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Visionary Promises:
W. E. DuBois
From Chapter One, "The Prophetic Pattern."
Carlyle and The Act of Interpretation
Ruskin and the Trivial
Joan Didion and Twentieth-Century Acts of Interpretation
John McPhee
Opposing the Audience
Thoreau and Arnold
Ruskin and Thoreau
The Prophet's Warning
Carlyle, Ruskin, and Others
Visonary Promises
Thomas Carlyle
John Ruskin
Henry David Thoreau
W. E. DuBois
Matthew Arnold
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 E. B. Du Bois ends his chapter on education in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) with another common version of the visionary close when he invokes the situation of those who see the Promised Land at a distance. Calling like Matthew Arnold for a "higher individualism which the centres of culture protect," Du Bois suggests that the very sufferings of his people have much to offer the world of culture:
The rich and bitter depth of their experience, the unknown treasures of their inner life, the strange rendings of nature they have seen, may give the world new points of view and make their loving, living, and doing precious to all human hearts. And to themselves in these the days that try their souls, the chance to soar in the dim blue air above the smoke is to their finer spirits boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by being black.
Arguing that the world of culture has no colorline, Du Bois moves from the literal to the symbolic and visionary: "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls." Similarly, he can summon Aristotle and Aurelius, who "come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension."
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Pointing out that thus "wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil," he turns to white America and asks, "Is this the life you grudge us . . . ? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?" He alludes to the thirty-fourth chapter of Deuteronomy, in which, before Moses dies, God commands him to ascend Mount Pisgah and there grants him a sight of Canaan as a reward for his loyal service. Throughout the nineteenth century this situation provided a popular subject for hymns and sermons, and it also provided paradigms, images, and types for a wide range of religious and secular literature. [Follow for a discussion of the Pisgah Sight in Landow, Victorian Types (1980).] Within these two closing paragraphs DuBois combines the visionary promise of the Pisgah Sight with the sage's characteristic alienation between vision and satire, for although he does not always write as a sage, he occasionally employs a wide range of the same techniques and allusions. The Souls of Black Folk centers on the problem of racial relations in America the same way that Carlyle's Chartism and Past and Present center on the problem of labor relations in England. Du Bois, who cites Carlyle, clearly knows both his literary techniques and those of the evangelical tradition upon which both men draw. His commitment in this book to rational historical argument produces a work that only occasionally draws on the devices of the sage -- and on that account is interesting in our context because it indicates how this genre intermingles with other forms of nonfiction.
In his ninth chapter, "Of the Sons of Master and Man," Du Bois points ' that the economic system of the American south in 1900 was not that of old industrial north or modem England and France. "It is, rather, a copy of England of the early nineteenth century, before the factory acts, -- the England that wrung pity from thinkers and fired the wrath of Carlyle" (192). The "captains of industry" (193), often men from the north, turn out to be not leaders Carlyle had hoped would arise to bring peace and justice to the age, but men who care only for "dollars and dividends" (193). When describing the life of Alexander Cromwell in chapter 12, he similarly employs language, imagery, and rhetoric of Sartor Resartus, On Heroes and Hero-Worship and Past and Present.
