Herman Melville | American literature

Herman Melville | American literature

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Henry Major Tomlinson's ecstatic first take on Moby-Dick

Henry Major Tomlinson
vintage snapshot print, 1922 by Lady Ottoline Morrell
 Image Credit: National Portrait Gallery, London

Or, one conversation starter for the 11th International Melville Conference next year in London... 

In Moby-Dick as Doubloon, editors Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford present four pieces by H. M. Tomlinson in praise of Melville's great whale book:

1.  [The Odd Priorities of American Professors: Time for Wordsworth but not Melville] (1921)
2. [A Supreme Test of a Reader] (1921)
3. [Melville's Emergence from Limbo] (1923)
4. [The Great War and Moby Dick] (1926)

The second of four extracts by Tomlinson (editorially titled "A Supreme Test of a Reader") is from The Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, Nov. 5, 1921. In More Evidence of H. M. Tomlinson's Role in the Melville Revival, Mary A. Taylor gives a related piece, Tomlinson's juicy letter to Christopher Morley from the New York Evening Post, February 5, 1921. This earlier 1921 item was reprinted in The Publishers Weekly, Volume 99 - February 12, 1921:

There's the letter to Morley and more Tomlinson in Critical Essays on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker. Tomlinson also wrote the insightful preface to the 1929 E. P. Dutton edition of Melville's Pierre. Hershel Parker has a good deal to say about H. M. Tomlinson in the "Historical Note" to the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Moby-Dick. Reprised and developed engagingly in Reading Billy Budd; and in Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative. The 1922 photo of Henry Major Tomlinson (with Lord David Cecil) shown above is one of several by Lady Ottoline Morrell in the Photographs Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London. As remarked in the Northwestern-Newbery edition of Moby-Dick (page 748), "a surprising number of Lady Ottoline Morrell's friends came to know The Whale or Moby-Dick."

But here's something I don't remember seeing before: the first ecstatic response to Moby-Dick (World's Classics edition, Oxford University Press) signed "H. M. T." in The Nation Volume 28 (January 1, 1921): 483. "H. M. T." is definitely Henry Major Tomlinson (1873-1958), author of The Sea and the Jungle and literary editor of The Nation. Tomlinson's review appeared in the first number of 1921, only a month before The Nation (edited by H. W. Massingham) merged with The Athenaeum to become The Nation & The Athenaeum. This then will be H. M. Tomlinson's first public take on Moby-Dick, bringing us closer than ever to the "consternating ecstasy in the office of The Nation" that Hershel Parker reenacts in the back of the Northwestern-Newberry Moby-Dick. Tomlinson gets so excited he relocates Father Mapple's chapel from New Bedford to Nantucket.

The World of Books.

THE "NATION" OFFICE, THURSDAY NIGHT.

IT was a book I had always known I was fated to read, but it never came my way till recently, when the Oxford University Press, as the unconscious agent of Providence, sent it to me in its new dress as a World’s Classic. There being 700 pages of it (but only at half-a-crown, and for the pocket), and each page full of lively words that, like the colors of the kaleidoscope, flowed incessantly to form new pictures and strange, I was, of course, carrying the book about with me, as a ready means of escape from these latter days. I met a friend whose opinions of books must be listened to with respect, and occasionally with pain and annoyance, and having this packet of newly-found magic in my pocket I said to him: "Do you know ‘Moby-Dick '?" Usually he is prompt with a creditable comment, but this time he hesitated, as though I had touched crudely on a matter that was personal and difficult. “I have known it for years,” he said presently; “but it is a book I seldom recommend, as I am hardly ever sure that the other fellow deserves it." He had never recommended it to me.

* * *

Perhaps my friend is right. Perhaps “ Moby-Dick" ought not to be divulged, except with care. But there is another way of looking at it. If a reader of books wants to know the truth about his understanding of English prose, whether it is natural and genuine, or whether his interest in it is but artificially suggested, like going to church or voting at elections, there is a positive test. Let him read this book by Herman Melville about a whale. If he doesn’t like it, then he—well, he can go to church.“Moby-Dick," written when Melville was thirty-two, was first published in New York in 1851. This edition from the Oxford Press has an introduction by Viola Meynell, who says that in it Herman Melville has endowed human nature with writing that she believes to be absolutely unsurpassed. “To read it and absorb it is the crown of one’s reading life." That may seem somewhat extravagant. When I read her introductory praise of the book (though not before I had followed the whale to the end) I thought, first, it was extravagant; though extravagance in praise of such a work is naturally the way one’s surprise and gratitude would instantly go. But now I am not sure. There is an important sense in which Miss Meynell is exactly right. I think it very likely that anyone who finds he cannot read “Moby-Dick” with delight, wonder, and some fear, has reason to doubt that he is more than learning to read.

* * *

A WELL-KNOWN literary critic once assured me that there were not more than 5,000 people who could read English. As soon as imagination begins to sport with the language, then the familiar words are changed; they take a look of mockery; they seem a little mad; they become free of our rules; they behave indecorously, seem giddy, are translated from dull, well-known lumps into shadows and wraiths uncanny with varying lights and implications; they startle us with half-suggestions of powers we never knew existed; they flit too perilously near the horizon of what we call sanity, and become speculative symbols in the distance weaving a mazy pattern of which we can but guess at the purport. Our own words then seem to have nothing in common with us. That gentleman who thought he had been using “prose" all his life was wrong. All he had been doing was to make noises, prompted by a few primitive instincts, which experience had taught him would be understood by his neighbors. So Miss Meynell is right when she calls this book the crown of one’s reading life. There is no other book like "Moby-Dick." It is about the sea and ships, and a remarkable voyage with some queer characters, and it is also a natural history of the sperm whale. Moby-Dick himself, the whale, is a principal character, but we do not meet him till we are ending the voyage. Yet, as in all great books, something in it is suggested that is beyond and is greater than anything it tells us. Melville’s narrative is drama, and over the little figures of men who move in it there fall shadows and lights from what is ulterior and tremendous. The men, whales, and ships in it, busy weaving the interest of the story, are felt to be relative to a greater and undivulged motive of which the author knows no more than the reader. Through the design made by their voyages and encounters there is determined, as by chance, a purpose not theirs.

* * *

Now I wish to say something about the book, critically, I find it is like trying to criticize the Congo, or the precession of the equinoxes. The book defies the literary critics, who are not yet familiar with sperm whales. Standing before this drama in a scientific spirit is like being a child with a spade and pail determined to investigate the Pacific Ocean. While reading “Moby-Dick” you often feel that the author is possessed, that what he is doing is dictated by something not himself which sometimes makes him use our accepted symbols with obliquity, with an apparent abandon; you fear, now and then, the sad and steady eye of this fascinating Ancient Mariner is on the point of flaring into a mania that may be prophecy, or may be incoherence. His words soar to the limit of their hold, on the known and reasonable. Yet they do not break loose. Nevertheless, we know Herman Melville became mad; and, knowing that, we are forced after reading “Moby-Dick,” to question whether our common-sense is really sanity at all. It is possible we have not sufficient intelligence to raise it to the height at which Melville lost his. After all, what is common-sense? The commonest sense, Thoreau tells us, is that of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

* * *

ALL one can say of “ Moby-Dick " is that it is unique. There is no other book of the sea the least like it. And how should one write of great whales, missing ships, and the Southern Ocean? Perhaps in the mind of the man who would do it the shadows not thrown by what is visible should be already stirring. They should darken and mystify his words, they should be like the forms of the unknown glimpsed deep below us in the pellucid but unfathomed sea. Yet “Moby-Dick ” is not a sad book. There are chapters in it of days along the equator which are radiant. There is an account of an attack by boats on an armada of sperm whales in Japanese seas which, for most of the uses to which English prose has been put, is miraculous in what it conveys. Somehow, Melville’s words are consonant with so immense a spectacle. And is there in all our literature such a picture of a church service as Melville gives us of Father Mapple’s church in Nantucket? Is there a better sermon than that on Jonah and the Whale which we hear preached there to Whalers, and the wives and widows of Whalers? Is there in Dickens or anywhere else such a remarkable inn as the Nantucket “Try Pots"? In fact, I find I have scored almost every page of “Moby-Dick” for quotation. But it is no good trying to quote from the rainbow and the eclipse.

H. M. T.

--The Nation v28 - Saturday, January 1, 1921 - page 483 This is the Google-digitized volume from the University of Michigan, now accessible online courtesy of the Hathi Trust Digital Library.

After his New Year's Day effusion (composed actually at the end of 1920, the night before New Year's Eve), Tomlinson received numerous "letters of genuine gratitude" which he playfully acknowledged in The Nation on February 12, 1921--again in the "World of Books" section:

A few weeks ago THE NATION shook out some signal bunting (There she Blows!) on sighting “ Moby Dick." The signal, it must he confessed, was more like dressing the ship rainbow-fashion, irregular if you like, but certainly the sign that something very unusual was in view. The result may be interesting to those who, before they address themselves once more to the golf-cure, hold that the public has no more interest in literature than themselves. “Moby Dick" is not a book which a bookish man would consider to be one that would draw a large and pressing crowd to the shop-windows. Yet if I had recommended a prayer in answer to which the Income Tax Commissioners would assuredly let go their hold of a victim, I could hardly have received more letters of genuine gratitude. Several of the letters were incoherent, because, I suppose, written immediately after reading the last chapter, when Ahab has perished, and the white whale has sounded once again and for ever. It was evident that some of those letter-writers would not have noticed it if, at that moment, the Income Tax had made another of its terrifying leaps. I have the certain assurance of a miracle. During the past month a certain number of men and women have been fascinated—and possibly changed, in a lasting way, in very nature—not by a grave speech by the Premier, not by the fall in prices, not by the immediate promise of revolution, not by the noble eloquence, choked with emotion, of Bottomley, not by the nervous agitation in Sunday papers for the family circle as to whether the ladies really do intend to lengthen their skirts again; no. By nothing the Press even mentioned. By something of which its tape machines are utterly ignorant. By a sperm whale which never existed, except as a bee in a sailor’s bonnet.
--The Nation v28 - February 12, 1921 - page 665

Maybe the earliest published response to Tomlinson was that of  "A Wayfarer," writing three weeks later in The Nation, January 21, 1921 as follows:

IT is clear that the wind of the spirit, when it once begins to blow through the English literary mind, possesses a surprising power of penetration. A few weeks ago it was pleased to aim a simultaneous blast in the direction of a book known to some generations of men as “Moby Dick.” A member of the staff of THE NATION was thereupon moved in the ancient Hebrew fashion to buy and to read it. He then expressed himself on the subject, incoherently indeed, but with signs of emotion as intense and as pleasingly uncouth as Man Friday betrayed at the sight of his long-lost father. While struggling with his article, and wondering what the deuce it could mean, I received a letter from a famous literary man, marked on the outside “Urgent,” and on the inner scroll of the MS. itself “A Rhapsody." It was about “Moby Dick.” Having observed a third article on the same subject, of an equally febrile kind, I began to read “ Moby Dick” myself. Having done so I hereby declare, being of sane intellect, that since letters began there never was such a book, and that the mind of man is not constructed so as to produce such another; that I put its author with Rabelais, Swift, Shakespeare, and other minor and disputable worthies; and that I advise any adventurer of the soul to go at once into the morose and prolonged retreat necessary for its deglutition. And having said this, I decline to say another word on the subject now and for evermore.

This last bit of controlled excitement appeared in The Nation along with other items in the regular "London Diary" of "A Wayfarer"--pseudonym of editor H. W. Massingham, as Kevin J. Hayes points out in The Critical Response to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. It's reprinted in the Hayes volume on page 44 as "[A Moby-Dick Testimonial]." Massingham's verdict must have been valued at Oxford University Press as weighty and authoritative. A snippet of the early and almost sobering response to Tomlinson by "A Wayfarer" was rapidly incorporated in the advertisement for the Oxford Moby-Dick which appeared in The Nation and The Athenaeum on February 19, 1921:

"... I hereby declare, being of sane intellect, that since letters began there never was such a book, and that the mind of man is not constructed so as to produce such another; that I put its author with Rabelais, Swift, Shakespeare, and other minor and disputable worthies; and that I advise any adventurer of the soul to go at once into the morose and prolonged retreat necessary for its deglutition."

Related post:

• Reade's Whale
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2019/08/reades-whale.html
  
  

Orville Dewey repeated Lowell lectures on Human Destiny in New York City, January-February 1852

The New York Public Library Digital Collections

UPDATE: Links are now provided below to the New York Daily Tribune articles on Orville Dewey's lecture series, where I found them in the database of Historical American Newspapers at the great Library of Congress Chronicling America site.

So Orville Dewey repeated his popular Lowell lectures on Human Destiny at the Church of the Messiah on Broadway in New York City.

In October and November 1851 Orville Dewey had lectured on The Problem of Human Destiny to full houses at the Lowell Institute in Boston. Hershel Parker gives the dates in Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative, courtesy of Dennis Marnon:

“Dewey delivered 12 lectures on successive Tuesday and Thursday nights late in 1851: Oct. 21 and 23, Oct. 28 and 30, Nov. 4 and 6, November 11 and 13, Nov. 18 and 20, Nov. 25 and 28.”

As Parker shows in his Herman Melville: A Biography V2 and, with Brian Higgins, Reading Melville's Pierre, the unmistakable influence of Dewey and his popular lecture title shows up in Book 17 of Melville's Pierre, when the young hero receives an obsequiously written request to lecture on "Human Destiny." Higgins and Parker date the parody of Dewey's chosen subject to January 1852, when

"Melville remembered the pomposity and arrogance of the title of Dewey's lecture series and wrote the lecture title "Human Destiny" into his book as the ne plus ultra of fatuousness." --Reading Melville's Pierre - page 15

No doubt Melville knew of Dewey's popular Lowell lectures in Boston. Coolly practical Falsgrave and Plinlimmon both probably owe something to Dewey (Higgins and Parker 14-17). That dig at Dewey's lectures on "Human Destiny" occurs in the first chapter that Melville seems to have added in anger after a big fight with his friend Evert Duyckinck, in early January.

Still, the timing of Dewey's repeat performances in New York suggestively coincides with Melville's latest additions and revisions to the manuscript of Pierre--completed before February 20, 1852 when his brother Allen signed the Harpers contract in New York (Parker, V2.93). Yep, Human Destiny was the talk of the town when Pierre was finally turned over to the Harpers.

In Manhattan at the Church of the Messiah, Dewey gave eight lectures on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from January 27, 1852 (first in the series) to February 19, 1852 (eighth and final lecture). Accounts of each lecture were published as follows in the New York Daily Tribune:

I. New York Daily Tribune, Wednesday, January 28, 1852

The Problem of Human Destiny.

BY REV. DR. DEWEY.

LECTURE I. [Tuesday, January 27, 1852]

The course of lectures by Rev. Orville Dewey, on the Problem of Human Destiny, was opened last evening in the Church of the Messiah before a numerous audience. The special interest of the problem, said Dr Dewey, which he proposed to discuss consisted in the fact of the existence of evil. Without this, the condition of man on earth would present few mysteries. Floating down the easy current of existence, he would be a mere partaker of enjoyment; he would observe, but would not question; and content with the present, would not attempt to explore the future for the solution of his doubts. But evil exists. It throws its dark shadow over the fairest scenes of our present life. We are exposed to physical evil, which is pain, and to moral evil, which is sin. An irresistible instinct has always compelled the human intellect to pry into the reason for this condition of our being.

It may be said that the subject is above our comprehension. Man, in attempting to penetrate its depths, has been compared to a fly, attempting to explain the revolution of a wheel, by which he is carried round. But with this mock modesty, said Dr. D., I do not sympathize. It is the sentiment of the atheist or skeptic. It proceeds from arrogance rather than humility. Even the famous saying of Socrates, that he knew nothing but his own ignorance, had its origin in intellectual pride. For my own part, continued the lecturer, I make no claim to this philosophical ignorance. I venture to believe that I know something about the subject, and stand here to tell what it is. Not that I pretend to have wholly fathomed its infinite depths. I have not exhausted its illimitable wealth. Nor does the emigrant to California exhaust the affluent stores of her golden placers. But this fact does not forbid our engaging in the research with confidence, for we may be certain that some precious fruit will await our labor.

For after all, it is a problem which we propose to discuss. And a problem, by its etymology pro ballo Greek, means something which is thrown out for consideration, something to be examined on all sides, like a ball which is to be kept rolling. We may compare the universe to a ball, wound round with the mysteries of life, of which we endeavor to catch a glimpse in its rapid revolution, even if we cannot fathom its vast profundities. After a series of comments on the argument of Leibnitz, as set forth in the Theodice, Dr. D. said that he should explain the existence of evil on the following principles.

It is no limitation of the attributes of the Deity to assert that he cannot make a contradiction possible. The illustration is often used that God cannot make two mountains without a valley between them. But the question does not involve the consideration of power, in the slightest degree. It is not correct to say, that God cannot do the thing, but that the thing cannot be. It is an absurdity, in the nature of things. It follows from the nature of a triangle, that the sum of it angles is equal to three right angles. It cannot be otherwise. To ask whether God could not make a triangle, the three angles of which should be equal to five or seven right angles, is the same as to ask whether he could construct a figure, which should be a triangle and not a triangle at the same time, or in other words, whether he could make an impossibility possible.

Applying these principles to the question of the origin of evil, Dr. D. argued that the present system is created, is not self existent, does not depend on its own inherent energies. Hence, it must be limited. This is involved in the fact of creation. The thing created cannot share the fullness of the Creator. The finite must by the nature of the case be inferior to the Infinite on which it depends. Hence, it must be imperfect, and hence EVIL, natural and moral. It is inherent in the very idea of creation. Its absence would be an impossibility, would imply a contradiction; for if the created being were not liable to evil, it would be perfect; but perfection is an attribute of the Creator. The creature and the Creator, on this supposition, would be identical. Evil must therefore be inevitable in any system of creation.

The same thought may be presented in another light. All created being must begin somewhere. The fact of beginning implies infancy, or imperfection, or in other words evil. The first time a thing is done, the result must be inferior to the excellence which comes from long practice. This is another illustration of the inevitableness of evil in a created system.

Proceeding from these views, to the fact of the moral freedom of man, Dr. D. showed that evil was an essential contingent in the discipline by which he was trained to virtue and happiness. This point was elucidated by a variety of considerations, with which the lecture was finally brought to a close.

II. New York Daily Tribune, Friday, January 30, 1852; describes second lecture on “various adaptations of the material universe to the uses of man, as indicative of the power and benignity of the Creative Providence.” To demonstrate "influence of natural beauty on the soul," Dewey closed by quoting from the first book of Wordsworth's The Excursion:

----------Sound needed none,
Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank
The spectacle: sensation, soul, and form
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live; they were his life.
In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the living God,
Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired.
No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request;
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the power
That made him; it was blessedness and love!

III. New York Daily Tribune, Thursday, February 5, 1852 describes third lecture on “the subject of human organization, regarded in its connection with the formation of character and the development of mind.”

Now-a-days we have a philosophy of everything. The most superficial treatises of shallow sciolists are dignified with the title of philosophy. But the true aim of philosophy is elevated and rational, and intimately connected with the progress of humanity. Let us, then, examine the difference between the organization of man and that of the lower animals, in regard to its influence on the training and perfection of his spiritual nature....

A coarse skin is almost incompatible with a refined mind. If I knew a man who could let a fly creep over his face without feeling it, I should be apt to set him down as harsh and coarse-grained in his spiritual nature, and destitute of noble, expansive and sympathetic sensibilities. The skin in man, then, is an efficient means of his spiritual education....

Another important element in his training to higher ends is the faculty of laughter. The animals are not endowed with this power, unless the grinning of monkeys is an exception. This is not merely an expression of the sense of the ludicrous. Laughter is the symbol of a contented mind, of a genial fellowship, of a comfortable sense of satisfaction, and tends to unite the scattered elements of society in a common feeling of fraternity. Its influence on health is not to be overlooked. An explosion of laughter is an excellent aid to digestion. Superior to old wine, or old cheese, or other celebrated peptic persuaders.

IV. New York Daily Tribune, Saturday, February 7, 1852; describes fourth lecture “on the Human Soul, in reference to its capacities for spiritual culture.”

When I ponder over the lucid pages of Dugald Stewart, that most sublime modern philosopher, to whom such a just and eloquent tribute has been paid by Sir James Mackintosh, I feel as if I were a head taller and can only give vent to my ineffable feelings by striding across the room.

V. New York Daily Tribune Thursday, February 12, 1852 Dewey's fifth lecture “devoted to a consideration of the complex nature of man, consisting of soul and body, as adapted to his spiritual culture.”

The complex nature of man, moreover, places him in society, with all its comprehensive and powerful influences. This was the grand educator of the race. Some of its features have been considered unfavorable to human development, such as its selfishness, its inequalities, is competition, and its solidarity. But the ill-effects of these had been greatly exaggerated. Wealth and rank are the objects of strong aversion with many: they have been called in question by the moralist, ridiculed by the satirist, and abused by the cynic. But they form a part of the inevitable system of inequality which prevails in the world. I am opposed, indeed, said Dr. D. to the possession of hereditary wealth, founded on a system of entails. But where every man has a fair chance, no hurtful inequalities can exist. And you cannot do them away. Make all men equal to-morrow, they would at once change places, and the old distinctions would return. Nor was competition so rife as it was often stated. There was little of it in the country. It was almost exclusively confined to cities.

VI. New York Daily Tribune, Monday, February 16, 1852; reports sixth lecture on “the forms of human activity and the conditions to which they are subjected, considered in their relations to spiritual culture."

He was going to lead his audience, said Dr. D. into the midst of common every day themes. He did not pretend to be the teacher of a transcendental philosophy, but trusted that he was able to expound the principles of common sense…. It was a great error first put forth by feudalism, and strengthened by the institution of slavery, that labor was disgraceful, whereas it is one of the primeval ordinances of the Creator, and at the basis of human improvement and dignity....

... The conditions of human activity, noticed by Dr. D., were imperfection, illusion and fluctuation. In treating of illusion, he said that many persons had a great desire to obtain the absolute truth, but he doubted whether this was desirable. Remove the thin veil of mysticism which covers the universe, dispel all the bright illusions which now so strongly pique the imagination, let everything be presented in the pure and awful reality, he doubted whether the human eye could bear the spectacle. After giving an eloquent panegyric on sleep, under the head of fluctuation, with some remarks on the fancied superiority of angels to men, the Lecturer closed his original and instructive Discourse.

VII. New York Daily Tribune, Thursday, February 19, 1852; reports seventh lecture on the subjects of Pain, Hereditary Evil, and Death:

... certain conditions of human life which were usually regarded as most perplexing and mysterious. They present themselves before us in grim array, challenging investigation, and demanding us to reconcile them with the order of Providence.  In every age they have caused many anxious doubts.  The sublime mind of Plato seems at times to have staggered beneath their weight, as when he describes them as the work of some inferior, malicious demon; although, on the whole, he appears to have inclined to the theory of necessity, as developed in the present course.  This is the only key to the mystery, as has been already stated….

... But pain is necessary as a lesson of prudence.

VIII. New York Daily Tribune, Friday, February 20, 1852; on “the grand movement of humanity, or the phases of progress in the history of man.”

The lecturer then gave a condensed and graphic sketch of the course of civilization from the earliest ages to the present time. Everything shows that progress has been made in government, arts, literature, religion and social happiness. But this is only a foretaste of what we may expect. The visions of Condorcet, who, in the midst of the ferocity and carnage of the French Revolution, wrote a treatise on the destiny of the race to freedom, virtue, and happiness, had a foundation in reality. The lecture was closed with a glowing description of the resources of the present and the hopes of the future, for the advancement of humanity.