it has ever been a summons to action, an inspiration to daring and
bloody deeds, the call of the war-gods, the frenzy of the dance.
Born of the thunder, speaking with the voice of the storm and the
cataract, it rouses in man the beast with quivering nostrils and
lashing tail who was part of the forest and the night.

Music is ever an expression of the moods and morals of its time. The
bugle and the fife share with the drum the rousing of martial spirit
in our armies to-day, but to our savage ancestors the drum was
supreme. Primitive man expressed his harmony with nature by imitating
its sounds. He struck his own body or a hollow log covered with skin.
Uncivilized peoples crack their fingers, snap their thighs, or
strike the ground with their feet to furnish music for impromptu
dancing. In Tonga they crack their fingers; in Tahiti they pound the
earth with the soles of their feet; here in Atuona they clap hands.
The Marquesans have, too, bamboo drums, long sections of the hollow
reed, slit, and beaten with sticks. For calling boats and for
signaling they use the conch-shell, the same that sounded when
"the Tritons blew their wreathed horn." They also have the jew's-harp,
an instrument common to all Polynesia; sometimes a strip of bark
held between the teeth, sometimes a bow of wood strung with gut.

[Illustration: The _haka_, the Marquesan national dance]

[Illustration: Hot Tears (on the left) with Vai Etienne]

Civilization is a process of making life more complex and subtle. We
have the piano, the violin, the orchestra. Yet we also have rag-time,
which is a reaction from the nervous tension of American commercial
life, a swinging back to the old days when man, though a brute, was
free. There is release and exhilaration in the barbaric, syncopated
songs and in the animal-like motions of the jazz dances with their
wild and passionate attitudes, their unrestrained rhythms, and their
direct appeal to sex. These rag-time melodies, coming straight from
the jungles of Africa through the negro, call to impulses in man that
are stifled in big cities, in factory and slum and the nerve-wearing
struggle of business.

So in the dance my Marquesan neighbors returned to the old ways and
expressed emotions dying under the rule of an alien people. With the
making light of their reverenced _tapus_, the proving that their
gods were powerless, and the ending of their tribal life, the dance
degraded. They did not care to dance now th