Copyright, 1924, by Albert & Charles Boni Printed in the United States of America by きん 18-17-29 20254-2 INTRODUCTION Israel Potter is a romance of the American Revolu tion, compounded of adventures on land and sea, in war and peace: sea-adventures told with brilliant beauty, sufferings on the shores of Christendom piled up with vindictive bitterness. It is the story of a hero of Bunker Hill, whose strange chance it was to touch orbits with George III, Benjamin Franklin, Horne Tooke, Ethan Allen, and John Paul Jones, and then to drag out forty years of exile, obscurity and debasement. At the age of seventy-nine, Israel Potter, a decrepit beggar, embarked in the Thames for Boston. "It happened that the ship, gaining her port, was moored to the dock on a Fourth of July; and half an hour after landing, hustled by the riotous crowds near Faneuil Hall, the old man narrowly escaped being run over by a patriotic triumphal car in the procession, flying a broidered banner, inscribed with gilt letters: Bunker Hill-1775-Glory to the Heroes That Fought!" It is a book in which the beauty of splendid adventure ends in the closing chapters by wasting itself in an impotent rage at life's small ironies. "But" -the words are Melville's "like the battered brains surmounting the Giant of Gath, its haughty summit is crowned by a desolate castle, in and out of whose arches the aerial mists eddy like purposeless phantoms thronging the soul of some ruinous genius who, even in overthrow, harbors none but the loftiest conceptions." Israel Potter is Melville's own life, allegorized. Israel Potter was published in 1855. Four years earlier Melville had dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne. With the bitterest of ironies he dedicated this book "To His Highness the Bunker Hill Monument," with the intimation that he, like the anonymous privates of June 17, 1775, would be a fool to count on "other requital than the solid reward of its granite." Two years after Israel Potter, and thirty-four years before his death, Melville published his last novel. About half of this book closely follows "Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel Potter, (a Native of Cranston, Rhode-Island). Who Was a Soldier in the American Revolution. Providence: Printed by Henry Trumbull-1824. (Price 28 Cents)." This half of the book may indeed "be not unfitly regarded in the light of a dilapidated old tombstone retouched." The other, and more splendid half of the novel, is all Melville's own. It is only when Melville cuts himself clean from Israel Potter's autobiographical story, to indulge "some expansions, and additions of historic and personal details," that his genius swells to amplitude. And then he conjures with notable names. Concerning Franklin he apologizes for exhibiting "very little indeed of the sage's multifariousness." Though Melville repeatedly admires Franklin in parentheses, he presents him in every word and deed as merely "thrifty, do ་ mestic, dietarian, and, it may be, didactically waggish." The portrait is, in effect, a little disenchanting: that of a dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat, the automaton of a pattern American. Though he is praised in comment, Franklin is damned in presentation. Melville's soul was, indeed, a vast dark forest; and it could evoke little sympathy for Franklin's almanac morality, his neat kitchen-garden scheme of things. Melville's kinship was rather with tumultuous and uncharted souls, and upon Ethan Allen and John Paul Jones he lavished his best art. Allen he presents as scornful and ferocious to the last degree, yet possessed by "that wild heroic sort of levity, which in the hour of oppression or peril seems inseparable from a nature like his; the mood whereby such a temper best evinces its barbaric disdain of adversity, and how cheapfully and waggishly it holds the malice, even though triumphant, of its foes." "Though born in New England, he exhibited no trace of her character. He was frank, bluff, companionable as a Pagan, convivial, a Roman. hearty as a harvest. His spirit was essentially Western; and herein is his peculiar Americanism." Though Allen's is a racy and brilliant portrayal, the signal achievement + of Israel Potter are the chapters concerned with John Paul Jones. John Paul is presented as a young and gallant Captain Ahab, "combining in one breast the vengeful indignation and bitter ambition of an outraged hero with the uncompunctious desperation of a renegade. In one view, the Coriolanus of the sea; in another, a cross between the gentleman and the wolf." |