Toward the Bouddha chrétien

Nearly three decades passed between the stoppage of writing on The Confidence-Man and Melville’s work on Billy Budd, Sailor began in 1885. During that time, particularly after the Civil War, much more of Balzac’s work became available in translation, and numerous important critical works appeared about him, particularly as Henry James began to build his understanding of Balzac’s method into Realism. Moreover, America had taken up New Thought, not the confident cosmopolitan’s “geniality,” and was growing in ideas of spiritualism, paranormal psychology, and most prominently, Theosophy. Melville or members of Melville’s household, bought across this time more than a dozen renditions of Balzac in English along with transatlantic commentaries. Melville himself, in his poetry, began to find particular favor in Eastern thought, and the first successful set of La Comédie humaine in English was made and interpreted through Theosophical Buddhism. Melville read and marked a number of these volumes, particularly Balzac’s personal correspondence, which seemed to affect him profoundly. This combination of reading and rereading opened him to a much deeper resonance with Balzac’s ontological belief than he had comprehended previously: the Christian Buddha of the “Avant-propos.”