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 VIIIof 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.
I make no attempt to trace outside influences on the mythologies of Island creeds; indeed, no influences can be traced. The only influence I was aware of, or ever heard discussed, was this, that with the advent of the missionary, Island mythology and heathen legends were sponged off the map of existence. The missionaries, IXnaturally enough, could see no use in preserving legendary creeds founded on idol-worship and sacrificial cannibalism, and all that was certainly “not the correct thing” in a world where morals and manners differ so greatly from our own. In this way, both the old legends and the crude, primitive conceptions of religious worship have long since been swept away, and sometimes also the tribes that cherished these crude ideas were swept away with their creeds.
Islands that twenty years ago had populations numbering many thousand, to-day have a scattered population of a hundred or so. The blue-blooded Marquesan tribes have been wiped out. The survivors are so mixed in blood that they do not seem the children of their fathers. So rapid has been the change that many old chiefs are still living who recall the days when the voices of the winds and mountains were mutterings of the mighty gods of shadowland. Born under the influences of new conditions, the natives of to-day do not look back beyond the lotu times. Their imaginations are steeped in the atmosphere of the biblical stories they learn in the mission-room. Having a sense of shame for the sins of their fathers, they deny even the far-off wonders of the tapu-groves. In these tapu-groves, and beneath the sacred banyan trees, there once stood the heathen temples (mareas), the dwelling-places of those terrible priests who, empowered by superstitious reverence, officiated at the sacrificial altars. These priests were more powerful in their profession than cannibal chiefs or heathen kings. Looking at the ruins of the altars overgrown with weeds, it seems incredible that human hands were once lifted in supplication to relentless captors before they were sacrificed to the bigotry of heathen gospel. It forces upon us the similarity of their fate and that of our old English martyrs. In the forest, hard by, slept the dead—the Xdead who were the strange, wild peoples that once made every shadow a lurking god, their superstitious eyes seeing the starlit forest’s height as some mighty dark-branched brain of a heathen deity’s glittering thoughts.
The Polynesians believed that their great ancestors were metamorphosed into stars; in this belief there is something of the Egyptian and Hellenic touch. There are many star-legends concerning the origin of the conspicuous constellations of their lovely skies, legends that strangely resemble those of Greek mythology. As Circé turned Odysseus’ comrades into swine, so did the heathen goddesses turn Samoan warriors into crabs, snakes, and cuttle-fish. Travellers have often been struck by this resemblance in South-Sea mythology to the folk-lore of the western world. The resemblance, I think, is easy enough to understand, for Man is man wherever one goes in this wide world. Be he black, tawny, or white, his innermost hopes and aspirations are much the same.
The South-Sea savage gazed with the same wondering eyes of hope on the travelling sun, moon, and stars. To his childlike mind they were the movements of his mighty deities and ancestors. He too peopled the visible universe with gods and goddesses, as did the ancient Greeks; the phenomena of nature impressed his mind in much the same way as it has impressed mankind from the remotest ages. The same kind of sorrow dwelt in the hearts of those old-time savages when they gazed on the dead child in the forest. The sunsets blew the silent bugles of mysterious hues along their horizons, touching their lovely skylines with unheard but visible melodies over the briefness of all living things. They too crept out of their forests long ages ago, and stared with wonder on the rainbow that shone over their empurpled seas. Those old rainbows, sunsets, XIand stars left the first etherealized impressions of beauty in the heart of primeval Man the world over. And those old rainbows, sunsets, and stars still exist, are shining to-day in Man’s imagination, in all those longings for the beautiful that we call “Strivings after Art.” Thus there is a strong link, a twinship between us and those past savage races. Their old symbols of the stars, drifting clouds, fading sunsets, and moons that once hung in the wide galleries of their heaven still exist in all our poetic conceptions of that which is wild and beautiful. Through the alchemy of man’s transmuting mind, the wonders of that old world are represented in all that is highest in our Art; the very landscape-painting that hangs on our homestead walls to-day faintly expresses the poetic light that once sparkled in the eyes of those who lived when the world dreamed in its savage childhood. The music maestro to-day stands before the footlights, not of the stars, but before Man’s artificial splendour of lamplit halls, a highly-cultured savage, some wonderful embodiment of the genius who once blew in the magical conch-shell—that old barbarian musician who instinctively caught the harmonies of creation from the resounding primeval seas, the winds in the forests, and the songs of the first birds, applying them as sympathetic symbols of sound that he might please the earnest longings, the deepest dreams of that shaggy-haired, fierce audience that assembled in their barbarian forest halls. So it seems that nothing that pleases our eyes and senses belong to civilization or is of our own making. I imagine that it has all been derived from the first tremendous blackboard—the primitive days and starlit nights of heathen lands. And, so, the first wild children of creation were our masters, who unconsciously studied in the great school of Art under God’s mysterious tuition that we might feel the pride XIIand glory of all that is beautiful and divine, with hope in this far-away New Day! We dwell to-day in a materialistic age of brassy-blare and “advanced thought.” We have weighted ourselves with the thick armour of civilization, till we fight on with curved spines, hardly listing where we may fall. The old mythological light of the stars is now switched on the pounding machinery of our cities, instead of being fixed on our imaginations. We grope in some darkness of our own making, as a thousand sects mumble in their beards about some dubious hope beyond the grave. We are chained prisoners in the stone cells of our own vaunted ambitions. No flower or singing bird is a true symbol of hope, delight, or wonder; all that we see is divested of the fairy-wings of that imagination that brings us wealth beyond our fleshly selves. The true poetry of life has gone for ever. The wild bird’s song steams in our old stew-pot—we like it better that way! But one must suppose that all this is as it should be. Nevertheless, we are the old savages, the Dark Ages, in a double sense, dreaming that we are the children of the Golden Age! The nursery tale told to the children as they sat by some Kentish homestead’s fireside last night, was whispered into the ears of wondering children of the South Seas long ages ago.
In reference to the general style of my book, I have written on the theory that autobiographical writing should be inspired, not by any idea of the apparent merits of those things which the author may feel that he has done well, but from his indwelling regret over the many things which he has never succeeded in doing at all. I imagine that it is so easy to convince the world of our faults and so difficult to interest it by putting down on paper those virtues we all secretly hope we possess. However that may be, my reader XIIIcan rest assured that my memoirs are based on my happy meditations over all the great, worldly things that I have never succeeded in doing, and so, whatever interest my book lacks, is not lacking through any fault of my own.
I feel that it is necessary to admit here that I have been obliged to dig deep whilst resuscitating from the legendary dark the old mummies, the gods and goddesses which I found buried in the pyramids of heathen mythology. It is I who have breathed the new breath of life into their dusty nostrils as I unrolled their spiced, rotting swathings so that they might have some resemblance to the time when they had true visionary existence before the wondering eyes of those wild, savage peoples of a mythological past. I have placed them, with a little diffidence, on their crumbling feet, refashioning them with their unsewn eyelids and mouths somewhat awry, on show in the temple of my memoirs, in full view, standing along the aisles of dim remembrance, faintly lit up, I hope, by the light of my own imagination.
As books of an autobiographical nature usually devote a chapter or so to incidents connected with the author’s birth and childhood, and as some of the critics of my previous books wished to know something of my genesis, I am pleased to say that I am still full of go, still following the sea-birds and land-birds on my vagabond travels. Through my parentage I can claim the blood of three nations—English, Scottish, and a strain of Italian—my mother being a descendant of Thomas Haynes Bayly, the English ballad-writer; my father, a literary man, a descendant of Charles, the second Earl of Middleton, and a lady of the Italian Court: I believe this lady wrote some revolutionary songs, which were the direct cause of her enforced flight from her own country. Having said this much, XIVI will retire as gracefully as possible by saying that I have only stepped on the stage of this book as one of its humblest actors, as a hollow-voiced prompter who would bolster up the reputations of his old friends of the past with the weight of his fleshly self. And so I am here in the spirit of good comradeship, the far-away echo of my violin on the South-Sea buskin march assisting those who are scattered or dead, and no longer able to help themselves on this new stage of a shadowy drama in which I have placed them.
A. S.-M.