EMERSOX] UNWRITTEN LITERATUEE OF HAWAII 261 



poetry (Liddell and Scott). Again, take the Hawaiian word i'rt, 

 fish — Maori, ika; Malay, ikan; Java, iwa,' Bouton, ikani (Edward 

 Tregear: The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary). Do not 

 these words form a chain that links the Hawaiian form to the tx^us 

 of classic Greece ? The subject is fascinating, but it would soon lead 

 ais astray. These examples must suifice. 



If we can not give a full account of the tangled woodland of Ha- 

 waiian literature, it is something to be able to report on its fruits 

 and the manner of men and beasts that dwelt therein. Are its fruits 

 good for food, or does the land we have explored bring forth only 

 poisonous reptiles and the deadlj^ upas? Is it a land in which the 

 very principles of art and of human nature are turned upside down? 

 Its language the babble of Bander-log? 



This excursion into the jungle of Hawaiian literature should at 

 least impress us with the oneness of humanity ; that its roots and 

 springs of action, and ours, draw their sustenance from one and the 

 same primeval mold; that, however far back one ma}^ travel, he will 

 never come to a point where he can say this is " common or unclean ; " 

 so that he may without defilement " kill and eat " of what the jungle 

 provides. The Avonder is that they in Hawaii of the centuries past, 

 shut off by vast spaces of sea and land from our world, yet accom- 

 Ijlished so much. 



Test the ancient Hawaiians by our own weights and measures. 

 The residt will not be to their discredit. In practical science, in 

 domestic arts, in religion, in morals, in the raw material of literature, 

 even in the finished article — though unwritten — the showing would 

 not be such as to give the superior race cause for self-gratulation. 



Another lesson — a corollary to the above — is the debt of recogni- 

 tion we owe to the virtues and essential qualities of untutored human 

 nature itself. Imagine a portion of our own race cut off from the 

 thought-currents of the great Avorld and stranded on the island- 

 specks of the great ocean, as the Polynesians have been for a period 

 of centuries that would count back to the times of William the Con- 

 queror or Charlemagne, with only such outfit of the world's goods 

 as might survive a 3,000-mile voyage in frail canoes, reenforced by 

 such flotsam of the world's metallic stores as the tides of ocean might 

 chance to bring them — and, with such limited capital to start with 

 in life, what, should we judge, would have been the outcome of the 

 experiment in religion, in morals, in art, in mechanics, in civilization, 

 or in the production of materials for literature, as compared with 

 what the white man found in Hawaii at its discovery in the last 

 quarter of the eighteenth century? 



It were well to come to the study of i^rimitive and savage people, 

 of nature-folk, with a mind purged of the thanks-to-the-goodness- 

 and-the-grace spirit. 



