Lines Written on Reading a Celebrated Infidel Book

The reprinting of this pseudonymous poem (taking "Melville" as a nom de plume) in the Boston Recorder enables me to improve my earlier transcription with the correct reading "stoic sage" in the third line of the first stanza. Whoever wrote it, the speaker's bout with unbelief presents the quintessential Melvillean quandary. The figure of the stoic as a model of cold philosophical comfort adds a favorite device of Melville's to the familiar theme. The stoic figure seems all the more Melvillean when contrasted, as here in these 1838 "Lines," with the consoling promise of heaven. In Melville's religious epic Clarel (1876), the Anglican priest Derwent will invoke "The Stoic" to argue the same point in dialogue with the divinity student Clarel:

What if some camp on crags austere
The Stoic held ere Gospel cheer ?
There may the common herd abide,
Having dreamed of heaven? Nay, and can you?
--Herman Melville, Clarel 3.21 - In Confidence

First published in the Christian Watchman on March 2, 1838, the poetic "Lines" signed "Melville" were reprinted in the Boston Recorder for March 9, 1838. "Melville" also contributed the six-part essay on Missions to the Western Indians that appeared in the Christian Watchman between November 10, 1837 and July 13, 1838.

POETRY.
For the Watchman. 

LINES
WRITTEN ON READING A CELEBRATED INFIDEL BOOK. 

Well, be it thus;— renounce the page
   Which tells of brighter worlds on high;
Then rest content, as stoic sage,
   In gloomy doubt, to grope and die.
Shut out the light which shines from heaven;
   To boastful creed of reason keep;
Say brutish life to men is given,
   And death is but eternal sleep.

But leave thy neighbor’s spirit free,
   Nor, with rash hand, the hope destroy,—
Blest hope of immortality,
   Which all dilates the heart with joy;
Nor wake the peaceful dreamer thou,
   The bitter dregs of life to taste:
If vain the hopes which bind us now,
   O, let the sweet delusion last! 

If life a false speck can be shown,
   The ocean of eternity
Up from its heaving depth has thrown;
   If hapless man may never see
Aught when this anxious being dies,
   But sink to nothingness again,
As on the earth he shuts his eyes,
   O, let him wish and hope till then!

Go to the mother, as she gives
   Her first-born to the arms of death;—
How sinks her heart, which anguish rives
   Its chords to mark the final breath!
And wilt thou soothe her frenzied thought,
   With words of cold philosophy;
Or say the infant soul is nought,
   As her’s, anon, shall surely be?

Away, away, a voice within
   Gives thy vain sophistry the lie;
It pleads for that which is,—hath been,—
   And, all divine, can never die.
Hope, reason, Scripture,—all proclaim,
   To virtue’s ear, a nobler rest:
‘Tis writ, in characters of flame,
   On ev’ry heart, in ev’ry breast.

The holy light of day; the sun,
   Bright image of the Lord Supreme;
The clouds, the viewless wind; in one,
   All things which vast or lovely seem;
The hoary earth, the deep blue sea,
   Each with ecstatic life replete;
The thin, free air, o'er land and sea,
   Where nature’s subtler wonders meet;—

The sombre majesty of night,
   As o’er the pensive mind it steals;
The calm, bright moon, whose silver light
   In vain the fleecy cloud conceals;
The stars, so eloquent, which seem
   Of silent consciousness possest,
Which active fancy well might deem
   Kind heralds of the heavenly rest. 

Speak to the soul, and wake its glow,
   While the far-vault of heaven on high
Wide echoes to the deep below
   Its soft and sacred minstrelsy.
All mind, the universe, where’er
   A thought has ranged, or science trod,
With voice united, all declare
   A Spirit, and that Spirit’s God.     

MELVILLE.

Herman Melville's burned-up Seneca

UPDATE 2: Check out the later Melvilliana post on marginalia in Melville's lost Seneca, as reported by Jay Leyda in vol. 1 of The Melville Log. Leyda described this volume of Seneca's Workes from the collection of Carl Haverlin as the 1620 second edition, not the 1614 edition.

Two volumes of Seneca, old (London, 1746) and older (1614!), are listed in the catalog at Melville's Marginalia Online. One survives in the NYPL Gansevoort-Lansing collection: the 1746 London edition of Seneca's Morals (Sealts 458). That's the volume Herman inscribed to his brother Tom:

"Thomas Melville from Herman Melville"; "My Dear Tom, This is a round-of-beef where all hands may cut & come again. Jan: 26th 1854. Pittsfield. Mass:"

Yow! For more on the book that does exist still in the physical world, see the update at the end, please. Ishmael definitely knew his Seneca:

"What matters it how many masters we have, when it is but one slavery?"
--Seneca's Morals: By Way of Abstract

The 1614 volume (Sealts 457) most likely burned up in a fire. Reportedly it contained Melville's annotations as well as markings:

This copy of Seneca's Works was described to Merton M. Sealts, Jr., by Carl Haverlin, whose library in California was destroyed by fire on 4 January 1954. Among the contents of this 1614 edition of Seneca's Works is "The Life of Lucius Annaeus Seneca Scribed by Iustus Lipsius." --Melville's Marginalia Online

That lost, probably incinerated 1614 volume was published in London by William Stansby. First, let's see if we can find it. No luck just yet at Google Books. How about trusty Hathi Trust? Bingo! And what a treasure! Now that we have in a way rescued Seneca (not Melville's annotated copy you understand, but the same edition he had) from oblivion, let's check and see if this precious volume has Seneca's Letters from a Stoic.

 

His Epistles I see listed second in the Contents. Would those include Letter 47 on masters and slaves? I want to know, being lately re-interested in Seneca as perhaps the guiding spirit behind Ishmael's interrogative challenge, "Who aint a slave? Tell me that" in the first chapter of Moby-Dick.

Yes, that letter XLVII is here.

Only in this volume Seneca's servus "slave" is translated servant. So the whole letter deals with the right treatment of and relation to "servants" which is to say, slaves:

Is hee a servant? But happily a free man in minde. Is he a servant? Shall this hurt him? Shew one that is not. One serveth his lust, another his avarice, another ambition, another feare. I will shew you a man that hath beene Consul, serving an old woman. I will let you see a rich man serving a poore maid: I will shew you the noblest yong men, the very bond-slaves of Players. There is no servitude more foule, then that which is voluntarie. For which cause, thou hast no reason that these disdainfull fellowes should deterre thee from shewing thy selfe affable to thy servants, and not proudly superiour. --The workes of Lvcius Annaevs Seneca p238

But later the more usual translation of servus is "slave," thus:

Is he a slave? His mind may yet be free: is he a slave? Why should this prejudice you against him? Shew me the man who is not a slave. One is a slave to lust; another to covetousness; another to ambition; and all to fear. I can shew you a man of consular dignity, a slave to an old woman; a very rich man a slave to his handmaid; and many a young nobleman, who are the very bond-slaves of players. No slavery is more infamous than that which is voluntary: there is no reason, therefore, that some over-nice persons should deter you from shewing yourself affable and good-humour'd to your servants; instead of carrying yourself proudly as their superior. --The epistles of Lucius Annaeus Seneca

As Ishmael's subtext, Seneca aint no stretch. In the paragraph immediately before the one where Ishmael asks "Who aint a slave?" Ishmael invokes the Roman Stoic by name, presenting his brand of moral philosophy as the most consoling one around for downwardly mobile intellectuals:

The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. --Moby-Dick, Loomings

Well, you can see why Melville liked old books. There's so much to marvel over in the 900-plus pages of this rich and rare old book, The Workes of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, both Morrall and Naturall. Translated, I almost forgot to mention, by Thomas Lodge.

More later--time to read.

UPDATE 1: Great news! that one surviving volume of Seneca from Melville's library (Sealts 458), the one he gave to his brother Tom in January 1854, also has the letter on masters and slaves. Numbered 17 for some reason--EPISTLE XVII.--, not the usual 47.

So let's cut again, now from the book Melville lovingly bestowed, Seneca's Morals: By Way of Abstract. Though not from his fifteenth edition which I don't yet see online. This passage I take to be the classical basis not only of Ishmael's "Who aint a slave?" challenge, but also Melville's critique of elitism in Francis Parkman's Oregon Trail:

When we affect to contemn savages, we should remember that by so doing we asperse our own progenitors; for they were savages also. Who can swear, that among the naked British barbarians sent to Rome to be stared at more than 1500 years ago, the ancestor of Bacon might not have been found? Why, among the very Thugs of India, or the bloody Dyaks of Borneo, exists the germ of all that is intellectually elevated and grand. We are all of us—Anglo-Saxons, Dyaks, and Indians—sprung from one head, and made in one image. --Melville's review Mr. Parkman's Tour

Here you go, Seneca on virtue as the true nobility, in this 1806 edition printed by John Prentiss under the headings, "We are all equal by blood" and "Tenderness to servants":

. . . The original of all mankind was the same, and it is only a clear conscience that makes any man noble: for that derives even from heaven itself. It is the saying of a great man, that, If we could trace our descents, we should find all slaves to come from princes, and all princes from slaves: but fortune has turned all things topsy turvy, in a long story of revolutions. It is most certain, that our beginning had nothing before it, and our ancestors were some of them splendid, others sordid, as it happened. We have lost the memorials of our extraction; and, in reality, it matters not whence we came, but whither we go. Nor is it any more to our honor the glory of our predecessors, than it is to their shame the wickedness of their posterity. We are all of us composed of the same elements; why should we then value ourselves upon our nobility of blood, as if we were not all of us equal, if we could but recover our evidence?

. . . It is worthy of observation, that the most imperious masters over their own servants are, at the same time, the most abject slaves to the servants of other masters. I will not distinguish a servant by his office, but by his manners. The one is the work of fortune, the other of virtue. But we look only to his quality, and not to his merit. Why should not a brave action rather dignify the condition of a servant, than the condition of a servant lessen a brave action? I would not value a man for his cloathes, or degree, any more than I would do a horse for his trapping. What though he be a servant! Shew me any man that is not so, to his lusts, his avarice, his ambition, his palate, to his mistress; nay, to other men's servants; and we are all of us servants to fear: insolent we are, many of us at home; servile and despised abroad; and none are more liable to be trampled upon than those that have gotten a habit of giving affronts by suffering them. What matters it how many masters we have, when it is but one slavery? and whosoever despises that is perfectly free, let his masters be never so many. --Seneca's Morals: By Way of Abstract, 1806 ed.

Related post:

• Marginalia in Melville's lost Seneca 

Dana's 1869 N-words

Harpers' Family Library, Public domain
 via Wikimedia Commons

For the first of two epigraphs to the chapter on White-Jacket in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, Jeannine Marie DeLombard chooses a vivid passage on flogging from Dana's Two Years Before the Mast featuring two exclamatory uses of the N-word, the second in all capital letters.

In parentheses, DeLombard gives the date as 1840, thus presenting the doubly loaded epigraph as a quotation from the first edition of Two Years Before the Mast.

This date is important for historically grounding the ensuing argument, as DeLombard makes sure to point out early on, at the start of the second paragraph:

"My epigraphs indicate antislavery rhetoric's pervasive influence on antebellum culture." --"White-Jacket: Telling Who Is--and Aint--a Slave" in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (Cambridge University Press, 2014) page 51.

Maybe so for the second epigraph from Moby-Dick, although a case can be made for Seneca as the inspiration for Melville's philosophical question "Who aint a slave?"

"He is a slave." His soul, however, may be that of a freeman. "He is a slave." But shall that stand in his way? Show me a man who is not a slave; one is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear. I will name you an ex-consul who is slave to an old hag, a millionaire who is slave to a serving-maid; I will show you youths of the noblest birth in serfdom to pantomime players! No servitude is more disgraceful than that which is self-imposed. --Seneca, EPISTLE XLVII

Plato, Seneca, and Aristotle
Devotional and Philosophical Writings, MS Hunter 231 (U.3.4), page 276
Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library

But that first epigraph from Dana's book rather exemplifies the rhetoric of postbellum culture. At any rate, the Dana epigraph is not taken from any publication in 1840 or any year before the Civil War. It really comes from 1869 and after. Dana's 1840 edition reads as follows:

"You see your condition! You see where I've got you all, and you know what to expect!"—"You've been mistaken in me—you didn't know what I was! Now you know what I am!"—"I'll make you toe the mark, every soul of you, or I'll flog you all, fore and aft, from the boy, up!"—"You've got a driver over you! Yes, a slave-driver—a negro-driver! I'll see who'll tell me he is n't a negro slave!" --1840 Two years before the mast

This same passage with "negro-diver" and "negro" instead of the capitalized N-word was quoted in the October 1840 review in the New York Knickerbocker.

Now perhaps Dana in 1869 was aiming to restore the sadistic captain's offensive language as he originally heard it, not as first printed in 1840. OK but even so, you would need to explain that line of reasoning. You can't give 1840 as the publication date of a text first published in 1869. Well you can, it turns out, but you shouldn't. For comparison, Hathi Trust digital library also has the 1869 revised edition with the passage that DeLombard excerpts for her epigraph.

You could say the vocabulary does not matter a bit for DeLombard's argument, that either way, in either version, Dana's sailors are explicitly compared to and treated as slaves. Yes indeed! So why bother at all with the anachronistic (in a discussion focused on Melville's 1850 White-Jacket and antebellum culture) and for us in our time gratuitously offensive 1869 version?

The crazy thing is, on page 284 of her book In the Shadow of the Gallows (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), DeLombard did accurately quote the 1840 passage from the 1981 Penguin edition (where editor Thomas Philbrick followed "the text of the original Harper edition"). And as in the New Cambridge Companion, DeLombard juxtaposed Dana with Ishmael.

https://books.google.com/books?id=zEH8Rjmwi-EC&pg=PA284&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false

What's going on?