"Visible Objects of Reverence": Quotations from Goethe in Melville's Annotated New Testament

“Visible Objects of Reverence”: Quotations from Goethe in Melville’s Annotated New Testament JAMES DUBAN University of North Texas I D eviating from his customary habit of annotation, Herman Melville inscribed lengthy but unattributed quotations on the inside covers of a New Testament and Psalms presented to him in 1846, one of several Melville-family bibles still in existence.1 Scholarship has accounted for a far briefer quotation located on the front flyleaf of that volume, but the origins of the longer and rather more provocative quotations have until now remained elusive.2 Here, I identify their source in Thomas Carlyle’s C
2007 The Authors Journal compilation C
2007 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc 1 The Bible under discussion, housed at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, was presented to Melville in 1846 by an aunt, Jean Melville. See The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ: Translated out of the Original Greek; and with the Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised (New York: American Bible Society, 1844) [call number ∗AC85.M4977.Zz844b]. I quote the marginalia on the inside covers by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. The Bible is listed as Item 65 of Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville’s Reading: Revised and Enlarged Edition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), along with other Melvillefamily bibles (155-56). For previous attention to Melville’s annotations in his 1844 Bible, see William Braswell, Melville’s Religious Thought: An Essay in Interpretation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1943), 11, 23, 26, 27 (who quotes the inscription at the back of Melville’s Bible); Nathalia Wright, Melville’s Use of the Bible (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1949), 9-11, 91 (who quotes from the inscription at the front of Melville’s Bible). These instances of unattributed quotations on the inside covers or fly leaves of books personally owned by Melville deviate from his more customary annotations on these pages, as illustrated throughout Walker Cowen’s “Melville’s Marginalia” (Diss.: Harvard, 1965, 11 vols.), reprinted as Melville’s Marginalia, 2 vols. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1987); hereafter cited as Melville’s Marginalia. Although the inside covers and fly leaves of many volumes contain, as anticipated, Melville’s name and the date or source of a volume’s acquisition (or similarly casual information, such as where he may have first read a work), only a few of those pages or spaces feature more extensive personal information. Among the exceptions are Melville’s account of how he chanced, at a bookstore, to purchase the very copy of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy once owned by his father (I:375); his partial record of family marriages, births, and deaths in still another of his bibles (I:317-19); and his playful musings over a piece of sea moss toward the front of his personal copy of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse (I:604). As for unattributed quotations on fly leaves, another instance occurs in Melville’s copy of Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes (II:130). 2 For the source of the shorter quotation, in St. Evremond (but as derived by Melville from a 1710 English translation of Pierre Bayle’s An Historical and Critical Dictionary), see James Duban, “The L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 3 J A M E S D U B A N translations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Wilhelm Meister’s Travels and suggest that the emphases and contexts leading up to each quotation within Goethe’s novels should figure in discussions of Melville’s choice to extract each of these passages.3 Even so, attribution is complicated by the fact that Carlyle himself quotes one of the passages in his essay “Goethe” (1828), reprinted in Carlyle’s Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1839). Although Melville borrowed Evert Duyckinck’s copy of Wilhelm Meister in 1850, he was also reading various works of Carlyle around the same time.4 Thus, while the...