The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought Part 15

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 a.s.suaged!

s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 panda.n.u.s drupes Were sought out in thy morning rambles, Nor was the sweet-scented myrtle forgotten.

Sometimes thou didst seek out Fugitives peris.h.i.+ng 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 _fete_ 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 suns.h.i.+ne, or cropped the clover on all-fours like a tender calf" (519. 231). Of the p.a.w.nee 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-sh.e.l.l 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 Zuni 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 "n.o.ble 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 j.a.panese, 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 naei llore, y cada dia nace porque.

[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 fas.h.i.+on:--

"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 h.e.l.l. 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 new-born babes cry and weep"

(385. 6).

Curiously enough, as if to emphasize the relativity of folk-explanations, a Mussulman legend states that it is "the touch of Satan" that renders the child "susceptible of sin from its birth," and that is the reason why "all children cry aloud when they are born" (547.

249).

Henderson tells us that in the north and south of England "nurses think it lucky for the child to cry at its baptism; they say that otherwise the baby shows that it is too good to live." But there are those also who believe that "this cry betokens the pangs of the new birth," while others hold that it is "the voice of the Evil Spirit as he is driven out by the baptismal water" (469. 16).

Among the untaught peasantry of Sicily, the sweet story goes that "Mary sends an angel from Heaven one day every week to play with the souls of the unbaptized children [in h.e.l.l]; and when he goes away, he takes with him, in a golden chalice, all the tears which the little innocents have shed all through the week, and pours them into the sea, where they become pearls" (449. 326).

Here again we have a borrowing from an older myth. An Eastern legend has it that when Eden was lost, Eve, the mother of all men, wept bitterly, and "her tears, which flowed into the ocean, were changed into costly pearls, while those which fell on the earth brought forth all beautiful flowers" (547. 34). In the cla.s.sic myth, the pearl is said to have been born of the tears of Venus, just as a Greek legend makes _aelektron_ come from the tears of the sisters of Phaethon, the daughters of the sun, and Teutonic story turns the tears of the G.o.ddess Freyja into drops of gold (462. III. 1218).

In the _Kalevala_ we read how, after the wonderful harping of Wainamoinen, the great Finnish hero, which enchanted beasts, birds, and even fishes, was over, the musician shed tears of grat.i.tude, and these, trickling down his body and through his many garments, were trans.m.u.ted into pearls of the sea.

Shakespeare, in _King Henry V_., makes Exeter say to the King,--

"But all my mother came into mine eyes, And gave me up to tears,"--

and the tears of the mother-G.o.d figures in the folk-lore of many lands.

The vervain, or verbena, was known as the "Tears of Isis," as well as the "Tears of Juno,"--a name given also to an East Indian gra.s.s (_Coix lacryma_). The lily of the valley, in various parts of Europe, is called "The Virgin's Tears," "Tears of Our Lady," "Tears of St. Mary."

Zmigrodzki notes the following belief as current in Germany: "If the mother weeps too much, her dead child comes to her at night, naked and trembling, with its little s.h.i.+rt in its hand, and says: 'Ah, dearest mother, do not weep! See! I have no rest in the grave; I cannot put on my little s.h.i.+rt, it is all wet with your tears.'" In Cracow, the common saying is, "G.o.d forbid that the tears of the mother should fall upon the corpse of her child." In Brittany the folk-belief is that "the dead child has to carry water up a hill in a little bucket, and the tears of the mother increase its weight" (174. 141).

The Greeks fabled Eos, the dawn-G.o.ddess, to have been so disconsolate at the death of Memnon, her son, that she wept for him every morning, and her tears are the dewdrops found upon the earth. In the mythology of the Samoans of the Pacific, the Heaven-G.o.d, father of all things, and the Earth-G.o.ddess, mother of all things, once held each other in firm embrace, but were separated in the long ago. Heaven, however, retains his love for earth, and, mourning for her through the long nights, he drops many tears upon her bosom,--these, men call dewdrops. The natives of Tahiti have a like explanation for the thick-falling rain-drops that dimple the surface of the ocean, heralding an approaching storm,--they are tears of the heaven-G.o.d. The saying is:--

"Thickly falls the small rain on the face of the sea, They are not drops of rain, but they are tears of Oro."

(Tylor, Early Hist. of Mankind, p. 334.)