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[PLATE I.] [ II.] [ III.] [ IV.] [ V.] [ VI.] [ VII.] [ VIII.] [ IX.] [ X.] [ XI.] [ XII.] [ XIII.] [ XIV.] [ XV.] [ XVI.] [ XVII.] [ XVIII.] [ XIX.] [ XX.] [ XXI.] [ XXII.] [ XXIII.] [ XXIV.] [FIGURE 1.] [ 2.] [ 3.] |
Female dancing in hula costume Íe-íe (Freycinetia arnotti) leaves and fruit Hála-pépe (Dracaena aurea) Maile (Alyxia myrtillifolia) wreath Ti (Dracaena terminalis) Ilima (Sida fallax), lei and flowers Ipu hula, gourd drum Marionettes (Maile-pakaha, Nihi-au-moe) Marionette (Maka-kú) Pahu hula, hula drum Úli-ulí, a gourd rattle Hawaiian tree-snails (Achatinella) Lehua (Metrosideros polymorpha) flowers and leaves Hawaiian trumpet, pu (Cassis madagascarensis) Woman playing on the nose-flute (ohe-hano-ihu) Pu-niu, a drum Hawaiian musician playing on the uku-lele Hala fruit bunch and drupe with a “lei” Pu (Triton tritonis) Phyllodia and true leaves of the koa Acacia koa) Pala-palai ferns Awa-puhi, a Hawaiian ginger Hinano hala Lady dancing the hula ku’i Puíli, bamboo rattle Ka, drumstick for pu-niu Ohe-hano-ihu, nose-flute |
Frontispiece 19 24 32 44 56 73 91 93 103 107 120 126 131 135 142 164 170 172 181 194 210 235 250 113 142 145 |
MUSICAL PIECES
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[ I.] [ II.] [ III.] [ IV.] [ V.] [ VI.] [ VII.] [VIII.] [ IX.] [ X.] [ XI.] [ XII.] [XIII.] [ XIV.] |
Range of the nose-flute—Elsner Music from the nose-flute—Elsner The ukeké (as played by Keaonaloa)—Eisner Song from the hula pa’i-umauma—Berger Song from the hula pa-ipu—Berger Song for the hula Pele—Berger Oli and mele from the hula ala’a-papa—Yarndley He Inoa no Kamehameha—Byington Song, Poli Anuanu—Yarndley Song, Hua-hua’i—Yarndley Song, Ka Mawae—Berger Song, Like no a Like—Berger Song, Pili Aoao—Berger Hawaii Ponoi—Berger |
146 146 149 153 153 154 156 162 164 166 167 168 169 172 |
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 enjoyment. Besides this, it kept the communal 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 we find a ready-made anthology that includes every species of composition in the whole range of Hawaiian poetry. This epic [1] 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 oli; 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.
Footnote 1:[ (return) ] It might be termed a handful of lyrics strung on an epic thread.
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 the 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 with the riotous and passionate ebullitions of Polynesian kings and the amorous posturing of their voluptuaries. We must make a just distinction, however, between the gestures and bodily contortions presented by the men and women, the actors in the hula, and their uttered words. “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” In truth, the actors in the hula no longer suit the action to the word. The utterance harks back to the golden age; the gesture is trumped up by the passion of the hour, or dictated by the master of the hula, to whom the real meaning of the old bards is ofttimes a sealed casket.
Whatever indelicacy attaches in modern times to some of the gestures and contortions of the hula dancers, the old-time hula songs in large measure were untainted with grossness. If there ever were a Polynesian Arcadia, and if it were possible for true reports of the doings and sayings of the Polynesians to reach us from that happy land—reports of their joys and sorrows, their love-makings and their jealousies, their family spats and reconciliations, their worship of beauty and of the gods and goddesses who walked in the garden of beauty—we may say, I think, that such a report would be in substantial agreement with the report that is here offered; but, if one’s virtue will not endure the love-making of Arcadia, let him banish the myth from his imagination and hie to a convent or a nunnery.