THE CHILD AS POET, MUSICIAN, ETC.
Poeta nascitur, non fit.--_Latin Proverb_.
As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came.--_Pope_.
_The Child and Music_.
"Music," said quaint old Thomas Puller, "is nothing else but wild sounds
civilized into time and tune," and Wallaschek, in his recent volume on
_Primitive Music_, has shown how every nation under heaven, even
the most savage and barbarous of peoples, have had a share in the work
of civilization. Music has been called "the language of the gods," "the
universal speech of mankind," and, early in the golden age of childhood,
the heaven of infancy, is man made captive by "music's golden tongue."
As Wallaschek has said of the race, Tracy says of the individual, "no
healthy, normal child is entirely lacking in musical 'ear.'" The
children of primitive races enjoy music, as well as their fellows in
civilized communities. The lullaby, that _quod semper ubique et ab
omnibus_ of vocal art, early engages and entrances the infantile ear,
and from the musical demonstrations of his elders, the child is not
always or everywhere excluded. Indeed, the infant is often ushered into
the world amid the din and clamour of music and song which serve to
drown the mother's cries of pain, or to express the joy of the family or
the community at the successful arrival of the little stranger.
Education in music and the dance begins very early with many peoples. At
the school of midwifery at Abu-Zabel in Egypt, according to Clot-Bey, in
cases of difficult childbirth, a child is made to hop and dance about
between the legs of the mother in order to induce the foetus to imitate
it (125. II. 159).
As understudies and assistants to shamans, "medicine-men," and
"doctors," children among many primitive peoples soon become acquainted
with dance and song.
In Ashanti, boy musicians, singers, and dancers figure in the
processions of welcome of the chiefs and kings, and young girls are
engaged in the service of the fetiches (438. 258). At a funeral dance of
the Latuka, an African tribe, "the women remained outside the row of
dancers dancing a slow, stupid step, and screaming a wild and most
inharmonious chant, whilst boys and girls in another row beat time with
their feet." Burchell, while _en route_ for the Kaffir country,
found among certain tribes that "in the evening a whole army of boys
would come to his hut and listen with manifest pleasure to the tones of
his violin, and would repeat the melodies he played with surprising
accuracy" (546. 3, 199). The _meke-meke_, a dance of the Fiji
Islanders, "is performed by boys and girls for whom an old musician
plays"; at Tahiti the children "are early taught the 'ubus,' songs
referring to the legends or achievements of the gods," and "Europeans
have at times found pleasure in the pretty, plaintive songs of the
children as they sit in groups on the sea-shore" (546. 35, 180, 208). In
some of the Polynesian Islands, young girls are "brought up to dance the
timorodea, a most lascivious dance, and to accompany it with obscene
songs" (100. 62). At Tongatabu, according to Labillardiere, a young girl
"sang a song, the simple theme of which she repeated for half-an-hour"
(546. 31). Wallaschek calls attention to the importance of the child in
song in the following words (546. 75):--
"In some places the children, separated from the adults, sing choruses
among themselves, and under certain circumstances they are the chief
support of the practice of singing. On Hawaii, Ellis found boys and
girls singing in chorus, with an accompaniment of seven drums, a song in
honour of a quondam celebrated chief. Even during supper with the
Governor, table-music was performed by a juvenile bard of some twelve or
fourteen summers, who sang a monotonous song to the accompaniment of a
small drum.... In Fiji a man of position deems it beneath him to sing,
and he leaves it to his wife and children, so that women sing with women
only, and children with children."
Speaking of the natives of Australia, with whom he came into contact,
Beckler says "the octaves of the women and children at the performance
he attended were perfectly in tune, as one rarely hears in a modern
opera chorus, they were in exact accord." In the Kuri dance, witnessed
by Angas, a number of boys take part (546. 37, 223).
In New Guinea "the Tongala-up, a stick with a string whirled in the air,
is played by women and children." Among the Tagals of the Philippines,
Volliner found (with perhaps a little Spanish influence) "a chorus was
performed in a truly charming manner by twelve young girls formed in a
circle, one girl standing in the middle to direct." In the Andaman
Islands, where the men only, as a rule, sing, "the boys were far the
best performers" (546.24, 27, 75).
Among the Apache Indians of Arizona and Mexico, "old matrons and small
children dance until no longer able to stand, and stop for very
exhaustion" (546. 46).
_The Child as Poet_.
Victor Hugo, in one of his rhapsodies, exclaims: "The most sublime psalm
that can be heard on this earth is the lisping of a human soul from the
lips of childhood," and the rhythm within whose circle of influence the
infant early finds himself, often leads him precociously into the realm
of song. Emerson has said, "Every word was once a poem," and Andrew
Lang, in his facetious _Ballade of Primitive Man_, credits our
Aryan ancestors with speaking not in prose, but "in a strain that would
scan." In the statement of the philosopher there is a good nugget of
truth, and just a few grains of it in the words of the wit.
The analogy between the place and effect of rhythm, music, and poetry in
the life of the child and in the life of the savage has been frequently
noted. In his recent study of _Rhythm_ (405 a), Dr. Bolton has
touched up some aspects of the subject. With children "the habit of
rhyming is almost instinctive" and universal. Almost every one can
remember some little sing-song or nonsense-verse of his own invention,
some rhyming pun, or rhythmic adaptation. The enormous range of
variation in the wording of counting-out rhymes, game-songs, and
play-verses, is evidence enough of the fertility of invention of
child-poets and child-poetesses. Of the familiar counting-out formula
_Eeny, meeny, miny, mo_, the variants are simply legion.
The well-known lines of Pope:--
"As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came,"
receive abundant illustration from the lives of the great geniuses of
song.
Among primitive peoples, if anywhere, _poeta nascitur, non fit_. In
her article on _Indian Songs_, Miss Alice C. Fletcher says:
"Children make songs for themselves, which are occasionally handed down
to other generations. These juvenile efforts sometimes haunt the memory
in maturer years. An exemplary old man once sang to me a composition of
his childhood, wherein he had exalted the pleasures of disobedience; but
he took particular care that his children should not hear this
performance. Young men sing in guessing-games, as they gambol with their
companions, tossing from hand to hand a minute ball of buffalo hair or a
small pebble, moving their arms to the rhythm of the music." This, and
the following statement made of the Omaha Indians, will hold for not a
few other savage and barbarous tribes: "Children compose ditties for
their games, and young men add music to give zest to their sports"
(445).
Dr. F. Boas says of the Eskimo of Baffin Land (402. 572): "Children tell
one another fables and sing short songs, especially comic and satirical
ones." The heroes of the Basque legend of Aquelarre are thus described
by Miss Monteiro (505. 22):--
"Izar and Lanoa were two orphan children; the first was seven years of
age, and the latter nine. These poor children, true wandering bards,
frequented the mountains, earning a livelihood by singing ballads and
national airs in sweet, infantile voices, in return for a bed of straw
and a cupful of meal. Throughout the district these children were known
and loved on account of their sad state, as well as for their graceful
forms and winning ways."
Mr. Chatelain, in his recent work on African folk-tales, says of the
natives of Angola: "No Angola child finds difficulty at any time in
producing extemporaneous song."
Dr. Gatschet, in his study of the Klamath Indians, gives examples of
many songs composed and sung by young people, especially girls; and many
other Indian tribes, Algonkian, Iroquois, etc., possess such as well.
When Darwin reached Tahiti, his arrival was "sung by a young girl in
four improvised strophes, which her fellow-maidens accompanied in a
pretty chorus"; and among the song-loving people of the islands of the
South Sea, the poetic talent develops quite early in both sexes. Among
the aborigines of Peake River, in Australia, when a youth--at
puberty--has undergone the ceremony of tattooing, and, his wounds having
healed, is about to return to his fellows, "a young girl selected for
the purpose, sings in her own way a song which she has composed, and,
amid dancing, merriment, and feasting, the youth is welcomed back to his
family and his kin" (326. 11. 241). Throughout the Orient woman is a
dancer and a singer. India has her bayaderes and nautch-girls, whose
dancing and singing talents are world-known.
The Gypsies, too, that wander-folk of the world, are famed for their
love-songs and fortune-telling rhymes, which the youth and girlhood
among them so often know how to make and use. Crawford, who has
translated the Kalevala, the great epic of the Finns, tells us, "The
natural speech of this people is poetry. The young men and maidens, the
old men and matrons, in their interchange of ideas unwittingly fall into
verse" (423. I. xxvi.). Among the young herdsmen and shepherdesses of
the pastoral peoples of Europe and Asia, the same precocity of song
prevails. With songs of youth and maiden, the hills and valleys of
Greece and Italy resound as of old. In his essay on the _Popular Songs
of Tuscany_, Mr. J. A. Symonds observes (540. 600, 602): "Signor
Tigri records by name a little girl called Cherubina, who made
_Rispetti_ by the dozen, as she watched her sheep upon the hills."
When Signor Tigri asked her to dictate to him some of her songs, she
replied: "Oh Signore! ne dico tanti quando li canto! ... ma ora ...
bisognerebbe averli tutti in visione; se no, proprio non vengono,--Oh
Sir! I say so many, when I sing ... but now ... one must have them all
before one's mind ... if not, they do not come properly."
World-applicable as the boy grows out of childhood--with some little
change of season with the varying clime--are the words of Tennyson:--
"In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of
love,"
and everywhere, if poetry and song be not indeed the very offspring of
love, they are at least twin-born with it.
Lombroso, in his discussion of the man of genius, gives many examples of
precocious poetical and musical talent: Dante (who at nine years of age
wrote sonnets), Tasso (wrote at ten years of age), Wieland (who wrote an
epic at 16), Lope de Vega (who wrote verses at 12), Calderoii (at 13),
Metastasio (who composed at 10), Handel (who wrote a mass at 13, and was
director of opera at 19), Eichhorn, Mozart, and Eibler (all three of
whom gave concerts at 6), Beethoven (who wrote sonatas at 13), Weber
(who wrote his first opera at 14), Cherubini (who wrote a mass at 15),
etc. (300.15).
Among English poets whose precocity was marked, we find the most
noteworthy to be Robert Browning, whose first poetic effusion is
ascribed to his fourth year. It is now known, however, that poetry is
much more common among children than was at first supposed, and early
compositions are not to be expected from geniuses alone, but often from
the scions of the ruder commonalty.
In her interesting study of individual psychology, Dr. Caroline Miles
informs us that out of ninety-seven answers to the question, "Did you
express yourself in any art-form before eighteen years of age?" fourteen
stated that the person replying used verses alone, fourteen used stories
and poetry, three used poetry and drawing or painting, two used poetry
and painting. Dr. Miles notes that "those who replied 'no' seemed to
take pride in the fact that they had been guilty of no such youthful
folly." This is in line with the belief parents sometimes express that
the son or daughter who poetizes early is "loony." Some who were not
ashamed of these child-expressions volunteered information concerning
them, and we learn: "Most interesting was one who wrote a tragedy at
ten, which was acted on a little stage for the benefit of her friends;
from ten to thirteen, an epic; at thirteen, sentimental and religious
poems" (310. 552, 553).
Dr. H. H. Donaldson, in his essay on the _Education of the Nervous
System_, cites the fact that of the musicians whose biographies were
examined by Sully, 95% gave promise before twenty years of age, and 100%
produced some work before reaching thirty; of the poets, 75% showed
promise before twenty, and 92% produced before they were thirty years of
age (216. 118). Precocity and genius seem to go together.