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THE CHILD AND CHILDHOOD IN FOLK-THOUGHT
STUDIES OF THE ACTIVITIES AND INFLUENCES OF
THE CHILD AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES, THEIR
ANALOGUES AND SURVIVALS IN THE
CIVILIZATION OF TO-DAY
THE CHILD AND CHILDHOOD
IN FOLK-THOUGHT
(THE CHILD IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE)
BY
ALEXANDER FRANCIS CHAMBERLAIN
M.A., PH.D.
TO
HIS FATHER AND HIS MOTHER
THEIR SON
Dedicates this Book
"Vom Vater hab' ich die Statur,
Des Lebens ernstes Führen;
Vom Mutterchen die Frohnatur
Und Lust zu fabulieren."--_Goethe_.
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 institutions 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 gratitude 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, Mass., April, 1895.
CONTENTS.
I. CHILD-STUDY
II. THE CHILD'S TRIBUTE TO THE MOTHER
III. THE CHILD'S TRIBUTE TO THE MOTHER (Continued)
IV. THE CHILD'S TRIBUTE TO THE FATHER
V. THE NAME CHILD
VI. THE CHILD IN THE PRIMITIVE LABORATORY
VII. THE BRIGHT SIDE OF CHILD-LIFE: PARENTAL AFFECTION
VIII. CHILDHOOD THE GOLDEN AGE
IX. CHILDREN'S FOOD
X. CHILDREN'S SOULS
XI. CHILDREN'S FLOWERS, PLANTS, AND TREES
XII. CHILDREN'S ANIMALS, BIRDS, ETC.
XIII. CHILD-LIFE AND EDUCATION IN GENERAL
XIV. THE CHILD AS MEMBER AND BUILDER OF SOCIETY
XV. THE CHILD AS LINGUIST
XVI. THE CHILD AS ACTOR AND INVENTOR
XVII. THE CHILD AS POET AND MUSICIAN
XVIII. THE CHILD AS TEACHER AND WISEACRE
XIX. THE CHILD AS JUDGE
XX. THE CHILD AS ORACLE-KEEPER AND ORACLE-INTERPRETER
XXI. THE CHILD AS WEATHER-MAKER
XXII. THE CHILD AS HEALER AND PHYSICIAN
XXIII. THE CHILD AS SHAMAN AND PRIEST
XXIV. THE CHILD AS HERO, ADVENTURER, ETC.
XXV. THE CHILD AS FETICH AND DIVINITY
XXVI. THE CHILD AS GOD: THE CHRIST-CHILD
XXVII. PROVERBS, SAYINGS, ETC., ABOUT PARENTS, FATHER AND MOTHER
XXVIII. PROVERBS, SAYINGS, ETC., ABOUT THE CHILD, MANKIND, GENIUS
XXIX. PROVERBS, SAYINGS, ETC., ABOUT MOTHER AND CHILD
XXX. PROVERBS, SAYINGS, ETC., ABOUT FATHER AND CHILD
XXXI. PROVERBS, SAYINGS, ETC., ABOUT CHILDHOOD, YOUTH, AND AGE
XXXII. PROVERBS, SAYINGS, ETC., ABOUT THE CHILD AND CHILDHOOD
INDEX TO PROVERBS
XXXIII. CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SUBJECT-INDEX TO SECTION A OF BIBLIOGRAPHY
SUBJECT-INDEX TO SECTION B OF BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX I.--AUTHORITIES
INDEX II.--PLACES, PEOPLES, TRIBES, LANGUAGES
INDEX III.--SUBJECTS
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
assuredly 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 sexual 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 God cometh not with
observation: neither shall they say, Lo, here! or, There! for lo, the
kingdom of God 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
constitution 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 nobly 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 retarded 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 competition, 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, 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 child-birth, 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."