If the dignity and quality of the meles now used, or reported
to have been used, in the hula _úli-ulí_ are to be taken as
any criterion of the quality and dignity of this hula, one
has to conclude that it must be assigned to a rank below that
of some others, such, for instance, as the _ala’a-papa_,
_pa-ipu_, _Pele_, and others.
David Malo, the Hawaiian historian, author of _Ka Moolelo
Hawaii_,[246] in the short chapter that he devotes to the hula,
mentions only ten hulas by name, the _ka-laau_,
_pa’i-umauma_, _pahu_, _pahu’a_, _ala’a-papa_, _pa’i-pa’i_,
_pa-ipu_, _ulili_, _kolani_, and the _kielei_. _Ulili_ is but
another form of the word _úli-ulí_. Any utterance of Malo is
to be received seriously; but it seems doubtful if he
deliberately selected for mention the ten hulas that were
really the most important. It seems more probable that he set
down the first ten that stood forth prominent in his memory.
It was not Malo’s habit, nor part of his education, to make
an exhaustive list of sports and games, or in fact of
anything. He spoke of what occurred to him. It must also be
remembered that, being an ardent convert to Christianity,
[Page 108] Malo felt himself conscience-bound to set himself in
opposition to the amusements, sports, and games of his
people, and he was unable, apparently, to see in them any
good whatsoever. Malo was a man of uncompromising honesty and
rigidity of principles. His nature, acting under the new
influences that surrounded him after the introduction of
Christianity, made it impossible for him to discriminate
calmly between the good and the pernicious, between the
purely human and poetic and the depraved elements in the
sports practised by his people during their period of
heathenism. There was nothing halfway about Malo. Having
abandoned a system, his nature compelled him to denounce it
root and branch.
[Footnote 246: Translated by N.B. Emerson, M.D., under the
title “Hawaiian Antiquities,” and published by the B.P.
Bishop Museum. Hawaiian Gazette Company (Limited), Honolulu,
1903.]
The first mele here offered as an accompaniment to this hula
can boast of no great antiquity; it belongs to the middle of
the nineteenth century, and was the product of some gallant
at a time when princes and princesses abounded in Hawaii:
_Mele_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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