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 Théâtre Français 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.