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The romantic savages which appear in the poetry, art, and fiction of the nineteenth century draw
both upon the enthusiastic description of the early voyagers and upon the less favourable accounts
of the missionaries; the romantic savage was, in a sense, child both of noble and of ignoble
savage. And as the noble savage had been an epitome of the virtues of the natural man of the
Enlightenment so the romantic savage became an epitome of the virtues treasured by the
romantics. A great love of personal freedom, a devotion to race and ‘nation’, a temperament which
reacted violently and immediately to experience, courage, great emotional depth, and a childlike
warmth and generosity of feeling characterized his personality. He was of course, like the noble
savage, essentially a European fiction, but it was grounded upon a longer and better
acquaintanceship with primitive peoples. Faulty as knowledge still was, the conception of the
romantic savage was a genuine effort on the part of the European imagination to make contact
with the personal life of primitive peoples. 69
The fundamental difference between the ‘Noble Savage’ and the ‘Romantic Savage’ is that the
latter’s destiny has not yet come to fruition:
[T]he former was self-sufficient and most happy in his natural state, the later was a representative
of the childhood of man, interesting because he possessed the unrealized accomplishments of the
child. The noble savage expressed the classical desire for a state of natural perfection, the romantic
savage expressed the ideal of life as a voyage, a continuous movement towards an ever-receding
goal. When this romantic ideal was applied to the fields of history and sociology it tended to
produce a theory of social undulation – man’s genius being progressively expressed in societies
which, like organisms, are born, flourish, and decay. The idea […] had been frequently put into
service by travellers and writers reflecting upon the future of the Pacific. 70
The result of this line of thinking was often the idea that out of the ashes of the ancient Polynesian
civilisation the Pacific could become the new seat of future civilisations whilst those in the West,
like many before them, declined.
Dieffenbach, likewise, dwells on the origins of the Maori and the ancient Polynesian stock
in general. With the similarities in social structure, language, customs, as well as agricultural and
architectural techniques, of the various islands in the Pacific, Dieffenbach argues, one is led to
believe that the “islands of the great ocean were peopled in periods long passed away” and that
the “primitive stock from which all these islanders have sprung was possessed of a certain degree
of civilization, of which we now see only the remains” (II:96). Thus, he sees similarities between
the remnants of this “common stock” in New Zealand with that of the ancient empires of the
Asiatico-African civilisation 71 through their “fine and regular cast of countenance […], the
69 Smith, European Vision, 326.
70 Ibid., 330f.
71 The first Polynesians are believed to have descended from the Lapita people in South China/Taiwan and arrived in
New Zealand c.1250-1300 (K. R. Howe, The Quest for Origins: Who first discovered and settled New Zealand and
the Pacific islands? Auckland: Penguin Books, 2003, esp. 76-88, 176-82; Gavin McLean and David Young, “The
Last Place on Earth, Prehistory-c.1300”, in: Frontier of Dreams, 27-37; Young, “Treasure Islands, c.1300-1642”, 38-
43).
79