No More Learning

Children's sayings, ed. with a digression on the small people, by
William Canton . . .
Canton, William, 1845-1926.
London, Isbister and company limited; 1901.
http://hdl. handle. net/2027/uc1. $b240617
Public Domain, Google-digitized
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? Children's sayingsWilliam Canton
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? fad hi/
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
EDITED
WITH A DIGRESSION ON THE
SMALL PEOPLE
BY
WILLIAM CANTON
AUTHOH OF "THE INVISIBLE PLAYMATE," "A CHILD'S
BOOK OF SAINTS," ETC,
LONDON
ISBISTER AND COMPANY Limited
IS ft 16 TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1901 . ,
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? V
? ? ? ?
. ? ?
. ? ? ?
i
-- il
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
I do not know of a more conclusive proof that
the wisdom of the East has not been overrated
than the fact that among the Hindoos the
Children are known as the Baba log--the Baba
folk. For the word baba is primarily a term of
reverence applied to the head of a household,
the ancient of the hearth, the old man vener-
able.
Scholars, of course, have ingeniously wasted
much time in trying to discover what was the
intention of the wise or witty man who first
bestowed that remarkably accurate appellation.
Some have conjectured that he must have been
a believer in reincarnation, and have fancied
that he recognised in the bald, reflective bit of
humanity he called "son" an ancient ancestor
returned to the goodly earth for another lease
of life. Others have fancied that he was a
profound philosopher who, looking into the
7
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
long vistas of the future with their swarming
generations, felt himself compelled to treat the
. baba with the respect due to the prospective
parent of an innumerable progeny.
Others, again--and these I am disposed to
believe have come nearer the truth--supposed
him to have been a pleasantly ironical person,
who, on finding that the new-comer had
usurped his place of importance, and appro-
priated to himself his various creature comforts,
had resigned his soul to the inevitable with a
solitary word of humorous sarcasm-maimed
probably at the baba's mother.
Whatever the correct explanation may be, it
is obvious that no more adequate name could
have been devised for that irrepressible and
irresponsible "third estate," which has tyran-
\ nised over good men and devoted women from
the beginning of time.
On the whole, the Baba log seem to have
used their power graciously. One finds that
in all ages their slaves and dependents took a
delight in serving them, treasured as a joyful
possession the memories of the days of their
servitude, and when they outlived them, spoke
of them with tears, and rarely outlived the
sorrow of losing their small taskmasters.
8
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
East and West, tradition is the same: they
have ever been a race of plaguey, adorable,
impish, angelic, indistinguishable, unique little
creatures; radiant as the dawn, changeable as
April; the dewy flower of humanity. Many
of the beautiful things said about them have
perished, but one of the finest survives. "The
great man," said Mencius, the Chinese sage,
"is he who does not lose his child's heart. "
Grave old Homer, who was not given to trifling,
takes pleasure in thinking of the motherly
hand which brushes away the flies from the
face of the sleeping babe; he smiles at the
woeful two-year-old who plucks at the gown of
the mother, too busy at first to take her up
and cuddle her, but compelled at last to yield
to the child's persistency; he knows what a
delight it is to a little fellow to have two or
three trees in the garden that he can call his
very own ; he has watched the youngsters mak-
ing sand forts on the seashore, and has laughed
to see the ass munch his way at leisure
through the corn in spite of the blows showered
on him by the feeble bird-scarers. Then one
remembers the babes on the chest of Cypselus,
and the small people of Tanagra, and the
weeping maid at the knee of Niobe, and the
9
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
little maker of locust-cages in Theocritus, and
the carver of peach-stones in Aristophanes, and
the legend of Euphaues at Epidaurus; and no
more is needed to indicate how in the old, old
centuries the Baba log were loved by sages,
artists, and poets.
How far that love differed from ours in these
days it would be difficult to say. In its
natural elements it was doubtless identical
with our own. Indeed, there is a curiously
modern air about the answer of the Greek
statesman when, in reply to the question whom
he considered the most powerful person in
Athens, he pointed to his three-year-old and
said, "He rules his mother, and his mother
rules me. " But it surely lacked the sense of
mystery, the spiritual surmises and forecast-
ings, the feeling of nearness to the unseen
world, which with ourselves are such common
experiences in our intercourse with the inscrut-
able new-comers. There was also wanting
the sentiment which has come down to us
from the foreshadowing of the Jerusalem of>
Zechariah, "full of boys and^girls playing in
the streets thereof"; from the vision of the
peace of the world foretold by Isaiah, when
the reptile should cease to sting, and the wild
10
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
creature should lie down with the tame, and a
child should lead them; from the star-lit mys-
tery of the manger between the ox and the ass;
from the parable drawn by a divine spectator
of the singing-games of the children in the
Jewish market-place; from the new charter
given to childhood when a little one was set in
the midst of the impatient and undiscerning
disciples of the Master.
Much of that tradition of the Child the Jew
carried with him into the far lands of his exile.
The greybeard might have surrendered his last
hope of ever again seeing the Holy City and the
blessed hills which encompass it, but he found
a happiness in the thought that his children or
his children's children might one day return to
Zion. So, on the eve of the Passover, when the
departure from Egypt was told once more with
laughter and tears and song and good cheer, a
little fellow in the garb of a pilgrim came in,
staff in hand and bread-wallet on shoulder, and
the master of the house greeted him with the
question, "Whence comest thou, O pilgrim? "
"From. Egypt," was the reply. "Art thou
delivered from bondage? " "Yes, I am free. "
"Whither goest thou? " "To Jerusalem. "
"Nay, tarry with us to read the recital of the
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:05 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/uc1. $b240617 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
Passover. " And thereupon the ancient story,
In exitu Israel de Egypto, was read from some
long-treasured scroll.
Strangely modified by the casuistry of the
Christian theologians, the tradition of the Child
spread throughout Europe. Every now and
then, in the musty old chronicles written in
crabbed Latin, one comes across a beautiful
little passage which looks as if a flower, pressed
between the leaves half a dozen centuries ago,
had been changed into words and made itself a
place in the text.
Think, for instance, of that strange incident
in the history of Augsburg, when all the babes
^of the city were gathered together and laid on
the pavement before the high altar of the church,
so that their cries might move the Lord to save
the people from the sword of the besieging
Huns.
Or picture that fierce fight in 1143, when the
Senna Brook ran red with human blood and
the baby Duke of Brabant hung in a silver
cradle from a willow-tree while his gallant
subjects slaughtered and routed the forces of
the Lords of Grimberghe.
And here is another baby story, which
belongs to the year 1307. Wasted and hard
12
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:05 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/uc1. $b240617 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www.
Whatever the correct explanation may be, it
is obvious that no more adequate name could
have been devised for that irrepressible and
irresponsible "third estate," which has tyran-
\ nised over good men and devoted women from
the beginning of time.
On the whole, the Baba log seem to have
used their power graciously. One finds that
in all ages their slaves and dependents took a
delight in serving them, treasured as a joyful
possession the memories of the days of their
servitude, and when they outlived them, spoke
of them with tears, and rarely outlived the
sorrow of losing their small taskmasters.
8
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:05 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/uc1. $b240617 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
East and West, tradition is the same: they
have ever been a race of plaguey, adorable,
impish, angelic, indistinguishable, unique little
creatures; radiant as the dawn, changeable as
April; the dewy flower of humanity. Many
of the beautiful things said about them have
perished, but one of the finest survives. "The
great man," said Mencius, the Chinese sage,
"is he who does not lose his child's heart. "
Grave old Homer, who was not given to trifling,
takes pleasure in thinking of the motherly
hand which brushes away the flies from the
face of the sleeping babe; he smiles at the
woeful two-year-old who plucks at the gown of
the mother, too busy at first to take her up
and cuddle her, but compelled at last to yield
to the child's persistency; he knows what a
delight it is to a little fellow to have two or
three trees in the garden that he can call his
very own ; he has watched the youngsters mak-
ing sand forts on the seashore, and has laughed
to see the ass munch his way at leisure
through the corn in spite of the blows showered
on him by the feeble bird-scarers. Then one
remembers the babes on the chest of Cypselus,
and the small people of Tanagra, and the
weeping maid at the knee of Niobe, and the
9
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:05 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/uc1. $b240617 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
little maker of locust-cages in Theocritus, and
the carver of peach-stones in Aristophanes, and
the legend of Euphaues at Epidaurus; and no
more is needed to indicate how in the old, old
centuries the Baba log were loved by sages,
artists, and poets.
How far that love differed from ours in these
days it would be difficult to say. In its
natural elements it was doubtless identical
with our own. Indeed, there is a curiously
modern air about the answer of the Greek
statesman when, in reply to the question whom
he considered the most powerful person in
Athens, he pointed to his three-year-old and
said, "He rules his mother, and his mother
rules me. " But it surely lacked the sense of
mystery, the spiritual surmises and forecast-
ings, the feeling of nearness to the unseen
world, which with ourselves are such common
experiences in our intercourse with the inscrut-
able new-comers. There was also wanting
the sentiment which has come down to us
from the foreshadowing of the Jerusalem of>
Zechariah, "full of boys and^girls playing in
the streets thereof"; from the vision of the
peace of the world foretold by Isaiah, when
the reptile should cease to sting, and the wild
10
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:05 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/uc1. $b240617 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
creature should lie down with the tame, and a
child should lead them; from the star-lit mys-
tery of the manger between the ox and the ass;
from the parable drawn by a divine spectator
of the singing-games of the children in the
Jewish market-place; from the new charter
given to childhood when a little one was set in
the midst of the impatient and undiscerning
disciples of the Master.
Much of that tradition of the Child the Jew
carried with him into the far lands of his exile.
The greybeard might have surrendered his last
hope of ever again seeing the Holy City and the
blessed hills which encompass it, but he found
a happiness in the thought that his children or
his children's children might one day return to
Zion. So, on the eve of the Passover, when the
departure from Egypt was told once more with
laughter and tears and song and good cheer, a
little fellow in the garb of a pilgrim came in,
staff in hand and bread-wallet on shoulder, and
the master of the house greeted him with the
question, "Whence comest thou, O pilgrim? "
"From. Egypt," was the reply. "Art thou
delivered from bondage? " "Yes, I am free. "
"Whither goest thou? " "To Jerusalem. "
"Nay, tarry with us to read the recital of the
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-24 15:05 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/uc1. $b240617 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
Passover. " And thereupon the ancient story,
In exitu Israel de Egypto, was read from some
long-treasured scroll.
Strangely modified by the casuistry of the
Christian theologians, the tradition of the Child
spread throughout Europe. Every now and
then, in the musty old chronicles written in
crabbed Latin, one comes across a beautiful
little passage which looks as if a flower, pressed
between the leaves half a dozen centuries ago,
had been changed into words and made itself a
place in the text.
Think, for instance, of that strange incident
in the history of Augsburg, when all the babes
^of the city were gathered together and laid on
the pavement before the high altar of the church,
so that their cries might move the Lord to save
the people from the sword of the besieging
Huns.
Or picture that fierce fight in 1143, when the
Senna Brook ran red with human blood and
the baby Duke of Brabant hung in a silver
cradle from a willow-tree while his gallant
subjects slaughtered and routed the forces of
the Lords of Grimberghe.
And here is another baby story, which
belongs to the year 1307. Wasted and hard
12
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
pressed by Kaiser Albrecht, the Landgrave
Friedrich was compelled to fly from the Castle
of Wartburg--that famous fortress within
whose walls, two hundred years later, Luther
found his Patmos. Through the valley of the
Neckar, with his wife and their infant daughter
by his side, the huge-limbed Landgrave rode
among his knights and men-at-arms, well
aware that the Kaiser's troops were following
hot-foot on their track.
Through all the first hour of their flight the
child's fretful wail was heard above the clatter
of hoofs and the clank of armour, till the
colossal Landgrave could no longer endure it.
"What ails the poor little mortal ? " he asked
as they hurried onward.
"Alas! she is crying because she is hungry,"
answered the Landgravine, "and I fear she
won't be quiet till she is suckled. "
"Then suckled she shall be," exclaimed the
giant, "if I lose all Thuringia for it. Halt! "
In a green wooded hollow he drew up his
men to be ready to meet any attack, and bade
them be silent, while the child lay nestling at
its mother's breast. Knight and man-at-arms
stood mute but light-hearted, thinking of the
baby and listening for the hoof-beats of their
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
pursuers. But the green boughs hid the
fugitives, and the Kaiser's troops swerved away
from their traces and thundered off into space.
It is sorrowful to reflect that these incidents
are typical of but one aspect of the mediaeval
Child legend. The other was based on the
hideous dogma that until baptism had been
administered the new-born babe was not a
child of divine love, but a child of perdition.
Of such was the kingdom of heaven--in no
wise. In the Vision of Frate Alberico--the
vision of a lad of ten years--one is shown the
"place filled with red-hot burning cinders and
boiling vapour, in which little children were
purged "--poor helpless sinners no more than
twelve months old. Human nature rebelled
against this detestable theology; but even when
at length the souls of the unbaptized innocents
were rescued from the unquenchable fires and
consigned to a " sorrow without torment," their
limbo was still a region on the verge of
"the abysmal valley dolorous. " The Beatific
Vision was denied to them whose angels do
always behold the face of the Father which is
in heaven.
Happily, we have in a great measure emerged
from the shadow of that belief, though some
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
traces of it still survive in the minds of good
men and good women, who continue to think that
children are "born bad. " But for how many
centuries it must have darkened the lives of
parents and children of Christendom. Indeed,
it seems to me to be ultimately the real ex-,
planation of the blindness and perversity which
characterised, even within living memory, the
conception of a child's education. How other-
wise can we account for the fact that in the
early years of this century men and women
seem to have lost all recollection that they too
were once children; that it never occurred to
them to regard a child as a small human being
living in a half real, half imaginary world of
its own; that they never discovered that love
and beauty are a child's Guardian Angels, and
that the golden bridge between the world of
childhood and the world of maturity is a sym-
pathetic imagination; that it never suggested
itself to fathers and mothers that nine-tenths
of a child's fractiousness and naughtiness spring
from physical conditions, and that a merry
laugh, a cheery word, a quarter of an hour of
fresh air, are surer and saner remedies than
* slap or strap?
Any one who reads of the unhappy child-
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
hood so frequently recorded of those evil days,
when babes and sucklings were doomed and
unregenerate creatures, the wicked days when
"tempers were broken," and poor shivering little
souls, with the bloom of Paradise still rosy on
their faces, were scourged into obedience and
rectitude, and contrasts the stupidity of that time
with the humane temper of our own, cannot
well avoid conjecturing as to the cause of the
change. It is not to be supposed that any
living father or mother loves a child more
devotedly to-day than our grand-parents and
great-grand-parents loved their boys and girls;
nor can it be doubted that they were as good
and as well-meaning as any of their descendants.
Yet how one's heart quickens and one's blood
boils as one reads of the "discipline" which
. l. even religious people considered it their duty
to inflict on the children of their love. No
doubt the growth of education and the broaden-
ing of intellectual sympathies have enabled us
to regard childhood and the problem of child-
training from a wiser point of view; and it
may be that art, poetry, and fiction have aided
our too accustomed eyes to recognise the
sweetness and beauty of child-life and to ponder
over its mysteries; but more than to any other
16
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
single influence we must ascribe our change of
views regarding the Baba log and our own
dealings with them to the greater stress
which has been laid in our own generation on
the fatherhood of God and the sonship of man.
The wise teaching of Richter and the tender
humanity of Froebel have come to us at a
moment when we are best fitted to understand
and appreciate them.
Thrice happy child of to-day! Thy star
glitters over the roof, and thou art born into a
believing generation. We cherish the old'
legends which tell how the brute stones and
wild waters and the winds of heaven are in
league with thee; and how all woodland things,
from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on
the wall, from the bees that gave thee honey to
the grey wolf that gave thee milk, are pledged
to guard thee from wrong. We sing again
the old cradle-songs of many lands, to bribe
thee to sleep with promises of golden cradles
and foreign towns and churches, and we guide
thy little feet through the movements of the
quaint singing-games of a time gone by. The
poets have made thee the theme of their inspi-
ration; the novelists are exploiting thee and
thy sweetness and grave benignity; the educa-
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
tional statisticians are weighing and measuring
thee, and recording thy ways and thy words in
learned books.
To any one who has made acquaintance with
the Baba log, unless indeed he be a curmud-
geon, none of these things seem strange.
Even as the merest babes they are imposing
creatures. "There is something gigantic
about them," wrote Tennyson with true obser-
vation. "The wide-eyed wonder of a babe
has a grandeur in it which as children they
Jose. They seem to me to be prophets of a
mightier race. "
One of the strangest things in life, a mother
will tell you, is what she calls the transparent
veil that interposes between her and her babe,
and renders the small immortal as inaccessible ,
as Sirius. Occasionally there is a look of grave
omniscience in its great tranquil eyes, which
thrills her with an eerie apprehension of invi-
sible witnesses. The tender and playful touch
of its soft hands restores the comfortable
feeling of its simple humanity. Then sud-
denly she becomes conscious that it is almost
as much animal as human--that it is-beyond
human appeal, human reasoning, human com-
prehension. How she waits and watches for
I
18
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
that veil to be drawn aside! But it is never
drawn aside. It breaks slowly thread by
thread, dissolves as it were in an unaccount-
able way, and some day the last film disap-
pears, and she finds with joy that the babe is
neither angel, changeling, nor elemental crea-
ture, but a responsive child of sweet and whole-
some flesh and blood.
Meanwhile the pigmy has been philo-
sophically taking stock of the colossal world
which is still a part of himself; drinking in light
and colour and sound; making the acquaint-
ance of that startling phenomenon, his own
l foot; discovering with surprise, not free from
apprehension, that a certain podgy fist which
bangs him occasionally is in reality an erratic
prolongation--or possibly a colony--of his
own personality. Out of his experiences he
rapidly constructs a provisional standard of
comparison and a scheme of the universe.
One wonders whether the physiologist will
some day discover that there is a physical
something in the unworn freshness and
purity of a child's senses to account for the
. "dream-like vividness and splendour," which,
as Wordsworth noted, invests the objects of
vision in our early years, to explain that
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
curious hearing "in colours" referred to by
Professor Sully, and to assist us in under-
standing the child's remarkable faculty for
vitalising and personifying all that strikes on his
perception. It has perplexed me exceedingly
to reconcile, in the case of a little fellow of
three and a half, his slowness to perceive
something I point out to him with my stick,
and the wonderful acuteness with which he has
observed a thousand details about trains and
engines--things which are his delight by day
and his dream by night, but which scare him
beyond words if he chances to come within
fifty yards of them.
The little pilgrim of the dawn has now the
freedom of what Professor Sully calls "the
realm of fancy. " In his active brain he has a
magic wand which makes him master of
creation. He fills the blank spaces between
the zenith and the nadir with his imaginings;
makes the woods fearful with wolves, discovers
the haunts of fairies and tree-folk in holes
under the tree roots, and associates the church,
the barn, the lane, the brook, the gate, with
the people and places of his story-books.
This realm is not only the land of fancy, but
that of fetich. To one little fellow, born in
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? CHILDREN'S SAYINGS
Siberia, the great god Pan was a reality. At
night he would say, "Bye-bye, Poo-ah I"--
"Good night, Out-of-doors! " Another went
in mortal dread of a feather from the eider-
down, or a fluff of the wool in which a banana
had been packed, and he would flee with a yell
when it moved towards him on a breath of air.
Boy Beloved had an unspeakable horror of an
indiarubber hot-water bottle, but if he had to
pass near it, he would propitiate it with "Nice
water-bottle! " and, watching it carefully, sidle
out of danger.
In this realm of fancy a child's quaint and
pretty sayings, his flashes of natural poetry,
appear almost inevitable. He is continually
checking off likenesses; he understands through
similitudes. Spectacles could hardly fail to
become "little windows"; a quivering compass-
needle "a bird "; a butterfly a "flying pansy. '1
"Oh, making mud-pies! " cried a little maid
gleefully, when she saw some nursery gardeners
hard at work; and "Want a drink of meolk! "
when a waggoner drew up at the horse-trough.
Boy Beloved had seen his mother's thread
ravel, and when he could not pull open the
cupboard door, stamped his foot and roared,
"In a knot, in a knot! "
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