Wolf howling, music and romance
DRAGOONED: Writing, talking, and rewriting like Herman Melville in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853). No. 4.
Something WILD happens in the third installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” first published in the December 1851 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger and reprinted with significant revisions in Part II, Chapter 4 of Scenes and Adventures in the Army (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857 and 1859). Midway through, ultra-literary passages on “Wolf Howling, Music and Romance” (as later synopsized in the Table of Contents for the book version1 ) give free rein to the romantic and poetical impulses of the writer—or ghostwriter, or ghost-editor.
After a couple of disjointed journal entries, the narrator’s admittedly “Imaginary Friend” (“I. F.” for short) interrupts to complain, “You neglect me!” This dramatic intervention achieves the desired effect of generating better, more entertaining content, highlighted by encounters with a fierce and seemingly “deathless” buffalo, and phantomesque Camanche Indians. At this crucial stage of the fall expedition by U. S. Dragoons, their Captain’s most pressing concern is how far west the merchants will require military escort. Most immediately, in the last days of September 1843 Captain Philip St. George Cooke needed to order provisions and arrange for receiving them. How much in the way of food and supplies he should requisition, and where to have them sent or stored, depended on whether protection by the U. S. Army would be demanded all the way to Santa Fe. If traders were to meet up with a friendly Mexican force rumored to be heading for Cimarron Spring in lower Kansas, the Dragoons might honorably return home to Fort Leavenworth. Alternatively, if required to march on to New Mexico this late in the year, Cooke and his men could expect a long stay at Bent’s Fort, located along the Arkansas River in southeastern Colorado. As accurately stipulated in the Table of Contents for the book version, the overwhelming question confronted by the real Captain of U. S. Dragoons at this point in the march was, “Where shall the Winter be passed?”
The ostensible time frame of events depicted in the December 1851 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” runs from late September to early October 1843. In September 1843, as described in the previous installment, merchants and soldiers suffered many hardships in the rain, wind, and freezing cold. As Philip St. George Cooke would state for the record in his official report of the fall expedition dated October 26, 1843, “very many of the Mexican drivers were sick, and six or eight died.”2 Demonstrably, this report (probably not the original document, but a serviceable copy) served as a primary source-text for select portions the December 1851 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” Borrowing from Cooke’s much fuller account of the summer march is also evident in this third number of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” as witnessed in both previous installments. For example, on June 17th Cooke wrote in his journal of the summer trip, “I fear the traders have been so slow as to be water bound at Cow Creek.” In producing the 1851 account of the fall expedition, the Captain’s exact wording in June 1843 has been transposed to late September 1843, when a messenger “reports the whole caravan still water-bound at Cow-Creek.”
How closely and selectively the 1851 rewrite has followed Captain Cooke’s official report of the second expedition by U. S. Dragoons in the fall of 1843 may be seen by the following comparison (emphasis in bold is mine, here and throughout):
Report by Philip St. George Cooke dated October 26, 1843
Sept. 25th there was a severe frost.
October 1st. I was twenty-five miles below the crossing: and the caravan was strung out on desperate roads ten or fifteen miles behind: I began to feel the decision of the questions, how I was to extricate my command from this desert, and where winter them, to be urgent: the difficulty was the greater, as I felt uncertain whether provision for its subsistence at the base of the Rocky Mountains, had been made, or could now be made…. I now assembled the principal traders and demanded of them if they desired escort beyond the boundary. I confidently assured them of the absence of any danger but from Indians, (whom they then professed not to fear:) I offered to accompany them 60 miles beyond the Arkansas to the Semirone [Cimarron]….… to my surprise, the Asst. Surgeon now reported that an additional supply of medicines would be absolutely necessary: so I determined to send an express to Fort Leavenworth for a light wagon to come to my winter quarters with the medicine.
”Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” December 1851
[September] 26…. I. F. … “Was there really a frost?”
“Last night there was a severe frost….”
… And now shall I despatch an express to Fort L. for a light load of medicines and other necessaries for eight months in the wilderness,—time being precious, or shall I wait for the small chance of the Mexicans dispensing with the escort at the Lower Semarone Spring, sixty miles in their country, in which event the command should certainly return?
Worthy of special notice is the Melvillean manner in which the 1851 version has transformed Philip St. George Cooke’s recording of “severe frost” on the 25th of September into dialogue. Where the real Captain Cooke merely observed, “there was a severe frost,” some ghostwriter or ghost-editor has found a handy conversation starter. In this instance the trick of composing fictional prairie talk involves turning a declarative statement (“there was a severe frost”) into a question (“Was there really a frost?”). In all honesty, the invented question would hardly bear scrutiny for logic or dramatic continuity. Presumably the interrogator, supposed to be the narrator’s traveling companion, has shared the narrator’s experience of extreme cold during the night and did not need to ask about it. Here as elsewhere in the series, the confessedly imaginary friend acts as a stand-in for the reader. Fair play, considering how the first installment began in June 1851 with a warning that our narrator only wanted “a good listener,” followed by a promise to do the talking for us whenever necessary.
Melville’s penchant for turning prose into dialogue is evidenced in certain notes he wrote in the back of a Shakespeare volume, copied nearly verbatim from “Doctor Faustus” in the fourth volume of Thomas Roscoe’s The German Novelists (London: Henry Colburn, 1826).3 Several of Melville’s jottings from “Doctor Faustus” reformulate prose statements by or about Mephostophiles and Faust into leading questions. Here are two prime examples:
“Do you believe all that stuff ?”
“But is not this you mentioned here — in the scriptures ?”
In their physical context—inscribed by Herman Melville on a formerly blank endpaper, in close proximity to each other—these interrogatives read like lines of dialogue for a scene with two speakers. The question about “stuff” would have been posed by a mephistophelian skeptic as a challenge to orthodoxy, specifically the biblical account of Creation. The question “But is not this you” would have been asked by a Faustian quester of the Devil, or the Devil’s agent, alluding to passages in the Bible that identify the Devil as “a great liar.”4
Wolf Howling, Music and Romance
September was hell. The Third Circle of Dante’s Hell, to be exact, as figuratively represented in prairie dialogue between the narrator and his imaginary “Friend” that only appears in the book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army. As demonstrated in an earlier chapter of the present investigation, this extra bit (added sometime before 1856 during revision of the September 1851 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border”) features direct quotations in Italian and English from the prose translation of Canto 6 in Dante’s Inferno by John A. Carlyle. The Carlyle volume is Sealts Number 173a in the searchable “Catalog of Books and Documents Owned, Borrowed and Consulted by Herman Melville” at Melville’s Marginalia Online. As shown on Melvilliana, Melville drew from it in his next novel after Moby-Dick. Disparaging references in Dr. Carlyle’s Introduction to frivolous, superficial, or otherwise inadequate readings of Dante by “literary Dilettanti” seem to have prompted the condescending treatment of “the Dilletante in Literature” by Melville’s narrator in Book IX of Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852).
Without question, to actual participants in the fall expedition, the suffering experienced in September 1843 must have felt only too real. As scrupulously noted by Captain Cooke in his formal report of the fall expedition, delays, disease, and multiple deaths had plagued the caravan through to the end of the month. In the telling, or more accurately, re-telling, October brings a welcome change of weather, and a return to the full-on romantic style of writing about it that we last encountered in the effusive lament for “poor Charvis.” With the arrival of a new month, things start to get wild in the third installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border (December 1851):
Fair and bright dawned the first of October! The fierce chilling blast has sung a fit requiem to the infernal September; with its cloudy wings it has taken its eternal flight—may such another never revisit poor people so helplessly exposed to its dreary influences!
The narrating Captain’s notably literary welcome of October echoes the opening of “The Chase.—Third Day.,” the last regular chapter in Moby-Dick before the Epilogue.
“Fair and bright dawned the first of October!” (December 1851)
“The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh….” (November 1851)
Melville’s narrator in Moby-Dick Chapter 135 and the narrator of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” both use the construction fair and plus another adjective (bright, fresh) with the past tense verb form, dawned. If anything, the December 1851 example (ostensibly “Written on the Prairie”) has more of a poetic ring. It sounds more like poetry because the subject comes after the verb, reversing the usual order in prose.
This romantically amplified introduction to October is followed by two sequences or sections of wild content on the “Music of Nature, &c., &c.” (as summarized on the front cover of the Southern Literary Messenger for December 1851). The first wild section bears the date and time “Oct. 5th., 9 o’clock, P. M.—” and takes the form of a soliloquy or dramatic monologue, presumably spoken by the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons. Although nobody else is identified as present at this time, the speaker addresses an implied reader or hearer directly, twice, using second person pronouns:
And did you not know that wolves howl in concert? Did you never see them under the pale moon sit in circle watching their leader as bipeds do?
The form of address in the first question has a close verbal parallel in Moby-Dick Chapter 133 The Chase—First Day, when Ahab excitedly challenges his crew upon their first glimpse of the high white “hump like a snow-hill” that betokens Moby Dick:
“And did none of ye see it before?” cried Ahab.
Similar in its construction to the second question about the implied reader or hearer’s experience of prairie wolves, the formula did you never + “hear” in place of “see” is doubled by Flask in one long question, asked of Stubb in Chapter 73, Stubb and Flask kill a Right Whale:
“… did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale’s head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right Whale’s on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never afterwards capsize?”
Music of Nature, &c., &c.
The concert-like “Music of Nature” promoted (as promised on the December 1851 magazine cover, shown above) in fervent soliloquy includes tuneful contributions from insects (“whose life is a song—led by sweet katydid”) and birds (chiefly the whip-poor-will “whose song expresses the very Poetry of Night”). Wolf howling, however, is the headliner:
October 5th, 9 o’clock, P. M. — There has just gone forth from the hill-tops, on the wailing north wind, the wildest chorus that I ever heard; a swelling unison of many tones and a dying cadence! It is music—natural concert music—performed by brutes under the influence of this dark hour which heralds the dread footsteps of winter. And did you not know that wolves howl in concert? Did you never see them under the pale moon sit in circle watching their leader as bipeds do?
In substance as well as form, the wild passage on wolf howling in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” resonates with distinctive elements in the cluster of dramatically charged chapters 36-40 in Moby-Dick, all of which begin with italicized stage directions. The most obvious correspondences of language and imagery occur in Melville’s highly theatrical Chapter 36 The Quarter-Deck, where Ishmael likens the assembled crew of the Pequod, with all “wild eyes” focused on Ahab, to circled “prairie wolves” locking eyes with “their leader”:
… his three mates stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship’s company formed a circle round the group; he stood for an instant searchingly eyeing every man of his crew. But those wild eyes met his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but, alas! only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.
Melville’s wild-eyed wolves, figuratively introduced in a simile cued by the word as, represent men. All those present, mates as well as sailors, look at Captain Ahab like “prairie wolves” look at “their leader,” who looks back at them with identical intensity. By involving “every man” Melville possibly expands the figurative application to Everyman, who in that case would stand for every human being. By contrast, the wolves in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” are supposed to be real prairie wolves howling away near the Arkansas river. Remarkably, however, their trait of forming a “circle” and staring at “their leader” is compared (in a simile that begins with the word as) to characteristic behavior of human beings, curiously denominated “bipeds.” Melville’s narrator Ishmael represents all men (and women, too?) as prairie wolves. The soliloquist of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” reverses the figure, representing prairie wolves as human beings.
In choosing the word bipeds, the speaker echoes Ishmael’s diction elsewhere in Moby-Dick. In Chapter 65 The Whale as a Dish Ishmael directly challenges his implied reader or auditor to
Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds.
Ishmael’s command is followed by several rhetorical questions: “Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?” The interrogative mode adopted here and elsewhere by Ishmael is likewise evident in the two questions rhetorically proposed in the December 1851 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” (“And did you not know that wolves howl in concert?” and “Did you never see them under the pale moon sit in circle watching their leader as bipeds do?”). Such questions get no reply. On the subject of human “bipeds” and their brutish habits, nobody answers either speaker.
Rapture over wolf howling is rare in 19th century accounts of western travel. Hunting up descriptions of prairie wolves in some of the better-known sources, I found nothing comparable to the romantic delight in “their wild and mournful howling” at midnight, so ardently and dramatically expressed in soliloquy by the narrator of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” For one, Charles Joseph Latrobe, whose Rambler in North America supplied multiple entries in the Index Rerum of Herman’s older brother Gansevoort Melville, heard in the howling of prairie wolves only “a hubub of detestable sounds” in a “melancholy concert” that “sounded dolefully in my ears.”5 To the same effect, Latrobe’s traveling companion Washington Irving found no great pleasure in hearing
“the most forlorn concert of whining yells, prolonged into dismal cadences and inflections, literally converting the surrounding waste into a howling wilderness. Nothing is more melancholy than the midnight howl of a wolf on a prairie.”6
More appreciatively than most, soldier-engineer William H. Emory described the howling of prairie wolves as an evening “serenade’:
At night we had a serenade from a full choir of prairie wolves; they collected around our camp in great numbers, and broke forth in sudden bursts of their inimitable music. There are times when the wolf’s howl sounds pleasantly, and again there are times when the spirits of desolation seemed to be conjured up by it.7
Near an Arapaho village on the banks of the Arkansas, young Francis Parkman encountered “such multitudes” of wolves “that several hundred were howling in concert.” This “concert” Parkman reviewed negatively as a “horrible discord of low mournful wailings, mingled with ferocious howls.”8
Enterprising frontiersman Josiah Gregg had nothing good to say about wolf howling. According to Gregg, the noisiest jackal
cannot exceed the prairie wolf. Like ventriloquists, a pair of these will represent a dozen distinct voices in such quick succession—will bark, chatter, yelp, whine, and howl in such variety of note, that one would fancy a score of them at hand. This, added to the long and doleful bugle-note of the large wolf, which often accompanies it, sometimes makes a night upon the Prairies perfectly hideous.9
Mayne Reid the popular Irish-American novelist wrote that prairie wolves “enliven the prairie-camp with their dismal howling, although most travellers would gladly dispense with such music.”10
How different from the usual take is our narrator’s romantic enthusiasm for wolves as prairie Beethovens:
The wolves then harmoniously howl their plaints to Nature, and soothe their pains with music; it is the natural expression of the hour and its influences, and it strikes in the human breast the chord which they have strung.
It may be singular—I can scarce account to myself—but I never heard without pleasure this voice of the Night—the more if it be stormy and threatening—whether in the “witching” midnight hour, or in the lonely morning watch by the feeble guard-fire, their wild and mournful howling has been ever welcome. This instant! listen! It comes to my soul far more intelligible music than those extravaganzas of sound triumphantly “executed” by men and maidens.
Thus concludes the wild soliloquy of December 1851, rejoicing in the darkly expressive “Poetry of Night” and “Music of Nature,” above all the “wild and mournful howling” of prairie wolves.
Wilder still is the segue from soliloquy or dramatic monologue into dialogue out of a play. The dialogue has two well defined speaking parts and in the book version, one parenthetical stage direction: “Friend (entering the tent).” The dramatic form of this particular sequence resembles the theatrical presentation of chapters 36-40 in Moby-Dick.11 Asterisks retained in both the magazine and book versions indicate that something may have been cut from the original passage in manuscript, just before it transitions to dialogue with the entrance of “I. F.” the speaker’s Imaginary Friend.
** Blessed IDEAL! rosy realm! Welcome resort of sad and weary souls! welcome, as to the fainting lost way-farer, struggling with darkness and perils, the rising sun revealing prospects of relief and enjoyment!
So poetically and romantically has the soliloquist hymned the music of nature, the endeavor appears to have magically transported him to another world. This altered state of being (something like the ideal world of Art, perhaps) he hails (apostrophizes, like a good poet should) as a “Blessed IDEAL” and “rosy realm.” The figurative language used to express how welcome this ideal world is, has interesting parallels with similes that begin “welcome as…” in writings by Herman Melville.12
The soliloquy finally ends with another apostrophe, by now a familiar feature of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” and a clear token of ghostwriting. This one is even more complicated than usual, being addressed to a cherished “Friend,” unnamed, who is physically absent yet present in “spirit” as conductor to an ideal paradise or dreamworld. Unheralded before now, the spirit-friend is warmly greeted as a familiar acquaintance, and muse:
Dear Friend! whose presence I have felt—whose spirit has taken the poetic embodiment and has by the holy sympathy of Love illumined my soul to recognize thee with joy—Sweet Inspiration! that leadest me from this drear world, through transparent skies, to the fountains and groves of Memory—Beautiful Presence!
As originally presented in December 1851, the speaker’s “Dear Friend” turned Muse through a conceptually difficult process involving “poetic embodiment” of the unnamed “Friend” as “spirit,” followed by intercommunication soul-to-soul by means of “the holy sympathy of Love.” Most of that goes missing in the simplified book version:
Dear friend!—spirit oft invoked!—Sweet Inspiration! that leadest me ever with winged joy from the dreary present to the fountains and groves of Memory—Beautiful Presence!
After revision, “friend” and “spirit” are one and the same ethereal being. Deletion of confusing ideas about “poetic embodiment” and enlightenment gained a little too mysteriously through “the holy sympathy of Love” has effectively removed any hint of the unnamed friend’s implied prior history as a real individual—conceivably, at least, with a physical as well as spiritual “presence.”
Soliloquy morphs into dialogue with the arrival of I. F., the narrator’s first imaginary friend, who brings the narrator back to reality. Feeling jilted, apparently, I. F. barges into the scene, interrupting the dreamlike reverie to complain of being displaced by the new “friend” who has suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Incredibly, their ensuing dialogue is soaked in Moby-Dick. Some of the more striking verbal parallels to Melville’s way of writing will be found in the aforementioned cluster of “dramatic” chapters, especially Chapter 36 “The Quarter-Deck.” For some reason the closest verbal correspondences to Moby-Dick were deleted in revision. In order to locate specific revision sites and reasonably account for the changes, as well as to facilitate comparison with Melville’s writings, I give the rest of the dialogue below, providing images and text from both the magazine and book versions.
First, the magazine version, as presented in the December 1851 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger Volume 17:
I. F.— “Dreamer, awake! Thy monologue I endured whilst it touched of earth; but, when self-forgetting, thou transformest thy true friend to a spirit-minister of dubious sex—who, methinks, would wander here, from no comfortable abode of earth or sky”—
“Scoffer! Thou knowest not what thou hast done. Now,—I feel that we are on the earth.
“There has been a change; Destiny has new shuffled the cards of our small fates; they had been stocked by some attendant imp, who was leading us (and tickling us the while with exciting chimeras) to the D—.”
I. F. “Nay, Friend, I belong to earth—from thy flight descend not lower: as your old-fashioned friend, I feel interested in your surface wanderings; but let your double-refined poetry and romance go ‘to the D—.’”
“I submit. But the Reality I think is too darkly, coldly real, the earth very earthy; but, to please you, mark—I now attempt a lower level.”
I. F. “Where I fear you will scarcely be at home to-night; only tell me then what you did near this hour—two nights ago—with those dark men who excluded me from your presence?'“
Dialogue above is quoted from the short third installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” in the Southern Literary Messenger, Volume 17 (December 1851) pages 726-729 at 729. Significantly revised, the book version of the same dialogue is quoted below from chapter 4 of Scenes and Adventures in the Army: Or, Romance of Military Life (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1857 and 1859) pages 261-272.13
A voice. Dreamer, awake!
“Scoffer! Who art thou, so near?”
Friend (entering the tent).— Thy monologue I endured, whilst it touched of earth; but when self-forgetting, thou transformedst thy true friend to a spirit minister of hardly dubious sex,—who methinks, would wander here, from no comfortable abode of earth or sky—
“Enough! And may not the actor be dreamer too? Ah! dreams, dreams! And why not thus live o’er the few rosy hours?—taste again, if may be, the one sparkling drop of ‘misery’s cup?’”
Friend.—Pshaw! That cup, if you please, at your elbow, and let’s have a drop of creature comfort. Things are changed?
“Yes; destiny has now shuffled the cards of our small fates; they had been stocked by some attendant imp, who was leading us (and tickling us the while, with exciting chimeras), to the d—l.”
Friend.—Nay, stick to the surface now; only “to the d—l” with your double-refined poetry and romance.
“Well, I must submit, to please you, and attempt a lower level.”
Friend. Where I fear you will scarce be at home tonight. But do give me the news?
Verbal parallels in Moby-Dick, deleted in revision
“Thou knowest not what thou hast done.” Uncontracted, the trigram thou knowest not is used by Herman Melville only two times, only in Moby-Dick.14 Ahab speaks it twice (three times if you count the implied “thou” in one instance of “knowest not”) in Chapter 119 The Candles while dramatically addressing his absent Maker in the manner of a fire-worshiping Zoroastrian as “thou clear spirit of clear fire.” Madly, heroically defiant, Ahab taunts the supposedly all-powerful and all-knowing Creator-God with comparative ignorance:
— “Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun.”
— “I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent.”
Minus not, the positive form thou knowest occurs a total of three times in Chapter 16 “The Ship” and Chapter 18 “His Mark”; only used by Bildad (2x) and Peleg (1x). In the case of “Thou knowest not,” speech deleted in revision of the December 1851 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” had the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons talking like a Quaker whaling Captain in Moby-Dick. Ahab, especially.“Now,—I feel that we are on the earth.” Here again, the expression “Now I feel” is Ahab’s utterance—one of his last, spoken near the end of the last numbered chapter in Moby-Dick. When the White Whale finally smites the Pequod in Chapter 135 The Chase.—Third Day., Captain Ahab can only watch from his whaleboat, unable to help or go down in glory with his ship: “Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.” Seconds later Ahab will defiantly hurl his harpoon at Moby Dick, only to be jerked out of his boat by a fateful “flying turn” of the line.
As noted earlier, Chapter 135 in Moby-Dick begins with a close verbal correspondence to an exclamation in '‘Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” The last chapter of Moby-Dick (November 1851) before the Epilogue opens, “The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh…..” Melville’s construction is suggestively close to the following line from the fabricated journal entry dated Oct. 1. in the December 1851 installment: “Fair and bright dawned the first of October!” This one did not get cut and appears unchanged in the book version.
The trigram “on the earth” occurs once in Moby-Dick Chapter 69 The Funeral, where Melville’s narrator Ishmael voices contempt for “… old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air!”“… as your old-fashioned friend.” A commonplace expression, to be sure, for some reason deleted in revision. The hyphenated compound adjective “old-fashioned” occurs 7x in Moby-Dick.
“… to please you, mark—I now attempt a lower level.” This revision brings us back to the theatrical Chapter 36 The Quarter-Deck, already cited herein for Melville’s wild image of prairie wolves in a circle, eyeing their leader. In the same Quarter-Deck chapter, Ahab engages the first mate in confidential asides, first telling Starbuck “thou requirest a little lower layer”and then, “Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer.” The similarly phrased term “lower level” in the December 1851 installment was not deleted in revision. Whatever it means in different contexts, “lower layer” or “lower level” is employed by each speaker in reply to criticism from a single interlocutor.
What did get deleted in the revised book version of the same scene is the word mark. As here, Melville employed the second-person form of the verb mark (in the usual imperative mood), at least 9x in Moby-Dick:
— “mark now, my shipmates” in Chapter 9, The Sermon
— “Mark ye, be forewarned; Ahab’s above the common” in Chapter 16 The Ship
— “Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward! mark the unfaltering silence aft!” (Starbuck in Chapter 38 Dusk)
— “But mark the other head’s expression” in Chapter 75, The Right Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
— “When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there.” in Chapter 86 The Tail
— “Mark this, too, in the whaler.” in Chapter 87 The Grand Armada
— “now mark his boat there; where is that stove?” in Chapter 119 The Candles
— “‘Aye, aye, men!” cried Ahab. “Look up at it; mark it well; the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale!’” in Chapter 119 The Candles
— “mark well the whale!” Starbuck in Chapter 135.
Referencing Ahab near the start of the Quarter-Deck chapter, Stubb whispers to the third mate, “D’ye mark him, Flask?” In Stubb’s usage here the word mark literally points to Ahab.
Verbal parallels in Pierre, deleted in revision
“But the Reality I think is too darkly, coldly real, the earth very earthy; but, to please you, mark—I now attempt a lower level.” The harsh “Reality” of living on the Santa Fe road got “too darkly, coldly real” for the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons, whose dramatic soliloquy on wolf howling, music and romance climaxed in a wild apostrophe to the “Blessed IDEAL” of Art and the unseen muse or “spirit minster” who took him there. Melville’s narrator in Book VI of Pierre (1852) will read the hero’s mind in similar terms. Before his first interview with Isabel, Pierre is unable to connect his mental image of her sad, haunting face with anything more substantial in the real, physical world:
“But imagination utterly failed him here; the reality was too real for him.”
Byron in “The Dream” had found a fearsome telescopic power in the “glance of melancholy” that made “the cold reality too real!”15 Perception of “the earth” as “very earthy” alludes to Adam as described by the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:47 (“The first man is of the earth, earthy”). Both the New Testament reference and Byronic conceit of reality being too real were cut before 1856 during revision of the December 1851 installment in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.”
Other words liked by Melville, but not deleted in revision
methinks
A favorite of Melville’s, as noted in the previous number As a sailor might say. The word methinks occurs 10x in Moby-Dick, including a cluster of four instances in Chapter 7 The Chapel; and 6x in Melville’s next book, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities.scoffer
“Who is that scoffer, said the man in gray….” The Confidence-Man, Chapter 6.
double-refined
Also in The Confidence-Man (Chapter 5) the “double-refined anatomy of human nature” offered by Tacitus is criticized by “the man with the weed” in dialogue with a college student.
Going “to the D” in Melville’s marginalia
Cited already herein for examples of the writer’s dialogic imagination at work (specifically evidenced in making questions out of declarative sentences he found in a source-text), Melville’s manuscript notes from Thomas Roscoe’s the German Novelists also exemplify repeated use of the capital initial “D” as an abbreviation for “Devil.”
— D begs the hero to form
one of a “Society of D’s” — his name would be weighty
&c — Leaves a letter to the D — “My
Dear D” —
A full transcription along with digital images of Melville’s notes in the back of Volume 7 in the Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (Sealts Number 460) may be viewed at Melville’s Marginalia Online. Melville’s beloved em dash here functions mainly to separate and distinguish content, more so than as a pious substitute for remaining letters in the Devil’s name. Nonetheless, the look of the handwritten expression “to the D —” as punctuated in Melville’s marginalia visually resembles the repeated phrase “to the D—” uttered once by each speaker in the magazine version of the dialogue between the narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons and his Imaginary Friend. In the 1857 book version of the same dialogue, the revised form “to the d—l” will keep the dash but erase the original similarity between the 1851 “D—” and Melville’s capital initial. In the earlier magazine version, the Captain of U. S. Dragoons or his ghostwriter in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” had treated the Devil as a proper name and, like Melville in his notes from “Doctor Faustus,” shortened it accordingly.
In different contexts elsewhere in the December 1851 number, two more usages exemplify different ways of referencing the Devil or devil in print. Both are jokes. In the first instance, the narrator’s observation that prairie Indians never attack caravans at night inspires “I. F.” to credit their “chivalry” in warfare, saying “to the D—l his due.” Later on, in a different conversation, the narrator acknowledges the “magical” effect of “feminine logic” on men, confessing “the d—l can as well resist holy water.”
With respect to the book version issued in 1857 and again in 1859 by Lindsay & Blakiston, the change from “D—” to “d—l” (with lower-case '“d” and added “l”) in the dialogue that immediately follows the monologue on wolf howling may simply reflect the publisher’s house style. The Philadelphia firm co-founded in 1843 by Robert Lindsay and Presley Blakiston specialized in religious and theological titles. Works of general interest such as Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (1850) by Charles Mackay allow both spellings, but try to reserve “Devil” with capital D for designating one particular and distinctly personal being.
As used by “I. F.” in the original prairie dialogue of December 1851, the phrase “to the D—” communicates rejection through a common and fairly mild sort of curse. Regarded merely as cliche, the word devil would appropriately begin with lowercase “d” as indeed it does in the book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army. Regarded as swearing, however, the “devil” in “to the devil” apparently could not be spelled out in a work published by Lindsay & Blakiston.
Harper & Brothers, on the other hand, duly printed every letter of the far more hostile usage in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852). Pressed for his mugshot by the editor of a popular literary magazine, Melville’s enthusiast hero-author declines, threatening violence:
—“drop my arm now—or I’ll drop you. To the devil with you and your Daguerreotype!” 16
The 4-gram to+the+devil+with, in close proximity with a 5th term your, would offer another fine example of writing or talking like Herman Melville, except the chronology is all wrong. Problem being, Melville in 1852 has made his hero swear like “I. F.” the narrating Army Captain’s Imaginary Friend in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border,” published eight months before Pierre in the December 1851 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger. In the case of “To the devil with…your ______________” from Pierre, Melville is exposed as the real copy-cat, writing just like the ghostwriter for “A Captain of U. S. Dragoons.”
Then again, when it came to riding high in wild flights of imagination, Pierre was by no means Melville’s first literary rodeo. Years before the narrator of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” found himself transported (with the help of a friendly “spirit minister”) from the real Santa Fe Trail into an empyrean of wolf howling, music and romance, the writing of Mardi; and, a Voyage Thither had carried away its author to equally fantastic places. Melville candidly mapped out his creative journey there in a letter to English publisher John Murray:
“Well: proceeding in my narrative of facts I began to feel an invincible distaste for the same; & a longing to plume my pinions for a flight, & felt irked, cramped & fettered by plodding along with dull commonplaces, — So suddenly abandoning the thing alltogether, I went to work heart & soul at a romance which is now in fair progress.… It opens like a true narrative — like Omoo for example, on ship board — & the romance & poetry of the thing thence grow continually, till it becomes a story wild enough I assure you & with a meaning too.” 17
But Murray wanted “true adventure” without the “romance and poetry” and eventually had to decline Melville’s third book in manuscript. The honor of publishing Mardi in England went instead to Richard Bentley.
Against all odds, Melville’s 1848 progress-report on Mardi makes a great road-map to narrative twists and turns in the 1851-1853 magazine series, “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.” The December 1851 installment, as we have seen, develops from a fairly straightforward record of tedious facts into the wild romance of wolf howling. As also witnessed herein, the narrator’s dramatic monologue on the music of nature is followed by invented dialogue with an imaginary fellow-traveller called “I. F.” who delivers meta-fictional commentary on the work in progress, including negative criticism of the narrator’s taste for “double-refined poetry and romance.” Rather like Murray and later Evert Duyckinck in their distaste for Melville’s wilder flights of “romance & poetry,” the narrator’s “old fashioned” interlocutor in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” emphatically prefers “surface wandering.” Concerning Herman Melville, the “inherent artistic urge,” toward romance and poetry would not be denied for long, obviously.18 Whether our Captain of U. S. Dragoons keeps being wild, or heeds the counsel of his “old fashioned” prairie friend by not writing so much like the author of Moby-Dick, will be examined in subsequent numbers of the present study.
This section of the narrative originally had been described as “The Music of Nature, &c., &c.” on the front cover of the Southern Literary Messenger for December 1851, the first issue in the series to offer a synopsis. As there given, the contents of the third installment were “Ride in the Rain—A buffalo Hunt—The Camanches—Frost on the Prairies—Music of Nature, &c., &c.”
“A Journal of the Santa Fe Trail (Concluded),” edited by William E. Connelley, Mississippi Valley Historical Review Volume 12 No. 2 (September 1925) pages 227-255 at 251. Accessible online via JSTOR and Google Books
https://books.google.com/books?id=R2gKAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA251&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false
Scott Norsworthy, “Melville’s Notes from Thomas Roscoe’s The German Novelists” in Leviathan, vol. 10 no. 3, 2008, pages 7-37. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/492876.
As Roscoe told it, the gentlemanly demon Mephostophiles “secretly resolved to pass off a false and profane account” of Creation. Mephostophiles directly contradicts the first chapter in Genesis when alleging that the earth “never was created, or without form.” See “Doctor Faustus” in the German Novelists Volume 4, pages 312-313.
Latrobe, The Rambler in North America. John Bryant calls attention to entries from Latrobe on the Mississippi River as the “Father of waters” in Gansevoort Melville’s Index Rerum; see Herman Melville: A Half Known Life Volume 1 (Wiley Blackwell, 2021) page 392.
Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies (London: John Murray, 1835) pages 284-285. <https://archive.org/details/touronprairies00irvi/page/284/mode/2up>
William H. Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnoissance from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri, to San Diego, in California (Washington: Wendell and Van Benthuysen, 1848) page 433.
https://books.google.com/books?id=_RAOAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA433&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false
Francis Parkman, The California and Oregon Trail (New York: George P. Putnam, 1849) page 382.
https://books.google.com/books?id=2UtEAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA382&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false
Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies Volume 2 (New York: Henry G. Langley and London: Wiley and Putnam, 1844) page 225.
The Hunters’ Feast; or, Conversations around the Camp-Fire by Capt. Mayne Reid (New York: De Witt & Davenport, 1856) page 272.
These chapters, as pointed out by the editors of the Longman Critical Edition, “increasingly use dramatic form. Chs. 37-39 are soliloquies, while Ch. 40 is a full-fledged drama staged on the forecastle and opening with a rising curtain (the foresail).” See Moby-Dick: A Longman Critical Edition, edited by John Bryant and Haskell Springer (Pearson Education, Inc., 2007) page 516.
Compare similes with “welcome as” in Melville’s Confidence-Man Chapter 11 (“....welcome as wine and olives after dinner”) and Clarel Part 3 Canto 4, The Cypriote (“welcome as the drums / Of marching allies unto men / Beleagured”).
Scenes and Adventures in the Army is accessible online via Google Books, here: https://books.google.com/books?id=YC5FAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA270&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false
Poetically contracted, the form “thou know’st not” occurs one time, only in Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876). In Part 2 Canto 18 the Syrian Monk reports his devil of a tempter on Mount Quarantania telling him, ”Alive thou know’st not death; and, dead, / Death thou’lt not know.’”
Anthologized by editor Rufus Wilmot Griswold in The Poets and Poetry of England: In the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1845) page 221.
Quoted from Book XVII, “Young America in Literature,” part III in the first edition of Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1852) page 346. Pierre’s refusal to be photographed in Melville’s 1852 fiction is biography-based, as Hershel Parker shows in Herman Melville: A Biography Volume 2, 1851-1891 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) at pages 80-81. See also Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, Reading Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Louisiana State University Press, 2006) pages 149-153.
Letter to John Murray, 25 March 1848, in Herman Melville, Correspondence, edited by Lynn Horth (Northwestern University Press, 1993) pages 105-108 at 106.
https://books.google.com/books?id=nBeBBc3m4yYC&pg=PA106&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false
Merrell R. Davis reads the March 25, 1848 letter to John Murray as Melville’s disclosure of “his inherent artistic urge” in Melville’s Mardi: A Chartless Voyage (Yale University Press, 1952) page 75.