Literature on the Little Arkansas

DRAGOONED: Writing, talking, and rewriting like Herman Melville in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853). Number 6.

Originally published in the January 1852 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, the fourth installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border brings the narrating “Captain of U. S. Dragoons” home to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in late October 1843 after thrilling chases of elk and buffalo, a couple of witty conversations with his invented prairie companion, and a much needed rest stop in the woods at “110 Mile Creek.”¹ The homecoming of the cavalry through frost and fire closes out the matter of the 1843 military escort of Santa Fe Traders. One highlight of this installment, “Literature on the Little Arkansas,” offers an especially fine instance of writing like Melville and for that reason gets all my attention herein.

The segment on “Literature on the Little Arkansas” is teased in just those words on the front cover of the magazine, and nowhere else.²

Scenes Beyond the Western Border. Written on the Prairie. By a Captain of U. S. Dragoons. Elk-shooting—A painful scene: After supper—A Buffalo Chase—Literature on the Little Arkansas—”110 Mile Creek”—Fire on the Prairie, &c. . . 47

Emphasis in bold here and throughout is mine. The 1857 book version would give differently phrased synopses of the same contents:

Chapter V.

Return March—Splendid Elk Chase—Dialogue and Soliloquy—Buffalo Chase—Criticism of J. P. R. James—Prairie on Fire—Snow Storm—Fort Leavenworth, … 272

After revision, “Criticism of J. P. R. James” replaces “Literature on the Little Arkansas.” While the new label more specifically describes the subject of the second prairie dialogue, it also introduces a spelling error in the name of popular British author George Payne Rainsford James. Regularly abbreviated “G. P. R. James” (G for George), the novelist’s name is erroneously printed “J. P. R. James” in the Table of Contents for Scenes and Adventures in the Army.³

Canceling “Literature on the Little Arkansas” eliminated a distinctively phrased conceit that had echoed one of the loudest outbursts of literary nationalism in Herman Melville’s 1850 review essay, Hawthorne and His Mosses. Here’s the hottest version, un-moderated, of Melville’s argument:

You must believe in Shakespeare’s unapproachability, or quit the country. But what sort of belief is this for an American, an man who is bound to carry republican progressiveness into Literature, as well as into Life? Believe me, my friends, that Shakespeares are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio. And the day will come, when you shall say who reads a book by an Englishman?⁴

Melville honors “Literature” as a noble field of human endeavor, presenting its pursuit as an imaginative counterpart to the business of real “Life.” In manuscript, the first letter in each of these alliterating pursuits, “Literature” and “Life,” was changed into a capital “L” by Herman himself. Melville scholars can tell that Herman altered both lower-case forms previously copied in the handwriting of his wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville.⁵

“Literature” and “Life” were printed in the Literary World as intentionally altered by Herman Melville, with the first letter of each word capitalized.

Melville’s next sentence puts Shakespeare “on the banks of the Ohio” river. Not for the purpose of further magnifying Shakespeare, as in Maurice Morgann’s influential essay on Falstaff, but to prophesy the making of great Literature by homegrown American writers.⁶ Plural Shakespeares, as Melville asserted in manuscript before revision, would come from the heartland, nurtured on the shores of what the old explorers called La Belle Rivière.

Not merely an emblem of Middle America, the Ohio River as Melville understood it also represented frontier life and the allure of westward expansion. One overlooked analogue is Westward Ho! (2 vols., New York: J. & J. Harper, 1832) by James Kirke Paulding, alternatively titled in the 1833 London edition by A. K. Newman and Company, The Banks of the Ohio; Or, Westward Ho! Paulding’s Westward Ho! was a popular novel during Melville’s boyhood in upstate New York.⁷ The library of the Albany Young Men’s Association had both volumes of Westward Ho! and two sets of Paulding’s earlier two-volume work, the Dutchman’s Fireside (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1831).⁸

Evidently Melville read and remembered some of Westward Ho! The high regard for neglected contemporaries of Shakespeare in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” follows the example of Paulding in the opening chapter of Volume 2:

But mankind must have an idol, one who monopolizes their admiration and devotion. The name of Shakspeare has swallowed up that of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors; thousands, tens of thousands echo his name that never heard of Marlow, Marlow, to whom Shakspeare himself condescended to be indebted, and whose conception of the character of Faust is precisely that of Goëthe; —of Webster, Marston, Randolph, Cartwright, May, and all that singular knot of dramatists, who unite the greatest beauties with the greatest deformities, and whose genius has sunk under the licentiousness of the age in which it was their misfortune to live. The names of Massinger, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher are, it is true, more familiar; but it is only their names and one or two of their pieces that are generally known. These last have been preserved, not on the score of their superior beauties, but because they afforded an opportunity for Garrick and other great performers to reap laurels which belonged to the poet, by the exhibition of some striking character. Far be it from us to attempt to detract from the fame of Shakspeare. Superior he is, beyond doubt, to all his countrymen who went before or came after him, in the peculiar walk of his genius; but he is not so immeasurably superior as to cast all others into oblivion.

Melville, in the mask of “A Virginian Spending July in Vermont,” thus revived a proclamation from the Banks of the Ohio that Shakespeare “is not so immeasurably superior” to gifted contemporaries:

Surely, to take the very greatest example on record, Shakespeare cannot be regarded as in himself the concretion of all the genius of his time; nor as so immeasurably beyond Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Beaumont, Johnson, that those great men can be said to share none of his power? — Hawthorne and His Mosses

Melville in his prime liked “to invoke American place-names for purposes beyond literal reference.”⁹ His “Mosses” essay invoked “the banks of the Ohio” as a figure of America in general and, heeding the example of Paulding’s fictional construction in the Banks of the Ohio; Or, Wesward Ho!, the American West in particular. Fulfilling the promise in the series title to portray “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” the January 1852 installment goes further than Melville did in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” by carrying the discussion of “Literature” to Kansas “on the Little Arkansas.”

Thematically as well as verbally, the deleted conceit of “Literature on the Little Arkansas” in the magazine version recalls Melville’s riverene rhetoric of literary nationalism in “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Same rhetoric, different river.

Us Americans

Granted, the “Literature” part mostly concerns the latest novel by the popular English author G. P. R. James. Nevertheless, the impromptu review of The False Heir on the Little Arkansas begins with a patriotic jab at the anti-American prejudice of every British writer, James included:

“James has at last committed the folly, which, first or last, all the British authors seem to fall into—I mean a sneer, or slander, on us Americans.”

In just the same way, Melville presumed to speak for “us Americans” in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” urging his countrymen to honor and appreciate freedom-loving American authors instead of slavishly favoring British models:

… while fully acknowledging all excellence everywhere, we should refrain from unduly lauding foreign writers, and, at the same time, duly recognize the meritorious writers that are our own:—those writers who breathe that unshackled, democratic spirit of Christianity in all things, which now takes the practical lead in this world, though at the same time led by ourselves—us Americans.”

In the middle of the 20th century, Perry Miller quoted this same passage in the Raven and the Whale (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956) to illustrate the punch of Melville’s America-First rhetoric in “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” As Miller observed, the various manuscript revisions (both authorial and editorial) designed to cool the high heat of Melville’s literary nationalism “still leave standing, and standing in full defiance, Melville's major point." That “major point,” as Miller called it, is communicated in a sentence that intentionally ends with the locution “us Americans.”

As may be seen in the detail from “Hawthorne and His Mosses” in manuscript, shown above, Melville altered the sentence with clear intent. Before revision, as copied in the handwriting of Melville’s wife Lizzie, the key sentence had ended “… led by us.” Melville struck through “us” to finish it with “ourselves—us Americans.”

When Philip St. George Cooke or his ghostwriter put “us Americans” at the end of a sentence protesting the anti-American bias of a best-selling English novelist, he was really writing like Melville.

Criticism of The False Heir

Most of the second prairie dialogue (originally titled “Literature on the Little Arkansas) in the January 1852 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” is taken up with criticism of the False Heir. In terms of chronology, the selection of G.P.R. James’s False Heir for review is consistent with the matter of the fall expedition on the Santa Fe Trail. Philip St. George Cooke and three companies of U. S. Dragoons left Fort Leavenworth in late August 1843; the False Heir had only recently been published in America by the Harpers in early June of the same year.

Even so, the harsh conditions described by Cooke in his official army report do not sound amenable to close reading of any novel, however entertaining, or to the trenchant literary criticism ventured in the January 1852 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” Enter I.F., to the rescue! The dramatic fiction of the Imaginary Friend invites suspension of disbelief by a sympathetic reader. The segue from straight narration to dialogue begins, conforming to what by now has become a regular pattern of intervention, with commentary by the narrator’s invented traveling companion, followed by a provocative question. Thus:

I.F. Very interesting, this dry grass and frost! Has the idea of home banished me from your thoughts?

The backhanded compliment (“very interesting”) of the narrative in progress applies equally well to Cooke’s original description of the journey Eastward in his official report of October 23, 1843:

“October 5th. I marched Eastward. We began now to be exposed to black frosts and the grass rather suddenly failed us.”¹⁰

Having chided the diarist for this boring preoccupation with “dry grass and frost,” I.F next poses a question that accuses the narrator, and perhaps the reader along with him, of neglect: “Has the idea of home banished me from your thoughts?” Thus constructed, the appeal of real domestic felicity is opposed to that of fantasy, in much the same way that Ishmael contrasted the two poles of experience in chapter 94, A Squeeze of the Hand:

“… by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the country.”

Denying any exclusive focus on the comforts of home, the narrator of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” admits to being “a bit of a philosopher.”

— “Ah, no! I am a bit of a philosopher; and take this October marching very kindly—particularly, after thawing of a morning and riding ahead, I kill a grouse occasionally with my pistol.

Both the dragoon captain’s negating sigh, “Ah, no!” and the reveal of his identity as “a bit of a philosopher” exemplify writing like Melville. The expression “Ah, no” begins sentences in Mardi and Redburn, in both novels punctuated with an exclamation mark.¹¹ Without exclamation mark, “Ah, no” begins a sentence in the rejected short fiction, The Two Temples. In Redburn, the mate on the Highlander is “a bit of a wag.” Any sailor, as a Jack of All Trades, needs to be “a bit of an embroiderer” and “a bit of a musician,” among numerous other sorts of employment depicted in Melville’s fourth book. Much to their credit, Melville portrays the heroic Captain Jack Chase as “a little bit of a dictator”; and Mad Jack as “a bit of a tyrant” in his fifth book, White-Jacket. In the late tragic fable of Billy Budd, Melville conceived the archetypal Handsome Sailor as being “in some cases a bit of a nautical Murat in setting forth his person ashore.” Old Rozoko, a royally favored monkey on Hooloomooloo, the Isle of Cripples in Mardi, maximizes the conceit in being “much of a philosopher” rather than merely and more modestly “a bit” of one.

The set-up for “Literature on the Little Arkansas” proceeds with another leading question:

I.F. “ What would you give to see a late paper?

In reply, the Captain helpfully tells how he found the latest novel by G. P. R. James, in his baggage.

— “You have me there! I have a weakness for a damp newspaper; —let me see— it is now eight weeks since we have had news. But I discovered a copy of James’ False Heir with my baggage; that, in my mental famine, has been quite a feast.”

Feasting on the False Heir is nowhere mentioned in Philip St. George Cooke’s Journal of the Santa Fe Trail, the main source-text for the matter of 1843 in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” Indeed, one feels in reading Cooke’s army journal, especially his official report of the fall escort on October 26, 1843, the lack of time or any interest in reading for pleasure.

Question and answer in this exchange both feature writing like Melville. The question “what would you give”( a 4-gram) occurs in White-Jacket, Chapter 29. The Captain’s answer, “You have me there!” has a more distinctively Melvillean ring to it, echoing Ishmael’s direct address to imaginary critics in Moby-Dick Chapter 78 Cisterns and Buckets:

We have thee there. Not at all, but I have ye....

The Captain’s admitted “weakness” is a construct Melville uses repeatedly in some connection with officers, either in a nautical or military context. Captain Delano in Benito Cereno has “a weakness for negroes.” Major Jack Gentian, though a wounded Civil War veteran and model patriot, has “a weakness for certain gewgaws, that savour of the monarchical.”¹² “Ladies,” Melville claims in a flattering letter to Brigadier General Robert O. Tyler, “have a weakness for heroes.”

The Captain’s Imaginary Friend, not entirely confined to asking questions that function as dramatic cues for speeches by the boss, delivers critical insights of his own. Substantive remarks by I. F. in “Literature on the Little Arkansas” concern the pattern of quick-witted valets in fiction by G. P. R. James, and that author’s quirk of making characters repeat phrases at the beginning of every speech. I. F. is the speaker who credits James with generally positive cultural influence as “an effective moralist.”

Overall, however, the critical reception of James’s False Heir on the banks of the Little Arkansas is decidedly negative. Asked point blank, “Do you like it?” the Captain of U. S. Dragoons faults the author for lackluster presentation and a hackneyed plot, in addition to the gratuitous slander “on us Americans.” As a specimen of James’s snobbery, the Captain reads aloud a cutting aside from the False Heir, admiring the putdown of “Americanism” as “coolly and deliberately” executed:

—" “I say Americanism advisedly; for republicanism is a very different thing, and does not imply rejection of refinement in the higher classes of society.”¹³

James here equated Americanism with crude values and rude manners, alleging “rejection of refinement” even “in the higher classes of society.”

A good deal in the early going of Pierre, well underway when this haughty disparagement of “Americanism” was quoted verbatim from the False Heir in the January 1852 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” might be seen as Melville’s answer to G.P.R. James. Melville or his narrator is clearly is on a mission in the first few sections of Pierre, hell bent on

“asserting the great genealogical and real-estate dignity of some families in America, because in so doing we poetically establish the richly aristocratic condition of Master Pierre Glendinning, for whom we have before claimed some special family distinction.”

The burden of countering specifically British disdain for American culture seems to persist in Melville’s correspondence with London publisher Richard Bentley. As if he were still mad about the slander of “us Americans” as uncultivated hillbillies in the False Heir, Melville urged Bentley to consider the popular appeal of his new book as a treatment of "a new & elevated aspect of American life."¹⁴

At its core, the criticism of James’s False Heir in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” manifests deep dislike of the artificial plot twists and tidy resolutions frequently encountered in popular novels, including historical romances.

“In the most commonplace manner, he has thrown the hero and favorite characters into difficulties for the transparent object of a final triumph.”

In pretty much the same terms, Herman Melville professionally objected to over-engineered happy endings. The central complaint about James’s False Heir leveled in the January 1852 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” will be restated in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (first published in late July 1852); and again in the Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857).

PIERRE Book 7, section 8
“… the countless tribes of common novels laboriously spin vails of mystery, only to complacently clear them up at last.”

CONFIDENCE-MAN chapter 14
Acknowledged “masters” of novel-writing “challenge astonishment at the tangled web of some character, and then raise admiration still greater at their satisfactory unraveling of it; in this way throwing open, sometimes to the understanding even of school misses, the last complications of that spirit which is affirmed by its Creator to be fearfully and wonderfully made.”

In the role of Western literary critic, talking about “Literature on the Little Arkansas,” the Captain of U. S. Dragoons also has managed to anticipate the “Western Critic” later invoked, twice, in Melville’s marginalia. Two annotations by Melville in his volume of New Poems by Mathew Arnold (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867) channel this invented persona, Melville’s vehicle for hearty, free-spirited commentary.¹⁵

1. “A Western Critic here exclaims—

   What in thunder did the Gods create us

   for then?

2. ["Damn] the "volumes", exclaims the
   Western critic.

Ciphers, riddles, masks, etc.

Below is the breakdown of plot and characters in the False Heir, as compactly presented by the Captain of U. S. Dragoons in dialogue with his Imaginary Friend:

The hero is a lad of seventeen; old enough to fall in love, and but little else. St. Medard is a mere abstraction, De Langy a cypher, Artonne a riddle, Monsieur L—, a man in a mask who puts himself in the way sufficiently to give some interesting trouble and help out the plot. In the most commonplace manner, he has thrown the hero and favorite characters into difficulties for the transparent object of a final triumph; he disinherits the hero, shipwrecks his best friend, St. Medard; confines Artonne in prison for murder, and last, not least, sends his best drawn character, Marois, to the galleys!”¹⁶

Besides the main complaint, noted already, all the key terms of the analysis by the Captain turned Western Critic are exampled in Melville’s writings. Instances cited below are meant to be illustrative, not exhaustive.

A LAD OF

• a lad of sixteen—a bright, curly-headed rascal— Omoo, Chapter 37

• a lad of considerable assurance Mardi; and a Voyage Thither

• a lad of about sixteen, a very handsome young fellow. White-Jacket, Chapter 59

• a lad of Pierre’s own age. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities Book 20, Charlie Millthorpe

ABSTRACTION

• far from furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate. Moby-Dick Chapter 107 The Carpenter

• I keep my love for it in the lasting condition of an untried abstraction. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade

A RIDDLE

• His ruminations were a riddle. Mardi: and a Voyage Thither Volume 1

• that book, which was now a riddle to every one in the house but my father Redburn: His First Voyage

• Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold. Moby-Dick Chapter 110 Queequeg in his Coffin

• thou wert a riddle to me. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

• In short, the entire ship is a riddle. Confidence-Man Chapter 22

A CYPHER or CIPHER

• The captain—a mere cipher—was an invalid in his cabin. Omoo Chapter 12

• that man, to others, too often proves a cipher. Mardi Volume 2 Chapter 76, Some Pleasant, Shady Talk in the Groves

• He who on all hands passes for a cypher today, if at all remembered hereafter, will be sure to pass for the same. Mardi Volume 1 Chapter 69, The Company Discourse

• two irons, both marked by the same private cypher. Moby-Dick Chapter 45 The Affidavit

• if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics. Moby-Dick Chapter 68 The Blanket

• But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Moby-Dick Chapter 79 The Prairie

• the round world itself but an empty cipher. Moby Dick Chapter 99 The Doubloon

• Fate puts the chemic key of the cipher into his hands. Pierre Book IV Retrospective

MAN IN A MASK

• I am the Vailed Persian Prophet; I, the man in the iron mask; I, Junius. Mardi Volume 1 Chapter 97, Faith and Knowledge

• In a mask, he dodges me. Mardi Volume 2 Chapter 39, Wherein Babbalanja Discourses of Himself

• a dark satyr in a mask. Benito Cereno

PUTS HIMSELF. These are the last, “heart-proscribing” words spoken in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities by the hero’s mother, before disowning him forever. Recollected later on for added dramatic force, the locution puts himself (using the present tense verb form) does not occur anywhere else in Melville’s published writings, before or after the two instances in Pierre.

• “Beneath my roof, and at my table, he who was once Pierre Glendinning no more puts himself.” Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, Book XI He Crosses the Rubicon.

• But now the dread, fateful parting look of his mother came over him; anew he heard the heart-proscribing words—“Beneath my roof and at my table, he who was once Pierre Glendinning no more puts himself.” Book XIV The Journey and the Pamphlet

HELP OUT THE PLOT

“This must ye feign. With quick conceit
Ingenuous, attuned in heart,
Help out the actor in his part,
And gracious be.”

Clarel, a Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, Volume 2 Part 3 Mar Saba, Canto 19 The Masque

Whoever dreamed up the idea of focusing a dialogue about “Literature on the Little Arkansas” on criticism of the False Heir was committed to achieving a certain kind of realism, as evident in the perfect chronological match of James’s 1843 novel to the year of summer and fall expeditions by U. S. Dragoons on the Santa Fe Trail. On the other hand, the obviously fictional device of the “Imaginary Friend” tends to wreck even the most sympathetic reader’s belief in the reliability of the narrator, and the authenticity of these supposedly real-life “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” If the real Captain Philip St. George Cooke fished up a copy of the False Heir from his “baggage” at any point in either of the two 1843 marches, he never mentioned the fact in his journal, or any formal report.

Demonstrably, the fixation on G. P. R. James we find in the January 1852 installment of '“Scenes Beyond the Western Border” reflects events and issues then current in Herman Melville’s world as a professional writer living in Berkshire County, Mass. At Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania, the life and works of G. P. R. James did not similarly trouble Lieutenant Colonel Philip St. George Cooke, now Superintendent of the Cavalry Recruiting Service, outside of this one invented prairie dialogue in the magazine series he had been forwarding to his nephew in Richmond for publication in the Southern Literary Messenger. As head of recruiting, Lieut. Col. Cooke’s official army business included oversight of urban stations in New York City, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh; drilling new troops for active service on the frontier; enforcing military discipline; preparing quarterly budgets; and coordinating the requisition of uniforms and supplies.¹⁷

Some relevant intersections of James and Melville are documented below.

Literary World - July 6, 1850

July 1850. Anticipating the same complaint by I. F. in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” the anonymous reviewer of James’s novel the Old Oak Chest in the New York Literary World for July 6, 1850 criticized James’s annoying habit of making his characters repeat "the beginning of each speech."

We find the same verbiage, the same measured sentences, seeming to have been dipped in a starch cup, and dried stiff. The same repetition of the beginning of each speech, as if the speaker, having made a baulk at the start, trotted back for a fresh tap of the drum.

To visualize this particular criticism of G. P. R. James, the anonymous reviewer figuratively represented the author as drum major and his fictional personae as soldiers on parade, mustering when called by the “tap of the drum.” This unsigned review of James’s Old Oak Chest appeared six weeks before the first part of Herman Melville’s two-part essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses” in the same New York journal. I don’t claim that Melville wrote the 1850 review of the Old Oak Chest. Considering his friendship and ongoing collaboration with the editors of the Literary World where it appeared, it seems likely that he read it. In that case, hypothetically, Melville might possibly have re-assigned the jibe at James’s habitual “repetition of the beginning of each speech” to the narrator’s Imaginary Friend in the 1852 prairie dialogue once branded as “Literature on the Little Arkansas”:

I. F. — James has an extraordinary habit of making his spokesmen repeat the first sentence of their speeches, thus — “I don’t know, sir; I don’t know, sir,” — “That’s a pity — that’s a pity !” Since I have noticed it, it always makes me nervous!

G. P. R. James in Western Massachusetts, 1850-1852

Springfield Daily Republican - December 2, 1850 via genealogybank.com

• December 1850. Lecture on the Anglo-Saxons delivered “by G. P. R. James Esq, the English Novelist” at Hampden Hall in Springfield, Mass. on December 3, 1850.

• February 1851. “G. P. R. James has leased the residence of Mrs Ashburner, in Stockbridge, Berkshire Co. with a view of making it his residence during his stay in this country.” As reported in the Springfield Daily Republican on February 15, 1851.

Pittsfield Sun - August 21, 1851 via genealogybank.com

• August 1851. James injured in carriage accident “while driving an unruly horse at Stockbridge.” Some journalists used the occasion to make fun of of James’s writing style; for example in the article “Two Ways of Telling a Story” that appeared in the Pittsfield Sun on September 15, 1851.

• August 5, 1851. In Lenox “Mr. James, and Herman Melville were more or less discussed” by Nathaniel Hawthorne at his Berkshire residence, in conversation with a visitor, Miss Elizabeth Lloyd.¹⁸

New York Daily Herald - September 18, 1851 via newspapers.com

• September 18, 1851. “Massachusetts Correspondence” of the New York Herald links the names “Herman Melville—Mr. G. P. R. James” with other famous “Literary Persons” dwelling “amidst the grand and beautiful Berkshire hills.” As the Herald correspondent goes on to report, “Mr. G. P. R. James, the English author…has lately bought a farm of about 300 acres in the neighborhood, comprising a large part of the celebrated Monument Mountain. This farm lies on the high-road from Stockbridge to Great Barrington, about a mile and a half from the former place, and is watered by several beautiful streams. Mr. James has lately here erected a picturesque farm house.”

• Also in September 1851, James gives a public speech at the 4th annual meeting of the Berkshire Horticultural Society in Stockbridge; reported in the Pittsfield Sun on September 25, 1851.

• November 4, 1851. Herman’s mother Maria G. Melville looks forward to meeting “the great novelist” G. P. R. James, invited along with Nathaniel Hawthorne and family to a social gathering for local literati hosted by Charles and Elizabeth Buckminster Dwight Sedgwick.¹⁹ Thrilled at the chance, Maria attends the tea party in Lenox with Herman and two of his four sisters (Helen and Kate). Much to their mother’s chagrin, however, “the great novelist” never showed. Mr. James sent his wife with the excuse he had just started writing a new book.

Nothing by G. P. R. James is listed in the catalog of books owned or consulted by Herman Melville at Melville’s Marginalia Online, or in Melville’s Sources (Northwestern University Press, 1987) by Mary K. Bercaw. Nevertheless, certain overlooked textual correspondences suggest that James’s False Heir, the main subject of “Literature on the Little Arkansas,” may have influenced the narrator’s character and posturing in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. One such correspondence, discussed already, is the biased view of Americanism as a “rejection of refinement” which might have fired up Melville’s feisty counter-claim for the “richly aristocratic” estate and lifestyle bequeathed to the hero of Pierre. Besides that one, G. P. R. James also appears to have influenced the way Melville’s narrator tries to justify and prepare the reader for disruptions of chronology, at the start of Book 3, The Presentiment and the Verification, Section 3.

PIERRE

“This history goes forward and goes backward, as occasion calls. Nimble center, circumference elastic you must have.”

THE FALSE HEIR

“As usual in the course of all true tales, from the time of Tom Jones down to the present day, the reader is obliged to go backwards and forwards in this book, from scene to scene and from place to place, in order that he may lose nothing of that which was taking place, and affecting the history of those in whom he feels an interest. The cause of it is, dear reader, that Fate is ubiquitous, and man the reverse. Fate operating everywhere; each individual is the centre of the circumstances which are attacking him on every side: so that, when we want to see the causes which affect any particular personage, we have to wander far and wide, and then do not discover even one half.”²⁰

In any event, by January 1852 James and Melville made easy targets for Berkshire rumormongers. Both great authors were coupled at least nominally by Mathew Henry Buckham aka “Maherbal” in published correspondence of the Windsor, Vermont Journal.

Vermont Journal - January 16, 1852 via newspapers.com

To recap, verbal and thematic echoes of “Hawthorne and His Mosses” in the January 1852 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” exemplify writing like Melville in the curious wording of the original segment title, “Literature on the Little Arkansas,” and the patriotic defense of “us Americans” against slander by prejudiced British authors. “Literature on the Little Arkansas” offers detailed criticism of the False Heir by G. P. R. James, conveyed in dialogue between the narrating “Captain of U. S. Dragoons” and “I. F.” his imaginary prairie friend. Further scrutiny of this particular segment reveals another link to the New York Literary World where Melville’s essay originally appeared in two parts on August 17 and 24, 1850. The annoyance voiced by “I. F.” with characters who mechanically

recycles published criticism of the habitual

in the anonymous review of James’s novel the Old Oak Chest in the Literary World for July 1850—six weeks before the declaration of literary independence signed by “A Virginian Spending July in Vermont.”

In closing, here’s something to hold for future consideration. Pointers herein to the Literary World, co-edited by Melville’s good friend Evert A. Duyckinck with his brother George, suggest the possible influence of Evert (if not both Duyckinck brothers) on the evolving character of the narrator’s Imaginary Friend. It is I. F. who ventriloquizes the notice of James’s repeating speeches from the Literary World; and it is I. F. whom the notice makes “nervous.” Pursuing that line of thought will keep us on the River a little longer. There’s a whole other dialogue to break down in this marvelously rich January 1852 installment, before we can even think of going home to Fort Leavenworth. The good news is, we’re still in Kansas.

1. Reprinted in Part II, Chapter 5 of Scenes and Adventures in the Army: or, Romance of Military Life (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857 and 1859).
<https://archive.org/details/scenesadventures00incook/page/272/mode/2up>

2. An image from microfilm of the rare front cover for the January 1852 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger is accessible online courtesy of the Internet Archive:
<https://archive.org/details/sim_southern-literary-messenger_1852-01_18_1>

3. The spelling error is uncommon but not unique. Published sources with “J. P. R. James” include Richard Bentley’s advert of the False Heir in the London Examiner of July 1, 1843; Biographical and Critical History of the British Literature of the Last Fifty Years by Allan Cunningham (Paris, France: Baudry’s Foreign Library, 1834) page 189; and the List of New Books for December in the American Monthly Review for January 1833, page 87.

4. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. ““Hawthorne and his mosses”” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/3dcaace0-7-0132-a2c7-58d385a7b928

In print, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” appeared in two parts in the Literary World for August 17 and August 24, 1850.

5. See the editorial Notes on “Mosses” in the Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860 (Northwestern University Press, 1987) page 679. <https://archive.org/details/piazzatalesother0009melv/page/679/mode/1up>

6. Maurice Morgann, Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff, edited by William Arthur Gill (London: Henry Frowde, 1912) page 65.
<https://archive.org/details/essayondramaticc00morguoft/page/65/mode/1up>

7. Black, Michael L. “James Kirke Paulding: Forgotten American.” New York History, vol. 88, no. 2, 2007, pp. 207–13. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23183313.

8. Catalogue of Books in the Library of the Young Men’s Association of the City of Albany. Albany, NY: J. Munsell, 1837. “Dutchman’s Fireside, 2 vols., 2 sets” is listed as number 1309 on page 9 of the 1837 Catalogue; “Westward Ho! 2 Vols.” is number 1307 on page 32.

9. Richard Alan Sax, “Sailing Down the Mississippi of Broadway: Regional Stereotypes in the Literary Imagination of Herman Melville, 1846-1857.” Dissertation. University of Michigan, 1992. http://books.google.com/books?id=OV4eAQAAMAAJ

10. Connelley, William E. “A Journal of the Santa Fe Trail--(Concluded).” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 12, no. 2, 1925, pages 227–55 at page 252. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1886514.

<https://books.google.com/books?id=R2gKAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA252#v=onepage&q&f=false>

11. In the first volume of Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (Harper & Brothers, 1849) Chapter 25, Peril a Peacemaker, the narrator exclaims, “Ah, no! No end to those feuds” (between Samoa and Annatoo). In Redburn (Harper & Brothers, 1849) Chapter 30, finding crayon drawings in his father’s guidebook to Liverpool that might be regretted as childish graffiti, the narrator exclaims, “Ah, no!—these are all part and parcel of the precious book, which go to make up the sum of its treasure to me.”

12. Here quoted from Melville’s sketch “Jack Gentian / Portrait of a Gentleman” as presented in Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writings, edited by G. Thomas Tanselle, Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, Robert Sandberg and Alma MacDougall Reising (Northwestern University Press, 2017) at page 210.

13. In the first English edition, the offending take on “Americanism” appeared on page 82 of Volume 1 in G. P. R. James, The False Heir, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1843). The American edition of James’s False Heir (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1843) has it on page 17. Neither edition of the False Heir gave “Americanism” in italics, as printed in the magazine version of this passage in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” The book version in Chapter 5, page 279 of Scenes and Adventures in the Army removed the italics to make it “Americanism,” not “Americanism.”

14. Letter to Richard Bentley dated April 16, 1852 in the Letters of Herman Melville, edited by Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (Yale University Press, 1960) page 150.
<https://archive.org/details/lettersofhermanm00melv/page/150/mode/2up>

15. Digital images of the two marginal annotations in Arnold’s New Poems that quote a free-speaking “Western Critic” may be viewed courtesy of Melville’s Marginalia Online, here:

1. https://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=13&PageID=219

2. https://melvillesmarginalia.org/Share.aspx?DocumentID=13&PageID=9391

16. Scenes Beyond the Western Border in the Southern Literary Messenger Volume 18, January 1852, page 49; reprinted in Scenes and Adventures in the Army, pages 279-280.

17. Abundantly witnessed in extant letters from PSGC to the Adjutant General in Washington City; accessible online via Fold3.

Fold3, US, Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General Main Series 1822-1860. https://www.fold3.com/publication/791/us-letters-received-by-the-adjutant-general-1822-1860

18. Privately printed for Stephen H. Wakeman in Twenty days with Julian and little Bunny, A Diary by Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York, 1904). Text of Hawthorne’s entry for August 5, 1851 appears also in the Heart of Hawthorne’s Journals, edited by Newton Arvin (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1929) on page 148. Also quoted from Hawthorne’s journal by Jay Leyda in Volume 1 of the Melville Log (Harcourt, Brace and Comapany, 1951) at page 419.
<https://archive.org/details/melvillelog0001jayl_s0z7/page/418/mode/2up>

19. For more details of G. P. R. James’s deflating no-show at the Sedgwick home in early November 1851, see Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 1, 1819-1851 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) pages 875-877; and Volume 2, 1851-1891 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) page 31.

20. The False Heir by G. P. R. James is here quoted from chapter 23, page 73 in the 1843 American edition by Harper & Brothers; Google-digitized and accessible via HathiTrust Digital Library.