Melville's Intervisionary Network : Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance [1 ed.] 9781942954248, 9781942954231

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance

Melville’s Intervisionary Network Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance JOHN HAYDOCK

© 2016 by Clemson University All rights reserved First Edition, 2016 ISBN: 978-1-942954-23-1 (print) eISBN: 978-1-942954-24-8 (e-book) Published by Clemson University Press Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina.

For information about Clemson University Press, please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press. Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro by Carnegie Book Production.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Debt to Honoré de Balzac

1

Chapter One: Networked Melville

9

Chapter Two: International Balzac

39

Chapter Three: M. de l’Aubépine

57

Chapter Four: Hawthorne’s Secret?

73

Chapter Five: Transvisionary Translating

107

Chapter Six: Balzac’s Types at Sea

145

­­­Chapter Seven: Physiology of Thinking

173

Chapter Eight: American Comédie 205 Chapter Nine: Toward the Bouddha chrétien 233 Chapter Ten: The Clue in the Labyrinth

259

Endnotes 289 Index 325

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Acknowledgments

Over the course of this project I have experienced much gratitude for scholars and professionals that I have drawn on for academic support. Primarily I would like to recognize Buford Jones, who while I was an undergraduate at Duke, allowed me the privilege of reviewing and annotating for the first edition of A Checklist of Hawthorne Criticism, the international scholarship on Hawthorne up to that time. I am likewise grateful to William Dillingham, whose guidance into the world of Melville while I was a grad student at Emory afforded an intimation of the link that spurred this book. Moreover, I need to identify John Bryant, who during his tenure as administrator of the Melville Society provided a forum for me to share my ideas, through publication, with the Melville community. Finally, I need to acknowledge Kevin Hayes for his continued synchronic awareness of Balzac’s influence on Melville’s shorter fiction and his conviction that the discussion of Melville and Balzac belongs in scholarly conversation. Additionally, I need to mention the incredible technological and strategic support provided to me by dozens of library specialists, particularly Catherine Downey and her colleagues at the Circulation Desk, Georgia Gwinnett College and the University System of Georgia. I owe particular thanks in this regard to Tal Nadan in the The Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and vii

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Manuscripts, The New York Public Library, for providing me with precise digital copies of Melville’s markings in his library of Balzac translations. While invaluable guidance is apparent in the work of both Charles Olson and Wilson Walker Cowen, these images cleared up many uncertainties left by attempts at indirect reproduction as well as through inadvertent manual errors. Chiefly, I wish to mention enthusiastically my general editor at Clemson University Press, John Morgenstern, who has kept my prose and my contexts relevant in the fluctuating sea of Americanist criticism.

I n t ro d u c t i o n

Debt to Honoré de Balzac

A

round the beginning of the year 1851 a remarkable and fundamental change took place in the mind of Herman Melville. It was at this time that Melville, ever more intent on being both a significant and a popular writer, arrived at a series of innovations in style and structure of his writing that first of all regulated the composition of Moby-Dick as we know it and then went on to shape his narratives until the day of his death. From the beginning of Melville criticism, and particularly since the appearance of Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael in 1947, these changes have been attributed, in great part, to Melville’s intense and emotional reading of the tragedies of William Shakespeare. But however much this reading operated as an “exhilarative and provocative”1 to Melville, much more was involved in moderating the form and development of his novels than can be derived from the works of one great dramatist. The imprint of Shakespeare is so pervading, vast, and obvious in Moby-Dick that other influences have been concealed or washed out in the wake of Shakespeare’s flash through Melville’s consciousness. This study proposes that on a deliberate technical level, in areas of plot, characterization, and psychological analysis particularly, Melville was also assimilating, even borrowing from La Comédie humaine of Honoré de Balzac for examples on how to reach his goals 1

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as an author. Balzac was growing in popularity and public appreciation in the United States just during the period that Melville was undertaking his most mature projects, and in this regard one must keep in mind another observation made by Olson: Melville’s reading is a gauge of him, at all points of his life. He was a skald, and knew how to appropriate the works of others. He read to write. Highborn stealth, Edward Dahlberg calls originality, the act of a cutpurse Autolycus who makes his thefts as invisible as possible. Melville’s books batten on other men’s books.2 The opinion may be stark, but the sentiment has hardly abated even to this day. Yet in any list of Melville’s influences, Balzac is notably absent. In creating this book, I have tried to put myself into Melville’s place—his growing up under French influence, his traveling in French territory and France, his on/off affiliation with the politicoliterary forces of Young America inspired by the French liberal ideas of Jeunes-France, his affiliation with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was steeped in French Romanticism, and his own natural self-identification with French author Honoré de Balzac as an artist—to come to conclusions about what would be the most logical way for Melville to have responded, given his temperament, his passion, and his dreams of success. Dependency on Balzac was not a weakness; Melville genuinely wanted to help found a unique literature for Americans through the same vision and literary paths followed by Balzac for the French through a universal sociology. He was unwaveringly committed to being a “literary diver” of the human psyche in the culture of the decolonialized United States, by whatever medium was required—prose, lecture, or poetry. Reinforced by surviving extra-textual proof that Melville was openly studious of Balzac in the last years of his life, other evidence demonstrates, from close reading and scores of comparative passages,

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that 40 years earlier than expected he began experimenting with those elements of writing that set Balzac apart from all other authors of the age. Specifically, these elements relate to the representation and moral action of his version of the Genius; the strong-willed Promethean hero, the religious interaction of a particular ontology and epistemology; and a physiology of types that depends on a scheme of collective motivational energies. The “visible truth” is for Melville the stimulus for the creation of original characters, and this truth is not the surface truth, but the conscious discernible truth of Balzac—the truth of moral conscience. Ultimately, resignation or dispassion becomes for Melville the proper vehicle for elevated life. Across many decades, Melville chose to participate in corresponding philosophical themes and linguistic forms in a deliberate attempt to produce texts that were both accessible to a large enough American audience that his book sales might support his family and yet be bold and innovative enough to exercise a quality in his writing that was international and profound, even shocking. Thinking of the modern book as “short-lived,” Melville assiduously kept his work ahead of widespread dissemination of Balzac’s novels in America, while coveting a support system for his own imaginative ventures. In seeking to duplicate Balzac’s popularity, Melville did not want to become an imitator of European convention as had Letitia Elizabeth Landon or Edgar Allen Poe. Although appearing to use the art of the French author as a frequent launching stage for his own creations, Melville wrote as he pleased. He strongly resisted being accused of “oscillating in Emerson’s rainbow” and remained throughout his life cautious of being anyone’s adherent. Still, he was strongly, if silently, drawn as under enchantment to Balzac’s way of representing reality, as we demonstrate in the following chapters. This context furthered his desire to establish a distinctive and realistic American literature among all great literatures of the world as well as to fulfill his personal ideal of authorship. The literary thread of influence from Balzac is the clue that allows us to

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unlock much of the riddle and ambiguity of Melville’s labyrinthine characters and plots that would otherwise remain obscure. The moral quality of their responses to the imposition of Will and their attempts at imposing the same on each other and themselves defines the characters’ places on Melville’s moral measure of humanity, which is an evolutionary scale that is both selfgoverning, in the sense that all persons have the freedom to ascend this ladder by their efforts, and hierarchical by the level of their unflinching awareness of stages of good and evil alike. The men of higher consciousness represent what Melville felt were a legion of “posts of God” grounded to portray the truth, who formed a special fraternity to channel universal forces. In this affirmation he remained consistent from his apparent early sympathy with Balzac. Melville accepted the Specialism of elevated states of consciousness and employed key words that serve as signs to multilateral meaning. Tentative at first and rather awkwardly done from the negative side in Pierre, this way of viewing and writing about psychological destiny without commitment to a formal system culminated finally in Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside [interior] Narrative. Additionally, in the nineteenth century critical technological and literary networks were being established that facilitated the transmission of Balzac’s creative vision across the Atlantic in ways not possible before. John Bryant’s insight two decades ago of attempting to define “the rhetorical conditions of creation” during the period covered herein is particularly relevant: “the more we know about how Melville used the rhetorical models that prevailed in his time, the more we can come to understand the intersection of authors and audience in his creations as well as the motives within American Creativity.”3 Keeping in mind these networks and models is an important component in verifying Melville’s links with Balzac. The word “intervisionary” captures precisely what is being shared between the two writers: a unique, realistic vision of humanity and the universe. While Melville does not often “translate” narrative details in the traditional sense, he does

Debt to Honoré de Balzac

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earnestly attempt Balzac’s role of secretary for society in addition to employing similar psychological perceptions and descriptive techniques. This book opens with a review of the principal literary and technological networks active during the mid-nineteenth century that facilitated Melville’s access to the works of Balzac in both French and English. Next Melville’s biography illustrates specific incidents and opportunities by which he encountered works from and about Balzac, again in both French and English, during his travels in France and French territorial outre-mer. Following that, we turn to Melville’s most obvious mentor and firmly establish the relationship between Nathaniel Hawthorne and his French influence; we see how Hawthorne’s own career reflects the theory and intent of Balzac. The next chapter explains several specific elements and components that Hawthorne might well have conveyed to Melville as the “secret” to his recent sudden success with The Scarlet Letter. A new explanation emerges of their interaction and of Melville’s infamous essay “Hawthorne and his Mosses.” This article coincided precisely with the death and widespread consecration of Balzac in Europe and Melville’s sudden uprooting from New York to Hawthorne’s neighborhood in the Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts; evidence of definite collaboration between the two friends thereby emerges. The second part of the book examines in turn each of the subsequent novels created by Melville and their links to Balzac: Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence-Man. By the time he was composing Billy Budd, Sailor, Melville had absorbed much Buddhism and spent years in the mode of writing poetry to do primarily with religion, and found himself in harmony with Balzac’s ultimate ontological hero, Séraphîta, and the doctrine in action of the Bouddha chrétien. Finally, there are some special features of this investigation of Melville and Balzac that need to be noted right at the beginning. Since this book has been primarily prepared for English-speaking readers, I have selected proof passages from the English editions

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of Balzac’s writings that were contemporary with and easily accessible to Melville during the time he wrote any particular work. This strategy should put at ease those readers who continue to doubt that Melville could read Balzac straight away. In these instances, I have referred to the text as marketed in English, unless the name is quite different, and then, on first notice, I indicate the French title. When the editions have not yet been identified, I have reverted directly to the French in my own translation and to the French title as given by Balzac’s publishers. Because much of Balzac’s work appeared in English in random periodicals, which we are still only recuperating slowly by isolated discoveries, and the internal evidence shows strongly that Melville was aware of many of these works, such a choice of selecting the first language is reasonable and affords the reader unfamiliar with the originals valuable contact with the thought and sentiment inherent not only in the French, but in the nineteenth-century understanding of “translation.” Like Rabelais before him, Balzac was a master of the esoteric discourse Argotique, so I render French into English in a way that might not always use the literal or conversational equivalent but will tend to echo in the panomphean ears of the more Hermetic readers.4 Additionally, in line with modern ideas of “translation,” there are some words or phrases technical to Balzac’s unique ontology that do not have clear substitutes in English and have often been translated too simply, or in some cases, contrary to what was meant to be conveyed—a situation modernists call “interference.” Melville was familiar with both languages, and since we have no way of really knowing the details of his proficiency, however intensively certain scholars have tried to “log” his correspondence and movements, we must allow both languages to have their play. Also, underlines in the English passages are Melville’s emphasis in handwriting or in books he owned; character names and titles are reproduced as they are in specific editions and translations, reflecting variants from Balzac’s originals.

Debt to Honoré de Balzac

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The assertion that Honoré de Balzac had an essential and profound inspiration on the career and consciousness of Herman Melville, therefore, will find credibility from the weighty environmental proof provided by the historical context, the texts, and the experiential logic that operates within them in addition to hard, witnessed evidence. The energetic and genetic conditions that confronted Melville from all sides, inwardly as well as outwardly, lasted from his formative years through his old age at a highly intense pitch. Interest was brought on by the general rise in popularity of foreign literature and its mass dissemination in the growing industrialized American economy, fueled by recurring riots and hoopla in continuous competition with European nationalists over American exceptionalism. In reality, the central question may better be phrased: How could Melville not be influenced by Balzac? That would be the more difficult condition to explain.

C ha p t e r O n e

Networked Melville

T

he novels of Herman Melville are usually examined from the basis of some theme almost exclusively American: American society, American history, American politics, American industry, etc. European or other planetary contexts are treated as reactions or responses to assumed limited or exclusively “American” considerations. While this local approach plays well in an arena constructed on American exclusiveness, it does not express the reality of the literary processes working around Melville in the middle of the nineteenth century. A series of active, expanding networks made his writing part of a global complex, without which he could not have created and completed his narratives. Balzac was also in the web of these same technologies both during and at the height of Melville’s creativity; and because they both shared energetic participation in networked activities, an affiliation developed almost inevitably to bring them together. Only recently have scholars begun to identify such linkages, and usually the criticism that has developed out of this strategy pertains to recent postcolonial situations. However, the networks and interrelationships had their origins in Melville’s world of the Industrial Revolution and can be identified in literary history as accurately as similar processes in India, China, Africa, or other contemporary interdependent emerging 9

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cultures. Melville’s America was just eighty years beyond liberation from England. Consequently, many of the phases identified for the development of a national literature undergoing “decolonialization” can still be found in the literary processes of Melville’s time. Remarkably, the intertextuality of Herman Melville and Honoré de Balzac is quite exactly a casebook study in transcultural comparativism. A strictly historical approach to the relationship between these writers, one constrained to specific authorial admissions, public records, third-party witnesses, or even some form of plagiarism that could be irrefutably demonstrated involves an interpretive process more like a court of law than the arena of the humanities. Hence the existence of the heavy tomes and logs of daily records that reflect little of Melville’s vital essence. Due to these restrictions many areas of interaction are unnoticed or devalued as “general knowledge” simply “in the air” without significant contact—what are now termed “typological affinities.” By looking at the environment, including a sociological standpoint, however, more meaningful results can be obtained; the networks can take on more significant roles practically equivalent to what have been traditionally classed as genetic contacts. Associations in the networks help to populate what Bryant identifies as “pluralistic historicism”: “By pluralistic and comprehensive, I mean that it gives access to the metaphysical grounding as well as political and sexual particulars of Melville’s work; it treats the author as an independent consciousness and the reader as a historical force.”1 When thinking about life in the mid-nineteenth century, we often tend to underestimate both the rapidity and the extent of communication technologies, from printing to private mail. Although certainly not as swift as the electronic systems of today, information transport in the industrialized Eastern seaboard around 1840–50 should not be associated with quaint sluggishness. The newspapers were telegraphing stories around the country, steamships were making runs across the Atlantic weekly, and the expanding railroads exploited swift and numerous routes. While

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he did not live in a media-based environment like ours, Melville still had convenient access to a timely, vibrant, and reliable pool of multinational intelligence and texts. Essentially, five active networks determined the processes confronting the writer in the literary marketplace: the network of the packet boat lines, the network of book printing production and distribution, the network of the periodical magazines, the network of reader response, and the network of local and international politics. In addition to these networks, which strictly controlled the structure and timing of individual creations, there were significant effects arising from the experience and consciousness of the writers themselves. Each of the elements of these linkages connected with others by competition or cooperation.

The Packet Boats Perhaps the most crucial link between Europe and the contemporary field of American literature in the nineteenth century was the packet boat exchange. The most valuable feature it added was the keeping of a regular schedule, as much as changing weather would permit. The service was originally set up by the British government to send important mail to its far-flung embassies by clipper ship, but it quickly became a vehicle for public mail, merchant goods, and private passengers. On the east coast of America, the most popular lines went from Boston and New York to Liverpool and back. Part of the cargo was recently published books and periodicals from Europe via England, where most prominent families and merchants had relatives or correspondents, even publishers, to send them new items. Until 1849, customs in the preservation of intellectual property was very lax, and so the shipping of any type of printed matter faced little impediment. While initially, in the early nineteenth century, most of the packet boats were sailing vessels, gradually they became hybrid steam-driven side-wheelers to make it through doldrums and calm

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weather.2 By 1849, fully steam-powered ships were taking over much of the route, which was cut down from about twenty-five days to fourteen.3 By the end of the century this was reduced to five days and about twenty hours.4 Coupled with the advances in printing outlined below, this dependability made it possible to re-typeset and reprint received publications overnight, to present them to the metropolitan book merchants within a few weeks of their appearance in London; in fact, books could reach the buying public almost at the same time as the periodical notices of their European release, with appropriate editing of course, because the printing industry could quickly enlist an army of fast typesetters, or “swifties,” to facilitate the early stages of production. The packet boats also carried people when cargo left enough space. Starting with only about eight to ten, capacity grew to several dozen, and this convenience made oceanic trips secure, scheduled, and profitable.5 However, the trips were not always comfortable: The pioneer steam-ship had chambers so narrow that there was just room enough for a stool to stand between the edge of the two-feet-wide berth and the wall—mere closets. There were two berths in each room, one above the other. By paying somewhat less than double fare a passenger given to luxury might have a room to himself, according to the advertisement of the Great Western. Within such narrow quarters, however, everything possible was done for the passenger’s comfort.6 As the technology of steam navigation developed, particularly with the advent of first one- and then two-screw propellers to replace the side-wheel,7 transatlantic lines brought more efficiency, and the voyagers’ ride became gradually more tolerable; places for the better-off passengers increased in number and volume. Ralph Waldo Emerson made two tours back and forth to England, particularly to converse with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his friend

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Thomas Carlyle. In 1833 he noted that “The road from Liverpool to New York, as they who have traveled it well know, is very long, crooked, rough and eminently disagreeable.”8 But things would not always be so. Just fourteen years later he depicted a trip on a steamer quite differently: We found on board the usual cabin library: Basil Hall, Dumas, Dickens, Bulwer, Balzac, and Sand were our seagods. Among the passengers, there was some variety of talent and profession; we exchanged our experiences, and all learned something. The busiest talk with leisure and convenience at sea, and sometimes a memorable fact turns up, which you have long had a vacant niche for, and seize with the joy of a collector.9 Not only was stimulating conversation afforded the international traveler, but actual intercultural artifacts were available on the boats. Margaret Fuller confirms that there were indeed examples of French “decadence” present on the packet boats in 1846, some brought aboard by passengers themselves, in addition to the standard libraries. No doubt thinking of Balzac’s reputation as immoral, she included in her essay about French novelists the observation that: On the steamboats we have seen translations of vile books, bought by those who did not know from the names of their authors what to expect, torn, after a cursory glance at their contents, and scattered to the winds. Not even the all but all-powerful desire to get one’s money’s worth, since it had once been paid, could contend against the blush of shame that rose on the cheek of the reader.10 Clearly, the improvement in accommodation made physical transportation more pleasant and no doubt more frequent for

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those who could afford it. For the wealthy travelers, the food was comparable to a good hotel, and on many ships, the captain dined with the cabin passengers. Ventilated doors opened directly into the cabin and saloon, a common area for eating and socializing. Melville took similar trips to Liverpool in 1849 and 1856, which must have been in stark contrast with his trip over the same route by merchant vessel in 1837. The social aspects could be both enlightening and distracting, and in 1849 Melville found the company quite appealing. His journal shows that his onboard activity was also very similar to Emerson’s and contained the same stretches of reading, philosophical discussion, and social drinking.11 Both stress the prevalence of intellectual argument and discovery on the crossing, and Melville records associations with passengers sharing an infatuation with Romantic philosophy. Among the men in his group with whom he most regularly associated were “several Frenchmen,” particularly a “Monsieur Moran,” who seemed to be a frequent companion, along with Professor George G. Adler, an author who had extensive knowledge of French:12 We talked metaphysics continually, & Hegel, Schlegel, Kant &c were discussed under the influence of the whiskey. I shall not forget Adler’s look when he quoted La Place the French astronomer—“It is not necessary, gentlemen, to account for these worlds by the hypothesis” &c.13 On the first day at sea he had engaged this friendship with Adler. From the standpoint of our analysis, apart from Melville’s habitual luck at finding books when he needed them, Adler is the most likely source for first awakening, or reawakening, Melville’s mind to certain principal Romantic ideas exploited by Emerson and which Melville had tried out in Mardi.14 Adler had an organized and systematic mind that helped Melville begin to see new connections in the vast amount of reading he had recently undertaken. The two men wasted no time falling into favorite waters together:

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there are some very pleasant passengers on board, with whom to converse. Chief among these is a Mr Adler, a German scholar, to whom Duyckinck introduced me. He is author of a formidible [sic] lexicon, (German and English); in compiling which he almost ruined his health. He was almost crazy, he tells me, for a time. He is full of the German metaphysics, & discourses of Kant, Swedenborg &c. He has been my principal companion thus far [first two days].15 And later: [We walked the deck] till a late hour, talking of ‘Fixed Fate, Free-will, foreknowledge absolute’ &c. His philosophy is Colredegian [sic]: he accepts the Scriptures as divine, & yet leaves himself to inquire into Nature. He does not take it that the Bible is absolutely infallible, & that anything opposed to it in Science must be wrong. He believes there are things out of God and independent of him,—things that would have existed were there no God;—such as that two and two make four; for it is not that God so decrees mathematically, but that in the very nature of things, the fact is thus …16 In 1851 and 1860 Melville was still receiving books translated from German and French into English by Adler, which demonstrates that networking liaisons begun by the simple encounter of fellow passengers on a packet boat can found an enduring relationship. Melville was among the very few who attended Adler’s funeral in 1868.17 The packet boat system maintained an irreplaceable part of the other networks active in the nineteenth century. Cargo as varied as two-page letters or huge printing plates for the international publication of books could be shipped across the world in a few days. Similar technology on both sides of the Atlantic

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allowed for a new level of intellectual exchange and international merchantability.

Printing and Binding Technology What made the “bestseller” possible during the mid-nineteenth century was vast improvement in the speed and accuracy of the printing press. It allowed Balzac’s La Comédie humaine in France and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in the United States to be commercial successes. Publishers were taking greater control over the production of books and, coupled with powerful new machinery, they were able to collect a network of their own authors with almost monopolistic effectiveness.18 The technology gave so much power to the possessor of printing capabilities that for MobyDick Melville decided to oversee the metal plates himself and sell them to whichever publisher might pay him most.19 Printing had long been hampered by the force it took to make an inked impression on paper, the lack of durability of lead type, and the speed of page production—one pull and one person at a time. Some technological improvements had been made with the steam impression presses of the early part of the century, and with the use of stereotype plates rather than manual type; but the process itself was still generally the same as that pioneered by Gutenberg in the Middle Ages. Just when it was needed by the literary network, however, the rotary press appeared in the United States. Created in 1843 by Richard M. Hoe, it solved numerous problems in the movable type system, such as lost or dropped letters, crooked justification, and damaged lines of type. The thin stereotype plates of the time—about one-sixth of an inch—could be fitted around a cylinder rather than under a press. Instead of a flat bed of thousands of pieces of type, after an initial impression on stiff paper or matte, and a recasting, the entire page or book signature became a single plate. Invented in Germany and adopted in England by

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the London Times, the plates’ convenience allowed printing to go much faster than signature-by-signature linear pulling—potentially to millions of individual pages per day. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune was the first to take up the technology in the American newspaper trade, in 1846, but variants of Hoe’s continuous improvements affected all manner of printing, including books. Coupled with steam power, rolled paper was then introduced to increase the speed and quantity of feeding even further, because the combination allowed for continuous output of the presses. The advancement in turn allowed the faster reprinting of volumes, and concurrently led to the reprinting of pirated feuilleton periodicals, many bootlegged from England, to appear native and legitimate on their arrival by packet boat. Almost simultaneously a new convenience appeared, the penny press, so-called because it allowed a price reduction: papers now sold at one to three cents rather than the five charged by big papers like The New York Times. Instead of being relegated solely to reading rooms and borrowing, the common reader could purchase the papers on his own. But the technology was not restricted to the daily news. Capable of producing as many as twenty thousand pages (on both sides) an hour,20 it rapidly moved into other areas of printed communication. With the development of advertising— even in books, to help lower costs further—the publishing industry accelerated its expansion. As the century progressed into the seventies, the advent of the Mergenthaler and other typesetting machines, along with the distribution of alternating electrical current, meant that the swifty human letter compositor was no longer essential, and writers became the beneficiaries as long as they took responsibility for their own proofs and corrections. Even Mark Twain dreamed of grasping his part of this burgeoning market by replacing steam with electricity, but for lack of the right motor, he had to surrender. It was a booming competition, but he failed and moved to Europe to earn money to pay his expenses. Additionally, his book publishing

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company, based on door-to-door sales and subscriptions to expensive leather-bound editions, also went bankrupt. Twain’s failure was partly due to the binding procedures, which underwent similar acceleration. Balzac’s Luck and Leather (1843) (an American version of La Peau de chagrin) was distributed in the United States as sewn pages suitable for binding. The purchaser would then find a bookbinder to place boards and usually a leather binding around the printed pages, either to match existing library covers or to make the book an item of beauty. But by 1850, with the proliferation of rotary presses, cloth took over from leather as the dominant material for binding books, saving both time and money in book production and lowering cost to consumers. Gradually mechanisms were developed to take the dried, inked paper right off the press and make a hard cloth binding in the same shop. By the time Hawthorne and Melville were publishing, the cloth-bound book had become the standard, greatly increasing the transportability of ideas. Along with this increased manageability came a marketing system that could facilitate even further the dissemination of books. Brentano opened his book stall in front of the New York Hotel in 1853 and by the 1880s he ran several branches. Barnes & Noble, then doing business as Arthur Hinds & Company, opened in 1886 until Noble bought the shop. Doubleday, both publisher and bookseller, opened in 1897. Roberts and Company, who were binders initially, were apparently forced into publishing by facing competition efficiency from the technology of high-speed production alternatives. All told, a network of nearly a hundred booksellers, a fifty percent increase from the century before, was active in America by mid-nineteenth century.21 Books became technical instruments across the network, much as our electronic devices are today. Additionally, other changes in the social networks fed directly into this expansion: increased political participation by classes beyond the wealthy, greater literacy among the general population, and the

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increased leisure time afforded by general changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution.22 All of these innovations enhanced the portability and accessibility of international ideas and perceptions, as Melville notes in this passage from White-Jacket: My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact that every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.23

Periodical Journals Besides daily newspapers like the Tribune and the Boston Herald, which took full advantage of this new printing equipment and began to form cooperative organizations like the Associated Press at this time, the greatest beneficiary of the technology became the periodical magazines, an unregulated and fully disorganized group of independent editors tussling with one another over the reading public. Taking advantage, like the newspapers, of the railroads and expanding geographical area of the States along with the new technology, they acted as intermediaries between what was being written in Europe and what they thought would sell in America. A plethora of journals appeared, each targeting a particular segment of the culture and porting advertising focused on readers’ interests, such as family, religion, or abolition. Versions of novels were often first published in serial form, crowded into three or more columns per page, to force readers to buy multiple issues. A short time later

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the novels were then reset into a more readerly two-column format and sold as books by the same publisher in an aftermarket. With no intellectual property rights to pay and no one checking for faithful accuracy in the narratives, the use of the authors’ names was more of a commodity than what they wrote, as Fuller’s anecdote above supports. In the 1840s, owing to the work of The Democratic Review and The New World in particular, a growing awareness of European literature was expanding. While we will enter into more detailed consideration of these journals later, they deliberately set out to capture the idea of world literature as Goethe had foreseen it. Founded by publisher J. Winchester, who regularly turned its translations into cloth-bound books, the biweekly The New World would, in a typical issue, announce such items as The Rose of Thistle Island—a “NEW SWEDISH ROMANCE!”—along with stories from Eugene Sue, Sketches of American Society, Sketches of Life in Texas, and Scenes and Adventures in Mexico. The publication was particularly proud of its place in the international literary networks: Arrangements are in progress for the establishment of such relations with the principal cities of the Eastern World [Europe] as shall enable us to furnish the readers of the New World with the earliest information on literary subjects, and the choicest selections from foreign works: and by means of these facilities we shall be able to very greatly increase the interest of our widely-circulated periodical.24 While The New World was avowedly a non-partisan family newspaper, The United States Magazine and Democratic Review was an organ of the Democratic Party, and its founder and editor, John O’Sullivan, had played a key role in the election of President James Polk. Melville and Hawthorne were both among the young Democrats who supported the paper and its “ruthless democracy on all sides,” as Melville characterized his own feelings to Hawthorne. Speaking of the Democratic Review, Edward Widmer wrote that:

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Of kindred importance was the portrayal of the realistic elements of daily life, especially the new realism of urban America. Many French authors such as Balzac, Pierre Jean de Béranger, Eugène Sue, and Victor Cousin, generally ahead of their English peers on this score, found unusual acceptance among Review readers for their treatment of menial and modern character types in their fiction.25 Balzac was introduced to the American public through such periodicals and their reprints. His fabulously publicized La Peau de chagrin was released in France in August 1831, immediately reviewed in English in The Spectator by September 15, and copies were probably in New York by early October. The article went into quite a bit of detail regarding the narrative. The English reviewer was full of praise: THE Skin of Shagreen [like Balzac’s title, a pun on chagrin (sorrow)/shagreen(rawhide)], a philosophical romance by M. de BALZAC, which has accidently fallen in our way, fixes our attention for a moment on the class of modern French literature of which it is a favorable representation. It is impossible to conceive of a more brilliant or a more striking form of composition than those series of sketches of which the young and vigorous writers of France are in the habit of clubbing together under the name of Romance. Life is viewed from some new and almost inaccessible position, and all the concerns and interests of it are passed over in a rapid survey. Learning is mixed up with the observations of yesterday; philosophy descants in the stews or the gambling-houses; magnificence and squalor are joined hand in hand; suicide alternates with rapture. All established opinions are set at naught; faith is laughed at as is incredulity; morality and virtue are either proved to be vice and meanness, or they are placed upon a new basis:

22

Melville’s Intervisionary Network everything gives away before a brilliant remark or a play of the imagination.26

In 1833, popular romance writer Letitia Landon published a tale, “The Talisman,” based on ideas from La Peau de chagrin, both in The Novelist Magazine and as a bound book, The Book of Beauty.27 While she changed the names of the characters to Charles Smythe (Valentin), Laura Herbert (Foedora), and Ellen Cameron (Pauline) and moved them from Paris to London, the story is essentially the same as the part from which she borrowed, with appropriate cultural changes. The author admitted that “The hint for such a talisman is taken from M. de Balzac’s Peau de Chagrin. I have not read the tale itself, but saw a notice of it in Le Globe [August 20, 1831].” Although she professed not to have seen the novel, her Anglicizing reflects intimate knowledge, at least with the first part of the book. The article she refers to in Le Globe is certainly long and detailed, practically a Saint-Simonean tract against French elitist society,28 much of which she avoids in order to preserve the gentility of English culture. However, the name of her story was taken directly from Balzac’s subtitle for the first of three parts of the novel: “Le Talisman.” Landon’s books came out in Melville’s youth, but were continuously republished into the 1860s and ’70s. Their popularity was so enduring, in fact, it is quite possible that Balzac, always attuned to English literature, used her Ethel Churchill, or The Two Brides (1837) for his own epistolary novel, Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées (1841) [Letters of Two Brides]. At least one more periodical rewrite of a Balzac story in English appeared on the heels of publication in France. As discovered by Thomas Palfrey,29 “Le Dragon Rouge,” a parody of Balzac’s “JésusChrist en Flandre,” appeared in Dublin University Magazine, a popular literary and political publication likely collected in the reading rooms of Boston and New York, if not subscribed to by Melville’s friends and relatives. Like the revision of Landon, the story is much embellished by its author, “J. C.,” yet no credit was

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given to Balzac. It appeared in October of 1833, just a short time after the original’s publication in France, and contains striking similarities to The Confidence-Man. It also takes place on a sailing vessel: the master still hesitated to cast off the chain, he blew long and repeated blasts upon the horn that was suspended at his side, vainly the impatient passengers cried out— “What wait we, Sir Captain?—will you never put off?” &c. When the patience of the voyagers had been tolerably well exercised, a man suddenly sprang from the pier upon the poop, sorely discomposing a group of seven fashionable individuals, the occupants of that place of honour; these, upon the arrival of the stranger eagerly hastened to take possession of the seats, and, with a spirit of selfishness worthy of a later period, so arranged matters, as to deprive him of any participation in the comforts of the afterpart of the galley. The appearance of the stranger was, in truth, not calculated to inspire much respect—he was a tall, black-haired, dark-visaged person, wore a plain tunic of brown camelot with a cap of the same material, and bore neither sword, purse, nor jewel to give him any claim to mingle with gentles of high degree.30 But, also like some other early renderings of Balzac in English, “J. C.” thought it wise to alter the end of the story, either for humor or to undercut Balzac’s preference for individual Will. Instead of having the nameless stranger (meant to be a caricature of a risen Jesus) rescue the poor citizens on the craft by walking them across raging waters that provoked a shipwreck, “J. C.” has his stranger and the oarsmen jump headlong into the water and swim to the shore. As it turns out, the joke is on the skipper, because the vessel weathered

24

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the storm perfectly intact, and his desperate act only brought about his own exhaustion. Again, cultural reinterpretations are already creating a new version of the initial printing of the short story. Intertextuality enters a comparativistic culture first of all through paraphrase and imitation.31 As Palfrey concludes, in view of the unscrupulous custom of preying upon foreign publications during the period in question it would be surprising if a careful examination of other American periodicals did not uncover many more plagiarisms and imitations of Balzac, taken from both French and English sources, than are included in [the early] bibliography.32

Reader Receptivity It was the network of reader receptivity that was the most sensitive in the culture of the nineteenth century prior to our modern concepts of literary intertextuality and determining its extent. Moral judgment was openly the main concern. We saw this in relation to Margaret Fuller’s comments on the packet boats. Fuller was, on the surface, making an argument similar to that already set forth in April 1836 by John W. Croker in a scathing diatribe against “French Novels”: We next arrive at the cleverest, the most prolific, and the most popular of all these novelists, M. DE BALSAC [sic] If we were considering the literary merit of these works, we should have much to say in praise and at least as much in censure of M. De Balsac. He has considerable powers of local description, but he considerably abuses them by idle and wearisome minutiae. He occasionally excites great interest, but quite as often destroys all interest by the improbability and incongruity of his incidents.33

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Croker’s interest is not literary merit but the cultural imperative of moral condemnation, and he spends some thirteen pages of his article in the Quarterly Review, a popular publication among Melville’s family and friends, just on Balzac. His ultimate judgment: “M. Balsac never had any taste—and the shallow vein of his talents appears to be nearly worked out.”34 Croker’s prediction was, of course, quite wrong. Below the surface there was quite a bit of literary interest across the network of periodical readers. Hawthorne did not get his books by Balzac at the Athenaeum where he frequented but through some agent or seller yet to be discovered. British writers like Thackeray, Dickens, and Bulwer-Lytton were all learning from Balzac. At first, the British publishing industry did not translate Balzac at all, because of his moral offenses. Graham Robb verifies that “Balzac’s novels were handled with surgical gloves … he was lumped together with all those other ‘revolting’ French novelists— Dumas, Sue and Hugo.”35 Part of the reason for Balzac’s success in America, where the first efforts at a complete translation of La Comédie humaine were attempted, evolves from the analysis of the readers themselves. According to Sheila Post, the categories were three: first, the general, common, or popular readers “referred to those middleclass audiences of both sexes who read largely for entertainment.” A second group “attempted to regulate literary production as well as the aesthetic tastes of general readers.” These were known among themselves and contemporaries as “intellectual” or “cultivated” readers. Between these two was a group Post calls “literary” readers, who represented a midpoint: “Literary readers blended the receptiveness of general readers to progressive ideological views with the particularly formulated aesthetic standards demanded by cultivated readers.”36 Over the first half of the nineteenth century all of these groups significantly increased in numbers; and they met with a technological and expanding culture waiting to provide for their interests.

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Founded in the eighteenth century and reaching perhaps the height of popularity in the 1850s, private and public institutions set aside rooms for the casual reading of newspapers and journals, many that were expensive to subscribe to, especially if the publications originated overseas and were not reprinted in America. During the earlier decades of the century, when newspapers were relatively expensive, reading rooms sprang up in public and private libraries, which allowed all readers alike to peruse the dailies, and later the quarterlies, without cost. The new technology did not put the rooms out of business; on the contrary, they expanded their offerings intellectually. With the increasing number of readers came a proliferation of reading areas where the second and third tiers could access material without the expense of buying or subscribing. Because of his limited cash, Melville spent all the time he could in such reading rooms. Even on his visit to France he spent days at Galignani’s, the main English reading room in Paris.37 Hawthorne reported spending much time in the reading room at the Boston Athenaeum when he was a bachelor. The expansion of general education throughout the country also meshed with the proliferation of reading rooms. At a time when communication remained mainly individual and personal, there was a consequent acquisition of education through all of the various readerships, which increased their numbers. A taste for “realism” began to rise, although the intellectual and literary readers could not agree what “realism” meant, which answers for some of the ambiguity about Balzac, although his presence and meaning continued to gain ground. More women were becoming readers at this time, and, as the example of “L. E. L.” (Letitia Landon) has demonstrated, more women were becoming writers, even if they had to mask their names or in some cases leave them off entirely, like George Eliot and George Sand. Women formed a large and increasing part of the new novel-reading public. As Martyn Lyons characterized it, the female reader was “occupying a space of her own”—so much so

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that the traditional discrepancy between male and female literacy rates was eliminated at the end of the nineteenth century.38 Nor is it unusual that Landon was among the first to acknowledge Balzac in English nor that the major translators of La Comédie humaine in the nineteenth century were women. Personal correspondence between readers was of course another way in which information about literature was shared, and it appears that Balzac’s works attracted female interest in English as well as they did in French. Robert Browning wrote one of his friends, “You read Balzac’s ‘Scènes’ etc—he is publishing one, ‘Béatrix,’ in the feuilleton of the ‘Siécle,’ [sic] day by day—I receive it from Paris two days old and usually post it off to a friend of mine, as soon as skimmed.”39 We have seen how Landon made perhaps the first rendering of his work outside of France, but a reader of no less stature than Elizabeth Barrett Browning also recognized Balzac’s importance in 1844: Have you read much of Balzac? To my apprehension, Balzac is a writer of extraordinary power, & as a describer … take from his descriptions of old houses, upwards … he is unrivalled. He has a Dutch hand, and an Italian soul— finishes, to the very down on the wing of a butterfly—yet comprehends wholeness & unity. You touch, taste, & handle everything he speaks to you of—yet he can write withal such elegent [sic] sentiment & passion to have produced (in his “Lily of the valley”) one of the most perfect of the “Nouvelle Heloises” of the day. An eloquent, powerful book, that “Lily” is,—although it will not please you, perhaps, as it did me. Still there are other books of Balzac which will & must—& I must ask you to make way through them.40

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Browning was writing to her friend Mary Russell Mitford, who became a friend of Hawthorne’s and later perceived the similarity of Balzac’s writing to Hawthorne’s own work. Melville sought always to find that right set of materials to write about to attract the largest range of readers he could imagine, female and male, shifting from familiar to exotic, hoping to synchronize with the network as a whole. He probably was not being ingenuous when he wrote a letter to his neighbor that Pierre would be a “rural bowl of milk,” but he actually looked at it, in all its intended horror, as something to satisfy female readers. Under the same motivation, he moved from travel literature to philosophic adventure, to sensational fiction, and even deliberate satire. Hawthorne had a similar trial before he found his niche as a novelist. Nearly his entire output was for a publication of the Democratic Party and fit into the general aim of the periodical’s publishers. Nevertheless, for the writer who could time all of the links well, including the political ones, the network was a supportive place.

Political Networks It was in December 1846, after Fuller had made her analysis of French novelists, and Melville was working to get Typee through a publisher, that he met Evert Duyckinck, who would become his advisor and friend for several years to come. Since the early 1840s, O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, Cornelius Mathews, and Duyckinck had nurtured a loose association of writers and cultural activists that included Nathaniel Hawthorne. Associated sometimes by their colleagues with the “loco-focos” of Tammany Hall (a particular subset of the Democratic Party), the cluster was contemporaneous with the Jeunes-France set of artists and writers in Europe, well known to O’Sullivan, who had been educated in France and England during the time of democratic fervor and returned to America as an ardent spokesman for the Democratic Party, which had obligingly restored his family fortune. Both

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coteries were devoted to forming and promoting a unique national literature, each within their own countries. The most enduring and the most famous of the worldwide “young” democratic art groups after the recent spate of revolutions through Europe was still Jeunes-France and surely the one O’Sullivan used to model his New York reflection. The writers took the similar sobriquet “Young America,” and carried on what Emerson, echoing Longfellow, called a “politico-literary” group.41 Margaret Fuller had been researching and showing interest in Jeunes-France since the 1830s, although working for the Whig Horace Greeley and sustaining a friendship with the non-political Emerson. Charles Capper indicates that although her gender and her unsociableness kept her apart from the male assemblies, she had much sympathy with Young America politics: Fuller and Young America evidently recognized their literary and strategic comradeship. Duyckinck had praised her Summer on the Lakes as the “genuine American” article, Mathews sent her his books and manuscripts to defend from his legion of critics … [and] she did promote their careers and boost their projects, particularly Duyckinck’s two series, whose books she frequently reviewed, sometimes at his behest. (“Will you send me Typee and Titmarsh’s journey?” she asked Greeley. “Mr. Duyckinck has asked me to look at them”).42 Melville’s friendship with Duyckinck would have introduced him to this circle, and for a while he was passively compliant with its initial program. Jeunes-France, le Petit Cénacle, had its beginning in 1832 with Théophile Gautier’s enthusiastic devotion to Honoré de Balzac after the publication of La Peau de chagrin, which spurred great popular response and “fanism” that sold out all the copies of the book almost immediately.43 Graham Robb also indicates that Jeunes-France used to engage in the subterfuge of writing reviews

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to promote each other and themselves.44 Widmer is convinced the Democratic Review’s ties with France were very close: Beyond the ethnicity of the contributors, the Review’s French focus suggested an extension of the alliance between democrats and France dating back to the first party struggles of the 1790s. Lewis Cass wrote a lengthy series of articles on France in 1840 while serving as American ambassador, and many more were written around 1848. The magazine fawned over Tocqueville and Guizot, and French fiction was often featured, especially when it treated themes of poverty and government insensitivity (Balzac and Hugo were particular favorites).45 At the beginning of his career, Melville participated, though unenthusiastically, in the ideas of Young America. As Leonard Engel points out, “Melville aligned himself with the literary nationalists only to become a writer.”46 He wrote some satirical pieces for Yankee Doodle in 1847 and penned a few ironic lines in their favor in Mardi. But although Perry Miller believes that Melville became too nationalistic, it actually appears that until “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” he had hung back from involvement in the grandiloquence of the group. Only in White-Jacket did he come forth with some of the rhetoric, and then in a very limited framework: “And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”47 It was not until he found it beneficial to make a more substantial investment on the Young America side in 1850 that Melville allowed his language to become more enthusiastic. But he had to learn that such sequestering was politically insubstantial. Had MobyDick been on sale considerably more than just five months ahead of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and had it been more like “Benito Cereno” than like Balzac, the political network would have responded quite differently than it did.

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International intellectual property disputes caused writers like Melville to enter new networks to publish in English beyond American borders or, as with White-Jacket, before domestic release. Protection of a British copyright was peremptorily denied to outsiders, including Americans, in 1849. The entire Englishspeaking world spun in chaos over the ensuing controversy, and neither writers nor publishers knew precisely how to deal with the ramifications. Libraries in favor of authors’ rights were loath to shelve, and thereby legitimize, pirated editions. These volatile circumstances, in large part, had forced Melville to go to London personally that year in order to find a local publisher that would shield White-Jacket from British looters. This sort of misappropriation had befallen Melville’s Typee in France and later to others of his works in England.48 Furthermore, the English and the French, responding to threats from the new technologies of publishing, had no agreement whatever between them, and customs agents on both sides were keen on stopping competition with printers outside of their own countries. This situation affected Melville directly in 1849. At the English border he lost a copy he had purchased to confiscation: a popular English work printed in France.49 The immediate response was that American markets became even more attractive for the printers of unauthorized texts. Once a book with an air of notoriety attached to it appeared in any language, illegal and adulterated versions would spring up on America’s shores, where only a partial measure of exclusivity was occasionally supplied by state District Courts. (The Library of Congress did not start issuing federal copyrights until 1870; and there was no national Registrar of Copyrights until 1897.) An author not already published legally in the country or one unmarketable in England often found his works turn up swiftly in metropolitan America.50 Sometimes even American works gone out of print would be reset elsewhere and sent back into the US for sale illegally in bookstores, while American printings of English works were constantly being confiscated at British customs.

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Finally, the cumulative effects of these and numerous lesser networks of material and intellectual content provided innumerable links and extensions that interplayed across the creativity of commercial writing in America. Through such tactics it was no longer possible to exclude an author either by physical location or cultural conditioning.

A Persistent Intuition The earliest suggestion that Melville may have felt some significant connection with the writings of Honoré de Balzac is usually traced back to J. St. Loe Strachey and his essays in The Spectator in 1922 and 1923, before the publication and general awareness of Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). Strachey was confident that there were plenty of Balzac works available during Melville’s lifetime,51 and was particularly struck by the similarity in the handling of characters by the two authors: The way in which Melville will take up a character like that of Jackson [in Redburn] just mentioned and, falling in love with his study, paint it with intense ardour, is characteristic of Balzac.52 He then proceeds to discuss a particular scene in Redburn, in the boardinghouse at The Sign of the Baltimore Clipper: There is no terminological resemblance of course between this and the more somber picture of the pension at the beginning of Père Goriot. Yet one cannot help feeling that the two pictures are something allied in spirit.53 The two most salient features of Balzac’s writing—characterization and scenic details—are both conspicuously appreciated in Melville by the eminent reviewer.

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Later, both Van Wyck Brooks and Newton Arvin assumed that Melville had been well aware of Balzac’s writing by the 1850s.54 Additional published research of my own and parallels discovered by Benjamin Sherwood Larson, Kevin Hayes, and Carol Colatrella55 have pointed out convincing correspondences in writings of the same decade, although these articles, like Strachey’s, hesitate to make firm genetic connections. Perhaps the scholar who dares to make the closest connection between Melville and Balzac is Leon Chai. His close reading of both authors reveals numerous philosophical and metaphorical links.56 Similarly, William Dillingham in Melville and His Circle makes Balzac one of Melville’s companions very late in life, but he cannot propose any formative relationship, even if he indicates emphatically that “in Melville’s religion of the imagination, Balzac was a revered saint.”57 Despite these well-supported intuitions, when the principal candidates for “exhilarative and provocative” works, as influential texts are called in Pierre, are specifically put forward for Melville, no title from La Comédie humaine is ever listed. The perceived artistic lineage between the two men warrants an extensive investigation, and the substantial flow of a genealogy of ideas needs to be assimilated by readers.

Pervading Methodology The belief that late encounters were Melville’s first contacts with Balzac has been accepted more because of an accident of logistics rather than from rigorous literary analysis. Thanks to the efforts of Merton Sealts, Jr. and his followers like Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Wilson Walker Cowen, and Steven Olsen-Smith, we know many things about Melville’s reading and education from books and notes he left behind.58 We have convincing suggestions about when he read several important and influential authors, and we have good guesses for a number of others; but regarding Balzac, the date of his first acquaintance is more uncertain than anticipated, since Melville

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had access to knowledge and a diversity of printed matter in French and English most of his adult life. Moreover, although Balzac was writing prolifically from the 1830s onward, the collection called La Comédie humaine was not constituted until 1842. Although not formally recognized by contemporary English-speaking scholars, Balzac possessed much popular appeal throughout this period. While recognized authors did not translate Balzac, often using the excuse that his multilayered French was too witty and too complicated to pass into the less metaphorical English, popular writers, secure in the lack of international copyright, did not hesitate to steal from him. Early in the consecration process, H. H. Walker gave an indication of just how influential Balzac was during these years on the development of English writers: In the mean time, if the English reading public have neglected Balzac, English authors certainly have not. They have not translated him, but they have adapted and adopted him, and his influence on English literature is to be traced as distinctly as was that of Sir Walter Scott on continental literature of his day.59 However, the relevant Melville records that survive almost exclusively belong to the contents of familial and residential books bequeathed to the New York Public Library considerably after Melville’s death, and these were in English. Even if the donors felt these books to be intimately associated with Melville, they were probably unaware of the volumes’ provenance or history, or the existence of other editions owned and replaced. In addition, the inventory of books does not extend to periodicals, magazines, and other ephemeral texts that even more clearly reflect the interests and activities of their households. Melville changed residence several times in his adult life and, like most book-lovers who move, from time to time sold or gave away considerable quantities of books that he had read and which

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had gone beyond their immediate usefulness.60 Novels could also have been scavenged haphazardly as visiting gifts or other social trinkets. There could have been any number of Balzac volumes of this sort. The partial condition of the Balzac set in Melville’s estate could reflect such generous depletion. Indeed, there is also much in his biography to suggest that Melville was a regular visitor of book auctions, where, given his intractable financial difficulties, he probably frequently sold as well as bought. There is even a report of his buying a volume previously owned by his father,61 an indication that in the Melville household, turnover in books was probably conventional and relatively active. The move from Pittsfield, Massachusetts back to New York was particularly downsizing financially, and many books could have been traded away, lost, or returned to unknown owners in 1863. Even then, the surviving evidence of Melville’s reading painstakingly traced by scholars relies primarily upon late acquisitions and assumptions about how Melville on occasion supplemented his reading of some other foreign authors: with translations. The preponderance of the surviving data deals with books printed or obtained after 1860, and most were purchased or published in the 1870s and ’80s. Those books Melville read before 1850 are generally discovered only by mention in letters, as gifts to other family members or friends, on library check-out lists, or by hearsay or circumstantial identification. Consequently, records from the most significant period in Melville’s life, 1846 to 1852 in New York and Pittsfield, are not available in any form.62 Nevertheless, we can verify that the Melville household began collecting volumes at such a rate that around the time of Melville’s death, its bookshelves held eleven books of a set of The Comedy of Human Life along with other stories, criticism, biographies, correspondence, and newspaper clippings relating to Honoré de Balzac.63 This evidence of an outpouring of such interest in Balzac on Melville’s part could not reflect a fresh phenomenon, but more likely a culmination of a long acquaintance supported by the reality that Balzac simply

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became more acceptable in English both for Melville and for other readers among his household. Yet the principal difficulty in facing this enigma arises from methodology. Almost exclusively, conventional criticism that has been rigorously applied to Melville and to his life is starkly materialistic. Everything considered important must be an artifact that verifies interpretation in social reality as viewed by the traditional critic. Modernist criticism, however, recognizes that novels in particular are manageable and portable and that there exists a multiplicity of technologies of representation that can— and do—convey effects without being confined to the material. The height, and possibly the limit, of traditional log-making of this sort is exemplified by Hershel Parker’s excellent definitive twovolume biography recently released on Melville, a work of nearly two thousand pages. To the modernist, the text of Billy Budd, Sailor shows that Melville had continued a dramatic inner development of significant magnitude in consciousness and writing style from his previous works. He confessed once to Hawthorne, “From my twenty-fifth year [1844] I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself.”64 It is likely that such development continued. And yet, just barely a hundred pages cover the entire last fourteen years of his life, almost twenty percent of his lifetime. The fault is not with the biographer but with the limitations of the accumulative method. Not until the mid-1880s, with the approaching centenary celebration of his birth, were a majority of Balzac’s works systematically and extensively available and portable in American English; such works found their way into the Melvilles’ last book collection, which is all empirical evidence can tell us. As we continue, we should heed one last caution of Merton Sealts, Jr. on this matter of Melville’s library list, since it helps define the ground on which new traces of Balzac’s intellectual interests are freshly sought:

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And it must be remembered that Melville knew—or knew of—many more authors and titles than those mentioned in correspondence or listed in records of purchase and library loans. Important as they are, these records tell much less than the full story of his voluminous reading during the years of his progressive unfolding …65 We can confidently move forward, therefore, trace Melville through the networks surrounding him, and evaluate, with new precision, exactly the development of his vision and the role Balzac may have had in constructing it.

C ha p t e r T wo

International Balzac

T

he most frequent barrier for traditional critics’ accepting that Balzac exerted a stimulus for all of Melville’s romances during and after the composition of Moby-Dick has been the uncertainty of whether or not he knew French. Early commentators expected that he did; but when no annotated Balzac books entirely in French were uncovered in Melville’s final estate, general opinion accepted the hypothesis that he had not read French. This conjecture, although often treated as unassailable in Melville criticism, is yet to be decisively confirmed. Laurie Robertson-Lorant, a biographer of Melville, made a deliberate effort to discover “how well Melville knew the [French] language” in 1995. She raises many tantalizing questions: “How well did Melville speak French? Could he carry on a conversation? Could he read French?” But she finds few hard answers, closing with the assessment that, “Sifting through the evidence we have so far, I would have to conclude that Melville probably spoke little more than the nineteenth-century equivalent to high school French.”1 Even reaching this tentative judgment, her search remains problematic: “In the end, Melville’s knowledge or lack of knowledge of French remains a mystery. His writings reveal ambivalence toward France that may account for his not learning to speak or read the language well.”2 This suggestion is based on speculation from very 39

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scant evidence, which we will expand upon shortly. Nor do we know how much Melville’s French improved over time with reading and conversation, or when among the seventy-two years of Melville’s life the critic fixes this assessment. Melville had little formal education, but the breadth of his learning has been frequently noted, including his awareness of foreign-language originals. The principal evidence for the idea that Melville had more actual knowledge of French than assumed is of course his welldocumented family connections to readers and speakers of that language. His father spent much of his life visiting France and importing French dry goods and cultural objects, books significant among them. The library at the Melville home probably contained numerous books in French. His sisters practiced French for their academic classes. And if this passage in Redburn can be trusted with autobiographical overtones, Melville had been attracted by French literature at quite an early age: Then, too, we had a large library-case, that stood in the hall … with large glass doors, through which might be seen long rows of old books, that had been printed in Paris, and London, and Leipsic … And there was a copy of D’Alembert in French, and I wondered what a Great Man I would be, if by foreign travel I should ever be able to read straight along without stopping, out of that book, which now was a riddle to everyone in the house but my father, whom I so much liked to hear talk French, as he sometimes did to the servant we had.3

Melville in French Territory Melville’s favorite uncle Thomas had lived in France and married the niece of Madame Récamier, the admired French salon host, giving Melville his French cousin, and consequently offering him

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another incentive to learn the language. French-born Priscilla was an active member of Melville’s extended family in the Berkshires.4 There is even some speculation that Melville had an illegitimate sister of French background as well,5 although this proposal is now generally repudiated.6 Had young Herman voiced even the slightest linguistic interest, some of his family would have told him stories about the work of the writer just then the rage in Europe, or translated or recited some appropriate excerpts for him from the books themselves. Reading aloud together was a contemporary practice exercised in his household. The “without stopping” in Redburn suggests that the narrator had been making attempts but had to rely, at least occasionally, on a dictionary. The argument for immersion then presents itself as a viable alternative to formal study. There is hardly a Melville tale or romance unmarked by a French name, a French object, a French vessel, or a French place. He writes much of the French and French culture in Omoo, and his remarks are clear as of 1847: “Though I say the French are no sailors, I am far from seeking to underrate them as a people. They are an ingenious and right gallant nation. And, as an American, I take pride in asserting it.”7 Many of the travel books Melville enumerates in Chapter 30 of Redburn bear French titles and were at his side during composition. The citation above identifies the process of learning French as “foreign travel,” and not formal, documented schooling. Melville engaged in just such travel (and in locations where French was the principal language). Until his death in 1844, Uncle Pierre Melvill8 was a hero to Herman. He had gone to sea and spent time along a route very similar to the one Melville followed eventually to Les Îles Marquises.9 This expedition in the early 1840s afforded him an opportunity not only to improve his French in the outer territories but also to encounter Balzac in books or in summary retellings by immigrants and sailors. It was common to encounter shipboard libraries, often with eclectic and multifaceted collections. Melville describes one of these in White-Jacket: “There was a public library

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on board, paid for by the government, and trusted to the custody of one of the marine corporals, a little, dried-up man, of a somewhat literary turn.”10 The titillating nature of Balzac’s pornography in such works as “The Girl with the Golden Eyes” and Sarrasine had calculated appeal for vulgar conversation, and like boys sitting around a campfire telling dirty jokes, the sailors would crowd around a reader or translator to hear risqué stories. In his writing, Melville repeatedly references the sailors’ idle time taken up by storytelling that “never flagged.”11 The seamen would collect cheap reprints in their lockers as material for the long hours of waiting. Balzac’s salacious Droll Stories (Contes Drolatiques) came out in three volumes (1832, 1833, 1837), which made great reading and easy telling for lonely men. Admits Melville’s narrator in White-Jacket: I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favorite authors were such as you may find at the bookstalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature.12 It is likely that Balzac’s “physiologies” were of great interest to such readers. That Melville had an eye for any type of literature is unquestionable. He had been a schoolteacher and a devoted student of ideas before his days as a sailor. These sorts of “casual publications,” like Balzac’s, seemed particularly to have appealed to White-Jacket. In this sort of situation Balzac’s writing easily came into his hands or his head by just such an informal chance. Although Balzac’s alleged lack of morals made him a public nuisance in New York, in the rest of the world, particularly for readers of French such as those on the islands Melville visited, Balzac had been a sensation for more than a decade. Literature from the homeland takes on exceptional value to citizens dwelling far

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overseas. That would have been particularly true of Balzac’s serialized stories. Nuku Hiva, the second largest island in the Marquises, which occupies the bulk of Melville’s attention in Typee, was home to the French administrative seat, Hakapehi, with a sizeable contingent of European settlers. Significantly, France annexed the islands in 1842, and Melville arrived there that summer. Clearly, although he objected to some of the tactics and impressions involved, at such an intense cultural moment for the French, if Melville wanted to improve his language “by foreign travel,” he had an excellent opportunity and the quick mind to do so.

Practice in Conversation Other direct practice with French language and culture presented itself on Melville’s trip to Europe in 1849, and in this case he had a still better opportunity to discover the philosophy, methods, and stories of Balzac in French. The steamer’s library of course would have been a primary source for Melville to probe. Assembled for educated international travelers and not simply puritanical Americans, the reading collections on the ships were both diverse and contemporary. Emerson had discovered Balzac among the books in a standard shipboard library to Liverpool in 1847, almost two years before the same sort of passage taken by Melville. Such coincidence indicates the high probability that Melville met with Balzac’s writing in this similar environment. Emerson does not say whether the literature he read was in French or English; but either language provided enough material for social interchange. It is important to remember (as Melville emphasized in Redburn) that in the first half of the nineteenth century, French, and not English, was the worldwide language of exchange. Discussions among passengers from different nations would take place in French, which enforces Melville’s remarks on learning French by travel. Moreover, the topics Melville loved to talk about were decidedly intercultural in flavor and implication, the principal thinkers being European:

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network McCurdy invited Adler and Taylor & I to partake of some mulled wine with him, which we did, in my room. Got— all of us—riding on the German horse again—Taylor has not been in Germany in vain. After another curious conversation between the Swede and the Frenchman about Lamertine [sic] & Corinne, we sat down to whist, & separated at about 3 in the morning.13

To conclude that the Swedish, French, German, and American interlocutors were all speaking English is to impose American twenty-first-century linguistic privileges on early nineteenthcentury global discourse. Melville certainly understood enough of the conversation to be encouraged to pick up his own copy of Corinne from his English publisher Bentley on his arrival in London.14 Furthermore, with so much discussion about Romantic principles and sources integral to Balzac’s creativity (particularly Swedenborg and Mme. de Staël), mention of Balzac especially would seem to have been inevitable in 1849, nearly twenty years after Balzac began publishing under his own name.

Travel across Europe The most powerful testimony to Melville’s comprehension of French was the time that he spent in Paris, first as a tourist, and second as a purchaser of books. He frequently met with Adler, and the professor was his steady guide through French society. Melville stayed at the principal English hotel in the city, where, once his credentials were noted, his gregarious nature would have led him to enter into his usual conversations about philosophy and literature. Additionally, he spent each day at Galignani’s English Reading Room, which also had a lending library.15 British journals were rife with reviews and parodies of Balzac if no cultivated translations had yet been marketed as books. In the 1840s, papers like Bentley’s Miscellany, Monthly Review, and Foreign Quarterly were publishing

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articles about Balzac and his works.16 British readers of French literature would have been among Melville’s acquaintances, and he certainly would have encountered Croker’s assessment of Balzac. Moreover, Melville’s own reputation as a writer, even after the less-than-impressive performance of Mardi, was largely favorable in France and would have admitted him to many literary conversations. The famous anglophile critic Philarète Chasles had given him a high rating if for nothing more than effort in attempting the popular “mixed style” of the French: Here is a curious novelty, an American Rabelais … imagine Daphnis and Chloe or Paul and Virginie dancing in the clouds with Aristotle and Spinoza escorted by Gargantua and Gargamelle, in I do not know what fantastic gavotte. Incredible work worthy of a Rabelais without gaiety, a Cervantes without grace, a Voltaire without taste—Mardi and A Voyage Thither is nothing less than one of the most singular books to appear for a long time on the face of the globe.17 Furthermore, at that time, Balzac was at the climax of his notoriety and celebrity in Paris. The massive La Comédie humaine was completed in the standard Furne and Company edition (1842– 48), and was republished in a new printing that year. In addition to making “corrections” on almost every page of the Comédie by hand, Balzac was still having stories serialized in multiple periodicals simultaneously. Even though a limited speaking proficiency in French might hamper Melville somewhat with booksellers, the name “Balzac” would be recognizable and easy to trace out in any context. Melville’s well-documented curiosity about fame and greatness would not have allowed him to ignore such unbridled popularity as that which Balzac was finally achieving as a selfsupporting professional author.

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The uncertainty over whether Melville was able to understand French comes closest to a resolution during this episode in Paris. At one point Melville went to visit Adler at his quarters, but he was not there. Melville records that while he waited he talked with the French host as best he was able.18 This means that from his childhood or through his travel experiences he had really mastered the language enough to speak casually, which suggests that he read French, at least tentatively. Melville also wrote that on the train to Germany there was a “Fat Frenchman with whom I conversed a little.”19 If Melville had knowledge of French, he might have missed some of the subtle connotations of Balzac’s wit but surely followed the narrative thread and envisioned the important characters and their environments.

Balzac in English While we do not insist that Melville needed to or did read translations of Balzac either primarily or essentially, in addition to his intercultural activities Melville would have had many opportunities back home and in England to encounter Balzac in his own language before he wrote Moby-Dick. Balzac’s reputation in America was mixed. Urbanites like Emerson and Margaret Fuller, holding global visions, read him in French, while others simply stayed away from his works without reading more than magazine gossip like Croker’s. The major resistance to Balzac’s success was not his language, his politics, or his representation, but the darkness and eroticism of some of his subject matter. In any case, Balzac was known. According to Clarence Decker, “Balzac was first translated [into English] as early as 1834; additional works were issued throughout the century.”20 Balzacian romances were subjects of great curiosity over the ten years after Melville’s return to New York from his youthful sea voyages, and we can reasonably recreate, considering his friends, his reading habits, his interests, and the popular discourse of the time, the network through which he encountered Balzac.

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Melville often scoured popular works for knowledge and soundings on readers’ tastes at the bustling bazaar for books in New York. It was Melville’s habit that once he heard of an author, he would follow up by reading that author’s works through borrowing, browsing in others’ libraries, or simply “glancing over” the books in a bookstore.21 Since the majority of the first Balzac translations, in the 1830s and early 1840s, were distributed initially in periodicals, the popular assumption has been that they were disintegrated to waste paper by the time Melville landed home in October, 1844. But entertaining printed matter, more revered and more passed around, reader-to-reader, in nineteenth-century culture even than it is today, tended to persist longer than our pulp equivalents. Moreover, serialized narratives were often reset and reprinted in bound volumes of a more enduring nature. However, American periodicals and inexpensive reprints of British quarterlies in current or back issues were never meticulously inventoried; consequently, much of the material is often irrecoverable. Nevertheless, Balzac’s fiction was continuously available to an English-speaking public. According to Decker: Balzac’s literary career in England spanned the entire Victorian period. A translation of Scenes from Parisian Life was published by Fraser as early as 1834. The next translation, that of Mother and Daughter, did not appear until 1842. From then until the end of the century Balzac’s fiction appeared regularly either in the monthly or annual magazines or in book form. English critics, at first hostile to these translations, as the century advanced became more and more persuaded of Balzac’s genius.22 Moreover, Sheila Post’s research also shows that by 1850 Balzac was not only well recognized, but also represented a serious commercial threat to American writers’ sales.23

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Multiple Translations Thomas Palfrey has noted that the first English translation of Le Colonel Chabert appeared in London’s Metropolitan Magazine of May and June, 1833, under the title “The Count Chabert,” without name of author or translator.24 It was then promptly republished in New Haven, Connecticut. A partial translation of Maître Cornelius which appeared in The Dublin University Magazine (1834) and an anonymous partial translation of Le Père Goriot, from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1833), found their way to America and the hands of avid readers of papers like Melville in reading rooms. An anonymous translation or adaptation of Gobseck, appeared in Chamber’s Edinburgh Review (1836). A translation of Scènes de la vie parisienne (Scenes from Parisian Life) was made as early as 1834.25 Michael Tilby additionally cites a serialization of La Cousine Bette in English, which appeared in 1846 and in book form in 1847.26 To compound the problem, while Balzac was still alive, through 1850, he continued to edit, regroup, and excise his writing, making a stable version, the grail of traditional critics, impossible and shortening the shelf life of interim ones. For example, fourteen versions of Louis Lambert have been counted.27 The rewriting prevented translators from having static texts to render into English, although, given the cultural parameters, this mattered little to the network. Consequently, most of the early romances were anglicized several times under a variety of titles by multiple anonymous translators in uncoordinated editions, often quickly and poorly executed simply to exploit Balzac’s tantalizing reputation. The ephemeral press, because of the immoral lure of Balzac’s penchant for indecorous subjects, would both tease with and “revise” his works in one or two volumes at a time, distributed in perishable paper covers, which tended to encourage rather than curtail the proliferation of unauthorized texts. Such renditions were only imperfectly related to their originals, another reason they probably have not been widely preserved. Satisfied with some of the plot only, one early

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American translator felt it necessary not to “lug into English what is immaterial to the story”; that is, what was offensive to American morals: If the latter [translation] be marred, the translator can only lay the blame on certain “peccant humors” necessary at whatever sacrifice to eject. On the whole, he has taken the liberty to “bring home” [Balzac’s] Peau de chagrin as smack-masters do their fish, in a “cured” state.28 “Cured” versions, though read, would eventually pass out of existence when the final versions were at last released. Incentive to guard euphemistic publications was not strong. For serious readers, the texts would quickly become obsolete; for careless ones, they were valueless after the initial titillation subsided. Nonetheless, the basic rhetorical structures would survive such vicissitudes in readers’ memories and preferences. Unfortunately, artificial limits to the reality of the American public’s familiarity with Balzac were temporarily accepted when Benjamin Griffith stated that between 1828 and 1885 only about a dozen works by Balzac were published in English in the United States. Moreover, he asserted that “only the largest universities taught French” and that only liberal-minded, well-educated, “more or less cosmopolitans” responded favorably to Balzac’s subjects.29 We have demonstrated that this was an incomplete assumption. Griffith’s bibliography, compiled in 1930, is based on another scholar’s work, that of William Hobart Royce, which updates only to the late 1920s, still quite distant in time from the historical period being examined.30 Furthermore, he considers as “extant” only translations printed initially or primarily in American cities, ignoring sources from the rest of the English-speaking world that had been anonymously pirated in the United States or shipped by packet boat. Without the resources also of a national library catalog, Griffith had little insight into the books held in American

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libraries. Nevertheless, he discovered a core of romances actually published in the United States during the period in question. He names Madame Firmiani (1837), The Countess with Two Husbands (1837), A Daughter of Eve (1843), Eugenia Grandet (1843), The Lady with Two Husbands (1843), Luck and Leather (1843), The Philosopher’s Stone (1844), Father Goriot (1844), and Melmoth Redeemed (1844).31 Most of these appeared initially in Winchester’s The New World between 1839 and 1845. Griffith missed The Democratic Review’s publication of translations of Le Réquisitionnaire and Il Verdugo in 1843 and La Vendetta in 1845.32 This latter extended over three consecutive issues, probably because it was written by the popular actress Fanny Kemble, who had recently been a vivid correspondent on the European revolutions of the 1840s and was an outspoken abolitionist known to affluent readership. In 1843 the magazine also published a “cured” English version of La Grande Bretèche,33 a novel generally accepted as an inspiration for the immurement in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.”34 Finally, the National Union Library Catalog gives some indication of how many English translations of Balzac were preserved in libraries in the period 1830–51, but any selections of this sort were made on standards of public taste and the morality of the era, not on quantity or diversity of supply. As we have noted above, these criteria were not in Balzac’s favor. Besides, bibliographic investigation rests almost solely on imperfect official registration and haphazard library cataloging, not necessarily facilitated by modern electronic indexing. Consequently, a quantity of Balzac titles in English went unregistered, unpreserved, or had their dates of publication confused. Moreover, American libraries are unlikely to have had translations that appeared in fugitive form in some other English-speaking place. Nevertheless, from the 1840s and 1850s a number of individual Balzac narratives in English were cataloged. These were produced by publishers like Liberty Book House and Happy Hour Library.35 English anthologies of European literature often contained Seraphita and selections from the “Droll Stories.”36

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Others included Father Goriot, “Jesus Christ in Flanders,” and Louis Lambert.37 According to the Catalog but not chronicled elsewhere are Catherine De Medici (1842), A Distinguished Provincial at Paris; Lost Illusions; and other stories (1844), Seraphita and Other Stories (1846), and A Harlot’s Progress, The Hated Son and Other Stories (1847).38 Again, the state of the cultural environment offers indications verifying the assumption first made by Strachey, Brooks, and Arvin, that there was a more than an adequate number of Balzac’s novels and stories in English for Melville to choose from if he wished, even if most were outside the “imposing air” and “invaluable volumes” of libraries as Melville had described them.

Growing Awareness of Balzac Evidence also supports the idea that an almost constant stream of information about Balzac and his ideas continued to flow within and into the US. By Griffith’s count there were at least thirty-nine major articles before 1885.39 Among these, in 1839, the important essay “Modern French Romance” was published anonymously by Samuel Ward in The New York Review, which strongly praised Balzac for his detailed and “objective” realism: M. Balzac does not sally forth in quest of romantic adventure. His studies are objective and introspective. The cause and effect are proportioned. The proper chord responds to the sound—even as there are some spirits oftener in dissonance than in harmony with the murmurs or melodies around them.40 This enthusiasm no doubt would impress an immature writer (Melville was then nineteen) even to the extent of supporting his own search for realistic material. Moreover, shortly after Melville’s return from the sea, another significant article appeared, this time

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in The North American Review: J. Lothrop Motley’s “The Novels of Balzac.” This was even longer and more detailed than the previous essay, but expressed the same enthusiasm for Balzac’s accomplishments.41 Motley makes it clear that, unlike critics such as Margaret Fuller, he is for admitting Balzac into English literature in translation, that he prefers him to both Sue and Sand, whose work was also popular: Balzac, on the contrary, is an artist. He is neither moral nor immoral, but a calm and profound observer of human society and human passions, and a minute, patient, and powerful delineator of scenes and characters in the world before his eyes. His readers must moralize for themselves.42 Making use of an analogy from nineteenth-century technology, Motley paints a telling picture of how Balzac portrays his characters: Balzac’s pictures of society are like daguerreotypes rather than paintings. There is the same painful and indisputable resemblance, the same accurate delineation of the most minute characteristics and infinitesimal blemishes; and there is the same somber hue and slightly distorted expression.43 In his consideration of the Balzacian hero, Motley makes an interesting comment that will again recur in our observations about Melville: We cannot say much in favor of this form of the heroic, although the model is somewhat original. We are not sure whether it would pass muster with [Thomas] Carlyle; yet certainly these heroes are not pale and conventional, like the flunky whom he abhors, but are up to any thing in the way of energetic, unscrupulous working.44

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There is much in this essay, available to Melville, that could have made an impression on a young author, confirming his own feelings about becoming a writer. In an article in the Foreign Quarterly Review that we can securely claim that Melville found,45 the writer discusses a monograph against the Parisian Press. Balzac was angry with his former friend Jules Janin, and the commentator tried to explicate in Balzac’s favor how the literary establishment had mistreated him. This piece was published a little more than a year before Melville’s return to New York and a copy was kept at the home of his father-in-law and in the office of his friend and mentor Evert Duyckinck.46 It would soon enough be a lesson to Melville about so-called friends in the writers’ network.

Fuller’s Assessment It was also around Melville’s return from whaling, in February, 1845, that Margaret Fuller published an important review, “French Novelists of the Day,” in Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune and New York Weekly Tribune. Fuller was the first full-time female book critic in New York and had generally avoided writing about European literature, although she was reading some in the original languages. Fuller held the post of Greeley’s literary reviewer 1844– 46, before Melville became disillusioned with the review process. Her Women in the Nineteenth Century had recently been published following serialization in The Dial. It is likely that Melville regularly read her reviews, because the sting he recounts at having not been believed as a documentarian stems directly from Fuller’s review of Typee.47 Fuller shared Melville’s passionate belief in the need to create a distinctly American literature. She also expressed her admiration for Balzac. Contrary to her usual judgment that some French authors were good, but none great or geniuses, she made an allowance for Balzac:

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network Her single exception—and the judgment showed, as well as any she ever made, her willingness to buck cultural prejudices—was Honoré de Balzac. Although the bold-faced eroticism of Balzac’s novels made them the most widely condemned of all French books, in her notes she praised him for “facing the dark side of human nature …”48

As she tried to maintain the delicate balance between American morals and the effects created by the extraordinary French novelist, she did not always reveal her inmost feelings about La Comédie humaine. Nevertheless, she praised Le Père Goriot as Balzac’s “most celebrated work”: But the conception of this work is so sublime, that, though the details are even more revolting than in his others, you can bear it, and would not have missed your walk through the Catacombs, though the light of day seems stained afterward with the mould of horror and dismay.49 She would have never disturbed the readers of the Tribune with Balzac’s morals, but she gave plenty of examples of his narrative power: “The transitions are made with as much swiftness as a curtain is drawn upon the stage, yet with no feeling of abruptness, so skillfully are the incidents woven into one another.”50 What stands as her final judgment is harsh yet true: “But as a writer, never was the modern Mephistopheles, ‘the spirit that denieth,’ more worthily represented than by Balzac.”51 The essay could thus have directed Melville toward Balzac and his attachment to the dark side of human nature, something he had not yet tested in his own writing. For all the scholarly investigation, Tilby has the clearest explanation for the current situation on Balzacian English texts:

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It is, however, impossible to compile a definitive list of 19th-century translations. Some that are known to have existed appeared in an ephemeral format and have disappeared without a trace. There are likely to have been others. The existence of at least some translations mentioned by contemporary observers remains open to question. [Wilkie] Collins himself could not be sure that his memory of an early translation of La Peau de chagrin was not an invention.52 Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence to support the intuition of Strachey, Brooks, and Arvin that rather than a paucity of opportunities to react personally to Balzac through his local and international experience, Melville could have developed a very clear idea of the significance and talent of the French writer long before he began even thinking about Moby-Dick.

C ha p t e r Th r e e

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he most momentous circumstance in Melville’s development of a deeply personal comprehension of Balzac was his interaction with Nathaniel Hawthorne, an apprentice of French-biased sensibilities. While it is apparent that many literary minded individuals were familiar with Balzac, few had really made a serious study of his methods or tried to crack the secret of his popularity as Hawthorne had. They were often satisfied to denigrate his deplorable morals without engaging seriously the implications of his literary achievements. Importantly, it was at this period in 1850 when the two met that he was particularly steeped in Romantic philosophy and theory,1 a favorite preoccupation of Melville from the year before with Professor Adler and his packet boat companions. In any conversation, Melville could contribute to the exchange from the German side, while Hawthorne was adept with the French.

Artistic Study According to William Bysshe Stein, Balzac, whom Hawthorne read in the original, “fascinated him throughout his life; he had procured copies of the French master’s work as soon as they appeared in print.”2 While no Balzac books can be found in Hawthorne’s library 57

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preserved at Bowdoin,3 corroborating evidence does support his possession of such works around the time Melville was visiting him. Hawthorne probably acquired most of the volumes from friends or from a private bookseller. According to Austin Warren, The Athenaeum [check-out] lists cannot, however, be taken as a complete index to Hawthorne’s reading during the decade in which he was most free to explore. For example, when Miss Elizabeth Peabody made his acquaintance, in 1836, he had, though he had not drawn them from Salem’s chief library, read all of Balzac’s works which had then appeared. And Eugénie Grandet (1833) and Le Père Goriot (1834) must have been among the novels of which Hawthorne had made, in the words of his sister, “an artistic study.”4 Since Peabody was a bookseller in Boston, it is likely that he would continue to order books through her, especially given that in 1842 he married her sister, Sophia. Concerning Hawthorne’s application of Balzac’s narrative innovations, Leon Chai writes, “Here I believe it is possible to speak not only of affinity but of an actual influence exerted by the great French author upon his American contemporary.”5 Stein adds that Hawthorne “was not averse to adapting and modifying general plot themes or certain technical approaches” to his own advantage.6 Moreover, according to Chai, it was “from Balzac’s theory of the Will, [that] Hawthorne [developed] his intuition of life as an expression of the individual consciousness.”7 Nothing is written down for us to find, however. Hawthorne never mentions any contemporary writers.8 Melville apparently destroyed his letters from Hawthorne, his most cultivated informant. Melville’s letters to Hawthorne are largely missing; the ones we have are secondhand, copied and recopied by family members on both sides hoping to write their own history of the relationship. In any case, it

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would be unreasonably conservative simply to assume that because most commentary in the press was negative, that there were no committed readers and writers like Hawthorne and Melville who were especially attentive of Balzac, the greatest literary pioneer of the century. Chai reminds us that: By 1836–37, through almost superhuman efforts, [Balzac] had produced more than half of the Comédie humaine and virtually all of the Études philosophiques. The magnitude of Hawthorne’s reading of Balzac thus bears witness to his thorough immersion in the world of the Comédie humaine. Even among his contemporaries his affinity with the French author did not pass unnoticed.9 We have already seen how a professional revolutionary like Margaret Fuller had to equivocate on her praise of Balzac, although she took to wearing a fresh flower daily in honor of Balzac’s character Paquita, heroine of “The Girl with the Golden Eyes.”10 Hawthorne was restrained in his praise of Balzac owing to the demands of a similar etiquette (and, no doubt, his wife’s infamous censorship). He only admitted his devotion to La Comédie humaine to his sister-in-law (and this before his marriage), but to no one outside the immediate family. And although persons we admire today, like Emerson, make note of their acquaintance with some of Balzac’s writings, at the time they were already narrowly marginalized as radicals themselves. When much of the press and the religious establishment was opposed to the mere thought of Balzac’s novels, and one must make a living solely on public opinion, the disciple of Balzac would be strongly inclined to the typically Victorian strategy of ambiguous reticence, as was apparently the case with Hawthorne. But Balzac yet remained a potent subtext in the English literary network. All these conditions combined to determine how both Hawthorne and Melville responded to Balzac in the environment

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with silence; they maintained public and private restraint regarding the novels and short stories they knew of or had read. The fact that Balzac is barely mentioned in published biographies does not impinge on the observations here of pervading intertextuality. Such biographies are constructed exclusively upon intense superficial scrutiny and the accepted assumptions and liberties of their authors; the resonance of Balzac for Hawthorne and Melville was entirely interior and translucent. Either Hawthorne hid his affiliation with Balzac well or Evert Duyckinck, through his connections in the publishing network and its attempts to promote a purely “American” literature, was in on the obfuscation. According to Philip McFarland, Duyckinck advanced the view “categorically that ‘Of the American writers destined to live [on], [Hawthorne] is the most original, the one least indebted to foreign models or literary precedents of any kind.’”11 Chai and many others disagree.

Balzacian Realism While Balzac is not considered among Realist writers today, his practices and intentions are universally accepted as the foundation of modern Realism and Naturalism, thanks to his indirect influence on Zola, Flaubert, Stendhal, and others in Europe, and Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain in America. But because he was a pioneer in this territory, he was rapidly surpassed and re-theorized by critics and other writers as not being real enough. Henry James wrote five essays about Balzac, some of them quite lengthy, but never fully admitted him into Realism. As early as 1891 the injustice of this opinion was being noted: The fact that Balzac has been largely introduced into England by the school which claims him as their founder— the realistic school divided between M. Zola and M. Bourget—is misleading. He is accredited with the philosophy, as well as the method, of his followers. He is deprived

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of one of his strongest claims to supremacy in his art, the union of idealism in conception with extraordinary realism in expression.12 So when we speak of realism (with a miniscule “r”) during the time of Hawthorne and Melville—particularly the 1840s and ’50s— we cannot judge by the standard of the 1870s and ’80s without considering what we have already introduced as Bryant’s “rhetorical conditions of creation” and account seriously for the relative evolution that was proceeding in writers’ minds. Like institutionalized Realism, Balzacian realism concerns itself with the characters of everyday life or of ordinary circumstances; but Balzac’s style was not yet isolated from the Romantic imagination; so while in advance of other authors in this regard, Balzac’s stories kept him “behind” some of his literary beneficiaries. It was just at the time when Balzac was perfecting this hybrid advance that Hawthorne took up his “artistic study” of Balzac—and he found his niche in the French atmosphere of the Democratic Review, which supported almost the entirety of his early work. His tales were quaint, local, and heavily allegorical, and Hawthorne was not happy with the lack of attention they drew, complaining about it in the 1837 introduction to Twice-Told Tales: The author of Twice-Told Tales has a claim to one distinction, which, as none of his literary brethren will care about disputing it with him, he need not be afraid to mention. He was, for a good many years, the obscurest man of letters in America. These stories were published in Magazines and Annuals, extending over a period of ten or twelve years, and comprising the whole of the writer’s young manhood, without making (so far as he has ever been aware) the slightest impression on the Public.13

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But an important literary event took place in 1842, which seems to have made a tangible difference to Hawthorne’s success. In the six-volume edition of La Comédie humaine of that year, Balzac included for the first time an “Avant-propos” or Introduction in which he not only set out to justify his own career against his detractors, but to explain his intentions and practices within the limitations he set for himself: Le hasard is the greatest storyteller in the world; in order to be creative, it is only necessary to study it. French society would be the historian; I would be only the secretary. In making an inventory of vices and virtues, in collecting the chief facts of the passions, in painting characters, in choosing the principal incidents of society, in composing types by reunifying the traits of several homogeneous characters, perhaps I could arrive at writing the history forgotten by so many historians, that of moral actions.14 The French term hasard can be translated by a number of English words that include luck, destiny, risk, and opportunity—a condition we may translate, post-Carl Jung, as “synchronicity” in this context: an event that has some substantial orderly relationship to the participant with or without obvious material cause. It is part of the active character (mœurs) of the individual. Significantly, Balzac did not write La chance, which is more akin to accident than hasard. Rendering hasard in English as mere “chance” is too shallow for his insight.

Transliterary Perception Although formulated from and within French culture, this vision was translatable to America and to a catalog of American behaviors depicted in fiction. The idea was a shock of recognition for Hawthorne. After 1842 one can note a definite change in the force

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of his writing; his scenes become starker, his themes darker, his characters more psychological, his scope more social. He seems to be experiencing a new vital energy in his life, as if launched along the trail of a secret. He would work toward an absolute disconnect from the inspiration’s cultural origins, but with only partial success. That same year he wed long-time friend Sophia Peabody and moved into a home in Concord—and his writing slowly began to take on more depth. Such was the change that by 1846 he had restricted his habitual practice of allegory, which he had been working on in a volume named Allegories of the Heart. By that same year he had released a collection of more substantial fiction in Mosses from an Old Manse, and by 1850 he was able to publish his first realistic romance, The Scarlet Letter. He considered the story of Hester Prynne “positively a hell-fired story, into which I found it almost impossible to throw any cheering light.”15 One is reminded particularly of the gruesome conclusion of Balzac’s La Cousine Bette, printed just as Hawthorne was contemplating The Scarlet Letter. His achievement rid him once and for all of the financial stresses (and self-deprecation) that had become a habit of a man trying to live by his pen. By the time he wrote the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne is almost recounting Balzac verbatim when he states a modern romance must conform realistically to “the truth of the human heart,” but not necessarily to the strict “probable and ordinary course of man’s experience.”16 The sentiment echoes Balzac’s “Avant-Propos” to La Comédie humaine: History does not have a law, like the romance, to tend toward a beautiful ideal. History is or should be what it was; while romance should be the better world, as was said by Mme. Necker [Mme. de Staël], one of the most distinguished thinkers of the last century. But the romance would be nothing in this august fiction if it were not true in details.17

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Public Association with Balzac Over the years, critics have noted in Hawthorne’s writing some quite direct borrowings from La Comédie humaine. Jane Lundblad has suggested that Hawthorne’s “The Gentle Boy” and Balzac’s “L’Enfant maudit” bear certain striking similarities, as do the scientific laboratories in “The Birth-mark” and La Peau de chagrin.18 Wagenkneckt connected Le Père Goriot to The Blithedale Romance.19 Hawthorne’s last manuscripts are collectively known as the “elixir of life texts,” an appellation clearly resonant of Balzac’s “L’Elixir de longue vie.” And Melmoth réconcilié shares close thematic similarities with “Ethan Brand,” as “Rappaccini’s Daughter” does with La Recherche de l’Absolu. A particularly striking parallel can be seen in “A Select Party,” published in July 1844 by the Democratic Review. The text reflects direct knowledge of Balzac’s tale “Jésus Christ en Flandre” (1832). Balzac’s boat is peopled with much the same elite crowd as Hawthorne’s Castle in the Air, which he compares to “a monastery of the middle ages,” where the humble and ordinary of the group are shunned and disliked. The Balzac story is a parody of Sebastian Brandt’s medieval narrative of the ship of fools: At the appearance of a bareheaded man whose coat and breeches were brown camlet, whose stiff linen collar had not a single ornament, who carried in hand neither cap nor bonnet, without purse nor sword at his belt, everyone took him for a burgomaster sure of his authority, a burgomaster good and gentle like so many an ancient Fleming, whose nature and humble character have been so well preserved by native painters.20 The nameless character turns out to be a persona of the Savior, rejected by the elite passengers, but worshipped by their democratic, poor fellows. Similarly, Hawthorne’s stranger is never

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named, just identified as a stranger, in the same mysterious sense as in Balzac. His fate as a literary savior under similar circumstances, is comparable to Balzac’s stranger: But now appeared a stranger, whom the host had no sooner recognized, than, with an abundance of courtesy unravished on any other, he hastened down the whole length of the saloon, in order to pay him emphatic honor. Yet he was a young man in poor attire, with no insignia of rank or acknowledged eminence, nor anything to distinguish him among the crowd except a high, white forehead, beneath which a pair of deep-set eyes were glowing with warm light. It was such a light as never illuminates the earth, save when a great heart burns as the household fire of a grand intellect.21 Hawthorne clearly felt that Balzac’s representation was worth repeating in the context of the American Dream. Another story that is remarkably like Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin is Hawthorne’s “The Virtuoso’s Collection,” also written in 1844. The story is a parody and expansion of the scene in Balzac’s curiosity shop where the hero is led about by a centenarian; Hawthorne’s character is conducted by a man who turns out to be The Wandering Jew. The central difference is that Hawthorne’s narrator is not tempted by any of the elixirs or magical objects he is offered, while Balzac’s hero, out of suicidal despair, succumbs to the lure of the magic skin. Critics have discovered a number of additional parallels in Hawthorne’s work with Balzac’s. For example, Stein sees in “The Intelligence Office” and “The Procession of Life” the Balzacian theme of “the solipsistic negations of abstract thought … los[ing] their relations with the concrete realities of the earth.”22 It is not surprising, then, that contemporary readers, editors, and critics frequently associated Hawthorne with the “school” of those

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writers influenced by the French romance and the susceptibility to loathsome European sentimentality. Privately, in correspondence, there was more awareness. The English author and socialite Mary Russell Mitford, whom we introduced earlier as a friend and correspondent of Balzac promoter Elizabeth Barrett Browning, thanked Hawthorne for a presentation copy of The Blithedale Romance that he had sent her in 1852 with the following response: I forgot, dear Mr. Hawthorne, whether I told you that the writer of whose works you remind me, not by imitation but by resemblance, is the great French novelist, Balzac. Do you know his books? He is untranslated [in England] and untranslatable … I doubt if he be much known amongst you … Mrs. Browning and I used to discuss his personages like living people and regarded his death as a great personal calamity to both.23 In his mild resituating, Hawthorne demonstrated what Balzac had deemed indispensable in the creation of modern literature: what made it “interesting.” Lundblad concludes, “the affinities in Balzac and Hawthorne as to conception and treatment of similar subjects are in many cases so great as to have caused, by themselves alone, the juxtaposition of their names.”24

Perpetual Interculturation From the beginning of his career, Hawthorne was thrown into the same despicable “French” mix as Poe among American writers. The association was to continue, even when interest in Balzac was on hiatus. In December, 1861, Harper’s Weekly carried an ad for a new romance sold by Hawthorne’s publisher, which linked Hawthorne and Balzac in praise for a lesser novelist’s new work. They were presented as equals—one European and one American. The copy reads:

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The Most Brilliant and Successful Novel of the Year is CECIL DREEME by Theodore Winthrop …. The author of this New Novel is that gallant Major Winthrop who died so nobly at the Great Bethel. His Novel, CECIL DREEME, has been compared by eminent critics to the best works of HAWTHORNE and BALZAC. Its success has been extraordinary; FIVE EDITIONS being sold in two weeks.25 Winthrop clearly mashes themes and suggestions of homosexuality lifted from the two authors to make his novel: particularly works like Sarrasine and Blithedale Romance. What its popularity confirms is that in the minds of American readers, tolerance for Balzacian themes was growing, hence opening a wider path toward acceptance with emerging native consciousness. In 1873, a decade after Hawthorne’s death, the linkage became even more evident, without much development. Juliet Pollock, who seems to have known Hawthorne in England, made the following observation: [Hawthorne] dealt with the profoundest emotions. He analyzed them with the most subtle investigation; he traced with complete skill the analogies between the seen and the unseen; he pierced mystery, he dived into the soul of man, his plunge was deep as Balzac’s. French literature has exercised a wide influence over that of most other nations, and of all French writers Balzac has made the strongest impression … In Hawthorne’s work there is something felt of Balzac’s sway;—but Hawthorne is neither an imitator nor a disciple; and with him a similar skill in anatomical scrutiny is differently used. There is nothing of the gross and little of the physical in Hawthorne: his descriptions, except where they treat of external nature, are psychological and spiritual in the highest degree.26

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In 1879, James wrote a long and important monograph about Hawthorne; and yet he judged him according to the Realism he and Howells were articulating, not according to the context wherein Hawthorne had worked. To keep him firmly out of Realism’s club, James insisted that Hawthorne was “intensely and vividly local,” echoing Duyckinck’s promotional representation, and in his own favor, since Balzac was a major influence on James. But still he could not escape the obvious connection: I have alluded to the absence in Hawthorne of that quality of realism which is now so much in fashion, an absence in regard to which there will of course be more to say; and yet I think I am not fanciful in saying that he testifies to the sentiments of the society in which he flourished almost as pertinently (proportions observed) as Balzac and some of his descendants—MM. Flaubert and Zola—testify to the manners and morals of the French people. He was not a man with a literary theory; he was guiltless of a system, and I am not sure that he had ever heard of Realism, this remarkable compound having (although it was invented some time earlier) come into general use only since his death.27 Hawthorne certainly was aware of some of the subtlest tenets of Balzacian realism and had made a thorough and ongoing study of La Comédie humaine. He may not have invented a theory of his own, but, far from “guiltless of a system,” he did at least possess a definite method distilled from Balzac. By 1917, when Dorothy Scarborough was writing The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction, the connection with Balzac appeared to be conventionally fixed—now rarely mentioned: Balzac’s Magic Skin [La Peau de chagrin] is a symbolic story of supernaturalism that suggests Hawthorne’s allegoric

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symbolism and may have influenced it in part. It is a new application of the old theme, used often in the drama as in Gothic romance, of the pledge of a soul for earthly gratification. A magic skin gives the man his heart’s desires, yet each granted wish makes the talisman shrink perceptibly, with an inexorable decrease. This theme, symbolic of the truth of life, is such a spiritual idea used allegorically as Hawthorne chose frequently …28

Self-Identification An important tale that reinforces Hawthorne’s link with Balzac is “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844). In its introduction, Hawthorne creates a literary persona and claims the text of the story was not written by himself but originally in French by one M. de l’Aubépine (Mr. Hawthorn) for La Revue Anti-Aristocratique, a sobriquet of his own for the Democratic Review. Whether this was simply Hawthorne’s coy trick to thumb his nose at critics who had classed him with Poe among the imitators of the French Romanticists matters little, for he clearly identifies himself as a young unknown writer with a similar history to Balzac. We do not remember to have seen any translated specimens of the productions of M. de l’Aubépine; a fact the less to be wondered at, as his very name is unknown to many of his own countrymen, as well as to the student of foreign literature. As a writer, he seems to occupy an unfortunate position between the Transcendentalists (who, under one name or another, have their share in all the current literature of the world), and the great body of pen-and-ink men who address the intellect and sympathies of the multitude. If not too refined, at all events too remote, too shadowy and unsubstantial in his modes of development, to suit

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While bemoaning Aubépine’s own lack of recognition except among a small clique, as he had in the earlier introduction to Twice-Told Tales, Hawthorne is clearly reflecting on and associating himself with the state of Balzac’s early experience and reputation. According to Lundblad, “For nine years Balzac led an obscure existence, certainly not the life of a recluse, but rather that of a Paris Bohemian, experiencing different kinds of life and society, and experimenting with different types of writing.”30 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is certainly a dark representation of both the distortion of love and the obsession of a parent, as in Père Goriot, hence Hawthorne is not far from the truth in creating his pseudoBalzacian persona. The alter-ego seems to be what Margaret Fuller later identified as “one of that wretched class of writers who live by the pen,”31 an accusation suitable to Hawthorne as well as Balzac. He disguises his own self-assessment again with the character of the hapless, “unappreciated M. de l’Aubépine.” Hawthorne does not betray his study of the French writer, but certainly places himself by his side through translating his own works into French as if they belonged to someone very similar: Our author is voluminous; he continues to write and publish with as much praiseworthy and indefatigable prolixity, as if his efforts were crowned with the brilliant success that so justly attends those of Eugene Sue. His first appearance was by a collection of stories, in a long series of volumes, entitled “Contes deux fois racontées” [Twice-Told Tales]. The titles of some of his more recent works (we quote from memory) are as follows:—“Le Voyage Céleste à Chemin de

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Fer,” [The Celestial Railroad] 3 tom. 1838. “Le nouveau Père Adam et la nouvelle Mère Eve,” [The New Adam and Eve] 2 tom. 1839. “Roderic; ou le Serpent à l’estomac,” [Roderick: or The Bosom Serpent] 2 tom. 1840.32 Hawthorne is touting his own version of the “voluminous” La Comédie humaine and his personal desire to be accepted as a literary icon, as Balzac was becoming to French democrats. He concludes with the better judgment that Aubépine/Balzac/Hawthorne is not yet ready for full disclosure in America: Our somewhat wearisome perusal of this startling catalogue of volumes has left behind it a certain personal affection and sympathy, though by no means admiration, for M. de l’Aubépine; and we would fain do the little in our power towards introducing him favorably to the American public. The ensuing tale is a translation of his “Beatrice; ou la Belle Empoisonneuse,” recently published in “La Revue Anti-Aristocratique.” This journal, edited by the Comte de Bearhaven, has, for some years past, led the defense of liberal principles and popular rights, with a faithfulness and ability worthy of all praise.33 “Rappaccini’s Daughter” was first published of course under John O’Sullivan’s editorship of The Democratic Review. O’Sullivan really was the last living Count of Bearhaven.34 Importantly, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a decidedly psychological and sexual tale in the Balzacian vein about a scientist father who raises his daughter to care for poisonous plants; and she is poisoned, dying from a deadly “antidote” concocted by a rival scientist. In fact, in her 1846 essay about Balzac, Fuller had drawn on imagery from Hawthorne’s tale, reinforcing mutual associations even further: “There is a touch of the demon, also, in Balzac, the cold but gayly [sic] familiar demon; and the smile of the amateur yields easily to

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a sneer, as he delights to show you on what foul juices the fair flower was fed.”35 The friendship between Fuller and Hawthorne was poisoned post-mortem by the latter’s son, Julian Hawthorne, but such repetition suggests that their passionate discussions also covered international literature.36 Since 1839 she had been attending “conversations” at Peabody’s bookstore on such literary matters. Therefore, in his own eyes and in those of contemporary literary society, by 1850 Hawthorne was firmly situated in the French school of the romance along with Eugène Sue and George Sand, both of whom were gathering attention in America through translations. In addition to romances, short fiction makes up the massive content of La Comédie humaine in a mode of writing appropriately reformulated to an American venue in time by both Hawthorne and Melville. Of the two, Hawthorne was the first to detect and absorb the heart of Balzac’s ontology and the notion that the deterministic interactions of characters served as a functional mechanism to represent the real world. This was the perfect point in Hawthorne’s literary career to encounter Melville and begin a collaboration that empowered them both to forge an untried genre in American literature.

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y the summer of 1850, Hawthorne was successfully drawing himself out of extended metaphor into harsher and more interesting realism, with stories like “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” At the same time, The Scarlet Letter brought new attention to his writing. What talisman had Hawthorne found that suddenly turned him from the least-known to the most-popular creative writer? It is likely to have been his “artistic study” of Balzac, through which he initiated what historically turned out to be the precursor of American Realism. Before advancing through an analysis of the texts to demonstrate exactly what Hawthorne was learning from Balzac, a review of the relevant elements of Balzac’s unique vision of reality, particularly in the introduction to the La Comédie humaine and in the Etudes philosophiques, will here suggest what Hawthorne comprehended of the Frenchman’s signature achievements, especially in light of early commentators from Croker onward.

Delineating Characters One important essay that we have yet to mention presented significant insights useful to Hawthorne in articulating the details of his study during his evolutionary period. Published in July, 1844 in the 73

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widely circulating Foreign Quarterly Review, George Henry Lewes, who would become Mary Ann Evans’s partner before she took the name George Eliot, wrote a thirty-three-page essay comparing the merits of George Sand and Balzac in almost every aspect of their art. He evinced a remarkable estimation of Balzac’s writing, which relates particularly to the development of Hawthorne, who was already being soundly schooled in Balzac’s fiction: In delineation of character it would be difficult to choose between Balzac or George Sand; both are great in this department, and both very opposite in method. It is Balzac’s forte. It endows his works with a value which no faults can deprecate; overcomes all the objections raised against his tendency, style, and want of narrative power … Balzac’s knowledge of character is immense, his penetration of motive is astonishing; his works are experiences of life, psychological studies. But he imparts this knowledge like a professor, not like an artist. He analyses when he should create, describes when he should paint.1 Skillful handling of characters was required for Hawthorne if he were to enter into the fullness of his career as a writer; and while Lewes has considerable reservations about Balzac’s talents, he does stress one particular strong point—the details of motivation: Motive is more subject to observation than passion; it is of itself a thing of intellect, and by intellect can be comprehended; but the passions, while they may be observed in their effects, must be felt before their mysteries are known. The passionate experience contained in the works of George Sand is greater than those of any writer of the epoch; similar praise may be awarded to the knowledge of motive in Balzac.2

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Lewes’s comments strike a chord with Hawthorne’s own solitary nature and inward-turned, detached intellectualism, suggesting he made the best of his own nature and gifts by emulating Balzac’s approach. According to Lewes, then, the understanding and application of character motivation is Balzac’s supreme gift, and such an observation is unlikely to have escaped Hawthorne, who published “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” his first real dip into Balzacian motivation, less than six months after the publication of Lewes’s essay, only to follow it with more rich personages. In one volume Lewes was reviewing for The Foreign Quarterly Review Balzac included an introduction explaining the secret to his observation of motivation—his consistent application of a universal configuration of living beings. The hints provided in this introduction link to his “immense” knowledge of character as noted by Lewes.

Unité de composition All of Balzac’s characters perform within a consistent worldview he calls “l’unité de composition.” While he did not have our modern concepts either of Gaia, ecology, “consilience,” or any number of other similar notions popular in our time, Balzac envisioned a common intellectual institution among the humanities and sciences, in his case (as often today) through biological science. His idea is that the entire universe was made of the same substances and materials; only the form changes while the energies and forces remain the same in their arrangements and conflicts. He calls this state of the universe, of every thing, the single composition of matter, energy, and spirit. The same had to be true of characters in fiction. While Balzac had written several prefaces to different works included in La Comédie humaine as they came out, he revealed his entire ontology and methodology in the masterful preface to the assembled edition of his work in 1842. This “Avant-propos” had

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several intentions: one was to counter his detractors with philosophy; another was to elevate his writing to a national treasure. Balzac decidedly tones down the mystical aspects of his imagination and concentrates on creating an unparalleled history of a genuine moral array: The animal vegetates like the plant; we detect, I say, the rudiments of the beautiful law of subjectivity, which lies at the root of unity of composition. There is only one animal. The creator used a single and identical pattern for all organized beings. The animal is a principle that takes its external form, or, to speak more exactly, the variations in its form from the milieu in which it is obliged to develop. Zoological species are the result … Having been convinced of this system well in advance of the discussions that have taken place, I understood that in this respect Society resembled Nature. For does not society condition mankind according to the environment where his actions display as many different men as there are varieties in Zoology?3 Balzac explains that his presentation of characters rests upon this understanding: a perception ruled by a Unitism that depends on the same elements working consistently at every scale of living creation–animal, human, and divine–much like Swedenborg’s correspondences. The phrase is typically translated as “synthetic unity,” “unity of structure” or “unity of plan,” but it is all and neither one exclusively. As in English, the French composition conveys the double sense of both configuration and writing, so that Balzac’s l’unité de composition expresses a definite mode of representation in his individual narratives that reflects the realism of the cosmos. The heart of his view of mankind is clearly stated in the “Avant-propos”:

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Mankind is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and aptitudes; Society, far from corrupting him, as speculated by Rousseau, perfects him, makes him better; but interest also develops his bad tendencies … I do not share the belief in indefinite progress for Societies; I believe in the progress of man as an individual. Those who insist on perceiving in me the intention to consider man a finished creation are strangely deceived. Séraphîta, which gives what I may call the doctrine in action of the Bouddha chrétien, seems to me a sufficient response to that accusation [of immorality] lightly enough advanced elsewhere.4 Bouddha chrétien is one of those terms that seem slippery to translate, and so it remains as Balzac composed it. Most often the words are simply rendered “Christian Buddha,” but this loses the technical sense; and because of the intractability of English grammar and capitalization, tends to emphasize “Christian” and “Buddha” equally, if not favoring “Christian” by capitalizing it and putting it ahead of “Buddha.” Balzac does say in Le Médicin de campagne that Christianity, and Catholicism specifically, is a complete system for repressing the depraved tendencies of man and that it is the greatest element of social order. But in this context he is not writing of containment but moral elevation, and for that he has a specific “doctrine in action” in mind. But for all its difficulty, the “Avant-propos” expresses Balzac’s cosmic vision in direct terms, which helped put together disparate elements in Hawthorne’s mind into a framework of homogenous whole. For a writer like Hawthorne, the “Avant-propos” was not just a confession but a textbook on how to write a modern novel, since, despite the objections of Margaret Fuller, Edward Duyckinck, and others, Balzac’s books were still doing well in America. Moreover, Balzac stimulated some of the best literary criticism of the time, if by nothing else than his moral ambiguity.

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Applying the Process As Lewes contends, at the heart of Balzac’s realism are his characters. Their strength comes from the fact that he never sees them in isolation. What they do and how they think are always a reflection of a consistent universe in Balzac’s narratives, a literary ontology through which correspondences of inner, outer, and universal forces are always at work: but to deserve the praise to which every artist needs aspire, must I not also study the reasons or the cause of these social effects, detect the hidden sense in this immense assembly of figures, passions, and incidents … ?5 Therefore, the most important features of a character come from the implied causes of behavior, and the hidden sense of the actions makes up the plot. The basis of Balzac’s characterization is portrayal of the management of energetic drive, which he sometimes equates with intellectual passion, “the vital social element,” which he saw as a combination of thought and feeling. Narrative strategy emerges out of the parameters of this reality, which Balzac develops in his method of writing the romances of La Comédie humaine. This vision involves human action and reaction within a fixed set of universal forces that are “material” in that they function like actual invisible fluids that ebb and flow through individual consciousness under discernable scientific laws and limitations of attraction and repulsion. Lundblad interprets this to mean that: Balzac was an observer, a materialist, but also a visionary. [Philosopher Hippolyte] Taine classes Louis Lambert and Séraphita, two of the Etudes philosophiques most concerned with mysticism and occultism, as the climax of Balzac’s work, the achievements that crown his production “like the flower of the plant.” To Taine, these fantastic tales are the

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most complete expression of Balzac’s genius, the “cherries of the cherry-tree.”6 Therefore, the philosophical romances are not extraneous variations of Balzacian mysticism, but are the very bone structure of his vision. Along with the “Avant-propos,” they form the skeleton of what would later give substance to the movement supported by Howells and James. The fictional casebooks in this sense can be found primarily in these stories, particularly a few written between 1830 and 1833, during Hawthorne’s period of Balzac study, principally L’Elixir de longue vie, Les Proscrits, La Peau de chagrin, Louis Lambert, and Séraphîta. They do not generally put Balzac scholars at ease, for many critics do not see these romances as integral to La Comédie humaine but rather as ill-advised leftovers from Balzac’s struggling apprenticeship as a writer of pseudonymous science fiction. They would prefer to think of Balzac as Fuller presented him: the blatant, unflinching portrayer of muddy truth. But these works portray the deep philosophical understructure of La Comédie humaine, and this prevailing critical opinion belies a common misreading of these works, particularly of Louis Lambert and Séraphîta, as fantasies. The stories reflect Balzac’s profoundest perceptions, his most elaborated theory of Will, and the universal interaction of forces he observed everywhere. Again, Lundblad has rightly observed that: La Peau de Chagrin forms part of the Etudes philosophiques that are without a doubt the section of Balzac’s work most likely to have influenced readers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, even if the admirer of Anthony Trollope must have relished Balzac’s realistic pictures of contemporary French society and admired the gigantic plan of his work.7 The elements of Balzac’s ontology had been presented in another text first published in 1832 but that, frustratingly for

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him, never caught on with the book-buying public. This contribution to Etudes philosophiques came to be known as Louis Lambert, a cerebral history narrated by the alleged same author as La Peau de chagrin (probably to attract readers of that book). Emerson, who had been deeply affected by the religious composition in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, read one of the versions of Louis Lambert in 1839, in a two-volume edition with Séraphîta and Les Proscrits (about Dante exiled in Paris) entitled Le Livre mystique.8 The publication in Belgium was the salvo of a literary war Balzac was waging with the publishing network in Paris over rights and deadlines. In December of that year, Emerson sent the book to Margaret Fuller, who at that time was on good conversational terms with Hawthorne.9 He would have been shown the book by her. Such an exchange is significant, since Balzac explains that this version of Louis Lambert was expanded from the first two editions, one of which Hawthorne already owned. It became the version, with slight changes, published in La Comédie humaine henceforward. Consequently, I will be using this version of the novel for explication of Balzac’s system given its availability to him. In any case, with Louis Lambert the “Avant-propos” offered Hawthorne the keys he needed to unlock Balzac’s l’unité de composition, the formula to developing realistic characters in moral action.

Mapping Consciousness Within this universal context, Balzac identified three phenomena, which he called the animal powers or centers of gravity, as they are found in universal behavior: “Instinct,” “Abstraction,” and “Specialism.” The latter, Specialism, characterized by developed volition and by the acquisition of definite features of personal greatness above others and over physical matter, is the moral prerogative of the Great Man. Balzac’s observation is “democratic” in the sense that the degree of Specialism is not predetermined or immobile; it develops from “aptitudes” or inherent tendencies. Yet it is still a

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variant on the possible evolution of the self, moral and spiritual, with the exercise of Will. These forces are Balzac’s modification of Swedenborg’s universe, and part of a general theory of evolution based on the biological discourse of the time. He defines his terms precisely in the language of moral capacity: There are three degrees of mankind: Instinctive, below the average; Abstractive, the average; Specialism, high above both. Specialism opens to man his true career; infinity begins to dawn in him; there he perceives “his destiny.”10 Individual social, physiological, and religious values, then, fall hypothetically into a hierarchy of universal experience similar to that of the transcendentalists, topped by exceptional knowledge and recognition of truth, a state described as “superior consciousness,” la connaissance supérieure.11 According to Balzac, this destiny is to become, ultimately, a divine being; that is, a fully human being completed, superior to, and free of the mécanisme du monde of ordinary conditioned humanity and actions flowing from selfwill. It is a return to the uncorrupted state of Adam, the domain of the Perfect. This rising comprehension or expanding point of view can be charted on a scale of ascension like Jacob’s ladder (or Dante’s staircase in Paradiso), producing a definite ranking of humanity’s conscience. It is not simply a scale of superiority but a perspective of cosmic responsibility. It is precisely this version of the transcendental ladder that Melville encountered in a lecture by Emerson in 1849. One of Sealts’s important conclusions is that (as was his habit), “Melville places Emerson favorably on the vertical scale that he commonly used in estimating a man’s worth: Emerson has both elevation and depth.”12

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SPHERE OF THE DIVINE

SPHERE OF ABSTRACTION Relative Vertical Measure of Humanity SPHERE OF INSTINCT

SPHERE OF THE ANIMAL

Balzac’s Ladder of Conscience. The image presents le schème ascentionnel as explained in Louis Lambert, Le Livre mystique, 190–200.

Not birthright nor learning, but the substance of individual Will draws the person upward from lower forms of consciousness; and the accumulation of Will attracts the responses of the motivating primal forces themselves. Abstraction rightly elevates toward the Will for spiritual perfection, for change of the conscious state with positive social orientation; and the ascent becomes a definite religious scale. This ascension implies possible spiritual evolution suggested by Lamarck and Saint-Hilaire’s physical evolution. Moreover, this is a scheme of faculties and être d’exception13 not just moral justification. Although, superficially, the scheme may appear to be a mere variation on the Romantic elevation of the Great Man on the Chain of Being, moral rising is much more complex and far-reaching than that, and contains a social element of altruistic participation. According to Balzac, “At Abstraction, Society begins. If Abstraction, as compared with Instinct, is an almost divine

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power, it is incredibly weak compared to the gift of Specialism, which alone can explain God.”14 We see comparable consciousness in The Scarlet Letter, in the socialization of Hester and the innocence of her daughter after the trials they endure. In Balzac’s scheme this sort of incorruptible, divine type can be identified in characters like Daniel d’Arthez, Joseph Brideau, Séraphîta/Séraphitüs, and the doctors Maurice Bianchon and Minoret. To regain the human perfection of the Adamic ideal, one needs properly to arrive at a state of Will through altruistic thinking, or the proper education provided by a good society. Therefore, the quality and the action of the force of Will determine human character on the whole, and Will, what might be called “conscious volition (volonté),” is the only thing in man, notes Balzac in another of the Etudes philosophiques, that comes close to what has been called “the soul”: These simple creatures were indifferent to thought and its treasures, but ready to sink everything in a belief; making their faith more robust because they had never disputed nor analyzed it; virgin natures where conscience remained pure and feeling strong; repentance, trouble, love, and work have exerted, purified, concentrated, and redoubled, their will—the only thing in mankind that resembles what savants call a soul.15 Here Balzac clarifies the possibility that the soul, the highest manifestation of fully realized humanity, is in fact synonymous with individual volonté and its complete development apart from intellection and discourse. A religious hue is thus cast on Will. To perfect himself and become complete, man must develop his inner being, by forging and exercising Will. Elsewhere, Balzac suggests: The most beautiful human geniuses are those who departed the shadows of Abstraction to reach the lights of Specialism.

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network (Specialism, species, sight; speculation, or seeing everything, and all at once; Speculum, a mirror or means of recognizing something by seeing the whole of it.)16

In the Introduction to La Peau de chagrin, Balzac describes the wisdom of Specialism differently but in a way that sheds light on the anticipated Specialist. Authentic geniuses have a particular ability to face the truth unflinchingly: It is a sort of second sight, which permits them to call up the truth in every possible situation, or, better still, I know not what power which transports them there where they must or wish to be. They invent the truth by analogy, or see the object to describe, or the object comes to them, or they themselves go toward the object …. These men, do they have the power to bring the universe into their brains, or is the brain a talisman with which they abolish the laws of time and space?17 Balzac’s character-building process of observation and subsequent unity of composition is explained through the practice of the “great writer” in La Comédie humaine, Daniel d’Arthez. The method is widely understood to be that of Balzac himself, and has been called by Paul Bourget “retrospective penetration”: Probably he lays hold of the elements of experience and casts them into a seeming retort of reveries. Thanks to an alchemy somewhat analogous to that of Cuvier, he was enabled to reconstruct an entire temperament from the smallest detail, and an entire class from a single individual; but that which guided him in his work of reconstruction was always and everywhere the habitual process of philosophers: the quest and investigation of causes.18

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Hawthorne is frequently depicted as falling into this sort of state, sometimes even in company. Finally, Balzac explains that this scheme is not of his own creation, but that it came through him by his studies in mysticism. According to the preface of Le Livre mystique, Balzac points out that “Mysticism is precisely Christianism in its pure principle. Here the author invented nothing, he proposes nothing new; he has put down a work of buried treasures, he has plunged into the sea and there took virgin pearls for the necklace of his Madonna.”19

Reaction and Action Any dualism in Balzac’s system between the interior man of divine substance and the external mechanics of social conflicts, although deterministic, is merely situational and temporary—because all existence lies within a unified cosmic field of material from rock to deity.20 Character emerges as a specific accumulation of Will through personality, a blend of essence and experience. Some readers have assumed Gnosticism, occultism, or forms of pantheism to be at the core of Balzac’s ontology; but this is not a full reading. What is depicted is the source of strength in consistent individual motivation, a definite psychology that reflects the insight of Mesmer and anticipates Schopenhauer: “the whole of our Volitions and our Ideas constitutes Action, and the whole of our external acts, Réaction.”21 Again, this becomes clear as allegory is muted in the later tales of Hawthorne. Action equals the functioning level of consciousness, so that an individual can be only who and where he is on this scale in any given instant, since his level of action is determined by his essence and understanding. The stair of consciousness is traversed by the unfolding of particular capacities to visualize the mechanism of the universe directly and completely while holding one’s individual higher part inviolate against the vulnerabilities of life. While this concept composes the ground of Balzac’s famous determinism it

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is also perceived much like Buddhist Karma, which also means “action.” To continue the religious analogy from the Hindus and Buddhists, the Specialist is the evolutionary result of performance over several personal lives (seven, according to Séraphîta) of struggle and growth in a process of deliberate metempsychosis and metamorphosis of the human essence. George Frederic Parsons comments on the implications of this supposition: Human destiny, according to this theory, is a painful course of elevation and emancipation; a working out of what we call Matter into what we call Spirit,—but which really is merely different conditions of one primal substance …. These three worlds must be traversed in turn by souls of men, which in these journeyings must pass through three stages, namely the Instinctive, the Abstractive, and the Specialist.22 In Séraphîta, the companion story in Le Livre mystique already read in some edition by Hawthorne, according to his sister-in-law, Balzac has one of his characters explain further: Swedenborg calls angelic Spirits the beings who, in this world, are prepared for heaven, where they become Angels. According to him, God did not create Angels specifically; none exist that have not been men upon earth. Earth is the nursery-ground of heaven …. These Spirits are, so to speak, the flowers of humanity, which culminates in them and works toward this culmination. They must have either the Love of heaven or the Wisdom of heaven, but they are always in Love before in Wisdom. 23 Balzac retains the “realistic” tenet of the primacy of the material world that subdues the will-less and becomes the instrument

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of the person of Will. Since, as we have seen, Balzac considers Will to be the truest description of the “soul,” perfecting Will is the central concern of the extraordinary individual. This idea, too, contains within it a definite religious aspect. In the thread of reincarnation, Will is a self-cultivating agency. Hawthorne’s characters in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables particularly undergo this kind of change.

A Clash of Magnets For the purposes of analyzing fiction, the taxonomy of distinctive behavior, often called Balzac’s physiology (which Margaret Fuller found quite tedious), can also be charted on a planar layout to express psychological reactions and interdependencies, dealings, and external acts, determined by interior psychological orientations. The arrangement represents the circulation of forces (perceived as comparable to physical fluids) throughout life in the universe. As Jared Wenger has pointed out, this is a matter of the function of character in narrative, not a matter simply of the personality of the character in question.24 Max Andréoli calls this a “contradiction of antagonistic essences” (contradiction des essences antagonistes)25 and represents the concentration scheme (le schème de la concentration), which is a refiguring of the unitary and ascending schemes given above.26 By developing Andréoli’s reflection and charting this scheme in its dialectical form, readers can observe multiple characters of a text in their proper narrative relationships synchronistically. The spheres of different forces of passionate energy then cohere into definite personality types. It is within the field of these reactions that, for Balzac, all human events occur and all true plots in romances are constructed. Hawthorne discovered that Balzac created characters using this carefully referenced and detailed architecture, which builds the oppositions in correspondence within the unity of composition. He invents his fictional persons following the standards from his

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observations of reactive mechanisms in ordinary life by envisioning (like Schiller) certain “superior functions” or motivations in different individuals reflective of the unified forces in his ontology. Instinctive characters displaying the force of bodily activity, abstractive characters employing the force of mind-activity, and specialist characters empowered with Will or divine force obtained by great effort and suffering, respond to one another within a definite magnetic arena of psychophysical tension. This model is not reductionist; it is a map of human spiritual (and physical) territory as observed by Balzac. Men and women in his stories fall around these three psychological cores with passions and capabilities functioning across the dialectical matrix. In the sense of motivation they become the antinomies du mouvement according to Andréoli, of the unified lifesubstance.27 Each of the centers of gravity or points of the dramatic triangle draws out of human consciousness certain overt behavior that exposes the moral nature of a character’s inner worth or poetic significance within the narrative and in the cosmic scheme.28 As perfected humanity, the Specialists serve as the charismatic representatives of the vital idea that compels lower types to act. They are characterized by innocent altruism and community contribution. This formal organization serves as the paradigm of “mécanisme du monde” that inevitably snares humanity. The most extraordinary characters perceive this limitation in their individual efforts to go beyond the condition of the masses and the deterministic process of the world. This is the expression of what Lewes called the mastery of intention of the characters, and Hawthorne understood this process. How potential Specialists respond to the confrontation with reality determines the social and spiritual outcomes of their actions. Says Louis Lambert, “The Specialist is necessarily the most perfect expression of MANKIND, and he is the link binding the visible world to the higher worlds; he acts, sees, and feels by his INTERIOR. The Abstractive thinks. The Instinctive acts.”29 The two “lower” types share a predilection for reactive intellect (habitual mind-activity as opposed to wisdom or consciousness),

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which prevents them from engaging the subtle influences or sensitivities of emotion that the Specialist intuitively appreciates as divine truth. In undesirable circumstances, this passion is self-destructive: excess of thought (passion and intellection), for example, destroys the thinker thoroughly. In Balzac’s understanding, the forces of Instinct and Abstraction attract or repel one another “magnetically,” depending on chance circumstances or the inevitable causes and effects of determinism in what Andréoli calls a unique “antagonisme des sphères.”30 Abstractive force is naturally drawn to Specialism by charisma or a sense of longing. Conversely, there is a contrasting field between Specialism and Instinct, not from rejection by an Almighty God, but owing to internal negativity of envy and jealousy inherent to the lower type. This field is not necessarily repellant, for the instinctive person is drawn to the Specialist by the same negative attitude that characterizes his own lack of altruistic feeling. Magnetic force translates into character types that necessarily react to each other in predictable (determined), lawful, universal ways. ANGELIC OR SPECIALIST CHARACTERS Superior Consciousness

Positive Attraction Admiration

Negative Attraction Resentment Changeable Attraction INSTINCTIVE CHARACTERS Passion

ABSTRACTIVE CHARACTERS Passion

(Lower types depend on the cleverness, the negativity of spontaneous reactive thought)

Balzac’s character arrangement on interactive scale, le schème de concentration as demonstrated in narrative action.

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Angelic or fully realized moral characters are original to Balzac. Both the Instinctive and the Abstractive types are identified (Schiller’s term) with the charismatic Specialist. However, this is a negative attraction for the Instinctive character in the sense that this motivation borders on obsession and functions through the emotions of jealousy or revenge. Yet the Specialist character is not threatened by or in fear of the Instinctive, owing to the intense energy of Will and detachment from any form of evil by spiritual elevation. The unobstructed attraction of the Abstractive toward the Specialist is love. Together these prototypes embody the forces that shape the narrative and the configuration of Balzac’s plots. As we will demonstrate shortly, Hawthorne came to understand this pattern and to use it effectively.

The Mixed Type There is one more crucial development in the paradigm that proves immensely important in the success of the romances and short stories in La Comédie humaine as well as Hawthorne’s evolving creativity. That element involves the place of the Balzacian misfit and his use of the word “genius.” Just below the Specialist in power and action of Will lies an important type of specialist character in gestation, as it were: to these Balzac gives the particular name “Genius”: “Between the sphere of Specialism and that of Abstractivity is found, as between the latter and that of Instinctivity, beings in whom the diverse attributes of both realms blend and produce mixtures; men of genius.”31 But the Geniuses’ evolution to Specialism has in a way stalled or “crystallized” to leave them stuck, somehow, in the “incomplete” state of their present condition.

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SPECIALIST (Characterized by Will)

Negative Attraction Resentment

INSTINCTIVE

SUPERIOR GENIUS (Characterized by charismatic domination)

ABSTRACTIVE INFERIOR GENIUS (Characterized by “Cleverness”)

(All characterized by vehemence and extreme intellectuality [reactive “thinking”])

Balzac’s perception of Genius as it appears in narratives about “ontological heroics” as conceived by Melville and Hawthorne.

The “lower” Geniuses are represented in Balzac’s fiction as typical Romantic villains: the banker Gobseck, Madame de St. Estève, Goriot, etc. We will not concern ourselves much with these characters; they are occasionally flat and conventional and are typically like the petty thieves abundant in Romantic prose. Lewes was aware of this aspect of Balzac’s characters, but he misunderstood their place in l’unité de composition: Although thus warmly recognising Balzac’s truth and accuracy in his depiction of character, there are one or two points which demand refutation. Having, as we said, observed life more than he has felt it; and having reasoned on character more than he has sympathized with and understood it; he has fallen into the very natural error of over-rating the powers of intelligence. He is fond of making men succeed in great and complicated undertakings by mere force of cunning calculation. Du Tillet, Rastignac, De Marsay,

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However, these characters exist as examples of weakness, of persons not even able to reach a state of abstraction, where they may at least acquire a sense of morality. Intellect is not equal to consciousness.

Ontological Geniuses Of singular conception in Balzac is the superior or volitional Genius. He or she borders on the Specialist and possesses superior Will but does not yet evince the moral substance required to elevate the soul to Divine. They stand in a position against Nature and against God. Rather than cultivating sympathy, the superior Genius has nurtured crime in its deepest moral sense. Henri Gauthier points out this contrast and its consequences: Specialism introduces a mode of superior consciousness. It is the attribute of the INTERIOR MAN, whose predominant faculty is intuition … it permits direct penetration into the thoughts of others, it transcends time and space, it is independent of sensation … The man of genius is a mixed being who possesses partly the power of abstraction and partly the gift of specialism.33 This being, who is rare and more advanced than the Instinctive and the undeveloped Abstractive possesses no philanthropic force and has a special fate. The Genius is inwardly drawn to supremacy by attraction or a universal flowing magnetic force but cannot cross the threshold into the state of master. It is as if the Genius skips being Abstractive altogether and jumps directly from Instinct into a higher plane of corrupted awareness. As a hybrid type, these Geniuses do not possess the whole goodness of the Angel; they devote themselves to egoistic mischief almost as consciously

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and with as much precision as the aware Specialist contributes to impersonal, social unselfishness. Besser explains it this way: There is a demonic side to the acquisition of inordinate power and knowledge, an infernal snare that awaits the unwary. The weak man falls an easy prey to the devil; his eagerness for power and knowledge beyond his capacities traps him into Satan’s age-old bargain.34 Thus the accountant Castanier is trapped initially by his own ambiguous morals. Such characters are uniquely Balzacian and include some evil individuals of immense personal power and awareness, like Balthazar Claës, John Melmoth, Cousine Bette, and first and foremost, Jacques Collin, the infamous Vautrin. Yet they are still subject to the magnetism of collective attraction; the infernal and fabulous Vautrin is nonetheless drawn inexorably to the angelic Lucien de Rubempré. Vautrin, too, is yearning to be an Angel, but one of the demoniacal sort—godlike but yet immune to the ennobling influences of society. Such negative efforts driven by egoism always lead to criminality or madness (as in Balthazar Claës’s monomania), because these characters are inherently antisocial. The Genius has complete, almost hypnotic control over the lower types and manipulates them by the power ascribed to mesmerism. He or she expresses the “shadows” of self-interest as opposed to the “lights” of Specialism.

Applying the Ideas Hawthorne first began trying this scheme in his short stories before attempting his own romance based on the interaction of the unique forces of unité de composition. In March, 1843 he published “The Birth-mark,” in which he applies this triad. Georgiana is clearly the angel figure in the story. She is literally “perfect” except for the tiny birthmark which she can cover with two fingers on her cheek. Her

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husband, Aylmer, represents the Balzacian Genius, an Abstractive scientist unable to move into the sphere of the Specialist because of his intellectual obsessions. Perhaps most dramatically depicted in the short story is the character of Instinct, whom Aylmer could not do without: Forthwith there issued from an inner apartment a man of low stature, but bulky frame, with shaggy hair hanging about his visage, which was grimed with the vapors of the furnace. This personage [Aminadab] had been Aylmer’s underworker during his whole scientific career, and was admirably fitted for that office by his great mechanical readiness …35 Immediately upon his introduction, Aminadab is opposed to the abstractive scientific Genius and serves as a force of resistance. Aylmer is exposed by his own log as a type of failing Promethean genius: “He handled physical details as if there were nothing beyond them; yet spiritualized them all and redeemed himself from materialism by his strong and eager aspiration towards the infinite.”36 By representing faithfully Balzac’s “mixed creature,” he becomes the first of Hawthorne’s failed scientists. Hawthorne attempted the same scheme the following year in “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” again using the obsessed scientist as the unfortunate Genius. In this case the “normal” abstractive is introduced into the pattern in the character of Giovanni, who falls in love with the apparent Angel, Beatrice. The instinctive rival of Rappaccini, Baglioni, plays the role of the antagonist, defeating the Genius not with Specialism but with cunning trickery, as Balzac’s triangular representation predicts.

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A Full-Blown Romance After his apprenticeship in short fiction, Hawthorne developed his awareness of character motivation profitably. He moved forward to the more complex and at once less rigid The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne is a character whose calm intuition takes her beyond the ordinary Instinctive and Abstractive types. By taking upon herself the physiognomic letter “A,” she resigns to a state of intentional suffering for the benefit of those she loves. She is both Adulteress and Angel. She is “heroic” in her return to town, her devotion to public service, and her nurturing of Pearl. She transforms her inner being through the agency of her innocent daughter into an angelic (also signed with “A”) existence by the end of The Scarlet Letter, although she is not a fully “perfected” human being by the vertical measure. She demonstrates Specialism and altruism relative to other major characters and gravitates toward the pole of superior conscience. By bearing society’s “A” as well she is both the “original Adam” in Balzac’s sense, and the capstone of the social pyramid. Dimmesdale, on the other hand, is Abstractive in the same dialectic; he seethes in guilt, unable to deter the Will that Hester obviously comes to demonstrate. He is plagued with thoughts of worthlessness and sin, a victim of society’s official Puritan morality. Chillingworth provides the Instinctive or nearly animalistic psychology to the plot. He may be classed as a minor Genius in the Balzacian sense, as he is a “mixed” character with a certain cleverness of the Abstractive. Ultimately, the narrative revolves around the psychological interaction of these forces personified. We can see that Hawthorne used the same virtual scheme again in The House of the Seven Gables, but with greater detail and effect. In this narrative, Clifford Pyncheon takes on the role of the innocent and recaptures the life he has unjustly lost to years of torment in prison: a version of intentional, truly “Christian” suffering and transformation. And there is no guarantee that the “angel” can survive. He moves above the consciousness he is “assigned” by life

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through his undeserved suffering (a necessity upon which Balzac insists). Holgrave is an Abstractive sort who uses science, ideas, and what mixture he possesses of Specialism (mesmerism) to repair the past. Jaffrey Pyncheon, the enduring Instinctive who dies of bodily self-consumption, is the antagonist who clings selfishly to the extension of the Pyncheon legacy. By using the same forces of tension in his romances as Balzac and without borrowing in any way the content, Hawthorne was able to retain his American orientation although he did write somewhat like a Frenchman in cosmopolitan network terms. Moreover, in promoting the idea that extraordinary crime shares some of the traits of extraordinary consciousness, Hawthorne has again taken a clue from La Comédie humaine. In fact, the two novels Hawthorne wrote during his contact with Melville tend to show an identical rhetorical situation formulated on evil to that demonstrated in Balzacian classics: A crime against society and the social fabric has been committed (by Col. Pyncheon; by Fauntleroy), which has resulted indirectly in the rise to power of a witch or wizard (the Maules; Westervelt) with mesmeric powers over the actions of a daughter or granddaughter of the original sinner (Alice and Phoebe; Priscilla and Zenobia).37 Thus instinctive crime elicits reaction from abstractive justice to free angelic innocence. Lundblad recognizes Balzac’s practice as a possible direct stimulus to Hawthorne’s moral darkness: “Balzac’s descriptions of geniuses, immolating the happiness of others to the exigencies of their own self-realization may have contributed to the shaping of Hawthorne’s bearers of the ‘unpardonable sin.’”38 Hawthorne’s method is a direct representation of what Balzac considered a law of radical subjectivity (Self for Self ) or self-preservation and expresses a strong criticism of Goethe’s interpretation of consciousness. It is likely that in this context Hawthorne was not

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averse to borrowing “plot themes and technical approaches” from Balzac.39

Configuration, Not System The complete temperament/physiology dialectic perceived by Hawthorne thus reflects characters possessing certain motivational “charges” that interact with each other according to unalterable affinities and repulsions. The advantage in using this template is in the place-holding of the characters, not necessarily in the moral qualities on the vertical measure. The forces acting between the poles create the motivations, causes, and actions in any narrative. Some readers, like Somerset Maugham,40 view this scheme as merely an application of shallow convention; but something more subtle than simply “each one to his humor” is disclosed upon close examination. The types are not traditional clichés but, as Balzac maintains, derived uniquely by him from careful observation of real human types and are far more realistic than mere stock characters. Furthermore, most characters in La Comédie humaine are persons of combined traits; very few are “pure.” It is not the type but the power that is crucial in Balzacian analysis and representation. This discovery leads to a recognition of moral ambiguity that sets Balzac’s fictional population apart from the usual Romantic personae of good and evil melodrama, and lays the groundwork for the more regimented realism found in later writers like James.

Physiognomy An essential support system to Balzac’s physiology that unifies La Comédie humaine is the literary coordination with popular psychology of the day. Balzac wanted his realism to be accurate according to contemporary conversation, and for this he turned to the writings of current popular science, since the function of observation depends on the same premise of Unitism that Balzac

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proposed: on the invisible side of a man, his psychological and moral condition, and is by nature (in our century we might suggest DNA) reflected on his physical form, his body. Principally, emerging psychology denied the purely arbitrary in human existence and stated that for each effect observable by the physiognomic reader, an interior cause might be accurately discovered and assigned. Therefore, the greatest realistic value for the romance writer from the representational point of view was linguistic. Affiliated with Swedenborg’s experiments in universal language, practitioners explicitly employed the metaphor of the text, of language, to define their agenda in the creation of a repertoire of human behavior. Clearly, the application of acknowledged psychological discourse to the creation of fictional characters was of compelling importance to representational strategy. When Balzac describes his characters in physical detail, he is not extrapolating his realism without purpose: every physical trait can be a sign not just of the social and cultural role of the character, but can also correspond to hidden moral and metaphysical affiliations. According to Christopher Rivers, Balzac’s writing was “the most explicitly physiognomic of the many European writers of the period from 1800 to 1850,” and he was most admired for his ability to “objectively” apply such scientific principles to his depiction of human beings.41 Moreover, appearances and seeing become the primary activities of practitioners of this science, and of the Balzacian novelist also. In the very broadest sense of the term, the belief in an essential, visible link between physical and metaphysical domains, Balzac’s very purpose in writing the Comédie humaine is “physiognomical.” His work is thus in keeping with [Johann Caspar] Lavater’s own enterprise: the recognition of the importance of superficial, physical details in their capacity as signifiers. For Balzac, any man is an “homme hiéroglyphié” with the “text” of his existence

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written on him. Through the medium of physiognomical description, all narrative becomes self-explanatory.42 Importantly, Rivers emphasizes that the physiognomy of Balzac is primarily metaphorical and theoretical, rather than practical. It is far more valuable in his hands than its mere scientific formalism or its banal derivations in popular phrenology. Thus, as a writer, Balzac used physiognomic vocabulary to create characters without crediting the science with any ability to help men and women in life. Its primary element was the playing out of magnetic antagonisms between the various spheres of self-imagination, and thus between individual egos. Instead of turning to the old forms of Romantic allegory per se, Balzac used psychological correspondences to draft his characters from different points of view in his unified program and employed realistic details to show links to higher valuation in the cosmos of deterministic mechanicalness. In Balzac’s words: Physiognomy has created a true science. It has finally taken its place among the fields of human knowledge … The habits of the body, writing, the sound of the voice, manners have more than once illuminated the woman in love, the lying diplomat, the able administrator.43

Mesmerism A consistent outward trait of Balzac’s Specialists and superior Geniuses is the exercise of mesmeric powers, a dangerous practice that could turn into moral dysfunction. Mesmerism looms large in Balzac’s Louis Lambert, in certain feats of telepathy, but most notably in Ursule Mirouet, where the entire plot rests on the reality of a subtle mental communication to save the heroine’s fortune. Mesmerism was portrayed as a vehicle of heightened consciousness, an awakening of the interior man to his essence and to new

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forms of intuition—good or evil, of course, according to free will and its deterministic consequences. Balzac’s depiction was in line with Mesmer’s original vision, since he had attempted to apply the laws of Newton universally to electricity and magnetism, not just to celestial but to all bodies, including human beings in a lawful universe.44 As Balzac depicts one Specialist practitioner of mesmerism: This great but unknown man, who is still alive, was not only capable of personally curing the cruelest, most deeprooted diseases from a distance … he could instantly induce the strangest symptoms of hypnotism by quelling even the most rebellious temperaments. He claims to derive his power directly from God and to communicate, like Swedenborg, with the angels; his face is like a lion’s full of concentrated, irresistible energy.45 By specializing one’s forces, the philosophy of magnetism was thought to provide the key to action between psychological and physical space. Additionally, social myth found the submission and loss of Will demoniacal action on the part of the mesmerist, and was of great general interest. As in physiognomy, the eyes are the principal tools in identifying mesmeric states: witness Balzac’s Madame de St. Estève in La Comédie humaine. During his lifetime, Balzac was thought to be a clairvoyant. How else, his rivals and supporters alike believed, could he have penetrated so well the motivations and the inner lives of his characters? Much of this ability was ascribed to his interest in mesmerism. Banking on popular familiarity with the general theories of Lavater, references strongly reminiscent of Mesmer were employed in calculated experiments to give the author more realistic leverage, more details to interest readers, because the psychological vocabulary of mesmerism and its real and imagined consequences was well comprehended by the general public, even in America. For

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Balzac, plunging into and articulating the depths of the inner workings of his characters replaced the conventions of moralizing and emotional hyperbole current in the Romantic novel. To do this effectively and interestingly, he applied, in his “noble lie” of fiction, the poetic application of what we would now term pseudoscience. In a seemingly shared application of the art of mesmerism, Hawthorne exploits it just as Balzac does. Hawthorne’s principal character in The House of the Seven Gables, Holgrave, is a mesmerist. Balzac’s mesmerism is an amoral form of manipulative science, in that it can be used for either good or ill, depending on the operator. Emphasis on eyes and their assumed energetic powers is important in any incident of mesmeric action. Matthew Maule has an “evil eye”; but there is a positive side to his character that relates directly to Specialism. This was Hawthorne’s principal objection to mesmerism—not to the science itself but its frequent application by charlatans. The practice turns up again in The Blithedale Romance practiced by Hollingsworth more in the form used by Balzac’s villains than previously by Hawthorne. Robert C. Fuller points out: Psychological ideas were, so to speak, the lowest common denominator to which America could reduce otherwise hopelessly abstract considerations of how to align themselves with the greater scheme of things … Its psychological terminology transposed the form of personal piety from categories of theological transcendence to those of psychological immanence, thus accommodating the conceptual needs of an increasingly pluralistic culture.46 In comparison with Hawthorne’s later work, Stoehr points out just how important was this Balzacian concentration on mesmerism: The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance are better novels if for no other reason than the fortunate

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Balzac once again was a global instigator of mesmeric motivations in the romance. Samuel Chase Coale goes even farther and attributes a specific variety of mesmerism to Hawthorne himself: As a writer of what he called romances, he often saw himself as a kind of mesmerist/medium in which he used the very forces he himself morally opposed to describe and produce techniques and strategies of his art. His writing exhibits significant parallels with mesmerism and examines the psychology of idolatry—the compulsive veneration of certain objects as icons—that he sees operating within it.48 Stoehr corroborates that Hawthorne had learned a definite representational strategy of creating character types in his writing and that he experimented with physiognomic description and mesmerism, “not merely as a method of characterization, but as a mode of literary consciousness”: When we turn from these life sketches to the imaginative renderings of characters in The House of the Seven Gables— as Hawthorne himself did—we can see how thoroughly this mode of literary consciousness had taken over his art …. In his novel the use of physiognomy as a focus of attitude and motive is even more thorough going, but depends less on narrowly descriptive passages punctuated by conjecture. Instead we find generous elaborations suggestive of personality and intimate circumstances. On first acquaintance each character is described both physically and spiritually in terms of physiognomy.49

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Since the “hieroglyphical man” is so inescapably associated with Balzac, it is likely Hawthorne discovered the usefulness of such vocabulary through the unité de composition in La Comédie humaine.

Sexuality One can sense a similar tendency in Hawthorne’s and Balzac’s writing relating to sexual material. Although The Scarlet Letter does not possess the abundance of “peccant matters” found in much of Balzac, it is one of the first American romances to deal frankly with illicit sexuality and to question the administration of Christianity in society, both frequent themes of Balzac. Likewise, it was this romance that propelled Hawthorne to literary prominence. The House of the Seven Gables also follows some darkly conceived themes of seduction, while a number of critics have found implied homosexuality between Hollingsworth and Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance. By getting his multilayered writings past both Sophia Hawthorne and the Duyckinck establishment, Hawthorne was a forerunner in the realistic presentation of sexual conflicts in American literature. The success of Cecil Dreeme verifies the connection of Tickner and Fields between Balzac and Hawthorne in this regard, at least.

Thinking as Destructive The Balzacian concept that thought destroys the thinker is evident in Hawthorne’s explanation of Ethan Brand’s moral condition in the tale named after him. Brand originally was the central character not in a short story, but in “an abortive romance” possibly attempted at least partially during Hawthorne’s discussions with Melville. Hawthorne’s idea of unpardonable sin in fact derives from a Protestant interpretation of Balzac’s perception of crime, which softens much of the hopelessness of the deterministic mechanism.50 Based on such romances as Melmoth réconcilié and La Recherche de

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l’Absolu, Hawthorne offered the possibility of redemption, if not Christian, at least one based on faith in goodness or even in the positive power of human understanding, in each of the despicable characters he creates. Therefore, one may envision Brand’s “unpardonable sin” in a broader novelistic context. We do not know with whom he has been in contact, only his individual crime: He began to be so [evil] from the moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect. And now, as his highest effort and inevitable development—as the bright and gorgeous flower, and rich, delicious fruit of his life’s labor—he had produced the Unpardonable Sin!51 Balzac’s central character in Melmoth réconcilié (a novel Stein claims influenced Hawthorne)52 suffers from a similar condition: “His interior self had burst forth. In a moment, his brain was enlarged, his senses had expanded. His thought embraced the whole world, he saw things as if he had been placed at a prodigious height.”53 These characters ultimately led to an attempt at creating a Balzacian Genius in The Blithedale Romance, perhaps Hawthorne’s least effective work in this period. The mildly criminal Westervelt is seen as deterring the successes of the Abstractive Hollingsworth in part, but not totally impeding him. Westervelt’s mesmeric power over Priscilla obstructs Hollingsworth’s philosophic achievement but not his romance with her. Coverdale, whose instinct at once causes him difficulties, confesses his identification with Priscilla, which Hollingsworth has impeded by his active courtship. Priscilla holds the superior Angelic place until the veiled girl is revealed, and steps aside much as Hester does for Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, in unselfish and communal humility.

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Architectural Details Additionally, Balzac’s mannerism of diverting the reader to endless details of the environment, as is readily apparent, is not unknown to Hawthorne, who was using it in 1851 to describe his house of seven gables. Lundblad noted something very similar to Strachey’s observations in regard to Balzac’s use of surroundings: His realistic method may in itself have influenced Hawthorne, whose work was, in accuracy—not to say meticulousness—of portraiture comparable to that of Balzac … [we also find] the expression of what might be called a philosophy of environment … This idea is the germ of the theory that sustains the story of The House of the Seven Gables, where the old house represents the symbol of the oppressive influence of the past. Hawthorne goes further than Balzac in finding connection between the houses and the people who live in them, between architecture and “les événements de la vie humaine.”54 In fact, Lundblad adds that Hawthorne showed little interest in architecture until the 1830s, “the period when he got acquainted with Balzac’s works.”55 Such duplications and similarities classify Hawthorne, then, as a Balzac expert, qualifying him as an ideal instructor for Melville, should they encounter one another. Balzac must have been a familiar topic in the Hawthorne household, too: his son Julian translated both Melmoth Reconciled and another tale, “The Conscripts,” during his own career as a writer.

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awthorne was not the only American author making an “artistic study” of works selling well in the American marketplace. In addition to Olson’s charge that Melville was a notorious literary pickpocket, Hennig Cohen also remarked on Melville’s strong “tendency to respond to what was afloat in the popular culture.”1 Similarly, a reader can take as significant Strachey’s intuition that Melville had become “very strongly under the spell of Balzac.”2 Additionally, until the year of their meeting, both Hawthorne and Melville were in debt and shared with Balzac, not only the dream of self-sufficiency by writing alone, but real poverty. Balzac’s ultimate rise to popularity by the skill of his narratives was an object lesson for both Americans. However, while Hawthorne had, despite his earlier whining, at last by 1850 captured the popularity he wanted with The Scarlet Letter, Melville was still concerned with crafting a masterpiece; the networks and the moment seemed right to bring him a similar windfall. While Strachey notes that in Redburn Melville was developing an important Balzacian effect, at least in his villain Jackson, and it was clear in White-Jacket that he was starting to explore in depth psychological realities through the metaphor of the jacket, he was still trapped by allegory, particularly in the ponderous ending 107

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of White-Jacket, where in excruciating detail he stretches a trope of society as a sailing vessel ad nauseam. Most of Melville’s creative efforts after his trip to Europe in 1849 were devoted to working on a narrative about whaling excursions, much in the way and in the context in which he had thought about travel on men-of-war or packet boats: as another sea-faring account. The earliest extant reference to what would become MobyDick is in a letter to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., dated May 1, 1850, in which Melville told Dana, About the “whaling voyage”—I am half way in the work, & I am very glad that your suggestion so jumps with mine. It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.3 The light-hearted commentary seems to suggest something in the realm of Mardi: and a Voyage Thither, rather than something of the seriousness of White-Jacket. At the end of June he made a practical request to Bentley, his publishing house in London: In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write you now to propose its publication in England. The book is a romance of adventure founded upon certain wild legends of the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author’s own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooner …. I do not know that the subject treated of has ever been worked

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up by a romancer; or, indeed by any writer, in any adequate manner …4 This letter shows that before his extensive transformation of style, Melville was still thinking of “legends” and a “subject” “worked up” based on his experiences at sea. Either this is again an advertisement to enhance his credibility with a potential buyer, which the equivocation of being a harpooner might support (which he never had been), or it is a reflection of what was really on his mind about the nature of his representation. The record gives us another clue that Melville was promoting the same method and seeking the same results once again that had been profitable in his last two romances, “illustrated by the author’s own personal experience.” In fact, he probably used some of the very same sources as for White-Jacket to expand his composition of the whale story, if only to cut down on research time and to make use of his library collection. In his letter to Bentley, Melville is careful to note the assumed necessary ingredients: personal (documentary) experience, fiction (romance), and factual information; and he uses the word “wild,” which he had taken previously to describe Mardi. We can assume that the narrative aspects of the developing novel were as usual in the voice of a first-person speaker acting as the focus of reader attention. Whether he had included borrowed, thinly veiled elements from elsewhere is unclear, but we can imagine this to be the case given his marking in some of the scientific sources he consulted.5 And then on August 5 he told Catherine Maria Sedgwick that his new book was “mostly done—a romantic, fanciful & literal & most enjoyable presentiment of the whale fishery,—something quite new.”6 Again, even if authentic, this manuscript is being advertised as “most enjoyable”— not two words that come to mind immediately upon reading the published Moby-Dick. Melville wanted to leave impressions that he thought the book was progressing well and as he expected. He even gave an approximation of a completion date. But the phrase “latter part of the

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coming autumn” is somewhat vague. Had the whale story been entirely conceived on the same plan as his last romances, the five months since his return from England would have been enough for its composition, given that he had written two popular books within the same time frame the year before—yet he promised late autumn. Moreover, he had told Sedgewick in August it was “mostly done.” In June and August he had not yet made the decision to move out of New York, nor had he envisioned the immense demands made by manual labor on a farm coupled with family travel problems as inevitable impediments to his book’s completion, so he was not calculating time-consuming interruptions; yet he was suggesting that another five-six months may be required before the material could be sent to England. That would mean allocating to it almost as much time as he had spent on Mardi. It is tempting to surmise that this lacuna was calculated for him to take the book through the domestic printing process independently, to make distribution more attractive to the publishing networks, as he eventually tried; or perhaps the delay was somehow related to the nature of the romance, “considering its great novelty.” We may never know, but it was certainly unusual for him to begin looking for a publisher so many months before the projected completion of his manuscript, especially since his previous book was entirely finished before he set out to engage a publisher. On the practical side, Melville needed to find an approach to help his narrative live up to the promises he had made Bentley; and one very effective strategy for that success presented itself to Melville by a concurrence of significant events. Melville had returned from Europe in February 1850; in March, Tickner and Fields published a new novel, and it was an instant success—Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. The book sold out very quickly, and hardly a month later, a second edition of about 2,500 was manufactured and sold out at once. It was an American replication of what happened in France with Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, now that mass manufacture of books was developing and the “bestseller” had the means of taking

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off. Although he claimed he had not read many of Hawthorne’s tales, Melville had certainly known of his connection to the Democratic Review and Young America. The stir in New York literary circles (a rival to the Bostonian English conservatives) attracted Melville as he began to engineer his own entrance into the enterprise, implied by his business venture expected with book production. Competition was no doubt in his mind when in the summer family time disrupted his solitary labors in New York, and they all departed to Massachusetts to spend his birthday and some leisure at Robert Melvill’s farmhouse-inn, where he planned to continue wrestling with the whale manuscript.

Unfolding in Himself Although the changes in the style and organization of Melville’s romance writing between White-Jacket and Moby-Dick may seem drastic and practically spontaneous to us from historical distance, a certain preparation and mental evolution went before the discernable change. Balzac was a historian of manners, and rather than buying into a single system, composed a reflection of his contemporary society from many angles of thought, romanticism as well as realism. As fate would have it, just before Melville’s encounter with Hawthorne, he had a certain education as well in philosophic context that would help him move ahead into multifaceted literary territory. What Hawthorne did for Melville, besides introducing to him specific ideas derived from his studies of La Comédie humaine, was to direct Melville toward bringing into focus the major concepts that had been interesting him just before their intense conversations. At minimum, Hawthorne was a catalyst who brought to clarity in Melville’s mind what he had already known or intuited from reading works by and about Balzac as an exemplar of contemporary writing in Europe. At the extreme, he instructed Melville directly on Balzac’s narrative theory and scheme of characterization which he himself had deciphered. Or, most likely,

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theirs was a creative exchange leading to significant alterations in both men’s literary performance as conversations revealed hidden treasures in the idea of the unity of composition. They brought to their sessions compatible principles and techniques that not only expanded Melville’s nascent whaling story toward powerful literary effects, but would also crystallize an American ontology throughout the rest of their careers as writers. The thread of experience that helped Melville into his new style probably began a year and a half before he considered the coherent, esoteric elements discussed with Hawthorne. Melville’s preparation began first of all by gaining familiarity with and experience of ideas derived from known advocates of the transcendental mentality (such as Carlyle, Emerson, and Schiller) and newly direct encounters with the products of great minds and great beings (like Shakespeare, Swedenborg, and Lavater) who were considered the progenitors of a physiology of man’s higher and deeper nature. From here, it would not take a great leap for Melville to incorporate human psychology into the narrative as envisioned by Balzac; it would involve only the interjection of a positive dialectic into his own prepared understanding. Besides being the finest novelist of the era, Balzac had been able to condense and put into action the most successful literary practices of the period. Melville’s assimilation of these ideas was most in earnest when he began to formulate for himself the condition of the Great Man once he undertook Redburn and White-Jacket.

Looking for the Hero Melville borrowed from Duyckinck both Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and Hero-Worship, apparently to take with him to read in the Berkshires.7 It is productive to speculate where this interest arose and where Melville was going with it intellectually. Carlyle was certainly a darling of Young America, and Melville had drawn on his ideas in Mardi. In fact, he had requested a letter of introduction to Carlyle

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from Emerson, via Melville’s father-in-law, before his European trip, but the favor never materialized.8 After his trip, Melville was more amenable to Young America’s democratic agenda. Adler’s influence on Melville was mostly in the area of philosophy; and their encounters on ship mainly involved the German line deriving from Goethe. Through his reading, Melville knew that Goethe was also one of Carlyle’s German masters. Moreover, Carlyle, in his theory of heroic individuals, was an ardent physiognomist. According to Goldberg in his introduction to Carlyle’s On Heroes: As a “physiognomic reader,” Carlyle believed that a person’s inner character impressed itself on every action and utterance. He never wavered in his adherence to this ancient belief in the ability to find moral and spiritual features reflected in the face and its expressions …. Physiognomy lay at the heart of his interest in portraiture and it furnishes a guide to his approach to the pictures he offered of his heroes.9 Carlyle certainly was a catalyst and lens to bring into manifestation all of the results of Melville’s intellectual encounters of the previous year. Furthermore, as with Emerson, Balzac, and Jeunes-France, William Shakespeare is among the geniuses Carlyle lauded most highly. As Melville continued to read drama, and in particular his seven-volume Shakespeare, over the period when “The Whale” was in gestation, he clearly felt some resonance with Carlyle, especially as he took the time to read two of his books right then and only a month or so later borrowed a third one on German romance.10 For Carlyle, it was important to be around individuals of superior consciousness, because their energies tended to raise human beings of normal temper to a higher moral state by their presence alone: One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable company. We cannot look, however imperfectly,

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network upon a Great Man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which has enlightened the darkness of the world: and this is not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say, of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness;—in whose radiance all souls feel that it is well with them.11

This, then, is the source and benefit of hero-worship in Carlyle’s sense; and it reflects—particularly in employing the key term “noble”—the social value Melville associated with Emerson throughout his life. Melville tended to look at any system in motion, to keep shifting his own internal locale in relation to a set of ideas as if unwilling to be trapped, and at the same time gaining as wide a comprehension as possible.

The Trip to Greylock Melville went to celebrate his birthday and vacation in the mountains of Massachusetts in summer 1850, engaged in his own struggle as a writer with Carlyle ringing in his ears, vulnerable and not expecting the turn he was about to make in the presence of Hawthorne, whom he clearly represented after meeting him as a Great Man. And that shock was even more likely to occur than before and to provide him with another possibility that he could enter the scope and method of wide acclaim and the emerging network of world literature under the interaction in the presence, thought, and energy of a famous, popular writer. The friendship between Melville and Hawthorne is perhaps the most discussed and surely the most ambiguous relationship in American literary history. Their interaction has been examined from almost every possible angle, interpreted, and reinterpreted. We arrive at this friendship, like Melville, on a search for compositional

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keys to literature; to understand Melville’s apparent reaction to Hawthorne, one absolutely must consider Melville’s mental landscape and see where his focus was heading and on what level his spirit was active that particular afternoon of their fateful meeting and their destiny thereafter. For the moment, this encounter set the tone for an entire relationship, or at least the atmosphere of their immediate interaction. Although the records are not entirely coherent, the generally accepted chronicle of Melville’s meeting and subsequent written reaction to his encounter with Hawthorne are as follows. He met Hawthorne on August 5, 1850, during an outing up Monument Mountain in the Berkshires sponsored by David Dudley Field, a New York lawyer who lived in the area. While there were a few representatives of the Bostonian “English imitation” school, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, who ridiculed American literary nationalism,12 the majority of the party had been in some way affiliated with John O’Sullivan and the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. According to Edward Widmer, they all “had a common bond in their Review experience, and Melville was no stranger to their machinations.”13 Melville found the chance to talk extensively with Hawthorne, and at the dinner back at Field’s house that night, was probably the one who interjected some recorded comments about “SeaSerpents.” Reports Widmer: “Mathews, the author of Behemoth, would have had much to say about oversized fictitious animals.”14 Melville took up the challenge offered by Holmes against “American” literature and argued vociferously (with Carlyle’s rhetoric, no doubt) on the positive side of American self-consciousness. After Holmes had gone home, the assembly agreed that Melville should write an article for Duyckinck’s Literary World encouraging American exceptionalism in the guise of a review of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, although Duyckinck had published the book nearly three years before. The result was Melville’s notorious inflation of a national literary figure, which as well served

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as a self-justification or self-proclamation of his own thinking. The cosmopolitan Carlyle’s assurances that “Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means!” were fresh in his mind.15 These sentiments probably resonated in Duyckinck’s intention as well, since he was the original possessor of the Carlyle book Melville had recently borrowed. Critics have pointed out quite a large number of such borrowings and rhetorical echoes of On Heroes in Melville’s strategic review.16 Hawthorne apparently was completely aware of the essay’s promotional purposes and its author’s intentions, having participated on the same side of the argument himself17 in “a sparkling and unwonted manner.”18 Why Melville would agree to this assignment is not particularly mysterious, nor does his decision lie solely in his argument with Holmes, as is often proposed. Melville had clearly known about and been on the outskirts of the Young America organization since his meeting with Duyckinck in 1846, although owing to his subject matter and his own preferences, Melville was not yet an energetic campaigner for national ascendancy. But following his success with Redburn and White-Jacket, and his lengthening labors on a new whaling story, his appreciation of the group began to change. He had known about Mathews’s and Duyckinck’s first journal, Arcturus, because he had nodded to it in Mardi.19 He was also well aware that Hawthorne had become known through Duyckinck’s encouragement of his entire output in The Democratic Review (until O’Sullivan moved on, giving up the editorship). The politics of the outing and its results were an additional incentive for Melville to show his spiritual harmony with the Young America cénacle—in some hope, of course, of getting much-needed support in return. By volunteering to elevate Hawthorne in the mode of exemplary genius in the Carlylean sense, he joined fully the mutual admiration routine. Melville saw a path for help toward his own ambition to be a self-sustaining author: the recent success of The

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Scarlet Letter had made this the most lucrative time in Hawthorne’s writing career. As Sheila Post demonstrated in 2005, Melville was keenly aware of the world book market and how it could determine his success and the accomplishment of his desire to be a renowned author.20 He saw a way to be both distant from that network and yet participate in it simultaneously. At that stage in his growth as a writer, Melville was a desperate man, and he recognized Hawthorne as someone to lead him out of the commercial doldrums onto the winds of dynamic, interested readership. Perhaps in his dreams, Hawthorne would show him, if not a vision for making his writing monumental and gratifying, at least how to develop a broad, profitable performance characteristically his own: a style, a direction—something to point his artistic compass toward successful authorship. Melville contracted all his subsequent debts in this overwhelming expectation that he was just one more literary work away from establishing his fame as an agent of truth like Hawthorne. His intention was to be lodged at last in the mind of the American public as he had long wished with “masterpiece after masterpiece.”21 Melville was sincere in his professional admiration and not merely an opportunist seeking in Hawthorne a facilitator for his own expectations; but the impulsiveness, the enthusiasm, and unbounded optimism he showed at this period bespeak anxious excitement. It is clear that Melville recognized enough of world stature in Hawthorne’s efforts that they quickly established some substantial mutual ground for exchange, or so implies what diminished record there now exists, to create a common entrance into a fully American genre. Hawthorne apparently had sympathy for the young writer suffering the same financial and professional situation that he had just escaped by the power of his independent pen. A couple of days later, Hawthorne wrote to his friend Horatio Bridge: Duyckinck of the Literary World and Herman Melville are in Berkshire, and I expect them to call here this morning.

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network I met Melville the other day and liked him so much that I have asked him to spend a few days with me before leaving the area.22

Much of the remainder of his vacation, then, saw Melville benefitting the publishers, critics, editors, and booksellers of New York, and, most of all, his new mentor Hawthorne, in such a way as to prepare for himself, by his rhetoric, a niche for his own forthcoming romance.

Melville’s Bait Melville’s resulting book review, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” ostensibly composed to analyze Mosses from an Old Manse, stands at an enigmatic point in his career that has never quite been put into sensible perspective. Superficially, the essay appears to be a fervent tract promoting the objectives of an original American literature as demonstrated by Hawthorne’s native accomplishments, not much below William Shakespeare, in fact. However, given the weighty persiflage in, and rather odd circumstances surrounding, the essay, it has drawn interpretation as widespread as an infatuation or hero worship, a sexual advance, an incestuous grieving for a dead father, a love letter, an expression of extreme narcissism, or the desperate grasp of a sinking artist in danger of losing his dream. Rhetorical exaggeration to emphasize his personal posture is consistent with the disingenuous and anonymous subterfuge Melville puts into the essay, which only Julian Hawthorne (as confused as he was about the context) interpreted almost rightly: It is certainly not necessary to the vindication of Hawthorne’s fame to bracket him with Shakespeare, and to the man himself the idea must have appeared too absurdly monstrous to be understood otherwise than as covert satire, or at least as the ravings of well-meaning imbecility …23

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The substance of the accusation is, on a significant level, true.24 And yet, Hawthorne had consented to the ploy: the project was executed in the pure self-promoting spirit of Jeunes-France. While it is often repeated that in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” Melville was unintentionally, even unconsciously, projecting himself (or his perception of himself ) on the “character” Hawthorne in the review, it is more likely that Melville entered into a pact of his own choice fully aware of what he was doing. As Brenda Wineapple perceptively notes: If Eliot’s Waste Land salutes Pound as it replaces him, so too does Melville rewrite Hawthorne with his eye on a prize Hawthorne seems already to possess. Did Melville believe, or hope, or fantasize that he could surpass his Berkshire neighbor as profound truth teller, afire with humanity? … if Melville found in Hawthorne another writer attempting to shake and agitate “the tribe of ‘general readers’” (Corr. 192), he also envied the other’s skill, his standing, and his circumspection.25 Melville saw in Hawthorne’s efforts traces of the evil characters found in Balzac, and he wanted to find out how Hawthorne had captured that effect without accusation of imitation. Unfortunately, most readers have taken the political propaganda far too seriously and have missed the underlying parody and irony that become obvious in Melville’s writings not long after the review’s publication. Melville had spent nearly five years on the fringes of Young America, whose opinions he shared, participating in loose association with the group because he had anticipated consistent support throughout his writing career, particularly from Evert Duyckinck. Melville had accepted the bold step, then popular in Europe and particularly in France, of hoping to make his living from his writing alone; he may even have engaged in

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his sea adventures in order to gain unique material with which to foster a signature American narrative perspective. Melville had begun to show new interest in the concept of the Great Man and the Carlylean hero the year before, and he had read much of the Scott’s writing up to the time of his sojourn in the Berkshires—so the idea of the moral hero was in his thoughts. Consequently, one source for Melville’s portrayal of Hawthorne is a story in Mosses from an Old Manse itself: “A Select Party.” It not only reflects Hawthorne’s hurt at being ignored, but suggests a great boost for the ideology of the American genius. In Hawthorne’s story, the host accedes to a humble visitor with light in his eyes (a prototypical Great Man) rather than the elite and prosperous party surrounding them: And who was he; Who, but the Master Genius, for whom our country is looking anxiously into the mist of time, as destined to fulfil the great mission of creating an American literature, hewing it, as it were, out of the unwrought granite of our intellectual quarries. From him, whether moulded in the form of an epic poem, or assuming a guise altogether new, as the spirit itself may determine, we are to receive our first great original work, which shall do all that remains to be achieved for our glory among the nations.26 Thus Melville was not exposing anything particularly personal about Hawthorne, or anything new. He writes the article under a pseudonym, “a Virginian Spending July in Vermont,” as a ruse to disguise his affiliations. In fact, Melville even uses the deception that he never met Hawthorne in order to bring the point home that his praise had nothing personal in it: In treating of Hawthorne, or rather of Hawthorne in his writings (for I never saw the man; and in the chances of

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a quiet plantation life, remote from his haunts, perhaps never shall)…27 And here lies the remarkable spin to the entire piece: Melville whets the reader’s interest for a book marketed years previously and likely sorely depleted or out of print to get customers into the bookstores, only to have them referred to Hawthorne’s latest book, of which there would have been plenty on sale. Such an ingenuous feint allowed him to give advantage to Hawthorne and the book industry without overtly making his review a fluffy advertisement. Graham Robb writes of a parallel instance in France surrounding the publication of Balzac’s: La Peau de chagrin: The novel finally went on sale, two days after Balzac finished writing it, on 1 August 1831. It was swept in on such a wave of publicity that it sold out before it reached the bookshops: extracts in the papers, a reading in the salon of Mme Recamier, articles from Balzac’s network of “Balzacking” friends (as one of them said) in the provinces, and a pleasant review in La Characature by Count Alexandre de B—[Balzac himself ].28 By 1850 Melville had likely also read, from some source yet to be discovered, Balzac’s “Avant-propos” to La Comédie humaine as had Hawthorne, since in the essay Melville makes a number of theoretical comments about American literature, some of which seem almost borrowed from Balzac: Melville: The great mistake seems to be that even with those Americans who look forward to the coming of a great literary genius among us, they somehow fancy he will come in the costume of Queen Elizabeth’s day …. Whereas, great

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Balzac: First, the characters whose existence exceeds and becomes more authentic than that of the generation into which they were born, only live on the condition that they be a vast reflection of the present. Conceived in the womb of their century, the whole heart of humanity stirs within their frame, where often hides an entire philosophy.30 It is misreading and misleading to think that praise for Hawthorne, however hyperbolic, had much personal attraction in it. Even as late as February 1851, Melville mentions to Duyckinck that his opinion had not changed after months of conversations; it is only Hawthorne’s skill with narrative and characters that impresses him, not his person;31 “I regard Hawthorne (in his books) as evincing a quality of genius, immensely loftier, & more profound, too, than any other American has shown hitherto in the printed form.”32 After having spent six months with him, Melville still looked on Hawthorne as a Great Man in his books—that is, in his mastery of fiction only. The parentheses reveal Melville’s mental separation between the writer’s personality and his art. He realized that technique is not necessarily dependent on the technician. Moreover, Melville was cautious to emphasize that his opinion referred here to American authors particularly, not fiction in general. This sentence may be the best proof available that Melville’s interest in Hawthorne was primarily professional, not personal. The ideal and coming American genius is the true central character of “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (Melville uses the word “genius” nineteen times in fourteen pages). The epitome of his understanding of this character initially is that of a kind of an enlightened master, like the character in “A Select Party.” Melville not only absorbed the vocabulary of Emerson’s natural aristocracy

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in the democratic context of Young America, but believed and accepted it, although he manipulated its particulars to his own advantage. How else could he put Shakespeare and Hawthorne together in the same breath? Wrote Melville: There are minds that have gone as far as Shakespeare into the universe. And hardly a mortal man, who, at some time or other, has not felt as great thoughts in him as any you will find in Hamlet … Believe me, my friends, that men not very much inferior to Shakespeare are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio … Now, I do not say that Nathaniel of Salem is greater than William of Avon, or as great. But the difference between the two men is by no means immeasurable.33 What he is speaking of, then, is that ideal moral scale of greatness he had come to use for himself as a measure of individual worth.34 Most important here is his placement of universality amid the possibility of attaining a level of humanity that carries the most weight—with the subsequent responsibility of upholding truth that goes with it. He later writes of the rhetorical “Hawthorne” that “genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”35 The phrase relates to an “initiation” and is not far from the conventional Romantic concept of the Great Man as used seriously by Carlyle and sometimes ironically by Balzac. Melville later even connected himself with Hawthorne in “a chain of God’s posts round the world,”36 who must suffer similarly to uphold truth. It is worth remembering that Melville considered Emerson a Great Man, and Sophia Hawthorne, a physiognomic reader like Carlyle, came to think of Melville similarly: “I am not sure that he [Melville] is not a very great man.”37 A certain understanding of consciousness and its manifestation was shared.

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Melville repeats with emphasis an expectation of the “Master Genius” and begins, if only rhetorically, his identification with his new friend: Now, the page having reference to this “Master Genius” so happily expresses much of what I yesterday wrote, touching on the literary Shiloh of America, that I cannot but be charmed by the coincidence, especially, when it shows such parity of ideas, at least at this one point, between a man like Hawthorne and a man like me.38 Melville invested heavily in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” hoping to become a full-fledged participant in the ideology of Young America, but he was not yet finished hoping to ascend the ladder to the plateau of genius. “But I am content to leave Hawthorne to himself, and to the infallible finding of posterity; and however great may be the praise I have bestowed upon him, I feel that in so doing, I have more served and honored myself, than him.”39 The essay ends without further concealment of either the personal or political intent of the article, in a way that develops out of personal praise yet emerges instead from subjective projection: —But even granting all this; and adding to it, the assumption that the books of Hawthorne have sold by the five-thousand,—what does that signify? They should be sold by the hundred-thousand; and read by the million; and admired by every one who is capable of admiration.40 Additionally, Melville uses “seems to be” four times in his evaluations of Hawthorne in the essay. The series culminates with, “The truth seems to be, that like many other geniuses, this Man of Mosses takes great delight in hoodwinking the world—at least, with respect to himself.”41 Such comments are, of course, deliberately ambiguous.

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Moral Blackness as Technique Beyond the patriotic and passionate issues broadly addressed, the supposed critique of “Hawthorne and His Mosses” emphasizes a certain obscurity as yet undeveloped in American literature—except, Melville contends, by Hawthorne. His ability to represent what Melville names moral “blackness” somehow places Hawthorne at a superior level on the scale of authentic genius, which the narrator anticipates as specifically pertinent to American consciousness: At all events, perhaps no writer has ever wielded this terrific thought with greater terror than this same harmless Hawthorne. Still more: this black conceit pervades him, through and through. You may be witched by his sunlight,—transported by the bright gildings in the skies he builds over you;—but there is the blackness of darkness beyond.42 The revelation of this interior shadow apparently fascinates the narrator, and he cannot help publicly speculating on what it might suggest; he toys with it as if it were the secret to Hawthorne’s success. And yet he is not convinced himself that this characteristic is honest: Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom,—this, I cannot altogether tell.43 Melville cunningly leaves room for the possibility that this skeptical dark representation, of which he makes so much, is in part an intentional technical device, even a deliberate lure in order to devise interesting and striking material to entice a reading public

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becoming more educated in worldwide literary movements. Melville had known Hawthorne’s work for some time44 and the recently assembled biographical evidence shows he was convivial and experienced enough in human relations to recognize the character of another as swiftly and penetratingly, even at first encounter, as anyone.45 Melville understood his man and certainly grasped some similarities with Balzac. As Mitchell points out, Melville was not necessarily doing Hawthorne a favor in pointing out this aspect of his work, especially in light of some active critical arguments against The Scarlet Letter: Melville’s praise of the courageous “blackness” that he found in Hawthorne’s works was precisely the kind of praise that Hawthorne did not want to hear—even if he was grateful for Melville’s general encomium … Melville thus unwittingly contributed greatly to a problem that Hawthorne felt he must avoid if he were to make his exertions as a writer more commercially successful than they had yet been.46 Such comments could have been interpreted in the readers’ network as a push even more into the camp of Poe, Sand, and Sue. Therefore, although the focus on Hawthorne’s “blackness” may be accepted without suspicion of a purely satirical motive, the ambiguity around it need not be taken lightly. Probably what is true in the essay and based on genuine perception is in fact deliberate confirmation rather than fleeting impression. But, ultimately, the narrator even tries to negate his own promotion of this observation: “Nor need you fix upon that blackness in him, if it suit you not. Nor, indeed, will all readers discern it, for it is, mostly, insinuated to those who may best understand it, and account for it; it is not obtruded upon every one alike.”47 So while it “fixes and fascinates” the anonymous character of the Virginian, it appears to be more

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like a birthmark than a talisman. One must be able to “account for it” in order to comprehend it fully.

Writing like a Frenchman Close to the middle of the article, on one of Melville’s frequent forays into patriotic zeal, he makes a curious statement that holds undiscovered implications resolving this issue of Hawthorne’s shadowy atmosphere. He performs a veritable tirade against Americans imitating English literature and suddenly, apparently out of context, introduces a new idea: And we want no American Goldsmiths, nay, we want no American Miltons. It were the vilest thing you could say of a true American author, that he were an American Tompkins. Call him an American, and have done, for you can not say a nobler thing of him.—But it is not meant that all American writers should studiously cleave to nationality in their writings; only this, no American writer should write like an Englishman, or a Frenchman; let him write like a man, for then he will be sure to write like an American.48 His enthusiasm is unquestionable; but why, in the midst of such railing against British imitators, should a fellow writer in English suddenly interject a “Frenchman?” True, Melville not long before, had been characterized as an “American Rabelais” in France, for his extravagant performance in Mardi. Melville’s remark may reflect a dash of self-criticism, even of humorous self-deprecation, for which he is known. It is also plausible that the sentence is merely an emphatic device, an insertion of syllables repeating “man” three times to rhyme with the last syllable of “American.” But the apparent irrelevance can also be an indication that he had sensed the possible origin of Hawthorne’s comprehensive blackness—a particular Frenchman.

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One tale in Mosses from an Old Manse that Melville neglects to mention (despite the Virginian’s culling of the table of contents) is “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” written by Hawthorne in his French disguise as M. de l’Aubépine. Melville’s joke could hardly be more direct to those insiders in Young America who knew of Hawthorne’s French affiliations at the Democratic Review and no doubt his masquerade as Frenchman in “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Melville executes his irony, moreover, while writing in his own persona of a Virginian. That the essay promotes Hawthorne as the quintessential American author as promoted by Duyckinck, even heightens the irony of the remark. There is so much pathetic “blackness” in ”Rappaccini” that it is truly surprising the fiction is never mentioned at all in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” but it is not difficult to comprehend why. The story had probably been known to Melville for some time, since it was published just as he was returning from the sea to start his own writing career—and perceptibly is Balzacian. Moreover, suspiciously, the narrator also neglects to mention “The Birth-mark,” also reprinted in the same volume and clearly structured from Balzac’s pattern. Melville had to know Balzac’s reputation well. The language and rhetoric Melville uses to describe Hawthorne’s moral darkness echoes precisely the criticism of American reviewers directed at Balzac over the previous decade, and particularly in the often reprinted review by Margaret Fuller. Speaking of Le Père Goriot, Fuller wrote: In other of his works, I have admired [Balzac’s] skill in giving the minute traits of passion, and his intrepidity, not inferior to that of Le Sage and Cervantes, in facing the dark side of human nature. He reminds one of the Spanish romancers in the fearlessness with which he takes mud into his hands, and dips his foot in slime. We cannot endure this when done, as by most Frenchmen, with an air

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of recklessness and gayety; but Balzac does it with the stern manliness of a Spaniard.49 Remembering such criticism as this shows that the concentration on blackness is both exposing and concealing an attitude toward Hawthorne.

Melville’s Plummet Says the narrator of “Mosses”: —there is no man in whom humor and love are developed in that high form called genius; no such man can exist without also possessing, as the indispensable complement of these, a great, deep intellect, which drops down into the universe like a plummet.50 The use of “plummet” in relation to Hawthorne is of particular importance. Melville began to use this metaphor familiarly in 1849 after attending a lecture by Emerson about Great Men. They were arranged in his mind along an upward sweep like mountain plateaus along the transcendental elevation. Although in stature he found Emerson stiff and somewhat cold, Melville responded to the inner human being concealed as if he were indeed one of the worthies the lecturer had spoken about in his text. He wrote a letter the next day to Duyckinck: I think Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow. Be his stuff begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufacture he is an uncommon man—for the sake of argument, let us call him a fool;—then had I rather be a fool than a wise man.—I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim on the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he don’t [sic] attain the bottom, why,

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Eighteen months later, in “Mosses,” Emerson was ranked on this scale in second place behind Hawthorne among all the American writers the Virginian knew. It is of interest in this context that Melville also uses the imagery of the whale that goes “down stairs” and comes back up again. This suggests that in his mind this sort of activity takes place within different levels at different stages of understanding as in the transcendental vision. Moreover, the imagery clarifies that the values belonging to the true “aristocrats” of humanity lie not just on a vertical reach but on a climb with evident landings, as depicted in the aristocratic Dante Melville had so lately read (he purchased his copy in June of 1848). It is important to note, too, that in Melville’s mind already the image of the diving whale connected with moral depth. At least in phantom form, the story of Moby-Dick and the force of this deep diver was already swimming in Melville’s subconscious; he had caught the correspondence between the depth of the human heart and the immense power of the thoughts suggested by the submerged monster. Following his encounter with Emerson, references and images of psychological diving recurred frequently in Melville’s writing, most notably in White-Jacket, which he was probably thinking about at the time he wrote this letter. Motley (1847) began his essay on Balzac by bemoaning the dearth of new novels since Balzac’s engagement with Madame Hanska and draws on imagery from Le Père Goriot that echoes Melville’s own later discourse: “Perhaps he may be only diving very deep, and staying under very long, in some very remote and profound ocean, to come up all fresh and dripping again, with his hands full of pearls.”52

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This metaphor was critical to the development of Melville’s White-Jacket, who throws himself from the mast to fall into a deep dive and come back up, cutting off his familiar identity and letting it sink. There is a similar metaphor in a passage of Balzac that Melville had likely read by this time, if our supposition is right that he had already encountered Father Goriot, since it was published in French in 1832 and in New York in American English in 1845: But Paris is an ocean in which you may cast the lead without finding a bottom. Travel over it, examine it, describe it; and with whatever pains you examine and describe— however numerous and interesting may be the discoveries you make, you will still overlook many things new and strange—flowers, pearls, and monsters which have escaped the observation of preceding travelers.53 The original French, however, which we can tentatively assume that Melville had already encountered, has an even more direct affiliation to this sort of imagery: Mais Paris est un véritable océan. Jetez-y la sonde, vous n’en connaîtrez jamais la profondeur. Parcourez-le, décrivez-le; quelque soin que vous mettiez à le parcourir, à le décrire; quelque nombreux et intéressés que soient les explorateurs de cette mer, il s’y rencontrera toujours un lieu vierge, un antre inconnu, des fleurs, des perles, des monstres, quelque chose d’inouï, oublié par les plongeurs littéraires.54 Melville’s phrase “All the lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet [to attain the bottom],” in the letter above, is parallel to Balzac’s “Jetez-y la sonde, vous n’en connaîtrez jamais la profondeur.” In the recurring contexts used by Melville, “literary divers” (plongeurs littéraires) is persuasively similar to “thought divers.” And, of

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course, in less than two years Melville would also find a “monster” beneath the psychological ocean of Moby-Dick. Perhaps of all the reviews of Mardi, the one that pleased Melville the most, despite its generally unfavorable tone, was that in Grahams Magazine in August, 1849. It employed some of the same vocabulary Melville used himself to express the value of Great Men and Emerson: I have done with Mardi—one is reminded in reading it (after Typee) that “there is as much skill in making dikes as raising mounts—there is an art of diving as well as flying,” and who knows but what the author, after attaining a comfortable elevation by his former works, may not have made this plunge on purpose, as men who climb to the top of a high mast that they may dive the deeper.55 In its prescience, the review reflects the diving of White-Jacket and Melville’s deep attachment to thought-diving, or what Edward Edinger called “diving into the objective psyche.”56

Drastic Decision An extraordinary hasard of network proportions took place at the beginning of September 1850 that would provide a key to an enduring mystery: why did Melville suddenly decide to give up his place in New York and move impulsively to the Berkshires? Balzac died August 18, while Melville was still contemplating America’s Master Genius, and he had experienced a couple weeks of discussion with Hawthorne. By the day on which Melville, rather impulsively it seems, purchased his Massachusetts home, word of Balzac’s demise had arrived in New York and been passed on to Hawthorne by a correspondent, or in direct mail. Nearly a month had gone by since Balzac’s death. On September 14, while New York newspapers were then reporting Balzac’s demise, Melville

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surprisingly purchased, at what has been considered not a particularly good price, a house in Pittsfield with the intention of moving to the area permanently. Melville convinced himself that the best way for him to proceed with his stalled novel was to get out of New York and move to Pittsfield near Hawthorne in Lenox, where he would be able to work in isolation and be close, of course, to his new-found colleague and the possibility of benefitting himself from Hawthorne’s recent success. Moreover, he had perceived by that time from their mutual appreciation of Balzac that they could forge a professional collaboration to establish a unique genre of American realism. Melville had no guarantee that the famous author would continue to rent in the neighborhood (he was notorious for moving about impulsively) or even that he would see him much, but his move demonstrated the irrational action of a tyro lured by imagination to a perceived mentor. This desire is probably a substantial part of why he openly wagered everything in subjugating himself to Hawthorne. He was convinced that the social inconveniences of separation from the literary center of New York were worth it, that the agonizing pressure that came primarily from his finances would diminish once he made another remarkable demonstration in the publishing world, as he had when he was younger with Typee, and which had recently brought financial release for Hawthorne. In the Berkshires he might be able to escape what he called the “brick kiln” of New York and contemplate his whaling romance in the peace of a new piazza. At any rate, by the time Melville returned to New York a couple days later, he likely learned of another important event. Balzac was buried on August 20, which meant that the packet boats were then delivering to the papers in New York the text of Victor Hugo’s great eulogy: In one day all fictions have vanished. The eye is fixed not only on the heads that reign, but on heads that think,

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network and the whole country is moved when one of those heads disappears. To-day we have a people in black because of the death of the man of talent; a nation in mourning for a man of genius. Gentlemen, the name of Balzac will be mingled in the luminous trace our epoch will leave across the future … Body to body he seizes modern society; from all he wrests something, from these an illusion, from those a hope; from one a catch-word, from another a mask. He ransacked vice, he dissected passion. He searched out and sounded man, soul, heart, entrails, brain,—the abyss that each one has within himself. And by grace of his free and vigorous nature; by a privilege of the intellect of our time, which, having seen revolutions face to face, can see more clearly the destiny of humanity and comprehend Providence better,—Balzac redeemed himself smiling and severe from those formidable studies which produced melancholy in Moliere and misanthropy in Rousseau … Alas! This powerful worker, never fatigued, this philosopher, this thinker, this poet, this genius, has lived among us that life of storm, of strife, of quarrels and combats, common in all times to all great men. To-day he is at peace. He escapes contention and hatred. On the same day he enters into glory and the tomb. Thereafter beyond the clouds, which are above our heads, he will shine among the stars of his country. All you who are here, are you not tempted to envy him?57

Still excited by his own rhetoric about the idea of the national literary genius and likely seeing himself in Balzac’s story, Melville was moved when he read or heard about this remarkable oration. In fact, it stayed with him all his life, for in his last library was found in his much-read copy of Balzac’s Correspondence (1889) a clipping from the Boston Transcript entitled “Balzac’s Burial”

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and dated August 20, 1890—the fortieth anniversary of Balzac’s death.58

Moving Onward By the second week of September, Melville had announced his imminent relocation to the Berkshires, which was extensively reported in literary circles. Additionally, newspapers continued to give notice of Balzac’s funeral and the mass outpouring of veneration in Paris. Melville was an avid reader of such journals; it would have been uncharacteristic of him to miss the articles on Balzac. Whether or not Melville had understood much about Balzac’s methodology of realism or the darkness it rendered before his thinking around “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” the Frenchman’s influence henceforward emerges to represent for him a reproducible paradigm. Among the journals the British magazine The Atlas bemoaned Balzac’s passing most fervently: We have lost poor Balzac at last, in spite of the hope which had been held out to us so long that the Faculty at Paris would be able to master the disease which had baffled the skill of so many continental doctors … Perhaps amongst all the authors of our day none will go down to posterity but Balzac. His ideas were grand and majestic, and his bold attacks upon the vices and follies of society constant and unwearied. As the greatest proof of his excellence as an author may be mentioned the distinction which he shared with the great Molière—he was refused admittance to the Academie.59 According to Hayes, parts of the notice were excerpted in Duyckinck’s Literary World, the same periodical that had published Melville’s “Hawthorne and His Mosses” only a month before.60

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After Balzac’s death the cultural tide took a decided turn from denigration toward praise, toward translation rather than Bowdlerization, once general readers had learned of the extraordinary celebration surrounding Balzac’s funeral in Paris and Victor Hugo’s ebullient praise of his immortal talent.61 Melville undoubtedly expected that Balzac would now be accepted by American readers and, therefore, that novels and stories like Balzac’s would likely be even better candidates for bestsellers in the near future. Melville had the idea from the beginning that the “wondrous effects” wrought by Hawthorne’s moral darkness could be a sort of affectation, and later comments make it likely he came to believe it. Melville also saw this “blackness” as artifice: moral negativity was not enough to make a bestseller. There was some secret, perhaps, below the surface that Hawthorne had taken from the Frenchman and that had turned him into a popular author; and Melville wanted to dive for it.

A Collaborative Relationship Once it becomes clear that the effort put into “Hawthorne and His Mosses” was primarily intended to sell books while advocating a political stance through what Parker judged the most popular literary journal of the time and “which had the largest and most critical audience of any periodical in America,”62 several mysteries about the article can be explained, primarily the anonymity of its narrator. Melville was able to protect himself from any unlucky association with Young America or any unintended political effects that might rebound from openly supporting the Democratic Party. Additionally, Melville was not generally recognized as a member of the New York association, so by putting his alleged author far to the South, in a slave state, in fact, he diverted suspicion should his rhetoric backfire. Additionally, the anonymity gave him the privilege of mainly talking about himself and placing himself in the

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corona of the American genius/hero for his own exploitation later, once the whale story was done. Therefore, in Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville had made contact not only with someone who knew and understood the theory behind profitable writing for contemporary tastes, but a writer who had actually demonstrated successful Americanization and authentication of truly global literary excellence, since Hawthorne’s peculiar way of effectively exemplifying social evil had its original counterpart in Balzac—and Melville knew this. Coming off the last book that he really wanted to write—Mardi—Melville was particularly susceptible to esotericism and the esoteric side of Balzac, which Hawthorne had extracted from the Etudes philosophiques. What the two achieved together cannot even fairly be called “proto-Realism” since Melville particularly imbibed the whole range of Balzac’s vision from darkness through satire and apotheosis. Through interaction with Hawthorne, Melville came to confront evil as a believable cosmic element with precise technical dimensions in a narrative without falling subject to the temptation of dissolute thoughts themselves. As a technique, the almost scientific depiction of depravity in characters became through Balzac’s unité de composition an objective art rather than an expression of personal experience, preference, or ethics. As Margaret Fuller had pointed out, this was Balzac’s strength and also the circumstance that left him most open to charges of actual madness and immorality. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that for a few months, the meetings between Hawthorne and Melville were repeated and mutually enlightening activities; probably much more frequent and intense than the surviving documents reflect. But the extant records allow us to infer that over the next few months, either from staying overnight or from arriving early in the day during Hawthorne’s habitual writing hours, Melville would spend considerable time waiting in a sitting room “furnished with bookshelves” until Hawthorne decided he could meet with him and talk.63 There

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would be no reason for Melville to leave behind evidential traces of this sort of casual culling of a friend’s library. Moreover, any discussions of Balzac’s method or subsequent exemplary reading can be expected because all the sources that Melville would need, including Louis Lambert, Séraphîta, Le Père Goriot, and other major Balzac works, were probably available to him in Hawthorne’s private collection, precluding the need for additional borrowing or purchase. Those hours he waited for Hawthorne, morning after morning in the small room, would have provided ample time for Melville to digest the major examples from this French literary giant, at an appropriate level to his reading ability. Caught up in formulating his own argument for a unique genius in American literature, Melville began intently to see that close study of the circumstances around Hawthorne’s works represented his best chance for re-establishing his teetering literary career.

The Psychology of Ontological Heroics The period between February and August of 1851 was extraordinarily fruitful for their conversations, after Hawthorne had finished The House of the Seven Gables and while Melville was still “tinkering” with the conclusion of Moby-Dick.64 Sophia Hawthorne was away on an extended visit to West Newton with her family. The two men entered the house to smoke and drink together with a freedom not possible in the presence of Hawthorne’s spouse. Hawthorne was working on his next romance under the title “Hollingsworth” (The Blithedale Romance), whose nominal character was a willful misogynist bent on controlling an entire community of socialists. According to Hawthorne’s son, “it was with Herman Melville that Hawthorne held the most familiar intercourse at this time, both personally and by letter.”65 When Melville had the choice between talking of his own adventures or speculating on abstract philosophy, he usually chose philosophy. Most of the records of his

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interactions with others emphasize Melville’s enthusiastic attachment to abstract subjects. Besides Melville’s occasional visits to Lenox, Hawthorne went to Melville’s farm and would have gone more often had he possessed his own horse (as Melville did) and he had not been reluctant to leave his family unprotected or alone.66 Their conversations early in the year, during their most abundant period, had much to do with the topic of ontological speculation, true to Melville’s ruling interest since his days with Adler. According to the narrator of the story recounted in Leyda’s Log, who had heard the account originally from Melville, the pair of authors had “spent most of the week in smoking and talking metaphysics in the barn.”67 In retelling this story, Parker adds that “the men had ranged over their literary acquaintances and their prospects for helping make a genuine national literature.”68 They apparently had engaged in enough “psychological discussions” that Hawthorne joked about writing them down in a report to parody Thoreau’s latest book. In mid-nineteenth-century discourse, things “psychological” were synonymous with mesmerism and physiognomy.69 Given Melville’s recent purchase of Lavater’s book, the two writers had a basis for articulating signs of a literary psychology. There was strong promise that this “scientific” method of probing human experience would at last reach to the deepest treasures of human character where organized religion and ancient mystical fraternity had failed, that is, traditional metaphysics (which Melville had argued with Adler) and even mysticism (which he had explored when writing Mardi).70 Hawthorne’s references to Balzac would have educated Melville in a mélange of philosophy and mesmerism of this potential through the “Avant-propos” and other readings from La Comédie humaine, where individual characters are the primary expressions of Balzac’s unique Vitalism. Such commentary would go well with discussions of a national literature. The anecdote of the conference in the barn also supports the perception that these sessions were evidently, as Randall Stewart

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characterized, frequent, extensive, free, metaphysical, and wideranging.71 Such observations would certainly coincide with Hawthorne’s description of their talks centering on “time and eternity, things of this world and of the next.”72 Moreover, this was the period in his life in which Hawthorne was most engaged in studying literary theory, particularly reviewing that aspect of “the imagination guided by conscious will.”73 Melville characterized some of their meetings as focused on what he termed “ontological heroics,”74 suggesting a probe into the systematic detail of method and consciousness akin to Specialism. Melville’s term conveys elements of both attempting to confirm man’s essential godliness, by its clear allusion to Anselm’s ontological proof of God, and interest in extraordinary men and the nature of the hero, something that Melville had been pursuing since he witnessed Emerson’s lecture on the “natural aristocracy” of genius and read Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes. In writing to Hawthorne he expressed his vocabulary of the godlike character, using the same imagery of seeing as Balzac: By visable [sic] truth, we mean the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do their worst to him,—the man who, like Russia or the British Empire, declares himself a sovereign nature (in himself ) amid the powers of heaven, hell, and earth. He 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 my sovereignty in myself; that does not make me tributary.75 Both of these expressions also find concurrent demonstration in the Superior Genius of La Comédie humaine, and it seems very unlikely that one as passionately attached to Balzac as Hawthorne would not recall his European informant in such contexts.

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Another Direction The sort of realism that Hawthorne and Melville were trying to introduce into American literature and its contrast with the more articulated theories of the critics of the 1870s and beyond is significant. Interestingly, it is telling to read the ideas of these writers in defense of their own thinking when they have had the advantage of two decades’ experience following Balzac’s death and additional European developers of ideas in the persons of Zola, Flaubert, and others. Our study has concluded that by the end of 1852 Hawthorne and Melville had a very clear idea of Balzac’s method and to their credit—but it was a feat that the generation of James and Howells did not seem to comprehend. Along religious lines, the difference dramatizes Melville’s struggle with the meaning of the right formulation of the good and Hawthorne’s fight to redeem or reconcile a corrupted inner inertia. Therefore, at Lenox we find two enthusiastic writers bent on elevating literary production on Young America ideals both modern and popular while preserving national character and experience. Despite his outward mildness, at this point Hawthorne was theoretically of a much bolder and more experimental nature than Melville and would have intentionally coached the younger man into creating a genre of American fiction designed to exploit directly that mature realistic form so popular in Europe and England under what Graham Robb called Balzac’s “massive paternal influence on other writers.”76 Hawthorne sensed the power of Melville’s malleability and was willing to encourage him to take literary risks he himself, because of familiar and social restraints, was unwilling or unable to take in order to realize a shared accomplishment expressed in Melville’s half-serious manifesto. During this period Melville confessed in a letter to Duyckinck that “My evenings I spend in a sort of mesmeric state in my room—not being able to read [by candle light]—only now and then skimming over some large-printed book.”77 Edinger suggests

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that while Melville was writing Moby-Dick he was practicing a kind of self-hypnosis that clinical Jungian psychologists now call “amplification”78 to gain access to his imagination, and this activity would certainly have belonged under the umbrella of “mesmerism” as Balzac described it in La Comédie humaine. If Melville is serious in his letter, he had picked up some of the deep pondering practices in this art that Hawthorne no doubt knew well from personal experience and study for his character Holgrave.79 The practice also echoes that of Balzac and Daniel D’Artez from La Comédie humaine. That Specialism is based on seeing and on vision (as in Swedenborg), especially in the apprehension of higher consciousness, indicates that Melville, in his definition of “visible truth,” expressed a comparable idea with similar linguistic roots, since both words derive their meaning from terms associated with perception. Melville foresees a test of some realistic objectivity to the typical heroism that belongs in a “final stage of metaphysics”80 and connects functionally with the ability to perceive and to withstand the pressures of psychological diving to the very sea floor of human nature. Gradually, he comes to practice himself the lessons of Balzac. He was closer to applying for himself new understanding of both the hero and the Genius.

Reliance on Text Almost all of our knowledge of the Hawthorne and Melville association outside the texts of the novels relies on the phraseology of letters—and this analysis involves careful interpretation. We do not have any evidential idea of what Hawthorne advised or directed Melville specifically because their conversations were private; and Melville ultimately destroyed all of his written correspondence with Hawthorne. To complicate matters, the roving Hawthorne (who traveled light) burned correspondence he had received on cleaning out his Berkshire place with the move to West Newton

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in 1852, at which point he had received the bulk of Melville’s letters. To complicate matters still further, the Melville family recopied (and no doubt edited) the duplicates of Melville’s letters to Hawthorne. There is some indication, as we shall soon see, that Melville was trying out some very specific Balzacian experiments in Moby-Dick and was at work in an ongoing collaborative effort on Pierre, the two romances Melville composed under Hawthorne’s close eye. What we are left with beyond the manuscripts is uncertainty over how often the two met, how the meetings were initiated or, most important, what were the specific topics discussed. Yet much is transparent in the texts themselves, and there lie the labyrinthine clues. The basic scenario we feel confident to propose from the investigation thus far is that Hawthorne, initially a short story author of tales, learned or developed his craft of the serious romance in part from a close study of the writing of Honoré de Balzac. During the period in which Melville was writing Moby-Dick, these techniques and examples were freshly reviewed in Hawthorne’s mind as he concluded another romance himself, elaborating many of the same principles with a new subject. Hawthorne and Melville, in the context of conversations covering psychology, metaphysics, and literary theory, then exchanged ideas about narrative writing, initially touching on and modified from a mutual recapitulation of Balzac’s example. Like Hawthorne, Melville came not to plagiarize La Comédie humaine directly but to adopt and test in an American setting the broad effects of Balzac’s innovative literary performances. All of their discussions were within the context of current American sentiments favoring American social superiority. Melville had reached a point where his professional core was not only identified with Hawthorne’s, but close to Balzac’s as well. He was at this stage of his life and work particularly susceptible to the influence of the Frenchman on all levels of philosophy, theory, and practice. He already believed in the nationalistic role of literature and the importance of the writer to be (in Balzac’s sense)

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society’s secretary. Given his philosophical encounters, Melville was able to comprehend Balzac’s pre-skeptic ontology and tiers of consciousness. He now knew that the romance should be a tool for the exploration of the inner life, a means to delineate the hidden but motivational thoughts of a society of individuals. And finally, he was ready to adapt his writing to certain effective rhetorical techniques in order to connect directly to the discourse and the consciousness of his contemporary audience. That we do not have documentation of the details of Hawthorne and Melville’s hours together is not surprising, for what artist would leave the talisman of success accessible for some casual admirer to discover? But we can be assured that what went on had to do with the issues critical to Melville’s writing and not hours of infatuation or random gossip. Melville wanted to dive and left little on the surface to trace. Only minds that prefer to stay on the surface hope to solve the mystery there. In the next chapter we will explore the way into Balzac’s depths, where Melville and Hawthorne went. Melville saw them as a team: “The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question—they are One.”81

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onventional academic interpretation ascribes the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne on Melville’s narrative style, structure, and subjects to indications present in the fabric of Pierre, his sixth romance.1 However, Melville dedicated Moby-Dick, not Pierre, to Hawthorne,2 which implies that he had something important to do with the earlier book. The other factor that suggests active influence relates to the publishing history of Moby-Dick. While Melville had told several persons that the book was “half-done,” “mostly done,” or that it would be completed by autumn 1850, the manuscript did not make it to press until many months later in 1851. During that time, Melville plainly made extensive emendations and revisions,3 and as far as we can tell today, his characters evolved in traits and motivations along an outline suggestive of a newly tapped paradigm. In fact, scholars agree that his most extensive revisions had to do with adding, eliminating, enlarging, or changing the characters of the drama. Moreover, Melville had not been happy with his two previous romances, despite their positive contributions to his popularity. He had written to his father-in-law in this regard as he left for Europe in 1849: “But no reputation that is gratifying to me can possibly be achieved by either of these books [Redburn and White-Jacket]. .

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They are two jobs which I have done for money–being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood.”4 While most critics agree that Melville was then undertaking a mixed-form novel5 like Balzac’s usual mélange of science and passion, it probably was more linearly connected than truly mixed. Like White-Jacket, Moby-Dick was likely written in accumulating stages: the simple narrative version first, although quite a different narrative than exists now. From remarks and conversations that have been recorded, there was no serious uncertainty about the nature of the ending, with the whale ultimately bringing down the ship, which Melville appears to have had in mind from the first as the “wild legend.” After that initial direction of the story, and possibly some of the commentary on whaling, Melville dedicated himself to two additional phases developing some of the more difficult dramatic passages or supplementary essays and consolidating rewrites to make the book appear to present a continuous flow of ideas.6 In this chapter, we will consider aspects of the text probably composed at this stage that separate Moby-Dick from the two immediate “pre-European” romances Redburn and White-Jacket, particularly White-Jacket, and how Melville owes a debt to Balzac, as indicated by the nature of these “alterations” of his habitual performance.

Addressing Weaknesses In a previous chapter we elucidated those structural and spiritual aspects of Balzac’s unité de composition that had influenced Hawthorne, who in turn discussed them with Melville. Balzac’s strategy of writing allowed him to create a balanced mixed style of documentary and human conflict in stories like La Cousine Bette, La Maison Nuncigen, and Illusions perdues that made him popular. Melville’s major changes in style are suggestive of direct consequences of applying certain aspects of Balzacian “physiology,” or character typology, to the story, encouraged by direct association

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with Hawthorne. The timing, then, is critical evidence. Melville was relatively isolated from cosmopolitan influences in Massachusetts, and he had surrendered his will to the “germinous” seeds Hawthorne had planted in his mind. “Germinous” implies pieces of knowledge or information capable of development within his own consciousness. Moreover, the two writers existed in an atmosphere of mutual exchange. Prior to the writing of Moby-Dick, Melville did not draw on these or related patterns in his writing, despite their availability to him. In experimenting with the techniques of Balzac, Melville was probably learning how to write a novel by the same method that painters learn their art by copying the great masters. In borrowing the scheme of Balzac’s representation of vital forces, Melville sensed a creative engine that would not only help him in the physics of writing but also in the metaphysics of ontology. He used the scheme of unity of composition as a matrix of imagination to ascertain the precise contents of his characters’ consciousness without concern about cultural camouflage. His characters changed from clusters of actions to fields of responses to surrounding circumstances. Many internal reactions he converted into willed actions: good by altruism, evil by unbridled self-interest. We have arrived at a point in our analysis where we may begin looking for very specific answers to an old question, formulated by Sidney Moss in 1975, that has remained pertinent: the unarguable point is that during the time Hawthorne lived in the Berkshires, Melville passed through an artistic conversion. Precisely what role Hawthorne played in that conversion has yet to be investigated, but there is a prior question that presses for attention—namely, the nature of that conversion.7 The substance of the conversion has been implied by Howard P. Vincent in his close analysis of the period just before Melville

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completed Moby-Dick. Vincent criticized Melville’s writing of 1849 quite specifically: Not a novel, White-Jacket has neither a strong central hero around whom a continuous and developing action is built, nor consequently any similar sort of villain. It has, rather, a set of people known from a voyage, not from a plot … Structurally, White-Jacket is built as a documentary and not as a novel. The narrator serves more as a guide than a creator; he leads us around the man-of-war to show us its life—both “its” life as a ship and the living within the ship.8 In White-Jacket, Melville was still not writing through a fully psychological mode. He had been exploiting exclusively the witness-report style and did not really operate, in his narrative or in his characterization, from a definite angle of mental or spiritual process or development of consciousness. Melville’s characters were memorable not for any finely drawn personality features or even their relationship to great ideas, but more from their twist on conventionality or, like Fayaway, Yillah, Babbalonga, and others in Mardi, by their wildly exotic depiction. Redburn and WhiteJacket, for the most part, emerge as characters not through who they are or what they think, but because of the actions they undertake or observe. Such an attitude and intention would have been inherent in Melville’s early descriptions of the whale story. But realism, the Balzacian realism that had so impressed Margaret Fuller and inspired Hawthorne’s successful plotting, is grounded in characters and their predispositions—just as Lewes and, later, William Dean Howells proposed. Hence the central scaffolding of the unity of character is not a mere aspect of realism but its central tenet, and makes the efforts of Hawthorne and Melville to trace this scheme more important than one might first suppose. Since the layout is a map of the universal interactions of psychological states or energies, it provides centers of motivation

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for individual characters and determinants for their reactions. This concept of realism was articulated most succinctly by Howells in an observation born directly from the work of Balzac: “The true plot comes out of the character; that is, the man does not result from the things he does, but the things he does result from the man, and so plot comes out of character.”9 Vincent also focuses on another major difficulty: Melville’s tendency to limit dramatic conflict to that between two individuals only, usually a clash between an officer and a common sailor. But the weakness of such a plot was that it focused the attention of the reader on the human conflict, away from the documentary, whaling materials. The reader’s attention shuttled back and forth from the whaling exposition to the dramatic conflict; the narrative was split into two distinct and poorly connected parts.10 This line of thought led him to the conclusion that Chapter fiftyfour of Moby-Dick, “The Town-Ho’s Story,” was the “original or first plot” of what became the novel. From his extensive study of Balzac’s method, Hawthorne no doubt saw these needs in Melville as clearly as did Vincent, and it was probably at just this juncture that Melville began to understand the example of Balzac, however much he had read the Frenchman superficially beforehand. This factor was critical, since Hawthorne had very soon after their meeting read all of Melville’s work since Typee.11

Crafting a Genius of a Different Sort Addressing the first objection Vincent made to Melville’s prevailing style, the evidence available suggests that one way Melville conceived of setting his novel right was through the creation of a Balzacian superior or malevolent Genius under the wing of the power of blackness he had lately pronounced on Hawthorne. Through his

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discussions of “ontological heroics” with Hawthorne, his idea of the Great Man evolved from that of Emerson and Carlyle to the “monstrous” Genius of Balzac. Captain Ahab emerges to solve essential narrative shortcomings related to lack of strength and context of characters, which in turn were needed to sustain reader interest. We know that Melville had been experimenting along this line with the character Jackson in Redburn, but unsatisfactorily. Ahab became an ultimate expression of this negative energy. The central actor of the whaling book at first probably had the qualities of one of the Romantic conventional types, like the excised Bulkington or Jack Chase in White-Jacket. That Melville offered to send Hawthorne a “fin of the Whale” as a “specimen” in 185212 implies that Melville had already shown him other drafts. If this is the case, Hawthorne would have given him much the same advice as Vincent, thereby offering strong incentive for a long and drawn-out revision to find an appropriate galactic villain. Melville needed a strong, focused character to uphold the drama against the largest creature on earth and its creator, but Hawthorne could not offer that model within his own works. Melville selected the alternative, then, of placing into his story a commanding presence of Balzacian type. Captain Ahab, emerges as an appropriation and development of Balzac’s most extreme but failed human type, the Genius. In this way, Melville came in his works to parallel the French writer much more closely than his colleague Hawthorne, because he was able to face spiritual depth and accept the dark interior, fully humanized consequences of volition, with an equanimity Hawthorne was too timid to represent in his own texts, though he realized its power as certain aspects of The Blithedale Romance imply. Melville’s protagonist takes on a violent force of character, is more sinister than Hawthorne’s sinister types, yet echoes the conscious depiction of Promethean struggle introduced into the international romance by Balzac. Melville set himself the task of examining all the misfortunes

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of familiarity with dark truth, for the sake of composing a magnificent book at last.

Ahab’s Progenitor In Balzac’s universe of recurring characters it is above all Vautrin, Jacques Collin, the irascible “Trompe-la-Mort,” who carves out the temperament of ultimate malevolence manifesting insuperable, godlike Will power. Vautrin is the most effective of all Balzac’s Genius villains, and as a model of pure intentional evil he became extremely popular with nineteenth-century audiences. He unquestionably provided “many a shake and tremor for the tribe of ‘general readers,’” as Melville described “Ethan Brand” to Hawthorne.13 His is a personality of implacable volition; but instead of turning Will to developing his spiritual life by altruism, Vautrin shapes himself through egotism into a type of fiend. His traits are unique, because he is a Genius, trapped between the clenched fist of resistant intellectual thought and the inability to let go of his identified attraction to the spiritual Angel. Vautrin is also far from the conventional “bad man” in Romantic literature. He has more than a few sane and appealing qualities that leave an impression of moral ambiguity in the hearts and minds of readers. Although he recurs in several romances, Vautrin gives his first and principal performance in Le Père Goriot (1834–35). Of the several distinct aspects relevant to Melville in the romance,14 that to which he is most attentive in his quest to make Moby-Dick an interesting and memorable book appears to be this original character. The strong man dominates Le Père Goriot and illuminates every event through his powerful volition, which Balzac says is “the highest human power.” Vautrin remained one of Balzac’s most popular characters, always unassailable in his determination never to yield his Will. He was such a popular character with readers that Balzac, unsuccessfully, wrote a play about him hoping for the

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success of Shakespeare’s Falstaff for his own character, but it was rejected by the public. When Melville returned to New York from sailing on the USS United States, less than six months later, in 1845, Winchester’s The New World was serializing Father Goriot: Or Scenes of Life in Paris. The New World made a concerted attempt in 1845 to address the desire of subscribers for international literature in English, and with Luck and Leather [La Peau de chagrin] already selling in bookstalls, it would seem only logical to start serious serialization with an eye on producing a book later.15 If Melville had by chance missed the magazine serialization, he could have encountered that same year the bound book Harper and Brothers was distributing in a four-volume collection of the better pamphlet romances previously printed in The New World. This set, known simply as Selected Novels, comprised complete selections of previously serialized narratives, reset from the three-column format of the magazine into two wide columns. The third volume contains a collection of stories of the European sensational type along with some anonymous imitations. There were two narratives by Eugene Sue, a feminist melodramatic, Gothic piece by Emilie Carlen (Emilie Flygare-Carlén), and Father Goriot, Edward S. Gould’s translation of Balzac’s Le Père Goriot that had appeared March to May. Melville was certainly paying close attention to the Harper Brothers’ list at that time, because he unsuccessfully sought to have them publish Typee.16 They did subsequently publish Omoo and remained his exclusive house to the time he composed The Confidence-Man a decade later. One story by Sue was directly related to Melville’s immediate interests, and capable of drawing his eyes to the contiguous Goriot: The Salamander: A Naval Romance. Even if Melville missed both The New World segments and the anthology when it was released in 1845, as a Harpers author he would have been offered such books from the backlist17 up until the warehouse fire in 1853, when all back stock was lost.18

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It is revealing that late in life, when Melville was collecting his matched set of American translations of Balzac in the 1880s, except for one three-word underline, he made virtually no reading marks in Father Goriot itself but only in the text of “Avant-propos” bound with it.19 Here, absence may become evidence. It is likely Melville did not go through the romance again, being so familiar with it by 1885 through his wide reading or rereading of the French author, that he probably felt that Goriot had already served its usefulness. Only a brief note on Rastignac’s rebuff by his aristocratic cousin is scribbled on the back flyleaf.20 In our analysis of Moby-Dick that follows we will use the Winchester (Gould) American English translation of Father Goriot, which was available to Melville in 1845 or shortly thereafter. But this is simply a backup strategy. Real discussion of the novel and characters would have come from conversations with Hawthorne, who had read the book when it came out in French. Furthermore, we have already shown in “Melville’s Plummet” that he was using an image from Le Père Goriot as early as 1849.

Melville in the Ocean of Paris Vautrin is quite a seductive prototype for Captain Ahab. In his own particular way, the mastermind criminal has sworn to stand alone “against the government with its tribunals, its gendarmes, and its budgets; and I will triumph over all.”21 He repeatedly does so. Correspondence with Hawthorne during the composition of Moby-Dick shows us that while he was working on the portrayal of the captain of the Pequod, Melville was considering identical eccentricities to provide Ahab, his version of the Balzacian Genius. These latter words of Vautrin, “I will triumph over all,” are especially revealing in light of Melville’s use of similar vocabulary to describe the state of his own ontological character wrestling with visible truth each moment:

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network the man who, like Russia or the British Empire, declares himself a sovereign nature (in himself ) amid the powers of heaven, hell, and earth. He 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 my sovereignty in myself; that does not make me tributary.22

Moreover, the subtle shift of person in the passage from third to first discloses Melville’s strong personal identification with this philosophy of undaunted Will and a supposition that he was seeking this perceptual capability to apprehend truth as a conscious gateway into original fiction. Like Vautrin’s, Ahab’s opposition includes the government of the cosmos as well as that of society. If Melville had indeed imagined himself inside the aberrant consciousness of Vautrin by amplification, it explains much of his subsequent remarks about Moby-Dick being baptized in hell, a “wicked book,”23 which reminds us of Hawthorne’s assessment of The Scarlet Letter as a “hell-fire story.” One critic assessed the role of Vautrin precisely: The active principle in him, the force that Balzac is trying to make us see in him, through him, is the will to power … He also has a gift of “second sight,” another sign of power. He has a “magnetic,” “divining,” “fascinating” “profound” gaze. His eyes seemed to pierce the depths … of everyone’s conscience.24 In sum, whether introduced to Melville by Hawthorne or otherwise, or recalled during their conversations, Vautrin is a strong candidate for a precursor of Ahab, who bears all these talents as well. As usual, the Balzacian persona does not imitate the popular and prolific convention of the Miltonian or Faustian sort, but mimics a more complex, superhuman Promethean. Though often confused with the typical Byronic hero, Vautrin is importantly

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different; and because Ahab resembles Vautrin at critical points more closely than, for example, Milton’s Satan, the concurrence supports again Melville’s foundation on Balzac over other rhetorical models, including Hawthorne’s. Additionally, a popular fascination with crime and stories of crime also attracted a readership in 1851,25 and Melville, exploited audience interest when opportune, like Balzac. In fact, Balzac modeled the character Vautrin on a popular criminal turned investigator, Eugène François Vidocq.26 Melville refers to Vidocq by name in White-Jacket, where he is mentioned in relation to the character of Bland, the sergeant-at-arms,27 who himself appears to be precursor of John Claggart in Billy Budd, Sailor. The Genius is a criminal by definition, because he violates in his being and Will the conventional agreements of civilization and the universal laws of Nature, thereby opposing society’s rules and religious values. General readers hungrily grasped any hints of illegality in stories. Consequently, through Melville’s transformations, the whole history of the Pequod is a history of crime. The captain of a typical whaling vessel reveals himself a criminal who commandeers a commercial ship, kidnaps the crew, and forces them against their expectations and human dignity into a kind of slavery to suit his personal Will to Revenge. He plays the egotistical criminal monster with an overabundance of vital energy without the mediation of sympathy, which would make him worthy of salvation (he refuses to help the Rachel, for example, in Chapter 128). Modeling Ahab on the world’s most popular outlaw at the time, Vautrin, gave Melville an added advantage: his book featured an intrigue that would potentially attract a popular readership. One could extend these comparisons almost indefinitely, but even a few similarities tend to enforce the link between the characters. One French critic has remarked: Balzac is the only author who has introduced a god into a story in which all the other characters exist on a more

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This notion of putting “a god into a story in which all the other characters exist on a more normal psychological plane” precisely outlines the ultimate rhetorical condition of Moby-Dick. It is as if Melville deliberately introduced the “energetic, unscrupulous working” that Motley described. Ahab is even introduced as a divinity by Captain Peleg: “He’s a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn’t speak much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen.”29 Melville makes it clear, by Ahab’s own confession, that this is exactly his intention: to put a delusional, aspiring god into the story. Ahab’s madness is American exceptionalism gone mad—his destiny is only to kill and reap the consequences of destruction: “They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself!”30 This particular combination of self-consciousness and immense evil of the demoniacal kind singularly belongs to the Balzacian formation of the Genius, and although one might see some shades of Milton, Melville was more intent on striking an accord with readers fed on French sensationalist fiction than those admiring serious British poetry. He wanted evil to be not only terrifying but ambiguous as well, as Vautrin is. Melville goes right to Balzac’s limits in creating such a being of extraordinary moral malformation. Both Vautrin and Ahab are depicted as beings of great knowledge and experience: adventurers who remain mysterious to those who are around them. Balzac reveals of Vautrin that, “In fact, he understood almost everything: vessels, the sea, France, foreign countries, public affairs, men and events, laws, hotels, and prisons.”31 The same vastness of knowing rests on Ahab as well. According to Captain Peleg, the master of the Pequod is truly a prodigy:

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Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s above the common; Ahab’s been in colleges, as well as ’mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales.32 It is the prerogative of the Genius to be well versed because of an over-active intellect in all things human. Moreover, both men seem silent and inscrutable in identical ways. Melville and Hawthorne must have had discussions along these lines, since Vautrin, being a genuine Balzacian Genius, served ontological purposes in the unité de composition. He truly can be seen as the new hero type of cosmic importance, and Ahab certainly fits this mold. When Melville was finishing Moby-Dick in June, 1851, he wrote to Hawthorne: When I am quite free of my present engagements, I am going to treat myself to a ride and a visit to you. Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together.33 The development of Ahab as an “ontological hero” would make good subject matter for their conversations.

Paradigmatic Echoes In his second objection to Melville’s writing in White-Jacket, Vincent cites the inconsistency and disorganization of the repeated officersailor opposition that spoiled a truly mixed-style presentation and consequently, the interactive scheme of human consciousness. Apparently to address this weakness, Melville deliberately interjected into his whale narrative Balzac’s unité de composition pattern as used by Hawthorne in his stories and romance. The framework can be spotted easily in Father Goriot. There is a dynamic tension in the novel as the characters face off in their well-executed narrative

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relationships, which demonstrates how this scheme operates. Vautrin desires to draw the young abstractive apprentice Rastignac into his confidence. Rastignac admits, referring to Vautrin, “That brigand has in few words told me more of virtue than I ever before learned from men or books.”34 Concurrently, the instinctive Mademoiselle Michonneau, the former courtesan, pursues her own advantage against all. She has been rejected by society and is eventually thrown out of the boarding house by unanimous consent of the other residents. The moral conscience of humanity, as represented by Doctor Bianchon in Father Goriot, fills the place of the Specialist or divine presence in the romance. The Genius Collin, by his immense Will, simply skews the force of attractions toward himself and away from an apex of good. Despite his masked evil, all are attracted to Collin’s magnetic personality. The arrangement of character relationships in the plot of Moby-Dick was apparently designed based on a triangular frame of characterization paralleling that in Father Goriot, ending once for all the limited one-on-one habitual conflict pattern in Melville’s fiction that Vincent noted. After introducing Ishmael and his implications as the observer and the one survivor of the adventure, the author introduces two chapters by the same name, “Knights and Squires.” With Ishmael in the role of the Specialist who lies above the action but part of it, who sees it, each of the other functional Balzacian types is carefully presented individually and given a significant explanation and specific character representative, who retains his role throughout the whole of Moby-Dick. The series opens in Chapter twenty-six with the Abstractive Starbuck, the roots of whose name of course suggest the potentiality of completing the journey “from the shadows of Abstraction to attain to the lights of Specialism (the stars).” But because he is essentially the “general average” of humanity, his specializing is not focused enough to provide him sufficient force of Will to execute action, rather than reaction (bucking): his life has been “a telling pantomime of action,” says Ishmael.35 He plays the role of holding

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to moral convention, following rules and reacting to suffering based on prescribed Christian or conventional religious feelings along with his own memories and superstitions. The chapter reveals that Melville was not simply copying a list of traits, but understood at a deep psychological level the meaning of being Abstractive: “And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery … [that] cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.”36 By the same psychological law that means Rastignac is susceptible to Vautrin, Starbuck cowers before Ahab. The opposing, Instinctive characters are offered up to the reader in the next chapter (twenty-seven). Stubb is the principal representative of the instinctive type in Moby-Dick. Of course, Flask, Queequeg, and the pagan harpooners are also with him—all of whom seem to represent instinctive motivation in its differing aspects. These are the types at home with danger and death, as long as their individual comforts are occasionally offered: A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant, taking perils as they came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the chase, toiling away calm and collected … He was particular about the comfortable arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the snugness of his box … What he thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question …37 The man of instinct acts, perceives Balzac, and these actors all respond immediately to orders, only to discover to what they pertain once they “obeyed the order, and not sooner.” Lastly, Ahab is introduced in a chapter by himself (Chapter twenty-eight). An extreme and ambivalent demoniacal character of the Genius type, who has been deprived at the base of his humanity, in the symbolic sense of losing his lower limb, and has relinquished

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his mind to passionate identification with the white whale. His leg, the member that allows him to walk upright, what makes him a man, has been ripped from him and replaced with a mere prop. It has narrowed, hardened, come to a focal point. This characterization emphasizes Melville’s turning to real metaphor and not just labored allegory as in White-Jacket. Immediately upon seeing him, “foreboding shivers” run over Ishmael. “So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted that not a little of his overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood.”38 His excessively willful nature is clearly felt by the narrator: “There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrendering willfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance.”39 Melville thus introduces his principal actors and sets them on the stage of the Pequod with Balzacian precision. Ahab is the ontological definition of criminality—the willful deformation for subjective purposes of the great triad of universal forces, which creates his own monster, the white whale. The lower Abstractive and Instinctive characters are subjugated by and morally oppose the criminality of the Genius, but have no strength to object, and become alternately companions and antagonists to each other. Starbuck to the last does not deny the noble humanity of his captain.40 Concurrently he wishes to yield to divine nature, but he is blocked by Ahab’s ambiguity. He cannot kill Ahab and remains in awe of him, deterministically trapped in his own abstract thoughts, obstructed from his own self-realization. Stubb, Flask, and the exotics, although close to Nature, oppose it in the form of Moby-Dick under orders from Ahab, and are consequently destroyed by the same agent as the captain. This ironic identification is dramatized specifically in Starbuck’s inability to win Stubb’s support for a mutiny, despite the reasonableness of his argument.

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The Doubloon as Confirmation Melville expresses the essence of this Balzacian design with both dialog and commentary throughout the romance. There are many indications that Ahab possesses a species of Genius as well as abstractive power. Ishmael concedes his superiority: “Oh, Ahab! What shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!”41 Ahab is also the character to establish the dominant relationship between himself and the two other spheres of force in the romance, through contact with the chief representatives of each. “Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors!”42 It is as if Ahab recites the baseline of the Balzacian triangular antagonisme des spheres as he dismisses the shipmen. Moreover, the passage immediately calls to mind Vautrin’s self-identification as a “bell-wether” and his disdain for ordinary humanity in Father Goriot. In the chapter titled “The Doubloon,” Melville exploits the structure of this interaction again by having each of the principal types, one after the other, stare at the details of a coin nailed to the mast, this time in descending order (Ahab-Starbuck-Stubb). In temperamental rhetoric, their reactive talk is colored individually by the forces of their physiognomy. Sees Ahab in the coin: There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here,— three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and the victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab …43 “Egotistical” is another of Melville’s many linguistic affiliations with Balzac that lead the reader back to a representation of the

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intense Genius identified as godlike. Again, the Balzacian triangle (mountain-top) with the force of Will at the usurped apex is evoked by Ahab’s vision. Next to face the inner mirror of the doubloon is Starbuck. His vision is one reflective of the Abstractive: pious and good. A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly symbol. So in the vale of Death, God girds us round; and over all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope … [murmured Starbuck to himself ].44 Starbuck sees only religious imagery in the coin. He interprets the nature of things through metaphor, not reality. He is passive, weak, and dependent on Providence for life. Furthermore, the discourse reveals that Starbuck is a typical Balzacian weak character caught by doubts and inhibitions generated from his own primary and righteous religious idealism characteristic of the typical Abstractive: And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.45 His imagined duty, not his Will, brings Starbuck to his destiny. Stubb, the Instinctive, on the other hand, perceives only symbols of nature and unreasonable positivity in the coin. “There’s a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jollily he,

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aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and so, alow here does jolly Stubb.”46 Stubb, the worn-down nether-end of natural humanity, likewise cannot measure up to the Will power of Ahab. As an Instinctive type, he identifies his being with the sensations of the physical self. Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb’s own unwinking eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattress that is all too soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee, thou grinning whale!47 Nothing like this array of characters, in any variation, appears through deliberate or even unconscious application in Melville’s writing before Moby-Dick, nor persists more unwaveringly in all he wrote afterward. This design reveals the most striking aspect of what he achieved in this great romance: to show the play and shift of these ambiguous cosmic forces and human types, each other’s obverse and reverse, in the mechanism of a deterministic universe of correspondences. There is no less complicated explanation for the sudden appearance of these radical innovations entering Melville’s compositional strategy than that inspiration or example in these fictional areas had been given him by l’unité de composition. The catalog of changes leads directly back to Balzacian sensational or metaphysical romances, including many additional traits we have omitted here to save space.

Lavater and Physiognomy Besides the central core of his narrative and the character interactions, Melville appears to have borrowed a number of other narrative techniques from Balzac to try out in Moby-Dick. Although objecting to physiognomy personally, Hawthorne made use of Balzac’s penchant toward physiognomic description in his

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own narratives and apparently passed this technique on to Melville, with appropriate ambiguity. Many of the philosophers and thinkers that appear in Adler and Melville’s documented conversations were naturally of the German Romantic school: Hegel, Kant, Laplace, Lamartine, and Swedenborg.48 But another member of the German group who came up was Lavater, of the same circle as Goethe, whose physiognomy in its various forms remained popular and accepted well into the next century. In fact, this idea of “physiological psychology” is yet to pass totally from popular discourse.49 In America, in Melville’s time, it was a dominant precursor to psychoanalysis. Once Melville got to London in 1849, he bought a copy of Lavater’s essays.50 Until this time, Melville had used the term “physiognomy” only in a vaguely descriptive sense, without the theoretical implications of discrete correspondences. But after this time, though he does not apply the full implications of the system, Melville is aware of the physiognomic signs. Melville was not in any sense a disciple of the Swiss theologian nor a “physiognomic reader” like Carlyle, and he consistently rejects physiognomy as a practical system, but he uses continually its vocabulary as a discourse of description, like Balzac, to heighten the momentary clarity of any given rhetorical situation. As in Hawthorne’s The House of The Seven Gables, the major characters in Moby-Dick appear to the reader in a physiognomic framework. For example, once Ishmael’s fear subsides at finding himself billeted with a cannibal, he can take the time to read Queequeg correctly “in fixed reality.” With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face–at least to my taste–his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that

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would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim.51 At sea, Ishmael meets Starbuck, the first mate of the Pequod, for the first time, who is likewise introduced to the reader by a physiognomic portrait: But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates.52 Not a few of the metaphors have analogs from similar applications in Balzac. Yet Melville in the same text uses physiognomy with irony, as he will in Pierre as well. In contrast to the exact application of the science to his text, Melville seems sometimes on the surface to make light of physiognomy based on attempting a bodily description of the whale in several admired chapters of Moby-Dick. It is a subject, indeed, for much mirth on the narrator’s part, and his analysis ends with a sober conclusion: Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.53

Melville had implied a similar attitude when he wrote about Jesus’s lack of recognition from appearances in “Hawthorne and His Mosses.”54 But despite this seeming lack of any ambivalence, in the actual words of Moby-Dick Melville certainly makes use of physiognomic technique to embellish the descriptions of his character types.

Dipping Hands in Mud In addition to the over-abundant introduction of these psychological and stylistic elements almost exclusively associated with the innovations of Balzac in the modern romance, there were other, rather obvious differences between Redburn and White-Jacket and the later Moby-Dick that suggest intervention in Melville’s writing through deeper acquaintance with Balzac than previously. Melville’s handling of sexual matters in the romance, for instance, is at a level of frankness more common in Balzac than in contemporary English or American fiction. The unvarnished representation of male attraction and dependence outside ordinary conventions or expectations was uncomfortably received. Implied fantasies of male companionship coupled with what we would now assume to be “subliminal” messages of homosexuality have been found regularly by critics in both Balzac’s and Melville’s works. Metempsychosis, or the “transmigration of souls,” is an important element in Balzacian evolutionary psychology that Melville mentions openly in Moby-Dick. Principal characters suggest that they have lived before, had other lives, prior to the adventure with the whale. Ahab feels that he had once been a mighty Persian at sail on the ocean, while Starbuck endures like a “revived Egyptian.” The narrator, or one of them (this identity is never quite fixed)

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sings the song of the timelessness of taking and processing the great whale in terms of a historical whole: Oh! The metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!55 In Séraphîta the Specialist about to obtain divinity offers a long dissertation on “the road to God” that discusses the seven reincarnations of life required to escape the dialectics of “mécanisme” in correspondence with Buddhist cosmology. This passage may be an example of Melville’s revival of ideas fallen into disuse, which Balzac felt to be a positive act of the modern author, as he indicated in the “Avant-propos” to La Comédie humaine.

Architectural Fixation Melville also experimented in Moby-Dick with Balzac’s (sometimes irritating) manner of “slow disclosure” in his philosophy of corresponding architecture. In order to control more carefully reader response to the text, Melville alters the pace and detail of description from his earlier habit, as Hawthorne does in The House of the Seven Gables. In his first romances, Melville tends to be brief, simple, and direct in his description. Moby-Dick, on the other hand, opens slowly and deliberately. Melville must have tried out this idea intentionally at the beginning of the book but then abandoned it later as inappropriate and interfering with action. The influence of Balzac’s backgrounding style persists: Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks, and heard a forelorn [sic] creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath—“The SpouterInn:—Peter Coffin.” Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the creaking sign had a poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.56

The passage is certainly a fantastic parody of Balzac if it is not intended seriously. Regard the description Balzac gives as he directs the reader along a Paris street into the Maison Vauquer in Father Goriot: The garden, as wide as the façade was long, was inclosed [sic] on one side by the wall of the street, and on the other by that of the adjoining house, which last was entirely hid by a mantle of ivy, sufficiently picturesque for Paris. Each of the garden walls was covered by a mass of vines, and along each wall there was a narrow walk, of some eighty feet in length, leading to a group of linden trees … Between the two sidewalks there was a bed of artichokes, flanked with fruit-trees and bordered with sorrell, lettuce, and parsley. Under the shade of the lindens was a circular table, painted green, and surrounded with seats.57 This is what Lundblad noticed in regard to Hawthorne’s scenic meticulousness, which she felt had been influenced by Balzac: the insistence on architecture and “les événements de la vie humaine.”58

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The translation reveals that Balzac goes on in this disposition for nearly 2,000 words before the story of the boarding house gets underway. In Moby-Dick the detail is similarly overwrought. It is almost another hundred lines before the reader gets inside the structure Melville is describing: Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose.59 It takes nearly two more pages to get beyond the painting and other wall-hangings and finally to arrive at the entry: Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way—cut through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with fireplaces all around—you enter the public room … Within the shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death.60 After nearly three more pages, human beings appear in this highly detailed environment. This writing style continues through the rest of the long chapter and then reappears farther on, in “The Chapel.” Fortunately for the reader, this experiment in description or foray into humorous parody ends once the scene moves to the sea; but

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this style resembles none more than Balzac’s and shows that Melville was deliberately inserting these effects into his narrative, since he had never attempted such strategies under his own flag.

Story Within Story The practice of giving a story within a larger story is a characteristic Balzacian strategy found in such works as Séraphîta, “La Messe de l’athée,” La Peau de chagrin, and numerous others. Until MobyDick Melville had not used this technique; this change suggests that his contact with Balzacian strategy had made his writing more “novelistic” in this way than previously. The concepts of the Promethean Will to Power in exceptionally strong characters and the action of extreme passion and thought as dissolvent are both dramatized in Moby-Dick: But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own … God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.61 It is telling that Melville, in the process of converting the Greek myth to Balzacian truism, has in fact rewritten the story: making the traditional eagle a vulture at the Promethean heart and not the liver. This is certainly an expression of a preference he was voicing to Hawthorne in his letters and which is the moral “message” behind Balzac’s selfish Geniuses. Melville refers to Captain Ahab as seeing into the future; Prometheus’s name means “forethought.”

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Ontological Vision Whatever ideas of ontology or method Melville received from Balzac through his association with Hawthorne or by direct reading, they began to show themselves clearly in the composition of Moby-Dick: Balzac’s ontological unity was transcending Melville’s former consciousness. Considering such a possibility, then, the significance of Melville’s dedication of the romance to Hawthorne takes on new meaning. Besides being a sign of friendship and admiration, it may also be a direct acknowledgment of Hawthorne’s role in the composition of Moby-Dick, his introduction of its author to certain novelistic innovations as yet unrecognized in wider American fiction. Like some British writers, Melville and Hawthorne were drawing from Balzac without acknowledging him. In “Hawthorne and His Mosses” Melville had asked the rhetorical question, “and the day will come, when you shall say who reads a book by an Englishman that is a modern?”62 He found a substitute (as a modern writer in English) by means of a modern French author. If asked, Melville would no doubt vigorously have denied that his application of these conventions was a form of imitation. Rather, if his experiments proved successful, he would have deemed them appreciation only. He had fully Americanized everything and included nothing that was not part of his own contemporary national discourse. By applying Balzacian exercises to an American theme—a great theme, at that—he had purged it of its “foreignness.” Despite its status as the great American novel, Moby-Dick owes much to French antecedents. In fact, the book served as an important proving ground for Melville in his search for personal achievement as a native author. Warner Bertoff recognized that it was during this period of exchange with new ideas that Melville formulated the vision that would orient him for the rest of his artistic life:

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network At this climax of his explosive inward growth, two apprehensions took command of [Melville’s] thought—first, that he now fully understood the order of the world’s existence, and had therefore some power of imaginative ascendancy over it; but, also, that he now fully understood the accidental, contingent nature of his own particular being, his profoundest mind and soul, and therefore had no real independence of action at all.63

This is the most emphatic and clearest statement in Melville criticism of what he gained during this period of exchange with Hawthorne and Balzac: what critics have called “determinism.” Moreover, Bertoff’s paraphrase sounds like a summary of Balzacian psychology and cosmology. If Bertoff is right, Melville learned the necessity of comprehending the absolute conditions of present things, the visible truth. His narrator, though his exact identity is obscure, is another diver, this one forced to plummet with the cursed ship but rise on the coffin of his friend. As author, Melville, too, like Ishmael, became through his change in consciousness a Specialist.

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he previous chapters have shown not only the direct influence of Hawthorne on the creation of Moby-Dick but that this influence was primarily effected through his sharing of what he had learned about realistic composition from his deep study of Honoré de Balzac’s works and their critical reception. Melville had begun a whaling story with his habitual narrative form, but his progress was deterred, and rightly so. This delay relates to Hawthorne’s conversations on Melville’s earlier novels. According to Parker, Hawthorne had written Duyckinck on 29 August, 1850 that he read the books by Melville: “with a progressive appreciation of the author,” having found Mardi a rich book, “with depths here and there that compel a man to swim for his life,” “so good that one scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded long over it so as to make it a great deal better.” Hawthorne further decided that no writer “ever put the reality before his reader more unflinchingly” than Melville had done in his last two books [Redburn and White-Jacket].1 Hawthorne, for as long as he intended to put up with Lenox, encouraged Melville to brood over Moby-Dick. We do not know 173

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precisely when or why Hawthorne came to the conclusion that he was ready to move, but during the last preparations for publication of Moby-Dick, Melville was beginning work in earnest on Pierre; but a few months later he began to display his characteristic haste to produce another novel once Moby-Dick was published on November 14. Perhaps he toyed with the idea of another “job” just to make money fast. This haste is often attributed to the looming commercial failure of Moby-Dick and the “betrayal” of Young America; but it can just as well be attributed to his realization that his time with his collaborator was coming to an end. We have thoroughly reviewed some of the catalog of insights and enhancements in the text reflecting the unique narrative innovations of Honoré de Balzac. By 1852, however, packet boat travelers were no longer tearing up his books and casting them into the sea as reported by Margaret Fuller in 1846; the international writer was now growing in popularity among the affluent purchasers of books, who displayed new curiosity and interest, although rendering in English was still left principally to the literary magazines. Given Melville’s perpetuating and progressively more devastating financial situation, he, too, wanted to give these readers what they wanted, or appear to have wanted, if sales were any indication. Moby-Dick was not the bestseller he had anticipated (as much because of the state of the literary networks and the antebellum rumblings of the Civil War, perhaps, as his own style). The time he had spent “brooding” over Moby-Dick had also cost him much needed income; although he had indeed impressed Hawthorne,2 he needed another sort of publication to help him master the literary diving of Balzac by means of American realistic writing.

An “Original” Plan The severity of Melville’s need is reflected in a letter to his London publisher, nearly two months after the manuscript of Pierre was

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finished and already circulating in America. The adamant tone in which he rejects the publisher’s terms stresses Melville’s enthusiasm for finding a guaranteed combination that would broaden his acceptance with the global reading public: And more especially am I compelled to decline these overtures upon the ground that my new book possessing unquestionable novelty, as regards my former ones,— treating of utterly new scenes & characters;—and, as I believe, very much more calculated for popularity than anything you have yet published of mine—being a regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, & stirring passions at work.3 Melville’s unwavering insistence on popularity and sales is evident in this 1852 letter, and he had resigned himself some time previously to a necessary compromise in his writing, contrary to his complaint to Hawthorne that he was “damned by dollars.”4 He is no longer stressing the “wild” aspects of his romances; rather the “new & elevated” (European?) aspects of his story, with its “stirring passions at work.” As a palliative, Melville has conceded to compose a calculated production almost solely organized with the aim of achieving popular attention in the marketplace. Since his relocation to the farm in Pittsfield, nearly seven months since his decision to restructure Moby-Dick, his financial situation had only become more complicated. Sheila Post focuses on the phrase “regular romance” in the 1852 letter to Bentley to suggest that Melville had decided at some point to deliberately compose not a sentimental romance nor a historical romance as his intention is often misconstrued, but a French sensational romance, which to the nineteenth-century critical mind represented a specific literary genre, popular with readers but not loved by American critics.5 According to Post, French sensational fiction patently appealed to book-buying readers, an

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audience characterized by Duyckinck as that “class of readers … who have theories of seduction and adultery modeled after the French school of novelists.”6 This friend of Melville’s from Young America despised the genre for depicting a “morbid anatomy of the passions”: The hidden workings of the impassioned heart, stung and tortured by ill-directed passions, long suppressed but never thoroughly subdued, and bursting forth at last only the more fiercely because of that long restraint, are laid bare with a terrible fidelity and force, which fixes and fascinates our unwilling interest.7 Therefore, when Melville had reached the decision to try something new in this vein, he doomed himself at once to lose the support of the Young America establishment as represented then by the circle of the Duyckincks rather than by O’Sullivan. Why risk this, since it was this very coterie who had been his champions and supporters and to whom he had made a total investment by associating himself with Hawthorne? Clearly Melville had faith that the remuneration from Moby-Dick and his next books would outweigh any ideological offense he might commit. Not yet bruised by the novel’s harsh reception and flushed with a fresh revelation of his own literary strength, Melville was tempted to cast his line to Hawthorne for more guidance, knowing Hawthorne’s skill and familiarity with this other way of writing that he felt unable to undertake alone. He was open to trying not a parody nor imitation, but a deal that was “calculated for popularity”—and get away with it, profitably. Just as he had used a Balzacian character to support his imagination of Captain Ahab, Melville opened himself to Hawthorne for further aid with a genre (albeit foreign) of additional conventions that might save his future efforts from being inharmoniously mixed.

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Exploring a New Track Today, we may take Pierre all too seriously. As early as June 1851 Melville was starting to chafe at the energy the whale was consuming. He wrote Hawthorne: “What’s the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book? Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.”8 Again, accounting for scale, the nineteenth century was not that different from ours in terms of popular culture. While writers and artists were not subject to “fifteen minutes of fame,” the attention of the public was shifting and fickle: “I have come to regard this matter of Fame as the most transparent of all vanities. I read Solomon more and more, and every time see deeper and deeper and unspeakable meanings in him. I did not think of Fame, a year ago, as I do now.”9 It is certainly not unreasonable to believe that Melville was intent on making a quick seller (as he had with Redburn and White-Jacket) but this time more likely to interest a growing psychologically aware audience. The gothic or historic romance was appreciated almost exclusively by elite intellectual patrons, and the sentimental romance was particularly popular with women. But the French sensational romance, still gaining in popularity and interest, cut across gender and educational lines to entice even the readers of cheap paperbacks. Significantly, the name occupying the top of Post’s list of French sensationalist novelists popular in 1852 is Honoré de Balzac,10 and this prominence certainly must have enforced Melville’s continued attention on La Comédie humaine, which he knew his friend Hawthorne had fully absorbed. His plea led Hawthorne to assist Melville again quite directly by working with him to plan a unified and potentially more profitable text than before; and this is the most likely genesis of Pierre, which is often mistaken for a rush job but clearly recognized by readers as a new sort of challenge from those books Melville felt were “botches.” When Melville was working on what would become

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Pierre in August, he recognized that his mixed style in Moby-Dick, which was then nearly finalized, was too haché: the narrative was neither metaphysical nor sensational enough to have marketable appeal, although he thought it a great book nonetheless. By the time he had added, revised, and pared down all the suggestions on Moby-Dick borne through his conversations with Hawthorne, he had invested too much time and effort in the whale to scrap the project and start over with completely fresh material based on the seeds of the new principles now flourishing in his mind. Revision remained the most expedient route. Having once made that commitment, he was unable to turn around and restart no matter how uncertain he came to feel about potential sales. But considering a new project along the way, while the “fin of the whale” was still cooking, gave Melville the chance to hone his psychological style from the outset without any lingering preconceptional leftovers. Given Hawthorne’s attachment to French literature through his history at the Democratic Review and his own reading, he would have been delighted to collaborate with Melville on such an innovative track. He had been successful with the unité de composition in House of the Seven Gables and already begun another on his own— the “Hollingsworth,” which became The Blithedale Romance.

Continuous Interaction There is ample evidence, through the correspondence surrounding Melville’s 1852 “Agatha” proposal to Hawthorne, that collaboration between the two of them was an ordinary occurence. In an early letter to Hawthorne, Melville imagines them both in the next world: and if we shall then cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together, till both musically ring in concert—then,

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O my dear fellow-mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now distress us …11 In this context, Melville acquired some information about a woman who had married a seaman who abandoned her and her child for many years before returning, only to leave again—this plot he proposed to be undertaken by his friend Hawthorne, and records show that Hawthorne did indeed make some notes of his own with the idea before returning it to Melville, who may or may not have pursued it.12 In this case, at least, we do have sufficient documentation of exchange (despite no direct response from Hawthorne) and significant interaction. Consequently, one can back-engineer Wyn Kelley’s theory about “Agatha” to get a good picture of what was going on with Moby-Dick and, likely concurrently, Pierre. According to Kelley: One can speculate, too, that early in his friendship with Hawthorne, Melville was thinking about literary collaboration between them. Their apparently unprecedented intimacy in the Berkshires, in visits and letters, did not eventuate in a published literary work, but Melville’s famous response to Hawthorne’s letter praising Moby-Dick and his telling Hawthorne not to review the book may not have been quite as foolish or selfless a gesture as it might appear. If Melville substantially reworked the original text after meeting with Hawthorne and finished it in the sunshine of Hawthorne’s genius, he may have felt it in a sense as joint work; not, therefore, something Hawthorne could review.13 The decisive evidence for this hypothesis of philosophical and psychological partnership (including a critique of Balzac) can be found in the romances composed by the two writers over the period of their close contact. It is important to recall that after these

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months of debate and theorizing, both Melville and Hawthorne produced romances more like the French writer than at any point before or after. Hawthorne probably discussed the decidedly psychological nature of his draft of The Blithedale Romance, while Melville was still nudging Moby-Dick toward completion.14 Significantly, Monika Mueller thinks that Pierre echoes Melville’s reading of The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter, while The Blithedale Romance reflects the influence on Hawthorne of dipping into Moby-Dick.15 She rates the two books as genuine “companion pieces”16 in many ways. Additionally, these two works were for both writers a first attempt at fiction about contemporary times and of persons known and/or comparable to their readers. Pierre was Melville’s first turn away from the sea and into the urban waters of Balzac’s mental universe. Both Pierre and The Blithedale Romance are deeply interior novels of Balzac’s breed. Pierre was also Melville’s first venture into consistent third-person narration, the normal narrative mode of the La Comédie humaine. The potential of sensational production awakened revolutionary plans, then, in both authors. This influence also became intensified through the channel of Melville’s direct confabulation of Balzac’s texts. Although Pierre and Blithedale both mark a first use of psychological protagonists,17 the character Hollingsworth is nominally Faustian while Pierre Glendinning attempts to be Promethean. The differences reflect their authors’ divergent receptions of Balzac’s extraordinary depiction of ontological heroism and unité de composition. Moreover, the response of contemporary critics to Pierre was much the same as that of readers who habitually deplored European literary influence. Robertson-Lorant indicates that “Many critics complained that Pierre was not ‘American,’ and when they conducted mock searches for the father of this bastard novel, he always turned out to be a Frenchman.”18 They considered Pierre as “prima facie evidence of the decadence” of the moral blackness characterizing American literature. Melville was then lumped peremptorily with

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Poe and Hawthorne, “two writers who had already been accused of succumbing to the seductions of the French.”19 A collaboration over a would-be popular novel with which Hawthorne had for quite a while been engaged is possible. Interestingly, Melville had a plan and a manuscript of Pierre progressed enough to discuss it with Hawthorne around November 14, 1851, the same day he gave his friend a presentation copy of Moby-Dick with its laudatory dedication to him.20 They spent most of the day together and had a late dinner in a Lenox inn. It was near the end of Hawthorne’s time in the Berkshires; almost immediately after he moved about a hundred miles eastward to West Newton, near his wife’s family. This was the reason Melville wrote so furiously and intensely on Pierre from October onward,21 hoping to get as far as possible before Hawthorne entirely disappeared. After the meeting, Melville accelerated his already fast-paced composition to an even greater intensity.22 Within another six weeks, Melville was ready to take a manuscript to his American publisher: on January 1, 1852, after apparently only two months of writing, less than half of it with Hawthorne away in West Newton.23 Even for Melville, this haste was extraordinary, and one has to ask, had he not been discussing it privately for much longer with his mentor?24 Again, pertinent to “Agatha” but reflective of their entire collaborative relationship, Kelley proposes: Although Hershel Parker has argued for the idea that “Agatha” became a later finished story by a single author, Melville, what we see here is a working collaboration in letters between Melville and Hawthorne. It is one of the few such collaborations in American literature that we know of before Emily Dickenson and Susan Gilbert Dickenson started writing letters and poems together …25 Taking into account the information that scholars have now collected about Melville’s method of writing, we can safely surmise

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that he had definitely been thinking about Pierre and how to write it for considerable time before putting pen to paper. Although the book appears on the calendar to have been a typical hurried job, the subject likely presented itself early in discussions with Hawthorne, who had begun writing his own gothic novel, The House of the Seven Gables, in mid-1850, just before he met Melville. By the time they began to discuss psychology, Hawthorne was at his initial emotional investment in the venture. Although it was written after Melville had nearly completed Pierre, the final letter that Melville sent to Hawthorne before his departure from Lenox tends to support also the perception of a collaboration and suggests that Melville showed Hawthorne some of Pierre that last day at the inn. “Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine.”26 Melville’s “flagon” was the source of his creativity, the water from the fountain at the end of his favorite Gargantua and Pantagruel; and he sensed it common to both of them. Moreover, that his “lips” are in fact Hawthorne’s implies that his discourse is identical to that of his friend, and even that it originates from him. Hence he calls their friendship “an infinite fraternity of feeling.” The letters we have reflect a continuous conversation and hint at a dialogue over those issues pertinent to the composition of Pierre for more than a year, not just across a few weeks from October through December, 1851.

Counter Balance Literary investigation surrounding Pierre suggests that Melville still was definitely working to remedy the shortcomings of his composition (seen by Vincent and probably Hawthorne) by making and sticking to a simple and definite narrative plan from the outset. The manuscript also shows that he gave closer attention to the lessons of his European competition than previously in composing this work and strove to illustrate within it a strict conventional form and a

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less spontaneous structure than he had allowed himself in MobyDick or any other of his previous narratives. The characters seem to have been chosen and their relationships realized well enough to supply a confident execution. In fact, in his letter the following year to Bentley, as he strove to get Pierre published in London, he presented himself turning to “a new field of productions, upon which I embark in the present work.”27 Essentially, Melville wanted to bypass a haphazard style and plunge into more focused character exploration. He was in fact relieved, as is clear in his famous “Kraken” remark, once MobyDick was out of the way: “So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish;—I have heard of Krakens.”28 The response may mean in part that while the reader of his earlier work witnessed the immediacy of the characters and events as in a theater, Melville felt that as an author and literary diver he was obliged to probe deeper and show the gradual formation of the inner “devouring creature” he had found in Ahab’s psyche.29 He sought to haul to the surface the “monster” of clutching psychological blackness he had probed in his first experiments. The kraken (or giant squid) lives at extreme dark depths of the ocean. In Pierre, Melville dove for the elements lodged in the under-side of the human sea, there to explore causes in ponderous detail that readers might apprehend the implications of visible truth when driven by invisible influences, as in Balzac’s dive for social causes. Pierre certainly does die when he realizes that as in the Tennyson poem Lucy has felt the “roaring” at the surface. Unlike White-Jacket, Pierre cannot come up from his dive, even “all redeyed”—he can but perish.

Traces of Mutual Support Taking an indication from Kelley, we can find, in the limited documentation we have of this period, traces of the topics and issues

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confronted in Pierre and their relationship with Balzac. At most we find only a few untranscribed meetings and three letters from Melville, thoroughly edited, but these do show that certain key concepts were being exchanged. Henry Murray noted some years ago, “There are many verbal parallels between [Pierre] and Melville’s letters to Hawthorne in 1851.”30 Their discussions were face to face and can only be inferred from the mail, but proof is there, even if they were preserved only for their praise of Hawthorne. In the letter dated April 16, 1851, Melville makes an important comment about Clifford Pyncheon from The House of the Seven Gables, of which Hawthorne had just sent him a presentation copy: There is a certain tragic phase of humanity which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne. We mean the tragicalness of human thought in its own unbiased, native, and profounder workings. We think that into no recorded mind has the intense feeling of the visable [sic] truth ever entered more deeply than into this man’s.31 The comment not only summarizes the principal conflict in Pierre but also no doubt reflects some of their conversation. For Balzac, too, intellectual passion is self-destructive in undesirable circumstances: excess of thought destroys the thinker thoroughly. This idea was stated precisely: “if thinking or passion, which includes thought and feeling, is the socializing element, it is also a destructive element. In this, social life resembles a human life.”32 In short, a comment by Edgar Evertson Saltus about Balzac’s theme of enthusiastic intellectual activity makes this unambiguously plain: Balzac proceeds to prove that ideas and sentiments are simply dissolvents of a greater or lesser activity; and taking as his premise the admitted fact that instincts violently excited by factitious or fortuitous circumstances produce

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unconsciousness and even death, and also that thought when augmented by transitory force of passion, may become a poison or a dagger, he infers from the ravages produced by the intellect, that thought is the most active agent in the disorganization of man, and consequently, of society.33 This is a perfect description of Pierre and his principal weakness— the monster at the core of the novel below the surface of Pierre’s failure–his own thinking. Saltus’s statement shares so much with Melville’s own sentiments he marked this whole passage with a marginal line for emphasis in his own copy in 1885.34 The similarity becomes obvious in Melville’s continued discussion of Clifford Pyncheon, a Balzacian derivative devised by Hawthorne in The House of the Seven Gables. The success of that novel confirmed for both men the effectiveness of tranvisionary borrowing from the Frenchmen, as Melville emphasized in his mock “Pittsfield Secret Review” in his letter to Hawthorne Clifford is full of an awful truth throughout. He is conceived in the finest, truest spirit. He is no caricature. He is Clifford. And here we would say that, did circumstances permit, we should like nothing better than to devote an elaborate and careful paper to the full consideration and analysis of the purport and significance of what so strongly characterizes all of this author’s writings.35 Here Melville recognizes the portrayal of the Angel as being at the heart of what Hawthorne has achieved; since he is actually writing to Hawthorne, to insert any qualifiers would appear rude. Still, he explains in Balzacian terms what Hawthorne has accomplished: “We mean the tragicalness of human thought in its own unbiased,

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native, and profounder workings.”36 He is referring to the state of thought as a dissolvent, of thought destroying the thinker, as in the case of Louis Lambert or Henriette Mortsauf, for such is Clifford’s restored blameless destiny. In the next extant letter, from the first week of June 1851, Melville continues to speak of issues also pertinent to Pierre and to theories of Balzac. He goes forward to point out: “But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.”37 While hinting, perhaps, that he had done too much with Moby-Dick, he came to realize that a simpler work—like Pierre—might be a better prospect. Moreover, he again brings up Pierre’s failure of ego: he has stripped himself psychologically to the core to the extent that he can go no further. Melville was anticipating the same metaphoric end of Balzac’s Louis Lambert, under the recurrent theme of the Great Man: “A flower born on the margin of a precipice, it should fall there unknown into it, with its colors and its fragrances unknown. Like so many misunderstood people, he had often wished to dive haughtily into nothingness in order to lose there the secrets of his life!”38 Melville also tended to identify with his central narrators as he worked on them. In the same letter he refers to his main impression of Ethan Brand in Hawthorne’s “The Unpardonable Sin,” which he had just read. “It is a frightful poetical creed that the cultivation of the brain eats out the heart,” again demonstrating that more than a month later he is still brooding on Pierre’s problem of mistaking knowledge for conscience and Balzac’s truism that thought destroys the thinker.

Heavy Weight of Balzac Melville was certainly familiar early in the collaboration with Balzac’s Louis Lambert since the outline of character types is delineated there, and the scheme was replicated in the paradigm of Moby-Dick. Also, as with Balzac’s greatest philosopher, Pierre’s

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self-obsession brings his downfall, although Louis’s distraction is decidedly more elevated than Pierre’s. The latter appears to be stuck at an early stage of the same moral development that Balzac describes in Louis: Although already gifted with the qualities that distinguish superior men, he was still a child; though abundant and skillful with abstractions, his brain was still feeling the delicious beliefs that float around all youth. His conception was touching the ripest fruits of his genius, at some points, and at others, clung to the pettiness of its seedling.39 Part of Melville’s purpose in Pierre is to trace this universal, human catastrophe of the head outpacing the heart in an American setting, something Melville also found in the “unpardonable sin” of Hawthorne’s Ethan Brand. Pierre is an Abstractive doomed to failure by his weakness. He is one of those unfortunates who succeed in comprehending truth; but, unlike Louis Lambert or even Hawthorne’s Clifford Pyncheon, he has neither the force of action nor the luck of happy intervention, nor the experience of life to survive the abstract ambiguities it brings him. For as Besser points out, in the Balzacian cosmos, “Where a person is weak-willed, easily discouraged or distracted, he will fail, no matter how great the promise of his talent.”40 Indeed, Louis Lambert’s uncle agrees (though without understanding) that Louis died “weak from too much strength.”41 In comparing Pierre’s worth to the superficial Charlie Millthorpe, Melville uses a similar metaphor to Balzac’s: “It is the glory of the bladder that nothing can sink it; it is the reproach of a box of treasure, that once overboard it must drown.”42 Pierre appears not to be a diver at all, but a victim pulled down by his own ponderous kraken. Parsons says the same thing of Balzac’s similar vision: “This is the enforcement of [Balzac’s] axiom that excess in Will and thought operates as a dissolvent; that it tends to destroy both the society and the

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individual that indulge in it; that it is suicidal, and kills not only the physical but the psychical elements in man.”43

Melville’s Specializing Primary evidence of intervisionary awareness is Melville’s use of a uniquely Balzacian term to describe Pierre’s growing sense of moral uncertainty when his consciousness momentarily alters to include new ambiguities of childhood memories: what of general enchantment lurked in these strange sensations, seemed concentringly condensed and pointed to a spear-head, that pierced his heart with an inexplicable pang, whenever the specializing emotion—to call it so— seized the possession of his thoughts, and waved into his visions, a thousand forms of by-gone times, and many an old legendary family scene, which he had heard related by his elderly relations, some of them now dead.44 Although Balzac had used “specialist” and “specialism” in this sense of intensified mental vitality in the 1830s, the word apparently did not find its way into English usage in any comparable sense until the 1860s45—well after Melville wrote this passage. And although Melville excessively coins new words as a matter of habit, in this case, with unusual emphasis, he points the reader toward the nomenclature that is central to Louis Lambert’s character. He uses “specializing” quite precisely in the Balzacian sense of seeing “the fact in its roots and in its results, in the past where it was engendered, in the present where it is manifest, and in the future where it would evolve.”46 Specialist activity is a moment of visible truth. As with Lambert, Pierre’s “thought destroys the thinker” insofar as both youths apparently go mad after abandoning their true loves for the seductive ideals that obsess them.

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Just as he uses “specializing” to note this form of gradual coming to awareness of life’s mechanism, so does Melville apply “unspecializing” in the sense of conscience without conscious awareness of its action. Although Isabel cannot comprehend his words because she has no experience of “visible truth,” Pierre tries to explain Lucy’s situation to her: She will never name the not-to-be-named things to thee; nor hint at them; because she knows them not. Still, without knowing the secret, she yet hath the vague, unspecializing sensation of the secret—the mystical presentiment, somehow, of the secret. And her divineness hath drowned all womanly curiosity in her; so that she desires not, in any way, to verify the presentiment … for in that she thinks the heavenly summons to come to us, lies …47 She intuitively, but unconsciously, possesses the truth without her intellect even registering it or desiring it. She sees it although she cannot describe it.

Focusing on a Single Source While the search for a synthesis of sources for Pierre might seem on the surface to be a fruitful one, it actually goes counter to what Melville was intending. Trying to pile images in the mind would be just as much a “botch” as Moby-Dick turned out to be, and Melville did not want to repeat his mistake. To help him with organization, Melville would likely have selected a single paradigm, choosing not to create another mélange when his fortune virtually depended on his ability to respond to the latest trends of the contemporary marketplace.48 He was temperamentally drawn to the avant-garde and wanted to forge innovations, not imitations, in a new American literature.49

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It is likely, then, that in order to keep to a tight plan and safe design, Melville drew on his conversations about ontological heroics with Hawthorne and selected a single exemplary model to target. Given the time constraints already dogging him, Melville also selected a source with which he had at least some familiarity and about which Hawthorne would have enough knowledge to offer significant comment. The best candidate on all of these counts was Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, at the heart of the genesis of Jeunes-France and the first Balzac book published in America. Moreover, the plot of the story was introduced into English years earlier by Landon, an enduring woman writer still admired by the very audience Melville was hoping to snatch—the growing pool of female readers and buyers. By this time, he would have read his copy of Corinne that he obtained in London. The possibility of this new audience is probably why Melville characterized his book to Mrs. Hawthorne as “a rural bowl of milk,”50 hoping at least at first to appeal to readers attached to the sensational romance. The evidence for affiliation between Pierre and Luck and Leather is quite strong, and elsewhere are enumerated many echoes and similarities between the two texts and other Balzac narratives.51 Two other novels have also been compared with Pierre: Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni52 and Balzac’s Lost Illusions; 53 but both suggestions are inadequate. The principal reason for excluding the former is that Zanoni is a fully Gothic romance, not a realistic sensational romance of Pierre’s genre. Second, Lost Illusions is in fact several narratives lately tagged together and would be difficult to serve as a unified pattern. But with La Peau de chagrin, the case is different. First, both are about unsuccessful aristocratic young writers who ruin themselves and neglect to get their major work published; second, both protagonists move from country to city to seek success; third, both books contain invectives against the writing establishment—Balzac on Parisian journalism, Melville on Young America; fourth, both heroes encounter a life-changing text they fail to comprehend but which is a part of them—the shagreen

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and Plinlimmon’s pamphlet; fifth, both display such sensational passion that their narratives are believed to represent their authors’ personal stories; sixth, both end their lives in suicide; and finally, both have shallow friends, Rastignac and Millthorpe, who fail to save them from disaster. In aligning the two stories we need not be impeded by any doubt about Melville’s ability to read La Peau de chagrin in the original or by any question of whether it was plausibly within his reach. English excerpts, as with the case of Father Goriot, will come from Luck and Leather (1843).

Parallel Plotting Balzac saw La Peau de chagrin occupying a special place alongside Louis Lambert and Séraphîta as a story about material existence. He explained this in the Introduction (Avant-propos) to La Comédie humaine: [in] the Philosophical Studies, the second part of the work, the social means of all these effects find themselves demonstrated, where the ravages of thinking are painted, feeling after feeling: and of which the first work, The Wild Ass’s Skin, to some extent forms a link between the Philosophical Studies and the Studies of Manners, with an almost oriental fantasy, wherein life itself is painted overcome with desire, the principle of all passion.54 Had Melville discussed this idea with Hawthorne, and it is likely that Hawthorne had read the “Avant-propos” by this time, the essay would have suggested to Melville that he should move away from the negative ontological identification of Ahab and concentrate on contemporary psychological problems in this romance. Pierre traces the career of a man similar to the central character of Luck and Leather, caught up in the will to justify his thoughts and the need for self-justification in order to exist. It is a drama of

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self-indulgence and debauchery and the failure to achieve superior conscience; of Balzacian “dissipation” and excess passion of the sexual kind. Balzac chronicles the failed man of talent as precisely as he does the elevated Genius; and Pierre is a romance about a determined failure. Inadequate discrimination upon having one’s ardent wishes granted constitutes the tragedy of Melville’s narrative, as it does Luck and Leather. Melville knew of the riot of readers in Paris attempting to beat down the publisher’s doors for copies of La Peau de chagrin55 and its connection with Jeunes-France; this romance would have surely struck him as the most perfect of imports to transpose, should broad popularity be the aim. Moreover, Hawthorne’s edition carries the rare preface by Balzac going into his compositional practices. At Hawthorne’s, Melville would have had another textbook and an instructor readily at hand to coach him on the sensational novel.

L’Unité de composition in Pierre Melville applies the dialectical characters who parallel Balzac’s habitual rhetorical pattern in Pierre; the centers of force determine the course of the narrative in much the same way it does in Luck and Leather. In his earlier experiments, Melville had driven the narrative of Moby-Dick under the heel of an extraordinary character, Captain Ahab; but in this instance, he adopts the conventional Balzacian plan, with no “godlike” character on stage. Pierre is no ontological hero. The Angelic individual in Pierre is clearly Lucy, in both her “innocent” and “fallen” depictions. Early in the novel, the narrator speaks without irony of her natural angelhood: “My proper province is with the angelic part of Lucy. But in some quarters, there prevails a sort of prejudice against angels, who are merely angels and nothing more; therefore I shall martyrize myself, by letting such gentlemen and ladies into some details of Lucy Tartan’s history.”56 Later, Pierre recognizes her as an “angelic plume of humanity,”57

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who like Pauline in Luck and Leather endures abandonment and neglect by her abstractive lover with equanimity and unwavering devotion, even to her own heartbreak. Lucy is also repeatedly given the epithet “angel.” In reading her “artless, angelic letter,” Pierre felt “he caught upper glimpses of the seraphim in the visible act of adoring.”58 Even Lucy’s antagonist Isabel sees her as “that good angel, which some say, hovers over every human soul.”59 As Vautrin and Louis Lambert, the touch of divinity almost always brings a tinge of insanity as far as Balzacian characters are concerned. Says Lambert, “Mankind holds on to faculties, angels hold on to essence.”60 In this, Lucy emulates the distractedness of the Angelic type, both in her mental status and in the metaphoric significance of her name—“light” (from the Latin Lucia). The girl tends to judge only Pierre’s essence, not his actions.61 In this she is also a sister of Luck and Leather’s Pauline, who stands always waiting for Raphael. Lucy remains by Pierre despite his tragic miscalculation. Additionally, the “theory” of angelhood in Pierre is derived directly from Balzac, and not from typical Romantic discourse, where the term is vague and sentimental. The novel’s narrator informs the reader with almost scientific precision: For what may be artistically styled angelicalness, this is the highest essence compatible with created being; and angelicalness hath no vulgar vigor in it—and that very fact—which being, in man or woman, is at bottom nothing but ambition—this quality is purely earthly, and not angelical. It is false, that any angels fell by reason of ambition. Angels never fall; and never feel ambition.62 With the passage, Melville draws a clear distinction between the top of the triangle of oppositions and its base: in this instance, between the Angelic Lucy and the ambitious, Instinctive Mrs. Glendinning, an early comic proxy for Isabel. It is important to note that in Melville’s scheme, as in Balzac’s, the Angel does not

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fall; only the weak Abstractive meets with failure. Importantly, just as Balzac equates angelhood with human completeness, so Melville ascribes it to “the highest essence compatible with created being.” The narratives and actions exert undeviating parallel turns. Moreover, there seem to be clues sprinkled throughout the book, especially in the numerous “angel” references (some even made ironically to Pierre himself ), that lend support to Brooks’s and Arvin’s speculation that Melville had read Séraphîta by 1851: “Thou art a visible token, Pierre, of the invisible angel-hoods … Were all men like unto thee, then there were no men at all,—mankind extinct in seraphim!”63 This is, of course, an exact description of what happens to the self-transforming character Séraphîta, and in the principle that earth is a nursery-ground for heaven.64 Like Raphael, Pierre is drawn as a typical Abstractive. They are far in development from the divine type, although they both bear the intellectual potential for Specialism. Pierre is a man of the mind entangled in imagination and ideas; he makes errors based on platitudes and idealism. He “thinks” too much, and his moral essence becomes corroded. But the Abstractive may also have moments, although he cannot sustain them, of the higher awareness characteristic of full self-understanding. If he were strong-willed and deeply emotional, he could become a Specialist himself. But without powerful volition, or if subject to the allure of self-indulgence, the Abstractive meets with inevitable selfimmolation. Such is the shared moral dilemma of Raphael and Pierre. Moreover, both of them are indolent and seek a “talisman” that will give them occult power without subsequent moral and social obligations. Melville’s instinctive femme fatale, Isabel, is extremely close not only in appearance but in behavior to Luck and Leather’s Foedora. They are both sensual, “veiled,” dark ladies with mysterious and unrecoverable pasts who sing hauntingly. Their true motivations are kept secret or obscure, yet they are blatantly manipulative in sexual temperament, as is Pierre’s mother, her stand-in.

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Two Geniuses Both romances are texts about reading and the nature of representation that reflect on themselves and their “authors.” The theoretical lure of a virtual talisman of sorts makes its appearance in Pierre to parallel the talisman in Luck and Leather. Landon’s short story is called “The Talisman,” a phrase which appears in later and perhaps profounder renderings of La Peau de chagrin into English as the heading for the first part of the novel.65 This linguistic parallel takes dramatic form as the tract by the Genius Plotinus Plinlimmon. Had he understood it, Pierre might have comprehended an effortless principle to endure the ambiguities of his life. In early chapters, the talisman is associated with Pierre’s comprehension of his own name and his place in the scheme of his ancestors. At the stage of abandonment of the familial property for the city, Pierre must read or misread Plinlimmon; while Raphael, after abandoning suicide, must comprehend his message in the ass’s skin itself, the Talismanic Secret. The substance of the essay is out of Pierre’s reach, for he is attempting to attain consciousness from an abstract base and not through noble feeling: Plinlimmon’s pamphlet is “not so much a Portal as part of the temporary scaffold to the portal of this new philosophy.”66 The play on “scaffold” of course denotes a sort of self-execution, a fate comparable to Raphael’s terminal attachment to his desires. Pierre reads Plinlimmon’s linguistic talisman “merely to drown himself,”67 making the same mistake as Raphael when he accepts the animal skin talisman on the way to drowning himself.68 Balzac’s hero first discounts the leather “rag” the Cosmopolite provides him, but then, as an alternative to self-destruction, takes up the “experiment” in a free and independent life it allows him, although he does not grasp its printed warning: “Forget not that limitless might hath limitless obligations. Chary of me, I cherish thee: ever decreasing in due regard, as thy wishes wax inordinate. Wilt have me? Heaven shall hear thee, even—[Hell?] so: Amen!”69

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For Balzac, without altruism, Genius is incomplete and criminal. The scraps of paper Pierre finds are longer and more convoluted, but they are equally as pragmatic and infernal as that of the Cosmopolite. He cannot reconcile his own desires with the heartfelt divinity of the words in the Sermon on the Mount. On the surface the incomplete essay promises a new type of solution for Pierre—disinterestedness—although he is unsuited to comprehend it: Hereupon then in the soul of the young enthusiast youth two armies come to the shock: and unless he prove recreant, or unless he prove gullible, or unless he can find the talismanic secret, to reconcile this world with his own soul, then there is no peace for him, no slightest truth for him in this life. Now without doubt this Talismanic Secret has never yet been found; and in the nature of human things it seems as though it never can be.70 The latent satire and partial argument of Plinlimmon’s system has been thoroughly explicated by critics both in a serious and a comic context. From our perspective, it is indeed presented honestly, because it tempts Pierre into the type of intellectualizing that would close his heart and cool his conscience while it feeds his misapprehension of being morally superior to the rest of humanity. Pierre does not walk away as haughtily with his script as Raphael does his, but Melville’s narrator implies that he did take it on in practice, nonetheless. It symbolically worked its way into his garment and stuck permanently into his coat,71 exactly the way the power of the magic skin (which Raphael carries in his coat pocket) becomes so deeply ingrained in Raphael’s personality that he can no longer separate himself from his vital soul’s inevitable erosion. In the end, both talismans are destined to entice the characters to the same self-defeating goal. Both elect to follow their own desires, neglecting their social obligations in pursuit of their “names,” their fame.

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The antiquarian Cosmopolite at the cluttered curiosity shop where Raphael receives the magic hide shows much of the same mysterious temperament of both concealment and knowledge as does Plinlimmon wandering the halls of the Church of the Apostles. Although the two do not look alike (the shopkeeper is a centenarian), they share significant psychological powers over the vulnerable young men. Both characters are members of the class of Balzacian Geniuses and share abundant traits that recur in the works of both authors. Raphael’s donor displays these signs: A shrewdness without parallel, seemed lurking in the sinuous wrinkles of his features … every trait betokened much familiarity with life and manners; an insusceptibility of being duped; a power to unearth men’s thoughts: ’t was a Cosmopolite; one whom every clime had seasoned, every people taught; the walking index, the genius of this wonderful receptacle—and more. An appalling self-reliance informed his pale features; a clear tranquility befitting Dom Prometheus unbound … The man stood clear, no doubt, of human susceptibilities; had brayed them beneath a more than human volition … he must occupy, doubtless, a sphere of his own ….72 Such a character has surely exaggerated his Will, as Melville would see it, even to the point of becoming an object of terror. He has the familiar air of Prometheus and Mephistopheles and displays an excess of volitional force. Melville’s Plinlimmon is apparently younger, but he creates a similar impression on Pierre, not only in his passing in the hallway, but through his philosopher’s distant stare, which the young man takes to be deeply penetrating: But while the personal look and air of this man were thus winning, there was still something latently visible in him which repelled. That something may best be characterized

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network as non-Benevolence. Non-Benevolence seems the best word, for it was neither Malice nor Ill-will; but something passive … One would almost have said, his very face, the apparently natural glance of his very eye disguised the man … He seemed thoroughly upset by the mere sight of this hat-lifting, gracefully bowing, gently-smiling and most miraculously self-possessed, non-benevolent man … that remarkable face of repose,—repose neither divine nor human, nor anything made up of either or both— but a repose of a face by itself. One adequate look at that face conveyed to most philosophical observers a notion of something not before included in their scheme of the Universe.73

Plinlimmon also presents the visage of the “non-benevolent” Geniuses, Vautrin and Ahab. He is on the line between divine and undeveloped human, but as a Genius he is unique. His intense eyes mesmerize the disturbed abstractive Pierre. Plinlimmon’s philosophy would be a lot like Vautrin’s, if Vautrin were a philosopher rather than an outlaw, and Melville with his discourse connects Plinlimmon directly with Balzac’s special monster.

Abandoning the Experiment Toward the end of the novel, in a section judged to be written late, after the initial manuscript was complete in January 1852, Melville’s focus shifts direction. Such turning of mood was a typical performance by Melville, which he confessed to Hawthorne as “not three weeks” of staying in the same mental place. After he finished Mardi he did not wish to talk about it; he dissociated himself from Redburn and White-Jacket as mere “jobs”; and he set Moby-Dick aside for bigger fish in Pierre. So it is not surprising that Melville essentially did the same thing with this novel. The revealing paragraph comes toward the end of Pierre:

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He [Pierre] did not see that there is no such thing as a standard for the creative spirit, that no one great book must ever be separately regarded, and permitted to domineer with its own uniqueness upon the creative mind; but that all existing great books must be federated in fancy; and so regarded as a miscellaneous and a Pantheistic whole … thus combined, they would prove simply an exhilarative and provocative to him.74 As articulated in the letter to Bentley later that year, Melville continued to promote Pierre as an example of a popular romance; however, if Parker is correct that this passage was written after his realization that Moby-Dick had failed, Melville had already begun to dissociate himself from the now less likely success of Pierre. Melville learned from this experience that although the sensational romance sold very well, when it was clear that the author was from France, English readers might not take to a very similar product if they knew that an American had written it. Apparently, Melville had even suggested, perhaps only half in jest, that Bentley withhold his name from the title page: After Moby-Dick failed to excite the reading public, Melville proposed to his [English] publisher that Pierre be issued anonymously, “By a Vermonter.” Melville’s praise of Hawthorne in the Literary World was signed “by a Virginian spending July in Vermont.”75 This was not Melville’s expressed reason for anonymity, but there may be some truth in his own explanation worth considering: I have thought that, on several accounts, (one of which is the rapid succession with which my works have lately been published) it might not prove unadvisable to publish this present book anonymously, or under an assumed name:—*

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network “By a Vermonter, say. I beg you to consider the propriety of this suggestion, but refer the final decision to your own better experience in such matters, since I am prompted in throwing out the idea, merely in regard to your advantage as publisher. *Or By Guy Winthrop76

In any case, Melville turned his attention to England and Europe, hoping that his melodrama would be understood better there.

Young America Redux After publishing Moby-Dick and still in the process of completing Pierre, Melville became disenchanted with the unexpected development of Young America, which had veered from its intended cultural focus in the 1830s to political and ideological embroilment by 1852. Widmer sees such a significant shift of attitude that he calls this new organization (O’Sullivan had left the Democratic Review in 1846) “Young America II.” He presents the change as part of a worldwide reaction to the end of the Second French Republic and the rise of the Second French Empire under the dictator Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte.77 The American Democratic response was simply to become more imperial, too, taking out of context O’Sullivan’s “manifest destiny” and agitating for a Mexican War. Duyckinck’s own review of Moby-Dick shows that he had become less willing to support literary experiments like Melville’s than he had when he sponsored Melville in Young America. The group appears to have taken up the attitude of the clamorous Democrats, and Parker, Hayford, and Tanselle describe the review succinctly as bearing the tone of a disapproving judge trying to be fair: “This was to say that Melville deserved blame for his faults but did not quite deserve credit for his virtues—which emerged ‘in spite of ’ himself.”78 In any case, as a representative of Young America, Duyckinck had not sustained his support of

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innovation and individual achievement the initial advertisement of 1846 had promised; and Melville canceled his subscription to the Literary World.79 But more than personal justification and selfpity lie behind the Young America chapters in Pierre. Perhaps, on a personal level, it was absolutely necessary, in this work so reminiscent of La Peau de chagrin—the international inspiration originally for the later Jeunes-France and hence the metamorphosis locally into Young America—that Melville make a central political statement about American writing as it had become. It appears that in his detailed attempt to make Pierre compatible with Balzacian sensational romance, Melville took the idea of balanced form from the standard of Luck and Leather and applied it to Pierre. Luck and Leather, like so many comparable books, was published in two volumes, each section being of about equal length. As Melville’s draft manuscript apparently first left off,80 Pierre did not fit conventional proportions: much more material accrued on the rural than the urban side of the story, which naturally breaks at Pierre’s departure from Saddle Meadows (Chapter thirteen). However, with the additional chapters on authorship contributing to the “urban” content of Pierre’s adventure (as they do for Raphael’s), the structural imbalance diminishes. In the final published version there are twenty-six chapters: thirteen chapters in the country and thirteen chapters in the city, marking a clear and balanced division between what leads up to the fated hero’s action and the consequences that deterministically develop out of this resolve. The same evenness of architecture is found in Luck and Leather, where the division occurs as Raphael bids adieu to Foedora and attempts to change the direction of his life by a new infusion of Will.81 The second volume of the romance concludes the story in approximately the same number of pages as does volume one, making a matched pair. This way the work fits the convention of metaphysical novels Eigner calls the “two-part structure: sequential form.”82 Melville had written to Bentley that his new book was a “regular romance” and very much “calculated for popularity.” He

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saw a profitable advantage to making the novel suited in length and division for modes of distribution in separate markets, including England and Europe. Critics that argue against Melville’s chapters of Pierre as an author base their speculation in part on length; but when examined in terms of number, the harmony becomes apparent. Parker, who in the 1990s published his own version of Pierre to “correct” what he thought were irregularities, argues that his shorter version is preferred. Parker discounts the “Pierre as Author” sequences and actually cuts them out to make a “better” novel of his own; but this sort of satire is a vital if evasive signal about Melville’s relationship to writing, which is remarkably similar to Balzac’s. According to Richard Poirier, “The alleged additions, [Parker] asserts, ‘wrecked’ such precious elements as Melville’s ‘symmetrical’ time scheme and the novels ‘meticulous control;’”83 both of which they actually support. Parker’s main argument is that Melville was so angry and so upset with circumstances that the additions were forged from vindictiveness and personal disappointment. Poirier objects to this idea: “Parker’s conjectures may or may not be right, but Melville’s state of mind, whatever it was, did not necessarily dictate what he wrote at the time or his artistic decisions where and how to insert that writing [about authors and publishers] into the book.”84 Melville had perhaps been seeking a talisman from Hawthorne that would become his ticket into the “politico-literary” world; but he had not succeeded by either emulation or imitation. In a way, he thought of Pierre as marking his freedom from his dependence on Balzac as well as his trust in Young America and his former cenacle of Duyckinck. The parallel responses of Balzac to Janin and his former literary “friends” only emphasize the fact that common interests regarding writing and publishing careers most definitely belong at the heart of both Pierre and La Peau de chagrin; the passages in Pierre are neither whimsical nor noxious by appearing there but instead parallel Balzac’s invective against the Paris writing elite before the outbreak of his war from Brussels with the subversive

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release of Le Livre mystique. Any determination to eliminate the additional chapters is to hack to the quick of Melville’s attempt at depicting a unity of composition. So while Melville was on target with his concept, he misread the subtle determinant of political affiliation that again caused him to veer away from his mark. He had made such a tremendous investment in the stock of Young America, his ultimate rejection by it was comparable to Balzac’s treatment by the Paris newspapers. We noted that in his famous outburst against his former colleagues, Balzac wrote a “Monographie de la Presse Parisienne,” which was discussed in The Foreign Quarterly Review, to which Melville had access in Boston when he saw Emerson’s lecture.85 Said the anonymous English reporter about Balzac’s difficulties: Ten long years of persevering toil, ten years of uncheered, unmarked exertion, would have broken down many a man of less resolute will: and when, at last, the public is struck by one of these tales which glide into the traditions of a people, the press, following the movement of admiration, turns suddenly round, and affects the right, first to take the hitherto neglected novelist under its own supreme protection, and then, on the first show of difference between them, to charge him with base ingratitude to his selfelected protector!86 Melville must have remembered this analysis and identified it with Duyckinck and himself at least in part as he wrote the paragraphs in Pierre which were thought through but nonetheless destructive. Seemingly wishing to turn to another experimental path on his journey to become a writer who lived by his works, Melville then began creating serialized short stories for respected periodicals, another form of composition particularly representative of La Comédie humaine, to which Balzac had turned to fend off his debt collectors.

C ha p t e r Eigh t

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he Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, the last novel published by Melville in his lifetime (1857), ends with a suggestive anticipation: “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.”1 The statement could mean, as sometimes interpreted, that he intended to write a continuation or expansion of the text, since the journey of the riverboat Fidèle on which the narrative takes place had not yet reached its destination. Or, in light of Melville’s philosophical development, he could have been on the verge of a new philosophical level beyond “geniality,” where the text concludes, to resolve the moral conflicts he raises in this narrative. In either case, The Confidence-Man is the closest thing Melville wrote to the spirit of La Comédie humaine in the sense of a history of manners that Balzac outlines in his “Avantpropos.” Though its scale is quite different, its intention is similar, to depict moral actions in American culture. Moreover, the story itself, while dramatizing and discussing a range of native characters, incorporates its own explanatory comments in which an assumed author clarifies his narrative theory and his defense against critical readers in the stated agenda of the French master. If Melville had been deeply convinced, through Hawthorne’s urging and his own proclivities, of the necessity to build up a national literature promised by the nascent Young America, the intervening years of 205

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transformation had given him some time to reconsider his position relative to Balzac’s writings, which were becoming more available in English and French in the United States. Melville may at last have articulated his own principles of fiction by placing his work in contrast to the practices spreading from misunderstanding of a realist movement developing from Balzac’s example. The most accessible ground for discovering a stable theoretical relation between Honoré de Balzac and Melville’s understanding of literary realism is The Confidence-Man. An authorial voice interrupts the story by the vehicle of metatext to modulate the effect on the reader of certain associated narrative passages. These chapters are generally considered, from examination of existing manuscript leaves and the scholarly speculations of Watson Branch, to have been added at the middle of the process of composition, or perhaps even later.2 Although playful in tone, they do seem to express, sometimes by indirection, ideas and opinions from a definite theory of fiction that discloses an intimate awareness of the realistic romance as Balzac delineated and practiced it. If remaining traces of Balzacian influence are to be found anywhere outside Melville’s imaginary scenes, this would be the most likely place to find them. Furthermore, the events that led up to the writing of these chapters disclose how Melville was attracted to turn directly to this sort of argument at this particular time in his career. Additionally, we can consider these chapters a literal continuation of the criticism leveled in “Young America in Literature” in Pierre.

Realism in Theory Since his days of discussion with Hawthorne in Lenox, Melville applied the principles of realism as his friend had derived them from his study of La Comédie humaine. Consequently, Melville had made two abortive attempts at executing these theories in practice. He felt that Moby-Dick turned out to be a “botch,” and his closely modeled “French” romance Pierre became a commercial

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disaster. By this time, no doubt, while still staying close in theme and relationships to Balzac, he wanted to point out his creative differences as well as affiliations as they were gradually becoming part of literary practices in the United States. He was still almost twenty years away from the famous “realism wars” of the latter part of the century, but nonetheless felt obliged to point out and “correct” certain tendencies and applications of popular writers inspired by the French surge to world renown at midcentury. Melville’s intention was to emphasize the characterization in realism as it then stood. The fact that he chose for his satire “real” people like Emerson, Thoreau, and Fanny Kemble in the fictional context of The Confidence-Man is a significant demonstration of his corrective tactic. Although we do not know for certain when Melville first read or annotated Balzac’s “Avant-propos,” or whether he did so in English or French, certain textual echoes suggest that he had known the text, even before 1850, when translations of Balzac were chaotic and irregular. The speed with which “Jésus-Christ en Flandre,” La Peau de chagrin, and other stories appeared across cultures corroborates Palfrey’s assertion that we are still missing most of what was in actual circulation across the network. The writing of The Confidence-Man, both its content and its arrangement, implies strongly that Melville had a résumé or copy of the “Avant-propos” at hand as he composed the The Confidence-Man. It is certainly pertinent to the kind of conversations held between Melville and Hawthorne, and the “Avant-propos” would have served almost as a workbook for the type of nationalistic social realism with which they experimented. After two novels, however, and the critical reaction thereto, Melville’s own ideas about fiction had matured somewhat within the framework in which he had originally formulated them, and he wished to advance them, both in action and in commentary. With the taking up of political arms by groups like Young America II, Melville wanted to set a steady ground for his own literary opinions. The “Avant-propos” is of such

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a length and nature that it probably appeared in an ephemeral text or general periodical without much editing.

Continuing Interest in Balzac Hayes makes a strong case for the idea that during his time as a magazine contributor—between Pierre and The Confidence-Man— Melville continued to rely on Balzacian themes and patterns for his fictions as well. Hayes argues that The Countess with Two Husbands, Joseph Price’s translation of Le Colonel Chabert that appeared in the New-York Mirror in 1837,3 seven years before Melville returned from his string of sea adventures, has much to do with the composition of “Bartleby the Scrivener,” which Melville published late in 1853.4 While Melville had certainly abandoned his absolute faith in Young America and in Duyckinck as a mentor, he still appreciated Balzac. Something that may have supported his continuing attachment to Balzac as a guide to formulating an American literature was a fervent defense of him in The Democratic Review (1853), although it was no longer edited by O’Sullivan. Melville still believed in formulating an independent genre, as signaled by his acceptance to write for Putnam’s Monthly, which had offered him an invitation to publish on just such grounds. He would have noted that the Review employed some of the same language he had used to describe Hawthorne a few years earlier: Except for Shakespeare, or to a certain degree Walter Scott, we know of no English writer of fiction to compare with Balzac. Bulwer and Thackeray, who have both in different ways been his imitators, are alike immeasurably his inferiors. … We pity Bulwer, we laugh at Thackeray. In dark and cynical moments we perhaps despise them both.5 The anonymous writer identifies Balzac’s power with characters directly, and the importance of hasard in the compositions:

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Balzac is at home with the details of every profession and trade, with every form of religious belief, and every shade of philosophical opinion. He displays with equal brilliancy and penetration the arcana of the existence of the banker and the beggar, the duchess and the courtesan, the thief and the minister… So perfect is his creation of character, so distinct and individual each personage, that we feel it to be quite an amusing experiment to see what he or they will do amid entirely new circumstances and new actors.6 The writer dedicates many lines to praise of La Peau de chagrin, and ends with an expected cry from Les Jeunes-France: Balzac, the Shakespeare of France, the Homer of the social epic, in the words of France’s fairest and noblest students— who did not distain to adopt in their most exquisite reunions the names and characters of his drama—l’adorable Balzac! 7 It is quite likely that he was already thinking of his steamship of American fools and how to populate it when this article appeared. In the important instance of The Confidence-Man Melville’s network link went all the way back to a story in the 1831 Gosselin edition of Romans et contes philosophics, the short story, “Jésus-Christ en Flandre.” So far, we know it as among the first Balzac writing rendered into English (1833), albeit in parody form. It was continually reprinted in 1832, 1833, 1836; and in 1846 it obtained its final form with another story, “The Church” (“L’Eglise”) appended to it. Melville was likely long aware of this story, and we have strong evidence that Hawthorne owned an early version. “Jésus-Christ en Flandre” first appeared when Hawthorne was certainly very familiar with and possessed books by Balzac. In fact, if Stein is correct about Hawthorne being influenced by Melmoth réconcilié,8 then, according to Elizabeth Peabody’s timetable, Hawthorne probably purchased the 1836 edition of the volumes, in which was bound

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the shorter “Jésus-Christ en Flandre.” He certainly knew it by the time he wrote “A Select Party” in 1844. Melville may have perused the book on an overnight stay or while Hawthorne was unavailable for conversation. Since he apparently began The Confidence-Man as an offering to Putnam’s Magazine, Melville could also have encountered an original periodical article in English as yet undiscovered. The principal part of Balzac’s story concerns the fate of a medieval ferryboat voyage just at sunset between an island and the coast of Flanders. An unusual stranger, mild and meek and without baggage, boards the ferry last after a group of other citizens both rich and poor take up most of the passenger places. The travelers are divided in their opinions of this odd individual, the subject of much banter, yet he remains silent, unresponsive, and notably humble. A storm develops, and the skipper of the boat urges everyone to make extraordinary efforts to survive, while the stranger only asks them to have faith in him and they shall be saved. The apparent “burgomaster” is met with both hoots and supplications as the storm rages stronger, and the steersman, not trusting in prayer or in Providence, demands more courageous participation on everyone’s part. At last the ferry breaks up near its destination: Those who disbelieve and are proud or selfish drown from the weight of their possessions and their egoism; those with confidence in the stranger are saved. The skipper, however, hangs on by his own individual Will and stubbornly survives. Melville himself had taken a ferryboat from Ostend in Flanders to Dover in 1849, by a similar route as in Balzac’s tale: Arrived at Ostend at 11 1/2 P.M. The boat was at the wharf—took a 2d class passage, & went down into a doghole in the bow, & there sat & smoked, & shivered, & pitched about in the roll of the sea from midnight till 5 o’clock in the morning, Thursday 13th Dec when we arrived at Dover. Disembarked in the dark in a small boat & went to The Sign of “The Gun.”9

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Disembarking from a small Flemish craft after a rough sea voyage closely reflects elements of the French narrative, which also recur in The Confidence-Man. Personal experience is a strong element in all Melville’s writing, and he probably found something charming or memorable in Balzac’s use of a Flanders setting, especially if Hawthorne had introduced him to the story little more than a year after his adventure on the ferry. The result of contact with this story is a similar part for Melville’s man in cream-colors to that of the stranger in Balzac’s tale. Both nameless passengers appear suddenly and mysteriously on shore just as a crowded ferry is ready to pull away; they are both buffeted by the self-occupied crowd already on board. They carry no baggage and have no attendants. Both are ethereal, mild and attractive persons, and they stimulate speculation and chatter, even common “titters,” among their companions. Neither finds a place to sit and must move to the portion of the boat where the poor and rejected reside. In opposition to prevailing skepticism, both expound discourse of religious faith. Both rely on New Testament phrases to communicate, and each is thought simple-minded as a result. Both vanish as suddenly and unnoticed as they appear. Philosophically, both characterizations rely prominently on the essence of I Corinthians 13:12 and exploit the problem for the bringer of salvation of being perceived by followers in a narrow-spirited and indignant humanity.10 However, we face the same historical dilemma with “JésusChrist en Flandre” as with the “Avant-propos.” While textual echoes clearly demonstrate Melville’s familiarity with the story, as I have enumerated them elsewhere,11 no paper copy or record thereof exists beyond “Le Dragon Rouge” as of 2016. Consequently, I offer my translation of the standard French version in lieu of citing English translations, which are not yet recoverable prior to those in 1890s. In their detailed commentary as part of the Northwestern Newberry edition of The Confidence-Man, the editors Harrison

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Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle propose the accepted theory that Herman Melville began writing this novel after reading a newspaper article about the re-appearance in New York of an “original confidence man,” known as William Thompson. Yet beyond this assertion, they confess uncertainty on several points still to be resolved. Two of these are the nature of the story’s initial setting and its philosophical development: Nor do we know two further basic matters: how or when it occurred to him to put his Confidence Man aboard a Mississippi steamboat rather than keep him, like his prototype, in an eastern city, or when in his planning and writing of the book Melville enlarged his Confidence Man to a character of wider social and even cosmic significance than the newspaper original.12 Since Vincent’s pioneering analysis of Melville’s method of composition, readers have known of Melville’s tendency to “expropriate,” embellish, and append observations and incidents from other writers in his own work, according to Watson Branch.13 Although American literary criticism tends to perpetuate its own myths, Melville is unlikely to have created such a complex masterpiece based on a newspaper article published six years before (which he may never have seen). By recognizing the connection with “Jésus-Christ en Flandre,” considerably more depths of meaning are reached.

Consistency of Characters The first intrusion into the narrative concerning the composition of characters in The Confidence-Man, Chapter fourteen, is a reflection on the role of the consistency of characters in fiction. Duyckinck and the Young America group valued rhetorical homogeneity as a sign of (logical) reality. But Balzac raises a different argument from l’unite de composition: “there have existed and therefore will exist in

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all eras social species as there are zoological species,” in the context that they follow the same or similar universal laws of interaction.14 Melville’s narrator admits a certain “inconsistency” in the characterization of a passenger on the Fidèle, but justifies this depiction with the same metaphor as Balzac: a zoological one. Observation of nature is a superior means of developing fictional characters over popular aesthetic expectations. To illustrate his point, Melville’s commentator turns to natural history and the “duck-billed beaver” to show that “no writer has produced such inconsistent characters as nature herself has.”15 In much the same way as Balzac cites biologists St. Hilaire and Buffon, Melville continues: For how does it couple with another requirement—equally insisted upon, perhaps—that, while all fiction is allowed some play of invention, yet fiction based on fact should never be contradictory to it; and is it not a fact that, in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis? … the author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as a flying-squirrel, and, at different periods, as much as variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts.16 Melville indirectly challenges Balzac for taking on too much. According to Balzac, the writer of fiction must strive to uncover the laws of the human universe, a difficult task: Is it not veritably more difficult to compete with established institutions by writing of Daphnis and Chloe, Roland, Amadis, Panurge, Don Quixote, … Ivanhoe, Manfred, Mignon, than to put in order more or less the same facts in every nation, or to search out the intent (spirit) of laws fallen into disuse; to draft the theories which mislead peoples, or, like certain metaphysicians, to explain what is?17

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Melville is more subdued in stating his goals but just as absolute. Balzac stresses the point that his technique involves a certain necessary application of universal organization, with which Melville agrees. Balzac does not imply that his creations are simply grotesque “duck-billed characters,” and as Melville restates it: “As elsewhere, experience is the only guide here; but as no one man’s experience can be co-extensive with what is, it may be unwise in every case to rest upon it.”18 In repeating the phrase “what is” directly from the “Avant-propos,” Melville’s commentator is again touching on Balzac’s argument that the metaphysical approach alone is more unreliable than allowing for complex and extraordinary personae with realistic features. There must be a balance of observation and metaphysical consistency. Melville does not wish to disparage entirely the psychological insight of Balzac’s literary diver. It is the effort to dive for the principles that impresses him, despite his intuition that “all the lead in Galena” cannot bring one to them:19 But as, in spite of seeming discouragement, some mathematicians are yet in hope of hitting upon an exact method of determining the longitude, the more earnest psychologists may, in the face of previous failures, still cherish expectations with regard to some mode of infallibly discovering the heart of man.20 Besides taking another swipe at physiognomy, Melville is asserting the possibility of authors expressing some inner workings of their characters by their common traits. With this reservation, the narrator is not at all severing himself from Balzac’s form of aesthetic mesmerism, only certain un-malleable principles of its application, as the conclusion of the chapter reveals: “But enough has been said by way of apology for whatever may have seemed amiss or obscure in the character of the merchant; so nothing remains but to turn to our comedy, or, rather, to pass from the comedy of thought to that of action.”21 The use of the word “comedy” here is not

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gratuitous or accidental but indicative of the entire effort implied by The Confidence-Man: to present thematically the characters of American society in the manner of the great comedy created by Balzac. Melville’s antithesis of thought and action echoes Balzac’s principles.

Authentic Characters Having addressed the idea of allowing into his comedy a character that is inconsistent, Melville then shifts in Chapter thirty-three to cajole the reader into accepting a character that is not literally “true-to-life.” At this point, the pendulum has swung to the other end of the arc of believability, where the incredible image of Melville’s cosmopolitan needs to be anticipated. Balzac addresses comparable instances directly in La Comédie humaine. Hence, Balzac unhesitatingly offers readers a skiing angel in Séraphîta and a flawless occultist in Ursule Mirouët. Since Melville discussed the importance of Mme. De Staël with his shipboard friends and purchased her romance Corinne, he would have had some definite idea about what Balzac meant. In his discourse, the Melvillian speaker approaches the same point with appreciation: “Strange, that in a work of amusement, this severe fidelity to real life should be exacted by any one, who, by taking up such a work, sufficiently shows that he is not unwilling to drop real life, and turn, for a time, to something different.”22 “Severe fidelity” (a good description of Duyckinck’s preferences) is too extreme for romance; the writer must save room for the “noble falsity” of fiction as dictated by Balzac. To support his case, the critic in The Confidence-Man turns from zoological imagery to the metaphor of the stage, the second principal analogy used by Balzac to describe the narratives of La Comédie humaine. He writes: There is another class, and with this class we side, who sit down to a work of amusement tolerantly as they sit at a

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One can sense behind this paragraph references both to Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter’s custom house) and Balzac (Madame Vauquer’s boarding house) as positive examples of the commentator’s point. The hypertexts are apt, given the goal of the argument. The narrator echoes Balzac’s perspective when he concludes that: Surely a little is to be allowed to that writer who, in all his scenes, does but seek to minister to what, as he understands it, is the implied wish of the more indulgent lovers of entertainment, before whom harlequin can never appear in a coat too parti-colored, or cut capers too fantastic.24 Here Melville clearly justifies his appreciation of the Genius cosmopolitan based on imagined reader response. Again, he is making his choices based on romance rather than strict documentary. Balzac makes a similar observation in his “Avant-propos” when he establishes that the principal challenge of the writer is to be entertaining: “How to please at the same time the poet, the philosopher, and the masses who want both poetry and philosophy under striking images?”25 This task lies at the root of Melville’s ambition to create an interesting American romance fit for a public educated on European sensational novels. In his short sentence, Balzac summarizes Melville’s persistent predicament. It encapsulates Melville’s wish to be both popular and philosophical as Balzac was. Moby-Dick and Pierre are certainly examples of a good attempt at conveying “philosophy under striking imagery,” if not the most successful in American literature.

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Original Characters It is in the third section of theoretic commentary that the reader finds the most direct references to Balzac’s methodology. Having argued for the significance and viability of inconsistent and “unrealistic” characters in the service of literature, the narrator moves into the realm of discussing the “original character.” He grounds his assertion by reverting once again to Balzac’s comparison between humanity and animals. “Every great town is a kind of man-show, where the novelist goes for his stock, just as the agriculturalist goes to the cattleshow for his.”26 Balzac makes a similar admission about his own methods, but he stresses the importance of close observation at the “man-show”: “By holding to this rigorous reproduction, a writer can become a painter more or less faithful, more or less happy, patient, or courageous of human types, the contours of the dramas of private life, the archaeologist of social furniture, the cataloguer of professions, the registrar of good and evil.”27 In a similar context, however, Melville then introduces his individual turn: “But in the one fair, new species of quadrupeds are hardly more rare, than in the other are new species of characters—that is, original ones.”28 His intention is introduced as an attempt to prove the inappropriateness of applying “original” to the cosmopolitan, while he is actually setting the stage for just such an interpretation by the susceptible reader. He is preparing for the recognition of the cosmopolitan as a Genius. Balzac’s concept of originality demands that it involves not simply innovation but also a certain quality of representation: “Though dazzled so to speak by Walter Scott’s amazing fertility, always himself and always original, I did not despair, for I found the source of his genius in the infinite variety of human nature.”29 Melville takes up the theme by showing more care to define precisely what original means in relation to the composition of an entertaining narrative. He first establishes that a character of this kind is indeed extraordinary in life and in literature: “As for original characters in

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fiction, a grateful reader will, on meeting with one, keep the anniversary of that day. True, we sometimes hear of an author who, at one creation, produces some two or three score such characters; it may be possible.”30 Again, Melville is responding directly to the popular tendency to repeat unoriginal stock characters in imitation of recurring characters, as in La Comédie humaine. In this context Balzac writes in the “Avant-propos” of his attempt “to depict the two or three thousand conspicuous types of a period.”31 Logic dictates that not all of these are “original.” Melville demonstrates a similar understanding of the lesser or “instinctive” Geniuses of Balzac. According to the system of vital Will from Louis Lambert, these characters occupy the position of Genius between the Instinctive and Abstractive characters: “the commonality of men.” Melville’s thoughts about these actors are clear: “they can hardly be original in the sense that Hamlet is, or Don Quixote, or Milton’s Satan.”32 Melville’s intrusive “author” names three characters particularly noted for their adherence to Will despite overwhelming personal, social, even divine opposition. In fact, like Balzac, Melville sees this type of character as outside the usual dialectical matrix of human interaction and functioning on something other than common instinct: “characters, merely singular, imply but singular forms, so to speak, original ones, truly so, imply original instincts.”33 This type of genial originality lies at the core of both Melville’s intention with the cosmopolitan and his firm agreement with Balzac regarding the character possessing exceptional volition. “In short, a due conception of what is to be held for this sort of personage in fiction would make him almost as much a prodigy there as in real history is a new law-giver, a revolutionizing philosopher, or the founder of a new religion.”34 Louis Lambert is just such a law-giver, Daniel d’Arthez is a philosopher, and Séraphîtüs is the founder of a new religion. Balzac had reached the conclusion that “After having painted the social life in these three books [Scènes de la vie privée, Scènes de la vie de province, Scènes de la vie parisienne] it remained to show the exceptional existences that summarize the interests

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of many people, or of everybody, and are some way outside the communal law.”35 This summarizing is of course precisely what Melville is doing with the cosmopolitan, the original character of The Confidence-Man, to envision an American individual empowering his personality in order to cope with temporal morality outside the range of normal conditions, or, as Adler put it, “outside God”: The [odd or singular] character sheds not its characteristics on its surroundings, whereas the original character, essentially such, is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round it—everything is lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is with Hamlet) …36 For Melville the original character becomes part of a singular species that represents by charismatic force a magnetic field distracting the other characters of the human theater. His disposition is the limelight of the play. There is little difference between this sort of character and the Geniuses of Balzac, for this is a fair description of the Prometheans in La Comédie humaine: Balthazar Claës, John Melmoth, and, foremost of all, Jacques Collin, Vautrin. They, too, show themselves as “Drummond lights” in the narratives to which they belong— everything revolves around their superior force. This is an echo, of course, of Carlyle, who first taught Melville of a “light fountain” hero of “original insight.”37 Melville considered Ahab a successful creation of this type, and he wanted readers to see the cosmopolitan as another. By writing in his commentary that such characters produce an effect in readers’ minds akin to the creation allegory in Genesis, Melville suggests that godlike Will is essential to the definition of originality—as essential as sympathy and altruism to the Specialist—though perhaps out of the range of the Genius. The American commentator says: “To produce such characters, an author, besides other things, must have seen much and seen

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through much; to produce but one original character, he must have had much luck.”38 “Much luck” of course reflects Balzac’s hasard and the Frenchman’s theoretical offering from the “Avant-propos.” The narrator even closes his observations with the primary figure of speech used by Balzac, the zoological. He stays in harmony with Balzac’s belief that all creation proceeded from a single, primordial entity and divided under the influence of environment. “There would seem to be but one point in common between this sort of phenomenon in fiction and all other sorts: it cannot be born in the author’s imagination—it being as true in literature as in zoology, that all life is from the egg.”39 Once again, Melville returns to the unique Balzacian metaphor of biology indicating a unity of composition. As in his later comment to be found in Billy Budd, Sailor denoting the “clue in the labyrinth” of character needed to comprehend Claggart, Melville is alluding to the abstract necessity of extraordinary progenitors as well as experiential ones based on some particular cosmic secret. The archetypes exist on a different plane from life. By returning to the basic principles he found in his analysis of Balzacian realism with Hawthorne as he was writing Moby-Dick, Melville was hoping to answer potential critics of the somewhat fantastical portions of The Confidence-Man and at the same time refute his Young America detractors, who were unknowingly duplicating English and European imitations of realism rather than studying carefully the recognized master novelist of the age.

Solving Compositional Problems By 1857 Melville’s financial situation was bringing a decisive end to his sole career as a professional prose writer. He appears at this time nonetheless solidly dependent on continuing to apply interesting compositional structures with proven audience success from others’ storytelling, even though his technique changed. In the intervening years the words “confidence man” had been used in the media and conversation frequently enough for it to be in fairly common usage

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by 1855—common enough for Melville to see how appropriately the term fit his social and religious purposes, the initial “cosmic significance” of the story, which was more than an afterthought. Given that his subject is certainly ontological and religious, a careful unity of composition would seem essential. Moreover, the performance is peppered by puns and double entendres in the familiar style of Balzac. The preponderance of shared elements with “Jésus-Christ en Flandre” certainly suggests just such an intention to borrow from another “single printed work”40 as the editors suggested. Recognizing the harmony between The Confidence-Man and “Jésus-Christ en Flandre” solves persistent questions about Melville’s romance, such as those posed by the Newberry editors above. Not surprisingly, the Balzacian model voices a similar complaint about lack of faith in a secular society and develops a “perilous plight” where there no faith left on the earth actually exists. The story is in fact about the manifestation of deity in disguise, unrecognized by the citizens around him, an idea Melville had toyed with in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” and is reflected in Melville’s Man in Cream Colors. By considering the similarities with this tale, one finds a new plausible explanation of religious meaning surrounding The Confidence-Man.

Prototypes In a way that has become expected, the sketched geometry of distributing characters in both The Confidence-Man and “Jésus-Christ en Flandre” fits the usual Balzacian model in the sense that the action is polarized among the three psychological centers of gravity resolving a primary dialectical tension. Balzac’s story, although it concerns religious and spiritual matters more directly than most, is intentionally kept true to plausible experience in the manner of réalisme. There are no aspects of magic or mysticism portrayed in the text. As the ship flounders, the Savior does encourage some of the passengers to follow him to shore by walking on water,

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but as with the improbable events in other stories, the action is surrounded by such believable detail that a suspension of disbelief blocks any doubt in the reader. Since both stories dramatize the common rejection of traditional Christian discourse, the divine apex of the triangle remains vacant. In this version of the Balzacian plot/character layout, the superior Genius plays the significant role. The skipper or pilot is the sole authority responsible for making certain that the journey across the strait is accomplished, and it is by his Will that the ferry almost completes the route to its destination intact—close enough, at least, for him to save himself and others: “When the boat, guided by the miraculous skill of the pilot, came almost within the sight of Ostend, to fifty paces from the shore, she was struck by seizure of the storm and suddenly capsized.”41 The skipper is one of Balzac’s original Geniuses because he defies Providence in the form of the Savior’s promise of “believe in me.” He dives headlong and swims to the shore, exhausted but alive, while the selfish, instinctive passengers loaded with earthly treasure and lust sink to the bottom for good. Moreover, he is warned by the Savior not to try such boldness again; his Promethean behavior sets a bad precedent for the common passengers. In Melville’s story, the cosmopolitan (a name suggesting also ontological heroics) imagines the rich farmer diving from a likely shipwreck and suggests survival by clinging to an insignificant chamber pot. While there is no shipwreck that concludes The Confidence-Man as there is in “Jésus-Christ en Flandre,” the possibility is discussed at length between the miser and the cosmopolitan. These are the “original characters.” Although Balzac’s skipper rejects Christ in disguise, and he may not utterly defeat nature (the boat is capsized by the storm, lives are lost), his effort has brought crew and passengers close enough to shore for the good to survive. The Savior could accomplish his rescue, and their own individual fates can be realized because of the skipper’s actions. The skipper gains proximity to salvation for himself and directs numerous others out of danger. Unlike Vautrin, who must

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commit murder and theft to support his charitable aims, the skipper is considerate without being destructive to others and couples his Will with his physical prowess alone, although he is a religious outlaw. He remains defiant of the deity—a willful disbeliever. He helps others not by giving or taking, but by encouraging them to call on individual fortitude. He succeeds without the help of the Savior and without inhibiting (or helping) his fellow passengers washed ashore by the sea that overwhelms the weak. His salvation is a private one. The cosmopolitan attempts to “save” his marks by stimulating their confidence, to whatever extent seems needed. But most important, the quality of the Genius in these stories has undergone a transformation of tolerance and sympathy in a manner unlike others among Balzac’s Prometheans. The skipper is not an egoist, although he rejects the trappings of Christianity. He may be a heretic but he is not a devil. The cosmopolitan shows sympathy with his discussants, though never abandons his will to get them to know themselves. At the point of the Abstractive there are in these stories two “saviors” who appear in the guise of Jesus, as he is conventionally depicted. Balzac’s Savior has all the traits of the divine character. He lacks godlike power (although he can walk on water) but he does want passengers to “believe” in him. The man only saves those poor (in spirit) who have professed this confidence in his person. The others are brought down by their own attachments in life. Notably he demonstrates a charismatic and extremely humble presence. Yet the savior exists in an ambiguous context and is obstructed by the negative energy directed against him by the passengers. He is literally despised and rejected by the rich and influential men onboard. Melville’s Abstractive receives the same treatment, only he is totally mute, and can only scrawl his biblical quotes on a board that few bother to read. As with Stubb and Starbuck in Moby-Dick, the two bearers of salvation are each paired with Instinctives. Thomas, a doubter, is slow to accept the savior in Balzac’s story, and the barber William

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Cream, who offers “No Trust” to the passengers in Melville’s tale. He is the other half of the human baseline, since the savior is the “man in cream colors.” The double use of the word “cream” identifies them as authentic characters, but not original ones. The mass of passengers falls into two groups in both narratives: those who are concerned primarily with themselves, and those who have been good, loyal, sympathetic servants to society and believe in God. This distinction portrays the typical delineation between Instinctive and Abstractive types. High society physically separates itself from the poor by its imagined superiority, but the storm shows no distinction. Facing reality, aristocracy does not matter; Balzac’s sea is “ruthlessly democratic” in this regard. In fact, Balzac objects to democracy only on the grounds that it does not sufficiently allow for the needs of minorities, including laborers and the poor.

Man in Cream Colors Opening The Confidence-Man initially with the rejected stranger, Melville has again recast Balzac’s imagery in an American setting. What is immediately striking is how closely the details are paralleled, with the exception of one particular inversion: Balzac’s ship casts off at sunset, while Melville’s weighs anchor at sunrise. This difference is partly the result of Melville’s intention to extend his narrative to an entire April Fool’s Day, while Balzac wishes his characters to face evening and darkness as soon as they take to the water. This divergence aside, similar images are quickly evoked. In fact, Melville’s discharged customs officer even calls the Fidèle (“faithful”) a “ship of fools”42—a direct echo of Sebastian Brandt’s medieval satire presenting much of the same irony found in “Christ in Flanders.” Suggesting linguistically that he was borrowing from Balzac, Melville refers directly to the steamer as a “boat,” despite the contrast in size to an ancient bark, and later writes that “like any small ferry-boat, to right and left, at every landing, the huge

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steamboat Fidèle still receives additional passengers in exchange for those who disembark.”43 Thereby he identifies the allegorical bark with a modern journey. By the conclusion, the stories are practically identical in representation, although not entirely in consequence. Even if the religious lamplight goes out in the sleeping quarters in The Confidence-Man and the passengers are left in darkness, while the sky darkens into night in “Christ in Flanders,” the significant difference is that the cosmopolitan turns off the light himself, much as Balzac’s Willful steersman decides his own fate. And while Melville’s characters simply prepare for a shipwreck, in Balzac’s tale there actually is one. Like Balzac’s story, The Confidence-Man primarily contains common social types and behaviors, particularly in terms of right human responses, and in Melville’s story, with its focus on American manners, life appears more nationalistic than Balzac’s. What constitutes the nature of vital trust and goodness are deeply investigated in both narratives. Additionally, both stories address the inefficacy of contemporary Christian ideology in modern life and the growing religious indifference of mercantile society at a time when the most sacred form of worship was the Church Bazaar. They also treat the nature of faith in face of these two elements, in a theme that Melville had been analyzing in his other romances: first faith in a captain, then faith in a father, and faith in a spouse (in the missing Isle of the Cross).44 Now he takes the theme further on a modern vessel, the Faithful, where faith in Providence is tellingly displaced. The beginnings of the two narratives strengthens the dependence. Balzac: The boat that served to carry passengers from the Island of Cadzand to Ostend was going to leave shore. … At that moment a man appeared several paces from the jetty, the skipper, who had not heard the sound either of coming or walking, was rather surprised to see him. This traveler seemed to have sprung up suddenly, like a peasant

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network who would have lain in the field awaiting the point of departure and whom the trumpet had awakened.45 Melville: At sunrise on a first of April there appeared, suddenly as Manco Capac at the lake Titicaca, a man in cream-colors, at the water-side in the city of St. Louis …. In the same moment with his advent, he stepped aboard the favorite steamer Fidèle, on the point of starting for New Orleans.46

Balzac’s description of the appearance suggests a supernatural origin (they could not hear the stranger’s footsteps). Melville bases the beginning of his story on this same imaginative effect with a similar surprise appearance of his initial character. Moreover, Manco Capac is a mysterious outsider who comes to shore unexpectedly from an island in Lake Titicaca to found the Inca faith. Although “advent” can be a general term particularly appropriate to this Incan savior, since it also has familiar Christian connotations of “the coming of the Savior.” Also, April 1 is usually close to Easter, the celebration of a resurrected God on the Christian calendar. That Balzac’s stranger “sprang up from the earth” can also suggest a resurrection; and the stranger’s assumed sleep is literally duplicated by the man in cream colors at the end of his participation in Melville’s story. It is notable that both vessels are already crowded with passengers anxious to be on their way. Both boats are just on the point of departure, and the final boarders are each judged impatiently. Melville’s vessel is set to transport its passengers from St. Louis all the way to New Orleans, but it retains the same flavor of antiquity as Balzac’s little ferry. Both strangers are distinguished by what they wear: the “man in the brown camlet coat” and the “man in cream-colors.” Neither “man” is ever given a definite name. Balzac’s is once or twice “the man,” while Melville’s always bears the designation “the man in cream-colors.” Even the stature of the two Christ-like strangers

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evokes striking correspondences, and the same “titters,” (railleries chuchotées), make up the response of unsympathetic passengers. Both are alone. They are alike in their extraordinary projection of an unmistakable mildness and innocent beauty. Neither carries baggage of any sort, a telling point that strengthens their identity as being both outside society and free of its accoutrements. In contrast, the other passengers on both boats travel with heaps of baggage. Both vessels carry former soldiers and widows. Balzac’s stranger is forced to the bow of the boat, while the man in cream colors must find his place in steerage, the least desirable part of their conveyances, among the passive and indigent. Melville was inspired by the same passage as Hawthorne for “A Select Party”: Balzac: At the appearance of a bareheaded man whose coat and breeches were brown camlet, whose stiff linen collar had not a single ornament, who did not carry in hand cap nor bonnet, without purse nor sword at his belt, whom everyone took for a burgomaster sure of his authority, a burgomaster good and gentle like so many an ancient Fleming, whose nature and humble character have been so well preserved by native painters. The poor passengers, then, received the stranger with demonstrations of respect that provoked tittering among the people at the opposite end of the boat.47 Melville: His cheek was fair, his chin downy, his hair flaxen, his hat a white fur one, with a long fleecy nap. He had neither trunk, valise, carpet-bag, nor parcel. No porter followed him. He was unaccompanied by friends. From the shrugged shoulders, titters, whispers, wonderings of the crowd, it was plain that he was, in the extremest sense of the word, a stranger …. Stared at, but unsaluted, with the air of one neither courting nor shunning regard, but evenly pursuing the path of duty, lead it through solitudes or cities, he held on his way along the lower deck …48

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The two characters use clichés reflecting Christian virtues— faith and charity—phrases from I Corinthians that prove to be appeals both equally worn and unimpressive to those around them. There is no one to protect Melville’s character and no one ready to defend Balzac’s. Similarly, both strangers ignore their negative reception by the other passengers, who remain fixed in their self-concern. One can see Melville’s intent to connect the ineffectual preacher in cream colors with the paradigm of the conventional image of Jesus; Balzac conveys a picture of his man like a common devotional painting. By way of a similar impression, the stranger in Balzac’s story is called “stupid,” while Melville’s is a “simpleton.” Not listed among the numerous disguises assumed by Melville’s cosmopolitan,49 the man in cream colors is thus part of a preamble, which plays upon a particular religious stage from which the cosmopolitan can later offer his alternative speech on Providence similar to the vehemence against providence made by Balzac’s steersman.

Ontological Pilot as Confidence Man In closing The Confidence-Man, Melville accentuates the link between Balzac’s hero and the American cosmopolitan. Principally, he takes up the theme of Providence, which he addresses seven times, three of them in the last chapter alone. It is the principal topic Hawthorne recalls from his meeting with Melville just after he had finished the book.50 The issue is critical to understanding the man of strong Will who does, indeed, succeed without displaying any confidence in Providence at all, the next stage in spiritual development. This man of Will, even more effective than the Savior (or at least as effective as he), mistrusts the action of higher powers to rescue mankind. He acts in cooperation with Christianity but does not trust in Providence. At the same time, he is a “fatalist” because he sees life deterministically, not magically. He believes in the inevitable result of one’s actions formulating

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one’s destiny. In many ways, he is the direct opposite of the devout Christians around him. Melville ascribes similar strength to his cosmopolitan. Balzac’s introduction of the skipper’s self-affiliation with the devil is never exploited, but the acquisition of great Will often conjures demonic associations in the Genius. He takes the role of Providence upon himself, like Vautrin; yet for this act the Savior does not excommunicate him, nor do any of the passengers on the vessel berate him. Melville, with different details, suggests a movement toward a similar assessment of the human condition and traditional ideas of simple dependence on Providence for salvation. As a replacement to the deaf mute savior, the cosmopolitan confidence man leads at last the old Christian farmer, confused by the Bible, to his individual “life-preserver,” however imaginary or inadequate it may seem. The cosmopolitan first addresses unfounded optimism. The old man tells of his trust in Providence: “in all our wanderings through this vale, how pleasant, not less than obligatory, to feel that we need start at no wild alarms, provide for no wild perils; trusting that Power which is alike able and willing to protect us when we cannot ourselves.”51 In response, the cosmopolitan, subject to no power, as one would expect, nevertheless does not try to dissuade the farmer directly, but instead parodies the American convention of Providence that the reader might better see its mechanical absurdity: I believe in a Committee of Safety, holding silent sessions over all, in an invisible patrol, most alert when we sounder sleep, and whose beat lies as much through forests as towns, along rivers as streets. In short, I never forget that passage of Scripture which says, “Jehovah is my confidence.” The traveler who has not this trust, what miserable misgivings must be his; or, what vain, short-sighted care must he take of himself.52

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“Committees of Safety” have been instituted by several nations during times of revolution to replace or exclude existing government. Since the cosmopolitan does not believe in a genuine Committee of Safety, he is attempting by indirection to enlighten the old Christian by shining an original, ironic illumination upon Providence’s action. The text suggests not only the Committees of Safety set up during the American Revolution, but the ignominious French Committee of Public Safety that conducted the Reign of Terror and saw to it that thousands of persons were executed under the blade of the guillotine. The cosmopolitan turns the innocent thoughts of the old man into Vautrin’s reality, a Providence which “destroys us men on the right and left—at random, in short.”53 After assuring the old man that a chamber pot will be enough to preserve his life in emergency (anything will do in the face of “Providence”), the cosmopolitan says: “I think that in case of a wreck, barring sharp-pointed timbers, you could have confidence in that stool for a special providence.” “Then, good-night, good-night; and Providence have both of us in its good keeping.” “Be sure it will,” eying the old man with sympathy, as for the moment he stood, money-belt in hand, and life-preserver under arm, “be sure it will, sir, since in Providence, as in man, you and I equally put trust.”54 Such satire was not unique to Melville; in this case, Balzac’s skipper has the same feeling: “Leave alone your Holy Virgin,” the skipper told the passengers. “Put your hands to the scoops and bail the water out of the bark—And the rest of you,” he went on, addressing the sailors, “pull with all your might! We have a moment of respite. In the name of the devil who is leaving you in this world, be your own providence!55 Of course, both men are misanthropists in their way, and

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equally distrust providence, as Melville’s ambiguous syntax belies. The idea of the cosmopolitan introducing providence without an initial capital may be lost in context, although he means to take the idea out of the miraculous and into the calculation of determinism.

Providential Outcome Once Providence is put in a new light, the theme of seeing is developed for the reader. The narrator had noted at the beginning of the chapter that: In the middle of the gentleman’s cabin burned a solar lamp, swung from the ceiling, and whose shade of ground glass was all round fancifully variegated, in transparency, with the image of a horned altar, from which flames rose, alternate with the figure of a robed man, his head encircled by a halo.56 Although Melville’s scene takes place in a water closet rather than an open boat and there is no shipwreck, only anticipation of one, the metaphors correspond with Balzac. The glass that refracts the light coming from a single source is alternately hellish (horned altar and flames) and Christian (robed man, halo). The light is both “execrated” and “blessed” by the various sleepers nearby. Unfortunately, the captain’s order was that the light not be extinguished so passengers might relieve themselves without “sad consequences” as interpreted by the administration. The fading light shaded by dualistic religion must be kept on, no matter how irritating to sleepers. The dramatic, thematic, and linguistic reflections in The Confidence-Man drawn from “Jésus-Christ en Flandre” are in fact more evident and crucial than any set examined in relation to possible Balzacian influence so far, even when Melville’s specific sources have been uncovered. The internal evidence implies a particularly intimate relation between “Christ in Flanders” and The Confidence-Man

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that goes beyond accident. It supports with obvious borrowings that Melville not only knew this story of Balzac’s, either in French or in English (both are possible), but he also found in it a device to launch his own “ship of fools” populated with American characters and arguments. He found a way to employ the popular narrative framework of a European literary mode while retaining artistic integrity within the American substance of the work. Balzac’s re-evaluation of “confiance” as a decrepit sign of faded religion provided a perfect impetus for Melville’s similar philosophic demonstration that goes right up to the final extinguishing of the smoky light (of organized faith) at the end of the novel. The relationship supplies an obvious answer to the first question by the Newberry editors in explaining how the confidence man appears onboard a ferryboat instead of staying in the city: He is an integral part of a premeditated allegory about Providence and individual Will, subject to the “German horse” that had so occupied Melville for several years and that he was ready to explore in fiction. Melville’s keen awareness of marketplace competition and his persistent desire to make a living by popular writing permitted him the artistic license necessary to parody such evident success as Balzac’s. The second uncertainty is also explained with the same evidence. From its conception, the story was intended to have the cosmic significance of a sociological analysis rather than be just a humorous crime story, given Melville’s addiction to Balzac’s ontology. It was intended from the outset to be a continuation of the discussions began on shipboard in 1849, an example of Melville choosing to write the way he had preferred since his struggle over completing Mardi. The religious themes and overtones of The Confidence-Man come into dramatic clarity through their source in Balzac’s story.

C ha p t e r Ni n e

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t is tempting, in conducting a longitudinal study of an author’s work, to assume or even force a logical progression of thought or content without accounting for the important fact that decades often separate one work from the next. Awareness of this risk is particularly necessary in the case of Melville and Billy Budd, Sailor, for more than thirty years passed following the publication of The Confidence-Man before the former narrative was even conceived. Melville went through a considerable mass of poetic material and life experience, so in this chapter I will seek some continuity but allow also for new interpolations. Melville indulged in irony and cynicism in The Confidence-Man, developing a bitter religious image of the genial misanthrope; but our analysis need not be bound by any tendency found there, given the expanse of the passage of time. It would be a rare person who remains unmoved in spirit for thirty years. He had told Hawthorne at one point, “From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself.”1 The pace changed over the decades, but his moral elevation continued. Consequently, the manuscript that became Billy Budd, Sailor may be the most thought out, if not the final, evidence for Melville’s reconciliation of life and creative endeavor. It is an ideal conception 233

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unlike any examined in the preceding chapters of this book. His executer, Arthur Stedman, indicated that Melville wrote the story not for publication but for his own amusement.2 Modern scholars think that Melville did in fact plan some sort of publication, otherwise the obvious expenditure of effort, including at least attempts at a fair copy for printing, would seem unnecessary. Also, “amusement” may be too shallow a word for what Melville was likely attempting; a higher understanding of central issues of ontology is more likely. In it Melville tried out an abstract connection of metaphoric forces without collapsing into allegory as in the final chapter, “The End,” of White-Jacket. His paradigm, moreover, is closer to the dialectic of Hawthorne (who is referenced in the story) and to Balzac’s unity of composition than in any other work. He rejects the “mixed style” once and for all and turns to a straightforward telling of his tale like Balzac in Louis Lambert. Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts determined that Melville wrote the first version of Billy Budd between 1886 and 1887 and expanded it into a hundred-and-fiftyleaf manuscript by November 1888.3 This period coincides exactly with Melville’s receipt and reading of Saltus’s Balzac, given to him by his wife for his birthday in August 1885.4 From that time to his death in 1891, Melville continued to work on the narrative and elaborate it until it more than doubled in length.5 This latter period covers the time when the Melvilles were accumulating Balzac’s romances in English, although the exact order of receipt is not yet fully chronicled. His extant edition of Seraphita is one of these volumes, which came to Melville sometime in 1889 or later, and is marked with his characteristic underlining, side lining, and comments. Over this same period, Melville was persistently seeking out or receiving works and commentary about Balzac to support this philosophic development. It was at this stage that Dillingham found Balzac to be a “kindred soul”6 to Melville: “Melville was not as driven as Balzac, but the difference was one of degree rather than kind.”7 Although Melville may have ceased writing prose for publication while working at the New York

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Custom House and in retirement, there is no indication that he ceased to read despite his bad eyesight. In fact, to the contrary there seems to have been no suspension of his trips to reading rooms, in his correspondence, or in his continued collection of newspaper clippings found in his books.

Melville’s Drift Toward Buddhism Although Melville could not have been familiar with either Nietzsche’s elaborate analysis of Buddhism or Schopenhauer’s Westernization of its concepts by 1856, he did have the example of Balzac, beside his own awareness of Swedenborg, the “Buddha of the North,”8 to frame much of the spiritual understanding hinted at by the cosmopolitan in The Confidence-Man. Balzac wrote, à propos of Swedenborg’s doctrines, that there has “never been but one religion since the world began,” a footnote Melville sidelined in his American text. Swedenborg figures in the pragmatic transcendental considerations of Mark Winsome (a parody of Emerson?),9 and Melville apparently discussed Swedenborg’s religious philosophy at some length with Adler in 1849.10 Additionally, the Swedenborgian Church in America was faddishly in the news most of the first half of the century, particularly in Greeley’s publications. And Balzac’s amalgamation of Buddha and Swedenborg was at the foundation of his religious perception. Melville’s concept of action over passivity rests to a great extent on the same philosophy as Balzac and his delineation of the “Bouddha chrétien.” It is important to note that Balzac again stays free of any formal system, and does not speak of the christianized Buddha as an alternative to institutionalized Christianity particularly to Catholicism, but only uses it as a description of an individual’s state of moral perfection. After Hegel defined it as a religion in which the personality had to be annihilated in order to return to the void from which everything arises, Buddhism became anathema to most Christians, and it would take a writer as bold as Balzac to risk mentioning Buddha

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in the same sentence, let alone the same phrase, as Christ. Hegel did not consider Buddhism atheistic because for him God was no-thingness; but only insofar as He was an absolutely Indeterminate Being. It is hard for us today to comprehend truly the extent of the paranoiac effect on mid-nineteenth-century society that such thinking manifest, particularly in America, since Buddhism has, since after the Second World War and familiarity with Zen, mutated in the Western consciousness into a benign way of life.11 But back then, moralists damned Buddhism as an atrocious error, a repulsive religion, an absurd doctrine, and a hateful system. No insults were too harsh to be leveled against it. Catholics identified Buddha with Satan and even convinced themselves of the necessity of evangelizing the Orient where this “cult of nothingness” contradicted all reason and threatened to blast away the foundations of civilized society.12 Melville’s readings in Buddhism stretch back at least to the composition of Mardi and probably continued throughout his life. It resounds like a basso profundo throughout his thought. No adequate or longitudinal study of Melville and Buddhism has been published to date. Yet, as we will consider while moving on from this point, Melville apparently attached himself with Buddhist Junya, “the suchness of things, a place which is beyond all polarities.” According to Kathryn Krauss, “It is Melville’s, and the Buddha’s, Middle Way.”13 In fact, Dillingham concludes that “Melville seemed to find most aspects of Buddhism attractive.”14 This predilection may also show a powerful influence from Balzac, who expresses his version of the Bouddha chrétien in opposition to the Hindu-inspired pantheism that appealed to Emerson and the Transcendentalists. As a “middle way” it certainly reflects on the reconciling mode of the Specialist in the dialectical triangle of principal human types. The fact that the Savior acknowledges the skipper’s success by his own means in “Jésus-Christ en Flandre” bespeaks an ineffective God and legitimizes the skipper as a sort of humanist in the cosmopolitan’s literary ancestry. Again, charitable

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Buddhism is a good fit for Melville’s essentially ironic religious discourse, and we will find more of these examples later. Moreover, The Confidence-Man had been Melville’s first attempt to consider in depth the problem of religious feeling, which he later expanded upon in the long poem Clarel, his next composition. Melville, then, like Balzac, was looking for a revitalizing new sense of religion—a savior “wanted” by those who need confidence but cannot count on Providence to provide it. This Savior, in his affiliation with Buddha in America, is seen as a social criminal of the monstrous sort. Such thoughts apparently continued to occupy Melville when he announced that more might follow on the cosmopolitan’s masquerade. It was again in the “Avant-propos” that Balzac announced his attraction to the “Bouddha chrétien.” Melville kept up his intense interest in analyzing religion after he finished his novel, for he set out next on a journey to the East that he had had to postpone in 1849 because of his lack of funds, and which had obviously been a persistent dream of his. Duyckinck described with typical language the writer’s habitual discourse at this time, just after he completed The Confidence-Man, when he re-established their old personal relationship. He wrote that Melville showed up to their first meeting “charged to the muzzle with his sailor metaphysics and jargon of things unknowable … ploughing deep and bringing to the surface some rich fruits of thought and experience.”15 The reminiscence reveals that Melville seemed always ready and eager to discuss theoretical and abstract propositions with those who would listen. Together, such incidents reveal Melville as an enthusiastic conversationalist who frequently coined philosophic-sounding phrases to express intuitions he perhaps found unsayable otherwise.

Meeting an Old Friend These conclusions gain credence when placed beside what Melville tried to speak about with Hawthorne on his arrival in England in

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1856 soon after finishing The Confidence-Man. Hawthorne recorded the subject discussed at their meeting as “of Providence, futurity, and everything that lies beyond human ken.”16 There was clearly some continuity of the themes we have identified occupying Melville— the arbitrariness of Providence, what would come of a “genialized” American culture, and the relation of God’s word to mankind. But instead of engaging with him in dialogue, Hawthorne was passive and wrote in his journal about his friend with stock responses almost identical to his words recorded in Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife. It is significant, though, that Hawthorne also wrote of his friend uncharacteristically in religious terms: “[Melville] informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief.”17 One needs to be particularly cautious with “pretty much,” since it is clearly Hawthorne’s and makes one suspect the accuracy of the full quotation as Melville’s, however it is presented in the text.18 But there is some truth in the statement if one considers that Melville was trying to talk with Hawthorne about Buddhist annihilation into Nirvana, a state he wrote about in a poem several years later. But Hawthorne insists on a “definite belief ” as in Protestant Christianity. Rather than “a belief,” Melville was searching for an ontology he could call his own, not another man’s. Just as he was unwilling to “swing in Emerson’s Rainbow,” as he had written Duyckinck, he was ill at ease in Hawthorne’s rendition of Balzac. So although Melville wanted to talk seriously about some of the impersonal, epistemological implications of The Confidence-Man, Hawthorne was more interested in consigning him to conventional unbelief and shutting off his ideas as “beyond human ken,” much as he had earlier thought Melville’s conversations concerned “impossibilities.” After showing disappointment in Melville’s persistent search for “belief,” Hawthorne wrote the curious sentence: “If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth

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immortality than most of us.”19 Hawthorne took the tenor of their conversation as a sign that Melville was in a state to be pitied. In his conventional thought he equated “religious” and “church-going.” This is not remarkable, because in the minds of most European and American Christians in the 1850s Buddhism presented that same equation. They did not comprehend unfamiliar truth, as the inappropriate categories of “belief ” and “immortality” were blinders. Revealingly, Melville simply remembered their meeting as a “good talk.” It was no doubt difficult for the conventionalist Hawthorne to comprehend precisely how resignation to willed annihilation might represent an advance in Melville’s spirituality, and so it repulsed him, rather than excited him to sense this new relationship to geniality as opposed to genius, particularly of the accustomed Balzacian kind. Melville was not deterred by this mere discursive reaction. A few days later, he left for his own experience of the Holy Land. He returned on another track that ultimately led him to his highest expression of humanity in the character of his own amalgam of Christ and Buddha, Billy Budd. After his return from the Holy Land, Melville turned to performing on the lecture circuit, rather than taking up prose again. His interest in poetry as a mode of expression increased, and although this study does not include poetry, such a long span before the next prose story demands some mention of it.

Poetic Plummets It is not known with precision when Melville wrote the poem “Monody,” which is often thought to refer to Hawthorne.20 It was published in 1891, but if the speculation is true, some scholars place the date of composition around the winter of 1864–65, when Melville visited Hawthorne’s grave; or it could have been composed in response to Julian Hawthorne’s visit in 1879 to discuss Melville’s relationship with his father. In any case, the writing seems to have

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inspired Melville to return to his copy of Mosses from an Old Manse, in which he wrote additional notes.21 In the story “Monsieur du Miroir,” which he mentioned in “Mosses,”22 Melville made a note pertinent to his last day with Hawthorne. Next to Hawthorne’s “He will pass to the dark realm of Nothingness, but will not find me there,” Melville wrote: “This trenches upon the uncertain and the terrible.” With characteristic ambiguity, his words suggest Genesis 28:17 of a Latin Bible (Terribilis est locus iste) directly associated with the “catholic” cosmopolitan in The Confidence-Man, and what modernists tend to render, “This place is awesome.” The theme of the narrator of the story getting to know himself by staring in a mirror, besides resonating with the discussion of “annihilation,” is strikingly similar to the conversations of the cosmopolitan with the passengers he meets. Although not published until 1876, Melville was obviously working on Clarel for years in his time away from mundane efforts at New York customs to make some money. Clarel is another attempt at composing a Gospel for the modern world. It depends heavily on his visit to the Holy Land and, as we will see, directly affects aspects of his last romance. Whether he was reading Balzac at that time or not, Melville was still working with ideas that took Christianity and sought a renovation for modern readers with the growing cosmopolitan awareness of world religions like Buddhism. Melville writes in his poem, 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.23

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The “ill-resigned” signals that perhaps, at this moment, Melville accepts only certain aspects of Balzac’s altruism. Although we have no indications of his reading at his time, the imagery is linked with Balzac. In the opening scene of Séraphîta, Minna is introduced to a saxifrage plant blooming in the snow, meant to represent the would-be angel and the coming apotheosis. The “swimmer rising from the deep” evokes the end of a deep “plummet” below psychological waters that we explored in relation to White-Jacket. The swimmer as Clarel seems to be rising “all red eyed” and releasing a secret of some kind at the bottom of “last whelming sea.” Both the flower and the swimmer must exert exceptional individual effort to reach their proper circumstances; and they do. The crocus is a significant flower associated with the bloom of consciousness. It is a sign of awakening or at the very least of the Buddha-nature of renunciation (and ultimately annihilation), because from it comes saffron, which makes the sacred color of the robes of Buddhist priests, individuals seeking complete enlightenment. Further, Stan Goldman stresses that “keep thy heart” is “a sign to remember the divinity within the heart, not a sign of selfish hoarding.”24 Such images, even without commitment, tend to undercut the general “ironic” reading of Melville’s last story. Finally, in one of the miscellaneous verses that follow the composition of Timoleon (1891),25 Melville united the same images and feelings we have been following in this chapter. The poem is therefore clearly concerned with the future of the man of moral volition Melville was developing in the draft of Billy Budd, Sailor. By this stage of the writing, Billy’s characterization was almost finished. What is most valuable to note about the poem is that the quotation at the head of the poem clearly connects its title to a Christian source (the Book of James), which offers an interesting amalgamation reminiscent again of the Bouddha crétien. The poem also echoes Melville’s conversation with Hawthorne some twentyfive years before, when they met in England: Melville wrote,

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Here we find not only the connection with Clarel’s summative “swim to less and less,” but also with Melville’s resignation to “being annihilated” (“Aspirant to nothingness!”). To be made no-thing, in the correct Hegelian state of repose, would be a benefit, especially to be “absorbed” into nothingness and drawn into a higher spiritual condition.

Balzac’s Literary Translation It is often assumed that between the first flurry of interest in Balzac in his lifetime and the decade leading up to his centennial, there was a lacuna in American attentiveness to Balzac, and the apparent gap was probably due more to the Civil War, financial investment concerns, and the continued rise and content change of periodicals rather than from any lack of reader interest. In 1860, for example, New York publisher Rudd and Carleton attempted to make available a collection of as many works of Balzac in English as possible. They published four different novels before popular interests shifted with the outbreak of war, when reading French novels was probably not high among popular activities. The titles were Cesar Birotteau, Petty Annoyances of Married Life (Physiologie du marriage), The Alchemist (La Recherche de l’Absolu), Eugenie Grandet, and Père Goriot. Melville’s library at his death contained

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a copy of this edition of Eugenie Grandet; 27 and since Rudd and Carleton stopped publishing the planned series in 1861, Melville could have acquired his copy any time after that. Unfortunately, researchers discovered an autograph dating from 1870 in the book, and this discovery has been accepted conveniently as the time he read it. Many of the books in Melville’s last library are unsigned, and a signature was sometimes affixed when a book was loaned out or otherwise separated from its shelf. What we do know of Melville’s habits later in life is that with an eagerness for the originals, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, his household often acquired Balzac translations quite close to their publication date. Over the years, Balzac had grown into what we would call today a “celebrity” throughout the world literary network. He particularly attracted female admiration, and the collection in the Melville house seems equally a concern of the ladies as of Melville himself. A number of volumes were given to him by his wife (and these dates we can trust as acquisition); but after his death many were passed down to, and personalized by, readers of French in the family.28 Nightly reading aloud and storytelling were still frequent and encouraged pastimes within the family through the 1890s,29 and it is likely that many of the less inappropriate tales of La Comédie humaine were part of the popular culture that everyone shared. By the late 1860s Leon Gozlan’s two memoirs about Balzac had been fully translated into English. They gave a realistic picture of the French writer to the English-speaking audience from the point of view of his former secretary. They would have been accessible through visits to reading rooms or the homes of friends and relatives. Balzac en Pantoufles, the first of his intimate portraits, had appeared in 1856. In 1866 the biography appeared as “Balzac in Undress”30 in Dublin University Magazine. The second volume, Balzac chez lui was originally published in French in 1862 and translated into English in St. Paul’s Magazine in 1868 as Balzac at Home.31 Sequestered probably in more than one volume over time, a newspaper clipping from 1876 announcing the publication of the

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correspondence of Balzac (1818–50)32 was also part of Melville’s collection. The article was clipped, according to Olson, from “some N.Y. paper” just before Thanksgiving. Several letters are excerpted in English. While the paper has not yet been located, typestyle and format suggest The Evening Telegram, but thousands of issues of papers, usually costing between two and five cents, as well as copies saved for a while in reading rooms are untraceable—especially when each usually had two or more editions per day. Nevertheless, one thing we do know is that Olson’s dating of the clip is wrong, since on the reverse page of the article are ads that clearly establish the issue from November 24, not November 20 or 21 as Olson surmised.

Advertisements found on the back of the newspaper clipping on Balzac’s letters showing that the issue came out on November 24, 1876. Source: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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Moreover, the clipping shows two types of folds—one in half (the older one) to fit into a quarto-format book and a second fold to make the clip shorter for the book it ultimately wound up in. The article’s title, “Balzac at Home: Inner Glimpses of the Life of A Man of Genius,” recalls Trollope’s 1868 publication of Gozlan’s Balzac chez lui while summarizing in English a few of the 384 letters just published in France. The article excerpted several letters that revealed the intimacy of Balzac’s suffering over his individual works. Harmony of feeling stimulated a personal attraction for Melville. In fact, one of the letters translated in the paper Melville marked again in his own copy thirteen years later.33

Selected letter from 1876 clipping announcing Balzac’s Correspondance in Paris; preserved by Melville for fifteen years. Source: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Sometime after the publication of the article, Melville purchased a copy of Phillip Kent’s translation of short fiction from La Comédie humaine. Although the translation came out in England in 1879 and was first reprinted in Chicago that same year as The Cat and Battledore and Other Tales,34 it did not appear in New York in the edition possessed by Melville (The Shorter Stories and Tales of Honoré de Balzac) until 1882,35 so he probably purchased it then or shortly thereafter. When Olson found the article at the New York Public Library, it was inside the Kent translation. This discovery

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suggests that before its final location in the Arundel Print edition, the clipping had been carefully preserved elsewhere for at least six years. Did Melville’s wife Lizzie save it all that time in anticipation of an English version’s arrival in America? In 1889 she did in fact give Melville that publication for his birthday, and it became the most marked and annotated of the family’s entire Balzac collection. 36 Interestingly, curators also found another newspaper article secreted in a volume of Balzac’s Correspondence. During the seventies and eighties there was an ongoing and rather organized interest in Balzac within the Melville household. There is no precise record of when Melville obtained H. H. Walker’s The Comédie Humaine and Its Author, published in England in 1879, which he annotated extensively with personal responses, perhaps around 1885 or a little later. The book contains translations along with English commentary and original French short stories and excerpts.37 Besides the characteristic pencil underlines (no doubt to facilitate later erasures and preserve the book), Melville also marked passages important to him with lines in the margins. Early in Walker’s text he highlighted the important sentence previously cited, verifying Balzac’s influence on English literature.38 Suggesting that he agreed, perhaps from his own perspective that such influence was felt, Melville marked this as a significant insight of Walker’s.

Melville’s sideline marking in Walker’s anthology highlighting the influence of Balzac’s work, even if untranslated. Source: Manuscripts and Archives division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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Melville also owned an important critical biography of Balzac by 1885. The book was a gift from his wife Elizabeth for his birthday on August 1 of that year, and it, too, bears Melville’s personal marks.39 Her choice of Edward Saltus’s Balzac (particularly so soon after its publication in 1884), clearly reflected a genuine and recognized preference of her husband. Among the passages he found affiliation with in this volume, Melville marked one where Saltus reiterates Balzac’s warning against thought in a way particularly relevant to Pierre.40

Melville’s marking in Saltus reiterating the unique Balzacian concept of thought as dissolvent as in Pierre. Source: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

In June 1886 there was another important article about Balzac in The Atlantic Monthly, a publication which was not always complimentary about Melville’s poetry but probably too popular for him to ignore. The article was simply titled “Honoré de Balzac” and was written by journalist George Frederic Parsons, who had arrived from California in the seventies to become a member of the New York Theosophical Control Board. The article offered a cogent counterbalance to Saltus, and stressed Balzac’s less-mentioned but more transcendental side, the side that had so influenced Hawthorne. The

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Parsons essay has been judged as particularly good: “Mr. Parsons has written a very trustworthy general review in The Atlantic Monthly, careful and accurate, and free from obtrusive originality.”41 After going into detail about Balzac’s concepts of evil and the creation thereof in characters, he points out that Seraphita, as Balzac noted in his important Introduction to La Comédie humaine, is a single notable exception of untarnished goodness: There is only one such character in Balzac, and that has been singularly misunderstood. Seraphita is not a romance, but a mystical poem, and a noble one. The central figure, Seraphita-Seraphitus, is emblematic of the spiritual condition in which all the frailties of incarnated existence having been overcome, sex ceases; for pure spirit can have no sex.42 Melville was just then engaged in writing poetry that was truly mystical, and the description of Balzac’s novel as a “mystical poem” would have caught his eye. Similarly, Billy Budd would be the unmitigated good character among all Melville’s works. Whether or not he was influenced by Parson’s thought in this particular article, within three years the Melvilles’ library contained three more influential essays by Parsons on just such spiritual aspects of Balzac’s fiction. It seems natural that his wife again addressed Melville’s continuing interest in Balzac by giving him a copy of Balzac’s Correspondence for his birthday in 1889, the same year he obtained and began to read Seraphita.43 This volume now also contains a well-preserved newspaper clipping about Balzac’s funeral. Most of his annotations express personal analogs through reflections on hard work, suffering, and even the effects of too much coffee. He was particularly moved by Balzac’s descriptions of his struggle to perfect his work, which often took many printer’s proofs to complete:44

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Two examples of Melville’s markings in Balzac’s Correspondence. Many of them pertain to personal suffering brought about by network and financial pressures. Source: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

An accompanying clipping, published in September 1890, presents a full translation of Victor Hugo’s funeral oration of forty years previous; it also movingly reflects the prevalent interpretations of Balzac as an artist:

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network As this powerful address was being delivered, it is recorded, sobs were heard in all directions, and the very heavens wept gentle showers upon the grave. The tomb was scarcely sealed before its occupant was, so to speak, canonized. All Paris burst at once into tumultuous praise. Those who had been his detractors in life, vied with each other in honoring his memory.45

Clearly, either Melville had continued to peruse the Correspondence for inspiration throughout the year that had passed since his birthday, or the article once again awakened his sense of the importance of Balzac’s death, and he found the volume an appropriate resting place for the reminiscence.

Americanization of Balzac It is remarkable, given the initial hostile responses of Americans to the works of Balzac, that the first comprehensive translation of La Comédie humaine was made in the United States and not in Great Britain. Over the last decades of the century (1883–97), Roberts and Company in Boston published a collection of Balzac’s works translated by Katherine Prescott Wormeley, a prominent personality from the Civil War. While the task of translating the almost 100 stories in a short period of time impacted the depth of her work, these translations were, for some time, the only matched English translations available. Melville’s household obtained in serial or by set multiple volumes of this popular and almost complete La Comédie humaine in English soon after publication began.46 It would then have been possible for Melville to immerse his mind in a consistent collection, though biased by Theosophy, of an English corpus of multiple volumes rather than to read a single romance or two without context. International copyright restrictions were no longer an obstacle, and the books also appeared in England under the publisher Routledge a few months later.

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British literary pundits like Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde, dissatisfied at first with Wormeley’s eccentric translations and theosophical bent, later encouraged another set of The Human Comedy published by J. M. Dent (1895–98) under the general editorship of George Saintsbury, who had done a translation of his own and written extensively on Balzac as an academic. Also translated hastily and bearing obvious inaccuracies, these editions were primarily the work of two women, one occasionally taking a male pseudonym. They seemed to pacify the detractors of Wormeley, and became the English-language standard of the twentieth century.47 Today, Wormeley’s translations are generally preferred of the two. Three of the Roberts books contain long and detailed introductions by Parsons that emphasize the transcendental and theosophical aspects the Etudes philosophiques. The Theosophical Society was an American organization founded in New York in 1875, which would have still made a difference to Melville, even if he decided not to support its philosophy. His library contained almost all of the Wormeley volumes published to the time of his death, including two from 1890; but he did not live to see the rest of the forty volumes appear. There is no clear indication that the family did not complete a subscription: almost all the volumes finally donated to the New York Public Library bore Melville’s marking exclusively. If his family did not continue to accumulate works by Balzac published after Melville’s death in 189148 this suggests it was his interest, and not theirs, that warranted the purchases.

Melville’s Attention to Balzac Despite the fact that post-mortem library inventories are too limited a resource to prove one way or the other the timing of Balzac’s influence over Melville, there are intriguing isolated suggestions among these materials that hint at Melville’s knowledge of Balzac earlier than the 1880s and 90s. Marginal notes in H. H. Walker’s The Comédie Humaine and Its Author are one such indicator we have

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already mentioned. In that same book, following a chronological list of works by Balzac, Melville left underlinings and notes in the side margin, as if to continue or update the incomplete register: 49 Walker excerpts two of the titles, Albert Savarus and Gaudissart II, but the others are not found in that volume. The dates are those of French publication. If this list is in part a catalog of books owned by or read by Melville to this juncture, they tellingly pertain to a particularly important period of Hawthorne’s reading. Nevertheless, some of the Wormeley texts had to be in print and probably in Melville’s possession before the notes were made. Both came out in 1885 and bear the earliest copyright dates in Melville’s Balzac collection, save the stray volume of Eugénie Grandet.50

Melville’s extensive markings in the chronological list of La Comédie humaine in H. H. Walker’s anthology. Source: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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It is the chronology that is most telling. Melville made markings that suggest especial interest in two specific works that have loomed importantly in our investigation. On the list proper is evidence of penciling and underlining of several titles from La Comédie humaine, most of them not reprinted by Walker. However, Melville apparently drew a box around Louis Lambert and circled and underlined the entry for Seraphita.51 This implies close attention and an emotional response. The copies of these works in Melville’s library were published in 1889, so it is impossible that in 1885 he was referring to his Wormeley translation; nor do these titles appear among the additions on the following page (they are volumes 38 and 39 respectively). The next volumes (that still exist) Melville received through his subscription were The Two Brothers (Vol. 11) and The Country Doctor (Vol. 31), both dated 1887. They do not appear on the inventory either, so we can wager confidently that these notes were made sometime in 1885–87, while Melville was beginning work on Billy Budd, Sailor. Therefore, one can reasonably conclude that he had become familiar with Louis Lambert and Seraphita either by reading them in French, by hearsay, or from other English translations made at an earlier date. These sources are lost or unrecorded. Some of the marking Melville left behind in his books offers similar indications. Roberts and its commercial descendants (the business was finally sold to Little Brown in 1899) filled out incomplete signatures and endpapers not with blanks, but with ads for their own volumes. Two such ads were marked by Melville in the edition of Seraphita he acquired in 1889.

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Melville’s marking on an advertisement found in his edition of Seraphita. Note the context and development of the ideas marked, particularly Balzac’s “mystical gift of intuition” of particular significance to Billy Budd. Source: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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Not only did Melville mark Balzac’s eloquence and his ability to hold a world in his head and bring it forth, his checkmark beside the comments about Parsons’s commentary, with which he was familiar at least from Seraphita, is a key indicator of the ideas found in Billy Budd, Sailor: Many critics, and several noted ones, have so little understood the real meaning of “Louis Lambert” and “Seraphita” that they have wondered why the author gave them a place in the “Comédie Humaine,” which, nevertheless, without them would be a temple without a pediment, as M. Taine very clearly saw and said. Mr. Parsons takes advantage of Miss Wormeley’s translation to state and prove and elucidate this truth.52 The mark indicates that Melville, as well, was still working to understand the deep truth in the works of Balzac. Finally, while Melville frequently marked many of the English versions in his library, it is curious that he made no marks or underlines at all in Wormeley’s translation of Louis Lambert.53 Again, one infers from this omission, especially after noting the emphatic marking on that title in the Walker anthology, that Melville had owned and previously read a copy of this major romance—in English or in French. It is likely that his time with Hawthorne gave him the opportunity to digest thoroughly the concept of l’unité de composition and its ontological significance.

Reviewing the “Avant-Propos” The same dearth of markings found in Père Goriot is found in the Preface to The Comedy of Human Life. Melville may have reviewed the text as early as 1885, perhaps even before he had conceived of Billy Budd. Writing anonymously, Wormeley introduced the “Avant-propos” with the following footnote:

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network This preface, written forty-three years ago, is placed here to give Balzac’s own interpretation of his books. Without it they will not be fully understood. His letters, published after his death, reveal in like manner the man himself, his wonderful method of work, and the sincerity of this preface.54

Her comments could have encouraged the Melvilles to purchase those letters at a later time. Markings in the “Preface” suggest that Melville may not have completed a close reading of the entire text and only scanned a few pages. He principally noted the zoological origins of unity—as he had in The Confidence-Man. His first check mark stands in the margin of Wormeley’s definition of unité de composition: “we find, I say, the rudiments of that strong law of self preservation upon which rests the theory of synthetic unity.”55 Wormeley, of course, does not quite catch the subtlety with the idea of a “synthesis,” and considers it a “theory” rather than an ontology. She also misses, despite her theosophical sensitivities, the double entendre of calling the law of subjectivity “belle,” given the painter’s metaphor that overlays all of Balzac’s thought. Nevertheless, her translation of the paragraph drew a reaction from Melville. As Melville reiterated in The Confidence-Man, he continued to line and check the zoological links and triple checked an observation perhaps reminiscent of The Isle of the Cross or some of Balzac’s remarkable women: but in the world of men, woman is far from being the female of the male. Two species of mankind may exist in one household: the wife of a shopkeeper is sometimes fit to be the wife of a prince; often the wife of a prince is unworthy to be the companion of the meanest laborer.56

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Melville skipped over most of the specific literary genealogy that follows, but made another mark next to a principle he used in his own Pierre. If we study carefully a representation of Society moulded as it were upon the living form, with all its good and evil, we shall find that while thought,—or rather passion, which is thought and feeling combined,—is the social element and bond, it is also an element of destruction.57 Again he has marked a basic tenet of the Balzacian ontology—the base and basis of the interaction of common forces.

Social Responsibility On page xii, Melville underlined the importance of religion and monarchy—voiced in “L’Eglise”—and marked a passage that reflects much that is dramatized in The Confidence-Man and the fanaticism in Young America II: “The suffrage, if granted to all, will give us government by the masses,—the only government that is irresponsible and whose tyranny will be without check because exercised under the name of law.”58 His next marking was clearly more personal and came from past experiences: “and I may add that the writer who cannot stand the fire of criticism is no more fit to start upon the career of authorship than a traveler is fit to undertake a journey if he is prepared only for fine weather.”59 On the same page he highlighted Balzac’s comment about fiction’s failure when not true to detail. Melville sidelined and underlined a comment by Balzac on the coldness of Protestant women and his reiteration of the scientific reality of “determinism”—no matter how advanced science may become, if man does not change his thoughts or consider them among the vital cosmic fluids of composition:

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network If incontestable facts hereafter prove that thought must be classed among the fluids which are known only by their effects, and of which the substance escapes our human perception. Added though they be by all mechanical facilities, still this would be no more amazing than the circumference of the globe perceived by Columbus, or its rotary motion perceived through Galileo. Our future will remain the same.60

This idea is at the root of Balzac’s conception of reality as penetrated by Louis Lambert and no doubt stressed to Melville by Hawthorne. Therefore, it is evident from traces of his continued reading of Balzac and from his focus on ethical areas, that Melville’s interests and personal way of looking at the universe changed significantly after The Confidence-Man and during the composition of Billy Budd, Sailor. He at last appears fully in harmony with the essence of Balzac’s unity of composition and the Etudes Philosophiques cultivated with his friend Hawthorne, who particularly valued them. Although he may not have comprehended l’unité de composition fully for some time, after his contact with Balzac’s letters and perhaps other novels that he had not read before, given the added energy of theosophy, Melville came to a new level of receptivity to Balzac’s ideas, particularly the Bouddha chrétien in action as an alternative to cosmopolitan geniality, a sort of political correctness. Now he could attempt one more time to reach the height of Balzacian realism on his own terms and create a last diver into the waters of mœurs.

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nlike other drafts of Melville’s novels, with Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative we have a good record of its composition and the method Melville went through in putting together the final story. At least in part, this advantage is due to the circumstance that he died before the final fair copy for printing was finished, and researchers Hayford and Sealts painstakingly reconstructed from clues in the many separate handwritten leaves what they felt Melville had intended. They published their work in 1962, and since then their rendering of the text has become the closest thing to standard, given the contentious field of Melville criticism.1 Because they prepared in assembling their reading a genetic text that offered a logical timeline for construction, I will use it in this chapter as evidence of Melville’s continual and careful reference to Balzac and his mode of developing American realism. Often, and perhaps now more frequently than otherwise, Billy Budd, Sailor is looked upon much as critics in the last chapter interpreted Les Etudes philosophiques—as out of place, satiric, ironic, and a little tongue-in-cheek rather than a significant literary creation from a sympathetic author’s mind. The evidence of the text leaves and the surrounding circumstances mitigate against this, however, and consequently this chapter deals with the novella as if 259

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Melville were serious and sincere about its moral circumstance. Just as Taine commented that the Philosophic Studies were the flowers of La Comédie humaine, Billy Budd, Sailor is the final philosophic study of Melville in his quest to capture “visible truth” and reach the level of realistic idealistic writing attained by Balzac. In this chapter, I will rely again on the English texts Melville had at hand. At this stage, he and his family had plenty to read. Nevertheless, I will continue to supply the standard text in notes for those readers who wish to verify what Balzac, at least at the end of his life, wanted to say. Underlines correspond to the pencil marks made by Melville in his personal copies. A considerable number of new Balzac translations became available to the general reader in America over the last decade of Melville’s life, and as Stedman indicates, he read or reread much of Balzac, including Seraphita in English during this time. Although the boxing and double underlining of its title in his Walker anthology could suggest he possessed an undiscovered copy of Séraphîta, we can be absolutely certain from witnesses that Melville was studying the book during the late stages of writing Billy Budd, Sailor, which Hayford and Sealts have labeled “F,” “G,” and the pencil corrections.2 We can further deduce from the heavy marking in the text that the translation of Séraphîta was very interesting to him. Building on the characterization and rhetoric of Balzac’s narrative, Melville constructed his final story about seaman William Budd. In the “Avant-propos,” Balzac names Séraphîta as depicting the “doctrine in action of the Bouddha chrétien.”3 It is not unreasonable to see Melville attempting the same moral illustration of the Christianized Buddha who exercises Will as the essence of his Being. Melville worked carefully in perfecting his tale, and he mentions the full name of his ontological hero only once, with emphasis: “You say that there is at least one dangerous man aboard. Name him.” [said Captain Vere.] “William Budd, a foretopman, your honor.”

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“William Budd!” repeated Captain Vere with unfeigned astonishment … “The same, your honor: but for all his youth and good looks, a deep one. Not for nothing does he insinuate himself into the good will of his shipmates, since at the last they will at a pinch say—all hands will—a good word for him, and at all hazards ….”4 That the traits—Will, I-am, Budd[ha] — come together in Billy’s name becomes a precise clue, among many, to his role. Similarly, “Vere” resounds in “verity” while “Claggart” recalls the noise of hard striking (clack). Moreover, by the time of choosing the final name for his central character, Melville was aware of just how carefully Balzac selects the names of his actors to reflect their moral potentials. As the century progressed toward its end, theosophical writing was drawing avid readers.5 Through its agency, Buddhism was becoming more acceptable and less threatening to a Christian generation brought up with studies in comparative religions and the “Higher Criticism.” Melville also knew what Balzac had said of Séraphîta in his letters: “I think it will be a book for those who like to lose themselves in the vagueness of infinity. The eighth chapter, entitled ‘Le chemin pour aller à Dieu’ [The way to go to God], will win the hearts of all pious souls over to me.”6 The “vagueness of infinity” reminds one of the ambiguities so loved by Melville as well as the vertical moral measure he had adopted to judge consciousness. Balzac, after 1835, changed the expression to “Le chemin pour aller au Ciel [Heaven]” and this is the version translated by Wormeley, although it misses the initial intent.7 Despite Stedman’s testimony, Melville’s choice of Wormeley’s Seraphita as a model for a return to the literary market was both safe and potentially profitable, now that he had retired from the customs house. He would have felt gratification himself to win pious American souls with such an original theme in Billy Budd. It would

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be a re-entry to the lost arena of his success with sailor stories and a way to infuse the new philosophies he and the American public were absorbing. Theosophy and Christian Science had emerged in the 1870s and the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882—all in the New York/Boston area. Melville’s close reading of Wormeley’s translation of the “Avant-propos” in 1885, in perhaps the first volume he attained in the series, may have reminded him of basic Balzacian principles as reflected in his markings. Séraphîta had been widely known for many years in Europe, England, and America, a text we have pointed out as bearing analogs to many of Melville’s other works. We have also stressed that Seraphita was the most emphatically marked fiction in Melville’s collection of Balzac. While the Boston Brahmins and Transcendentalists had flirted with Hindu legends, advocates of New Thought and writers like Walt Whitman, another Democratic Review graduate encouraged by Hawthorne, joined the theosophists in a more substantial appropriation of Buddhism. Precisely coincident with the beginning of Billy Budd’s composition as determined by Hayford and Sealts (1886), the Atlantic Monthly article by Parsons appeared that extolled the uniqueness and importance of Séraphîta: For in real life imperfection is the rule. It is only in idealistic fiction that wholly upright, pure, impeccable characters are found, and the further they are removed from the weaknesses of our common humanity the less they impress us … Balzac was deeply disappointed because Seraphita did not acquire the popularity he had anticipated.8

Eastern Evolution of Seraphita Balzac’s romance is a story about an androgynous seventeen year old (first called Seraphitus) who possesses great spiritual and physical

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beauty, and dies, defying conventional expectations, an untimely and unwarranted death, voluntarily, quietly, and fully self-aware. Although uneducated, this individual has cultivated intuition so completely that he surpasses the intellect and the transient limitations of physical life, represented by the romance’s setting in a Norwegian outpost. His actions depict the last steps of a Specialist who is intent on moving beyond the mechanical world of deterministic negativity to a totally “other” existence beyond earth’s unreasonable material standards, where Providence kills at random, according to Vautrin. Unlike Louis Lambert, who is physically left within his flesh, Seraphitus makes a clean break with earthly existence and leaves behind no vestige of incomplete faculties. His Will leads him to the cessation of life, not catatonia, like Lambert. His purity and innocence of heart are innate; Seraphitus lacks the need for “experience” in order to practice unhesitating surrender. This Angel is loved by a man and a woman and opposed by a jealous Protestant pastor named Becker, who is intent on exposing the youth as a fraud, but is deftly out-argued by the truthful adolescent. For Balzac, “heaven” meant the state of possessing perfected human qualities and no longer having to contend with imperfection on earth. In Seraphita the action follows the central character through the final process and internal struggle that produce earthly annihilation and effect a permanent change into non-egoistic life, despite the vehement protests of Wilfrid, Seraphitus’s male suitor, and Minna, his girlfriend. He not only faces truth, but also gives over his essence to it. The androgynous Seraphita/us counsels against active resistance even to an “unjust” death, for the principal success of this conscious transformation is dependent on correct “resignation”: Resignation is a fruit that ripens at the gates of heaven. How powerful, how glorious the calm smile, the pure brow of the resigned human creature …. This earth on which we live is but a single sheaf of the great harvest; humanity is

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Seraphita concerns much the martyrdom of the Angel and the virtues of resignation, two major themes in Billy Budd, Sailor. Source: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

This is not the misanthropy of self-pity or defeat, but rather the Buddhist recognition of one’s being in action—as Balzac put it. It is an act of volition above circumstances. One seeks to find as much human strength and realization as possible in its momentous fulfillment. Melville marked part of this passage following Seraphita’s realization that, “the worst of all those struggles is the last…”10

Melville’s emphasis on resignation perhaps reflects on his own years away from an audience as well as Billy’s response to his conviction. Source: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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This paragraph, marked up for his own attention, had meaning for him. It expresses with beauty and precision what the cosmopolitan was aiming for in his universal disinterestedness. Moreover, it would have certainly resonated with the narrative Melville was developing, for the inspiring poem “Billy in the Darbies,” which he wrote in 1886 but ultimately withheld from the poetry volume John Marr and Other Sailors in 1888, concerned the nighttime resignation of a mutineer to his capture and inevitable execution the next day. In his reworking of the idea into prose as the similar resignation of a youthful Handsome Sailor, the struggle to accept the abandonment of life became even more intense. Whether Seraphita’s youth and beauty contributed to this character modification is a fascinating question. Resignation was important for Melville, who had understood Balzac’s warning about becoming a writer in the “Avant-propos,” and it carried with it a victory by the deliberate decision not to resent his place, the Catholic détachement. What is sought unsuccessfully with force in the resistant Genius opens up peaceably to the resigned Specialist. There is a parallel thought in Louis Lambert, which Melville also owned in Wormeley’s version by this time: “philosophers will regret the foliage frost-nipped in the bud; however, they will find the flowers enclosed perhaps in some region far above the highest places on earth.”11 Besides the Buddha, Billy Budd’s name is suggestive of a gestating flower (bud), recalling the associative image of Seraphita.12 So saying, he [Seraphitus] gave her the hybrid plant his falcon eye had seen amid the tufts of gentian acaulis and saxifrages—a marvel, brought to bloom by the breath of angels. With girlish eagerness Minna seized the tufted plant of transparent green, vivid as emerald, which was formed of little leaves rolled trumpet-wise, brown at the smaller end but changing tint by tint to their delicately notched edges, which were green. These leaves were so tightly

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network pressed together that they seemed to blend and form a mat or cluster of rosettes. Here and there from this green ground rose pure white stars edged with a line of gold, and from their throats came crimson anthers but no pistils. A fragrance, blended of roses and of orange blossoms, yet ethereal and fugitive, gave something as it were celestial to that mysterious flower, which Seraphitus sadly contemplated, as though it uttered plaintive thoughts which he alone could understand.13

To recognize Billy Budd as an attempt to explore the implications of the resignation of the Bouddha chrétien in parallel with Seraphita is not at all to suggest that when Melville wrote “Billy in the Darbies” or the first pages of prose, he had intended the character to represent such a complex ontological hero, although this had probably been his intention with Ahab and the cosmopolitan, other central characters less organic to their composition. That Billy grew as an initial hero from a poem to a younger and more innocent “bud” is convincing evidence of Melville’s change in the pattern of creation. The prose developed out of the poetry and evolved through attributes, which to Melville’s mind emerged from a more noble form of expression than ordinary romance. What we are seeking in this final attempt at solving the problem of Melville’s relation to Balzac is Billy Budd’s character as resolved in 1891, at the end of Melville’s thinking and the height of his known immersion in the theory of Will articulated by Balzac.

Enhancing the Bouddha chrétien In his introductions, Parsons attempts to clarify the philosophy of Volition, mesmerism, and metempsychosis dramatized by Balzac. That these three volumes—Louis Lambert, La Peau de chagrin, and Seraphita—remained on Melville’s bookshelves until his death testifies to their importance to him in articulating the finer

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elements of Balzac’s thought and Hawthorne’s interests, perhaps, in the Etudes Philosophiques. We know he paid some attention to these essays, since Melville marked particularly Parson’s comments about Sir Isaac Newton in the introduction to Seraphita.14 Likewise, his marking in the advertisement for the book, shows the commentary’s importance and relevance for him. These texts are important to an examination of Melville’s borrowed view of human character, because in them lie some key passages that have resonance in Billy Budd, Sailor. Parsons even quotes Madame Blavatsky, co-founder of Theosophy, as an authority. He does not hesitate to make thorough cross-references to the kabbalah, alchemy, Buddhism, Hindu philosophy, and other mystical topics familiar to readers of popular theosophical discourse (and, of course, to Melville since at least the composition of Mardi). Parsons calls Séraphîta without qualification “the most remarkable and unquestionably the most elevated work of fiction ever written.”15 Melville learned of Schopenhauer from Adler, but at the time of their acquaintance, Schopenhauer was fairly obscure even in his own language. However, The World as Will and Representation had been published in 1818, and Adler, as a Kantian and professor of German, might well have mentioned him to Melville as one philosophic equestrian on the “high German Horse” they discussed so extensively. Schopenhauer was certainly a “kindred spirit” sharing Melville’s often pessimistic worldview, and he had much to say of the genius in Religion: A Dialogue, and other Essays: “The genius, on the other hand, is at bottom a monstrum par excessus; just as, conversely, the passionate, violent and unintelligent man, the brainless barbarian, is a monstrum par defectum.”16 The fact that Melville uses Schopenhauer’s term, “monster,” to describe the anticipated genial misanthrope in The Confidence-Man (and of course the kraken in Pierre) is certainly suggestive of at least a nominal acquaintance. However, the book in question was not available in English until 1890 and Will as Representation not until 1883–86. The scholarly consensus is that Melville knew some

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Pessimistic philosophy as early as the 1870s, but did not pursue any active study until about this time.17 This was an uncharacteristically slow reaction, given Melville’s usual prompt follow-through of literary hints and what his literary executor called “absorbing interest in philosophy,”18 although this tendency had hardly abated since his days with Adler. According to Stedman, Melville became preoccupied with the work of Schopenhauer throughout his last illness, and Sealts’s research has confirmed that during the final months of work on Billy Budd, Sailor, Melville had a minimum of five works by Schopenhauer and had borrowed others.19 Most of the Schopenhauer texts he read were not published in English before 1890,20 and we know that the ones published before then Melville bought during his last year of life.21 Since Melville’s copy of Seraphita was printed in 1889, one tantalizing possibility is that Schopenhauer’s theory of the will was a “Germanization of the law of karma,” as Parsons describes in his introduction.22 Melville would have found an impetus in this idea given his awareness of Balzac’s Bouddha chrétien.

Schopenhauer’s Contribution Researchers have discovered significant points of influence emerging from Melville’s reading of Schopenhauer while working on the leaves of Billy Budd.23 The ideas tend to supplement and often elucidate suggestions that appear in the works of Balzac but are more articulately and systematically presented by Schopenhauer. The inner man or divine entity (monad) Balzac approximated with the Christian “soul” is comparable to Schopenhauer’s volition—a force strong enough to overcome the instinctive will to live. Melville was led to pursue lines of thought he had already encountered previously to shed additional light on the scheme of ascending consciousness in a hostile environment. The concerns Schopenhauer shared with Balzac include euthanasia, the belief in reincarnation, the absolute necessity for volition to subdue

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the Will-to-Power, the nature of consciousness as it is inspired by crisis, the persistence of the will to live, and the recognition that “humanity is the only stage at which the Will can deny itself, and completely turn away from life.”24 Since Billy Budd, Sailor had been a work in progress for at least four years under Balzac’s influence alone, Melville grafted Schopenhauer’s perceptions to the root of the text, in order to represent an organically whole ontology of modern “Pessimistic” heroism. Parsons pointed this out in his introduction to Louis Lambert, which was in Melville’s possession by then: There is no direct evidence that Balzac was acquainted with the writing of Schopenhauer, and the indirect evidence is against the probability of such knowledge …. There are undoubted analogies between Balzac and Schopenhauer, but they are explicable by the fact that both writers drew information from the same source; namely, the philosophies and sacred books of the East.”25 Parsons’s Theosophy aside, this is correct, since Schopenhauer did indeed acknowledge his debt to the Upanishads, and it was Balzac who first devised the concept of the Bouddha chrétien. One acceptable explanation for the lack of markings in Melville’s copy of Wormeley’s Louis Lambert is that he obtained the book primarily for Parsons’s Introduction and not Balzac’s text, perhaps because of the advertisement he marked in Seraphita. In the books Melville read,26 Schopenhauer particularly discusses the effects of the power of sudden death. A passage that resonates substantially to Billy Budd, Sailor is quite clear on one pertinent idea: I have mentioned in the text that the great and rapid revolutionary changes in man’s innermost nature, which has here been considered and has hitherto been entirely

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network neglected by philosophers, occurs most frequently when, fully conscious, he goes out to a violent and certain death, as in the case of executions.27

In this concept, facing execution is the ultimate test of a man’s ability to control his response to feeling the full force of the “visible truth” and, even more, to act selflessly and without fear, is to display the height of mindful action on the vertical moral measure. It brings about change in the inner man by the Will consciously to detach from life. But, most significantly, for Schopenhauer Buddhism embodied the best institutional expression of the willed transformation of existence.28 In his Introduction to Seraphita, after acknowledging Swedenborg’s contribution to the narrative, Parsons moves to an extensive examination of Buddhism. Moreover, in his copy of The World as Will and Idea, Melville marked a passage with a marginal line closely related to Balzac’s sentiments regarding the Bouddha chrétien: the true spirit and kernel of Christianity, as also in Brahmanism and Buddhism, is the knowledge of the vanity of earthly happiness, the complete contempt for it, and the turning away from it to an existence of another, nay, an opposite, kind. This, I say, is the spirit and end of Christianity, the true “humor of the matter;” and not, as they imagine, monotheism; therefore even atheistic Buddhism is far more related to Christianity than optimistic Judaism or its variety Islamism.29 Other investigators have likewise emphasized the links between Billy Budd and Buddhism, noting the same ideas touched on by Parsons in this edition of Seraphita.30 Consequently, both the Introduction and the text proper of the Roberts Seraphita, which Melville owned and marked during

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the last three stages of work on Billy Budd, Sailor, present significant parallels to the latter narrative. One can find unmistakable references to the tenet that in phenomenal cases the power of Will can overcome the unjust and base elements of material life and accomplish the flowering of humanity from this earthly “nursery” through the expression of good in return for evil and displaying a lack of egoism without objectives of power. This contemporaneity is certain, supplementing other evidence that suggests a long acquaintance with Balzac’s meaning.

Conspicuous Methodology Again trusting Melville’s consistency in visiting reading rooms, scouring newspapers, and idly reading journals in friend’s and relatives’ living rooms, it is likely that Melville found an article, “Balzac’s Way of Working” in The New York Times in 1882. We have seen that previously with his prose, Melville conceived a story or a plot first, and then filled it in later: Moby-Dick is perhaps the best example, with the conclusion of the whale bringing down the Pequod as dramatic conclusion. The article describes what the author found looking through Balzac’s drafts presented for auction: One sees by them that their author set out with a purpose and labored to get, ere he started, his characters clear into his head. But the plot grew up as he went on. It was not designed, it was organic …. The resignation that she [Baroness Hulin] is absolute, and she has what is termed in Catholic theology “détachment” [sic] in a high degree.31 More than in any other case, Melville in Billy Budd was attempting to get the characters down first and allow a plot to develop later. The research of Hayford and Sealts has allowed us actually to know that Melville developed his manuscript of Billy Budd, Sailor one character at a time, accommodating each of the points of the

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Balzacian narrative triangle in turn, and that the inner story emerges entirely from this process of character-making. While in earlier assumed borrowings from Balzac, Melville took the conditions of the original plot into his version: the writer Pierre moves from the country to the city as the writer Raphael does; the confidence man performs on a crowded boat full of social representatives with a Savior. Yet in this case he fully appropriates the inner workings of the characters but manages to place them in entirely original external scenes. Nevertheless, the rhetorical and symbolic pattern of conflicting forces is retained. After forming the character of Billy, Melville turned to contrasting him with the other principal participants in the story, Claggart and Vere respectively.32 Showing how these characters interact in light of the types in Balzac’s Séraphîta gives us another angle on how Melville was working. One can diagram the principal characters and their relationships in the familiar spheres. The Genius or mixed character is not present in this version, because the narratives concern entirely the ideal condition of humanity, as it functions in an ontology both “real” and fictionalized. The skeptic Becker opposes both Seraphita and Wilfrid as his opposites, but also occasionally accepts Wilfrid as a potential companion for himself and his daughter. Minna and Wilfrid are both drawn to Seraphitus, who has no natural attraction of his own, characteristic of the Bouddha chrétien or Specialist. A variation of the same arrangement can be sketched for Billy Budd, Sailor. Billy shows self-consciousness to a lesser degree than Seraphitus, but his function in Andréoli’s schème de la concentration is comparable. He is equally able to subsume the will-to-live. The Specialist need not display the vehemence and ambition of the Genius; for there is no need of violence to accomplish resignation. The change accentuates Melville’s commitment to the democratic heart in Billy over the forensic mastery of the confidence man. Moreover, the principal feature of his death being euthanasia signals an inner correspondence as well. Both Claggart and Vere

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are drawn to Billy, as it were, at “opposite ends” of his personality, yet they also are hostile to each other’s attractions like Wilfrid and Becker. “Fate and ban”33 keep the divine magnet turned away from Claggart, who experiences nevertheless a strong force from Billy; in his sphere, charisma is transformed into repulsion rather than genuine sympathy. This is the familiar “antagonism of the spheres” we find also in Balzac. In this case, Billy actually strikes down the Instinctive, but it is clearly an act “unconscious,” and not of the soul, not willed. The event also occurs before his moment of “completion” the night before his execution.

The Final Dive That Billy is intentionally Angelic is made obvious enough in the romance. Like the summation of humanity given by Balzac in Seraphita, Billy is called “the flower of [the] flock”;34 his complexion is often compared to lilies and roses.35 Furthermore, Billy is foreshadowed by his foil, the “Handsome Sailor,” who is abundantly described in sidereal and divine terms, those primarily of light, stars, and heavenly objects, just as Balzac associated Seraphitus with similar celestial descriptors. Billy is twice called a “peacemaker,”36 which of course evokes the promise given in Matthew 5:9: “How blessed are the peacemakers;/ God shall call them his sons.”37 Appropriately, Ratcliffe assigns Billy to a post superior to ordinary humanity on the ship, to the foretop. The narrator tells us that Billy spins yarns with his friends in his aerial club “like the lazy gods.”38 Most directly, the captain perceives him as “an angel of God.”39 Again, Sealts and Hayford assign this attribution to Melville’s very last stages of work on Billy Budd, level “G” and the final pencil corrections after 1888.40 In the Introduction of Melville’s edition of Seraphita, Parsons recounts the legend that Balzac conceived his story while gazing at the finely carved statue of an angel in a friend’s studio.41 One of the first comparison’s Melville makes about Billy Budd is his

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resemblance to sculpture.42 Similarly, Billy and Seraphitus are both compared to painted angels of classical art. In describing Billy’s aspect after his “illumination” the night before his death, Melville recounts the legend of the Roman Germanicus, who brought to the Pope British captives (of which Billy is a prime specimen, according to the narrator): [The Pope said:] “Angles do you call them? And is it because they look so like angels?” Had it been later in time, one would think that the Pope had in mind Fra Angelico’s seraphs, some of whom, plucking apples in gardens of the Hesperides, have the faint rosebud complexion of the more beautiful English girls.43 It is significant to observe that here, in the abandoned fair copy before his final revisions, stage “Fa,” Melville chose the word “seraph” as the angel type to link with Billy Budd, in echo of Seraphita. In a very similar passage, Balzac describes the beauty of Seraphitus: No known type conveys an image of that form so majestically male to Minna, but which to the eyes of a man would have eclipsed in womanly grace the fairest of Raphael’s creations. That painter of heaven has ever put a tranquil joy, a loving sweetness, into the lines of his angelic conceptions; but what soul, unless it contemplated Seraphitus himself, could have conceived the ineffable emotions imprinted on his face?44 Although Balzac refers to Raphael and Melville to Fra Angelico (to echo “angel,” of course), the meaning of the metaphors is identical. As we have seen, this “angel existence” is the ultimate end of Balzac’s ontology: angels are the “flower” of humanity.45 As a principal idea of Swedenborg’s, this concept was probably discussed by Melville and Adler in 1849,46 or after a lecture they attended in

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Rome in 1857.47 Here lies the completion of the Bouddha chrétien. With his purified will and developed charity, Billy also is a perfect human being. He is not separate from humanity, but its fulfillment.

Instinctive Antagonist In illustrating Claggart, Melville develops again the Balzacian Instinctive type as presented in Seraphita by the skeptic Becker. Thus Claggart is given the role of a being scarcely above the animal, despite his articulate and smooth, slippery manners. He is “the direct reverse of a saint.”48 He is subject to the action of cold depravity “dominated by intellectuality,”49 monitored by a conscience that is “but the lawyer to his will.”50 Again, like other lower types, he lets his head dominate his heart. Similar to Ahab’s iron man, he has no heart and is all head. His depravity is essential, “born with him and innate,”51 and reflected in his physiognomy. Melville uses the very word “instinctive” to describe Claggart at his nadir.52 He fits the Balzacian type perfectly as Parsons interprets it: Instinctive Man not only deliberately prefers his inferiority, but regards with positive enmity all who evince a desire to ascend the scale of existence. This enmity is in part automatic and literally instinctive, and resembles the resistance which an air-breathing creature offers to immersion in the water.53 So functions Claggart’s malignant power against Billy’s good Will, albeit much of the time also unconsciously, because of his firm attachment to enforcement and his isolation from issues of the heart. Significantly, Billy destroys Claggart with a blow to his devious intellectuality—to his forehead, “so shapely and intellectual-looking a feature in the master-at-arms.”54 Importantly, Melville describes Claggart much like Bland, a “Vidocq,” who was Balzac’s historical model for Vautrin.

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Abstractive in Elevation Of particular importance in Seraphita is Wilfrid, who after his experiences with Seraphitus, becomes a devoted follower of the doctrine of man’s possible perfection. He presents much the same masculine vehemence as Captain Vere in Billy Budd, Sailor. Like Wilfrid, Vere is the Abstractive type who has not yet gained full understanding of the issues of the heart but has begun to experience intuitions of immortality and superior indifferent destiny. That Vere is Billy’s follower on the triangle of forces, and moves upward in the scheme, in a fashion similar to that of Wilfrid in Seraphita, is made clear also by the language that describes him. Because of his abstractive nature, Vere can only operate in conventional forms, a weakness Melville stresses. The keyword “intuition” is used several times in relation to the captain and his ability to make sound and perceptive decisions rapidly. He “leans toward everything intellectual,”55 yet his nature is not evil, only “pedantic” and “bookish.”56 He is at a stage of spirituality that puts him above the common abstractive intellectual but below the Specialist. Vere, however, is afforded the epithet “starry Vere,”57 which remains with him until his death and places him among higher affiliations with Billy. Balzac created a similar fate for the Abstractive.58

Like one on the path to heaven, Vere is signaled in Billy Budd as one on the way to stars, as in Seraphita. Source: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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One day, after many attempts through incarnation, he may rise to the young man’s level on the ascending ladder of completed humanity. His association with the English hero Nelson parallels in many ways the genial place of Napoleon in Balzac’s cosmos. Significantly, the last words on Vere’s lips are “Billy Budd, Billy Budd” and not in “the accents of remorse,”59 suggesting that Billy’s death and Vere’s own reflect the relationship of the forerunner (foretopman, the sun) to the devotee (the moon). His was a true martyrdom for society’s needs and not an aberration. Because of his abstractive inconsistency, Vere is morally changeable, like the moon to Billy’s constant sun: “Slowly he uncovered his face; and the effect was as if the moon emerging from eclipse should reappear with quite another aspect than that which had gone into hiding.”60 His lack of remorse implies that Vere committed no crime, no murder, but played his role like the Gnostic Judas.61 He had simply resigned himself to the role demanded by Billy’s individual passion play and ascends by means of the purgative suffering it caused. Any crime associated with this act is mitigated by Billy’s final words. Billy dies because his sacrifice is necessary if he is to attain perfection of his Will, his detaching soul: it is the next fated step in the schooling of his ultimate character, and the abstractive Vere senses this necessity intuitively in respecting Budd and meeting his own destiny. In Billy Budd, Vere acts the role of Pontius Pilate in the biblical story of the Crucifixion but takes full responsibility for the hanging of Budd. The philosophical narrative concludes neatly when, at the end of the drama, Vere himself perishes—by a shot from the “main cabin” of the ship Athée (Atheist).62 Providence does not punish him. With the lack of a god and in light of Schopenhauer’s statement, Melville was saying that even “atheistic Buddhism” was superior to contemporary Christianity. The link provides even more credence for the inspiration of the Bouddha chretien of Balzac. As with the previous romances influenced by Balzac, Melville has rotated the rhetorical conditions of the story several degrees to suit a stronger realist bent: Billy does not obviously metamorphose

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into a spirit, and his execution by a surrogate father is an ironic inversion of the death of Seraphitus, who is protected and nurtured by his father. But in both narratives we witness the calm, premeditated passing of innocent phenomenal young persons of androgynous character; the confounding of the morals and beliefs of those around them by their unschooled sweetness, bravery, and repose; the coincidence of their passing with the cloud-parting dawn. Melville unusually marked a passage in Seraphita, “The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.”63

Melville’s exceptional mark in Seraphita that is supporting the idea of Billy’s apotheosis. Cowen indicates the remnents as well of an erased underline. Source: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Death without Struggle In perhaps his final statement on willed resignation as the power to replace conventional faith and Christianized misanthropy in the America of the future, at a late interim stage of the writing process, levels “F/G,”64 Melville saw fit to include a direct discussion of volition associated with Billy’s ability to achieve death without trauma. This comes in a conversation between the doctor and the purser in Chapter twenty-six, when they try to settle on the meaning of the sacrificial ritual of Billy’s execution65 through a discussion of his “ontological heroics.” The miraculous nature of his death reflects typical Balzacian realism where the impossible is paired with the

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mundane, as in the Savior walking on water and Seraphita’s skiing trip. The jovial purser credits Billy’s calm death to willpower, but the saturnine doctor objects: “Your pardon, Mr. Purser. In a hanging scientifically conducted—and under special orders I myself directed how Budd’s was to be effected—any movement following the completed suspension and originating in the body suspended, such movement indicates mechanical spasm in the muscular system. Hence the absence of that is no more attributable to will power, as you call it, than to horsepower—begging your pardon.”66 A man clearly more attached to the heart than the head, the purser finally gets the “sparse” medical scientist to admit that the calmness of Budd’s death was exceptional, and he forces the doctor to the limits of his science, leaving prejudice his only escape from facing the truth: “But tell me, my dear sir,” pertinaciously continued the other, “was the man’s death affected by the halter, or was it a species of euthanasia?” “Euthanasia, Mr. Purser, is something like your will power: I doubt its authenticity as a scientific term— begging your pardon again. It is at once imaginative and metaphysical—in short, Greek—But,” abruptly changing his tone, “there is a case in the sick bay that I do not care to leave to my assistants. Beg your pardon, but excuse me.” And rising from the mess he formally withdrew.67 The satirical intent is evident here: the officious repetition of “begging pardon,” the making of excuses, the egotism, the materialism all tend to weaken the credibility of the surgeon’s interpretation and give substance to the purser’s questions. Readers

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are not to take this surgeon seriously; he is a scientist straight out of Hawthorne. Moreover, through the agency of the Handsome Sailor, Billy has been continually described in Greek terms—Greek heroes,68 Greek gods,69 “reposeful” Greek sculpture70—so a Greek interpretation should be the right organic one, especially on a mission taking place in the Mediterranean Sea. In truth, Billy is meant to be “the prodigy of repose in the form suspended in air.”71 He does not just achieve the geniality of the confidence man, but obtains genuine “repose” in his being.

Transcendental Recall Said Jacques Borel in language familiar to our reading of Melville’s ideas of consciousness: Our heroine [Séraphîta] will be a little less incomprehensible if we clarify in our sight her position on the theosophical ladder of beings. According to the doctrine, fallen man aspires to his regeneration, that is to say, to return to the Adamic purity, his proper divine state. It appears not without pain and effort, at a price of a series of proven lives, implicating a metempsychosis that is only affirmed in the texts and remains enveloped in the indispensable occult.72 As with Melville, there is no actual proof that Balzac thought metempsychosis was real; it is a staple, however, of the romancer’s discourse, and he makes maximum use of its implications aesthetically. In Wormeley’s text, based on Balzac’s final version of Louis Lambert, Balzac did imply as much: “‘Heaven,’ he said to me, ‘must be the survival of our perfected faculties, and hell the nothingness into which unperfected faculties return.’”73 Of course, Wormeley’s wording is open to much transcendental interpretation. By suppressing the italics in the original and choosing “unperfected”

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for imparfaites, she suggests the Buddhist concept of reincarnation toward perfection without explaining “néant.”74 Yet the road to God is the same. Most important, the figurative language of Billy’s death reveals the closeness of the parallel between Melville’s thinking and Balzac’s. Seraphitus has a “falcon eye” and is a “blossom” transformed into a “bird” by achieving apparently spiritual wings: “Her soul, like a white dove, remained for an instant poised above that body whose exhausted substances were about to be annihilated.”75 Billy also faces this transition as a “singing bird.” Like the young man/girl in Seraphita gently giving up the temporal body for Nirvana, he/she has a mystical vision and proclaims:76

Seraphita’s prayer explains much behind the common emotion of Billy, who literally blesses the justice of his execution. Source: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Although it does not guarantee agreement, Melville’s underlining surely shows that he read this passage with some care, and suggests how he used it creatively. Since Melville marked these particular sentences, he was reading the story from the perspective of the annihilation of the self and the dissolution of earthly (mechanical, will-to-live) existence. Quite literally, Billy blesses the

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justice of his martyrdom: “God bless Captain Vere!” He is fully Christian in his blessing and fully Buddhist in his detachment from both resentment and injustice: Without volition, as it were, as if indeed the ship’s populace were but the vehicles of some vocal current electric, with one voice from alow and aloft came a resonant sympathetic echo: “God bless Captain Vere!” And yet at that instant Billy alone must have been in their hearts, even as in their eyes.77 Melville had emphasized self-knowledge in The Confidence-Man. Now he was turning to self-annihilation. Seraphita’s promises to “bless thy justice” during martyrdom was a powerful suggestion to Melville. This is the highest expression in Balzac’s works of the one who possesses what he defined as “altruism.” He is the man who treats all powers with equanimity, impersonally, but not with resistance like the Genius, but with the resignation of the Specialist.

Forgiveness and Release The “shekinah” in the kabbalah mentioned by Parsons also represents the Gate of the Shadow of Death, echoing directly Balzac’s “gates of the sanctuary.”78 Parsons, in his introduction to Melville’s copy of Seraphita, suggests that “the Shechinah [sic]—[is] the Sanctuary of exiled Unselfish Love,”79 which love is surely ascribed to Billy in context. Shekinah is also identified with Buddhist annihilation in Nirvana.80 Billy has certainly undergone a revolutionary inner change through his suffering. Just as the witnesses see a great transformation in Seraphitus to a perfected human spirit, so does Billy cast aside his obvious weakness of stuttering, to depart with only perfected qualities: “syllables too delivered in the clear melody of a singing bird on the point of launching from the twig—had a phenomenal effect, not unenhanced by the rare personal beauty

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of the young sailor, spiritualized now through the late experiences so poignantly profound.”81 Like Seraphita’s monad educated and empowered through the schooling of reincarnation, Billy’s volition certainly has grounding in the forces of human apotheosis, though he cannot intellectualize them. Balzac wrote a similar passage in Seraphita marked by Melville.82

A revealing passage Melville marked, suggesting that the sacrifice of Billy Budd is real spiritual action and not at all ironic from the narrator’s angle. Source: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Although Billy’s Will be yet “unconscious” (Schopenhauer), it is nonetheless efficacious. Billy Budd reconciles the good simpleton with the Specialist by means of Will and consciousness. He has remained silent through his ordeal and only speaks to bless his justice. While Ahab was essentially no good, Plinlimmon declared good impossible; the cosmopolitan represented only limited good, Billy is described as completely good. Although he may not have the knowledge of the angels, like Seraphita, he has the essence of one.

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Accomplishing the Vision After all of his experience as a writer and a reader, Melville had at last come to a deep realization of the scheme and implications of Balzac’s unity of composition. In Billy Budd, Sailor he was devising the simplest and yet at the same time the most profound vision intended by Balzac. It is in this story, too, that he pays homage to Hawthorne for having initiated him into this ontology; in the analysis of the character Claggart, his narrator introduces the following anecdote. Long ago an honest scholar, my senior, said to me in reference to one who like himself is no more, a man so unimpeachably respectable that against him nothing was ever openly said though among the few something was whispered, Yes, X—is a nut not to be cracked by the tap of a lady’s fan. You are aware that I am the adherent of no organized religion, much less of any philosophy built into a system. Well, for all that to try and get into X—, enter his labyrinth and get out again, without a clue derived from some source other than what is known as “knowledge of the world”—that were hardly possible, at least for me.83 The significance of this passage is multiple. First, Melville, in the guise of his narrator, is introducing an anecdote told him by an older colleague who, as a “scholar,” had no doubt made significant studies of the texts of human nature. It is not an exaggeration from our perspective to identify this individual who “is no more” as Hawthorne, who, by explaining the ontological abstractions surrounding Balzac’s characters, could identify the Frenchman as the giver of the functional character paradigm. This knowledge, even if it is not frozen into a “system,” is necessary to comprehend humanity; some level of understanding above “knowledge of the world” is required to understand the nature of evil, in this case

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that of the instinctive Claggart. Finally, Melville makes it seem that this admission on the part of his informant was not totally native to him. He needed the guidance of the formal unité de composition to comprehend and to create his characters. This assumption is supported by another passage found elsewhere in the narrative, not to suggest too much affiliation. When describing the angelic nature of Billy, the narrator writes: Though our Handsome Sailor had as much of masculine beauty as one can expect anywhere to see; nevertheless, like the beautiful woman in one of Hawthorne’s minor tales, there was just one thing amiss in him. No visible blemish, indeed, as with the lady; no, but an occasional liability to a vocal defect. Though in the hour of elemental uproar or peril he was everything that a sailor should be, yet under sudden provocation of strong heart-feeling, his voice otherwise singularly musical, as if expressive of the harmony within, was apt to develop an organic hesitancy, in fact, more or less of a stutter or even worse.84 We have indicated that “The Birth-mark” was one of the first stories in which Hawthorne attempted to express the unity of composition, shortly after the “Avant-propos” had been published. Hawthorne could indeed have used this story to illustrate the interaction of forces for Melville, and so he found it important for his work in Billy Budd. Moreover, by linking the feminine angel in the Hawthorne tale with the masculinity of the Handsome Sailor, Melville offers a hint of an androgynous central figure like Seraphita. As in “The Birth-mark,” Billy Budd uses the simple but sufficient interaction of the three forces: Billy/Georgiana vs. Claggart/Aminidab, and Vere/Aylmer. However, Vere undergoes a change of attitude and becomes more like Starbuck than Aylmer. There is no monster genius in Billy Budd, but an Abstractive still

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working toward a “starry” (heavenly) milieu. In this, the balance of the three energies is expressed. Additionally, just as Melville had done in The Confidence-Man, he comments on his own principal character: “The avowal of such an imperfection in the Handsome Sailor should be evidence not alone that he is not presented as a conventional hero, but also that the story in which he is the main figure is no romance.”85 Melville wants to stress that in the Balzacian world of realistic characters, Billy is an original. Like the cosmopolitan, he comes from his own egg. Melville also wants to emphasize that Billy does not “make for a better world” as Mme. de Staël writes, quoted in the “Avant-propos,” but is a realistic representation of the universal composition of morals. Melville is letting his readers in on the necessity to look at some theory or philosophy beyond mere experience to solve the riddle of this story. From one angle, he is confessing that esoteric philosophy, the speculations of Schopenhauer on Buddhism, or perhaps Balzac’s dialectic typology, are necessary to comprehend the full force of what Claggart represents. As in The Confidence-Man, he is attempting to frame reader response by introducing a hypertextual level of indeterminacy; but he may also be “honest” about the ambiguities thereby.

Resignation as Consciousness One paragraph in Seraphita that Melville scored and underscored is particularly significant in this regard. Its mention of a lisp emphasizes its importance, linking with Billy’s stutter, and the passage overtly mentions the “scaffold.” Seraphitus is speaking to companions in a chapter Wormeley titles “The Path to Heaven,” the same chapter singled out by Balzac as the one with which he hoped to win pious hearts:

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When the happy day arrives in which you set your feet upon the Path and begin your pilgrimage, the world will have nothing of it; earth no longer understands you; you no longer understand each other. Men who attain to a knowledge of these things, who lisp a few syllables of the Word, often have not to lay their head; hunted like beasts they perish on the scaffold, to the joy of assembled peoples, while Angels open to them the gates of heaven. Therefore, your destiny is a secret between yourself and God, just as love is a secret between two hearts.86 As Melville’s literary journey may also have been a personal excursion to reach the state of facing without resistance the absolute conditions of his own situation, as in recognizing “visible truth,” it is worth noting Dillingham’s evaluation that resignation in the mode of Hawthorne’s Clifford Pyncheon, has an important antecedent in Melville’s own biography: Perhaps the greatest triumph of [Melville’s] life was his emerging without whining from these nineteen years in a situation where unfairness, pettiness, corruption, and stupidity were rife. He came through with his honesty and his imagination intact and without the bitterness that can cripple or even destroy.87 In this context, although Billy Budd, Sailor can be read as a testament of will, it may also be Melville’s last philosophic statement. Billy has reversed the curse uttered by Hawthorne’s Maule at his execution that his killer should have “blood to drink,” making it a “benediction” of his executioner. Whether Melville had turned to Buddhism or found harmony in theosophy or New Thought, the development is clear. We can see Billy Budd, Sailor as a conscious reworking of the allegory at the end of White-Jacket and with the same emphasis on natural aristocracy. As a metaphor for the

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human comedy, the novella implies that mankind is like a crew of impressed sailors on an isolated ship characterized by beauty and power (Bellipotent) whose laws, be they karmic or arbitrary (sealed orders in any case), are out of our control and far from any intervening king. Although there is not much we can do about those things “outside,” one can control the development of the “inside narrative” of the inner self by subverting inherent anger and selfishness like the Bouddha chrétien. This would be an appropriate meaning for an individual so close to his death to work out in his imagination, knowing that the true story would be distorted however it was told. The death described in Billy Budd, Sailor becomes the true “victory” that Melville saw on the horizon at the conclusion of Clarel. In it triumphs an active death, a transformation, and in the context of this act, death is “routed” since it is no longer unmanageable death but relaxation, a passing to Nirvana, or, as for Vere, the suggestion of another higher incarnation of volition in face of man’s most absolute condition, death. Perhaps, in part, Melville saw himself as Vere, this adherent of vérité (truth), another candidate for the encounter with visible truth, with his inability to go beyond the rules, driven by the energy of his intellectual and abstractive power, unable to rescue the innocent, but aware of the deterministic and interwoven drama of human events and actions. In light of Melville’s sense of himself “unfolding” like a bud into a flower, the recurrent imagery takes on more personal symbolism. The mediocrity of rules and regulations hanged the sailor and prevented his full blooming, but willing annihilation is its own vindication in the end. In this Melville may have found his own deepest ontological vision, his belief, in harmony at last with the highest thoughts of Balzac, but still his own.

Endnotes Notes to Introduction 1

Herman Melville, Pierre: or The Ambiguities (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 284. 2 Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 36. 3 John Bryant, Melville and Repose (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 265. 4 François Rabelais, “The Heroic Sayings and Deeds of the Excellent Pantagruel” Gargantua & Pantagruel: The Five Books, trans. Jacques LeClercq (New York: Heritage Press, 1939), 134. Rabelais: “A notable chapter! A most authentic gloss!” Panurge declared. “Is this all the Trismegistian or thrice-mighty Bottle’s word meant? I am very grateful, of course …” “Exactly that and nothing more,” Bacbuc explained. “For ‘Trinc’ is a panomphean word, that is, a word employed, understood and celebrated among all nations.”

Notes to Chapter 1 1 Bryant, Melville and Repose, 265. 2 John H. Gould, “Ocean Passenger Travel,” Scribner’s Magazine 9, 4 (April, 1891), 399. 3 Gould, “Passenger Travel,” 399. 4 Gould, “Passenger Travel,” 409. 5 Gould, “Passenger Travel,” 400–402. 6 Gould, “Passenger Travel,” 405. 7 Gould, “Passenger Travel,” 407.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820–1872, Vol. III: 1833–1835 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 201. 9 Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1856), 37. 10 Margaret Fuller. “French Novelists of Today,” Life Without and Life Within, ed. Arthur B. Fuller (Boston: Brown, Taggart and Chase, 1859), 158–59. 11 Herman Melville, Journals (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 4–12. 12 Dwight A. Lee, “Melville and George G. Adler,” American Notes and Queries XII (1974), 40. Within a decade of meeting Melville, Adler had translated Claude Charles Fauriel’s History of Provencal Poetry, which Melville owned (Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville’s Reading (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 176). 13 Melville, Journals, 8. 14 Lee, “Melville and George G. Adler,” 139. 15 Melville, Journals, 4. 16 Melville, Journals, 4–5. 17 Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 670. 18 A History of the Book in America, Vol. 3: The Industrial Book 1840–1880 ed. Scott E. Casper et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 13–14. 19 Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 839. 20 A History of the Book, 56. 21 A History of the Book, 119–29. 22 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 35–39, 43–50; Dan Schiller, Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 15–17. 23 Herman Melville, White-Jacket or the World in a Man-of-War (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 169. 24 The New World, pub. J. Winchester (New York) (July 6, 1844), 32. 25 Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 41. 26 [Robert Stephen Rintoul], “The Spectator’s Library: New Books,” The Spectator (September 10, 1831), 881–82. 27 Letitia Elizabeth Landon, “The Talisman,” The Novelist’s Magazine 1 (1833), 96–106. 28 Michael Tilby, “Une polémique littéraire autour de ‘la Peau de chagrin’,” Révue de l’Année Balzacienne 1 (2010), 441.

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29 Thomas R. Palfrey, “Balzac in England,” Modern Language Notes 49.8 (Dec., 1934), 514. 30 J. C., “Le Dragon Rouge,” Dublin University Magazine 2 (Jul.–Dec., 1833), 386–90. 31 Marko Juvan, History and Poetics of Intertextuality (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2008), 30. 32 Palfrey, “Balzac in England,” 516. 33 John W. Croker, “French Novels,” Quarterly Review 56 (Apr.–Jul., 1836), 81. 34 Croker, “French Novels,” 94. 35 Graham Robb, Balzac: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 441. 36 Sheila Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 5. 37 Melville, Journals, 32–33. 38 Martyn Lyons, “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers,” A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 55–56. 39 Robert Browning, To Euphrasia Fanny Haworth, letter 689, The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 4 (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1984), 137–38. 40 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, To Mary Russell Mitford, letter 1611, The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 8 (Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1984), 316. 42 Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. II: The Public Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 237. 43 Robb, Balzac, 180–81. 44 Robb, Balzac, 180. 45 Widmer, Young America, 157. 46 Leonard Engel, “Melville and the Young American Movement,” Connecticut Review 4.2 (1971), 91. 47 Ted Widmer, Ark of the Liberties: Why American Freedom is Important to the World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), xi. 48 Jay Leyda, The Melville Log, Vol. I (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951), 334. 49 Melville, Journals, 39. 50 Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Pursuing Melville (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 225. 51 J. St. Loe Strachey, “The Complete Works of Herman Melville,” The Spectator (May 26, 1923), 887. 52 J. St. Loe Strachey, “Books: Herman Melville Mariner and Mystic,” The Spectator (May 6, 1922), 560. 53 Strachey, “Melville Mariner,” 560.

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54 Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972), 227; Van Wyck Brooks, The Times of Melville and Whitman (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947), 169. 55 Benjamin Sherwood Lawson. “Federated Fancies: Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Melville’s Pierre” in Intertextuality in Literature and Film, ed. Elaine D. Cancalon and Antoine Spacagna (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 37–47; Kevin Hayes, “Melville and Balzac,” Resources for American Literary Study 26.2 (2000), 159–81; Carol Colatrella, “The Significant Silence of Race: La Cousine Bette and ‘Benito Cereno,’” Comparative Literature 46 (1994), 240–66. 56 Leon Chai, The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 57 William Dillingham, Melville and His Circle (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 100. 58 The principal studies consulted in such an exploration are generally three: Sealts’s Melville’s Reading is an elaborate and detailed attempt to trace as completely as possible records of Melville’s intellectual interests from a variety of sources, but primarily through the contents of his personal library as it was reconstructed after Melville’s death; Mary K. Bercaw Edward’s Melville’s Sources (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1987) builds on similar material and attempts to clarify many literary connections and how Melville applied them; however, the most trusted of the empirical instruments is Wilson Walker Cowen’s Melville’s Marginalia (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1987), which meticulously reproduces the markings and even erasures traceable in archived books. The assumption is that if Melville’s spirit truly had been stirred by Balzac, his spontaneous markings on the page would express the intensity and extent of his affiliation with his French exemplar. 59 H. H. Walker, The Comédie Humaine and Its Author (London: Chatto and Windus, 1879), 24. 60 Sealts, Reading, 56. 61 Sealts, Reading, 15. 62 Dorothee M. Finkelstein, Melville’s Orienda (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 25. 63 Sealts, Reading, 153. 64 Herman Melville, Correspondence (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 163. 65 Sealts, Reading, 56.

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Notes to Chapter 2 1 Laurie Robertson-Lorant, “Melville’s French Connections,” “Melville Among the Nations”: Proceedings of an International Conference, Volos, Greece, July 2-6, 1997, eds. Sanford E. Morovitz and A. C. Christodoulou (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2001), 515. 2 Robertson-Lorant, “Melville’s French Connections,” 515. 3 Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 7. 4 Hershel Parker, Herman Melville, Vol. 2. 59–60 and passim. 5 Phillip Young, The Private Melville (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), passim. 6 See Clare Spark, Enter Isabel: The Herman Melville Correspondence of Clare Spark and Paul Metcalf (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), passim. Parker has updated the story and concluded that “Evidence is strongly against the younger woman being an illegitimate daughter of Allen Melvill [Melville’s father]” (Parker, Herman Melville, II, 59). 7 Herman Melville, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 111. 8 The final “e” was added to the family name by Melville’s mother after his father’s death. The name is spelled both ways in Great Britain; the revised spelling gives the illusion of being more French than Scottish, an impression suitable for a grand family. 9 Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1996), 90. 10 Melville, White-Jacket, 167. 11 Melville, Omoo, 11. 12 Melville, White-Jacket, 169. 13 Melville, Journals, 9. 14 Melville, Journals, 144. 15 Melville, Journals, 144. 16 Clarence R. Decker, The Victorian Conscience (New York: Twayne: 1952), 21, 51, 53, etc. 17 Chasles: “Voici une nouveauté curieuse, un Rabelais américain … Imaginez Daphnis et Chloé ou Paul et Virginie dansant au sein des nuages, avec Aristote et Spinoza escortés de Gargantua et Gargamelle, je ne sais pas quelle gavotte fantastique. Œuvre inouie, digne d’un Rabelais sans gaieté, d’un Cervantes sans grâce, d’un Voltaire sans goût,—Mardi ou le Voyage là-bas n’en est pas moins un des plus singuliers livres qui aient paru depuis longtemps sur la face du globe …” (Quoted in Leyda, Melville Log, 304). 18 Melville, Journals, 31. 19 Melville, Journals, 39.

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Notes to pages 46–51 20 Decker, Victorian Conscience, 51. 21 Sealts, Pursuing, 225. 22 Decker, Victorian Conscience, 49–50. 23 Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings, 129. 24 Palfrey, “Balzac in England,” 514. 25 Palfrey, “Balzac in England,” 514. 26 Michael Tilby, “Honoré de Balzac,” Encyclopedia of Literary Translations into English, Vol. 1, ed. Olive Classe (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), 99. 27 Grégoire Mallard, “Interpreters of the Literary Canon and Their Technical Instruments: The Case of Balzac Criticism,” American Sociological Review 70 (Dec., 2005), 1000. 28 Honoré de Balzac, Luck and Leather, trans. Anonymous (Boston: Brainard & Co., 1843), from an unsigned and unpaginated “Introduction.” 29 Benjamin Griffith, Balzac en Amérique (Paris: Les Presse Modernes, 1930), 8–9. 30 Griffith, Balzac en Amérique, 13. 31 Griffith, Balzac en Amérique, 11–13. 32 Honoré de Balzac, “Le Réquisitionnaire” (“Mother and Son”), The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 12.60 (Jun., 1843), 618–26; Honoré de Balzac, “El Verdugo” (“The Executioner”), The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 13.61 (Jul., 1843), 303–08; Honoré de Balzac, “La Vendetta, or The Feud” trans. Mrs. F. A. Butler, The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17.85 (Jul.–Aug., 1845), 276–89. 33 Honoré de Balzac, “La Grande Bretèche,” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review Vol. XIII, No. LXV (Nov., 1843), 525–36. 34 E. Preston Dargon, “Studies in Balzac III,” Modern Philology (Jul., 1919), 116. 35 Library of Congress, National Union Catalog, Vol. 33 (Marnell: Baltimore, 1956), 184. 36 Library of Congress, National Union Catalog, Vol. 33, 107. 37 The New York University Publishing Society is recorded as publishing some of Balzac’s works in English in sixteen volumes in 1842. In 1844 a translation of La Recherche de l’Absolu was published under the title The Philosopher’s Stone by J. Winchester, who also published a translation of Père Goriot as Father Goriot that same year (both had first been serialized in The New World). There are numerous other publications in English listed with no recognized publishing date, which may well have been in circulation before 1850. 38 Library of Congress, National Union Catalog, Vol. 33, passim. 39 Griffith, Balzac en Amérique, 15.

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40 [Samuel Ward], “Modern French Romance,” The New York Review 4 (Apr., 1839), 455. 41 [John Lothrop Motley], “The Novels of Balzac,” North American Review 46 (Jul., 1847), 85. 42 Motley, “Novels of Balzac,” 86–87. 43 Motley, “Novels of Balzac,” 88. 44 Motley, “Novels of Balzac,” 97. 45 “Monographie de la Presse Parisienne by M. De Balzac,” Foreign Quarterly Review 31 (Apr.–Jul., 1843), 182. 46 Hayes: “No contemporary English-language journal reviewed Balzac more frequently than the Foreign Quarterly Review. If Melville did not purchase the British quarterlies himself, he read those of his father-inlaw, Lemuel Shaw, who subscribed to the Foreign Quarterly Review, or he read the periodical at Evert A. Duyckinck’s home, where he found other British periodicals” (Hayes, “Melville and Balzac,” 161). Substantiated by Sealts, Reading, 245. 47 Margaret Fuller, Essays on American Life and Letters (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 366. Fuller considered Typee a “record of imaginary adventures” and spent a couple of lines discounting the probability of the plot, but she nevertheless thought it entertaining and “clever.” 48 Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. I: The Private Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 260. 49 Fuller, “French Novelists,” 159. 50 Fuller, “French Novelists,” 161. 51 Fuller, “French Novelists,” 163. 52 Tilby, “Honoré de Balzac,” 100.

Notes to Chapter 3 1

William A. Cook, Hawthorne’s Artistic Theory and Practice (Diss: Lehigh University, 1971), 43. 2 William Bysshe Stein, Hawthorne’s Faust (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1953), 49. 3 Cook, Hawthorne’s Artistic Theory, 311. 4 Austin Warren: “Elizabeth Hawthorne, describing her brother’s habits after his return from Bowdoin asserts: ‘He read a great many novels; he made an artistic study of them.’ But already much earlier before his departure for college, the novel had become Hawthorne’s special interest” (“Hawthorne’s Reading,” The New England Quarterly 8.4 (Dec., 1935), 483). 5 Chai, Romantic Foundations, 163. 6 Stein, Faust, 49. 7 Chai, Romantic Foundations, 158.

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Notes to pages 59–64 8 Jane Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne and European Literary Tradition (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 176. 9 Chai, Romantic Foundations, 163. 10 Meg McGovern Murray, Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 149. 11 Philip McFarland, Hawthorne in Concord (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 88. 12 William Wilson, “Balzac and his English Critics,” The Author (Jan. 15, 1891), 242. 13 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Preface,” Twice-Told Tales: Extended Annotated Edition (Lochsberg: Jazzybee Verlag, 2013), 22–23. 14 Balzac: “Le hasard est le plus grand romancier du monde: pour être fécond, il n’y a qu’à l’étudier. La Société française allait être l’historien, je ne devais être que le secrétaire. En dressant l’inventaire des vices et des vertus, en rassemblant les principaux faits des passions, en peignant les caractères, en choisissant les événements principaux de la Société, en composant des types par la réunion des traits de plusieurs caractères homogènes, peut-être pouvais-je arriver à écrire l’histoire oubliée par tant d’historiens, celle des mœurs” (“Avant-propos,” La Comédie humaine, Tome I (Paris: France Loisirs, 1985), 14–15). 15 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Great Short Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Frederick Crews (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1992), xii. 16 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), vii. This is the text of the 1851 edition and matches the text that Melville read. There are numerous other such theoretical parallels throughout Hawthorne’s definitions of fiction. In the preface to The Blithedale Romance, for example, he offers an excellent rendering of Balzac’s idea of the “beautiful ideal” of the romancer as expressed in the “Avant-propos” to La Comédie humaine (cf. PostLauria, Correspondent Colorings, 129–31). 17 Balzac: “L’histoire n’a pas pour loi, comme le roman, de tendre vers le beau idéal. L’histoire est ou devrait être ce qu’elle fut; tandis que le roman doit être le monde meilleur, a dit madame Necker, un des esprits les plus distingués du dernier siècle. Mais le roman ne serait rien si, dans cet auguste mensonge, il n’était pas vrai dans les détails” (“Avantpropos,” 20). 18 Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 174, 177. 19 Edward Wagenknecht, Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Man, his Tales, and Romances (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1989), 114. 20 Balzac: “A l’aspect d’un homme à tête nue, dont l’habit et le hautde-chausses en camelot brun, dont le rabat en toile de lin empesé n’avaient aucun ornement, qui ne tenait à la main ni toque ni chapeau, sans bourse ni épée à la ceinture, tous le prirent pour un bourgmestre sûr de son autorité, bourgmestre bon homme et doux

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comme quelques-uns de ces vieux Flamands dont la nature et le caractère ingénus nous ont été si bien conservés par les peintres du pays” (“Jésus-Christ en Flandre,” La Comédie humaine. Tome XXIII (Paris: France Loisirs, 1987), 14). 21 Nathaniel Hawthorne, “A Select Party,” Mosses from an Old Manse (Orange Street Press, 1999), 70. 22 Stein, Faust, 48. 23 Mary Russell Mitford, “SWALLOWFIELD, August 6, 1852,” in George P. Lathrop, A Study of Hawthorne (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 230. 24 Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 188. 25 “Advertisements,” Harper’s Weekly XXIV (Dec. 7, 1861), 784. Winthrop was also a late associate of Young America, whose fervent attachment to democracy led him to his death in the Civil War. 26 Juliet Pollock, “Imaginative Literature of America,” The Contemporary Review 22 (Jun.–Nov., 1873), 358. 27 Henry James, Jr., Hawthorne (London: MacMillan & Co., 1879), 4. 28 Dorothy Scarborough, The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (New York: Putnam, 1917), 60. 29 Hawthorne, Short Works, 318. 30 Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 166. 31 Fuller, Life Without and Life Within, 159. 32 Hawthorne, Short Works, 318. 33 Hawthorne, Short Works, 319. 34 Widmer, Young America, 27. 35 Fuller, Life Without and Life Within, 164. 36 Thomas R. Mitchell, “Julian Hawthorne and the ‘Scandal’ of Margaret Fuller,” American Literary History 7.2 (Summer, 1995), 210–33.

Notes to Chapter 4 1 George Henry Lewes, “Balzac and George Sand,” Foreign Quarterly Review 33 (Apr.–Jul., 1844), 283. 2 Lewes, “Balzac and Sand,” 284. 3 Balzac: “L’animal végète comme la plante; on trouve, dis-je, les rudiments de la belle loi du soi pour soi sur laquelle repose l’unité de composition. Il n’y a qu’un animal. Le créateur ne s’est servi que d’un seul et même patron pour tous les êtres organisés. L’animal est un principe qui prend sa forme extérieure, ou, pour parler plus exactement, les différences de sa forme, dans les milieux où il est appelé à se développer. Les Espèces Zoologiques résultent … Pénétré de ce système bien avant les débats auxquels il a donné lieu, je vis que, sous ce rapport, la Société ressemblait à la Nature. La Société ne fait-elle pas de l’homme, suivant les

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Notes to pages 77–84 milieux où son action se déploie, autant d’hommes différents qu’il y a de variétés en zoologie?” (“Avant-propos,” 10–11). 4 Balzac: “L’homme n’est ni bon ni méchant, il naît avec des instincts et des aptitudes; la Société, loin de le dépraver, comme l’a prétendu Rousseau, le perfectionne, le rend meilleur; mais l’intérêt développe aussi ses penchants mauvais … Je ne partage point la croyance à un progrès indéfini, quant aux Sociétés; je crois aux progrès de l’homme sur luimême. Ceux qui veulent apercevoir chez moi l’intention de considérer l’homme comme une créature finie se trompent donc étrangement. Séraphita la doctrine en action du Bouddha chrétien, me semble une réponse suffisante à cette accusation assez légèrement avancée d’ailleurs” (“Avant-propos,” 16, 21). 5 Balzac: “mais, pour mériter les éloges que doit ambitionner tout artiste, ne devais-je pas étudier les raisons ou la raison de ces effets sociaux, surprendre le sens caché dans cet immense assemblage de figures, de passions et d’événements … ?” (“Avant-propos,” 15). 6 Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 168–69. 7 Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 168. 8 Honoré de Balzac, Le Livre mystique, 2 vol. (Bruxelles: J. P. Meline, Libraire-Editor, 1836). 9 Mitchell, “‘Scandal’ of Margaret Fuller,” 216ff. 10 Balzac: “De là trois degrés pour l’homme: Instinctif, il est au-dessous de la mesure; Abstractif, il est au niveau; Spécialiste, il est au-dessus. Le Spécialisme lui ouvre sa véritable carrière. L’infini commence à poindre en lui. Là il entrevoit ‘sa destinée’” (Livre mystique, Vol. I, 196). 11 Henri Gauthier, L’Image de l’homme intérieur chez Balzac (Geneva/ Paris: Libraire Droz, 1984), 88. 12 Sealts, Pursuing, 261. 13 Gretchen R. Besser, Balzac’s Concept of Genius (Geneva: Library Droz, 1969), 11. 14 Balzac: “A L’Abstraction commence la Société. Si l’Abstraction comparée à l’Instinct est une puissance presque divine, elle est une faiblesse inouïe, comparée au don de Spécialité qui peut seul expliquer Dieu” (Livre mystique, Vol. I, 194). 15 Balzac: “Ces simples créatures étaient insouciantes de la pensée et de ses trésors, mais prêtes à les abîmer dans une croyance, ayant la foi d’autant plus robuste qu’elles n’avaient jamais rien discuté, ni analysé; natures vierges où la conscience était restée pure et le sentiment puissant; le remords, le malheur, l’amour, le travail avaient exercé, purifié, concentré, décuplé, leur volonté, la seule chose qui, dans l’homme, ressemble à ce que les savants nomment une âme” (“Jésus-Christ en Flandre,” 23). 16 Balzac: “Les plus beaux génies humains sont ceux qui sont partis des ténèbres de l’Abstraction pour arriver aux lumières de la Spécialité.

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(Spécialité, species, vue, spéculer, voir tout, et d’un seul coup; Spéculum, miroir ou moyen d’apprécier une chose en la voyant tout entière)” (Livre mystique, Vol. I, 195). 17 Balzac: “C’est une sorte de seconde vue qui leur permet de deviner la vérité dans toutes les situations possibles; ou, mieux encore, je ne sais quelle puissance qui les transporte là où ils doivent, où ils veulent être. Ils inventent le vrai, par analogie, ou voient l’objet à décrire, soit que l’objet vienne à eux, soit qu’ils aillent eux-mêmes vers l’objet … Les hommes ont-ils le pouvoir de faire venir l’univers dans leur cerveau, ou leur cerveau est-il un talisman avec lequel ils abolissent les lois du temps et de l’espace?” (“Préface de la première édition de 1831,” La Peau de chagrin (Paris: Librairie Paul Ollendorff, 1900), 373–74). 18 Paul Bourget, “Introduction,” Repertory of the Comédie humaine, ed. Anatole Cerfbarr et al. (Philadelphia: Avil, 1902), xv. 19 Balzac: “Le Mysticisme est précisément Christianisme dans son principe pur. Ici l’auteur n’a rien inventé, il ne propose rien de neuf; il a mis en oeuvre des richesses enfouies, il a plongé dans la mer et y a pris des perles vierges pour le collier de sa Madone” (Livre mystique, Vol. I, xiii). 20 Max Andréoli, Le Système balzacien: essai de description synchronique (Paris: Diffusion aux Amateurs de Livres, 1984), 56–63. 21 Balzac: “l’ensemble de nos Volitions et de nos Idées constituait l’Action, et l’ensemble de nos actes extérieurs, la Réaction” (Livre mystique, Vol. I, 78). 22 George Frederic Parsons, “Introduction” Seraphita, trans. Katherine Prescott Wormeley (Boston: Roberts, 1889), xi. This is the same edition read by Melville late in life. 23 Balzac: “Swedenborg appelle Esprits angéliques les êtres qui, dans ce monde, sont préparés pour le ciel, où ils deviennent Anges. Selon lui, Dieu n’a pas créé d’Anges spécialement, il n’en existe point qui n’ait été homme sur la terre. La terre est ainsi la pépinière du ciel … Ces Esprits sont, pour ainsi dire, les fleurs de l’humanité qui s’y résume et travaille à s’y résumer. Ils doivent avoir ou l’Amour du ciel ou la Sagesse du ciel; mais ils sont toujours dans l’Amour avant être dans la Sagesse” (Livre mystique, Vol. II, 99–100). 24 Jared Wenger, “Character-Types of Scott, Balzac, Dickens, Zola,” PMLA 62.1 (Mar., 1947), 215. 25 Andréoli, Le Système balzacien, 71. 26 Andréoli, Le Système balzacien, 161. 27 Andréoli, Le Système balzacien, 97. 28 Chai: “Differences in energy produce a difference in individual characteristics or (to use a term common to Melville and Balzac) Natures” (Romantic Foundatious, 218). 29 Balzac: “Le Spécialiste est nécessairement la plus parfaite expression de l’Homme, l’anneau qui lie le monde visible aux mondes supérieurs: il

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Notes to pages 89–103 agit, il voit et il sent par son Interieur; L’Abstractif pense. L’Instinctif agit” (Livre mystique, Vol. I, 196). 30 Andréoli, Le Système balzacien, 249–54. 31 Balzac: “Entre la sphère du Spécialisme et celle de l’Abstractivité se trouvent, comme entre celle-ci et celle de l’Instinctivité, des êtres chez lesquels les divers attributs des deux règnes se confondent et produisent des mixtes: les hommes de génie” (Livre mystique Vol. I, 195–96). 32 Lewes, “Balzac and Sand,” 284. 33 Gauthier: “Le Spécialisme fait intervenir un mode de connaissance supérieur. Il est l’attribut de l’Homme intérieur dont l’intuition est la faculté prédominante … elle permet de pénétrer directement la pensée d’autrui, elle franchit le temps et l’espace, elle est indépendante de la sensation … L’homme de génie est un être mixte qui possède partie le pouvoir d’abstraction, partie le don de spécialité” (Image de l’homme intérieur, 79–80.) 34 Besser, Balzac’s Concept of Genius, 155. 35 Hawthorne, Short Works, 306. 36 Hawthorne, Short Works, 301. 37 Taylor Stoehr, Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists (Hamden: The Shoe String Press, 1978), 53. 38 Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 190. 39 Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 49. 40 Somerset Maugham, “Balzac’s Characters,” Critical Essays on Honoré de Balzac, ed. Martin Kanes (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), 34. 41 Christopher Rivers, “‘L’homme hiéroglyphié’: Balzac, Physiognomy, and the Legible Body,” The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater, ed. Ellis Shookman (Columbia: Camden House, 1993), 144. 42 Rivers, “‘L’homme hiéroglyphié,’” 145–46. 43 Quoted in Rivers, “‘L’homme hiéroglyphié,’” 146. 44 F. A. Mesmer, Le Magnétisme animal, ed. Robert Amadou (Paris: Payot, 1971), 53. 45 Honoré de Balzac, Ursule Mirouet, trans. Donald Adamson (London: Penguin, 1987), 88. 46 Robert C. Fuller, “Mesmerism and the Birth of Psychology,” Pseudoscience and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Arthur Wrobel (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press, 1987), 218–19. 47 Stoehr, Mad Scientists, 50–51. 48 Samuel Chase Coale, Mesmerism and Hawthorne (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 3. 49 Stoehr, Mad Scientists, 86. 50 Brand’s heart is so hardened that its remnants survive cremation like bone: “So little Joe ran up the hillock, and stood by his father’s side. The marble was all burnt into perfect, snow-white lime. But on its surface,

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in the midst of the circle—snow-white too, and thoroughly converted into lime—lay a human skeleton, in the attitude of a person who, after long toil, lies down to long repose. Within the ribs—strange to say— was the shape of a human heart” (Hawthorne, Short Works, 368). 51 Hawthorne, Short Works, 365. 52 Stein, Hawthorne’s Faust, 48. 53 Balzac: “Sa forme intérieure avait éclaté. En un moment, son crâne s’était élargi, ses sens avaient grandi. Sa pensée, embrassa le monde, il en vit les choses comme s’il eût été placé à une hauteur prodigieuse” (Melmoth réconcilié, in La Comédie humaine, Tome XXIII (Paris: France Loisirs, 1987), 74). 54 Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 181–82. 55 Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 182.

Notes to Chapter 5 1 Hennig Cohen, “Melville’s Masonic Secrets,” Melville Society Extracts 108 (1997), 3. As Balzac’s Daniel d’Arthez tells Lucien de Rubempré about literary borrowing: “Treat your subject from different points of view, sometimes in a side-light, sometimes retrospectively; vary your methods, in fact, to diversify your work. You may be original while adapting the Scots novelist’s form of dramatic dialogue to French history” (Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, trans. Herbert J. Hunt (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 213). It is clear that, in Balzac’s view, one may both simultaneously borrow and be original. 2 Strachey, “Complete Works,” 560. 3 Melville, Correspondence, 162. 4 Melville, Correspondence, 163. 5 See Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia; Sealts, Reading. 6 Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography, 246. 7 Sealts, Reading, 163. 8 Parker, Herman Melville, Vol. 1, 659. 9 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-worship, & the Heroic in History, notes and introduction by Michael K. Goldberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), xxxv–xxxvii. 10 Sealts, Reading, 163. 11 Carlyle, On Heroes, 3–4. 12 Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839–1860 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press: 1987), 654 [note]. 13 Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 157. 14 Widmer, Young America, 157.

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Notes to pages 116–21 15 Carlyle, On Heroes, 97. 16 Sealts, Reading, 64. 17 Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography, 246. 18 Parker, Herman Melville, Vol. 1, 747. For a few days at least, Hawthorne pretended not to know who had written “Hawthorne and His Mosses” and apparently his son Julian never found out (Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife, Vol. I (Grosse Pt: Scholarly Press, 1968; originally published 1885), 385). The truth was probably also kept from Nathaniel’s wife Sophia as long as possible. Given Hawthorne’s repeated behavior outside the purview of Sophia’s censorious eyes, he may even have been complicit in the writing with Melville. The “Preface” to a new edition of Twice-Told Tales written not long afterward refers directly to points made in Melville’s review. That England and Europe (Balzac’s circle included) had such groups of supporters who wrote back and forth to publicize each other was common knowledge among literary fraternities. 19 Herman Melville, Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849), 132. 20 Sheila Post, “Melville and the Marketplace,” A Historical Guide to Herman Melville ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 106. 21 Parker, Herman Melville, Vol. I, 784. 22 Horatio Bridge, “Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 84 (Dec., 1891–May, 1892), 371. 23 Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 385. 24 Recent biographies have given us a new picture of Melville’s social life that separates it from the brooding inward-seeking self-pitying image promulgated during most of the twentieth century. In fact, Melville appears to have been a regular “life of the party” type, sometimes even becoming silly in his behavior, but always entertaining and engaging, able to laugh at himself and capable of spending long hours in conversation to no one’s regret. Even Julian Hawthorne admitted Melville’s desire and ability to entertain with jovial and charismatic skill. Factuality, “reality,” and literal truth were seldom part of this habitual behavior. If “Hawthorne and His Mosses” was indeed written under the democratic influence, as some scholars now concede, what bound Melville to being 100% committed to his propaganda? Can we reasonably decide line by line what is to be taken without inflation? The humorous tone and subversive intent of the essay is ignored at the reader’s peril. 25 Brenda Wineapple, “Hawthorne and Melville; or, The Ambiguities,” ESQ 46 (2000), 80–81. 26 Hawthorne, “A Select Party,” 70–71. 27 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 249.

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28 Robb, Balzac, 180. 29 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 246. 30 Balzac: “D’abord, presque toujours ces personnages, dont l’existence devient plus longue, plus authentique que celle des générations au milieu desquelles on les fait naître, ne vivent qu’à la condition d’être une grande image du présent. Conçus dans les entrailles de leur siècle, tout le cœur humain se remue sous leur enveloppe, il s’y cache souvent toute une philosophie” (“Avant-propos,” 13–14). 31 Despite the comment recorded by Sophia Hawthorne. She had written that “[Melville] said Mr. Hawthorne was the first person whose physical being appeared to him wholly in harmony with the intellectual & the spiritual. He said the sunny haze & the pensiveness, the symmetry of his face, the depth of eyes, ‘the gleam—the shadow—the peace supreme’ all were in exact response to the high calm intellect, the glowing, deep heart—the purity of actual and spiritual life.” (Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 615). Given Melville’s skepticism of practical physiognomy, clearly evinced in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” at least about Jesus (but not about the Master Genius of American literature), if he made such statements, they were probably mercurial and intended to keep a suspicious Sophia, a notorious physiognomic reader, at bay. Melville: “But that dust of which our bodies are composed, how can it fitly express the nobler intelligences among us? With reverence be it spoken, that not even in the case of one deemed more than man, not even our Saviour, did his visible frame betoken anything of the augustness of the nature within. Else, how could those Jewish eyewitnesses fail to see heaven in his glance” (“Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 240). Melville bought a book of physiognomic essays in London less than a year before and the words of Lavater and Combe were in his head as predominantly as those of Carlyle and Shakespeare. Note also in his correspondence the jocular tone Melville takes in his negative assessment of physiognomy both in Pierre and The Confidence-Man, and his playful parody in Moby-Dick. 32 Melville, Correspondence, 181. 33 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 245–46. 34 Sealts, Pursuing, 261. 35 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 249. 36 Melville, Correspondence, 195. 37 Parker, Herman Melville, Vol. I, 770. 38 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 253. 39 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 249. 40 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 249. 41 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 250–51.

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Notes to pages 125–36 42 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 243. 43 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 243. 44 The “Virginian” confesses that: “I have thus far omitted all mention of his ‘Twice Told Tales,’ and ‘Scarlet Letter.’ Both are excellent, but full of such manifold, strange and diffusive beauties, that time would all but fail me, to point the half of them out. But there are things in those two books, which, had they been written in England a century ago, Nathaniel Hawthorne had utterly displaced many of the bright names we now revere on authority” (Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 249). One can feel the almost back-handed complement in Melville’s language, which implies of course that Hawthorne is not only more “European” than American, but is also behind the times. 45 Newly drawn evidence from Parker of Melville’s daily life shows he was not the uneducated misfit that came from earlier reconstructions of his character. 46 Thomas R. Mitchell, “In the Whale’s Wake: Melville and The Blithedale Romance,” ESQ 46.1–2 (2002), 57, 59. 47 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 245. 48 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 248. 49 Fuller, “French Novelists,” 159. 50 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 242. 51 Melville, Correspondence, 121. 52 Motley, “Novels of Balzac,” 85. 53 Honoré de Balzac, Father Goriot; or, Scenes of Life in Paris, trans. Edward S. Gould, Selected Novels, Vol. 3 (New York: Harper Brothers, 1845), 7. 54 Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot, La Comédie humaine, Tome IV (Paris: France Loisirs, 1985), 22. 55 Leyda, Melville Log, 311. 56 Edward F. Edinger, Melville’s Moby-Dick: An American Nekyia (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1995), 11. 57 Victor Hugo, “Honoré de Balzac,” The Art of Public Speaking, J. Berg Esenwein and Dale Carnagey [Carnagie] (Springfield: Home Correspondence School, 1915), 503–04. 58 Sealts, Reading, 153. 59 “DEATH OF M. DE BALZAC,” reprinted from The Atlas in The Hobart Town Courier (Saturday, 25 January 1851), 4. 60 Hayes, “Melville and Balzac,” 162. 61 Besser wrote: “The reputation which Balzac had acquired while still alive blossomed into a form of veneration after his death. Victor Hugo set the stage for this apotheosis in his eulogy at Balzac’s funeral, in which he publicly proclaimed the writer ‘un des premiers parmi les plus grands, un des plus hauts parmi les meilleurs,’ and referred to his friend

Notes to pages 136–44

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as ‘un de ces êtres qui ont plané longtemps au-dessus de la foule avec les ailes visibles du génie’” (Balzac’s Concept of Genius, 233). 62 Parker, Herman Melville, Vol. I, 249–50. 63 J. Hawthorne, passim; Sealts, in a footnote in Pursuing, 382. Sealts also offers a description of the “boudoir” from Rose Hawthorne Lathrop. 64 Melville, Correspondence, 197. 65 J. Hawthorne, Hawthorne and his Wife, 398. 66 Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 109. 67 Leyda, Melville Log, 407. 68 Parker, Herman Melville, Vol. I, 827. 69 Robert C. Fuller, “Mesmerism and the Birth of Psychology,” Pseudoscience and Society in Nineteenth Century America, ed. Arthur Wrobel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 218. 70 See particularly Maxine Moore, That Lonely Game (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1975). 71 Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 110. 72 J. Hawthorne, Hawthorne and his Wife, 415. 73 Cook, “Artistic Theory,” 78. 74 Melville, Correspondence, 196. 75 Melville, Correspondence, 186. 76 Robb, Balzac, 422. 77 Melville, Correspondence, 174. 78 Edinger, Melville’s Moby-Dick, 75. 79 For a while, Melville appeared to have dwelt intimately with the Hawthornes in an atmosphere of mesmerism, for Sophia Hawthorne definitely saw Melville with mesmeric criteria in mind, drawn from an art in which she had been well educated before she married Nathaniel: “[Melville] has very keen perceptive power, but what astonishes me is that his eyes are not deep—he seems to see everything very accurately … —once in a while his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression out of those eyes, to which I have objected—an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel—that he is at that instant taking deepest note of what is before him—It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique—It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into himself. I saw him look at Una so yesterday several times” (Parker, Herman Melville, Vol. I, 773). 80 Melville, Correspondence, 186. 81 Melville, Correspondence, 213.

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Notes to pages 145–51

Notes to Chapter 6 1

F. O. Matthiessen first proposed this idea, and it has subsequently been repeated without question (American Renaissance (New York, Oxford University Press: 1941), 468). 2 Melville dedicated Moby-Dick thus (on page vii): IN TOKEN OF MY ADMIRATION FOR HIS GENIUS, This Book is Inscribed TO NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE Pierre, on the other hand, is simply dedicated: TO Greylock’s Most Excellent Majesty The language is ambiguous enough to be a swipe at the absent Hawthorne, given their first meeting at Greylock; but Melville obfuscates any possible implication with three short paragraphs pointing the reader to the physical mountain and its surroundings (Melville, Pierre, frontispiece). 3 “Historical Note,” in Moby-Dick, 611–59. 4 Melville, Correspondence, 139. 5 Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings, 106. 6 Melville, Correspondence, 191. 7 Sidney Moss, “Hawthorne and Melville: An Inquiry into Their Art and the Mystery of Their Friendship,” Literary Monographs 7 (1975), 45. 8 Howard P. Vincent, The Tailoring of Melville’s White Jacket (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 33, 60. 9 Quoted by Edwin M. Eigner, The Metaphysical Novel in England and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 19. 10 Howard P. Vincent, The Trying-out of Moby-Dick (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1980), 46. 11 Parker, Herman Melville, Vol. 1, 768. 12 Melville, Correspondence, 196. 13 Melville, Correspondence, 190. 14 Hayes has made an interesting comparison between Moby-Dick and Father Goriot, which, he has little doubt, Melville read (“Melville and Balzac,” 163). He indicates that Goriot certainly suffers from a species of monomania in relation to his daughters that Rastignac cannot relieve, which compares psychologically to Ahab’s quest for the whale that Ishmael is unable to arrest. Moreover, Hayes sees that both Ishmael and Rastignac “recognize the flaws in their elders’ characters, yet both also see tragic grandeur in the two men” (“Melville and Balzac,” 163). Although this is certainly a fair observation, Melville was probably more interested in the dark, evil character of Vautrin in

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his quest to make Moby-Dick more interesting, rather than in Goriot, whom he probably thought an “ordinary” type of merely “remarkable” character. Balzac’s old man is very passive and in fact suffers from lack of will rather than an excess of it, like Ahab. 15 The New World 9.26 (Dec. 29, 1844), 830. In the last issue of 1844, The New World touted: “THE NEW WORLD. This favorite publication is about to appear in a new dress, new shape, and with such a host of new and rare PICTORIAL EMBELLISHMENTS as will create a profound sensation throughout the United States.” The ad goes on to promote the upcoming translation of the “Original and Only Genuine Edition of the WANDERING JEW By EUGENE SUE and THE MAGIC GOBLET or the Consecration of the Church of Hammarby BY EMILIE CARLEN [Swedish Gothic Romance writer].” There was a stated attempt to satisfy readers with this worldwide fare, which supports Post’s work about the international circumstances of the book marketplace. 16 Parker, Herman Melville, Vol. I, 376. 17 Hayes, “Melville and Balzac,” 163. 18 Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography, 337. 19 Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 143. 20 Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 149. 21 Balzac, Father Goriot (Gould), 77. 22 Melville, Correspondence, 165. 23 Melville, Correspondence, 212. 24 Felicien Marceau, Balzac and His World (New York: Orion Press, 1976), 297. 25 David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance (New York: Knopf, 1988), 177. 26 Vidocq was a renowned thief and imprisoned several times. He later turned vigilant police agent and ultimately became the first chief of the Sûreté, the Parisian detective bureau. His Mémoires appeared in 1828, the first of several volumes. Vidocq described his investigating methods in great detail, which included many innovations in the now recognized sciences of the criminalist. Vidocq is thought to be the “egg” not only of Vautrin, but of Inspector Javert in Hugo’s Les Misérables. 27 Bland, the master-at-arms is a veritable “Vidocq”: “It is indispensable that [the sergeant-at-arms] should be a very Vidocq in vigilance. But it is a heartless, so it is a thankless office” (Melville, White-Jacket, 27). 28 Marceau, Balzac and His World, 299. 29 Melville, Moby-Dick, 79. 30 Melville, Moby-Dick, 168. 31 Balzac, Father Goriot (Gould), 8. 32 Melville, Moby-Dick, 79. 33 Melville, Correspondence, 196.

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Notes to pages 158–74 34 Balzac, Father Goriot (Gould), 46. 35 Melville, Moby-Dick, 115. 36 Melville, Moby-Dick, 116–17. 37 Melville, Moby-Dick, 118. 38 Melville, Moby-Dick, 124. 39 Melville, Moby-Dick, 124. 40 Melville, Moby-Dick, 544. 41 Melville, Moby-Dick, 148. 42 Melville, Moby-Dick, 553. 43 Melville, Moby-Dick, 431. 44 Melville, Moby-Dick, 432. 45 Melville, Moby-Dick, 374. 46 Melville, Moby-Dick, 433. 47 Melville, Moby-Dick, 570. 48 Lee, “Melville and George G. Adler,” 140. 49 There is a school of psychology around the Enneagram, some of whose advocates not only examine personality types but relations to body types as well. Of course, constitutional medicine is largely based on the same principles, where treatment or therapy for “type A” personalities differs from others, and Sheldon’s exomorph, endomorph, and ectomorph are still discussed. 50 Melville, Journals, 24. 51 Melville, Moby-Dick, 49–50. 52 Melville, Moby-Dick, 115. 53 Melville, Moby-Dick, 347. 54 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 240. 55 Melville, Moby-Dick, 429. 56 Melville, Moby-Dick, 10. 57 Balzac, Father Goriot (Gould), 4. 58 Lundblad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 182. 59 Melville, Moby-Dick, 12. 60 Melville, Moby-Dick, 13. 61 Melville, Moby-Dick, 202. 62 Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 245–46. 63 Warner Bertoff, The Example of Melville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 47–48.

Notes to Chapter 7 1 Parker, Herman Melville, Vol. I, 768. 2 Melville wrote: “Your letter was handed me last night on the road going to Mr. Morewood’s, and I read it there. Had I been at home, I would have sat down at once and answered it. In me divine magnanimities are

Notes to pages 175–81

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spontaneous and instantaneous—catch them while you can. The world goes round, and the other side comes up. So now I can’t write what I felt. But I felt pantheistic then—your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome’s Pantheon. It is a strange feeling—no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content—that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling” (November 17, 1851; Correspondence, 212). 3 Melville, Correspondence, 226–27. 4 Melville, Correspondence, 191. 5 Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings, 129. 6 Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings, 131. 7 Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings, 129. 8 Melville, Correspondence, 192. 9 Melville, Correspondence, 193. 10 Post-Lauria, Correspondent Colorings, 129. 11 Melville, Correspondence, 189–90. 12 Wyn Kelley, “Hawthorne and Melville in the Shoals,” Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship, ed. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), passim. 13 Kelley, “Hawthorne and Melville,” 184. 14 J. Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Wife, 428. 15 Monika Mueller, This Infinite Fraternity of Feeling (Madison: Associated University Presses, 1996), 18. 16 Mueller, Infinite Fraternity, 24. 17 Mueller, Infinite Fraternity, 16. 18 Robertson-Lorant, Melville, 325. 19 Robertson-Lorant, Melville, 325. 20 Herman Melville, Pierre: or The Ambiguities, abridged by Hershel Parker (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), xix. 21 Melville, Pierre (Parker), xvii. 22 Melville, Pierre (Parker), xxiii. 23 Melville, Pierre (Parker), xxvii. 24 Early in September Melville apologized to his neighbor Sarah Morewood for not turning at once to a book she had given him, Zanoni, a Rosicrucian romance by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, because the Fates had plunged him “into certain silly thoughts and wayward speculations,” which sounds as if he was in fact well into planning Pierre, which would prevent him for a time from reading this and another book she had given him (Melville, Pierre (Parker), vxi–xvii). 25 Kelley, “Hawthorne and Melville,” 185–86.

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Notes to pages 182–85

26 Melville, Correspondence, 190. 27 Melville, Correspondence, 226. 28 Melville, Correspondence, 213. This remark is usually interpreted by critics as a reference to Tennyson’s poem, “The Kraken.” Given Melville’s thought metaphors about plunging into deep oceans, remarking on the entire poem is valuable, expressing in part his psychological intent when conceiving Pierre (who sinks to the bottom and does not arise.) It also reflects on the imagery of the psychological ocean we found so like Melville’s—the “literary diver.” We can also see a counter-position to White-Jacket’s rise from the unconscious where he shed his personality. The dark vision is not assuaged until Clarel’s victorious rise from his dive nearly twenty years later where victory rather than death lies at the surface. The image is finally reversed by Billy Budd’s willingness to die and be entombed not in sleep, but in rest, among the seaworms. Below the thunders of the upper deep, Far beneath in the abysmal sea, His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee About his shadowy sides: above him swell Huge sponges of millennial growth and height; And far away into the sickly light, From many a wondrous grot and secret cell Unnumbered and enormous polypi Winnow with giant fins the slumbering green. There hath he lain for ages and will lie Battering upon huge seaworms in his sleep, Until the latter fire shall heat the deep; Then once by man and angels to be seen, In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die. (Alfred Lord Tennyson, “The Kraken” (1830), Tennyson (New York: Knopf, 2004), 42). The poem seems to have stuck permanently in Melville’s consciousness, for it is clearly reflected in his own poem “The Maldive Shark,” published in 1888 in John Marr and Other Sailors. 29 Melville, Moby-Dick, 202. 30 Edwin Haviland Miller, Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 359. 31 Melville, Correspondence, 186. 32 Balzac: “si la pensée, ou la passion, qui comprend la pensée et le sentiment, est l’élément social, elle en est aussi l’élément destructeur. En ceci, la vie sociale ressemble à la vie humaine” (“Avant-propos,” 16). 33 Edgar Evertson Saltus, Balzac, reprint of 1884 edition (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 47. 34 Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 300.

Notes to pages 185–90

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35 Melville, Correspondence, 185–86. 36 Melville, Correspondence, 186. 37 Melville, Correspondence, 193. 38 Balzac: “Fleur née sur le bord d’un gouffre, elle devait y tomber inconnue avec ses couleurs et ses parfums inconnus. Comme beaucoup de gens incompris, n’avait-il pas souvent voulu se plonger avec orgueil dans le néant pour y perdre les secrets de sa vie!” (Livre mystique, Vol. I, 201). 39 Balzac: “Quoique doué déjà des qualités qui distinguent les hommes supérieurs, il était encore enfant; quoique riche et habile aux abstractions, son cerveau se ressentait encore des délicieuses croyances qui flottent autour de toutes les jeunesses. Cette conception touchait aux fruits mûrs de son génie par quelques points et par d’autres aux petitesses du germe” (Livre mystique, Vol. I, 96). 40 Besser, Concept of Genius, 128. 41 Balzac: “Mon cher monsieur, repliqua le vieillard après m’avoir attentivement écouté, votre raisonnement et sans doute fort logique ; mais je ne comprends pas comment Louis s’est affaibli par trop de force.” (Livre mystique, Vol. I, 181). 42 Melville, Pierre, 280. 43 George Frederic Parsons, “Introduction,” Honoré de Balzac, The Magic Skin, trans. Katherine Wormeley (Boston: Roberts Publishers, 1888), xxxvii. 44 Melville, Pierre, 50. 45 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1961. 46 Balzac: “Voyait le fait dans ses racines et dans ses productions, dans le passé qui l’avait engendré, dans le présent où il se manifestait, dans l’avenir où il se développait” (Livre mystique, Vol. I, 195). 47 Melville, Pierre, 313–14. 48 Parker calls the time of Pierre’s composition unequivocally “miasmal” for Melville, both psychologically and financially, and RobertsonLorant thinks that commercial success was the primary motivation behind the composition of Pierre. See Parker, Herman Melville, Vol. I, xxvii; Robertson-Lorant, Melville, 300. 49 Post emphasizes that Pierre “has suffered from misperceptions by twentieth-century readers. Considered a ‘flawed grandeur,’ the novel is commonly viewed as Melville’s failed attempt to attract female readers of the sentimental mode. Contemporary reviews of the period, however, indicate that Melville targeted a much wider audience” (Correspondent Colorings, 127). 50 Melville, Correspondence, 219. 51 John Haydock, “Melville & Balzac: Pierre’s French Model,” Leviathon: A Journal of Melville Studies 2,1 (March, 2000) 67–81.

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Notes to pages 190–202 52 Leon Howard and Hershel Parker, “Historical Note” to Melville, Pierre, 371. 53 Lawson, “Federated Fancies,” passim. 54 Balzac: “les Études philosophiques, Seconde Partie de l’ouvrage, où le moyen social de tous les effets se trouve démontré, où les ravages de la pensée sont peints, sentiment à sentiment, et dont le premier ouvrage, La Peau de chagrin, relie en quelque sorte les Études de mœurs aux Études philosophiques par l’anneau d’une fantaisie presque orientale où la Vie elle-même est peinte aux prises avec le Désir, principe de toute Passion” (“Avant-propos,” 25). 55 Robb, Balzac, 180. 56 Melville, Pierre, 25. 57 Melville, Pierre, 311. 58 Melville, Pierre, 311. 59 Melville, Pierre, 314. 60 Balzac: “L’homme tient aux facultés, l’ange tient à l’essence” (Livre mystique, Vol. I, 199). 61 Melville, Pierre, 310. 62 Melville, Pierre, 59. 63 Melville, Pierre, 156. 64 Balzac, Livre mystique, Vol. II, 99. 65 This linguistic borrowing can again indicate that Melville had had some early encounter in French with this novel, read Landon’s short story, or at the very least, perused pages in Hawthorne’s library at Lenox. 66 Melville, Pierre, 210. 67 Melville, Pierre, 209. 68 Balzac, Luck and Leather I, 17. 69 Balzac, Luck and Leather I, 47. 70 Melville, Pierre, 208. 71 Melville, Pierre, 294. 72 Balzac, Luck and Leather I, 39–40. 73 Melville, Pierre, 290–91. 74 Melville, Pierre, 284. 75 Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973), 359–60. 76 Melville, Correspondence, 227–28. 77 Widmer, Young America, 185. 78 “Historical Note VII” in Melville, Moby-Dick, 721. 79 Melville, Moby-Dick, 696. 80 Herman Melville, Pierre, (Parker) xli. 81 Balzac, Luck and Leather I, 214. 82 Eigner, The Metaphysical Novel, 200–207. 83 Richard Poirier, “The Monster in the Milk Bowl” London Review of Books 18,19 (3 October 1996) 19.

Notes to pages 202–13

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84 Poirier, 19. 85 “Monographie de la Presse Parisienne by M. De Balzac,” Foreign Quarterly Review 31 (Apr.–Jul., 1843), 182–87. 86 “Monographie,” 182.

Notes to Chapter 8 1 Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1984), 251. 2 Melville, Confidence-Man, 297–300. 3 Honoré de Balzac, The Woman with Two Husbands, trans. Joseph Price, The New-York Mirror 19 (Aug.–Sept., 1837). 4 Indeed, Hayes even suggests that Colonel Chabert “seems a more important source” than others put forward: “Both stories begin and are set largely in law offices, and both concern the plight of mysterious strangers who enter the offices and profoundly affect the lawyers they meet” (“Melville and Balzac,” 164). 5 J. Langley and H. G. Langley, “Henri de Balzac,” The United States Democratic Review 32.4 (Apr., 1853), 326–27. 6 Langley, “Henri de Balzac,” 326, 327. 7 Langley, “Henri de Balzac,” 329. This is a cry from an elegy by eighteenth-century poet l’Abbé Ménage that has nothing to do with Honoré de Balzac—though it became a cry of Jeunes-France and their supporters in the 1830s praise of Honoré. 8 Stein, Faust, 48. 9 Melville, Journals, 39. 10 The New English Bible: “Now we see only puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we shall see face to face. My knowledge is now partial; then it will be whole, like God’s knowledge of me” (The Gospel, 221). 11 John Haydock, “Melville and Balzac: The Man in Cream-Colors,” College Literature 35.1 (Winter, 2008), 58–81. 12 Melville, Confidence-Man, 278. 13 Melville, Confidence-Man, 280. 14 Balzac: “Il a donc existé, il existera donc de tout temps des Espèces Sociales comme il y a des Espèces Zoologiques” (“Avant-propos,” 11). 15 Melville, Confidence-Man, 70. 16 Melville, Confidence-Man, 70. 17 Balzac: “N’est-il pas véritablement plus difficile de faire concurrence à l’État-Civil avec Daphnis et Chloë, Roland, Amadis, Panurge, Don Quichotte, … Ivanhoë, Manfred, Mignon, que de mettre en ordre les faits à peu près les mêmes chez toutes les nations, de rechercher l’esprit de lois tombées en désuétude, de rédiger des théories qui égarent les

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Notes to pages 214–24 peuples, ou, comme certains métaphysiciens, d’expliquer ce qui est?” (“Avant-propos,” 13). 18 Melville, Confidence-Man, 70. Emphasis Melville’s. 19 Melville, Correspondence, 121. 20 Melville, Confidence-Man, 71. 21 Melville, Confidence-Man, 71. 22 Melville, Confidence-Man, 182. 23 Melville, Confidence-Man, 183. 24 Melville, Confidence-Man, 183. 25 Balzac: “comment plaire à la fois au poète, au philosophe et aux masses qui veulent la poésie et la philosophie sous de saisissantes images?” (“Avant-propos,” 13). 26 Melville, Confidence-Man, 238. 27 Balzac: “S’en tenant à cette reproduction rigoureuse, un écrivain pouvait devenir un peintre plus ou moins fidèle, plus ou moins heureux, patient ou courageux des types humains, le contour des drames de la vie intime, l’archéologue du mobilier social, le nomenclateur des professions, l’enregistreur du bien et du mal …” (“Avant-propos,” 15). 28 Melville, Confidence-Man, 238. 29 Balzac: “Quoique, pour ainsi dire, ébloui par la fécondité surprenante de Walter Scott, toujours semblable à lui-même et toujours original, je ne fus pas désespéré, car je trouvais la raison de ce talent dans l’infinie variété de la nature humaine” (“Avant-propos,” 14). 30 Melville, Confidence-Man, 238. 31 Balzac: “de peindre les deux ou trois mille figures saillantes d’une époque” (“Avant-propos,” 23). 32 Melville, Confidence-Man, 238. 33 Melville, Confidence-Man, 239. 34 Melville, Confidence-Man, 239. 35 Balzac: “Après avoir peint dans ces trois livres la vie sociale, il restait à montrer les existences d’exception qui résument les intérêts de plusiers ou de tous, qui sont en quelque sorte hors la loi commune …” (“Avantpropos,” 24–25). 36 Melville, Confidence-Man, 239. 37 Carlyle, On Heroes, 3–4. 38 Melville, Confidence-Man, 239. 39 Melville, Confidence-Man, 239. 40 Melville, Confidence-Man, 280. 41 Balzac: “Quand la barque, conduite par la miraculeuse adresse du pilote, arriva presque en vue d’Ostende, à cinquante pas du rivage, elle en fut repoussée par une convulsion de la tempête, et chavira soudain” (“Christ,” 24). 42 Melville, Confidence-Man, 15.

Notes to pages 225–34

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43 Melville, Confidence-Man, 8. 44 Hershel Parker, “Herman Melville’s The Isle of the Cross: A Survey and Chronology,” American Literature 62 (1990), 1–16. 45 Balzac: “La barque qui servait à passer les voyageurs de l’île de Cadzant à Ostende allait quitter le rivage … En ce moment, un homme apparut à quelques pas de la jetée; le pilote, qui ne l’avait entendu ni venir, ni marcher, fut assez surpris de le voir. Ce voyageur semblait s’être levé de terre tout à coup, comme un paysan qui se serait couché dans un champ en attendant l’heure du départ et que la trompette aurait réveillé” (“Christ,” 7–8). 46 Melville, Confidence-Man, 3. 47 Balzac: “À l’aspect d’un homme à tête nue, dont l’habit et le haut-dechausses en camelot brun, dont le rabat en toile de lin empesé n’avaient aucun ornement, qui ne tenait à la main ni toque ni chapeau, sans bourse ni épée à la ceinture, tous le prirent pour un bourgmestre sûr de son autorité, bourgmestre bon homme et doux comme quelques-uns de ces vieux Flamands dont la nature et le caractère ingénus nous ont été si bien conservés par les peintres du pays. Les pauvres passagers accueillirent alors l’inconnu par des démonstrations respectueuses qui excitèrent des railleries chuchotées entre les gens de l’arrière” (“Christ,” 9–10). 48 Melville, Confidence-Man, 3. 49 The list of eight characters given in Chapter three (13) is generally considered Melville’s revelation of the extent of the confidence man’s “masquerade,” although sometimes the narrator of the story is also included as a ninth manifestation. 50 Melville, Journals, 628. 51 Melville, Confidence-Man, 250. 52 Melville, Confidence-Man, 250. 53 Balzac, Father Goriot (Gould), 43. 54 Melville, Confidence-Man, 251. 55 Balzac: “Laissez-moi donc là votre sainte Vierge, dit le patron aux passagers. Empoignez-moi les écopes et videz-moi l’eau de la barque. Et vous autres, reprit-il en s’addressant aux matelots, ramez ferme! Nous avons un moment de répit, au nom du diable qui vous laisse en ce monde, soyons nous-mêmes notre providence.” (“Christ,” 19). 56 Melville, Confidence-Man, 240.

Notes to Chapter 9 1 Melville, Correspondence, 106. 2 Arthur Stedman, “Introduction,” Typee, A Real Romance of the South Seas (Boston: L. C. Page, 1892), xxi.

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Notes to pages 234–39 3

Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 2. 4 Sealts, Reading, 210. 5 Melville, Billy Budd, 2. 6 Dillingham, Circle, 127. 7 Dillingham, Circle, 134. 8 Honoré de Balzac: “Mais, le dernier de tous [fondateurs], Swedenborg, sera peut-être le Bouddha du Nord” (Louis Lambert (standard edition), La Comédie humaine, Tome XXVI (Paris: France Loisirs, 1987), 98). 9 Melville, Confidence-Man, 198. 10 Melville, Journals, 4. 11 After cultural encounters with Japan on such an intense level, information in the form of scholarship and awareness increased. Zen is the predominant form of Buddhism in Japan. In the time of Melville and Balzac, the popular writings of Swedenborg carried many of the correspondences. Recent studies clarify this, such as D. T. Suzuki, Swedenborg: Buddha of the North (West Chester: Swedenborg Foundation, 1996) and Devin Zuber, “The Buddha of the North: Swedenborg and Transpacific Zen” Religion and the Arts 14 (2010) 1–33. The ofttried phrase “Buddha of the North” comes initially from Balzac’s Louis Lambert. 12 See Roger-Pol Droit, Le Culte du néant: les philosophes et le Bouddha (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997). 13 Kathryn Carol Krauss, “Melville’s Middle Way,” Dissertation Abstracts 54.8 (Feb., 1994), 3031-A. 14 Dillingham, Circle, 116. 15 Melville, Correspondence, 225. 16 Melville, Journals, 628. 17 Melville, Journals, 628. 18 Parker, Herman Melville, Vol. II, 301. 19 Melville, Journals, 628–29. 20 Melville: To have known him, to have loved him After loneness long; And then to be estranged in life, And neither in the wrong; And now for death to set his seal– Ease me, a little ease, my song!

By wintry hills his hermit-mound The sheeted snow-drifts drape, And houseless there the snow-bird flits Beneath the fir-trees’ crape: Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine

Notes to pages 240–45

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That hid the shyest grape. (“Monody,” Timolean, Etc. (New York: Claxton Press, 1891), 34). 21 Sealts, Reading, 183. 22 Melville: “The great beauty in such a mind is but the product of its strength. What, to all readers, can be more charming than the piece entitled ‘Monsieur du Miroir’; and to a reader at all capable of fully fathoming it, what, at the same time, can possess more mystical depth of meaning?—Yes, there he sits, and looks at me,—this ‘shape of mystery,’ this ‘identical Monsieur du Miroir.’—‘Methinks I should tremble now, were his wizard power of gliding through all impediments in search of me, to place him suddenly before my eyes’” (“Hawthorne and His Mosses,” 242–43). 23 Herman Melville, Clarel, A Poem and Pilgrimage in The Holy Land (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 298. 24 Stan Goldman, Melville’s Protest Theism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 164ff. 25 Rogin and others find in the plot of Timoleon obvious borrowings from Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse, which Wormeley translated as The Two Brothers. There is much evidence that Melville was in fact reading this romance concurrently with writing his poem (Sealts, Reading, 130, etc.). 26 Herman Melville, Poems (London: Constable and Company, 1924), 270. 27 Sealts, Reading, 131. 28 Parker, Herman Melville, Vol. II, 905. Melville’s daughter set the requirement that whoever would inherit the Balzac volumes, even if they were all in English, would have to prove being able to read Balzac in the original French first, which she had done. Ultimately she passed them to her niece, who passed them to the NYPL. 29 Sealts, Reading, 15–16. 30 “Balzac in Undress,” Dublin University Magazine, a Literary and Political Journal 67 (1866), 604–17. 31 “Balzac at Home,” Saint Pauls: A Monthly Magazine, ed. Anthony Trollope, 2 (1868), 418–31. 32 Charles Olson, The Melville Project, University of Connecticut Libraries, cards 162–3. 33 Honoré de Balzac, The Correspondence of Honoré de Balzac, With a Memoir by his Sister, Vol. 1. tr. C. Lamb Kennedy, (London: Bentley, 1878), 370; Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 103. 34 Honoré de Balzac, The Cat and Battledore and Other Tales, 3 vols. trans. Phillip Kent (Chicago: Belfords, Clarke & Company, 1879). The identical translation was published in England under the same title that year in also three volumes by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington. However, the three-volume text there includes as preface a

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Notes to pages 245–51 translation of the “Avant-propos” to the Comédie humaine. However, since the Arundel text owned by Melville has the same pagination as the Chicago edition, and since Olson, Cowen and Sealts only record a single volume in Melville’s library, the “Avant-propos” was not there. 35 W. O’G., Good Literature. A Weekly Review of American and Foreign Publications 3.75 (Jun. 17, 1882), 233. The article states: “Some of Balzac’s stories have been translated into English and published in New York recently. I have a book with the following title: “The Shorter Stories and Tales of Honoré de Balzac, translated into English by Philip Kent, B.A. New York: The Arundel Print.” The book contains the following stories: The Cat and Battledore (“La Maison du chat qui pelote”); The Vendetta (La Vendetta); The Purse (La Bourse); The Ball at Sceaux (Le Bal de Sceaux); A Double Family (Une Double Famille). This is the same table of contents Melville wrote in pencil in his volume, though he had them somewhat out of order (Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 149). See also Olson below, card 162. 36 Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 100–118 (73 reproduced pages). 37 Sealts, Reading, 224. 38 Walker, Comédie Humaine, 24. 39 Sealts, Reading, 210. 40 Edgar Edward Saltus, Balzac (Boston: Hougton Mifflin, 1884), 47. 41 William Wilson, “Balzac and his English Critics,” The Author (London: Watt, 1891), 241. 42 George Frederic Parsons, “Honoré de Balzac,” The Atlantic Monthly 57.334 (Jun., 1886), 843. 43 The transliteration of Séraphîta into English conventionally omits the “î” and uses the common “i” instead, probably because of the unfamiliarity of “î” in the English type case. When I use the title or name without “î” or, also at times without “é,” the reference is to an English rendition of the narrative. 44 Balzac, Correspondence, 357, 388; Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 102–3. 45 Fred Holland Day, “Balzac’s Burial [Special Correspondence of the Transcript],” Boston Evening Transcript 6 (Sept., 1890), 10. 46 Sealts, Reading, 131. 47 Although records are difficult to uncover, the translations themselves seem to suggest that Ms. Wormeley was a theosophist or heavily edited by one. This bias is one reason the Saintsbury and not the Wormeley translations have been preferred for many years in English. There are numerous examples of how this bias operates throughout her version of the Comédie humaine; for example, in Séraphîta the road to heaven (Le chemin pour aller au ciel) is translated as “the Path” as in good contemporary theosophical discourse, even to the capital “P.” Another example is the translation of the French destination as “destiny” rather than “in the direction of ” or even “destination.” The Saintsbury editions correct

Notes to pages 257–58

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such things. For confirmation see Dillingham, Circle, 49. We cannot infer that Melville preferred this sort of rendition (or even needed it), but it was all that was available to his family, who purchased several volumes for him as gifts. 48 Donations made to the New York Public Library and inventories by Sealts, Bercaw, Cowen, and the Melville’s Marginalia database make this conclusion highly probable. 49 Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 729. Walker, Comédie Humaine and Its Author, 28–29. 50 Sealts, Reading, 152. 51 Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 729. Walker, Comédie Humaine and Its Author, 30. 52 Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 147; Balzac, Seraphita (Wormeley), 277. 53 Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, lxxxvi. 54 Honoré de Balzac, “Preface,” Père Goriot, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1885), v. 55 Balzac: “on trouve, dis-je, les rudiments de la belle loi du soi pour soi sur laquelle repose l’unité de composition” (“Avant-propos,” 10). 56 Balzac: “tandis que dans la Société la femme ne se trouve pas toujours être la femelle du mâle. Il peut y avoir deux êtres parfaitement dissemblables dans un ménage. La femme d’un marchand est quelquefois digne d’être celle d’un prince, et souvent celle d’un prince ne vaut pas celle d’un artiste” (“Avant-Propos,” 11). 57 Balzac: “En lisant attentivement le tableau de la Société, moulée, pour ainsi dire, sur le vif avec tout son bien et tout son mal, il en résulte cet enseignement que si la pensée, ou la passion, qui comprend la pensée et le sentiment, est l’élément social, elle en est aussi l’élément destructeur” (“Avant-propos,” 16). 58 Balzac: “L’Élection, étendue à tout, nous donne le gouvernement par les masses, le seul qui ne soit point responsable, et où la tyrannie est sans bornes, car elle s’appelle la loi” (“Avant-propos,” 17). 59 Balzac: “D’ailleurs, l’auteur qui ne sait pas se résoudre à essuyer le feu de la critique ne doit pas plus se mettre à écrire qu’un voyageur ne doit se mettre en route en comptant sur un ciel toujours serein” (“Avantpropos,” 19). 60 Balzac: “Si, par des faits incontestables, la pensée est rangée un jour parmi les fluides qui ne se révèlent que par leurs effets et dont la substance échappe à nos sens même agrandis par tant de moyens mécaniques, il en sera de ceci comme de la sphéricité de la terre observée par Christophe Colomb, comme de sa rotation démontrée par Galilée. Notre avenir restera le même” (“Avant-propos,” 22).

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Notes to pages 259–67

Notes to Chapter 10 1

Hershel Parker, Reading Billy Budd (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990) 174. 2 Melville, Billy Budd, 271–73. 3 Balzac: “Séraphita, la doctrine en action du Bouddha chrétien,” (“Avant-propos,” 21). 4 Melville, Billy Budd, 94. 5 Washington, Peter, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America (New York: Shocken Books, 1995), 95f. 6 Honoré de Balzac, The Correspondence of Honoré de Balzac, Vol. II, trans. C. Lamb Kenney (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1878), 2. 7 Balzac, Livre mystique, Vol. II, 221. 8 Parsons, “Honoré de Balzac,” 843. 9 Balzac, Seraphita (Wormeley), 183–84; Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 147. 10 Balzac, Seraphita (Wormeley), 182–83; Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 147. 11 Balzac: “les philosophes devront regretter les frondaisons atteintes par la gelée dans le bourgeon; dont ils devront pleurer les fleurs écloses peut-être, en des régions plus élevées que ne le sont les plus hauts lieux de la terre.” (Livre mystique, Vol. I, 112–13). 12 In the opening incident of the Balzac narrative, Seraphitus and Minna are climbing and skiing on the highest peak in Norway, one covered heavily and thoroughly with frozen snow, when they happen across a sheltered, green meadow. It is there he finds a flower amid the cold, white wasteland that he wishes to make a reminder of illumination for his companion in her spiritual journey. The freshly bloomed androgynous bud, transformed into a celestial flower shaped like a star, becomes the primary image of Balzac’s Seraphita. It is a “hybrid” plant, suggesting that some element of divine intention has been involved in its mutation, even if that “star” of consciousness comes from within itself. 13 Balzac, Seraphita (Wormeley), 16. 14 Parsons, Seraphita (Wormeley), lxvii; Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 147. 15 Parsons, Seraphita (Wormeley), viii. 16 Arthur Schopenhauer, Religion: A Dialogue, and other Essays, trans. T. B. Saunders (London: Sonnenschein, 1890), 90–91. Melville checked this passage, a symbol marking a second level of importance after marginal lines (Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 315). The sentiment expressed by Schopenhauer is strikingly similar to Balzac’s distinction between the two states of Genius as we have delineated them.

Notes to pages 268–74

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17 Dillingham, Circle, 58. 18 Sealts, Reading, 131. 19 Sealts, Reading, 130. 20 Sealts, Reading, 153–54. 21 Sealts, Reading, 130. 22 Parsons, Seraphita (Wormeley), xxii. 23 See essays in Melville’s Billy Budd, ed. F. Barron Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948); R. K. Gupta, “Billy Budd and Schopenhauer,” Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch (1992) 73, 91–97. See also several others listed in Bercaw, Melville’s Sources, 115–16. The fullest coverage of this subject is found in Dillingham’s Circle. 24 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (Clinton: Falcon Wing’s Press, 1958), 637. 25 George Frederic Parsons, “Introduction” to Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert, trans. Katherine Prescott Wormeley (Boston: Roberts, 1887, 1896), cxliv. 26 Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 308–34. 27 Schopenhauer, Will, 631. 28 Schopenhauer, Will, 504, 604. 29 Schopenhauer, Will, 226; Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 330. 30 Walter Sutton, “Melville and the Great God Budd,” Prairie Schooner 34 (Summer, 1960), 128–33. For a careful interpretation of how Melville used Buddhistic ideas (although seen somewhat differently than from our point of view) see Krauss, “Melville’s Middle Way.” A common thread through Schopenhauer and Buddhism is also explored in Olive L. Fite, “Billy Budd, Claggart, and Schopenhauer,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 23 (Dec., 1968), 336–43. 31 “Balzac’s Way of Working, Paris Dispatch to the Pall Mall Gazette.” The New York Times XXI, 9579 (May 21, 1882) 2. 32 Melville, Billy Budd, 8. 33 Melville, Billy Budd, 88. 34 Melville, Billy Budd, 48. 35 Melville, Billy Budd, e.g. 50. 36 Melville, Billy Budd, 27, 28. 37 New English Bible, “The Gospel,” 7. 38 Melville, Billy Budd, 68. 39 Melville, Billy Budd, 101. 40 Melville, Billy Budd, 379. 41 Parsons, Seraphita (Wormeley), viii. 42 Melville, Billy Budd, 51. 43 Melville, Billy Budd, 120–21. 44 Balzac, Seraphita (Wormeley), 20. 45 Balzac, Seraphita (Wormeley), 74. 46 Melville, Journals, 4.

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Notes to pages 275–81 47 Melville, Journals, 112. 48 Melville, Billy Budd, 74. 49 Melville, Billy Budd, 75. 50 Melville, Billy Budd, 80. 51 Melville, Billy Budd, 76. 52 Melville, Billy Budd, 88. 53 Parsons, Seraphita (Wormeley), lxxvii. 54 Melville, Billy Budd, 99. 55 Melville, Billy Budd, 62. 56 Melville, Billy Budd, 63. 57 Melville, Billy Budd, 61. 58 Balzac, Seraphita (Wormeley), 176. 59 Melville, Billy Budd, 129. 60 Melville, Billy Budd, 101. 61 There is a Gnostic story that Melville probably knew praising Judas as the most loving of Jesus’s disciples, because he took the necessary role of betrayer that brought the Christ to an innocent but redemptive death. Vere helps the inner “William” Budd to move forward in karmic elevation. Because of the need to perform the fated sacrificial drama of execution in history, he who loved Jesus most took the responsibility to betray Him. 62 Melville, Billy Budd, 129. 63 Balzac, Seraphita (Wormeley), 176. 64 Melville, Billy Budd, 266. 65 Melville, Billy Budd, 412. 66 Melville, Billy Budd, 124. 67 Melville, Billy Budd, 125. 68 Melville, Billy Budd, 44, 51, 71, 77. 69 Melville, Billy Budd, 48, 51, 68, 88, 99. 70 Melville, Billy Budd, 51. 71 Melville, Billy Budd, 127. 72 Borel: “Notre héroïne serait à peu près incompréhensible si ne venait l’éclairer à nos yeux sa position sur l’échelle théosophique des êtres. Comme le veut la doctrine, l’homme déchu aspire à sa régénération, c’est-à-dire au retour à la pureté adamique, état proprement divin. Il y parvient, non sans peine ni efforts, au prix d’une série de vies d’épreuves, impliquant une métempsychose qui n’est d’ailleurs pas nettement affirmée dans les textes et reste enveloppée de l’occulte indispensable” (Séraphîta et le mysticisme Balzacien (Paris: Librairies José Corti, 1967), 222). 73 Balzac, Louis Lambert (Wormeley), 58. 74 Balzac: “—Le Ciel, me disait-il, serait après tout la survie de nos facultés perfectionnées, et l’Enfer le néant où retombent les facultés

Notes to pages 281–87

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imparfaites” (Louis Lambert, La Comédie humaine Tome XXVI (Paris: France Loisirs, 1987, 61). 75 Balzac, Seraphita (Wormeley), 186. 76 Balzac, Seraphita (Wormeley), 184; Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 147. 77 Melville, Billy Budd, 123. 78 Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah (New York: Ibis Books, 1979), 265. 79 Parsons Seraphita (Wormeley), xiii. 80 J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 2nd ed. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1983), 293. Schopenhauer offers another clarification of Billy’s Balzacian “change of state”: “But the Buddhists with complete frankness describe the matter only negatively as Nirvana, which is the negation of this world or of Samsara. If Nirvana is defined as nothing, this means only that Samsara contains no single element that could serve to define or construct Nirvana” (Schopenhauer, Will, 608). Nirvana, then, is not a void, but no-thing in relation to this material existence—something totally “other” than our reality. Death by annihilation is also akin to the understanding of Nirvana, since the concept is also used in the sense of a return to the original purity of the Buddha-nature (comparable, perhaps, to “prelapsarian Adam”) after the dissolution of the physical body. That is, equal to the perfect freedom of the unconditioned state. In this context, Billy Budd is truly a son of God as his designation of peacemaker implies. Parsons spends several pages in the Introduction to Louis Lambert discussing Nirvana and its place in the cosmic scheme used by Balzac; Melville had every opportunity to read it or hear it read by members of his household. See Parsons, Louis Lambert (Wormeley), lxxv–lxxviii. 81 Melville, Billy Budd, 123. 82 Balzac, Seraphita (Wormeley), 182. 83 Melville, Billy Budd, 92. 84 Melville, Billy Budd, 53. 85 Melville, Billy Budd, 53. 86 Balzac, Seraphita (Wormeley), 177–78; Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 147. 87 Dillingham, Circle, 128.

Index Abstractive, Abstraction, sphère de l’Abstractivité (Balzac) 81, 86, 88, 89–90, 92 Balzac 158 Hawthorne characters 94–96, 104 Melville characters 158–62, 187, 193–94, 198, 218, 223–24, 276–77, 285, 288 superior Genius 90–92 Adler, George J. 14–15, 44, 46, 57, 113, 139, 164, 219, 235, 267–68, 274 Allegories of the Heart (Hawthorne) 63 American exceptionalism 7, 115, 156 Angelhood see Specialism Arcturus (ed. Duyckinck) 116 Aubépine, M. de l’ (Hawthorne pseudonym) 69–71, 128 “Avant-propos,” “Introduction to La Comédie humaine”) (Balzac) 62–63, 75–80, 121, 139, 153, 167, 191, 207, 211, 214, 216, 218, 220, 237, 285, 286 see also Melville, Herman Balzac, Honoré de 1–7, 9, 41, 46 architectural details 105, 167 Buddhism 5, 77, 235–37, 260, 266

characters 78, 87–90, 151, 159–63, 187–88, 193, 208 La Comédie humaine 34, 79 compositional technique 84, 97, 111, 142, 146, 149, 171 death and funeral 132–35 determinism (méchanisme du monde) 85, 172 English criticism of 25, 32, 44, 51–55, 74–75, 77 Études philosophiques 59, 73, 78–79, 83 Genius 90–93, 153–54, 156 influence on English writers 21, 22, 24, 27, 58, 111 interior man (l’homme interior) 81–84 Jeunes-France 29, 121 ladder of conscience and consciousness 86 as literary diver 131, 174, 183 in literary networks 10, 13, 16, 25, 42–43, 107, 112, 141 in Melville’s library 33, 35–36, 39 mesmerism 99–101 moral blackness 54, 64, 96, 125, 128, 137 physiognomy 97–99, 102, 147 popularity 30, 32, 33, 42, 45, 59 posthumous reputation 136, 141, 174

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realism 26, 60–62, 68, 73, 78, 148 religion 83, 261 sexuality 67, 103 Romanticism 85 theory of will 87, 151 on thought as dissolvent 103, 184, 187, 247 translations into English 18, 21, 22, 27, 34, 46–51, 55, 242–45 see individual works “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (Melville) 208 “Benito Cereno” (Melville) 30 Billy Budd, Sailor, An Inside Narrative (Melville) 4, 32, 253, 258 Buddhism 5, 233, 266, 270 characters 220, 239, 248, 264, 265, 269, 271, 276, 277, 283, 285 composition of 36, 155, 234, 255, 259, 262, 268, 271, 273 death of Billy 277, 288 Seraphita (Balzac/Wormeley) 241, 255, 261, 267, 272, 274, 283, 284 transcendental aspects 254, 259–60, 269, 287 “The Birth-mark” (Hawthorne) 93, 128, 285 La Peau de chagrin (Balzac) 64, 66 blackness (moral) 13, 46, 70 Balzac 129, 149, 13, 79 Hawthorne 125–29, 136 Melville 180, 183 The Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne) 64, 67, 101–04, 138, 150, 178, 180 Bourget, Paul Charles Joseph 60, 84 Le Bouddha chrétien see Specialism, Specialist Bridge, Horatio 117 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 27–28, 66 Browning, Robert 27

“Buddha” (Melville) 242 Buddhism 236, 241, 260 Zen 236 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George 13, 25, 208 Zanoni 190 Butler, Mrs. F. A. see Kemble, Fanny Carlyle, Thomas 13, 52, 112–14, 115–16, 150, 164 Heroes and Hero-Worship 120, 123, 140, 219 Sartor Resartus 112 Cecil Dreeme (Theodore Winthrop) 67, 103 Clarel, A Poem and Pilgrimage in The Holy Land (Melville) 237, 240–42, 288 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 12, 15 La Comédie humaine (Balzac) 1, 16, 25, 27, 33–34, 45, 54, 59, 62–64, 68, 71, 72, 73, 75, 78–80, 84, 90, 96, 97, 100, 103, 111, 121, 139, 140–43, 167, 177, 180, 191, 203, 205–06, 215, 243, 245, 248 see also The Comedy of Human Life, The Human Comedy The Comedy of Human Life (Balzac) tr. Katherine Wormeley 35, 255 see also The Human Comedy, La Comédie humaine concentration scheme (of Balzacian characters) 87, 89, 272 see also le schème de la concentration The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (Melville) 5, 23, 152, 205–12, 215, 219, 220, 231, 233, 235, 237, 238, 240, 256, 258, 267, 282, 286 “Jésus-Christ en Flandre” (Balzac) 221–28 Providence 228–32

Index contradiction of antagonistic essences (of Balzacian characters) 87, 94, 160 see also contradiction des essences antagonistes Correspondance de H. de Balzac, 1819–1850 244–45 The Correspondence of Honoré de Balzac [English] 134, 244, 246, 248, 250 La Cousine Bette (Balzac) 48, 63, 93, 146 Croker, John W. 24–25, 45–46, 73 Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. 108 Dante Alighieri 80, 81, 130 Dickens, Charles 13, 25 “Le Dragon Rouge” (English parody of Balzac’s “Jésus-Christ en Flandre”) 22, 211 Duyckinck, Edward 77 Duyckinck, Evert A. 15, 28–29, 53, 60, 68, 103, 112, 115–19, 122, 128–29, 135, 141, 173, 176, 200, 202, 203, 208, 212, 215, 237, 238 Droll Stories, Contes Drolatiques (Balzac) 42, 50 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) 26, 74 “L’Elixir de longue vie” (Balzac) 64, 79 elixir of life texts (Hawthorne) 64 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 12, 14, 29, 43, 46, 59, 80, 112, 236 Melville’s opinion of 3, 81, 113, 114, 122–23, 129–30, 132, 140, 150, 203, 207, 235, 238 “L’Enfant maudit” (Balzac) and Hawthorne’s “The Gentle Boy” 64 esoteric discourse (Argotique) 6, 112, 137, 286 “Ethan Brand” (Hawthorne) 103, 151, 186–87 Balzac’s Melmoth réconcilié 64

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Father Goriot; or, Scenes of Life in Paris (Balzac) tr. Edward S. Gould 50–51, 131, 152–53, 157, 168, 191 compared to Moby-Dick 158–61 see also Le Père Goriot Fidèle (in The Confidence-Man) 205 and 213 compared to “La Dragon Rouge” and “Jésus-Christ en Flandre” (Balzac) 224–26 Field, David Dudley 115 Fields, James T. 103, 110 Flaubert, Gustave 60, 68, 141 Foreign Quarterly Review 44, 53, 74, 203 Fuller, Margaret 13, 20, 24, 46, 52–55, 59, 70, 77, 79, 87, 148, 174 “French Novelists of the Day” 28, 128, 137 Hawthorne friendship 71–72, 80 review of Typee (Melville) 29, 47 Young America 29 Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais) 6, 45, 127, 182 Gautier, Théophile and Jeunes-France 29 “The Gentle Boy” (Hawthorne) and Balzac’s “L’Enfant maudit” 64 “The Girl with the Golden Eyes,” “La Fille aux yeux d’or” (Balzac) 42 Margaret Fuller 59 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 20, 96, 113, 164 Greylock, Mt. and outing to 114–18 Hasard (hazard) 62, 132, 208, 220 “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (Melville) 5, 30, 118–35, 136 Hawthorne, Julian 72, 105, 118, 238, 239

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Melville’s Intervisionary Network

Hawthorne, Nathaniel 2, 5, 26, 28, 67, 73, 85, 107, 123, 137, 191, 280 Balzacian traits 5, 25, 28, 57–60, 62–72, 73, 74–75, 77, 87, 90, 93–97, 101, 102–05, 163, 167, 243, 168, 206, 209, 220, 227, 255 The Democratic Review 20, 28, 61, 64, 69, 111, 115–16, 128, 178 Études philosophiques 79, 137, 258, 267 French sensibilities 57 Margaret Fuller 80 Melville (collaboration with) 110–12, 114–35, 137, 138–44, 145–51, 154, 157, 171, 173, 176–86, 192, 202, 205, 207, 211, 216, 228, 238, 284–85 “ontological heroics” 91, 190 Romanticism 57 see individual works Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody (Mrs. Nathaniel) 50, 63, 103, 138 physiognomic reader 123 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 14, 164, 235–36, 242 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 115–16 The House of the Seven Gables, (Hawthorne) 63, 87, 95, 101–03, 105, 138, 164, 167, 178, 180, 182, 186 Melville’s opinion of 184–85 Howells, William Dean 60, 68, 79, 141, 148 Hugo, Victor 25, 30 Balzac’s eulogy 133–34, 136, 249 The Human Comedy (Dent/Saintsbury) 251 Les Iles Marquises 41, 43 Illusions perdues (Balzac) 146, 190 “The Intelligence Office” (Hawthorne) 65

Instinct, Instinctive, sphère de l’Instinctivité 77, 80–83, 86, 88–92, 158, 184, 223, 268 character type 90, 91 Hawthorne characters 94–96, 104 inferior Genius 91 Melville characters 159–60, 162, 163, 193, 194, 218, 222, 273, 275 “Introduction” to La Comédie humaine see “Avant-propos” James, Henry, Jr. 60, 68, 79, 97 “Jésus-Christ en Flandre” (Balzac) 21, 207 history of 227 The Confidence-Man (Melville) 209–12, 221, 222, 224, 225, 231 “Le Dragon Rouge” 22 “A Select Party” (Hawthorne) 64 Les Jeunes-France 2, 28, 29, 113,119, 190, 192, 201, 209 Karma 86, 268 Kemble, Frances Anne (Mrs. Butler) 50, 207 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth 3, 26, 27, 190 The Book of Beauty 22 Ethel Churchill, or The Two Brides and Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées (Balzac) 22 see also “The Talisman” Lavater, Johann Kaspar 98, 100, 112, 139, 163–64 Lewes, George Henry 74–75, 78, 88, 91, 148 The Literary World (ed. Duyckinck) 115, 117, 135, 199, 201 Le Livre mystique (Balzac) 80

Index see also Séraphîta and Louis Lambert Lost Illusions 51, 190 see also Illusions perdues Louis Lambert (Balzac) 48, 51, 78, 79, 80, 82, 88, 99, 138, 186–88, 191, 193, 218, 234, 253, 258, 263 Louis Lambert (Balzac) tr. Katherine Prescott Wormeley 253, 255, 265, 266, 269, 280 Luck and Leather (Balzac) tr. Anonymous 18, 50, 152, 190–95, 201 see also La Peau de chagrin, The Magic Skin, The skin of Shagreen The Magic Skin, (Balzac) tr. Katherine Wormeley 68 see also La Peau de chagrin, Luck and Leather, The Skin of Shagreen La Maison Nuncigen (Balzac) 146 Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (Melville) 14, 30, 45, 108, 109, 110, 112, 116, 127, 132, 139, 148, 173, 198, 232, 236, 267 Chasles, Philarète 45 Mathews, Cornelius 28, 29, 115, 116 Maugham, Somerset and le schème de concentration 97 Le Médicin de campagne (Balzac) 77 Melmoth réconcilié (Balzac) 50, 105, 209, 219 Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand” 64, 93, 103–04 see also Melmoth Reconciled, Melmoth Redeemed Melmoth Reconciled (Balzac) tr. Julian Hawthorne 105 Melmoth Redeemed (Balzac) tr. anonymous 50 Melvill, Priscilla 42 Melvill, Pierre 41 Melvill, Robert 111

329

Melville, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Knapp Shaw (Mrs. Melville) 247 Melville, Herman 1–7, 26, 35, 36, 46, 111, 142, 205 American literature 9, 116, 120, 122, 171 “Avant-propos” (Balzac) 121, 207, 212–20, 255–58, 260, 262, 265 Balzac’s fiction (reading of ) 32, 33, 119, 121, 46–53, 53–55, 59, 107, 184, 205, 208–12 book sales 16, 18, 28, 35, 117, 121, 245 Buddhism 235–39 Carlyle, Thomas (reading of ) 112–14, 115, 116, 120 characterization in The ConfidenceMan 212–20 French language (fluency in) 39–46 friendship with Adler 14–15, 57 intellectual property 31 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (collaborating relationship with) 57, 60, 91, 105, 111, 115, 117, 119, 124, 126, 127–29, 136–38, 142–44, 145, 172, 173, 178–80, 182, 185, 237–39 Kant 14, 57, 112 last library 34–37, 233–35, 242–50, 251–55 literary diver 129–32, 183 moral measure of humanity 81, 103, 123, 125 “ontological heroics” 138–42, 192, 228–31 Pittsfield, Massachusetts (move to) 115, 132–36 poetry 239–42 realism 61, 72, 206 rhetorical conditions (networks) 9–11, 14, 19, 22, 25, 58, 96, 107, 109, 134, 156, 207

330

Melville’s Intervisionary Network

Romanticism 14, 57, 112 travel to/in Europe 14, 45 unity of composition 146 visible truth 123, 140, 142 Young America 20, 28–30, 111, 115, 116, 206 see individual works Mesmer, Anton 85 Mesmerism 142, 198, 266 Balzac 93, 99–101, 214 Hawthorne 96, 101–104 Melville 141 Methodology 33, 35, 75, 135, 217, 271 Mitford, Mary Russell 28, 66 Milton, John 127, 154, 155, 156, 218 Moby-Dick or The Whale (Melville) 1, 5, 16, 30, 170, 171 Ahab and Vautrin 150, 151–53, 153–57 architecture in 167–71 dedication to Hawthorne 145 development of 46, 55, 108, 109, 130, 143, 146–49, 163, 171 dialectical (triangular) character scheme (Balzac) le schème unitaire in Moby-Dick 158–63 Father Goriot as provocative 157 metempsychosis 166 physiognomy 164–66 Promethean power 170 a wicked book 154, 176 Mosses from an Old Manse (Hawthorne) 63, 115, 118, 120, 128 Motley, J. Lothrop “The Novels of Balzac” 52 Networks (technological and literary) 4, 5, 9–32, 37, 107, 110, 174 The New World (newspaper) 20, 50, 152 Nirvana 238, 242, 281, 282, 288

The Novelist Magazine 22 Nuku Hiva 43 O’Sullivan, John (publisher) 20, 71, 115, 116, 176, 178, 200, 208 Jeunes-France 28–29 manifest destiny 200 Young America 28 Peabody, Elizabeth 58, 209 Margaret Fuller (friendship with) 72 Peabody, Sophia (Mrs. Hawthorne) 58 see also Hawthorne, Sophia La Peau de chagrin (Balzac) 18, 21, 29, 49, 55, 64–65, 68, 79–80, 84, 110, 121, 152, 170, 190, 209, 266 Hawthorne’s use of 64, 65, 68, 79 source for Pierre (Melville) 152, 190, 190–92, 195, 201, 202 specialism 84 see also The Wild Ass’s Skin, The Magic Skin, The Skin of Shagreen, Luck and Leather Le Père Goriot (Balzac) 32, 48, 54, 58, 70, 128, 130, 138, 153, 242, 255 The Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne) (similarities) 64 see also Moby-Dick (Melville) and Father Goriot (Balzac) Physiognomy 97, 100, 113, 164 Balzac 99 Hawthorne 102, 139, Melville 161, 163, 164, 165, 214, 275 Pierre: or The Ambiguities (Melville) 4, 5, 28, 33, 132, 180, 182, 186, 189, 190–95, 198, 202, 207, 208, 215, 267 abridged by Hershel Parker 202 Balzacian language 165, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188–89, 201, 247

Index development of 174–78, 181–83, 186, 189, 190, 199 Hawthorne (collaboration) 143, 145, 179, 180, 181 Luck and Leather 191–92 La Peau de chagrin 191–92 and Louis Lambert 186–88, 257 as sensational romance 190, 201, 216 l’unité de composition 187, 188, 192–98 writing of 198–201, 202–03 Poe, Edgar Allan 3, 50, 66, 69, 126, 181 “The Procession of Life” (Hawthorne) and Balzac’s thought as dissolvent 65 Les Proscrits (Balzac) 79, 80 Providence 19, 134, 162 “Jésus-Christ en Flandre” compared with The ConfidenceMan 210, 222, 225, 228, 229–32, 237 Hawthorne 238 Seraphita 263, 277 pseudonyms 251 Balzac 79 Hawthorne see Aubépine, M. de l’ Melville (A Virginian) 120, 200 Putnam’s Monthly Magazine 208, 210 Rabelais, Francois see Gargantua and Pantagruel “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (Hawthorne) 73, 75, 94, 128 Balzac’s La recherché de l’Absolu 64 Hawthorne’s self-identification with Balzac 69–72 Reading Rooms 17, 22, 26, 48, 235, 243, 244, 271 Galignani’s Reading Room (Paris) 26, 44 The Boston Athenaeum 25–26, 58

331

realism 21, 26, 149 American Realism 68, 73, 97, 137, 207 Balzacian 51, 60–62, 78, 97, 98, 221 Billy Budd 259, 278 The Confidence-Man 207, 220 Hawthorne and Melville 73, 111, 133, 135, 141, 148–49, 258 see also Schopenhauer, Swedenborg, Carlyle Récamier, Jeanne-Françoise Julie Adélaïde 40, 121 Redburn: His First Voyage (Melville) 32, 40, 41, 43, 107, 112, 116, 146, 148, 150, 166 autobiographical basis for 41 Hawthorne’s opinion 173 Melville’s comments on 145, 177, 198 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 77, 134 Saltus, Edgar Evertson 184, 185, 234, 247 Sand, George (Amantine-LucileAurore Dupin) 52, 72, 126 Sarrasine (Balzac) 42, 67 The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) 5, 16, 63, 73, 83, 87, 95, 103, 104, 107, 110, 117, 126, 154, 180, 216 Le schème de la concentration (Balzac) 87, 89, 94, 95, 97 see also l’unité de composition Le schème ascentionnel 85 Schiller, J. C. F. 88, 90, 112 identification 35, 90, 104, 123, 160, 191 Schopenhauer, Arthur 85, 235, 267–70, 271, 283, 286 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria 109 “A Select Party” (Hawthorne) 64, 120, 122 “Jésus-Christ en Flandre” (Balzac) (similarities to) 210, 227

332

Melville’s Intervisionary Network

Septimius Felton or, the Elixir of Life (Hawthorne) Balzac’s L’Élixir de longue vie (as source) 64, 79 see also elixir of life texts Seraphita/Séraphita (Balzac) in English 50, 51, 148, 253 tr. Katherine Prescott Wormeley 234, 248, 254, 255, 260, 262–68, 269, 270, 272, 273, 274, 276, 278, 279, 281, 282, 283, 285 see also Séraphîta, Le Livre mystique Séraphîta (Balzac) 5, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 86, 138, 167, 167, 191, 194, 215, 241, 260, 261, 262, 272, 280 see also Le Livre mystique Shakespeare, William 1, 112, 113, 118, 123, 152, 208, 209 The Skin of Shagreen (Balzac) 21, 65, 68, 69, 191, 195, 196 see also La Peau de chagrin Specialism, Specialist, sphère de la Spécialité (Balzac) 4, 80–94, 95, 96, 99, 100–01, 140, 142, 158, 167, 172, 194, 219, 236, 263, 265, 272, 276, 282, 283 Le Bouddha chrétien 5, 77, 235–37, 241, 258, 260, 266, 268–70, 272, 277, 288 characters 84, 86, 89, 91, 158, 188, 236 Hawthorne characters 95, 101 Melville characters 4, 140, 158, 188, 282 Swedenborg 86, 142 Visible Truth 142, 153, 172, 183, 189, 260, 270, 287–88 The Spectator (periodical) 21, 32 Staël, A. L. G., Mme. de 44, 63, 286 Corinne 215 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 60 Sue, Eugène 20, 21, 25, 52, 70, 72, 126, 152

Swedenborg, Emmanuel 15, 44, 98 correspondences 76, 274 Balzac’s realism from 81, 86, 100, 235, 270 Melville awareness of 112, 142, 164 synthetic unity (Balzac) 76, 256 see also l’unité de composition (tr. Wormeley) Taine, Hyppolyte 78, 255, 260 “The Talisman” 22 La Peau de chagrin (as source) 22 see also Landon, Letitia Elizabeth Tammany Hall (NY Democratic Party headquarters) 28 Tennyson, Alfred, first baron 183 Thackeray, William Makepeace 25, 208 Theosophy/Theosophical Society 247, 250, 251, 256, 258, 261, 262, 267, 269, 280, 287 Typee: A Real Romance of the South Seas (Melville) 28, 29, 31, 43, 53, 132, 133, 149, 152 Twain, Mark 17, 18, 60 Twice-Told Tales (Hawthorne) 61, 70 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 30 The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 20, 28, 30, 50, 61, 64, 69, 71, 111, 115, 116, 128, 178, 200, 208, 262 unity of composition, l’unité de composition (Balzac) 27, 75, 76, 80, 84, 87, 91, 112, 147, 163, 192, 171, 203, 212, 220, 221, 234, 255, 256, 258, 284, 285 unity of plan (Balzac) see l’unité de composition (tr. Bell) uniformity of structure (Balzac) see l’unité de composition (tr. Kent) Ursule Mirouët (Balzac) 99, 215

Index Vidocq, Eugène François 155, 275 “The Virtuoso’s Collection” (Hawthorne) 65 Visible Truth see Specialism, Specialist Ward, Samuel “Modern French Romance” 51 White-Jacket or the World in a Manof-War (Melville) 19, 30, 31, 42, 107–09, 111–12, 116, 130, 131–32, 145–50, 155, 157, 160, 166, 173, 177, 183, 198, 234, 241, 287 Whitman, Walt 262 Will as conscious force 4, 15, 58, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92,

333

95, 100, 151, 154, 155, 158, 162, 163, 170, 187, 197, 201, 210, 218, 219, 222, 228, 229, 232, 260, 261, 263, 266, 267, 269, 270, 275, 277, 283 Winchester, J. (publisher) 20, 50, 152, 153 Winthrop, Theodore, 67 Yankee Doodle 30 Young America 2, 20, 29, 30, 111, 112, 113, 116, 119, 122, 124, 128, 136, 141, 174, 176, 190, 200–03, 205, 206, 207, 208, 212, 220, 257 Zola, Emile 60, 68, 141