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 Mütter geben uns von Geiste Wãrme und die Vãter Licht," and Goethe, in a familiar passage in his Autobiography, declares:—
"Vom Vater hab'ich die Statur,
Des Lebens ernstes Führen;
Vom Mütterchen die Frobnatur,
Und Lust 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 noble 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 sex that does not speak" (518. XLIII. 249), and with other peoples in higher stages of culture, the "silent woman" lingers yet. Taceat mulier in ecclesiâ 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,"