Likely inspired by negative mentions of "literary Dilettanti" and "Dilletantism" in the preface to John Aitken Carlyle's prose translation of Dante's INFERNO
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| Illustration of Dante's Inferno Canto 6 by Giovanni Stradano, 1587. |
In Book IX of Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities (1852) Herman Melville alludes to "horrible allegorical meanings" in Dante's Inferno as something beyond the ken of a nameless hypothetical reader, clueless but happy, whom Melville or his narrator labels "the Dilletante in Literature":
"Fortunately for the felicity of the Dilletante in Literature, the horrible allegorical meanings of the Inferno, lie not on the surface...."
In a similar contrast between naive and knowing readers, the "deeper significances" of Hamlet are said to elude "all but the rarest adepts." Melville fans will recognize in this section of Pierre a version of the contrast in Hawthorne and His Mosses between the "superficial skimmer" and a more discerning "eagle-eyed reader." In the "Mosses" essay, as here in Pierre, the thing supposedly missed by insufficiently attentive readers concerns the problem of evil. The "mystery of iniquity" is a major theme of Melville's later writings, too, especially his epic religious poem Clarel and the uncompleted novella, Billy Budd.
The terrible truth, as Melville understands it, is the presence of evil in the very fabric of creation, which makes sin and misery ineradicable as well as universal. In this view, only by way of the darkest visions and doctrines--of Original Sin as conceived by Calvinists, of the creator as malicious demiurge according to Gnostics, of the Hindu goddess Kali, consort of Shiva the destroyer--may the truth about the elemental nature of evil be apprehended.
Tracing the influence of Dante in Mardi and Pierre, Dennis Berthold in American Risorgimento: Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy (Ohio State University Press, 2009) finds in Pierre a satire of the naive hero's "literary pretensions" and, more broadly, of the 19th century "Dante revival" in America, "which undoubtedly had its share of dilettantes" (page 138). Here Berthold called attention to cultural resonances evoked by "the Dilletante in literature," but the focus in American Risorgimento on Henry F. Cary's verse translation as Melville's source-text did not allow for consideration of any more precise borrowing. No form of dilettante occurs anywhere in Cary's Dante. More context, including previously unidentified textual prompts for Melville's dismissive handling of the literary "Dilletante," may help to explicate the main idea of this interesting passage.
To much the same effect, Melville's 1857-8 lecture on "Statues in Rome" began by contrasting the "technical" expertise of "the dilettante" with deeper, more personal and penetrating responses to great works of art:
With Dr. Carlyle, Melville in full truth-seeking mode presumably would prefer the interpretations of grounded, reality-based readers on the lookout for meaning and wisdom, and hopefully believing in the promise of salvation. Unfortunately, no fine insights into the true meaning of Dante avail the tragic hero of Melville's novel. Poor Pierre! He can't avoid his fate, once challenged to do right by Isabel Banford, allegedly his half-sister. Melville (as Berthold points out) withholds from his fictional hero any hope or even knowledge of Dante's journey through Purgatory to Paradise. Crusading for justice to Isabel, Pierre will abandon the Beatrice he already has in Lucy Tartan, his blonde-haired and blue-eyed sweetheart. (Lucy rebounds and heroically rejoins Pierre in the second half of Melville's novel, too late to save Pierre, his fake wife Isabel, or herself.) Back in Book IX, for now betrothed to Lucy but stuck between Dante's Hell and Shakespeare's Hamlet, Pierre experiences a psychic meltdown that leaves him "dabbling in the vomit of his loathed identity."
Otherwise, with respect to Dante's Inferno one would think the literal content is bad enough. It's literally Hell. What could possibly be more disturbing or "horrible" than graphic depictions of torture inflicted forever on the lost souls of human beings in nine successively worse Circles of Hell? In the most horrifying scene of all (Dante's Inferno Cantos 32-23), the shade of traitor Count Ugolino gnaws on the back of his betrayer's skull while both souls are hemmed in the same ice-hole. You have to wonder what business a dilettante would have with Dante in the first place.
Henry A. Murray in the 1949 Hendricks House edition at page 198 printed "Dilettante," correcting Melville's nonstandard spelling "Dilletante." Dr. Murray made no further editorial comment, except to observe in a professional way how deep-seated hostilities against the world may be interpreted as psychological "projections" by either the author or his fictional hero, or both (Introduction, xciii). Ignoring the emended form "Dilettante" adopted by Murray and others before him (in, for example, the 1923 Constable edition) the 1971 Northwestern-Newberry volume edited by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle retained Melville's spelling "Dilletante" as an acceptable variant.
Dilettante means "An admirer or lover of the fine arts" according to Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (Harper & Brothers, 1848) page 295. The word occurs infrequently in Melville's writings. In the second volume of Mardi: And a Voyage Thither, the antiquary "Oh-Oh" is comically depicted as a “dilettante in things old and marvelous.” Oh-Oh's name reflects his irrepressible enthusiasm for the arts, and artifacts. As representative dilettante, however, his passion for great rarities is that of a collector who is merely a collector, having little knowledge or even interest in their real meanings, or expressions of truth and beauty. Keeping in character, he overvalues numerous pieces of trashy ephemera, but lets Babbalanja have a priceless manuscript on how to achieve "A Happy Life" (by the Polynesian Seneca, hence loaded with stoic wisdom) for nothing.
"True, the dilettante may employ his technical terms; but ignorance of these prevents not due feeling for Art, in any mind naturally alive to beauty or grandeur."
-- quoted here from the reconstructed text by Merton M. Sealts, Jr. in The Piazza Tales, and Other Prose Pieces, edited by Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle, and others (Northwestern University Press, 1987) page 398.
Dilettante here is employed in the sense of "acknowledged expert," rather than "amateur" or "dabbler." Alternatively, "professional critic or connoisseur" as reported in several 19th century newspapers. A couple of published reviews have Melville using the plural form, dilettanti, still meaning something like "Art experts."
In Mardi, Melville's comic portrayal of Oh-Oh as "an extraordinary old antiquary" draws on negative associations of dilettante with superficiality, frivolity, and indifference to marks of deep, enduring value. In Pierre Book IX the hypothetical "Dilletante" has an equally shallow understanding of great world literature, according to the narrator. Likely prompts for Melville's invocation of the literary "Dilletante" in Pierre may be found in the preface to a book Melville definitely owned or had access to, Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Inferno. A literal prose translation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849) by Dr. John Aitken Carlyle, younger brother of Thomas Carlyle. Digital versions are accessible online courtesy of HathiTrust Digital Library; and also via the Internet Archive:
John A. Carlyle’s prose translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Inferno is Sealts Number 173a in the searchable “Catalog of Books and Documents Owned, Borrowed and Consulted by Herman Melville” at Melville’s Marginalia Online. As there noted, we know Melville read at least part of it because he quoted “John Carlyle‘s version” of Canto 3, line 26 (“And sounds of hands among them”) in one of his annotations to Henry Francis Cary’s verse translation (Sealts Number 174). If Melville's ironic slight of "the Dilletante in literature" in Pierre were at all inspired by mentions of "literary Dilettanti" and "dilettantism" in Carlyle's preface, then Melville must have had either the 1849 first edition (English, by Chapman and Hall in London? or American, by the Harpers in New York?) or the 1851 reissue of Dante's Divine Comedy: The Inferno. A literal prose translation by John A. Carlyle, M.D. As in Melville's usage "Dilletante," occurrences of "Dilettanti" and "Dilettantism" capitalize the initial "D" in both the English and American editions. However, only Harper & Brothers give the spelling "Dilletantism" (page xxii). The closer parallel to Melville's spelling of the base word "Dilletante" would seem to favor the American edition as the one Melville consulted.
Here below are four passages from the preface to John A. Carlyle's prose translation that individually or collectively might have influenced Melville's conception of "the Dilletante in Literature." Each example features a form of the base word dilettante.
- "In the year 1831, being called to Italy by other duties, I first studied the Divina Commedia, under guidance of the most noted literary Dilettanti of Rome and other places. I heard them read it with wondrous gestures and declamation, and talk of it in the usual superlatives." -- John A. Carlyle, Preface to Dante's Divine Comedy: The Inferno, page iv
- "During the seven years which followed, I often studied it again, at leisure hours, along with the other works of Dante; and got intimately acquainted with various Italians of different ranks, who, without making any pretensions to literature, or troubling themselves with conflicting commentaries, knew all the best passages, and would recite them in a plain, sober, quiet tone—now rapid, now slow, but always with real warmth—like people who felt the meaning, and were sure of its effect. To them the Divina Commedia had become a kind of Bible, and given expression and expansion to what was highest in their minds. The difference between them and the Dilettanti seemed infinite, and was all the more impressive from the gradual way in which it had been remarked." Carlyle, Preface, v
- "But to return. Having thus acquired a clearer idea of the Poem, and got fairly beneath the thick encumbrances of Dilettantism and other encumbrances, which hide its meaning, I began to be convinced that the quantity of commentary, necessary to make the substance and texture of it intelligible, might be compressed into a much smaller space than had been anticipated." Carlyle, Preface, vii
- It is impossible to mention all the other commentaries of the 18th century. That of Lombardi, which appeared in 1791, is such as could be written by the honest effort of a whole life, amid the "dark wood" of Dilletantism produced by a host of idle writers; and one feels a real respect for the worthy Friar, though at times he is surprisingly naïve, or perhaps dull.... Most of the old commentaries on Dante are written with a kind of large complacency, and genuine though long-winded enthusiasm, which makes them very interesting at first sight ; but on closer inspection, they are found to contain a surprising quantity of worn-out rubbish, and extremely little real information.
Preface, "Comments and Translations" pages xxi - xxii. As noted above, only the American edition by Harper & Brothers gives the spelling "Dilletantism" here. London editions in the same place (page xxx) make it "Dilettantism."
The context in John A. Carlyle's preface could hardly be more relevant to Book IX of Pierre. Dr. Carlyle's concern with the problem of rightly interpreting Dante is nearly identical with that of Melville, or Melville's narrator. To be sure, Carlyle's "Dilettanti" do not come across as mere amateurs or dabblers of the type often implicated in usages that rely on negative connotations of the term dilettante. Rather, as Carlyle describes them, "literary Dilettanti" for the most part are Dante Experts of high repute. Their deficiency lies in attending more to boring minutia than meaning. Or in their enthusiasm for comparatively superficial matters of form, technique, and special poetic effects. According to Carlyle, readers with a deeper appreciation of Dante have zero literary expertise or "pretensions to literature." Along with a shared seriousness, the best readers of Dante take the Divine Comedy for "a kind of Bible." Such readers unaffectedly treasure Dante's great work as an expression of the highest classical values of truth, goodness, and beauty.
More extensive debts to Dante in Pierre have been examined by G. Giovanni
Giovannini, G. “Melville’s Pierre and Dante’s Inferno.” PMLA, vol. 64, no. 1, 1949, pp. 70–78. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/459670. Accessed 28 Oct. 2025.
Giovannini, G. “Melville and Dante.” PMLA, vol. 65, no. 2, 1950, pp. 329–329. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/45947.
and Nathalia Wright
Wright, Nathalia. “Pierre: Herman Melville’s Inferno.” American Literature, vol. 32, no. 2, 1960, pp. 167–81. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2922675.
G. Giovanni most helpfully connects the problem of interpreting Dante's profounder "allegorical meanings," as raised by the narrator in Book IX, with the "melodramatic violence" displayed by Pierre when "trampling on the torn pages of the Inferno." As Giovanni shows, the hero's behavioral and mental health crisis is precipitated by his new awareness of evil, beginning with the sins of his own father lately disclosed through Isabel's claim of shared paternity.
Pierre's frustration on the sudden discovery of moral disorder is here roughly equated with Hamlet's; its ultimate source is the universalization of his father's moral lapse through "the horrible allegorical meanings of the Inferno." Limited in his experiential knowledge of the world, Pierre finds the form and generic significance of his particular perception of evil in the Inferno allegorically construed as a picture of life itself. The Inferno initiates Pierre into "that darker though truer aspect of things.
"Melville's Pierre and Dante's Inferno," pages 75-76
... These references to the Inferno in first half of the novel, from the time when Pierre first sees Isabel to his pretended marriage and departure with her for the city, are closely coordinated with Pierre's development towards a realization of the ubiquity and universality of evil. Melville conceives Pierre's development within the sequence of his confrontations of the Inferno, and sees the poem metaphorically as an index of a naive idealism resentful of the existence of evil."
"Melville's Pierre and Dante's Inferno," page 77
The effect of reading Dante and Shakespeare on poor Pierre, augmenting his new personal knowledge of worldly wickedness, is well summarized by Giovanni:
"...The fragments from the poets bring into focus a reality larger than Pierre's particular experience and central to the tragedy: evil is an integral part of existence, and the attempt to eradicate it must lead to tragic failure."
"Melville's Pierre and Dante's Inferno," page 76
In Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 2, 1851-1891 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) at page 435, Hershel Parker made reference to the "variant rendering of a line by John Carlyle" that Melville inscribed in his volume of Cary's Dante. Parker added, "in this case there is no other evidence that he had further knowledge of Carlyle's translation." Now, more than twenty years on, I am glad to offer multiple mentions of "Dilettanti" and "Dilettantism" or (as spelled on page xxii in the American edition by Harper & Brothers) "Dilletantism" as pretty good evidence that Melville read attentively in John Aitken Carlyle's preface--some time before the Harpers brought out Pierre in the summer of 1852.
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| Worcester MA Spy - August 5, 1852 |
