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"They but reflect the things": style and rhetorical purpose in Melville's "The Piazza Tale"
Style, Spring, 2001 by Scott A. Kemp
A second noticeable pattern relates to reviewer preference. Many reviewers highlighted for mention the stories that still command our attention today. They most overtly preferred "Bartleby, the Scrivener," "Benito Cereno," and "The Encantadas," particularly with regard to the stories' topics. That these stories have maintained importance in the Melville canon attests to how little reader expectations--at least in terms of topical interest-- have changed from 1856 to today. But beneath the surface of the reviews--and important for my analysis here, it is the style or styles of "The Piazza Tale," the introductory tale of the collection, that clearly attracted contemporary readers. Though not mentioned nearly as often as the other tales, "The Piazza Tale" was singularly highlighted by reviewers. Notice the effect consistently described in the following responses: the book "would be an excellent companion for a summer tour" (478); it's "a delightful companion for an afternoon lounge" (478); "each [tale] forms th e feast of a long summer's noon" (482). That this effect can be linked with "The Piazza Tale" specifically is evident in statements made by various reviewers: says one, "All of [the tales] exhibit that peculiar richness of language, descriptive vitality" that awaken in the reader "a deep longing to gaze with him upon the sublime and lovely scenery which his words paint so well" (482). Melville, says another, "proves to travel into the mystic regions of fairy land, that it is very seldom he can be either appreciated or understood" (473). These are all direct references to the narrator's gazing from his piazza into the scenery of the Berkshire mountains and his eventual journey there represented in "The Piazza Tale." The reader's desiring to "lounge" directly parallels the disposition of the narrator, who in the tale chooses a "royal lounge of turf--a green velvet lounge, with long, moss-padded back" to "leisurely" gaze upon the mountains around his home (2).
While reviewers for the popular press often do not read an entire book, that they selected for comment passages from "The Piazza Tale" nonetheless indicates their attachment to the style of Melville's writing. Their comments suggest that Melville's style affected readers on an intuitive, psychological level. Indeed, it may be that the style affected readers in a way that the ideas in the tales did not. Only one reviewer, in writing that he knew not whether to laugh or cry in reading "Bartleby," even hints at the "concealment" motif we attach to Melville's intentions as a writer. Instead, it was the poetic nature of "The Piazza Tale" itself that invited comment. As one reviewer described it, "the introduction is one of the most graceful specimens of writing we have seen from and American pen. It is a poem--essentially a poem--lacking only rhythm and form" (481).
