More on Melville in Cleveland

Cleveland Plain Dealer - January 9, 1858

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) for January 9, 1858; found at GenealogyBank:

HERMAN MELVILLE.-- The public may confidently anticipate a rich intellectual treat in the lecture of this gentleman on Monday evening. He has selected the classic subject of Roman Statuary, and we venture to say he will handle it excellently and brilliantly.  

Cleveland Plain Dealer - January 6, 1858
via GenealogyBank

Melville gave his "Statues in Rome" lecture at Melodeon Hall in Cleveland, Ohio on January 11, 1858. Also via GenealogyBank, from the Cleveland Plain Dealer for January 12, 1858:

Cleveland Plain Dealer - January 12, 1858

MELODEON.-- Mr. Melville's lecture on Roman Statuary last evening did not attract a large audience, but those who listened to it were generally, we believe, very well satisfied.  

As mentioned in a previous post, the reviewer for The Ohio Farmer (January 23, 1858) observed that Melville's "affection for heathenism is profound and sincere. He speaks of the heathenism of Rome as if the world were little indebted to christianity...."

The Cleveland Leader rated Melville's talk on Roman Statuary "one of the most interesting lectures of the season." Genealogy Bank archives currently include files of the Cleveland Leader but not for January-May 1858. Here is the summary in the Annals of Cleveland - 1858, W. P. A. Project 14066 (Cleveland, 1937) page 265:

2029 – L Jan. 12, 1858: 3/2 – Herman Melville's lecture yesterday before the Library association, was one of the most interesting lectures of the season. It was gathered from his lecture that the divinity of art is not a thing of education, that it borrows no radiance from traditional fame, but is inherent and immortal as the spirit of beauty itself. (11)

The favorable Cleveland Leader review of Melville's lecture on Statues in Rome is extensively quoted in Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville as Lecturer (Harvard University Press, 1957) at pages 31-34. Texts of Melville's three known lectures, reconstructed from contemporary newspaper reports, are also available in the 1987 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860.

Related posts:

• Melville in Cleveland
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2017/11/melville-in-cleveland-1858.html

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

Frank T. Bullen on global New Bedford and Melville's "glorious imagination"

Image Credit: Goodreads

From the Rochester [New York] Democrat and Chronicle, Sunday, October 13, 1901. Found in the online archives of Old Fulton NY Post Cards By Tom Tryniski. Also published the same day, Sunday, October 13, 1901 in the Cleveland Leader.

NEW BEDFORD ONCE OF FAMOUS INTEREST.

Frank T. Bullen's Memories of the Past and Impressions of the Present After an Absence of Twenty-six Years 

WRITTEN FOR THE DEMOCRAT AND CHRONICLE

... When I was last in New Bedford twenty-six years ago, like most other sailors, I did not stray far from the water-front, and felt as if my intrusion up-town would be resented. Knowing nobody, and by sheer stress of circumstances caring little for anybody as long as I was not in his power, like most other sailors, as I say, my experiences were confined to those lively quarters where seafarers most did congregate. And what a concourse it was! I do firmly believe that nowhere in the wide world could have been found such a congeries of fortuitous atoms of the human race as in New Bedford a quarter of a century ago. From all the isles of the South they came, sturdy of limb and clear of eye from Polynesia, lithe, sinewy, and cruel visaged from Malaysia, black with the blackness of soft coal from East Africa, stolid and haughty from Arabia, and last, but greatest both in number and importance, the stately cavalier-like Portuguese from that Atlantic cluster of jeweled isles, the Azores, Cape Verde’s and Madeira. A whole series of articles might be written by a competent man on the queer transmutations which have brought into closest, most intimate contact, these dusky denizens of one of the most retrograde, hide-bound of nations with the sturdy upstanding Puritans of England’s prime who feared not the face of man nor recked aught of right divine except it was that of the only wise King Invisible, eternal in the heavens. 

But as such a comparison, such a series of articles is utterly beyond either my scope or my intention, I must hark back to that quaint scene that might then be witnessed any day along the wharves of New England’s metropolis of whaling. Here at least, no matter how queer your garments or foreign speech, you might be sure that none would bestow a second glance upon you because of the certainty that upon your heels would be treading a queerer garbed, more foreign-looking individual than yourself. How splendidly has Herman Melville depicted this in the opening chapter of “Moby Dick.” How his glorious imagination runs riot among these scenes of marvelous color, those wonderful kaleidoscopic views of all the sea-skirting world’s representatives drawn to one small town by the exigencies of a unique business such as the world never saw before and in all probability never will see again.

Bullen's letter to the New York Times, September 30, 1905:

•  Mr. Bullen and Melville.

Raymond Blathwayt quoting Melville's Pebbles

Raymond Blathwayt
Vanity Fair (September 22, 1909)

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

On August 2, 1891 the New York Herald published an interview with William Clark Russell by Raymond Blathwayt under the title, "By the Seaside with W. Clark Russell." Blathwayt's interview closes with these lines from Melville's poem Pebbles:

Implacable I, the old Implacable Sea:
Implacable most when most I smile serene--
Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.
Curled in the comb of yon billow Andean,
Is it the Dragon's heaven-challenging crest?
Elemental mad ramping of ravening waters--
Yet Christ on the Mount, and the dove in her nest!

Is this the same interview, or some revised version of it, published December 20, 1889 by the Pall Mall Gazette?  In volume 2 of Herman Melville: A Biography, Hershel Parker cites the Gazette interview titled "The Novelist of the Sea" by an unnamed reporter (V2.899). In the Pall Mall Gazette, the same lines from Pebbles (published in John Marr and Other Sailors, the 1888 volume dedicated to Russell) are confusingly presented as "words never before published."

Costly answer: (after registering and paying up at the wonderful British Newspaper Archive) YES! The interview with Russell in the NY Herald is indeed a revised version of the unsigned interview published in the London Pall Mall Gazette, 20 December 1889. In revision, Blathwayt deleted the incorrect characterization of the quoted lines from a poem in John Marr and Other Sailors as "words never before published."

Blathwayt's 1893 book Interviews incorporates some material from the seaside interview as published in the Herald, and before that in the London Pall Mall Gazette, but not the lines from Melville's poem Pebbles.

On the same date as the NY Herald article, August 2, 1891, the same interview by Blathwayt appeared in the Cleveland Daily Leader under the heading, "Stories of the Sea / An Hour with W. Clark Russell the Charming Writer of Them..."

Brief notice of Battle-Pieces in Cleveland: "musical and meritorious"

From the Cleveland Daily Leader, Saturday, September 8, 1866:

BATTLE-PIECES AND ASPECTS OF THE WAR.

By Herman Melville. Extra cloth binding;
fine paper; pp. 272. Published by
Harper & Brothers: 1866. For sale by
Ingham & Bragg, Cleveland.

Mr. Melville has written some very musical and meritorious lines commemorative of battle-scenes, battle-grounds, and the memory of fallen heroes. The present volume is a collection of poems upon subjects introduced by the late war, and some of them of a high order of literary merit. It is entertaining, and will doubtless enjoy extensive popularity.

--found in the Newspaper Archives at Genealogy Bank

Edwin W. Cowles edited the Cleveland Leader.

"Before and during the Civil War, the paper was anti-slavery, with strong editorials pushing for the abolition of slavery and the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act." --Chronicling America