Elegant Jeremiahs: The Genre of the Victorian Sage

Abstract

In the introduction to Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold wryly complained that a newspaper had labelled him ‘an elegant Jeremiah’.1 Although Arnold may not have been pleased by the Daily Telegraph’s placement of him in the company of the Old Testament prophet, its remark does indicate that Arnold’s Victorian readers perceived his obvious relation to an ancient literary tradition — one, to be sure, whose zeal and self-proclamation made the urbane, gentlemanly Arnold feel more than a little ill at ease however much he drew upon it. Readers of Carlyle and Ruskin similarly perceived their obvious indebtedness to Jeremiah, Isaiah, Daniel and other Old Testament prophets. Walt Whitman, we remember, commented that ‘Carlyle was indeed, as Froude terms him, one of those far-off Hebraic utterers, a new Micah or Habbukak. His words bubble forth with abysmic inspiration’, and he approvingly quotes Froude’s description of him as ‘a prophet, in the Jewish sense of the word’, one of those, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, who have ‘interpreted correctly the signs of their own times’.2 All three Victorians in fact owed more than just their tone and their willingness to castigate their contemporaries to Old Testament prophecy, a scriptural genre that devotes itself as much to diagnosing the spiritual condition of an age as to predicting the future.KeywordsTrue MeaningContemporary PhenomenonSecular CultureModern PainterNorman MailerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.