Editing Noble savage (section)

===Charles Dickens===
In 1853, in the weekly magazine ''[[Household Words]]'', Charles Dickens published a negative review of the Indian Gallery cultural program, by the portraitist [[George Catlin]], which then was touring England. About Catlin's oil paintings of the North American natives, the poet and critic [[Charles Baudelaire]] said that "He [Catlin] has brought back alive the proud and free characters of these chiefs; both their [[nobility]] and manliness."<ref>Eisler, ''The Red Man's Bones'' (0000), p. 326.</ref>
[[File:William Fisk - George Catlin - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|right|250px| For European art collectors, the American portraitist ''George Catlin'' painted idealized representations of the North American noble savage. ([[William Fisk (painter)|William Fisk]], 1849)]]
[[File:George Catlin - Sha-có-pay, The Six, Chief of the Plains Ojibwa - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|right|250px|The Noble Savage as stereotype: [[Sha-có-pay]], Chief of the Ojibwa Indians of the Great Plains. (George Catlin, 1832)]]

Despite European idealization of the mythical noble savage as a type of morally superior man, in the essay “The Noble Savage” (1853), Dickens expressed repugnance for the American Indians and their way of life, because they were dirty and cruel and continually quarrelled among themselves.<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20100521073634/http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/2529/ "The Noble Savage"]</ref> In the satire of [[Primitivism|romanticised primitivism]] Dickens showed that the painter Catlin, the Indian Gallery of portraits and landscapes, and the white people who admire the idealized American Indians or the [[San people|bushmen]] of Africa are examples of the term ''noble savage'' used as a means of [[Other (philosophy)|Othering]] a person into a [[Racialism|racialist stereotype]].<ref name="ReappraisingDickens'sNobleSavage">Moore, "Reappraising Dickens's 'Noble Savage'"(2002): 236–243.</ref> Dickens begins by dismissing the mythical noble savage as not being a distinct human being:

{{blockquote|text=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. . . . <ref>Dickens, Charles. "The Noble Savage" (1853) p. 000.</ref><br>

I don't care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the Earth. . . . <ref>Dickens, Charles. "The Noble Savage" (1853) p. 000.</ref><br>

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.<ref>Dickens, Charles. "The Noble Savage" (1853) p. 000.</ref>}}

Dickens ends his cultural criticism by reiterating his argument against the romanticized ''[[persona]]'' of the mythical noble savage:

{{blockquote|text=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 this place [Earth] knows him no more.<ref>Dickens, Charles. "The Noble Savage" (1853) p. 000.</ref>}}