Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/122

112 Spirit, for the pipe is a known symbol of peace. But the white man stands also to the savage painter for the portrait of the Evil Demon, especially in Africa, where we find the natives of Mozambique drawing their devil in the likeness of a white man, while Römer, speaking of the people of the Guinea coast, says that they say the devil is white, and paint him with their whitest colours. The pictures of him are lent on hire for a week or so by the old woman who makes them, to people whom the devil visits at night. When he sees his image, he is so terrified that he never comes back. This impersonation need not, however, be intended by any means as an insult to the white man. As Captain Burton says of his African name of Muzungu Mbaya, "the wicked white man," it would have been but a sorry compliment to have called him a good white man. Much of the reverence of the savage is born rather of fear than of love, and the white colonist has seldom failed to make out that title to the respect of the savage, which lies in the power, not unaccompanied by the will, to hurt him.

The rudeness and shapelessness of some of the blocks and stones which serve as idols among many tribes, and those not always the lowest, is often surprising. There seems to be mostly, though not always, a limit to the shapelessness of an idol which is to represent the human form; this is the same which a child would unconsciously apply, namely, that its length, breadth, and thickness must bear a proportion not too far different from the proportions of the human body. A wooden brick or a cotton-reel, set up or lying down, will serve well enough for a child to represent a man or woman standing or lying, but a cube or a ball would not answer the purpose so well, and if put for a man, could hardly be supposed even by the imagination of a child to represent more than position and movement, or relative size when compared with larger or smaller objects. Much the same test is applied by the uncivilized man