ABSTRACT

GREAT GENIUSES ARE PARTS OF THE TIMES,” MELVILLE WROTE IN THE summer of 1850; “they themselves are the times, and possess a correspondent coloring.”1 This comment in the essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” which Melville composed while working on Moby-Dick, indicates Melville’s own relation to the predominantly Transcendental milieu of the 1840s and early 1850s as much as it does Hawthorne’s. Melville’s conception of genius suggests the underlying idea of Emerson’s Representative Men, published early in 1850. Emerson had written that although a great man “inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty,” such a unique individual “must be related to us, and our life receive from him some promise of explanation.” “All men,” Emerson continued, “are at last of a size”; and “the key to the power of the greatest men” is that “their spirit diffuses itself.”2