The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought by Alexander F. Chamberlain (read full novel txt) 📖

In brief, the child is father of the man and brother of the race.

In all ages, and with every people, the arcana of life and death, the mysteries of birth, childhood, puberty, adolescence, maidenhood, womanhood, manhood, motherhood, fatherhood, have called forth the profoundest thought and speculation. From the contemplation of these strange phenomena sprang the esoteric doctrines of Egypt and the East, with their horrible accompaniments of vice and depravity; the same thoughts, low and terrible, hovered before the devotees of Moloch and Cybele, when Carthage sent her innocent boys to the furnace, a sacrifice to the king of gods, and Asia Minor offered up the virginity of her fairest daughters to the first-comer at the altars of the earth-mother. Purified and ennobled by long centuries of development and unfolding, the blossoming of such conceptions is seen in the great sacrifice which the Son of Man made for the children of men, and in the cardinal doctrine of the religion which he founded,—“Ye must be born again,”—the regeneration, which alone gave entrance into Paradise.

The Golden Age of the past of which, through the long lapse of years, dreamers have dreamt and poets sung, and the Golden City, glimpses of whose glorious portal have flashed through the prayers and meditations of the rapt enthusiast, seem but one in their foundation, as the Eden of the world’s beginning and the heaven that shall open to men’s eyes, when time shall be no more, are but closely allied phases, nay, but one and the same phase, rather, of the world-old thought,—the ethnic might have been, the ought to be of all the ages. The imagined, retrospect childhood of the past is twin-born with the ideal, prospective childhood of the world to come. Here the savage and the philosopher, the child and the genius, meet; the wisdom of the first and of the last century of human existence is at one. Childhood is the mirror in which these reflections are cast,—the childhood of the race is depicted with the same colours as the childhood of the individual. We can read a larger thought into the words of Hartley Coleridge:—

“Oh what a wilderness were this sad world, If man were always man, and never child.”

Besides the anthropometric and psycho-physical investigations of the child carried on in the scientific laboratory with exact instruments and unexceptionable methods, there is another field of “Child-Study” well worthy our attention for the light it can shed upon some of the dark places in the wide expanse of pedagogical science and the art of education.

Its laboratory of research has been the whole wide world, the experimenters and recorders the primitive peoples of all races and all centuries,—fathers and mothers whom the wonderland of parenthood encompassed and entranced; the subjects, the children of all the generations of mankind.

The consideration of “The Child in Folk-Thought,”—what tribe upon tribe, age after age, has thought about, ascribed to, dreamt of, learned from, taught to, the child, the parent-lore of the human race, in its development through savagery and barbarism to civilization and culture,—can bring to the harvest of pedagogy many a golden sheaf.

The works of Dr. Ploss, Das kleine Kind, Das Kind, and Das Weib, encyclopædic in character as the two last are, covering a vast field of research relating to the anatomy, physiology, hygiene, dietetics, and ceremonial treatment of child and mother, of girl and boy, all over the world, and forming a huge mine of information concerning childbirth, motherhood, sex-phenomena, and the like, have still left some aspects of the anthropology of childhood practically untouched. In English, the child has, as yet, found no chronicler and historian such as Ploss. The object of the present writer is to treat of the child from a point of view hitherto entirely neglected, to exhibit what the world owes to childhood and the motherhood and the fatherhood which it occasions, to indicate the position of the child in the march of civilization among the various races of men, and to estimate the influence which the child-idea and its accompaniments have had upon sociology, mythology, religion, language; for the touch of the child is upon them all, and the debt of humanity to the little children has not yet been told. They have figured in the world’s history and its folk-lore as magi and “medicine-men,” as priests and oracle-keepers, as physicians and healers, as teachers and judges, as saints, heroes, discoverers, and inventors, as musicians and poets, actors and labourers in many fields of human activity, have been compared to the foolish and to the most wise, have been looked upon as fetiches and as gods, as the fit sacrifice to offended Heaven, and as the saviours and regenerators of mankind. The history of the child in human society and of the human ideas and institutions which have sprung from its consideration can have here only a beginning. This book is written in full sympathy with the thought expressed in the words of the Latin poet Juvenal: Maxima debetur pueris reverentia, and in the declaration of Jean Paul: “I love God and every little child.”

CHAPTER II.

THE CHILD’S TRIBUTE TO THE MOTHER.

A good mother is worth a hundred schoolmasters.—_English Proverb_.

The first poet, the first priest, was the first mother. The first empire was a woman and her children.—_O. T. Mason_.

When society, under the guidance of the “fathers of the church,” went almost to destruction in the dark ages, it was the “mothers of the people” who saved it and set it going on the new right path. —_Zmigrodski_ (adapted).

The story of civilization is the story of the mother. —_Zmigrodski_.

One mother is more venerable than a thousand fathers. —_Laws of Manu_.

If the world were put into one scale, and my mother into the other, the world would kick the beam.—_Lord Langdale_.

Names of the Mother.

In A Song of Life,—a book in which the topic of sex is treated with such delicate skill,—occurs this sentence: “The motherhood of mammalian life is the most sacred thing in physical existence” (120. 92), and Professor Drummond closes his Lowell Institute Lectures on the Evolution of Man in the following words: “It is a fact to which too little significance has been given, that the whole work of organic nature culminates in the making of Mothers—that the animal series end with a group which even the naturalist has been forced to call the Mammalia. When the savage mother awoke to her first tenderness, a new creative hand was at work in the world” (36. 240). Said Henry Ward Beecher: “When God thought of Mother, he must have laughed with satisfaction, and framed it quickly,—so rich, so deep, so divine, so full of soul, power, and beauty, was the conception,” and it was unto babes and sucklings that this wisdom was first revealed. From their lips first fell the sound which parents of later ages consecrated and preserved to all time. With motherhood came into the world song, religion, the thought of immortality itself; and the mother and the child, in the course of the ages, invented and preserved most of the arts and the graces of human life and human culture. In language, especially, the mother and the child have exercised a vast influence. In the names for “mother,” the various races have recognized the debt they owe to her who is the “fashioner” of the child, its “nourisher” and its “nurse.” An examination of the etymologies of the words for “mother” in all known languages is obviously impossible, for the last speakers and interpreters of many of the unwritten tongues of the earth are long since dead and gone. How primitive man—the first man of the race—called his mother, we can but surmise. Still, a number of interesting facts are known, and some of these follow.

The word mother is one of the oldest in the language; one of the very few words found among all the great branches of the widely scattered Aryan race, bearing witness, in ages far remote, before the Celt, the Teuton, the Hellene, the Latin, the Slav, and the Indo-Iranian were known, to the existence of the family, with the mother occupying a high and honourable place, if not indeed the highest place of all. What the etymological meaning was, of the primitive Aryan word from which our mother is descended, is uncertain. It seems, however, to be a noun derived, with the agent-suffix -t-r, from the root ma, “to measure.” Skeat thinks the word meant originally “manager, regulator [of the household],” rejecting, as unsupported by sufficient evidence, a suggested interpretation as the “producer.” Kluge, the German lexicographer, hesitates between the “apportioner, measurer,” and the “former [of the embryo in the womb].” In the language of the Klamath Indians of Oregon, p’gishap, “mother,” really signifies the “maker.”

The Karankawas of Texas called “mother,” kaninma, the “suckler,” from kanin, “the female breast.” In Latin mamma, seems to signify “teat, breast,” as well as “mother,” but Skeat doubts whether there are not two distinct words here. In Finnish and some other primitive languages a similar resemblance or identity exists between the words for “breast” and “mother.” In Lithuanian, móte—cognate with our mother—signifies “wife,” and in the language of the Caddo Indians of Louisiana and Texas sássin means both “wife” and “mother.” The familiar “mother” of the New England farmer of the “Old Homestead” type, presents, perhaps, a relic of the same thought. The word dame, in older English, from being a title of respect for women—there is a close analogy in the history of sire—came to signify “mother.” Chaucer translates the French of the Romaunt of the Rose, “Enfant qui craint ni père ni mère Ne pent que bien ne le comperre,” by “For who that dredeth sire ne dame Shall it abie in bodie or name,” and Shakespeare makes poor Caliban declare: “I never saw a woman, But only Sycorax, my dam.” Nowadays, the word dam is applied only to the female parent of animals, horses especially. The word, which is one with the honourable appellation dame, goes back to the Latin domina, “mistress, lady,” the feminine of dominus, “lord, master.” In not a few languages, the words for “father” and “mother” are derived from the same root, or one from the other, by simple phonetic change. Thus, in the Sandeh language of Central Africa, “mother” is n-amu, “father,” b-amu; in the Cholona of South America, pa is “father,” pa-n, “mother”; in the PEntlate of British Columbia, “father” is mãa, “mother,” tãa, while in the Songish mãn is “father” and tan “mother” (404. 143).

Certain tongues have different words for “mother,” according as it is a male or a female who speaks. Thus in the Okanak·ên, a Salish dialect of British Columbia, a man or a boy says for “mother,” sk’õi, a woman or a girl, tõm; in Kalispelm the corresponding terms for “my mother” are isk’õi and intoop. This distinction, however, seems not to be so common as in the case of “father.”

In a number of languages the words for “mother” are different when the latter is addressed and when she is spoken of or referred to. Thus in the Kwakiutl, Nootka, and Çatloltq, three British Columbia tongues, the two words for “mother” are respectively ât, abóuk; ãt, abEmp; nikH, tãn. It is to be noted, apparently, that the word used in address is very often simpler, more primitive, than the other. Even in English we find something similar in the use of ma (or mama) and mother.

In the Gothic alone, of all the great Teutonic dialects,—the language into which Bishop Wulfila translated the Scriptures