Miracle roses in ROSARY BEADS, borrowed from the real LIFE OF SAINT ELIZABETH

Good morning from the prairie! Breaking news... my latest essay on Substack, Saint Elizabeth's Miracle of Roses in Melville's Rosary Beads finds the inspiration for the red and white roses in the second stanza of Melville's poem Rosary Beads in the world-famous miracle roses of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary.

Excerpt:

Melville’s image of red and white roses that used to be meat and bread alludes to a delightful highlight in the life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, the miracle of the roses. The story is well told in a book we know Melville owned and commended to family members, The Life of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary:

Elizabeth loved to carry secretly to the poor, not alone money, but provisions and other matters which she destined for them. She went thus laden, by the winding and rugged paths that led from the castle to the city, and to the cabins of the neighbouring valleys.

One day, when accompanied by one of her favourite maidens, as she descended by a rude little path—(still pointed out) —and carried under her mantle bread, meat, eggs, and other food to distribute to the poor, she suddenly encountered her husband, who was returning from hunting. Astonished to see her thus toiling on under the weight of her burthen, he said to her, “Let us see what you carry”—and at the same time drew open the mantle which she held closely clasped to her bosom ; but beneath it were only red and white roses, the most beautiful he had ever seen and this astonished him, as it was no longer the season of flowers. Seeing that Elizabeth was troubled, he sought to console her by his caresses, but he ceased suddenly, on seeing over her head a luminous appearance in the form of a crucifix. He then desired her to continue her route without being disturbed by him, and he returned to Wartburg, meditating with recollection on what God did for her, and carrying with him one of those wonderful roses, which he preserved all his life. At the spot where this meeting took place, he erected a pillar, surmounted by a cross, to consecrate for ever the remembrance of that which he had seen hovering over the head of his wife.12

In humbly ministering to the poor Elizabeth did all the moralizing speaker asks in the second (or third, reviving “A Charm in Life”) segment of Rosary Beads. Through her generous and exemplary foodservice this princess did “live up to the Rose’s light” and duly received the promised blessing of red and white roses, unnaturally beautiful and magically transmuted from ordinary meat and bread. Faithfully narrated by Montalembert, the story of Elizabeth’s miracle roses is the poet’s unnamed exemplum in Without Price.

https://melvilliana.substack.com/p/saint-elizabeths-miracle-of-roses?r=n51cr&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Related post:

• A Charm in Life
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2022/09/a-charm-in-life.html

Herman Melville and the Bible

Herman Melville and the Bible: The Cambridge Companion to the Bible and Literature - March 2020

Ruth Blair has a fine chapter in The Bible and Literature, ed. Calum Carmichael (Cambridge University Press, 2020) with this to say about the "spiritual exercise" required by the demanding yet "often fluid and flexible" verse form of Clarel:

"... the poem engages the reader in a difficult journey, rather like the pilgrimage itself, on horseback--a mode of travel in which one cannot afford to lose concentration, and whose rhythm the tetrameter line echoes" (page 249).

The Hymn in Moby-Dick: Melville's Adaptation of "Psalm 18"

The Hymn in Moby-Dick: Melville's Adaptation of "Psalm 18": In 'The Sermon,' Chapter 9 of Moby-Dick, the hymn sung by the congregation of Whaleman’s Chapel contributes pointedly to Herman Melville’s realistic depiction of organized worship and to the thematic coherence of both chapter and work. As David H. Battenfeld first discovered, Melville’s source for the hymn is the first part of a rhymed version of the 18th Psalm (subtitled 'Deliverance from despair'), printed in The Psalms and Hymns of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in North America. This is the psalter and hymnal authorized by the church of Melville's mother, Maria Gansevoort Melville, in which he was baptized.1 Noting the book was first published 'in 1789, and was expanded in 1830 and 1846,' Battenfeld took his copy-text from an 1854 printing of Psalms and Hymns, apparently assuming 'Psalm 18' remained unaltered from the 1789 edition up to and beyond the publication of Moby-Dick in 1851. Moreover, Battenfelds analysis addressed only the ways Melville changed the hymn 'to fit the specific reference to the story of Jonah' (574); he made no effort to examine Melville’s alterations in light of ideas and images that inform Moby-Dick as a whole. But the actual setting of “Psalm 18” that Melville adopted was, in fact, not the version included in Psalms and Hymns until the book was expanded for the first time, after the synods of 1812 and 1813, and the text of this setting was altered for editions following...

Incurably irreligious

Found via EBSCO in the American Antiquarian Society Historical Periodicals Collection, specialized database of Congregational, Presbyterian, and Reformed Church Periodicals, 1803-1902. Transcriptions are mine.

From The Presbyterian, November 29, 1851. Published in Philadelphia by William Stockton Martien.

MOBY-DICK, or the Whale. By Herman Melville, author of "Typee," "Omoo," "White Jacket," &C. New York, 1851, Harper & Brothers. 12mo, pp. 634,

We are sorry to say that Mr. Melville has not improved in the religious features of his works. With a power of description almost unequalled, with a ready inventive faculty not often surpassed, he is incurably irreligious, and even seems to seek occasions to make things sacred the subjects of his irreligious wit. There is very much in this volume which is amusing and instructive, but we are so often repelled by his improper and indelicate allusions, that we can no more commend this book than we could Typee and Omoo.

Citation:
“MOBY-DICK, or the Whale.” Presbyterian (Philadelphia, PA 1831-1874, 1876), vol. 21, no. 48, Nov. 1851, p. 192. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cpp&AN=85450049&site=ehost-live.

From The Presbyterian, March 24, 1855:

ISRAEL POTTER; his fifty years of Exile. By Herman Melville, author of "Typee," "Omoo," &c. New York, G. P. Putnam & Co. 12mo, pp. 276.

The general irreligious tendency of Melville's writings have been a great off-set in the minds of many to their undoubted merits as works of genius. We observe less of this bad quality in the present, than appeared in some of his former books. The author undertakes, in this volume, to give the history of a rough New England hero, who made his bow to the public about the time of the battles of Bunker Hill and Lexington, was taken prisoner to the old world, and went through a series of most marvellous adventures. Melville's pen does full justice to the fruitful theme. 

Citation:
“ISRAEL POTTER; His Fifty Years of Exile.” Presbyterian (Philadelphia, PA 1831-1874, 1876), vol. 25, no. 12, Mar. 1855, p. 48. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cpp&AN=83553065&site=ehost-live.

Related post:

• Presbyterians on Pierre 
  http://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2019/01/presbyterians-on-pierre.html

Philip Jenkins on Melville's Dualism in "Lost Gnostic Poem"

 Alternative Scriptures: Melville's "Lost Gnostic Poem"

Philip Jenkins reads a Timoleon poem and locates Melville's poetical Fragments on the Albigensian part of the "Dualist/Gnostic continuum."

More curious is why it is allegedly “of the twelfth century.” All the Patristic sources concerning Gnosticism were focused on the first three or so centuries of the Christian era. Now, there were medieval Dualist movements in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries like the Bogomils and Albigensians, and many writers (including myself) have suggested possible continuities from ancient Gnosticism. I have even spoken of the Dualist/Gnostic continuum. In that sense, you could even imagine an Albigensian poem of the twelfth century, say, being described as Gnostic in a very broad sense.

Along the way, the Baylor historian raises interesting questions pertaining to the study of Melville's sources. Did Melville read Jules Michelet or Madame Blavatsky? Check out the enlightening blog post by Philip Jenkins for The Anxious Bench, on Patheos via the Evangelical Channel:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2017/06/fragments-lost-gnostic-poem/

Typee down the memory hole

Here's a glimpse of Typee as touchstone for arguments (not to mention deep and enduring hostilities), between Catholics and Protestants. Early criticism of Melville's first book on religious grounds came mostly from Congregationalist, Dutch Reformed, Methodist, Presbyterian, and other Protestant readers. Notwithstanding rebukes by Melville here and there of French Catholics, the readers who complained loudest about unfair treatment of missionaries in the first edition of Typee, and subsequently in Omoo, were Protestant.

Forgiving Melville his thoughtless impieties in the first edition, the evangelical Protestant press welcomed the American revised edition of Typee which removed objectionable parts with the author's complicity and blessing.

However, as the following item shows, the Catholic press noticed and lamented the expurgations. Anticipating the idea behind Orwell's memory hole, the Kentucky writer advises readers to hold on to their hard copies of the first, uncensored edition, lest Melville's unflattering views and remarks on Protestant missionaries disappear from the historical record.

"It seems that testimonies like these as to the real results of Protestant missionary efforts are not very palatable to the saints at home. Herman Melville spoke too plainly and honestly of what he beheld, and we are informed that his work, in more recent editions, has been, whether with or without his consent we know not, carefully freed from those passages which recorded the effects and success of missionary zeal. This fact should not be lost sight of, and those who have a copy of the first edition of his work should preserve it carefully, for the benefit of future times."

--The [Louisville, Kentucky] Catholic Advocate, Saturday, December 18, 1847;
found at Old Fulton NY Post Cards

Example of censored material, not present in the American revised edition of Typee:

How little do some of these poor islanders comprehend when they look around them, that no inconsiderable part of their disasters originate in certain tea-party excitements, under the influence of which benevolent-looking gentlemen in white cravats solicit alms, and old ladies in spectacles, and young ladies in sober russet low gowns, contribute sixpences towards the creation of a fund, the object of which is to ameliorate the spiritual condition of the Polynesians, but whose end has almost invariably been to accomplish their temporal destruction.

Let the savages be civilized, but civilize them with benefits, and not with evils ; and let heathenism be destroyed, but not by destroying the heathen. The Anglo-Saxon hive have extirpated Paganism from the greater part of the North American continent; but with it they have likewise extirpated the greater portion of the Red race. Civilization is gradually sweeping from the earth the lingering vestiges of Paganism, and at the same time the shrinking forms of its unhappy worshippers. --Typee, chapter 26

 1846 edition of Typee (uncensored), courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library:

This day 180 years ago

January 26, 1834. A snowy Sunday in Albany, New York. Herman Melville, 14 years old, was where?

Where he was supposed to be, in church.... From the 1834 journal of Herman's older brother Gansevoort Melville:

January 26th Sunday

On rising this m’g was glad to see snow, it is wanted very much for our streets have been perfectly bare for 10 or 12 days. Uncle Herman still remains with us, he is a very pleasant man in a family, more so than any man I am acquainted with. The snow storm prevented the female members of the family from going to church—Uncle Herman, Herman and Allan were all that went. My throat continues inflamed. (Boston Public Library Quarterly, October 1950)

Lacordaire, the model for Melville's Dominican in CLAREL

"The people once elected me
To be their spokesman. In this gown
I sat in legislative hall
A champion of true liberty--
God's liberty for one and all--
Not Satan's license. Mine's the state
Of a staunch Catholic Democrat."
--Clarel 2.25

Melville’s portrait of the Dominican priest in Clarel as “A champion of true liberty” draws heavily on the real life and times of Father Henri–Dominique Lacordaire (1802-1861). "Dieu et la Liberté!" was the motto of the journal L’Avenir (The Future), founded in 1830 by Lacordaire with Montalembert and others dedicated to the extension of civil liberties including basic freedoms of religion and education (separation of church and state), freedom of the press, freedom of association, and the extension of voting rights. In the 1862 review essay on "Lacordaire and Catholic Progress," Melville's converted countryman Orestes Brownson praised Lacordaire as:

"inherently a brave man, what we call a manly man, the hero of the pulpit, and the champion of free speech, free education, free thought, and free discussion."
-- Brownson's Quarterly Review - July 1862 

In her 1867 biography, Dora Greenwell calls Lacordaire

"the tried champion of popular liberty."  (130) -- Dora Greenwell, Lacordaire

Melville's democratically inclined Dominican distinguishes true liberty from a worldly, carnal understanding of freedom or "Satan's license." So too, Lacordaire, from the pulpit of Notre Dame preached that without Christ and the Church, "liberty becomes license" (in the paraphrase by Greenwell, 72).

Melville's Dominican "sat in legislative hall" as an elected representative of the people. Likewise Lacordaire was famous in his time for briefly serving in the French National Assembly. Historian Robert Gildea explains:

"Lacordaire was elected in Marseille, one of twenty priests and three bishops to be elected to the National Assembly, and took his place there dressed in his white Dominican robes."  Children of the Revolution: the French, 1799-1914 (Harvard University Press, 2010), 130.

Closer to Melville's milieu, volume 24 of Bentley's Magazine (1848) features a report on the National Assembly that laments the absence of Lacordaire:

"The strange white robe of the eloquent Dominican monk, the Pere Lacordaire, has disappeared: he has retired in disgust before the tumultuous nature of the National Assembly."  (77) -- Bentley's Miscellany, Volume 24

Writing in the London Theological Review 11 (1874), Charles Beard included the white robe in his catalog of essential traits and accomplishments of Lacordaire:

One of the great religious sensations of the times was the appearance of the white Dominican robe in the pulpit of Notre Dame, after so many years during which the public wearing of the dress of any religious order had been prohibited. Lacordaire lived to exhibit the same habit upon the benches of the National Assembly of 1848... But much more curious and interesting than this episode of religious reaction in France, is the completeness with which the mediaeval idea of holiness took possession of Lacordaire's mind, and the reconciliation which to a certain extent he effected in himself between the ascetic saint and the orator, the politician, the man of letters.
-- The Theological Review, Volume 11

Lacordaire's monastic asceticism is quite visibly shared by Melville's Dominican. Indeed, it's practically the first thing Clarel, Derwent, Rolfe, Vine, and company notice about the stranger, after his white robe:

Surprise they knew, yet made a stir
Of welcome, gazing on the man
In white robe of Dominican,
Of aspect strong, though cheek was spare,
Yellowed with tinge athlete may wear
Whom rigorous masters overtrain
When they with scourge of more and more
Would macerate him into power.
Inwrought herewith was yet the air
And open frontage frankly fair
Of one who'd moved in active scene
And swayed men where they most convene.  -- Clarel 2.25

Melville seems to have picked up his word "macerate" from The Inner Life of the Very Reverend Père Lacordaire, of the Order of Preachers (Dublin, 1867), which thus recalls Lacordaire's monastic "austerities":

"every kind of maceration in use among the saints; — hair-cloths, disciplines, scourges of every kind and description, were all known and practised by him!" (343) 

-- Bernard Chocarne, Inner Life

Melville's Rolfe looks "incredulous" at the Dominican's description of himself as a "Catholic Democrat." "Hardly those terms ye reconcile, " observes the priest, yet that's what Lacordaire was all about, "reconciling democracy with Catholicity" ("Two Catholic Reformers," Annals of St Joseph Volume 28 (July 1916) pages 73-75 at 73). Orestes Brownson, again, cited

"the democratic tendencies so apparent in Pere Lacordaire"
-- Brownson's Review - July 1862

 as essential and characteristic qualities.

James Trenor, in the translator's preface to Montalembert's Memoir of the Abbé Lacordaire (London, 1863) attests to Lacordaire's reputation for the very attributes that Melville gives his Dominican priest:

He fought for liberty; he was for twenty years the idol of the French youth. He was one of the greatest of modern orators. He was sent to represent France in the National Assembly at a time when the frock of the monk was looked upon with anything but favor.  (vi-vii)

In the introduction to American Risorgimento (The Ohio State University Press, 2009) Dennis Berthold summarizes Melville's take on the Dominican as "a satirical portrait of the Dominican priest" (page 23; elaborated in chapter 6 at pages 241-248). In his 2004 article for Nineteenth-Century Literature on "The Italian turn of thought" in Clarel, Professor Berthold pointed out that the Dominican’s confidence in Rome oddly ignores the curbed authority of the Pope in recently unified Italy (359-366). But "satirical portrait" ought to be reconsidered now, in light of Melville's use of defining details from Lacordaire's real-life story as the basis for his treatment of the Dominican. Even the historical incongruity remarked by Berthold nicely registers the influence of Lacordaire, who died nearly a decade before the 1870 annexation of Rome.

Lacordaire’s earlier activism in the cause of democratic liberties, his memorable election in 1848 to the French National Assembly, his eloquence in the pulpit of Notre Dame, and even his rumored “austerities” in the exercise of monastic self-discipline—all widely reported in contemporary sources—gave Melville ample material for his portrait of the

“Disinterested, earnest, pure
And liberal” -- Clarel 2. 26

exponent of Roman Catholicism.

Here's Lacordaire himself, writing in February 1861 on "Christianity and Democracy":

...the union of liberty and Christianity is the sole possible salvation of the future. Christianity alone can give liberty its real nature, and liberty alone can give Christianity the means of influence necessary to it.

M. de Tocqueville understood this, and this is the great feature of his life. Christianity made him a complete liberal, pure, disinterested, superior to the parties which divided the men of his day, and God willed that despite this superiority, he should win the unanimous homage of France, Europe and America. His opinions, like his memory, should be the compass of all those who think like you, Sir, and in the eulogium which I passed upon him, on a memorable occasion, I had no other intention than to throw into relief a figure evidently given us as a model. 

-- Montalembert, Lacordaire's Letters to Young Men, trans. James Trenor (London, 1865), 200-201.

Aha! So Melville puts Lacordaire's own words in Derwent's mouth (Derwent? I think that's right) in sympathetically describing the Dominican as disinterested, pure, liberal. In his portrait of the Dominican, Melville seems even to have appropriated the memorializing project that Lacordaire attempted for de Tocqueville, only applying it to Lacordaire himself. Just as Father Lacordaire says he aimed to eulogize de Tocqueville, so Melville, too, through his borrowings from the life of the historical Lacordaire, has attempted

"to throw into relief a figure evidently given us as a model." 

Related posts

• Saints as Syrens
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/08/saints-as-syrens.html

• Clarel's name
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2019/11/clarels-name.html