Attributions of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" to deceased portrait artist Josph Wood and the late Rev. John W. Curtis

Attributions of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" to deceased portrait artist Joseph Wood and the late Rev. John W. Curtis by Scott Norsworthy

Two posthumous claims, both of them wrong, issued during the lifetime of Clement C. Moore

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

Unabridged! Welling's review of MOBY-DICK in the NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER: Original research and riffs on Herman Melville, authorship, and 19th century American literature. 

Complete text of James Clarke Welling's review, as first published in the Washington, DC National Intelligencer on December 16, 1851

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/unabridged-wellings-review-of-moby-dick.html

Socialistic rhapsodies and theosophical trash

James Clarke Welling's 1852 review of Lectures and Miscellanies by Henry James Sr. 

In Herman Melville's prime the Washington, DC National Intelligencer was an important and influential Whig newspaper that embraced conservative, pro-Union values up to and through the American Civil War. As literary editor of the National Intelligencer from 1850 to 1856, James Clarke Welling wrote the highly regarded column of book reviews titled "Notes on New Books." Welling's authorship of the regular "Notes on New Books" column was revealed in 1860 by owner-editor William W. Seaton in a formal statement of Welling's promotion to co-editor. Under the heading "Editorial Announcement," the full statement originally appeared in the National Intelligencer on Thursday, August 30, 1860. Frequently reprinted North and South, usually without Seaton's assurances of continuing loyalty to the Union and support of the United States "Constitution, which is the cement of the Union." Here below is the abridged version that appeared in the New York Evening Post on August 31, 1860.

New York Evening Post - August 31, 1860
via genealogybank.com

Successor to Mr. Gales in the National Intelligencer.

As the surviving editor of the National Intelligencer, I have to announce that Mr. James C. Welling will hereafter be associated with me in the editorial conduct of this journal. In making this announcement it is proper to state that Mr. Welling is no stranger to 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. * *

WM. W. SEATON 

 -- New York Evening Post, August 31, 1860.

Initially, notices of new books during Welling's tenure as literary editor were borrowed with due credit from other newspapers. As best I can tell, Welling made his debut as author of the regular "Notes on New Books" column in the Daily National Intelligencer on June 24, 1851, with a cogent reality-check of Charles Kingsley's Yeast: A Problem. Kingsley, being a sort of Christian socialist,

"has vague notions that the constitution of English society is radically wrong, and that the laboring poor of town and country should be instructed in art, poetry, music, and science; but upon the means of attaining this desirable end he is profoundly silent. At one time he seems to hint at Chartism, now at Communism, now at Socialism, just as in his religion he is at first Materialist, then Pantheist, then Humanitarian."

Dismissing Yeast: A Problem as the fantasy of a well-meaning but hopelessly deluded social reformer, Welling concluded by resting on common sense:

"That the world, however, will ever be converted into a lazy Valhalla of social perfectionists, or that all mankind will ever be reduced to a gregarious equality, is a consummation that our modern new light gospellers will, it is imagined, never attain so long as the present laws of mind and matter shall remain in most contumacious disregard of their beautiful theories."

Welling (not William Allen Butler as Hugh W. Hetherington and later Melville scholars mistakenly decided) wrote the long and mostly favorable review of Moby-Dick that appeared in the Daily National Intelligencer on December 16, 1851. In April of the following year, Welling returned to the theme of his Yeast review, the woeful impracticability of Communism, exposing the social reforms urged by philosopher Henry James Sr (the future novelist's father) in his published Lectures and Miscellanies as "communistic and theosophic reveries." Welling's telling extracts from James's book and instructive remarks thereon are transcribed herein from the Washington, DC National Intelligencer of April 20, 1852; digital images with the original review may be found on genealogybank.com.

NOTES ON NEW BOOKS.

LECTURES AND MISCELLANIES. By Henry James. Redfield, New York, 1852.

Apothecaries, by wise enactment, are forbidden to vend any of the compositions of their retort, mortar, and pestle without affixing a label to each box and vial descriptive of their contents; and so too the bookmakers, it seems to us, should be required to utter their volumes with such titles as shall at least give one a suspicion of what they contain. If any son of Esculapius should retail the nux vomica or prussic acid under the names of "Vegetable Life Pills" or Universal Phœnix Bitters" he would justly incur the penalty of a criminal prosecution. Now, Mr. James, in issuing the work whose name stands at the head of our columns, has acted like the druggist who should dispense a specific nostrum under the general description of a "medicated mixture;" for who can tell from the title of his book whether it is intended to "minister to a mind diseased," by purging off certain errors of understanding, or whether, like a mental cordial, it aims merely to refresh the fancy and gratify the taste? We do not protest at all against the publication of these "Lectures and Miscellanies." We wish the press to be just as free for the dissemination of Mr. James's speculations as it is for the advertisement of "Watts's Mirific Nervous Antidote" or "Dalley's Pain Killer." We presume to say nothing in this connexion against either quacks in medicine or pretenders in literature. Mr. James assures us that society is at present established on a very unscientific basis, and so long as this "abnormal" state endures, it must needs be, we suppose, that charlatans and pseudo-philosophers impose on the credulity of the "great vulgar." We could wish, however, that Mr. James had selected such a title for his book as would have given purchasers an inkling of the socialistic rhapsodies and theosophical trash which were in store for them. And, still further, we think that the author has chosen an inopportune time for the final publication in printed form of the lectures composed and delivered by him a few years ago. Then they had the charm of public and engrossing interest, and floated upon the agitated surface of society like so many brilliant but insubstantial bubbles. The popular mind of Europe was at that time inflated by the leaven of socialism and demagogy, and it was the transmitted influence of these same elements that generated even on our own shores a fermentation of thought that occasionally broke out in just such gaseous eruptions as are discernible in the work before us. But at present the crudities of these ventose reformers and humanitarian philanthropists have been pretty generally left to the digestion of a few very bashful ladies, loud in the advocacy of "woman's rights," and to certain mendicant statesmen of Europe who have been recently illustrating among us, by a "modern instance," the "old saw" concerning beggars put on horseback. All such unripe speculations are now either too late or too early in the day--too late to ride upon the crest of the wave that has already broken on the shore, or too early to stem the receding tide which is now setting back into the sea. 

As to the merely literary execution of the volume under consideration, we are free to confess that it possesses considerable merit. Mr. James has at ready command a vocabulary of philosophical language that leaves no one in doubt respecting the author's opinions on the most recondite subjects which he undertakes to discuss. There is none of that groping after the light in a misty vacuity which seems to have been the attitude of certain writers on metaphysical subjects. Mr. James clearly eyes his mark and hits it in the white; he does not bandy words merely in the dazzling fence of a rhetorician, but speaks like one really in earnest, or endeavoring to seem so. Sometimes, it is true, we think he becomes the dupe of his own enchantments, and imagines, when he has tricked off an old idea in the livery of his peculiar dialect, that his brain has been safely delivered of a Minerva; the reader, on the contrary, bethinks himself of the mountain laboring with a mouse. We propose to give our readers, before indulging in further remark, a side view of the most salient features which stand out in these remarkable political and philosophical sketches. It has generally been our wont to cull a few excerpts from an author under consideration, in order to append them to the foot of our own disquisitions; but on the present occasion we prefer to give Mr. James the honor of a first hearing, reserving to ourselves the right of following with such animadversions as shall seem good to us in the premises. With the "New Theology" of our author it does not become us specially to concern ourselves; whether the "objective sphere of human existence" is external or internal to the subjective, and whether consequently the relation of God to man is external or internal, it is no part of our theology either to deny or affirm. Believing that such questions minister to strife and vain janglings rather than edification, we dismiss them with the simple query of honest Strepsiades in the play of Aristophanes: "How, my friend, being old, forgetful, and slow, shall we ever learn the hair-splittings of such nice words?"

Mr. James has so mixed up his politics with his religion that it becomes no easy task for us to eviscerate the former from the body of his lectures without bringing away some portions of the latter; but politics undoubtedly form the chief staple of the three opening lectures of the present volume, which are respectively entitled, "Democracy and its Issues," "Property as a Symbol," and "The Principle of Universality in Art." What our political philosopher's theory respecting the origin and ends of government actually is, will sufficiently appear from the following extracts:  

"Every Governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention. No one can doubt that, if human life had been perfect in the infancy of the race--that is to say, if just social relations had existed from the beginning--Government would never have been though of as a necessity of human society. It's existence is simply a confession of the immaturity of society."

"I look upon Democracy as heralding the moral perfection of man--as inaugurating the existence of perfectly just relations between man and man, and as consequently preparing the way for the reign of infinite Love. It supposes that men are capable of so adjusting their relations to each other as that they will need no police or external force to control them, but will spontaneously do the right thing, in all places and at all times." * *

"Because the moment society becomes perfect, the moment all legalized privilege ceases among its subjects, and every man becomes the equal of every other in the public care, that moment you make it the interest of the individual to cherish the good of the whole, because his own advantage is identified with it; and if you can make it the interest of man to be orderly, of course you need no machinery of police to ensure that result. It will take place of itself without any compulsion. The reason why evil exists among mankind is, that their outward life, their life as determined by institutions, does not fully according with their inward or essential life--the life they have in God."

"I am entirely persuaded that nothing but the persistent and ever-enlarging operation of the Democratic principle, or, what is the same thing, the destructive legislation now in progress, is requisite to inaugurate the Divine life on earth, to bring about that great prophetic period to which all history form the beginning has tended--that everlasting Sabbath or rest which is to close in and glorify the brief  but toilsome week of man's past experience."

"Criminality is the product exclusively of vicious legislation, of institutions which insist upon distributing the bounties of Providence unequally. The world waits for nothing else, in order to begin its eternal Sabbath, than the legislative recognition of human unity by the destruction of the last remnant of privilege." 

"In a true society, or fellowship, among men, envy would be impossible; because no arbitrary distinctions, no such thing as exclusive privilege, in which alone envy has its source, would exist. Why would not these things exist? Because a true society, a society scientifically organized, would confer no unequal property, no exclusive privilege, upon its subjects. That is to say, a true  society would guaranty to every man, woman, and child, for the whole term of his natural life, food, clothing, shelter, and the opportunities of an education adapted to his  tastes; leaving all the distinction he might achieve to himself, to his own genius, freely influencing the homage of his fellow-men. Where society observed this wisdom, all envy would at once disappear."

"Every one would be greatly happier if, being brought into this  world without his own consent, he might be permitted to live in it without the continual consent of somebody else. Each of us would be greatly happier if his relations to others were so scientifically adjusted as that every one would stand ready when he came into the world to endow him with cradles, and nurseries, and schools, and shoes, and coats, and breeches, and  breakfast, and supper, and lodging, and whatever else makes life comfortable, and thus leave him free to do only the special work which God empowers him to do."

"Inasmuch as moral distinctions--the distinctions of good and evil--exist only where hostile or divided interests exists among men, so of necessity the divine life which exacts a perfect unity of interests among its subjects, will at its coming utterly obliterate moral distinctions from the face of the earth. In other words, the perfect life is not moral, because it involves a harmony so complete among men as to be fatal to the existing differences of good and evil." "No man ever antagonizes his neighbor's interest, save with a view of promoting his own; and if, therefore, you release men from this temptation, by removing their existing social inequalities, you utterly vacate every shade of moral diversity among them."

"A state of society may exist, without the slightest prejudice to morality, in which, notwithstanding, each and all its members, or the public and private interests, May be so harmoniously related as to allow the utmost possible freedom to all the appetites and passions  of human nature. But I do not stop here. I am not content with merely saying that a state of society which puts man in harmony with his nature, or, in equivalent terms, ensures him the ample gratification of all his appetites and passions, may exist  without prejudice to the interests of morality. I claim that such a state of society is absolutely indispensable to those interests. I insist that such a state of society is the actual fulfilment of all morality; is the destined consummation of all law and prophecy; is, in fact, the necessary basis of God's kingdom on earth."

"We instinctively feel that society has no right to guaranty one man's nature ampler satisfaction than another's; that natural want is in every case the ample title to, and the only measure of, natural gratification; and that society's prime function therefore is, not to ordain inequalities in this regard, but utterly to destroy them as fast as they come to her notice. The diversity of human gifts has been ordaining these inequalities all along the course of history, or giving one man superior natural endowments to another. But society's business is not to legislate for one or few, but for all. She should, therefore, aim to reduce these inequalities wherever they have arisen, and ensure all the same material succor, the same exemption from outward want, which has been realized hitherto only by the few. The province of society lies wholly in providing for man's material development, in removing from that sphere every thing like organized injustice and inequality. The development of his genius and the care of his spiritual interests belong appropriately to God, who, I doubt not, would be found amply competent to the task, whenever society should consent to inaugurate Him."

Here we close our extracts, taken passim from these "Lectures and Miscellanies;" especially directing the notice of readers to the concluding paragraph, being Mr. James's polite and condescending certificate to the competency of the Deity.  

Our readers will not, of course, suppose that our attention has been attracted to these speculations by their intrinsic novelty, for it is not at all difficult to trace the paternity and pedigree of nearly every prominent idea embodied at second-hand by Mr. James in his communistic and theosophic reveries. Fichte, with his work on the "Destination of Man;" Sweedenborg, with his New Jerusalem revelations and seventh-heaven rhapsodies; Fourier, with his analogies and correspondence between man and nature; the "young school" of Hegelians, such as Ruge, and Feuerbach, and Ronge, with their humanitary visions of a social regeneration; Spinosa, with his philosophism respecting God and Creation; and even old Leibnitz, with his doctrine of the "pre-established harmony," are all clearly discernible in the composite and eclectic philosopher whose work we are considering--a work which shows the great advance of "humanitary ideas" in our modern philosophers over such "old fogies" as Aristotle with his Politics, Xenophon with his Economics, Plato with his ideal Republic and Laws, Justinian with his Commentaries, More with his Utopia, Fenelon with his celebrated romance; and even over Jean Jacques with his Social Contract, Robert Owen with his Harmonists, and Monsieur Cabet with his affectionate Icariens.

It is plain that the eyes of the American philosopher have been dazzled by the same splendid illusion which, like a mirage of the desert, has cheated so many sanguine students of historical science. The philosophical historians would convince us that the "unitary man" is constantly approximating towards the goal of human perfectability in the gradual progress marked by the evolutions of history. Mr. James arrives at the same conclusion by his "ineffaceable conviction of man's inward righteousness, and of the intimate alliance subsisting between God and the human soul," which only needs to have the social gyves and legislative fetters stricken off in order to install itself in the full fruition of consummate and supernal beatitude. The "new heavens and new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness," in the opinion of such a thinker or visionary, are only to be ushered in by some grand social cataclysm, or by a more gradual process, through the advance of "positive science;" and it is evident that by the phrase positive science Mr. James means the same thing as does Monsieur Auguste Comte. The antagonism which now exists between man and external nature, according to his theory, is only initial and mediatory to the ultimate and "manifest destiny" which requires of Man to subdue the earth; and we are told that every power of nature will eventually be rendered subservient to the uses of man's moral, intellectual, and physical life, until finally "the veil of the temple shall be rent from top to bottom, and the Holy of Holies shall stand suddenly revealed in the lineaments of an immaculate and omnipotent humanity." The phalansterians of Monsieur Fourier have always been sorely gravelled to reconcile the performance of certain menial offices in social life with their conceptions of man's dignity and their theory of human equality and universal brotherhood. Cooks, chambermaids, bootblacks, and sweeps, hostlers, and waiters, and scullions, have been thus far found necessary agents even in the best-adjusted of their social parallelograms. Mr. James, however, in the gradual progress of a "positive philosophy" sees the "good time coming" when science shall be the only menial on the face of the earth; when the relations of Man to external nature shall be so scientifically constructed that he will have no need to take thought, saying what shall we eat? or what shall we drink? or wherewithal shall we be clothed? for Society, invested with the potent wand of subject nature, will be changed into a greater than the Deus Fortuna of the ethnic mythology, as from her cornucopia she dispenses, with beneficent hand, upon each new comer into the renovated earth, "cradles, and nurseries, and schools, and shoes, and coats, and breeches, and breakfast, and supper, and lodging, and whatever else makes life comfortable," leaving each nascent scion of the social stock "free to do only the special work which God empowers him to do." Life now-a-days is a fardel, but it will be worth living in those days, and it is confidently expected that suicide will become obsolete, except in the case of an occasional Cleombrotus; for in this halcyon period, for which even now "the whole creation groaneth," envy will disappear from among men, vanity from among women, and indiscretion from among children; society will no longer be infested by the social evil that has been heretofore engendered by "class legislation," but all men every where will rejoice in the cognition of the Deity; will discourse on subjects as "high as metaphysic wit can fly;" will glorify "the rehabilitation of the senses;" will talk in poetry better than Milton ever dreamed of, and lose themselves in the ecstacy of aesthetic contemplations and the worship of the Beautiful. Other system builders and ideal philosophers have been startled from their complacency by visions of women putting tea-kettles on the fire and peeling potatoes, and of men delving in the soil like old Adam with sweat on their brow; but when the "perfect and integral humanity" of Mr. James shall appear on the earth, self-guiding as well as self-sharpening ploughs will cultivate the land, steam machinery will hoe corn, and automatic shovels dig potatoes, each particular shovel working with the velocity and power of forty modern Hibernians. Such is the destination of man in the resplendent future; we have to regret, however, that there is hardly any probability that we will live long enough to see it; we must content ourselves with the poets and painters, lawyers and priests of the existing species--the mere "harbingers of the perfect man, the nearest approximation permitted by our infirm science, but by no means his veritable self." They bear, indeed, says our social astrologer, precisely the same relation to the Lord, or the complete divine man, that the present path of the ecliptic does to the equator, which is a relation of decided obliquity. Philosophers tell us that when the earth shall have attained her true poise upon her axis, the path of the ecliptic will be coincident with the equator, and the rigors of winter and the fervors of summer consequently will alike give place to a new and perpetual spring which shall bathe the whole earth in gladness. So, when humanity, exclaims Mr. James, shall have attained true moral poise, these men who have hitherto been her ecliptic, "will give place to the equatorial or perfect man, who shall completely reconcile the still disunited elements of good and evil in a new individuality, which shall carry the dew and fragrance of God into every commonest nook of our everyday life, and absorb alike the parched aridity of the saint and the rank fecundity of the sinner in the unity of the integral man."

In the present order of things life is at best a checkered scene of lights and shadows. As the poet sings--

Enough has Heaven indulged of joy below
     To tempt our tarriance in this lov'd retreat;
Enough has Heaven ordained of useful woe

     To make us languish for a happier seat 

[Elegy IV, Written at the Approach of WINTER in The Poetical Works of John Scott; London, 1782.]

But when the earth is swung back to her equatorial poise, and man has attained his true moral centre, there will no longer be any need of a higher sphere in which to fulfil his destiny, and by that time, too science will have established such a chemically exact equilibrium between the nutriment and excretion, the absorption and the exhalation, that perpetual youth will result just as inevitably as water from the union of oxygen and hydrogen. Why, in fact, exclaims philosopher Proudhon, should man grow old? The spiritualists and theosophs promise us a new and imperishable life beyond the grave. Why does not this life commence from the present? Why a transition? And, if this hope be well founded, who knows but that one day, by the perfecting of the species, the present life may acquire this ultra-mundane incorruptibility? People have long believed in the possibility of escaping death; examples of it have been cited--witness the tradition of the "Wandering Jew"--a proof beyond reply, says the French communist, "that the previous experience which man has made of death has not at all sufficed to demonstrate to him the necessity of the thing." But still it is not to be expected that the social levellers will feel authorized to dispense entirely with the services of the "great leveller." It is the duty of society to preserve a constant arithmetical equality. Accordingly the humanitary philosophers have recommended the "painless extinction" of all the supernumerary offspring of a "social phalanx," and, as a melancholy pleasure to the bereaved parents, it has been beautifully proposed to adorn the corridors of their communistic temples with middling-sized flower-pots, in which should be interred the infants who had thus perished by "painless extinction," in order that the community might not be overburdened." Bills of mortality, it is true, will then be out of date, but in their place will succeed a floral catalogue of the "painless extinctions" per week by which society will be assured of its equilibrium, and a taste for flowers kept alive in the virtuous ladies of the association. This is the aesthetics of communism.  

The socialists of France have been too much disposed to deify Labor. With daring profanity they have doxologized it by the pater nosters of their impious devotion, saying,"Thine, oh labor, is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever, amen." But Mr. James has no such idolatrous homage for the "accursed necessity of earning one's bread by the sweat of his brow." Talk as we may on gala days, says he, man hates compulsory labor, labor which the body lays upon the soul, "because it does not express the true order of human life, does not express that inward and divine force which is the proper glory of man, and which reveals itself only in free or spontaneous action--action that descends from the soul to the body." Nothing but whips, and dungeons, and gibbets, and a ceaseless army of men affirming the terrors of a vindictive future keeps the needy, he says, from supplying their wants in a more summary way than by their present servitude; and as Mr. James is the sworn enemy of all "penal exactions," the reader can readily infer the consummation he thinks "devoutly to be wished;" and unless speedy justice be done to "human individuality," by furnishing it suitable media for the display of its "inmost and essential innocence," he predicts that, like a bursting thundercloud, it will break out in "eccentric and explosive methods."

We do not feel that it is at all incumbent on us to attempt a confutation of the transparent fallacies which lurk in almost every proposition and paragraph of the extracts above quoted. They are too extravagant to be even specious. There are some truths so axiomatic that it is a work of supererogation to essay their demonstration, and there are some falsities so palpable that, like the darkness of Egypt, they do not require us for their discovery so much as to open our eyes; they can be felt. To state them is to confute them. They all emanate from what O'Connell would have called "a multitudinous and monstrous lie;" or, if this expression implies a disrespectful imputation, from an egregious blunder, to wit, that social inequalities and governmental repression are the causes instead of being the effects of moral and consequently of physical evil. As well might you say that the knife and cautery, the compress and bandage of the surgeon are the causes of cancers and tumors and broken limbs. We pass to notice a moralism of our author respecting the "philosophy of intemperance."

Very ardent and well meaning reformers among us are anxious "to cut up intemperance by the roots," and to this end propose the entire suppression of the traffic in intoxicating liquors "except for mechanical, medicinal, and sacramental purposes." All such philanthropists will be interested to learn of a reformatory process which will encounter no opposition from rum-sellers, and which, nevertheless, we are assured, will prove infallibly effective. Cases of confirmed intemperance, says Mr. James, are a clinging and a burning reproach to the society that tolerates them. "Society," he asserts, "has ample virtue to cure every instance of intemperance within her limits, provided she had only the will to exert it." Drunkenness, he argues, is the vice of those men of passive habit, in whom the energies of passion and thought are superior to their energy of action. Now, if society were so constituted that every man found sufficient stimulus in his daily engagements to call into action his energies of thought, we are assured that no man would resort to artificial stimuli in order to evoke the dormant activity of his nature. The first step, and the vitally important one, in Mr. James's process of reforming drunkards, consists in society coming to regard drunkenness as nothing more or less than a "symptom of disease in the will," and in ceasing consequently to regard the subject as criminal on account of it. The drunkard simply asks, he says, that you should, "by the potent magnetism of your sympathy, empower or inflame his will" with sufficient strength to enable him successfully to stem the drift of a passive habitude. We do not wish to make cavilling objections to any philanthropic enterprise, but simply inquire of Mr. James who is to "empower and inflame" the will of society with a disposition to exert the virtue which, as he says, she possesses "to cure very instance of intemperance"; for if the drunkard is not to be regarded as a criminal because the seat of his disease consists in a "diseased will," is not society equally exonerated from all culpability if her "will" is so "diseased" that she cannot exert her virtue? We hasten to dismiss this sickly sentimentalism by presenting the following specimen as an addition to the "Amenities of Literature:"

"When Society shall have the grace to forgive all her erring offspring, by assuming to herself the burden of their offences, she will learn that the path of magnanimity is also the path of consummate prudence. Teach a man to believe himself at heart a sinner, and he will be sure to 'play hell,' as the phrase goes, with his teachers. Teach him, on the contrary. to believe himself at heart sound, and a sinner only by social imputation, and he will abound in all manner of manly fruit. Accordingly the poor drunkard, being inwardly relieved of that guilt which bows him to the dust, and which forever darkens the hope of the future by the memory of the loathsome past, being restored to more than pristine peace and innocence by your loyalty to truth, will put on vigor and beauty with the day, and shed the slough of natural habit as spontaneously as flowers shed their foliage or corn its husks." 

-- James C. Welling, review of Henry James Sr., Lectures and Miscellanies in "Notes on New Books," Washington National Intelligencer, April 20, 1852.

Before the Civil War, book reviews in the National Intelligencer by James Clarke Welling repeatedly called attention to the magical thinking exhibited by social reformers, and warned against real miseries bound to accompany the actual implementation of socialist policies. For example, reviewing Charlotte Brontë's Villette on May 26, 1853, Welling felt safe in saying that

"In our country we may not be harassed by any fears lest a Blithedale romance may inoculate the popular mind with a contagion like socialism."

Reviewing Peruvian Antiquities by Mariano E. Rivero on November 29, 1853, Welling predicted that

"If socialism found its full and rotund development under these autocratic rulers, swaying at will an ignorant and degraded populace, whose equality consisted only in an equality of barbarism, we may judge to what results a similar policy would conduct the nations of Europe."

As in the 1852 review of Henry James's Lectures, transcribed in full herein, Welling often put a spotlight on the horrifying policy of infanticide, as theoretically approved by Plato in his Republic and confidently advocated in the 19th century by "Monsieur Fourier" and other "crazy" European socialists, perhaps under the influence of Malthus or the dark Malthusian "Marcus pamphlet" deplored by Carlyle in his treatise on Chartism. Reviewing the Life and Travels Herodotus in the Fifth Century before Christ by James Talboy Wheeler in the National Intelligencer for July 1, 1856, Welling thus ridiculed the latest Utopian scheme for population control through the "painless extinction" of unwanted babies:

Every body knows that when Monsieur Fourier set about to effect "the synthesis of matter and spirit" according to the most philosophical adjustments of "passional attraction" of the supernumerary offspring by which the free and easy working of the social machine which he had invented was liable to be clogged, and in the end brought to a stand-still. To guard against any such obstruction he recommended (it was but an exaggerated phase of Malthusianism, such as might have been expected from a French translation of that politico-economical system or from a crazy Gaul ambitious to "out-herod Herod") that children who came into the world (that is, the phalanstery) without being wanted might be disposed of in a way which would be advantageous to the community, without, it was supposed, being very harrowing to anybody's parental feelings in an association among whom the birth of a "wise child," as defined by the familiar proverb, was a social impossibility. St. Augustine, we remember, speaks of the infants who perished under the sword of Herod as the flores martyrum, or "flowers of the martyrs." It was perhaps in memory of this pious fancy that certain ardent Fourierites have recommended the ornamentation of the phalanstery with sculptured flower pots in which the nascent "martyrs" of the community might be aesthetically inurned.

In the same vein, this time focusing on maltreatment of living children as the "most loathsome" consequence of communism, Welling asked a sadly prophetic question in his review of The Mother and her Offspring by Stephen Tracy and Letters to Country Girls by Mrs. Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm, published in the Washington, DC National Intelligencer on May 18, 1853:

The veriest and most loathsome communism is the price at which woman must purchase her equality of rights. The modern advocates of the same social theories are not always so consistent [as Plato in the Republic], and they cannot, therefore, shield themselves behind the philosopher's mantle. Let them remember that the foundling hospital must be endowed before woman can be installed in the "rights" now withheld. Are American mothers prepared for such a consummation?

Protest leftovers in NYC - January 2017

Related posts

• James C. Welling, his Notes on New Books in the Washington National Intelligencer
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/james-c-welling-his-notes-on-new-books.html

• Unabridged review of Moby-Dick by James Clarke Welling
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/unabridged-wellings-review-of-moby-dick.html 

• 2 + 2 = 4 Melville's Anti-Communist Math
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2021/08/2-2-4-melvilles-anti-communist-math.html

William Allen Butler's friendly notice of THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES

As previously shown on Melvilliana, William Allen Butler (1825-1902) the Wall Street lawyer and genial satirist in prose and verse only served as an "occasional" New York correspondent for the Washington National Intelligencer in 1850-1 and most certainly did not write the long and largely favorable review of Moby-Dick, or the Whale attributed to him since 1953 in published Melville studies.

The real reviewer of Melville's "prose Epic on Whaling" in the regular "Notes on New Books" column of the National Intelligencer (December 16, 1851) was literary editor James C. Welling (1825-1894). 

Although William A. Butler never dreamed of writing the learned and perceptive review of Moby-Dick in the National Intelligencer, he probably deserves credit for another, more ordinary notice in the same newspaper: the friendly and favorable review of Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables that appeared on April 22, 1851 under the heading "New York Correspondence." 

Butler's first published letter to the National Intelligencer appeared on July 19, 1850 under the heading, "Cursory Notices of New Books, and Literary and Fine Art, in New York." Dropping Cursory, Butler or his editors gave subsequent letters the revised title, "Notices of New Books, Literature, and the Fine Arts in New York," shortened to "New Books, Literature, and the Fine Arts in New York" (Daily National Intelligencer, February 3, 1851), and then changed again to "Society, New Books, and the Fine Arts in New York" (February 11, 1851). Through February 1851, all of Butler's letters from New York were signed "Jacques du Monde," also Butler's pseudonym in verse contributions to the Literary World and other periodicals. 

The last letter from William Allen Butler to the National Intelligencer signed "Jacques du Monde" appeared on March 1, 1851, under the heading "New York Correspondence." A few more appeared after that under the same heading but without any signature. Several of these closely resembled the contributions from Butler aka "Jacques du Monde" in their contents and style of writing. The last anonymous contribution of "New York Correspondence" in the usual vein of William Allen Butler contains the glowing notice, transcribed below, of Hawthorne's most recent work The House of the Seven Gables. Extant notes to his old classmate and traveling companion George L. Duyckinck at NYPL provide documentary support for ascribing the Hawthorne notice to William Allen Butler.

One mention of Hawthorne occurs near the close of a letter to George L. Duyckinck dated April 3, 1851 and written at Willard's Hotel in Washington, D. C. where Butler had been staying with his wife Mary:

"The Scarlet Letter we have been reading. It is Hawthorne all over, & capital at that. I think it will do more for his reputation than anything else."

The clincher however is this short note dated April 14, 1851 wherein Butler asks Duyckinck to obtain for him a review copy of Hawthorne's latest work, doubtless meaning The House of the Seven Gables.

Citation: 

Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "1843-1849" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1843 - 1849. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/83e4c970-2731-0133-8a0e-58d385a7bbd0 

29 Wall St.

Ap. 14, 1851

Dear Duyckinck, 

Can you get me a copy of Hawthorne's Book? I will read & notice it incontinently. I believe I understood you that you had spoken to Fields about notices for the Intelligencer. If you can get it without any trouble please send it to the office & much oblige 

Yours Truly

Wm: Allen Butler 

By incontinently Butler meant "instantly," "immediately."

Evidently William Allen Butler got the book with the help of George L. Duyckinck and made good on his promise to "read & notice it" without delay. Five days after requesting a review copy, Butler worked a warm and generous treatment of Hawthorne's new book into his letter to the National Intelligencer dated April 19, 1851 and published there on April 22nd under the heading "New York Correspondence." Reprinted in the weekly edition of the same newspaper on April 26, 1851, this may have been the last of Butler's published contributions as an occasional correspondent of the Washington, D. C. National Intelligencer. 

This item is not recorded in Gary Scharnhorst's Nathaniel Hawthorne: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism Before 1900 (The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1988). 

Washington Weekly National Intelligencer
April 26, 1851 - via genealogybank.com

The House of the Seven Gables, a romance, by NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Boston. Ticknor, Reed & Fields.

A greater treat than this volume, fresh from the magic pen of HAWTHORNE and the dainty press of TICKNOR & CO., (a fit conjunction of author and publishers,) has not been given to the reading public for this long time. Mr. HAWTHORNE, after having occupied for a number of years the position of an occasional essayist, writing more from impulse than from any settled purposes or plans of authorship, and appealing necessarily to a limited class of readers, has emerged into a position far better suited to his breadth of genius, and taken his stand in the front rank of that class of writers of fiction with whom fiction is only the medium for the exhibition and analysis of human thought and passion. The Scarlet Letter, published about a year ago, was his first experiment in this new and enlarged sphere. It was a book which no man could read without acknowledging an unrivalled power in the author; a book of intense interest and pathos, not from any startling developments of plot or incident, but from its masterly painting of character and strange revelations of the human heart. It proved deservedly successful, and enlarged Hawthorne's sphere of readers and admirers from a New England to a national circumference. His present book is a pleasing authentication of the success of the former one, and will be eagerly sought after by all who have already made themselves familiar with the author.

The House of the Seven Gables is a New England story, true in all its details and descriptions as to its locale, and yet in its spirit and mode of treatment as far removed from the commonly received notion of New Englandism, and as dissimilar, as the castles of Niederwald are from the factories at Lowell. It is one of the peculiarities of our literature that in the midst and centre of the most practical and least romantic of communities, both in action and thought, we should find a writer like Hawthorne eliminating the elements of a purely imaginative tale from the life going on around him. He is thoroughly native in his taste in almost all his works, taking as their ground-work some local tradition of the old Puritan or Colonial times, and giving prominence to the characteristics and peculiarities of his immediate neighbors as the best material for his purpose. The House of the Seven Gables stands in a street of a Massachusetts town; its occupants are Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, an old maid of veritable New England stamp, and Phoebe, her niece, and idealized "smart girl" such as one meets with, but entirely unidealized, all along  the valley of the Connecticut. The shadow of a curse has rested upon the old house, and pervaded its dark time-blackened interior, ever since the original Puritan proprietor built it over the spot of ground which he had wrested from the heirs of old Mathew Maule, who had been hung for witchcraft, and in one way or another has darkened the life of all its inmates. Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon is driven by her poverty to the sad extremity of keeping a shop in the once aristocratic mansion, and the story opens with the bitter experience of the worthy dame in this emergency. The old maid and her brother, a man whom an unjust sentence has kept thirty years in prison, and who comes home to the Pyncheon homestead a wreck and ruin, and his cousin, Judge Pyncheon, the respectable and moral wealthy citizen, but in reality the author of the convict's misfortunes, and his deadly enemy, are the principal characters, not forgetting a streak of sunlight, woven through the otherwise dark texture of the tale, in the person of Phoebe, a beautiful and complete character, who is the good genius of the story. The plot is simple, and the thread of the narrative even, its whole power lying in the marvellous chiaroscuro in which the characters are painted, and the subtle analysis presented thereby of thoughts and passions common to the race of man, of which the Pyncheons are only single embodiments and types. I can safely pronounce the House of the Seven Gables the most strikingly original romance of American authorship, viewed as a work of imaginative power, which has yet appeared.

Related posts

• James C. Welling, his Notes on New Books
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/james-c-welling-his-notes-on-new-books.html

• Unabridged! Welling's review of Moby-Dick in the National Intelligencer
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/unabridged-wellings-review-of-moby-dick.html

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 (in 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

Related posts

• James C. Welling, his Notes on New Books
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/james-c-welling-his-notes-on-new-books.html 

• William Allen Butler's friendly notice of The House of the Seven Gables 
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/09/william-allen-butlers-friendly-notice.html 

• Moby Dick widely praised in 1851-2
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/02/moby-dick-widely-praised-in-1851-2.html

James C. Welling, his "Notes on New Books" and the 1851 review of MOBY-DICK in the Washington NATIONAL INTELLIGENCER

J. C. Welling
Brady-Handy photograph collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Herman Melville's great American novel Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851) got high, early praise in the nation's capital and beyond when the influential Washington National Intelligencer, a leading Whig newspaper, called it "a prose Epic on Whaling" by a magician with words. Spellbound, the reviewer marveled over the wizard-writer's "strange power to reach the sinuosities of a thought" and "depths of pathos that few can fathom." This remarkable unsigned review appeared under the heading, "Notes on New Books" in the Daily National Intelligencer for December 16, 1851. Taking Moby-Dick as obviously "the production of a man of genius," the reviewer also commended the author's "unrivalled" powers of description and "actually Shakespearean" depth of character development. Not without reservations, however: Melville ought to have curbed his "irreverent wit" and lewd imagination, especially as displayed in Chapter 40 Midnight, Forecastle "with its maudlin and ribald orgies." Nonetheless, this long and largely favorable notice in the National Intelligencer ended by extolling Moby-Dick as an "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
Who wrote so early and well about Melville and his legendarily neglected masterpiece? 

Although confidently ascribed to William Allen Butler in previous Melville scholarship, including the Historical Note for the 1988 Northwestern-Newberry Edition of Moby-Dick, or The Whale, Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and both volumes of Hershel Parker's Herman Melville: A Biography (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002), the eloquent and appreciative review of Moby-Dick in the Washington Daily National Intelligencer for December 16, 1851 is far more likely to have been written by James Clarke Welling (1825-1894). Some time in 1850 or 1851, six months at least before this important review appeared under the heading "Notes on New Books," Welling had replaced Edward William Johnston as literary editor of the National Intelligencer. As reported late in April 1851, Johnston left that paper to conduct the Richmond Whig. 

24 Apr 1851, Thu The National Era (Washington, District of Columbia) Newspapers.com

As shown below, multiple sources credit Welling with authorship of the regular "Notes on New Books" column in the Washington National Intelligencer from 1850 or 1851 to 1856. The span of Welling's known tenure as literary editor and book reviewer for the National Intelligencer encompasses the later review of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in 1856 as well as the 1851 review of Moby-Dick. Both reviews, as Hershel Parker has pointed out in the 3rd Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, feature the distinctive conjunction of sinuosities and thought in the similarly phrased expressions, "sinuosities of a thought" (1851) and "sinuosities of thought" (1856).

James C. Welling's authorship of the "Notes on New Books" column during the period in which both the Melville and Whitman reviews appeared was first made public in late August of 1860, through a formal statement in the National Intelligencer (August 30, 1860) by owner-editor William W. Seaton that circulated widely in other U. S. newspapers--particularly in the south and west.

Charleston Courier - September 3, 1860
via genealogybank.com

1. Reprinted, for example, in the Charleston, SC Daily Courier on September 3, 1860:

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.

2. From the memorial volume by Josephine Seaton, William Winston Seaton of the "National Intelligencer": A Biographical Sketch (Boston, 1871) pages 360-361:

A month subsequent to the lamented death of Mr. Gales, Mr. Seaton announced that thenceforth Mr. James C. Welling would be associated with him in the editorial conduct of the Intelligencer, with which indeed, during the previous ten years, he had been connected; first, in charge of its literary department, after the retirement from that position of the accomplished gentleman and brilliant writer, the late Edward William Johnston. "Mr. Welling," adds Mr. Seaton, "was the author of those Notes on New Books, which, by their scholarship and ability, would of themselves be a sufficient evidence of the qualifications he brings to the tasks of journalism. Enjoying 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." Most ably indeed did Mr. Welling meet these flattering expectations. To a fulness of matured thought upon every point of theoretical or practical national polity, and an erudition ranging through every field of science and literature, Mr. Welling united a force and readiness of discussion with an appreciation of the conservative tone and dignity characterizing the Intelligencer, which gained the marked approval of the constituents of the time-honored journal, and amply justified the confidence reposed in him by Mr. Seaton.

3. From the 1881 Baptist Encyclopædia, edited by William Cathcart:

Welling, James C., LL.D., was born July 1, 1825, at Trenton, N. J. After pursuing his preliminary studies at the Trenton Academy, he entered Princeton College, from which he graduated in 1844. From 1844 to 1846 he was a private tutor in the family of Henry T. Garnett, Esq., of Westmoreland, Va. He afterwards entered upon the study of the law with the Hon. Willoughby Newton, of Virginia, but at the expiration of a year he was recalled to New Jersey by the illness of his father. On the death of his father, in 1848, he became one of the principals of the New York Collegiate School, the oldest grammar-school in that city. In 1853 he resigned this position to accept the associate editorship of The National Intelligencer, Washington, D. C., for which celebrated journal he had already, since 1850, written the "Notes on New Books," which were a characteristic feature of the paper. Dr. Welling, as editor of the Intelligencer during the trying period of the war, conducted it with signal ability. 

4. Biographical Sketch of James C. Welling in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time, edited by Allen Thorndike Rice. Sixth Edition (New York, 1888) page 643:

JAMES C. WELLING.

JAMES C. WELLING was born in Trenton, N. J., on the 14th of July, 1825. After graduation at Princeton College, in 1844, he studied law, but renounced its practice to become Associate Principal of the New York Collegiate School in 1848. In 1851, he became literary editor of the National Intelligencer at Washington, D. C., and, a few years later, succeeded to Joseph Gales in the political conduct of that old and influential journal. During the Civil War his relations with the members of President Lincoln's Cabinet were intimate and often confidential. Before, during, and after the war, Mr. Welling stood steadfastly by the Constitution and the Union, without, however, always approving the civil policies of the Administration. He resigned his editorial position in 1865, because of broken health. For several years he was one of the clerks of the United States Court of Claims. In 1870 he was appointed Professor of Belles Lettres in Princeton College, and, a year afterward, was called to the presidency of the Columbian University—an office which he still holds. During his administration of that institution it has received a new charter from Congress, has erected a new University building in the heart of Washington, and has enlarged the scope of its operations by adding a scientific school to the other schools already comprised in its system. By joint resolution of Congress in 1884, he was appointed a Regent of the Smithsonian Institution, and is Chairman of its Executive Committee. He is also the President of the Board of Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, and takes a deep interest in the prosperity of that institution—the most richly endowed institution of its kind in the country.

5. Rev. A. J. Huntington in President James C. Welling, LL.D: Memorial Service (The Columbian University, 1895) page 17:

We have not now the time to speak of the parentage and birth of the late Dr. James C. Welling, of his early training, of his college course and graduation at Princeton, or of his teaching for a few years afterward in lower Virginia and in the city of New York. In 1853, some nine years after he left college, he became literary editor of the "National Intelligencer," then published in this city, having been already for some years a writer of book-notices for this journal. In 1856 he became its associate editor, and soon afterward its chief editorial manager; and this position he continued to fill until he resigned it in 1865. The "Intelligencer," both before and after he took charge of it, was one of the leading journals of the great Whig party, and exerted before our civil war a more powerful influence perhaps than any other political paper of the country.

6. Report of S. P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, for the year ending June 30, 1895 (Washington D. C., 1896) page 33:

James Clark Welling, at the time of his death, September 4, 1894, was nearly 70 years of age. Descended from New England colonial ancestors, a native of one of the Middle States, in early manhood a teacher in the South, and for nearly half a century a resident of the national capital, he was an American of the best type, free from sectional bias, personifying the higher traits and tendencies of the nation, loyal to the traditions and aspirations of its founders.

He was graduated in 1844 from the College of New Jersey, studied law, and was admitted to the bar, but soon afterwards entered upon the profession of journalism. He always retained, however, a strong inclination for the study of constitutional and international law, and of politics, and his interest in public affairs was greatly stimulated by his connection for fifteen years with the most important of Washington journals, at that time national in its influence. He became the literary editor of the National Intelligencer in 1850, and was its managing editor throughout the entire period of the civil war. In this capacity he had the privilege of personal acquaintance with all our public men, and confidential access to many of them, including Lincoln, Seward, and Stanton. 

Washington, D. C. Evening Star - November 1, 1894
via genealogybank.com

7. Princeton Alumni Association, tribute "In Memory of Dr. Welling," as printed in the Washington D. C. Evening Star on November 1, 1894:

"...literary editor of the National Intelligencer in its palmiest days."

05 Sep 1894, Wed Times Herald (Washington, District of Columbia) Newspapers.com

8. Washington, D. C. Times, September 5, 1894: 

"Then he became known as a newspaper contributor, and in 1850 he was engaged by Joseph Gales and William W. Seaton as literary editor of the National Intelligencer, then the leading paper of Washington. In 1856 he became associate editor and had chief management of it through the trying times of the civil war."

9. New York Herald, September 5, 1894: 

"He was literary editor of the National Intelligencer in Washington from 1850 to 1856, and editor-in-chief to the close of the war." 

10. William E. Ames, A History of the National Intelligencer (University of North Carolina Press, 1971) page 306:

Seaton’s absence from the Intelligencer probably never would have been possible if it had not been for a highly capable young editor hired in 1850. James Clarke Welling started work as literary editor for the Intelligencer, but before he finished his editorial duties he was the guiding hand behind the newspaper. 

The unique review of Moby-Dick in the Washington, D. C. National Intelligencer was first ascribed to William A. Butler by Hugh W. Hetherington in his chapter on "Early Reviews of Moby-Dick" for Moby-Dick Centennial Essays, edited by Tyrus Hillway and Luther S. Mansfield (Southern Methodist University Press, 1953) at page 106. Promptly but erroneously endorsed by Perry Miller in The Raven and the Whale, the mistaken attribution to Butler was amplified by Hetherington in Melville's Reviewers: British and American (University of North Carolina Press, 1961) pages 214-215. 

As best I can tell, the mistake originated in confusion about the nature of lawyer-poet William Allen Butler's involvement in 1850-1851 with the National Intelligencer. And perhaps in overestimating Butler's gifts as a literary critic. As correctly reported in 1937 by Luther Stearns Mansfield:

"Butler wrote a regular column for the National Intelligencer, "Notices of New Books, Literature, and the Fine Arts in New York," which he usually signed, "Jacques du Monde."

Mansfield, Luther Stearns. “Glimpses of Herman Melville’s Life in Pittsfield, 1850-1851: Some Unpublished Letters of Evert A. Duyckinck.” American Literature, vol. 9, no. 1, 1937, pp. 26–48. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2920071. Accessed 27 Aug. 2024.

William Allen Butler's signed contributions over the pseudonym "Jacques du Monde" began to appear in the National Intelligencer in July 1850 and only continued until March or so of the following year. His book notices (aptly billed as "Cursory Notices of New Books" in the first letter dated July 13, 1850) during this limited run were generally light and breezy announcements of new works, "cursory" indeed but full of compliments to their authors and publishers. Butler supplemented these typically short-and-sweet book notices with well-informed commentary on recent art exhibits and music concerts, along with the latest local news and gossip. 

Washington Daily National Intelligencer - July 19, 1850
via genealogybank.com

Early on, as Mansfield also reported, Butler had been gently instructed by the publishers not to bother Southern readers with boring literary gossip about the personal affairs of "writers in the North of whom they have scarcely heard." Presumably Gales and Seaton, knowing of Butler's close affiliation with the Duyckinck brothers, wanted to discourage their newest Manhattan correspondent from over-promoting literary stars of the Young America movement--particularly Cornelius Mathews, dubiously crowned the "American Dickens." As Butler explained to his good friend George L. Duyckinck in a letter dated August 24, 1850:

"I wrote a letter to the National Intelligencer in which I worked a little Berkshire experience & spoke of Melville, Mathews, Headley & Hawthorne & in my next note from Gales & Seaton they asked me to permit them to suggest in friendliness that the great mass of their readers could not feel much interest in the private pursuits habits & whereabouts of writers in the North of whom they have scarcely heard. Cool, wasn't it !"

https://archive.org/details/sim_american-literature_march-1937-january-1938_9/page/36/mode/2up

By his own account, Butler seems to have corresponded directly with co-publishers Gales and Seaton, rather than either the outgoing literary editor Edward William Johnston or his eventual replacement, James C. Welling. I don't yet know exactly when Welling started working for the National Intelligencer, but Johnston's departure as literary editor would not be formally announced until late in April 1851.

Very likely Welling either had not yet been hired, or had not yet been tasked with resuming Johnston's column of "Notes on New Books," when "Jacques du Monde" began submitting his weekly series of "Cursory Notices" from New York City. Gales and Seaton would have valued the book notices in Butler's New York correspondence all the more as a stopgap, until their new-hire Welling could get himself "trained in" and ready to produce book reviews for the National Intelligencer. One early sign of the transition then impending or already underway: "Notes on New Books" in January and February 1851 were reprinted from the New York Evening Mirror, evidently as a sort of placeholder. 

Lots more investigative work remains to be done. Good!

Dated February 22, 1851, the last letter from Butler signed "Jacques du Monde" appeared in the National Intelligencer for March 1, 1851 under the heading "New York Correspondence." The next under the same heading, published on March 25, 1851, is unsigned, but the tone and contents resemble those in previous letters from William Allen Butler. Another unsigned item of "New York Correspondence" appeared on  April 1, 1851, likewise similar in style and substance to earlier letters signed "Jacques du Monde." Aha! Here's something good and unexpected. The unsigned letter dated April 19, 1851 and published in the National Intelligencer on April 22nd under the heading "New York Correspondence" contains a glowing notice of Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables. Unrecorded in Hawthorne scholarship? I'm guessing this letter in the Daily National Intelligencer for April 22, 1851 might represent William Allen Butler's final report to Washington, D. C. on literary and cultural happenings in Manhattan. 

Another, later review of Hawthorne's "NEW BOOK" House of the Seven Gables appeared on page 2 of the National Intelligencer for Monday, April 28, 1851, over the initials "P. S."

One short item of "New York Correspondence" dated May 1, 1851 and published in the National Intelligencer on May 3rd gives news of Jenny Lind and is subscribed with an asterisk. No books are mentioned in "New York Correspondence" published in the National Intelligencer on June 18, 1851. And no books receive notice in "New York Correspondence" published July 2, 1851 over the initials, "S.K.S."

When hired by Gales and Seaton (in 1850? or 1851?!) James Clarke Welling had been living in New York City, employed there as Associate Principal of the New York Collegiate School. Evidently he continued living in NYC for some time while reviewing books for the Washington D. C. newspaper. Perhaps he did other editorial jobs for Gales and Seaton before taking over "Notes on New Books." However it happened, Welling made a bold entrance on page 2 under the familiar old heading, with a blistering criticism of Yeast: A Problem by Charles Kingsley (Daily National Intelligencer, Tuesday June 24, 1851).

To wrap up for now, the main point here is that William Allen Butler, during his short stint as a New York correspondent of the National Intelligencer, contributed comparatively brief "Notices of New Books," never the weightier "Notes on New Books."

Many years later Butler recalled Jenny Lind and Barnum as highlights of his writing for the National Intelligencer:

"Jenny Lind's first concert was given--of all places in the world--in Castle Garden! It was, of  course, a great event. I was there, and wrote an account of it for The National Intelligencer of Washington, for which I was an occasional correspondent. I think the audience hardly equaled in numbers Barnum's expectations, but believe the results of the Jenny Lind concerts, as a whole, satisfied the showman. However, he afterward wisely confined himself to wild animals and the ring." 

As stated at page 234 in A Retrospect of Forty Years, edited by his daughter Harriet Allen Butler (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911) William Allen Butler was only ever "an occasional correspondent" for the Washington, D. C. National Intelligencer. Butler the industrious lawyer and good-humored satirist both in prose and verse did not write the regular column of "Notes on New Books" for the National Intelligencer and never reviewed Moby-Dick for that or (as far as we know) any other publication. 

In a subsequent post I hope to give the full text of James C. Welling's splendid review of Moby-Dick.
Update - done, here:

• https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/unabridged-wellings-review-of-moby-dick.html

Including the opening, demonstrably penned under Melville's spell but omitted in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews. When I say "demonstrably," I mean this bit about 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.

sounds very like Melville giving his whale Extracts, conceived to have been painstakingly compiled by a "poor devil of a Sub-Sub" librarian and

solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing bird's-eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, Including our own. 

Turns out, I'm not the only one impressed by the reviewer's appropriation of Melville's language and style in Moby-Dick. On Christmas Day 1851 the Richmond Watchman and Observer reprinted a long section of the first paragraph under the heading, "How Saints are Made," and credited the piece to Herman Melville himself. 

Richmond Watchman and Observer
December 25, 1851

How Saints are Made.

BY HERMAN MELVILLE

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.

--from the Richmond, Virginia Watchman and Observer of 25 December 1851; found on Virginia Chronicle, The Library of Virginia. 

 Related posts

• Unabridged! James Clarke Welling's review of Moby-Dick in the National Intelligencer
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/08/unabridged-wellings-review-of-moby-dick.html

• William Allen Butler's friendly notice of The House of the Seven Gables
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2024/09/william-allen-butlers-friendly-notice.html 

• Moby-Dick reviewed in the Richmond, Va. Watchman and Observer
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2025/02/moby-dick-reviewed-in-richmond-virginia.html 

• Moby-Dick widely praised in 1851-2
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2020/02/moby-dick-widely-praised-in-1851-2.html

• Socialistic rhapsodies and theosophical trash James Clarke Welling's 1852 review of Lectures and Miscellanies by Henry James Sr.
  https://melvilliana.blogspot.com/2025/07/socialistic-rhapsodies-and-theosophical.html