Socialistic rhapsodies and theosophical trash

James Clarke Welling's 1852 review of Lectures and Miscellanies by Henry James Sr. 

In Herman Melville's prime the Washington, DC National Intelligencer was an important and influential Whig newspaper that embraced conservative, pro-Union values up to and through the American Civil War. As literary editor of the National Intelligencer from 1850 to 1856, James Clarke Welling wrote the highly regarded column of book reviews titled "Notes on New Books." Welling's authorship of the regular "Notes on New Books" column was revealed in 1860 by owner-editor William W. Seaton in a formal statement of Welling's promotion to co-editor. Under the heading "Editorial Announcement," the full statement originally appeared in the National Intelligencer on Thursday, August 30, 1860. Frequently reprinted North and South, usually without Seaton's assurances of continuing loyalty to the Union and support of the United States "Constitution, which is the cement of the Union." Here below is the abridged version that appeared in the New York Evening Post on August 31, 1860.

New York Evening Post - August 31, 1860
via genealogybank.com

Successor to Mr. Gales in the National Intelligencer.

As the surviving editor of the National Intelligencer, I have to announce that Mr. James C. Welling will hereafter be associated with me in the editorial conduct of this journal. In making this announcement it is proper to state that Mr. Welling is no stranger to the columns of the Intelligencer, having been, in different capacities, connected with it for the last ten years, during the first five of which, after the retirement of the accomplished Edward William Johnston from the literary department of the paper, Mr. Welling had charge of it, and was the author of those "Notes on New Books," which, by the scholarship and ability evinced in their composition, would, of themselves, be a sufficient evidence of the qualifications he brings to the tasks of journalism. But it is just to add that during the last five years he has participated in all the duties incident to the editorship of this journal, and has thus served a noviciate quite long enough to give full proof of his vocation to the exacting career upon which he has entered. Enjoying during this period, in the fullest degree, the confidence of my late lamented colleague, Mr. Gales, he has equally, by his high moral and conscientious character, no less than by his rare attainments, merited my own; and I avail myself of his temporary absence from Washington to make this announcement to the patrons whom it is the honor of the Intelligencer to address. * *

WM. W. SEATON 

 -- New York Evening Post, August 31, 1860.

Initially, notices of new books during Welling's tenure as literary editor were borrowed with due credit from other newspapers. As best I can tell, Welling made his debut as author of the regular "Notes on New Books" column in the Daily National Intelligencer on June 24, 1851, with a cogent reality-check of Charles Kingsley's Yeast: A Problem. Kingsley, being a sort of Christian socialist,

"has vague notions that the constitution of English society is radically wrong, and that the laboring poor of town and country should be instructed in art, poetry, music, and science; but upon the means of attaining this desirable end he is profoundly silent. At one time he seems to hint at Chartism, now at Communism, now at Socialism, just as in his religion he is at first Materialist, then Pantheist, then Humanitarian."

Dismissing Yeast: A Problem as the fantasy of a well-meaning but hopelessly deluded social reformer, Welling concluded by resting on common sense:

"That the world, however, will ever be converted into a lazy Valhalla of social perfectionists, or that all mankind will ever be reduced to a gregarious equality, is a consummation that our modern new light gospellers will, it is imagined, never attain so long as the present laws of mind and matter shall remain in most contumacious disregard of their beautiful theories."

Welling (not William Allen Butler as Hugh W. Hetherington and later Melville scholars mistakenly decided) wrote the long and mostly favorable review of Moby-Dick that appeared in the Daily National Intelligencer on December 16, 1851. In April of the following year, Welling returned to the theme of his Yeast review, the woeful impracticability of Communism, exposing the social reforms urged by philosopher Henry James Sr (the future novelist's father) in his published Lectures and Miscellanies as "communistic and theosophic reveries." Welling's telling extracts from James's book and instructive remarks thereon are transcribed herein from the Washington, DC National Intelligencer of April 20, 1852; digital images with the original review may be found on genealogybank.com.

NOTES ON NEW BOOKS.

LECTURES AND MISCELLANIES. By Henry James. Redfield, New York, 1852.

Apothecaries, by wise enactment, are forbidden to vend any of the compositions of their retort, mortar, and pestle without affixing a label to each box and vial descriptive of their contents; and so too the bookmakers, it seems to us, should be required to utter their volumes with such titles as shall at least give one a suspicion of what they contain. If any son of Esculapius should retail the nux vomica or prussic acid under the names of "Vegetable Life Pills" or Universal Phœnix Bitters" he would justly incur the penalty of a criminal prosecution. Now, Mr. James, in issuing the work whose name stands at the head of our columns, has acted like the druggist who should dispense a specific nostrum under the general description of a "medicated mixture;" for who can tell from the title of his book whether it is intended to "minister to a mind diseased," by purging off certain errors of understanding, or whether, like a mental cordial, it aims merely to refresh the fancy and gratify the taste? We do not protest at all against the publication of these "Lectures and Miscellanies." We wish the press to be just as free for the dissemination of Mr. James's speculations as it is for the advertisement of "Watts's Mirific Nervous Antidote" or "Dalley's Pain Killer." We presume to say nothing in this connexion against either quacks in medicine or pretenders in literature. Mr. James assures us that society is at present established on a very unscientific basis, and so long as this "abnormal" state endures, it must needs be, we suppose, that charlatans and pseudo-philosophers impose on the credulity of the "great vulgar." We could wish, however, that Mr. James had selected such a title for his book as would have given purchasers an inkling of the socialistic rhapsodies and theosophical trash which were in store for them. And, still further, we think that the author has chosen an inopportune time for the final publication in printed form of the lectures composed and delivered by him a few years ago. Then they had the charm of public and engrossing interest, and floated upon the agitated surface of society like so many brilliant but insubstantial bubbles. The popular mind of Europe was at that time inflated by the leaven of socialism and demagogy, and it was the transmitted influence of these same elements that generated even on our own shores a fermentation of thought that occasionally broke out in just such gaseous eruptions as are discernible in the work before us. But at present the crudities of these ventose reformers and humanitarian philanthropists have been pretty generally left to the digestion of a few very bashful ladies, loud in the advocacy of "woman's rights," and to certain mendicant statesmen of Europe who have been recently illustrating among us, by a "modern instance," the "old saw" concerning beggars put on horseback. All such unripe speculations are now either too late or too early in the day--too late to ride upon the crest of the wave that has already broken on the shore, or too early to stem the receding tide which is now setting back into the sea. 

As to the merely literary execution of the volume under consideration, we are free to confess that it possesses considerable merit. Mr. James has at ready command a vocabulary of philosophical language that leaves no one in doubt respecting the author's opinions on the most recondite subjects which he undertakes to discuss. There is none of that groping after the light in a misty vacuity which seems to have been the attitude of certain writers on metaphysical subjects. Mr. James clearly eyes his mark and hits it in the white; he does not bandy words merely in the dazzling fence of a rhetorician, but speaks like one really in earnest, or endeavoring to seem so. Sometimes, it is true, we think he becomes the dupe of his own enchantments, and imagines, when he has tricked off an old idea in the livery of his peculiar dialect, that his brain has been safely delivered of a Minerva; the reader, on the contrary, bethinks himself of the mountain laboring with a mouse. We propose to give our readers, before indulging in further remark, a side view of the most salient features which stand out in these remarkable political and philosophical sketches. It has generally been our wont to cull a few excerpts from an author under consideration, in order to append them to the foot of our own disquisitions; but on the present occasion we prefer to give Mr. James the honor of a first hearing, reserving to ourselves the right of following with such animadversions as shall seem good to us in the premises. With the "New Theology" of our author it does not become us specially to concern ourselves; whether the "objective sphere of human existence" is external or internal to the subjective, and whether consequently the relation of God to man is external or internal, it is no part of our theology either to deny or affirm. Believing that such questions minister to strife and vain janglings rather than edification, we dismiss them with the simple query of honest Strepsiades in the play of Aristophanes: "How, my friend, being old, forgetful, and slow, shall we ever learn the hair-splittings of such nice words?"

Mr. James has so mixed up his politics with his religion that it becomes no easy task for us to eviscerate the former from the body of his lectures without bringing away some portions of the latter; but politics undoubtedly form the chief staple of the three opening lectures of the present volume, which are respectively entitled, "Democracy and its Issues," "Property as a Symbol," and "The Principle of Universality in Art." What our political philosopher's theory respecting the origin and ends of government actually is, will sufficiently appear from the following extracts:  

"Every Governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention. No one can doubt that, if human life had been perfect in the infancy of the race--that is to say, if just social relations had existed from the beginning--Government would never have been though of as a necessity of human society. It's existence is simply a confession of the immaturity of society."

"I look upon Democracy as heralding the moral perfection of man--as inaugurating the existence of perfectly just relations between man and man, and as consequently preparing the way for the reign of infinite Love. It supposes that men are capable of so adjusting their relations to each other as that they will need no police or external force to control them, but will spontaneously do the right thing, in all places and at all times." * *

"Because the moment society becomes perfect, the moment all legalized privilege ceases among its subjects, and every man becomes the equal of every other in the public care, that moment you make it the interest of the individual to cherish the good of the whole, because his own advantage is identified with it; and if you can make it the interest of man to be orderly, of course you need no machinery of police to ensure that result. It will take place of itself without any compulsion. The reason why evil exists among mankind is, that their outward life, their life as determined by institutions, does not fully according with their inward or essential life--the life they have in God."

"I am entirely persuaded that nothing but the persistent and ever-enlarging operation of the Democratic principle, or, what is the same thing, the destructive legislation now in progress, is requisite to inaugurate the Divine life on earth, to bring about that great prophetic period to which all history form the beginning has tended--that everlasting Sabbath or rest which is to close in and glorify the brief  but toilsome week of man's past experience."

"Criminality is the product exclusively of vicious legislation, of institutions which insist upon distributing the bounties of Providence unequally. The world waits for nothing else, in order to begin its eternal Sabbath, than the legislative recognition of human unity by the destruction of the last remnant of privilege." 

"In a true society, or fellowship, among men, envy would be impossible; because no arbitrary distinctions, no such thing as exclusive privilege, in which alone envy has its source, would exist. Why would not these things exist? Because a true society, a society scientifically organized, would confer no unequal property, no exclusive privilege, upon its subjects. That is to say, a true  society would guaranty to every man, woman, and child, for the whole term of his natural life, food, clothing, shelter, and the opportunities of an education adapted to his  tastes; leaving all the distinction he might achieve to himself, to his own genius, freely influencing the homage of his fellow-men. Where society observed this wisdom, all envy would at once disappear."

"Every one would be greatly happier if, being brought into this  world without his own consent, he might be permitted to live in it without the continual consent of somebody else. Each of us would be greatly happier if his relations to others were so scientifically adjusted as that every one would stand ready when he came into the world to endow him with cradles, and nurseries, and schools, and shoes, and coats, and breeches, and  breakfast, and supper, and lodging, and whatever else makes life comfortable, and thus leave him free to do only the special work which God empowers him to do."

"Inasmuch as moral distinctions--the distinctions of good and evil--exist only where hostile or divided interests exists among men, so of necessity the divine life which exacts a perfect unity of interests among its subjects, will at its coming utterly obliterate moral distinctions from the face of the earth. In other words, the perfect life is not moral, because it involves a harmony so complete among men as to be fatal to the existing differences of good and evil." "No man ever antagonizes his neighbor's interest, save with a view of promoting his own; and if, therefore, you release men from this temptation, by removing their existing social inequalities, you utterly vacate every shade of moral diversity among them."

"A state of society may exist, without the slightest prejudice to morality, in which, notwithstanding, each and all its members, or the public and private interests, May be so harmoniously related as to allow the utmost possible freedom to all the appetites and passions  of human nature. But I do not stop here. I am not content with merely saying that a state of society which puts man in harmony with his nature, or, in equivalent terms, ensures him the ample gratification of all his appetites and passions, may exist  without prejudice to the interests of morality. I claim that such a state of society is absolutely indispensable to those interests. I insist that such a state of society is the actual fulfilment of all morality; is the destined consummation of all law and prophecy; is, in fact, the necessary basis of God's kingdom on earth."

"We instinctively feel that society has no right to guaranty one man's nature ampler satisfaction than another's; that natural want is in every case the ample title to, and the only measure of, natural gratification; and that society's prime function therefore is, not to ordain inequalities in this regard, but utterly to destroy them as fast as they come to her notice. The diversity of human gifts has been ordaining these inequalities all along the course of history, or giving one man superior natural endowments to another. But society's business is not to legislate for one or few, but for all. She should, therefore, aim to reduce these inequalities wherever they have arisen, and ensure all the same material succor, the same exemption from outward want, which has been realized hitherto only by the few. The province of society lies wholly in providing for man's material development, in removing from that sphere every thing like organized injustice and inequality. The development of his genius and the care of his spiritual interests belong appropriately to God, who, I doubt not, would be found amply competent to the task, whenever society should consent to inaugurate Him."

Here we close our extracts, taken passim from these "Lectures and Miscellanies;" especially directing the notice of readers to the concluding paragraph, being Mr. James's polite and condescending certificate to the competency of the Deity.  

Our readers will not, of course, suppose that our attention has been attracted to these speculations by their intrinsic novelty, for it is not at all difficult to trace the paternity and pedigree of nearly every prominent idea embodied at second-hand by Mr. James in his communistic and theosophic reveries. Fichte, with his work on the "Destination of Man;" Sweedenborg, with his New Jerusalem revelations and seventh-heaven rhapsodies; Fourier, with his analogies and correspondence between man and nature; the "young school" of Hegelians, such as Ruge, and Feuerbach, and Ronge, with their humanitary visions of a social regeneration; Spinosa, with his philosophism respecting God and Creation; and even old Leibnitz, with his doctrine of the "pre-established harmony," are all clearly discernible in the composite and eclectic philosopher whose work we are considering--a work which shows the great advance of "humanitary ideas" in our modern philosophers over such "old fogies" as Aristotle with his Politics, Xenophon with his Economics, Plato with his ideal Republic and Laws, Justinian with his Commentaries, More with his Utopia, Fenelon with his celebrated romance; and even over Jean Jacques with his Social Contract, Robert Owen with his Harmonists, and Monsieur Cabet with his affectionate Icariens.

It is plain that the eyes of the American philosopher have been dazzled by the same splendid illusion which, like a mirage of the desert, has cheated so many sanguine students of historical science. The philosophical historians would convince us that the "unitary man" is constantly approximating towards the goal of human perfectability in the gradual progress marked by the evolutions of history. Mr. James arrives at the same conclusion by his "ineffaceable conviction of man's inward righteousness, and of the intimate alliance subsisting between God and the human soul," which only needs to have the social gyves and legislative fetters stricken off in order to install itself in the full fruition of consummate and supernal beatitude. The "new heavens and new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness," in the opinion of such a thinker or visionary, are only to be ushered in by some grand social cataclysm, or by a more gradual process, through the advance of "positive science;" and it is evident that by the phrase positive science Mr. James means the same thing as does Monsieur Auguste Comte. The antagonism which now exists between man and external nature, according to his theory, is only initial and mediatory to the ultimate and "manifest destiny" which requires of Man to subdue the earth; and we are told that every power of nature will eventually be rendered subservient to the uses of man's moral, intellectual, and physical life, until finally "the veil of the temple shall be rent from top to bottom, and the Holy of Holies shall stand suddenly revealed in the lineaments of an immaculate and omnipotent humanity." The phalansterians of Monsieur Fourier have always been sorely gravelled to reconcile the performance of certain menial offices in social life with their conceptions of man's dignity and their theory of human equality and universal brotherhood. Cooks, chambermaids, bootblacks, and sweeps, hostlers, and waiters, and scullions, have been thus far found necessary agents even in the best-adjusted of their social parallelograms. Mr. James, however, in the gradual progress of a "positive philosophy" sees the "good time coming" when science shall be the only menial on the face of the earth; when the relations of Man to external nature shall be so scientifically constructed that he will have no need to take thought, saying what shall we eat? or what shall we drink? or wherewithal shall we be clothed? for Society, invested with the potent wand of subject nature, will be changed into a greater than the Deus Fortuna of the ethnic mythology, as from her cornucopia she dispenses, with beneficent hand, upon each new comer into the renovated earth, "cradles, and nurseries, and schools, and shoes, and coats, and breeches, and breakfast, and supper, and lodging, and whatever else makes life comfortable," leaving each nascent scion of the social stock "free to do only the special work which God empowers him to do." Life now-a-days is a fardel, but it will be worth living in those days, and it is confidently expected that suicide will become obsolete, except in the case of an occasional Cleombrotus; for in this halcyon period, for which even now "the whole creation groaneth," envy will disappear from among men, vanity from among women, and indiscretion from among children; society will no longer be infested by the social evil that has been heretofore engendered by "class legislation," but all men every where will rejoice in the cognition of the Deity; will discourse on subjects as "high as metaphysic wit can fly;" will glorify "the rehabilitation of the senses;" will talk in poetry better than Milton ever dreamed of, and lose themselves in the ecstacy of aesthetic contemplations and the worship of the Beautiful. Other system builders and ideal philosophers have been startled from their complacency by visions of women putting tea-kettles on the fire and peeling potatoes, and of men delving in the soil like old Adam with sweat on their brow; but when the "perfect and integral humanity" of Mr. James shall appear on the earth, self-guiding as well as self-sharpening ploughs will cultivate the land, steam machinery will hoe corn, and automatic shovels dig potatoes, each particular shovel working with the velocity and power of forty modern Hibernians. Such is the destination of man in the resplendent future; we have to regret, however, that there is hardly any probability that we will live long enough to see it; we must content ourselves with the poets and painters, lawyers and priests of the existing species--the mere "harbingers of the perfect man, the nearest approximation permitted by our infirm science, but by no means his veritable self." They bear, indeed, says our social astrologer, precisely the same relation to the Lord, or the complete divine man, that the present path of the ecliptic does to the equator, which is a relation of decided obliquity. Philosophers tell us that when the earth shall have attained her true poise upon her axis, the path of the ecliptic will be coincident with the equator, and the rigors of winter and the fervors of summer consequently will alike give place to a new and perpetual spring which shall bathe the whole earth in gladness. So, when humanity, exclaims Mr. James, shall have attained true moral poise, these men who have hitherto been her ecliptic, "will give place to the equatorial or perfect man, who shall completely reconcile the still disunited elements of good and evil in a new individuality, which shall carry the dew and fragrance of God into every commonest nook of our everyday life, and absorb alike the parched aridity of the saint and the rank fecundity of the sinner in the unity of the integral man."

In the present order of things life is at best a checkered scene of lights and shadows. As the poet sings--

Enough has Heaven indulged of joy below
     To tempt our tarriance in this lov'd retreat;
Enough has Heaven ordained of useful woe

     To make us languish for a happier seat 

[Elegy IV, Written at the Approach of WINTER in The Poetical Works of John Scott; London, 1782.]

But when the earth is swung back to her equatorial poise, and man has attained his true moral centre, there will no longer be any need of a higher sphere in which to fulfil his destiny, and by that time, too science will have established such a chemically exact equilibrium between the nutriment and excretion, the absorption and the exhalation, that perpetual youth will result just as inevitably as water from the union of oxygen and hydrogen. Why, in fact, exclaims philosopher Proudhon, should man grow old? The spiritualists and theosophs promise us a new and imperishable life beyond the grave. Why does not this life commence from the present? Why a transition? And, if this hope be well founded, who knows but that one day, by the perfecting of the species, the present life may acquire this ultra-mundane incorruptibility? People have long believed in the possibility of escaping death; examples of it have been cited--witness the tradition of the "Wandering Jew"--a proof beyond reply, says the French communist, "that the previous experience which man has made of death has not at all sufficed to demonstrate to him the necessity of the thing." But still it is not to be expected that the social levellers will feel authorized to dispense entirely with the services of the "great leveller." It is the duty of society to preserve a constant arithmetical equality. Accordingly the humanitary philosophers have recommended the "painless extinction" of all the supernumerary offspring of a "social phalanx," and, as a melancholy pleasure to the bereaved parents, it has been beautifully proposed to adorn the corridors of their communistic temples with middling-sized flower-pots, in which should be interred the infants who had thus perished by "painless extinction," in order that the community might not be overburdened." Bills of mortality, it is true, will then be out of date, but in their place will succeed a floral catalogue of the "painless extinctions" per week by which society will be assured of its equilibrium, and a taste for flowers kept alive in the virtuous ladies of the association. This is the aesthetics of communism.  

The socialists of France have been too much disposed to deify Labor. With daring profanity they have doxologized it by the pater nosters of their impious devotion, saying,"Thine, oh labor, is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever, amen." But Mr. James has no such idolatrous homage for the "accursed necessity of earning one's bread by the sweat of his brow." Talk as we may on gala days, says he, man hates compulsory labor, labor which the body lays upon the soul, "because it does not express the true order of human life, does not express that inward and divine force which is the proper glory of man, and which reveals itself only in free or spontaneous action--action that descends from the soul to the body." Nothing but whips, and dungeons, and gibbets, and a ceaseless army of men affirming the terrors of a vindictive future keeps the needy, he says, from supplying their wants in a more summary way than by their present servitude; and as Mr. James is the sworn enemy of all "penal exactions," the reader can readily infer the consummation he thinks "devoutly to be wished;" and unless speedy justice be done to "human individuality," by furnishing it suitable media for the display of its "inmost and essential innocence," he predicts that, like a bursting thundercloud, it will break out in "eccentric and explosive methods."

We do not feel that it is at all incumbent on us to attempt a confutation of the transparent fallacies which lurk in almost every proposition and paragraph of the extracts above quoted. They are too extravagant to be even specious. There are some truths so axiomatic that it is a work of supererogation to essay their demonstration, and there are some falsities so palpable that, like the darkness of Egypt, they do not require us for their discovery so much as to open our eyes; they can be felt. To state them is to confute them. They all emanate from what O'Connell would have called "a multitudinous and monstrous lie;" or, if this expression implies a disrespectful imputation, from an egregious blunder, to wit, that social inequalities and governmental repression are the causes instead of being the effects of moral and consequently of physical evil. As well might you say that the knife and cautery, the compress and bandage of the surgeon are the causes of cancers and tumors and broken limbs. We pass to notice a moralism of our author respecting the "philosophy of intemperance."

Very ardent and well meaning reformers among us are anxious "to cut up intemperance by the roots," and to this end propose the entire suppression of the traffic in intoxicating liquors "except for mechanical, medicinal, and sacramental purposes." All such philanthropists will be interested to learn of a reformatory process which will encounter no opposition from rum-sellers, and which, nevertheless, we are assured, will prove infallibly effective. Cases of confirmed intemperance, says Mr. James, are a clinging and a burning reproach to the society that tolerates them. "Society," he asserts, "has ample virtue to cure every instance of intemperance within her limits, provided she had only the will to exert it." Drunkenness, he argues, is the vice of those men of passive habit, in whom the energies of passion and thought are superior to their energy of action. Now, if society were so constituted that every man found sufficient stimulus in his daily engagements to call into action his energies of thought, we are assured that no man would resort to artificial stimuli in order to evoke the dormant activity of his nature. The first step, and the vitally important one, in Mr. James's process of reforming drunkards, consists in society coming to regard drunkenness as nothing more or less than a "symptom of disease in the will," and in ceasing consequently to regard the subject as criminal on account of it. The drunkard simply asks, he says, that you should, "by the potent magnetism of your sympathy, empower or inflame his will" with sufficient strength to enable him successfully to stem the drift of a passive habitude. We do not wish to make cavilling objections to any philanthropic enterprise, but simply inquire of Mr. James who is to "empower and inflame" the will of society with a disposition to exert the virtue which, as he says, she possesses "to cure very instance of intemperance"; for if the drunkard is not to be regarded as a criminal because the seat of his disease consists in a "diseased will," is not society equally exonerated from all culpability if her "will" is so "diseased" that she cannot exert her virtue? We hasten to dismiss this sickly sentimentalism by presenting the following specimen as an addition to the "Amenities of Literature:"

"When Society shall have the grace to forgive all her erring offspring, by assuming to herself the burden of their offences, she will learn that the path of magnanimity is also the path of consummate prudence. Teach a man to believe himself at heart a sinner, and he will be sure to 'play hell,' as the phrase goes, with his teachers. Teach him, on the contrary. to believe himself at heart sound, and a sinner only by social imputation, and he will abound in all manner of manly fruit. Accordingly the poor drunkard, being inwardly relieved of that guilt which bows him to the dust, and which forever darkens the hope of the future by the memory of the loathsome past, being restored to more than pristine peace and innocence by your loyalty to truth, will put on vigor and beauty with the day, and shed the slough of natural habit as spontaneously as flowers shed their foliage or corn its husks." 

-- James C. Welling, review of Henry James Sr., Lectures and Miscellanies in "Notes on New Books," Washington National Intelligencer, April 20, 1852.

Before the Civil War, book reviews in the National Intelligencer by James Clarke Welling repeatedly called attention to the magical thinking exhibited by social reformers, and warned against real miseries bound to accompany the actual implementation of socialist policies. For example, reviewing Charlotte Brontë's Villette on May 26, 1853, Welling felt safe in saying that

"In our country we may not be harassed by any fears lest a Blithedale romance may inoculate the popular mind with a contagion like socialism."

Reviewing Peruvian Antiquities by Mariano E. Rivero on November 29, 1853, Welling predicted that

"If socialism found its full and rotund development under these autocratic rulers, swaying at will an ignorant and degraded populace, whose equality consisted only in an equality of barbarism, we may judge to what results a similar policy would conduct the nations of Europe."

As in the 1852 review of Henry James's Lectures, transcribed in full herein, Welling often put a spotlight on the horrifying policy of infanticide, as theoretically approved by Plato in his Republic and confidently advocated in the 19th century by "Monsieur Fourier" and other "crazy" European socialists, perhaps under the influence of Malthus or the dark Malthusian "Marcus pamphlet" deplored by Carlyle in his treatise on Chartism. Reviewing the Life and Travels Herodotus in the Fifth Century before Christ by James Talboy Wheeler in the National Intelligencer for July 1, 1856, Welling thus ridiculed the latest Utopian scheme for population control through the "painless extinction" of unwanted babies:

Every body knows that when Monsieur Fourier set about to effect "the synthesis of matter and spirit" according to the most philosophical adjustments of "passional attraction" of the supernumerary offspring by which the free and easy working of the social machine which he had invented was liable to be clogged, and in the end brought to a stand-still. To guard against any such obstruction he recommended (it was but an exaggerated phase of Malthusianism, such as might have been expected from a French translation of that politico-economical system or from a crazy Gaul ambitious to "out-herod Herod") that children who came into the world (that is, the phalanstery) without being wanted might be disposed of in a way which would be advantageous to the community, without, it was supposed, being very harrowing to anybody's parental feelings in an association among whom the birth of a "wise child," as defined by the familiar proverb, was a social impossibility. St. Augustine, we remember, speaks of the infants who perished under the sword of Herod as the flores martyrum, or "flowers of the martyrs." It was perhaps in memory of this pious fancy that certain ardent Fourierites have recommended the ornamentation of the phalanstery with sculptured flower pots in which the nascent "martyrs" of the community might be aesthetically inurned.

In the same vein, this time focusing on maltreatment of living children as the "most loathsome" consequence of communism, Welling asked a sadly prophetic question in his review of The Mother and her Offspring by Stephen Tracy and Letters to Country Girls by Mrs. Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm, published in the Washington, DC National Intelligencer on May 18, 1853:

The veriest and most loathsome communism is the price at which woman must purchase her equality of rights. The modern advocates of the same social theories are not always so consistent [as Plato in the Republic], and they cannot, therefore, shield themselves behind the philosopher's mantle. Let them remember that the foundling hospital must be endowed before woman can be installed in the "rights" now withheld. Are American mothers prepared for such a consummation?

Protest leftovers in NYC - January 2017

Related posts

• James C. Welling, his Notes on New Books in the Washington National Intelligencer
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/james-c-welling-his-notes-on-new-books.html

• Unabridged review of Moby-Dick by James Clarke Welling
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/unabridged-wellings-review-of-moby-dick.html 

• 2 + 2 = 4 Melville's Anti-Communist Math
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/08/2-2-4-melvilles-anti-communist-math.html

Leicester tea merchant and social reformer J. W. Barrs on Herman Melville

Leicester Mercury (Leicester, Leicestershire, England)
August 8, 1882

Published in the London National Reformer (November 8, 1891) over the pseudonym "SIRIUS" about six weeks after the death of Herman Melville in New York City, the long-forgotten memorial tribute transcribed herein was evidently written by Melville's English admirer and correspondent John William Barrs (c1852-1922), a Leicester tea merchant and radical secularist. 

Unique details in the pseudonymous National Reformer article titled "HERMAN MELVILLE" have precise matches in the lengthy fan-letter dated January 13, 1890 that Barrs wrote Melville, now in the Melville collection at Houghton Library, Harvard and available in the "Letters Received" section of the 1993 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Melville's Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth, on pages 759-762. In 1890 J. W. Barrs told Melville himself exactly what "Sirius" tells readers of the National Reformer, specifically about his having read Mardi to the blind poet Philip Bourke Marston, about the ignorance concerning Melville's literary works allegedly displayed by Marston's American friend Louise Chandler Moulton, about Barrs' particular fondness for the character of Babbalanja, and his deep appreciation of Walt Whitman. Courtesy of James Billson, Barrs had received a copy of Melville's poetry and prose collection John Marr and Other Sailors, which explains how "Sirius" could know so much of so rare a volume, privately printed for the author in 1888. 

Barrs, a good friend of the poet James Thomson (Bysshe Vanolis), had given Melville the posthumously published volume A Voice from the Nile: and other poems (London: Reeves and Turner, 1884); Sealts Number 522, now at Princeton, as indicated in the "Catalog of Books and Documents Owned, Borrowed and Consulted by Herman Melville" at Melville's Marginalia Online. 

J. W. Barrs, presentation inscription to Herman Melville in
A voice from the Nile : and other poems / by the late James Thomson ("B. V.")
Princeton University Library

From the London National Reformer of November 8, 1891; digitized and first made available on the great British Newspaper Archive in April 2025: 

HERMAN MELVILLE. 

AMERICA has just lost one of her most original writers and her finest stylist. It is with deep regret that we learn of the death of Herman Melville, the author of two perfect narratives of adventure, “Omoo” and "Typee”, of one of the most brilliant of allegorical novels, "Mardi”, and of the most powerful and imaginative novel of seafaring life, “Moby Dick, or the Whale”, ever written by one of an English-speaking race. And, to the eternal disgrace of United States literature, he has died practically forgotten; indeed, for the last twenty years he has, as a writer, been utterly neglected by his countrymen. Some eight years ago I remember reading through a great part of Melville’s "Mardi" to Phillip Bourke Marston, who had not previously known any of Melville’s books. He expressed unbounded delight in Melville’s imagination, his prose style, and his subtlety of thought, and promised to learn something of him from his (Marston’s) intimate friend Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, and to acquaint me with anything of interest concerning Melville he might learn from her. In a letter to me shortly after he said he had asked Mrs. Moulton for some information about Melville, but all she said was that she "had heard of him, and believed if he was not dead that he lived in, or somewhere near to, New York”. This evidence of a general neglect (for Mrs. Moulton must, from her literary reputation, be credited with knowing something of all writers in the States whose works were in vogue, even if but among the innermost circles of American literature) received a further confirmation but a few days ago when I met a particularly well-read Americaine, who had just arrived here for the purpose of taking some Oxford degrees open to women. Her ignorance of Herman Melville and of his works was even deeper, if deeper it could be, than Mrs. Moulton’s. Indeed, so thoroughly oblivious had the Americans become of the man who to the day of his death was their richest prose writer, and so utterly was Melville himself without any hope of any recognition of his genius, that the issue of his last publication, a booklet (1888) entitled “John Marr and other Sailors, with some sea-pieces”, was restricted to twenty-five copies, and distributed among his friends and admirers—not surely a very wide circle, in Melville’s opinion, but I am fain to believe an altogether wider one than he knew of. The trinity of writers of this century produced by America who eventually shall be esteemed her highest names in literature will surely be made up of Poe, Whitman, and Melville. Concerning the two former there is a large consensus of opinion as to their lofty place in English and their highest place in American letters; and it is difficult to doubt that such works as “Moby Dick” and "Mardi”, together with “Omoo” and “Typee”, will eventually place Melville’s name on a level with Poe’s and Whitman’s. Melville’s insight into the problems of life was, I think, less sustained than Whitman’s; less positive, perhaps, also; but keener, more piercing, now and again boring the core of some mystery with a Meredithean swiftness, but with a sympathy more obvious than Meredith’s. Indeed Melville’s inmost self is as interwoven with his work as is Poe’s in his, and this personal note it is which gives a great and added charm to every book he has written. The narrative, novel, or allegory pulsates with Melville’s individuality; the artist, in fact, pervades the work—one might almost say, is the work—in almost every instance. 

If asked to describe Melville's religion, I should do so in the words Pessimistic-Pantheist or Pessimistic-Atheist. Full of democratic fire, yet with a fear which he could not shake off—so far as I can find in reading him—that the aristocrat would always get the best of it under one guise or another; lacking, unfortunately for himself —whether or not for truth—that overmastering faith in the future apotheosis of the average man to permeating and overfilling Whitman; he was not less sympathetic than the "Good Grey Poet”. Perhhaps, indeed, as he was less hopeful, so his sympathy was of even a greater depth. Melville had less than Whitman the gift of dealing in his thought with men in the mass. Whitman has created no characters in his poems: Melville has created many. His Ahab in “The Whale”, his Jackson in “Red Jacket" [Redburn], his Babbalanja in "Mardi ”, to note just three, are unequalled in American or any other fiction. There can be little hesitation, after perusal of his “John Marr”, written but three years ago, in concluding that Melville’s early antagonism to Supernaturalism had become his settled conviction; for in that booklet, the sad undertone of which is ever in the ear as one reads, there is a calm acquiescence in the facts of life and death as they present themselves undistorted by any chimæras of the fancy, a quiet acceptance of death as an end—oblivion, so far as we can know — and as an absolute and perfect anodyne for the suffering caused by all our "weakness and weariness and nameless woes”’. On the grave of one forgotten before he died, yet to be remembered by his countrymen long after he is dead, we Freethinkers may be permitted to lay a spray of laurel. In Herman Melville the world has lost a great writer, a noble teacher, and a brave and loving heart. On the other hand, America has added one more blot to her literary history by her neglect of one of her most manly minds, one of her most brilliant imaginations. 

SIRIUS.  

https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0005488/18911108/028/0011

Other contributions signed "Sirius" in the London National Reformer are most likely by the genial atheist J. W. Barrs. Like his encomium of Herman Melville on November 8th, the following pieces all appeared in 1891. All but one are signed "SIRIUS." The business-minded letter against tariffs on imports ("Fair Trade v. Free Trade," published on November 1, 1891) is signed "JOHN W. BARRS." The earliest item listed here below, a letter to the editor dated April 18, 1891 and sent from Leicester, polemically quotes from a chapter in Mardi in order to expose the supposed "hollowness of the Christian dogma of eternal life."

• From the London National Reformer, April 26, 1891:
  

"THE BROWNING HEAVEN" AND "THE CAT O' NINE TAILS." TO THE EDITOR OF THE "NATIONAL REFORMER".

Sir,—Some of the numberless difficulties with which the theory of the immortality of man bristles, and many of which are either stated or inferred in your able article of last week, are so well put by Herman Melville, that you may not be disinclined to print an extract from his "Mardi." Here it is:

"But if our dead fathers somewhere and somehow live, why not our unborn sons; for backward or forward eternity is the same; already have we been the nothing we dread to be". 

The short chapter entitled "Babbalanja Solus" from which I quote, is well worth quoting entire, as probably by no one has the hollowness of the Christian dogma of eternal life been more poetically demolished. Touching the raising of Lazarus, who surely had some knowledge of heaven or hell, if only so much as the knowledge one gets of France, by going to Paris and back in twenty-four hours, Melville remarks: "But rubbed he not his eyes and stared he not most vacantly! Not one revelation did he make. Ye gods! to have been a bystander there!" A pity our interviewer was not then invented. 

A word, also, if  you have space, on the flogging of criminals. Marcus Clarke's "For the Term of His Natural Life", a story founded on the official Convict Prison Reports and others equally reliable—that is, equally reliable for not overstating the case against the use of the "cat"—exhausts the subject, and would, I think, leave your adverse critics as bitterly opposed to its use on any man (aye, even on a murderer and cannibal like the wretch Gabbett in Clarke's story) as you are yourself. The use of the "cat" may be justified by the passions; never, I think, by the intellect, after a full review of its effects on all brought within the sphere of its results.  

 

SIRIUS,

Leicester, April 18, 1891. 

 

P.S. Even where the use of the "cat" is confined to special classes of criminals and is inflicted only by order of a Judge, it must be borne in mind that verdicts are fallible, and one dreads to think how much of truth there is in the Frenchman's paradoxical saying that "There is only one thing more terrible than crime and that is——Justice".

https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0005488/18910426/027/0013 

• "Dr. Wace's Consolation." London National Reformer, May 24, 1891.

• "Nonproof v. Disproof: or Dr. Wace's Consolation." London National Reformer, May 31, 1891.

• "Nonproof v. Disproof." London National Reformer, June 14, 1891.

• "John Jarvis /  Ejus Liber / 1799." London National Reformer, August 30, 1891.
  

• "Health and Atheism." London National Reformer, September 20, 1891.

• Signed "JOHN W. BARRS." "Fair Trade V. Free Trade." London National Reformer, November 1, 1891.

• "Christianity in the Sandwich Islands," London National Reformer, November 15, 1891.

Leicester Mercury -  Saturday, July 15, 1922
via newspapers.com

From the Leicester Mercury (Leicestershire, England) of July 15, 1922:

The late Mr. John William Barrs, who died at the Chantry House, The Newarkes, on Thursday [July 13, 1922], at the age of 70 years, was the son of a former member of the Town Council and the old School Board, and a well-known tradesman.

Mr. Barrs, unlike his father, who was a Churchman and Tory of the old school, became an out-and-out Radical. He was a great reader, and his contributions to newspaper correspondence had a distinct literary flavour, marked perhaps by the keenness of his criticisms which, however, were never envenomed.

London WEEKLY TIMES & ECHO, notice of THE WHALE with excerpt from Chapter 3, "The Spouter Inn"

Found on the wonderful British Newspaper Archive with images newly available in June 2025, an early notice of The Whale in the London Weekly Times & Echo for Sunday, November 2, 1851. This item is not collected in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2009). I will add it now to my inventory of 1851-1852 reviews of Moby Dick; or The Whale, here:

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/02/moby-dick-widely-praised-in-1851-2.html

From the London Weekly Times & Echo (2 November 1851):

THE WHALE. By Herman Melville, Author of "Typee," "Omoo," "Redburn," &c. 3 Vols. London: Bentley, New Burlington street.

Mr. Herman Melville stands alone in his peculiar celebrity, that of enabling the public to obtain glimpses of the private life and confidential transactions of seamen and their companions. In the volumes before us he gives evidence of having enjoyed most favourable opportunities of studying the personal characters of harpooners, mates, and sailors generally, and of becoming acquainted with the struggles, adventures, and experiences attendant upon whaling expeditions. "The Whale" is a book in which there is a great deal of romance mixed up with real sketches of life and manners. The captain of a ship that starts from Nantucket for the South Seas to catch the whale undertakes the voyage for the sole purpose of making the chase of the white whale, which, we are told, can neither be captured nor hurt, as the harpoon will not wound it, and which possesses extraordinary strength and cunning. The catastrophe of this daring adventure is that the ship is attacked by the white whale, and sinks with all on board. The early chapters, though containing but little adventure, are by far the best, and relate to topics that are, for the most part, fresh to English readers. Mr. Herman Melville there appears in his strongest point--sketching of character; and we cannot resist the temptation of laying before our readers one of his broad pictures of 

LIFE IN AMERICAN SEAPORTS. 

[Excerpted from Chapter 3, The Spouter-Inn in the British edition, titled The Whale]

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.  * * * * * Upon entering the place, I found a number of young seamen gathered about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of skrimshander. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full—not a bed unoccupied. “But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer’s blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a-whalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.” * * “I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper? Supper’ll be ready directly.” — I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but he didn’t make much headway, I thought. At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland—no fire at all—the landlord said he couldn’t afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind—not only meat and potatoes, but dumplings. Good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner. — "My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead certainty.” — "Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the harpooneer is it?” — "Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny; “the harpooner is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don’t—he eats nothing but steaks, and likes ’em rare.”

* * Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried, “That’s the Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a three years’ voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we’ll have the latest news from the Feegees.” — A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open, and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale’s mouth—the bar—when the little wrinkled old fellow there officiating soon poured them out brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which the fellow mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of an ice-island. The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering about most obstreperously. 

The "little wrinkled old fellow" tending bar in the London Weekly Times & Echo version above (printed "wrinkled little old fellow" in The Whale) is a "wrinkled little old Jonah" in the 1851 American edition of Moby-Dick. A longer excerpt from Chapter 3 "The Spouter Inn," correctly giving "wrinkled little old fellow" from the British edition, had appeared with the generally negative review of The Whale in the London Athenaeum on October 25, 1851. 

Related post 

• Moby-Dick widely praised in 1851-2
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/02/moby-dick-widely-praised-in-1851-2.html

The House Where Moby Dick was Written

H. N. Hudson, 1847 letter to Evert A. Duyckinck

Here is my transcription of a letter from Henry Norman Hudson to Evert A. Duyckinck, now at NYPL in the Duyckinck family papers, Literary correspondence of Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck. Digital images of this 3-page manuscript letter dated March 27, 1847 are accessible via NYPL Digital Collections. Citation:

Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "Hudson, Henry Norman (1814-86)" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1845 - 1854.  https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/9462eaa0-69fc-0133-794f-00505686a51c

Boston, March 27, 1847

My dear Sir;

I am altogether delighted with your paper. It has made Saturday quite a favorite day with me. I watch for its coming somewhat as a lover does for his appointed interview. I hope you will not make it necessary to me, and then withdraw it from me. It was my intention to have written something for its columns before this. Two weeks ago, indeed, I undertook to get up a few paragraphs with that view, but before I got through, I found my paper quite too long for your purpose. Besides, the matter was not exactly of the right stamp to appear in such a quarter; so I have sent it to Colton [George H. Colton, editor of the American Whig Review where Hudson's essay on the "Religious Union of Associationists" eventually did appear in the May 1847 issue]. It is on Mr. W. H. Channing and his "Church of Humanity." You will readily understand how, when I got engaged on such a theme, I found it difficult to stop. Whether Colton will publish the thing I do not know. The article is not very velvet-footed, though considerably milder than the one on "Festus." Our incontinent reformers are so conceited, that they can hardly be reached by any weapons but satire and ridicule. Their fanaticism of innovation seems proof against everything but the arrows of scorn. My article on the Philanthropists is not begun yet; though I have for some time kept up a thinking on the subject.

Many thanks for the civil things you have said of me. Much as these are calculated to make me like your paper, I think they have not produced so powerful an impression that way, as your notices of Somebody's Life of Taylor, of Griswold's late Sham [The Prose Writers of America, reviewed in the Literary World on March 20, 1847] and of Hazlitt's Napoleon [reviewed on March 27, 1847]. If with such papers as these the Literary World cannot go ahead, then the public is not worth writing for; that's all I have to say. It is high time Griswold's quackeries were exposed. I have long thought there was nothing too mean for him to do, provided he could make anything by it.

Have you seen the piece of softly, slobbering criticism on Emerson's Poems in the last Christian Examiner? If you want an example of precisely what criticism ought not to be, I advise you to read it. One would think the writer were made to die of a rose in aromatic pain. If criticism cannot speak out plainly, and call things by their right names, for heaven's sake let criticism hold its tongue. To be fit for the office of critic, and, indeed, for almost any office, it seems to me one must be a good hater; then his hatreds will serve to accredit his loves. These Boston authorlets, pretending to love everything and hate nothing, do not appear to have energy enough to do either. Always trying how finely and elegantly they can write, they seem alike affected in their censure and their praise. We are now having a very long drizzle of such criticisms in Mr. [George Stillman] Hillard's Lectures on Milton. Last evening I heard him on Paradise Lost. The first half of the lecture was taken up in puerile fault-finding, and the rest in straining after fine figures. It was very much as if a milliner should go to work, with lace, scissors and needle, to adorn the Falls of Niagara. Amid the sweet austerities of Milton's domestic scenes Mr. Hillard went whining along like some love-sick stripling. He has neither strength to feel Milton's delicacies, nor delicacy to feel his sublimities. He can cut very pretty ruffles out of the lace that others have woven; and that is about all he can do. Mr. Whipple seems to think people will be drawn to the study of Milton by these lectures. How any one that is weak enough to be moved by them is to stand up under Milton is beyond my comprehension.

However, the mutual admirers appear to think them very beautiful; and so I suppose the rest of us must submit. As for myself, I own it vexes me to see such a subject fall into such hands. I do not want people should be encouraged to suppose there is anything in Milton to countenance their amiable dulness and refined insipidity. I know not whether Mr. Hillard overrates him more as a man, or underrates more as a poet. Milton rebelled like a hero, and wrote poetry like a hero; in both he was more like his own Satan, than like his commentator. He was a good hater; as is evident from the fact, that "he hated everything that he was required to obey" [paraphrasing Samuel Johnson on Milton in Johnson's Lives of the Poets]. Whatever he did, there was a strength and vigor about him, which it strikes me these petty spinners of literary gossamer had better let alone. And yet it is rather amusing to see a spider weaving a web to catch a lion.

As soon as anything appears to me, worth printing, I shall try to indite you some paragraphs. I am told an edition of Mrs. Hutchinson's Memoirs of her husband is coming out soon. It is a very delightful book; and perhaps I will get you up a notice of it when it appears. Wiffen's Tasso is another book that I am meditating a notice of. You know I have not much facility in occasional writing. Generally I have to think long before I can write anything, and write long after I have got to thinking.

Please give my regards to Headley [Joel Tyler Headley] and Matthews [Cornelius Mathews]; read them this letter (if, indeed, you ever read it at all;) then hurry it into deepest night; and believe me

Sincerely your friend &c ;

H. N. Hudson

Boston Evening Transcript - March 25, 1847
via genealogybank.com

Related post

• "The Fiddler" ascribed to Melville in the CHURCHMAN, edited by Henry Norman Hudson
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-fiddler-ascribed-to-melville-in.html

"A sort of philosophical Christian swindler"

Melville's Confidence-Man favorably reviewed in the Hartford Evening Express, edited by Joseph R. Hawley.

Found on genealogybank.com and transcribed herein, a previously uncollected review of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade in the Hartford Evening Express for April 14, 1857. Published in Hartford, Connecticut the Evening Express was a Republican daily newspaper then edited by Joseph Roswell Hawley in partnership with William Faxon. After the Civil War, General Hawley's Evening Express merged with the Hartford Courant which the distinguished war hero, governor, and future United States Representative and Senator from Connecticut also owned and edited. 

This item is not reprinted or listed in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2009). 

Instead of giving titles of Melville's previous works in the header, Hawley's Evening Express printed "&c." (for etc. or et cetera) three times, presuming that "everybody knows" Melville and his books. 

Hartford Evening Express - April 14, 1857

THE CONFIDENCE MAN: HIS MASQUERADE. By Herman Melville—Author of &c., &c., &c.— (we need not say what—everybody knows him.). Published by Dix, Edwards & Co.

A series of "rough and tumble" dashes at western life and American peculiarities generally, thrown off in the style of a man who would lead you to believe he isn't half trying: as an artist might take charcoal in his toes and show you how good a portrait he can sketch with his hands tied behind him and his eyes shut. Nevertheless Mr. Mellville is a good deal in earnest and makes a fascinating book—of course. The scene of operations is on a Mississippi steamboat, and the Confidence Man appears to be a sort of philosophical Christian swindler, making all kinds of experiments upon poor human nature with as little mercy as an entomologist pins beetles. 

For sale by F. A. Brown. 

*** 

"The Fiddler" ascribed to Melville in THE CHURCHMAN, edited by Henry Norman Hudson

Henry Norman Hudson (1814-1886)
via The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Herman Melville's short story "The Fiddler" first appeared, uncredited as usual for magazine fiction of the time, in the September 1854 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine.

Melville's narrator in The Fiddler is Helmstone, a proud classicist and poet. Helmstone seems appealingly earnest though self-absorbed and over-ambitious, at first, of critical acclaim and "immortal fame." Distraught by bad reviews of his last poem, Helmstone bumps into a friend named Standard on Broadway. There they meet Standard's acquaintance Hautboy, happily on his way to the circus to see a renowned clown. Hautboy is a grown man, fortyish, but joys in the circus performance like a child. After the show they join "crowds of others" at the fabulous Taylor's Saloon, downing "stews and punches" while seated "at one of the small marble tables." Although moved by the "clear honest cheeriness" that Hautboy exhibited at the circus, Helmstone doubts his ability to do more than laugh and clap. Clearly he's no genius, this Hautboy. So thinks Helmstone before hearing Hautboy play his "dented old fiddle." And says out loud during Hautboy's absence from their table at Taylor's. In response, Standard mysteriously alludes to "Master Betty," the once-famous child actor William Henry West Betty. Helmstone is baffled by his friend's reference to the celebrated British virtuoso until he actually hears Hautboy (at Hautboy's home, off Broadway) doing "Yankee Doodle" and other popular tunes with "the bow of an enchanter," like "an Orpheus." Through Standard, the narrator learns Hautboy's true identity and humble occupation, teaching music "from house to house." Helmstone instantly recognizes the real name of Hautboy (whispered in his ear by Standard) as a favorite entertainer whom he had enthusiastically cheered and applauded "in the theater" as a boy. Thus chastened, the narrator ditches his poems in manuscript and buys a fiddle. Instead of writing, Helmstone will take lessons from Hautboy and let go his dreams of literary glory.

William H. Gilman in Melville's Early Life and Redburn (New York University Press and Oxford University Press, 1951) at page 316, note 148 identified Joseph Burke (1815-1902) as the likeliest real-life model for Melville's fictional fiddler, Hautboy. As a child in the early 1830's Melville could have seen "Master Burke" perform in Albany, New York and, like his narrator Helmstone in "The Fiddler," made himself "hoarse" from yelling and "applauding that name in the theatre."

MASTER BURKE as ROMEO.
via The New York Public Library Digital Collections

Later in the last century, John M. J. Gretchko began a provocative essay on sexually suggestive wordplay and germane historical contexts in "The Fiddler" by calling attention to the anonymity that Melville might have expected and indeed preferred; see "Fiddling with Melville's 'Fiddler'" in Melville Society Extracts Number 104 (March 1996) pages 20-23 at page 20. Citing Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Did Melville Write "The Fiddler"? Harvard Library Bulletin 26 (January 1978) pages 77-80, Gretchko observed that the story's original anonymity in some measure appears to have encouraged the later, false attribution of "The Fiddler" to Fitz-James O'Brien. As demonstrated by Sealts, and duly affirmed in the 1987 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, edited by G. Thomas Tanselle, Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker, strong external evidence for Melville's authorship of "The Fiddler" is supplied by Melville's wife Elizabeth Shaw Melville, who 

listed "The Fiddler" in her memoranda of her husband's periodical pieces and kept a copy of it in her collection of his magazine stories. -- Northwestern-Newberry Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, Editorial Appendix, Notes on "The Fiddler," page 692.

What's new today on Melvilliana, unrecorded in Melville scholarship before now, is my discovery of an early and explicit attribution of "The Fiddler" to Herman Melville in the New York Churchman of September 9, 1854, contemporary with the story's first, anonymous publication in Harper's magazine. 

New York Churchman - September 9, 1854

"The Fiddler" was seldom referenced in newspaper roundups of periodical literature and, except in the Churchman, never linked to Herman Melville. Despite the rarity of any notice at all, the Churchman editor discloses Melville's authorship of "The Fiddler" positively and rather casually, not so much as breaking news but as a matter of fact, familiar to insiders in New York City. Accompanied by a line of plot summary, this so-far unique contemporary attribution of "The Fiddler" to Herman Melville appeared in the last issue of the Churchman to be edited by H. N. Hudson. A Vermonter by birth, Henry Norman Hudson was already well known for his trenchant literary criticism and popular lectures on Shakespeare. As shown by Mark Bayer, "Hudson was a prolific scholar, editor, and educator" whose influence on Shakespeare studies in the United States deserves fuller appreciation and respect. 

• Bayer, Mark. “Henry Norman Hudson and the Origins of American Shakespeare Studies.” Shakespeare Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2017): 271–95. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48559742.

Middlebury Vermont Register - January 5, 1853
via genealogybank.com

Because the department of Literature was indisputably Hudson's domain, I think reviews and notices therein may reasonably be charged to his account during his short and stormy tenure of twenty months as editor, from January 1853 through September 9, 1854. Whether he supplied the content of every item is impossible to determine without more information. 

Articles Hudson did not approve of allegedly had been solicited or planted by owner John Hecker. Real or imagined, his employer's interference eventually motivated Hudson's resignation. By his own account, however, the editorial meddling that most offended Hudson had dealt with Church doctrine and traditions, as he specified soon after his departure in a letter to the New York Times dated Sept. 16, 1854, and printed there on September 20, 1854. Hudson would be succeeded as editor of the Churchman by Thomas Ramsay, a British layman. As revealed in Hudson's letter to the editor of the New York Times, Ramsay had written the two-part article "Our Mother Church of England" supposedly foisted on Hudson by his domineering boss.

Whether Hudson was too impractical or too temperamental, or whether the proprietor was a little impatient, we can not be sure. That friction arose is entirely certain and that Hudson was firmly determined to have no more of it is equally plain. He resigned, he announced in THE CHURCHMAN (September 9, 1854), because the proprietor was setting "the editorial department at strife and controversy with itself" by engaging outside writers without consulting the editor.  -- Clifton H. Brewer on "The History of The Churchman: Some Old-Time Editors" in The Churchman Volume 132 (November 28, 1925) pages 10-11.

In this light, as rebellious littérateur, Henry Norman Hudson looks and acts like a ballsy Bartleby. And talks a bit like Turkey, another of Melville's characters in Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853). In the afore-cited letter to the New York Times, Hudson adopts Turkey's catch-phrase with submission:

"With submission, then, I must still think that I was substantially right in making the announcement as I did."

On his last day at work, September 9, 1854, editor H. N. Hudson chose to notice two contributions by Melville in different magazines, "The Fiddler" in Harper's and several chapters of "Israel Potter" in Putnam's. In "Harper's Magazine for September" the Churchman editor acknowledges only three items. Ignored altogether are three new chapters from Thackeray's new novel, The Newcomes. Instead, Hudson notices

a sketch, "The Fiddler," by MELVILLE, showing how an author, as the world goes, may be reconciled to the failure of his volume....

Brief as it is, this treatment of "The Fiddler" in the Churchman features a handy summary of the story's moral along with the casual attribution to Melville. Both the commentary and the attribution are unparalleled. In Hudson's selective survey of Harper's for September, the notice of "The Fiddler" appears in between mentions of an "illustrated paper on the old Dutch times of Manhattan" (uncredited in Harper's but associated by Hudson with "the competent resources" of Benson John Lossing) and Tayler Lewis on the "Unity of the Human Race" (sole topic of the unsigned essay taking up the whole "Editor's Table" that month, starting with the question, "IS THE HUMAN RACE ONE OR MANY?"). 

In the same column of the Churchman, surveying the contents of another prominent American journal, the editor went on to notice the latest installment of Melville's Israel Potter, as serialized in the September 1854 issue of Putnam's Monthly Magazine:

Putnam's Monthly has an elaborate article, clearly written, on the "Parties and Politics" of the country, past and present; several interesting descriptive papers of American nature; a continuation of Israel Potter's Fifty Years of Exile, the main incidents of which are founded on fact. POTTER was wounded at Bunker Hill, was captured by the British in an attempt to cut off their supplies in Boston harbour, and was carried to England. He was actually employed by FRANKLIN, as represented by MELVILLE in this embellished account of his career, the interest of which is well developed in the present number. 

Elsewhere in the same issue, Hudson gave a different sort of notice, announcing his decision to quit the newspaper for good.

"... it only remains for the Editor to inform the readers, that from henceforth he is not, and must not be held, responsible for the editorial conduct of the paper; and that he will withdraw from all connection with it as soon as practicable."  -- New York Churchman, September 9, 1854

At present the online archive at Newspapers.com has digital images of The Churchman for two years only, 1854 (10 months, March through December) and 1855 (two months, January and February), generously furnished by the Brooklyn Public Library. Hopefully, future searches in other digital and print archives will uncover additional references to Herman Melville's magazine fiction. It would be wonderful to find some notice of Bartleby, for instance, in November or December 1853; or "COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!" which first appeared in the December 1853 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine Magazine. 

For now I can offer three additional Melville items that appeared in the New York Churchman when edited by Henry Norman Hudson. In the Churchman for March 11, 1854, Hudson favorably noticed the opening sketch of "The Encantadas" in Putnam's Monthly. 

New York Churchman - March 11, 1854

Putnam's Monthly for March has the commencement of a series of papers by HERMAN MELVILLE, sketches of the barren islands of the Gallapagos, under the equator, on the Pacific. His opening sentence shows his graphic hand,-- "Take five-and-twenty heaps of cinders dumped here and there in an outside city lot; imagine some of them magnified into mountains, and the vacant lot the sea; and you will have a fit idea of the general aspect of the Encantadas or Enchanted Isles."

On April 22, 1854 the Churchman editor observed that "Putnam's Monthly for April continues Mr. MELVILLE"S Encantadas...."

Hudson also gave a shout-out to Melville in a long review of George W. Peck's Melbourne, and the Chincha Islands; with Sketches of Lima, and a Voyage round the World (New York: Charles Scribner, 1854); this mention appeared in the Churchman for May 6, 1854. 

New York Churchman - May 6, 1854

But we turn to more agreeable incidents. A sailor's dinner is a thing to be relished all the world over. Who does not remember, in Mr. MELVILLE'S capital book "Redburn," the achievements of that young gentleman on his first voyage when, at Liverpool, "he goes to supper at the sign of the 'Baltimore Clipper'," and the ardent company "wrapt themselves in hot jackets of beef-steaks." This is the kind of thing to give a wholesome shock to the dyspeptic. Would you know what appetite really is, of what this admirable structure is capable, flee Delmonico's and the St. Nicholas, the jaded tables of the Fifth avenue, and place yourself alongside of a potent skipper of the seas in DORAN's modest mansion, which rises amidst the incense of fiery oyster sacrifices in the very heart of the Fulton Market--or, for the same number of shillings, you may enjoy Mr. PECK's hardly less substantial feast at Melbourne. 

Reviewing Peck, Hudson directly quotes from Redburn Chapter 28.

Under Thomas Ramsay's editorial watch, the New York Churchman for June 5, 1856 featured a favorable review of The Piazza Tales; reprinted by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker in their great collection Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge University Press, 1995; paperback 2009) at pages 475-476. The Contemporary Reviews volume (see page 500) also has the brief notice of The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade in the New York Churchman for April 30, 1857. 

Also reprinted in Contemporary Reviews, at pages 394-395, the review of Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale that appeared in the Churchman for December 6, 1851. William Walton then edited the Churchman. On Walton's watch, the Churchman appreciated the "character of the monomaniac Captain Ahab" as "a novelty, and powerfully drawn," but found it "pitiable to see so much talent perverted to sneers at revealed religion and the burlesquing of sacred passages of Holy Writ."

New York Daily Times - November 13, 1852

Cleaning up now with the aim of good housekeeping, I would suggest that the otherwise unidentified "Mr. Hudson" on page 249 in the first volume of Jay Leyda's good old Melville Log (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951) could well be Henry Norman Hudson, then a resident of Boston and well known for his lectures on Shakespeare. Leyda thus quotes Ida Russell in a letter dated July 8, 1847 to her cousin Richard Henry Dana, Jr.:

"Mr. Herman Melville is expected to take tea with us tomorrow which is Friday afternoon he would like to meet you . . . If you see Mr. Hudson will you be so kind as to extend the invitation to him.  

I intend only to ask a few Dr. Vinton among others. If any other members of your family are in town I wish they would come."

Possibly Melville got to meet Dana and "Mr. Hudson" the next day on Friday, July 9, 1847, at tea with Ida Russell. In any event, Henry Norman Hudson's presence in Boston is definitely established by extant letters to Evert A. Duyckinck, accessible courtesy of the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Most relevant there is Hudson's newsy 3-page letter from Boston dated March 27, 1847. Citation:

Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "Hudson, Henry Norman (1814-86)" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed April 16, 2025. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/9462eaa0-69fc-0133-794f-00505686a51c

Looking further into the identity of Ida Russell's "Mr. Hudson," I just learned that Roma Rosen nominated Henry Norman Hudson 63 years ago in Melville's Uses of Shakespeare's Plays (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1962). As Rosen reasons, 

"There is a possibility that the "Mr. Hudson" mentioned in Miss Russell's invitation was the Shakespearean critic and that Melville met him, too, on this occasion." (pages 183-184)

Rosen makes a great case for the influence of Hudson's negative view of Polonius in Lectures on Shakespeare Volume 2 (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1848) pages 119-121 on the equally salty commentary of Charlie in the Confidence-Man Chapter 30. 

In the first two months of 1847, Henry Norman Hudson made a hit with his two-part review of Philip James Bailey's Festus, A Poem in the American Whig Review: 

"This book has come to us, wafted on a perfect gale of puffery."

Hudson's 1847 review of Festus very likely influenced Melville's critique of Transcendentalism in Pierre (1852), as James Duban argues in Melville's Major Fiction: Politics, Theology, and Imagination (Northern Illinois University Press, 1983) at pages 172-176. John Stafford in The Literary Criticism of Young America (University of California Press, 1952) at page 102 recalls how

"Henry Norman Hudson thoroughly dissected P. J. Bailey's Festus for the Whig Review, objecting to its liberal and transcendental philosophy, its liberal and democratic politics.

At page 127 of the same book, Stafford pairs Hudson and George Washington Peck as New England "farm boys," both of whom became "conservative supporters of the Establishment party," more or less in opposition to democratic Young Americans and their Manhattan champion, Evert A. Duyckinck. 

Hudson's two-volume work, Lectures on Shakespeare (Baker and Scribner, 1848) is Number 376 in Melville's Sources by Mary  K. Bercaw (Northwestern University Press, 1987). Listed there on page 92, citing H. J. Lang who had proposed Hudson's 1848 Lectures on Shakespeare as a source for "Benito Cereno" and Billy Budd in "Poe in Melville's 'Benito Cereno,'" English Studies Today, Fifth Series (1973) pages 405-429. 

From the obituary of Henry Norman Hudson, "the well known Shakespearian scholar," as published in the Boston Evening Transcript on January 18, 1886: 

... Personally Mr. Hudson was said to be a man of marked peculiarities. He cared little for the opinions of others where they were at variance with his own, and would not have been troubled if he had had to stand against the world. He had the courage of his convictions almost more than any other man of his time. In appearance he was thought to resemble Carlyle. His life work had been primarily the study of the one great subject of Shakespeare, and his English text-books were a vigorous protest "against putting young students through a course of mere nibbles and snatches from a multitude of authors, where they cannot stay long enough with any one to develop any real taste for him or derive any solid benefit from him." In 1852 he married Emily S., the oldest daughter of the late Henry Bright of Northampton. His son is a merchant in Omaha. 

Also published in the year of Hudson's death, Jeremiah Eames Rankin's public address The Shakespeare Interpreter (Middlebury, Vermont, 1886), concluding with a fine memorial tribute to Henry Norman Hudson on pages 29-42. 

For more in the way of 19th century biography, see the entry for HENRY NORMAN HUDSON in the Cyclopædia of American Literature, Volume 2, edited by Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck (New York: Charles Scribner, 1856) pages 597-599. A later, more succinct treatment may be found in the New International Encyclopædia, Volume 9, edited by Daniel Coit Gilman, Harry Thurston Peck, and Frank Moore Colby (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1903) at page 630. 

HUDSON, HENRY NORMAN (1814-86). An American Shakespearean scholar and editor, born at Cornwall, Addison Co., Vt. In early life he worked as a baker and a wheelwright. He graduated from Middlebury College, Vermont, in 1840, and then taught school in Kentucky and Alabama. He presently became an authority of considerable note on Shakespeare, lectured widely on his works, and was appointed a professor in Boston University. Among his works in this field are: Lectures on Shakespeare ( 2 vols., 1848); a valuable annotated edition (11 vols.,1851-56); and Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters (2 vols., 1872). Having entered the priesthood of the Protestant Episcopal Church, he was for some years editor of the Churchman; was rector at Litchfield, Conn., 1859-60, and served as chaplain in the Union Army during the Civil War. On his return he published A Chaplain's Campaign with General Butler (1865). He was author also of Sermons (1874); Studies in Wordsworth (1884); Essays in Education (1884); and other works. 

Related post 

• H. N. Hudson, 1847 letter to Evert A. Duyckinck
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2025/04/h-n-hudson-1847-letter-to-evert.html