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,
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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