Chapter 9

In The Confidence Man Melville went back to the vein of satire he had opened in Mardi. He was shrewd enough, however, to curb the outward extravagance and the aesthetic vagaries of Mardi: the scene is a Mississippi steamboat, the characters are the motley company one might find on such a craft, and the story itself, so far from being incoherent, remains almost monotonously within the frame that Melville set for it in the first chapter.

At St. Louis a deaf-mute in a cream-coloured suit, with flaxen hair and a white fur hat, steps aboard the steamboat Fidele. He circulates among the crowd with a slate on which he writes: Charity thinketh no evil: suffereth long and is kind: endureth all things: believeth all things: never faileth. The passengers look upon this advertiser of St. Paul as a lunatic: that sign fills them with dubiety, although the sign outside the barber-shop, +NO TRUST+, seems to them an obvious and natural one.

Here in a simple image is the moral Melville confronts and elaborates in the rest of the book. This steamer, the Faithful, is the world, with all possible varieties of the human animal on board, natives and foreigners, men of business and men of pleasure, parlour men and backwoods men, farm-hunters, fame-hunters, heiress-hunters, buffalo-hunters, happiness-hunters, fine ladies in slippers and moccasined squaws, Quakers, soldiers, black, white, brown, and every religion and degree of morality. One thing mars their professions and plagues their lives: their suspicion. A wooden-legged man, apparently once a customs-officer, most suspicious of functionaries, denounces a cheery black beggar who has come among them, as an impostor: immediately, almost every man on deck turns against the poor fellow. Even a brawny Methodist minister, who first takes the black’s part, becomes infected: his confidence is gone. A sad demure man in weeds of mourning makes his appearance: with great simplicity of purpose, he insinuates himself into the confidence of a merchant, and gets ten dollars from him. A little later a man in a grey coat and white tie accosts his fellow passengers for contributions to a Widow and Orphan Asylum recently founded among the Seminoles. When rebuffed as a sharper, he asks his denouncer to be more charitable and throw off suspicion. The full title of the story is The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, and one does not go so far without suspecting that the Confidence Man is a protean character and that the mysterious appearance and disappearance of the deaf-mute, the negro beggar, the man in mourning, or the turning up of a seller of quack medicine which cures by establishing confidence, are merely his own mutations—or at least are conducted by him. By a hundred shady devices, he breaks down suspicion, makes men charitable, gives them faith in one another: but always when they are on the point of being completely disarmed, their lurking baseness or suspicion will rise to the surface. The herb-doctor’s pain-dissuader is selling well until a passenger gives him the lie: “Some pains cannot be eased but by producing insensibility, and cannot be cured but by producing death.” That hard truth destroys the whole baseless fabric of confidence he had built up.

Worse doubts intervene. People buy herb remedies because they think these medicines are natural, and what is natural is good. But if man is vile, what about Nature? Is the cough one attempts to cure not natural, and what of the cholera and the rattlesnake and the deadly nightshade? The Missourian, who utters this doctrine, has no more faith in humanity than he has in Nature: he is a bitter heretic, even in politics. What is abolitionism but the expression of fellow feeling of slave for slave? From Maine to Georgia the best breeds are to be bought up for any price from a livelihood to a presidency. “Machines for me!” exclaims the Missourian. So the characters pass, talking, argufying, blasting charity, killing confidence, either unconsciously or deliberately blackening the character of man, and proving the emptiness of all the sweet professions of civilization.

Two men become acquainted and hit up an intimacy over a bottle of wine. One of them, Frank Goodman, a cosmopolitan philanthropist, reeking good-will, professes to be inflamed by his friend’s nobility of mind and his good opinion of his fellow men, and in a sudden burst of confidence throws himself upon his high-minded fellow: he admits he is in want of money and asks for a loan of fifty dollars. Charlie turns away in dudgeon. “Go to the Devil, sir. Beggar, impostor!” Rising quickly from his seat and taking ten half-eagles from his pocket, Frank lays them in a circle around Charlie: with the air of a magician, he summons his friend to reappear. The practical necromancy works. Ha! ha! it was all a joke, of course. Charlie had humoured him. He had played his part to the life!... On top of this the philanthropist has an encounter with Mark Winsome, a mystic philosopher, and his disciple, who state and practice the extreme opposite of philanthropy: his philosophy stands the test of truth: it conforms to the world and does not produce a character at odds with it! This Winsome is no visionary: far from it: “Was not Seneca a usurer? Bacon a courtier? and Swedenborg, though with one eye on the invisible, did he not keep the other on the main chance?” Winsome is the original pragmatist: a man of serviceable knowledge: the doctrines he preaches will lead neither to the mad-house nor the poor-house. When Goodman poses to his disciple a situation like that he had just tested, the disciple handles it with adroit coolness. The loan is not to be thought of: friends do not help friends. If Frank turn beggar, then Charlie for the honour of friendship will turn stranger.

The philanthropist has enough of this icy philosophy: he retreats to the barber shop, his confidence in humanity unshaken. There he arranges with the barber to take down the no trust sign, promising to reimburse the man himself for any loss he may incur through his confidence. Unfortunately, Goodman leaves the shop, after signing the agreement, without paying for his own shave: and the barber, suddenly restored to his senses, tears up the contract and replaces the sign. Finally, Goodman comes to a comely old man, sitting in his berth, reading the Bible by the dim cabin light. Here is a man who has complete faith—yes, and the old man of faith equips himself with a cabin-lock, a counterfeit detector, a money-belt, a life-preserver, and an insurance policy!

It is not hard to see where all this leads, although the story itself ends abruptly. The Confidence Man, in his masquerade, represents all the sweetness and morality of the race, all that professes to see good in the heart of evil, all the benign impulses to succour the poor and heal the sick, all that would place friendliness and natural intimacy above cold circumspection, that would make every alien soul a friend, and would place the needs of man above the safety of property. This sweetness and morality had become for Melville the greatest of frauds. The people who professed it were sharpers and quacks. Nature, life, human institutions, did not encourage this fine morality: they contradicted it. The Pharisee, tightening his purse and disclaiming responsibility for his brother in distress, the old friend permitting the matter of a loan to disrupt a friendship—these things, and a score like them, shrivelled up the outward pretences of social man. Not faith and charity, but +NO TRUST+ was the key to a prosperous and efficient life. There was nothing wrong in the profession: love, faith, and charity might make the worst of ills tolerable; but the miser clung to his money, the merchant to his reputation, the good man to his immaculateness, and he who believed in the Word of God had more faith in the insurance company and the life-preserver. No trust. Man’s soul was lead. Without money or reputation, it sank.