The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought Part 1

The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought.

by Alexander F. Chamberlain.

PREFATORY NOTE.

The present volume is an elaboration and amplification of lectures on "The Child in Folk-Thought," delivered by the writer at the summer school held at Clark University in 1894. In connection with the interesting topic of "Child-Study" which now engages so much the attention of teachers and parents, an attempt is here made to indicate some of the chief child-activities among primitive peoples and to point out in some respects their survivals in the social inst.i.tutions and culture-movements of to-day. The point of view to be kept in mind is the child and what he has done, or is said to have done, in all ages and among all races of men.

For all statements and citations references are given, and the writer has made every effort to place himself in the position of those whose opinion he records,--receiving and reporting without distortion or alteration.

He begs to return to his colleagues in the University, especially to its distinguished president, the _genius_ of the movement for "Child-Study" in America, and to the members of the summer school of 1894, whose kind appreciation of his efforts has mainly led to the publication of this work, his sincerest grat.i.tude for the sympathy and encouragement which they have so often exhibited and expressed with regard to the present and allied subjects of study and investigation in the field of Anthropology, pedagogical and psychological.

A. F. CHAMBERLAIN

CLARK UNIVERSITY, WORCESTER, Ma.s.s., April, 1895.

CHAPTER I.

CHILD-STUDY.

Oneness with Nature is the glory of Childhood; oneness with Childhood is the glory of the Teacher.--_G. Stanley Hall_.

Homes ont l'estre comme metaulx, Vie et augment des vegetaulx, Instinct et sens comme les bruts, Esprit comme anges en attributs.

[Man has as attributes: Being like metals, Life and growth like plants, Instinct and sense like animals, Mind like angels.]--_Jehan de Meung_.

The Child is Father of the Man.--_Wordsworth_.

And he [Jesus] called to him a little child, and set him in the midst of them.--_Matthew_ xviii. 2.

It was an Oriental poet who sang:--

"On parent knees, a naked, new-born child, Weeping thou sat'st, while all around thee smiled; So live, that, sinking in thy last, long sleep, Calm thou mayst smile, while all around thee weep,"

and not so very long ago even the anthropologist seemed satisfied with the approximation of childhood and old age,--one glance at the babe in the cradle, one look at the graybeard on his deathbed, gave all the knowledge desired or sought for. Man, big, burly, healthy, omniscient, was the subject of all investigation. But now a change has come over the face of things. As did that great teacher of old, so, in our day, has one of the ministers of science "called to him a little child and set him in the midst of them,"--greatest in the kingdom of anthropology is a.s.suredly that little child, as we were told centuries ago, by the prophet of Galilee, that he is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. The child, together with woman, who, in so many respects in which the essential human characteristics are concerned, so much resembles him, is now beyond doubt the most prominent figure in individual, as well as in racial, anthropology. Dr. D. G. Brinton, in an appreciative notice of the recent volume on _Man and Woman_, by Havelock Ellis, in which the secondary s.e.xual differences between the male and the female portions of the human race are so well set forth and discussed, remarks: "The child, the infant in fact, alone possesses in their fulness 'the chief distinctive characters of humanity. The highest human types, as represented in men of genius, present a striking approximation to the child-type. In man, from about the third year onward, further growth is to some extent growth in degeneration and senility.' Hence the true tendency of the progressive evolution of the race is to become child-like, to become feminine." (_Psych. Rev._ I. 533.)

As Dr. Brinton notes, in this sense women are leading evolution--Goethe was right: _Das Ewig-weibliche zieht uns hinan_. But here belongs also the child-human, and he was right in very truth who said: "A little child shall lead them." What new meaning flashes into the words of the Christ, who, after declaring that "the kingdom of G.o.d cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo, here! or, There! for lo, the kingdom of G.o.d is within you," in rebuke of the Pharisees, in rebuke of his own disciples, "called to him a little child and set him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven." Even physically, the key to the kingdom of heaven lies in childhood's keeping.

Vast indeed is now the province of him who studies the child. In Somatology,--the science of the physical characteristics and const.i.tution of the body and its members,--he seeks not alone to observe the state and condition of the skeleton and its integuments during life, but also to ascertain their nature and character in the period of prenatal existence, as well as when causes natural, or unnatural, disease, the exhaustion of old age, violence, or the like, have induced the dissolution of death.

In Linguistics and Philology, he endeavours to discover the essence and import of those manifold, inarticulate, or unintelligible sounds, which, with the long flight of time, develop into the splendidly rounded periods of a Webster or a Gladstone, or swell n.o.bly in the rhythmic beauties of a Swinburne or a Tennyson.

In Art and Technology, he would fain fathom the depths of those rude scribblings and quaint efforts at delineation, whence, in the course of ages, have been evolved the wonders of the alphabet and the marvellous creations of a Rubens and an Angelo.

In Psychology, he seeks to trace, in childish prattlings and lore of the nursery, the far-off beginnings of mythology, philosophy, religion.

Beside the stories told to children in explanation of the birth of a sister or a brother, and the children's own imaginings concerning the little new-comer, he may place the speculations of sages and theologians of all races and of all ages concerning birth, death, immortality, and the future life, which, growing with the centuries, have ripened into the rich and wholesome dogmas of the church.

Ethnology, with its broad sweep over ages and races of men, its searchings into the origins of nations and of civilizations, illumined by the light of Evolution, suggests that in the growth of the child from helpless infancy to adolescence, and through the strong and trying development of manhood to the idiosyncrasies of disease and senescence, we have an epitome in miniature of the life of the race; that in primitive tribes, and in those members of our civilized communities, whose growth upward and onward has been r.e.t.a.r.ded by inherited tendencies which it has been out of their power to overcome, or by a _milieu_ and environment, the control and subjugation of which required faculties and abilities they did not possess, we see, as it were, ethnic children; that in the nursery, the asylum, the jail, the mountain fastnesses of earth, or the desert plains, peopled by races whose ways are not our ways, whose criteria of culture are far below ours, we have a panorama of what has transpired since, alone and face to face with a new existence, the first human beings partook of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and became conscious of the great gulf, which, after millenniums of struggle and fierce compet.i.tion, had opened between the new, intelligent, speaking anthropoids and their fellows who straggled so far behind.

Wordsworth has said: "The child is father of the man," and a German writer has expanded the same thought:--

"Die Kindheit von heute Ist die Menschheit von morgen, Die Kindheit von heute Ist die Menschheit von gestern."

["The childhood of to-day Is the manhood of to-morrow, The childhood of to-day Is the manhood of yesterday."]

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, p.u.b.erty, 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 G.o.ds, and Asia Minor offered up the virginity of her fairest daughters to the first-comer at the altars of the earth-mother.

Purified and enn.o.bled 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 encompa.s.sed 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_, encyclopaedic 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 child-birth, motherhood, s.e.x-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 G.o.ds, 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 inst.i.tutions 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 G.o.d 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_.