Editing Noble savage (section)

==Origins==
[[File:Gaius Cornelius Tacitus mirror.jpg|thumb|Roman historian [[Tacitus]] introduced the idea of the ''noble savage'' in his historical work ''[[Germania (book)|Germania]]'', describes the [[Germanic peoples|ancient Germanic people]] in terms that precede the notion.]]
The first century [[Ancient Rome|Roman]] work ''[[Germania (book)|De origine et situ Germanorum]]'' (''On the Origin and Situation of the Germans'') by [[Tacitus|Publius Cornelius Tacitus]] introduced the idea of the ''noble savage'' to the [[Western world|Western World]] in 98 AD, describing the [[Germanic peoples|ancient Germanic people]] as aligned with [[Ancient Roman philosophy|ancient Roman virtues]], such as bravery and honesty.<ref>''Paradies auf Erden?: Mythenbildung als Form von Fremdwahrnehmung : der Südsee-Mythos in Schlüsselphasen der deutschen Literatur'' (2008) Anja Hall Königshausen & Neumann, p. 0000.</ref>
{{Blockquote
|text=Thus with their virtue protected they live uncorrupted by the allurements of public shows or the stimulant of feastings. Clandestine correspondence is equally unknown to men and women. Very rare for so numerous a population is adultery [...] No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted.
|author=Tacitus
|source=''Germania'' (c. 98 AD)
}}
The 12th-century [[Al-Andalus|Andalusian]] allegorical novel ''[[Hayy ibn Yaqdhan]]'' developed the idea through its ''noble savage'' titular protagonist understanding [[natural theology]] in a ''[[tabula rasa]]'' existence without any education or contact with the outside world,<ref>{{cite book |last1=Özalp |first1=N. Ahmet |title=Hay bin Yakzan |date=1996 |publisher=Yapı Kredi Yayınları |isbn=975-363-475-7}}</ref> inspiring later Western philosophy and literature during [[Age of Enlightenment]].
The [[stock character]] of the ''noble savage'' appears in the essay "[[Of Cannibals]]" (1580), about the [[Tupinambá people]] of Brazil, wherein the philosopher [[Michel de Montaigne]] presents "Nature's Gentleman", the ''bon sauvage'' counterpart to civilized Europeans in the 16th century.[[File:John Dryden by Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt.jpg|thumb|right|250px|The playwright John Dryden coined the term "noble savage" in the stageplay ''The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards'' (1672).]]
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The first usage of the term ''noble savage'' in [[English literature]] occurs in John Dryden's stageplay ''[[The Conquest of Granada|The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards]]'' (1672), about the troubled love of the hero Almanzor and the Moorish beauty Almahide, in which the protagonist defends his life as a free man by denying a prince's right to put him to death, because he is not a subject of the prince:

{{poemquote|
I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.<ref>Noble savage, ''The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory'' Third Edition (1991) J.A. Cuddon, Ed. pp.588–589.</ref>}}

[[File:Alexander Pope circa 1736.jpeg|thumb|right|250px|In the poem "An Essay on Man" (1734), the poet Alexander Pope developed the noble savage into the non-European [[Other (philosophy)|Other]]. ([[Jonathan Richardson]], c. 1736)]]
By the 18th century, Montaigne's predecessor to the noble savage, ''nature's gentleman'' was a stock character usual to the [[Sentimentalism (literature)|sentimental literature]] of the time, for which a type of non-European Other became a background character for European stories about adventurous Europeans in the strange lands beyond continental Europe. For the novels, the opera, and the stageplays, the stock of characters included the "Virtuous Milkmaid" and the "Servant-More-Clever-Than-the-Master" (e.g. [[Sancho Panza]] and [[Figaro (character in operas and plays)|Figaro]]), literary characters who personify the moral superiority of working-class people in the fictional world of the story.

In English literature, [[British North America]] was the geographic ''locus classicus'' for adventure and exploration stories about European encounters with the noble savage natives, such as the historical novel ''[[The Last of the Mohicans|The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757]]'' (1826), by [[James Fenimore Cooper]], and the epic poem ''[[The Song of Hiawatha]]'' (1855), by [[Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]], both literary works presented the [[primitivism]] (geographic, cultural, political) of North America as an ideal place for the European man to commune with Nature, far from the artifice of civilisation; yet in the poem “[[An Essay on Man]]” (1734), the Englishman [[Alexander Pope]] portrays the American Indian thus:

{{poemquote|
Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud-topp'd hill, a humbler heav'n;
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!
To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire:
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.}}

To the English intellectual Pope, the [[Indigenous peoples of the Americas|American Indian]] was an abstract [[Person|being]] unlike his insular European self; thus, from the Western perspective of "An Essay on Man", Pope's metaphoric usage of ''poor'' means "uneducated and a heathen", but also denotes a savage who is happy with his rustic life in harmony with Nature, and who believes in [[deism]], a form of [[natural religion]] — the [[idealization and devaluation]] of the non-European Other derived from the mirror logic of the Enlightenment belief that "men, everywhere and in all times, are the same".
[[File:Royal coat of arms of Denmark (2024).svg|thumb|right|250px|'''The Noble savage:''' In the royal coat of arms of Denmark, the [[Wild man|wild men]] (woodwose) who [[Supporter|support]] the royal house date from the early reign of the Oldenburg dynasty.]]

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Like Dryden's ''noble savage'' term, Pope's phrase "Lo, the Poor Indian!" was used to dehumanize the natives of North America for European purposes, and so justified white settlers' conflicts with the local Indians for possession of the land. In the mid-19th century, the journalist-editor [[Horace Greeley]] published the essay "Lo! The Poor Indian!" (1859), about the social condition of the American Indian in the modern United States:

{{blockquote|text=I have learned to appreciate better than hitherto, and to make more allowance for the dislike, aversion, contempt wherewith Indians are usually regarded by their white neighbors, and have been since the days of the Puritans. It needs but little familiarity with the actual, palpable aborigines to convince anyone that the poetic Indian — the Indian of [[James Fenimore Cooper|Cooper]] and [[Henry Wadsworth Longfellow|Longfellow]] — is only visible to the poet's eye. To the prosaic observer, the average Indian of the woods and prairies is a being who does little credit to human nature — a slave of appetite and sloth, never emancipated from the tyranny of one animal passion, save by the more ravenous demands of another.<br><br>

As I passed over those magnificent bottoms of the Kansas, which form the reservations of the [[Delaware Tribe of Indians|Delawares]], [[Potawatomi|Potawatamies]], etc., constituting the very best corn-lands on Earth, and saw their owners sitting around the doors of their lodges at the height of the planting season, and in as good, bright planting weather as sun and soil ever made, I could not help saying: "These people must die out — there is no help for them. God has given this earth to those who will subdue and cultivate it, and it is vain to struggle against His righteous decree."<ref>''An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859'' (1860), by Horace Greeley. {{Cite web | url=http://www.yosemite.ca.us/library/greeley/indians.html | title=An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859, "Lo! The Poor Indian!", by Horace Greeley}}</ref>}}

Moreover, during the [[American Indian Wars]] (1609–1924) for possession of the land, European white settlers considered the Indians "an inferior breed of men" and mocked them by using the terms "Lo" and "Mr. Lo" as disrespectful forms of address. In the Western U.S., those terms of address also referred to East Coast humanitarians whose conception of the mythical noble-savage American Indian was unlike the warrior who confronted and fought the frontiersman. Concerning the story of the settler Thomas Alderdice, whose wife was captured and killed by [[Cheyenne|Cheyenne Indians]], ''The Leavenworth, Kansas, Times and Conservative'' newspaper said: "We wish some philanthropists, who talk about civilizing the Indians, could have heard this unfortunate and almost broken-hearted man tell his story. We think [that the philanthropists] would at least have wavered a little in their [high] opinion of the Lo family."<ref>Barnett, Louise, in ''Touched by Fire: the Life, Death, and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer'' (University of Nebraska Press [1986], 2006), pp. 107–108.</ref>