10

I cannot leave The Confidence Man without a word about its incidental characteristics. One of the most important things about the story is that it is unfinished. Melville took leave of The Confidence Man before he had unmasked him: the meaning of the fable is left hanging in the air: the plot, which has neither up nor down, preparation nor climax, suddenly collapses—as if Melville were discouraged or a little bored by his own contrivances, or dismissed the story to his contemporaries with a gesture of contempt, hopeless that they would read it, or confident that, even if they did, they would not know the difference. The last words in the book are—“Something further may follow of this Masquerade”—as if he were waiting for some breath of popular response.

The fable of The Confidence Man is plain as far as it goes: there is nothing obscure or difficult in the symbolism; but it has the abrupt and scanty appearance of a Manx cat. In the individual sections, the writing is always competent; and sometimes far more than that: but the story moves as torpidly and sinuously as the muddy Mississippi itself, and there are repetitions of movement, as when the hypothetical Frank and Charlie go over the same ground as the original ones. Mr. Freeman’s notion that the story was written for the vain purpose of exposing the hypocrisy and assertiveness of passengers on a steamboat is a little beside the point, and his notion that the characters support Dickens’s worst charges in Martin Chuzzlewit is even more amusing; nor is Mr. Mather any more accurate when he speaks of The Confidence Man as “Middle Western character sketches.” One might meet queer, uncouth animals on a Mississippi steamer; doubtless one did; but the queerness Melville satirized he had met in the slums of Liverpool and the drawing-rooms of New York.

When one regards The Confidence Man in its true light, not as a novel, but as a companion volume to Gulliver’s Travels, its whole aspect changes: its turbid, tedious, meandering quality remains: but there are rapids of dangerous and exhilarating satire, as in the humane proposal, not yet wholly adopted, to organize the redemption of the world on strict Wall Street principles by farming out the charity and missionary work to the highest bidder, and forcing the inhabitants of Africa and Asia to pay for their own redemption and the relief of their own poverty. The Confidence Man may be considered as Melville’s own masquerade; his own bitter plea for support, money, confidence. Indeed, a Mississippi steamboat whose passengers quote Zimmermann, Hume, Francis Bacon, Rabelais, Jeremiah, Jeremy Taylor, Diogenes, and Timon could scarcely be anything but Melville’s own heavily laden soul, all its characters and incidents being part of that long soliloquy in which Melville struggled with a cankerous mood that threatened to remove, not merely the clothes, but the epidermis, no, the very bowels of his fellow creatures.

The passionate defiance was gone: a more savage, relentless humour took its place, a humour that stabbed and punctured with intent to kill. Melville’s aim remained good: there is more than one passage like this description of a miser: “A lean old man, whose flesh seemed salted codfish, dry as combustibles; a head like one whittled by an idiot out of a knot; a flat, boney mouth, nipped between buzzard nose and chin.... His eyes were closed, his cheek lay upon an old white moleskin coat, rolled under his head, like a wizened apple upon a grimy snowbank.”

A book with so much of Melville’s ingrained thought and cast of mind cannot be dismissed as a “posthumous book,” nor can it be set to one side because it lacks the human veracity of Life on the Mississippi. The book is without doubt below the level of the great eighteenth century satires; above all, it lacks the virtue of brevity; but as an indictment of humanity, The Confidence Man is far more deeply corrosive than anything in Bierce or Mark Twain. It is hard to refute Melville’s black words, difficult to find an antidote for this spiritual nightshade. Melville’s contemporaries did not try. They applied to the book the same medicine that worked so well in life: they agreed to forget it. Most of the sweetness and decorum of society rests on an agreement to forget. The sewer and the garbage pile and the slaughterhouse, the prison, the hospital, the slum, the asylum, the battlefield, live and flourish behind that agreement. Sometimes, though they are out of sight beyond the city’s limits, their odour is carried on the wind and mingles with the air of the drawing-room. The guests shift a little uneasily in their chairs. The hostess speaks in a loud intent voice: the guests respond with vivacious eagerness: the agreement must be maintained. How that dress shimmers in the soft light! What delicious perfume that bosom exhales! Is there any pleasant sound or sight that riches cannot purchase? The hostess looks uncomfortably at the window: the guests follow her eyes uneasily: the maid closes the window, and, with a touch of finality, draws the curtains again. A long breath of relief: the agreement triumphs: the licence to forget!

Melville could not forget, and yet he could go no further with these observations and memories. He recoiled from his experience into a mournful humility. After The Confidence Man, these terrible blacks softened into greys: the wound whitened into a scar: the eyes automatically shut when the scene they beheld became too painful. When one has found the worst that can be said against the world, one must still live in it, and eventually Melville resigned himself, and lived. The crack which began to open like the gaping earth in Moby-Dick, that widened with a shiver in Pierre, became a foaming abyss in The Confidence Man. As he was on the point of falling into that abyss, Herman Melville withdrew, and the wide fissure closed—or seemed to close.