PREFACE
With the drawings it began.
An expired world tried to come to life again in the fragments which some old Maori narrated. Nature all around favoured admiration only, and her loneliness was alive with longing.
Of Maori art I had never heard, and, when that art was first offered to me, I had none other to choose. At first it disgusted me. But I had to make use of my time. The evergreen nature was beautiful, and entrancing was her invitation to waste my life in her midst, as she herself was wasting hers.
To protect myself against her allurements, I began the first sketches of old carvings. Then I made more.
Sitting beside me, and looking at my work, an old Maori related the deeds of his ancestor, upon whose carved image I was at work.
And they were mighty deeds!
In the evenings later, at the camp-fire, those deeds lived again in my thoughts, and the imagination busied herself, awkwardly enough, to express new ideas with the help of new forms.
That was the beginning of the first drawing.