To come to the point
at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I
consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition. His calling
rum fire- water, and me a pale face, wholly fail to reconcile me to him. I
don't care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a
something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth. I think a
mere gent (which I take to be the lowest form of civilisation) better than a
howling, whistling, clucking, stamping, jumping, tearing savage. It is all one
to me, whether he sticks a fish-bone through his visage, or bits of trees
through the lobes of his ears, or bird's feathers in his head; whether he
flattens his hair between two boards, or spreads his nose over the breadth of
his face, or drags his lower lip down by great weights, or blackens his teeth,
or knocks them out, or paints one cheek red and the other blue, or tattoos
himself, or oils himself, or rubs his body with fat, or crimps it with knives.
Yielding to whichsoever of these agreeable eccentricities, he is a savage -
cruel, false, thievish, murderous; addicted more or less to grease, entrails,
and beastly customs; a wild animal with the questionable gift of boasting; a
conceited, tiresome, bloodthirsty, monotonous humbug.
Yet it is
extraordinary to observe how some people will talk about him, as they talk
about the good old times; how they will regret his disappearance, in the course
of this world's development, from such and such lands where his absence is a
blessed relief and an indispensable preparation for the sowing of the very
first seeds of any influence that can exalt humanity; how, even with the
evidence of himself before them, they will either be determined to believe, or
will suffer themselves to be persuaded into believing, that he is something
which their five senses tell them he is not.
There was Mr. Catlin,
some few years ago, with his Ojibbeway Indians. Mr. Catlin was an energetic,
earnest man, who had lived among more tribes of Indians than I need reckon up
here, and who had written a picturesque and glowing book about them. With his
party of Indians squatting and spitting on the table before him, or dancing
their miserable jigs after their own dreary manner, he called, in all good
faith, upon his civilised audience to take notice of their symmetry and grace,
their perfect limbs, and the exquisite expression of their pantomime; and his
civilised audience, in all good faith, complied and admired. Whereas, as mere
animals, they were wretched creatures, very low in the scale and very poorly
formed; and as men and women possessing any power of truthful dramatic
expression by means of action, they were no better than the chorus at an
Italian Opera in England - and would have been worse if such a thing were
possible.
Mine are no new views
of the noble savage. The greatest writers on natural history found him out long
ago. BUFFON knew what he was, and showed why he is the sulky tyrant that he is
to his women, and how it happens (Heaven be praised!) that his race is spare in
numbers. For evidence of the quality of his moral nature, pass himself for a
moment and refer to his 'faithful dog.' Has he ever improved a dog, or attached
a dog, since his nobility first ran wild in woods, and was brought down (at a
very long shot) by POPE? Or does the animal that is the friend of man, always
degenerate in his low society?
It is not the
miserable nature of the noble savage that is the new thing; it is the
whimpering over him with maudlin admiration, and the affecting to regret him,
and the drawing of any comparison of advantage between the blemishes of
civilisation and the tenor of his swinish life. There may have been a change
now and then in those diseased absurdities, but there is none in him.
Think of the Bushmen.
Think of the two men and the two women who have been exhibited about England
for some years. Are the majority of persons - who remember the horrid little
leader of that party in his festering bundle of hides, with his filth and his
antipathy to water, and his straddled legs, and his odious eyes shaded by his
brutal hand, and his cry of 'Qu-u-u-u-aaa!' (Bosjesman for something
desperately insulting I have no doubt) - conscious of an affectionate yearning
towards that noble savage, or is it idiosyncratic in me to abhor, detest,
abominate, and abjure him? I have no reserve on this subject, and will frankly
state that, setting aside that stage of the entertainment when he counterfeited
the death of some creature he had shot, by laying his head on his hand and
shaking his left leg - at which time I think it would have been justifiable
homicide to slay him - I have never seen that group sleeping, smoking, and
expectorating round their brazier, but I have sincerely desired that something
might happen to the charcoal smouldering therein, which would cause the
immediate suffocation of the whole of the noble strangers.
There is at present a
party of Zulu Kaffirs exhibiting at the St. George's Gallery, Hyde Park Corner,
London. These noble savages are represented in a most agreeable manner; they
are seen in an elegant theatre, fitted with appropriate scenery of great
beauty, and they are described in a very sensible and unpretending lecture,
delivered with a modesty which is quite a pattern to all similar exponents.
Though extremely ugly, they are much better shaped than such of their
predecessors as I have referred to; and they are rather picturesque to the eye,
though far from odoriferous to the nose. What a visitor left to his own
interpretings and imaginings might suppose these noblemen to be about, when
they give vent to that pantomimic expression which is quite settled to be the
natural gift of the noble savage, I cannot possibly conceive; for it is so much
too luminous for my personal civilisation that it conveys no idea to my mind
beyond a general stamping, ramping, and raving, remarkable (as everything in
savage life is) for its dire uniformity. But let us - with the interpreter's
assistance, of which I for one stand so much in need - see what the noble
savage does in Zulu Kaffirland.
The noble savage sets
a king to reign over him, to whom he submits his life and limbs without a
murmur or question, and whose whole life is passed chin deep in a lake of
blood; but who, after killing incessantly, is in his turn killed by his
relations and friends, the moment a grey hair appears on his head. All the
noble savage's wars with his fellow-savages (and he takes no pleasure in
anything else) are wars of extermination - which is the best thing I know of
him, and the most comfortable to my mind when I look at him. He has no moral
feelings of any kind, sort, or description; and his 'mission' may be summed up
as simply diabolical.
The ceremonies with
which he faintly diversifies his life are, of course, of a kindred nature. If
he wants a wife he appears before the kennel of the gentleman whom he has
selected for his father-in- law, attended by a party of male friends of a very
strong flavour, who screech and whistle and stamp an offer of so many cows for
the young lady's hand. The chosen father-in-law - also supported by a
high-flavoured party of male friends - screeches, whistles, and yells (being
seated on the ground, he can't stamp) that there never was such a daughter in
the market as his daughter, and that he must have six more cows. The son-in-law
and his select circle of backers screech, whistle, stamp, and yell in reply,
that they will give three more cows. The father-in-law (an old deluder,
overpaid at the beginning) accepts four, and rises to bind the bargain. The
whole party, the young lady included, then falling into epileptic convulsions,
and screeching, whistling, stamping, and yelling together - and nobody taking
any notice of the young lady (whose charms are not to be thought of without a
shudder) - the noble savage is considered married, and his friends make
demoniacal leaps at him by way of congratulation.
When the noble savage
finds himself a little unwell, and mentions the circumstance to his friends, it
is immediately perceived that he is under the influence of witchcraft. A
learned personage, called an Imyanger or Witch Doctor, is immediately sent for
to Nooker the Umtargartie, or smell out the witch. The male inhabitants of the
kraal being seated on the ground, the learned doctor, got up like a grizzly
bear, appears, and administers a dance of a most terrific nature, during the
exhibition of which remedy he incessantly gnashes his teeth, and howls:- 'I am
the original physician to Nooker the Umtargartie. Yow yow yow! No connexion
with any other establishment. Till till till! All other Umtargarties are
feigned Umtargarties, Boroo Boroo! but I perceive here a genuine and real
Umtargartie, Hoosh Hoosh Hoosh! in whose blood I, the original Imyanger and
Nookerer, Blizzerum Boo! will wash these bear's claws of mine. O yow yow yow!'
All this time the learned physician is looking out among the attentive faces
for some unfortunate man who owes him a cow, or who has given him any small
offence, or against whom, without offence, he has conceived a spite. Him he
never fails to Nooker as the Umtargartie, and he is instantly killed. In the
absence of such an individual, the usual practice is to Nooker the quietest and
most gentlemanly person in company. But the nookering is invariably followed on
the spot by the butchering.
Some of the noble
savages in whom Mr. Catlin was so strongly interested, and the diminution of
whose numbers, by rum and smallpox, greatly affected him, had a custom not
unlike this, though much more appalling and disgusting in its odious details.
The women being at
work in the fields, hoeing the Indian corn, and the noble savage being asleep
in the shade, the chief has sometimes the condescension to come forth, and
lighten the labour by looking at it. On these occasions, he seats himself in
his own savage chair, and is attended by his shield-bearer: who holds over his
head a shield of cowhide - in shape like an immense mussel shell - fearfully
and wonderfully, after the manner of a theatrical supernumerary. But lest the
great man should forget his greatness in the contemplation of the humble works
of agriculture, there suddenly rushes in a poet, retained for the purpose, called
a Praiser. This literary gentleman wears a leopard's head over his own, and a
dress of tigers' tails; he has the appearance of having come express on his
hind legs from the Zoological Gardens; and he incontinently strikes up the
chief's praises, plunging and tearing all the while. There is a frantic
wickedness in this brute's manner of worrying the air, and gnashing out, 'O
what a delightful chief he is! O what a delicious quantity of blood he sheds! O
how majestically he laps it up! O how charmingly cruel he is! O how he tears
the flesh of his enemies and crunches the bones! O how like the tiger and the
leopard and the wolf and the bear he is! O, row row row row, how fond I am of
him!' which might tempt the Society of Friends to charge at a hand-gallop into
the Swartz-Kop location and exterminate the whole kraal.
When war is afoot
among the noble savages - which is always - the chief holds a council to
ascertain whether it is the opinion of his brothers and friends in general that
the enemy shall be exterminated. On this occasion, after the performance of an
Umsebeuza, or war song, - which is exactly like all the other songs, - the
chief makes a speech to his brothers and friends, arranged in single file. No
particular order is observed during the delivery of this address, but every
gentleman who finds himself excited by the subject, instead of crying 'Hear,
hear!' as is the custom with us, darts from the rank and tramples out the life,
or crushes the skull, or mashes the face, or scoops out the eyes, or breaks the
limbs, or performs a whirlwind of atrocities on the body, of an imaginary
enemy. Several gentlemen becoming thus excited at once, and pounding away
without the least regard to the orator, that illustrious person is rather in
the position of an orator in an Irish House of Commons. But, several of these
scenes of savage life bear a strong generic resemblance to an Irish election,
and I think would be extremely well received and understood at Cork.
In all these
ceremonies the noble savage holds forth to the utmost possible extent about
himself; from which (to turn him to some civilised account) we may learn, I
think, that as egotism is one of the most offensive and contemptible
littlenesses a civilised man can exhibit, so it is really incompatible with the
interchange of ideas; inasmuch as if we all talked about ourselves we should
soon have no listeners, and must be all yelling and screeching at once on our
own separate accounts: making society hideous. It is my opinion that if we
retained in us anything of the noble savage, we could not get rid of it too
soon. But the fact is clearly otherwise. Upon the wife and dowry question,
substituting coin for cows, we have assuredly nothing of the Zulu Kaffir left.
The endurance of despotism is one great distinguishing mark of a savage always.
The improving world has quite got the better of that too. In like manner, Paris
is a civilised city, and the Theatre Francais a highly civilised theatre; and
we shall never hear, and never have heard in these later days (of course) of
the Praiser THERE. No, no, civilised poets have better work to do. As to
Nookering Umtargarties, there are no pretended Umtargarties in Europe, and no
European powers to Nooker them; that would be mere spydom, subordination, small
malice, superstition, and false pretence. And as to private Umtargarties, are
we not in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-three, with spirits rapping at
our doors?
To conclude as I
began. My position is, that if we have anything to learn from the Noble Savage,
it is what to avoid. His virtues are a fable; his happiness is a delusion; his
nobility, nonsense.
We have no greater
justification for being cruel to the miserable object, than for being cruel to
a WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE or an ISAAC NEWTON; but he passes away before an
immeasurably better and higher power than ever ran wild in any earthly woods,
and the world will be all the better when his place knows him no more.
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