It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed…

The lines come from “Hawthorne and His Mosses”, an essay Melville published anonymously in The Literary World in August 1850, signed “a Virginian Spending July in Vermont”. Praising Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales, he turns to a larger cause: America must learn to honour its own original writers. “There are hardly five critics in America,” he jokes, “and several of them are asleep.” Then he takes aim at a graceful and very popular author who perhaps owes his chief reputation to “the self-acknowledged imitation of a foreign model”, a jab usually read as aimed at Washington Irving. The line follows, and after it the rallying cry: “we want no American Goldsmiths, nay, we want no American Miltons.”

Melville had just met Hawthorne in the Berkshires, in Massachusetts, and was at work on Moby-Dick, which he would dedicate to him. The essay reads like a manifesto for his own ambitions. Moby-Dick, published in 1851, was a commercial failure; by his own standard, Melville had chosen to fail in originality rather than succeed in imitation.

Hawthorne and His Mosses, published in The Literary World, 1850

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work