The noble savage is an old term.
"Savage" is a new term.
The term "noble savage" is an idea people had: Without civilization, humans are essentially good; it is civilization that makes them act in bad ways. The idea started in the 17th century and developed in the 18th century. One of the first to express it was Shaftesbury. He told the would-be author “to search for that simplicity of manners, and innocence of behaviour, which has been often known among mere savages; ere they were corrupted by our commerce” (Advice to an Author, Part III.iii). His counter to the doctrine of original sin, born amid the optimistic atmosphere of Renaissance humanism, was taken up by another author who lived at the same time, the essayist Richard Steele, who attributed the corruption of contemporary manners to false education.
In the eighteenth-century cult of "Primitivism" the noble savage, uncorrupted by the influences of civilization, was considered more worthy, more authentically noble than the contemporary product of civilized training. Although the phrase noble savage first appeared in Dryden's The Conquest of Granada (1672), the idealized picture of "nature's gentleman" was an aspect of eighteenth-century sentimentalism, among other forces at work.
Pre-history of the Noble Savage
During the seventeenth century, as an aspect of Romantic "Primitivism", the figure of the "Good Savage" was held up as a reproach to European civilization, then in the throes of savage wars of religion. People were especially horrified by the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew (1572), in which some 20,000 men, women, and children were massacred, chiefly in Paris, but also throughout France, in a three-day period. This led Montaigne to write his famous essay "Of Cannibals" (1587), in which he stated that although cannibals ceremoniously eat each other, Europeans behave even more barbarously and burn each other alive for disagreeing about religion. The treatment of indigenous peoples by the Spanish Conquistadors also produced a great deal of bad conscience and recriminations. 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 the simple manners of the indigenous Americans and reported that they were incapable of lying. European guilt over colonialism, with its use of recently invented guns on people who did not have them inspired fictional treatments such as Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, about a slave revolt in Surinam in the West Indies. Behn's story was not primarily a protest against slavery but 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 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 Eighteenth Century.
Origin of term "Noble Savage" In English, the phrase Noble Savage first appeared in Dryden's 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." However, the term "Noble Savage" only began to be widely used in the last half of the nineteenth century and then as a term of disparagement. In French the term had been the "Good Savage" (or good "Wild man"), and, in French (and even in eighteenth-century English), the word "savage" did not necessarily have the connotations of cruelty we now associate with it, but meant "wild" as in a wild flower.