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

In a modern Greek folk-song three youths plot to escape from Hades, and a young mother, eager to return to earth to suckle her infant child, persuades them to allow her to accompany them. Charon, however, suddenly appears upon the scene and seizes them just as they are about to flee. The beautiful young woman then appeals to him: “Let go of my hair, Charon, and take me by the hand. If thou wilt but give my child to drink, I will never try to escape from thee again” (125. II. 589).

The watchful solicitude of the mother in heaven over her children on earth appears also in the Basque country (505. 73), and Ralston, noting its occurrence in Russia, observes (520. 265):—

“Appeals for aid to a dead parent are of frequent occurrence in the songs still sung by the Russian peasantry at funerals or over graves; especially in those in which orphans express their grief, calling upon the grave to open, and the dead to appear and listen and help. So in the Indian story of Punchkin, the seven hungry, stepmother-persecuted princesses go out every day and sit by their dead mother’s tomb, and cry, and say, ‘Oh, mother, mother, cannot you see your poor children, how unhappy we are,’ etc., until a tree grows up out of the grave laden with fruits for their relief. So, in the German tale, Cinderella is aided by the white bird, which dwells in the hazel-tree growing out of her mother’s grave.”

Crude and savage, but born of a like faith in the power of the dead mother, is the inhuman practice of the people of the Congo, where, it is said, “the son often kills his mother, in order to secure the assistance of her soul, now a formidable spirit” (388. 81).

Heavy upon her offspring weighs the curse of a mother. Ralston, speaking of the Russian folktales, says (520. 363):—

“Great stress is laid in the skazkas and legends upon the terrible power of a parent’s curse. The ‘hasty word’ of a father or a mother will condemn even an innocent child to slavery among devils, and, when it has once been uttered, it is irrevocable,” The same authority states, however, that “infants which have been cursed by their mothers before their birth, or which are suffocated during their sleep, or which die from any causes unchristened or christened by a drunken priest, become the prey of demons,” and in order to rescue the soul of such a babe from the powers of evil “its mother must spend three nights in a church, standing within a circle traced by the hand of a priest; when the cocks crow on the third morning the demons will give her back her dead child.”

Fatherly Affection.

That the father, as well as the mother, feels for his child after death, and appears to him, is an idea found in fairy-story and legend, but nowhere so sweetly expressed as in the beautiful Italian belief that “the kind, dear spirits of the dead relatives and parents come out of the tombs to bring presents to the children of the family,—whatever their little hearts most desire.” The proverb,—common at Aci,—_Veni mè patri?—Appressu_, “Is my father coming?—By and by,” used “when an expected friend makes himself long waited for,” is said to have the following origin:—

“There was once a little orphan boy, who, in his anxiety to see his dead father once again, went out into the night when the kind spirits walk, and, in spite of all the fearful beating of his little heart, asked of every one whom he met: Veni mè patri? and each one answered: Appressu. As he had the courage to hold out to the end, he finally had the consolation of seeing his father and having from him caresses and sweetmeats” (449. 327).

Rev. Mr. Grill speaks highly of the affection for children of the Polynesians. Following is the translation of a song composed and sung by Rakoia, a warrior and chief of Mangaia, in the Hervey Archipelago, on the death of his eldest daughter Enuataurere, by drowning, at the age of fifteen (459. 32):—

“My first-born; where art thou? Oh that my wild grief for thee, Pet daughter, could be assuaged! Snatched away in time of peace.

Thy delight was to swim, Thy head encircled with flowers, Interwoven with fragrant laurel And the spotted-leaved jessamine.

Whither is my pet gone— She who absorbed all my love— She whom I had hoped To fill with ancestral wisdom?

Red and yellow pandanus drupes Were sought out in thy morning rambles, Nor was the sweet-scented myrtle forgotten.

Sometimes thou didst seek out Fugitives perishing in rocks and caves.

Perchance one said to thee, ‘Be mine, be mine, forever; For my love to thee is great.’

Happy the parent of such a child! Alas for Enuataurere! Alas for Enuataurere!

Thou wert lovely as a fairy! A husband for Enuataurere!

Each envious youth exclaims: ‘Would that she were mine!’

Enuataurere now trips o’er the ruddy ocean. Thy path is the foaming crest of the billow.

Weep for Enuataurere— For Enuataurere.”

This song, though, published in 1892, seems to have been composed about the year 1815, at a fête in honour of the deceased. Mr. Gill justly calls attention to the beauty of the last stanza but one, where “the spirit of the girl is believed to follow the sun, tripping lightly over the crest of the billows, and sinking with the sun into the underworld (Avaiki), the home of disembodied spirits.”

Among others of the lower races of men, we find the father, expressing his grief at the loss of a child, as tenderly and as sincerely as, if less poetically than, the Polynesian chief, though often the daughter is not so well honoured in death as is the son. Our American Indian tribes furnish not a few instances of such affectionate lamentation.

Much too little has been made of the bright side of child-life among the lower races. But from even the most primitive of tribes all traces of the golden age of childhood are not absent. Powers, speaking of the Yurok Indians of California, notes “the happy cackle of brown babies tumbling on their heads with the puppies” (519. 51), and of the Wintun, in the wild-clover season, “their little ones frolicked and tumbled on their heads in the soft sunshine, or cropped the clover on all-fours like a tender calf” (519. 231). Of the Pawnee Indians, Irving says (478. 214): “In the farther part of the building about a dozen naked children, with faces almost hid by their tangled hair, were rolling and wrestling upon the floor, occasionally causing the lodge to re-echo with their childish glee.” Mr. im Thurn, while among the Indians of Guiana, had his attention “especially attracted by one merry little fellow of about five years old, whom I first saw squatting, as on the top of a hill, on top of a turtle-shell twice as big as himself, with his knees drawn up to his chin, and solemnly smoking a long bark cigarette” (477. 39). Of the wild Indians of the West, Colonel Dodge tells us: “The little children are much petted and spoiled; tumbling and climbing, unreproved, over the father and his visitors in the lodge, and never seem to be an annoyance or in the way” (432. 189). Mr. MacCauley, who visited the Seminole Indians of Florida, says: “I remember seeing, one day, one jolly little fellow, lolling and rollicking on his mother’s back, kicking her and tugging away at the strings of beads which hung temptingly between her shoulders, while the mother, hand-free, bore on one shoulder a log, which, a moment afterwards, still keeping her baby on her back as she did so, she chopped into small wood for the camp-fire.” (496. 498).

There is a Zuñi story of a young maiden, “who, strolling along, saw a beautiful little baby boy bathing in the waters of a spring; she was so pleased with his beauty that she took him home, and told her mother that she had found a lovely little boy” (358. 544). Unfortunately, it turned out to be a serpent in the end.

Kissing.

As Darwin and other authorities have remarked, there are races of men upon the face of the earth, in America, in Africa, in Asia, and in the Island world, who, when first seen of white discoverers, knew not what it meant to kiss (499. 139). The following statement will serve for others than the people to whom it refers: “The only kiss of which the Annamite woman is cognizant is to place her nose against the man’s cheek, and to rub it gently up and down, with a kind of canine sniff.”

Mantegazza tells us that Raden-Saleh, a “noble and intelligent” Javanese painter, told him that, “like all Malays, he considered there was more tenderness in the contact of the noses than of the lips,” and even the Japanese, the English of the extreme Orient, were once ignorant of the art of kissing (499. 139).

Great indeed is the gulf between the Javanese artist and the American, Benjamin West, who said: “A kiss from my mother made me a painter.” To a kiss from the Virgin Mother of Christ, legend says, St. Chrysostom owed his “golden mouth.” The story runs thus: “St. Chrysostom was a dull boy at school, and so disturbed was he by the ridicule of his fellows, that he went into a church to pray for help to the Virgin. A voice came from the image: ‘Kiss me on the mouth, and thou shalt be endowed with all learning.’ He did this, and when he returned to his schoolfellows they saw a golden circle about his mouth, and his eloquence and brilliancy astounded them” (347. 621).

Among the natives of the Andaman Islands, Mr. Man informs us, “Kisses are considered indicative of affection, but are only bestowed upon infants” (498. 79).

Tears.

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depths of some divine despair, Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes, In looking at the happy autumn fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.”

Thus sang the great English laureate, and to the simple folk—the treasure-keepers of the lore of the ages—his words mean much.

Pliny, the Elder, in his Natural History, makes this statement: “Man alone at the very moment of his birth, cast naked upon the naked earth, does she [Nature] abandon to cries and lamentations;” the writer of the Wisdom of Solomon, in the Apocrypha, expresses himself in like manner: “When I was born, I drew in the common air, and fell upon the earth, which is of like nature, and the first voice I uttered was crying, as all others do.” Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, bluntly resumes both: “He is born naked, and falls a-whining at the first.”

The Spaniards have a proverb, brusque and cynical:—

“Des que naeí lloré, y cada dia nace porqué. [I wept as soon as I was born, and every day explains why.]”

A quaint legend of the Jewish Rabbis, however, accounts for children’s tears in this fashion:—

“Beside the child unborn stand two angels, who not only teach it the whole Tora [the traditional interpretation of the Mosaic law], but also let it see all the joys of Paradise and all the torments of Hell. But, since it may not be that a child should come into the world endowed with such knowledge, ere it is born into the life of men an angel strikes it on the upper lip, and all wisdom vanishes. The dimple on the upper lip is the mark of the stroke, and this is why newborn babes cry and