Spreading the ideology of "Confidence"

Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: Reading Notes, Part the Second

The confidence man advises an effete young scholar to abandon reading the Greek and Roman Classics as heretical and injurious in their lack of "confidence" and thus undermining of God and Christendom.

The scholar overhears the confidence man in one of his incarnations promoting investment in the Black Rapids Coal Company and greedily seeks to buy shares when he appears in different disguise.

The confidence man denounces the Wall Street "bears": "The depression of our stock was solely owing to the growling, the hypocritical growling, of the bears. . . . The most monstrous of all hypocrites are these bears: hypocrites by inversion; hypocrites in the simulation of things dark instead of bright; souls that thrive, less upon depression, than the fiction of depression; professors of the wicked set of manufacturing depressions. . . . Fellows who, whether in stocks, politics, bread-stuffs, morals, metaphysics, religion -- be it what it may -- trump up their black panics in the naturally-quiet brightness."

The confidence man suggests that the bears get their "sulk" not from life but from plays and books. "Ten to one, he has lugged home from auction a musty old Seneca, and sets about stuffing himself with that stale old hay; and thereupon, thinks it looks wise and antique to be a croaker, thinks it's taking a stand 'way above his kind."

The scholar having gullibly invested in the mining concern, the confidence man seeks to lure him to a further speculation in New Jerusalem, "a new and thriving city, so called, in northern Minnesota."

Next, disguised as a Quaker, the confidence man scatters handbills about the Fidele's saloon containing an "Ode of the Intimations of Distrust in Man, Unwillingly Inferred from Repeated Repulses in Disinterested Endeavors to Procure his Confidence."

Observing a card game in the company of a new target, the confidence man poo-poos the idea that card sharpers may be at work, suggesting that "a fresh and liberal construction would teach us to regard those four players -- indeed this whole cabin of players -- as playing at games in which every player plays fair, and not a player but shall win."

Discussion of humanity from story of "anomalously vicious woman," that calls into question whether the "human form be, in all cases, conclusive evidence of humanity." Suggestion that perhaps "only the good are human" in refutation of Roman Senator Thrasea who, as related by Pliny, posited 'he who hates vice, hates humanity.'"
Woman in story is unpromisingly named Goneril; described as having a hardened and baked complexion "like that of the glazed colors on stoneware" and as "rather beautiful, though of a style of beauty rather peculiar and cactus-like."

Considering the dismal fate of the unfortunate husband (supposedly one of the confidence man's earlier avatars) of this inhuman Goneril, the current edition of the confidence man proposes that the real question is whether the spouse bore his misfortune despondently or "with confidence."



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