The characteristics of the style, described by Murray as a "miscellany of grammatical eccentricities, convoluted sentences, neologisms, and verbal fetishisms", are by themselves enough to set Pierre off as "a curiosity of literature."[5] The chapter arrangement, by contrast, with each chapter called "Book" and sub-divided into short numbered sections, seems to aim for a clear structure that for critic Warner Berthoff helps "to salvage some degree of organization and pace from the chaos of Melville's purposes."[6]
Imitation of Psalms
According to scholar Nathalia Wright, the style of Psalms is imitated in the passage where Pierre and Lucy one morning ride into the country, which is described in the manner of "a prose paean which has many of the characteristics of a Hebrew poem":
- Oh, praised be the beauty of this earth; the beauty, and the bloom, and the mirthfulness thereof! The first worlds made were winter worlds; the second made, were vernal worlds; the third, and last, and perfectest, was this summer world of ours. In the cold and nether spheres preachers preach of earth, as we of Paradise above. Oh, there, my friends, they say, they have a season, in their language known as summer. Then their fields spin themselves green carpets; snow and ice are not in all the land; then a million strange, bright, fragrant things powder that sward with perfumes; and high majestic beings, dumb and grand, stand up with outstretched arms, and hold their green canopies over merry angels—men and women—who love and wed, and sleep and dream, beneath the approving glances of their visible god and goddess, glad-hearted sun, and pensive moon!
- Oh, praised be the beauty of this earth; the beauty, and the bloom, and the mirthfulness thereof. We lived before, and shall live again; and as we hope for a fairer world than this to come; so we came from one less fine. From each successive world, the demon Principle is more and more dislodged; he is the accursed clog from chaos, and thither, by every new translation, we drive him further and further back again. Hosannahs to this world! so beautiful itself, and the vestibule to more. Out of some past Egypt, we have come to this new Canaan, and from this new Canaan, we press on to some Circassia.[7]
The vocabulary and rhythm of this passage, Wright argues, "unmistakably echo the Psalms." The Psalmist employs the words "praised be", "thereof", and "Hosannahs". Melville also follows the general principle of form, with a refrain to introduce each paragraph, with alternation between the outbursts of exultation and the description of matter providing the grounds for the exultation. In the first half of each paragraph is a stanzaic pattern: in the first a distich and a tristich, in the second a distich and a tetrastich. The pattern becomes clear if the passages are printed as poetry:
- Oh, praised be the beauty of this earth;
- the beauty, and the bloom, and the mirthfulness thereof.
- We lived before,
- and shall live again;
- and as we hope for a fairer world than this to come;
- so we came from one less fine.
Unknown to the King James Version translators, parallelism is the fundamental characteristic of all Semitic poetry, with the distich or two-line parallel as the norm, and variations of tristich and tetrastich. Numerous examples from Psalms may be used for comparison, Wright chooses the following, printed to reveal the extent of the parallelism:
- Sing unto the Lord with thanksgiving;
- Sing praise upon the harp unto our God:
- Who covereth the heaven with clouds,
- who prepareth rain for the earth,
- who maketh grass to grow upon the mountains...
- He giveth snow like wool:
- he scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes.
- He casteth forth his ice like morsels:
- who can stand before his cold?
- He sendeth out his word,
- and melteth them:
- he causeth his wind to blow,
- and the waters flow.[8]
