CHAPTER XVII.
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."