INTRODUCTION 



This book is for the greater part a collection of Hawaiian songs and 

 poetic pieces that have done service from time immemorial as the 

 stock supply of the hula. The descriptive portions have been added, 

 not because the poetical parts could not stand by themselves, but to 

 furnish the proper setting and to answer the questions of those who 

 want to know. 



Now, the hula stood for very much to the ancient Hawaiian; it 

 was to him in place of our concert-hall and lecture-room, our opera 

 and theater, and thus became one of his chief means of social enjoy- 

 ment. Besides this, it kept the coimnunal imagination in living 

 touch with the nation's legendary past. The hula had songs proper 

 to itself, but it found a mine of inexhaustible wealth in the epics 

 and wonder-myths that celebrated the doings of the volcano goddess 

 Pele and her compeers. Thus in the cantillations of the old-time 

 hula Ave find a ready-made anthology that includes every species of 

 composition in the whole range of Hawaiian poetry. This epic « of 

 Pele was chiefly a more or less detached series of poems forming a 

 story addressed not to the closet-reader, but to the eye and ear and 

 heart of the assembled chiefs and people; and it was sung. The 

 Hawaiian song, its note of joy par excellence, was the oU; but it must 

 be noted that in every species of Hawaiian poetry, mele — whether 

 epic or eulogy or prayer, sounding through them all we shall find the 

 lyric note. 



The most telling record of a people's intimate life is the record 

 which it unconsciously makes in its songs. This record which the 

 Hawaiian people have left of themselves is full and specific. When, 

 therefore, we ask what emotions stirred the heart of the old-time 

 Hawaiian as he approached the great themes of life and death, of 

 ambition and jealousy, of sexual passion, of romantic love, of conjugal 

 love, and parental love, what his attitude toward nature and tho 

 dread forces of earthquake and storm, and the mysteries of spirit and 

 the hereafter, we shall find our answer in the songs and prayers and 

 recitations of the hula. 



The hula, it is true, has been unfortunate in the mode and manner 

 of its introduction to us moderns. An institution of divine, that is, 

 religious, origin, the hula in modern times has wandered so far and 

 fallen so low that foreign and critical esteem has come to associate it 



'^ It might be termed a handful of lyrics strung on an epic thread. 



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