Introduction to Melville's Marginalia in Matthew Arnold's New Poems

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Peter Norberg
Saint Joseph's University

Melville's acquisition, on 13 February 1871, of Matthew Arnold's New Poems (Ticknor & Fields, 1867) signaled an important phase in his serious and prolonged engagement with Arnold's poetry and aesthetics. That engagement had begun a decade earlier, on 6 April 1862, when he purchased the 1856 Ticknor & Fields edition of Poems as part of the deep study of Classical, European and British poetic traditions he undertook in the years following the rejection of his own first volume of Poems by Scribner’s and Rudd & Carleton (Parker, 2.443-444). His renewed interest in Arnold's poetry in 1871 was sparked by his close study of Arnold's criticism. In 1869, he purchased the American edition of Arnold's Essays in Criticism (Ticknor & Fields,1865) and, as the table of contents shows, systematically checked off each essay as he read them over the next few months, or years. Melville found the discussion of epic poetry in Arnold's lectures "On Translating Homer" especially relevant to his efforts to create a modern epic in Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), and his purchase of New Poems indicates in part a determination to evaluate Arnold's poetry in light of his criticism. By February 1871, with Clarel underway, Arnold's poetry and criticism served as an imaginative prod and a critical standard against which Melville would measure his own poetic ambitions (Norberg, 2004).

As Walter Bezanson first observed, Melville read Arnold's poetry "with a sense of coming upon a major contemporary" (366), and in his marginalia to New Poems we see him reacting against Arnold's idealist aesthetics, using specific poems as sources for thematic concerns in Clarel and his late poetry, and paying close attention to prosody and other formal elements of poetic composition. Moreover, New Poems contains evidence of Melville's reading habits that can help us better understand the intensity of his engagement with Arnold. In a number of instances, his markings and annotations cross-reference specific poems to specific essays included in Essays in Criticism, and his later acquisition of Culture and Anarchy, Mixed Essays, Literature and Dogma, as well as Travelling Journals, with Extracts from the Life and Letters by Matthew Arnold's father Thomas Arnold, show Melville collecting Arnold with the same seriousness of purpose he gave to collecting prints and engravings. Perhaps most significantly, Melville found in Arnold a poet and a critic who shared his deep appreciation of classical antiquity. Arnold's use of characters and events from ancient Greek and Roman culture and his deliberate comparison of ancient culture with modern Europe resonated powerfully with Melville, who, in his 1859 lecture "Statues in Rome," questioned whether "all our modern triumphs equal those of the heroes and divinities" represented in the sculpture housed in the Vatican museum (Piazza Tales, 408). New Poems, therefore, should be listed among Melville's primary sources for Clarel, but it also should be viewed in relation to studies of classical culture and aesthetics he undertook during the last three decades of his life.

Thematic and Rhetorical Influences     

Samples of the marginalia to New Poems were first published by Jay Leyda in The Melville Log (1951) and were briefly discussed by Leon Howard in Herman Melville: A Biography, published that same year. The first substantial study, however, was Walter Bezanson's "Melville's Reading of Arnold's Poetry," which surveys the markings and annotations in Melville's volumes of Poems and New Poems. It was Bezanson who first revealed Arnold's poetry to be a central influence on Melville's conception of Clarel. Shirley Dettlaf has added to Bezanson's analysis an informative study of Melville's engagement with Arnold's aesthetics. Agnes D. Cannon, William Dillingham, and Hershel Parker have discussed more generally Arnold's influence on Melville's conception of the poet and poetry, and Edgar A. Dryden has examined similarities between Melville and Arnold's use of classical allusions. New Poems is perhaps most significant because of its influence on the thematic concerns Melville explored, and the poetic techniques he employed, in crafting his epic poem Clarel; however, because he continued to acquire volumes of Arnold's criticism into the 1880s, his response to New Poems may also provide insight into John Marr, and other sailors (1888), Timoleon (1891), and the poetry left in manuscript at the time of his death.

Melville marked twelve of the forty-two poems included in New Poems, and these can be loosely grouped into three categories: (1) poems of influence on Clarel, including "Empedocles on Etna," "The Good Shepherd with the Kid," "A Southern Night," "Obermann Once More," and "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," (2) poems related to Arnold's aesthetics, including "Austerity of Poetry," "Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoön," and "Heine's Grave," and (3) poems concerned with youth, age, mortality, and fame, including "Fragments of a Chorus of A Dejaneira," "Human Life," "Youth and Calm," "Growing Old," and "A Wish."

Of the first group, "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" is arguably the most important. Like Clarel, it is written in rhyming iambic tetrameters, and its story, the narrator's encounter with his loss of faith during a visit to a Carthusian monastery, parallels that of Melville's protagonist, Clarel, a divinity student who travels to Jerusalem because of a similar crisis in faith. Melville's markings to "Empedocles on Etna" and "Obermann Once More," show him tracking similar themes of modernist disillusionment, and his markings to "A Southern Night" suggest that poem's influence on his conception of European tourists in the Levant.

The second group of poems shows Melville following closely Arnold's characterizations of the poet and poetry, as he had earlier when he read "The Scholar Gipsy," "Resignation," and "Obermann" in Arnold's Poems. He triple checked the sonnet "Austerity of Poetry," in which Arnold used the tragic death of the bride of medieval Italian poet Giacopone di Todi as a symbol of the poet's Muse: "Such, poets, is your bride, the Muse! young, gay,/ Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden ground/ Of thought and of austerity within" (88.13-15).[1]  In "Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoön," he isolated a similar ascetic strand in Arnold's thoughts on poetry, marking Arnold's appropriation of Pausanias' comment, in his Description of Greece, that he found "Good poems, if he looked, more rare/ (Though many) than good statues were" (136.18-19). "Heine's Grave" is especially significant for Melville's partially erased annotation, in which he identifies Arnold's aesthetic alternative to Heine's cynicism as derived from Joubert, and then compares it with that of Dante. The act of comparative analysis shows Arnold to be a central figure in the ongoing dialogue Melville maintained with the great writers of the past via his reading.

The third group of poems is no less significant. Though many seem little more than occasional, light verse, Melville's markings show him tracking Arnold's thoughts on youth, mortality, and the processes of aging, themes important to his late poetry and Billy Budd. Consistently, Melville's attention was drawn to Arnold's perspective on the Victorian crisis in faith brought on by modern industrial life, his classicism, and his figuration of the poet's life as one of stoic asceticism—matters that preoccupied Melville's imagination during his last years.

In Arnold, Melville found confirmation of his own belief that the major crisis facing the industrialized West in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was the displacement of Christian moral values by scientific materialism. In poems such as "The Shepherd with the Kid," "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," and "Obermann Once More," he consistently marked those passages where Arnold expresses nostalgia for early Christian Europe, a time when belief was untainted by skepticism (New Poems, 87, 180-181, 194-195).

Yet Melville was unsatisfied with Arnold's affirmation of human love as an antidote to modern skepticism (New Poems, 109, 169) and frustrated by Arnold's occasional endorsement of cultural progress (New Poems, 28). Whereas Arnold expressed nostalgia for a lost faith, resignation to our modern plight, and some small hope for the future, Melville in Clarel would pursue a dialogic anatomy of modern skepticism in all its phases. His dissatisfaction with Arnold's solutions prompted him to make both a stronger condemnation of the empty materialism of late Victorian culture and a more pessimistic assessment of its future prospects.

"The Western Critic"

Despite, or because of, his careful study of Arnold's Essays in Criticism, the Melville we see in the margins of New Poems is less a student putting himself to school at the hands of a master than he is an equal subjecting Arnold's aesthetic sensibilities to his own critical analysis. When he read Arnold's preface to Poems in 1862, Melville followed carefully the aesthetic theory Arnold outlined, including his reasons for excluding "Empedocles on Etna" from the collection because it represents a situation "from which no enjoyment can be derived," and therefore, violates Schiller's claim that "the right Art is that alone, which creates the highest enjoyment" (Poems 10.31). There Melville had mildly objected to this rationale, and one might therefore expect Melville to have viewed Arnold's inclusion of "Empedocles on Etna" favorably when he encountered it in New Poems. Instead, in two lengthy annotations, he reacted to Empedocles' stoic despair in a tone significantly more judgmental than his earlier assessment of Arnold's endorsement of Schiller. He marked with his characteristic "X" Empedocles' declaration that man "has no right to bliss,/ No title from the Gods to welfare and repose," and wrote at the bottom of the page this sharp rebuttal: "A Western critic here exclaims—What in thunder did the Gods create us for then? If not for bliss, for bale? If so, the devil take the Gods" (New Poems 20.4-5). With a sense of entitlement befitting the expostulatory nature of this commentary, Melville is speaking out on behalf of humanity's "right to bliss," both in life and in aesthetic experience. Yet this apparent agreement in principle with Arnold's endorsement of Schiller is complicated by the aggressively critical tone Melville takes under the guise of "the Western critic," a tone that suggests he may have begun reading New Poems with the express purpose of submitting Arnold's poetry to his own critical analysis.

Eight pages later, Melville again reacted to Arnold in the role of "the Western critic," this time with a cynical tone directed as much at modern progress as at Arnold's poetry.   In response to Empedocles' complaint that knowledge has come to exceed human comprehension ("The mass swells more and more/ Of volumes yet to read,/ Of secrets yet to explore"), Melville wrote "Damn the 'volumes', exclaims the Western critic.—'What could a sage of the Nineteenth Century teach Socrates? Why, nothing more than something about Cyrus Feilds [sic] and the ocean telegraph, and the Sewing Machine &c." (28.18-20). This dismissal of modern progress, while apparently directed at Arnold, nonetheless invokes, with its allusion to Socrates, the same respect for classical culture that Melville admired in Arnold's 1853 Preface to Poems and in his three lectures "On Translating Homer" in Essays in Criticism.

Melville's writing in the role of "the Western critic" is unique in Melville's marginalia and therefore merits careful consideration. It not only adds greater nuance to his evaluation of Arnold's aesthetics, but provides evidence of his attitude toward cultural criticism as he was writing Clarel. As Bezanson has argued, "western" may refer to "American" in contrast with Arnold's reputation as an Anglo-European critic of stature, the holder of the Oxford Professorship of Poetry from 1857-1867. Further, if one recalls Melville's description of Ethan Allan in Israel Potter (1855) as embodying a "spirit" that is "essentially western," and therefore, "peculiar[ly] American" (149), then this pose of "the Western critic" can be seen as derived from a critical spirit within Melville's own writing that predates his encounter with Arnold. Melville gave a decidedly critical edge to this distinctively "western spirit" in his characterization of the Missourian in The Confidence Man (1857), whose frontier spirit is defined in contrast with the cosmopolitan. The Missourian associates the cosmopolitan with reformers, abolitionists and the Puritans of New England, and accuses him of being a representative instance of "the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right" (112). If, under the guise of "the Western critic," Melville is upbraiding Arnold for indulging in a comparable sort of "moderate" thinking, then he is, in essence, applying Arnold's own critical standards to these stanzas of "Empedocles on Etna."

Significant in this regard is the fact that, while reading Arnold's Essays in Criticism, Melville followed carefully Arnold’s condemnation of the moderate “Philistinism” of British middle-class culture (see for example Essays, x, 25, 146-47, 172).   Melville's reaction to Arnold in the role of "the Western critic" may then represent a stage in his development of the critical perspective on Gilded Age progress given in Clarel. "The Western critic" is a sort of intermediate character between the Missourian of The Confidence Man and Ungar, the ex-Confederate soldier from Maryland, who possesses a comparable "western" spirit by virtue of the fact that he is descended from an early British colonist and a Native-American woman, and described as having an "Anglo brain, but Indian heart" (4.5. 141). In the annotations he wrote in the voice of "the Western critic," then, we can see Melville trying out a critical voice, one he would later use in Part IV of Clarel to deliver Ungar's jeremiad against modern progress which predicts that centennial America will usher in "the Dark Ages of Democracy" (4.21. 148).

Intertextual Evidence 

There is other evidence in New Poems that Melville evaluated Arnold's poetry by Arnold's own critical standards. His identification of the influence of Joubert and Spinoza on Arnold's thinking (New Poems 169.19-21, 174.14-19) along with his close reading of Arnold's poem "Heine's Grave" strongly suggest that Melville recently had read Arnold's essays on "Joubert," "Spinoza" and "Heinrich Heine" in Essays in Criticism. Furthermore, in the essay "Spinoza," Melville's annotation observing that Spinoza's Ethics "are now translated­—1871—by Willis" shows that he was reading Essays in Criticism in the same year, or after, he purchased New Poems (Essays, 245.23). And, as Agnes Cannon has demonstrated, reading Arnold's lectures "On Translating Homer" in Essays and Criticism deepened Melville's appreciation of Arnold's opinion on matters of style and technique. His appropriative use of verse forms, diction, and other poetic techniques from "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," may therefore indicate that reading these lectures led Melville to consciously imitate Arnold's prosody. So although Melville came to New Poems reading more with the critical perspective of a poet among equals, that perspective was itself influenced by Arnold's criticism.

By the time he read New Poems in 1871, Melville's estimate of Arnold's aesthetic sensibilities had developed since his earliest known encounter with Arnold's poetry in 1862. While his marginalia to Poems indicate that he was reading Arnold in the role of a student, attentive to formal matters of poetic technique, his marginalia to New Poems show him reading Arnold on more equal footing, as a contemporary subject to his critical estimate but still suitable as a model for his own poetic endeavors. Moreover, reading New Poems soon after, or during, his careful reading of Essays in Criticism deepened his understanding of literature as a vehicle for social criticism. That he would later purchase three other volumes of Arnold's critical writings (Sealts Nos. 16, 18, and 19) indicates the degree of importance Melville gave to the critical perspective Arnold sought to foster in his readers. His reaction to New Poems shows a sharpening of critical perspective that coincides with a new sense of purpose as a poet. Interestingly, it was Matthew Arnold's criticism that helped him to this perspective, even as we see him trying it out on Arnold's poetry.   As Leon Howard observed, in the decade after his return from the Holy Land, Melville "wavered between serious criticism and incidental commentary" in his lectures and war poetry (281). His reading of Matthew Arnold's poetry and criticism helped sharpen his sense of how his writing could function as a form of cultural critique.

[1] Parenthetical page references in this introduction to works by Matthew Arnold refer to pagination in "Melville's Marginalia in Mathew Arnold's New Poems," "Melville's Marginalia in Mathew Arnold's Poems," and "Melville's Marginalia in Mathew Arnold's Essays in Criticism," with line numbers following pagination where applicable. For instance, the citation "88.13-15" refers to page 88, lines 13 to 15 of Arnold's New Poems and may include the mouse-over critical comment linked to the passage in question.

Arnold, Matthew. Essays in Criticism. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865.

Cannon, Agnes D. "Melville's Concepts of the Poet and Poetry." Arizona Quarterly 31 (1975): 315-339.

Dettlaff, Shirley M. “’Counter Natures in Mankind': Hebraism and Hellenism in Clarel.” Melville's Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays. Ed. John Bryant and Robert Milder. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997.

­———. “Melville's Aesthetics.” A Companion to Melville Studies. Ed. John Bryant. Westport, CT : Greenwood, 1986. 625-665.

———. “Ionian Form and Esau's Waste: Melville's View of Art in Clarel.” American Literature 54.2 (May, 1982): 212-228.

Dillingham, William B. Melville and His Circle: The Last Years. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Dryden, Edgar. Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Gibbon, Edward. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ed. David Womersley. 3 vols. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. 

Higgins, Brian and Hershel Parker. Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Howard, Leon. Herman Melville: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951.

Leyda, Jay, ed. The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1892. 2   vols. New York: Harcourt Brace. 1951; reprint with supplement, New York: Gordian Press, 1969.

Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative. Eds. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

———. Clarel. Eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1991.

———. Collected Poems. Ed. Howard P. Vincent. Chicago: Packard and Co., Hendricks House, 1947.

———. The Confidence Man. Eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1984.

———. "Hawthorne and His Mosses." The Piazza-Tales, and Other Prose Pieces: 1839-1860. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle, and others. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987: 239-53.

———. Israel Potter. Eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1982.

———. Journals. Eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1989.

———. "Statues in Rome." The Piazza Tales, and other Prose Pieces. Eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987: 398-409.

Norberg, Peter. "Finding an Audience for Clarel in Mathew Arnold's Essays in Criticism." Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 6.1 (March, 2004): 35-54.

Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns-Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002.

Sealts, Merton M., Jr. Melville's Reading: Revised and Enlarged Edition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.