THE IMMENSE EFFORT OF literary pictorialism in Moby-Dick ensured that Melville had learned to use the device with consummate skill in his writings. There hardly seems room for further development of the technique, or even for its further refinement. But composing Pierre presented a new and difficult set of problems in composition, and his own attitude toward the book is revelatory. Responding to some remarks that Sophia Hawthorne must have made about the recently published Moby-Dick, Melville wrote on January 8, 1852, with scarcely concealed irony, “I had some vague idea while writing it, that the whole book was susceptible of an allegoric construction” and promised that “I shall not again send you a bowl of salt water. The next chalice I shall commend, will be a rural bowl of milk” (Correspondence 219)—humorous and somewhat blasphemous wordplay notable for its implication. The letter’s playfulness then gives way to a declaration of serious intent in which the composition of the book is like a sea voyage that can conclude in “All Persia & the delicious lands round-about Damascus” (220).
Pierre is an unanticipated lengthy voyage, for Melville had originally intended what must have been a swift-paced thriller on the model of Bulwer-Lytton, William Gilmore Simms, or the Englishmen William Harrison Ainsworth and George Walker.1 The book did change during the course of composition, and the result was a novel that garnered unfriendly reviews, some of them savage.2 More recent critics reflect the difficulties the novel offers. Newton Arvin is dismissive: “So extreme is its badness as an integral work of art that some faint-hearted readers might well wish to be excused from any prolonged discussion of it” (219). A more temperate view is offered by Warner Berthoff: “Its great theme is again muffled by the preposterousness of the story, which is finished out by main force, in haste and self-doubt” (53–54). Henry A. Murray speaks of the book as “a literary monster,” its “repellent aspects” balanced by its excellences. Other studies avoid judgments of the whole and concentrate on certain aspects, its Timonism, its relationships with Spenser or Dante, its narrator, or its themes of flux and fixity.3
But whatever final accounting we give of Pierre, a study of its ekphrastic prose displays Melville at his virtuosic best, using his hard-earned skills to advantage in embellishing the texture of his tale or developing motifs and plot. Pierre’s loneliness, as an only son, and his desire for a sibling as well as for some personal glory “capping the fame-column, whose tall shaft had been erected by his noble sires,” is a theme rendered in architectural terms. These terms continue with Pierre’s reflection on the ruins of Palmyra, including “a crumbling, uncompleted shaft, and some leagues off, ages ago left in the quarry, is the crumbling corresponding capital, also incomplete” (8). The architectural motif foreshadows the fall of the house of Glendenning, represented here by a splendid but ruined art object that “Time crushed in the egg.” Time is the quenchless feuding enemy and the stone cannot compete with it but is “left abased beneath the soil.” A “fine military portrait” of General Glendenning, Pierre’s grandfather, offers the occasion for an ekphrastic passage that emphasizes its “majestic sweetness” and its “heavenly persuasiveness of angelic speech” that declares “man is a noble, god-like being, full of choicest juices; made up of strength and beauty” (30). Melville’s description is enriched by his using an actual family portrait, Gilbert Stuart’s painting of Peter Gansevoort, to serve as model for Pierre’s revered ancestor. Lucy Tartan is described in painterly terms, in which “her hair was Danae’s spangled with Jove’s shower” (24). The allusion is largely mythological, but Danae is also a famous art subject. Melville was not to see Correggio’s Danae until his visit to the Borghese Gallery in Rome on March 5, 1857, but Correggio’s picture was well-known from copies and widely distributed prints. Seduced by Zeus, Danae became the mother of Perseus, and later Perseus undertook to defend his mother against King Polydectes of Seriphos, who attempted to force her to marry him. Pierre, an avatar of Perseus, defends his Danae from Glen, a modern Polydectes. Lucy is an enthusiastic artist who does pencil sketches and sits with Pierre to examine pictures: “there’s the book of Flemish prints—that first we must look over; then, second, is Flaxman’s Homer—clear-cut outlines, yet full of unadorned barbaric nobleness. Then Flaxman’s Dante—Dante! Night’s and Hell’s poet he” (39, 42).4 The Flemish prints offer a picturesque version of rural life, in stark contrast to the hellish inferno of Flaxman’s Dante illustrations, which will reflect the descent into the city of Dis, where the eventual tragedy will take place.
Pierre’s deceased father is presented through a series of art objects. Learning that Isabel is his sister, Pierre must face the prospect of regarding the parent— whose “shrine seemed spotless, and still new as the marble of the tomb of him of Arimathea”—in a new light, for her letter has “stripped his holiest shrine of all overlaid bloom, and buried the mild statue of the saint beneath the prostrated ruins of the soul’s temple itself” (69). His new and perilous regard becomes centered upon a number of art objects, the first a marble statue:
this shrine was of marble—a niched pillar, deemed solid and eternal, and from whose top radiated all those innumerable sculptured scrolls and branches, which supported the entire one-pillared temple of his moral life; as in some beautiful Gothic oratories, one central pillar, trunk-like, upholds the roof. In this shrine, in this niche of this pillar, stood the perfect marble form of his departed father; without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, and serene; Pierre’s fond personification of perfect human goodness and virtue. (68)
The lavish description and the comparison of the shrine to the Mausoleum permit Melville to emphasize the illusions that Pierre has about his father. Through a few careful strokes, he casts doubt almost immediately upon the young man’s devotion, painting him as “the eye-expanded boy” who “perceives, or vaguely thinks he perceives, slight specks and flaws in the character he once so wholly reverenced” (68). Since the elder Glendenning is dead, he must be evoked entirely by the revenants of art. Like the elder Redburn, he intrudes, a wraithlike apparition of an unhappy past, slowly made clear to the young man. The persistence of this motif, worked by means of the art analogy, is a central feature of both Redburn and Pierre and offers the added impact of the autobiographical fact. Through his own art, Melville attempts to exorcise the father, a source of his deepest, most resigned melancholy.
The next pictorial rendering of the father occurs almost immediately, in an elaborate passage describing the painting that Pierre keeps in a locked, round-windowed closet:
In this closet, sacred to the Tadmor privacies and repose of the sometimes solitary Pierre, there hung, by long cords from the cornice, a small portrait in oil, before which Pierre had many a time trancedly stood. Had this painting hung in any annual public exhibition, and in its turn been described in print by the casual glancing critics, they would probably have described it thus, and truthfully: “An impromptu portrait of a fine-looking, gay-hearted, youthful gentleman. He is lightly, and, as it were, airily and but grazingly seated in, or rather flittingly tenanting an old-fashioned chair of Malacca. One arm confining his hat and cane is loungingly thrown over the back of the chair, while the fingers of the other hand play with his gold watch-seal and key. The free-templed head is sideways turned, with a peculiarly bright, and care-free, morning expression. He seems as if just dropped in for a visit upon some familiar acquaintance. Altogether, the painting is exceedingly clever and cheerful; with a fine, off-handed expression about it. Undoubtedly a portrait, and no fancy-piece; and to hazard a vague conjecture, by an amateur.” (71–72)
The details in this carefully structured description are relevant to the novel’s motifs. “Tadmoor privacies” return us to the earlier allusions to Palmyra. Tadmor is an alternative name for the city, with its broken and uncompleted architecture, symbolic of the family. Privacies have been the overwhelming characteristic of the seemingly happy Glendennings, concealing the sinful past that will overwhelm the present.
Melville has been accused of using the outworn style of a dying romantic tradition in Pierre, but passages such as this one go far to refute the claim. The novel is multivoiced and full of vocal mimicry. Melville always knows what he is parodying. The “casual glancing” and well-imagined critic who might have commented on the painting is skewered by the language that the author creates for him. There is a rich fund of humor in the mocking ekphrasis, in phrases like “grazingly seated in,” “free-templed head,” and the critically opaque “morning expression.” Melville wants us to see how foolish such a substitute for authentic art criticism can sound. His target could be any of the current newspapers and journals of the period. A likely candidate for his satire is The Literary World, which printed much about the visual arts in articles about exhibitions, poems about artists, reviews of books about the arts, and articles that undertook to provide art tours. The magazine displayed a deep interest in the Art-Union and printed lengthy and usually bad criticisms of exhibited paintings as well as full-page advertisements of the Union’s offerings.5 A typical critical note appears in the issue of November 6, 1847:
No. 144. “Our Father who art in Heaven.” H. P. Gray. A sweet picture that appeals so directly to the heart that criticism seems set at defiance. What little faults of drawing there may be, pass unnoticed when we stand before it, and feel the calm and holy spirit that pervades the composition in every part, so full of expression, so delicate in sentiment. There is beautiful color here, and an elaborate finish that does not in the least detract from the breadth of the picture. The accessories are charmingly painted. Pictures such as this will elevate the public taste, and fulfil the great mission of Art to raise the mind of man out of the depths of his lower nature. (330)
As a serious student of the visual arts, determined to understand them and make them part of his battery of literary devices, Melville must have been struck by the amateurism, sentimentality, and limp diction of such prose, an irresistible object for his caricature.
As Henry Murray indicates, Melville is describing a portrait of his father, executed by John Rubens Smith (1775–1849), who lived in New York and Philadelphia and worked as a drawing teacher, engraver, and painter. Melville might well have read some of Smith’s interesting publications, including A Compendium of Picturesque Anatomy (1827) and A Key to the Art of Drawing the Human Figure (1831).6 Of most importance, however, is what the passage contributes to the novel. We learn that the portrait is a companion to another picture of Pierre’s father, one not locked away but freely and openly displayed in the Glendenning home. Mrs. Glendenning has found the first portrait “namelessly unpleasant and repelling” and “could not abide this picture which she had always asserted did signally belie her husband.” The portrait that she does approve of shows “a middle-aged, married man, and seemed to possess all the nameless and slightly portly tranquilities, incident to that condition when a felicitous one” (72–73). The description of this larger portrait fits the painting of Allan Melvill by Ezra Ames (1768–1836). The hidden portrait, like the hidden life of the elder Glendenning, does not offer the felicitous picture of middle-aged comforts and timidities.7
Comparison of the two portraits leads the narrator to explain how Pierre has acquired the little picture, a gift when he reached the age of fifteen, from his father’s sister. She retains a miniature that portrays her dead brother. To Pierre’s insistent questions, she answers with the story of the painter, Ralph Winwood, a cousin, and the French emigrant lady who attracted the attentions of Pierre’s father and then disappeared. Ralph has painted his cousin’s portrait by slyly getting the self-absorbed man to sit without being aware of his role; “stealing his portrait” is the vivid phrase that Aunt Dorothea uses.
In the scheme of the novel, the use of Ralph Winwood as well as real artists like John Rubens Smith and Ezra Ames has an important role. Melville’s earlier novels stand upon a solid basis of internationalism, emphasized by the exoticism of Typee, Omoo, and Mardi, the mix of national character types in White-Jacket, and, in Moby-Dick, the astonishment of the “outlandish,” even on the streets of New Bedford with its “nondescripts from foreign parts.” By contrast, Pierre, the “rural bowl of milk,” is American, regional, and provincial. It is imagined “that in demagoguical America, the sacred past hath no fixed statues erected to it, but all things irreverently seeth and boil in the vulgar caldron of an everlasting uncrystalizing Present” (8). The art of America is part of that vulgar caldron of the uncrystalizing Present, its chief exhibits copies or prints of great European art or phony artworks with revered European names attached to make them attractive or the work of the art unions, a mix of paintings by genuine artists such as Cole, Allston, Durand, West, and a few others and the amateurish dabs and daubs distributed to Union members and overpraised by whatever passes for art criticism. Melville seems intent upon making a case in favor of this raw America but also demonstrates the two levels of response to American art. The portrait of the young Glendenning is the work of an amateur. The portrait of the older Glendenning, fit for exhibiting openly in one’s home and, later, in museums, is the work of a professional.
The lengthy passage discoursing upon the two portraits comes to an end with Pierre reflecting upon what they tell him: that, perhaps, Ralph Winwood knew of Glendenning’s liaison with the Frenchwoman and of Isabel, its issue; and that the two portraits in their differences make up one full picture of a man. Here Melville introduces what Hagstrum designates as ecphrasis, a situation in which an art object is given voice. Pierre is made to imagine the voice of his portrayed father emanating from the paintings and saying “Consider in thy mind, Pierre whether we two paintings may not make only one. Faithful wives are ever overfond to a certain imaginary image of their husbands; and faithful widows are ever over-reverential to a certain imagined ghost of that same imagined image” (83). This double vision, mirrored in the two portraits, becomes merged for Pierre, who can react only by recalling the appropriate verses from the twenty-fifth canto of The Inferno, which portrays the fusion of Agnello and a serpent in the seventh bolgia of Circle VIII, a horrid metamorphosis at which the watchers exclaim, in words that Melville quotes, “Ah! how dost thou change, / Agnello! See! Thou art not double now, / Nor only one” (85). The fusion is not complete, either, for Agnello or for Pierre’s father, despite the latter’s effort to convince his son that the two portraits offer a true depiction. Melville possesses a keen visualizing talent and could imagine vividly the scene of Agnello’s transformation; but he would be greatly aided by John Flaxman’s illustrations of Dante’s infernal torments, even though none of Flaxman’s pictures illustrates this scene. The reading of Dante, in the Bohn edition of 1847, which Melville acquired in 1848, and the impact of the Flaxman Oeuvre Complet (Paris 1833), apparently acquired in 1849, stirred his imaginative rendering of Pierre’s inner hell.8
Melville’s experience in dealing with the art analogy grew out of his determined efforts to learn about the sister arts. In 1847 he became a member of the New-York Gallery of Fine Arts and, no doubt, took advantage of his membership to visit its exhibitions. He had the advantage of personal contact with artists and was able to view their works from a particular, personal point of view. The portraits of his grandfather, father, and mother, executed by Gilbert Stuart, E. L. Henry, and Ezra Ames, conveyed much about character painting and adducing the worth of a person from the display of physical appearance. In 1847 Melville himself sat for a portrait by Asa Weston Twitchell and could therefore see the results of physiognomical representation applied to him. During the visit to London in 1849–50, he associated with artists; during the 1856–7 journey to Europe, he visited the studios of several artists in Italy.9
Pierre’s reactions to the portraits of his father demonstrate his inability to come to terms with his new knowledge. He cannot bear to look at the “no longer enigmatical, but still ambiguously smiling portrait” and turns it to the wall of his closet (87). He cannot go to his mother, whom he depicts in her “immense pride;—her pride of birth, her pride of affluence, her pride of purity, and all the pride of high-born, refined and wealthy Life, and all the Semiramian pride of woman.” As a result, he feels “himself driven out an infant Ishmael into the desert, with no maternal Hagar to accompany and comfort him” (89). The reference to Ishmael and Hagar links Pierre to the Ishmael of Redburn and Moby-Dick, and, perhaps, to Salvator Rosa’s painting of the subject. The unspecified allusions may be either to literary works or to artworks.
Murray discusses the literary backgrounds of the Semiramis allusion, citing Spenser, Byron, Calderon, Voltaire, and Rossini (456). Particularly valuable is the Rossini notation, a production of his Semiramide at Palmo’s theater in New York in June 1847, for Melville may well have attended performances of the musical drama. More important, however, is the linking of the proud queen with Melville’s interest in such varied subjects as Babylon, Nineveh, Chaldeans, and magi. By the time he visited the British Museum on November 16, 1849, and saw “big arm & foot—Rosetta stone—Nineveh sculptures—&c” (Journals 19), he had very likely read of Henry Layard’s excavations at Nineveh, for White-Jacket alludes to them. There is no evidence that he knew Layard’s Nineveh and Its Remains (1848–49), which contained illustrations, but magazine stories called attention to Layard’s work and his study The Monuments of Nineveh, “illustrated in One Hundred Plates.”10 The subject fascinated Melville. James B. Fraser’s Mesopotamia and Assyria (1845), a volume in Harper’s Family Library, would have given him information for his allusion to Nineveh in Redburn. The pictorial elements for a portrait of the fabled Semiramis—who “is said to have built the city of Babylon and its hanging gardens, founded Nineveh, and conquered Persia, Libya, and Ethiopia” (Murray 456)—offer a splendid precursor to compare to Pierre’s overly proud mother.11
As an exiled Ishmael, Pierre can hardly tell his mother all about Isabel. He can just about manage a question for Mr. Falsgrave, the minister, another character who is visualized in painterly terms. Breaking a roll for Mrs. Glendenning, the minister “acquitted himself on this little occasion, in a manner that beheld of old by Leonardo, might have given that artist no despicable hint touching his celestial painting” (99). Melville’s model here is Leonardo’s Last Supper, in which the Lord gravely breaks bread with his friends. Falsgrave, “an image of white-browed and white-handed, and napkined immaculateness,” cannot properly answer Pierre’s earnest question about the proper relationships between a legitimate son and an illegitimate child and, thus, hardly acquits himself as well as the figure in Leonardo’s painting. When Pierre has presented his presumably hypothetical case and been answered by the minister’s alliterations and pomposities (“Millions of circumstances modify all moral questions”), there occurs a scene involving some highly symbolic art objects. Falsgrave’s napkin, “surplice-like,” falls away revealing “a minute but exquisitely cut cameo brooch, representing the allegorical union of the serpent and dove” (102). Melville was probably well acquainted with the arts of cameo and pendant design, since his father, as an importer of European art objects, must have brought to America any number of examples. The iconography of dove and serpent is familiar, though perhaps not as familiar in cameos, which more often seem to be used for portraiture. Enameled pendants, on the other hand, often bear mythical and biblical illustrations—David with the head of Goliath, Leda and the swan, St. George and the dragon. In his great need, Pierre cannot expect aid from Falsgrave and adopts the serpent symbol of the cameo as the basis of his thinking. The thought of his future, “in great part and at all hazards dedicated to Isabel,” is “icy-cold and serpent-like” as it crawls “in upon his other shuddering imaginings” (104).
Sensitive to what he read, Melville often responded to it with laughter. The language of ekphrasis in magazines and books of the time stirred him to parody, and the picturesque landscape of Walter Ulver’s farm is as richly confusing as it is improbable:
Where he stood was in the rude wood road, only used by sledges in the time of snow; just where the outposted trees formed a narrow arch, and fancied gateway leading upon the far, wide pastures sweeping down toward the lake. In that wet and misty eve the scattered, shivering pasture elms seemed standing in a world inhospitable, yet rooted by inscrutable sense of duty to their place. Beyond, the lake lay in one sheet of blankness and of dumbness, unstirred by breeze or breath; fast bound there it lay, with not life enough to reflect the smallest shrub or twig. Yet in the lake was seen the duplicate, stirless sky above. Only in sunshine did that lake catch gay, green images; and these but displaced the imaged muteness of the unfeatured heavens.
On both sides, in the remoter distance, and also far beyond the mild lake’s further shore, rose the long, mysterious mountain masses; shaggy with pines and hemlocks, mystical with nameless, vaporous exhalations, and in that dim air black with dread and gloom. At their base, profoundest forests lay entranced, and from their far owl-haunted depths of caves and rotted leaves, and unused and unregarded inland overgrowth of decaying wood—for smallest sticks of which, in other climes many a pauper was that moment perishing; from out the infinite inhumanities of those profounder forests, came a moaning, muttering, roaring, intermitted changeful sound: rain-shakings of the palsied trees, slidings of rocks undermined, final crashings of long riven boughs, and devilish gibberish of the forest-ghosts. (109)
This is a fascinating, strange bit of pictorialism. The elements portrayed in the first paragraph are characteristically Melvillean. The lake, in its blankness and dumbness, mirroring the blank, dumb sky, is much like the tranced, watery vistas of other writers, the silent, mirroring tarn at Poe’s house of usher, the lakes and streams of Shelley’s Alastor, and others.
As the description proceeds, however, Melville dips into the language of Gothic hyperbole, piling on visual and aural images till they collide and collapse. His models are in the romantic sensational literature of the previous generation, the language, say, of Frankenstein, which Melville had taken care to acquire and read. In Mary Shelley’s portrayal of the mountains, there are “shattered pines,” a “thunder sound of the avalanche,” the cracking of “accumulated ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn” (chap. 10).
David S. Reynolds has made an excellent case for the vast number of sensational writings, “dark adventures” and “subversive fiction,” available to Melville during the 1840s. He cites especially the stories of George Lippard, George Thompson, Laughton Osborn, and Richard Kimball. Without focusing upon what Melville is sure to have known, Reynolds speculates that “Melville and Hawthorne were almost certainly aware of Kimball’s St. Leger (1849), a novel that created a great sensation” (193–95). Reynolds shifts the basis of scholarly interest in Melville’s reading from the works of acknowledged masters to best-sellers, crowd-pleasing fictions that gloried in bloodletting, incest, mystery, and extravagant adventure. Since Pierre fits exactly into this pattern and, in fact, spends much of its strength in satirizing and mimicking such fictions, the emphasis is rightly taken.
However, the horrors of the landscape that Pierre observes, its lakes of blankness reflecting the indifference of nature, its air “black with dread and gloom,” its forest-ghosts full of “devilish gibberish,” only one aspect of Melville’s art of parody. This is the horrific sublime of Burke, carefully overstated to push it into the realm of comedy. The contemporary critics who spoke ill of the prose in Pierre were missing the point. The prose is not bad; it is doing precisely what Melville intended for it to do, though the risk of parody is that the audience may mistake it for its target. Melville’s comic vision once more intrudes, as he moves his picture, in the blink of an eye or the turn of a paragraph, from the horrific sublime to a pastoral calm. The movement is from Salvator Rosa or Henry Fuseli to John Constable. Nor do Pierre’s reflections help the description, for, looking at the decaying wood in the forest, he is stung by social concerns. The wood is going to waste, while “for smallest sticks of which, in other climes many a pauper was at that moment perishing.” This from Pierre, eater of large breakfasts.
Another aspect of Melville’s landscape painting here is its insistence upon the sentimental side of romantic art, the portrayal of rusticity and rural beauty. His “moss-incrusted” farmhouse is picturesque:
At one gabled end, a tangled arbor claimed support, and paid for it by generous gratuities of broad-flung verdure, one viny shaft of which pointed itself upright against the chimney-bricks, as if a waving lightning-rod. Against the other gable, you saw the lowly dairy-shed; its sides close netted with traced Madeira vines; and had you been close enough, peeping through that imprisoning tracery, and through the light slate barring the little embrasure of a window, you might have seen the gentle and contented captives—the pans of milk, and the snow-white Dutch cheeses in a row, and the molds of golden butter, and the jars of lily cream. (110)
These are the standard accessories for pictures of rural simplicity and calm. The dairy shed is a particularly comic touch, with its gentle captives—the milk, cheeses, and cream (where one might have expected the captives to be the cattle).
Melville’s parody of the picturesque is stoutly anchored in the literary practices of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and should be related to literary pictorialism. John Bryant, summarizing the work of William Gilpin, Archibald Alison, and Richard Payne Knight, discovers the picturesque in “that which we associate in the mind with framed pictures … a visual habit, a painterly way of seeing the world and transforming nature into a coherent landscape” (147–48). Familiar with landscape paintings and prints, Melville owned examples of the work of Constable, Landseer, Wouverman, Poussin, and other topographical studies. This “painterly way” of seeing a portion of the world as a framed picture offers the author, aware of his audience’s probable knowledge of such views, the chance to create, in his ekphrastic prose, a kind of landscape that no one artist could have painted. The passage demonstrates Melville’s distrust of the pathetic fallacy and the keenness of his mimicry. The elms have a sense of duty, the lake is bound by its bed, and the entranced forests mutter and roar. The arbor claims support and the cheeses and creams stand as “gentle captives.” With a sure hand, he points out the most ridiculous excesses of this genre and touches them with his mockery.
The story that Isabel tells Pierre has some elements in common with the story the creature tells in Frankenstein, and Isabel herself is somewhat like Safie, the “Arabian” in the creature’s narrative. Safie has had a difficult past, she plays the guitar, and she sings strange songs. Mary Shelley carefully avoids the necessity of quoting Safie’s lyrics, simply noting that they are “entrancingly beautiful.” Melville, of course, tops this by quoting Isabel’s lame lyrics, and the word “mystery” uses up six of her song’s ten words. In the description of her song “the waltzings, and the droppings, and the swarming of the sounds,” the word “droppings” is artfully ambiguous (126).
The delineation of Isabel makes use of art analogy, portraying her unruly mass of hair as covering and muffling her face like the “saya of Limean girl.” Visiting Peru and reading about it, Melville was much taken with the subject of “saya y manto,” the first being a petticoat or skirt and the second a mantle or veil used to conceal the face.12 Pierre sees Isabel’s veiling herself in her hair in terms of religious art. She is like a girl “at the dim mass in St. Dominic’s cathedral.” Moreover, “To Pierre, the deep oaken recess of the double casement, before which Isabel was kneeling, seemed now the immediate vestibule of some awful shrine, mystically revealed through the obscurely open window, which ever and anon was softly illuminated” (149). Pierre, deprived of the marble niche where he had worshiped his father, discovers a wooden niche, cathedral-like within the confines of Ulver’s red farmhouse, where he can worship the sister he had hoped for. The ambiguity—perhaps the irony—of the scene resides in the clash between the hushed portrayal of religious art and the eroticism of Isabel’s displaying herself with hair like the “saya,” the petticoat, partially concealing her face, rather than the “manto,” the far more usual mantle of concealment.
Having decided to go away with Isabel and Dolly, Pierre, at the Black Swan Inn, looks once more at the chair-portrait of his father:
Face up, it met him with its noiseless, ever-nameless, and ambiguous, unchanging smile. Now his first repugnance was augmented by an emotion altogether new. That certain lurking lineament in the portrait, whose strange transfer blended with far other, and sweeter, and nobler characteristics, was visible in the countenance of Isabel; that lineament in the portrait was somehow now detestable; nay, altogether loathsome, ineffably so, to Pierre. He argued not with himself why this was so; he only felt it, and most keenly. (196)
The psychology of aesthetic and moral perceptions engages Melville’s attention here, and he is quick to establish the ways in which knowledge and the emotions control what the viewer of a work of art sees. The little painting has not changed since Pierre last studied it, but he has. The passage underlines some of the meanings of the novel’s subtitle by its use of the word “ambiguous.” The ambiguity of the portrayed father’s smile allows Melville to probe Pierre’s developing ideas about the world he has, so unprepared, found himself facing. In the next paragraph, there is a rich fund of ideas about the powers of the visual arts:
In the strange relativeness, reciprocalness, and transmittedness, between the long-dead father’s portrait, and the living daughter’s face, Pierre might have seemed to see reflected to him, by visible and uncontrollable symbols, the tyranny of Time and Fate. Painted before the daughter was conceived or born, like a dumb seer, the portrait still seemed leveling its prophetic finger at that empty air, from which Isabel did finally emerge. There seemed to lurk some mystical intelligence and vitality in the picture; because, since in his own memory of his father, Pierre could not recall any distinct lineament transmitted to Isabel, but vaguely saw such in the portrait; therefore, not Pierre’s parent, as any way rememberable by him, but the portrait’s painted self seemed the real father of Isabel. (197)
The portrait has a reality beyond the reality of the actual world. It depicts, with greater truth than the available facts, what Pierre should have known, and its “painted self,” in Melville’s telling phrase, is now more real than any memory of the vanished father. It is the function of a portrait to give substance to an evanescent and nearly forgotten past and to bring before the observer a personage otherwise lost to negligent memory. Ralph Winwood’s little portrait of the elder Glendenning is an example of what the artist who painted better than he knew could accomplish. It stirs Pierre to a significant soliloquy, in which he declares that he will not “mummy” his memory into such a memorial as the painting. His “Hamletism,” hinted at in the lengthy passage about the Memnon Stone, comes to the fore. Like Hamlet, he will set right the time that is out of joint, but first, as Hamlet does, he must fix the present in his mind by destroying all memorials of the past.
When Pierre and his companions move into the old Church of the Apostles that has been turned into a boarding house, Melville offers a painterly description of the building, its stone construction, and its tower. The brick building at the rear of the church receives a detailed account, with its colonnades and the “dismantled, rusted, and forlorn old railing of iron” that encloses what was once a burial ground (265–66). That Melville was interested in prints showing buildings of various sorts is emphasized by Wallace’s account of the Reese collection, much of which consists of pictures of churches, homes, and abbeys.13 Churches appear in the Liverpool landscape of Redburn (chaps. 36, 41) and in the treatment of the Whaleman’s Chapel in Moby-Dick (chap. 7). These descriptions tend to be rather general; in the chapel that Ishmael visits, more is made of the memorial tablets and the pulpit than of the structure itself. Redburn designates himself “an admirer of church architecture,” and Melville’s 1849–50 visit to Europe gave him the opportunity to examine architectural views. As his journal records, he was keen to seize upon his chance and visited Canterbury Cathedral, St. Swithin’s, and St. Magnus Martyr. He went “down to the Temple-Church to hear the music,” visited Westminster Abbey, and took note of St. Giles and St. Dunstans (Journals 16, 17, 20). In France, he went to Notre Dame (31), St. Roche, and “an old church near by,” possibly St. Etienne-du-Mont. In Cologne, he saw the cathedral and its tower as well as the Jesuits’ church.14
With this extraordinarily large cache of observations and impressions, Melville composed Moby-Dick, and, although the novel did not offer many opportunities for him to use his enlarged knowledge of church architecture, he did manage to refer to the Cologne cathedral and insert allusions to some of the secular architecture he observed, notably the Hotel de Cluny. Gordon V. Boudreau looks closely at Melville’s use of Gothic architecture in Moby-Dick, especially at the handling of archways made of whalebones, the whalebone chapel in “A Bower in the Arsacides,” and Father Mapple’s church in New Bedford (“Of Pale Ushers” 67–72). The fullest experience Melville had during his earlier books was in observing and describing the structure of ships, and he made good use of this experience in Moby-Dick.
The Church of the Apostles once had its day in what had been a fine residential district, but “change and progress had rolled clean through its broad-side and side-aisles” (266). Melville’s description of the changes in the church, its being divided into stores and offices, is a devastating reminder of the differences between the old and new worlds. In Europe he had seen many churches, some of them ancient, preserved with care and affection and still used for their original and appropriate functions. By contrast, in New York a church barely a hundred years old is converted to secular and vulgar occupations. The offices have become “a roost for gregarious lawyers,” a place of perches for unusual fowls. The bird imagery continues in the description, as upper stories of the building house “ambiguously professional nondescripts” who take rooms and “like storks in Holland, light on the eaves” where they sit “and talk like magpies.” Looking for dinners, they are “like lean rows of broken-hearted pelicans” (267). Ruskin believed that architecture is “an art that shelters human life” (Landow 107), and Melville’s images underline his strong feeling about the inhuman uses of a human art.
His knowledge of architecture, already strengthened by his assiduous study of churches and other structures, could have been supplemented by a reading of Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1848). The book was reviewed in The Literary World in July, and, as part of Evert Duyckinck’s library, it was available to Melville (Wallace, Melville and Turner 330–31). The first volume of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice appeared in 1851, and Melville could have profited not only from Ruskin’s aesthetic theories but also from the moral and ethical conclusions of the volumes. In Seven Lamps, Ruskin observed that “we can command an honest architecture: the meagreness of poverty may be pardoned, the sternness of utility respected; but what is there but scorn for the meanness of deception.” The architecture of the Church of the Apostles is surely honest, but its poverty and loss of a moneyed congregation resulted in its being handed over to the new owners, who ruin its honesty by converting it to new uses. The “venerable merchants and accountants,” pretending distress at the necessity, have decided “that the building could no longer be efficiently devoted to its primitive purpose” (266). The operative word is “efficiently.” Even a church must pay its way by doing its job, whatever that might turn out to be, in an efficient manner.15
What seems to be of importance in this venture into pictorialism is the moral conclusion to be drawn from the church that has been transmogrified into a commercial structure. It is no longer a church of the Divine Unity but only a church of the Apostles. Divinity has departed and been supplanted by the “virtuous expediency” of Plotinus Plinlimmon’s thesis. The birdlike grotesquerie of its tenants is matched by the “indigent philosophers,” some of whom are “Teleological Theorists, and Social Reformers, and political propagandists of all manner of heterodoxical tenets.” Hence, each is “styled an Apostle” (268), though they can hardly be what Christ had in mind when he designated, from his disciples, the original apostles.
In treating Lucy’s fascination with art, Melville depicts that favorite subject of visual artists, the artist’s studio. She has an “expertness in catching likenesses, and judiciously and truthfully beautifying them” and wants to sketch some of the remarkable heads of the church’s tenants. She is greatly satisfied by the room arranged as her studio. An artist’s studio once before, it has some advantages, for “one window had been considerably elevated, while by a singular arrangement of the interior shutters, the light could in any direction be thrown about at will” (330–31). Her theory of a “beautifying atmosphere” such as the water of a lagoon where “the roughest stone, without transformation, put on the softest aspects” has echoes in Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, which notes that “the greater part of those bodies in Nature, which possess Hardness, Strength, or Durability, are distinguished by angular forms,” whereas curves indicate softness and delicacy. Roughness is an essential element in the picturesque, but Lucy’s art would turn the picturesque into the beautiful. She will take striking, perhaps rough, heads and, “by steeping them in a beautifying atmosphere,” soften their outlines. This Tartanesque version of the sublime, the picturesque, and the beautiful contradicts the heroic vision of Pierre (himself a rough stone), who is likely to see the world in its rugged and sublime aspects, as in the Memnon Stone and the natural sculpture of Enceladus.
In a glancing way, Melville relates the passage on Pierre’s book to literary pictorialism:
As a statue, planted on a revolving pedestal, shows now this limb, now that; now front, now back, now side; continually changing, too, its general profile; so does the pivoted statued soul of man, when turned by the hand of Truth. Lies only never vary; look for no invariableness in Pierre. Nor does any canting showman here stand by to announce his phases as he revolves. Catch his phrases as your insights may. (337)
Unlike the oil painting or engraving, the statue can be viewed from many points of view, each offering a different vista for contemplation and thus offering more of the inner sense of a figure or bust than a portrait in oils. The revolving pedestal was used in nineteenth-century showings of sculpture, notably in exhibits of Powers’s Greek Slave. Melville’s simile allows him to characterize Pierre from a number of vantage points, some of them contradictory. Pierre is a thwarted Titan, his thews “forestallingly cut by the scissors of Fate.” He is seen “as a moose, hamstrung.” He is an atheist who “wrote down the godliest things” (339). Melville’s depiction of the malady that Pierre suffers when his eyes begin to fail is, perhaps, suggested by the appearance of eyes in sculptured busts: “again the pupils of his eyes rolled away from him to their orbits. He put his hand up to them, and sat back in his seat. Then, without saying one word, he continued there for his usual turn, suspended motionless, blank” (341). This blankness matches the usual blankness of sculpted busts.
The Enceladus episode, crucial to Melville’s conception of Pierre and of the entire novel, represents a most impressive and intricate use of literary pictorialism. He prepares us for it by portraying Pierre’s thoughts in the sections of the novel immediately following the matter of Lucy’s artistic ambitions. Aware that Glen Stanly and Frederic, “two boiling bloods,” are likely to take violent steps to prevent Lucy’s staying at the Church of the Apostles, and certain that they are planning some action, Pierre has to “look forward to wild work.” Thinking of “all the ambiguities which hemmed him in,” including the loss of happiness and “his one only prospect a black, bottomless gulf of guilt,” his hatred of Glen and Frederic could lead only to murder.
The murder of Stanly does not seem to have an adequate objective correlative. Newton Arvin attempts to find it in Pierre’s emotional absolutism and destructive violence, “burning the father’s picture to ashes, driving the mother to madness and death, shooting and killing the cousin, bringing death to the fiancee and the half sister, and at last gulping poison oneself” (203–4). Arvin locates Melville’s models in “the old novel of sensibility, the Gothic romance, the novel of romantic sophistication, and even Elizabethan tragedy,” citing “Mrs. Radcliffe or Susanna Rowson … Charles R. Maturin or Disraeli” as possible originals for Melville’s outrageous plot. There is a closer possible source, however, in William Gilmore Simms’s Beauchampe; or The Kentucky Tragedy (1842). The perceptive comment of Mansfield and Vincent that “whatever Melville read he piratically made his own, extending, deepening, and embellishing his thefts so that no literary judge can but approve and applaud” (570–71) applies well in the case of Simms.
The “Kentucky Tragedy” achieved fame in American literature in treatments by Poe, Thomas Holley Chivers, Robert Penn Warren, and a number of playwrights. It was the sort of story that Melville would have enjoyed and used as he used the Colt-Adams case and the story of Monroe Edwards in “Bartleby.” In 1825, Jeroboam O. Beauchamp stabbed Colonel Solomon Sharp to death in Frankfort, Kentucky, to avenge the dishonoring of his wife. The crime and trial were sensational and much written about. In prison, awaiting execution, Beauchamp wrote his confession, which was published as a pamphlet after his death. He and his wife attempted suicide in his cell. She died, but he survived long enough to be hanged.16
Simms’s novel follows the original tale closely, elaborating it with rationalizations to justify the murder. After Beauchampe has finally been told by his wife that his friend, Colonel Sharpe, is the man who dishonored her, Simms asserts that “the world will not willingly account this madness. It matters not greatly by what name you call a passion which has broken bounds, and disdains the right angles of convention” (Beauchampe 320; chap. 32). Later, he asks the question, “Was Beauchampe any more sane—we should phrase it otherwise— was he any less mad than his wife?” Beauchampe, Simms’s character, had, like the real Beauchamp, pledged to kill the man, but believed that this implied a duel. Sharpe refuses to fight, an unthinkable dilemma for a Kentucky gentleman like Beauchampe, who now has no alternative but to murder his adversary. Simms accepts unquestioningly the code of honor.
Melville is not given such an option, however, and finds motivation in his treatment of the Enceladus story. This passage revives the ancient literary device of the dream-vision, a “phantasmagoria of the Mount of Titans” (342). Among rocky shapes near his home, Pierre has a vision of “Enceladus the Titan, the most potent of all the giants, writhing from out the imprisoning earth.” He then compares this vision to an artwork:
Not unworthy to be compared with that leaden Titan, wherewith the art of Marsy and the broad-flung pride of Bourbon enriched the enchanted gardens of Versailles;—and from whose still twisted mouth for sixty feet the waters yet upgush, in elemental rivalry with those Etna flames, of old asserted to be the malicious breath of the borne-down giant;—not unworthy to be compared with that leaden demi-god—piled with costly rocks, and with one bent wrenching knee protruding from the broken bronze; not unworthy to be compared with that bold trophy to high art, the American Enceladus, wrought by the vigorous hand of Nature’s self, it did go further than compare;—it did far surpass that fine figure molded by the inferior skill of man. (345–46)
Melville again places Nature as artist in competition with human artistic creation and discovers it to be superior in its conceptions and execution. “Marsy gave arms to the eternally defenseless,” he says, “but Nature, more truthful performed an amputation, and left the impotent Titan without one serviceable ball-and-socket above the thigh” (346). In his visit to Versailles, on December 6, 1849, Melville recorded seeing a “Titan overthrown by thunderbolts &c” (Journals 34). Horsford cites, among items viewed in the visit, the Paul Veronese painting of Jupiter hurling thunderbolts and the Bassin d’Encelade of Gaspard Marsy (1625–1681). In his careful study of the art of Versailles, Gerald Van Der Kemp describes the Enceladus fountain as a “huge lead sculpture” that “represents the giant crushed by the rocks of Mount Olympus which he had attempted to scale with his companions to reach heaven” (206–07).
Conjoining painting with sculpture, Melville can give the scene a genuine fullness of expression. Enceladus, the rebellious giant, was partially buried under Mount Etna, and Marsy’s sculpture depicts the event. But under Melville’s hand, Pierre does not “fail still further” to elucidate the vision that has presented itself in this phantasmagoria:
Old Titan’s self was the son of incestuous Coelus and Terra, the son of incestuous Heaven and Earth. And Titan married his mother Terra, another and accumulatively incestuous match. And thereof Enceladus was one issue. So Enceladus was both the son and grandson of an incest, and even thus, there had been born from the organic blended heavenliness and earthliness of Pierre, another mixed, uncertain, heaven-aspiring, but still not wholly earth-emancipated mood; which again by its terrestrial taint held down to its terrestrial mother, generated there the present doubly incestuous Enceladus within him; so that the present mood of Pierre—that reckless sky-assaulting mood of his, was nevertheless on one side the grandson of the sky. (347)
Richard Brodhead quotes this passage with the comment that it “makes the myth of Enceladus figure forth the dynamics of Pierre’s moral anguish” and, as well, “the dynamics of his psychological experience, showing how his relation to his mother breeds in him an ambiguous mixture of sexual desire and reverential love” (187–88). Pierre, Michael Rogin suggests, is “punished not for his own sin of incest, but for his family’s” (181).17
Pierre, recovering from what he has witnessed, now resolves “by an entire and violent change, and by a willful act against his own most habitual inclinations, to wrestle with the strange malady of his eyes, this new death-fiend of the trance, and this Inferno of his Titanic vision” (347). The Titanic vision is an Inferno because Pierre, drenched in Dante, combines the classical vision of Enceladus with the medieval Dantean tableau of the Giants who stand around the edge of the central pit of Hell. In the Cary translation of The Inferno, which Melville owned, the passage reads “of one already I descried the face, / Shoulders, and breast, and of the belly huge / Great part, and both arms down along his ribs” (31.42–44). Dante is describing Nimrod of Nineveh, builder of the Tower of Babel, who brought a confusion of tongues to the world. Other Giants in Dante’s catalog are Ephialtes, Briareus, and Antaeus. Dante took advantage of the medieval confusion of Titans and Giants and combined their rebellions and punishments. Though Enceladus is not mentioned by Dante, he is one of the rebellious Titans and would have been punished as the others were. Nathalia Wright discusses this passage in the light of Pierre’s rebellion against divine authority, an action in which he imitates the folly of the Giants and Titans; she enumerates some striking parallels—”The equivalent of Ephialtes in Latin is incubus; the moss on the head of the rock Enceladus is an ‘undoffable incubus’”—and relates the blindness of Ephialtes to Pierre’s eye trouble (“Pierre” 176–78n.36). Flaxman’s illustrations have been discussed by Schless, who points out that thirty-eight of the drawings are devoted to The Inferno. Schless does not treat this passage from Pierre, but his discussion of the City of Dis, accompanied by the appropriate Flaxman illustration, demonstrates the kinds of pictorial inspiration that Melville would have drawn from his study of the artist’s work (74–76).
It is the “reckless, sky-assaulting mood” of Pierre that sets him apart from such heroes as Beauchampe. They play out an earthbound fantasy of the gentleman’s honor while he rebels against the divinity and against his fate. In Moby-Dick Ahab accepts the same terrible odds, saying “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other.” A vaulting, godlike ambition, doomed by its own nature, is one of the similitudes between Pierre and Ahab, but Ahab’s rage is against a godlike creature who can punish him directly, while Pierre assaults another man, easily gunning him down, and thus an important ingredient of the epic pattern is lost.
Nevertheless, working with the Flaxman drawings, Melville must have been struck by the illustrations that the artist had provided for Aeschylus. The hero of Prometheus Bound, another sky-assaulting Titan, receives a punishment similar to that visited upon Enceladus. Melville’s treatment of the Enceladus rock— partly excavated by “young collegians” and leaving “stark naked his in vain indignant chest to the defilements of the birds, which for untold ages had cast their foulness on his vanquished crest” (345)—parodies the activities of the eagles who tear at the vitals of the bound Prometheus.
The phantasmagoric vision of an American Enceladus finds its double in Pierre’s face and features, as the art of the portrait or of sculptured portraiture doubles and magnifies human or godlike physiognomy. The physiognomical researches of Lavater, Gall, and Spurzheim, among others, play an important role in establishing both a moral and an aesthetic basis for the depiction of a face. Melville knew Lavater’s writings well. In London, on November 21, 1849, he “bought Lavater’s Phisiognomy in Holborn, for 10 shillings (sterling)” (Journals 24). The link between Lavater’s studies of physiognomy as a science and as the art of portraiture is to be found in the works of Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), painter and close friend of Lavater. Two portraits of Fuseli appear in the 1789 edition of Lavater’s Physiognomy, and one, from a drawing by Sir Thomas Lawrence, has been said to offer an accurate reading of the painter’s character, a prime purpose in physiognomical research. In his own art, Fuseli “followed the precepts of Lavater in expressing by attitude, gesture, or other movements of the limbs or features, the passions or emotions which he wished to delineate in his characters.” His pictures were often depictions of Shakespearean scenes and mythology, and his “Milton Gallery” consisted of forty pictures from that poet’s work. His posthumously published Lectures on Painting (1830) were republished in 1848 by Bohn, as part of Lectures on Painting, by the Royal Academicians, Barry, Opie, and Fuseli, and Melville may well have seen this volume. They would have offered him a basis for his portrayal of Enceladus. In the first lecture, Fuseli speaks of expression in the work of ancient artists, notably Apollodorus, pointing out “that as all men were connected by one general form, so they were separated each by some predominant power, which fixed character, and bound them to a class.” As an example, Fuseli cites “the figure of Ajax wrecked, and from the sea-swept rock hurling defiance unto the murky sky” (Fuseli 357).18
Gall and Spurzheim had a bad influence upon physiognomy, for their work led to the development of phrenology, a laughable pseudoscience, whereas physiognomy might have continued to offer aesthetic guidelines for the noble art of portraiture. It is noticeable that Melville took a somewhat jesting attitude toward phrenology, while his comments based on physiognomy are more serious, even though he had once called it “a passing fable.” His lecture on “Statues in Rome,” delivered about six years after publication of Pierre, seems to be based almost entirely on physiognomical considerations. In Sealts’s carefully assembled version of the lecture, Melville points out that his “object is to paint the appearance of Roman statuary objectively and afterward to speculate upon the emotions and pleasures that appearance is apt to excite in the human breast.” His characterizations of sculptured busts and forms partake of the language of physiognomy. Demosthenes “resembles a modern advocate, face thin and haggard and his body lean.” Socrates “reminds one much of the head and rubicund phiz of an Irish comedian.” Julius Caesar’s head is much like that of a railroad president, and Seneca has “a face more like that of a disappointed pawnbroker.” Nero’s “delicate features are only those of a genteelly dissipated youth.” In chapter 79 of Moby-Dick Ishmael seriously considers the physiognomical aspect of the whale and finds that “the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature” who must be surveyed from the point of view of “the full front of his head,” for “this aspect is sublime.”
The American sublime is much on Melville’s mind as he ponders and writes about Enceladus. American artists may not be able to execute sculptural forms with the power of Marsy’s Titan, or, if we consider other statues that impressed Melville, the Laocoön, Apollo Belvedere, Farnese Hercules, or Antinous. Still, in the American wilderness, Nature far surpasses, in truth and power, the fabricated works of human artists. An apparent jumble of rocks rearranges itself, if the eye of the beholder be willing, into sphinxes, “the Cheopian pyramid,” or the Titanic “form defiant, a form of awfulness.” Keenly aware of the imitativeness of much of the American art that he observed, Melville was especially sensitive to the artistic qualities of inimitable Nature.
Pierre, Isabel, and Lucy visit a “gallery of paintings, recently imported from Europe, and now on free exhibition preparatory to their sale by auction.” This is a familiar scene for Melville, who saw the exhibits of firms like Goupil, Vibert & Company frequently advertised and subjected to commentary in The Literary World.19 Studying the fictional exhibit’s catalog, “Among the long columns of such names as Rubens, Raphael, Angelo, Domenichino, Da Vinci, all shamelessly prefaced with the words ‘undoubted,’ or ‘testified,’ Pierre met the following brief lines:—’No. 99. A stranger’s head by an unknown hand’” (349). Like Melville, Pierre is incensed by the effrontery of art dealers who deliberately mislead their patrons, for “the whole must be a collection of those wretched imported daubs … christened by the loftiest names known to Art” (349–50).
Writers on art matters tried constantly to put Americans on their guard against fakery. In The Literary World for April 22, 1848, a notice, ironically entitled “Pictures by Old Masters,” pointed out that many pictures on the market were “third-rate copies, picked up from the picture dealers of the continent, and introduced to the Americans with all the pompous epithets of connoisseurship” (228). But Pierre sees some merit even in the fakes, which might be “yet unfulfilled perfections of the future” (350). Melville uses both his printed sources and his own observations about art matters. In the same story in The Literary World, the writer notes that a catalog of “the gallery recently opened in the Lyceum Building, 563 Broadway,” contains some of the most famous names in painting, and
it is a matter of secondary importance to establish the originality of all these works, since, in almost every instance, they are so marked with the characteristics of those to whom they are ascribed, that they adequately represent the school of each artist.… Cuyp’s landscape glows with the sentiment of the hour.… Vandyke’s Prince Maurice in armor is a noble specimen of his unequalled school of portraiture. The “Lot and His Daughters,” attributed to Rubens, is a piece of coloring which our young artists would do well to contemplate patiently. (228)
This may be so, Melville seems to be saying, but he cannot let the observant Pierre accept such an optimistic view, for as he
walked along by the thickly hung walls, and seemed to detect the infatuated vanity which must have prompted many of these utterly unknown artists in the attempted execution by feeble hand of vigorous themes; he could not repress the most melancholy foreboding concerning himself. All the walls of the world seemed thickly hung with the empty and impotent scope of pictures, grandly outlined, but miserably filled. The smaller and humbler pictures, representing little familiar things, were by far the best executed, but these, though touching him not unpleasingly, in one restricted sense, awoke no dormant majesties in his soul, and therefore, upon the whole, were contemptibly inadequate and unsatisfactory. (350)
Pierre’s Titanism, like Ahab’s Promethean ambition, is in the great line of Goethe’s Faustian excess. Ishmael discovered that “man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity” (Moby-Dick 416), but Ahab and Pierre are “sky-assaulting” giants. For Pierre, the “smaller and humbler pictures” represent the smaller and humbler, and therefore the “contemptibly inadequate and unsatisfactory” life.
At this point in the narrative, Melville’s pictorial strategy is to avoid ekphrastic description of details in any of the pictures that Pierre is observing. The allusions to Rubens, Raphael, Michelangelo, Domenichino, and Da Vinci allow the reader to make whatever he will of the kinds of paintings and of fakes that are being displayed. The names are the staples of art guides and traveler’s guide-books. But the centerpiece of the art gallery scene is a pair of recognitions. In her encounter with the mysterious painting “by an unknown hand,” Isabel at once recognizes that the stranger’s face in the painting is familiar, for “only my mirror has ever shown me that look before.” The effect is complex, since in perceiving her father’s lineaments in the European painting, she also sees her own and Pierre’s. At the same time, Lucy, separated from the others, observes a famous work of art, a copy of “that sweetest, most touching, but most awful of all feminine heads—the Cenci of Guido.” The two pictures, facing one another across the gallery, seem “pantomimically talking over and across the heads of the living spectators.” the Beatrice Cenci reminds the viewer of “the two most horrible crimes … possible to civilized humanity—incest and parricide” (351), while the “Stranger” excites the contradictory feelings of Isabel and Pierre about their relationship. The ecphrasis of the pictorial scene—that is, the implication that the pictures facing one another carry on a colloquy—is subtly rendered. Of what would they converse? Incest and parricide are the presumed topics, along with speculation about the definitively blonde Cenci, “double hooded, as it were, by the black crape” of her crime. Melville is fascinated by the deceptive nature of the art of portraiture, that can demonstrate innocence in the face of guilt and thus create “that sweetest, most touching, but most awful of all feminine heads.”20
From this scene, the novel hastens to its tragic conclusion. Goaded by the letter of Glen Stanly and Frederic Tartan, Pierre rushes, armed, into the street. His encounter with the two men and his murder of Stanly are treated in a very brief scope, less than a page of the story. The remainder of the tale takes up only a short section, about two and a half more pages. It is no doubt this economy of scenic narration that has caused problems for readers and critics. Berthoff’s remark that the story is “finished out by main force, in haste and self-doubt,” serves well as a critique of Melville’s unusual technique—or, perhaps, his supposed lack of technique—at this point in his narrative.
But an alternative suggestion about his procedure takes us back to the conclusion of William Gilmore Simms’s Beauchampe. When Orville Beauchampe murders Colonel Sharpe, the scene is rendered in few words: “The sharp edge of the dagger had answered the shocking secret—whatever might have been its character—and the terrible oath of the husband was redeemed!—redeemed in a single moment, and by a single blow” (333). Having disposed of the most dramatic scene in the novel in one sentence, Simms then gives some leisurely pages to explaining why he has not lingered over the murder:
A murder in a novel, though of very common occurrence, is usually a matter of a thousand thrilling minutiae. In the hands of a score of modern romancers, it is surprising what capital they make of it! How it runs through a score of chapters!— admits of a variety of details, descriptions, commentaries, and conjectures! Take any of the great raconteurs of the European world—not forgetting Dumas and Reynolds—and see what they will do with it! How they turn it over, and twist it about, as a sweet morsel under the tongue. (335)
Simms goes on to satirize the “dreary details,” the “particulars of search and discovery,” and the “poor devil,” who, while innocent, looks guilty. This is one way of writing a novel, and “one might think it a tolerably good way, indeed, were it not that most people find it abominably tedious.” He then concludes his explanation with a cautionary and self-congratulatory statement, to the effect that “We make short a story which, long enough already, we apprehend, might, by an ingenious romancer, be made a great deal longer” (335–37). Such an appeal to the reader’s common sense might have proved irresistible to Melville, who, in any case, was having trouble with the length in his own novel.
It is helpful to compare the conclusions of Simms’s and Melville’s tales. Simms had to deal with a trial and incarceration, a suicide and an attempted suicide, the execution of Beauchampe, and some later events, but he has six more chapters for these events, and so, while he can skimp description of the trial, despite the good material available in pamphlets and books about the case, he can give himself room to philosophize about love and honor. Melville never takes his story as far as a trial but has his suicides occur in the city jail on the evening of the murder. The contemporary accounts of the “Kentucky Tragedy” could have served him well if he had chosen, or been allowed, to make use of them in an expansive way.
It is impossible to say with certainty that Melville knew Simms’s novel. There is no record of his having owned or read it. One teasing possibility emerges. Beauchampe was published as a two-volume novel in 1842. When it was reissued in 1856, the second volume, dealing with the murder and the trial, was published as a novel under the title Charlemont. In 1856 Melville was writing The Confidence-Man, the thirty-fourth chapter of which is the Cosmopolitan’s story “of the gentleman-madman,” Charlemont. The coincidence is provocative but hardly conclusive. But the similarities between the two books show that Melville knew quite well what kind of novel he wanted to write in order to engage the novel-reading public. Beyond that, he demonstrated vigorously that he could find in a lurid plot a suitable vehicle for a tragedy of heroic and even noble proportions.