Herman Melville: Typee

0. PREFACE and INTRODUCTION TO THE EDITION OF 1892 (continued)

'Pierre; or, the Ambiguities' (1852) was published, and there ensued a long series of hostile criticisms, ending with a severe, though impartial, article by Fitz-James O'Brien in Putnam's Monthly. About the same time the whole stock of the author's books was destroyed by fire, keeping them out of print at a critical moment; and public interest, which until then had been on the increase, gradually began to diminish.

After this Mr. Melville contributed several short stories to Putnam's Monthly and Harper's Magazine. Those in the former periodical were collected in a volume as Piazza Tales (1856); and of these 'Benito Cereno' and 'The Bell Tower' are equal to his best previous efforts.

'Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile' (1855), first printed as a serial in Putnam's, is an historical romance of the American Revolution, based on the hero's own account of his adventures, as given in a little volume picked up by Mr. Melville at a book-stall. The story is well told, but the book is hardly worthy of the author of 'Typee.' 'The Confidence Man' (1857), his last serious effort in prose fiction, does not seem to require criticism.

Mr. Melville's pen had rested for nearly ten years, when it was again taken up to celebrate the events of the Civil War. 'Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War' appeared in 1866. Most of these poems originated, according to the author, in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond; but they have as subjects all the chief incidents of the struggle. The best of them are 'The Stone Fleet,' 'In the Prison Pen,' 'The College Colonel,' 'The March to the Sea,' 'Running the Batteries,' and 'Sheridan at Cedar Creek.' Some of these had a wide circulation in the press, and were preserved in various anthologies. 'Clarel, a Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land' (1876), is a long mystical poem requiring, as some one has said, a dictionary, a cyclopaedia, and a copy of the Bible for its elucidation. in the two privately printed volumes, the arrangement of which occupied Mr. Melville during his last illness, there are several fine lyrics. The titles of these books are, 'John Marr and Other Sailors' (1888), and 'Timoleon' (1891).