Details:
PDF Name: The Confidence Man
No. of Pages: 222
PDF Size: 986 KB
Originally Published: April 1, 1857
Authors: Herman Melville
Genres: Novel, Satire, Reference Work, Philosophical Fiction
Languages: English
Summary:
The complete transcript of the Confidence-Man Herman Melville's satirical allegory, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, was released in 1857. This work, which was the last to be released while Melville was still alive, exhibits his dismal image of an America that has become tawdry due to selfishness, self-delusion, and a lack of charity.
Special Quotes:
- “Money, you think, is the sole motive to pains and hazard, deception and devilry, in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?”
- “But truth is like a thrashing-machine; tender sensibilities must keep out of the way.”
- “If reason be judge, no writer has produced such inconsistent characters as nature herself has. It must call for no small sagacity in a reader unerringly to discriminate in a novel between the inconsistencies of conception and those of life. As elsewhere, experience is the only guide here; but as no one man’s experience can be coextensive with what is, it may be unwise in every case to rest upon it.”
- “The sky slides into blue, the bluffs into bloom; the rapid Mississippi expands; runs sparkling and gurgling, all over in eddies; one magnified wake of a seventy-four. The sun comes out, a golden huzzar, from his tent, flashing his helm on the world. All things, warmed in the landscape, leap. Speeds the daedal boat as a dream.”
- “The devil is very sagacious. To judge by the event, he appears to have understood man better even than the Being who made him.”
- “Those who thought they best knew her, often wondered what happiness such a being could take in life, not considering the happiness which is to be had by some natures in the very easy way of simply causing pain to those around them.”
- “Every heart is ice-bound till wine melt it, and reveal the tender grass and sweet herbage budding below, with every dear secret, hidden before like a dropped jewel in a snow-bank, lying there unsuspected through winter till spring.”
- “There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.”