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Pierre Bayle and Moby Dick

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Millicent Bell
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Extract

When Melville bought an English translation of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique early in 1849, he obviously anticipated—with mock alarm—an “influence.” He wrote Evert Duyck-inck, in whose library he may have come across it earlier: “I bought a set of Bayle's Dictionary the other day, & on my return to New York I intend to lay the great old folios side by side & go to sleep on them thro' the summer, with the Phaedon in one hand & Tom Brown in the other.” It was, of course, a moment for influences, the most receptive and most productive period of Melville's life. That year, he saw Mardi and Redburn into print, and made the memorable trip to England with the MS. of White Jacket. A few months later he moved to the Berkshires, where he met Hawthorne and began work on a new book about a whaling voyage. Though we hear no more of Bayle's Dictionary we can feel sure that the program of summer reading was carried out. I shall show how pervasive were its effects on Moby Dick.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 66 , Issue 5 , September 1951 , pp. 626 - 648
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951

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References

Note 1 in page 626 He might have had one of three English editions: 1710 (London, Harper, etc., 4 vols.), 1734–38 (London, Knapton, etc., 5 vols.), and 1734–41 (London, Bettenham, etc., 10 vols.), all folio. All references to follow will be to the 2nd ed. (1734–38), reputedly more accurate than the first, and with fewer additions “in the spirit of Bayle” by the English editors, than the third.

Note 2 in page 626 Willard Thorp, Herman Melville: Representative Selections (New York, 1938), p. 375.

Note 3 in page 626 E.g., by Charles R. Anderson, Melville in the South Seas (New York, 1939), and Howard P. Vincent, The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick (Boston, 1949).

Note 4 in page 627 The title page of this work, in the edition of 1728, alone survives. It is in the Metcalf Collection of the New York Public Library, bearing the inscription “Herman Gansevoort to Herman Melville.”

Note 5 in page 627 Vincent is to be credited with the discovery that Melville must have made some use of Kitto, even though there is no external evidence that he ever saw or read this two-volume work which was just newly issued in 1849.

Note 6 in page 627 Merton M. Sealts, Jr., “Melville's Reading: A Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed,” ELB, ii (1948), 141. A Brooklyn book dealer, A. F. Farnell, bought a cartload of these books from Mrs. Melville, and Carl V. Wight, who purchased some of them, recalls that Farnell scrapped what he could not re-sell, for waste paper (Oscar Wegelin, “Herman Melville as I Recall Him,” Colophon, n.s. i [1935], 22). If it was not destroyed then, perhaps Melville's Bayle will turn up one of these days.

Note 7 in page 628 For well-known statements of Melville's views on Emerson, see his letter to Evert Duyckinck, March 1849 (Thorp, Representative Selections, pp. 371–373), and later comments written into his copy of the Essays (W. Braswell, “Melville as a Critic of Emerson,” AL, ix [1937–38], 317–333).

Note 8 in page 628 So Melville expressed his disapproval of Goethe's pantheism, in a letter to Hawthorne in 1851 (Thorp, Representative Selections, p. 393).

Note 9 in page 628 This sentence of Emerson's received scornful marginal comment from Melville in the 60's (Braswell, “Melville as a Critic of Emerson,” p. 324).

Note 10 in page 629 Œuvres Completes de Voltaire (Paris, 1819), x, 116.

Note 11 in page 629 The English Notebook by Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Randall Stewart (New York, 1941), p. 433.

Note 12 in page 630 Miscellaneous Works (London, 1837), p. 32.

Note 13 in page 631 Howard P. Vincent has discussed Melville's use of Bayle in these chapters in The Trying-Out of Moby Dick, pp. 269–286. He does not include some pertinent comparisons given here, however. In particular, he omits the significant bit of proof discussed below, Melville's translation of Bayle's supposition that the shrewder ancients would have rejected all the fabulous whale stories, whether Hebrew or Greek, into the flat statement that certain thinkers actually did so—a slip that betrays the borrower more certainly than the most striking parallelism.

Note 14 in page 631 Moby-Dick or The Whale, ed. Willard Thorp (New York, 1947), pp. 342–343. All subsequent references to Moby Dick will be to this edition.

Note 15 in page 633 In the chapter on the Manichees, Bayle stages a discourse between Zoroaster and Melissus, Zoroaster producing telling arguments, while his creator sanctimoniously deplores his success; and in the chapter on Pyrrho, in which he deals with the perilous subject of Cartesian scepticism, the controversy is presented by another pair of puppets, two anonymous abbots.

Note 16 in page 633 Vincent points out that a number of statements in this chapter as well as in Chapter XXV, “The Affadavit,” owe something to Kitto's Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature. Most of the material, however, stems from Bayle; Melville has taken along with this material something of the Frenchman's method and attitude, his very comic intent; and his use of other sources is merely incidental.

Note 17 in page 634 John Harris' Navigantum atque Itinerantum Bibliotheca (London, 1705) does contain a reference to a mosque near Tigris, but tells nothing about a perpetual lamp.

Note 18 in page 635 Nathalia Wright, Melville's Use of the Bible (Durham, N.C., 1949), p. 186.

Note 19 in page 636 Wright, p. 84.

Note 20 in page 640 F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), p. 442.

Note 21 in page 645 Isaiah xlv.7.

Note 22 in page 646 Letter to Hawthorne, March 1851 (Thorp, Representative Selections, p. 388).

Note 23 in page 647 That Melville's “Descartian vortices” symbolize the workings of a Godless universe seems indisputable when it is recalled that Descartes' famous theory of the vortices (later discredited by Newton) described a cosmos maintained in motion by spontaneous mechanical laws. The attempt to explain the motion of bodies by the eddies formed in a primary aether filling all space, was, as Sir William Dampier observes, “a bold attempt to reduce the stupendous problem of the sky to dynamics. ... It reduced the physical Universe to a vast machine, expressible, though as Newton showed, inaccurately, in mathematical terms” (A History of Science [Cambridge, 1942], p. 150).