 |
The wanderer above the sea of fog
Caspar David Friedrich via Wikimedia Commons |
In Herman Melville: Making of the Poet (Northwestern University Press, 2008) Hershel Parker observes the evolution of Melville's seventh book in "Wordsworthian" passages that demonstrate "the unfolding of the inner mind in majestic natural settings" (94). One specific influence on Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852) is a passage from Wordsworth's Excursion (book 3) giving names to rocks, a source for sections in Pierre about boulders named Memnon and Enceladus as shown in Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 2, 1851-1891 pages 57-58. Another source from The Excursion, book 5, is cited by Thomas F. Heffernan: the "fertilising moisture" of certain rocks is recast in Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities as "a subtile moisture, which fed with greenness" the nearby ground ("Melville and Wordsworth," American Literature, November 1977: 338-351 at 340 fn 9.).
The following passage from Wordsworth's "Descriptive Sketches" refers to "nearer mist," an unusual phrasing which also occurs in Pierre, in a similar context:
— 'Tis morn: with gold the verdant mountain glows,
More high, the snowy peaks with hues of rose.
Far stretched beneath the many-tinted hills
A mighty waste of mist the valley fills,
A solemn sea! whose vales and mountains round
Stand motionless, to awful silence bound.
A gulf of gloomy blue, that opens wide
And bottomless, divides the midway tide.
Like leaning masts of stranded ships appear
The pines that near the coast their summits rear;
Of cabins, woods, and lawns a pleasant shore
Bounds calm and clear the chaos still and hoar;
Loud thro' that midway gulf ascending, sound
Unnumber'd streams with hollow roar profound:
Mount thro' the nearer mist the chaunt of birds,
And talking voices, and the low of herds,
The bark of dogs, the drowsy tinkling bell,
And wild-wood mountain lutes of saddest swell.
-- Descriptive Sketches, Poetical Works page 50
And below, the passage with "nearer mist" extracted from the online
text of Pierre at Project Gutenberg:
Well for Pierre it was, that the penciling presentiments of his mind
concerning Lucy as quickly erased as painted their tormenting images.
Standing half-befogged upon the mountain of his Fate, all that part of
the wide panorama was wrapped in clouds to him; but anon those
concealings slid aside, or rather, a quick rent was made in them;
disclosing far below, half-vailed in the lower mist, the winding
tranquil vale and stream of Lucy's previous happy life; through the
swift cloud-rent he caught one glimpse of her expectant and angelic face
peeping from the honey-suckled window of her cottage; and the next
instant the stormy pinions of the clouds locked themselves over it
again; and all was hidden as before; and all went confused in whirling
rack and vapor as before. Only by unconscious inspiration, caught from
the agencies invisible to man, had he been enabled to write that first
obscurely announcing note to Lucy; wherein the collectedness, and the
mildness, and the calmness, were but the natural though insidious
precursors of the stunning bolts on bolts to follow.
But, while thus, for the most part wrapped from his consciousness and
vision, still, the condition of his Lucy, as so deeply affected now, was still more and more disentangling and defining itself from out its nearer mist, and even beneath the general upper fog. For when
unfathomably stirred, the subtler elements of man do not always reveal
themselves in the concocting act; but, as with all other potencies, show
themselves chiefly in their ultimate resolvings and results. Strange
wild work, and awfully symmetrical and reciprocal, was that now going on
within the self-apparently chaotic breast of Pierre. As in his own
conscious determinations, the mournful Isabel was being snatched from
her captivity of world-wide abandonment; so, deeper down in the more
secret chambers of his unsuspecting soul, the smiling Lucy, now as dead
and ashy pale, was being bound a ransom for Isabel's salvation. Eye for
eye, and tooth for tooth. Eternally inexorable and unconcerned is Fate,
a mere heartless trader in men's joys and woes.
I was prompted to wrestle again with Melville's words in book 5 of Pierre while reading in Hershel Parker's new book, Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative. In chapter 2, "Textual Editor as Biographer in
Training" (35-36), Parker explains the practically irresistible emendation of "nearer" to "nether." Parker offers this appealing change, now effected I see in the
Trade Paper edition
of the Northwestern-Newberry Pierre, as an example of the common readerly
response of mentally, then marginally correcting a text by substituting
"the right word" for a wrong one. The correction makes good "topographical" sense, neatly clarifying the
upper vs lower distinction that is already there, an ongoing contrast that later on includes the explicit reference to "upper and nether firmaments." Earlier on Melville pictured "the lower mist" hiding Lucy-as-valley from
Pierre-as-mountaineer. Well then, nether means "lower" so
correcting "nearer mist" to "nether mist" eliminates the puzzling "nearer" and keeps
everything and everybody properly aligned and oriented.
Piece of cake?
Maybe not, after all, considering the precedent in Wordsworth--and considering, too, the shared situation of a youthful traveler in the mountains: Wordsworth's literal Alps and valley, Melville's metaphorical mountain and valley. Metaphorically, Melville's upper and lower somehow represent parts of the psyche,
conscious and repressed unconscious. But here as throughout
Pierre the language is tricky, the progress convoluted.
Two
paragraphs are involved, and looking again and trying to follow more
closely I see a possible twist in the second paragraph, a turn involving both
action and orientation that is signaled at the start of the paragraph in
the word "But." Before, in the first paragraph, we were looking down
into the valley with Pierre seeing things as they looked "to him," but
here, wait: has the orientation weirdly shifted? The
grammatical subject of the relevant sentence is an abstract noun,
condition--more
concretely, Lucy's condition. What is emerging more visibly? Lucy's
condition. From what is Lucy's condition "disentangling and defining
itself? From, emerging out from, its "nearer mist."
ITS. Possessive pronoun, third person, antecedent "the condition of Lucy." Nearer to whom I guess is still the question. Most immediately to Lucy,
below, still contrasted with Pierre above, in or closer to the "upper fog." It is the same "lower mist" as in the previous paragraph, only pictured now
as nearer, closer to Lucy. Yes all of this has reference to the mind of
Pierre, his conscious thoughts and unconscious stirrings. These
metaphorical mists that lately had hidden Lucy from Pierre's conscious
thoughts are both "nether" and "nearer": "nether" to Pierre on the
mountain, "nearer" to Lucy in the valley. Lucy's condition is emerging
from the mists nearer to, closer to Lucy's condition, which are also
nether, lower mists in Pierre's subconscious mind.
What is Lucy's figurative condition? That of a cruelly suffering crime victim,
tied up in the basement and held for ransom. O!
In
Wordsworth's scene a sea of mist covers the valley below, seen
through an opening or "gulf" in the mist. Bordering this figurative bay
is a figurative "shore" of familiar things, all comfortably natural:
cabins, woods, lawns. Melville's Lucy belongs to the same kind of cozy valley
scenery, seen like the features of Wordsworth's "pleasant shore" through
a hole in the mists. In Wordsworth's passage, bird songs and other
sounds from that homey lower world waft up through "nearer mist." That's
the mist closer to the birds, people, cows and dogs.
I
think. Hmm. I have to admit what Wordsworth means by his "nearer
mist" is for me hard to de-mistify. And what about other (later?)
versions with many changes including the change of "nearer mist" to
"nearer vapours"? Somebody somewhere must have a better explication of all this. Here's something helpful, possibly. Tracing the influence of
Beattie's The Minstrel and James Clarke (
Survey of the Lakes),
Stephen Gill explains that "for Wordsworth, the nearer, domestic" sounds are distinct, as in Clarke, "but not those heard through the
gloomy midway gulf." Well, that's the association I was getting at,
Wordsworth's "nearer" in relation to the valley as more
domestic, which is exactly the condition of Lucy now in relation to Pierre's lofty new enthusiasm.
I still need to get hold of earlier studies, especially:
Maxine Moore, "Melville's Pierre and Wordsworth: Intimations of Immorality." Ha! immorality.
New Letters 39 (Summer 1973): 89-107; and
Michael Davitt Bell, "The Glendinning Heritage: Melville's Literary Borrowings in
Pierre."
Studies in Romanticism 12 (Fall 1973): 741-762; and
Hershel Parker, “Melville and the Berkshires: Emotion-Laden Terrain,
‘Reckless Sky-Assaulting Mood,’ and
Encroaching Wordsworthianism,” in
American Literature: The New England Heritage, ed. James Nagel and Richard Astro (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981) 65-80.
And Johnathan Hall, "The Non-correspondent Breeze: Melville's Re-writing of Wordsworth in Pierre." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 39 (1993): 1-19.
You probably knew Melville's copy of
The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth has been reproduced digitally at
Melville's Marginalia Online. Descriptive Sketches is one of the Juvenile Pieces, the line with "nearer mist" appears on page 50--nope, no markings by Melville here or anywhere in this section of the book.
More
to ponder, as usual.
Update
The later reference in
Pierre to the
"resolute traveler" in the Alps (Book 21.1) evokes the mountain setting of the earlier passage with "nearer mist" in it. The later, more elaborate passage on the Switzerland of the soul thus returns to the landscape of Wordsworth's "Descriptive Sketches" which describe "a pedestrian tour among the Alps." Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker point out the main correspondences of symbolism and imagery in
Reading Melville's Pierre, 161. And why "resolute"? Melville's characterization of the "traveler" as "resolute" sounds like another nod to Wordsworth, alluding to the "Traveller" of
"Resolution and Independence," the poem that
Melville would parody the following year in "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! (1853).
Hey look! a whole
dissertation by Cory R. Goehring on
"The Wordsworthian Inheritance of Melville's Poetics."
And check this out, Robert A Duggan, Jr. on Melville's poem "The House-top" and The Prelude.
It's great to see the Wordsworth-gap closing, as identified by R. D. Madison:
"The study of the relationship between Melville and Wordsworth remains one of the largest gaps in Melville criticism."
-- "Literature of Exploration and the Sea" in A Companion to Herman Melville (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006; paperback 2015) edited by Wyn Kelley, page 285.
