Sources and Symbols for Melville's Confidence-Man

Abstract

Melville criticism seems fated to a slow and uncertain growth. We have come a long way, to be sure, beyond the author who dismissed Melville as one among “several minor writers resident in the city or state of New York.” But one chief fault we seem not to have corrected: it is perhaps not over-rash to say that this criticism learns only reluctantly from what it has already accomplished. We know, for instance, that Melville's literary borrowings in such a work as Moby-Dick are worth close scrutiny; we also know that the allegory and the symbol lurk everywhere in Melville's pages. But our knowledge is not regularly put to use as a hypothetical principle for the examination of other works. Now I suggest that there is still a good bit to be done with these tools alone, and in this present paper I mean to try to do a part of it. I propose to identify and follow out certain of the sources and symbols which went into one of Melville's least-known works, The Confidence-Man.