Recently Sidney P. Moss set out to "neutralize certain legends that distort Melville scholarship," defining them as follows:¹ "One of them is that Melville was anti-Transcendentalist and especially anti-Emersonian, a mistake that has led to biased interpretations of his later novels, particularly of Pierre and The Confidence-Man. A second is that Melville's emotional and intellectual temperament was attuned to Hawthorne's, a notion that prevents us from seeing why Melville's fiction is more dynamic than his 'mentor's.' A third legend is that Melville's 'Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!' is a satire, whether of Thoreau, Emerson, Wordsworth, or Transcendentalism in general, a misreading that has made this tale, though the happiest in the Melville canon and one of the most exultant in literature, badly neglected indeed." This project is fairly ambitious, since the Minotaurs in what Moss calls "the labyrinth of Melville scholarship" include (besides Egbert S. Oliver) Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Jay Leyda, Edward Rosenberry, and--most notably--Elizabeth S. Foster. I will here disregard the second "legend," suspecting that it is believed by few Melvilleans, at least in so simple a version. The first and the third deserve attention, especially the first. An evaluation of the evidence for Melville's satire of Emerson and Thoreau will show that earlier critics (some of whose best arguments Moss unaccountably does not mention) have established the fact that Melville in at least one work did satirize Transcendentalism and Transcendentalists and that Moss has considerably distorted the history of critical comment.

Though other scholars had observed that Mark Winsome in The Confidence-Man was a portrait of Emerson, the first to attempt a scholarly identification was Egbert S. Oliver. Between 1945 and 1948 he argued in three articles that Melville had satirized Thoreau in "Bartleby," both Emerson and Thoreau in The Confidence-Man, and Thoreau in "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!"² These three articles are most responsible for the propagation of Moss's first and third "legends," though it is fair to say that most serious Melville scholars have ignored all but the article on The Confidence-Man. Since none of them evoked any immediate critical retorts, I can disregard the order in which they were published and discuss them within the chronology of Melville's works.

Oliver had little external evidence for his argument that the "germ" of the character of Bartleby came "from an external contemporary source, namely, Thoreau's withdrawal from society." He could not cite any mention of Thoreau in any of Melville's writings, "whether his literary work, letters, or various journal jottings." His main evidence was Evert A. Duyckinck's record that Melville had borrowed Thoreau's Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in 1850, though no proof exists that Melville borrowed the book for himself (he had a large household) or that he read it after borrowing it. Oliver also suggested that because Hawthorne had lived in Concord "during the time of Thoreau's residence in the cabin by Walden Pond, his so-called hermitage," the Hawthornes and Melville "probably discussed Thoreau's experiment in "withdrawing" from society on occasion or on many occasions during their period of close relationship".³ Admitting that Melville might never have heard Thoreau's name from Hawthorne or anyone else, he suggested that Melville must have had access in the Hawthorne house to "Resistance to Civil Government" in Aesthetic Papers, a volume of mainly Transcendental literature edited in 1849 by Mrs. Hawthorne's sister, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Melville "undoubtedly had a chance" to see it "in the Hawthorne home if he did not himself have a copy of it." From this rather extreme statement, Oliver went to assert that Melville had actually read Aesthetic Papers, at least Thoreau's essay. The movement from conjecture to assertion was bridged by a summary of Thoreau's argument in that essay. Oliver arbitrarily identified certain passages "which suggested much to Melville" and said that Thoreau spoke with a defiance "which Melville must have admired."⁴ He asserted further that Melville "was undoubtedly aware that Thoreau was generally accused of being a 'copyist' himself, a cop[i]er of Emerson, as Lowell pictures him in A Fable for Critics." He did not quote the Lowell poem in this article, and when he did in the article on The Confidence-Man he quoted the lines referring to Channing, not Thoreau; so this bit of evidence is somewhat vitiated.⁵ Oliver further suggested that in revealing that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, Melville may have been referring to "Thoreau's extended use of ancient and oriental literature"--apparently seeing a pun on dead letters and dead literatures.⁶ In his last paragraph, Oliver suggested that Melville had read the three instalments of A Yankee in Canada in Putnam's Monthly for the first three months of 1853 ("Bartleby" appeared in the November and December issues), but he did not demonstrate that these instalments in any way confirmed Melville in his opinion of Thoreau or that he even knew who the anonymous author of the instalments was. In fact, he did not demonstrate that Melville had read them at all.

It is difficult to summarize Oliver's arguments on internal evidence, for most of the "parallels" are unconvincing. Bartleby is a scrivener and Thoreau is a copyist (i.e., a copycat). Bartleby behind the green screen yet within call is like Thoreau behind the green screen of trees yet near Concord. Bartleby, like Thoreau (still according to Oliver), refuses "a type of work involving the joint labors of two or more men."⁷ Someone else does Bartleby's work just as Thoreau lived on Emerson's land by Walden Pond, borrowed Alcott's ax, and let someone else pay his tax. Bartleby ate only ginger nuts and Thoreau made dietetic experiments. Bartleby and Thoreau both embody "passive nonco-operation." "Even as Henry Thoreau went quietly to the Concord jail with Constable Sam Staples, so, too, did Bartleby" go quietly to the Tombs.⁸ "Bartleby became less and less a man until there was nothing left of him. There can be no such thing as an effective life of aloofness. When Thoreau wrote, 'I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually,' he was but expressing an absurdity."⁹ One might well feel that the moral thus drawn has dubious applicability to the story and that important aspects of "Bartleby" hardly get mentioned--Melville's use of his narrator, for instance, or the similarity between Bartleby and other figures from history or literature, or between Bartleby and other Melville characters. Melville scholars have hardly made Oliver's interpretation one of the "legends" of their "labyrinth," as a glance through the 1965 Melville Annual on "Bartleby" will show.¹⁰

Oliver's evidence as to Thoreau's presence in "Cock" is also imperfect. He asserted that Melville "certainly' had a passage in the middle of "Monday" (in A Week) "before him" as he wrote the tale, and that "undoubtedly" Melville found "much in Thoreau to interest him," judging from "his repeated reading of the small amount of Thoreau's work which was published."¹¹ This assertion about Melville's repeated reading of Thoreau is based on Oliver's own evidence, especially in his article on "Bartleby." His parallels between A Week and "Cock" are so unconvincing that they resist repetition; Moss is altogether right in thinking that Oliver does not make a case for the influence of Thoreau's A Week upon Melville's story. Yet Oliver can be wrong about that influence and still be right in a part of his main conclusion that the story is "a reductio ad absurdum of the transcendental disregard of materialism."¹² Given Melville's usual mistrust of optimist philosophies, one might well suspect a satiric reference to Emersonian self-reliance in the cock's crowing "in pure overflow of self-reliance and a sense of universal security," as well as in the repeated reference to the crowing as coming "from out of the East."

With his study of Melville's portrayal of Emerson and Thoreau in The Confidence-Man Oliver had much better evidence. He was able to demonstrate that Melville's interest in Emerson dated long before and after the composition of that work. He quoted the famous letters about Emerson which Melville wrote from Boston to Evert A. Duyckinck in early 1849, after hearing Emerson lecture, and quoted briefly from Melville's marginalia in copies of Emerson's Essays which he marked after 1862. He speculated that Melville would have learned something of Emerson from the Hawthornes--rightly, as a later discovery has shown. In 1953, Mrs. Metcalf printed a letter written by Mrs. Hawthorne to her sister Elizabeth in October, 1850,¹³ now appearing conveniently in the Supplement to the new edition of The Melville Log:¹⁴ "He was very careful not to interrupt Mr Hawthorne's mornings--when he was here. He generally walked off somewhere--& one morning he shut himself into the boudoir & read Mr Emerson's Essays in presence of our beautiful picture. In the afternoon he walked with Mr Hawthorne." Oliver showed that the physical portrait of the mystic Mark Winsome is similar to Emerson's appearance at the time Melville saw him (1849) and that Lowell in A Fable for Critics had described the polarities of Emerson's mind ("Greek head on right Yankee shoulders") in a way that suggests Melville's description of Winsome as "a kind of cross between a Yankee peddler and a Tartar priest." Other Oliver testimony is anachronistic, but the quotation from Lowell remains impressive, even though he did not prove that Melville read the poem. (For more indication that he did one might cite the allusion to climbing "Parnassus with a pile of folios on his back" in Pierre, XXI, I.) Oliver provided quotations from Emerson's writings that he felt were echoed in the words of Winsome, some of them extremely apposite, especially the parallels between Emerson's dictum on self-contradiction in "Self-Reliance" and Winsome's in Chapter 36. He also pointed out that Winsome, like Emerson, had written an "Essay on Friendship." Oliver decided that except for the passage from "Self-Reliance," which Melville could have learned of without reading the essay, he had not "used Emerson's Essays, either first or second series." Most of his Emersonian parallels to The Confidence-Man, which were drawn from Nature, tended to be unconvincing. Still, he cited a passage that can be read as a parallel to Egbert's endorsing hard-heartedness toward the poor, a parallel passage on the beauty even of serpent, and a passage on the special insight of children that could account for Winsome's speaking with "infantile intellectuality."¹⁵ Oliver did not conclusively explain why Melville would have wanted to satirize Emerson, though his argument that Melville found Transcendentalism heartless is sound. But his discoveries seem of minor significance, after all, and Oliver called the chapters involving the mystic and the disciple a mere "interlude in the action" and said that Winsome "adds little directly to the very thin thread of plot in the story."¹⁶

It remained for Elizabeth S. Foster to relate the mystic-and-disciple section to the rest of the book and to prove beyond any doubt, as far as I can see, that Winsome was indeed a portrait of Emerson. Her contribution was partly a mustering of new external evidence, including more of Melville's marginalia in Emerson's Essays than Oliver had used. By the time she wrote, Mrs. Metcalf had published the letter about Melville's reading Emerson's essays in the Hawthorne's boudoir in 1850; so she had good evidence that Oliver lacked. She ignored Nature, rightly I think, and cited convincing parallels from several of the essays, like "Self-Reliance," "Circles," "Napoleon," and "Friendship." She demonstrated that for Melville Transcendentalism was the most obvious contemporary American target for an opponent of optimistic philosophies. What deserved satirizing in it was precisely what deserved satirizing in Shaftesbur[i]an optimism, Utilitarian optimism, the nature cult of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and liberal, modernist Christianity--in short, any philosophy which assumes "that the universe is benevolent and human nature good."¹⁷ From her study of the surviving manuscript fragments of The Confidence-Man she even concluded--probably too hastily--that the "brush between the Confidence Man and Emerson perhaps was the nucleus around which the rest of the story took shape in Melville's mind."¹⁸ Even if this last theory is discounted, she still demonstrated the crucial significance of something that had seemed merely episodic to Oliver, and she bolstered his evidence with more pertinent citations from Emerson than his own.

Oliver's identification of Egbert, the disciple, with Thoreau was flawed from the start by a footnote citing the authority of his own earlier article identifying Bartleby with Thoreau. For a skeptic regarding the first argument, that footnote was hardly auspicious, and one who penetrated beyond it found an imperfect array of evidence. Oliver quoted Lowell to make the point that Thoreau was known as a disciple of Emerson just as Egbert was a disciple of Winsome, but he quoted the lines that in fact referred to Channing, not to Thoreau, and did not assemble more contemporary evidence about Thoreau's imitation of Emerson. Oliver then tried to account for Egbert's being in the West India trade:¹⁹ "It might seem, at first glance, that this introduction of the disciple as engaged in the West India trade, a practical young merchant, would be far from the real Thoreau; but Melville was a devotee of the pun, and his sense of humor often followed odd associations. Thoreau dealt heavily in Hindu, or Indian mysticism; hence he was engaged in the West India trade, introducing a product of India to the West." Oliver next showed that Thoreau was about fifteen years younger than Emerson, just as Egbert was about fifteen years younger than Winsome, and that Winsome was pictured as about the age of Emerson when Melville saw him. Oliver accounted for the relative lack of detail in the description of Egbert by saying that if Melville had never seen Thoreau his description "would naturally be more general than his description of Emerson, whom he had seen." Discussing Egbert's imitation of Winsome's clothing, Oliver cited one of F. B. Sanborn's 1855 notebook entries to the effect that Thoreau "dresses very plainly, wears his collar turned over like Mr. Emerson"--a custom which Sanborn in a later note contrasted with his own: "we young collegians then wearing ours upright." He further argued that Egbert's discourse on friendship is "an examination of the cold heartlessness of a section of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a book which Melville borrowed in 1850 from Evert Duyckinck."²⁰ Oliver committed himself to the view that Melville had re-read Week during the composition of The Confidence-Man, a hardly tenable position. The rest of his article is less well argued, consisting largely of successive quotations from The Confidence-Man where the line of argument calls for quotations from Thoreau to be juxtaposed with quotations from Melville. He made one further apposite quotation from Thoreau's remarks on friendship in the chapter 'Wednesday" in Week and pointed out that Emerson had written an essay on friendship just as Egbert's "sublime master" had done.

Rather than re-examining the evidence and bolstering his identification of Egbert (as she had done with his identification of Winsome), Miss Foster rejected it almost out of hand. She objected that "Emerson was certainly not Thoreau's 'sublime master' in the 1850's"--perhaps an accurate point, but one that reflects the 1950's view of Thoreau rather than the 1850's view.²¹ Admitting that at least one contemporary, Lowell, thought Thoreau was a disciple of Emerson, she rejected the relevance of that fact by arguing that the "difference between Winsome and Egbert, however, is not so much the difference between an originator and a disciple as between a mystic and a practical man, between the man of theory who confines himself to words and the man of action who puts that theory to work." (She recognized that in view of Thoreau's practical application of Emerson's principles her own point could support Oliver's thesis, and called his omission of it rather surprising.)²² In denying that Winsome and Egbert are characterized as originator and disciple, Miss Foster was forced to ignore the chapter title where Egbert is conspicuously described as a disciple as well as Winsome's benevolent introduction of him as "Egbert, a disciple."²³ Intent on the inadequacies of Oliver's presentation, especially of his parallels from Week, she ignored the likelihood that the ideas Melville attributes to Egbert could have come, with even greater satiric force, from Emerson's own essays. Miss Foster concluded that Melville had split Emerson's philosophy between Winsome (the metaphysics) and Egbert (the ethics), then decided that a "perhaps better" formulation would be that Melville had split Emerson's philosophy between Winsome (the abstract philosophy) and Egbert (its practical effect).²⁴ This seems bafflingly clumsy and unlikely. One finally suspects that Oliver's presentation of the evidence led her into a too-hasty decision that anything so imperfectly argued must be wrong.

With a little effort Miss Foster might have bolstered Oliver's argument about Thoreau as she had done his argument about Emerson. Oliver's quotation about the disciple engaged in the West India trade she lumped in with points "too far-fetched to be significant,"²⁵ but in the first chapter of Walden, a book neither Oliver nor Miss Foster mentioned as a possible source, Thoreau himself offered a long allegorical account of trade with the Celestial Empire. In 1954, Miss Foster could have found even more evidence than Oliver that Thoreau was widely regarded in his own time merely as an imitator of Emerson. Now it is easy to go to Harding's Thoreau: Man of Concord, among other sources, for substantial documentation of the tendency of Thoreau's contemporaries to assert that he changed his way of speech to ape Emerson's and even began "getting up a caricature nose like Emerson's."²⁶ Some of this gossip conceivably could have been available to Melville, who after all--as neither Oliver, Miss Foster, nor Moss mentioned--did visit the Hawthornes in Concord in 1852 (on December 2, as a letter in the new edition of the Log shows), while Thoreau was apparently in residence.²⁷ Miss Foster and Moss did not mention an anecdote available in the first (1951) edition of the Log which testifies to the casualness with which Hawthorne mentioned Thoreau to Melville. Theodore F. Wolfe in Literary Shrines (Philadelphia, 1895) reported this plausible-sounding anecdote about Hawthorne's and Una's several-day visit to the Melvilles in March, 1851:²⁸ "March weather prevented walks abroad, so the pair spent most of the week in smoking and talking metaphysics in the barn,--Hawthorne usually lounging upon a carpenter's bench. When he was leaving, he jocosely declared he would write a report of their psychological discussions for publication in a book to be called 'A Week on a Work-Bench in a Barn,' the title being a travesty upon that of Thoreau's then recent book, 'A Week on Concord River.'" Though Miss Foster and Moss are free to discount this story, it ought to have been assembled along with other evidence that Melville might have had many occasions to become familiar with Thoreau's ideas.

Such points of contact are notoriously hard to draw with Melville, whose papers were not systematically preserved (indeed, were systematically destroyed) and whose library was largely scattered at his death and who, in the 1850's, was deliberately cutting himself off from his New York literary circle of the 1840's. Still, some lines of possible contact can be drawn. Duyckinck may well have mentioned Thoreau to Melville between 1846 and 1850, even before Melville borrowed A Week, for Duyckinck had corresponded with more than one acquaintance of Thoreau's and had refused Emerson's suggestion that he publish A Week.²⁹ Duyckinck was probably familiar with some of Thoreau's early anonymous contributions to the Democratic Review, the New York Tribune, and Sartain's Magazine, and he printed a two-page review of A Week in his Literary World on September 22, 1849, at a time when he was in close touch with Melville. He had strong opinions about Thoreau, and, over the period of four years, probably found occasion to express some of them to Melville. Another contact may have been through Horace Greeley, who had known Melville's brother Gansevoort rather well, and who began using his New York Tribune to "get Thoreau's name before the public and create an audience for him" as early as 1848.³⁰ In early April, 1849, just before Melville returned from Boston, Greeley puffed Thoreau, in a reference that the Concord Y[eo]man's Gazette picked up, and indulged in a bantering exchange about Thoreau with a correspondent in the Tribune of April 7, 1849. Greeley wrote a long review of A Week for the issue of June 12, 1849, while Melville was in town and at other times broadcast Thoreau's availability for lectures.³¹ Other New York papers and magazines that Melville was familiar with also reviewed A Week; for one, Holden's Dollar Magazine gave it a long paragraph in July, 1849, while Melville was in New York City. We know (though neither Oliver, Miss Foster, nor Moss mentioned it) that Melville read the preface to Mosses from an Old Manse, where Thoreau is alluded to, as well as the "Custom House" essay in The Scarlet Letter. From Hawthorne's prefaces, even aside from Hawthorne the man, Melville could have gained the impression that Thoreau was a significant Concord figure. Oliver pointed out that parts of A Yankee in Canada appeared--though anonymously--in Putnam's early in 1853, the year "Bartleby" appeared in the same magazine. Thoreau's authorship could have been an open secret, as Melville's anonymous authorship frequently was. Walden received a full four-page, two-column per page review in Putnam's issue for October, 1854, the same issue in which Chapter 13 of Israel Potter was published.³² The reviewer called Thoreau twice a "Yankee Diogenes," and adopted a rather guying tone toward him. He printed long excerpts from "Economy" and a good deal of the passage in "Solitude" in which Thoreau declared he had "never felt lonesome": "Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?" I think Melville may have read this review--he certainly was receiving the magazine and I think the author of Chapter 93 of Moby-Dick, "The Castaway," might well have been appalled at Thoreau's cosmic confidence.

Even this rapid survey makes it clear that today one could gather much more evidence about Melville's possible and certain knowledge of Thoreau than Oliver, Miss Foster, and Moss did. I see no conclusive proof that Melville read anything of Thoreau's completely, even A Week, though quite likely he did. His image of Thoreau as an imitator of Emerson might have developed early from gossip in New York, Boston, or Pittsfield, or from a glance at A Week, and perhaps at excerpts from A Week and Walden in newspaper and magazine reviews. His strategy in The Confidence-Man, as Miss Foster failed to see, did not call for his knowing the disciple's work in detail, since he was making his satiric points by putting into Egbert's mouth echoes of Winsome's writings and teachings.

Oliver's arguments for the presence of Emerson and Thoreau in The Confidence-Man were not presented in a convincing fashion, and his "corrective" article revealed an imperfect knowledge of Melville's works, Melville's life, and Melville scholarship. Witness Moss's initial rhetorical questions:³³ "I only raise the obvious questions--namely, why a well-known author like Melville would wish to satirize an obscure passage in an obscure book by an unknown writer (A Week, of course, was Thoreau's first book and its total distribution was less than three hundred copies), and who was to understanding the point of his satire, for what value has satire if the object of its ridicule is unknown?" The first question is anachronistic, for to Melville and many in Massachusetts in the early and mid-1850's Thoreau may well have seemed eccentric and imitative enough but still one of the major Concord Transcendentalists. Though we cannot safely assume with Oliver that Hawthorne and Melville talked frequently of Thoreau, it is unrealistic to assume that they never mentioned him, particularly in the light of the new letter about Melville's reading Emerson's Essays at the Hawthornes, the Wolfe anecdote about Hawthorne's making a travesty of Thoreau's title to Melville, and Hawthorne's prefaces to Mosses and The Scarlet Letter, even aside from Melville's trip to Concord. Melville might even have met Thoreau. My point is that with such contextual arguments we are always partly at the mercy of what record, if any, chances to survive. For all we know, although it seems unlikely, Melville may have been a good deal more interested in Thoreau than in Emerson and might have wanted to satirize him, since he evidently linked him with Emersonian optimism. Miss Foster's evidence about Melville's hatred of optimistic philosophies seems conclusive, even without Merton M. Sealts's earlier corroborating evidence.³⁴

Moss's second rhetorical question ignores what Melville was habitually writing in the mid-1850's, when he was a man driven to writing at least as much for himself as for the public. Being understood might be irrelevant, as far as any immediate audience was concerned. Jay Leyda has brilliantly discussed Melville's motivations in the "games" he played in the stories of this period:³⁵ "We are compelled to regard these stories as an artist's resolution of that constant contradiction--between the desperate need to communicate and the fear of revealing too much." Leyda observed poignantly that "much of these stories' materiality seems a minutely painted and deceptive screen erected across what is really taking place behind it--in Melville's mind."³⁶ Miss Foster also gave ample illustration of Melville's habit of writing "one story for the public and another for himself," citing studies by Sealts³⁷ and E. H. Eby.³⁸ On the other hand, as far as The Confidence-Man is concerned, one could argue that it is the product of a man recovered from whatever personal or literary crises he had undergone. Melville may well have meant almost all of the book to be as immediately accessible as Hawthorne's "The Celestial Railroad," which is the same sort of allegory with many of the same satiric targets, including Transcendentalism. Developing a distinction between the contorted personal allegories in some of the tales and the more public air of The Confidence-Man, one could speculate that the few pages which do seem to be written for Melville himself--mainly Chapter 40, the China Aster story--might be scraps from his writings of a year or two earlier. Some qualification is necessary: while an intelligent and sympathetic reader of "The Celestial Railroad" ought to have understood The Confidence-Man, Melville's recent experiences with a timid publisher had made him aware of the somewhat perverse satisfaction an author could gain by blaspheming while still being published and by palming off personal allegories as innocent magazine tales. Both of Moss's rhetorical questions, in short, have answers, and his first and third "legends" remain obfuscated but unneutralized. In his own best arguments Moss clearly knows that the Minotaur is better propitiated with evidence than with appeals to authority and rhetorical questions.

2 "A Second Look at 'Bartleby,'" CE, Vol. 6 (May, 1945), 431-439; "Melville's Picture of Emerson and Thoreau in The Confidence-Man," CE, Vol. 8 (Nov., 1946), 61-72; and "'Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!' and Transcendental Hocus-Pocus," NEQ, Vol. 21 (June, 1948), 204-216.

3 "A Second Look at 'Bartleby,'" 432.

4 Ibid., 433.

5 Ibid., 434. The question of whose names go in the blanks was settled by Leon Howard's report on the Lowell manuscript in Victorian Knight-Errant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 262.

6 "A Second Look at 'Bartleby,'" 439. The more literal-minded scholar might also want to know that the Pittsfield Sun on March 6, 1851 (a week before Hawthorne and Una came to visit the Melvilles) ran a squib about "THE DEAD LETTER OFFICE" in Washington where every quarter six thousand packed-down bushels of dead letters were received.

7 Ibid., 434.

8 Ibid., 434-437. The quotations are from 435 and 437.

9 Ibid., 438.

10 Melville Annual 1965: A Symposium: Bartleby the Scrivener, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1966).

11 "'Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!' and Transcendental Hocus-Pocus," 207.

12 Ibid.

13 Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 91.

14 Jay Leyda, ed., The Melville Log, 2 Vols. (N.Y.: Gordian Press, 1969), 925. The "Supplement" consists of 901-966 in Vol. II.

15 "Melville's Picture of Emerson and Thoreau in The Confidence-Man," 65-67.

16 Ibid., 62.

17 The Confidence-Man, ed. Elizabeth S. Foster (N.Y.: Hendricks House, 1954), liii-lxix. The quotation is from lxix. Her discussion of Emerson and Thoreau is mainly on lxxiii-lxxxii and 351-357.

18 Ibid., lxxix. In the Historical Note of the Northwestern-Newberry Edition of The Confidence-Man Watson G. Branch will present strong arguments against Miss Foster's theory of the genesis of the book.

19 "Melville's Picture of Emerson and Thoreau in The Confidence-Man," 68-69.

20 Ibid., 69.

21 Foster, 351.

22 Ibid., 352.

23 The title and fourth paragraph of Chapter 37.

24 Foster, lxxiii.

25 Foster, 351.

26 Walter Harding, ed., Thoreau: Man of Concord (N. Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), 120. See 4, 57, 62, 111, 120, 121, and passim. Moncure Daniel Conway (111) refers to the "quiet joke in Concord that Thoreau resembled Emerson in expression, and in tones of voice." Other testimony is more detailed. One could argue that the evidence shows only that Melville had an imitator of Emerson in mind in The Confidence-Man, not specifically Thoreau. Ellery Channing is the most likely alternative, since Lowell gave him more space as an imitator of Emerson than he did Thoreau; Channing was also about fifteen years younger than Emerson, and like Egbert was something of a poet. Since he had a prominent role in the preface to Mosses, Melville certainly knew of him. But apparently after the 1840's it was Thoreau rather than Channing who was identified as the major disciple of Emerson and accused of the most thoroughgoing kinds of imitations of the master.

27 Log, 932.

28 Log, 407. Through 899 the Log is identical in both editions.

29 John Stafford, The Literary Criticism of Young America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 24.

30 Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau (N.Y.: Knopf, 1965), 241.

31 Ibid., 213-214, 230, 239-241, 248-249. Harding's book has other documentation of contemporary comments that Melville might have seen.

32 "Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!" was published in the December, 1853, Harper's,before Walden was published.

33 Moss, 193.

34 Foster, liii-lxxxvii. In her notes she has several occasions to mention Merton M. Sealts, Jr.'s unpublished Yale dissertation, "Herman Melville's Reading in Ancient Philosophy" (1942) which contains background on Melville's opposition to ancient equivalents of Transcendentalism; see his more specific comment on Melville's hostility to Transcendentalism in "Melville's 'Neoplatonical Originals,'" MLN, Vol. 67 (February, 1952), 80-86, especially 80 and 86.

35 Jay Leyda, "An Introduction," in The Complete Stories of Herman Melville (N. Y.: Random House, 1949), xxvii-xxix; the quotation is from xxviii.

36 Ibid., xxviii.

37 "Herman Melville's 'I and My Chimney,'" AL, Vol. 13 (May, 1941), 142-151.

38 "Herman Melville's 'Tartarus of Maids,'" MLQ, Vol. 1 (March, 1940), 95-100.

return to bibliography