Writing beyond Prophecy: Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville after the American Renaissance

Chapter 4. Melville’s Benediction

chapter 4 Melville’s Benediction Clarel’s Recollection of Calling: Melville and Emerson Annotating his copy of The Conduct of Life (1860), Melville notices that Emerson “jumps into the pulpit, from off the tripod here.”1 As noted at the beginning of the chapter on Emerson, Melville’s marginal comment sheds light on a general movement of Emerson’s career around the time that he was composing the lectures that became Conduct, as Emerson returned to a more ministerial role in his speaking and writing. The tripod belongs to the position of the seer; to leap from thence into the pulpit entails a shift from prophecy to preaching. Melville compresses his commentary through a shorthand of imagery not merely rich in connotation but also precisely indexed to an earlier Emerson essay of great personal significance to Melville. To note Emerson’s vocational jump, Melville alludes to “Shakspeare; or, the Poet,” from Representative Men (1850). Emerson describes the hermetic, oracular quality of Shakespeare’s writing, the wisdom that can touch only “the Shakspeare in us” (CW 4:119). For the genius to condescend and explain would be fruitless: “He cannot step from off his tripod, and give us anecdotes of his inspirations” (4:119; emphasis added). The oracle cannot stoop to reach his audience; he will not preach to the nonelect. Emerson uses this hermetic quality as one criterion to judge the authenticity of Shakespearean authorship (as, indeed, the author of The Prophetic Melville uses this criterion to trace what he sees as Melville’s decline: from the prophetic visionary of Moby-Dick who presents mystery and “wonder” to a later Melville who supplies “commentary” in an 128 writing beyond prophecy increasingly “didactic” manner that betrays “the tragic denouement of the writer-prophet’s sense of himself”).2 Emerson has acquainted himself with contemporary scholarship that traces the “indebtedness” of the bard and that suggests that substantial portions of certain plays “were written by some author preceding Shakspeare” (CW 4:112). Reading Henry VIII in the light of this hypothesis, Emerson believes he can “see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his own finer stratum was laid” (4:112). Unlike the verse of Shakespeare himself, rhythmically true only to its own meaning rather than reliant upon conventional forms, “here the lines are constructed on a given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence” (4:112; emphasis added). The “pulpit” belongs to Shakespeare’s precursor; the genius has outgrown this constraint; the “tripod” of inspiration is Shakespeare’s own. To complete the expansion of Melville’s commentary: to jump “into the pulpit, from off the tripod” is to return to the position of the precursor and the mode of writing the author has overthrown. Shakespeare, the figure Melville calls to mind to mark Emerson’s turn from inspiration to exhortation, bears a special emblematic significance to the author of Moby-Dick. Shakespeare played a formative role in his own development as an author and served as the touchstone for measuring the American literary achievements of his own day. In 1849, Melville reads both Emerson and Shakespeare for the first time. In these authors, he sees the possibility of a new “literary genius and messianic spiritual power,” as Richard Brodhead underscores in “Hawthorne, Melville, and the Fiction of Prophecy.”3 In a letter to Evert Duyckinck on March 3, 1849, Melville verbally slaps his forehead with the force of an epiphany: “Dolt & ass that I am have lived more than 29 years, & until a few days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William. Ah, he’s full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, aye, almost as Jesus. I fancy that this moment Shakspeare in heaven ranks with Gabriel Raphael and Michael. And if another Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakesper’s person.”4 Of course the most famous Second Coming Melville heralded was the advent of Shakespeare in the person of Nathaniel Hawthorne, as he exulted in the 1850 “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” From this turning point onward, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Shakespeare are linked to prophetic authorship for Melville. If F. O. Matthiessen could have presented the term “American Renaissance” to the foremost authors alleged to have melville’s benediction 129 defined the period and asked them to ascribe a meaning to the phrase, one possible response might have lain in this comparison drawn by Melville. In his generation, he had...