Squaw man

“ A stolid savage, knowing only a dozen words of English, and her native speech unintelligible to the man, she cannot convey her grief, despair and ravished mother love by impassioned rhetoric or gestures. Whoever plays the part is restricted to little more than grunts. The squaw grasps the situation slowly, consents with a nod, almost as if it were a commonplace for a woman to surrender her child and mate to an abstraction of which she understands nothing, and leaves the stage. ”

“ Never having seen in all her life any reception but torture for prisoners, she cannot be made to believe, for some minutes, that the white man does not war that way. The other squaws come crowding after her, each eager to grasp the general's hand, and then to insert therein the tiny fist of the pappoose hanging in stolid wonderment on her back. One of the squaws, a young and really handsome woman, is shot through the hand, but she holds it unconcernedly before her, letting the blood drip to the ground while she listens to the interpreter's explanation of the general's assurance of safety. ”

“ DON JUAN. Pshaw! all this is old. Your weak side, my diabolic friend, is that you have always been a gull: you take Man at his own valuation. Nothing would flatter him more than your opinion of him. He loves to think of himself as bold and bad. He is neither one nor the other: he is only a coward. Call him tyrant, murderer, pirate, bully; and he will adore you, and swagger about with the consciousness of having the blood of the old sea kings in his veins. ”

“ On the contrary, what more deformed or shocking object can be exhibited to view, than the human face distorted by all the vile and malevolent passions belonging to man's nature? Let any one reflect what sensations he has had on the sight of an idiot, an outrageous madman, or one possessed by ungovernable fury, extreme hatred, or implacable revenge, and he must allow that the picture Swift gives of the Yahoo face, always expressive of some one or other of similar passions, however hideous it may be, is yet a just likeness. ”

“ But when the footman had bowed and retired and we were alone, he turned slightly, and I then saw that his bony face, with high cheek-bones, slight gray side-whiskers, hard mouth and black eyes set closely together, was one that bore the mark of evil upon it—the keen, sinister countenance of one who could act without any compunction and without regret. Truly one would not be surprised at any cruel, dastardly action of a man with such a face—the face of an oppressor. ”

“ They tell us we shall then find men who will run, and screech like women. It will not be a pleasure to torment such men. We had rather torment a bold warrior, like you, who makes us admire him for his manliness. We love our squaws, but not in the war-path. They are best in the lodges; here we want nothing but men. You are a man—a brave—we honor you. ”

“ And the strangest thing of all was that he who had thought and reasoned as a civilised man, dealing subtly and finely with the intricacies of life, could now only demand with the primitive directness of a savage. ”

“ Suppose in a war between two tribes of red men, a brave is captured, consigned to adopt the dress and occupation of a squaw, and is in every way treated as a squaw. Would this unnatural life be to the brave's tastes? Would he be blamed if he sought to escape where he could live according to his masculine inclinations? No more is the passive invert to be blamed for escaping occasionally where he can live according to his quasi-feminine instincts. ”

“ Eh, the people are cruel nowadays. There’s no gentleness or kindness in them.... A savage people! A man is drowning and they shout to him: “Hurry up and drown, we’ve got no time to look at you; we’ve got to go to work.” As to throwing him a rope—there’s no worry about that.... ”

“ Unable to conceive of life abstractly as a "permanent possibility of sensation" or a "continuous adjustment of internal arrangements to external relations," the savage thinks of it as a concrete material thing of a definite bulk, capable of being seen and handled, kept in a box or jar, and liable to be bruised, fractured, or smashed in pieces. It is not needful that the life, so conceived, should be in the man ”

“ Either the savage represents a lower stage of mental development than his civilized relative or he does not. The answer to the question presented is not easy ... it is interesting to note that the trend of authoritative opinion is distinctly in the direction of minimizing the degree of difference of mental capacity between savage and civilized man and regarding the mental gap as more apparent than real and due rather to experience and training than to innate factors. ”

“ It tires one’s arms and back so, to go on shovelling. You can’t change, you see, sir, and the same parts keeps getting gripped more and more. Then you must mind your eye, if you’re [225] shovelling slop into a cart, perticler so; or some feller may run off with a complaint that he’s been splashed o’ purpose. Is a man ever splashed o’ purpose? No, sir, not as I knows on, in coorse not. ”

“ If such an effect, so produced, may be strong—and it varies greatly—in the civilised man, it is likely to be much stronger in the savage, who does not distinguish so clearly between the world without him and what is in his own mind. ”

“ And in the savage the brain retains, as we may say, but few impressions, it is wholly at the mercy of the feeling that rushes in upon it; while in the civilized man, ideas sink into the heart and change it; he has a thousand interests and many feelings, where the savage has but one at a time. ”

“ The unfavourable impression produced by the prevailing character of their physiognomy, is confirmed, if their phrenological conformation is taken into consideration; and certainly, if the principles of that science are admitted to be true, these savages are woefully deficient in all the qualities which contribute to man's moral supremacy. ”

“ In a word, it was Queequeg’s conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.
Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized; that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing, generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day. ”

“ Thou hast told me but little of thy life, Black Squire, but it is enough maybe; and I see that thou mayst not tell me more because thou hast thy mind set on what may betide thee when this day is over. But thou must know that thou hast come into the wood of Evilshaw, wherein, besides those savage men who quelled thee and their like, there be uncouth things no few, and wights that be not of the race of Adam; wherefore no great marvel is it that thou sawest visions, and images of them that were not by thee. ”

“ A little boy watched his father work and learned the lesson that man lives best by the sweat of his own brow, not by the sweat of other men's brows. While they toiled, through the shadows of the surrounding forest a savage stole secretly toward them on his soft moccasins. ”

“ With horrid cries the women approached him, and ran into his flesh the burning ends of sticks, which they flourished in their hands, and they hallooed and shouted in his ears, to rouse him up to feel the more acutely his sufferings. Talk of the noble qualities of savages, I’ve seen a good deal of human nature, and to my mind, left to itself without anything to improve or correct it, there is nothing too bad or abominably cruel which it will not do. ”

“ Now, to my surprise, I found that it was a ridiculously easy matter to knock a man down and end the squabble in short order, thereby escaping a great deal in the shape of disgusting recriminations, and coming off victorious with nothing more vital in the way of wounds than a couple of bruised knuckles. ”

“ "look at me, now. Don't I sit before you, every way, just as much a man as you are? Look at my face,—look at my hands,—look at my body," and the young man drew himself up proudly; "why am I not a man, as much as anybody? ”

“ They have somehow got the idea that cow-boy swagger and the criminal's lingo are the main features of a manly man, and having an abnormal desire to realize their ideal as quickly as possible, they go forth to acquire them. ”

“ His appetites, his tastes, his habits, even his bodily functions are perverted. Of course, there are degrees of depravity, and varieties of perversion. In some respects, savages approach more nearly to the natural state than civilized man, and in other particulars, the latter more nearly represents man's natural condition; but in neither barbarism nor civilization do we find man in his primitive state. ”

“ The squaws (poor creatures!) are compelled to do all the hard work and drudgery of life, and you may frequently see a poor woman trudging slowly home, half bent beneath the weight of some heavy load, while her jovial lord trots cheerily by on his nag ”

“ It is this chain that binds the Son of God to guilt, and it is this chain the Holy Spirit would remove from his holy mind. For the chain of savagery belongs not around the chosen host of God, who cannot make himself host to the ego. In the name of his release, and in the Name of Him Who would release him, let us look more closely at the relationships the ego contrives, and let the Holy Spirit judge them truly. ”

“ How little strain it puts upon our popularity or our courage! And how amusing it is to watch the course of human affairs with tolerant acquiescence! Yes, but, says Swift, "amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think," and may we not say that acquiescence is the cowardice of those who dare not feel? There will always be some, at least, in the world whom savage indignation, like Swift's, will continually torment. It will eat their flesh and exhaust their spirits. ”

“ I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities; and all my love is toward individuals: for instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love counsellor such a one, and judge such a one: It is so with physicians, (I will not speak of my own trade) soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man [3] ; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself many years (but do not tell) and so I shall go on till I have done with them. ”

“ Send not these savage messengers into the world, to feast upon it and to prey upon reality. For they will bring you word of bones and skin and flesh. They have been taught to seek for the corruptible, and to return with gorges filled with things decayed and rotted. To them such things are beautiful, because they seem to allay their savage pangs of hunger. ”

“ Here and there (as in the Popol Vuh, an enigmatic, Quichua record) we see traces of anxious interest in the sun. Again, all savage races have nature-myths explanatory of the motions of the heavenly bodies—a rude sort of science. But as to this all absorbing, all-pervading tender and poetic habit of primitive sympathy with natural phenomena, we find no proof of it anywhere. Savages, like civilised people, are much more interested in making love, making war, making fun, and providing dinner, than in the phenomena of nature. ”

“ Who else than he, with an invisible and yet potent hand, has driven from human society like savage beasts that ever noxious and destructive tribe of evil spirits who of old had made all nations their prey, and by the motions of their images had practiced many a delusion among men? ”

“ To compare the complex sensations of civilized man with the much simpler ones of the savage we must [406] consider first the functions of the outer organs of sense and then the internal sense-processes in the cortex of the brain. Fritz Schultze has pointed out in his Psychology of the Savage, in regard to both sets of organs, that the savage is a man of sense-life, the civilized human being a man of mind-life. ”

“ I see in you the civilized man become savage: you see in me the wild man whom the Great Spirit (I know not from what motive) desired to civilize. Having each entered upon the career of life from opposite directions, you came to repose yourself at my place, and I have seated myself in yours ”

“ The demise of a warrior provokes an excessive demonstration of woe and general sense of serious loss; the death of a squaw is almost unnoticed, except by her intimate friends and personal female relatives. ”

“ For the savage believes that the sympathetic connexion which exists between himself and every part of his body continues to exist even after the physical connexion has been broken, and that therefore he will suffer from any harm that may befall the severed parts of his body, such as the clippings of his hair or the parings of his nails. ”

“ I have never sneered in my life. Sneering doesn't become either the human face or the human soul. I am expressing my righteous contempt for Commercialism. I don't and won't trade in affection. You call me a brute because you couldn't buy a claim on me by fetching my slippers and finding my spectacles. You were a fool: I think a woman fetching a man's slippers is a disgusting sight: did I ever fetch YOUR slippers? I think a good deal more of you for throwing them in my face. No use slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for: who cares for a slave? ”

“ He turned and left us for a little, we wandered without end; like a beast of prey which is trained by blandishments and by fear, but if so be that men turn from it, rebels and strays and becomes savage in the midst of peace. ”