Noble savage

A noble savage is a literary stock character who embodies the concept of the indigene, outsider, wild human, an "other" who has not been "corrupted" by civilization, and therefore symbolizes humanity's innate goodness. Besides appearing in many works of fiction and philosophy, the stereotype was also heavily employed in early anthropological works.

In English, the phrase first appeared in the 17th century in John Dryden's heroic play ''The Conquest of Granada'' (1672), wherein it was used in reference to newly created man. "Savage" at that time could mean "wild beast" as well as "wild man". The phrase later became identified with the idealized picture of "nature's gentleman", which was an aspect of 18th-century sentimentalism. The noble savage achieved prominence as an oxymoronic rhetorical device after 1851, when used sarcastically as the title for a satirical essay by English novelist Charles Dickens, who some believe may have wished to disassociate himself from what he viewed as the "feminine" sentimentality of 18th- and early 19th-century romantic primitivism.

In his ''Inquiry Concerning Virtue'' (1699), the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury had postulated that the moral sense in humans is natural and innate and based on feelings, rather than resulting from the indoctrination of a particular religion. Shaftesbury was reacting to Thomas Hobbes's justification of an absolutist central state in his ''Leviathan'', "Chapter XIII", in which Hobbes famously holds that the state of nature is a "war of all against all" in which men's lives are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Hobbes further calls the Native Americans an example of a contemporary people living in such a state. Although writers since antiquity had described people living in conditions outside contemporary definitions of "civilization", Hobbes is credited with inventing the term "State of Nature". Ross Harrison writes that "Hobbes seems to have invented this useful term."

Contrary to what is sometimes believed, Jean-Jacques Rousseau never used the phrase ''noble savage'' (French '' bon sauvage''). However, the archetypical character that would later be termed ''noble savage'' appeared in French literature at least as early as Jacques Cartier (explorer of Quebec, speaking of the Iroquois) and Michel de Montaigne (philosopher, speaking of the Tupinambá) in the 16th century.

Pre-history of the noble savage

Tacitus' ''De origine et situ Germanorum'' (''Germania''), written 98 AD, has been described as a predecessor of the modern noble savage concept, which started in the 17th and 18th centuries in western European travel literature.

Ibn Tufail's 12th-century novel ''Hayy ibn Yaqdhan'' provides an important antecedent to the concept of the noble savage. Written to explore the idea of natural theology, the novel sees the main character, a savage isolated from society, come to knowledge of God through the observation of nature. The book would come to inspire and influence many Enlightenment thinkers, among them Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton and Immanuel Kant.Samar Attar, ''The Vital Roots of European Enlightenment: Ibn Tufayl's Influence on Modern Western Thought'', Lexington Books, .

Following the discovery of America, the phrase "savage" for indigenous peoples was used disparagingly to justify the colonization of the Americas. The concept of the savage gave Europeans the supposed right to establish colonies without considering the possibility of preexisting, functional societies.

During the late 16th and 17th centuries, the figure of the "savage"—and later, increasingly, the "good savage"—was held up as a reproach to European civilization, then in the throes of the French Wars of Religion and Thirty Years' War. In his famous essay " Of Cannibals" (1580), Michel de Montaigne—himself a Catholic—reported that the Tupinambá people of Brazil ceremoniously eat the bodies of their dead enemies as a matter of honour. However, he reminded his readers that Europeans behave even more barbarously when they burn each other alive for disagreeing about religion (he implies): "One calls 'barbarism' whatever he is not accustomed to." Terence Cave comments:

In "Of Cannibals", Montaigne uses cultural (but not moral) relativism for the purpose of satire. His cannibals were neither noble nor exceptionally good, but neither were they suggested to be morally inferior to contemporary 16th-century Europeans. In this classical humanist portrayal, customs may differ but human beings in general are prone to cruelty in various forms, a quality detested by Montaigne. David El Kenz explains:

The treatment of indigenous peoples by Spanish Conquistadors also produced a great deal of bad conscience and recriminations. The Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas, who witnessed it, may have been the first to idealize the simple life of the indigenous Americans. He and other observers praised their simple manners and reported that they were incapable of lying, especially in the course of the Valladolid debate.

European angst over colonialism inspired fictional treatments such as Aphra Behn's novel ''Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave'' (1688), about a slave revolt in Surinam in the West Indies. Behn's story was not primarily a protest against slavery; rather, it was written for money, and it met readers' expectations by following the conventions of the European romance novella. The leader of the revolt, Oroonoko, is truly noble in that he is a hereditary African prince, and he laments his lost African homeland in the traditional terms of a classical Golden Age. He is not a savage but dresses and behaves like a European aristocrat. Behn's story was adapted for the stage by Irish playwright Thomas Southerne, who stressed its sentimental aspects, and as time went on, it came to be seen as addressing the issues of slavery and colonialism, remaining very popular throughout the 18th century.

Origin of term

In English, the phrase ''Noble Savage'' first appeared in poet John Dryden's heroic play, ''The Conquest of Granada'' (1672):

I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

The hero who speaks these words in Dryden's play is here denying the right of a prince to put him to death, on the grounds that he is not that prince's subject. These lines were quoted by Scott as the heading to Chapter 22 of his "A Legend of Montrose" (1819). "Savage" is better taken here in the sense of "wild beast", so that the phrase "noble savage" is to be read as a witty conceit meaning simply the beast that is above the other beasts, or man.

Ethnomusicologist Ter Ellingson believes that Dryden had picked up the expression "noble savage" from a 1609 travelogue about Canada by the French explorer Marc Lescarbot, in which there was a chapter with the ironic heading: "The Savages are Truly Noble", meaning simply that they enjoyed the right to hunt game, a privilege in France granted only to hereditary aristocrats. It is not known if Lescarbot was aware of Montaigne's stigmatization of the aristocratic pastime of hunting, though some authors believe he was familiar with Montaigne. Lescarbot's familiarity with Montaigne, is discussed by Ter Ellingson in ''The Myth of the Noble Savage''.

In Dryden's day the word "savage" did not necessarily have the connotations of cruelty now associated with it. Instead, as an adjective, it could as easily mean "wild", as in a wild flower, for example. Thus he wrote in 1697, "the savage cherry grows".

One scholar, Audrey Smedley, claimed that "English conceptions of 'the savage' were grounded in expansionist conflicts with Irish pastoralists and more broadly, in isolation from, and denigration of neighboring European peoples." and Ellingson agrees that "The ethnographic literature lends considerable support for such arguments".

In France the stock figure that in English is called the "noble savage" has always been simply "le bon sauvage", "the good wild man", a term without any of the paradoxical frisson of the English one. Montaigne is generally credited for being at the origin of this myth in his Essays (1580), especially "Of Coaches" and "Of Cannibals". This character, an idealized portrayal of "Nature's Gentleman", was an aspect of 18th-century sentimentalism, along with other stock characters such as, the Virtuous Milkmaid, the Servant-More-Clever-than-the-Master (such as Sancho Panza and Figaro, among countless others), and the general theme of virtue in the lowly born. The use of stock characters (especially in theater) to express moral truths derives from classical antiquity and goes back to Theophrastus's ''Characters'', a work that enjoyed a great vogue in the 17th and 18th centuries and was translated by Jean de La Bruyère. The practice largely died out with advent of 19th-century realism but lasted much longer in genre literature, such as adventure stories, Westerns, and, arguably, science fiction. Nature's Gentleman, whether European-born or exotic, takes his place in this cast of characters, along with the Wise Egyptian, Persian, and Chinaman. "But now, alongside the Good Savage, the Wise Egyptian claims his place." Some of these types are discussed by Paul Hazard in ''The European Mind''.

He had always existed, from the time of the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'', where he appears as Enkidu, the wild-but-good man who lives with animals. Another instance is the untutored-but-noble medieval knight, Parsifal. The Biblical shepherd boy David falls into this category. The association of virtue with withdrawal from society—and specifically from cities—was a familiar theme in religious literature.

''Hayy ibn Yaqdhan,'' an Islamic philosophical tale (or thought experiment) by Ibn Tufail from 12th-century Andalusia, straddles the divide between the religious and the secular. The tale is of interest because it was known to the New England Puritan divine, Cotton Mather. Translated into English (from Latin) in 1686 and 1708, it tells the story of Hayy, a wild child, raised by a gazelle, without human contact, on a deserted island in the Indian Ocean. Purely through the use of his reason, Hayy goes through all the gradations of knowledge before emerging into human society, where he revealed to be a believer of natural religion, which Cotton Mather, as a Christian Divine, identified with Primitive Christianity. The figure of Hayy is both a Natural man and a Wise Persian, but not a Noble Savage.

The ''locus classicus

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