Hawthorne and His Mosses

by Herman Melville

"[...]for love and duty seem both impelling to the task. A man of a deep and noble nature has seized me in this seclusion. His wild, witch voice rings through me; or, in softer cadences, I seem to hear it in the songs of the hill-side birds, that sing in the larch trees at my window.
Would that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother, that so it might be, we could glorify them, without including their ostensible authors. Nor would any true man take exception to this;—least of all, he who writes,—"When the Artist rises high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he makes it perceptible to mortal senses becomes of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possesses itself in the enjoyment of the reality."
But more than this, I know not what would be the right name to put on the title-page of an excellent book, but this I feel, that the names of all fine authors are fictitious ones, far more than that of Junius,—simply standing, as they do, for the mystical, ever-eluding Spirit of all Beauty, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius. Purely imaginative as this fancy may appear, it nevertheless seems to receive some warranty from the[...]".

Genres: Literary Criticism, American

18 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1850

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship and then on the whaler Acushnet, but he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. Typee, his first book, and its sequel, Omoo (1847), were travel-adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the islands. Their success gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Boston jurist Lemuel Shaw. Mardi (1849), a romance-adventure and his first book not based on his own experience, was not well received. Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both tales based on his experience as a well-born young man at sea, were given respectable reviews, but did not sell well enough to support his expanding family.
Melville's growing literary ambition showed in Moby-Dick (1851), which took nearly a year and a half to write, but it did not find an audience, and critics scorned his psychological novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener". In 1857, he traveled to England, toured the Near East, and published his last work of prose, The Confidence-Man (1857). He moved to New York in 1863, eventually taking a position as a United States customs inspector.
From that point, Melville focused his creative powers on poetry. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War. In 1867, his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. Melville's metaphysical epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in 1876. In 1886, his other son Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired. During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished. The novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at his death, but was published posthumously in 1924. Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891.

Reviews

[John Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5* (docked half a star for all the florid prose)!

A must read for me as a Hawthorne groupie.

This is a review by Melville of Hawthorne’s collection of short stories, “Mosses From An Old Manse”. It’s something of a love-in, to put it mildly. But then, Melville may have been in love with him? He was one of Hawthorne’s greatest admirers, dedicating his magnum opus, Moby Dick, to him.

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh my, what can I say?! This is a beautiful review of Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse (which I haven't even read yet), written with powerful insight and a good deal of humor as well. I just want everyone to read this and to love Hawthorne as much as I do! :)

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. And if it be said, that continual success is a proof that a man wisely knows his powers,—it is only to be added, that, in that case, he knows them to be small.
- Herman Melville, Hawthorne and His Mosses

I was going to say they don't write book reviews like this any more, but on second thought, I'm not sure anyone ever wrote a review like this apart from Melville himself. It is so many things at once: an erotic love letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne; a proto-modernist literary manifesto; a nationalistic call to cultural arms; a pre-emptive apologia for Moby-Dick or, the Whale; a book review; and a masturbatory fantasy about his own genius being recognised by proxy through the valorising of his crush.

Put simply, Melville was a very eloquent fanboy. If he weren't such a fine and funny writer, this document would probably be quite embarrassing to read, but its excessiveness (as with all of Melville's manic prose, come to think of it) is what makes it so charming. It helps that Melville was a genius too. There's something really quite inspiring in watching someone much cleverer than you squeal with delight over their new favourite thing, losing all their inhibitions in the process so that you can glimpse, in the torrent of outpouring thoughts, the immensity of the cavernous mind from which they surge. "I am Posterity speaking by proxy," he declares. "Give not over to future generations the glad duty of acknowledging him for what he is."

I'm not sure an author could ask for a more awesome wingman.

This isn't just about Hawthorne though. Melville is very explicit about that. Just before writing this, he had met Hawthorne on a picnic, and they spent two hours together waiting for a rainstorm to pass, chatting about the mysteries of the universe. The two were so impressed with one another that Melville, remembering he had an unread copy of Mosses from an Old Manse lying around, was easily encouraged by another of Hawthorne's friends to write a review.

So Melville returned home, sat down, and began to read.

It must be remembered that Melville was hard at work on Moby Dick at this point, perhaps the most daring and original experiment in literature since Don Quixote, (or Sartor Resartus if you're feeling very generous). This was a book destined to fail with both the public and with critics. It was a book doomed to be appreciated only by posterity. Melville, being the man he was, probably saw this coming, and was therefore overjoyed to discover in Hawthorne's work a similar mind to his own.

Well, 'overjoyed' really isn't a strong enough word for it. Melville was very clearly in love with Hawthorne on a deep, romantic level, sure, but this was also the first time he had ever encountered a person who could really match his talents, interests, and sheer intensity of will. Hawthorne was, for Melville, a kind of double of himself, a model of the kind of writer he wanted to be, and thus many of the compliments that Melville makes about Hawthorne have less to do with the actual guy than with the titanic, idealised hero-figure that Melville envisaged and wished to imitate. There's probably a joke here one can make about Hawthorne being Melville's white whale, but I'm not Harold Bloom, so that Oedipal snideness is beneath me.

The point is that Melville was doing something dangerous with Moby Dick. Every chapter was a fresh gamble, daring his craft far beyond the limits of his (very considerable) abilities. That's part of what makes Moby Dick special. It's an unwieldy mess, rocking about unsteadily under the gale force of its own wildness with a hull half-smashed to splinters by its own grapeshot. Half the things it tries just don't work, but it piles on so many experiments, so many new ideas, and tries its hand at commenting on everything from semiotics to existentialism to white supremacy and capitalism long before any of those things had even been named, that of course it ended up being one of the greatest books ever written. I once tried to explain its appeal to a close friend by saying that, "It's a book about literally everything at once."

"What about Feminism?" she asked.

"Ah," I had to concede. "That might be the one thing it isn't about..."

Like I said, destined to failure, but damn if it isn't beautiful for that fact.

Nevertheless, can you imagine what it must have been like to try and write a book like that? Can you imagine how scary it would feel, knowing that you need to put food on your family's plate and that this crazy, experimental mess probably isn't going to do it? Can you imagine the doubt, the clawing in your stomach at night wondering whether you should just try making something safe and sane and normal, but knowing that you can't, because there's a white whale in your mind and you just have have HAVE to see it through to the end?

This is why Melville felt such relief on discovering that, "on the hither side of Hawthorne's soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in a blackness, ten times black." Beneath his superficial charm, Hawthorne has a darkness in him, a kinship with the bleaker parts of life that Melville's melancholy nature is sensitive enough to pick up on. This quality, to Melville, is what elevates Hawthorne to the heights of genius, and in his rapidly scribbled fawning he is compelled to compare the man to Shakespeare.

This is, uhh, awkward. Shakespeare today is seen as an untouchable demigod, to put it lightly, but early American audiences quite possibly adored the man and his works even more fervently. The language barrier wasn't quite such a problem back then, meaning that his works were popular as mass entertainment in a way that isn't really possible today. Comparing Hawthorne to Shakespeare could, at first glance, seem like Melville trying to bait his audience, but it segues into a deeper point about literary nationalism.

Full disclosure, literary nationalism disgusts me. To me, art is about breaching barriers, be them moral, cultural, or personal, in pursuit of truth. I see little of value in erecting national boundaries to defend with pointy sticks and strict curriculums. Language barriers are real, I grant that, but this is a barrier we trust translators to try and breach for us. Culture is a global endeavour. Much as many of us might hate that fact, we're all stuck on this planet together. Might as well get to know each other.

This is not a lesson that is necessarily taken to heart by mainstream American culture. Whilst everyone else on the planet from Shanghai to Havana is inundated with American media, American music, and American movies at every turn (indeed, I once walked by a toyshop in Tehran displaying Captain America figurines in its window), both England and America do a terrible job at importing translations from abroad. We all know the statistics about how few Americans have passports, but the numbers for translations purchased per nation are pretty shocking too. To put this in more human terms, consider memoirs like Between the World and Me, which eloquently diagnoses the toxic effect that an insular, hegemonic subscription to American culture can inflict on its citizens, who are left unaware of the possibilities represented by other worlds. Consider, too, the anger in certain circles when the Korean film, Parasite, won the Oscar for Best Picture, rather than for Best Foreign Film (a categorisation that explicitly defines English-language culture as innately superior to the quaint cultural products of other peoples).

In this light, it feels a little grating to hear Melville complain that Americans are trying too hard to imitate English literature, since:

While we are rapidly preparing for that political supremacy among the nations, which prophetically awaits us at the close of the present century; in a literary point of view, we are deplorably unprepared for it

I mean... yeah. Kudos, Melville. You saw that supremacy coming. I just don't think you realised how ugly it was going to be.

Nevertheless, the context was different for him. He lived at a time where Americans were genuinely unsure about their own cultural image, with the predominant attitude being that writers should look to England for inspiration, in much the same way the Medieval England idolised French culture, or the Japanese imitated Ancient Chinese culture. Against this came a new wave of writers, referred to as the American Renaissance, that included people like Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and, of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who sought to establish a new kind of national American literature. Their argument was essentially that, being a new country, the challenges they faced and and the culture they would develop would be very different from that of their ancestors. It didn't make sense to try and import Jacobean drama to modern American storytelling, because Jacobean drama evolved from a very particular cultural context. With a new country, there was a chance to wipe the slate clean and try and invent new kinds of literature that better reflected the lives Americans were living and the unique 'spirit' of their people. And of course, if America really was a great experiment in democracy, then it stood to reason that the art they produced should be experimental too.

Nauseous as some of those sentences make me, there is an element of truth to them. After all, Edgar Allan Poe practically invented the modern short story, the detective story, the horror story, and being a moody goth all by himself. Perhaps some of that was down to him just being a really weird guy; perhaps some of it was down to early American culture giving him a chance to express himself in ways no mortal ever dared express themselves before. Who knows?

Melville's contribution to this rollicking debate was to declare that Hawthorne might just be America's Shakespeare, a founding genius who would inspire generations of writers to come with a new and distinctly American style. The problem was, (as Melville rather ludicrously claims, and at the end of his essay admits is kinda bogus), nobody seemed to want to read him. There was too much cultural insecurity going around. Previous writers like Washington Irving had, in Melville's opinion, only been popular at home because they tried too hard to sound like British writers. But Britain was a tyrannical monarchical state, full of pomp, secret police, and toxic imperial dogma. What could British art offer the new world? What did British art know of bravery, whose citizens chased even Byron from their shores? America did not need more of that. It needed something new, even if those new experiments were doomed to fail, because at least failure meant you'd tried.

This bravado is obviously Melville projecting his own anxieties about Moby Dick onto the nation as a whole, but this chauvinism is still ugly:

Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her own children, before she praises (for everywhere, merit demands acknowledgment from every one) the best excellence in the children of any other land. Let her own authors, I say, have the priority of appreciation. I was very much pleased with a hot-headed Carolina cousin of mine, who once said,—"If there were no other American to stand by, in Literature,—why, then, I would stand by Pop Emmons and his 'Fredoniad,' and till a better epic came along, swear it was not very far behind the 'Iliad'." Take away the words, and in spirit he was sound.

Take away the words? It speaks volumes of Melville's transcendental leanings that he can appeal to such a technique, though such a search for the absolute is already present in how he describes his intuition of Hawthorne's genius on a level beyond communication.

That said, even chauvinism can be charming when Melville is the one writing it. See the following passage where he envisages international culture as a kind of gentleman's bar-room brawl:

Let us boldly contemn all imitation, though it comes to us graceful and fragrant as the morning; and foster all originality, though, at first, it be crabbed and ugly as our own pine knots. And if any of our authors fail, or seem to fail, then, in the words of my enthusiastic Carolina cousin, let us clap him on the shoulder, and back him against all Europe for his second round.

So I guess that balances out...

Overall this is an essay as bizarre as it is brilliant. Melville even has a break-away segment two thirds of the way through where he claims to have walked away from the text for 24 hours to finish reading Hawthorne's book! Now, maybe this is just an act of literary prankishness, similar to Poe's extended trolling in The Philosophy of Composition, but I'm inclined to take Melville at his word. He wrote the vast majority of this review not as an exercise in planned argument but in a rapid gush of excitement. His essay is so revealing about his anxieties over Moby Dick because it is so spontaneous. The few stories he read matched so perfectly with his troubles that he wrote into Hawthorne's character an idealised version of the writer he wished to become and the reputation he (rightly) thought they both deserved.

Melville admits that it was perhaps "foolish" of him to do this, but assures us that he had felt "sufficiently sensible of the subtle essence" in what he read to have got the gist of Hawthorne's genius. As if in further apology to the man for being premature in his praise, he makes the following profession in a characteristically Melvillian expression of alluring homoeroticism:

already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.

I blush. I smile. Dear god, this man is so adorable!

Of course, this leaves the question of what Hawthorne thought of Melville. After all, I don't think there's any reader today who would choose to read the former over the latter if given the choice - New England angst over Puritanical Calvinism not having the same immediate interest to us as it it might have done to his contemporaries. Fortunately, I can give you that too. I've not read much Hawthorne, so I'll take Melville at his word regarding the man's intelligence, and share what his mind once made of that dark and marvellous madman I cannot help loving, after their final (and presumably one-sidedly romantic) walk together:

Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do (a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder), in a rough outside coat, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner.... [W]e soon found ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and confidence. Melville has not been well, of late; ... and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success, latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind....

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists – and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before – in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his disbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.

If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, Journal: November 20, 1856

I guess Hawthorne must have been a genius after all.

[Mack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Melville critiques Hawthorne, and along the way, Melville mentions Shakespeare, Spenser, and American literature.

[Mait Harkey · Rating 4 out of 5]

2 May 2025

4 stars

What is the importance of American Literature? Will it ever rival the European Canon? And who in Melville's time is the Shakespeare of the American Canon?

(Answers: becoming greater every day, how could it not, Nathaniel Hawthorne)

***

"For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and in other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, -- even though it be covertly, and by snatches."

"Shakespeare has been approached. There are minds that have gone as far as Shakespeare into the Universe, and hardly a mortal man who at some time or other has not felt as great thoughts in him as any you will find in Hamlet."

"Great geniuses are parts of the times; they themselves are the time; and possess an correspondent coloring."

"Let him write like a man, for then he will be sure to write like an American."

[George Dibble · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

"It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Failure is the true test of greatness."

One of the better essays on writing: on writing with originality and what it means to be an American, an American writer, and an American writer. The latter half of this essay was perfect and I flew through it. It gave me a lot of energy and courage to write. Gave me ideas for pieces I'm working on.

Was recommended this essay by Dr. Mikayla Steiner. Said this was one of the better affirmative essays.

[Dustin Bagby · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dude loves himself some Hawthorne.

[Carlos Hugo Winckler Godinho · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nunca vi tanta babação de ovo por uma pessoa. Confesso que em algumas cartas fiz uma "leitura dinâmica". O intuito de eu ler esse livro era ver como o Melville escreve, e nesse ponto o autor me agradou. Espero ler Moby Dick tão logo eu possa, e também acrescentei a vontade de ler um livro do Hawthorne.

[Don Packett · Rating 1 out of 5]

Herman Melville had one big author-chubby for Nathaniel Hawthorne.

While I think the line "I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul." is extremely poetic and beautiful, I also think he could've just given Hawthorne's books a 5-star rating on Goodreads and gotten on with his life.

[EvaLovesYA · Rating 2 out of 5]

En rigtig god kilde med dybdegående stof og en grundig gennemgang.
- Brugt på universitetet (litteraturvidenskab) til en opgave om Melvilles forfatterskab.