Criticism of G. P. R. James

Late in 1851, G. P. R. James was another idol of Berkshire, like Hawthorne and Melville.  Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker observe that Herman Melville's mother Maria

"bestowed high respect on any man of high literary reputation and unimpeachable Christian principles, such as G. P. R. James, the popular novelist who had recently settled near Stockbridge." (Reading Melville's Pierre, 13)

Higgins and Parker cite Parker's biography (1.829-30) on Maria Melville's regard for James as "the great novelist." She called him that in a letter to her daughter, Herman Melville's sister Augusta. At one point in the letter, Maria describes a party where the Melvilles socialized with the great novelist's wife, but missed the absent Mr. James.

At his blog Fragments from a Writing Desk, Parker gives more of the 5 November 1851 letter from Maria Melville to Augusta. Here's some of it, including Maria's reference to G. P. R. James as "the great novelist":

Mrs James is agreeable, does not dress well, is thin, but badly form'd, her rich silk dress was not well made. . . . Mr James has purchase'd a farm near Stockbridge, his son is to manage it. The author is going to build upon this farm & locate himself permanently on the expiration of their present lease--which was taken for two years.
Mr & Mrs Sedgwick on the entrance of Mrs James both ask'd for her husband, she slowly & very quietly said, Mr James beg'd me to say that he had "commenced a new book to day," & could not break out on any account. Bessie Sedgwick says he snuffs to such a degree that his bosom is cover'd with the dust, and you can't help inhaling some of the particles when you sit beside him. Our disappointment was very great at not seeing the great novelist. (transcribed by Hershel Parker)

Two months later, James receives detailed consideration in the January 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, when the narrating captain of dragoons dissects James's 1843 novel The False Heir in conversation about books and authors with his Imaginary Friend. I. F. for short.

Verbal and thematic connections to Melville's writings are demonstrated in previous posts on the quirk of repeating speech and the complaint about artificial plot twists. What strikes me now is the timing of the criticism, and its evident importance to the writer or more likely the ghostwriter. In the 1857 book version, this unusual significance is attested by the synoptic chapter headings in the table of contents, where the dialogue is described as Criticism of J. P. R. James.

The 1859 printing is the same except for the title page (updated to reflect Philip St George Cooke's promotion to Colonel) and repeats the error of J. P. R. instead of the correct G. P. R. for George Payne Rainsford James. Not exactly a common error, though Allen Cunningham's 1834 Biographical and Critical History provides one early example of the same thing.

UPDATE: James's offending sentence on the bad influence of Americanism, which supposedly undermines social order and high culture, is the sort of thing Melville argued against in the first book of Pierre. There Melville self-consciously aimed to "poetically establish the richly aristocratic condition of Master Pierre Glendinning." (Pierre, 1852)  And he kept at it. Trying still to counter the kind of disdain for "Americanism" that James had coolly exhibited in The False Heir, Melville urged Richard Bentley to consider the popular appeal of his new book as a treatment of

"a new & elevated aspect of American life." (April 16, 1852)

January 1852:

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

"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's False Heir with my baggage; that, in my mental famine, has been quite a feast."

I. F. — Do you like it ?

"I think he has exhausted his best powers: the plot turns solely on a worn-out incident; the real or pretended substitution of infants. 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. Strange, indeed, that a writer who has made friends of the readers of a great nation, should without any good object turn their finer feelings into contempt or anger, by a few motions of his pen. Ah! deliver us from the temptation of a sneer! But this is coolly and deliberately done."

I. F. — And what is it?

"I say Americanism advisedly; for republicanism is a very different thing, and does not imply a rejection of refinement in the higher classes of society." [quoting James as narrator in The False Heir]

I. F. — He pins his faith then upon the mercenary class of tourists; for he has never visited us. Did you ever remark that his valets are often the most intelligent and quickwitted of his characters?

"It is the case in this very work. 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 cipher, 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 [Marais], to the galleys!

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!

"One of the last announcements I read before I left home, was, that he had engaged to write a 'serial' for the Dublin University Magazine; sorry I am, but such is the accustomed drivel of exhausted minds."

I. F. — After all, James has been a most effective moralist; and we owe him much.

down on the philosophy of Human Destiny

Look to the right and you will see links to monthly installments of the magazine series Scenes Beyond the Western Border.  Taken together the series forms part two of the 1857 book Scenes and Adventures in the Army.  Many fine previous commentators (Hamilton Gardner, Otis E Young) on the book did not know about earlier printings of the same material in newspapers and magazines including the Southern Literary Messenger.  The late date of the book mostly reflects the difficulties Lt. Colonel Cooke had with getting the thing published.  Seeing the magazine installments month-by-month more precisely and usefully situates the writing, especially the freewheeling prairie dialogues between the narrator and his imaginary friend, in 1851-1853.

Besides all the verbal and thematic correspondences shown relentlessly on this blog, the chronology of publication dates matches up surprisingly well to known milestones and moods of Herman Melville during the same period.

The series begins in June 1851, with the narrator sounding cocky and confident like Melville did, about to wrap up Moby-Dick.  Looking to make a friend of one ideal reader, the "Captain of U. S. Dragoons" even talks like Melville to Hawthorne, promising to do all the work of socializing.  Early on, the chatty survey of books and ideas covers the subjects discussed by Melville and Hawthorne, who named some in his journal entry for August 2, 1851:

“time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters.”  (quoted in Hershel Parker's biography, V2.8)

Or in another view, the early installments of Scenes Beyond the Western Border effectively flesh out "A Week on a Work-Bench in a Barn," the book Melville and Hawthorne reportedly planned after Thoreau, to memorialize their conversations.

The mood shifts in December 1851, as the imaginary friend starts to sound less like idealized Hawthorne and more like Melville's critical friend Evert Duyckinck:

 ... as your old fashioned friend, I feel interested in your surface wanderings; but let your double-refined poetry and romance go 'to the D—.'" (Scenes Beyond the Western Border)

The amazingly self-aware critique of poetry and romance continues for the rest of the series.  References to motherhood and nursing infants occur only after the birth of Melville's son Stanwix in October 1851.  The bizarre and inappropriate if not inexplicable rant on foreign books and international copyright in September 1852 follows Melville's discouraging correspondence in March-April 1852 with Richard Bentley, his London publisher.  Bentley had based his low estimation of Pierre on copyright concerns and lousy sales of previous works.  Copyright provided editorial grist for New York newspapers, as Parker shows in columns that must have caught Melville's attention (Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative 402-7).  The Harpers and New York Times promoted Dickens over American authors while Greeley and the Tribune defended them and promoted international copyright.

In September 1852, the Captain of U. S. Dragoons (ostensibly writing in July 1845) seems oddly, personally immersed in these New York newspaper wars of spring 1852, complaining bitterly about "cockney condescension" abroad and "foreign-fashion loving public taste" at home:

And then the infernal trash—much of it from the stews of Paris and London—utterly undersells us, to the almost total suppression of native labour; and to the robbery too of the best foreign authors, whose works would command a copyright.

So much for the fourth of July,—and a dry one!  (September 1852) 

The March 1853 episode of the grizzly bear cub, presented as a mock tragedy, wittily twists negative reviews of Melville's Pierre.  In August 1853, the concluding number, in dialogue between the narrator and his imaginary friend, (named Frank since August 1852) incorporates key terms deployed by Evert and George Duyckinck in their review of Pierre for the New York Literary World.

OK, I said all that to say this, on the subject of Human Destiny in Scenes Beyond the Western Border.  Now then, the matter of 1843 is concluded in January 1852.  After two months off, the series resumes in April 1852 with a new subject, the matter of the 1845 dragoon expedition to the Rocky Mountains.

Having of necessity dropped the source material in Cooke's 1843 Santa Fe Journal, the writer or ghostwriter confronting new matter of 1845 needed new sources.  He found the first one in
Oregon, Ho!, first printed over the signature of "St George" in the Washington National Intelligencer, July 15, 1845. 

Examining the revisions to Oregon, Ho! in April 1852, we find the writer now cynically regarding the Oregon emigrants as "unconscious workers of National Human Destiny."  Our narrating Captain of U. S. Dragoons views westward expansion as a second fall, a comparison that Melville saved for Clarel.

They scorn all royal paper claims to this virgin world of ours! The best diplomatists of us all, they would conquer the land as easily as, — Adam lost Paradise.
(Scenes Beyond the Western Border, April 1852; and  Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

 Whatever happen in the end, 
Be sure 'twill yield to one and all
New confirmation of the fall
Of Adam. Sequel may ensue,
Indeed, whose germs one now may view:
Myriads playing pygmy parts-- 
Debased into equality:
In glut of all material arts
A civic barbarism may be:
Man disennobled--brutalized
By popular science--Atheized 
Into a smatterer " (Clarel 4.21)

The fixation with Human Destiny persists into the June 1852 number--possibly indicating a cluster of 1852 installments, April-May-June, apparently composed and submitted together.  In late January and February 1852, Orville Dewey had repeated his Lowell lectures on the Problem of Human Destiny at the Church of the Messiah in New York City.  Melville wrote a dig at Human Destiny lecturers into book 17 of Pierre, then the Captain of U.S. Dragoons railed at "demagogues and infidels" who wowed crowds with "licentious speculations on human destiny":

C.  "But even science is at fault—philosophy at a discount. The public mind is occupied with the theorism of demagogues and infidels, who, abandoning themselves to licentious speculations on human destiny, attract multitudes of fanatical followers, whose minds they bewilder, and whose morals they debase." (June 1852; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

The celebrated Rev. Orville Dewey, a demagogue and infidel?

What's more, a licentious infidel. Debasing the masses with marketable science or "philosophy at a discount."

Who talks like that?  Melville's Ungar the self-exiled soldier, for one, denouncing "popular science" in the lines from Clarel quoted above.  Also Babbalanja in Mardi, musing on the popularity of theorists.  And Ahab, contemplating the whale's head that has voicelessly witnessed enough to "make an infidel of Abraham."

And Melville as Pierre's biographer who disparages "infidel levities" and "infidel-minded" knaves.

Curiously, another bit from one of Dewey's Manhattan lectures on Human Destiny also made its way into the same June 1852 installment with the denunciation of Human Destiny demagogues.  As reported in the New York Daily Tribune for Thursday, February 5, 1852, Dewey's third NYC lecture at the Church of the Messiah considered laughter as a unique feature of "human organization, regarded in its connection with the formation of character and the development of mind":

Another important element in his training to higher ends is the faculty of laughter.  The animals are not endowed with this power, unless the grinning of monkeys is an exception.  This is not merely an expression of the sense of the ludicrous.  Laughter is the symbol of a contented mind, of a genial fellowship, of a comfortable sense of satisfaction, and tends to unite the scattered elements of society in a common feeling of fraternity.  Its influence on health is not to be overlooked.  An explosion of laughter is an excellent aid to digestion.  Superior to old wine, or old cheese, or other celebrated peptic persuaders.

In the June 1852 installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, one of the prairie dialogues makes use of Dewey's theme, as follows:

C.   "....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."   

(Scenes Beyond the Western Border, Southern Literary Messenger, June 1852); and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army

Melville took up the same theme in The Confidence-Man, riffing ironically on what Orville Dewey had said in praise of laughter, in those widely beloved Lowell lectures on Human Destiny:

Humor is, in fact, so blessed a thing, that even in the least virtuous product of the human mind, if there can be found but nine good jokes, some philosophers are clement enough to affirm that those nine good jokes should redeem all the wicked thoughts, though plenty as the populace of Sodom. At any rate, this same humor has something, there is no telling what, of beneficence in it, it is such a catholicon and charm—nearly all men agreeing in relishing it, though they may agree in little else—and in its way it undeniably does such a deal of familiar good in the world, that no wonder it is almost a proverb, that a man of humor, a man capable of a good loud laugh—seem how he may in other things—can hardly be a heartless scamp."

"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed the other, pointing to the figure of a pale pauper-boy on the deck below, whose pitiableness was touched, as it were, with ludicrousness by a pair of monstrous boots, apparently some mason's discarded ones, cracked with drouth, half eaten by lime, and curled up about the toe like a bassoon. "Look—ha, ha, ha!"

"I see," said the other, with what seemed quiet appreciation, but of a kind expressing an eye to the grotesque, without blindness to what in this case accompanied it, "I see; and the way in which it moves you, Charlie, comes in very apropos to point the proverb I was speaking of. Indeed, had you intended this effect, it could not have been more so. For who that heard that laugh, but would as naturally argue from it a sound heart as sound lungs? True, it is said that a man may smile, and smile, and smile, and be a villain; but it is not said that a man may laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and be one, is it, Charlie?"

"Ha, ha, ha!—no no, no no."

waters flowing through depths, emerging far away

Devil's Gate, Wyoming
Frederick Piercy, 1853

Hershel Parker, Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative:

"To declare that Melville was interested in bodies of water—lakes, ponds, flowing water, waterfalls, confluences of rivers, and oceans—is to announce the obvious. But there was more. Melville was fascinated by, perhaps haunted by, feelings of being subterranean, in the orlop deck, in vaults, in passages such as Giovanni Belzoni wormed his way through, in depths below depths as in the Hôtel de Cluny in Paris. He was particularly intrigued by waters that went subterranean and emerged far away." (15)

"You stand upon one side of what seems a deep green river, flowing through mountain passes to the sea..." (Omoo)

Thus liberated, the river enters a vast sunburnt plain; and, as if to take a last farewell of the romantic ridge, runs five or six miles to the foot of the solitary Independence Rock, thrown out like a grim sentinel upon the desert's boundary; then, as if warned of the salt and lava desolation beyond, turns again, and hastens to join the Platte, to aid in the evident struggle before it, with all the rocky powers of chaos and volcano.

Having thus, as from impulse, surrendered name and identity, and the excited contest over, they emerge from the secret and sublime mountain passes, in dreary unity, upon the boundless flatness of barren plains,—though some fleeting enjoyment of flowery savannas succeeds— before both are lost in Missouri's dark and turbid flood.

Farewell to thee, then, sweet daughter of Mountain! Thou smile upon our mother's melancholy face! Go,— with thy bright and blithe innocence,—like many another victim;—go purling merrily when you may, ignorantly happy, to the dark course of thy destiny. Thus do the Fates spin our warped life-threads,—thus do we weave its chequered or sombre web! [earlier version, Sept. 1852: "...ignorantly happy, to the chequered course of thy destiny. Thus do the silent Fates prepare for our warped life threads their sombre woof!]

.... Silvery gleams attract our sight—there is water—it is the river! In the midst of its secret, fierce course, a sweet glen has tempted it to a gentle pause on its soft bosom. It is then a river valley! Truly, close to our right, through an unsuspected chasm of wondrous depth, the happy Platte, having been somewhere secretly united to Sweet Water, has come to meet us, as witnesses to its triumph, or sharers in the excitement of a pleasure tour. Lowly, but bright and joyous in its life of motion and cumulative power, it advances, courting first all sweet and quiet recesses—yet daring all opposition to its wilful course. How we watch it now! Yonder, it sweeps in curves of beauty;—but suddenly lost, we gaze conjecturing where it may next appear; unexpectedly, it has paid a smiling visit to a grim mound, that stands modestly far aside; satisfied, it comes forth to new discoveries;—a determined barrier seems opposed ; but carelessly yet, it sports in some little meadows which can scarce be seen. Then it advances more seriously to a green hill, which seems bent in homage. But no! Nothing less than the loftiest mountain of proud rock, must give it passage! and through a narrow—a sublime chasm, it fiercely rushes forth to new labyrinths beyond.

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

Update:  This lavish personification of the Sweetwater River has also to do with, besides surprise emergings from depths and labyrinths, a preoccupation with the confluence of rivers, here the Sweetwater and Platte, with a gloomy anticipation too of another confluence, the inevitable merging of the Platte and Missouri rivers.

"Why would he not seek out confluences of rivers, since from childhood he had walked on the Battery, seeing where the East River and the Hudson (or “North River”) merged after they poured separately into the bay?"  (Hershel Parker, Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative)

amigo mio

Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker on the break between Herman Melville and Evert Duyckinck in early 1852: 

"Only a dramatic personal confrontation just at this time, a meeting in which Duyckinck told Melville that he could not recommend the work to any publisher, seems adequate to account for the anger Melville displayed toward his friend in what he inserted into his manuscript a week or so into January."

"... Duyckinck's blunt condemnation of Pierre is the most likely cause of Melville's apparent decision not even to try to find another publisher for his manuscript."
(Reading Melville's Pierre 147)

C.  "Amigo Mio!  Didn't you desert me on the eve of a snow storm, like many another friend of so honest mouthing!  And is a touch of poetry a bad companion in difficulty and trial?  Never a bit; it was the boon of a God — Wisdom was ever feminine."

I. F.  "Phew!  The fit is on!  Sorry I said a word!   (April 1852)

"I. F." stands for "Imaginary Friend," later in this same installment also called "friend critic."   Just now the Captain is feeling abandoned, deserted again by a friend

"on the eve of a snowstorm." 

the moral of the story

"Beyond any doubt Duyckinck considered Pierre immoral:  we know that from the review he later wrote of the expanded version that the Harpers published."
Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, Reading Melville's Pierre, 147

"The most immoral moral of the story, if it has any moral at all, seems to be the impracticability of virtue..."
(Review of Melville's Pierre in Duyckincks' Literary World, August 21, 1852)

 My tragedy is all true,—and if not quite serious, has, as is proper, its moral;—but rather, as I have alluded to the primitive tragedy, let that " future reader" here imagine the entry of Chorus, and their song to Freedom! That dumb beasts prefer death to slavery! Liberty lost, they can die without the excitement of the world's applause, or hopes of a grateful posterity! (It is not possible, I think, that the cub could have known that I would immortalize him.)
("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," March 1853)

Below, the whole mockudrama as it originally appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger for March 1853.  This installment begins with a new and unique feature, a subheading with synopses of major episodes in italics.  The subheading shows that with the series winding down, the writer is getting ready to make a book of it, experimenting with italicized synopses for the table of contents.  The tale of the captured grizzly cub burlesques Greek tragedy and Shakespeare's Hamlet, while at the same time—as shown here—mimicking the vocabulary used in the hurtful review of Pierre in the New York Herald (September 18, 1852).  In the 1853 subheading, this incredible episode is titled:   Cub, a tragedy in three acts; same title appears in the table of contents for the 1857 book version, only with initial capital letters and without the italics:  Cub, a Tragedy in Three Acts.

Cub, a tragedy in three acts
March 1853

So there is a moral, after all.  And YOW what a moral!

romance and poetry

"... the romance & poetry of the thing thence grow continually, till it becomes a story wild enough I assure you & with a meaning too." 
(Letter to John Murray, 25 March 1848)

"Romance and poetry were synonymous—they were imaginative, not factual and not commonplace, and they were associated in Melville’s mind with a higher form of literature than factual (and partly fictionalized) travel and adventure narrative." 

(Hershel Parker, "Historical Note" to Published Poems; and
Herman Melville: The Making of the Poet)

OK, notice how the Captain's critical "Imaginary Friend" insists on this same contrast, but from the opposite point of view, much preferring a factual travel narrative of "surface wanderings":

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—.'" 
(Scenes Beyond the Western Border, December 1851)

Revisions in the 1857 book include the following: 

Friend. — Nay, stick to the surface now; only "to the d — l" with your double-refined poetry and romance.  (Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

he will do the talking

"Don't trouble yourself, though, about writing; and don't trouble yourself about visiting; and when you do visit, don't trouble yourself about talking. I will do all the writing and visiting and talking myself."

(Herman Melville, letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne formerly dated June [1?] 1851; redated to early May 1851 by Hershel Parker)

"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 17 (June 1851): 372; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army (Philadelphia, 1857), 228.

 "... [in Hawthorne] Melville found a good listener to whom he could talk philosophy, literature, or adventure without reserve."  (Leon Howard)