The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought Part 2

_"Mother's Son."_

The familiar expression "every mother's son of us" finds kin in the Modern High German _Muttersohn, Mutterkind_, which, with the even more significant _Muttermensch_ (human being), takes us back to the days of "mother-right." Rather different, however, is the idea called up by the corresponding Middle Low German _modersone_, which means "b.a.s.t.a.r.d, illegitimate child."

_Lore of Motherhood_

A synonym of _Muttermensch_ is _Mutterseele_, for soul and man once meant pretty much, the same. The curious expression _mutterseelenallein_, "quite alone; alone by one's self," is given a peculiar interpretation by Lippert, who sees in it a relic of the burial of the dead (soul) beneath the hearth, threshold, or floor of the house; "wessen Mutter im Hause ruht, der kann daheim immer nur mit seiner Mutterseele selbander allein sein." Or, perhaps, it goes back to the time when, as with the Seminoles of Florida, the babe was held over the mouth of the mother, whose death resulted from its birth, in order that her departing spirit might enter the new being.

In German, the "mother-feeling" makes its influence felt in the nomenclature of the lower brute creation. As contrasted with our English female donkey (she-donkey), mare, ewe, ewe-lamb, sow, doe-hare (female hare), queen-bee, etc., we find _Mutteresel_, "mother-donkey "; _Mutterpferd_, "mother-horse"; _Mutterschaf_, "mother-sheep"; _Mutterlamm_, "mother lamb"; _Mutterschwein_, "mother swine"; _Mutterhase_, "mother-hare"; _Mutterbiene_, "mother-bee."

Nor is this feeling absent from the names of plants and things inanimate. We have _Mutterbirke_, "birch"; _Mutterblume_, "seed-flower"; _Mutternelke_, "carnation"; _Mutternagelein_ (our "mother-clove"); _Mutterholz_. In English we have "mother of thyme," etc. In j.a.pan a triple arrangement in the display of the flower-vase--a floral trinity--is termed _chichi_, "father"; _haha_, "mother"; _ten_, "heaven" (189. 74).

In the nursery-lore of all peoples, as we can see from the fairy-tales and child-stories in our own and other languages, this attribution of motherhood to all things animate and inanimate is common, as it is in the folk-lore and mythology of the adult members of primitive races now existing.

_Mother Poet._

The arts of poetry, music, dancing, according to cla.s.sic mythology, were presided over by nine G.o.ddesses, or Muses, daughters of Mnemosyne, G.o.ddess of memory, "Muse-mother," as Mrs. Browning terms her. The history of woman as a poet has yet to be written, but to her in the early ages poetry owed much of its development and its beauty. Mr. Vance has remarked that "among many of the lowest races the only love-dances in vogue are those performed by the women" (545a. 4069). And Letourneau considers that "there are good grounds for supposing that women may have especially partic.i.p.ated in the creation of the lyric of the erotic kind." Professor Mason, in the course of his remarks upon woman's labour in the world in all ages, says (112. 12):--

"The idea of a _maker_, or creator-of-all-things found no congenial soil in the minds of savage men, who manufactured nothing. But, as the first potters, weavers, house-builders were women, the idea of a divine creator as a moulder, designer, and architect originated with her, or was suggested by her. The three Fates, Clotho, who spins the thread of life; Lachesis, who fixes its prolongation; and Atropos, who cuts this thread with remorseless shears, are necessarily derived from woman's work. The mother-G.o.ddess of all peoples, culminating in the apotheosis of the Virgin Mary, is an idea, either originated by women, or devised to satisfy their spiritual cravings."

And we have, besides the G.o.ddesses of all mythologies, personifying woman's devotion, beauty, love. What shall we say of that art, highest of all human accomplishments, in the exercise of which men have become almost as G.o.ds? The old Greeks called the singer [Greek: poiaetaes], "maker," and perhaps from woman the first poets learned how to worship in n.o.ble fashion that great _maker_ of all, whose poem is the universe. Religion and poetry have ever gone hand in hand; Plato was right when he said: "I am persuaded, somehow, that good poets are the inspired interpreters of the G.o.ds." Of song, as of religion, it may perhaps be said: _Dux foemina facti_.

To the mother beside the cradle where lies her tender offspring, song is as natural as speech itself to man. Lullabies are found in every land; everywhere the joyous mother-heart bursts forth into song. The German proverb is significant: "Wer ein saugendes Kind hat, der hat eine singende Frau," and Fischer, a quaint poet of the sixteenth century, has beautifully expressed a like idea:--

"Wo Honig ist, da sammlen sieb die Fliegen, Wo Kinder sind, da singt man um die Wiegen."

Ploss, in whose book is to be found a choice collection of lullabies from all over the globe, remarks: "The folk-poetry of all peoples is rich in songs whose texts and melodies the tender mother herself imagined and composed" (326. II. 128).

The Countess Martinengo-Cesaresco devotes an interesting chapter of her _Essays in the Study of Folk-Song_ to the subject of lullabies. But not cradle-songs alone have sprung from woman's genius. The world over, dirges and funeral-laments have received their poetical form from the mother. As name-giver, too, in many lands, the mother exercised this side of her imaginative faculty. The mother and the child, from whom language received its chief inspiration, were also the callers forth of its choicest and most creative form.

_Mother-Wit._

"An ounce o' mother-wit is worth a pound o' clergy," says the Scotch proverb, and the "mother-wit," _Muttergeist_ and _Mutterwitz_, that instructive common-sense, that saving light that make the genius and even the fool, in the midst of his folly, wise, appear in folk-lore and folk-speech everywhere. What the statistics of genius seem to show that great men owe to their mothers, no less than fools, is summed up by the folk-mind in the word _mother-wit_. Jean Paul says: "Die Mutter geben uns von Geiste Wrme und die Vter Licht," and Goethe, in a familiar pa.s.sage in his _Autobiography_, declares:--

"Vom Vater hab'ich die Statur, Des Lebens ernstes Fuhren; Vom Mutterchen die Frobnatur, Und l.u.s.t zu fabulieren."

Shakespeare makes Petruchio tell the shrewish Katherine that his "goodly speech" is "_extempore_ from my mother-wit," and Emerson calls "mother-wit," the "cure for false theology." Quite appropriately Spenser, in the _Faerie Queene_, speaks of "all that Nature by her mother-wit could frame in earth." It is worth noting that when the ancient Greeks came to name the soul, they personified it in Psyche, a beautiful female, and that the word for "soul" is feminine in many European languages.

Among the Teton Indians, according to the Rev. J. Owen Dorsey, the following peculiar custom exists: "Prior to the naming of the infant is the ceremony of the transfer of character; should the infant be a boy, a brave and good-tempered man, chosen beforehand, takes the infant in his arms and breathes into his mouth, thereby communicating his own disposition to the infant, who will grow up to be a brave and good-natured man. It is thought that such an infant will not cry as much as infants that have not been thus favoured. Should the infant be a girl, it is put into the arms of a good woman, who breathes into its mouth" (433. 482).

Here we have _father_-wit as well as _mother_-wit.

_Mother-Tongue_.

Where women have no voice whatever in public affairs, and are subordinated to the uttermost in social and family matters, little that is honourable and n.o.ble is named for them. In East Central Africa, a Yao woman, asked if the child she is carrying is a boy or a girl, frequently replies: "My child is of the s.e.x that does not speak" (518. XLIII. 249), and with other peoples in higher stages of culture, the "silent woman"

lingers yet. _Taceat mulier in ecclesia_ still rings in our ears to-day, as it has rung for untold centuries. Though the poet has said:--

"There is a sight all hearts beguiling-- A youthful mother to her infant smiling, Who, with spread arms and dancing feet, And cooing voice, returns its answer sweet,"

and mothers alone have understood the first babblings of humanity, they have waited long to be remembered in the worthiest name of the language they have taught their offspring.

The term _mother-tongue_, although Middle English had "birthe-tonge," in the sense of native speech, is not old in our language; the _Century Dictionary_ gives no examples of its early use. Even immortal Shakespeare does not know it, for, in _King Richard II._, he makes Mowbray say:--

"The language I have learned these forty years (My native English) now must I forego."

The German version of the pa.s.sage has, however, _mein mutterliches Englisch_.

Cowper, in the _Task_, does use "mother-tongue," in the connection following:--

"Praise enough To fill the ambition of a private man, That Chatham's language was his mother-tongue."

_Mother-tongue_ has now become part and parcel of our common speech; a good word, and a n.o.ble one.

In Modern High German, the corresponding _Mutterzunge_, found in Sebastian Franck (sixteenth century) has gradually given way to _Muttersprache_, a word whose history is full of interest. In Germany, as in Europe generally, the esteem in which Latin was held in the Middle Ages and the centuries immediately following them, forbade almost entirely the birth or extension of praiseworthy and endearing names for the speech of the common people of the country. So long as men spoke of "hiding the beauties of Latin in homely German words," and a Bacon could think of writing his chief work in Latin, in order that he might be remembered after his death, it were vain to expect aught else.

Hence, it does not surprise us to learn that the word _Muttersprache_ is not many centuries old in German. Dr. Lubben, who has studied its history, says it is not to be found in Old High German or Middle High German (or Middle Low German), and does not appear even in Luther's works, though, judging from a certain pa.s.sage in his _Table Talk_, it was perhaps known to him. It was only in the seventeenth century that the word became quite common. Weigand states that it was already in the _Dictionarium latino-germanic.u.m_ (Zurich, 1556), and in Maaler's _Die Teutsch Spraach_ (Zurich, 1561), in which latter work (S. 262 a) we meet with the expressions _vernacula lingua_, _patrius sermo_, _landspraach_, _muoterliche spraach_, and _muoterspraach_ (S. 295 c). Opitz (1624) uses the word, and it is found in Schottel's _Teutsche Haupt-Sprache_ (Braunschweig, 1663). Apparently the earliest known citation is the Low German _modersprake_, found in the introduction of Dietrich Engelhus' (of Einbeck) _Deutsche Chronik_ (1424).

Nowadays _Muttersprache_ is found everywhere in the German book-language, but Dr. Lubben, in 1881, declared that he had never heard it from the mouth of the Low German folk, with whom the word was always _lantsprake, gemene sprake_. Hence, although the word has been immortalized by Klaus Groth, the Low German Burns, in the first poem of his _Quickborn:_--

"Min Modersprak, so slicht un recht, Du ole frame Red!

Wenn blot en Mund 'min Vader' seggt, So klingt mi't as en Bed,"

and by Johann Meyer, in his _Ditmarscher Gedichte:_--

"Vaderhus un Modersprak!

Lat mi't nom'n un lat mi't rop'n; Vaderhus, du belli Sted, Modersprak, da frame Red, Schonres klingt der Nix tohopen,"

it may be that _modersprak_ is not entirely a word of Low German origin; beautiful though it is, this dialect, so closely akin to our own English, did not directly give it birth. Nor do the corresponding terms in the other Teutonic dialects,--Dutch _moederspraak, moedertaal_, Swedish _modersml_, etc.,--seem more original. The Romance languages, however, offer a clue. In French, _langue mere_ is a purely scientific term of recent origin, denoting the root-language of a number of dialects, or of a "family of speech," and does not appear as the equivalent of _Muttersprache_. The equivalents of the latter are: French, _langue maternelle_; Spanish, _lengua materna_; Italian, _lingua materna_, etc., all of which are modifications or imitations of a Low Latin _lingua materna_, or _lingua maternalis_. The Latin of the cla.s.sic period seems not to have possessed this term, the locutions in use being _sermo noster, patrius sermo_, etc. The Greek had [Greek: _ae egchorios glossa ae idia glossa,_] etc. Direct translations are met with in the _moderlike sprake_ of Daniel von Soest, of Westphalia (sixteenth century), and the _muoterliche spraach_ of Maaler (1561). It is from an Italian- Latin source that Dr. Lubben supposes that the German prototypes of _modersprak_ and _Muttersprache_ arose. In the _Bok der Byen_, a semi-Low German translation (fifteenth century) of the _Liber Apium_ of Thomas of Chantimpre, occurs the word _modertale_ in the pa.s.sage "Christus sede to er [the Samaritan woman] mit sachte stemme in erre modertale." A munic.i.p.al book of Treuenbrietzen informs us that in the year 1361 it was resolved to write in the _ydeoma maternale_--what the equivalent of this was in the common speech is not stated--and in the _Relatio_ of Hesso, we find the term _materna lingua_ (105 a).

The various dialects have some variants of _Muttersprache_, and in Gottingen we meet with _moimen spraken_, where _moime_ (cognate with Modern High German _Muhme_, "aunt"), signifies "mother," and is a child-word.

From the _mother-tongue_ to the _mother-land_ is but a step.

As the speech she taught her babe bears the mother's name, so does also the land her toil won from the wilderness.