The Noble Savage
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.
-THE END-
Charles Dickens' short story: The Noble Savage
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
