The Later Legends were composed more in the Style
of our Fairy Romances, and reveal an Advance
in Morality.

(9) Of course this is still more true of the later tales of the heroes and their wars, the navigators and their adventures and migrations, such as are collected in the later volumes of White's "Ancient History of the Maori." The heroes, like Kupe and Turi, Tamatekapua and Ruaeo, no longer become demigods, though they may be transformed into giants nine and eleven feet high. They have to deal with fairies, and monstrous wizards and taniwhas, and have a supernatural atmosphere thrown round them. But Olympus is closed, and we have here nothing but the wonder-working imagination of the fairy-story-teller, the same that, when Christianity had spread over Europe, turned the unconverted, unsubdued tribes of the mountains and lake, forest and cave into pixies and kelpies, dryads and gnomes. Half the stories in White's later volume are the outcome of the religious imagination that has lost faith in the manufacture of gods, and indulges in raising semi-supernatural fabrics on a basis of fact; the other half are histories of the heroes and their deeds, still green in the memory of the dying generation.

(10) There is clear evidence of moral progress in the New page 222Zealand records of the story-telling art. As we go farther back towards the gods and their times we encounter coarser and coarser incidents, gross adulteries and incests, fierce cannibalism, wild injustice, undiluted filth. The nearer we come to purely human times, the more we have of humane dealings, tender passion, lofty generosity, pure chivalry. The fairy stories are mellowed with gentle and kindly relationships between the supernatural and the humans. And down in the merely human annals we have such tales of tender love and high feeling as those of Hinemoa and Tutanekai and of Takaranga and Raumahora. The tales of the gods are no more gross or in-human than those of Greek or Teutonic mythology. And though cannibalism and human sacrifice appear far down in the less supernatural series of Maori tales and legends, there are alongside of these a chivalry and generosity and loftiness of feeling that form a striking contrast to the European tales of classical or mediaeval or even modern warfare. We have indeed the clearest evidence of the primeval sources of Polynesian culture being far lower in morality than the stage it reached before the advent of Europeans; and in the partial secularisation of the prose literature a proof of the mingling of various racial and religious elements. There are traces of all the constituent peoples having improved even before they mingled.