TO
G. B. S.-M.
“On the open window-sill of the universal soul the ancient æolian harp awakes.”—Andrew Millar, Robes of Pan.
PREFACE
THOUGH the adventures recorded in this book may set up the impression that I am a kind of Don Quixote of the South Seas, I do not claim to have sought to redress wrongs done to beauteous dusky maidens. It was the ardent, adventurous spirit of youth that brought me to the side of such original characters as Fae Fae, Soogy, and Fanga, and gave me the charming friendship of those pagan chiefs who have inspired me to write this book. It is possible that many stay-at-homes will think I have romanced, will think it incredible that such characters as I have attempted to portray really existed. Well, all I can say is, that my greatest literary effort in the following pages has been to keep to the truth of the whole matter, even though such frankness should leave me, at the end of this volume, with a blackened name.
As I have introduced several Polynesian legends and myths in this book, I would like to make a few remarks with reference thereto. In recording my memories of Island folk-lore I have to use, of course, my own order of intelligence—as compared with that of the wild people who told the stories—when I attempt to recreate the legendary lore, the poetry, and the loveliness of the natural world as it must have appeared to the imagination of primitive minds believing in them. In doing this I merely accept the inevitable transmutation which all legends and myths of primitive peoples must undergo when written down.
Myths in their earliest stage were the poetic babblings of the children of nature. It is certain that folk-lore which comes to us in written form has been subjected to obvious transformation. All creation-myths and subtle moving legends that are representative of human passions and yearning, be they from the lore of the ancient Finns, Hindoos, Babylonians, Japanese, Egyptians, or Greeks, have been completely transformed before they reached us. Legends are told, retold, and embellished in accordance with the storyteller’s notion of what seems compatible with and faithful to primitive conceptions, until, out of the imaginative fires of a dozen or so narrators, we get the poetic picture which the primitive mind probably conceived, but was unable to express. There is little doubt, I imagine, that, if it were possible to trace our great epic poems to their remote original sources, we should find them based on simple poetic superstition which had its origin in the minds of the lowest tribes of primitive man. Thus, through the influence of mind on mind, the world’s great epic, when compared to that far-off original, will resemble it as much as the nightingale’s egg of this summer will resemble the full-fledged bird’s midnight-song to next year’s moon.
So much would I say for my method in writing my reminiscences of heathen fairy-land. As for idol-worship, I have written about it just as O’Hara and I saw it with our own eyes, distinct and solid as are the biblical images of stone in the churches of our own sacred creed.