BOOKS
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Chronometrical and Horological conceit, in sum, seems to teach
this:- That in things terrestrial (horological) a man must not be
goverened by ideas celestial (chronometrical); that certain minor self–
renunciations in this life his own mere instinct for his own every-day
general well-being will teach him to make, but he must by no means
make a complete unconditional sacrifice of himself in behalf of any
other being, or any cause, or any conceit. " How that long sentence is
stretched. Pierre Glendinning is fooled into awe, but not Melville. We
will hear this voice again in American literature. The p>riest in
Faulkner's
A Fable
speaks to a doomed corporal who resembles Billy
Budd. Sell out, the priest urges, betray yourself. We all have, we all do.
It wasn't He with His humility and pity and sacrifice that converted
the world; it was pagan and bloody Rome which did it with His
martyrdom . . .. It was Paul, who was a Roman first and then a man
and only then a dreamer and so of all of them was able to read the
dream correctly and then realise that, to endure, it could not be a
nebulous and airy faith but instead it must
be
a
church,
an
establish–
ment,
a morality of behavior inside which man could exercise his
right and duty for free will and decision, not for a reward resembling
the bedtime tale which soothes the child into darkness, but the
reward of being able to cope peacefully, hold his own, with the hard
durable world in which . .. he found himself.
Like Faulkner, Melville knows the voice of the devil. He heard it in
Hawthorne. Do not sacrifice yourself. Plinlimmon's text breaks off.
When extended, the doctrine of virtuous expediency becomes the
consecutive sayings of Poor Richard. Pierre is spared the aphorisms.
When he finally meets Plinlimmon face to face, Plinlimmon appropri–
ately has nothing to say.
The traffic between life and art is heavy in Miller's biography.
That Melville needed and cherished Hawthorne is certain. That
Hawthorne failed him is highly probable. The space in which Miller
works is speculative. For the Melville he creates is taken largely from
Melville's fiction, warped around a set of mythological presupposi–
tions, and then bound by a reductive reading of Melville's florid letters
to Hawthorne. Once this system of transference is established, every–
thing is possible. Melville's life and Melville's art fall into an amazing
series of exact correspondences. Brilliant biographies are of course
written on this very principle of imaginative speculation, but Miller's
Melville
is not one of them.
If
Melville and Hawthorne ever discussed
the problem of narcissism, of egotism, it is a fair guess that Melville
dominated the conversation, and was less the egotist for it. Did
