Melville in Cleveland, 1858

Herman Melville gave his lecture on Roman Statuary in Cleveland, Ohio on January 11, 1858. Melville sounded pleasantly intoxicating if not in fact intoxicated to one listener who noted his "boozy elocution" in a review published the following week in The Ohio Farmer. As for the substance of the talk on Statues in Rome, this remarkably perceptive Ohio reviewer liked what Melville said about art, but deplored his criticism of Christianity.

According to the masthead, Ohio Farmer was owned and edited by Thomas Brown. After his death in 1867, Brown was remembered as "a writer of no ordinary ability" in Appleton's Annual Cyclopaedia.

The Ohio Farmer - January 23, 1858
via GenealogyBank

HERMAN MELVILLE.

This gentleman, already well known to the readers of light literature, as the author of "Typee," "Omoo," "Moby Dick," &c., lectured before the Library Association last week, on "Roman Statuary."

The lecture, in point of style, was very good; superior, in that respect, to nine-tenths of the lectures usually delivered. There is a dreamy beauty about the utterances of the author, suggestive of the balmy atmosphere of the South Pacific. If we are not mistaken, there is a kind of hazy-lazy air common to both; at all events, as we sat and listened to the boozy elocution of the speaker, an intoxication, as of opium or profuse odors, "lapped us in Elysean pleasures."

We think the lecturer would have it so. It seemed to us as if the writer had never forgotten his imprisonment among the Pacific cannibals, and half regretted his extradition from that physical paradise. We would venture a bet that Mr. Melville, with all his admiration for the Medicean Venus, thinks Fayaway worth a score of cold unhabited marbles.

It seemed to us as if the writer had never recovered from his captivity. His affection for heathenism is profound and sincere. He speaks of the heathenism of Rome as if the world were little indebted to christianity; indeed, as if it had introduced in the place of the old Roman heroism, a sort of trusting pusillanimity.

This under-current of regret, or sorrow, or malice, at the introduction of christianity, seemed to pervade the whole lecture, and marred one's enjoyment of the fine observation and the deep sympathy manifest in every part of the performance. His beautiful sentiments, felicitous diction, and exquisite choice of terms were merely so many chaplets to adorn a corpse. Hung about heathen manners and heathen morals, they flung their beauty and fragrance over death and corruption.

So far as the lecture was confined to the limits of the title, it was masterly and without offense. The portraiture of character was very fine. We could have sat for hours witnessing this skillful and appreciative master of ceremonies taking the robes from the pictured pages of Tacitus and putting them upon the lifeless marbles of the Vatican, and there breathing into them the breath of life, till Rome became living Rome again; but we can not reverse the proverb and believe that a dead dog is better than a living lion. The carrion-feeding eagle is not nobler than the lion of the tribe of Judah.

In Melville as Lecturer (Harvard University Press, 1957), Merton M. Sealts, Jr. credits David Mead with the earliest mention of the Ohio Farmer review, citing Mead's Yankee Eloquence in the Middle West: The Ohio Lyceum, 1850-1870 (Michigan State College Press, 1951), pages 75-6 and 256. Mead quoted the Ohio Farmer on Melville's reportedly "boozy elocution," a phrase that Sealts omits in summarizing. George Kummer's 1936 article "Herman Melville and the Ohio Press" is available online courtesy of Ohio History Connection.

Reconstructed texts of "Statues in Rome" and Melville's other lectures are available in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860.

Related posts:

• More on Melville in Cleveland
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/02/more-on-melville-in-cleveland.html

• Can art, not life, make the ideal?
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2015/02/can-art-not-life-make-ideal-herman.html

Scored in Melville's New Testament

These verses are marked in Luke 2, as shown at Melville's Marginalia Online:

9  And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid. 

10  And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. 

14  Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds / 1833-34, Thomas Cole
The Chrysler Museum of Art

Herman Melville lived in Albany from October 1830 to April 1838, so hey! he could have seen Cole's great new painting The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds when it was on display in City Hall (1834) or at the Albany Museum (1835). From the Albany Argus, Tuesday, March 18, 1834, reprinting early praise in the New York Evening Post (Thursday, March 13, 1834) for Cole's picture which was then on exhibit at the American Academy of Fine Arts: 

COLE has just executed a large picture of the Angel appearing to the shepherds of Bethlehem, which is now exhibiting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Barclay street. The right of the picture represents the towers, houses, and cottages of Bethlehem, grouped on the borders of a lake and drawn with great beauty of disposition and coloring. In the sky directly over the stable which is supposed to shelter the infant Saviour, is seen the miraculous star shedding its cool light over that part of the landscape, and partially reflected in the water below.—On the left of the picture appears the Angel floating on roseate clouds in the midst of a flush of light which seems to proceed from the opened heavens. Three shepherds occupy the foreground, one of whom is prostrate with his face on the earth, another appears just recovering from the awe and amazement excited by the glorious apparition, and a third, a venerable old man, stands leaning on his staff, gazing with an air of mingled curiosity and veneration at the spectacle, and listening to the proclamation of the reign of peace and benevolence uttered by the celestial messenger. This group is happily imagined and well executed. Around are scattered their flocks over a broken rocky country, and in the distance other shepherds with their flocks are all descried. The contrast between the solemnity and repose of the right hand portion of the picture and the splendor of the left has a delightful effect. The work does great credit to the genius and skill of Mr. Cole.—[ N. Y. Evening Post.

dreadful glory

Isaac Watts, by unknown artist. 
National Portrait Gallery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Glorious! to find poetry by Melville appreciatively discussed in so respectable a place as the NY Times Opnionator, in the recent online commentary by Cynthia Wachtell, Melville's About-Face. Wachtell is doing something I love, comparing different versions of texts. John Bryant by the way wrote a great book about the pleasures of that enterprise, The Fluid Text, well deserving of wider readership. In her Opinionator piece, Wachtell essentially offers what Bryant would call a "revision narrative" to account for two small yet potentially significant changes Melville made (or rather tried to make before publication) to the text of his brief Civil War poem, "Inscription for the Slain at Fredericksburgh." As Wachtell explains, Melville wanted to change "Slain" in the title to "Dead," and "glory" to "dreadful glory." A third change, "Strown" to "Strewn" receives no comment. There we catch Melville regretting his grammar. To discuss that about-face gets you deep into the grammar of weak verbs with strong past participles. Yow! No wonder Watchell won't touch "strown" or "strewn."

Let's just say Melville rejected "strown" as distractingly archaic, and let it go.

Wachtell unconvicingly treats "slain" and "dead" as synonyms with different connotations or associations, one ("slain") more romantic and one ("dead") more realistic. But wait, these words are not semantically the same, not quite. Slain means killed by someone, even murdered, violently--right? Slain conjures the slayer. Dead seems by contrast more neutral, concerned with the fact of death, not the manner. Melville's tribute memorializes the military dead as proactive heroes of their own lives. They acted bravely, performed a deed worthy of a song. Slain threatens to steal some of that hard-won glory from the patriot and give it to the rebel. Forget for now the Confederate slayers, this one is for the noble Union dead.

Wachtell reads the d-words "dead" and "dreadful" as attempts by Melville to modify a conventionally pious stance through the "starker" language of "nascent realism." This interpretation strangely conflates romanticism and reverence, regarded as equally quaint and delusional, apparently, to which Wachtell opposes realism, regarded it seems as a later, less embarrassing stage of human development. But who in the world, any world, wants realism on a memorial inscription to dead soldiers? But let that go, for now. I truly meant to consider "dreadful glory," the interesting change from this

A glory lights an earnest end;

to this:

A dreadful glory lights an earnest end;

Wachtell sees in "dreadful" a change of heart, Melville's "about-face" away from the familiarly worshipful "glory":

His insertion of “dreadful” to modify “glory,” like the substitution of “dead” for “slain,” subtly alters and challenges the otherwise reverential tone of the work.  (Melville's About-Face)

But here's the thing. The change to "dreadful glory" makes the tone more not less reverential. Whatever tension or conflict dreadful poses for glory is thoroughly traditional. The challenge perceived by Wachtell derives not from the dictionary of realism, but the dictionary of Protestant hymnody and theology. God's righteousness (glory) is conventionally placed alongside the terror of God's (dreadful) wrath. Melville's change to "dreadful glory" echoes a number of Protestant hymns, most notably Psalm 65 in the verse translation by the "progenitor of the English congregational hymn" Isaac Watts. Watts's psalms in Melville's day were widely available, collected (and awaiting perusal at Google Books) for example in popular hymnbooks such as A Pastor's Selection of Hymns (Philadelphia, 1860).

With dreadful glory God fulfils
What his afflicted saints request;
And with almighty wrath reveals
His love, to give his churches rest. 

Then shall the flocking nations run
To Zion's hill, and own their Lord;
The rising and the setting sun
Shall see the Savior's name adored.
(Psalm 65, Isaac Watts)

We knew Melville liked to use (and abuse?) Watts. Hershel Parker has called attention to the borrowing from Watts in Moby-Dick:

The words to popular hymns were often composed by notable religious poets such as Isaac Watts and William Cowper. Melville makes his lank Bildad, for example, sing Watts’s “A Prospect of Heaven Makes Death Easy” as he pilots the Pequod out of Nantucket in chapter 22 of Moby-Dick. --Melville: The Making of the Poet

And we knew Melville made poetic use of other metrical adaptations from the Psalms, not only from Watts. Again in Moby-Dick, Father Mapple's hymn is reworked from Psalm 18 in the hymnal of the Protestant Reformed Dutch Church. 

So rather than a jolt of "nascent realism," Melville's change to "dreadful" would have interposed the uncomfortable but nonetheless familiar Protestant view of God, or the divine, or divine dispensations, as terrifyingly awesome. This connection happens right away in the first line. Subsequent language similarly evokes Christian history and eschatology: a time of joyful restoration ("jubilee") when souls ("ghosts") are "transfigured." When are they transfigured?  The end time, raptured even to the "rapturous height" of, what, heaven?

No! The fallen at Fredericksburg are "transfigured" at the "rapturous height"

Of their passionate feat of arms.

Feat or defeat? Why "passionate"? Melville again employs biblical language to honor the dead as, well, like Christ and Christ's passion in their ultimate self-sacrifice.

The parallel to Christ is reinforced in the closing line, as Jason Skonieczny nicely points out in a comment on Watchtell's Opinionator essay:

"Strown their vale of death with palms" renders the fallen into Christlike victims"

As Skonieczny observes, the effects of the parallel are arguable. This indeed is where all the argumentative fun properly starts. Did the dead patriots martyr themselves, rapture themselves, transfigure themselves by their dauntless, thoughtless courage? And the best line has to be the fifth:

 Death to the brave's a starry night,---

Wow! What could be finer than that? Melville liked it so well he ended "Chattanooga" with the same line, slightly revised, in Battle-Pieces. 

But in the memorial poem for the fallen at Fredericksburgh, you need to get the allusion to Christ, and recognize some of the biblical terms and themes to begin to get what Melville was about.
Along with references to passion, palms, rapture and transfiguration, the nod to Watts in "dreadful glory" shows Melville aiming high, investing his brief "Inscription" with the hallmark of an old and much-beloved religious hymn.

Inscription For the Dead At Fredericksburgh

A dreadful glory lights an earnest end;

In jubilee the patriot ghosts ascend;

Transfigured at the rapturous height

    Of their passionate feat of arms,

Death to the brave's a starry night,---

    Strewn their vale of death with palms.

--Correspondence and Published Poems and Ishmailites