Harding. — On Unwritten Literature. 447 



library, and newspaper. It was the sole storehouse of mental 

 food possessed by an intelligent race. In their songs relating 

 to departed and sometimes deified ancestors, in their prayers 

 and charms, they felt the presence of the unseen, and must 

 have realised, if only in a vague degree, some of those truths 

 underlying all religions, and which holders of more advanced 

 and systematic creeds claim to have been made known by 

 direct revelation. They had a very real and abiding sense of 

 the existence of a world of spirits. If we are inclined to scoff 

 at their belief in witchcraft, we have but to look back three 

 hundred years to find the whole of Christendom on the same 

 mental level. If we find fault with their necromancy, we may 

 see exactly the same thing revived to-day in the " spirit 

 circles " in our own communities. The lore of the Maori was 

 exactly appropriate to his mode of life and his surroundings. 

 It afforded him just the mental exercise that he required. 

 His songs cheered many an hour of privation and weary toil ; 

 his potent charms inspired him with hope and courage ; his 

 wise and pithy proverbs urged him to diligence ; and thus his 

 mental and moral faculties were strengthened. 



Poetry, some would persuade us, is the outcome of an im- 

 perfect development ; and certainly, with the advance of 

 material science the higher forms of literature seem to be 

 less appreciated. This applies to art of every kind. We may 

 yet find that there is something to admire in the uncivilised 

 man, and even something to be learned from him. As a 

 typical example of the ghastly side of human progress and 

 science, we have only to look at the desecrated Manawatu 

 Gorge, where Nature is taking effective revenge for the out- 

 rages inflicted upon her. Primitive man lived nearer to Nature 

 than we do to-day, and understood her better than we. 

 Primitive man has left us from remote ages a legacy of lite- 

 rature that we cannot now surpass. 



There are some who hold that poetry, the loftiest of the 

 arts, is doomed to perish with the progress of material ad- 

 vancement. The illustrious Darwin w r as, by his own account, 

 an example of the " atrophy " of the aesthetic faculties induced 

 by too exclusive a devotion to physical science, and appears 

 to have been to some extent afflicted with atrophy of the 

 faculty of spiritual insight as well. But, whatever the general 

 tendency of the age may be, modern progress has not suc- 

 ceeded in quenching the poet's inspiration. The two great 

 men on opposite sides of the Atlantic who have just departed 

 have proved that the highest poetic gifts may co-exist with a 

 very sordid and materialistic condition of society ; that the 

 art of printing, though it has been the means of overwhelming 

 literature with a deluge of rubbish, has not quite killed it ; 

 and that, though primitive man is not without his poets and 



