IN HIS COPY OF THE Iliad, Melville took note of the passage in Book 18 that portrays the shield of Achilles, fashioned to replace the one lost in battle. This elaborate artifact is as much a work of art as an instrument of war. Gathering his tin, silver, gold, and brass, Hephaestus creates “a strong and spacious shield / Adorn’d with twenty several hues.” Homer offers a detailed poetic description of the shield’s face, with its pictorial representation of constellations, cities, weddings, judgments, armies and battles, vineyards, and dancing. The passage, marked by Melville, reads, in part:
To these the fiery Artizan did add a new-ear’d field,
Large and thrice plough’d, the soil being soft, and of a wealthy yield;
And many men at plough he made, that drave earth here and there,
And turn’d up stitches orderly, at whose end when they were,
A fellow ever gave their hands full cups of luscious wine;
Which emptied, for another stitch, the earth they undermine,
And long till th’ utmost bound be reach’d of all the ample close. (Cowen 2:29)
The copy of the Iliad that Melville owned, the Chapman translation, was one that he received from George Duyckinck in 1858, so his markings must have been made then, or even later; but he had long known the poem and its beautiful representation of the Achillean shield and had made use of it in his writings. In Moby-Dick, for example, Ishmael, acting as a connoisseur and critic of art forms, discusses the portrayals “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.” During his exhaustive catalog of artistic effects, he refers to the efforts of the “white sailor-savage” who will “carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield; and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer” (270).
Melville cares much for allusions to the arts and uses them often in his compositions, calling up the names of artists and works of art to vivify his descriptions and remind his reader of similitudes. In the early “Fragments from a Writing Desk,” he speaks, rather vaguely, of “several magnificent pictures illustrative of the loves of Jupiter and Semele, Psyche before the tribunal of Venus, and a variety of other scenes” (Piazza Tales 202). In Typee, Tommo is reminded of “monstrous imps that torment some of Teniers’ saints” (211), a reference to one of Melville’s favorite painters, who will receive fuller treatment in the late poem, “The Bench of Boors,” a rather detailed description of a Teniers painting. In Mardi, Taji, an enthusiastic but somewhat unfocused dilettante, describes “the Chondropterygii and other uncouth hordes infesting the South Seas” and invokes the names of painters, “old Wouvermans, who once painted a bull bait,” or Gudin or Isabey, “who might have thrown the blue rolling sea into the picture” under “one of Claude’s setting summer suns.” His vision of “God’s creatures fighting fin for fin a thousand miles from land, and with the round horizon for an arena, is no ignoble subject for a masterpiece” (42). Such a masterpiece as Taji envisions would have been a strange collaboration for Wouverman, one of Melville’s likeable Dutch painters, and Gudin and Isabey, Melville’s contemporaries, with their seas below a Claudean sunset in an odd pastiche of seascape and cannibalism. The reference is still somewhat vague and it is difficult to know what Melville knew of these painters, but he is beginning to make his taste in art better known.
Théodore Gudin (1802–1880) was noted for his early marine paintings, Coast Scene, Shipwreck on Coast of Genoa, Agitated Sea, Rescue of the Passengers of the Colomb, and the like. Eugène Isabey (1804–1886) painted such subjects as Storm, Ships at Anchor, View of Dieppe, and View of Boulogne Harbour. In Carlo, an immigrant boy aboard ship, Wellingborough Redburn sees “such a boy as Murillo often painted” (247), and, moved by the sight of Jackson, the sailor, he says that “this man was still a picture, worthy to be painted by the dark, moody hand of Salvator” (275). Bartleby is observed as “a sort of innocent and transformed Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage,” an allusion to a popular subject for painters; and, in the same story, Wall Street on a Sunday morning “is de serted as Petra,” the ancient city that Melville, without ever seeing it, admired for its magnificent architecture (Piazza Tales 27–28). In Clarel, Melville has the prodigal speak of “Earth’s loveliest portrait, daintiest,” which he identifies as “Titian’s Venus, golden-warm” (4.26.236–39). Billy Budd, the narrator of that tale tells us, possesses “that humane look of reposeful good nature that the Greek sculptor in some instances gave to his heroic strong man, Hercules.” Such a system of reference and allusion greatly enriches the texture of Melville’s writing, as it does for all authors who make much use of it.
As we see from Homer’s striking depiction of the shield, the poetic description of a work of visual arts has a hallowed place in literature. In his study of literary pictorialism, The Sister Arts (1958), Jean H. Hagstrum refers to the technique as “iconic” and offers a definition: “In such poetry the poet contemplates a real or imaginary work of art that he describes or responds to in some other way” (18). Hagstrum adds the term “ecphrastic” to mean “that special quality of giving voice and language to the otherwise mute art object” (18n.34). Since Hagstrum’s publication, other critics have taken issue with his terminology. Writing of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Leo Spitzer prefers to use the term “ekphrasis” to refer to “the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art… the reproduction, through the medium of words, of sensuously perceptible objets d’art” (72). Others have chosen Spitzer’s ekphrasis over Hagstrum’s iconic. In his study of Spenser’s pictorialism, John B. Bender uses it to define the “literary description of real or imagined works of visual arts” (51). Murray Krieger has used it in the sense of “the imitation in literature of a work of plastic art” and, in his imaginative and expansive study of the subject, Ekphrasis (1992), has discussed the historical background and the limitations of the term.1
Ekphrasis has always been, and continues to be, a wonderfully apt literary technique for establishing the direction of a major portion of a work of literature and sometimes the structure of the entirety of a novel or long poem. In The Sense of Life in the Modern Novel, Arthur Mizener calls attention to Anthony Powell’s use of a careful description of Poussin’s painting A Dance to the Music of Time. Mizener quotes a substantial portion of this ekphrasis of a fine artwork “in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays.” The quotation continues, exhibiting the movements implied in the painting as “partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.” Mizener then remarks that the description of the painting “really tells us all we need to know about the design” of this lengthy work of fiction (92–93). Since the essay in which this analysis appears also deals with the novels of James Gould Cozzens, Mizener might have added, though he does not, that the American author’s description in the opening pages of By Love Possessed of an objet d’art, a finely shaped clock illustrating the motto “Love Conquers All,” is an ironic ekphrasis dominating the entire novel.
The term, however, is subject to almost infinite expansion. As Krieger points out, early Greek usage included “a verbal description of something, almost anything, in life or art.” Krieger adds that “the ekphrasis, as an extended description, was called upon to intrude upon the flow of discourse and, for its duration, to suspend the argument of the rhetor or the action of the poet… a device intended to interrupt the temporality of the discourse, to freeze it during its indulgence in spatial exploration” (7). This comment seems a good basis for an understanding of the place of the ekphrastic motive in literature. It is an important descriptive technique whose limits need to be set somewhere between the breadth of “almost anything” and the narrowness of Spitzer’s definition. Studying George Eliot’s uses of the visual arts, Hugh Witemeyer takes the sensible course of associating her writings “with pictures and pictorial traditions which she knew” (6). An examination of some of Melville’s uses of the technique should help to make his limits clear.
Melville’s writings display a clear understanding of the possibilities of ekphrasis, and he uses the technique with great skill. He describes paintings, statues, buildings and the carvings which decorate them, and ships as elaborate in their architecture as any land-bound building. He sometimes depicts people as if they themselves were works of art, comparing them to statues or paintings or even architectural masterpieces. He defines them as characters by associating them with the artworks they encounter in the various events of their lives. When he uses some form of ekphrasis in his prose and poetry, he links it, as often as not, with specific works of art. With the Homeric description of the shield of Achilles in mind, he has the young Wellingborough Redburn go to supper at a boarding house called the Baltimore Clipper. At the supper table Redburn observes “a mighty pewter dish, big as Achilles’ shield.” Melville then moves beyond the relative simplicity of art allusion to create a parody of the Homeric ekphrasis. Redburn sees the supper table as a large work of art, the “shield” of “smoking sausages” at one end, “head-cheese” in the middle, “and at the opposite end, a congregation of beef-steaks, piled tier over tier. Scattered at intervals between, were side dishes of boiled potatoes, eggs by the score, bread and pickles” (Redburn 134). This is, of course, a lighthearted and humorous use of the technique, and it does not greatly advance the movement of the novel. But there are more serious and powerful ekphrases in Melville’s work that do involve great emphases in the form and development of his fiction and poetry. Redburn lovingly describes the glass ship in his home and gives a highly distinctive account of the travel books that he reads, exhibiting his pleasure in their look and feel. Later in the novel, he carefully reports the appearance of the artworks in the “Palace of Aladdin,” when he and Harry Bolton visit that house in London. Ishmael describes paintings in the Spouter-Inn and the Whaleman’s Chapel and depicts the Pequod, Ahab, and Queequeg in painterly terms. When he undertakes to portray the whale, he speaks of himself as an artist and sets out to “paint to you as well as one can without canvas” the awesome proportions and subtle colorings of his subject (Moby-Dick 260). In “The Piazza,” the introduction to The Piazza Tales, Melville says that the lack of a piazza would be as bad “as if a picture-gallery should have no bench” (2), and thus fortified with a vantage point from which he can, in leisurely fashion, view the artworks available in the stories, he portrays the architectural oddities of Wall Street in “Bartleby, the Scrivener”; the elaborate, decaying naval architecture of the San Dominick in “Benito Cereno” and its gruesome figurehead sculpture of skeleton and inscription; the Salvatorean landscapes and seascapes of “The Encantadas”; and the campanile and domino of “The Bell-Tower.”
As Melville collected his impressions of Europe in 1857, he seems to have planned for a work of some length to be called “Frescoes of Travel by Three Brothers: Poet, Painter, and Idler” (Journals 154). Some of the poems in Timoleon appear to have been part of that plan. There is a satisfying ekphrasis of “Milan Cathedral” depicting the building standing upon the “old plain of Lombardy.” Everything in the view consists of sharp, narrow points, reaching skyward. The cathedral and “Its tribes of pinnacles / Gleam like to ice-peaks.” As do the pinnacles, the “Statues of saints over saints ascend / Like multitudinous forks of fire.” The poet meditates upon the “master-builder’s” motive and suggests that the saints, “Sublimely ranked in marble sessions clear,” signify “the host of heaven.”
“Pisa’s Leaning Tower” portrays the old campanile as “tiers of architraves” and as a “maker’s master-work.” In the poet’s eye, the building takes on a vivid consciousness as it “debates”:
It thinks to plunge—but hesitates;
Shrinks back—yet fain would slide;
Withholds itself—itself would urge;
Hovering, shivering on the verge
as a “would-be suicide,” ready to plunge to its destruction. The poem is an ekphrastic delineation of a powerful personal response. Melville recorded his observations of the tower on March 23, 1857: “Campanile like pine poised just ere snapping. You wait to hear crash. Like Wordsworth’s moor cloud, it will move all together if it move at all. Pillars all lean with it. About 150 of ‘em. There are houses in wake of fall” (Journals 114). The allusion is to lines from Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” that carry the burden of suicidal impulses felt by the poem’s speaker, held by “fears and fancies,” thinking of the suicidal Chatterton and the early death of Burns, and concluding that “We poets in our youth begin in gladness; / But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” These moods adequately match Melville’s own feelings at the time of seeing the tower, and, in composing his poem, he displaces the personal, human catastrophe to the more impersonal scenic impending disaster. William Bysshe Stein’s elaborate reading of the poem calls attention to the close links between the poem and Melville’s “The Bell-Tower.” Stein’s view, that the ruinous fall of the tower “foreshadows a religious inevitability—the catastrophic extinction of Christianity,” is, perhaps, too broad in its interpretation, but he perceptively sees the vision that Melville sees, of “intellectual and spiritual suicide” limned in the poem (117).
Other poems in Timoleon are, similarly, well-worked-out pieces of ekphrastic description. “The Bench of Boors” depicts the forms and colors of a painting by David Teniers. “The Marchioness of Brinvilliers” carefully describes a seventeenth-century picture of an infamous poisoner, a piece of portraiture possibly by Charles Le Brun. Other poems in the collection both describe and comment. “The Parthenon” is about the impressions that the famous structure makes upon the beholder from various points of observation. “Greek Architecture” counsels “reverence for the Archetype.” “The Great Pyramid” expresses the viewer’s overwhelming astonishment at the massive, timeless quality of the architectural masterpiece that dares “Time’s future infinite” and considers that the builders “Usurped on Nature’s self with Art.”2 Ekphrasis, in short, is a powerful literary tool that Melville came to use with increasing confidence and skill to balance against the narrative impulse of his work.
In an important passage in Clarel, Melville has Rolfe describe the city of Petra, which the pilgrims will not have an opportunity to visit. He enumerates the colors, the “purple gloom / Of cliffs” and the “rosy stain” of stone before speaking of the shape of the ruins, “Of porch and pediment in crag.” Then, in a brief, vivid outburst, he expresses his feelings about the scene: “One starts. In Esau’s waste are blent / Ionian form, Venetian tint” (3.30.17–18). The passage fuses brilliantly in a pictorial image Melville’s sense of the literary art. He knew well the tints of Venice, having visited that city in 1857 and noted in his journal the “Great gorgeousness of effect” of the colors in the place. The women he saw reminded him that “The rich brown complexions of Titian’s women drawn from nature after all.… The clear, rich, golden brown. The clear cut features, like a cameo.” Venice pleased him. “Rather be in Venice on rainy day,” he wrote, “than in any other capital on fine one” (Journals 119–20). His affection for the city appears again in the poem “At the Hostelry” in the words of Paul Veronese to Gerard Dow, contrasting Italian and Dutch art: “Her sunsets—there’s hearth-light for you; / And matter for you on the Square. / To Venice, Gerard” (Collected Poems 327). A term like “Venetian tint” seems to fit very well his concepts of embellishment, color, and chiaroscuro as part of the sister arts.
“Ionian form” is even more important than “Venetian tint,” and Melville’s sense of form is intense, his struggle for form obsessive and persistent in the novels, the stories, and the poetic collections. As he wrote, he educated this urge to form by a constant reference to the design in works of visual art. An expression of his concern can be found in his marking a passage from the preface that Matthew Arnold composed for the 1853 edition of his Poems: “what distinguishes the artist from the mere amateur, says Goethe, is Architectonicé in the highest sense; that power of execution, which creates, forms, and constitutes” (Cowen 1:75). When Melville calls this feeling for structure “Ionian,” he is using the word, in a general sense, to mean Greek architectural patterns. In Timoleon, the poems that speak of Greek buildings underline the ways in which this matter engrosses his attention. “The Attic Landscape” matches the natural with artifice in which “The clear cut hills carved temples face, / Respond, and share their sculptural grace.” Of “The Parthenon” he says, “In subtlety your form’s defined” and calls the temple “Art’s meridian.” Seeing the columns of a ruined temple in “Off Cape Colonna,” he reflects that they are “sublimed to fancy’s view, / A god-like group.” And, in a more general poem on “Greek Architecture,” the poet finds its virtue: “Not magnitude, not lavishness, / But Form—the Site.” To accomplish both form and tint in his writings, he calls upon all the enticements of the visual arts.
Although Melville came to use the art analogy in individual and sophisticated ways, he assiduously studied his literary models, following, no doubt, the advice of Isaac Disraeli’s The Literary Character, which he emphatically marked in his copy of the book: “‘Our best and surest road to knowledge,’ said Lord Kaimes, ‘is by profiting from the labours of others, and making their experience our own’” (Cowen 1:511). Melville put the matter well in his description of Pierre Glendenning’s ardent study of his precursors: “A varied scope of reading, little suspected by his friends, and randomly acquired by a random but lynx-eyed mind, in the course of the multifarious, incidental, bibliographic encounterings of almost any civilised young inquirer after Truth” (Pierre 283). The literary artist, like the visual artist, learns the trade by careful study of the masters and diligent imitation of their finest strokes.
In addition to his Homeric borrowings, Melville’s epigraphs to the sketches in “The Encantadas” were evidence of his enthusiastic reception of landscape description in The Faerie Queene. Melville tended to see Spenser’s poetry through the eyes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century enthusiasts who drew rather loose analogies between painting and poetry. As he must have known, Spenser had often been lauded for this pictorial quality of his writings. Alexander Pope claimed that upon reading “a canto of Spenser two or three days ago to an old lady … she said that I had been showing her a gallery of pictures.” Leigh Hunt devoted a considerable part of his book Imagination and Fancy (1844), which features the Pope quotation, to matching selections from Spenser to paintings by Raphael, Correggio, Titian, Guido Reni, and Salvator Rosa. He declared in his preface that the book was “intended for all lovers of poetry and the sister arts,” and, in his introductory comments to the section offering “A Gallery of Pictures from Spenser,” he spoke of “the old family relationship between poetry and painting.” Although we cannot be sure that Melville read Hunt’s book, its American edition, under the title of The Poetry of Imagination and Fancy, was published by Wiley and Putnam, publisher of his first novel, and advertised in The Literary World in 1847. Melville’s markings in his copy of Spenser’s poems demonstrate his attentiveness to their pictorial values. The set of Spenser that he marked was published in 1855, and inscriptions indicate that he did not have access to it until 1861 (Sealts #483). The epigraphs for “The Encantadas,” therefore, came from earlier readings of Spenser; those from The Faerie Queene are all taken from Cantos 9 and 10 of the first book and from Canto 12 of the second book. The pictures that the epigraphs limn emphasize the “darke, dolefull, dreary,” the “ugly shapes and horrible aspects,” and the “caitive wretches, ragged, rude, deformed” that Melville, in his pseudonymous guise of “Salvator Tarnmoor” wanted to depict. As Carol Moses shows in her study of Melville and Spenser, the second sketch of “The Encantadas” draws upon Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, which details the journey of Guyon to the Bower of Bliss, where “the palmer is able to vanquish the sea monsters they meet with his ‘vertuous staffe’” (135). The tortoises of Melville’s sketch are portrayed as artworks, with the “calipee or breastplate being sometimes of a faint yellowish or golden tinge.” His later markings as he read and reread The Faerie Queene show his continued interest. In the first book some twenty-three stanzas are marked from the ninth canto. In the second book the ninth canto, with twenty-four markings, and the twelfth canto, with twenty-two markings, receive the most attention. Hunt remarked that Spenser “took a painter’s as well as poet’s delight in colour and form, lingering over his work for its corporeal and visible sake … in short, writing as if with a brush instead of a pen.”
In reading Shakespeare, Melville responded to the imagery of artworks and marked his copy of the volumes as he read. In Venus and Adonis he used a sideline to indicate his interest in the complaint of the amorous Venus to a cold Adonis: “Fie, lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone, / Well-painted idol, image dull and dead, / Statue contenting but the eye alone” (11. 211–13). Many of the sonnets are marked in their entirety, among them the twenty-fourth, in which the poet says
Mine eye hath play’d the painter, and hath stell’d
Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart.
My body is the frame wherein ’tis held,
And perspective it is best painter’s art. (Cowen 2:487)
These are conventional images involving the literary transformation of the painter’s art by importing the idea of the framed portrait and the painterly device of perspective, but they illustrate the possibility of complexities. The poet has created a fictitious picture, painted, indeed, not upon canvas but within the lover, for the picture is “in my bosom’s shop,” whose windows are “glazed with thine eyes.” Once the metaphor of the artwork has been introduced, it can lead the eye into varied vistas.
It appears that Melville knew something of John Dryden’s poetry and prose. Sealts lists a copy of Dryden’s Poetical Works as a presentation copy from Melville to Mrs. Morewood (Sealts #191), and, in his own copy of The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, he read and marked Dryden’s “A Parallel of Poetry and Painting,” a piece written as a preface to the translation that Dryden made of Charles Du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica. In a poem like the ode “To the Pious Memory of the Accomplisht Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew,” Dryden calls attention to the parallel by adding to his title the complimentary assertion that his subject has been “Excellent in the Two Sister-Arts of Poesie and Painting.” His praise of the young woman’s poetry disposed of in the first parts of the poem, he turns “To the next Realm” where “she stretched her Sway, / For Peinture neer adjoyning lay.” As artist, she “perfectly could represent / The Shape, the Face, with ev’ry Lineament.” Her genius is such that “Her Pencil drew, what e’re her Soul design’d, / And oft the happy Draught surpass’d the Image in her Mind.” The poet praises her landscape art and makes room for her portraiture as well. For King James II, “Her hand call’d out the Image of his Heart / His Warlike Mind, his Soul devoid of Fear” as well as Queen Mary’s beauty in the lines, “Her Dress, her Shape, her matchless Grace, / Were all observ’d as well as heavenly Face.” Hagstrum, who has written well of Dryden’s knowledge of the sister arts and the uses of them in the poetry, calls attention to examples in “Absalom and Achitophel” and “All for Love” (176–202).
A number of eighteenth-century English poets were much involved in the study of the visual arts, were acquainted with artists and read the treatises that appeared, and often collected examples of Italian and French art in engravings. Elizabeth Manwaring’s extensive study of the influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa upon English writers, artists, and critics, quotes an anonymous poet who distinguishes between Italian and Dutch art: “Why do Salvator’s daring strokes delight, / While Mieris’ care and labour Tire the sight?” (50). Manwaring cites James Thomson’s use of the pictorial landscape in The Seasons (101–06), and Hagstrum points out the iconic tendencies in Liberty as well as in The Seasons (246–61). Sorting among the sayings of minor figures in eighteenth-century England, Manwaring discovers the author of the essay “Of the Sister Arts,” asserting that “The nearer the Poet approaches to the Painter, the more perfect he is; and the more perfect the Painter, the more he imitates the Poet” (20).
Pope studied painting with Charles Jervas and sent him a copy of Dryden’s translation of Du Fresnoy with a poem that read, in part, “Read these instructive leaves, in which conspire / Fresnoy’s close art, and Dryden’s native fire.” In “An Essay on Criticism,” he develops the analogy between the sister arts by pointing out defects of critics, whose
Lines, tho’ touched but faintly, are drawn right.
But as the slightest Sketch, if justly trac’d,
Is by ill Colouring but the more disgrac’d,
So by false Learning is good Sense defac’d.
The sources of his pictorialism in “The Rape of the Lock” are masterfully traced by Hagstrum to paintings by Titian and Guido Reni (220–22), and Hagstrum especially calls attention to an index that Pope added to his translation of the Iliad, listing under the heading of “Painting, Sculpture &c.” the passages of the poem that he believed to be picturesque, with some attention to the shield of Achilles (231–32). Thomas Gray, perhaps the most learned of the poets of the time, took careful notes on his visits to Continental collections of paintings and, in his vast course of study, read Vasari, Du Fresnoy, Bellori (Hagstrum 288) and, as William Jones has shown in Thomas Gray, Scholar, studied “Potter’s Antiquities of Greece,” “Kennet’s Antiquities of Rome,” “Richardson on Painting,” and numerous Italian treatises dealing with “Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, & Antiquities. &c” (Jones 152–57). In its pictorial aspects, Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is greatly indebted to Nicolas Poussin’s The Shepherd of Arcady and “The Bard” to Raphael and Parmegiano, as Gray himself noted (Hagstrum 295–96, 310–11).
It seems likely that Melville learned much from his study of contemporary writers who included aspects of the art analogy in their works. He knew Wordsworth’s poetry well and must have read those poems that dealt with the sister arts of painting and sculpture. His copy of The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth was published in 1839, and we cannot be sure when he acquired it, but the volume contains more than a hundred markings and annotations (Heffernan 339). Melville marked a passage from “Laodamia” and commented that the “line must have been suggested by the ‘Antinous,’” a statue he knew well. He likewise marked and commented upon a passage from Wordsworth’s “To B. R. Haydon, Esq.,” displaying his considerable knowledge of the life and career of the British painter. As Heffernan notes, Melville annotates one of the poems about Haydon with the remark that “Wordsworth should be held partly responsible for Haydon’s suicide, for he encouraged him in a career which necessarily ended there” (345–47).3 Wordsworth’s poems include sonnets to painters like Haydon and G. H. Beaumont, the memorial sculpture of Nollekens, a portrait painted by Margaret Gillies, and two poems addressed more generally “To a Painter,” whose picture at first leaves the poet dissatisfied and finally allows him, gratefully, to “see its truth.”
Wordsworth wrote occasional poems about scenes and events that attracted his attention during his travels, and some of these center around artworks. “Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837” features a poem about Raphael, two translations from Michelangelo, and an ekphrastic description of the Pillar of Trajan. The poem, “Lines Suggested by a Portrait from the Pencil of F. Stone” allows the poet to study the picture of the woman and comment, in painterly terms, on
the tender shade,
The shade and light, both there and everywhere,
And through the very atmosphere she breathes,
Broad, clear, and toned harmoniously.
A poem, “Upon Seeing a Coloured Drawing of the Bird of Paradise in an Album,” gives the poet license to reflect upon the inadequacy of art to mirror the splendors of nature. The extensive markings in his copy of Wordsworth suggest what Melville found valuable in his poetry. There are similarities in the way Wordsworth seizes upon occasions to speak of artists and works of art that he encounters in his tours and the associations of the arts observed by Melville during his tours and then converted into poetry, especially in poems in Timoleon.
It is significant that, among the books that Melville owned, we find an illustrated edition of Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes. Of all the poets whose work Melville knew, Keats presents the most highly developed response to the visual arts, and the poem is rich in pictorial imagery. The Beadsman, walking along the chapel aisle, passes the “sculptur’d dead” and sees how the “carved angels, ever eager-eyed / Star’d, where upon their heads the cornice rests.” The richness of embellished architecture appears in the passage “A casement high and triple-arch’d there was / All garlanded with carven imag’ries / Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot grass.”4 But the finest example in Keats’s poetry of the art analogy is the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” an ekphrastic work in which the poet creates, through his literary art, a work of sculptural art, dwelling upon such descriptive details as the lovers, the priest, and townspeople in a procession toward a sacrifice and, in a particularly imaginative passage, the town that is not even portrayed on the urn he is depicting. Meditating upon this work of art, the poet gives voice to it in the admonition that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Keats’s December 1818 letter to his brother George gives further evidence of his response to the visual arts:
A year ago I could not understand in the slightest degree Raphael’s cartoons— now I begin to read them a little—and how did I learn to do so? By seeing something done in quite an opposite spirit—I mean a picture of Guido’s in which all the Saints, instead of that heroic simplicity and unaffected grandeur which they inherit from Raphael, had each of them both in countenance and gesture all the canting, solemn, melodramatic mawkishness …. When I was last at Haydon’s I looked over a Book of Prints taken from the fresco of the Church of Milan the name of which I forget—in it are comprised Specimens of the first and second age of art in Italy.
Melville certainly knew the “Ode,” for he refers specifically to it by writing “The legend round a Grecian urn, / The sylvan legend” in contrasting the landscape of Keats’s Greece with the Dead Sea (Clarel 2.29.1–2). Keats’s rich visual imagination is matched by that of Melville, for both writers were stimulated by the study of artworks and literary compositions that include painting and others of the sister arts.
Melville read Byron’s poetry, and, like many others, knew Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The poem’s fourth canto, describing its hero’s travels in Italy, is, to some extent, a guidebook of the visual arts. The poet describes the Venus de Medici, the goddess who “loves in stone and fills / The air around with Beauty” (49), the statue known for a long time as the Gladiator (140), and the art treasures of the Vatican, where two of Melville’s choice statues repose: the Laocoön, with its “torture dignifying pain, and the Apollo Belvedere, “the God of Life, and Poesy, and Light” (160–61). Melville owned The Poetical Works of Byron and marked some stanzas of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. He also marked an important passage from The Prophecy of Dante, with references to St. Peter’s, along with a note from the writings of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses on the works of Michelangelo. He underlined Byron’s reference to “the marble chaos” and must have looked at the footnote that referred to “the statue of Moses on the monument of Julius II.” Further along in the volume were notes on Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment and anecdotes about the artist’s professional life.
We have no volume of Robert Browning’s works from Melville’s library, but he must have been acquainted with Browning’s poetry about the visual arts. In his copy of The Works of Eminent Masters, in Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and Decorative Art, Melville took note of a title, “The Unknown Masterpiece,” and annotated it with the remark, “‘Pictor Ignotus’ of Browning” (Cowen 2:737). The story attached to this is different from the one in Browning’s poem. It deals with the discovery by Rubens, in a monastery in Madrid, of a painting “of the most sublime and admirable talent,” showing a monk. Though Rubens pressed for the identification of the painter, it was never revealed to him. But it is Browning’s poetic tale that Melville seems to find significant in a personal way. The “Unknown Painter” sometimes feels his “heart sink, as monotonous I paint / These endless cloisters and eternal aisles / With the same series, Virgin, Babe, and Saint,” but takes comfort in the fact that “no merchant traffics in my heart.” If Melville knew “Pictor Ignotus,” it seems likely that he also knew others of Browning’s art poems. “My Last Duchess” is an ekphrastic description of a portrait. In “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church” a worldly man of god revels on his deathbed in thoughts of the artistic masterpiece that his tomb will be, with “peach-blossom marble,” a slab of “antique-black,” the Nero-antico, a beautiful black marble, a lump of lapis lazuli, and a bas-relief that shows “The Savior at his sermon on the mount, / Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan / Ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off.” In “Andrea del Sarto,” the monologue of “the faultless painter,” he confesses his inferiority to Raphael; and “Fra Lippo Lippi” is a poetic testament of a painter whom Melville admired enough to put into his own poem, “At the Hostelry.” Browning’s account of Lippi was drawn from Vasari, and Melville would have enjoyed the conjunction of the two texts. For Melville, Browning’s poems illustrate the point of view of the artist, justifying himself and his works.5
American writers also provided sources of word painting for Melville to ponder. Washington Irving’s New York Dutchmen were associated with the paintings of Flemish and Dutch genre painters and portrayed with the kind of earthy realism that Brouwer, Dow, Steen, and Ostade provided for willing American viewers. In “Rip Van Winkle,” the strange group of men that the hero encounters in the mountain are carefully depicted and “reminded Rip of the figures in an old Flemish painting, in the parlour of Dominie Van Shaick, the village parson.”6 The adoption of a pseudonym like Geoffrey Crayon, the use of The Sketch Book as a title, and the language of the introductory sketch, “The Author’s Account of Himself,” all emphasize the pictorial presence. In Europe “were to be seen the masterpieces of art”; the author views scenes of life “with the sauntering gaze with which humble lovers of the picturesque stroll from the windows of one print shop to another.” Those who travel “bring home their port folios filled with sketches.” An “unlucky landscape painter” filled his sketch book “with cottages, and landscapes, and obscure ruins.” Irving sets out to paint as well as one can without canvas the varied scenes of England’s art heritage, including Westminster Abbey. Melville’s first chapter of Redburn, with its sketch of a boy’s early education in the arts, resembles Irving’s introduction to The Sketch Book.
Drawing upon art resources different from those employed by Irving, Edgar Allan Poe creates ekphrastically an ideal Helen as artwork, where “in yon brilliant window niche / How statue-like I see thee stand, / The agate lamp within thy hand!” His similarly ideal raven is posed “upon the sculptured bust” of Pallas Athene, goddess of wisdom and the arts. The narrator of “Ligeia” sees her sculpturally, with ivory forehead, hyacinthine hair, a nose like the ones portrayed on Hebraic medallions, and a chin showing “the contour which the God Apollo revealed but in a dream to Cleomenes,” the Greek sculptor. After Ligeia’s death, the narrator decorates the bridal chamber of his decaying abbey with an architectural masterpiece of phantasmagoric fantasy, as improbable as it is beautiful: a “bridal couch, of Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebony”; a sarcophagus of black granite; and tapestry rich “with Arabesque figures.”
Poe’s most impressive ekphrastic work appears in “The Fall of the House of Usher” where the author has his narrator attempt to give an account of Roderick Usher’s paintings. They imitate the pictures painted by Fuseli, he observes, and adds that one “may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words,” a sensible warning for the writer who invades the visual. The shadowing forth takes this form:
A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible—yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor.
Despite his caveat, the author demonstrates his capacity for rendering in his prose the subtleties of form, color, light, and shade.
The question of the influence of Hawthorne’s pictorialism upon Melville is more problematic. If, as Melville suggests in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” he did not become well acquainted with Hawthorne’s writings till the middle of 1850, then he had worked out the procedures of his pictorial writing very well by that time. Several of the stories in Mosses from an Old Manse might have appealed to Melville for their use of the art analogy. “Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent” presents George Herkimer as a sculptor, but little is made of his art. On the other hand, “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” though Melville does not mention it in his review of Mosses, could well have influenced Melville’s thinking. The young carver in wood, given mostly to second-rate sculpture, creates a ship’s figurehead that displays genius and then lapses once more into mediocre work. As a character and commentator in the story, the painter John Singleton Copley sees the value of the figurehead, objects to its being painted, and gives advice to the carver, probably mistakenly. Drowne’s most important activity is finding the image in the wood by carving it until “the work assumed greater precision and settled its irregular and misty outline into distincter grace and beauty.” He is an artist who has to seek, by painful steps, the beauty within his materials, a useful likeness, perhaps, to Melville’s sailors who carve scrimshaw or to Queequeg, who works at refining the features of Yojo, his little carven god. “The Artist of the Beautiful” presents, in Owen Warland, the figure of the artist who could leave his work unfinished. A prophet dies young, a poet leaves his work unfinished, and “The painter—as Allston did—leaves half his conception on the canvas to sadden us with its imperfect beauty.” Ishmael calls his work of classifying the whale an incomplete job, like the uncompleted Cologne Cathedral. The portrait of the whale that he contemplates presenting will, of necessity, never be completed.
The best study of Hawthorne’s uses of the visual arts, Gollin and Idol’s Prophetic Pictures, describes some of the devices that the author uses beyond simple allusion: cataloging artists or artworks, using “art objects to give realistic and (sometimes) symbolic touches to his settings,” using art objects for foreshadowing, relating artworks to characters, using artists as characters in stories (39–64). These all achieve a greater or lesser degree of intensity in the texture of a literary work. Hawthorne did a great deal more in The Marble Faun, and Witemeyer has indicated that he “taught George Eliot how to use ecphrasis, or the verbal imitation of works of visual art, as a technique of psychological revelation and prophecy.” It was, indeed, as Witemeyer has suggested, “a seminal work in the history of literary pictorialism” in its influence on George Eliot’s later novels and the writings of Henry James (55). But Melville had already demonstrated such uses in Moby-Dick and Pierre, and it may be that Hawthorne took some hints from these novels.
Gail Coffler suggests in “Melville, Dana, Allston” that Melville read Washington Allston’s Lectures on Art and Poems (1850), a volume edited, after Allston’s death, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and her parallel passages from the lectures and Billy Budd are significant (2–5). If Melville read the lectures, it is likely that he also read the poems. Allston’s volume is just the sort of book that Melville would have been interested in exploring, and it may well have presented him with ideas and forms for his own work. Allston’s poetry, though scarcely significant, would have some things to offer. A fairly long poem, “The Two Painters,” is cast as a debate between two deceased artists (Allston 237). The octosyllabic couplets offer, among other goods, a lecture on painters, including Raphael, who
soon with health his sickly style
From Leonardo learned to smile;
And now from Buonarotti caught
A nobler Form
and may have suggested to Melville the couplets that predominantly fill the form of Clarel. Other Allston poems are on art subjects as well, as their titles indicate: “Sonnet on the Statue of an Angel,” “On Greenough’s Group of the Angel and Child,” “On Michel Angelo,” “Rubens.” Some have more portentous titles: “Sonnet on the Group of the Three Angels Before the Tent of Abraham, by Raffaelle, in the Vatican” and “Sonnet on a Falling Group in the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo, in the Capella Sistina.” The depiction of the falling group wrings from the poet the exclamation “How vast, how dread, o’er whelming, is the thought / Of space interminable” (273). It is likely that Melville supplemented a reading of these poems, if he did read them, by seeing the work of Raphael and Michelangelo in his visits to the Vatican. How much Melville could have learned from Allston’s poetry is conjectural, but he did have the habit of picking up hints from even unlikely sources. Allston’s short poems fall into the pattern of little poems on art topics that frequently appeared in The Literary World during the 1840s, when Melville was associated with the magazine. It would have struck quite forcibly the well-developed sense of irony in Melville that the greatest American painter of his time was moved to paint as well as one can without canvas.
Analogies between the sister arts came as naturally to writers of the nineteenth century as they had to those who compared poetry and painting in earlier times. Well after Melville’s own venture into the art analogy, Henry James, a constant visitor to museums and exhibitions, demonstrated his skills in his art criticism. In his fiction, James demonstrated his mastery of subtle forms of art allusion and ekphrasis. The opening chapters of The American (1877) pose Christopher Newman in the Museum of the Louvre, closely examining first a Murillo painting, then an artist’s copy of it, and, finally, “the great canvas on which Paul Veronese has depicted the marriage feast of Cana.” Hans Holbein’s art affected both “The Beldonald Holbein” (1901) and The Ambassadors (1903). In revising earlier works like Roderick Hudson (1876), James brought in references to paintings by Pinturicchio and Daumier. In his literary criticism, he was quick to observe and comment upon the art analogy. Writing of Théophile Gautier in the North American Review in 1873, he luxuriated in the act of finding appropriate terms to praise Gautier’s pictorial imagination, speaking of the author’s “faculty of visual discrimination,” his capacity for saying “in a hundred places, the most delightfully sympathetic and pictorial things about the romantic or Shakespearean drama,” the way in which his newspaper pieces “form a great treasury of literary illustration,” and, in stories that “remind us of those small cabinet paintings,” the creation of characters “altogether pictorial” (James 357, 359, 363, 366).7 It is, perhaps, too much to assume that an elderly Melville read James, but he was an eager scanner of magazines and did read fiction in his later years.
These writers, and many others, offered Melville an entry into the varieties of pictorialism, a literary technique that he wished to know thoroughly and practice confidently. He believed in the arts as part of the skilled and professional life and said so. Redburn, for instance, thinks that the “thorough sailor must understand much” and “be a bit of an embroiderer,” “something of a weaver,” “a sort of jeweler,” and, in addition, a carpenter, a sempstress, and a blacksmith, “for you know nothing till you know all”; the mariner who achieves such completeness is “an artist in the rigging” (121). Ishmael, commenting on the virtues of Manilla rope, finds it as handsome as it is useful, “since there is an aesthetics in all things” (278) and beauty often resides in utility. Clarel finds much to admire in Rolfe, an ideal figure, who is “no scholastic partisan” but, rather, “supplemented Plato’s theme / With daedal life in boats and tents” (1.31.17–20). Here, daedal is a magical invocation of the creativity and inventiveness of man’s labyrinthine artistry.
In 1862 Melville was giving thought to German literature and art. According to his annotation, he acquired the two volumes of Germany, by Madame de Staël, on March 4 and sometime in April (Sealts #487). His extensive markings in his copy of Germany indicate his interest in the poems and dramas of Klopstock, Goethe, and Schiller, in the works of Lessing and Winckelmann, and in the philosophical writings of Kant and Fichte. At about the same time, on March 17, he acquired the Bohn edition of the poems of Heinrich Heine, in a translation by E. A. Bowring (Sealts #268); the introduction spoke of “Heine’s next great work, his ‘Reisebilder,’ or Pictures of Travel, written partly in poetry and partly in prose” and observed that the book was “descriptive of his travels in different countries, especially in England and Italy,” a passage that Melville marked, possibly considering that it had something in common with his own projected “Frescoes of Travel.” As if to emphasize this idea, he annotated the “Pictures of Travel” section with the marginal remark “The poetical part of The Reisebilder” and marked a number of passages from the poetic sequence (Cowen 1:654, 656).8 He may have been considering the possibility of a volume of “Frescoes” that would combine prose and poetry, and some of his later works, published and unpublished, do combine the two. “Naples in the Time of Bomba” is mostly in poetry but has prose headnotes for the various sections. John Marr and Other Sailors opens with a prose description of the last years of the sailor-poet. “Rip Van Winkle’s Lilac,” part of the planned volume Weeds and Wildings, combines prose and poetry in its narrative. The poetical part of Heine’s pictures of travel prints the complete set of lyrics dealing with “The Return Home,” a theme underlined by Melville’s final poem in Timoleon, a “L’Envoi” about “the return of the Sire de Nesle,” who sings “My towers at last! These rovings end.” The question of influence would be exceedingly difficult to fix, but Bowring’s translations are often persuasive in capturing the shapes of Heine’s lyrics and the poetic attitudes expressed in the many poems in the volume.
Among other poems in Heine’s volume, Melville marked the seventh of the nine “Fresco-Sonnets to Christian S-,” a suggestive title, and, almost in its entirety, a section of the long poem “Germany,” in which the poet speaks of Cologne Cathedral as “a form of monstrous sort” and “black as the devil,” meant as a “bastile” for the “cunning papists” until
Luther appear’d and soon by his mouth
A thundering “Halt!” was spoken
Since then the Cathedral no progress has made
In building, the charm being broken. (Cowen 1:655, 657–68)
Melville had already presented a “fresco” of the great building, recording in his journal a visit on December 9, 1849, to “the famous cathedral, where the everlasting ‘crane’ stands on the tower” (Journals 35). Subsequently, it became the art object to symbolize his unfinished cetological system in Moby-Dick, “the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower,” for great architectural undertakings “ever leave the copestone to posterity” (Moby-Dick 145). Perhaps Heine’s poem only reminded him of what he had seen and described, or perhaps it gave him an impetus toward thinking about another ekphrasis of the impressive cathedral.