HERMAN MELVILLE’S READING IN ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY

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T his d iss e rta tio n h a s b e e n m ic ro film e d e x a c tly a s r e c e iv e d

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SEALTS, J r ., M erton M ille r , 1915HERMAN M ELV ILLE'S READING IN ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY. Y ale U n iv e r s ity , P h .D ., 1942 L anguage and L ite ra tu r e, m odern

U n iv ersity M icrofilm s, Inc., A n n A rbor, M ich igan

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MERTON MILLER SEALTS, JR. 1969 ____________________________________

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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HERMAN MELVILLE’S READING IN ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY

Merton M» S e a l t s ,J '

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of The Graduate School of Yale University ,in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1942

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Summary

Intended as the foundation for a definitive treatment of Herman Melville'3 relation to historical philosophy, this study opens with an introduction to Melville, his reading, and his interest in philosophy, together with a survey of materials available for an investigation of this nature.

The next three chapters analyze in

detail Melville’s use of Plato, the most important of all his philosophical sources because of the ethical influence of P l a t o ’s Socrates, the stimulus of Platonic thought, and the effect on Melville’s literary style of P l a t o ’s imagery and myths.

Later chapters trace Melville’s

familiarity with philosophers and their ideas up to the beginnings of modern inductive thought, showing that except for Plato, Proclus, Plutarch, and the Stoics, his knowledge of ancient thinkers came mostly from secondary sources.

In addition to defining the extent of Melville's reading within the limits of its field, this investigation has established the source of many hitherto obscure allusions in Melville's works and has thrown new light on a number of important problems of critical interpretation. Melville's interest in ancient mythology and in the psychology developed first by ancient thinkers does much to explain the symbolism of Mardi, Moby-Dick, and especially the perplexing Pierre.

Appended to the text

will be found a discussion of the composition of Mardi, a record of books purchased by Melville from his publishers, and a concordance of his allusions to philosophical and religious thinkers.

This sup­

plementary material, all relevant to the present subject, has never before been dealt with by Melville scholarship.

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Contents

"Out of the trunk the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters." Moby-Dick, II, 9.

Chapter

_ Preface

One

Two

ii. iii.

Melville and the Doctrines of the Republic Myths and Figures in the Republic and Timaeus — Melville’s Debt to Plato

Philosophy, Mythology, and Religion i. ii. iii.

Six

Mardi and the Phaedrus Madness and Right Reason Pierre and the Symposium

Plato's Republic and Timaeus i.

Five

Melville’s Text of Plato The Character of Socrates Melville and the Phaedo

P l a t o ’s Phaedrus and Symposium i. ii. iii.

Four

The World of Mind The World of Books Melville’s Knowledge of Philosophy

Socratic Wisdom i. ii. iii.

Three

iii

The Scope of Melville’s Reading i. ii. iii.

"Neoplatonical Originals" Fire- Worshippers and Gnostics The philosophy of Mythology

Other Ancient Philosophers i. ii. iii.

Page

"Seneca and the Stoics" Melville and the Philosophic Tradition Some Sources of Melville’s psychology

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1 2 13 23 35 36 39 48 66 67 75 83 93

94 105 118 125 126 136 148 158 159 168 180

page Summary and Conclusion

191

Appendices

204

I. II• III*

The Composition of Melville’s Mardi Books Bought by Melville from his Publishers, 1846-1880 Melville’s Allusions to Philosophical and Religious Thinkers

Bibliography

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205 211 215 224

HERMAN MELYILLE, 1819-1891

”And if you rightly look for it, you will almost always find that the author himself has some­ where furnished you with his own picture.” ’’Hawthorne and His Mosses, in Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces, p. 138.

”One read his superscription clear --A genial heart, a brain austere — And further, deemed that such a man Though given to study, as might seem, Was no scholastic partisan Or euphonist of Academe, But supplemented P l ato's theme With daedal life in boats and tents, A messmate of the elements....” Clarel, I, 121.

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Preface

This dissertation is a study of Herman Melville’s reading in philosophy from the Greek thinkers to the beginners of modern inductive thought --- in general, from Plato to Bacon.

In offering an

introduction to Melville, his reading, and his interest in philosophy, and in concentrating on his knowledge and use of the thought of the ancients, I have endeavored to lay the foundation for a definitive treatment of Melville’s relation to historical philosophy.

To Herman Melville’s granddaughters --- Mrs. Eleanor Melville Metcalf of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Mrs. Frances T« Osborne of West Orange, Hew Jersey ---

I should like to express m y gratitude for

their kindnesses in furthering m y study of their grandfather’s work. I a m also indebted to other students of Melville for favors granted me in the preparation of this dissertation:

Dr. Henry A. Murray and

Professor Kenneth B. Murdock of Harvard University, Mr. William Braswell of Purdue University, Mr. Charles Olson of New York City, Dr. Victor Hugo Paltsits, recently retired from the New York Public Library, Miss Elizabeth Foster,who is preparing a doctoral dissertation at Yale on Melville’s The Confidence-Man, and Mr. Walter Bezanson,who i s — making a study of Clarel.

Members of, the staffs of the Yale University, Harvard University, Columbia University, Ne w York Public, University of Chicago, and University of Missouri Libraries have been generous in allowing me to use Melville material in their possession.

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Professor

Murdock, as Chairman of the Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization, Harvard University, has authorized m y quotation of unpublished manuscripts and other material in the Melville Collection of the Harvard University Library.

Such material,

identified in the notes of this study by the symbol [Mj* is not to be printed without permission in writing from the Harvard authorities. Dr. Paltsits has also made available unpublished information relating to Melville in the Duyckinck and Gansevoort-Lansing Collections of the Hew York Public Library, identified in the notes by the respective symbols

[d ] and [G-L].

All quotations from Melville’s published works are from the Standard Edition, in sixteen volumes, published by Constable & Co. (London, 1922-1924).

Customary abbreviations for titles of scholarly

periodicals are employed in the notes, and in addition the following basic books, frequently cited in subsequent Melville scholarship, are referred to by the last name of the author only: Anderson, Charles R., Melville in the South Seas (New York, 1939). Mumford, Lewis, Herman Melville (New York, 1929). Paltsits, V. H., ed., Family Correspondence of Herman Melville, 1830-1904, in the Gansevoort-Lansing Collection (New York Public Library, 1929). Sundermann, K. H», Herman Melviller, Gedankengut (Berlin, 1937)1 Thorp, Willard, Herman Melville: Representative Selections (New York, 1938). Weaver, Raymond, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic (New York, 1921).

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V

Because of the completeness and accuracy of the bibliographies of Melville scholarship printed by Anderson and Thorp, I have not felt it necessary to duplicate their work here.

A bibliography of

publications on Melville appearing in 1938 and after is included in this study as a supplement to their compilations.

To Professor Stanley T. Williams of Yale University, my research adviser, I am grateful for inspiration and wise counsel.

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1

Chapter One

The Scope of Melville's Reading

"In this love of reading he found con­ firmation of his own more reserved thoughts — confirmation which he h a d vainly sought in social converse, so that as touching most fundamental topics, there had got to he established in h i m some positive convictions...." Billy Budd..., p. 29.

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2

i The World of Mind

Sometime during 1848, in the course of writing his third book, Mardi: and a Voyage Thither, Herman Melville inserted a short chapter by -nay of interlude entitled "Sailing On."

In its fashion

a statement of the theme of Mardi, the chapter conveys the excitement of a m a n ■who, Columbus-like, h a d touched upon an undiscovered continent. "But this new world here sought," in Melville’s words, "is stranger far than his, who stretched his vans from Palos.

It is the world

of mind; wherein t h e wanderer m a y gaze round, with more of wonder

1 than Balboa's band roving through the golden Aztec glades."

Mardi, the world of mind, is also stranger far than t h e South Seas, from which Melville had returned in 1844 among the crew of sin American man-of-war.

He h a d first gone to sea in 1837 at

the age of seventeen, and after teaching school and doing clerical work for a time, he had signed

aboard a whale-ship in 1841.

Deserting

in the Marquesas Islands, he spent a month with a native tribe sus­ pected of cannibalism, and in the next two years he visited various parts of the South Pacific before enlisting in the United States Navy for his voyage home around Cape Horn.

In Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847),

written following his return, he had commenced an account of his vagabond life, which he resumed again after Mardi in Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850).

But Mardi itself, originally intended as a

sequel to Qmoo, turned out to have little in common w ith the series which it thus interrupted.

1.

Mardi, II, 277.

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3

This log-book of a voyage to the world of mind is a re­ markable production for a man of Melville's background writing in his twenty-ninth year.

In its departure from the matter and the manner

of Typee and Omoo, the book prepared the w a y for three of his later works, Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), and The Confidenee-Man (1857). Each of these continues the exploration of the realm of psychological and philosophical speculation which Melville began in Mardi.

In the

reportorial vein of his earlier books Melville's critical faculty w a s already awakened, setting the evils of nineteenth-century civilization against the blessings of t h e primitive life he had seen in the South Seas.

In Mardi -Melvilie is once more the critic, but his style rises

there toward the philosophical level he was finally to reach in MobyDick.

Once he h a d begun writing in the new vein Melville dreaded

the thought of going down to posterity only as a "man tAio lived among the cannibals!"

For during his years at sea, he explained to Hawthorne,

he had "had no development at all. m y life.

From.my twenty-fifth year I date

Three weeks have scarcely p assed between then and now,

2 that I have not unfolded within myself."

Thus, though in Moby-Dick Melville pictures himself ten years before as a dreamy, meditative man who kept a poor lookout for whales

3 at the mast-head,

the author of Mardi and Moby-Dick had changed since

the day he had sailed aboard the Acushnet in 1841.

Even the Melville

of Typee and Omoo, written in 1845 and 1846, shows no interest in the

2. Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, [ ] June, 1851, printed b y Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His W i f e , 2 vol. (Boston, 1885), I, 400-407. The suggested date is supplied b y Thorp, p. 389. 3. Moby-Dick, I, 197. The fanciful mood of the "Mast-Head" chapter, from which this is taken, is the outgrowth of Chapter XIX of White-Jacket ("The Jacket Aloft"), in which Melville describes himself as a sailor "of a meditative humour" climbing the masts alone to "give loose to re­ flection" (p. 96). There are no such characterizations in Typee or Omoo. R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

4

abstract speculation which appears first in Mardi.

Apart from recalling 4 in Omoo the fondness for Hobbes of his old companion Dr. Long Ghost,

he nowhere mentions a philosopher’s name in his first two books. Even in White-Jacket he remembers finding the philosophy of Locke’s 5 Essays "but miserable reading at sea." When Melville declares in

6 Moby-Dick that "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,"

the

reader may be sure that formal philosophy had been a minor part of the curriculum.

Against the evidence of Melville’s letter to Hawthorne regard­

ing the course of his development, one must look elsewhere than to his whaling career for more immediate influences upon the composition of Mardi.

Following his return to America in 1844 Melville had become acquainted with Evert Duyckinck during the writing of Typee.

Duyckinck,

an intimate of leading American authors of the day, introduced Melville 7 into the literary circles of New York. As one of the "Knights of the Round Table" gathering with Duyckinck in his home at 20 Clinton Place,

8 Melville had ample opportunity to "talk sentiment or philosophy"

and

to increase the range of his reading by making use of Duyckinck’s wellstocked library.

Duyckinck and his brother George were both widely

read, and with the resources of their books at his disposal Melville plunged avidly into the literature of the past.

Shakespeare himself,

he once wrote, "had his fathers too" among the authors who had 9 preceded him, and in Melville’s own case genealogical charts survive

4.

Qmoo, p. 14.

5.

White-Jacket, p. 207.

6.

Moby-Dick, I, 139.

7. The importance of Melville’s friendship with Duyckinck and his circle is properly stressed in Luther S. Mansfield*s unpublished Univer­ sity of Chicago dissertation (1936), "Herman Melville-;- Author and New Yorker, 1844-1851," drawn on by the present writer as well as by Thorp and Anderson. Mansfield is now at work on further study of Duyckinck and his friends. 8.

Cf. Mardi, I, 3.

9.

Pierre, p. 191.

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5

in the partial records of his -voluminous reading.

From the available

records it is known that under the stimulus of Duyckinck and his circle Melville, having drawn extensively upon the literature of the

10 South Seas in writing Typee and Omoo,

turned more and more to the

realm of belles-lettres and philosophy.

Behind the wide allusiveness of Mardi and its successors, therefore, lies the development of Melville's taste and the increasing scope of his reading after 1844.

The Mardian philosopher Babbalanja

holds that authorship is born of "a full h e a r t : ----brimful, bubbling,

11 sparkling; and running over like the flagon in your hand, m y lord.” Overflowing with book-lore and stimulated b y good companionship, Melville might have made just such a pronouncement himself to his host, over the Duyckinck punch-bowl.

The character of Babbalanja, to whom

he gives disproportionate space in Mardi, is in fact a measure of Melville's own new and growing interest in philosophy.

The subordina­

tion to Babbalanja of the f igures of Mohi the chronicler and Yoomy the poet matches exactly the change from the Melville of Typee and Omoo to the Melville of Mardi and Moby-Dick.

Dissatisfied w i t h retelling

his South Sea adventures as the range of his conversation and his reading increased, he had set out to conquer the new world of mind in Mardi.

Between the world of mind and the literary world of the

Duyckincks there was a direct connection.

Though in its final form Mardi wavers between romance, an extended allegory, and a series of fragmentary critiques on organized society, on ethics and religion, and on the problems of philosophy, it

10. In Anderson's Melville in the South Seas is a full treatment of Melville’s use of source-material t o enrich his own reminiscences in Typee, Omoo, and ~White-Jacket. Relevant diort articles on the same sub­ ject are listed in Anderson's notes and in T h orp’s bibliography. H.

Mardi, II, 322.

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6

is nevertheless what Hawthorne found it to he -—

a rich book.

There

are, as he said, ” depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life.

It is so good that one scarcely pardons the writer for 12

not having brooded long over it, so as to make it a great deal better.” Melville did brood over Mardi, longer than over any of his other works before Moby-Dick, but it w a s not until after he had begun writing that 13 some idea of th e book as w e n o w have it took shape. The four years of development which lay immediately behind the b o o k had stored Melville's mind with ideas that demanded release — - ideas wh ich had little in common with a straightforward account of a sailor's adventures. So to the disgust of one school of criticism common to Melville's century and the next, he interrupted a series of successful adventurestories to write his first work of philosophical fiction.

As the turning-

point in hi s literary career, Mardi is -the beginning of any study dealing with Melville's mature ideas.

^

The present investigation is intended to contribute to the

understanding of Mardi and its successors by exploring the reading in philosophy -vdiich lay behind their composition.

Melville himself once

predicted that ”Time, which is the solver of all riddles, will solve 14 Mardi,” and Time and scholarship are beginning to prove hi m correct. The stud^r of hi s reading in other departments of literature has revealed a large measure of Melville's meaning in ascribing his real development to those years in w h ich his knowledge of books had increased so rapidly.

12. Hawthorne to Evert Duyckinck, 29 August, 1850 [D], quoted in part b y Thorp, note, p. 423. 13. This fact is not generally realized by students of Melville despite its obvious importance. I have therefore supplied the detailed evidence for such a conclusion in Appendix I, pp. 205-210. 14. Melville to his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, 23 April, 1849 [M], quoted in part by Weaver, pp. 273f.

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7

What he learned of philosophy between 1844 and the writing of Mardi four years later was responsible to a considerable degree for the nature of the books

its troublesome composition, its uncertain execu­

tion, and the thoughts not yet fully formed with which it is overloaded. In Moby-Dick, however, the fruits of Melville,s reading in philosophy ---------15 are as completely assimilated as the "historical whale-research" which also w e n t into the later book.

Between the two works his ideas

had matured as his reading progressed and his style improved.

Beginning

with his early acquaintance with philosophy, this investigation will therefore consider both t h e genesis of Melville's ideas and t h e develop­ ment of his literary technique as influenced b y one important segment of his reading.

There is ample external evidence for Melville's continued interest in philosophy between 1848 and 1851, whaa. Moby-Dick was publidied.'

In the fall of 1849, during his voyage to Europe, his

companion on shipboard w a s G. J. Adler, a professor of German introduced to him b y George Duyckinck.

On their second night at sea Melville and

Adler talked "to a late: hour ... of 'Fixed Fate, Free-Will, foreknowledge 16 absolute* &c," and in true Mardian style they continued their philosophical conversations throughout the trip over whiskey and mulled wine.

"Topic

metaphysics," runs Melville's entry in 17 his journal regarding one of their talks. Melville was delighted with

15.

as usual —

Moby-Dick, II, 208.

16. Melville 'g journal of his European trip [M], entry of 13 October, 1849. His allusion is of course to Paradise Lost, ii.560. Weaver, pp. 284-304, prints extracts from the journal, though as in the case of the present quotation (p. 285) his transcription is some­ what inaccurate. Citation here and be l o w is directly from Melville's MS. 17. Melville’s journal, 7 December, 1849. and 27 October; 2, 15 November; 4 December.

Cf. entries of 12, 22,

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8

Adler, who as a professional student of German literature and thought 18 ■was prepared to instruct h i m in "Hegel, Schlegel, Kant, etc.” The effect of A d l e r ’s information upon Melville and his writing is difficult to estimate, b u t it was undoubtedly considerable.

It is unlikely

that such conversation would have interested Melville a few years before: his journal abundantly oonfirms the impression given b y Mardi of a far different man from the adventurer of Typee and Omoo.

In t h e summer of 1850, following his early return from Europe, Melville and his family moved from New York City into western Massachusetts. head, the

During October they settled near Pittsfield at Arrow­

old farmhouse that was Melville’s residence until his return

to Ne w York in 1863.

On 5 August, 1850, had begun the most important

friendship of Melville’s life, w h e n Evert Duyckinck introduced him to 19 Nathaniel Hawthorne. Until November of 1851 the t w o were near neighbors, exchanging frequent visits and sharing ideas while Melville w a s writing Moby-Dick.

Surviving letters from Melville to Hawthorne and entries

in the letter’s notebooks echo their talks ’’about time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters, that lasted pretty deep into

20 the night....”

18.

Substitute for Hawthorne the literati of New York,

Melville’s journal, 22 October, 1849.

19. Duyckinck had been acquainted with Hawthorne for some years. Copies of letters from Duyckinck to Hawthorne dated as early as 21 March, 1845, are preserved in Duyckinck’s "Miscellany” copy-book [D]. For Duyckinck’s description of the occasion of Melville’s first meeting with Hawthorne, cf. Luther S. Mansfield, "Glimpses of Herman Melville’s Life in Pittsfield, 1850-1851," Am. Lit., IX, 26-48 (March, 1937). Other accounts of this meeting also are cited by Mansfield. Concerning Hawthorne’s influence on Melville’s writing, cf. Leon Howard, "Melville’s Struggle with the Angel," M L Q ,I, 195-206 (June, 1940). 20. The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Randall Stewart (tfew Haven, 1932), p* 220 (entry of 1 August, 1851).

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put Mardi in place of Moby-Dick, and one has in broad outline the interests that prompted Melville to write the earlier book,

Moby-Dick

begins where Mardi ends, just as in Hawthorne Melville had found a richer

21 vein than that of Duyckinck,

The "new world here sought” in Mardi

is the setting of Melville’s greatest imaginative work.

In his writing

as in his conversation, speculation was n o w his characteristic habit.

Thus the pattern of 1848 had become set in 1851, but with Moby-Dick Melville himself felt that in his development he had ”come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and -that shortly the flower must fall to 22 the mould.” A series of disappointments did follow, the first being Hawthorne’s departure from the Berkshires in the same month that the book was published in N e w York. ’’Ontological heroics” indulged in over 23 a bottle of brandy became a thing of the past, though w i t h Oliver Wendell Holmes, in residence near Arrowhead, conversation on at least one occasion ’’drifted to East India religions and mythologies” and con24 _ tinued ’’for hours” with considerable brilliancy on both sides, "What's the reason, Mr. Hawthorne,” Melville had once inquired, ”that in the last stages of metaphysics a fellow always falls to swearing so? I 25 could rip an hour.” But the omnipresent bottle, the metaphysics, and the

21.

Mardi, II, 277.

22. Melville t o Hawthorne, [ ] June, 1851, printed by Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne a n d His W i f e , I, 400-407. 23.

Melville to Hawthorne, 29 June, 1851, ibid., I, 398-400.

24. M. B. Field, Memories of Many Men and of Some Women (New York, 1874), pp. 201f. 25. Melville to Hawthorne, 16 April, 1851, printed in Nathaniel Hawthorne and His W i f e , I, 385-389. The date o f this letter, headed ^Pittsfield, Wednesday morning,” is established from a presentation copy of Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables [M] inscribed ”April 1 1 ^ 1851/ Friday evening/ S|.ophiaJ A H [ a w t h o m e Jri. A "review” of the book occupies most of the letter, written the fbllowing week.

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swearing were too much for Melville's other neighbors; with his '•liberal views," a visitor reported, he was "apparently considered by the good people at Pittsfield as little better than a cannibal or 26 a 'beach-comber.>"

The barrier between Melville and his neighbors was no greater than the gulf between him and his public.

Preference for his factual

narratives over his philosophical romances was the general critical 27 reaction in both England and America, but Melville refused to write more Typees and Ctaioos -—

he had never quite forgiven himself for

28 turning out R e d b u m .

Public response to Pierre, the most intro­

spective of all his novels, was distinctly unfavorable, and by the time of its publication Melville had exhausted both his health and his money.

During the next few years, the most crucial period of his

life, he occupied himself with contributions to magazines, but The 29 Confidence-Man (1857) was his last public appearance as a writer of prose.

A rather unsuccessful series of lecture engagements followed

his trip to the Holy Land in 1856-1857.

His failure in attempting to

26. Letter from Titus Munson Coan to his mother, quoted in part in C o a n ’s "Herman Melville," The Literary World, XXII, 492f (19 December, 1891), and printed in full by Arthur StecLman, " 'Marquesan' Melville," in the New York World for 11 October, 1891, p. 26. On Melville's irreverent language, cf. a letter from his neighbor Sarah Morewood to George Duyckinck, 28 December, 1851 [Dj» quoted in Mansfield's "Glimpses..." (note 19, above); Evert Duyckinck's diary, 1 October, 1856 [D] (note 31, below). 27. Charles R. Anderson, "Melville's English Debut," Am- Lit., XI, 23-38 (March, 1939), p. 37. 28. On Melville's distaste for Redburn, which he considered a pot­ boiler, cf. his journal, 6 Novemc7eT‘7^x84'9™"['MJ, and his letter to Evert Duyckinck from London, 14 December, 1849 [d ], printed by Thorp, pp. 376f. 29. Miss Elizabeth Foster's Yale dissertation, "Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man is in progress as this is written.

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11

publish a projected volume of poems and to obtain a consular appoint­ ment led to his accepting an obscure post in New York as inspector of customs.

This position Melville occupied from 1866 through 1885,

retiring six years before his death.

Apart from, several volumes of

verse intended for limited distribution, notably the long poem Clarel 3° (1876), he published no more.

Though the failure of Pierre had for all practical purposes ended Melville’s literary career, both the content of his later work and the testimony of the few friends of his last years show that hostility to his philosophizing on the part of the public had not affected his own interest in philosophy.

Evert Duyckinck described

him in 1856 as “charged to the muzzle with his sailor metaphysics and 31jargon of things unknowable.” Hawthorne, who saw him in Liverpool later that year, took note of his poor health and spirits but found 32 his topics of conversation familiar: “Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken....

It is strange how he persists — - and has per­

sisted ever since I knew him, and probably long b e f o r e

in wandering

to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sandhills amid which we were sitting."

Three years later a student at Williams

College, Titus Munson Coan, went to Arrowhead hoping to hear Melville

30. "Herman Melville’s Clarel Walter Bezanson’s Yale disserta­ tion now in progress, deals in more detail with Melville’s career up to this date. 31. Duyckinck’s diary, 1 October, 1856 [D], quoted by Willard Thorp, “Herman Melville’s Silent Years,” University Review, III, 254-262 (Summer, 1937), p. 257. 32. Hawthorne’s account of their meeting in his English Note-books, 20 November, 1856, is printed in the full version in tKe 'Introduction to Melville’s Journal up the Straits, ed. Raymond Weaver (New York, 1935), pp. xxv-xxvii•

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12

-fcalk of* the South Seas, but found that the subject was closed.

Before

Fayaway, the maiden of Typee, "the shade of Aristotle arose like a cold mist."

Coan, who "had quite enough of Greek philosophy" at Williams,

was disappointed in this trend of the talk. he was forced to add.

"But what a talk it wasJ"

"Melville is transformed from a Marquesan to

a gypsy student, the gypsy element still remaining strong in him." Everything but the South Seas he discussed freely, and when Coan left him "he was in full tide of discourse on all things sacred and profane. But he seems to put away the objective side of life and to shut himself 33 up ... as a cloistered thinker."

In N e w York, where he later became intimate with Melville, Coan found these characteristics essentially the same.

Melville was friendly

and open with a few friends on all subjects except that of his own works, and stories of his complete withdrawal into himself are exaggerations. His absorption in philosophy, almost legendary in his last years among those who knew him, is reflected in his writing of that period but should not be over-estimated.

In his late poetry Melville ventured his belief 34 that "the belated funeral flower of fame" would be his at last, and thirty years after his death in 1891 Moby-Dick began to come into its own.

Nineteenth-century America had not sought the world of mind nor

been interested in Mardian lore, but today the new understanding of Melville’s artistic achievement has extended to the ideas which lie behind his finest creative work.

As a major source of those ideas hnd an important

influence on his literary development, the reading in philosophy which Melville began before the publication of Mardi and continued through the rest of his life deserves careful investigation and appraisal.

33.

Titus Munson Coan, letter to his mother, cited above, note 26.

34.

"Thy Aim, Thy Aim," Poems, p. 415.

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13

ii The World of Books

Some of the most illuminating among recent studies of Melville have concerned the direct relation between his reading and his published work.

The largest segment of source-material to be investigated to date

includes the trave1-books, which Melville in his factual narratives employed to supplement recollections of his own experiences.

His

knowledge of philosophy ami general literature, which was even more extensive, has not yet received proportionate attention. Unless dealing 35 with the Bible or some acknowledged source, any study of Melville’s - ■ reading must necessarily begin with a survey of available evidence bearing on his possible knowledge of this or that book.

Such evidence, which

will be continually referred to in the course of the present study, is unfortunately far from complete.

Leading into the heart of the problem

is the story of one of over a hundred surviving books from Melville’s own library, a volume of extracts from Bur t o n ’s Anatomy of Melancholy. On its flyleaf are two signatures, Melville’s and his father’s.

"I

bought this book more than four years ago at Gov/an’s store in N e w York,” Melville noted on the same page in 1851. ’’Today, Allan [his brother] in looking at it, first detected the above pencil signature of m y father’s; who

as it now appears —

must have had this book, with many others, 36 sold at auction, at least twenty five years ago.— StrangeJ"

In view of this reference to his fat h e r ’s ”many other” books, it is possible that the Melville family library played an important

35. Melville's use of the Bible is the subject of a Yale Master’s essay by Miss Nathalia "Wright; cf. her "Biblical Allusion in Melville’s Prose,” Am. Lit., XII, 185-199 (May, 1940). 36.

This book is n o w in the Harvard University Library [M].

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14

part in Herman Melville’s intellectual development.

In Redburn,

based on his o w l experiences at the age of seventeen, he dwells on the fascination of his father’s "large library-case," vhich was "tall as a small house" and full of "long rows of old books, that had been printed in Paris, and London, and Leipsic."

Among these were a

Plutarch, a set of the Spectator, and a volume of D ’Alembert in 37 French; perhaps one should add also the edition of "the vast specu38 lations of Plato" which belonged t o the father of Melville’s Pierre. Like young Redburn, Pierre spent long afternoons in the "fastidiously 39 picked and decorous library" of his father, and here again Melville may have been writing out of his own experience.

It would have been typical of the senior Allan Melville, as his character is known to us, to have collected just such a library, and in his prosperous years, through his occupation as importer and his own travels abroad, he had ample opportunity for surrounding himself with even the less common tokens of a cultivated life. expensive imported editions —

Perhaps some of his

one of Plato, for example —

escaped

the auctioneer and found their w a y more directly than did the Burton to the shelves of his son.

From the comparatively well-preserved con­

dition of the Burton, despite its sojourn in the second-hand shops, it 40 may be judged that its original owner had not given it much wear. This of course scarcely permits the generalization that Allan Melville

37.

Redburn, pp. 6, 85.

38.

Pierre, p. 347.

39.

Ibid., p. 5.

40. It should be noted in this connection that Herman Melville also acquired a complete edition of the Anatomy in February, 1848, nearly a year after buying the volume of extracts in April, 1847. This second copy has not survived, but the record of its purchase may be found in a statement of Melville’s account with John Wiley, the publisher and bookseller, dated 1 July, 1848 [M]s cf. Appendix II, p. 211.

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15

had collected hooks more for display than for reading, but such an inference would not be inconsistent with the characteristics seen in 41 him b y certain of his son's biographers. The fact that good books were at least present in the home of Herman Melville's boyhood, w hat­ ever their utility and subsequent fate, should not" be overlooked-.

Little is known of Melville's formal schooling, which pro42 ceeded no further than his attendance at the Albany Academy. Yet from the numerous and somewhat labored literary allusions in his early 43 ’’Fragments from a Writing-Desk" (1839) it can be seen that b y his twentieth year, at home or at school, he had made the acquaintance of many authors.

During his later adventures at sea, an odd assortment

of books came his ways

some of them are mentioned in the tales based

on his rovings.

The most extensive listing occurs in "White-Jacket, 44 where a chapter headed *’A Man-of-War Library" tells of Melville's reading aboard the frigate which brought him back to America.

But it

41. Some notion of Allan Melville's literary tastes in the days before his marriage to Mania Gansevoort ma y be derived from his choice of two books which he presented to hers Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination and Mrs. Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind. These books survive. (Weaver, pp. 57-59.) 42. Cf. Weaver, pp. 49-62, for an account of his probable course of study there. 43. Reprinted in Billy Budd arfl Other Prose Pieces, pp. 382-399: note the mention of "ol’d B u r t o n p . 382. 44. White-Jacket, pp. 207-209. Anderson (p. 358 and notes, p. 484), by consulting United States Naval records, has found a list of books in the library of the frigate on which Melville sailed. This list includes none of the books mentioned in White-Jacket, and Anderson is accordingly inclined to regard it as only a partial inventory. I have noted in the catalogues of Evert Duyckinck's library (cf. note 49, p. 17) a number of the titles named b y Melville: it is therefore possible that the reading which he describes in "A Man-of-War Library" may actually have taken place in New York at the time White-Jacket was being composed.

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■was in New York City, where Melville settled following his marriage to Elizabeth Shaw in 1847, that books began exerting their full influence upon his work.

It is therefore no accident that in Mardi, his first

writing done entirely in New York, is the first real overflow of Melville’s general reading.

No doubt under Duyckinck's guidance,

Melville’s curiosity continued to expand.

On Duyckinck’s own shelves 4-5 and those of the New York Society Library, he found ample material.

Though records of Melville’s borrowings from these libraries 46 are available, they do not take into account his unrecorded browsings within the library rooms.

Mrs. Melville, in a letter to her mother

reporting a typical day in the Melville household, notes that her husband was in the habit of walking down-town in the late afternoon to visit 47 ’’the reading room” during the composition of M a rdi. Considering that at home living quarters were shared with Melville's mother, his three sisters, and his married brother, a few hours spent at Duyckinck’s or the Society Library were no doubt a welcome change for the book-hungry

45. Melville’s receipt from the library for $6.00 annual dues, dated 4 May, 1848, has been preserved [g -L]. For an account of the library, cf. A. B. Keep, History of the New York Society Library (New York, 1908). A brief description is given in Mansfield’s '’’Herman Melville, Author and New Yorker,” pp. 169-171. 46. Conveniently assembled in T h o r p ’s notes, pp. xxvi-xxviii. The fact that Melville apparently withdrew but one book from the New York Society Library suggests that he did most of his reading within the library rooms, no record of such browsing having been made. Cf • note 47. 47. Letter of 23 December, 1847 [m ], printed by Weaver, pp. 265-268. Keep, op. cit., pp. 400f, quotes a description in the New Yorker^ for 28 November, 1840, of the building occupied by the Society Library from 1840 until 1853. The reading-room, containing newspapers and periodicals, was separated from the open-shelf room only by two smaller apartments, used ”as studies for those authors who desire to pursue their investiga­ tions with their authorities around them, or vrho wish to make new books on old Burton’s recipe, 'as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring out of one vessel into another.’” With both old Burton and his recipe, Melville was thoroughly familiar.

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17

young author.

It is surprising that the attention of scholars has been

confined largely to the books actually withdrawn from these libraries by Melville, especially since others known to have been used in his works were available on their shelves.

Choosing at random, for illustra­

tion, from the "Extracts” prefacing Moby-Diok, one finds citations on whales and whaling from Tooke's Lucian, Falconer’s Shipwreck, and 48 Montgomery's World Before the F l ood. It is probably more than coincidence that all these are catalogued in Evert Duyckinck's library, 49 in editions ranging from 1808 to 1844. In Mardi, again, a satirical section lists the books and manuscripts hoarded by an old antiquary: many of these, under disguised titles, were publications currently being 50 read in the N e w York of 1848. "Frankor its King, Court, and Tadpoles," obviously Lewis Cass * France, its King, Court, and Government, and

48.

Moby-Dick, I, xiii, xviii, xix.

49. Lenox Library Short-Title Lists, VIII, XII. The Duyekinck Collection of 15,164 books and 1,569 pamphlets was presented to the Lenox Library, n o w a part of the Ne w York Public Library, in 1878, the year of Evert Duyckinck’s death. Part of this material was transferred to the library building at this time and the remainder following the death of Mrs. Duyekinck in 1890. (H. M. Lydenberg, History of the N e w York Public Library [New York, 1923], pp. lOlf.) The collection was catalogued for use of the library staff in Nos. VIII and XII of the above Lists. Dr. V. H. Paltsits, w h o assisted in preparing the second section, lias kindly allowed me to consult the complete catalogue. These lists reveal that many of Duyckinck’s books, as shown by date of publication, were not acquired by him until after Melville’s removal from Ne w York to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1850, thus pre­ cluding their possible influence on Melville’s early work. Thorp and Anderson are therefore inaccurate in speaking of Melville’s access to "some 17,000" volumes in Duyckinck’s library before 1850 or even later, the library never attaining that size. Mansfield in his discussion of Duyckinck’s books (op. cit., pp. 171-188) is more conservative, though he states that most of the volumes were acquired before 1850. Often Duyekinck noted his date of purchase within individual volumes, and in addition he himself prepared the following during his lifetime: "Catalogue of the Books of Evert A Duyekinck" (1838), "List of Books" (undated), and "Catalogue of Books" (1856). Still other titles appear in his list of "Books Lent." All this material [D] has been of considerable value to the present study. 50.

Mardi, II, 74.

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Three Hours at St. Cloud (New York, 1841), Melville had probably seen 51 in the New York Society Library.

In lieu of other records, it is

possible in similar fashion to establish the presence of additional volumes within one library or the other, at exactly the time when the internal evidence of Melville’s works shows him to have used them.

Meanwhile Melville was buying books for himself, at discount 52 53 from his publishers and in the second-hand markets. The brothers Duyekinck, fond of old authors, turned his attention to rare editions to be found in stores like that of William Gowan, which produced the copy of Burton once belonging to Melville’s father.

Gowan, both book­

seller and publisher, specialized in rare books imported from abroad or reissued under his own name in this country.

Through rummaging in

Gowan’s stock, reading here and there as he once read Emerson in Putnam’s 54 store, Melville unquestionably acquired some of the out-of-the-way information familiar to readers of his works.

For "though public

libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes,” Melville declares in White-Jacket, "yet, somehow, the books that prove

51. It is listed in the Alphabetical and Analytical Catalogue of the New York Society Library (New York, 1850), p. 79, together v.'ith an edition of 1840. This earlier edition lacks the last portion of the title, "Three Hours in St. Cloud," which appears in the next item in 0h-0h’s list: "Tnree Hours in Vivenza [America], containing a Full and Impartial Account of that Whole Country: by a Subject of King Bello [Great Britain]" --- probably satirizing Dickens’ American Notes (1842). 52. Recorded in a series of statements of Melville’s accounts with YiTiley & Putnam, John Wiley, and Harper & Bros. [M]. Relevant extracts from these statements are included in Appendix II of the present study, pp. 211-214. 53. Cf. allusions in Melville’s late correspondence, Paltsits, passim. Oscar Wegelin, "Hannan Melville as I Recall Him," Colophon, N.S. I, 21-24 (Summer, 1935), states that at the time of Melville’s death in 1891, the rumor was current in the book-trade that more of his small income was spent on books than suited his family. 54. Letter to Duyekinck, Boston, 3 March, 1849 [d ], printed by Thorp, pp. 371-373.

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most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up bychance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; 55 those -which pretend to little, but abound in much.”

Apart from listing the books -vhich he pur chased abroad in 56 1849,

Melville has left no record of his excursions to the second-hand

shops.

Occasionally his recent acquisition of some book is mentioned

in correspondence, but a proposed catalogue of his library was never 57 completed. A number of his books were retained in the family after 58 his death in 1891 and are n o w available to scholars, but the greater part of his extensive collection was broken up as that of his father had been some sixty years before.

Eis widow, encumbered by the great store

of books w h ich had accumulated b y the end of his life, disposed of a 59 full wagon-load to a dealer in Brooklyn for only $110. A volume con­ taining the autograph of an obscure author, as Melville had become in those days, meant little, but since the revival of Melville*s fame a few of the discarded items, again turning up in the bookmarts, have

55.

White-Jacket, p. 209.

56. In the journal of his trip to Europe, 1849-1850 [M]. list is printed b y Thorp, p. xxviii.

The

57. A blank-book intended for this purpose but "barren of entries is now in possession of Mrs. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Melville’s grand­ daughter. 58. The largest collection of Melville material [M] includes many books from his library deposited b y Mrs. Metcalf; numerous other books are in possession of her sister, Mrs. Frances T. Osborne. These collec­ tions I have been permitted to examine in detail. Descriptions of additional books n o w in private hands and not available to scholars may be found in sale-catalogues and newspaper accounts listed in Thorp’s bibliography. Through confidential sources I am also aware of additional items not open to examination, but none of this restricted material has direct bearing upon the subject of this investigation. 59. "VTegelin (note 53 above) gives an account of the sale of Melville’s library.

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20

brought many times that small price.

Revealing annotations and mark­

ings in the books thus recovered and in those kept in the family are a token of what has been lost with the remainder.

The surviving titles,

together with records of Melville's borrowings and purchases, thus supply only a partial index to his reading.

His far greater range, shown in

the wide allusiveness of his writing, is demonstrated by the findings of source-studies, but its full extent can never be exactly known.

From Melville's surviving copies of the works of three philosophical writers, marked and annotated in his hand, comes the only direct knowledge of his habits of reading in the field covered by this research. Schopenhauer.

In the last months of his life he was reading

The passages which he marked show, as Thorp has noted,

his particular interest in Schopenhauer's separation of morality and

60 religion;

the passages dealing with the more technical points of

61 formal philosophy, it may be added, are conspicuously free of markings.

60. Thorp, note, p. xxvii. A detailed consideration of-Melville*s marked volumes of Schopenhauer [M] is given in Chapter IX of William Braswell's unpublished University of Chicago dissertation (1934), "Herman Melville and Christianity." Mr. Braswell is now at work on a book based on this dissertation. In order that the present study may avoid duplication, he has, in correspondence with the author, kindly outlined the contents of his own forthcoming monograph. 61. This is m y own observation, based particularly on an examina­ tion of Melville's copy of The World as Will and Idea, tr. R. W. Haldane, 3 vol. (London, 1888) • All' but one of Melville's markings occur in Vols . I and III, which deal with less technical material than that in Vol. II. Even more markings are found in the transla­ tions by T. B. Saunders (London, 1890, 1891) of Schopenhauer's popular works: Counsels and Maxims, Religion: a Dialogue, Studies in Pessimism, and The Wisdom of Lil‘e » Melville*s own ethical thought of many years before is in close agreement on numerous points with that of Schopenhauer, read only at the end of his life. C f . his reference ^-n Billy Budd, written 1888-1891 as this reading progressed, to Captain Vere *s reading for "confirmation of his own more reserved thoughts•" (Billy Budd..., p. 29.)

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21

Between 1861 and 1870, after the close of his great creative period, Melville bought three volumes of Emerson, making annotated comments on Emerson’s ideas concerning the poet, the conduct of life, and the 62 problem of evil. The third writer Melville read in 1848 or earlier, and in this case his reading had an immediate effect upon his own work. In a copy of Seneca’s Morals by W a y of Abstract Melville marked a number of passages, which emerge in Mardi as the sayings of an anonymous

63 ’’antique pagan” quoted with relish b y the philosopher Babbalanja. Only in this volume of Seneca is it possible to see Melville’s mind at work directly upon philosophical source-material, marking what he had selected for verbatim incorporation into Mardi,

The investigator,

lacking other books so valuable, must depend on his own resources in tracing Melville’s similar adaptations.

Other external evidence of Melville’s reading is of little assistance to this purpose.

Writing to Duyekinck in April of 1849 he

reported his recent purchase in Boston of a translation of Pierre 64 Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, important as a secondary source of philosophical ideas, but there is no record of his having

62. William Braswell prints and discusses these annotations in "Melville as a Critic of Emerson,” Am. Lit., IX, 317-334 (November, 1937). On 22 March, 1861 [2?], according t o Melville’s inscription, he bought Emerson’s Essays, Second Series (Boston, 1844); on 22 March, 1862, Essays, First Series (Boston, 1847); in November, 1870, The Conduct of Life (London, I860) [Mj. In 1859, according to Braswell, he had been given a copy of Emerson’s Poems. (Braswell, review of Sunaermann, Am. Lit., X, 104-107 [March, 1938], note, pp. 106f.) ~-63. William Braswell, "Melville’s Use of Seneca," Am. Li t ., XII, 98-104 (March, 1940); cf. Mardi, II, 78f. The volume of Seneca is now in the New York Public Library [G-L], 64. Melville to Evert Duyekinck, Boston, 5 April, 1849 [D], printed by Thorp, pp. 373-375.

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22

bought books pertaining exclusively to philosophy other than the copies of Schopenhauer, Emerson, and Seneca.

In July and August of

1848, while engaged in writing Mardi, he had withdrawn Hartley’s 65 Observations on Man from the Hew York Society Library, but beyond this one entry the records of his borrowings also are silent.

In

the catalogue of that library issued in 1850, however, an extensive section devoted to works of metaphysics, ethics, and logic testifies that in his hours spent in the reading-room Melville had access to ample philosophical material.

In Duyckinck’s collection, too, were

volumes of Bacon, B&yle, Berkeley, Locke, Paley, Pascal, Plato, Tucker, and Zimmermann —

all writers referred to by Melville.

The

resources of these two libraries alone were in themselves nearly sufficient to account for Melville’s familiarity with the hundred or so philosophical and religious thinkers mentioned by name in his works

66 and correspondence.

The most likely places for Melville to have

consulted these works, especially during his residence in New York at the beginning of his career, were the rooms of these libraries: his use of other books of general literature within the library buildings has been suggested above.

Editions currently available

there of philosophical texts obviously read by Melville, as shown by allusions in his own writing, will therefore normally be cited in the course of this study.

65.

Thorp, note, p • xxvi.

66.

Cf. Appendix III, pp. 215-223.

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23

iii Melville’s Knowledge of Philosophy

Sinoe definite external evidence bearing on Melville’s reading of particular philosophical works is limited, and sinoe the results of its investigation are available in the work of other scholars, the present study must necessarily work largely with evidence to be found in Melville *8 own writing.

The medium of his philosophical romanoes,

particularly Moby-Diok, is a distinctive epic prose that is indebted to the English stylists of the seventeenth century*

Characteristic

of their prose and of Melville’s is a richness of allusion to matters historical, geographical, and philosophical that demonstrates wide reading and informative conversation on the part of the author*

This

habit of allusion, which adds to the expansiveness of Melville’s prose just as a catalogue of chips or of rivers contributes to the spacious­ ness of the Iliad or of Paradise Lost, often provides the student with oblique clues to the works Melville was reading.

But like all internal

evidence, such clues are deoeptivey-and they must be employed with care.

Many of Melville’s references to persons, places, and events,

as scholars are increasingly aware, do not come from first-hand observation or from reading of primary sources, but from secondary sources in the works of other writers. 67 Though Mardi mentions over a score of philosophers by name, in contrast to the single appearance of Hobbes in its predecessor Omoo, it is of course very doubtful that Melville had read in the works of twenty philosophers b y the time Mardi was published.

The composition

67. Cf. Appendix III, pp. 215-223, for statistics summarized here and in the following discussion.

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24

°f Typee and Omoo, which oooupied much of his time after his return to America in 1844, required that most of his reading during the years 1844-1846 should he in the relevant field of trave1-literature*

On

the evidence of parallel passages it can he shown that his awakening interest in philosophy soon led to his first-hand acquaintance with certain philosophical works, hut the presence of most of the names in Mttrdi undoubtedly came indirectly through Melville's general reading* Spinoza, for example, is mentioned on two occasions in the hook, onoe hy name and onoe b y unmistakable reference to nthe Jew that rejected the Talmud, said his all-permeating principle, to which Goethe and

68 others have subscribed."

In eleven later references Melville shows

considerable familiarity with Spinoza and his ideas, yet there was no English translation of Spinoza's Ethics available, as Melville 69 himself notes on one occasion, until 1871* Sinoe Melville read only in English, the obvious inference is that his knowledge of Spinoza came indirectly* To establish the secondary source of acquaintance on Melville's part is impossible in the case of many philosophical and religious thinkers whom he mentions*

As an index to the increase of his general

reading it is interesting to note that the number of references to such men by name inoreases in frequency at almost an even rate from Mardi through Redburn and White-Jacket, taken together as the work of 1849, to Moby-Diok (1851) and Pierre (1852)*

Melville's irregular

literary activity after publishing Pierre makes further statistical 68.

Mardi, I, 204*

69. In his copy of Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism (Boston, 1865), which he bought 10 July, 1869 [M], p. 245, Melville annotates Arnold's statement that no translation of the Ethics into English had been made: "They are now translated 1871 -— by Willis."

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25

evidence of little value*

But in Clarel (1876), the long philosophical

poem on itoioh he was oocupied at intervals for a number of years, more references of this nature ooeur than in any other single work*

This

confirms external evidence of Melville*s lasting interest in philosophy, whioh began before Mardi was published and iriiich continued until the end of his life.

Among the thinkers idiom he mentions, however, many

names occur but onoe, usually in a context offering no indication of Melville’s familiarity with them except by reputation.

In the case

of authors whose works were comparatively obscure or difficult to obtain in Melville*s day, it is therefore safe to conclude that his acquaintance was at second-hand.

Cardan, Duns Sootus, and Servetus, each mentioned

but once, are examples of such men, and there are many more. The majority of these references might have been made with the same freedom by any widely-read man possessing a retentive merory. Melville himself, in occasionally going beyond the mere mention of a name, is quite likely to be concerned with a point of biography rather than a philosophical doctrine* as the idea.

he was interested in the mem. as well

His encyclopedic manner of writing, it has been recognized,

owed much to the authors of an earlier day —

"old Burton" and Sir

Thomas Browne, and also Bayle and Montaigne, Tacitus and Plutarch. Melville's indebtedness to their works was for matter as well as for manners

he delimited in storing his mind with the miscellaneous

information he found there.

To paraphrase his own words*

had not 70

Sir Thomas Browne lived, Melville would not have written as he did* Such writers, then, were responsible for many of his allusions, particularly

70. Cf. Melville to Evert Duyekinck, 3 March, 1849 [D], printed by Thorp, pp. 371-373* "Lay it down that had not Sir Thomas Browne lived, Emerson would not have mystified...."

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26

to philosophers of the early schools:

his references to Heraclitus

and Democritus for example, as the gloomy sad the happy philosopher, repeat the conventional epithets used by the seventeenth-century 71 'writers* Beyond pointing out a few occurrences of this kind to illustrate Melville’s consistent practioe, there is no purpose served in the present investigation by attempting to trace all such allusions to their source. In addition to general reading, Melville’s conversation with informed friends has been suggested as the stimulus behind his own interest in philosophy*

How much he learned from discussion is extremely

problematical, though his friend Adler, as a student of German culture, oonoeivably taught him a great deal*

It is oustomary to speak of

Evert Duyekinck as an extremely religious man, somewhat easily shocked 72 by the freedom of Helville*s expression, but there is also reason for believing that he was well-informed concerning philosophy*

The

presence of representative philosophical works in his library has already been noted:

this is undoubtedly owing in part to the fact that

he had taken a thorough course in philosophy at Columbia College in 1834.

Some of these books were purchased at this time, as shown by

inscriptions in them accompanying his signature.

Extracts from these

volumes and from Tennemann’s manual of philosophy, whioh he owned, are copied into his lecture-notes to supplement classroom material:

a

71. Cf. Mardi, II, 54, 350, 352j Pierre, p. 385j The ConfidenceMan, p. 63; Sir Thomas Browne*s Religio Medici, ii.4j below, pp.' 168f. 72. Cf. Melville to Duyekinck, 24 February, 3 March, 1849 [D], printed by Thorp, pp. 370f, 371-373. Duyckinck*s objection to Melville*s having called Shakespeare "gentle, aye, almost as Jesus" in the first letter led in the second to Melville*s apology for having "seemed irreverent." At the end of his long review of Moby-Diok in'lhe Literary World, IX, 381-383, 403f (16, 22 November, 1861), Duyekinck objected io the "free-thinking" in the book. Duyekinck*s personal papers con­ cerning his membership in and service to the Episcopal Church have been preserved [D]. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

27 bound volume of six college notebooks is preserved among Duyekinck *s 73 personal papers* When his friend Melville was making a first acquaintance with formal philosophy he could have found valuable material in DuyokinokTs concise and informative manuscript, and there is some possibility that he actually did so* Among the extracts with whioh Duyekinck supplemented the words of Professor John M*Yiokar at Columbia is a long quotation from Locke, concluding with the following underlined sentence:

"It is of

great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom the depths of the ooean.”

In its theme, the

limitations of human knowledge, and in its phrasing as well, this sentence is remarkably similar to a passage in Melvillets Mardi ascribed to the old author Bardianna, so frequently cited by Babbalanja:

"Fellow-

menJ

the ooean we would sound is unfathomable; and however much we add 74 to our line, when it is out, we feel not the bottom*" Since Melville

probably knew Locke directly at the time of writing Mardi, having had access to his works at sea, the sentence in Mardi, if inspired by Locke, need not have derived from Duyekinck*s quotation*

If Melville examined

the manuscript, however, the underlined sentence with its nautical connotation would certainly have attracted his attention* More interesting in its implications is a diagram occurring in Duyekinck*s unusually full notes on Bacon, whom Melville himself 73. This volume [D] contains "Professor M*Yiokar*s Leotures on Philosophy," comprising two notebooks on "The History of Philosophy" (1834) and one on "Moral Philosophy"; plus "Professor M'Yiokars [sic] Outline of the History of Literature" (two books, 1834), and additional notes on "Political Oeconomy" (1835)* The philosophical notes laok pagination, but the order follows historical sequenoe* John M*Yiokar, D.D*, was professor of moral philosophy in Columbia College, New York* 74.

Mardi, II, 301.

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28

read with considerable profit*

The diagram indicates the divisions of

knowledge set up in Baoon’s Advancement of Learning* Memory

Imagination

History

Poetry

Understanding Philosophy

These same three faculties are represented in Mardi by the historian Mohi, the poet Yoomy, and the philosopher Babbalanja.

That the three

characters owe their creation to the Baconian scheme, either in the Advancement itself or as reproduced in Duyokinck’s manuscript, is a possibility*

though not susceptible of convincing proof, the suggestion

is nevertheless provooative.

Unfortunately there are no further clues

in the volume of notes definite enough to confirm the hypothesis of its consultation by Melville, though if he did examine the material there it could well have provided much of the general philosophical background for Mardi*

The value of the Duyekinck manuscript to this study lies ohiefly in its evidence of Duyokinck’s familiarity with philosophical subjects* In view of his influence upon Melville at the beginning of the young author’s career, his part in stimulating Melville’s interest in philosophy can with justice be emphasized.

As Melville’s borrowing of Sir Thomas

Browne and his purchase of Burton are directly traceable to the enthusiasm of the brothers Duyekinck for authors of the sixteenth aid seventeenth centuries, so too his reading of Bacon, in Evert Duyekinck*s library or elsewhere, probably came of the same inspiration*

Prom

the evidence examined above, it is clear that Duyekinck would have been qualified to make similar recommendations of other philosophical authors as well as to discuss than intel ligently with Melville*

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29

A link 'between Melville's reading and his conversation with friends on philosophical topics can he shown convincingly in at least one instance*

Both Coleridge and Carlyle did considerable writing

on German literature and philosophy whioh appeared in periodicals and which, upon being collected in book form, was doubly accessible* Emerson's knowledge of German philosophy, it is well known, was directly 75 related to his reading in w>rks of both authors* Melville borrowed 76 several volumes of Carlyle in 1850 from Duyekinck, in whose library ewr*

tI

each writer was well represented,

and in 1848 he had himself bought 78 an edition of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria* A year later in

TBhite-Jaoket he wrote of the Never sink's chaplain, "who so pranoed on

75

Coleridge's High German horse," and who oould be seen with Biographia 80 Literaria in his hand* In 1849 Melville too was "riding on the 81 German horse" with his friend Adler during his trip to Europe, and

75* Cf. Joseph Warren Beach, The Concept of Nature in NineteenthCentury English Poetry (New York, 1§36), p p * 318-345; John S. Harrison, fke Teachers ot Emerson (New York, 1910), pp. 287fj F. T* Thompson, "Emerson's Indebtedness to Coleridge," SP, XXIII, 55-76 (January, 1926), and "Emerson and Carlyle," SP, XXIV, 438-453 (July, 1927). 76.

Cf. Thorp, note, p. xrviii.

77. Nineteen separate editions, 1850 or earlier, of various works of Carlyle and a like number of Coleridge are catalogued in Duyokinok's library. (Lenox Library Short-Title Lists, VIII, 9f, 12j XII, 12, 21f•) Among the more relevant titles! are Carlyle»s Critioal and Miscellaneous Essays (Boston, 1839) and Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (London, 1839), Biographia Literaria (London, 1817j New York, 1847, 1848), and Friend (London, 1618)'. 78. On 8 February* (Appendix II, p. 211.,)

of. statement from John Wiley, 1 July, 1848.

79.

White-Jacket, p. 207.

80.

Ibid., p. 193.

81.

Melville's journal [M], 27 October, 1849.

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50 it is significant that he at onoe identified Adler ’s own philosophy 82 as "Colredegian"[slo]. Reading Coleridge, it seems clear, had prepared Melville to disouss German metaphysios with Adlerj their conversations perhaps in turn had something to do with Melville's reading Carlyle upon his return from abroad* In addition to what Melville learned of philosophy from his friends and from general reading of books and magazine articles dealing incidentally with the subject, an important potential source of information was the philosophical manual*

Sinoe external evidence of

his owning or borrowing such a book is laoking, and sinoe the numerous manuals available in his day oovered the same material in much the same fashion, it is impossible to identify any one of them as having f 83 been used b y Melville as Emerson used that of De Gerando. Tet it seems quite likely that some history of philosophy did help to provide his knowledge of the traditional philosophical problems and their various attempted solutions.

Evert Duyekinck's use of Tennemann's

Manual of Philosophy has been mentioned* Melville might have consulted 84 this book in his library, or have borrowed the handy two-volume Epitome of the History of Philosophy owned by Duyekinck*s brother

82.

Melville's journal [M], 13 October, 1849*

83. Cf. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes, lo vol. (Boston,- 1909-19314), II, 330 (27 October, 1830)* "I begin the Histoire Comparee des Systemes de Philosophie par M. De Gdrando.^ Ro~bes ana extracts follow. 84. Duyokinok's copy of Tennemann, tr. A. Johnson (Oxford, 1832), survives [D]. A second copy, the Bohn translation by J. R. Morrell (London, 1852), was catalogued in his library (Lenox Library ShortTltle Lists. VIII, 59), but is no longer among Xis books. Tennemann's manual appears in his own "List of Books" (undated) »«d "Catalogue of Books" (1856), part II [Dj.

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31 85

George.

The latter work, translated by C. S. Henry from the French,

had appeared in 1842 in the inexpensive "Harper*s Family Library" series.

A complete set of the Family Library was available to Melville

86 during part of his service aboard the frigate United States in 1844, and it is reoorded that he himself purchased three unspecified volumes 87 of the series on 10 .April, 1847 — - the year in which Mardi was begun.

88 It is possible that two of these volumes may have been Henry's Spitome. There were of course a number of other manuals in print before 1850, several of them in the New York Society Library.

Two

of these were a one-volume edition in English of Victor Cousin's _ 89 90 Introduction to the History of Philosophy, a book read by Emerson, and a four-volume translation of E. Ritter's standard reference work, 91 X History of Ancient Philosophy. The list of available manuals could easily be extended, but it seems sufficient to indicate those most

85. This book, inscribed "George L. Duyekinck/ Jan 24. 1842," survives [D], having been included with Evert Duyckinck's own library. (Lenox Library Short-Title Lists, XII, 45.) It is possibly the "History of I*hilosop'!hy 2 vols — " appearing in Evert Duyckinck's "Catalogue of Books" (1856), part I [D). Another copy belonging to "E Gansevoort" (Melville,s cousin, Henry Sanford Gansevoort ?) also survives [G-L]. . 86. p. 484.

Cf. note 44 above, p. 15, and Anderson, p. 358 and notes,

87. Cf. statement from Harper & Bros., 1 August, 1847. II, p. 212.)

(Appendix

8 8 . A third volume in the series which might have interested Melville was F^nelon's Lives of the Ancient Philosophers, tr. Rev. John Cormack (1842).

89. Tr. E. G. Linberg (Boston, 1832), listed in the Alphabetical and Analytical Catalogue of the New York Society Library (Sew York:, 1850}, p. 109. Cousin's Element's of Psychology (Hartford, 1834) is also catalogued there. 90.

Emerson, Journals, IV, 404f.

91.

Tr. A. J. W. Morrison (Oxford, 1838-1846):

Catalogue, p. 379.

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32

accessible to Melville —

particularly the Tennemann and the Henry.

An examination of these and other volumes unfortunately reveals nothing so closely paralleled in Melville’s own writing as to establish his 92 use of one or another particular manual. Any of them, however, might have provided considerable information, both of a general nature and in regard to thinkers in whom Melville was especially interested.

The foregoing survey of possible channels of knowledge reveals the impossibility of establishing the oertain provenience of all Melville’s philosophical references.

To examine the works of every

philosopher whom he mentions would not in itself answer the difficulty, simply because to do so would be to ignore the importance of Melville’s secondary sources.

As a general rule, however, and one established

empirically, Melville refers most often to those philosophers he knew best from first-hand acquaintance with their works.

In the course of

the present study, therefore, these authors are emphasised.

No

attempt is made to study the writers Melville knew about, but those whom investigation shows him to have known, have read, and have used. The distinction is valid.

There are of course certain works whioh

Melville might well have read, though as in the case of the manuals, no sufficient internal evidence will prove or disprove the matter.

But

in regard to his major philosophical sources, which after all are of 93 greatest interest to the student, his knowledge is unmistakable.

92. Dr. Henry A. Murray, who has worked far longer than I on the problem, has had no more success. He and I agree that Melville probably employed a philosophical manual. 93. In Appendix III, pp. 215-223, is a concordance to Melville’s allusions to philosophical and religious thinkers. Possible sources of Melville’s acquaintance with certain of these, not extensive enough to justify discussion in the text of this study, are registered in the notes to this concordance.

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33

The relation of this program to other Melville scholarship remains to be indicated briefly.

Anderson*s Melville in the South

Seas, the most comprehensive single investigation of Melville*s literary souroes, has demonstrated Melville’s practice in adaptation of material and has established a technique for further scholarly investigation.

Anderson has had marked suooess in showing Melville's

knowledge of certain books when internal evidence alone has been available.

This same problem arises in -the following pages, but

•wherever possible the attempt is made to indicate how Melville probably secured a copy of the book.

It is not accidental that Melville's

most influential reading in philosophy was done in his early years in New York, when his interest was fresh, his etyle was developing, and where the resources of two well-equipped libraries were open to him.

The chronology of both his private life end of his literary

work requires that the greatest emphasis be laid on this formative period of his career.

Melville's reading in philosophy has itself been touched upon by several scholars, but has not yet been treated definitively. Eis annotations in Emerson and Seneca have been reported in published 94 articles which are referred to here, but duplioation of other scholar­ ship is not intended.

K. E. Sundermann, whose German study, Herman

Melvilles Gedankengut, undertakes a minute systematization of Melville's thougjvt, has given some attention to philosophical sources.

His

suggestions are valuable, but his interest in sources is incidental to his main object. 94.

Sundermann has been adversely oritioized for

Cf. p. 21, above, and notes.

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54

95

failure to traoe fully the development of Melville’s ideas,

"whereas

an investigation based primarily upon Melville’s reading will properly emphasize their genesis and growth.

But Melville originated no 96 philosophical system, as Sundermann himself readily admits, and to force him into the role of systematic thinker, besides doing violence to his thought, is to ignore him as a writer of imaginative literature. Not Melville as a thinker nor even as a reader, but the relation of one aspect of his reading to the creation of his art, is the primary subject of the following pages.

95. Cf. William Braswell’s review of Sundermann, Am. Lit., X, 104-107 (March, 1938). -------96.

Sundermann, p. 4*

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35

Chapter Two Sooratio Wisdom

"On. themes that under orchards old The chapleted Greek would frank unfold, And Socrates, a spirit divine••••" "At the Hostelry," Poems, p. 374.

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36

i Melville’s Text of Plato

Though Melville’s allusions to Plato and Platonism outnumber his references t o any other philosopher, he mentions by name only 1

three of Plato’s dialogues, the Fhaedo, the Symposium, and the Repub lie. The first of these he consistently spells "Phaedon," an old usage which suggests his familiarity with some English rendering of the French version of Plato by Dacier. William Gowan, the New York bookseller in whose shop Melville found his father’s old copy of Burton, published in 2 1833 a Phaedont or, A Dialogue on the Immortality of the Soul, taken from a translation of Dacier.

Melville oould have bought this book 3 from Gowan or borrowed it from Evert Duyekinck* In the New York Society Library he might also have read a Phaedon translated from the German of 1. In a letter to Evert Duyekinck, 5 April, 1849 [D], printed by Thorp, pp. 373-375, Melville humorously announces his intention of sleeping through the coming summer "with the Phaedon in one hand & Tom [Sir Thomas] Brown[e] in the other." In White-Jaoket, completed that same year, he writes of the learned allusions of tlhe Never sink’s chaplain to "the Phaedon of Plato" (first New York ed., l£? 6 , p.' 185; misprinted in Constable ed., p. 193), and in his next book, MobyDiok, he again refers to "the Phaedon" (i, 197). In the de Grandvin papers (Billy Budd..., p. 351) is mention of "Plato’s ’Banquet’" and in an unpublished fragment to be discussed below (p. 75) is a note on the Republic. 2. The edition includes FeneIon’s life of Plato, whioh is pre­ fixed, an outline discussion of the Phaedo, and notes. An 1849 edition is mentioned in Roorbach’s Bibliotheca Americana, 1820-1852. 3. Duyckinck’s copy, according to his own inscription, was bought in 1834 — the year in whioh he was studying philosophy at Columbia [D]. It is presumably the -volume meant by "The Ihaedon of Plato" listed in his undated "List of Books" and the "Plato on the Immortality of the Soul" included in part II of his "Catalogue of Books" (1856) [D].

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37 4

Moses Mendelssohn. It is evident, however, that Melville used an edition containing additional dialogues of Plato, even though he might have bought or borrowed a separate copy of the Phaedo.

Among those

available early in his oareer were various editions of the Dacier 5 version, the translation by Thomas Taylor and Ployer Sydenham published 6 in 1804, and the six-volume Bohn translation by various hands, in 7 progress between 1848 and 1854. The New York Society Library catalogued in 1850 both the Taylor-Sydenham and the first volume of the Bohn 8 translation. In Melville’s Billy Budd, written at the end of his life, is an allusion that could have come from no other than the Bohn 4* (London, 1789), listed in Alphabetical and Analytical Catalogue of the New York Society library (New York, 1850), p. 294. Melville refers -feo Mendelssohn in Clarel, I, 259f. 5. The British Museum Catalogue lists a two-volume abridged translation from Dacier (London, 1701, 1720, 1749, 1772) and a later one-volume edition (London, 1859). 6 . In 5 vol. (London, 1804). Taylor also brought out a volume of selections* The Cratylus, Phaedo, Parmenides and Timaeus of Plato (London, 1793).

7. Title-pages of the volumes are dated as follows* I, 1848} II, 1849; III, 1850; IV, 1851; V, 1852; VI, 1854. That the seoond volume was available early in 1849 is indicated by its listing, with Vol. I, in the Supplement, 1846-1849, to the London Catalogue of Books, the preface to which is dated March, 1849. 8 . Catalogue, p. 351. In an undated newspaper clipping preserved in Evert Duyckinck’s notebooks [D] is the announcement of certain new books acquired by the New York Society Library, including the Taylor-Sydenham Plato. Other translations of Plato in the library in 1850 were the Mendelssohn Phaedon, the Taylor Phaedrus (London, 1792), and a translation of ttie tenth book of the Laws by Tayler Lewis (New York, 1845). Lewis* work, entitled Platonic Theology; Plato contra Atheos, also belonged to Duyckindc; 'of. his Catalogue of Books* (18556)', part II [D]; Lenox Library Short-Title Lists, VIII, 36. I have found nothing 'in this Vook to indicate its use by Melville.

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38 9

edition,

which had been the standard English translation earlier

in the century*

The first volume of this series, it will be noted,

was available in the year in -which Melville was writing Mardi, though it is impossible to say definitely that he employed it at

10 that time*

But in view of his later use of the Bohn edition,

references to Plato’s works in the following pages will be made to that text, which though no longer standard is still readily accessible*

Billy Budd** *, p. 45: "In a list of definitions included in the autheni ic trains lation of Plato, a list attributed to him, occurs this: ’Natural Depravity:- a depravity according to nature.’" Whewell’s and Jowett’s later nineteenth-century translations do not include these definitions, which are found only in the Bohn edition. Melville, with his usual looseness of quotation, must have imperfectly recalled the following: "Natural depravity — a badness by nature, and a sinning in that, whioh is according to nature; a disease of that, which is according to nature." (Plato’s Works, Bohn ed., VI, 143.) Billy Budd was not prepared for publication prior to Melville’s death, and the~"quotation was never verified. 10. It has been suggested above (p. 14) that Melville might have come into possession of a Plato from his father; of. Pierre, p. 347: "the simple page, which in [Pierre's] father’s edition prefixed the vast speculations of Plato." Melville’s first allusion to Plato is a reference to "Platonic affection" in Typee, p. 254 — scarcely an indication of his knowledge of the dialogues before Mardi. The first two volumes of the Bohn Plato might have been included "in the "Classical Library" with which he was charged on 19 March, 1849, but there is some reason for thinking that the pur chase was made by his brother, possibly for Evert Duyekinck. Cf. Appendix II, p. ii 3^ and note.

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39

ii The Character of Socrates "When I am quite free of my present engagements," Melville wrote Hawthorne in 1851, "I am going to treat myself to a ride and a visit to you*

Ha*ve ready a bottle of brandy, because I always feel

like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics

11 together,"

Much of the conversation in Mardi, Van Wyck Brooks

12 observes, may likewise be described as "ontological heroics."

Hot

only does it give a fair idea of the talk between Melville and Hawthorne, but the employment of the dialogue form in Mardi suggests that its author may have had in mind the example of Plato, master of the philosophical dialogue.

This impression is strengthened by a general

resemblance of old Babbalanja, in his more serious aspects, to Plato’s portrayal of Socrates. In the earlier Platonic dialogues Socrates does not appear as the constructor of an elaborate philosophical system.

The Apology, for

example, presents him as a man "not conscious to myself that I am wise," 13 as he told his judges, but dedicated rather to the exoosure of 14 ignorance and sophistry in others. "Ah! my lord," says Babbalanja 11. Letter to Hawthorne, Pittsfield, 29 June, 1851, printed by Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, 2 vol. (Boston. 1885), I, 398-400. 12. "Notes on Herman Melville," in Emerson and Others (New York, 1927), p. 180. 13.

Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Bohn ed., I, 7.

14. Cf. ibid., I, 18* Socrates as a gadfly sent to rouse the Athenians. Among the books of Oh-Oh the antiquary (Mardi, II, 73) is "The Gad-Fly, and other Poems."

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40

in his own apology to King Media, "think not that in aught I ’ve said ... I would assert any wisdom of m y own. I but fight against the armed 15 and crested Lies of Mardi...." Babbalanja too is no system-builder; on the contrary he is "forever pruning" his own redundant beliefs, "down 16 to the standard of what is unchangeably true." In this search for a standard of truth Babbalanja not only resembles Socrates but also exemplifies the critical process going on in Herman Melville’s mind since his first sea-voyage had opened his eyes to what was false in nineteenth-century civilisation.

That Melville was conscious of his

own parallelism with Socrates is shown by his reply to Hawthorne’s praise of Moby-Diok, the book for whioh Mardi prepared the way.

"You

were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body," he wrote, "and embrace the soul.

Onoe you hugged the ugly Socrates because you saw

the flame in the mouth, and heard the rushing of the demon, —

the

familiar, —

and recognized the sound; for you have heard it in 17 your own solitudes." Melville too had heard "the rushing of the demon," and the appearance of Azzageddi, Babbalanja's familiar spirit corresponding to the celebrated inward monitor of Socrates, has well 18 been called the first sign of Melville’s maturity.

15*

128«

It id., II, 80f.

17. Letter to Hawthorne, written sometime in November, 1851, printed by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne (Boston, 1897), pp. 156-160. The famous account ot Socrates* outer ugliness occurs in the Symposium, Bohn, III, 561-564. (It should be noted that this volume of* the Bohn Plato was available a year earlier than the writing of Melville’s letter.) Cf. Melville’s description of a London waiter with "a head like Socrates" in "The Paradise of Bachelors" (in Billy Budd...), p. 234, also pp. 236f. 18. Mumford, p. 104. In this connection it should be recalled, however, that Socrates is always restrained by the monitor and is never prompted affirmatively as Azzageddi prompts Babbalanja (Bohn, I, 19, 27, 317). Cf. p. 79, below, and note.

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41

The creation of Babbalanja may thus he ascribed in part to a union between a fundamental attribute of Melville’s own temperament and the congenial character of Plato’s Socrates. Babbalanja’s likening 19 of himself to an ancient sage, Bardianna, is a graceful acknowledge­ ment of Melville’s debt to the philosophy of antiquity.

Parallels

between Ahab and Pierre in later books and Shakespeare’s Lear and Hamlet represent a similar affinity between Melville and another great literary influence.

The delineation of these characters is surer and

more deliberate than Babbalanja’s modeling after Socrates, for Melville learned through experience to work more independently of sources as he continued to write.

It may well have been with his own Mardi in

mind that he analyzed Pierre’s tendency to depend less on his own creative powers than on books for the material of his authorship. "Though Plato was indeed a transoendeatly great man in himself," Melville writes in Pierre, "yet Plato must not be transcendently great" to an author who would create something valuable of his own.

For "no

one great book must ever be separately regarded, and permitted to domineer with its own uniqueness upon the creative mind*..."

In

accordance with this principle, undigested borrowings from Plato gradually disappear in Melville’s own writing, for he had come to believe that "all existing great works must be federated in the fancy; and so regarded as a miscellaneous and Pantheistic whole; and then, — without at all dictating to his own mind, or unduly biasing it any way,

thus combined, they would prove simply an exhilarative and

20 provocative to him."

The passage just quoted is an interesting example of Melville’s 19.

Mardi, II, 90.

20.

Pierre, p. 395.

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42

powers of self-criticism, and though, the Shakespearian, touches in. Moby-Dick and Pierre belie his entire ability to take his own advice, the reference to Plato is pertinent both to Mardi and to his later works.

A* an "exhilarative and provocative” Plato exerted a continued

though less bald influence on Melville after Mardi, particularly through his attachment to the character of Socrates.

In the introduction to

the Apology in the Bohn Plato the translator observes that ”with a dignity and fulness of hope worthy even of a Christian,” Socrates "expresses his belief that the death to which he is going is only a

21 passage to a better and a happier life."

In Redburn, written

directly after Mardi in 1849, Melville perhaps recalled this passage in his first mention of Socrates by name*

"Though the Christian era

22 had not then begun, Socrates died the death of the Christian....” He was evidently impressed deeply by Plato’s account in the Phaedo of Socrates* last hours, and in one of his short stories the narrative is built around just such a "brave cock" as the "bird rightly offered up by 23 the invincible Socrates, in testimony of his final victory over life.”

Melville wrote this story at a critical time in his career, when the introspective and philosophical tendency of his writing that

21.

Bohn, T, 2.

22.

Redburn, p. 377.

23. "Cock-A-Doodle-DooJ" (1853), in Billy Budd..., p. 154; of. Socrates* last words; "Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius; pay it, therefore, and do not neglect it " (Phaedo, Bohn, I, 127). Melville wrote his story at about the time when fears for his sanity had led his family to arrange an examination of his mind. In my "Herman Melville’s *1 and My Chimney,*" Am. Lit., XIII, 142-154, (May, 1941), is an account of circumstances surrounding this examination, and in a later publication 1 plan to discuss the relation of the symbolism of "Cook-A-Doodle-DooJ” and other short stories to their author's state of mind at this period.

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43

had first emerged in Mardi threatened disaster to his welfare as & man and as an author*

He had just published in Pierre an account of

a young man's disillusionment that is in its way his ovm spiritual autobiography*

The theme is "the conflicts of a noble soul with a 24 dastardly world,” the never-ending warfare in which there is no surrender, in which the victory over life is paid with death.

Unless

a man can find ”the talismanic secret, to reconcile this world with his own soul," Melville declares, "then there is no peace for him, no slightest truce for him in this life*"

"The invincible Socrates"

stands in sharp contrast to that "guild of self-imposters" Melville scorns in Pierre, the philosophers who pretend to have discovered this 25 Talismanic Secret which has never yet been found. Socrates opposed the world and the world forced him to die*

in one of the books sur­

viving from Melville's library is a penciled comment upon his sentence. "•You are undermining the laws, and are dangerous to the young,' said the judges to Socrates.

They said the truth, & from this point of view,

were just in condem[n]ing him."

As "a self-constituted agent for the

conservation of youthful persuasions [?]," Melville bitterly adds, 26 "-- I suppress the inference." At the time this note was made, probably during the Civil War, Melville was still smarting under a publio rebuke more devastating than any of the attacks upon his treatment of the missionaries in Typee

24.

Pierre, p. 377.

25.

Ibid., p. 290.

26. Quoted in part from Melville's annotation in a copy of Mme. de Stael's Germany, 2 vol. (Hew York, 1859), I, 26 [M]. Melville bought the book in New York, 4 March, 1862.

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44 27 and Omoo.

28 Refusing to trim his writing to the taste of the times,

he had given Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Conf idence-Man to an audienoe that wanted no philosophy or sooial criticism — yarns.

only more South Sea

He had learned the temper of his Judges, who from their own

point of view wBre Just in condemning him, not to death but to obscurity and isolation.

At about this same period Melville marked

in another volume a poetic statement describing the gulf that had come between himself and his contemporaries! "Alone the Poet lives — - alone he dies* Cain-like, he bears the isolating brand Upon his brow of sorrow. True, his hand Is pure from blood-guilt, but in human eyes

27. Are Melville's strictures upon the missionaries and the attaoks thereby provoked reflected in Babbalanja*s statement made in Maramma, the center of organised Mardian religion, that "in my boyhood, ray own sire was burnt for his temerity} and in this very isle"? (Mardi, II, 33; italics mine.) 28. Writing Hawthorne in June, 1851, while composing Moby-Dick, Melville spoke of his dilemma between "what I feel most moved to write" and what he knew would pay. (Printed by Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His W i f e , I, 400-407.) Even Solomon, he goes on -fco say, "a. little managed the truth with a view to popular conservatism...." MeTvi'lle himself speaks of the fearfulness of truth many times in his published works, particularly Moby-Dick and Pierre : William Braswell suggests that Pierre was intended as a” iTInal fling at his critics. ("The Satirical Temper of Melville's Pierre," Am. Lit., VII, 424-438 [January, 1936].) A lengthy annotation in his copy of Mme. de Stael's Germany (note 26, above) deals with the question of censorship. In James Thomson he saw a parallel to himself, holding that to be popular Thomson's essays would have to be "diluted with that prudential worldly element wherewithal Mr. [Matthew] Arnold has conciliated the conventionalists*... But ... this would have been too much like trimming...." (Letter to James Billson, 20 December, 1885, printed in Nation and Athenaeum, XXIX, 712 [13 August, 1921].) In a presentation copy of H. S . Salt *s Life of James Thomson (London, 1889), p. 69 [M], he marked a passage on fkomson's refusal to "accommodate his writings to the temper of his readers."

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45

His is a darker orime than, that of Cain,-Rebellion against Social Wrong and LawJ" 29 To such circumstances, "barely half-way through his career, Melville’s uncompromising books had brought him, confirming all he had set down about the impossibility of reconciling this world with the soul.

In

the face of material progress, human nature had not changed since the days of the ancient Greeks*

the age-old problem was the same.

"What

could a sage of the nineteenth oentury teach Socrates?” asked Melville. "Why, nothing more than something about Gyrus Peilds [sic] end the 30 ocean telegraph, and the Sewing Machine...." In the private writing of Melville’s remaining years is the record of the gradual purging away of this mood of bitterness.

A

brief poem in Timoleon, a volume of verse published in the year of his death, expresses the spirit with which he learned to face the world* Though fast youth’s glorious fable flies, View not the world with the worldling’s eyes; Nor turn with weather of the time. Foreclose the coming of surprise* Stand where Posterity shall stand; Stand where the Ancients stood before, And, dipping in lone founts thy hand, Drink of the never-varying lore* Wise once, and wise thence evermore.

29. A translation from the German of Ferdinand Freiligrath, in James Clarence Mangan’s Poems (New York, 1859), p. 284 [M]. Melville did not mark the date of 'his buying this book, at second-hand, but annotations on the back fly-leaf indicate that he had studied its metrics with some care during his own poetic period, c. 1859 onward. Passages of similar tone are frequently checked in other books owned by Melville, showing that his black mood was not a casual one. 30. Quoted in part from an annotation by Melville in his copy of Matthew Arnold’s New Poems (Boston, 1867), p. 28 [M]. The book was purchased on 13 February, 1871. 31.

Poems, p. 267.

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46

The mood of this poem, "Lone Founts," carries over into the prose of Billy Budd, left partially finished at Melville’s death, a story -which ------------------------------32 has "been called Melville’s testament of acceptance. Billy Budd returns to Melville’s old ethical problem, the conflict "between a noble soul and a dastardly world.

Unlike Pierre, however, it embodies

a solution in positive spiritual terms, a solution which Yvor Winters 33 suggests is that of Socrates. In the story young Billy Budd, having replied to a false charge of treason by striking his acouser dead with a blow of the fist, is brought to trial before a naval court. Should he be hanged or set free?

The disparity between private belief

and the public code is represented in the struggle within the mind of Captain Vere, who guides the deliberations of the court, between his knowledge of Billy’s essential innocence and his obligations under the articles of war.

Vere reaohes his decision, and as Socrates had

influenced the judges at his own trial so Vere moves the court to follow the code to the letter and condemn Billy Budd to be hanged.

From one

point of view, as Melville had said of the Greek judges, they were just in condemning him; on the spiritual level Billy is not touched.

Between

his fate and his innocence is the margin of private tragedy, felt most keenly by the humane Captain Vere, but as serenely as Socrates Billy

SB*

32. E. L. Grant Watson, "Melville’s Testament of Acceptance," VI, 319-327 (June, 1933).

33. Yvor Winters, "Herman Melville, and the Problems of Moral Navigation," in Mauls’s Curse (Norfolk, Conn., 1938), pp. 8 6 f. My interpretation of Billy Budd is indebted to Winters* discussion.

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.4 7 34

himself goes to his death. The decision of Captain Vere, the serenity of Billy Budd, are as near as Herman Melville ever oame to finding the talismanic secret.

Standing "where the Anoients stood before,” he had in his last years achieved just that "calm self-collectedness of simplicity" he once 35 characterized as "Sooratic wisdom." To the end of his life he refused to view the world "with the worldling’s eyes."

Remaining at

odds with prevailing beliefs, he in a real sense sacrificed his literary

career to the welfare of a stolid public who saw no health in the buzzing of his gadfly about their heads.

He was never on trial for

hi 8 life, like the opponent of sophism among the ancients or his own Billy Budd; his resemblance to Socrates is no greater than that of many another seeker after truth who refused to compromise his integrity by becoming a trimmer.

But the similarity is worth pointing out.

The

influence of Socrates as a philosopher and as a man left its mark on Melville at a deoisive point of his career in shaping the figure of Babbalanja, and though references to Socrates are not numerous in his 36 published works, that influence remained implicit.

34. In Edward Fitzgerald’s Polonius (London, 1852), a collection of apothegms acquired by Melville 'in ’1875 [M], is a quotation from Bishop Bufcler to the effect that no injury is ever as great as the injured person imagines (p. 17). In the margin Melville notes* "Silvio P e l l i c o S ervetu s the innocent hung. — Yet there is truth in it". Pellico appears in Melville’s published work in Clarel (1876), I, 149, and Poems, pp. 280-283; in view of Anderson’s account of "The Genesis of Billy Budd " (Am. Lit., XII, 329-346 [iJovember, 1940}), is it possible that "the innocent hung" is Philip Spencer, Billy’s historical prototype? 35. Moby-Dick, I, 61. Cf. his characterization of Ushant in 'White-Jackei (p. 444) as "a sort of sea-Socrates," and his statement Tn Pierre (p. 3 1 4 ) that simplicity is "the truest and profoundest pari for man." 36.

Cf. Appendix III, p. 222.

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iii Melville and the Phaedo

"Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and 37 who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head." So Melville warns in Moby-pick.

Though when he himself had gone

whaling in 1841 he had probably not shipped with the Phaedo in his 38 head, his neighbors of ten years later observed that he was then given to unseasonable meditativeness.

And there is striking evidence that

at this time, as he was writing his greatest book, the Phaedo was indeed in his head, thus completing the vignette of self-portraiture.

As Melville*s Ishmael, the narrator of Moby-Dick, prepares to sail on the Pequod, he pays a visit to Father Mapple*s chapel in Nantucket.

Inspecting there the memorial tablets to whalemen lost

at sea, he realizes that "there is death in this business of whaling --- a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?" he asks: Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is m y true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too muck like oysters observing the sun through the w a t e r , and thinking that thick wafer the thinnest of a i r « Methinks m y body is but the lees of m y better being. In fact, take my body who will, take it I say, it is not m e . And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.^9

37.

Moby-Dick, I, 197.

38.

Cf. p. 3, above, and note.

39.

Moby-Dick, I, 45 (italics m i n e ) . ,

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49

H. IU Couch, commenting on the striking figure of "oysters observing the sun through the water," cites a parallel to this passage 40 in the myth told by Socrates near the conclusion of the Phaedo» Socrates

pictures mortal men

as dwellers in

hollows of the earth,

though mistakenly imagining that they inhabit its upper parts: as if any one dwelling in the bottom of the sea, should think that he dwelt on the sea, and, beholding the sun and the other stars through t h e w a t e r , should imagine -bha'-b the sea was the heavens •... This then is the very condition in which we are; for, dwelling in some hollow of the earth, we think that we dwell on the surf&oe of it, and call the air heaven, as if the stars moved through this, being heaven itself. But this is because by reason of our weakness and sloth, we are unable to reach the summit of the air i.e., to attain spiritual vision.

The Platonism in Melville1s

words, which like those of the passage in the Phaedo concern the limitations of mortal m e n ’s spiritual vision, Couch regards as "too patent to be the chance creation of a similar figure by an independent mind.”

He suggests an unconscious reproduction of the image on Melville’s

part, believing that Melville would not have brought oysters into the context "if his memory had served him better."

Actually his memory

had ranged elsewhere in Plato, a fact which escaped the notice of Couch in his citation of only the above parallel.

In the Phaedrus as well as in the Phaedo Socrates discusses the impediment to our soul of our mortal f r a m e

"this which we now

carry about with us and call the body, fettered to it like an oyster 42 to its shell." Here is the probable source of Melville’s adapted

40. H. N. Couch, "Jfoby Dick and the Phaedo," Classical Journal, XXVIII, 367f (February, I9"S3). — 41.

phaedo, Bohn, I, 118 (italics mine).

42.

phaedrus, Bohn, I, 326 (italics mine).

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50

phraseology, furnishing additional evidence for the hypothesis of '•unconscious reproduction” in a manner familiar to readers of John Livingstone Lowes on Coleridge.

Melville1s notion that ”my body

is but the lees of m y better being” is strongly reminiscent of Socrates * theme in the two dialogues mentioned, culminating in the Phaedo with his reply to Crito’s inquiry regarding his burial.

Bury me “just

as you please,” answers Socrates, ”if only you can catch me, and I do not escape from you.”

For, he goes on to explain, ”when I die,

I shall not remain, but shall depart....”

Crito should therefore

not be sad "when he sees m y body either burnt or buried, ... nor say at my interment that Socrates is laid out, or is carried out, or is 43 buried.” In the same vein is Ishmael's remark in Moby-Dick: ”In fact, take my body who will, take it I say, it is not m e . ”

To return briefly to the original passage in the Phaedo, it should be noted that Socrates, after observing that ”by reason of our weakness and sloth, we are unable to reach the summit of the air,” continues as follows: Since, if any one could arrive at its summit, or, becoming winged, could fly up thither, or emerging from hence, he would see, -— just as with us, fishes emerging from the sea, behold what is here, so any one would behold the things there, and if his nature were able to endure t h e c o n t e m ­ plation, he would know that that is the true heaven, and the time light, and the true earth. With a characteristic touch, Melville has also adapted the suggestion of this remark to the motif of Moby-Dick.

'•With a frigate's anchors

for my bridle-bits and fasces of harpoons for spurs,” he writes later in the book, "would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens really lie encamped beyond

43.

Phaedo, Bohn, I, 124f.

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51 44

my mortal sight I”

Here immortality and limited mortal vision are

the subjects, just as in the Phaedo, but the skeptical Melville cannot speak of an after-life with the sure conviction of Socrates. the heavens are fabled heavens still•

For him

Though Couch has not noticed

either this use of the latter half of the passage which he quotes, or the source of Ishmael's disparaging reference to his body, each instance adds confirmation to his partial evidence of Melville*s borrowing from the Phaedo.

Reviewing the passages just examined, one finds that in less than a single paragraph of Moby-Dick Melville draws on two sections of the Phaedo and one of the phaedrus, combining three related figures originally employed in these dialogues.

The longest of the sections

in his sources is again reflected in Moby-Dick two hundred pages later. In each case the theme of Socrates is either the impediment to the soul of the mortal body, the prospect of an after-life, or both; in each case Plato has compacted the thought into a single vivid phrase which remained fixed in Melville’s memory.

A f i s h ’s clouded vision

and an oyster fettered to its shell become ’’oysters observing the sun through the water.”

A fish emerging from the sea to behold

the earth becomes a man riding a leaping whale to behold the heavens, as Socrates said a man might do could he "fly up thither."

Socrates’

lifeless body is not Socrates, and Ishmael’s body is not Ishmael. That two of these figures concern the sea is significant, for one need not read far in Melville to become aware of the quick play of his mind about any matter touching the element upon which he had spent the most adventurous years of his life.

44.

Moby-Dick, I, 345 (italics mine).

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52

Thus, in addition to the account given in Plato*s Phaedo of the death of* Socrates, Melville -was evidently fascinated also by the myths which Socrates relates in both that dialogue and the Phaedrus . In the imagery of Plato's myths, as in his account of Socrates, Melville found what T. S. Eliot calls objective correlatives for particular emotional attitudes which he felt himself —

in the one

case, toward the dualism of soul and body; in the other, toward that of the soul and the world.

Like the omnipresent quincunx which Sir

Thomas Browne has celebrated, an all-pervading dualism was apparent to Melville in the heavens above, in the earth below, and in the mind of man.

When he borrowed from Plato, as in the passages above, it

was because Plato's attitude on such a subject as dualism was in harmony with his own.

Melville's employment of even the imagery

which Plato had used shows how thoroughly he had read the Phaedo by the time Moby-Dick was written.

Just how long before 1850 this reading had taken place cannot be definitely established.

White-Jacket and Redburn, written 45 in 1849, both contain allusions to the dialogue, but the nature of

the two books did not .make extensive borrowing from Plato appropriate. It is in Mardi that the influence of the Phaedo first becomes apparent. Melville was therefore reading Plato at least by the time Mardi was undertaken, and he may well have reread the Phaedo before beginning Moby-Dick.

Shortly after completing Mardi, Melville wrote Evert

Duyckinck that his idea of spending a pleasant summer was to lounge on a pile of old folios "with the Phaedon in one hand & Tom Brcwn[e]

45. In Redburn, p. 377, Melville refers to the death of Socrates (p. 42, above); in White-Jacket, p. 193, he mentions the Phaedo itself (p. 36, above, n o t e ) . "

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53 46

in the other.1'

This association of the dialogue with Sir Thomas

Browne is interesting, for in Mardi there are passages in which the influence of both is mingled just as the phaedo and the Phaedrus are combined in Moby-Dick.

Melville had borrowed an edition of Browne 47 from Duyckinck after beginning Mardi, with the result that almost at once he began imitating the cadences of Browne's prose in various 48 passages of his own work. The first set speech of the philosopher Babbalanja is a meditation on death suggesting the mood of Browne*s 49 Urn-Burial. Death and immortality are discussed more often.in Mardi than in any other of Melville’s works, though without the intensity of feeling and imaginative richness with which they are treated in MobyDick and Clarel.

The somber passages of Browne and the arguments of

Socrates in the Phaedo, who so attracted Melville, may have been largely responsible for his speculative interest in these subjects as early as Mardi.

It is not unlikely that he was reading Plato and Browne at

46. Melville to Evert Duyckinck, 5 April, 1849 [d ], printed by Thorp, pp. 373-375. 47. Thorp, note, p. xxvii. Luther S. Mansfield, "Herman Melville, Author and New Yorker" (unpublished University of Chicago dissertation, 1936), note, p. 195, dates the borrowing between December, 1847, and 18 March, 1848, when Duyckinck wrote his brother George, in part [D]s "By the way, Melville reads Old Books. He has borrowed Sir Thomas Browne of me and says finely of the speculations of the Religio Medici that Browne is a kind of 'crack’d Archangel.’ Was ever anything of this sort said before by a sailor?" The edition borrowed by Melville was that edited by Simon Wilkin, 4 vol. (London, 1835-6), from which the following quotations are taken. 48. Melville's first allusion to Browne occurs in an imitative passage early in Mardi (I, 45), followed in a later chapter ("'Xiphius Platypterus,»" I,- 118-121) by a more extended attempt in the same style. This early enthusiasm for Browne probably had considerable effect on Melville's changing intentions in writing Mardi. For further dis­ cussion of Melville’s debt to Browne in both Mardi and Moby-Dick, cf. Thorp, pp. lxi-lxv; F. 0. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), pp. 122-125. Browne’s influence on his work has been recognized by various other critics since Melville’s own day. 49.

Mardi, I, 275-277.

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about the same time.

Two related ideas of these authors which fascinated Melville were thePythagorean. concept of metempsychosis, a favorite notion of 50 51 Browne which is found also in Plato, and Pl a t o ’s theory of knowledge 52 as the recolleotion of ideas latent in the mind since preexistence. A discussion of the latter doctrine occurs in the Phaedo as a part of Socrates’ argument for survival after death.

How Melville associated

the two ideas in Mardi is shown in Babbalanja's reply to an accusation by Media — - made with some justice — writers that have ever written.”

that he plagiarizes "all the

The old philosopher answers:

May you not possibly mistake, m y lord? for I do not so muc h quote Bardianna, as Bardianna quoted me, though he flourished before me; and no vanity, but honesty to say so. The catalogue of true thoughts is but small; they are ubiqui­ tous; no m a n ’s property; and unspoken, or bruited, are the same. When we hear them, w h y seem they so natural, receiving our spontaneous approval? why do we think we have heard them before? Be­ cause they but reiterate ourselves; they were in us before we were born. The truest poets are but mouthpieces; and some men are duplicates of each other; I see myself in B a r d i a n n a . 53

50. Matthiessen (note 48, above), illustrates Melville's adapta­ tion of the doctrine from Browne. 51. Bohn, I, 84f (phaedo), 324f (phaedrus); II, 310f (Republic), 347, 408f (Timaeus). Plato holds that the sour is reincarnated £n a debased animal state as a punishment for wickedness. Melville mentions the same notion in Clarel, II, 13, 171, 175, but terms this "Thibetan faith.” Eastern thought was evidently in his mind at the time this was written. 52. Bohn, I, 73-78 (Phaedo), 321-328 (phaedrus), 377-380 (Theaetetus); III, 20-28 (Meno); etc. In the Theaetetus Socrates terms himself a midwife presiding at the birth of ideas latent in others; in the Meno he illustrates the "Socratic method" by eliciting geometric propositions from an untutored boy merely by asking him appr opr iat e que st ion s • 53.

Mardi, II, 90 (italics mine).

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55

The immediate source of this passage appears to be the following from Religio Medici: For, as though there were a metempsychosis, and the soul of one man passed into another, opinions do find, after certain revolutions, men and minds like those that first begat them* To see obrselves again, we need not look for p l a t o ’s year: every man is not only himself; there have been many Diogeneses, and as many Timons, though but few of that name; men are lived over again; the world is now as it was in ages past; there was none then, but there hath been some one sinoe, that parallels him, and is, as it were, his revived self.5^ But interpolated into Babbalanja’s speech is one of Melville’s many allusions to P l a t o ’s doctrine of innate ideas.

As Socrates argues

in the Phaedo t we must necessarily have had a knowledge of all these before we were b o m **.* And if, having once had it, we did not constantly forget it, we should always be born with this knowledge, and should always retain it through life....55 The same general formula appears to apply in this case as in the other instance of double indebtedness noted in Moby-Dick.

The subject-matter

in both Browne and Plato is quite similar; Browne is discussing trans­ migration of the soul; Plato’s Socrates, its preexistenoe.

The

reference to ’’Plato's year” in the passage from Religio Medici is interesting, for recent studies of the process of verbal reminiscence in other writers have shown the part played by single words and phrases in establishing a chain of mental association.

Another combination of Plato and Browne occurs in a chapter of Mardi appropriately entitled "Dreams,” an imaginative explanation for the inspiration which produced the book itself.

54.

Browne, Works, XI, lOf (italics mine).

55.

phaedo, Bohn, I, 77 (italics mine).

The theme of

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56

the ohapter is given in a statement by Babbalanja elsewhere in Mardi: "Every thought’s a soul of some past poet, hero, sage. We are fuller 56 than a city." This notion appears to be Melville’s own, but it combines two concepts which he had found in Browne, metempsychosis and the microcosm -—

the popular seventeenth-century doctrine that

roan is an epitome of the world.

Melville writes, by analogy, that

"the thoughts of men are each a soul, as the lung-cells are each a 57 lung...." In "Dreams" he expands the same metaphor into the image of a ship, "full with a thousand souls" that rush up from below, "like 58 miners from caves," to inspire his writing. The ship is himself, and the past poets, heroes, and sages whom he lists, over a score in all, are those familiar to him from his recent reading:

"divine

Plato, and Proclus, and Verulam are of m y counsel; and Zoroaster whispered m e before I was b o r n ....

My memory is a life beyond birth;

my memory, m y library of the Vatican....

And ... so, with all the 59 past and present pouring in me, I roll down my billow from afar." Thus Melville again alludes to ideas as present in the mind since pre­ existence, and on this occasion he himself mentions Plato in the same

56.

Mardi, II, 323f.

•

57. Ibid., II, 75. Cf • I, 56: "Every wave in my eyes seems a soul." In Moby-Dick Melville writes, in somewhat similar vein: "It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely undeveloped skulls" (II, 85). 58. Mardi, II, 53. For other images of the soul as a ship, cf. ibid., II, £77; Moby-Dick, I, 133; Pierre, pp. 471f; Piazza Tales, p . 47. These successive ship-images are directly related to the course of Melville’s speculative thought — - in his own words, his voyage to the world of mind. In White-Jacket, the Neversink is the microcosm. For the soul as a mine, Mardi, II, S07f, 326; Pierre, pp. 45, 359; Clarel, I, 131, 241; II, 289. 59.

Mardi, II, 54 (italics mine).

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context, along with other authors whom he is known to have read at 60 the time of Mardi.

Though this is the only mention of P l ato1s name in Mardi, there is possibly an allusion to Plato or Socrates in Babbalanja »s reference to Mthe sage lawgiver Yamjamma, who ... roundly asserts, 61 that all men who knowingly do evil are b e d e v i l e d . S o Socrates 62 in the Republic believes that "no one is voluntarily bad." There is a somewhat similar oblique reference in Moby-Dick. To philosophers ““ 63 of all men, Socrates declares, "death is least formidable." Writing of the daring of death by whalemen, Melville remarks that "if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening 64 fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, hy your side." "Speculative 65 indifference as to death" he elsewhere characterizes as "Platonian," and in the light of Melville's familiarity with the Phaedo and his admiration for the character of Socrates as he is depicted there, it is probable that he had the content of the dialogue in mind as he wrote the passage.

The influence of the Phaedo on'Melville*s ideas of death and immortality is not easy to estimate, though a few passages such as the foregoing suggest that he had given considerable thought to the

60. In particular, Proclus, whose commentary On the Theology of Plato provided the material for a number of passages in M a r d i . cf * p p • T29-135, below. 61.

Mardi, I, 366f.

62. Republic, Bohn, II, 402.

63.

Phaedo,!, 66.

64. Moby-Dick, I, 357.

65. Melville conveys this idea in a humorous passage (Moby-Dick, II, 68) comparing the "placidity" of a sperm whale with the "practical resolution in facing death" of a right whale. "This right whale I take to have been a Stoic; the sperm whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years." Cf. I, 335: "a full-grown Platonian leviathan." Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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"Platonian” views expressed by Socrates in the Phaedo«

Certain other

parallels to the argument of the dialogue should be considered in this connection.

A passage in Moby-Dick which speaks of the soul as "glued"

inside the body is probably indebted to a similar expression in the

66 Phaedo.

Socrates, in keeping with his conviction that the body is

a hindrance to pure spiritual knowledge, prescribes an aescetic discipline for lovers of wisdom.

The philosopher, though forbidden

to take his own life, will nevertheless strive through his manner of living to separate the soul from the body:

this "is nothing else than 67 to pursue philosophy aright, and in reality to study how to die...." Melville,s Ishmael, whose Platonic convictions have already been demonstrated, relates that in meditating upon the problem of the

68 universe at the mast-head, "my soul went out of m y body;"

Melville’3

Pierre, in slaving over his projected book, "is learning how to live, 69 by rehearsing the part of death," though his regimen is scarcely that prescribed for the philosopher in the Phaedo.

Since the body is such a clog to spiritual advancement, Socrates argues, either the soul will never attain the knowledge which she seeks, or she will attain it only when completely freed of the 70 body, after death. The alternative of skepticism is echoed in the Socratic temper of Babbalanja:

though man may attain the "Penul71 timate" of wisdom on earth, "where," he asks, "is the Ultimate?" Three years later, in Pierre, Melville himself declares that only

66. Cf. Moby-Dick, I, 194; Phaedo, Bohn, I, 86. Melville’s figure of the watch-coat in the same passage may have been suggested by Plato’s image of the body as a garment (Bohn, I, 91f). 67.

Phaedo, Bohn, I, 83f.

Cf. the immediate context.

68.

Moby-Dick, II, 1.

70.

Phaedo, Bohn, I, 65. 71.

69.

Pierre, p. 425. Mardi, II, 81.

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59

m a n ’s '’miraculous vanity” ever persuades him that he can attain "the 72 Ultimate of Human Speculative Knowledge.” As for the possibility of revelation after death, Socrates’ other alternative, Melville pondered the question in Mardi, in Moby-Dick, and in Clarel, but without

~73-----arriving at any certain conclusions.

------

Sundermann, incidentally, believes

that consideration of this problem is typical of the later Melville, 74 finding in it "indisputable” (unbestreitbar) influence of the Phaedo.

Far from fearing death, Socrates had said in the Apology, he holds "great hope that death is a blessing.” For to die is one of two things: for either the dead may be annihilated and have no sensation of any thing whatever; or, as it is said, there is a certain change and passage of the soul from one place to another. And if it is a privation of all sensation, as it were a sleep in which the sleeper has no dream, death would be a wonderful gain.^® In Mardi Melville too wrote of death as a release: "since death

is

the last enemy of all, valiant souls may taunt him while they may. Yet rather, should the wise regard him as the inflexible friend, who, even against our own wills, from life's evils triumphantly relieves 76 us.” He also mentions in Mardi the possibility of annihilation, which had a strange fascination for him throughout his life, and which he evidently associated with the teachings of Oriental thought concerning resignation of the will and absorption of the individual

72.

Pierre, p. 233.

73. Mardi, II, 89f, 193, 375;Moby-Dick, II, 246f, 256f; Clarel, II, 3. 74.

Sundermann, p. 61 and note,

75.

Apology, Bohn, I, 28.

76.

Mardi, I, 36.

p. 201.

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60 77

spirit, after death, into the impersonal All of pantheism.

In

1856 he confessed to Hawthorne that he had "pretty much made up his 78 mind to be annihilated." But at that time he had just passed through a period of poor physical health and of mental despondency, and during the reintegration which took place in the years that followed he appears to have given equal consideration to the other alternative offered by Socrates, personal immortality.

As early as Mardi Melville had begun to survey possible grounds 79 for positive belief in individual survival. Among other arguments

77. On this point, cf. Mardi, I, 309f; Moby-Dick, II, 256f; Pierre, pp. 167, 298f; "Bartleby the Scrivener" in its entirety (Piazza Tales, pp. 19-65); The Confidence-Man, p. 115; Clarel, I, 49; II, 132, 145, 215; letter to John C. Hoadley (1877), Paltsits, pp. 48, 50; Poems, pp. 241f, 270, 299, 341. In "Rammon," a MS fragment [m ] partia 1 ly printed in Poems, pp. 241f, Melville writes: "To Rammon ... cessation of being was the desirable event." Both "Rammon" and "Buddha" (Poems, p. 270) have Oriental settings. Sundermann, p. 78 and note, p. &04, cites Melville's references to Lethe and Nepenthe, classical symbols of oblivion. On absorption into the All after death, cf. Moby-Dick, II, 17, 252f, 270; Pierre, p. 167; Clarel, I, 23; II, 13; Poems, p. 270. 78. Hawthorne's English Note-Books, 20 November, 1856, quoted in unabridged form by Raymond Weaver, introduction to Melville's Journal up the Straits (New York, 1935), pp. xxv-xxvii. Thorp (note, p .cxvi) interprets Melville’s statement to mean that he was nearly persuaded to the materialist position, but there are overtones in the words which cannot be so briefly paraphrased. For an admirable discussion of Melville's thinking along this line, cf. Walter Bezanson's analysis of Mortmain and other characters in "Herman Melville's ’Clarel'" (unpublished Yale dissertation, 1942), the most thorough study yet made of Melville's state of mind in his later years. 79. In Mardi Melville ponders grounds for belief in man's desire for immortality (I, 276f, 335, with which Sundermann, note 24, p. 195, compares the Phaedo), in virtue and religion (II, 79f, 302, 368), in nature (I, 244, 277) and in the (Kantian) notion of compensation hereafter for human suffering on earth (II, 302, 359). He would like to talk with one who has been in the next world (I, 276; II, 34); he wonders about the status of animals (I, 335f) and whether man himself must toil forever (II, 300). There may be no individual survival (i, 244; II, 323f), even in a hell for the wicked (II, 33f). "Peradventure" man may live again (I, 272), but "better to perish meriting immortality than to enjoy it unmeritorious" (II, 303). In this attitude William Braswell sees the influence of Seneca ("Melville's Use of Seneca," Am. Lit., XII, 98-104 [March, 1940]).

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61

is that of the Phaedo, based upon the preexistence of the soul as demonstrated by its innate ideas.

Melville's allusions to this

doctrine in Mardi have already been mentioned; in Moby-Dick and possibly in Billy Budd, written at the end of his life, it appears 80 once more with direct reference to preexistence. In the Phaedo Socrates argues that as preexistence is the prelude to mortal life, so mortal life, by the alternation of opposites, is but the prelude 81 to immortality. This reasoning is also examined in Mardi by Babbalanja, though without the assured conviction of Socrates.

He

comes upon a fragment of the works of old Bardianna, who taught that "death is but a mode of life.”

"Whence then is this?" he asks.

"If

the fogs of some few years can make soul linked to matter naught; how can the unhoused spirit hope to live when mildewed with the damps 82 of death?" This is perhaps reminiscent of Cebes’ fear in the Phaedo that when the soul "is separated and goes out from the body, it is 83 dispersed and vanishes like breath or smoke, and is no longer any where...."

Socrates answers this objection to the satisfaction of Cebes by declaring the soul does not perish, but merely passes through opposite states — - from death into life, from life into 84 death, and from death into life again. In Pierre Melville recalls Socrates’ formula once more in observing that "the most mighty of Nature’s laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life," but he does not apply the argument to the question of personal immor-

80.

c f • pp» 54-56, above, and pp. 70, 72, below.

81.

Phaedo, Bohn, I, 73ff; cf. Meno, Bohn, III, 28.

82.

Mardi, II, 75.

83.

Phaedo, Bohn, I, 69.

84. Ibid., I, 70f. Cf. Mardi, I, 277s is a setting; living is dying...."

"the su n ’s rising

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62

tality.

85

In no work written before Clarel does Melville give any

indication of affirmative convictions of his own on the subject. A m o n g the characters of that poem, however,

immortality is constantly

debated and at its conclusion Melville himself writes as follows: But through such strange illusions have they passed "Who in life’s pilgrimage have baffled s t r i v e n --Even death may prove unreal at the last, And stoics be astounded into heaven. Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned — Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind; That like the crocus budding through the snow — That like a swimmer rising from the deep -— That like a burning secret which doth go Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep; Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea, And prove that death but routs life into victory.®® This is the first evidence of an awakening faith in Melville’s own heart.

In another poem written not long before his death, "The

Lake,” the analogy from nature is even clearer. The theme is the 87 ”warmth and chill of wedded life and death,” with the application being made in the following song: ’Dies, all diest The grass it dies, but in vernal rain Up it springs, and it lives againj Over and over, again and again, It lives, it dies, and it livesagain, Who sighs that all dies? Summer and winter, and pleasure and pain, And everything everywhere in G o d ’s reign. They end, and anon they begin again: Wane and wax, wax and wane: Over and over and over amain, End, ever end, and begin a g a i n End, ever end, and forever and ever begin again!’®® 85. Pierre, p. 9, in commenting on the new life given in America to political institutions elsewhere decadent. Sundermann. p. 93 and note, p. 208, compares the argument in the Phaedo. Cf. also Moby-Dick, II, 163: the lying-in Hospital built on the site of an old grave-yard. 86.

Clarel, II, 298.

87. ”The Lake,” Poems, p. 434. Cf. the description in Moby-Dick (II, 214) of vegetatioh covering thebody of a dead whale: "Life1 folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.” 88. Poems, p. 433. Cf. Socrates’ mention of the alternation cf pleasure and pain, Phaedo, Bohn, I, 57.

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63

In the cycles of nature, the poet thus sees the same alternation of* opposites of which Socrates had spoken.

Billy Budd, written during

the same period as "The Lake,” may be a further revelation of Melville’s personal beliefs at the time of his death.

There is no passage

in which Melville directly affirms his belief in an after-life, but 89 the possibility appears to be left open for young Billy. Like 90 Socrates, he is better prepared for his death than those about him. As he awaits execution, "a serene happy light born of some wandering reminiscence or dream would diffuse itself over his face, and then gi wane away only anew to return.”

Forty years earlier, in Moby-Dick,

Melville had observed that ’'human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still 92 spiritually feeding upon some unearthly reminiscence....” In the same book, Starbuck suggests that the "strange sweetness" of p i p ’s lunacy revives in the little negro forgotten memories of a preexistent state --- "heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes.

Where learned

89. Young Billy is "wholly without irrational fear" of death (Billy Budd..., p. 97); his innocence is "a better thing than religion wherTSP with to go to judgment" (p. 9 9 )j the chaplain "did not fear for his future" (p. 100). Billy’s last words were "delivered in the clear melody of a singing-bird on the point of launching from the twig" (p. 102; cf. Socrates’ "swan-song," Phaedo, Bohn, I, 88f). As he dies, the sky in the East "was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision, and simultaneously there­ with, ... Billy ascended: and ascending, took the full rose [MS originally "full shekinah" [M]] of the dawn" (p. 103). After his death the sailors regard a chip of the spar from which Billy was hanged "as a piece of the Cross" (p. 113). Note that Billy Budd is dedicated to Jack Chase, Melville's old shipmate, "wherever that great heart may now be here on earth or harboured in Paradise" (p. 2; italics mine). 90.

c f . discussion above, pp. 46f.

91.

Billy B u d d ..., p. 96 (italics mine).

92. Moby-pick, II, 134 (italics mine); cf. Mardi, I, 178, on children *s vi sions and preexistence.

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64 93

he that, tut there?”

This is Socrates1 argument from preexistence.

Thus from Mardi until Billy Budd Melville’s speculations on immortality are frequently expressed in Platonic language.

It is un­

necessary to claim all the passages cited above as borrowings from the dialogue, but they do indicate a certain correspondence in thought that is more than accidental.

Especially in Mardi the arguments of the

Phaedo on immortality and related subjects appear side by side with an equal number of passages contradicting the affirmations of Socrates in 94 the dialogue, for when writing Mardi Melville was just beginning to explore such philosophical problems.

In Moby-Dick Father Mapple,

recognizing as did Melville that positive proof of immortality is withheld from the limited knowledge of mortal men, preaches that ’’mortal 95 or immortal,” men had best leave eternity to God. In 1856 Melville had almost given himself over to the negative position, yet in the last fifteen years of his life, following the publication of Clarel, his mind was more open on the question of immortality than in any other

93.

Moby-Dick, II, 249f.

94. Cf. note 78, above. On the soul’s inferiority to and dependence upon the body, c f . Mardi, I, 346f; II, 193, 214f; also Moby-Dick, I, 194; II, 350; Pierre, p. 364. Babbalanja’s statement that a bodily resurrection is necessary to insure personal survival, since bodily passions determine individual personality (Mardi, II, 215), may reflect Melville’s knowledge of British empirical philosophy. On the terror and evil of death, which Socrates denies, cf. Mardi, II, 356ff; MobyDick, I, 44, 156f; II, 269f, 309f; ’’Journal of Melville’s Voyage in a Clipper-Ship” (1860) [m], printed in N E Q , II, 120-125 (January, 1929). Note also the excellent commentary by Yvor Winters (Maule's Curse, pp. 58ff) on the place of death and evil in the symbolism o f MobyDick (i, 14, 346, etc.). On immortality as a delusion first advanced hy Christ, c f . Clarel, I, 52 f. 95.

Moby-Dick, I, 59.

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65

period of his maturity.

These contrary pronouncements are tokens of Melville's agnostic temper, which oscillated between extremes in an endless search 96 for a mediating ground on which to stake a few positive convictions. As the end of his life drew near, the spiritual influence of the Phaedo, forced to work against Melville's own temper and the contrary influences of other philosophical literature, seems once more to have emerged in 97 the note of hope expressed in Clarel, "The Lake,” and Billy Budd. Thus the character of Socrates and his assertion of the supremacy of the human spirit to the body and to bodily corruption were a part of Melville’s thinking for over forty years.

"Knowing you," Melville

once confided to Hawthorne, "persuades me more than the Bible of our 98 immortality." If Melville and Hawthorne are enjoying their projected 99 champagne-supper in Paradise, Socrates too should be of their company.

96. As early as Typee Melville found "Truth, who loves to be cen­ trally located," to be "between the two extremes...” (pp. 276f). In MobyDick, he described himself as "neither believer nor infidel" (II, ll7), and in a letter to James Billson, 22 January, 1885, as "neither pessimist nor optimist" (printed in Nation and Athenaeum, XXIX, 712 [13 August, 1921]). Hawthorne in 1856 said that Melville "can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief" (cf. note 77, above). 97. C f . Sundermann’s Comment (p. 56) on Platonic elements in Melville’s thinking during this late period. 98. Letter to Hawthorne, written sometime in November, 1851, printed by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne, pp. 156-160. 99. Letter to Hawthorne, written sometime in June, 1851, printed by Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, I, 400-407.

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66

Chapter Three

Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium.

” ... at once imaginative and metaphysical in short, Greek.'* Billy Budd..., p. 104.

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67

i Mardi and the Phaedrus

"The books that really spoke to Melville," writes F. 0* Matthiessen, "became an immediate part of him to a degree hardly matched by any other of our great writers in their maturity."

in

illustrating Melville's debt to Sir Thomas Browne in writing Mardi, Matfchlessen declares that his response to Browne "went to the length of ventriloquism," for his thoughts "were still so new to him that he had as yet no vocabulary to express them that was not at second-

1 hand."

The preceding chapter has shown that Plato's Phaedo was one

of the books which thus became a part of Melville, and that it was associated with Browne in providing the philosophical vocabulary of Mardi.

In Moby-Dick there is a similar combination, probably

unconscious, of the Phaedo and Plato's Phaedrus.

If Melville had

read both dialogues by the time of Mardi, it would not be surprising to find reminiscences of the Phaedrus in the earlier book as well.

The evidence for Melville's knowledge of the Phaedrus earlier than the writing of Moby-Dick is not so convincing as in the case of the Phaedo.

There are no references to the dialogue in

Redburn or White-Jacket, and Melville's correspondence during this period makes no mention of it •

But both dialogues appear in the

same volume of the Bohn Plato, which Melville may have been using, and certain passages of Mardi contain a number of interesting resemblances to the Phaedrus-.

This may indicate some influence of that

dialogue, or it may show nothing more than a general correspondence in thought and expression between the two authors.

There is

1» F * 0. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), pp. 122f.

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68

enough similarity, however, to warrant a detailed comparison for submission to further criticism.

Sundermann has already pointed out a broad resemblance between the allegorical theme of Mardi and one of the best-known passages of the Phaedrus, P l ato’s figurative analysis of the human soul into three constituent parts, ’’two of them having the form of

2 horses, and the third that of a charioteer."

One of the horses,

representing the appetites, is passionate and impetuous, eager to carry the charioteer toward sensual indulgence; the other, restrained and obedient, desires only to draw him toward the pleasures of virtue and philosophy. Sundermann suggests that in Melville’s "world of 3 mind" the equivalent analysis may be indebted to Plato’s figure, with Taji taking the place of the charioteer, Hautia that of the sensual horse, and Yillah, "the earthly semblance of that sweet vision, 4 5 that haunted my earliest thoughts,” that of the ideal. The allegory in Mardi is of course worked out in terms of human characters, but the respective symbols have identical values in both Plato and Melville. Each author presupposes the same ethical doctrine, the dualism of flesh and spirit which is a major topic of the Phaedo and Phaedrus and also of Mardi and Moby-Dick.

Melville’s inclination toward dualism, evidently encouraged by his study of the Phaedo, may have been responsible in itself for

2.

Phaedrus, Bohn, X, 330s

3.

Mardi, II, 277.

4.

cf. I, 322, 330—333. Ibid., I, 184.

5. Sundermann, pp. 68f and note, p. 203. Sundermann compares also the relation of Pierre to Isabel and Lucy in Pierre and that of Captain Vere to Claggart and Billy in Billy Budd. Critics have generally recognized that Melville employs the same allegorical theme in these works as in Mardi, but the later portrayals are more subtle than those of Taji# HHUtia, and Yillah. Other possible influences upon the characterization of Pierre are suggested below, pp. 180-190.

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69

the conception of the allegory in Mardi.

The search for the ideal,

which begins when Taji and Yillah become separated and which provides the narrative continuity of much of the book, is a Platonic motif, yet critics have suggested other possible sources in books which Melville

6 was reading at the time he wrote Mardi,

There are further resemblances

to Plato's Phaedrus, however, which Sundermann has not noticed, and which will accordingly be pointed out here. Plato’s myths has already been shown:

Melville’s interest in

the myth in the Phaedrus, of

which the figure of the charioteer and his horses is a part, provided the image of the oyster fettered to its shell which he adapted in Moby-Dick.

Plato writes in the Phaedrus, as in the Phaedo, that the

soul fettered to body lacks perfect spiritual vision, which she possesses only before birth and after death.

This teaching is embodied in the 7 mythical representation of the preexistent soul as "all winged.”

Upon descending into body, the soul loses her wings --that is, her spiritual vision ---, but the philosopher, being spiritually pure, may recover them once more under the quickening power of Love. Thus a partial restoration of the true vision is granted the philosopher even before death.

It is worth noting that Melville’s philosopher in

6. Van Wyck Brooks, Emerson and Others (New York, 1927), pp. 179f, and Thorp, note, p. lxi, compare Rabelais; Luther S. Mansfield, "Herman Melville, Author and New Yorker" (unpublished University of Chicago dissertation, 1936), pp. 202f, suggests Frithiolf’s Saga. Both the Saga and Rabelais were borrowed by Melville from Duyckinck, along with Sir Thomas Browne (Thorp, note, p. xxvii). Matthiessen, American Renaissance, pp. 272f, also compares Mardi with Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas; Brooks, pp. 180f, adds Thomas Moore and Poe. Other general parallels” could be cited in Dante (cf. note 10, below), Bacon’s New Atlantis, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and possibly Homer's Odyssey. Melville’s knowledge of Swift deserves particular investigation: there are close resemblances in Mardi and elsewhere. The influence of Plato’s dialogues as a literary form has been suggested above, p. 39. 7.

Phaedrus, Bohn, I, 327; cf. pp. 322-334.

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70

Mardi is transported to the realm of preexistent souls and is given instruction there "concerning things unsearchable to us."

Babbalanja

tells his companions later that his "sixth sense sleeps again, with all the wisdom that it gained," but he recalls having seen "spirits in their essences ... vital with intelligence, which seeks embodiment." This it is, that unbeknown to Mardians, causes them to strangely start in solitudes of night, and in the fixed flood of their enchanted noons. From hence are formed your mortal souls; and all those sad and shadowy dreams, and boundless thoughts man hath, are vague remembrances of the time when the soul’s sad germ wide wandered through these realms.® So Socrates declares, with a similar reference to the familiar Platonic doctrine, that "this is a recollection of those things which our soul 9 formerly saw when journeying with deity...."

This vision of the spiritual realm and the emphasis in Mardi on Love may have been suggested by the Phaedrus, or they may have come from Dante's Paradiso, which Melville was probably reading

10 at this time.

But Love in the Phaedrus takes the distinctive form

of a divine madness, which inspires the lover, the prophet, the poet,

8.

Mardi, II, 378 (italics mine).

9. Phaedrus, Bohn, I, 325 (italics mine). Other allusions to Plato’s doctrine of reminiscence are cited in the preceding chapter. 10. Melville purchased "1 Cary's Dante" on 22 June, 1848, according to John W i l e y ’s statement of 1 July of that year (Appendix II, p. 211). George C. Homans, "The Dark Angel: The Tragedy of Herman Melville," HEQ, V, 699-730 (October, 1932), p. 727, note, and Sundermann, p. 35 and note, p. 198, suggest that Dante’s Maremma (Inferno, xxix.48, etc.) is the source of Melville’s "Maramma" (Mardi, II, Iff). (The "weird Maremma" of Poems, p. 359, is probably recalled from Melville’s visit to Italy in T 8 5 7 .) Of Melville’s two specific references to the Inferno in Mardi (I, 14, 346), the second indicates some knowledge of its con­ tents . This and the section on Maramma, which follows it, were probably written after he had bought and begun to read his Dante. He might easily have read the Paradiso before describing Babbalanja’s vision, which occurs late in M a r d i .

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71

11 and the philosopher.

The philosopher, as a lover of things heavenly,

sums up in himself all these forms of inspiration.

He recalls true

spiritual beauty in beholding imperfect earthly loveliness, or in figurative language, he "begins to recover his wings."

He then "longs

to soar aloft, but being unable to do it, looks upward like a bird, 3.2 and despising things below, is deemed to be affected with madness." So Babbalanja, inspired to the madness of inspiration by his demon Azzageddi, is deemed mad by normal Mardians.

He and the other seekers 13 for Yillah, moreover, are likened to "birds, with pinions clipped,"

and when Taji meets the sensual Hautia and touches her hand, down drops 14 "a dead bird from the clouds." In the Phaedrus the winged soul seeks to return to the eternal realm from which she came; in Mardi Melville writes:

"Thus deeper and deeper into T i m e ’s endless tunnel, does the

winged soul, like a night-hawk, wend her wild way; and finds eternities

15" before and behind; and her last limit is her everlasting beginning."

The bird-imagery elsewhere in Mardi is also noteworthy, par16 ticularly in its application to poets, though this is of course con­ ventional.

Each Mardian poet, incidentally, is in full agreement with 17 Socrates that poetry is produced solely by inspiration. "My lord,

11.

Phaedrus, Bohn, I, 319-328.

12. Ibid., I, 326 (italics mine). By "keeping aloof from human pursuits, and dwelling on that which is divine," the philosopher is "found fault with by the multitude as out of his senses, but it escapes the notice of the multitude that he is inspired" (I, 325f). 13.

Mardi, II, 133.

14.

Ibid., II,395.

15.

Ibid., I, 268f (italics mine).

16• Ibid»* II* 53ff, 135, 324, 331. 17. Cf. also P l ato’s development of this same belief in the Ion, Bohn, IV, 287-308, concerning the art of the rhapsodist.

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72 18

I seldom think,1’ says Yoomy; "I but give ear to the voices in my calm.” The poet Lombardo, according to Babbalanja, was ”a mere amanuensis writing 19 by dictation.” In explaining Lombardo’s inspiration to Abrazza,

20 the ”king-philosopher”

-—

possibly a satire on the philosopher-king

21 of Plato’s Republic

--- Babbalanja appropriately refers once again

to the Platonic doctrine of innate ideas.

”M y lord, all men are inspired;

fools are inspired; your highness is inspired; for the essence of all ideas is infused.

22

Of ourselves, and in ourselves, we originate nothing.”

Thus Yoomy, Lombardo, and Babbalanja are all familiar with poetry as a ’’possession and madness proceeding from the Muses, which seizing 23 upon a tender and chaste soul,” rouses and inspires it to composition.

From these parallels it will be seen that Melville and Plato have similar conceptions of poetic inspiration:

both emphasize the

purity of the poet, his resemblance to the philosopher, and the isola­ tion of each from the multitude; both employ bird-imagery in discussing these subjects.

P l a t o ’s Socrates, crediting inspiration to the power

of Love, cuctes the following Homeric verse:

’’Him mortals indeed call 24 v/inged Eros, but immortals Pteros (Flyer) for his flighty nature.” Almost a summary of such Platonic doctrine occurs in the dialogue of Mardi; ’M y lord, my lordt’ cried Yoomy. ’The air that breathe.s my music from me is a mountain air I Purer than others am I ; for though not a woman, I feel in me a w o m a n 's soul•*

18.

Mardi, II, 191.

19.

Ibid., II, 327.

21.

Republic, Bohn, II, 56f, 159.

22.

Mardi, II, 326 (italics mine).

23.

Phaedrus, Bohn, I, 320f (italics mine).

24.

Ibid., I, 328 (italics mine).

20. Ibid., II, 317.

Cf. pp.94f f , below.

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73 ’Ah, have done, silly Yocany,' said Media. 'Thou art becoming flighty, even as Babbalanja, when Azz&geddi is uppermost.1 'Thus evert ever thus l* sighed Yoomy. prehend us not.’

'They com— — —

•ITor me, ' said Babbalanja. ’Yoomy: poets both, we differ but in seeming; thy airiest conceits are as the shadows of my deepest ponderings; though Yoomy soars, and Babbalanja dives, both meet at last. Mot a song you sing, but I have thought its thought.... Poets are we, Yoomy....^ And as Babbalanja says elsewhere, "I am wrong in seeking to invest sublunary sounds with celestial sense. muni cable by this ether we breathe.

Much that is in me is in com26 But I blame ye not."

The difficulty of communicating inspired truth was very real to Melville, and it was probably no great surprise to him that Mardi itself proved incomprehensible to the general reading public.

"Why it

had become a far different book from the projected sequel to Qaoo which he had at first begun is evident from the passages quoted on the subject of inspiration.

As his reading and writing progressed con­

currently, Melville's desire to objeotify what Babbalanja calls "some­ thing going on in me that is independent of me," had momentous results. For like his old philosopher, he had willed to do one thing, and another has been done. I will not say by myself, for I was not consulted about it; it was done instinctively. My most virtuous thoughts are not born of my musings,but spring up in me, like bright fancies to the poet; unsought, spontaneous•••• As vanity, I regard the praises of my friends; for what they commend, pertains not to me, ... but to this unknown something that forces me to it.^7

25.

Mardi, II, 136f (italics mine).

26.

Ibid., II, 37.

27.

Ibid., II, 155f.

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74 There is a similar acknowledgment of unconscious inspiration in "Dreams," which has been shown to express Melville's recognition of his indebtedness to other authors:

"an iron-mailed hand clenohes

mine in a -rice,” he declares, "and prints down every letter in my spite* Fain would I hurl off this Dionysius that rides me; my thoughts

28 crush me down till I groan**.*"

He therefore seems to have been

well aware of the mysterious mental processes whioh transformed a recollection of Thomas Browne or of Plato's Phaedo into a passage from his own pen.

Whether or not the parallels cited above between

'Ww-rdi and the Phaedrus may be accounted for in similar fashion is a more perplexing question*

That one image in Moby-Diok emblematic

of the dualism of flesh and spirit comes from the Phaedrus seems reasonably certain, and the allegory in the earlier book shows a singular correspondence in imagery and phrasing with that dialogue* This may be merely fortuitous, or it may indicate that Melville had read the Phaedrus attentively as early as Mardi*

Though the evidence

just examined does not appear conclusive, it undoubtedly deserves the attention of students of Melville*

28* Mardi, II, 55. For other references to composition Ty unconscious inspiration, of* Pierre, p* 147j Poems, pp* 3, 331j Clarel, II, 19* In the significant poem "Art” (Poems, p* 270), Melville holds that "instinct and study” must "meet and mate" in the creation of literature*

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75 ii Madness and Right Reason

In both the Phaedrus and Symposium of Plato, Soerates teaohes that the philosopher may asoend to the realm of ideal truth through the inspiration of Lorre*

Love, or Desire, is Plato's name for the funda­

mental impetus or drive in human nature which later thinkers have variously called the entelechy, the will to live, the elan vital, or some similar term*

But in other dialogues, notably the Republic,

Socrates takes the position characteristic of Greek philosophy in general, that the attainment of truth is purely a rational process*

It

is d e a r that Plato's emphasis on the non-rational activity of the mind was more congenial to Melville than the exaltation of reason in the Republic *

In the bulk of his writing, references to knowledge that

comes through intuition far outnumber the few passages in which reason is even mentioned*

A surviving page of manuscript which Melville left unpublished records his mature opinion of the role of reason in human affairs: A Reasonable Constitution What though Reason forged your scheme? 'Taras Reason dreamed the Utopia's dream: 'Tis dream to think that Reason can Govern the reasoning creature, man* To this verse Melville adds in prose:

"Observable in Sir Thomas More's

'Utopia' are First Its almost entire reasonableness*

Second Its almost

entire impracticability.

The remark applies more or less to the Utopia's 29 prototype 'Plato's Republic.'" The handwriting of this fragment and 29* [M]* The stanza of verse quoted above ha3 been printed by Mumford, p* 317, but the prose has never been published* For "Govern" (line 4) Melville considered substituting "Influence," but cancelled it in favor of the original reading.

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76 the paper on which it is written resemble those of the manuscripts of Melville's Billy Budd and his two late volumes of poems, John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891):

it probably dates from the same period*

The comment shows that to the end of his life Melville had but little faith in the rule of reason, either in epistemology or in sooial ethics*

This same tendency in Melville *s thought is evident as early 30 as Mardi, in which he speaks of reason itself as "inspiration” and 31 "a noble instinct" — words which would scarcely be used by a philosophic rationalist*

Ittien Taji and his Mardian companions visit Serenia,

the home of sincere Christianity, they are told that Right Reason and Alma [Christ] are the same; else Alma, not reason, would we reject* fKe Master's great command is Love; and here do all things wise, and all things good, unite* Love is all in all* The more we love, the more we know; and so reversed 33 Melville's identification of Christ with Love is of course familiar in Christian thought, but the place of reason in this formula is more 30* Mardi, II, 301: "Undeniably, reason was the first revelation; and so far as it tests all others, it has precedence over them* •. • But inspiration though it be, it is not so arrogant as some think*... Though in its best estate, not infallible; so far as it goes, for us, it is reliable***. But if this our first revelation stops short of the uttermost, so with all others*" 31. Ibid*, II, 122f: "Nor is there any impiety in the right use of our reason, whatever the issue*... Is not reason subtile as quick­ silver -— live as lightning..•? Can we starve that noble instinct in us, and hope that it will survive? Better slay the body than the soul...." 32.

Ibid., II, 370 (italics mine)*

33. This is implicit in the context of the quotation just given from Mardi, and is explicit in Poems, p* 276* Cf • Ahab's address to the Spirit of Fire in Moby-Dick, II, 282: "Came in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and !kiss thee*..*" For a comparison of Melville's treatment of love in Pierre with Plato's Symposium, of* pp. 85ff, below*

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77 unusual.

The passage as a whole should be compared with a ourious

annotation made by Melville after Mardi was written.

On the back

fly-leaf of the volume of his Shakespeare containing Othello. Hamlet. and Lear are written the following words* Ego non baptiso te in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sanoti — - sed in nomine Diaboli. madness is undefinable -— It & right reason extremes of one. --- not the (black art) Goetic but Theurgio magic — seeks converse with the Intelligence. Power, the Angel

F. 0* Matthiessen, commenting on this passage, points out that N 'Right Reason, * in the Coleridgean and Emersonian terminology, is the 35 highest range of intuitive intelligence, the gateway to divine madness." The treatment of reason in Mardi as a form of intuition is oertainly in keeping with such doctrine.

Melville had some knowledge of Coleridge

at the time the book was written, though his acquaintance with Emerson »s 36 thought was then largely indirect. As for divine madness itself, how­ ever, no one has heretofore suggested that Melville may have been indebted to Plato's Phaedrus as much as to the nineteenth century thinkers, both of whom were themselves devoted to Plato.

In the Phaedrus, it will

be recalled, Socrates holds that Love inspires madness in the lover; in Melville's words, love and madness are in turn compared with the concept of intuitive reason.

The idea that madness and reason are

"extremes of one" may even be indebted to Plato's two-fold pathway to truth, through the inspiration of Love and through rational dialeotio. 34. This annotation (italics mine) was first transcribed and printed from Melville's set of Shakespeare [M]'by Charles Olson, "Lear and Moby-Dick," Twice a Year, I, 165-189 (Fall-Winter, 1938), p. 17*3• 018on reads "reasons." 35.

F. 0. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, note, p. 457.

36. Cf* pp. 21, 29, above; of. also Matthiessen*s notes, op. cit., pp. 456, 184-186.

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78 It is unfortunate that Melville's copy of Plato has not survived along with his Shakespeare* for any markings or annotations relating to the subjects of inspiration and madness would no doubt be extremely interesting*

Lacking direct evidenoe of this sort* it

would be unwise to advance the suggestions just made to the point of dogmatism*

Tet the presence in Mardi of various parallels with the

Phaedrus * especially the character of the inspired philosopher* is significant*

"The narrow border-line separating the artist from

insanity seems to have preoccupied Melville*" as Matthiessen notes* 37 "from the time that he wrote Mardi*11 If he was in fact reading the Phaedrus during the same period* Plato might well have been responsible for turning his thoughts in this direction*

nThe fever runs through

me like lava*1* Melville himself exolaims in "Dreams;1* "my hot brain 38 burns like a coal****" In "all of us*" he told Evert DuyckLnok after completing Mardi* "lodges the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt* momentarily* what madness is has but a 39 mouthful of brains*" To Hawthorne he described Moby-Dick as written 40 in "hell-fire," and in the book itself he specifically warns the reader: Give not thyself up ••• to fire* lest it invert thee* deaden thee; as for the time it did me* There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness* And there is a Catskill

37* American Renaissance* p* 224* note* concerning Melville's marking of passages on this subject in his copy of Hawthorne's TwiceTold Tales* In another note* p. 209* Matthiessen supplies a convenient Tist of the volumes of Hawthorne's works belonging to Melville [M]* 38*

Mardi* II* 55.

39* Letter to Evert Duyckinok* 5 April* 1849 [D]* printed by Thorp, pp* 373-375* The occasion for Melville's comment was news of the insanity of his friend Charles Fenno Hoffman. 40- Letter to Hawthorne, 29 June* 1851* printed by Julian Hawthorne* Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife* 2 vol. (Boston* 1885)* I, 398-400.

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79 eagle in some souls -that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges* and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.^1

The consistent fire-imagery employed by Melville with reference to madness illuminates his allusion to "the flame in the 42 mouth" of "the ugly Socrates." Nowhere in Plato is Socrates said to be mad* though in the Phaedrus he himself characterizes the philosopher as a lover inspired with madness.

Since the character of

Babbalanja seems to be patterned in part after Socrates* the teachings ascribed to Socrates in the Phaedrus may also have entered into 43 Melville's conception of the old philosopher. Babbalanja is Melville's

41. Moby-Dick, II* 182. Compare the figure of the eagle with the bird-imagery In Mardi disoussed above. Birdsin Melville are frequently symbols of creative imagination. 42. November*

The full quotation* from a letterto Hawthorne written in 1851* is given above, p. 40.

43. Certain similarities have been pointed out in the preceding chapter* pp. 39ff* with the observation that though Socrates was in­ variably checked by his inward monitor, Azzageddi prompts the mad talk of Babbalanja instead of restraining him. Melville was evidently familiar with the notion of the inward check — Babbalanja says that though the poet Lombardo "abandoned all monitors from without; he re­ tained one autocrat w i t h i n his crowned and sceptred instinct" (Mardi* II, 328; italics mine) -- but it did not suit his purposes in creating Azzageddi. From reading Plato and Proolus Melville was well aware that Greek theology recognized various types of demons: the "account of certain invisible spirits, yoleped the Plujii" (Mardi* I, 305-308), introduced shortly before Azzageddi first appears*is a satirical treatment of demonology. He may also have been indebted to the "Digression of the nature of Spirits" in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (New York, 1847), pp. 115-127. Melville purchased the Anatomy, probably in this edition* in February, 1848* according to John Wiley's statement of 1 July of that year (Appendix II, p. 211). Burton, p. 115* refers to the benevolent demon of Socrates. Sugges­ tions from a number of authors were probably at work in Melville's characterization of the philosopher and his demon* but this does not mile out the argument proposed above.

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80 first sketch in a series of later characters affected with madness or near-madness

especially Ahab and Pip in Moby-Diok and Pierre and

Isabel in Pierre*

It is well-known that Ahab and Pip are modeled

after Shakespeare *s Lear and his Fool # and that Pierre is a nineteenthoentury Hamlet*

But Melville did not begin his intensive reading

44 of Shakespeare until he had finished Mardi#

so that the creation

of Babbalanja does not reveal the same indebtedness*

What Melville intended in this series of characters is shown in a comment on Shakespeare which he wrote in the summer of 1850# while already at work upon Moby-Dickt Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet# Timon# Lear# and lago# he craftily says# or sometimes insinuates the things which we feel to be so terrifically true# that it were all but madness for any good man# in his own proper character# to utter# or even hint of them. Tormented into"Hesperation, Lear# the frantic king# tears off the mask# and speaks the same madness of vital truth*^5

44* Allusions in "Fragments from a Writing-Desk" (Billy Budd*.*# pp. 382-399) show that Melville had some knowledge of Shakespeare as early as 1839# but Shakespeare did not become a major influence until the time of Moby-Diok* On 18 January# 1848# Melville purchased his edition of Shakespeare [M]# according to a statement from John Wiley on the following 1 July (Appendix II, p* 211). That he found no time to read it is shown by his letter of 24 February, 1849# to Evert Duyckinck [d ]# praising its format and confessing that "until a few days ago" he had "never made close acquaintance with the divine William" (printed by Thorp# pp. 370f). At this time# says Mhtthiessen# Melville had "just begun to meditate on Shakespeare more creatively than any other American writer ever has" (American Renaissance# p* 189)* Matthiessen# pp* 421-459# and Charles 61 son (note 34, above) have made important studies of the markings and annotations in Melville *s Shakespeare and of the influence of Shakespeare upon Moby-Diok. 45* "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (Billy Budd**.# pp* 123-143)# p* 130. This review first appeared in Evert Duyckinck*s Literary World, 17 and 24 August# 1850*

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81

Hoi; "In his own proper character," but through the mouths of Babbalanja and Azzageddi, Melville had begun the same procedure in Mardi»

In Moby-Dick, influenced by Shakespeare, he makes a distinction

between the blasphemous monomania of Ahab and the madness of revelation which overcomes little Pip*

Charles Olson, commenting on this point,

refers to the annotation on madness in Melville*s Shakespeare: who employs the blaok arts,

or "Goetio magio," fails to reach

Ahab, God,

whereas

Pip and Bulkington, representing the saored arts ofmadness 46 and right reason, each attain revelation* Pip saw God*s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad* So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompramised, indifferent as his G o d * ^ It is interesting to compare this passage with the statement of Socrates in the Phaedrus that "the greatest blessings we have spring from madness, when granted by divine bounty,” for madness is "more noble than sound sense, that which comes from God than that which 48 proceeds from men*” Since Melville seems to have known the Phaedrus with some thoroughness by the time of Moby-Diok, and perhaps earlier, it is quite likely that he had the concept of divine

madness in mind in writing of Pip's revelation*

There is thus a strong probability that the doctrines

46. "Lear and Moby-Dick" (note 33, above), pp. 175ff. Matthiessen concurs in this analysis (American Renaissance, note, pp. 457f)• 47.

Moby-Dick, II, 169f.

48*

Phaedrus, Bohn, I, S19f*

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82 of the Phaedrus played an important part in Melville's thinking and in the creation of some of his major characters.

His prejudice

against reason as a governing faotor in human affairs led him to condemn such a scheme as that of Plato's Republic because he considered its fundamental presupposition to be impracticable. But Plato's other extreme, divine madness, -was more congenial. Melville's preoccupation with madness began at the time of Mardi, which contains many references to inspiration and revelation similar to those in the Phaedrus.

The philosopher Babbalanja and

his demon, besides being patterned after Socrates and his demon, exemplify the conception of the inspired philosopher found in Plato's dialogue.

After completing Mardi, Melville became deeply

interested in Shakespearean tragedy, which provided him with models for characters in Moby-Dick and Pierre just as Plato seems to have given hints for Babbalanja.

But the madness of Pip, though evidently

suggested by that of the Fool in King Lear, illustrates the same divine revelation of which Plato speaks in the Phaedrus.

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85

iii Pierre and the Symposium

When Melville described himself to Hawthorne in November of 1851 as '‘the ugly Socrates," he was alluding to Alcibiades1 49 characterization of Socrates in P l ato’s Symposium, or Banquet.

This

is his first reference to the dialogue, though he may of course have read it at an earlier date, either in the Bohn translation, published in 1850, or in same other version.

"The divine magjiet is on you,"

Melville told Hawthorne in a postscript to the same letter, "and m y magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question --- they 50 are One*" For the notion of a spiritual affinity, whom Melville believed he had found in Hawthorne, he may have been indebted to the celebrated myth related in the Symposium by Aristophanes, the comic poet.

Man, says Aristophanes, was originally a divine hermaphrodite, 51

subsequently "cut in twain by the deity" and made "to dwell asunder." Each individual therefore goes through life "in search of his counter52 part." In the second chapter of Pierre, on which Melville was at

49.

Cf. p. 40, above, and note.

50. The whole letter, printed by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne (Boston, 1897), pp. 156-160, should be examined in this connection. But Julian Hawthorne remarked that if his father "chatted with a group of rude sea-captains ... or talked metaphysics with Herman Melville on the hills of Berkshire, he would aim to appear in each instance a man like as they were; he would have the air of being interested in their interests-and viewing life by their standards. Of course, this was only apparent; the real man stood aloof and observant..." (Hawthorne and His W i f e , I, 88f). For new light on the HawthorneMelville relationship, which has been the subject of considerable m i s ­ guided criticism, cf. the relevant chapters in Walter Bezanson’s "Herman Melville’s 'Clare! " (unpublished Yale dissertation, 1942). 51.

Symposium, Bohn, III, 514; cf. II, 508-516.

52. Ibid., Ill, 512. On the antiquity of the myth,cf. Ill, 539, note.

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84 53

work at the time,

is a specifics reference to the Platonio myth.

Describing the stratagems of Lucy Tartan's mother in seeking to promote a match between her daughter and Pierre, Melville observes that the thing demanded no manoeuvering at all. The two Platonic particles, after roaming in quest of each other, from the time of Saturn and Ops till now; they came together before M r s . Tartan's own eyes; and what more could Mrs. Tartan do toward making them forever one and indivisible?®

53. The chronology of Pierre has not heretofore been examined in detail, although certain pieces of evidence are available. Moby-Dick had been published in London on 18 October, 1851, from a revision of the American proof-sheets; the Mew York edition appeared the following month, calling forth the praise from Hawthorne that Melville acknowledges in the letter mentioned above. Since Moby-Dick had evidently been finished sometime during the summer, Melville must have been at work on Pierre during the fall and winter. On 28 December, 1851, his neighbor Sarah Morewood wrote George Duyokinck [D] concerning Melville's preoccupation with his w r i t i n g evidently Pierre. This letter is quoted in part by Luther S. Mansfield, "Glimpses of Herman Melville's Life in Pittsfield, 1850-1851," Am. Lit., IX, 26-48 (March, 1937), p. 48. On 8 January, 1852, Melville wrote Mrs. Hawthorne that he would "not again send you a bowl of salt water [Moby-Dick]. The next chalice I shall commend will be a rural bowl of milk LPlerre]...." This letter is partially printed 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, l93l). Cf. the rural setting of the opening chapters of Pierre, and the young hero's demand for "three bowls of milk" (Pierre, p. 22). On 21 January, Melville's brother Allan, his business agent, wrote Harper A Bros, regarding the contract for Pierre, the agreement being signed by him on 20 February. His copies of the letter and the agreement are pre­ served among Herman Melville's business papers [m ]« An unpublished letter from Mrs. Melville's father, Lemuel Shaw, to his son Samuel Shaw, 2 May, 1852 [m ], reports that "Elizabeth and her husband have returned to Pittsfield [from Boston? ]. . .. I have no notice, yet, of Herman's new book." Pierre was evidently out of Melville's hands by this date, but there is some uncertainty as to the time of its publication. This is sometimes given as August, 1852, but R. S. Forsythe in his edition of the book says 14 July (New York, 1930, p. xix). A memorandum among Melville's papers [m ] shows that the title was registered for copyright on 15 July, and a statement from Harper A Bros, dated 21 March, 1853 [M] charges Melville with two copies of the book on 29 July. The same statement mentions three copies deposited for copyright on 9 February, presumably an error. 54.

Pierre, p. 36.

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85 Thor© is also a reference later in the book to the "fable" of "self55 reoiprooally efficient hermaphrodites," probably a further allusion to the myth in the Symposium.

From the number of these allusions, it seems likely that Melville had in fact been reading the Symposium sometime in 1851. Hone of the passages mentioned is particularly significant, but there are other more important elements in Pierre involving a reminiscence of the dialogue.

The content of the Symposium consists of a number of

poetic speeches on Love delivered at a banquet in the house of Agatho, culminating in Socrates * recital of the doctrine of spiritual love which he had learned from the prophetess Diotima.

This doctrine, an

extension of the observations on love in the Phaedrus, is that by a process of spiritual refinement the true lover passes from contemplation of corporeal beauty to beauty in the abstraot, and from love of the 56 physical to love of the ideal. Melville may have had in mind this famous passage on "the ladder of Love" as he wrote in Pierre that "Love’s secrets, being mysteries, ever pertain to the transcendent and the infinite; and so they are as airy bridges, by which our further shadows 57 pass over into the regions of the golden mists and exhalations...."

Also in Pierre, following by only a few pages the reference to "the two Platonic particles," is an entire section of the same chapter devoted to an encomium of Love.

The language of the whole passage

55* Pierre, p. 361. On Melville’s subsequent use of the myth in his poetry, cf. p. 124, below, note 104. 56.

Symposium, Bohn, III, 531-556, especially III, 550ff.

57. Pierre, p. 113. The imagery of this passage, as will be shown below, pp. 98 -103, is similar to that of Melville’s specific references to Plato as a transcendental idealist.

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86 is so extravagant that Melville*s critics have been puzzled as to -whether the author*s intentions were serious* humorous* or satiric• A representative example of this difficult style is the following paragraphs Love was first begot by Mirth and Peace* in Eden* when the world was young* The man oppressed with cares* he cannot love; the man of gloom finds not the god* So* as youth* for the most part* has no oares* and knows no gloom* therefore* ever since time did begin* youth belongs to love* Love may end in grief and age* and pain and need* and all other moods of human moumfulness; but love begins in joy* Love’s first sigh is never breathed* till after Love hath laughed* Love laughs first* and then sighs after* Love has not hands* but cymbals; Love’s mouth is chambered like a bugle* and the instinctive breathings of his life breathe jubilee notes of joyt®® For some of these unusual phrases Melville seems to be indebted to the various speeches on Love in the Symposium* which indeed might well have prompted the writing of the whole section.

Like Diotima

as quoted by Socrates in the dialogue* Melville proposes a genealogy 59 of Love* which he calls the ohild of Mirth and Peace* Like Phaedrus, he regards Love as a god, born "when the world was young*" According to Phaedrus, "next after Chaos were born these two* 60 Earth and Love;" according to Melville* "All this Barth is Love’s 61 affianced; vainly the demon Principle hcwls to stay the banns*" The

58.

Pierre, p. 44.

59.

Cf* Symposium* Bohn* III, 534f.

60. Ibid., Ill* 487* The presence of phaedrus in both the Symposium and the dialogue bearing his name underlines the relation­ ship between the two* 61. Pierre, p* 46. There is possibly some Shelleyan influence, which is pervasive in the thought and imagery of Pierre * in this conception: cf. Prometheus Unbound and Melville’s various references in the book to Prometheus and hhe Titans* The platonism in Shelley would make the association in this instance perfectly appropriate*

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87 62

demon Principle of evil he calls "the accursed clog from chaos." In all probability there was a general recollection of Plato in Melville's mind as he composed the passage.

Mingled with these probable Platonic echoes are oertain allusions to the Christian tradition. ... in Eden.”

Love, says Melville, was "begot

Elsewhere in this same section he reoalls both the

dootrine and the phraseology of the Christian gospel according to St. John.

In John i.5 it is written of the Word, or logos 3

"All

things were made by him* and without him was not any thirg made that 63 was made." In Pierre Melville writes: "All things that are sweet to see, or taste, or feel, or hear, all these things were made by Love; 64 and none other things were made by Love." The Word, says John, made all things; Love, says Melville, made all things that are sweet. made not the Arctic zones, but Love is ever reclaiming them. not the fierce things of this earth daily, hourly going out?"

"Love

Say, are In

John, Christ is identified with the metaphysical dootrine of the logos; 65 in Melville, here as in other passages, Christ is identified with Love. Melville's antithesis of Christ, as Love, with "the demon Principle," Satan, is in accordance with Christian tradition.

But despite the optimistic tone of this section of Pierre, which implies that Love will ultimately triumph over evil, the passage quoted at length above contains ominous foreshadowings.

62.

"Love's

Pierre, p. 44.

63. This passage is unmarked in Melville's copy of the New Testament [M]. 64.

Pierre, p. 45 (italics mine).

65.

Cf • p. 76, above, and note.

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88 first sigh is never breathed, till after Love hath laughed. laughs first, and then sighs after."

Love

Melville, having called upon

the doctrines of Love in religion and in classical philosophy to help celebrate the springtime happiness of Pierre and Lucy Tartan, suddenly shifts the burden of his narrative in the pages immediately following, to present the first token of the impending disaster that is to fall upon the young couple. he mentions to Lucy.

Pierre himself has dark forebodings, which "God help thee, and God help me, Lucy," he

exclaims: I cannot think, that in this most mild and dulcet air, the invisible agencies are plotting treason against our loves. OhI if ye be now nigh us, ye things I have no name for; then by a name that should be efficacious — by Christ’s holy name, I warn ye back from her and me. Touch her not, ye airy devils; hence to your appointed helli why come ye prowling in these heavenly purlieus? Cannot the chains of Love omnipotent bind ye, f i e n d s ? 6 6 But the chains of Love are not omnipotent, and Pierre, "deprived of 67 joy," finds "cause for deadly feuds with things invisible." Faced with the existence of Isabel Banford, whom he takes for his illegitimate half-sister, he breaks with Lucy and with his mother to take the part of Isabel against the world.

The result is utter tragedy.

In the light of the subsequent development of the narrative, it is evident that Melville designed the idyllic praise of Love early in the book for purposes of deliberate contrast.

Instead of a triumph

of Love over evil, as promised in Christian belief, a triumph of evil over Love is the story he tells.

66.

Pierre, p. 51.

67.

Ibid., p. 57.

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89

For there is no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy, that a mortal man can possibly evoke, which will stand the final test of a real im­ passioned onset of Life and Passion upon him. Then all the fair philosophic or Faith-phantoms that he raised from the mist, slide away and disappear as ghosts at cock-crow. For Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass. Against his gray philosophisings, Life breaks upon a man like a morning.®® Neither the Bible nor Plato can help Pierre.

In the Symposium Socrates

unfolds the mystic doctrine of Diotima concerning the power of Love. By ascending from visible forms of beauty to the realm of the ideal, seen only by the spiritual eye, man will "beget not the shadowy show of v i r t u e

as not coming into contact with shadowy s h o w s 69 virtue in reality, as coming in contact with a reality...."

But

Pierre, tried by suffering, utterly rejects Plato's doctrine.

"Look,"

he declares to Isabel near the end of Melville’s book:

but

"a nothing is

the substance, it casts one shadow one way, and another the other way; and these two shadows cast from one nothing; these, seems to 70 me, are Virtue and Vice."

This is the absolute antithesis of Platonism.

Melville

himself, contrasting the "savage and untameable health" of the Texas Camanche with the miserable condition of Pierre, bitterly demands: "If physical, practical unreason make the savage, which is he?

68.

Pierre, p. 403.

69.

Symposium, Bohn, III, 555.

70. Pierre, p. 382. 7/illiam Braswell, "Herman Melville and Christianity^ (unpublished University of Chicago dissertation, 1934), p. 163, compares this passage with the thought of Spinoza and Kant. Melville, in his copy of Shakespeare’s King Lear [m ],underlined and checked L e a r ’s words in the opening scenej ^WcrEhing can come of nothing....” Pierre in the passage in Melville just cited exclaims: "From nothing proceeds nothing."

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90 71 Civilisation, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue* behold your victim*”

As

early as Moby-Dick Melville himself, despite the Platonic echoes already noted there, had begun to part company with Plato.

He relates

by way of digression the story of "an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato1s honey head, 72 and sweetly perished there?" In the same book is an explicit denial of the assumptions of Platonic metaphysics:

"Though in many of

its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible 73 spheres were formed in fright." Melville’s speculations, by the time of Pierre, had nearly drawn him into the position of the honeyhunter, but instead of the ideal truth and beauty and virtue that Plato held to exist in the spiritual world, Melville found only hopeless ambiguity.

No wonder, then, that in Pierre he terms Plato

a member of the "guild of self-imposters," which also includes "Spinoza, and Goethe, and many more."

If these thinkers, he observes

pointedly, "do not in the end discover their own delusion, other people soon discover it for themselves, and so these philosophers and their 74 vain philosophy are let glide away into practical oblivion." It is significant that Plato’s Socrates escapes the condemna­ tion thus bestowed upon Platonic doctrine, for Melville evidently made a distinction between the ethical principles of "Socratic wisdom" and the metaphysical system of Plato.

Like Milton’s castigation of Greek

philosophy in Paradise Regained, the foregoing passage in Pierre must

71.

Pierre, p. 421.

72. Moby-Dick, II, 80.

73.

Ibid., I, 243.

74. Pierre, p. 290.

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91

have been -written with both intellectual honesty and emotional regret, for to each author Plato exerted a lasting appeal that philosophical disagreement could not destroy*

Milton renounced Plato because his

thought was pagan and not Christian, but Melville in Pierre holds that 75 neither the pagan nor the Christian scheme of salvation is possible. In Plotinus Plinlimmon’s pamphlet, read by Pierre, is a long discussion of the disparity between heavenly ideals and earthly performance, a dualism familiar in both Platonism and Christianity. Plinlimmon 76 offers the compromise of "a virtuous expediency but from his teachings, writes Melville, I confess, that I myself can derive no conclusion which permanently satisfies those peculiar motions in my soul, to which that lecture seems more particularly addressed. For to me it seems more the excellently illustrated re­ statement of a problem, than the solution of the problem itself. But as such mere illustrations are almost universally taken for solutions (and perhaps they are the only possible human solu­ tions), therefore it may help to the temporary quiet of some inquiring mind; and so be not wholly without use

In the state of mind which Melville had reached when he wrote Pierre, no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy could re­ solve this difficulty, though in his later years he found it possible to return to Plato's dialogues, including the Symposium, with pleasure and profit.

In 1852, however, he had come to an impasse in

his speculations which seemed hopeless.

According to one brilliant

interpretation of the course of his thought, that of Yvor Winters, the assumption of Pierre is that in the face of pervading ambiguities.

75. Cf. S. Foster Damon, "Pierre the Ambiguous," Hound and Horn, II, 107-118 (January-March, 1929). 76.

Pierre, p. 299.

77.

Ibid., p. 293.

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92

m a n ’s limited knowledge makes it impossible to form a valid judgment 78 as a basis for action* Having rejected Plato’s belief in a benevolent spiritual order of the universe, and having denied that reason exercises control over human affairs, he had in Pierre also asserted the insufficiency of Love, both Christian and Platonic.

In

the Phaedrus Plato says love brings madness; in the Symposium, that love brings ideal truth and virtue.

Melville, having looked too

long into the face of the fire, had learned only the wisdom that is woe, and the woe that is madness.

Pierre, the victim of Philosophy

and Ideal Virtue, fearful lest his mind give way, was the end-product of Melville’s four years of intense speculation, which had left him over-worked, baffled, and disillusioned like his own hero.

78. Yvor Winters, "Herman Melville, and the Problems of Moral Navigation," inMaule's Curse (Norfolk, Conn., 1938), pp. 51-89. Cf. especially pp. ?9ff.

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93

Chapter Four

Plato’s Republic and Timaeus

"Plato had a secret doctrine, had he? What secret can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon? of Montaigne? of Eant? Therefore, Aristotle said of his works, ’They are published and not published*»" Marked by Melville in his oopy of Emerson's "Spiritual Laws" [m 3*

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94 i Melville and the Doctrines of the Republic Although it was late in Melville's life when he expressly

1 dismissed the political scheme of Plato's Republic as impracticable, his judgment was doubtless essentially the same earlier in his career. At the time of Mardi, through the character of Taji, he had refused the refuge of an ideal state, Serenia, which may owe something to the example of Plato's commonwealth as well as to the principles of 2 Christianity* Having seen life at first hand aboard ship and on the beaches of the South Seas, Melville had lost the faith of "the

3 mere philosopher" in "mere undiluted reason" humanity, individually or collectively*

and its power to govern

His years of adventure had

bred in him a constitutional distrust of intelleotualism divorced from practical experience*

"To one who has weathered Cape Horn as

a common sailor," he once remarked of an optimistic pronouncement by 4 Onerson, "what stuff all this is*"

But apart from his disagreement with Plato's major premise, rationalism, Melville was in sympathy with certain of the political and social ideas of the Republic.

Continuing in Mardi the social

criticism he had begun in Typee and Qmoo, he made further statements, through his characters and in direct comment, of opinions similar to

1*

Cf* pp* 75f, above*

2* Except for the Serenians' qualified identification of wisdom and goodness (Mardi, II, 375), which is perhaps reminiscent of the Republic, their tenets are less Platonic than Christian. 3.

Pierre, pp* 259f.

4* Cf • William Braswell, "Melville as a Critic of Emerson," Am* Lit., IX, 317-334 (November, 1937), p. 329. ("Horne" in the printed text is an error.)

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95 those of Socrates in Platofs dialogue.

The Mardian ruler Media, like

his friend Abrazza, is more or less a "king-philosopher," as Plato*s 5 guardians of the state are required to be. His charge that poets are

6 guilty of "stirring up all Mardi" with their lays

is perhaps a 7 humorous echo of the famous attack on poetry in the Republic. Melville is more serious in his critique of American democracy of the 8 1840*s as practiced in Vivenza. in Babbalanja's observations and in the mysterious scroll delivered to the Vivenzans Melville presents ideas not unlike Soorates* strictures on democracy and his aristocratic 9 conception of true liberty, for in the ideal state Plato presupposes the superiority of aristocracy to democracy and all other forms of government.

Despite the "ruthless democracy on all sides" which Melville

10 later professed to Hawthorne,

there is a prevailing aristocratic

strain in Mardi and the books that followed it which suggests com­ parison with the Republic.

Neither Plato nor Melville believed in an hereditary caste system, but in an aristocracy of ability.

In Mardi Melville declares

to the Vivenzans that "though all men approached sages in intelligence, some would yet be more wise than others; and so, the old degrees

11 be preserved."

The Serenians, neither monarchists nor communists,

12 recognize that "equality is not for all.... 5.

Cf. p. 72, above.

6.

Such differences must be."

Mardi, II, 135.

7. Socrates charges that poetry stirs up the inferior part of the soul(Republic, Bohn,II, 294-297) and is itself inferior because an imitative art (II, 284ff). Most forms of poetry are therefore banished from the commonwealth. 8.

Mardi, n ,

222-252.

9.

Republic, Bohn, II, 244ff.

10. Letter to Hawthorne, written sometime in June, 1851, printed by Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, 2 vol. (Boston, 1885), I, 400-407. 11.

Mardi, II, 242.

12.

Ibid., II, 367.

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96

For as Melville explains in Redbura:

"There are classes of men in the

world who bear the same relation to society at large that the wheels do to a ooach:

and are just as indispensable•”

But "no contrivance,

no sagacity, can lift them out of the mire; for upon something the 13 coaoh must be bottomed; on something the insiders must roll*” This principle of degree is inherent in the Republic, and may be presented so forcefully in Mardi and R e d b u m partly as a result of Melville’s having read the dialogue at the time the books were written.

But

whereas Media, like Plato, accepted the practice of the Greek citystates in compelling the performance of menial labor by nthe common sort, including serfs, and Helots, war captives held in bondage," 14 Melville himself has only condemnation for suoh a practice. His attacks on American slavery elsewhere in Mardi confirm this position.

Nevertheless, Melville was "hopeless of all ••• real and 15 permanent democracies," and like Plato he believed in a republican delegation of political power.

After the American Civil War his dis­

trust of the mass of mankind extended even to their chosen leaders. Clarel reflects his disillusionment in the post-war political scene, and even in Billy Budd there is a disparaging reference to the capabilities 16 of "most legislatures in a demooracy." Yet Melville's Swiftian dislike for humanity in the aggregate is offset by his devotion to "that democratic dignity" in individuals "which, on all hands, radiates without end from God" regardless of political and social rank or station.

13.

His heroes are therefore "meanest mariners, end renegades

R e d b u m , p. 177.

14.

Mardi, I, 223.

15.

Pierre, p. 387.

16. Billy Budd..., p. 85. There are indications in the MS [m ] that Melville intended this passage to be cancelled.

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97 17 and castaways,"

as he explains in Moby-Dick, whose spiritual

grandeur is of Another order, and more r a r e -As high above the Plato mind As this above the Mammon kind. Melville's conception of human dignity was so exalted that it defies comparison with the practice of his fellow-Amerioans or the theories of his fellow-philosophers. A sham intellectual aristocracy he 19 specifically disclaimed, Just as he rejected the artificial distinc-

20 tions of family pride not based on true spiritual worth. copy of Religion:

In his

A Dialogue Melville marked Schopenhauer's state­

ment that "Plato's dictum, that the multitude can't be philosophers,

21 will always remain true."

But for all his belief in degree,

neither Plato's Helots nor his intellectuals were placed high enough on the spiritual scale for Melville's approval.

Whatever influence

Plato may have had on Melville's sooial and political views, particularly his concept of aristocracy, Melville thus went beyond Plato in working out his own beliefs and embodying them in the characterizations of 22 Ahab, Pierre, and Billy Budd. 17#

Moby-Pick, I, 144.

18.

Clarel, II, 143.

19. Cf. the letter to Hawthorne cited above, note 10. In MobyDick, I, 265f, Melville maintains that intellectual ascendency d O W ' Hot "cover the complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a sort of corporeal relation." 20. Cf. the opening chapters of Pierre, particularly the un­ masking of Mrs. Glendinnxng*s false prTdS: 21. Religion: A Dialogue..., by Arthur Schopenhauer, tr. T. B. Saunders (London, "T896 ), p • 19 [M ]• Cf. Republic, Bohn, II, 181. 22. The most complete treatment of Melville's conception of spiritual aristocracy as a literary motif is that of Stanley Geist, in his admirable Harvard honors thesis, Herman Melville: The Tragie Vision and the Heroic Ideal (Cambridge, Mass., x939). Mumi'ord, the earliest of several critics to comment on Melville's political view3, remarks that "one needs some such compound word as aristodemocraoy to describe his dominant political attitude" (p- 296). A concise summary of Melville's social ideas is given by Thorp, pp. xovii-cxix.

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Another possible allusion in Mardi to the doctrines of the Republic occurs in a half-serious, half-satiric speech of King Media. Petitioned by a group of his subjects requesting the establishment of trial by jury. Media rejects their appear -with the following words: Away l As unerring justice dwells in a unity, and as one judge will at last judge the world beyond all appeal; so — though often here below justice be hard to attain -- does man came nearest the mark, when he imitates that model divine. Hence, one judge is better than twelve. And as Justice, in ideal, is ever painted high lifted above t!he crowd; so, from the exaltation of his rank, an honest king is the best of those unioal judges, which individually are better than twelve. And therefore am I, King Media, the best judge in this land.^3 Besides ridiculing the pretensions of Media, Melville in his references to justice a3 an abstract entity, a single ideal model, may be recalling Socrates* argument in the Republic, which opens as an inquiry into the nature of justice and develops the ideal state as a model for actual terrestrial governments.

This is in accordance with Plato*s theory

of ideas, which maintains that all particular entities having an earthly or material existence are patterned after transcendental spiritual forms which are eternal and unchangeable.

Melville’s familiarity with the doctrine of ideas is well illustrated in the Platonic terminology which he adopts in various discussions of aesthetics.

In Pierre, for example, he speaks of the

'feemi-reflected, ideal faces, which, even in the presence of the original, a spiritual artist will rather choose to draw from than

23. Mardi, I, 215f (italics mine). F. 0. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), note, p. 384, compares the thought of Carlyle• There is, however, no positive evidence that Melville knew Carlyle directly earlier than 1850 (cf. pp. 29f, above).

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99 24 from the fleshy face, however brilliant and fine*”

In the Republic

Socrates compares his picture of an ideal commonwealth with the analogy of a painter, "who having painted the portrait of a very handsome man, and having expressed everything fully in his pioture, is yet unable to show that such a man really exists."

A translator's note to this

passage goes on to explain that "Plato's object here is to show, that painters in the high departments of art copy ideal, not actual nature, — 25 nature in its perfection, — not in its imperfect and actual nature." Elsewhere in the dialogue

Socrates objects to all imitative art on the

ground that as the artist's conception imperfectly realizes ideal forms, so the work of art in turn imperfectly realizes the idea in 26 the mind of the artist. To Melville, similarly, all the great books in the world are but the mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied images in the soul; so that they are but the mirrors, distortedly reflecting to us our own things; and never mind what the mirror may be, CJr-'"'

-

24.

Pierre, p. 100.

V

25. Republic, Bohn, II, 158 and note. Melville's words may recall more directly a passage in Religio Medicis cf. Sir Thomas Browne, Works, ed. Simon Wilkin, 4 vol. (London, 1835-1836), II, 89f. 26. Republic, Bohn, II, 284ff. The theory of this passage is developed more expensively by Plotinus, Ennead V, viii, "On the Intellectual Beauty." Plotinus holds that the beauty of form in a work of art is first in the designers "that original beauty is not transferred; what comes over is a derivative and a minor," showing itself "only in so far as it has subdued the resistance of the material" (Plotinus, Works, tr. Stephen Mackenna, 6 vol. [London, 1917], IV, 73). The only English versions of Plotinus available in Melville's day were those of Thomas Taylor, whose Select Works of Plotinus (London, 1317) Melville may have known (cf. pp. i'26ff, b e l o w B u t neither this volume nor Taylor's •Concerning the Beautiful (London, 1787; reissued as An Essay on the Beautiful, 1792), a paraphrase of Plotinus, Ennead Vi, contains the section just quoted. It seems evident that Plato himself must be considered the literary source of similar passages in Melville, but the underlying concept, though essentially Platonic, is familiar to every creative artist from his own experience.

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100

if we would see the object, we must look at the object itself, and not at its reflection.^ Melville expresses the same conception in other passages employing 28 equally characteristic Platonic terminology.

.Another instance of Melville *s indebtedness to Plato is his use of shadow-imagery, illustrated in the quotation just given. According to Socrates, visible objects are but the shadows of reality; the material world of the senses is a realm of shadowy illusion.

True

reality exists only in the world of ideas, seen by the spiritual eye 29 when illuminated by the sun of reason. "Oh I how immaterial are all materialsl" cries Melville's Ahab. "What things real are there, but 30 imponderable thoughtsT" But to Babbalanja, "The shadows of things are greater than themselves; and the more exaggerated the shadow, the 31 more unlike to the substance.” For "things visible are but conceits of the eyes

things imaginative, conceits of the fancy. If duped by 32 one, we are equally duped by the other." Thus Melville aooepts the 27. context•

Pierre, pp. 395f •

Note the reference to Plato in the same

28. The poet Lombardo confessed that his work "ever seemed to him but a poor scrawled copy of something within, which ... he could not completely transferll— (M&rdi, n , 334; italics mine). In "Hawthorne and His Mosses" Melville terms Hawthorne's writing "the visible type" of the author's mind (Billy Budd. •., p. 126), and declares that "the immediate products of 3. great ailnd" are "infallible indices" of the greatness within which cannot be completely expressed (pp. 130fj. In Pierre he speaks of "the fresh, unwritten images of the bunglingly written tnings," contrasting "the perfect ideal* to the "attempt at embodying it" (p. 380; italics mine). — — 29. C f . t h e celebrated figures of "the divided line" (Republic, Bohn, II, 199) and the cave of sense (II, 202ff). "Perceptibn of shadows" is for Plato the lowest form of sense-perception. 30. Moby-Dick, II, 310. "Thoughts and cares," says Babbalanja, "are life," and liberty, and immortalityl" (Mardi, II, 249). Melville was familiar with other philosophical ideaiTBtff 'as well as Plato. In Mardi, for example, he refers to Bishop Berkeley, "who, metaphysically speajcing," holds "all objects to be mere optical delusions..." (I, 72). 31.

Mardi, II, 48.

32.

Ibid., I, 329.

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101

two-world, system of* Plato, but he denies that illusion is less eharacteristio of the spirit than of the senses.

In Pierre, as already

noted, is the bitter conclusion that Virtue and Vice are "two shadows 33 cast from one nothing," and as late as Timoleon (1891) Melville was still askings 0, tell at last. Are earnest natures staggering here But fatherless shadows from no substance cast? Yea, are ye, gods?34

The ambiguity of all knowledge which confronted Melville made it impossible for him to base an ethical philosophy on the meta35 physics of idealism* The idealists were evidently in his mind when, as early as Mardi, he makes Media charge that "the free, airy robe" of Babbalanja's philosophy "is but a dream, which seems true while it lasts; but waking again into the orthodox world, straightway you resume 36 the old habit." By the time of Pierre Melville had obviously adopted this view as his own.

The conflict of earthly imperfection and heavenly

ideals, so strikingly illustrated in Plinlimmon's pamphlet, is the theme of the book, and Melville*s contrast of the two undoubtedly owes much to his familiarity w i t h Platonic thought.

Once more in Clarel,

where in one passage or another most of Melville *s mature ideas recur, the same theme appears again:

33.

Pierre, p. 382; cf. p. 89, above.

34. "Timoleon," Poems, p. 252. Other instances of shadowimagery in passages containing allusions to Plato*s Phaedrus and Symposium are noted above, pp. 70, 85, 89. 35. Cf • Poems, p. 251, in which Melville comments on the want of moral sanctions ‘ b oth in his own day and in Plato’s. 36. Mardi, II, 57. The comparison of the sleeping and waking states is Tamiliar in Plato, as in the Republic, Bohn, II, 163. Melville’s hero in Pierre declares: "it is all a dream — we dream that we dreamed w e dream” (p. 382). Cf • also Ma rdi, II, 378 (quoted above, p. 70).

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102 But ah, the dream to test by deed, To seek to handle the ideal And make a sentiment serve need: To try to realise the unreall37 Thus Melville denies P l a t o ’s primary assumptions in metaphysics and ethics, just as in social and political philosophy, but at the same time he employs Platonic terminology and even Platonic concepts in discussing the philosophic problems treated in the Republic.

That Melville regarded Plato with mixed emotions is shown by the changing tone of references to him by name in Melville’s various books.

In the Republic Socrates places at the summit of the hierarchy

of ideas the idea of the good, which he explains as "not essence, but beyond essence, and superior to both [being and essence] in dignity and power.” replies:

To this statement his friend Glaucon, ”heartily laughing,” 38 ”By Apollo, here is a marvelous transcendencyi” Plato’s

willingness to mix philosophy and wit in this little exchange may help to explain Melville's appreciation of Benjamin Franklin’s 39 "graciousness of good humour” as "Plato-like." The specific passage may even have been in his mind when in Moby-Dick, with tongue in cheek, he sets forth certain "profound thoughts" of his own, "capable of a transcendental and Platonic application," on the homely subjects of 40 beer, beef, and bread. This light tone is characteristic of Melville’s references to the idealist in philosophy — - "an aerial architect," as he is called in Mardi; "a constructor of flying

37.

Clarel, I, 108.

38.

Republic, Bohn, II, 199.

39. Israel Potter, p. 61. A few pages earlier Franklin is called "this homely sage, and. household Plato" (p. 58). 40. Moby-Dick, II, 209. Note the humorous reference in the same book to "ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on” (II, 116). In Pierre, p. 395, Plato is called "transcendently great."

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103 41

■buttresses.”

With Plato Melville associated Emerson, the apostle of

nineteenth-century Transcendentalism, as "this Plato who talks thro* 42 his nose,” and later in Pierre he satirizes Emerson*s followers as striving to forget "their physical forlornness, by resolutely revelling 43 in the region of blissful ideals."

The tenor of these quotations indicates that Melville was not enamoured of Transcendental idealism in either its Greek or its Emersonian form.

TJhgar in Clarel touches exactly upon the point at

which Melville parted company with the Platonists: Quite they shun A god to name, or cite a man Save Greek, heroical, a Dons *Tis Plato*s aristocratic tone. All recognition they forgo Of Evil; supercilious skim With spurious wing of seraphim The last abyss.” Plato *s hierarchy of ideas culminates in the governing idea of the good; Melville's metaphysics demands recognition of the fundamental

antagonism of good and evil which in his Weltanschauung pervades all nature: No, disproportionate is evil In influence. Evil, do I say? But speak not evil of the evil: Evil and good they braided play Into one chord. In the monism of an idealistic metaphysical system there is no place 41. Mardi, I, 42. This may be a concealed allusion to Plato. In the sanflTTSSHtext is a reference to the subiect-matter of Byron's "Manfred," and in a similar passage in Moby-Dxck, I, 197, the poet is again Byron and the philosopher is plAto. 42. Letter to Evert Duyckinck, 3 March, 1849 [D], printed Thorp, pp. 371-373. 43.

Pierre, p. 372.

44.

by

Clarel, II, 244f.

45.Ibid., II, 173f. This idea was in Melville's mind as early as Mardi; cf• II, 348. Evil, he declares in the same book, is "the" chronic malady of the universe; and checked in one place, breaks forth in another" (II, 344).

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104

for such dualism, -which to Melville could not be-explained away.

By

the historian of philosophy, Plato ’s doctrine of ideas is seen as an attempt to reconcile the metaphysical and epistemological dualism of earlier Greek thinkers.

But Melville was acutely conscious of the

disguised dualism of P l a t o ’s own treatment of the problem of knowledge, and in metaphysics he felt that Plato had avoided the dualism of good and evil only by ignoring it.

This was the evasion that called forth

his most contemptuous reference, when Pierre apostrophizes "ye chat­ tering apes of a sophamorean Spinoza and Plato, who once didst all but delude me that the night was day, and pain only a tickle. 46 this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye cannot."

Explain

At the time these words were written, as already shown in the discussion of P l ato’s Symposium, Melville had dismissed all faith, all stoicism, and all philosophy as of no avail to struggling man.

He had

condemned transcendental idealism not because he rejected the reality of the spiritual world, but because, contrary to Christian and Platonist alike, that world appeared to him not merely more real but "more 47 terrific, because more spiritual," than the realm of sense-experience. Melville’s Ahab and Pierre face an ambiguous spiritual order that is indifferent at its best, and at its worst malignant.

Unable to dis­

cover its secret by any existing creed, they challenge it, battle it, and become its victims.

So Melville, undoubtedly stimulated in his meta­

physical speculations by the doctrines of the Republic, fell victim to his own introspection.

Though his allusions to Plato after Pierre

are more tolerant, the evidence of Clarel is sufficient to show that in his later years he continued to find in Platonism no more than "the excellently illustrated re-statement" of the same insoluble dualistic problems.

46.

Pierre, p. 421.

47. Moby-Dick, I, 143. Cf. II» 347, "all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless...•"

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105

ii Myths and Figures in the Republic and Timaeus

The foregoing comparison of Melville's thought with the doctrines of the Republic suggests certain generalizations regarding Melville*s reading of Plato.

In both politics and metaphysics he

was in closer agreement with Plato as a negative critic than as a constructive thinker.

"When Socrates offers Plato's objections to

democracy or discusses the illusions of sense-perception, Melville approves; when Socrates sketches Plato's plans for an ideal state or outlines his metaphysical system, Melville replies that reason will never govern man, dispel illusion, or solve the problem of evil.

In

short, Melville frequently accepted a Platonic analysis of a philosophic question but rejected its Platonic solution.

At the same time, his

own meditations on the same subject are often colored by Platonic language and myth, as shown both in the present chapter and in dis­ cussion of dialogues other than the Republic.

The inference is that

despite Melville's unwillingness to accept Plato's thought in its entirety, he had nevertheless been considerably influenced by Plato's presentation of some of the major problems of philosophy.

In addition to the myth and imagery of the Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Symposium, Melville likewise made use of the celebrated Myth of Er in the Republic and the creation-myth in the Timaeus, a dialogue commonly associated with the Republic.

The concluding book of the

Republic describes in detail the vision of Er, a Pamphylian slain in battle who returns to life, according to Socrates, and describes what he had seen in the world beyond the grave.

After telling of the arrival

from earth of the souls of the dead, Er reveals that some of the souls

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106

are condemned to be cast into hell and others are permitted to a scend into the upper world.

After a period of several days the latter

appear before the Three Fates — - to whom Melville alludes in Moby48 ---Dick, Pierre, and Israel Potter -— and receive lots and samples of the lives which they will assume in their next earthly incarnation: Souls of a dayl The beginning of another period of men of mortal race! — -the demon shall no-fc receive you as his lot, but you shall choose the demon; he who draws the first, let him first make choice of a life, to which he must of neoessity adhere....^® Such is the word of Lachesis, one of the Fates, recalled by Melville in Babbalanja’s statement that the end of ”our mortal lives ... 50 whatever it may be, ... will prove but as the beginning of another race.”

The same passage in Plato was probably in Melville’s mind when in White-Jacket he composed the following meditation on fate: But all events are mixed in a fusion indis­ tinguishable. What we call Fate is even, heartless, and impartial; not a fiend to kindle bigot flames, nor a philanthropist to espouse the cause of Greece. W e may fret, fume, and fight; but the thing called Fate everlastingly sustains an armed neutrality. yet though all this be so, nevertheless, in our own hearts, we mould the whole w o r l d ’s hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods. Each mortal casts his vote for whom he will to rule the worlds; I have a voice that helps to shape eternity; 48. Moby-Dick, I, 6; Pierre, pp. 96, 400; Israel Potter, p. 168. These allusions are noted by Sundermazm, p. 96 and note, p. 209. 49.

Republic, Bohn, II, 308 (italics mine).

50. Mardi, II, 300 (italics mine). Melville could not have used the Bohn translation of the Republic while writing Mardi since it was not published until 1849. But in the Taylor-Sydenliam version of Plato, to which he had access (of. p. 37, above), the rendering of the passage from the Republic just quoted (I, 474) is almost identical with that in the Bohn text.

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107

and m y volitions stir the orbits of the furthest suns. In two senses, we are precisely what we worship. Ourselves are Fate. 51

Though Melville speaks here of the ruler of the worlds, and Plato of individual tutelary spirits, there is a close similarity between the two in the concept of choice.

The subject of Fate

evidently reminded Melville of the Myth of Er, which he had read in the Republic at least as early as the writing of Mardi?

his mention

of "the cause of Greece" indicates the direction his thought had taken. Sundermann, in pointing out the parallel in the Republic, suggests Platonic influence on Melville’s belief in a residue of m a n ’s power 52 of self-determination. But the passage in Tfhit e- Jacket is unusual in this respect, for in Mardi, Moby-Dick, and particularly in Pierre Melville’s customary emphasis is on fate at the expense of free-will. His Calvinistic religious training was undoubtedly the most important single influence on his inclination toward philosophic determinism. The chief contributions of the Myth of Er to Melville’s thinking were 53 probably the concepts of reincarnation of the soul and the successive cycles of the world:

as old Bardianna declares in "his roundabout

chapter on ’Cycles and Epicycles,’" it is "a perpetual cycling with 54 us, without progression...." In similar passages Melville employs these ideas figuratively, to illustrate his denial of progress. 51.

TShite-Jacket, p. 404 (italics mine).

52.

Sundermann, p. 95 and note, p. 208.

53. Cf. pp. 54ff, above.

54. Mardi, II, 161. For other allusions to reincarnation and to cycles, c f . Mardi, I, 267, 277; II, 300, 302, 307; letter to Hawthorne, written sometime in November, 1851, printed by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne (Boston, 1897), pp. 156-160; MobyDick, I, 73, S00; II, 104, 186f, 232, 264. Cf. also Robert £ur-Eon*s ■Anatomy of Melancholy (New York, 1847), p. 34; Sir Thomas Browne, Works, ed. Simon WiljEin, 4 vol. (London, 1835-1836), II, 9, for other possible verbal influences.

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108

Sundermann believes that certain passages in Mardi show 55 ----the influence of P l a t o ’s Timaeus. The theme of the Timaeus is the creation of the world, which Plato calls "an animal with a soul, truly intellectual, and created through the providence of the deity containing within itself all the other animals with which it is 56 naturally allied." So Melville says of the world of Mardi: Daily the slow, majestic throbbings of its heart are perceptible on the surface in the tides of the lagoon. Its rivers are its veins; when agonized, earthquakes are its throes; it shouts in the thunder, and weeps in the shower; and as the body of a bison is covered with hair, so Mardi is covered with grasses and vegetation, among which we parasitical things do but crawl, vexing and tormenting the patient creature to which we cling. Nor yet, hath it recovered from the pain of the first foundation that was laid. Mardi is alive to its axis.®? 58 The idea of a soul of the world, explicit in the Timaeus, Sundermann 59 points out also in Melville, although overlooking an impressive illustration in Moby-Dick: And heaved and heaved, s till unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.®®

55. Sundermann, p. 94 and note, p. 208, cites Mardi, I, 268; II, 161, 328. I see nothing particularly reminiscent of the Timaeus in the third of these references. 56.

Timaeus, Bohn, II, 334f (italics omitted); cf. II, 343, 380.

57.

Mardi, II, 159.

68.

Timaeus, Bohn, II, 339f, etc.

59. Sundermann, p. 100 and note, p. 209, cites Mardi, II, 53; "beneath me, at the Equator, the earth pulses and beats like a warrior’s heart...." 60.

Moby-Dick, I, 296; cf. also I, 198 and II, 253.

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109

In Neoplatonic thought, with which Melville had some acquaintance, P l a t o ’s soul of the world becomes the Over-Soul, a familiar subject in Emerson.

This is a technical term signifying the third member of the

Plotinian Trinity, linking the transcendental and terrestrial realms* Whereas in Mardi Melville employs the concept in an animistic sense, in MoTy-Dick he Is closer to the metaphysical concept of Plotinus. 61 In the Timaeus Plato maintains that "our plastic Creator" 62 molded the world out of the preexistent matter of chaos; Melville remarks in Mardi that "the controversialists have debated, whether 63 indeed the All-Plastic Power itself can do more than mould." This would seem to indicate a wider knowledge of this doctrine than from acquaintance with only the Timaeus, although it is likely that Melville was familiar with the dialogue at the time Mardi was written.

In

addition to the textbooks of philosophy, he could have found this interpretation of creation in one of his favorite w o r k s , the apocryphal 64 Wisdom of Solomon, and also in Milton. It is interesting to note a possible recollection of Milton in one of the passages cited by Sundermann as showing the influence of the Timaeus.

Time may have

been, says Melville, when the whole material universe lived in its Dark Ages; yea, when the Ineffable Silence, proceeding frcan its unimaginable remoteness, espied it as an isle in the sea. And herein is no derogation. For the Immeasurable's altitude is not heightened by the arches of Mahomet’s heavens; and were all space a vacuum, yet would it be a fulness; for ^fco Himself Sis own universe is He.^*> 61.

Timaeus, Bohn, II, 387.

63.

Mardi, I, 267.

62.

Ibid., II, 360.

64. Wisdom of Solomon, xi.l7s "thine all-powerful hand, that created t h W WdrTd but' "of TSrmless matter." 65. Mardi, I, 268. Melville’s comparison of Time and Eternity^ here and iia H , 359, may owe something to Plato: cf • Bohn, II, 169ff (Republic); II, 341 (Timaeus). F. 0. Jlatthiessen, American Renaissance, 7*' 255; suggests HaWttlCWTtf's influence in later passages.

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110

This pantheistic concept resembles a passage in Paradise Lost; Boundless the Deep, because I am who fill Infinitude, nor vacuous the space.6®

As Sundermann notes, Melville was evidently attracted to

67 pantheism at the time of Mardi,

his only quarrel with the doctrine

being over the problem of evils Oro [God] is in all things, and himself is all t h i n g s the time-old creed. But *81x106 evil abounds, and Oro is all things, then he cannot be perfectly good; wherefore, O r o *8 omnipresence and moral perfection seem incompatible.66 The dualism of good and evil being difficult to reconcile with a monistic pantheism, Melville »s recourse to the idea of preexistent matter is fiQ

understandable.

MAtter, he implies in Moby-Dick, cannot be annihilated,

nor can evil. In Pierre he refers to evil as "the accursed clog from 70 chaos," and in other passages he suggests that evil and matter are

66. Paradise Lost, vii*168f. The image in Mardi of God moving on the face of* the wa-Eers, from Genesis, i.2, is found also in Paradise Lost, i«19ff, and in Melville*s Pierre, p. 284, which seems to recall both. 67. Sundermann, p. 60 and note, p. 201. Melville alludes to pantheism or animism in Mardi, I, 14, 139, 204, 268; II, 53, 124f, 158f, 255, 300, 352; RedtauraTT PP» 81* 84; White-Jacket, p. 96; letters to Hawthorne printed Ibry Julian Hawthorne, Sfa-fclhanieY Hawthorne and His Wife, I, 400-407, and Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne, pp. 156-160; Moty-Dick, I, 58, 198; II, 26, 169, 2&9, 252Y, 276; Pierre, pp. 6157,"7£>,"'167, 213, 349, 395, 422, 441; Clarel, I, 23, 73£, 200, 243; II, 13, 28; Poems, pp. 270, 277, 285. InTiis copy of Schopenhauer*s Religion: A 'Dialogue [m ] Melville marked this statement: "Taking an unprejudiced view of the world as it is, no one would dream of regarding it as a god" (p. 56). None of the references after Mardi indicate any real belief in pantheism, but rather a poetic conception of the vitality of nature. 68.

Mardi, II, 124 (italics Melville«s).

69. Moby-Dick, II, 119: "Could annihilation occur to matter," the whale1s tail "were the thing to do it." This doctrine also occurs in Milton. 70.

Pierre, p. 44; cf. p.

37, above.

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Ill 71

co-existent•

Such doctrine Is of course as old as the history of

human thought, and to distinguish the relative importance of various influences on Melville —

Plato, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Milton,

Spinoza, and Goethe, to mention several — of available evidence.

is impossible on the basis

The cosmology of the Timaeus probably stimu­

lated Melville*s imagination rather than his purely philosophical speculation, thereby coloring some of the more poetic passages cited in the present disoussion.

The Timaeus was probably in Melville’s

mind, however, when in the character of Derwent in Clarel he remarks That even in Physics much late lore But drudges after P l ato’s theme

Another section of the Timaeus which undoubtedly interested Melville is Plato’s presentation of the ancient concepts of psychology which prevailed in essentially the same form until the beginnings of modern medical study.

Plato recognizes the head, the chest, and the

abdomen as the respective seats of the rational, sensitive, and vegetal

71. In Israel Potter, p. 151, Melville mentions "the idea ... that all human affairs ar»f> subject to organic disorder, since they are created in and sustained by a sort of half-disciplined chaos....” In Clarel, II, 251, Ungar asks: *What incantation shall make less The ever-upbubbling wickedness I Is this fount na t u r e ’s?* The tragedy of Pierre arises partly from the fact that ’’though charged with the fire of all divineness, his containing thing was made of clay” (Pierre, p. 150). 72. Clarel, I, 252. One other possible influence of the Timaeus might be mentioned in passing. Plato observes that the images of objects seen in a mirror are reversed, a concave mirror presenting ”an image wholly inverted” (Timaeus, Bohn, II, 351). Melville employs the mirror, along with water and fire, as symbols of introspection, declaring in Pierre that in the region of speculative truth, maxims ’’finally become wholly inverted” (p. 231). Cf • Moby-Dick, II, 180-182, 295j ”The Tartarus of Maids” (in Billy Budd...), p. 24#V

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112 73

faculties or "souls";

Melville uses the same scheme as the basis 74 for the symbolic characterization of Pierre, although he was chiefly

dependent on a more detailed outline which he found in Robert Burton's 75 Anatomy of Melancholy. Plato's tripartite division of the soul appears also in the figure of the winged horses and the charioteer in 76 the Phaedrus, already compared with the characterization of Mardi, and in the Republic.

The good government of the soul, Socrates

declares in the latter dialogue, consists in a harmony of these three principles :

the rational or governing part, the irrational or con­

cupiscent part, and the irascible part or will*

In regulating bodily

desires, the will becomes auxiliary to the reason in enforcing control 77 over the third member and thus achieving harmony* What Socrates calls justice does not regard merely a man's external action, but what is really internal, relating to the man himself, and what is properly his own; not allowing any principle in him to attempt what is another's province, or to meddle and interfere with what does not belong to it; but really well establishing his own proper affairs, and maintaining proper self-government, keeping due order, becoming his own friend, and most naturally attuning these three principles, as three musical strings, base, tenor, and treble, or whatever others may intervene: --- thus will he he led to combine all •bhese together, and out of many to form one whole, temperate, attuned, and able to perform whatever

73. Timaeus, Bohn, II, 349, 380-382. Plato places the immortal or rational soul in the head, the sensitive soul or spirited part in the heart, and the vegetal soul or the appetites in the liver. 74. E. L. Grant Watson, "Melville's Pierre," MEQ, III, 195-234 (April, 1930), was the first to point out a similar relation between Pierre (the head), Isabel (the heart), and Delly (the sensual appetites), but without investigating the literary background of Melville’s symbolism.

75. The present discussion should be read in connection with the study of Melville's use of Burton offered below, pp. 180-190. 76.

Cf. p. 68, above.

77.

Republic, Bohn, II, 127.

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113

is to be done, either in acquiring wealth, or managing the 'body, or any public affair or private bargain... .^8

That this anatomy of the soul made a considerable impression on Melville is shown by his use of "that notion of Socrates, that the 79 soul is a harmony." The doctrine appears also in Plato fs Phaedo, where it is introduced by Simmias into the discussion of immortality but is rejected by Socrates, on the grounds that it contradicts the theory of knowledge as recollection and that it makes the soul dependent on the mortal body as music is dependent upon the strings 80 of a harp. The psychological implications of Melville’s use of this figure, however, indicate that he had the Republic in mind when employing it. Babbalanja in Mardi hears "the thrilling of my soul’s 81 monochord," and in a trance-like state he had once beheld a being from the star Aldebaran whose soul in germ, "trembling, like to a harp82 string," vibrated in its inmost being. Preparatory to his vision in Serenia, Babbalanja "started at a low, strange melody, deep in my 83 inmost soul." Such an experience is not for the uninitiate, he cautions King Media:

"prick not your ear to hear it; that divine

harmony is overheard by the rapt spirit alone; it comes not by the 84 auditory nerves."

78. Republic, Bohn, II, 129 (italics mine). The same conception of harmony appears also in II, 147, 244, 260f, 282. 79.

The Confidence-Man, p. 49.

80. Phaedo, Bohn, I, 89f, 97-100. Sundermann, p. 98 and note, p. 209, cites only the Phaedo as the source of Melville's reference in The Confidence-Man, ignoring other allusions to the doctrine in both Plato and! Melville • 81.

Mardi, II, 283.

82.

Ibid., II, 353 (italics mine).

83.

Ibid., II, 373.

84.

Ibid., II, 283.

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114

It should bo noted that Melville employs the figure in Mardi as a symbol of introspection, carrying over from Plato the image of a harp-string to represent the "inmost being” of the soul. In his next book, R e d b u m , he returns to the same theme, music; But what subtle power is this, ... that so enters ... into our inmost beings, and shows us all hidden things? Not in a spirit of foolish speculation altogether, in no merely transcendental mood, did the glorious Greek of old fancy the human soul to be essentially a harmony. And if we grant that theory of Paracelsus and Campanella, that every man has four souls within him; then can we account for those banded sounds with silver links, those quartettes of melody, that sometimes sit and sing within us, as if our souls were baronial halls, and our music were made by the hoariest old harpers of Wales.®® This passage, as will be shown later, is the key to the characteriza­ tion of Pierre, with its combination of the psychology of Plato and Burton.

For the present it is sufficient to indicate Melville,s

further use of the concept of harmony in the later book.

Early in

Pierre external nature is represented as restoring harmony to the soul of Melville*s hero, already troubled by his first revelation

86 concerning the symbolic Isabel.

But a much subtler signification

occurs repeatedly after Isabel begins unfolding to Pierre the story of her mysterious past.

”Not mere sounds of common words,” Isabel tells Pierre, "but inmost tones of my heart*s deepest melodies should now be audible to 87 thee." And when she has finished speaking, "still, the low melodies 88 of her far interior voice hovered in sweet echoes in the room.*.."

85.

Redburn, p. 322.

86. Pierre, p. 120.

87.

Ibid., p. 159.

88. Ibid., p. 166.

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115

Since the incestuous relation of Isabel and Pierre is now recognized as Melville *s symbol of the soul turning inward upon itself through 89 introspection, it will be seen that the musical quality of Isabel, 90 who represents the deepest part of the soul, has much in common with the music-symbolism of Mardi*

Melville declares in Pierre that

"where the deepest words end, there music begins with its supersensuous 91 and all-confounding intimations So Isabel adds to the melodious­ ness of her speech the music of her guitar, promising Pierre that its strings "shall sing to thee the sequel of my story; for not in words 92 can it be spoken*" Pierre cannot understand the message of Isabel *s 93 guitar, for to him it sings only "MysteryX" But the wonderful melodiousness of her grief had touched the secret monochord within his breast, by an apparent magic, precisely similar to that which had moved the stringed tongue of her guitar to respond to the heart-strings of her own melancholy plaints* The deep voice of the being of Isabel oalled to him*... 94 Thus, just as Babbalanja had heard his soul'3 "divine harmony," 95 audible to "the rapt spirit alone," Pierre becomes aware through Isabel’s music of the mysteries of his own inmost being* 89. Cf* George C. Homans, "The Dark Angel* The Tragedy of Herman Melville," NEQ, V, 699-730 (October, 1932), p* 723, and Stanley Geist, Herman Melville: The Tragic Vision and the Heroic Ideal, pp* 56f* 90. A discussion of the significance of Isabel will be found in my "Herman Melville*s *1 and My Chimney,*" Am* Lit., XIII, 142-154 (May, 1941), and below, pp* 180-190. 91. Pierre, p* 393* On the incapacity and abuse of words, cf. Mardi, I, 313, 329, 364; II, 125, 286; "White-Jacket, pp* 447f; MobyPlck, I, 268; Pierre, pp. 253, 393, 49g; Clarel, II, 172* 92. Pierre, p* 177* Isabel*s discovery of the name inscribed in her guitar (p . 207) may have been suggested to Melville by the finding of his father’s signature in a book he had purchased (cf. p. 13, above). 93.

Pierre, pp* 178, 211.

94* Ibid., p. 241 (italics mine). Notice the similar conception of a harmonic response in The Confidence-Man, p* 49, where the allusion to "that notion of Socrates^ is explicit* 95*

Mardi, II, 283.

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116

The device of the guitar has a material value in the development of Melville*s story, like a piece of stage property in the drama, but in addition it performs a symbolic function*

Only

the guitar itself, says Isabel, taught me the secret of the guitar; the guitar learned [3ic] me to play on the guitar. No musicmaster have I ever had but the guitar. I made a loving friend of it; a heart friend of it. It sings to me as I to it. Love is not all on one side with my guitar. All the wonders that are unimaginable and unspeakable, all these wonders are translated in the mysterious melodiousness of the guitar. It knows all my past history. Sometimes it plays to me the mystic visions of the confused large house I never name. Sometimes it brings to me the birdtwitterings in the air; and sometimes it strikes up in me rapturous pulsations of legendary delights eternally unexperienced and unknown to m e .9® The same

inspiration innate in the guitar also affects Pierre as

turnsmore and more to Isabel, and of his

he

inward upon himself. In themidst

writing he feels ’’chapter after chapter born of its wondrous

suggestiveness,** but the wonders

of which the music alone can speak 97 are ’’eternally incapable of being translated into words •'* This is another illustration of Melville’s Platonic conception of creative art — - the difficulty of translating ideas into satisfactory outward expression.

Melville had found that the mysteries within himself

which he had been attempting to resolve in Mardi and Moby-Dick defied verbal representation. The guitar, as a symbol both of introspection and of inspiration, not only signifies Melville*s dilemma, but al3o illustrates his recourse to symbols and figures as communicative mediums.

The result in Pierre was a kind of private writing that was

96 • Pierre, p • 177 • Note the occurrence of bird-imagery, as in other passages in which Melville discusses inspiration (cf • pp. 71, 78f, above). 97.

Pierre, p. 393.

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117

unintelligible to his contemporaries, and that present-day critics are only beginning to understand*

In this connection, Isabel*s reference to "the mystic visions of the confused large house I never name” is of considerable interest. She is speaking of the asylum in which, during her mysterious child98 hood, she had for a time been confined* Once more Melville links inspiration and madness, as Plato had done in the Phaedrus, and in Isabel he hints at the dangers of prolonged searching of the soul's depths*

Isabel brings disaster to Pierre, and to disaster Melville

himself at this period came dangerously close* The pursuit of the 99 heart, the delving into the self, was more than a literary theme; it was a part of Melville's own experience.

Introspection, as early

as Mardi, he associated with the figure of the soul as a harmony.

In

neither Mardi nor Pierre is the idea used as Plato had employed it, either in discussing the immortality of the soul or in illustrating its tripartite nature.

But Plato's musical strings provided Melville with

the imagery for one passage in Redburn and the symbol of Isabel's guitar in Pierre. The man in harmony with himself, says Plato, becomes "his own friend;" Isabel is "a heart friend” of her guitar*

Isabel

herself signifies the heart, which Pierre pursues to his own destruc­ tion.

She and her music, symbols of inspiration and introspection,

are Melville's warning that though turning inward upon the self brings harmony, it is a siren's music that allures only to destroy.

98.

Pierre, pp. 168ff.

99* Ibid*, p. 127: "The heartl the heartl »tis God's annointed; let me pursue the heartl” Isabel, as previously noted, personifies the heart*

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118 iii Melville's Debt to Plato To judge from the Platonic allusions in Melville's works which have now been examined, Melville was chiefly familiar with six of Plato's most widely-read dialogues, the Apology, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium, Republic, and Timaeus.

Since a passage in Billy Budd is

derived from a definition attributed to Plato, as printed in the concluding volume of the Bohn edition, it seems likely that he had also investigated even the more obscure portions of the Platonic canon.

There are, however, no specific parallels to be found between

Melville's books and any of Plato's authentic writings except the dialogues just mentioned.

In all probability Melville's first-hand

acquaintance with Plato began about 1847, the year in whioh Mardi was undertaken.

Apart from a reference in Typee to "Platonic affection,"

he does not mention Plato earlier than Mardi, but in that book there are numerous echoes of the Apology, Phaedo, Republic, Timaeus, and probably the Phaedrus.

The large number of verbal reminiscences of

the Phaedo found in Moby— Dick suggest that Melville reread at least the one dialogue with particular attention about 1850, and in the following year he seems to have become familiar with the Symposium for the first time.

Were Melville's own edition of Plato now available, it would be possible to establish this tentative chronology with more accuracy. But no set of the dialogues belonging to him can be located at the present time, nor is there a known record of his purchasing such books. At least by the time of Billy Budd Melville was using the Bohn trans­ lation, to which page references have been made here.

The Apology,

Phaedo, and phaedrus all appear in the first volume of the Bohn

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119 edition, which was readily accessible to Melville in the New York Society Library while Mardi was in progress-

The Symposium was

published in the third volume of that translation in 1850, a year before Melville first alluded to the dialogue-

But the Republic and

Timaeus, both of which were known to Melville at the time of Mardi, did not appear in the Bohn translation until after Mardi wa3 completed. Melville probably first read these two dialogues in the TaylorSydenham version, also in the Society Library, in 1847 or 1848.

If,

however, he at some time bought a complete set of Plato, it was presumably "the authentic translation," as he calls the Bohn edition in Billy Budd-

In addition, it is likely that he bought or borrowed

the translation of the Phaedo separately published by William Gowan-

The earnestness with which Melville read Plato reveals itself in his lasting regard for Socrates, one of his spiritual heroes-

To

the standard of "Socratic wisdom" he habitually referred ethical problems of his own career.

Socrates the skeptic, the historical

figure who professed nothing of himself but who sought critically for truth and wisdom in others, seems to have been in Melville's mind when he sketched the character of Babbalanja in Mardi-

Long afterwards,

when his own pursuit of truth brought him into conflict with the customs of the age, he continually turned to the situation of Socrates

100 before his judges for comparison with his own difficulties-

The

100- Note that in one of Melville's late allusions he is not strictly accurate in stating that Socrates was charged with undermining the laws and being dangerous to the young (p- 43, above). In the Apology Socrates faces the accusations of having corrupted the youth and of not believing in the gods of the state. This suggests that Melville had not recently read the Apology when he wrote the passage quoted- The same charges against Socrates are reported by Plato and by Xenophon in the Memorabilia, which Melville may also have known, although I have been unable to find positive evidence that he was familiar with this Work-

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120 historical Socrates is most clearly presented by Plato in the Apology and other early dialoguesj in his later works, especially the Republic, the figure of Socrates becomes that of the ideal Platonic philosopher, simply a convenient mouthpiece for the theories which Plato himself wished to unfold. distinction.

Melville seems to have been fully aware of this

In Pierre, where he is most hostile to Plato, there is

no word of condemnation for Socrates.

And it is significant that

the Phaedo, the one dialogue which most influenced Melville, contains not only an exposition of Plato’s thought but also his noble portrait of Socrates fearlessly facing death.

Echoes of both the imagery and

the ideas of Socrates * meditation on immortality are recurrent in Melville*s works, from Mardi through Billy Budd.

Melville’s attitude toward Plato’s system of thought is best approached from the philosophical position of dualism.

Plato’s

dualistic distinctions between body and soul, matter and spirit, sense-experience and spiritual perception, the mass of mankind and an aristocracy of ability, all were completely acceptable to Melville. Plato, as a transcendental idealist, states these problems of early Greek philosophy only as a preliminary to the construction of his own system, which attempts to resolve the various dualisms into a higher monism.

Melville, on the other hand, was so thoroughly grounded in

the principles of dualism that such procedure appeared to be merely a shallow evasion.

Though reading Plato at the time of Mardi evidently

did much to establish Melville as a dualist, he felt obliged in Pierre, after four years of meditation on Plato’s theme, to denounce Platonism and all other forms of transcendental thought.

If Plato had not meant

so much to Melville’s development, the abuse in Pierre would never have been written.

The mood of Pierre is the mood of a baffled and

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121

seemed useless, but in Melville's later years his references to Plato and to other philosophers as well are phrased in kindlier tones.

Thus Plato as a critical dualist received the same approval that Melville extended to Plato the biographer of Socrates, but as a monistic metaphysician he could offer no ultimate truths to a man who believed ultimate reality to be hidden by an all-pervading, ambiguous dualism.

In Pierre, despite savage references to "sophomorean" Plato

and other "chattering apes" who profess to solve the problem of evil by ignoring it, Melville admits that "an excellently illustrated re­ statement" of philosophical questions is to be found in transcendentalist thought.

Applied to Plato himself this statement is par­

ticularly illuminating.

The Greek spirit, as characterized by

Melville in Billy Budd, is both imaginative and metaphysical, and

101 Plato is the epitome of all things Greek.

To Plato's style,

if

not to his doctrine, Melville continued to respond warmly, for what he

101. Note the following stanza in Melville's description of "The Attic Landsoape" (Poems, p. 284): A circumambient spell it is, Pellucid on these scenes that waits, Repose that does of Plato tell — Charm that his style authenticates. Having visited Athens during his Journey to the Near East in 1856-1857, Melville probably composed these lines at the beginning of his poetic period, c. 1859. They were not published, however, until 1891, when they appeared in Timoieon with other poems tinder the heading, "Fruit of Travel Long Ago•w In connection with Melville's travels, his references to a statue of Plato which he saw in Rome are of interest. On 21 February, 1857, he noted in his journal [m ]: "Hall of bronze statuary. Plato (hair & beard & imperial)...." Later“in the same year, on 2 December, he lectured in Boston on "Statuary in Rome." In the account of his lecture printed in the Boston Journal of the following day is this: "Plato with the locks and hair of an exquisite, as if meditating on the destinies of the world under the hand of a hair-dresser." Cf. Melville's Journal up the Straits, ed. Raymond Weaver (New York, 1935), p. 121 and note.

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122

could not accept as a thinker he could use as an imaginative writer. Most verbal reminiscences of Plato in Melville's works therefore come from the more poetic and figurative passages of the dialogues, particularly the myths related by Socrates.

Each instance

involves a vivid impression upon his memory of one or more striking figures:

sometimes two images combine into a single pioturesque

metaphor, like "oysters observing the sun through the water;" some­ times an echo of Plato becomes linked with a similar recollection of Sir Thomas Browne; sometimes Plato's application is altered com­ pletely, as when the notion of the soul as a harmony becomes the inspiration of Isabel’s music in Pierre.

In each case the adaptation

is original, appropriate, and thoroughly characteristic of Melville. Gifted with an unusually retentive memory, he did not borrow passages directly from the dialogues as he had taken material from the travelbooks, for like Ishmael in Moby-Dick he had Plato thoroughly "in his head” --- so thoroughly, in fact, that many of his reminiscences were undoubtedly purely unconscious • With the chaplain in WhiteJacket, he had drunk deeply of "the mystic fountain of Plato,” which both fed and released the springs of his own imagination. Melville's interest in the Platonic myth is doubly sig­ nificant because of his search for an appropriate medium to convey philosophical ideas.

Mardi, like Plato's works, is a philosophical

dialogue, and its allegory of the quest for an ideal is essentially a Platonic theme.

But its author had not yet learned the virtues of

artistic selection, being reluctant to discard any idea or fancy which floated into consciousness from the deepening stream of his literary acquaintance.

The material of Moby-Dick was far more tractable, and

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123

continuity is sustained throughout the later book.

In individual

passages Platonic imagery is perfectly assimilated, never out of place and invariably adding overtones of color and meaning to the context.

The whole book, moreover, may be thought of as an extended 102 myth, related by Ishm&el in the role of Socrates. Like Plato, Melville had discovered that ideas can be presented in the form of fiction as well as through purely rational argument and dialogue. According to the Platonic doctrine, all things are representations of an idea, a theory which Plato put to practical use in teaching philosophy through myths, figures, and symbols.

To both the theory

and the practice of the master, the conception and execution of MobyDick are deeply indebted.

'

Thus, despite Melville's intellectual reservations, the author of Mardi and Moby-Dick was at heart close to Plato.

To one

who had supplemented Plato ’s theme With daedal life in boats and tents, spiritual evil was as real as the spiritual good of Platonism, for Melville never allowed his imaginative sympathy to interfere with his intellectual honesty.

Philosophically, he rejected Plato’s

102. Van Wyck Brooks, in Emerson and Others (New York, 1927), p. 205, long ago compared Melville’s myth of the White Whale with the mythical Grendel of Beowulf. Melville's interest in ancient mythology will be dealt with below, pp. 136ff, and Melville as a myth-maker will be treated in Charles Olson's forthcoming book. 103. Clarel, I, 121. Walter Bezanson, in "Herman Melville's Clarel" (unpublished Yale dissertation, 1942), shows that Rolfe, whom this description concerns, is Melville's intentional selfportrait. Sundermann, discussing other characters in the poem, suggests that Pinto's idea of the highest good plays a part in Mortmain's lost idealism (p. 43) and compares the Platonism of the old seaman with that of Melville himself (pp. 49f).

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rational world of ideas, but his own world of mind is its spiritual equivalent•

Melville recovered from the mood of Pierre, and in

his late works there is evidence that he was rereading Plato with 104 much of his original appreciation. From his comment on the Republic it is clear that he still objected to Plato's rationalism, and passages in Clarel show the same awareness of evil and ambiguity that Plato's system could not resolve.

Nevertheless, his attitude toward

immortality at the end of his life was essentially one with the 105 doctrines of "Lord High Admiral Plato, and Commodore Socrates."

104. Cf • the Platonic allusions in Billy Budd, including the definition attributed to Plato, and the late comment on the Republic. In the de Grandvin papers, composed in mingled prose and verse about the time of Melville's retirement from the customs house in 1886, he speaks of "a richer than Plato's 'Banquet'” (Billy Budd..., p. 351), and in "At the Hostelry,” a related poem, he refers to Socrates as no "alien ... to cheerful wine" (Poems, p. 374). This is an unmistakeable allusion to the Symposium, in which Socrates* prowess at drinking is mentioned on four occasions during the course of Agatho's banquet (Bohn, III, 482, 559, 570, 576). "After the Pleasure party," published in Timoleon (1891) and probably dating also from this late period, is based on the myth of the Platonic particles Melville had employed long before in Pierre; “Why hast thou made us but in h a l v e s -Co-relatives? This makes us slaves. If these co-relatives never meet Selfhood itself seems incomplete (Poems, p. 257). Mumford's attempt to read biography into the poem (pp. 274-278) has properly been corrected by Thorp's analysis (pp. 426f), though the composition remains obscure in itself and in its relation to Melville's own opinions on the subject of sex. The quotation above may be com­ pared with Clarel, II, 145, which expresses the same doctrine in Biblical language: The rib restored to Adam’s side, And man made whole, as man began. The three late allusions to the Symposium may be explained by Melville’s purchase in 1873 of Shelley's Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations, and Fragments, ed. Mrs. Shelley, 2 vol. (London, 1862) (Mj, which contains Shelley's version of that dialogue. 105.

Cf • ~White-Jacket, p. 195.

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Chapter Five

Philosophy, Mythology, and Religion

"•••divine Plato, and Proclus, and Verulam are of my counsel; and Zoroaster whispered me before I was born.” "Dreams," Mardi, II, 54.

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"Neoplatonical Originals”

Emerson, visiting Wordsworth in 1848, was disappointed to find

1 the translations of Thomas Taylor the Platonist neglected in England. Taylor's versions of the Neoplatonic philosophers, the only English

2 translations available in that day, were among Emerson's favorite books. They were not to be found "in every American library,” as Emerson would have had Wordsworth believe, but it is true that under the stimulus of American Transcendentalism the works of Taylor were fairly well known in the United States.

Melville may have used the Taylor-Sydenham version jj

of Plato, as suggested earlier in this study,

and possibly Taylor's

Select Works of Plotinus (London, 1817), both of which were accessible 4 to him in the New York Society Library. It is certain that he was acquainted with The Six Books of Proclus on the Theology of Plato, a two-volume translation by Taylor published in London in 1816. There are several passages in Melville which reflect the cosmological system of the Neoplatonists.

The successors of Plato,

seeking to avoid the dualism of matter and spirit inherent in the old accounts of creation, had recourse to the monistic doctrine of emanation.

1. Emerson’s W o r k s , Centenary ed., 12 vol. (Cambridge, Mass., 1903-1904), V, 295. A "bibliography of Taylor’s publications has been compiled by Miss Ruth Balch, Shomas Taylor the platonist (Newberry Library, Chicago, 1917); a general account o f his career is given by Frank B. Evans, III, "Thomas Taylor, Platonist of the Romantic Period," FMLA, LV, 1060-1079 (December, 1940). 2. For a discussion of Emerson’s indebtedness to Neoplatonism, cf. J. S. Harrison, The Teachers of Emerson (New York, 1910), and F. I. Carpenter, Emerson and Asia (Cambridge, Mass., 1930). 3.

Cf. pp. 37; 106, note; 119, above.

4. Alphabetical and Analytical Catalogue of the New York Society Library (New York, 1856), pp. 351 f.

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According to this concept, familiar to Melville’s generation through Emerson’s Nature, ’’The Over-Soul,” and other essays, all things both spiritual and material emanate from a single source, the ineffable One, which is the fountain-head of the entire scale of being.

”In

all the universe is but one original,” writes Melville in Mardij ”and 5 the very suns must to their source for their fire....” In the same book, Babbalanja quotes his favorite essayist, Bardianna, as saying that mankind is ’’but a step in a scale, that reaches farther above us

6 then below.”

This resembles the Neoplatonic formula, which places

man midway on the scale between spirit and material nature.

Another

passage, in Pierre, is in harmony with the same doctrines We lie in nature very close to God; and though, further on, the stream may be corrupted by the banks it flows through, yet at the fountain’s rim, where mankind stand, there the stream infallibly bespeaks the fountain.^

The monism underlying each of the above quotations contrasts strangely with Melville’s usual outspoken dualism, and none of the passages is characteristic of his metaphysical convictions.

The two

illustrations from Mardi perhaps belong with other passages already

8 compared with Plato's Timaeus, platonic cosmology.

the inspiration for much of the Neo­

If Melville read the Timaeus in Thomas Taylor's

translation, as he probably did, he would have found lengthy citations from Neoplatonic authors in Taylor’s generous annotations.

The passage

from Pierre, however, even in its imagery, is remarkably similar to the writings of Plotinus, which Melville may have examined directly. 5.

Mardi, I, 267.

6.

Ibid., II, 299.

7.

Pierre, p. 151.

8. Cf. pp. 108f, above. Melville’s reference to the scale of being, however, is probably indebted to Religio Medici, in which it is said that the greatest interval on the scale is -Gnat between men and angels. Cf. Sir Thomas Browne, Works, ed. Simon Wilkin, 4 vol. (London, 1835-1856), II, 47f. -----

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In the same book Melville satirizes the nineteenth-century Trans9

cendentalists and their "Greek or German Neoplatonical originals," and that to the character of their leader he gives the name Plotinus

10 Plinlimmon.

-------There is no mention of Plotinus elsewhere in Melville,

though in Mardi Babbalanja relates a fable concerning the philosopher

11 Grando, who "had a sovereign contempt for his carcass•"

The

inspiration for Grando may have come to Melville from Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, the substance of which is given in paraphrase by Thomas Taylor in the Introduction to his Select Works of Plotinus.

According

to Porphyry, Plotinus was "ashamed that his soul was in body."

His

"vehement love for intellectual pursuits, and contempt for body, made

12 him disdain to sit for his picture...."

In Pierre Melville scorns

the elaborate attempts of the cultists to fit man's "dog of a body" 13 for heaven, and his hero pointedly refuses to sit for his 9.

Pierre, p. 290.

10. A passage in Specimens of the Table-Talk of S. T. Coleridge, 2 vol. in one (New York, ±b3bj, I, 112, may have suggested the name "Plinlimmon" to Melville. Coleridge traces a phrase in "The Ancient Mariner" to a remark made by a friend during an ascent of Plinlimmon, a peak in Wales (but cf. J. L. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu [New York and Boston, 1927j, p. 210 and note, p .' b'23)• Melville, who was interested in "The Ancient Mariner" (of. Moby-Dick, I, 236f) and who could have i-ead th*? Table-Talk in Evert uuycIcxncK:«s library (Lenox Library Short-Title Tl'St'&'/'Vril, 12; cf. p. 29, above), undoubtedly knew of Coleridge's familiarity with Neoplatonic thought. His own Coleridgean powers of association might well have evoked the name from his recollections of Coleridgeana. R. S. Forsythe, in the Introduction to his edition of Pierre (New York, 1930), p. xxvi, suggests that the character of PlinlTMndn ’derives from Carlyle's Teufelsdrockh and characters in Longfellow's works. 11. Mardi, II, 215. Babbalanja says Grando punished his body until it refused, 'no carry him home from a desert place, so that he perished there. No such anecdote is related of Plotinus. I take the substance of the fable to be Melville's invention, suggested perhaps by an account in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (New York, 1847), pp. 187f, of the rebellion of tne body m students* Who overwork. 12. Select Works of Plotinus, tr. Thomas Taylor (London, 1817), p. xi (TayToi* rd 11 a 1 i'cd-'61SI,t b£d')‘ Cf. Emerson, "Heroism" (Works, II, 237) "Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its body." 13. Pierre, p. 417. Forsythe, op. cit., p. xxv, suggests "Alcott and his associates at FruitlahdS" fe.6 the butts of Melville’s satire on dietetic eccentricities.

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14

picture.

Melville may have had Plotinus in mind in one or more of

these instances, but there is no indication that he made any important 15 or extensive use of Plotinian philosophy.

In the case of Proclus, however, Melville's indebtedness is easily determined. Mardian

Describing Maramma, the center of orthodox

religion, he inserts his first allusion to Proclus in a passage

of humorous dialogue

between Babbalanja and old Mohi thechronicler.

The multitudinous gods of wood and stone seen in Maramma prompt Mohi to hold forth in unsophisticated fashion on the more numerous divinities of the air: 'You breathe not a breath without inhaling, you touch not a leaf without ruffling a spirit. There are gods of heaven, and gods of earth; gods of sea and of land; gods of peace and of war; gods of rock and fell; gods of ghosts and of thieves; of singers and dancers; of lean men and of house-thatchers. Gods glance in the eyes of birds, and sparkle in the crests of the waves; gods merrily swing in the boughs of the trees, and merrily sing in the book. Gods are here, and there, and everywhere; you are never alone for them. * •If this be so, Braid-Beard,' said Babbalanja, •our inmost thoughts are overheard; but not by eavesdroppers. However, my lord, these gods to w hom he alludes, merely belong to the semi-intelligibles, the divided unities in unity, this sicTe of ihe 'First Adyta. *

14. Pierre, pp. 354f. Cf. Melville's own refusal to be "obliviona'bed ty a Daguerreotype," in- his letter to Evert Duyckinck, 12 February, 1851 [d ], printed by Thorp, pp. 384-386. 15. I have examined in detail three of Taylor's translations of Plotinus: Select Works of Plotinus; On Suicide... (London, 1834), which was also in -the New York Society Library; and Five Books of Plotinus (London, 1794). Except for the general parallels mentioned above, there is nothing in the content of these works to indicate that Melville was familiar with the thought of Plotinus to any significant extent. A possible analogue of Pierre occurring in one of Taylor’s notes in Select W o r k s ... is discussed below, p. 188. C f . also p. 99 above, note 26.

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’Indeed?* said Media ‘Semi-intelligible, say you, philosopher?* cried Mohi* ‘Then, prithee, make it appear so; for what you say, seems gibberish to me.*-^ The inspiration of this seeming “gibberish" is not the demon Azzageddi, but The Six Books of Proclus on the Theology of Plato*

In

Book II of Thomas Taylor's translation is the following passage: Let us ••• celebrate the first God ••• as unfolding into light the whole intelligible and intellectual genus of Gods, together with all the supermundane and mundane divinities — as the God of all Gods, the unity of all unities, and beyond the first adyta, — as more ineffable ■than all silence, and more unknown than all essence, — - as holy among the holies, and concealed in the intelligible Gods.17 In the theological scheme of Proclus a distinction is made between the “intellectual" and "intelligible" divinities, those of "the first adyta" constituting, according to Taylor, "the highest order of intel18 ligibles." Melville's opinion of this esoteric doctrine is indicated not only by Mohi*s comment above, but also by other passages

in

Mardi based on the terminology of Proclus. Babbalanja is again the speaker in the second of Melville's allusions to the Theology*

Yoomy the poet, breaking off a lengthy

song, explains that he has but "ceased in the middle; the end is not yet."

"Mystioisml"

retorts Babbalanja:

What, minstrel; must nothing ultimate come of all that melocjy? no final and inexhaustible IS.

Mardi, II, 22 (italics mine).

17. The Six Books of Proclus on the Theology of Plato, tr. Thomas Taylor, 2 vol. (London, 1818), I, 133 (italics mine}, as quoted in Taylor*3 Introduction, I, x. The passage is also given in sub­ stantially the same form in Taylor's Select Works of Plotinus, pp. 256f, note. 18. x, note.

Theology, I, 139, note, and Taylor's Introduction, I,

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131

meaning? nothing that strikes down into the soul's depths; till, intent upon itself, it pierces in upon its own essence, and is resolved into its pervading original; becoming a thing constituent of the all-embracing deific; w h e r e b y we mortals become part and parcel of the gods; our souls to them as thoughts; and we privy to all things occult, ineffable, and sublime? Then, Yoomy, is thy song nothing worth? ... I mistrust thee, minstrel1 that thou hast not yet been impregnated by the arcane mysteries, that thou dost not sufficiently ponder on the Adyta, the Monads, and the Hyparxes; the Dianoias, the Unical fiypostases, t h e G n o s t i c powers of the Psychical Essence, and the Supermundane and Pleromatic Triads; to say nothing of the Abstract Uoumenons• The italicized words in this passage are all to be found in Taylor's edition of the Theology, many of them being defined in a convenient

20 glossary that Melville pillaged in behalf of Babbalanja.

On the morning following the arraignment of Yoomy by the learned philosopher, they and the other members of their party visit

21 "the sage Doxodox, surnamed the Wise One."

In the character of

Doxodox Melville satirizes the tendency of most philosophers to baffle the laity by using incomprehensible terminology:

the name "Doxodox"

itself perhaps derives from a word used by Proclus and his translator — 22 doxastic, "the last of the gnostic powers of the rational soul." Babbalanja himself indulges in another outburst of phrase-making as he and his companions approach "the portals of Telestic lore," 23 telestic art being that pertaining to mystic ceremonies. He explains

19.

Mardi, II, 281f (italics mine).

20. Theology, I, lxxixf. The glossary defines Monad, Eyparxis, and XJnical, "and. mentions "the gnostic powers of the rational soul." The terms "unical hypostases" and "psychical essence" are used in the text which, follows, I, 7f; much of the Theology is concerned with exposition of various "triads." The italicized adjectives will be found passim. 21.

Mardi, II, 285.

23.

Ibid., II, 181.

22.

Glossary, Theology, I, lxxix.

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that Doxodox ”is said to have penetrated frcan the zoned, to the unzoned principles” and ’'attained unto a knowledge of the ungenerated 24 essences.” This mystic discipline is all in accordance with the system of Proclus.

Showing proper deference and humility, Babbalanja

addresses the sage: *0h wise DoxodoxI Drawn hither by thy illustrious name, we seek admittance to thy innermost wisdom. Of all Kardians, thou alone comprehendest those arcane combinations, whereby to drag to day the most deftly hidden things, present and to come. Thou knowest what we are, and what we shall be. We beseech thee, evoke thy Tselmnst' •Tetrads; Pentads; Eexads; Heptads; Ogdoads; — meanest thou those?* •Hew terms alll» '

The presence in both Bacon and Shakespeare of the identical expression "the flower of virtue cropped" ma y be left to their respective commentators to explain, this being scarcely the occasion for reopening an old controversy.

Its appearance in Pierre would

seem to be another example of Melville’s powers of multiple associa­ tion.

Obviously he was familiar with the legend of Memnon:

the

statue, he observes in the same context, is spoken of by "all Eastern travellers," for it "survives down to this present day."

Such verbal

parallels as "overmatch," "untimely," and in the full text "rash" and "rashness," "mournful sound," and the like suggest that in writing Pierre he turned to Bacon to refresh his memory of details.

B a c o n’s

"flower of virtue" presumably reminded him of the nearly identical phrase in Kamlet, which in turn reminded him of Montaigne, as on a 96 previous occasion. The similarities both in phrasing and in moral

95. Bacon, Works, I, 297f (italics mine). B a c o n ’s full version of the myth, as one would expect, gives more details than Melville’s briefer allusion. 96. In his copy of Shakespeare [M], Melville had marked in the second scene of Act II of Hamlet the dialogue beginning "Denmark’s a prison" and concluding " W e ’ll wait upon you.” "Here," he noted, "is forcibly shown the great Montaignism of Hamlet." His copies of Shakespeare and Montaigne were purchased on the same day, 18 January, 1848, as recorded in John W i l e y ’s statement of the following 1 July [m ] (Appendix II, below, p. 211).

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application between Melville's account and Bacon's seem to be more than a coincidence; the omission of a specific acknowledgment of indebtedness is Melville's usual practice in employing literary sources.

The foregoing illustrations are chosen from a large number of allusions common to Melville and Bacon showing their similar methods of dealing with ancient mythology.

Believing that "under

some of the ancient fictions lay couched certain mysteries and allegories," Bacon observed that such parables have a two-fold use, "conducing as well to the folding up and keeping of things under a S7 veil, as the enlightening and laying open of obscurities." Such a position is close to Melville's belief that some things are "so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, 98 in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them." What Bacon calls "parabolical poesy" tendeth to the folding up of those things, the dignity whereof deserves to be retired and distinguished, as with a drawn curtain: that is, when the secrets and mysteries of religion, policy, and philosophy are veiled and invested with fables, arid, parables .^9 In The Wisdom of the Ancients this doctrine is illustrated by interpretation of traditional myths, in each of which Bacon finds at least one significant moral lesson.

So Melville, in his abundant

mythological allusions, depends frequently on the point of the fable to enforce his own meaning, which is sometimes deliberately cryptic.

97.

Bacon's Preface to The Wisdom of the Ancients, W o r k s , I, 285f.

98.- "Hawthorne and His Mosses," in Billy Budd . .., p. 130. C f . p. 60, above. 99 . Bacon *s De Augment is, quoted in introducing The Vdisdom of the A n o i n t s , Works, I, 272 (italics mine).

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Reference to The Wisdom of the Ancients is occasionally helpful in

H)0 elucidating Melville's hidden design.

Thus, though Melville's own "random knowledge of the

101 ancient fables”

was considerable, he was probably indebted by

way of their philosophical interpretation to Bacon, who he thought had reclaimed from riddle the hidden meanings of mythology.

The

possibilities of Bacon's "parabolical poesy” may also have helped turn Melville’s attention to allegory.

Allusions in Melville's works

102 indicate that he was well-read in Bacon at the time of Mardi, which mentions "Verulam" in company with other contributors to Melville's developing theory of symbolic communication — - plato, Proclus, and Zoroaster.

It is significant that his praise of Bacon

on the ancients contrasts so sharply with his opinion of Bacon as one of the founders of so-called "modern” philosophy, for as an original

100. Melville's allusion to Narcissus, his symbol of philosophical introspection, in Moby-Dick, I, 3f, may for example be glossed by comparison with Bacon's "Narcissus, or Self-Love." Such figures "in their youth do flourish and wax famous; but being come to ripeness of years, they deceive and frustrate the good hope that is conceived of them" like a fruitless flower (Bacon, Works, I, 289). Cf. Melville's own statement to Hawthorne that sliortly his own flower "must fall to the mould," in a letter written sometime in June, 1851, printed by Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, 2 vol. (Boston, 1885), I, 400-407. The entire letter shows Melville’s own sense of frustrated hope. In "The Tartarus of Maids," Melville's narrator, describing his frozen cheeks, declares: "Two gaunt blood-hounds, one on each side, seemed mumbling them. I seemed Actaeon" (Billy Budd..., p. 246). As Bacon writes, "Acteon having unawares, and as it were by chance, beheld Diana naked, was turned into a stag, and devoured by his own dogs" (Works, I, 294). That Melville's allusion is doubly appropriate has recently been shown by E. H. Eby's article on this story in MLQ, I, 95-100 (March, 1940), which interprets it as a symbolic presentation of "the biological burdens imposed on women because they bear the children" (p. 97). 101.

Pierre, p. 483.

102.

Cf. Appendix III, below, p. 216.

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-thinker Melville -fchough-t Bacon to have ’’mere watchmaker's brains” --103 by interpretation, to be pragmatic and heartless.

In this chapter, further light has been thrown on one of Melville's media of philosophical expression.

The hypothesis is

that from Bacon, as from Plato, he took precepts and examples of allegorical writing, drawing still further examples from his knowledge of classical mythology and his reading, in Plutarch and Bayle, of 104 the mythology of Egypt and Persia. From the time of Mardi, in which allusions to this material first appear, to Melville's last work, many of his central philosophical concepts are presented indirectly in the guise of ancient myth.

His rejection of the purely

fanciful interpretations of Proclus and other writers of n^rstical "gibberish” indicates the seriousness of his purpose and the deliberation with which he selected the imaginative vehicles for his ideas.

103. Pierre, pp. 294f. Cf • the bitter comment on the results of Baconian teachings in Pierre, p. 276, and the satiric reference to Bacon’s m a x i m s "which come home to m y business and bosom” --in The Confidence-Man, p. 65. Cf. also pp. 198-199, below. 104. Mention should also be made here of Melville’s knowledge of Indian thought (cf. Appendix III, below, p. 219). M. B. Field, in Memories of Many lien and of Some Women (New York, 1874), p. 201, tells of a brilliant discussion of "East India religions and mythologies" between Melville and his neighbor at Pittsfield, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Melville's mention of "the Shaster" (MobyDick, II, 104) and his allusions to the Ramayana, a Sanskrit epic "(Clarel, I, 130, II, 29),suggest that he had done some reading in Indian literature. Surviving MSS [g -L] reveal that his brother-inlaw, John C. Hoadley, shared his interest -- a fact which may be significant.

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Chapter Six

Other Ancient Philosophers

"Of old Greek times, before man's brain went into doting bondage, and bleached and beaten in Baconian fulling-mills, his four limbs lost their barbaric tan and beauty; when the round world was fresh, and rosy, and spicy, as a new-plucked a p p l e ; all's wilted nowl" Pierre, p. 276.

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i "Seneca and the Stoics"

"The transition is a keen one, I assure you," says Melville in an autobiographical chapter of Moby-Dick, "from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics

1 to enable you to grin and bear it.

But even this wears off in time."

Endurance was virtually a synonym for Stoicism to Melville, and Seneca was the representative Stoic philosopher.

Although a character

in The Confidence-Man charges that "a musty old Seneca" lugged home

2 from auction makes a man gloomy,

Melville’s purchase of a second­

hand copy of Seneca’s Morals led to no such unhappy results.

This

volume, one of the few philosophical works he is known to have owned, provided source-material for Mardi and confirmed, if it did not suggest, many of the religious ideals outlined there by Melville. His use of the book has been examined in a detailed article by 3 «Villiam Braswell.

In addition to Seneca, Melville alludes to four other Stoic luminaries:

Marcus Aurelius; Epictetus and the compiler of 4 his discourses, Arrian; and Zeno. There is nothing in his two brief

1. Moby-Dick, I, 5. A similar passage in Redburn, p. 156, recalls the difficulties of Melville’s earlier voyage t o Liverpool, which he endeavored to bear "like a young philosopher," taking most things "coolly, in the spirit of Seneca and the Stoics." 2.

The Confidence-Man, p. 64.

3.

Cited above, p. 21 and note.

4.

Cf. Appendix III, below, under the respective names.

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160

references to Zeno to suggest that he knew much of that philosopher, but there is a possibility that he read the works of both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.

One passage in Mardi, for example, ma y have

come from either philosophers Thy own skeleton, thou thyself dost carry with thee, through this mortal life; and aye would view it, but for kind nature’s screen; thou art death alive; and e ’en to w h a t ’s before thee wilt thou come.® The central “idea is similar to an allusion to Epictetus in the Commentaries of ifercus Aurelius:

"Thy Condition as Epictetus .

expressed it, is that of a poor Soul carrying about with it the 6 Burden of a Carcase.” Melville’s Babbalanja, who believed that men do wrong involuntarily, may have been influenced by Marcus 7 Aurelius as well as by Socrates. Melville's admiration for the emperor-philosopher possibly came as a result of his reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which provided the historical background for a later poem by Melville, ”The Age of the

8 Antonines.”

5.

Mardi, I, 277.

6. The Commentaries of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus, tr. James Thomson (London, 1747), p. 60. Thoms o n ’s translati on is listed in the Alphabetical and Analytical Catalogue of the New York Society Library INew York, 1850), p. 17. 7. "Men's wickedness proceeds from Ignorance" (Commentaries, p. 44). Cf. Mardi, I, 366f; P l a t o ’s Republic, Bohn ed., II, 402; p . 57, a b o v e . 8. Cf. letter to John C. Hoadley, "Saturday in Easter Week 1877" [G-L]: "I remember that the lines were suggested by a passage in Gibbon (Decline & Fall) Have you a copy? Tuna to ’Antonine' &c in index" (printed by Paltsits, pp. 47-50). The poem was later revised for publication in Timoleon, Poems, pp. 273f.

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Another stimulus to Melville's regard for Marcus Aurelius was his purchase on 10 July, 1869, of Matthew A r n o l d ’s Essays in Criticism, containing a famous essay on the pagan philosopher. Melville heavily marked Arnold's statement that "the acquaintance of a man like Marcus Aurelius is such an imperishable benefit, that one can never lose a peculiar sense of obligation towards the man 9 who confers it." A passage in Clarel (1876) shows the unmistakable influence of Arnold's essay.

Says Ungars

'Go ask Aurelius Antonine — A Caesar wise, grave, just, benign, Lord of the w o r l d why, in the calm ■Which through his reign the empire g r a c e d --Why he, that most considerate heart Superior, and at vantage placed, Contrived no secular reform, Though other he knew not, nor balm.' 'Alas,' cried Derwent (and, in part, As vainly longing for retreat), 'Though good Aurelius was a man Matchless in mind as sole in seat, Yet pined he under numbing ban Of virtue without Christian heats As much you intimated too, Just saying that no balm he k n ew.' 10 Arnold, it will be recalled, was troubled by Aurelius's persecution of the Christians and by the wickedness of his son Commodus. Araoldian definition of religion ---

The

"morality touched with emotion" ---

is reflected in Derwent's "virtue without Christian heat," and the "balm" referred to is surely that longing for "something beyond"

11 paganism --- Christianity---- which Arnold sensed in Marcus Aurelius.

9. Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism (Boston, 1865), p. 258 [m ]. Melville's name and "the date of purchase are inscribed on the fly-leaf. 10.

Clarel, II, 243.

11. The considerable influence of Arnold upon Clarel is being examined in waiter Bezanson's Yale dissertation, "Kerman Melville's Clarel."

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Melville’s Derwent once again touches on the coldness of Stoicism unleavened by Christianity in a later passage of Clarel: ’What if some camp on crags austere The Stoic held ere Gospel cheer? There may the common herd abide, Having dreamed of heaven? Nay, and can y o u ? ’ ^

Melville’s mention of Arrian, compiler of the Manual of Epictetus, may indicate his first-hand knowledge of the works of 13 “the noble cripple." The New York Society Library contained George Stanhope’s translation of Epictetus, His Morals; with Simplicius, l4 his Commentary,

but this volume does not include Epictetus’s

Discourses, which seem closer to Melville’s thought than does the Manual.

When Melville’s Ishmael, for example, cries “three cheers

for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, 15 for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot,” he is close to the exultant self-sufficiency of Epictetus:

“My leg you will chain — - yes, but 16 ny will --- no, not even Zeus can conquer that." Although it is

12.

Clarel, II, 107 (italics Melville’s).

Cf. II, 298:

Even death may prove unreal at the last, And stoics be astounded into heaven. . 13. A character in The Confidence-Man asks “how, without aid from the noble cripple, Epictetus, you have arrived at his heroic sang-froid in misfortune" (p. 123). Another character in the same book holds to metempsychosis, feeling that he was once the stoic Arrian (p. 257). Melville also mentions Epictetus in Pierre, p. 405. 14. Catalogue (1850), p. 147. This volume, the fifth edition corrected (^London, 1741), is the only English translation listed. In White-Jacket, pp. 193f, Melville mentions a commentary by Simplicius on Aristotle. 15.

Moby-Dick, I, 45;

cf• pp. 48ff, above.

16. Epictetus, Discourses, l.i. My quotation is from the Matheson translation in The Stoic and Epicure.an Philosophers, ed. Whitney J. Oates (New York, 1940), p. 2£5. ™

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impossible bo cite exact parallels in the Stoic authors, many passages in Melville testify to his absorption of this characteristic doctrine. Father M a p p l e ’s sermon declares that "Delight is to him

a far,

far upward, and inward delight — - who against the proud gods and 17 commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.” Ahab defiantly boasts:

"Nor white whale, nor man, nor fiend, can

18 so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and inaccessible being.” Even the ’’unconditional, unintegral mastery” of the Spirit of Fire he defies: In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; ... yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights.... Come ... as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of fullfreighted worlds, t h e r e ’s that in here that still remains indifferent.^

Stoic self-sufficiency has always attracted the American spirit of self-reliance as found in Emerson and Melville, but the Stoic emphasis on passive endurance is foreign to the American concept of aggressive action.

As Melville writes of Stonewall

Jackson, the Civil War general; A stoic he, but even more; The iron will and lion thew 20 Were strong to inflict as to endure....

17.

Moby-Dick,I, 59.

18.

Ibid., II, 350.

19. Ibid., II, 281f. Cf. Melville's letter of 16 April, 1851, to Nathaniel Hawthorne, printed by Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, 2 vol. (Boston, 1885), I, 385-389: "the man who ... dec lari"s'TbTms elf a sovereign nature (in himself) amid the powers of heaven, hell, and earth ... may perish; but so long as he exists he insists upon treating with all Powers upon an equal basis. If any of those other Powers choose to withhold certain secrets, let them; that does not impair m y sovereignty in myself; that does not make me tributary." 20.

"Stonewall Jackson,” in Battle-Pieces, Poems, p. 60.

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164

Yet in Moby-Dick Melville occasionally adopts the tone of the ancient philosophers, and in one passage he gives positive advice of a decidedly Stoic cast.

In the whale, he declares;

we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, manl admire and model thyself after the whalei Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the Equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. P e t e r ’s, and like the great whale, retain, 0 manl in all seasons a temperature of thine own.21 Indifference to external circumstances is a cardinal Stoic teaching. So Melville's Pierre, though ’’haggard and tattered in body from his ... utter misery,’1 was yet ’’stoically serene and symmetrical in 22 soul.” He achieved a ’’certain stoic, dogged mood ... born of his recent life, which taught him never to expect any good from anything; but alwavs to anticipate ill; however not in unreadiness to meet the 23 contrary; and then, if good came, so much the better.”

The Stoic emphasis on duty is also reflected in Melville, as in his reference to "that best blessedness which, with the sense 24 of all duties discharged, holds happiness indifferent.” In Moby-Dick he alludes to the "enormous practical resolution” of the 25 Stoic "in facing death,” and Sundermann suggests that the Stoics, notably Marcus Aurelius, were in part responsible for his preoccupation

21.

Moby-Dick, II, 33.

22.

Pierre, p. 240.

23.

Ibid., p. 460.

24. Ibid., p. 87. The thought is also reminiscent of Carlyle, whom Melville “had read in 1850; c f . Thorp, note, p. xxviii. 25.

Moby-Dick, II, 68.

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165 26

with the concept of Fate.

It is a Stoic precept that the only-

true individual freedom lies in putting one's will in harmony with the will of the universe.

A h a b ’s proud self-sufficiency is of course

a magnificent defiance of all things external which ends in heroic tragedy.

Pierre, the hero of Melville’s next book, likewise sees

himself standing ’’untrammelledly his ever-present self I

free 27 to do his own self-will and present fancy to whatever endI” That his self-sufficiency is an illusion is the moral of the novel, in which, Melville declares ironically at the outset, "we shall see ... whether Fate hath not just a little bit of a word or two to say in 28 this world....” Still, "the profound wilfulness” in Pierre would not give in to Fate:

”His soul’s ship foresaw the inevitable rocks, 29 but resolved to sail on, and make a courageous wreck.”

From the foregoing discussion, it is clear that Melville was interested in Stoicism at least as early as Mardi, which was influenced by his reading of Seneca.

He was familiar with the Stoic

doctrines of self-sufficiency, endurance of circumstance, resolution in facing death, and freedom achieved in acceptance of Fate.

He

greatly admired the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, of whom he had read in Gibbon and Arnold, and may have known directly the works of both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus as well as of Seneca.

Stoic ideas

and Stoic personalities are the materials of a large number of allusions in Mardi and its successors, including Melville’s late poetry, and the dichotomy of two Stoic principles ---

26.

Sundermann, p. 98 and note, p. 209.

27.

Pierre, p. 277.

28.

Ibid., p. 17.

29.

self-sufficiency

Ibid., pp. 471f.

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and Fate --- is a central theme of Pierre, which implies that selfsufficiency is an illusion.

Though Melville had written in Moby-

Dick that even "amid the tornadoed Atlantic of m y being, do I 30 myself still forever centrally disport in mute calm,w he realized then that "these blessed calms” which the Stoic cultivates do not 31 last. Stoic internality, in short, must fail, for in the words of Pierre, "there is no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy, that a mortal man can possibly evoke, which will stand the final 32 test of a real impassioned onset of Life and Passion upon him.".

Though Melville found no final solution in Stoic endurance and negation, the lives and works of the Stoic philosophers were for him a genuine source of inspiration and fortitude.

His portrait

of Queequeg in Moby-Dick, complete with Melvillean humor, is a sketch of the ideal philosopher, whose virtues were a combination of Socratic dignity and Stoic serenity.

Although Queequeg was far from home,

yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own com­ panionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have 'broken his digester.'

30.

Moby-Dick, II, 136.

31.

Ibid., II, 264.

32. Pierre, p. 403. Cf. p. 398: hearing death, Pierre "in vain sought to parade all his to drive off the onslaught of natural passion. The superiority of reason to passion is another other ancient philosophies. 33.

of his mother's stoic arguments Nature prevailed...." tenet of Stoic and

Moby-Dick, I, 62.

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167

William Braswell has reoently showa that, in addition to the Stoic philosophers, Melville was also familiar with the name of at least one Stoic poet. Mars Hill, declares:

In Acts 17:28, St. Paul, speaking on

"For in him [the Lord] we live, and move,

and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring."

The margin of Melville’s Mew Testament

bears an annotation on this passage:

"Aratus"

a

Stoic poet whose

Phaenomena opens with the assertion that men are the offspring of

3T Zeus.

Melville may of course have identified P a u l ’s allusion with

the aid of a Biblical commentary or encyclopedia; there is no indica­ tion in his writings of the influence of Stoic poetry.

34. Braswell’s discussion occurs on p. 38 of the MS of his forthcoming monograph on Melville’s religious ideas, which discusses the Stoics"on p. 18. The date of Melville’s annotation in his Mew Testament and Psalms (Mew York, 1844), which was given him in 1846 Lm ], is unknown■

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168

ii Melville and the Philosophic Tradition

The major influences of ancient thought upon Melville nowhaving been examined, it remains to discuss his relation to the historical development of ancient philosophy.

Melville's allusions

to early Greek thinkers indicate only a passing acquaintance with the pre-Socratic schools.

In Mardi he alludes to the maxims of : 35 Zeno, the laughter of Democritus, and the sneer of Pyrrho; in 36 Pierre he notes the reputation of Heraclitus for pessimism; in The Confidence-Man one of the characters resents being compared to 3? Diogenes the Cynic.

Possible sources of Melville's knowledge of

these philosophers include Fenelon's essay on "Democritus and 38 Heraclitus," which appeared in a school textbook used by Melville; 39 a manual of philosophy; and the encyclopedic writings of Francis Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Robert Burton, and Pierre Bayle, his most 40 important secondary sources of philosophic information. In addition,

35. Mardi, II, 54, 350, 352. Melville Pyrrhonism" again in Moby-Dick, II, 116, and been unable to find a source for the legend relates in "The Apple-Tree Table," in Billy

mentions Pyrrho and Clarel, I, 253. I have of Democritus which he Budd..., p. 325.

36.

Pierre, p. 385; cf. The Confidence-Man, p. 63.

37.

The Confidence-Man, p. 184.

38.

The English Reader

39.

Cf. above, pp.

[G-L], discussed above, p. 140,

note 56.

30-32.

40. E.g., frequent allusions to Democritus and Heraclitus in Browne and Burton ("Democritus Junior"); Bayle's long discussion of Pyrrho's skepticism, Dictionary, tr. Bernard, 10 vol. (London, 1734-1741), Till, 595-60TT

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allusions in other ancient philosophers -whom Melville knew directly, such as Plato, the Stoics, and Plutarch, would have given him con­ siderable knowledge of the relation between various schools of earlier thought.

With one other Greek thinker, Pythagoras, Melville may have had more extensive acquaintance. His first allusion, in Moby-Dick, 41 cites a Pythagorean maxim; a second refers to the Pythagorean 42 43 doctrine of metempsychosis; Pierre mentions "Pythagorean dietings." It is possible that he had read such a volume as Robert Mushet’s Book of Symbols, an interpretation of Pythagorean oracles which 44

discusses both metempsychosis and Pythagoras’s theories of diet. There are a number of parallels between Mushet and Melville which 45 are worth noting, although it cannot be said with certainty that

41.

Moby-Dick, I, 6.

42. Ibid., II, 187j cf. pp. 53ff, above, and Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in Works, ed. Simon Wilkin, 4 vol. (London, 1835-1336), II, £5: MI cannot believe the wisdom of Pythagoras ever did positively, and in a literal sense, affirm his metempsychosis...." 43.

Pierre, p . 417.

44. Robert Mushet, The Book of Symbols, second edition (London, 1847) comments on metempsychosis in a discussion of immortality which includes an examination of P l a t o ’s Phaedo (pp. 44-60), and twice refers to Pythagorean diet and abstinence from animal food (pp. 100-104, 271-278). 45. "This silence is a strange thing," reads Melville’s journal for 24 November, 1849 [m]» "N o wonder, the old Greeks deemed xt the vestibule to the higher mysteries." Cf. also mention of silence in Mardi, I, 268, 329, II, 379: Pierre, pp. 284, 290; Mushet, pp. 15-20. Melville’s concept of silence"has been compared with that of Carlyle; it is interesting to find in the second passage of Pierre just cited an unusual word --- "talismanic"---- used also by Musnet (p. 1). Cf. also the concepts of nature as G o d ’s agent fMushet, p. 12; Moby-Dick, I, 204); language as an impediment to thought (Mushet, p. 18; pp. 114ff, above); knowledge and truth as a fountain, well, or ocean (Mushet, pp. 3, 12, 29; the sea-symbolism of Moby-Dick) .

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170

Melville used Mus h e t ’s book.

An additional passage in Pierre is

interesting in the light both of Melville’s allusions to Pythagoras and of his interest in Persian thought.

Young Pierre ’’seemed a youth­

ful Magian, and almost a mountebank together.

Chaldaic improvisations

burst from him, in quick Golden Verses, on the heel of humorous retort 46 and repartee." This quotation may indicate Melville's familiarity with a tradition equating the oracles of Zoroaster with the Golden 47 Verses of Pythagoras.

How much Melville knew of one of the greatest Greek thinkers, Aristotle, is extremely problematical. Aristotle is mentioned by name 48 only in three of his allusions, and specifically as an author in three other references.

One of the latter is in White-Jacket, where

the chaplain exposes "the follies of Simplicius’s Commentary on 49 Aristotle’s ’De C o e l o a second is the listing of Aristotle 50 in Moby-Dick among those who have written of the whale j

the third

is a statement by the cosmopolitan, one of the characters in The Confidence-Man: The popular notion of humour, considered as index to the heart, would seem curiously confirmed by Aristotle --- I think, in his Politics (a work, by the by, which, however it may be viewed upon the

46.

Pierre, p. 47 (italics mine).

47. Cf. a discussion of Coleridge’s interpretation of one of the Golden Verses in H. IT* Coleridge’s Preface to Specimens of the TableTalk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 vol. in one (New York, 1835), xix-xxi a book which Melville probably read. He was also presumably familiar with the account of Pythagoras in Bayle, Dictionary, VIII, 609-620. 48. Mardi, I, 14 ("the Stagirite”); Redburn, p. 254; MobyDick, II, "245. 49.

White-Jacket, pp. 193f; c f . above, note, p. 142.

50.

Moby-Dick, I, 165.

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■whole, yet, from the tenor of certain sections, should not, without precaution, be placed in the hands of y o u t h ) who remarks that the least lovable men in history seem to have had for humour not only a disrelish, but a hatred; and this, in some cases, along with an extraordinary dry taste for practical planning. I remember it is related of Phalaris, the capricious tyrant of Sicily, that he once caused a poor fellow to be beheaded on a horse­ block, for no other cause than having a horse-laugh.51

The cosmopolitan being one of the manifestations of Melville's deceitful confidence-man, it is not advisable to take his literary allusions at their face value, any more than to hunt for the purely fictitious ’’little note” in Proclus cited by another character in the 52 same book. Melville himself may of course have read the Politics and other works of Aristotle:

a few years after The Confidence-Man

was written a young visitor at Pittsfield asked in vain ”to hear of •Typee’ and those paradise islands” ; Melville ’’preferred to pour forth instead his philosophy and his theories of life.

The shade of 53 Aristotle arose like a cold mist between myself and Fayaway....” ■Whether Titus Munson Coan, the visitor, really received a lecture on Aristotle, or whether he meant Aristotle to stand for philosophy in general, is of course uncertain.

It can be safely said, however,

that first-hand knowledge of Aristotle on Melville’s part is not

51.

The Confidence-Man, p. 219.

52.

Ibid., p. 256, and above, p. 134.

53. Titus Munson Coan, ’’Herman Melville, " The Literary World, XXII, 492f (19 December, 1891); c f . above, p"p. 10^ 12•

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172 54

reflected to any extent in his works,

particularly in comparison

with the considerable use he made of Aristotle’s teacher, Plato.

Melville’s knowledge of Hellenistic and Roman thought has been touched upon in sections of this study treating the Neoplatonists and the Stoics; he makes no mention whatever of Epicureanism or of Epicurean philosophers and poets.

There is one reference in Clarel

to the efforts of Alexandrian scholars to unite the traditions of Hellenistic and Hebraic thought: Recall those Hebrews, which of old Sharing some doubts we moderns rue, Y/ould fain Eclectic comfort fold By grafting slips from P l a t o ’s palm On M o s e s » melancholy yew; But did they s p r o u t ? 5 5 Melville was evidently interested in the long tradition of Hebraism, 56 from the Biblical era to modern times. **The truest of all men,” he says in Moby-Dick, "was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.

54. Two passages in Melville are reminiscent of Aristotle’s Poetics, the work of Aristotle he would have been most likely to know at first-hand: a discussion of the all-importance of subject in literature (Moby-Dick, II, 220), and the hope expressed in the Supplement to Battle-Pieces that "the terrible historic tragedy of our time [the civil War] ma y not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved country through terror a n d pity...” (Poems, p. 190; italics mine). One of the poems in Battle-pieces , "On the Photograph of a corps Commander” (Poems, p. 76)” has an Aristotelian ring; It is good To look upon a Chief like this, In w h o m the spirit moulds the form. Sundermann, however, suggests (p. 99) the influence of Schiller. 55.

Clarel, I, 259; cf. above, note, p. 150.

56. Cf. Appendix III, below: RABBINICAL TRADITION; Clarel, I, 259ff; Mumford, p. 320. In Clarel, I, 216, Melville mentions the Jewish historian,Josephus.

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173

•All is vanity.'

ALL.

This wilful world hath not got hold of 57 unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet.” To Eawthorne he once wrote: I read Solomon more and more, and every time see deeper and deeper and unspeakable meanings 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; or else there have been many corruptions and inter­ polations of the t e x t .5®

59 The ’’Solomonic insights”

were an important contribution to Melville's

philosophic temper, and the number of his allusions is an index to the regard he felt for Solomon’s pessimistic writings.

”1 have no

correspondents except Solomon,” he wrote in ”1 and My Chimney,” 60 ’’with whom, in his sentiments, at least, I entirely correspond....” The Melvillean pun is thus extremely apt.

■Western philosophy between the time of the Stoics and the beginnings of modern thought is represented in Melville chiefly by references to figures associated with the Christian church, including Arius (author of the Arian heresy), Augustine, Chrysostom, Julian

61 the Apostate, Origen, and Tertullian.

57.

Melville's religious training.

Moby-Dick, II, 181f.

58. Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, written sometime in June, 1851, printed by Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His W i f e , 2 vol. (Boston, 1885), I, 400-407. In his copy of The Book of~English Songs, ed. Charles Mackay (London, n.d.), bought in 1860 [Mj, Melville compared an interpolated stanza of poetry (p. 130) with "the interpolations in the Song of Solomon.” 59. Pierre, pp. 93f; cf. Appendix III, below: SOLOMON. 60.

"I and My Chimney,” in Billy Budd..♦, p. 299.

61. Mardi, I, 15, 344, II, 54; White-Jacket, pp. 193f, 236; The Conf idene e-Man, pp. 167f; Clarel, II, ll4fl

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his reading of the historian Gibbon, and his study of Christian history, doctrine, and tradition at the time Clarel was composed are likely sources of his acquaintance.

The article on Origen in

Bayle's Dictionary, which discusses Origen's controversy with the 62 Manichees, may also have attracted Melville’s attention. It is probable that he knew directly the works of Augustine:

for a

character in The Conf idence-Man "St. Augustine on Original Sin is my text-book,”

and Sundermann has suggested Augustine's City of God 64 as the source of a figure in one of Melville's letters. Allusions in Melville to later thinkers testify to no great familiarity with

medieval .thought.

Two references to Thomas a ICempis may suggest that 65 he read a translation of De Imitations Christi, but he probably knew little of Abelard, Bede, Cardan, Duns Scotus, and St. Dunstan

66 except their names and general reputations.

Three thinkers of the

62. Bayle, Dictionary, VIII, 44-55. There is a curious parallel in Melville's vmits-Ja eke t , p. 236, and a passage in the revised, onevolume edition of George Henry Lewes's Biographical History of Philosophy (Hew York, 1857). Melville writes: "More than once a master-at-arms ashore has been seized by night by an exasperated crew, and served as Origen served himself, or as his enemies served Abelard.” The uncle of Reloise, says Lewes, "surprised Abelard sleeping, and there inflicted.that atrocious mutilation, which Origen in a moment of religious frenzy inflicted on himself” (p. 354). This statement was not in the original four-volume edition of Lewes's work (London, 1845); unless his association of Origen and Abelard was influenced by White-Jacket, it seems likely that he and Melville used some common source, which I have been unable to locate. 22 *

The Confidence-Man, pp. 167f.

Note the ensuing discussion.

64. Sundermann, p. 21; cf. Melville's description of God as "all brain, like a watch," quoted above, p. 144, and The City of G o d , XXI, 24. 65.

Mardi, II, 54; Poems, p. 258.

66. Cf. the respective listings in Appendix III, below. There is an article on Cardan (1501-1576), Italian mathematician and writer on medicine and occult sciences, in Bayle's Dictionary, IV, 113-122; he is frequently mentioned in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.

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Renaissance

Machiavelli, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas M o r e -67 Melville knew directly, but there is nothing in his works to indicate that any of the men just mentioned exerted an important influence on his thought.

One of Melville’s minor interests, in medieval alchemy, has striking implications for students of his literary sources and of the development of his thought.

"The Bell-Tower," which reminds

68 Mumford of a minor work of Hawthorne’s youth,

concerns the creation

of a mechanical man by the alchemist Bannadonna, thought to be "hopelessly infected with the craziest chimeras of his age; far out­ going Albert Magus and Cornelius Agrippa. But the contrary was 69 averred." Melville presumably had read the accounts of Cornelius Agrippa and Albertus Magnus in his copy of Bayle, who mentions the 70 legend that Albertus Magnus once made an artificial man. In Israel Potter, written during the same period as "The Bell Tower," Melville remarks in a description of the Parisian Latin Quarter that

67. The content of references in White-Jacket, p. 207; The Confidence-Man, p. 324; Journal up the Straits, ed. Raymond Weaver (New York, 1935), p. 165 (ll April, 1857); and Clarel, II, 216f, suggests Melville’s first-hand acquaintance with iMachi&velli. C f • other references listed in Appendix III, below. In his copy of Robert B e l l ’s collection Songs from the Dramatists (London, 1854), purchased in 1873, Melville annotated the beginning of a song from Ben Jonson’s The Queen's Masque ("Fools, they are the only nation / Worth m e n ’s envy or admiration. "Erasmus's Folly -- This seems a versification of the first of it" (p. 114). This volume is now in possession of Melville's grand­ daughter, Mrs. Frances T. Osborne. For Melville’s MS note on M o r e ’s Utopia, c f . above, pp. 7 5 f . 68.

Mumford, p. 236.

69.

"The Bell-Tower," Piazza Tales, p. 267.

70.

Bayle, Dictionary, I, 351-362, 429-432.

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176

’’one almost expects to encounter Paracelsus or Friar Bacon turning 71

the next corner, with some awful vial of Black-Art elixir in his hand." These allusions recall Melville’s earlier reference to "(black art) 72 Goetic" and "Theurgic magic." The distinction between black and which magic is age-old, but just when and where Melville learned the technical terms Goetia and Theurgy is uncertain.

He may have read

some history of magic or esoteric doctrine, a number of such books being available in his day, but investigation has located none which 73 he can be said to have used.

The sources of most of Melville’s references to Paracelsus, however, can be identified:

they illustrate Melville’s habits of

reading and, in one instance, provide the key to the psychological

71. Israel Potter, p. 61. One probable source of Melville’s acquaintance with Roger Bacon is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (New York, 1847), pp. 323f, which relates some anecdotes of Bacon, Paracelsus, and other alchemists. 72. C f • p. 77, above: the annotation in a volume of Melville's Shakespeare. With Bannadonna, in "The Bell-Tower," "common sense was theurgy" (Piazza Tales, p. 268: note the reference to "theosophists"). Is there a connectionhere with the contrast of black and white frost in a curious passage of Clarel, I, 130? 73. Melville could have found numerous references to theurgy in Proclus and Augustine, but not the explicit distinction above. I have examined all books on magic of Melville’s day in the Yale library, but none seems to answer the requirements. Other students of Melville with whom I have discussed this question --- Mr. Charles Olson, Dr. Henry A. Murray, Mr. Walter Bezanson, and Miss Elizabeth Foster --have had no more success. Melville’s allusions to occult lore, though not of major significance, are numerous enough to be important, and deserve further investigation. Melville probably knew something of the Rosicrucian cult, to which he alludes in The Confidenee-Man (written during the same period as "The Bell-Tower" and Israel hotter), p. 173, and "The New Rosicrucians," Poems, p. 337. Two references to "the German mystics," in White-Jacket, p. 475, and Clarel, II, 132f (hell within hell), should also be examined in this connection.

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s y s t e m underlying Mardi and Pierre«

While at work on Mardi, h e

chanced upon the following account of Paracelsus and his art, taken from Isaac Disraeli’s appropriately-named Curiosities of Literature: Paracelsus has revealed to us one of the grandest secrets of nature. When the world "began to dispute on the very existence of the elementary folk, it was then he boldly offered to give birth to a fairy, and has sent down to posterity the recipe. He describes the impurity which is to be transmuted into such purity, the gross elements of a delicate fairy, which, fixed in a phial in fuming dung, will in due time settle into a full-grown fairy, bursting through its vitreous prison --- on the vivifying principle by which the ancient Egyptians hatched their eggs in ovens. I recollect at Dr. Fa r m e r ’s sale the leaf which preserved this recipe for making a fairy, forcibly folded down by the learned commentator; from which we must infer the credit he gave to the experiment. There was a greatness of mind in Paracelsus, who, having furnished a recipe to make a fairy, had the delicacy to refrain.... ^4 This passage is quoted in an annotation to the edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici which Melville was using during the composi­ tion of Mardi.

What Melville did with this improbable story is seen in one of the most hilarious chapters of his own book, "The Tale of a 75 Traveller,** assembled almost entirely from his recent reading. ”It was Samoa who told the incredible tale,” he begins; ’’and he told it as a traveller.

But stay-at-homes say travellers lie” ---

a bow to the incredulous critics of Typee and Omoo.

After discussing

74. Sir Thomas Browne, Works, ed. Simon Wilkin, 4 vol. (London, 1835-1836), II, 52f, note. On Melville’s borrowing this edition from Evert Duyckinck, c f . note above, p. 53. Later, on 26 February, 1862, Melville bought a set of D ’Israeli’s works, ed. Benjamin Disraeli, 7 vol. (London, 1859), now in possession of his granddaughter, Mrs. Frances T. Osborne. 75.

Mardi, I, 346f.

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178

such tale-tellers as Bruce, Baron. Munchausen, Sir John Mandeville, and even D a n t e

.who "took the census of Hell” but found not Sir

John there — - Melville proceeds to the remarkable narration of Samoa.

The Islander declares that he had once performed a trepanning

operation upon a wounded friend, replacing an injured portion of the brain with part of the live brain of a young pig.

This story

Melville had found reported on hearsay in Ellisfs Polynesian 76 Researches, but whereas Ellis had stated that the patient "became furious with madness, and died," Samoa declares that his friend lingered among the living for an entire year as "a perverse-minded and piggish fellow, showing many of the characteristics of his swinish grafting."

Some of the assembled Mardians credit this

prodigy, but Babbalanja holds out to the last, answering it finally with a satirical tall tale of his own: 'Yet, if this story be true,' said he, 'and since it is well settled, that our brains are somehow the organs of sense; then, I see not why human reason could not be put into a pig, by letting into its cranium the contents of a m a n 's . I have long thought that men, pigs, and plants are but curious physiological experiments; and that science would at last enable philosophers to produce new species of beings, by somehow mixing, and concocting the essential ingredients of various creatures; and so forming new combinations* My friend Atahalpa, the astrologer and alchemist, has long had a jar, in which he has been endeavouring to hatch a fairy, the ingredients being compounded according to a receipt of his own.' ^

76. David Jaff^, "Some Sources of Melville's Mardi," Am. L i t ., IX, 56-59 (March, 1937), shows that this is one of ten passages in Mardi borrowed from Ellis and other travel-books which Melville had already used in writing Typee and Qmoo. The source of this account is also cited by Thorp, note, pT Txvi, quoting Ellis, Polynesian Researches (1829 ed.), II, 277. 77.

Mardi, I, 347.

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179

This anecdote furnishes an amusing finale to a chapter compounded according to a I,receipt"of Melville's own, but it has a serious purpose as well.

To conclude a chapter with some moral

reflection, either solemn or satiric, is his usual custom in Moby-Dick, for which Mardi served as a kind of practice-exercise. The present instance is one of Melville's flank attacks on the pretensions of experimental science, which to him was "but a passing 78 fable,** achieving nothing but an enlargement of the scope of 79 human ignorance. Babbalanja's "friend Atahalpa" is of course Paracelsus, a transition-figure between medieval science, based on the teachings of the ancients, and modern inductive method.

It was

from Paracelsus and Campanella, of whom Melville read in Burton's 80 Anatomy of Melancholy, that the suggestion.came for the psychological symbolism of Mardi and Pierre, to be discussed in the next section of this study.

78. Moby-Dick, II, 83. Cf. Ahab's rejection of science, symbolized “by his breaking the quadrant, ibid., II, 274. 79.

Clarel, I, 126, 253; Poems, p. 194; cf. pp. 198ff, below.

80. Cf. Redburn, p. 322, and the discussion below. The chapter on ambergris in Moby-Dick, II, 162, cites "that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk.” Here, as Anderson has shown (pp. 44f), Melville is following Thomas Beale's Natural History of the Sperm "Whale in quoting Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors* in Works (1835-1856), II, 517. Melville directly alludes to or quotes from the same context in Browne elsewhere in Moby-Dick, I, xv, 165, II, 152. Collation reveals that in MobyDick he was using the 1686 folio edition of Browne which he ^had purchased in London, 19 December, 1849 (Melville's journal [m ); Thorp, note, p. xxviii). For other allusions to Paracelsus, c f . listings in Appendix III, below.

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iii Some Sources of Melville’s Psychology

Not in a spirit of foolish speculation altogether, in no merely transcendental mood, did the glorious Greek of old fancy the human soul to be essentially a harmony. And if we grant that theory of Paracelsus and Campanella, that every man has four souls within him; then can we account for those banded sounds with silver links, those quartettes of melody, that sometimes sit and sing within us, as if our souls were baronial halls, and our music were made by the hoariest old harpers of Wales. Theforegoing passage from in two authors:

Redburn is based upon Melville's reading

Plato, as shown earlier in this study, and Robert 82

Burton, with whose Anatomy of Melancholy he had long been familiar. The notion of the soul as a harmony Melville took from Plato’s 83 Republic; "that theory of paracelsus and Campanella11 he found explained in Burton; Some ... make one soul, divided into three principal faculties; others, three distinct souls.... Paracelsus will have four souls, adding to the three grand faculties a spiritual soul: which opinion of his, Campanella, in his book de sensu rerum, much labours to demonstrate and prove.... 84

81.

Redburn, p. 322.

82. Melville alludes to Burton as early as ’’Fragments from a Writing-Desk" (1839), in Billy Budd..., p. 382. On 10 April, 1847, probably stimulated by his friend Evert Duyckinck's enthusiasm for Burton, he bought a volume of extracts from the Anatomy [m ], sub­ sequently discovering that the book had once belonged to his father (cf. pp. 13f, above). On 8 February, 1848, according to a statement from John Wiley of the following 1 July (Appendix II, below, p. 211), he purchased a complete edition, probably that published by Wiley & Putnam (New York, 1847), which will be cited here. For other allu­ sions to Burton, cf. Appendix III, below: BURTON. 83. The relevant in connection with the 84. p. 100.

discussion above, pp. 111-117, present section.

should

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York, 1847),

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beread

181

The concept of three psychological faculties is at least as old as the tripartite division of the soul in Plato's Republic and Timaeus; Burton's analysis "Of the Soul and her Faculties" is heavily endebted to Aristotle and a multitude of medical and philosophical authorities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. distinguishes three soulsj

Burton himself

the vegetal, present in all living things;

the sensible, present only in the animal kingdom; and the rational, 85 present only in man, who possesses all faculties. Melville's Babbalanja in Mardi also recognizes these three levels of existence: "In kings, mollusca, and toadstools," he holds, "life [i.e., vegetal

86 life] is one thing and the same."

yillah, in the same book, sees 87 in her pet bird "two souls, not one” --- another reflection of the same doctrine which Melville had found in Burton's conteraporary, Sir

85. For convenient reference, Burton's section "Of the Soul and her Faculties" (pp. 99-108) may be outlined as follows: The vegetal soul; nourishes, augments, and begets, through "the power of natural heat (pp. lOOf). The sensible soul: possesses sense, appetite, judgment, breath, and motion (pp. 101-104). Apprehension: five outward senses (sight, hearing, smelling, taste, touching); three inward senses (common sense, phantasy, and memory). The moving faculties: appetite (natural or vegetal, sensitive, voluntary or intellective); moving from place to p l ace. The rational soul: lives, perceives, understands, and freely acts (pp. 104-108). Understanding: Will:

apprehends and judges.

acts on data given by the understanding.

86. Mardi, II, 255; cf. II, 352: "the same life that moves that moose, animates alike the sun and Oro [God].'1 87.

Ibid., I, 182.

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182 88

Thomas Browne*

These references are of course ho the "two inferior

faculties, the vegetal and sensible souls:

’’The inferior,” says

Burton, ”may be alone, but the superior cannot subsist without the other; so sensible includes vegetal, rational both; which are con­ tained in it (saith Aristotle) ut trigonus in tetragono, as a triangle 89 in a quadrangle.”

The suggestion has been advanced earlier in this study that the characterization of Mardi may be based on one form or another of the old faculty psychology.

Burton, it seems likely, contributed

also to the significance of several characters. Melville’s Media, 91 for example, who represents the average man, occupies the place of Burton's "common sense" - —

"the judge or moderator" of the other 92 inward senses, phantasy and memory, represented by Melville’s poet

Yoomy and chronicler Mohi. The reflective passages of Mardi are assigned to the philosopher Babbalanja, who may represent the rational power of understanding; the action of the book is the allegorical

88. Cf. Browne's Religio Medici, Works, ed. Simon Wilkin (London, 1835-1836), II, 21: "Who admires not Regio Montanus his fly beyond his eagle; or wonders not more atthe operation of two souls in those little bodies than but one in the trunk of a cedar?" An editor’s note to this passage explains the psychological allusion. Sundermann, p. 98, refers to Melville’s mention of the theory of four souls in Redburn in discussing Yillah's bird, but does not investigate the implications of either passage. 89.

Burton, p.

100.

90. Cf. above, pp. 27f (on Bacon'sAdvancement of Learning), 68ff (on Plato’s phaedrus, the influence of which is suggested, by Sundermann, pp. 6§f and note, p. 203). 91. Cf. Mardi, I, 196f; Media symbolically seats himself in the middle position. The name "Media" is itself a clue. 92. Burton, p. 102. Media's function as a judge (Mardi, I, 212-216; cf. above, p. 98) may be another piece of intentional symbolism.

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story of Taji, -who symbolizes the rational will.

According to

Burton, the rational soul is divided into two chief parts:

"the

understanding, which is the rational power apprehending; the will, 93 which is the rational power moving" and which acts on data furnished by the understanding.

In Mardi, Babbalanja identifies his own quest 94 for the Ultimate with that of Taji, but in the course of the book

he ends his search in Serenia, advising Taji and his other companions 95 to do likewise. Taji refuses the guidance of rational understanding, and at the conclusion of the narrative he turns his boat once more into the racing tide, abandoning free will to fate:

"Now, I am m y 96

own soul’s emperor; and my first act is abdication!"

Moby-Dick, too, is taken by various critics to represent in its characters the different aspects of the human soul.

Even the 97 Pequod seems the counterpart of the dominating soul of Ahab, and her three mates signify spiritual traits after the fashion of the 98 symbolic type-characters of Mardi. Still, each remains an individual, as shown by A h a b ’s realization that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual mastei— ship; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced will were A h a b ’s, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s brain;

93.

Burton, p • 105.

94.

Mardi, I, 230; on Babbalanja and the Ultimate, c f . II, 81.

95.

Ibid., II, 3 8 0 f .

97.

Moby-Dick, II, 180; c f . II, 243.

96.

Ibid., II, 400.

Ibid., I, 233: "the incompetence of mere unaided virtue 98. or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of in­ difference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask."

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184

still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his captain*s quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it, or even frustrate it.®® Melville, it will be recalled* had gone beyond the Platonic concept of an intellectual aristocracy in his own recognition of a spiritual 100 elite superior to the intellectually gifted. In this passage, although treating the interrelation of faculties in a manner reminiscent of Burton, he likewise introduces the element of spirituality.

In

Burton he had read that '•Paracelsus will have four souls, adding to the three grand faculties a spiritual soul,” and there is other evidence in Moby-Dick that he had accustomed himself to thinking in terms of

101 four faculties.

The full influence of his four-fold conception of the soul, however, is seen in the characterization of Pierre, his next book. As pointed out above, Pierre, Isabel, and Dally stand, respectively,

102 for the head, the heart, and the natural appetites,

but. the full

significance of their relation is brought out only by reference to 103 passages in The Anatomy of Melancholyc E. L. Grant Watson calls attention to the symbolism of the following, description of Pierre’s chambers: The three chambers of Pierre at the Apostles* were connecting ones. The first --- having a little retreat where Delly slept --- was used for the more exacting domestic purposes: here also their meals were taken; the second was the chamber of Isabel; the third was the closet of Pierre. In the first --- the dining-

99.

Moby-Dick, I, 265f.

100. Cf. above, pp. 95-97.

101. Cf. "brain and heart and hand” (Moby-Dick, I, 267); "a brain, and a heart, and a soul” (I, 311);"heart, soul, and body, lungs and life” (II, 2 8 3 ) r 102.

Cf. p. 112, above, and note.

103. E. L. Grant YiTatson, "Melville !s Pierre,” NEQ, 234 (April, 1930), pp. 222f.

III, 195-

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185

room, as they called it --- there was a stove which boiled the water for their coffee and tea, and where Delly concocted their light repasts. This was their only fire.... But by prudent management, a very little warmth may go a great way. In the present case, it went some forty feet or_more. A horizontal pipe, after elbowing away from above the stove in the dining-room, pierced the partition wall, and passing straight through Isabel’s chamber, entered the closet of Pierre at one corner, and then abruptly disappeared into the wall, where all further caloric -- if any --- went up through the chimney into the air, to help warm the December s u n .

Turning to Burton, one finds in his description of the natural organs of the abdomen, or "Lower Region," a comparison of this bodily cavity with "some sacred temple, or majestical palace," in which the stomach is called "the kitchen, as it were," of "the belly."

The functions of this part of the body are nutrition and 104 generation. This is the dwelling-place of the vegetal soul, which 105 provides the rest of the body with "natural heat." Of the next division, the "Middle Region," or chest, "the principal part is the 106 heart, ... the seat and organ of all passions and affections." The

upper region is the head, containing the brain, "the dwelling-house and seat of the soul, the habitation of wisdom, memory, judgment, reason, and in which man is most like unto God...."

The ventricles

of the fore-brain "are the receptacles of the spirits, brought hither by the arteries from the heart, and are there refined to a 107 more heavenly nature, to perform the actions of the soul." And of spirit Burton writes:

103.

Pierre, pp. 413f.

104.

Burton, pp. 97f

105.

Ibid., p p • lOOf.

106.

Ibid., p. 98.

107.

Ibid., p. 99.

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186

Spirit is a most subtile vapour, which is expressed from the blood, and the instrument of the soul, to perform all his actions; a common tie or medium between the body and the soul, as some will have it; or as Paracelsus, a fourth soul of itself.... Of these spirits, there be three kinds, according to the three principal parts, brain, heart, liver; natural, vital, animal. The natural are begotten in the liver, and thence dispersed through the veins, to perform those natural actions. The vital spirits are made in the heart of the natural, which by the arteries are transported to all the other parts; if the spirits cease, then life ceaseth, as in a syncope or swooning. The animal spirits formed of the vital, brought up to the brain, and diffused by the nerves, to the subordinate members, give sense and motion to them all.-^-*®

The anatomical Implications of Pierre, it seems clear, stem from Melville's reading of these passages in Burton.

Delly Ulver

represents the vegetal soul, located in the abdomen or "belly" -and specifically,by some authorities,in the liver.

Her very name, 109 as Watson suggests, is a clue to her symbolic significance• Isabel,

whom Pierre follows to his destruction, is the heart: ’" t i s God's 110 annointed," he cries; "let me pursue the heart I1' Pierre himself is the rational soul, located in the head --- symbolically described elsewhez'e in the book as "a locked, round-windowed closet connecting with the chamber of Pierre,

... whither 1t0 had always been wont to

go, in those sweetly awful hours, when the spirit crieth to the

111 spirit, Come into solitude with me, twin-brother...."

Like

Paracelsus, moreover, Melville adds to these three faculties a spiritual soul, symbolized in pierre by the character of Lucy Tartan, whose "angelical," "heavenly” character is consistently emphasized

108.

Burton, p. 96.

109.

Watson

(note 102, above), p. 208.

110.

Pierre, p. 127.

111.

Ibid., p. 98.

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187 112

throughout the book.

The character of Pierre himself, from ■within

whose face are seen "a second face, and a third face, and a fourth 113 face,” is thus the soul and all its faculties, represented on various levels by Delly, Isabel, and Lucy.

The rational soul, according

to Burton, "includes the powers, and performs the duties” of the 114 other faculties, "which are contained in it.”

There is a possible analogue for the anatomy of Pierre in Plato, whose concept of the soul as a harmony is used by Melville to emphasize the relation of these four symbolic characters.

In the

Republic, P l a t o ’s Socrates fashions "an image of the soul” in which the various attributes are represented symbolically as a hydra (the desires), a lion (anger, or the will), and a ma n (reason).

"Unite

now these three in one,” says Socrates, "so that they may somehow coexist*...

Form now around them the external appearance of one of

them, that of the man; so that to one who is not able to see what is within, but who perceives only the external covering, the man may 115 appear one creature." P l a t o ’s figure, along with Burton’s psychology, may have suggested to Melville the analysis offered in his own book. In Pierre he of course makes no effort to present a single "external covering,” but it is interesting to note that in "I and My Chimney,” a short story written a few years after the composition of Pierre, he employs the chimney of his old farmhouse at Pittsfield as the

112. Rote the descriptions of Lucy on pp. 28, 33, 44, 48, 54, 7Sf, 81f, 432, 437f, 441, 455, 470 of Pierre. 113.

Ibid., p. 165.

114.

Burton, p. 105.

115.

Republic, Bohn ed. (London, 1849), II, 279f.

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188

external symbol of his own heart and soul.

The symbolism of "I and

M y Chimney,‘ ccmplements that of Pierre, throwing more light on the significance of the novel in relation to the state of Melville’s own 116 mind during a critical period of his career.

There is another analogue of Pierre in a note to Thomas Taylor's Select Works of Plotinus, a volume which Melville may have --------------------- m — read before writing Pierre. Whether or not Melville was influenced by Taylor, the analogue provides an interesting commentary on the meaning of the book, particularly the symbolic value of Isabel.

The

ancients, says Taylor, "by the sphinx, designed to represent to us the nature of the phantasy or imagination."

The riddles of the sphinx are

images of the obscure and intricate nature of the phantasy. Ee, therefore, who is unable to solve the riddles of the sphinx, i.e. who cannot comprehend the dark and perplexed nature of the phantasy, will be drawn into her embraces and torn in pieces, viz. the phantasy in such a one will subject to its power the rational life, cause its indivisible energies to become divisible, and thus destroy as much as possible its very essence. But he who, like Oedipus, is able to solve the enigmas of the sphinx, or, in other words, to comprehend the dark essence of his phantasy, will, by illuminating its obscurity with the light of intellect, cause it, by becoming lucid throughout, to be no longer what it was before.U S Isabel, the "Dark Lady" of Pierre, corresponds closely to Taylor’s image of the phantasy, which Burton classifies as a part of the sensible soul.

She draws Pierre into her embraces just as Melville’s

116. Cf. my "Herman Melville's XIII, 142-154 (May, 1941). 117.

'I and My Chimney,'" Am. Lit.,

C f • above, pp. 126-129.

118. Thomas Taylor, Select Works of Flotinus (London, 1817), note, p. 540 (in part), extracted from the notes to Taylor’s trans­ lation of pausanius.

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189

introspective preoccupation with his own phantasy threatened the stability of his rational life.

Pierre is faced throughout the book

with Isabel’s ambiguity; Lucy, on the other hand, is characterized 119 by a "most vivid transparency•" "Read me through and through,"

120 Lucy tells pierre; she has no "secret thing" to keep from him.

By

turning from the spiritual Lucy to the ambiguous Isabel, bothhis

121 "deepest angel” and his "Bad Angel,"

pierre prepares the way for

the destruction of Isabel, Lncy, and himself.

At his death Isabel

cries guiltily that "thy sister hath murdered thee, m y brother, oh m y brother*" --- and "at these wailed words from Isabel, Lucy shrunk

122 up like a scroll, and noiselessly fell at the feet of Pierre."

The complexity of this symbolic narrative goes far beyond the relatively simple allegory of Mardi, the exact connection between 123 the two being a puzzle to students of Melville’s symbolism. Taji in Mardi pursues Yillah, a kind of lost Platonic ideal beauty, only 124 to find her somehow mysteriously connected with Hautia, symbol of

119. Pierre, p. 80. Is there a possible connection between Lucy's name, which presumably signifies "light”, and Taylor's use of the terms "illuminating" and "lucid"? 12°*

Ibid«* P- 5 4 *

122.

Ibid., p. 503.

121•

Ihid., pp. 90, 438, 503.

123. C f • particularly Wa t s o n ’s article (note 102, above); George C. Homans, "The Park Angel: The Tragedy of Herman Melville," NEQ, V, 699-730 (October, 1S32); Yfilliam Braswell, "Herman Melville and Christianity" (unpublished University of Chicago dissertation, 1934), pp. 155-166. Since my discovery of Melville’s use of Burton’s psychology, I have been in correspondence with Mr. Braswell on this subject. His interpretation of the symbolism of Mardi and Pierre differs in detail from the conclusions offered above, as will be seen in relevant sections of his forthcoming monograph on Melville’s religious ideas, but I am nevertheless indebted to his constructive criticisms and suggestions for m y own treatment here. 124.

Mardi, II, 386.

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190

sensual evil.

The feminine characters in Pierre likewise represent

the non-rational elements of the soul, but Isabel's correspondence with the temptress of Mardi is only superficial.

As the sensitive

faculty, specifically the phantasy or imagination, she is not wholly evil, but ambiguous, destructive to Pierre because he fails to com­ prehend her true nature.

This contrast of feminine imagination and

masculine intellect, of heart with brain, is customary in Melville's 125 thought and imagery, but Pierre is the most complete and significant exposition of their relation to be found anywhere in his writing. The present survey of various sources of Melville's psychology throws new light on the interpretation of Pierre, which has by no means been established in this brief exposition.

As the study of ancient philosophy

had helped stimulate the theological and metaphysical speculation which Melville wove into Moby-Dick, so suggestions for the psychological symbolism of Pierre came from two and possibly three authors from whom he had learned of the thought of the ancients --- Plato, Robert Burton, and perhaps the Platonist Thomas Taylor.

No future student

of Pierre, it is safe to say, can ignore Melville's familiarity with their ideas.

125. Cf. Mardi, II, 136; The Confidence-Man, p. 87; Clarel, I, 287, II, 185, 233, 270; Billy Bud'd / I n Billy B u d d ..., p. 87.” It is interesting that Tfi-ylor, note, p. 539, calls the feminine sex "the image, from its passivity, of the irrational life." In Pierre Melville stresses Isabel's passivity (pp. 264, 268, 451) and irrationality (pp. 168ff, 172f, 264, 381, 436f). Melville's term "heart," which has intrigued several critics, has roughly five general connotations: imagination, as shown in the symbolic character of Isabel and in the passages cited at the beginning of this note; passion; humane sympathy; greatness, nobility, or heroicness; the entire soul or personality. I base this classifica­ tion on my comparison of some fifty passages in Melville in which the word occurs .

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Summary and Conclusion

"Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not he here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept m y word.... For small erections m a y be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the cope-stone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught — nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience I" "Cetology," Moby-Dick, I, 179.

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The contributions of this study to Melville scholarship may be listed under three general headings.

The first of these is

the establishment of primary and secondary literary sources of Melville’s knowledge of ancient philosophy.

On the basis of source-

study, it is possible to analyze the development of leading philosophical ideas in Me l v i l l e ’s w o r k and to examine certain influences on his literary style, particularly in his use of symbolism and allegory. In these concluding pages, a concise summary will be given of Melville’s sources and their contribution to his thought and literary technique.

i Melville’s most extensive reading in the field df ancient philosophy was in the dialogues of Plato, beginning in 1847 or 1848 before the completion of Mardi and continuing at intervals throughout his subsequent career.

A t about the same time that he began reading

Plato he purchased a volume of Seneca, and he may later have read the works of other Stoic philosophers, notably Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.

The Platonic and Stoic systems of thought were two of

the major influences on Melville’s own ideas, though he accepted neither uncritically.

The Neoplatonists, on the other hand, had

little to offer Melville, and no mention of Epicurean thinkers occurs in his work at all.

During the composition of Mardi Melville looked

into the commentary of the Neoplatonist Proclus on P l a t o ’s theology, but he found the system of Proclus, particularly his terminology, difficult and even ridiculous.

Sometime before writing Pierre he

may also have read a translation of Plotinus, with whose work there are parallels in the thought and imagery of Melville’s book, but this

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193

evidence alone is inconclusive.

With the works of Plutarch Melville

was acquainted before he himself began writing professionally.

He

probably knew Plutarch’s Morals at the time of M a rdi, and from both the Morals and the Lives he learned much about the civilization and thought of the ancient world.

Plutarch’s philosophical treatment of Greek, Persian, and Egyptian myths attracted Melville, wh o had long been familiar with classical mythology.

Allusions to Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Persian,

and Indian myths are nearly as frequent in his works as references to the literature of the Old and Hew Testaments.

Plato, too, taught

Melville both the theory and the practice of the philosophical myth, and Francis Bacon’s Wisdom of the Ancients pointed out to him the symbolic implications of classical fables.

His interest in Zoroastriai

theology and mythology was stimulated by his purchase in 1849 of Pierre Bayle’s philosophical dictionary, notable for its exposition of the Manichean and Gnostic dualistic heresies.

In the works of

these authors Melville found the material for much of the philosophical allegory of Mardi, Mo by-Dick, and Pierre, in which he assumes the role of myth-maker and symbolist.

Plato, Plutarch, and Bayle were

largely responsible for his adherence to the philosophical position of dualism, which he had adopted as early as Mardi and which is the most striking feature of his thought as it developed in the works which followed.

Bayle’s dictionary was the most important secondary source of Melville’s knowledge of ancient thought.

His familiarity with

ancient philosophers and schools other than those mentioned above came either from Bayle, from an unidentified manual of philosophy,

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194

or from h i 8 extensive general reading in ancient and modern literature. Many allusions to historical thinkers in Melville's works can be traced to his fondness for the essays of Montaigne and Bacon and thi writings of Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, whose temperament, literary style, and encyclopedic range of mind influenced him pro­ foundly.

Melville’s taste for their works was fostered early in his

career by his friend Evert Duyckinck, wh o was himself well-read in philosophy and who placed the resources of his large library at Melville's disposal.

The influence of Melville's childhood training

in orthodox Calvinism, which conditioned his thinking throughout his life, has been acknowledged in this study, although his reading in purely religious literature is beyond the strict scope of the present investigation.

In addition to a thorough grounding in the Bible,

Melville had some knowledge of the history of the early Christian church and the rabbinical tradition of the Hebrews.

He probably knew

the works of Augustine at first hand, and acquired additional knowledge of the Fathers of the early Church from his religious training and later from his background reading for Clarel, his long poem on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land published after the close of his great creative period.

M r . W i l l i a m Braswell has in preparation a study of Melville's religious thought which will deal with much of this theological material.

The investigation of Melville’s reading in modern philosophy,

for which the present work is a foundation, should include a treatment of his use of theological works written during the period of the Renaissance and after, including those of Ethan Allen, Burnet, Calvin, Edwards, Jebb, Massilon, Paley, Servetus, Swedenborg, Jeremy Taylor, Tillotson, and W e s l e y

all mentioned by Melville.

Of medieval and

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Renaissance writers, it has been shown here, Melville knew little at first hand apart from the works of Machiavelli, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas fibre, none of which constituted a major influence on his thought.

Among the modern philosophers, the British empirical thinkers,

the French encyclopedists, and the German and American transcendentalists were familiar to Melville, directly or indirectly, to a degree yet to be established by the continuation of this study into the modern period. Although contributions of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century essayists to Melville’s knowledge of ancient and medieval thought have been touched upon here, no attempt has been made to treat their influence definitively.

Another aspect of his reading which may yet be covered,

depending on the results of further research, is Melville’s knowledge of alchemy, magic, and esoteric beliefs and cults.

Many of his allusions,

however, are so brief and so general as to provide no adequate clues to books and authors wham he actually read and used.

ii Both internal and external evidence show that Melville’s interest in philosophy began about 1847 and 1848, its most striking manifestation being his alteration of M a rdi, which was then in process of composition, from a story of South Sea adventure to a philosophical romance.

Like its predecessors, Typee and Ctaoo, Mardi is more directly

dependent upon literary sources than is Melville’s later and more mature work.

Plato and Sir Thomas Browne are echoed in Mardi, as

one scholar has said, to the point of ventriloquism, and Melville’s philosophical borrowings can be shown by comparison of parallel passages in their work and Melville's.

Moby-Dick likewise contains

striking reminiscences of P l ato’s phrasing and imagery and of Browne’s

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prose oadences, but Melville’s indebtedness to philosophers is, on the whole, of a more general nature there than in Mardi.

The ideas

he had found in Plato and Browne --- preexistence, innate ideas, poetic inspiration, metempsychosis, ethical and metaphysical dualism, and the l i k e

were no longer new and strange, but part of his own

habits of thought.

His borrowings from Bayle, w h o m he had read more

recently, can be illustrated only by broad comparisons; the technique of citing parallel passages is entirely inapplicable.

In Pierre

there is specific warning against the domination of literary sources, Plato being mentioned by name as a writer to be resisted.

Melville

evidently made a deliberate effort to perfect his own ideas and style independently.

Records of his reading at this time show also that

he was reading less Plato and Plutarch, more Shakespeare, Dante, and other writers of general literature.

The years 1847-1849 can therefore be taken as the date of Melville’s most extensive reading in ancient philosophy, although neither his interest in the subject nor his reading terminated at the end of that period.

"What his philosophical reading had done was to

force his reexamination of received truth; the new ideas which he encountered did not simply provide him w i t h a new stock of beliefs. ’’For the more we learn, the more we unlearn,” he declares in Mardi;

i "we accumulate not, but substitute; and take away more than we add.” Even Redburn and Whits-Jacket, his next books, demonstrate his critical temper, though they are not in the philosophical vein of Mardi, MobyDick, and Pierre.

1.

In Redburn he remarks that ”you know nothing till

Mardi, II, 80.

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2 you know all; which is the reason we never know anything.”

In

White-Jacket is the observation that philosophy, though ”the best wisdom that has ever in any way been revealed” to man, is still "but 3

a slough and a mire, with a few tufts of good footing here and there.” These words are straws in the wind, for in Moby-Dick is an implicit denial of much orthodox philosophical doctrine and in Pierre an explicit rejection of all faith, all stoicism, and all philosophy as deceptive and worthless.

Critics who stress Melville's preoccupation

with metaphysics have too often overlooked the increasing bitterness of his attitude toward philosophy in the books which followed Mardi.

■What was Melville's quarrel with the philosophers?

First

of all, he realized that the influence of philosophy upon his manner of writing in Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre had alienated his reading public.

In one of the short sketches written after Pierre he declares

that even his family, "like all the rest of the world, cares not a 4 fig for my philosophical jabber." Secondly, he had come to look upon further speculation as unprofitable.

In the same story he com­

pares his old farmhouse to "a philosophical system," in which "you seem to be forever going somewhere, and getting nowhere," for "if you arrive at all, it is just where you started, and so you begin 5 again, and again get nowhere." This slur at systematic philosophy

6 contrasts with his praise of "old Montaigne,"

3.

the unsystematic

2.

Redburn, p. 154.

White-Jacket, p. 231.

4.

"I and My chimney," in Billy Budd. .., p . 309•

5. Ibid., pp. 292f. The same thought is presented figura tively in Moby-Dick, I, 300. 6.

"I and My Chimney," in Billy Budd..., p. 289.

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198

essayist, one of those "unconventional writers who, free from cant and convention,

... honestly, and in the spirit of common sense, 7 philosophise upon realities." By implication, the system-builders

8 lack honesty, common sense, and realism. want of what Melville called "heart."

Another fault was their

This criticism has been

excellently stated by Stanley Geist: The philosophers — - all of them, and not simply one or another — were infuriating and absurd not because their systems were opposed to his, but because their thought was systematized, hence heartless.... All philosophic unity was both analytic and eclectic; while any unity which was to be valid for Melville had to be intuitive and inclusive — in other words, perceived by the great heart, not by the watchmaker’s brain....®

The philosopher whom Melville considered to have “mere

10 watchmaker’s brains" was Francis Bacon, experimental philosophy and science.

one of the founders of modern

Melville was evidently familiar

11 with Bacon's place in the history of ideas,

7.

but though he respected

Billy Budd, in Billy Budd..., p. 29.

8. In his copy of Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (Boston, 1865), purchased in 1869 [m ], Melville marked a quotation from Joubert on "the failure of every system of metaphysics,11 underlining as follows; "Not one of them has succeeded; for the simple reason, that in every one ciphers have been constantly used instead of values, artificial ideas instead of native ideas, jargon instead of idiom." (p. 215). In the preface by the translator, T» B. Saunders, of Schopenhauer's Religions A Dialogue (London, 1890) [m ], Melville marked the statement •that Schopenhauer *s scheme of things "shares the common fate of all metaphysical systems in being unverifiable, and to that extent u n ­ profitable..." (p. viii). 9. Stanley Geist, Herman Melville: The Tragic Vision and the Heroic Ideal (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), p. 42. 10.

pierre, pp. 294f.

11. Cf. his contrast of the modern era with "old Greek times, before m a n ’s brain went into doting bondage, and bleached and beaten in Baconian fulling-mills, his four limbs lost their barbaric tan and beauty..." (Pierre, p. 276).

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199

Bacon as a commentator on ancient mythology, he had little regard for Bacon as a representative modern thinker.

His "Club for the

Immediate Extension of the Limits of all Knowledge, both Human and

12 Divine,"

is a satire on the spirit of Bacon’s Advancement of

Learning; modern science, Melville believed, enlarges not the scope of human knowledge but the scope of human ignorance.

"Why then do

you try to ’enlarge’ your mind?" he asks in Moby-Dick. "Subtilise 13 it." Science deals with external nature, not with the human heart 14 or conscience; in fact heartlessness may even be, to Melville, "of 15 a purely scientific origin." His conviction that science deals with nature rather than with human nature helps to explain Melville's distrust of a large segment of modern thought and his humanistic bias in favor of belles-lettres, including the literature of antiquity.

Among the ancient philosophers Melville's favorites are seen to be those who wrote least like system-builders and most like authors of creative literature.

He had little to say of Aristotle,

the greatest systematizer of the ancient world, but much of Plato, who is as readily claimed by the poets as by the philosophers.

Though

Melville could not accept Plato's transcendental dogma of ideas, he responded warmly to the myths and figures in Plato which kindled his own imagination.

And though Melville came to reject Plato and the

Platonic system, he never uttered a harsh word concerning Plato's greatest literary creation, his portrayal of Socrates.

The attraction

to Melville in Zoroastrianism, similarly, was not so much the bare concept of metaphysical dualism, but the mythology of Persian fire-

12.

Pierre, p. 351.

13.

Moby-Dick, II, 63.

14.

Mardi, II, 71.

15.

White-Jacket, p. 314.

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200 worship —

the personification of good and evil as eternally warring

deities of light and darkness.

Melville's handling of the theme

of darkness illustrates his manner of dealing imaginatively with intellectual concepts.

Waiting of the power of "blackness” in

Hawthorne, he found its force to lie in its appeals "to that Calvinistic sense of -Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visita­ tions, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free."

16

To Melville, it may be surmised, the imaginative

concept of blackness was as definite and real as- the intellectual concept of evil and sin to the systematic theologian or philosopher.

This same blackness in Shakespeare was for Melville one of "the things that have made for Shakespeare his loftiest but most cir­ cumscribed renown, as the profoundest of thinkers." The "intuitive 17 Truth" in Shakespeare meant far more to Melville than "the mere 18 undiluted reason" of "the mere philosopher." The man of imagination -— Hawthorne, Shakespeare, and presumably himself — is immeasurably deeper than the plummet of the mere critic. For it is not the brain that can test such a man; it is only the heart. You cannot come to know greatness by inspecting it; there is no glimpse to be caught of it, except by intuition; you need not ring it, you but touch it, and you find it is gold.19 The heart rather than the brain, intuitive truth rather than reason, poetic inspiration rather than systematic thought, imaginative symbols rather than intellectual concepts — - these are the preferences that place Melville not with the formal philosophers, but with the poets and makers. 16. "Hawthorne and His Mosses," in Billy B u d d ..., p. 129. 17.

Ibid., p. 130.

18.

Pierre, pp. 259f.

19.

"Hawthorne and His Mosses," p. 129.

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201 iii

The conflict of heart and head in Melville is one of the primary causes of the spiritual crisis that came with Pierre,

Since

the time of Mardi he had sought to maintain equilibrium between the critical, skeptical, analytic tendencies of his intellect and the eclecticism of his creative, synthesizing imagination.

The power of

imagination had succeeded in Moby-Dick in welding the seemingly dis­ parate elements of factual background, narrative, characterization, and philosophical allegory; in Pierre, an artistic failure except to the initiate, the attempted synthesis breaks down.

There Melville’s

passion for analysis led him into an almost pathological anatomizing of his own soul that defied adequate literary treatment.

By reference

to the sources of Melville’s symbolism, plato, Burton, and possibly Thomas Taylor, it has been possible in this study to suggest a re­ interpretation of Pierre which throws new light on the course of Melville's speculative thought.

The hero of Pierre, like Melville himself, had through exposure to unconventional truth become "distrustful of himself, the most wretched distrust of all.

But this last distrust was not of the

20 heart; ... it was ... distrust of his intellect.,,,"

This was

exactly what had befallen Melville in his adventures both in the world of experience and in the world of mind.

Like Pierre, Melville too

had continued to trust the heart, but if the symbolism of the novel represents his own condition, he felt himself deceived in following the heart just as Pierre is deceived by the ambiguous nature of Isabel. The source of error is actually in neither the heart nor the head,

20.

Pierre, p. 234.

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202

but in the dissociation of the two which is portrayed in the novel. This interpretation is suggested by the following remarkable passage of self-criticism; That all-comprehending oneness, that calm representativeness, by which a steady philosophic mind reaches forth and draws to itself, in their collective entirety, the objects of its contempla­ tions; that pertains not to the young enthusiast. By his eagerness, all objects are deceptively fore­ shortened; by his intensity each object is viewed as detached; so that essentially and relatively everything is misseen by him.

M elville’s own eager and intense passion for analysis had, in other words, destroyed the synthesizing power of imagination of which he had read in Coleridge, so that his imagination and intellect were working not in harmony but at cross-purposes.

This same warfare

within the self had been going on since Mardi and had found expression in the baroque characterization of all three of Melville’s symbolic novels.

Mardi dramatizes the conflict between the ideal and the

sensual in Yillah and Hautia and the struggle of understanding with will in Babbalanja and Taji, each representing an aspect of Melville’s own character.

A h a b ’s soul in Moby-Dick is likewise ”dissociated

22 from the characterising mind" vengeance.

through his monomaniac passion for

Babbalanja, Taji, and Ahab are each in pursuit of the

Ultimate, but after Moty-Dick and its imaginative vision of spiritual terror, Melville himself had turned in retreat from ’’those Hyper­ borean regions” in which all maxims ’’begin to slide and fluctuate, and finally become wholly inverted....”

21.

Pierre, pp. 244f.

Neither by imagination nor by

22.

Moby-Dick, I, 252.

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203

intellect, he had learned, must man follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind; for arrived at the Pole, to whose barrenness only it points, there, the needle indifferently respects all points of the horizon alike.

The ambiguity of truth and the psychological conflict in 24 Melville between the powers of creation and destruction brought an end, for all practical purposes, to Melville's public career as an author.

With his eventual achievement of reintergration, his anti­

intellectual ism gave way to a new wholeness of vision, and his interest in philosophy reawakened.

By the close of his life, in

Billy B udd, Melville had come to terms with himself and the universe in a constructive mingling of Socratic wisdom, stoic serenity, and Christian love.

Philosophy, particularly ancient philosophy, thus

played its part in his intellectual development from the time of Mardi until his death.

Pierre, p. 231; cf. Moby-Dick, II, 181f. 24.

C f . Pierre, p. 424, on Pierre as an author.

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Appendices

" ... it is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.” "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (in Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces), p. 143.

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205

Appendix I The Composition of Melville's Mardi To eaoh of his longest prose works, Mardi and Moby-Dick, Melville devoted roughly a year and a half of -work, including writing, revision, copying, and proof-reading.

Because the composition of

Mardi marks the turning-point in his career between stories of his own adventures at sea and his more sophisticated philosophical novels, the events leading up to its publication are of considerable interest to students of Melville's developing thought.

Having seen Omoo safely in print early in 1847, Melville apparently did little writing through the following spring and summer other than to contribute a series of humorous articles to the magazine

1 Yankee Doodle.

IVhile -fosse artioles were still appearing he went to

Boston, where on 5 August of that year he married Elizabeth Knapp Shaw, daughter of his father's old friend Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts.

After a short honeymoon and a stay with Melville's

family at Lansingburgh, near Albany, the couple took up residence in New York City with Melville's brother Allan aid his bride.

There

Melville began nork on his third book, mentioned as early as 22 September, 1847, in a letter from Evert Duyokinck to his brother.

That the new

book was originally intended as a sequel to Typee and Omoo seems indicated by Duyokinck*s statement that it would "exhaust the South 2 Sea marvels."

1. Luther S. Mansfield, "Melville's Comic Articles on Zachary Taylor," Am. Lit., IX, 411-418 (January, 1938). The artioles ran from 24 July to 11 September, 1847. 2. The letter [D] is quoted in part b y Anderson, p. 343, in support of this contention.

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206

The new Mrs. Melville's letters to her mother continue to report the progress of her husband's writing.

On 23 Decentoer, out­

lining a typical day's program, she mentions his reading aloud the 3 chapters just oompleted. On 4 February, 1848, Melville had had offers from abroad for the book in hand, and for the sake of his work he and his wife had determined to give up parties and late hours.

Otherwise,

Mrs. Melville realizes, "he does not feel bright for writing the next 4 day and the days are too preoious to be thrown away...." Meanwhile the design of the book had evidently shifted somewhat as composition progressed, for on 9 March Duyckinck speaks of having recently seen Melville and "a few chapters of his new book, which in the poetry and 5 wildness of the thing will be far ahead of Typee & Omoo." By this date, then, Melville had already abandoned the straightforward narrative style he had employed in his initial travel-books, which carries over into Mardi through the first thirty-eight chapters.

The "poetry and

wildness" of which Duyckinck writes begin to appear in the chapters immediately following.

Mrs. Melville's later letters mention her own unfamiliar problems of housekeeping and manuscript copying, at iriiioh she and Melville's sisters were now hard at work.

When her mother inquired

3. Weaver, p. 2 66. Weaver prints in full three of this series of Mrs. Melville's letters [M], pp. 265-272. 4. Weaver, p. 269. My reading of the original MS differs from that of Weaver, who gives "right" rather than "bright" and who prints the quotation above as two sentences. 5. In a letter to his brother George [D], quoted in part by Anderson, p. 343, and, with some variation, by Thorp, p. 410, note. Anderson thinks that Duyokinck was aware that the plan of writing a sequel to Typee and Omoo "had been changed in the prooess of composi­ ---tion." —

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207

about the possibility of a visit to Boston, she replied on 5 May, 1848, that "the house Trill be ready to clean again" before it would be possible for her

to leave —

not until July or even August-

As. for

Herman’s book, it is "done now, in fact (you need not mention it) and the copy for the press is in p r o g r e s s . " N e x t month sometime" the proof sheets were to be sent to

London, and

edition was on the booksellers ’ shelves the

as soon

as the New York

Melvilles would proceedto

6 Boston.

On 6 June the task of copying was

Melville was preparing to leave

"nearly

through."

Mrs.

far Boston with Sam Shaw, with Herman

"to come on for me in two or three weeks, if he c a n

and then in 7 August when he takes his vacation he will take me there again." Despite her fears lest the book might not be finished without her help, Mrs.

8 Melville did go to Boston, where Melville joined her sometime in July.

But though this part of the schedule carried through smoothly, Mrs. Melville was evidently more oonfident than her husband that Mardi was ready for the press.

At the rate Melville’s other books were

printed, Mardi should have been out of his hands by the time of the projected August vacation, and actually on sale before the end of the year.

But instead it was January, 1849 f before Melville had written

his preface, which is so dated, and 27 January before Augusta Melville 6 . Weaver, pp. 270f. 7.

Quoted in part by Weaver, pp. 280-282 [M].

8. On 13 July, 1848, R. H. Dana received an invitation from Lemuel Shaw to meet his daughter and son-in-law at dinner. In his diary for 23 August, 1847, Dana had recorded an earlier meeting with Melville at a dinner given by "the Russells in Milton." (J. D. Hart, "Melville and Dana," Am. Lit., IX, 49-55 [March, 1937].) This must have occurred before ¥elvilie’s marriage on 5 August, since the newly­ weds left Boston immediately after the wedding.

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208

9

announced that "the last proof sheets are through.

Mardi,s a hook."

In March following, the first edition appeared in London, with New-

10 York publication on 14 April.

It seems clear that this delay of

several months was caused b y extensive revision of the manuscript, supposedly "done" as early as May, 1848, and almost all oopied for the

11 printer in June, when proofs were scheduled to b e sent to London. This revision must have occupied nearly the remainder of 1848, after Melville was again in N e w York.

With Mardi at last out of the way in

the first month of 1849, Melville joined his wife in Boston to await the birth of their first child, Malcolm, on 16 February.

There he was

at liberty to lounge on a sofa reading Shakespeare and to attend lectvres and readings, as he declares in a series of care-free letters 12 to Evert Duyckinck. On 27 March he directed Harpers to furnish

IS Duyckinck with advance sheets of Mardi,

and early in April he returned

to New York in time for the b o o k fs public reception.

Two new works,

9. In a letter to Melville’s wife [M], then in Boston, quoted in part b y Weaver, pp. 272f. 10.

Ibid., p. 273.

11. Anderson, referring to the letters quoted b y Weaver, pp. 271, 273, concludes that the b o o k "was finished" in May, 1848, "though not published for another year..." (p. 482, note 54). Dr. Henry A. Murray, however, holds as I do that both internal and external evidence point to extensive revision during the interval following: he tells me that he has been able to date tentatively certain portions of the work. 12. 24 February, 3 a n d 28 March, 5 April, 1849 [D], printed by Thorp, pp. 370-375. Melville’s presence at two recent evening parties is noted in D a n a ’s journal for 18 March, 1849. (Hart, "Melville and Dana," Am. L i t ., IX, 52.) 13. Letter to Duyckinck, 28 March, 1849,[D], printed by Thorp, p. 373. Duyckinck published a notioe of Mardi, with long extracts, in his Literary W o rld, 7, 14, and 21 April, 1849.

%

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209

Redburn, published in September, 1849, and White-Jacket, published in 3.4

1850, occupied him during the summer.

Both books, semi-autobiographical

in character, evidently gave Melville less trouble than the more elaborate M a r d i .

The effect of Melville’s radical alteration of Mardi is seen in the internal structure of the book.

In addition to the early shift

in style already mentioned, the allegory and satire in the main portion of the work are but imperfectly articulated.

Certain long chapters

seem to have been inserted arbitrarily, in particular a lengthy dis15 cussion of literary composition occurring late in the printed text. This chapter concerns the poet Lombardo, not mentioned elsewhere in Mardi, and the composition of his "Koztanza."

As Weaver points out,

Augusta Melville’s letter of 27 January, 1849, concludes with a quota­ tion from Mardi:

" ’Oh my Koztanza, child of my prayers. O r o ’s 16 blessing on t h eel1” It is likely that Augusta recalled this chapter because it had but recently been written by her brother, as a sort of 17 ’’posthumous note” to his own finished book. W i t h reference to what

14. In Mrs. Melville’s pocket diary is a brief biography of her husband, written in her old age, which reads in part: "Winters of 47 & 48 worked very hard at his books. Sat in a room without fire wrapped up. Wrote M a r d i published ed. 1849. Summer of 1849 we remained in New York. He wrote Redburn & White Jacket. Same fall [he ] went to England....” (Melville left New York on 11 October, 1849.) A lengthy quotation from this diary, now in possession of Mrs. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, is printed in the Introduction to Melville’3 Journal up the Straits, ed. Raymond Weaver (New York, 1935), pp. x v f • 15. Mardi, II, 320-335: C f . p p . 54ff, above.

333:

’’Some pleasant, Shady Talk....”

16. Weaver, p. 273 (corrected from the MS [m ]). "Ah, my own Koztanza* child of many prayers*” 17.

C f * Mardi, II,

Cf. Mardi, II, 330.

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210

is known of the composition of Mardi itself, it is interesting to observe that Lombardo, having made a false start, burned his 18 original draft of "full fifty folios;" that he avoided working "by 19

r u s h - l i g h t t h a t he abandoned the restrictions of the classical

20 unities;

and that after unsatisfactory advice from various critics

he determined to "toil no longer," but "ere his ■work was well done,"

21 to "send it to be multiplied."

Losbardo wrote far two reasons: 22 "a full heart" and the necessity of earning some money. "When he set about composing his work, "he knew not what it would become.

He

did not build himself in with plans; he wrote right on; and so doing, 23 got deeper and deeper into himself...." So Melville in writing Mardi.

In abandoning his earlier manner after beginning the book,

Melville in 1848 was already taking soundings for Moby-Dick.

3.8.

Mardi, II, 325.

19. Ibid., II, 326. Cf. Mrs. Melville's letter of 23 December, 1847: Melville "does not use his eyes but very little [sic] by candle light...." (Weaver, p. 266}. Melville's eyes continued to bother him, a fact to which he alludes directly in his correspondence and indireotly in Pierre, writing of Pierre's career as an author. (Pierre, pp. 473-4^6)■ As a commentary on his own habits of composi­ tion, this section in Pierre is comparable to the chapter on Lombardo in Mardi. 20.

Mardi, II, 328.

21.

Ibid., II, 332, 334.

22.

Ibid., II,

23. Ibid., II, 326. Thewhole context, together with Melville's prefaoe, should be considered as a clue to his intentions in writing Mardi. That he was prepared fcr the unfavorable reception accorded ■fcKe book is indicated by his remarks on criticism of the "Koztanza."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

322.

211

Appendix II Books Bought by Melville from his Publishers, 1846-1880 The following excerpts are reproduced from the statements of Melville's accounts with his publishers [Mj, the charges for books purchased being deducted from royalties accruing from the sale of his own works. Books by Melville himself are omitted here except in the case of gift copies, as shown below. This data, not available in any Melville scholarship now in print, must not be employed without permission from the authorities of Harvard University. 1. Statement from Wiley & Putnam, 1 January, 1847; [1846

Aug] Sept

28 8

Dec

12 ti

30

Del^ Brother 1 Cowpers Poems Mor. Ex 1 [Martin Tupper's] Pro­ verbial Phil[osoph]y fancy ” " 1 [Bayard Taylor's] Views Afoot 2 parts 1 Floral Tableaux 1 Curiosities Modern Travel 1 Recreation 4 Typee Morocco Extra SI 2.50 for Brother " do 1 Lfy Own Treasury gilt by do 1 Thompsons Mexico Nov 27^h

2.Statement from John Ailey, 1 [1847] April

17 1

3 50 1 1 6 1 1 10 1

25 — — 50 50 -25 75

July, 1847:

-Vilkes U. S. Exploring Expedition Sheep

6Vols 21 00

3. Statement from John Wiley, 1 July, 1848: 1847

Deer

1848

Jany Feby

June

2 To 1 Froissart's Ballads [ed. P. P. Cooke, Philadelphia, 1847?J 18 " 1 Shakespear e l f . -- J " 1 Monta[i]gne J 8 " 1 Typee Cloth... " 1 DeFoes Fortunate Mi stress " 1 [Coleridge's] Biographia Literari[a] 2 vols clo " 1 Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy [probably the Wiley & Putnam ed., Hew York, 1847] 22

"

1 Cary's Dante

4. Statement from John

75 o pk 67 75 1 50 2.— 2.1