r. writes,
His interest for readers today lies mainly in his artistic triumphs in the form of the romance, at present too little understood, and in his pungent and pertinent insights into the development of American and European civilization (Beard 241).
In the novel, the idea of the noble savage is important, with Chingachgook as an authentic example while Natty Bumppo is the colonial example. That is, the idea of the noble savage referred originally to the Indians found in the New World, but the uneducated settlers soon became a different vision of the noble savage--untrained, by European standards uncivilized, and yet highly capable and as in touch with the world of nature as the Indian. This was part of the Romantic literary vision which elevated nature and extolled the wonders of the natural world and found the only true morality in that world rather than the world of man. The Romantic vision also celebrated personal expression, which was in keeping with the image of the free spirit such as Hawkeye, a man who recognized no political boundaries in his world and who instead sought to achieve a unity with nature such as he saw in his adopted family among the Mohicans and other tribes of the New World.
The regard with which Hawkeye (Bumppo's other name) and Chingachgook hold one another reflects well on both of them. They have this respect in part based on a shared knowledge of the wilderness, which also translates into an understanding of
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