of youth and maiden, the hills and valleys of Greece and Italy resound as of old. In his essay on the Popular Songs of Tuscany, Mr. J. A. Symonds observes (540. 600, 602): “Signor Tigri records by name a little girl called Cherubina, who made Rispetti by the dozen, as she watched her sheep upon the hills.” When Signor Tigri asked her to dictate to him some of her songs, she replied: “Oh Signore! ne dico tanti quando li canto! … ma ora … bisognerebbe averli tutti in visione; se no, proprio non vengono,—Oh Sir! I say so many, when I sing … but now … one must have them all before one’s mind … if not, they do not come properly.” World-applicable as the boy grows out of childhood—with some little change of season with the varying clime—are the words of Tennyson:—

“In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,”

and everywhere, if poetry and song be not indeed the very offspring of love, they are at least twin-born with it.

Lombroso, in his discussion of the man of genius, gives many examples of precocious poetical and musical talent: Dante (who at nine years of age wrote sonnets), Tasso (wrote at ten years of age), Wieland (who wrote an epic at 16), Lope de Vega (who wrote verses at 12), Calderoii (at 13), Metastasio (who composed at 10), Handel (who wrote a mass at 13, and was director of opera at 19), Eichhorn, Mozart, and Eibler (all three of whom gave concerts at 6), Beethoven (who wrote sonatas at 13), Weber (who wrote his first opera at 14), Cherubini (who wrote a mass at 15), etc. (300.15).

Among English poets whose precocity was marked, we find the most noteworthy to be Robert Browning, whose first poetic effusion is ascribed to his fourth year. It is now known, however, that poetry is much more common among children than was at first supposed, and early compositions are not to be expected from geniuses alone, but often from the scions of the ruder commonalty.

In her interesting study of individual psychology, Dr. Caroline Miles informs us that out of ninety-seven answers to the question, “Did you express yourself in any art-form before eighteen years of age?” fourteen stated that the person replying used verses alone, fourteen used stories and poetry, three used poetry and drawing or painting, two used poetry and painting. Dr. Miles notes that “those who replied ‘no’ seemed to take pride in the fact that they had been guilty of no such youthful folly.” This is in line with the belief parents sometimes express that the son or daughter who poetizes early is “loony.” Some who were not ashamed of these child-expressions volunteered information concerning them, and we learn: “Most interesting was one who wrote a tragedy at ten, which was acted on a little stage for the benefit of her friends; from ten to thirteen, an epic; at thirteen, sentimental and religious poems” (310. 552, 553).

Dr. H. H. Donaldson, in his essay on the Education of the Nervous System, cites the fact that of the musicians whose biographies were examined by Sully, 95% gave promise before twenty years of age, and 100% produced some work before reaching thirty; of the poets, 75% showed promise before twenty, and 92% produced before they were thirty years of age (216. 118). Precocity and genius seem to go together.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE CHILD AS TEACHER AND WISEACRE.

The child is father of the man,—_Wordsworth_.

And wiser than the gray recluse This child of thine.—_Whittier_.

And still to Childhood’s sweet appeal The heart of genius turns, And more than all the sages teach From lisping voices learns.—_Whittier_.

Wisdom of Childhood.

In his beautiful verses—forming part of one of the best child-poems in our language—

“And still to childhood’s sweet appeal The heart of genius turns, And more than all the sages teach From lisping voices learns,”—

Whittier has expressed that instinctive faith in the wisdom of childhood that seems perennial and pan-ethnic. Browning, in Pippa’s Song, has sounded even a deeper note:—

“Overhead the tree-tops meet, Flowers and grass spring ‘neath one’s feet; There was nought above me, nought below, My childhood had not learned to know: For, what are the voices of birds —Aye, and of beasts,—but words, our words, Only so much more sweet? The knowledge of that with my life begun. But I had so near made out the sun, And counted your stars, the seven and one, Like the fingers of my hand: Nay, I could all but understand Wherefore through heaven the white moon ranges; And just when out of her soft fifty changes No unfamiliar face might overlook me— Suddenly God took me.”

The power and wisdom of the child are quaintly and naively brought out in the legends and folk-lore of the various races of men, not alone of the present day, but of all eras of the world’s history. As an illustration of the truth contained in the words of a great child-lover, “A little child shall lead them,” and their echo in those of the Quaker poet,—

“God hath his small interpreters; The child must teach the man,”

nothing could be more artless and natural than the following legend of the Penobscot Indians of Maine, recorded by Mr. Leland, which tells of the origin of the “crowing of babies” (488. 121):—

When Glooskap, the culture-hero of these Indians, had conquered all his enemies, giants, sorcerers, magicians, evil spirits and ghosts, witches, devils, goblins, cannibals, et id genus omne, pride rose within him, and he said to a certain woman, that now his work was done, for he had conquered all. But she told him that he was mistaken; there yet remained “one whom no one has ever yet conquered or got the better of in any way, and who will remain unconquered to the end of time.” This was Wasis, “the baby,” who was sitting contentedly on the floor of the wigwam chewing a piece of maple-sugar. The great Glooskap, so the story runs, “had never married or had a child; he knew nought of the way of managing children”—yet he thought he knew all about it. So he smiled graciously at baby, and, “in a voice like that of a summer bird,” bade him come to him. But baby sat still and went on sucking his sugar. Then Glooskap got angry, and in a terrible voice, ordered baby to crawl to him at once. But baby merely cried out and yelled, stirring not. Then Glooskap tried his last resort, magic, “using his most awful spells, and singing the songs which raise the dead and scare the devils.” Still baby only smiled, and never budged an inch. At last the great Glooskap could do no more; he gave up the attempt in despair, whereupon “baby, sitting on the floor in the sunshine, went ‘goo! goo!’ and crowed lustily.” And to this day, the Indians, when they hear “a babe well-contented going ‘goo! goo!’ and crowing, and no one can tell why,” know that it is because he “remembers the time when he overcame the great Master, who had conquered all things. For of all beings that have been since the beginning, baby is alone the invincible one.”

Manabozho, the culture-hero of the Chippeways and other Algonkian tribes of the Great Lakes, and probably identical with his eastern analogue, Gluskap, was, like the latter, discomfited by a child. This is the legend:—