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

thought to have been obtained: “Young children are less merciful than older ones. When they appear cruel and resentful, we know that they are exercising what they honestly consider the right of revenge. Boys are less merciful than girls. Young children judge of actions by their results, older ones look at the motives which prompt them. If a young child disobeys a command and no bad result follows, he doesn’t see that he has done wrong. Punishments which, have in them the idea of restitution are common to all ages. Girls consider the why more than boys; they explain to Jennie oftener than boys do. Threats and forced promises do not impress children” (341. 96).

 

Jurisprudence of Child’s Play.

Pitré, the great Italian folklorist, has made a special study, though a very brief one, of the judgments rendered by children in games and plays,—the jurisprudence of child’s play (323). His essay, which is devoted to the island of Sicily, touches upon a field which is likely to yield a rich harvest all over the world. The rules of the game; who shall play and who shall not; what is “out,” “taw,” “in”; when is one “it,” “caught,” “out”; what can one “bar,” and what “choose,”—all these are matters which require the decisions of the youthful judiciary, and call for the frequent exercise of judgment, and the sense of justice and equity. Of the “Boy Code of Honour” some notice is taken by Gregor (246. 21-24). Mr. Newell thus describes the game of “Judge and Jury,” as played at Cambridge, Massachusetts (312.123): “A child is chosen to be judge, two others for jurors (or, to speak with our little informant, juries), who sit at his right and left hand. Each child must ask the permission of the judge before taking any step. A platter is brought in, and a child, rising, asks the judge, ‘May I go into the middle of the room?’ ‘May I turn the platter?’ ‘On which side shall it fall?’ If the platter falls on the wrong side, forfeit must be paid.” In Germany and Switzerland there is a game of the trial of a thief. In the former country: “There is a king, a judge, an executioner, an accuser, and a thief. The parts are assigned by drawing lots, but the accuser does not know the name of the thief, and, if he makes an error, has to undergo the penalty in his stead. The judge finally addresses the king, inquiring if his majesty approves of his decision; and the king replies, ‘Yes, your sentence entitles you to my favour’; or, ‘No, your sentence entitles you to so many blows.’ Thus we see how modern child’s play respects the dignity of the king as the fountain of law.” In the Swiss version, as Mr. Newell remarks, “the memory of the severity of ancient criminal law is preserved,” for “the thief flies, and is chased over stock and stone until caught, when he is made to kneel down, his cap pushed over his brows, and his head immediately struck off with the edge of a board” (313.124).

 

Boy-Moots.

The most interesting section, perhaps, of Mr. Johnson’s Rudimentary Society among Boys, is that devoted to “Judicial Procedure” (272. 35-48). Fighting, arbitration, the ordeal and the wager have all been in use as modes of settling quarrels at the McDonogh School—such matters of dispute as arose having been left for the boys to settle among themselves without the control of the faculty. Indeed, the advice which Polonius gives to Laertes seems to have been ever present in the earlier days:—

 

“Beware Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in, Bear’t that th’ opposed may beware of thee.”

 

Following the appeal to fists came the appeal to chance and luck—the “odd or even” marbles, the “longest straw,” and like devices came into vogue. The arbitration of a bystander, particularly of “a big boy who could whip the others,” and the “expedient of laying a wager to secure the postponement of a quarrel,” are very common. But the most remarkable institution at McDonogh is undoubtedly the boy-moot, one of whose decisions is reported in detail by Mr. Johnson,—an institution in action “almost daily,” and part and parcel of the life of the school. None but the author’s own words can justly portray it (272. 47, 48):—

“The crowd of boys assembled about the contestants, whose verdict decides the controversy, is, in many respects, the counterpart of a primitive assembly of the people in the folk-moot. Every boy has the right to express an opinion, and every boy present exercises his privilege, though personal prowess and great experience in matters of law have their full influence on the minds of the judges. The primitive idea that dispensing justice is a public trust, which the community itself must fulfil towards its members, is embodied in this usage of the ‘McDonogh boys.’ The judges are not arbitrators chosen by the disputants, nor are they public functionaries whose sole business is to preside over the courts; but the whole body of the population declares by word of mouth the right and wrong of the matter. This tumultuous body of schoolfellows, giving decisions in quarrels, and determining questions of custom, reproduces with remarkable fidelity the essential character of the primitive assembly.”

Mr. Johnson was struck with “the peace and good order generally prevalent in the community,” which speaks well for the judicial system there in vogue.

The editor, in his introductory remarks, observes:—

“Every schoolboy and every college student in his upward way to real manhood represents the evolution of a primitive savage into a civilized being. Every school and college reproduces the developmental process of a human society in some of its most interesting aspects, such as government and law. There are all stages of social development in the student class, from actual savagery, which frequently crops out in the very best schools and colleges, to effeminate forms of modern civilization. There are all degrees of institutional government, from total anarchy and patriarchal despotism to Roman imperialism and constitutional government; although it must be admitted that self-government among the student class—said to obtain in some American schools and colleges—is not yet a chartered right. The regulation of student society by itself, or by all the powers that be, presents all phases of judicature, from the most savage ordeals to the most humane. Student customs are full of ancient survivals, and some editions of ‘College Laws’ are almost as archaic as the Code of Manu. One of these days we shall perhaps find men investigating college jurisprudence, college government, and college politics from the comparative point of view, and writing the natural history of the student class” (272. 3).

In the community of the sand-pile studied by Dr. Hall, “a general habit of settling disputes, often brought to issue with fists, by means of meetings and specifications, arose.” There is room for a volume on the jurisprudence of childhood and youth, and every page would be of intensest interest and of value in the history of the evolution of the ideas of justice in the human race.

 

CHAPTER XX.

 

THE CHILD AS ORACLE-KEEPER AND ORACLE-INTERPRETER.

Enfants et fous sont devins [Children and fools are soothsayers]. —_French Proverb._

Children pick up words as chickens peas, And utter them again as God shall please.—_English Proverb_.

The fresh face of a child is richer in significance than the forecasting of the most indubitable seer.—_Novalis_.

 

Child-Oracles.

“Children and fools speak the truth,” says an old and widespread proverb, and another version includes him who is drunken, making a trinity of truth-tellers. In like manner have the frenzy of wine and the madness of the gods been associated in every age with oracle and sign, and into this oracular trinity enters also the child. Said De Quincey: “God speaks to children also, in dreams and by the oracles that lurk in darkness,” and the poet Stoddard has clothed in exquisite language a similar thought:—

 

“Nearer the gate of Paradise than we, Our children breathe its air, its angels see; And when they pray, God hears their simple prayer, Yea, even sheathes his sword in judgment bare.”

 

The passage in Joel ii. 28, “Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions,” might stand for not a few primitive peoples, with whom, once in childhood (or youth) and once again in old age, man communes with the spirits and the gods, and interprets the events of life to his fellows. The Darien Indians, we are told, “used the seeds of the Datura sanguinea to bring on in children prophetic delirium in which they revealed hidden treasures” (545. II. 417).

One of the most curious of the many strange practices which the conservatism of the Established Church of England has continued down to the present is one in vogue at the parish church of St. Ives, in Huntingdonshire. A certain Dr. Eobert Wilde, who died in 1678, “bequeathed £50, the yearly interest of which was to be expended in the purchase of six Bibles, not exceeding the price of 7s. 6d each, which should be ‘cast for by dice’ on the communion table every year by six boys and six girls of the town.” The vicar was also to be paid 10s. a year for preaching an appropriate sermon on the Holy Scriptures. Public opinion has within recent years caused the erection of a table on the chancel steps, where the dice-throwing now takes place, instead of on the communion table as of old. Every May 26th the ceremony is performed, and in 1888 we are told: “The highest throw this year (three times with three dice) was 37, by a little girl. The vicar (the Rev. E. Tottenham) preached a sermon from the words, ‘From a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures’” (390 (1888). 113).

 

The Child as Vision-Seer.

In the history of the Catholic Church one cannot fail to be struck by the part played by children in the seeing of visions, especially of the Virgin. To St. Agnes of Monte Pulciano (A.D. 1274-1317), when fourteen years of age, the Virgin appeared and told her she should build a monastery before she died (191. 24); Jeanne de Maille (1332-1414) was but eleven when the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus came before her in a vision; Catherine of Racconigi (1486-1547) was visited by the Virgin when only five years of age (191. 108); in 1075, Hermann of Cologne, while still a boy, saw in a vision the Virgin, who kissed him, and made a secret deposit of food on a certain stone for his benefit. In 1858 a vision of the Immaculate Conception appeared to Bernadetta Soubirous, a sickly child of fourteen, at Lourdes, in the Hautes Pyrenees. No one else saw this vision, said to have occurred on Shrove Tuesday (Feb. 11), four years after Pius IX. had proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The vision lasted for fourteen successive days (191. 484). On Jan. 17, 1871, the Virgin is alleged to have appeared at Pontmain to several children, and a detailed account of the vision has been given by Mgr. Guérin, chamberlain of Pius IX., in his Vie des Saints, and this is digested in Brewer. The children who saw the apparition are described as follows: “Eugène Barbedette was the second son of a small farmer living in the village of Pontmain, in the diocese of Laval. He was twelve years old, and his brother Joseph was ten. The other two [Françoise Richer, Jeanne Marie Lebossé] were children from neighbouring cottages, called in to witness the sight. The parents of the children, the pastor of the village, Sister Vitaline, the abbot Guérin, all present, could see nothing, nor could any of the neighbours of outlying villages, who flocked to the place. Only the