SOURCE: “Why an Enthusiast?: Melville’s Pierre and the Problem of the Imagination,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Vol. 33, No. 3, 3^rd quarter, 1987, pp. 146-67.

Few studies of Herman Melville's Pierre (1852) fail to mention the hero's “enthusiasm” or to refer to Pierre as an “enthusiast,” but seldom does the critic consider exactly what the word implies for our reading of the novel. Lawrance Thompson's statement is typical: “Pierre becomes the allegorical type of the ‘Enthusiast’—literally, God-possessed and God-inspired. And Melville further manipulates the actions of his young enthusiast in such a way as to illuminate his own anti-Christian theological beliefs.”¹ Thompson assumes we know how the “allegorical type” will act. He follows Henry Murray's explanation of Melville's “conception of his hero” as seen in the epithet “Enthusiast to Duty”: the term derives from the “Socratic or Platonic notion of Eros”; it means “a man possessed by Eros, passionate love.”² Without defining the term, Bruce Franklin discusses at length the “case against Pierre's enthusiasm,” which is “more lustful than divine” and provides “the crux of Pierre”; and Murray Krieger devotes fourteen pages to “The Perils of ‘Enthusiast’ virtue” in Melville's “Enthusiast”—likewise undefined.³ James Duban links Pierre's “quasi-religious enthusiasm” with the ideas of Jonathan Edwards, adding that Melville uses the term to “describe Pierre's excitement.”⁴ More recently, William B. Dillingham recognizes Melville's emphasis on the term but quickly connects it with Gnosticism; and Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, in the Pierre chapter of A Companion to Melville Studies, state that Melville “now confronted the possibility that absolute Christlike behavior … might always be … destructive to the enthusiastic follower of Jesus.”⁵ The last statement indicates that our common understanding of this undefined term has moved a great distance from Murray's assumption of a Platonic definition.

It is not surprising that scholars cannot agree on the meaning of the term; what does surprise is that no one has attempted to determine how Melville is using it, for it is basic to the character, plot, and meaning of the novel. Some form of the word occurs thirty-five times in Pierre—as opposed to a single use in Moby-Dick.⁶ And the terms “idealist” and “idealism,” repeatedly used to categorize the hero or the subject of Melville's attack, do not appear at all.⁷ Instead, Pierre is called “our young Enthusiast,” “the Enthusiast to Duty,” and “the enthusiastic youth”; and his “unprecedented” decision (to atone for his father's sin by pretending that his illegitimate half-sister Isabel is his wife) is twice labelled an “enthusiast resolution.”⁸

Although the “Enthusiast” is but one layer in a complex character, and although any attempt to define a single “intention” in Pierre would be reductive, to focus on “enthusiasm” opens the text in new ways, indicating a greater distance between Pierre and his creator than most critics have been willing to grant. Pierre reveals a sound knowledge of the literature of enthusiasm, which discusses the term's inherent ambiguity, often equates enthusiasm with madness, and focuses on the problem of determining the source of supposed inspiration and the difficulty of discovering truth in enigmatic situations without some extrinsic authority to provide validation of that “truth.” To look at Pierre in this context suggests that however “prescient”⁹ Melville's psychology may have been, or however aberrant Pierre's behavior may seem, Melville drew on typology and vocabulary provided by philosophers and religious thinkers of the period, which he could have expected some of his audience to recognize. Once again we see that Melville's genius lay not in his conception of original characters and plots but in his ability to transform and complicate borrowed materials in ways that simultaneously explore the recesses of his own mind, his problems as a writer, and the culture in which he lived.

In Pierre, Melville is refitting an old term to a new use—finding a language, as Philip Gura suggests the writers of the American Renaissance had to do, rooted in human nature rather than divine, that would speak to a post-Scriptural world, and, in the process, discovering the “ambiguity inherent in the gesture of human speech.”¹⁰ Gura's project is to show “how the terms of theological debate, particularly with regard to the accuracy and implication of scriptural revelation, when coupled with the influence of continental romanticism, were transformed into premises with deep reverberations in epistemology, theology, education, and literary form” (p. 6). My discussion will focus on a single, sometimes theological term, “enthusiasm,” which helps explain not only Pierre's seemingly illogical behavior and tragic end but also Melville's use of his story to explore the problem of the imagination, especially for the writer of fiction, as a guide to action and a means to truth in a modern, secular world.

I

Melville could not have chosen a better vehicle than “enthusiasm” to convey the ambiguities of the imagination. Derived from the Greek entheos, which may mean either “God possessing Man or Man caught up into God,” the word entered English in the Renaissance, when it “referred to religious experience, whether of possession or ecstasy,”¹¹ or to some form of divine inspiration, religious or poetic. Enthusiasm was the “major preoccupation of religious minds” for a hundred and fifty years (roughly 1650 to 1800), “obscuring from contemporary view the rise of atheism,” according to Ronald Knox, whose study of this “chapter in the history of religion” chronicles successive eruptions of what he would prefer to call “suprasupernaturalism.”¹² Spreading at this time into Lockean epistemology and evangelical religion, sentimentalism and skepticism, piety and naturalism, the term most frequently connoted delusion; beginning in the nineteenth century, “enthusiasm” more often meant “ardent zeal” (OED) or the mental state in which a noble selflessness replaces selfishness.¹³

The term is problematic because historically “enthusiasm” has both positive and negative connotations, as innumerable attempts to distinguish between “true” and “false” enthusiasm make clear. How, asks John Locke in his discussion of enthusiasm in Book 4 of The Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), can one “distinguish between the delusions of Satan and the inspirations of the Holy Ghost?”¹⁴Pierre is built on this ambiguity. Melville could have found a full Platonic (and positive) understanding of the word in the anonymous “editor's” “Introduction” to Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni (mentioned in a letter to neighbor Sarah Morewood in the fall of 1851¹⁵) where the Sage explains, “‘Plato … expresses four kinds of Mania, by which I desire to understand enthusiasm, and the inspiration of the gods. Firstly, the musical; secondly, the telestic or mystic; thirdly, the prophetic; and fourthly, that which belongs to Love.’”¹⁶ Likewise, Shaftesbury asserts in Characteristics (1711) (mentioned in a June 1851 letter to Hawthorne¹⁷) that “inspiration may justly be called divine enthusiasm; for the word itself signifies divine presence, and was made use of by the philosopher whom the earliest Christian Fathers called divine [Plato], to express whatever was sublime in human passions.”¹⁸

Melville is clearly also aware of the word's negative sense. The enthusiast's strange behavior might not be god-inspired. Instead, “enthusiasm” was often derogatory, connoting something excessive or some form of delusion. Typical judgments called enthusiasm “mistaken … divine inspiration,” a “misconceit of being inspired,” a “counterfeit of true religion,” “an imaginary, not a real, inspiration.” New England divine Charles Chauncy expands this last definition in his “Caveat Against Enthusiasm” (1742): “the Enthusiast … has a conceit of himself as a person favored with the extraordinary presence of the Deity. He mistakes the workings of his own passions for divine communications, and fancies himself inspired by the Spirit of God, when … he is under no other influence than that of the over-heated imagination.” Enthusiasm properly understood is a “disease, a sort of madness.”¹⁹

John Wesley, preaching on “The Nature of Enthusiasm” (1750), goes beyond his fellow thinkers in acknowledging the ambiguity of language: the term, he insists, “is undefinable.” Exploring etymology, he cautions (and Melville's critics would do well to listen) that the term is “exceeding rarely understood, even by those who use it most.”²⁰ It is a “dark, ambiguous word”;²¹ its pre-Socratic Greek origins are impossible to trace; the word may mean “‘in God’” or “‘in sacrifice.’” In fact, Wesley states in a surprising conclusion, the word itself may be “fictitious.” Fictitious or not, “enthusiasm” persists in many languages, he continues, “because men were no better agreed concerning the meaning than … the derivation of it. They therefore adopted the Greek word because they did not understand it: they did not translate it into their own tongues because they knew not how to translate it, it having been always a word of loose, uncertain sense, to which no determinate meaning was affixed” (Sermons, II, 48). Wesley soon returns to safer ground, stressing that enthusiasts mistake “imaginary” influences for the “real influence of the Spirit of God” (Sermons, II, 53) and that reason and Scripture provide true and clear guides to God's will.

Melville's general understanding of the term may very well derive from Locke's attack in the Essay: enthusiasm takes away “both reason and revelation, and substitutes the ungrounded fancies of a man's own brain.”²² Locke's discussion is extracted (without quotation marks) into the lengthy entry on “enthusiasm” in Chambers' Cyclopedia, which Melville owned in the 1728 edition.²³ In this passage Locke asserts that “in all ages, men, in whom melancholy has mix’d with devotion, or whose conceit of themselves, has raised them into an opinion of a greater familiarity with God, than is allowed others; have often flattered themselves with the persuasion of an immediate intercourse with the deity, and frequent communications from the divine spirit. Their minds being thus prepared,” they tend to view “whatever groundless opinion comes to settle itself strongly upon their fancies [as] an illumination from the spirit of God; and whatsoever odd action they find in themselves an inclination to do, that impulse is concluded to be a call, or direction, from heaven, and must be obeyed.” Locke goes on to discuss the problem of “immediate revelation, of illumination without search, and certainty without proof,” and concludes that God works through natural reason or provides some “marks which reason cannot be mistaken in.”²⁴ Melville may also have read David Hume's popular Essays; in “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm” (1741) Hume discusses the swollen imagination that produces “raptures, transports, and surprising flights of fancy [which] are attributed to the immediate inspiration of that Divine Being, who is the object of devotion.”²⁵ Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755) codified the pejorative sense of “enthusiasm” in its first definition: “A vain belief of private revelation; a vain coincidence of divine favour or communication.” Other meanings in the Dictionary are more secular and neutral: “2. Heat of imagination: violence of passion, confidence of opinion” and “3. Elevation of fancy; exaltation of ideas.”²⁶

II

Dozens of discussions of enthusiasm could be cited,²⁷ only a few of which we can be certain that Melville knew. And one might argue that he needed no more than the Cyclopaedia's version of Locke, with its interesting statement of the central problem of enthusiasm: “But of this seeing and feeling [of the hand of God moving within], is it a perception of an inclination to do something, or of the spirit of God moving that inclination?”²⁸ The source of the “inclination to do something” is central to Pierre's “grand enthusiast resolution”: Melville examines relentlessly all the factors that can enter into a single decisive action—the nexus of fate, free will, and chance that determines human events—but his treatment is far more naturalistic, skeptical, and secularized than earlier discussions of enthusiasm. Pierre's bizarre behavior is most true to a type provided by one of the last significant explorations of enthusiasm, first published in 1829, which defines enthusiasm as a diseased imagination, a mental illness with specific causes, symptoms, and consequences: Isaac Taylor's Natural History of Enthusiasm.

As Taylor's best-known work, the Natural History of Enthusiasm went through ten editions, British and American, between 1829 and 1845. A copy could have been in the “‘cartload’” of books Melville's widow sold to A. F. Farnell of Brooklyn after Melville's death, which included many “‘theological’ works … regarded as a dead loss and … scrapped for waste paper”²⁹—a terrible loss for scholars. A wonderful compendium for the popular mind of the basic elements of “enthusiasm” as it had evolved over the two hundred years preceding its use by Melville as the subject for his rural romance, the Natural History of Enthusiasm would have delighted Melville's ever-questioning, alternately skeptical and believing mind: it is “a sort of historico-philosophical disquisition on the perversions of religious imagination, … written with a freshness and vigour which gave it an instant vogue.”³⁰ Despite its somewhat religious orientation, however, the Natural History (as the title suggests) attempts to be scientific and objective in its approach to the traditional problem of distinguishing true from false inspiration. Taylor's proofs are from nature, not Scripture, and he stresses worldly causes and consequences rather than heavenly ones. For Taylor, enthusiasm is the product of a diseased or disordered imagination, a natural human faculty.

This literalization of the long-metaphorical relationship between enthusiasm and madness³¹ makes Natural History of Enthusiasm particularly useful for an understanding of Pierre. In much the same way that autobiographical or nautical facts structured his earlier works, the typical characteristics and progress of the early nineteenth-century version of the enthusiast became the framework for Melville's case study of a disease that he seemed to have contracted. He seeks not to judge Pierre but to understand his behavior by entering his mind, thus transforming Taylor's type into a richer, more ambiguous figure.

The text for Wesley's sermon links enthusiasm with Melville's own personal concerns at this time: from Acts 26, 24, “And Festus said with a loud voice, Paul, thou art beside thyself,” the text focuses on the problem of insanity and societal opinion of individual behavior out of conformity with its codes. Wesley's restatement of the problem anticipates the ideas of Melville's Plotinus Plinlimmon in the pamphlet Pierre reads on his way to the city: “It is easy to observe that the determinate thing which the world accounts madness is that utter contempt of all temporal things [Plinlimmon's ‘horologicals’], and steady pursuit of things eternal [Plinlimmon's ‘chronometricals’].” Since Wesley wants to absolve Methodism of the derogatory charge of enthusiasm, he, like Plinlimmon, counsels “rational” behavior rather than enthusiasm, which he calls a “disorder of the mind [that] greatly hinders the exercise of reason …, a religious madness arising from some falsely imagined influence or inspiration of God.”³² To Melville in 1850 and 1851, first struggling to complete Moby-Dick and then reading the early reviews of his masterpiece while writing his seventh book in as many years, recognizing that dollars damned him and yet refusing to write what would sell, and exhibiting symptoms that were causing family and reviewers to question his sanity, this subject would have great personal significance.³³ He even quoted Paul's reply to Festus, “‘I am not mad, most noble Festus’” (Acts, 26, 25), in a letter to Hawthorne (November 17? 1851), when he was beginning Pierre. Partly because of his own worries about insanity, it seems, Melville cast Pierre in the role of the enthusiast as a way of exploring the apparently aberrant workings of the human mind a half-century before Freud.³⁴

Unlike Wesley, Taylor in the Natural History does not want to recognize the inherently ambiguous nature of enthusiasm. To prevent the spread of this dangerous disease, he adopts a one-sided stance. In his “Advertisement” he is dogmatic: he will describe distinctly the “perilous illusion” (enthusiasm) to “fix the sense of the term.”³⁵ Thus he calls enthusiasm a “religion of the imagination” (p. 16), “fictitious piety” (p. [iii]), an “intellectual disease” (p. 98), a “common vice of the mind” (p. 16); the product of a “pampered imagination” (p. 17), and the “perversion of the religious affections” (p. 31); it always involves an “error of imagination … misjudging of realities … [and] calculations which reason condemns” (pp. 14-15); and it always connotes “folly,” “weakness,” “extravagance” (p. 14). But Taylor's awareness of the difficulty of “fixing” a definition creeps in at several points, as at the end of the sweeping statement that anyone who “cuts himself off from the common sympathies of our nature, and makes idiot sport of the energies of moral action, and has recourse either to a jargon of sophistries, or to trivial evasions when other men act upon the intuitions of good sense … must be called an enthusiast, even though he were at the same time—if that were possible—a saint” (p. 92). (Compare Wesley's admission that any man “excellent in his profession … has … in his temper a strong tincture of enthusiasm”; Sermons, II, 48-49.) The term refuses to contain a single meaning; uprooted in empirical epistemology from any grounding in the transcendent, “enthusiasm” has become inherently ambiguous.

It is the ground between the various possibilities—the enthusiast as madman, as deluded, as suffering from an overactive imagination, as heroic or even saintly—that Melville exploits in Pierre. Whereas the religious writers try to contain the problem of the aberrant imagination by referring all questions to the known source of truth (Holy Scripture), Melville makes it the stuff of moral tragedy, openly playing with the ambiguity of enthusiasm as a means of raising questions about the validity of the imagination as a guide to action. On the one hand, he suggests that Pierre's is a case of “true” enthusiasm: the crisis prompted by Isabel's mysterious note leads Pierre to an “almost superhuman” resolution, and, the narrator concludes, “Thus, in the Enthusiast to Duty, the heaven-begotten Christ is born” (p. 106). “Nothing great was ever done without enthusiasm,” Emerson says at the end of “Circles”; but Pierre comments ironically on such naivete, suggesting Pierre's may be “false” enthusiasm. For, only a few days (and a hundred pages) after the birth of the enthusiast in Pierre, as “our young Enthusiast” rides in the silent coach, away from Saddle Meadows, his past, and his patrimony, he suffers extreme doubts: “to him the Evil One propounded the possibility of the mere moonshine of all his self-renouncing Enthusiasm” (p. 205). Is his decision heroic, the only just action possible under the circumstances, a true enacting of the injunctions of Scripture? Or is Pierre a dupe of his own overactive imagination? Or is he (as he later wonders, recalling the apparent insanity of both his parents at their deaths) insane? Like “sin,” “vice,” and “virtue,” “enthusiasm,” we realize from exploring its etymology and uses, may be “another name for the other name” (p. 274)—madness, insanity, ego, sexual desire, delusion.

III

A major obstacle to critical and popular appreciation of Pierre has been the “revolting” nature of its title character and plot. One contemporary reviewer knew exactly why Pierre was “trash”: “the plot … is monstrous, the characters unnatural, and the style a kind of prose run mad.”³⁶ For many readers Newton Arvin's objection still holds: “Pierre is presented to us as an Enthusiast to Duty: well and good. … We are not prepared to believe in his acting like a madman.” Arvin concludes that “Melville is chargeable in the end with an abysmal lapse of moral seriousness and coherence. … Pierre has behaved, not in fact like a Don Quixote, but like an Orlando Furioso.… he has conducted himself generally like a psychopath” (pp. 228-229). However, considering the language available to Melville in 1851, we see that Pierre behaves exactly as Taylor's scientific model predicts he will.

Taylor's genre—natural history—affords him a middle ground between theology and fiction that he peoples using narrative techniques, and the character that emerges from his analysis resembles Pierre in striking ways. From the Natural History we learn that the incipient enthusiast lives in a dream world, in “a sort of happy somnambulency—smiling and dreaming as he goes, unconscious of whatever is real, and busy with whatever is fantastic”; he seems both reckless and serene (p. 12). Perpetual illusion leads him to misjudge reality (pp. 14, 15); his “disordered imagination” creates a “region of fictitious happiness” in “the fields of intellectual enjoyment … especially of poetry and the fine arts.” A “refugee” from the “vexations of common life,” he lacks the “vigor necessary for continued and productive toil”; nevertheless, he wastes time on some ambitious “gaudy or preposterous extravagance of verse or picture: or perhaps [spends his] days in loading folios, shelves, and glass-cases with curious lumber of whatever kind most completely unites the qualities of rarity and worthlessness” (Taylor, pp. 13-14). To many, he seems insane.

Melville's extremely unrealistic treatment of the “dewily refreshed” Pierre in the “green and golden world” of his fathers (p. 3) and Pierre's relationships with his mother and Lucy creates in the opening chapters a subject and tone that mirror the enthusiast's unreal world, the illusory soil that engenders enthusiasm. And, although the transformation of the athletic and aristocratic Pierre of the novel's opening to dabbler in precious verse of Book XVIII is unprepared for, such dilettantism is a natural attribute of the enthusiast described by Taylor.

Taylor identifies the common element in all enthusiasts as presumption of self-importance, revealed in their demand for “sensible evidence” of God's special attentions: visions, voices, bodily commotions, natural signs. This is impiety, Taylor asserts, and the enthusiast's “experience” of such “evidence” results from uncontrolled imagination, not God's special activity on his behalf.³⁷ Peculiar behaviors are not evidence of God's influence. In fact, God's operations, he asserts in true Enlightenment fashion, are inscrutable because they are perfectly harmonized (Taylor, p. 66): in the human world as in nature, God works in natural ways, unseen and unperceived (p. 70), not by “extra-natural impulses, or sensible shocks upon the intellectual system” (p. 67). The “heavenly emanation which heals, cleanses, and blesses the spirit is still, and constant, and transparent” (p. 68). Taylor would agree with Melville's narrator's statement that “Silence is the only Voice of our God” (Pierre, pp. 204, 208). The enthusiast, however, “eager for transitory excitements” (Taylor, p. 70), demands more. Not content with the “silent rise of the well spring of purity and peace” (p. 71), his desire for palpable evidence results in “frothy agitations” and a sour “uncharitable temper,” physical melancholy, and “relaxation of the moral sentiments” (p. 71). The result is a sort of bipolar manic swing from ecstasy to despondency.

Examples of Pierre's presumptuous enthusiasm abound: his belief in “divine commands upon him to befriend and champion Isabel” (p. 106), his sense that Isabel's letter is the “unmistakable cry of the godhead through her soul” (p. 174), his calling on the Terror Stone to fall on him if his vow is unjustified, and his assertion that he has “‘consulted heaven itself upon [the deceitful solution to his problem], and heaven itself did not say Nay’” (p. 192). To enthusiasm, also, can be attributed Pierre's unrealistic view of the world, alternately agitated and despondent emotional state, rejection or twisting of authority and reason, and a tendency to act impulsively or leap to conclusions with insufficient evidence.

According to Taylor, the enthusiast, in his role as a “heaven-commissioned minister of religion” (p. 160), is often complacent, hypocritical, and vain (p. 175); or he may indulge in “self-renunciation” and other types of “metaphysical suicide” (p. 40—compare Pierre's “self-renouncing Enthusiasm,” p. 205). The Christian should endure unnecessary suffering only when unavoidable through the use of reason (see Taylor, pp. 211, 214; compare Plinlimmon's statement that “certain minor self-renunciations” are necessary, but one must “by no means make a complete unconditional sacrifice of himself in behalf of any other human being” [Pierre, p. 214]). The Tayloresque enthusiast tends to blame Chance for events which actually arise from the “intricate connections of the social system” (p. 128) and to label God's actions “mysteries” (compare Pierre's increasing sense of the utter mysteriousness of life as a result of his encounter with the “mystery” of Isabel).

The variety that most closely anticipates Pierre is Taylor's intellectual enthusiast—the “heresiarch” or “heretic by temperament” (p. 87)—a type much like the Melville who wrote Moby-Dick and Pierre. This sort of mind enjoys the “intellectual gratifications [of] abstruse speculation”: “discovery—invention—exaggeration, and paradox” (Taylor, p. 85). Yet, uncontrolled, these qualities spell danger. Heresy occurs when the imagination trespasses on forbidden territory—Scripture—“improving” and “embellishing” the source of Christian authority. Pierre's announcement, “Virtue and Vice are trash! Isabel, I will write such things—I will gospelize the world anew” (p. 273), suggests that he is such a heretic.

Taylor's mini-biography of the typical heresiarch closely parallels Melville's hero's development. The young heresiarch has “spent the earliest season of life, while yet the ingenuousness of youth remained unimpaired, in the pursuits of literature or science, and [is] ignorant of Christianity otherwise than as a system of forms and offices” (Taylor, p. 88). Likewise, Pierre “did … glide toward maturity thoughtless” of reality, spending many hours in his father's “fastidiously picked and decorous library; where the Spenserian nymphs had early led him into many a maze of all-bewildering beauty” that produced “soft, imaginative flames in his heart.”³⁸ Eventually reality punctures the enthusiast's dream, producing a crisis very like that caused by Isabel's information about Pierre's father: “But the moment of awakening arrives; some appalling accident or piercing sorrow sets the interest of time in abeyance, and opens upon the soul the vast objects of immortality” (Taylor, p. 88). Taylor then explores the psychology of the woe-awakened conscience. Although submission or humility may result, the enthusiast hovers over a void: “the first accidental contact with doctrinal paradox kindles the constitutional passion, and rouses the slumbering faculties to the full activity of adult vigor; contention ensues—malign sentiments, though perhaps foreign to the temper, are engendered, and these impart gloom to mysticism, and add ferocity to extravagance.” The ingenuous youth becomes a “delirious bigot” (Taylor, p. 88).

Pierre's enthusiastic, imagination-based religion is the worship of his imaginary father (“without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, and serene” [p. 68]) described in Book IV. The “doctrinal paradox” is the discovery of his father's sin and the “fact” of Isabel's sisterhood; and the contention between the two occupies over a hundred pages of Pierre, from the moment when Pierre fearfully reads Isabel's mysterious note on pages 63 and 64 until he “crosses the Rubicon” and informs Lucy of his “unprecedented final resolution” on page 182. In this section, the narrator minutely anatomizes the mind and heart of his enthusiast (“I am more frank with Pierre than the best men are with themselves” [p. 108]), seeking the clue to his motive for choosing the perilous path and Isabel over the simple world of Saddle Meadows and Lucy. In the last of these books, Book X (“The Unprecedented Final Resolution of Pierre”), “enthusiasm” or some variant appears six times in ten pages. Pierre's crucial decision, Taylor would assert, is the natural consequence of the fundamental unreality of his life.

Taylor's and Melville's enthusiasts both ingeniously support their heresies—in Pierre's case, his simultaneous devotion to his “sister” and to his father's reputation. Spurning authority, Taylor's heresiarch hastily convinces himself of the “certainty of the new truth” (p. 87) and argues cleverly but fallaciously to buttress his false beliefs. With more “intellectual mobility” than “strength,” his “ready perception of analogies gives him both facility and felicity in collecting proofs, or rather illustrations, in support of whatever opinion he adopts.”³⁹ Certainly the most elaborate analogy in Pierre is that constructed by Plinlimmon to support his (heretical) argument for a “virtuous expediency” (p. 214), but Pierre recognizes and chastizes his own tendency to analogize: “‘Quit thy analogies; sweet in the orator's mouth, bitter in the thinker's belly’” (p. 42). Still, when presented with what appears to be a compelling coincidence, he ignores his better reason: even before hearing the first part of Isabel's story he confirms his “presentiments” of his mother's attitude by her response to Ned and Delly's analogous situation; from this he concludes “he now perfectly knew his mother's mind, and had received forewarnings, as if from heaven” (p. 110), not to mention Isabel to her. A second coincidence—Isabel's residence in the house of Delly's father—seems one more argument for divine intent. At such times, the narrator says, one tends to ask, “chance, or God?” (p. 111). Taylor's heretic is soon duped by his self-created “false doctrine” (p. 89): “In this state of mind, of what value are the opinions of teachers and of elders? Of what weight the belief of the catholic church in all ages? They are nothing to be accounted of;—there seems even a glory and a heroism, as well as a duty, in spurning the fallible authority of man:—modesty, caution, hesitation, are treasons against conscience and heaven!” (p. 87). Pierre's examination of the “evidence” in his case—the two portraits, his aunt's story, Isabel's fragmentary memories—and his use of these products of the imagination to determine a truth, along with his failure to be honest with Lucy and his attempt to gain Falsgrave's support—in fact all of his mental machinations in Books IV through X—serve to justify his conviction of the “new truth,” that Isabel is indeed his sister and that he indeed must somehow help her.

The prognosis for the young heretic is dire, for the natural result of his enthusiasm is “a lamentable catastrophe.” Taylor's description anticipates what happens to Pierre in New York: “when the heart is sick and faint from the exhaustion of over activity, when the whispers of conscience have long ceased to be heard, when the emotions of genuine piety have become painfully strange to the soul, nothing is so probable as an almost sudden plunge from the pinnacle of high belief; into the bottomless gulf of universal scepticism” (p. 89).

Taylor is the only writer on enthusiasm to explore in any detail the consequences of enthusiasm for the individual, and the two major dangers of the excessive imagination enumerated in Section I closely anticipate Pierre's fate and Melville's treatment of it. First, it can overcome “all other affections and motives belonging to human nature” (p. 11), sever the enthusiast from “all sympathy with the common interests of life, and … render a man a mere phantom” (p. 12). Taylor explains, “whoever [creates] a paradise of abstract contemplation, or of poetic imagery, where he may take refuge from the annoyances and the importunate claims of common life—whoever thus delights himself with dreams, and is insensible to realities, lives in peril of awakening from his illusions when truth comes too late” (p. 18). Imaginative indulgence tends to “indurate” (p. 17) the heart. “Artificial excitement” induced by the “religion of the imagination” (pp. 17, 16) is unhealthy and transforms the tender heart into “a freezing centre of solitary and unsocial indulgence. … No cloak of selfishness is in fact more impenetrable than that which usually envelopes a pampered imagination. The reality of woe is the very circumstance that paralyses sympathy: … more often than not, this kind of luxurious sensitiveness to fiction is conjoined with a callousness that enables the subject of it to pass through the affecting occasions of domestic life in immovable apathy:—the heart has become, like that of Leviathan, ‘firm as a stone—yea, hard as a piece of the nether millstone,’” (Taylor, pp. 18-19).

Whereas most discussions of enthusiasm are filled with images of heat (enthusiasm, according to Chambers, is “Prophetic rage, or fury, which … enflames and raises the imagination”),⁴⁰ Taylor insists it leads to coldness and stoniness: “a fictitious piety corrupts or petrifies the heart not less certainly than does a romantic sensibility” (p. 18). When enthusiasm infects philanthropy, the “emotions of the heart are transmuted into mere pleasures of the imagination” (p. 177). In monkish enthusiasm, “imaginative indulgences … petrify the heart,” making “void the law of love to our neighbor, by a pretended intensity of love to God” (p. 220). (Compare Pierre's question, “Lucy or God?” p. 181.) Monastic life represents an “absolute separation from the society of man. The anchoret was a disjoined particle, frozen deep into the mass of his own selfishness,” and Taylor concludes that “this sort of meditative insulation is the ultimate and natural issue of all enthusiastic piety” (p. 220).

Taylor's discussion of enthusiasm's effect on the individual brings together several themes significant to Melville's exploration of the subject: selfishness, the inciting effect of woe, cold, the problem of fictionalizing, and, especially, stoniness—the dominant metaphor for Pierre's transformation.⁴¹ “Enthusiastic Truth, and Earnestness, and Independence” “invariably lead” the well qualified mind to “Hyperborean Regions,” according to Melville at the beginning of Book IX, as he explores the moral crux Pierre has involved himself in. His cutting himself off from his mother, his fiancee, his past, his patrimony, and his future; his long cold days at his desk in New York; his becoming in his dream a monolith, the armless Enceladus; his death in the low-ceilinged stone dungeon of the prison: these are all consequences of his “grand enthusiast resolution” which, the narrator points out, will require Pierre to “make a sacrifice of all objects dearest to him” (p. 106).

But, for Taylor, this is not the worst danger facing the enthusiast: even though it severs one from the sympathy of mankind, worse can happen if enthusiasm is, by chance, aligned with “the malign passions”:

Opportunity … and habit may be wanting, but intrinsic qualification for the perpetration of the worst crimes is not wanting to the man whose bosom heaves with enthusiasm, inflamed by malignancy. If checks are removed, if incitements are presented, if the momentum of action and custom is acquired, he will soon learn to extirpate every emotion of kindness or of pity, as if it were a treason against heaven; and will make it his ambition to rival the achievements, not of heroes, but of fiends. (p. 18)

Similarly, Melville's narrator generalizes about those “Hyperborean regions” to which Pierre's enthusiasm has led him: there the common maxims of social man can become inverted and confounded until one “entirely loses the directing compass of his mind” (p. 165). From the moment he receives Isabel's letter, Pierre behaves irrationally, simultaneously holding conflicting goals, failing to seek evidence before acting, leaping over the obvious question, “What must I do?” to the problem of “How must I do it?” (pp. 87-88), and rationalizing that his quest for truth can somehow be accomplished by living a lie. It is this loss of reason that causes critics like Arvin to label Pierre an “Orlando Furioso.” The fall that Taylor predicts suggests the plot of Pierre from the moment when young Glendinning receives Isabel's note and swears he “will be impious” (p. 66)—a fall from innocence that climaxes when he arrives in the city. Glen's cold rejection of his woe-maddened relative issues in Pierre's “savage impulse” to murder his cousin; and Glen's dismissal of Pierre as a “‘remarkable case of combined imposture and insanity’” (p. 239) is fit prelude to the descent to hell (the police station at night). From here it is a small step to Pierre's declaration that virtue and vice are “nothing” and his question, “How can one sin in a dream?” (p. 274).

The infamous actions so revolting to nineteenth-century reviewers of Pierre are a natural consequence of enthusiasm. Although the enthusiast may, under ordinary circumstances, suffer no ill effects from his “fictitious piety” or enthusiasm, Taylor asserts, his artificial support will “necessarily” fail him “in the hour of unusual trial.” Lacking “the common principles of honor and integrity which carry worldly men with credit through difficult occasions, [the] enthusiast is … of all men the one who is the worst prepared to withstand peculiar seductions.—He possesses neither the heavenly armor of virtue, nor the earthly” (p. 20). In fact, the enthusiast “has only a choice of immoralities, to be determined by his temperament and circumstances” (p. 20): he may become a zealot, visionary, railer, or recluse. Hemmed in by apparently irreconcilable options—to tell the truth he must grievously wound his mother and impugn his father's reputation; to help Isabel he must reveal his father's secret or reject Lucy—Pierre convinces himself that his chosen “immorality” is the least painful for all concerned, but in return he is considered a monster, a swindler, a villainous liar, and a fiend. The “seduction” Pierre faces upon meeting his strange but beautiful “sister” is “peculiar,” to say the least, and in the question of whether or not Pierre withstands this seduction in a physical sense lies the taboo subject of incest in the novel. One is reminded, too, of Plinlimmon's statement that “almost invariably, with inferior beings, the absolute effort to live in this world according to the strict letter of the chronometricals is, somehow, apt to involve those inferior beings eventually in strange, unique follies and sins, unimagined before” (p. 213). From the birth of his enthusiasm to his disastrous end, Pierre closely follows the naturalistic type provided by Taylor's study.

IV

Melville uses Pierre's enthusiasm to explore the question of the validity of art—the product of the imagination as interpreted by the imagination—as a guide to action and a means to truth in an artificial world where habitual fictionalizing renders all “Truth” suspect. Theological concern about enthusiasm had centered on the source of inspiration, whether it was divine or demonic; with the advent of romanticism, however, inspiration gives way to imagination, moving the locus of reality from outside to inside the individual mind. Though the terms have changed, the problem remains, as Taylor's treatment of the imagination makes clear. Thoroughly Baconian and empirical, convinced of the superiority of the inductive method, Taylor distrusts abstraction in areas where (scientific) reason should prevail, and he believes the diseased imagination—enthusiasm—leads to a dangerous loss of reality. Repeatedly he emphasizes the need for authoritative reason to control the errant imagination. But his entire argument is predicated upon the very real existence of the imagination, twin to reason: both are necessary human faculties. The opening of the Natural History, in fact, is a paean to the imagination that introduces an immediate ambiguity into his discussion:

Some form of beauty, engendered by the imagination … invests almost every object that excites desire. These illusions—if indeed they ought to be called illusions, … by mediating between body and spirit, reconcile the animal and intellectual propensities and give dignity and harmony to the character of man. It is these unsubstantial impressions that enrich and enliven the social affections; and these, not less than the superiority of the reasoning faculties, elevate mankind above the brute. (p. 9)

But, not only is imaginative speculation attractive; enthusiasm is necessary to human progress. Without it, “the sciences would never have moved a step in advance of the mechanic arts, much less would the high theorems of pure mathematics, or the abstruse principles of metaphysics, have been known to mankind” (p. 93). Because the imagination deals with what is not there, what is not already realized—the abstract, the metaphysical—it can theorize, invent, dream. But, misused or uncontrolled, it can create heretical doctrine, abstruse speculation, or “fictitious happiness” (p. 12), rendering the dreamer unable to deal with reality. Only a thin line separates the imagination from its perversion, enthusiasm.

Melville drops numerous “hints” that Pierre's predicament is the result of the imagination's usurping the role of reason. At the beginning of Book IV, the narrator discusses the difficulty—if not impossibility—of accounting for human emotions which can lead an individual like Pierre to behave in a way that most people consider insane. The whys and hows of human experience are lost in the chain of circumstances that leads to any event. “Idle then would it be,” he concludes, to attempt to explain why Isabel's information led Pierre immediately and unquestioningly to do battle with Fate for his “sister.” Nevertheless, “some random hints” may help to understand Pierre's “tumultuous mood” (p. 68). The “hints” all concern Pierre's father, but more specifically the imaginary father Pierre has confected from his own memories, his mother's attitudes, his Aunt Dorothea's stories, and the “chair-portrait” that was “stolen” by cousin Ralph. Again, in Book X, attempting to explain Pierre's “extraordinary” decision to pretend that his sister Isabel is his wife, the narrator states that in tracing “the rarest and profoundest things,” their “probable origin” is often “something extremely trite or trivial” (p. 176); the very strong “hint” he offers here is the “fictitiousness” of Pierre and his mother's “brother-sister” relationship. And, in Book XII, attempting to explain Pierre's sudden hatred and destruction of the chair-portrait, the narrator “hints” that the ambiguously smiling face of his father symbolizes for Pierre the “tyranny of Time and Fate”: only in the portrait does he find a link between his deceased father and the strange woman, so that the painted image, not the real man, seems to be the father of Isabel (p. 197).

All of these “hints” point to the imagination as the motivating force. Whether the medium be paint or language, the human capacity to envision and represent what is not there is the immediate cause of Pierre's acts. For the real flesh-and-blood father, Pierre has substituted an idealized version whom he worships. Another imaginative version of his father, captured in the chair-portrait, seems to speak, urging him to believe in an alternate reality; this portrait supplies him with the only bit of “evidence” to support Isabel's claim—the physical similarity Pierre noticed between the two “faces.” “For the real Lucy”—the person most cruelly used in Pierre's scheme—he substitutes an abstraction, a “sign,” an algebraic “x” (p. 181). And, for the real Isabel, he substitutes an enigma (a literary problem), the “mystery of Isabel,” “wholly … out of the realms of mortalness, and … transfigured in the highest heaven of uncorrupted love” (p. 142). The products of the imagination work on each other: the “conjectured past of Isabel took mysterious hold of his father; therefore, the idea of his father tyrannized over his imagination” (p. 104). In fact, after his first “interview” with Isabel, Pierre sees all human relationships as imaginary: faced with “mysteries interpierced with mysteries, and mysteries eluding mysteries,” he begins to “seem to see the mere imaginariness of the so supposed solidest principle of human association” (p. 142). However, Pierre irrationally uses this “evidence” to arrive at the “burning fact, that Isabel was his sister” (p. 170).

Only at the end of the novel does Pierre come to realize that his “grand enthusiast resolution” was predicated upon a tissue of abstractions and fictions rather than a foundation of facts. The words in Isabel's note become the key that unlocks the mystery of the father's ambiguous smile, whereas the chair-portrait becomes Pierre's only “proof,” “the entire sum and substance of all possible, rakable, downright presumptive evidence” (p. 353) that Isabel is his sister. Pierre draws on the world of the imagination to fill the spaces in his knowledge; his “proofs” are insubstantial because each is the product of the imagination, and each depends on the other for validation.

Pierre begins to realize his folly soon after his arrival in New York: “Call me brother no more! How knowest thou I am thy brother? Did thy mother tell thee? Did my father say so to me?—I am Pierre, and thou Isabel, wide brother in the common humanity,—no more” (p. 273). The doubts return more forcefully after Pierre, Isabel, and Lucy visit the art gallery with its strangely evocative portraits: “How did he know that Isabel was his sister?” (p. 353), Pierre seems to ask as he responds to the pictures. He reviews his aunt's “nebulous legend,” the “shadowy points” in “Isabel's still more nebulous story,” uncertain and blurred as it is; he recalls his “own dim reminiscences of his wandering father's death-bed”; and then he sets aside “all his own manifold and inter-enfolding mystic and transcendental persuasions,—originally born, as he now seemed to feel, purely of an intense procreative enthusiasm:—an enthusiasm no longer so all-potential with him as of yore”; and, in the light of “real naked reason,” looking at the “plain, palpable facts,” the central question remains, “how did he know that Isabel was his sister?” (p. 353). The crux of enthusiasm is the source of the “truth.”

V

Pierre's enthusiasm is an important element in Melville's exploration of the role of the imagination in the quest for truth. In a very interesting way, Isabel's story and the chair-portrait illuminate each other at the same time that they call into question the possibility that the imagination—as both the creator and the interpreter of art—can lead to truth.⁴² Both the story and the portrait are enigmas, artistic puzzles demanding solutions of their hidden meanings. Pierre is bewildered by the “enigmas” (p. 138) that invest Isabel, an “enigmatic girl” (p. 176), after she tells her “enigmatical story” (p. 128) which ends in “enigmatical obscurity” (p. 136) to the point where he begins to wonder whether “I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?”⁴³ Pierre's handling of these enigmas, especially when compared to Taylor's discussion of this subject, is further evidence that his imagination has usurped his reason.

Taylor's concern is the problem of interpreting scriptural prophecy, since erroneous interpretation is a symptom of enthusiasm. Recognizing the difficulty of explaining God's method of speaking to men about things that have no real existence, he uses an analogy: a Biblical prophecy is like an enigma, a literary form used traditionally to manifest—and conceal—the “most important and serious truths” (p. 108). He develops at length a hint from Locke, that God provides some “extrinsical” “mark” whereby truth can be distinguished from delusion.⁴⁴ An enigma is “artfully constructed” (p. 111) so that the real subject is hidden or disguised “by some ingenuity of definition, and by some ambiguity of description” (p. 108); the enigma is designedly so framed as to tempt and to allow a diversity of hypothetical explanations” (p. 109); and the key to the correct interpretation of the enigma is a “special mark which shall prevent the possibility of doubt once the substance signified is seen” (p. 108).⁴⁵

Among its ambiguities, Pierre contains numerous enigmas demanding solution, including Isabel's handkerchief and guitar and the carved “S. y^e W.” on the Memnon stone. One minor enigma satisfies all of Taylor's “laws”: the apparent cooling of Pierre's once-fervid friendship with his cousin Glen. The disguise that conceals while revealing lies in the subtle change in Glen's correspondence with Pierre; of several possible interpretations for this perceived coolness, the narrator claims, “one possible ambiguity [becomes] the only possible explanation for all the ambiguous details”: the fact that Glen too has romantic feelings for Lucy, a truth Pierre arrives at, significantly, through his imagination. Here is the “master solution” that explains “all the singular enigmas in Glen”: “thus read, all these riddles apparently found their cunning solution” (p. 224). Later events support this solution. As this example makes clear, Pierre's imagination may lead to truth. What is significant in “solving” an enigma is arriving at the one solution that explains all the ambiguities—Taylor's “special mark that prevents the possibility of doubt.” Melville hints that Pierre may have arrived at such a solution in relation to Plinlimmon's enigmatic pamphlet; the narrator's avowed befuddlement about this enigma-within-an-enigma suggests (as the multiple critical interpretations of the piece indicate) that the pamphlet, if understood, might be the “chemic key of the cipher” (p. 70) of Pierre.

According to Taylor, the enigma's disguise serves three purposes: it is “a blind to the incurious—a trap to the dogmatical, and an exercise of modesty, of patience, and of sagacity, to the wise” (p. 109). The story of Isabel lures Pierre into the dogmatic trap: convinced even before she tells her story of the “fact” of Isabel's sisterhood, Pierre considers only a single interpretation. Her incoherencies add up to a terrible indictment of his father as the source of the damsel's distress. Taylor emphasizes that if the “expositor” of an enigma settles on “any one of the several interpretations of which an enigmatical prophecy is suceptible, and … claims for it a positive and exclusive preference,” he “sins most flagrantly, and outrageously, against the unalterable laws of the language” (p. 111); the subsequent reading of contemporary events as fulfillments of the misinterpreted prophecy can lead the expositor to the “verge of insanity—or worse, of infidelity.” “In this feverish state of the feelings, mundane interests, under the guise of faith and hope, occupy the soul to the exclusion of ‘things unseen and eternal:’ meanwhile the heart-affecting matters of piety and virtue become vapid to the taste, and gradually fall into forgetfulness” (p. 113).

On the other hand, Pierre's response to the chair-portrait is far more fluid and open-minded, suggesting this may be a truly imaginative interpretation, an “exercise of modesty, of patience, and of sagacity” (Taylor, p. 109). The one bit of evidence—the catalyst in Pierre's decision—is this ambiguously created, ambiguously smiling portrait. It is appropriate that this illustration of the possible deceits of the imagination be a work of art, even more important that it be the product of a series of deceits, cousin Ralph's lies about the painting he was making as he “stole” the image from the young man who became Pierre's father while that young man was wearing a smile that perhaps hid—or revealed?—his deception of the social world and of a young Frenchwoman, and that it be interpreted by a romantically sentimental sister. In trying to capture that face of deceit, the artist indeed created an enigma, “artfully constructed” to reveal and conceal the truth.

As Pierre sought to penetrate the mystery of the chair-portrait during his adolescence, the portrait had seemed to speak, to encourage him to probe deeper into the mystery behind its ambiguous smile. In the heat of Pierre's enthusiasm, Isabel's story becomes the key to the mystery—the special mark—to unlock all of its previous ambiguities, a moment of enlightenment suggestive of a religious conversion:

But now, now—Isabel's letter read: swift as the first light that slides from the sun, Pierre saw all preceding ambiguities, all mysteries ripped open as if with a keen sword.… Now his remotest infantile reminiscences—the wandering mind of his father—the empty hand, and the ashen—the strange story of Aunt Dorothea—the mystical midnight suggestions of the portrait itself; and, above all, his mother's intuitive aversion, all overwhelmed him with reciprocal testimonies. (p. 85)

The portrait, Melville goes on to say, is “no longer wholly enigmatical, but still ambiguously smiling” (p. 87).

Later, however, at the art gallery, Pierre recognizes that the now-destroyed chair-portrait, like the similar portrait he sees, may have been “a pure fancy piece” (p. 353), a product of the imagination, and he now dismisses any similarity to the real father as “one of the wonderful coincidences” (p. 352)—whereas earlier, he had read coincidences as signs to be followed. The portrait, the coincidences—these constituted the evidence for the decision that is inexorably leading to his end. By framing Pierre's enthusiastic gesture with two apparently similar portraits whose significance can be determined only by some knowledge that resides outside of the artifacts themselves—Locke's “something extrinsical to the persuasions themselves” (Works, III, 157)—Melville deftly indicates the perils that attend the imagination when unrestrained by reason.

VI

The question framed by the portraits has to do with the nature and truth of art and the imagination and their relationship to human action. Is the product of the imagination “merely” a “fiction”—a lie? Is the truth that one thinks one discovers through the imagination merely an enthusiastic fantasy, the product of disordered reason? Or is that shadow land that Pierre enters when the chair portrait seems to speak to him in his adolescence—is that world more real than the supposedly real world of facts and surfaces, Mary Glendinning's world as represented by the drawing-room portrait? The space that Pierre's youthful mind enters in the fifth chapter of Book IV, as Melville seeks an answer to the question of the motive and cause of Pierre's immediate entrance into the lists opened by Isabel's note, resembles the moonlight world in the second story of Hawthorne's Custom-House: here are the “ever-elastic regions of evanescent invention” (Pierre, p. 82; compare Taylor's use of “elasticity” in reference to the “inventive power [p. 84]); in “reveries and trances” Pierre opens himself to all those ineffable hints and ambiguities, and undefined half-suggestions, which now and then people the soul's atmosphere” (p. 84); here he falls into a “midnight revery” (p. 85). It is this elastic world that engenders Pierre's enthusiasm, here that art speaks to his fluid mind and seems to convey a truth deeper than that which his social world is teaching him to know.

For the Christian addressed by most of the writers on enthusiasm, the bulwark against dangerous enthusiastic speculation is a rational approach to Scripture, the authoritative word of God which resolves all possible questions. Melville's plot indicates that this authority is unavailable to Pierre: his father (whose “pure, exalted idea” [p. 82] had once controlled his imagination) is dead and discredited; his mother failed to act her part and is now revealed to be coldly proud; and twice Pierre has discovered Falsgrave's position on the very real problem of illegitimacy, both times receiving an answer quite opposite from that taught in the Sermon on the Mount. He has come to see the social world as selfishly hypocritical, an institution whose smooth functioning depends on compromises (compare Plinlimmon's dismissal of chronometrical truth as a guide for horological life) and forms and lies, and thus he becomes his own authority, trapped in the hermetic circle of his imaginative logic.

Melville underscores this problem of the absence of an authoritative center to guide the enthusiast's actions by comparing Pierre's mood of “rebellion and horrid anarchy and infidelity” (p. 205) to that of the priest tempted to renounce his belief: whereas the priest retained his faith through the “indestructible anchors” of Christianity, Pierre has destroyed the only hard evidence he had—a work of the imagination. Moreover, Melville insists, Pierre's problem is of a different order: whereas the priest's problem concerned belief, for Pierre “it was a question whether certain vital acts of his were right or wrong.” And he stresses this distinction between beliefs and acts by adding, “In this little nut lie germ-like the possible solution of some puzzling problems” (p. 205). Throughout Pierre, Melville is concerned with this vital question of the relationship between imagination and action—with how the “fancy pictures” created by the mind may determine human events. Despite the book's many ambiguities, Pierre's uncontrolled imagination (his “enthusiasm”) is the cause of his actions.

Although Pierre's interpretations of the enigmas of Isabel and his father are clearly enthusiastic, Melville further complicates the question of the validity of the imagination by suggesting—at exactly the moment that Pierre is berating himself for his enthusiastic act, near the end of the work—that Pierre's intuitive solution may indeed have been correct. When Pierre and Isabel, side by side, view “A stranger's head, by an unknown hand,” they seem to respond identically, but the omniscient narrator reveals that they are seeing different things. For Pierre, the similarity between this portrait and the one he destroyed raises questions about the necessary relationship of art to life and calls into question the whole edifice upon which he built his grand enthusiast resolution: “the original of this second portrait was as much the father of Isabel as the original of the chair-portrait. But perhaps there was no original at all to this second portrait” (p. 353). The father of Isabel produced by his imagination may not exist at all. On the other hand, Isabel apparently sees in the portrait the face of the gentleman she associates with the word “Glendinning” and remembers from her childhood; if so, the portrait provides exactly the corroborative evidence Pierre sought.

But, as Taylor warns it will, skepticism has finally replaced enthusiastic faith: recently to Pierre, the “whole story of Isabel had seemed an enigma, a mystery, an imaginative delirium” (p. 354), especially now that he, through his own art, understands the fiction-making process. Only now, when it is too late, does he come to ask himself the questions that Taylor insists one must ask when confronted with an enigma. Pierre's recognition that Isabel's story may have been an “enigma, a mystery, an imaginative delirium,” as well as his rejection of coincidences as conclusive proof, represents a return to a more rational approach to the problem. Coming fast upon his severe case of enthusiasm, however, it can only plunge Pierre into “the bottomless gulf of universal scepticism” that Taylor predicts for the “young heresiarch” (p. 89).

Melville's connection of Pierre's new-found skepticism with his role as a professional “bejuggler”—a “profound” writer (p. 354)—suggests how he was using his creation of a Tayloresque enthusiast to explore the problem of the dangers and deceits, the lure and the ambiguity of the imagination he was encountering as a writer of fiction. The problem is especially acute in a selfish and scientific age when unusual behavior like Pierre's, or even Melville's, is no longer considered inspiration, but instead insanity. As opposed to his earlier belief (expressed in the review of Hawthorne's Mosses, 1850) in “fine authors … standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding Spirit of all Beauty, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius,” the Melville of Pierre wonders whether such a writer is merely trapped in his own fictions, deluding himself and his readers. In that same review, Melville had compared Truth “in this world of lies” to a “scared white doe [fleeing] in the woodlands,” revealed “only by cunning glimpses … covertly, and by snatches,” and he had acknowledged that the writer of fiction (like Taylor's creator of enigmas) may usefully create titles “directly calculated to deceive—egregiously deceive, the superficial skimmer of pages.”⁴⁶ Pierre's questions at the end of the novel suggest not only that the professional creator of serious fictions must resort to the conscious deceit of the enigma in order to conceal while revealing the most important truths, but also that those “truths” as well may be deceits. One is tempted to ridicule Pierre for his “unprecedented” method of “knowing” truth by enthusiastically creating and living a lie; but such subterfuge is endemic to professional fiction-making. Habituated to his created fictions, Melville suggests, the writer may lose the ability to distinguish between the actual and the imaginary and end by either deceiving himself and his readers or doubting the possibility of any truth. His treatment of these questions in Pierre shows him well on his way to the questions concerning truth and art explored in The Confidence-Man.

But, unlike Taylor, Melville is not dogmatic on this point: whether or not Isabel is his sister remains for Pierre an unanswered question. The imagination may have led Pierre closer to the real truth of Isabel and the social world than factual evidence ever could have. Instead, Pierre dramatizes the difficulty of arriving at final truth, a difficulty suggested by the progression of metaphors Melville chose to image Truth—from a “scared white doe” in 1850 to a fathomless white whale in 1851, to the “appallingly vacant” “central room” (p. 285) of the pyramid in 1852.⁴⁷ The problem is not so much that Truth is elusive (as in Mardi and Moby-Dick), but that the human instrument for seeking Truth may be unreliable. The only true fiction, then, as Melville both states and practices in Pierre, will be that which resists the attempt to systematize the unsystematizable as do most novels and thus remains true to the “one sensational truth” about the “complex web of life” (a learning that Pierre derives from his encounter with Isabel): “the unravelable inscrutableness of God”—or, rather, that which “all men are agreed to call by the name of God” (p. 141), a statement that implies another act of the imagination, possibly a way of talking about something that has no real existence.

More important, however, is Pierre's awareness of the implication of being trapped by a possible fiction: a fiction, like an enigma, is made by someone for some “cause.” His new “knowledge” brings new questions, new ambiguities: who, and for what purpose, could have implanted in Isabel information that would later derail Master Pierre Glendinning as he glided on to his “choice fate” as heir to the family seat, to a life of aristocratic luxury, surrounded by adoring females? In Book I of Pierre, the narrator clumsily shoves the question of “Fate” and its possible role in Pierre's life at the reader through repeated foreshadowings and indirect questions (“we shall see if Fate hath not just a … small word or two to say” [p. 12; compare p. 14]). Taylor, however, indicates that the hows and whys of human events lie in neither the “unravelable inscrutableness of God,” nor Fate, nor chance, nor some perverse human agent; instead he loads the dice in favor of “temperament and circumstances” (p. 20).

VII

Melville's type-casting of Pierre according to this naturalistic model suggests that we consider—before Darwinian ideas had emphasized heredity and environment—how large a role natural rather than supernatural causes play in the plot of human life. The “fixed threads of the warp” (Moby-Dick, p. 185) of Pierre's life (Taylor's “temperament and circumstances”) are his “susceptible, reflective, and poetic” (p. 111) nature, his high-strung spirit, his “double revolutionary descent” (p. 20), his background, childhood, culture and education; the stimulation of his imagination and habitual fictitiousness of his life result in predictable behavior. The element of “chance” that brings Isabel into Pierre's physical sphere would be interpreted by Taylor as the result, instead, of the “intricate connections of the social system.” He goes on to explain that “The thread of every life is entangled with other threads, beyond all reach of calculation” (p. 128). Melville echoes this thought: Pierre justifies his “strange,” “deceitful … but harmless way” out of his difficulty, explaining to Isabel, “thy true heart foreknoweth not the myriad alliances and criss-crossings among mankind, the infinite entanglements of all social things, which forbid that one thread should fly the general fabric … without tearing itself and tearing others” (p. 191).

The threads that led to Pierre's first “fatal” view of Isabel's face (all that has happened, he believes, “inevitably proceeded from the first hour I saw thee” [p. 192]) may include Isabel's father's (if indeed he was her father) desire to provide somewhat for his unacknowledged daughter by locating her in his vicinity; Delly's pregnancy, which deprives her family of her labor; the existence of some “necessitous emigrants” (p. 44) in the neighborhood; the Miss Pennies' deafness and resultant charitable effort in establishing a sewing circle in their home; and Mary Glendinning's role as local philanthropist. This intricate web leads to a severe psychic shock which, as Taylor predicts, results in the onset of the disease (enthusiasm) in one constitutionally susceptible as is Pierre.

Among all of these threads, the opportunity for Pierre's weaving into his destiny any measure of free will is limited.⁴⁸ As Melville says, “Fixed Fate and Free Will were arguing him, and Fixed Fate got the better in the debate” (p. 182)—“Fate” interpreted, as Taylor's work suggests, as the natural elements that produce his enthusiasm. If free will exists, Melville suggests it is located in the link between thought and action, exactly the point where Taylor fears the trespassing of the imagination. In his lengthy probing of the motives leading to Pierre's “unprecedented final resolution” in Book X, the narrator hovers over Pierre like a Greek chorus, commenting on the significance of his action “if he now acted out his most rare resolve” (p. 176). Enumerating the terrible consequences that even “impulsive Pierre” recognizes, he concludes, “Such, oh thou son of man! are the perils and the miseries thou callest down on thee, when, even in a virtuous cause, thou steppest aside from those arbitrary lines of conduct, by which the common world, however base and dastardly, surrounds thee for thy worldly good” (p. 176).

The forms, codes, lies, and hypocrisies of modern social life—justified as necessary for survival—encourage a divorce between idea and action: it is prudent to believe one thing and do another, as Falsgrave and Mary Glendinning demonstrate. Pierre has an inkling of the need for the “social lie” when he curses “the hour I acted on the thought, that Love hath no reserves. Never should I have told thee the story of that face, Lucy” (p. 37). But, even in this vital area of action, Pierre suggests that free will may be extremely limited: “not always in our actions are we our own factors” (p. 51), we are reminded, as Pierre ponders the “motive” that led him, for the first time, to lie to his mother. For at this point in the novel, the narrator “hints” that the clue to Pierre's fatal action may lie in the habitual fictitiousness of their relationship. Thus, Pierre finds the solution to his problem in the “baleful thought” that enters his mind as he ponders his irreconcilable motives, “that the truth should not always be paraded; … that sometimes a lie is heavenly, and truth infernal” (p. 92). Only one habituated to fictions would consider such a solution as the means to knowing “Truth.”

The plot of Melville's Pierre, like Taylor's treatise and Plinlimmon's pamphlet, is a critique of enthusiasm—of acting under the delusion that one is in direct communication with God, mistaking imagination for reality, acting (in Plinlimmon's terms) chronometrically while living in a horological world. But, both Taylor and Plinlimmon recognize the possibility of a few great souls who are truly inspired, although this is not the lot of the many. Rare indeed are those who can live enthusiastically or chronometrically “without folly or sin” (p. 213). Melville's novel transcends both of these little treatises in also recognizing and dramatizing the complexities and ambiguities that surround any decisive human action, and in the process creating a frightening image of the modern world as Melville saw it—an “artificial world,” as Plinlimmon calls it, where the “soul of man” is necessarily “removed from its God and … heavenly truth” (p. 211). In representing this world, through the artificiality, the bombast, the excess, the baroque style of Pierre, Melville creates an image of the artificial, imaginary world that the mass of men have come to believe is real. In the end, Pierre, like Plinlimmon's pamphlet, is “more the excellently illustrated re-statement of a problem, than the solution of the problem itself.” But, as Melville adds parenthetically to his judgment of the pamphlet, “Perhaps [such illustrations] are the only possible human solutions” (p. 210).

Pierre indeed illustrates the problem of the uncontrolled imagination in its most developed form, the diseased form of what Taylor calls the “constitutional fictions” (p. 11) all humans are subject to. It dramatizes the difficulty of right action in a situation where the voice of God is a paradoxical silence, an artificial world of lies and hypocrisies, of surfaces and masks, where the Isabels are abandoned, the Dellys are banished, and the Pierres set off shock waves; where for the lack of an authoritative center, Plinlimmon's pamphlet remains an enigma. Melville's fiction too remains enigmatic because its truth turns back upon and questions its own instruments at the same time that it indicts the artificiality of human life in a self-created imaginary world; the mind rebels when confronted with this illustration of how impossible it is for one brought up in western society to distinguish truth from falsehood, imagination from reality. Habitual fictionalizing—the creation of an artificial, antiseptic world, divorced from nature and real feeling (the insights Melville had begun to formulate in writing Typee six years earlier) and from any real possibility of the transcendent—makes it extremely difficult, Melville suggests through his character Pierre, for the individual to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from lie, and thus to discover any authoritative guide to action. On this level, Pierre becomes a hideous allegory, demonstrating through Pierre's “enthusiasm,” his diseased imagination, the problem of western man in a culture that has lost its connection with a reality beyond its own man-created world of fictions.

Notes

1. Thompson, Melville's Quarrel With God (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 267-268.

2. Murray, “Introduction,” Pierre (New York: Hendricks House, 1949), p. lx; “Explanatory Notes,” p. 460, n. 125.17; cf. p. 473, n. 244.20.

3. Franklin, The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1963), p. 105; Krieger, The Tragic Vision: Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960; Phoenix edition, 1966), pp. 195-209.

4. Duban, Melville's Major Fiction (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1983), p. 179.

5. Dillingham, Melville's Later Novels (Athens and London: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986), p. 195 ff.; Higgins and Parker, “Reading Pierre,” A Companion to Melville Studies, ed. John Bryant (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), p. 228.

6. Larry Edward Wegener, A Concordance to Herman Melville's Pierre: or the Ambiguities, 2 vols. (New York and London: Garland, 1985); Eugene F. Irey, ed., A Concordance to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, 2 vols. (New York and London: Garland, 1982). Father Mapple cries out “with a heavenly enthusiasm” on p. 50 of Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1967).

7. Wegener; for Robert S. Forsythe, “Introduction,” Americana Deserta ed. (New York: Knopf, 1930), Pierre records “the tragic downfall of a brilliant young idealist” (p. xxxi); for William Ellery Sedgwick, Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1944), it is a “tragedy of youthful idealism” (p. 167); Murray's Pierre is “an idealistic, benevolent youth crushed by the practical, non-benevolent world” (p. xcviii); Merton M. Sealts, Jr., “Melville and the Platonic Tradition,” in Pursuing Melville, 1940-1980 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1982), classes Pierre with Melville's “other objections to philosophical idealism” (p. 323); Milton R. Stern, The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville (Urbana, Chicago, and London: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1968), discusses the “problem of idealism” (p. 151); Duban's Pierre is motivated by “idealistic absolutism” (p. 153). The list could be multiplied many times.

8. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. and Newberry Library, 1971), pp. 204, 106, 208, 106, 111; hereafter cited parenthetically.

9. Higgins and Parker, “Reading Pierre,” p. 213.

10. Gura, The Wisdom of Words (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1980), p. 4.

11. Susie I. Tucker, Enthusiasm: A Study in Semantic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972), p. 3.

12. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, with Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950, 1962), pp. 4, 2.

13. Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press for Wellesley College, 1957), p. 264.

14. Locke, “Enthusiasm,” Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Works, 10 vols. (London: 1823; rpt. Germany: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1963), III, 155-156.

15. Melville to Sarah Morewood, September 12? 1851, The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960).

16. Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni (New York: A. L. Burt, 1845), p. viii. Leon Howard and Parker discuss possible influences of the novel on Pierre in the “Historical Introduction” to the Northwestern-Newberry edition, pp. 370-372.

17. Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 1? 1851, Letters.

18. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John M. Robertson, 2 vols. in one (1711; rpt. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), I, 38.

19. “mistaken”: Meric Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm, As it is an Effect of Nature: but is Mistaken by Many for Either Divine Inspiration, or Diabolical Possession (London: by R. D. …, 1655); “misconceit”: Henry More, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings of Dr. Henry More … 4th ed. … (London: Joseph Downing, 1712), p. 2; “counterfeit”: James Foster, Sermons, 4 vols. (London: J. Noon & A. Millar, 1755), III, 276; “imaginary”: Charles Chauncy, “A Caveat Against Enthusiasm” (Boston: J. Draper …, 1742), p. 3.

20. Wesley, Sermons II, Works, ed. Albert C. Outler, (Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1985), II, 47. “The Nature of Enthusiasm,” first printed in volume 3 of Sermons (1750), was separately printed in 1755 and included in the popular Sermons on Several Occasions, printed in seven editions in the eighteenth century and about 35 editions, English and American, in the nineteenth century prior to 1851. It is a work Melville could easily have seen.

21. Wesley, Sermons, II, 58.

22. Locke, Works, III, 149.

23. Sealts, Melville's Reading: Revised and Enlarged Edition (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina, 1988), p. 164.

24. Ephraim Chambers, Chambers' Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London: D. Midwinter, &c., 1741), s. v. “Enthusiasm.” Because the edition Melville owned (J. & J. Knapton, &c., 1728) capitalizes all substantives in the entry, a practice I find distracting, I quote the 1741 edition, which differs from the 1728 (in quoted portions) only in this respect.

25. Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Religious, Philosophical Works, ed. T. H. Green & T. H. Grose, 4 vols. (London: 1882; rpt. Germany: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1964), III, 145.

26. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language …, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan, 1755; rpt. New York: AMS, 1967), s. v. “Enthusiasm.”

27. For extensive treatments see Knox and Tucker, cited in notes 11 and 12.

28. Locke, Works, III, 152, from Chambers' Cyclopaedia, s. v. “Enthusiasm.” Locke reads, “is it a perception of an inclination or fancy to do. …”

29. Sealts, “Records of Melville's Reading,” Melville's Reading, p. 10.

30. Thomas Seccombe, “Taylor, Isaac (1787-1865),” DNB (1898-1899).

31. Tucker is interested in “how figurative language reflects attitudes of mind” (p. 5); see her discussion in ch. 11, “Metaphors,” pp. 144-161.

32. Wesley, Sermons, II, 47; compare Pierre, p. 214; Sermons, II, 49-50.

33. See Paul Smith, “Flux and Fixity in Pierre,” ESQ [A Journal of the American Renaissance], 32 (1986), 119-120, n. 1. Murray, “Introduction,” discusses Melville's “exhaustion,” “moral conflict,” and “underlying will to wreck his self” (pp. xiv-xv), and Newton Arvin, Herman Melville, American Men of Letters Series (New York: William Sloane. 1950), Melville's “psychoneurotic fatigue” (p. 218). See also Sealts, “Herman Melville's ‘I and My Chimney,’” Pursuing Melville, esp. pp. 16-22 passim. Higgins and Parker (“Reading Pierre”) mention a letter revealing that in December Melville was angered by gossip about Moby-Dick as “‘more than Blasphemous’” (p. 226). Sarah Morewood to George Duyckinck, December 28, 1851, in Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville, Cycle and Epicycle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), worried about Melville's “morbid excitement,” teased him by suggesting that his reclusive life was making “city friends think he was slightly insane—he replied that long ago he came to the same conclusion himself” (p. 133). See also Melville's letters to Hawthorne of November 17? 1851 (“I am not mad, most noble Festus”) and July 17 1852, and Melville's description of the probable success of Pierre to English publisher Richard Bentley (April 16, 1852).

34. See Dillingham, pp. 238-243, on the therapeutic value of Pierre for Melville.

35. Isaac Taylor, Natural History of Enthusiasm (London: Holdsworth & Ball, New York: J. Leavitt, 1830). Only Murray has connected Pierre with Taylor's treatise: for him Pierre contradicts Taylor's model. Commenting on Melville's leniency “in allowing [his hero] to be the sole carrier of the spirit in a world of universal ‘Imbecility, Ignorance, Blockheadedness and Besottedness,’” Murray writes, “As a challenger, Isaac Taylor, for one, would have proved a tough customer. In an excellent little book, Natural History of Enthusiasm, widely read in Melville's day, the Rev. [in fact, Taylor was not a clergyman] Mr. Taylor succeeded in accomplishing his announced intention [warning against enthusiasm]. In defending his hero against Taylor's piercing criticisms, Melville might have succeeded in forging the one positive conception that is lacking in this novel” (p. lxxvi). Knox devotes two sentences to Taylor's History (which he dates as 1823): “Isaac Taylor scored an instantaneous success with The Natural History of Enthusiasm; probably the most uniformly dull book ever written. You may read through 275 pages, in the inflated style of the period, without coming across one arresting sentiment, or one important consideration” (pp. 6-7). I do not concur.

36. New York Commerical Advertiser, August 11, 1852; rpt. in Critical Essays on Herman Melville's Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), p. 35.

37. Compare Locke: Enthusiasts' “minds being thus prepared, whatever groundless opinion comes to settle itself strongly upon their fancies, is an illumination from the spirit of God, and presently of divine authority; and whatsoever odd action they find in themselves a strong inclination to do, that impulse is concluded to be a call or direction from heaven” (Works, III, 150).

38. Pierre, p. 6. Pierre's religious training has been merely formal: “At the age of sixteen, Pierre partook with his mother of the Holy Sacraments” (p. 7); his father believed “no man could be a complete gentleman … unless he partook of the church's sacraments” (p. 98).

39. Taylor, p. 87. Locke, Works, III, 151 and 153, contains an interesting discussion of the enthusiast's circular logic.

40. See Tucker, pp. 145-148; Chambers, s. v. “Enthusiasm.”

41. See especially Saburo Yamaya, “The Stone Image of Melville's ‘Pierre,’” Selection, 34 (1957), 31-58; Franklin, pp. 101-103; and Edgar Dryden, Melville's Thematics of Form (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 118-127, passim.

42. The relationship between fictions, the fictionalizing imagination, and Melville's plot, style, and characterization in Pierre is explored by Dryden in Melville's Thematics of Form, pp. 132-138, and “The Entangled Text: Melville's Pierre and the Problem of Reading,” Boundary 2, 7 (1979), 145-173; and by Brook Thomas in “The Writer's Procreative Urge in Pierre: Fictional Freedom or Convoluted Incest?” Studies in the Novel, 11 (1979), 416-430. Richard Gray explores the work's anticipation of postmodernism in its skeptical examination of “its own claims and assumptions,” subversive techniques, and self-reflexive idiom in “‘All's o’er, and ye know him not’: A Reading of Pierre,” in Herman Melville: Reassessments, ed. A. Robert Lee (London and Totawa, N. J.: Vision and Barnes & Noble, 1984), p. 117. Richard Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), explains Melville's use of the form of the sentimental romance to call attention to itself as fiction and the artist's recognition that he is trapped in a fiction (pp. 163-193).

43. Pierre, p. 139. The word “enigma” or one of its variants occurs ten times in Pierre (Wegener) as compared to only two uses in Moby-Dick (Irey), both of the adjectival form “enigmatical”: Ishmael's recollection of the “enigmatical hintings” of Elijah (p. 190) and his pointing out a “strange, enigmatical object” (“the whale's penis,” Hayford and Parker's note explains) on the deck (p. 350).

44. Locke, as excerpted in Chambers' Cyclopaedia, states, “to enable [the prophet] to judge of his inspirations, whether they be of divine original or no … [God] either evidences that truth by the usual methods of natural reason, or else makes it known to be a truth which he would have us assent to by his authority; and convinces us, that it is from him, by some marks, which reason cannot be mistaken in.” Chambers omits Locke's emphasis on the need for “something extrinsical to the persuasions themselves” if we are to distinguish among “inspirations and delusions, truth and falsehood” (Works, III, 156-157).

45. Howard and Parker, in the “Historical Note” to the Northwestern-Newberry Pierre, quote from Bulwer-Lytton's explanation (in a later edition of Zanoni) that his novel is a “book of ‘mysteries,’” a “story in which ‘typical meanings’ were concealed, and … each ‘mystery’ or ‘enigma’ might lend itself to a variety of interpretations by different individuals” (p. 371). This language closely parallels Taylor's definition of the enigma.

46. “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern Univ. and Newberry Library, 1987), pp. 239, 244, 251.

47. Dillingham's positive reading of this passage—his insistence that it does not signify Melville's recognition of emptiness in the soul of man—is interesting but not, to my mind, convincing (pp. 168-169).

48. Although I find Brodhead's discussion perhaps the most illuminating of recent work of Pierre, my exploration of Pierre's enthusiasm leads to a very different conclusion from his statement that “The discovery of this discrepancy [between heavenly precepts and human behavior] allows an enthusiastic youth three choices” (p. 180). Taylor's naturalistic model suggests he has very little choice.