“For God’s sake…get you confidence.”

Moby-Dick is well known for its many doubles, but they’re elsewhere as well; twinning things seems to have been almost unavoidable for Melville. The major twin in The Confidence-Man is confidence and distrust. Everything comes down to confidence or distrust. Whether passengers give to a beggar is a sign of whether they have confidence or distrust in their fellow-man. Whether they buy medicine from the herb-doctor is a sign of whether they have trust in the goodness of nature—and of course, trust in the herb-doctor. Whether stocks rise or fall is a matter of confidence.

It is the confidence-man who always brings this up, explaining what confidence has to do with whatever scene is at hand. Or rather, explaining why the problem with whatever is going on is that someone, somewhere, doesn’t have enough confidence. It can get somewhat convoluted. “Confidence” does a lot of work and makes the book a bit of pun of ideas.

For example, a cripple tells the pathetic story of how he was wrongly jailed and never recovered from the experience. The herb-doctor at first denies the possiblity that the story is true, but then, even granting it is, argues that in fact the man’s problem is a lack of confidence. Since human government is “subordinate to the divine,” it takes on some “characteristics of the divine”:

That is, while in general efficacious to happiness, the world’s law may yet, in some cases, have, to the eye of reason, an unequal operation, just as, in the same imperfect view, some inequalities may appear in the operations of heaven’s law; nevertheless, to one who has a right confidence, final benignity is, in every instance, as sure with the one law as the other.

But doesn’t it seem foolish to have such confidence? Foolish to have confidence in the herb-doctor’s remedies, or the legitimacy of the philanthropist’s charity? It does seem so. When the confidence-man tells an old man he is trying to convince about an investment, “I live not for myself; but the world will not have confidence in me, and yet confidence in me were great gain,” it hardly inspires confidence. It also seems a clear reference to a religious figure—or, to another, erm, irreligious figure.

But we must be confident! Those without confidence are gloomy, destroy the good, and only want to sulk. No one wants to share his champagne or cigars with the distrustful, for he is a bore. According to the confidence-man and his various avatars, those who lack confidence have two—twinned—faults as a result:

“You rather jumble together misanthropy and infidelity.”

“I do not jumble them; they are coördinates. For misanthropy, springing from the same root with disbelief of religion, is twin with that. It springs from the same root, I saw; for, set aside materialism, and what is an atheist, but one who does not, or will not, see in the universe a ruling principle of love; and what a mistanthrope, but one who does not, or will not, see in man a ruling principle of kindness? Don’t you see? In either case the vice consists in a want of confidence.”

The confidence-man has a particular dislike for misanthropy, and in the following discourse on his philanthropy (literally) again brings to mind the possibility of the twinned religious referents:

“Is the sight of humanity so very disagreeable to you then? Ah, I may be foolish, but for my part, in all its aspects, I love it. Served up à la Pole, or à la Moor, à la Ladrone, or à la Yankee, that good dish, man, still delights me; or rather is man a wine I never weary of comparing and sipping; wherefore am I a pledged cosmopolitan, a sort of London-Dock-Vault connoisseur, going about from Teheran to Natchitoches, a taster of races; in all his vintages, smacking my lips over this racy creature, man, continually. But as there are teetotal palates which have a distaste even for Amontillado, so I suppose there may be teetotal souls which relish not even the very best brands of humanity.”

Pitch, whom I mentioned yesterday, is one such teetotaler—the object of this speech, in fact. But what then is right? Misanthropy is an “obvious” negative, just as charity is an “obvious” positive. But of course there are understandable instances of distrust—justified absences of confidence. Of course the confidence-man wants people to have confidence; that’s how he gets away with his confidence tricks. But isn’t it more loving toward your fellow-man to have confidence in him? The sands shift. But this isn’t a problem for me or for Melville—or for the cosmopolitan himself, who says:

“I seldom care to be consistent. In a philosphical view, consistency is a certain level at all times, maintained in all the thoughts of one’s mind. But, since nature is nearly all hill and dale, how can one keep naturally advancing in knowledge without submitting to the natural inequalities in the progress?”