Litanie Des Saints

Unabridged! Welling's review of MOBY-DICK in the NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER

"... all the special pleading of a literary devil's advocate cannot prevent a writer of genius from assuming his appropriate place among the auctores classici of his nation and tongue."

My full transcription of the long and mostly laudatory review of Moby-Dick, or The Whale in the Washington, D. C. Daily National Intelligencer (December 16, 1851) restores the ornately fabricated intro figuring the author, any author, as potentially a candidate for sainthood, and the severer sort of critic (not the "bland and benevolent" kind) as a "literary devil's advocate." Everything from "After a saint..." to "the auctores classici of his nation and tongue" was omitted without explanation in the version given on pages 398-401 in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Although attributed there and elsewhere in Melville scholarship to William Allen Butler, the December 16, 1851 review of Moby-Dick in the National Intelligencer appeared in the regular and highly regarded "Notes on New Books" column by then literary editor James C. Welling. 

Dr. James C. Welling
via National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - U. S. Department of Commerce

Welling's authorship of "Notes on New Books" after the departure of former literary editor Edward William Johnston (by April 1851, if not earlier) was confirmed in a public statement by owner-editor William Winston Seaton that originally appeared under the heading "EDITORIAL ANNOUNCEMENT" in the National Intelligencer on August 30, 1860. News of Welling's appointment circulated North and South, often with reference to his authorship of "Notes on New Books," as in this extract from Seaton's original statement, reprinted in the Charleston, SC Daily Courier on September 3, 1860:

Charleston Courier - September 3, 1860 
via genealogybank.com

National Intelligencer.-- W. W. SEATON, Esq., the venerable survivor of the DAMON and PYTHIAS partnership of GALES & SEATON, announces the connection of JAMES C. WELLING with the editorship of the Intelligencer. Mr. WELLING is thus introduced:

Mr. Welling is no stranger in the columns of the Intelligencer, having been, in different capacities, connected with it for the last ten years, during the first five of which, after the retirement of the accomplished Edward William Johnston from the Literary department of the paper, Mr. Welling had charge of it, and was the author of those "Notes on New Books," which, by the scholarship and ability evinced in their composition, would, of themselves, be a sufficient evidence of the qualifications he brings to the tasks of journalism. But it is just to add that during the last five years he has participated in all the duties incident to the editorship of this journal, and has thus served a noviciate quite long enough to give full proof of his vocation to the exacting career upon which he has entered. Enjoying during this period, in the fullest degree, the confidence of my late lamented colleague, Mr. Gales, he has equally, by his high moral and conscientious character, no less than by his rare attainments, merited my own, and I avail myself of his temporary absence from Washington to make this announcement to the patrons whom it is the honor of the Intelligencer to address.

Most likely penned by James C. Welling, the complete review of Moby-Dick is transcribed below from the Washington Daily National Intelligencer of December 16, 1851. 

NOTES ON NEW BOOKS.

MOBY DICK: or the Whale. By HERMAN MELVILLE, author of "Typee," "Omoo," "Redburn," "Mardi," "White Jacket." New York: Harper & Brothers.

After a saint has been dead and buried long enough, that is, after his foibles and venial peccadilloes have been almost forgotten, and when accordingly it is proposed to affix his name to the long list of kindred worthies enrolled on the calendar, his pretensions to such canonization, it is well known, must be previously submitted to the ecclesiastical adjudication of the apostolic camarilla; and, still further to guard against the great scandal which might arise from the precipitate bestowal of this saintly investiture on personages whose lives have won for them an unenviable celebrity, and the symmetry of whose character has been marred by any one of the seven deadly sins, the merits and claims of every plaintiff for sainthood are subjected to inquisitorial post mortem examination, much as the Egyptians were wont to do before they would allow the defunct a burial ticket, save that the camarilla buries first and examines afterwards; for we shrewdly suspect that a few of the titled "saints" would never have attained their worshipful dignity if they had not been previously reduced to that condition which enables poets and fish, according to Peter Pindar, to shine with a lustre all their own. Now, in order that the plea for canonization may proceed after due process of law, an officer is attached to the apostolic chamber, known under the complimentary cognomen of the Devil's Advocate, whose duty it is, indeed, in the behoof of the commonwealth of Tartarus, to regard himself as a regularly licensed attorney-general of his satanic majesty, and whose function it is to rake, scrape, and collect all that can be truly or slanderously said, surmised, or thought against the claimant in this suit for an apotheosis among the saints. Thus it is easy to see that the calendar is kept pure, though persons of a cavilling disposition might allege against the equity of this judicial arrangement that, in order to ensure a poetic justice, the devil should be invested with the sole appointment of his deputy, and that it should not be lodged with the court, as is actually the case, without at least his advice and consent. Still, so far as we have read in the "apostolic constitutions," about whose genuineness so much ink has been shed, they contain no proviso of this kind, though it is patent that without it the "inalienable rights" of the aged Nicholas are no more protected than those of South Carolina without such an amendment to the American constitution as shall empower her, in her single sovereignty, to elect a President as well as the other thirty States! 

It is not, however, its political significance that has beguiled us into a reminiscence of this bit of ecclesiastical history; on the contrary, we have recurred to it because the fancy suddenly struck us that there was some analogy between the amiable task of the Devil's Advocate and that sometimes assumed by the critical functionaries of the press; for, as it is the office of the former to pick a deceased saint to pieces in order to preclude his admittance among the elect of the calendar, so also it sometimes becomes the duty of the latter to pluck a hapless wight of an author until he becomes like Diogenes's edition of Plato's man. And if the newspaper critics are not always given to diabolical detraction of the "presentation copies" which  authors and publishers so kindly furnish them, let it not be thought that our analogy fails, for it is hinted that the Devil's Advocate himself, for reasons of his own, has occasionally allowed a candidate for the saintship to pass muster without a very rigid scrutiny. Now, among the reasons which partly tend to induce this suavity of commendatory and stereotyped criticism, we believe there are two worthy of especial mention. In the first place, the critic's "presentation copy" is always fresh from the press, and as he opens it, with  paper-cutter in hand, he finds each particular page still redolent of the paper-mill. The perfume of new books is the critic's peculiar incense, and unless the reader, like that most gentle of men and genial of essayists, Elia, is fond of titillating his olfactory by inhaling the extract of printer's ink; unless, like Charles Lamb, we say, he  considers a new book superior to  any thing of Lubin's, he cannot duly appreciate the kindly and propitiatory influence it experts upon a bland and benevolent critic. And, in the second place, who but the veriest curmudgeon could find it in his heart to indite any thing severe against objects so goodly to the sight as new-bound books, printed, every one  of them, in "the highest style of modern art," and profusely embellished with pictures to match? For ourselves, we can never be induced to say aught against those "illustrated editions," all bound in "cloth, full gilt," or "Turkey morocco, extra." Such books are only intended for the centre table or étagère; and if they are only pleasant to the eyes, it matters little whether or not they are like the apple of Eve, to be desired to make one wise. And occasionally, when dulness entombs itself in the garnished sepulchre of Turkey morocco, we call to mind the provident maxim, nil de mortuis nisi bonum.

Thus it has come to pass, we imagine, that the bibliographical censors of the press are not always strict to mark the sins against Quintilian and Blair which may be detected in the "complimentary copies" laid on the editorial table. The familiar saw relative to the oral examination of a gift horse would protest against any such procedure. Still, it is undeniable that these self-appointed custodians of the world's literature, especially such as preside over the "reviews" and solemn "quarterlies," attend to this matter better; that is, more in the legitimate spirit of a devil's advocate. However much "bated breath" there may be among the changling critics of the daily press, it is always expected that these oracular organs will deliver the most authoritative and impartial responses; their strictures must be terrible, for, as the motto of the greatest of them all asserts, "Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur." The same Publius Syrus who furnished the Edinburgh reviewers this haughty motto of theirs, (though  the "smug" Sydney Smith tells us that none of its  founders had ever read a line in his dull works;) this same Publius, we say, has another sentiment that must  have been written for the especial accommodation of the newspaper critics: "Ad pœnitendum proprat qui cito judicat." Yet the great oracles have not always proved true in their critical vaticinations. To drop our persiflage, it may be doubted whether criticism exerts any thing more than a negative influence on the literature of the day. The most that even a sagacious critic can do is to anticipate the favorable or unfavorable decision that awaits some aspirant for transient or enduring literary distinction, provided such a rare work as that which aspires now-a-days to the latter should come within his ken. For, after all, it is the general sense and sovereign judgment of mankind that must put its broad arrow upon all that is noble in literature, while such works as are destined to a nine days' immortality will find their way to the grocery-stores and trunk-makers fast enough without being shown the road. After some luckless member of the literary Sisyphus family has been laboriously trundling his stone up to the summit, for a surly critic to help it to an additional kick downhill is at once most uncalled for and gratuitously malignant. We hope that our readers will not accuse us of unduly magnifying our office when we assure them that in our estimation the critics are at best only a set of literary jackals, appointed to prey upon authordom and cater for that great lion, the universal public.

And how often, besides, has  criticism overshot its mark? How many are the opinions of that megatherium of English literature, "the immortal" Doctor Johnson, which the subsequent  sense of enlightened men has reversed? Who now-a-days would carp at Milton as he did; who would call Gray a "barren rascal," or vote Fairfax's translation of Tasso a bore, or deny to Tristram Shandy the merit of humor? Or, in later times, was not Lord Jeffrey compelled to unsay much that he wrote while editor of the Edinburgh Review? Has Wordsworth any fewer admirers because the Edinburgh Reviewer met the "Excursion," on its first appearance, with the cheerful exordium of "this will never  do!" Is poor Keats less read because the London Quarterly killed him? We trow not. There were many able critics in France during the times of Voltaire, and no one, we presume, has forgotten how the Patriarch of Ferney and his allies in philosophical criticism disparaged a little book over which every reader has wept and melted, the "Paul and Virginia" of Bernardin de Saint Pierre. From these most easily-remembered examples we draw this useful inference, that all the special pleading of a literary devil's advocate cannot prevent a writer of genius from assuming his appropriate place among the auctores classici of his nation and tongue.

The professional criticism of the present day has run into channels somewhat remote from that which was once considered its legitimate province. It concerns itself not only with the application of critical rules to the judgment of literary productions, in which alone criticism may be said technically to consist, but has gradually developed itself into essay writing, so that our critical reviews, quarterlies, and similar periodical literature have become serial publications of essays on all literary and scientific subjects, the name and work of some author being taken as a mere caption to the articles, and having no more to do with the subsequent matter than the texts of certain clergymen have with their sermons: thus, instead of a critical analysis of Mr. Tennyson’s “Princess,” we have an elaborate disquisition on poetry in its nature and essence; instead of a critical examination of Mr. Macaulay’s History of England, we are treated to recondite disquisitions on the Philosophy of History, until the periodical review has become a pamphlet of essays or a fragment of the encyclopædia. If we were disposed on the present occasion to follow the example thus set us by our betters, we should forthwith proceed, taking “Moby Dick, or the Whale,” as our text, to indite a discourse on cetology. Such, however, is not our intention., Nor do we propose, like a veritable devil’s advocate, to haul Mr. Herman Melville over the coals for any offences committed against the code of Aristotle and Aristarchus: we have nothing to allege against his admission among the few writers of the present day who give evidence of some originality; but, while disposed to concede to Mr. Melville a palm of high praise for his literary excellencies, we must enter our decided protest against the querulous and cavilling innuendoes which he so much loves to discharge, like barbed and poisoned arrows, against objects that should be shielded from his irreverent wit. On this point we hope it is unnecessary to enlarge in terms of reprehension, further than to say that there are many passages in his last work, as indeed in most that Mr. Melville has written, which “dying he would wish to blot.” Neither good taste nor good morals can approve the “forecastle scene,” with its maudlin and ribald orgies, as contained in the 40th chapter of “Moby Dick.” It has all that is disgusting in Goethe’s “Witches’ Kitchen,” without its genius.

Very few readers of the lighter literature of the day have forgotten, we presume, the impression produced upon their minds of Mr. Melville’s earlier publications—Typee and Omoo. They opened to all the circulating library readers an entirely new world. His “Peep at Polynesian Life,” during a four months’ residence in a valley of the Marquesas, as unfolded in Typee, with his rovings in the “Little Jule” and his rambles through Tahiti, as detailed in Omoo, abound with incidents of stirring adventure and “moving accidents by flood and field,” replete with all the charms of novelty and dramatic vividness. He first introduced us to cannibal banquets, feasts of raw fish and poee-poee; he first made us acquainted with the sunny glades and tropical fruits of the Typee valley, with its golden lizards among the spear-grass and many colored birds among the trees; with its groves of cocoa-nut, its tattooed savages, and temples of light bamboo. Borne along by the current of his limpid style, we sweep past bluff and grove, wooded glen and valley, and dark ravines lighted up far within by wild waterfalls, while here and there in the distance are seen the white huts of the natives, nestling like birdsnests in clefts gushing with verdure, while off the coral reefs of each sea-girt island the carved canoes of tattooed chieftains dance on the blue waters. Who has forgotten the maiden Fayaway and the faithful Kory-Kory, or the generous Marheyo, or the Doctor Long Ghost, that figure in his narratives? So new and interesting were his sketches of life in the South Sea islands that few were able to persuade themselves that his story of adventure was not authentic. We have not time at present to renew the inquiry into their authenticity, though we incline to suspect they were about as true as the sketches of adventures detailed by De Foe in his Robinson Crusoe. The points of resemblance between the inimitable novel of De Foe and the production of Mr. Melville are neither few nor difficult to be traced. In the conduct of his narrative the former displays more of naturalness and vraisemblance; the latter more of fancy and invention; and while we rather suspect that Robinson’s man Friday will always remain more of a favorite than Kory-Kory among all readers “in their teens,” persons of maturer judgment and more cultivated taste will prefer the mingled bonhommie, quiet humor, and unstrained pathos which underlie and pervade the graphic narratives of Mr. Melville. Still we are far from considering Mr. Melville a greater artist than Daniel De Foe in the general design of his romantic pictures; for is it not a greater proof of skill in the use of language to be able so to paint the scenes in a narration as to make us forget the narrator in the interests of his subjects? In this, as we think, consists the charm of Robinson Crusoe—a book which every boy reads and no man forgets; the perfect naturalness of the narrative, and the transparent diction in which it is told, have never been equalled by any subsequent writer, nor is it likely that they will be in an age fond of point and pungency.

Mr. Melville is not without a rival in this species of romance-writing, founded on personal adventure in foreign and unknown lands. Dr. Mayo, the author of “Kaloolah” and other works, has opened to us a phantamagorical view of life in Northern Africa similar to the “peep” which Mr. Melville has given us of the South Sea Islands through his kaleidoscope. Each author has familiarized himself with the localities in which his dramatic exhibition of men and things is enacted, and each have doubtless claimed for themselves a goodly share of that invention which produced the Travels of Gulliver and the unheard-of adventures and exploits of the Baron Munchausen. Framazugda, as painted by Dr. Mayo, is the Eutopia of Negrodom, just as the Typee valley has been called the Eutopia of the Pacific Islands, and Kaloolah is the “counterfeit presentment” of Fayaway.

Moby-Dick, or the Whale, is the narrative of a whaling voyage; and, while we must beg permission to doubt its authenticity in all respects, we are free to confess that it presents a most striking and truthful portraiture of the whale and his perilous capture. We do not imagine that Mr. Melville claims for this his latest production the same historical credence which he asserted was due to “Typee” and “Omoo;” and we do not know how we can better express our conception of his general drift and style in the work under consideration than by entitling it a prose Epic on Whaling. In whatever light it may be viewed, no one can deny it to be the production of a man of genius. The descriptive powers of Mr. Melville are unrivalled, whether the scenes he paints reveal “old ocean into tempest toss’d,” or are laid among the bright hillsides of some Pacific island, so warm and undulating that the printed page on which they are so graphically depicted seems almost to palpitate beneath the sun. Language in the hands of this master becomes like a magician’s wand, evoking at will “thick-coming fancies,” and peopling the “chambers of imagery” with hideous shapes of terror or winning forms of beauty and loveliness. Mr. Melville has a strange power to reach the sinuosities of a thought, if we may so express ourselves; he touches with his lead and line depths of pathos that few can fathom, and by a single word can set a whole chime of sweet or wild emotions into a pealing concert. His delineation of character is actually Shakspearean—a quality which is even more prominently evinced in “Moby Dick” than in any of his antecedent efforts. Mr. Melville especially delights to limn the full-length portrait of a savage, and if he is a cannibal it is all the better; he seems fully convinced that the highest type of man is to be found in the forests or among the anthropophagi of the Fejee Islands. Brighter geniuses than even his have disported on this same fancy; for such was the youthful dream of Burke, and such was the crazy vision of Jean Jacques Rosseau.

The humor of Mr. Melville is of that subdued yet unquenchable nature which spreads such a charm over the pages of Sterne. As illustrative of this quality in his style, we must refer our readers to the irresistibly comic passages scattered at irregular intervals through “Moby Dick;” and occasionally we find in this singular production the traces of that “wild imagining” which throws such a weird-like charm about the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge; and many of the scenes and objects in “Moby Dick” were suggested, we doubt not, by this ghastly rhyme. The argument of what we choose to consider as a sort of prose epic on whales, whalers, and whaling may be briefly stated as follows:

Ishmael, the pseudonymous appellative assumed by Mr. Melville in his present publication, becoming disgusted with the “tame and docile earth,” resolves to get to sea in all possible haste, and for this purpose welcomes the whaling voyage as being best adapted to open to his gaze the floodgates of the oceanic wonder world; the wild conceits that swayed him were two—floating pictures in his soul of whales gliding through the waters in endless processions, and “midst them all one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.” This “grand hooded phantom,” thus preternaturally impressed on his mental retina, proves to be Moby Dick, a great white whale, who had long been the terror of his “whaling grounds,” noted for his invincible ferocity and for a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead, and a high pyramidical white hump on his back. It is not, however, his prodigious magnitude, nor his strange white hue, nor his deformed visage that so much invested the monster with unnatural terror, as the unexampled and intelligent malignity which he had repeatedly evinced when attacked by different whalers, so that no turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could smite his foes with more seeming malice. Ishmael embarks on board the whaling vessel “Pequod,” whose captain, Ahab, had been previously bereft of a leg in an encounter with the terrible “Moby Dick;” a spirit of moody vindictiveness enters his soul, and he determines to be avenged upon the fell monster that had, with such intelligent and prepense maliciousness, rendered him a cripple for life; the white whale swam before him as the incarnation of all those wicked agencies which some deep men, according to Mr. Melville, feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung; in other words, Capt. Ahab became a monomaniac, with the chase and capture of Moby-Dick for his single idea; so that all his powers were thus concentrated and intensified with a thousand-fold more potency than he could have brought to bear on one reasonable object. The “Pequod” encounters Moby Dick, and in the deadly struggle which ensues the whole crew perish save the fortunate Ishmael. On such a slender thread hangs the whole of this ingenious romance, which for variety of incident and vigor of style can scarcely be exceeded.

Review of MOBY DICK-1 16 Dec 1851, Tue Daily National Intelligencer and Washington Express (Washington, District of Columbia) Newspapers.com

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Dr. John, "When the Saints Go Marching In"

Saints as Syrens

Conference paper read June 19, 2009 at the École Biblique in Jerusalem, Israel for the Seventh International Melville Conference, Melville and the Mediterranean:

SAINTS AS SYRENS:

THE OLD FAITH AND MELVILLE’S NEW MYTHOPOEIA

When the saints go marching in Clarel (1876) they exemplify the bravery of unbounded, unsophisticated faith—a heroism of credulity, as it were—and affirm the catholicity of Melville’s aesthetic vision. The Roman Catholic bent is pronounced, as William Ellery Sedgwick found (213-17), and structural, in that the “poem-pilgrimage” happens, as Hilton Obenzinger has reminded us, in liturgical time (76). The favorable treatment of Catholicism is examined by William Potter as part of Melville’s larger fascination with “the intersympathy of creeds.” In a similar vein, Brian Yothers credits the sympathy for Catholicism, which for conservative Protestants in Melville’s day could still mean Sympathy for the Devil, as the impetus for the “broader consideration of religious pluralism” in Clarel. The high regard “for saints and icons” has been recognized by Vincent Kenny (140), and Joseph G. Knapp notices the “special fondness for Catholic saints” in Melville’s correspondence (99).

But no critic has elaborated Melville’s affinity for saints as charmers, most obvious in versified views of Saints Louis, Francis, and Cecilia, and warm praise for virgin martyrs. Nehemiah is a “saint” but no siren. Even granting his credentials as a venerable wanderer, his lonely evangelism converts nobody. Catholic saints are the dangerous ones. Their seductive charms for a wayward Protestant like Rolfe (or Melville) are cheerfully confessed when Derwent the Anglican priest compares virgin saints to the sirens of classical mythology. Through Derwent, Melville contemplates a bold project of mythopoeia or “myth-making” in recommending Catholic “legends” as “the poet’s second mine,” a new treasure trove (better than the old Greek myths) awaiting versifiers in the sweet, non-sectarian future.

The French Biblical School makes a fitting place to consider Melville in relation to what he appreciatively called “the Old Faith.” Here we are doubly indebted to Dominicans: first, for the hospitality of this important center of Catholic biblical scholarship; and second, for the example of Henri–Dominique Lacordaire (1802-1861), who in the early 1840’s revived the formerly banned Dominican order in France. Melville’s sympathetic portrait of the Dominican in Clarel as “A champion of true liberty” draws heavily on the life and times of Father Lacordaire, memorialized by one biographer as “the tried champion of popular liberty” (Greenwell 130). As Dennis Berthold has suggested, the Dominican’s confidence in Rome oddly defies new strictures on the political authority of the Pope in recently unified Italy (359-366). And yet, the historical incongruity 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 religious freedom, 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 characterization of the “Disinterested, earnest, pure / And liberal” exponent of Roman Catholicism. 

What draws the Dominican into the narrative action of Clarel is a song, Ave maris stella, “Hail, thou Star of Ocean.” Rolfe leads off the Vespers hymn to Mary, in observance of a pilgrim rite at the Jordan River. Derwent and Vine join in. Hearing the hymn in three-part harmony, the Dominican strolls over for what Larry David would call a “stop and chat.” The French guest gets a canto (2.25) to make his case as a “staunch Catholic Democrat” for Roman orthodoxy: Catholicism appeals to the heart and offers supremely adaptable and enduring modes of consolation to suffering humans when protestant reform, scientific rationalism, and revolutionary politics fail to comfort.

After the “new St. Dominick” leaves, the long talk “Of Rome” (2.26) between Rolfe and Derwent elicits Derwent’s admiration for Catholic saints―especially “sainted virgin ones.” He pictures the virgin martyrs as temptresses, “syrens” more captivating than fabled sea nymphs like Parthenope whose sweet songs lured mariners to destruction (lines 71-72). But Derwent fears not the siren’s snare of Catholicism. Securely lashed to his liberal theology, the Anglican priest esteems miracle tales for their aesthetic merits, devoid of dogma:

Her [Rome’s] legends—some are sweet as May;
Ungarnered wealth no doubt is there....
When much that sours the sects is gone,
Like Dorian myths the bards shall own—
Yes, prove the poet’s second mine. (Clarel 2.26:86-93)

Although Derwent never precisely defines “legends,” the context suggests the genre of saints’ lives, conventionally termed legendaries. His enthusiasm for saints’ lives as a literary goldmine is Melville’s. Writing to his brother-in-law on “Saturday in Easter Week” 1877, Melville praised “legends of the Old Faith” as “really wonderful both from their multiplicity and their poetry” (Correspondence 452). To illustrate, he commended the biography of St. Elizabeth of Hungary by the Count of Montalembert, the same “book of the sainted queen” which he had presented in October 1875 to his cousin Kate.

Derwent’s notion of Catholic legends as the “second mine” of future poetry likely derives from this passage in the introduction, as translated by Mary Anne Sadlier:

With regard to poetry, it would be difficult to deny that [popular religious traditions] contain an inexhaustible mine….a source of poetry infinitely more pure, abundant, and original, than the worn-out mythology of Olympus. (Life of Saint Elizabeth, pages 88-89)

Along with the mine metaphor, Melville was impressed by the critique of “worn-out” Greek myths. Absent the scorn, Montalembert’s comment underlies Melville’s idea that for “multiplicity” and “poetry,” legendaries like the Life of St. Elizabeth “far surpasses the stories in the Greek mythologies” (Correspondence 452). Montalembert’s long introduction, an effusive overview of religion, politics, and art in the thirteenth-century, repeatedly extols the poetry in saints’ lives. By “poetry” he means chiefly the imaginative, romantic display of “charming incidents, illustrative of all that is freshest and purest in the human heart” (84). Replete with “ineffable sweetness” (90), tales of saintly bravery and piety reflect “the implicit faith” held by Christians of every class in medieval Europe. Nevertheless, the poetic charm of saints’ lives is also an inherent quality that exists “independent of their theological value” (88).

More debts to the Life of St. Elizabeth appear in the canto “Huts.” Melville’s main source, unidentified before now, for the ritual separation of lepers in the middle ages is chapter 24 on the heroine’s poverty and spiritual development. Elizabeth grew in humility and mercy through her irrepressible devotion to the poor and sick, lepers above all others. As Montalembert explains (296), believers in those days identified the leper with Christ on the authority of Isaiah 53:4: “…we have thought him as it were a leper, and as one struck by God and afflicted.” Melville adapts the verse and its medieval Christian exegesis in saying that Jesus “as a leper was foreshown” (1.25: 27).

From the solemn liturgy for the exile of lepers as described by Montalembert (294-298), Melville appropriated the Mass for the Dead, procession to the leper’s assigned dwelling place, ritual blessing of household utensils, and consecration of the hut with graveyard dirt. He borrowed the priest’s admonition, “Be thou dead to the world, living again to God,” as well as the closing benediction and provision of the leper’s hut with cross and alms-box. Melville’s “chance citation” (1.25: 79) of Sybella, sister to King Baldwin III of Jerusalem, again mimics Montalembert, who cited the Countess Sybella of Flanders as a medieval “heroine of charity” for her saintly ministrations to the lepers of Palestine (297).

In focused takes on saints, Clarel further explores the possibilities for poetry mined from Catholic legends. St. Louis and St. Francis receive the most significant attention. Louis IX (1214-1270) of France, thirteenth-century king and crusader, was legendary for lifelong piety. We might find more to mourn than praise in some deeds of the historical Louis, who oppressed Jews to war on Islam. His two crusades were both disasters in deserts. Ironically, however, the spectacular failures of Louis in Africa heighten his appeal for Melville as a figure of the hapless enthusiast. Rolfe, wanting the confidence to journey through the Judean wasteland, invokes St. Louis as an icon of blind faith in blank places: “King, who betwixt the cross and sword / On ashes died in cowl and cord … St. Louis! rise, / And teach us out of holy eyes / Whence came thy trust.” In ten lines Melville glosses the archetypal virtues of Louis: his humility, symbolized by the monastic garb of “cowl and cord”; his courageous heart, seemingly undaunted by suffering; and his childlike trust, baffling in the face of unrelieved misery (2.13: 1-10).

Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) combines the “simple faith” of Louis with charm and love. Devoted spouse of poverty and now patron saint of animals and ecology, Francis lived on alms and preached to the birds, yet somehow reformed his world. Two cantos in book 4 of Clarel focus on St. Francis. In canto 13, the saint illumines Salvaterra, the Franciscan guide in Bethlehem. The noble-looking novice reminds the pilgrims of the young St. Francis (4.13: 176), but his zeal alarms them. Rolfe is pained by visual evidence of Salvaterra’s ascetic lifestyle. That, or his too-fervent belief in miracles also bothers Derwent, who kindly hopes the lad will learn to relax.

In the next Bethlehem canto, Rolfe approves the role of Franciscans as custodians of Christian shrines, justified he argues by the uniquely Christ-like life of the original begging friar:

Through clouds of myth investing him--
Obscuring, yet attesting him,
He burns with the seraphic glow
And perfume of a holy flower.
Sweetness, simplicity, with power! (Clarel 4.14: 69-73)

Melville’s phrase seraphic glow alludes to the reception of the stigmata as related in Bonaventure’s early Life of St. Francis. As Francis prayed on a mountain side for a physical experience of the crucifixion, his devotions became so heated they produced a “seraphic glow of longing” that transported him skyward (Salter 138). The crucified Jesus appeared to Francis in the likeness of an angel who imprinted on his body the five wounds of Christ’s Passion.

“Perfume” like “seraphic glow” marks the saint. But positive proofs of sainthood may overwhelm the mundane subject in divine attributes, “obscuring” the historical person while “attesting” the saint. Myths are all we know, “clouds of myths” to which Melville through Rolfe contributes. In times of spiritual dearth, as Northrop Frye argued, “poets have to hammer out their own archetypes…. hence the whole tradition of recreated mythology” (91). Here, myths that hallow Francis blur his ordinary humanness but confirm his best and most exemplary charms as Melville recreated them: “Sweetness, simplicity, with power!”

Derwent perceives the sweet humility of Francis as a feminine weakness, unbecoming in a “manly” man. Rolfe exalts the supposedly feminine side of Francis as entirely Christ-like. Derwent’s objection to sweet St. Francis betrays a gender bias or double-standard that Rolfe does not share, and forces Rolfe to defend compassion, sensitivity, and yielding love as redeeming Christian virtues. Rolfe rightly fears his case for Christian charity will seem “too orthodox” in its assumption of sinful human nature (4.15: 108). Rather than hear Rolfe preach on innate depravity, Derwent changes the subject. Still, Rolfe’s tribute to the “sweetness” of St. Francis echoes Derwent’s springtime simile, “sweet as May,” even if its inventor meant exclusively to honor women saints.

Of the women Cecilia enjoys the status of a favorite in Melville’s private calendar of saints. In Italy he had seen Raphael’s St. Cecilia, and he read and marked high critical praise for the painting in travel narratives, as Douglas Robillard has shown. And, as Robert K. Wallace reports, Melville owned a print of Cecelia after Domenichino. In Clarel Melville glances twice at Cecilia. Her stamped image, enthroned “'Tween angels with a rosy crown,” graces the cover of Rolfe’s hymnal. Attributes of Cecilia also convey the allure of Vine, whose uncanny “charm of subtle virtue” operates like

…that perfumed spell
Of Paradise-flowers invisible
Which angels round Cecilia bred. (Clarel 1.29: 24-26)

Timothy Marr reads these fragrant paradise flowers as a sign of Melville's "islamicist imagination," particularly evoking the cultural fascination with peris as beautiful and otherworldly female spirits. Another source for the scent of unseen “Paradise-flowers” is the section on Cecilia in the second volume of Anna Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art. As Jameson relates, Cecilia made a secret vow of chastity before marrying a wealthy Roman named Valerian. After converting and receiving baptism, Valerian found the maiden sanctity of his bride divinely approved by the presence of “an angel, who was standing near her, and who held in his hand two crowns of roses gathered in Paradise, immortal in their freshness and perfume, but invisible to the eyes of unbelievers” (585; emphasis mine). Chaucer’s “Second Nun’s Tale,” another possible source, lacks two words used by Melville, perfume and invisible, that are to be found in Jameson’s prose sketch of Cecilia, the first of “Four Great Virgins of the Latin Church” (along with Agnes, Agatha, and Lucia). Holy fragrance links Cecilia and Francis as bona fide saints, and reveals more than we knew of Melville’s reading in hagiography and art history.

Jameson’s influential study of Christian iconography contains saints’ lives in abundance, with rich treatments of virgin martyrs. But Melville leaves them alone, mostly. “Arm ye, forearm!” warned Derwent, urging Rolfe to beware those virgins, lest their heroism convert him. The allure is real, the response ambiguous. Even Rolfe, the most catholically inclined of the non-Catholic pilgrims, stops short of acceptance. For one thing, outright conversion would terminate his job as philosophical rover, a seeker not a finder. And Rolfe like Melville is enamored of myths and rituals from many cultures and eras, not exclusively Roman Catholic ones. To follow the example of, say Cardinal Newman or Orestes Brownson would be to stop wandering, which truly Melvillean pilgrims never do. Had Melville gone Catholic and systematically devoted himself to writing sonnets on Jameson’s virgin saints he would not be Melville. He would be…

Commander William Gibson, United States Navy (1825-1887). In 1877, just one year after the publication of Clarel (1876), this unsung navy poet quietly turned out nine sonnets collectively titled “The Brides of Christ.” The whole sequence was first published in the Catholic World, and then reprinted with other verses on saints including Francis of Assisi in the 1881 collection, Poems of Many Years and Many Places. Gibson’s major source for sonnets on Dorothea, Cecilia, Agnes, Catherine, Margaret, Barbara, Agatha, Lucia, and Ursula was Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art. The cycle offers both the “multiplicity” and “poetry” that delighted Melville in “Legends of the Old Faith.” As Derwent preferred, Gibson keeps the legends “sweet as May,” and remarkably innocent of Church doctrine.

Sweetness, simplicity, with power. Fragrance and fire. These distinguishing features of Rolfe’s feminized aesthetic also distinguish Gibson’s virgin saints. Childlike simplicity defines Agnes and Margaret. The martyred Agnes inherits pastoral “meads of asphodel,” eternally preserving her employment as Christ’s shepherdess: “I lead his lambkins by my lily bell, / Where the pomegranates shade the softest sward.” No virgin saint, says Gibson, is “more meek and mild / Than sweet St. Margaret.” Sweet but strong, too: she’s a “Daisy” who overmastered the dragon Satan. Other “Brides of Christ” blaze, like Francis in Clarel, with fire and fragrance. Dorothea the “little martyr-maid” commissions an angel “with hair like odorous flame” to confound doubters with the fragrant testimony of flowers and fruit from Paradise. Barbara, though “soft as rosy May,” is also the “Christian Bellona,” as terrifying as the Roman goddess of battle. Proving her might, a cannon blast of “instant fire” incinerates her murderous father. Agatha’s power lives on in her veil, a relic strong enough to thwart the destruction of a convent by arresting molten lava in full flow from Mount Etna: “That Red Sea curdled by Saint Agatha!”

Fire and fragrance are again conjoined in “The Ecstasy of St. Theresa,” too daringly erotic perhaps for the Catholic World but appended to “The Brides of Christ” in Gibson’s 1881 volume. Theresa, the foremost of “unworldly yearners” in Clarel (3.1: 14-15), “swim[s] in flowers and flames,” overwhelmed in the sensuality of her longing for Christ as mystical lover. Inspired by the Bernini sculpture in Rome, the sonnet likens the “voluptuous agony” of Theresa’s desire to the yearning “of pagan maidens” for Apollo. Christ as Apollo, and St. Barbara as war goddess creatively associate Classical and Christian ideals, much in the same way that Melville’s Rolfe, as Walter E. Bezanson notes, habitually links Christian traditions with settings and motifs from Greek mythology (NN Clarel 817; 831).

As we have seen, the mythology of Olympus seemed a “worn-out” mine to Montalembert and Derwent after him. Earnestly working that first mine of Greek myths, William Gibson had published some fine longer poems in Harper’s magazine on Persephone, Apollo and the Sibyl, and Empedocles. In Jameson’s sainted virgins, however, he found a “second mine” of poetic inspiration. So Gibson proved Melville right about the literary gold in “Legends of the Old Faith.” When prophesied by Derwent, the new “Era” of verse-making from “the poet’s second mine” was surprisingly imminent. Versified saints’ lives by Commander William Gibson, USN, would triumphantly enact the catholic mythopoeia that Melville projected in Clarel but relinquished to unknown bards and better days.

Works Cited

Bercaw, Mary K. Melville’s Sources. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1987.

Berthold, Dennis. “‘The Italian turn of thought’: Risorgimento Politics in Clarel.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59 (December 2004): 340-371.

Frye, Northrop. Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance. Ed. Michael Dolzani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Gibson, William. “The Brides of Christ.” I. St. Dorothea; II. St. Cecelia; III. St. Agnes. The Catholic World 25 (June 1877): 420-421.

_____. “The Brides of Christ.” IV. St. Catherine; V. St. Margaret; VI. St. Barbara. The Catholic World Volume 25 (July 1877): 556-557.

_____. “The Brides of Christ.” VII. St. Agatha; VIII. St. Lucia; IX. St. Ursula. The Catholic World Volume 25 (August 1877): 701-702.  

_____. Poems of Many Years and Many Places. Boston: Lee and Shepard; and New York: C. T. Dillingham, 1881. 

Goldman, Stan. Melville’s Protest Theism: The Hidden and Silent God in Clarel. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993.

Greenwell, Dora. Lacordaire. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1867.

Jameson, Anna. Sacred and Legendary Art. Third Edition. 2 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1857.

Kenny, Vincent S. Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Spiritual Autobiography. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1973.

Knapp, Joseph G. Tortured Synthesis: The Meaning of Melville’s Clarel. New York: Philosophical Library, 1971.

Marr, Timothy. The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism. Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Melville, Herman. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1991.

_____. Correspondence. Ed. Lynn Horth. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1993.

Montalembert, Charles Forbes René. The Life of St. Elizabeth, of Hungary. Translated by Mary Hackett. Introduction translated by Mrs. J. Sadlier. New York: Sadlier, 1870.

Obenzinger, Hilton. American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002.

_____. Melville: The Making of the Poet. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2008.

Potter, William. Melville’s Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004.

Robillard, Douglas. Melville and the Visual Arts: Ionian Form, Venetian Tint. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997.

Salter, Emma Gurney, ed. Life of Saint Francis by Saint Bonaventura. London: J. M. Dent, 1904.

Sealts, Merton M. Jr. Melville's Reading: Revised and Enlarged Edition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

Sedgwick, William Ellery. Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944. Reprinted, New York: Russell & Russell, 1962.

Wallace, Robert K. “Melville’s Prints and Engravings at the Berkshire Athenaeum.” Essays in Arts and Sciences 15 (June 1986): 59-90.

Yothers, Brian. “‘Remember Hospitable Rome’: The Allure of Democratic Catholicism in Herman Melville’s Clarel.” Unpublished paper, presented at the 18th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association (Boston, MA), 24 May 2007.

_____. The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790-1876. Aldershot, Hants, England and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2007.

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When the Saints Go Marching In