Unwritten Literature of Hawaii | Page 5

to exhaust neither
the subject nor the reader, but to answer some of the questions of the
intelligent thinker.
Thanks, many thanks, are due, first, to those native Hawaiians who
have so far broken with the old superstitious tradition of concealment
as to unearth so much of the unwritten literary wealth stored in
Hawaiian memories; second, to those who have kindly contributed
criticism, suggestion, material at the different stages of this book's
progress; and, lastly, to those dear friends of the author's youth--living
or dead--whose kindness has made it possible to send out this fledgling
to the world. The author feels under special obligations to Dr. Titus
Munson Coan, of New York, for a painstaking revision of the
manuscript.
HONOLULU, HAWAII.
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LITERATURE OF HAWAII
By NATHANIEL B. EMERSON
I.--THE HULA
One turns from the study of old genealogies, myths, and traditions of

the Hawaiians with a hungry despair at finding in them means so small
for picturing the people themselves, their human interests and passions;
but when it comes to the hula and the whole train of feelings and
sentiments that made their entrances and exits in the _halau_ (the hall
of the hula) one perceives that in this he has found the door to the heart
of the people. So intimate and of so simple confidence are the
revelations the people make of themselves in their songs and prattlings
that when one undertakes to report what he has heard and to translate
into the terms of modern speech what he has received in confidence, as
it were, he almost blushes, as if he had been guilty of spying on Adam
and Eve in their nuptial bower. Alas, if one could but muffle his speech
with the unconscious lisp of infancy, or veil and tone his picture to
correspond to the perspective of antiquity, he might feel at least that,
like Watteau, he had dealt worthily, if not truly, with that ideal age
which we ever think of as the world's garden period.
The Hawaiians, it is true, were many removes from being primitives;
their dreams, however, harked back to a period that was close to the
world's infancy. Their remote ancestry was, perhaps, akin to
ours--Aryan, at least Asiatic--but the orbit of their evolution seems to
have led them away from the strenuous discipline that has whipped the
Anglo-Saxon branch into fighting shape with fortune.
If one comes to the study of the hula and its songs in the spirit of a
censorious moralist he will find nothing for him; if as a pure
ethnologist, he will take pleasure in pointing out the physical
resemblances of the Hawaiian dance to the languorous grace of the
Nautch girls, of the geisha, and other oriental dancers. But if he comes
as a student and lover of human nature, back of the sensuous posturings,
in the emotional language of the songs he will find himself entering the
playground of the human race.
The hula was a religious service, in which poetry, music, pantomime,
and the dance lent themselves, under the forms of [Page 12] dramatic
art, to the refreshment of men's minds. Its view of
life was idyllic, and it gave itself to the celebration of those mythical
times when gods and goddesses moved on the earth as men and women

and when men and women were as gods. As to subject-matter, its warp
was spun largely from the bowels of the old-time mythology into cords
through which the race maintained vital connection with its mysterious
past. Interwoven with these, forming the woof, were threads of a
thousand hues and of many fabrics, representing the imaginations of
the poet, the speculations of the philosopher, the aspirations of many a
thirsty soul, as well as the ravings and flame-colored pictures of the
sensualist, the mutterings and incantations of the _kahuna_, the
mysteries and paraphernalia of Polynesian mythology, the annals of the
nation's history--the material, in fact, which in another nation and under
different circumstances would have gone to the making of its poetry, its
drama, its opera, its literature.
The people were superstitiously religious; one finds their drama
saturated with religious feeling, hedged about with tabu, loaded down
with prayer and sacrifice. They were poetical; nature was full of voices
for their ears; their thoughts came to them as images; nature was to
them an allegory; all this found expression in their dramatic art. They
were musical; their drama must needs be cast in forms to suit their
ideas of rhythm, of melody, and of poetic harmony. They were,
moreover, the children of passion, sensuous, worshipful of whatever
lends itself to pleasure. How, then, could the dramatic efforts of this
primitive people, still in the bonds of animalism, escape the note of
passion? The songs and other poetic pieces which have