PRIMITIVE MAN IN POLYNESIA.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1746, 23 August 1905, Page 63

PRIMITIVE MAN IN POLYNESIA.

POLYNESIAN ART: THE LITERARY. No. XVIII. (BY PROFESSOR J. MACMILLAN BROWN.) [All Rights Reserved.] LITERATURE COMBS LONG BEFORE WRITING, AND PROSE IS THE FIRST TO BE SECULARISED. So deeply has printing left ite impress on the western mind that it is difficult to think of literature without books. I he connection between the two was looser and lees essential in ancient times, when writing was the only means of recording, and a manuscript book was a rare possession. But long before a script or alphabet was thought of, there was a vast and ever-growing literature in the world, not merely in somewhat cultivated races like the Sanskrit-speakers when they reached the Punjaub, but amongst barbarous and even savage tribes. There are a fe-w primitive folks like the Fuegians, in South America, and the Andaman Is--1 an dens, in the South of Asia, that have no trace of a literature, or that, like the Veddahs, of Ceylon, have only one legend, that of their origin. But, as a rule, even savages have some method of expressing their feelings rhythmically, and something about their forefathers that they can hand down from generation to generation. The now-extinct Tasmanian®, who belonged to the very earliest stage of palaeolithic culture, used to sing extemporaneously the deeds of themselves and their ancestors, and indulge in recitative dialogue with pantomime, and had legends of gods and demons and the origin of fire. But these germs of literature go little "beyond the intonation and action of daily intercourse. It is when music and dancing become the handmaids of religion that literature proper emerges. Then is there a diction, or form of speech, evolved that differs essentially from that of everyday life; it is dignified, rhythmic, and often melodious in form, figurative in thought, passionate and often plaintive in emotion, and soon, as belonging to the most conservative of all human phenomena, religion, archaic in language; and even in its highest and latest phases it cannot doff these habits with ease, long after it has been completely secularised. It is prose that first flings off the trammels of its parents*—music, dancing and religion. The teller of legends and stories trusts to the language of the moment when he repeats them to n ew audiences or new generations; he is moat engaged by the incidents and names he has to use ; and considerable latitude is allowed him in their embellishment. Involved though these in the holy past and the worship of ancestors, they admit of comparative freedom in the expression and in the introduction of episodes. hence the prose, legends of POLYNESIA ARE FELL OE VARIATIONS AND CONTRADICTIONS. In White's “Ancient History of the Maori" we can see this prose literature in process of formation. Every tribe has its own version of the legends of the gods and the heroes, as seen in the first two volumes. We might have expected a people so strict in their attention to accuracy of genealogy and incantation to ©ling rigidly to the one form of the story of their gods. But here we have tribe after tribe give its own version, in which, indeed, we can recognise the nucleus common to all; but there is often little else common; every detail varies with the tribe; one will give it baldly, another with a labyrinth of romance. The stories of VVhiro and Tinirau of Maui and Tawhaki, and even of Rangi and Papa, T'ane and Tu vapy in a bewildering way. The higher criticism would make but short work of them. How the high priests of the Maori could have kept their faith in them undisturbed, in presence of the manifest inconsistencies, contradictions and absurdities, it is difficult to understand, for they had many of them the keenest of philosophical, if not. sceptical, intellects, as we saw in the article on Polynesian thelogy and mythology. Sir George Grey,' in his Polynesian Mythology, leaves a different impression on the mind. For he has smoothed out the inconsistencies and rejected the disagreements and variations, in order that the stories might have their full effect as romances of the primitive mind. He is a harmoniser of the legends rather than a reporter. And the result is very satisfactory to the seeker of fairy stories and romances, and anything but satisfactory to the student of ethnology or folklore, or even the history of the Polynesian mind. Had the author of Polynesian Mythology fulfilled the title of his book, and sought farther afield than New Zealand, his task would have been tenfold more difficult do harmonise the sacred stories of the various branches of the Polynesian race. Their language makes one clear, broad impression of a racial unity. The legends, especially the divine legends, diverge in the most astonishing manner, not merely in the details, but in the prime essential®. The name® of the gods and the demi-gods are common to some extent; but the r places in the pantheons of the various groups, nay, ef the various islands of each group, and the functions anrl honours of the divinities, differ as widely as in those of the different branches of the Aryan-Speaking race®. The general moulds of the divine stories, and characters, and manners, are not unlike, guided ae they are, first by the psychological un.ty of mankind, but still mar© by the racial unity. But the names attached to them, names, that are often manifestly the same in origin, are assigned to them as if drawn in a sweepstake.

Every group, nay every islet, has taken its own path in recreating its pantheon. THIS SECULARISATION IS AN EVIDENCE OF MIXTURE OF RACE.

In short, the art of legend-making had continued vital in Polynesia down till recent times. There was no sacrilege in evolving the old gods or in inventing new gods, none in altering and embellishing the stories handed down by ancestors, or in making them brand new. In other words, the art of moulding the Polynesian Olympus had been long secular ®ed; even though it remained largely in the hand® of the priests, It had a-ko become an art of pleasure for the long nights; though the incantations were handed down and taught amid the strictest mystery in the school of theology, tii tales of the gods and demigods were told around the fire or the lamp by any who knew them, by preference the old men. This revolution in the attitude towards sacred things could not well have come about except by mixture of pe>ples, or races., that ha a different pantheons and different traditions. Purity of race, in other word®, complete isolation of its racial culture and ideas, is the only thing that will preserve its religion unchanged and uncnangeable in .every feature; and here we have unmistakable evidence of a w deepread and vigorous commingling of races and peoples in the secularisation of the art of religious tradition and legend, even if we had not already had enough in the revolutionary changes of the Polynesian pantheon. Gods and their histories and functions are but pawns on the religious ch ss-board of Polynesia, to bo moved hither and th.ther with illimitable caprice. Nothing but stratum on stratum of people and belief can explain th*s singular phenomenon. There was no tapu on the stories of the gods; ail might listen to them; and the secular imagination might still work on them, unhampered by more than the mere general mould of tradition. Once or twice we hear of heterodoxy, as when a hgh priest is condemned for teaching that Tiki made man, and precautions are taken by stopping the mouth and ears of his corpse against the heresy passing into others. But this i® a rare exception, and ws may take for granted that the art of divine legend-making and divine storytell ng had lost the consecration it had originally had as long as each element of the ultimate amalgam of Polynesian population remained pure. THE LATER LEGENDS WERE: COM- - POSED MORE IN THE! STYLE OF OUR FAIRY ROM ANO ESI, AND REVEAL AN ADVANCE IN MOE ALITY. Of course this is still more true of the latest tale® of the heroes and their wars, the navigators, and their adventures and migrations, such a© are collected in the later volumes of White’s Ancient History of the Maori. The heroes l.ke Kupe and Turi, Tamatekapua and Ruaeo no longer become demigods, though they may be transformed into giants nine and eleven feet high. The etories have to deal with fairies, and monstrous wizard® and taniwhas, and have a supernatural atmosphere thrown round them. But Olympus is closed. And we have here nothing but the won-der-working imagination of the fairy-story-teller. the same that, when Christianity" had spread over Europe, turned the unconverted, unsubdued tribes of the mountain and lake, forest and cave into pixies and kelpies, dryads and gnomes. Half the stories in White’s later volumes are the outcome of the religious imagination that has lost faith in the manufacture of gods, and indulges in raising sembsupernatural fabric® on a basis of fact; the other half are histories of the heroes' and their deeds, still green in the memory of the dying generation. There is clear evidence of moral progress in the New Zealand records of the story-telling art. A® we go farther back towards the god© and their Times we encounter coarser and coarser incidents, gross adulteries and incests, fierce cannibalism, wild injustice, undiluted filth. The nearer we come to purely human times, the more we have of humane dealings, tender passion, lofty generosity, pure chivalry. The fairy stories are mellowed with gentle and kindly relationships between the supernaturals and the humans. And down in the merely human annals we have such tMcs of tender love and high feeling a® those of Hinemoa and Tutanekai, and .of Takaranga and Kaumahora. The tales of the god® are no more gross or inhuman than those of Greek or Teutonic mythology. And, though cannibalism and human sacrifice appear far down in the less supernatural series of Maori tales and legends, there are alongside of these a chivalry, a generosity and a loftiness of feeling that form a striking contrast to the European tales of classical or mediaeval or even modern warfare. We have indeed the clearest evidence of the primeval sources of Polynesian culture being far lower in morality than the stage it reached before the advent of Europeans; and in the - partial secularisation of the prose literature a proof of the mingling of various racial and religious elements. There are traces of all the constituent peoples having improved even before they mingled. THE INCANTATIONS REMAINED MUSICAL AND RELIGIOUS TO THE END, AND EVIDENTLY BELONGED TO THE! LAST IMMIGRANTS AND CONQUERORS,

It is only the incantations in the. poetical literature that reveal the same progi-ess. For they, as handed down unchanged for generations, being steeped in the religion, that greatest preservative of the past, give true pictures of the manners of the primeval past. Every turn and act of life that belonged to the conquering minority had its incantation, every step in the making and launching of a canoe, every movement in preparation for war, in battle and siege and in returning from the expedition, every item of every ceremony, birth, bapt.sm, naming, cutting the hair, tattooing, death, mourning, burial, re-burial of the bones, every act in the industries that the ai-ikis condescended to engage in, netmaking, weaving the ornamental border

of mats, dyeing with red, kumara-plant-ing and kumara-harvesting. There were no incantations for the employments of ommon men or slaves; and in the lives of even chiefs’ daughters there were only a few. And all the incantations were in the peculiar unequal rhythm of the Polynesians; they were meant to be poetry, and were accordingly chanted or intoned by th© priests, often with "response or chorus. This chanting with response isa marked feature of the Hauhau religion ; and when visiting Matatua in the Urewera country, the shrine of Hauhauism, last summer I heard this going on in the carved house morning, noon and night; and in the middle of the night I was wakened by the religious exercises of my host and hostess in a tent beside the whore. The husband intoned and the wife gave the responses. That this was not derived from the Anglicanism in which Te Ivooti. the founder of the new religion, had been brought up is clear from an observation of Crozet on the religion of the Lay of Islands, when he v sited it in 1772. “I noticed that the savages who cam© to sleep on board our vessels were in the habit of communing with themselves in the middle of the night, sitting up and mumbling- a few words that resembled a prayer, in which they answered one another and appeared to chant. This sort of prayer lasted eight or ten minutes.’’ Nocturnal intoning and response evidently come amongst the Maoris from very ancient times. These ancient incantations are generally marked by constant recurrence of a phrase or sentence, appeal or injunction, evidently meant, like the refrain or burden of our song, to indicate poetical form. It expresses the natural periodicity or tiding -of emotion. And it is generally explicit in it® meaning. But it is not so -with the rest of the chant; the references are often to some obscure god or hero- or event in legendary history, and are couched in -obscure metaphor that doe© not always reach articulateness or grammar. This is doubtless the stamp of antiquity. And the -whole is. often steeped in the fierce passions of primeval time®, nakedly and violently expressed.

It is no rash inference from previous indications to hold that these karakias or religious chants belong to the last incomers and conquerors, and picture the earlier phase© of their culture, probably long before they set out from their birthland in the South of Asia. Religion preserve® prehistoric ethics and beliefs, as the amber does the prehistoric fly. Women had nothing to do with either the making or the use of incantations. For poetry,- like its parent religion, was, amongst the Aryan peoples at least, who had early thrown off the matriarcliate, the affair of the men. That wom-en should have come to have- any ©hare in poetry and its guiding spirits, music and dancing, reveals the solvent power that new races and new environment had over Polynesian religion. In all the islands they entered more into song and dance than in New Zealand, probably because the enervating climate turned the men to indolence and luxury. In Tonga they were most emanicipated in these and other respect®, perhaps because of the proximity of Melanesia -and its matriarch ate. THE REST OF THE POETRY WAS LARGELY SECULARISED; FOR WOMEN (SHARED IN IT, AND IT BECAME VERY NOBLE. It was rather the growing secularisation of the poetic art that in New Zealand admitted women Do share in it. They take a large- place in the waiatae and laments and dirges, not merely as theme®, but as singer®. Even in the old legend of Irawaru, that belongs to the time of the demigods, it is Hina that laments in poetry o-ver the transformation of her husband into a dog by her brother, Maui; ‘T weep, I call to the steep billows of the -sea, And him, the great, the ocean-god.’’ “And let the wave® wear their mourning too, And sleep as sleep© the dead.’’ “O, heaven, now sleeping, rouse thee, rise to power, And O, - thou earth, awake, exert thy might for me, And open wide- the -door to my last home, Where calm unruffled waits me in the sky.” But as a rule the more ancient the song or lament, the more is it occupied with the feelings, desires, passions, and deeds of the men, and the more -evident is it that it was written by a man. Tiiere are dirge© over the dead slain in battle, sung by the whole tribe, dirges over children who have died a natural death, laments over the loss o-f the kuma-ra crops or over the sweeping away of the eel-weir, and laments of the hungry, the*defeated, the enslaved, the men taken in battle and led to sacrifice. It is only as we come towards modern times that love-songs begin to predominate, and many of them are. sung by women. But the most striking feature about these is that they are often by married women expressing lawful and noble love and sorrow. There is never a mention of the lawless lover -o-r paramour, who takes such a large place in the song and ballad of Christendom. Free, even chartered, though the Maori girl might be before marriage, and little though the emphasis that was laid on that ceremony, after it there was never a thought of disloyalty or lawlessness; of course there was in actual life; but not •in the poetry -o-r romance. The song of love is that for a husband at a distance from his wife, beginning: “How weary my eyes are with looking for thee, , . . ~ And watching the hill o’er winch thou didst pas©!’’ The lament Is that of the wile who has had words of anger used to her by her husband, that of a wife abandoned by her husband, that of one who mourns over her husband ©lain, in battle, that of a mother over her dead daughter. The dirge® are those of widows. Aid they are .nstinct with the beauty that comes from true love and real grief, alonar with a refined poetic sense

“Edit father, come, come back to home, And sleep with all thine own belove-d ones now, While I my palpitating heart will hold, And weep- my loss of long-kept bird, Whose song awoke me at the earliest dawn. And now that bird has swooped And gone far, far away. from me.” Of course the poetic beauty of passion ia not confined to the women; the love songs and laments of the men are full ■of longing regret for the past, and sorrow over the dead; they nave their song® of the love of days long past, love song® that are also dirges of woe, dirges sung! by the dying, and dirges of love sung just before dea.th. And we can understand why they kept alive for so many centuries the memories of their birthland, Hawaikl, when we see their songs that mourn -over the homes they have to leave or have left; there is the full germ of a passionate patriotism in them. 'What can be more beaudiul than the departure s.uth of the Maori Napoleon, Te Rauparaha, with his relatives and tribe from their old home, Kawhia? A® they reached! the last hill that looked back on the ancestral hearth they were leaving, they; wailed aloud, and, weeping, sang a song of farewell: “ O , my own home * Ah me! I bid faro* well to you, And still at distance bid farewell.’’ But that which appeals most in the Maoris to our modem sense of humanity] i© the love they bore their children. Their luliabic© are many and poetical; but it is naturally over the little ones that have gone that their poetry rise© to its highest. Tha-y have many beautiful ancient dirges over the dead; but these as sung by the whole tribe over the warriors and the honoured have something official in them. It is the lament© over- tire -dr-ad . children that are so poignant in the- intensity of. their grief. Take this ancient dirge for example: “O let my restless spirit Dream that thou, O Riki, still art in the

world; And I with thee can view the wave®, That cover all the sea around the point. Where life was joy at my own home. But now alone, I am alone and desolate.”

Even that fierce warrior, Te Ruaparraha, has a most pathetic lament over his child. IHER-E WAS NO NEED FOR METRICAL AIDS IN THE OLD POETRY, WHICH WAS NEVER DIVORCED FROM MUSIC, AND SELDOM FROM DANCE. And in their poetry the Maoris have a far keener sense of the- beauty of the nature around them, the mountain® and the forests-, the sea and the stare, than any poets of the West, except those*since the Renaissance. This is especially apparent in their laments and their song® of pathetic regret, and most in those that, belong to more recent centuries. There seems to have been a distinct development of their poetry in this direction. Even in the.r fiercer masculine poetry, the poetry oi the passion for battle and the sea-passion, there is recognition of the wilder and more violent aspects of nature. But the early European voyagers ©aw them chiefly at play, or unstirred by their dominant passion; and they report the universal tendency to plaintive melody and song. And it is their laments that approach nearest td our modem idea of poetry. They never, developed in the direction of the drama ae their kinsfolk in Eiastem Polynesia did, nor in the direction of epic as the Tonga'ns did. Their narrative poetry was more like oux old ballads, short, energetic pictures of a famous battle or deed. For it must not be forgotten with regard to their literature that it was never divorced like ours from music, and only the lament and the love song were ever divorced from' dancing or gesture-action. This is the reason why rhythm, in our sense -of the word a© a regular syllabic or accentual foot or line, was never attained in Polynesia, whilst rhyme, that wholly modern embellishment' Of poetry, and open alliteration, its old Teutonia embellishment, are unknown. Even the Vedic poets, and probably the old Aryan: peoples, whence they came, had a fair idea of metre. The Maori poetry ha® nothing syllabic or accentual in the form, though t#re Hawaiian poetry tried to get accent on the last word of every line. It appeals wholly to the higher: sense of music, like Walt Whitman’s and Henley’s; it has no fetters even in the length of the line; its chief beauty of form lie© in a subtle alliteration or harmony of repeated sound, just as ou it® spiritual side it appeals to emotion, and the emotional imagination. Never without music as it® guiding spirit, and seldom without the aid of dance or gesture, it does not feel the need of those external attractions for*the ear and eye, regular metro and rhyme. PROSE WAS DEMOCRATISED. POETRY REMAINED LARGELY ARISTOCRATIC. ■' j For instead of being the rare accomplishment of a few choice spirits, as it is and has been for long in the West, poetry was the universal atmosphere of Polynesian life, and especially of Maori life. Nothing was done without it, at least nothing that was aristocratic and, did not belong ty slaves or eo-mmon men or common employments. Though their music and dancing degenerated into amusements, they still . retained the mark© of their religious birth, and poetical literature retained them torn, whilst prose literature, the legend, the fable, and tile proverb, early threw them off. Ail the life of the conquerors from South Asia was interlaced with their poetry,: ; most of .t ancient, much of it modern.,. And, though many of their gods and , demigod® and heme®., and many of their religious beliefs, came in with the wo-. • men of the conquered into their households and the early education of theirchildren, the poetry was almost mono- , polked by them, and doubtless, as a whole, noiiits back to South Asia a© ite

Tvirthland It is in the pros© legend that t may seek for relics of the they were early emancipated fro tutelage of religion doubtless by th help of the _of the immigrant conquerors children, ™l<Ttake C are to fill the imaging tions of the young with the stones of their own past.