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The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade:
The Confidence-Man is
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Very poorly received by an uninterested and uncomprehending public, The Confidence-Man was Melville's last novel. He would thereafter turn to writing poetry, resuming prose fiction only in 1885 with the commencement of Billy Budd, Sailor.
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Mr. Melville is lavish in aphorism, epigram, and metaphor. When
he is not didactic, he is luxuriously picturesque; and, although
his style is one, from its peculiarities, difficult to manage, he
has now obtained a mastery over it, and pours his colors over the
narration with discretion as well as prodigality.... [W]e grow so
familiar with the passengers that they seem at last to form a
little world of persons mutually interested, generally eccentric,
but in no case dull....
Full of thought, conceit, and fancy, of affectation and
originality, this book is not unexceptionally meritorious, but it
is invariably graphic, fresh, and entertaining. --London
Athenaeum, April 11 1857
Mr. Melville has a manner wholly different from that of the anonymous writer who has produced The Metaphysicians. He is less scholastic, and more sentimental; his style is not so severe; on the contrary, festoons of exuberant fancy decorate the discussion of abstract problems; the controversialists pause ever and anon while a vivid, natural Mississippi landscape is rapidly painted before the mind; the narrative is almost rhythmic, the talk is cordial, bright American touches are scattered over the perspective -- the great steam-boat deck, the river coasts, the groups belonging to various gradations of New-World life. In his Pacific stories Mr. Melville wrote as with an Indian pencil, steeping the entire relation in colours almost too brilliant for reality; his books were all stars, twinkles, flashes, vistas of green and crimson, diamond and crystal; he has now tempered himself, and studied the effect of neutral tints. He has also added satire to his repertory, and, as he uses it scrupulously, he uses it well. His fault is a disposition to discourse upon too large a scale, and to keep his typical characters too long in one attitude upon the stage.... The charm of the book is owing to its originality and to its constant flow of descriptions, character-sketching, and dialogue, deeply toned and skilfully contrasted. --London Leader, April 11 1857
We notice this book at length for
much the same reason as Dr. Livingston describes his travels in
Monomotapa, holding that its perusal has constituted a feat which
few will attempt, and fewer still accomplish. Those who,
remembering the nature of the author's former performances, take
it up in the expectation of encountering a wild and stirring
fiction, will be tolerably sure to lay it down ere long with an
uncomfortable sensation of dizziness in the head, and yet some
such introduction under false pretences seems to afford it its
only chance of being taken up at all. For who will meddle with a
book professing to inculcate philosophical truths through the
medium of nonsensical people talking nonsense -- the best
definition of its scope and character that a somewhat prolonged
consideration has enabled us to suggest. A novel it is not,
unless a novel means forty-five conversations held on board a
steamer, conducted by personages who might pass for the errata of
creation, and so far resembling the Dialogues of Plato as to be
undoubted Greek to ordinary men. Looking at the substance of
these colloquies, they cannot be pronounced altogether valueless;
looking only at the form, they might well be esteemed the
compositions of a March hare with a literary turn of mind. It is
not till a lengthened perusal -- a perusal more lengthened than
many readers will be willing to accord -- has familiarized us
with the quaintness of the style, and until long domestication
with the incomprehensible interlocutors has infected us with
something of their own eccentricity, that our faculties, like the
eyes of prisoners accustomed to the dark, become sufficiently
acute to discern the golden grains which the author has made it
his business to hide away from us....
... We do, as Mr.
Melville says, desire to see nature "unfettered, exhilarated," in
fiction we do not want to see her "transformed." We are
glad to see the novelist create imaginary scenes and persons,
nay, even characters whose type is not to be found in nature. But
we demand that, in so doing, he should observe certain
ill-defined but sufficiently understood rules of probability. His
fictitious creatures must be such as Nature might herself have
made, supposing their being to have entered into her design. We
must have fitness of organs, symmetry of proportions, no
impossibilities, no monstrosities. As to harlequin, we think it
very possible indeed that his coat may be too parti-coloured, and
his capers too fantastic, and conceive, moreover, that Mr.
Melville's present production supplies an unanswerable proof of
the truth of both positions. We should be sorry, in saying this,
to be confounded with the cold unimaginative critics, who could
see nothing but extravagance in some of our author's earlier
fictions -- in the first volume of Mardi, that
archipelago of lovely descriptions is led in glittering reaches
of vivid nautical narrative -- the conception of The
Whale, ghostly and grand as the great grey sweep of the
ridged and rolling sea. But these wild beauties were introduced
to us with a congruity of outward accompaniment lacking here. The
isles of "Mardi" were in Polynesia, not off the United States.
Captain Ahab did not chase Moby Dick in a Mississippi steamboat.
If the language was extraordinary, the speakers were
extraordinary too....
It is, of course, very possible that
there may be method in all this madness, and that the author may
have a plan, which must needs be a very deep one indeed.
Certainly we can obtain no inkling of it. It may be that he has
chosen to act the part of a medieval jester, conveying weighty
truths under a semblance antic and ludicrous; if so, we can only
recommend him for the future not to jingle his bells so loud.
There is no catching the accents of wisdom amid all this
clattering exuberance of folly. Those who wish to teach should
not begin by assuming a mask so grotesque as to keep listeners on
the laugh, or frighten them away. Whether Mr. Melville really
does mean to teach anything is, we are aware, a matter of
considerable uncertainty. To describe his book, one had need to
be a Hollen-Breughel; to understand its purport, one should be
something of a Sphinx. It may be a bona fide eulogy on
the blessedness of reposing "confidence" -- but we are not at all
confident of this. Perhaps it is a hoax on the public -- an
emulation of Barnum. Perhaps the mild man in mourning, who goes
about requesting everybody to put confidence in him, is an emblem
of Mr. Melville himself, imploring toleration for three hundred
and fifty-three pages of rambling, on the speculation of there
being something to the purpose in the three hundred and
fifty-fourth; which, by the way, there is not, unless the
oracular announcement that "something further may follow of this
masquerade," is to be regarded in that light. We are not denying
that this tangled web of obscurity is shot with many a gleam of
shrewd and subtle thought -- that this caldron, so thick and slab
with nonsense, often bursts into the bright, brief bubbles of
fancy and wit. The greater the pity to see these good things so
thrown away....
It will be seen that Mr. Melville can still
write powerfully when it pleases him. Even when most wayward, he
yet gives evidence of much latent genius, which, however, like
latent heat, is of little use either to him or to us. We should
wish to meet him again in his legitimate department, as the
prose-poet of the ocean; if, however, he will persist in
indoctrinating us with his views concerning the vrai, we
trust he will at least condescend to pay, for the future, some
slight attention to the vraisemblable. He has ruined
this book, as he did with Pierre, by a strained effort
after excessive originality. ----London Literary Gazette,
April 11 1857
The author of Typee has again come upon us in one of his
strange vagaries, and calls himself
Even the most partial of Mr. Melville's friends must allow that
the book is not wholly worthy of him. It has a careless and
rambling style which would seem to have been easier for the
author to write than his readers to peruse. There are bright
flashes in it; scintillations of poetic light, and much common
sense well expressed, but the book as a whole is somewhat heavy.
--Worcester, Massachusetts Palladium, April 22
1857 ...[T]he Confidence-Man contains a mass of
anecdotes, stories, scenes, and sketches undigested, and, in our
opinion, indigestible. The more voracious reader may, of course,
find them acceptable; but we confess that we have not "stomach
for them all." We said that the book belonged to no particular
class, but we are almost justified in affirming that its
genre is the genre ennuyeux. The author in his
last line promises "something more of this masquerade." All we
can say, in reply to the brilliant author of Omoo and
Typee is, "the less the merrier." --London
Illustrated Times, April 25 1857 There is one point on
which we must speak a serious word to Mr. Melville before parting
with him. He is too clever a man to be a profane one; and yet his
occasionally irreverent use of Scriptural phrases in such a book
as the one before us, gives a disagreeable impression. We hope he
will not in future mar his wit and blunt the edge of his satire
by such instances of bad taste. He has, doubtless, in the present
case fallen into them inadvertently, for they are blemishes
belonging generally to a far lower order of mind than his; and we
trust that when the sequel of the masquerade of the
Confidence-Man appears, as he gives us reason to hope that it
soon will, we shall enjoy the pleasure of his society without
this drawback. --London Saturday Review, May 23
1857 Mr. Herman Melville has also issued a new book,
through the publishing house of Dix, Edwards & Co. It is called
The Confidence Man. It is the most singular of the many
singular books of this author. Mr. Melville seems to be bent upon
obliterating his early successes. Typee and
Omoo give us a right to expect something better than any
of his later books have been. He appears now, to be merely trying
how many eccentric things he can do. This is the more to be
condemned, because in many important points he has sensibly
advanced. His style has become more individualized -- more
striking, original, sinewy, compact; more reflective and
philosophical. And yet, his recent books stand confessedly
inferior to his earlier ones. As to The Confidence Man,
we frankly acknowledge our inability to understand it.... The
Confidence Man assumes innumerable disguises -- with what object
it is not clear -- unless for the sake of dogmatizing,
theorizing, philosophizing, and amplifying upon every known
subject; all of which, philosophy, we admit to be sharp,
comprehensive, suggestive, and abundantly entertaining. But the
object of this masquerade? None appears. The book ends where it
begins. You might, without sensible inconvenience, read it
backwards. You are simply promised in the last line, that
something further shall be heard of the hero; until which
consummation, the riddle must continue to puzzle you unsolved.
--Ann Sophia Stephens, in New York Mrs. Stephens' New
Monthly Magazine, June 1857
We are not among those who have had faith in Herman Melville's
South Pacific travels so much as in his strength of imagination.
The Confidence-Man shows him in a new character -- that
of a satirist, and a very keen, somewhat bitter, observer. His
hero, like Mr. Melville in his earlier works, asks confidence of
everybody under different masks of mendicancy, and is, on the
whole, pretty successful.... It required close knowledge of the
world, and of the Yankee world, to write such a book and make the
satire acute and telling, and the scenes not too improbable for
the faith given to fiction. Perhaps the moral is the gullibility
of the great Republic, when taken on its own tack. At all events,
it is a wide enough moral to have numerous applications, and
sends minor shafts to right and left. Several capital anecdotes
are told, and well told; but we are conscious of a certain
hardness in the book, from the absence of humour, where so much
humanity is shuffled into close neighbourhood. And with the
absence of humour, too, there is an absence of kindliness. The
view of human nature is severe and sombre -- at least, that is
the impression left on our mind.... Few Americans write so
powerfully as Mr. Melville, or in better English, and we shall
look forward with pleasure to his promised continuation of the
masquerade. The first part is a remarkable work, and will add to
his reputation. --London Westminster and Foreign Quarterly
Review, July
1857
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