"Artificial Fire": Reading Melville (Re-)Reading Hawthorne (Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne‪)‬

Melville, we mostly agree, is our first strong reader of Hawthorne: our blue-eyed Nathaniel really does have the power greatly to deceive the "superficial skimmer of pages"; and the premise of "blackness" endures, even if troubled by our evolved sense of racial discourse. (1) But this is not to say that Melville always gets it right. The discovery that "Young Goodman Brown" is no "Goody Two-Shoes" seems to record a perfect shock of recognition: someone (else) is taking the premise of Evil pretty seriously. But given what we have learned about "specter evidence," we may hesitate to address the author in his very own words: "It is yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin." The words are in fact those of the Devil, and Melville's own energetic will-to-blasphemy seems everywhere to shorten up the distance between Hawthorne's doubtful drama and Satan's subtle plot. Then too, the premise of "blackness" is founded not here, but in certain biographical suggestions about "Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent" and "The Christmas Banquet"; and these, as I have suggested elsewhere, have not always been taken quite seriously. (2) "Strong" readings are, as we have learned, not always meticulous; and this may be particularly true in the case of a literary competitor, who may well have a critical agenda all his own. No harm would be done in trying to share--with Melville's "Virginian Spending a month in Vermont"--a certain enthusiasm for the fine touches of "The Old Apple Dealer" or "Fire Worship." One could even, at a discount, permit Melville to read more of Hawthorne than of his own readerly self into the Truth-seeker of "The Intelligence Office." It would take a determined skeptic to conclude that Melville errs in simply paraphrasing the too explicit moral of the excitable and inconstant narrator of "Earth's Holocaust": the danger may well be that "the all-engendering heart of man" might itself be consumed by a blaze whose purpose is to rid the world of imperfection. But even the most ardent devotee needs to be reminded that Melville significantly misquotes the conclusion of "The Artist of the Beautiful": "When the Artist rises [rose] high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he makes [made] it perceptible to mortal senses becomes [became] of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possesses [possessed] itself in the enjoyment of the Reality" (HHM, 517). Changing all the narrator's historical past tenses to the generalizing present, Melville ascribes to Hawthorne the virtually solipsist view that the true artist cares for neither object nor audience--for nothing beyond the pleasure in the process of artistic aspiration itself. Surely Hawthorne had satirized this view on his very first page, where Owen Warland appeared in the midst of all sorts of watches, "all with their faces turned from the street, as if churlishly disinclined to inform the wayfarers what o'clock it was." (3)