Chapter VIII.
Governor of New Zealand—continued.
The Mythologist.

It used to be said that three leading men in New Zealand entered into a compact (a holy compact, this time) to contribute each his share to the literature or the literary history of the Colony. Governor Grey was to collect and edit the legends of the Maoris. Hugh Carleton, one of the many good scholars early New Zealand had to boast of and long a prominent legislator, was to compose the history of the historically most picturesque of the provinces. And James Edward FitzGerald was to write the history of Anglican Canterbury, of which he was at one time Superintendent, which he long represented in the Legislature, and where he founded and edited a newspaper.^* None of the three altogether failed to redeem their pledges. FitzGerald did not write a history of Canterbury, but he edited from the newspapers the earlier Hansard of the colony, where the struggle towards self-government manifested itself in the debates, and he prefixed to it a historical sketch. Carleton did not compose a history of Auckland, but he composed A Page from the History of New Zealand, describing an important episode in its history; and the biography of his father-in-law, Archdeacon Williams, is almost a history of Northern New Zealand. Grey, perhaps the most constitutionally indolent of the three, nobly fulfilled his undertaking and a good deal more. He collected and translated both the mythology and legends and the proverbs of the Maoris.

The task had an earlier origin and a deeper source than any compact. In 1883, when he was handing over to the city of Auckland the second magnificent collection of books he had formed, he avowed: "I have, from the earliest times to the present, done my utmost to preserve and record the languages and dialects of each of the nations [did he say, peoples?] amongst whom I have lived.'' He had made a worthy beginning with the blacks of Western Australia. He now undertook a more difficult task with a nobler race. Ambition, enthusiasm, and sympathy were all at the bottom of it. Literary ambition had burned in him ever since, at Sandhurst, he had translated Schiller and acquired the rhythmical lilt that never afterwards deserted his style. He had tasted of the intoxicating juice of the grape in his Journals; he was now to essay a work of recovery and reconstruction that would raise him almost to the level of Snorro Sturleson. Enthusiasm too was inspired by a theme that aroused equally his instincts of romance, his sense of poetry, and his thirst for science. And his heartfelt sympathy with a race that all the world has agreed to aggrandise was a no less potent motive. He caught the Maoris at the critical point when the shock of collision between two races projected such an image of the natives on the minds of the immigrants as readily translated itself into literature. He found the Maoris at their best, with their valour, beauty, and poetry still intact. Heroic and romantic qualities clung to them like a garment.

Grey lost little time in setting to work. In the summer (Southern summer) of 1849-50 he made an expedition overland from Auckland to Taranaki, and he passed through the picturesque country of Rotorua and Taupo to the West Coast. In course of it he gathered some characteristic pieces of Maori literature from the lips of tohungas, or priests, and of high chiefs. The short collection contains two imprecations, of the kind common in mythologies, a poetical welcome to strangers, and two legends, one of which alone would have rewarded his insatiable curiosity. It was a "gem of purest ray serene"—the legend of Hinemoa, the Maori maiden, who, page 67reversing the Greek tale, swam out to an island in the green lake of Rotorua to meet her lover. The legend was finely translated by the Governor and dictated to his secretary, Mr. G. S. Cooper, long Under-Secretary for the Colony, and incorporated by him in a Journal nominally written by him, but possibly dictated by the Governor. The Journal, with these gems enchased in it, was published at Auckland in 1851.

The enthusiast continued his self-imposed task, and three years later the indefatigable worker issued in London a collection of Maori legends in the original. In the following year (1855) Grey published his masterpiece —the Polynesian Mythology, and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race, as furnished by their Priests and Chiefs. It consists of translations of the legends and myths in the foregoing work, but, as we learn from the catalogue of the Grey Library at the Cape, it does not contain the whole of these, translations of some of them existing only in manuscript. Should not these 'lost leaves' be rescued from their banishment and produced in an English dress?

In an interesting preface the author relates how he came to collect the legends. In the constant intercourse with the natives which the duties of government imposed on him he discovered that the chiefs continually cited proverbs or fragments of ancient poems, or made allusions to things mentioned in their legends; and he soon found that he could neither successfully govern the Native race nor hope to conciliate its good-will, if he remained in ignorance of their literature, which was none the less really such that it was still unwritten. "My Native friends," as he called them, aided him, and in after-years he recited the names of the chiefs and priests from whose mouths he took down the legends and myths. First and foremost figures "the Tiger of the Wairau," the formidable Rangihaeata; next came Te Rou, King Potatau, the ill-fated Te Heuheu, Patuone, and Te Taniwha; while men so authorised as John White, most instructed of Maori mythologists, Primate Hadfield, who must have known the Maori intus et in cute, Chief-Justice page 68Martin, another philo-Maori, Archdeacon Maunsell, the philologist, and the missionary Wohlers contributed elucidations. Many of the Maoris, he says, sent him voluminous manuscripts. On the whole, few works of the kind have been drawn from more authoritative or authentic sources.

The work has long been a storehouse of information on Polynesian mythology. It has not escaped criticism. Grey himself claimed that it was a "close and faithful" rendering, and its general truthfulness has not been denied Yet Maori scholars have alleged that the translator sometimes sacrificed literality to elegance, and it is certain that, once at least, he sacrificed truth to decency. In fact, he admitted, in a letter to Mr. Tylor, that he had necessarily expurgated the myth of Maui, relating to the creation of the world; and Mr. Tylor states that he received from Grey "a more explicit and mythologically more consistent" version of the myth than the one Grey first published. It is also asserted that he was less deeply conversant with the hieratic form of the language than with colloquial Maori. Let all allowances be made on these two scores, and the Polynesian Mythology will still remain a classic.

A few months after it was published, it was translated into French by Dr. René Primaverre Lesson, who had accompanied as naturalist the French corvette, La Coquille, and who visited the Bay of Islands in 1824. According to his own account, he appended long notes to the translation, which was addressed to the Anthropological Society of Paris. Nineteen months later a member of the Society, M. Gaussin, reported on it, but it seems not to have been published. Should not the Government of New Zealand, which in 1886 issued a second edition of the original, see to it that those doubtless valuable notes are recovered and done into English? Polynesia has long been a subject of predilection with French writers, and an appraisement of French contributions to the literature of New Zealand would be particularly interesting.

Grey's classic has been the source of many articles and many chapters. It has furnished materials to science and been used to buttress conflicting conclusions. Through it and some subsequent inquiries Mr. Tylor has discovered that Maui is a solar hero and the death of Maui "a nature-myth of the setting-sun." An equal authority, Mr. Andrew Lang, on the other hand, disputes the solar character of the Maui-myth and sees in the story of the death of Maui a myth of the origin of death. With all his mastery Mr. Tylor is still enmeshed, even as another evolutionist, John Fiske, was, in that ancient solar mythology which the late John Crawford called "mere modern moonshine.''

The work has also supplied materials for poetry, and in his Ranolf and Amohia: a South-Sea Day-Dream, Alfred Domett, Browning's "Waring," has poetically paraphrased a number of the songs in Grey's collection.