IN THE QUARTER-CENTURY between Pierre (1852) and Clarel (1876), Melville wrote both fiction and poetry in which he found partial and sometimes fitful uses for the intensities of ekphrastic composition. There are, of course, good reasons for his interrupted progress. Descriptions of art and the creation of a painterly element are not always required in literary works, and it seems that special conditions are called for to bring them into being. The protagonist or narrator of a tale and the speaker in a poem must demonstrate knowledge of the sister arts, love for their beauties and signification, and an awareness of how these fuse with the resources of the literary imagination. Melville’s creation of such personages as Redburn, Ishmael, Pierre, and Clarel, who often seem fixated upon artists and works of art, offered the most likely prospects for this fusion, and his ample reaches of learning and artifice ensure the success of the results. As director of all utterances in the poems, he could depend upon the convention of an erudite narrativity to deal with all aspects of pictorialism.
In the three years following the publication of Pierre, Melville concentrated his best efforts in creating the short story, the novella, and the literary sketch. Having lavished the best of his imaginative sense of the art analogy during the previous three years upon Moby-Dick and Pierre, he was able to consider how to make the most effective use of what his practice had taught him and, while no doubt driven to magazine publication by economic exigencies, to make the shorter forms yield what they could in the way of pictorial opportunities.
The five literary works that constitute The Piazza Tales (1856) were carefully chosen from a larger number of short pieces written in the three-year period after the disastrous failure of Pierre with the public. In their selection and placement we see Melville’s deliberate effort to create a cohesive and coherent group of short pieces rather than a volume of what might have simply been “tales and sketches.” As a way of holding the volume together, he establishes a painterly scene and situation in his prose introduction, “The Piazza,” which implies that with his skills he can create a genuine unity of view. After all, the landscape itself invites landscape painters; in fact, the area is “A very paradise of painters” (1). The narrator intimates that using his “panoramic piazza” will allow him to “feast upon the view” of the natural world about him. Like a bench in a picture-gallery, the piazza affords the “time and ease” for him to enjoy these “galleries hung, month after month anew, with pictures ever fading into pictures ever fresh” (2). The narrator concludes, after Marianna’s tale, by finding his piazza to be a “box-royal” or an “amphitheatre” from which he can view, as artworks, a variety of scenes. The situation is an appealing one, promising another narrator who, like Redburn and Ishmael, loves art and who will view each of the scenes he paints in the stories with an eye that recognizes their kinship with engaging and beautiful art objects. On his piazza, he is “haunted by Marianna’s face, and many as real a story” (12). “The Piazza” embodies a noble concept in its insistence on making a collection of shorter pieces into a coherent and cohesive whole and will serve as exemplar for the volumes of poems, Battle-Pieces, John Marr and Other Sailors, Timoleon, and the one or two or possibly even three unpublished and incomplete volumes left at his death. He seems to be driven always by an impressive urge toward the integrity of incorporation and embodiment. The integrity of this volume of prose pieces as a unified composition depends largely upon the validity of his apologia in “The Piazza.”
The first story in Piazza Tales, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” does not really permit its narrator, an elderly lawyer, to see things in a distinctively ekphrastic way. There are hints in his description of his chambers, which he calls “deficient in what landscape painters call ‘life,’” and he can here be said to be depicting an architectural artwork. But the description is brief and, from the viewpoint of rendering an objet d’art in prose, quite unsatisfactory. The lawyer’s allusion to the Wall Street area as being “deserted as Petra” is effective, as is the immediately following allusion to what must be a painting, or at least an engraving, of “Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage” (27–28). The employment of the Tombs, or “the Halls of Justice,” offers Melville the opportunity to elaborate on the oddity of that structure, secure in its Egyptological imitativeness and gloomy authority, but he declines to make use of its possibilities.
Several scenes of “Benito Cereno” offer excellent situations for the narrator of Captain Delano’s misfortunes. As a piece of naval architecture, the San Dominick receives impressive ekphrasis. The ship’s tops and forecastle are given sufficient notice, as are the quarter galleries: “these tenantless balconies hung over the sea as if it were the grand Venetian canal” (49). Best of all, the “shield-like stern-piece” is demonstrably an artwork, “intricately carved with the arms of Castile and Leon, medallioned about by groups of mythological or symbolical devices; uppermost and central of which was a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked” (49). The great impact of Melville’s ekphrasis, so strategically placed in the story, is its ability, in retrospect, to recall the entire symbolic significance of the tale.1 In addition, the climactic scene of revelation, the removal of the canvas covering of the beaked forepiece with its gruesome skeleton, as if it were a work of art first revealed, is a powerful ekphrasis that mingles the hideous matter of death with the uncommon beauty of the human frame as art.
The sketches that make up “The Encantadas” offer perhaps the most inviting prospects for Melville’s sophisticated pictorialism. He prepares for such a vision by using, in complete consciousness of its appropriateness, the pseudonym, “Salvator Tarnmoor,” with its echoes of “Salvator Rosa” and the blasted landscapes of that Neapolitan artist’s best work. The islands are beautifully described in the author’s most ingenious prose, which without referring to artworks renders them vividly as desolate, solitary, parched, uninhabitable cinders. This presentation of island landscape proceeds realistically in the first sketch, where the extinct volcanoes are shown “looking much as the world at large might, after a penal conflagration” (126). The ekphrasis of Rock Rodondo exhibits its architectural design; the rock looks like the campanile of St. Mark and has a base resembling broken stairs and a tower that rises “in entablatures of strata” (134). The shells and calapees of the Galapagos tortoise are presented as tinted sculptures. “Medallioned and orbed like shields, and dented and blistered like shields that have breasted a battle,” the shells remind one of the great shield of Achilles, though, instead of depicting the scenes of life and death in ancient Greece, these beautiful objects expand into a transfiguration, as “Roman Coliseums in magnificent decay” (131). Part of their magnificence comes from their apparently antediluvian presence; they seem, as the narrator puts it, “newly crawled forth from beneath the foundations of the world,” where they resemble the Hindu artistic representations of the tortoises that hold up the planet. From this representation of the artistic sublime, the armory of the beasts lapses into useful and comedic artwork, as the sailors fashion “the three mighty concave shells into three fanciful soup-tureens, and polished the three flat yellowish calapees into three gorgeous salvers” (133). The factuality of much of the writing in “The Encantadas,” as magnificently equipped as it is for the work of a sketchbook writer or a traveler, intent upon making the reader see and, perhaps, even feel, the grimness of the scenes before him, lacks the last degree of fictive originality. In its final parts, the structure of the work breaks down into anecdote and loses the energy evolved from the sketches devoted to the tortoises or to the unfortunate Hunilla, whose ride into “Payta town” on “a small gray ass” affords a striking ekphrasis of “the jointed workings of the beast’s armorial cross” (162). Perhaps Melville, aware that his skills were not being given full range, decided not to complete what might have been a long book and almost certainly would have become a less interesting one.
Given the nature of the plot and setting of “The Bell-Tower,” it is inevitable that ekphrastic treatment is a necessary element in the tale. The tower, in the pride of its construction, is not so described, but its ruin is an artwork of the combined labors of man and Nature. It seems “the black stump of some immeasurable pine,” and the part still standing, “one steadfast spear of lichened ruin,” evokes a beautiful apostrophe: “From that tree-top, what birded chimes of silver throats had rung. A stone pine; a metallic aviary in its crown” (174). The “great state-bell” is somewhat like the fabulous shield of Achilles, embellished with “mythological devices” and fashioned from tin, copper and “much plate.” The figure that eventually kills Bannadonna is an impressive creation of art: “It had limbs, and seemed clad in a scaly mail, lustrous as a dragon-beetle’s. It was manacled, and its clubbed arms were uplifted, as if, with its manacles, once more to smite its already smitten victim” (182). By means of brief ekphrases and their symbolic values, Melville is able to communicate the subject of his tale, the hubris of the artist who assumes, as Richard Chase notes, “that the task of Prometheus can be accomplished by mechanical means” (xi).
Melville’s effort, by persuasion and almost minimal example, to impose structural effects, or at least to prescribe them, in a volume where they are, perhaps, not readily apprehensible to his audience, signals a highly refined and somewhat elusive pictorial sensibility. It is obvious that he has a clear conception of what a “piazza tale” is intended to be, and, since he does not admit other stories, presumably he does not consider them “piazza tales.” But what he has left out presents the materials for an engaging discussion of the sensibility that persists in seeing pictures. The brief sketch “I and My Chimney” is well qualified to be considered. Viewed as the narrator views it, the chimney is surely an artwork. It is, for example, situated near the village of New Petra, a contemporary avatar of the magnificent architectural masterpiece in the Near East that Melville accepted into his repertory of pictorial images and continued to use with great skill for many years. The narrator comments on pieces of architecture and the effect of chimneys on them, from the palace of Versailles to his own rather wide house. “The architect of the chimney,” he asserts, “must have had the pyramid of Cheops before him; for, after that famous structure, it seems modeled” (355). The chimney is a crippled artwork, some fifteen feet of its summit having been removed with the gable roof that had once supported it (356).
Several stories written during this period take the form of the diptych. James Duban’s study of “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumb” indicates the manner in which the author is able to make use of this ancient and honorable exemplum of the decorative arts, to establish contrast between two different pictures observed by the narrator. As Duban notes, “Melville was drawing on a well-established pictorial tradition, but he bent that tradition to serve the ends of plaintive social commentary” (277).2 The reader loses, almost at once, the sense that the author is really dealing with pictures, even though the two parts of the narrative are entitled “Picture First” and “Picture Second.” The result seems to be that the sketches have the pictorial imposed upon them in a superficial way, without much literary profit.
Another diptych, “The Two Temples,” with its emphasis upon the architecture of interiors, offers promising materials for ekphrases. In the tower of the first temple, the narrator encounters “three gigantic Gothic windows of richly dyed glass,” which add a spectrum of vivid colors, “flaming fire-works and pyrotechnics” to the scene (304). Light and color dominate the scene: “the whole interior temple was lit by nought but glass dimmed, yet glorified with all the imaginable rich and russet hues” (306). The second “temple,” a London theater, offers the prospect of an audience as painterly subject: “like beds of glittering coral, through the sea of azure smoke, there, far down, I saw the jewelled necks and white sparkling arms of crowds of ladies in the semicirque” (313). Sanford Marovitz deals in great detail with Melville’s use of the architectural, not only in this piece but in a whole range of his writings.3 Marovitz finds that Melville’s use of directional imagery “increases the pictorial effectiveness of his architectural settings as accessories to the intellectual drama in which characters and ideas are dynamically engaged,” and he comments effectively on “the subtle use of light/dark imagery” in the creation of architectural pictorialism (103). As a final diptych, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” poses contrasting scenes in the most extreme terms. The apartment visited by the narrator in the first sketch is given only brief description, but the factory that is the Tartarus is finely conceived in a number of ekphrases. In an impressive natural setting that features “a Dantean gateway,” “Plutonian, shaggy-wooded mountains,” and the Blood River, the paper-mill gains authority from its “frame of ponderous iron, with a vertical thing like a piston periodically rising and falling upon a heavy wooden block” (328).4
THE ANGUISH NONE CAN DRAW
Curiously, perhaps, Melville does not seem to have availed himself of the excellent advantages of ekphrasis in Israel Potter or The Confidence-Man. The sources of his “Revolutionary narrative of the beggar” did not offer much sanction for the creation of an inward, art-loving character, and there was much in the way of physical action and adventure to float Israel’s story without the intrusion of pictorialism. The case of The Confidence-Man might have been different, since the river views and landscape of the novel could have been rich in pictorialist opportunities. Melville’s observation of panoramic paintings of the Mississippi River might well have suggested to him the value of introducing the art analogy into his narrative. But the tale, as he envisaged it, did not leave much room for elaborate ekphrasis. As Christopher Sten has demonstrated in The Weaver-God, He Weaves, setting, perhaps the richest material for exploitation, is “transient, public, dreamlike.” The river of John Banvard’s literal panoramic painting is not the river of Melville’s circular tale whose “narrative inscribes a plot that repeats itself almost endlessly yet seems to go nowhere” (285–86). The description of Cairo, Illinois, in chapter 23 is certainly promising material, bolstered by the chapter’s promise, in its title, that it will deal with “the powerful effects of natural scenery.” But little happens in that direction. Possibly the scene is too transient and dreamlike, for the reader is treated instead to the cogitations of a character about “human subjectivity” and “the crafty process of social chat.” The very nature of Melville’s narrative intent undercuts almost any attempt at such conventional novelistic devices as careful ekphrases of personages, ship’s architecture, or the panoramic unrolling of an enormous stretch of canvas painted all over with marvelous views of the Mississippi.
When he turned to poetry, after publication of The Confidence-Man, Melville was able to translate at least some of his pictorial skills to the new medium. Several of the poems in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) are interesting examples of the ekphrastic technique. In “The Portent,” the execution of John Brown is depicted as if the poet’s view of it is a magazine illustration, but one that could never have appeared in the magazines of the time. There were many magazine illustrations of the event in 1859, but they restricted themselves to showing Brown ascending the steps of the scaffold or standing on the trapdoor of the gallows, his face hidden by the cap, while the executioners fixed the rope and prepared him for the execution. By rendering a portrayal of the execution itself, in which the man is “Hanging from the beam, / Slowly swaying,” with the executioner’s cap hiding “the anguish none can draw” (Collected Poems 3), Melville presents an infinitely more powerful picture for the reader than any that the artistic conventions of the time would have allowed. Here, Melville once more uses art as a prelusive device. The poem and its illustration of Brown as “meteor of the war” indicate the tenor of the volume. The poet’s views of the war in the poems that follow will be those of a somewhat distant observer rather than an active participant, and he will have to depend on published accounts of scenes and engagements, along with the many pictorial renditions of the conflict.5
“The Temeraire,” is, in part, the ekphrasis of an actual painting, Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, an engraving of which Melville owned (Wallace, Melville and Turner 54–55). But the poet also concentrates upon pictorial effects not evident in the Turner picture in the lines “On open decks you manned the gun / Armorial.” The allusion is somewhat cryptic, and he feels called upon to contribute a prose note, part of which reads “Some of the cannon of old times, especially the brass ones, unlike the more effective ordinance of the present day, were cast in shapes which Cellini might have designed,” a statement that supports his use, in earlier lines of the poem, of such art terms as “garniture, emblazonment, / And heraldry” (37, 449). These significant words exhibit the artistic endeavor of early naval architecture. Garniture is decoration or embellishment with beautiful details; emblazonment is rich ornamentation of heraldic devices or armorial bearings; and heraldry, a term resonant with connotation, encompasses both garniture and emblazonment upon arms and armor.
Two poems in the volume refer specifically to pictures. Melville makes sure that the reader cannot mistake the source of “The Coming Storm” by attaching an epigraph identifying his source as a painting by Sanford R. Gifford and noting that he has seen it at the April 1865 exhibition of the National Academy. In the poem, however, there is little attempt at ekphrasis; the poet concentrates on speculating about the feelings of Edwin Booth, the owner of the painting. The assassination of Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth had taken place only two weeks before the opening of the exhibition, which, in fact, had been scheduled for April 14 and had to be postponed. On the other hand, “Formerly a Slave” is the ekphrasis of a picture by Elihu Vedder that Melville saw at the same 1865 exhibition. Poetic language matches the visual imagery in the first line, “The sufferance of her race is shown,” and in the final pair of lines, “Her dusky face is lit with sober light, / Sibylline, yet benign” (101). A certain poetic inexperience is exhibited by the rather clumsy phrasing of “is shown,” which occurs in this poem as well as in “The Portent.” A similar problem occurs in “On the Photograph of a Corps Commander,” which tries valiantly to incorporate the art of photographic portraiture into the poet’s lexicon of the art analogy but is defeated by language like “Here you see” and “A cheering picture. It is good / To look upon a Chief like this.” A more poetic solution occurs in “Commemorative of a Naval Victory,” which evokes “The hawk, the hound, and sworded nobleman / In Titian’s picture for a king” to describe suitably the sailors who have won the victory.
Several of the commemorative poems toward the end of the volume use monuments, themselves a form of elegiac art, to comment on aspects of the war. The most effective poem may be “An Uninscribed Monument on One of the Battle-Fields of the Wilderness.” The monument itself speaks, an example of what Jean Hagstrum would designate ecphrasis, “that special quality of giving voice and language to the otherwise mute art object” (18n.34).
ART’S MERIDIAN
In “Rip Van Winkle’s Lilac,” a combination of prose sketch and poem that Melville intended for the projected but unpublished volume Weeds and Wildings, a painter is imagined as speaker and representative of the pictorial viewpoint. He is “a certain meditative vagabondo, to wit, a young artist,” who, “in his summer wanderings after the Picturesque,” has discovered the ruined house where Rip once lived and is busy painting it (Collected Poems 287). The site is now “a greenly ruinous home,” or, perhaps, in alternative readings, a “green wreck,” or even a “ruinous abode,” attractive to the artist mainly as a ruin.6 He has a certain point of view to express about the picturesque, and he gets the opportunity when engaged in some verbal fencing with the “gaunt, hatchet-faced, stony-eyed individual, with a gray sort of salted complexion like that of a dried cod-fish,” an unfortunately conventional sort of character who derides his selection of a painterly theme and would prefer that he paint “something respectable, or, better, something godly,” like the church on the nearby hill. “Disreputable” is this citizen’s word for both Rip and his house. The painter’s rejoinder is pert and fitting: “what should we poor devils of Bohemians do for the picturesque, if Nature was in all things a precisian, each building like that church and every man made in your image” (289). The artist might possibly have considered that Nature is always a precisian, even in its creation of ruined wrecks of houses, but he does not do so because Melville is trying out a different idea. The church on the hill, with its aspiring steeple, is posed against the mountains that “looked placidly down,” though in a cancelled passage they may have looked “sublimely” down.
Terms like “picturesque” and “sublime” work together a bit later in the account of the artist. “The lean visitor” on his “albino” horse seems merely a picturesque, odd-looking figure, a parody, perhaps, of Ichabod Crane astride old Gunpowder. But as he leaves, he passes “in an elevated turn of the hilly road,” and “man and horse, outlined against the vivid blue sky,” are framed into a memorable picture for the artist before disappearing “as if swallowed by the grave.” This visionary scene gives a serious turn to the occasion: “‘What is that verse in the Apocalypse,’” murmured the artist to himself, now suspending the brush and ruminatingly turning his head sideways, “‘the verse that prompted Benjamin West to his big canvas?—I looked and beheld a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death’” (289). It is only the angle of vision as the rider “obliquely crossed the Bohemian’s sight” that transforms a picture merely eye-catching in its oddity into the sublime. The pale horse of Benjamin West is a secure part of Melville’s lexicon of paintings and appears as part of the terrible vision of whiteness in Moby-Dick where “even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse” (192).
In the poem “At the Hostelry,” which he may have intended as part of an unrealized “Frescoes of Travel,” Melville offers “an inconclusive debate as to the exact import of a current term significant of that of the manifold aspects of life and nature which under various forms all artists strive to transmit to canvas” (Collected Poems 317). Under such an expansive rubric, the picturesque encompasses just about any pictorial subject; and, in fact, Melville has the Dutch painter, Jan Steen, express this view of art:
to this I hold,
Be it cloth of frieze or cloth of gold,
All’s picturesque beneath the sun;
I mean, all’s picture; death and life
Pictures and pendants, not at strife—
No, never to hearts that muse thereon.
For me, ’tis life, plain life, I limn—
Not satin-glossed and flossy-fine (Collected Poems 329)
Jan Steen is exaggerating a bit, no doubt, although, for a painter all should probably be, at least potentially, picture. Melville is using the term “picturesque” in its most general meaning as something not necessarily striking or unusual but, rather, picturable or suggestive of a picture. Dugald Stewart had defined the term in this way: “Picturesque properly means what is done in the style, and with the spirit of a painter.” It is clear that, as the argument develops in Melville’s poem, there is much room for all sorts of painterly content in the paintings of the artists who speak. Spagnoletto’s “Flaying of St. Bartholomew” and “Laurence on the gridiron” (318) are satisfyingly picturesque. Swanevelt, the Dutch painter, converts the horrific sublime into the picturesque:
Like beauty strange with horror allied,—
As shown in great Leonardo’s head
Of snaky Medusa,—so as well
Grace and the Picturesque may dwell
With Terror. (319)
In contrast with the Medusa, the “Arcadian woods in hue” of Claude, the Van Dyck portraits, the “boors at inns, / Mud floors—dark settles—jugs—old bins” of Teniers, the seascapes of Van de Velde, and the sprightly kitchen scenes of Gerard Dow (Collected Poems 320–26) are also good examples of the picturesque, which thus becomes a term to encompass the sublime, the homeliness of genre art, the narrativity of religious and mythological paintings, the psychology of portraiture, and the “enchanting” and “romantic landscape” of some valley or wood.
Melville’s desire to place every sort of picturable event under the comprehensive terminology of the picturesque seems to have been a fairly late development in his thinking about the arts. For at least a brief time, he had considered other possibilities. In Pierre, he seems to be speaking for himself in Book 20 when he puts forth a tentatively comprehensive division of his topic:
If the grown man of taste, possesses not only some eye to detect the picturesque in the natural landscape, so also, has he as keen a perception of what may not unfitly be here styled, the povertiresque in the social landscape. To such an one, not more picturesquely conspicuous is the dismantled thatch in a painted cottage of Gainsborough, than the time-tangled and want-thinned locks of a beggar, povertiresquely diversifying those snug little cabinet-pictures of the world, which, exquisitely varnished and framed, are hung up in the drawing-room minds of humane men oftaste, and amiable philosophers of either the “Compensation,” or “Optimist” school. They deny that any misery is in the world…. (276–77)
Quoting this passage in That Cunning Alphabet, Richard S. Moore points out Melville’s concern with “the disjunction between aesthetic vision and reality as well as the clash between moral issues and aestheticism” (187). By the time of the painters’ symposium in “At the Hostelry,” he seems to have arrived at some sort of compromise, in which the ugly can be seen as the beautiful.
But the compromise is not complete and not a solid part of the poet’s thinking. The term “picturesque” had always been wrestled about, quite often to match the critic’s vision of the painterly. In reading William Hazlitt’s Table Talk, Melville must have encountered the brief essay “On the Picturesque and Ideal,” in which the author set out some terms: “The natural in visible objects is whatever is ordinarily presented to the senses; the picturesque is that which stands out, and catches the attention by some striking peculiarity; the ideal is that which answers to the preconceived imagination and appetite in the mind for love and beauty” (Sealts #266a). Under such a program, Rubens is the most picturesque of painters but almost the least ideal; Rembrandt is picturesque and Correggio and Claude are ideal, while Van Dyke is natural. “A country,” Hazlitt contends, “may be beautiful, romantic, or sublime, without being picturesque.” Melville seems to accept Hazlitt’s categories in the first stanza of “The Attic Landscape” when he says,
Tourist, spare the avid glance
That greedy roves the sight to see:
Little here of “Old Romance,”
Or Picturesque of Tivoli. (Collected Poems 245)
The ruins of Tivoli, including Hadrian’s villa and a temple dedicated to Vesta, are merely romantic or picturesque or even beautiful, without the “Pure outline pale” that Melville celebrates in the poem’s second stanza.
Writing poems that make use of the visual arts in varied ways, Melville continued to read about the subject in his latter years, and his studies seem to underline his sense that the debate over the picturesque continued “inconclusive.” In a memoir about Melville, Arthur Stedman spoke of his “interest in all matters relating to the fine arts,” but most of the art books he acquired “are among those volumes lacking his autograph and notation of his date of purchase” (Sealts 130–31). The range is gratifying—pottery, porcelain, “other Objects of Vertu,” the ceramic arts, ancient costume—as well as painterly studies of Gainsborough, Constable, Claude, Ruisdael, Hobbema, Cuyp, Potter, Meissonier, Corot, Daubigny, Dupré, Millet, Rousseau, Diaz, Rembrandt, Wilkie, Turner, Reynolds, and Cruikshank. The little volumes by Frank Cundall (1891) and John William Mollett (1881, 1882, 1890) offered helpful summaries of the works of painters and provided illustrations of some of their works, but there are no markings or marginal comments to indicate that Melville was still studying the subject and acquiring new insights. In his introduction to Clarel, Walter Bezanson suggests that Melville was “an avid skimmer of current journals and newspapers” (611); and, in writing about his later life and reading, Merton Sealts points out that “As in earlier days, Melville continued to read newspapers and magazines; according to a family tradition … he subscribed to the New York Herald because it contained the best shipping news” (127). If, as is likely, he did read the magazines regularly, he must have come across much about the visual arts that would have interested him. There were, for instance, reviews of the spring exhibitions at the National Academy of Design in The Nation, Galaxy, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, and Appleton’s Journal. For a time in the 1870s, the Atlantic Monthly ran a regular column on art, and through all of Melville’s later years, the magazine printed articles on various subjects.7 A short article by William Howe Downes on “Elihu Vedder’s Pictures” in the June 1885 issue of the Atlantic Monthly made the point that “Vedder is, more frankly and thoroughly than any other American painter, an idealist; in this age of naturalism and realism he has set his face squarely in the contrary direction” (842). Downes spoke of the designs Vedder had drawn for the recent edition of the Rubaiyat, a volume that Melville would later acquire (Sealts #392) and commented on some of Vedder’s early and recent paintings. In the light of Hazlitt’s remarks about the ideal, this assessment would have interested Melville, who continued to enjoy Vedder’s art and, in the last months of his life, dedicated Timoleon to the painter.
TO GRAPPLE FROM ART’S DEEP
Over Melville’s working career, the habit of thinking of the art analogy became engrained in his writing procedures so that, with great ease, he slips into the pictorial mode of description, analogy, and analysis. In chapter 80 of Moby-Dick, for instance, he gives an account of a biological theory proposed by Lorenz Oken: “It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely undeveloped skulls.” Then he has Ishmael recall that “the Germans were not the first” to demonstrate the idea, and adds that “A foreign friend once pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the peaked prow of his canoe” (349). The artistic act of inlaying in basso-relievo, a delicate art, mixes with the rather shocking revelation of the materials of his cannibal art, and we recall that Queequeg, another artistic cannibal, is in the habit of carving Yojo, his little god image, and spends much time embellishing the lid of his coffin with the signs of a lost art. In the poem entitled “Venice” in Timoleon, Melville finds, as a “kindred art” to the construction of that beautiful city, the work that “a worm can do” as the “little craftsman of the Coral Sea” works to build
his marvelous gallery
And long arcade,
Erections freaked with many a fringe
Of marble garlandry. (Collected Poems 229)
Nature as artist, even the worm as artist, competes with the best work of man and surpasses it. “Disinterment of the Hermes” seems to be a reproof to those who go about “raking arid sands / For gold more barren,” but lines deleted from the poem indicate a vital but repressed plan: “The Hermes, risen, renews its span / In resurrection never proved in man” (239; Stein 126). Poems left unpublished demonstrate his continued consideration of the picturable in the sister arts. A brief piece, “In the Hall of Marbles,” which he carefully assures the reader in an epigraph is made up of “Lines recalled from a destroyed poem,” reflects upon the way in which, in contrast to the “Attic years,” our own “arts but serve the clay,” and concludes that, in the words of the sibyls, “Man fell from Eden, fall from Athens too” (388–89). “The Medallion” (387–88) meditates upon the work of miniature art forms that fix in one static image “The ground-expression, wherein close / All smiles at last” and contrasts it to the poetic art “Whose verse the years and fate imbue / With reveries where no glosings reign.” “The Old Shipmaster and His Crazy Barn” casts the architectural art in a new light. No doubt the barn was as trim and in plumb as any shipmaster might have required, but Nature, the great artist, has intervened to render it “Bewrinkled in shingle and lichened in board.” It takes on some of the appearance, at least to a shipman, of a ship whose “gaunt timber shrieks / Like ribs of a craft off Cape Horn” (379). Though neighbors, as utilitarian in outlook as the man in “Rip Van Winkle’s Lilac,” advise pulling the wreck down, the shipmaster knows that “a Spirit inhabits, a fellowly one,” and, feeling “touchy as tinder / Yea, quick to take wing,” he will not get rid of the mirror image of his own ruin and imminent death.
In his study of Melville’s poetry, William H. Shurr suggests that the poem “In the Pauper’s Turnip-Field” was probably inspired by Jean Francois Millet’s painting The Man with the Hoe (190) and finds the connection in the shape of the hoe, or mattock, that the man in the painting, and in the poem, leans against. Melville knew Millet’s work from the volume he owned about the Barbizon painters (Sealts #362). Shurr finds the poem’s theme in mortality, “the imminence of death,” but the poem, contrasting the “preachment” of the nearby crow with the “homily of my hoe,” seems to be more about the living condition of pauperdom and brutalizing labor, certainly the subject of the Millet painting.
The visual arts receive some historical criticism in the ekphrasis of “Puzzlement as to a Figure Left Solitary on a Unique Fragment of Greek Basso-Relievo.” Perhaps this is a piece that he promised John Hoadley he would try to purchase from a shipman (Correspondence 453). The terms of the poem are enticing. The relief sculpture, broken from a larger work, may show Artemis looking toward someone else whose identity may only be conjectured. But the puzzlement is that it may not even be Artemis, the virgin huntress and Apollo’s sister, for the face carved there “breathes too much of Eve’s sweet way.” Melville thus connects, in his paradoxical manner, the pagan and the Christian, as he had in portraying Clarel’s Ruth as a discordant combination of Eve and a nereid. Then, the piece might be like a fragment of a Keatsian Greek urn, which uninterruptedly shows its lovers, but, here, only “somebody meets her sight,” a somebody who can never be ascertained. This leads the poet to speculate, as a viewer might do while imposing a coherent narrativity upon this incoherent fragment of a tale untold:
Why, could one but piece out the stone—
Complete restore its primal state,
Some handsome fellow would be shown,
Some lover she would fascinate
By that arch look—(408)
But the depicted lady would have to be someone other than Artemis, who “high, austere, / Chill as her morn,” could never look so at a potential lover; and the viewer, reluctant to destroy his own tale, is forced to conclude “Nay—can it be? / Again methinks ’tis Artemis” and interrogates the vanished artist, “Rogue of a Greek! and is it she?”8 The poet, finding her look arch, is scarcely less arch himself in proposing that the sculptor brings the human into a portrayal of the godly in making “austere Artemis a coquette,” and so is likely of a later date than the classical Greek age, from a time, perhaps, when “faith’s decay begot thine art.” In the sense that Palestine had become Niebuhrized by the time of Melville’s “pilgrimage and poem,” it seems that Greek religious idealizations are Niebuhrized into the “impudence of sweet persiflage.”
A brief poem with the long title “Suggested by the Ruins of a Mountain-Temple in Arcadia, One Built by the Architect of the Parthenon” catches up a number of Melville’s themes of art and life:
What solace?—Old in inexhaustion,
Interred alive from storms of fortune,
The quarries be! (407)
William Bysshe Stein finds “gloomy implications” in the poem, for the ruined temple “discourages belief in the romantic notion of imperishable artistic beauty … nothing of human creation survives temporal contingency” and so “Melville despairingly acknowledges the futility of the awe” (121–22). However, there is a cancelled final verse that opens up the laconic speech of the poem—”But, tell, shall time’s consummate year / As fair a temple yield, thy peer, / Replacing thee?”—and rather explicitly offers the solace requested in the second verse. It seems likely that Melville cut out the finale because he found his second stanza answering its own question. The solace lies in the fact that the quarries from which come the marble of the ruined temple are inexhaustible and, buried alive, could still provide the replacement temple that he contemplates, at least briefly, in what he must have concluded was an ill-considered sop to a weakened poetic convention. Melville is terse about his provisionally hopeful feelings because, as he wrote about James Thomson’s poetry, “As to his pessimism, altho’ neither pessimist nor optomist [sic] myself, nevertheless I relish it in the verse if for nothing else than as a counterpoise to the exorbitant hopefulness, juvenile and shallow, that makes such a bluster in these days.” A guarded optimism about a rejuvenation of Attic spirit and artistry might seem in order in 1885 if America were to offer the world a new Athens, but it could not be the subject of bluster.
There is room for the sublime in Melville’s picturesque. “In the Desert” is a marvelous ekphrasis of light:
Never Pharaoh’s Night,
Whereof the Hebrew wizards croon,
Did so the Theban flamens try
As me this veritable Noon.
In the clarity of noon, light and atmosphere predominate: “Like blank ocean in blue calm / Undulates the ethereal frame.” The poem ends in apostrophe:
Holy, holy, holy Light!
Immaterial incandescence,
Of God the effluence of the essence,
In his copy of Bartlett’s Forty Days in the Desert, Melville had marked passages about “the dead heat of noon,” when “the hot film trembled over the far-stretched and apparently boundless sands.” In the early mornings, before sunrise, “there is a glorious radiance through the vast open concave of the sky,” but by noon one felt the “terrible and triumphant power of the sun upon this wide region of sterility and death” (Cowen 1:163–64). As Barbara Novak put it, “Light is, of course, more than any other component, the alchemistic medium by which the landscape artist turns matter into spirit” (41), and a number of Melville’s contemporaries, including Sanford R. Gifford, were attempting to make light a central element in their paintings. In The Empire of the Eye, her study of American landscape art, Angela Miller speaks of the paintings of Gifford and John Frederick Kensett in which “Resonant, light-suffused atmosphere melded topographic divisions into a vividly seamless whole” (243). This feature of painting, now labeled “luminism,” is characterized by Ila Weiss as “the mystery of marginal visibility,” where air is “a space-filling medium, a plastic material nearly transparent, holding light, and physically continuous with the substance of tangible nature” (18). Part of its tangibility in Melville’s poem rests in the strength of its heat. It is “one flowing oriflamme” and the “fiery standard” of God. Napoleon’s troops are “bayonetted by this sun,” this “immaterial incandescence” and “effluence of the essence,” powerful terms for what William Bysshe Stein calls “a note of almost mystical tension” (136). Without alluding to any specific artwork or painter, Melville’s “luminist” poem catches up the intense endeavors of a whole school of painting.9
“The Great Pyramid” discovers the sublime in the architectural, as the poet doubts the merely human in its construction:
Your masonry—and is it man’s?
More like some Cosmic artisan’s. Your
courses as in strata rise,
Beget you do a blind surmise
Like Grampians.
Mountainous, the pyramid cleaves “the blue / As lording it,” and in its powerful stance “All elements unmoved you stem” and dares “Time’s future infinite” as it wears “Eld’s diadem” (241). Seeing the pyramids in 1857, Melville had recorded his sense of immensity in “Precipice on precipice, cliff on cliff. Nothing in Nature gives such an idea of vastness” and was “oppressed by the massiveness & mystery” as they “still loom before me—something vast, indefinite, incomprehensible, and awful” (Journals 75–76). In the conclusion of the poem, he comes at last to the builders who, incomprehensibly, have moved into the terrain of art commanded only by inhuman powers:
Craftsmen, in dateless quarries dim,
Stones formless into form did trim,
Usurped on Nature’s self with Art,
And bade this dumb I AM to start,
Imposing him.
The paradox that not even Nature, with its almost infinite art-creating resources, can match “in vastness” this man-made artwork is a powerful comment on Melville’s concept of art. In the poem “Art,” he had considered the “unlike things” that “must meet and mate” in artistic creation—flame and wind, patience and energy, humility and pride, instinct and study, love and hate, audacity and reverence. The contradictions, almost unendurable, merge in a spiritual, agonistic act:
These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art. (231)