So she began to run.  Te Ponga and his men joined in the swift flight, and as soon as they had reached the water they jumped into their canoe, seized their paddles and shot away, swift as a dart from a string.  When the pursuing villagers arrived at the beach they laid hold of another canoe, but found that the lashings of all had been cut, so that pursuit was impossible.  Thus the party that had come to make peace returned joyfully to their own country, with the enemy’s young chieftainess, while their foes stood like fools upon the shore, stamping with rage and threatening them in vain.

These stories are undoubtedly romantic; but again I ask, are they stories of romantic love?  There is romance and quaint local color in the feat of the girl who, reversing the story of Hero and Leander, swam over to her lover; in the wooing of the two girls proposing to an unseen man up a tree; in the action of the chief who saved the beautiful girl and her father from dying of thirst, and acted so that his men came to the conclusion he must love her “almost as well” as war; in the slyly planned elopement of Te Ponga.  But there is nothing to indicate the quality of the love—­to show an “illumination of the senses by the soul,” or a single altruistic trait.  Even such touches of egoistic sentimentality as the phrase “To the heart of each of them the other appeared pleasing and worthy, so that in the breast of each there grew up a secret passion for the other;” and again, “he felt his heart grow wild with emotion, when he saw so much loveliness before him,” are quite certainly a product of Grey’s fancy, for Polynesians, as we have seen, do not speak of the “heart” in that sense, and such a word as “emotions” is entirely beyond their powers of abstraction and conception.  Grey tells us that he collected different portions of his legends from different natives, in very distant parts of the country, at long intervals, and afterward rearranged and rewrote them.  In this way he succeeded in giving us some interesting legends, but a phonographic record of the fragments related to him, without any embroidering of “heart-affairs,” “wild emotions,” and other adornments of modern novels, would have rendered them infinitely more valuable to students of the evolution of emotions.  It is a great pity that so few of the recorders of aboriginal tales followed this principle; and it is strange that such neatly polished, arranged, and modernized tales as these should have been accepted so long as illustrations of primitive love.[194]

MAORI LOVE-POEMS

Besides their stories of love, the Maoris of New Zealand also have poems, some accompanied with (often obscene) pantomimes, others without accompaniment.  Shortland (146-55), Taylor (310), and others have collected and translated some of these poems, of which the following are the best.  Taylor cites this one: 

     The tears gush from my eyes,
     My eyelashes are wet with tears;
     But stay, my tears, within,
     Lest you should be called mine.