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Melville's Ship of Fools
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Two of the surest critical propositions about Melville are that his prevailing theme is the problem of moral evil and that his prevailing narrative vehicle is the ship-microcosm. With few exceptions his major works have some fairly obvious basis in the fusion of that image and that theme. In most cases the competent study of source materials and of the image-theme pattern peculiar to the work in question has yielded an understanding sufficient to the purposes of responsible criticism. Only The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade has continued to tantalize both casual readers and dedicated students, notwithstanding the scholarly and critical attention which has long been lavished on it and which is now available to all in the admirable edition of Miss Elizabeth Foster. The singularly baffling quality of this novel is the more surprising, too, for its wearing so plainly on its face the signs of its author's characteristic theme and image; not even Moby-Dick bespeaks its artistic character so forthrightly. In order to penetrate a little farther into the stubborn mysteries of The Confidence-Man I propose to examine some antecedents, both in and out of Melville's own writings, which may have exerted a significant or even a definitive influence on its structure and meaning.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960
References
1 New York: Hendricks House, 1954.
2 The Spirit Above the Dust (London, 1951), p. 92.
3 White-Jacket (New York, 1892), p. 74; The Confidence-Man, ed. cit., p. 8. The quotation immediately below is from White-Jacket, p. 366. Subsequent references to both books will appear in the text.
4 Richard Chase has commented on the significance of Bland's name and nature in anticipation of the Confidence-Man: Herman Melville (New York, 1949), p. 262, n.
5 “Sources and Symbols for Melville's Confidence-Man,” PMLA, LXVI (June 1951), 363–380.
6 I have discussed this influence in Melville and the Comic Spirit (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), pp. 161–166.
7 Aurelius Pompen, English Versions of the Ship of Fools (London, 1925), pp. 295–301.
8 Miss Porter kindly explained the genesis of her book in a letter dated 14 January 1957. An excerpt from the novel in question was published under the title “Ship of Fools” in the Atlantic for March 1956.
9 Pompen, pp. 14–19.
10 Pompen, p. 1; T. H. Jamieson, ed., Introduction to The Ship of Fools by Alexander Barclay (Edinburgh & London, 1874), i, xxi; Thomas Wright, History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art (London, 1865), pp. 218, 224; Charles H. Herford, Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1886), pp. 327, 333; Frank W. Chandler, The Literature of Roguery (Boston, 1907), I, 75–76; Cambridge History of English Literature, iii, 69–70.
11 The Cambridge History of English Literature (iii, 70) calls such references “frequent,” but I can personally testify only to those few in Greene and Dekker which are mentioned by Herford (pp. 370–372) and to one in Marston (The Fawn, i, ii).
12 See the Burton entries in the index of Jay Leyda's The Melville Log (New York, 1951).
13 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan Smith (New York, 1955), pp. 36, 42, 59. The italics are Burton's.
14 Merton M. Sealts, “Melville's Reading: A Check-list of Books Owned and Borrowed,” Harvard Library Bulletin, in, 3 (Autumn 1949), 417.
15 John M. Berdan, Early Tudor Poetry, 1485–1547 (New York, 1920), pp. 222, n. 2, 224, n. 1; Herford, p. 342, n. 1; Pompen, p. 293, n. 4.
16 A. V. Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld (New York, 1930), pp. 24, 51, 420–422, 515, n. 3.
17 Berdan, p. 225 n.
18 Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent by Herman Melville, 1849–50, ed. Eleanor Melville Metcalf (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), pp. 31, 84–85.
19 William E. Sedgwick, Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1944), p. 188.
20 Judges, p. 305.
21 P. 151. See Miss Foster's note, p. 328; also Shroeder, op. cit. (above, n. 5), p. 371.
22 Leyda, Melville Log, n, 507; John W. Nichol, “Melville and the Midwest,” PMLA, LXVI (September 1951), 622.