The stance of the Old Testament prophet and the Victorian sage, however, involves more than announcing something important. One can join with his fellows when he conveys good news or bad, and telling someone that his house is on fire requires little more than a loud voice, but when one announces to his contemporaries that they unknowingly stand in burning houses and that their ignorance or evil kindled the flames, a particular posture becomes necessary. Thus, in Jeremiah 5:25 the inspired prophet announces to the Israelites: "Your iniquities have turned away these things, and your sins have withholden good things from you."

Like the Old Testament prophet, therefore, the Victorian sage positions himself in conscious opposition to his audience or entire society. Even Emerson, who rarely writes as a sage, draws several times upon his knowledge of the prophetic tradition to describe aspects of the sage's method or ideas associated with it. In "The Young American" he urges upon his audience the "need of a withdrawal from the crowd, and a resort to the fountain of right, by the brave. The timidity of our public opinion, is our disease, or, shall I say, the publicness of opinion, the absence of private opinion. Good-nature is plentiful, but we want justice, with heart of steel, to fight down the proud" (227). The center of such a belief that one must inevitably stand apart from the mass of men to speak the truth derives ultimately, I suspect, from the more radical portions of Puritan and evangelical Protestantism. [See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, Norton, 1971), for the classic statement of ways in which romanticism transfers -- and transmutes -- elements of traditional Christianity.] In its later, dechristianized form it appears as an Emersonian romantic individualism that assumes "the private mind has the access to the totality of goodness and truth, that it may be a balance to a corrupt society; and to stand for the private verdict against popular clamor, is the office of the noble" ("The Young American," 227). The essentially Protestant roots of such Emersonian individualism appear in his assertion that "to believe in your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius" ("Self-Reliance," 259).

Thoreau, who openly opposes and even attacks his audience in his antislavery writings, explains: "If ... we find a certain Few standing aloof from the multitude -- not allowing themselves to be carried along by the current of Popular feeling, we may fairly conclude that they have good reason for so doing -- that they have looked farther into the subject than others," and in "Popular Feeling" he argues for his assumption that individuals tend to be superior to the masses of their fellows with the following analogy: "Those in the stream ate not aware of the cataract at hand, but those on the bank have it in full view. Whose is the wisest and safest course?" [Early Essays and Miscellanies, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer, Edwin Moser, and Alexander C. Kem (Princeton, Princeton UP, 1975), 24.]

Thoreau opens "Walking" by taking precisely such a stance, for he announces: "I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness" and to consider man as "part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society." He emphasizes that he wishes to make "an extreme statement," an emphatic one, "for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that" (194). After announcing his theme in a relatively neutral tone, Thoreau abruptly becomes hostile and attacks his audience. Although he has immediately revealed that he would oppose the view of man as entirely a social being, he unexpectedly shows both that he himself stands apart from society and that he perceives its members as enemies.

As we see from Thoreau's example, one of the simplest and yet most powerful means by which the sage can distance himself from his audience is to use the second-person pronoun. In "Reform and Reformers," Thoreau makes clear that an unwillingness to set oneself apart from others when necessary, say when one must save them from themselves by warning them of impending disaster, marks conservatives, who "naturally herd together for mutual protection" and naturally employ the first-person-plural pronoun: "They say We and Our, as if they had never been assured of an individual existence. Our Indian policy, our coast defences, our national character. They are what are called public men, fashionable men, ambitious men, chaplains of the army or navy; men of property, standing and repectability, for the most part, and in all cases created by society. Sometimes even they are embarked in 'Great Causes' which have been stranded on the shores of society in a previous age, carrying them through with a kind of detected and traditionary nobleness" (181).

Such direct attack upon the audience is exemplified in Arnold's "My Countrymen," the opening chapter of Friendship's Garland: "You seem to think that you have only got to get on the back of your horse Freedom, or your horse Industry, and ride away as hard as you can, to be sure of coming to the right destination. If your newspapers can say what they like, you think you are sure of being well advised. That comes of your inaptitude for ideas, and aptitude for clap-trap" (5.22; italics added). In the succeeding chapters of Friendship's Garland, which purport to be letters to Arnold from Arminius, Baron von Thunder-ten-Tronckh, he adopts a manner more characteristic of the eighteenth-century satirist than of the Victorian sage since the harsh satire and pointed criticism supposedly come from an outsider. In the opening chapter, in contrast, such direct criticism comes explicitly from the writer himself, and the tone therefore resembles that found in the Victorian sermon or Old Testament prophecy more than in Swift or Pope.

Last modified 2000