TheCambridge Introduction to Hermann Melville

During the holiday, an uncle gave Herman a copy of John Preston’s incongruously
titled teachers’ manual, Every Man His Own Teacher, which supplied
the mathematics exercises his students sorely needed. Melville observed that
some of them had traveled through their arithmetic “with so great swiftness
that they can not recognize objects in the road on a second journey: and are
about as ignorant of them as though they had never passed that way before”
(W, XIV, p. 8). Preston emphasized the nobility of teaching, an endeavor the
literary genius typically disdained. The comparison between teaching andwriting
had the opposite of its intended effect onMelville. Preston’s comments are
enough to make any teacher with serious literary pretensions wonder what he
is doing before a classroom full of unruly students.
Melville had yet to display anything approaching literary genius, but the
letter thanking his uncle reveals his predisposition toward the literary life and
contains flashes of brilliance. Describing where he lived, Melville indulged
his Romantic fancy, situating himself atop “the summit of as savage and
lonely a mountain as ever I ascended. The scenery however is most splendid
and unusual, – embracing an extent of country in the form of an Ampitheatre
sweeping around for many miles and encircling a portion of your state
in its compass” (W, XIV, p.

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