Surprise! Cooke no romantic: 1878 review of Conquest of New Mexico and California

La Ciudad de Santa  Fe (1846-7)
Report of Lt. J. W. Abert, U.S. Army Signal Corps

Gen P. St George Cooke publishes through the Putnams the first historical narrative of the conquest of New Mexico and California, following the Mexican war, and their incorporation as territories of the United States.  The account is a diary, rather tedious as to style, but having much information valuable for reference, especially as to topographical descriptions.  A map shows the military routes.  A mere handful of regulars and volunteers went through these regions, inspiring the natives with a wholesome respect for the United States by a ceremonious swearing in of officials and a liberal display of howitzers for the recusant.  The soldiers feasted and starved by turns, encountered thermometric extremes, and killed enough Indians and Mexicans to keep their hands in.  Were Gen Cooke of a more romantic turn of mind his book would be more entertaining.

"LITERARY NEWS AND REVIEWS"

Springfield [Massachusetts] Republican, Friday, April 26, 1878
accessible at genealogybank.com

cravings

“I speak now,” said Babbalanja, “of the ravening for fame which even appeased, like thirst slaked in the desert, yields no felicity, but only relief; and which discriminates not in aught that will satisfy its cravings.  (Melville's Mardi)

Ay de Mi! Our life is a sad struggle;—our material nature with its base cravings,—its cares for animal comforts, and all the ills of the flesh, preys upon and tethers the soul, which yearns for the Beautiful, the Noble, the Exalted ;—essays to soar in that sphere, whose types are the bright stars of Heaven! Or, clings to that electric chain of Love which binds humanity—and is the olden Time drew down angels!

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

Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for Pierre's own private shelf. That it is, whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink.
(Melville's Pierre)

The rich in their craving glut, as the poor in their craving want, we have with us always. 
(Melville's Jimmy Rose)

what imagination essays, led by hope

In dialogue!  Besides the similar vocabulary, observe, too, the passionately gloomy theme (incineration of ideals born of hope) and, say cadence.

I. F. This profoundly silent Desert—like a world without life—awes and stills the senses: but the soul is excited to speculations on the origin, the history—if it have one—and the destiny of these boundless wastes.

C. Or surrounds itself with the airy creations of fantasy,—or, mournfully wanders back among the dim traces of joys and sorrows gone. I address not then, the shallow or hurried worldling; but the friendly one, who in the calm intervals from worldly cares, grants me the aid of a quiet and thoughtful,—and if it may be,—a poetic mood!

Ay de Mi! Our life is a sad struggle;—our material nature with its base cravings,—its cares for animal comforts, and all the ills of the flesh, preys upon and tethers the soul, which yearns for the Beautiful, the Noble, the Exalted ;—essays to soar in that sphere, whose types are the bright stars of Heaven! Or, clings to that electric chain of Love which binds humanity—and is the olden Time drew down angels!

I. F. Ay! it is a fire that consumes; and sometimes burns to ashes the hearts and hopes of proud men, and leaves but wrecks, mournfully floating upon the dull currents of life.

C. And welcome then, the rapids and the final plunge! Yes: the struggle is ever, and leads us sorrowing to the dark portals which shut out the life beyond. There may this holy fire from Heaven find more happy sympathy. Here, amid ages of pain, it grants us but moments of felicity.

Methinks, amid those stars so refulgent with celestial light, studding the bright blue ether of this moonless summer night, a seraphic Intelligence is hovering with a pale but friendly smile, to rekindle the wasted torch of Hope!

Fond traitor! constant friend—blind guide— beautiful Hope! that leadest us wandering ever,—heartless, but living still.

Yes! Time, the inexorable,—Time the physician and the conqueror,—Time the hopeful, rolls on, dragging us at his chariot wheels, wounded, suffering, unpitied,—but living still!

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

Above, C. and I. F. (who later becomes plain "F" for Frank) as talking travelers anticipate Charlie and Frank in the second half of The Confidence-Man.  But the conversation below is from the first half of Melville's 1857 book (chapter 13, "The man with the traveling cap, etc."), before Frank Goodman (the Cosmopolitan) shows up.

At intervals they slowly quaffed several glasses in silence and thoughtfulness. At last the merchant's expressive face flushed, his eye moistly beamed, his lips trembled with an imaginative and feminine sensibility. Without sending a single fume to his head, the wine seemed to shoot to his heart, and begin soothsaying there. "Ah," he cried, pushing his glass from him, "ah, wine is good, and confidence is good; but can wine or confidence percolate down through all the stony strata of hard considerations, and drop warmly and ruddily into the cold cave of truth? Truth will not be comforted. Led by dear charity, lured by sweet hope, fond fancy essays this feat; but in vain; mere dreams and ideals, they explode in your hand, leaving nought but the scorching behind!"

     "Why, why, why !" in amaze, at the burst; "bless me, if In vino Veritas be a true saying, then, for all the fine confidence you professed with me, just now, distrust, deep distrust, underlies it; and ten thousand strong, like the Irish Rebellion, breaks out in you now. That wine, good wine, should do it! Upon my soul," half seriously, half humorously, securing the bottle, "you shall drink no more of it. Wine was meant to gladden the heart, not grieve it; to heighten confidence, not depress it."

Dante on the prairie

Friend. — Is there no end to this trudge through mud and rain? It seems to me we are always the same, — in the centre of a great circle of dank, flat, and changeless prairie. 

"I have been thinking very seriously to what this infernal march may lead us. 'Circle,' indeed! and having escaped from that of incessant fierce winds, we have duly fallen upon the 'third circle.' "

"——della piova,
Eterna, maledetta, fredda a greve." 

Friend. — Of rain eternal, accursed, cold, and heavy — it is a wonder Dante left out the musquitos!

"Yes; but our Cerebus has three hundred wolfish throats which bark and howl at us."

Friend. — Well, I think it won't do ; you have fetched hell too far.

"Only come here in the dog days, and if you can't imagine yourself around the edges of a more than poetical hell, it will be because the eternal winds are scorching, instead of cold." (Scenes and Adventures in the Army, 248-249)

The precise quotation, images and specific details from Dante's Inferno were all added in revision of the original magazine series, Scenes Beyond the Western Border.  The entire passage, quoted above from Scenes and Adventures in the Army, is an interpolation into the September 1851 installment.

In Pierre (1852), Melville's allusions to Dante's Inferno included early and important references to the second circle.  Helen Annn Hauser writes in her 1975 dissertation:

"Hell actually begins with the second circle, where carnal sinners are placed. Semiramis is the first person Dante meets there; Mary Glendinning is specifically compared to Semiramis. Also in this circle are Paulo and Francesca. Pierre refuses to look at Dante with Lucy for fear of some such dark fate as theirs. It then occurs to him that Isabel's face reminds him of Francesca's, and he bursts out, 'Damned be the hour I read in Dante! more damned than that wherein Paulo and Francesca read in fatal Launcelot.' "

 

Also, as Nathalia Wright alluded to in her study of Pierre as "Melville's Inferno," Melville in writing about Francesca in Dante appropriates  language from the Cary translation which he owned.  Cary in the Argument to Canto V describes the doomed inhabitants of the second circle "tost about ceaselessly in the dark air by the most furious winds."  Isabel's face makes Pierre think of Dante's Francesca,

"wafted on the sad dark wind, toward observant Virgil and the blistered Florentine."

The elaborate revision in Scenes and Adventures in the Army fixes on the third circle, but also demonstrates close familiarity with the phenomenon of wind (right, the familiarity that Melville showed in Pierre) associated with the second circle. Clearly the writer is determined to make a structural parallel between the westward journey of the narrator (along with his imaginary friend) and the descent of Dante (along with his imaginary friend Virgil) from the second to third circle of Dante's Hell:

"...having escaped from that of incessant fierce winds, we have duly fallen upon the 'third circle.'" 

UPDATE:  The added dialogue on Hell strengthens the correspondence to Dante's journey which was already present in Scenes Beyond the Western Border.  The most spectacular use of Dantean language and imagery occurs the next-to-last installment, in the dream sequence of the Dantean Fairy Dance.  Overall, the narrative journey of the Captain and his Imaginary Friend "Beyond the Western Border" progresses structurally and symbolically from Hell to Paradise.

trees over flowing waters, dramatized in dialogue

 

Yet unstained, bright and cheerful, gayly pattering  o'er  [1857: splashing 'mong] the rocks,—merry river, knowest thou, surely, where thou rushest in such haste?

Art careless now, in thy morning, of these pleasant green trees' shade?

Well, [1857: Ah!] be happy while thou mayst, round thy mountain parents' feet; smiling thou, and reflecting every hopeful smile of theirs!

Yes, whilst they shelter, dance in sunshine, now thou mayst—

F.—Hillo! what are you about? Writing in tune with the merry cotton-wood leaves? ....
(Scenes Beyond the Western Border, May 1853; and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army)

Look how these willows over-weep
The waves, and plain: 'Fleet so from us?
And wherefore? whitherward away?
Your best is here where wildings sway
And the light shadow's blown about;
Ah, tarry, for at hand's a sea
Whence ye shall never issue out
Once in.' They sing back: 'So let be!
We mad-caps hymn it as we flow—
Short life and merry! be it so!' "  (Clarel 2.27)

his sentence-ending howl

In the mock tragedy "Cub," the captive bear cub turns defiant and frightens onlookers with his fierce "howl" of protest:

"... he came to life in a manner that might very well have been criticized as an overdone piece of stage-effect,—but that in fact, the spectators were much moved, and gave full credit to the dangerous passion of his howl.

Scenes Beyond the Western Border, (March 1853): 159 and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857), 390

Verbally ("his howl") and thematically (imprisoned hero protests), the narrative from "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" replicates the situation of Enceladus the Titan in Melville's Pierre (1852).  In Pierre Melville's "form defiant" is a half-buried hillside boulder that looks like the defeated giant Enceladus, "writhing from out the imprisoning earth":

—turbaned with upborn moss he writhed; still turning his unconquerable front toward that majestic mount eternally—in vain assailed by him, and which, when it had stormed him off, had heaved his undoffable incubus upon him, and deridingly left him there to bay out his ineffectual howl. -- Pierre

Ooh! Meditating on these sentence-ending howls along with the playful use in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" of language from negative reviews of Pierre (demonstrated here and here and here), not forgetting Harrison Hayford on Melville's Prisoners, I am about ready to declare victory and go home. 

a subject of joke

Herman Melville's wife Elizabeth denied that bad reviews of Pierre (1852) made a hermit of her husband.  No, she wrote a relative in 1901, Herman was "naturally" reclusive and prone to shun "the bustling outside world."  Moreover, according to Melville's wife, the critical failure of Pierre

"was a subject of joke with him..."
(quoted in Pursuing Melville by Merton M. Sealts, Jr. at 215)

A joke!  How might Melville have joked about criticism like this

…Modern readers wish to exercise some little judgment of their own.... We are past the age when an artist superscribed his chef d’oeuvre with the judicious explanation, “this is a horse.” Mr. Melville longs for the good old times when the chorus filled the gaps between the acts with a well-timed commentary on the past, and a shrewd guess at the future.  (New York Herald, September 18, 1852, quoted here)

and these gems from the unfriendly review of Melville's Pierre in the Literary World, August 21, 1852:

"Mark the tragical result..."

"Mr. Melville may have constructed his story upon some new theory of art to a knowledge of which we have not yet transcended; he evidently has not constructed it according to the established principles of the only theory accepted by us until assured of a better, of one more true and natural than truth and nature themselves, which are the germinal principles of all true art.... The most immoral moral of the story, if it has any moral at all, seems to be the impracticability of virtue..."

"All the male characters of the book have a certain robust, animal force and untamed energy, which carry them through their melodramatic parts—no slight duty—with an effect sure to bring down the applause of the excitable and impulsive."

That's Evert Duyckinck coolly damning his sailor pal in print, so you can see why Hershel Parker thinks Melville's stoic joking must have masked a good deal of personal suffering.  (Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 2 at 142)

How to reconcile the reception of Pierre as "a subject of joke" in Elizabeth's memory with the expected, natural human feelings of pain and bitterness?  Here's how:

 Cub, a Tragedy in Three Acts

In crossing the Platte this morning, the grizzly bear cub came on the scene in his final act.

It will be remembered by the patient and attentive future reader of this dry and methodical narrative, that its first appearance on any stage, was in "high" tragedy—that the first act embraced an unusual amount of sanguinary incident—that an innocent brother, (or sister,) being ruthlessly slain, and the baffled lady-mother left (unceremoniously) full of towering and demonstrative rage,— the imprisoned hero himself sank overwhelmed,—or in a well-acted counterfeit of death, (and was borne off, remember, on a "real" horse). That in the next act, (and three acts shall do for the tragedy of my bear,—originally they had but one,—but that was at the sacrifice of a goat,) he came to life in a manner that might very well have been criticized as an overdone piece of stage-effect,—but that in fact, the spectators were much moved, and gave full credit to the dangerous passion of his howl.

To-day, then,—for I scorn anachronism— was performed the final act. The stage (wagon) was on "real water." Enraged at his wrongs, his losses, and his galling chain, the "robustious beast" acted in a ridiculous and unbearable manner; aye, ''tore his passion to tatters, to very rags,"—splinters; the stage (wagon) could not hold him: and finally in despair, he "imitated humanity so abominably," as to throw himself headlong, and so drown—or hang himself: (the author cannot decide which—even after a post mortem examination;—and so leaves the decision of this important point to the commentators).

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," Southern Literary Messenger 19 (March 1853): 159 and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857), 390