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

3

. . . thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women (2 Samuel 1:26)

NUMBER THREE exposes more censorship in revision of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border."  In the 1857 book version, Scenes and Adventures in the Army, the biblical phrase “passing the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26) is missing after revision of a passage from the August 1852 installment. 

August 1852                                       1857

The deletion of “passing the love of women” eliminates the reference to David’s love for Jonathan, and with it the specific and apparently too-provocative idealization of love between two men.  The Captain’s idea of “a pure soul-love, a deathless friendship” anticipates the "fonder dream of love / In man toward man--the soul’s caress” for which the young hero of Clarel also longs (Clarel 2.27, 124-125). 

Later in the same work, Melville more directly paraphrases 2 Samuel 1: 26, and elaborates with specific reference to Clarel's feelings for Vine:

* * * Can be a bond
(Thought he) as David sings in strain
That dirges beauteous Jonathan,
Passing the love of woman fond?
And may experience but dull
The longing for it?  Can time teach?
Shall all these billows win the lull
And shallow on life’s hardened beach?—          (Clarel 3.30, 149-156)

2 Samuel 1, verses 22-27 are scored in Melville’s Bible
(Melville Log, ed. Leyda, 369)

The August 1852 installment of "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" thus finds the Captain of U. S. Dragoons preoccupied with a theme that Melville will explore in verse more than twenty years later.  The essential correspondence goes deeper than the congruence of two writers quoting the same Old Testament text.  Both the Captain and Melville also construct a problem around this idea of a bond "passing the love of women."  Moreover, both pose the problem interrogatively.  C. in dialogue with his Imaginary Friend, and Clarel in dialogue with himself, become questioners, philosophically asking whether ideal love has any place in the real world.  Both envision a love between male soul mates that is pure and perfect but sadly vulnerable, exposed and subject to corrupting material forces.  In "Scenes Beyond the Western Border," soul-love confronts "life's trials and the world's baseness"; in Clarel, desire for one’s soul-mate forever confronts "life's hardened beach.”  The Captain believes, or wants to believe, that "pure soul-love" must prevail.  Clarel is not so sure.  He pictures his forbidden urges as ocean waves eternally breaking on the shore of real life.  Reality opposes the deepest yearnings of both the Captain and Clarel, yet their yearnings persist.