RIFFS
No. 2 ― "Sympathetic Threads":  Melvill (Henry) not Melville (Herman)

Philip St. George Cooke

Radical Freelance, Esq.

William Gibson, USN

Augustus Ely Silliman

Texts by Anonymous

Resources

Events

Can dozens of books and thousands of websites and Hillary Rodham Clinton all be wrong?  Yes!  Despite the confident attribution in the first chapter of It Takes a Village (New York, 1996; reprinted 2006) and all over the internet, Herman Melville is not the author of these fine words:

We cannot live for ourselves alone.  Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results. 

Simple mistake―Hillary and the rest got the wrong Melvill(e), that's all.  Falsely attributed almost everywhere to American writer HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891), the quotation above actually derives from an 1855 sermon on “Partaking in Other Men’s Sins” by the once popular and influential London preacher HENRY MELVILL (1798-1871). 

Lots of folks understandably love this quotation.  In consequence of its huge appeal and wide transmission, innumerable variants now exist.  Hilary Clinton’s version is distinctive for references to the “thousand invisible threads” and “sympathetic fibers” that knit humanity.  Other versions employ the terms “thousand fibers” and “sympathetic threads” to designate bonds among “fellow men.” 

Poor Henry Melvill!  A hundred years ago, the Anglican clergyman was better known than the American author.  The compilation by Hialmer D. Gould and Edward L. Hessenmueller entitled Best Thoughts of Best Thinkers (Cleveland, 1904) correctly ascribed the following quotation to “Melville” under the category of “Influence”:  "We cannot live only for ourselves.  A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and along these fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects."  (565)

Editors Gould and Hessenmueller liberally quoted Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau, never their contemporary Herman Melville.  Before the “Melville Revival” of the 1920’s, a citation of Melville most likely referred to Henry Melvill, alternatively spelled “Melville.”  Thus in 1904, as the index to Best Thoughts indicates, Melville meant “Melville, Henry.”  Presumably in some such volume, later researchers found the quote from “Melville” or
“H. Melville” and transferred it to Herman―maybe the only Melville they knew.

The erroneous attribution has fooled even the most distinguished of academic administrators.  In his annual report for 2000-2001, Myles Brand, then President of Indiana University, conventionally misattributed the “sympathetic threads” version to that “great 19^th-century American novelist Herman Melville”:

We cannot live only for ourselves.  A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men (and women); and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.  <http://www.homepages.indiana.edu/011802/text/viewpoint.html>

For all the ostensible author’s acknowledged greatness, Dr. Brand felt obliged to sneak in his parenthetical assurance that the uncomfortably old-fashioned phrase fellow men embraced women, too. 

Old-fashioned indeed is the original context of the quotation in Melvill’s  sermon, delivered at St. Margaret’s Church, Lothbury, on Tuesday morning, 12 June 1855.  Melvill, celebrated in his day as the “Evangelical Chrysostom,” was about explicating 2 John 11 (“For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds”).  Melvill's theme  was not the importance of charitable giving, but rather the awful eternal consequences of “setting a bad example”:

"There is not one of you whose actions do not operate on the actions of others—operate, we mean, in the way of example.  He would be insignificant who could only destroy his own soul; but you are all, alas! of importance enough to help also to destroy the souls of others. … Ye live not for yourselves; ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects." (Penny Pulpit Sermons No. 2,365 as reprinted in Henry Melvill’s Golden Lectures for 1855, page 454; emphasis added.)

Melvill's exhortation has proved eminently quotable.  Motivational gurus, self-help experts, teachers, politicians, psychologists, sociologists, and fundraisers for all kinds of charities and non-profits have cited the preacher's words (albeit without knowing their evangelical source) as an enlightened call to social engagement.  Most recently, the notion of interconnectedness by fibers and threads has been regarded as a startling prophecy of business networking and blogging.    

Ironically, the false attribution to the author of Moby-Dick may have ensured the enduring popularity of Melvill's words.  Transferred to Herman Melville, the cry for community became safely secular and, for audiences in the United States, attractively American.  One wonders though, how many of those who approve the great writer’s wisdom would as warmly accept the great preacher's burden of personal responsibility for the sins of others.

Herman Melville (could he weigh in from the grave) might not disavow the fine sentiments wrongly attributed to him.  During a visit to London in December 1849, Melville (Herman) walked over to Goswell Road to hear his “famous namesake” Melvill (Henry) deliver a Sunday charity sermon.  Afterward the American writer confessed that he “hardly ever heard so good a discourse before—that is from an ‘orthodox’ divine.” *

*See Melville's Journals, ed. Howard C. Horsford (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1989), page 41.