value and sources of highest art

Thinking and tinkering about aesthetics, all the while steeped in Byron...

 MAY 1853

Frank said, solemnly: " The present is all we possess: but we should turn from sad experience to the future; there to lay hopeful plans, with good resolves." 

C. —Labour and depravity are our curse: but blessings too are the high faculties of the soul: among which are poetic fancies, — perception of the beautiful, —romantic yearnings, which were given for cultivation; they elevate man's mind, and

'Make his heart a spirit—'

In cherishing these heaven-descended attributes, we can oft forget that we are animals too.  ("Scenes Beyond the Western Border")

1857:

... my Friend said solemnly: "The present only is ours; but we should turn from sad experience to the future, there to lay hopeful plans, with good resolves."

"Labor and care and depravity are our curse: but blessings too are the faculties by which we struggle above the Sensual;—perceptions of the Beautiful, and the Sublime,—all the elements of the Ideal realm, where, Fancy-borne, we draw the materials of highest art; they elevate poor grovelling man, and

'Make his heart a spirit—'

Thus to poetry, and much-abused romance, we owe the cherished oblivion of our animal natures. (Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 411)

From Melville's 1857-1858 Lecture on "Statues in Rome"

They appeal to that portion of our beings which is highest and noblest....These marbles, the works of the dreamers and idealists of old, live on, leading and pointing to good.  They are the works of visionaries and dreamers, but they are realizations of soul, the representations of the ideal....They were formed by those who had yearnings for something better, and strove to attain it by embodiments in cold stone.  How well in the Apollo is expressed he idea of the perfect man.  Who could better it?  Can art, not life, make the ideal?  (Melville as Lecturer, 150)

According to contemporary newspaper reports, Melville ended his lecture on Roman statuary by quoting famous lines from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Canto 4, 145):

“While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;
  When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;
  And when Rome falls—the world.”

on civilization

Review of Typee in Graham's Magazine (May 1846):

[Mr. Melville] writes of what he has seen con amore, and at times almost loses his loyalty to civilization and the Anglo-Saxon race.... "The white civilized man," he considers to be entitled, in point of "remorseless cruelty," to the dubious honor of being " the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth."  So far he seems to think sailors and missionaries have carried little to the barbarous nations which have come under his notice, but disease, starvation and death.

"As a philanthropist in general, and a friend to the Polynesians in particular, I hope that these Edens of the South Seas, blessed with fertile soils and peopled with happy natives, many being yet uncontaminated by the contact of civilization, will long remain unspoiled in their simplicity, beauty, and purity. And as for annexation, I beg to offer up an earnest prayer—and I entreat all present and all Christians to join me in it—that the banns of that union should be forbidden until we have found for ourselves a civilization morally, mentally, and physically higher than one which has culminated in almshouses, prisons, and hospitals.'  (Close of Melville's 1859 lecture on "The South Seas," as reconstructed by Merton M. Sealts, Jr. in Melville as Lecturer)

 "Civilization ever advances sword in hand, with poisons, pestilence and crime in her train."

("Scenes Beyond the Western Border," May 1853; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army)