“Assume an Identity of Sentiment”: Rhetoric and Audience in Emerson's “Divinity School Address”

Abstract

In “the american scholar” Emerson defines the problem of his vocation: The “duties” of the scholar are such as become Man Lecturing. His “office” is an explicitly rhetorical one: “to cheer, to raise, and to guide men.” The most requisite virtue for this task is “self-trust”; yet as Emerson elaborates on his public role, it turns out that he really means trust in the possibility of communion with his audience:For the instinct is sure that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be translated. The poet in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts and recording them, is found to have recorded that which men in crowded cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions, – his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, – until he finds that he is the complement of his hearers; – that they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest secretest presentiment, – to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself.