Many of the Maori chiefs were, and some even now are, masterly rhetoricians.  The bent of the race was always strongly to controversy and discussion.  Their ignorance of any description of writing made them cultivate debate.  Their complacent indifference to time made deliberative assembly a prolonged, never-wearying joy.  The chiefs met in council like Homer’s heroes—­the commons sitting round and muttering guttural applause or dissent.  The speeches abounded in short sententious utterances, in proverbs, poetic allusions and metaphors borrowed from legends.  The Maori orator dealt in quotations as freely as the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, and his hearers caught them with as much relish as that of a House of Commons of Georgian days enjoying an apt passage from the classics.  Draped in kilt and mantle, with spear or carved staff of office in the right hand, the speakers were manly and dignified figures.  The fire and force of their rhetoric were not only aided by graceful gesture but were set out in a language worthy of the eloquent.  If we cannot say of the Maori tongue as Gibbon said of Greek, that it “can give a soul to the objects of sense and a body to the abstractions of philosophy,” we can at any rate claim for it that it is a musical and vigorous speech.  Full of vowel-sounds, entirely without sibilants, but rich in guttural and chest notes, it may be made at will to sound liquid or virile, soft or ringing.

The seamy side of Maori life, as of all savage life, was patent to the most unimaginative observer.  The traveller found it not easy to dwell on the dignity, poetry and bravery of a race which contemned washing, and lived, for the most part, in noisome hovels.  A chief might be an orator and skilled captain, but, squatting on the ground, smeared with oil, daubed with red ochre and grimly tattooed, he probably impressed the white visitor chiefly as an example of dirt and covetousness.  The traveller might be hospitably entertained in a pa the gate of which was decorated with the smoke-dried heads of slain enemies by a host whose dress might include a necklace of human teeth,[1] the owner of which he had helped to eat.  Though a cannibal feast was a rare orgie, putrid food was a common dainty.  Without the cringing manner of the Oriental, the Maori had his full share of deceitfulness.  Elaborate treachery is constantly met with in the accounts of their wars.  If adultery was rare, chastity among the single women was rarer still.  The affection of parents for young children was requited by no kindness on the part of youth for old age.  Carving never rose higher than grotesque decoration.  The attempts at portraying the human face or form resulted only in the monstrous and the obscene.

[Footnote 1:  At any rate among the Ngatiporou tribe.]

[Illustration:  A MAORI MAIDEN

Photo by ILES, Thames]