After the hostile and profoundly dispiriting reception of Pierre, a crooked genuflection to fashionable romances, Melville sought refuge in the magazines. Once he gained back a measure of confidence through this more amenable ecosystem, there arose the idea of a serialized novel about a revolutionary. As things stood, no excuses were left for Melville to indulge his metaphysical bent and his subversive inquiries—under all their guises the public had been able to spot them and recoil. In a letter to Putnam, his publisher, he was straightforward about the new novel: "There will be very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure." Thus Israel Potter was conceived. Ultimately, however, it made no difference. The reviews were few and lukewarm; the sales, exceedingly modest.
The posthumous reception of the book has been disappointingly similar. Kind words, even passionate ones, exist: Weaver called it "a spirited narrative"; Mumford, "a living picture"; Winters, "one of the few great novels of pure adventure in English"; and Hardwick, "an agreeable and readable book." Yet Bezanson's verdict remains true: "Israel Potter is something of a stepchild among Melville's books—little known, not widely read, only intermittently in print." Melville's greatest effort to appease the public begot his most unpopular work.
Israel Potter lies uncomfortably between two disparate traditions: the picaresque and the Romantic; that is, the centrifugal and the centripetal. They have been reconciled at times. Byron, one of Melville's cherished poets, wrote Don Juan in this manner; it is structurally episodic and thematically provocative. Byron owed much to his inclination for Augustan literature and to his disdain for the Lake Poets. In Melville's case, the synthesis is considerably less successful. It has, however, a certain significance—we follow a belated Elizabethan disciplining himself in an antipodal style.
The novel recounts the misadventures of a revolutionary who, after doing prodigious deeds for his country, ends up destitute. Melville uses as a starting point the memoirs of an actual historical figure, but his adherence to the source material is erratic enough to give ample space to his imagination. The interest seems clear: there is pathos in a man who elevates his country only to be repaid with cruel anonymity. Thematically, then, Melville has a solid grasp of his subject. All his problems reside in the constraints that he has imposed upon himself to reach a wider audience.
Melville develops his fixtures here and there with full force: elaborate subordinations, Shakespearean cadences, Biblical and Classical allusions, eccentric antitheses and similes. Otherwise, he intercalates only the occasional meditative passage:
Since all human affairs are subject to organic disorder; since they are created in, and sustained by, a sort of half-disciplined chaos; hence, he who in great things seeks success, must never wait for smooth water; which never was, and never will be; but with what straggling method he can, dash with all his derangements at his object, leaving the rest to Fortune.
For the most part, he contrives a style reminiscent of Carlyle's in his Life of Sterling; it is epigrammatic, suggestive, and brisk. It results in fine sentences: “Adversity, come it at eighteen or eighty, is the true old age of man.” “Who does not shun the scurvy wretch, Poverty, advancing in battered hat and lamentable coat?” “War and warriors, like politics and politicians, like religion and religionists, admit of no metaphysics.” It adds, moreover, a new dimension to his direct characterizations—Franklin, for instance, is seen through the dense foliage of Melville's ripened prose:
Viewed from a certain point, there was a touch of primeval orientalness in Benjamin Franklin. Neither is there wanting something like his scriptural parallel. The history of the patriarch Jacob is interesting not less from the unselfish devotion which we are bound to ascribe to him, than from the deep worldly wisdom and polished Italian tact, gleaming under an air of Arcadian unaffectedness. The diplomatist and the shepherd are blended; a union not without warrant; the apostolic serpent and dove. A tanned Machiavelli in tents.
Yet he is also seen through the trim petals of Melville’s unfolding prose:
Old age seemed in nowise to have dulled him, but to have sharpened; just as old dinner-knives—so they be of good steel—wax keen, spear-pointed, and elastic as whale-bone with long usage. Yet though he was thus lively and vigorous to behold, spite of his seventy-two years (his exact date at the time) somehow, the incredible seniority of an antediluvian seemed his. Not the years of the calendar wholly, but also the years of sapience.
This treatment is extended to the Ahab-like John Paul Jones and Ethan Allen. Even so, Melville is not sufficiently acquainted with this style. He adopts a number of habits that aggravate his already well-known disjointedness: he abruptly and arbitrarily telescopes events (“Imagination will easily picture the rural days of the youth of Israel. Let us pass on to a less immature period”), he mixes metaphors in close proximity (“And letting grow all his wings, he starts like a deer”), he halts the pace owing to his too infrequent digressions, and he rarely conveys his protagonist’s inner life, so that among the whole cast Potter appears blurred and diminished. It is only in the elegiac concluding chapter that Melville seems at ease with, and in complete control of, the exigencies.
Geoffrey Stone, in his insightful study of Melville’s metaphysical vision, laments the Romantic stubbornness that made him contemptuous of grind, for “Corinth cannot be burned every day and some ores of great value are uncovered only with the patient and drudging pickaxe.” It is an unjust stance; there has always been something unpalatable in the expectation that all true artists should wade through scorn and indifference alike, trusting that their genius will somehow vindicate them. It is unjust, but it speaks to our desire for the fulfillment of a promise. Israel Potter is proof that a first-rate mind writing in a congenial medium, even at its most accommodating, will yield fruitfully imperfect work.
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