UPDATE: Digging out my old
Harper's Weekly (June 12, 1858) for the post on Philip St. George Cooke as
Prince of Cavalry Soldiers, I happened to look again at the article on then Lieutenant-Colonel Cooke which accompanies his fabulous engraved portrait. Well! Against Cooke's own published confession of March 1853, also preserved in the 1857 book Scenes and Adventures in the Army, the Harper's article ends with a vigorous denial that Cooke ever slept on the job. Say what?
For thirty years he has been in harness, guarding the frontier against a wily and untiring foe; and as he has performed faithfully his duty, he has not missed his reward. He is at this moment one of the best known and most popular officers in the army throughout all the great Western tier of States. The citizens of these States are fully aware of his services, and justly hold him in high favor and esteem. He has won this honorable distinction by never nodding at his post, but watching with sleepless vigilance over the regions he has been posted to defend. Colonel Cooke is a thoroughly-trained soldier--a man to be relied on; that is the origin of his popularity and distinction.
--Harper's Weekly (June 12, 1858) p372
Sounds like Cooke may have regretted the imputation of at least one of the imaginary prairie dialogues published under his name.
Did I dream? --Mardi: And A Voyage Thither
id I dream?—Had I slumbered at my
post? I did dream.
And why not tell my dream?—Life is little
better; nay, it is little different. . . .
--Scenes Beyond the Western Border, March 1853; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army
> "Had I slumbered at my post?"
ReplyDeleteI don't see any specific language matches, but there is of course an extended scene in M-D where Ishmael falls asleep at his post in the night -- some of the atmospherics are perhaps similar:
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt/search?q1=%22a+brief+standing+sleep%22&id=dul1.ark%3A%2F13960%2Ft3kw6ns1s&view=1up&seq=9
"Never dream with thy hand at the helm!" Clearly I need to read that book again.
ReplyDeleteSomething else about language, the March 1853 scene is explicitly a "night-watch" setting. Which becomes a theme, as indicated in the italicized heading for this issue:
> "A night-watch in the mountains, and a dialogue thereon."
But "night-watch" and "dialogue" are dropped in the table of contents for the book version. Revised chapter head:
> "Was it a Dream? Watcher's Soliloquy."
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/loc.ark:/13960/t8df76j3z?urlappend=%3Bseq=17
I hadn't previously read any extended sections of Cooke's memoir beyond the excepts you had posted, so today I clicked through to your link above and noticed that Chapter 13 mentioned paleontology, so I read through it.
ReplyDeleteMoby-Dick is the only Melville I know, but "Cooke" certainly does have a Melville feel. It may well be what psychologists call confirmation bias at this point -- once you believe something you tend to notice only evidence that supports your belief and ignore evidence that contradicts it -- but I kept hitting words and images that Melville was certainly fond of. "Verdure," "golden sands," "vast herds" of buffalo walled in by mountains as the "vast herds of wild horses" in M-D are fenced in by mountains -- even "bearskin," and sharing a pipe with a friend, and "You are a monomaniac, by Jove!" The dialogue in the Paleontology section makes fun of long words -- and M-D makes fun of "the Macrocephalus of the long words" and using "superfluous scientific words." (There's a whole chapter on "The Fossil Whale.") It's conventional I suppose to compare a sea of grass to the ocean, but in M-D this is also set up very specifically, with the waving grass brushing against rocks like breakers on the beach, etc.
Have you tried to do any statistical analyses of the full text? I don't know the specifics, but I know that sort of thing is done in authorship studies.
RJO
Great point about confirmation bias. Another thing that can happen is, one starts to think Melville wrote everything. That way lies madness. About statistical analyses, I would be interested in attempting a good one if I knew how. Many challenges there--for one thing we are talking about re-writing as much as writing, which necessarily involves multiple authors and occasional collaboration. And the universe of Melville's known writings is so large. What has struck me most forcibly about authorship claims is how many of them are wrong. The spectacular ones are almost always wrong, for example Don Foster's sensational break-through claim for A Funeral Elegy as Shakespeare's. Wrong.
DeleteI've been hoping first to increase awareness about these wonderful texts, and second maybe to kick loose some kind of previously unknown, undiscovered, or unrecognized bit of documentary evidence linking Melville and Cooke. Getting less likely by the hour, I guess. Meanwhile I truly appreciate your engagement and knowledgeable comments. I got the fun with long words but missed that Macrocephalus bit in this previous post:
http://dragooned.blogspot.com/2012/03/he-has-thing-about-long-words.html