The Melville Revival
The Melville Revival
Raymond M. Weaver.
Herman Melville Mariner and Mystic.
New York: George H. Doran Company, 1921.
Weaver’s biography—the first book-length treatment of Melville’s life—marks the beginning of the twentieth century’s “Melville Revival.” His assessment was that Melville’s longevity had done deep harm to his reputation and obscured the “phenomenal brilliancy of his early literary accomplishment,” his last 40 years being “a long and dark eclipse.” Weaver dismissed the unpublished poems and prose as “not distinguished,” and his bibliography of the author’s works did not include a reference to Billy Budd or its concluding poem, “Billy in the Darbies.”
Michael Sadleir.
Excursions in Victorian Bibliography.
London: Chaundy & Cox, 1922.
Interest in Melville grew slowly but steadily from the 1880s into the early decades of the twentieth century. Carl van Doren’s praise in the Cambridge History of American Literature in 1917, and Weaver’s 1921 biography probably stimulated reprintings of key Melville works, notably Typee and Moby-Dick. In 1923, D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature elevated Melville further and the “Melville Revival” reverberated across the Atlantic.
English bookman Sadleir cites the “Melville boom” as his reason for including the American in his list of collectable first editions of Victorian novels. According to Sadleir, Melville had “been discovered by intellectuals, belauded, a little read, and once more forgotten” until revived by interest in The Whale.
Meade Minnigerode.
Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville and a Bibliography.
New York: The Brick Row Book Shop, 1922.
Meade Minnigerode, a London-born, Yale-educated, New York-based writer, introduced this bibliography appended to his edition of Melville letters with: “Many lives, many bibliographies, of Melville will be written ... this being but a small effort towards a wider acquaintance.” As with Weaver and Sadleir, however, Minnigerode’s important work perpetuated the view of a finished work in stating that “At the time of his death [Melville] had just completed another novel, Billy Budd, which remains unpublished ... in manuscript form.”
Herman Melville.
Volume 13 of The Works of Herman Melville Standard Edition. Edited by Raymond Weaver.
London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1924.
Edition of 750.
G. Thomas Tanselle maintains that, although Melville did not live to publish the novella, he meant to do so. Michael Sadleir, the bibliographer and force behind the 16-volume Constable edition—the first standardized version of Melville’s complete writings—engaged Raymond Weaver as editor for this, the first publication of Billy Budd, Foretopman. What Befell Him in the Year of the Great Mutiny, Etc.
Weaver declared the text “finished,” using a title Melville is now known to have discarded, and further stated: “The text ... has, so far as possible, been printed verbatim from Melville’s manuscript. Here and there, however, owing to the heavily corrected condition of the papers, slight adjustments in the interests of grammar or of style have been made.”
John Freeman.
Herman Melville.
London: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1926.
Issued as part of the revitalization of the English Men of Letters series, this is the first biography of Melville published in Britain. In his slender but thoughtful life of Melville, Freeman exalts Melville as “the most powerful of all the great American writers” and praises Billy Budd for its “effortless loftiness of imagination” and double interest in story and psychology.
Freeman follows Weaver’s thesis that Melville’s genius challenged the world, which had defeated him by ignoring the challenge. In the face of that defeat, Freeman claims, Melville managed to achieve an “inner peace.”
Herman Melville.
Shorter Novels of Herman Melville.
Introduction by Raymond Weaver.
New York: Horace Liveright, 1928.
By 1928, Weaver’s view of the merit of Billy Budd had evolved substantially and he praised the novella as Melville’s “last word upon the strange mystery of himself and of human destiny.” It is, for him, “brief and appealing, unmatched among Melville’s works in lucidity and inward peace.” Weaver contends that Melville “had come to the end of his long ordeal. The passionate urgencies within him had been tempered by years, and his worldly defeat had gone into recollections of things past.” In this, Weaver set down a touchstone to be extended or countered by critics and scholars in the following decades.
E. M. Forster.
Aspects of the Novel.
New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927.
Novelist E. M. Forster based this study of fiction on his 1927 Clark lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge. Following a discussion of Moby-Dick, Forster characterizes Billy Budd as a “remote unearthly episode, [in which Melville] after the initial roughness of his realism, reaches straight back into the universal, to a blackness and sadness so transcending our own that they are undistinguishable from glory.”
Forster devotes almost as much space to Billy Budd as to Moby-Dick and refers to the novella as “a song not without words,” a foreshadowing of his later collaboration with Eric Crozier on the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd opera.