UIsTWRITTE^ 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 

 halaii (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 an- 

 tiquity, he might feel at least that, like Watteau, he had dealt worth- 

 ily, 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 primi- 

 tives; 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 re- 

 semblances 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 him- 

 self entering the playground of the human race. 



The hula was a religious service, in which poetry, music, panto- 

 mime, and the dance lent themselves, under the forms of dramatic 



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