CLAREL, “A POEM AND PILGRIMAGE,” is Melville’s most carefully considered book. Its composition engaged him for years, and its wide reaches, far beyond the scope of his brief stay in Palestine, are filled with the results of his reading and study and with echoes of accounts of other travelers and pilgrims. As Walter Bezanson has amply demonstrated, Melville used a number of books that he acquired in the years after his pilgrimage: William Henry Bartlett’s Forty Days in the Desert and Walks About the City and Environs of Jerusalem, William McClure Thomson’s The Land and the Book, and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History. He may have used John Murray’s guide for Syria and Palestine and Eliot Warburton’s The Crescent and the Cross and quite possibly some other sources (Clarel 704–05, 706ff.). Allusions and insertions indicate his gathered knowledge when he pauses, for instance, “to impart / A chapter of the Middle Age” (1.34.73–74), a record of “The Travels of Bishop Arculf in the Holy Land, Toward A.D. 700.” As Bezanson indicates (Clarel 752), Melville probably took as his source the printing of Arculf’s travels from Thomas Wright’s Early Travels in Palestine (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1848), another of those inexpensive books that he must have encountered as he “swam through libraries.” If he read Wright, he had before him, in addition to the account of Arculf’s journey, a pageant of travels through the Holy Land from the eighth through the seventeenth centuries. Reading through these successive travel accounts, he found a varied set of impressions and attitudes and might have reacted to a predominantly reverential approach to the scene by taking pleasure, for instance, in the travel notes of Henry Maundrell (1697), who cast a skeptical eye on the impressions of previous travelers and often found them wanting in accuracy. The story of the apples of Sodom, Maundrell wrote, “induces me to believe that there may be a greater deceit in this fruit than that which is usually reported of it,” and he cited “my Lord Bacon” in noting that false ideas are kept up “because it serves for a good allusion, and helps the poet to a similitude.” Maundrell found that the Dead Sea would not buoy up his body as others had reported. He doubted the usual reports of the age of the olive trees in Gethsemane and observed, ironically, that most of the actions reported as occurring in the Holy Land seemed to take place in grottoes (Wright 454–55, 471, 479). But, however Melville read them, the main value of these early travel records is that they provided him, again and again, with descriptions of the places he himself had seen in a land of stones and monuments—the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Church of the Nativity, the Dead Sea, the Wailing Wall. Where he had set his foot, others, centuries before, had also passed. He therefore wrote much of Clarel under the influence of the idea, expressed at the end of the poem, of a procession of travelers, like figures upon a frieze. Like him, they passed and paid tribute to the desert wastes, the stones, the churches and grottoes, the fragments of art, wisdom, and folly that made up such a pilgrimage.
The most striking impression that Melville had of his visit must have been the “diabolical landscapes” of Judea (Journals 89). He had seen nothing quite like this since his journey to the Galapagos Islands, and, in his writings, he would seek to establish the likenesses between those arid islands and this dessicated world. He was struck by what he called the “Barrenness of Judea,” spoke of the “bones of rocks,” and found in the scene the “mere refuse & rubbish of creation” (83). A passage that combined serious and whimsical observations dealt with the “Stones of Judea” (90). Melville speculated, “Is the desolation of the land the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity? Hapless are the favorites of Heaven” (91). His observation reflected the idea, widely held during the century, of a land cursed and made desolate by God.
It seems likely that this intense feeling about the barren land that he saw impressed itself upon Melville’s consciousness for the same reason that it affected many other pilgrims. Naomi Shepherd suggests that “Palestine had to compete with a powerful rival: its own image in European art and literature” (17) and that painters, contradicting what they would have seen in the Holy Land, which they never visited, often used elements of European scenery as backgrounds for the painting of biblical events. The paintings that Melville and his contemporaries admired depicted their events against imaginary settings that clashed harshly with the reality one saw on the site, for they were settings that might be full of luxurious trees and bodies of water. Clarel’s earliest impressions of the Holy Land, teased by what he has seen of it in inaccurate pictures, include “the scorch of noon / Thrown off by crags” and the towers of Jerusalem “Like the ice-bastions round the Pole” (1.1.53–60). The visual, and hence the strong intrusion of the visual arts, plays its crucial role in such a pilgrimage. Melville came to his depiction of the Holy Land well armed with the visual conceptions of artists to agree with or to contradict by his own impressions. Many of the travel books produced in profusion during the first half of the nineteenth century were illustrated. William Henry Bartlett, who produced the pictures for Walks about the City and Environs of Jerusalem and Forty Days in the Desert, two of the books that Melville acquired, was chiefly an illustrator “intent on topographical accuracy” (Shepherd 100). Bartlett (1809–1854), a prolific and widely traveled artist, made three trips to Palestine as well as four tours of America and Canada, and Melville may have previously known the pictures that he produced for N. P. Willis’s American Scenery in 1840. Bartlett’s illustrations would serve as an aid, should there be any need of one, for Melville’s extraordinary visual imagination. Sir David Wilkie and Horace Vernet also visited the Holy Land to paint the scenes there.1
When the pilgrims of the poem move out into the desert regions, the poet has a ready description:
Sands immense
Impart the oceanic sense:
The flying grit like scud is made:
Pillars of sand which whirl about
Or arc along in colonnade,
True kin be to the water-spout. (2.12.38–43)
The colonnades of dust are the evanescent architectural landscape of a desert scene and match the description that Melville marked in his copy of Bartlett’s Forty Days in the Desert where the “loose shifting hills” are “lashed up by the whirlwind into dense tremendous clouds of sand, obscuring all prospect … relieved on the dark stormy sky, formed a sublime spectacle” (Cowen 1:169). Melville adds the movement of a caravan proceeding, “long drawn, dispirited,” and finds in it the simile of a dismasted fleet retreating from battle (44–50). The description is, as Shirley Dettlaff points out, an excellent example of the Burkean sublime in its immensities of vista (218).
Landscape painting, a central concern of ekphrasis, allows Melville to shift from the omnipresent, dispirited scenery of Judea to pictures of his native land that reflect its generous vegetal growths on prairies and rivers. Looking at the “walls of wane” in Jerusalem and the pool of Hezekiah, Clarel thinks of another desolate scene in which
No tarn
Among the Kaatskills, high above
Farm-house and stack, last lichened barn
And log-bridge rotting in remove (1.1.163–70)
can be more lonesome than the place he is viewing. In the canto describing the life of Nathan, father of Ruth, there is a setting in Illinois, the “vast space” that challenges the space of the desert. What Nathan “daily beheld” is a new land seen as an old one:
Three Indian mounds
Against the horizon’s level bounds
Dim showed across the prairie green
Like dwarfed and blunted mimic shapes
Of Pyramids at distance seen
From the broad Delta’s planted capes
Of vernal grain. In nearer view
With trees he saw them crowned, which drew
From the red sagamores of eld
Entombed within, the vital gum
Which green kept each mausoleum. (1.17.57–67)
The “prairie green” of the American Midwest is a stark contrast to desert landscape, and the poetry luxuriates in finding analogies that contradict, seeing the Indian mounds as “mimic shapes” of the pyramids of Egypt, the “vernal grain” of the midcontinental river in contrast to the Nile, and the burial grounds of Indian sagamores as a counterpoint to the tombs of Pharaohs. But an oncoming night, as the poet sings, is
Like sails convened when calms delay
Off the twin forelands on fair day,
So, on Damascus’ plain behold
Mid groves and gardens, girdling ones,
White fleets of sprinkled villas. (1.18.1–5)
The colors of the retreating day “Thy wall, Angelico, suffuse, / Whose tender pigments melt from view— / Die down, die out, as sunsets do” (29–31). Watching the onset of night, we are back in the painterly world of Fra Angelico’s Florence. Melville probably did see the famous frescoes of Fra Angelico, though he left the event unrecorded in his journal. Hawthorne, coming to Italy after Melville, recorded on April 12, 1858, that he saw in Rome “some beautiful frescoes by Fra Angelico,” discovered after having disappeared. They were “of sacred subjects, both on the walls and ceiling, a good deal faded, yet pretty distinctly preserved.”
Nathan’s Illinois landscape is immediately reinforced by the details of a nearby scene that features “Bones like sea corals; one bleached skull / A vase vined round and beautiful / With flowers” (68–71). The picture is a still life, a product of Nature, the supreme artist. In “Neither Believer nor Infidel,” William B. Dillingham quotes the passage as an example of “nature’s lack of reverence for man” (511), but surely nature has no reason to revere man or any of its other creations. Nathan is made aware of its power, for as he looks, he feels “with bated breath / The floral revelry over death” (71–72). When Paul Cezanne came to use skulls as objects in still life paintings, substituting them for fruits, vegetables, or dead game, the pictorial result was powerful and strange. Nathan’s vision of death in such natural surroundings makes it only a part—perhaps not the most important part—of an immense and timeless pageantry.
Melville offers a powerful ekphrasis of the Dead Sea by associating it with Keats’s poetic description of the Grecian urn. “The legend round a Grecian urn,” he tells us, “the sylvan legend” is that of a vessel which certainly possesses the “Ionian form” that he considers requisite to beauty. Details of the “Venetian tint” may have been erased where “decay / Have wormed the garland all away, / And fire have left its Vandal burn,” but he can assert that “beauty inextinct may charm / In outline of the vessel’s form” (2.29.1–6). With this vision of the form of beauty before him, he looks at “Sodom, shore and sea” and finds that the form is there and that the “valley’s sweep repays the glance, / And wavy curves of winding beach.” As far as form is concerned, the sea might be as beautiful as Lake Como, Melville might have said; but he reverses the analogy, insisting that “Fair Como would like Sodom be / Should horror overrun the scene” where all that might be sylvan and blooming “is charred and crunched and riven.” The sylvan parts of Keats’s “flowery tale” of youth “beneath the trees” and of the carving of “brede / Of marble men and maidens overwrought / With forest branches and the trodden weed” are firmly before the mind of the poet writing of the “horror” of Sodom. Eye and mind suffer from comparing the scene on Keats’s urn with the overpowering impression of the Dead Sea’s precincts. It is a place that “Scarce seems of earth whereon we dwell,” and this terrible vision leads to the ironic conclusion that “framed within the lines of heaven / The picture intimates a hell” (7–19). This pictorial diptych underlines Melville’s forceful contention that “J. C. should have appeared in Taheiti” (Journals 158) and Rolfe’s assertion, late in the poem, that “Tahiti should have been the place / For Christ in advent.” The pilgrims have been considering “How wrought the sites of Bethlehem / On Western natures,” and Rolfe’s “musings” of Tahiti include “That vinewreathed urn of Ver, in sea / Of halcyons,” a scene far removed from the Palestinian waste land (4.18.31–43).
Melville’s brief experience of the Dead Sea contributes greatly to his description. The sea would have been Lake George, “all but verdure,” and the “foam on beach & pebbles like slaver of mad dog.” He tasted the bitterness of the water and saw a rainbow over the sea, raised because “heaven, after all, has no malice against it.” A picnic would have been a fitting subject, with “nought to eat but bitumen & ashes with desert of Sodom apples washed down with water of Dead Sea” (Journals 83). When he came to jot down some ideas for imaginative works of prose or poetry, “bitterness” was the term that most engaged his thought and becomes, almost, a visual image: “Bitterness—Dead Sea. (Bitterness of Death)” (158).
This passage, descriptive of a “calcined” landscape, is like the portrayal, by Agath, the timoneer, of Narborough Isle, one of the Galapagos chain. Questioned by Vine as to whether he has seen any landscape that might “compare / With Judah here,” Agath unfolds a description of “that isle which haunteth me.” This is a set piece, and the poet makes it more so by claiming license in his rendering of what the “rude” timoneer actually says. The scene, burning and volcanic, is “leaden,” “dull,” and “sealed,” and its “beach is cinders.” The rocks form “A broken field of tumbled slabs / Like ice-cakes” and shape themselves into a place of worship, where they are “much worn down / Like to some old, old kneeling-stone / Before a shrine” (4.3.10–35). The sense of a shrine, something created, usually artistically, for a worshipful purpose, continues: “Paved with jet blocks those terraces, / The surface rubbed to unctuous gleam / By something which has life, you feel” (50–52). The timoneer has an overwhelming impression of Nature itself creating art, for he, it seems, is a living, breathing art object himself, his arm a “living fresco,” with its tattooed crucifixion “A thing of art, vermil and blue” (4.2.50). The Narborough Isle ekphrasis revisits Melville’s painterly world of Salvator Rosa and the “heaps of cinders” in the Spenserian landscapes of “The Encantadas.” The fourth sketch of that work portrays “the grim and charred Enchanted Isles,” placing Narborough “in the black jaws of Albermarle like a wolf’s red tongue in his open mouth.” In the first sketch, Melville had speculated on the “desolateness” of the islands, which could not evoke the sympathetic thoughts that cemeteries and ruins, “associated with humanity,” might offer. He asserts that “even the Dead Sea, along with whatever other emotions it may at times inspire, does not fail to touch in the pilgrim some of his less unpleasurable feelings.” In the fact of the visit to the Dead Sea, it is hard to find “less unpleasurable feelings.”
Although landscape plays a crucial role in Melville’s conception of the Holy Land that he visited, by offering “inscapes” to match the externality of a barren world, he conceived his poem as a number of set pieces, monologues, dialogues, and colloquies of his pilgrims. The literary portraiture in Clarel is vital to the successful realization of Melville’s intentions, and he creates an impressive gallery of characters, often associating them with artworks. The beginning of the pilgrimage sounds somewhat like the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, but he makes a point of calling attention to the differences between his pilgrims and Chaucer’s; there will be no franklin or squire, for instance, and there will be no “morris-dance / Of wit and story good as then” (2.1.10–11). (A morris dance, or Moorish dance, is one in which a story is acted out by costumed dancers.) Melville follows the lead of Chaucer’s prologue by offering well-drawn preliminary depictions of several of his pilgrims as they embark on their horseback journey, and then, at least in some instances, of going to greater length within the later portions of the poem to establish each one’s essence, or being.
Clarel himself is lightly drawn in the poem, but we know at once how he differs from such robust young men as Redburn and Ishmael. The “face he lifts— in features fine, / Yet pale, and all but feminine” (1.1.15–16) has more in common with Harry Bolton than with Redburn. As a student rather than one who has independently taken to the sea, he has
a mind
Earnest by nature, long confined
Apart like Vesta in a grove
Collegiate, but let to rove
At last abroad among mankind. (106–10)
Association with the goddess of the hearth, and, perhaps with the Vestal Virgins who worship at her temple, may account for the feminine element in his nature and appearance. And, like the Vestal Virgins who have broken their vow, he is immured, as the poem opens, in the room of his inn, which is of “Masonry old, late washed with lime— / Much like a tomb new-cut in stone” (2–3). He is not given the chance, as Redburn and Ishmael were, of reviewing and recounting his tale after the passage of years. It is natural that he would seek, as Harry Bolton did in Redburn, a robust nature to fill a masculine element in his life, and he finds it in Rolfe. His name, Clarel, is unusual, and he may take both his name and situation from the pictorialism of heraldry, where it is associated with the armorial device of six martlets (Burke 198). Ruskin speaks of “The most brilliant, and… most effective of the arts—Heraldry,” and surely an effective way of characterizing the young student is by offering him under a coat of arms that bears the martlet, the symbolic bird portrayed without feet and representing, perhaps, the younger son who has no footing in the inheritance of family property. Melville, fascinated by the art of heraldry, knew well the arms of his own family (Clarel 839–40) and used armorial devices as artworks often in his writings.
For Melville’s depiction of Derwent, Chaucer’s “A Knyght ther was, and that a worthy man” becomes a source of parody. “A priest he was—though but in part,” is the observation, bolstered by a glance at Derwent’s “prosperous look / That bordered vanity” and his “Fair color as from ruddy heart” (2.1.26–29). Since the Englishman is a combination of “cavalier and monk,” Chaucer’s satirical treatment of his monk is a subtext to Melville’s portrait. Melville concentrates on his priest’s worldly attitude, in which “Thought’s last adopted style he showed.” Derwent is very much “A priest of the club—a talking man,” and Melville uses such physical details as the cloth cape and “cleric coat” as “emblems of that facile wit, / Which suits the age” (30–56). Bezanson perceptively draws attention to Derwent’s resemblance to characters in other Melvillean works “who practice their law, medicine, or theology so professionally as to endanger their response to experience” and cites the lawyer-narrator of “Bartleby” and the minister, Falsgrave, in Pierre as good examples (Clarel 621).
In the canto of argument with Clarel, Derwent attempts to lessen the influence of other pilgrims upon the young man
Our comrades—frankly let me say—
That Rolfe, good fellow though he be,
And Vine, methinks, would you but see,
Are much like prints from plates but old. (3.21.286–89)
The simile is an attractive one, for much-used old plates would yield blurry prints rather than sharp pictures for the student to use in studying their approaches to religious belief. But Melville immediately cancels out such a happy assessment of Derwent’s art knowledge by posing him against a genuinely powerful work of art, a medallion at the monastery of Mar Saba,
a shield of marble nigh,
Set in the living rock: a stone
In low relief, where well was shown,
Before an altar under sky,
A man in armor, visor down,
Enlocked complete in panoply,
Uplifting reverent a crown
In invocation. (3.22.19–26)
There seems to be no actual source for the medallion (811), so that the description given it is, like that of Keats’s urn, an ekphrasis of an invented artwork, limned in careful detail without the burden of having to adhere to the factuality of the real:
This armed man
In corselet showed the dinted plate,
And dread streaks down the thigh-piece ran;
But the bright helm inviolate
Seemed raised above the battle-zone—
Cherubic with a rare device:
Perch for the bird of Paradise.
A victor seemed he, without pride
Of victory, or joy in fame:
’Twas reverence, and naught beside,
Unless it might that shadow claim
Which comes of trial. Yes, the art
So cunning was, that it in part
By fair expressiveness of grace
Atoned even for the visored face. (27–41)
Melville’s treatment of the piece of marble is imaginative. It might be difficult to show the “dread streaks” on the armor, but perhaps the source is Chaucer’s knight, who “wered a gypon / Al besmotered with his habergeon.” The helm’s device, “perch for the bird of Paradise,” is a cross that, raised above the scene of battle, is an indication of a Christian victory. Derwent’s mood, as he views the medallion, gives a sense of his superficiality. At first, he is “Charmed by the marble’s quiet mood / Of beauty” (43–44), but when he becomes convinced that the figure is not Achilles, then “straightway / He felt the charm in sort decline” (68–69). Derwent cannot recognize the figure of a Crusader in the low-relief sculpture, and his narrowness would make him, in any event, skeptical of the Crusades. The marble shield comes as close as anything can to disturbing Derwent’s imperturbable mediocrity of vision, though he is very nearly able to shrug off the unsettling effect of this artwork, with its “unglad mystery,” so strange to him, by conceding, “in his further range,” that “travel teaches much that’s strange” (3.23.1–5).
Derwent is again placed in close proximity to art when he resolves to visit the abbot, “the archimandrite.” Here, he brings “to pass the thing / That he designed: which was to view / The treasures of this hermit-king.” The blind old man prizes what he shows:
Small shrines and reliquaries old:
Beryl and Indian seed-pearl set
In little folding-doors of gold
And ivory, of triptych form,
With starred Byzantine pictures warm,
And opening into cabinet
Where lay secured in precious stone
The honeycombed gray-greenish bone
Of storied saint. (3.23.78–86)
Although the abbot’s treasures are worthy of reverence, and Derwent does offer it, he maintains a silent skepticism that the old man perceives. They engage in a dialogue about the miraculous powers of the relics, and Derwent’s response to them, as might be expected, is “bland” as he asks, “Have miracles been wrought / From these?” But his superficial religious belief keeps him in suspension between faked reverence and ironic disbelief, so the art objects do not have the proper effect upon his spirit.
It is hardly possible that two personages could be less alike than Derwent and Vine, though they share a common lineage in their names. The Derwent is a British river, probably Wordsworthian, shallow, perhaps, but beautiful as a work of natural art and at the center of the Melvillean myth where “meditation and water are wedded forever” (Moby-Dick 4). And Vine is part of some deep mystical traditions: on the eve of his crucifixion, Christ says to his disciples, “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit” (John 15.5). Melville links Vine with laurel, mistletoe, and the Golden Bough, all sublime symbols of veneration. While Derwent is characterized by the device of placing him close to artworks, it is Vine’s physical appearance in the pilgrim company, with his centrality to the poem’s meanings, that evokes a powerful ekphrasis of sculpture and painting, for Vine himself is a work of art. In Clarel’s first view of him, at the Sepulcher of Kings, before the journey of the pilgrims begins, he is posed against the frieze that mirrors both the Hellenic joy of Theocritus and the Hebraic grief of a text of Joel. He is vividly presented: “A low wind waves his Lydian hair; / A funeral man, yet richly fair— / Fair as the sabled violets be” (1.28.41–43). Vine’s Lydian hair is in the style of carvings and friezes of the Lydians, the ancient Aegean peoples of Sardis and Smyrna, and thus art and man become joined in Melville’s poetic view:
The frieze and this secluded one,
Retaining each a separate tone,
Beauty yet harmonized in grace
And contrast to the barren place. (44–47)
The next canto of the poem, “The Recluse,” adds measurably to the portrait of Vine. Clarel first envisions him as the most potent of all figures in Melville’s mythic iconography:
If use he served not, but forbore—
Such indolence might still but pine
In dearth of rich incentive high:
Apollo slave in Mammon’s mine?
Better Admetus’ shepherd lie. (1.29.17–21)
Apollo had killed the Cyclopes, armorers to Zeus, and as punishment was first banished to Tartarus and then, upon a plea for mercy from Leto, his mother, was made to serve King Admetus of Pherae for a year in his sheepfolds. The Apollonian qualities of Vine are suggested both by his physical beauty and by his name, which may refer to the laurel wreath that crowns the head of Apollo in statues. The statue of the Apollo Belvedere features, as a support to the figure’s form, a tree trunk embellished with laurel leaves. A further association is suggested by the allusions to mistletoe and the Golden Bough. In Turner’s painting of The Golden Bough, the Apollonian Aeneas receives the sacred bough from the Cumaean Sibyl. A framed engraving of Turner’s painting, part of Melville’s collection of prints (Wallace, Melville and Turner 49, 613), is central to Melville’s concept; Aeneas receives the bough, which Virgil compares to the mistletoe in winter, giving forth new leaves. In his portrait, the poet asserts Vine’s “gifts unique,” which, like the plant, “grow, / As on the tree the mistletoe” (1.29.4–6). Bezanson calls attention to the passage from the Aeneid, to the Turner print, and to the use of the mistletoe analogy (Clarel 745). With such apparent gifts in his person, it is no wonder that Vine “gleamed the richer for the shade / About him, as in sombre glade / Of Virgil’s wood” (56–58). Like the Virgilian Aeneas, he is entering the underworld of his own enigmatic being. This allusion links Vine with Hawthorne, for Melville was no doubt well aware that his friend was often referred to as an “Apollo.” The Hawthorne home in the Berkshires contained a bust of Apollo, and friends like William Ellery Channing wrote of Hawthorne as an Apollo figure.2
Melville further develops his verbal portrait of Vine by associating him with Christian legend and art. Though the poet denies that he is describing a saint, nevertheless Vine’s
charm of subtle virtue shed
A personal influence coveted,
Whose source was difficult to tell
As ever was that perfumed spell
Of Paradise-flowers invisible
Which angels round Cecilia bred. (1.29.22–27)
A number of paintings celebrate Saint Cecelia. Melville’s journal for March 30, 1857, reports his seeing Raphael’s Sr. Cecelia in Ecstasy in Bologna, and he owned a print of Domenichino’s St. Cecelia (Wallace, “Berkshire” 83, fig. 9). The “Paradise-flowers” are most likely the lily and rose, which symbolize the saint’s purity and martyrdom. Melville almost surely knew the story of St. Cecelia from Chaucer’s “Second Nun’s Tale.” This paradoxical ekphrasis of Vine, ranging from the masculine pagan Apollonian to the feminizing Christian saint, is part of Melville’s taxonomy of human beauty. The beauty of Billy Budd, for example, is that “which the Greek sculptor in some instances gave to his heroic strong man, Hercules.” In Redburn, Harry Bolton is “one of those small, but perfectly formed beings,” his complexion “a mantling brunette, feminine as a girl’s.” Vine is between these extremes. As mature as the Apollo, as delicate as the fabled saint, he is no saint but possesses “the ripe flush, Venetian mould” (29) that Melville had noted in Venice in “the rich brown complexions of Titian’s women drawn from nature, after all (Titian was a Venetian)” (Journals 119). And, in further paradox, Vine is “in sort Carthusian / Though born a Sybarite” (39–40).
For a final bit of portraiture in the canto, Melville draws deeply on Virgilian myth and its representation in pictorial terms. Vine is again drawn away from the monkish life:
Cloisters? No monk he was, allow;
But gleamed the richer for the shade
About him, as in somber glade
Of Virgil’s wood the Sibyl’s Golden Bough. (55–58)
Melville’s language is painterly. “Gleamed,” “shade,” and “somber” strongly imply the shadings of chiaroscuro and characterize the shadings and rich light of Vine’s complex character. Bezanson calls attention to the appropriate passage in Virgil’s Aeneid and associates the description with J. M. W. Turner’s LakeAvernus, the Fates, and the Golden Bough (Clarel 745). Wallace indicates that Melville probably saw Turner’s painting in 1849 and perhaps again in 1857 and then, at some subsequent date, acquired J. T. Willimore’s engraving of the painting (“Ambrose Group” 34–35). Aeneas, guided by the Sibyl of Cumae, receives the Golden Bough as a talisman and enters the underworld at Avernus. Richly reinterpreting the myth, Melville places Vine in a personal, perhaps hellish, underworld that seems to be of his own making.
When Clarel next sees Vine, he is a member of the group of pilgrims, though he is lagging behind the others and looking back, as if pursued. Indeed, he is pursued—by “reminiscence folded over,” perhaps, or by “some deep moral fantasy.” The projection of his character and visage is, again, complex, for there is “in face a dusk and shiver,” as if he “heard amazed” and
saw the phantom knight
(Boccaccio’s) with the dagger raised
Still hunt the lady in her flight
From solitude to solitude. (2.1.239–45)
The story, from The Decameron, puts Vine in the position of Boccaccio’s young man, a witness to a continuously reenacted scene of horror and violence in which a knight, who has committed suicide for love, pursues his lover, disembowels her, and feeds heart and entrails to his dogs (Clarel 761). The tale has some points in common with the often-reenacted scene of Actaeon and the naked Artemis, a favored mythological subject for painters. If Vine is intended, partially, as a Melvillean portrayal of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the story has points of reference with Hawthornesque tales. Goodman Brown is the unwilling witness to the supernatural scene in the forest. Reuben Bourne’s expiation for his failure to bury Roger Malvin comes as a result of his participating in, and being a witness to, the almost ritualistic murder of his son. Vine, as a character, is in part a portrait drawn from Hawthorne, in part a figure from classical sculpture, and he takes some of his form and color from religious legendry and from Titian’s golds and browns.3
But the most revealing of all the portraits of Vine occurs in the third book of the poem, where Clarel observes him:
He wore that nameless look
About the mouth—so hard to brook—
Which in the Cenci portrait shows,
Lost in each copy, oil or print;
Lost, or else slurred, as ‘twere a hint
Which, if received, few might sustain:
A trembling over of small throes
In weak swoll’n lips, which to restrain
Desire is none, nor any rein. (3.7.17–25)
By the time he wrote this passage, Melville must have read Hawthorne’s remarks on the Guido Reni portrait of Beatrice Cenci in the Italian Notebooks, as well as the description in chapter 7 of The Marble Faun. Hilda has studied the portrait, since permission has not been given for it to be copied. Hilda’s picture shows “a sorrow that removed this beautiful girl out of the sphere of humanity, and set her in a far-off remote region, the remoteness of which—while yet her face is so close before us makes us shiver as at a spectre.” The expression is lost or slurred because, in the language of Hawthorne’s Miriam, “Everywhere we see oil-paintings, crayon-sketches, cameos, engravings, lithographs, pretending to be Beatrice, and representing the poor girl with blubbered eyes, a leer of coquetry, a merry look as if she were dancing, a piteous look as if she were beaten, and twenty other modes of fantastic mistakes.”
Clarel, withdrawing from the other pilgrims, has “passed among the crags” and seen “there / Like David in Adullum’s lair— / Could it be Vine, and quivering so?” (13–16). David is in the cave Adullam (1 Sam. 22) because he is fleeing the wrath of Saul and has had to feign madness to escape death. In his Bible, Melville had marked some relevant passages in Samuel. David relieved Saul of his evil spirit by playing the harp (16.23), a subject treated by Browning in his poem “Saul.” After the battle with the Philistines and David’s slaying of Goliath, he is greatly praised and Saul is “very wroth” and “displeased,” suspicious that David may get his kingdom, so that he “eyed David from that day and forward” (18.9). In the next verse that Melville marked (18.15), because David has acted wisely and “the Lord was with him,” Saul “was afraid of him.” The passage about David at Adullam is not marked. Melville has Vine seek a hiding place because he, like Clarel, is moved by the cry of Jesus crucified and, apparently, forsaken (Mark 15.34). If Vine wears the nameless look of Beatrice, it is because, according to the apocryphal story, she is portrayed in the painting on the night before her execution and is likewise forsaken. Christ on the Cross is the subject of much iconography, His anguish a larger thing than Vine’s. Real anguish and real fear can be conjured up from Old and New Testament exempla and from Renaissance legendry, but not from Vine’s nineteenth-century “small throes.”
As Vine represents the internalized, doubting, hypersensitive temperament of the artist, Rolfe is depicted in an opposite light, a man, in Bezanson’s words, who “is an experienced world-traveler, mariner, and intellectual who quickly assumes leadership among the pilgrims” (631). To Clarel’s view,
Trapper or pioneer
He looked, astray in Judah’s seat—
Or one who might his business ply
On waters under tropic sky. (1.31.4–7)
The depiction of his physical characteristics is vivid and intricate, a mingling of art and myth, for he is, in some part, a living work of art:
He rose, removed his hat to greet,
Disclosing so in shapely sphere
A marble brow over face embrowned:
So Sunium by her fane is crowned.
One read his superscription clear—
A genial heart, a brain austere—
And further, deemed that such a man
Though given to study, as might seem,
Was no scholastic partisan
Or euphonist of Academe,
But supplanted Plato’s theme
With daedal life in boats and tents. (1.31.9–20)
On his brief sojourn in Greece as he returned from Palestine in 1857, Melville did not record seeing Sunium, crowned with its fane, though he might have caught some glimpse of it around February 8. Since his allusion is literary and artistic, a probable source for it is a book he acquired in 1871, Christopher Wordsworth’s Greece: Pictorial, Descriptive, and Historical (1844), which, along with text, featured “three hundred and fifty engravings on wood and twenty-eight on steel, illustrative of the scenery, architecture, and costume of that country.” Wordsworth provides an engraving of the site and describes the ruins of the structure that he identifies as a temple of Minerva at Sunium. It stands “like the Portico or Vestibule of Athens,” the whiteness of its marble visible from a great distance, to remind the traveler approaching it from the south, “by the fair proportions of its architecture, and by the decorations of sculpture and of painting with which it was adorned, that he was coming to a land illustrious for its skill in the most graceful Arts.” Attica was thus “a sacred Temenos, whose boundaries were Seas and Mountains, and whose Propylaea was the Temple of Minerva on the promontory of Sunium” (128). Like the white marble temple of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, the marbled brow of Rolfe is the propylaeum, or entrance, to the temple of his “brain austere.”4 Davis perceptively notes that “Rolfe joins religious desire with aesthetic and sensuous appreciation” (144). Melville captures both in his portrayal of the brow as the locus of both wisdom and the beautiful architectural realization of devotion.
The marble of brow above the embrowning earth and rock is a “noble superscription” of the proper fusion of heart and head, the distinguishing trait that sets Rolfe off from Vine. In “Ethan Brand” Hawthorne had drawn the archetypal personage whose intellect had overborne his heart, the seat of feelings, so that it “had withered,—had contracted,—had hardened,—had perished.” When Brand, so branded, throws himself despairingly into the kiln to perish, his heart retains its shape, as though made of marble. Rolfe, equipped with a marble brow, escapes such a characterization with his “genial heart,” which continues to give him what Hawthorne called a “hold on the magnetic chain of humanity.” If Melville is providing, in Vine, a parodic portrait of Hawthorne, he is probably offering a parodic portrait of himself in Rolfe to establish the differences between the two men. He finds himself, like Rolfe, “Too frank, too unreserved, may be, / And indiscreet in honesty” (24–25).
Rolfe’s “daedal life” sets him off from the other pilgrims. Aspects of the word “daedal” include its hints of artistry, aesthetic cunning, and insistence upon the labyrinthine. Rolfe is an artist in his word-painting and in his understanding, in his description of Petra, of what art does. “Mid such a scene / Of Nature’s terror, how serene / That ordered form,” he says. Daedal also means “of the earth,” an important element in Rolfe’s complex character, for it softens the hardness of his marble intelligence and brings the necessary leavening of the coldness by adding the fertility of the soil.
Clarel tries to estimate the two men as he “glanced from him to Vine; / Peers, peers—yes, needs that these must pair.” They are “Exceptional natures, of a weather / Strange as the tropics with strange trees, / Strange birds strange fishes, skies and trees” (41–42, 45–47). Rolfe has within him some “tinge of the soil— / Like tarnish” in his look to match what, in his character, is a “touch of the untoward / In aspect hinting nothing froward” (27–31). The “untoward” is something refractory in one’s nature, and “froward” is stubborn, contrary, and obstinate; Rolfe, paradoxically, is one but not the other. The soil, too, although it relieves him of the classical hardness of marble, has its own taint. Like all Melvillean characters, he has a tarnish somewhere in his nature, though he is closest, in the poem, to a complete personality.
Bezanson characterizes Ruth as “Less a person than a symbol of vestal love” (Clarel 632), and, thus, she is a suitable foil for Clarel, who was “long confined / Apart like Vesta.” Melville, with his usually subtle onomastic sense, has given her the name of the Old Testament book and personage, the woman who, with her mother-in-law, Naomi, goes to Bethlehem after the deaths of her husband and his father. There she remarries and bears a son who will be an ancestor of David. The biblical story suggests what Goethe had called “the loveliest little idyll that tradition has transmitted to us,” and Clarel’s courting of his Ruth should be an idyllic and attractive portion of the poem. It does not turn out that way, however, and the love story is at first underplayed and then made tragic in a curiously muted manner. Melville’s treatment of what ought to be a central fact of Clarel’s life becomes a pessimistic comment on the tragic consequences of love.
When Clarel, in company with Nehemiah, visits the “Wall of Wail,” he first sees Ruth. She is thus shown poised against a huge masterpiece of architectural art, an “Ararat / Founded on beveled blocks how wide, / Reputed each a stone august / Of Solomon’s fane” (1.16.88–91), and, even in such an impressive setting, she resembles a precious work of art, for “She looked a legate to insure / That Paradise is possible / Now” (163–65). With her “Eve-like face,” she must resemble the artworks that Melville saw in Rome. Looking at the Vatican frescoes based upon the designs of Raphael, which Melville recorded seeing on March 2, 1857, “The Loggie—piazzas—sky between columns—Adam & Eve—The Eve—” (Journals 108). Christian and pagan elements intermix in the portrait in Ruth’s “Nereid eyes with virgin spell.” Her nereid eyes and other characteristics contrast with those of her mother. Nathan, Ruth’s father, met “A Jewess who about him threw / Else than Nerea’s amorous net / And dubious wile. ’Twas Miriam’s race” (1.17.203–05). Agar, “A sibyl, but a woman too,” does not practice the wiles of Nerea, or Nereis, or Eurybia, the sea nymph who, as Doris, mothered, with Nereus, the fifty nereids. But Ruth nevertheless inherited, if not from her mother then from elsewhere, something of the nereid quality. As Perseus fascinates Melville as an archetype of the vividly pictorial, so do the nereids so often associated with him. They enter into Melville’s painterly thinking, in this case from such pictures as Guido Reni’s Perseus Rescuing Andromeda. Cassiopeia, mother of Andromeda, boasted that her daughter and she were more beautiful than the nereids. When the sea nymphs complained to Poseidon, he sent the sea monster that Perseus must slay in order to rescue Andromeda.
Ruth’s portrait continues in a deepening sense of paradox. She seems a dove, it is true, but “deeper viewed, / What was it that looked part amiss? / A bit impaired? what lack of peace?”Even at this early stage there is a feeling of fated mystery about the girl that will play its way out in later portions of the poem. Still, Melville quiets these intangible feelings by the delicately coloristic depiction of the girl’s features:
Hebrew the profile, every line,
But as in haven fringed with palm,
Which Indian reefs embay from harm,
Belulled as in the vase the wine—
Red budded corals in remove,
Peep coy through quietudes above;
So through clear olive of the skin,
And features finely Hagarene;
Its way a tell-tale flush did win—
A tint which unto Israel’s sand
Blabbed of the June in some far clover land. (178–88)
Melville’s portrait of Ruth, like those of Lucy Tartan and Isabel, is a promising development and seems to signal a softening element in the generally harsh picture of the world that Clarel has entered. He has been “bereft while still young, / Mother or sister had not known.” But his love for Ruth and the welcome into her family allow Melville the use of some religious pictorialism. Noticing “What charm to woman may belong / When by a natural bent inclined,” he concludes that “On earth no better thing than this— / It canonizes very clay,” and apostrophizes the eternal female and maternal with “Madonna, hence thy worship is” (1.39.16–26). In Bologna, on March 30, 1857, Melville recorded his visit “To the Gallery. The Madonna of the Rosary.” As Horsford notes, he could have seen Madonnas by Lodovico Caracci or Zampieri Domenichino (Journals 116, 499). In his copy of Valery’s Travels, which he seems to have been using as a guidebook during this tour, Melville marked the descriptions of a number of paintings, including the Domenichino Madonna, “with its shower of roses, and the sublime old man’s head” (Cowen 2:711).
Melville’s satirical portraiture is reserved for the unnamed pilgrim known simply as a “banker of the rich Levant” who lives in “Thessalonica, / Which views Olympus” (2.1.105, 111–12). Like Chaucer’s franklin, he is vividly realized: “Parisian was his garb, and gay. / Upon his saddle-pommel lay / A rich Angora rug, for shawl / Or pillow” (119–22). The banker is a generalized realization of a servant of Mammon (Clarel 616–17). His place in the poem is as a foil to a religious ascetic such as Nehemiah. A heavy smoker, he is visibly uncomfortable on the journey—” Florid overmuch and corpulent, / Labored in lungs, and audibly” (2.12.19–20). Rolfe generously changes horses with him and then, in reflecting upon this representative of Mammon, places him in an unusual connection with examples of the visual arts:
Ill would it accord
If nabob with asthmatic breath
Lighted on Holbein’s Dance of Death
Sly slipped among his prints from Claude.
Cosmetic-users scarce are bold
To face a skull. (28–33)
The Claudian landscapes, attractive and soothing, would have offered the old banker an unpleasing jolt if Holbein’s unsavory depiction of death turned up among them.
The banker has no name, but as Ekaterina Georgoudaki has shown, he is closely based on Djékis Abbot, whom Melville had met on his journey. His journal for December 7, 1856, records a visit to “Abbots place enclosed by high thick stone wall,” where he viewed conspicuous signs of wealth and was “Served with sweetmeats & liqueurs & coffee” (Journals 55–56). As usual, Melville’s journal entry is only a hint of all he has observed; he will depend on his capacious memory to enliven his portrait.
For all that he is associated with art, the banker simply considers artworks another possession. Irritable about his companions on the pilgrimage, he regards them as “Pedants and poor! nor used to dine / In ease of table-talk benign —/ Steeds, pictures, ladies, gold, Tokay, / Gardens and baths, the English news, / Stamboul, the market” (2.10.187–91). Prints of Claudian landscapes or even of Holbein’s allegory of death, statues in his garden, and an architectural masterpiece of a house are the signs of wealth and power. Even the possession of a prospective son-in-law in Glaucon, his young companion on the pilgrimage, lends stature to his economic superiority. The pilgrimage itself is not undertaken, as it is with others, from a deep desire to see the outward forms of religious feeling. He has “dull time to kill” and, with the young man, “Scarce through self-knowledge or self-love / They ventured Judah’s wilds to rove” (2.1.173–76).
Mortmain is first characterized by his name, for “so in whim / Some moral wit had christened him” (2.1.190–91). To be christened is more than to be named or nicknamed. This person is baptized with the name of “dead hand,” a fitting cognomen to his system of theological belief. In The Spirit Above the Dust, Ronald Mason perceptively suggests that Mortmain “is a more intellectual, more disillusioned Bulkington” who finds no comfort in idealism and detachment, until finally he “asks no more than oblivion, and oblivion is all he gets” (237). Here is a striking indication that, in some ways, Clarel may be thought of as a reconsidered Moby-Dick, developing and amplifying ideas proposed in the novel. Melville conspicuously withholds details of portraiture of Mortmain in the long description given of his background (2.4) but makes him into an artist of sorts in “The Inscription” (2.31). Derwent discovers a rock on which Mortmain has “Traced in dull chalk” a kind of picture—“a cross; three stars in row / Upright, two more for thwarting limb / Which drooped oblique” (22–24). He is somewhat like the carpenter in Moby-Dick who paints vermilion stars on Stubbs’s paddle. The pilgrims attempt to make sense of his rather crude device, created in “passion’s whim,” as Vine puts it, musing “in silent heart.” It might be the representation of the Southern Cross, Clarel believes, and is seconded by Rolfe. But like painters who will not let the image speak for itself, but, in the manner of Turner, append verses to explain the pictorial, Mortmain has resorted to verse. Bereft of Turner’s pictorial skill, he is a somewhat better poet. He sees the “device” in the language of coats of arms. The stars are “emblazoned,” as it were in the skies, and, as “symbols vain,” have simply “declined to heraldries” (53–59). As we have seen with the hieroglyphs of Queequeg’s religion, when the living qualities of a belief have “declined” into artistic representation, meaning has somehow been lost, as it may have been done in the case of “Orion’s sword.” If this is so, then “In constellations unadored, / Christ and the giant equal prize” (70–71). Bryan C. Short discusses Mortmain’s song as one of those that “reaffirm the significance of a faith” or “conveys the attractiveness of the dead symbol” (563). But, instead, his rough scrawling on the rock seems to confirm his status: “By one who wails the loss, / This altar to the Slanting Cross” (46–47).
In the canto, “Mortmain Reappears” (2.34), we are given a sense of the Swede’s actual appearance. The pilgrims, eager enough to see him, nevertheless “shrank or fell adroop” at sight of him, and with good reason. He is portrayed in menacing terms:
Like Hecla ice inveined with marl
And frozen cinders showed his face
Rigid and darkened. Shunning parle
He seated him aloof in place,
Hands clasped about the knees drawn up
As round the cask the binding hoop—
Condensed in self, or like a seer
Unconscious of each object near,
While yet, informed, the nerve may reach
Like wire under wave to furthest beach. (2.34.10–19)
The frozen spewings of the Icelandic volcano, once active and fiery but now immovable, match the name of Mortmain and his face, “Rigid and darkened.” While around it, as Sabine Baring-Gould wrote in his travel book, Iceland (1863), “clustered the white heads of the mountain asphodel” (190). Asphodel, as the mystic sign of Agath, is life below the death of fire. Melville thus sets up a contrast between the two men by his use of pictorial techniques.
Agath, the “pilgrim-timoneer,” is a human work of art—carved, wrinkled, and tattooed. His “weird and weather-beaten face, / Bearded and pitted, and fine vexed / With wrinkles of cabala text” (3.12.32–34), like the tattooed face of Queequeg, is embellished with a once-meaningful symbolical and now cabalistic set of lines and forms that heralds an occult and esoteric theosophy too withdrawn from human considerations to be seen otherwise as art. He possesses “a beauty grave” bald except for “a silvery round / Of small curled bud-like locks which bound / His temples as with asphodel” (42–44).
The simile of the asphodel is resonant with myth, poetry, and the pictorial. In the eleventh book of the Odyssey, the great journey into the underworld to seek knowledge from Tiresias, Odysseus encounters Achilles, who first expresses his pain at being dead and then asks news of his son Neoptolemus. Odysseus praises the young man’s actions in the Trojan Horse:
This made the soul of swift Achilles tread
A march of glory through the herby mead,
For joy to hear me so renown his son;
And vanish’d stalking.
The translation is Chapman’s (11.731–34) and is emphatically marked in Melville’s copy (Cowen 2.53). Chapman’s version does not mention the asphodel, but Melville would have known that it is the flower of the Elysian fields. In Milton’s Comus he could have read “To embathe / In nectared leaves strewed with asphodel” (838), and his favorite Thomas Browne spoke, in Hydriotaphia, of how “The dead are made to eat Asphodels about the Elysian meadows.” A more recent reminder would have been Tennyson, who wrote in “The Lotos-Eaters” of “some, ’tis whispered—down in hell / Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell, / Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel” (168–70). Agath’s arm is “a living fresco,” as Derwent calls it. It is “A thing of art, vermeil and blue, / A crucifixion in tattoo, / With trickling blood-drops strange to see.” This portion of the pictograph, with its bright red and blue on a field of white, the man’s arm, would greatly resemble a medallion or coat of arms. But Derwent’s characterization of the entire illustration as fresco is justified because of the complexity of the incised images:
Above that emblem of the loss,
Twin curving palm-boughs draping met
In manner of a canopy
Over an equi-limbed small cross
And three tri-spiked and equal crowns:
And under these a star was set:
And all was tanned and toned in browns.
In chapel erst which knew the mass,
A mullioned window’s umber glass
Dyed with some saintly legend old,
Obscured by cobwebs; this might hold
Some likeness to the picture rare
On arm here webbed with straggling hair. (4.2.50–65)
The ekphrasis is doubly proposed in the backgrounds offered for the embellishments. The old man’s arm, “tanned and toned in browns,” rivals the “window’s umber glass” of the chapel that Melville adds as the other element of his simile. The elaborate symbolism of palm boughs, cross, crowns, and star is lost on Agath, who believes that it “by some / A charm is held ’gainst watery doom” (95–96). But it is a signal to the others, who interpret or question it as they will. Derwent’s interpretation is the most conventional, as might be expected. The palm signifies Judea, the crowns are those of the magi, the star is that of Bethlehem, and the “cross scarce needs a word, agree” (131–36). Rolfe, more learned, more interpretative, and more historically attuned, links the tattoo with the marks of pilgrims who have made the journey to Calvary (Clarel 821–23), as well as with the artistic renditions of Crusaders who bore the artwork upon armor or body. As Rolfe justly concludes, it is another form of religious art that has lost its significance, and “Losing the import and true key, / Descends to boatswains of the brine” (124–25). Agath, like Queequeg, is a living work of art who cannot speak the message of his pictographs.
Architecture, as a powerful and impressive art form, plays a significant role in the poem, casting its spell over pilgrims and tourists. In Palestine one is overwhelmed by buildings built on ruins and, often, built of ruins. As any pilgrim must, Clarel makes his expected visit to that most revered shrine, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where he sees, “in sculptured stone, / Dim and defaced” the depiction of “the march / Of Christ into another gate— / The golden and triumphal one, / Upon Palm’s Morn.” This exhibition of the entrance’s sculptured stone entrance should be compared to Melville’s ironic description in his journal entry: “Much elaborate sculpture once graced what is now visible of the original facade; but Time has nibbled it away, till it now looks like so much spoiled pastry at which the mice have been at work” (Journals 89). Bartlett’s Walks about the City and Environs of Jerusalem, one of Melville’s often-used sources in his composition of the poem, provides an engraving of the church that offers a more neutral picture, perhaps in keeping with the more neutral language of the poem. The picture shows hardly any of the defacement of the entryway (Clarel 714).
Several of the architectural features of the city are visited and alluded to but without much attempt at pictorial depiction. The Golden Gate (1.10.75–104), David’s Tower (1.11.65–77), and the Ecce Homo Arch (1.13.20–30) are each given their place and do add a portion of the movement in the poem, but they remain unclear, as a guidebook notation might. Melville is not intent upon giving equal weight to all the historically interesting features of the pilgrimage. However, his pictorial sense operates briefly but effectively in his description of “The Wall of Wail.” Clarel and Nehemiah follow a group of pilgrims and, in a “sunken yard / Obscure, where dust and rubbish blow,” they observe the wall,
Founded on beveled blocks how wide
Reputed each a stone august
Of Solomon’s fane. (1.16.85–92)
This impressive piece of architecture links art and history, and the illustration provided in Bartlett’s Walks about the City and Environs of Jerusalem (Clarel 733), which Melville acquired before writing the passage, gave him the chance to pursue his “object, the saturation of my mind with the atmosphere of Jerusalem, offering myself up a passive subject, and no unwilling one, to its weird impressions” (Journals 86).
Full ekphrastic description is given to “The rifled Sepulcher of Kings” when Ruth and Clarel, as new young lovers, visit this “waste where beauty clings.” The sepulcher, itself a work of art, is embellished with the works of artists:
Hewn from the rock a sunken space
Conducts to garlands—fit for vase—
In sculptured frieze above a tomb:
Palm leaves, pine apples, grapes. These bloom,
Involved in dearth—to puzzle us—
As ‘twere thy line, Theocritus,
Dark Joel’s text of terror threading:
Yes, strange that Pocahontas-wedding
Of contraries in old belief—
Hellenic cheer, Hebraic grief.
The homicide Herods, men aver,
Inurned behind that wreathage were. (1.28.25–36)
The passage is full, even clotted, with the results of Melville’s observation, reading, and thought. The line of Theocritus, embodying Hellenic cheer, is not made clear from the context, but Joel’s “text of terror” and an example of “Hebraic grief” might be the passage that Melville marked: “Egypt shall be a desolation, and Edom shall be a desolate wilderness, for the violence against the children of Judah, because they have shed innocent blood in their land” (Joel 3:19). Melville enriches this canto by using the opportunity to introduce Vine in this stony atmosphere of vine leaves and ruins, for Vine surely combines the contrarieties of Hellenic and Hebraic.
The most spectacular example of architectural ekphrasis in the poem occurs in the canto “Of Petra.” Melville had met a “Petra party” (Journals 80), but Clarel and the pilgrims will not ride south to see the long-deserted city, and so Derwent asks Rolfe for a description. The features in Rolfe’s monologue are those mentioned by other visitors to the Red City. Above the “purple gloom” of the cliffs, the natural beauty of oleanders mixes with the “rosy stain” of the rock that forms “porch and pediment in crag.” Rolfe expresses his astonishment: “One starts. In Esau’s waste are blent / Ionian form, Venetian tint” (2.30.18–19).
We have seen Melville create ekphrastic representations of existent artworks that he has observed and have noted how he can create descriptions of imaginary art objects. Here he moves into new reaches of rhetorical pictorialism in evoking a real masterpiece of architecture that he has never seen. For this accomplishment, as Bezanson has carefully documented it, he was dependent upon the description of Petra in Arthur Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine. Stanley is insistent upon the array of colors at the site: “All the describers have spoken of bright hues—scarlet, sky-blue, orange, etc. Had they taken the courage to say instead, ‘dull crimson, indigo, yellow, and purple’ their account would have lost something in effect, but gained much in truth. Nor really would it have lost much any way. For the colours, though not gaudy,—or rather because they are not gaudy,— are gorgeous” (Cowen 2:611). Stanley thus provides the elements of Melville’s “Venetian tint,” an effect noted during his stay in Venice. The journal entry for April 6, 1857, reports his response to the scene of a “shining lagoon through windows draped with rosy silks … silver censers” a scene with a “Great gorgeousness of effect” (119). The beautiful women that he sees, with skins of “clear, rich, golden brown,” are like those of Titian’s, with their “rich brown complexions.” He notes St. Mark’s “at sunset, gilt mosaics, pinnacles,” and “precious marbles, from extreme age,” that “look like a mosaic of rare old soaps.” No wonder the splendid colors cause him to reflect, “Rather be in Venice on a rainy day, than any other capital on fine one” (119–20). Something of this buoyancy of colors gets into the description of Petra.
In addition to his reading and marking in Stanley, Melville also marked relevant passages about Petra in his copy of Bartlett’s Forty Days in the Desert. Bartlett is always conscious of previous explorers. Setting out on his “formidable” journey he is especially aware of “a feeling of melancholy” while standing “within a stone’s throw too of the grave of poor Burckhardt” (Cowen 1:163). He later praises Burckhardt’s account, the “accurate notes of Irby and Mangles” and Count Leon de Laborde and M. Linant, who obtained “materials for the splendid work which first introduced Petra to the European public,” and knows the “lively account” of John Lloyd Stephens. El Deir is “a remarkable architectural facade” with a “most singular … very mysterious appearance” (167). He notes “the wonderful contrasts of the colouring, the variety of the overhanging foliage of the wild fig, the crimson-flowered oleander, and the trailing bright-green plants, with the plan of light and shade among the rocks.” With triple side-lines, Melville marked a passage descriptive of the whole scene of edifices, where “The mass of crags out of which they are hewn is also most picturesque, rising in numerous jagged points and clefts” (168). Bartlett’s experience as an artist is demonstrated in his remarks about the colors of the rocks, a passage that Melville partially marked:
The general tinting of the sandstone mountains environing the city is very fine; the broad rich red and grey tones such as the artist revels in; but, in addition, the surface of the rocks is veined after the manner of watered silk, with a most indescribably and startling variety of hues—white, saffron, orange, vermillion, pink, crimson, and violet, in endless shades and tints, in some places forming combinations really beautiful. (168)
He marked another passage on El Deir, which offers, “from its vastness and the wildness of its situation, an impression almost of awe.” Bartlett’s artistic eye takes note that “it is very defective in its style, for it is ponderous without grandeur, and elaborate without elegance” (168). Perhaps this is what Rolfe means by the door “sculptured in elfin freak.”
The “Ionian form” is present in poetic phrases limning the shapes of Petra, the “porch and pediment in crag.” The dizzying heights surrounding these great architectural entryways to temple and tomb mark the sublimity of the deserted city, where
Mid such a scene
Of Nature’s terror, how serene
That ordered form. Nor less ’tis cut
Out of that terror—does abut
Thereon: there’s Art. (41–45)
The passage, splendidly depicting a fabulous work of art, presents a problem, that of function within the large structure of the poem. The word “abut” is particularly relevant, since the elaborately carved fronts of the Khasne and other cliff constructions promise more than is behind them in the caves. Bezanson cites the themes of the passage as “that the charm of expectation surpasses fulfillment, that art is an ordered form on the rim of the abyss, and that all solicitations for final meanings remain unanswered”; he makes the point that the canto is “an episodic intrusion” that “may have been added at any time” (Clarel 784). Shirley Dettlaff makes the passage an essential part of Melvillean aesthetics, pointing out that, while “the serenity of ordered form can co-exist with the terror of nature’s chaos,” there is not a complete transformation—”the carved buildings create only a momentary relief from inhospitable surroundings” (215–16).
However, Melville’s ekphrasis plays a functional part in the poem. The Petra canto is embedded in a discussion initiated by Derwent and Rolfe at the shore of the Dead Sea. To the south of the pilgrim’s route is Mount Hor and “prohibited Seir / In cut-off Edom” (2.29.78–79). Nehemiah then brings up the curse of God upon Edom, “None there pass through—no, never, never,” a paraphrase of the biblical “none shall pass through it for ever and ever” (Isa. 34:10). The theme is further established in Ezekiel 35:3 in the words of God, “O mount Seir, I am against thee, and I will make thee most desolate.” After the rediscovery in 1812 of Petra, the deserted city in Edom, its long desolation was interpreted by some as the desolation foretold by the Lord. In the discussion, Margoth and Derwent disagree with the predominant theory. “My friend Max Levi, he passed through,” Margoth says (85), and Derwent remarks that one must
make allowance meet
For Orientalism’s display
In Scripture, where the chapters treat
Of mystic themes. (98–101)
“Ay, Keith’s grown obsolete” (104), claims Margoth (referring to the writings of Alexander Keith, the most prominent of the writers who argued for the curse of God and the desolation of Edom [Clarel 783–84]). Rolfe, as someone who has passed through Petra, is a vivid proof of the ineffectiveness of the curse.
Stanley, Melville’s chief source for the Petra canto, does not enter into the argument of God’s curse upon the city. It is clear that Melville knew of Keith’s argument, and he may have known another book that described the Red City. John G. Kinnear’s Cairo, Petra, and Damascus in 1839 (London 1841), written as a series of letters, contains an interesting account of Petra. Kinnear, accompanied by the artist, David Roberts, discovered that, when he first saw the city, his “expectations were far more than realised.” The passage continues
It is certainly one of the most wonderful scenes in the world. The eye wanders in amazement from the stupendous rampart of rocks which surrounds the valley to the porticoes and ornamented doorways sculptured on its surface. The dark yawning entrances of the temples and tombs, and the long range of excavated chambers, give an air of emptiness and desolation to the scene…. But in the valley itself, the patches of green corn among the ruins, the stream bordered with oleander and willow, the sweet sound of running water, and the cry of the cuckoo and partridge, were all delightful and refreshing after the silence and dreary solitude of the Desert. (132)
Kinnear sees and describes all the outstanding sites, the Khasne, El Syk, the “convent,” or “El Dier,” as he calls it in contradiction of other writers who settle for “El Deir.” He concludes with an earnest consideration of the prophetic curse and disagrees by citing the passage of pilgrims through the country and “a party of merchants” who “bivouacked beside us one night” and told of passing through annually. Moreover, the streams and land have not turned into pitch, nor the dust into brimstone, as the prophecy had claimed. Kinnear’s explanation is that the prophecy has a “double application, to the visible and to a mystical Edom, as the prophecies against Babylon are applied in a secondary sense to Rome, the mystical Babylon” (156–57). Kinnear’s use of “mystical” for the prophecies is seemingly echoed in Derwent’s “mystic themes” in Scripture.
Derwent’s innocent-sounding skepticism extends beyond the prophecies in the Petra canto. To Rolfe’s “a dream the Edomite,” he makes the rejoinder that
dreamers all who dream of him—
Though Sinbad’s pleasant in the skim.
Paestum and Petra: good to use
For sedative when one would muse. (60–64)
A skim is superficial, and so are the wonderful adventures of Sinbad. Paestum, the ruined Greek colony of Sybaris famed for its temples, is as minatory as Petra but does not bear the burden of the Lord’s curse. The lesson is driven home in the next canto when the cross and stars are discovered chalked upon a rock with a “mystical” verse about “symbols vain once counted wise, / And gods declined to heraldries” (2.31.52, 58–59). The versifier then questions the Cross,
When, ages hence, they lift their eyes
Tell, what shall they retain of thee?
But class thee with Orion’s sword?
In constellations unadored,
Christ and the Giant equal prize? (67–71)
The Cross, not nearly as marvelous a pictorial apparition as the city of Petra, nevertheless adds its point about the skeptical religious view.
The matter of Petra and the Cross is part of a problem enunciated by Rolfe, who earlier stated that “All’s now revised: / Zion, like Rome, is Niebuhrized” (1.34.18–19). Barthold Niebuhr’s History of Rome “sought to winnow out factual history from the long accumulations of myth and legend” (Clarel 753). In turn, George Grote’s History of Greece, in its earlier chapters, sought to Niebuhrize Grecian myth and history, as John Stuart Mill’s Edinburgh Review essay pointed out. Zion, as Rolfe observes, is being Niebuhrized and so, as he may have added, is the great mythic city of Petra. The author of the verses shown with the Cross certainly wonders if Christianity will become as much a myth as the Greek myths.
By attaching to the lengthy third part of the poem, with its thirty-two cantos, the name of “Mar Saba,” Melville gives this architectural gem its rightfully central place in the poem, and its ekphrasis extends over many lines of poetry. The ninth canto approaches the subject prelusively by evoking monasteries in a great range of other places and times—one in the Alps, a “desert convent of the Copts” in Egypt, one near Mount Olympus, others in the Grand Chartreuse, Vallambrosa, and Montserrat (3.9.1–32). Saba, however, is unique; as “the loneliest,” which “with an eagle’s theft / Seizeth and dwelleth in the cleft” of the high mountainous region. The Greek monastery is graced by a splendid heraldic standard, “With mystic silvery brede divine, / St. Basil’s banner of Our Lord … Stained with the five small wounds and red” (53–57). The monastery church, “the minster,” is rich in embellishment, “Gilded with venerable gold,” and possessed of riches in “Plate of Byzantium, stones and spars, / Urim and Thummin, gold and green”; the Old Testament is read aloud “From parchment, not plebeian print.” Even Derwent, suspicious as always of whatever clashes with his rather utilitarian Anglican world, finds the church “A goodly fane” (1–30, 53).
The monastery is impressive from every vantage point. Clarel, on the watch-towers with Derwent, has a view of “All the mountain-land … poised as in a chaos true, / Or throe-lock of transitional earth” (3.21.11–17). Leaving the tower, he chances to see into a crypt where, posed on benches, “Sat the dim conclave of the dead, / Encircled where the shadow rules, / By sloping theaters of skulls” (3.24.52–54). As a souvenir of Mar Saba, Melville owned a watercolor given by the artist, Peter Toft, in 1882, of The Holy Palm of Mar Saba Palestine (Wallace, “Berkshire” 86; Marovitz 101). Writing before this event, Melville places the palm in the center of his meditations. As Sanford Marovitz notes, the palm has some such function as the doubloon in Moby-Dick, allowing “four principal speakers [to] address the palm in monologue from as many different vantage points” (102). Vine, who confesses that “I but love the past,” sees the scene as accomplished picture: “Mar Saba, thou fine long-ago / Lithographed here” (3.26.15, 20–21). Mortmain dies while viewing the palm, his “filmed orbed fixed upon the Tree,” an eagle’s feather lightly resting on his lips. In death, he is seen architecturally, “undermined / In frame; the brain a tocsin-bell / Overburdensome for citadel / Whose base was shattered” (3.32.30–42).
In Bethlehem, the pilgrims visit the Church of the Star. Led by a monk whose appearance has sculptural significance—”the feet, the face / Alike in lucid marble grace” (4.13.26–27)—they pass through “long-drawn double colonnades: / Monoliths two-score and eight” (41–42), to the star in the pavement that marks where the Magi once stood, and then by way of “a rock-hewn stair,” to the “place of the Nativity.” Here, Melville’s ekphrastic touches combine into a fully realized picture:
Dim pendent lamps, in cluster small
Were Pleiads of the mystic hall;
Fair lamps of silver, lamps of gold—
Rich gifts devout of monarchs old,
Kings catholic. Rare objects beamed
All round, recalling things but dreamed:
Solomon’s talismans garnered up,
His sword, his signet-ring and cup.
In further caverns, part revealed,
What silent shapes like statues kneeled;
What brown monks moved by twinkling shrines
Like Aztecs down in silver mines. (114–25)
The pilgrims are startled by the discordance of perception implied by the dissimilarity of a richly embellished grotto and the Nativity tale of “the Stable mean and poor.” They are inclined to question the idea of a Nativity taking place in a cave, with the sort of skepticism that Maundrell had expressed in the seventeenth century and Harriet Martineau echoed in the nineteenth century by quoting Maundrell. Other richly embellished objects leave Derwent in a state of frivolity, though “open levity ’twas not” (199). The situation of the manger, “marble lined,” with draperies including a “damask one of gold and white / Rich flowered with pinks embroidered bright” might be cause for levity, but the pilgrims are moved by the sight of “herdsmen in the shaggy coat” who worship at the shrine.
Throughout the poem, Melville describes works of art or makes use of them in allusive passages. One of the most suggestive of these occurs in a powerful speech by Celio. Of the passage, Bezanson says, “One of the better dramatic sequences of the poem is his eloquent defiance of Christ at the Arch of Ecce Homo” (Clarel 618). In his edition of Clarel, Bezanson has characterized Celio as embittered by the deformity of his body and noted that he has “the hope of extracting some new talisman from Judah’s ancient secret.” As he stands at the Arch, Celio makes a lengthy speech, part of which is as follows:
Anew, anew,
For this thou bleedest, Anguished Face;
Yea, thou through ages to accrue,
Shalt the Medusa shield replace:
In beauty and in terror too
Shalt paralyze the nobler race—
Smite or suspend, perplex, deter—
Tortured, shalt prove a torturer. (1.13.92–99)
The iconography of the Medusa Shield is a lengthy and complex one. Melville must have encountered Joseph Forsyth’s description when he acquired Forsyth’s account of travels in Italy in the early 1800s, just after Napoleon’s plunder of that country’s art treasures. Touring the Vatican, Forsyth commented on the loss to the French of the Apollo and mentions the statue of Perseus that “stands fronting the cast of the departed Apollo and seems to challenge comparison.” His description of the Perseus would have greatly interested Melville: “Perhaps the hero is too delicate and smooth for a mortal warriour; he has the soft beauty of a Mercury, or an Antinous. Instead of turning in horrour from the petrifick head, he eyes it with indignant complacency.” A footnote describes the aegis of Minerva, where “the Gorgon is generally a flat, round, gaping face; on the vases, called Etruscan, it has the tusk of a boar; but Canova’s Medusa has classick authority for its soft and feminine beauty” (Forsyth 195–96). It is clearly not the Medusa of Canova that Melville has in mind but the Gorgonian one as his exemplary horrific sublime.
One of the most impressive uses of artworks occurs in the canto of Clarel entitled “Prelusive,” in a passage of more than thirty lines given to a description and comment on “Piranezi’s rarer prints.” These are very likely the set of Carceri (Clarel 789–91), “rarer” because they were not easily available in America and because Melville did not encounter them during his art pilgrimages in Europe. The Lathers collection of engravings, accessible to Melville, had works, not identified, of Piranesi (Cohen, “Lathers” 23), and Melville might have seen illustrated books not specified in any of his writings.
The ekphrasis is carefully arranged to make the most of the “Interiors measurelessly strange” that impress the poet:
Stairs upon stairs which dim ascend
In series from plunged Bastiles drear—
Pit under pit; long tier on tier
Of shadowed galleries which impend
Over cloisters, cloisters without end;
The height, the depth—the far, the near;
Ring-bolts to pillars in vaulted lanes,
And dragging Rhadamanthine chains;
These less of wizard influence lend
Than some allusive chambers closed. (2.35.5–14)
As the poet reminds the reader, it will be better for him not to read the next canto if he, “green or gray retain / Childhood’s illusion, or but feign” (38–39), for the next canto will destroy whatever illusions he may have. The next canto, “Sodom,” is a lucid and lengthy exposition of the Pauline text, Paul’s “mystery of iniquity,” the text from 2 Thess. 2:7 that often engages Melville’s attention. Most of “Sodom” is given over to the exposition, with examples, of man’s labyrinthine iniquity, and this exposition is left to Mortmain, the “dead hand” of the church. The prelusive canto is meant to prepare us for that, for, like Piranesi’s labyrinthine stairs, pits, galleries, and cloisters, like the ringbolts and chains, like man’s “penetralia of retreat— / His heart, with labyrinths replete” (35.21–22), the finally insoluble mystery that “the greatest enemy to man is man” is put forth in its most vivid pictorial terms.5 It is of great interest that Melville’s labyrinth is that of Piranesi’s prison rather than the Daedalian labyrinth of Minos, a classical allusion one might have expected him to use.6
In the “Sodom” canto, Mortmain uses brilliant and evocative exempla to support his (and Melville’s) disturbing indictment of humanity’s inhumanity: “Burkers,” who, like resurrectionist William Burke, kindly suffocates victims in order not to ruin the cadavers for dissection; Medea, the mass murderer; Jael, the murderer of Sisera. It is because of such examples that Melville visualizes, in the prelusive canto, the method of engraving used in Piranesi’s work, the “touches bitten in the steel / By aqua-fortis” (34–35). Aqua-fortis, the nitric acid used in steel engraving, is also the ancient “strong water,” its corrosiveness the bitter water of the Dead Sea.
In Bethlehem, the pilgrims are called to attention by Derwent, who points out an object for them to examine. It turns out to be “an ancient monument— Rude stone; but tablets lent a charm” (4.20.8–9). Melville offers a detailed account of the three tablets that the pilgrims observe:
In one
The Tender Shepherd mild looked down
Upon the rescued weanling lost,
Snugged now in arms. In emblem crossed
By pastoral crook, Christ’s monogram
(Wrought with a medieval grace)
Showed on the square opposed in face.
But chiefly did they feel the claim
Of the main tablet; there a lamb
On passive haunches upright sate
In patience which reproached not fate;
The two fine furry fore-legs drooping
Like tassels; while the shearer, stooping,
Embraced it with one arm; and all
The fleece rolled off in seamless shawl
Flecked here and there with hinted blood.
It did not shrink; no cry did come:
In still life of that stone subdued
Shearer and shorn alike were dumb. (10–28)
As Bezanson notes, there does not seem to be an existent monument for Melville’s observation or in the travel literature (Clarel 827). So the ekphrasis has the freedom of not being tied down to a precise description of an existent artwork, and Melville is allowed to dispose the pictorial elements in the most effective manner for his needs. Bezanson perceptively calls attention to the near paraphrase of Isa. 53:9: “he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before his shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.” In the dumb show of the carving both shearer and shorn are arrested in movement.
Near the end of the poem, Melville composes the description of a procession in the Via Crucis, finding the grouping “As ‘twere a frieze” (4.29.26). He is thus able to give to the movement the stasis and formality of a carved entablature, rich with varied life:
Bowed water-carriers; Jews with staves,
Infirm gray monks; over-loaded slaves;
Turk soldiers—young, with home-sick eyes;
A Bey, bereaved through luxuries;
Strangers and exiles; Moslem dames
Long-veiled in monumental white,
Dumb from the mounts which memory claims;
A half-starved vagrant Edomite;
Sore-footed Arab girls, which toil
Depressed under heap of garden-spoil;
The patient ass with panniered urn;
Sour camels humped by heaven and man,
Whose languid necks through habit turn
For ease—for ease they hardly gain.
In varied forms of fate they wend—
Or man or animal, ’tis one:
Cross-bearers all, alike they tend
And follow, slowly follow on. (4.34.27–44)
This impressive and artfully arranged grouping of citizenries should, as Clarel recognizes, move him closer to belief. But he is unable to discern “A message from beneath the stone” (53).
Although Clarel “Vanishes in the obscurer town” (56) and from the sight of the reader and seems unable to wrest the conclusion that he has so obviously sought in his pilgrimage, Melville, as narrator, does not quite permit such a moral defeat. Instead, he brings together a grouping of art allusions:
The ancient Sphinx still keeps the porch of shade,
And comes Despair, whom not her calm may cow,
And coldly on that adamantine brow
Scrawls undeterred his bitter pasquinade.
But Faith (who from the scrawl indignant turns)
With blood warm oozing from her wounded trust,
Inscribes even on her shards of broken urns
The sign o’ the cross—the spirit above the dust! (4.35.4–11)
The shards of broken urns formed a predominantly gloomy image for Melville the traveler in Italy. In the poem “The Ravaged Villa,” he speaks of the “sylvan vases” broken into shards and the way in which, “flung to kiln, Apollo’s bust / Makes lime for Mammon’s tower.” Faith has the fragile and breakable urn for its armory, while Despair is adamantine, inflexible, and unbreakable. The pasquino, a statue of ancient Rome, served as a posting place for satires, lampoons, and ridicule. The sign of the cross mingles with the coat of arms of the Melville family (Clarel 839–40) to provide as hopeful a conclusion as possible: “Even death may prove unreal at the last, / And stoics be astounded into heaven” (25–26).