Modern Language Quarterly

BARTLEBY THE TRANSCENDENTALIST

MELVILLE’S DEAD LETTER TO EMERSON
By CHRISTOPHER
W. STEN

In his essay “ T h e Transcendentalist” (1843), Emerson remarked that

he expected there would be “ridiculous stories” to be told about the
American idealists of his day, but he neglected to say whether he
thought any such stories would make their way into print.’ Nonetheless,
had his dislike for narrative fiction not prevented him from doing so, he
later would have recognized in “Bartleby the Scrivener,” first published
in Putnam’s Monthly in 1853, not only a story of the Transcendentalist,
but one which appears to be formulated on the basis of Emerson’s essay
and to voice what Emerson himself prophetically called “a great deal of
well-founded objection” to, in addition to some sympathy for, “the say-
ings and doings of this class” as spelled out by Emerson himself (pp.
355-56). Melville earlier had shown a decided inclination to spin tales
which condemned American idealists, many times in fact, in Mardi
(1849), in Moby-Dick (1851), and most recently and conspicuously in
Pierre (1852); and he had continued to d o so later in T h e Conjdence-
Man (1857), where it is generally assumed that Emerson is carica-
tured as the icy mystic, Mark Winsome.2 But the extent of Melville’s
acquaintance with the Transcendentalist theories of Emerson prior to

* “ T h e Transcendentalist,” in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, in The Complete Works of

Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, I (Boston, 1903). 356. Page references are
to this, the so-called Centenary Edition, antl appear in the text.
* Hershel Parker, “Melville’s Satire of Emerson and Thoreau: An Evaluation of the Evi-
dence,” ATQ, No. 7 (Summer 1970), pp. 61-67. points out that “the first to attempt a scholarly
identification” was Egbert S. Oliver, in “Melville’s Picture of Emerson antl Thoreau in T h e
ConJidence-Man,” CE, 8 (1946) 61-72, but argues that a more conclusive case is made by Eliza-
beth S. Foster in her introduction to T h e Conjdence-Man (New York, 1954), pp. lxxiii-lxxxii.
For a fuller study of Melville’s anti-idealism, see Milton R. Stern, T h e Fine Hammered Steel
ofHerman Melville (Urbana, 1957).
30

Published by Duke University Press

 Modern Language Quarterly

CHRISTOPHER W. S T E N 31

his 1862 purchase and subsequent annotation of Essays, First Series and
Essays, Second Series has remained open to question, in part because
non-Emersonian forms of philosophical idealism were in the air during
the late forties and early fifties, when Melville read so voluminously,
and in part because the record of his familiarity with Emerson’s writ-
ings and lectures during this period is so Thus, in so far as i t can
be established here that Melville relied upon “ T h e Transcendentalist”
for his “Bartleby,” we can fix a date earlier than 1862 for his working
knowledge of certain features of Emerson’s Transcendentalism; we can
understand his response to Emerson’s thinking in a way never before
recognized; and, most importantly, we can make some sense of Mel-
ville’s most enigmatic character and most haunting piece of fiction.
According to his own account, Melville had “only glanced at a book”
of Emerson’s “once in Putnam’s store-that was all I knew of him, till 1
heard him lecture” in Boston during the winter of 1848-49.4 This
“book,’’ however, probably did not contain “ T h e Transcendentalist,”
which appeared in collection in America for the first time in September
1849, in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (Boston: Munroe; rpt. Boston:
Phillips, ISSO), at least seven months later-unless Melville saw one of
the pirated London collections, Nuture; an Essay. And Lectures on the
Times or Orations, Lectures, and Addresses (both published by Clarke
in 1844), or unless he used the term book to refer to the essay itself,
originally printed in T h e Dial (January 1843).5
One source of speculation on the question of Melville’s knowledge of
Emerson’s essay is provided by the testimony of Sophia Hawthorne,
inexact though it is, that “one morning” in the late summer or early fall
of 1850, during the period of Melville’s visits to the Hawthorne home
in Lenox, Massachusetts, “he shut himself into the boudoir &
read Mr Emerson’s Essays. . . .”6 I t cannot be determined whether
these “Essays” included “The Transcendentalist,” but it is known that
3There is no record that Melville owned any of Emerson’s prose works until 1862. See
Merton M. Sealts, Jr.,Melville’s Reading: A Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed (Madi-
son, 1966), p. 59.
Melville to Evert A . Duyckinck, 3 March 1849; recorded in Eleanor Melville Metcalf.
Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 58. Jay Leyda, T h e Mel-
ville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891 (1951; rpt. with a new supple-
ment, New York, 1969). I , 287, speculates that Melville heard Emerson speak on “Mind &
Manners in the Nineteenth Century” on 5 February.
5 See George Willis Cooke, A Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1908), pp. 56,.
97. 99-100; for corrections and additional information, see Jacob Blanck, Bibliography of
American Literature, 111 (New Haven, 1959), 20-21 and 25. Melville visited London late in
1849; see n. 8.
“Sophia Hawthorne to her sister Elizabeth, Oct?” (Leyda, 11, 924-25). Melville probably
read these “Essays” on 5 or 6 September.

Published by Duke University Press

 Modern Language Quarterly

32 MELV I L LE’S “BA KTLE B Y ”

Emerson ,had sent Hawthorne a presentation copy of Nature, Addresses,

and Lectures in September of the previous year.7 Furthermore, it seems
more likely that Melville’s attention would have been drawn to a recent
publication than to an older one; and this was, if we can depend upon
Emerson’s journals, the most recent collection he had presented to
Hawthorne. What is equally probable, Melville simply may have bor-
rowed a copy of this collection (perhaps from the well-stocked shelves of
his friend Evert Duyckinck, at least prior to their four-year estrange-
ment beginning in February 1852) in the years between his attendance
at Emerson’s lecture and his composition of “Bartleby.”8 H e as often
borrowed other works as he borrowed from them in the writing of his
own.
There is, then, apparently no way at hand to prove incontrovertibly
that Melville had even read “ T h e Transcendentalist” before writing
this story, but a comparative examination of the two suggests that he
had and that he had read it with care, using Emerson’s idealist for his
portrayal of the incommunicative Bartleby and Emerson’s materialist
(also depicted in that essay) for his portrayal of the Wall Street lawyer.
T h e parallels are remarkable both in broad outline and frequently in
detail; even the language is often similar, as evidenced here et passim.
“Unless the action is necessary, unless it is adequate, I d o not wish to
perform it. I d o not wish to do one thing but once. I d o not love rou-
tine. Once possessed of the principle, it is equally easy to make four or
forty thousand applications of it” (p. 350; my italics). T h i s is Emerson
speaking on behalf of the radical Transcendentalist (and it must be
emphasized at the outset that there is some distance, at times a great
deal, between Emerson himself and the young Transcendentalist he
describes). “I would prefer not to” is apparently Melville’s rendering of
the idealist’s refusal to act in complicity with the monotonous and spir-

’I See Journals uf Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1876, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson antl
Waldo Emerson Forbes, V I I I (Boston, 1912),48.
Nature, Addresses, and Lectures was reviewed on 3 November 1849 in T h e Literary World
(pp. 374-76), which Duyckinck coedited with his brother George L. According to Sealts, “Mel-
ville . . . was probably a regular subscriber-at least d u r i n g the period of Evert Duyckinck’s
editorship [October 1848-December 1853]-until he canceled his subscription in a letter of
14 Feb 1852” (Melville’s Reading, p. 75). Melville lived in New York, where Duyckinck re-
sided. a t the time Emerson’s collection was published, but he had already departed for
London ( I I October 1849) when it was reviewed in The Literary W o r l d . Extracts froin Red-
burn appeared in the 10 November 1849 issue of this journal, antl it was reviewed there one
week later, so Melville had reason to peruse its back issues. Following his return to New Yolk
( I February 1850) and his move to Pittsfield in the early fall of 1850, he visited New York on a t
least two occasions in 1851-52 (and Duyckinck visited him in Pittsfield twice in 1850-51) before
he terminated his subscription and broke off his friendship with Duyckinck. See Leyda, I , 318
et passim.

Published by Duke University Press

 Modern Language Quarterly

C H K I S T O P H E K W. S T E N 33

itually bankrupt world of the materialist. Possessed of the principle of

copying legal documents, Bartleby does not wish to continue to per-
form the routine work demanded of him by his employer. I t is, in the
lawyer’s words, “a very dull, wearisome, and 1e.thargic affair.”g I t is not
necessary, nor is it adequate to fill the void of Bartleby’s divine poten-
tial. Spiritual ripeness is all, the scrivener thinks, and so he materially
wastes away.
“Bartleby” is more than an implicit critique of the Transcendentalism
described by Emerson, however. I t is of course a critique of the ma-
terialism of the age, too, as indicated by the self-protectiveness of the
Wall Street setting and of those who literally spend their lives there.
But the suggestion of Melville’s reliance upon Emerson’s essay also
helps us more fully to understand this story as Melville’s comment on
the essential dualism of “Want and Have,” to use Emerson’s famous
phrase, and hence as another of his visions of the essential tragedy of the
human condition, the very dualism and tragedy which Emerson himself
tried to overcome with his peculiar brand of idealism and his theory of
“correspondence,” but an idealism and a theory which Melville found
to be na’ive and fallacious because ultimately life-denying. For Melville,
as demonstrated by the fate of the scrivener, death provides the only
escape from this dualism and tragedy. T h e “correspondence” between
the ideal and the material worlds is at best only an occasional phenom-
enon and so cannot be trusted as an absolute principle. Like the “corre-
spondence” which Bartleby puts to the flames in Washington, this kind,
too, often ends u p in the Dead Letter Office. Nothing is certain;
nothing is stable. I t is forever true that in the affairs of this world there
will be “a change in the administration,” such as the literal, politically
inspired ones responsible for the lawyer’s dismissal from his job in New
York and for Bartleby’s reported dismissal from his in Washington (p.
54).

“As thinkers,” Emerson said in “ T h e Transcendentalist,” and it is a

statement which invites us to view “Bartleby” as a comment upon not
only the idealism of the Transcendentalist but the whole Western phil-
osophical tradition,

“Bartleby.” in P i n m Tales, ecl. Egbert S. Oliver (New York. 1948), p. 24. References are to
this edition and appear in the text. Although n o reader has previously argued that Uartleby
and the lawyer were patterned after the Transcendentalist and the niaterialist in Emerson’s
essay, Oliver has suggested that ‘rhoreau was Melville’s model for the scrivener (“A Second
Look a t ‘Bartleby,’ CE, 6 [ 19451, 431-39). See also Parker, who finds Oliver’s demonstration
”

11 n convi nci ng.

Published by Duke University Press

 Modern Language Quarterly

54 h4ELVI LLE’S “UAKTLEBY”

mankind have ever divided into two sect.s, Materialists and Ideal-
ists; the first class founding on experience, the second on conscious-
ness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses,
the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, T h e
senses give us representations of things, but what are the things
themselves, they cannot tell. T h e materialist insists on facts, on his-
tory, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the
idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on inspiration, on
miracle, on individual culture. (pp. 329-30)’O

I t is significant that Melville’s lawyer-narrator, briefly postponing his

tale of Bartleby, begins by telling his own story and by depicting him-
self, though unwittingly, as a materialist, a man who defines life in
terms of “experience” and thinks from “the data of the senses,” for his
own life on Wall Street, unlike the scrivener’s, at least offers some solid
materials on which he can initiate his narrative. Emerson’s formula for
the materialist, like his formula for the Transcendentalist, is followed
to a fault by the lawyer and his scrivener respectively, thus providing
the central clue to the tragic failure of each man’s life and to the failure
of their relationship.
T h e nature of the lawyer’s avocations, he tells us, at the same time
implying his regard for sense “experience” as the sine qua non of life,
had brought him into “more than ordinary contact with what would
seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men.” I n fact, the
story of Bartleby is simply the record of his own experience of Bartleby,
for he is painfully aware that that is virtually all he can know about
him. H e could relate “divers histories” of other scriveners but laments
his inability to supply anything more than “a few passages in the life of
Bartleby, who was a scrivener, the strangest I ever saw, or heard of,”
thereby revealing the materialist’s reliance upon both “history” and
“the senses” (sight and sound) for his understanding of other men. “I
believe that no materials exist, for a full and satisfactory biography of
this man,” he says, insisting upon a “material” definition of identity.
“What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby,” he concludes, sug-
gesting once again his dependence upon the senses rather than intui-

l o In his portrayals o f the lawyer antl the scrivener, Melville might have been influenced t o o
by.Emerson’s “ T h e Conservative,” which was also published in The Dial (October 1842) and
in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures. T h e Conservative and the Reformer o f this essay are phil-
osoph icall y in agreement wit ti Emerson’s materialist antl Transcendental is t respectively (see
Complete Works, I , 295-326).I a m indebted to Wallace E. Williams, of Indiana University, for
suggesting this possibly atltlitional soiirce to me.

Published by Duke University Press

 Modern Language Quarterly

CHRISTOPHER W. STEN 35

tion as his means of coming to grips with this mysterious figure, “that is
all I know of him, except, indeed, one vague report . . .” (p. 16).
Implicitly characterizing himself as a materialist still further, the
lawyer states that it was John Jacob Astor’s opinion that “my first grand
point [is] prudence; my next, method,” and he adds, ‘‘I do not speak it
in vanity, but simply record the fact, that I was not unemployed in my
profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love
to repeat; for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like
unto bullion” (p. 17). In addition to the lawyer’s self-interestedness
and the dependence of his imagination upon money even for metaphor,
what is revealed here is his adulation of Astor’s wealth and power, what
Emerson called the materialist’s predilection for “the animal wants of
man”-professional success, financial security, material ease. This pre-
dilection is further evidenced by the lawyer’s well-known admissions
that “from his youth upwards” he has been “filled with a profound con-
viction that the easiest way of life is the best” and that, as a result,
others consider him “an eminently safe man.” Finally, among the fea-
tures noted above in Emerson’s definition of the materialist, it was the
“force of circumstances”-in this case, the new Constitution-which
was responsible for “the sudden and violent abrogation of the office of
Master in Chancery” and the lawyer’s consequent rashness and “dan-
gerous indignation” at his loss of “a life-lease of the profits” from this
position (pp. 16-17). Unlike the Transcendentalist who says, “I make
my circumstance,” the materialist lawyer is, to use Emerson’s word, the
“child” of his circumstances, for he lacks the Emersonian principle of
self-reliance (p. 334).
T h e lawyer’s metaphysics are those of the materialist in another fea-
ture, too. “In the order of thought,” according to Emerson, “the materi-
alist takes his departure from the external world, and esteems a man as
one product of that” (p. 332). T h e lawyer himself is clearly a “product”
of Wall Street society in that he depends upon that society to define his
professional position and his social status-in fact, he appears to have
no identity (and no life) away from his office. Hence quite naturally he
also expects the scrivener to conform to the role prescribed for him by
this same society. Considerably perplexed by Bartleby’s eccentricity and
perversity-by his failure to act like an automaton-the lawyer admits
that it was “exceeding difficult to bear in mind all the time those
strange peculiarities, privileges, and unheard of exemptions, forming
the tacit stipulations on Bartleby’s part under which he remained in my
office” (p. 31). T h e lawyer is like the materialist “grave seniors” de-

Published by Duke University Press

 Modern Language Quarterly

36 M E LV 1 L LE ’S ‘ I B A K T LE B Y ”

scribed by Emerson; they insist that others show respect to “this institu-
tion and that usage; to an obsolete history; to some vocation, or college,
or etiquette, or beneficiary, or charity, or morning or evening call . . .
these old guardians never change their minds; they have but one mood
on the subject, namely, that Antony is very perverse . . .” (p. 356).
Thus, too, in terms that are consistent with Emerson’s materialist and
idealist, we find in “Bartleby” a confrontation between the guardian of
institutional, economic America and the “perverse” agent of disruptive
spiritual value.
I t is more difficult to detail the similarities between Melville’s por-
trayal of Bartleby and Emerson’s portrayal of the idealist because Bar-
tleby, virtually speechless and impassive, gives us little from which to
intuit his philosophical position. Yet it is precisely in this trait that he
follows the Transcendentalist program most perfectly. “If you do not
need to hear my thought,” Emerson says, speaking for the radical Tran-
scendentalist, “because you can read it in my face and behavior, then I
will tell i t you from sunrise to sunset. If you cannot divine it, you would
not understand what I say. I will not molest myself for you” (p. 344).
Bartleby suggests a similar line of reasoning throughout the narrative
but especially at the point when, following his refusal first to verify
copies and then even to copy any more documents, he finally loses pa-
tience with the lawyer’s insistent demands for an explanation (he is
unusually garrulous here): ‘Do you not see the reason for yourself,’ he
“

indifferently replied”-a statement, not a question, which elicits no

’
response from his dumbfounded employer (p. 38).
Bartleby is not totally impassive, however. H e does act and speak, if
only to reject and deny; and in this, too, he resembles the Transcenden-
talists, who, according to Emerson, “complain that everything around
them must be denied” and whose “strength and spirits,” consequently,
“are wasted in rejection” (pp. 356-57). Emerson’s essay is further in-
structive here because it informs quite specifically the pattern of the
scrivener’s rejections. Emerson says that the Transcendentalist “does
not respect labor, or the products of labor, namely property, otherwise
than as a manifold symbol,” and he does not respect these things be-
cause he “reckons the world an appearance” (p. 333). “His thought,-
that is the Universe” (p. 334). T h e Transcendentalist does not need the
material world, he thinks; rather, the world needs him. Without his
Transcendentalist ego, the material world does not exist; like God, he
calls it into being. Although we cannot know whether Bartleby’s logic
is precisely the same, his eventual refusal to copy anything niakes it evi-

Published by Duke University Press

 Modern Language Quarterly

C H R I S T O P H E R W. S T E N 37

dent that he, like the Transcendentalist, does not “respect labor.’’ Nor
does he respect “the products of labor,” for he declines the wages due to
him. Furthermore, Bartleby’s failure to respect the lawyer’s title to the
law office (cf. Emerson’s “property”) when he takes it for his own home
is cause for considerable indignation on the part of his employer, sug-
gesting still another case of their conflicting philosophies-Transcen-
dentalist and materialist: “What earthly right have you to stay here?”
the lawyer asks. “Do you pay any rent? Do you pay my taxes? O r is this
property yours?” (p. 42).
Melville seems to have relied upon Emerson’s essay for yet other ex-
amples in the litany of Bartleby’s rejections. In particular, the Tran-
scendentalist chooses to respect neither “the church, nor charities, nor
arts, for themselves,” according to Emerson (p. 333). I t is on a Sunday
morning while on his way to Trinity Church that the lawyer discovers
Bartleby inhabiting his office, and so, although he is sure his employee
would not “by any secular occupation violate the proprieties of the
day,” the implication is clear that, like the Transcendentalist, Bartleby
is something of a heretic, whereas the materialist lawyer is a church-
goer, though only a casual one at best, for he was going to Trinity
Church “to hear a celebrated preacher” (pp. 3 1-32). Moreover, Bartleby
rejects the “charities” of the lawyer’s twenty-dollar gratuity and his offer
to help the scrivener settle comfortably elsewhere. His refusal even to
acknowledge his employer’s kindnesses is only one of many unex-
plained discourtesies; but once again Emerson provides a clue to his
behavior: “ T h e Buddhist, who thanks no man, who says, ‘Do not flatter
your benefactors,’ but who, in his conviction that every good deed can by
no possibility escape its reward, will not deceive the benefactor by pre-
tending that he has done more than he should, is a Transcendentalist”
(p. 337). Finally, though perhaps this stretches the point, neither does
Bartleby appreciate in the least what might be called the scrivener’s
“art.” T h e Transcendentalists, says Emerson, “feel the disproportion
between their faculties and the work offered them . . .” (p. 341).
In addition to informing the pattern of the scrivener’s rejections,
Emerson’s essay informs the philosophy behind them. T h e radical
Transcendentalist’s contention that “Mind is the only reality, of which
men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors” (p. 333), helps
considerably to explain Bartleby’s negativism. His apparent adherence
to this principle permits him to make incredible demands on the
lawyer and on everything else in the material world; it permits him to
find them all to be “worse reflectors’’ of the ideal in his mind and so to

Published by Duke University Press

 Modern Language Quarterly

38 ME LV I L LE ‘S €3 A K T LE €3Y”

reject them. Emerson said further that the Transcendentalists “wish a

just and even fellowship, or none. They cannot gossip with you, and
they do not wish, as they are sincere and religious, to gratify any mere
curiosity which you may en terrain.” More specifically, their “quarrel
with every man they meet,” he says, “is not with his kind, but with his
degree. There is not enough of him,-that is the only fault” (pp. 343-44).
Consequently, they “say to themselves, I t is better to be alone than in
bad company’’(p. 347). T h e Transcendentalists’ ethics, therefore, “follow
easily” from their metaphysics, according to Emerson: “ I t is simpler to
be self-dependent” (p. 334).
Bartleby’s ethics, like his metaphysics, are evidently those of the
Transcendentalist, for he is similarly “self-dependent.” H e will not
allow himself to be violated by conversation with the “eminently safe”
lawyer (there is quite clearly “not enough of him”); he refuses to gratify
his employer’s curiosity about where he was born or, in fact, about “any-
thing” else concerning himself, we are told; and he prefers the evening
and weekend solitude of Wall Street to a home in society (pp. 35-36).
Although Bartleby answers the lawyer’s advertisement and accepts a job
in commercial society, from the moment of this initial compromise with
the imperfect material world the scrivener withdraws more and more,
until finally he is separated from it altogether. His fate thus provides a
comic yet shrewd comment on Transcenden talist metaphysics, and a
devastating blow at the ethics of “self-reliance” as well.

T h a t the mind is ever capable of creating images which are prefer-

able to their counterparts in material reality is the source of Bartleby’s
despair and, ultimately, the source of his tragedy. But, like all beliefs,
the Transcendentalist’s contention that “mind is the only reality” can
itself be considered a “fiction,” in the special sense in which Frank
Kermode has wisely used that word, meaning simply any idea, any
mental order or form, which the human imagination creates in its con-
tinuing attempt to make sense of the inhuman chaos that daily con-
fronts the mind. “What can be thought,” Nietzsche said, and Melville
seems to have agreed, “must certainly be a fiction.”ll What is distinctive
about both Bartleby and the radical Transcendentalist is that each
would create the “supreme fiction,” to use Wallace Stevens’s term, by
doing away with the inhuman chaos of the world altogether. And this,

I 1 Quoted in T h e Sense o f a n Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York, 1967), p.
34; see also “Fictions.” pp. 35-64. I wish here to express niy indebtedness to Kermode, whose
book has stimulated. however indirectly, my reading of “Bartleby.”

Published by Duke University Press

 Modern Language Quarterly

CHRISTOPHER W. S T E N 39

in Melville’s more skeptical view, was creating fictions in a vacuum; it

was tantamount to consigning one’s correspondence to the Dead Letter
Office. Indeed, the scrivener’s rejection of the mundane material world-
his attempt to be absolutely free, pure, and. self-reliant-leads to his
premature death. Mind is not the only reality, its desires not the only
truths. We must trust our senses. I t is neither possible nor humanly
beneficial to be self-reliant, for self-reliance is neither life-preserving
nor life-encouraging. I t is a fiction without a realizable purpose, a fic-
tion without a future.
I t is because the Transcendentalist’s ethics of “self-dependence” do in
fact follow from his metaphysics that Melville considered the latter to
be dangerous. A seemingly innocent ethical theory, even the apparently
healthy “American” one of self-reliance, can in practice be quite deadly.
But at least as important as the death which results from Bartleby’s
“self-dependence” is the fact that his adherence to this principle pre-
vents the possibility of even the slightest personal fulfillment and so
constitutes a kind of living death. His determination to avoid the im-
perfect fellowship of the lawyer, in addition to the itnperfect offerings
of the material world at large, forces him to lead a frightfully lonely and
consequently an inconceivably empty existence. “His poverty is great,”
the lawyer says of the scrivener; “but his solitude, how horrible!” (p.
33). Bartleby’s death is quite literal, and it is the only point at which he
can fully ignore the detnands of the material world. But his death is also
an “objective correlative” for the nihilistic process he has been engaged
in all along, a symbol of the inhumanity of the ideal. I t is hardly less
true in the beginning of his story than in the end that, as the lawyer
tells the grub man at the Tombs, Bartleby “Lives without dining” (p.
53).
Melville was of course willing to believe in fictions; indeed, he knew
we must, for he was as aware of our “poverty” as Emerson was. Al-
though his philosophical position might be termed fundamentally ma-
terialist, it was not singularly so. T h a t his demands were more difficult
to satisfy than even Emerson’s, that he required recognition of both the
materialist’s and the idealist’s claims simultaneously, not one to the ex-
clusion of the other, is apparent in his satirical treatment of both the
scrivener and his employer, who are equally extreme, and equally
life-denying, in the practice of their respective philosophies. T h e
lawyer also leads a life of solitude in Wall Street; “one of those unambi-
tious lawyers who never addresses a jury, or in any way draws down
public applause,” he, too, works in “bachelor’s hall” and “prefers not

Published by Duke University Press

 Modern Language Quarterly

40 IMELVILLE’S “BAKTLEBY”

to” enrich himself by engaging the wider world (pp. 16, 33). But unlike
Bartleby, who is wholly concerned with ends, the lawyer is wholly con-
cerned with means. Where the Transcendentalist fails to create fictions
which respect the material world, the materialist creates only the barest
fictions. H e respects only the material world, and as a result his ethics
are those of self-serving expediency. T h e lawyer even twists Christ’s
injunction, “A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one
another,” to serve only himself, when he admits, though with some
self-deprecation, that it was this new commandment which “saved me”-
not Bartleby-from suffering the consequences of doing away with
his scrivener in a moment of rage. “Mere self-interest, then,” he remarks
dryly, “if no better motive can be enlisted, should, especially with
high-tempered men, prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy” (p.
43). Indeed, “mere self-interest” is his only touchstone throughout most
of the story. H e respects Nippers, for example, because “he always
dressed in a gentlemanly sort of way; and so, incidentally, reflected
credit upon my chambers” (p. 21).
Because a world which operates on the principle of self-interest is
a meaningless world, self-interest being an empty fiction designed to
insure only an endless material existence, Melville would have us
sympathize with Bartleby’s refusal to perform the mechanical,
self-aggrandizing work the lawyer demands from him. H e would have
us appreciate Emerson’s insistence that
What you call your fundamental institutions, your great and holy
causes, seem to [the Transcendentalists] great abuses, and, when
nearly seen, paltry matters. Each “cause” as i t is called,-say Aboli-
tion, Temperance, say Calvinism, or Uni tarianism,-becomes speed-
ily a little shop, where the article, let i t have been at first never so
subtle and ethereal, is now made up into portable and convenient
cakes, and retailed in small quantities to suit purchasers. (p. 349)

Remarkably, as practiced in the office of the scrivener’s employer, who

does “a snug business among rich men’s bonds, and mortgages, and
title-deeds,” the law is reduced to just such a “little shop” where
Turkey would quite literally turn his “article” into convenient little
ginger cakes, eating the cakes with one hand and copying with the
other, “the scrape of his pen blending with the crunching of the crisp
particles in his mouth” (pp. 16, 22).
Melville agreed with the Transcendentalists that the law and other
“subtle and ethereal” causes were made moribund by petty materialists

Published by Duke University Press

 Modern Language Quarterly

C H R I S T O P H E R W. STEN 41

and “eminently safe” men such as Bartleby’s employer. And, too, he

shared their view that such causes, as well as the men who debase them,
needed renovation‘; new orders, new fictions had to be created to re-
place the decaying ones, and new life had to be.infused into the hearts
of their defenders.12 Bartleby offers himself as a silent example of the
often painful spirit of renovation shunned by his self-protective em-
ployer, and the scrivener does have a modest effect upon him, unset-
tling him and drawing him out of his Wall Street cell. T h e lawyer even
comes to admit (in his typically exaggerated way) that “ I t is not seldom
the case that, when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and
violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest
faith. H e begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may
be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side” (p. 26).13 But,
although he grows from a man whose life is governed purely by expe-
diency to become the scrivener’s benefactor, even risking his profes-
sional reputation in the process, he remains tied to a self-serving, still
noticeably mercenary ethic. “Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious
self-approval,” he none too coyly remarks. “To befriend Bartleby ; to
humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost me little or nothing,
while I lay u p in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for
my conscience” (p. 28).
Still, the fault for his arrested moral development is not entirely the
lawyer’s own. Melville felt that each man was bound by Christ’s “new
commandment” to serve as his brother’s keeper, and this the Transcen-
dentalist Bartleby denies. A perfect brother would need no keeping;
and an imperfect one is not worthy. T h e tragedy of the confrontation
between the scrivener and his employer, therefore, is not explained by
the fact that the lawyer remains bound by the temporal strictures of the
materialist’s world, where there is, in Emerson’s words, “a spirit of cow-
ardly compromise and seeming which intimates a frightful skepticism, a
life without love, and an activity without an aim” (pp. 349-50), though
to be sure it is the lawyer’s personal tragedy that he does not free him-
self from that world. T h e tragedy of their confrontation, the tragedy

Melville’s reformist tendencies had been denionstrated earlier in Typee (1846) and
W h i t e j a c k e l (1850).
I 3 Cf. Enierson’s materialist. who, “secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at fine-spun
theories, at star-gazers and tlreaniers, antl believes that his life is solid, that he at least takes
nothing for granted, but knows where he stands. and what he does,” ttntil he is shown by the
idealist’s presence that “he also is a phantom walking antl working amid phantoms, antl that
he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions to find his solid universe
growingtlini antl impalpable before his sense” ( p . 331).

Published by Duke University Press

 Modern Language Quarterly

42 MELVl LLE’S “BAKTLEBY”

which is Melville’s concern in this story, is explained by the fact that as

the lawyer becomes increasingly less selfish and more sympathetic the
scrivener becomes increasingly more self-dependent-more purely
Transcendentalist-and less willing to respond to his employer’s imper-
fect fellowship. Like the ideal the scrivener himself seeks, Bartleby is
absolutely unattainable; he continues to retreat beyond the lawyer’s
grasp.
T h e lawyer does not begin fully to understand Bartleby’s spiritual
malaise or the hollowness of his own existence until “a few months after
the scrivener’s decease,” when he hears the report of his former position
in the Dead Letter Office. This report, an artifact of the material world,
does not explain what the scrivener’s ailment is, but it does symboli-
cally suggest its source, hence making his unhappiness understandable
to his employer, and to us as well. Moreover, it suggests also that the
symbolic mind such as Melville’s is necessarily dependent upon a fun-
damentally materialist vision, for the material world is the symbolic
mind’s vehicle of communication and its source of raw meaning as well.
“Dead letters! does i t not sound like dead men?” the lawyer asks. These
letters are symbols of every man’s poverty and of the disappointment of
man for man. They carry the aid which one man would extend to his
fellow but which remains forever unknown to him: “a bank-note sent in
swiftest charity-he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any
more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died
unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calami-
ties” ( p. 54). These letters are symbolic of the Transcenden talist Bar-
tlebys who fail to fulfill the role envisioned for them by Emerson when
he said, “these youths bring us a rough but effectual aid. By their un-
concealed dissatisfaction they expose our poverty and the insignificance
of man to man” (p. 346). They fail because, like dead letters, they d o
not communicate; they d o not collaborate with the material world; in a
word, they d o not “correspond.” And so it is evident that the Transcen-
dentalist’s “self-dependence” is but another name for the materialist’s
“self-interest.” “On errands of life, these letters speed to death,” the
lawyer observes. N o t until his concluding statement-“Ah, Bartleby!
Ah, humanity!”-does the lawyer reveal an understanding of his own
spiritual emptiness and admit the selfishness of his worldly pursuits (p.
54). Now he recognizes the world’s disappointment for the scrivener,
the disappointment of man for man. Now he sees that he has disap-
pointed Bartleby; but, just as important, now he sees that Bartleby has
disappointed him.

Published by Duke University Press

 Modern Language Quarterly

C H K I S T O P H E K W. S T E N 45

Melville was not very sanguine about the human condition by the
time he published “Bartleby” in 1853, but he does suggest in this work
that there is hope to be found in the example of the lawyer because he
begins as a materialist and becomes more the idealist. In the example of
Bartleby there can be no hope, for he would not attempt the arduous
task of realizing man’s dual nature. In a sense not intended by Emerson,
Melville nevertheless agreed with his opinion that “Every materialist
will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materi-
alist” (p. 330). T h e former is free to step in the direction of love, the
latter in the direction only of death-because the radical Transcenden-
talist would patiently wait for the miracle which would unite perma-
nently these two sides of man. “Cannot we screw our courage to pa-
tience and truth,” implores the Transcendentalist, “and without com-
plaint, or even with good-humor, await our turn of action in the Infi-
nite Counsels?” (p. 351). And Bartleby, infinitely patient, at last sleeps
“With kings and counselors,” the grub man learns from the lawyer, who
is now able to mediate between the spiritual world of the idealist and
the brute materialist world of the prison “sarvant” (pp. 52-53).
Melville could and did accept man’s poverty without liking it any
better than the Transcendentalists did, but unlike them he attempted
to make sense of and give meaning to that poverty by creating the kinds
of fictions-extraliterary as well as literary-which might satisfy man’s
double nature. T h e idealist and the materialist in every man, in Mel-
ville’s view, must continually strive to come together with his opposite,
as Bartleby does momentarily in the beginning when he arrives at the
lawyer’s Wall Street cell and as the lawyer does in the end when he
visits Bartleby’s cell at the Tombs. These two sides of man, like these
two kinds of men, must ever seek to communicate by testing the idea
and the world against one another. If, when the material world is tested
against the idea, it is found unsatisfactory (and it always will be, if the
idea is worthy), then man must seek to change the nature of things as
they are in order to bring it into closer correspondence with the idea.
But the idea must be tested against the material world, too, and if it is
found to be only a dead letter, then a new idea, a new fiction, must be
imagined.
Melville recognized that the material world, like the great White
Whale, is shifting and ambiguous-because imperfectly known. But he
knew it could never be ignored. Moreover, he believed that he could
come to know that world better, and thereby better that world, by
bringing his own sense-making powers to bear upon it, his skepticism

Published by Duke University Press

 Modern Language Quarterly

44 kl E LV I L LE 'S BA K T L E BY
" "

never allowing him to trust fictions beyond their usefulness as

life-preservers-never, that is, permitting him to confuse fictions and
the world which they can only crudely represent. And, in the interest of
life, he was ever ready to abandon the supreme fiction for a limping, if
sufficiently buoyant one. As in an earlier work, Melville again tells us
that where a lifeboat is needed a coffin will do.

George Washington University

Published by Duke University Press