a poet's audacity

As shown by the Dantean fairy dance sequence, the May 1853 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" in the Southern Literary Messenger is notable for exceptionally high literary aims and execution.  Here I want to continue exploring the remarkable literariness of the May 1853 number.  After the fairy dance vision, on the same night (supposedly July 25, 1845), the Captain and his imaginary friend revel in the experience of a mountain thunderstorm.  More fiction, fancifully spun from the plain statement in Henry S. Turner's 1845 journal:

“A hard rain after getting into Camp, much lightning & loud claps of thunder.”
--Letters Received by the Adjutant General, 1845 (K113), Fold3

Without even mentioning thunder and lightning, William B. Franklin noted:

"During all the latter part of the day it was rainy."
(March to South Pass, 27)

 That's it!

However spare the factual information reported by practical-minded journalists of the 1845 Rocky Mountain expedition, the idea of a thunderstorm in the vicinity of Pike's Peak irresistibly leads the narrator in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" to Byron in the vicinity of Mont Blanc.  In the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, stanza 92, Byron depicts an exhilarating storm in the mountains above Lake Léman (Geneva).  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is an important subtext in "Scenes Beyond the Border," quoted here ("I live and die unheard / With a most voiceless thought" etc.); and here and here ("Reposing from the noontide sultriness" etc.).  UPDATE:  And from June 1852 a double dose of Byron, Don Juan here ("'Tis the vile daily drop on drop...) and Childe Harold here ("let me quit man's work[s]...").  And here, in the last sentence of the August 1852 installment, deleted in revision for the 1857 book:  "Farewell!  with him alone may rest the pain."

Byron's thrilling lines in canto 3 were well known and reprinted frequently, like many others from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, in Murray's and other guidebooks for travelers in Europe.   Byron's own footnote to the stanza revealed that on June 13, 1816 he had witnessed such a storm at Lake Léman. 

That was the summer of 1816, the Romantic "summer of love" at Lake Geneva.

With Pike's Peak in view, the Captain's imaginary friend comes in with the thunder, just as in "The Candles" chapter of Moby-Dick, where the sudden appearance of "Old Thunder" Ahab at the side of Starbuck coincides with a volley of thunder during a Typhoon.  The fierceness of the storm delights the narrator and inspires his friend to declaim those magnificent lines from Byron:

"Scenes Beyond the Western Border"
Southern Literary Messenger 19 (May 1853): 314

Wait, did he really say fata morgana?  Yes but never mind about that right now.  Look at that long quotation from Childe Harold, canto 3, stanza 92:

                                                      —Oh night,
  And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,
  Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light
  Of a dark eye in woman!  Far along,
  From peak to peak, the rattling crags among
  Leaps the live thunder!

Extensive revisions to this scene in the book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army (411-412) include making the quote much shorter, by deleting everything after "your strength."  In the next book chapter, the simile of the "dark eye in woman" gets worked back into the conversation between the Captain and his imaginary friend, but gone is the glorious leaping and booming "peak to peak" of the "live thunder."

Yes the passage from Byron was well known, and critically acclaimed.   The ninth volume of Byron's Life and Works gave an engraved facsimile of the stanza in manuscript.  Sir Walter Scott praised Byron's lines as a "picture of sublime terror, yet of enjoyment."  In an 1825 essay on "Lord Byron's Character and Writings,"  the prestigious North American Review lauded the passage as a matchless "burst of poetry" from Byron:

He has great vividness of conception, and great power of expression; and where the aspects of nature corresponded to the gloom and storminess of his own mind, there is sometimes a burst of poetry, which will never be excelled. The thunder storm among the Alps—every one recollects it....

Nothing can he more magnificent. There is here no imperfect personification. The mastery of the poet's spell is complete; and the thunder and the mountains are alive.

But here's the thing.  Along with high praise for Byron's romantic burst, the North American reviewer felt bound to criticize the aforementioned simile as inappropriate to the context:

 In the passage from Byron, it is true, that the light of a dark eye in woman, is out of place, not being in accordance with the gigantic sublimity and force of the images, among which it is introduced.  (North American Review October 1825, 341)

The image of power in a woman's dark eye struck some critics as too earthy and sensual and suggestively feminine, apparently.  The problem for this and for many American critics boiled down to Byron's "want of strong moral sentiment."

What we have to notice here is how the dialogue zeros in on the standard criticism, Byron's supposed fault of inappropriate sensuality--and dismisses it!  Here the imaginary friend Frank plays against type.  Normally the practical realist and materialist, Frank surprises the Captain by his unprecedented lapse into verse.  Not only does Frank recite the famous "Storm in the Alps" passage from Childe Harold, he essentially defends Byron from the usual charges of extravagance and moral recklessness by pleading poetic license, making allowances for the audacity of a poet:

F.— "...That 'dark eye in woman,' introduced with such beautiful expression, but with all a poet's audacity, to illustrate an Alpine storm, pleases you, does it not?"

C.— "Can you condemn it?"

Nobody condemns the figure of the "dark eye in woman"; both C. and F. effectively dispute Byron's critic of the North American Review.  C. would not think of condemning it.  Frank himself never condemned it, just the opposite.  In the book version, the question "Can you condemn it?" is dropped entirely from the dialogue.

Now then, whence this unexpected defense of poetic license, this contrarian prairie assertion of legitimacy by right of "a poet's audacity"? 

Somebody has been reading Frederick Schlegel on the "audacity and fearlessness of a poet" (Plays of Aristophanes):

All the peculiarities of the old comedy may be traced to those deifications of physical powers, which were prevalent among the ancients. Among them, in the festivals dedicated to Bacchus and the other frolicsome deities, every sort of freedom—even the wildest ebullitions of mirth and jollity, were not only things permitted, they were strictly in character, and formed, in truth, the consecrated ceremonial of the season. The fancy, above all things, a power by its very nature impatient of constraint, the birth-right and peculiar possession of the poet, was on these occasions permitted to attempt the most audacious heights, and revel in the wildest world of dreams, —loosened for a moment from all those fetters of law, custom, and propriety, which at other times, and in other species of writing, must ever regulate its exertion even in the hands of poets. The true poet, however, at whatever time this old privilege granted him a Saturnalian licence for the play of his fancy, was uniformly impressed with a sense of the obligation under which he lay, not only by a rich and various display of his inventive genius, but by the highest elegance of language and versification, to maintain entire his poetical dignity and descent, and to show in the midst of all his extravagances, that he was not animated by prosaic petulance, nor personal spleen, but inspired with the genuine audacity and fearlessness of a poet. Of this there is the most perfect illustration in Aristophanes.  
(Schlegel, Lectures on the History of Literature)

Oh yes audacity the word occurs frequently in Melville's writings.  In Mardi as in Schlegel and "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," the context is the nature and power of creative inspiration.  Melville's lecture on the South Seas linked audacity with the sensuality of Greek myths and traditions. To make art in "Art" requires Audacity with Reverence, exactly as in Schlegel.  In Clarel, Melville links audacity with Byronic sensuality in the person of the Lyonese--described by Hershel Parker in his great new book Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative as "a sensual, joyous young man." The sensual, joyous Audacity of the Lyonese meets the sadly earnest Reverence of the divinity student.   Astoundingly, in conversation the "light audacity" of the Lyonese leads eventually to this question divertingly asked of Clarel:

Blue eyes or black, which like you best?  (Clarel 4.26)

which in essence is the same question asked of C. in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" by his imaginary friend Frank.  Big difference is, C. does not hesitate to answer, and heartily:

F.—  "... but what then do you like?"

C.— "Blue, in man or woman!"

Melville's audacities

"fain would I unsay this audacity...."  (Mardi)

"to think's audacity"  (Moby-Dick)

Isabel's "attitude of beautiful audacity" (Pierre)

"audacity of the design"  (The Confidence-Man)

Polynesian "love legend" displays "audacity of the Grecian fables" 
(1858-9 Lecture on The South Seas)

Audacity—reverence. These must mate  ("Art")

"Laughed with a light audacity" (Clarel 4.26, The Prodigal)