Herman Melville
irritations that attend productive literary effort would themselves be
an evidence of eccentricity, or something worse.
9
In The Confidence Man Melville went back to the vein of satire he had
opened in Mardi. He was shrewd enough, however, to curb the outward
extravagance and the aesthetic vagaries of Mardi: the scene is a
Mississippi steamboat, the characters are the motley company one
might find on such a craft, and the story itself, so far from being
incoherent, remains almost monotonously within the frame that Melville
set for it in the first chapter.
At St. Louis a deaf-mute in a cream-coloured suit, with flaxen hair and
a white fur hat, steps aboard the steamboat Fidele. He circulates among
the crowd with a slate on which he writes: Charity thinketh no evil:
suffereth long and is kind: endureth all things: believeth all things:
never faileth. The passengers look upon this advertiser of St. Paul as
a lunatic: that sign fills them with dubiety, although the sign outside
the barber-shop, +NO TRUST+, seems to them an obvious and natural one.
Here in a simple image is the moral Melville confronts and elaborates
in the rest of the book. This steamer, the Faithful, is the world,
with all possible varieties of the human animal on board, natives
and foreigners, men of business and men of pleasure, parlour men
and backwoods men, farm-hunters, fame-hunters, heiress-hunters,
buffalo-hunters, happiness-hunters, fine ladies in slippers and
moccasined squaws, Quakers, soldiers, black, white, brown, and every
religion and degree of morality. One thing mars their professions and
plagues their lives: their suspicion. A wooden-legged man, apparently
once a customs-officer, most suspicious of functionaries, denounces
a cheery black beggar who has come among them, as an impostor:
immediately, almost every man on deck turns against the poor fellow.
Even a brawny Methodist minister, who first takes the black’s part,
becomes infected: his confidence is gone. A sad demure man in weeds
of mourning makes his appearance: with great simplicity of purpose,
he insinuates himself into the confidence of a merchant, and gets
ten dollars from him. A little later a man in a grey coat and white
tie accosts his fellow passengers for contributions to a Widow and
Orphan Asylum recently founded among the Seminoles. When rebuffed
as a sharper, he asks his denouncer to be more charitable and throw
off suspicion. The full title of the story is The Confidence Man:
His Masquerade, and one does not go so far without suspecting that
the Confidence Man is a protean character and that the mysterious
appearance and disappearance of the deaf-mute, the negro beggar, the
man in mourning, or the turning up of a seller of quack medicine which
cures by establishing confidence, are merely his own mutations--or
at least are conducted by him. By a hundred shady devices, he breaks
down suspicion, makes men charitable, gives them faith in one another:
but always when they are on the point of being completely disarmed,
their lurking baseness or suspicion will rise to the surface. The
herb-doctor’s pain-dissuader is selling well until a passenger
gives him the lie: “Some pains cannot be eased but by producing
insensibility, and cannot be cured but by producing death.” That hard
truth destroys the whole baseless fabric of confidence he had built up.
Worse doubts intervene. People buy herb remedies because they think
these medicines are natural, and what is natural is good. But if man
is vile, what about Nature? Is the cough one attempts to cure not
natural, and what of the cholera and the rattlesnake and the deadly
nightshade? The Missourian, who utters this doctrine, has no more faith
in humanity than he has in Nature: he is a bitter heretic, even in
politics. What is abolitionism but the expression of fellow feeling of
slave for slave? From Maine to Georgia the best breeds are to be bought
up for any price from a livelihood to a presidency. “Machines for me!”
exclaims the Missourian. So the characters pass, talking, argufying,
blasting charity, killing confidence, either unconsciously or
deliberately blackening the character of man, and proving the emptiness
of all the sweet professions of civilization.
Two men become acquainted and hit up an intimacy over a bottle of
wine. One of them, Frank Goodman, a cosmopolitan philanthropist,
reeking good-will, professes to be inflamed by his friend’s nobility
of mind and his good opinion of his fellow men, and in a sudden burst
of confidence throws himself upon his high-minded fellow: he admits
he is in want of money and asks for a loan of fifty dollars. Charlie
turns away in dudgeon. “Go to the Devil, sir. Beggar, impostor!” Rising
quickly from his seat and taking ten half-eagles from his pocket, Frank
lays them in a circle around Charlie: with the air of a magician, he
summons his friend to reappear. The practical necromancy works. Ha!
ha! it was all a joke, of course. Charlie had humoured him. He had
played his part to the life!... On top of this the philanthropist
has an encounter with Mark Winsome, a mystic philosopher, and his
disciple, who state and practice the extreme opposite of philanthropy:
his philosophy stands the test of truth: it conforms to the world
and does not produce a character at odds with it! This Winsome is no
visionary: far from it: “Was not Seneca a usurer? Bacon a courtier?
and Swedenborg, though with one eye on the invisible, did he not keep
the other on the main chance?” Winsome is the original pragmatist:
a man of serviceable knowledge: the doctrines he preaches will lead
neither to the mad-house nor the poor-house. When Goodman poses to his
disciple a situation like that he had just tested, the disciple handles
it with adroit coolness. The loan is not to be thought of: friends do
not help friends. If Frank turn beggar, then Charlie for the honour of
friendship will turn stranger.
The philanthropist has enough of this icy philosophy: he retreats
to the barber shop, his confidence in humanity unshaken. There he
arranges with the barber to take down the no trust sign, promising
to reimburse the man himself for any loss he may incur through his
confidence. Unfortunately, Goodman leaves the shop, after signing the
agreement, without paying for his own shave: and the barber, suddenly
restored to his senses, tears up the contract and replaces the sign.
Finally, Goodman comes to a comely old man, sitting in his berth,
reading the Bible by the dim cabin light. Here is a man who has
complete faith--yes, and the old man of faith equips himself with a
cabin-lock, a counterfeit detector, a money-belt, a life-preserver, and
an insurance policy!
It is not hard to see where all this leads, although the story itself
ends abruptly. The Confidence Man, in his masquerade, represents all
the sweetness and morality of the race, all that professes to see
good in the heart of evil, all the benign impulses to succour the
poor and heal the sick, all that would place friendliness and natural
intimacy above cold circumspection, that would make every alien soul a
friend, and would place the needs of man above the safety of property.
This sweetness and morality had become for Melville the greatest of
frauds. The people who professed it were sharpers and quacks. Nature,
life, human institutions, did not encourage this fine morality: they
contradicted it. The Pharisee, tightening his purse and disclaiming
responsibility for his brother in distress, the old friend permitting
the matter of a loan to disrupt a friendship--these things, and a score
like them, shrivelled up the outward pretences of social man. Not faith
and charity, but +NO TRUST+ was the key to a prosperous and efficient
life. There was nothing wrong in the profession: love, faith, and
charity might make the worst of ills tolerable; but the miser clung
to his money, the merchant to his reputation, the good man to his
immaculateness, and he who believed in the Word of God had more faith
in the insurance company and the life-preserver. No trust. Man’s soul
was lead. Without money or reputation, it sank.
10
I cannot leave The Confidence Man without a word about its incidental
characteristics. One of the most important things about the story is
that it is unfinished. Melville took leave of The Confidence Man before
he had unmasked him: the meaning of the fable is left hanging in the
air: the plot, which has neither up nor down, preparation nor climax,
suddenly collapses--as if Melville were discouraged or a little bored
by his own contrivances, or dismissed the story to his contemporaries
with a gesture of contempt, hopeless that they would read it, or
confident that, even if they did, they would not know the difference.
The last words in the book are--“Something further may follow of this
Masquerade”--as if he were waiting for some breath of popular response.
The fable of The Confidence Man is plain as far as it goes: there is
nothing obscure or difficult in the symbolism; but it has the abrupt
and scanty appearance of a Manx cat. In the individual sections, the
writing is always competent; and sometimes far more than that: but the
story moves as torpidly and sinuously as the muddy Mississippi itself,
and there are repetitions of movement, as when the hypothetical Frank
and Charlie go over the same ground as the original ones. Mr. Freeman’s
notion that the story was written for the vain purpose of exposing
the hypocrisy and assertiveness of passengers on a steamboat is a
little beside the point, and his notion that the characters support
Dickens’s worst charges in Martin Chuzzlewit is even more amusing; nor
is Mr. Mather any more accurate when he speaks of The Confidence Man
as “Middle Western character sketches.” One might meet queer, uncouth
animals on a Mississippi steamer; doubtless one did; but the queerness
Melville satirized he had met in the slums of Liverpool and the
drawing-rooms of New York.
When one regards The Confidence Man in its true light, not as a novel,
but as a companion volume to Gulliver’s Travels, its whole aspect
changes: its turbid, tedious, meandering quality remains: but there
are rapids of dangerous and exhilarating satire, as in the humane
proposal, not yet wholly adopted, to organize the redemption of the
world on strict Wall Street principles by farming out the charity and
missionary work to the highest bidder, and forcing the inhabitants of
Africa and Asia to pay for their own redemption and the relief of their
own poverty. The Confidence Man may be considered as Melville’s own
masquerade; his own bitter plea for support, money, confidence. Indeed,
a Mississippi steamboat whose passengers quote Zimmermann, Hume,
Francis Bacon, Rabelais, Jeremiah, Jeremy Taylor, Diogenes, and Timon
could scarcely be anything but Melville’s own heavily laden soul, all
its characters and incidents being part of that long soliloquy in which
Melville struggled with a cankerous mood that threatened to remove,
not merely the clothes, but the epidermis, no, the very bowels of his
fellow creatures.
The passionate defiance was gone: a more savage, relentless humour
took its place, a humour that stabbed and punctured with intent to
kill. Melville’s aim remained good: there is more than one passage
like this description of a miser: “A lean old man, whose flesh seemed
salted codfish, dry as combustibles; a head like one whittled by an
idiot out of a knot; a flat, boney mouth, nipped between buzzard nose
and chin.... His eyes were closed, his cheek lay upon an old white
moleskin coat, rolled under his head, like a wizened apple upon a grimy
snowbank.”
A book with so much of Melville’s ingrained thought and cast of mind
cannot be dismissed as a “posthumous book,” nor can it be set to one