On Melville 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2020 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/onmelville01unse 
 
Oil Melville 
 
 I ' 
 
 The Best from American Literature 
 
 Edited by Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady 
 
 Duke University Press Durham and London 1988 
 
© 1988 Duke University Press 
 All rights reserved 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 on acid-free paper 00 
 
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 appear on the last printed page of this book. 
 
Contents 
 
 - Sir 
 
 Series Introduction vii 
 
 The Anatomy of Melville’s Fame (1931) 
 
 O. W. Riegel i 
 
 Herman Melville’s “I and My Chimney” (1941) 
 
 Merton M. Sealts 10 
 
 Melville’s “Sociality” (1945) 
 
 R. E. Watters 23 
 
 Melville’s “The Town-Ho’s Story” (1949) 
 
 Sherman Paul 40 
 
 Melville’s “ ‘Soiled’ Fish of the Sea” (1949) 
 
 John W. Nichol 50 
 
 Melville on Homer (1950) 
 
 R. W. B. Lewis 52 
 
 Some Notes on the Structure of The Confidence-Man (1957) 
 
 John G. Cawelti 62 
 
 Hawthorne, Melville, and “Blackness” (1965) 
 
 Hubert H. Hoeltje 73 
 
 The Domestic Adventurer in Melville’s Tales (1965) 
 
 Judith Slater 84 
 
 Redburn and the Failure of Mythic Criticism (1967) 
 
 James Schroeter 97 
 
 “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” and Some Legends in Melville Scholarship (1968) 
 Sidney P. Moss 116 
 
 Melville and the Negro: From Typee to “Benito Cereno” (1969) 
 
 Eleanor E. Simpson 135 
 
 Melville’s Bachelors and Maids: Interpretation Through Symbol and 
 Metaphor (1969) 
 
 Beryl Rowland 155 
 
 Melville and the Theme of Timonism: From Pierre to The Confidence- 
 Man (1972) 
 
 Charles N. Watson, Jr. 172 
 
VI 
 
 Contents 
 
 Vere’s Use of the “Forms”: Means and Ends in Billy Budd (1975) 
 Christopher W. Sten 188 
 
 The Composition of Moby-Dic\ (1975) 
 
 James Barbour 203 
 
 Form as Vision in Herman Melville’s Clarel (1979) 
 
 Bryan C. Short 221 
 
 Moby-Dic\: The Transformation of the Faustian Ethos (1979) 
 
 Gustaaf Van Cromphout 238 
 
 Melville’s Comic Debate: Geniality and the Aesthetics of Repose (1983) 
 John Bryant 254 
 
 Index 275 
 
Series Introduction 
 
 From Vol. i, no. i, in March 1929 to the latest issue, the front cover 
 of American Literature has proclaimed that it is published “with the 
 Cooperation of the American Literature Section [earlier Group] of 
 the Modern Language Association.” Though not easy to explain 
 simply, the facts behind that statement have deeply influenced the 
 conduct and contents of the journal for five decades and more. The 
 journal has never been the “official” or “authorized” organ of any 
 professional organization. Neither, however, has it been an indepen¬ 
 dent expression of the tastes or ideas of Jay B. Hubbell, Clarence 
 Gohdes, or Arlin Turner, for example. Historically, it was first in 
 its field, designedly so. But its character has been unique, too. 
 
 Part of the tradition of the journal says that Hubbell in founding 
 it intended a journal that should “hold the mirror up to the profes¬ 
 sion”—reflecting steadily its current interests and (ideally) at least 
 sampling the best work being done by historians, critics, and bibliog¬ 
 raphers of American literature during any given year. Such remains 
 the intent of the editors based at Duke University; such also through 
 the decades has been the intent of the Board of Editors elected by the 
 vote of members of the professional association—“Group” or “Sec¬ 
 tion.” 
 
 The operative point lies in the provisions of the constitutional 
 “Agreements” between the now “Section” and the journal. One of 
 these provides that the journal shall publish no article not approved 
 by two readers from the elected Board. Another provides that the 
 Chairman of the Board or, if one has been appointed and is acting in 
 the editorial capacity at Duke, the Managing Editor need publish no 
 article not judged worthy of the journal. Historically, again, the 
 members of the successive Boards and the Duke editor have seen 
 eye-to-eye. The Board has tended to approve fewer than one out of 
 every ten submissions. The tradition of the journal dictates that it 
 keep a slim back-log. With however much revision, therefore, the 
 journal publishes practically everything the Board approves. 
 
 Founder Hubbell set an example from the start by achieving the 
 
Series Introduction 
 
 viii 
 
 almost total participation of the profession in the first five numbers 
 of American Literature. Cairns, Murdock, Pattee, and Rusk were 
 involved in Vol. i, no. i, along with Boynton, Killis Campbell, 
 Foerster, George Philip Krapp, Leisy, Mabbott, Parrington, Bliss 
 Perry, Louise Pound, Quinn, Spiller, Frederick Jackson Turner, and 
 Stanley Williams on the editorial side. Spiller, Tremaine McDowell, 
 Gohdes, and George B. Stewart contributed essays. Canby, George 
 McLean Harper, Gregory Paine, and Howard Mumford Jones ap¬ 
 peared as reviewers. Harry Hayden Clark and Allan Gilbert entered 
 in Vol. I, no. 2. Frederic I. Carpenter, Napier Wilt, Merle Curti, 
 and Grant C. Knight in Vol. i, no. 3; Clarence Faust, Granville 
 Hicks, and Robert Morss Lovett in Vol. i, no. 4; Walter Fuller Tay¬ 
 lor, Orians, and Paul Shorey in Vol. 2, no. i. 
 
 Who, among the founders of the profession, was missing.? On 
 the other hand, if the reader belongs to the profession and does not 
 know those present, she or he probably does not know enough. 
 With very few notable exceptions, the movers and shakers of the 
 profession have since the beginning joined in cooperating to create 
 and sustain the journal. 
 
 The foregoing facts lend a special distinction to the best articles 
 in American Literature. They represent the many, often tumultuous 
 winds of doctrine which have blown from the beginnings through 
 the years of the decade next to last in this century. Those articles 
 often became the firm footings upon which present structures of un¬ 
 derstanding rest. Looking backward, one finds that the argonauts 
 were doughty. Though we know a great deal more than they, they 
 are a great deal of what we know. Typically, the old best authors 
 wrote well—better than most of us. Conceptually, even ideologi¬ 
 cally, we still wrestle with ideas they created. And every now and 
 again one finds of course that certain of the latest work has rein¬ 
 vented the wheel one time more. Every now and again one finds 
 a sunburst idea which present scholarship has forgotten. Then it ap¬ 
 pears that we have receded into mist or darkness by comparison. 
 
 Historical change, not always for the better, also shows itself in 
 methods (and their implied theories) of how to present evidence, 
 structure an argument, craft a scholarly article. The old masters 
 were far from agreed—much to the contrary—about these matters. 
 
Series Introduction 
 
 IX 
 
 But they are worth knowing in their own variety as well as in their 
 instructive differences from us. 
 
 On the other hand, the majority of American Literature's authors 
 of the best remain among us, working, teaching, writing. One testi¬ 
 mony to the quality of their masterliness is the frequency with which 
 the journal gets requests from the makers of textbooks or collections 
 of commentary to reprint from its pages. Now the opportunity pre¬ 
 sents itself to select without concern for permissions fees what seems 
 the best about a number of authors and topics from the whole sweep 
 of A merican Literature. 
 
 The fundamental reason for this series, in other words, lies in the 
 intrinsic, enduring value of articles that have appeared in American 
 Literature since 1929. The compilers, with humility, have accepted 
 the challenge of choosing the best from well over a thousand articles 
 and notes. By “best” is meant original yet sound, interesting, and 
 useful for the study and teaching of an author, intellectual move¬ 
 ment, motif, or genre. 
 
 The articles chosen for each volume of this series are given simply 
 in the order of their first publication, thus speaking for themselves 
 and entirely making their own points rather than serving the com¬ 
 pilers’ view of literary or philosophical or historical patterns. Hap¬ 
 pily, a chronological order has the virtues of displaying both the de¬ 
 velopment of insight into a particular author, text, or motif and the 
 shifts of scholarly and critical emphasis since 1929. But comparisons 
 or trend-watching or a genetic approach should not blur the individ¬ 
 ual excellence of the articles reprinted. Each has opened a fresh line 
 of inquiry, established a major perspective on a familiar problem, or 
 settled a question that had bedeviled the experts. The compilers aim 
 neither to demonstrate nor undermine any orthodoxy, still less to 
 justify a preference for research over explication, for instance. In 
 the original and still current subtitle, American Literature honors 
 literary history and criticism equally—along with bibliography. To 
 the compilers this series does demonstrate that any worthwhile au¬ 
 thor or text or problem can generate a variety of challenging perspec¬ 
 tives. Collectively, the articles in its volumes have helped to raise 
 contemporary standards of scholarship and criticism. 
 
 This series is planned to serve as a live resource, not as a homage 
 
X 
 
 Series Introduction 
 
 to once vibrant but petrifying achievements in the past. For several 
 sound reasons, its volumes prove to be weighted toward the more re¬ 
 cent articles, but none of those reasons includes a presumed superior¬ 
 ity of insight or of guiding doctrine among the most recent genera¬ 
 tions. Some of the older articles could benefit now from a minor 
 revision, but the compilers have decided to reprint all of them ex¬ 
 actly as they first appeared. In their time they met fully the stan¬ 
 dards of first-class research and judgment. Today’s scholar and 
 critic, their fortunate heir, should hope that rising generations will 
 esteem his or her work so highly. 
 
 Many of the articles published in American Literature have ac¬ 
 tually come (and continue to come) from younger, even new mem¬ 
 bers of the profession. Because many of those authors climb on to 
 prominence in the field, the fact is worth emphasizing. Brief notes 
 on the contributors in the volumes of their series may help readers to 
 discover other biographical or cultural patterns. 
 
 Edwin H. Cady 
 Louis J. Budd 
 
The Anatomy of Melville’s Fame 
 
 O. W. Riegel 
 
 T he extraordinary enthusiasm for Herman Melville in recent 
 years among persons who had not previously heard of him has 
 led to two erroneous conclusions: first, that Melville’s contemporaries 
 were blind to the significance of his work, and, second, that until 
 the beginning of the revival of the last decade Melville was com¬ 
 pletely forgotten. 
 
 I 
 
 There is sufficient evidence to show that Melville’s contemporaries 
 were fairly well aware of his intentions. The sea romances, Typee and 
 Omoo, are praised today for the same virtues that were observed in 
 the 1840’s, and the attacks upon Melville’s later and more philosophi¬ 
 cal works arose not so much from a lack of comprehension in the 
 critics as from a dislike for the philosophy which they understood 
 only too well. For instance, The Democratic Review (July, 1849) 
 pointed out that “Mardi is an allegory that mirrors the world,” but 
 the critic was “saddened” because Melville “seems to think that the 
 race is in a vicious circle, from which we cannot escape.”^ A sim¬ 
 ilar point of view was expressed by The Literary World (August 21, 
 1852) in a review of Pierre: “The most unmoral moral of the 
 story . . . seems to be the impracticability of virtue. . . . But or¬ 
 dinary novel readers will never unkennel this loathsome sugges¬ 
 tion.”^ 
 
 Melville was attacked by his contemporaries, it is true, for the 
 failure of his later work as literature, but modern critics at the height 
 of the Melville boom have passed virtually the same unfavorable 
 judgments. Compare, for example, the critique published mThe 
 Athenceum in 1852, which called Pierre “a prairie in print, wanting 
 the flowers and freshness of the savannahs, but almost equally puz¬ 
 zling to find a way through it,”® with Lewis Mumford’s comment, 
 “It is the failure of Pierre as literature that draws our attention to 
 
 ''The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, XXV, 44 (July, 1849). 
 
 'The Literary World, XI, 118 (August 21, 1852). 
 
 'The Athenceum, XXV, 1266 (November 20, 1852). 
 
2 
 
 O. W. Riegel 
 
 Melville’s predicament as a man,”^ or with H. M. Tomlinson’s de¬ 
 scription of Pierre as “a tragic and noteworthy failure.”® The tone 
 of the modern critics is more sympathetic, but the judgment of Pierre 
 as literary art remains much the same. 
 
 An apparent exception to the general comprehension of Mel¬ 
 ville’s meaning was the inability or the unwillingness of British 
 critics to see in Moby Dic\ anything more than a poorly constructed 
 whaling story. As early as December, 1851, Harper s Magazine, an 
 American journal, said that “beneath the whole story the reader 
 may find a pregnant allegory,”® but the British, with an amazing 
 stupidity, never recognized the possibility of a philosophical inter¬ 
 pretation. They tested Moby Dic\ by the canons of unity, coherence 
 and emphasis, and found it wanting. The London Examiner, for 
 instance, found that in Moby Dicl{ “all the regular rules of narrative 
 or story are spurned and set at defiance.”^ The London Spectator 
 remarked that “such a groundwork is hardly natural enough for 
 a regular-built novel, though it might form a tale, if properly man¬ 
 aged.” The Spectator censured Melville for “beginning in the auto¬ 
 biographical form and changing ad libitum into the narrative.”® 
 Indeed, there was always a sharp difference of opinion between 
 British and American criticism of Melville during his creative 
 period, a fact which has not hitherto been stressed by Melville’s 
 biographers. Ill feeling, national pride, and a patronizing attitude 
 toward America help to explain the severe condemnation by the Eng¬ 
 lish of Melville’s “Yankeeisms” and “Go-ahead method.” They 
 also help to explain the unexpected English praise of The Confidence 
 Man, a book which nearly every one else has whole-heartedly 
 damned. For instance. The Westminster Review (July, 1857) said: 
 “Perhaps the moral is, the gullibility of the great Republic when 
 taken on its own tack.”® Had Americans felt more cultural pride 
 and less inclination to grovel before British oracles, Melville might 
 have become then, as he is now, a great hero of American national 
 consciousness. 
 
 ‘Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York, 1929), p. 218. 
 
 °H. M. Tomlinson, Introduction to Pierre (New York, Dutton, 1929), p. xv. 
 
 * Harper’s Magazine, IV, 137 (December, 1851). 
 
 'The Examiner, November 8, 1851, p. 709. 
 
 * Reprinted in The International Magazine, IV, 602 (December, 1851). 
 
 '‘The Westminster Review, XII, 311 (July, 1857). 
 
Melville’s Fame 
 
 3 
 
 Melville’s genius was, indeed, recognized by the critics who 
 undertook to evaluate his work as a whole: Philarete Chasles {Revue 
 des Deux Mondes, May 15, 1849),^® Fitz-James O’Brien {Putnam’s 
 Monthly, February, 1853),^^ “Sir Nathaniel” {The Neu/ Monthly 
 Magazine, July, 1853),^^ and others clearly apprehended Melville’s 
 power, although they might quarrel with him over stylistic excesses 
 or his offenses against the proprieties and evangelical morality, such 
 as references to smoking the vile weed, drinking spirituous liquors, 
 and cohabiting with Polynesian maidens. 
 
 II 
 
 The second myth, that after the close of the first productive pe¬ 
 riod Melville was almost completely forgotten, is simply false. It is 
 true that little evidence of the continuation of an enthusiasm for Mel¬ 
 ville can be found in the literary histories and text-books. Beginning 
 with the Duyckincks’ Cyclopcedia of American Literature and Gost- 
 wick’s Hand-boo\ of American Literature, Melville found a place 
 in a considerable number of academic works; but these notices, in 
 general, reveal a dismal ignorance both of the man and of his work. 
 Academic criticism abounded in plagiarism and paraphrase of pre¬ 
 vious criticism, and it was apparent that few of the literary his¬ 
 torians bothered to read Melville with any degree of critical insight, 
 if at all. More important as indicative of an abiding interest in 
 Melville were the references to him by men of letters and literary 
 amateurs on both sides of the Atlantic. The extent of the interest 
 in Melville among the reading public can never be determined ac¬ 
 curately, because the opinions of ordinary readers do not often 
 find their way into print; but a sufficient number of professional 
 writers left comments on Melville to prove the existence of a fol¬ 
 lowing, however small it might be. Among the more important 
 men who were admirers of Melville at one time or another during 
 the “dark” periods before 1919 may be mentioned Robert Louis 
 Stevenson, Charles Warren Stoddard, Sir Alfred Lyall, John La 
 
 “ Philarhc Chasles, “Voyages Reels et Fantastiques d’Hermann Melville,” Revue des 
 Deux Mondes, II (new period), 541-570 (May 15, 1849). 
 
 “ Fitz-James O’Brien, “Our Young Authors—Melville,” Putnam’s, I, 156-164 (February, 
 1853). 
 
 ““Sir Nathaniel,” “Herman Melville,” The Neu> Monthly Magazine, XCVIII, 300-308 
 (July, 1853). 
 
4 
 
 O. W. Riegel 
 
 Farge, Robert Buchanan, Henry S. Salt, Arthur Stedman, Titus 
 Munson Coan, W. Clark Russell, J. M. Barrie, Frank Jewett Mather, 
 Jr., Archibald MacMechan, William Morris, and Theodore Watts. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Contrary to the popular impression, the recent revival of interest 
 in Melville is not the first, nor even the second or third, attempt to 
 rehabilitate the author’s reputation. It is possible to demark at least 
 four or five movements which sought to reawaken a general interest 
 in Melville. The first occurred in England in the middle i88o’s, 
 with Robert Buchanan and Henry S. Salt as the chief advocates.^® 
 Another occurred in England and America after Melville’s death 
 (1891), when new editions of four of the books were published.^^ 
 Professor William P. Trent mentioned a “revival of interest” in Mel¬ 
 ville—and deprecated it—in 1903.^® Another revival, which re¬ 
 sulted in the acknowledgment of Moby Dicf{ as Melville’s master¬ 
 piece and one of the greatest sea books in all literature, began in 
 1914 with Professor Archibald MacMechan’s essay on the White 
 Whale.^® The last revival began with the Melville Centenary in 
 1919 and still continues. 
 
 “C/. Robert Buchanan, “Socrates in Camden,” The Academy, XXVIII, 102-103 (August 
 15, 1885). 
 
 The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, South Seas Edition, edited by Sir Sidney Colvin 
 New York, 1925), III, 71. 
 
 Henry S. Salt, “Herman Melville,” The Universal Review, IV, 78 (May, 1889). 
 
 Henry S. Salt, “Imperial Cockneydom,” The Scottish Art Review, II, 186-190 (Novem¬ 
 ber, 1889). 
 
 Letter from W. Clark Russell to Herman Melville dated July 21, 1886, published in 
 The New Yorl(^ World, October ii, 1891, p. 26. In this letter Russell wrote, “Your reputa¬ 
 tion here [England] is very great.” 
 
 “ C/. Richard Henry Stoddard, “Herman Melville,” The Mail and Express, XX, 5 
 (October 8, 1891). 
 
 Arthur Stedman, “Marquesan Melville,” The New Yor\ World, XXXII, 26 (October ii, 
 1891). 
 
 W. Clark Russell, “A Claim for American Literature,” The North American Review, 
 CLIV, 138-149 (February, 1892). 
 
 Henry S. Salt, “Marquesan Melville,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, CCLXXII, 248-257 
 (March, 1892). 
 
 This is only a partial bibliography of notices of Melville published during the years 1891 
 and 1892. 
 
 “C/. William P. Trent, A History of American Literature, 1607-186; (1903), New 
 York, 1929, p. 390. 
 
 A commentary on the interest in Melville at this time may be found in an article on 
 Herman Melville by Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., published in The Saturday Review of Lit¬ 
 erature, V, 945-946 (April 27, 1929). 
 
 “ Cf. Archibald MacMechan, “The Best Sea Story Ever Written.” In The Life of a Little 
 College (Boston, Houghton MifSin, 1914), pp. 179-198. 
 
Melville’s Fame 
 
 5 
 
 The divergent character of the various revivals is important. 
 In the first two or three Melville was talked of only as a writer of 
 “travel books,” the author of the charmingly exotic Typee and 
 Omoo. H. S. Salt’s comment in The Scottish Art Review (Novem¬ 
 ber, 1899) was typical: ‘'Typee takes precedence of all his other 
 writings, in merit no less than in date.”^^ When Moby Dic\ 
 emerged in 1914, it was as a glorified sea and whaling story. Mac- 
 Mechan, who set the tone of this revival, was not interested in the 
 philosophy and allegory of Moby Dicl{ so much as in its “expansive¬ 
 ness” and “freedom from rules and conventions.” The Whitman 
 vogue was in full swing. To MacMechan, Melville was the “Walt 
 Whitman of prose.”^® 
 
 The most recent Melville boom began with a repetition of ortho¬ 
 dox judgments,^® and a new note did not enter criticism until the 
 publication of Frank Jewett Mather’s articles on Melville in The 
 Review in August, 1919.^® The Centenary reawakened interest in 
 Melville both in England and in America, but again there were im¬ 
 portant national differences. The English have always been inter¬ 
 ested in Melville as a writer of travel literature and of books about the 
 sea. Since 1919 English criticism has concerned itself chiefly with 
 style and story. Its main characteristic has been its enthusiasm for 
 Moby Dic\, an enthusiasm which partly atones for former blind¬ 
 ness.^^ But it is an enthusiasm for Moby Dic/{ as the whaling epic. 
 English criticism has been, therefore, stylistic and literary, and it is 
 a significant fact that John Freeman’s most original contribution to 
 Melville criticism has been his analysis and literary appraisal of the 
 poems.^^ Carl Van Doren could speak in 1921 of the “greater re- 
 
 ” op. cit., p. 186. “ Op. cit., passim. 
 
 ^ Cf. the Centenary articles in The New Yor\ Times, LXVIII, July 27, 1919, Section 3, 
 p. i; The New Yor\ Evening Sun, XXXIII, August i« 1919, p. 16; The New Yor\ Evening 
 Post, CXVIII, August 2, 1919, p. 6; The New Yori(^ Tribune, LXXIX, August 4, 1919, p. 8. 
 In England, F. C. Owlett, “Herman Melville (1819-1891): A Centenary Tribute,” The Lon¬ 
 don Bookman, LVI, 164-167 (August, 1919). 
 
 "Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., “Herman Melville,” The Review, I, 276-278 (August 9, 
 1919), and I, 298-301 (August 16, 1919). 
 
 ” C/. Viola Meynell, “Herman Melville,” The Dublin Review, CLXVI, 96-105 (January, 
 February, March, 1920). 
 
 E. L. Grant Watson, “Moby Dick,” The London Mercury, III, 180-186 (December, 1920). 
 
 Augustine Birrell, “The Great White Whale,” The Athenteum, January 28, 1921, pp. 99- 
 
 100. 
 
 F. L. Lucas, “Herman Melville,” The New Statesman, XVIII, 730-731 (April i, 1922). 
 
 “John Freeman, Herman Melville (New York, Macmillan, 1926). 
 
6 
 
 O. W. Riegel 
 
 vival interest” in England,but he was not speaking of the great 
 Melville boom which is still going on in this country. The “new” 
 Melville criticism, the reinterpretation of the character of Melville 
 and of his work in the light of modern psychology and philosophy, 
 is essentially an American phenomenon. 
 
 IV 
 
 The recent revival of interest in Melville has been attributed by 
 some to “the spirit of the age.” This is undoubtedly true, but “spirit 
 of the age” is a term difficult to define, and one that leaves the in¬ 
 quirer groping for more ponderable reasons. Some have empha¬ 
 sized the appeal of Melville’s boldness and expansiveness, which 
 were the same qualities that attracted Professor MacMechan in 
 1914. A more distinctive characteristic of the third decade of the 
 twentieth century may be its devotion to psychological history, to 
 “case histories” of spiritual struggle and conflict, to the spectacle 
 of man against the world, to all evidences of psychological mal¬ 
 adjustment: a devotion induced by the recent enthusiasm for 
 psychology as well as by the post-war psychosis of futility, of futility 
 and defiance. 
 
 Mather’s importance as a critic of Melville arises from the 
 fact that he was one of the first to see clearly Melville’s personal 
 struggle with a perspective on the Victorian age. The point of view 
 was elaborated by Professor Weaver in his biography: “Indeed, Mel¬ 
 ville’s complete works, in their final analysis, are a long effort to¬ 
 wards the creation of one of the most complex, and massive, and 
 original characters in literature: the character known in life as 
 Herman Melville.”^^ This sentence, indeed, sounds the keynote 
 of the new criticism. For what that “Herman Melville” character 
 is which has been discovered by recent critics, and its meaning to 
 modern life, one must go to the works and the biographies. The 
 important point is that the new interest in Melville is not so much 
 belletristic as biographical, and it is the biographical interest that is 
 responsible for the gradual reclamation of the literary “failures.” 
 The unpopular works, even Pierre and The Confidence Man and 
 
 ”*Carl Van Doren, The American Novel (New York, Macmillan, 1921), pp. 75-76. 
 
 ” Raymond M. Weaver, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (New York, E>oran, 1921). 
 
Melville’s Fame 
 
 7 
 
 Clarel, have been brilliantly gilded and festooned and illuminated 
 with modern effects, and so rescued from the limbo. 
 
 The biographical enthusiasm reached its climax in D. H. Law¬ 
 rence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1922), Carl Van 
 Vechten’s essay in The Double Dealer (January, 1922), and espe¬ 
 cially, in Lewis Mumford’s Herman Melville (1929). Van Vech- 
 ten clearly revealed the attitude of this group of critics: 
 
 In spite of all the detractors, I think . . . the day may come when there 
 will be those who will prefer the later Melville just as there are those 
 who prefer the later James, those who will care more for the metaphysical, 
 and at the same time more self-revealing works, than for the less subde 
 and more straightforward tales.^^ 
 
 The excitement over Melville as a man may be held responsible 
 for the sometimes excessive praise of his writing, for the elabora¬ 
 tion of awful but often improbable “hidden meanings,”^® and for 
 the amusing contradictory opinions among enthusiastic critics. To 
 Lewis Mumford, for instance, Melville is always a conscious art¬ 
 ist;^® to Van Wyck Brooks he is an unconscious artist.^^ To M. 
 Josephson, Melville is an “escape” writer;^® to Mumford he is a 
 realist in the deepest sense.^® Other examples may be found in the 
 criticism of the last ten years, but these will suffice to show the 
 lack of agreement on the more strictly literary aspects of Melville’s 
 work. 
 
 V 
 
 In spite of the enthusiasm of the Melville boom, there has been, 
 and there still is, a strong dissenting opinion. Pierre, it seems, is as 
 difficult to read as ever. Here again there seems to be a difference 
 
 "Carl Van Vechten, “The Later Work of Herman Melville,” The Double-Dealer, HI, 12 
 (January, 1922). 
 
 “ Cj. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, Seltzer, 
 
 1923)- 
 
 Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York, Harcourt, 1929). 
 
 W. S. Gleim, “A Theory of Moby Dick,” The New England Quarterly, 11 , 402-419 (July, 
 1929). 
 
 “Lewis Mumford, “The Significance of Herman Melville,” The New Republic, 
 LVI, 212-214 (October 10, 1928). 
 
 Van Wyck Brooks, Emerson and Others (New York, 1927), p. 181. 
 
 “M. Josephson, “Transfiguration of Herman Melville,” The Outlook, CL, 809 (Sep¬ 
 tember 19, 1928). 
 
 “Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York, 1929), pp. 228 and 195. 
 
8 
 
 O. W. Riegel 
 
 between English and American criticism, the conservative Ameri¬ 
 can critics being suspicious of blurb and exaggeration, and the Eng¬ 
 lish being unwilling to evaluate Melville on other grounds than 
 those of intrinsic literary merit. A reviewer 'mThe Freeman (Octo¬ 
 ber 26,1921) expressed the cynical American point of view: 
 
 Well it was only a question of time: sooner or later the darkness that 
 surrounds this extraordinary man was certain to yield before our indefat¬ 
 igable national appetite for investigation and research. Next year Mel¬ 
 ville will have been forgotten again. . . . But for the next six months 
 there is to be a Melville boom. Ishmael is to emerge at last: he is to 
 have his little hour. And there will be a few hundred or a few dozen 
 readers, moreover, who, discovering him for the first time in this lime¬ 
 light, will seize upon his gift as a permanent possession.®” 
 
 Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., commenting on Lewis Mumford’s biog¬ 
 raphy, said: “Indeed there is some exaggeration in the general en- 
 visagement of Herman Melville as a Prometheus too lonely even, 
 to attract the vultures.”®^ Professor Weaver limits Melville’s claim 
 to fame to three exploits: the literary discovery of the South Seas; 
 the creation, with Dana, of a new world of literature of the sailor; 
 and Moby Dic\, which reveals a great imagination.®^ But Professor 
 Weaver seems to be doubtful, as he revealed in private conversa¬ 
 tion, of Melville’s claim as a literary artist. 
 
 It ought to be remembered that the epic hero, the “Herman Mel¬ 
 ville” of the modern critics, is an American created by Americans. 
 Differences in national psychology may account for the failure of 
 the English to catch the spark of enthusiasm for this figure. Much 
 of the English criticism has been, therefore, literary and conservative. 
 Michael Sadleir said in 1922: “Apart from Moby Dick^, the neo- 
 Melvillian has little beyond patronizing approval for the books of 
 his hero.” Even Moby Dic\ was over-praised: 
 
 In some degree the worship of Moby Dic\ and the comparative neglect 
 of the other work are inevitable corollaries to the Melville boom at its 
 present stage. During the first period of any new ^esthetic wonder, the 
 peculiar transcends the normal in the imagination of disciples. ... In 
 
 ""“A Reviewer’s Notebook,” The Freeman, IV, 166-167 (October 26, 1921). 
 
 ” Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., “Herman Melville,” The Saturday Review of Literature, V, 
 945-946 (April 27, 1929). 
 
 “Raymond M. Weaver, “Herman Melville,” The Bool^man, LIV, 323 (December, 1921). 
 
Melville’s Fame 
 
 9 
 
 years to come, \vhen the glamour of oddity has paled a little, it will be 
 admitted that the book labours under a sad weight of intolerable pro¬ 
 lixity.^^ 
 
 Probably the most sober appraisal of Melville’s work has come from 
 an Englishman, H. P. Marshall. Moby Dick, is in a class by itself. 
 Redhurn, Typee, Omoo, and some of the Piazza Tales deserve to 
 be read for their style as well as their matter. Badly written but in¬ 
 teresting, Mardi and Pierre are books that publishers would call 
 “human documents.” But Israel Potter has only moments, White 
 Jacket is ordinary, and The Confidence Man is “extremely dull and 
 monstrously constructed.”®* 
 
 VI 
 
 One may suspect that the Melville culte is not so large as the 
 mass of recent notices of Melville would seem to indicate. It may 
 be limited, indeed, to those who find in the “Herman Melville” of 
 the recent biographies a kindred spirit, or a life which embodies 
 their own psychological conflicts. The whole subject of Melville’s 
 reputation is extremely interesting because it has unusually sharp 
 contrasts and because it permits us to see the complicated process 
 of literary apotheosis going on all around us at the present moment. 
 Perhaps the “spirit of the age” will soon become sufficiently cor¬ 
 poreal to enable us to see why there has been such a strong Melville 
 revival in this generation. Although Herman Melville has a throne 
 in our literary Valhalla, it may perhaps be seen, after the rosy clouds 
 have rolled away from the pedestal, that he is balanced precariously 
 on a chair with a single leg, and that made of whale-bone, like the 
 leg of Captain Ahab. 
 
 Michael Sadleir, Excursions in Victorian Bibliography (London, Chaundy & Cox, 
 1922), p. 218. 
 
 “ H. P. Marshall, “Herman Melville,” The London Mercury, XI, 58-59 (November, 
 
 1924). 
 
Herman Melville’s "I and My Chimney” 
 
 Merton M. Sealts 
 
 T he five years between the publication of Moby-Dic\ and his 
 advent to the Holy Land were the most crucial in Melville’s 
 long life. . . So Raymond Weaver has written of the obscure 
 period in Herman Melville’s career between 1851 and 1856 which 
 included the writing of Pierre (1852), a number of short stories 
 and sketches for periodicals (1853-1856), and The Confidence-Man 
 (1857). At this time Melville was living at Arrowhead, his farm¬ 
 house near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which provided the setting for 
 some of his less familiar prose. Such is the case with “I and My 
 Chimney,” a short sketch in a humorous vein probably written near 
 the end of 1855,^ in which “Melville makes the old chimney at 
 Arrowhead the chief character in a sketch of his domestic life at 
 Pittsfield. . . .”® But the story, as will be shown, is more than a 
 mere descriptive sketch: it is Melville’s subtle comment on a major 
 spiritual crisis of his life. The clue to certain elements in Pierre is 
 also afforded by an understanding of Melville’s procedure in writing 
 “I and My Chimney.” 
 
 A brief account of the plot of the story should be useful in fur- 
 
 ^ In the Introduction to his edition of Melville’s Journal up the Straits, October ii, 
 1856-May 5, 1857 (New York, 1935), p. xii. 
 
 To Herman Melville’s granddaughter, Mrs. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, and to the Com¬ 
 mittee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization, Harvard University, 
 I am indebted for permission to quote from manuscript material as indicated below. This 
 material, hitherto unpublished, is now in the Melville Collection of the Harvard University 
 Library. Mr. William Braswell of Purdue University has also allowed me to quote from 
 his unpublished dissertation, Herman Melville and Christianity. For these and 'other favors 
 connected with the preparation of this article, I am grateful. 
 
 “ A study of the number and frequency of Melville’s contributions to periodicals, in¬ 
 cluding Israel Potter (1855, but first published serially), indicates that none of this work 
 remained long in manuscript. “I and My Chimney” was written enough in advance of 
 March, 1856, to appear in Putnam's Monthly Magazine for that date, yet it was not 
 reprinted with other pieces from Putnam’s in Melville’s Piazza Tales (1856). A letter of 
 March 24, 1856, from Melville to his publishers, Dix & Edwards, accompanied his return 
 of corrected proofs of The Piazza Tales {Family Correspondence of Herman Melville, 
 1850-1^04, in the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection, ed. V. H. Paltsits, New York Public 
 Library, 1929, p. 12). Allowing the necessary time for transactions with the publishers 
 and printing of the material, it seems likely that Melville planned The Piazza Tales late in 
 1855, and that he wrote “I and My Chimney” shortly thereafter. 
 
 ® Raymond Weaver, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic (New York, 1921), p. 308. 
 
“I and My Chimney” 
 
 II 
 
 ther discussion. The action turns on the affection of its narrator 
 for his beloved old chimney, which he describes in detail, and his 
 lengthy dispute with his wife over her proposals to alter it and later 
 to remove it entirely from the house. Over the protests of her 
 husband, the wife employs an architect and stonemason. Scribe by 
 name, to make a thorough examination of the chimney. Scribe 
 startles the family by suggesting the possible existence of a secret 
 closet within the structure, and the wife and daughters immediately 
 conjure up visions of treasure hidden away by the late builder of 
 the house—the narrator’s mysterious kinsman. Captain Julian 
 Dacres. But the husband, to put a stop to such foolishness and to 
 gain a little peace for himself, eventually bribes the not unwilling 
 Scribe to accept fifty dollars in return for a certificate attesting to 
 the entire soundness of the chimney. Fortified with this evidence, 
 which he hangs prominently above the fireplace, the narrator re¬ 
 fuses to countenance the slightest alteration to the chimney, but as 
 the story closes he is still facing minor assaults of the opposition and 
 “standing guard over my mossy old chimney; for it is resolved 
 between me and my chimney, that I and my chimney will never 
 surrender.”^ 
 
 This rather slight plot has attracted less attention to the story 
 than has its setting, drawn as it is from Melville’s surroundings at 
 Arrowhead. Weaver, noting this factual background, states that the 
 farmhouse itself was built in 1780 by a Captain David Bush, but he 
 does not call attention to Bush’s transformation by Melville into 
 the narrator’s kinsman. Captain Dacres. This is but one example 
 of Melville’s free handling of details in the story, which Weaver 
 does not discuss,® nor have Melville’s other full-length biographers 
 added appreciably to Weaver’s treatment of the story. John Free¬ 
 man remarks only that it is “an example of Melville writing like 
 Hawthorne,”® and Lewis Mumford says merely that it is more an 
 essay “in character” than a tale.^ Yet Mumford himself sees “a 
 glimpse of Melville’s own drift of mind” in other prose of this 
 
 * “I and My Chimney,” in Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces (Vol. XIII in the 
 Standard Edition of Melville’s works, t 6 vols., London, Constable and Co., 1922-24), 
 p. 311. All succeeding references to Melville’s works are to volumes of the Constable 
 edition. 
 
 ‘ Weaver, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, pp. 308 ff. 
 
 'John Freeman, Herman Melville (London, 1926), p. 52. 
 
 ’Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York, 1929), p. 236. 
 
12 
 
 Merton M. Sealts 
 
 period,® and more recent investigation has found Melville’s pen¬ 
 chant for symbolism revealed even in one of his most matter-of- 
 fact sketches.® With this in mind, the extent of Melville’s depar¬ 
 tures from literal truth in “I and My Chimney” should be carefully 
 considered. 
 
 First, as pointed out above, Melville makes the builder of the 
 house a kinsman of the narrator, naming him “Dacres.” Secondly, 
 he places in the story a household of four persons: the husband and 
 wife with their two daughters, Anna and Julia. Melville’s own 
 daughters were younger than these two characters: Elizabeth was 
 born in 1853 and Frances in 1855, both before the probable time of 
 composition of the story. In addition, the family at Arrowhead 
 included two older sons, Melville’s own sisters, and his mother. 
 The presence of Melville’s mother is significant because of a nota¬ 
 tion made by Melville’s wife concerning the spouse of the story: 
 “All this about his wife, applied to his mother—who was very 
 vigorous and energetic about the farm, etc.”^® If Mrs. Melville is 
 correct, this represents still another departure from literal truth. 
 The nagging spouse, far from an attractive figure, is scarcely typical 
 of Melville’s own wife, whereas according to family tradition his 
 mother was persistently critical. More than one writer toys with 
 the idea that the domineering Mary Glendinning in Pierre is based 
 on the character of Maria Gansevoort Melville, and the wife of “I 
 and My Chimney” may be cut from the same pattern. But Mrs. 
 Melville’s notation goes still further: “The proposed removal of the 
 chimney,” she continues, “is purely mythical.” Not only the char¬ 
 acters, then, but also the motivation of the plot itself shows Mel¬ 
 ville’s inventive touch—and Melville never invents without purpose. 
 In Mardi, Moby-Dic\, and Pierre, Melville’s myth-making is in- 
 
 ® Ibid., p. 238. 
 
 ° E. H. Eby, “Herman Melville’s ‘Tartarus of Maids,’ ’’ Modern Language Quarterly, 
 I, 95-100 (March, 1940). Eby holds that here “Melville’s main intention is to represent 
 through the medium of the story the biological burdens imposed on women because they 
 bear the children. This is conveyed by symbolism remarkably consistent and detailed" 
 (P- 97)- 
 
 Weaver prints this notation with the text of the story in the Constable edition, 
 p. 287. He is inaccurate in his accompanying statement that it is taken from the manu¬ 
 script of the story, which has apparently not survived. Mrs. Melville made her notation 
 on a printed copy of the story which, with clippings of other periodical pieces by her 
 husband, she collected in a binder. This volume is now in possession of her grand¬ 
 daughter, Mrs. Henry K. Metcalf, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has kindly permitted 
 me to examine it. 
 
“I and My Chimney” 
 
 13 
 
 tentionally allegorical and symbolic. If the removal of the chimney 
 is “purely mythical,” has Melville more to communicate than the 
 mere spinning of a yarn ? And why should he write of a chimney } 
 
 In Pierre, published four years before, Melville had described 
 “the gray and grand old tower” of the Church of the Apostles, “em¬ 
 blem to Pierre of an unshakable fortitude, which, deep-rooted in 
 the heart of the earth, defied all the howls of the air.”“ The chim¬ 
 ney in the present story is a similar emblem of fortitude, “for it is 
 resolved between me and my chimney, that I and my chimney will 
 never surrender.” Again in Pierre Melville writes: “Deep, deep, 
 and still deep and deeper must we go, if we would find out the 
 heart of a man; descending into which is as descending a spiral stair 
 in a shaft, without any end, and where that endlessness is only 
 concealed by the spiralness of the stair, and the blackness of the 
 shaft.”^^ So Melville in his writing, like the poet Lombardo in 
 Mardi, “got deeper and deeper into himself.”^® It is with the same 
 purpose that in the present story he traces the shaft of the chimney: 
 “Very often I go down into my cellar, and attentively survey that 
 vast square of masonry. I stand long, and ponder over, and wonder 
 at it. It has a druidical look, away down in the umbrageous cellar 
 there, whose numerous vaulted passages, and far glens of gloom, 
 resemble the dark, damp depths of primeval woods.”^* As it would 
 be vain to search for the bottom of the endless shaft described in 
 Pierre, so the narrator of “I and My Chimney” digs in vain about 
 the foundation of the chimney. The vast area of this lower part of 
 the structure is emphasized: “. . . large as it appears above the roof,” 
 says Scribe, the architect, “I would not have inferred the magnitude 
 of this foundation, sir.”^'’ 
 
 The significance of all this may be summarized briefly: the shaft 
 is the image of “the heart of a man”; the chimney is an emblem of 
 fortitude; what lies at its bottom is hidden in darkness. Like a 
 pyramid in its shape, the chimney is thus discovered to have its 
 greatest area shrouded in mystery. This consistent likening to the 
 pyramids is important: “The architect of the chimney must have 
 had the pyramid of Cheops before him; for after that famous struc¬ 
 ture it seems modelled. . . .”^® Had the wife’s projected tunnel been 
 
 Pierre, p. 378. Ihid., p. 402. 
 
 Mardi, II, 326. “I and My Chimney," p. 283. 
 
 Ibid., p. 295. ** Ibid., p. 280. 
 
14 
 
 Merton M. Sealts 
 
 thrust into the chimney, “some Belzoni or other might have suc¬ 
 ceeded in future ages in penetrating through the masonry, and 
 actually emerging into the dining-room. . . Belzoni was an 
 Egyptologist. And again: “We seemed in the pyramids; and I, 
 with one hand holding my lamp over head, and with the other 
 pointing out, in the obscurity, the hoar mass of the chimney, seemed 
 some Arab guide, showing the cobwebbed mausoleum of the great 
 god Apis.”^® A commentary on this passage is afforded by an 
 often-quoted sentence in Pierre: “By vast pains we mine into the 
 pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with 
 joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and no body is 
 there!—appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!”^^ What 
 Melville is saying in the story is that in pondering over and won¬ 
 dering at his “chimney” he is introspectively surveying his own 
 soul—and that introspection is an endless, empty-handed search. 
 
 Melville’s identification of the chimney with himself is made 
 certain by the amusing connotations of other passages in the story. 
 Built around the structure were “the most rambling conceivable” 
 rooms which (like the organs of the body), “as it were, dovetailed 
 into each other. They were of all shapes; not one mathematically 
 square room among them all. . . Almost every room “was in 
 itself an entry, or passageway to other rooms . . . —never was there 
 so labyrinthine an abode. Guests will tarry with me several weeks, 
 and every now and then, be anew astonished at some unforeseen 
 apartment.”^^ This jocular anatomizing depicts perfectly the 
 enigma Herman Melville presented to his acquaintances, who were 
 anew astonished every now and then by what he said and did. 
 
 ” Ibid., p. 292. 
 
 Ibid., p. 295. Apis was “supposed to be the image of the soul of Osiris. . . . He 
 was also regarded as the reincarnation (or the son) of Ptah—except by Greek writers . . .” 
 (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed., II, 99). 
 
 Pierre, p. 397. Note the significance of other references to the pyramids: in a letter 
 to Hawthorne written in 1851 as printed by Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and 
 His Wife (2 vols., Boston, 1885), I, 405 ff.; a passage in “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Piazza 
 Tales, p. 64; the profound effect on Melville of the pyramids themselves, described in his 
 Journal up the Straits, pp. 56-59. 
 
 “I and My Chimney,” p. 306. For still another physiological connotation, cf. pp. 
 286 ff.; the “mysterious closet.” This passage should be read in the light of Eby’s article, 
 cited above, and with reference to the chronology of Melville’s family life in 1855. Those 
 familiar with E. L. Grant Watson’s article, “Melville’s Pierre,’’ New England Quarterly, 
 III, 195-234 (April, 1930), should also compare the description of Pierre’s chambers 
 (Pierre, pp. 413 ff.), noting reference to “the dining room” there as in the present story 
 (p. 292). Ibid., pp. 292 ff. 
 
“I and My Chimney” 
 
 15 
 
 Carrying on the anatomical figure, Melville’s narrator exclaims at 
 his wife’s proposal toto to abolish the chimney”: 
 
 What! . . . abolish the chimney? To take out the backbone of any¬ 
 thing, wife, is a hazardous affair. Spines out of backs, and chimneys out 
 of houses, are not to be taken like frosted lead-pipes from the ground. 
 Besides, . . . the chimney is the one grand permanence of this abode. If 
 undisturbed by innovators, then in future ages, when all the house shall 
 have crumbled from it, this chimney will still survive—a Bunker Hill 
 monument. No, no, wife, I can’t abolish my backbone.^^ 
 
 “Backbone,” the colloquial term for fortitude, together with the 
 reference to the enduring Bunker Hill monument (like the church 
 tower in Pierre), further amplifies the connotation of the chimney. 
 No wonder that to Scribe “this house would appear to have been 
 built simply for the accommodation of your chimney”;^® that “I 
 and my chimney could not be parted” that “it is never out of my 
 house, and never out of my mind”;^® that “I look upon this chim¬ 
 ney less as a pile of masonry than as a personage.”^® All this is 
 entirely true, for the “chimney” is the heart and soul of Herman 
 Melville. 
 
 II 
 
 The identification of the chimney with Melville’s own personal¬ 
 ity would constitute nothing more than a piece of subtle ingenuity 
 on the part of both author and reader were it not for the larger 
 implication of “I and My Chimney.” This centers in the “purely 
 mythical” proposal to remove the chimney and the subsequent 
 examination made of it by Scribe. Scribe’s report of his findings 
 reads in part as follows: 
 
 It is my solemn duty to warn you, sir, that there is architectural cause 
 to conjecture that somewhere concealed in your chimney is a reserved 
 space, hermetically closed, in short, a secret chamber, or rather closet. 
 How long it has been there, it is for me impossible to say. What it 
 contains is hid, with itself, in darkness. But probably a secret closet 
 would not have been contrived except for some extraordinary object, 
 whether for the concealment of treasure, or what other purpose, may be 
 left to those better acquainted with the history of the house to guess.^^ 
 
 Ibid., p. 294. Cf. the dedication of Israel Potter (dated June 17, 1854) to the Bunker 
 Hill monument. Ibid., p. 295. 
 
 ** Ibid., p. 298. Ibid., p. 297. 
 
 Ibid., p. 284. ’‘"'Ibid., p. 300. 
 
i6 
 
 Merton M. Sealts 
 
 The wife and daughters, on receipt of this report, immediately con¬ 
 clude that the mysterious kinsman who built the house must have 
 hidden something away—another excuse for probing the chimney: 
 
 Although they had never before dreamed of such a revelation as Mr. 
 Scribe’s; yet upon the first suggestion they instinctively saw the extreme 
 likelihood of it. In corroboration, they cited first my kinsman, and sec¬ 
 ond, my chimney; alleging that the profound mystery involving the 
 former, and the equally profound masonry involving the latter, though 
 both acknowledged facts, were alike preposterous on any other supposi¬ 
 tion than the secret closet.^® 
 
 From this point on, the secret closet becomes the central topic of 
 argument: over its possible existence the family quarrel bitterly. 
 The wife argues that “when you think of that old kinsman of 
 yours, you ]{now there must be a secret closet in this chimney.”^® 
 The husband, unable to silence his wife by outtalking her, finally 
 resorts to the bribing of Scribe to certify, as “a competent surveyor,” 
 that having examined the chimney he “found no reason to believe 
 any unsoundness; in short, any—any secret closet in it.”®® This 
 studied phrasing makes the secret closet signify unsoundness, so 
 that the reason for probing the chimney becomes to ferret out its 
 weakness. The likelihood of such “unsoundness,” it will be re¬ 
 called, was corroborated by “first my kinsman, and second, my 
 chimney.” 
 
 In the story the specific kinship of the highly mysterious Cap¬ 
 tain Dacres is never disclosed. But in Pierre the immediate relatives 
 of the hero are all marked at one time or other by mental unsound¬ 
 ness. Isabel, whom Pierre takes for his half sister, had been kept 
 in a madhouse;®^ Pierre’s father had died in delirium,®® and Pierre’s 
 mother also had died insane.®® “Nor did this remarkable double¬ 
 doom of [Pierre’s] parents wholly fail to impress his mind with 
 presentiments concerning his own fate—his own hereditary liabil¬ 
 ity to madness.”®^ And behind this fear in Pierre lay Melville’s 
 knowledge of what had befallen one of his own parents. His 
 
 Ibid., p. 302. 
 
 Ibid., p. 304. The ensuing dispute over the ash-hole is a strange passage, dealing 
 with the wife, the cat, and St. Dunstan’s devil. Cf. Isabel’s mention of the cat in Pierre, 
 “softly scratching for some hidden thing among the litter of the abandoned fire-places” 
 (p. 163). Ibid., p. 308. Italics mine. 
 
 Pierre, pp. 168 fl. Ibid., pp. 96 ff. 
 
 Ibid., p. 398. Ibid., p. 400. 
 
“I and My Chimney” 
 
 17 
 
 mother was still living when Pierre was written, but in 1832 his 
 father had died under the cloud of mental derangement. His con¬ 
 dition on his deathbed is briefly described in a letter to Lemuel 
 Shaw, Herman Melville’s future father-in-law, from Thomas Mel¬ 
 ville (Herman Melville’s uncle): “I found him very sic\ —induced 
 by a variety of causes—under great mental excitement—at times 
 fierce, even maniacal. —in short, my dear sir, Hope, is no longer 
 permitted of his recovery, in the opinion of the attending Physi- 
 
 • _ »>35 
 
 Clans. . . . 
 
 The pattern of “I and My Chimney” now begins to emerge, 
 becoming more clear as the plot of the story unfolds. Following the 
 bribing of Scribe, the narrator cites the certificate attesting to the 
 chimney’s soundness in an effort to put an end to the argument: 
 
 Wife, . . . why speak more of that secret closet, when there before 
 you hangs contrary testimony of a master mason, elected by yourself to 
 decide. Besides, even if there were a secret closet, secret it should remain, 
 and secret it shall. Yes, wife, here, for once, I must say my say. Infinite 
 sad mischiej has resulted from the profane bursting open of secret re¬ 
 cesses. Though standing in the heart of this house, though hitherto we 
 have all nestled about it, unsuspicious of aught hidden within, this chim¬ 
 ney may or may not have a secret closet. But if it have, it is my kins¬ 
 man’s. To break into that wall, would be to break into his breast?^ 
 
 The tone of this passage contrasts with the general light tone of the 
 earlier part of the story, as even a casual reading will show. The 
 sudden seriousness here, in speaking of the “profane” meddling 
 with any secrets of the kinsman, is more in keeping with the rever¬ 
 ent mood of Pierre in approaching the image of his “sacred father”®^ 
 enshrined in his mind,®® or in retiring to the “locked, round-win¬ 
 dowed closet . . ., sacred” to his privacies, where the ambiguous 
 chair-portrait of his father is hung.®® Though the beloved image is 
 later so tragically shattered, the memory of his father “for right 
 cause or wrong” remains “ever sacred and inviolate” to Pierre.^” 
 
 ’'From an unpublished letter dated Albany, January 15, 1832, now in the Melville 
 Collection of the Harvard University Library, printed with permission of Mrs. Eleanor 
 Melville Metcalf and authorities of Harvard University. Peter Gansevoort had touched 
 upon the matter five days earlier in a letter to Thomas Melville, now in the Gansevoort- 
 Lansing Collection of the New York Public Library (Willard Thorp, Herman Melville: 
 Representative Selections, New York, 1938, p. xii and n.). 
 
 ” “I and My Chimney,” p. 309. Italics mine. 
 
 "P/erre, p. 89. Ibid., p. 93. 
 
 ” Ibid., p. 98. Italics mine. Ibid., p. 267. Italics mine. 
 
i8 
 
 Merton M. Sealts 
 
 That such a mood was also Herman Melville’s is strikingly indi¬ 
 cated by the name given the kinsman in “I and My Chimney,” 
 “Dacres” being simply an anagram for sacredl This is startling 
 confirmation that both Dacres and Pierre’s father are based on 
 memories of the unfortunate Allan Melville. 
 
 Besides explaining the first of the two reasons given for the 
 possible unsoundness of the chimney, this analysis is important in 
 an understanding of Melville’s intentions in Pierre. Many of the 
 details of Pierre’s situation, from his surroundings at Saddle Mead¬ 
 ows to the torture of his failing eyesight, are unquestionably drawn 
 from Melville’s own life. Some critics, cautioned by Melville’s dis¬ 
 tinct warning that “the thoughts we here indite as Pierre’s are to 
 be very carefully discriminated from those we indite concerning 
 him,”^^ object to any interpretation of Pierre as its author’s spiritual 
 autobiography. But from this new evidence it is obvious that a 
 fundamental element in Pierre’s situation is taken straight from 
 his creator’s experience. When Pierre “dropped his angle into the 
 well of his childhood, to find what fish might be there,”^^ he 
 brought forth dark memories of the unhappy death of his father. 
 And Isabel, supposedly his father’s illegitimate daughter, is mys¬ 
 teriously connected with the father’s fate just as the chimney in 
 Melville’s short story is related to the mysterious kinsman. There 
 is general agreement among recent critics that Isabel, again like 
 the chimney, symbolizes the depths of Melville’s mind.^® As it was 
 impossible to reach the bottom of the endless shaft of the soul, the 
 ultimate foundation of the chimney, so Pierre “renounced all 
 thought of ever having Isabel’s dark lantern illuminated to him. 
 Her light was lidded, and the lid was locked.” Such is the dark 
 mystery surrounding the girl; though, Melville continues, by inter¬ 
 rogating relatives “on his father’s side” Pierre “might possibly rake 
 forth some few small grains of dubious and most unsatisfying 
 things, which, were he that way strongly bent, would only serve 
 
 Ibid., p. 233. *^Ibid., p. 396. 
 
 Note the similarity in terms employed by Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville, pp. 
 220 ff.; E. L. Grant Watson, “Melville’s Pierre,” New England Quarterly, III, 201 (April, 
 1930); George C. Homans, “The Dark Angel: The Tragedy of Herman Melville,” New 
 England Quarterly, V, 723 (Oct., 1932); William Braswell, “The Satirical Temper of 
 Melville’s Pierre,” American Literature, VII, 431 n. (Jan., 1936); Willard Thorp, Herman 
 Melville: Representative Selections, p. Ixxx. 
 
“I and My Chimney” 
 
 19 
 
 the more hopelessly to cripple him in his practical resolves. He 
 determined to pry not at all into this sacred problem.”^^ So in 
 “I and My Chimney” Melville warns against the profane disturb¬ 
 ance of secrets relating to his sacred kinsman. 
 
 I interpret this passage as the expression of Melville’s own fear 
 that, “were he that way strongly bent,” he would experience the 
 same fate as his father’s by continued delving into the depths of 
 his mind. His dilemma was something like that of Pierre over the 
 symbolic Isabel: to acknowledge her publicly is impossible without 
 hurting his mother; to vindicate openly her relationship to him 
 means tarnishing his father’s honorable memory. Melville’s advice 
 to his hero is to “quit Isabel” and to “beg humble pardon of thy 
 mother,” but Pierre is unable to free himself so easily from his prob¬ 
 lem. In the confusion of his soul at these “absurdities” he “would 
 fain have disowned the very memory and the mind which produced 
 to him such an immense scandal upon his common sanity. This 
 sounds suspiciously like the two reasons offered for the existence of 
 the symbolic secret closet, in “I and My Chimney.” At the time 
 of Pierre Melville had nevertheless continued his introspection just 
 as Pierre in the novel gave himself over to Isabel. No wonder that 
 he later concluded in “I and My Chimney” that he had been “a 
 little out of my mind, I now think,” in trying to lay bare the very 
 foundation of the structure which his kinsman had established.^® 
 
 That Melville’s family shared his uneasiness is suggested by Mrs. 
 Melville’s private account of this portion of her husband’s career, 
 from the writing of Moby-Dic\ “under unfavorable circumstances” 
 in 1850 and 1851 until the period now under discussion.‘‘^ “We all 
 felt anxious about the strain on his health in spring of 1853,” 
 writes Mrs. Melville: she is confirmed by authentic tradition. At 
 the time of the publication of Pierre, Melville, says William Bras¬ 
 well, “had worked himself into so frightful a nervous condition that 
 his family had physicians examine him for insanity. The physicians 
 pronounced him sane and assumed responsibility for his actions; 
 but authoritative tradition survives that tells a pathetic story of his 
 
 “ Pierre, p. 199. Italics mine. 
 
 *' Ibid., p. 239. Italics mine. ** “I and My Chimney,” p. 283. 
 
 Weaver prints a lengthy quotation from Mrs. Melville’s pocket diary in his Intro¬ 
 duction to Melville’s Journal up the Straits, pp. xv ff. 
 
20 
 
 Merton M. Sealts 
 
 life during this period.” In a note Braswell adds: “I base this state¬ 
 ment upon personal talks with Mrs. Eleanor Melville Metcalf [Mel¬ 
 ville’s granddaughter] and with Professor Raymond Weaver.”^^ 
 
 Mrs. Metcalf, with whom I have also discussed the entire situa¬ 
 tion, agrees with me that “I and My Chimney” is an allegorical 
 version of the circumstances leading to this examination. Melville’s 
 own serious mental condition was the primary cause, made doubly 
 distressing to his family by the tragic memory of his father’s death, 
 which Melville himself had recalled in Pierre. Hence the relation 
 of the chimney itself and the “kinsman” of the story to the possible 
 unsoundness of the structure. It is conceivable that Melville’s anal¬ 
 ysis of his own condition in writing Pierre played a part in the 
 decision of the family to have his mind examined. According to 
 tradition the subtler meanings of his work were a mystery even to 
 his closest relatives,^® but the pointed allusion to Pierre’s father prob¬ 
 ably did not escape the notice of those familiar with the facts of 
 Allan Melville’s death—particularly Maria Gansevoort Melville and 
 Lemuel Shaw. It is significant that Melville’s mother is said to be 
 the original of the character in “I and My Chimney” who instigates 
 the examination, who is actively hostile to the narrator’s “philo¬ 
 sophical jabber,”^® and who even after Scribe’s report continues to 
 tap the wall of the chimney after the manner of a physician ex¬ 
 amining a man for life insurance.®^ 
 
 The possible identification of one other character in the story is 
 worth considering—that of Scribe, the examiner. Again referring 
 to Mrs. Melville’s journal we find that Melville’s physical health 
 remained poor for several years after the writing of Pierre. “In 
 
 William Braswell, Herman Melville and Christianity (unpublished University of 
 Chicago dissertation, 1934), p. 166 and n., quoted with permission of the author. A part 
 of this dissertation (pp. 129-166, 207-211) has been printed in lithotype in a private 
 edition distributed by the University of Chicago Libraries, 1936. Cf. also Weaver’s dis¬ 
 cussion in his Introduction to Melville’s lournal up the Straits, pp. xii-xxiv. 
 
 Concerning Mardi Mrs. Melville had written her mother: “I suppose by this time 
 you are deep in the ‘fogs’ of ‘Mardi’—if the mist ever does clear away. I should like to 
 know what it reveals to you . . .” (from an unpublished letter dated New York, April 30, 
 1849, now in the Melville Collection of the Harvard University Library, printed with 
 permission of Mrs. Eleanor Melville Metcalf and authorities of Harvard University). Mel¬ 
 ville himself told Mrs. Hawthorne that she was “the only woman" who liked Moby-Hic^, 
 but that with her “spiritualizing nature” she could “see more things than other people” 
 (from a letter dated New York, Jan. 8, 1852, printed in part in “An Unpublished Letter 
 from Herman Melville to Mrs. Hawthorne in Explanation of ‘Moby-Dick.’ ” American 
 Art Association—Anderson Galleries Catalogue of Sale, No. 3911, p. 9 [New York, 1931]). 
 
 Cf. “I and My Chimney,” pp. 309 ff. Ibid., p. 308. 
 
“I and My Chimney” 
 
 21 
 
 Feb 1855 he had his first attack of severe rhumatism [sic] in his 
 back—so that he was helpless—and in the following June an attack 
 of sciatica. Our neighbor in Pittsfield Dr. O. W. Holmes attended 
 & prescribed for him.”®^ The relation between Holmes and Melville 
 was more than that of doctor and patient. Holmes’s “The Last 
 Leaf” was written about Melville’s own grandfather, Major Thomas 
 Melville, and interesting records survive of vigorous conversations 
 between the two younger men when both were in residence at Pitts¬ 
 field.®® Reviewing these points, we find that the literary doctor was 
 on familiar terms with Melville and had served him in a profes¬ 
 sional capacity twice during the very year in which “I and My 
 Chimney” was probably written. It has been shown that as the 
 architect found no unsoundness in the chimney, that is, in Melville’s 
 mind; so doctors had “pronounced him sane and assumed responsi¬ 
 bility for his actions.” Is it possible that Holmes had been one of 
 the doctors, and that Melville meant to indicate the fact in the story 
 by giving the examiner there the name of “Scribe,” or writer? In 
 view of Melville’s general procedure in composing the story, this 
 identification is at least not implausible. 
 
 The significance of “I and My Chimney” may now be summar¬ 
 ized briefly. It is Melville’s account of the examination of his mind 
 made a few years before the story was written, at the instigation of 
 his family. This meaning is conveyed in disguised form by the plot 
 itself, with the aid of symbolism parallel to that of Pierre though the 
 terms are dissimilar. The examination was made because of anxiety 
 over Melville’s nervous condition, represented by the speculation 
 concerning the chimney, and with the knowledge of the tragic cir¬ 
 cumstances surrounding the death of his father, represented by the 
 mystery concerning the late kinsman of the story. This fear of pos¬ 
 sible hereditary insanity was alluded to by Melville himself in 
 Pierre. The characterization of “I and My Chimney” points to Mel¬ 
 ville’s mother as the person responsible for the consultation of 
 physicians, one of whom may have been Dr. Oliver Wendell 
 
 Introduction to Journal up the Straits, p. xvi. Note the reference to sciatica in 
 “I and My Chimney,” pp. 287 ff.: this may be of some value in confirming the suggested 
 date of the story. 
 
 See a letter of Evert A. Duyckinck to his wife dated Pittsfield, August 6, 1850, 
 printed by Luther S. Mansfield, “Glimpses of Herman Melville’s Life in Pittsfield, 1850- 
 1851,” American Literature, IX, 29-31 (March, 1937); M. B. Field, Memories of Many 
 Men and of Some Women (New York, 1874), p. 202. 
 
22 
 
 Merton M. Sealts 
 
 Holmes. The examination revealed that Melville’s nervous condi¬ 
 tion was not a manifestation of insanity, and the subsequent course 
 of his life confirmed the judgment of his examiners. 
 
 Of the evidence afforded by records of Melville’s career after 
 this time, Forsythe observes that “no one who has any knowledge 
 of Melville in his later years” needs such testimony. “For thinking 
 people, the question ... of Melville’s sanity has long since been 
 completely settled.”^^ With these words there can be only thorough 
 agreement. In the present study Herman Melville himself has been 
 allowed to explain how the question was first raised: it cannot be 
 too strongly emphasized that any suspicions based on his own 
 nervousness and associated with memories of his father had been 
 entirely groundless. This is not to minimize the seriousness of 
 his condition in 1852-1853, though in a day when a better under¬ 
 standing of nervous disorders prevails than in Melville’s own life¬ 
 time there is no reason for describing his difficulties in sensational 
 terms. Had modern mental therapeutic knowledge been available 
 to Melville himself, he and his family would doubtless have been 
 spared much of the distress they were forced to endure. More im¬ 
 portant than misguided amateur psychologizing at this late date, 
 however, is an appreciation of the unexpected extent to which, 
 through employment of symbols, Melville committed his deepest 
 spiritual problems to subtle analysis in print. There is further evi¬ 
 dence for this practice in other work of the period of “I and My 
 Chimney,” as I plan to discuss in a future publication, but for the 
 present it is sufficient to take leave of him still “standing guard over 
 my mossy old chimney; for it is resolved between me and my 
 chimney, that I and my chimney will never surrender.” 
 
 Robert S. Forsythe, reviewing Weaver’s edition of Journal up the Straits, American 
 Literature, VIII, 85 (March, 1936). 
 
Melville’s "Sociality” 
 R. E. Waiters 
 
 H erman MELVILLE lived in an age when most Americans 
 were more concerned that society should not interfere with the 
 individual than that the individual should contribute to the wel¬ 
 fare of the social group. In 1837 Emerson, for instance, wrote 
 approvingly of “Everything that tends to insulate the individual,— 
 to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man 
 shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a 
 sovereign state with a sovereign state.”^ Thirty years later he 
 summarized his generation’s development: 
 
 The former generations acted under the belief that a shining social 
 prosperity was the beatitude of man, and sacrificed uniformly the citizen 
 to the state. The modern mind believed that the nation existed for the 
 individual, for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea, 
 roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of 
 the philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world,^ 
 
 For Emerson, even friendship had its dangers. Although he began 
 his essay on the subject with commendation, he soon found himself 
 battling against any diminution of his independent self-complete¬ 
 ness: “Let us feel if we will the absolute insulation of man. . . . 
 Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying 
 ‘Who are you.? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more.’”® 
 
 It is true that the interrelationships of one man to another and 
 particularly to the Over-Soul are repeatedly mentioned by Emerson; 
 but the self-reliant doctrine of insulated individualism that was 
 more than equally emphasized would seem to have been far more 
 readily accepted by his public, as being more congenial with a 
 spirit dominant in his time. Little heed was taken of Melville’s 
 dissenting reminders that man is born, lives, and dies in constant 
 debt to the social community of his fellows. Yet Melville’s books 
 
 ^Complete Worths (Centenary ed., Boston, 1903-1904), 1 , 113. 
 
 * Ibid., X, 326. * Ibid.. II, 214. 
 
24 
 
 R. E. Watters 
 
 had repeatedly portrayed the distortion of the individual and the 
 destruction of the group v^^hich follow upon voluntary repudiation 
 or involuntary neglect of that debt/ In his setting up a contrary 
 doctrine of “sociality,”® in which the individual is shown to find 
 satisfaction in receptiveness to all the currents of friendliness, sym¬ 
 pathy, love, Melville was far closer to Whitman, who once declared: 
 
 The common ambition strains for elevations, to become some privileged 
 exclusive. The master sees greatness and health in being part of the 
 
 mass-Not that half [of the ideal] only, individualism, which isolates. 
 
 There is another half, which is adhesiveness or love, that fuses, ties and 
 aggregates, making the races comrades, and fraternizing all. Both are 
 to be vitalized by religion. . . . For I say at the core of democracy, 
 finally, is the religious element.® 
 
 II 
 
 The concept of the commonalty of mankind, past and present, 
 recurs in Melville’s works. Several passages voice the thought that 
 “all generations are blended . . , one and all, brothers in essence,” 
 because in the beginning “the sons of God did verily wed with our 
 mothers, the irresistible daughters of Eve.”^ In Babbalanja’s opin¬ 
 ion,® “We are full of ghosts and spirits . . . full of buried dead, 
 
 * See “Melville’s ‘Isolatoes,’ ’’ by the present writer, soon to be published in PMLA. 
 
 ® The following paper does not pretend to give an exhaustive discussion of Melville's 
 whole social philosophy. It is believed, however, that the brevity necessary to a short 
 paper entails no essential distortion of the general whole other than, perhaps, the slight 
 overemphasis inseparable from any concentration upon a specific concept. Much more 
 might be said (for instance, about the various complex characters) if all elements of Mel¬ 
 ville’s social philosophy were under discussion. 
 
 “ Complete Writings (Camden ed.. New York, 1902), V, 80. 
 
 ’’Mardi, I, 13-14, Works of Herman Melville (Standard ed., London, 1922-24). All 
 references are made to this edition. 
 
 ® The danger which exists in attributing to a novelist the opinions voiced by his 
 characters must be faced by all students of Melville, the bulk of whose work is written 
 in the first person and whose practice it undoubtedly was to use his characters as mouth¬ 
 pieces. How much of Moby-Dick, for instance—altogether apart from passages spoken 
 or thought specifically by Ishmael or others—may be considered the narrator’s (Ishmael’s) 
 and how much Melville’s.'’ Certainly the narrator sees and knows more than Ishmael, 
 the crewman, could. The safest answer would perhaps be Ishmael-Melville—^unless 
 scholarship on the novelist is to cease almost entirely. 
 
 The practice followed here is this: all passages spoken by or definitely attributed to 
 the several characters are so indicated, and should be taken as not necessarily Melville’s 
 own. (Only about one quarter of the passages cited fall into this category.) The other 
 passages are considered to present Melville’s opinions, whether or not the work has a 
 supposed narrator. The persistent repetition of the general idea of “sociality” throughout 
 his works from first to last must justify the practice. Would an author repeat a theme 
 constantly in various forms, through various characters, and in nearly all his volumes, 
 written over a period of more than forty years, unless he in general subscribed to it— 
 or (to be overcautious) at least desired to convey it to his readers? 
 
Melville’s “Sociality” 
 
 25 
 
 that start to life before us. And all our dead sires, verily, are in us; 
 that is their immortality. . . . Every thought’s a soul of some past 
 poet, hero, sage. We are fuller than a city.”® Melville himself 
 reaffirms the general idea of the immanence of mankind in the 
 individual: “I was at the subsiding of the Deluge, and helped swab 
 the ground. . . . With the Israelites, I fainted in the wilderness. . . . 
 I touched Isabella’s heart, that she hearkened to Columbus. ... I, 
 the man in the iron mask; I, Junius.”^® The famous chapter 
 “Dreams” in Mardi has been taken as evidence of Melville’s lean¬ 
 ing toward the transcendental Over-Soul,^ ^ but if it is read care¬ 
 fully it is found to reveal an identification of self not with an 
 immanent divinity but instead with an immanent humanity: 
 “Many, many souls are in me. ... In me, many worthies recline, 
 and converse.”^® The apparent identification of self with the 
 universe is the result merely of a more grandiose trope than the 
 one of the frigate which is also used. 
 
 The concept of the oneness of the human race, moreover, ap¬ 
 pears in a review by Melville, published the same month with 
 Mardi. To rebuke Parkman’s contempt for the Indians ‘m The 
 Oregon Trail, Melville reminds the historian that “our own pro¬ 
 genitors” were savages: 
 
 Who can swear, that among the naked British barbarians sent to Rome 
 to be stared at more than 1500 years ago, the ancestor of Bacon might 
 not have been found? Why, among the very Thugs of India, or the 
 bloody Dyaks of Borneo, exists the germ of all that is intellectually ele¬ 
 vated and grand. We are all of us—Anglo-Saxons, Dyaks, and Indians— 
 sprung from one head, and made in one image. And if we regret this 
 brotherhood now, we shall be forced to join hands hereafter.^® 
 
 In Redburn Melville opposed the exclusion of immigrants from this 
 country on the ground that “the whole world is the patrimony of 
 the whole world.”^^ Immigration had enriched American blood 
 until it has become like “the flood of the Amazon, made up of a 
 thousand noble currents all pouring into one. . . . Our ancestry is 
 
 * Mardi, II, 323-324. See also Hid., p. 90. 
 
 Hid., I, 345 - 
 
 Willard Thorp, Herman Melville: Representative Selections (New York, 1938), 
 Introduction, p. xxxviii. 
 
 Mardi, II, 54. 
 
 Literary World (March 31, 1849). Quoted by Thorp, op. cit., p. cii. 
 
 Redburn, p. 378. 
 
26 
 
 R. E. Watters 
 
 lost in the universal paternity; and Caesar and Alfred, St. Paul 
 and Luther, and Homer and Shakespeare are as much ours as 
 George Washington, who is as much the world’s as our own. We 
 are the heirs of all time, and with all nations we divide our in¬ 
 heritance.”^® 
 
 Part of the individual’s inheritance from common humanity 
 was an ethical legacy—a kind of moral common sense. In Typee 
 Melville concludes that the idyllic, virtuous life of the natives 
 resulted from 
 
 an inherent principle of honesty and charity towards each other. They 
 seemed to be governed by that sort of tacit common-sense law which, say 
 what they will of the inborn lawlessness of the human race, has its pre¬ 
 cepts graven on every breast. The grand principles of virtue and honour, 
 however they may be distorted by arbitrary codes, are the same all the 
 world over. ... It is to this indwelling, this universally diffused per¬ 
 ception of what is just and noble, that the integrity of the Marquesans 
 in their intercourse with each other is to be attributed.^® 
 
 In Mardi the same doctrine reappears, when Babbalanja quotes 
 Bardianna: “We need not to be told what righteousness is; we 
 were born with the whole Law in our hearts.”^^ Only misan¬ 
 thropes, according to Frank Goodman m The Confidence Man, do 
 not or will not “see in man a ruling principle of kindness.”^® 
 
 Ethical values to the individual could come in other forms from 
 the human race. Isabel, in Pierre, believed herself “saved” by an 
 infant whose innocent and thoughtless confidence in its mother 
 first filled Isabel “with the sweet idea of humanness” and made her 
 aware “of the infinite mercifulness, and tenderness, and beautiful¬ 
 ness of humanness.”^® In Clarel, Mortmain’s physical isolation from 
 his mother and mental isolation from his father were counteracted 
 only by “the vague bond of human kind,” which inspired him to 
 philanthropy.^® The high value Melville placed upon this “vague 
 bond” is indicated by one of his Civil War poems: 
 
 Ibid., pp. 216-217. 
 
 Typee, pp. 269-270. Melville’s doctrine of innate morality should be distinguished 
 from Emerson’s. To the transcendentalist, “All things are moral,’’ and every natural 
 process “shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong’’ {op. cit., I, 40-41). 
 Emetson’s individual inherited his moral principles from Nature and the Over-Soul. To 
 Melville, however. Nature is either evil or indifferent, and the individual derives his 
 principles from humanity (or, in rare passages, the orthodox God; see Typee, p. 144). 
 
 Mardi, II, 303. ^^The Confidence Man, p. 211. 
 
 ^'‘Pierre, pp. 171-172. ’‘^Clarel, I, 187. 
 
Melville’s “Sociality” 
 
 27 
 
 Nothing can lift the heart of man 
 Like manhood in a fellow man. 
 
 The thought of heaven’s great King afar 
 But humbles us—too weak to scan; 
 
 But manly greatness men can span 
 And feel the bonds that draw.-^ 
 
 Here manliness is asserted to give more sustenance to the human 
 spirit than godliness. 
 
 The racial community of mankind, to which the individual 
 owed not only his physical existence but intellectual and ethical 
 values, was always supplemented by the social community in which 
 the individual lived. Sometimes, of course, this society produced 
 evil for individuals, or at least left them dissatisfied. Life on board 
 ship, for instance, could spread moral contagion, since certain 
 evils seem organic in such life.““ Sailors, often presented unflatter- 
 ingly by Melville, are what society and their circumstances make 
 them.^^ The tour of the islands in Mardi further revealed many 
 social groups in which men inflict misery upon their kind. 
 
 But despite all Melville’s awareness of the evils and inadequacies 
 of society and civilization, he knew that the individual’s physical 
 and spiritual welfare is by no means independent of the social 
 group. The briefest statement of this conviction is found in the 
 sketch “The Two Temples.” The narrator, after being rebuffed 
 by the unfriendly atmosphere of a church, was given a ticket to a 
 “genial humane assembly” in a theater. The gift was, he specu¬ 
 lates, charity; but, he asks himself, “ ‘Why these unvanquished 
 scruples? All your life, naught but charity sustains you, and all 
 others in the world. Maternal charity nursed you as a babe; pater¬ 
 nal charity fed you as a child; friendly charity got you your pro¬ 
 fession. . . . You, and all mortals, live but by sufferance of your 
 charitable kind.’ This admission is antipodal to Ahab’s boast: 
 “Ahab stands alone among all the millions of the peopled earth, 
 nor gods nor men his neighbors!”"® Yet Ahab himself recognizes, 
 even while he curses it, “that mortal interdebtedness which will 
 not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down 
 
 ” Poems, p. 76. 
 
 White-locket, pp. 473-474. 
 
 ” See Redbum, chap. xxix. 
 
 ** Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces, p. 1 87. 
 
 Moby-Dicl{, II, 341. 
 
28 
 
 R. E. Watters 
 
 in the whole world’s books. . . Despite himself he is forced 
 to acknowledge indebtedness to others—to the carpenter “for a 
 bone to stand on” and to his forebears “for the flesh in the tongue 
 I brag with.”^'^ 
 
 In Pierre Melville disguised a fundamental truth in bitter irony 
 when he reminded his hero of “the perils and miseries thou callest 
 down on thee, when, even in a virtuous cause, thou steppest aside 
 from those arbitrary lines of conduct, by which the common world, 
 however base and dastardly, surrounds thee for thy worldly 
 good.”^® The community may sometimes impede a man’s search 
 for absolute heavenly virtue, but its regulations do promote his 
 earthly well being. 
 
 Typee society displayed communal life nearly at its best: every¬ 
 body shared in the fishing, building, worshiping, rejoicing. Al¬ 
 though overt political and religious organization was negligible, 
 the Typees’ “unanimity of feeling” (a trait which more than all 
 else aroused Melville’s admiration)^® produced “that social order 
 which is the greatest blessing and highest pride of the social 
 state.”®® “They showed this spirit of unanimity in every action of 
 life; everything was done in concert and good fellowship.”®^ 
 Heaven itself would not satisfy Melville unless good fellowship 
 existed there. He once described to Hawthorne their life together 
 in Paradise, with good talk and good champagne producing friend¬ 
 ly joviality.®® More seriously, in Mardi he advocated friendliness 
 among the peoples of the world because “in heaven, at last, our 
 good, old, white-haired father Adam will greet us all alike, and 
 sociality forever prevail.”®® 
 
 Ill 
 
 That the individual should recognize and value his indebtedness 
 to all mankind and to his social group was, then, one of Melville’s 
 recurrent beliefs. But he goes further to show that the individual 
 
 °° Ibid., II, 240. " Ibid., II, 239-240. 
 
 Pierre, p. 246. Melville, it is true, declares that humanity had failed Pierre during 
 his wretched hours after he received Isabel’s letter, just as divinity failed him even more 
 wretchedly in the city (pp. 412-413). Yet Pierre is shown as at least pardy responsible 
 for his desertion by man and God. 
 
 ’‘'‘Typee, p. 273. Ibid., p. 269. 
 
 Ibid., p. 273. 
 
 Julian Hatythorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (Boston, 1885), I, 403. 
 
 Mardi, I, 14. 
 
Melville’s “Sociality” 
 
 29 
 
 is unavoidably caught up in both a cosmic and social context 
 whether or not he recognizes or likes the fact. The cosmic limita¬ 
 tion of the individual’s self-reliant freedom is a kind of Over-Soul— 
 but an evil one. The social limitation springs from the inescapable 
 bonds of the social fabric. 
 
 The present paper is not the place to develop at length Mel¬ 
 ville’s doctrine of cosmic evil and its relation to his views of fate 
 and free will.®^ But enough can be suggested to show that the 
 individual, in Melville’s opinion, was to some extent limited by a 
 force similar to Emerson’s Over-Soul, but a force which was evil 
 rather than good. It is a curious fact that the characters usually 
 chosen by students of Melville to illustrate his “individualism” 
 (Ahab and Pierre) are the very ones who talk most about being 
 dominated by Fate or some other uncontrollable spiritual force. 
 As soon as Pierre began to enter the labyrinth of his relations with 
 Isabel, he for the first time in his life “felt the irresistible admoni¬ 
 tions and intuitions of Fate,”®® and by the time his life ended he 
 had called himself “the fool of Fate.”®® Moreover, Pierre sometimes 
 had a “vague, fearful feeling” of “a God—a Being positively pres¬ 
 ent everywhere.” When he sat down he felt that he “displaced the 
 Spirit.” Only the “humanness of Delly” near him relieved his 
 apprehensiveness.® 
 
 Ahab, even more than Pierre, questions his individual freedom 
 and responsibility, and feels the same kind of evil pantheism:®® 
 
 “Is Ahab, Ahab.? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm.? But if the 
 great sun move not of himself . . . how then can this one small heart 
 beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, 
 does that thinking, does that living, and not I.? By heaven, man, we are 
 turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate 
 
 Some discussion of the subject can be found in the present writer’s “Herman Mel¬ 
 ville’s Metaphysics of Evil,’’ XJniversity of Toronto Quarterly, IX, 170-182 (Jan., 1940). 
 
 Pierre, p. 85. 
 
 Ibid., p. 499. 
 
 Ibid., p. 441. 
 
 It is worth noting that the transcendentalist Winsome, who seems created in the 
 image of Emerson, confesses his inner desire to be exempt from “knowledge, and con¬ 
 science, and revel for a while in the care-free, joyous life of a perfectly instinctive, un¬ 
 scrupulous, and irresponsible creature”—like “the ratdesnake!” {The Confidence Man, 
 p. 252). Melville is possibly implying that, in Emerson’s doctrine of surrender to in¬ 
 stincts and spiritual currents of the Over-Soul, creatures like the rattlesnake should not be 
 forgotten. 
 
30 
 
 R. E. Watters 
 
 is the handspike. . . . Look! see yon albicore! who put it into him to 
 chase and fang that flying-fish 
 
 To the carpenter, Ahab had speculated that a divine presence may 
 be “invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where 
 thou now standest,”^® Starbuck and such lesser men do not have 
 this sense of identifying their wills with God’s, nor of fighting the 
 deity for room to stand or sit. Ahab’s fatalistic pantheism may 
 spring either from the desire to disavow his responsibility to the 
 human beings he leads to destruction or to the wish to consider 
 himself identical with God. The man who deliberately isolates 
 himself, deliberately severs his connection with mankind, may 
 well try desperately to unite himself with God by expanding his 
 ego. Only such a man will believe that he is “the Fates’ lieutenant,” 
 because “this whole act’s immutably decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by 
 thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled Starbuck 
 and the others deny Ahab’s self-identification with God. “Aye, sir, 
 thou wilt have it so,” remarks Starbuck, when Ahab commences 
 the chase on the third day. And at the eleventh hour, when the 
 white whale breached to expose Fedallah caught in the lines and 
 then began to swim away from Ahab and the Pequod, Starbuck 
 cries again: “Seel Moby-Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that 
 madly seekest him!”^^ 
 
 It is surely significant that, apart from Ahab and Pierre, the 
 characters in Melville’s novels who are presented as flotsam in the 
 currents of Fate are usually such men as Jackson, Bland, Radney, 
 Claggart. Jackson was “spontaneously an atheist and an infidel.”^® 
 Bland was “an organic and irreclaimable scoundrel, who did wicked 
 deeds as the cattle browse the herbage, because wicked deeds 
 seemed the legitimate operation of his whole infernal organiza¬ 
 tion.”^^ Radney was “doomed and made mad,” a “predestinated 
 mate.”*® Claggart, who of all the type is analyzed at greatest 
 length, was born evil—a man with natural depravity,*® who had 
 “no power to annul the elemental evil in himself . . . apprehending 
 the good, but powerless to be it”; he was “like the scorpion for 
 
 ** Moby-Dic\, II, 330. “* Ibid., II, 239. 
 
 Ibid., II, 352. **Ibid., II, 361. 
 
 “ Redbum, p. 134. ** White-Jacket, p. 235. 
 
 “ Moby-Dic\, I, 310, 314. ** Billy Budd, pp. 45-46. 
 
Melville’s “Sociality” 
 
 31 
 
 which the Creator alone is responsible.”^^ In some moods Clag- 
 gart “could even have loved Billy but for fate and ban.”^® All these 
 are men whose individualities are limited by the cosmic inter¬ 
 ference of an evil Over-Soul, or God. 
 
 But although spiritual interference, in the form of predestina¬ 
 tion or fate, appears chiefly in connection with error in Melville’s 
 “individualists” or evil in his villians, some limitation exists on the 
 freedom of every man. In Pierre Melville says that his hero was 
 learning “what all mature men, who are Magians, sooner or later 
 know, and more or less assuredly—that not always in our actions, 
 are we our own factors.”^® The “not always” leaves some room 
 for freedom, but not much. In Whit€-]acl{et Melville had called 
 fate “not a fiend . . . but ... an armed neutrality. ... I have a 
 voice that helps to shape eternity.”®® And in Moby-Dic\, Ishmael, 
 who at first held the “Fates” responsible for his decision to go to 
 sea, eventually reached the more considered and comfortable opin¬ 
 ion of “chance, free will, and necessity—no wise incompatible— 
 all interweavingly working together.”®^ 
 
 Just as no man could entirely escape some restrictions upon his 
 free individuality from these cosmic forces, neither could he escape 
 restrictions imposed by social forces. Pierre, who felt some com¬ 
 pulsion of the supernatural, was perhaps more aware of the com¬ 
 pulsions of society, “the myriad alliances and criss-crossings among 
 mankind, the infinite entanglements of all social things, which for¬ 
 bids [r/r] that one thread should fly the general fabric, on some 
 new line of duty, without tearing itself and tearing others.”®^ Both 
 Ahab and Pierre reduce their worlds to tatters when they follow 
 their self-assigned duties. For Ishmael, the chief social limitation 
 of his will was symbolized in the “monkey-rope” that joined him 
 to Queequeg. This rope protected Queequeg from falling into the 
 sea while he worked on the slippery whale moored alongside the 
 ship; at the same time the rope endangered Ishmael, who could 
 be pulled overboard unless he took proper care: 
 
 Ibid., p. 49. Compare this passage with that about Winsome and the rattlesnake, as 
 cited in footnote 38 above. 
 
 Ibid., p. 60. 
 
 Pierre, p. 69. 
 
 White-Jacket, p. 404. 
 
 Moby-Die\, I, 270. 
 
 Pierre, p. 267. 
 
32 
 
 R. E. Watters 
 
 I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was ijow 
 merged in a joint stock company of two: that my free will had received 
 a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge 
 innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. . . . And yet ... I saw 
 that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that 
 breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese 
 connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, 
 you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, 
 you die. . . 
 
 And whatever care Ishmael took, he had the management of only 
 one end of the rope. Ahab, too, had his spiritual “monkey-rope” 
 yoking him with Fedallah,®^ and even a physical one with Starbuck, 
 who guarded the rope which hoisted Ahab aloft to look for the 
 whale.®® Without the help of Starbuck (and, of course, the crew 
 to sail the ship) Ahab could not look for Moby Dick, just as he 
 could not even stand without the carpenter’s help. The social fabric 
 enmeshed Ahab despite himself. 
 
 Unrestricted free will has always been attributed to the self- 
 reliant individualist. Emerson, aware though he was of some of 
 the diflEculties in the concept of freedom, nevertheless wagered his 
 intellectual wealth upon it. Melville’s inability to subscribe to the 
 doctrine without notable qualifications—that cosmic and social 
 forces limited one’s free will—refutes those who designate him an 
 extreme individualist. It is true that while finishing Moby-Dic\ 
 he wrote to Hawthorne applauding the man who “declares himself 
 a sovereign nature (in himself) amid the powers of heaven, hell, 
 and earth” and who “insists upon treating with all Powers upon 
 an equal basis.”®® But this famous utterance and possibly one or 
 two similar ones cannot adequately support the contention that 
 Melville celebrated “an individualism whose acceptance required 
 more hardihood than his generation possessed,” and which was 
 “founded ... on the hard doctrine that security is an illusion” and 
 on the rejection of Emerson’s belief “that the constitution of the 
 universe is on his [man’s] side.”®'^ That Melville rejected Emer- 
 
 ^^Moby-Dic\. II, 49. 
 
 Ibid., II, 320. 
 
 ^^Ibid., II, 321. 
 
 Julian Hawthorne, op. cit., I, 387. 
 
 R. H. Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought (New York, 1940), 
 
 P- 73- 
 
Melville’s “Sociality” 
 
 33 
 
 son’s optimism about the bias of the universe is true enough; any 
 man who let himself drift with Emerson’s “currents of Universal 
 Being” would, in Melville’s opinion, soon find himself in the Great 
 Maelstrom. The alternative is not individualism, however, since 
 Melville could believe that although man can not rely upon Nature 
 he may (or must) rely upon mankind. 
 
 That Melville did think this reliance necessary would seem 
 indicated by the fates he assigned his principal individualists, Ahab 
 and Pierre and Bartleby the Scrivener. They repudiated their bonds 
 with their social group; all met defeat and death. If Ahab and 
 Pierre can be regarded as tragic heroes in the Shakespearean sense, 
 then it is at least conceivable that Melville intended their scorn of 
 their social debts to be the “tragic flaw” in their characters that 
 encompasses their fall. At the end of Mardi, Taji, also, shows him¬ 
 self as an unsubmissive individualist. He refuses to content him¬ 
 self with Serenia, which satisfies his companions. Rejecting the 
 values of sociality, he in effect rejects everything in this life. Turn¬ 
 ing away with “eternity in his eye,” he cries: “Now I am my soul’s 
 emperor; and my first act is abdication! Hail! realm of shades!”®* 
 For some few, who spurn sociality to pursue some phantom value 
 of their own devising, the realm of shades may perhaps be pref¬ 
 erable to Serenia; but Melville warns us that the passage thither 
 is “over an endless sea.”®* 
 
 Nevertheless, Melville advocated no bemused or heedless an¬ 
 chorage in the harbor of humanity or the social emotions. Though 
 he admired Typee society, he deserted the valley at first chance, 
 since he himself would always be an alien in a Marquesan com¬ 
 munity. Typee society was not good for a Westerner, just as West¬ 
 ern civilization was not good for Typees. Each society had its 
 own internal evils, but the evils were exaggerated when one sought 
 to impose its cultural pattern upon the other. He therefore pitied 
 the Marquesans for extending their trustfulness beyond the confines 
 of their own culture: “Unsophisticated and confiding, they are easily 
 led into every vice ... by their European civilisers.”*® As Mel¬ 
 ville shows, there are too many Claggarts, Jacksons, Blands—per¬ 
 haps even Winsomes—in the world for men to bestow complete 
 
 Mardi, II, 400. 
 
 " Ibid. 
 
 ’‘'‘Typee. p. 18. 
 
34 
 
 R. E. Watters 
 
 confidence upon everybody and expect generous dealing at all 
 times. But surely, in urging caution, Melville is being neither 
 cynical nor misanthropic. Those readers who see in The Con¬ 
 fidence Man a bitter exposure of confidence, misinterpret the book 
 entirely. The more careful reader will find no evidence at all that 
 in any of his guises the Confidence Man defrauds anybody. The 
 men exposed in the book are not the herb-doctors or the Frank 
 Goodmans, but the Charlie Nobles, Mark Winsomes, and Eg¬ 
 berts. The latter are men whose intellectual principles have frozen 
 their hearts. Each is suflBcient unto himself and feels no sympathy 
 or generosity towards the poor and miserable among his fellow 
 travelers. The unfortunates who turn to humanity for aid and 
 comfort are shrugged off by these men of self-centered intellect, 
 but they can and do find relief from the herb-doctors and Good- 
 mans, who are animated by love of their kind. But whatever 
 the risk of reproof, the unfortunates must turn to their fellow men 
 rather than to a distant deity, in Melville’s opinion, if they are to 
 find help at all. 
 
 IV 
 
 The psychological quality which Melville believed was chiefly 
 responsible for “insulated” individualism was the excessive develop¬ 
 ment of intellect at the expense of the heart. Several critics®^ 
 have already remarked upon Melville’s concern with the problem 
 of “disequilibrium” between head and heart, between thought 
 (which is relatively solitary) and emotion (which is relatively 
 social). 
 
 What seemed to him to be the excessive intellectualism of the 
 transcendentalists chiefly aroused Melville’s criticisms. Writing to 
 Duyckinck in 1849, he remarked that Emerson’s dislike of cakes- 
 and-ale geniality was “his misfortune, not his fault. His belly. Sir, 
 is in his chest, and his brains descend down into his neck. . . .”®^ 
 Presumably Emerson simply had no room for heart. About four¬ 
 teen years later, in an annotation on Emerson’s Essays, Melville 
 attributed Emerson’s “gross and astonishing errors & illusions” to 
 an “intensely intellectual” “self conceit.” “Another species of Mr. 
 
 For example, Thorp, op. cit., p. lix; William Braswell, Melinite’s Religious Thought 
 (Durham, N. C., 1943), pp. 22 ff.; F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and 
 Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York, 1941), passim. 
 
 '""Thorp, op. cit., p. 373. 
 
Melville’s “Sociality” 
 
 35 
 
 Emerson’s errors, or rather blindness, proceeds from a defect in the 
 region of the heart.”®® Goethe, often linked by Melville with the 
 philosophic ancestors of transcendentalism, is condemned as “the 
 pretentious, heartless part of a man.”®^ Plotinus Plinlimmon, the 
 transcendentalist philosopher in Pierre, belied his winning appear¬ 
 ance by his characteristic of “non-Benevolence.”®® From his self- 
 sufficient isolation he detachedly observed Pierre’s growing de¬ 
 spair.®® The Confidence Man contains an exposure of the trans- 
 cendentalists’ principles of friendship, which would coldly banish 
 from the world any generous, friendly help in money matters. It 
 is worth noting also that whenever Melville wished to present 
 human depravity he chose to make his villains—such as Jackson, 
 Bland, Claggart—men of cold objectivity, not hot passion. 
 
 The character who mainly illustrates separation of head and 
 heart is, of course, Ahab. As he says of himself: “Gifted with the 
 high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power.”®’ In his sleep, 
 the frustrated “living principle or soul” would sometimes rebel 
 against “the characterizing mind.” “God help thee, old man. Thy 
 thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense 
 thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that 
 heart forever; that vulture the very creature he creates.”®® In 
 Ahab’s “broad madness,” we learn, “not one jot of his great natural 
 intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the 
 living instrument.”®® Ahab himself was aware of this: “All my 
 means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”’® In Ahab, Mel¬ 
 ville seems to have created his own Ethan Brand to illustrate his 
 comment to Hawthorne on the “frightful poetical creed that the 
 cultivation of the brain eats out the heart.”” Ahab was, of course, 
 a man of fiery passions, but these were not at all social emotions; 
 rather they served only to fuse other men into instruments for his 
 own egocentric will. Although he has a few moments when he ap¬ 
 pears to value the help of others,’® he more characteristically and 
 
 William Braswell, “Melville as a Critic of Emerson,” American Literature, IX, 331 
 (Nov., 1937). 
 
 ** Pierre, p. 422. Ibid., p. 404. 
 
 ** Ibid., pp. 408-409. Moby-Dic\, I, 207. 
 
 '‘^Ibid., I, 252-253. '‘'’Ibid., I, 231. 
 
 '"’Ibid., I, 232. ’^Julian Hawthorne, op. cit., I, 404. 
 
 Especially in two remarks to Starbuck. First, when Ahab cried, “Close! stand close to 
 me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better . . . than to gaze upon God” 
 (H> 329). Secondly, when he supported himself with Starbuck after his whalebone leg 
 
36 
 
 R. E. Watters 
 
 continually hardens his heart not only against the gods but also 
 against the loving Pip, Starbuck, his own remembered wife and 
 child, his crew, and his Nantucket neighbor in search of a lost son. 
 Ahab’s specifications for “a complete man after a desirable pat¬ 
 tern” would include “no heart at all” but a “brass forehead, and 
 about a quarter of an acre of fine brains.”'^® The tyrannical king 
 Abrazza, who lives only for his selfish pleasures no matter the cost 
 in misery to others, would agree with Ahab, since he says: “We 
 kings should be ever indifferent. Nothing like a cold heart; warm 
 ones are ever chafing and getting into trouble.”'^^ 
 
 But although Melville saw clearly the evils thai resulted when 
 head was dominant over heart, he was not blind to the dangers of 
 excesses of the heart. Pierre’s uncritical heart leads him as surely 
 to suffering and disaster as Ahab’s overdeveloped intellect.’’^® 
 Pierre’s “enthusiastic heart” bursts itself against “the heart-vacancies 
 of the conventional life . . . [the] heartless, proud, ice-gilded 
 world.”^® “The heart! the heart!” cries Pierre; “’tis God’s 
 anointed; let me pursue the heart!”^^ In his opinion, “the brains 
 grow maggoty without a heart; but the heart’s the preserving salt 
 itself, and can keep sweet without the head.”^® 
 
 That was, however, only Pierre’s opinion. Mere sweetness, as 
 Melville shows, is not enough. He did not identify himself com¬ 
 pletely with either Ahab or Pierre. Reviewing Hawthorne’s 
 Mosses, he maintained that no man who possesses humor and love 
 developed to the point of genius can exist “without also possessing 
 . . . a great deep intellect, which drops down into the universe like 
 a plummet. Or, love and humor are only the eyes through which 
 such an intellect views the world.”'^® A year later, in a letter to 
 Hawthorne, he advances as his ''prose opinion” that “in most cases, 
 in those men who have fine brains and work them well, the heart 
 extends down to hams.”®® It is true that he goes on to add: “I 
 stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head! I had rather be a 
 fool with a heart, than Jupiter Olympus with his head.” But this 
 
 had been snapped off: “Ay, ay, Starbuck, ’tis sweet to lean sometimes . . . and would 
 old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has” (II, 350). Thus even the individualistic 
 Ahab at times paid tribute to human sociality. 
 
 Moby-Dic\, II, 238. Mardi, II, 341. 
 
 ’'See Matthiessen, op. cit., p. 467. '"‘Pierre, p. 126. 
 
 Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 445. 
 
 Thorp, op. cit., p. 332. Julian Hawthorne, op. cit., I, 404. 
 
Melville’s “Sociality” 
 
 37 
 
 merely emphasizes his general belief that a scientific head could 
 lead a man farther astray than a social heart. Heart alone was 
 better than head alone, but the best endowment is a warm heart 
 directed by a cool (not cold) head—as he was to show in Billy 
 Budd. 
 
 Clarel (1876) contains much discussion of the head-heart antith¬ 
 esis, as seen for example in the conflict of science and religion. 
 Preference is usually given to the heart, though not uncritically. 
 The suave cleric Derwent, who is portrayed rather unsympatheti¬ 
 cally, is the chief advocate of the heart. But when he echoes Pierre 
 and cries 
 
 “Behead me—rid me of pride’s part 
 And let me live but by the heart!” 
 
 his enthusiasm is pierced by Mortmain’s “Hast proved thy heart? 
 first prove it.”®^ Nevertheless, in the Epilogue Melville returns 
 to the heart: 
 
 Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned— 
 
 Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind.*- 
 
 In opposition to the doctrines of intellectualism, Melville set up 
 almost as a religion the social and emotional values of love, com¬ 
 panionship, sympathy, beneficence, unselfishness. In Typee he had 
 applauded the “instinctive feeling of love” in the breasts of the 
 natives, who among themselves “appeared to form one household, 
 whose members were bound together by the ties of strong affec¬ 
 tion. The love of kindred . . . seemed blended in the general 
 love.”®® Serenia, in Mardi, is another such community. All men 
 are brothers in this Land of Love.®^ The highly intelligent but 
 untranscendental philosopher Babbalanja is finally converted to the 
 doctrines of Alma [Christ], whose “great command is Love.” Yet 
 this love is not opposed to thought, since the old Serenian says that 
 if “Right-reason and Alma” were not the same, “Alma, not reason, 
 would we reject.”®® The love Melville perceived at the root of 
 Christ’s teachings impelled him to condemn the logic of the Old 
 Testament Jehovah. He once wrote to Hawthorne: “The reason 
 the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because 
 
 “ Clarel, II, 29. ** Ibid., II, 298. 
 
 ** Typee. pp. 33, 275. Mardi, II, 364. 
 
 ’‘^Ibid., II, 370. 
 
38 
 
 R. E. Watters 
 
 they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a 
 watch.”®® Melville’s criticism of religion was aimed at the con¬ 
 ventional and institutional encrustations which men had added to 
 the simple, loving doctrines of Christ.®'^ The brain, not the heart, 
 builds systems and regulations. 
 
 Billy Budd, Melville’s last work, portrays the balance of head 
 and heart. Captain Vere, who is sympathetically portrayed, has 
 “a marked leaning toward everything intellectual,” but he is also 
 full of fatherly affection for Billy. At the court-martial he warns 
 the officers: . . let not warm hearts betray heads that should be 
 cool. . . . The heart is the feminine in man, and . . . must here 
 be ruled out.”®® But it is ruled out not to further some coldly 
 rational or selfish purpose, but to promote the good of the dis¬ 
 ciplined community (the Navy) in which both judge and prisoner 
 live, and to serve which both joyfully die, one a felon’s death, the 
 other (later) a warrior’s. Because of the love and trust Billy has 
 for Vere, he accepts unrebelliously his role as the sacrificial Isaac 
 offered by Abraham in obedience to higher authority. Each of 
 them has surrendered some individual good for the good of the 
 community. Vere, who calls Billy’s blow a “divine judgment,” 
 surrenders the wish of his heart which would pardon this “angel 
 of God.”®® He declares that at “the Last Assizes” Billy would be 
 acquitted, but he insists that he and his officers must “proceed under 
 the law of the Mutiny Act.”®® The bonds of love and sympathy 
 which unite Billy and Vere are strong. So sure was Vere that 
 Billy would agree with and forgive the military compulsion which 
 made his death necessary that he reveals to Billy all the motives 
 and circumstances which led to the decision.®^ Billy, who finds 
 “a sort of joy” in Vere’s frankness and trust, surrenders his life. 
 His dying words, “God bless Captain Vere!” show that he not only 
 forgave the captain and condoned the judgment, but glorified the 
 whole act, since under his influence the entire crew, as if they were 
 “the vehicles of some vocal current-electric,” returned a sympathetic 
 
 Julian Hawthorne, op. cit., I, 404. 
 
 Babbalanja had rejected the religion of Alma on the island of Maramma, where the 
 Church flourished as an elaborate and heartless institution. The Reverend Mr. Palsgrave, 
 because he accepted the established moral code, repulsed Pierre. 
 
 Billy Budd, p. 87. 
 
 Ibid., p. 75. 
 
 Ibid., pp. 87-88. 
 
 Ibid., p. 91. 
 
Melville’s “Sociality” 
 
 39 
 
 echo of the same words.®^ In short, at the moment of his death 
 Billy healed any breach his execution might have caused in the 
 respect and affection of the crew for the captain. Though the in¬ 
 dividual may die, the community must live on, whole and sound. 
 Thus Billy submerged his individuality in love for his captain and 
 loyalty to his country. Unlike Ahab, who was dragged down to 
 his death; unlike Pierre, who died in a low dungeon; Billy “as¬ 
 cended; and ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.”®^ 
 
 Hawthorne as well as Melville had opposed the transcendental- 
 ists’ approval of solitude and self-reliance by revealing the dis¬ 
 tortion which accompanied the individual’s arrogant separation 
 from his fellows. But in so far as Melville substituted a positive al¬ 
 ternative for such isolation, he went beyond Hawthorne’s cool 
 observation of a human phenomenon. Tliat alternative sprang 
 from the racial and social community of mankind, with its wealth 
 of social virtues: love, sympathy, gratitude, friendliness, charity, 
 kindness, companionship. Some virtues a man may acquire in soli¬ 
 tude—such as, perhaps, self-reliance, truth, benevolent goodness; 
 but he cannot acquire charity, love, beneficent goodness. Babba- 
 lanja’s longing to prune himself down to “what is unchangeably 
 true”®* is transformed, after his voyage round the Mardian world, 
 into the flowering of love, nourished by the brotherly community 
 of Serenia: “Love and Alma prevail. . . . Reason no longer domi¬ 
 neers; but still doth speak.”®® Captain Vere, unflinchingly expos¬ 
 ing the cold truth of Billy’s case—innocent under heavenly law, 
 guilty under earthly law—unites that truth with a warm human 
 love which purges it of all its cerebral harshness and redeems its 
 earthly injustice. The two surrender their individualities, but they 
 discover fulfillment in an embracing sociality. 
 
 *^lbid., p. 102. 
 
 ^^Ibid., p. 103. 
 
 '‘^Mardi, I, 80-81. 
 
 '‘^Ibid., II, 371. 
 
Melville’s "The Totvn-Ho’s Story” 
 
 Sherman Paul 
 
 O F THE NINE ENCOUNTERS with whaling ships in Moby- 
 Dicl{, “The Town-Ho’s Story” is the first on-the-sea report of 
 the white whale. Unlike the other reports this story can stand alone 
 artistically and was actually printed separately in Harpers in 1851. 
 R. S. Forsythe says that “since this sailor’s yarn is not closely woven 
 into the fabric of the novel, there is no awkwardness in its publica¬ 
 tion as an independent work; it is complete in itself.”^ This, how¬ 
 ever, does not mean that the story is not integrally necessary to the 
 deepest imderstanding of Moby-Dic\, for “The Town-Ho’s Story” 
 offers an alternative and variant meaning of the significance of the 
 white whale. It is a tragic but not an unwarrantably pessimistic 
 tale that inspires an awe of, but not an aversion to, the whale; it 
 marks the beginning of that feeling of attraction for the whale 
 which Melville nurses carefully in the seven remaining stories and 
 without which the dramatic focus on Ahab’s monomania would be 
 diminished. Furthermore, the themes and characters of the story, 
 and its symbolic techniques, make it Melville’s “Ethan Brand,” the 
 kind of short story the significance of which, as in the case of 
 Hawthorne and similarly of Melville, penetrates the main body of 
 an author’s work. 
 
 The story itself, stripped of long digressions for its recital, is 
 told with yarnlike ease at the Golden Inn in Lima, Peru. Its por¬ 
 tentous meaning, which, Melville wrote, “seemed obscurely to in¬ 
 volve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one 
 of those so-called judgments of God,”^ arises seemingly from the 
 simple fabric of a sailor’s recollection. The audience of entertain¬ 
 ment-expecting Dons of “This dull, warm, most lazy and hereditary 
 land” are driven to outbursts of incredulity much as the reader who 
 at this point in Mohy-Dic\ first encounters the whale and who must 
 readjust his faculties and shift his expectations for even more “won- 
 
 ^ “Herman Melville’s The Town-Ho’s Story," 'Notes and Queries, CLXVIII, 314 (May 
 
 4 . 1935)- 
 
 * Moby-Dic\ (London, 1922), I, 306. 
 
“The Town-Ho’s Story” 
 
 41 
 
 drous visitations” to come. The scene of the telling of the story in 
 “corrupt” Lima, to men conditioned by Catholic mysteries and yet 
 unbelieving, forms a contrast to the heightened all-pervading re¬ 
 ligious content of the tale and reaffirms Ishmael’s devotion to the 
 mysterious fatalities of life. The humor of their skepticism—for 
 the faith of the land-locked, comfortable, aristocratic wine drinkers 
 who never put to sea is another “tale” in the Holy Evangelists— 
 moves Ishmael to ask for “the largest sized Evangelists,” even to 
 swear on the Testament.® 
 
 “The Tou/n-Ho’s Story” contains Melville’s germ of tragedy and 
 his portrayal of the retributive justice of the whale. In this there is 
 a glimmer of relief from the overwhelming sense of evil that en¬ 
 gulfs Ahab. For here the whale carries out a cosmic decree that 
 more nearly accords with our ideas of Christian justice. And there 
 is more: an affirmation of the sanctity of personality and of the 
 kind of democracy that recognizes kings in commoners. As Charles 
 Olson has indicated, “Democracy, to Melville, merely gave man his 
 chance to be just—in politics, society and intimate human rela¬ 
 tions.”^ The idea of the inviolability of man’s personality was the 
 key to what Melville called, in his “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 
 “that imshackled, democratic spirit of Christianity in all things.”® 
 Christian democracy was that democracy in which the laws were 
 more in accord with divine law and the natural dignity of all men. 
 Melville thought that after eighteen hundred years it was de¬ 
 mocracy that should realize this fundamental Christianity, this 
 unique value of the human being which, when recognized, was 
 manifested by men in bonds of love, sympathy, and charity. Startled 
 by the apathy of mankind toward humanity caught up in poverty 
 and death in the streets of Liverpool, as described in Redburn, he 
 went further to protest against the inhumanity of law in White- 
 Jac/^et. Here, he cited Blackstone on the Law of Nature as a moral 
 justification for mutiny® and dramatized man’s instinctive sense of 
 his own dignity as justification for defiance of authority. When 
 White Jacket was arraigned at the mast to be flogged for no offense 
 by a wilful captain who “would not forgive God Almighty,” he 
 
 * Ibid., p. 330. 
 
 ‘“Lear and Moby Dick,” Twice a Year, I, 188 (Fall-Winter, 1938). 
 
 ® Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces (London, 1924), p. 136. 
 
 * White-]acl(et (London, 1922), p. i8i. 
 
42 
 
 Sherman Paul 
 
 decided to rush against the captain and pitch him into the sea. 
 In describing White Jacket’s justification for this defiance of author¬ 
 ity, Melville Avrote: 
 
 But the thing that swayed me to my purpose was not altogether the 
 thought that Captain Claret was about to degrade me, and that I had 
 taken an oath with my soul that he should not. No, I felt my man’s 
 manhood so bottomless within me, that no word, no blow, no scourge 
 of Captain Claret could cut me deep enough for that. I but swung to an 
 instinct in me—the instinct diffused through all animated nature, the 
 same that prompts even a worm to turn under heel. Locking souls with 
 him, I meant to drag Captain Claret from this earthy tribunal of his to 
 that of Jehovah, and let Him decide between us.^ 
 
 The sense of tragedy comes when this essential dignity is abused, 
 whether through the self-willed arbitrary law of a captain or through 
 Ahab’s misuse of his own personality. In both it was the God-idea 
 in man—as Starbuck recognized it—which should be used in better 
 ways than revenge on man or animal. 
 
 Out of this conflict between the different orders of law and the 
 warrant for the higher law which Melville dramatizes in terms of 
 the dignity of man grows the problem of good and evil. White- 
 ]acJ{et, Billy Budd, and “The Town-Ho’s Story” have this as their 
 basic situation; the instance of Ushant’s beard as a symbol of his 
 dignity brings him before the mast in White-]ac\et; the essential 
 innocence of Billy Budd is at the mercy of human law as executed 
 by the all-knowing, godlike Captain Vere; Radney, the mate of the 
 Town-Ho, goes beyond the law of the ship and the divine law and 
 brings down upon himself the force of divine justice. 
 
 In Melville’s development of this problem, “The Toum-Ho's 
 Story” stands midway between White-Jaef^et and Billy Budd. For 
 White Jacket’s intention of letting God decide is fulfilled by the 
 whale in the action between Steelkilt and Radney. Their story is 
 a simple one.® When the whaler Town-Ho sprang a leak in the 
 Pacific, it became necessary to man the pumps almost continuously. 
 Steelkilt, “a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo,” exhausted by 
 his turn at the pumps, was ordered to sweep down and remove some 
 excrement from the deck. In so ordering, the mate Radney had 
 
 ’ Jbid., pp. 352 - 353 - 
 
 ® “The Town-Ho’s Story,” Moby-Dicl{, I, 306-330. 
 
“The Town-Ho’s Story” 
 
 43 
 
 overlooked the rules applying to such duties and had issued a com¬ 
 mand to Steelkilt only to “sting and insult” him. Radney was 
 moved to do this because he was “ugly” and resented Steelkilt’s 
 physical nobility. It was only conventional, Melville points out, 
 “that when a person placed in command over his fellow men finds 
 one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of 
 manhood ... he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern’s 
 tower, and make a little heap of dust of it.” Steelkilt “instinctively 
 saw all this” but, like a “really valiant” man, refused to give way 
 to passion and so arouse further anger; he merely refused on the 
 grounds that it was not his duty. Again Radney ordered, cursing 
 him, and threatened Steelkilt with a hammer. And when Radney, 
 in defiance of Steelkilt’s warnings, grazed him with the hammer, 
 the latter smashed the mate’s jaw. 
 
 Mutiny followed. Steelkilt and his fellow seamen entrenched 
 themselves and refused to man the pumps until the captain swore 
 not to flog them. In the face of the captain’s indecision Steelkilt 
 twice shouted, “. . . treat us decently, and we’re your men; but we 
 won’t be flogged.” When neither party would give in, Steelkilt 
 followed the Captain’s orders and allowed himself to be confined 
 with his nine followers in the forecastle. But “The fetid closeness 
 of the air, and a famishing diet . . . constrained” all but three to 
 surrender. Then Steelkilt, “maddened by his long entombment in 
 a place as black as the bowels of despair”—a Melvillean hell—pro¬ 
 posed to the two other seamen to break out and take the ship. The 
 other two, however, betrayed him, and all three were bound and 
 hoisted into the rigging for the remainder of the night. On the 
 following morning the captain flogged the two betrayers into life¬ 
 lessness, but Steelkilt forewarned the captain with a “hiss.” (One 
 is reminded here of old Ushant’s saying after he was flogged that 
 “ ’tis no dishonour when he who would dishonour you, only dis¬ 
 honours himself. . . . My beard is my own.”)® The captain, ap¬ 
 parently recognizing in this defiance Steelkilt’s inviolability, ordered 
 him to be cut down, but Radney refused to take heed and personally 
 laid on the punishment. 
 
 When the normal life of the ship was resumed, the seamen 
 agreed to Steelkilt’s plan of giving up the chase by no longer singing 
 
 * White-Jacket, p. 461. 
 
44 
 
 Sherman Paul 
 
 out for whales, and returning to port to desert ship. Meanwhile 
 Steelkilt planned his revenge—to crush Radney’s skull and drop 
 him into the sea. But at the moment of execution, “by a mysterious 
 fatality. Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands 
 into its own the damning thing he would have done.” “Just be¬ 
 tween daybreak and sunrise,” the topwatch spied out Moby-Dick 
 and involuntarily cried, “ ‘Jesu, what a whale,’ ” calling out Christ’s 
 name instinctively at the critical moment when the whale had come 
 to take from Steelkilt his revenge. In the hunt for Moby-Dick that 
 followed, Radney was tossed into the sea and destroyed when his 
 boat struck the whale. After the crew reached port, they deserted 
 ship and, detaining the captain by the sheer force of Steelkilt’s will, 
 “forever got the start on their Captain.” In the end, Steelkilt tri¬ 
 umphed; God had decided, by means of Moby-Dick, between Steel¬ 
 kilt and Radney. 
 
 Melville’s handling of the story sharpens this central idea. In 
 the character of Steelkilt he creates another handsome sailor, who, 
 although an inlander, is, like Jack Chase, “wild-ocean born” and 
 “wild-ocean nurtured.”^® He is of the pattern of Billy Budd and 
 Chase in his personal strength and beauty, his seamanship, his 
 qualities of leadership and geniality, and his “off-hand unaffected¬ 
 ness of natural regality.”^^ The type of person Melville portrayed 
 in Steelkilt he describes in Billy Budd as “an amusing character all 
 but extinct now, but occasionally to be encountered, and in a form 
 yet more amusing than the original, at the tiller of the boats on 
 the tempestuous Erie Canal or, more likely, vapouring in the grog- 
 geries along the towpath.”^^ And like Jack Chase, who was “a 
 stickler for the rights of man,”^® the canaller “was the champion 
 [ashore]; afloat the spokesman; on every suitable occasion always 
 foremost.”^ Steelkilt became the embodiment of the American 
 savage, the natural man, a being free from civilized hypocrisy. 
 Melville describes him fondly as the fulfilment of his idea of the 
 democratic hero, sharing that “democratic dignity which, on all 
 hands, radiates without end from God . . . our divine equality!”^® 
 
 Moby-Dick., I. 309. 
 
 Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces, p. 5. 
 
 Ibid., p. 6. White-Jacket, p. 19. 
 
 Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces, p. 6. 
 
 ^’‘Moby-Dick, I, 144- 
 
“The Town-Ho’s Story” 
 
 45 
 
 “Stcelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, 
 and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last 
 viceroy’s snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in 
 him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he 
 been born son to Charlemagne’s father.”^® He would have fitted 
 Melville’s description of the canaller as “the young Alexander 
 curbing the fiery Bucephalus.”” 
 
 One can hardly fail to see the physical mold of Steelkilt. What 
 goes unemphasized in this characterization, only to rise foremost 
 in that of Billy Budd, is Melville’s corollary that “The moral nature 
 was seldom out of keeping with the physical make.”^® Steelkilt, 
 like Melville’s cherished friend Jack Chase and “peacemaker” 
 Billy Budd, whom all his fellows “love,” maintains throughout the 
 story a certain passiveness, intensified and dramatized by the excep¬ 
 tional strength and violence of the man. Except when threatened 
 with flogging and abused by Radney, he follows orders. He has 
 a sense of duty which Melville points up by having Steelkilt save 
 the crew by cutting the line holding their boat fast to the whale 
 (which in this instance, though fulfilling justice in the destruction 
 of Radney, is still the symbol of universal physical force that gives 
 the whale an almost Old Testament significance as the bearer of 
 both wrath and justice). It is Steelkilt, also, who meets his captain 
 with Christ’s words, “I come in peace,”^® and who seeks revenge 
 only when “maddened” by the hell of confinement and stung by 
 flogging to “the ventricles of his heart.”^ Again, the heart as 
 symbol of feeling and of man’s innate dignity contrasts with the 
 cold intellectuality of a Radney, Claggart, Bland, or Jackson. Each 
 of them partakes of that depravity which “towards the accomplish¬ 
 ment of an aim which in wantonness of malignity would seem to 
 partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgment sagacious and 
 sound.”*^ Against this background, Ahab’s tragedy comes to mean 
 the same thing as Radney’s: Ahab’s violation of his own personality 
 or heart by his will makes him proudly assert that other men are 
 his hands and feet, thereby violating them and the natural law: 
 
 p. 31T. 
 
 Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieres, p. 6. 
 
 Ibid., p. 6. ** Moby-Dic^, I, 329. 
 
 Ibid., p. 324. 
 
 ’’ Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces, p. dCy 
 
46 
 
 Sherman Paul 
 
 and this is reflected in his consequent inability to feel, to sympathize, 
 and to look into man’s eyes. His tragedy is a self-wrought loneli¬ 
 ness arising from the separation of men from men by the separation 
 of mind and heart. For Radney destruction came about through 
 his own rash ignorance; for Ahab, through his acceptance of fate as 
 a rationalization for his wilfulness. 
 
 Against this formula for monomania, Melville indirectly builds 
 up Steelkilt’s moral nature by creating in him a Christ-indwelling 
 figure. Radney’s offense had insulted Steelkilt “as though Radney 
 had spat in his face.”^^ And this action, symbolic of striking the 
 godhead in man, is reminiscent of a similar incident of the indi¬ 
 vidual versus authority in Matthew 27:30, where the soldiers spit on 
 Christ. And there are other more marked symbolic Christian refer¬ 
 ents in Steelkilt’s passivity, his betrayal “at midnight,” his coming 
 from the depths of the forecastle, and the stringing of the three 
 seamen in the rigging. Probably the three mutineers are intended 
 to remind one of Christ’s crucifixion, for after the beating of the 
 two betrayers Melville compares their lifelessness to “the two cru¬ 
 cified thieves.”^* This is enough to suggest the Christian insight 
 that Melville wished to provide in his characterization of Steelkilt. 
 For Melville, befriended by Jack Chase, the humanity of helping “a 
 poor stranger in a strait” was a Christlike thing, and even for a man 
 of violence, a redeeming quality.^ 
 
 Melville merely sketches the figure of Radney as a symbol of evil. 
 He describes him as “brutal,” “overbearing,” “fearless,” “ugly,” 
 “hardy,” and “malicious.” He provoked Steelkilt by failing to show 
 him “that common decency of human recognition which is the 
 meanest slave’s right.”^® Where Ahab has strength of purpose and 
 a tragic perception of his willingness to fulfil fate, Radney has only 
 maliciousness. But Radney, too, had his saving part—like Jackson 
 and Claggart, to whom he is more nearly akin, and whom Melville 
 pities as men of sorrows. He is said to have “some good-hearted 
 traits,” just as Ahab had his “humanities.” What these were in 
 Radney’s case the story never reveals, unless in his widow’s grief 
 we recognize the one bond of love that tied him to humanity. 
 Coming at the very end of the tale, it bears the weight of final verity, 
 the one redeeming feeling and value of this cosmic struggle. 
 
 Moby-Dic\, I, 313. Ibid., p. 322. 
 
 Ibid., p. 317. Ibid., pp. 309-310. 
 
“The Town-Ho’s Story” 
 
 47 
 
 But there seems to be more to Radney’s tragedy than this. A 
 forecast of doom can be sensed in the symbolic details of the story: 
 the leak that compels the action that follows is never found because 
 it is too far below the ship’s water line; submerged in evil, in 
 mystery, it is beyond man’s probing. The leak widens mysteriously, 
 and only Radney feels apprehensive over making port. The self- 
 contained ship is somehow rent, and the sea-evil enters, and from 
 this moment Radney “was doomed and made mad.”^® Melville 
 says that Radney was moved by a “cozening fiend,” was “predes¬ 
 tined,” was “branded for the slaughter by the gods.”^^ In fact, “a 
 strange fatality pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily 
 mapped out before the world itself was charted.”^® This can be seen 
 in the symbolic merger of the white-bandaged Radney and the white 
 whale, where the whale again takes on an evil significance, and 
 evil blends with evil, at the same time that this judgment of God 
 gives Steelkilt his salvation.^ That the smallest event should be so 
 ordered was the sign of fatality; the ways of necessity, as Babbalanja 
 observed in Mardi, left more to man—the choice of evil and a self- 
 imposed and self-willed fate. 
 
 There are two modes by which Melville further illumines what 
 he means by Christian democracy: the moral contrast of the tale 
 with the scene of its recital, and explanations in the story of refer¬ 
 ences to America. The Peruvian backdrop of decadent Christianity 
 and the ship-symbol serve to bring into focus the struggle for faith 
 in America. The land of the Dons has no more autos-da-fe, but 
 Don Pedro thought “that at your temperate North the generations 
 were as cold and holy as the hills.”^“ In explaining this Melville 
 re-creates the savage-civilized life of the American interior by imag¬ 
 inatively developing its parallels to the antipodal societies he him¬ 
 self has found in the world—the primitive life of Typee and the 
 regimentation of a frigate. The interior is a world in itself; its 
 great lakes are oceans with romantic Polynesian isles like the great 
 oceans and bordered by a variety 6f life as ancient and barbaric, as 
 new and civilized as any provided by history. It has its “paved 
 capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland,” its “ancient and unentered 
 
 Ibid., p. 310. ’‘’’Ibid., pp. 312, 314, 315. 
 
 Ibid., p. 327. Ibid., p. 327. 
 
 Ibid., p. 317. 
 
48 
 
 Sherman Paul 
 
 forests.” The link between this “Christian corn-field” and the “bar¬ 
 baric seas” is the Erie Canal, whose “one continual stream of Vene- 
 tianly corrupt and often lawless life” flows “by rows of snow white 
 chapels, whose spires stand almost like milestones.” To the corn¬ 
 field of churches the water-borne evil of the canal brings the old 
 and new corruptions, the wicked “Mark Antony” of a canaller, and 
 the challenge of its commerce and vulgarity. But it is not the canal¬ 
 ler whom Melville despises; rather, it is the American pagan “under 
 the long-flung shadow, and snug patronizing lee of churches” which 
 serve as mileposts along the way. This disunity and cross-purpose, 
 represented by the canal which separates as well as connects, is Mel¬ 
 ville’s picture of the outrunning of the religious support of de¬ 
 mocracy and of the ever-grasping, ever-extending rapaciousness of 
 American life.®^ 
 
 This apparent failure in the basis of American democracy has 
 its counterpart in the mutiny that takes place on the Town-Ho. The 
 ship-as-society or world-in-itself is a recurrent symbol in Melville’s 
 work and in “The Town-Ho’s Story” becomes a stage on which is 
 acted one possible failure in human institutions. The captain, “be¬ 
 lieving that rare good luck awaited him in those latitudes,” little 
 heeds the sea-evil, relies wholly on his pumps and stout men. But 
 the evil reaches deeper and brings on a mutiny by enlarging the 
 sense of separation that had taken place between Steelkilt and 
 Radney or, symbolically, between those who rule and those who 
 obey. Melville suggests that all would have been well if Radney 
 had only recognized that portion of the right of manhood in Steel¬ 
 kilt which was due even a slave—but Radney “did not love Steelkilt.” 
 Law, to have religious sanction, must be tempered with love, 
 Christian love and compassion, and for this fundamental right, like 
 the French in 1848, the “sea-Parisians”®^ patrolled their barricades. 
 More was at stake than the ship Town-Ho; it was a matter of the 
 humane basis of society, of Christian democracy. 
 
 The vindication of mutiny in the name of personality and the 
 retributive role of the whale are the secret parts of the story that 
 Ahab never hears. Ahab, as one who himself felt oppressed, might 
 
 Ibid., pp. 308-309, 315-317. 
 
 Ibid., p. 318. 
 
“The Town-Hos Story” 
 
 49 
 
 have responded to Steelkilt’s rebellion on the grounds of personality. 
 For in his soliloquy on fire Ahab proclaims his inviolate part, “the 
 queenly personality” that “lives in me, and feels her royal rights.”^^ 
 But as oppressor, intent on shaping the world to his monomaniac 
 vision of it, he had seen the cosmic evil, but could not hearken to his 
 humanities and ^ve love its redemptive place. The central meaning 
 of “The Town-Ho's Story” is the reafl&rmation of the heart with 
 which Melville arms his reader for the greater tragedy to come. 
 
 ” Moby-Dick,, II, 282. 
 
Melville’s ” 'Soiled’ Fish of the Sea” 
 
 John W. Nichol 
 
 I N CHAPTER XCII of White-Jacket, Melville describes his fall 
 into the sea from the yardarm of the U. S. frigate Neversink- F. O. 
 Matthiessen selects this passage to illustrate the manner in 'which 
 Melville, the artist, worked/ His discussion is an excellent example 
 of judicial and appreciative critical comment, but on one important 
 point Mr. Matthiessen is the victim of a rather unlucky error. After 
 setting forth the series of trancelike moods which Melville employs 
 in describing his experience of falling, Matthiessen quotes, evidently 
 from the Constable Standard Edition of Melville’s Works, the fol¬ 
 lowing passage in which Melville relates his feelings while still 
 under the water: 
 
 I wondered whether I was yet dead or still dying. But of a sudden some 
 fashionless form brushed my side—some inert, soiled fish of the sea; the 
 thrill of being alive again tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning 
 of death shocked me through.^ 
 
 Commenting on these lines, Matthiessen says: 
 
 But then this second trance is shattered by a twist of imagery of the sort 
 that was to become peculiarly Melville’s. He is startled back into the 
 sense of being alive by grazing an inert form; hardly anyone but Melville 
 could have created the shudder that results from calling this frightening 
 vagueness some "soiled fish of the sea.” The discordia concors, the un¬ 
 expected linking of the medium of cleanliness with filth, could only have 
 sprung from an imagination that had apprehended the terrors of the 
 deep, of the immaterial deep as well as the physical.^ 
 
 The unlucky error of all this lies in the fact that Melville in all 
 probability used the adjective coiled rather than soiled in describing 
 his “fish of the sea,” and that it was some unknown typesetter, 
 
 1 Amencan Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Lon¬ 
 don and New York [1941]), pp. 390-395. 
 
 2 The Worths of Herman Melville (London, 1922-1924), VI, 497. 
 
 3 American Renaissance, p. 392. 
 
“ ‘Soiled’ Fish of the Sea” 
 
 51 
 
 rather, who accounted for the “shudder” and the "discordia concors” 
 of the “unexpected linking.” If, as is probable, Constable made up 
 the Wor\s from first editions, then the word “soiled,” which Mat- 
 thiessen quotes correctly from his source, is really a misprint for 
 Melville’s “coiled,” for both the American and English first editions 
 of White-]ac\et printed the latter word.^ It is interesting to note 
 that the change in this case does not invalidate the general critical 
 position arrived at by Matthiessen; it merely weakens his specific 
 example. However, such a textual slip could, in the proper context, 
 have promulgated an entirely false conception. 
 
 I am indebted to Dr. Howard P. Vincent for checking a copy of the English first edition. 
 
Melville on Homer 
 
 R. W. B. Lewis 
 
 T he works of the great poets have never yet been read 
 by mankind,” Thoreau wrote, indulging in paradox and 
 exaggeration to make a very good point; “for only great poets can 
 read them.” Melville’s reading of the Iliad and the Odyssey provides 
 a unique illustration of at least the second half of that statement; and 
 we are fortunate in being able to watch the process at work: the 
 process, that is, by which a great book and a great reader can 
 affect each other by mutual impact. Melville first looked into Chap¬ 
 man’s Homer in November, 1858, when George Duyckinck sent 
 him the two epics in four volumes; he had already read Pope’s 
 translation and found the earlier one incomparably betterThe line 
 pencilings he made in those volumes indicate the most penetrating, 
 thorough, and comprehensive reading of the poems; they are flashes 
 illuminating the book and the reader and, more significantly, the 
 human experience both were involved in. There is a measure of 
 happy surprise in this for the student who remembers the temper of 
 the age: since, to hear them talk, one might assume that Americans 
 of creative strength had quite decided to abandon those old sources 
 and to be nourished purely and simply by the immediate and actual 
 and the national landscape. And yet even Emerson, who had the odd 
 habit of announcing the break with the past by a hundred allusions 
 to books that came out of it, had written in an essay called “Spiritual 
 Laws”: 
 
 1 Chapman’s version, Melville wrote Duyckinck in a letter of thanks, would send Pope’s 
 “off shrieking, like the bankrupt deities in Milton’s hymn.” He wrote in the margin Pope’s 
 translation of half a dozen passages, and underlined the sentences in the editor’s (Richard 
 Hooper’s) introduction comparing the two versions—unfavorably to Pope. 
 
 Houghton Library at Harvard contains the Chapman volumes (London, 1857), along 
 with Homer’s Batrachomyomachia, Hymns and Epigrams (London, 1858), also by Chap¬ 
 man and also marked by Melville. A complete “Checklist of Books Owned and Borrowed 
 by Melville,” by Merton M. Sealts, Jr., began in the Spring, 1948, issue of the Harvard 
 Library Bulletin. A slightly outdated list of “Books in the Harvard College Library Once 
 Owned by Herman Melville” appears in the bibliography of F. Barron Freeman (ed.), 
 Melville’s Billy Budd (Cambridge, Mass., 1948). 
 
Melville on Homer 
 
 53 
 
 We are always reasoning from the seen to the unseen. Hence the perfect 
 intelligence that subsists between wise men of remote ages. A man cannot 
 bury his meanings so deep in his book, but time and like-minded men will 
 find them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had he.^ What secret can he conceal 
 from the eyes of a Bacon? of Montaigne? of Kant? Therefore, Aristotle 
 said of his works, “they are published and not published.” 
 
 When he read that passage in 1862, Melville knew at once what 
 Emerson was talking about: “Bully for Emerson,” he wrote; “good.” 
 (He disagreed violently with other Emersonian effusions in the same 
 essay.) Homer’s secret, if he had any, was not long concealed from 
 Herman Melville. 
 
 But “secret” is probably not as apt a sign of what Melville dis¬ 
 covered in the epics as “pattern” or “figure” (to make use of Henry 
 James’s term). The most rewarding aspect of Melville’s markings, 
 here as elsewhere in his editions of Shakespeare and Hawthorne, is 
 that they do form patterns; rarely casual or isolated, they fall usu¬ 
 ally on the essential threads, forcing the poems to yield the figure 
 woven within them. They are not of course the only figures we can 
 trace in Homer; they have indeed, especially the Odyssey, a queer 
 new look about them, for Melville was not a passive reader.^ His 
 response to great literature was often baffling. But the mystery about 
 it is resolved when we accept the fact that poems like the Iliad and 
 King Lear defy metaphysical laws; they are animate; they have souls 
 of their own and are always growing. This growth is most con¬ 
 spicuous when they are confronted by an imagination as active and 
 creative as Melville’s. 
 
 It is the “figures” which Melville’s markings bring sharply into 
 the foreground that I wish particularly to consider here. Occasionally 
 he marked details for their mere vividness: in the Iliad (III, 232), 
 he was struck by the observation that, though the son of Atreus was 
 the tallest member of the Greek council when it stood, “Yet set, 
 Ulysses did exceed, and bred more reverence.” Images caught his 
 fancy, and a careful exploration of them would heighten our per¬ 
 ception of the tone and rhythm of Melville’s style.® But the great 
 
 2 Since “The Poet” was the essay of Emerson he most heavily annotated, Melville prob¬ 
 ably shared the conception elaborated there of the dynamic interrelation of poet, poem, 
 reader, and object; all working together, co-operating in the creation of newer and higher 
 forms. 
 
 3 E.g., the description of Thetis appearing to comfort the weeping Achilles (I, 360); 
 “Up from the grey sea like a cloud.” This reminded Melville of one of the most effective 
 similes in Paradise Lost. He wrote; “Exhalation. Milton—‘rose like an exhalation’—the 
 Pandemonium Palace.” 
 
54 
 
 R. W. B. Lewis 
 
 majority of the passages Melville checked or underlined have the¬ 
 matic interrelations; they are worth examining.^ 
 
 II 
 
 The Iliad, under Melville’s inspection, emerges as a tragedy: a 
 dark portrait of a world at war, a world in which lonely, grieving 
 men are caught up in vast, indefinable forces and move without hope 
 to meet the violence and death that awaits them, under the rule of 
 implacable divinities. If this appears to be a somewhat conventional 
 view of the poem, we should recall the peculiar comment of Emerson 
 only a year or two before: “True bards have ever been noted for their 
 firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies in the sunshine; Chaucer is 
 glad and erect.” Emerson’s reading was almost exclusively an index 
 to his own mind; as he thought it ought to be: “Nature and books 
 belong to the eyes that see them.” But in Melville, discovery and 
 projection intermingled, and he could discover little sunshine pene¬ 
 trating the clouds which lay thickly over the siege of Troy. The at¬ 
 mosphere he sensed emanated rather from passages he underlined 
 like the following: 
 
 Evermore worst matters put down best. (I, 557) 
 
 because his power is most, 
 
 He will destroy most. (II, loi) 
 
 But Jove hath order’d I should grieve, and to that end hath 
 cast 
 
 My life into debates past end. (II, 330) 
 
 Death—sudden, violent, irresistible—is the identifying feature of hu¬ 
 man experience in such a world. Melville rarely failed to mark the 
 moments of abrupt collision, the language imaging the swift and 
 utter finality of the clanging blow, the instant plunge into Hades. 
 The effect of so-to-speak italicizing these passages (e.g., IV, 556; V, 
 
 ^ I am not concerned with “literary influence.” However, the relation between the 
 Homeric epics and Moby-Dic\ ought perhaps to be sketched here. The reading of Chapman 
 is irrelevant, since it followed Moby-Dic\ by at least seven years; the problem turns on the 
 date of Melville’s reading of the Pope translation. The facts, as I quote them from a letter 
 recently received from Merton M. Sealts, Jr., seem to be as follows: “On 19 March 1848, 
 HM was charged with ‘1 Classical Library, 37 v. ($) 12.23.’ ■ • ■ This is Harper’s series . . . 
 and Pope’s Homer constitutes three of the volumes, nos. 32-34, containing a biographical 
 sketch plus the Iliad and Odyssey. . . . No one knows what’s become of any of these 
 books. . . . Also at some time after 1856 ... he acquired The Poetical Works of Alexan¬ 
 der Pope, with a Life, by Rev. Alexander Dyco, Boston, Little, Brown, 1856. 3 v.” The 
 apparently Homeric overtones to some of the language and incidents in Moby-Dick, were 
 touched on by F. O. Matthiessen in American Renaissance (pp. 460-463). 
 
Melville on Homer 
 
 55 
 
 63, 83; 161; VI, 13) is to draw the outlines of a crowded and com¬ 
 pressed world animated chiefly by pure force. A tragic awareness by 
 the warriors through whom the deadly current flowed did not escape 
 Melville: his marking of the crash of heroes extended to the clear 
 and disturbingly passionless comments of their killers (e.g., Diomede, 
 Achilles) on the inevitability of the stroke of death in human life as 
 they had learned to suffer it. 
 
 But as the last quotation above suggests, Melville saw in the Iliad 
 an ambiguity of power, an obscurity affecting and affected by the 
 relation between man and the gods. He brought to the passages about 
 the gods the imagination which had spoken in Moby-Dic\ seven 
 years earlier: “There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh! ye 
 frozen heavens!” This becomes the spirit of the Iliad too, as Mel¬ 
 ville’s pencil bears down on comparable passages in it, slighting a 
 little certain others which might have softened the pervasive grim¬ 
 ness. An active reader tends to select and order in a novel way. Mel¬ 
 ville selected passages like these: 
 
 He pray’d; Jove heard him not, but made more plentiful the 
 birth 
 
 Of his sad toils. (II, 366) 
 
 The race of Gods is far above men creeping here below. (IV, 
 426) 
 
 The pattern which forms under these markings and literally dozens 
 more like them is almost Puritan in its contours. The bustling in¬ 
 trusion of the gods on either side of the battle is largely forgotten, 
 and we are left with a remote and hostile race, quick to anger, 
 harshly indifferent to the fate of man, interfering only to blast his 
 tenuous hopes. Human will and freedom count for little; an im¬ 
 pression rises from the marked pages of men accomplishing their 
 own destruction in the midst of forces they can neither identify nor 
 control. Melville found no cause for complaint against Homer, if 
 the epic vision was ultimately obscure. He recognized a mystery, 
 and in the mystery he felt he had probed to the meaning. Chap¬ 
 man’s comment, in the discussion following Book XIV, was heavily 
 underlined; he spoke of the “plebeian opinion that a man is bound 
 to write to every vulgar reader’s understanding.” Homer, Chap¬ 
 man said, wrote “darkly.” The author of Pierre knew about that. 
 
 One source of relief could yet be found amid so much darkness 
 and pain: love of family, love of friends. An intense preoccupation 
 
56 
 
 R. W. B. Lewis 
 
 with the value and need of friendship had allowed Melville to trace 
 a compelling theme even in so slight a performance as The Two 
 Gentlemen of Verona; in the Iliad, he could pause over Diomede’s 
 plea for a companion on the secret mission in Book X ( 11 . 196 et 
 seq.): “Two may together see,” Diomede explained. But the most 
 sustained marking in the entire poem occurs in Book VI, from line 
 440 to the end: the parting of Hector from his wife and child. The 
 framework of Melville’s other patterns (violent death, hostile deities) 
 lends a peculiar sense of compassion to this long passage. It has 
 something of the effect produced on a smaller scale by the friend¬ 
 ship of Queequeg and Ishmael in Moby-Dichj. “I felt a melting in 
 me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned 
 against the wolfish world.” The heroes of the Iliad, and especially 
 Achilles, appear in Melville’s edition as terribly alone; Melville found 
 a portion of what he brought to the book, the sense of isolation which 
 had gone into the projection of Ahab. Fighting alone after the death 
 of Patroclus, Achilles has only his magic armor to sustain him; as 
 Ahab, cut off from human companionship, has only the great har¬ 
 poon. The making of the armor (XVIII, 422-501), a turning-point 
 so comparable in significance and power to the forging of the har¬ 
 poon, is marked over nearly a hundred lines. 
 
 m 
 
 The impact of Melville on the Odyssey led it to take the form of 
 a Bildungsroman in which the relation between the characters and 
 the sequence of the events stands for growth of insight into the heart 
 of reality. The metaphysical term is intended since, to judge from 
 the markings, Melville read the Odyssey on a more symbolic level 
 than he did the Iliad. In the latter, his pencil was attracted prin¬ 
 cipally to actions and to the forces which directed them; he stayed 
 with the concrete embodiment; his reading was dramatic. But the 
 passages he noted in the Odyssey (which he apparently read some¬ 
 where in the Pacific in i860) move in the direction of interpreta¬ 
 tion. There are signs of immense enjoyment in the adventures them¬ 
 selves—the Lotophagi, the Laestrygonians, the visit to Hades, the 
 conquest of Ithaca, and the slaying of the wooers—but Melville was 
 primarily interested in meaning. 
 
 The meaning he seems to have found borrows much of its force 
 from the unusual emphasis Melville laid on the sorrows and hard¬ 
 ships of Ulysses and the generalizations about human evil which 
 
Melville on Homer 
 
 57 
 
 they gave rise to: to the point where a rich and spacious poem looks 
 surprisingly gloomier than we have normally regarded it. There 
 are undoubtedly sorrows enough in the Odyssey; but they stand 
 forward in a new way under Melville’s gaze; for that itself showed 
 a tendency towards gloom in those days. Melville noted the re¬ 
 curring description of Ulysses and his dwindling crew sailing on 
 stricken at heart after some frightful encounter; and he made much 
 of Ulysses’s somewhat artful sigh to Nausicaa, that he was the 
 victim of “a cruel habit of calamity” (VI, 257). The author of The 
 Confidence-Man may have taken a bitter personal relish in the dis¬ 
 claimer of Telemachus which he marked: 
 
 Not by any means 
 
 If Hope should prompt me or blind confidence 
 
 {The God of fools) or ever deity 
 
 Should will it, for ’tis past my destiny. (Ill, 309) 
 
 The gods have become no more benevolent than they had been in 
 the Iliad. Both of Nestor’s remarks (III) are checked: 
 
 Not with ease 
 
 The eternal Gods are turned from what they please. 
 
 I know God studied misery 
 
 To hurl against us. 
 
 Passages touching the power of the gods are regularly scored (e.g., 
 V, 222; VI, 283). The grief of the central characters and the severity 
 of the gods join to develop the perception of a wolfish world, when 
 marked passages like the following are added: the reaction of Te¬ 
 lemachus to the dishonor shown his father: 
 
 No more let any sceptre-bearing man 
 Benevolent, or mild, or human be. 
 
 Nor in his mind form acts of piety, 
 
 But ever feed on blood. (II, 348) 
 
 I am deliberately trying to indicate the special nature of Melville’s 
 response to the Odyssey, for if you put together lines and passages 
 like those quoted (and they are typical of thirty-odd more) you 
 begin to create a vision of terror and evil which casts a deep shadow 
 over the beauty and fluid grace which the poem could otherwise be 
 seen to reflect, and its sustained sense of impending triumph. But 
 the passages are there, integral parts of the poem as it stands, in¬ 
 vented by Homer and Chapman and not by Melville; and I can 
 
58 
 
 R. W. B. Lewis 
 
 never read the Odyssey again without being sharply conscious of 
 their presence. The Odyssey moves perceptibly, shifts and re-forms, 
 as Melville’s imagination engages it (as it does under the impact of 
 Joyce’s legend of Leopold Bloom). For if he dims some of the 
 brightness in the poem, he does so by unfolding a pattern whose 
 theme is education, the motion of the human spirit from appearance 
 to reality; a painful process in Melville’s and very likely in Homer’s 
 view. It is a reading which brings the Odyssey effectively close to 
 Moby-Dic\. 
 
 A sign of Melville’s attitude is the particular value he apparently 
 attached to the Telemachiad, the first four books. Melville’s con¬ 
 sistent fascination with the subject of children may have been per¬ 
 sonal and domestic, but it was not unique in the age. Emerson found 
 “a certain tenderness” towards children the symbol of the period, 
 when he looked back at it in 1867; Thoreau reverted again and again 
 to the theme of children as natural poets whose imaginations might 
 yet be spared the deadening effects of characteristic adulthood. Mel¬ 
 ville missed hardly a single allusion to any aspect of childhood in 
 the plays of Shakespeare; and a continuing preoccupation is sug¬ 
 gested by his double-check in the Odyssey of such relatively trivial 
 remarks as the one comparing the ages of Telemachus and the son 
 of Nestor; “His years seem short of yours” (III, 71). The historic 
 impulse to most of this was probably the prevailing concern with a 
 fresh awakening of consciousness emerging from the contemporary 
 tension between tradition and freedom. The transition from youth 
 to manhood could serve both as image and illustration; and this 
 Melville could find in the Odyssey. 
 
 The departure of Telemachus for sandy Pylos assumes an in¬ 
 escapably symbolic quality when Melville’s pencil relates passages 
 like these: 
 
 If fits not you so young 
 To suffer so much by the aged seas 
 And err in such a wayless wilderness. 
 
 (Eurycleia to Telemachus) (II, 545) 
 Why left my son his mother? Why refused 
 His wit the solid shore to try the seas 
 And put in ships the trust of his distress 
 That are at sea to man unbridled horse, 
 
 And run past rule? (Penelope) (IV, 942) 
 
Melville on Homer 
 
 59 
 
 The enterprise of going to sea as an image of the growing-up 
 process in its varied dimensions has long been central for Melville; 
 he even marked a particularly fine use of it by Hawthorne in The 
 House of the Seven Gables. In the first of the pair of quotations 
 above, Melville underlined the adjectives whose contrast deepens the 
 significance of the entire passage: young and aged. It is tempting 
 indeed, contemplating the two passages together, to find a proto- 
 Jungian interpretation in Melville’s mind; for the crucial motion to¬ 
 wards the archaic unconscious which Jung elaborated was reflected 
 everywhere (he believed) in the twin images of shore-and-sea and 
 horse-and-rider—images combined in the question of Penelope. 
 
 But we do not need to go so far afield to follow Melville’s notion 
 of the education-theme in the Odyssey. Going to sea was a way of 
 doing what Thoreau could do by settling down along a tiny lake: 
 he went, Thoreau said, in order “to front . . . the essential facts of 
 life.” For Melville this was fundamentally an intellectual, indeed 
 a metaphysical, venture; and if not m.ore difficult, it was a good deal 
 more harrowing than it had been for Thoreau, since malice and 
 evil were among the facts to be fronted. Both the nature and the 
 peril of the undertaking were suggested in the advice Proteus gave 
 Menelaus, along the margin of which Melville ran a strong penciled 
 line: 
 
 Cease 
 
 To ask so far. It fits thee not to be 
 Sc cunning in thine own calamity. 
 
 Nor seek to learn what learned thou shouldst forget. 
 
 Men’s knowledges have proper limits set 
 
 And should not prease into the mind of God. (IV, 657) 
 
 The echo of Eurycleia’s admonition carried by the impersonal verb 
 (“it fits not”) must have been intended; for the old nurse and the 
 old man of the sea are saying very much the same thing. Both are 
 remarking on the danger, the rashness, the inappropriateness of at¬ 
 tempting to probe too deeply into what Melville called elsewhere 
 “the very axis of reality.” All of Melville’s heroes, like Telemachus 
 and Ulysses, aware of their rashness, take the plunge nevertheless. 
 Melville noted some of the results, as Ulysses (to whom his interest 
 of course shifts, along with Homer’s) struggles ashore on the island 
 of Nausicaa: 
 
6 o 
 
 R. W. B. Lewis 
 
 The sea had soak’d his heart through. (V, 612) 
 
 The hard pass 
 
 He had at sea stuck by him. (VI, 198) 
 
 Both lines are underscored. 
 
 If the poem is some sort of allegory describing the quest of the 
 mind for truth, a prying beyond natural limits into the mind of God, 
 what answer does it offer ? What can be learned by braving the sea, 
 by meeting the challenge of the sea-god—who, as Melville noted in 
 I, 33, “divine Ulysses ever did envy?”^ What is gained in exchange 
 for the buffets, the soaking, the hard pass that stays by one } Ulysses’s 
 experience is contained in the tales he told the court of Antinoiis, 
 the incidents of which Melville marked heavily. But all that the 
 wanderer will ever tell are adventure stories embodying human suf¬ 
 fering; and most of them will be lies. He knew it would be fatal to 
 do otherwise. One of the heaviest markings in the poem, three em¬ 
 phatic lines in the margin, greets the action of Ulysses when he 
 arrives in Ithaca: 
 
 Therefore he bestowed 
 A veil on truth; for evermore did wind 
 About his bosom a most crafty mind. (XIII, 370) 
 
 That scene, in which Ulysses’s impromptu fabrications are affection¬ 
 ately exposed by Athena, can be read as high comedy; a cheerful 
 temperament will normally read it so. But in the framework Mel¬ 
 ville had built it deepens the tragic tone; it has the quality of the 
 fool’s speech in the tragedy of Lear: “Truth’s a dog must to kennel.” 
 When he marked that in 1850 Melville still felt the possibility as 
 well as the compulsion to speak forth what he saw and knew: the 
 sermon he wrote for Father Mapple in Moby-Dic\ concluded with 
 the injunction to “preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood.” But 
 the response to his books convinced him of the impossibility of 
 writing this way; and write the other way, he could not, as he told 
 Hawthorne. By the time he read the Odyssey in the Pacific Ocean 
 he had himself “bestowed a veil on truth”; he had withdrawn into 
 that privacy which none of his biographers has ever fully invaded.® 
 
 ® “Envy” carried the connotation of “malice” for Melville; he so used it in Billy Budd, 
 and he noted the footnote to his edition of Julius Caesar which explained the proximity of 
 the nouns for the Elizabethan. 
 
 ® F. Barron Freeman (op cit.) may be an exception; his careful and sensible account of 
 Melville’s last years and the writing of Billy Budd can help modify opinions like my own. 
 However, even Freeman finds the following quotation from Arnold, underlined by Melville, 
 
Melville on Homer 
 
 6i 
 
 Athena’s response to the elaborate lie of Ulysses is a wondering 
 exclamation: 
 
 Not secure thy state 
 
 Without these wiles, though on thy native shore 
 Thou settest safe footing? 
 
 Triple-checking and underlining those lines, Melville may have felt 
 he knew the answer, knew it was negative. Ulysses had suffered 
 too much at sea; he had discovered the abundance of evil in the 
 heart of reality. However Homer resolved his narrative, in Mel¬ 
 ville’s Odyssey the education of the hero ends in fables or silence. 
 
 the most apt summary of Melville’s final attitude: "There is more power and beauty in the 
 well-kept secrets of one’s self and one’s thoughts than in the display of a whole heaven that 
 one may have inside one” (“Maurice de Guerin”). 
 
Some Notes on the Structure of The Confidence-Man 
 
 John G. Cawelti 
 
 O NE OF THE significant phenomena of recent Melville criticism 
 has been an awakening of interest in. The Confdence-Man} 
 The book has been, until the last ten years or so, the least appreciated 
 of Melville’s longer works, for it is a most enigmatic novel and the 
 range of disagreement over its meaning has been extreme.^ Little 
 attention has been given to the book’s structure, however, and in this 
 article I shall develop a structural analysis that appears to illuminate 
 some of the novel’s important themes and the way in which the 
 author relates them. 
 
 Melville, himself, provides the best clue to his intention in three 
 short chapters, spaced throughout the novel, in which he leaves the 
 narrative thread in brief quasi-philosophical digression. This type 
 of philosophical interlude is familiar. We recall such chapters as 
 “The Whiteness of the Whale” in Moby-Dic\ and the digression 
 on horologicals and chronometricals in Pierre, both crucial to the 
 meaning of those works. In The Confidence-Man, these three breaks 
 not only develop and expand the meaning of the narrative but have 
 the important structural function of emphasizing significant epi¬ 
 sodes: the first stresses a sudden revelation by one of the characters; 
 the second emphasizes the most enigmatic of the many anecdotes 
 woven into the narrative; and the third prepares the reader for the 
 novel’s conclusion. 
 
 Chapter XIV (“Worth the consideration of those to whom it may 
 prove worth considering”) ostensibly explains why one of the char¬ 
 acters approached by the confidence-man has suddenly burst out 
 with the desperate cry: 
 
 ' I would like to express my appreciation to Prof. John C. Gerber for encouragement in 
 the preparation of this paper. 
 
 “Scholarship and criticism are discussed in The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, 
 ed. Elizabeth S. Foster (New York, 1954), pp. xxxiii-xlvii. All citations are to this 
 edition. 
 
The Structure of The Confidence-Man 
 
 63 
 
 “Ah, wine is good, and confidence is good; but can wine or confidence 
 percolate down through all the stony strata of hard considerations, and 
 drop warmly and ruddily into the cold cave of truth? Truth will not 
 be comforted. Led by dear charity, lured by sweet hope, fond fancy 
 essays this feat; but in vain; mere dreams and ideals, they explode in your 
 hand, leaving naught but the scorching behind!”® 
 
 This statement might stand as a summary of one aspect of the 
 novel’s moral content. Yet, it is presented in this peculiar way: a 
 character whom the reader has no occasion for thinking to be other 
 than a good-natured, simple, easily duped country merchant, without 
 insight into the nature of things, suddenly, after a few glasses of 
 wine, breaks forth with it. Immediately after he has spoken, he 
 subsides into confusion, not at all understanding what he has said. 
 Chided by the confidence-man, he can only stammer apologies and 
 retire: “So saying, the merchant rose, and making his adieus, left the 
 table with the air of one, mortified at having been tempted by his 
 own honest goodness, accidentally stimulated into making mad dis¬ 
 closures—to himself as to another—of the queer, unaccountable 
 caprices of his natural heart.”^ 
 
 Chapter XIV takes up at this point. Admitting that this sudden 
 reversal of character is an inconsistency, Melville defends himself 
 on the ground that this sort of inconsistency is more characteristic 
 of real life than the false consistency imposed by most writers of 
 fiction on their material. The reader insists that fiction be based 
 on reality, but is it not a fact, he asks, that in real life a consistent 
 character is a rara avis? Where the lesser author presents only sec¬ 
 tions or parts of life, eliminating the inconsistencies for the sake of 
 clarity and comprehension, the truly great writer will draw life 
 with all its complexities. He concludes: 
 
 Upon the whole, it might rather be thought that he, who, in view of its 
 inconsistencies, says of human nature the same that, in view of its con¬ 
 trasts, is said of the divine nature, that it is past finding out, thereby 
 evinces a better appreciation of it than he who, by always representing it 
 in a clear light, leaves it to be inferred that he clearly knows all about 
 it.® 
 
 It seems that, for Melville, reality is ultimately inscrutable; the 
 things man experiences are only a glittering surface over impene- 
 
 *The Confidence-Man, p. 74. * Ibid., p. 75. 
 
 ® Ibid., p. 77. 
 
64 
 
 John G. Cawelti 
 
 trably dark depths. Yet, at certain times a hint of the depths comes 
 boiling up to the surface, like a great fish, breaking the water, shat¬ 
 tering the calm and scattering men and boats. The representation 
 of such a moment is, for him, the ultimate goal of art. Roberts’s 
 sudden outburst is such a moment, though, like everything in The 
 Confidence-Man, in a minor key. To be presented with its full 
 shock, it must be wholly inconsistent with everything that has been 
 and will be. It must be a reversal, sudden and starthng, of character, 
 action, and tone, for only in this way can it represent the moment at 
 which the mask gives way to the face behind. 
 
 And yet it leads to nothing definite. The insightless, slightly 
 bewildered character, the glittering surface action, the inanely 
 jocular tone, are immediately resumed. So, with Melville, it must 
 always be, for reality remains unattainable; the moment of see min g 
 truth may be only another mask, the sudden inconsistency only 
 another delusion. We are left with ambiguity at the heart of 
 things. 
 
 The second philosophical digression can be found in Chapter 
 XXXIII (“which may pass for whatever it may prove to be worth”). 
 Here Melville rouses himself to reply to “a certain voice,” presumably 
 the reader, who exclaims: “How unreal all this is! Who did ever 
 dress or act like your cosmopolitan.?”® His answer to this charge 
 is particularly striking in the light of the disquisition in the chapter 
 we have just discussed. There he defended an inconsistency by 
 claiming that real life has this characteristic, and that the serious 
 writer should strive above all to represent real life. Here he re¬ 
 sponds: 
 
 Strange, that in a work of amusement, this severe fidelity to real life 
 should be exacted by any one, who, by taking up such a work, sufficiendy 
 shows that he is not unwilling to drop real life, and turn, for a time, to 
 something different. Yes, it is, indeed, strange that anyone should clamor 
 for the thing he is weary of; that any one, who, for any cause, finds real 
 life dull, should yet demand of him who is to divert his attention from it, 
 that he should be true to that dullness.’^ 
 
 He goes on to give a brief rationale of romanticism. Fiction 
 should be real life heightened, nature “unfettered, exhilarated, in 
 effect, transformed.” In this way it can present even more reaUty 
 
 * Ibid., p. 206. 
 
 ’ Ibid. 
 
The Structure of The Confidence-Man 
 
 65 
 
 than real life can show. The concept is quite close to Hawthorne’s 
 as expressed in the prefaces to The Scarlet Letter and The House 
 of the Seven Gables. That Melville has the former in mind is sug¬ 
 gested by his allusion to “the same old crowd around the custom¬ 
 house counter.” 
 
 But Melville has, in effect, reversed himself. In Chapter XIV, 
 he argued that the serious writer of fiction should attend faithfully 
 to such characteristics of real life as inconsistency. Here he insists 
 that fidelity to real life is not the proper course. The writer should 
 heighten real life, should present another world than this one. By 
 implication he is in both chapters discussing his own practice so that 
 the reader is left wondering just what his fiction is supposed to be. 
 Is he dealing with reality in the sense of real life, with the intention 
 of telling us something about it, or is he dealing with reality as real 
 life transformed, seeking to “... minister to what, as he understands 
 it, is the implied wish of the more indulgent lovers of entertain¬ 
 ment, before whom harlequin can never appear in a coat too parti¬ 
 colored, or cut capers too fantastic.”® No matter how carefully we 
 read, we never find a sure answer to this question. 
 
 What Melville has done in these two chapters is the same thing 
 we find him doing on every level in The Confidence-Man. He pre¬ 
 sents something for the reader to hold onto and then snatches it away 
 by presenting its contrary. The result is that the reader is con¬ 
 fronted with a vast maze of conflicting clues to the meaning of the 
 novel. But I do not think this is just a perverted attempt to bedevil 
 the reader. It arises from a serious view of reality as ultimately 
 inscrutable and ambiguous and leads to a dynamic search for some 
 way to structure and represent this reality. 
 
 The third and last of the reflective interludes gives us a good 
 example of the way in which Melville carefully develops his repre¬ 
 sentation of an unattainable reality. Chapter XLIV (“In which the 
 last three words of the last chapter are made the text of discourse, 
 which will be sure of receiving more or less attention from those 
 readers who do not skip it”) is a discussion of the aptness of the 
 phrase “quite an original” as a description of the cosmopolitan, the 
 final incarnation of the confidence-man. We might expect to dis¬ 
 cover from such a disquisition some hint of the author’s attitude 
 toward his protagonist, as we might have anticipated some statement 
 
 * Ibid., p. 207. 
 
66 
 
 John G. Cawelti 
 
 of his attitude toward the relationship between his fiction and reahty 
 in the two earlier chapters. As the interlude begins the author is 
 ruminating on the subject of original characters in fiction. He 
 stresses the rarity of such characters, mentioning as examples Ham¬ 
 let, Don Quixote, and Milton’s Satan, and insists that originality 
 is more than being novel, singular, striking, or captivating. Then, 
 after asserting that the novelist picks up his characters from life and 
 not out of his imagination (we recall the argument of Chapter XIV) 
 he comes to his crucial point: the truly original character “. . . is 
 like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all 
 around it—everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark 
 how it is with Hamlet), so that, in certain minds, there follows 
 upon the adequate conception of such a character, an effect, in its 
 way, akin to that which in Genesis attends upon the beginning of 
 things.”® 
 
 The confidence-man is such a “revolving Drummond light” in 
 that every event in the novel is contingent on him; everything starts 
 up to him and no character or occurrence has any significance 
 or existence apart from its relationship to him. In his terrifying, 
 enigmatic, and ambiguous nature he would be a superb embodiment 
 of the Melvillean universe. Yet, for Melville, even this is saying 
 too much about reality, which must remain, despite all hints and 
 counter-hints, past finding out. In the concluding paragraph of the 
 chapter, the author suddenly gives the lie to the implication he has 
 built up: 
 
 In the endeavor to show, if possible, the impropriety of the phrase, Quite 
 an Original, as applied by the barber’s friends, we have, at unawares, 
 been led into a dissertation bordering upon the prosy, perhaps upon the 
 smoky. If so, the best use the smoke can be turned to, will be, by retiring 
 under cover of it, in good trim as may be, to tbe story 
 
 These three philosophical interludes are of utmost significance 
 to the novel as a whole: they provide a frame of ambiguity within 
 which the enigmatic action of the narrative takes place; and they 
 furnish the key to the structural representation of a dark reality 
 that is, by definition, past finding out. That key is what we might 
 call the incomplete reversal: something is presented, a character, an 
 incident, an idea, anything which might give the reader some clue 
 
 ^ Ihid.. p. 271. 
 
 Ibid. 
 
The Structure of The Confidence-Man 
 
 67 
 
 to the interpretation of the represented reahty; then a counter inci¬ 
 dent or idea appears, powerful enough to destroy the usefulness of 
 the first clue, but insuflScient to provide a foundation for a new 
 interpretation of what has been presented. We are left in the air 
 with no way of resolving two mutually exclusive possibilities. 
 
 II 
 
 The Confidence-Man is structured around incomplete reversals 
 at every level. The book’s two main divisions provide a good 
 illustration. In the first section. Chapters I-XXIII, the confidence- 
 man appears in a series of six major disguises (not including the 
 Mute who will be discussed later, and the elderly Quaker who ap¬ 
 pears only briefly): Black Guinea, the man with the weed, the 
 man with the gray coat and white de, the man with the book, the 
 herb-doctor, and the man from the Philosophical Intelligence OflEce. 
 In each of these disguises he bilks one or more of his fellow pas¬ 
 sengers of varying sums of money. In the second section. Chapters 
 XXIV-XLV, the confidence-man appears in only one mask, the 
 cosmopolitan, and, in this secdon, his role is reversed. He is not 
 the purveyor of false stocks, the false cripple, or the dispenser of 
 Omnibalsamic Reinvigorator, but the seeker of friendship and 
 brotherhood. Instead of succeeding as the earlier confidence-men 
 do, each time he makes his appeal he is rebuffed by distrust, sus¬ 
 picion, indifference, and hosdlity. In the first part of the second 
 secdon, the drinking scene with Charlie Noble (Chapters XXV- 
 XXXV), the reader is even temporarily led to believe that Charlie 
 is the confidence-man, and so Mark Winsome later judges him. But 
 again the reversal is incomplete, and in the scene with the barber, 
 (Chapters XLI-XLIII), the confidence-man is again up to his old 
 tricks, bilking the barber out of the price of a shave. This prepares 
 us for the terrifyingly ambiguous conclusion; when the cosmopolitan 
 mrns out the light and “kindly” leads the old man away, it is almost 
 overpowering, for we are completely unable to evaluate the meaning 
 of this obviously symbolic act. We see the two possibilities: the 
 cosmopolitan is truly kind and is charitably assisting the old man 
 as he had “kindly” purchased a poem from a seedy poet,^^ or he is 
 a devil malevolently leading the old man out on the deck where he 
 can rob and murder him. Yet, to attach either meaning con- 
 
 ^^Ibid., p. 219. The word “kind” is actually employed. 
 
68 
 
 John G. Cawelti 
 
 clusively would require ignoring one set of the clues given earlier in 
 the novel. 
 
 An analysis of the secondary divisions of the novel discloses that 
 some kind of reversal takes place in almost every one. Generally 
 these reversals occur on three levels: there are reversals of roles, e.g., 
 the pursuer becomes pursued,^^ the suspicious, confiding reversals 
 of ideas, e.g., lying becomes truth,^^ charity becomes villainy,^® and 
 fiction, reahty;^® and reversals of the reader’s expectations and inter¬ 
 pretations, e.g., villains become heroesphilosophers, practical;^® 
 philanthropists, surly, and misanthropes, genial;^® and comedy, 
 tragedy.®” 
 
 m 
 
 A detailed examination of the many scenes in the novel is beyond 
 the compass of this paper, but an analysis of two of the crucial epi¬ 
 sodes will demonstrate, I think, how carefully Melville has em¬ 
 ployed the reversal throughout The Confidence-Man. 
 
 Take, for example, the novel’s first scene: the appearance of a 
 mute on the Fidele. The first description given of this character 
 stresses his innocence, weakness, and isolation, but hardly has he 
 stepped onto the boat when he comes to a placard “. . . offering a 
 reward for the capture of a mysterious imposter, supposed to have 
 recently arrived from the East. . . .”®^ The connection between the 
 mute and the mysterious imposter, though hardly sure, is suggestive, 
 and the suggestion is strengthened by the superb bit of irony which 
 immediately follows. The author, commenting on the bandits who 
 had once infested the region, compares them to wolves whose ex- 
 
 As when the collegian, who has been pursued by the man with the weed, 
 becomes the pursuer of the man with the book, ibid., chap, v and ix. 
 
 As when the crippled and misanthropic “Soldier of Fortune” suddenly con¬ 
 fides his true story to the herb-doctor, ibid., chap. xix. 
 
 Cf. the story of Charlemont, a fiction told as a truth, then claimed as a 
 fiction, but actually a truth about life, ibid., chaps, xxxiv and xxxv. 
 
 Cf. the fictitious Seminole widows’ and orphans’ home, a charity employed by 
 the confidence-man to bilk his fellow passengers. 
 
 The novel itself as brought out in ibid., chaps, xiv, xxiii and xliv. 
 
 As in the Noble-Goodman scene, ibid., chaps, xxv-xxxv, when the cosmopoli¬ 
 tan-confidence-man, a kind of villain to this point, becomes a hero of sorts by his 
 bearding of the even more hypocritical and deceitful Charlie Noble. 
 
 Cf. the character of Egbert, disciple of the philosopher Mark Winsome in ibid., 
 chaps, xxxvii-xli. 
 
 Ibid., pp. 200-201. 
 
 Cf. ibid., chap, xlv, the conclusion of the novel. 
 
 ^^Ibid., p. I. 
 
The Structure of The Confidence-Man 
 
 69 
 
 termination . . would seem cause for unalloyed gratulation, and 
 is such to all except those who think that in new countries, where 
 the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase.”^^ 
 
 By this time, the mute has begun inscribing on his slate the 
 Pauline quotations on charity. This, combined with the rough treat¬ 
 ment he receives from the other passengers, stresses again his inno¬ 
 cence and weakness, arousing the sympathy of the reader. This 
 second reversal of the mute’s character and significance reaches its 
 climax in the final description accorded him before he disappears 
 from sight: 
 
 His aspect was at once gentle and jaded, and from the moment of seating 
 himself, increasing in tired abstraction and dreaminess. Gradually over¬ 
 taken by slumber, his flaxen head drooped, his whole lamb-like figure 
 relaxed, and, half reclining against the ladder’s foot, lay motionless, as 
 some sugar-snow in March, which, softly stealing down over night, with 
 its white placidity startles the brown farmer peering out from his 
 threshold at daybreak.^® 
 
 However, the reversal is again incomplete, and the earlier suspicion 
 lingers. We are left with the insoluble question of whether the mute 
 is what he seems, or another mask for the confidence-man. 
 
 This first chapter provides important preparation for the rest 
 of the book, particularly for the second half, which, as we have seen, 
 is a reversal of the first. It announces the two basic idea-complexes 
 of confidence and distrust around which the book centers, and the 
 mystery of the mute foreshadows the later, more complex ambiguity 
 of the cosmopolitan. The barber with his “no trust” sign not only 
 prepares us for his reappearance at the end of the book, but is a 
 prototype of the distrustful and hypocritical characters the cosmo¬ 
 politan will encounter: Charlie Noble, Mark Winsome, Egbert, and 
 then the barber, himself. And the final ambiguity of the mute with 
 the reference to the book of Genesis (Jacob’s ladder) sets the stage 
 for the terrifying enigma of the last chapter with its references to 
 Revelation. 
 
 Another example, the Charlie Noble-Frank Goodman episode, 
 occurs at the center of the book. Frank Goodman, the cosmopolitan, 
 has appeared one chapter earlier. He has first encountered the 
 surly Pitch, by whom he is rebuffed, and then he himself has 
 
 Hid., p. 2. 
 
 ‘’‘Ibid., p. 5. 
 
70 
 
 John G. Cawelti 
 
 been accosted by Charlie Noble, who, it turns out, is another Mis¬ 
 sissippi operator. Charlie invites Frank to join him for a drink and 
 the next ten chapters (XXV-XXXV) retail the ensuing discussion. 
 The episode is shot through with reversals and ambiguities. First 
 of all, the roles of confidence-man and victim are exchanged. At the 
 beginning of the episode it seems apparent that the cosmopolitan is 
 the confidence-man, but Charlie’s behavior is suspicious enough that 
 he soon has the cosmopolitan suggesting that he is the confidence- 
 man. At this point, the cosmopolitan, hitherto the apostle of confi¬ 
 dence, becomes distrustful. Then the roles are reversed again; when 
 the cosmopolitan asks for a loan, Charhe, who to this point had 
 been playing the innocent by eulogizing the virtues of trust in one’s 
 fellow men, is suddenly filled with hissing suspicion. He becomes 
 snakelike; later the cosmopolitan takes on some of the attributes of 
 the snake in similar fashion, in his conversation with Mark Winsome. 
 
 Several idea reversals take place in the Noble-Goodman scene, 
 the most important centering around the antitheses of confidence- 
 suspicion, isolation-sociability, love-hate, and philanthropy-misan¬ 
 thropy. We see, in the actions of both the cosmopolitan and Charlie, 
 a professed confidence and geniality become the most profound 
 mutual suspicion and dislike. In the story of Charlemont, the 
 gentleman madman, we see sociability suddenly succeeded by, and 
 indeed the cause of, intense isolation, while in the anecdote of Col. 
 Moredock, the Indian-hater, the two extremes of sociability and 
 isolation are combined in the same person. The story of the 
 Indian-hater is also an examination of the love-hate polarity, illustrat¬ 
 ing the growth of hate out of love, and then the co-existence of the 
 two in the same personality. These thematic ideas are brought to¬ 
 gether in the extended discussion of philanthropy which is the focal 
 center of the Goodman-Noble episode. In Melville’s world the 
 philanthropist is bound to be surly and isolated from other men, for 
 his love of his fellows makes his expectations too high. Being cut 
 off from society, however, he is cut off from life. On the other hand, 
 the misanthrope, hating his fellows, can at least accept them and be 
 sociable. Neither the surly philanthropist nor the genial mis¬ 
 anthrope has a particularly desirable role, but perhaps there is none 
 other for the honest man. We sense that Melville, himself, feels 
 that he has passed through the stage of surly philanthropy and has 
 
The Structure of The Confidence-Man 
 
 71 
 
 reached a kind of passive acceptance of things in the role of the 
 genial misanthrope, that man described by the cosmopolitan’s un¬ 
 named friend in the parable of the wine-drinker: 
 
 “He said that it illustrated, as in a parable, how that a man of disposition 
 ungovernably good-natured might still familiarly associate with men, 
 though, at the same time, he believed the greater part of men false¬ 
 hearted—accounting society so sweet a thing that even the spurious sort 
 was better than none at all. And if the Rochefoucaultites urge that, by 
 this course, he will sooner or later be undermined in security, he answers, 
 ‘And do you think I don’t know that.? But security without society I 
 hold a bore; and society, even of the spurious sort, has its price, which 
 I am willing to pay.’ 
 
 IV 
 
 The Confidence-Man, then, is not a random collection of epi¬ 
 sodes; it is not the bitter polemic of a despairing man; it is not 
 merely a philosophical leg-pull, but a serious, carefully planned at¬ 
 tempt to present one man’s vision of reality. As the vision sees am¬ 
 biguity at the heart of things, so the basic structural principle is one 
 that leaves the reader alone with an enigma. One cannot deny, 
 I think, that Melville prepared for this result painstakingly and 
 skilfully. 
 
 We find in this novel an attempt to grasp and structure human 
 experience; to represent man’s involvement in an inscrutable cosmos, 
 where life is only a shimmering surface masking the impenetrable 
 depths of ultimate reality. And man is masked; he changes sud¬ 
 denly, meaninglessly, from one role to another, his purposes and 
 motivations always obscure. If there is any wisdom in such a uni¬ 
 verse it can only be that of seeing that there are at least two 
 opposing sides to everything. This wisdom may not make man any 
 happier or more successful, but it may help him avoid the dismal 
 fate of China Aster, the subject of the novel’s last anecdote: 
 
 FOR HE WAS RUINED BY ALLOWING HIMSELF TO BE PERSUADED/ AGAINST HIS 
 BETTER SENSE,/ INTO THE FREE INDULGENCE OF CONFIDENCE,/ AND/ AN ARDENT¬ 
 LY BRIGHT VIEW OF LIFE,/ TO THE EXCLUSION/ OF/ THAT COUNSEL WHICH 
 COMES BY heeding/ THe/ OPPOSITE VIEW.^^ 
 
 '*Ibid., p. 184. 
 
 “ Ibid., p. 248. 
 
72 
 
 John G. Cawelti 
 
 Is there anything conclusive in the novel: a hidden moral sense 
 or a “true map” for navigating the world ? There is, I think, none. 
 Melville is less interested, at this point, in solving the world’s 
 problems than in presenting a paradigm of reahty as he envisages 
 it. The confidence-man, enigmatic, ambiguous, inscrutable, and 
 vaguely terrifying, is such a paradigm. He is also man, many 
 faced, confronting a many-masked world and headed for a destiny 
 that is past finding out. 
 
Hawthorne, Melville, and "Blackness” 
 
 Hubert H. Hoeltje 
 
 T he growth of the reputation of Herman Melville as a writer 
 of fiction, once so astonishing, has become a commonplace in 
 contemporary commentary on American literature. The interest in 
 Melville as a critic, and more specifically as a critic of Hawthorne, 
 is, however, a fairly recent and, to some of us, a starthng phenom¬ 
 enon. For instance, thirteen years after the appearance of R. M. 
 Weaver’s pioneering Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic in 1921, 
 a scholarly selection of Hawthorne’s writings, with introduction, 
 bibliography, and notes, and having a wide currency among our 
 colleges and universities, made no reference whatever, either in the 
 introduction or in the bibliography, to Melville’s “Hawthorne and 
 His Mosses.”^ 
 
 Today the picture is different. Now we have been assured that 
 the so-called “blackness” which Melville thought he found in Haw¬ 
 thorne’s fiction has emerged as “Hawthorne’s trademark,” so im¬ 
 pressed by the significance of Melville’s criticism has one of our 
 contemporaries become. Indeed, so impressed has this critic been 
 by Melville’s comment that he apparently finds this “blackness” 
 even more characteristic of Hawthorne than of Melville himself." 
 Perhaps a veteran reader of Hawthorne might be inclined to dis¬ 
 miss such judgments as evidence of an unrestrained enthusiasm 
 did these views not seem to be supported by the remark of a 
 distinguished Hawthorne scholar that “ ‘Hawthorne and His 
 Mosses’ is one of the great critical essays of the nineteenth cen¬ 
 tury. .. Melville, it appears, has now been adjudged a great critic 
 as well as a great novelist—or, at least, a great critic of Hawthorne. 
 Before this seeming tide of opinion quite over sweeps discretion, 
 
 ‘ Austin Warren, ed., Nathaniel Hawthorne: Representative Selections, with Intro¬ 
 duction, Bibliography, and Notes (New York, 1934). 
 
 * Harry Levin, The Power of Blacl^ness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York, 1958), 
 p. 26. 
 
 * Randall Stewart, review of Inward Sky, the Mind and Heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
 by Hubert H. Hoeltje, Durham, N. C., 1962, American literature, XXXIV, 577-578 (Jan., 
 1963). 
 
74 
 
 Hubert H. Hoeltje 
 
 it might be well to do what appears not yet to have been done— 
 namely, to examine Melville’s essay on Hawthorne’s Mosses in some 
 detail and to determine whether it represents a sound criticism sup¬ 
 ported by irrefutable evidence or whether it reveals a mistaken view 
 which, in our day, has turned much of the comment on Hawthorne 
 into a quagmire of erroneous interpretation. 
 
 One need not quarrel with Melville’s ardor for the prospects for 
 American literature, especially since one can now be confident that 
 our literature has established itself among the hteratures of the 
 world. Nor need one quarrel in its general nature with Melville’s 
 high regard for the fiction of Hawthorne, since that fiction with¬ 
 stood the debunkers of several decades and has maintained its stand¬ 
 ing through the re-evaluations of recent years. As mature criticism, 
 however, Melville’s essay may seem to lose some of its force when 
 one becomes aware that the young man who rather cavalierly takes 
 to task the “endless commentators and critics” of Shakespeare^ had 
 himself discovered Shakespeare only a little more than a year 
 before,^ and could therefore hardly have read very widely in the 
 critics. And what can one say of Melville’s assertion that “ ‘The 
 Mosses from an Old Manse’ will be ultimately accounted [Haw¬ 
 thorne’s] masterpiece,”^ except to reply that apparently the prophecy 
 after one hundred years has not yet been fulfilled.? Even more 
 disturbing, what scholarly charity can accept such a judgment when 
 the prophet has apparently only a very slight acquaintance with any 
 other book by Hawthorne, and so bases his prophecy and makes all 
 his allegations regarding “blackness” as a dominating trait in Haw¬ 
 thorne after reading only one book.?^ Surely even the most gentle 
 reader who judges Melville’s commentary with his eyes open must 
 have some doubts regarding the validity of the essay as a whole. 
 
 I 
 
 Before examining Melville’s major theme, that is, the “blackness” 
 which he is assured he has personally discovered in Hawthorne’s 
 writing, it may not be amiss briefly to scan Melville’s approach to his 
 
 * Willard Thorp, ed., Herman Melville: Representative Selections, with Introduction, 
 Bibliography, and Notes (New York, 1938), p. 334. 
 
 ' Ibid., p. 370. 
 
 * Ibid., p. 345. 
 
 ’’Ibid., p. 385. In a letter to Duyckinck, Melville, now having read Twice-Told 
 Tales, says that they "far exceed the Mosses”! 
 
Hawthorne and Melville 
 
 75 
 
 concluding thought. It is a gradual approach, skilfully made, lead¬ 
 ing the reader from commonly accepted views to the view which 
 Melville offers climactically as deeper and truer than any ever 
 offered before. Early in his essay he speaks of the “noon-day repose 
 of Hawthorne’s spell,” and then, presently, of the melancholy which 
 rests like an Indian summer all over Hawthorne. But these qualities, 
 he says, are only the least part of the genius of Hawthorne which 
 has attracted admiration. In spite of “the Indian-summer sunlight 
 on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul,” the other side, he now 
 asserts, “is shrouded in blackness, ten times black.” Whether this 
 blackness is only an artisdc device or evidence of a Puritanic gloom 
 in Hawthorne himself, Melville at this point is not ready to say, 
 though within the limits of the same paragraph he is ready to say 
 that “the world is mistaken in this Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Then, 
 with an apparently cautious reserve, he approaches the heart of his 
 argument: “Perhaps he does not give us a ray of his light for 
 every shade of his dark.” Having made this advance, he at once 
 qualifies and reasserts his position by saying that the reader need not 
 fix upon the blackness in Hawthorne, nor will all readers discern it, 
 though it will be evident to those best qualified to understand it—a 
 remark surely calculated to encourage the reader to wish to be 
 among the discerning ones. 
 
 Now, too, Melville dissolves the doubt whether Hawthorne 
 treats his subject matter as mere material for art, or whether it 
 represents the man himself, for, like “all true, candid men,” 
 Hawthorne, in Melville’s eyes, is “a seeker, not a finder yet.” 
 Furthermore, in the second part of his essay, after the lapse of the 
 twenty-four hours during which he has read more of the tales in 
 Mosses, and during which he has discovered “Young Goodman 
 Brown,” Melville seemingly throws all qualification to the winds 
 by offering that celebrated story as a “strong positive illustration of 
 that blackness in Hawthorne, which I had assumed from the mere 
 occasional shadows of it, as revealed in several other sketches.” 
 
 In short, when the essay comes to an end, “blackness,” which has 
 earlier been offered as “the very axis of reality,” has become, so 
 Melville is convinced, the basic quality in Hawthorne’s writing, a 
 quality inherent in the constitution of the man Hawthorne, and 
 not a mere device of artistry. And if any doubt may hover in the 
 
76 
 
 Hubert H. Hoeltje 
 
 mind of the reader regarding the meaning of “blackness” as the 
 word is used by Melville, that doubt is dispelled by Melville’s letter 
 written to Hawthorne subsequent to his reading of The House of 
 the Seven Gables, a letter appearing less than a year after the essay: 
 “There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says 
 no! in thunder; but the devil himself cannot make him say yes. 
 For all men who say yes, lie . . . The remark is obviously a 
 caustic reference to Carlyle’s exulting “Everlasting Yea” in Sartor 
 Resartus, and, though more literary in flavor, is no less to the point 
 than a later blunt pronouncement by Mark Twain—namely, “the 
 man who isnt a pessimist is a d-d fool.”® 
 
 If, then, Melville stamps the brand of pessimism on Hawthorne, 
 it will be interesting to examine the major tales and sketches in the 
 one book which Melville has read and to which he alludes. He has, 
 for instance, read the introductory essay, “The Old Manse,” as well 
 as “Buds and Bird Voices,” in which he finds the “noon-day 
 repose” of Hawthorne’s spell, and the delicious apples of the 
 “thoughts and fancies of this sweet man of Mosses,” remarks suf¬ 
 ficiently appreciative. But since these qualities, though granted and 
 shortly to be spoken of as “the least part” of Hawthorne’s genius, 
 presumably discernible even to the “superficial skimmer of 
 pages,” it may be well to point out in particular some aspects of 
 these essays to which Melville makes no specific reference but which 
 may have more bearing upon Hawthorne’s ultimate thought than 
 Melville has seen or admitted. For instance, in “The Old Manse,” is 
 it truly only the least part of his genius that is to be found in Haw¬ 
 thorne’s remark, after a wild day on the Concord with Ellery Chan- 
 ning, “how sweet was it to return within the system of human 
 society”? Is Hawthorne not truly serious when he returns to the 
 Old Manse and home with the prayer “that the upper influences 
 might long protect the institutions that had grown out of the 
 human heart” ? Is he expressing only a soothing pleasantry, and not 
 a deep conviction near “the very axis of reality,” when, reclining on 
 the withered autumn grass, he whispers to himself, “O perfect day! 
 O beautiful world! O beneficent God!” Is he writing only for the 
 
 “Julian Hawthorne, ttathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (Boston, 1885), I, 388. Leslie 
 A. Fiedler, in No! in Thunder (Boston, i960), p. 6, quotes Melville’s comment on 
 Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables as the most explicit of all expressions of the 
 “Modern Muse,” which Fiedler characterizes as “demonic, terrible and negative.” 
 
 "Albert B. Paine, Mar\ Twain, a Biography (New York, 1912), III, 1508. 
 
Hawthorne and Melville 
 
 77 
 
 “superficial skimmer of pages” when he says, in “Buds and Bird 
 Voices,” “But who can estimate the power of gentle influences”? 
 Or, “There is no decay. Each human soul is the first created 
 inhabitant in its own Eden” ? 
 
 One may feel sympathetic with Melville’s finding, in “The Old 
 Apple Dealer,” “the subtlest spirit of sadness,” but the use of this 
 sketch as an example of the “melancholy” which rests all over Haw¬ 
 thorne—the melancholy which Melville employs as a transition to 
 the “blackness” which he is about to introduce—needs the careful 
 examination for which Melville himself has pleaded. If there is 
 melancholy in this sketch, it is not the melancholy of despair. The 
 climactic sentences in the character sketch of the old apple dealer 
 Melville seems not to have observed: “the soundless depths of the 
 human soul and of eternity have an opening through your breast. 
 . . . There is a spiritual essence in this gray old shape that shall flit 
 upward too.” Shall one say that this Christian hope of immortality 
 is not honestly expressed, or that it is the least part of Hawthorne’s 
 genius? This sketch, if it is representative of Hawthorne, is repre¬ 
 sentative, not of a melancholy tinged with “blackness,” but of 
 his idealism and his high hopes for even the humblest of men. 
 
 It is, however, when Melville enters the body of his essay that 
 he becomes most convinced that he has found the true Hawthorne 
 who is pervaded by blackness “through and through.” “How 
 profund, nay appalhng, is the moral evolved by ‘Earth’s Holo¬ 
 caust’. . . .” What is so appalling, one might ask. The poor de¬ 
 ceived girl, who would throw herself into the conflagration, is 
 advised by the good man: “Be patient, and abide Heaven’s will. So 
 long as you possess a living soul, all may be restored to its first 
 freshness. These things of matter and creations of human fantasy 
 are fit for nothing but to be burned when once they have had their 
 day; but your day is eternity.” Is it so appalling to be assured that 
 “Our faith can well afford to lose all the drapery that even the 
 holiest men have thrown around it, and be only the more sublime 
 in its simplicity,” or that “Not a truth is destroyed nor buried so 
 deep among the ashes but it will be raked up at last” ? 
 
 Of course it is the last paragraph of “Earth’s Holocaust” that 
 Melville finds most appalling: “The heart, the heart.... Purify that 
 inward sphere, and the many shapes of evil that haunt the out- 
 
78 
 
 Hubert H. Hoeltje 
 
 ward, and which now seem almost our only realities, will turn to 
 shadowy phantoms and vanish of their own accord; but if we go 
 no deeper than the intellect, and strive, with merely that feeble 
 instrument, to discern and rectify what is wrong, our whole ac¬ 
 complishment will be but a dream. . . Are these sentiments so 
 very different from those of one of Hawthorne’s contemporaries ? 
 
 The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is 
 solved by the redemption of the soul. . . . Love is as much its demand 
 as perception . . . when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object 
 from personal relations and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the 
 same time, kindle science with the fire of holiest affections, then will 
 God go forth anew into the creation. ... Build therefore your own world. 
 As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will 
 unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will 
 attend the influx of spirit . . . until evil is no more seen. 
 
 Do not both passages emphasize love or the heart and the need for 
 the redemption of the soul, and the weakness of the intellect as the 
 sole instrument of that redemption, a redemption following which 
 the many shapes of evil which haunt us shall vanish.? Are we to 
 say, therefore, that Emerson’s Nature, too, ends in an appalhng 
 moral } 
 
 If the nature of the human heart seemed appalling to Melville, 
 it did not seem so to Hawthorne. In the very period at the Old 
 Manse when he was planning “Earth’s Holocaust,” Hawthorne was 
 contemplating another sketch, the plans for which show how com¬ 
 pletely Melville misunderstood him: 
 
 The human heart to be allegorized as a cavern; at the entrance 
 there is sunshine, and flowers growing about it. You step within, but a 
 short distance, and begin to find yourself surrounded with a terrible 
 gloom, and monsters of divers kinds; it seems like Hell itself. You are 
 bewildered, and wander long without hope. At last a light strikes upon 
 you. You peep towards it and find yourself in a region that seems, in 
 some sort, to reproduce the flowers and sunny beauty of the entrance, 
 but all perfect. These are the depths of the heart, or of human nature, 
 bright and peaceful; the gloom and terror may lie deep; but deeper still 
 is the eternal beauty.^® 
 
 ^“Randall Stewart, ed., The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne (New 
 Haven, 1932), p. 98. 
 
Hawthorne and Melville 
 
 79 
 
 It is in reference to “The Christmas Banquet” and “The Bosom 
 Serpent” that Melville finds the “other side” of Ha\vthorne’s soul 
 “shrouded in blackness, ten times black.” Why so? The former 
 is patently an indirect plea for the preciousness of the human af¬ 
 fections, a recurring theme in Hawthorne’s writing; and as for the 
 latter, could Melville have read its conclusion ? “Rosina had 
 emerged from the arbor and was bending over [Roderick Elliston] 
 with the shadow of his anguish reflected in her countenance, yet so 
 mingled with hope and unselfish love that all anguish seemed but 
 an earthly shadow and a dream.” And when the question is 
 asked, “Can a breast where jealousy has dwelt so long, be purified ?” 
 Rosina replies, “O yes. . . . The serpent was but a dark fantasy, and 
 what it typified was as shadowy as itself. The past, dismal as it 
 seems, shall fling no gloom upon the future. To give it its due im¬ 
 portance we must think of it but as an anecdote in our Eternity.” 
 Hope, love, forgiveness. Eternity. Do the ideas encompassed in 
 these words suggest “blackness”? Melville’s inversion of meanings 
 is here surely beyond the bounds of rational thought. 
 
 It is in “Young Goodman Brown,” however, that Melville sees 
 “such a strong positive illustration” of blackness in Hawthorne— 
 presumably because he sees in it “that Calvinistic sense of Innate 
 Depravity and Original Sin” to which he had earlier attributed the 
 “Puritanic gloom” in Hawthorne. That Hawthorne was drama¬ 
 tizing the repulsive elements of Puritanism is a thought that seems 
 not to have occurred to Melville in his hasty two-day reading. 
 
 II 
 
 If these remarks seem unfair to Melville, perhaps the reactions 
 of Hawthorne himself and those of his wife Sophia,^^ may throw 
 some light on the accuracy of Melville’s interpretations, for both 
 read Melville’s reviews when neither as yet knew who was their 
 author. That Hawthorne was pleased by Melville’s generous ap¬ 
 preciation of his book is clear enough from his letter to Evert 
 Duyckinck, though he protests that with his wife’s admiration he 
 should do very well without any other. What may not be apparent 
 at first reading is the fact that Hawthorne limits his remarks to 
 Melville’s praise (not all of which he necessarily accepts), and that 
 he says not one word about Melville’s interpretation of his tales and 
 
 Both letters are quoted in Thorp, p. 423. 
 
8 o 
 
 Hubert H. Hoeltje 
 
 sketches. Sophia in her letter to Duyckinck is of course happy over 
 such an enthusiastic review of her husband’s writing, as she is in 
 her letter on the same subject to her mother. In the latter, however, 
 Sophia indicates clearly enough that Melville has misinterpreted 
 her husband’s thought: “But it is funny to see how he [the anony¬ 
 mous writer, Melville] does not know how this heart and this 
 intellect are enshrined.”^^ Like her husband, she had said nothing, 
 in her letter to Duyckinck, to approve of Melville’s interpretation. 
 In her letter to her mother she had not hesitated to qualify her 
 pleasure in Melville’s review. 
 
 What Hawthorne thought of Melville’s interpretation of his 
 writing after he probably knew that Melville was the author, may 
 be clearly indicated by his remarks on a general review of all his 
 writings by Henry T. Tuckerman in the Southern Literary Mes¬ 
 senger following the publication of The House of the Seven Gables. 
 When Tuckerman’s essay was republished in Uttell’s Living Age 
 on June ii, 1864, shortly after Hawthorne’s death, it was preceded 
 by a letter to Tuckerman from Hawthorne written at Lenox, Massa¬ 
 chusetts, and dated June 20, 1851, a letter which, with the accom¬ 
 panying essay by Tuckerman, will place Melville’s review in proper 
 perspective. 
 
 I have received the Southern Literary Messenger, and have read your 
 beautiful article on my, I fear, unworthy self. It gave me, I must confess, 
 the pleasantest sensation I have ever experienced, from any cause con¬ 
 nected with literature; not so much for the praise as because I felt that you 
 saw into my books and understood what I meant. I cannot thank you 
 enough for it. 
 
 It is obvious that this letter is quite different from the one that 
 Hawthorne wrote to Duyckinck. In his comment on Melville’s re¬ 
 view, Hawthorne had spoken of his pleasure in Melville’s praise, not 
 of Melville’s understanding of his writing. In his letter to Tucker¬ 
 man he minimizes the praise and emphasizes Tuckerman’s under¬ 
 standing. That Hawthorne valued Tuckerman’s comment much 
 more than he did Melville’s is clearly implied. Hence, though 
 Tuckerman’s excellent essay is too long even to be outlined here, 
 some of its more salient aspects are offered as pertinent to a criticism 
 of Melville’s enthusiastic but faulty commentary. 
 
 Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne (Boston, 1897 ), P- *73- 
 
Hawthorne and Melville 
 
 8i 
 
 In the first place, Tuckerman had done what Melville should 
 have done before he undertook to make such broad and sweeping 
 generalizations—that is, Tuckerman had read thoroughly all of 
 Hawthorne’s writing, and hence did not superficially base his judg¬ 
 ment on one solitary volume. Consequently, Tuckerman’s review 
 possesses, among other things, a balance quite lacking in what 
 Melville had to say. It is apparent, too, that Tuckerman had a width 
 of experience in reading, and certainly in reviewing, unknown to 
 Melville. He was aware that the first duty of a good critic is to see 
 what an author has to say, and not merely to express the reviewer’s 
 predilections. Melville’s essay, however revelatory of Melville, is 
 much less satisfactory than Tuckerman’s for the simple reason that 
 Melville ignored this first principle of criticism. 
 
 More specifically, the balance present in Tuckerman’s review and 
 absent from Melville’s is indicated by Tuckerman’s awareness of the 
 variety in Hawthorne’s writing. Instead of reducing all to melan¬ 
 choly and “blackness,” Tuckerman sees not only the variety of 
 subject matter, but also the variety of tone. The tragic element and 
 the comic element, the cheerfulness and the solemnity, the tactful 
 humor and the grave undertone, the “alternating melancholy and 
 brightness which is born of a genuine moral life,” all receive due 
 recognition; hence there emerges not the emaciated author whom 
 Melville’s imperfect vision had imagined, but the healthy and 
 affirmative man and author that Hawthorne really was. Further¬ 
 more, though Tuckerman gives but a nod of recognition to “Young 
 Goodman Brown,” which to Melville seems to have been such a 
 positive illustration of the Ihiritanic gloom in Hawthorne, he fully 
 disposes of the question of such gloom in his comment on The 
 Scarlet Letter, which Melville had not read when he rushed into his 
 broad generalizations. Beneath “the picturesque details and intense 
 characterization” of The Scarlet Letter, said Tuckerman, “there 
 lurks a profound satire. The want of soul, the predominance of 
 judgment over mercy, the tyranny of public opinion, the look 
 [lack.'^J of genuine charity, the asceticism of the Puritan theology, the 
 absence of all recognition of natural laws, and the fanatic substitu¬ 
 tion of the letter for the spirit, which darken and harden the spirit 
 of the pilgrims to the soul of a poet are shadowed forth with keen, 
 stern, and eloquent, yet indirect emphasis that haunts us like ‘the 
 
82 
 
 Hubert H. Hoeltje 
 
 cry of the human.’ ” The profound satire and the indirectness which 
 Tuckerman correctly perceived in The Scarlet Letter, and which are 
 present with equal subtlety in “Young Goodman Brown,” have, of 
 course, escaped the observation of many a “superficial skimmer of 
 pages.” 
 
 But it is among his concluding remarks on The House of the 
 Seven Gables that Tuckerman focuses the final and true aim and 
 accomplishment of Hawthorne as man and author. In reading this 
 statement, one should remember that it had Hawthorne’s own ap¬ 
 probation as what he meant to do in his writing, though that 
 writing itself, to the careful reader, is ample evidence of Tucker- 
 man’s judgment. 
 
 Thus narrowly, yet with reverence, does Hawthorne analyze the 
 delicate traits of human sentiment and character; and opens vistas into 
 that beautiful and unexplored world of love and thought that exists in 
 every human being, though overshadowed by material circumstance and 
 technical duty. This ... is his great service.^^ 
 
 “Reverence . . . human sentiment and character . . . love and 
 thought. . . .” In the recognition of these ultimates, what must one 
 think of the “blackness ten times black” which Melville, in holding 
 a mirror up to himself, saw pervading Hawthorne “through and 
 through”.? What now of the hectic assertion, “There is the grand 
 truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says no! in thunder; but the 
 devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, 
 lie.. . .” Coolly appraised, these remarks of Melville are sophomoric 
 distortions. Sympathetically viewed, they are the words of an un¬ 
 happy, lonely man who longs for the understanding of a kindred 
 pessimistic spirit—one whom he quite mistakenly supposes he has 
 found in Hawthorne.^^ 
 
 As for our contemporary who has convinced himself that “black¬ 
 ness” is “a virtual obsession with Hawthorne,” and that “it became 
 Hawthorne’s trademark after Melville had pointed it out”—well, 
 one should perhaps be willing to forgive what may only be a tender 
 susceptibility to the maladies current in our present-day critical 
 
 Tuckerman’s ^essay deserves to be reprinted because it won such high approval from 
 Hawthorne and because of its inherent excellence. 
 
 “ The story of the friendship of Hawthorne and Melville I have told in some detail 
 in Inward Sky, mentioned earlier in these notes. It was a true friendship in spite of limita¬ 
 tions, respected and valued by both men. 
 
Hawthorne and Melville 
 
 83 
 
 climate. That Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses” is an interest¬ 
 ing essay as revealing somewhat of the literary hope of the time, 
 and much more interesting as disclosing the mind of Herman Mel¬ 
 ville (“a seeker, not a finder yet”), may readily be granted; but 
 as an interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne it is certainly not “one 
 of the great critical essays of the nineteenth century” for the one 
 overpowering reason that it lacks a necessary ingredient of greatness 
 —namely. Truth. 
 
The Domestic Adventurer in Melville’s Tales 
 
 ]udith Slater 
 
 I T HAS BEEN RECOGNIZED that the philosophical development which 
 can be traced through Melville’s novels has important ramifica¬ 
 tions in the tales as well. Six o£ the tales in particular become more 
 meaningful if viewed as a group and as an extension of one of the 
 major philosophical preoccupations of the novels. “Cock-a-Doodle- 
 Doo!,” “The Lightning-Rod Man,” “I and My Chimney,” “Jimmy 
 Rose,” “The Apple-Tree Table,” and “The Piazza” all treat what 
 might be called the “Ishmael” theme. After the wild defiance of 
 the quest and after what we are led to believe is the acceptance of 
 moral ambiguity which saves him, what is the future of Ishmael? 
 That is to say, how can such an individual without sacrificing his 
 complexity of vision adjust himself, as he must, to “home”? Mel¬ 
 ville answers that question indirectly in these particular tales by 
 creating a series of domestic adventurers, widely different in person¬ 
 ality, each of whom stands in a more or less mature relationship 
 to his environment.^ 
 
 The tales have several common denominators. The most con¬ 
 spicuous is domesticity as it is embodied in wives and children, 
 hearths, attics, cellars, rambling country homes, pastoral vistas, and 
 old age. The narrators share certain important characteristics: like 
 Ishmael, they come to terms with reality without denying its 
 ambiguity. Like him, their orientation is humanistic—they share 
 a reverence for the past, a love of meditation, a feeling of kinship 
 with nature and divinity, and an enjoyment of friendship and 
 mirth. In some way, these narrator-protagonists are all forced to 
 defend their values against an encroaching modernism which 
 threatens the spaciousness of their experience; but aside from this 
 outside threat, the narrators are notably secure. The agonizing 
 introspection, the search for the “phantom of life” which dominates 
 the novels, is conspicuously absent from these tales. 
 
 ^ "Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” is a burlesque variation on the theme and must be exempted 
 from the following generalizations. 
 
The Domestic Adventurer 
 
 85 
 
 The acceptance of the narrators must not be confused with 
 defeat, however; for while they admittedly lead tame lives, they 
 are still, in a special sense, adventurers. They have not abandoned 
 the quest but, whether consciously or not, have accepted limits on 
 it. Ishmael foreshadows this development in his figure of the Cats- 
 kill eagle in the mountain gorge: still pursuing the knowledge of 
 “darkness,” the eagle does so within the protective enclosure of a 
 gorge and thus avoids the abyss and the “woe that is madness.” 
 Similarly, these narrators are insulated from the mad quest of the 
 ego; they do not assault the universe but are content to live in “low” 
 houses and to seek symbolic adventure in contemplation. 
 
 I 
 
 “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” enjoys a special status within the do¬ 
 mestic adventurer group. Whereas the other tales are concerned 
 with the manifestation or development of dual vision in a single 
 character, “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” dramatizes the failure of partial 
 vision in two characters. Its method is a less ambitious version of 
 that of Moby-Dicl{: the characters are deployed around a central 
 symbol—the cock—which is ambiguous. Both Merrymusk and the 
 narrator choose to interpret the cock solely in terms of one of its 
 aspects. Their distortions, though opposites, are equally destructive. 
 
 The narrator’s sin is optimistic excess. His “transformation” 
 comes as no surprise to the reader, for from the beginning he dis¬ 
 plays a childish self-indulgence. His peevish mood, we soon dis¬ 
 cover, is occasioned as much by his inability to rid himself of a 
 dun as by the death of a close friend. Then, the triumphant crow 
 rings out and the narrator leaps from one emotional extreme to the 
 other: self-pity becomes self-exaltation; the train, just previously a 
 murdering Moloch coming through the woods like the “Asiatic 
 cholera,” is suddenly “white cars, flashing through the trees like a 
 vein of silver”; and as for the dun—“I’ll club him, by Jove, if he 
 duns me this day,” crows the narrator in high spirits. 
 
 Once he has yielded to the cock’s illusion, the narrator ceases 
 to be merely foolish and becomes a fool. One critic has said that he 
 loses his sense of proportion, renounces social responsibility, and 
 gives himself over to hedonistic self-indulgence.^ While this is 
 
 “ William B. Stein, “Melville Roasts Thoreau’s Cock,” Modern Language Notes, LXXIV, 
 ’iq (March, 1959). 
 
86 
 
 Judith Slater 
 
 generally true, it is doubtful that the narrator ever had a sense of 
 proportion, and we suspect that he yields to the illusion with a fair¬ 
 ly clear percepdon of what is to be gained: it affords, after all, a 
 rather fancy, if not philosophical, justificadon for a hfe of indolence 
 and pleasure. As the story develops we see more and more clearly 
 that it is the narrator who is transforming the cock into an alter 
 ego. He fancies that the cock crows solely for his benefit, to en¬ 
 courage and to compliment him. Even his praises of the cock are 
 a form of self-flattery (“It was... the crow of a cock who knew a 
 thing or two; the crow of a cock who had fought the world and 
 got the better of it”). 
 
 It is not surprising that the narrator admires the cock’s “solitary 
 scorn and independence,” for he too lives solely “on his own ac¬ 
 count.” His hfe is a merry round of loafing, gormandizing, and 
 joking, the latter at the expense of the unfortunate dun who, de¬ 
 spite a sober manner and lean appearance bespeaking conscientious¬ 
 ness and honest need, receives from the narrator only ridicule and 
 physical punishment. 
 
 Merrymusk too is under the cock’s spell, but his delusion is ex¬ 
 pressed in the “woe that is madness.” From his first appearance, 
 as the narrator’s wood sawyer, he gives evidence of an unbalanced 
 personality: he has “a long saddish face, yet somehow a latendy 
 joyous eye, which [offers] the strangest contrast.” He saws steadily 
 all day without speaking and even while sharing the narrator’s 
 diimer maintains a “sullen silence.” The narrator learns from the 
 villagers that Merrymusk in his youth had been a man of extremes, 
 that in the ten years since his marriage he has led a sober and in¬ 
 dustrious existence but has fallen victim to extreme misfortune. 
 Just as there was psychological motivation for the narrator’s trans¬ 
 formation, these details prepare us for Merrymusk’s madness. 
 
 When the narrator visits Merrymusk in his wretched cottage, 
 the latter flaunts his despair, scornfully aware that the narrator will 
 not perceive the truth of the situation. (It is, in some respects, a 
 Benito-Delano relationship, for the narrator is all but blind to the 
 signs of Merrymusk’s distress.) When he is questioned about the 
 cock, Merrymusk hurls back the narrator’s own sentiments, but 
 steeped in such bitter irony that they echo like a curse. The nar¬ 
 rator asks if the sick family really likes the crowing: “Don’t you 
 
The Domestic Adventurer 
 
 87 
 
 like it? Don’t it do you good? Ain’t it inspiring? don’t it impart 
 pluck? give stuff against despair?” The narrator comments that it 
 must be a doleful life for the Merrymusks: “Haven’t I Trumpet? 
 He’s the cheerer... crows at the darkest; Glory to God in the 
 highest! continually he crows it.” The narrator expresses his 
 amazement at Merrymusk’s owning the cock: 
 
 Poor man like me} Why call me poor? Don’t the cock I own glorify 
 this otherwise inglorious, lean, lantern-jawed land? Didn’t my cock 
 encourage you ? And / give you all this glorification away grads. I am 
 a great philanthropist. I am a rich man—a very rich man, and a very 
 happy one. 
 
 For Merrymusk, the cock’s “glory to God” is derisive and 
 blasphemous, and yet he is under the bird’s spell more inexorably 
 than is the narrator. Merrymusk’s madness is his refusal to sell 
 the cock, his masochisdc insistence on steeping himself in his own 
 despair and yielding to the maniacal vision which is only one aspect 
 of the cock. This madness culminates in the diseased ecstasy of 
 his death, which appalls even the narrator, as well it should. But 
 if Merrymusk has succumbed to a distorted vision, no less so has 
 the narrator who, recovering from his fear and yielding again to 
 the cock’s spell, perceives the death scene as one of transfiguradon 
 and triumph, sanctified by the cock’s “Bravo! Hurrah! Three-times- 
 three!” The ending of this “comic” spectacle is uncompromisingly 
 bleak. Both men are grotesque; both have sacrificed their hu¬ 
 manity in indulging in opposite, yet equally devastating, emotional 
 extremes. 
 
 In contrast, “The Lightning-Rod Man” centers on a narrator 
 whose perspective is balanced and in harmony with his world. 
 In emphasizing the satiric aspects of this tale, critics have sUghted 
 the stature of the narrator who, although he fails to rout the light¬ 
 ning-rod salesman from his neighbors’ property, achieves a personal 
 triumph over that “false negotiator.” Against the salesman’s invo¬ 
 cation of fear, the narrator invokes his “faith”: “In thunder as in 
 sunshine, I stand at ease in the hands of my God. False negotiator, 
 away! ... I read in the rainbow, that the Deity will not, of purpose, 
 make war on man’s earth.”® 
 
 ’ Several critics have suggested that the character of the salesman may have been 
 inspired by Cotton Mather’s chapter on thunder in Magnolia Christi Americana: see 
 
88 
 
 Judith Slater 
 
 There may appear slight similarity between the narrator’s 
 Christian view of a sacramental universe and the complicated per¬ 
 spective of an Ishmael, but there is more to the narrator than his 
 final affirmation. Like Ishmael, he combines aspects of the empiri¬ 
 cal and the imaginative. In response to the salesman’s attempts to 
 arouse his fear, he calmly insists: “The reasons, if you please.” His 
 first instinctive response to the stranger, however, has been warm 
 and fanciful: “Sir ... have I the honor of a visit from that illustrious 
 god, Jupiter Tonans.i^” 
 
 The parallel should not be overdrawn, for the boldly speculative 
 aspect of Ishmael is absent from this portrait. While Ishmael un¬ 
 doubtedly would have viewed the lightning as a profoundly am¬ 
 biguous force, the narrator’s “faith” prevents his so doing, although 
 there are suggestions that he has at least considered the malign 
 possibilities of lightning (“Did you hear of the event at Montreal 
 last year ? A servant girl struck at her bed-side with a rosary in her 
 hand; the beads being metal. Does your beat extend into the 
 Canadas.?”). The narrator’s strength derives essentially from his 
 acceptance of the universe and from his humble humanity: his 
 house is a “low” one on top of a mountain, and the symbols with 
 which he identifies are humble—his hearthstone and his rush- 
 bottomed chair. For him, the quest is not to perceive the nature 
 of reality but to sustain his vision of it. His adventure is the con¬ 
 templation of the majestic in nature and the attempt at communion 
 between “clay and sky.” (What excites him about the “returning 
 stroke” of hghtning is its suggestion of a direct response of earth 
 to divinity.) 
 
 While this man lacks the full dimensions of Ishmael, his pro¬ 
 portions are nevertheless grand. In his refusal to be lured away 
 from his fireplace and into the center of the room—that is, to 
 relinquish his breadth of vision—he looks ahead to the more com- 
 
 espccially Leon Howard, Herman Melville (Berkeley, 1951), p. 216, and Jay Leyda, ed.. 
 The Complete Stories of Herman Melville (New York, 1949), p. xxvii. It seems more 
 likely, though, that if Melville used “Ceraunius,” it was as a basis for the characterization 
 of the narrator, since the predominant message of the chapter is the magnificence and 
 beneficence of God as manifested in the voice of His thunder. 
 
 An even closer analogue to the characterization of the narrator is found in Jonathan 
 Edwards’s “Personal Narrative.” Edwards recalls how he “felt God” at the first approach 
 of a thunder storm and “used to take the opportunity, at such times, to fix [himself] in 
 order to view the clouds, and see the lightnings play, and hear the majestic and awful 
 voice of God’s thunder.” 
 
The Domestic Adventurer 
 
 89 
 
 plicated narrator in “I and My Chimney” (hereafter referred to 
 as T’). 
 
 “I” too hves in a “low,” but “wide,” old house, and in the 
 “Chimney” sketch houses are explicit metaphors for approaches to 
 reaUty: for want of abundant space, the narrator explains, town 
 houses are narrower than country houses; town people, to com¬ 
 pensate, vie with one another in the height of their houses. “Such 
 folks, it seems to me, need mountains for neighbors, to take this 
 emulous conceit of soaring out of them.” The wife is, of course, 
 the human embodiment of the town house spirit; her narrow pro- 
 gressivism which insists on an egotistic, unchecked soaring is most 
 vehemently expressed in her open rebellion against the chimney. 
 
 As Stuart C. Woodruff has shown, the chimney which domi¬ 
 nates the house and “I” ’s perspective seems in its broadest sense to 
 represent the entire historical and creative process. To accept the 
 “sober, substantial fact” of the chimney is to accept a temporal 
 framework and thereby gain a sense of identity. The wife’s per¬ 
 version is her inability to accept anything but newness; in her de¬ 
 fiance of the chimney she not only exhibits her own moral deformi¬ 
 ty, but she also threatens that which makes man most fully human 
 —his ties with humanity and his rich hoard of experience, the past.'* 
 
 The conflict over the chimney comes to a head in the dispute 
 over the “secret closet.” “I” tells his wife that “infinite sad mischief 
 has resulted from the profane bursting open of secret recesses.” 
 To be sure, upon first hearing of the closet from Scribe, he himself 
 had been tempted to break in, just as once earlier, a httle out of his 
 mind, he had begun to dig at the foundations of the chimney. But 
 despite these temptations, he has learned that to purchase peace of 
 mind one must govern the overweening curiosity of the ego. To 
 protect his sanity, the eagle stays within the gorge; to maintain his 
 equilibrium, “I” accepts the inscrutability of the universe, just as 
 he has come to accept in “a comfortable sort of not imwelcome... 
 way” the fact of mortality. 
 
 But whatever “I” may sacrifice in height (he neither soars nor 
 plummets into the abyss), he more than gains in breadth. Just as 
 the country provides ample space for the construction of roomy 
 houses, so his way of life is the vehicle for personal growth. De- 
 
 *Scc “Melville and His Chimney,” PMLA, UCXV, 285 (June, i960). 
 
90 
 
 Judith Slater 
 
 spite the loneliness of his domestic situation, “I” lives as full a life 
 as most “real” adventurers. His chimney is his “open sesame” to 
 the realms of human experience and human fellowship. “I” has 
 often been cited as an important development in the theme of the 
 search for self-knowledge which runs through Melville’s novels. 
 At the very least we can say that in this sketch Melville dramatizes 
 in a quiet domestic context one method of existing in a hostile en¬ 
 vironment without sacrificing one’s personal development or hap¬ 
 piness. 
 
 “Jimmy Rose” uses some of the same materials as “My Chim¬ 
 ney,” although its focus is quite different. The characters are nearly 
 identical: both stories have a conservative, sentimental old narrator 
 whose “progressive” wife and daughters are intent on remodeling 
 an old house. The more important tliematic similarity has not been 
 noticed, however, because most analyses of “Jimmy Rose” pass 
 over the narrator to concentrate on Jimmy’s story, which is general¬ 
 ly treated as a charming and compassionate study of a failure who 
 triumphs over his adversity. James W. Gargano takes exception 
 to such a reading; he insists that “Jimmy Rose” is the story of a 
 man whose adjustment to failure is made without any moral growth, 
 told by a narrator who, although sentimental and compassionate, 
 manages to suggest the truth about Jimmy’s pride which keeps him, 
 even on his deathbed, from self-knowledge.® 
 
 Mr. Gargano’s analysis is, in the main, soundly convincing, al¬ 
 though his treatment of the narrator as an experimental refinement 
 is not entirely satisfactory. If we say that the narrator is simply a 
 device for heightening the realism and the subtlety of the narration, 
 then we have to admit that the fairly lengthy account of the nar¬ 
 rator’s relationship to his house is digressive and delays Jimmy’s 
 story unjustifiably, and that the rich symbolism of that prologue is 
 equally irrelevant. It seems scarcely possible that such an artistic 
 flaw should occur in a story otherwise so subtly constructed. The 
 shape of “Jimmy Rose” is more satisfactorily accounted for if the 
 narrator is viewed as part of the thematic pattern—as a moral yard¬ 
 stick for Rose and his society. 
 
 The narrator is an old man, heir to a “great old house” whose 
 roots are in the past. Like the chimney, the house has been sub- 
 
 ® “Melville’s Rose,’ ’’ Western Humanities Review, XVI, 276-280 (Summer, 
 
 1962). 
 
The Domestic Adventurer 
 
 91 
 
 jected to various attempts at modernization: its romantic shutters 
 and its “fine old pulpit-like porch” have been removed. Like the 
 “wax nose” on the chimney, the “graft of modernness” on the 
 house presents an incongruous aspect; but just as the essential 
 dimensions of the chimney had been preserved, so too the house in 
 its essence (its inside) has not been altered. 
 
 There is one room in pardcular which attracts the narrator— 
 “the parlor of the peacocks.”® Here a small leak in the eaves has, 
 over a period of time, “sadly dimmed” the wallpaper on the north 
 wall. And yet in the bedraggled peacocks on that wall, the 
 narrator finds a curious pleasure: 
 
 Yet so patiently and so pleasandy, nay, here and there so ruddily did 
 they seem to bide their bitter doom, so much of real elegance still lin¬ 
 gered in their shapes, and so full, too, seemed they of a sweet engaging 
 pensiveness, meditating all day long, for years and years, among their 
 faded bowers, that though my family repeatedly adjured me (especially 
 my wife, who, I fear, was too young for me) to destroy the whole hen¬ 
 roost, ... I could not be prevailed upon, however submissive in other 
 things. 
 
 Both “I” and this narrator, then, stand firm against their fami¬ 
 lies’ attempts to alter the essence of things. Both, in identifying 
 themselves within a temporal dimension, have arrived at a cheerful 
 acceptance of mortality, presenting a sharp contrast to their wives 
 who are unable to accept the “north” side—the fact of death and 
 decay. (“I” ’s wife, it will be remembered, persisted in planting 
 flower beds on the north side where they could not live.) Both 
 have the habit of meditation: just as “I” enjoys the meditative com¬ 
 panionship of his chimney and pipe, this narrator chooses as his 
 favorite companions the elegant, pensive peacocks. The humanity 
 of both narrators, then, derives from a more or less philosophical 
 acceptance of things and people as they are. 
 
 To be sure, the narrator in “Jimmy Rose” has decided limita¬ 
 tions: his sentimentality and kindness cloud his perceptions about 
 Jimmy. Occasionally he skirts the truth, as for example when he 
 indirectly suggests that Jimmy’s flaw was a “weak love of vain 
 display,” but he can go only so far and the final ironies must be 
 perceived by the reader. 
 
 * Although, like * 1 ,” he too is fond of his huge, mysterious cellar, rich in ruin. 
 
92 
 
 Judith Slater 
 
 It is, however, the moral presence of the narrator in the tale that 
 heightens those ironies; he provides a continual contrast. For 
 example, Jimmy’s story is framed by the quiet meditative atmos¬ 
 phere of the parlor of the peacocks, an atmosphere which opposes 
 itself sharply to the environment of Jimmy; his society had no roots 
 in the past, no habit of meditation, no capacity for feeling—in 
 short, no inner life. Jimmy, who must be judged both as a child 
 and victim of his society, cannot escape comparison with the nar¬ 
 rator who refuses to judge him; we see Jimmy as a shrunken, piti¬ 
 ful, yet repulsive creature. Unlike the narrator, he is unable to 
 adjust himself to change or to accept the ravages of time. (Where¬ 
 as the narrator feels an affinity for the bedraggled peacocks, Jimmy 
 preserves artificially the roses in his cheeks.) It is thus the narrator 
 who unconsciously gives the portrait of Jimmy’s moral degeneracy 
 its final poignancy, for despite his limitations he represents an ap¬ 
 proach to old age which is truly dignified: he is the real coin and 
 Rose’s society the counterfeit medal. 
 
 The domineering, “modernistic” wife and the hubsand submis¬ 
 sive in all but one particular reappear in “The Apple-Tree Table.” 
 This sketch is a farcical treatment of the domestic conflict which 
 figmes in “My Chimney” and, to a lesser extent, in “Jimmy Rose.” 
 But more interesting, “The Apple-Tree Table” traces an individual’s 
 progress toward a mature perspective, records, so to speak, the birth 
 of a domestic adventurer. 
 
 The symbolic center of the story is the ambiguous attic which 
 contains elements of the grotesque and the beautiful: it is insect- 
 infested but also festooned with cobwebs which shine “like Bagdad 
 tissues and gauzes”; it is a graveyard of human accumulations and 
 yet it contains the “pulpit-like platform” which leads to the scuttle 
 opening into “living greenness” (perceived by the narrator in terms 
 of resurrection). Like cellars in the other tales, the attic reaches 
 far back into a mysterious past; in this case, the mystery is given 
 more definite outlines: the narrator discovers in the attic a document 
 resembling “the original bond that Doctor Faust gave to Mephis- 
 topheles,” a broken telescope, and a staved-in celestial globe—^all sug¬ 
 gestive of the vanity of the search for knowledge. In one of its 
 aspects, then, the attic represents the realm of forbidden knowledge, 
 the secret closet whose recesses it is profane to search. But, on the 
 
The Domestic Adventurer 
 
 93 
 
 Other hand, the attic leads to “living greenness” and out of it comes 
 the beautiful bug. 
 
 The attic, like the whale and like the cock, is a fusion of the 
 demonic and the divine. Its repulsive, deathly aspect warns of the 
 danger of spending too much time there, but its exotic mystery 
 and its associations with resurrection suggest that not to know the 
 attic is to be somehow impoverished. It is significantly the nar¬ 
 rator, the only person in the story capable of moral and intel¬ 
 lectual growth, who visits the attic. The wife is scornful of all 
 that is old and “unfashionable” and the daughters fearful of ex¬ 
 perience which would contradict their roseate vision of life. 
 
 Whereas the narrators in “My Chimney” and “The Lightning- 
 Rod Man” were a serious blend of pragmatism and imagination, 
 this narrator, at first, is an obviously comic blend, a perpetual con¬ 
 test between “panic and philosophy”: “In a strange and not un¬ 
 pleasing way, I gently oscillated between Democritus and Cotton 
 Mather.” 
 
 The absurdity of being “all Democritus” is illustrated by the 
 wife. Upon first hearing the ticking in the table, she wants to cure 
 it speedily with an application of roach powder or a sound whip¬ 
 ping. In rejecting her “cures” the husband gently reminds her 
 that there is a mystery about the table which they ought to respect: 
 “It’s a queer table, wife; there’s no blinking it.” (We are reminded 
 of “I” ’s admonition to his wife about the “fact” of the chimney.) 
 Wildly impatient, the wife later proposes cutting into the wood 
 with a knife. But again her husband prevails upon her to wait, 
 for he is now imaginatively involved with the portending event 
 and is anxious to see what all the “warm nursing” is about to hatch. 
 
 The cryptic ending of the sketch suggests that the narrator, un¬ 
 like his wife and daughters, has recognized in the event an am¬ 
 biguity which he has not yet fully digested. He accepts neither 
 the factual explanation of the scientist nor the simple-minded, 
 rapturous belief of Julia (for the bug did die the next day).’ There 
 is little doubt that the narrator has gained from the experience. 
 His refusal to accept a simple or easy explanation is a significant 
 step beyond his earlier comic oscillations; it is the refusal to deny 
 
 ^ See Richard Harter Fogle, Melville's Shorter Tales (Norman, Okla., i960), p. 84, 
 who similarly contends that the last word lies with “the introspective and finally un¬ 
 committed narrator [who] ... does not choose to speak it.” 
 
94 
 
 Judith Slater 
 
 complexity characteristic of a balanced view. This dawn of a new 
 perspective is also evident in the playful irony with which the 
 narrator takes his leave of the reader: unbelievers, he suggests, 
 should come to view the exact spots where the bugs emerged, which 
 his daughters have marked in somewhat the same way as the spots 
 “where the cannon balls struck Brattle Street Church.” As if the 
 casual observer could “know” the bug without the imaginative 
 experience of it! 
 
 The last of this group of stories, “The Piazza,” in several ways 
 epitomizes the theme of the domestic imaginative adventure. This 
 sketch has the familiar setting and symbolic motifs: a wide, old- 
 fashioned country house, its stone quarried from “the heart of the 
 Hearth Stone Hills,” set amidst the splendor of Greylock and his 
 surrounding hills. Again, the narrator is contemplative and con¬ 
 servative in his reverence for a tranquillity and constancy which he 
 associates with the past. As soon as he has occupied his new home, 
 he decides that a piazza must be built. The significance of the 
 covered porch is made explicit in his contrast of spiritual ad¬ 
 venturers of the past and those of his own day: 
 
 For though, of old, when reverence was in vogue, and indolence was not, 
 the devotees of Nature, doubtless, used to stand and adore—just as, in 
 the cathedrals of those ages, the worshipers of a higher Power did—yet, 
 in these times of failing faith and feeble knees, we have the piazza and 
 the pew. 
 
 Later, he compares his experiences on the deck of the piazza to 
 those of a sea adventurer on his ship’s deck. Taken together, these 
 two comparisons are an explicit formulation of the motif underly¬ 
 ing the stories I have discussed: the transmutation of the grand 
 quest into a tamer mode of adventure. 
 
 Like the other narrators, this one is determined to be an ad¬ 
 venturer, however feeble his knees. Just as “I” recognizes his 
 chimney as the central fact of his existence, so this narrator in 
 building his piazza to the north yields to the overwhelming pres¬ 
 ence of Greylock. (He is derided for his “winter piazza” much 
 as the narrator in “Jimmy Rose” is abused for defending his north 
 wall.) But although the narrator is an intelligent and imaginative 
 man, he has yet to realize the full significance of his choice of ex- 
 
The Domestic Adventurer 
 
 95 
 
 posures. The burden of the sketch, as one critic has remarked, is 
 his “progress from immaturity to maturity.”* 
 
 Recovering from an illness, the narrator experiences a revulsion 
 against his Chinese creeper after discovering worms among its 
 leaves: “millions of strange, cankerous worms, which, feeding upon 
 those blossoms, so shared their blessed hue, as to make it unblessed 
 evermore—worms, whose germs had doubtless lurked in the very 
 bulb which, so hopefully, I had planted.” His mood is close to that 
 of Ishmael at the conclusion of “The Whiteness of the Whale.” 
 For him, as for Ishmael, it is the suggestion of evil at the very core 
 of existence which appalls. The thought is so overwhelming as 
 to upset temporarily the emotional equilibrium of both men, but 
 while Ishmael’s reaction is to identify himself with Ahab’s resolve 
 to destroy the emblem of the evil, this narrator’s reaction is less 
 heroic: he seeks an escape in fantasy from the ambiguity suggested 
 by the cankered flower and accordingly sets out to discover the 
 fairy ring which sparkles on the mountain. 
 
 With the discovery comes the inevitable disillusion: the fairy 
 window is fly-specked; the sun that gilds the cottage also burns and 
 blinds its human tenant; the fairy lore proves to be that of suf¬ 
 fering and isolation. Resolved to be done with “real” adventure, 
 the narrator returns to his piazza where the scenery is “magical— 
 the illusion so complete” and he can forget the weary face behind 
 the golden window. The knowledge of woe, however, has left its 
 indelible mark: “But, every night, when the curtain falls, truth 
 comes in with darkness.... To and fro I walk the piazza deck, 
 haunted by Marianna’s face, and many as real a story.” 
 
 As critics have pointed out, the experience does broaden the 
 narrator’s perspective. He learns to accept the dark truth of the 
 north exposure, but he is still able to enjoy the illusion of beauty. 
 Yet, there is something distinctly unsatisfactory about the resolu¬ 
 tion. Doubtless the narrator suffers sincerely, but there is an arti¬ 
 ficiality about enjoying illusion by day and wrestling with truth by 
 night and within the protective enclosure of a piazza. Certainly he 
 is wise to insulate himself from the “woe that is madness,” but he 
 falls short of the truly comprehensive perspective which can look 
 
 ’ Darwin T. Turner, “A View of Melville’s Tiazza,’ ” College Language Association 
 Journal, VII, 57 (Sept., 1963). Both Mr. Turner and Mr. Fogle interpret the narrator’s 
 inability to delight in hb Chinese creeper as symptomatic of a limited perspective. 
 
96 
 
 Judith Slater 
 
 Steadily on a universe in which good and evil live side by side day 
 and night. The narrator lives in a divided realm and suffers from 
 his inability to reconcile the halves. 
 
 n 
 
 Although none of the narrators, with the possible exception of 
 “I,” measures up to Ishmael, nearly all of them possess to some 
 degree a doubleness of vision which was foreshadowed in Ishmael’s 
 development. The stories suggest Melville’s continuing concern 
 with the relation of the individual to an ambiguous universe, but 
 they show him consciously adapting that theme to what Richard 
 Chase has called “lower, but more stable levels of being.”® 
 
 These domestic adventurers, despite their naivete and other 
 limitations, have something essential to tell us about Melville’s 
 thinking during that period of personal crisis in the fifties in which 
 the tales were written. The protagonists in some way all illustrate 
 the importance of accepting certain limitations to the search for 
 self-knowledge and for knowledge of the universe. (Conversely, 
 the “villains” in these tales illustrate the danger of creating personal 
 versions of reality which, of necessity, will involve distortion and 
 will end up by warping their creators.) The protagonists who ad¬ 
 just most successfully are those who acknowledge the “forbidden 
 enclosures,” who, unlike the gander in “My Chimney,” wear their 
 “collar of the Order of the Garotte” willingly. Self-strangulation, 
 Melville seems to be saying, is the price of insatiate curiosity. The 
 true intellectual and emotional development is not a soaring up¬ 
 ward or plunging downward, but a gradual broadening process—a 
 creative act whereby the individual honestly and yet modestly con¬ 
 fronts the complexity of experience and assimilates it. 
 
 '‘Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York, 1949), p. 143. 
 
Redburn and the Failure of Mythic Criticism 
 
 James Schroeter 
 
 T he usual critical opinion of Redburn is that it is a gloomy 
 book. Some recent critics, including William Gilman and Ed¬ 
 ward Rosenberry, have pointed out comic elements in it, and when 
 the book first appeared it was praised mainly for its “freshness” 
 and “humor.” But ever since the Melville revival of the twenties, 
 the critics, perhaps because they were trying to stress that the book 
 ought to be taken seriously, have been calling it a “dark” book, a 
 “bitter” book, a self-pitying book, a tragedy of some kind, or a re¬ 
 flection of Melville’s own misery.^ Commenting on the period when 
 Melville was composing it, Lewis Mumford observes: 
 
 Now, for the first time, Melville is conscious of the black maggot within 
 him, deposited as a mere egg in his youth, and growing day by day, 
 nourished by his later disappointments, sorrows, frustrations. Things 
 have begun to go badly: he thinks back without difficulty to times when 
 they were even worse. The physical misery of those early years, the 
 patched clothes, the bad food, the rough treatment of the sailors, the 
 feeling of homelessness, the consciousness of being an Ishmael—all these 
 experiences tallied point by point with the world outside, its cruelty, its 
 misery, its sordidness and vice.^ 
 
 Similarly, F. O. Matthiessen says that both Redburn and White- 
 Jacket “reveal that the actual sufferings of mankind had been so im¬ 
 pressed upon [Melville’s] consciousness that none of the optimistic 
 palliatives or compensations of his age could ever explain them 
 away. As was the case with Keats, the miseries of this world became 
 misery for him, and would not let him rest.”® Newton Arvin 
 writes: “Blows and hard words are mostly Redburn’s lot on the 
 
 * Edward H. Rosenberry, Melville and the Comic Spirit (Cambridge, Mass., 1955). 
 William Gilman, Melville’s Early Life and Redburn (New York, 1951), pp. iTy-^ys. 
 A summary of the early reviewers and their comments on the humor is contained in Gil¬ 
 man, Appendix D, “The Reputation of Redburn," pp. 274-281. 
 
 * Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision, rev. ed. (New 
 York, 1962), p. 72. (The book originally appeared in 1929.) 
 
 “ F. O. Mathiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson 
 and Whitman (New York, 1941), p. 396. 
 
98 
 
 James Schroeter 
 
 Highlander, yet he suffers not only from the inhumanity of men 
 but from the spectacle of their depravity generally,”^ 
 
 I 
 
 Despite the general stress on the gloomy tone of the book, there 
 have been two critical methods of interpreting it, two radically dif¬ 
 ferent frameworks into which critics have tried to fit it. The first, 
 which might be called the biographical framework, is most clearly 
 represented in the books on Melville written in the twenties by 
 Raymond Weaver, John Freeman, and Lewis Mumford. “In Red- 
 burn, Melville went back to his youth and traced his feelings about 
 life and his experience up to his eighteenth year,” says Mumford. 
 “The book is autobiography, with only the faintest disguises: 
 Bleecker Street becomes Greenwich Street, and the other changes 
 are of a similar order.”® 
 
 The last major reading of Redburn as autobiography was Wil¬ 
 liam Gilman’s Melville’s Early Life and Redburn (1951), which 
 delivered, or was intended to deliver, the death blow to the bio¬ 
 graphical school by demonstrating painstakingly that the book is 
 not “autobiography, with only the faintest disguises.” But in any 
 event the biographical mode of reading Redburn was already dying 
 at the time Gilman’s book appeared, a victim of widespread changes 
 in the fashions of literary criticism and of a shift away from the 
 biographical method of reading Melville. By about 1950, a second 
 method, which might be called the “mythic” method, had already 
 taken root, the most influential instance of it being an interpretation 
 in Newton Arvin’s Herman Melville. 
 
 Arvin’s main point is his statement of what he takes to be 
 Redburn s “inward subject”: 
 
 The outward subject of the book is a young boy’s first voyage as a sailor 
 before the mast; its inward subject is the initiation of innocence into 
 evil—the opening of the guileless spirit to the discovery of “the wrong,” 
 as James would say, “to the knowledge of it, to the crude experience of 
 it.” The subject is a permanent one for literature, of course, but it has 
 also a peculiarly American dimension, and in just this sense, not in any 
 other, Redburn looks backward to a book like Brockden Brown’s Ormond 
 as well as forward to The Marble Faun and to so much of James himself. 
 
 ‘Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York, 1950), p. 104. 
 
 '^Mumford, p. 71. 
 
Redburn and Mythic Criticism 
 
 99 
 
 Wellingborough Redburn sets out from his mother’s house in a state 
 of innocence like that before the Fall, a state like that of Brown’s Q)n- 
 stantia Dudley or James’s Maisie Farange, but he has hardly gone a mile 
 from home before the world’s wickedness and hardness begin to strip 
 themselves before him. Man, Redburn quickly finds, is a wolf to man.® 
 
 The point that Redburn is concerned in some way with “the initia¬ 
 tion of innocence into evil” is too fundamental to have escaped de¬ 
 tection. For instance Matthiessen had noted in 1941 that “the 
 account of Redburn’s first voyage is a study of disillusion, of in¬ 
 nocence confronted with the world, of ideals shattered by facts,”’ 
 But Arvin was the first critic who attempted in a unified way to 
 substitute the “initiation” theme for the autobiographical one as a 
 broad pattern into which details of character, incident, and symbol 
 could be fitted. 
 
 Arvin does this by selecting a number of more or less vivid de¬ 
 tails for symbolic interpretation—the character Jackson, “the first 
 of Melville’s full-length studies of ‘depravity according to nature,’ ” 
 and a figure on whom, according to Arvin, all the “accumulated 
 evil ... is focused so concentratedly” as to “raise him to something 
 like heroic stature”; Melville’s “wonderful series of Hogarthian 
 evocations” of Liverpool, which Arvin takes to be Melville’s “sym¬ 
 bol of human iniquity”; the London chapter concerned with “Alad¬ 
 din’s Palace,” which Arvin identifies as “the opulent counterpart 
 of the ‘reeking’ and ‘Sodom-like’ dens in Liverpool, where Red- 
 burn’s shipmates indulge their squalid vices”; the imagery of “di¬ 
 sease, disaster and death,” especially the dead sailor who is thrown 
 overboard and the suicide of the drunken sailor, which Arvin 
 takes to be part of the “metaphor of death and rebirth, of the pas¬ 
 sage from childhood and innocence”; a series of humble “anti¬ 
 romantic” or “shrunken” symbols—the glass ship, the guidebook 
 to Liverpool, Redburn’s moleskin shooting jacket; and the ship¬ 
 board epidemic among the immigrants, which Arvin calls “the 
 symbolism of plague and pestilence that had been or was to prove so 
 expressive for a long series of writers from Defoe and Poe to Thomas 
 Mann.”® The point, in other words, that Arvin seems to be striving 
 
 * Arvin, p. 103. 
 
 ’ Matthiessen, p. 396. 
 
 ® Arvin, pp. 104-109. 
 
100 
 
 James Schroeter 
 
 to make is that practically the whole of Redburn’s experience with 
 the outside world is with various guises of horror, death, and 
 depravity. 
 
 Although clearly Arvin selected the features and stressed the 
 symbolic horror in the way he did, even at the risk of appearing 
 to strain and exaggerate slightly, because he wanted to lend sub¬ 
 stance to his “initiation” theory, his points seem to have been a 
 guide to subsequent critics. For instance, Ronald Mason, whose 
 study of Melville appeared the year after Arvin’s, takes up the guide¬ 
 book, the glass ship, the violent deaths, the Liverpool slums, and 
 Jackson, whom he describes as “personified iniquity.”® R. W. B. 
 Lewis takes up the epidemic, the guidebook, Jackson—who “reveals 
 to Redburn the power of the scabrous,” and Liverpool and its 
 “stench of corruption.”^® Harry Levin, mThe Power of Blackness, 
 confines himself mainly to Jackson and Liverpool.^^ But the im¬ 
 portant point is that Arvin’s central idea, that the real subject of 
 Redburn is the “initiation of innocence into evil,” has formed a 
 main tenet—perhaps the main tenet—of Redburn criticism since 
 about 1950. Two independent studies, James E. Miller’s “Redburn 
 and Whitejacket: Initiation and Baptism” (1959) and Heinz 
 Kosok’s “A Sadder and a Wiser Boy: Herman Melville’s Redburn 
 as a Novel of Initiation” (1965), adopt the initiation idea as a 
 framework; and much of the incidental comment on Redburn 
 either explicitly or implicitly accepts the initiation idea in much 
 the way earlier critics once accepted the idea that Redburn was 
 autobiography.^^ “In Redburn (1849), the Adamic coloration of 
 the experience which most interested Melville became explicit,” 
 according to R. W. B. Lewis. “This has been remarked by Mel¬ 
 ville’s best commentator, Newton Arvin, who observes that the 
 boy-hero of the novel ‘sets out from his mother’s house in a state 
 of innocence like that before the fall’; and the voyage to Liver- 
 
 ® Ronald Mason, The Spirit Above the Dust: A Study of Herman Melville (London, 
 1951). PP- 71-78. 
 
 R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago, 1953), pp. 136-138. 
 
 “Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (New York, 1958), pp. 178-180. 
 
 James E. Miller, “Redburn and Whitefacket: Initiation and Baptism,” Nineteenth 
 Century Fiction, XIII, 273-293 (March, 1959). Heinz Kosok, “‘A Sadder and a Wiser 
 Boy’: Herman Melville’s Redburn as Novel of Initiation,” fahrbuch fiir Amerikastudien, 
 X, 126-152 (1965). Other critics who refer to Redburn as a novel of "initiation” include 
 Robert Spiller, Merlin Bowen, Ronald Mason, and R. W. B. Lewis. 
 
Redburn and Mythic Criticism 
 
 lOI 
 
 pool and back comprises for young Redburn ‘the initiation of in¬ 
 nocence into evil.’ 
 
 The “mythic” interpretation of Redburn first appeared about the 
 time that a wave of books which either argued for, or explicitly 
 applied, a mythic method to the interpretation of American litera¬ 
 ture was gathering strength—for instance, Richard Chase’s Herman 
 Melville (1949), Chase’s Quest for Myth (1949), and Henry Nash 
 Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth 
 (1950). These were followed by R. W. B. Lewis’s The American 
 Adam (1955), and after that a deluge of studies which reinterpreted 
 Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Faulkner, and Heming¬ 
 way in the light of mythic quests and patterns. In other words the 
 reinterpretation of Redburn which has been going on for the past 
 fifteen years must be seen in the context of a broad critical move¬ 
 ment and as a contribution to the movement, much in the way that 
 the biographical books on Melville by Weaver, Freeman, and 
 Mumford were a contribution to the biographical method of the 
 twenties—the style represented by Van Wyck Brooks’s The Ordeal 
 of Mar\ Twain or Joseph Wood Krutch’s book on Poe. But the 
 difficulty with the mythic method, certainly as applied to Redburn, 
 is that, like the biographical method, it does not hold up—that 
 it is contradicted repeatedly by some of the most important tonal 
 and structural features of the novel. 
 
 II 
 
 Melville’s tone, the peculiar quality of Redburn’s narrative voice, 
 presents the most obvious barrier to the “tragic fall” theory, espe¬ 
 cially Redburn’s voice in the passages which are most clearly 
 “initiatory,” and in which Redburn is most obviously “innocent.” 
 This, for instance, is Redburn’s response when he is first initiated 
 into shipboard blasphemy: 
 
 At that time I did not know what to make of these sailors; but this much 
 I thought, that when they were boys they could never have gone to the 
 Sunday School; for they swore so, it made my ears tingle, and used words 
 that I never could hear without a dreadful loathing.^^ 
 
 Later, the Greenlander sailor urges Redburn to drink Jamaica 
 spirits, and Redburn reflects: 
 
 Lewis, p. 136. 
 
 Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage (New York, 1957), pp. 31-32. 
 
102 
 
 James Schroeter 
 
 But I felt very little like doing as I was bid, for I had some scruples about 
 drinking spirits; and to tell the plain truth, for I am not ashamed of it, 
 I was a member of a society in the village where my mother lived, called 
 the Juvenile Total Abstinence Association, of which my friend, Tom 
 Legare, was president, secretary and treasurer, and kept the funds in a 
 little purse that his cousin knit for him. There was three and six-pence 
 on hand, I believe, the last time he brought in his accounts.^® 
 
 A few pages later, there is a smoking party, and a sailor named Ned 
 offers Redburn a cigar. Redburn reflects: 
 
 But I was a member of an Anti-Smoking Society that has been organized 
 in our village by the Principal of the Sunday School there, in conjunc¬ 
 tion with the Temperance Association. So I did not smoke any then, 
 though I did afterward upon the voyage, I am sorry to say.^® 
 
 Redburn’s response to the trio of conventional sailor’s vices— 
 smoking, drinking, swearing—depends for the effectiveness of its 
 comedy not only on Redburn’s absurdly naive Sunday school 
 morality but upon the ironic tone, which in turn depends on the 
 separation Melville maintains between himself and his narrator. 
 Clemens was later to handle this device for humor in a more con¬ 
 trolled manner in Huckleberry Finn, in which the vices of men are 
 also reflected with comic irony through the eyes of a naive boy, 
 but Redburn shows the first sustained use of the device in the 
 American novel. 
 
 It can be seen in a more important way in Redburn’s initiation 
 into the ship’s hierarchy, brought out in his abortive attempts to 
 establish friendly relations first with the men, then with the mates, 
 and finally with the captain: 
 
 Thinking to make friends with the second mate, I took out an old 
 tortoise-shell snuff-box of my father’s, in which I had put a piece of 
 Cavendish tobacco, to look sailor-like, and offered the box to him very 
 politely. He stared at me a moment, and then exclaimed, “Do you think 
 we take snuff aboard here, youngster? no, no, no time for snuff-taking 
 at sea; don’t let the ‘old man’ see that snuff-box; take my advice and pitch 
 it overboard as quick as you can.” 
 
 I told him it was not snuff, but tobacco; when he said, he had plenty 
 of tobacco of his own, and never carried any such nonsense about him as 
 
 Ibid., p. 40. 
 
 Ibid., p. 44. 
 
Redburn and Mythic Criticism 
 
 103 
 
 a tobacco-box. With that, he went off about his business, and left me 
 feeling foolish enough.^’^ 
 
 One entire chapter, “He Contemplates Making a Social Call on the 
 Captain in His Cabin,” is devoted to Redburn’s attempt to establish 
 friendship with the captain. It begins with his naive speculations 
 about the captain: 
 
 I had thought him a fine, funny gendeman, full of mirth and good 
 humor, and good will to seamen, and one who could not fail to ap¬ 
 preciate the difference between me and the rude sailors among whom I 
 was thrown. Indeed, I had made no doubt that he would in some spe¬ 
 cial manner take me under his protection, and prove a kind friend and 
 benefactor to me; as I had heard that some sea-captains are. ... Yes, 
 I thought that Captain Riga would be attentive and considerate to me, 
 and strive to cheer me up and comfort me in my lonesomeness.^® 
 
 To prepare himself for making “the first advances,” he gets 
 himself up in what he thinks is fitting dress. “I put on a white shirt 
 in place of my red one, and got into a pair of cloth trowsers instead 
 of my duck ones, and put on my new pumps, and then carefully 
 brushing my shooting jacket, I put that on over all, so that upon 
 the whole, I made quite a genteel figure.” His hands are stained 
 deep yellow from tar, and thinking “it would never do to present 
 myself before a gentleman in that way,” he slips on a pair of woolen 
 mittens his mother has knitted for him. Dressed in that fashion, 
 he plans to “drop into the captain’s cabin” to pay his respects.^® 
 
 What is most interesting about the chapter devoted to the social 
 call is that it never takes place. The chief mate collars Redburn on 
 his way to the cabin, and “shoved me forward, roaring out I know 
 not what,” while the sailors, standing around the windlass, look 
 aft “mightily tickled.” Instead, Melville focuses on Redburn’s 
 dreams of the treatment he will receive from the captain—“that he 
 would invite me down into the cabin of a pleasant night, to ask me 
 questions concerning my parents, and prospects in life, besides ob¬ 
 taining from me some anecdotes touching my great-uncle, the il¬ 
 lustrious senator; or give me a slate and pencil, and teach me prob¬ 
 lems in navigation; or perhaps engage me at a game of chess”; on 
 
 Ibid., p. 25. 
 
 Ibid., p. 65. 
 
 Ibid., pp. 65-67. 
 
James Schroeter 
 
 104 
 
 Redburn’s elaborate attempts to get himself up in genteel costume; 
 and the merriment of the crew. Possibly Melville aborted the actual 
 scene because his imagination boggled at the prospect of a boy 
 such as Redburn, dressed in shooting jacket, pumps, and woolen 
 mittens, “dropping in” on the captain. But what is more likely is 
 that Melville softened the climax, deliberately substituting an anti¬ 
 climax, because, despite all that critics have had to say about the 
 “cruelty” and “hardship” of Redburn’s lot on the Highlander, Mel¬ 
 ville sees clearly enough that showing Redburn as the butt of the 
 most crushing and serious humiliations and insults does not fit the 
 larger purposes of the novel. 
 
 The imaginative situation of a human, personal confrontation 
 between captain and “boy,” between captain and crewman, or in 
 general between superior and inferior was to be touched on with 
 complexity and power in the later Melville—in Moby-Dic\, “Barde- 
 by,” “Benito Cereno,” and Billy Budd. Such a scene, passed over rev¬ 
 erently, forms the crux of Billy Budd —the scene between Captain 
 Vere and Billy, which Melville likens to the scene between Abra¬ 
 ham and Isaac. In such passages in the later Melville—^between Pip 
 and Ahab, between the lawyer and Bartleby, or in quite a different 
 way between the aristocradc Benito Cereno and the slave Babo— 
 Melville suggests that the conventional barrier society interposes be¬ 
 tween men of differing social stations is in some way terrible, ludi¬ 
 crous, irrational—but capable of being overstepped. The conven¬ 
 tional hierarchical arrangement breaks down, much as in Tolstoy’s 
 “Master and Man,” into an elemental love-hate relationship between 
 two human beings. The “mastery” is subtly reversed, translated by 
 hate in the Benito-Babo relationship, or love in the Pip-Ahab rela¬ 
 tionship. No transformation of this kind takes place in Redburn, 
 partly because Melville is as much concerned with holding up to 
 view the absurdity of Redburn’s ignorance of conventional usage 
 as the absurdity of the convention. 
 
 The passages in which Melville’s ironically comic tone is per¬ 
 haps most beautifully modulated are the ones concerning Redburn’s 
 clothing. A number of critics—Newton Arvin, James Miller—have 
 commented on the fact that Melville raises the clothing, especially 
 the shooting jacket, to poetic or symbolic status. But Arvin’s com¬ 
 ment that “old, cheap and ill-fitting clothes” are a “natural meta- 
 
Redburn and Mythic Criticism 
 
 105 
 
 phor” for the “insulted and injured,” or that “Redburn’s shooting 
 jacket puts one in mind of that other shabby garment, the old 
 clerk’s overcoat in Gogol’s famous tale,” seems—much like Lewis 
 Mumford’s sentimental comment about Melville-Redburn’s “patched 
 clothes” and “bad food”—wholly to miss the dignity and com¬ 
 plexity of Melville’s comedy.^” 
 
 Melville focuses mainly on three “patched” or “maimed” items of 
 clothing—Redburn’s boots, his pantaloons, and his shooting jacket. 
 The boots are described as follows: 
 
 Nor must I forget my boots, which were almost new when I left 
 home. They had been my Sunday boots, and fitted me to a charm. I 
 never had had a pair of boots that I liked better; I used to turn my toes 
 out when I walked in them, unless it was night time, when no one could 
 see me, and I had something else to think of; and I used to keep looking 
 at them during church; so that I lost a good deal of the sermon. In a 
 word, they were a beautiful pair of boots. But all this only unfitted 
 them the more for sea-service; as I soon discovered. They had very high 
 heels, which were all the time tripping me in the rigging, and several 
 times came near pitching me overboard; and the salt water made them 
 shrink in such a manner, that they pinched me terribly about the instep; 
 and I was obliged to gash them cruelly, which went to my very heart. 
 The legs were quite long, coming a good way up towards the knees, 
 and the edges were mounted with red morocco. The sailors used to 
 call them my “gaff-topsail-boots.” And sometimes they used to call me 
 “Boots” and sometimes “Buttons” on account of the ornaments. . . . 
 
 At last I took their advice and “razeed” them, as they phrased it. 
 That is, I amputated the legs, and shaved off the heels to the bare soles, 
 which, however did not much improve them, for it made my feet feel 
 flat as flounders, and besides, brought me down in the world. . . 
 
 Redburn’s magnificent moleskin hunting jacket is also “altered” 
 or “maimed” in a similar way: 
 
 Every day it grew smaller and smaller, particularly after a rain, until 
 at last I thought it would completely exhale, and leave nothing but 
 the bare seams, by way of a skeleton, on my back. It became unspeakably 
 unpleasant when we got into rather cold weather, crossing the Banks of 
 Newfoundland, when the only way I had to keep warm during the night 
 was to pull on my waistcoat and my roundabout, and then clap the 
 
 Arvin, p. 109. 
 
 Redburn, pp. 71-72. 
 
io6 
 
 James Schroeter 
 
 shooting-jacket over all. This made it pinch me under the arms, and it 
 vexed and irritated and tormented me every way; and used to incommode 
 my arms seriously when I was pulling the ropes; so much so, that the 
 mate asked me once i£ I had the cramp.^^ 
 
 Redburn focuses mainly, however, on the most maimed item, the 
 pantaloons: 
 
 I had them made to order by our village tailor, a little fat man, very 
 thin in the legs, who used to say he imported the latest fashions direct 
 from Paris, though all the fashion plates in his shop were very dirty 
 with fly-marks. 
 
 Well, this tailor made the pantaloons I speak of, and while he had 
 them in hand, I used to call and see him two or three times a day to try 
 them on, and hurry him forward; for he was an old man with large round 
 spectacles, and could not see very well, and had no one to help him but 
 a sick wife, with five grandchildren to take care of. . . . Now, this old 
 tailor had shown me the pattern, after which he intended to make my 
 pantaloons; but I improved upon it, and bade him make a slit on the out¬ 
 side of each leg, at the foot, to button up with a row of six brass bell 
 buttons; for a grown-up cousin of mine, who was a great sportsman 
 used to wear a beautiful pair of pantaloons, made precisely in that way. 
 
 And these were the very pair I now had at sea; the sailors made a 
 great deal of fun of them, and were all the time calling on each other to 
 “twig” them; and they would ask me to lend them a button or two, by 
 way of a joke; and then they would ask me if I was not a soldier. Show¬ 
 ing very plainly that they had no idea that my pantaloons were a very 
 genteel pair, made in the height of the sporting fashion, and copied from 
 my cousin’s, who was a young man of fortune and drove a tilbury.^® 
 
 This is Redburn’s account of how these beautiful and elegant panta¬ 
 loons come to be patched and maimed: 
 
 When I went aloft, at my yard-arm gymnasdcs, my pantaloons were all 
 the time ripping and splitting in every direcdon, particularly about the 
 seams, owing to their not being cut sailor-fashion, with low waistbands, 
 and to wear without suspenders. So that I was often placed in most un¬ 
 pleasant predicaments, straddling the rigging, sometimes in plain sight 
 of the cabin, with my table linen exposed in the most inelegant and un- 
 gentlemanly manner possible.^^ 
 
 Ibid., p. 72. 
 
 Ibid., pp. 70-71. 
 
 ®* Ibid., p. 70. 
 
Redburn and Mythic Criticism 
 
 107 
 
 The point of producing these passages is not merely to show that 
 gloomy Redburn has its comedy—although this point alone seems 
 in need of being stressed as much as possible. The point is rather 
 to show why there is comedy—that it is not simply an element Mel¬ 
 ville added here and there for relieving the gloom, or, as William 
 Gilman concludes, for “offsetting the prevailing tone of somber¬ 
 ness.” Instead, the comic tone seems to stem from the structure of 
 the book, and to be a necessary part of the conception. The pas¬ 
 sages in which Redburn is introduced to smoking, drinking, and 
 swearing seem to be based on Melville’s analysis of the conventional 
 sailor’s vices. The passages in which Redburn tries to make friends 
 first with the men, then with the mates, and finally the captain 
 stem from Melville’s analysis of the ship’s social hierarchy. Sim¬ 
 ilarly, the other “initiatory” passages—in which Redburn is intro¬ 
 duced to shipboard language, shipboard eating habits, clothing, use 
 of leisure, manners, superstitions—are arranged in a series, as though 
 Melville had worked from an outline in which he divided shipboard 
 language from shipboard customs, and then subdivided these into 
 finer, discrete parts. This technique, which is a general character¬ 
 istic of Melville’s writing, was noted in the thirties by R. P. Black- 
 mur, who observed that Melville tended to work from an intel¬ 
 lectual scheme rather than from a dramatic or story conception, 
 and who aptly dubbed this the “technique of putative statement.” 
 Melville’s presentation of shipboard and English life in Redburn is 
 organized, in other words, much as the materials are organized in 
 Typee or Omoo, in which the novelist devotes so many passages to 
 Polynesian religion, language, social habits, use of leisure; or, in 
 Moby-Dic\, in the “cetological” portions, or the chapters dealing 
 with the social hierarchy of a whaler. 
 
 The vividness of these “putative” sections of Redburn are based 
 on the sharpness of the incongruity between Melville’s scenes and 
 Melville’s narrator—between Redburn’s genteel dress, language, cus¬ 
 toms, and expectations, and those of the people he comes in contact 
 with. But the irony, complexity, and comedy depend on the fact 
 that Melville himself takes a quite independent and detached stance 
 in portraying the conflict, especially when he is working most suc¬ 
 cessfully, removed on the one hand from the narrow gentility of his 
 narrator and on the other from the crudities of shipboard life. 
 
io8 
 
 James Schroeter 
 
 The “Adamic” pattern into which modern critics have rather 
 clumsily been trying to fit Redburn requires a prelapsarian hero like 
 Billy Budd or Hawthorne’s Donatello—a “natural” man who is 
 uncontaminated by society and its institutions. But the h um or in 
 Redburn depends on the fact that the hero is not a “guileless spirit,” 
 certainly not a Billy Budd or Donatello. His mother’s village, with 
 its Sunday School, Anti-Smoking Society, Juvenile Total Tem¬ 
 perance Association, and cousin who drives a tilbury, is not an Eden 
 nor a Monte Beni. Nor does Redburn “set out from his mother’s 
 house in a state of innocence like that before the Fall,” as Arvin 
 and Lewis claim. On the contrary, he sets out from his mother’s 
 house as a “Son-of-a-Gentleman,” with the catalogue of social atti¬ 
 tudes, prejudices, and minor vices that this estate implies—snob¬ 
 bery, exaggerated piety, smugness, priggishness, narrowness. Most 
 important, the mythic Adamic pattern is a tragic pattern; it is a 
 “Fall.” But Melville does everything in his power to make clear that 
 Redburn’s transition from “Son-of-a-Gentleman” to “Sailor Boy” 
 is not a “fall”—that the gentleman’s estate is less rather than more 
 blessed than the deracinated estate of the classless voyager at which 
 Redburn, after completing his initiation, finally arrives. 
 
 The fall of Adam might be called an archetypal myth, “arche¬ 
 typal” in the grand sense used by Northrop Frye and other mid¬ 
 twentieth-century critics who suppose that such archetypes have 
 always secretly but powerfully influenced the imagination; yet it is 
 doubtful whether Melville was writing myth in even the local 
 sense of “myth” which obviously influenced the nineteenth-century 
 storyteller. Many novels of “initiation” had appeared in the years 
 before Melville wrote Redburn —stories about genteel or aristocratic 
 young heroes who undergo a change from one class into a lower 
 one. For the most part, these fall into one of two opposite cate¬ 
 gories. The least common and more modern variety is the demo¬ 
 cratic romance—the story of the ennobling consequences of hard 
 work or the common lot on the privileged or coddled, the story 
 of the snob who is made into a man. Richard Dana had touched on 
 this theme in Two Years Before the Mast, as did Hawthorne in 
 quite a different way in “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”; but it 
 was not until considerably later—in Dickens’s Great Expectations 
 or, more obviously, in Kipling’s Captains Courageous —that the 
 
Redburn and Mythic Criticism 
 
 109 
 
 theme found full romantic expression. The earlier and more 
 common variety is the bourgeois tragedy—the story of fineness, 
 beauty, and distinction trampled underfoot by the commonplace, 
 or the theme of gentility in adversity that Dickens uses in Oliver 
 Twist or David Copperfield. Melville had both kinds of myths 
 available to him when he wrote Redburn, especially the second; but 
 the point is that he rejects them, carefully steering a middle course 
 between—and this is perhaps the strongest evidence that Melville, 
 rather than relying on myth of any kind, was consciously trying 
 to stay independent of it. 
 
 The second alternative, the myth of the fallen aristocrat, was 
 probably the more dangerous temptation for Melville. Those quali¬ 
 ties of “bitterness,” “misery,” and “self-pity” which so many critics 
 have noted in Redburn, and which some feel mar the book, may be 
 due to the fact that Melville fails wholly to avoid the temptation. 
 Yet the function of Melville’s ironic comedy, which most of the 
 critics who think Redburn is full of self-pity ignore, is to reject the 
 myth—to reject genteel pretension of merely any sort. 
 
 Another American novel about gentility fallen on hard times 
 written at the same time as Redburn, Hawthorne’s The House of the 
 Seven Gables, has been to some extent recognized as a democratic 
 rejection of aristocratic values. Critics have observed, for instance, 
 that Hawthorne portrays the aristocratic and genteel Pyncheon in¬ 
 heritance from the past as not only useless or chimerical but actually 
 sickly, cumbersome, disadvantageous, harmful: the Pyncheon family 
 claim to vast tracts of land is a harmful chimera; the aristocratic 
 Pyncheon roses sicken while the plebeian Maule beans flourish; 
 Hepzibah’s aristocratic name and blood is not only useless but dis¬ 
 advantageous in running a penny shop. But Melville’s rejection in 
 Redburn, although equally important to the scheme and worked 
 out in more circumstantial detail, seems to have been ignored: that 
 the manners Redburn acquired, which dictate his offering the mate 
 tobacco out of a “tortoise-shell” box, result in the ridicule of the 
 mate; that his attempts to dress in mittens and pay the captain a 
 social call result in the ridicule of the crew; that the more genteel 
 and fashionable his clothes, the more useless they are at sea—that 
 the beautiful moleskin jacket must “shrink,” that the elegant panta¬ 
 loons must rip and be patched before they are useful, that the 
 
no 
 
 James Schroeter 
 
 fashionable boots must have their high heels removed so that Red- 
 burn can “come down in the world”; that Redburn’s notions of 
 “proper” table manners and his ignorance of the way food is served 
 and eaten by a ship’s crew result in the crew’s regarding him as 
 unmannerly and in his going hungry; that the genteel recommenda¬ 
 tion Mr. Jones gives the captain, the sort of recommendation that 
 would be given of a young gentleman about to start a career in 
 banking, result in his advance wages being withheld; that his 
 father’s guidebook, a relic of genteel prosperity, misleads him; 
 and the elegant glass ship imported from France gives him a dam- 
 agingly false view of the world of ships. 
 
 There has already been too great, or at least too sentimental, 
 a stress on the terrible hardships Redburn undergoes—the vicious¬ 
 ness of Jackson, the cruelty of the captain and crew, the bad clothes 
 and bad food, the hideous impact of the Liverpool slums. But these 
 elements are also important. There is a tough-minded realism in 
 Melville’s rejection of gentility and the past, coupled with a demo¬ 
 cratic dislike of class distinction; but at the same time Melville goes 
 at least as far in the opposite direction by refusing to romanticize 
 the common lot or the salubrity of menial labor. 
 
 Hawthorne ends his romance by uniting Maule and Pyncheon in 
 a marriage which implies an acceptance of both the plebeian and 
 aristocratic myths. But Melville ends his with the phrase, “yet, I, 
 Wellingborough Redburn, chance to survive”—the expression of a 
 proud and lonely Ishmael, who has rejected both plebeian and gen¬ 
 teel society as opposite but connected parts of a total social order. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The strongest evidence of Melville’s rejection is provided by the 
 main strucmral feature of Redburn. Characteristically, Melville 
 builds the deeper meanings of his stories and novels on the basis 
 of parallels and contrasts that he draws between characters who 
 represent certain complex abstractions—for instance, Billy Budd 
 as a representative of Good, Claggart of Evil; Ahab as a representa¬ 
 tive of Defiance, Ishmael of Acceptance. Melville uses the same kind 
 of structure in Redburn in the parallels and contrasts he draws be¬ 
 tween Harry Bolton, the gentlemanly Englishman who sails back 
 on the Highlander, and Jackson, the rufl&anly American sailor. 
 
 A great deal of attention has been paid to Melville’s picmre of 
 
Redburn and Mythic Criticism 
 
 III 
 
 Jackson; but except for Merlin Bowen, in his study “Redburn and 
 the Angle of Vision,” relatively little comment has been devoted to 
 Harry Bolton, who is as important as Jackson, and who, if Bowen is 
 correct in his guess that Melville would have enlarged the figure 
 had he been less hasty in drawing his book to a conclusion, played 
 a larger role in Melville’s conception. 
 
 Bowen notes a parallel between Harry Bolton and Redburn, 
 which he claims is “carried out in such detail as to cause one to 
 wonder that it has not been more commonly noted”: 
 
 Both, to begin with, are more than ordinarily well born and come 
 from a relatively sheltered background. Both are “Ishmaels,” driven hy 
 hard times and misfortune too soon into the world. They are alike, too, 
 in their romantic and distorted views of the world: the Canaan to which 
 each aspires is the Egypt, from which the other would escape. The 
 illusions of each are at first encouraged by the captain’s “sympathetic 
 concern” and later shattered hy the cruelty of both officers and crew. 
 Both are inexperienced as sailors, and both exacerbate the contempt this 
 brings upon them by their incongruous dress and by their pretensions to 
 refinement and high social status. 
 
 Several incidents of the homeward voyage, moreover, appear as coun¬ 
 terparts (occurring in the same order and at roughly similar intervals) of 
 experiences encountered by Redburn on the passage out. The discovery 
 of the burning corpse in the bunk is in effect a repetition of the frenzied 
 suicide that took place on the first night out from New York. Harry’s 
 humiliating first trip aloft is a vivid reminder of Redburn’s earlier suc¬ 
 cess in meeting the same challenge. . . . Arriving in America, Bolton 
 meets with much the same exclusion and indifference that Redburn had 
 encountered in England. And the last sentence of the book reinforces 
 the parallel with the narrator’s expression of wonder that, though Harry 
 has died, he himself has “chance[d] to survive.”"® 
 
 Certainly these parallels between Redburn and Harry exist, and 
 are striking enough; but Bowen fails to notice that an equally strik¬ 
 ing parallel can be made between Harry and Jackson: (i) like 
 Redburn, both are lonely or in some way isolated figures; (2) un¬ 
 like Redburn, both are exceptionally scornful of proprieties, and 
 override social or conventional restraints; (3) both are careless about 
 their own preservation, Harry by wasting his property and Jackson 
 
 ‘'Merlin Bowen, “Redburn and the Angle of Vision,” Modern Philology, LIT, 107-108 
 (Nov., 1954). 
 
II2 
 
 James Schroeter 
 
 by wasting his health; (4) both exercise a strange fascination or 
 attraction for Redburn; (5) both, for a time, are able to tyrannize 
 over, and control, Redburn; (6) both lose their control, and become 
 objects of pity to Redburn; (7) both are older than Redburn and 
 his superior in terms of experience and knowledge; and most im¬ 
 portant (8) both meet their deaths, and in a similarly dramatic way 
 —at sea, without proper burial. 
 
 There are, more obviously, differences. Harry’s recklessness 
 seems to stem from his having too much money; Jackson’s from 
 having nothing. Jackson exercises his control at sea or in sailor- 
 haunts; Harry, on his home ground. Jackson and Redburn are 
 drawn by hate; Harry and Redburn by love. Most important. Jack- 
 son represents the lowest, hardest, coarsest element aboard the High¬ 
 lander; Harry—with his finery, girlish beauty, and voice “like a 
 bird”—represents the highest, softest, finest. The contrasts and simi¬ 
 larities are such as to suggest that Melville was deliberately drawing 
 in Harry and Jackson two extreme models, both counterparts of 
 Redburn, both representing a kind of experience, but an opposite 
 kind; and both experiences representing certain attractions but also 
 dangers which Redburn, if he is to survive, must avoid. The figures 
 are orbits, either one of which Redburn might have been drawn into 
 with disastrous consequences—and the two orbits are much like the 
 “aristocratic” and “plebeian” commitments which Melville avoids in 
 narrating the book. 
 
 H. Bruce Franklin, the most recent commentator on Redburn, 
 seems to believe that if Redburn had properly protected and be¬ 
 friended Harry when the two arrived in New York, Harry would 
 not have drowned at sea. He maintains as the main point of his 
 article that Redburn is responsible for Harry’s death.^® But surely 
 Melville, who draws faults and weaknesses in Harry almost from 
 the moment he is introduced more than sufficient to lay the ground¬ 
 work for his destruction, makes it clear that it is not Redburn’s 
 fault but Harry’s. 
 
 The most vivid instance is the scene in which Redburn, to his 
 astonishment, sees Harry, who has shipped as a common sailor, 
 “on deck in a brocaded dressing gown, embroidered slippers and 
 a tasseled smoking cap, to stand his morning watch”: 
 
 H. Bruce Franklin, “Redburn’s Wicked End,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, XX, 
 pp. 190-194 (Sept., 1965). 
 
Redburn and Mythic Criticism 
 
 “3 
 
 As soon as I came behind him thus arrayed, a suspicion, which had 
 previously crossed my mind, again recurred, and I almost vowed to 
 myself that spite his protestations, Harry Bolton never could have been at 
 sea before, even as a Guinea-pig in an Indiaman; for the slightest ac¬ 
 quaintance with the sea-life and sailors, should have prevented him, it 
 would seem, from enacting this folly. 
 
 “Who’s that Chinese mandarin?” cried the mate, who had made 
 voyages to Canton. “Look you, my fine fellow, douse that mainsail now, 
 and furl it in a trice.” 
 
 “Sir?” said Harry, starting back. “Is not this the morning watch, and 
 is not mine a morning gown?” 
 
 Redburn finally persuades Harry to take off his outlandish costume, 
 and Harry exclaims: 
 
 “It’s too bad! I meant to lounge away the watch in that gown until 
 coffee time;—and I suppose your Hottentot of a mate won’t permit a 
 gentleman to smoke his Turkish pipe of a morning; but by Gad, I’ll 
 wear straps to my pantaloons to spite him!”^^ 
 
 This passage, with its exaggeratedly farcical humor, combines in a 
 short space several themes developed in a more leisurely way in the 
 first half of the book when Redburn, rather than Harry, appeared 
 in a shooting jacket, high-heeled boots, and gentlemanly pantaloons; 
 and when, like Harry, he showed a comic ignorance of sea language, 
 sea usage, and the relationship between officers and men. But Harry 
 is in every respect more extreme: his dress more absurdly refined and 
 unsuited to sea duty; his ignorance of sea language still wilder. 
 Most important, his response to the seaman’s tasks he is given marks 
 a crucial difference. As Newton Arvin has pointed out, Redburn 
 had been desperately afraid of “falling—falling—falling” when he 
 was sent up to loosen the skysail. But he loosens it, and later “Begins 
 to Hop About in the Rigging Like a Saint Jago’s Monkey.” Harry 
 never does. He makes one desperate attempt, “but no; he stopped 
 short, and looked down from the top. Fatal glance! it unstrung his 
 every fiber; and I saw him reel and clutch the shrouds.” From that 
 moment, “he never put foot in rattlin; never mounted above the bul- 
 warks.’’^"® 
 
 Redburn, p. 245. 
 
 “ Ibid., p. 248. 
 
James Schroeter 
 
 114 
 
 Jackson’s catastrophic end comes not because he is too little of a 
 sailor but because in a sense he is too much of one. He is hard 
 enough, experienced enough, and cruel enough to survive any voy¬ 
 age; but he is wasted by his strengths—^by his hardness, hatred, 
 brutality, and debauchery. But Harry, the girlish youth, seems to 
 perish for the opposite reasons—from being too soft, gentle, refined, 
 genteel. It is perhaps symbolically significant that Harry, besides 
 failing to climb the rigging, fails to jettison his gentlemanly bag¬ 
 gage—his “collection of silks, velvets, broad cloths and satins,” 
 which he brings aboard in a special chest. 
 
 Newton Arvin observes: 
 
 Despite the underlying gravity of the symbolism generally, Redbum 
 is anything but a lugubrious book as a whole: the current of animation 
 and vivacity on which it is sustained is purely inspiriting. Melville’s 
 feeling ... for light and shade did not fail him in the writing of Red- 
 burn. . . . There is the familiar ballast of prosaic information—the chap¬ 
 ter, for example, on the furniture of the quarter-deck—and there is a 
 good deal of Melville’s characteristically smiling and low-toned hu¬ 
 mor. ... In its richness of emotion and variety of tone, Redburn is 
 generally the most likable of Melville’s secondary books.^® 
 
 This concluding statement, which Arvin seems to have added as a 
 needed corrective to his main position, is a triumph of good sense 
 over critical method; and one finds fault with it only in its failure 
 to connect the “feeling for light and shade,” the “variety of tone,” 
 the “current of animation,” with the actual details of Melville’s tone 
 and structure—and in the failure to see that this tone and structure 
 runs directly contrary to the view of Redburn as a novel of “tragic 
 initiation.” 
 
 Redburn’s rejection of Bolton and Jackson, and Melville’s rejec¬ 
 tion of the genteel and “Jacksonian” viewpoints seem both to stem 
 from Melville-Redburn’s striving for balance and independence. 
 Melville projected the striving into a unique artistic technique in 
 Moby-Dic\ —in, for example, the balance between the lyricism of 
 “The Symphony,” and the realism of “The Try-Works”; between 
 the rhythms of stasis and of motion; or in the balancing figures of 
 Ahab and Ishmael, who represent far better than Jackson and Harry 
 
 Arvin, p. 109. 
 
Redburn and Mythic Criticism 
 
 "5 
 
 Bolton what Melville grew to see as the two main responses to life. 
 But if the balances are less complex and less successfully worked 
 out in Redburn, they are of a similar kind; and they represent 
 a more nearly unique and independent artistic achievement than 
 any of the critics who have been trying to fit Redburn into an auto¬ 
 biographical or mythic pattern have given Melville credit for. 
 
"Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” and Some Legends 
 in Melville Scholarship 
 
 Sidney P. Moss 
 
 I N THIS ESSAY I WISH TO NEUTRALIZE certain legends that distort 
 Melville scholarship. One of them is that Melville was anti- 
 Transcendentalist and especially anti-Emersonian, a mistake that 
 has led to biased interpretations of his later novels, particularly of 
 Pierre and The Confidence-Man. A second is that Melville’s emo¬ 
 tional and intellectual temperament was attuned to Hawthorne’s, 
 a notion that prevents us from seeing why Melville’s fiction is more 
 dynamic than his “mentor’s.” A third legend is that Melville’s 
 “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” is a satire, whether of Thoreau, Emerson, 
 Wordsworth, or Transcendentalism in general, a misreading that 
 has made this tale, though the happiest in the Melville canon and 
 one of the most exultant in literature, badly neglected indeed.^ 
 To accomplish these ends, I shall use “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” as 
 my Ariadne’s thread into the labyrinth of Melville scholarship, 
 with the prime object of rescuing the tale from the Minotaur. 
 
 I 
 
 The legend that “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” is a satire and that its 
 object of satire is “buoyant transcendental principles”—more par¬ 
 ticularly, a “brief passage” in A Wee\ on the Concord and Merri¬ 
 mack^ Rivers —seems to have originated with Egbert S. Oliver.^ Oh- 
 ver’s assumption that the tale is satirical and his adducing of par¬ 
 allel passages from Thoreau and Melville to support that assump- 
 
 ^ Apart from collections of Melville’s fiction, only two anthologies contain the tale— 
 oddly enough, Kenneth S. Lynn’s The Comic Tradition in America: An Anthology (New 
 York, 1958) and Brom Weber’s Anthology of American Humor (New York, 1962), as if 
 the story were comic (or, as Lynn says, “comic satire”) instead of comedic, a distinction 
 I shall discuss later. I wish here to acknowledge my profound indebtedness to Barry 
 Sanders, my colleague and friend, who lived this “Stiick” with me. 
 
 *“‘Cock-A-Doodle-DooI’ and Transcendental Hocus-Pocus,” New England Quarterly, 
 XXI, 204-216 (June, 1948). “This story of course is symbolical,” Oliver wrote, “but the 
 intent of the symbols and the satirical depth of the fable are only apparent as it is read 
 in the light of a passage in Thoreau. . . 
 
“Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” 
 
 117 
 
 tion are questionable, as I shall indicate. At this point I only raise 
 the obvious questions—namely, why a well-known author like 
 Melville would wish to satirize an obscure passage in an obscure 
 book by an unknown writer (A Wee^ of course, was Thoreau’s 
 first book and its total distribution was less than three hundred 
 copies), and who was to understand the point of his satire, for what 
 value has satire if the object of its ridicule is unknown? The fact 
 that Oliver has also found that Thoreau, or at least Thoreau’s 
 ideas, are satirized in “Bartleby” and The Confidence-Man is even 
 more disturbing.^ For the ground of his argument becomes clear: 
 Melville was fixated on Thoreau, despite the fact that there is no 
 evidence that he ever met the man. If the point has any validity, 
 there would surely be some direct reference to Thoreau or to Tho¬ 
 reau’s work somewhere in Melville, if only in his letters. All we 
 have is Duyckinck’s list which shows the books he lent Melville. 
 For the year 1850 this list indicates that Melville borrowed fifteen 
 titles (a total of twenty volumes), among them “Thoreau’s Merri¬ 
 mack.”^ 
 
 That “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!”, not to mention certain passages in 
 
 * "A Second Look at ‘Bartleby,’” College English, VI, 431-439 (May, 1945); and 
 “Melville’s Picture of Emerson and Thoreau m The Confidence-Man," ibid., VIII, 61-72 
 (Nov., 1946). 
 
 ‘Willard Thorp, Herman Melville: Representative Selections (New York, 1938), p. 
 xxviii n. Inadvertently, Oliver specifies the date of Melville’s borrowing of A Wee\ as 
 1849. It may be pointed out here, for what it is worth, that Melville also borrowed 
 Sartor Resartus in 1850; that earlier, in September, 1849, he asked Lemuel Shaw to secure 
 a letter of introduction from Emerson to Carlyle (see Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman 
 Melville: Cycle and Epicycle, Cambridge, Mass., 1953, p. 64); and that, if we use Oliver’s 
 logic, Melville might have been influenced by the “Everlasting Yea” as opposed to the 
 “Everlasting No” in conceiving of “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” At all events, Oliver’s con¬ 
 clusions regarding “Bartleby” and The Confidence-Man have already been questioned. 
 Edward H. Rosenberry voices my judgment when he writes that Oliver’s “formal attempt 
 to prove ‘Bartleby’ a . . . satire on 'Thoreau ... is badly hampered by lack of facts and 
 lack of decisive satiric tone in the story itself” {Melville and the Comic Spirit, Cambridge, 
 Mass., 1955, p. 198, n. 20). And Elizabeth S. Foster, whom Harrison Hayford calls 
 “the most thorough critic” of The Confidence-Man, tell us that she does not find “Mr. 
 Oliver’s identification of Winsome’s disciple Egbert with Thoreau . . . convincing,” for 
 reasons which she gives at length (see her edition of The Confidence-Man, New York, 
 I 954 t PP- 35 i' 354 )- In addition, we have Melville’s own comment on “Bartleby,” which 
 in no way indicates satirical intent: “My first emotions [toward Bartleby] had been 
 those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of 
 Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, 
 that pity into repulsion. . . . [That repulsion] proceeds from a hopelessness of remedy¬ 
 ing excessive and organic ill” (Jay Leyda, The Melville Log, New York, 1951, I, 481-482. 
 The narrator-protagonist of “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!,” as we shall .see, has no organic ill; 
 only those who cannot hear the cock have organic ill. 
 
ii8 
 
 Sidney P. Moss 
 
 Other Melville works, is to be read as a kind of Fable for Critics 
 has another proponent in William Bysshe Stein.® Stein also alleges 
 that “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” satirizes Thoreau, but the source he 
 adduces is not a passage in A Wee\ but Thoreau’s “essay, ‘Walk¬ 
 ing’.” Here, too, the argument proceeds by a comparison of par¬ 
 allel passages, but Stein errs in a significant fact; for though Tho¬ 
 reau delivered lectures on “Walking” in 1851 and 1852, and again 
 in 1856 and 1857, the essay “Walking” was published only posthu¬ 
 mously (in June, 1862, in the Atlantic Monthly), some nine years 
 after Melville published “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” (in December, 
 1853, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine).^ 
 
 Legends by their nature are accretive, and no less so with this 
 legend. Citing Oliver’s articles, Frederic Ives Carpenter, by substi¬ 
 tuting Emerson’s name for Thoreau’s, asserted that Melville in 
 “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” and “Bartleby” “satirized Emerson’s self- 
 reliance by the process of reductio ad absurdum, the one story de¬ 
 scribing the absurdly tragic results of an active absolute idealism 
 (like Pierre), and the other the tragic results of a passively ‘self- 
 reliant’ withdrawal from society.”^ Edward H. Rosenberry also 
 accepts the legend concerning “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” Accretively, 
 too, he asserts that the tale contains “parodic echoes” of Emerson 
 and Wordsworth as well. While he offers no evidence for the 
 Thoreau and Emerson “echoes,” he claims to find documentation 
 for the Wordsworth parody in Leon Howard’s biography of Mel¬ 
 ville.® But the fact is that Howard thinks “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” is 
 
 ® “Melville Roasts Thoreau’s Cock,” Modern Language Notes, LXXIV, 218-219 (March, 
 1959)' Stein writes: “Readers of Pierre and The Confidence-Man arc familiar with Mel¬ 
 ville’s scorn for the philosophy of Thoreau and other Transcendentalists.” 
 
 "See Walter Harding, A Thoreau Handbook (New York, 1961), p. 70; and Henry 
 Seidel Canby, ed.. The Worths of Thoreau (Boston, 1937), p. 640. In a subsequent article, 
 Stein shifted his ground somewhat to argue the point that the “real target of Melville’s 
 ridicule” in “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” is the apostle Paul; but he repeats that the narrator- 
 protagonist of the tale is a “burlesque Thoreau. . . (“Melville’s Cock and the Bell 
 of Saint Peter,” Emerson Society Quarterly, No. 27, pp. 5-10, 2d Quart., 1962). 
 
 'Emerson 'Handhoo\ (New York, 1953), p. 232. Carpenter added: “These stories 
 were all so exaggerated as to destroy much of their effect.” 
 
 ® According to Rosenberry, Howard “asserted that the story is a parody on Words¬ 
 worth’s ‘Resolution and Independence’,” and on this basis Rosenberry avers that the 
 “woodcutter Merrymusk,” not the narrator-protagonist, as Oliver and Stein urge, “is the 
 victim” of Transcendental principles. Rosenberry concedes, however, that the “story moves 
 with a remarkable comic lightness and rewards even the reader who is not attuned to 
 parodic echoes of Emerson, Thoreau, or Wordsworth” {Melville and the Comic Spirit, 
 pp. 163, 198, n. 20). 
 
“Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” 
 
 119 
 
 “serious at the core,” though admittedly he does say that Melville 
 parodied “Resolution and Independence.” In context, however, 
 Howard clearly intended to say that Melville adapted two lines 
 from Wordsworth for his purposes: 
 
 The Agatha theme of nonaggressive but unshakable patience continued 
 to haunt his mind. . . . “Bardeby”. . . gave some indication of the sort of 
 secret power which he conceived as exisdng in quiet stubbornness. . . . 
 In the power of his quiet resoludon and independence lay one of the 
 mysteries of humanity. ... In his next story ... he found a symbol which 
 suggested his analysis of it. For in . . . “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” a char¬ 
 acter like Bartleby reappeared in the person of Merrymusk. . . . Mel¬ 
 ville interpreted the humble padence which fascinated him as an ex¬ 
 pression of pride, and, as such, it struck a strong responsive chord in 
 his own being.® 
 
 Given the assumption that “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” must be a 
 satire of Thoreau or of whomever, pertinent passages are not hard 
 to come by, though the process vulgarizes a small masterpiece. 
 There are, for instance, passages in Walden that with equal validity 
 could be cited as the object of Melville’s mockery. In his epigraph 
 to that work, Thoreau wrote: “I do not propose to write an ode to 
 dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, 
 standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” Or the 
 chapter on “Sounds,” in which Thoreau confesses that he thought 
 of keeping a cockerel whose note: 
 
 certainly the most remarkable of any bird’s, . . . would soon become 
 the most famous sound in our woods, surpassing the clangor of the 
 goose and the hoodng of the owl . . . [with its] clarions. To . . . hear 
 [it] crow clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth . . .—think 
 
 * Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography (Berkeley, 1951), pp. 208-209. See 
 also p. 210 for Howard's remarks on Melville’s “parody” of Wordsworth’s poem. For 
 further discussion of the “Agatha theme,” see Patricia Lacy, “The Agatha Theme in 
 Melville’s Stories,” University of Texas Studies in English, XXXV, 96-105 (1956). So far 
 as I can determine. Jay Leyda in the Complete Stories of Herman Melville (New York, 
 1949), p. xxiv, and Richard Chase in Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York, 
 i 949 )> P- 163, were the first to point out Melville’s use of Wordsworth in “Cock-A-Doodle- 
 Doo!”—something about which I shall say more later. I might add here that, to my 
 knowledge, Howard and Chase are the only scholars whose regard for this tale begins to 
 approximate my own. Though Howard’s remarks are to the point, they are necessarily 
 brief; and though Chase is too narrow in his reading of the tale (this “remarkable story,” 
 he tells us, deals with “the artist’s need for the sense of power and the guilt-feelings which 
 accompany it”), he fully appreciates its magnificence. 
 
120 
 
 Sidney P. Moss 
 
 of it! It would put nations on the alert. Who would not be early to 
 rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till he 
 became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise? 
 
 It could be argued, of course, that Melville might have taken such 
 passages in the positive rather than in the negative sense; that is, 
 he might have been “inspired” to dramatize Thoreau’s love of life— 
 Melville, after all, was a life-lover—rather than mock it. But then 
 there is the problem of fact. “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” was published 
 in 1853 and Walden in 1854.^^ 
 
 II 
 
 If neither Thoreau nor Wordsworth is the object of satire in 
 “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo I,” surely, many would argue, the tale, like 
 passages in Pierre and The Confidence-Man, satirizes such Tran¬ 
 scendental principles as self-reliance and optimism. My reply to 
 this contention can only be discursive. For Melville’s attitude to¬ 
 ward Transcendentalism is at once the simplest and knottiest prob¬ 
 lem, knotty and distorted if we adopt an either-or position, simple, 
 and undistorted if we do not. Anyone who has examined the evi¬ 
 dence must conclude, as F. O. Matthiessen reluctantly did, that 
 Melville “felt a strong attraction in the transcendental beliefs. . . .”“ 
 For Melville’s attitude toward Transcendentalism, and it was not 
 especially concerned with “modern” versions of it^^ (in fact, it 
 
 A likelier object of satire than has yet been adduced by anyone is Cornelius 
 Mathews’s Chanticleer: A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family (1850), a narrative 
 advertised in the Literary World, popular in its time (it ran through two editions in 
 1850), and written by a man whom few people besides Evert Duyckinck could abide, and 
 whom Melville knew. In Mathews’s story the prescient red rooster crows three times at 
 certain crucial points and “knows more than anybody about this farm, except old grand¬ 
 father.” But again, except for both tales using a cock in certain unusual ways, there is 
 no relation whatever between the two tales. 
 
 F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), p. 184. Perry Miller, 
 fighting fire with fire, has asserted, much too sweepingly in my judgment, that Moby- 
 Dick and Pierre “are, to the end, implacably, defiantly, unrepentantly. Transcendental” in 
 the sense that they “reject tragedy” (“Melville and Transcendentalism,” Virginia 
 Quarterly Review, XXIX, 556-575, Autumn, 1953, reprinted in an enlarged version in 
 Moby-Dick Centennial Essays, Dallas, 1953, pp. 123-152). 
 
 See Merton M. Sealts, Jr., “Melville’s ‘Neoplatonical Originals,’ ” Modern Language 
 Notes, LXVII, 80-86 (Feb., 1952). In this essay Sealts tells us that, in part at least, the 
 object of Melville’s satire in Mardi was The Six Books of Proclus on the Theology of 
 Plato, and that his “satirical treatment of this abstruse source-material and his later 
 reference to Proclus in The Confidence-Man, both so different in tone from Emerson’s 
 attitude, are an indication of Melville’s hostility to certain characteristics of Transcenden¬ 
 talism, ancient and modern.” See also Melville’s ambivalent reactions to Goethe’s "Ijve 
 
“Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” 
 
 121 
 
 would have made little difference to Melville’s temperamental prob¬ 
 lem if French, German, British, and American Transcendentalism 
 had not been in the air), was not so complex as ambivalent. Strug¬ 
 gling to reconcile the dissonant elements of life, he was impelled to 
 search for the “Talismanic Secret,” as he called it in Pierre, but 
 could not find it, or at least could not accept it, and in despair or 
 rage he labeled those who claimed they had a “guild of self-im¬ 
 posters”—namely, “Plato, and Spinoza, and Goethe . . . with a 
 preposterous rabble of Muggletonian Scots and Yankees, whose vile 
 brogue still the more bestreaks the stripedness of their Greek or 
 German Neoplatonical originals.”^^ 
 
 In short, Melville, as Hawthorne noted, could “neither believe 
 nor be comfortable in his unbelief”; and he was “too honest and 
 courageous not to try to do one or the other.”^^ Hawthorne under¬ 
 stood Melville’s problem, for caught in the same dilemma, he had 
 himself flirted with Transcendentalism—had, in fact, joined Brook 
 Farm and married a Transcendentalist—before he “settled” the 
 problem once and for all by locking himself uncomfortably into 
 negativism: his hostility to idealistic enthusiasms, his skepticism 
 about social reform, and his noncommittal attitude; turning, in 
 short, anti-intellectual and assuring himself all the while that he 
 was happy—a locking-in that spelled, in my judgment, his artistic 
 death. Melville was too honest and courageous, as Hawthorne saw, 
 to accept such defeatism, and he kept struggling for a way out. And 
 as D. H. Lawrence noted in his foreword to Women in hove, 
 “Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling with his own 
 soul. The people that can bring forth the new passion, the new idea, 
 
 m the <dV' {The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman, 
 New Haven, i960, pp. 130-131). Henry A. Murray in his edition of Pierre (New York, 
 1949). P- Ixxvii, points out that among the “numerous roots of ‘Chronometricals and 
 Horologicals’ ” are passages in “Plutarch, St. Paul, Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Jeremy Taylor, 
 Shaftesbury, Mandeville, and others. . . .” 
 
 ’“TAe Worlds of Herman Melville (Constable ed.; New York, 1963), IX, 290. 
 
 The English Notebool{s by Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Randall Stewart (New York, 
 1962), p. 433. For this reason I think Matthiessen was in serious error when he wrote: 
 “How an age in which Emerson’s was the most articulate voice could also have given birth 
 to Moby-Dick, can be accounted for only through reaction” {American Renaissance, p. 184). 
 Melville, given his temperament, would have been of two minds at any point in history. 
 Brom Weber’s statement about Moby-Dick., that the universe is “tragic for Ahab but, in 
 a religious and physical sense, comic and hopeful for Ishmael” {Anthology of American 
 Humor, p. 301), seems much closer to the truth than Matthiessen’s in that it catches 
 Melville’s fundamental dualism. 
 
122 
 
 Sidney P. Moss 
 
 these people will endure. Those others, that fix themselves in the 
 old idea, will perish with the new life strangled unborn within 
 them.” No more than the Transcendentalists of his time could Mel¬ 
 ville be unaware that modern man is divided—divided from God, 
 from nature, from society, and from himself.^® As he wrote to Haw¬ 
 thorne in 1851, this sense of dividedness is the “knot with which we 
 choke ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon 
 you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam.”^^ The 
 Transcendentalists were proposing a means of reintegration, and 
 their work was no “hocus pocus.” Rather, they were addressing 
 themselves to the same problem as Karl Marx was at the same time, 
 if by another method. The central idea of these thinkers, and Emer¬ 
 son of course was among them, was that modern man assumes 
 dividedness to be a metaphysical fact when it is largely a psycholog¬ 
 ical symptom of the divisiveness intensified by modern capitalist 
 society, especially in its overpowering demands for economically 
 useful activities and its indifference to, if not hostility toward, activi¬ 
 ties that are privately and psychologically useful and integrative.^^ 
 Those scholars who have recognized Melville’s ambivalence to 
 
 I am not saying, of course, that modern man alone suffers this dividedness. Such 
 examples as the Book of Job, Oedipus Rex, and Hamlet would flatly deny this. I am 
 only saying that the problem becomes more afflictive in modern times. For suggestive 
 evidence that Hawthorne was locking himself into negativism, I point out the following: 
 In the original version of “The Hall of Fantasy,” Hawthorne said of Emerson, “No 
 more earnest seeker after truth than he, and few more successful finders of it” {Pioneer, 
 I, 52-53, Feb., 1843). By 1846, however, in the “Old Manse” sketch, Hawthorne began to 
 deny the possibility of finding truth or even the worthwhileness of the pursuit: “For 
 myself, there had been epochs of my life when I too might have asked of this prophet 
 [Emerson] the master word that should solve me the riddle of the universe; but now, 
 being happy, I felt as if there were no question to be put, and therefore admired Em¬ 
 erson . . . but sought nothing from him as a philosopher.” It was a strange kind of 
 happiness that, in an age when sleep was the dominant metaphor of death-in-life, Haw¬ 
 thorne could, in the same sketch, argue that “the great want which mankind labors under 
 at this present period is sleep. The world should . . . take an age-long nap.” Or that 
 he should “pray,” again in the same sketch, “that the world may be petrified and ren¬ 
 dered immovable in precisely the worst moral and physical state that it ever yet arrived at, 
 rather than be benefited by such schemes of such philosophers.” (See The Complete 
 Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Riverside ed., Boston, 1900, IV, xx and 39-43 passim.) 
 By 1856 Hawthorne considered such intellectual and emotional struggles as Melville 
 was undergoing “deserts.” Melville “will never rest,” he noted, “until he gets hold of a 
 definite belief. It is strange how he persists ... in wandering to-and-fro over these 
 deserts” (Stewart, Hawthorne's English Notebooks, pp. 432-433). 
 
 Melville’s Letters, p. 125. 
 
 One of the most discerning introductions to the Transcendentalists is that by George 
 Hochfield, Selected Writings of the American Transcendentalists (New York, 1966), esp. 
 pp. xxiv-xxvii. 
 
“Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” 
 
 123 
 
 Transcendental thought have had good reason to re-examine his 
 alleged thrusts at Emerson. Henry A. Murray, for instance, is con¬ 
 vinced that Plotinus Plinlimmon in Pierre, far from being a carica¬ 
 ture of Emerson, is a “striking and psychological likeness of Haw¬ 
 thorne. . . .” “Chronometricals and Horologicals” “echoes views ex¬ 
 pressed by Hawthorne. . . . Strip Plinlimmon of the disguising title 
 of Grand Master . . . and you have . . . Hawthorne. . . .” Murray 
 adds that Plinlimmon’s pamphlet “is scarcely Emersonian in temper. 
 Certainly Emerson did not start a ‘surprising sorcery’ upon Mel¬ 
 ville in the writing of Moby-Dick^. He was not a Paul Pry of the 
 guilty heart, nor a compound of Apollo and Saturn, nor character¬ 
 istically inscrutable. His philosophic attitude was not depressing. 
 There was no Death in him" [italics added].Rosenberry agrees 
 with Murray, at least to the extent of saying that “it is probably 
 misreading Melville to identify . . . [Plinlimmon] with any single 
 personality as an intentional portrait.”^® And William Braswell, on 
 the basis of his study of the Melville-Emerson relationship, has said 
 that '"The Confidence-Man as ... a satire on the Transcendentalists 
 seems to me unfounded.”^ 
 
 If these statements regarding Melville’s attitude toward Tran¬ 
 scendentalism and especially Emerson’s version of it seem too conjec¬ 
 tural, let us look at the known facts. By his own admission, Mel¬ 
 ville’s initial exposure to Emerson occurred when he heard him 
 lecture in Boston on February 5, 1849.^^ As he wrote to Evert 
 
 Introduction to Pierre, pp. Ixxvii-lxxix and 475-477 passim. 
 
 Melville and the Comic Spirit, p. 166. 
 
 “Melville as a Critic of Emerson,” American Literature, IX, 319, n. 9 (Nov., 1937). 
 The criticism of The Confidence-Man is so snarled that nothing can be gained, least of all 
 clarity, by adding one more argument. We have gone all the way from Carl Van 
 Vcchten’s assertion that “Emerson is the confidence man,” to Richard Chase’s statement 
 that the confidence-man is a composite figure, to Leslie Fiedler’s observation that he is 
 Christ come “to bamboozle us into belief,” to John W. Shroeder’s contention that the 
 confidence-man is the Devil or one of his legion, to Rosenberry’s judgment that 
 “Mark Winsome and his disciple are only two of the masks that the Confidence-Man 
 assumes. Their relatively minor role and late placement in the story might even persuade 
 the reader that Melville did not, after all, attach much thematic importance to them.” 
 It may be, as Fiedler has suggested, that the “clue to the primary ambiguity of the 
 book” is that Melville himself “was just not sure.” See Van Vechten, Excavations (New 
 York, 1926), p. 87; Chase, Melville, p. 188, et passim-, Fiedler, Nation, CLXIX, 494-496 
 (Nov. 19, 1949); Shroeder, “Sources and Symbols for Melville’s The Confidence-Man," 
 PMLA, LXVI, 363-380 (June, 1951); Rosenberry, Melville and the Comic Spirit, p. 170. 
 
 The editors of Melville’s Letters, p. 77, n. 2, supply this date, as they do the two 
 Melville letters I quote subsequendy (pp. 76-80). 
 
124 
 
 Sidney P. Moss 
 
 Duyckinck on March 3 of that year, “I had only glanced at a book 
 of his once in Putnam’s store—that was all I knew of him, till I 
 heard him lecture.” His reaction to that lecture, still exuberant some 
 two weeks later (in a letter dated February 24), was: “Say what 
 they will, he’s a great man.” 
 
 Melville had reason to say only this much about Emerson, for he 
 knew what “they” would say, “they” being Evert Duyckinck; for 
 Duyckinck, fixed in his Episcopalian orthodoxies, was decidedly 
 hostile to Emerson’s heresies. In reviewing Mardi for the Literary 
 World (Duyckinck’s magazine), “they” would say, hesitantly at first, 
 that Melville’s “ingenious moral writing” was such that “Emerson 
 would not disclaim.Of Moby-Dic\, however, “they” would say 
 it was rashly “daring in speculation, reckless at times of taste and 
 propriety. . . . This piratical running down of creeds and opinions, 
 the conceited indifferentism of Emerson, or the run-a-muck style of 
 Carlyle ... is out of place and uncomfortable. We do not like to see 
 what, under any view, must be to the world the most sacred associa¬ 
 tions of life violated and defaced.”^ And of Pierre “they” would say: 
 
 The combined power of New England transcendentalism and Spanish 
 Jesuitical casuistry could not have completely befogged nature and truth, 
 than this confounded Pierre has done. . . . The most immoral moral 
 of the story, if it has any moral at all, seems to be the impracticabiUty 
 of virtue; a leering demoniacal spectre of an idea seems to be peering 
 at us through the dim obscure of this dark book, and mocking us with 
 this dismal falsehood. Mr. Melville’s chapter on “Chronometricals and 
 Horologicals,” if it has any meaning at all, simply means that virtue 
 and religion are only for gods and not to be attempted by man. But 
 ordinary novel readers will never unkennel this loathsome suggestion. 
 The stagnant pool at the bottom of which it lies, is not too deep for 
 their penetration, but too muddy, foul, and corrupt. If truth is hid in a 
 well, falsehood lies in a quagmire. 
 
 Duyckinck concluded by saying that if Pierre represented a de¬ 
 velopment in Melville, we are not “sufficiently advanced in trans- 
 
 Literary World, IV, 333-335 (April 14, 1849). 
 
 Literary World, IX, 403-404 (Nov. 22, 1851). Evert Duyckinck also noted in this 
 review what I have pointed out earlier, that there was in Ishmael “the self-torturing 
 agency of a mind driven hither and thither as a flame in a whirlwind. . . .” If one be¬ 
 lieves, as I do, that Melville in his maturer fiction was finding metaphors for his tem¬ 
 peramental problems, the conclusion is obvious. 
 
“Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” 
 
 125 
 
 cendentalism to lift ourselves skywards and see clearly the coming 
 light with our heads above the clouds.”^ 
 
 Evidently, tasked by Duyckinck for simply averring that Emer¬ 
 son is “a great man” (we do not have Duyckinck’s letter), Melville 
 was forced to defend himself in another letter (dated March 3, 
 1849). He said that he did not “oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow,” 
 but preferred, given his inability to accept Emerson’s optimism: 
 
 to hang myself in mine own halter. . . .Swear he is a humbug [had 
 Duyckinck alleged as much?]—then is he no common humbug. Lay it 
 down that had not Sir Thomas Browne lived, Emerson would not have 
 mysdfied [had Duyckinck charged that Emerson was derivative and 
 unintelhgible ? ]— I will answer, that had not Old Zack’s father begot 
 him. Old Zack would never have been the hero of Palo Alto. . . . No 
 one is his own sire.— I was very agreeably disappointed in M*' Emerson. 
 I had heard of him as full of transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gib¬ 
 berish. ... To my surprise, I found him quite intelligible. . . . And, 
 frankly, for the sat{e of the argument [italics added], let us call him a 
 fool;—then had I rather be a fool than a wise man. 
 
 Not that Melville could not see a “gaping flaw” in Emerson—his 
 intellectual arrogance, “the insinuation, that had he lived in those 
 days when the world was made, he might have offered some valu¬ 
 able suggestions.” Yet this statement, though Melville had occasion 
 to make similar ones in later years, might well have been at this 
 time a concession to Duyckinck’s sensibilities. For Melville also 
 found himself apologizing in the same letter for remarks he had 
 made about Shakespeare in his earlier one—namely, that “he’s full 
 of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle—aye, almost as Jesus. . . . And 
 if another Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakesper’s person.” His 
 apology was: “I . . . only seemed irreverent.” He would, he added, 
 no more burn “tuns of rancid fat” at Shakespeare’s shrine than, pre¬ 
 sumably, he would at Emerson’s or any man’s. 
 
 Whatever the reasons for the four-year hiatus in their friendship, 
 and the reasons are not altogether clear, Melville must have been 
 stung at being flogged with the Transcendental stick; and on Feb¬ 
 ruary 14, 1852, sometime between the Moby-DicI{ and Pierre re- 
 
 Literary World, XI, 118-120 (Aug. 21, 1852). See also Paul Smith, “The Confi¬ 
 dence-Man and the Literary World of New York,” 'Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XVI, 
 329-337 (Mardi, 1962). 
 
126 
 
 Sidney P. Moss 
 
 views, he curtly addressed a letter to the “Editors of Literary World” 
 canceling his subscription and obviously his friendship with 
 Duyckinck.^ 
 
 Melville’s second known exposure to Emerson occurred the 
 following year when he visited the Hawthornes. Careful “not to 
 interrupt Mr. Hawthorne’s mornings,” as Sophia Hawthorne wrote, 
 Melville “generally walked off somewhere—& one morning he shut 
 himself into the boudoir & read Mr. Emerson’s Essays,”^ an act that 
 reveals at once his interest in and superficial knowledge of Emerson. 
 His only other known exposure to Emerson occurred after he had 
 published Pierre (1852), “Bartleby” (1853), “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” 
 (1853), and The Confidence-Man (1857). Hardly affluent, he was 
 nevertheless curious enough about the sage of Concord to buy three 
 of his books, if only in secondhand copies. These were Essays: First 
 Series, Essays: Second Series (both purchased in the early sixties), 
 and The Conduct of Life (purchased in 1870). The annotations 
 Melville made in these books indicate a sense of discovery and are, 
 on the whole, in approbation of Emerson. Such expressions as the 
 following regularly appear as marginalia: “Bully for Emerson!— 
 Good”; “A noble expression, with a clear strong meaning”; “All 
 this is nobly written, and proceeds from noble thinking, and a 
 natural sympathy with greatness”; “True”; “True & admirable! 
 Bravo.” When he took exception to Emerson, it was to his rejection 
 of evil, his occasional intellectual smugness, and to what Braswell 
 calls his “imperfect appreciation of the suffering of mankind. . . 
 
 This is the known evidence, and it does not suggest that Emer¬ 
 son was Melville’s bete noire or that he had satirized him in book 
 after book. Duyckinck did not recognize Emerson in Plinlimmon, 
 nor did he see Thoreau in “Bartleby,” nor anti-Transcendentalism 
 
 See Melville’s Letters, p. 149; Leyda, Melville Log, passim; and Howard, Melville, 
 p. 236, who correcdy notes that on October i, 1856, Melville “sloughed off his four years 
 of sensitive estrangement from Evert Duyckinck and spent the evening . . . with him.” 
 
 ’“Metcalf, Melville, p. 91. Though the letter is undated, it is clear from the context 
 that it was written in the fall of 1850. 
 
 “Melville as a Critic of Emerson,” p. 331. I have not called attention to the fact 
 that Melville owned a copy of Emerson’s Poems (7th ed.; Boston, 1858), a gift he 
 received from Samuel Shaw in 1859, because there is nothing in his mere scoring of two 
 passages of “Merlin” and the quotation from Anacreon that he wrote beside a stanza 
 from “The Humble-Bee” that is at all revealing about his attitude toward Emerson. See 
 Leyda, Melville Log, II, 607. 
 
“Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” 
 
 127 
 
 in “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!”^ Common sense would tell us that if 
 Emerson or Thoreau were satirized by Melville, someone would 
 have observed that fact somewhere, if only in a review or letter. To 
 repeat, then, Melville was ambivalent to Transcendental thought, 
 both ancient and modern; and to demonstrate that he was not 
 implacably opposed to it and that once, in a joyous moment, he 
 surrendered to its “comedic” vision, we shall have to mrn to 
 “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!”^ Before we do, however, a word needs to 
 be said about the “comedic vision” inasmuch as it is so badly con¬ 
 fused with the “comic vision.” 
 
 The comic vision (and I can only be suggestive here) has a 
 large gamut, running the range from seeing the amusing incon¬ 
 gruities of life to observing the yawning disparities between the 
 ideal and the real and being roused to the harsh satire and black 
 humor of, say. Swift in the Fourth Book of Gulliver’s Travels. The 
 comedic vision is entirely different; in fact, it is the obverse of the 
 tragic vision. If the tragic vision sees man as passing from innocence 
 and freedom to corruption, necessity, and finally death, the comedic 
 vision sees the possibility, even the acmality, of a glorious reversal, 
 as Whitman does in “Song of Myself.” Not that the comedic vision 
 refuses to recognize the brute facts of man’s subjection to necessity, 
 his proneness to evil, and the imminence of his death. It simply re¬ 
 fuses to settle for this limited view. Instead, it encompasses these 
 
 Duyckinck, in the Literary World, XIII, 295 (Dec. 3, 1853), noted that “Bartleby” 
 was a ‘Toeish tale, with an infusion of more natural sentiment. . . .” Earlier, on Nov. 
 26, 1853, p. 278, he had observed that “Cock-A-Doodlc-Doo! ” “is an imaginative, de¬ 
 scriptive, sentimental paper, dramatically moralizing in a northern New England land¬ 
 scape, the sound of the farmyard trumpeter—in a strain for humor and poetry which 
 would make merry the heart of old Dan Chaucer. ... It is not at all difficult to rec¬ 
 ognise, in this paper, the best qualities of one of the foremost of American writers. Her¬ 
 man Melville never was in better trim than in this resonant ‘article.’ ” Some two years later 
 Duyckinck called “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” “one of the most lively and animated produc¬ 
 tions of his pen” (Evert A, and George L. Duyckinck, eds.. Cyclopaedia of American 
 Literature, 11 , New York, 1855, 674). 
 
 ““ When Melville read Emerson’s “Heroism” in Essays: First Series, he came upon 
 the following passage that would serve, with minor revisions, to define the theme of 
 “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!”: “Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul 
 at war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the 
 power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. ... It is generous, hospitable, tem¬ 
 perate, scornful of petty calculations and scornful of being scorned. It persists; it is of 
 an undaunted boldness and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness 
 of common life. That false prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the foil, the 
 butt and merriment of heroism.” Melville “drew a marginal line beside these sentences 
 and observed: This is noble again’” (Braswell, “Melville as a Critic of Emerson,” p. 325). 
 
128 
 
 Sidney P. Moss 
 
 jEacts at the same time that it transcends them. The comedic vision 
 has its ovv^n integrity and is an ans^ver to the easy and even posturing 
 despair of modern times, a despair seldom so hard-bought as Mel¬ 
 ville’s; and if it is foolishness, then, in Melville’s words, it is better 
 to be a fool than a wise man. 
 
 The comedic vision has reaches beyond the power of the tragic 
 vision to explore, for, as has been remarked, the tragic vision is self- 
 limiting. It is Dante’s Paradise rather than his Inferno, Shake¬ 
 speare’s The Tempest rather than Macbeth, Eliot’s Four Quartets 
 rather than The Waste Land. It is the biblical statement, “the peace 
 of God, which passeth all understanding,” as against the despair 
 expressed by Septimius Severus, "Omnia fui et nihil expedif’ (“I 
 have seen all things and it availed nothing”). It is Emily Dickinson’s 
 awareness that “Much Madness is divinest sense” and Robert Frost’s: 
 
 Ah, when to the heart of man 
 Was it ever less than a treason 
 To go with the drift of things, 
 
 To yield with a grace to reason. 
 
 And bow and accept the end 
 Of a love or a season? 
 
 If, in short, the comedic vision has any one characteristic, it is its 
 defiance of life-denying forces. 
 
 Ill 
 
 On the basis of Melville’s adaptation of two lines in “Resolution 
 and Independence,” Richard Chase has made the telling point that 
 Wordsworth’s poem may have “quite possibly suggested” “Cock-A- 
 Doodle-Doo!,” for its “whole meaning is similar to that of the 
 poem.” And not only its meaning, I might add, but its structure, 
 development, and characterization as well. As Wordsworth despairs 
 at the beginning of his poem, so does the narrator at the outset of 
 the tale. As Wordsworth projects his despair upon the universe, so 
 does the protagonist of “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” Where Wordsworth 
 writes: 
 
 We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; 
 
 But thereof come in the end despondency and madness. 
 
“Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” 
 
 129 
 
 Melville wrote, adapting the verses to the exigencies of his narrative: 
 
 ... Of fine mornings, 
 
 We fine lusty cocks begin our crows in gladness; 
 
 But when eve does come we don’t crow quite so much, 
 
 For then cometh despondency and madness. 
 
 And as Wordsworth rejects despair after his encounter with the 
 leech-gatherer, so the narrator of the tale achieves his full comedic 
 vision after his final meeting with the Merrymusks. 
 
 But though Melville owed much to Wordsworth’s poem in 
 theme, design, and in many details, he owed nothing to him in exe¬ 
 cution and tone. For where Wordsworth narrates and is didactic, 
 Melville dramatizes and writes a small but exultant masterpiece. 
 Since the story has been misread so often, and since my major inten¬ 
 tion in this essay is to rescue the narrative from the near-oblivion 
 into which it has fallen, I may be pardoned for making a detailed 
 analysis of the tale. 
 
 The narrator tells us that despotism and casuality rule the times. 
 Despotism has put down “high-spirited revolts”; casuality has 
 injured or destroyed “high-spirited travelers”; and his own “private 
 affairs are also full of despotisms [and] casualities. . . .” He who 
 was once high-spirited is now “full of hypoes”: he sleeps poorly or 
 not at all, finds the “air damp, disagreeable,” the “country . . . 
 underdone.” In short, to use Melville’s figure, it is as if he were 
 butting his head against the world. 
 
 But it is a time of death and rebirth in the world and in himself, 
 a struggle for life against life-denying forces. The earth about him 
 shows “tokens of a divided empire”: the “old grass and the new 
 grass” are striving together, and the woods are “strewn with dry 
 dead boughs, . . . while the young trees” are beginning to bud. But 
 he is still in his “old grass,” “dead bough” frame of mind. He 
 broods about the fate of his “good friend and thirty other good 
 fellows” who “were sloped into eternity at the bidding of a thick¬ 
 headed [steamboat] engineer, who knew not a valve from a flue,” 
 and of a “crash on the railroad” when “near a score of noble hearts, 
 a bride and her groom, and an innocent little infant,” all on the 
 verge of a new life, were “disembarked into the grim hulk of 
 Charon. .. .” In despair, he tells himself that casuality is the inexor- 
 
130 
 
 Sidney P. Moss 
 
 able fact of life, so “what’s the use of complaining,” especially as 
 the ultimate despotism may be “the heavens themselves” that 
 “ordain these things. . . .” Yet he cannot “go gentle into that good 
 night,” to use Dylan Thomas’s expression; rather, he rages “against 
 the dying of the light.” With consummate futility, he rants against 
 the “thousand villains and asses who have the management. . . [of] 
 vital things in the world” and against the alleged “great improve¬ 
 ments of the age” like the railroad, which he calls a Moloch, a 
 chartered murderer, and a death monopolizer. 
 
 The thought of death makes him think at once of his creditor 
 “who frightens the life out of me more than any locomotive” 
 [italics added], a “smaller dunning fiend . . . who seems to run on 
 a railroad track, too,” a demon who “duns me even on Sunday . . . 
 and . . . shoves himself between me and salvation”—a “lean,” “lan¬ 
 tern-jawed rascal” who personifies everything mechanistic, ma¬ 
 terialistic, and destructive in his private life. 
 
 Happening to feel in his pocket, he finds a powder he “was 
 going to send to the sick baby in yonder hovel,” and he thinks of 
 all the sick children on the verge of life carried off by disease, of 
 his powerlessness against such universal evil, and even the punish¬ 
 ment he now endures for having tried to help. For he got “rheu¬ 
 matics” in his shoulder, the good one of course, when “in a crowded 
 boat, I gave up my berth to a sick lady, and stayed on deck till 
 morning in drizzling weather. There’s the thanks one gets for 
 charity! Twinge! Shoot away, ye rheumatics! Ye couldn’t lay on 
 worse if I were some villain who had murdered the lady instead of 
 befriending her.” 
 
 At this moment of helpless despair, he hears the “triumphant 
 thanksgiving of a cock-crow! Glory be to God in the highest!' 
 
 It seems necessary to point out that there is a “cock tradition” in religious thought, 
 which critics of this story seem unaware of. On gravestones, in sermons, and in religious 
 writing in general, cocks appear with fair regularity for obvious symbolic reasons. If 
 death is like sleep, the cock’s crow is like a call to resurrection. Failing to understand 
 the religious symbolism of the cock, some commentators insist upon interpreting the cock 
 in sexual terms, though for this tale such an interpretation has no relevance whatever. 
 Among these commentators is one English critic (Martin Green) who faults American 
 critics for misreading and even inventing texts. See his Re-Appraisals: Some Common- 
 sense Readings in American Literature (New York, 1967), pp. ii and 108-112. The cock 
 as symbol of death-defiance also appears in Moby-Dicl{, as Lynn in The Comic Tradition in 
 America, pp. 232-233, has also noted. In “The Doubloon” (chap. 99) Ahab considers 
 the cock on the coin as “the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl. . . .” And 
 
“Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” 
 
 Immediately, both he and the world change; more precisely, his 
 view toward himself and the world changes. He begins to “feel 
 a litde in sorts again”; the mist seems to lessen; the sun starts to 
 show itself. Again he hears the cock whose crow plainly says to 
 him, “Never say die!” for there is no death and defeat except as 
 we yield to them. The cock’s crow is so “blessed” that he finds him¬ 
 self addressing the calves in the field, and he realizes that he has 
 been a calf to fall into despondency and madness. For what has he 
 to despair of when a cock can cry “like a very laureate,” though, 
 like all mortals, it has “death hanging over him at any moment” ? 
 At the next crow of the cock, which is so “clamorously-victorious,” 
 he finds himself flapping his elbows and crowing too. 
 
 But despite his sense of exultation, he is not yet fully reborn. 
 Doubt obtrudes: Has he overestimated the cock’s pluck? Will it 
 crow so well at noon or at nightfall? After all, “even cocks have 
 to succumb to the universal spell of tribulation. . . .” Nevertheless, 
 he is marvelously invigorated. He will now eat “something hearty,” 
 not his parsimonious tea and toast. Moreover, his whole percep¬ 
 tion of life is changed. The train now flashes “through the trees 
 like a vein of silver” instead of coming “like the Asiatic cholera can¬ 
 tering on a camel”; its “steam pipe chirps” instead of going “snort! 
 puff! scream!”; and its passengers are gay, hardly sacrifices to 
 Moloch. Everything, in short, has fallen into exquisite harmony— 
 train, passengers, earth, river, sky. “The old grass,” he thinks now, 
 playing on the word knocks “has to knock under to the new,” as 
 his dun—his life-denying force—must knock under to him, by a 
 club if need be, for there have been enough “knockings on the 
 heads” of high-spirited people. 
 
 When the dun plies him again, he turns him out, for nothing 
 frightens him now: “Duns!—I could have fought an army of them!” 
 
 in “Queequeg in His Co£fin” (chap, no) Pip calls “for a game cock now to sit upon 
 his head and crow!” For “Queequeg dies game! I say, game, game, game!” For cocks 
 on gravestones, see Allan I. Ludwig, Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its 
 Symbols, 1650-1815 (Middletown, Conn., 1966), pp. 133 fl. For cock metaphors in religious 
 writing, see, for example. Images or Shadows of Divine Things, ed. Perry Miller (New 
 Haven, 1949), p. 92, in which Jonathan Edwards writes: “The crowing of the cock 
 to wake men out of sleep and to introduce the day seems to signifie the introducing 
 the glorious day of the church by ministers preaching the Gospel. Many shall be awakened 
 and roused to preach the Gospel with extraordinary fervency, to cry aloud and lift up 
 their voice like [a] trumpet.” Trumpet, of course, is the name Melville gave to his cock. 
 
132 
 
 Sidney P. Moss 
 
 He also learns that the cock’s crow is mightiest “at the darkest,” 
 that it is clearly “a cock who had fought the world and got the bet¬ 
 ter of it, and was now resolved to crow, though the earth should 
 heave and the heavens should fall.” Reassured, he returns home 
 “dauntless”; and now, when he considers the life-crushing forces 
 that put down the “risings of the poor oppressed” and destroy people 
 in “railroad and steamboat accidents,” including his own friend, 
 it is to his astonishment “with a calm, good-namred rapture of de¬ 
 fiance,” which would enable him to “meet Death, and invite him 
 to dinner, and toast the Catacombs with him, in pure overflow of 
 self-reliance and a sense of universal security.” 
 
 The next morning, his spirit and body miraculously refreshed, 
 he decides to buy the cock, the “bird rightly offered up by the in¬ 
 vincible Socrates, in testimony of his final victory over life,”®^ for 
 while the cock’s crow reinforces him, the cock’s spirit is not yet his. 
 In searching for it, he can only determine that the crow of this 
 “Brother of the Sun,” “this bird of cheerful Socrates—the game- 
 fowl Greek who died unappalled,” comes from the East (life), not 
 from the West (death). No one he asks can help him, for none 
 of them can hear the cock, for they are “uncheerful and uncheer- 
 able. . . .” But though he is not yet aware of the fact, he hardly 
 needs the cock, for his own “soul . . . would turn chanticleer, and 
 clap her wings, and throw back her throat, and breathe forth a 
 cheerful challenge to all the world of woes.” 
 
 To interiorize the cock’s spirit and become fully reborn and in¬ 
 dependent, he has yet to go through one more stage, a stage through 
 which Merrymusk guides him. Merrymusk, a man who sawed and 
 split his wood and who endures such torments of despotism and 
 casuality as trivialize his own, appears for his pay. He gives Merry¬ 
 musk what he can, and in a day or two proceeds to his shanty, 
 where the sawyer lives with his four ailing children and invalid 
 wife, to pay him the rest of his wages. The closer he comes to the 
 shanty, the more clearly he hears the cock, until finally he sees the 
 creature whose appearance is in every way as martial and victorious 
 as its voice. It is “like a golden eagle,” “a Field-Marshal,” “Lord 
 Nelson, with all his glittering arms on, standing on the Vanguard's 
 
 Socrates’s last words to Crito in the Phaedo, it will be recalled, were: “I owe a 
 cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?” 
 
‘Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! 
 
 133 
 
 quarter-deck going into battle”; the “Emperor Charlemagne in his 
 robes at Aix-la-Chapclle. . . Its crest is “like unto Hector’s hel¬ 
 met”; its “embroidered trappings” like those of “some Oriental 
 king. . . .” 
 
 Merrymusk, despite his miserable poverty, refuses to sell him the 
 cock, for it is the pearl beyond price. Its presence is so celestial that 
 it irradiates the shanty; its voice gives such stuff against despair that 
 it transfigures the children and makes them seem the offspring of 
 “emperors and kings”; and, in Merr\'musk’s words, the cock glori¬ 
 fies “this otherwise inglorious, lean, lantern-jawed land,” adjec¬ 
 tives that the narrator had applied to the dun. To prove his point, 
 Merrymusk bids the cock crow its best, at which the cock delivers 
 a blast comparable only to that of “some overpowering angel in the 
 Apocalypse.” It seems to herald the defeat of evil in the world and 
 the rise of righteousness, for the cock “seemed crowing over the fall 
 of wicked Babylon, or crowing over the triumph of righteous Joshua 
 in the vale of Ashkelon.” 
 
 Recovering from his fright at hearing this preternatural blast, the 
 narrator asks Merr>’musk if there is any hope for the recovery of his 
 wife and children. “Not the least,” Merrymusk repHes, adding, 
 nevertheless, that he is “a very rich man, and a very happy one.” 
 
 On the way home, the narrator has his last doubt, for he is “not 
 wholly at rest concerning the soundness of Merr\’musk’s viev,’s of 
 things, though full of admiration for him”; but it is a doubt that 
 the cock’s crow dispels once and for all. Thus, when some of his 
 relatives die, he wears no mourning but drinks “stout in preference 
 to porter,” for he no longer acknowledges death, only life. 
 
 Some weeks later, returning to Merrymusk’s shanty, he finds the 
 “whole house ... a hospital. .. .” Yet when he would make Merrv'- 
 musk aware that he and his family are dying, Merr\’musk also re¬ 
 fuses to acknowledge death and insists, instead, that all is well. 
 Merrymusk dies protesting this fact; and, as if the family were a 
 single organism, each of them dies quickly in turn, with the cock 
 crowing as if it meant the blast to thrust their souls “sheer up to 
 the seventh heavens” and to rejoin them “in the upper air.” Then, 
 sounding one last “supernatural note,” the cock too drops dead. 
 
 The narrator buries the family and erects a gravestone over them. 
 But the stone bears no image of skull and crossbones, the tokens of 
 
134 
 
 Sidney P. Moss 
 
 man’s mortality and death’s victory. Instead, the stone bears the 
 image of “a lusty cock in act of crowing” in sign of man’s immor¬ 
 tality, the call to resurrection, and of death’s defeat, in token of 
 which he had these words chiseled into the stone: 
 
 O death, where is thy sting? 
 
 O grave, where is thy victory? 
 
 But that is not the end. Though the cock is dead, its spirit, phoenix¬ 
 like, has risen in the narrator’s own person. So that now he too can 
 crow amid universal tribulation, “Cock-a-doodle-doo! —oo!—oo!— 
 oo!—oo!” 
 
 “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” is clearly a companion piece to “Barde- 
 by.” Apart from the fact that they appeared concurrently in 1853, 
 they represent opposite positions. Where Bartieby is defeated by 
 life and withdraws even into death, the narrator of “Cock-A- 
 Doodle-Doo!” comes to defy and even deny death while exulting 
 in life. Perhaps the final comment should be left to Yeats who in 
 “Sailing to Byzantium” shared in his own way Melville’s comedic 
 vision: 
 
 An aged man is but a paltry thing, 
 
 A tattered coat upon a stick, unless 
 
 Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing 
 
 For every tatter in its mortal dress. . . . 
 
Melville and the Negro: 
 
 From Typee to "Benito Cereno” 
 
 Eleanor E. Simpson 
 
 I NASMUCH AS Melvtlle PUBLISHED most of his bcst work in the years 
 between the Mexican and Civil Wars—the years during which the 
 interconnected problems of westward expansion and slavery reached 
 crisis stage—it might seem, as Sidney Kaplan thinks, “not surpris¬ 
 ing that from Typee in 1846 to the Battle-Pieces of 1866 there is 
 scarcely an important item in the Melville canon that does not con¬ 
 tain Negro characters or touch in some way the question of bondage 
 and revolt.”^ Yet the frequency and importance of the Negro’s role 
 in Melville’s work is, in fact, surprising in view of the absence of 
 black men from the work of his contemporaries. 
 
 Though Negroes figure prominently in such abolitionist efforts 
 as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, they seldom appear in the nonpropagandistic 
 writings of Melville’s literary peers. Emerson, Thoreau, and Whit¬ 
 tier, for example, may have spoken and editorialized against the 
 evils of slavery and the wickedness of Daniel Webster and Judge 
 Shaw, but Negroes as individuals have no place in their poetry. 
 Negroes do, of course, figure in Whitman’s work, but Leaves of 
 Grass was pubUshed four years after Moby-Dic\, and Whitman 
 was not widely known until still later. Mention of Negroes and 
 slavery is also conspicuously absent from the stories and novels of 
 Melville’s close friend and correspondent Nathaniel Hawthorne 
 (though he discusses the slavery issue in his campaign biography of 
 Franklin Pierce, whose administration was pro-slavery). Further¬ 
 more, Melville’s correspondence makes no reference to the slavery 
 issue. Even the letters to his father-in-law and confidant, Judge 
 Lemuel Shaw, contain no mention of either Negroes or slavery, 
 though Shaw was at the time embroiled in the fugitive slave cases 
 
 ' Sidney Kaplan, “Herman Melville and the American National Sin,” originally pub¬ 
 lished in the Journal of Negro History, XLI, 311-338 (Oct., 1956) and XLII, 11-37 (Jan^ 
 1957). My references are to the article as reprinted in Images of the Negro in American 
 Literature, ed. Seymour L, Gross and John Edward Hardy (Chicago, 1966), p. 135. 
 
136 
 
 Eleanor E. Simpson 
 
 and the Boston school segregation case which made him famous 
 (or infamous, if one took the abolitionists’ view). Considering this 
 lack of literary precedent, then, we should not expect to find Mel¬ 
 ville in his fiction creating black characters and dealing with slavery 
 as he does. 
 
 In discussing Melville’s attitudes toward Negroes and slavery I 
 have tried to avoid treating the stories and novels solely as historical 
 documents—that is, as statements apart from the literary traditions 
 and conventions in which they were written, because these often 
 help to account for the way in which he portrays Negroes. When, 
 for example, we find Melville relying on a literary convention or 
 stereotype (the Rousseauistic “noble savage” or the “jolly African”), 
 we may conclude one of four things: (i) he accepts the convention 
 or stereotype as true, (2) he is not sufficiently interested in that par¬ 
 ticular character to go beyond the convention, (3) he desires to 
 individualize the character but has been unable to break out of the 
 convention, (4) he is consciously and deliberately using the conven¬ 
 tion, or stereotype, for thematic or artistic purposes. It would seem 
 that Kaplan in his study, “Herman Melville and the American Na¬ 
 tional Sin,” has erred badly on occasion (as will be discussed below) 
 by ignoring the possible relevance of such literary factors and by 
 crediting only the first of these alternatives—that the stereotypes he 
 uses actually represent Melville’s own convictions. 
 
 I 
 
 The influence of literary tradition is most noticeable, as might be 
 expected, in Melville’s first two novels, the fledgling efforts of a 
 young writer. Thus the liberal, equalitarian treatment of the island 
 natives in Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) is probably to be ac¬ 
 counted for largely in terms of the literary convention of the “noble 
 savage,” rather than taken as a conscious exposition of racial atti¬ 
 tudes. 
 
 In these early novels Melville was, after all, writing a couple of 
 potboilers and although they contain many passages of serious, 
 thoughtful prose, they should be seen in the light of the expectations 
 of the reading public of the day. The account of travel to exotic 
 lands—especially the still (for most Americans) idyllic South Sea 
 Islands—was popular among nineteenth-century readers, and such 
 
Melville and the Negro 
 
 137 
 
 accounts often included sentimentalized portraits of the natives. 
 Since Melville had decided on a career as a professional writer and 
 desired financial as well as artistic success, he was probably only 
 giving the public what it had come to expect when he pictured 
 the islanders as innocent, robust, charming people to whom the 
 corruptions of civilization were unknown. Melville, of course, 
 also had before him the example of Cooper, with his largely con¬ 
 ventional and sentimental treatment of “nature’s nobleman.” 
 
 Since, then, Melville at this point would seem to be following 
 established romantic conventions in his portraits of dark-skinned 
 peoples, his praise of the natives and condemnation of exploitive 
 white traders and missionaries is not to be wondered at, and prob¬ 
 ably not too much significance should be attached to what Kaplan 
 calls “the clean atmosphere of physical democracy” present in 
 Typee and Omoo?' Similarly, the stereotyped figures of “the jolly 
 little Negro,” Billy Loon, and the old cook, Baltimore, probably 
 have little relevance to Melville’s actual attitudes toward Negroes, 
 except as perhaps demonstrating that at this early period he evi¬ 
 dently had no deep convictions on the subject and accepted ready¬ 
 made stereotypes without really examining them. That this accep¬ 
 tance was unconscious and uncritical would seem the more probable 
 inasmuch as the stereotypes he uses in Typee and Omoo are the 
 partially conflicting ones of the Negro as happy-go-lucky, mindless 
 buffoon (Billy Loon) and as “noble savage” (the Typee warrior), 
 with its implications of dignity and strength. It should be noted 
 also that these early portraits of the islanders are not unequivocally 
 laudatory. Their romantic coloring is somewhat qualified, for ex¬ 
 ample, by the fact that Tommo’s injury continues to trouble him 
 despite his idyllic surroundings. Also, there is no gainsaying the 
 repulsion aroused in the narrator by his hosts’ cannibalism and by 
 their violent attempt to prevent his escape from the island. 
 
 In Mardi, Melville’s next novel (1849), most of the dark-skinned 
 islanders encountered merely serve the allegorical purpose of the 
 author and are on the whole treated in the same manner as those 
 in the earlier books. Exceptions to this generally causal treatment 
 are Samoa and Annatoo, an islander and his termagant wife en¬ 
 countered aboard an abandoned brigantine. Annatoo is primarily a 
 
 ’ Kaplan, p. 136. 
 
138 
 
 Eleanor E. Simpson 
 
 comic character who, having fulfilled her duty to amuse the reader, 
 conveniently falls overboard. Though at first depicted comically 
 as her henpecked husband, Samoa soon acquires an individualized 
 personality of considerable dignity and, with it, the narrator’s increas¬ 
 ing respect. The narrator imputes to him the capacity for both good 
 and evil action, thus breaking from stereotypes of uncivilized per¬ 
 sons as either “jolly” or vicious. Samoa is “a man who, without pre¬ 
 cisely meditating mischief, could upon occasion act an ugly part.” 
 Although the narrator’s description still retains a hint of con¬ 
 descension (“of his courage and savage honor, such as it was, I had 
 little doubt”), Samoa is on the whole characterized primarily in 
 terms of the noble savage, but with some attempt at individualiza¬ 
 tion. Like the later Queequeg, of whom he is partially a prototype, 
 Samoa is something of a “George Washington cannibalistically de¬ 
 veloped”; though he wears a knife sheathed in an earlobe and a 
 polished nail through his nose, he is a “hero” reminiscent of Lord 
 Nelson and Napoleon, and he has “a soul in his eye looking out 
 upon you there, like somebody in him.”® 
 
 Mardi contains Melville’s most explicit attack on slavery. In 
 the course of their allegorical journey, the narrator Taji and his 
 companions enter the Republic of Vivenza (the United States). Its 
 motto, “In this republican land all men are born free and equal,” is 
 followed by an Orwellian postscript in very small letters: “except the 
 tribe of Hamo.” In the Temple of Freedom (the United States 
 Senate) caricatures of Webster and Calhoun debate the Fugitive 
 Slave Act. Among these “dogmatically democratic” Vivenzians, 
 “there’s not so much freedom ... as these freemen think,” as the 
 philosopher Babbalanja observes. The Temple of Freedom is, after 
 all, “the handiwork of slaves” (p. 431). 
 
 In the extreme south of the republic the travelers see slaves at 
 work in the fields; it is a static, decaying and cheerless land over 
 which “men with thongs” rule. Portraying Calhoun (called “Nulli” 
 for his nullification doctrine) as a harsh overseer, Melville mocks the 
 argument that Negroes have no souls and are thus not fully human. 
 “Their ancestors may have had,” Nulli asserts, “but their souls 
 have been bred out of their descendants, as the instinct of scent is 
 
 ^ Mardi, and a Voyage Thither (New York, 1964), pp. 91-93. Hereafter, page numbers 
 of Melville’s works will be cited in parentheses in the text for convenience; all citations 
 refer to editions given in the notes. 
 
Melville and the Negro 
 
 139 
 
 killed in pointers.” Yoomy, the poet, remains unconvinced. After 
 carefully examining one of the slaves, he muses, “I swear he is a 
 man.” “Under the lash,” replies the Negro, “I believe my masters 
 and account myself a brute, but in my dreams bethink myself an 
 angel. But I am bond, and my little ones—their mother’s milk is 
 gall.” Nulli finds it advantageous to evade this dangerous debate 
 about the Negro’s soul and counters with the well-known assertion 
 that his slaves are at least well fed and cared for. They are con¬ 
 tent in their ignorance and are better off than the “serfs” who work 
 in Northern factories and mills. To Nulli these skeptical visitors 
 are “incendiaries” and “fanatics” come to instigate revolt, always 
 the most sensitive issue for Southerners, as Melville knew (pp. 439- 
 442). 
 
 Despite the travelers’ unmistakable sympathy for the slaves, in 
 Mardi their future is left in doubt. Though slavery is a sin, “a blot 
 foul as the crater poor of hell,” though the narrator knows that 
 lamenting the slaves’ lot does not help to alleviate it (“tears are not 
 swords”), he is nevertheless unwilling to precipitate civil war in 
 order to free the slaves (pp. 441-442). Kaplan objects to what he 
 considers Melville’s defeatist attitude: “Whereas the abolitionists 
 are optimistic actionists of one kind or another, for Melville the 
 slaves’ plight is completely hopeless.”^ Such a judgment, I suggest, 
 errs in confusing literature with history; its implied demand that 
 Melville be an“optimistic actionist” ignores the fact that the writer’s 
 first duty is to his art as art, not as propaganda. Further, to chide 
 Melville for this position is to assume that his characters’ opinions 
 are his own, certainly a doubtful assumption. 
 
 II 
 
 Melville’s characterization of Negroes in Redburn (1849) and 
 White-]ac\et (1850) is more equalitarian and less indebted to lit¬ 
 erary convention and stereotype than in any of his previous works. 
 On the whole, Negroes in these two books are neither patronized 
 as jolly minstrels nor sentimentalized as noble savages. This is 
 especially appropriate in that these novels of the seaman’s life are 
 based closely on Melville’s own experience, and it is probable that 
 most of his first-hand contact with Negroes came during those years 
 
 * Kaplan, p. 139. 
 
140 
 
 Eleanor E. Simpson 
 
 when he shared the forecastle and seamen’s mess with them aboard 
 whalers and frigates. 
 
 The two Negroes on board Redburn’s ship are both types, it is 
 true, but the interesting thing is that they are not particularly Negro 
 types; most of the narrator’s description of them would apply just as 
 well were they white. The steward, “a handsome, dandy mulatto” 
 (p. 80), is, like innumerable fictional stewards, fastidious of his 
 dress and “a sad profligate and gay deceiver ashore, addicted to every 
 youthful indiscretion” (p. 51).® The second Negro is the cook, Mr. 
 Thompson. Secreted away in his shack, from which emerge the 
 proverbially rank odors and bad coffee, he reads his greasy Bible 
 in the manner of several fictional old cooks and spends his spare 
 time trying to reform the steward. 
 
 Like Mard't, Redburn was written during the course of the Con¬ 
 gressional debates over the Fugitive Slave Act and the Compromise 
 of 1850. As in the earlier book, Melville has something to say in 
 Redburn about slavery and also about the condition of the free Ne¬ 
 gro. The young protagonist, wandering around Liverpool on leave, 
 comes upon the statue of Lord Nelson. The manacled figures orna¬ 
 menting the base of the statue, though meant to represent Nelson’s 
 victories, remind the American of “four African slaves in the 
 market place.” Musing on the historical position of Liverpool as a 
 center of the slave trade, Redburn involuntarily associates the city 
 with Virginia and Carolina. His are abolitionist sympathies; he 
 sees those who defend slavery as defenders of a “sordid interest” 
 against the claims of humanity (pp. 148-149). 
 
 The narrator also finds himself comparing the status of Negroes 
 in Liverpool with that of free Negroes in the northern cities of the 
 United States. He notices, for example, that the Liverpool slums 
 are inhabited by whites, in contrast to those of the “free states,” 
 where black people “almost always form a considerable portion of 
 the destitute” (p. 194). Redburn also remarks that American Negro 
 sailors are much freer in Liverpool than in their own country: “In 
 Liverpool indeed the negro steps with a prouder pace, and lifts 
 his head like a man; for here, no such exaggerated feeling exists in 
 respect to him, as in America.” Redburn has several times encoun¬ 
 tered the mulatto steward out with white women, something which 
 
 ^Redburn, His First Voyage (Garden City, N. Y., 1957). 
 
Melville and the Negro 
 
 141 
 
 he realizes would provoke mob violence in New York, but which in 
 the English city is not at all remarkable. He acknowledges that, 
 “unconsciously swayed in some degree by those local and social 
 prejudices that are the marring of most men,” he was “surprised 
 that a colored man should be treated as he is in this town; but a 
 little reflection showed that, after all, it was but recognizing his 
 claims to humanity and normal equality. . . .” And he adds wryly 
 that “in some things, we Americans leave to other countries the 
 carrying out of the principle that stands at the head of our Declara¬ 
 tion of Independence” (p. 195). 
 
 In White-]ac\et Melville attacks all forms of arbitrary govern¬ 
 ment and legalized brutality. Though his immediate target is the 
 military machine as codified in the Articles of War, his whole stance 
 is one of democratic rebellion against any law or act of government 
 which undermines or simply ignores the dignity and rights of men. 
 There is an unusually large number of Negroes among the Never- 
 sinl(s crew. Four of them—the cook. Old Coffee, and his three as¬ 
 sistants, May-day, Rosewater, and Sunshine—are essentially por¬ 
 trayed in the same vein as Billy Loon; that is, though treated sym¬ 
 pathetically, they are not really taken seriously as human beings. 
 The same does not apply, however, to the two Negro seamen. One, 
 captain of White Jacket’s gun crew, is a “fine negro” who, pre¬ 
 figuring Daggoo and Queequeg of Moby-Dick^, commands the nar¬ 
 rator’s outspoken admiration. The other, Tawney, is described as 
 intelligent and dignified and is highly regarded by his fellow sea¬ 
 men. It is especially significant that these two Negroes are de¬ 
 lineated as individuals, with little of the stereotype about them, as 
 this would indicate that Melville is coming to rely less on conven¬ 
 tional images and more on personal evaluation. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Probably for most Americans of the period the best-known lit¬ 
 erary statement on slavery and the Northerner’s obligation to the 
 fugitive slave was Unde Tom’s Cabin (1852). There is evidence, 
 however, that Melville’s alertness to the problem and dissatisfaction 
 with the Fugitive Slave Act had found expression in Moby-Dic\ a 
 year earlier. Two men close to Melville were involved in the case 
 of Thomas Simms, a fugitive slave from Georgia, who was tried 
 
142 
 
 Eleanor E. Simpson 
 
 before the Massachusetts Supreme Court in April, 1851. Melville’s 
 father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, was Chief Justice of that court, and 
 his friend Richard Henry Dana was one of the attorneys retained to 
 defend Simms. 
 
 Shaw had made himself widely unpopular in Massachusetts when 
 in a similar case in 1842 he had ordered the return of the slave 
 George Latimer to Virginia. At that time 50,000 citizens of the 
 state had signed a petition protesting his decision, a petition which 
 former President John Quincy Adams had tried—^unsuccessfully— 
 to present to Congress. Whittier had written his poem “Massa¬ 
 chusetts to Virginia” in protest, and Garrison and Phillips had 
 joined in the attack on Shaw. 
 
 The Simms case served to revive the abolitionists’ animosity. The 
 runaway, arrested in Boston, was ordered by Shaw returned to 
 Savannah, where he received a public whipping. During his trial 
 an iron chain had encircled the court building, together with an 
 armed guard of police. This chain furnished the Judge’s critics 
 with a ready-made propaganda weapon. Wendell Phillips, for ex¬ 
 ample, castigated him for having “betrayed the bench and the 
 courts of the Commonwealth, and the honor of a noble profession 
 when ... he crept under a chain into his own courtroom.” The 
 chain, Phillips continued, was a mark of “wanton servility to the 
 slave power . . . and wanton flattery to Daniel Webster.”® 
 
 Lemuel Shaw had been a close friend of the Melville family 
 even before Herman’s marriage to his daughter, after which the 
 bond of affection between the two men had grown stronger. It is 
 certainly possible, therefore, that Melville discussed with his father- 
 in-law the Latimer and Simms cases and others (such as the Roberts 
 school segregation case of 1849, in which Shaw, upholding Boston’s 
 segregated school system, had established the “separate but equal” 
 doctrine). Despite his knowledge of Shaw’s position and his own 
 affection for the Judge, however, Melville had not hesitated to speak 
 out against slavery in Mardi and in favor of free Negroes’ rights in 
 Redburn and to delineate many Negroes sympathetically in his 
 novels. Though not an abolitionist and consistently skeptical of 
 
 ® Wendell Phillips, "Surrender of Sims,” in Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, First Series 
 (Boston, 1891), p. 62. For a summary of these incidents, see Charles H. Foster, “Some¬ 
 thing in Emblems,” New England Quarterly, XXXIV, 3-35 (March, 1961). 
 
Melville and the Negro 
 
 143 
 
 reform movements, Melville probably was in conflict with his fam¬ 
 ily’s patriarchal head on this matter. 
 
 Though I do not think the evidence supports Professor Foster’s 
 thesis that in Moby-Dic\ Melville produced “a democratic, anti¬ 
 slavery fable,... a revolt against Judge Shaw,” it would appear that, 
 as he suggests, particular passages do allude to slavery and perhaps 
 specifically to the Simms case.^ There are many indications that 
 Melville, who reported to Dana in May, 1850, that he was half-way 
 through the novel, later began rewriting it, perhaps radically chang¬ 
 ing its course. Although he originally assured his publisher that 
 the book would be ready by fall, 1850, it was not sent off until Sep¬ 
 tember of the next year. Leon Howard suggests that Melville’s rad¬ 
 ical rewriting began in September, 1850, the month in which the 
 Fugitive Slave Act took effect.® George R. Stewart, working from 
 internal evidence, also concludes that major revisions were made 
 in the course of composition.® Some of them may well have come 
 during the spring of 1851, possibly at the time of the Simms trial. 
 Thus, two events pertinent to the fugitive slave issue took place 
 during the course of the composition of Moby-Die and may have 
 figured in its repeated revision. 
 
 Building on Stewart’s analysis, Foster suggests that Father 
 Mapple’s sermon (Chapter 9) and the role of the Negro Pip were 
 among Melville’s later insertions, and that the sermon covertly ex¬ 
 presses Melville’s dissatisfaction with Judge Shaw’s handling of the 
 Simms case. This would seem plausible in view of the preacher’s 
 exhortation that we must destroy all sin, though “[we] pluck it out 
 from under the robes of Senators and Judges” (p. 57).^® Foster is 
 surely right in thinking that for many New Englanders of the day, 
 the most sinful senator was Daniel Webster, and that, for Melville 
 especially. Judge might well mean Lemuel Shaw.“ 
 
 Even if Melville’s characterization of the Negroes aboard the 
 Pequod was not consciously intended as a reaction to Shaw’s con¬ 
 servatism, it is difficult to conceive how he could have more effec¬ 
 tively refuted the assumptions which underlay tliat conservatism— 
 
 ’ Foster, p. 21. 
 
 * Leon Howard, Melville: A Biography (Berkeley, 1951), pp. 162-172. 
 
 “George R. Stewart, “The Two Moby-Dicks,” American Literature, XXV, 417-448 
 (Jan., 1954)- 
 
 Moby-Dick.: or, The Whale, ed. Alfred Kazin (Boston, 1956). 
 
 ** Foster, pp. 16-20. 
 
144 
 
 Eleanor E. Simpson 
 
 the assumption that the slave was property rather than person, that 
 legalism rather than conscience or humanitarianism was adequate 
 to decide the Negro’s status. Certainly Ishmael’s statements about 
 Queequeg conflict radically with then-current notions concerning 
 the Negro’s supposed inferiority, his limited intelligence, his lack 
 of morals, and brutishness. Though perhaps not technically a Ne¬ 
 gro—he is from one of the South Pacific islands—Queequeg is de¬ 
 scribed as though he were. He worships a Negro idol (a “black 
 manikin,” a “Congo doll”), and Ishmael’s reflection that a white 
 man is really “a white-washed negro” implies that he was thinkin g 
 of Queequeg in these terms. 
 
 The most fervent abolitionist could hardly have asked for 
 anything more liberal than Ishmael’s attitude toward Queequeg; 
 in fact, Ishmael is frequently more radical in his equalitarian 
 views than the abolitionists themselves who, though unwaver¬ 
 ing in their opposition to slavery, were considerably less cer¬ 
 tain about the desirability of social equality and integration. Though 
 they realized that to be consistent they also had to work for equal 
 rights for free Negroes, most abolitionists were nonetheless reluctant 
 to flout custom and mix socially with black men. The contention 
 aroused over the question of admitting Negroes to the antislavery 
 societies demonstrates how strong this inhibition was.^^ The Gar¬ 
 risons, Phillipses, Whittiers, and their like had, it is certain, never 
 experienced the close contact with Negroes which Melville had 
 known as a seaman. Therefore, the picture of Ishmael, descended 
 (like Redburn and Melville himself) from a genteel Yankee fam¬ 
 ily, sharing a bed and becoming “chums” (the seaman’s word) with 
 Queequeg, was probably a bit extreme even for the most advanced 
 antislavery man. 
 
 Ishmael, faced with the prospect of close contact with Queequeg, 
 is, in fact, less concerned about the latter’s race than about his 
 “heathenish” appearance and his cannibalism. Ishmael’s decision 
 that “the man’s a human being just as I am, . . . better sleep with a 
 sober cannibal than a drunken Christian,” recalls the attitude of the 
 narrator of Typee {Moby-Dic\, p. 40). Queequeg, he discovers, 
 has “a simple honest heart; his countenance yet had a something in 
 it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul” 
 
 See Leon F. Litwack, “The Abolitionist Dilemma: The Anti-Slavery Movement and 
 the Northern Negro,” New England Quarterly, XXXIV, 50-73 (March, 1961). 
 
Melville and the Negro 
 
 145 
 
 (p. 58). There is “a certain lofty bearing about the pagan. ... He 
 looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a 
 creditor.” Queequeg is nothing less than “George Washington 
 cannibalistically developed,” self-sufficient, serene, with a “Socratic 
 wisdom” (p. 58). 
 
 Queequeg, of course, plays a crucial role in one of the novel’s 
 major thematic developments—the redemption of Ishmael from his 
 initial despair and, in the epilogue, his symbolic redemption from 
 the destruction which has befallen the rest of the crew. Queequeg’s 
 forthright and unsentimental offer of friendship dissolves the mood 
 of despair in which Ishmael had set out: “No more my splintered 
 heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. 
 This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indif¬ 
 ference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hy¬ 
 pocrisies and bland deceits. . . . I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, 
 since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy” (p. 59). 
 The references to “soothing savage” and “civilized hypocrisies” may 
 reveal some lingering influence of the noble savage convention, but 
 the relationship between Ishmael and his friend is developed for 
 the most part in terms not marred by resort to such models. 
 
 The genuineness of Ishmael’s attitude is affirmed by an incident 
 which might well have had its parallel whenever a white and a 
 Negro were seen together: on the crossing to Nantucket, Ishmael and 
 Queequeg draw “jeering glances” from their fellow passengers, “who 
 marvelled that two fellow beings should be so companionable; as 
 though a white man were any thing more dignified than a white¬ 
 washed Negro” (p. 65). This last statement is startling in that it 
 goes far beyond the position of most abolitionists. Later white 
 liberals, in fact, seldom achieve this detachment, for the assump¬ 
 tions implicit in Ishmael’s phrase are the opposite of those which un¬ 
 derlie, for example, Kenneth Stampp’s faintly condescending com¬ 
 ment that Negroes are “white men with brown skins.” 
 
 Daggoo, a “gigantic, coal-black negro-savage,” is, like Queequeg 
 and the Indian Tashtego, one of the Pequod's harpooners. Again in 
 Melville’s description of the African there is something of the noble 
 savage convention (“Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues”), but 
 at the same time Melville takes the opportunity to introduce explicit 
 Negro-white comparisons, in which the latter comes off second 
 
146 
 
 Eleanor E. Simpson 
 
 best: “a white man standing before him [Daggoo] seemed a white 
 flag come to beg truce of a fortress” (p. 108). Furthermore, Mel¬ 
 ville’s African in no sense fits the complacent American stereotype 
 of the Negro as docile and self-effacing. Daggoo, proud of his race 
 (“Who’s afraid of black’s afraid of me! I’m quarried out of it!”), is 
 challenged by another sailor who taunts him: “Thy race is the un¬ 
 deniable dark side of mankind—develish dark at that.” The African 
 calls the other’s bluff, and in the ensuing fight Melville makes clear 
 that this is not just another skirmish between sailors. It is a contest 
 between black man and white man: “White skin, white liver!” 
 Daggoo cries, leaping on his opponent (p. 148). Though Melville 
 will in “Benito Cereno” develop thematically the white seaman’s 
 identification of the Negro with diabolism, he is here clearly on the 
 Negro’s side. 
 
 The cabin boy Pip is another Negro who plays a significant role 
 aboard the Pequod. Introduced as the happy-go-lucky, tambourine¬ 
 playing black boy of the stereotype, he is soon given another, more 
 serious and more individualized dimension. It is Pip who perceives 
 the full significance for himself and the rest of the crew of Ahab’s 
 determination to hunt down the white whale: “Oh, thou big white 
 God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this 
 small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have 
 no bowels to feel fear!” (p. 149). His prayer, with its race-conscious 
 overtones and following as it does immediately upon Daggoo’s fight 
 with the white sailor, would seem to be part of that racial theme 
 first noted in relation to Queequeg, a theme which reappears in 
 Pip’s later scenes. 
 
 As Foster has observed, the cabin boy becomes a really significant 
 figure only toward the end of the book, and then rather suddenly and 
 inexplicably. Approximately one-third of the novel’s bulk separates 
 Pip’s prayer to the “big white God” and the very important scene 
 as castaway which grooms him for his role as Fool to Ahab’s Lear. 
 If, however, as Foster believes, Melville created Pip toward the end 
 to humanize the mad Ahab and then went back and inserted the 
 earlier mention of him, Pip’s prayer is to be seen as congruent with 
 the later episode, in which the fact of his race is also emphasized.^® 
 Too, if Melville had been interested only in the Lear’s-Fool quality 
 
 Foster, pp. 24-25. 
 
Melville and the Negro 
 
 147 
 
 of Pip, a white cabin boy would have served as well; yet he makes 
 Pip a Negro and calls attention to this fact both in the prayer and in 
 the opening lines of “The Castaway.” 
 
 The possibility that Pip is meant to function as—among other 
 things—a vehicle for comment on slavery may account for the other¬ 
 wise somewhat superfluous incident of his first leap overboard and 
 Stubb’s subsequent lecture on the relative value of whales and black 
 men. Pip first leaps out of the whaleboat when, put in as a substitute 
 oarsman, he becomes frightened during the chase. With the bow¬ 
 line wrapped around his chest and neck, he is being drawn through 
 the water beside the boat while Stubb, the mate, must decide whether 
 to cut the line, thus saving Pip but losing the whale. The rope is cut 
 and Pip saved, but only to take a tongue-lashing from the boat’s 
 crew for costing them their catch. The terms of profit and loss in 
 which Stubb and the narrator comment on Pip’s action gives this 
 episode more than passing significance. After Stubb has “in a plain, 
 business-like, but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially,” 
 he advises him never again to jump from a boat. But, as the narra¬ 
 tor comments, though “stick to the boat” is usually the best motto 
 in whaling, there are occasions when “leap from the boat” is even 
 better. Stubb is aware of this, yet 
 
 as if perceiving at last that if he should give undiluted conscientious ad¬ 
 vice to Pip, he would be leaving him too wide a margin to jump in for 
 the future; Stubb suddenly dropped all advice, and concluded with a 
 peremptory command, “Stick to the boat, Pip, or, by the Lord, I won’t 
 pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can’t afford to lose whales by 
 the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, 
 in Alabama.” 
 
 And the narrator adds, “perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though 
 man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which 
 propensity too often interferes with his benevolence” (pp. 320-321). 
 
 This passage, whose length and detail is unnecessary to the ma¬ 
 jor castaway scene which follows, constitutes, I think, another of 
 those oblique comments on Negro-white relations which are to be 
 found scattered throughout the novel. It is certainly pertinent to 
 the problem which fugitive slaves posed for Northern commercial 
 interests, circa 1851. From an ideological and humanitarian stand¬ 
 point, the North would be expected at least to admit—if not actually 
 
148 
 
 Eleanor E. Simpson 
 
 encourage—fugitives. But, as Melville’s narrator observes, “man is 
 a money-making animal,” and Northern businessmen were over¬ 
 whelmingly opposed to the abolitionists’ efforts to encourage run¬ 
 away slaves. Abolitionist agitation, in the eyes of such men, posed a 
 dangerous threat to profits, and they were loath to exchange a 
 whale—or anything else—for a black man like Pip. I conclude, 
 then, that two aspects of Pip’s role are important for this study: 
 (i) the fact that he is delineated as a rather complex individual with 
 a crucial part to play in the drama, rather than as a stereotyped 
 Sambo, and (2) the fact that the prayer and castaway scene reveal 
 Melville’s continued concern with slavery, especially the plight of the 
 fugitive slave. 
 
 The last Negro to appear in Moby-Dick^ is the old cook Fleece, 
 whose sermon to the sharks mixes humor with a serious bit of 
 philosophizing pertinent to the novel’s theme. Beyond this moment 
 of seriousness, however. Fleece is definitely a comic character. Stubb 
 has some fun ordering the “old black” around, and though the or¬ 
 dering is harmless enough and not of a malicious sort, it places the 
 cook in the convention of the stage “darky” who shuffles through his 
 part, speaking in thick dialect and obeying the white man’s orders, 
 however sulkily (pp. 235-238). Kaplan, incidentally, disagrees; in 
 his view. Fleece is saved from the stereotype by his sardonic remark 
 about church membership (“unlike his predecessors, he is no devout 
 Uncle Tom”) and his sermon to the sharks.^^ The scene between 
 Fleece and Stubb, however, continues for two pages beyond this 
 sermon, and in those pages Fleece plays his comic role on cue. It 
 might be interesting to speculate why Melville has stereotyped this 
 one Negro when he has taken care to avoid such treatment of the 
 others in Moby-Dic\. Since we can only speculate, it seems reason¬ 
 able to accept the simplest explanation—that he needed comic relief 
 at this point and furnished it through the cook and Stubb. 
 
 IV 
 
 Melville’s work between Moby-Dict{^ and “Benito Cereno” con¬ 
 tains little that is relevant to this study. The playing o£F of the blonde 
 Lucy against the dark Isabel in Pierre (1852), for example, seems 
 an entirely conventional use of dark-light symbolism similar to the 
 
 Kaplan, p. 150. 
 
Melville and the Negro 
 
 149 
 
 opposition of the blonde Yillah and the dark Hautia in Mardi. 
 “Benito Cereno,” then, of the many short stories Melville wrote in 
 these years, is the one most clearly concerned with Negroes. 
 
 This novella, originally published in the October, November, 
 and December, 1855, issues of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, was in¬ 
 cluded the next year in the Piazza Tales. In view of his sustained in¬ 
 terest in racial themes, it is not surprising that Melville would have 
 written a story of slave revolt, especially at the height of the Southern 
 panic on the subject. It is interesting, however, that not one of the 
 eight periodicals which reviewed the Piazza Tales suggested that 
 the story might be of topical interest. Even George W. Curtis, edi¬ 
 torial consultant to the publisher of the Piazza Tales, who thought 
 the story “very good,” evidently failed to see in it any significance 
 for contemporary events.^® 
 
 Yet these were, after all, years not only of mounting fear of 
 slave revolts in the South, but years also of fighting over the exten¬ 
 sion of slavery in Kansas, in which a large contingent of New En¬ 
 glanders took part, and of increasing traffic on the underground 
 railroad. The thesis that Melville is in fact talking about slave in¬ 
 surrection here is substantiated by H. Bruce Franklin’s observation 
 that one of the changes Melville made in his source {Narrative of 
 the Voyages and Travels of Amasa Delano) was to move the date 
 from 1805 back to 1799, thus making Babo’s revolt correspond to 
 the rule of Toussaint L’Ouverture on Santo Domingo.^® 
 
 Despite the wishful thinking of some well-intentioned liberals, 
 it is clear that Melville did not intend Babo and his mutinous Ne¬ 
 groes to come off as heroic fighters against oppression and injustice, 
 thus allowing us to read the story as an antislavery tract. Melville 
 wastes no time making clear what it is about the Negroes aboard 
 the San Dominic\ that Captain Delano fails to see: it is their malice, 
 their evil. On the story’s opening page we are told that Captain 
 Amasa Delano is “a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature, 
 not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and 
 hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the 
 
 '“These reviews are listed in Jay Leyda, The Melville Log (New York, 1951), II, 
 500-501. 
 
 H. Bruce Franklin, “Apparent Symbol of Despotic Command: Melville’s Benito 
 Cereno" New England Quarterly, XXXIV, 470 (Dec., 1961). 
 
150 
 
 Eleanor E. Simpson 
 
 imputation of malign evil in man” (p. 3)/'^ Moreover, the whole 
 technique of the story rests upon Delano’s inability to distinguish 
 between appearance and reality, thereby insuring the reality of any¬ 
 thing he persists in believing unreal—such as the possibility of foul 
 play on the part of the blacks. Neither should Cereno’s last words 
 leave any room for doubt concerning their real character. Through¬ 
 out the story Don Benito is consistently portrayed as the man whose 
 eyes have been opened—the good man who trusted only to have 
 that trust betrayed, the Old World European whose sense of the 
 reality of evil has not been dulled by the bland optimism of nine¬ 
 teenth-century America. Therefore, when he answers “The Negro” 
 to Delano’s query, “You are saved; what has cast such a shadow 
 over you?” it is clear that to the Spaniard—the perceiver of truth— 
 “Negro” is synonymous with “evil” (p. 90). 
 
 Don Benito’s perception of the Negro is true; Delano’s false— 
 that much is clear. What, then, had Delano’s perception been be¬ 
 fore his horrifying discovery? The American had complacently 
 seen Negroes in terms of the prevailing stereotype—as docile, good- 
 natured, and incapable of malice or any action that demanded in¬ 
 telligence or calculated planning. “The whites,” he thought, “were 
 by nature the shrewder race . . . the blacks too stupid” to connive 
 (p. 39). The Negroes have a “peculiar love ... of uniting industry 
 with pasttime,” he remarks with unconscious irony on seeing four 
 old men busily polishing hatchets on deck. Fit by nature for menial 
 tasks, they perform them zealously and thus make “the most pleas¬ 
 ing body servant[s] in the world”; they are “natural valets and hair¬ 
 dressers” particularly suited to domestic employments by their 
 “great gift of good humor ... a certain easy cheerfulness, har¬ 
 monious in every glance and gesture; as though God had set the 
 whole negro to some pleasant tune.” Delano’s complacent and 
 benevolent nature is especially impressed with the Negro’s “docility, 
 arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind, and 
 that susceptibility of blind attachment sometimes inhering in indis¬ 
 putable inferiors. . . .” Delano applauds that something about the 
 Negro which—as he thinks—“exempts him from [that] inflicted 
 sourness of the morbid or cynical mind” which in Don Benito so 
 depresses him (p. 49). 
 
 “Benito Cereno,” in Selected Tales and Poems by Herman Melville, ed. Richard 
 Chase (New York, 1950). 
 
Melville and the Negro 
 
 151 
 
 Captain Delano is by nature “not only benign, but familiarly 
 and humorously so” and is patronizingly benevolent toward Ne¬ 
 groes in a way that passed for tolerance in that day (as in this). 
 He enjoys watching them at work or play and likes to be “on chatty 
 and half-gamesome terms” with those among his crew. “In fact, 
 like most men of a good, blithe heart. Captain Delano took to 
 negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to 
 Newfoundland dogs” (p. 50). 
 
 If it is this complacent, stereotyped image of the Negro that 
 Melville’s story declares false—as it surely is—what are we to put in 
 its place ? For purposes of this particular story at least, the transfor¬ 
 mation of images is clear: the idyllic picture of the sleeping Negro 
 woman, “like a doe in the shade of a woodland rock” (p. 36), gives 
 way abruptly to the vision of that same woman, more sadistic even 
 than the male, urging the slaves on to bloodthirsty revolt. Has Mel¬ 
 ville, then, gone to an opposite extreme from that which delineated 
 Queequeg, Daggoo and Pip ? Has he, as Kaplan asserts, repudiated 
 “his superficial, old notions (which were Delano’s too) about the in¬ 
 nately jolly, minstrel, religious nature of Negroes” only to transmute 
 them into “hatred of the ‘ferocious pirates’ of the San Domi¬ 
 nick. . .”?^® 
 
 Kaplan sees “Benito Cereno” as “an artistic sublimation of . . . 
 notions of black primitivism dear to the hearts of slavery’s apologists, 
 a sublimation in fact of all that was sleazy, patronizing, backward 
 and fearful in the works that preceded it.” As such, he says, the 
 story is a failure: “looked at objectively, the tale seems a plummet¬ 
 like drop from the unconditionally democratic peaks of White- 
 jacket and Moby-Dick- • . •” Melville, Kaplan thinks, is well rid of 
 his shallow primitivistic notions, but has overreacted and failed to 
 “perceive the free spirit of the Tawneys and the Daggoos as the 
 reality behind the masks.”^® 
 
 A number of comments might be made on this evaluation. For 
 one thing, Kaplan has erred rather badly in confusing the criteria 
 appropriate to a work of fiction with those appropriate to a tract 
 on race relations. When he judges “Benito Cereno” a failure, he is 
 really saying that Melville has failed to talte what Kaplan thinks is 
 the proper attitude toward Negroes. But literary works are not to 
 
 Kaplan, p. 155. 
 
 ^^Ibid., pp. 154-155. 
 
152 
 
 Eleanor E. Simpson 
 
 be judged in these terms. Kaplan, moreover, is hardly being more 
 “objective” than Melville; he is merely biased in another direction, 
 as his glorification of “the free spirit of the Tawneys and the Dag- 
 goos” reveals. Furthermore, he makes the gratuitous assumption 
 that Delano’s attitudes are Melville’s, a confusion which adherence 
 to the most elementary principles of literary criticism would have 
 helped him avoid. It is particularly strange that Kaplan would im¬ 
 pute “superficial old notions” to Melville, inasmuch as he spends the 
 bulk of his essay insisting that Melville was seldom dominated by 
 such prejudices. 
 
 Finally, we must ask whether Melville is in fact seeking to de¬ 
 stroy the image of “black primitivism dear to the hearts of slavery’s 
 apologists” in order (presumably) to warn Southerners of the real 
 dangers lurking among carelessly guarded slaves. I don’t think so. 
 In the first place. Southern slaveholders evidently did not believe 
 those platitudes about black primitivism and docility that they pub¬ 
 lished for Northern consumption—and perhaps as reassurance for 
 Southern ladies. The existence of the slave codes and the care 
 taken to prevent slaves from acquiring anything which might be 
 used as a weapon indicates this much. 
 
 It was, rather, the Northerner, whether abolitionist or not, who 
 was most likely to accept the image of the Negro as primitive. 
 It was an abolitionist, James Freeman Clarke, who in an article ad¬ 
 dressed to free Negroes inadvertently associated them with animals 
 (and apes at that); admonishing them to acquire wealth as the 
 surest way to social acceptance, he assured them that “no race in 
 this country will be despised which makes money. If we had in 
 Boston or New York ten orang-outangs worth a million dollars 
 each, they would visit in the best society. . . Another antislavery 
 man, Charles Stuart, asserted, Delano-like, that Negroes were guilty 
 of fewer “atrocious crimes” because they were “less ferocious, less 
 proud, and passionate and revengeful, than others.”^^ William El¬ 
 lery Channing, in an essay on “The African Character,” with which 
 Melville may have been acquainted, claimed that Negroes were by 
 nature docile, friendly, and cheerful and that if they possessed less 
 
 James Freeman Clarke, “Condition of the Free Colored People of the United States,” 
 Christian Examiner, LXVI, 264 (March, 1859). 
 
 Charles Stuart, “On the Colored People of the United States,” Quarterly Anti-Slavery 
 Magazine, II, 16 (Oct., 1836). 
 
Melville and the Negro 
 
 153 
 
 energy and courage than whites and were inferior intellectually, 
 they compensated for this in their “amiableness, tranquillity, gentle¬ 
 ness, and content.”^^ 
 
 The abolitionists thus helped perpetuate both the docile primitive 
 and Sambo stereotypes; instead of questioning these images, they 
 claimed that such qualities—since they rendered Negroes both harm¬ 
 less and likable—formed no obstacle to political and social rights for 
 free Negroes or to freeing the slaves. White spokesmen for Negro 
 rights probably relied on such stereotypes to evoke sympathy, inas¬ 
 much as they permitted the public to retain undisturbed its assump¬ 
 tions of the Negro’s inferiority and at the same time to be “tolerant” 
 and “Christian” at no risk. It is well known that any demonstration 
 of intellectual or moral superiority by Negroes was apt to cause the 
 abolitionists considerable embarrassment; Frederick Douglass’s re¬ 
 fusal to act the role of Uncle Tom for them is a case in point. 
 
 Northern whites thus accepted and perpetuated images of the 
 Negro which were not only false and derogatory, but which masked 
 the depth of that hatred and violence which slavery could breed in 
 its victims. In “Benito Cereno” Melville has indeed struck through 
 the mask. He has said, not that Negroes in general are bestial and 
 malevolent, but that Negroes—like other men—are capable of ex¬ 
 treme violence and sadistic cruelty, especially when subjected to the 
 dehumanizing conditions of slavery. Given this capabilitv, bland 
 stereotypes are not only irrelevant but dangerous. It is not Delano’s 
 faith in human goodness that saves him, but Don Benito’s apprecia¬ 
 tion of the possibilities of human malevolence. It would seem, then, 
 that in Amasa Delano, Melville has portrayed—indeed, parodied— 
 certain of his fellow Northerners. Delano, significantly, is a Massa¬ 
 chusetts man; in fact that is the first thing we are told about him. 
 
 It is interesting to speculate as to how much Melville knew or 
 suspected about Negro role-playing and accommodation techniques. 
 Inasmuch as he was capable of seeing the inconsistencies and dan¬ 
 gers of Delanolike complacency, it is not unlikely that he also 
 suspected that Sambo was essentially a role which the Negro played, 
 often consciously and shrewdly, but which could be shed when cir¬ 
 cumstances permitted. For this is exactly what the Negroes aboard 
 
 ** William Ellery Charming, “The African Character,” m The Anti-Slavery Pic\nic\: 
 A Collection of Speeches, Poems, Dialogues and Songs; Intended for Use in Schools and 
 Anti-Slavery Meetings, ed. John A. Collins (Boston, 1842), pp. 56-58. 
 
154 
 
 Eleanor E. Simpson 
 
 the San Dominic^ are doing—Babo especially. He is role-playing 
 to the hilt, making use of techniques learned as a slave. Ironically, 
 that is also what Don Benito is doing, and it is his role-playing which 
 ultimately saves both his own life and the more candid, utterly 
 guileless Delano’s. As he reminds Delano at the end, the latter had 
 been walking on treacherous ground all along, but lulled by his 
 trust in the “docile” Negro—which the slaves had done everything 
 possible to confirm—he had been unaware of his danger. 
 
 In objecting to Melville’s imputation of malice to Negroes, 
 Kaplan reveals that, like many white liberals, he wishes to exchange 
 one stereotype (Negro as primitive) for another (Negro as hero— 
 as “free spirit”). But if one must go to extremes, it is surely more 
 complimentary to the Negro to credit him with Babo’s intelligence 
 and boldness than to perpetuate the prevailing image of guileless— 
 because mindless—docility. Moreover, evil is always more real for 
 Melville than good, and life for him is never one-sided. It was the 
 ambiguity and mystery of man’s nature—black and white—that 
 fascinated him, and it is the artistically successful creation of these 
 elements that makes “Benito Cereno” a work of art—not a propa¬ 
 ganda tract. 
 
 In reviewing Melville’s treatment of Negroes and slavery from 
 his first novel to the story in which these themes are most fully ex¬ 
 plored, we have perceived several changes in attitude. By the time 
 of “Benito Cereno,” Melville had come so far from the relatively 
 facile, conventional portrayals of Typee and Omoo that the Negro 
 Babo is not only individualized, but individualized in a manner 
 radically opposite to all prevailing stereotypes. This would indicate 
 that in the ten years between Typee and “Benito Cereno,” Melville 
 grew more thoughtful about and more deeply concerned with the 
 Negro and slavery, as reflected in the increasing originality of his 
 portrayals and his decreasing reliance on literary convention and 
 popular stereotypes. Finally, he was able, unlike most people of 
 his day—in North or South—to see Negroes as multifaceted, com¬ 
 plex individuals, capable of both good and evil and neither simply 
 docile not simply vicious. He had portrayed with equal accuracy— 
 and artistic success—both Daggoo and Babo. 
 
Melville’s Bachelors and Maids: 
 
 Interpretation Through Symbol and Metaphor 
 
 Beryl Rowland 
 
 C ritical exegesis of “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus 
 of Maids” has focused on the longer of the two sketches. The 
 first seems to acquire its significance largely through illumination 
 thrown back on it by the tale of the maids, a work which could 
 easily stand alone. There is little argument about the levels of mean¬ 
 ing in the latter: in the general view, E. H. Eby’s comment that 
 the tale presents both the biological and social burdens of women 
 is still valid. Related to the first part of the diptych, the two levels 
 of meaning are appropriately extended or modified. For Eby, the 
 maids’ drudgery and female subjugation to biological processes con¬ 
 trast with the bachelors’ happy life and male freedom.^ For C. G. 
 Hoffmann, W. R. Thompson, and R. H. Fogle, further dimensions 
 are apparent: a distinction between “Old World leisure and New 
 World industrialism”;^ an indictment of the moral weaknesses of 
 both civilizations;® an attack on “mass production, the publishing 
 business, and some theories of American democracy,”^ with the first 
 tale serving to point up comparison and contrast. 
 
 Most critics feel that the diptych is technically unsuccessful. The 
 second tale is “bristling . . . with sexual symbols,”® but when the 
 allegory is correlated with the first tale it seems to illustrate some 
 tritely obvious fact of life. Melville’s serious critical purpose in 
 linking the civilizations of Europe and America does not come 
 through because of a “strucmral flaw.”® His oblique approach ob- 
 
 * E. H. Eby, “Herman Melville’s ‘Tartarus of Maids,’ ’’ Modern Language Quarterly, I, 
 100 (March, 1940). 
 
 * C. G. Hoffmann, “The Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 
 LII, 424 (July, 1953)- 
 
 ® W. R. Thompson, “‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’: A Re¬ 
 interpretation,” American Quarterly, IX, 44-45 (Spring, 1957). 
 
 ‘ R. H. Fogle, Melville's Shorter Tales (Norman, Okla., i9€o), pp. 53-54. 
 
 ® 'Thompson, p. 35. 
 
 * 'Thompson, p. 34; Hoffm ann , p. 424. 
 
156 
 
 Beryl Rowland 
 
 scures his honest, if pessimistic, analysis of the contemporary con¬ 
 dition. 
 
 We know that Melville’s vision was complex: his world was 
 vast, strange, and of multiple meaning. He recognized that if he 
 was to achieve his purpose and present timeless and unrestricted 
 truth, he needed to find the right relation between subjective and 
 objective modes of experience. His short fiction, written in the four- 
 year period following the completion of Pierre in 1852, seems to 
 have provided experimental answers to the problem raised in his 
 now well-known letter to Hawthorne, June, 1851,'^ and to the dif¬ 
 ficulties of structural and artistic control which troubled him in 
 longer works. In most instances he took some aspect of experience 
 that defied expression and projected it into a single block of ma¬ 
 terial which could be given pattern and structure. 
 
 Essential to his purpose was the employment of two interde¬ 
 pendent strategies: the first-person narrator who, while posing as a 
 rational, humane man, addressing readers similarly inclined, could 
 become sufficiently disturbed by the action he related to reveal 
 thoughts and behavior inconsistent with his chosen self-image; met¬ 
 aphors and symbols which served as vehicles for parabolic truth and 
 had an organic, unifying function. The tropological approach was 
 the natural outcome of Melville’s “transcendentalism,” which saw 
 an infinity of correspondences between the visible and invisible 
 world; symbol and metaphor were his principal means for revealing 
 the “fruyt” beneath the “chaf.” 
 
 In this diptych, the levels of meaning so far postulated, valid as 
 they are, are subordinate. They fail to realize that a metaphor lies 
 at the heart of the work. They reach only the cortex and miss the 
 organic experience. Central to the diptych is a traditional metaphor 
 which Melville uses in a highly original way, structuring his tales 
 upon it with meticulous craftsmanship. I believe that he derived 
 it from the argot of the streets and that he intended that it should 
 control meaning, action, form, and imagery in the two parts of the 
 diptych. 
 
 The mill may have originated in a documentary account of a 
 visit to a New England paper factory, but it is also an almost bla- 
 
 ’’ The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Divis and William H. Gilman (New 
 Haven, i960), p. 128: “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. 
 Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.” 
 
Bachelors and Maids 
 
 157 
 
 tant, basic symbol with very long traditions. When we perceive the 
 figurative meaning, we find that the hell with which the diptych 
 is concerned is not only that of woman in her service to the machine 
 and to biology but that of man in his relationship or, rather, his 
 service to woman. The concealment of the tenor is not due to artis¬ 
 tic perversity or ineptness; it was the only way whereby Melville 
 could communicate the incommunicable. 
 
 On one level the first part of the diptych is an ironic dissection 
 of the “bachelors”—Melville’s half-jocular term for those who think 
 that they know how to live the good life, how to close their eyes to 
 evil and pain, and who are, in reality, smug, unperceptive, and in¬ 
 adequate.® But the dominant protagonist here, as in the second 
 part, is a man who, like Actaeon, is finally compelled to accept a 
 role which he had not recognized as his, that of the impotent voyeur. 
 For all the whimsy and nostalgia accompanying the description of 
 the bachelors in their “snug cells,”® the irony indicates that, just 
 as the girls are “mere cogs to the wheels” of the machine,^® so these 
 men live routine lives of quiet negation. The paradox is that while 
 the narrator conveys their atrophied condition with such sensuous 
 perceptiveness, experience topples him from a sophisticated and 
 confident knowingness to the disturbed recognition that he is one 
 of their company. The dinner, the journey, the exploration of the 
 mill all become vehicles for conveying an aspect of human suffer¬ 
 ing epitomized in the “I” of the diptych. 
 
 The slang metaphor of the mill is of ancient origin, the grind¬ 
 ing of the corn into life-giving flour being regarded as analogous 
 to the creative act. Man was the miller, woman the mill, and the 
 Talmud, commenting on Samson grinding in the prison-house, 
 states: “It teaches that everyone brought his wife to him to prison 
 that she might bear a child by him.”^^ Job and Isaiah use the same 
 imagery and St. John symbolizes the destruction of the Whore of 
 Babylon as a stone “like a great millstone” cast into the sea.^® 
 
 ® On Melville’s “bachelors” see Fogle, pp. 14 and n., 46 50-51, 105, 132 £. 
 
 * “The Paradise o£ Bachelors and the Tartarus o£ Maids,” in The Complete Stories 
 of Herman Melville, ed. Jay Lcyda (New York, 1949), p. 189, 1 . 5. All quotations 
 are £rom this edition. 
 
 P. 202, 11 . 16-17. 
 
 ^^The Babylonian Talmud, ed. I. Epstein (London, 1936), Sotah, loa. 
 
 Job 31:9-10; Isa. 47:1-2; Rev. 18:21-24. 
 
158 
 
 Beryl Rowland 
 
 In England the idea was proverbial in Chaucer’s day/® as it 
 was in France/^ and I have found numerous examples of its use in 
 ballads and scurrilous verse from the fifteenth to the nineteenth 
 century/® John Florio defines the associated verb in A Worlde of 
 Wordes, 1598, when he translates mancinio as “the grinding or 
 greest, also taken for carnall copulation,”^® but by Burns’s day the 
 metaphor had been dropped from polite societyd^ It survives in 
 “Bawdyhouse Blues,” reputed to be a very old jazz song,^® and is 
 current today with all its associated imagery in a lively song of a 
 reluctant but “cuddlesome lass” and an enterprising young man 
 who “leapt with a will / And found her mill.”^® While “to do a 
 grind” may simply refer to a rotation of the pelvis, it still most 
 commonly denotes jutuere and, indeed, might be a straight trans¬ 
 lation of molere as anciently used by Petronius and others/® 
 
 The early use of mill to express a fundamental concept, its per¬ 
 sistence in proverb and in literature, point to continuous colloquial 
 usage. It could apply to an individual woman or to women collec¬ 
 tively as prostitutes,^^ and there is no reason to suppose that the 
 metaphor ever lost its vitality. 
 
 Melville is known to have made extraordinary use of the re¬ 
 sources of the language, particularly those of the vernacular. He 
 had an intense interest in cant languages, and in Moby-Dic\ alone 
 
 ^^The Wor\s of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston, 1957), p. 80, 1 . 389; 
 W. W. Skeat, Early English Proverbs (Oxford, 1910), p. 112. 
 
 Lf Roman de la Rose, ed. Ernest Langlois (Paris, 1920-1924), IV, 13145-13149; 
 Le Parnasse satyrique du quinzieme siecle, ed. M. Marcel Schwob (Paris, 1905), pp. 89, 
 220. 
 
 BM. AD MS 22311, fol. 119; BM. AD MS 22312, fol. 188; the ballad of “my 
 ladyes water-myll,” The Early English Carols, ed. R. L. Greene (Oxford, 1935), p. 311; 
 Henry Neville, The Ladies' Parliament (London, 1647), 11 . 69-70, 139-140 (“Digbie’s lady 
 takes it ill, / that her lord grinds at her mill”; “Simons may rejoice still / that the Priest 
 doth ply her mill”); Thomas d’Urfey, Wit and Mirth or Pills to Purge Melancholy (Lon¬ 
 don, 1719-1720), I, 120, II, 61, V, 139; The Tea-Table Miscellany, ed. Allan Ramsay 
 (Edinburgh, 1724), p. 153. 
 
 ^“London, 1598, p. 210. 
 
 ^’’The Letters of Robert Bums, ed. J. De Lancey Ferguson (Oxford, 1931), II, 167: 
 “The original song ‘The Mill mill O’ though excellent is, on account of decency, inad¬ 
 missible.” Bums to George Thompson, April 7, 1793. 
 
 S. Longstreet, The Real fazz Old and New, 52, cited in Dictionary of American 
 Slang, ed. Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner (New York, i960), p. 230. 
 
 Contributed to the writer by Earle Birney. 
 
 Satiric., xxiii, 4, Varro, Menippearum Reliquiae, 331. 
 
 See “Colin Blowbol’s Testament,” Nugae Poeticae, ed. J. O. Halliwell (London, 
 1844), p. 5; “The Bel-man,” The Non-Dramatic Worlds of Thomas DeWer, ed. Alexander 
 B. Grosart (London, 1885), III, 52. 
 
Bachelors and Maids 
 
 159 
 
 he employed some thirty terms for which the Islew English Dic¬ 
 tionary and the Dictionary of American English quote him as be¬ 
 ing the first or sole user.^^ These are not words which he coined: 
 they belong to argot which seldom finds it way into print. As 
 C. M. Babcock has remarked: 
 
 His firsthand acquaintance with usages developed among the American 
 people and his employment of these hitherto unrecorded words of the 
 “national blood” makes of his published works an invaluable source book 
 for American lexicographers. . . . Herman Melville derived his unique 
 vocabulary from the “plain facts” of experience, observed in “the vulgar 
 cauldron of an everlasdng uncrystallising Present.”^ 
 
 Life was Melville’s dictionary in the true Emersonian sense. His 
 reading was astonishingly eclectic, as Sealts has shown, but it was 
 probably from the streets that he acquired the metaphor of the mill 
 and other comparable figurative expressions which he employs in 
 other tales.^^ When we reexamine the diptych and interpret the 
 mill in its popular sense, we find that the metaphor integrates the 
 two experiences and milieux which, superficially, may seem so 
 disparate. 
 
 At the time when Melville wrote the diptych the question 
 whether the Templars were innocent of the charges for which they 
 were condemned early in the fourteenth century was warmly de¬ 
 bated. Chief among the charges was that of sodomy which had 
 been “documented” as early as 1654 by Pierre du Puy, librarian to 
 the Bibliotheque Royale, in order to exculpate the French mon¬ 
 archy.^® In the nineteenth century the discussion received fresh 
 impetus with the spirited defense of F, J. M. Raynouard in his 
 Monumens historiques, relatifs a la condamnation des chevaliers 
 
 ” C. Merton Babcock, “The Language of Melville’s Isolatoes,” Western Folklore, X, 
 286, n. 3 (October, 1951). 
 
 C. Merton Babcock, “Melville’s ‘Moby Dictionary,’ ’’ Word Study, XXIX, 7-8 
 (December, 1953). 
 
 ’* In Pierre the guitar on which Isabel focuses her affections is clearly intended to be 
 a symbol of the womb. Such symbolism is very ancient and can be traced back to the 
 Egyptian sistrum. In “I and My Chimney’’ the chimney is, among other things, a symbol 
 of virility. See E. Hale Chatfield, “Levels of Meaning in Melville’s ‘I and my Chimney,’ ’’ 
 American Imago, XIX, 163-169 (Summer, 1962); Darwin T. Turner “Smoke from Mel¬ 
 ville’s Chimney,” College Language Association Journal, VII, 107-113 (September, 1963). 
 
 Traittez concemant Vhistoire de France: sgavoir La Condamnation des Templiers, 
 avec quelques actes: L'Histoire du Schisme, les Papes tenans le siege en Avignon: et 
 quelques procez criminels (Paris, 1654). 
 
i6o 
 
 Beryl Rowland 
 
 du Temple, Paris, 1813, and with the reply by the famous oriental¬ 
 ist, Friedrich von Hammer-Purgstall, five years later, who, con¬ 
 tending that the Templars were Gnostic Ophites, produced repre¬ 
 sentations of obscene ceremonies and mystic signs alleged to have 
 been found in the Templars’ buildings.^® A succession of German 
 and French scholars upheld the innocence of the order, and their 
 views were popularized in England by C. G. Addison in the 1840’s.^^ 
 On the other hand, the famous historian Jules Michelet, who had 
 supported the Templars in his history of France, then accepted the 
 original charges, republishing them in detail in his Procbs des 
 Templiers, the first volume of which appeared in 1841. The accu¬ 
 sation that the Templars practiced unnatural vice was reaflSrmed. 
 Whether they had any relations with women was debated on scanty 
 evidence. Women were oflBcially banned from their society, but du 
 Puy’s charge that any child born from intercourse between a Tem¬ 
 plar and a virgin was roasted and made into an unguent^® certainly 
 implied heterosexual relations. Through Michelet the alleged prac¬ 
 tices of the Templars gained wide currency. They were accepted 
 without qualification by Thomas Wright, the well-known anti¬ 
 quarian, who subsequently expanded them to support his thesis in 
 The Worship of the Generative Powers, and with reservation by 
 Charles Knight, whom Melville met in London.^ 
 
 In the United States the Templars also aroused wide interest. 
 In 1821 a freemason called Jeremy Cross asserted m The Templars’ 
 Chart or Hieroglyphic Monitor that the modern order of the 
 Knights Templars stemmed directly from the ancient one, and he 
 later listed fifty-one grand masters from Hugh de Payens to Sir 
 
 ** Mysterium Baphometis revelatum in Fundgruben des Orients, VI (Vienna, i8i8). 
 On Melville’s familiarity with the Ophite heresy see Lawrance Thompson, Melville’s Quarrel 
 with God (Princeton, 1952), pp. 430-431. 
 
 The History of the Knights Templars, the Temple Church, and the Temple (ist and 
 2nd ed., London, 1842; 3rd ed., London, 1852). 
 
 Histoire de la condannation des Templiers (Brussells, 1713), I, 27-28: ‘Traeterea, 
 si ex Templarii coitu, infans ex puella virgine nascebatur, hunc igni torrebant; exque 
 eliquata inde pinguedine, suum simulachrum, decoris gratia ungebant.” 
 
 ““ Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent by Herman Melville, ed. Eleanor 
 Melville Metcalf (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), p. 80; for Wright, see A Contemporary Nar¬ 
 rative of the Proceedings against Dame Alice Kyteler (London, 1843); The Worship of 
 the Generative Powers (London, 1866). See also London, ed. Charles Knight (London, 
 1841-1844), III, 316: “There seems little doubt but that the body grew in many respects 
 more and more lax in their observance of many of the virtues for which they had at 
 one time been so distinguished.” Melville purchased a copy of London, December 15, 
 
 1849- 
 
Bachelors and Maids 
 
 i6i 
 
 Sidney Smith (1838). In his manual, which ran into sixteen edi¬ 
 tions by 1851, he stressed that the Templars took the oath of chas¬ 
 tity, and he maintained that they were much maligned by their 
 oppressors: 
 
 What were their crimes? It was said that they burnt their own infants! 
 and yet an instance was never yet produced, in which the child of a 
 Templar had disappeared. . . . They were said to have committed upon 
 one another the most unnatural of all crimes! and yet no individual 
 produced a specific instance which he could corroborate by indubitable 
 proof.30 
 
 Melville may have known of the modern movement: the “gen¬ 
 eral encampments” (organizational meetings) of the American 
 Templars were held in Boston, and lodges were located in Massa¬ 
 chusetts. The nine Brethren may even have originated in the nine 
 Knights Templars who were required before a new lodge or “en¬ 
 campment” could be officially recognized. But his motive for 
 choosing the subject, affected as it may have been by the contemp¬ 
 orary interest and by his own visit to the Temple, was governed 
 by his artistic purpose: the equivocal nature of the Knights’ mode 
 of life made the subject uniquely suited to the experience which 
 he wished to convey. 
 
 From the beginning Melville’s “Paradise” is shot through with 
 relevant ironic undertones: “Templar? That’s a romantic name. 
 Let me see. Brian de Bois-Guilbert was a Templar, I believe.”^^ In 
 Ivanhoe Brian de Bois-Guilbert tries to rape a Jewish girl and 
 when she repulses him he trumps up a charge of witchcraft against 
 her. The language describing the Templars’ downfall is oblique: 
 “Though no sworded foe might outskill them in the fence, yet the 
 worm of luxury crawled beneath their guard, gnawing the core 
 of knightly troth, nibbling the monastic vow, till at last the monk’s 
 austerity relaxed to wassailing, and the sworn knights-bachelors 
 grew to be but hypocrites and rakes.” In the popular medieval 
 sense “the worm of luxury” was the Tempter himself, the Old 
 Serpent urging man to the deadly sin of Luxuria. Here it is an 
 ingenious reminder of the more famous prelapsarian Paradise and 
 
 ^’‘The Templars’ Chart or Hieroglyphic Monitor (New York, 1852), p. 53. 
 
 ®'P. 186, 11. 1-2. 
 
i 62 
 
 Beryl Rowland 
 
 seems to imply that the Templars’ guilt, like that commonly at¬ 
 tributed to Adam and Eve, was sexual knowledge. 
 
 The passage immediately following the reference to Brian de 
 Bois-Guilbert suggests that the modern bachelors are even further 
 debased. They are “so entirely secularized as to be reduced from 
 carving out immortal fame in glorious battling for the Holy Land, 
 to the carving of roast-mutton at a dinner-board. Like Anacreon, 
 do these degenerate Templars now think it sweeter far to fall in 
 banquet than in war?” 
 
 But we must note the increase in humor. The values are made 
 deliberately ambivalent. The ironic undertone which pervades 
 the whole tale makes it impossible to know how seriously we are 
 to regard the degeneracy with which he charges the present-day 
 representatives of the Templars; whether Anacreon is introduced 
 because he was a great exponent of love or because he choked to 
 death on a grape. 
 
 Impotency, sodomy, unnatural vice—any of these modes of 
 behavior may be implicit in the charges which Melville admits 
 against the original Templars. But if the Templars were “hypo¬ 
 crites and rakes,” their descendants are “Brethren of the Order of 
 Celibacy,” and the nine diners “represent the general celibacy of 
 the Temple.” Their fraternal love for one another appears to be 
 beyond reproach. It evinces itself in a conviviality which is never 
 indecorous nor forgetful of the comfort of others. If the name 
 Socrates has a special significance it may simply be to remind us 
 of an inquiring mode of discourse often accompanied by a special 
 kind of irony rather than of the leisurely intellectual life of the 
 male clique which he dominated. 
 
 What emerges is the hint that the bachelors’ mode of living is 
 enjoyable because it is second-hand, that the tragedy of the Tar¬ 
 tarus arises because the narrator leaves the “dreamy Paradise of 
 Bachelors,” as he calls it, to seek direct experience. The bachelors 
 dine in a fashion that can be described in terms of military maneu¬ 
 vers, but they no longer fight. One diner tells spicy anecdotes not 
 about himself but of former companions; another has a strange 
 characteristic tale about the Duke of Wellington. Almost all of 
 them “were travelers, too,” but those who describe their travels 
 are concerned with the splendors of antiquity, not with present 
 
Bachelors and Maids 
 
 163 
 
 human relations. Women are excluded from this society; yet some 
 of the bachelors go back to their chambers to read a fourteenth- 
 century collection of tales of heterosexual love.®^ 
 
 The climax of the evening is the appearance of the “immense 
 convolved horn,” brought in by Socrates. This horn v^^as the 
 symbol of Israel’s military triumph of which it was both instrument 
 and inspiration. It came from the ram, and Melville appears to 
 emphasize its phallacism by giving it two protuberant horned 
 heads, those of the goat, the symbol of male lust. This horn now 
 conquers no cities. Its function, so Melville implies, is both more 
 innocuous and more enjoyable. Jericho means “sweet-smelling,” 
 and appropriately the horn is filled with snuff. It is not called a 
 snuffbox. Because of its size, silver mounting, and ornamentation, 
 it is properly termed a mull, as he observes himself: “... my nostrils 
 were greeted with the smell of some choice Rappee. It was a mull 
 of snuff.” The use of the word derives from the fact that snuff 
 is a powdered preparation, ground from tobacco. In Scotland 
 it referred both to the early machines which made the snuff and 
 to the containers themselves; in England it usually applies to the 
 table model as distinct from the small portable box for the pocket. 
 It is from the Scandinavian. The form from the Old English is 
 mill. As would be obvious, not only to an etymologist but to any¬ 
 one who considered their application, mull and mill are the same 
 word. 
 
 It is this snuff-taking, freely enjoyed yet in such a manner that 
 none “so far violated the proprieties, or so far molested the 
 invalid bachelor in the adjoining room as to indulge himself in 
 a sneeze,” which concludes the evening, with the narrator ad¬ 
 miringly exclaiming to his smiling host that “this is the very Para¬ 
 dise of Bachelors!” 
 
 This mull appears to be a further token of the bachelors’ vi¬ 
 carious mode of living: the horn of Jericho has become an orna¬ 
 mental container, a symbol of pleasure instead of a summons 
 to war and destruction. Whether it has some sexual significance 
 we cannot determine. We may see parallels between the convo¬ 
 luted nature of the horn and the vaginal imagery in the second 
 part of the diptych, and we may regard the use of the word mull 
 
 ” P. 195. 1 - 3 - 
 
164 
 
 Beryl Rowland 
 
 as suggestive that the horn represents at least a quasi-sexual ex¬ 
 perience for the bachelors and the narrator. But such features are 
 not “clues.” On the contrary, they contribute to the intentional 
 ambiguity which controls the effect: Melville sees to it that the 
 intimate lives of the bachelors remain private and gives the 
 reader the choice of either suspending moral judgment or making 
 one colored by individual prejudice. All we know is that the 
 rite of the mull is important in the social intercourse of the bach¬ 
 elors and appears to afford complete satisfaction to the narrator. 
 The second part of the diptych pivots around a different kind of 
 mill. Whereas the bachelors’ mull appears only toward the con¬ 
 clusion of the evening, Melville, with a firm sense of meaningful 
 structure, makes the mill central to the tale of the maids because 
 the experience it involves, culminating in the personal failure of 
 the narrator, is central to the meaning of the diptych as a whole. 
 
 There are three consecutive descriptions of the route to the 
 paper-mill, each given by the narrator. The first is a general 
 pseudogeographical account, telling of “the Mad Maid’s Bellows- 
 pipe” (a dusky pass), “the Black Notch” (a sudden contraction 
 of the gorge, with steep black walls), and a huge purple hopper¬ 
 shaped hollow called “the Devil’s Dungeon,” with an abandoned 
 saw-mill on a bluff on one side, and itself the locale of both the 
 turbulent waters of the Blood River and the paper-mill. 
 
 The second description, subjectively and intensely felt, consists 
 of the narrator’s journey in his pung drawn by his horse Black. 
 While the landscape on the first occasion was sinister, the effect 
 being enhanced by adjectives associated with death or violence 
 and proper names of evil connotation, in the second it is sensuously 
 brittle. The frosty trees groan with the petrifying cold as the cut¬ 
 ting blast sweeps through them. Only the horse impels the rider 
 on. It starts at a fallen hemlock but still goes forward through 
 the Black Notch, speeding “madly past the ruined saw-mill.” The 
 terrified rider almost collides “with the bleak nozzle of a rock, 
 couchant like a lion in the way,” and has difficulty in discovering 
 the mill in the bleak snowy landscape. 
 
 The third description begins in retrospect and then continues 
 with the narrator’s discoveries from the point at which they were 
 broken off previously. In reviewing his approach to the sinister 
 Black Notch, he compares it with the first sight of the Temple 
 
Bachelors and Maids 
 
 165 
 
 Bar. This comparison is extended when he arrives at the mill and 
 exclaims: “This is the very counterpart of the Paradise of Bachelors, 
 but snowed upon, and frost-painted to a sepulchre.” 
 
 More than one writer has pointed out the equations of the 
 landscape. The description of the mountain scenery is, as Richard 
 Chase observes, “expressed in kinaesthetic and visual imagery 
 appropriate to the mythical identification of the body with the 
 landscape.”^^ Valid and illuminating comments have been made 
 on the function of such imagery both as a description of the sexual 
 act and as an anticipation of the gestation allegory. But we may 
 further discover that the meaning of the descriptions relates 
 specifically to the introspections of the narrator as part of the total 
 experience of the diptych, and that the imagery conveys sensations 
 which are intended to account, in part, for the final trauma, for 
 an experience which is truly Tartarean compared with the Paradise 
 left behind. 
 
 We realize, as soon as he introduces himself, that the seedsman 
 has a symbolic function, and this function has been fully expli¬ 
 cated by critics in terms of the allegory of procreation and parturi¬ 
 tion. The nightmare ride is also obviously symbolic. Traditionally, 
 from Plato onward, the horse and rider have been used to denote 
 body and soul. The rider who is unable to control his horse or 
 chariot is a man who has succumbed to physical desire.^^ Psy¬ 
 chologists have noted the recurrence of the same image in the 
 angstvolle Traumfahrt of the nightmare in which the terrified 
 victim of unresolved sexual fears is depicted as either riding or 
 being ridden upon to some kind of hell where mutilation and death 
 await him.®® It has its counterpart, too, in the folklore of the 
 Furious Host, the ghostly huntsmen and their baying hounds who 
 are psychopomps seeking to carry off guilty souls to the world 
 below.®® In the seedsman’s journey the horse seizes control. The 
 
 Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York, 1949), p. 160. 
 
 •‘Plato, Phaedrus, ed. W. H. Thompson (London, 1868), pp. 247, 253-256; James 
 3:2-3; Plutarch, Opera, ed. J. G. Hutten (Tubingen, 1796), X, 219; St. Augustine, “De 
 moribus ecclesiae,” Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, XXXII (Paris, 1841), col. 1313; 
 Philo Judaeus, “De Agricul., Opera Omnia, ed. C. E. Richter (Leipzig, 1828), II, 15-19. 
 
 •' For the anatomy of the nightmare ride, see Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare (New 
 York, 1959), Part III. 
 
 •’See Guillaume d’Auvergne, “De universo,” Opera (London, 1674), I, 1066; Gervase 
 of Tilbury, Otia imperialia, Scriptores rerum Brunsvicensium, ed. G. Leibnitz (Hanover, 
 1707), I, iii, 62, 92; Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1886), p. 37. 
 
Beryl Rowland 
 
 166 
 
 rider likens his horse to a runaway London bus dashing through an 
 ancient arch. Significantly, he projects himself into both exper¬ 
 iences and finds the similitude tinged “not less with the vividness 
 than the disorder of a dream.” 
 
 Related to the protagonist, as Melville obviously intended that 
 it should be, the trip into the funnel is a representation of a sexual 
 encounter attended by deeply rooted anxieties. Dominant among 
 these is the fear of the vagina dentata, conveyed in symbols which 
 appear also in folklore.®^ The rider is terrified by the Black 
 Notch, by the saw-mill which, if it is in ruins, still retains its 
 sawn-up logs, the symbols of castration, by the fallen hemlock 
 compared to an anaconda—the gigantic snake which crushes its 
 prey to death and then swallows it. Still consumed with fear, 
 acutely conscious of the physical harms from which he has so 
 narrowly escaped, the narrator moves from one fantasy of female 
 exploration to another, to a whole factory of women, at the sight 
 of which not even his instinctual drive will carry him on. The 
 image clusters—the “redly and demoniacally boiled Blood River,” 
 the “long woodpile ... all glittering in mail of crusted ice” ready 
 to be cut up, the horse-posts “their north sides plastered with 
 adhesive snow,”^® show that he associates the impending expe¬ 
 rience with female heat and male frigidity. Not surprisingly, his 
 good horse cannot manage the last dangerous declivity, and the 
 rider is unmounted when the icy wind finally shoots him into 
 the square beside the main edifice. 
 
 Horse-posts betoken riders, and the narrator immediately thinks 
 of the Temple and asks: “But where are the gay bachelors?” His 
 question is prefixed with an “inverted similitude.” Using images 
 which ironically recall Spenser’s great “spousall” poem, he re¬ 
 marks: “The sweet, tranquil Temple garden, with the Thames 
 bordering its green beds.” The garden, the traditional symbol of 
 woman herself, is paradoxically used here for an all-male Para¬ 
 dise. Its counterpart is “frost-painted to a sepulchre.”®® The de- 
 
 See G. Legman, The Horn Boo\ (New York, 1964), pp. 191-193. 
 
 The color of the landscape may owe something to the Templars. Their uniform was 
 white with a red cross, their banner striped black and white and charged with a red 
 cross. 
 
 °° Two further metaphors, both apposite, may be concealed here: whited sepulchres, 
 originally referring to the scribes and Pharisees but later proverbially denoting the pros¬ 
 titute, as a deceptive repository of corruption; painted Jezebels, also denoting women of 
 “loose morals”—see E. C. Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (London, 1900), p. 681. 
 
Bachelors and Maids 
 
 167 
 
 scription is followed by an action in which the woman is rejected. 
 He wants to know where to put his horse, which is now shivering 
 in the wind. He finds a girl, only to be repelled instantly at the 
 sight of her: “‘Nay,’ faltered I, ‘I mistook you. Go on; I want 
 nothing.’ ” 
 
 He knocks on a dormitory door. Another girl appears and the 
 expletive with which he dismisses her suggests that his repulsion 
 is intensified: “‘Nay, I mistake again. In God’s name shut the 
 door. But hold, is there no man about?”’ Finally he gets direc¬ 
 tions from Old Bach, the overseer. Making every effort to cover 
 up his horse in the woodshed, he then runs on foot, “lamely, . . . 
 stiff with frost,” and hampered by his driver’s dreadnaught, into 
 the factory. Here the slavelike submission of the operatives to the 
 machine appals him. A moment later he is dragged outside by 
 Old Bach because his face is frostbitten. 
 
 The symbolism of the factory operation is not consistent. Some 
 of the processes are not fully correlated with the dominant sym¬ 
 bols of the paper as the infant, the machine as the womb, and the 
 contents of the two vats as sperm. Melville characteristically allows 
 the symbols to accumulate meanings so that their complexity 
 enhances the ambiguity behind which he can efface himself, leaving 
 the reader to make his own evaluations. This pervasive ambiguity 
 is intensified by the dreamlike role of the narrator, an isolato, 
 sympathetically portrayed, seeking to identify himself with a social 
 group. The introspective seedsman “finds” himself in strange 
 places, is “amazed,” “fastened” with a “spell,” filled with “curious 
 emotion” or with “awe.” Like the typical protagonist of a dream, 
 he is baffled, terrified or impressed by mysterious operations, and 
 he can communicate only intermittently with other people. He is 
 in the upside-down world of the nightmare in which the symbolic 
 appear to have an exclusively immediate, nonsymbolic function, 
 and the concrete “I” is confused and conscious of appearing stupid 
 to others. 
 
 Cupid gives the visitor a guided tour of the machinery, during 
 which, as various critics have pointed out, the process of insemina¬ 
 tion is presented allegorically. The narrator is particularly dis¬ 
 turbed by the inevitability of the processes which he wimesses. He 
 has the painful illusion that he sees the pallid faces of the girls 
 imprinted on the moving pulp: “Slowly, mournfully, beseechingly. 
 
i68 
 
 Beryl Rowland 
 
 yet unresistingly, they gleamed along, their agony dimly outlined 
 on the imperfect paper, like the print of the tormented face on 
 the handkerchief of Saint Veronica.” The room is intensely hot 
 but he feels cold. He has to be taken outside again, and this time 
 he does not return. 
 
 In his transactions at the mill the visitor is inhibited by the 
 fears so graphically symbolized in his previous journey. He 
 watches. He cannot participate. His reaction is clarified by the 
 episode of the frozen cheeks. 
 
 . . . the dark-complexioned man, standing close by, raised a sudden cry, 
 and seizing my arm, dragged me out into the open air, and without 
 pausing for a word instantly caught up some congealed snow and began 
 rubbing both my cheeks. 
 
 “Two white spots like the whites of your eyes,” he said; “man, your 
 cheeks are frozen.” 
 
 “That may well be,” muttered I; “’tis some wonder the frost of the 
 Devil’s Dungeon strikes in no deeper. Rub away.” 
 
 Soon a horrible, tearing pain caught at my reviving cheeks. Two 
 gaunt blood-hounds, one on each side, seemed mumbling them. I seemed 
 Actaeon. 
 
 Concealed here is the typical folk figure, occurring in several 
 ballads of a himtsman, accompanied by two dogs, exemplifying 
 coitus.^ The dogs wait outside while the huntsman enters a pond 
 or looks into it. In this situation, Actaeon, confronted with the 
 primordial femaleness of Diana bathing naked, was destroyed by 
 his own dogs—rendered impotent by a woman. When this image 
 is applied to the seedsman, we are no longer in doubt as to his 
 intentions and the reason for his involuntary recoil. Significantly, 
 it is not Cupid but the celibate. Old Bach himself, the man to 
 whom he turned in his initial repulse of the mill girls, who saves 
 him now. 
 
 Impotency continues to make him an observer rather than a 
 participant even in the experiment undertaken to prove that the 
 paper-making process takes only nine minutes. He starts with 
 the end product and even that he hands over to Cupid to drop 
 into the mass of pulp. In his service to the machine, it is as far as 
 he can go: “My travels were at an end, for here was the end of the 
 machine.” 
 
 40 
 
 Legman, p. 193. 
 
Bachelors and Maids 
 
 169 
 
 The fantasy which finally drives him away further illuminates 
 his reactions. In his illusion, the faces of the girls bear the tor¬ 
 mented impression on the handkerchief of St. Veronica—the 
 print of Christ on his way to Calvary. He conflates the agony of 
 the girls with the far greater agony of celibate male suffering. 
 
 Various images in the subsequent scene support the significance 
 of the basic metaphor and convey the nature of the activity. The 
 women are called mares, animals which, as early as Aelian,^^ were 
 popularly believed to be so lascivious that they might be impreg¬ 
 nated by the wind, and to be so acquiescent that, unlike other 
 animals, they would receive the male at any time. In an extension 
 of mill imagery to be found in the popular songs, they are also 
 likened to the cogs of wheels.^ The maleness of the iron animals 
 which they serve is never in doubt. Common phallic symbols 
 show that in this female world Man is present as an inexorable 
 generative organ. He is the rider whose horse can be accommo¬ 
 dated along with the mounts of other riders at the horse-posts. 
 He is the long, glittering scythe, an instrument which, by its 
 position, indicates its antagonism to the female principle. He 
 possesses no further identity. He services the machine imperson¬ 
 ally. The transaction is as meaningless as discarding an old shirt. 
 The bachelors, the narrator suggests, may furnish old shirts for 
 rags but not the buttons with them; nor are there any bachelor’s 
 buttons to be found there except on the chest of Old Bach. Pro 
 verbially, to lose one’s bachelor’s buttons is to marry.^^ Here the 
 male participant evidently never stays, never sets up a human re¬ 
 lationship. 
 
 The intense cold so frequently remarked upon is probably not 
 an image of female frigidity as has been suggested. It appears 
 to be a shifting symbol, standing both for male impotence and for 
 the nature of man’s association with woman, as the narrator sees 
 it. This association, if it brings suffering to the woman, is agon¬ 
 izing for the man; “That moment two of the girls, dropping 
 their rags, plied each a whetstone up and down the sword-blade. 
 My unaccustomed blood curdled at the sharp shriek of the tor¬ 
 mented steel.” 
 
 Df natura animalium, ed. F. Jacobs (Jena, 1832), I, iv. 6, ii. 
 
 Cf. The Tea-Table Miscellany, p. 153. 
 
 ** Brewer, p. 82; J. O. Halliwell, A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words 
 (London, 1847), I, 130. 
 
170 
 
 Beryl Rowland 
 
 To Old Bach the women are simply classified as unmarried, 
 but to the seedsman, for good reason, they are all virgins at the 
 end, and “some pained homage to their pale virginity” makes him 
 “involuntarily bow.” They are virgins because he cannot touch 
 them: the only relationship possible for him is that which he 
 found at the Temple among the bachelors. 
 
 His cheeks, which evoked the comparison to Actaeon, are 
 whitish yet and will not mend, as he himself observes, until he 
 gets out of the Devil’s Dungeon. His horse is equally affected—“all 
 cringing and doubled up with the cold.” What has resulted from 
 this experience when contrasted with that previously recounted is 
 a bitter kind of self-awareness and a recognition of how disparate 
 the two worlds are for him: “At the Black Notch I paused, and 
 once more bethought me of Temple Bar. Then, shooting through 
 the pass, all alone with inscrutable nature, I exclaimed—Oh! Para¬ 
 dise of Bachelors! and oh! Tartarus of Maids!” 
 
 The final exclamation serves to convey his pleasure in the 
 bachelors’ world and his recoil from the world of women, which 
 have been the subjects of the diptych. The extent of the deviation 
 which the first world represents we never know. The “Paradise” 
 reveals an exclusively male society, urbane, leisured, mannerly, 
 comfortable, intellectual, with the rite of the mull representing 
 the climax of satisfaction. The “Tartarus” describes the experience 
 of a man who enjoys this society of bachelors but is compelled by 
 his instinctual drive to explore the sexual nature of woman. For 
 him, woman has no identity, no meaning, beyond her physical 
 function, and his deep-rooted fears based on a castration fantasy, 
 his association of the sexual act with commercial exploitation, his 
 repugnance for the inexorable nature of sex which turns the 
 whole world of women into a brothel and lying-in hospital simul¬ 
 taneously, result in his impotence. His revulsion is imaginatively 
 conveyed through concrete description, incident, and dialogue in 
 which irony and metaphor remain just below the surface, with 
 the mill, simultaneously representing the pudenda and women 
 collectively engaged in the hold-door trade—an assembly line of 
 parts servicing and being serviced by man—as the controlling 
 symbol. 
 
 The “I” of the diptych, while he leaves no doubt as to the 
 world he wants, never understands his motivation. That he 
 
Bachelors and Maids 
 
 171 
 
 should think of Temple Bar on the two occasions when he ap¬ 
 proaches Black Notch seems meaningful:'^ we perceive that there 
 is an association between his preference and the site of his deepest 
 apprehensions. The narrator is confused and disturbed by the 
 juxtaposition the first time, but the second time he simply pauses 
 and makes good his escape. He sees himself “all alone with in¬ 
 scrutable nature.” The statement epitomizes his plight. Caught 
 in a limbo between hell and heaven, this solitary deviate can 
 only acknowledge that the complexities governing man’s strong¬ 
 est impulses are unfathomable. The trite and deliberately in¬ 
 adequate phrase is the culminating irony; it is also Melville’s 
 perception of truth. 
 
 “ Melville’s predilection for puns, particularly those which were “both intricate and 
 problematical,” makes one suspect that Temple Bar means mental barrier. Melville clearly 
 appreciated that sexual inhibitions stemmed from psychological causes. 
 
Melville and the Theme of Timonism: 
 From Pierre to The Confidence-Man 
 
 Charles N. Watson, Jr. 
 
 N ot many Melville readers would dispute the idea that between 
 1851 and 1856 Melville’s vision of life darkened. By late 1856, 
 with the manuscript of The Confidence-Man deposited at the pub¬ 
 lisher’s, Melville was sufiSciently exhausted and depressed for his 
 family to send him off to Europe and the Middle East for a travel¬ 
 ing rest-cure. His family, to be sure, was always fussing about the 
 state of his nerves; but there can be litde doubt that when he ar¬ 
 rived in England his friend Hawthorne was accurate in judging 
 him “much overshadowed” since their last meeting four years 
 earlier. This state of depression has been variously explained. For 
 one thing, it was the result of a religious disillusionment, an in¬ 
 creasing skepticism about the benevolence and even the existence 
 of God. Though such doubts had begun well before 1851, after 
 Moby-Dic\ they became, if anything, more pronounced. Another 
 dimension, as Edgar A. Dryden has persuasively shown, was artis¬ 
 tic.^ Increasingly Melville came to doubt the ability of literary art 
 to perform the lofty truth-telling function he had conceived for it 
 in 1850, at the time of his absorption in the writings of Shakespeare 
 and Hawthorne. Instead, he began to suspect—^with an ultimate kind 
 of epistemological nihilism—that truth either cannot be known or 
 does not even exist 
 
 What I should like to suggest here, however, is that Melville’s 
 disillusionment during these years had still a third dimension: an 
 increasing belief that his career had been betrayed and destroyed by 
 his family, friends, and readers. His final disillusionment thus con¬ 
 cerns not only the capacity of his art to tell the truth but also the 
 capacity of his audience to receive the truth when it is told. In one 
 sense, certainly, there is nothing new in the notion that Melville 
 had troubles with his readers. While deep in the throes of Moby- 
 
 ^ Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth (Baltimore, 1968). 
 
The Theme of Timonism 
 
 173 
 
 Dick^ he had written to Hawthorne the widely-quoted and prophetic 
 statement of his dilemma: “Dollars damn me. . . . My dear Sir, a 
 presentiment is on me,—I shall at last be worn out and perish, like 
 an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of 
 the wood. . . . What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it 
 will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.”^ If he 
 was wrong in concluding that all his books were “botches,” he was 
 prescient in his recognition of the toll that this conception of his 
 audience would take on his inner resources. And like the other forms 
 of his disillusionment, this one was bound to find embodiment in his 
 fiction. 
 
 The extent of this fictional embodiment, though it has often 
 been touched on, has not yet been fully explored; nor have its bio¬ 
 graphical implications been satisfactorily explained. More and more, 
 in the works after Moby-Dic 1 {, Melville found a metaphor for his 
 disillusionment in the theme of Timonism—a theme which took its 
 name from his reading of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and 
 which implies a betrayal and desertion by one’s friends.® During 
 these years, with his health and finances precarious and his early 
 literary admirers falling away, he seems to have had an increasing 
 sense of Timon’s plight as an analogue to his own. Following such 
 a betrayal, he saw two alternatives: to withdraw, like Timon, into 
 misanthropic solitude; or to engage the public on its own terms, tak¬ 
 ing on the protective coloring of an artistic confidence-man, playing 
 with a grim humor on the egotism and gullibility of his audience. 
 In the works prior to The Confidence-Man, the first of these reac¬ 
 tions is embodied in such characters as Hunilla, Bartleby, Israel Pot- 
 
 *Thc Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New 
 Haven, Conn., i960), p. 128. 
 
 * Timon of Athens was one of the plays that Melville read and annotated in the edi¬ 
 tion of Shakespeare he acquired in early 1849. Although it is one of Shakespeare’s weaker 
 plays, Melville was sufficiently impressed with its central character to include him in the 
 company of Hamlet, Lear, and lago when, in his review of Hawthorne’s Mosses (1850), 
 he wanted to suggest that the essence of Shakespeare’s genius lay in his ability to say, 
 or insinuate, “the things which we feel to be so terrifically true that it were all but mad¬ 
 ness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them.’’ As 
 others have observed, the statement is highly pertinent to Melville’s own artistic method. 
 The suggestion that after Mohy-Dick, Melville went through a period of Timonism first 
 appeared in Lewis Mumford’s Herman Melville (New York, 1929) and was invoked oc¬ 
 casionally thereafter by other early critics and biographers. After the “normalizing" 
 biographical work of the early 1950’s, however, the term was relegated to the status of an 
 unscholarly myth and has languished there ever since. 
 
174 
 
 Charles N. Watson, Jr. 
 
 ter, and Benito Cereno. The second appears most fully in Oberlus 
 and Babo, while a combination of the two responses appears in 
 Pierre and Jimmy Rose. The occasional pairing of these characters 
 (Hunilla-Oberlus, Babo-Cereno) suggests that in contemplating 
 the appropriate response to betrayal and desertion Melville was 
 engaged in a kind of inner debate—a debate finally resolved in 
 The Confidence-Man, where the same patterns of response can 
 be traced through a series of characters with a progression that 
 implies Melville’s increasing disillusionment with the role of pro¬ 
 fessional author.^ 
 
 The composition of Pierre, during the winter of 1851-52, was 
 clearly influenced by Melville’s increasing disappointment over the 
 reviews of Moby-DicJ{. From the “rural bowl of milk” he had prom¬ 
 ised Mrs. Hawthorne during the early stages, the novel followed a 
 downward path into an agonized despair unequaled in all his fic¬ 
 tion. After the rescue of Isabel, the action is dominated by a series 
 of Timon-like betrayals: banished and disinherited by his mother, 
 spurned by Palsgrave and Glen Stanly, Pierre at last feels deserted 
 by “even the paternal gods.”® Despite the companionship of Isabel 
 and eventually Lucy, his withdrawal to the Church of the Apostles 
 is a Timon-like retreat into spiritual isolation: though he is “one 
 in a city of hundreds of thousands of human beings,” he is “solitary 
 as at the Pole” (p. 398). 
 
 With this bitter isolation comes a progressive absorption in the 
 solitary labor of his writing. But, like Melville himself, having been 
 flattered by obsequious editors and witless readers for his trivial early 
 writings, Pierre soon learns that “though the world worship Medi- 
 
 ‘ Though the pattern of betrayal and desertion by one’s friends is most clearly ex¬ 
 emplified by these characters, there are many others who are peripherally related to it: 
 Redburn, Jackson, and Harry Bolton {Redbum)-, Ishmael, Ahab, Perth the blacksmith, and 
 Pip (Moby-Dicl(); the narrator and Merrymusk (“Cock-a-Doodle-Dool”); the Coulters 
 (“Poor Man’s Pudding’’); Hautboy and the narrator (“The Fiddler’’); the uncle (“The 
 Happy Failure’’); and Bannadonna (“The Bell-Tower”). These bankrupts, outcasts, failed 
 artists, and wounded Titans have one thing in common: the world has not treated them 
 kindly. 
 
 ^Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities, ed. Henry A. Murray (New York, 1949), p. 349. Ref¬ 
 erences to other works by Melville are to the following editions: Moby-Dick., ed. Harrison 
 Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York, 1967); The Complete Stories of Herman Mel¬ 
 ville, ed. Jay Leyda (New York, 1949); Israel Potter (Garden City, N.Y., 1965); The 
 Confidence-Man, ed. H. Bruce Franklin (Indianapolis, 1967). References to Timon of 
 Athens are from the Yale Shakespeare, ed. Stanley T. Williams (New Haven, 1919). Ci¬ 
 tations appear hereafter in the text. 
 
The Theme of Timonism 
 
 175 
 
 ocrity and Common-Place, yet hath it fire and sword for all con¬ 
 temporary Grandeur” (p. 310). In short, he is “Timonized” (p. 300). 
 As the world’s flattery turns to hostility, he counters by becoming a 
 literary con-man, giving back “jeer for jeer, and taunt[ing] the apes 
 that jibed him.... For the pangs in his heart, he put down hoots on 
 the paper. And every thing else he disguised under the so conve¬ 
 niently adjustable drapery of all-stretchable Philosophy” (p. 398-399). 
 At last, hounded by his cousin as a lying seducer and cast off by 
 his editors as a blaspheming swindler, he can summon one more 
 effort at revenge and can then take refuge only in death. Pierre thus 
 encompasses, to a violent extreme, both of the reactions to Timon’s 
 plight—a misanthropic withdrawal into spiritual isolation and a 
 cunning game of literary imposture.® 
 
 Both Hunilla and Oberlus, whose stories form companion pieces 
 in “The Encantadas” (1854), have suffered Timon’s misfortune of 
 betrayal and desertion; but their reactions are strikingly different. 
 Hunilla, along with her husband and brother, has been left on an 
 island by a French sea captain, who has promised to return for her. 
 But the two men are accidentally drowned, and it soon becomes clear 
 that the French captain has abandoned her. Later, after a long 
 period of increasing despair, she signals a passing whaler in the 
 hope of rescue, but is instead raped by the ship’s crew. Her last hope 
 apparently betrayed, she retreats into a spiritual isolation which is 
 scarcely relieved even when she is at last rescued. 
 
 At the opposite extreme from Hunilla’s blank despair is the 
 Timon-like misanthropy of the hermit Oberlus. At first glance, it 
 would seem absurd to imply even the slightest resemblance between 
 Oberlus and Melville. But so excessive is the narrator’s condemna¬ 
 tion of him that by the time he is described as “a creature whom 
 it is religion to detest, since it is philanthropy to hate a misanthrope” 
 (p. 112), we may begin to suspect the possibility of irony. He is 
 bestial, true; but his bestiality is of a rather regal sort: he is com- 
 
 * Raymond J. Nelson has recently argued against biographical and psychological in¬ 
 terpretations by dissociating Melville from Pierre on the interesting supposition that the 
 narrator is not Melville but Pierre himself ('The Art of Herman Melville: The Author 
 of Pierre," Yale Review, LIX, Winter, 1970, 197-214). The evidence for this supposition, 
 however, seems fully insufficient. Much as one may share the desire to acquit Melville 
 of the novel’s weaknesses, it still appears far more likely that the weaknesses stem from 
 Melville’s increasing inability to keep a saving dbtance between himself and his author- 
 protagonist. 
 
176 
 
 Charles N. Watson, Jr. 
 
 pared to a bear and a tiger; and, like Ahab, he is a “Lord Anaconda.” 
 Though he is as treacherous as the most Satanic of Melville’s char¬ 
 acters, he has a kind of perverse pride and resilience that at dmes 
 makes him look almost heroic. When, after an act of especially 
 diabolical malice, he is outwitted and captured, his punishment is 
 harsh enough to draw our reluctant sympathy: he is severely 
 whipped, and all his possessions—^his hut, food supply, garden, 
 and money—are either seized or destroyed. Thereafter, Ahab-like 
 (and Timon-like), “brooding among the ruins of his hut, and the 
 desolate clinkers and extinct volcanoes of this outcast isle, the in¬ 
 sulted misanthrope . . . meditates a signal revenge upon humanity, 
 but conceals his purposes” (p. 107). If this sounds a bit like Pierre’s 
 literary revenge, we soon learn that Oberlus, too, was an “accom¬ 
 plished writer, and no mere boor; and what is more, was capable 
 of the most tristful eloquence” (p. no). In the wily role-playing of 
 his letter to his antagonists (pp. iio-iii), he embodies the second 
 response to the Timon-like plight of betrayal and desertion, the 
 artistry of a Satanic con-man. 
 
 In “Bartleby” (1853), the pattern continues. The heart of the 
 story lies in the way the lawyer-narrator, despite his initially well- 
 intentioned efforts to deal with Bartleby’s perverse “preferences,” 
 finally betrays and abandons the scrivener to a Timon-like isola¬ 
 tion and death. As the narrator correctly perceives, Bartleby is 
 “alone, absolutely alone in the universe.” He is a “bit of wreck in 
 the mid-Atlantic” (p. 29), who seeks only shelter from the storm of 
 life that has wrecked him. But at the end, the eminently sane, prac¬ 
 tical, reasonable Wall Street lawyer—^for all his good will—denies 
 his responsibility for Bartleby’s plight and takes refuge in Pilate-like 
 rationalizations: “I distinctly perceived that I had now done all that 
 I possibly could ... to benefit Bartleby, and shield him from rude 
 persecution. I now strove to be entirely care-free and quiescent; and 
 my conscience justified me in the attempt; though, indeed, it was 
 not so successful as I could have wished” (p. 42). With Bartleby 
 near death inside the walls of the Tombs, the narrator makes a 
 fatuous (and again implicitly self-justifying) attempt to persuade 
 him that the prison “is not so sad a place as one might think” 
 (p. 43), and urges him to find consolation in the sky and the grass. 
 But Bartleby knows where he is. Confronted with a universe of 
 
The Theme of Timonism 
 
 177 
 
 blank walls and dead letters, he has found in the lawyer’s ofl&ce an 
 island of comparative safety, only to be driven finally to the silence 
 of the Tombs/ 
 
 When in his search for new materials Melville turned in 1854 
 to the little volume of Israel R. Potter’s Life and Remar\able Ad¬ 
 ventures, which he had acquired a few years earlier, he might have 
 taken a sardonic satisfaction in noting that Israel, like himself, was 
 born on the first of August. But the parallels between their lives did 
 not stop with that one coincidence. Like an earlier quasi-autobio- 
 graphical character, Ishmael, Potter was driven to sea by his disap¬ 
 pointments on land and eventually shipped on a whaling vessel. 
 Melville’s description of his motives (which does not appear in the 
 source) echoes Ishmael’s wry assertion that the sea is his “substi¬ 
 tute for pistol and ball.” “With a philosophical flourish,” says 
 Ishmael, “Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the 
 ship” (p. 12). In the parallel passage in Israel Rotter, the allusion to 
 Timon is clear: “A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the nar¬ 
 row-minded misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the asylum 
 for the generous distressed” (p. 20). 
 
 But what may have been still more appealing to the Melville 
 of the mid-i85o’s was Potter’s reason for telling his story, his bit¬ 
 terness over the government’s failure to recognize his heroic service 
 in the Revolution. In the novel, Melville transforms this motive 
 into the heavy pathos of the ending, where Israel languishes in a 
 crushing poverty and obscurity, ignored by the government he 
 has served. The abandonment of the deserving Israel is reminiscent 
 of Melville’s own failure to secure a consular appointment and, more 
 broadly, of the public’s indifference or hostility toward his most 
 ambitious literary efforts. Once again, therefore, a quasi-autobio- 
 graphical character responds to betrayal by a stoical withdrawal that 
 conceals an underlying bitterness. At the end, Israel’s distress is no 
 longer “generous.” 
 
 The lugubrious pathos of the ending of Israel Rotter is repeated 
 
 ’ The general resemblance between Melville’s situation and Bartleby’s has been pointed 
 out often before and need not be reviewed here. One of the best of the biographical read¬ 
 ings, however—Leo Marx’s “Melville’s Parable of the Walls,’’ Sewanee Review, LXI (Oct., 
 I953)> 602-627—seems to me to err in concluding that the story offers “a compassionate 
 rebuke to the self-absorption of the artist’’ and “a plea that he devote himself to keeping 
 strong his bonds with the rest of mankind” (p. 627). The autobiographical motive is not, 
 I think, self-castigadon, but rather self-justification mixed with a touch of self-pity. 
 
178 
 
 Charles N. Watson, Jr. 
 
 with more restraint in the ending of “Benito Cereno” (1855), when 
 Cereno, overwhelmed by Babo’s treachery, withdraws to a monas¬ 
 tery to await an imminent death. Having trusted the slaves to roam 
 the deck unfettered, he now sees “the negro” as a symbol of all the 
 treacherous forces of the universe, much as the blank walls and dead 
 letters become symbols to Bartleby. And just as Bartleby has his 
 Job’s-comforter in the genially superficial lawyer, Cereno has the 
 blithely commonsensical Captain Delano to try ineffectually to per¬ 
 suade him of the benignity of nature: “But the past is passed; why 
 moralize upon it ? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, 
 and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new 
 leaves” (pp. 351-352). But Cereno cannot forget, and his disullusion- 
 ment is a spiritual death shortly to become physical. 
 
 Between the passive withdrawal of the disillusioned master, how¬ 
 ever, and the savage heroism of the rebellious slave, there is very 
 nearly a thematic balance—just as there is an implied balance be¬ 
 tween Hunilla and Oberlus. Like Oberlus, Babo is the perpetrator 
 of evil, but he is also its victim. Betrayed into slavery, he devotes all 
 his considerable cunning to turning the tables on his captors. Once 
 he has achieved the upper hand, the skill with which his masquerade 
 dupes Captain Delano casts him as another artistic con-man, whose 
 ingratiating art can be used for purposes of revenge on his betrayers. 
 For Babo, such revenge—however terrifyingly bloodthirsty—is the 
 only possible route to physical survival and a measure of human dig¬ 
 nity. In his “voiceless end,” with his impaled head meeting, “Un¬ 
 abashed, the gaze of the whites” (p. 353), there is an incipient “re¬ 
 venger’s tragedy” with something of the power of Ahab’s. If Babo 
 also reminds us of lago, we may recall that lago was one of those 
 “dark characters,” including Timon, in whose words Melville de¬ 
 tected a terrifying truth.® 
 
 One other story of 1855, “Jimmy Rose,” brings us still closer to 
 The Conjidence-Man in its detailed repetition of the theme and 
 action of Shakespeare’s Timon. At the height of his wealth, Jimmy, 
 like Timon, wines and dines his friends in a spontaneous outpouring 
 of generosity, only to find that after his financial collapse his friends 
 have deserted him. He thereupon retires to his house, locking him- 
 
 * The most persuasive case for viewing Babo as something more than a mere per¬ 
 sonification of evil has been made by Allen Guttmann, “The Enduring Innocence of Captain 
 Amasa Delano,” Boston University Studies in English, V (Spring, 1961), 35-45. 
 
The Theme of Timonism 
 
 179 
 
 self away in misanthropic solitude, just as Timon retires to his 
 hermitage in the forest. At this point Melville seems almost to have 
 been working with a copy of Timon in front of him when the nar¬ 
 rator, calling on Jimmy at his retreat, hears a “hollow, husky voice” 
 addressing him through the keyhole: 
 
 “Who are you?” it said. 
 
 “A friend.” 
 
 “Then shall you not come in,” replied the voice, more hollowly than 
 before. 
 
 “Let me in. Rose; let me in, man. I am your friend.” 
 
 “I will not. I can trust no man now.” 
 
 “Let me in. Rose; trust at least one, in me.” 
 
 “Quit the spot, or—” (p. 248) 
 
 This dialogue appears to have been shaped by two related sequences 
 in Timon. In the first, Alcibiades visits Timon’s cave and protests, 
 “I am thy friend and pity thee, dear Timon,” to which Timon 
 growls, “How dost thou pity him whom thou dost trouble? I had 
 rather be alone” (IV.iii.97-98). Later, Timon’s steward, Flavius, 
 approaches and hails Timon as “My dearest master”: 
 
 Timon. Away! What art thou? 
 
 Flavius. Have you forgot me, sir? 
 
 Timon. Why dost ask that? I have forgot all men; 
 
 Then, if thou grant’st thou’rt a man, I have forgot thee. 
 
 Flavius. An honest poor servant of yours. 
 
 Timon. Then I know thee not. . . . (IV.iii.481-485) 
 
 Thereafter, allowing his protagonist to mask his bitter misanthropy, 
 Melville concludes the story by having Jimmy take the advice that 
 Apemantus vainly offered to Timon: “Be thou a flatterer now, and 
 seek to thrive / By that which has undone thee” (IV.iii.211-212). 
 Jimmy thus begins a kind of desperate confidence-game, resuming 
 his round of buoyant social activity by ingratiating himself with his 
 former friends and keeping up the pretense of his earlier mastery 
 until he dies pathetically in his “lone attic,” accompanied by the 
 narrator’s reiterated lament, “Poor, poor Jimmy—God guard us 
 all—poor Jimmy Rose!” (pp. 252, 253). 
 
i8o 
 
 Charles N. Watson, Jr. 
 
 The residue of self-pity that weakens such stories as “Jinimy 
 Rose” is finally dissolved in the bitter comedy of the last work of 
 Melville’s career as a public author, The Confidence-Man. Like any 
 of the greatest of Melville’s works, this novel defies a restrictively 
 biographical interpretation. Ultimately it transcends even the bril¬ 
 liance of its satire to become a parable of the human situation. As 
 the punning title suggests, we are all either confidence-men, vic¬ 
 timizing our fellows, or men of confidence, extending our trust at 
 the risk of becoming victims. From the horns of this dilemma no 
 one in the novel escapes. 
 
 This movement between the extremes of charity and misan¬ 
 thropy is also the movement of Timon, and it is no accident that 
 Shakespeare’s embittered protagonist is invoked a number of times 
 in Melville’s novel. Here for a final time Melville is facing the prob¬ 
 lem of Timonism, brooding on the disappointments of his own life, 
 and transforming them into a work that moves beyond self-justifica¬ 
 tion or self-pity. But however superbly transformed, the roots of the 
 novel in Melville’s experience can still be traced and some con¬ 
 clusions can be drawn about his state of mind at the close of his 
 public career. Throughout the novel we find characters who em¬ 
 body the problem of Timonism and who are also symbolic authors— 
 that is, ones whose activities bear an implied resemblance to author¬ 
 ship. The theme of confidence increasingly becomes the theme of 
 friendship, and, more specifically, the theme of the relationship be¬ 
 tween an author and his public.® 
 
 The theme emerges in the first three chapters, where three char¬ 
 acters—the lamb-like man. Black Guinea, and the wooden-legged 
 cynic—embody the entire range of responses to Timon’s plight, from 
 passive withdrawal to cagy role-playing to snarling misanthropy. 
 Furthermore, each of these characters is a symbolic author who is 
 reviled by the crowd for his efforts at symbolic authorship. The 
 first of them, the lamb-like man, writes on his slate the litany of 
 charity from Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians and for his pains is 
 buffeted and jeered by the passengers, who clearly do not know what 
 
 * One of the notable accomplishments of recent criticism of T he Confidence-Man is its 
 discovery of the extent to which the novel deals with the problem of fiction-writing and 
 truth-telling. Far from being confined to the apparent digressions (chapters 14, 33, and 44), 
 this theme pervades the entire novel, constantly raising the question of whether a work of 
 fiction can convey any truth at all—and indeed whether there is any to be conveyed. 
 
The Theme of Timonism 
 
 i8i 
 
 to make of him, labeling him (among other things) an “odd fish,” 
 a “humbug,” and a “moon-calf.” Thereafter, he mutely steals into 
 Timon-like retirement, where, “going to sleep and continuing so, he 
 seemed to have courted oblivion, a boon not often withheld from so 
 humble an applicant as he” (p. 12). 
 
 The second figure, a Satanic counterpart of his Christlike prede¬ 
 cessor, is Black Guinea, a Negro cripple who earns a few meager 
 coins through a grotesque travesty of the game of authorship, in 
 which to be an author-like public entertainer is the ultimate in 
 degrading servility, with the audience paying for the privilege of 
 heaping abuse on the performer: 
 
 Still shuffling among the crowd, now and then he would pause, throwing 
 back his head and opening his mouth like an elephant for tossed apples 
 at a menagerie; when, making a space before him, people would have a 
 bout at a strange sort of pitch-penny game, the cripple’s mouth being at 
 once target and purse, and he hailing each expertly-caught copper with a 
 cracked bravura from his tambourine. To be the subject of alms-giving is 
 trying, and to feel duty bound to appear cheerfully grateful under the 
 trial, must be still more so; but whatever his secret emotions, he swal¬ 
 lowed them, while retaining each copper this side the esophagus. And 
 nearly always he grinned, and only once or twice did he wince, which 
 was when certain coins, tossed by more playful almoners, came incon¬ 
 veniently nigh to his teeth, an accident whose unwelcomeness was not 
 unedged by the circumstance that the pennies thus thown proved but¬ 
 tons. (p. 17) 
 
 Soon, however, the crowd begins to turn from degrading patronage 
 to overt hostility. Like the lamb-like man. Black Guinea seems none 
 too surprised at the crowd’s inconstancy, “as if instinct told [him] 
 that the right or the wrong might not have overmuch to do with 
 whatever wayward mood superior intelligences might yield to” 
 (p. 18). The crowd’s reversal of attitude then provokes the narrator 
 to compare Black Guinea to a Timon-like man “proved guilty, by 
 law, of murder, but whose condemnation was deemed unjust by the 
 people, so that they rescued him to try him themselves; whereupon 
 they . . . found him even guiltier than the court had done, and 
 forthwith proceeded to execution; so that the gallows presented the 
 truly warning spectacle of a man hanged by his friends” (p. 19). 
 
 This contagion of distrust has been spread to the crowd by the 
 
i 82 
 
 Charles N. Watson, Jr. 
 
 third of the trio of characters, the wooden-legged cynic, the only 
 one of the three who is explicitly compared to Timon. He is also 
 the one who most fully sees the game of authorship for what it is, 
 an act of crowd-pleasing imposture. Such knowledge may even 
 have come from his own experience as an author, for there may be 
 an allusion to Hawthorne in the comparison of the cynic to “some 
 discharged custom-house ofl&cer, who, suddenly stripped of con¬ 
 venient means of support, had concluded to be avenged on govern¬ 
 ment and humanity by making himself miserable for life, either by 
 hating or suspecting everything and everybody” (p. 17). If the al¬ 
 lusion is indeed to Hawthorne, it hardly matters here that Melville 
 is exaggerating his friend’s misanthropy; what is important is the 
 way he has transformed it into the experience of the cynic, which 
 has led him to distrust the authorial role as public entertainer and 
 benefactor and to see it instead as a cynical confidence-game. The 
 cynic thus foreshadows the final stage of Timonism in the novel as 
 a whole—total disillusionment with the role of public author. 
 
 These early indications that an author is necessarily a con-man 
 and impostor are borne out by two later Timon-like episodes, the 
 stories of the “unfortunate man” and the “soldier of fortune.” Each 
 of these characters has been betrayed by his friends, each narrates 
 his own history, and each is involved with the question of authorial 
 imposture. The unfortunate man’s story concerns his effort to rescue 
 his daughter from his shrewish wife, Goneril, vidth the result that 
 his wife and friends conspire against him, reduce him to poverty, 
 destroy his reputation, nearly succeed in getting him committed, 
 and finally drive him into a lonely exile. Significantly, however, the 
 very telling and retelling of this Timon-like tale raises the question 
 of its truth—or at least the question of whether its audience will re¬ 
 ceive it as such—^for in the next chapter one of its hearers tries to 
 persuade another hearer that the unfortunate man is in reality a per¬ 
 son of “great good fortune. . . . Lucky dog, he dared say, after all” 
 (p. 92). One liability of the teller of unhappy truths like the Timon 
 story, therefore, is that he is forever afflicted with an audience that 
 persists in turning his message of darkness into a blithe reassurance 
 that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. 
 
 The crippled “soldier of fortune,” who is linked to the “un¬ 
 fortunate man” by the similarity of their epithets, is linked also to 
 
The Theme of Timonism 
 
 183 
 
 an earlier crippled author-figure, Black Guinea (his is “much such 
 a case as the negro’s” [p. 138]). Taken to jail as the witness to a mur¬ 
 der, the soldier has no money for bail and no friends to provide any. 
 He is therefore left to rot in prison until the trial, at which the 
 murderer—who, unlike the soldier, has friends—is acquitted. The 
 soldier, now hopelessly crippled by the prison dampness, is forced 
 to conclude that not having friends is a “worse crime than murder” 
 (p. 133). Reduced to beggary, he knows (like Black Guinea) that 
 the only way to retain the favor of the mob is to dress up his mis¬ 
 fortune in a more appealing form. “Hardly anybody believes my 
 story,” he says, “so to most I tell a different one” (p. 135). Posing 
 as a wounded veteran, he goes about soliciting “a shilling for Happy 
 Tom, who fought at Buena Vista ..., something for General Scott’s 
 soldier, crippled in both pins at glorious Contreras” (p. 135). After 
 witnessing this act of author-like imposture, the herb-doctor neatly 
 sums up the kind of compromise that the act of public authorship 
 entails: “For all that, I repeat he lies not out of wantonness. A ripe 
 philosopher, turned out of the great Sorbonne of hard times, he 
 thinks that woes, when told to strangers for money, are best sugared” 
 (P- 136). 
 
 But a crucial turning point in this procession of Timon-like sym¬ 
 bolic authors is marked by the appearance of the gruff Missouri 
 backwoodsman named Pitch, who is explicitly compared to Timon 
 and who embodies a Timon-like combination of magnanimity and 
 misanthropy. Though the P.I.O. agent temporarily persuades him 
 to take on another boy, there is little chance of his surrendering his 
 conviction that “boyhood is a natural state of rascality” (p. 162)— 
 a conviction drawn from the seemingly invincible evidence of 
 thirty-five successive boys who have betrayed his confidence in them. 
 But unlike the earlier symbolic authors. Pitch is a misanthropic 
 truth-teller who is unwilling to sugarcoat the pill. Truth, he says, 
 is “like a thrashing-machine; tender sensibilities must keep out of 
 the way” (p. 166). His last opponent, the Cosmopolitan, urges the 
 familiar kind of authorial role-playing: “Life is a pic-nic en costume', 
 one must take a part, assume a character, stand ready in a sensible 
 way to play the fool” (pp. 187-188). But by declining to “play the 
 fool”—^by declining to compromise his gloomy vision by transform- 
 
184 
 
 Charles N. Watson, Jr. 
 
 ing it into narrative art—Pitch marks the first of three steps toward 
 Melville’s valediction as a professional author. 
 
 The second step is taken by Colonel Moredock, the Indian-hater. 
 Like Pitch, Moredock is a backwoodsman who combines fierce 
 misanthropy with benevolent humanity, for he is a “species of diluted 
 Indian-hater, one whose heart proves not so steely as his brain” 
 (p. 213). In contrast, the theoretical “Indian-hater par excellence'' 
 is more fully Timon-like, one who, “with the solemnity of a Spaniard 
 turned monk . . . takes leave of his kin” and “commits hims elf to 
 the forest primeval; there ... to act upon a calm, cloistered scheme 
 of strategical, implacable, and lonesome vengeance” (p. 212). Since 
 the Indians in question seem symbolic of the savage propensities in 
 all men (Moredock “hated Indians like snakes” [p. 198]), Indian- 
 hating implies a broader kind of Timon-like misanthropy. When 
 Melville has the Cosmopolitan facetiously call the colonel “a More¬ 
 dock of Misanthrope Hall—the Woods,” he manages, in a single 
 brilliant ptm, both an allusion to Timon and a sly hint that Moredock 
 is not so much a real person as a fiction contrived by a misanthropic 
 author. Judge Hall.^® As recreated by a misanthropic Hall and re¬ 
 vised by a misanthropic Melville, Moredock is another truculent 
 realist, whose awakening to the facts of Indian (hence human) na¬ 
 ture came when his entire family was wiped out in a massacre. And 
 finally, Moredock, too, must decide (author-like) whether to com¬ 
 promise his grim vision by playing a public role: 
 
 If the governorship offered large honors, from Moredock it demanded 
 larger sacrifices. These were incompatibles. In short, he was not un¬ 
 aware that to be a consistent Indian-hater involves the renunciation of 
 ambition, with its objects—the pomps and glories of the world; and 
 since religion, pronouncing such things vanides, accounts it merit to re¬ 
 nounce them, therefore, so far as this goes, Indian-hadng, whatever may 
 be thought of it in other respects, may be regarded as not wholly without 
 the efficacy of a devout sentiment, (pp. 219-220) 
 
 By declining the governorship, Moredock, like Pitch, renounces the 
 
 The fact that Melville thus implies a kinship between himself and Hall would seem 
 one piece of evidence against Edwin Fussell’s contention that Melville was covertly attack¬ 
 ing Hall’s supposed racism {Frontier: American Literature and the American West, 
 Princeton, 1965, pp. 318-325). A convincing argument for viewing the Indians as symbols 
 and Moredock as a hero is presented by Merlin Bowen, “Tactics of Indirection in Mel¬ 
 ville’s The Confidence-Man," Studies in the Novel, I (Winter, 1969), 401-420. 
 
The Theme of Timonism 
 
 185 
 
 kind of author-like imposture that the world applauds, and thereby 
 retains his integrity. 
 
 The final stage in this procession of symbolic authors is con¬ 
 tained in the story of China Aster. As the culmination of the theme 
 of friendship betrayed, it is carefully prepared for by the episodes 
 that precede it: the conversation between the “boon companions,” 
 Frank Goodman and Charlie Noble, at the end of which Charlie 
 changes abruptly from friend to enemy when Frank solicits him 
 for a loan; the story of Charlemont, the gentleman-madman, who 
 withdraws, Timon-like, from the scene of his earlier bankruptcy, 
 returning years later with an outward good cheer but a deep inward 
 disillusionment; and the role-playing conversation between the “hy¬ 
 pothetical friends,” in which Egbert (as “Charlie”) expounds his 
 coldly self-serving nodon of friendship. At this point Egbert tells 
 the story of the Timon-like China Aster, which turns out to be a 
 veiled allegorical account of the literary and financial humilations 
 that beset Melville’s entire career as an author.^^ By disclaiming the 
 spirit of the style and distorting the meaning, Egbert provides a final 
 instance of Melville’s unsanguine view of the fate of unpleasant 
 truths in a complacent world. 
 
 First, China Aster is a candle-maker, “one whose trade would 
 seem a kind of subordinate branch of that parent craft and mystery 
 of the hosts of heaven, to be the means, effectively or otherwise, of 
 shedding some light through the darkness of a planet benighted” 
 (p. 291). If this sounds strongly like Melville’s earlier conception of 
 the artist’s role as cosmic truth-teller, the note of self-mockery (“ef¬ 
 fectively or otherwise”) reflects his current disillusionment with so 
 lofty an aim. But there are more sf)ecific parallels to Melville’s ca¬ 
 reer in the account of China Aster’s financial dealings. Lured on by 
 the seemingly beneficent loan from his friend Orchis, and by the 
 
 " Edwin Fusscll has briefly suggested that the China Aster story is “a rather transparent 
 allegorical parody of Melville’s disastrous literary career and of its relation to Hawthorne’’ 
 {Frontier, p. 3i4n.), and Walker Cowen has similarly proposed that “a Hawthorne may 
 be urging a Melville to continue writing great books which will not sell” (“Melville’s 
 Marginalia,” m The Recognition of Herman Melville, ed. Hershel Parker, Ann Arbor, Mich., 
 1967, p. 388). Finally, after the present article was completed, Hershel Parker’s ” ‘The Story 
 of China Aster’: A Tentative Explication” was published for the first time in the Norton 
 Critical Edition of The Confidence-Man (New York, 1971), pp. 353-356. Parker’s sug¬ 
 gestive but rather inconclusive observations surely need some sort of clarifying context, 
 and perhaps the most appropriate is the autobiographical theme of Timonism explored 
 here. 
 
i86 
 
 Charles N. Watson, Jr. 
 
 appearance in a dream of an angel called “Bright Future,” who 
 showers gold upon him, China Aster follows Orchis’s advice to “drop 
 this vile tallow and hold up pure spermaceti to the world” (p. 292), 
 which Orchis promises to buy from him. Similarly, Melville was 
 lured on toward a seemingly bright future by the enthusiasm for his 
 first two books on the part of his family, publishers, and literary 
 friends. But the rapid growth of his mind in the late 1840’s led him 
 to reject such “vile tallow” and to venture instead into “spermaceti,” 
 which suggests not only Moby-Dick^ but also, more broadly, Mardi 
 and Pierre —in short, the kind of light-giving, truth-telling book that 
 (as he told Hawthorne) he felt “most moved to write.” The disap¬ 
 pointing reception of these three books, ending with the near-total 
 public failure of Pierre, exactly parallels the fate of China Aster’s 
 three ventures into spermaceti: the first “rather disappointed [his] 
 sanguine expectations”; the second turned out “still less prosper¬ 
 ously”; and the third ended in “almost a total loss” (p. 298). There¬ 
 after, when China Aster made a new beginning, “he did not try his 
 hand at the spermaceti again, but, admonished by experience, re¬ 
 turned to tallow” (p. 301), just as Melville began an attempt to re¬ 
 coup his reputation and finances by writing for the magazines. 
 
 Orchis, the fair-weather friend who betrays China Aster and 
 drives him to destruction, may be a reflection of Melville’s dis- 
 illusiomnent with Hawthorne, as Edwin Fussell and Walker Cowen 
 have suggested. Or he may be simply a catch-all representation of 
 the forces that Melville felt had blighted his career: the reading 
 public that had stopped buying his books; the editors and critics 
 whose praise of his early books had turned to sharp attacks on the 
 later ones; and the members of his family who were less sympathetic 
 toward his work than he could have wished. Possibly it was this 
 conception of an impenetrable audience that prompted the seemingly 
 innocent whimsy of the pun on Orchis’s occupation as a shoemaker, 
 whose task was to “defend the understandings of men from naked 
 contact with the substance of things” (p. 292). In the biographical 
 context, the pun blossoms into a deft thrust at Orchis as a kind of 
 guardian of the public complacency. 
 
 The final details of China Aster’s death are then drawn from 
 the death of Melville’s bankrupt father. Precisely like Allan Mel¬ 
 ville, China Aster suffered a physical collapse, then “lingered a 
 
The Theme of Timonism 
 
 187 
 
 few days with a wandering mind, and kept wandering on, till at 
 last, at dead of night, when nobody was aware, his spirit wandered 
 away into the other world” (p. 304). To the son, the old specter of 
 the father’s failure and death must have come to seem a prefiguring 
 metaphor of his own impending “death” as a public author, for his 
 artistic capital at last was spent. 
 
 Though biographical conclusions drawn from an author’s ficdon 
 are always hazardous, there seems a strong probability that the per¬ 
 sistence of the Timon theme in Melville’s fiction of this period tells 
 us something about the author that a merely factual chronicle of his 
 life tends to obscure. Both in its characters and events and in its 
 tone of black humor and sardonic gloom. The Confidence-Man ap¬ 
 pears to bring to a final focus Melville’s reflections on his career as a 
 professional author—a career hampered, he seems to have felt, by 
 the inconstancy and obtuseness of even his most ardent early ad¬ 
 mirers. The disillusioned Timon stands at last as a symbol of the 
 disillusioned author, whose highest ambitions and greatest work now 
 appeared headed for oblivion. Perhaps, therefore, Melville’s final 
 despair, described so memorably by Hawthorne when they met in 
 England, stemmed not only from doubts of “Providence and fu¬ 
 turity” but also from a deep skepticism about the possibility of com¬ 
 bining honest artistic creativity with genuine human friendship. Cer¬ 
 tainly it is a tribute to the fundamental sanity of his genius that he 
 could turn his disillusionment into the brilliant bitter-comedy of 
 The Confidence-Man, where the benignly Satanic Cosmopolitan 
 survives, plying his artistic trade, leading another unsuspecting 
 reader into the dark. But as a public author, Melville may well have 
 known that he was taking his last long dive. Though he continued 
 to write poetry until the end of his life and returned to prose fic¬ 
 tion in Billy Budd, he never again thought seriously of public suc¬ 
 cess. Possibly, after all, it was the artist, as much as the religious 
 quester, who told Hawthorne that he had “pretty much made up his 
 mind to be annihilated.” 
 
Vere’s Use of the "Forms”: 
 Means and Ends in Billy Budd 
 
 Christopher W. Sten 
 
 S INCE THE 1962 appearance of the Hayford-Sealts edition of Billy 
 Budd, Sailor, there has been no break in the critical inquest, 
 initiated by Joseph SchifTman’s ironist reading in 1950, into Melville’s 
 view of Vere’s decision to execute Billy.^ Edward H. Rosenberry and 
 Paul Brodtkorb, Jr., each attempted to settle the dispute in the mid- 
 1960’s, but the more recent conflicting assessments by Bernard Rosen¬ 
 thal and B. L. Reid seem to imply that the two traditions in Billy 
 Budd criticism will live as long as Melville’s most controversial novel 
 continues to be read.^ The very difficulty of resolving the controversy 
 may, however, indicate that Melville intended neither to endorse nor 
 to condemn Vere’s judgment. Indeed, Hayford and Sealts have con¬ 
 cluded that the effect of Melville’s “noncommittal ‘alienation,’ ” 
 achieved by his late dramatizations of what earlier had stood as parti¬ 
 san statements, was “often—perhaps usually—deliberately sought.”® 
 Still, perhaps some progress in this celebrated case can be made, first 
 by arguing for the necessity of Vere’s decision and then by suggesting 
 what might have been Melville’s purpose in creating that necessity. 
 Billy Budd poses a typically Romantic question which every reader 
 
 ^ Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., eds., Billy Budd, Sailor {An Inside Nas'- 
 rative) (Chicago, 1962). References are to this edition and appear in the text. Besides Schiff- 
 man, "Melville’s Final Stage, Irony: A Re-examination of Billy Budd Criticism,” American 
 Uterature, XXII (May, 1950), 128-136, see Hayford-Sealts, pp. 26-27 and 203-212, for the 
 other pre-1962 ironist critics; and W. G. Kilbourne, Jr., “Montaigne and Captain Vere,” 
 American Literature, XXXllI (Jan., 1962), 514-517; Ray B. Browne, "Billy Budd: Gospel of 
 Democracy,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XVII (March, 1963), 321-337; Ralph W. Willett, 
 “Nelson and Vere: Hero and Victim in Billy Budd, Sailor," PMLA, LXXXII (Oct., 1967), 
 370-376; and Bernard Rosenthal, “Elegy for Jack Chase,” Studies in Romanticism, X 
 (Summer, 1971), 213-229. 
 
 a Rosenberry, a non-ironist, examines the novel’s tone and “ethical logic,” in “The Prob¬ 
 lem of Billy Budd,” PMLA, LXXX (Dec., 1965), 489-498, while Brodtkorb, in “The Defini¬ 
 tive Billy Budd: ‘But aren’t it all sham.^’” PMLA, LXXXII (Dec., 1967), 602-612, argues 
 that virtually “everything is demonstrable,” because the novel is “unfinished.” Rosenthal; 
 Reid, “Old Melville’s Fable,” Massachusetts Review, IX (Summer, 1968), 529-546. 
 
 * Hayford-Sealts, p. 38. 
 
Vere’s Use of the “Forms” 
 
 189 
 
 is left to answer for himself: Does the end—civilization—justify the 
 inevitable sacrifice of the natural man ? 
 
 The Captain’s reasoning, while it seems to have had Melville’s 
 reluctant sympathy, cannot be said to have had his full support, for 
 in his presentation of Vere’s handling of the case Melville merely 
 brought into focus the means-and-ends dilemma. Rather than an 
 autocratically held end in itself, every one of Vere’s applications of 
 the “forms,” like each of his deviations from them, was a deliberately 
 chosen means to the end of insuring the security of England and 
 thence the salvation of “the Old World” (pp. 128, 54). Billy, like 
 Christ, was sacrificed not by a “martinet” but by a benevolent despot 
 who used inhuman means to effect ends at once tragic and potentially 
 divine: the death of a blameless man and “the peace of the world and 
 the true welfare of mankind” (pp. 128,63).^ 
 
 Although the Christian parallel need not signal Melville’s endorse¬ 
 ment of Vere’s decision, it may signal his larger intent. By focusing 
 on the means-and-ends dilemma through this secularized version of 
 the Crucifixion story, Melville makes us sensible of the price of civili¬ 
 zation. And he reminds us that the responsibilities of the survivors, 
 like the “agony” of authority and the passion of the victim, are fea¬ 
 tures of our everyday lives, not antique curiosities (p. 115). Civilized 
 beings bear a responsibility to the sacrificial victim who, as an “up¬ 
 right barbarian,” symbolizes the natural in every man; thus they bear 
 a responsibility to themselves to make their civilized lives worthy of 
 the ideal in whose name the sacrifice is made (p. 52). First Adamic, 
 then Christ-like, this “child-man” whose life was taken in his twenty- 
 first year is finally a type of us all (p. 86). His fate is the human fate. 
 It is because Melville sought to awaken us to the common fate and 
 its attendant responsibility that he could go no further in his defense 
 of Vere; he had to stop where he did in order to prevent this work of 
 imaginative literature from becoming the political treatise it is often 
 taken to be. 
 
 11 
 
 Despite the many indictments, it is remarkable that those who 
 condemn Vere’s decision seldom offer more than ad hominem argu- 
 
 ■* For an earlier treatment of the means-and-ends problem, see Wendell Click, "Ex¬ 
 pediency and Absolute Morality in Billy Budd," PMLA, LXVIII (March, 1953), 103-110. 
 
190 
 
 Christopher W. Sten 
 
 merits based upon ironic readings of the text. Vere is viewed as a 
 tyrant who blindly or weakly or insanely followed, rather than man¬ 
 fully defied, the “forms, measured forms” of the Mutiny Act which 
 demanded death as the penalty for striking an officer. Thus he is 
 supposed to have violated those “primitive instincts,” forming the 
 basis of natural law, which demand mercy for one who was not only 
 innocent of intent but, as even Vere felt sure, had also rid the world 
 of an “Ananias” (pp. 109, 100). To condemn Vere on such grounds, 
 however, is in itself to violate the principles of natural law. It is to 
 look but to the “frontage,” as war and the Mutiny Act do, and to 
 judge Vere by the consequence of his decision rather than by his 
 intent, as Vere said the court must judge Billy (p. 112). 
 
 Yet Vere’s decision invites condemnation, as surely as it was meant 
 to. Melville knew it would because he knew from the experience of 
 his cousin, Guert Gansevoort, that the comparable conduct of the 
 Somers affair had been condemned.® Moreover, the Bellipotent’s sur¬ 
 geon, the court, and later “some officers” criticized Vere’s handling 
 of the case (p. 103). While Melville was concerned to demonstrate 
 the need for compassion, for Vere no less than for Billy, he was 
 equally concerned to demonstrate that compassion will suffice for 
 neither of these tragic figures. The power of compassion cannot 
 exceed the power of historical circumstance to create the tragic neces¬ 
 sity for inhuman action, and in this Melville could rely on the au¬ 
 thority of the Father of the crucified Christ. Sympathetic understand¬ 
 ing of Vere’s rationale is warrantable, but so is indignation at the 
 necessity of Billy’s death. One must feel both pity and fear in response 
 to this tragedy. 
 
 Melville’s intention to portray the grim necessity of Billy’s execu¬ 
 tion is revealed by the fact that the narrative cards could hardly have 
 been stacked more expertly to force Vere’s hand. Indeed, that “the 
 unhappy event” (Claggart’s death at the hand of Billy) “could not 
 have happened at a worse juncture was but too true.” If Melville’s 
 intention, as the ironists argue, was in fact to strike out at arbitrary 
 authority, it seems reasonable to ask why he bothered to place the 
 event at a juncture which included among its critical factors not only 
 the recently “suppressed insurrections” at Spithead and the Nore but 
 a tightly interlocked and painstakingly detailed arrangement of other 
 
 ® See Hayford-Sealts, pp. 26-30, 181-183. 
 
Vere’s Use of the “Forms” 
 
 191 
 
 circumstances: that there were some on board who had participated 
 in those insurrections; that England’s defense rested on her navy; 
 that the enemy had been sighted just before Claggart’s death; that the 
 Bellipotent stood at the moment “almost at her furthest remove from 
 the fleet’’; and that the incident occurred “in the latter part of an 
 afternoon watch,” when the cover of night, too conducive to the kind 
 of intrigue earlier refused by Billy, was soon approaching (pp. 102, 
 90). Important as it is, the argument from the author’s need for dra¬ 
 matic tension seems inadequate; for what on one level is dramatic 
 tension becomes on another the source of the problem and the debate. 
 
 From the outset Vere was portrayed not as one imprisoned by 
 forms or conventions but as one independent in mind and non¬ 
 conformist in manner. In conversation, for example, the narrator 
 remarked that the “honesty” of “natures constituted like Captain 
 Vere’s . . . prescribes to them directness, sometimes far-reaching like 
 that of a migratory fowl that in its flight never heeds when it crosses 
 a frontier” (p. 63). This simile, coming as it does at the end, empha¬ 
 sizes Vere’s characterization throughout Chapters 6 and 7 as a man 
 who did not fear to transgress the world’s boundaries—its customs, 
 its forms—in pursuit of a distant goal. More pertinently, neither was 
 the Captain portrayed as a mechanical formalist in his attitude to¬ 
 ward the crew or toward Billy. We are told that, “though a con¬ 
 scientious disciplinarian, he was no lover of authority for mere au¬ 
 thority’s sake,” and in his speech to the court (“ ‘I feel as you do for 
 this unfortunate boy’ ”) and in his closeted interview with the fore- 
 topman we witness Vere’s heartfelt desire to do Billy justice (pp. 104, 
 113). But Billy was the “man trap” Claggart claimed him to be, one 
 which Vere knew he must avoid (p. 94). Unlike Ahab, Vere knew 
 the cruel injustice of the fact that “whatever devotes itself to justice 
 at the expense of reality,” in the memorable words of Frank Ker- 
 mode, “is finally self-destructive.”® But Vere knew, too, as his own 
 subsequent death showed, that there is no cause more worthy of 
 devotion. In the fight against the Atheist, he died for the same cause 
 for which he sacrificed Billy—the defense of his nation and his view 
 of what constitutes justice to mankind. 
 
 Unconcerned about self-destruction, Vere was unswervingly con¬ 
 cerned about the destruction of the British community for which he 
 
 ®rAe Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York, 1967), p. 105. 
 
192 
 
 Christopher W. Sten 
 
 spoke and acted. He was “prompted by duty and the law,” he said 
 in formulating the case against Billy, and duty to that community 
 demanded that he prevent a mutiny on his ship (p. 113). In this time 
 of war, a mutiny would have endangered not simply the lives of 
 those on board; as the spread of insurrection in the Great Mutiny 
 had shown, it would have endangered also the very life of a fleet 
 which was “the right arm of a Power then all but the sole free con¬ 
 servative one of the Old World.” Hence mutiny had the potential 
 for becoming to “the British Empire . . . what a strike in the fire 
 brigade would be to London threatened by general arson” (p. 54). 
 Vere had to choose, therefore, either individual justice or communal 
 justice; for in the fate of Billy Budd possibly rested the fate of an 
 entire nation, perhaps even of “the Old World.” 
 
 Given this context, only two issues could have made Vere’s decision 
 debatable: the question whether the possibility of mutiny on the 
 Bellipotent was real and present; and the danger of encountering the 
 enemy before the case could be referred to the admiral. That Vere’s 
 fear of mutiny was not paranoiac is suggested by the narrator’s asser¬ 
 tion that “Discontent foreran the Two Mutinies, and more or less it 
 lurkingly survived them. Hence it was not unreasonable to appre¬ 
 hend some return of trouble sporadic or general” (p. 59). What is 
 even more pertinent, Vere knew that the Bellipotent was at the time 
 “mustering some who . . . had taken a guilty part in the late seri¬ 
 ous troubles” and “others also” who had been impressed into her 
 duty (p. 92). The impressed men, too, were not trustworthy: “some¬ 
 times,” particularly before twilight, they were “apt to fall into a sad- 
 dish mood which in some partook of sullenness” at the thought of 
 their families at home (pp. 49-50). While “very little in the manner 
 of the men . . . would have suggested to an ordinary observer that 
 the Great Mutiny was a recent event,” some grounds arose to sub¬ 
 stantiate Vere’s sense of the potential mood of his men (pp. 59-60). 
 At least they were not docilely responsive to his every word, as seen 
 on three occasions—the announcement of Billy’s execution, the execu¬ 
 tion itself, and Billy’s sea interment—when order had to be restored 
 by a “strategic command” for an uncustomary use of the forms. On 
 the first occasion there went up from the crew a “confused,” on the 
 second an “inarticulate,” and on the third a “strange human” mur¬ 
 mur, the last followed by an “uncertain movement ... in which 
 some encroachment was made” (pp. 117,126-127). That Vere’s judg- 
 
Vere’s Use of the “Forms” 
 
 193 
 
 ment against Billy provoked these disturbances is beyond question. 
 But it is also true that the potential for mutiny was shown to exist 
 among the men both before and after the judgment was announced. 
 
 According to Ralph W. Willett, Vere’s “fear of mutiny serves to 
 rationalize” his “hasty” judgment that Billy must hang; for, Willett 
 hedgingly asserts, Melville “points out” that the possibility of mutiny 
 “is in no way suggested by the behavior of the Bellipotenfs crew.” 
 Attributing Vere’s prejudgment to the temporary impairment of his 
 “powers of cerebration,” Willett argues that “The most clearly ironic 
 example” of his “rashness” “begins with Vere’s attempt to forestall 
 mutiny by making an example of Billy Budd; this only serves to 
 stimulate discontent among the crew and to make Billy a martyr.”^ 
 There is irony here, to be sure, but “the might-have-been” as the 
 narrator observes, “is but boggy ground to build on” (p. 57). There 
 was simply no way for Vere, as there is none for us, to be sure how 
 the crew would have acted had Budd not been executed. Though 
 there is no certainty that Billy’s hanging prevented a mutiny, Willett 
 begs the question when he concludes that its “only” effect is the ironic 
 one. Furthermore, that Vere’s fear of mutiny was not a rationaliza¬ 
 tion but a fundamental concern can be seen as early as midway in 
 Claggart’s accusations, even before Billy had been named. Vere is 
 said to have concluded that even “if in view of recent events prompt 
 action should be taken at the first palpable sign of recurring insub¬ 
 ordination . . . not judicious would it be ... to keep the idea of 
 lingering disaffection alive by undue forwardness in crediting an 
 informer, even if his own subordinate and charged . . . with police 
 surveillance of the crew” (p. 93). Thus, too, by reserving judgment 
 about his master-at-arms’s report, the Captain early revealed his will¬ 
 ingness to deviate from the forms when his crew’s steadiness was at 
 issue. 
 
 Once again, Vere’s fear of mutiny was not self-contained; it related 
 to his more comprehensive desire to maintain full strength in the 
 event of a confrontation with the enemy, which in turn related to his 
 larger concerns for the defense of England and “the peace of the 
 world and the true welfare of mankind.” Such a confrontation had 
 almost occurred just before Claggart accused Billy, when an enemy 
 frigate was sighted and the Bellipotent gave chase. The fact that this 
 
 ^ Willett, pp. 370-371. 
 
194 
 
 Christopher W. Sten 
 
 was a frigate is important, because it implies the proximity of a 
 French squadron or fleet, frigates being sent out alone primarily as 
 scouts; as Hayford and Sealts point out, they “formed no part of the 
 line of battle.”® Then, too, it was while on “a somewhat distant” 
 expedition, the Bellipotent being “almost at her furthest remove from 
 the fleet,” that she unexpectedly sighted the frigate; consequently, 
 there was time in which to encounter enemy battleships before Billy’s 
 case could be brought to Vere’s superior (p. 90). Neither fanciful nor 
 fanatical, Vere’s desire to insure full strength for an enemy engage¬ 
 ment was vindicated by the subsequent clash with the Atheist. In¬ 
 deed, Melville seems to have been doubly willing to vindicate the 
 Captain in this matter by contriving the French line-of-battle ship’s 
 defeat. Though Vere lost his life in this fight, like Lord Nelson he 
 had fulfilled his duty to maintain England’s security. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Although the possibilities of a mutiny and of a meeting with the 
 enemy were the two critical factors in Vere’s decision, his detractors 
 have tended to focus on the first of these and on subsidiary questions 
 relating to his conduct of the trial. Besides his failure to place the 
 case in the admiral’s hands, these include Vere’s demands for secrecy 
 in the proceedings against Billy; his determination of the irregular 
 make-up of the court; his demand for dispatch in its reaching a ver¬ 
 dict; his briefs to the court and virtual usurpation of its role; and, 
 running through each of the others, the question of his mental sta¬ 
 bility at the time. It is here that examination of Vere’s use of the 
 forms most clearly reveals his deliberateness; for in each of these 
 matters except the last—and this turns upon his thinking in the 
 others—Vere clandestinely deviated from the forms or manipulated 
 them to his advantage. And he did so for the same reasons he es¬ 
 poused in adhering to the forms of the Mutiny Act in the final ver¬ 
 dict; he had to insure the stability of his men and thence the safety 
 of his nation. 
 
 Vere’s demands for secrecy, like his other contrivances for assuring 
 his command, commenced immediately after Claggart accused Billy, 
 when the Captain showed “perplexity” chiefly about “how best to act 
 in regard to the informer.” Although at first “he was naturally for 
 
 ® Hayford-Sealts, p. 144. 
 
Vere’s Use of the “Forms” 
 
 195 
 
 summoning that substantiation of his allegations which Claggart said 
 was at hand,” Vere realized that “such a proceeding would result in 
 the matter at once getting abroad, which in the present stage of it, 
 he thought, might undesirably affect the ship’s company.” Thus 
 deserting the customary course, which he felt free to do because his 
 crew had as yet no precise expectations, Vere “would first practically 
 test the accuser” by shifting the scene from the “broad quarter-deck” 
 to his cabin and there scrutinizing “the mutually confronting visages” 
 upon the reiteration of Claggart’s charge. His fear of publicity even 
 at this early stage seems appropriate, because “the interview’s con¬ 
 tinuance already had attracted observation” from some of the sailors 
 (pp. 96-98). 
 
 Vere’s desire for secrecy following Claggart’s death was consistent 
 with that before it, and from then on he was even more cautious. 
 “Here he may or may not have erred,” the narrator said equivocally; 
 but still it is suggested that this and every subsequent decision had 
 been thoroughly considered: “Until he could decide upon his course, 
 and in each detail; and not only so, but until the concluding measure 
 was upon the point of being enacted, he deemed it advisable, in view 
 of all the circumstances, to guard as much as possible against pub¬ 
 licity” (p. 103). Thus, having earlier used Albert, in whose “discre¬ 
 tion and fidelity” he had “much confidence,” to retrieve Billy, Vere 
 was so careful as to hide Claggart’s body from the hammock-boy’s 
 view when he was summoned to send for the surgeon (p. 97). 
 Though Vere’s wariness was called into question by the surgeon, it 
 was later seen to have been warranted by the crew’s continued curi¬ 
 osity in the affair. For, while “less than an hour and a half had 
 elapsed” between Claggart’s disappearance and the announcement of 
 Billy’s execution, it “was an interval long enough ... to awaken 
 speculations among no few of the ship’s company as to what it was 
 that could be detaining in the cabin the master-at-arms and the 
 sailor” (p. 116). Though Vere, also in the cabin during this period, 
 did not witness their curiosity, he was a commander “long versed in 
 everything pertaining to the complicated gun-deck life, which like 
 every other form of life has its secret mines and dubious side, the side 
 popularly disclaimed” (p. 93). While it can be said that there would 
 have been no cause for rumors had Vere proceeded aboveboard 
 throughout, as was customary in capital cases, it cannot be known 
 
196 
 
 Christopher W. Sten 
 
 whether in that event there might not have been cause for mutiny.® 
 
 Why Vere hastened to call a drumhead court, like the question of 
 why he demanded dispatch in its reaching a verdict, is answered by 
 his remark near the end of the trial: “ ‘while thus strangely we pro¬ 
 long proceedings that should be summary—the enemy may be sighted 
 and an engagement result’ ” (p. 112). Thus keeping his eye on larger 
 responsibilities, Vere deviated from usage; for the surgeon and the 
 court agreed that it would be best to confine Billy, “and in a way 
 dictated by usage,” and wait until the matter could be referred to the 
 admiral (p. loi). In fact, the “case indeed was such that fain would 
 the Bellipotent’s captain have deferred taking any [final] action 
 whatever respecting it.” But with the “self-abnegation” of a monk 
 he chose to keep “his vows of allegiance to martial duty.” This state¬ 
 ment, suspect in isolation, is translated to mean not that Vere weakly 
 subordinated the claims of his conscience but that he steadfastly 
 attempted to maintain his crew’s stability: “Feeling that unless quick 
 action was taken on it, the deed of the foretopman, so soon as it 
 should be known on the gun decks, would tend to awaken any 
 slumbering embers of the Nore among the crew, a sense of the 
 urgency of the case overruled in Captain Vere every other considera¬ 
 tion” (p. 104). 
 
 There has been less dispute about Vere’s determination of the 
 court’s irregular make-up, although in selecting the officer of marines 
 to sit with the sea lieutenant and the sailing master he again “perhaps 
 deviated from general custom.” He did so because “he took that 
 soldier to be a judicious person, thoughtful, and not altogether in¬ 
 capable of grappling with a difficult case unprecedented in his prior 
 experience.” Yet even as to him Vere had “some latent misgiving” 
 about the reliability of his “extremely good-natured” character in “a 
 moral dilemma involving aught of the tragic.” Nonetheless, the 
 marine captain seemed to be more suitable as a judge than the other 
 two “honest natures,” for “their intelligence was mostly confined to 
 the matter of active seamanship and the fighting demands of their 
 profession” (pp. 104-105). While they were hardly ideal jurists (Vere 
 regarded them as “well-meaning men not intellectually mature”), in 
 light of their demurrers during the trial—particularly those voiced by 
 the soldier, “the most reluctant to condemn of the members”—it can- 
 
 ® See C. B. Ives, "Billy Budd and the Articles of War,” American Literature, XXXIV 
 (March, 1962), 36. 
 
Vere’s Use of the “Forms” 
 
 197 
 
 not be claimed that Vere had unfairly stacked the court in this 
 departure from custom (pp. 109, 129). 
 
 Once the court had been convened, Captain Vere interfered in its 
 role and deliberations in at least four ways. First, though “tem¬ 
 porarily sinking his rank” because he was the only witness in the 
 case, he was cautious enough to maintain it “in a matter apparently 
 trivial” by testifying from the ship’s elevated side (p. 105). Second, 
 he instructed the court to confine its attention to the blow’s conse¬ 
 quence, not its provocation or intent. Third, he assumed the role of 
 “coadjutor,” arguing against allegiance to Nature and in behalf of 
 allegiance to the King (p. no). And, last, he warned against miti¬ 
 gating the sentence. While each interference entailed a violation of 
 due process or a departure from custom, Vere’s rationale in each 
 instance, as seen in his reply to the marine captain’s inquiry about 
 leniency, returned to his persistent fear of mutiny: “‘consider the 
 consequences of such clemency,’ ” he said. “ ‘The people’ (meaning 
 the ship’s company) ‘have native sense; most of them are familiar 
 with our naval usage and tradition. . . . [T]o the people the fore- 
 topman’s deed . . . will be plain homicide committed in a flagrant 
 act of mutiny.’ ” If the well-known penalty does not follow, “ ‘Will 
 they not revert to the recent outbreak at the Nore.?’ ” (p. 112). 
 
 These interferences, together with the concluding warning against 
 clemency, make it obvious that Vere’s primary interest was to bring 
 the secret court’s verdict into line with public expectations. That this 
 verdict was demanded by “the law of the Mutiny Act” (or so Mel¬ 
 ville thought) was important to Vere because the law corresponded 
 with and defined his crew’s expectations (p. in). If, having already 
 decided against Billy, the Captain then railroaded his judgment 
 through the court, why did he bother to convene it? One implicit 
 explanation is that, because Vere could not know beforehand how 
 the court would decide, its concurrence was an even wager. More 
 importantly, Vere was “very far” from wishing to monopolize to 
 himself “the perils of moral responsibility.” Hence his motivation for 
 not varying from “usage” in turning “the matter over to a summary 
 court of his own officers” was not self-serving.‘“ It stemmed from his 
 
 In fact, Vere’s argument from “usage” in this regard is tenuous. See Hayford-Sealts, 
 pp. 175-176, and Ives, pp. 32-36. Apparently this was Melville’s error, as he made a related 
 mistake earlier, when it was said that Vere had been a member of “a court-martial ashore 
 . . . when a lieutenant” (p. 94). “According to statute,” the editors say, “regular naval 
 courts-martial consisted of commanders and captains” (p. 178). See also pp. 181-182. 
 
198 
 
 Christopher W. Sten 
 
 awareness of the limited “moral” capacity of one man to decide such 
 an issue. Vere knew he was not God. Yet he also knew that he had 
 sole responsibility for any of the crew’s actions which might result 
 from a lenient verdict by the court. Thus he reserved “to himself, as 
 the one on whom the ultimate accountability would rest, the right of 
 maintaining a supervision of it, or formally or informally interposing 
 at need” (p. 104). Even Vere’s subsequent interferences, then, had 
 been anticipated. He was a deliberate, even a prescient, man. While 
 his calculations, like his justifications, might still be judged “insane,” 
 it cannot be argued that he had lost self-control (p. 102). It is as true 
 of Vere as of Nelson that “in foresight as to the larger issue of an 
 encounter, and anxious preparations for it . . . few commanders 
 have been so painstakingly circumspect as this same reckless declarer 
 of his person in fight” (pp. 57-58). 
 
 Because all proceedings after the announcement of Billy’s hanging 
 were necessarily public, Vere felt an even greater need to be circum¬ 
 spect. Accordingly, once Billy had been transferred from the Cap¬ 
 tain’s quarters “without unusual precautions—at least no visible 
 ones,” then “certain unobtrusive measures were taken absolutely to 
 insure” that no one but the chaplain had communication with him. 
 Contrary to the narrator’s assertion, however, Vere did not observe 
 “strict adherence to usage” in every public proceeding “growing out 
 of the tragedy,” despite the fact that in no point could usage be 
 deviated from “without begetting undesirable speculations in the 
 ship’s company” (pp. 117-118). When Vere ordered the drummer 
 to beat to quarters “at an hour prior to the customary one” in re¬ 
 sponse to the crew’s “encroachment” following Billy’s burial, the 
 narrator remarks: “That such variance from usage was authorized 
 by an officer like Captain Vere . . . was evidence of the necessity for 
 unusual action implied in what he deemed to be temporarily the 
 mood of his men” (pp. 127-128). Though Vere risked the conse¬ 
 quences of manipulating the forms in public only under the most 
 pressing circumstances, this stratagem shows the power of the forms 
 to have been such that their use was imperative in all dealings with 
 the crew. 
 
 “ ‘With mankind,’ ” Vere would say, “ ‘forms, measured forms, are 
 everything; and that is the import couched in the story of Orpheus 
 with his lyre spellbinding the wild denizens of the wood.’ And this 
 he once applied to the disruption of forms going on across the Chan- 
 
Vere’s Use of the “Forms” 
 
 199 
 
 nel and the consequences thereof” (p. 128).“ It was a mechanically 
 inhuman, unredeemed society which Vere saw, but it was the reality 
 he could not ignore despite his desire to do Billy justice. Vere’s state¬ 
 ment was an insight of tragic dimension and a lament for the in¬ 
 exorable state of things as they are, not a declaration of personal 
 philosophy. It was not with Vere but with “mankind,” and in par¬ 
 ticular these men-of-war’s men who were “of all men the greatest 
 sticklers for usage,” that the forms were sacrosanct (p. 117). Almost 
 at the moment Claggart fell, Vere, who was “in general a man of 
 rapid decision,” spoke his full comprehension of the paradoxical 
 situation before him: “‘Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the 
 angel must hang!’” (pp. 103, loi). He knew, therefore, that the 
 lyre’s forms do indeed “lie.” But he knew, too, that only the forms 
 could “spell-bind” his crew. Unlike Billy and the Bellipotent's other 
 prelapsarian sailors, Vere had partaken of the “questionable apple of 
 knowledge” (p. 52). With him the forms were not “everything.” 
 There were also the otherwise “wild denizens” of the man-of-war 
 world and the inhuman “consequences” of the “disruption of forms 
 going on across the Channel”—the “wars which like a flight of 
 harpies rose shrieking from the din and dust of the fallen Bastille” 
 and the attendant chaos responsible for both the abrogation of the 
 Rights of Man in Billy’s impressment and the destruction of Starry 
 Vere (p. 66). 
 
 Yet Vere’s tragedy was not that he died in service to mankind. His 
 tragedy was that he had to use the inhuman forms of the Mutiny Act 
 in order to attempt to secure more human forms, and not merely in 
 order to conserve the stability of the larger community. A “bachelor,” 
 without wife and child at home to protect, Vere “disinterestedly 
 opposed” the theories of the revolutionary innovators “not alone 
 because they seemed to him insusceptible of embodiment in lasting 
 institutions, but at war with the peace of the world and the true 
 welfare of mankind” (pp. 60, 62-63). Certainly the objective of 
 
 A more precise parallel between Vere and Orpheus is suggested by the fact that the 
 mythical poet is known for resolving “a quarrel among the Argonauts (on whose voyage he 
 sailed) that enabled them to reach Colchis strand and the Golden Fleece,” though, unlike 
 Vere, Orpheus achieved control over the ship’s company by the eloquence of his poetrj'. 
 See Thomas H. Cain, “Spenser and the Renaissance Orpheus,” University of Toronto Quar¬ 
 terly, XLI (Fall, 1971), 25. Note also that, according to one of Spenser’s sources, civilization 
 originated with Orpheus (p. 27). 
 
200 
 
 Christopher W. Sten 
 
 “world peace” has been invoked to embolden the schemes of tyrant 
 and madman; but, for that very reason, it is not an objective we can 
 afford to live without. Everyone with an objective—whether Clag- 
 gart, Billy, or Vere; whether Satan, Christ, or God—must use the 
 imperfect means of the world to achieve his end. And this is, I think, 
 the legacy of Melville’s tragic, anti-Transcendentalist vision. His por¬ 
 trayal of Vere’s dilemma presents the means-and-ends riddle with a 
 vengeance, and our recognition of the riddle in Billy Budd makes it 
 impossible to read this work as Melville’s “testament of acceptance.”^^ 
 The arbitrary fate of Captain Vere makes us feel the human need for 
 the forms, but the unjust fate of Billy Budd makes us, like Vere, feel 
 the need to change the state of things as they are and so to make 
 more human forms possible. 
 
 Following Billy’s early morning sea burial, “the circumambient air 
 in the clearness of its serenity was like smooth white marble in the 
 polished block not yet removed from the marble-dealer’s yard.” These 
 are the last words of Melville’s narrative, save the “three brief chap¬ 
 ters” of its “sequel,” and they suggest not an end but the possibility 
 of a new beginning. The day is pure potentiality for those who wit¬ 
 ness the common fate; the world has begun anew, as it had for the 
 survivors of an earlier Gethsemane. But it can truly begin anew only 
 if the sacrifice of the natural “child-man” awakens us to the recogni¬ 
 tion that our potential salvation has its price—our debt to the victim 
 and our responsibility to create a world worthy of his sacrifice. The 
 world as it stands, like the book which mirrors it, lacks the “sym¬ 
 metry of form attainable in pure fiction”; it, too, is “less finished than 
 an architectural finial” (p. 128). Most important, it has not been, nor 
 is it meant to be, “accepted” as it is. The marble still lies in waiting; 
 civilized, human form has yet to be realized. 
 
 IV 
 
 In his travels, Melville had seen people in all corners cutting them¬ 
 selves off from Nature or ruthlessly being cut off from her by civi¬ 
 le E. L. Grant Watson coined this controversial term, in “Melville’s Testament of Ac¬ 
 ceptance,” New England Quarterly, VI (June, 1933), 319-327. See also William Braswell, 
 “Melville’s Billy Budd as ’An Inside Narrative,’” American Literature, XXIX (May, 1957). 
 133-146; Richard Harter Fogle, "Billy Budd: The Order of the Fall,” Nineteenth-Century 
 Fiction, XV (Dec., i960), 189-205; Brodtkorb; and Reid. 
 
Vere’s Use of the “Forms” 
 
 201 
 
 lized man. And what he found in civilization was not sufficiently 
 redeeming to justify the loss without perturbation. This was espe¬ 
 cially true because civilized man had blithely forgotten the loss in his 
 pursuit of “that manufacturable thing known as respectability.” The 
 “doctrine of man’s Fall,” according to the narrator, was “a doctrine 
 now popularly ignored,” even though it implies the death of the 
 Budd in every civilized man. For he observes that “where certain 
 virtues pristine and unadulterate peculiarly characterize anybody in 
 the external uniform of civilization, they will upon scrutiny seem not 
 to be derived from custom or convention, but rather to be out of 
 keeping with these, as if indeed exceptionally transmitted from a 
 period prior to Cain’s city and citified man” (pp. 52-53). Still, Mel¬ 
 ville seems not to be proposing a Rousseauist rejection of civilization. 
 Having made the discovery more than forty years earlier when he 
 wrote Typee, Melville still knew that once a man had bitten of “the 
 questionable apple of knowledge” he could not return to Nature and 
 the time before Cain. Billy Budd suggests that the Fall is a rite of 
 passage as irreversible as it is perilous. 
 
 The inadequacy of the chaplain’s Christian “consolation,” which 
 he extended to the still prelapsarian Billy awaiting death, seems to 
 imply that in his last years Melville himself could not find consola¬ 
 tion in institutionalized Christianity (p. 120). But in a work in which 
 he more than once voiced the expectation that his readers would find 
 the novel’s “savor of Holy Writ” disagreeable, it is fitting that Mel¬ 
 ville’s retelling of the Crucifixion story on the historical plane should 
 reveal his support of the essential truth of the complexly tragic and 
 triumphant Christian story as human drama (p. 76). Like Christ, 
 Billy was forced to play his role by the necessities of time and by his 
 awful responsibility to a community which failed to understand, yet 
 unknowingly benefited from, his sacrifice. Melville’s “inside narra¬ 
 tive” strikes that uneven balance and recalls to us what we were and 
 are, though it foretells nothing about what we shall become. Proph¬ 
 ecy is not the function of tragedy. But, having gained the burden¬ 
 some knowledge of duty, we thus are free to change ourselves and 
 our world. Like all great literature, Billy Budd ends not so much 
 with an answer and an ideological stand as with a question and a 
 challenge to remake the world in a more benevolent image. Unless 
 Billy’s sacrifice “vitalizes into acts” the heroic potential of those in 
 
202 
 
 Christopher W. Sten 
 
 whose name the sacrifice is made, as it vitalized Vere’s in his fight 
 against the Atheist, then such sacrifice is indeed “vainglory,” as the 
 Benthamites claimed of the death of Nelson; then, too, “affectation 
 and fustian is each more heroic line” of Billy Budd, and our investi¬ 
 gations into its meaning are little more than antiquarianism (pp. 
 
 57-58)- 
 
The Composition of Mohy-Dick 
 
 James Barbour 
 
 S OME TWENTY YEARS AGO Gcorgc R. Stcwart’s “The Two Moby- 
 Dicl^s" appeared in American Literature} Since that time his 
 theory of the composition of Moby-Dic\, though often ignored, has 
 not been seriously questioned;^ it is, briefly, that there were two 
 separate narratives written during two distinct periods of time and 
 arranged back to back in the completed work. It is now time to 
 review the theory of “two Moby-Dic\s" in order to see whether it 
 accurately describes either the writing of the novel or the manner in 
 which Melville arranged the compositional parts—for undoubtedly 
 Melville spent an unexpected length of time upon his book and 
 probably engaged in a considerable amount of arranging and re¬ 
 arranging before it went through the press. 
 
 I 
 
 The “two Moby-Dicl{s' culminates a history of investigation fre¬ 
 quently marked by shrewd and brilliant literary scholarship. From 
 the time the book was revived in 1919 until 1939, it was assumed 
 that Moby-Dic^ was of seriatim composition begun in February, 
 1850, and completed in early autumn, 1851. This assumption was 
 first questioned by Leon Howard in a paper delivered to the MLA 
 convention in New Orleans in 1939.^ On the basis of the slight 
 evidence then available he inferred that there may have been a 
 major revision of the novel after August, 1850, when the manuscript 
 was described as “mostly done.”^ This inference was later sup¬ 
 ported by the discovery of letters in which Melville described the 
 stages of composition of the early narrative. In 1947 Charles Olson 
 
 1 XXV (Jan., 1954), 417-448. 
 
 ^ Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford in Mohy-Dick. as Doubloon (New York, 1970), 
 p. 378, note that in much of the criticism that followed Stewart’s article “the theory tends 
 to be stated as fact.” 
 
 3 Printed as “Melville’s Struggle with the Angel,” Modern Language Quarterly, I (June, 
 1940), 195-206. 
 
 ■* Jay Leyda, The Melville Log (New York, 1951), I, 385. 
 
204 
 
 James Barbour 
 
 in Call Me Ishmael (New York, p. 35) announced, “Moby-DicI{ 
 was two books written between February, 1850, and August, 1851. 
 The first book did not contain Ahab. It may not, except inci¬ 
 dentally, have contained Moby-Dick.” Howard P. Vincent in The 
 Trying-Out of Moby-Dic\ (Boston, 1949) hypothesized a revision 
 that began much later, in the spring of 1851, when Melville acquired 
 Owen Chase’s Narrative^ his source for the sinking of the Pequod. 
 
 But the two works that were to settle matters were still to be 
 written. Leon Howard returned to the topic in his biography 
 Herman Melville (Berkeley, California, 1951, 150-179), and in his 
 chapter “Second Growth” he described Melville’s inspirational re¬ 
 vision of the early whaling narrative as under the tutelage of Shake¬ 
 speare and Hawthorne he began philosophically and histrionically 
 to reshape his “whaling voyage.” Finally George R. Stewart in 
 “The Two Moby-Dicl{s" identified the point at which the revision 
 began: he concluded that the early chapters (1-16) were original; 
 they were stitched by transitional chapters (17-22) to the revised 
 narrative (23-“Epilogue”). 
 
 Stewart’s “The Two Moby-Dicl{s” is the only study that has been 
 solely devoted to the problem of composition. Leon Howard was 
 primarily interested in Melville’s intellectual growth; Howard P. 
 Vincent was concerned with the cetological genesis of the novel; 
 and Charles Olson offered an impressionistic prose poem inspired 
 by the book—each man touched upon the composition only in 
 passing. Stewart, the last to speak, seemingly untangled the compo¬ 
 sitional riddle. However, his assumptions and methodology were 
 too limited: he believed there was only one seam in the book, and 
 he ignored external evidence that would have altered his conclu¬ 
 sions.® 
 
 This external evidence is available: there are letters that describe 
 the narrative during its various stages of writing, chapters that are 
 datable through external reference, and source materials that are 
 both identifiable and datable. This evidence indicates that there 
 
 ® Vincent implies that the plot of Moby-Dick. was added after September, 1850 (p. 45). 
 But what was included in this revision is unclear, for Vincent also states that the white 
 whale did not swim into the novel before March or April, 1851 (p. 47). 
 
 ® Had Stewart employed the datable textual references and source material, he probably 
 would have noticed that the earliest datable chapters (78 and 90) indicate the original 
 narrative extends beyond chapter 22. 
 
Composition of Moby-Dic\ 
 
 205 
 
 were not just two, but three well defined periods in the writing of 
 Moby-Dicl{: 
 
 1. The writing of an early whaling novel begun in February, 
 1850, and “mostly done” by August of the same year. 
 
 2. A period from August, 1850, until early in 1851 when Mel¬ 
 ville was writing cetological chapters and perhaps interpo¬ 
 lating adventure chapters into the narrative. 
 
 3. A final period, when, under the influence of Shakespeare and 
 Hawthorne, Melville was revising the early narrative; this 
 period extended from early 1851 until the publication of the 
 book in the fall of the year. 
 
 II 
 
 The progress Melville made on the whaling story that he began 
 in February, 1850, can be followed through three letters written 
 between May and August. 
 
 The story is first mentioned in a letter of May i to Richard H. 
 Dana, Jr., in which Melville writes: “About the ‘whaling voyage’ 
 —I am half way in the work, & am very glad that your suggestion 
 so jumps with mine. It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; 
 blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you may get oil out of it, the 
 poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—& to cook the 
 thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy .... Yet I mean 
 to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.”^ 
 
 Two months later he wrote to his English publisher Richard 
 Bentley offering the work for publication in the fall and describing 
 it as “a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends 
 in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the 
 author’s own personal experience, of two years & more, as a har- 
 pooneer” [sic].® 
 
 A final reference comes from Evert Duyckinck, editor of the 
 Literary World; he evidently read Melville’s manuscript, for he 
 wrote to his brother George on August 7, 1850: “Melville has a new 
 
 ’’The Letters of Herman Melville, ed., Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New 
 Haven, Conn., i960), p. 108. 
 
 ^ Letters, p. 109. 
 
206 
 
 James Barbour 
 
 book mostly done—a romantic, fanciful, & literal & most enjoyable 
 presentment of the whale fishery,—something quite new.”® 
 
 The theory that this narrative was substantially revised is founded 
 in large part on the testimony of these letters. They describe the 
 consistent progress of the narrative. If Duyckinck’s observation is 
 correct—and there is no reason to suppose otherwise—then the 
 manuscript could have been ready for publication in late autumn. 
 Its completion a year later suggests the story was extensively re¬ 
 vised. Melville’s description of the story lends support to this theory, 
 for nowhere is Ahab or Moby Dick mentioned in his letters; rather 
 he describes it in more general terms as a romantic but truthful 
 “whaling voyage.” 
 
 Evert Duyckinck’s unique position as the only person known to 
 have read the early story is significant in that he also reviewed 
 Moby-Dic\ in the Literary World (November 22, 1851). In the 
 review he observed, “there are evidently two if not three books in 
 Moby-Dic\ rolled into one.”^“ Undoubtedly he recognized the 
 changes Melville had made in the story since he had read it the 
 year before; perhaps it was that which prompted him to divide the 
 novel into books. He had enjoyed the story in manuscript, but 
 he only approved of one of the “books” in the published work: that 
 was Melville’s “thoroughly exhaustive account admirably given of 
 the great Sperm Whale . . . [with] its level passages, its humorous 
 touches, its quaint suggestion, its incident usually picturesque and 
 occasionally sublime.Duyckinck’s use of words like “humorous,” 
 “quaint,” and “picturesque” indicates that much of what he had 
 read and enjoyed in the manuscript may have remained in the 
 completed work, for Duyckinck’s passage paraphrases Melville’s 
 earlier description of the story as a strange sort of tale into which 
 was thrown a little fancy, yet one that also told the truth. 
 
 ^ The Melville Log, p. 385. 
 
 “Melville’s Moby-Dick.; or, The Whale," Literary World, IX (Nov. 22, 1851), rpt. as 
 “An Intellectual Chowder” in Moby-Dick_: Norton Critical Edition, ed. Harrison Hayford 
 and Hershel Parker (New York, 1967), p. 613. All quotations from the novel are taken from 
 this edition and cited by page reference in the text. 
 
 P. 613. Duyckinck objected to the portion of the novel where the crew of the Pequod 
 (especially Ahab) act like characters in a German melodrama, and to the poetic conceits, 
 extravagant speculations, and the “piratical running down of creeds and opinions” (p. 615). 
 His objections would seem to include the dramatic and cetological chapters (Duyckinck 
 specifically complains of the “run-a-muck style of Carlyle,” an influence in the cetology); 
 he also took offense at “The Ramadan” (17), an early land chapter, for theological reasons. 
 
Composition of Moby-Dicl{ 
 
 207 
 
 If the account of the Sperm Whale belongs to the original nar¬ 
 rative, then the first whaling story extends far beyond the land 
 chapters (1-22) hitherto identified with the original narrative. 
 Datable evidence supports this possibility, for if Melville wrote his 
 material soon after the events to which he refers (as logic sug¬ 
 gests), then two chapters late in the novel are of early origin: 
 “Cistern and Buckets” (78) compares the fall of one of the har- 
 pooners inside the head of a sperm whale to the collapse of Table 
 Rock into the Niagara, an event that occurred on June 25, 1850; 
 “Heads or Tails” (90) recounts an anecdote Melville read in the 
 June 29 issue of the Literary World. 
 
 Also, if there is a chronological correlation between Melville’s 
 letters and the composition of the novel, “The Affidavit” (45) was 
 probably written around the time of his letter of June 27 to Bentley, 
 for the chapter is an extension of his phrase, “illustrated by the 
 author’s own experience, of two years & more as a harpooneer.” 
 In the chapter Ishmael claims authenticity for his story by citing 
 “the author’s own experience”— 
 
 I have personally known three instances where a whale, after receiving 
 a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an interval (in one 
 instance of three years), has been again struck by the same hand, and 
 slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same private cypher, have 
 been taken from the body. 
 
 I say I, myself, have known three instances similar to this; that is in two 
 of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second attack, saw the 
 two irons with the respective marks cut in them, afterwards taken from 
 the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so fell out that I was in the 
 boat both times, first and last, and the last time distinctly recognized a 
 peculiar sort of huge mole under the whale’s eye, which I had observed 
 there three years previously. I say three years, but I am pretty sure it was 
 more than that. Here are three instances, then, which I personally know 
 the truth of. (pp. 175-176)'^ 
 
 At most Melville may have had some experience as a harpooner on the Charles and 
 Henry, a voyage of less than six months. Rather than personal experience in the early nar¬ 
 rative, Melville seems to have relied on other whaling books; the account of the “three-year 
 instance,” for example, was taken from Rev. Henry Cheever’s The Whale and His Captors 
 (New York, 1850). Other sources that he used in his chapters of whaling adventure were 
 Fredrick Debell Bennett’s A Whaling Voyage Round the World (London, 1840); Fredrick 
 Allyn Olmstead’s Incidents of a Whaling Voyage (New York, 1841); and J. Ross Browne’s 
 Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (New York, 1846). 
 
2o8 
 
 James Barbour 
 
 “The Affidavit,” with its recitation of legendary whales and their 
 feats, fulfills Melville’s promise that the story will be based on “cer¬ 
 tain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries.” 
 
 It seems evident that the early narrative underwent some revision 
 after August; otherwise the duration of time Melville worked on a 
 “mostly done” story cannot be logically explained. Also Melville’s 
 and Duyckinck’s descriptions of this story fail to match the pub¬ 
 lished novel; they suggest the original was a more fanciful (but 
 truthful), less dramatically conceived account of a whaling voyage. 
 Whether chapters like “The Affidavit” (45), “Cistern and Buckets” 
 (78), and “Heads or Tails” (90) are from the original narrative is 
 not absolutely determinable. It is probably true that Melville com¬ 
 posed chapters soon after the incidents to which he alludes, and 
 that there was often a temporal connection between what he was 
 writing in the novel and what he was writing to friends, but 
 neither assumption is incontrovertible. However, the consistency 
 with which such references describe and identify the composition 
 of large sequential sections of the novel is convincing. At this point 
 they only suggest that material written in the first stage may occur 
 in Moby-Dic\ as late as chapter 90. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The compositional activity of the autumn and early winter had 
 its antecedents in the spring. On May i when Melville estimated 
 he was half-way through, he wrote to Dana stating that he was glad 
 the latter’s suggestion for the book coincided with his own idea. 
 Dana may have urged him to “give the truth of the thing.” Regard¬ 
 less, Melville had already begun gathering his factual sources. On 
 April 29 he withdrew from the New York Society Library two 
 volumes by William Scoresby, Arctic Regions and History and 
 Description of the Northern Sperm Whale Fishery. Later in the 
 month he asked Putnam’s to send to England for Thomas Beale’s 
 authoritative work The Natural History of the Sperm Whale. 
 Melville’s intention in acquiring these sources was to add factual 
 material about whales and whaling to the narrative to give it 
 copiousness and authenticity.” Apparently he waited until his copy 
 
 Howard, Melville, p. 162. In previous novels Melville had added factual material to his 
 manuscript in the later stages of writing. For discussion of Melville’s compositional habits 
 
Composition of Moby-Dicl{ 
 
 209 
 
 of Beale arrived before working on the cetology (informational 
 chapters about whales, in particular the sperm whale) d* 
 
 Melville received Beale’s Natural History on July 10, However, 
 the ensuing weeks were ones in which he had little time for writing. 
 On July 15 he left New York City for the Berkshires, where he 
 embarked immediately with his cousin on an agricultural tour of 
 the county, returning on the evening of July 20. In the days 
 following Melville read Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse 
 and visited the Shaker community in nearby Hancock, where he 
 purchased A Summary View of the Millenial Church. On July 24 
 he returned to New York City and invited several friends to the 
 Berkshires. He then packed up his own family and traveled back 
 to the family home in Pittsfield to make preparations. On August 
 2 the guests arrived, among them Evert Duyckinck, who read the 
 manuscript. What he read contained little or nothing from Beale’s 
 Natural History, for Melville had not had time to read and incor¬ 
 porate it into the story. It was probably in this sense that Duyckinck 
 referred to the narrative as “mostly done.” 
 
 In early August Melville wrote of the impact Hawthorne, and 
 Shakespeare before him, had made on his imagination in his famous 
 review “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (published in the Literary 
 World, August 17 and 24, 1850). It is doubtful, however, that Mel¬ 
 ville found much time in the succeeding weeks for sustained writ¬ 
 ing. His energies were spent in other activities: “In September he 
 bought a farm near Pittsfield, and returned to New York City only 
 long enough to get his family moved. It was late fall before he was 
 working regularly on the book that had seemed half finished at 
 the first of May and ‘mostly done’ in August. Even then he worked 
 under bad conditions.”'® 
 
 see the appropriate sections in Leon Howard's Herman Melville; Howard’s “Historical Note” 
 in Melville's Typee (Evanston, 111 ., 1968); Harrison Hayford, “Introduction” to Omoo (New 
 York, 1969); Merrell R. Davis, Melville's "Mardi": A Chartless Voyage (New Haven, Conn., 
 1952); William Gilman, Melville’s Early Life and “Redburn" (New York, 1951); Hershel 
 Parker, “Historical Note” in Melville’s Redburn, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and 
 G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, 1969); and Watson G. Branch, “The Genesis, Composition, 
 and Structure of The Confidence-Man,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XXVII (March, 1973) 
 424-448. 
 
 A majority of the cetological chapters are drawn from Beale. Since Melville often 
 added factual material to his narrative in the later stages of composition, it is likely that most 
 of the cetology was added afer he received Beale’s Natural History. 
 
 Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker, “The Text: History, Variants, and Emenda¬ 
 tions,” Moby-Dick_: Norton Critical Edition, p. 471. 
 
210 
 
 James Barbour 
 
 From early September until the middle of October he was busy 
 fixing up the house he had purchased. On October 6 he wrote to 
 Duyckinck describing his continuing labors on the place. He re¬ 
 turned to his story in mid-October and by December he was writing 
 easily and rapidly. On December 13 he again wrote to Duyckinck 
 requesting “fifty fast writing youths with an easy style & not averse 
 to polishing their labors .... I wish you would [send them], 
 because since I have been here, I have planned about that number of 
 future works & cant [sic] find enough time to think about them 
 separately.”^® 
 
 It is generally assumed that Melville began to revise his narra¬ 
 tive soon after writing his review of Hawthorne’s Mosses. Certainly 
 Hawthorne—and to a greater degree Shakespeare—had a profound 
 influence on Moby-Dick^, but evidence suggests it was probably not 
 until the next year. This does not mean Ahab or the white whale 
 was absent from the early story. The gam with the ]ereboam (71) 
 was presumably written in the months after Melville’s visit to Han¬ 
 cock, for he refers to the mad prophet Gabriel as “nurtured among 
 the crazy society of Niskayuna Shakers” (p. 266), information 
 about Shaker history he gleaned (and misspelled) from A Summary 
 View. The gam would have been written for the early novel, indi¬ 
 cating that Ahab, whose death Gabriel prophesies, was definitely in 
 the story. (Gabriel’s insistence on Ahab’s death by the whale’s 
 tail, and his prediction of “fevers, yellow and bilious,” and “the 
 plague” [p. 267] for the ship suggests that the plot of the early 
 story, particularly the conclusion, was changed considerably in later 
 months.) 
 
 In the period between August and December of 1850, Melville 
 appears to have been writing cetological material for the story, pro¬ 
 ceeding with his plan of late spring. This is in part confirmed by 
 the fact that of the twenty cetological chapters in Moby-Dic\, nine 
 borrow from Beale and three of the Beale chapters refer to events 
 occurring between August and the end of the year—a strong indica¬ 
 tion that Melville was working on his cetology at that time. 
 
 The most accurately dated chapter is “The Fountain” (85), in 
 
 Letters, p. 117. 
 
 The following are the cetological chapters, with B included parenthetically for those 
 influenced by Beale: 32(B), 55(B), 56(B), 57, 65, 68, 74(B), 75, 76(B), 77, 79, 80, 85(B), 
 86(B), 88, 92(B), 102(B), 103(B), 104(B), and 105. 
 
Composition of Moby-Dicl{ 
 
 2II 
 
 which Melville writes, “thousands of hunters should have been close 
 by the fountain of the whale, watching those sprinklings and spout¬ 
 ings—that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed 
 minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock P.M. of this 
 sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850),’” it should still remain a 
 problem . . (p. 310). The ease with which Melville composed 
 
 the cetological chapters may be reflected in his request three days 
 earlier for fifty fast writing youths to take down his ideas. 
 
 The other datable chapters refer to events earlier in the fall. In 
 “Ambergris” (92) the smell rising from the hold of a Greenland 
 whaler is compared to the stench “arising from excavating an old 
 city graveyard, for the foundation of a Lying-In Hospital” (p. 343). 
 The reference is to the excavation of the old cemetery in Pittsfield 
 to make room for the new hospital which was dedicated on Sep¬ 
 tember 9. The chapter would have been written after Melville’s 
 return to Pittsfield. “A Bower in the Arsacides” (102) was com¬ 
 posed after Melville’s house guests had left. It describes the skeleton 
 of a whale as “a wonderful sight. The wood was green as mosses 
 of the Icy Glen . . .” (p. 374). Melville and his friends visited the 
 Ice Glen near Stockbridge on August 5. 
 
 A final piece of evidence supports the theory that Melville spent 
 this period writing the cetology. On December 30 Melville’s father- 
 in-law had charged to his membership at the Boston Anthenaeum a 
 copy of William Scoresby’s Arctic Regions. More than a month 
 earlier Melville had sent his wife and son to Boston to visit her 
 parents; now at Christmas he had joined them, still working with 
 his cetological sources.'® 
 
 IV 
 
 For Melville the final stage of composition was something of an 
 emotional roller-coaster ride. By the early months of 1851 his 
 good humor has passed: he resents intrusions upon his time and 
 becomes irritable with Duyckinck. He then turns to Hawthorne to 
 share his thoughts with his famous neighbor. His letters begin to 
 reverberate with a fresh vigor and renewed energy. The voice and 
 the attitude they reflect are Ahab’s, the statements are very much 
 
 In the American edition the date is 1851, probably a printer’s error (p. 483). 
 
 The Melville Log, p. 402. 
 
212 
 
 James Barbour 
 
 those of Shakespeare and Carlyle. Melville’s mounting excitement 
 continues throughout the spring and summer months, tempered 
 only by his critical reflection that what he had produced was a 
 “final hash.”^“ Both his excitement and harsh judgment were 
 probably prompted by his introduction of dissimilar material into 
 the narrative: the effort exhilarated him, but his statement that his 
 endeavor was a “hash” indicates how poorly, in Melville’s opinion, 
 the disparate parts had blended. 
 
 The change in Melville’s mood is first evident in a letter dated 
 February 12, 1851, in which he refuses Duyckinck’s request for a 
 daguerreotype and a contribution to Holden s Dollar Magazine: 
 “I am not in the humor to write the kind of thing you need .... 
 You must be content to believe that I have reasons, or else I would 
 not refuse so small a thing.”^^ Melville goes on to reveal that he 
 has been visiting Hawthorne and reading Twice-Told Tales. 
 
 February may have been Melville’s month of decision. Late in 
 the month or soon thereafter he asked his father-in-law to acquire 
 a copy of Owen Chase’s Narrative for him. In 1841 Melville had 
 read Chase’s account of the sinking of the Essex by a sperm whale, 
 and although he mentions the tragedy in “The Affidavit” (45), he 
 apparently did not have Chase’s book before him at the time of 
 writing, for quotations from it are footnoted to the history of the 
 Essex, evidence of a later interpolation. Melville’s request would 
 seem to indicate that Chase’s story now had a new importance— 
 perhaps he had been considering a new ending to his narrative, 
 one in which a ship is attacked and sunk by a whale (the Essex 
 was stoved and sank within ten minutes). That Melville’s original 
 conclusion was revised is suggested by the numerous events that are 
 foreshadowed in the early chapters but never fulfilled.^^ One state¬ 
 ment anticipates what may have happened to the crew in the 
 original story (the italicized words were deleted from the English 
 edition): “An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of 
 
 Letters, p. 128. 
 
 Letters, p. 120. 
 
 The early chapters look forward to landing on “barbarous coasts" (p. 116), but the 
 Pequod does not touch land; they also prepare for an atmosphere of brutality that does not 
 develop in the story—Ishmael, for example, remarks when kicked by Peleg, “That was my 
 first kick” (p. 95), but he is not kicked again. In the original narrative Queequeg may have 
 died in a separate incident, for early in the story Ishmael comments, “From that hour I 
 clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive" (p. 61). 
 
Composition of Moby-Dic\ 
 
 213 
 
 the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying old Ahab in 
 the Pequod to lay the world’s grievances before the bar from which 
 not very many of them ever came back. Black little Pip—he never 
 did—oh, no! he went before. Poor Alabama boy!” (p. 108).^* In¬ 
 asmuch as Pip does not precede the others in death and only Ishmael 
 returns from the voyage (in contrast to “not very many”), it appears 
 that the original conclusion was altered so that the crew would 
 perish together in a final catastrophic event. A further clue to 
 possible alterations in the story may be found in The New England 
 Primer, which Melville acquired on March 6; beside the letter “W” 
 he read, “Whales in the sea/God’s voice obey.”^' 
 
 Melville’s correspondence after receipt of the Narrative echoes 
 the intensely dramatic and defiant rhetoric of Ahab. His letter of 
 April 16 praises Hawthorne, but is more descriptive of Ahab; 
 
 We think that into no recorded mind has the intense feeling of the visible 
 truth ever entered more deeply than into this man’s. By visible truth, we 
 mean the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as 
 they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do their 
 worst to him,—the man who, like Russia or the British Empire, declares 
 himself a sovereign nature (in himself) amid the powers of heaven, hell, 
 or earth. He may perish; but so long as he exists he insists upon treating 
 with all Powers upon an equal basis. 
 
 There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in 
 thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who 
 say yes, lie; and all men who say no, —why, they are in the happy condi¬ 
 tion of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the 
 frontier into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,—that is to say, the 
 Ego.^” 
 
 The letter paraphrases Ahab’s highly dramatic speech in “The 
 Candles” (119), where he asserts his individuality in the face of the 
 fiery Father; “In the midst of the personified impersonal, a per¬ 
 sonality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe’er I 
 came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly per¬ 
 sonality lives in me . . .” (p. 417). 
 
 The American reading is recorded in “Substantive Variants Between Moby-Dick. and 
 The Whale,” Moby-Dick^: Norton Critical Edition, p. 479. 
 
 The Melville Log, p. 407. 
 
 Letters, pp. 124-125. 
 
214 
 
 James Barbour 
 
 In his next letter, of June i, Melville returns to an Ahabian topic 
 —truth: “But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a 
 living by the Truth—and go to the soup societies. Heavens! Let 
 any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, 
 the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own 
 pulpit bannister.Melville may have been thinking of “The Ser¬ 
 mon” (9) and Father Mapple’s message. Later he echoes another 
 passage from the novel as he writes, “I read Solomon more and 
 more, and every time see deeper and deeper and unspeakable mean¬ 
 ings in him. ... It seems to me now that Solomon was the truest 
 man who ever spoke, and yet that he a little managed the truth 
 with a view to popular conservatism . . . .” Ishmael repeats similar 
 words in defense of Ahab’s sorrow in “The Try Works” (96): “The 
 truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all 
 books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of 
 woe” (p. 355). The letter concludes with Melville’s talking of going 
 to New York City to “work and slave on my ‘Whale’ while it is 
 driving through the press.”"^ The book is now recognizable as 
 Moby-Dic\: it rocks with Ahab’s speech and focuses upon a par¬ 
 ticular whale. 
 
 On June 29 when the book is half-way through the press, Mel¬ 
 ville tells Hawthorne that he is patching the book together, pre¬ 
 sumably joining the original and revised portions and inserting 
 last-minute chapters into the manuscript: “Since you have been here, 
 I have been building some shanties of houses (connected with the 
 old one) and likewise some shanties of chapters and essays.”^® He 
 then discloses the book’s secret motto which underscores the philo¬ 
 sophic change he made in the early narrative (a change that is 
 mirrored in his letters). The words are from Ahab’s speech in the 
 dramatic baptismal scene in “The Forge” (113): “This is the book’s 
 motto (the secret one)—Ego non baptiso Te in nomine—but make 
 out the rest yourself.” 
 
 The final period of composition seems to have focused on Ahab 
 as a tragic hero rather than simply the captain of an ill-fated vessel. 
 In Melville’s letters Ahab’s language, attitudes, and dark metaphysi¬ 
 cal questioning are echoed throughout. The increased excitement 
 
 Letters, p. 127. 
 
 Letters, p. 128. 
 
 Letters, p. 132. 
 
Composition of Moby-Dicl{ 
 
 215 
 
 and the flow of ideas in the letters indicate that for Melville these 
 were months of great creativity. The notion inherent in “Hawthorne 
 and His Mosses,” of a character, who, like Shakespeare’s dark heroes, 
 would examine what we feel to be so terribly true—this idea seems 
 to have waited until early 1851 to find expression in Melville’s 
 dramatic presentation of Ahab. It is this Shakespearean Ahab who 
 enlivens the novel with his “quick probings at the axis of reality,”^® 
 and his tearing “off the mask” and speaking “the sane madness of 
 vital truth.”^” Melville’s excitement can be explained only as the 
 sympathetic involvement of the artist in his character’s emotionally 
 consuming quest for metaphysical truth. 
 
 V 
 
 Moby-Dick^ is the result of a planned composition extending 
 through the first two stages of writing: progress on the original 
 narrative was steady until August and then the cetology was added 
 to it. The final stage of writing involved the revision and some 
 eleventh-hour patchwork in joining the two narratives. The parts 
 Melville composed during these periods can be identified (the ini¬ 
 tial chapters have been generally accepted as part of the first story) 
 by following Melville’s methodology and tracing datable sources. 
 For example, the cetological chapters were added to the early narra¬ 
 tive; therefore, they should lead us back to the remains of the first 
 whaling voyage. The later revision of the book was strongly 
 influenced by Shakespeare; therefore, the echoes and obvious bor¬ 
 rowings from the tragedies should allow us to identify the revised 
 portions of the novel. 
 
 Cetological chapters may be classified as “fast” or “loose” depend¬ 
 ing on how well they are attached to the narrative. Those that are 
 “loose” are unattached to their immediate narrative surroundings; 
 in this sense they are movable chapters which Melville could have 
 placed anywhere in the manuscript. Because of their insularity 
 they are of no help in locating the early narrative.®^ On the other 
 
 “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Literary World (August 17 and 24, 1850), rpt. in 
 Moby-Dick,: Norton Critical Edition, p. 541. 
 
 P. 542. 
 
 The "loose” chapters were frequently written in self-contained units, a series of chap¬ 
 ters concerned with one topic. There are a total of twelve “loose” chapters in the book: 
 32, 55. 56, 57. 79. 80, 85, 86, 102, 103, 104, and 105. 
 
2i6 
 
 James Barbour 
 
 hand, the “fast” chapters have an expository relationship to the 
 chapters around them. They are attached to the narrative in the 
 manner anticipated in reviewing the book’s composition. It is these 
 “fast” chapters listed below that should lead us to the original story: 
 
 65. “The Whale as a Dish” 
 
 68. “The Blanket” 
 
 74. “The Sperm Whale’s Head” 
 
 75. “The Right Whale’s Head” 
 
 76. “The Battering Ram” 
 
 77. “The Great Heidelberg Tun” 
 
 88. “Schools and Schoolmasters” 
 
 92. “Ambergris” 
 
 The first of these chapters, “The Whale as a Dish” (65), is 
 appended to a chapter sequence that begins with “The Line” (60). 
 It supplies information for “Stubb Kills a Whale” (61), which, in 
 turn, produces the whale steak for Stubb’s supper, eaten in chapter 
 64, and discussed in “The Whale as a Dish.” In effect, then, the 
 chapters from 60 through 92 (which is “Ambergris,” the last of the 
 “fast” chapters), form a narrative frame in which the remnant of 
 the original story is located. This is supported by the fact that this 
 frame also contains all the dated chapters (listed below) from the 
 first two stages of composition, with the exception of the “loose” 
 and movable cetological chapter, “A Bower in the Arsacides” (102): 
 
 71. “The Pequod Meets the Jereboam”: August 1850 
 
 78. “Cistern and Buckets”: June 1850 
 
 85. “The Fountain”: December 1850 
 
 90. “Heads or Tails”: June 1850 
 
 92. “Ambergris”: August 1850 
 
 If the early narrative is enclosed within these chapters, then such 
 fanciful and often humorous accounts of whaling adventure like 
 “Stubb Kills a Whale” (61), “The Shark Massacre” (66), “The 
 Pequod Meets the Virgin” (81), “The Grand Armada” (87), and 
 “The Pequod Meets the Rose Bud” (91) were probably part of the 
 original story. These chapters tell of the adventure of whaling in a 
 manner that conforms to the descriptions of the first whaling 
 narrative. 
 
 The final stage of composition is the easiest to trace. The im- 
 
Composition of Moby-DicJ{ 
 
 217 
 
 portance of Hawthorne and Shakespeare in the revision of Moby- 
 Dicl^ needs no comment. It is Shakespeare, however, that is most 
 evident in Melville’s reshaping of Ahab: alternately Ahab plays 
 the roles of Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, King Henry, and 
 Timon; he appears in dramatically conceived scenes; his language, 
 its rhythms and allusions underscore the pervasive influence of 
 Shakespeare. This influence has been thoroughly documented by 
 Raymond Long in “The Hidden Sun: A Study of the Influence of 
 Shakespeare on the Creative Imagination of Herman Melville.”^" 
 A tabulation of Long’s findings plus the incidence of dramatic 
 elements in the novel (dramatic sub-titles, stage directions, and 
 soliloquies) show that the Shakespearean influence occurs with 
 much greater frequency in certain sections of the books. 
 
 Total Avg. reference 
 
 Chapters 
 
 references 
 
 per chapter 
 
 1-22 
 
 . 6 
 
 •27 
 
 23-59 
 
 72 
 
 1.91 
 
 60-92 
 
 10 
 
 •33 
 
 93-“Epilogue” 
 
 102 
 
 2.32 
 
 Those sections in Moby-Dick^ that have been associated with the 
 original narrative—1-22 and 60-92—evince only minimal Shake¬ 
 spearean influence. The influence occurs in chapters 23-59 93 ” 
 
 “Epilogue,” but even within these chapters certain ones demonstrate 
 considerably stronger influence. This is evident when they are 
 examined separately. 
 
 23-59I 
 
 Chapters 
 
 26-34 
 
 36-42 
 
 Total 
 
 references 
 
 24 
 
 35 
 
 93-“Epilogue”| 
 
 94&99 
 
 io6-“Epilogue” 
 
 9 
 
 93 
 
 Avg. reference 
 per chapter 
 2.67 
 5.00 
 
 4.50 
 
 3.00 
 
 ^-Dissertation, U.C.L.A.. 1965. Long divides the influence into two types: first, super¬ 
 ficial allusions, references either to Shakespeare himself or to his creations (plays and charac¬ 
 ters), and also quotations and implied quotations; second, deeper influences, which consist of 
 characters of a recognizably Shakespearean type, speeches, scenes, events from the plays, and 
 also Shakespearean devices such as speech patterns and images. Long has noted each occur¬ 
 rence in the novel. 
 
2i8 
 
 James Barbour 
 
 From this tabulation it appears that the revision concentrated on 
 several groups of chapters. Those that introduce the cast of char¬ 
 acters (26-34) were apparently revised, although the revision appears 
 to have been superficial; it is more pervasive in the chapters begin¬ 
 ning with Ahab at the quarter-deck (36-42). A consistent influence 
 is again discernible in the concluding section (io6-“Epilogue”). 
 
 It is not surprising that Ahab is prominent in these chapters. He 
 is introduced briefly in the initial segment (26-34) 5 more dra¬ 
 matically evident in the next group of chapters (36-42); and in the 
 concluding events he is before the reader constantly until he darts 
 his final harpoon into the unconquerable whale (106-“Epilogue”). 
 
 VI 
 
 This study has attempted to describe the composition of Moby- 
 Dic]{. External evidence has been considered, dates have been 
 ascribed to various textual references, and, as a result, stages of 
 composition have been determined and material in the novel 
 assigned to the various stages of writing. Much of the composition 
 still remains a mystery. Nevertheless, certain conclusions—and a 
 few conjectures—can be made about the writing of the book: 
 
 1. Melville wrote Moby-Dic\ in three stages. In February, 1850, 
 he began a whaling story, which he worked on steadily until 
 August. In the months following he wrote much of the cetology. 
 In the final phase, begun early in 1851, he revised the narrative and 
 later interpolated material into it. Each period produced the fol¬ 
 lowing identifiable chapters: 
 
 stage one: chapters 1-22. 
 
 stages one and two: chapters 60-92, and probably the 
 “loose” cetological chapters. 
 
 stage three: chapters 26-34,36-42, and io6-“Epilogue.” 
 
 2. The cetology was written for the original narrative and added 
 to it in late autumn and early winter of 1850.®* 
 
 Stewart states in “The Two Moby-Dickfi” that the revision probably took place in the 
 following order: first Melville conceived of a whale sinking a ship, as in the case of the 
 Essex; then he made it a particular whale with a particular name and color; and, after 
 changing the plot, “the author felt the necessity of establishing in the reader’s mind such 
 facts as that a whale could be white, could bear a name, and could sink a ship. Hence 
 sprang the cetology” (p. 446). Stewart has the progression of events backwards: the cetology 
 
Composition of Moby-Dic/{ 
 
 219 
 
 3. Melville may have revised the first story in two stages. The 
 earliest revision probably involved chapters 26-34; they seem to have 
 been revised before the present ending was added to the book, else 
 Pip’s early death would not be foreshadowed in chapter 27. Later, 
 perhaps in the spring of 1851, Melville may have decided to rewrite 
 the original conclusion. 
 
 4. The revised conclusion is first evident in “The Castaway” (93). 
 Pip’s rescue from a watery grave in this chapter prompts Ishmael 
 to remark that the episode anticipates his own abandonment, thus 
 foreshadowing his solitary state in “Epilogue.” But Pip’s rescue 
 may also offer a clue as to how Melville revised the original. In 
 the early narrative Pip was to have preceded the others in death; 
 perhaps he was drowned in the first version of “The Castaway” and 
 was resurrected in the revision so that he might play the fool to 
 Ahab’s Lear. In a similar manner Melville probably used other 
 scenes from the early novel, transforming them to meet the demands 
 of the plot. 
 
 The case of Queequeg illustrates what may have happened to 
 incidents Melville revised. Like Pip’s, Queequeg’s death is proph¬ 
 esied in an early chapter (13), where Ishmael states that his friend 
 is to take a “last long dive.” His death may have occurred as a 
 result of his descent into the ship’s hold to search for an oil leak; 
 he does become gravely ill and asks that a coffin be made for him. 
 But in the reshaping of the plot the various deaths are held for the 
 conclusion; thus Queequeg recovers and Melville uses his coffin to 
 save his narrator. 
 
 5. In joining the two narratives, Melville used large sections from 
 each, salvaging much from the original. He alternated sections 
 from the two narratives in structuring the novel, beginning with 
 the original land chapters (1-22), and then proceeding to the revised 
 chapters that introduce Ahab, the crew, and their quest (26-42); he 
 then returned to the original story, preserving certain adventure 
 chapters and the cetological chapters that he had attached to the 
 
 was written, then the plot was changed, and later, after April i, when Melville received 
 Chase’s Narrative, the cetological chapter “The Battering Ram" (76), which does what 
 Stewart suggests of the cetology as a whole (that is, prove that a whale “could sink a ship "), 
 was interpolated into the manuscript. Melville hatl Chase’s Nairatire before him when 
 writing the chapter, for he borrows verbatim Chase’s phrase “paved with horses’ hoofs" 
 (Henry F. Pommer, "Herman Melville anil the Wake of the Essex" American Literature, 
 XX, November, 1948, 295). 
 
220 
 
 James Barbour 
 
 early narrative (60-92) ; he concluded with the revised ending (106- 
 “Epilogue”). Melville stitched these sections together with a pot¬ 
 pourri of chapters of both early and late composition, including 
 many of the “loose” cetological chapters. 
 
 VII 
 
 Melville’s retrospective view of the composition is recorded in 
 his letter of June i, 1851, to Hawthorne. In the past sixteen months 
 he had patched two narratives together and in the process had 
 transformed a diverting story into an American classic. Melville’s 
 appraisal of his effort is ironic, but also prophetic, for he realized 
 that his Whale was the result of antithetical forces that he could no 
 longer resolve—the need to secure an audience for his writing, 
 coupled with an intense compulsion to tell the truth. The artistic 
 paradox finally resulted in his long silence. For Melville his greatest 
 effort was a failure: 
 
 My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me,—I shall at last be worn out and 
 perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant at¬ 
 trition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, 
 that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I 
 cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.'^* 
 
 Letters, p. 128. 
 
Form as Vision in Herman Melville’s Clarel 
 
 Bryan C. Short 
 
 I N HIS FOREWORD to Vincent Kenny’s book on Clarel, Gay Wilson 
 Allen recommends three “routes” for approaching the poem. The 
 first relates Clarel to Melville’s “spiritual quest for the meaning of 
 existence.” The second reaches Clarel by way of Melville’s actual trip 
 to Palestine. The third explores Melville’s anticipation of the pessi¬ 
 mism so important to later thought.^ Efforts by such recent critics as 
 Kenny and William H. Shurr, not to mention all whose contribu¬ 
 tions Kenny summarizes in his fourth chapter, have moved us far 
 enough along these routes that another can be glimpsed.^ Clarel 
 demands a reading in the light of relationships between Melville’s 
 poetic technique and modifications which the practice of verse 
 wrought in his view of literature. A reverence for organic unity 
 pervaded Romantic poetics in America;^ Melville’s changing inter¬ 
 pretation of this doctrine determines the adapting of versification to 
 narrative purpose which gives Clarel its unique shape. Such a study 
 promises a better understanding of how Melville’s later verse grew 
 out of the impatient questing of the novels, an explanation of his 
 curious abandonment of tetrameter in the Clarel epilogue, and a 
 more flattering image of his state of mind than has been current. 
 The protean nature of Melville’s poetry suggests that the promise 
 of artistic rather than philosophical accomplishment motivated the 
 varied forms of his mature works. Although his themes reflect the 
 depression which adorns his family correspondence, his incessant 
 technical experiments bespeak an undying vitality. Our view of 
 Melville should include the literary interests, both practical and theo¬ 
 retical, which kept him active at his desk in spite of obscurity, money 
 problems, family tragedy, poor health, and civil service. Clarel, with 
 
 ^ Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Spiritual Autobiography (Hamden, 1973), pp. x-xi. 
 
 ^ William H. Shurr, The Mystery of Iniquity (Lexington, Ky., 1972). 
 
 ^ See R. H. Fogle, “Organic Form in American Criticism, 1840-1870,” in The Develop¬ 
 ment of American Literary Criticism, ed. Floyd Stovall (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955), pp. 
 75 - 111 . 
 
222 
 
 Bryan C. Short 
 
 its profound dedication to organic poetics, reveals these springs and 
 motives as well as any other work in the cannon. 
 
 Battle-Pieces lays the groundwork for organic form in Clarel by 
 achieving a well-tested strategy for facing the terrors of experience, 
 a style which both suits and embodies that strategy, and a new con¬ 
 fidence, noted by critics, vis a vis the spiritual quest whose entice¬ 
 ments survived the foundering of Melville’s fiction.^ Without this 
 foundation, Clarel is unthinkable, for Clarel presents a world as 
 blasted and a plot as depressing as any met previously in Melville’s 
 works. A study of organicism in the epic begins with Battle-Pieces, 
 upon whose successes rests Melville’s decision, in the teeth of his 
 woes, to grapple with old and crushing obsessions in the medium 
 of eighteen thousand tetrameter lines. 
 
 The main strategy carried from Battle-Pieces into Clarel is the 
 abrogation of “deep diving” after “chronometrical” truths in favor of 
 a disciplined objectivity. Melville signals this strategy in a prefatory 
 note; 
 
 The aspects which the strife as a memory assumes are as manifold as are 
 the moods of involuntary meditation. . . . Yielding instinctively, one af¬ 
 ter another, to feelings not inspired from any one source exclusively, and 
 unmindful, without purposing to be, of consistency, I seem, in most of 
 these verses, to have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the con¬ 
 trasted airs which wayward winds have played upon the strings.® 
 
 Poetry responds to the winds of war without forcing an artificial 
 consistency on them. Battle-Pieces wagers that clearly “noted” his¬ 
 torical movements may reveal the meaning of existence more effec¬ 
 tively than the single-minded vision of a Taji, and that a valuable 
 organic bond can unite fact and verse. This is not to say that Melville 
 eschews fictionalization but that fictionalization plays a more limited 
 and descriptive role than in his novels. 
 
 Objectivity suits Melville’s main persona, an aging observer remote 
 from the action. However, during the course of Battle-Pieces, Mel¬ 
 ville discovers important correspondences between poetic and battle¬ 
 field deeds; the Civil War gives birth to modern man, brave, self- 
 
 ^ Laurence Barrett, “The Differences in Melville’s Poetry,” PMLA, LXX (Sept., 
 
 622. Edwin Fussell, Frontier (Princeton, N.J., 1965), p. 378. 
 
 ® Howard P. Vincent, Collected Poems of Herman Melville (Chicago, 1947), P- 446- 
 This edition is used for references to Battle-Pieces, hereafter cited by page number. 
 
Form as Vision in Clarel 
 
 223 
 
 controlled, and fatalistic, and Melville adopts this new hero as a 
 model for his own literary goals. Courageous warriors display the 
 same discipline as the poet, and both stand in the mainstream of 
 history. Praising the pilot of a suicide-launch, Melville writes: 
 
 In Cushing’s eager deed was shown 
 A spirit which brave poets own— 
 
 That scorn of life which earns life’s crown. 
 
 (“At the Cannon’s Mouth,” p. 83) 
 
 Poetry can strive for an organic encompassing of heroic action be¬ 
 cause it embodies a parallel heroism. 
 
 However brave, neither poet nor soldier, art nor experience, can 
 claim knowledge beyond death; in this objective limitation all share 
 equally. The living must be satisfied with mere hints at the meaning 
 of existence without hoping that some heroic act or literary “deep 
 dive” will yield more: 
 
 Obscure as the wood, the entangled rhyme 
 But hints at the maze of war— 
 
 Vivid glimpses or livid through peopled gloom. 
 
 And fires which creep and char— 
 
 A riddle of death, of which the slain 
 Sole solvers are. 
 
 (“The Armies of the Wilderness,” p. 69) 
 
 The equality of art and action only partly explains Melville’s confi¬ 
 dence in an objective, unified poetry. Art goes a step further by so 
 revealing the human heart that it anticipates experience. In “ ‘The 
 Coming Storm’ ” Melville takes the example of Shakespeare: 
 
 No utter surprises can come to him 
 Who reaches Shakespeare’s core; 
 
 That which we seek and shun is there— 
 
 Man’s final lore. (p. 94) 
 
 The truths of the heart cannot transcend mortality, but, as illumi¬ 
 nated by art, they predict whatever shocks may come—a function 
 which in Clarel takes the place of attempts to penetrate the paste¬ 
 board mask of reality. If one picks a great experience—the Civil War, 
 a pilgrimage to the Holy Land—a poetry which reflects its varied 
 aspects organically and without preconception can capture whatever 
 
224 
 
 Bryan C. Short 
 
 lessons the experience teaches. Imposing transcendental hopes on the 
 experience will only destroy both its heroic discipline and its validity. 
 
 In seeking to respond objectively to the winds of history, Melville 
 evolves a style in line with Emerson’s organicist dictum that “it is not 
 metres but a metre-making argument which makes a poem.”® He 
 describes the style in “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight”: 
 
 Plain be the phrase, yet apt the verse, 
 
 More ponderous than nimble; 
 
 For since grimed War here laid aside 
 
 His painted pomp, ’twould ill befit 
 Overmuch to ply 
 
 The rhyme’s barbaric cymbal, (p. 39) 
 
 The plain, apt verse of Battle-Pieces matures in “Lee in the Capitol,” 
 the penultimate poem in the volume, into the full-blown Clarel 
 form; loose iambic tetrameter, a prominent line throughout the col¬ 
 lection, falls into unequal verse paragraphs; flexible rhyme patterns 
 intrude on the predominant couplets. The poem presents a dramatic 
 yet essentially verbal scene much like those of Clarel and reflects a 
 similar relationship between narrator and character. “Lee in the Capi¬ 
 tol” presents the final hero of Battle-Pieces abandoning his avowed 
 silence to speak before a hostile public. Both the circumstances of 
 Lee’s act and the repetition of his views in a prose supplement sug¬ 
 gest Melville’s identification with him. Hero and poet come together 
 to climax the hope for both art and experience, a hope which rests 
 on the bravery, aptness, and objectivity of Lee’s words, compellingly 
 turned into verse. Out of the narrowed horizons and clouded dreams 
 of war comes a vision of honest courage and unified art. Lee’s act, 
 like Melville’s bow to history, reveals an ability to anticipate if not 
 transcend experience, for his plea catches “the light in the future’s 
 skies” (p. 152). Discipline and self-control sustain most of the Clarel 
 pilgrims. The belief that a verse like that of “Lee in the Capitol” can 
 contain metaphysical anxieties within an objective framework and 
 thereby anticipate their ravages is the heaviest weapon carried by 
 Melville from Battle-Pieces into the epic. Melville’s willingness to 
 fictionalize Lee’s speech demonstrates his willingness to sum up the 
 
 ® “The Poet,” in Essays, First and Second Series (Cambridge, Mass., 1929), part II, 9. 
 The idea is discussed by Edwin Fussell, “The Meter-Making Argument,” in Aspects oj 
 American Poetry, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (Columbus, Ohio, 1962), pp. 3-31. 
 
Form as Vision in Clarel 
 
 225 
 
 lesson of the war as he sees it; the abandonment of preconceived 
 transcendental goals does not stop art from reaching conclusions. 
 Clarel begins on the hope that new, if circumscribed, insights into 
 the “meaning of existence” are possible. 
 
 In line with principles of organic unity, Melville’s substitution of 
 disciplined objectivity for deep diving dramatically modifies the “dia¬ 
 gram” of his characteristic quest.’ In Clarel, the search leads away 
 from rather than toward the symbol which promises resolution. 
 Whereas Taji incessantly follows Yillah, Clarel’s pilgrimage leads 
 him from Ruth. This change in direction, to some a structural dis¬ 
 harmony, reflects Melville’s wish to distinguish spiritual knowledge 
 from emotional satisfaction and to keep the transcendent questing of 
 his earlier works from dominating experience.® The lesson of Civil 
 War fatalism permits Melville to build into Clarel his misgivings 
 about the nobility of both pilgrims and pilgrimage; vivid adventure 
 gives way to desultory wandering and endless talk; systems of belief 
 no longer command attention on the basis of logical force. Robert 
 Penn Warren comments that “Melville is trying, to show ideals not 
 as abstractions but as a function of the life process.”® This impulse, 
 both objective and organic, leads Melville to conclude that grand 
 ideas have little positive impact on human happiness; they do Clarel 
 no more good than they do the wounded veterans of the war. 
 
 Just as the search for knowledge in Clarel separates from the prom¬ 
 ise of satisfaction, the views of the characters have little to do with 
 their importance. The sociability of Derwent, whose meliorism sub¬ 
 jects him to derision, keeps him at the center of the group. Vine says 
 so little that his influence on Clarel partakes of the irrational. Rolfe’s 
 heartiness outweighs his contradictions. Walter Bezanson concludes 
 that Clarel “goes increasingly from asking whose beliefs are right to 
 asking who is the right kind of man.’”® A concomitant question 
 which Melville asks is not what truth is deepest but what kind of art 
 is both unified and honest, a question which finally undercuts all 
 abstractions. Melville’s objectivity challenges even Lee’s resigned wis¬ 
 dom. Removed from the realm of historical greatness, experience 
 
 ^ John Seelye, Melville: The Ironic Diagram (Evanston, Ill., 1970), discusses Melville’s 
 characteristic pattern. 
 
 ® R. H. Fogle, “Melville’s Clarel: Doubt and Belief,’’ Tulane Studies in English, X 
 (i960), 103. 
 
 ® “Melville’s Poems, ” Southern Review, n.s. Ill (Autumn, 1967), 831. 
 
 Clarel (New York, i960), p. Ixix. 
 
226 
 
 Bryan C. Short 
 
 offers less comfort than blind faith; the wise soldiers of Battle-Pieces 
 condense into Ungar, whose heroism is irrelevant to his needs. Ver¬ 
 sification follows suit by seeking effects of plainness and tension 
 rather than ease or dramatic brilliance. The tetrameters borrowed 
 from “Lee in the Capitol” come to embody, and finally to symbolize, 
 the hard realities of a wasted world. 
 
 Clarel is not, however, without a hint of redemption, but redemp¬ 
 tion, operating within the sphere of satisfaction rather than knowl¬ 
 edge, finally contradicts both the experience of its characters and the 
 outcome of its plot, creating a disintegration which threatens to ruin 
 the organic unity at the heart of the work. Redemption comes sec¬ 
 ond hand in Melville’s curiously buoyant epilogue. It is here that 
 Melville redefines organic form in order to escape the objective de¬ 
 corum of his narrative. Like the palinode of a Medieval allegory or 
 the epilogue of an Elizabethan play, the Clarel epilogue removes 
 Melville’s conclusion from the context of the tale. Clarel is left alone 
 shouldering a greater burden than ever; none of his friends can 
 comfort him; but Melville blithely tells us that things are not so bad. 
 In reevaluating the search for truth, Melville denies the final value 
 of brave and disciplined objectivity, the archetypal virtues of Battle- 
 Pieces; art, in the epilogue, is left alone to find its own satisfactions. 
 Melville salvages the principle of organic unity by shifting to a new 
 and fitting form. He abandons the tetrameters which have stood for 
 “apt” art since their emergence and takes on a pentameter line. Once 
 Clarel has conveyed its charge of depressing truth it flees into emo¬ 
 tional and stylistic exuberance. If, as the epilogue says, “death but 
 routs life into victory,”" hard facts seem to rout an art of truth into 
 an art of pleasure in which style answers organically not to experi¬ 
 ence but to the immediate delights of literature. The Clarel epilogue 
 trades tension, plainness, discipline, and objective seriousness for wit, 
 exaggeration, delicate stylistic artifice, and casual sophistication. 
 
 In the Clarel epilogue, Melville moves away from the typically 
 Romantic organicism of Emerson’s “metre-making argument” to a 
 perspective in which poetry, by creating its own decorum, becomes 
 an argument-making meter equally unified but liberated from ob¬ 
 jectivity. How this happens, and what it implies for Melville’s poetics, 
 
 Clarel, p. 523. Subsequent references to this edition will be cited in the text by page 
 number. 
 
Form as Vision in Clarel 
 
 227 
 
 reflect in the ways by which Melville prepares for the epilogue. Given 
 Melville’s doubts, it is hardly surprising objectivity and organic unity 
 result in the bleak finale of Clarel, but the ability of art to antici¬ 
 pate this bleakness enables Melville to detach and distance his poedc 
 voice from experience and finally to elevate it, like “the spirit about 
 the dust” (p. 522) over the predetermined ruins surrounding it. 
 Melville knows what is coming and has time to prepare an escape. 
 The heroism of poetry, discovered in Battle-Pieces, has given the 
 created world, the world of literature, an immediacy and a power 
 previously reserved for bold adventure and half-glimpsed spiritual 
 forces; when the potential emotional attractiveness of art rather than 
 either mysterious meanings or observed facts determines the style and 
 form of a work, that work can achieve an expressiveness and beauty 
 denied to an art of objective observation. It is in the context of 
 Melville’s shift in focus from truth to beauty that the symbolic value 
 of his versification comes into focus. 
 
 In Moby-Dicl{, Ishmael’s consciousness is a territory in which op¬ 
 posing views conflict; in Clarel, verse itself plays a similar role. Poetry 
 transforms Melville’s narrative voice from that of a first-person par¬ 
 ticipant or an objective observer into a less well-defined authorial 
 presence. The constraints of meter, rhyme, and third-person detach¬ 
 ment make it difficult for the narrator to submerge himself in the 
 events of Clarel as Ishmael does when the Pequod sets sail; his voice, 
 identified with versification, is less malleable. How Melville defines 
 this voice and makes it embody the conflict between experience and 
 freedom, truth and beauty, is best illuminated by Northrop Frye’s apt 
 description of musical rhythm in English epic verse: 
 
 When we find sharp barking accents, crabbed and obscure language, 
 mouthfuls of consonants, and long lumbering polysyllables, we are prob¬ 
 ably dealing with melos, or poetry which shows an analogy to music, if 
 not an actual influence from it. 
 
 The musical diction ... is congenial to a gnarled intellectualisra of 
 the so-called “metaphysical” type. It is irregular in metre (because of the 
 syncopation against stress), leans heavily on enjambement, and employs 
 a long cumulative rhythm sweeping the lines up into larger rhythmical 
 units such as the paragraph.^* 
 
 Combined with his assertion that English epic verse naturally tends 
 
 Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1957), pp. 256-257. 
 
228 
 
 Bryan C. Short 
 
 to a four-beat line, Frye’s description suits Clarel in all but one re¬ 
 spect; the longer line of the English epic tradition—from alliterative 
 to blank verse—permits four accentual stresses to appear in a line less 
 frequently than every other syllable, thus providing a hedge against 
 strict metrics. A pentameter line, for example, can easily show four 
 major accents, without either contradicting or abandoning its meters, 
 simply by deemphasizing one metrical stress. If the octosyllabic line 
 of Clarel is to escape from tetrameters into accentual rhythm, it must 
 resort to extra syllables, feminine endings, violent substitutions, and 
 continual enjambement. Although these occur with frequency, they 
 lack the sustained force necessary to efface the movement of Mel¬ 
 ville’s tetrameters, whose effect of disciplined plainness gave few 
 problems in the shorter compass of “Lee in the Capitol.” Conse¬ 
 quently, the rudiments of accentual rhythm, melos, continually strug¬ 
 gle against metrics, producing a tension which Melville finds valu¬ 
 able enough to his theme to reinforce through rhyme and indentation. 
 
 Melville generally indents or breaks a line whenever his focus shifts 
 from one character to another or to the narrator, and whenever the 
 narrative changes mode (conversation, song, thought, commentary, 
 description). However, indentation also varies the texture of the 
 verse, occurring more frequently in passages of agitation such as that 
 in which Clarel learns of Ruth’s death (pp. 512-513). Indentation 
 speeds the flow of verse by introducing new rhyme sounds and pat¬ 
 terns. Melville lends stability to calmer passages by utilizing couplets 
 and quatrains, as in “Clarel and Ruth”; elsewhere, as in “Celio,” 
 rhymes change and rhyme patterns mutate so rapidly as to prevent 
 the easy division of the poem into units smaller than the paragraph. 
 Taken together, indentations, breaks, rapid rhyme mutations, and 
 metrical irregularities call attention to the jagged and cumulative 
 effects defined by Frye, and the absence of these devices returns the 
 poem to the unchallenged metrics of “Lee in the Capitol.” Regular 
 metrics predominate in many places expressing hope for consolation 
 within the world of objective experience; accentual freedom struggles 
 more violently against meter where the discipline of established doc¬ 
 trines threatens to collapse. When the climax of the tale brings utter 
 despair, Melville escapes to a pentameter in which ease and rhythmic 
 freedom prevail, thus tolling the death of his organic combination 
 of objectivity with stylistic plainness and metrical tension. Melville 
 
Form as Vision in Clarel 
 
 229 
 
 makes sure that collapses in established order result from events 
 within the sphere of human anticipation, and thus that they pinpoint 
 the poverty of vision which now goes hand-in-hand with both heroic 
 discipline and the commitment of poetry to an organic “noting” of 
 factual trends. 
 
 The promise of escape which Melville consummates in the epilogue 
 informs the lyrics of Clarel. Although sometimes frivolous, as a 
 group they celebrate freedom from discipline, beauty, and related 
 values which receive little reinforcement from the pilgrims—hedo¬ 
 nism as opposed to self-denial, satisfaction as opposed to knowledge, 
 faith as opposed to reason, feeling as opposed to thought. Twenty-two 
 of them, nearly half, are sung by four characters—Glaucon, the 
 Cypriote, the Lesbian, and the Lyonese—who question the asceticism 
 of the pilgrimage; thirteen express a more comforting faith than that 
 of Clarel. The lyrics also give certain characters the opportunity to 
 speak more personally than they can elsewhere. Vine’s depth receives 
 a major witness in his two songs; Ungar reveals his hidden wishes 
 in verse. From the beginning, the lyrics undercut the constraint 
 which weighs upon the pilgrimage; they presage Melville’s leap into 
 the epilogue by exemplifying the qualities which make art satisfying 
 even in the face of blankness and by employing poetic forms less 
 restrained than that of the narrative. 
 
 The first lyric peeps out at Clarel from under the peeling white¬ 
 wash of his hotel room in Jerusalem. In the only sustained pentame¬ 
 ters outside the epilogue, it tells of an answer to doubt found by an 
 earlier tenant who sees the decayed remains of the Biblical world as 
 symbols of a personal, emotional faith: 
 
 So much the more in pathos I adore 
 
 The low lamps flickering in Syria’s Tomb. (p. 131) 
 
 The lyric embodies the ability to make subjective feelings and allur¬ 
 ing symbols into the bases for a satisfying faith—an ability which 
 Clarel lacks. Melville’s sophisticated use of alliteration in such lines 
 as “Triumph and taunt that shame the winning side,” and “My 
 unweaned thoughts in steadfast trade-wind stream” produces an ac¬ 
 centual rhythm which does not jar against metrics. Shortly thereafter, 
 Clarel’s actual pilgrimage begins and the message of satisfaction and 
 the pleasing style of the lyric are forgotten. 
 
 The start of the journey introduces Glaucon, Melville’s first hedo- 
 
230 
 
 Bryan C. Short 
 
 nist, who abandons the group after singing four lyrics warning 
 against the deliberate rejection of beauty for a life of trial. Glaucon’s 
 final song suggests that the psychological effect of a blasted landscape 
 is dangerous for those who traverse it: 
 
 Tarry never there 
 
 Where the air 
 
 Lends a lone Hadean spell— 
 
 Where the ruin and the wreck 
 Vine and ivy never deck 
 And wizard wan and sibyl dwell: 
 
 There, oh, beware! (p. 185) 
 
 However, the pilgrims continue in their belief that the search for 
 knowledge supercedes all sensations, a view which prevails until the 
 final section of the poem. 
 
 Following Glaucon’s departure, a Dominican friar sings a song of 
 praise for the Church which is mocked by Margoth in an important 
 negative example of the lyric promise: 
 
 Patcher of the rotten cloth. 
 
 Pickier of the wing o’ the moth. 
 
 Toaster of bread stale in date. 
 
 Tinker of the rusty plate. 
 
 Botcher of a crumbling tomb. 
 
 Pounder with the holy hammer. 
 
 Gaffer-gammer, gaffer-gammer- 
 Rome! (p. 230) 
 
 Margoth criticizes the Church in a poem whose metrical pounding 
 and short, parallel, end-stopped phrases produce a mechanical effect 
 more rigid than any other in the volume. The oppressive meter of 
 Margoth’s poem relates to its meaning in three ways; it symbolizes 
 his view of church activities, it exemplifies his own rigidly dogmatic 
 beliefs, and it embodies the danger that repeated formal patterns can 
 degenerate into empty, deadening convention. Melville satirizes both 
 the Church and Margoth for the programmed nature of their re¬ 
 sponses to life, and his metrics demonstrate the need for freedom in 
 art, personal attitude, and doctrine. For all his scientific sanctimony, 
 Margoth is as unsatisfied as the others; his trochaic tetrameter merely 
 offers an exaggerated mirror image of the iambic tetrameter of the 
 narrative. Margoth’s song makes it clear that an organic fitting of 
 
Form as Vision in Clarel 
 
 231 
 
 form to theme cannot alone produce a verse of comforting emotional 
 power. 
 
 The Dead Sea cantos of Clarel contain important lyrics by Nehe- 
 miah (p. 241), and Mortmain (pp. 250-251), both of which reaffirm 
 the significance of a faith like that in the first lyric. Mortmain 
 laments the death of the now “unadored” Southern Cross as a Chris¬ 
 tian symbol, and Nehemiah’s psalm paraphrase finds comfort in a 
 candle shining in the “valley of shade.” Both seek a religion sup¬ 
 ported by simple affective symbols comparable to the “low lamps 
 flickering in Syria’s Tomb” rather than intellectual abstractions—a 
 religion of satisfactions rather than truths. Mortmain’s song conveys 
 an impression of the attractiveness of the dead symbol: 
 
 How far removed, thou Tree divine, 
 
 Whose tender fruit did reach so low— 
 
 Love apples of New-Paradise! 
 
 About the wide Australian sea. (pp. 250-251) 
 
 Ultimately, Nehemiah’s narrow fundamentalism and Mortmain’s 
 bitterness prevent them from accepting the emotional and imagina¬ 
 tive freedom which is Melville’s key to escape from eternal pilgrim¬ 
 age; neither can create his own symbols of faith; both sing in the 
 iambic tetrameter of the narrative, and both die on the journey. The 
 presence of such delicate yet tragic songs in iambic tetrameter implies 
 that the lyric and narrative sensibilities can merge, that experience 
 can lay the groundwork for freedom if one can achieve the proper 
 combination of sensitivity and aesthetic distance—gifts which begin 
 to replace discipline and objectivity at the center of Melville’s art. 
 
 “Mar Saba” introduces the Cypriote and the Lesbian, whose songs 
 of love and pleasure contrast with the asceticism of the monastery. 
 Their sensuality awakens Clarel to the attractions of a return to Ruth, 
 thus contributing to the erotic theme discussed by Nina Baym.“ The 
 Cypriote’s first song is particularly symbolic; after two stanzas 
 describing the lasting delights enjoyed by the gods, he finishes with 
 an imperative: 
 
 Ever blandly adore them; 
 
 But spare to implore them: 
 
 “The Erotic Motif in Melville’s Clarel” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 
 XVI (Summer, 1974), 315-328. 
 
232 
 
 Bryan C. Short 
 
 They rest, they discharge them from time; 
 
 Yet believe, light believe 
 They would succor, reprieve— 
 
 Nay, retrieve— 
 
 Might but revelers pause in the prime! (p. 286) 
 
 For the Cypriote, earthly and heavenly revelry provoke comparison, 
 and revelry expresses faith; no gaping dichotomy separates flesh and 
 spirit, satisfaction and knowledge, beauty and truth. The proper ap¬ 
 proach to the gods combines adoration, affirmed in the first lyric and 
 lamented by Mortmain, with respect for the senses. The Cypriote’s 
 anapests and widely varied line lengths again suggest an alternative 
 to tetrameters. Hearing his song, the central group of pilgrims are 
 deeply touched. 
 
 “Mar Saba” climaxes when Melville brings Vine, Mortmain, and 
 Rolfe face to face with the famous palm tree of the monastery, while 
 Clarel looks on. Each of the three undergoes a moment of inspira¬ 
 tion, a hint at the unity of dream and experience available to the 
 liberated mind, and then each reverts to doubt and questioning. In 
 each, the choice of experience and objective reason over sensuality 
 and emotion prevents the acceptance of a vision woven out of mo¬ 
 mentary ecstasy. In the face of the most eloquent symbol and the 
 deepest feelings in the poem, they relapse. Mortmain, an Ahab 
 stripped of his command by Melville’s objectivity, dies in anguish. 
 Moved, Clarel begins to reflect on his love for Ruth; he acknowledges 
 the importance of erotic symbols to Christianity and the beauty 
 which they possess, but his belief in his own impurity keeps him 
 from rejecting a discipline which, unlike the Cypriote, he identifies 
 with religion. He continues to think of Ruth in abstract terms, as if 
 she too were an item of knowledge. As the pilgrimage leaves Mar 
 Saba, the stage is set for Ungar and the Lyonese, who restate the 
 conflict between order and freedom. 
 
 Ungar sings the swansong of Melville’s identification with Civil 
 War heroism. His two fragments, both metrically rigid, express a 
 philosophy of resignation and a secret hope for revenge (p. 425). 
 Ungar senses the vanity of his wish and the split between his knowl¬ 
 edge of life and his dream of vindication. Rather than finding a way 
 of uniting himself, he controls his disintegrated personality through 
 relentless mental discipline. He presides over the now stale pilgrim¬ 
 age which, with the coming of the Lyonese, begins to give way to the 
 
Form as Vision in Clarel 
 
 233 
 
 end of Clarel’s quest for knowledge and his concomitant acceptance 
 of satisfaction as a goal. 
 
 After arguing with a monk on the importance of sexuality, Clarel 
 dreams of the choice before him: 
 
 And Clarel dreamed, and seemed to stand 
 Betwixt a Shushan and a sand; 
 
 The Lyonese was lord of one, 
 
 The desert did the Tuscan own, 
 
 The pale pure monk. A zephyr fanned; 
 
 It vanished, and he felt the strain 
 
 Of clasping arms which would detain 
 
 His heart from each ascetic range, (pp. 499-500) 
 
 Just as a movement from end-stopped to run-on lines gives the pas¬ 
 sage a sense of emerging freedom, Clarel awakens to feel an “or¬ 
 ganic change” working within him; the arms of love which draw 
 him from Mar Saba promise a unity of spirit unknown to him be¬ 
 fore; he experiences a sudden impatience with his journey. The 
 Lyonese then sings the folly of a discipline which contradicts nature: 
 
 Rules, who rules ? 
 
 Fools the wise, makes wise the fools— 
 
 Every ruling overrules? 
 
 Who the dame that keeps the house. 
 
 Provides the diet, and oh, so quiet. 
 
 Brings all to pass, the slyest mouse? 
 
 Tell, tell it me: 
 
 Signora Nature, who hut she! (p. 500) 
 
 The four songs of the Lyonese accentuate his freedom from dogma. 
 They employ such rapidly shifting feet and strong alliteration that 
 they often attain an accentual rhythm which obliterates metrics, 
 anticipating Melville’s experiments in ]oh 7 i Marr and Other Sailors: 
 
 Over the river 
 
 In gloaming, ah, still do ye plain? 
 
 Dove—dove in the mangroves. 
 
 How dear is thy pain! (p. 488) 
 
 Clarel hears the Lyonese without heeding the elegiac tone central to 
 his lyrics. Dame nature both brings all to pass and makes all pass 
 away. The Lyonese, wise compared to the other hedonists, has bought 
 
234 
 
 Bryan C. Short 
 
 his freedom by a deliberate distancing of himself from the religion 
 which draws him to the Holy Land. His poems acknowledge and 
 integrate his sense of loss, creating out of pain a promise of consoling 
 beauty. Clarel also ignores the power of time sung by the Cypriote, 
 Ungar, and the Lyonese; he attaches his hopes not to freedom, imagi¬ 
 nation, beauty, and emotion but to Ruth herself. Fellowship and love 
 may well be experiences in which Melville takes unambiguous plea¬ 
 sure, but his works tell us that only the very lucky gather their fruit; 
 we are unprepared for life unless we prepare for loneliness. When 
 Ruth dies, Clarel, like Mortmain, relapses into anguish. 
 
 Melville’s final lyric, a dirge on the death of Ruth, firmly estab¬ 
 lishes the value of an art of expressive beauty; in it, Melville’s narra¬ 
 tive voice takes its new direction. The dirge sings in tetrameters, hint¬ 
 ing that disciplined objectivity can coexist with imaginative freedom 
 for those who are not blind. In order to avoid confusing this possibil¬ 
 ity with the vain hope that experience will reward the resolute, 
 Melville ends his story on an objective note, leaving Clarel to the fate 
 which has been anticipated. 
 
 Melville’s dirge places Ruth in a sensually pleasing realm of 
 “honey” and “mosses sweet” where her lover may hope to rejoin her. 
 It creates a mental image of death as gentle and feeling, an imagina¬ 
 tive leap which it justifies through literary symbolism rather than 
 experiential data. The final image sums up its main affirmation: 
 
 And if, ere yet the lover’s free, 
 
 Some added dusk thy rule decree— 
 
 That shadow only let it be 
 
 Thrown in the moon-glade by the palm. (p. 515) 
 
 The palm recalls that of Mar Saba, which cast a shadow over the 
 pilgrims by confronting them with the ephemeral nature of their 
 dreams. And yet, that shadow, the despair of Mortmain, the resigna¬ 
 tion of Vine and Rolfe, proves the imaginative force of those dreams. 
 The dirge, a sophisticated intrusion of art on ritual, affirms the emo¬ 
 tional appropriateness of such dreams even in a context which also 
 proves them insubstantial. Only in the world of personal emotion 
 and aesthetic sensitivity do they persist, yet life inhabits this world 
 as well as the objective realm of physical experience. The dirge shows 
 poetry capable of creating an alluring vision in response to the most 
 pressing tragedy, of establishing an organic symbol of hope com- 
 
Form as Vision in Clarel 
 
 235 
 
 parable to the adored symbols of Christianity. The true artist, lover, 
 or worshipper is he who sustains his faith creatively by keeping the 
 Southern Cross, the low lamps, Ruth, imaginatively alive or by 
 replacing them with equally compelling phenomena. 
 
 After the dirge, Melville dissociates his viewpoint from that of his 
 less imaginative protagonist; he describes Clarel’s Easter Week activi¬ 
 ties with reserve and artistic distance in order to fulfill his tale of 
 experience before retreating into the epilogue. However, during the 
 Passion Week canto, Melville imbues Christian ritual with the same 
 imaginative grace and delicate sensuality seen in the lyrics and the 
 dirge; 
 
 With the blest anthem, censers sway, 
 
 Whose opal vapor, spiral borne. 
 
 Blends with the heavens’ own azure Morn 
 Of Palms; for ’twas Palm Sunday bright. 
 
 Though thereof he, oblivious quite. 
 
 Knew nothing, (p. 517) 
 
 Clarel, in his depression, ignores the procession—another of the 
 sources of inspiration which experience offers to those who are sensi¬ 
 tive to beauty and uncommitted to doubt. Remaining blind, Clarel 
 vanishes into the “obscurer town” a final victim of Melville’s mold¬ 
 ing of heroism, discipline, and objectivity into an organic art. 
 
 The epilogue reaffirms the satisfactions of the Clarel lyrics. Not 
 only does Melville abandon his jagged tetrameters for an easier, freer- 
 flowing rhythm, but he displays a wit rare in both Clarel and his 
 earlier verse: 
 
 But through such strange illusions have they passed 
 Who in life’s pilgrimage have baffled striven— 
 
 Even death may prove unreal at the last. 
 
 And stoics be astounded into heaven, (p. 523) 
 
 Melville playfully mocks the blinding egoism of the intellect; the 
 urbanity of the verse prevents our reading it as either a true con¬ 
 fession of newfound religious faith or as an ironic joke. He offers, 
 above all, an elegant and clever literary antidote to the gloom of the 
 narrative. The determinism of “Darwin’s year” can be read into 
 “Luther’s day” if one wishes, but for the poet history is the raw 
 material of poetry, which stands on imagination, sensual pleasure. 
 
236 
 
 Bryan C. Short 
 
 and beauty. Life is a victory if celebrated rather than merely endured. 
 Like Glaucon, Melville abandons the pilgrimage with a warning for 
 those who deem it “life’s pilgrimage,” the only path to walk. 
 
 The Clarel epilogue in all its conscious artificiality fits form to 
 theme as carefully as any of Melville’s verses. Frequent couplets and 
 quatrains reinforce the witty comparisons which give it an Augustan 
 quality. Images and symbols are tossed off or piled on one another 
 with a breezy casualness which challenges intellectual rigor. Vast 
 generalizations explode into aphorism without warning, and dis¬ 
 appear as rapidly, hinting at their own insignificance. The verse 
 coolly recommends to Clarel, wracked by anguish. 
 
 Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned— 
 
 Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind. (p. 523) 
 
 Lightness of tone gives the caution a hollow ring which even an 
 image from The Scarlet Letter (“like a burning secret which doth 
 go / Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep”) cannot 
 counteract. Without the amusing stylistic artifice and exaggeration 
 which frames it, Melville’s conclusion would demand a deep evalua¬ 
 tion. What the style of the epilogue warns us is that such a conclu¬ 
 sion, always objectively problematical, is absurd in an art whose job 
 should be to create attractive, emotionally accessible, organic mani¬ 
 festations of whatever it affirms, and not to give sententious speeches. 
 The lesson of Melville’s changing art in Clarel is that truth-seeking, 
 whether transcendental or objective, too easily produces a truth which 
 is useless while ignoring opportunity after opportunity for beauty 
 and satisfaction. The Clarel epilogue, in its marvelously complex self- 
 consciousness, gives the best proof of Melville’s faith in literature and 
 playful delight in creative freedom since the early pages of Moby- 
 Dicl{. 
 
 Battle-Pieces and Clarel tell the tale of Melville’s interest in a seri¬ 
 ous, disciplined, realistic, and organically unified verse; as such, 
 Clarel can be called America’s greatest Victorian poem. Melville 
 found in Battle-Pieces a new approach to the doubts and ambiguities 
 hovering over his later fiction. As reservations about this approach 
 arose, he built them organically into the structure, the versification, 
 and the lyrics of Clarel, evolving an alternative vision at the fringes 
 of his epic. By the end, the alternative—faith in the satisfactions of 
 beauty, imaginative freedom, and art—moves from the fringe to the 
 
Form as Vision in Clarel 
 
 237 
 
 center, and the epilogue gives it the last word. Here, Melville pre¬ 
 figures the witty and technically sophisticated verse of his later years. 
 Clarel proves Melville’s tenacity and clear-sightedness in bringing to 
 completion a staggeringly difficult work, his alertness to sources of 
 new inspiration, and his willingness to risk stylistic audacity when 
 his vision warrants. 
 
Mohy-Dick: The Transformation of the Faustian Ethos 
 
 Gusiaaf Van Cromphout 
 
 O NE MAJOR DIFFERENCE between Moby-Dic\ and its five predeces¬ 
 sors in the Melville canon consists in its being its author’s first 
 exploration of “landlessness.” Like Moby-Dic\, the earlier novels 
 recount actual or allegorical voyages, three of them even involving, 
 briefly or incidentally, whaling ships. Like Moby-Dic\ also, those 
 novels express what Merlin Bowen has rightly called Melville’s “prin¬ 
 cipal concern” in all his works, “a concern with the problem of self- 
 discovery, self-realization.” But unlike Moby-Dic\, those novels also 
 involve an “otherness” both sufficiently real and sufficiently compre¬ 
 hensible to act as a foil in the process of self-definition. Tommo and 
 Redburn, for instance, learn much about themselves from their con¬ 
 frontations with the “other,” whether this be the valley of Typee, or 
 Liverpool, or the complexities of life aboard ship. The same is true, 
 mutatis mutandis, of the remaining early protagonists. In Moby- 
 Dic\, by contrast, this “other” ceases to function as an aid to self- 
 knowledge because it ceases either to be truly “other” or to be accessi¬ 
 ble to human understanding, in the former case becoming a mere 
 reflection of the self and in the latter becoming a world emptied of 
 meaning and hence emptied of reality. In Moby-Dic\ the voyage is, 
 literally and metaphorically, one into “landlessness.” The formal im¬ 
 plication of this “landlessness” have been noted by Edgar A. Dry- 
 den: “Unlike its predecessors, Moby-Dic\ is almost completely self- 
 contained and self-referring. ... it is always moving away from the 
 objective or factual world and persistently calling attention to itself 
 as fiction.” Melville’s masterpiece brings to full imaginative develop¬ 
 ment a tendency in his thought only implied by such earlier state¬ 
 ments as Redburn’s “I began to see, that my prospects of seeing the 
 world as a sailor were, after all, but very doubtful; for sailors only go 
 round the world, without going into it.”‘ 
 
 1 Bowen, The Long Encounter: Self and Experience in the Writings of Herman Melville 
 (Chicago, 1963), p. 2; Dryden, Melville's Thematics of Form (Baltimore, 1968), p. 83; 
 
Moby-Dick^ and the Faustian Ethos 
 
 239 
 
 The Pequod'% voyage into landlessness is Melville’s version of the 
 Romantic transformation of the Faustian ethos. When characteriz¬ 
 ing Moby-Dic\ as Faustian, I am not just referring to Ahab’s being 
 “the Faust of the quarter-deck,” as Evert Duyckinck put it upon the 
 novel’s appearance and as Melville criticism has recognized ever 
 since. Nor am I concerned with Moby-Dic\ as a variation upon the 
 traditional Faust story, complete with a Faust, a devil, a pact, and 
 a damnation, as William W. Betts and Charles Dedeyan have inter¬ 
 preted the book. I consider Moby-Dick^ Faustian in a more pervasive 
 way. Following the lead of such students of our culture as Thomas 
 Mann, Oswald Spengler, and T. K. Seung, I regard “Faustian” as 
 almost synonymous with “Western,” in that Faust represents what 
 is most characteristic of the Western psyche: its boundless aspirations, 
 its expansionism, its identification of knowledge with power, its 
 attempt to subdue nature, its yearning for control over its own des¬ 
 tiny. Thomas Mann’s claim that Faust symbolizes the West’s deepest 
 essence receives considerable support from our obsessive concern with 
 the Faust figure through the centuries; and no century was more 
 Faust-conscious than the nineteenth, as a result primarily of Goethe’s 
 masterpiece.^ 
 
 In the sense just indicated there is as much Faustianism in an 
 
 Redburn, The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and 
 G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, Ill., and Chicago, 1969), IV, 133. 
 
 ^ Duyckinck is quoted in Hershel Parker, ed.. The Recognition of Herman Melville (Ann 
 Arbor, Mich., 1967), p. 40. Betts, "Moby Dick,: Melville’s Faust," Lock Haven Bulletin, I 
 (1959). 31-44; Dedeyan, Le Theme de Faust dans la litterature europeenne (Paris, 1961), 
 IV, pt. I, 206-224; Mann, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main, i960), IX, 599; 
 Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 2 vols. (Munich, 1922-1923), the most brilliant 
 and elaborate argument for the identification of the Western mind with Faust; Seung, Cul¬ 
 tural Thematics: The Formation of the Faustian Ethos (New Haven, Conn., 1976). The 
 Western obsession with Faust is amply documented. See, e.g., E. M. Buder, The Fortunes 
 of Faust (Cambridge, Eng., 1952); Genevieve Bianquis, Faust a travers quatre siecles (Paris, 
 1935); it took Dedeyan six volumes to chronicle the theme of Faust in Western literature; 
 Andre Dabezies discovered that he had to take into account hundreds of works in order to 
 produce a reasonably complete survey of Visages de Faust au XXe siecle (Paris, 1967). From 
 among the innumerable nineteenth-century reactions to Faust, I select one whose origin (a 
 newspaper article of 1835) shows how widespread even then was the idea of Faust’s repre¬ 
 sentativeness; referring to Goethe’s conclusion of his masterpiece, the Zeitung fiir die 
 elegante Welt says that “to have abandoned Faust would have meant abandoning the entire 
 modern world, since Faust is all of us” (quoted in Hans Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische, 
 Stuttgart, 1962, p. 82; all translations in this essay are mine, unless otherwise indicated). On 
 more exalted levels, Hegel and Schopenhauer, Mme de Stael and Carlyle, Emerson and 
 Margaret Fuller were saying much the same thing. For Melville’s familiarity with Goethe’s 
 Faust, see Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America (Madison, Wise., 1961), p. 759, 
 n. 262. 
 
240 
 
 Gustaaf Van Cromphout 
 
 Ishmael or a Bulkington as in Ahab hirnself. And the Pequod —a 
 highly elaborate instrument for subduing nature, as Richard Chase 
 has reminded us—is on a Faustian voyage. Ishmael’s experience, as 
 I shall try to show, brings him to an important insight, an insight 
 reflecting Melville’s awareness of the profound change then trans¬ 
 forming the Faustian ethos. Moby-Dick^, itself a Faustian venture in 
 its epic ambitiousness, thus represents Melville’s endeavor to under¬ 
 stand some of the deepest spiritual tendencies shaping Western ex¬ 
 perience. In fact, Taji’s claim in Mardi, “This new world here sought 
 ... is the world of mind,” would have made an apt motto for the 
 greatest among Melville’s quests on the frontiers of human thought.® 
 
 There was a time when “limitless space,” which Spengler regarded 
 as the “prime symbol” {Ursymbol) of the Faustian psyche, made 
 ceaseless striving objectively worthwhile. “The world-embracing 
 metaphysical cupola,” as Leo Spitzer put it, gave meaning to man’s 
 quest.^ Such an early manifestation of the Faustian spirit as the 
 Gothic cathedral represented the soul’s attempt to escape from the 
 confining heaviness of matter in order to achieve union with a God 
 who was a personal presence rather than an abstraction.® Similarly 
 Marlowe’s well-known lines about 
 
 Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend 
 The wondrous Architecture of the world, 
 
 And measure every wand’ring planet’s course 
 
 reveal a faith in the objective substantiality of the universe that is in 
 striking contrast with, say, Emerson’s “It is the uniform effect of 
 culture on the human mind ... to lead us to regard nature as a 
 phenomenon, not a substance.” A Columbus, a Bacon, a Newton 
 strove to bring within human ken realities that, until their advances 
 in perception, had lain beyond it. And the Enlightenment, having 
 postulated a universally valid and humanly intelligible “order” in 
 nature, then appealed to that “order” to justify its intellectual and 
 artistic endeavors. The Faustian mind aimed at knowledge of and, 
 
 3 Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N.Y., 1957), p. loi; 
 Mardi, The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and 
 G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, Ill., and Chicago, 1970), III, 557. 
 
 ■‘Spengler, I, 229; Spitzer, Essays in Historical Semantics (New York, 1968), p. 300, 
 n. 70. 
 
 ^ Spengler, I, 264, 512. Cf. D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton, 1962), 
 p. 182; “The God of the Middle Ages . . . may have been ineffable . . . but He was a 
 much more immediate Being than the romantic infinite." 
 
Moby-Dicf{ and the Faustian Ethos 
 
 241 
 
 through knowledge, at benefit from or mastery over the forces it 
 perceived. Faustian space symbolized “einen Herrschaftsanspruch 
 der Seele fiber das Fremde”—the soul’s claim to dominance over 
 what is “other.”® 
 
 Occasionally, however, this “other” raised disturbing questions. 
 Pascal’s modernity, which consists in what Georg Lukacs has called 
 his “phenomenology of despair” rather than in his Jansenist solution, 
 is suggested by statements like “the eternal silence of infinite space 
 frightens me” and “engulfed in the infinite immensity of space, 
 which I do not understand and which knows me not, I am fright¬ 
 ened.” Space, which Western man had so daringly extended, lost its 
 meaningful content and became the realm of the void. It gradually 
 became, as Alexandre Koyre says, “the infinite, uncreated nothing¬ 
 ness, the frame of the absence of all being; consequently also of 
 God’s.” One Romantic response to this anguish of the void was to 
 turn more emphatically inward. The Faustian quest was interiorized, 
 eventually to culminate in Rilke’s claim that the only meaningful 
 space left is the space of the inner world (“Durch alle Wesen reicht 
 der eine Raum:/Weltinnenraum . . 
 
 In Moby-Dicl^ Melville confronts this collapse of Faustian space 
 and its consequences. The experience of space, Charles Olson has 
 said, is a central factor in Moby-Dicl^, but “space was the paradise 
 Melville was exile of.”® At first Ishmael voices the traditional Faust¬ 
 ian yearning for “limitless space”: “I am tormented with an everlast¬ 
 ing itch for things remote.”® In order to satisfy this yearning, he has 
 repeatedly shipped as a merchant sailor (p. 15). His now opting for 
 a whaling voyage will lead to a very different experience, although 
 his early remarks reveal a duality of purpose consonant with tradi¬ 
 tional Faustian aspirations: he wants to experience not only the sea, 
 which in the symbolic world of Moby-Dtc\ is the mirror of the self, 
 
 ® Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part I, 11 , vii, 21-23; Ralph Waldo 
 Emerson, Nature (1836; facsimile rpt. San Francisco, 1968), p. 61; Spengler, I, 400. 
 
 ’’ Lukacs, Die Zerstdrung der Vernunft (Neuwied am Rhein, 1962), p. 103; Blaise Pascal, 
 Pensees, Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1954), pp. 1112-1113; Koyre, From the Closed World to 
 the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, 1957), p. 275. On the extension of space see also Marjorie 
 Hope Nicolson, The Breaking oj the Circle (rev. ed.; New York, i960). Rainer Maria Rilke, 
 Sdmtliche Werfie (Wiesbaden, 1956), II, 93; see also his seventh Duineser Elegie: "Nirgends, 
 Geliebte, wird Welt sein, als innen. . . . immer geringer/schwindet das Aufien" (Sdmtliche 
 Werl{e, Wiesbaden, 1955, I, 711). 
 
 ® Call me Ishmael (New York, 1947), p. 82. 
 
 ® Herman Melville, Moby-Dick,, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York, 
 1967). p. 16. All page references to Moby-Dicfi are to this edition and will be given in 
 the text. 
 
242 
 
 Gustaaf Van Cromphout 
 
 but also the alien worlds beyond the sea, that is, the truly “other.” As 
 he puts it: “I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts” 
 (p. 16). Somewhat later, replying to Peleg’s question why he wants 
 to go whaling, Ishmael reveals the same dual impulse: “Well, sir, I 
 want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world” (p. 69). Per¬ 
 ceiving the duality, Peleg brings Ishmael to a sense of its inadequacy: 
 
 “Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find out by expe¬ 
 rience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to see the world? 
 Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just step forward 
 there, and take a peep over the weather bow, and then back to me and tell 
 me what ye see there.”. . . 
 
 Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the 
 ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely point¬ 
 ing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly 
 monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see. 
 
 “Well, what’s the report?” said Peleg when I came back; “what did 
 ye see?” 
 
 “Not much,” I replied—“nothing but water.” (p. 70) 
 
 The voyage of the Pequod bears out this landlessness, this failure to 
 encounter “otherness”: 
 
 But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his 
 crew drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now, 
 the circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sus¬ 
 tenance but what’s in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the whaler. 
 While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to 
 foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries no cargo but 
 herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. . . . Hence it is, that, 
 while other ships may have gone to China from New York, and back 
 again, touching at a score of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may 
 not have sighted one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but float¬ 
 ing seamen like themselves. So that did you carry them the news that 
 another flood had come; they would only answer—“Well, boys, here’s the 
 ark!” (p. 319) 
 
 The phrase “no man but floating seamen like themselves” suggests 
 that the gams or near-gams do not modify this “landlessness.” The 
 other ships, whalers like the Pequod, but mirror back to the Pequod's 
 crew their own hopes, fears, or fates.^” 
 
 For the possible compositional implications of the inconsistency between the book’s 
 “landlessness” and Ishmael’s earlier stated desire to “land on barbarous coasts” (p. i6), see 
 James Barbour, “The Town-Ho's Story: Melville’s Original Whale,” ESQ: A Journal of the 
 
Moby-Dic\ and the Faustian Ethos 
 
 243 
 
 Bereft of its “otherness,” the voyage becomes an experience of the 
 void that leads to a heightened experience of the self. “Boundless 
 solitude,” Spengler said, was ultimately “the homeland of the Faust¬ 
 ian soul.” Ishmael is a cosmic outcast to whom John Seelye rightly 
 attributes the suspicion that nature is but “a hollow sham, hiding 
 absolutely nothing.”" There is a Pascalian despair in Ishmael’s cos¬ 
 mic loneliness, as when he questions “the heartless voids and im¬ 
 mensities of the universe,” or when he exclaims: “The intense con¬ 
 centration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my 
 God! who can tell it?” (pp. 169,347). 
 
 And yet it is precisely the voyage of the self into this heartless 
 immensity that holds out the promise of one’s experiencing “truth.” 
 Pip’s confrontation with the void has led to the kind of insanity that 
 is “heaven’s sense” (p. 347); and Bulkington symbolizes the realiza¬ 
 tion that “in landlessness alone resides the highest truth” (p. 97). But 
 truth has clearly ceased to be an objective structure, identifiable and 
 graspable. Even conventionally honest, upright Starbuck no longer 
 finds its source: “Great God, where art thou?” (p. 422). The aboli¬ 
 tion of “otherness” had emptied also God and truth of content. The 
 Go dof Faustian man in his Romantic stage is no longer the personal 
 God “climbed after” in the great cathedrals, but instead has become 
 “an impersonal principle, unimaginable, ungraspable ... an incon¬ 
 ceivable abstraction,”" much like the “nameless, inscrutable, un¬ 
 earthly thing” (p. 444) that Ahab sometimes holds responsible for 
 his fate. How utterly God has become a deus absconditus is suggested 
 by Gordon V. Boudreau in his study of Melville’s architectural sym¬ 
 bology. When Melville compares the whale to a Gothic cathedral, 
 he commonly omits the “copestone (or its equivalent stone symbol),” 
 which symbolized “Christ as passage-way from earthly city to heav¬ 
 enly city”; and though this “persistent absence of copestone,” just 
 because it is so striking, draws the reader’s attention to the symbolic 
 significance of the copestone, it is itself, as absence, symbolic of “a 
 
 American Renaissance, XXI (2nd Quarter, 1975), in, and "The Composition of Moby- 
 Dick.,” American Literature, XLVII (Nov., 1975), 352 and n. 22. 
 
 ^'Spengler, I, 241; Seelye, Melville: The Ironic Diagram (Evanston, Ill., 1970), p. 64. 
 For a general perspective, see Robert Martin Adams, Nil: Episodes in the Literary Conquest 
 of Void during the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1966); pp. 141-148 deal with Moby- 
 Dicl^. 
 
 Spengler, I, 512. 
 
Gustaaf Van Cromphout 
 
 244 
 
 God that is always missing.”^^ Truth also is nowhere to be found. It 
 has become “shoreless, indefinite as God” (p. 97); it “hath no con¬ 
 fines” (p. 144); and it is as inscrutable as the “sphinx” that Ahab 
 questions (p. 264). As Melville already suggested in Mardi, truth, 
 like God, has become an unanswerable question. “Tell us what is 
 truth?” asks Mohi; to which the philosopher Babbalanja replies: 
 “The old interrogatory; did they not ask it when the world began? 
 But ask it no more. . . . that question is more final than any 
 answer. 
 
 Turning truth into an unanswerable question meant temporalizing 
 and subjectivizing it. If man is, like Bulkington, responsive to the 
 highest imperative of his being, he attempts without cease to formu¬ 
 late the question, whether in thought or in acdon. And “the pre¬ 
 supposition that each man is locked in the prison of his conscious¬ 
 ness,” which the Romantics, as J. Hillis Miller has noted, shared with 
 many modern thinkers, led them to conceive of truth as a metaphor 
 of self—as a ceaseless attempt “to utter our painful secret,” as Emer¬ 
 son put it, in order to achieve self-knowledge. “Truth . . . ,” we are 
 told in Goethe and Schiller’s Xenien, “My truth—for I don’t know 
 of any other.” Georges Poulet is right in stressing that one important 
 aspect of Romanticism was “a taking possession by consciousness of 
 the fundamentally subjective character of the mind.” The aesthetic 
 implications of this inward turn of consciousness are obvious. It is not 
 surprising that Hegel, whose Aesthetic has been called “the culmina¬ 
 tion of all romantic theories of art and aesthetics,” considered “the 
 true content” of Romantic art to be “absolute inwardness.” As sug¬ 
 gested above, the real object of the Faustian quest had become the 
 self in all its mysterious complexity. And Moby-Dic\ is emphatically 
 the product of a mind “which has turned away from the chaos and 
 confusion of the world toward a contemplation of its own activity.”^® 
 
 “Of Pale Ushers and Gothic Piles: Melville’s Architectural Symbologj’,” ESQ: A Jour¬ 
 nal of the American Renaissance, XVIll (and Quarter, 1972), 76, 79, 78. 
 
 Mardi, p. 284. 
 
 Miller, The Disappearance of God (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), p. 8; The Complete 
 Wor^s of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1903-1904), III, 5; 
 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gedenk.ausgabe der Werk.c, Briefe nnd Gesprdche, ed. Ernst Beutler 
 (Zurich. 1962), II. 471; Poulet, The Metamorphoses of the Circle, trans. Carley Dawson, 
 Elliott Coleman, and the author (Baltimore, 1966), p. 93; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 
 Vorlesungen iiber die Aesthetif^, Sdmtliche Werl(e, XIII (Stuttgart, 1964), 122-123; the 
 tribute to Hegel’s aesthetic theories is from Paul Frankl, The Gothic (Princeton, N.J., i960), 
 p. 473; Dry-den, p. 84. 
 
Moby-Dicl(^ and the Faustian Ethos 
 
 245 
 
 The Pequod's element, after all, is water—the unlimited watery 
 prospect that Ishmael faces during his first encounter with Peleg, 
 instead of “the world” he expected to see. And as meaningfully as in 
 Baudelaire’s “L’Homme et la mer,” water is in Mohy-Dich^ the mirror 
 of the soul; hence its universal attraction (pp. 12-14). Ahab, who, as 
 a whaler, has preeminently been a man going ''round the world, 
 without going into it,” is but universalizing his experience when he 
 attributes the soul-reflecting significance of the sea to the world as a 
 whole. The globe, in his view, “like a magician’s glass, to each and 
 every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self” (p. 359). 
 The voyage of the Pequod is an endeavor to see more clearly into the 
 mystery of the self, but the endeavor being in vain, the mystery looms 
 for ever unresolved. “The image of the ungraspable phantom of life” 
 (p. 14) fuses with “the overwhelming idea of the great whale,” that 
 “grand hooded phantom” (p. 16) whose mystery will for ever en¬ 
 compass our existence (pp. 380, 384-385). Interested as he was in 
 etymology, Melville must have been aware of the historical con¬ 
 tiguities in meaning among “idea,” “image,” and “phantom.” Their 
 combined effect is to create an atmosphere of objective unreality in 
 which the thinking “I,” standing forth as the only essence, reduces 
 the “other” to merely phenomenal existence.^® 
 
 The confrontation with the whale most clearly reveals the prob¬ 
 lems facing Faustian man. T. K. Seung has shown that the formative 
 period of Faustian culture (roughly the twelfth to the fourteenth cen¬ 
 turies) witnessed a transition from allegorical to literal sensibility 
 and modes of expression, a transition reflecting a shift from a theo- 
 centric to an anthropocentric world view. Literalism is a mode of 
 expression revealing man’s confidence in the objective validity of his 
 perceptions; it reflects man’s assumption that he knows or is able 
 to know that which he perceives. Not surprisingly literalism, as 
 Norman O. Brown has said in reference to its Protestant variety 
 (Luther’s Eindeutigi^eit), did much to foster the modern scientific 
 spirit with its assertion of man’s knowledge-based power over nature. 
 This argument can be applied in reverse to the transformation of 
 
 For a different interpretation, one emphasizing "things rather than ideas,” see Robert 
 Zoellner, The Salt-Sea Mastodon (Berkeley, 1973: the quotation is from p. 8). Zoellner's 
 argument is best summarized on p. 150: “The true narrative line of Moby-Dick^ is not the 
 pursuit of the White Whale, but rather the transmutation which Ishmael’s sensibility under¬ 
 goes as that pursuit is prosecuted—and the essence of this transmutation is the gradual 
 displacement of the conceptual whale by the perceptual whale.” 
 
246 
 
 Gustaaf Van Cromphout 
 
 Faustianism in the Romantic age: if the emergence of the Faustian 
 ethos involved a transition from allegorical to literal sensibility, the 
 Romantic transformation of that ethos may be said to have involved 
 a transition from literal to symbolic sensibility. From the end of the 
 eighteenth century onward the inadequacy of the literalist-scientific 
 view became obvious. “The letter killeth” acquired a new and poi¬ 
 gnant meaning for Blake or Wordsworth or Keats observing the 
 human spirit atrophied by the scientific mentality. The creative and 
 unifying power of the symbolic imagination appeared to be the road 
 to a new spiritual integrity. From a Faustian point of view, however, 
 symbolism involved limitation. In much the same way that the alle¬ 
 gorical sensibility reflected man’s ultimate p^werlessness in a theo- 
 centric universe, symbolism confronted man with a universe that 
 exploded his pretense of knowing and controlling it. In Die roman- 
 tische Schule (1836) Heinrich Heine pointed to the conceptual and 
 formal implications of the shift from a literalist to a symbolist sensi¬ 
 bility: “Classical art had to represent only the finite, and its forms 
 could be commensurate with the artist’s idea; Romantic art had to 
 represent, or rather to suggest, the infinite and the purely spiritual.”” 
 
 Ishmael approaches the whale on both the literal and symbolic 
 levels. As exemplified by him, the literalist sensibility has clearly lost 
 confidence in its own validity. The cetological chapters are riddled 
 with confessions of inadequate treatment. The collapse of meaning¬ 
 ful space, the disappearance of identifiable “otherness” is evidenced 
 by the literalist inability to establish any real links between the “me” 
 and the “not-me,” an inability illustrating “how impassable is the 
 gulf between the mind and its object.”^* The mind has no “hold” 
 upon the whale; it cannot force him into any graspable forms. “If 
 the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist 
 his brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to 
 square” (p. 293). Moreover, “If I know not even the tail of this 
 whale, how understand his head ? much more, how comprehend his 
 face, when face he has none?” (p. 318). The whale shows “his great 
 genius” by “his doing nothing particular to prove it” and by “his 
 pyramidical silence” (p. 292). He cannot even be properly seen: 
 “there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale 
 
 Seung, Cultural Thematics; Brown, Love's Body (New York, 1966), pp. 191-200; 
 Heine, Sdmtliche fVer^e (Munich, 1923), V, 351. 
 
 Bowen, p. 122. 
 
Moby-Dicl{ and the Faustian Ethos 
 
 247 
 
 really looks like” (p. 228). Clearly we have here an instance of that 
 “solipsistic unease” which, as A. D. Nuttall has brilliantly demon¬ 
 strated, has affected many minds from the eighteenth century on¬ 
 ward.^® Ishmael’s whale does “exist,” but his insusceptibility to the 
 mind’s efforts at analysis and understanding, to the mind’s attempts 
 at assimilation, makes his objective existence ultimately irrelevant to 
 the self. All the dissecting and analysis in the cetological chapters 
 merely demonstrate the failure of literalism to bring us any closer to 
 the “truth” about the whale. “Dissect him how I may ... I but go 
 skin deep; I know him not, and never will” (p. 318). 
 
 But if there is “no earthly way” to get to the truth about the whale, 
 there is perhaps a “landless” way, a seaway (pp. 228, 97). The whale 
 as symbol certainly brings us closer to the Faustian quest in its Ro¬ 
 mantic stage than the whale as objective reality: what is sought after 
 is no longer knowledge of the “other,” but knowledge of the self. 
 Furthermore, Moby Dick as symbol transcends the connotations asso¬ 
 ciated with the whale in traditional symbology and has thus lost that 
 protection against merely personal interpretation which a culture 
 confers upon its symbols. Moby Dick, like his element water, has 
 become a portrait of every individual contemplating him: he means 
 what anyone reads into him. Ahab, who, in Charles Olson’s words, 
 “had all space concentrated into the form of [the] whale,”®® has come 
 “to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his in¬ 
 tellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before 
 him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies 
 which some deep men feel eating in them” (p. 160). To Gabriel of 
 the feroboam the white whale is “the Shaker God incarnated” 
 (p. 267). To Captain Boomer of the Samuel Enderby he has become 
 a noli me tangere. Honest, upright Starbuck sees in Moby Dick the 
 indifference and basic innocence of nature. The sailors in general, 
 regarding Moby Dick with superstitious awe, credit him with ubiq¬ 
 uity and immortality (p. 158) and with being an instrument of God 
 (p. 208). Ishmael’s interpretation in “The Whiteness of the Whale” 
 
 A Common Sky. Philosophy and the Literary Imagination (London, 1974). See also 
 William Ellery Sedgwick, Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind (New York, 1962), 
 pp. III-II2: . . the solipsism of consciousness, a theme which Melville continually 
 
 broaches in Moby Dick"-, and Thomas Woodson, "Ahab’s Greatness: Prometheus as Nar¬ 
 cissus,” ELH: A fotirnal of English Literary History, XXXIII (Sept., 1966), 362: “Ahab is 
 haunted by the unknowability of ‘things,’ and turns desperately to solipsism.” 
 
 2® Call me Ishmael, p. 12. 
 
248 
 
 Gustaaf Van Cromphout 
 
 is the least definitional of all, and it is for that reason symbolically the 
 truest: more than anyone else Ishmael hints at the insoluble ambi¬ 
 guities, the endless mysteries suggested by the whale, whose color 
 serves to reinforce his role as “phantom” and “idea,” since whiteness 
 “in its profoundest idealized significance . . . calls up a peculiar 
 apparition to the soul” (p. 166; my italics). The paradox inherent 
 in such a view of reality is well conveyed by a statement of Paul 
 Brodtkorb’s: “The emotion that constitutes white makes vibrantly 
 visible as a presence the nothingness with which all existence is 
 secretly sickened.”^^ 
 
 Having been reduced to a medley of interpretations, the whale can 
 no longer provide a meaning transcending individual perception. 
 Reality has been reduced to the content of one’s perceptions, as is 
 demonstrated in “The Doubloon” and as Pip in his divine madness 
 realizes: “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look” 
 (p. 362). Herein lies the ultimate loneliness of the Faustian soul and 
 its inability to achieve self-definition. As long as the world was “real,” 
 the soul was “possible,” Spengler suggests; what gave direction and 
 meaning to the soul was its striving to comprehend reality and in the 
 process to realize its possibilities and thus its idea of its self. But the 
 “other” having been abandoned as unreal, there remained only the 
 self and that hypersubjectivism which Werner Kohlschmidt has 
 called “Fichte’s Greek gift [i.e., Trojan horse] to Romanticism” 
 (“das Danaergeschenk Fichtes an die Romantik”). While ostensibly 
 exalting the self, subjectivism undermined it: Romanticism, in Wylie 
 Sypher’s words, “created the self and destroyed the self.”^^ Without 
 the context of the “other,” the self became indefinable; alienation 
 became the crisis of identity. Teufelsdrockh’s “unanswerable ques¬ 
 tion: Who am /; the thing that can say ‘I?’” echoes through the 
 nineteenth century.^^ 
 
 Moby-DicJ{^ demonstrates that when the “not-me” becomes a mys¬ 
 tery inaccessible to the mind and thus, in effect, a void, the “me” 
 becomes a mystery insusceptible to definition. Ahab, who does not 
 
 Ishmael’s White World: A Phenomenological Reading of Moby Dick (New Haven, 
 I965),p. 119. 
 
 Spengler, I, 75, 107; Kohlschmidt, Form und Innerlichkeit (Bern, 1955), p. 162; 
 Sypher, Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art (New York, 1962), p. 19. 
 
 23 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (New York, 1937), p. 53; Ralph Harper, The 
 Seventh Solitude: Metaphysical Homelessness in Kierl^egaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche 
 (Baltimore, 1965), pp. 11-13. 
 
Moby-Dic\ and the Faustian Ethos 
 
 249 
 
 know whether the whale is “agent” or “principal,” inscrutable mask 
 or inscrutable essence (p. 144), has the same questions concerning the 
 whale’s counterpart, himself: “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, 
 that lifts this arm?” (p. 445). Thomas Woodson’s comment is to the 
 point: Ahab “is continually in doubt of his identity. . . . [He] is 
 never sure whether he is everything or nothing. . . . The mystery of 
 things and the mystery of self become the same problem to him.”^^ 
 Ahab’s plight is prefigured in his fantasy of the artificial man that he 
 wants the blacksmith to forge. He does not want him to have “eyes 
 to see outwards,” but instead “a skylight on top of his head to illumi¬ 
 nate inwards”; within, however, there is only a void, since the arti¬ 
 ficial man, though endowed with a “chest modelled after the Thames 
 tunnel,” will have “no heart at all” (p. 390). 
 
 In reference to the lack of progress into knowledge characterizing 
 his quest, Ahab claims that “we are turned round and round in this 
 world” (p. 445). The loss of “otherness” entails a reduction of the 
 Faustian quest to an endless solipsistic circle from which there is no 
 escape into something even resembling an absolute. Whether or not 
 the circular quest destroys the quester, it never provides him with an 
 answer, as Ishmael recognizes: 
 
 Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; 
 but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through num¬ 
 berless perils to the very point whence we started. . . . Were this world 
 an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new dis¬ 
 tances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or 
 Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in 
 pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that 
 demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; 
 while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren 
 mazes ot midway leave us whelmed, (p. 204) 
 
 The anacoluthon in the last sentence but reinforces the message that 
 the quest leads nowhere. 
 
 The passage just quoted is not, however, Ishmael’s final word on 
 the subject. His emancipation from traditional Faustianism is in¬ 
 complete so long as he has not transcended what Kierkegaard con¬ 
 sidered man’s self-defeating desire “to lay hold of something so really 
 
 “Ahab’s Greatness: Prometheus as Narcissus,” pp. 363-364. 
 
250 
 
 Gustaaf Van Cromphout 
 
 fixed that it can exclude all dialectics,”^® so long, that is, as he even 
 desires a “final” answer. As a participant in the action of Moby-Dic\, 
 Ishmael shares with Ahab, Bulkington, and the others the dilemma 
 inherent in the pursuit of an aim fatally beyond human reach, a di¬ 
 lemma well expressed by Charles Feidelson: “The phantom is un- 
 graspable as long as we stand on the bank; and the ocean is annihila- 
 tive once we dive into it.”^® But Ishmael dives and is not annihilated. 
 He survives to become the narrator of the action he participated in, 
 and it is as narrator that he best exemplifies the essence of Romantic 
 Faustianism, the recognition that “the goal of the journey of life [is] 
 the experience of the journey itself.”^’ 
 
 My argument involves a distinction between the “two Ishmaels” in 
 Moby-Dic\. In Walter E. Bezanson’s words, “the first Ishmael is 
 the enfolding sensibility of the novel, the hand that writes the tale, 
 the imagination through which all matters of the book pass. He is the 
 narrator. . . . The second Ishmael is not the narrator, not the in¬ 
 forming presence, but is the young man of whom, among others, 
 narrator Ishmael tells us in his story. . . . This is forecastle Ishmael 
 or the younger Ishmael of ‘some years ago.’ Narrator Ishmael, 
 moreover, is concerned with both narrative and narration. When 
 focusing on narrative, he tries imaginatively to recapture the moods 
 and hopes and perceptions of forecastle Ishmael and his companions; 
 his narrative deals with the then, with an experience already com¬ 
 pleted. When focusing on narration, Ishmael’s concern is with the 
 now —with his ongoing endeavor to put into words what happened 
 then. The now, representing an experience not yet completed, puts 
 its stamp upon the book as emphatically as the then: Moby-Dic\ “is 
 always in process and in all but the most literal sense remains un¬ 
 finished. For the good reader the experience of Moby-Dic\ is a par¬ 
 ticipation in the act of creation.”^® Authorial Ishmael’s endeavor to 
 give form and tentative meaning to his journey in the Pequod re¬ 
 sulted in a book that is as much about the experience of writing a 
 
 S0ren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and 
 Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J., 1941), p. 35, n. 
 
 Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago, 1953), p. 29. 
 
 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supematuralism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic 
 Literature (New York, 1973), p. 216. 
 
 2® “Moby-Dick.: Work of Art," in Moby-Dick: Centennial Essays, ed. Tyrus Hill way and 
 Luther S. Mansfield (Dallas, 1953), pp. 36-37. 
 
 Ibid., p. 56. 
 
Moby-Dic\ and the Faustian Ethos 
 
 251 
 
 book as about the experience recalled in the book. And in a sense, the 
 writing turned out to be as frustrating as the journey: both expe¬ 
 riences fail to provide answers to the questions they evoke. The 
 difference consists in Ishmael’s responses to these failures; and his 
 responses reveal different Faustian selves. 
 
 Forecastle Ishmael regards life as an Ixionic experience, as in the 
 “Round the world!” passage quoted above, or as in this meditation 
 on human destiny from “The Gilder”: 
 
 There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance 
 through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:—through infancy’s 
 unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the 
 common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in man¬ 
 hood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round 
 again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally, (p. 406) 
 
 Whether these words be Ishmael’s or not,®“ the fact remains that as 
 long as Ishmael is the Ishmael evoked in “Loomings,” an Ishmael 
 questing for answers and solutions, he identifies himself with the 
 other seekers and is bound to be as cruelly frustrated as they. Their 
 quest tends to become his quest (“Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed 
 mine”—p. 155), and the despair inherent in their quest tends to be¬ 
 come his despair, as in “The Lee Shore” (pp. 97-98), because like 
 them he seeks answers, and through them he realizes the fatal im¬ 
 possibility of finding answers. The quest, for Ishmael and his com¬ 
 panions alike, is thus reduced to an Ixionic experience in which the 
 Faustian dream of knowledge and mastery has become the night¬ 
 mare of total contingency. In this sense Carl F. Strauch is right in 
 claiming that “If” is “the most important word in Moby-DichJ'^^ 
 
 In the “Epilogue,” however, Ishmael ceases to be “another Ixion” 
 (p. 470). Though his final self-characterization as “orphan” sounds 
 like a conceptual echo of the “Call me Ishmael” of the opening, and 
 though we might thus be tempted to conclude that in his beginning 
 was his end, such a conclusion seems unwarranted in view of the 
 striking tonal difference between the “Epilogue” and the opening. 
 “Orphan” and “Ishmael” both suggest, to be sure, a crisis in self- 
 
 The Hayford-Parker edition of Moby-Dick, follows textual tradition in attributing this 
 passage to Ishmael; however, the editors note the (xjssibility of Ahab’s being the speaker of 
 the passage (see p. 494). 
 
 “Ishmael: Time and Personality in Moby-Dick.’’ Studies in the Novel, I (Winter, 
 1969), 471. 
 
252 
 
 Gustaaf Van Cromphout 
 
 definition: metaphorically they both stress the absence of any mean¬ 
 ingful relation to the “other” and hence of any real understanding of 
 the self. This point also is made in the “Ifs” passage in “The Gilder”: 
 “Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in 
 bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we 
 must there to learn it” (p. 406). But whereas Ishmaelism or spiritual 
 orphanhood is associated with bitterness and anguish in “Loomings,” 
 in the “Epilogue” it is accepted with a casualness that in no way dis¬ 
 turbs the preternatural peace pervading the scene. Ishmael, in other 
 words, has ceased tormenting himself about the ever-elusive answers 
 to his questions concerning his place in the scheme of things and 
 hence concerning his identity.^^ 
 
 Ishmael’s new attitude does not amount, however, to his turning 
 his back upon Faustian striving. The soul’s “last limit,” we were told 
 in Mardi, “is her everlasting beginning.”^® And at the end of his 
 Pequod experience Ishmael, a true embodiment of undying Faustian- 
 ism, faces indeed a new and equally arduous task: “and i only am 
 ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL thee” (p. 470). In his end is his true begin¬ 
 ning: as author he embarks on another endless journey, and as author 
 he demonstrates the principal lesson to be learned from his expe¬ 
 rience with the Pequod —that the journey itself is the goal of the 
 journey. When Ishmael is at his most authorial, he sees virtue rather 
 than horror in the absence of finality: “God keep me from ever com¬ 
 pleting anything” (p. 128), or, in reference to his cetological “books” 
 and “chapters”: “I promise nothing complete; because any human 
 thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly 
 be faulty” (p. 118). Like Emerson, he regards Cologne Cathedral, 
 not finished until 1880, as an apt symbol of the highest intellectual 
 or artistic achievement: its very incompleteness, its “ever leav[ing] 
 the copestone to posterity,” is a measure of its greatness (pp. 127- 
 28). For authorial Ishmael, as for Hdlderlin’s Hyperion, man’s want 
 and incompleteness have become grounds for self-congratulation.®^ 
 
 In its demonstration of the failure of traditional Faustianism, 
 
 Cf. Warwick Wadlington’s interesting discussion of the cycle of experience in Moby- 
 Dick, and its role in generating an ever-contingent identity: The Confidence Game in Ameri¬ 
 can Literature (Princeton, NJ., 1975), pp. 73-103. 
 
 Mardi, p. 230. 
 
 Emerson, Complete Works, XII, 70; Friedrich Holderlin, Hyperions Jugend, Sdmtliche 
 Werke und Briefe (Munich, 1970), I, 524: “Das ist die Herrlichkeit des Menschen, da /3 ihm 
 ewig nichts geniigt. In deiner Unmacht tut sie dir sich kund. Denke dieser Herrlichkeit!" 
 
Moby-Dic\ and the Faustian Ethos 
 
 253 
 
 Moby-Dick^ is a deeply pessimistic book: all the aspirations of the 
 captain and crew (including Ishmael as actor in the drama), whether 
 outer-directed or inner-directed, meet with frustration or disaster. But 
 once “the drama’s done” and a “dirge-like main” (p. 470) has 
 mourned the death of an illusion, Ishmael is ready for his exercise 
 in negative capability—the capability, in Keats’s words, “of being in 
 uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after 
 fact & reason.” The result is a highly inconclusive book and, through 
 authorial Ishmael’s recognition of the value of such inconclusiveness, 
 ultimately a book that transforms man’s epistemic limitations into a 
 glorious challenge. Its very inconclusiveness also makes Moby-Dich^ 
 a fit chapter in the totality of Melville’s oeuvre, which, as Albert 
 Camus maintained, but consists of “le meme livre indefiniment re¬ 
 commence.”^'’ Perhaps Melville was afraid of finality. In an age that 
 predicted the death of art,®® there was great value indeed in an 
 undying artistic effort, especially since, as Nietzsche was to say, “we 
 have art so that we won’t perish of truth,” or, in Ishmael’s version, 
 “clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to encounter” 
 (p. 286).®’ 
 
 ^^The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), I, 
 193; Camus, “Melville: Un Createur de mythes,” in Moby-Dick as Doubloon: Essays and 
 Extracts, ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (New York, 1970), p. 248. 
 
 Hegel’s Vorlesungen iiber die Aesthetik. have often been considered a “funeral oration 
 on art." See, e.g., Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism (New Haven, Conn., 1955), 
 11 , 321, 334; Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (New York, 1968), p. 302; 
 Erich Heller, The Artist's Journey into the Interior and Other Essays (New York, 1968), 
 p. 115. Cf. also Macaulay's claim, in his essay on Milton (1825), that “as civilisation ad¬ 
 vances, poetry almost necessarily declines ' (Critical and Historical Essays, London, 1961, 1 , 
 153). See also the references to the “Extinction of poetry" in Wellek, 11 , 456. 
 
 Friedrich Nietzsche, Gesammelte Wer^e (Munich, 1926), XIX, 229. 
 
Melville’s Comic Debate: 
 
 Geniality and the Aesthetics of Repose 
 
 John Bryant 
 
 AFTER Pierre, Melville published in rapid succession a portfolio of 
 ■cx tales, the serialized novel Israel Potter, and a “comedy of 
 thought,” The Confidence-Man. The feverish pace brought him fi¬ 
 nancial solvency but also a near breakdown, and by 1856 he had 
 abandoned fiction writing altogether. Scholars have held that the 
 bitter and exhausted author lost control of his later narratives and 
 that his once sportive yet genial comic spirit suffered a similar “pat¬ 
 tern of decline.”^ Some even argue that Melville’s failure was in¬ 
 evitable; he simply lost faith in the power of fiction and language 
 itself to “tell the truth.”^ But recent critics deny that any decline in 
 Melville’s narrative skill occurred.^ The same may be said for his 
 comic sensibility. Rather than deteriorating, Melville’s comic spirit 
 was seeking a new voice, one that could subsume a knowing mind 
 within a warm heart and yet remain critically detached from the 
 author’s personality or subject matter. In his magazine pieces, 
 Melville experimented meticulously with comic types and narrative 
 
 ^ Edward H. Rosenberry, Melville and the Comic Spirit (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. 
 Press, 1955), p. 7. The belief that Melville’s powers declined began with F. O. Matthicssen 
 who considered Israel Potter and The Confidence-Man to be products of “a miserable com¬ 
 pulsion.” See American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and 
 Whitman (1941; rpt. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 491. The present essay is 
 an expanded version of a paper delivered before the Melville Society, December 1977. 
 
 2 See Edgar Dryden, Melville’s Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth 
 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1968) and Nina Baym, “Melville’s Quarrel with 
 Fiction,” PMLA, 94 (1979), 909-21. 
 
 ® William B. Dillingham argues that Melville used irony as an artful means of mediating 
 his "profundity” and the vapidity of his audience’s expectations. See Melville’s Short Fiction, 
 1853-1856 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1977), pp. 4 and 370. From a different per¬ 
 spective, Warwick Wadlington argues that Melville invites his readers to engage in a 
 “godly gamesomeness” that exercises the heart rather than obscures truth. See The Confi¬ 
 dence Game in American Uterature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 96 
 and 147. 
 
 American Uterature, Volume 55, Number 2, May 1983. Copyright (E) 1983 by Duke 
 University Press. 
 
Melville’s Comic Debate 
 
 255 
 
 voice.* To be sure, the author severely challenged the utility of 
 Ishnaael’s jaunty sociability, but ultimately he strengthened his com¬ 
 mitment to geniality. 
 
 During this experimental phase of his career, Melville’s object was 
 to create an effective third-person speaker. A comparison of the end¬ 
 points of his experimentation reveals the degree of his success. Pierre 
 (1852) is something of a “botch”; The Confidence-Man (1857) is 
 masterfully controlled by a distant, self-effacing, third person who 
 is himself a kind of confidence man.® The genesis of this comic voice 
 is complex. The confidence man first appears as a character; he is the 
 dialectical counterpart of Melville’s familiar “genialist,” an Ameri¬ 
 can version of what Stuart Tave has called the amiable humorist.® 
 Gradually acquiring a psychological depth that enhances his comic 
 potential, the knavish figure unites with the genialist to form the 
 prophetic “genial misanthrope” of Melville’s last novel. Along with 
 this synthesis of comic types, Melville also used the confidence man 
 in his experiments with unreliable narration. Moving beyond the 
 limits of the ironic, first-person speakers of his early tales, he grad¬ 
 ually introduced into his fiction the “metaphysical scamp” as a 
 detached, third-person voice. 
 
 What guided Melville’s search for comic detachment was the need 
 to contain himself within, rather than expose himself through, his 
 humor. Far from exhibiting a decline, the magazine pieces testify to 
 a vigorous artistic growth along the positive principles of an “aes¬ 
 thetics of repose.” Although he was an artist in transition, Melville 
 was, nevertheless, an artist in control. 
 
 I 
 
 The genialist is often the butt of Melville’s satire or burlesque.^ But 
 
 ■* Evidence of the diversity and intensity of Melville’s experimentation can be found in 
 the fact that in the Spring of 1855 he composed or saw through publication five pieces, each 
 with a different kind of narrator. In March, April, and May, Melville published the ninth 
 installment of Israel Potter (third-person, omniscient narrator), “The Paradise of Bachelors 
 and the Tartarus of Maids” (first-person, unreliable), and “The Bell Tower” (third-person, 
 omniscient), respectively. By April, he had also proofed “Benito Cereno” (third-person, cen¬ 
 tral consciousness), and in July he composed “I and My Chimney” (first-person, reliable). 
 
 ® Dryden, p. 195. 
 
 ^ The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the eighteenth 
 and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, i960). 
 
 ^ For Elizabeth Foster, The Confidence-Man is a “philosophical satire on optimism.” See 
 Introd., The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, by Herman Melville (New York: Hendricks 
 
256 
 
 John Bryant 
 
 while Melville frequently “lacerates his persistently genial men,”® he 
 never rejects geniality. For him, geniality is an unavoidable instinct 
 urging man toward an integrative vision of life. Melville could no 
 more reject it than he could his “instinct of the knowledge of demon¬ 
 ism.”® The genial instinct is part of the fabric of humanity. It is that 
 force revealed to Babbalanja on May mornings, or (as Melville puts 
 it in ]ohn Marr) “that something . . . the flower of life springing 
 from some sense of joy in it. . . Without it, Pierre’s mind grows 
 “maggotty,” and Ahab becomes a “self-consuming misanthrope” 
 {MD, XCVI, p. 353). With it, Ishmael can “perceive a horror [yet] 
 ... be social with it” {MD, I, p. 16). But this “sense of joy,” or “ ‘all’ 
 feeling” (as Melville characterized it in a letter to Hawthorne) is 
 ephemeral, and an over-indulgent pursuit of it inevitably leads to a 
 shallow hedonism or facile optimism that blinds man to the world’s 
 “demonism.” Tommo embraces cannibals; Delano dandifies a “mon¬ 
 ster.” Their genial instinct is a sign of grace but also a tragic flaw. 
 It is a “humor” that can preserve or destroy, humanize or delude.^^ 
 
 Melville’s “persistently genial men” should not be damned. They 
 are complex beings who must balance geniality and their growing 
 recognition of life’s darker side: a lawyer is obsessed with his 
 scrivener’s dis-ease; a seedsman shivers over the vain mechanisms of 
 human sexuality. Poised on the brink of self-awareness, these ad¬ 
 mittedly impercipient men are stunned by their new knowledge yet 
 preserved by their genial instinct. If they are to be condemned, it is 
 because they serve only limited rhetorical ends. Only beginning to 
 grasp the demon spirit, they know less than they would like. They 
 lack assurance and control over the tales they attempt to tell. In 
 
 House, 1952), p. xiv. Similarly, Joseph Flibbert sees the novel as a "burlesque reconstruction 
 of [the age’s] philosophy of geniality.” See Melville and the Art of Burlesque (Amsterdam: 
 Rodopi, 1974), p. 149. 
 
 ® Marjorie Dew, “Black-Hearted Melville: ‘Geniality’ Reconsidered,” in Artful Thunder: 
 Versions of the Romantic Tradition in American Literature in Honor of Howard P. Vincent, 
 ed. Robert J. DeMott and Sanford E. Marovitz (Kent: Kent State Univ. Press, 1975), p. 177. 
 
 ^ Moby-Didi, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1967), 
 XLII, 169. Hereafter cited as MD-, Roman numerals refer to chapters. 
 
 Collected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Chicago: Hendricks 
 House, 1947), p. 161. 
 
 In an examination of Melville’s uses of the word “genial,” Merton M. Sealts, Jr., con¬ 
 cludes that the author remained at best ambivalent toward geniality. See “Melville’s Genial¬ 
 ity,” in Essays in American and English Literature Presented to Bruce Robert McElderry, Jr., 
 ed. Max Schulz (Athens: Univ. of Ohio Press, 1967), pp. 3-26. Dew explicitly contradicts 
 Sealts’s interpretation. 
 
Melville’s Comic Debate 
 
 257 
 
 creating the “genial misanthrope,” Melville was able to surpass these 
 ironic spokesmen and shape characters and voices (such as the 
 speaker in “I and My Chimney” or Charlemont and Goodman in 
 The Confidence-Man) who could more readily accommodate aware¬ 
 ness and sociability. 
 
 Geniality serves an aesthetic as well as a moral function. After 
 Pierre, Melville abandoned the Byronic mode of self-exposure that 
 typified much of his earlier works. His later fiction adheres to a more 
 restrained, reposeful conception of art. Melville’s chief problem was 
 to compress the chimeras of selfhood within a genial shell, to con¬ 
 tain the demonic within the comic, to master the tensions between 
 conflicting instincts. What impressed Melville about the ancient 
 statues he viewed in Rome was their “tranquil, subdued air such as 
 men have when under the influence of no passion.Even Laocodn’s 
 anguished face, a “symbol of human misfortune,” partakes of this 
 tranquility. For Melville, the ancient sculpture evokes a modern 
 dilemma in its embodiment of “the doubt and dark groping of specu¬ 
 lation in that age when the old mythology was passing away and 
 men’s minds had not reposed in the new faith.Just as Laocodn’s 
 creator buried within reposeful shapes in stone his agony over the 
 “passing away” of one belief, Melville aspired toward a reposeful 
 voice in prose that could articulate his own problem of faith without 
 exposing too sharply his “dark gropings.” His goal, too, was re¬ 
 straint: to objectify passions and subdue selfhood within art itself. 
 Hence, one of “the finest . . . statements of truth” for him was 
 Maurice de Guerin’s remark that “There is more power and beauty 
 . . . in the well-kept secret of one’s self and one’s thoughts than in 
 the display of a whole heaven that one may have inside one.”^^ Well 
 before Melville underscored this passage in 1869, he had found a 
 model for his principle of concealment in Nathaniel Hawthorne. 
 
 “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850) is as much an essay on the 
 artful function of geniality as on the recognition of “blackness, ten 
 times black.” In praising his friend’s covert “snatches” of truth and 
 “quick probings,” Melville argues that the “great Art of Telling the 
 Truth” is a process of concealment. But more, its mechanism for 
 
 Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville as Lecturer (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), 
 p. 150. 
 
 Sealts, Lecturer, p. 139. 
 
 Jay Leyda, The Melville Log (New York: Harcourt, 1951), pp. 703-04. 
 
258 
 
 John Bryant 
 
 restraint is the heart. Refraining from “all the popularizing noise and 
 show of broad farce, and blood-smeared tragedy,” Hawthorne is 
 “content with the still, rich utterances of a great intellect in repose, 
 and which sends few thoughts into circulation, except they be ar- 
 terialized at his large warm lungs, and expanded in his honest 
 heart.”^® The heart’s dual function is to express an inner being but 
 also to humanize that dark entity and make its expression palatable. 
 Governing the heart, the genial spirit “arterializes” deep thought. It 
 gives human dimension to demonic revelations and repose to the 
 mind. 
 
 Like the heart, Hawthorne’s “contemplative humor” rises above 
 the hail-fellow’s “rollicking rudeness.” It is “so high, so deep, and 
 yet so richly relishable. ... It is the very religion of mirth” {MM, 
 p. 403). Hawthorne’s “relishable” yet spiritual tone is transformed 
 under Melville’s scrutiny into images of suppressed fire and light. 
 The fireplace in “Fire Worship” (quoted at length by Melville) 
 illuminates the link between geniality and art. A metaphor for both 
 the heart and art, it exhibits Laocodn’s tense repose. Here, the hearth 
 contains the fire’s potential for “mischief” and “mad destruction” 
 within its warm “domestic kindness.” Just as Shakespeare has his 
 “flashings-forth,” the fire, Hawthorne writes, may “[betray] his wild 
 nature,” but its “red tongue” rarely escapes the stony hearth whose 
 warm heart atone [s] for all” {MM, p. 404). In its containment of 
 fiery truths, the fireplace resembles Melville’s crucible of “Art” in 
 which “unlike things must meet and mate” and where “Humility— 
 yet pride and scorn” are fused within the “mystic heart.”^® Hearth, 
 heart, and art—the three are similar emanations of the same genial 
 spirit. 
 
 In fusing the domestic and the sublime, Hawthorne’s art achieves 
 the ripeness of “Indian Summer sunlight” that unifies the landscape 
 in “one softness” yet “still reveals the distinctive hue of every tower¬ 
 ing hill, and each far-winding vale” {MM, p. 404). Hawthorne’s 
 “mirth” gives an artful presence to the variable topography of the 
 self; and yet it subdues the realities of “hill and vale” beneath “one 
 softness.” For Ishmael, nature “paints like the harlot” {MD, XLII, 
 p. 170), but for Melville, as artist, the “distinctive hues” of art give 
 
 Portable Melville, ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Viking, 1952), p. 408. Hereafter 
 cited as MM. 
 
 Melville, Poems, p. 231. 
 
Melville’s Comic Debate 
 
 259 
 
 palpable form to otherwise incomprehensible truths. The darkness 
 within us is not total. Indeed, its presence “gives more effect to the 
 ever-moving dawn, that forever advances through it, and circum¬ 
 navigates [the] world” {MM, p. 406). Melville’s art, like Haw¬ 
 thorne’s, does not deny darkness; it subdues and “forever advances 
 through if.” The voice of “a great intellect in repose” is built upon 
 the fusion of mind within “the all-engendering heart” {MM, p. 405). 
 It is the expression of dark inner truths which intrude upon but never 
 fully possess the bright world.^^ 
 
 Melville’s search for a voice that could match Hawthorne’s repose 
 reached a plateau with Ishmael’s “free and easy sort of genial, des¬ 
 perado philosophy” {MD, XLIX, p. 196). Although Ishmael plays 
 many roles, his multiplicity suggests a fruitful pliability of mind that 
 does not detract from his reliability as a narrator.^® He possesses many 
 “distinctive hues.” Moreover, although his ironic humor conveys the 
 despair of his failure to name what he knows is “dreadfully name¬ 
 less,”^® Ishmael can contain the emptiness of his white world within 
 the “one softness” of his genial voice. And yet, the very dominance 
 in Moby-Dic}{ of this semi-autobiographical character, full of “hy- 
 poes” and obsessions, denies Melville the narrative distancing, the 
 critical freedom from personality, that could lead him to authorial 
 “repose.” By turning to third-person narrative, he was in effect re¬ 
 jecting the notion of art as a sounding board for personality and 
 adopting an aesthetic based upon an effacement or abnegation of self¬ 
 hood. Moreover, in doing so, he could promote the growth of a genial 
 voice more securely located within the transcendent “mystic heart.” 
 
 To a large degree, Melville’s decision to write Pierre in the third- 
 person stems from his readiness to fulfill the Hawthorne model. But 
 unlike Ishmael who probes and yet is separate from Ahab’s mind, the 
 narrator in Pierre fails to sustain an even distance from his “infat¬ 
 uate” protagonist. He brands Pierre a “blind fool, and a million times 
 an ass”^“ for his insufferable idealism, an idealism which the proud 
 
 Melville’s most memorable expression of this aesthetic principle is found in his rumina¬ 
 tions on “Two Sides to a Tortoise": . . keep [the bright side] turned up perpetually if 
 
 you can . . . and don’t deny the black.” See Selected Writings of Herman Melville (New 
 York: Random House, 1952), p. 56. Hereafter cited as SW. 
 
 Wadlington, p. 73. See also Dryden, p. no. 
 
 Paul Brodtkorb, Jr., Ishmael’s White World: A Phenomenological Reading of Moby- 
 Dicl{ (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), p. 131. 
 
 Pierre; or the Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, et al. (Evanston and Chicago: 
 Northwestern Univ. Press and The Newberry Library, 1971), p. 171. 
 
26 o 
 
 John Bryant 
 
 speaker, it seems, has already overcome. The narrator is like an ob¬ 
 sessed personality hurling salvoes of indignation at himself through 
 the flimsy guise of a third-person pronoun. As Lawrance Thompson 
 notes, the “furiously derisive bitterness” in Pierre undermines the 
 novel’s “genial, jovial, comic” effect.^^ Thus, in attempting to create 
 a congenial third-person voice, Melville found himself ironically re¬ 
 moved from the sensibility of a “great intellect in repose.” He could 
 not duplicate what he had admired in Hawthorne. 
 
 To be sure, The Confidence-Man is not a novel that reposes in the 
 bosom of either an old or new faith, but its elusive speaker and cen¬ 
 tral character, the cosmopolitan, conform in significant ways to 
 Melville’s aesthetic. As Elizabeth Foster concludes, “the finest and 
 quietest irony of the book is a sort of constant whisper ... in the 
 very manner of the book, which in a style suggesting kindliness and 
 impartial good nature and gentle, sometimes jaunty, ease, leads 
 quietly up to the most bitter conclusions.”^^ By engaging readers in 
 a rich experience of doubt, the novel promotes a balanced understand¬ 
 ing of doubt: it is as much a suspicion that belief is possible as it is 
 that disbelief is inevitable. The cause of this reader experience lies in 
 the narrator’s abdication of authorial responsibility. By refusing to 
 judge or establish norms, Melville pushes the reader into a quagmire 
 of speculation on motives and meanings. The speaker’s coy equivoca¬ 
 tions only tease us deeper into doubt. And though his “ponderous 
 stuttering” lacks repose,^^ his voice evinces total effacement of the 
 author’s personality. Unlike Pierre, this novel contains little that is 
 autobiographical. In it, Melville’s presence (aside from three intru¬ 
 sive chapters) is thoroughly concealed. If anything, the author’s “self 
 and thought” remain, in Guerin’s words, a “well-kept secret.” 
 
 If T he Confidence-Man lacks the traditional, normative speaker, it 
 also lacks a hero. A tentative “moral center” amidst the knaves and 
 fools on board can be found, however, in Frank Goodman, the cos¬ 
 mopolitan. Prophesying the coming of “the genial misanthrope,” 
 Goodman offers a clue to his own identity: “. . . under an affable 
 air, he will hide a misanthropical heart. In short, the genial mis- 
 
 Lawrance Thompson, Melville’s Quarrel with God (Princeton: Princeton Unlv. Press, 
 1952). PP- 247-48. 
 
 22 Foster, p. xciv. 
 
 22 Warner Berthoff, The Example of Melville (1962; rpt. New York: Norton, 1972), 
 p. 166. 
 
Melville’s Comic Debate 
 
 261 
 
 anthrope will be a new kind of monster . . . [who, unlike Timon] 
 will take steps, fiddle in hand, and set the tickled world a’ dancing. 
 In a word, as the progress of Christianization mellows those in man¬ 
 ner whom it cannot mend in mind, much the same will it prove with 
 the progress of genialization.”^^ In being “genialized,” the misan¬ 
 thrope will “take on refinement and softness.” The cosmopolitan also 
 possesses “a healthy balance . . . between meekness . . . and mis- 
 anthropy.”“ In fusing such “unlike things,” he spiritualizes prag¬ 
 matism; he can both recognize man’s potential for good yet remain 
 wary of his capacity for evil. Like Machiavelli’s Prince, he can dis¬ 
 semble as well as show good faith. And like the novel’s narrator, he 
 is a gadfly or “metaphysical scamp” who can cheat cheaters and even 
 “con” others into a leap of faith. Annihilating our readiness to be¬ 
 lieve, he paradoxically goads us to entertain new beliefs. In words 
 Melville also used to describe Hawthorne, Goodman seems “to dis¬ 
 pense a sort of morning through the night” {CM, p. 207). The 
 cosmopolitan’s genial misanthropy, therefore, highlights the utility 
 of the genial spirit. Like a great intellect in repose, the genial mis¬ 
 anthrope will suppress thought within the heart and put on 
 “softness.” 
 
 These thumbnail sketches of Pierre and The Confidence-Mari iso¬ 
 late the salient features of Melville’s experimentation—the parallel 
 growths of the genial misanthrope as a character and the confidence 
 man as a narrator. In bridging the two works, certain tales and Israel 
 Potter display the choices Melville made in molding his fiction to his 
 aesthetic requirements. 
 
 II 
 
 Although historical antecedents for Melville’s confidence games 
 have been traced in the popular culture,^® the device grows naturally 
 
 The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, ed. Hershel Parker (New York, Norton, 1971), 
 p. 154. Hereafter cited as CM. 
 
 Elizabeth Keyset, “‘Quite an Original’: The Cosmopolitan in The Confidence-Man," 
 Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 15 (1973), 280. 
 
 Richard Chase identifies Melville’s confidence man as a variation on the Yankee 
 Peddler; see Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York: Macmillan, 1949). Daniel 
 Hoffman considers the figure to be “an amalgam of America’s popular comic figures” in 
 Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 283. For an 
 additional tracing of the confidence man motif see Susan Kuhlman, Knave, Fool, and 
 
262 
 
 John Bryant 
 
 from his own fictive patterns. Throughout such tales as “Bartleby,” 
 “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” and “Jimmy 
 Rose,” Melville relates the same conflict between impercipient genial- 
 ist and isolato. His confidence game emerges in other tales as a spe¬ 
 cialized version of this recurring pattern when the isolato is recast as 
 a false genialist or confidence man. Whereas a Bartleby may bewilder 
 his genial interlocutor, the false genialist schemes and attacks be¬ 
 neath a show of consanguinity. Out of this “comic debate” between 
 integrative (genialist) and subversive (confidence man) sensibilities, 
 the “genial misanthrope” evolves, uniting the identities of both types 
 into a “wary confidence” suited for humane survival. The magazine 
 pieces contain seven confidence men: Oberlus in “The Encantadas”; 
 the lightning-rod man; Israel Potter, Benjamin Franklin, and John 
 Paul Jones in Israel Potter\ Babo in “Benito Cereno”; and, interest¬ 
 ingly enough, the chimney in “I and My Chimney.” Each character 
 advances in seriousness and complexity beyond his predecessor. 
 
 Melville’s confidence games also have a narrative dimension. In 
 everyday experiences a confidence game requires a knave and a fool, 
 but in fiction someone must also relate the particulars to an audience. 
 An author may designate either the confidence man or his unwitting 
 dupe as first-person observer. Neither is particularly reliable since the 
 former is a cheat, and the latter a fool. Through a third-person 
 speaker, the author may attach himself to the central consciousness 
 of either confidence man or fool, and hence be unreliable. Or as an 
 omniscient consciousness, the third person may be thoroughly re¬ 
 liable. Of course, an omniscient speaker may also acquire knavish 
 traits by violating the expectations of a readership that has willingly 
 surrendered its disbelief unto him. In his early tales Melville relies 
 upon the first-person perspective of an intended victim, but in later 
 works he develops the voice of a “tainted” omniscient speaker, one 
 whose very refusal to direct our judgments awakens us to the fragility 
 of confidence. 
 
 Throughout the magazine pieces, Melville’s confidence games 
 progress through four phases: the experimentation with comic vil¬ 
 lains in certain early tales; the exploration of the confidence man’s 
 
 Genius: The Confidence Man as He Appears in igth Century American Fiction (Chapel Hill: 
 Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1973). For specific references to confidence men in the news¬ 
 papers of Melville’s day see Johannes D. Bergmann "The Original Confidence-Man,” Ameri¬ 
 can Quarterly, 21 (1969), 560-77. 
 
Melville’s Comic Debate 
 
 263 
 
 social and psychological potentials in Israel Potter \ the full articula¬ 
 tion of the comic debate in “Benito Cereno”; and the genesis of the 
 genial misanthrope in “I and My Chimney.” 
 
 After Pierre, Melville returned to his familiar first-person mode, 
 but his short narratives were not complete retrievals of his earlier, 
 Ishmaelian voice. The speakers in “Bartleby” and “Cock-A-Doodle- 
 do!” grope for meaning; their growth toward a higher consciousness 
 is questionable. The lawyer’s simplistic equation, “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, 
 humanity!” is as meaningless in its generality as the inarticulate 
 crowing of the speaker at the end of “Cock-A-Doodle-do!” Such tales 
 ironically expose the intellectual limitations of geniality. “The En- 
 cantadas,” however, marks a recovery of the Ishmaelian voice, but as 
 if to compensate for this elevation of the genial spirit, Melville intro¬ 
 duces for the first time the genialist’s nemesis, the confidence man. 
 
 Melville’s comic voice interlaces and unifies the wasteland imagery 
 of the “The Encantadas.” Both a metaphysician and a gourmand, his 
 speaker expounds and then literally devours his thoughts. The tor¬ 
 toise, for instance, is a highly allusive symbol of Melville’s bright and 
 dark philosophy, but in the end it makes for good soup. Such 
 “genialization” hints at a comic union of spirit and flesh that emerges 
 again in the final sketch when the speaker picnics in repose on the 
 graves of castaway sailors. Like a “religion of mirth,” Melville’s 
 “genial, desperado” tone transcends these doleful sketches and even 
 the penultimate tale of Oberlus, the hermit and confidence man. 
 
 A broadly-drawn, incompetent villain, Oberlus connives and lusts 
 but is doomed to failure. The surly misanthrope’s first impulse is to 
 seize power by blunderbuss. In need of slaves, he abducts a “righ¬ 
 teously suspicious” black sailor. But when the victim’s mates re¬ 
 taliate and leave Oberlus in chains, the hermit devises a more genial 
 strategy; he “makes up” to his new victims “like a free-and-easy 
 comrade, invites them to his hut, and with whatever affability his 
 red-haired grimness may assume, entreats them to drink his liquor 
 and be merry” (SW, p. 107). The false genialist’s dominion grows 
 until, rejected in his suit for an island queen, he seeks revenge by 
 arson and is jailed. His failure stems from his inability to repress his 
 fiery passions, and his incompetence as a villain suggests that, at best, 
 fortune reigns indifferently over good and evil. In rationalizing his 
 antipathy for Oberlus, Melville strives for a more positive conclusion: 
 
264 
 
 John Bryant 
 
 “it is religion to detest [the hermit], since it is philanthropy to hate 
 a misanthrope” (SW, p. 112). The paradox inherent in this re¬ 
 definition of love as hating those who hate does not disturb the 
 speaker; it is a witty accommodation of conflicting impulses. The 
 wordplay also indicates the speaker’s control. Once again, geniality 
 subsumes malignancy. In its earliest phase, then, the confidence man 
 figure teases the genialist into deeper self-awareness. 
 
 “The Lightning-Rod Man” is Melville’s first full-length portrait of 
 a confidence man actively pursuing a genial victim. Even though he 
 is more richly satanic than Oberlus, the title character also fails. Bas¬ 
 ing his rhetoric on fear, he sells his rods during thunderstorms. And 
 deeming isolation from man and nature to be the most effective insu¬ 
 lation, he sedulously avoids hearths and tall men because they draw 
 lightning. His misanthropy, however, pales before his victim’s brag¬ 
 gadocio. Standing by his hearth, the genial speaker takes comfort in 
 the notion that lightning can strike from earth to heaven. The 
 lightning-rod man is a poor rhetorician. He cannot modify his fear¬ 
 ful arguments to address his fearless and witty victim. The speaker 
 out-talks the salesman and even carves masks for him, a function that 
 a self-respecting confidence man is obliged to do for himself. The 
 peddler is labeled an undertaker, a god of thunder, Satan crying 
 before God, and a modern-day Tetzel, all before he gets his cloven 
 foot in the door. If this devil seems a shape-shifter, it is the speaker’s 
 doing, not his. The genialist’s victory, then, is as much rhetorical as 
 theological, and his verbal skills prefigure the controlled confidence 
 of the knave-killer, Frank Goodman. 
 
 Melville’s earliest confidence men are foiled by their own obses¬ 
 sions and incompetence. Their desperate misanthropy merely “gives 
 more effect” to the genial spirit. But in Israel Potter these straw men 
 grow into a figure of threatening psychological verisimilitude. Based 
 upon a “sleazy gray” pamphlet. The Life and Remarkable Adven¬ 
 tures of Israel R. Potter (1824), the serialized novel also explores new 
 narrative strategies. It is another and more successful experiment in 
 self-effacement. With such ironic, first-person tales as “Bartleby,” 
 Melville could project a speaker whose dim awareness is radically 
 distinct from his own consciousness. But the Potter tale goes even 
 farther to surpass the autobiographical mode of earlier works. Avoid¬ 
 ing the excesses of Pierre, this new attempt at third-person narration 
 
Melville’s Comic Debate 
 
 265 
 
 effectively balances bitterness and repose. Playing the biographer and 
 historian, Melville records the intimate thoughts of a fellow wan¬ 
 derer and yet remains distant, critical, and dispassionate. 
 
 Claiming to have reprinted the original story with only “a change 
 in the grammatical person,”^^ Melville, in fact, refined words, raided 
 history for additional characters, reduced and expanded scenes, and 
 added a veil of allegory. At times indignant, the novel’s reliable 
 third-person narrator has nevertheless purged the “bitter derisive¬ 
 ness” that marred Pierre. Any bitterness Melville may have had at 
 this time is transformed into a critique of Potter’s failure. Of course, 
 muted scorn can be sensed in the novel’s facetious dedication and the 
 allegory of the bricks, but these hints never erupt into derision. The 
 novel exhibits the author’s growing control. As John Freeman notes, 
 Melville had “resolved ... to restrict himself to the dry husk of 
 language, putting an external constraint upon his genius.”^® 
 
 This tale of an expatriate’s vain longings for home is also Melville’s 
 most extensive characterization of the confidence man as an embodi¬ 
 ment of self and society. Throughout its complex network of did¬ 
 dling, Israel must play all three roles in the confidence game. He is 
 Franklin’s slowly comprehending dupe but later a confidence man 
 himself, and he is an impartial observer of Franklin’s diddling of 
 Jones and of Jones’s own games. 
 
 Franklin is Melville’s first substantial confidence man. With damn¬ 
 ing, faint praise, the narrator exposes the common sense diplomat in 
 his “honorable hat” and “worsted hose” {IP, p. 48). It is a portrait 
 of subtle deficiencies. Franklin’s thoughtladen mind buzzes—like a 
 “hogshead on the wharf” swarming with flies {IP, p. 39). He is “the 
 type and genius of his land” but not “a poet” {IP, p. 48). He urges 
 men to be trustful, for too much distrust “is the worst consequence 
 of a miserable condition” {IP, p. 41). And yet securing trust is his 
 first step in manipulating men. Franklin’s geniality is only a paste¬ 
 board calling card for seeking entrance into other men’s favor and 
 possessions. When Israel attempts to slake his thirst for Otard and a 
 chambermaid, Ben spirits the temptations away—for Israel’s sake and 
 
 Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, ed. Harrison Hayford, et al. (Evanston and 
 Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press and The Newberry Library, 1982), p. vii. Hereafter cited 
 as IP. 
 
 2® Raymond Weaver, Introd., The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville (New York: 
 Horace Livcright, 1928), p. xxxv. 
 
266 
 
 John Bryant 
 
 Franklin’s pleasure. An apprentice in the devious arts, Israel quickly 
 catches on to the false genialist: “Every time he comes in he robs me 
 with an air all the time, too, as if he were making me presents” 
 {IP, p. 53). Franklin is “sly, sly, sly” {IP, p. 54). 
 
 Although Jones’s savage heart counters Franklin’s Tuscan head, 
 he, too, is a confidence man. Still, he plays Franklin’s fool. When 
 Jones demands more ships, the narrator mimicks Franklin’s byzan- 
 tine response. Impressed by empty wit, Jones attempts to display his 
 own verbal skills with an obvious play on the diplomat’s name: 
 “Thank you for your frankness . . . ; frank myself, I love to deal 
 with a frank man” {IP, p. 58). Franklin manages an incredulous 
 smile. The narrator’s refusal to interpret the smile and what it sig¬ 
 nals to Israel prefigures the wordy manipulation of later works. 
 
 Although a victim in the parlor, Jones is a victor at sea. Franklin 
 depends upon the “mild superiority of successful strategy” {IP, p. 52) 
 to manipulate, but Jones, a “gentleman-wolf,” plays a different game. 
 He survives through relentless bravado in a world “subject to organic 
 disorder” {IP, p. 114). Unlike Franklin, he is “a bit of the poet,” and 
 yet his passions, like his tattoos, are “elaborate, labyrinthine, cabalis¬ 
 tic” {IP, p. 62). A deadly practitioner of the confidential arts, he 
 slides into enemy ports to plunder by night as though insinuating 
 himself “into human harbors or hearts” {IP, p. 99). His “hood¬ 
 winking” battle tactics genially conceal powder and shot: “. . . .The 
 two ships glided on freely, side by side; in that mild air exchanging 
 their deadly broadsides, like two friendly horsemen walking their 
 steeds along a plain, chatting as they go” {IP, p. 113). “Intrepid, 
 unprincipled, reckless, predatory,” Jones, like America, is “civilized 
 in externals but a savage at heart” {IP, p. 120). 
 
 As confidence men, Franklin and Jones are all-too successful; they 
 characterize the glory of America’s shallow pragmatism and preda¬ 
 tory power. Israel’s schemes also succeed but afford him little more 
 than subsistence and anonymity. For him, the confidence game 
 erodes identity. Israel is shrewd enough to know that it is better “to 
 plough, than be ploughed” {IP, p. 12), and his native optimism 
 brightens his frequent seclusions in dark jails and hideaways. But not 
 all Yankees are winners, and the flaxen-haired Israel quickly learns 
 that no amount of scheming can insure success in a world governed 
 by chance. Escaping the British in “ditcher’s rags,” Israel artfully 
 
Melville’s Comic Debate 
 
 267 
 
 eludes his pursuers but is nevertheless arrested, not as an American 
 but as a deserter from the British army. The enemy’s misperception 
 ironically conceals Israel’s true identity but still lands him in jail. 
 This comic lesson in the futility of disguise foreshadows Israel’s 
 grandest larceny on board an enemy ship. But here, Israel’s confi¬ 
 dence game makes him a “nobody.” 
 
 Left dangling in the rigging of a British man-of-war, Israel must 
 manipulate his foe to his favor. A stranger in alien waters, he claims 
 to be a member of the British crew and “a poor persecuted fellow” 
 whom no one is “willing to remember” (IP, p. 138). Israel glad- 
 hands his incredulous “mates” urging them to be sociable. Grudg¬ 
 ingly, they accept the disguised Yankee but pass him unwanted 
 from foretop to hold, where he persists in his lie. Despite his “general 
 sociability” (IP, p. 141), the once boastful American becomes a 
 friendless Wandering Jew with “no end in the world” and “no final 
 destination” (IP, p. 140). Israel’s false geniality secures him a safe 
 but sullen anonymity. His complaint, “Who ain’t a nobody,” echoes 
 Ishmael’s “Who ain’t a Slave,” but it lacks the jocularity, even the 
 capitalization. Israel is a lower-case nonentity whose necessary self- 
 annihilation is a game he must play merely to survive. He has taken 
 to heart Franklin’s assurance that God will help him if he helps him¬ 
 self, but in the end he is a victim of his own “helping,” the butt of 
 a cruel joke, the punchline of which is that chance outstrips human 
 will. Israel’s conclusion is that man “succeeds better in life’s tragedy 
 than comedy” (IP, p. 160). 
 
 Israel’s tragedy lies not so much in his loss of identity as in his 
 necessary misuse of the genial spirit. He must deceive to exist; hence, 
 he is fated to fall from grace. In “Benito Cereno” Melville explores 
 the implications of this fall more carefully when he brings Delano, 
 Cereno, and Babo together to debate the uses of geniality. Ultimately, 
 the debate between acceptance and resignation remains precariously 
 unresolved. The tale also marks another development in Melville’s 
 narrative technique. Whereas the author of Israel Potter disguises 
 himself as a biographer; in “Benito Cereno” he fashions a voice so 
 seemingly non-commital that it becomes unreliable. The central con¬ 
 sciousness narrator exhibits no bitterness toward Delano’s naivete or 
 Cereno’s despair, no repulsion over Babo’s treachery. He is repose- 
 fully detached from his material. 
 
268 
 
 John Bryant 
 
 This tale of Amasa Delano’s inadvertent discovery of a slave revolt 
 on board a Spanish vessel centers upon the complex confidence game 
 that the slave leader has designed to cover-up his rebellion. Forcing 
 his captive captain to resume his former role, Babo plays the Cheer¬ 
 ful Negro; Cereno, the indifferent master. Delano, the intended vic¬ 
 tim of this masquerade, is the tale’s central consciousness. As one of 
 the densest lambs in Melville’s flock of impercipient genialists, he is 
 ill-prepared to penetrate Babo’s pretense. Like the lawyer in “Bar- 
 tleby,” he is a man of “assumptions”: his “household boat” is the 
 touchstone for “a thousand trustful associations” {SW, p. 297); all 
 black men are, to him, willing servants. Amidst the thinly-veiled 
 tensions, Delano benignly transforms a nursing slave (planted to 
 evoke a “sunny” and “quite sociable” sight for the American) into 
 the epitome of “naked nature, . . . pure tenderness and love” (SW, 
 p. 292). Delano takes to “negroes” as “other men to Newfoundland 
 dogs” (SW, p. 307). For him, the black man is the spirit of geniality. 
 But Delano’s benevolent racism is dangerously flawed; it denies the 
 black man his humanity and therefore ignores his capacity to lie and 
 kill. 
 
 In a confidence game, the dupe frequently asks to be duped. He 
 perceives the knave to be an ally, discloses his innermost desires, and 
 in effect suggests to the knave the rhetorical strategies by which he 
 can be undone. Convinced of the black man’s innate “good humor,” 
 Delano attempts “to tickle the negro” with his jokes. Playing the 
 servile Newfoundland dog, Babo tailors his game to Delano’s genial 
 “assumptions” and obliges him with ingratiating smiles. Although 
 Babo eventually fails, his rhetoric (which must be judged by its 
 thorough use of the available means of persuasion) dupes Delano so 
 completely that the American cannot distinguish black from white. 
 A mulatto’s “display of elegance,” for instance, proves to Delano that, 
 despite popular beliefs ascribing treachery to mixed breeds, such men 
 are not masked “devils” (SW, p. 313). The irony, however, is that 
 Delano does not know that black and white blood has already been 
 mixed (and will again be mixed) not in the heart but on the battle 
 deck. Delano’s convictions are so strong that he even forces a genial 
 construction upon Babo’s climactic attempt to murder Cereno, an 
 action the slave performs (Delano believes) “as if with desperate 
 fidelity to befriend his master to the last” (SW, p. 326). 
 
Melville’s Comic Debate 
 
 269 
 
 Early on, Delano sights a medallion depicting “a dark satyr in a 
 mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, 
 likewise masked” (SW, p. 259). The emblem prefigures the story’s 
 denouement when Delano, “his right foot [upon] . . . the prostrate 
 negro,” detains the “snakishly writhing” Babo (SW, p. 327). Like a 
 tableau vivant, the scene freezes for a moment a dramatic rendering 
 of the comic debate between the genial and the demonic. Delano is 
 the satyr-like genialist; Babo, the snakish confidence man. Both wear 
 genial masks: Delano’s faithfully projects his sunny disposition; 
 Babo’s promotes trust only to conceal savagery. The unresolved ten¬ 
 sion between the two continues after Babo’s demise as Delano at¬ 
 tempts at the end to reinvigorate Cereno’s dying confidence. 
 
 For the Spaniard, Babo’s piked head is a “hive of subtlety ”(SW, 
 p. 353), a haunting symbol of the peril, if not impossibility, of hu¬ 
 man confidence.^® Forced to play comrade to the murderer of his 
 best friend Aranda, Cereno has lost all taste for congeniality. He is 
 a tormented monk whose quarters, like his very being, blend the 
 auras of a “cluttered hall of some eccentric bachelor-squire” and a 
 torture chamber (SW, p. 305). “Again and again,” Cereno repeats 
 “how hard it had been to enact the part forced on [him]” (SW, 
 p. 350). But enact he did, and so well that Delano believed Cereno, 
 not Babo, to be the “monster.” Just as Potter plays a “nobody” and 
 thus becomes one, Cereno’s monstrous performance unleashes in him 
 a fearful recognition of human duplicity not unlike Babo’s. The 
 Spanish isolato chooses to die rather than assimilate this darker side. 
 Delano, however, reaffirms his genial spirit and in the tale’s final 
 dialogue argues that his instinctive trust preserved him “when acute¬ 
 ness might have cost [him his] life” (SW, p. 351). Delano urges 
 Cereno to forget: “. . . the past is passed; why moralize upon it.?” 
 Bright sun, blue seas and sky—they can forget. But, Cereno responds, 
 that is “because they have no memory, . . . because they are not 
 human” (SW, p. 351-2). Memory—as both the immediate recollec¬ 
 tion of Babo’s treachery and as the primal violence that Babo repre¬ 
 sents—is an unrestrainable human function. But equally instinctive 
 is Delano’s impulse to “turn over new leaves,” to reset his genial 
 mask. The debate ends in a draw: memory destroys; geniality pre¬ 
 serves. Neither can be denied. 
 
 To some extent, Babo combines features from Franklin who also possesses a “hive of 
 a head" (IP, p. 59) and Jones whose friendliness conceals a savage heart. 
 
270 
 
 John Bryant 
 
 The tale’s problematic narrative structure contributes to the care¬ 
 fully poised irresolution of this conflict between genial and mis¬ 
 anthropic instincts. Students of the tale are familiar with its shifting 
 voices. When Babo attempts to kill Cereno, Melville suddenly aban¬ 
 dons his third-person, central consciousness perspective for a narrator¬ 
 less deposition relating the details of the bloody revolt prior to and 
 after Delano’s arrival. The tale concludes with the voice of an omni¬ 
 scient speaker who records the final dialogue. Melville’s earlier critics 
 considered the deposition to be an unfortunate bit of padding, but 
 the shifting narrative serves more precise rhetorical ends. Each new 
 voice marks a subtle effacement of an authorial presence. Locked into 
 Delano’s central consciousness, the opening speaker provides no ex¬ 
 planation of events beyond one or two coy hints that something is 
 wrong. On the whole, he transmits uncritically Delano’s flawed per¬ 
 ceptions. In the deposition and final dialogue, Melville abandons 
 authorial guidance altogether. “Facts” and speeches are left to speak 
 for themselves. As with The Confidence-Man, the reader’s perspi¬ 
 cacity is at issue. But the gradual elimination of voice also serves a 
 dramatic and philosophical end. If Delano is to be taken seriously, 
 his seemingly superficial affirmation must appear as formidable an 
 alternative as Cereno’s resignation. As we shall see, Melville’s shifts 
 in voice are, in fact, a ploy to strengthen the American’s rhetorical 
 credibility in the final debate with Cereno. 
 
 The abandonment of the central consciousness narrative occurs 
 precisely at the moment when the battle between Babo’s rebels and 
 Delano’s men takes center stage. Details of this unseemly violence are 
 recorded in the legalistic jargon of the deposition. We, therefore, do 
 not read Delano’s immediate ruminations on the savagery that un¬ 
 folds before him nor on his own stupidity for not uncovering Babo’s 
 treachery earlier. We do not experience the American’s “shock of 
 recognition.” Instead, we see through secondary sources his “noble” 
 attempts to contain the ensuing bloodbath. The deposition, then, 
 functions somewhat like the messenger in classical tragedy who re¬ 
 ports what is too graphic to be staged. Of course, in fiction the reader 
 is automatically spared the immediacy of staged violence through 
 whatever dampening devices the author wishes to impose. But if 
 Melville had maintained his central consciousness perspective, no 
 amount of dampening could have mitigated the brief but intense 
 
Melville’s Comic Debate 
 
 271 
 
 moment of disillusionment that the American genialist must endure. 
 Could the reader, after observing at first hand Delano’s thoughts of 
 battle and possible self-recriminations, readily accept as valid his 
 final “sunny” speech without branding him impossibly insensitive.? 
 To make his audience more receptive to Delano’s optimism, Melville 
 willfully removes us from Delano’s consciousness to conceal his 
 anguish in the heat of action and lend credence to his advocacy of the 
 genial spirit. 
 
 The carefully contrived abandonment of central consciousness nar¬ 
 ration is only one of Melville’s manipulative strategies. Like a con¬ 
 fidence man, the narrator is also intent upon testing and teasing his 
 reader. He faithfully reports all that Delano sees and thinks, but he 
 consistently refrains from judging those perceptions and thoughts. 
 He seems to know the truth about Babo but is not telling. At the 
 outset, he challenges “wise” readers to determine if Delano’s geniality 
 signifies "‘more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual 
 perception” (SIV, p. 256; my italics). But at tale’s end, we realize that 
 Delano’s instinct, although a saving grace, signifies /ess. The narrator 
 has led us astray. Moreover, Melville’s narrator seems bent on legiti¬ 
 mizing Delano’s errors. Because the speaker rarely signals his shifts 
 from Delano’s thoughts to his own, the reader can easily lose track 
 of whether the narrator speaks for Delano or himself. At times, the 
 speaker adopts the American’s consciousness so thoroughly that he 
 lends authority to the captain’s false assumptions. Thus, when the 
 narrator proclaims the black man’s propensity for geniality as firmly 
 as Delano (SIV, p. 292), he draws the reader more readily into 
 Delano’s dangerous frame of mind. If Melville’s strategy succeeeds, 
 our discovery of Babo’s scheme will be as shocking as the naive 
 American’s. The speaker dupes the reader, then, just as Babo dupes 
 Delano. 
 
 In “Benito Cereno,” the reader’s game is to grow beyond the con¬ 
 fines of Delano’s mentality. But the odds are against us, for the nar¬ 
 rator plays fast and loose to trap us in Delano’s faulty assumptions. 
 To a large degree, this at times unreliable speaker is an early version 
 of the confidence man narrator in Melville’s last novel. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In referring to the Civil War’s only positive effect upon the Ameri¬ 
 can character, Henry James remarked that . . the good American 
 
272 
 
 John Bryant 
 
 . . . will be a more critical person than his more complacent and 
 confident grandfather.” But though “he has eaten of the tree of 
 knowledge,” he will not become a “cynic” or “skeptic” but rather an 
 “observer.”^® Even before the Civil War, Melville had also sensed the 
 need for one who could assimilate both prelapsarian complacency 
 and the modern dogma of doubt, keeping uppermost (as Cereno fails 
 to do and Delano overdoes) the preserving warmth of the heart. For 
 Melville, the “genial misanthrope” was such a character. 
 
 No tale comes closer to realizing this new comic type than “I and 
 My Chimney.” As a “gray headed old smoker” whose “warm heart” 
 and “gentle heat” conceal “secret recesses” best left untouched, the 
 chimney accommodates both complacency and doubt. It is the speak¬ 
 er’s alter ego and endures with him the onslaught of old age, im¬ 
 potence, and domesticity. After the speaker unwisely digs for hidden 
 meanings at the chimney’s “druidical” foundations, he abjures fur¬ 
 ther self-exposures, fearing that they will lead to “infinite sad mis¬ 
 chief” (SW, p. 406); he prefers the hearth upstairs where genial 
 flames beckon him to “philosophize” safely on human nature. This 
 is Hawthorne’s chimney in “Fire Worship,” for it keeps control of 
 the fiery “red tongue” of self awareness. Like “old Montaigne, and 
 old cheese, and old wine” (SW, p. 386), the old chimney is an image 
 of ripeness and repose. 
 
 But the chimney is a trickster, too. Its placement at the center of 
 the house creates a “labyrinthine . . . abode” with a maze of pas¬ 
 sageways and doors that forces inhabitants “to be forever going some¬ 
 where, and getting nowhere” ( 5 'IF, p. 389). When one of the daugh¬ 
 ter’s suitors, an affected youth, leaves with a protracted flurry of pre¬ 
 tentious adieus, he steps out of what he thinks is the front door and 
 into a pantry. Afterwards the boy drops his airs and becomes “more 
 candid” (SW, p. 390). The chimney has, in a way, duped the lad 
 into being more congenial. Like Frank Goodman, this prototypical 
 genial misanthrope is both confidence man and genialist; it sup¬ 
 presses dark impulses beneath a philanthropic aspect in order to pro¬ 
 mote among others a new sense of geniality. As a projection of the 
 speaker’s own stable sensibility, the chimney survives external and 
 internal assaults; and like the warm-hearted edifice, the speaker 
 attains the voice of an “intellect in repose.” 
 
 Henry James, “Hawthorne,” in The Shocks of Recognition, ed. Edmund Wilson (New 
 York: Farrar, Straus, 1955), pp. 536-37. 
 
Melville’s Comic Debate 
 
 273 
 
 “I and My Chimney” is the final phase of Melville’s experimenta¬ 
 tion with the literary confidence game. Although the tale reverts to 
 the genial and reliable first-person voice of “The Encantadas,” it re¬ 
 solves the stalemated debate in “Benito Cereno.” By recording the 
 genesis of the genial misanthrope, the tale allows for the assimilation 
 of Delano’s blue sky optimism with Babo’s secret savagery and 
 Cereno’s fated awareness. To be sure, the genially misanthropic 
 speaker of “I and My Chimney” is not the gadfly that Goodman 
 plays in Melville’s last novel. Nor, for that matter, is the somewhat 
 unreliable narrator of “Benito Cereno” the same voice as The 
 Confidence-Man s thoroughly unreliable speaker. Rather, the two 
 tales are experiments in character and voice, stepping stones en route 
 to The Confidence-Man. 
 
 Behind Melville’s experiments are the dynamic principles of re¬ 
 straint and fusion which make up the aesthetics of repose. On the 
 one hand, the author sought a detached voice that could conceal 
 rather than expose the “secret recesses” of the self. From Pierre to 
 Israel Potter to “Benito Cereno,” his third-person speakers become 
 increasingly non-committal and indeed unreliable. If, however, they 
 seem to lack the full repose that characterizes reliable narrative, they 
 nevertheless represent decisive steps toward a sense of repose in their 
 self-restraint and detachment. Moreover, Melville wanted an “origi¬ 
 nal” hero for his age, a character capable of surviving with heart and 
 mind not only intact but harmoniously united. The confidence man 
 figure grows to fit this need, first as a comic villain, then as a more 
 substantial nemesis for the naive genialist, and finally as the catalyst 
 for the genial misanthrope. The twin developments of voice and 
 character in the magazine pieces suggest that the concept of geniality 
 plays a profound role in Melville’s aesthetics and that the author, far 
 from having lost his creative power, was actively engaged in the 
 direction of his work. He was an artist at the helm. 
 

 If' 
 
 , 7 - 
 
 ( •\ 
 
 
 ,:lia 
 
 m 
 
 ^ii» - ie^- 1^ qr ■• - - - -- 
 
 r W* *■ 
 
 ««K.' 
 
 '" •• *-■ 
 
 V*'i^' 
 
 . -■« iw'jiffif', 
 
 ■ .-il' .-,’qt;V'i^i^'( -_ 
 
 'I'Vi.; r 
 
 ■.. ' . 3 J- 
 
 '.., 'Jii)' rti«.-„..diiBlf 
 
 'l.'^ 
 
 *, Ciiat'v 
 
 >..v: t'itfftuWj'i/ 
 
 *■■ -t V'.-'j •>r*'^ ■•'♦i 
 
 :r,|( 
 
 . <■ 4 ^; . 
 
 j , j ’' I 
 
 •«$1 
 
 
 ,1; 
 
 I '■ ^ 
 
 ij hA 
 
 r 4 l 
 
 fCiA.*m « ■ ' • - w ^ ^jjn# 
 
 I *.‘1 ' . I '"• ' . j^. - 
 
 
 
 ‘i i* ■• 
 
 Ti 
 
 ■•■ '^j 
 
 
 Hjf . 
 
 i'W.-M 
 
 r « /•-. .ifb « 
 
 
 >1 
 
Index 
 
 This index is centered on Herman Melville. The titles of his writings appear 
 as main entries, and an unqualified entry such as “appearance vs. reality” refers 
 directly to the content of those writings. The names of fictional characters (e.g., 
 Captain Vere) are listed as commonly referred to by critics and are not inverted 
 for alphabetical ordering. 
 
 Adamic myth, 108-9 
 
 Ahab, 26-32, 35-36, 40-41, 45-49, 
 
 191, 213-15, 248-49 
 appearance vs. reality, 58, 63-72, 84- 
 96, 122-23, 266-67. See also skepti¬ 
 cism 
 
 “Apple-Tree Table, The,” 92-94 
 artistry, 8, 62-72, 107, 155-71, i8on, 
 221-37 
 
 Arvin, Newton, 97-99, 104-5, 
 
 “Bartleby the Scrivener,” 33, 117-18, 
 134,176-77 
 
 Battle-Pieces, 26-27, 222-27 
 “Benito Cereno,” 104, 148-54, 178, 
 267-71 
 
 Billy Budd, 38-39, 42-45, 104, 188- 
 202 
 
 biographical approaches, 6, 10-22, 98, 
 142-43, 172, 1750, 1770, 1850,186- 
 87, 190, 237 
 Bowen, Merlin, 238 
 British opinion. See English critics 
 Brodtkorb, Paul, 248 
 
 Captain Amasa Delano, 149-54 
 Captain Vere, 38-39, 188-202. See 
 also Billy Budd 
 Carpenter, Frederic Ives, 118 
 Chase, Richard, loi, 165, 240 
 Christianity, 38, 47-48, 55, 189, 210, 
 230-36 
 
 Claggart, 30-31, 46. See also Billy 
 Budd 
 
 Clarel, 26, 37, 221-37 
 “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” 85-87, 116-34, 
 263 
 
 comic spirit, 10, 970, 102-4, 
 ii6n, 127-28, 180, 236, 254-73. 
 also irony 
 
 community, sense of, 25, 37-39, 41, 
 45-46, 109, 188-91 
 Confidence-Man, The, 2, 26, 34-35, 
 57, 62-72, 117, 123, 180-87, 257> 
 260-61 
 
 Cooper, James Fenimore, 137 
 Curtis, George W., 149 
 
 Daggoo, 145-46 
 
 democracy, 25, 41-42, 48-49, 136, 155 
 depravity, 45, 79, 99-101, 109, 150-51. 
 
 See also pessimism 
 determinism. See pessimism 
 domesticity, 84-96 
 Dryden, Edgar A., 172, 238 
 Duyckinck, Evert and George, 3, 34, 
 52, 80, 120, 124-25, 1270, 205-6, 
 208-9, 211-12, 239 
 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 23, 25, 260, 
 29, 32-34, 39, 53, 118-27, 159, 224, 
 226. See also transcendentalism 
 “Encantadas, The,” 175-176, 263-64 
 
276 
 
 Index 
 
 English critics, 1-9, ii, loi 
 evil. See depravity; pessimism 
 
 Father Mapple, 60 
 Faustian ideal, 239-53 
 Fleece, 148 
 
 Freeman, John, ii, loi 
 free will. See pessimism 
 Frye, Northrop, 108, 227 
 
 geniality, 34-35, 70-71, 190-91, 254- 
 
 73 
 
 Gilman, William, 97-98 
 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 35, 
 i2on, 239 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 39-40, 59, 65, 
 73-83, 108-9, 121-22, 156, 182, 
 1850, 186, 209, 211-13, 220, 257-59 
 “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 36, 41, 
 73-83, 209-10, 215, 257-59 
 head vs. heart, 34-39, 78-79, 235, 272 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 21-22 
 Homer, 52-61 
 
 Howard, Leon, 118, 143, 203-4 
 humor. See comic spirit 
 
 “I and My Chimney,” 10-22, 257, 
 
 272-73 
 
 Iliad, 52-56 
 
 irony, 87, 92, 161, 185, 259. See also 
 comic spirit 
 
 Ishmael, 41, 85, 88, 96, 177, 246-53, 
 
 259 
 
 isolation, 26-33, 49> 87-88, 163-64, 
 174-76. See also community, sense 
 of 
 
 Israel R. Potter {The Life and Re¬ 
 markable Adventures of), 177-78, 
 264-67 
 
 Jack Chase, 44-45 
 
 “Jimmy Rose,” 90-92, 178-79 
 
 fohn Marr and Other Sailors, 233, 256 
 
 Levin, Harry, loo-ioi 
 Lewis, R. W. B., 100 
 “Lightning-Rod Man, The,” 87-90, 
 264 
 
 Mardi, 12-13, 24-28, 33, 37, 39, 47, 
 137-39^186, 244 
 Mathews, Cornelius, i2on 
 Matthiessen, F. O., 50-51, 97, 99, 120 
 Melville, Allan, 17-18, 20, 186-87 
 Moby-Dicl{, 2-5, 8-9, 40-49, 58, 60, 
 104, 107, 114, 123, 141-48, 158-59, 
 172, 186, 227, 238-53; composition 
 of, 143, 203-20 
 
 Mumford, Lewis, i, 7-8, ii, 97-98, 
 
 lOI 
 
 myth critics, 97-115, 227 
 
 naivete, 103, 113-15. See also skepti¬ 
 cism 
 
 narrators, uses of, 24n, 88, 94-96, 102, 
 156, 227, 250-52, 2550, 259, 263, 
 270-71 
 
 natural man, 44, 47, 189, 200-201 
 Negro, figure of, 135-54 
 
 Odyssey, 52, 56-61 
 Olson, Charles, 203-4, ^47 
 
 Omoo, 136-37 
 optimism, 85-87, 130-34 
 organic form, 226-27 
 
 “Paradise of Bachelors and the Tar¬ 
 tarus of Maids, The,” 155-71 
 pessimism, 30-32, 54-56, 60-61, 74- 
 87, 172-87 
 
 “Piazza, The,” 94-96 
 Piazza Tales, The, 10, 84-96, 149, 254 
 Pierre, 1-2, 10-22, 26, 28-31, 33-36, 
 39, 123, 126, 148-49, 174-75, 186, 
 259-60 
 
 Pierre (as character), 17, 36, 39, 174 
 Pip, 146-48 
 
Queequeg, 144-45, 219 
 
 reading, 52-61, 173, aoyn, 208-9 
 Redburn, 25, 41, 97-115, 139-41, 238 
 religious ideas. See Christianity 
 Rosenberry, Edward H., 97, 118 
 
 Scarlet Letter, The, 236 
 Seelye, John, 243 
 
 self-knowledge, 84-96, 244-46, 257 
 sexuality, 155-71 
 
 Shakespeare, William, 53, 173-87, 
 209-10, 215, 217 
 
 skepticism, 69, 71, 93-94, 124-25, 187, 
 222-23, ^44> 
 
 social interdependence, 23-39, ^^9“ 
 202. See also community, sense of 
 style, 3, 158-59. See also artistry 
 
 Thompson, Lawrance, 260 
 
 Thoreau, Henry David, 116-20, 126- 
 
 27 
 
 "Town-Ho's Story, The,” 40-49 
 transcendentalism, 29n, 39, 120-28, 
 156, 200, 224. See also Emerson, 
 Ralph Waldo 
 
 Tuckerman, Henry T., 80-82 
 “Two Temples, The,” 27 
 Typee, 28, 33, 47, 136-37, 201 
 
 Vincent, Howard P., 204 
 
 Warren, Robert Penn, 225 
 Weaver, Raymond M., 6-8, ii, 20, 73, 
 
 lOI 
 
 White-Jacket, 31, 41-42, 50-51, 97, 
 
 141 
 
 Whitman, Walt, 5, 24, 135 
 Wordsworth, William, 118-19, ^28- 
 
 29 
 

 
 >>"'t ; T'fk. 
 
 •iT' L 
 
 ■l,,,;^. ..VTj "' '-♦^t:-- . ,. ,«»■.'-»■« ■ 
 
 ■ ■ 5 .'' r,«* ■ ^ ■ • VV' ■ 
 
 Djl’yfef '■ » 
 
 v^-Vl-^SS^lJ-pa 
 
 ■ V V"(' ■(! «" ' ■ 
 
 t yii 
 
 i v/ <> 4 ^ 
 
 ■ %iL^ '.it:.', ri* 
 
Notes on Contributors 
 
 James Barbour (1933-). University of New Mexico, 1969-. Edited Romanti¬ 
 cism (1986); Essays on Puritans and Puritanism ( 1986). 
 
 John Bryant (1949-). Pennsylvania State University, Shenango Valley Campus, 
 1980-1986; Hofstra University, 1986-. Melville Dissertations ig2^-ig8o: An 
 Annotated Bibliography (1983); A Companion to Melville Studies (1986). 
 
 John G. Cawelti (1929-). University of Chicago, 1957-1980; University of 
 Kentucky, 1980- Apostles of the Self-Made Man (1965); The Six-Gun Mys¬ 
 tique (1970); A Focus on Bonnie and Clyde (1973); Adventure, Mystery, and 
 Romance: Formula Stories in Art and Popular Culture (1976); The Spy Story 
 (1987). 
 
 Hubert H. Hoeltje (1898-1969). State University of Iowa, 1928-1947; Univer¬ 
 sity of Oregon, 1947-1961; Union College (Kentucky), 1961-1968. Sheltering 
 Tree: A Story of the Friendship of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Amos Bronson 
 Alcott (1943); Inward Skjy: The Mind and Heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne 
 (1962). 
 
 R. W. B. Lewis (1917-). Bennington College, 1948-1950; Smith College 1951- 
 1952; Newark College, Rutgers University, 1954-1959; Yale University, 1959-. 
 The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth 
 Century (1955); The Picaresque Saint: Representative Figures in Contempo¬ 
 rary Fiction (1959); Trials of the Word: Essays in American Literature and 
 the Humanistic Tradition (1965); The Poetry of Hart Crane (1967); Edith 
 Wharton: A Biography (1975). 
 
 Sidney P. Moss (1917-). Murray State University, 1954-1964; Southern Illinois 
 University, Carbondale, 1965-1987. Poe’s Literary Battles: The Critic in the 
 Context of His Literary Milieu (1963); Poe’s Major Crisis: His Libel Suit and 
 New Yor 1 (s Literary World (1970); Charles Dickens’ Quarrel with America 
 (1984). 
 
 John W. Nichol (1921-). Denison University, 1953-1966; University of 
 Hawaii, Manoa, 1976-1978; University of Southern California, 1966-86. 
 
 Sherman Paul (1920-). Harvard University, 1950-1952; University of Illinois, 
 1952-1974 (M. F. Carpenter Professor, 1967-1974); University of Iowa, Carver 
 Distinguished Professor of English, 1974-. Emerson’s Angle of Vision: Man 
 and Nature in American Experience (1952); The Shores of America: 
 Thoreau’s Inward Exploration ( 1958); Louis Sullivan: An Architect in Ameri¬ 
 can Thought (1962); Edmund Wilson, A Study of Literary Vocation in Our 
 Time (1965); Randolph Bourne (1966); The Music of Survival: A Biography 
 of a Poem by William Carlos Williams (1968); Hart’s Bridge (1972); Repos¬ 
 sessing and Renewing: Essays in the Green American Tradition (1976); 
 
Notes on Contributors 
 
 Olson’s Push: Origin, Blac\ Mountain, and Recent American Poetry (1978); 
 The Lost America of Love: Rereading Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and 
 Robert Duncan (1981); The Onward Way (1984); In Search of the Primitive: 
 Rereading David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg, and Gary Snyder (1986). 
 
 O. W. Riegel (1902-). Dartmouth College, 1927-1929; Washington and Lee 
 University, 1930-1973. Mobilizing for Chaos: The Story of the New Propa¬ 
 ganda (1934); Crown of Glory: The Life of James J. Strang, Moses of the 
 Mormons (1935). 
 
 Beryl Rowland (1918-). University of Toronto, 1962-1963; York University, 
 1963-1987; University of Victoria, 1987-. Blind Beasts: Chaucer’s Animal 
 World (1971); Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism 
 (1973); Birds with Human Souls (1978); Medieval Woman’s Guide to Health 
 (1981). Edited Companion to Chaucer Studies (1968, 1979); Essays in Chau¬ 
 cerian Irony (1985). 
 
 James Schroeter (1927-1985). Temple University, 1961-1962; Illinois Institute 
 of Technology, 1962-1974; University of Lausanne, 1974-1985. Edited Willa 
 Cather and Her Critics (1967). 
 
 Merton M. Sealts (1915-). Wellesley College, 1946-1948; Lawrence University, 
 1948-1965; University of Wisconsin, 1965-1982 (Henry A. Pochmann Profes¬ 
 sor of English, 1975-1982). Melville as Lecturer (1957); Melville’s Reading 
 (1966); The Early Lives of Melville: Nineteenth-Century Biographical Sketches 
 and Their Authors (1974); Pursuing Melville, ig^o-igSo (1982). Edited by 
 Billy Budd, Sailor (1962); Emerson’s "Nature”: Origin, Growth, Meaning 
 (1969). 
 
 Bryan S. Short (1942-). Northern Arizona University, 1967-. 
 
 Eleanor E. Simpson (19 -). 
 
 Judith Slater (1938-). Canisius College, 1970-1975; Clinical psychologist, 
 1980-. 
 
 Christopher W. Sten (1944-). George Washington University, 1970-. 
 
 Gustaaf Van Cromphout (1938-). State University of Ghent, 1966-1968; 
 Northern Illinois University, 1968-. 
 
 Charles N. Watson, Jr. (1939-). Washington State University, 1968-1975; 
 Syracuse University, 1975-. The Novels of Jact{ London: A Reappraisal (1983). 
 
 R. E. Watters (1912-1980). University of Washington, 1941-1944; Indiana 
 University, 1944-1946; University of British Columbia, 1946-1961; Royal 
 Military College of Canada, 1961-1976. Edited A Chec\ List of Canadian Liter¬ 
 ature and Background Materials (1959; 1972); Canadian Anthology (1966, 
 1974); The Sam Slic]{ Anthology (1969). 
 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 
 On Melville / edited by Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady, 
 p. cm.—(The Best from American literature) 
 
 Includes index. 
 
 I. Melville, Herman, 1819-1891—Criticism and interpretation. 
 I. Budd, Louis J. II. Cady, Edwin Harrison. III. Series. 
 PS2387.05 1988 8 i 3'.3—dc 19 88-18897 
 
 ISBN 0-8223-0867-3 
 
I 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
DUKE UNIVERSITY 
 LIBRARY 
 
 
 DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA 
 27706