Willy and Billy, braggarts and claggarts

Scotish Songs: in two volumes  (London, 1794) - Volume 1

Like Willy the wanton Scot, Billy Budd might be described at the start of Melville's uncompleted tale as a "man without a clag," taking clag in the moral or ethical sense that Ritson gives it in the glossary to Scotish Songs: "fault, failing, imperfection." Though Billy stutters and fights when he has to, such actions are categorized early on by the narrator as natural and spontaneous, "frank manifestations" of uncorrupted nature.

"Billy in many respects was little more than a sort of upright barbarian, much such perhaps as Adam presumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into his company."  --Billy Budd, Sailor - Chapter 2

A Scottish twist to Billy Budd's innocence could be whispered in Melville's reference to "Dundee" as home to the owner of Billy Budd's former ship, The Rights, short for the Rights-of-Man--a merchant ship whose "hard-headed Dundee owner was a staunch admirer of Thomas Paine." Though "God knows" where the handsome sailor came from before that, Melville at the outset emphasizes his radical innocence.

He was a man without a clag,
    His heart was frank without a flaw;
And ay whatever Willy said,
    It was still hadden as a law.
His boots they were made of the jag;
    When he went to the weaponshaw,
Upon the green nane durst him brag,
    The feind a ane amang them a’.

"Clag" may also refer to the imputation of fault. Sometimes it's spelled clagg with two g's:

"CLAG, CLAGG... 2. Charge, impeachment of character; fault, or imputation of one."  --John Jamieson, An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (Edinburgh, 1808)

Sir Walter Scott spelled it "clagg" when he quoted the two pertinent lines from "Willy was a Wanton Wag" (without naming their source, or needing to) in a letter to Allan Cunningham:

When there is any chance of Mr Chantrey coming this way, I hope you will let me know; and if you come with him, so much the better. I like him as much for his manners as for his genius. 

He is a man without a clagg;
His heart is frank without a flaw.''' --Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott

The quoted lines were printed along with Scott's letter to Cunningham in volume 3 of J. G. Lockhart's Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott which Melville presumably read after or along with his brother Gansevoort:

"Gansevoort Melville's Index Rerum shows a fascination both with Scott's writings and with John Gibson Lockhart's biography of him.  --Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, volume 2, 1851-1891 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) page 54.

Melville personally thought Lockhart a "cold fish" after meeting and dining with him in London, as Parker neatly compacts the relevant 1849 journal entry in Melville: The Making of the Poet (Northwestern University Press, 2008); reprised in the Historical Note for the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Published Poems (page 380). Still, Lockhart's biography seems a likely place for Melville to have encountered the lines via Scott's casual quotation. Complete lyrics were frequently reprinted in the 18th and 19th centuries, appearing for example in Allan Ramsay's The Tea-table Miscellany and various editions of Joseph Ritson's Scottish Songs.



The second volume of The Scotish Musical Museum gives the words and music to Willy was a wanton wag, accessible online courtesy of Burns' Scotland. The description there helpfully traces the words to "a later volume or edition of William Thomson's 'Orpheus Caledonius', in 1733" while noting that "the tune itself is generally believed to be much older than that date."

On the warship Bellipotent (or Indomitable, as Melville first called it in manuscript), impeachment of Billy Budd's character begins with false charges insinuated by Claggart. The name of Melville's envious master-at-arms thus matches his dramatic role as Billy's devilish accuser, embodying and evoking various lexical senses of clag or clagg, in particular stain, failing, and "charge, impeachment of character; fault, or imputation of one." As Melville presents him, Billy like Willy "was a man without a clag" until he switches ships and runs into Claggart.

Claggart is a claggart, one who claggs. In a gem of a note on Melville's nomenclature, Avery F. Gaskins explicates the Symbolic Nature of Claggart's Name and what's more, the grammar of Claggart's name as "a noun of agency," like braggart:

What Melville seems to have done is to add the -art suffix to the word clag and to create, thus, a noun of agency. As a braggart is one who brags, so Claggart is one who figuratively "sticks like glue" to Billy in his constant spying upon him and in his relentless persecution of the foretopman, both personally and through his henchmen. Claggart is also one who attempts figuratively to bedaub the character of Billy with false accusations and to stain it in the process.
-- American Notes and Queries 6.4 (December 1967): 56.

"Claggart" of course does not appear in Melville's writings outside of Billy Budd. To illustrate what Gaskins means by "noun of agency," below are two instances of the parallel form braggart used as a singular noun. The word braggart occurs twice in Mardi (1849); and once in Israel Potter (1854-5). Applied adjectivally to Ethan Allen, the example from Israel Potter seems more complicated than the relatively straightforward usages of braggart in Mardi. Ethan Allen's brag is in part a "part," a role that he assumes for self-preservation when doing battle with bullies.

 Goliath

• "the great braggart of Gath" --Mardi: And a Voyage Thither vol 1 ("They Fall In With Strangers")

Fofi

• "a cunning knave; a braggart, driven forth, by King Piko for his cowardice." --Mardi: And a Voyage Thither vol 2 ("A Reception Day at Pimminee")

Ethan Allen

• "his experience must have taught him, that by assuming the part of a jocular, reckless, and even braggart barbarian, he would better sustain himself against bullying turnkeys than by submissive quietude."  --Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile

Stockbridge correspondent "Jeannie Deans" on Berkshire in 1855

Glendale via RootsWeb - Ancestry.com

A native "westerner," formerly of Galena, the poet and journalist who signed herself "Jeannie Deans" after the heroine of Scott's The Heart of Midlothian (but not Jane Grey Swisshelm, the better known "Jeannie Deans") was a regular correspondent of the St. Paul Minnesotian in the early to mid 1850's. In the summer of 1853, "Jeannie Deans" visited Baltimore and Norfolk, Virginia. In August of that year she wrote about socializing with G. P. R. James in Nags Head, North Carolina (Weekly Minnesotian, September 24, 1853). In 1854 the Minnesota editor politely declined to reveal the identity of his gifted correspondent:

We have been asked a thousand times, "who is Jeannie Deans?" That question we are not at liberty to answer as yet. We can only say, although now residing in Massachusetts, she is a lady identified with the West from infancy, and with the North-West since the first settlement of northern Illinois. Galena particularly should be proud to claim one who has it within her power to assume a position in literary circles alongside of "Grace Greenwood," Miss Cummings, or any other famous names among our younger lady authoresses. --St. Paul Weekly Minnesotian, June 17, 1854

By that time "Jeannie Deans" had moved to Stockbridge. In the summer of 1855 she would move again, to New Jersey. Transcribed below, her piece "For the Minnesotian" dated March 26, 1855 features the obligatory reference to Berkshire resident Herman Melville and his "charming Typee." However, this particular selection of "Village Sketches" by "Jeannie Deans" seems more interesting and important for her contemporary description of the Glendale Woolen Mills.

From the St Paul Daily Minnesotian, April 13, 1855; reprinted in the Weekly Minnesotian, April 14, 1855.

[For the Minnesotian]

Village Sketches.

Our village is like any other village. It has the same broad street, swept clean just now, by the old woman March, who has come down from the sky, and clashes the branches of old trees together into a rude timbrel music.— Well, to retrace our steps, return to our street. On each side of it are ancient elms, turf and white fences, with here and there beautiful cottages nestling like birds, closing their wings around the house tree. Cottages—ornee and gabled, in every variety of architecture—porches, bay-windows and verandah "all around the house." We have one Doctor, ditto Shoemaker, the Store, a Blacksmith, Carpenters, Cows, Horses, fowl and flesh. A poor-house, crazy man, two superannuated colored people, a gossip and a bad boy. But it is unlike any other little place in its wealth of intellect, high orders of mind—refinement, cultivation and accomplishment. The air is filled with inspiration. Where congregates more genius than in Berkshire? Is not Monument Mountain a granite column to Bryant, that no time shall effect, but stand his soul-marks through eternity?— Is not every tree, rock and stream, around her native place crowned with the ever living wreath of fame by the talented Authoress of Berkshire?

Near us are Dr. Griswold, Herman Melville, the author of charming Typee, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and in the summer, Henry Ward Beecher and others. We catch glimpses of these shining lights sometimes. Shakespeare must have had a prophetic one, when he said,

"How far that little candle throws his beams."

Now-a-days we see all the great minds face to face, thanks to Photography and Railroads.

Apropros—the latter brings to mind a ride of last week. Seven ladies and one gentleman took the eleven o'clock train for Glendale, a beautiful place two miles distant; beautiful as its name; but doomed to bloom unseen, for utility had turned it into that destroyer of beauty, a manufacturing town. Its rippling stream was damned. Its finest rocks became a gas fixture, and its trees fell in its defence. We were going to the Glendale Mills, "Woolen Factory," (as the card expressed it,) to see all that was to be seen. And we did—from the commencement—the great furnace, with its red jaws, glowing and flaming, setting all the machinery in motion, to the spinning room, next the roof. 

"Here are the dyeing rooms;" a general smell of bark, a huge vat of boiling indigo, two gloomy phantoms looming up in the mist, "true blues," rolling up cloth on windlasses from the tubs beneath. A peculiar, cloudy, damp feeling, a dyeing sensation prevailed.

"Oh! the ladies' bonnets, the ladies' bonnets," screamed the foreman. "Mr. G., they will all dye!"

A concert scream and a rush followed. I am sorry for the sake of mankind to add, that the one gentleman was just as much afraid of dyeing as the ladies, and his new hat gave him courage to precede us in the melee. We who wore black bonnets and hoods returned, those whose new felts and velvets vanity had prompted to wear, stood

"Like Tantalus without the pale."

The finishing room was filled with roll upon roll of shining cloths of every hue, "grey, black and brown." The carding was new to all of us; each machine keeps one man busy. One little boy, scarcely fourteen years of age, had the care of one.

The spinning room at the top of the building employed but five men. One of these attracted our attention and interested us. His years numbered more than fifty; his clothes were poor and threadbare, but scrupulously clean; his face wore a resigned, melancholy look. Mr. G. told us that he had been absent from that mill but three days in the last eighteen years. Regular as clock-work he entered the door and walked fourteen hours daily in the winter, behind that machine. Think of it. What a tread mill life. Day after day to stand in the same room, on the same boards, rolling that pile of springing machinery. What is winter, summer, year in, year out, to him? Is it any wonder that he has grown mechanical, subdued, with a vacant, thoughtful face, chained to a rock by poverty. I felt as though he must fly. I wondered he did not open the window and dash out, down four stories; "anywhere, anywhere, out of the world." 

The weaving room was airy and spacious, the floor white, for the girls "holy-stone" it. Pillars through the center of the room and many windows. The whirr and clash of the shuttles was deafening. Here we had more interest.— This was the woman's department. One had the charge of the looms, and it was quite enough to keep them busy—taking out empty bobbins and replacing them with filled ones; tying weaver's knots and heading pieces. One little girl of twelve years was commencing the web of her life. Her looms wove and wove and the little hands flew from one to another without cessation. Her cheeks had an unnatural glow; want of air and exercise were weaving the warp of disease through the woof of nature.

Each factory girl had her window, filled with green plants, prayer books, looking glasses, bits of colored papers, and treasures that looking at helped to cheer them. Here was a casement void of green, a little red shoe and a half made apron and sewing implements filled the seat. The owner of these looms was a tall, slender woman, transparently white, hollow-eyed and negligently dressed. She seemed exhausted and harrassed. She dropped into a chair after feeding, as though she could stand no longer. I imagined her thinking of a little one at home; perhaps it was sick, or would not receive attention. Her face haunted me all day.

In contrast to her, the next looms were under the care of a bright, rosy Irish girl, neat and tidy—singing at her task, as pretty and healthy a specimen of the country girl as I have seen. Two roses were in full bloom in her window, and a vine with a small yellow blossom twining the pillar in the sunshine.

The shears and napping were inspected and then we went to the store while the gentlemen went to dinner; officiated and rummaged the drawers, dined on crackers, raisins, confections and cinnamon. Were obliged to wait two hours for the cars at the depot, some of the party took high seats on the desk for want of chairs, others played "Tee-to-tum." Several poetical discussions took place, with a general dissention of mind. Did any two ever agree entirely on Religion or Medicine, on Poetry or Philosophy? The boys who had been playing base around the station, called vociferously, "the cars; the cars." Imagine the sensation we created in the cars. I heard a gentleman whisper that we must have been to a woman's convention. I wonder if we looked strong-minded, or which he took for the Rev., the Dr. or the Lawyer.

JEANNIE DEANS.
Stockbridge, March 26, 1855

St. Paul Daily Minnesotian - April 13, 1855

Literary allusions by Gansevoort Melville, to Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott

via Hollywood Spy

In his great speech at the 1844 Jackson-fest, Gansevoort Melville compared the premature celebration of Henry Clay's victory by overconfident Whigs to eating rotten apples, counting unhatched chickens, and trying to enjoy a non-existent dinner:

"This celebration of theirs is pretty much the same thing as if some poor, hungry, starving loafer should cuddle up in a warm corner, close his eyes, shut his mouth, and eat a glorious good dinner—in imagination"

Gansevoort's ridiculous image of the homeless wretch and his fantasy-banquet alludes to a pretty well-known passage from Shakespeare's Richard II, where the banished Henry Bolingbroke contrasts the experience of real physical pain to imaginary kinds of relief which only intensify one's suffering:

O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?
O, no! the apprehension of the good
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse:
Fell sorrow's tooth doth never rankle more
Than when he bites, but lanceth not the sore.  --Richard II - Act 1 Scene 3

Gansevoort's "hungry, starving loafer" comically personifies Shakespeare's "hungry edge of appetite"; and the "glorious good dinner" is Shakespeare's unreal "feast," both enjoyed only in "imagination."

While Herman Melville was sailing home, his older brother was perfecting and publishing a highly allusive brand of political speech-making. Gansevoort's speech at the Nashville rally on August 15, 1844, as excerpted in the Nashville Union, was criticized in the rival Nashville Tennessean Republican Banner (September 11, 1844) for comprising "a parcel of borrowed historical illustration." In particular the Republican Banner noted Gansevoort's plagiarism of Sir Walter Scott:

His object evidently was to show off his fine speaking. He glorified Van Buren (who was defeated at Baltimore after innumerable trials) as equal in heroism to James Earl of Douglas at the Battle of Otterbourne! His narration over which locofoco editors have gloated with so much admiration, is all taken with a very slight (and most injurious) alteration and with no acknowledgment, from Scott's preface to the fine old ballad of "the Battle of Otterbourne" in the "Scottish Minstrelsy." But he was most unfortunate in his allusion to this matter. In our edition of "The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," we find that the Douglas to whom he compared MR. VAN BUREN when he introduced the story,—and who raised the cry "A Dead Douglas shall win the field!"—was KILLED BY ONE OF HIS OWN MEN!

"There are that say he (Douglas) was not slain by the enemy, but by one of his own men, a GROOM OF HIS CHAMBER."

So states the historian Godscroft.

We should think there was something in this, that would have prevented our New York orator from dwelling on it with any particular complacency. We have not time to run the parallel out but was not Martin Van Buren killed by his own men? Was not "a groom of his chamber," one of his understrappers, the author of his political death? --Nashville Tennessean, September 11, 1844

Here the criticism specifically refers to the frequently reprinted Dying Douglass portion of Gansevoort Melville's Nashville speech. As alleged, Gansevoort had indeed paraphrased Godscroft via Scott in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.

(As explained at the Walter Scott Educational Website, the 1802 version is the one in which "Earl Douglas is murdered by a resentful servant." Gansevoort was recalling the battlefield death described in the 1803 and later editions of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.) Gansevoort was also quoting verbatim from Scott's narrative of "The Battle of Otterburn" in the first volume of Tales of a Grandfather.  Only the Tales of a Grandfather version has the exact words Gansevoort reportedly spoke about the "tradition in our family that a dead Douglas" should/shall "win a field."

On a somewhat more positive note, the Nashville Republican Banner did grudgingly acknowledge that in subsequent visits to Nashville Gansevoort had developed a better style of delivery:

"he has decidedly improved in his rhetorical displays, under the criticism of the Press, since he made his first appearance at the Democratic Convention Ground. It is true he still can only skim the surface of questions, but his manner and manners are greatly amended: He has abated much of his preposterous gesticulation and mincing lady's maid tones..."

--Nashville Republican Banner, mis-labeled "The Tennessean" at Newspapers.com
Edited then by Donald Macleod.

Found on Newspapers.com

Old Mortality and Melville's approach to rewriting history

renewing with his chisel the half-defaced inscriptions....

Renewing gravestones with hammer and chisel was the unpaid business of Old Mortality, the source (not the main subject) of Sir Walter Scott's Old Mortality (1816).  

Rennovating or "retouching" old inscriptions:  what a great metaphor for Melville's habit of re-writing from sources!  Melville thought so.  Acknowledging a pamphlet autobiography as the primary source for Israel Potter (1856), Melville in the fanciful dedication compares his inventive rewrite of the original narrative to

"a dilapidated old tombstone retouched."  

Fittingly, Melville returns to the tombstone image and finishes the job of retouching in the last chapter, which as Alide Cagidemetrio points out in Fictions of the Past is titled Requiescat in Pace.  Cagidemetrio (and who else, I wonder?) gets the allusion to Scott's Old Mortality, and writes with fine insight about its significance for Melville's characterization of Israel Potter, and more broadly as a poet's approach to the rewriting of history:

The “old tombstone retouched” is a topos for the “poetics” of historical fiction.  The Cameronian tombstones in Walter Scott’s Old Mortality may serve as its most illustrious example.  The introduction to the novel is in fact the introduction to a character of the past, Old Mortality.  He is a forgotten, poor, and aged patriot turned by historical events, like Melville’s Israel, into a wanderer.”  Fictions of the Past:  Hawthorne & Melville (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 182.

"'Poetics' of historical fiction" is wonderful.  Aesthetics too or an aesthetic seems also implied.  Some day we might try elaborating on that theme, here at Melvilliana, Melville's aesthetics of the rewrite.

The use of multiple personae is interesting, too, and reminds me of Melville's experimenting with imaginary narrators and editors in his manuscript "Burgundy Club" sketches.  For great insight into that strategy check out Robert A. Sandberg's 1989 article on "the adjustment of screens."  Similarly the story of Old Mortality, as one of Walter Scott's Tales of My Landlord, has been redacted supposedly through various authorial and editorial personae, including (besides Scott himself and the landlord of the Wallace inn), the fictive narrator Peter Pattieson (deceased) and fictive editor Jedediah Cleishbotham.

From the description of Old Mortality's occupation as Peter Pattieson allegedly gave it in manuscript, according to Jedediah Cleishbotham in the "preliminary" first chapter of Old Mortality (Tale II in Tales of My Landlord:

"During this long pilgrimage, the pious enthusiast regulated his circuit so as annually to visit the graves of the unfortunate Covenanters, who suffered by the sword, or by the executioner, during the reigns of the two last monarchs of the Stewart line....In the most lonely recesses of the mountains, the moor-fowl shooter has been often surprised to find him busied in cleaning the moss from the grey stones, renewing with his chisel the half-defaced inscriptions, and repairing the emblems of death with which these simple monuments are usually adorned.

"... As the wanderer was usually to be seen bent on this pious task within the precincts of some country churchyard, or reclined on the solitary tombstone among the heath, disturbing the plover and the black-cock with the clink of his chisel and mallet, with his old white pony grazing by his side, he acquired, from his converse among the dead, the popular appellation of Old Mortality.

"... Conversing with others, he was grave and sententious, not without a cast of severity. But he is said never to have been observed to give way to violent passion, excepting upon one occasion, when a mischievous truant-boy defaced with a stone the nose of a cherub's face, which the old man was engaged in retouching."

Old Mortality / sculptural group at Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia
by James Thom (c. 1836) via Wikimedia Commons