Dragooned!  Ten Traces of
Herman Melville
in "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" (1851-1853)

Philip St. George Cooke

Radical Freelance, Esq.

William Gibson, USN

Augustus Ely Silliman

Texts by Anonymous

Resources

Events

1

NUMBER ONE discovers the Captain of U. S. Dragoons and Herman Melville deeply immersed in the “Paradise” cantos of the Divine Comedy and jointly fascinated by Dante’s vision of the cosmic dance. 

Here is the "fairy dance" episode in its original context, the next-to-last installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" in the Southern Literary Messenger for May 1853:

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Unable to sleep, the Captain wanders off from camp at night and climbs a rock, where he inexplicably hears a “sweet waltz” (1853) or “joyous air” (1857).  In a mountain-top vision, the Captain sees a brightly lit dancehall where music charms, hearts expand, joy abounds, and “all souls” are uplifted in love.  In this Dantean fantasy, otherworldly dance partners waltz like heavenly bodies through the cosmos:

the far-reaching couples, floating in that fairy dance,—revolving, like the moon around the sun, in circling circles.

Fittingly, the whole sequence adapts specific words and images from the sphere of Venus, as rendered by Dante in Canto 8 of “Paradise.”  “[W]afted up” to the sphere of Venus, the poet sees Beatrice in a new light:

                             ...the new loveliness

That grac'd my lady, gave me ample proof

That we had entered there.  (8.16-18)

In the same light, Dante views “other luminaries” wheeling in their appointed rounds:  “In circling motion, rapid more or less” (8.22-24).

Dante’s appreciation of “the new loveliness / That grac’d” his guide Beatrice at Venus is the original of the Captain’s enthusiasm for the “grace to loveliness” bestowed in the fairy dance.  The “circling motion” of Dante’s blessed souls is replicated in the “circling circles” witnessed by the Captain.  Dante’s luminous and loving celestial spirits “roll” together “in one orb” and “One motion.”  In the Captain’s vision, the “glittering ball” similarly lends “poetry to motion” and “exalt[s] all souls to the power of love.”

In the orbit of Venus, bright “celestial lights” leave “the circuit of their joyous ring” to greet Dante and Beatrice.  Dante associates Venus with the realm of Princedoms, where in Canto 28, dancing archangels circle “their festal ring” (114-115).  A footnote by translator Henry Cary to Canto 8 (line 43) glosses the princedoms of Canto 28 as “co-ordinate with this third sphere” of Venus (394).  In Melville’s copy of Cary’s Dante, this footnote, number “4” on page 394, is marked with an “X.”  The first of four “Dance” annotations occurs in the left margin of the same page.  The annotation “Dance” and vertical lines on page 394 in Melville’s volume effectively mark all of the lines from Canto 8 that are creatively interweaved in the Captain’s “fairy dance” sequence.

Melville’s copy of Cary’s Dante (Sealts no. 174) is now part of the William Reese collection.  The following account of Melville’s “Dance” marginalia is based on independent examinations of the volume in October 2006.  I am indebted to William Reese for kindly supplying careful and detailed descriptions, largely reproduced below, of the first three “Dance” annotations and related markings.

—In orbs
Of circuit inexpressible they stood,
Orb within orb.  Paradise Lost 5.594-6

[marked by Melville in his copy of the Poetical Works of John Milton; see “Melville’s Milton,” Leviathan 4 (March and October 2002):  139.]

Besides the marginalia in Canto 8 discussed above, relevant markings in Melville’s Dante also appear in Cantos 9, 28, 30, 31, and 33.  Dante’s simile of the sun-struck ruby (9.64-6), underlined by Melville near his second “Dance” annotation, may have inspired the Captain’s image of gemstones fired with “magic brilliancy” by the rising sun.  Melville’s third “Dance” annotation appears in the left margin on page 500, just above a marked reference in Canto 28 to Dante’s vision of a flaming “circle” of saints that “wheel’d about” one central “point” (22).  On the same page, Melville has underlined Beatrice’s explanation that “Heaven, and all nature, hangs upon that point” (38).  The Dantean image of beatified dancers in their appointed spheres, driven by love to orbit the fixed point upon which the whole universe “hangs,” generally informs the movement of “floating” couples in “circling circles” as described by the enraptured Captain.

In a more precise connection, the image of “many white robed fair” in the Captain’s vision belong to the “fair assemblage” of saints whom Dante, in Canto 30 of “Paradise,” sees clothed in “stoles of snowy white” (128-9).  In Melville’s Dante, a vertical line in the right margin on page 513 marks these lines (128-130) as a discrete group.  With similar precision, the “smile of one” that enlightens and sanctifies the Captain’s fairy dance is modeled on the enchanting smile of the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven, in Canto 31 of Dante’s “Paradise”:

…At their glee
And carol, smiled the Lovely One of heaven,
That joy was in the eyes of all the blest.  (31.123-125)

In Melville’s copy of Cary’s Dante, these lines from Canto 31 on the Virgin’s smile are marked on page 518 by vertical lines in both margins.

Melville’s fourth “Dance” annotation isolates the first two lines of poetry on page 525 which are scored with a double vertical line in the right margin:

Lo!  where, with Beatrice, many a saint
Stretch their clasp’d hands, in furtherance of my suit.  (33.37-38)

Melville seized on Dante’s vision of “clasp’d hands” reaching up in prayer to Mary as a dance move.  Mundane dance partners imitate their heavenly counterparts when they join hands and “stretch” or reach up to the ceiling.  Melville keyed on two lines that probably underlie the Captain’s depiction of sprightly dance partners as “far-reaching couples.”

The markings in Melville’s Dante illuminate other Dantean passages in Scenes and Adventures in the Army.  The following paragraph on the stars and seraphim, added in revision of the March 1853 installment, borrows heavily from Cantos 18 (105); 22 (108-9); 32 (88); and 33 (63-4) of “Paradise”:

O! ever splendent stars, which float along the sparkling blue and boundless ether, calming with its deep serene the poor desert watcher;—O!  immeasurably far, to whom no struggling ray of earth-light can ever reach;—are ye the abodes of happy beings, guarded from ill by flaming swords of seraphim?  May soul of man aspire to the beatitude of reunion there, with the last [lost?] loved of earth?  O! spirit ministers, are ye hovering near, radiant with pity divine, on guardian errands, to touch with hope the sinking hearts of myriad men?  And can no mortal eye behold thy subtilty supernal?  (Scenes and Adventures, 386)

In Canto 22, line 108, Dante appeals to the stars as literary muses:  “O glorious stars!”  This and subsequent lines, marked on page 472 in Melville’s Dante, form the basis of the Captain’s apostrophe, which begins:  “O! ever splendent stars…”  The Captain longs for “beatitude of reunion” with deceased loved ones; on page 452, Melville penciled an “X” by Cary’s gloss at 18.105 of Beatitude as “The band of spirits, for ‘beatitudo’ is here a noun of multitude.” 

The particular debt to Henry Francis Cary’s well-regarded translation in “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” is evident in the Captain’s use of the phrase deep serene in reference to the firmament, a phrase that Cary employs in Canto 32 of Paradise, at line 88.  Although “deep serene” is unmarked in Melville’s copy of Cary’s Dante, Melville must have read line 88, because it is sandwiched between two marked groups of lines, 82-85 and 90-93, on page 521.  Dante’s perception of the vast distance separating heavenly light from “mortal thought” (33.64) influenced the Captain’s lament over the invisibility of angels to “mortal eye.”  The main ingredients of the interpolated passage on the stars in Scenes and Adventures in the Army—the apostrophe to the stars; the habitation of the stars by blessed souls; the “beatitude” of saints in heaven; the intercession of saints as “guardian spirits”; and the incomprehensibility of heaven to unaided mortal thought—all derive from cantos of “Paradise” that are extensively marked in Melville’s volume.

Finally, another reflex of the Divine Comedy worth noting occurs in the January 1852 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.”  After a talk with his imaginary friend, the Captain declaims, in a soliloquy on the beauty of Nature:

The air, methinks, is fanned by seraphic spirits on their winged errands of Peace!  (48)

In attributing a gentle breeze to the motion of angelic wings, the Captain makes a Dantean association that Melville noticed and annotated in his copy of Cary’s Dante.  Erased notes on the rear free flyleaf, verso, include the phrases “Winnowing the air” (quoting Purgatory 2.35, where the poet marvels at the ability of an angel to power a boat by the motion of his wings, without oars or sails) and “Sough of wind.”  In Canto 24 of “Purgatory,” Melville paid close attention to the “wind” and “ambrosial smell” produced by the movement of an angel’s wing (lines 145-147).  He bracketed the entire passage, lines 142-151 on page 308, and vertically wrote “an angel” in the left margin.           

Significantly, although Lea Newman discusses numerous links between the text of Mardi and marginalia in Melville’s Dante, she does not relate the “Dance” annotations to Mardi or any other work by Melville.  Indeed, Newman’s important 1993 article in Studies in the American Renaissance does not even mention the “Dance” marginalia.  Newman does cite, intriguingly, three “Dance” annotations in her brief notice in the Melville Society Extracts.  As indicated above, I found a fourth instance of “Dance” during my recent examination of the volume in the William Reese Collection.  (My sincere thanks are due to Mr. Reese for generously making the volume available for study, and for sharing his detailed descriptions of the first three “Dance” annotations.) 

Newman’s longer essay reproduces two curious drawings at the top of page 504 in Melville’s copy of Cary’s Dante (see “Plate Fifteen” in Newman, 337).  The drawing on the left seems to represent the sun and crescent moon, hanging in a balanced “poise” between hemispheres, more or less as described in a marked passage from Canto 29 (lines 1-6), and amplified by Cary in the marked footnote at the bottom of the same page (504).  The inscription on this drawing reads “In Hand of Zenith,” replicating Cary’s formulation.  (Newman’s conjectural reading, “In Aires” and “Libra,” is wrong.) 

The drawing on the right is harder to interpret.  It looks like a miniaturized globe, obscurely represented as curled within the grip of a divine hand.  More prominent than the hand, however, is the long arm that projects diagonally from the upper left corner into the center of the framed picture.  My own best guess (informed by comparison with similar-looking illustrations of Mazourka figures in the January 4, 1845 issue of the New York New World) is that the quadrilateral frame delineates a dance floor. 

In the New World for 7 December 1844, the narrator of a farcical “Physiology of the Polka” theoretically understands “waltz” as “nothing more than a grand lesson in astronomy.”  The narrator, portrayed as a student of Parisian dance master Henri Cellarius, explains further:

The constant evolution of the waltzing couple round some central point, supposed to be the centre of the saloon, indicates, without doubt, the movement of our earth, which turns on its axis in revolutions round the Sun. …all wandering stars have been condemned by Nature to stray through creation, and to perform an everlasting waltz amid the belle assemblée of the Universe!  (707)

The Mazourka diagrams and seriocomic discourse on the astronomy of the waltz were published within months of Melville’s homecoming, after four years of seafaring and island roving, in October 1844.  A memory of these or similar associations would go far to explain why Melville methodically marked images in the “Paradise” cantos of dancing, circling, wheeling, revolving, and orbiting—and  why he wrote “Dance” in the margin on four different pages. 

In the two diagrams on page 504 in his copy of Cary’s Dante, Melville may be trying to combine the dance imagery in Cantos 8 and 28 with the astronomy of Canto 29 in rough sketches of the universe as dance hall.  These diagrams are reproduced in the article previously cited by Lea Newman:  "Melville's Copy of Dante:  Evidence of New Connections between the Commedia and Mardi," Studies in the American Renaissance 1993, 305-338 at 337.

The Captain’s multi-layered allusions to Dante can only have been achieved through careful study of the same “Paradise” cantos that Melville studied, marked, and pondered deeply.  More than that, the “Dance” marginalia in Melville’s copy of Cary’s Dante show Melville graphically working out a conception of Paradise as Cosmic Ballroom that would be realized in the Captain’s Dantean fantasy of “the glittering ball.”

However one reads the admittedly obscure drawings on page 504 of Melville's Dante, the quadrupled “Dance” annotation and related markings provide important external corroboration of the case for Melville’s authorship of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border.”  Melville’s “Dance” markings, weighed along with the abundant textual evidence, strongly suggest that from 1851 to 1853, Melville moonlighted in the costume of a Captain of U. S. Dragoons.