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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
From the number of articles on Dante and the frequency of American printings of the Divine Comedy in translation, it appears that even before 1850 Dante had a larger American public than might be supposed. At the mid-century Emerson remarked in his comments on Margaret Fuller's interest in Dante: “An edition of Cary's translation, reprinted in Boston, many years ago, was rapidly sold; and, for the last twenty years, all studious youths and maidens have been reading the Inferno.” Melville was one of these studious readers. He purchased a copy of Cary in 1848, and in works after this date made frequent reference to “that infernalest of infernos, The Inferno”, especially in Pierre. The hero of the novel is a devoted reader of Dante—“you always loved Dante”, says Millthorpe to Pierre (p. 441)—and about one half of it, Books ii to ix, pivots on references to the Inferno, which in a powerfully symbolical manner underscore the pervasive tragic gloom and develop on an emotive level the hero's reactions to the existence of evil. Relying on some knowledge of the Inferno on the reader's part, Melville adopts the technique of literary allusion and quotation functioning in place of formal exposition, the literary reference itself becoming contextually an expository symbol of the hero's internal states and of the ubiquity and universality of evil. Melville adopts this technique in other works, but never so extensively as in Pierre, nor so effectively at crucial moments in the development of character and theme.
1 See Theodore W. Koch, Dante in America (Boston, 1896) and Angelina La Piana, Dante's American Pilgrimage (Yale Univ. Press, 1948). Before 1850 there-were four American printings of translations of the Comedy, two of them complete: Cary's The Vision; or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri, which first appeared as part of The Works of the British Poets, ed. Robert Walsh (Philadelphia, 1822), and was reprinted by Appleton with John Flaxman's illustrations (New York, 1845); T. W. Parsons' The First Ten Cantos of the Inferno (Boston, 1843); and John A. Carlyle's Dante's Divine Comedy: the Inferno, a literal prose translation with the text of the original (New York, 1849). Translations of fragments, like Longfellow's in Voices of the Night, occasionally appeared. A translation of the Inferno, xxxiii, by a pupil of Lorenzo da Ponte, one of the earliest American translations unnoticed by bibliographers, was printed in Da Ponte's edition of Luigi Guidelli's translation of Robert Dodsley's The Economy of Human Life (New York, 1825). For two fragmentary translations, 1697 and 1791, see J. G. Fucilla's articles in Italica, viii (June 1931), 40–41, and xxv (March 1948), 9–11; the fragment of the Inferno, xxxiii, printed in 1791 is attributed to William Dunlap.
2 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston, 1852), i, 240. Emerson's reference is to the Philadelphia edition of 1822, copies of which appeared with a Boston and New York imprint added (Koch, p. 77).
3 From a statement of account with John Wiley among the Melville papers in the Harvard University Library, showing a charge of $2.12 for a copy of Cary's Dante on June 22, 1848. Melville may have bought the New York edition of 1845, referred to in citations of Dante in this article. Mr. Merton M. Sealts, Jr., who kindly made available to me many allusions to Dante in Melville, suggests the London (H. G. Bohn) edition of 1847 as another possibility since Wiley was an importer. Moreover, the price Melville paid seems to indicate the London edition, for the New York edition was listed at $1.50 cloth and $3.00 leather, (O. A. Roorbach, Catalogne of American Publications from 1820 to 1852 [New York, 1852], p. 145). The text of both follows that of the last corrected London edition of 1844.
4 Mardi, i, 346 (all references are to the Standard Edition of Melville, London: Constable, 1922–24). See also Mardi, i, 14; White Jacket, p. 120; Moby-Dick, ii, 116, 122; Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces, p. 140; Clarel, i, 144 (the reference is to Dante's City of Dis), ii, 123; Journal up the Straits, ed. Raymond Weaver (New York, 1935), p. 146; and n. 5 below. Melville, like many of his contemporaries, apparently did not extend his reading of Dante beyond the Inferno, which deeply impressed him during the composition of Pierre (pp. 57, 74, 119, 235–237, 239, 336, 441–442, 444, 484). There is, however, a close resemblance between the description of the growth of “yon little toddler” in Pierre (p. 412) and Dante's vignette of the soul's growth in the Purgatory xvi, 86 ff.
5 Cf. the elaborate symbolical use of Dante's City of Dis (Inferno vii–ix) in Israel Potter, Ch. xxv, and Melville's Journal for November 9, 1849, quoted by R. M. Weaver, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic (New York, 1921), p. 293; Melville's granddaughter, Mrs. Henry K. Metcalf, has pointed out to me that “coal boxes” in Weaver's quotation should be “coal barges.” See also the symbolical use of Dantesque elements in “The Tartarus of Maids” (Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces, pp. 238–243): “Dantean Gateway” (cf. Inferno iii, 1–9), the descent into the precipice (cf. Inferno xii, 1–11, 27–28), and boiling “Blood River” (cf. Inferno xii, 44–45, 100); Melville transfers the suffering of the violent against their neighbor in Dante's river of blood to the maids, victims of the industrial system in a paper-mill powered by Blood River. For a detailed analysis of the symbols, see E. H. Eby's “Herman Melville's ‘Tartarus of Maids,‘” MLQ, i (1940), 95–100.
6 Pierre is presented in Book i as an innocent child of nature educated in his father's “fastidiously picked and decorous library” (p. 5). Although he had occasionally visited the city, at nineteen he “had never yet become so thoroughly initiated into that darker, though truer aspect of things” which life in the city teaches (p. 94). Melville often traces Pierre's idealism to the influence of phenomenal nature (pp. 16, 196).
7 Melville owned a French edition of Flaxman's drawings of the Purgatory (Paris and Brussels, 1833) now in the possession of Mrs. Metcalf, who kindly informs me that Melville may have bought the drawings during the few days he spent in Paris in November and December of 1849, shortly after he made the entry on Dante in the Journal (n. 5 above). Melville had no doubt seen Flaxman's drawings of the Inferno; from passages on Flaxman quoted above it is clear that he at least knew about the illustrations of the Inferno v, one of which shows Paolo and Francesca r ading the romance of Lancelot and about to kiss (Compositions of John Flaxman from the Divine Poem of Dante Alighieri, London, 1807, plate 5).
8 Page 57; “wafted on the sad dark wind” was suggested by Cary's language in the Inferno v, 51, 83, and in his “Argument” to this canto, where “dark air” occurs; “blistered Florentine” recalls a popular story, possibly known to Melville, that Dante's face had been scorched in actual visits to hell (Boccaccio's Life of Dante, viii).
9 See pp. 151, 200, 268, 286, and 381–382; an allusion is made to the theme of incest by a symbolical use of Guido Reni's painting of Beatrice Cenci (p. 489). Melville was very much interested in the painting and the subject; see Journal up the Straits, pp. 129, 130, 133 and n, 177.
10 Pp. 120–121; cf. the burning of the chair-portrait, pp. 273–277.
11 Page 119. Melville slightly misquoted: “not” should be “nor.” Some of the language of Melville's description echoes Cary's Dante; for example, “melted into each other” (p. 119) is paralleled in Cary's “as they both had been of burning wax, / Each melted into the other” (Inferno xxv, 54–55). The metamorphosis is further developed in similar language (pp. 123, 157, 274).
12 Cf. in Chap, iii the repetition of the sentence, “Judge ye, then, ye judicious …”, which continues the mood of despondency and dilemma from Chap, ii and prepares for Pierre's sudden burst of rage and the mutilation of his copies of the Inferno and Hamlet in Chap. iv.
13 Page 235. The passage from Hamlet occurs at the end of Act i, and that from Dante in the inscription to the gate of hell, Inferno iii, 1–9, quoted with some slight variations from Cary's spelling and punctuation. Pierre omits the part of the inscription describing the origin of hell:
14 Page 236. Pierre's inaction and dilemma, which induce a loathing of himself (p. 239), are possibly subtly alluded to in the reference to Canto iii, notable for the description of the contemptible place outside of hell proper reserved for those who did not make a choice.
15 See pp. 199, 275, and 289–290. Cf. Mardi, ii, 244: “For evil is the chronic malady of the universe; and checked in one place, breaks forth in another”; the review of Hawthorne's Mosses (Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces), p. 129: “… that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking man is always and wholly free”; and Moby-Dick, i, 229: “That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning. …”
16 Melville (pp. 190–191) presents the tragedy of Pierre as typical of young idealists by referring it to the legend of Hamlet and the myth of Memnon, which “embodied the Hamletism of the antique world.”
17 Page 471. Cf. p. 91: “Let me go, ye fond affections; all piety leave me.”
18 Pp. 441–442, 444.
19 Page 422. Vivia, Pierre's hero, is speaking, but Pierre “seems to have directly plagiarised from his own experiences” (p. 421).
20 Pp. 335–336. Melville's panoramic view of sinful humanity in the watch-house appears to be patterned after Dante's description of the first sinners met in the Inferno iii, 21–29.
21 See n. 13 above.
22 Page 150. Cf. a similar invocation and condition at p. 56.
23 Page 381. Plinlimmon rejects (p. 297) the “infidel idea, that whatever other worlds God may be the Lord of, he is not the Lord of this”; but Pierre seems to entertain it. In his novel he sets down “the godliest things” but does so with “the soul of an Atheist” (p. 472).
24 Israel Potter, p. 212, in the context of the equation of London with Dante's City of Dis. Cf. Pierre, p. 275.
25 Inferno x, 35–37; xiv, 42–44; and n. 27 below.
26 Page 502. Cf. Ahab's defiance of the corposants (Moby-Dick, ii, 282); “Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.”
27 Inferno xxv, 1–3; this is the canto from which Pierre quotes (p. 119).