Seraphs fanning air

Deep interest in air spirits is common to Melville and Philip St George Cooke or his ghostwriter.

A previous post cited textual evidence from Mardi and commentary by Bret Zimmerman. But somehow we neglected a great example, one sentence that closely parallels one sentence in the January 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border."

"Even now, we may be inhaling the ether, which we fancy seraphic wings are fanning." 

--From Melville's Mardi (1849)

via Architectural Review

"The air, methinks, is fanned by seraphic spirits on their winged errands of Peace!" 

-- January 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and  

Scenes and Adventures in the Army.

Not a whit

First installment, Scenes Beyond the Western Border
Southern Literary Messenger 17 (June 1851): 372

Man lording it over man, man kneeling to man, is a spectacle that Gabriel might well travel hitherward to behold; for never did he behold it in heaven. But Darius giving laws to the Medes and the Persians, or the conqueror of Bactria with king-cattle yoked to his car, was not a whit more sublime, than Beau Brummel magnificently ringing for his valet.  --Mardi (1849)

"...and in asking these questions I was particular to address him in a civil and condescending way, so as to show him very plainly that I did not deem myself one whit better than he was, that is, taking all things together, and not going into particulars."  --Redburn (1849)

Luckily, my Bury blade had no acquaintance in Liverpool, where, indeed, he was as much in a foreign land, as if he were already on the shores of Lake Erie; so that he strolled about with me in perfect abandonment; reckless of the cut of my shooting-jacket; and not caring one whit who might stare at so singular a couple.  --Redburn

Poor, poor Wellingborough! thought I, miserable boy! you are indeed friendless and forlorn. Here you wander a stranger in a strange town, and the very thought of your father’s having been here before you, but carries with it the reflection that, he then knew you not, nor cared for you one whit.  --Redburn

Life is more awful than Death; and let no man, though his live heart beat in him like a cannon—let him not hug his life to himself; for, in the predestinated necessities of things, that bounding life of his is not a whit more secure than the life of a man on his death-bed. To-day we inhale the air with expanding lungs, and life runs through us like a thousand Niles; but to-morrow we may collapse in death, and all our veins be dry as the Brook Kedron in a drought.  --White-Jacket (1850)

“Not a whit, sir—not one particle...."  --White-Jacket

But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
--Moby-Dick (1851)

Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were some sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times, equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin ; and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those traditions one whit the less facts, for all that. --Moby-Dick, Jonah Historically Regarded

From these random slips, it would seem, that Pierre is quite conscious of much that is so anomalously hard and bitter in his lot, of much that is so black and terrific in his soul. Yet that knowing his fatal condition does not one whit enable him to change or better his condition. Conclusive proof that he has no power over his condition. For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;—nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.  --Pierre (1852)

Oh reader! "gentle" or not,—I care not a whit,—so you are honest—I will tell you a secret. I write not to be read, and I swear never even to transcribe for your benefit, unless I change my mind. All I want is a good listener; I want to converse with you; and if you are absolutely dumb, why I will sometimes answer for you.

--Scenes Beyond the Western Border, Southern Literary Messenger vol. 17 (June 1851): 372; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army, Part II.

Dollars, damn!

Look how Herman Melville likes to alliterate the "d" in dollars: with damn and Devil; with diplomas; with derived and ditties:

Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. --Herman Melville, 1851 letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Never mind, sir, never mind, sir; though rogues sometimes be gentlemanly; gentlemen that are gentlemen never go abroad without their diplomas. Their diplomas are their friends; and their only friends are their dollars; you have a purse-full of friends."  --Melville's Pierre, 1852

Now, the dollars derived from his ditties, these Pierre had always invested in cigars; so that the puffs which indirectly brought him his dollars were again returned, but as perfumed puffs; perfumed with the sweet leaf of Havanna.  --Pierre

Compare the examples above to this, the revised book version of the prairie dialogue that originally appeared in the August 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, without any reference to dollars, dealing, or dens:

Let us have a fling at the world,—the poor dollar-dealing sinners, cooped up in their great dens—" --Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Woo hoo!

Elsewhere in the original magazine version our Captain of U. S. Dragoons has been thinking of dollars--and in connection with writing and publishing, as the following passage shows:

" What is written, may always chance to be printed, if not read: how charming then to the busy denizens of the world, whose very brains have received an artificial mould, to read such incident! Now if I could only introduce the word 'dollar,' — good heavens! it was never heard here before! 

--July 1852, Scenes Beyond the Western Border; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Don't think Melville only ever speaks of plural dollars:

 And who will refuse, what Turk or Dyak even, his own little dollar for sweet charity's sake?  --The Confidence-Man

Or that our Captain of U. S. Dragoons only employs the singular dollar:

Imaginary Friend. — You are wandering again. What could have caused that strange circle in the grass there? — it is forty feet across, and, sure enough, it is of the rank sun-flower.

"Why, my friend, if you were imaginative you could people it with the fairies which have been frightened from the continent by the clink of gold, and have here found refuge—pretty far too from the sound of dollars."  -- June 1851 installment and Scenes and Adventures

For further consideration of that passage on dollar-dealers which appears only in the book version, see previous Dragooned posts on

• dollar-dealing sinners as the Duyckincks
• Den Koopman
• Flings at the World

Philosophizing on the pursuit of happiness

In each example the writer likes to talk and philosophize while traveling, in the company of at least one imaginary friend. From Melville's Mardi (1849):

Under a gilded guise, happiness is still their instinctive aim. But vain, Yoomy, to snatch at Happiness. Of that we may not pluck and eat....

 "Then I heard:—'No mind but Oro's can know all; no mind that knows not all can be content; content alone approximates to happiness....

Beatitude there is none. And your only Mardian happiness is but exemption from great woes—no more. Great Love is sad; and heaven is Love.

More on the same theme, from "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," June 1852:

I. F.  "You believe, then, that human happiness is to be found in some reformed and higher state of civilization? Have I not heard you envy the fate of these red sons of nature—some wild chieftain—with two or three slavish wives!"

C.  "I might envy his freedom from factitious laws—the tyranny and fanaticism of society. But as for 'human happiness'—ha! ha!—suffer me to laugh, I pray you (if you will not call that happiness). Happiness would be the infraction of an immutable law; that all sin, is certainly not more inevitable, than that all should be unhappy; those who suffer as little as they enjoy, have a calmness which may deceive. I prefer at times to disturb the philosopher's equilibrium, and to brave his fated reactions for the joy which for a moment sublimes both soul and sense. Strange! that laughter, man's lowest attribute, is distinctive; while the smile, which seems borrowed from Heaven, and which can confer rapturous joy, if not happiness, is shared, I think, in a slight degree by brutes....

... But it is a law that we ever seek happiness. And it is this free desert air alone, that emboldens me in the search, to question the dogmas which society holds so precious.

--Scenes Beyond the Western Border, June 1852; also
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

More on margins, above and below

Photo Credit: kitty

Melville's Pierre features another example of the word-stream, text-as-river metaphor, supplementing previous posts on wide margins and on Washington Irving:

It was a little curious and rather sardonically diverting, to compare these masterly, yet not wholly successful, and indeterminate tactics of the accomplished Glen, with the unfaltering stream of Beloved Pierres, which not only flowed along the top margin of all his earlier letters, but here and there, from their subterranean channel, flashed out in bright intervals, through all the succeeding lines.  --Pierre (1852)

As in the prairie tribute to Irving, Melville exploits the double sense of "margin" as space on a page and as the edge or bank of a river. Not only that, Melville (in what for him is a characteristic image) pictures the word-stream flowing underground, through a "subterranean channel" of text, but periodically resurfacing at "bright intervals." Just so does the Irving tribute picture the text-river as intermittently hidden, flowing down, underground, "anon delving into cave-like clefts,—romantic recesses" below the visible surface:

They have spared Irving, his writings, flowing through broad margins of letter press; to what can we compare them, but to a crystal streamlet purling through flowery savannahs and sweet shady groves; and anon delving into cave-like clefts,—romantic recesses, where, of old, the fairies sought shelter from the glare of day.  --Scenes Beyond the Western Border, June 1851

They have spared Irving: his liquid sentences flowing through glittering margins of fairest typography,—to what can we compare them, but to a crystal streamlet purling amid flowery savannas and sweet shady groves; and anon delving into cave-like clefts,—romantic recesses, where, of old, the fairies sought shelter from the glare of day. --Scenes and Adventures in the Army

In Redburn Melville imagines the singer's voice as "a musical brook." In this instance, words are the metaphorical margins of the flowing melody. As in the Irving tribute, the banks of the figurative stream are pictured in alternating shades, and are decorated with flowers.

His voice was just the voice to proceed from a small, silken person like his; it was gentle and liquid, and meandered and tinkled through the words of a song, like a musical brook that winds and wantons by pied and pansied margins. --Redburn

Photo Credit: Saratoga woods and waterways