“…pure faith amidst a thousand perfidies”
An extended metaphor is engaged to situate the Temple’s standing within the surrounding area of London as something truly spectacular and unexpected. More to the point, it is something so out-of-place as to almost defy belief…or purpose.
“Sweet are the oases in Sahara: charming the isle-groves of August prairies…but sweeter, still more charming, most delectable, the dreamy Paradise of Bachelors, found in the stony heart of stunning London.”
“The Temple is, indeed, a city by itself.”
In addition to seeming as out of place within the surrounding city as an oasis in the desert, once inside the Temple is revealed as so out of place that it seems like a completely different city within London. The casual reader may be tempted to read the text which follows the above metaphor as a kind of excited description of an impressed tourist, but in context it becomes abundantly clear that the narrator’s tone is ironic as if asking what those who inhabit this metaphorical city have done to deserve such solitary as a park, river-side and garden in which to lounge under trees in their leather boots speaking of nothing of any significance.
An Apple on the Ground
An apple becomes another metaphor by which the narrator delineates with ironic the difference between the Knights Templar who sought glory half a world away and the contemporary Londoners installing themselves as the pretenders to their legacy:
“But, like many others tumbled from proud glory’s height—like the apple, hard on the bough but mellow on the ground—the Templar’s fall has but made him all the finer fellow.”
"Struck by Time’s enchanter’s wand, the Templar is to-day a Lawyer."
The wickedly ironic narration of the first half of this story pits the glory of the Knights Templar against its current incarnation, reducing the reality to empty symbolic place-setter with this brilliantly evocative metaphor that gains power from its utter simplicity.
The Relations of Production
The maids in this Tartarus represent one of Melville’s most cogent arguments on capitalism thriving on the exploitation of workers. The pale young virgins operating the paper mill are not just bloodless in their appearance, but dehumanized in their relation to the means of production:
“The girls did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels.”
