Herman Melville

By Lewis Mumford

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Title: Herman Melville

Author: Lewis Mumford

Release date: February 23, 2026 [eBook #78016]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1929

Credits: Sean/IB and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HERMAN MELVILLE ***

[Illustration:

_J. O. Eaton, pinx._

HERMAN MELVILLE]

HERMAN
MELVILLE

LEWIS MUMFORD

HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY
NEW YORK

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC., RAHWAY, N. J.
TYPOGRAPHY BY ROBERT S. JOSEPHY

PREFACE

This is a study of Herman Melville’s life and thought. In interpreting
Melville’s life I have relied primarily on his own writings, including
his letters, some of which are still unpublished, and his notebooks.
There are occasional blank spaces in Melville’s history, but the record
is singularly complete in that part of Melville which most matters: his
ideas, his feelings, his urges, his vision of life. I have verified and
corrected these data by the use of every available piece of independent
evidence; and I must express my hearty thanks to Mrs. Frances Thomas,
Melville’s surviving daughter, for answering my written questions,
and to his granddaughter, Mrs. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, for giving
me the benefit of her own memories and family tradition, as well as
her courtesy and hospitality in placing at my disposal Melville’s
manuscripts. I am likewise indebted to Miss Caroline W. Stewart, an
old friend of the Melville family, for her impressions of the Melville
household during the later period of his life.

These pages could not have been written without Mr. Raymond Weaver’s
pioneer work on Melville. Mr. Weaver not merely brought to light much
important data and cleared up relationships that concerned Melville’s
objective life: he also, through Mrs. Metcalf, discovered Melville’s
unpublished manuscripts and included them in a definitive edition of
his work. For this, he has placed every admirer of Melville in his
debt. In addition to acknowledging this great service, I must thank him
for the scholarly generosity with which he gave me the benefit of his
intimate knowledge of Melville’s remains, and his copies of Melville’s
notebooks. Mr. Weaver’s generosity is equalled only by that of Dr.
Henry A. Murray, Jr., who shared with me his knowledge of certain
Melville letters otherwise inaccessible--an act of pure chivalry, since
Dr. Murray is himself at work on a biography of Herman Melville. Such
deeds sweeten one’s notions of human conduct: they give one not so
much a feeling of gratitude as a renewed sense of human dignity, and I
warmly place them on record.

In describing Melville’s experience and his state of mind, I have taken
the liberty of using his own language wherever possible; and I have
done this so freely that, except where I have quoted whole passages,
I have omitted quotation marks. In condensing and paraphrasing the
notebooks of Melville’s travels, I have usually employed Melville’s
own words; for it would be a vain biographer who did not make full use
of Melville’s sharp descriptions and striking epithets. If I have been
frank and unreserved in dealing with the difficult parts of Melville’s
life, I have been no more so than I think he would have wished, nor
more candid than he himself was in treating Pierre. “In reserves,” he
wrote, “men build imposing characters.” Melville’s worth, as a man and
a poet, has no need for a reputation so created. My purpose has not
been to embalm Melville but to bring him to life; and one cannot know
or sympathize with the man unless one shares his vicissitudes as well
as his triumphs.

Certain portions of this book have appeared, with slight changes and
abbreviations, in The New Republic, The American Mercury, and The
Saturday Review of Literature.

Lewis Mumford.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE 1

OLYMPIAN

CHAPTER ONE: BITTER MORNING 9

CHAPTER TWO: SEA-DRIFT 40

CHAPTER THREE: TROPICAL SUMMER 63

CHAPTER FOUR: AZZAGEDDI 86

CHAPTER FIVE: THE TARTARUS OF AUTHORS 108

TITAN

CHAPTER SIX: RED CLOVER 135

CHAPTER SEVEN: MOBY-DICK 158

CHAPTER EIGHT: AMOR, THREATENING 196

CHAPTER NINE: TIMONISM 223

PILGRIM

CHAPTER TEN: TROUBLED FOOTSTEPS 259

CHAPTER ELEVEN: ALARUMS AND RETREATS 292

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE FLOWERING ALOE 326

EPILOGUE 359

INDEX 371

Your zodiac here is the life of man in
one round chapter; and now I’ll read it
off, straight out of the book. Come,
Almanack! To begin: there’s Aries, or
the Ram--lecherous dog, he begets us;
then Taurus, or the Bull--he bumps us
the first thing; then Gemini, or the
Twins--that is Virtue and Vice; we try
to reach Virtue when lo! comes Cancer
the Crab and drags us back; and here,
going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring lion,
lies in the path--he gives a few fierce
bites and surly dabs with his paw; we
escape and hail Virgo, the Virgin; that’s
our first love; we marry and think to
be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra
or the Scales--happiness weighed and
found wanting! and while we are very sad
about that Lord! how we suddenly jump as
Scorpio or the Scorpion stings us in the
rear; we are curing the wound when whang
come the arrows all round; Sagittarius,
or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we
pluck the shafts, stand aside! here’s the
battering ram, Capricornus or the Goat,
full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong
we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the
Water-bearer, pours out his whole deluge
and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces
or the Fish we sleep.

Moby-Dick.

PROLOGUE

When Herman Melville died in 1891, the literary journal of the day,
The Critic, did not even know who he was. The editors rose bravely to
the occasion and copied a paragraph about him from a compendium of
American literature; and in the weeks that followed they reprinted
various commentaries on Melville and his work that were carried in the
correspondence columns of the New York newspapers.

The older generation remembered that Herman Melville had once been
famous. He had adventured in the South Seas on a whaler; he had lived
among the cannibals; and in Typee and Omoo he had made a romantic
pastiche of his experiences. On these books Mr. Melville’s fame had
been founded: it was a pity he had not done more in this line; for
his later books, obscure books, crowded books, books that could be
called neither fiction nor poetry nor philosophy nor downright useful
information, forfeited the interest of a public that liked to take
its pleasures methodically. Both the fame and the later absence of
recognition, Mr. Melville’s commentators agreed, were deserved. By his
interest in Sir Thomas Browne and metaphysics, Mr. Melville had carried
his readers into a realm much too remote, and an air too rarefied: a
flirtation with a South Sea maiden, warm, brown, palpable, was one
thing: but the shark that glides white through the sulphurous sea was
quite another. In Moby-Dick, so criticism went, Melville had become
obscure: and this literary failure condemned him to personal obscurity.

The writer about whom all these sage banalities were written shares
with Walt Whitman, I think, the distinction of being the greatest
imaginative writer that America has produced: his epic, Moby-Dick,
is one of the supreme poetic monuments of the English language: and
in depth of experience and religious insight there is scarcely any
one in the nineteenth century, with the exception of Dostoyevsky,
who can be placed beside him. To his contemporaries, the greatness
of Melville was an enigma: they valued him for those lesser virtues
in which he more closely resembled themselves. They had no place, on
their matter-of-fact plane, with its confident flat-footed science, and
its many odd and useful inventions, for the crosslights of Melville’s
imagination, for his oblique revelations, for his habit of questioning
the foundations upon which their vast superstructure of comfort and
complacency was erected. “What we want, sir, is facts!”--and though
Melville gave them facts, they resented his white vision, because it
froze the facts into a state that defied their easy assimilation. When
they charged Melville with obscurity, they did not realize, perhaps,
that sight demands not merely an object that can be seen, but an eye
that is capable of seeing; and it never occurred to them, with all
their doubts about Melville, that the defective vision might be their
own.

In a great degree, Herman Melville’s life and work were one. A
biography of Melville implies criticism; and no final criticism of his
work is possible that does not bring to it an understanding of his
personal development. The exotic elements in Melville’s experience
have usually been overstressed; the fatality and completeness of
his withdrawal from the contemporary scene have been exaggerated;
the incidental rocks and rapids and whirlpools have diverted the
critic’s attention from the flow of the stream itself. It is with
Herman Melville’s strength and energy on the spiritual plane that I
shall chiefly deal. He lives for us not because he painted South Sea
rainbows, or rectified abuses in authority in the United States Navy:
he lives because he grappled with certain great dilemmas in man’s
spiritual life, and in seeking to answer them, sounded bottom. He left
the clothed and carpeted world of convention, and faced the nakedness
of life, death, energy, evil, love, eternity: he drew back the cosy
hangings of Victorian parlours, and disclosed the black night outside,
dimly lighted with the lights of ancient stars. Had he been a romantic,
he would have lived a happy life, buttering his bread with feeble
dreams, and swallowing down his regrets with consolatory port: he who
wishes to escape the elemental stings of existence need only grasp the
outstretched hands of his contemporaries, accept the subterfuge goals
they call success in business or journalism, and shrink by means of a
padded physical apparatus from the cold reality of the universe itself.

But Melville was a realist, in the sense that the great religious
teachers are realists. He saw that horsehair stuffing did not make the
universe kinder, and that the oblivion of drink did not make the thing
that was forgotten more palatable. His perplexities, his defiances,
his torments, his questions, even his failures, all have a meaning
for us: whether we renounce the world, as Buddha did, affirm a future
transcendence, as Christ did, or, like Whitman, embrace its mingled
good-and-evilness, our choice cannot be called enlightened until it has
faced the gritty, unassimilable substratum Melville explored. Melville,
like Buddha, left a happy and successful career behind him, and
plunged into those cold black depths, the depths of the sunless ocean,
the blackness of interstellar space; and though he proved that life
could not be lived under those conditions, he brought back into the
petty triumphs of the age the one element that it completely lacked:
the tragic sense of life: the sense that the highest human flight is
sustained over an unconquered and perhaps an unconquerable abyss. On
the peak of Melville’s vision, a man stands poised as on the spur of a
glacier: nature offers no shelter, and humanity does not succour him:
he is alone. Will he live or die? One cannot say. But if he returns to
the warm valleys and the friendly villages he will be another man; and
a part of him, a precious part, will forever remain alone, impregnable.

OLYMPIAN

CHAPTER ONE: BITTER MORNING

The society into which Herman Melville was born was in the fullest
sense of the word a provincial one. His heritage and his work united
him with that society; and when its occupations were undermined and its
customs effaced by the great tide of destruction that marked the Civil
War, he himself was intimately involved in its ruin.

By a provincial society I mean one which finds its sources and
motives within its own region, and that achieves a certain balance
and continuity by a restricted development. To understand Melville’s
background, one must think back to a time when New York was only one
of a number of Atlantic ports that claimed the commerce of the seas
and the wealth that it brought: Salem was almost as important: so
were Boston and Baltimore and Charleston: it was little more than the
accident of a regular sailing packet line that made New York take
the lead in attracting population, that, and the opening of a direct
water-route into mid-America, via the Erie Canal, which was still
a-building in 1819, the year that Herman Melville was born.

The United States, except as an abstract political entity, scarcely
existed. There were eagles on the furniture: there were eagles on the
dollars: there were flags and martial birds on mirrors and bedspreads
and glass and china: but a good part of the community, certainly in
the older, more settled regions, was hardly yet political-minded,
still less conscious of a mystic relation with the other parts. During
the War of 1812 New England, threatened with economic ruin, was on
the point of breaking loose from the political union: and though
the national government coined money in quarter dollars, people
still referred to such coins as two shillings. If Rip van Winkle
was surprised at the changes that had taken place during his long
nap, a modern observer of that provincial society would be even more
astounded at the lack of them. Whitman, writing a whole generation
later, and loathing the notion of secession, still had a consciousness
of the individuality and independence of the separate states which the
strongest defender of states’ rights never expressed after the Civil
War.

This provincial society had its own economic foundations, its own
locus, its own seat of authority: it differed in a marked way from
that which was developing on the frontier: the drama of one of
Cooper’s best books, The Pioneers, is chiefly concerned with that
contrast. The frontier society was a flowing and moving one: the
only thing that united it was the common flag that waved over it
and the Constitution, to which its officers paid their superficial
respect. Its members came from anywhere, got a living anyhow, and
pushed on, in an uneasy, restless search for more fertile land, wilder
creatures, greater distance from their neighbours--or merely, from
the habit of locomotion. It was strenuous, uncertain, heroic; but
once the settlement was effected, once the town was founded and the
building-lots divided and the outlaws rounded up, it was unbearably
tame: the excitements of civilized life, the clash of ideas, the
conflict of cultures, the absorption of experience, did not occupy the
pioneer: even when he adopted the external habits of the red man, his
weapons, his tools, his maize and dried meat, he avoided the inner
content of his culture. In provincial society we are nearer to Europe,
that is, nearer to a settled life, to order, authority, tradition. In
every colony there was an historic mixture of nationalities and stocks,
and that peculiar to New York, English and Dutch, with a dash of French
Huguenots, had at last begun to bubble and ferment: presently a
Whitman, a Melville, came out of it.

In provincial society, the family was still a prime reality; and in New
York it was not less so, certainly, because of the fact that the Dutch
had founded great landed proprietorships, like those of the Gansevoorts
to whom Herman Melville belonged on his maternal side. Two hundred
years of inherited wealth create family pride and all the futile
snobberies of caste: they also create a firm sense of self-possession.
Washington Irving, who was one of the conquering English, might laugh
at these Dutch burghers and patroons: but from their manorial seats
along the Hudson and the Mohawk, the Van Rensselaers and the Schuylers
and the Gansevoorts could view this mockery with sleepy disdain. They
had only to sit tight to be eminent; as the population grew, the value
of the land doubled and quadrupled, and in spite of rent wars and the
abolition of feudal privileges, the landed families rose to the top
like cream.

The Dutch throve in this expansive environment, on farms that stretched
from hilltop to hilltop, as they throve by intensive activity in the
lowlands by the Zuyder Zee: if their old canals were covered over and
filled up in New Amsterdam, they still had their commodious stone or
brick houses in the country; there was one such at Gansevoort, where
the Gansevoorts lived, not far from Saratoga. The fine arts did not
find disciples among these great families: the Copleys, Trumbulls,
Stuarts, Peales had English names: but the crafts were cultivated
in great variety: the architecture was straightforward and in minor
matters, like the horizontal windows and the peculiar gambrel roof,
original: the landscape was well treated; and above all, there was
food, wild pigeon and grouse and deer, well-fed beef and succulent
ducks and geese and great handsome cheeses. When Herman is a little boy
his mother will remember Uncle Peter Gansevoort, at Albany, with a tub
of five hundred pickled oysters.

“A thoroughly developed gentleman is always robust and healthy.” When
Melville wrote these words he was thinking of the great gentlemen
between whose legs he had walked as a little boy, and particularly,
perhaps, of one he used to hear about, that grandest of old fellows,
General Peter Gansevoort, a mighty soldier during the Revolution and
a great figure among men. He had died but seven years before Melville
was born; many of his remains, including a portrait by Stuart, were
still visible; and his legend stayed on the tongues of those who had
known him. Six foot four he was, with an appetite and a digestion fit
to keep that colossal frame in motion. Now, among all the pleasures of
life, positive health--not mere freedom from disorder and disease--is
surely the first: living needs no extra justification when the blood is
clear and all the juices are flowing harmoniously. In Melville’s youth
even a city lad could sail a boat, tramp into the country, shoot game,
experience the active, outdoor life which has always been the mainstay
of the aristocracy, and which doubtless explains its ability to conquer
and control the urban populace, habituated to the ledger, the bench,
the desk, and the foul air thereof. Melville had scarcely reached
maturity before some of these natural pleasures were curtailed in the
city of his birth, so that, to preserve them, William Cullen Bryant
launched the campaign to create Central Park.

“Too often,” Melville wrote in 1852, “the American that himself
makes a fortune, builds him a great metropolitan house, in the most
metropolitan street, of the most metropolitan town. Whereas, a European
of the same sort would thereupon migrate into the country. That herein
the European hath the better of it, no poet, no philosopher, and no
aristocrat will deny.” Melville’s ancestors had kept close to the
country: Grandfather Peter and Uncle Herman at Gansevoort, Uncle Peter
at Albany, little more than a country town, Great Uncle Thomas Melville
on his farm, eastward in the Berkshires. Although Melville was born
in New York, he was nourished by the agricultural experience of the
back-country: when he idealized his early life in Pierre, he gave his
hero a twenty-mile ride or a ten-mile walk every day, a turn at felling
a hemlock in the forest, or boxing or fencing or boating. That was
something like a foundation, and it resembled Melville’s own. When we
come to a later period of Melville’s life we will not be tempted, if
we remember these things, to overstress his doldrums or his adolescent
uncertainties: for we shall not forget that he became a magnificently
healthy animal--and healthy animals itch to use their energies and test
their muscles.

Against the vigorous, fleshy life of the provincial countryside, the
immediate environment in which Melville was born must seem a little
petty and painful around the neck; and it was. Herman’s father, Allan
Melville, was by trade an importer of French goods, and by every
evidence of physiognomy, notebook, and letter a trivial but not
uncultivated man. The portrait of Allan as a young man that survives
is cruel in its exposure of Allan’s simpering elegance: his lip is
weak and his eye has a vacuous leer, and when one puts these qualities
alongside the careful pedanticism of his letters, one is left with a
mixture of odious characteristics.

Allan was completely given to the outward amenities of life. He valued
name: he was not unconscious of this, perhaps, when he married a
Gansevoort, nor was he less so the year before Herman was born, when
he visited his titled Scotch cousins at the original Melville seat.
Deportment and modest behaviour were only less in Allan’s eyes than
wifely name and beauty: when he married Maria he made sure, remembering
it may be a disturbing levity in Napoleonic France, which he had known
as a young man, that she saw eye to eye with him on every point. He was
the sort of man from whom one expects prudence without imagination.
He doubtless had passionate adventures before he married, for he was
thirty-two when that happened: but he was circumspect in all things,
and if the adventures left any tell-tale traces, we have no better
reason for thinking so than the fact that Melville confronted his
hero with such a crack in his father’s image, in his novel, Pierre.
Such a man may do very well in business, so long as no unforeseen
circumstances occur: not doing the wrong thing will suffice in many
occupations for actually doing the right thing--and one may be sure
that Allan Melville had a sense of gentlemanly correctness in all his
dealings. Business was not yet a ruthless obsession: one expected to
retire from it into a more cultivated existence; indeed, such an early
withdrawal was the capital mark of success.

Maria Melville, born Gansevoort, seems to have been Allan’s counterpart
in many ways: each carried the same tune in a different register. Like
Mrs. Glendinning, in Pierre, she was a noble creature, but “formed
chiefly for the gilded prosperities of life, bred and expanded in
all developments under the sole influence of hereditary forms and
world-usages.” She was correct, formal, proud; she valued a high
station in life, to which her maiden name, at least, entitled her; she
valued good food, low voices, courteous servants, correct manners.
An only girl in a family of boys, preening herself with a sense of
her family’s importance, does not profit by sufficient chastenings of
pride: Maria, unfortunately, was such a girl; and to the last she wore
her pride in station like a crest.

Maria had stooped a little to marry a mere trader like Allan, although
he, too, came of good English stock which sided with the colonies
in the Revolutionary War; still, she stooped; and she never quite
recovered from the painful crick in her back. She must have attributed
the misfortunes that followed in her middle age to this original
mistake; at all events, one cannot imagine a woman with such traits
as she left behind in the memory of her contemporaries, taking any
disaster to her station in life or her income with resignation or
becoming meekness. Christianity, for a Gansevoort, meant a prominent
pew in church, not an equal place in heaven; and to deprive her of the
world’s goods was to deprive her of everything she valued.

Both Melville’s father and his mother were monsters; but it took him a
long time to discover this, because they were correct and meritorious
members of society, and it is difficult to believe that the image
of God can err, if it be repeated often enough. In the New York of
the early nineteenth century, Mr. and Mrs. Allan Melville can be
duplicated many times over. Their correctness, their pettiness, their
shallowness, were the correctness and shallowness of a venial society
whose pretensions to culture and civilization were, on the whole,
pretty thin. It was an agreeable society, make no doubt, and Mr. and
Mrs. Melville were just the sort of people to persuade one to accept
its conventions as the very acme of human desire. One visited: one left
one’s card; one entertained at dinner; occasionally one went to the
theatre, or to one of those miscellaneous exhibitions of forgeries and
bad copies and minor masterpieces that served to introduce art into
America: one might even descend a little to that prodigious educational
spectacle, the Cosmorama, or Picture of the World, at Scudder’s Museum.

It was not London or Paris, of course. Allan had seen the paintings in
the Louvre and doubtless knew better than some of his contemporaries:
but it was the outward activity of a great city, with none of the inner
effort that sustained it in Europe. No one in New York, up to 1819, had
dedicated himself to the creative life; and whether one is conscious
of it or not, a great poem, an original thought, an effective piece
of scientific investigation, subtly affect the spirit and tempo of a
place. New York was the counterfeit of a great metropolis, just as the
pictures it looked at were the counterfeits of great painting, just as
the exhibition of a Cosmorama was a counterfeit of a voyage around the
world. Pigs snouted in the gutters; the waterfront had become a jumble
of shipping; the old docks had begun to splinter up and decay; the
Collect Pond was being filled up to make real estate for the growing
city, and later a site for the Tombs; in the vacant fields on the
outskirts of the town, squatters settled in little hovels that reminded
one of a misery and want not yet wholly native to America: in short,
over a vast welter of miscellaneous activities there was only the most
transparent film of a civilized life.

As long as one remained on the surface one could manage one’s time
agreeably; and the refined, fastidious people who constituted
Melville’s social class were unaware of the fact that their provincial
shell was becoming more and more hollow, as the organism within it
died part by part and shrivelled up. The Erie Canal and the general
starvation and impoverishment of Europe after the Napoleonic wars would
draw vast masses of needy men across the Atlantic: the city itself
would lose its waterfronts and pleasances: the trees would make way for
cobblestones and hitching-posts: the area around its little villages
would be broken up into building lots, and it would have to convert its
Potter’s Fields into parks in order to recapture a little open space:
by 1835, dingy-looking tenements, newly built, and made-over “tenant
houses,” abandoned by the original merchants, would spread around and
engulf the neat provincial city. In the twenties, from the overcrowded
slums and the insanitary backyard wells, fever came forth, year after
year: a little later, a wave of cholera caused almost a general exodus.
Eventually, the noses of the respectable would detect the change and
tilt upward in pained appreciation of it; but that the ugliness and
misery and disease were in any way connected with the sources of their
incomes, they would of course indignantly have denied.

Allan Melville was not a rich man; but when Herman Melville was born,
on August 1, 1819, Allan Melville was doing well in a modest way: the
family lived at Number Six, Pearl Street, and Herman was the second son
and the third child of this agreeable union. When Herman was a year
old, Allan noted in a letter that he had hired a cook and a nurse, and
wanted only a waiter; and one may take for granted, I think, that such
a household already has its complement of maids, linen, silver, sherry,
port, brocades, and books.

To awake in a home surrounded by the decencies of life must mollify
an infant’s indignation at having to enter the world at all; and in
Herman Melville’s earliest years, nothing ever conveyed a sense of
danger or physical stress. In the even decorum of the days, meals ebbed
and flowed like the tides; the sheets were as white as the tops of
wind-whipt waves off the Battery; clothes sprang into existence out of
the sewing-room as naturally as feathers cover a robin’s back: little
boys had handkerchiefs to blow their noses in and pillows to cuddle
into when they fell asleep in their cribs; in the obscure world that
crowded around little Herman, there were convivial discussions between
his father and strange gentlemen in the library, when he might do no
more than linger in the shadows of the hall or hush his breath at a
crack in the partly opened door; there were visits to relatives and a
few select friends that were as sociable as a regimental inspection
in the army, when he might not get his pinafore mussed, nor bunk up
against the furniture, nor tease his older sister, nor rub shyly into
his mother’s neatly disposed dress, visits with every one sitting
upright, stiff, the spine imitating the rigid line of the chairs, just
blossoming “deportment.”

On the whole, in spite of its high-chokered formalities, it was a kind
world that Melville found himself in: shallow men are not obstacles
to little boys, and as for Mrs. Melville, she had all the affection
for her children that natural instinct and the graces of society
prompted her to have, not a great deal, one suspects, for children,
like servants, are only subordinate ministers to the ego--and one
cannot take pride in satisfying society’s minimal requirements. She
was, however, an intelligent and capable mother: all her eight children
grew to maturity, and that was no little feat, even for an upper-class
family, in the early nineteenth century. Herman must have been a little
starved of affection, I think; for in Pierre he gives his hero no
sisters or brothers, so that Pierre may absorb all his mother’s warmth
for himself; and his hungry claims for sympathy and caresses were no
doubt put off by Mrs. Melville’s aloof rectitude, her concern to keep
part of her energy and sweetness for her husband, and her manifest
partiality to the younger children, when they arrived. Herman stood as
in a cold room before an open fire: one side of him was toasted, and
another side was chilled. That chilliness remained; and in the parts
of his emotional frame that were affected, circulation was never quite
restored.

When Herman was five the family moved two miles uptown, to a house in
Bleecker Street which combined the advantages of town and country. It
was good for Herman that the change was made. He had been ill and had
not regained his health fully: he looked, his father reported then,
pale, thin, and dejected; but the new house had a vacant lot where
children could play; and not far away the farms began to stretch on
each side of the Albany turnpike: despite the activity of the City
Planning Commissioners in laying out rectangular blocks over the hills
and dales and streams and swamps and ponds of the island, the farms
themselves were retreating slowly. Life, for little Herman, was no
longer a matter of sitting and staring at the furniture: he went to
school: he found that c-a-t and d-o-g were a new way of playing with
a dog and a cat: when he was bored he could always practise tricks
on Gansevoort, who was older and more considerate and could not
legitimately hit back.

Still, Herman did not thrive quite as well as he should have. Winter
drew a black curtain between him and all the pleasant things one could
see or find or do in the country: darkness fell much too soon after
school: November’s rains confined him to the house and March’s snows
and slush did the same: as the winter progressed his cheeks would grow
paler and his small blue eyes more wan. His father shook his head
doubtfully and grieved over little Herman’s melancholy situation. As
a result of these stops and gaps in his life Herman “is backward in
speech and somewhat slow in comprehension, but”--so Allan reports to
the Albany Gansevoorts, when Herman in the summer of 1826 is sent
to them on a visit--“you will find him, as far as he understands
men and things, both solid and profound and of a docile and amiable
disposition.”

One is grateful to Allan for using such unusual words as “solid” and
“profound” to describe a child of six: there must have been something
in Herman’s attitude or attack that warranted them: one cannot
altogether lay those adjectives to pompous speech or parental pride.
Is one going back too far if one finds the beginnings of Melville’s
reflective turn in these juvenile illnesses and confinements? The
periods of solitude in bed, the lassitude of recovery, the slow,
patient hours undistracted by physical activity, the rehearsing in the
mind of things done and things seen--these limitations make content
and docile little boys. John Ruskin amused himself, in an enforced
confinement without toys, by tracing minutely the patterns of the
parlour carpet: in such dull, quiet states is the beginning of a
meditative life.

A year later Herman was sent to his Great Uncle Thomas Melville at
Broadhall, near Pittsfield. Uncle Peter, at Albany, was still something
of a countryman: Uncle Thomas was a different sort, more fine, more
polished, with a touch of the old beau about him perhaps and no little
of the courtliness of aristocratic Paris: he had brought home a French
wife, and the undercurrent of French between the old fellow and his
spouse, when Herman was present and not supposed to understand, must
have teased him like a glimpse of a foreign port. Uncle Thomas had
nothing of the boor about him; his manners were mild and kindly, “with
a faded brocade of old French breeding” and a certain daintiness of
gesture, as when he would drop his rake and pause for a pinch of snuff,
that brought the reminder of a society less angular and impetuous than
that which jostled little boys in the streets of Manhattan. It was a
little pathetic, too, to see this fine old gentleman handling a rake or
patiently feeding a cow: he was so manifestly cut out for more urbane
companionship.

In the galaxy of uncles and grandparents and aunts, the patrician
element was dominant: every one of them knew what it was to be well
bred and cultivated in the arts and able to command men. There was
Grandfather Thomas at Boston, he whom Oliver Wendell Holmes poked a
little fun at in the trivial piece of verse called The Last Leaf: he
had been a major, too: he had fought well in the Revolution, too:
a dried-apple sort of man who had lost his juices and perhaps his
sweetness: let the times change as they would, he kept his shape, and
to define it, he wore cocked hat and knee-breeches up to the day of his
death: the eighteenth century was good enough for him. Then there was
Uncle John de Wulf, who dropped in miraculously one day to see Herman’s
father: an old man with hair as white as the pin-feathers on a swan’s
breast, and face as red as a cranberry: he used to sail to a place
called Archangel, and, more marvellous still, he had crossed Russia
with Captain Langsdorff, starting from the Sea of Okhotsk in Asia and
going to St. Petersburg, drawn by large dogs in a sled. What a hearty
old fellow he was! His clothes almost had the smell of the far-off
places he had visited. Ever memorable was that June day when his father
and Uncle John took Herman over to Staten Island, and they explored the
ruin of a fort that had been hastily erected by Governor Tompkins to
defend the city against the British in 1812. Uncle John was a mystery:
the crumbling walls of the fort were a mystery: but the sky above was
as blue and benign as the blue eyes of Herman’s mother, and in the
still air of noon, there was no sound but the twitter of birds, and a
great shout of delight and happiness in the little boy’s heart.

But Manhattan was always full of mysterious strangers and sunburnt
men with a rolling walk and a sea-bag or a chest jauntily carried on
one shoulder. New York did this for Herman Melville: it taught him to
be discontented with New York. There was Liverpool: there was London,
Havre, Paris. The trim little packets down at the docks went back and
forth between Liverpool and New York as regularly as clockwork, or very
nearly: the swift ones could make the journey, with a little luck, in
fifteen or sixteen days, and the best record for a sailing vessel was
considerably under this: they took away wheat and furs and passengers,
and they brought back cloth from the Midlands and carpets from Brussels
and gloves from Paris and knives from Sheffield and cheap gewgaws from
Birmingham and china from Burslem, or even from China itself--and more
passengers. One simply could not forget the wideness of the world in
this wide harbour, edged with green banks and feathery trees. Even some
of the furniture in the house had been made in Europe: Herman looked at
it again and again, wondering where the mahogany grew and whether the
workmen who made the furniture were still alive, and what they might
be doing with themselves now. His papa had been a great traveller; in
a score of years, as he methodically noted down, he had travelled “by
land 24,425 miles, by water 48,460 miles” and had been 643 days at sea;
and once Allan had lived two whole years in Paris. Every stone, every
mast, every stick of furniture, every print had a message for Herman:
Travel!

How the books and prints Allan had brought home fomented Herman’s
dreams! There were prints of French men-of-war, of French fishing
boats, with “high French-like land in one corner and a gray lighthouse
surmounting it. The waves were toasted brown and the whole picture
looked mellow and old. Perhaps a piece of it would taste good.” On
Saturdays, when school didn’t keep, and the rain imprisoned the
children in the house, Augusta and Gansevoort would take out a
French portfolio of coloured prints. More romance! Versailles: grand
drawing-rooms: fountains where writhing Tritons spouted gleefully:
rural scenes: shepherd boys and cottages: above all, there was a
picture of a great whale, as big as a ship, stuck full of harpoons,
and three boats sailing after it as fast as they could fly. Then, too,
there was a tall brown bookcase in the hall; behind its glass doors
one might see long rows of old books that had been printed in Paris
and London and Leipsic. There was the Spectator in six volumes with
“London” on the title page: there was a copy of D’Alembert in the
language Uncle Thomas used to speak to Tante Marie.

Some day Herman would grow up too: he would see the world and have
stories to tell about it: he would confront these marvellous pictures
and find out how real they were. How snug Herman felt on a winter
evening by the old sea-coal fire in Bleecker Street, when his father
would tell the children of monstrous waves at sea, waves mountain-high
and masts bending like twigs. Herman’s stomach curdled pleasantly
at the thought of it, or the equally dizzy but in some ways more
marvellous thought of looking over London from the ball of St. Paul’s,
and picking out the Monument and London Bridge and Blackfriars and
St. Dunstan’s crown, and Southwark, where Shakespeare used to act,
across the Thames. One would risk waves as high as mountains if one
had some assurance of reaching eventually this fine old land, full
of cathedrals and churches that were built before Columbus sailed to
America, and narrow, crooked streets without sidewalks, and fields and
woods that were as tidy as an American garden. That would be Albany or
Gansevoort, prodigiously magnified by age and association. How hard
to remember that little boys went to school in Europe, too, and were
punished if they didn’t learn their lessons. Did they study geography,
grammar, writing, speaking, and spelling there? Did they wear their
shirt collars turned over and tied with a black ribbon; and did their
papas allow them to wear boots, nice manly boots, instead of shoes? A
long breath; a sense of choking anticipation. The days pass so slowly.
Herman will be quite old--he may be twenty or twenty-five at this rate,
before he goes there!

In 1828 Allan’s position in society ballooned a little. He moved to
a house on Broadway, with a lot two hundred feet deep, and doubtless
more commodious rooms, for the rent was almost double that of his
old quarters; but whether he was losing hold of his prudence or
miscalculating, or whether circumstances that lay beyond his view were
altering his position as an importer, one does not quite know. It is
possible that, without being fully aware of his losses, he was shaken
by the financial crisis of 1826, or it may be that his importations
became inept, and the old lines were giving out. At all events, his
business became so bad that he moved to Albany in 1830, so that,
perhaps, he might take advantage of the Gansevoort connections. But he
moved too late. He became a bankrupt. In 1832, when Herman Melville was
only thirteen years old, his father gave up the struggle and died.

One suspects from the look of Allan’s portrait that he was a
fair-weather sailor and did not know what to do when the winds began
to blow adversely. He left his loving wife with eight children, and
only the family name to support them. No thanks to Allan that part
of the family name was Gansevoort; but although that name certainly
was an asset, and although Uncle Peter and his wife doubtless did all
that they felt was in their power to make things easier for the proud
widow and her orphans, the morals of bourgeois society are meant, like
Allan’s character, for smooth sailing, and when hardship overtakes
one branch of the family there is usually no such general sharing
round among the surviving groups as there is among the poor, who know
shipwreck perpetually. Herman was going to the Albany Academy when his
father died; he probably knew only by hints and murmurs and brooding
faces that a calamity was approaching--and he suddenly found himself a
half-orphan, with only the dear mild image of his father to comfort him.

This death before Herman had reached intellectual penetration did Allan
a kindness: he became “a shrine in the fresh-foliaged heart of [his
son] up to which he ascended by many tableted steps of remembrance;
and around which annually he ... hung fresh wreaths of a sweet holy
affection. In the shrine stood the perfect marble form of his departed
father, without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, serene ... fond
personification of perfect human goodness and virtue.” But this did
Herman himself an ill turn, for instead of permitting the august image
of his father to experience the vicissitudes of the weather, and ripen
into the natural disillusion that greets a son when he finds his deity
one in flesh with himself, equally mortal, equally fallible--instead
of this, the image became fixed, and when Herman outgrew his father,
he did not simply leave him behind: he rose up and annihilated him,
revenging himself upon the actual Allan for the perfect marble shadow
he had carried in his heart. In the asperities of fortune, Mrs.
Melville, with a hard row of her own to hoe, doubtless fell in Herman’s
heart because she had to face comparison with the marble portrait of
his father: even the best of mothers, under such circumstances, would
seem a little harsh and unkind, beside him who had by his bankruptcy
and his death escaped the dilemmas of both his creditors and his
family. At all events, Herman found himself at thirteen in the midst
of a hard-hearted world; and the shock of that transposition left him
breathless and weak.

The aunts and uncles were kind, of course; but they had cares and
interests of their own; and it needed dire extremity to move them to
action. Herman’s cousins continued to go to school: the cousins had
butter on their bread and cream on their porridge; but the Melvilles
must have known that sinking feeling that comes to a big family at
table when the eye takes in the bowl of stew or the little roast and
the nine plates that wait for it, and knows instantly that no thinning
of slices or spreading of gravy will make the portions large enough
to satisfy a healthy appetite. The summers in the country, the long,
lazy summers, were over: it was winter all the year round. Gansevoort,
dogged, patient, resourceful fellow that he was, opened a hat store
on Market Street, and as soon as Herman was fifteen, he got a job as
clerk in the New York State Bank, of which Uncle Peter was one of the
trustees: a year later, Herman shifted over to the hat store, where
Gansevoort now needed an extra clerk.

This was not the way, Herman doubtless felt, that one’s adolescence
should open. The son of a gentleman can, it is true, remain a
gentleman, even when he adds figures or sells hats: in America, thank
Heaven, every trade is an honorable trade; but there is something wrong
with a world that gives the young Gansevoorts all that their hearts
ask for, and that draws the Melvilles up sharply wherever they turn.
All Herman’s ambitions, to go to college, to become an orator, like
Patrick Henry, to become a great traveller, like Uncle John or Papa, or
to become a great general, like Grandfather Peter, to live in Paris,
like Uncle Thomas, to make the name of Melville somehow glorious--all
these dreams were like great bonfires suddenly drenched by cold rain.
He was as unambitious as a man of sixty. Such careers do not begin
in a hat shop. The stream of life had suddenly stopped; its margins
became stagnant; there was no way out; one might add columns or sell
hats forever. One’s uncles and cousins didn’t care. One’s friends only
said they cared. Cold, bitter cold as December, the world seemed to
young Melville. Fifteen years later, he still felt the bitterness and
sting. He had only a lonely pride to wrap around him; and the world,
not seeing any money in the pockets of that garment, smiled a little
scornfully, and wondered whether it might not be just as well to leave
such wrappings off!

At fifteen a lad can do little more than earn his keep; there was no
question of Herman’s helping to support the family, as Gansevoort
patiently did. Some one must have observed that things were not going
well with Herman in the hat shop; or perhaps there were not enough
hats to be sold to make his presence necessary; in the summer of 1836
he lived with his Uncle Thomas at Broadhall, helping in the hayfields;
and when autumn came he taught school--one needed muscle rather than
letters for teaching school in those days--in the Sykes district,
near by. He spent the winter in the shadow of Washington Mountain,
and when spring came, and his pupils were needed in the fields, he
himself felt a desperate longing to see his mother and his sisters
again, and Gansevoort and young Allan and little Tom; so, presently,
he went back to Lansingburgh, a little river village just outside of
Albany, where his mother had moved. Scarcely had the welcome worn off
before he realized that his existence was a problem: he was another
mouth to feed! What was he going to do? Perhaps Uncle Peter would get
him another chance at the bank. Not that? Well, what then? Gansevoort
is doing bravely: Allan is already thinking of the law: every one must
help.

Young Melville felt the world closing in on him. He had no answer to
the major problem of civilization, namely, how to get a living without
losing all the other things that make life joyful and significant.
Herman’s contemporaries, with all their factories and mines and
new-fangled machinery and speeding ships, were perhaps as far from
solving this problem as any civilization has yet been: the only people
who were contented with the current solution were those whose narrow
aims and limited personalities were completely fulfilled by the
business routine itself. Herman was not of that cast, so he must invent
an alternative. If he cannot go to college, he must at least have that
other advantage of an education: the Grand Tour. He will be his own
tutor, guide, philosopher, and friend. Why should he not ship for a
trip to Europe? He would not merely earn his keep; but at the end of
his voyage he might have a little to spare. Europe itself was at least
a goal, or the promise of a goal; not a dead-end, like the bank.

Herman had not spent his early years in Manhattan for nothing. He
doubtless knew, up in the fresh waters of Albany, the nostalgia of
desiring just a whiff of salt-laden wind: when he looked at the little
glass ship in the square case that stood on the claw-footed Dutch table
in one corner of the sitting-room, that admirable ship, with masts,
yards, ropes, all of glass, and little glass sailors on the rigging,
and a glass figurehead, and a glass captain smoking a glass cigar
and looking at the world with a glassy eye, all his desires somehow
crystallized into a sudden overwhelming passion to be on the sea, and
to wake up some early moonlit morning in a distant port, with dawn
breaking over strange roofs. His father’s books reinforced his dreams;
and he was still bound by his father’s heroic image and wanted to
follow it, ancient guidebook in hand, through the streets of Liverpool.
That would somehow establish a connection with those better and happier
times before bankruptcy, death, penurious circumstances, had cut like
flint through the soles of paper boots. In England, he might recapture
his magnificent ambitions; or, if not that, he would at least return
to Lansingburgh with a badge of cosmopolitan distinction: his sisters,
Fanny, Helen, Kate, Augusta, would be proud of him; and people might
say when he passed: Do you know that Herman Melville has been to
Europe? Yes, and he’s only seventeen!

It sounded daring and adventurous; but there was a brackish taste in
the going. At the outset of the journey, on the boat to New York, he
did not have enough fare for the trip and had to brazen his poverty
out: his sole wealth was a fowling-piece his brother had given him,
to sell in New York for spending-money; with the gun and a dollar and
his brother’s cast-off shooting-jacket, he set out to face the world.
He felt himself driven out into the desert, an infant Ishmael, without
a maternal Hagar to accompany him and give him comfort. Riches and
poverty stared at him at his very first venture alone beyond the family
nest: the jovial party in the saloon, gay, flushed over wine, crackers,
cheese, cigars--and himself on deck, collar up, outcast, facing the
rain! “Talk not of the bitterness of middle-age and after life,”
exclaimed Melville in Redburn, “a boy can feel all that, and much more,
when upon his young soul the mildew has fallen; and the fruit, which
with others is only blasted after ripeness, with him is nipped in the
first blossom and bud. And never again can such blights be made good;
they strike in too deep, and leave such a scar that the air of Paradise
might not erase it.”

Melville’s downheartedness was deepened by contrast with the natural
expectations which he had formed in the balmier period of his
childhood, and which people somehow kept up, for form, to go with the
family name. His sisters told all inquiring friends that Herman had
gone abroad, as if just for his health and education with no expense
spared; and when he applied for a place on ship, under the tutelage
of a young family friend, his friend’s high talk about Melville’s
name and connections enabled the sly captain to withhold an advance
in pay--because the family would attend to that! The pretensions were
shabby ones; they brought Herman nothing but an insufficient supply of
clothes and an empty stomach in the day that elapsed between his saying
good-bye to his friend and leaving port. That was the irony of having a
proud name and a poor purse, of following in his father’s footsteps and
sleeping in the forecastle instead of a stateroom.

Thirty days on the water will take the wind out of these pretensions.
Herman will forget that he is a Melville and a Gansevoort and a pupil
of the Albany Academy and a relative of a regent and a general, and
a reader of books, and a member of the Juvenile Total Abstinence
Association and the Anti-smoking Society; he will lose many of the
little refinements of birth and breeding; but the loss will not leave
him destitute. In exchange, he will learn the ropes, and find out what
men are like in the rough.

Every boat is a little world, every ship a Noah’s ark; but the vessel
on which Melville worked his way contained more than its share,
perhaps, of the battered and unvarnished furniture of human society,
from Captain Riga himself, sleek, bland, affable, cunning, a lap-dog
in port and a mastiff at sea, to Jackson, the depraved wreck of a man
who, not through any physical strength, but through a sort of Satanic
energy, ruled the forecastle.

The contrast between the sisterly society of Lansingburgh, clean and
very chaste, and the ugly, dirty, promiscuously vile company of the
forecastle was as acute as the difference between the feather-beds of
his home and the hard, bug-ridden planks on which he was forced to
sleep. A greenhorn in men, a greenhorn in work, Herman met face to
face the uncouth cruelty of men whose own hides had been blackened by
hardship and mean living, and who flayed every new comer until he was
equally able to stand the misery and depression.

With the exception of Jackson, these men were not innately unkind: they
had simply been brutalized. The Greenlander brought Herman Jamaica rum
the first time he was seasick, helping him to recover and incidentally
making him break his pledge of total abstinence; and though they
resented his nice language and his earnest moralizings, which marked
him off as a member of that inimical social class out of which
captains are hewn, they gradually learned to tolerate him when they
found that he was ready to work with a will and tumble out of his bunk
at call. But, at best, it was hard for Melville to get the hang of the
ship’s ways: climbing aloft was terrifying at first; and slushing down
the masts and spars with old grease was disgusting. He would have liked
to chat with Captain Riga in a friendly way and discuss his prospects
in the world and what one might find at Liverpool: surely, a gentleman
would appreciate the plight of a gentleman’s son, and perhaps he would
even cozen Herman with something tasty to eat, as an offset to the
hogwash and hard-tack of the forecastle: Herman was a little surprised
when he dolled himself up for a sociable call to find the mate stamping
with astonished outrage when he discovered Herman’s purpose in time to
turn him back. What a disillusion to find that there is an impassable
gulf between skipper and crew, a gulf that even gentlemen’s sons cannot
cross on any pretext!

There were few books on board: a dream-book and a copy of the Wealth
of Nations which his brother’s friend had solicitously given Herman,
for his self-improvement, on the eve of departure; but the sailors, who
had been to Gibraltar and Canton and Valparaiso and Bombay, just as
Herman might have ventured to Coenties Slip or Hoboken, were a complete
library of Voyages and Travels around the World. The names they uttered
in such a casual way were magical; but the world they moved in was
grim and formidable; a hand with delirium tremens jumped overboard and
drowned before the boat was much beyond the Hook: shipwreck, mouldy
bread, hard weather, mutiny, did not sound so romantic if one had been
in the thick of it; and as for the sailors’ fonder recollections,
these stories were as tasteless as duff: did the bar-girl in Hamburg
have blue eyes or black: what a nice time Max the Greenlander had had
with the young ladies in Stockholm: who kept the Foul Anchor Tavern at
Portsmouth at such and such a time? They had seen so much and taken
in so little, travelling with their bodies, not with their minds: they
knew chiefly the sameness of sailor’s stews and purchased caresses, and
to them one city was like another and one girl was like another: the
best port was that which promised the longest and fullest oblivion.

The ship itself was the strangest port of all. Pails were buckets:
pegs were plugs: floors were decks: “Yes, sir” was “Ay, ay, sir”: in
addition to all these new habits and ways, one must grasp new handles
for old ones. The ropes needed a dictionary in themselves: every knot
and reef had a name. The accent of this world was gruff: Herman had
never dreamed that a malign, cur-faced rascal like Jackson, who swore
he would swipe him off the rigging if Herman got in his way, could
exist in real life; nor could he have imagined the uncouthness of men
to whom life at its best was simply hard work, hard words, hard fare,
fornication, drunkenness and sleep. Herman was shocked: but the sea
gave him what the sailors did not: there were good moments when the
sails were hoisted to the breeze and the ship responded: every mast and
timber seemed to have a pulse in it, and as the ship picked up speed,
he felt a wild exulting in his own heart. “Then,” says Melville, “I was
first conscious of a wonderful thing in me, that responded to all the
wild commotion of the outer world and went reeling on and on with the
planets in their orbits, and was lost in one delirious throb at the
center of the All. A wild bubbling and bursting at my heart, as if a
hidden spring gushed out there.... But how soon these raptures abated,
when after a brief idle interval, we were again set to work, and I had
a vile commission to clean out the chicken coops, and make up the beds
of the pigs in the long boats. Miserable dog’s life is this of the sea:
commanded like a slave and set to work like an ass: vulgar and brutal
men lording it over me, as if I were an African in Alabama.”

What a contrast Herman Melville felt between the wholeness he felt
within, in response to wind and sea and sky, and the crass deformities
of the world outside, among cruel men, grasping men, lecherous men,
men sick and stunted in the soul, like the strayed seeds that creep
up through some cranny in the barnyard floor and become livid spindly
plants, unnourished by sunlight! It was a trial; but not altogether a
fruitless one. He had it in him to deal easily with life aboard ship.
Ill provided with clothes, a shrinking moleskin jacket being his chief
protection, his body was sound enough to furnish its own warmth. “I
frequently turned into my bunk soaking wet, and turned out again piping
hot and smoking like a roasted sirloin, and yet was never the worse
for it; for then I bore a charmed life of youth and health, and was
dangerproof to bodily ill.” This testing and priming of his physical
capacities was a great experience for Melville; and though in the end
he was to pay a heavy penalty for excessive exposure, the confidence he
achieved must have toned up his whole being.

Even dirty work and humiliation have, in retrospect, a power to sustain
a man: for if one has faced the worst indignities of life, if one knows
what it is to be poor and hungry and cold and friendless and beset by
hostile men, nothing that lies in store can really daunt one: once
one has touched the extremities of pain and misery, all the lesser
tribulations of life become small. Perhaps the best proof of this fact
is Melville’s small concern for money or authority in later life,
although it was poverty that drove him to sea, and only a position of
power on ship would have lifted his lot. He never went after these
things, never sought to improve his condition by their aid; and though
in the end, he struggled for a living and got it dearly, he never
sought for more than a living: he did not seek compensation in wealth,
ease, luxury, power.

At last Melville and the Highlander reached Liverpool. His anxieties
were at rest for six weeks: he was even freed from the miserable
pot-scrapings of the black cook, for no fire could be lighted in the
galleys while the ship was at dock; and the whole crew dined at the
Baltimore Clipper. England at last: a guest in an English tavern!

“I examined the place attentively,” writes Melville. “It was a long,
narrow little room, with one small arched window with red curtains,
looking out upon a smoky, untidy yard, bounded by a dingy brick wall,
the top of which was horrible with pieces of broken old bottles,
stuck into the mortar. A dull lamp swung overhead, placed in a wooden
ship suspended from the ceiling. The walls were covered with a
paper, representing an endless succession of vessels of all nations
continually circumnavigating the apartment. By way of a pictorial
mainsail to one of these ships, a map was hung against it.... From the
street came a confused uproar of ballad-singers, bawling women, babies,
and drunken sailors.”--And this is England?

It is not by dreams that people are defrauded, so much as by misplaced
pictures of reality. A dream represents an inner urge and movement;
presently it may work through to an objective manifestation; defeated
in one place, it attacks in another; and though its final form may be
far from the image originally projected, it does not disappoint one
like the comparison of an actuality with some previous description.
It was so with Melville in Liverpool: he eventually visited England
again and found its abbeys and its Lord Mayors’ processions; but when
he followed his father’s steps in Liverpool, down to Riddough’s Hotel
where Allan had once stayed, he was completely defeated: the hotel was
gone, and the city that had seemed so great and magnificent in the
guidebook, a generation before, had been swallowed up by a vaster town:
the pool itself, where ships once floated, had been filled up; even the
pretence of age was lacking, and mid the old shops and warehouses of
the waterfront, nothing seemed nearly so venerable as the gable-pointed
mansion of the Gansevoorts, whose bricks had been brought from the
Netherlands long before the Revolutionary War.

Disappointed, Melville nevertheless continued to explore the city. He
went aboard an Indian merchantman, built by Indian shipwrights out of
Oriental wood, manned by Malays, Burmese, and Cingalese: he visited
the floating chapel: he saw the German immigrants about to depart for
America: he was fascinated by the little salt droghers, with broad bows
painted black, and red sails: he even ventured out into the countryside
one fine morning, and got his first glimpse of the English landscape
and the English country people he had dreamed of. These were the
relatively bright lights in the picture: but there were ugly spots,
too: the villainous brothels and doss-houses, where murders were venial
sins and a stale putrid odour hung over every doorway: there were the
dock-wall beggars, full of sores, misery, and monstrous deformations:
worst of all, there was a narrow street, lined with cotton warehouses,
where the sunniest noon became twilight, and where, in an open vault,
communicating with deeper cellars, Melville came upon a motionless
figure of a woman, with a dead baby at her breast, and two blue-skinned
children clinging to her, slowly starving to death, starving, dying,
finally passing out, with not a soul except Melville to offer succour,
despite his pleas with constables and watchmen, until the stench
of their dead bodies demanded their removal and the application of
quick-lime to the spot where they had perished. A fine, prosperous
world! A great, progressive civilization!

Ironically, the city Melville had dreamt much about, London, he saw
only in a baffling nocturnal glimpse, behind the draperies of a
gambling-house, in the company of a new shipmate, a blade of good
family, who made friends with Melville and took a last opportunity,
with Herman for companion, to retrieve his fortunes. The whole journey
to London brought nothing more than the tantalizing glimpses one gets
from a cab--not Westminster nor Whitehall nor Regent Street. Mr.
Weaver has cast doubts on this adventure in London: he regards it
as one of the few wide inventions Melville made in Redburn: but to
me its very vagueness and mysteriousness smells of reality. That an
unsophisticated boy should be as confused by a gambling-house as by
Aladdin’s palace is quite natural: and if anything else were wanted
to show that the trip was real and the disappointment cutting, one
need but remember that Melville treated Israel Potter to a similar
experience on his first visit to Paris, although there is no foundation
in Israel’s story for his being confined to his room until the time
comes for departure.

The six weeks that confronted Melville with all these scenes and people
and apparitions were an essential part of his education. Indeed, there
is no better experience for a well-prepared lad than to be thrown in
a strange city, not too remote in habit and culture from his original
home, with long days for exploration, experience, meditation. Melville
regretted in later life that he had not encountered misery and bad
fortune by degrees; and very possibly, the shock of finding himself
suddenly in the midst of this bestiality, cruelty, degradation, was
too much for him: the inoculation with evil was almost as bad, it may
be, as the disease itself: it certainly must have cast a shadow on his
innocence, and it may even explain, in some degree, the inhibitions
and regressions of his own sexual life--since his first glimpse of sex
was in association with these filthy dives and their rotting inmates.
But, even with these allowances, such an education in men and cities is
better than the non-education given by textbooks and academic treatises
and unrelated “knowledge.” Between the Albany Academy or the Harvard
College of 1837 and Liverpool, the latter had incomparably more to
offer to a lad already sufficiently used to books to make constant
reference to them. If a whaling-ship proved finally to be Melville’s
university, Liverpool was at least an admirable preparatory school.

When the Highlander started home, it must have seemed to Melville that
everything would be smooth sailing: but one of the new crew was a dead
man, shipped aboard by a crimp, the ship met head winds and made no
progress: malignant fever broke out in the steerage: Jackson, with the
yellow skin, the snaky eyes, the projecting bones, the curse against
goodness and beauty, died: and when the ship finally got to port, with
Melville still in sound health, the wily Captain Riga buncoed him of
his wages. Four months of this sort of thing was quite enough. Melville
returned to Lansingburgh. For the next three years, he lived among the
civilities, and taught school, at Greenbush, now East Albany, and at
Pittsfield.

Melville’s growth was slow, and we have little evidence of what took
place during these three years. School teaching must have given him
leisure, and one can infer from two prose pieces, written in 1839, and
published in the Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser, that
his dreams and broodings were turned, not to the wretchedness of his
adventure, but to the susceptibilities and urges of adolescence.

What do we know of Melville’s early sexual life? In Pierre, Melville
pictures a passionate attachment between his hero and one of his
boy-cousins, and describes how it undergoes the normal sublimation
through erotic transfer to a person of the opposite sex: Melville’s
sharp observation here anticipated by many years the discoveries of
the analytic psychologists. When, in Redburn, we find the youthful
hero remembering the three red-cheeked maids who lived in the cottage
where he was given bread and milk, we cannot doubt that he made the
usual easy transition to a maturer state of sexuality. If we needed
any further evidence, these surviving clippings would be sufficient:
he pictures himself, beautiful as Apollo, “dressed in a style which
would extort admiration from a Brummel, belted round with self-esteem,
and sallying in dizzy triumph among the ladies--complimenting one,
exchanging repartee with another, tapping this one under the chin,
and clasping this one around the waist; and finally, winding up the
operation by kissing round the circle.”

It was a grandiose dream: under the cover of a jocose style, he tossed
it off in public. “By my halidome, sir,” he cries, “this same village
of Lansingburgh contains within its pretty limits as fair a set of
blushing damsels as one would wish to look upon on a dreamy summer
day.” Young Melville courted by the wholesale; he made love to the
village; reluctantly, he narrowed down his vision to a paltry three
girls, and dwelt for a little while upon their seraphic beauty. It was
high-flown silliness; and the second Fragment from a Writing-Desk, as
these pieces were called, went even further, in the manner of Thomas
Moore and Edgar Poe, painting a mysterious houri whom he followed to
her lair. She was properly mournful and lost in melancholy reverie--all
young ladies, in Melville’s day, arrayed themselves in a mysterious
sorrow, as an aphrodisiac, so that the tender hand of solace might
achieve in compassion what it dared not snatch by brasher methods--and
one leaves Herman, brain spinning and faculties gone, kneeling before
his Divinity.

This is a correct and roundabout way of announcing that he has kissed
a pretty hussy--or perhaps it is a covert expression of more deeply
pent-up desires; but one must remember that, when Melville was twenty,
Emerson, discussing the sexual life of young men with his literary
acquaintances in England, declared that the majority of young men in
America were chaste before marriage; and whether he was right or not
about the majority--Whitman gives us a different picture of city morals
among more plebeian contemporaries--there is little reason, in the
general state of morals and opinion and social censure, to doubt that
Melville was abstinent sexually during his nonage. When he wrote these
pieces, woman was still a divinity to him; and, like his sisters, like
his mother, she was still unapproachable.

These Fragments from a Writing-Desk do not merely throw a light upon
Melville in an amorous mood; they also are full of hints about his
reading and his preparation for authorship.

The manner of these essays was perfervid and exaggerated; the language
was the high-flown journalese that Poe never entirely conquered in
his short stories; and every word was turned before the mirror, and
powdered and ribboned, before being committed to the air. He had
nothing to write about except tenuous threads of dream, or rather, his
disguise of their warmer reality. Thoreau, at twenty, had ideas that
would not have done the man an injustice at forty; not so Melville.
Melville, like Whitman, resembled a deep well: he had to pump all sorts
of muddy water and stale slush to the surface before the crystal liquid
began to run. He was fortunate, however, in belonging to a social
class that had libraries: he alluded in these pieces to Burton, Lord
Chesterfield, Milton, Byron, Shakespeare, Scott, Coleridge, and we have
independent knowledge, through a letter written to a Cooper Celebration
Committee, that he had read widely at this period in his best early
American contemporary--whom he always valued. These mooning days by the
river, and these lone nights of candlelight, were days and nights of
preparation. His swollen language, his simpering allusions to beauty,
his self-consciousness, were vices, but not unpromising ones: better
all these flourishes, to begin with, than a wooden mould and a more
definite set of limitations.

There is nothing in print between these press clippings and Melville’s
first book, Typee; but from the great clarification of language,
and the abandonment of most of his weaknesses, it is plain that
Melville must have had much practice, if not at writing, then at
ample conversation and oral story-telling. Though Melville dated his
growth from his twenty-fifth year, as he told Hawthorne, it actually
began at an earlier period: it was self-consciousness that came into
existence at twenty-five. The growth was well started with a “solid and
profound” boy of six; and at twenty, the down of intellectual manhood
was already thickening into a beard. Like Pierre, he was an omnivorous
and lynx-eyed reader. With all these qualities leafing and budding, we
shall not be surprised at an early blossom.

CHAPTER TWO: SEA-DRIFT

In 1840, Richard Henry Dana published Two Years Before the Mast. It was
an account of a long voyage around the Horn, and various experiences
in the Spanish settlements of California where American boats traded
Yankee calico and trinkets for hides. Written from the point of view
of a sailor, Dana’s story gave no picture of unalloyed pleasure and
adventure; but there was quite enough exotic charm in the California
picture to make a healthy, adventurous lad forget about the floggings,
the brutality, the heroic difficulties of rounding Cape Horn. One has
no proof that Melville read Dana’s book as soon as it came out; but
nine years later, he referred to the author as “my friend Dana,” and
the chances are that Two Years Before the Mast gave Melville just the
fillip he needed to determine on a wider, farther jaunt into the South
Seas.

The wildness and misanthropy of Melville’s joining a whaler in the
depth of winter, with the certainty of having to endure a long
sea-voyage, may easily be exaggerated: it would be a mistake, I think,
to apply to the boyish impulse, which he shared with a thousand other
mothers’ sons, the dark words of the opening chapter of Moby-Dick:
“With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword;
I quietly take to the ship.” In Moby-Dick Melville was supremely
an artist, with an eye constantly upon the dramatic values of his
story; and in the very first paragraph, no, in the first sentence, he
establishes the mood in which the whole book is written. Every bit
of factual material Melville uses there is bent to his purpose; and
though Moby-Dick is biographic of Melville at thirty-two, in the
sense that it discloses every nook and corner of his imagination--one
must not make the mistake of reading back from it into the Melville of
twenty-one, strapping, healthy, restless, impetuous, and blind to his
deepest impulses.

The only certainly objective part of his account of himself in
Moby-Dick is his announcement that he had little or no money in his
purse, and nothing particular to interest him on shore. Melville was
preparing himself for something; but he was not at all sure for what;
and in those distracted hours before the feet are set definitely upon
the road to maturity he chose the most obvious goal before him--that
of adventure in the more watery part of the world. He did not run away
from home: he was already disattached. He did not retreat from hard
“reality”: his voyage to Liverpool had taught him what to expect as
a common seaman. In the light of Melville’s earliest promptings and
suggestions, his father’s trips, his uncle’s arduous voyages, his own
infinite curiosities, stirred by the strange sails and sailors he had
encountered in Liverpool, there is nothing mysterious in either his
mood or his purpose. The “Invisible Police Officer of the Fates” knew
more about the reason for Melville’s voyage than he himself did.

The whale, perhaps, had already seized Melville’s imagination;
he hints as much in the first chapter of Moby-Dick; but one must
accept this hint circumspectly; for in Redburn Melville tells how
disappointed he was when he first saw whales from the Highlander.
“Can these be whales? Monstrous whales such as I had heard of!... It
was a bitter disappointment, from which one was long in recovering. I
lost all respect for whales!... From that day whales fell greatly in
my estimation.” I suspect that the whale was important; but that the
distant voyage mattered even more. At all events, Melville, some time
in December, 1840, made his way to New Bedford, and on January 3, 1841,
he left land behind him.

New Bedford, a town of twelve thousand inhabitants, was already the
centre of the whaling industry, a port full of industry and piety,
great columned mansions set out on lawns, and benign elms, and iron
greyhounds guardedly couchant, and ship-chandler’s shops and dingy
little nautical inns, and a rough waterfront that was not altogether
puritanic nor of New England. Spots and patches of that New Bedford
remain today: the great mansions on County Street are still impressive:
the iron greyhounds and deer are unabashed: even the newer streets,
except around the dingy factory-slums, are lined with trees: the
Seamen’s Bethel is bright with new paint and elegant graining: the
chowders and the fish dishes are above the average, especially in
the poorer restaurants: but around these patches stretch the dismal
shopping thoroughfares, and the dismaler factory districts where an
impoverished population, French-Canadian, Portuguese, Italian, minds
the looms of vast prison-factories, dumped by the laws of chance and
political economy over a lawless landscape of dingy wooden houses.

The whale has become a memory. The gold rush of 1849 resulted in
a vast secession of whaling-men, lured from the South Seas to the
gold-diggings, and the discovery of petroleum in 1859 introduced a
cheaper substitute for whale-oil, whilst the manufacture of spring
steel took the place of whalebone for corsets. The Confederate blockade
under Simms and the sinking of the Stone Whaling Fleet in Charleston
Harbor, whose failure Melville was in due time mournfully to celebrate,
resulted in a large loss of tonnage; and, finally, the manufacture of
cotton for profit attracted capital more readily than the uncertainties
of the sea. All these things heaped together, and the mechanical
improvements of harpoons and harpoon guns and steam vessels and
launches, could not offset them.

Melville saw the whale’s day of glory; and that day was soon done.
There is a real whaling-ship embedded in concrete at South Dartmouth,
and an admirable reproduction on half scale in the Historical
Society’s museum; there are numerous prints and whaling treatises in
the New Bedford Library--Moby-Dick itself is bound in whaleskin, first
edition--and there is a tank labelled sperm oil on the waterfront:
in the museum collections there are models, log books, trinkets,
ornaments, scrimshaw work, tools, harpoons, Polynesian and African
loot, and names like Pease and Coffin still survive, in positions
more or less commanding, in New Bedford, and on Marthas Vineyard and
Nantucket. But there are no whaling-ships in New Bedford now: the
Norwegians maintain the trade; for the American masters of Leviathan
abandoned their calling in the years after the Civil War. The whaler is
to New Bedford what the Conestoga wagon is to Pittsburgh--a romantic
compensation for a dreary and untidy and depauperate provincial life.

The vessel on which Melville shipped was the Acushnet of Fairhaven,
sailing from New Bedford. The master was Valentine Pease; but one
must not look for Queequeg and Tashtego and the Parsee in this boat:
the motley crew of the Pequod was, perhaps, a possibility; but the
actual ship list shows twenty-one Americans, three Portuguese, and one
Englishman. For the first time, Herman Melville enters our vision with
a definable external appearance: forgetting the beard of his later
portraits, one is conscious of a small straight nose, high forehead,
full, mobile, sensitive lips, and, most curious of all, remote, cold
green-blue eyes, that, in this big head, below a shock of dark-brown
hair, have the canny, speculative look of the whale himself. His
complexion in the ship’s list is given as dark--which may merely mean
that he was used to the outdoors and well tanned by the sun. His
height, at twenty-one, was five feet nine and a half inches.

This is the sober-hilarious lad who scanned the tablets in the Seaman’s
Bethel and noted all the young men who had met their death fighting
weather and whales on remote seas: this is the young writer who
listened to the pedantic-looking Chaplain Mudge, and transformed him,
through later acquaintance with Father Taylor of Boston, into Father
Mapple in Moby-Dick: this is the secretive fellow who put down his
place of residence as Fairhaven, the little village across the river
where he had taken lodging. Does he sometimes look dour and grim around
the mouth? Perhaps; but he is as elastic as an india-rubber ball, and
he will bound back with a joke and a smile: and it will take more than
a little jouncing to break down that quizzical reserve.

We leave Herman Melville in New Bedford, and we do not really pick
him up again until he is in the South Seas, sailing towards the line,
one of a dissatisfied company on a harsh, uncomfortable ship, under a
brutal master. The ship stopped at Rio de Janeiro and at the Galapagos
Islands; and probably on the coast of Peru: there he picked up sights
and yarns that served him well in a later period; and in spite of the
bad food, the mean-spirited crew, and the inhuman treatment of the
sick, conditions about which every decent non-professional writer,
like Browne and Dana, justly complained, the voyage had not been a
lost one. For the man there are misfortunes, bitter ones, laming
ones. For the writer, who wishes to heighten his consciousness of
existence, to relive other men’s lives, and to share with them the
deeper realities of their experience, there are no misfortunes. Every
disappointment, every trial, has its revelation. The crew of the
Acushnet was an ill-fated one: ten years later Melville found out from
one of them, Hubbard, what had become of them: the record is one of
desertion, suicide, murder, or a miserable death from syphilis; and the
ship itself foundered in the very year he wrote Moby-Dick: but this
catalogue of misfortunes does not exhaust the matter.

Melville undoubtedly chafed at the monotonous routine and the salt
horse and hard-tack, varied though it might occasionally be by bananas
and breadfruit: in the meanwhile, however, he had jumped into boats and
gone in pursuit of the whale: he had helped to dismember its carcass:
he had chopped up blubber and watched the fire in the try-works:
he had observed his shipmates whittling and carving in wood and in
whalebone all sorts of curious tools, ornaments, and fetiches, work
that was often done with a more sure aesthetic touch than any of the
contemporary arts could show in America; for these whaling implements,
particularly the jagging-wheels, are worthy to have a place alongside
the handsome coverlets and the hooked rugs of the forties in a museum
of American folk-arts. Weaving mats, with the slow methodical motion of
the weaver, his thoughts would solidify into new patterns; or aloft,
on lookout duty, in the bland air of the tropics, he would gaze into
his own mind, still, gently heaving, fathomless, like the waters around
him, and be lulled into a feeling of oneness with the circumambient
world, not with the ship’s crew or the captain, but that remoter world
of infinite space and unthinkable time which somehow, in these moments
of solitude, seemed so much nearer to him.

These thoughts have no images and are not framed in words; Melville
must wait long before, in any way, he can find word or fable to express
them; but though he himself, as observer, was no more conscious of his
growth than a child is conscious of the passage of stars in the sky
during the daytime, these were growing-days for him. The routine of
the ship was in itself a varied education: every sailor was a bit of a
musician and a weaver and an artist and a ropemaker and a blacksmith
and an athlete: thought, when it existed at all, had the benefit of
those manual exercises and bodily rhythms which, quite literally,
increase a man’s grasp and range--a true gymnosophy.

“If by any possibility,” Melville said in Moby-Dick, “there be any as
yet undiscovered thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute
in that small but high hushed world which I might not unreasonably be
ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a
man might rather have done than have left undone; if, at my death, my
executors or more properly my creditors find any precious MSS. in my
desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory
to whaling; for a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”
Melville was not wide of the mark: these broad-bottomed ships, slow,
even sailers, cut off for six months at a time from the distractions of
any port, were in truth the best of universities for a young man, still
not out of adolescence, to retire into: they were a sort of profane
cloister. The regular routine, the monastic discipline, yes, even the
restricted diet, were all favourable to a vivid and purposive inner
life--all the more so because a lick of bad weather or a sudden chase
after the whale confronted Melville peremptorily with the demands of
reality, and broke the routine sufficiently to avoid the torpor and
complacent lassitude that dogs all restricted lives.

As the Acushnet approached the Marquesas in order to renew water and
to procure fresh food, Melville made plans to escape her. Conditions
were intolerable, and he had learned that there was no definite
terminus to the voyage: he had already endured a year and a half, and
he might have to hover somewhere between the tropics and the poles, if
the oil barrels did not fill up quickly enough, for three, four, even
five years. At twenty-two, he did not dare to squander so much of his
life: he had ties at home, and did not wish to be buried in a floating
coffin. Perhaps this tedious prospect determined Melville as much as
the inhuman treatment; perhaps the sight of Nukuheva itself, its bold
headlands, with the surf beating against the cliffs, its deep inlets
with thickly wooded valleys, separated by the bare spurs of formidable
mountains, made him ache for solid ground. There is a form of
homesickness one must call land-sickness, and perhaps Melville had it.
Did the naked maidens who swam aboard when the ship came to port make
the scene seem doubly attractive to Melville and to his companion,
Toby? Was he pleasantly shocked and intoxicated by those brown bodies,
and stirred, as well as repelled, by the open debauchery of the nights
they spent aboard ship? Melville does not tell us. The cruelty and the
hardship and the tedium and the green jungle and the abrupt mountains
and the brown maidens doubtless all played a part in the adventure
and gave heat to it: at all events, Toby and Melville made speedy
use of their shore-leave, and set out to escape for a while into the
interior, till they could make away again on another ship. Their plans
miscarried. After dire hardship, sleeping in dank ravines, leaping from
tree-trunk to tree-top down gorges, they found themselves in the valley
of a dreaded tribe, the Typees, whose very name meant eater of men.

Melville stayed among the Typees for four months, with a leg that
had become lamed and infected in making the escape. The people he
was thrown among were suspected of ferocity and cannibalism; that
is to say, like a good many savage tribes, they fought a species of
extravagant and ritualistic battle with their enemies, the Happars, and
retired from the fray usually fit enough in flesh and limb to fight
another time. As for the cannibalism, at the very end of his stay,
Melville had reason to think that one of their feasts was culminating
in the extreme delicacy of Long Pig: but up to that time he had had an
exemplary vegetarian diet of breadfruit and cocoanut and various fine
elaborations of these staples; and but for the anxiety of losing Toby,
who disappeared completely, after going in search of medical aid for
Melville’s leg, and the further anxiety of not knowing whether he was
being treated as a distinguished visitor, entitled to the services of
a young man-servant, Kory-Kory, and royal attentions from Mehevi, the
chief, or whether he was being fattened for the sacrifice, like the
god-apparent among the Aztecs--but for these things all was serene.

If life were merely a matter of getting a living in the physical
sense, as Western Civilization had come largely to believe, then the
Typees were in a higher state of civilization than New York or Paris
or London had achieved. The Typees were a sort of perpetually endowed
leisure class; their food fell from the trees; their water flowed
at their feet; their garments, of pounded bark, tappa, were a sport
to make, and with less attention than they would have to give to a
fitting from a Bond Street tailor or dressmaker, they were made; their
days were torpid and free from care, like those of a _rentier_ with
gilt-edge government bonds; and though they had ceremonial observances
and religious feasts and wars, the symbol never stood between them and
their physical life: they did not whine about their sins and cry to
God: even in their sexual life, there was rivalry without jealousy,
and marriage without physical fidelity: almost the only desire they
were accustomed to repress was the typical Western desire for a little
repression!

The first whaleman Melville had ever met, on his trip to Liverpool,
had raised a doubt about the value of civilized society. “And what’s
the use of being snivelized,” he used to say. “Snivelized chaps only
learns the way to take on ’bout life and snivel. You don’t see any
Methodist chaps feelin’ dreadful about their souls; you don’t see any
damned beggars and pesky constables in Madagasky.... Blast Ameriky, I
say.” Melville could appreciate this among the Typees. “There were,” he
says, “none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity
of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There were no
foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no
debts of honour in Typee; no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers,
perversely bent on being paid; no duns of any description; no assaults
and battery attorneys to foment discord, backing their clients into
a quarrel, and then knocking their heads together; no poor relations
everlastingly occupying the spare bed-chamber and diminishing the
elbow-room at the family table; no destitute widows with their children
starving on the cold charities of the world; no debtors’ prisons;
no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or, to sum up all in one
word--No Money! That ‘root of all evil’ was not to be found in the
valley. In this secluded abode of happiness there were no cross old
women, no cruel step-dames, no withered spinsters, no lovesick maidens,
no sour bachelors, no inattentive husbands, no melancholy young men, no
blubbering youngsters and no squalling brats. All was mirth, fun, and
high good humour. Blue devils, hypochondria, and doleful dumps went and
hid themselves among the nooks and crannies of the rocks.”

By this process of exclusion, Melville tells us much about his
experience and the effect it had on him. “Civilization,” he discovered,
“does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she had not even her
full share of them.... If truth and justice and the better principles
of our nature, cannot exist unless enforced by the statute-book, how
are we to account for the social condition of the Typees?” Small
wonder that Melville’s contemporaries in the money-warrens of the West
thought that he was inventing these people out of whole cloth! But
it was not by the mere absence of ugly and harassing things that the
Valley of the Typees was flecked with sunlight and warm, rose-violet
shadows; there were positive pleasures as well; above all things, there
was beauty, the constant beauty of splendid forms, undisguised by
clothes, beauty so simple and statuesque that, in later years, it gave
Melville an immediate clue to Greek sculpture. There were many happy
afternoons; afternoons that he spent in bathing with a parcel of brown
river nymphs; afternoons when, once he had got the taboo lifted, he
paddled idly in a canoe with Fayaway, a lovely girl in his household,
who was his constant companion; there were evenings spent watching the
dancers in the hula-hula grounds, swaying, arching, gliding, swimming,
whirling in an ecstasy of sensuous enjoyment that threatened to rob
this “quiet, sober-minded, modest young man” of all his studious
inhibitions; and there were days of contrast, spent with masculine
gravity in the company of Mehevi and his attendant warriors, feasting
heavily, with no cloying reminder of the other sex. Life itself became
the most beautiful of rituals: its duties were games, its necessities
were pastimes. Rivalry, enmity, jealousy, hardship, violence were all
transposed to the realm of art, where, instead of defeating life, they
added to its enjoyment.

True: these people were simple to the point of childishness: they could
become excited, young and greybeards alike, over a popgun that Melville
devised; but did not the Western World have its popguns, too: did
not the crowds on Broadway turn out for a fire or a soldiers’ parade
with the same naïve delight? It was true, too, that these islanders
had taboos, whose meaning Melville could never quite understand: they
seemed as capricious as the flight of a bat, and like that flight, were
determined doubtless by some imperceptible fact or belief that belonged
to the insect order of rationality: but the taboos did not strike many
of the essential elements of life. A man might be taboo against the
assaults of his enemies and so might venture among them freely as a
messenger, like the good fellow who abetted Melville’s final rescue,
or the canoe might be taboo against women using it--a comical male
reservation--but food and clothing were not made taboo to the destitute
by the laws of property, nor were men and women condemned to an acrid
chastity by sexual taboos which had also arisen very largely out of
laws and customs connected with the succession of property. There was
no theft where every one could help himself, and no vice where virtue
made such simple and rational demands.

Melville had a healthy capacity to adapt himself to a situation;
and he was not ill at ease, little though this life resembled the
world of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association,
which the missionaries were introducing with the help of biblical
pocket-handkerchiefs, pious exhortations, cheap Manchester rags, ugly
bedizenments, and the sense of bitter sin that naturally accompanies
the horrors of venereal disease. Had it not been for the infection in
his leg, the uncertainty as to his eventual fate, and the plain desire
of some of his native friends to make a thorough Typee of him, by a
spirited application of tattooing, there is no telling how long he
might have stayed, or how thoroughly he might have been lulled into
forgetfulness of his Western connections.

In Mardi Melville pictured Hautia, the symbol of sensual oblivion, as
the constant beckoner of the hero; and Hautia must have pressed him
hard in Typee. Nevertheless, Yillah, who represented the spiritual
quest, had already stirred him up before he started on his voyage,
and in the end, Yillah must have reminded him of activities that
found no answering chord among his happy, kindly Typee captors. When
that ghastly devil with his tattooing implements made advances to
him, Melville felt his quintessential foreignness. People wore queer
clothes in Albany, perhaps, but thank heaven, they did not permanently
discolour the flesh. Fayaway was lovely to look at, lovely to court,
and perhaps lovelier to possess: but no man in full command of his
faculties ever looked forward to a lifetime of such possession as
sufficient reason for not committing suicide. Kory-Kory, his ugly
man-servant, was as faithful as Sancho Panza; King Mehevi was as
gracious as Francis I; one might even say a good word about tattooing
and man-eating: they were matters of taste, perhaps; but inevitably,
Melville felt a little out of it; and neither love-making nor bachelor
companionship could quite make up for his spiritual isolation.

The moment for escape at last came. Melville, sadly in need of medical
aid, hobbled down to the shore: a boatload of tabooed Kanakas had come
with presents of calico and a musket to ransom the captive. The Typees
were unwilling to part with Melville, and the boat was about to pull
off without him, when, in the midst of the clamour, he broke away
and threw himself into the arms of his rescuers, escaping only after
he himself had killed a ferocious old chief, hot in pursuit, who in
a happier and more apathetic day had been kind to him. Fayaway and
Hautia’s bliss lay behind him; Fayaway clutching a piece of calico
Melville had thrown her for consolation: Yillah lay in an unfathomable
distance beyond, and what stood between was a tortured filthy life in
a broken-down whaler, whose planks were rotting and whose hold swarmed
with cockroaches and rats. Many a time during the next two years,
Melville must have regretted leaving Fayaway’s arms! Yes: and she must
have regretted Melville, for a little later an American traveller,
Henry Augustus Wise, discovered a brown maid from the valley of Typee,
named Fayaway, working as maid-of-all-work to the French commissary
of the garrison at Nukuheva--a proper snivelized anti-climax to the
unsullied tropical summer of Melville’s residence and courtship among
the Typees.

A harsh captain is a bad fellow to sail under, but a weak captain
is worse. When Melville came to on the Julia, a drab little barque,
with a jaunty way of catching the wind, he found himself under the
orders of an uncertain cockney landsman from Melbourne, with a crew
of discontented scalawags, and a roving commission to hunt whales or
seals or pick up a living somehow on the South Seas. Paper Jack, as
the men called this landlubber of a captain, signed him on for one
cruise, with the stipulation that he be discharged at the next port;
and when Melville looked around him, he discovered that between the
slack disorder of the Little Jule and the tyranny of the Acushnet he
had little to choose.

The physician on board, Dr. Long Ghost, had parted company with the
captain and had made his bunk in the forecastle. The mate, a hale,
bullet-headed fellow with a kind heart and a heavy fist, John Jermin
by name, was always half-seas-over; the captain was one of those
watchful, ineffectual, capriciously determined men who achieved the
dignity of isolation and got the semblance of obedience by never
delivering an order through his own mouth. Without any success in
whaling, the ship remained at sea, lest by lying in harbour and
replenishing its provisions it might incidentally lose the whole crew
by desertion.

Melville was contemptuous of the captain, he admired the bluff,
bustling Jermin, and he fell in with the doctor, who was an educated
man, as naturally as one globule of mercury will coalesce with another
as soon as they touch. The doctor was a capital fellow to finish off
Melville’s education and to while away the sleepy hours of the night:
“he had certainly at some time or other spent money, drunk Burgundy,
and associated with gentlemen. As for his learning, he quoted Virgil,
and talked of Hobbes of Malmesbury, besides repeating poetry by the
Canto, especially Hudibras. He was, moreover, a man who had seen the
world. In the easiest possible way he could refer to an amour he had
in Palermo, his lion-hunting before breakfast among the Caffres, and
the quality of the coffee he had drunk in Muscat.” Such a man did not
merely bring authentic reports of books and conversations; he was
himself a picaresque library, and he who ran with him had much to read.
This was the sort of acquaintance Melville could never have picked up
in Albany, nor in New York: one first must become an outcast before he
can have the privilege of such company.

The captain became seriously ill; and he purposed to send his men to
sea under command of Jermin while he recuperated on shore. Heartily
sick of the voyage, the crew rebelled at the notion, and when the ship
lay off the harbour of Papeetee, they sent a round robin to the English
consul, stating their grievances and petitioning to be put ashore.
Wilson, the consul, would not hear of it: to cow them into submission,
he delivered them over to the French frigate, La Reine Blanche, that
lay in the harbour; and for five days and nights Melville had a chance
to live on a French man-of-war and to observe the contrast between
French customs and character, and the American and English ways he was
used to; but the imprisonment was only a demonstration; and the ship
returned so that Wilson might again utter his ultimatum to the crew.
The upshot of it was that the crew was put inside the British jail, the
Calabooza Beretanee, under the surveillance of a huge, brown Polynesian
dignitary; and after a few weeks of their semi-confinement, the Julia
went off without them; and they finally found themselves at liberty
among the miscellaneous riff-raff that haunted the shores of these
tropical islands.

During the next couple of months, Melville lived the life of a rover,
in the company of Dr. Long Ghost, visiting among the natives, working
for a brief period on a Polynesian farm, for a tall robust Yankee
born in the backwoods of Maine, and finally trying, unsuccessfully,
to advance their fortunes in the court of Queen Pomaree. It was a
rambling, roving, thoroughly outlandish mode of life which must
have had the episodic and incredible quality of a dream: there was
a complete absence of pressure and direction; Melville drifted from
one islet in Imeeo to another as a leaf driven by chance breezes will
drift on the surface of a still pond. Thrown among the superficially
converted Christians of Tahiti, Melville observed no advance over
the untainted pagans of Typee; quite the contrary. “So far as mere
temporal felicity was concerned, the Tahitians are far worse off now
than formerly. Years ago brought to a stand, where all that is corrupt
in barbarism and civilization unite, to the exclusion of the virtues
of either state ... they must here remain stationary until utterly
extinct.”

Away from the purlieus of the Christian “mickonaree” Melville enjoyed
the lazy, savage life. The air was relaxing; but for a young American,
bred in Albany and Pittsfield, the danger was that he might bless his
braces, and damn his relaxes too opprobriously; so, on the whole,
one must count these months of rambling and laziness and observation
as good ones for Melville. Some of the dreamy, unexpected quality of
them went, no doubt, into the fantasy of Mardi when he came to write
it: Omoo, which records the actuality, and Mardi, which utters the
dream, are the morning and night of the same day. Through it all,
Melville kept his shape; he was still a quizzical, modest, slightly
sentimental, sober-minded young man: when he beholds the beautiful wife
of a sugar-planter, mounted gallantly on a white pony, his emotions
are touched by distant adoration and curiosity, just as they might
have been in Lansingburgh; and one suspects that he plagued more than
one incipient brown sweetheart with a far too respectful and brotherly
reserve. Five years later, Melville still remembered how the sugar
planter’s wife had captivated him: when he thinks back to this trivial
incident he sets it apart in a chapter; and he remembers, too, the
brown feminine mockery at his attempts to be sentimental. There is no
likelihood that this young man will succumb to Queen Hautia: he is
always on guard. If he needs any advice at this period it is that of
Koheleth: Be not righteous over-much: why shouldst thou destroy thyself?

Whether Melville judged better of his third whaling captain, the
Vineyarder, whom he finally fell in with, he does not tell: whether he
tired of whaling off the coast of Japan one does not know either. One
has a glimpse of him working as a clerk for four months in Honolulu,
the capital of the Sandwich Islands, among the fine dwelling-houses,
the hotels, the barber-shops, the offices, of the whites; and there
one’s knowledge ends. By the summer of 1843 he had shipped aboard the
frigate, United States, upon its homeward voyage. The free, vagrant,
uncertain life of the rover was over: he was in the Navy now. Melville
had not done more than pick up a bare living, certainly, for when
he was in Callao, about to equip himself for the terrible exposure
of rounding the Horn, he could get no pea-jacket from the purser,
and apparently could not afford to purchase one on shore: so he
manufactured a white jacket for himself out of a white duck frock,
folded and padded, cold comfort enough in dry weather, and colder
comfort in wet, when the jacket was so absorbent his shipmates would
cruelly stand up against him, to get rid of their own moisture.

Melville was as sick of adventure as Ulysses himself. When he heard
the words, “Up anchor! Man the capstan: we’re homeward bound,” from
the gruff boatswain, the words ran through his veins like golden wine.
Now the little daily current of anxiety was over: there were a few new
ropes to learn; but a strong, eager fellow, always ready to bear a
hand, always prompt to spring to his post, is pretty sure of getting
a good word from his immediate superiors, even though it is not an
audible one; and with the big ship’s company, the work itself was
not so onerous but that there was time for long chats and lengthier
meditations, particularly if one belonged to the maintop. Melville knew
the value of height and seclusion to stimulate the inward eye: climbing
a high tower, he wrote in The Encantadas, is the best way to see the
country around one; and at sea, he would climb the mast: that was his
watch-tower and his cloister.

The Navy of Melville’s day was not unlike the Navy of today: these
saurian institutions do not add to the quantity of brains in their
brain-pan, nor do they change the quality of their tissue: it was
bound up by red tape, precedent, a stupefying routine, and a set
of regulations designed to establish and maintain the authority of
those marginal officers who may have neither seamanship nor the gift
of command. In addition to the abuses that still exist in the Navy,
some of which are inevitable by the mere act of regimentation and by
an existence that is purposeless except in terms of slaughter and
bellicose action, there was in Melville’s time the further iniquity
of flogging. Melville’s words against this institution are in bold
contrast to Dana’s. Dana was one of those cautious friends of a cause
whose timid counsel is far harder to dispose of than the practices of
its enemies: he minced and compromised, and, dealing only with merchant
sailors, still recommended merely that flogging be mitigated. To
Melville flogging was a degradation of humanity; if discipline could
not be maintained without it, discipline was degrading; if the navy
of a free community could not be maintained without it, navies were
degrading: let us get rid of all these things together.

Life on the man-of-war was difficult and capricious still. Through the
mere punctilio of an officer in charge, Melville was unable to give his
white jacket a coat of paint; and he suffered from terrible exposure
in the journey round the Horn; but after the comparative solitude of
his savage Polynesian existence, with just a stray soul for company,
the ship had something of the stir and variety of a metropolis: it
contained people like Nord, a man of mystery and romance, who, Melville
suspected sympathetically, had been bolted in the mill of adversity:
and there was Lemsford, the poet, who conceived platitudes in Dionysiac
ecstasy, and above all, there was Jack Chase, the captain of the
maintop, a simple, hearty, beautiful soul, who gave young Melville all
a father could have given him; and to whom Melville clung, at sea,
and later, in memory--a starved orphan, finding in Jovian Chase all
that his father’s death, and his father’s marble image, denied him.
The hours spent with Chase on the maintop were happy hours indeed;
and no less so were those that Melville spent with books, Walpole’s
Letters and the Jew of Malta and Volpone, as well as earlier books
of travel and adventure, such as Morgan’s History of Algiers, and
Knox’s Captivity in Ceylon. Coming as they did, after a long period
of abstention and thirst, these books had a profound influence upon
Melville: and they give his literary pedigree. Through his experience
of life, he broke away by necessity from the weak romantics of his
youth, and, seeking the nearest parallels to his own adventures and
meditations and visions, he found them in the Elizabethan dramatists
and the seventeenth-century travellers and literary philosophers.
Melville’s genius followed two separate lines of growth, which joined
in Moby-Dick: one of them was that of Marlowe and Webster, with their
untrammelled emotions, their stertorous vitality, and their keen
transposition of dream into reality and of reality into dream--the
other was that of Knox’s Captivity, direct, honest, well ballasted. Had
not these books been in the ship’s library, Melville might have taken
much longer to find himself. Jack Chase himself added to Melville’s
literary education: he could recite the Lusiad by heart, and Camoëns
made a vivid impression on Melville. In two of his last poems he
assumed Camoëns’ personality.

“Mind you, White-Jacket,” Jack Chase would say, “there are many
great men in the world besides commodores and captains. I’ve that
there, White-Jacket”--touching his forehead--“which under happier
skies--perhaps in yon solitary star there, peeping down from those
clouds--might have made a Homer of me. But Fate is Fate, White-Jacket;
and we Homers who happen to be captains of the tops must write our Odes
in our hearts and publish them in our heads.” Did Melville smile at
Chase’s conceit, or was he already meditating his own odes and epics?
When he wrote Typee, he explained that the incidents of it had been
imprinted in his memory by being told over and over again; and one can
imagine a hundred places where Melville might have found less incentive
to literary activity than he found in the library and the maintop of
the U. S. frigate United States.

There were three main events in the voyage. Two of these experiences
involved deep personal humiliation. One was the time he was called to
the mast and condemned to the scourge for being absent from his post
at general quarters, a post to which he had never to his knowledge
been assigned: in a panic of righteous anger, he measured the distance
between himself and the captain, and had the blind impulse to rush
him overboard, and end his own life, too, rather than undergo the
degradation of this punishment. By a miracle, he was saved from this
fate through the courageous intercession of a corporal of the marines,
who spoke up in his behalf and got the order remitted. The other
humiliation was the massacre of the beards, when, by the capricious
order of “Captain Claret,” the autocrat of the United States, even the
oldest veteran, just completing his last voyage, was ordered to shave
his beard; and when he would not submit to it, was flogged and put in
irons. No one can feel the inner resentment occasioned by such an order
who has not been subject to a similar indignity; on such occasions, the
spirit boils in helpless rebellion. In civilian life, only the poor and
the outcast know this experience; but in every large and regimented
organization, military or commercial, such affronts to human dignity
and autonomy are commonplace; they characterize the system, rather than
the men who conduct it. Had Captain Claret not, on the whole, been a
lenient officer, Melville would have had a hundred other occasions for
this feeling. In gauging Melville’s conduct at a later period, one must
not forget these humiliations; their effect was cumulative.

But the crowning adventure of the voyage happened when the United
States was off the capes of Virginia in a calm sea: the ship gave a
sudden lurch and he was thrown from the yard-arm into the water. Let
him tell the story for himself:

“With a bloody, blind film before my eyes, there was a still stranger
hum in my head, as if a hornet were there; and I thought to myself
Great God! this is death. Yet these thoughts were unmixed with alarm.
Like frostwork that flashes and shifts its scared hues in the sun, all
my braided, blended emotions were in themselves icy cold and calm....
As I gushed into the sea, a thunderboom sounded in my ear; my soul
seemed flying from my mouth. The feeling of death flooded over me with
the billows, the blow from the sea must have turned me, so that I sank
almost feet foremost through a soft, seething, foamy lull. Some current
seemed hurrying me away; in a trance, I yielded, and sank deeper down
with a glide. Purple and pathless was the deep calm around me, flecked
by summer lightnings in an azure afar. The horrible nausea was gone;
the bloody, blind film turned a pale green; I wondered whether I was
yet dead, or still dying. But of a sudden some fashionless form brushed
my side--some inert coiled fish of the sea; the thrill of being alive
again tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning of death shocked me
through. For one instant an agonizing revulsion came over me as I found
myself utterly sinking. Next moment the force of my fall was expended;
and there I hung, vibrating in the mid-deep.... The Life-and-death
poise soon passed; and then I found myself slowly ascending, and caught
a dim glimmering of light. Quicker and quicker I mounted; till at last
I bounded up like a buoy and my whole head was bathed in the blessed
air.” Melville was rescued; but not before he had rid himself of his
white jacket forever; the ominous whiteness that he found later in
Moby-Dick was accentuated, perhaps, by his memory of that “accursed
jacket” which had delivered him up to the elements, rather than
protected him, and in the moment of extremity, had nearly proved his
shroud.

To have faced life and death, not as abstractions, but as concrete
events, when a sinew less of resolution would have meant his
extinction, in a stove boat off the coast of Japan, at the hands of
the pursuant Typees, or enveloped in the white jacket at sea: to have
thrown himself among strange men, and to have kept his own shape,
always set apart a little by culture and breeding, but never rebuffed
for a feebleness or an unmanliness or inability to bear a hand: to
feel the wild throb of a ship in a gale, sea-wracked but magnificent,
creaking, whining, wind-whistling, slapping into a trough of wave or
climbing dizzily on to a crest, and to feel a wilder, louder, more
victorious throb within: to have been attracted by the languors and
sensuous jollities of a savage life, but still more attracted by all
that civilisation had left with him, in hints and promises, Homer
and Dante and Shakespeare and Cervantes: to have left home a boy,
innocent and unspoiled, and to have returned a man, toughened, bronzed,
firm-fibred, and full of mixed knowledge, yet still essentially
innocent and unspoiled--all this had happened to Melville. He had left
America to seek adventures. Now he had found adventures; and he left
that behind, left the South Seas and the whaleman’s joys and hardships,
and the man-of-war’s settled routine, to pursue adventure farther, but
on a higher plane.

There comes a time--it is the beginning of manhood or womanhood--when
one realizes that adventure is as humdrum as routine unless one
assimilates it, unless one relates it to a central core which grows
within and gives it contour and significance. Raw experience is
empty, just as empty in the forecastle of a whaler as in the chamber
of a counting-house; it is not what one does, but in a manifold
sense, what one _realizes_, that keeps existence from being vain and
trivial. Mankind moves about in worlds not realized: Wordsworth’s
phrase expresses a profound reality, and Melville himself suggests
a similar idea in Mardi, when the philosopher points out that ages
hence people may realize more keenly what has happened today than our
own contemporaries do. It is the artist, the knower, the sayer, who
realizes human experience, who takes the raw lump of ore we find in
nature, smelts it, refines it, assays it, and stamps it into coins
that can pass from hand to hand and make every man who touches them
the richer. “No man can live for another” is a true doctrine as far
as experience goes; but it is the opposite of true in the life of
realization; for into this fuller and more durable apprehension of
experience goes our whole social heritage, all the forms and symbols
that have aided human expression in the past, the cumulative effect of
many cultures and many different modes of life. Those who absorb and
reflect and meditate and relate, play an important part in the economy
of society; and life is abrupt and incomplete when that part is not
performed.

Melville had travelled far and had experienced much; he had run the
gamut, or rather, the gauntlet of every sort of human experience
except the normal and easy and domestic one promised him by birth
and parentage. He will never be a school teacher, a professor, a
ship captain, a lawyer, a political leader; however necessary these
occupations, there is nothing in Melville’s training or temperament
that moves him in one of these directions. What is left? What is left
is something he has been silently preparing himself for all along: he
must become a writer. Though the society to which he returned, unlike
Jack Chase and other humble listeners to Melville’s yarns, regarded
that function as a trivial one, compared to accomplishments in a
dissociated world of action, and by its contemptuous regard and its
dissociation, deprived it of sustenance and made much of it in fact
trivial, here is the occupation which will gain in a hundred ways by
his experiences.

Melville must have had more than a dim anticipation of this career when
he stepped ashore, at Boston, in October, 1844; and had he known where
it would lead him he might well have shrunk from following it further.
His physical adventures were to be welcomed as romantic myths, and
his mental adventures were to be denounced as blasphemies. In short,
“the indefinite Navy Commissioners, so far out of sight aloft,” had
a mission in store for Melville that Hardy’s ironic President of the
Immortals might have concocted in a sinister moment.

CHAPTER THREE: TROPICAL SUMMER

In 1844, when Herman Melville landed in Boston, provincial American
society was in that state of uneasy transformation which means either
a vaster accomplishment or destruction; and in 1844 it was still
possible to think that the result would not be, fatally, destruction.
The Mexican War loomed ahead, thanks partly to the itch of Southern
planters to extend the territory under cotton, abetted by the belief
of men like Seward that by a process of territorial aggrandizement and
conquest the conflict between Northern and Southern economic interests
could be diverted. The American state had already acquired the desire
to crown itself with glory and prestige by conquering one of its
disordered neighbours--a process which mixed an ineffable air of virtue
with the proud consciousness that we had chosen an opponent who could
not possibly lick us.

Already something that aggravated the economic conflict had appeared
on the horizon, a breach between the several states over the ancient
metaphysical question of the one and the many, somewhat confused by
doubts as to whether free institutions could flourish alongside an
empire committed to slavery and expansion. These doubts must have
been even more confusing to a neutral observer, since cities like
Charleston and New Orleans, for all their slavery, were less depressing
and barbarous than such proud emporia as New York and such dingy
manufacturing hives as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. There was so much
right and wrong on both sides of Mason and Dixon’s line that the
question could only be decided by furious men of action, who would
decisively pound their fist into one side of the scale or the other in
order to make weight and register a conclusion.

If slavery showed a dark countenance, beautifully kalsomined by the
most solicitous Christian hypocrisy, industrialism showed a dingy
one. The little water-driven mill-wheel, which greatly lightened
the domestic labour of the early nineteenth-century farm, and which
served equally to operate the small mill or factory, had only a
brief day of social efficiency: by 1850, Melville could encounter a
factory in the Berkshire Hills, turning rags into paper, and call it
a Tartarus of Maids. Mechanical instruments, so far from diminishing
the amount of servile labour in the world, threatened to turn all
industrial operations into a form of servitude: in this middle period,
craftsmanship of the hand decayed, and craftsmanship of the machine was
subjugated by the demand for the cheap, the shoddy, the ephemeral. The
mills at Lowell, which Dickens described with admiration in 1837, were
already huge, and it was only by contrast with Bradford or Leeds that
they could be called tolerable. In the forties, the concentration of
coal and iron was slowly giving Pittsburgh a pre-eminence over the old
iron mines and furnaces scattered about the countryside in Connecticut,
New York, and New Jersey. Railroads, first laid where capital and
immediate convenience dictated, were now joining along strategic lines
of communication, following coast and inland water routes: as the
stage-coach disappeared, and the inns ceased to get patronage, the
inner parts of the country became inaccessible and they gradually ran
down: only the railroad thread prospered.

Was this a triumph or a _débâcle_, this coming of industrialism,
this volcanic intrusion of new methods of living, new means of
communication, new habits of work? When one thinks of the countrysides
that ran down, the forests that were wantonly destroyed, the soils
that were depleted, the towns that were jerry-built and burned and
jerry-built again, the public lands that were thrown into the laps of
speculators, the industrial population that was starved and depressed
in dingy cities, one sees that there is no easy answer to this
question; and certainly none of the economists has ever been impartial
enough as accountant to tell whether the final result for civilization
was a gain or a loss, and if so, how much was gained and how much
lost, and where these things happened. But when Melville came back to
America, industrialism was a value in itself: people encouraged it as
the patrons of the Renaissance encouraged art, not doubting that the
activity was a great one, and made for a higher civilization.

It is perhaps a little absurd to speak of such disparate things as
Attica and the North Atlantic states in the same breath: but these
regions, between 1820 and 1860, which coincided with Melville’s birth
and maturity, were in many respects in the same situation as Attica
between the birth of Socrates and the death of Plato. An old provincial
culture, closely bound to the land, was being overthrown by a new order
based upon trade and imperialistic enterprise and military expeditions
in support of the prestige of the state; and, at this moment of
dissolution, the spirit fulfilled itself in a sudden outburst which
expressed, in a new form, all that was valuable in the old culture,
with an additional energy, derived partly from the seething activities
of the new life that was inimical to it and already threatened it. The
gap between Sophocles and Menander was no greater than the gap between
Melville and Mark Twain: both these Americans roughed it and travelled
much and gave accounts of their adventures; but their feeling and their
vision belonged to different worlds.

In the America of the forties there was a sense of poignant expectation
which was also a fulfilment. Emerson was giving his lectures on the
Times, Thoreau was making his experiment at Walden Pond: warm spirits
with thin and fantastic notions about the ideal life were discussing
Fourier, welcoming the writings of Cabet, trying by a single gesture
to regenerate the morals of society, to get an easier living, reform
the diet, and alter the institution of matrimony--absurd, rickety
people they were, no doubt, but Bronson Alcott’s preference for the
sun-touched fruits and vegetables has turned out not to be so fantastic
in fact as it sounds in theory; and if it is possible now to eat food
which does not lead inevitably to gout and indigestion, to wear clothes
that do not stifle and constrict the human body, and to think candidly
about institutions which were once too sacred for rational thought, we
owe these improvements not a little to the passionate women who dared
to wear trousers and the comical men who listened patiently to Dr.
Graham’s famous lecture on the benefits of bran bread and squashes.

In 1844 this mixture in society of new and old, provincial and
metropolitan, free and servile, vital and mechanical, was still a
turbid one: the elements had not settled; contrast and comparison were
difficult; and people stood for one or the other, chiefly by intuition,
while perhaps a good part of the population sought both: they wanted
the old privileges of birth and the new ones of opportunity, the
old stability and order, and all the new fields to conquer and the
new positions to occupy. Melville belonged by temperament and shade
of interest to the order that was passing, and not to the chaos and
dissolution that was to come; still, in so far as he was aware of the
change, he accepted it and even took a little pleasure in it, as when
he anticipated from the progress of invention that fifty years hence
it would be a commonplace for an American to spend the week-end in
Honolulu.

Melville came back to this turbid spring freshet of a world, and he
found that his family, too, was in the process of growth and change.
Allan had become the business man of the family, a lawyer, with offices
in Wall Street; young Tom already wanted to become a sailor, not just
to see new places like Herman but to master the sea as a profession;
Gansevoort, who had struggled hard and become a little wan and
disappointed, had gone in for a political career, and, like Henry Adams
a little later, he went to join the American Legation in London in 1845
as secretary. After a little visiting among his relatives and with
Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts, an old friend of the family
with a marriageable daughter, Melville settled down for a while in
Lansingburgh: he had decided to write an account of his adventures. The
lack of any other opening and the promise of some financial return were
the external stimuli; but one cannot doubt that there was also an inner
need. This loquacious, introspective sailor, who can so vividly hold
an audience that, later, when he described for Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne
an encounter in which he had used a club, they searched the house on
his departure to find the imaginary club he had left behind--this young
man had reached a stage where literary expression was inevitable,
necessary--indeed, good for the health.

Up to the age of twenty-five Melville had knocked around the world
solely for the purpose of making the best of a bad job. At twenty-five
he discovered, in writing Typee, that he actually had made the best of
it: his roaming, wasted life was all to the good: its idlest moments
could be salvaged; for he had come into possession of something he had
not deliberately set out to find, and twenty years of sedentary labour
at home would not have given him equal experiences or equal leisure
to reflect upon them. The wreckage of these Polynesian years was more
precious than any cargo he might have punctually guarded in New York
or Boston, at some purser’s job like school-teaching. The outcast came
into his own; and the prodigal returned with his own fatted calf to
give him welcome!

Herman Melville’s first book was a narrative of his Four Months in the
Marquesas among the Typees: its American title was Typee. It was at
the opposite pole, at the other end of the world, from another book
that was being composed during this period, Thoreau’s Walden, but
the similarities are no less important than the contrasts. Typee is
Melville’s Walden, without the philosophic reflection and without the
premeditated purpose to test the benefits of a more primitive life:
Walden is Thoreau’s Typee without the physical derring-do and adventure.

Melville had found in the Marquesas the simplicity and directness of
livelihood that Thoreau sought nearer at hand; and as for Thoreau, he
treated the oak tree as if it were breadfruit, and was glad to find
sweet acorns fit to eat, because they diminished the number of enemies
in the universe. Both Melville and Thoreau had found out what it meant
to throw off the impedimenta of civilization; and though both of
them returned to the society of their own kind, they carried back to
everyday American life a little contempt. Life at the core was a much
simpler matter than the civilizee would admit: for civilization, which
creates enjoyable forms for human activity, also creates grotesque
ones, which grow up alongside the shapely forms and tend to supplant
them: the accumulation of capital comes to mean more than the provision
of food and shelter, and the regalia of the book of etiquette means
more than friendly intercourse. The Philistines that surrounded
Melville knew no more about the great forms of civilization, about
the art of Shakespeare or Rembrandt or the philosophy of Spinoza and
Goethe, than the naked savages: they were just as destitute in these
higher essentials, and, on top of these disabilities, they lacked the
savage’s animal health, charm, and good nature. Melville did not set
out to test these things, as Thoreau did; but unconsciously, on the
mere weight of evidence, he came to the same conclusion.

Writing is not merely a process of explicating what one already knows:
it is also a matter of discovering what one is not aware of: it brings
to light the hidden loot in that storehouse which psychologists call
the Unconscious. In the very act of writing Typee, Melville must have
become conscious of his specific equipment and his gifts as a writer;
for, though he had been able to make no notes of his adventures while
he was undergoing them, they had sorted themselves out and formed
a pattern of their own. In his first book, Melville went about his
work with a sure instinct. He read up every account of the South Seas
he could lay hands on, Captain Cook’s voyages, missionary reports,
travellers’ descriptions: he discovered, what some writers find out
far too late, that if one trusts to one’s own experience alone, one
gets something less than one’s own experience, while, if the background
is filled out and enriched, one’s own contribution comes out more
copiously. This habit of reference became characteristic of Melville
in almost all his later works: Moby-Dick is full of citations, and
even in a series of short sketches, like The Encantadas, he mentions
as authorities Cowley, The Buccaneer, 1684; Colnet, The Whaling Ground
Explorer, 1798, and Porter, The Post Captain, 1813.

It would have been hard to spoil such adventures as Melville’s:
he could only have done it by a weak memory or a poor gift of
visualization, or, more fatal perhaps than these, a tendency to touch
every event with a sentimental gloss. Melville’s Typee was free from
these sins. He trusted his eyes completely; he told what he saw. Did
he understand everything? By no means; the taboo was a mystery, the
religious observances obscure, the exact status of cannibalism hard
to define: in his very failure to interpret these data, he gave an
account which is still valuable to the anthropologist as a description
of the South Sea Islanders in an entirely primitive and untainted
state. If Melville had trusted his eyes less and his wits more he might
perhaps have disclosed facts which were sealed to him: he might also
have muddled and misinterpreted everything. The very limitations of
Melville’s descriptions give one confidence in their authenticity:
this is not unvarnished truth, perhaps, because unvarnished truth with
no inaccuracies and distortions and running together of separate events
is impossible without a written record, promptly made; but it is still
truth.

Does one want a further guarantee of Melville’s accuracy in Typee?
The answer is to be found in the rest of his work. While his powers
of invention were not small, it was only with difficulty that he
could escape the actual world and create a world sustained by his own
fantasy. He tried to do this in Mardi, and he was forced back upon
history and fact; by the time he reached the end of the book, he lost
his grip entirely and converted his fabulous Mardians into out-and-out
Europeans. He tried again in Pierre, and as we shall see, he fell back
upon the stereotyped figures of conventional melodrama: he succeeded
completely, in fact, only once, and he did this by an heroic effort,
for which he had to pay a severe physical penalty. Like Defoe, Melville
was closely chained to the document, the fact, the experience; he could
endow these things with imaginative life, for all the other instruments
of creative writing were at his command; but he was not given to
inventive elaboration. Do we not perhaps exaggerate the possibilities
of the pure imagination? The recent studies of Poe’s and Coleridge’s
fantasies should warn us. Even in the dream, where the imagination
works without any obligation to be understood or communicated, the
most bizarre effects are a blowing up into a vast bubble, through
the mechanism of dream-work, of some tiny drop of actual soapy
water. Indeed, the highest imaginations, those of an Aeschylus or a
Shakespeare or a Goethe, work upon themes already given in myth and
history: they do not waste their energies upon the skeleton of fact,
but take whatever lies at hand, cover it with flesh, breathe upon it,
and give it life.

In Typee, then, Melville made no attempt to write a pure idyll,
compounded of butterfly wings and spiderwebs and rainbows. Fayaway was
interesting to him; but so, on reflection, were the misdemeanours of
the missionaries in the Marquesas. The dangers of being eaten were
horrid: so were the brutalities that whaling captains inflicted on the
natives: so was the military overlordship of the French. Everything was
told in its place, as far as everything could be told to an already
Victorian public. The wonder is that Melville, in the first edition of
Typee, was as frank as he was: when Dickens’ Oliver Twist was published
in America it was attacked for its immoral picture of Bill Sykes and
Nancy, by one of the shrinkingly pure American newspapers of the time,
which no doubt carried in the neighbouring columns advertisements of
quack doctors, books on “sexology,” and patent medicines to be used
as abortifacients. Melville, who was fresh from four years of travel,
wrote with easy freedom and candour, forgetting that his audience was
Thackeray’s, not Smollett’s.

Typee belongs to the morning of the imagination--like Pickwick Papers.
It is direct, fresh, free from self-consciousness, like the healthy
youth who experienced these adventures and sat down to write about
them. That quality is precious and irretrievable. Dickens lived a
whole lifetime without again creating anything so sanative and comic
as Pickwick Papers; and though Melville fared farther and pondered
more deeply on life, this book and the one that followed, alone had
the full bloom of youth upon them. Such books are written without a
formula; their essential quality is almost beyond formulation. When
one has said youth one has said almost everything. Typee is a book to
make one go visiting tropical islands, a book to make one question
the well-arranged career, the carefully ironed routine, the dull
inevitability of the days one has chosen to lead. A scholarly boy reads
Typee, and engages a berth for himself on a ship bound for Madagascar;
a young architect reads the book and leaves his drawing-board for
a trader’s post in the Marquesas, where he becomes a specialist in
Polynesian dialects; another young man reads Typee and decides to
bind his Fayaway to him by the tie of marriage. One reads Typee, and
life suddenly shows a new vista. Adventure is possible: Eden is real:
life need not include time-tables and bank accounts and exercises in
physical culture. And unlike romantic fantasies Typee is not itself a
narcotic, a form of escape: it suggests appropriate actions and deeds.
If one person becomes a philologist through reading it, another takes
to anthropology; another buys himself a sailboat; and another suddenly
decides to carry out some difficult course he had resolved on and put
aside again and again.

Like Pickwick Papers--but how differently!--Typee communicates
its own simple health and manly confidence: its keenness, its
straightforwardness, its hearty appetite for life. It is written with
that skill which disarms skill, with the clarity beside which a more
deliberate artifice would be clumsy. The colour of such romantic
episodes may be artificially imitated: Kaloolah was such an imitation,
and in a very bad light one may not at once detect the difference: but
there is no imitating the down on the cheek and the clear eye--the
stigmata of unspotted youth. I do not underestimate the charm of his
subject; but Melville imparted to it his own candid and buoyant nature,
watching this strange delicious world with intent, water-blue eyes. The
subject was made for a young man to tell about--and happily the young
man appeared. It was matched to this adventurous young American as the
England of comfortable inns and Christmas jollity was matched to young
Dickens. Melville varied the formula of wishy-washy romance by treating
all romantic facts realistically, as he treated brutality and danger,
and both the romance and the hard adventures profited by it.

What a contrast Typee is to Robinson Crusoe! Defoe’s prose was a far
richer instrument than that Melville used in Typee; but after the
first few chapters of Robinson Crusoe one’s mind refuses to follow
that plaguy Philistine: nobody but a classical economist would pursue
his tedious moralizings and his adept contrivances on his desert
island. Defoe set out to teach a lesson, and before Crusoe has his
last boatload of wares stowed away, long before he has re-established
himself in that middle estate in life from which he originally fled,
we are asleep. Melville sets out to teach us nothing: but at every
step we follow eagerly and find ourselves making notes, instituting
comparisons, seeing the world in fresh perspective. Typee is a magic
mirror. In Typee we hold the secret of youth, and hold the world up to
its clear surface: for the first time, perhaps, we note its unhealthy
complexion, its fat paunch, its jaded smile, its fatuous anxieties, its
lack of even animal repose.

Typee, which was published in London by John Murray, in his Colonial
and Home Library, quickly won a name for itself as a piece of
picaresque fiction. The London Times could not believe that a common
American seaman could have the style of an educated literary man;
and even a friend of the family, Mr. Evert Duyckinck, could hint
politely that Melville had manufactured some of his adventures; Typee,
literally, seemed too good to be true. The only people who took Typee
for what it was were the missionary promoters: they damned the whole
account heartily as unfair to the missionaries, and a perversion
of Christian teaching, since this impudent and ribald young man
pictured evangelical zeal as making no particular improvement in
Polynesian morality, and since he even went out of his way to comment
sarcastically upon the missionaries in Honolulu, who published a
journal in which the doings of the “converted” king were recorded with
the unction of an official English court gazette.

Against the charge of untruth and the imputation of fiction, Melville
had two answers. One was happily furnished by Richard Tobias Greene,
the Toby of Typee, a resident of Buffalo, who had in fact escaped
from the Marquesas without being able to effect Melville’s rescue,
and who wrote to the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, when Typee was
published, verifying Melville’s story and asking Melville to get in
touch with him. Melville got from Toby an account of his adventures,
and embodied them in a sequel to Typee called The Story of Toby.
As for the missionaries, Melville’s instinct in controversy served
him well: in his next book, he returned to the misdemeanours of
the pious and hit harder in the same place. He had observed that
all the eulogistic reports of the missionaries were written by the
missionaries themselves: their zeal to propagate Christianity was not
unmixed with their concern to get money which would further that fine
enterprise: against these glowing reports of conversion and grace and
the introduction of shame and sin into the South Seas, Melville pitted
his own acrid memories. No animus against Christianity led him to do
this; for he had a strong initial bias in its favour: what spurred him
was mere honesty of record, and the desire to see the Polynesians left
alone in a happier state.

There is one further confirmation of Typee’s verity: one cannot neglect
it, though it comes at third hand. M. Philarète Chasles, in his
Anglo-American Literature and Mariners, translated and published in
New York in 1852, quotes a “well-informed American who reported that
a cousin of Melville had said: ‘My cousin writes very well, except
when he reproduces exactly what he has felt.... He could not invent
the scenes which he describes. Charmed by his improvised reputation,
he would be vexed, I think, to lose his reputation as an inventor.
The reappearance of his companion, Toby or Richard Greene, a real
personage, annoyed him to some degree. It made him descend from the
pedestal of romance to the level of mere narrator. For me, who know
Melville, his wild disposition, and the history of his youth--who have
actually read his rough notes, now in the hands of his father-in-law,
and who have talked twenty times with Richard Greene, his fidus
Achates, I laugh at the preoccupation of a public accustomed to see a
lie where no lie is.’”

A strain of malice lies in this description of Melville’s own reception
of praise as an inventor which does not altogether lessen one’s belief
in its authenticity. In Redburn, Melville resented his cousins, and in
Pierre he made one of his hero’s cousins play the part of a callous
betrayer of trust and friendship; one has reason to suspect a little
bitterness on Melville’s side, and a little condescension and concealed
envy on the other. If the public’s mistake made Melville find more
easily his path as an imaginative writer, let us thank the incredulous
but forever gullible public: their mistake did him service.

The fuss that was raised over Typee was not merely on account of its
supposed lack of fidelity. It was also because it had displayed loose
and immoral scenes. If people could find looseness and immorality in
Melville’s description of sexual customs in the South Seas, or in his
anecdote of the proud South Sea queen examining with naïve pleasure the
tattooing on a French sailor, and, in all innocence, raising her skirts
so as to disclose her own to such a connoisseur of the art, or in the
incident of the beautiful yellow-haired wife of a missionary, who was
worshipped by the natives as a mysterious goddess until they stripped
her of her clothes and discovered that she was even as they--if the
public could feel a titillation of wickedness over these things, it
must have been in a state of pathological sensitiveness; and no doubt
it was, for the exposure of more than the lower part of the female
ankle in society was then the mark of a wicked and abandoned woman.

This did not make it any easier for a candid fellow like Melville; and
when a new edition was projected in America, the officious and correct
Mr. Duyckinck must have suggested, as adviser to Wiley and Putnam,
that a little judicious editing would reduce the offence and increase
Melville’s audience. The young must be protected; the clergy must be
conciliated; just a little pruning here and there would give the book
a place on every library table. Melville should not have listened to
this nonsense; sooner or later a man with anything worth saying must
face the world of Pimminee and be prepared to stuff its prejudices and
its gentlemanly objections down its throat: if a young author does not
make this stand in his first book, he will increase his difficulties
with his fourth or fifth. But in 1846 Melville was still uncertain of
himself: a novice in his vocation, he was not aware of all the snares
that beset a man of letters: the pressure toward amiable compliance
with the all too amiable Mr. Duyckinck must have been pretty stiff; all
the more, perhaps, because a Duyckinck might almost be a Gansevoort,
and family pressure may have played a part, too. At all events, he
consented to let Typee be bowdlerized.

“The _Revised_ (Expurgated?--odious word!) Edition of ‘Typee’ ought
to be duly announced--and as the matter (in one respect) is a little
delicate, I am happy that the literary tact of Mr. Duyckinck will
be exerted on this occasion.” So Melville wrote in the middle of
1846 to Mr. Evert Duyckinck. He grimaced a little at the dose; but
unfortunately swallowed it. The anecdote about Queen Pomaree went:
the anecdote about the missionary’s wife went; and various other
passages were underscored by elimination. What Melville said about the
missionaries of the Dollar and the Cross is worth remembering, before
Mr. Duyckinck runs his blue pencil through it:

“Look at Honolulu, the metropolis of the Sandwich Islands!--a community
of disinterested merchants, and devoted self-exiled heralds of the
Cross, located on the very spot that twenty years ago was defiled by
the presence of idolatry. What a subject for an eloquent Bible-meeting
orator!... But when these philanthropists send us such glowing accounts
of one-half of their labors, why does modesty restrain them from
publishing the other half of the good they have wrought?--Not until
I visited Honolulu was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of
the natives had been civilized into draught horses and evangelized
into beasts of burden. But so it is. They have been literally broken
into the traces and are harnessed to the vehicles of their spiritual
instructors like so many dumb brutes.”

I would not say that this bowdlerization ruins the book, or that it
materially takes away from its value: that is not the point. Small and
“immaterial” suppressions may have no effect upon the literary value
of a work: but they cannot help having a subtly corrosive effect upon
the man who has created it. As A. E. once pointed out, in discussing
the matter of censorship, the spirit of the artist is a sensitive one,
and in many cases it works only with great difficulty. If its wings are
clipped by so much as a feather-tip, its capacity for flight may be
ruined. It is perhaps impossible to say how far Melville was harmed by
Mr. Duyckinck’s tactful exertions, or by the hysterical denunciations
that prompted them. For objective evidence, we have only the fact
that sex, except in remote allusions to debauchery in Redburn or to
sodomy in White-Jacket, did not enter into any of Melville’s stories,
until it suddenly erupted in 1852 in Pierre with the violence of long
repression. Mark Twain was burdened by a similar censorship; and he
took refuge in the flat obscenity of “1601.” Melville’s own development
as a man and a writer might have been a happier one, had not sex become
in his day a sanctimonious ritual, with no middle term between the
licence of the brothel and the waxen purity of the home. The censorship
which operated on Melville’s books bore equally on his spirit: his
libido turned back upon itself, and got lost for a time in the mazes
of an infantile life. To take sex easily, naturally, rationally, is to
subject it to the refining elements in life: to take it with a sense
of unholy attraction and holy repulsion is to dissociate it completely
from the normal influence of knowledge and convention and taste: in
this dissociated, fragmental state, sex rages irresponsibly like a bolt
of lightning in an open field: it may disappear into the ground, it may
shatter a tree, it may kill a human being.

Melville had carried back from the South Seas the simplicity of an
essentially chaste, but, we must suppose, not altogether inexperienced
young man. This simplicity had something valuable in it for Melville’s
contemporaries, just as his appreciation of savage society must have
warned them about the absurd extravagance of acquiring dyspepsia
and hard faces and an incapacity for the arts of living by their
concentration upon money-making--and the censorship of Typee kept
this part of Melville, I think, from maturing with reflection and
experience. Sex was taboo. That element in his growth knew no middle
state between greenness and blight. One part of life was locked for him
in a dark chamber; one part will die by asphyxiation.

Typee was a success, and Melville soon had the consciousness of being
an author. He could scarcely mention his book, in passing, without
pausing to realize how strange it sounded. All his dispersed interests
and his random purposes were suddenly concentrated: his life had the
spiritual momentum that a genuine career gives it: he was no longer
an outcast Olympian, but one of the great circle, now treated by his
elders as an equal, respected, deferred to, genially slapped on the
back, welcomed when a group of literary men met for conversation: if
an English author came to America, as Thackeray did a little later,
Melville was bound to be the most promising younger man in the circle
that dined him and gave him welcome.

In Pierre, Melville gives his hero’s sensations at suddenly finding
himself quoted in the public press, and urged by various grave
societies to lecture before them--little gratuities of attention that
afflicted him with a sense of his own insignificance, no matter how
inflated he might seem to the world outside: and Pierre’s humility was
doubtless Melville’s. He had grown a beard; but he did not need that
symbol of years and experience to wear his new honours easily: with
his reading and his miscellaneous adventure and the deep or brilliant
conversation that might unexpectedly escape from him, he must have been
a ready companion in any of the current literary circles: indeed, the
difficulty was that, in the particular group where he moved, it was
hard to single out any minds that came up to his level: the Manhattan
literati of Melville’s heyday were a slick and shallow parcel of
journalists, with a few scholars like the learned author of the Lives
of the Presidents, as makeweight.

Melville’s quick entry into the literary world was partly furthered
by two men who once wielded power in American letters, Messrs. George
and Evert Duyckinck; George, a little thin and abstemious and given
to pious reflections, Evert, more full-blooded, shrewd, worldly, an
energetic hack who accumulated more than a modest competence as an
editor and a compiler of ostentatious books of reference. They were
busy little moles, these Duyckincks; one can scarcely utter their
names or recount their ephemeral glories without smiling a little; but
they gave Melville support and sympathy at a time early enough for him
to profit by it; and if Melville found Evert Duyckinck worthy of his
friendship there was something in the man’s geniality that merited it,
and it is not for us to withhold what Melville himself freely gave.
Evert Duyckinck had, according to Richard Lathers, one of the choicest
libraries in the state: he was literary adviser to Messrs. Wiley and
Putnam, and after Charles Fenno Hoffman’s brief editorship, he assumed
charge of the Literary World. Until the publication of Pierre, Mr.
Duyckinck was intimately associated with Melville’s literary ventures.
Melville trusted him the way that a foreigner may trust a native as
a guide to a strange country, realizing only after many days that
the man he has thrown himself in with, whose company he has enjoyed,
would be the most antipathetic of companions if one met him on one’s
own ground. Duyckinck helped Melville to find his own depths; and when
Melville had found them the two men were, by that simple fact, cut off.

It is not difficult to see how this friendship matured and withered:
Duyckinck’s life was devoted to those superficies that Melville
dedicated his whole energies to piercing and getting beyond. Lowell hit
Evert off in one of his Fables for Critics; it was not the least happy
of his arrows:

Good-day, Mr. Duyckinck, I am happy to meet
With a scholar so ripe and a critic so neat,
Who through Grub Street the soul of a gentleman carries.
What news from the suburb of London and Paris?

Walt Whitman met the Duyckinck brothers: he describes them both as
“gentlemanly men” and he could say no worse of any one. “I do not know
of any description that it would have pleased them better to hear,”
added Whitman. “Both very clerical-looking--thin--wanting in body:
men of truly proper style, God help ’em!” But the Duyckincks had a
correct, bowing acquaintance with literature: they represented culture,
tradition, a knowledge of English grammar; and for a good while they
were not the least appreciative of Melville’s critics. If, when they
published their Cyclopedia of American Literature, they gave fourteen
pages to Longfellow and only three and a half to Melville, they were
but reflecting the judgment of gentlemanly men for the next generation.
More than thirty years later, Mr. Barrett Wendell and Mr. George
Woodberry had advanced no further on the road to appreciation.

Melville’s brother, Gansevoort, had procured an advance from Murray on
the English edition of Typee; and his new fame and financial success
must have made Melville look forward to literature as the source of a
permanent livelihood. In that “maturer and larger interior development”
that was now taking place in Melville, pride of career supplanted
pride of race: it was himself, his own nature, his experiences, his
thoughts, that mattered, and not the size of his grandfather’s breeches
or the length of that other lineage which perhaps joined him with
bonnie Jeanie Melville in the Scots ballad. His racial inheritance had
but added to his humiliation; by his own exertions and skill, he had
achieved his first triumph. He is now a proper child of the Revolution;
he knows, like Napoleon, that men make families quite as much as
families make men--and there is no ancestor so powerful as one’s
earlier selves.

Melville promptly followed Typee with a sequel of his adventures in
the South Seas called Omoo, which signifies rover. In the meanwhile,
Gansevoort, who had been the mainstay of the family while Melville was
growing up in Albany, had found nothing in the bleak streets and grimy
house-fronts of London to lessen his own depression; and he died. The
early struggle, which had left such a bitter taste with Herman, had
even more fatally taken the heart out of Gansevoort. From the last
of his letters home one has the feeling that he resigned from life,
rather than that he was suffering from any physical malady. “Selfishly
speaking,” he declared, “I have never valued life very much.” The fibre
loosened in Gansevoort; the grip relaxed; he passed out. There is no
sign in Omoo that Gansevoort’s death was a very profound event for
Melville; and yet one suspects that his sadness and hopelessness came
in later years to mingle with Melville’s pain.

Omoo is a description of Melville’s life from the day he escaped the
Typees to his signing up for another whaling voyage off the coast of
Japan: its contents I have already used in telling about his life
during that period. The narrative itself is done in the direct,
vigorous, rapid style of Typee: if anything, there is more humour in
it, and Melville gave himself greater liberties in using the material
and embroidering it. Omoo is perhaps the most underrated of Melville’s
books. While it solidified the reputation he had gained in Typee,
the first book has held first place, because of the unique people
and customs Melville dealt with there; whereas Omoo, which is a more
raffish tale, and in some respects superior in literary quality, has
been treated as if it were but the rinsings of the heady Typeean jug.
This is far from being true. The relatively unromantic, if outlandish,
quality of these later adventures, with the exception of the mutiny of
the Julia’s crew, made him rely more heavily upon his own skill: and
although the main incidents are probably accurate, all the characters
are focussed with a slight distortion, through Melville’s sense of the
comic: Dr. Long Ghost’s adventures and peccadillos are filled out a
little, and the venial doctor of Papeetee was treated in such a fashion
that the actual character uttered a cry of belligerent protest when the
book came to his attention.

Melville’s skill at character-drawing, of which his description of
Mehevi and Kory-Kory gave promise in Typee, became in Omoo more firm.
Here is a scene in which two minor characters, a land-lubber, Rope
Yarn, and an “affable-looking scamp”--Flash Jack--appear only for a
minute.

“Flash Jack crosses the forecastle, tin can in hand, and seats himself
beside the land-lubber.

“‘Hard fare this, Ropey,’ he begins; ‘hard enough, too, for them that’s
knowed better and lived in Lun’nun. I say now, Ropey, s’posing you were
back to Holborn this morning, what would you have for breakfast, eh?’

“‘Have for breakfast!’ cried Ropey, in a rapture. ‘Don’t speak of it!’

“‘What ails the fellow?’ here growled an old sea-bear, turning around
savagely.

“‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ said Jack; and then, leaning over to Rope
Yarn, he bade him go on, but speak lower.

“‘Well, then,’ said he, in a smugged tone, his eyes lighting up like
two lanterns, ‘well, then, I’d go to Mother Mill’s that makes the great
muffins: I’d go there, you know, and cock my foot on the ’ob and call
for a noggin o’ somethink to begin with.’

“‘And what then, Ropey?’

“‘What then, Flashy,’ continued the poor victim, unconsciously warming
up to his theme; ‘why then, I’d draw my chair up and call for Betty,
the gal wot tends to the customers. Betty, my dear, says I, you looks
charmin’ this mornin’; give me a nice rasher of bacon and h’eggs,
Betty, my love; and I wants a pint of h’ale, and three nice hot muffins
and butter--and a slice of Cheshire; and Betty, I wants--’

“‘A shark steak and be hanged to you!’ roared Black Dan with an oath.”

This quotation serves not merely to show how immediately and vividly
Melville can put before us a forecastle ragging. The passage is
interesting for another reason. Despite his admiration for Melville,
Robert Louis Stevenson gave rise to one of the parrot judgments about
Melville’s work when he said: “At his christening some influential
fairy must have been neglected. ‘He shall be able to see, he shall be
able to tell, he shall be able to charm,’ said the fairy godmothers;
‘but he shall not be able to _hear_,’ exclaimed the last.” In this
passage Stevenson was reproaching Melville for his inadequate rendering
of the Marquesan speech, a matter over which there is small cause for
wonder, since Melville’s four months among the Typees were followed by
four years before he committed the names and words to paper; but the
actual fact is just the reverse of Stevenson’s dictum: Melville had
a curiously accurate ear; and the little passage just quoted proves
it. Here, from an American writer, is perhaps the first clue to the
existence of modern cockney. One will not discover that speech in the
pages of Thomas Hood’s Punch; one will not discover it in Pickwick
Papers or Oliver Twist; what one finds there, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has
pointed out, is an earlier urban dialect. In Omoo, on the contrary,
Melville gives us the modern forms: the _ink_ ending for _ing_ and
the dropped and added aitches. He was almost equally felicitous in
rendering the difficult Belfast brogue: his transliteration of _haul_
into _harl_ is a test of it; and only an accurate ear will thus catch
the living tongue. Unlike Ruskin, Melville was not a painter with
words, but a musician; and in his maturity, his great passages have a
musical structure of their own. In a phrase like “a soft seething foamy
lull” he uses the sound of lull, rather than its sense, to convey his
meaning; and among the modern poets it is natural to find him turning,
later in life, to Shelley and to James Thomson.

Omoo was a rambling book: it had in a formal sense neither beginning
nor end; but it had something of the bright immediacy of a sketchbook
filled with graphic notes that might be worked into a finished picture.
There were no clouds over Melville when he wrote Omoo; even its ugly
parts were saturated with sunlight; beachcombing left Melville a
little brighter for being scoured by the sand. Smollett had taught him
all he needed to write this kind of work, Smollett and Defoe. Omoo
had the sharpness, the force, the exaggeration of character which
the eighteenth century had in its satiric artists; and every episode
was carried off with a dry discretion. With the habit of long verbal
practice, Melville watched his listeners: he never overloaded Omoo:
he knew where to skip and where to elaborate: he is a writer who
knows that one wants everything in a travel book except the tedium
and fatigue of actuality. Throughout the narrative, one always feels
that Melville has more up his sleeve: one is prepared to believe
that he has a hundred Omoos in his bosom: perhaps he had, and at all
events it required talent to make us believe so. More and more, his
speech cleansed itself of affectations: the direct, vigorous lingo
of the sea, with all its Elizabethan locutions, was doubtless a sound
influence in this part of his development: of the young man who wrote
the sublime gibberish in the Lansingburgh newspaper, there is scarcely
a trace left. One measures such growth in feet, not in inches: in seven
years Melville had not merely renewed his physical body completely: he
had acquired an equally complete literary shape.

In every sense of the word, Omoo is a companion volume to Typee. It is
not merely that the milieu is still these wild, wooded, mountainous,
sun-drenched islands, with their attractive brown inhabitants: it is
not simply that as soon as Melville steps aboard a boat, the deck
begins to climb and fall under one’s feet and the smell of pitch and
hemp rises to one’s nostrils: it is not merely that this South Sea
Prospero, as Robert Buchanan called him, is a weaver of spells, as full
of happy mischief as a Polynesian maid and as seductive as a tropical
night. In Typee and Omoo, Melville had that superb aplomb--formed by
an athleticism, an inner poise, a dexterity of hand, a sharpness of
eye--which we call Greek because for a little while the Attic peoples
experienced it as a community; the attitude which Whitman valued as
the sign and seal of the new American. Melville is appreciative; he
is humorous; but he is neither a professional funny man nor a syrupy
preserver of glamour. His aplomb never deserts him. He is always in
command. That trait is the key to his early literary success; it
explains the effortless accuracy of his descriptions. Such poise, such
aplomb, such confidence, rest on the nicest sort of spiritual and
physiological interplay: blood and muscle form a part of it as well as
mental serenity. We have seen this balance in our own day, embodied in
a young man who flew to Europe alone. The gesture surrounding this act
was the same precious essence that Typee and Omoo give us in the form
of art. I have called this quality youth; but it is what the Athenians
called virtue; and as soon as we depart from it we are hoary with sin,
and there is no health in us.

CHAPTER FOUR: AZZAGEDDI

In 1847 Herman Melville was twenty-eight years old. Omoo had been
finished at the end of the previous year; and, in the excitement of
finding himself established as an author and recognized as a man of
promise, he was casting about for a theme that would more fully evoke
his own proper powers. So far he had been living on his material: it
was time for his material to get a living from him. He found the theme
in Mardi, the vast allegorical romance of Mardi; but before he settled
down to it, the friendship or the affection between him and Judge
Shaw’s daughter, Elizabeth, deepened, and in August, 1847, they were
married.

One can only dimly speculate upon what manner of girl Elizabeth Shaw
was. There is no reason to think that Melville drew her portrait in
Pierre, and the “wife” of the stories he wrote in the fifties is always
a conventional feminine foil. The letter she wrote to her mother during
the first week of her marriage was dutiful, girlish, commonplace; and
ten years later her letters were equally inexpressive and jejune. Her
freshness or her amiable temper or her capacity for devotion may have
attracted Herman; but more likely, he loved her because he loved her;
and there is no need or possibility of explaining that. Certainly,
there was no intellectual parity between them, as there was between
Hawthorne and his linguistic blue-stocking, Sophia--and Elizabeth had
none of his ranting high spirits.

Melville probably worshipped Elizabeth at first, and idolized her
beyond all reason; for he loved romantically, and romantic courtship is
a heightened and extravagant season even for men of less imagination
and hot impulse than Melville. He who wishes to keep that original
and etherealized image of his lady should run away from her: when he
breaks it, he will feel, Melville later declared, like Pluto snatching
his Proserpine, and once the image is broken every fragment will be a
reproach. It is the romanticized Circe, and not her victim, who under
the spell of marriage turns into an animal, not a swine, of course,
but a pea-fowl, grey-feathered and not gorgeous, or a hen, clucking
over her chicks and moving only within the limits of the farmyard, or a
dove, cooing a little plaintively, unable to awaken the proud strut of
the eager, following male, who has wooed once too often.

After an arduous honeymoon, by stage-coach and rail through the
mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, on up through Montreal, and
back by Lake Champlain and the Champlain Canal, a rough, jouncing,
crowded, distracted sort of journey, and a brief sojourn with Herman’s
mother at Lansingburgh, they settled down at 103 Fourth Avenue, New
York, in company with Melville’s brother Allan and a swarm of sisters.
Elizabeth Melville has left us a picture of that household and her
husband’s daily routine; one cannot do better than put it in her own
words:

“We breakfast at 8 o’clock, then Herman goes to walk and I fly up to
put his room to rights, so that he can sit down to his desk immediately
on his return. Then I bid him good-bye, with many charges to be an
industrious boy and not upset the inkstand and then flourish the
duster, make the bed, etc., in my own room. Then I go downstairs and
read the papers a little while, and after that I am ready to sit down
to my work--whatever it may be--darning stockings--making or mending
for myself or Herman--at all events, I haven’t seen a day yet, without
_some_ sewing or other to do. If I have letters to write, as is the
case today, I usually do that first--but whatever I am about I do not
much more than get thoroughly engaged in it, than ding-dong goes the
bell for luncheon. This is half-past 12 o’clock--by this time we must
expect callers, and so must be dressed immediately after lunch. Then
Herman insists upon taking a walk of an hour’s length at least. So
unless I can have rain or snow for an excuse, I usually sally out and
make a pedestrian tour a mile or two down Broadway. By the time I come
home it is two o’clock and after, and then I must make myself look as
bewitchingly as possible to meet Herman at dinner.... At four we dine,
and after dinner is over, Herman and I come up to our room and enjoy
a cosy chat for an hour or so--or he reads me some of the chapters he
has been writing in the day. Then he goes down town for a walk, looks
at the papers in the reading room, etc., and returns about half past
seven or eight. Then my work or book is laid aside, and as he does not
use his eyes but very little by candlelight, I either read to him, or
take a hand at whist for his amusement, or he listens to our reading or
conversation as best pleases him. For we all collect in the parlour in
the evening, and one of us reads aloud for the benefit of the whole.
Then we retire very early--at 10 o’clock we all disperse.”

Admirable Elizabeth! In your direct, simple way you have told us
everything we need to know. You are busy and happy: you have adapted
yourself, with the aid of such extra space as was once enjoyed by
all families of moderate means, to the clan of sisters and brothers
and cousins and aunts that make up the provincial family of the old
kind: you make it possible for Herman to economize all his energies,
and go ahead, with gentle resolution, at his work. What a beautifully
divided day it is: Herman working behind closed doors, and you
yourself, very cheerful and attentive and industrious, cocking your ear
occasionally for sounds of restlessness. Then the little breaks: the
sociability and--do you not perhaps overestimate a lover’s capacity
for conversation?--the hour or two of cosy chat. Already Herman’s
eyes must be saved, and you are there to save them. True: he has
devoted sisters, too; and they are very nice in their way, all such a
jolly, helpful, numerous family. People are a little more punctilious
here than they are in New England; that is part of the European air
which New York somehow preserves; the men bow lower, make prettier
compliments, and get drunk more often. When you go to a dance without
Herman, you are treated as one of the sisters, and by virtue of your
supposed maidenhood, you are quite a belle again. Herman doesn’t like
dances and parties overmuch: the late hours and the late suppers take
the edge off his writing next morning: he finds it hard to begin and
is a little cross and irritable: but what difference does that make?
You would give up all these frivolities for such a shapely, manly,
courteous, thoughtful man: if he will stay by, the world may gaily pass.

You are not alone, Elizabeth Melville: Mrs. Darwin feels the same
way, too; so, with less satisfaction and complaisance, does Jane
Carlyle; so, presently, does Sophia Tolstoy. But such helpfulness and
affectionate sacrifice cannot last forever. Children will come; you and
your fine, high-spirited boy will see less and less of each other: you
will interrupt his deepest intimacy with concern for the baby’s bottle.
You will wonder, when you are alone, whether you have any right to
thrust these burdens on his shoulders: you will feel that the world is
a little cruel, and your being joined to this lover who is so strange
and remote, this affectionate man who is also so exacting, is uneasy
bewilderment.... I do not understand you, Elizabeth Melville? Reflect
again carefully: do not be afraid of your feelings: some of them are
still visible in the fading ink of old letters; and some of them are in
your heart, because you are a human being. If you do not resent sharing
Herman so much with his family, you are a greater angel than you should
be.

“How much,” wrote Melville in Pierre, “that goes to make up the
deliciousness of a wife already lies in the sister.” Do you sometimes
feel, Elizabeth, that Herman has only added another sister to the
family; that Lizzie is now but a step away from Kate and Helen and
Augusta? It is not that he loves them too tenderly, but that he
worships you too much, or, in alternate fits, is far too indifferent
and puts you at a sisterly distance from him. Do you feel that he will
never get near enough to you, will never appreciate the you that is,
although he may be disappointed because of the you that is not? He
accepts you, of course, accepts you tenderly: you darn his stockings
and sew new tapes in his drawers when he breaks them: you put up
patiently with the languors and irritabilities that follow an intense
morning at the desk, and at times, you have the power to erase them and
make his eyes shine with triumph instead.

But this Herman is not the jovial boy who once played with Fayaway: he
has his turns of high spirits, but his humours are a little obscure and
beyond you, and his face shades a little with disappointment when he
notes that your plain, literal mind does not follow his sallies. He is
growing beyond you: in the very act of writing Mardi, Elizabeth ceases
to exist: the book is haunted by a phantom called Yillah: a Yillah who
will never mend socks or replace broken tapes. Some day he will learn,
perhaps, that women, like whales, are objects of natural history; and
when he is weary with his wandering and his quests, he will not despise
your tired arms: one of the best and tenderest of his poems, The
Return of the Sire de Nesle, will be addressed to you. But before that
happens, you have both a long hard journey before you. Courage! The
burden of writing these books will not fall upon his shoulders alone.

The spring of 1848 was full of turbulence all over the world. In Paris
the red flag was raised, and in a froth of oratory men dreamed and
fought at the barricades and died. Germany seemed on the verge of a
republic, and the fragments of Italy made convulsive movements; with
these and many other events fomenting, chaos and disorder and perhaps
some glorious new society, based on universal suffrage and national
workshops and the commune, seemed about to be instituted. One looks
back with a tolerant smile to those days, days when a formula seemed as
powerful as a siege gun, when the ballot seemed by itself a guarantee
of order and justice in human affairs. The effect of the French
uprising was the pastry cook’s Empire of Napoleon III; the final result
of the German revolution was the brutal, semi-feudal industrialism
of Germany after 1870. “I should not be surprised,” said Melville’s
Redburn, “if there were more words than things in the world”; and in
1848 there was surely far more Peace, Progress, Political Perfection,
Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, in the mouths and minds of men, than
there was in political society.

The contrasts and absurdities in all our institutions made 1848 a great
year for satirical observation, so long as the observer could remain
far enough away from humanity to laugh at its errors rather than weep,
as Alexander Herzen did, over its sins, and over the dark collapse
of hope and ambition that followed. Melville, fortunately, lived in
America: its own 1848, namely, the Civil War, was just thirteen years
away; and the book which began in 1847 as an adventurous idyll of
the South Seas, poetically conceived with a remote allegorical quest
running through it, came to an end as a savage parody of the whole
economy of Western Civilization, and its lofty Christian professions.

Just as Melville was finishing Mardi, this eventful spring, Elizabeth
Melville conceived: and the summer months that followed were devoted to
final preparations for the book and the baby. Augusta worked hard to
copy Melville’s manuscript for the press; and with even greater zeal
she conned the genealogical tables for a name for the infant--having
settled in her mind that it would be a boy. Her zeal was justified.
When in February, 1849, Herman Melville became a father, Augusta’s name
for the child prevailed: it was Malcolm.

If Mardi throws any light upon Melville’s personal relations at all,
I think one must acknowledge that the light is a happy one. The true
test of a writer’s feelings is not what he says: it is the way in which
he says it. Mr. Chesterton once happily pointed out that in Byron’s
most melancholy lines the spontaneous gallop and thud of Byron’s metre
betrays his sanguine feelings; and I think one can say much the same
thing of Mardi. There are large sections of Mardi that are written with
a sort of sleepy ease; the words flow so languorously from Melville’s
pen that he floats along with them and lets them carry him where they
will; the rhythm is not always subtle; the voice lacks modulation and
change of tempo: it lulls one like the even murmur of the ocean at low
tide on a beach. When lovers are conversing on a summer’s afternoon, it
does not occur to them that any one could call such heavenly intimacy
tedious: what they would like to prolong for eternity one who did not
share their mood would not tolerate for five minutes. And it is so in
Mardi. Melville is so happy that he does not notice one cannot always
share the emotion with him.

Whether the beginning of Mardi was set up in type before the end was
reached one cannot surely tell: Melville made this happen to Pierre,
and explained what a handicap this method of production was to the
writer, since it did not allow him to work over the earlier parts and
create a unity. If the slowness of hand-setting and the customs of
the market made Melville actually do this, it would explain a certain
inconsequentialness in Mardi as due to external circumstances, and
not to Melville’s inability to master his material and criticize
his workmanship. But certainly pressure and speed seem absent from
Mardi: a soft tropical breeze is all that carries the story on, and
more than once this drops to a dead calm. Financial difficulties were
not yet pressing in Melville’s domicile when he began Mardi: no
baby demanded care: no breach had opened between the writer and his
audience: Elizabeth’s approaching confinement doubtless renewed some
of the tender, pre-nuptial feeling: these are all fairly objective
facts; and if one doubt them, the repeated, even cadences of Mardi,
as of a sleeping bosom, slowly heaving and falling, have the value of
corroborative testimony.

Mardi has been forgotten while lesser books have flourished. Let us
see how much we have missed. It is not a perfect book; but it has
something in it that defies death; and that something is the presence
of Melville himself, now arriving at maturity, a traveller who has gone
to the ends of the earth, and has not left his head smugly at home--a
vehement, clear-witted, copious, steady-eyed, jocose, untamable man.
The poise and completeness of Typee is gone: much as we prize youth,
the cost of continuing that balance, without a fresh integration, is
arrested development; and Melville went on. Mardi has all the promise
of imperfection.

The story begins on the plane of fact. We are off! The courses
and topsails are set, and the Arcturion is sailing dead before an
equatorial breeze in search of the whale. Overwhelmed by the monotony,
the teller of the story escapes at night in a whaleboat, in the company
of a faithful, taciturn sailor of the old Norse breed, Jarl. The sun
shines; the bonetas and sharks swim around the boat; the devil-fish
undulate repulsively in the deeper waters below; or at night the
phosphorescence spreads across the surface, and the hand dropped over
the side ripples through fluent silver; they sail on and on, making
for distant islands, tormented by the lack of water and the unyielding
sun, and worse still, by a dead calm, when the grey firmament of sky
collapses into the grey firmament of water. When at long last they
encounter a sail, it turns out to be an apparently deserted brigantine:
they board it and find themselves, after creepy suspicions, in the
company of a South Sea Islander and his wife, the sole survivors of a
Christian crew.

We are still on the plane of physical adventure: Annatoo is an amusing
termagant, and when Samoa, her husband, amputates his own arm by the
most primitive surgery and cautery, Melville might still be merely
describing curious South Sea customs, as in Omoo. In a little space
all this changes. The brigantine is lost, and the shipwrecked sailors,
again in a whaleboat, come upon a South Sea priest, with Seven Sons,
who is carrying a white maiden with golden hair and blue eyes, Yillah,
to another island. The hero rescues Yillah from the priest, and kills
him to make good his escape. With Yillah’s advent, the atmosphere
changes: a perfumed mist of unreality creeps over the sea from Mardi
itself.

Yillah’s mind is a spider-web of myth, in which the butterfly of her
spirit has been caught: she has dim recollections of being born in Amma
and spirited away, as a child, to Oroolia, the Island of Delights,
somewhere in the paradisial archipelago of the Polynesians. The waters
of Oroolia turned her olive skin to white and tinged her hair with
gold: she was transformed into the blossom of a vine, and hung there in
a trance, until the blossom was snapped from its stem and borne away on
the ocean, drifting to the island of Amma, where it was taken over by
the priest. The whaleboat floats on; the sea-fowls fly above it; the
fish dart and ripple and flash in the water: Yillah’s own dreams of her
past fade into the sweet vision that had haunted the hero’s earliest
thoughts. As love draws near, her divinity languishes: “Love sometimes
induced me to prop my failing divinity, though it was I myself who had
undermined it.” The Yillah of dream dwarfs into the Yillah of reality.

At last the voyagers reach the coast of Mardi, and, in the guise of
the Sun-God, Taji, the hero announces himself to an assemblage of
Mardian chiefs. His ruse is accepted; and for a brief while Taji finds
himself in Eden. The wide blue lagoon, the froth of breakers at the
reef, the milk-white smoke curling up from the volcanoes of Mardi: the
nights of starry entrancement, day dawning with Yillah, breaking along
the waking face, peeping out from her languid lids, then shining in
longer glances, till, like the sun, up comes the soul. All beauty and
beatitude Taji finds in Mardi. With Yillah for company, he retires to
a wooded islet, fringed with palm trees, watered by brooks. Near by,
in Odo, the kingdom of Media, is a harder world, where helots toil at
brutal tasks; but for a time Taji is happy with his Yillah. It all
ends. One day Taji finds her arbour vacant; she does not return; the
world becomes sour and empty; and Taji resolves to rove through Mardi
in search of Yillah.

With the disappearance of Yillah, the break from the actual becomes
complete: Yillah is a phantom, and Taji follows Yillah, in the company
of Media, the king, Mohi or Braidbeard, the historian, Babbalanja,
the philosopher, and Yoomy, the poet, through all the kingdoms and
principalities of Mardi. Where has Yillah flown, and where is the peace
that she gave?

Had Melville closed Mardi at this point the book would, I think,
have been hailed with delight as another, a purer, Typee: he need
only have searched a little farther and finally recaptured Yillah,
wiping out the last trace of ethereality and converting her into a
less primitive Fayaway--the stolen daughter of a highly respectable
missionary, perhaps--to have delighted his contemporaries with the
sweet concoction. This was the Melville they knew and could understand.
The language of Typee had become freer and in a limited sense more
poetical: but that only accentuated the banquet of sunrises and sunsets
and starry nights and palm groves and maidens more luscious than
Ingres’ odalisques, mixed with an occasional bite of tart adventure or
terror--almonds or olives--a banquet of unalloyed deliciousness after
the tame domestic lamplight and the corseted and petticoated heroines
of Victorian fiction, the Janes, the Doras, and even for that matter
the Beckys who were coming into fashion. The exotic has its glamour,
and somehow, those distant Polynesian maidens of Melville were a little
nearer, a little more thinkable in the flesh, than the Annabel Lees of
Poe, however near Adair and Oroolia might be to Aiden.

But Melville had grown. He started from the South Seas in order to have
familiar ground to spring from; he had no intention of merely amusing
his public with a less literal Omoo. Mardi is the world, and Yillah is
not a maiden but the spiritual life, who was brought to Mardi and given
a home there, but treacherously treated by the fates: the priests took
charge of her and sought to sacrifice her for their own purposes. Taji
slew the priest, and though the quest of Yillah is as tormenting as
the possession of her is peaceful and replete with happiness, still,
he would slay the priest again, if necessary, to bring her back. Once
Melville sets out on this quest, the South Seas of the Acushnet and the
Julia and Kory-Kory and Dr. Long Ghost vanish: these tropical isles are
a counterpart of the Western world, and in a thousand wild metaphors
and noble tropes, all the triumphs and follies of our civilization
parade again before the mind, clearer because of the disguise, more
immediate because they are so distant. Evil has entered Melville’s
paradise; evil, that “chronic malady of the universe” which, “checked
in one place, breaks forth in another,” and the knowledge of good and
evil is the beginning of his own sad wisdom.

Now witness Melville as he becomes conscious of life and history and
the recesses of his own spirit. Not for nothing were those brooding
hours on the maintop; not for nothing those lonely walks through the
crowds of Broadway, smiles, sunshades, shop-fronts, dashing rigs,
or, returning in the evening from the reading-room, with the stale
smell of wine coming up from the wine-cellars, the prostitutes already
ogling in front of the blue and red witches’ bowls in the apothecaries’
shops; not for nothing was it that he had exchanged calls with urbane
acquaintances of the family and succumbed to the customs of Pimminee,
where the Tapparians, in lieu of brains, carry a drop or two of
attar of roses in the corner of their craniums, and are the victims
of two incurable maladies, stone in the heart and ossification of
the head--with all their fripperies, fopperies, finesses. But I am
beginning to anticipate Taji’s Mardian discoveries. Let us retrace our
steps and survey this Mardi with Melville.

The isles of Mardi are easily recognized: Dominora, where King Bello
lives, is Great Britain: Vivenza is the United States: all the historic
states and empires are reduced, by translation into Mardian terms,
to something like their proper human proportions. Swift had used
this method once; and Melville employed it with little less effect,
particularly when he worked out the parallels carefully and retained
the South Sea atmosphere. In the guise of king, poet, philosopher,
Melville became a philosophic commentator, retelling the story of
Europe and Christianity and faith and doubt and religion and science,
exploring time, delivering himself through his dreams, disclosing,
in Babbalanja’s demonic inner man, Azzageddi, his own ultimate
perceptions. It is almost impossible to convey the vastness, the
variety, the genuine wealth of these pictures. I will only bring a
sample or two of his ore to the surface; the whole book is veined with
it.

Time and Eternity come before Melville. “And that which long endures
must long have remained in the germ. And duration is not of the future
but of the past; and eternity is eternal; because it has been; and
though a strong new monument be builded today, it only is lasting
because its blocks are as old as the sun. It is not the Pyramids that
are ancient, but the eternal granite of which they are made; which
had been equally ancient though yet in the quarry. For to make an
eternity, we must build with eternities; whence the vanity of the cry
for anything alike durable and new, and the folly of the reproach--your
granite hath come from the old-fashioned hills.” His copious mind
swarms to the idea; he throws fuel on it from a hundred sources. “No
fine firm fabric ever yet grew like a gourd. Nero’s House of Gold
was not raised in a day; nor the Mexican House of the Sun; nor the
Alhambra, nor the Escurial; nor Titus’ Amphitheatre; nor the Illinois
Mounds; nor Diana’s great columns at Ephesus; nor Pompey’s proud
Pillar; nor the Parthenon; nor the Altar of Belus; nor Stonehenge;
nor Solomon’s Temple; nor Tadmore’s Towers; nor Susa’s bastions, nor
Persepolis and its pediments.”

So he goes, sentence by sentence, till he has heaped into this fiery
furnace of death-defying things the grottos of Elephanta and the
Giants’ Causeway and the Grampian Hills and a score of other examples.
And at last: “If time was when this great quarry of Assyrias and Rome
was not extent; then, time must have been when the whole material
universe lived in its Dark Ages; yea, when the ineffable Silence,
proceeding from its unimaginable remoteness, espied it as an isle of
the sea. And herein is no derogation. For the immeasurable altitude is
not heightened by the arches of Mahomet’s heavens; and were all space a
vacuum, yet it would be a fulness, for to Himself his own Universe is
He. Thus deeper and deeper into Time’s endless tunnel does the winged
soul, like a night-hawk, wend her wild way, and finds eternities before
and behind; and her last limit is her everlasting beginning.”

When Melville’s French critics called Mardi Rabelaisian, and when the
English critics mentioned Sir Thomas Browne, one group was thinking
of these solemn, cadenced sentences, piling up phrases swollen with
sound like the great stops of an organ; while the other referred to
these prodigious catalogues and collocations. In Mardi Melville keeps
ideas in the air like a juggler’s balls; the images pass and repass,
making in those agile hands a single pattern. Satire is only one of
the moods of Mardi: poetic reverie, as in the chapter on Dreams, and
philosophic reflection, thread their ways in and out these scattered
islands of sense. Far more deeply and authentically than the author
of Eureka, Melville had anticipations of the drift of modern science
and philosophy. He accepts the notion of evolution, which Chambers had
popularized, saying, “Let us be content with the theology in the grass
and the flower, in seed-time and harvest.” And Babbalanja says: “I live
while consciousness is not mine, while to all appearances I am a clod.
And may not this same state of being, though but alternate with me, be
continually that of many dumb, passive objects we so carelessly regard.
Trust me, there are more things alive than those that crawl, or fly,
or swim. Think you, my lord, there is no sensation in being a tree?
feeling the sap in one’s boughs, the breeze in one’s foliage? Think you
it is nothing to be a world? one of a herd, bison-like, wending its way
across boundless meadows of ether? In the sight of a fowl, that sees
not our souls, what are our own tokens of animation? That we move, make
a noise, have organs, pulses, and are compounded of fluids and solids.
And all these are in this Mardi as a unit.”

After much exploration and much disappointment and much wine and witty
conversation to pass the time between, the travellers come finally
to Serenia, where the dictates of Alma--Christ--are embodied in the
polity. Here they find their quest come to an end, or rather, it has
lost all reason, “not because what we sought is found; but that I now
possess all which may be had of what I sought in Mardi.” Babbalanja
tarries there, to grow wiser; he counsels Media to return to Odo and
transplant to it the amaranths and myrtles of Serenia, letting no man
weep that he may laugh, and no man toil too hard that the king may be
idle: “Abdicate thy throne but still retain thy sceptre. None need a
king, but many need a ruler.” As for Taji, he will never find Yillah:
he may search further on the still unexplored islands; but when all is
seen he must “return, and find thy Yillah here.”

On the travellers sail. Their canoe is followed by the three avenging
brothers who have lurked in their wake all through the adventure,
bent upon taking Taji’s life; whilst the three messengers of Hautia,
the enchantress queen, with the iris, the venus-car, and a flower
white as alabaster, with forked and crimson stamens, trembling like
flame, bade the voyagers follow them to Hautia’s bower. They follow,
three pilot-fish in advance, three ravenous sharks astern. In some
wild way, Hautia, queen of the senses, has made a captive of Yillah,
and into some one of her black-eyed maids the blue-eyed one has been
transformed. But Taji could not find Yillah: Hautia claims him, with
wine and flowers and love: she offers him all the treasures of the
world, Health, Wealth, Long Life, and the Last Hope of Man, if he will
take her hands and dive with her into the crystal grotto: she will make
it easy to forget Yillah: he will lose his past, and learn to love the
living, not the dead. In vain she pleads. “Better to me, oh Hautia,
all the bitterness of my buried dead, than all the sweets of life thou
canst bestow; even were it eternal.”

All is over: the adventurers must go back to Serenia; they must deliver
Taji from Hautia, and save him from the avenging sons of the priest,
sin, conscience, remorse. Taji will not go. “‘And why put back? Is
a life of dying worth living o’er again? Let _me_, then, be the
unreturning wanderer. The helm! By Oro, I will steel my fate. Mardi,
farewell!’

“‘Nay, Taji, commit not the last, last crime!’ cried Yoomy.

“‘He’s seized the helm! Eternity is in his eye! Yoomy, for our lives we
must now swim.’...

“Now I am my own soul’s emperor; and my first act is abdication. Hail,
realm of shades! and turning my prow into the racing tide, which seized
me like a hand omnipotent, I darted through.

“Churned in foam, that outer ocean lashed the clouds; and straight in
my wake, headlong dashed a shallop, three fixed spectres leaning o’er
its prow; three arrows poising.

“And thus, pursuers and pursued flew on, over an endless sea.”

Mardi is strong enough as a satire and a criticism of life to stand
a frank admission of its weaknesses; and I shall not try to conceal
them. The book starts about to be one thing; it presently becomes
another; and before Mardi is entirely explored it becomes a third:
the adventure, the strange scenes and personages, the philosophic
reflection, the satire, all accrete together rather than form a single
intermingled whole. Taji, who begins as the hero and narrator, takes a
smaller and smaller part in the actual dialogue; presently the first
person becomes the third, and Taji emerges at the end out of the shadow
of silence. The reader who expected another Omoo was disappointed once
the first quarter of the story was over; the reader who might have
welcomed the dialogues, the political moralizings, the epigrams, was
put off a little by the original sea-yarn.

This is not all. The satire at its best achieves its end by a delicate
parody of actuality, as in the scene where Melville takes off a session
of the United States Congress; but sometimes Melville’s invention
flags, and he repeats actual history, with altered names, instead of
distorting, magnifying, transposing. Verbally, his touch is almost as
uncertain: at times he drops into obvious metres, only to rise into
passages of prose that have far greater claim to be set off as verse
than any of Yoomy’s stanzas. The verses interspersed in these pages
are worthy of the poet laureate that Yoomy is supposed to be; and that
is the best one can say about them. When Taji sits down with the
five-and-twenty kings, the invocation to wine is about at the level of
Peacock’s drinking songs: and the poorest of Yoomy’s songs are poetry
only by typographic courtesy. These are all faults; and not little
ones; but what means infinitely more is the fact that a brave, vigorous
spirit presides over Mardi, appraising all the evil and injustice and
superstition and ugliness in the world--as they masquerade under the
guise of religion and patriotism and economic prudence and political
necessity. In Mardi, one begins to feel Melville’s range, and his depth.

In this satiric fantasy, Melville had not the sure touch he later
achieved in Moby-Dick: but for all that, his thoughts exploded in a
succession of great rockets and Roman candles and flag-bombs; and the
spectacle was a dazzling and beautiful one. Such wit, such humour,
such starry intelligence, such wide knowledge, such resolute diving,
were not known in American literature before; and they are rare enough
in any literature. Much though we value Melville’s great American
contemporaries, he had something to give in Mardi that is beyond
their reach: we will search Emerson in vain for anything like the
Antiquarian’s catalogue; we will run through Hawthorne’s notebooks
without finding anything like the description of authorship in the
chapter on Lombardo. The Literary World said that the public would
discover in the author of Mardi a capital essayist, at least, in
addition to the fascinating novelist and painter of sea-life, and find
that the author had “original powers of high order”--and the praise was
accurate and just.

Mardi performed a more important work for its author than it did
for its immediate readers: it disclosed to him the nature of his
own demon--that deeper other half whom Babbalanja called Azzageddi.
Melville’s thoughts at this period paralleled each other in somewhat
unrelated layers. There was a Babbalanja who reflected the ideas of
his own time and country, who was a thoughtful Christian, a loyal
republican, a solid provincial, who met adversity with a jest or a wry
smile, who drank brandy with Mr. Duyckinck, and paid his respects with
genteel punctuality to all the Gansevoorts and Melvilles and Shaws.
This Melville never entirely disappeared. The pious man who wanted to
return to Serenia made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land: and when the
Civil War came, Melville accepted without question the doctrine of a
single, indivisible nation, as an unshakable postulate. In this aspect
of Melville there was something correct and limited, characteristics
whose chief advantage was that they kept him within speaking distance
of his contemporaries. In Mardi, however, Melville discovered a deeper
self: the unconscious Melville was not a man of his time, and he often
had intuitions which undermined or destroyed his more commonplace
convictions. This deeper Melville did not altogether supplant the man
of convention: they do not represent several and successive phases
of growth: but, as Melville suggested in Moby-Dick, they represented
aspects of a cycle which one goes through again and again, never
reaching a terminus, because there is in a proper sense no terminus, no
ultimate point of rest, or resolution.

Now it is Melville as Azzageddi, the demon who captures and speaks from
within the man, who interests us. The pious Christian is troubled by
the problems of physical immortality; but Azzageddi says, thinking how
even the sublimest thoughts fade and are lost, “If the fogs of some
few years can make soul linked to matter naught, how can the unhoused
spirit hope to live when mildewed in the damps of death.” The sociable
townsman continues to correspond with Mr. Duyckinck and respect his
judgment; but Azzageddi says: “All round me, my fellow-men are new
grafting their vines and dwelling in flourishing arbors; while I am
forever pruning mine, till it becomes but a stump. Yet in this pruning
I will persist; I will not add, I will diminish; I will trim myself
down to the standard of what is unchangeably true. Day by day I drop
off my redundancies; ere long I shall have stripped my ribs; when I
die, they will but bury my spine. I may have come to the Penultimate
... but where is the Ultimate?”

From Azzageddi’s mouth the deepest perceptions of Melville’s spirit
came forth first, in the form of jests and demonic laughter.
Azzageddi was free in the only unqualified sense of freedom: he was
irresponsible. Nothing will daunt him, no opposition to his conscious
habits, statements, prejudices, conventions will prevent him from
declaring himself. He was Melville, shorn of everything that might
make him circumspect and limited, a skeleton facing the world with
its ultimate grin. Azzageddi brought Melville to his supreme triumph
in Moby-Dick, and plunged him into temporary disaster in Pierre; for
he worked out of the bottomless parts of Melville’s unconscious,
and when he was given free line, he might haul up anything out of
those depths--a chest of gold or a white whale or a green corpse.
His appearance in Mardi was the first sign of Melville’s maturity;
and the attempt of the world to rebuff and castigate and repress
Azzageddi was excellent proof that Melville had found within himself
something worth the saying. Mardi was Melville’s spiritual Omoo. It
gave him the courage to be an intellectual rover, and to scorn the easy
domesticities in which thought reposes, and snores.

“There are those who falter in the common tongue, because they think
in another; and these are accounted stutterers and stammerers,” wrote
Melville in Mardi. Melville was plainly aware of the fact that he
was now acquiring a new language, not a new set of weaknesses: his
inward eye was now keeping pace in its growth with his outward one: he
was at last achieving that genuine bi-focal vision wherein “matter”
and “spirit” united to give depth and perspective to the world which
only through joint effort do they effectually behold. Already, he
had eternity in his eye. The easy triumph was no longer for him.
Clay crumbled, marble chipped, wood rotted, granite eroded: all the
common materials out of which monuments and civilizations are made
lie under the doom of a fatal metamorphosis: Melville sought a truth,
no matter how infinitely small in quantity and precious, which, like
radium, would undergo time and change and emanate energy without losing
perceptibly its bulk or its quality. It was useless to tell him that
there were no ultimate truths; that itself was perhaps the ultimate
truth which he sought. If Mardi were not ready for this search, he
would go it alone--and be the unreturning one. No grey shroud of ocean,
with threat of storm and sleet, would keep him from setting out for
that ultimate destination.

“Had I not written and published Mardi,” wrote Melville to Mr. Evert
Duyckinck in 1849, “in all likelihood I would not be as wise as I
am now, or may be. For that thing was stabbed _at_ (I do not say
_through_) and therefore I am the wiser for it.”

The truth is that Mardi got a mixed reception; whereas except for the
missionaries and the unco guid his first two books had been hailed and
acclaimed with a heartiness that is rarely accorded to a new author
with no well-defined connections. Mardi was praised in the Revue des
Deux Mondes, and damned as a rubbishing parody in Blackwood’s; the
Democratic Review said that it compared to Typee and Omoo as a cartoon
of Raphael to a seven-by-nine sketch of a sylvan lake; but the Dublin
University Magazine found it one of the saddest, most melancholy, most
deplorable and humiliating perversions of genius of a high order in the
English language. So it went, hot and cold, huzzas and hisses.

A book that could evoke such different responses must either be a
highly original book or a many-sided one; and Mardi has, it seems to
me, both qualities. It was, there is reason to believe, the wealth,
the profusion, the diversity of ideas in Mardi that brought down on
Melville the irritation of contemporary critics: instead of retiring
into after-dinner lethargy with Melville’s smoking, calabash-drinking
philosopher and king and poet, they were stirred into unaccustomed
mental activity. They resented that: they resented above all the
fact that Melville played with ideas. One could not be sure whether
he was fooling with the ideas or fooling with the audience; besides,
respectable ideas should not be played with: there is a time and a
place for everything. In the South Seas one expects to fondle brown
maidens: in a library, one locks the door on maidens and wrestles with
ideas. Their lips were whetted for another Fayaway: she evaporated into
Yillah: and Yillah vanished, leaving only a gritty taste in the mouth,
criticism, criticism of Christianity, politics, morality, things that
gentlemen prefer to take, if at all, in medical capsules, not as food.

Am I wrong in thinking that Mardi has been damned for its virtues? The
idea is all the more plausible because for more than a generation,
during which Melville’s work almost disappeared from critical notice,
Melville was reprobated, when he was noticed at all, for becoming
interested in abstruse philosophy and for writing extravagantly. The
burden of this criticism was that a writer of South Sea romances had
better leave Plato and Spinoza alone, and get his opinion of the
universe from professional purveyors, or rather, not be troubled by
such foreign interests. This attempt to keep Melville in his place was
absurd enough in itself; but it led to further stupidities, far more
deplorable in character. “As early as 1848,” wrote an historian of
American literature in 1903, “the quasi-speculative romance entitled
Mardi gave premonition of aberration and of the eventual frustration of
a promising career.” This criticism is nonsense, and libellous nonsense
at that: the aberration it refers to did not exist in Melville but
in the historian himself. At the very outset of his career, Melville
found himself confronting a similar opaqueness, blank as a wall, in his
own contemporaries. One remembers Macaulay’s withering condescension
over Plato and the scholastic philosophers; and one realizes that
any view of life which did not immediately sanction the pragmatism
of the nineteenth century was bound to seem an aberration for those
who regarded the local values of the time as ultimates. Melville’s
“aberration” was his great intellectual distinction: none of his
contemporaries had such a broad base in the fundamental activities of
the time, and yet rose so loftily above them. He did not rebel against
his milieu; like Thoreau, he reached outside of it, and grew beyond it,
taking out of the very environment from which he escaped the necessary
materials for his own development.

The scene is now set: the struggle in which Melville is to participate
is defined. It is a struggle between a plastic, conventional self,
moulded in the fashion of his fellow citizens and fellow writers,
and a hard, defiant, adamantine self that springs out of his deepest
consciousness of life, and is ready to assault, not merely human
conventions, but the high gods themselves. In a conflict between his
career and his family duties, between pot-boiling and his maturest
literary aims, this drama externalizes itself: it is present in the
man, and it is present in his outward relationships. Let us make no
mistake about it: Melville was not a writer of romances: it was a mere
accident of history that turned the world’s attention to him through
the charm and tropical radiance of the South Sea adventures. Herman
Melville was a thinker, in the sense that Dante was a thinker, who
clothed his thoughts in poetic vision. That thought and vision was
one of the most important things the century produced. All honour,
then, to the few critics who appreciated Mardi when it appeared: for
Melville had a greater work in store; and it was out of the freedom and
intellectual audacity acquired in writing Mardi, out of the discovery
of his Azzageddi, that he achieved the strength to attack it.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE TARTARUS OF AUTHORS

We return to Herman Melville’s daily life. In January, 1849, Mrs.
Melville went up to Boston to live with her mother and await her
confinement. At the end of January the last proof-sheets of Mardi
were corrected; in the middle of February Malcolm was born. With the
coming of the baby, Melville must have felt a certain tightening of
responsibility. One knows very little about the economic conditions
under which Melville lived during the first years of his marriage, or
to what extent Allan may have carried a good part of the burden of the
household. But early in 1849 Melville must have begun to write Redburn,
which was a potboiler; and before Redburn was printed he wrote, with
greater strength and fuller powers, having probably recovered by that
time from the strain of writing Mardi, the masterful account of navy
life in White-Jacket.

We now have a chance to watch Melville at work under every
disadvantage: the distraction of a household with a young baby, the
necessity to make a living, and to do this promptly, the handicap of
having to produce something on the level of his audience. If there are
flaws in the man, they should come out under these conditions. If he
has no sense of reality, he will not know how to meet them; if anything
has lurked under the surface of his life, it will rise, like dead fish
in poisoned water.

In Redburn, Melville went back to his youth and traced his feelings
about life and his experiences up to his eighteenth year. The book
is autobiography, with only the faintest disguises: Bleecker Street
becomes Greenwich Street, and the other changes are of similar order.
Following Mr. Weaver, I have relied upon Melville’s account of himself
in Redburn in giving a picture of his life in the earlier chapters; for
it tallies with all the other independently known facts.

For the first time in Melville’s writings, the note of personal
disappointment and bitterness appeared. He had, it is true, said in
Mardi that the highest happiness known to Mardians was the absence
of sorrow, and he had said also, as if to explain his hilarity,
that woe is more merry than mirth and only shallow sorrows brought
tears. But these observations were not peculiar or original; and they
were biographical only in the sense that all a man’s thoughts are
autobiographical--whether they arise out of his experience or his
reading or a passing mood conditioned by the state of his digestion.
In Redburn, Melville discloses to us a disappointed boy, who had hopes
of education, cultivation, gentility, and who resented the fate that
tore these things from his grasp and made him fight for a living in
a fighting world. “Claret for boys, port for men,” he exclaimed in
White-Jacket, is a good rule for travel: Mrs. Glendinning uses the
same phrase in another application in Pierre: the words took hold of
Melville, and one suspects that in his youth he had had an overdose
of port, and had participated in experiences that required a stronger
stomach.

Now, for the first time, Melville is conscious of the black maggot
within him, deposited as a mere egg in his youth, and growing
day by day, nourished by his later disappointments and sorrows
and frustrations. Things have begun to go badly: he thinks back
without difficulty to times when they were even worse. The physical
misery of those early years, the patched clothes, the bad food, the
rough treatment of the sailors, the feeling of homelessness, the
consciousness of being an Ishmael--all these experiences tallied
point by point with the world outside, its cruelty, its misery,
its sordidness and vice. These events and sights poisoned life for
Melville: he had not realized it at the time, he had certainly not
realized it while browsing through his father’s books in Lansingburgh,
or tramping to school through the wide valleys of the Berkshires or
brooding over the calm Pacific seas--but the poison had been slowly
working in his bones. Life was not kind. All its hints of kindness,
its proffers, its affected politenesses were shams. He had married a
divine creature--and she was nearest him when she mended his stockings.
The books that he wrote fared best when they revealed least of the
author and his deepest thoughts. He wanted something central and solid
in life, a house, a family, a sense of continuity and security for his
future work--and the baby was an expense, the future was a blank, and
instead of being able to plan another Mardi, he must hastily improvise
a salable article. “It is not with a hollow purse as with a hollow
balloon--for a hollow purse makes the poet _sink_--witness ‘Mardi.’”

“When a poor devil writes with duns all around him, and looking over
the back of his chair, and perching on his pen, and dancing in his
inkstand--like the Devils about St. Anthony--what can you expect of
that poor devil? What but a beggarly Redburn?” So Melville wrote to Mr.
Duyckinck in December, 1849. Those were the words of a harassed man.
Redburn, recalling the cruel memories of his youth, was also the first
bitter cry of his maturity.

We must not, however, take Melville’s disappointment at its face
value. On its level, Redburn is a sound, well-written book. Mr. John
Masefield has singled it out among Melville’s books, after Moby-Dick;
Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has seconded his judgment: with this praise in
mind, one cannot dismiss Redburn as contemptuously as Melville himself
did. At his lowest stage of strength and confidence, he could not
write anything that did not have his signature on every page. The
marks of haste in Redburn are in its simplicity and its reliance upon
memory: the reflective and critical passages, which are so copious in
Melville’s other books, scarcely appear in Redburn. He wrote about a
boy’s consciousness of the world, with a boy’s amazement at its cruelty
and hard-heartedness, even as he recalled a boy’s confusion when he was
placed in the midst of a strange institution like a gambling-house,
something outside book, memory or dream. The captain of the ship
will not chat with Redburn: Redburn thinks him no gentleman! Redburn
is summarily booted out of a Liverpool club when he intrudes: these
English, thinks Redburn, have no manners!

These reflections are just and true; but they are true and just by the
criterion of a boy’s world, which has not yet learned the pragmatic
justification of lies, cheats, hypocrisies, and hard-heartedness.
“Unless ye be as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of
Heaven.” The kingdom of heaven is this naïve world, where lies are
lies, even if they save one’s face; where cruelty is cruelty, even if
it be the custom of the club. To treat human beings as human beings,
and not as counters, tools, conveniences, is one of the ultimate
efforts of morality; but half the practices of society are, from this
point of view, definitely immoral. In Redburn, Melville found himself
treated, not with respect to his character and needs and spiritual
wants: he found himself treated like any other pauper: put to work
and told to keep out of sight. He never forgot that lesson; for, in
more subtle and various ways, society kept on dinning it into him.
If, when he was a sailor-boy, he was not supposed to converse freely
with the captain, after he had written Typee he was not supposed to
hold conversations with Plato or Sir Thomas Browne. But he was a
man! Society denied it; a sailor, yes, a South Sea adventurer, yes,
that too: but a boy, a sailor, a South Sea adventurer always, not
a brooding, pondering, philosophic, imaginative man, whose further
developments lay in seas unvisited by whalers or Captain Cooks.

“We have had vast developments of parts of men,” wrote Melville in
Mardi, in words that anticipated Thoreau and Whitman, and show his
kinship with them, “not of any wholes. Before a full-developed man,
Mardi would fall down and worship.” It was the consciousness of being
clipped, deformed, degraded, that made Melville bitter: circumstances
had done this to him as a boy, and now, with duns standing over him, it
was doing the same trick in his manhood. Better be a full Polynesian,
as large as a native can grow, than be the deformed creature who
accommodates himself to success in business or letters.

But Redburn is not primarily a book written about a grievance: it is
a narrative of a boy’s trip to sea, an honest narrative, with none
of the mildewed rainbows and lily-livered romanticism that usually
characterize such efforts. As so often happens with mere decent
veracity, Redburn, too, was denounced by one of its contemporary
critics as “outrageously improbable,” and though the brutality, vice,
and misery it pictured were certainly outrageous, there was nothing
at all improbable about it. The book, for all its boyish directness,
has the wry humour of the grown man, reflecting on his callowness, and
the characters it presents are surprisingly realized--surprisingly
because one doubts if Melville spent much pains on them. When one
compares Redburn to a much more elaborate work, like Two Years Before
the Mast, one discovers at once where Melville’s specific talents lay.
While Dana wrote directly and straightforwardly, he was not a creator
of character, and he had no gift of selection: in order to realize the
sea, he scatters tackle, blocks, mainsails, booms, compasses, bulwarks,
bulkheads on every page of the narrative: one is perpetually stumbling
over some recondite nautical term which Dana had mastered, and, like a
true landsman, hastened to exhibit. Two Years Before the Mast sounds
like a Bluejacket’s Manual.

Now, Melville, when he wrote Redburn, had seen far more of the sea than
Dana had; and since it was impossible to work a sailing-ship without
naming every article of its gear and tackle, he knew the names and uses
of these things quite as well as Dana did. But in Melville’s work the
lingo enters incidentally; and one encounters, not the physical ship of
the shipwright, but the ship in action, the ship that is part of the
sailor’s consciousness--in brief, the living ship as contrasted with an
abstract compendium of names and relationships. The same is true of the
characters. Dana describes his shipmates accurately enough: Melville
embodies them. The difference is the difference between a commonplace
photograph and a significant portrait. One does not forget Harry or
Jackson or Captain Riga or the Negro cook: they live as authentically,
within their narrow compass, as Colonel Newcome or Samuel Weller. That
is art; and even in his minor passages, Melville was an artist.

Redburn, in sum, showed only a portion of Melville; but he had no
reason to be ashamed of it, except for the reason that it fell short
of the higher standard he had now set himself, and the maturer art
he was now capable of creating. By 1850 twice as many copies of
Redburn as of Mardi had been sold, a difference accounted for partly
by the difference in bulk and price, but even more, I think, by the
preferences of Melville’s public. He had accomplished what he set out
to do: he had faced his immediate situation and improved it. That
Melville was forced to write such a potboiler was bad luck, and nothing
to be proud of: but that he met the situation squarely was a mark of
his resolution and balance. As long as Melville could fall back upon
his adventurous past, he had something to support him, something that
was viable in the marketplace. It was only when he had exhausted his
accumulated capital, and was forced to mine his ore and smelt it and
cast it, all under pressure of financial necessity, that he drew too
heavily on his resources. But we must not read back into these earlier
years his later difficulties. Redburn was a victory.

On the heels of Redburn came White-Jacket, or, the World in a
Man-of-War. White-Jacket was the sort of book that Melville could
hardly have attempted until he was sure of his capacities as a writer.
Although there is more than one adventurous passage in White-Jacket, it
is full of sober description and realistic criticism; and it depends
for its interest on Melville’s own strength of character, his shrewd,
quick insight, and his easy, seamanlike way of taking the world, rather
than on the glamour of his adventures.

The young writer casts about for interesting materials; the experienced
writer knows that no materials are uninteresting if they are capable
of being absorbed in the blood, and pumped through all the organs
and chambers of a man’s being: the more command a writer has of his
own resources, the more confident is he of his ability to turn any
experience to account. White-Jacket shows, I think, a greater art
and control over the material than any of Melville’s earlier books:
in Typee the art is gracefully unconscious: in White-Jacket it is
deliberate. Melville’s personal distinction and his own peculiar
adventures were subsumed under the jacket itself: he announced the
theme in the first chapter, recurred to it from time to time, when he
sought to waterproof the jacket, when he rounded the Horn in it, when
he tried to dispose of it at auction, and finally when he was blinded
by it and lost his hold on the yard-arm. The white jacket gave the
narrative a unity without introducing the extraneous mechanism of a
plot: it also symbolized his position as a white sheep in the black
flock of a man-of-war. Omoo was more fitful and inconsecutive for lack
of such a thread; Mardi did not open, like White-Jacket, on the theme
with which it closed. Like Redburn, White-Jacket was written under
pressure; but by now Melville knew his business. At thirty he had
mastery: he could take the dull routine of the man-of-war and make
every part of it live, from the maintop to the hold: he could take a
hundred dispersed facts and weave them into a solid pattern.

White-Jacket is a great portrait gallery. From the Commodore to the
rascally Master-at-arms, from Jack Chase of the maintop to Mad Jack,
the sea-going lieutenant, who, like Jermin, knew his business so well
he commanded Melville’s deep respect, from Mr. Pert the Midshipman
to Surgeon Cuticle--Melville typified, and yet individualized, every
character. The Neversink is an old-fashioned frigate of the line, now
long out of date, and it is all warships, down to the latest airplane
carrier. Mad Jack is an actual person; and he is all the officers
who exercise command by knowledge and capacity, none the less liked
for being a strict disciplinarian. Surgeon Cuticle is a man; and he
is all professional men who become specialized by their skill into
a brief-case or a textbook or an operating knife. Melville, who had
found that the world was something of a man-of-war discovered also
that a man-of-war’s crew was a pretty good representation of the
world. “Wrecked on a desert, a man of war’s crew could quickly found
an Alexandria by themselves, and fill it with all the things which go
to make up a capital.” Melville conveyed this feeling of richness and
varied capacity: every face was accentuated slightly in caricature,
except Jack Chase’s for Jack stood out among the officers and crew as
the real captain, the one complete, full-bodied man among them all,
robust, bearded, Jovian, ready in war or love or seamanship, singing
Dibdin’s ballads or reciting Camoëns’ Lusiad with equal gusto. Jack
Chase would have pleased Whitman: indeed, they had the same large,
sympathetic, readily dramatized personalities.

In White-Jacket, Melville’s power of invention appears only a few
times; but when it does, it is magnificent. The chapters on the
Surgeon of the Fleet and his operation show Melville’s satire at its
acutest: the picture would do honour to the Hogarth Melville loved.
One sees Cuticle, the eminent man of science and surgery, languishing
for three years in a man-of-war without a single major operation.
Fate at last hands Cuticle a poor wretch who has broken his leg; and
Cuticle cannot ease the itch to amputate. The consultation with the
other, surgeons is handled with cruel fidelity: they are all against
the operation; but Cuticle, with great presence, browbeats the junior
surgeon into an equivocation which his superior pounces upon as a
sufficient sanction for the operation. The grizzly preparation and
performance is told with the grizzliest humour; Melville went through
every detail of the butchery with a terrible levity, and an eye for
the vanity, the professional hypocrisy, the routine which, rather than
humanity and understanding, so often decide the issues of life and
death. The operation was a triumph for science and Mr. Surgeon Cuticle:
incidentally, it happened to be the death of the poor man who was
brought needlessly to the operating-table.

The satire is perfect; and it is perfect because, at the broadest
extreme of caricature, it does not lose sight of the pathetic reality
underneath. Melville did not waste breath dissecting the obvious
impostors and charlatans; for all but the simple can escape them. It is
the man in command, the man we admire, respect, put all our confidence
in, that Melville so skilfully opened up. No one has done a better
job of it: Cuticle and his operation must be put alongside the best
passages in Molière. If operations cannot now be performed in the Navy
without the consent of the principal party, Melville’s account of their
professional abuse is perhaps responsible, in part, for the improvement.

Nor was this scene merely a lucky hit by Melville; the scene between
the two sailmakers, sewing up the corpse, is equally strong and equally
endowed with imaginative life. In his earlier books, Melville had
defined his limits: they ranged between utmost fantasy and grossest
matter of fact: he could grub with Caliban or fly with Ariel, but
when he flew, his course was still a little erratic, and when he
remained on the ground, he was tied a little too close to actuality.
In White-Jacket his powers did not widen; but they gained firmness and
control. He could fly groundwise, giving the commonplace the benefits
of his imagination, carrying the double theme, the theme of life itself
and naval experience, under the same figure; and when he cut loose,
he did not need to throw overboard the ballast of good sense before
he could reach the upper air. The prose of White-Jacket is an advance
on all his previous writing; it has a richness of texture, a variety
of rhythm, a decisiveness of phrase that his earlier work had only
promised and that Mardi itself had not quite fulfilled.

White-Jacket is a portrait gallery: but it is more than that: it
is one of the best all-round characterizations and criticisms of a
powerful human institution that the century produced. Melville dealt
with the effect of regimentation, with the relation of superior
to underling, with the accidents and mischances and the ordinary
routine of a man-of-war’s life, in such a fashion that he included
other institutions as well: the human truths and relationships would
remain, though all the navies of the world were scrapped next week.
The malevolence of the Articles of War, the essential degradation of
the whole military process, the hectoring, the arrogance of station
(the quarter-deck face!), the military necessity of converting all the
variable human potentialities into mechanized patterns--that is, human
defectives--are here once and for all coolly observed and demonstrated:
White-Jacket forms a sort of illustrated supplement to Blake’s keen and
devastating epigrams on war. The fact that flogging was abolished in
the Navy as a result of an agitation in Congress that followed directly
upon White-Jacket’s publication, is a tribute to the moving truth of
what Melville wrote: his words on the sham republicanism of a country
that fostered an autocratic navy were a little too sharply aimed for
even the military racketeers to dodge. Had Melville’s picture been
that of a mere propagandist, I doubt if it would have taken such
immediate effect: on the contrary, it was that of a genuine critic,
who portrayed the whole truth in such a fashion as to make evasion
of the unpleasant parts of it almost impossible. He overreached his
antagonists by knowing more about their business than they themselves
did: as when he used the example of the British admiral, Collingwood,
to show that capable officers could govern the rowdiest crew without
the lash. Apart from Moby-Dick, White-Jacket is, I think, Melville’s
fullest achievement: and it is the best reasoned and seasoned of all
his factual narratives. The charm of youth was gone, perhaps, but the
manly grasp of maturity had succeeded it--the manly grasp and the
steady, unfaltering eye.

Melville’s appetite for facts, his voracious reading, his wide range
of experience, his philosophic brooding, at last had an imagination
capable of assimilating all these materials and using them to further
its own ends. Now was the time for a great leap, a leap which would
gather all these powers together and focus them on an object of epic
dimensions, a Typee, a Mardi, a Redburn, a White-Jacket, all in one.
Melville gathered himself for the leap; but before he could make it, he
was forced to attend to more mundane affairs; and in October, 1849, he
went over to England to arrange in person for the English publication
of Redburn and White-Jacket.

For a few months, we have the rare good luck to follow Melville day
by day, almost hour by hour. When, on October 11, 1849, he stepped
aboard the Southampton, a regular London liner, on a raw noon, leaving
behind his brother Allan and Mr. Duyckinck, who had come to the docks,
he began to keep a journal of his voyage. This journal, a later one
kept during his trip to the Near East, and a small sheaf of letters,
constitute with his books almost the only first-hand material for
Melville’s biography. Let us take advantage of this good fortune.
The literal, unadorned journal, made up hastily day by day, is the
least impeachable sort of testimony, unless the writer has an eye on
posterity. One need harbour no such suspicions about Melville’s simple
record.

(_Enter Herman Melville, in a green overcoat, with polite manners, and
a wary reticence underneath his appearance of rank conviviality. He
is just past thirty, and at times his grave demeanour and abstracted
look might pass him for forty; but there are other moments when the
fringe of brown beard seems only a mask, and one detects beneath the
thoughtful brow of the author and the anxious brow of the husband and
father an irrepressible boy. One wants a name for this combination of
outdoor strength and bookishness, this Bohemianism and gentlehood, this
mixture of the bronzed god himself and the plaster cast, and, for lack
of an epithet, one will have to call it Melvillian._)

What a queer business, this getting away. Yesterday one said a
passionate farewell to every one in the morning; but the winds were
unfavourable, and in the evening one was back again at home, feeling
almost as if one had accomplished the tour of Europe; the final
farewell was made a little stale by repetition; one felt relief when
the ship was at last under way. For almost the first time, one travels
as a passenger, travels alone, in a room as big as one’s own room at
home. It is good to be at sea again: one feels it more keenly among
the land-lubbers, who make anguished noises at the first choppy water
beyond the Narrows. In the morning, one is up early for the sunrise,
and, since the captain is friendly, one has the run of the ship. Fine
to be up in the rigging again! When a man is overboard one knows how
to act promptly: one raises a cry, drops overboard the tackle-fall of
the quarter boat, and when he fails to reach it, drops over the side
oneself to swing it toward him. Poor fellow: he sees it and does not
grasp it: he drowns with a demented smile on his face, when he might
have saved himself. The passengers say later he was insane.... To work
a boat, to know how to keep it pointed on its course, or to throw out a
life-line, this sort of knowledge gives one back one’s old confidence.
There’s no gammon about the ocean; it knocks the false bottom right off
a pretender’s keel.

The passengers prove better than one had dared hope: there is Adler,
a German philologist, who will talk to one till midnight about fixed
fate, free will, and foreknowledge absolute: his philosophy is
Coleridgian, a sort of friendly bridge between Kant and Hegel and
Schelling and Schlegel and one’s own less conscious metaphysics, one’s
hitherto dim doubts and intuitions. There is also a genteel sociable
youth named McCurdy, whose father is a New York merchant, and there is
a cousin of Bayard Taylor, the pedestrian traveller, all good fellows
over a bowl of punch. Taylor has a notion of going through the Near
East: down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople--Athens, Beyrut,
Jerusalem, Cairo, Alexandria. That would be something neither Polynesia
nor the Hudson Valley could give: marvellous, if it were not for the
strain on one’s purse. Four hundred dollars at least. Already, too--one
isn’t a week away from them--Lizzy and Barney the baby begin to tug
at one. No: one isn’t free any more. One is going to England to get a
little ready cash from Bentley or Murray or Moxon on White-Jacket: one
can’t dissipate that in travel. One is tied: there is no getting away
from that. One wants to travel far, perhaps; but not with the same
old lust and confidence: all paths lead home again. Where’s Lizzie
now? Where dat old man? The nice little beggar: those were the first
connected words he uttered.

Ah, well: the vacant days, the rough days, the dozy sunlit days: they
all relieve the tension a little. Five years ago one scarcely knew that
Hegel existed: now one is on one’s way to England--an author! One of
the ladies is reading a book by H. M.; she keeps on raising her eyes
to take one in, as if comparing the real man with the self-portrait.
People say: Are you _the_ Mr. Melville--the man who lived among the
cannibals? A fine way to go down to posterity.... What a slack lot of
sheep a company of passengers is; one’s sympathies are all with the
forecastle. There is the buxom Irish lady who sings, the gushy Miss
Wilbur who is so obviously marriageable and who talks of winning souls
to Christ, the Frenchmen with the bleak, sea-sick faces. When one goes
aloft to muse a little, they stand around and gape, as if one were a
performer in Barnum’s museum. Already we are three weeks from home.
How quickly time flies when one day is like another. Dear Lizzie: dear
little Barney: where dat old man!

With a fresh wind and a clear sky and land near, the passengers
suddenly re-galvanize into life: faces appear that had been below
decks most of the sail. The food tastes better; one plays shuffleboard
gaily, not dutifully; one reads Pickwick Papers and wonders about the
England that lies somewhere between one’s father’s journals, one’s
own grim memories of Liverpool, and the warm, roast-beef, veal-pie,
ale-drinking, punch-sipping, toddy-smacking England of Dickens. At last
the cliffs of Portland, where the Portland stone comes from, bleak,
melancholy; then the run along the Isle of Wight, past the Needles,
with the ploughed fields neatly marked off, and the lower shore of
Hampshire with its low cliffs on the other side. Oh, to get ashore, to
feel dry land, to quit this endless, tedious tacking: to rush ashore
at Portsmouth and let the ship find London by itself! No: it can’t
be done: out in the Channel and up to Dover now: one is restless and
impatient. Up in the morning in the dark at four, and into the cold
cutter, which heads for Deal, not Dover, to make a landing. Well:
England at last! Ten years ago, thirteen to be exact, a poor boy, half
orphan, teased and tormented by foul-mouthed sailors, young, hopeful,
innocent, a mere ship’s monkey--now, Herman Melville, traveller,
novelist, romancer, author of Peedee and Hullabaloo and Pog-Dog: the
conquering hero, with debts and duns at his back and a potboiler in
his carpet-bag. Triumph--and how raw the wind is at dawn!

Through the dark, narrow streets of Deal, the keen air faintly reeking
with the first kitchen-coals, then out into the country on foot for a
day’s walk to Canterbury with Taylor and Adler. A castle and a Roman
fortification before one is two hours ashore! Deal: the square mound
of the Roman castra: somehow, these things mean more than a hillful of
arrow-heads: the men who built them worried about God and Eternity:
a thousand years does not separate one from them. Canterbury is even
better: the nave, the cloisters, the queer fine thoughts one finds on
some of the tombs. Yes: this is a little nearer the England of one’s
dreams. Dinner at the Falstaff Inn, and in the evening a provincial
theatre, with a stage that might have been peopled by Dickens, every
actor more of a character than the character portrayed: an ineffably
funny business all round.

Next day, by train in a third-class open carriage to London: cold to
one’s marrow: cold and ravenous. When one arrives at London Bridge
one can think of nothing but a chop-house. While the chops and the
porter and the treacle pudding are digesting, one realizes that this
is England, old England, the dark, slightly grimy eating-stalls, the
red-cheeked, pert, coarse, kindly stupid waitress, the silent men
eating methodically, piling their forks up like a hod with food, the
lawyers’ clerks, shabby, rusty, genteel, the countrymen with leather
leggings and purple veins on their cheeks, the bagmen, voluble and
expansive for Englishmen, just one remove from the country pedlar, a
faint odour of musty paper and soot over one kind of Londoner, or of
ploughed fields and manure over the other: in short, England, London--a
society like that at Albany, bedded deep in dust, must, precedent,
and vast augmentations of gold. One is in it and out of it. The crowd
on the Strand stares at one’s green overcoat: some one had ominously
warned one on the steamer that it would set one down for a crude
American. Colour is already a little old-fashioned in this drab,
utilitarian England: this is the City of Dis: black coats, black hats,
have survival value in a sulphur-and-brimstone world: the damned need
protective colouration. One sinks down at last before a small fire in
a tall, draughty room in Craven Street, just off the Strand. One’s
journal has been a blank these last three days, and one must catch up
with it. Travelling takes the ink out of one’s pen as well as the cash
out of one’s purse.

But time is limited and one must quickly set to work. Murray is out
of town; so is Bentley, the publisher; but Bentley will come up from
Brighton to suit one’s convenience. In the meanwhile, one can drop
in for Julien’s Promenade Concert at Drury Lane, see the pictures at
the National Gallery, prowl through Chancery Lane, or go down into
Cheapside to witness the surviving pomp and gilded fustian of the Lord
Mayor’s show, exploring the Guildhall the next day, in the company of
an affable functionary in the finance department whom one picks up, by
chance, in the street, to witness a bit of infernal charity, worthy of
Dis itself: a horde of beggars pours into the tawny-warm twilight of
the hall, with all its flags and banners and fine timbering, to pick
and grab at the remains of hams, fowls, pastries, left over from the
high-and-mightinesses of the previous day. A comical sight at first;
but on slight reflection, not comical: no, not comical. Thank heaven,
civilization has not gone quite that far in America.

The world that holds Lord Mayor’s shows--and the starvation and misery
behind the show--also holds a bus-ride, on a mellow autumn Sunday,
through Piccadilly, by Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and then
on, past red cottages and little taverns and open commons, through
Hammersmith, Chiswick, Kew, and across the Thames to Richmond Hill,
where, at the crest, overlooking a long stretch of parkland, one can
see the distant castle of Windsor in the mist beyond, with the Thames
itself flashing occasionally like a fish’s back in the sun, in the
valley between. After that, one is ready for the sober crimson of
Hampton Court--the Van Dycks and the Titians and the Rembrandts: this
is what one means by a cultivated life. Must one be harried, must one
struggle over vain things, must one know so much temporal bitterness,
hardship, evil, in order to live? Not the Marquesans: not the Olympians
of England: they both live as the lilies, planting themselves in a
nourishing soil, drinking in the sun, growing, forming pollen and
fertilizing and becoming fertilized, flowering and seeding. That is
life, not the struggling, the harrying, the deprivation. But tomorrow
one must leave Rembrandt and Hampton Court far behind: one must dicker
for good terms and a fat advance with Bentley.

The greyness of London comes over one: the glacial greyness of St.
Paul’s: the brown greyness of Bloomsbury: the smeary greyness of the
Strand: the dank blue greyness of the Temple. The choir chanting in St.
Paul’s leaves one feeling wan and unhappy. What is Lizzie doing? Where
dat old man? If only they were here, or better, if one could be with
them for a little while, and come back to the quiet inwardness of one’s
days, warmed, refreshed, revivified. One could absorb so much more, if
one were settled and secure.

How near one feels to these English, these people who like good solid
food and ale and port, who have a manly straightness in their dealings,
merchants whose signature makes paper valuable, poets who have created
in words poems that atone for all the pictures that remain unpainted
and all the music that remains unsung in the English soul: hearty,
robust, gay, ready to turn a farce in Beaumont and Fletcher or in a
market Punch and Judy show, but grave, serious, at bottom very deep:
no one, not Dante, had struck more ruthlessly at the sinister meanings
of life than Shakespeare, no one had been more relentless and sardonic
than Swift or Hogarth--and yet with what tenderness, what warm love
of life, in Swift’s letters to Stella or Hogarth’s portrait of the
Shrimp-girl, as fresh as a newly opened wild-flower. A country of
sound men, buxom girls, beautiful tidy fields, snug inns--and terrible
revealers of life’s immense blackness. How intense the candle in those
brave hands: how sullen and eventful the grave shadows that swarm
around it!

But that other England--one was very distant from it. The England of
wealth and station and reputation and family in the county sense, with
its arctic Oh? and its hard, oysterlike rudeness, a stupid England,
but influential in everything, governing its very enemies by choosing
the issues over which they would fight. The England that had kicked
an innocent youth out of a Liverpool club and would doubtless do
the same, with less provocation, to a distinguished American author
whose reputation was growing in France and Germany: the England of
hard-faced men who rolled the wheels of progress over usury and penury
as twin rails: the England that had impressed seamen, struck down
its continental rivals, enclosed the commons, introduced an inhuman
system of industry, and defended privilege and empty title as the
very cornerstones of Civil Order--in short, the England of snobs and
flunkeys and a complacent, servile, self-righteous middle class--New
York, to be sure, without a hinterland that was still free and
unclaimed.

How trivial this other England essentially is. What a stupid lot at
Murray’s party, and what a bore old Lockhart was, with his ghastly,
grinning, mincing way: such a moth-eaten lion! Oh, conventionalism,
what a ninny thou art! How completely one felt out of it, how superior
one felt to these superiorities. Perhaps there was such a thing as
real aristocracy: one wonders if the Scotch Melvilles would show it,
or whether one might get a taste of the real thing at the Duke of
Rutland’s own seat: but these fishy eyes, these stupid faces, this
intellectual torpor, do not reassure one. Blackwood’s had printed a
long ponderous review of Redburn: that was a comical black mark against
the reigning Tory intellect, wasting good white paper on a book one
knows oneself to be trash, which one wrote to buy tobacco with. In
a society where the mask, the reputation, the hallmark count for so
much, how little any one is concerned with the substance beneath! One
is a well-known author: a success: ergo, Blackwood’s takes Redburn
seriously, not fathoming how little it is worth serious criticism.

One meets the publishers one by one, Bentley, who did Mardi, Murray,
who published Typee and Omoo, Mr. Longmans, Mr. Chapman, Mr. Bohn, Mr.
Moxon, who was Charles Lamb’s crony; and when one can’t make the deal
one had hoped for, one goes down the line; but the answer is always
the same: the copyright is unsatisfactory, the work may be pirated in
America; and they cannot risk two hundred pounds on the rights for
the first thousand copies. The prospects are not too pleasant; but
if the matter could be settled at once one wouldn’t have the excuse
and the opportunity to visit the Dulwich Gallery, remote from London,
but full of splendid treasures; one couldn’t sit with the Greenwich
pensioners at Greenwich; one couldn’t spend a Sunday morning, a little
too conspicuous for comfort, at the services in St. Bridget’s; nor
could one discuss metaphysics with Dr. Adler at the Edinburgh Castle,
dark-walled and like a beefsteak in colour, where the ale was so mellow
and the waiters so polite. One absorbs a city by food and drink, as
well as by sight and conversation: the Mitre--Johnson’s tavern--and
the Cock and the Rainbow--Tennyson’s haunts: the little French hotel
in Soho where one has morning coffee and a jelly omelette, or, to know
the worst about life in London, a cup of brackish coffee, a dirty roll,
an unappetizing piece of bacon, on a dank, foggy morning in a cheap
eating-house: such depression of taste, sight, sound, feeling adds a
new circle to life’s possible hells.

There are bright spots that serve for perpetual contrast: hours spent
over the bookstalls in Great Green Street and Lincoln’s Inn, picking
out folios of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Browne, coming,
with a sudden recognition of kinship, upon De Quincey’s dreams of an
Opium Eater, with passages so much like one’s best feats in Mardi;
or a sumptuous dinner with Mr. Bates at East Sheen, nine miles from
Richmond, where one meets Lord Ashburton’s nephew, and Baron This and
Baroness That and Mr. Peabody the Boston merchant, a warm old soul:
where the glasses and the silver are brilliant and the conversation
ripples in reflection of it, or at least seems to, as one intricate
piece of French cookery gives place to another, as white wine,
champagne, hock, claret, port, and Madeira follow in grand procession:
Taji dined no better among the five-and-twenty kings.

Yes: but then the melancholy of a day when one has spoken no more than
“Good morning” to the slavey: when a frightful nightmare fills with a
turbid residue the commonplaces of the diurnal routine: when one feels
lonely and apart in the haunts that thrilled one most: when one sits
at night in a damp chamber, thinking back to poor Gansevoort, who,
two years before, three, was sitting in such a chamber, in the midst
of such a silence, withdrawn, homesick, alone. What deep thoughts one
seems on the brink of in that silence and solitude: no wonder the
Greeks made silence the vestibule of the mysteries. But the weariness
of this inward communion, too--oh, solitude, where are thy charms!
One’s desires are fulfilled indeed: but always wryly, never in the
right proportion....

While one waits around doggedly, hoping for more favourable offers, one
had better seize the opportunity and make a flying trip to France: one
never knows if one is coming this way again; and besides, if one does
that story of the revolutionary beggar, Potter, one ought to be able to
follow him on his French mission. Very well: by steamer to Boulogne,
then by rail to Paris. A lodging-house on the Rue de Bussy, then a
room at Mme. Capelie’s on the Left Bank. This is civilization: the
Rue de Rivoli: the Place de la Concorde: the Tuileries: the Sorbonne:
these things have the imprint of logic and law. Chaos and old time are
somehow set at naught. The Louvre makes the National Gallery itself
seem a little provincial: Notre Dame, under repair, is still a noble
mass: there is a vivacity, an eagerness, an upright peasant homeliness
in the housewives in felt shoes, in the rosy-cheeked market-women,
that makes one feel a little nearer home. Courtesy takes the place
of servility here, innate courtesy; a market-woman may have it as
well as a duchess. The Hôtel de Cluny, on the site of the old Roman
bath, is just such a house as one would like to live in, venerable,
spacious, solid; and the bookstalls by the Palais Royal, with their
Latin translations and their Voltaire and their Fénelon, give one a
sense of a nation bred to thought and expression, not merely sharp and
acquisitive, like the Yankees, although, obviously, they do not let
the sous go by. And yet--well, the devilish nonsense of this passport
business: the tapeworm of an ancient bureaucracy. What a disappointment
to stand on line, once, twice, to get admission to Rachel in Phèdre,
and be turned away. Rachel acting at the Palais Royal: Victor Cousin
lecturing at the Sorbonne--and somehow, one remains out of it, unable
to get sight of, much less to understand, these things. For consolation
one has _eau de vie_ and a metaphysical talk with the ubiquitous Dr.
Adler.

One is a little downcast: but what did one expect? The truth is, one’s
heart is not altogether in it: one wants Lizzie and Barney, now,
far more than one wants Rachel, Cousin, and the triumphs of culture
generally. Still: one will make one last try: by train to Brussels,
that venerable but obviously stodgy place, Paris minor, and then over
into Germany for a little trip up the Rhine to Cologne, an antiquated,
gable-ended town, with the crane still aloft in the unfinished tower
of the Cathedral, full of associations that go back as far as
Charlemagne. How concentrated history becomes in Europe: here Rubens
was born and Marie de Médicis died: much lore and history to interest
a pondering man. Down the Rhine itself at night, between black cliffs
and crags, from Cologne to Coblentz. Metternich was born near this
great fortress, Ehrenbreitstein, but, more significant symbol than
this, the finest Rhenish wine-grapes are grown right under its guns.
Does not that stand for life itself? Our rarest triumphs and ecstasies
are touched with the shadow of ancient death. At dusk one finds oneself
standing in the place where the two rivers meet: opposite towers
the fortress: some four thousand miles away are Lizzie and America.
Tomorrow, the last lap begins: definitely one is homeward bound.

London itself seems halfway home, when one returns to the old chamber
overlooking the Thames. Back in London with a few presents, a pair of
gloves and shoes from Paris for Lizzie, a medallion one bought from
an old woman near the Arc de Triomphe, and a breast-pin one bought in
Cologne from a rascally shopwoman who cheated one, cheated--and by a
woman--and not even a pretty woman! If only one could splurge a little
on presents. No: one must be sensible: a trencher and breadknife,
as used of old at commons in New College: fine thing. One for Mrs.
Shaw, too. At last Mr. Bentley has come around to one’s terms; it
was worth waiting for. Two hundred pounds sterling on a note of
hand for six months, on White-Jacket. If only Lizzie and the Little
One were here--thank heaven for good letters from Lizzie--one might
settle down to a little enjoyment. The Duke of Rutland has sent one a
courteous invitation to visit Belvoir Castle in January. Alas! that
is three weeks ahead. Can one put another three weeks between one and
home? If one does not go, one will miss a royal opportunity to see
the aristocracy under the best possible conditions: not merely an
interesting experience in itself, but--a prudent author mustn’t forget
it--so much good material to be hoarded up for another book. If one
passes this up, Allan, shrewd fellow, will set one down for a ninny.

Ah! if only one could get over the three weeks: if the two images at
home would only down for that space of time. Another cigar: one must
weigh it over carefully. No: no: the visit to Leicester would be very
agreeable--at least very valuable--but the three weeks couldn’t be
borne. It is bad enough to have to go back in a thirty-day boat to
save money, instead of dashing in on a twelve- or fifteen-day packet
steamer. That’s settled: one goes. Yes: one goes. Now one can enjoy a
bright day, and an hour at the National Gallery looking at Rembrandt’s
Jew and the saints of Taddeo Gaddi and Guido’s Murder of the Innocents.
One is going home. Things brighten. Davidson has promised to discount
Bentley’s note at the banker’s; one even begins to enjoy old Bentley:
he is a fine, frank, off-handed old gentleman, opening up gradually,
like all Englishmen, but as solid as oak once he is sure of you and of
his own feelings. One begins to like these English: they are not all
masked and corseted in iron. There is Alfred Crowquill, for example,
Punch’s funny man, whom one meets at Bentley’s--a good fellow, free and
easy, and no damned nonsense. The Benchers at the Temple Bar are men
after one’s own heart: a Paradise of Bachelors, this! Well, one sails
a week hence. Ironically, one leaves for the old home just as one is
beginning to feel settled in the new one! One breakfasts for the last
time at the old place; one says good-bye to Bentley; one has one’s last
dinner at Morley’s; one’s first and last glimpse of the Reform Club, a
last good-bye to the somehow pleasantly dingy room in Craven Street.
Waterloo Station--Portsmouth--and one steps, with Captain Fletcher,
aboard the Independence, a small, ancient-looking wooden ship. In less
than twenty-four hours we are past Land’s End.

Nothing happens between December 26, when one sets sail, and January
30, when one gets sight of a pilot boat: nothing can possibly happen
outside that would compete with the memories, the stimuli, the
anticipations, the impetuous dreams, the regrets at visits forgotten
and experiences omitted, the whole inner tumult of this four months
away from home. Or rather, what happens most importantly now, comes by
way of books: De Quincey, Rousseau’s Confessions, Ben Jonson, Thomas
Browne, The Castle of Otranto, Lamb’s Essays, Hudibras, Marlowe,
Anastasius, Vathek, Goethe’s autobiography. The vessel is again one’s
cloister: but instead of a long, unconscious growth it contains a vivid
and conscious development: every day one is aware of new shoots, ideas,
emotions, feelings, insights, sprouting out of one: why, before one had
reached twenty-five one hardly had any growth one could point to at
all. And now.... If one could not write books one would burst. One is
big with a book; it kicks at the walls of the womb; it wakes one in the
night with its anticipatory motions.

The low-lying hills of Staten Island at last. The clack and clamour
of Whitehall, Broadway. Lizzie. Barney no longer says, “Where dat old
man?” He has a dozen other things to talk about. Lizzie is busy with
the household, her mother, her mother-in-law, Sam, Father, Uncle Peter,
Allan, the sisters: she chatters on about all of them, and about what
baby did last week. She will never quite realize, perhaps, what one
has been through, how deep one’s longing is, how strong one’s need
for escape is, too. She loves one, yes, but not with that gnawing
intensity; she will never appreciate how lonely one has been. Before
a fortnight is over one wonders why one had ever been so feverishly
anxious to come back. Lizzie would have waited another three weeks: an
invitation from the Duke of Rutland is irretrievable. No matter: spring
is coming, and one must get down to work, and be midwife to one’s own
progeny. What earthly shape will this embryo take on?

(_Exit Herman Melville, pondering his future._)

TITAN

CHAPTER SIX: RED CLOVER

It was time for Melville to begin work again. In February, 1850, he
owed his publisher, Harper’s, more than seven hundred dollars in
advances not covered by royalties. He did what he could to reduce
the scale of his living. In the spring, he left New York and went up
to Broadhall with his family--the old homestead that his Grand-Uncle
Thomas had sold when he emigrated to Ohio, had now been converted into
an inn: his grandfather’s old desk was still mildewing in the barn, and
Melville brought it to light, cleaned it up for his own use, and sat
down to it.

The Berkshires were “home” for Melville quite as much as Albany or New
York; perhaps more so, for he had a feeling for the open country and
its ways. By October he had found a near-by farmstead, with a house
that had been an inn during the eighteenth century, an apple orchard on
the south side, broad hay fields to the north, and pasture rising in
back of the house to the west, which ended in a wood lot on the summit
of the hill. The countryside was well cultivated. Maple trees lined the
highroad on each side, the willows dropped lazily over the banks of the
Housatonic, and, on the poorer upland soils, where the amaranth grew,
the white threads of birch trees stood out against the dark pattern of
the woods. Pittsfield, a village with metropolitan pretensions, the
capital of the Berkshires and the resort of palpable celebrities, was
only two miles or so away by a road that led down the valley and across
the river, past a sawmill, and through the parklike streets of the
village itself.

Judge Shaw advanced Melville funds on a friendly sort of mortgage to
purchase Arrowhead; and Melville doubtless intended by modest and
spasmodic farming, with a vegetable garden, hay fields, a wood lot,
a cow, and a horse, to eke out the narrow income derived from his
books. For a man in prime health there was nothing injudicious in
this arrangement: winter leaves a considerable amount of free time
from farm work, and, with only a few hundred dollars in ready cash
every year, Melville might have made a pretty good go of it. But there
were handicaps. He had a wife and child to support; other children
came presently, four in all; and Elizabeth Melville was a duffer as a
housekeeper: try as she would, she could not cook without strain nor
manage a servant; and her chief equipment for facing the work and the
winter was an admirable set of party dresses and slippers. Melville’s
picked-up knowledge of cookery must have been called upon for service
during the first weeks they were definitely on their own; and presently
Mrs. Maria Melville and his sisters came to join the household, in
order to teach Elizabeth the rudiments of the household arts. It was
a humiliating experience for Elizabeth; but there was no help for
it: to the end of her days she did not like housekeeping; the art of
“managing” was apparently not in her. The many hands in Arrowhead
doubtless made light work; they also made inroads upon the larder, and
what the Melvilles gained in service they lost in supplies. The house
itself was commodious in rooms, but cramped in space, since it did not
so much exist in its own right, as it did as a sort of annex to the
chimney, a vast brick structure, with a circumference of forty-eight
feet at the base; the chimney was ample enough, but it swallowed wood
on a winter day as a whale swallows little fishes: and the rooms that
were left were none too large.

On any realistic canvas, this new move, with all its unexpected
burdens, was a dubious one. But in 1850 Melville was at the top of
his energies: the impetus from Typee and Omoo had not been lost: the
reception in England had probably added to his confidence: and when he
looked around him, the American scene itself reinforced his courage and
his convictions, and gave him new strength.

In the spring of 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter appeared,
and Melville presently awoke to find that Hawthorne, whose books he
had hitherto kept away from, despite the praise of them he had heard,
was a kindred spirit. “A man of deep and noble nature has taken hold
of me in this seclusion,” he exclaimed; “his wild, witch-voice rings
through me; or, in softer cadences, I seem to hear it in the songs of
the hillside birds that sing in the larch trees at my window.” This
discovery must have added to Melville’s refreshing sense of welcome on
coming back to America. Melville had perhaps begun to doubt whether he
could find an audience among his fellow countrymen; and here, at last,
was one man capable of understanding every part of him. America and its
promise were not a fraud: Hawthorne seemed a deeper writer than any one
who had gained the public’s ear in England as a novelist, or, for that
matter, as a Victorian poet. When, this summer, Melville came upon the
Mosses from an Old Manse, which had been published some years before,
he realized he had lost much by his aloofness from the Salem magician.
He hastened to repair his neglect; for he gave to the Literary World
presently one of the best appreciations of Hawthorne, and incidentally
one of the keenest expositions of the situation of the creative writer
in America, that Hawthorne was in his own lifetime to get.

The “soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of
dreams,” Melville announced. In Hawthorne, humour and love were
developed in that high form called genius, and “no such man can exist
without also possessing, as the indispensable complement of these,
a great, deep intellect, which drops down into the universe like a
plummet.”

Hawthorne, without all of Rembrandt’s warmth, had this great quality
of Rembrandt: there were blacks in the midst of his sunlight, as
Melville had found there were blacks in the world. The blackness
fixed and fascinated Melville: it brought Hawthorne to the level of
Shakespeare, not in language and performance, perhaps, but in insight:
“those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive truth in him; those
short, quick probings at the very axis of reality,” the dark things
Shakespeare announced through his dark characters, Hamlet, Timon, Lear,
Iago, “these qualities, in spite of Hawthorne’s quiet temperateness,
so different from Shakespeare’s popularizing noise and show of broad
farce and blood-besmeared tragedy,” brought him on the same level.
Melville had re-discovered Shakespeare only two years before: and that
discovery, reserved happily for maturity, had contributed decisively to
his own rapid burgeoning: “Dolt and ass that I am,” he had exclaimed
then, “I have lived more than twenty-nine years, and until a few days
ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William. Ah, he’s
full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, ay, almost as Jesus. I take
such men to be inspired. I fancy this Mons. Shakespeare in heaven
ranks with Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael. And if another Messiah ever
comes he will be in Shakespeare’s person.” ... “I would to God,” he
wrote shortly after, “Shakespeare had lived later and promenaded in
Broadway. Not that I might have had the pleasure of leaving my card
for him at the Astor, or made merry with him over a bowl of the fine
Duyckinck punch; but that the marble which all men wore on their souls
in the Elizabethan day, might not have intercepted Shakespeare’s fine
articulateness. Now I hold it a verity that even Shakespeare was not
a frank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, [who] in this intolerant
universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a
difference.”

Shakespeare had prepared the way for Hawthorne in Melville’s mind.
If what one could not quite get from the Shakespeare of the printed
page one might get directly from the shy man himself, what great
good fortune to find a similar person, alive and abroad in one’s
own century! And if the Declaration of Independence did make a
difference, if the American had cut loose in more ways than one, and
could face life with a little less show and pretence and caste-spirit
than Europe had known, why, then one might really get to the bottom
of the matter with Hawthorne. That possibility piqued Melville. He
risked much in utterance himself; and he hoped that Hawthorne would
venture much in return. When they at last became friends, he contrived
a hundred different ways of assaulting Hawthorne’s reserve: he
staggered up mountains, uncovered mounds of debris, jumped gaily off
into innumerable abysses, all to excite Hawthorne to some equivalent
disclosure. He did not know at the outset of his enthusiasm for
Hawthorne that nothing would ever shake that mountainous reserve, that
no leaps and sorties of his would stimulate Hawthorne to put one foot
before the other. But Hawthorne caused Melville to hope for much; and
that hope mingled with the plan of Moby-Dick, while he was writing it.

What a difference there was between Hawthorne and the graceful
Washington Irving or the scholarly Longfellow, the men who had
heretofore stood before the world as the highest representatives of
American letters, urbane, elegant, sedulously following foreign models,
and avoiding all topics but smooth ones! Better to fail at times with
such originality as Hawthorne’s than to succeed in the easy, bland,
gentlemanly way--knowing one’s powers, because they are so small, and
keeping within them, because nothing beckons one to stir beyond.

Here, thought Melville, was a fellow spirit at last! Melville had
partly realized before that other men were working below the surface
of things in America; but the transcendentalists had put him off a
little by rallying around them the people who thought they were
lifting themselves above material things by taking cold water rubs, on
principle, or by being dreadfully concerned over the items of their
diet or the cut of their clothes: whereas Melville felt that champagne
and oysters were the proper nourishment for the body, if one could
get them, and he believed that one was less devoted to the material
life when one accepted its daily routine than when one attempted to
substitute plain living for high thinking, and lost true simplicity,
by making its attainment such a complicated matter. Even Hawthorne
at first seemed to lack something. Hawthorne was wonderfully subtle,
Melville wrote to Mr. Duyckinck, and his deeper meanings are worthy of
a Brahmin. Still, there was something lacking--a good deal lacking to
the plump sphericality of the man. What was that? He doesn’t patronize
the butcher--he needs roast beef, done rare.

Hawthorne became Melville’s sole connection with the
transcendentalists, and it never developed into a very deep union.
Melville had listened to a lecture of Emerson’s a year before and
defended Emerson from Mr. Duyckinck’s censure: he respected this Plato
who spoke through his nose. If Emerson was a fool, Melville had rather
be a fool than a wise man, and if he owed much to Sir Thomas Browne,
well, no one was his own sire: the debt was a universal one. Emerson
at least dived; and Melville loved all men who dive. “Any fish can
swim near the surface; but it takes a great whale to go downstairs
five miles or more, and if he don’t attain the bottom, why, all the
lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet that will.” That justified
Emerson: but except as one diver with another, Melville felt no kinship
with him. “I do not oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow, but prefer to hang
myself in mine own halter than to swing in any other man’s swing.”
It was the blandness, the sunniness, the mildness, the absence of
curses, shadows, shipwrecks in Emerson’s philosophy that set Melville
against it: Emerson was the perpetual passenger who stayed below in
bad weather, trusting that the captain would take care of the ship:
Melville was the sailor who climbed aloft, and knew that the captain
was sometimes drunk and that the best of ships might go down. “_All
hands save ship!_ has startled dreamers.”

Hawthorne, then, was a man to be grateful for: the smell of young
beeches and hemlocks was upon him, wrote Melville; the broad prairies
were in his soul; he had these qualities because he was an American
and deeply part of the scene; but, in addition, he had an eye for the
dankness and decay and for the inscrutable malevolence of the universe:
he was no sun-dial that recorded only the smiling hours of life. If the
country could nourish Hawthorne, and if Hawthorne could produce The
Scarlet Letter and the Mosses, well, what might not Melville himself
put forth? Though Hawthorne was a genius, perhaps, like Shakespeare, he
did not appear alone. “Shakespeare cannot be regarded as in himself the
concretion of all the genius of his time; nor as so immeasurably beyond
Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Beaumont, Jonson, that these men can be said
to share none of his power. Would it, indeed, appear so unreasonable
to suppose that this great fullness and overflowing may be, or may be
destined to be, shared by a plurality of men of genius?”

The presence of an Emerson, a Hawthorne, gave all the more reason for
a Melville. So Melville must have felt in his bones; and he was right.
What he could not venture as a perception--for who can see or measure
his contemporaries?--was certainly true as prophecy: in that flood of
intellectual and imaginative power that I have elsewhere called the
Golden Day, Emerson, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, were
all carried along in the same current: each reinforces and rounds out
the others: and it is this corpus of writers, rather than any single
one, that forms what Hawthorne himself called the Master Genius of
America.

Melville did not suppose, when he wrote his encomium of Hawthorne, that
this same summer would bring the two men into contact, that they would
become neighbours, near enough to make occasional visits by horseback
or wagon, and that, despite his premonition that “on a personal
interview no great author has ever come up to the idea of his reader,”
he would find in Hawthorne, temporarily, that comrade and friend for
whom he had been looking. There was, it is true, only half a generation
between them; and this particular distance makes intimacy difficult,
unless the older man is willing to treat the younger one as an assured
equal. How Hawthorne himself felt about the matter it is hard to tell:
Melville realized that his own boisterous democracy, which recognized
the thief in the jail as the equal of General George Washington, might
grate on Hawthorne a little, and that, like an English Howard in the
presence of a plebeian, Hawthorne’s intellectual aristocracy might
shrink at this claim and this contact. But Melville had no lack of
faith in his own powers; and he put forth the claim to equality with
easy and assured frankness; and unless he was unusually insensitive
at this point, his letter would indicate that Hawthorne accepted the
relationship on Melville’s terms.

On August 5, 1850, Hawthorne noted in his American Notebook that he
drove from Lenox, near which he lived in a penurious red farmhouse,
to Stockbridge, where he found at the house of Fields, the Boston
publisher, Dr. Holmes, Mr. Duyckinck of New York, also Mr. Cornelius
Matthews and Herman Melville. They ascended the Monument Mountain
and the party was caught in a shower: according to tradition, it was
during that summer storm, under a shoulder of rock where they had taken
refuge, that these two stormy souls first overcame their reticence
and shyness, and ploughed through conversation to a deeper intimacy.
The New Yorkers called on Hawthorne in the forenoon, two days later,
and Hawthorne treated them to a couple of bottles of Mr. Mansfield’s
champagne; and from that time on Melville was a familiar visitor
in the Hawthorne household. The family called him Mr. Omoo; young
Julian said that he loved Mr. Melville as well as his Mamma and Papa
and Una; Melville, who had amused the Marquesans with an improvised
popgun, was not likely to fall down in intercourse with children--and
he would sometimes ride over in the evening with his great dog, and
the children would ride on the dog’s back. Even Sophia Hawthorne was
fascinated by Melville: she, who adored her husband’s dark, lustrous
eyes, was puzzled and a little disturbed by Melville’s; and her tribute
to Melville is all the more notable when one remembers her complete
preoccupation with her husband.

“I am not quite sure,” she wrote, “that I do not think him a very
great man.... A man with a true, warm heart, and a soul and an
intellect--with life to his finger-tips; earnest, sincere and reverent;
very tender and modest. He has very keen perceptive power; but what
astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems
to me to see everything accurately; and how he can do so with his
small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite
undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and handsome, his
mouth expressive of sensibility and emotion. He is tall and erect, with
an air free, brave and manly. When conversing, he is full of gesture
and force, and loses himself in his subject. There is no grace or
polish. Once in a while his animation gives place to a singularly quiet
expression, out of these eyes to which I have objected; an indrawn,
dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that
moment taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange,
lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to
penetrate through you, but to take you into itself.”

The opportunity for real intercourse with Hawthorne, for talk about
Time and Eternity and ultimate things, smoking a fragrant cigar,
sipping brandy or cider, meant much to Melville; far more, no doubt,
than it did to Hawthorne. In Melville’s growing spiritual loneliness,
he needed the affection of a sympathetic mind; and for a while he
could persuade himself that, even in Hawthorne’s silences, he had this.
Hawthorne’s example as a novelist was a stimulus: it led Melville
beyond the easy shallows, where one could negligently wade, always
within easy calling distance of the shore; and his philosophical
conversation, or, still more, his apparently absorbed way of listening
to philosophical conversation, encouraged Melville to go further and
deeper along the passage he had begun to make a year before with Adler.

Each conversation opened new vistas: the night talks would often be a
prelude to next morning’s letters, and in those letters, particularly
in those which remain from the period covered by Moby-Dick, Melville
exposed the seamy depths of his own spirit. He had no reticences before
Hawthorne, and above all, no false modesty. Life was becoming a long
stage, with no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But
with Hawthorne for a fellow passenger, Melville was content and could
be happy. “I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for
having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible
of our immortality.” The hectic, desperate, ecstatic letters Melville
wrote his friend during the short year and a half that brought them
together in the Berkshires give one a surer insight into Melville’s
moods and aims than any other pages he ever wrote. Had the neighbourly
relations persisted, had Hawthorne’s response been wholly adequate,
Melville might have weathered more buoyantly the internal tempest that
set in with Moby-Dick. But Hawthorne was essentially as remote from
Melville as he was from the old worthies of the Customs House at Salem
or the old sea-captains he had exchanged civilities with over a mug of
ale. Though one could see daylight and the blue sky from the bottom
of Hawthorne’s well, there was not enough of it to share with any
companion. If he was touched by the homage of the younger man, he could
not fully reciprocate it. He recognized Melville’s moral earnestness
and intellectual vigour; but I doubt if he once suspected that his
extravagant friend was far nearer, by temperament and expression, to
the heart of Shakespeare’s genius than he himself was. In seizing upon
Hawthorne as an other self, Melville more than once did homage to
his own genius: his descriptions of Hawthorne’s powers, Hawthorne’s
achievements, are nearer to his own than to Hawthorne’s.

Melville’s relation with Hawthorne counts as one of the tragedies of
his life; and it was more than a minor one. Friendship itself must
have seemed a mockery, when he found that the dearest friend and
closest intellectual companion he had yet encountered was bound tight
in the arctic ice, and many leagues away. But he had no sense of the
distance between them until he attempted to span it: and it must have
been with amazement, with incredulity, that he finally read the story
of Ethan Brand, written during the prime year of their friendship,
and discovered what in his heart of hearts Hawthorne felt about
Melville’s lofty pride and his extreme spiritual quests. Ethan Brand
is a charcoal-burner, who has left his home in order to discover the
Unpardonable Sin; he finally returns to his kiln and his neighbours to
announce, after his long wanderings, that he has found the sin in his
own breast. Brand’s language is a parody of Ahab’s in Moby-Dick; and
what Hawthorne says about Brand he meant to apply, I have no doubt,
possibly by way of warning, to Melville himself.

Ethan Brand remembered, said Hawthorne, echoing Melville’s words in
the scene where Ahab recalls his first pursuit of the whale, “he
remembered how the night dew had fallen upon him,--how the dark
forest had whispered to him,--how the stars had gleamed upon him,--a
simple and loving man, watching the fire in the years gone by, and
ever musing as it burned. He remembered with what tenderness, with
what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and
woe, he had first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards
became the inspiration of his life; with what reverence he had then
looked into the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally divine,
and, however desecrated, still to be held sacred by his brother; with
what awful fear he had deprecated the success of his pursuit, and
prayed that the Unpardonable Sin might never be revealed to him. Then
ensued that vast intellectual development, which, in its progress,
disturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart. The Idea that
possessed his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone
on cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were
susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer
to stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth,
laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber
after him. So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That,
indeed, had withered,--had contracted,--had hardened,--had perished!
It had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He had lost his hold
of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man,
opening the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key
of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets;
he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his
experiment.... Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from
the moment his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement
with his intellect.”

We do not know when Melville discovered these words or felt their
jagged edges in his bosom: but we can be certain that from that
day forth the friendship between the two men sank like a stone in
quicksand. Hawthorne had committed the unpardonable sin of friendship;
he had failed to understand Melville’s development, or to touch by
sympathy and faith that part of Melville which was beyond his external
reach. All of Melville’s love recoiled, as we shall see presently, from
the icy strangeness of that friendship which was no friendship, from
that understanding which was almost enmity. Perhaps Ethan Brand was
not Melville? Perhaps it was but a shadowy suggestion, influenced more
by Ahab than by his author? Melville must have attempted this sort of
reconciliation more than once: but Hawthorne’s words would stick: yes,
they would stick because of the touch of truth in them, and because,
once Hawthorne’s hand was withdrawn, the magnetic chain of humanity
indeed would seem broken. This, however, was the crisis of their
friendship; and Melville had no inkling of this outcome whilst he was
writing Moby-Dick. There is no doubt that the presence of Hawthorne
fortified him for that endeavour.

Some time in 1850, towards the close of summer, Herman Melville must
have begun to write Moby-Dick; for the book, which is a long one, was
finished in the summer of 1851. In back of the actual writing went a
considerable amount of preparation; and one does not know how long
before the theme of the book had begun to root itself in Melville’s
mind. The work itself shows that he had reached out for every book on
whaling he could lay hands on, practically every book that had been
written, and, in addition, he had made note of every quotation and
allusion to the whale he had met in his wide miscellaneous reading.
Scholarship as well as personal experience went into this writing:
one of the best modern writers upon whaling, Frank Bullen, the author
of the Cruise of the Cachalot, confesses he would never have gone
further with his own work had he known about the wealth of information
and detail that went into Moby-Dick before he set out. Did Melville
consciously save the greatest of his ocean experiences for his
maturity? Did he wait for Leviathan to develop in his soul? Did he
begin another White-Jacket or Typee, and become conscious, in the act
of writing, of this deepening of his insight, this integration of his
powers, and of the vast fable that was now at his command?

One cannot even make a reasonable conjecture about the matter. All one
knows are the actual conditions under which Moby-Dick was written,
the reactions of the writing itself upon Melville, and its final
result--the story of the White Whale.

Conceive of Melville in his new home, as he embarks upon the most
extensive of his spiritual voyages. The furniture has been removed
to his new house, the beds put up, the heavier articles shifted and
re-shifted, and, by a month’s work outdoors, the woodpile has grown
and the hay been stowed into the hayloft. For the moment, all his
relations are well poised: Barney is through the period of teething:
Elizabeth has help in her housework and the first tension of removal
is over; Mr. Duyckinck occasionally, with the most tactful sort of
generosity, sends up a case of champagne in a wicker cradle or a fine
bundle of cigars, or he suggests a review to be written. He even tries
to nourish Melville’s reputation by abetting some one who is writing
about him in the papers and who wishes to publish a photograph of the
famous author: here alone Melville’s pride rebuffs this rudimentary
effort at an art which has become a loathsome sore in our own time: he
refuses his picture. “The fact is,” he explains, “almost everybody is
having his ‘mug’ engraved nowadays, so that this test of distinction is
getting to be reversed; and therefore, to see one’s ‘mug’ in a magazine
is presumptive evidence that he’s a nobody.... I respectfully decline
to be _oblivionated_....” But when a journeyman painter made the rounds
of the neighbourhood Melville sat for him--and the portrait, which
slightly resembles Allan’s, remains a just punishment for his vanity.

Below the edge of Melville’s horizon is this new friend, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and, as he raises his eyes from the desk in his second-story
chamber and looks through the single small window that faces the north,
he sees the wide valley sweeping across to successive ridges of hills,
dominated by Mt. Greylock--otherwise called, from the double hump in
the ridge, Saddleback. The red clover that incarnadined the summer
fields is gone; or rather, its colour has mounted to the crown of
the landscape; the maples are a still more glorious red. The spirits
caper in the autumn air; there are glowing Byzantine days when the
heavens reflect the hues of the October apples, when the sky is so
ripe and ruddy it seems there must be harvest home for the angels
and that Charles’ Wain is heaped as high as Saddleback with autumn
sheaves. The sunrises and the sunsets glow side by side in the woods,
and momentarily moult in the falling leaves. Neither the Rhine nor the
Moselle produces anything as heady as the landscape of the Berkshires
in autumn. Now is the time to begin. When Melville writes his first
words, “Call me Ishmael,” he is writing out of his health and ecstasy:
he himself is not an outcast, nor is his spirit drooping with the
“hypos”: his first touch is a black one because his canvas demands
it. He is about to build up a vast pyramid of contrasts, between the
whiteness of external evil and the blackness of man’s inner doom; and
he faces this drama with his full powers.

The apples are gathered; the autumn ploughing is done; Melville is at
work. The mood of creation is upon him: he is ready not for one book
but for fifty books: if Mr. Duyckinck would only send him about fifty
fast-writing youths with an easy style, not averse to polishing their
letters, he might set them all to work. “It is not so much the paucity,
as the superabundance of material that seems to incapacitate modern
authors,” he had written that summer. In this autumn ferment, Melville
has scarcely enough time to think about his future books separately;
in lieu of using fifty youths, he must pack as much as possible into
one book. Melville scarcely breaks his way through a chapter or two
before he realizes that he has found his theme; and the only question
is how to quarry this marble, how to get it out. “Youth,” Melville said
in another place, “must wholly quit, then, the quarry for a while;
and not only go forth and get tools to use in the quarry, but must
go and thoroughly discover architecture. Now the quarry discoverer is
long before the stone-cutter; and the stone-cutter is long before the
architect; and the architect is long before the temple; for the temple
is the crown of the world.” His apprenticeship is at last definitely
over: he is at work on the temple itself--such a temple as Dante,
Shakespeare, Webster, Marlowe, Browne, might each in his way have
conceived and designed.

The days go by; the leaves fall; the candlelight comes early; the mice
creep into the cupboard and make nests for themselves in the woodpile;
the wide meadows become as bleak as a grey sea. In this most inland
scene, with only the Housatonic to connect him with the watery world,
Melville still dreams of the sea: his thought centres on the sea, its
creatures, its boats, its fish, its men, its deeper monsters. Oh!
for a dash of salt spray! he cries; and as substitute he draws upon
experience and memory for the savour. The days grow cold. Snow hems in
the roof and chimney of Arrowhead. Melville has a sea-feeling all the
more: when he looks out of his little window on rising, he feels as if
he were looking out of his port-hole in the midst of the Atlantic: his
room seems a ship’s cabin, and at nights, when he wakes up and hears
the wind shrieking, he can almost fancy there is too much sail on the
house, and he had better go up on the roof and rig in the chimney. On
a winter morning he rises at eight, helps his horse to his hay and the
cow to her pumpkin, stands around to take in the grateful complacency
of the cow, she moves her jaws so mildly and with such sanctity; then,
with his own breakfast over, he goes to his workroom and lights the
fire, runs rapidly through the MS. and starts to work. At half past two
a knock comes. He does not answer. Again the knock and again: till he
rises from his writing, almost mechanically, and resumes the external
round: feed for the horse and cow: then dinner: then he rigs up his
sleigh and goes off to the village for the mail, for supplies, for
a little friendly chaffer perhaps round the tavern bar. So one day
follows another on the surface; but within, there is change and tumult:
Melville, like Ahab, finds a creature tearing at his vitals, and that
creature the thing he has created.

“How then with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously, my
chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill!
Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand. Friends! hold my arms! For in
the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me,
and make me faint with the outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as
if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations
of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all
the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole
universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the
virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce
a mighty volume you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring
volume can ever be written upon the flea, though many there be who have
tried it.”

Such intensity of effort, so many hours of writing and reading, are as
exhausting as the direction of a battle: but there is no lying up in
winter quarters, no delegation of responsibility: the writer does not
live outside his book: the world, the familiar, homely world, becomes
a weak picture, and his imagination is the body and blood of reality.
Taking a book off the brain, Melville exclaims while in the midst of
it, “is akin to the ticklish and dangerous business of taking an old
painting off a panel: you have to scrape off the whole brain in order
to get at it with due safety--and even then the painting may not be
worth the trouble.” Well, Moby-Dick is worth the trouble; the very
writing of it becomes a powerful instrument in his own development:
what absorbs so much of his time and life is not the book alone, “but
the primitive elementalizing of the strange stuff, which in the act of
attempting the book, has upheaved and upgushed in his soul. Two books
are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the
bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for ... his
own private shelf. That it is whose unfathomable cravings drunk his
blood; the other only demands ink.”

Melville knows he must not let up on this work; he flogs himself to
get his uttermost into it; the application ruins his eyesight. This
small aperture and northern light are bad for his eyes: no matter: he
writes with one eye closed and the other blinking. By December, in
the evening, he is exhausted: he spends the aftermath of the day in
a sort of physical trance: but already his mind is anticipating the
developments of the next day, and he is up early, and goes back to his
task.

Spring comes; but it is no spring for Melville. He will not even be
bothered for dinner. Some days he sits at his desk till 4:30 without
writing a word; in the spring twilight, when the catkins of the maples
glow in the mild sunset and the bluebirds dart about the field like
unfettered flowers, he at last comes out and creeps about like an owl.
If Melville ploughs and plants, he does it mechanically; his heart is
not in it; and he is not nourished by it. In the midst of his writing,
his soul reaches a pitch of exaltation, as it does defiantly in a
terrible gale, when the hand is firmly on the wheel, and the dangerous
seas that wash the decks do not loosen the hold: the letters that he
writes to Hawthorne then are prophetic, and deep, and full of proud
mastery. In building up his vast symbol of the whale, he strips the
universe down to his own ego; like Ahab himself, he says no to all the
powers and dominions that lie beyond it. Does not Hawthorne do as much?

“There is a certain tragic phase of humanity,” he writes to Hawthorne,
“which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by
Hawthorne.... He says No in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot
make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say
No,--why, they are in the happy condition of judicious unencumbered
travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity, with
nothing but a carpet-bag,--that is to say, the Ego. Whereas, those
_yes_-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage and damn them! they
will never get through the Custom House.”

But the soft milky air of June gets the better of Melville’s humours:
every breath of the warm earth, the spicy perfume of wild strawberries,
the honeyed odour of the locust trees, the dank green fragrance of
ferns, the sight of buttercups making the fields sunny even on dull
days, or the daisies turning the high grass into the whitish green
colour of the ocean when the waves disperse on the beach, the warm
feeling of animal contentment that the sun itself pours into a man--all
these things renewed his energies and revived his spirits. Melville
relaxed and refreshed himself in the sunlight, building an addition
to the house, and ploughing and sowing, and watching the green shoots
rise. He does not doubt the reality of his black moments: for, as
he tells Hawthorne, in the boundless, trackless, but still glorious
wilderness of the universe, where he and Hawthorne are outposts, there
are savage Indians as well as mosquitoes; still, one does not go on
fighting them forever. As for the crotchety and overdoleful chimeras,
“the like of you and me, and some others, forming a chain of God’s
outposts around the world, must be content to encounter now and then,
and fight them as best we can.”

Melville goes down to New York to see the first part of Moby-Dick
through the press; but the oppressive, humid days in that Babylonish
brick-kiln, and the long delays of the printers, disgust him; he
comes back to the country, and purposes to end the book, if possible,
reclining on the grass, or watching the clouds play on a summer
afternoon around old Greylock, from the newly built porch he has added
to the north side of the house, where the view lies. The tail of
Moby-Dick is not cooked yet; though the hell-fire in which the book was
broiled might not unreasonably have charred it before this. Melville’s
intention is sane enough, if only he had the leisure to cultivate
the calm, grass-growing mood; but no: he must keep on patching and
tinkering at his buildings: in July the hay waits for no author to
finish his chapter: there are a hundred chores to keep him away from
his book, still more from deep questions about the universe and its
meaning and evil and truth and all those aspects of reality that need a
Hawthorne for perfect communication. There is no help for it; he must
go back to New York to finish the book in a third-story room, where
there is no cow to milk, no horse to feed, no sister or wife or mother
to be a little hurt or concerned by his inattentiveness or moodiness.

These last straining days in New York were not unlike, one might guess,
those that Pierre experienced: the book that was begun in health and
exuberance in the keen, riotous air of October in the Berkshires
was finished in exacerbations and depression and desolation in the
humid dog days of a dirty, unkempt city, days of unrelieved sunlight,
followed by afternoon thunderstorms that leave the air even heavier
than before, the pavements steaming, the waves of warm, unpleasant air,
carrying slight odours of putrefaction, wafted upward into even the
third story.

“In the earlier progress of the book, he had found some relief in
making his regular evening walk through the greatest thoroughfares of
the city; and so the utter desolation of his soul might feel itself
more intensely against the bodies of the hurrying thousands. Then he
began to be sensible of more fancying stormy nights than pleasant
ones; for then the great thoroughfares were less thronged, and the
innumerable shop-awnings flapped and beat like schooners’ broad sails
in a gale, and the shutters banged like lashed bulwarks; and the slates
fell hurtling like displaced ship’s blocks from aloft. Stemming such
tempers through the deserted streets, Pierre felt a dark triumphant
joy; that while others had crawled in fear to their kennels, he
alone defied the storm-admiral, whose most vindictive pelting of
hailstones--striking his iron-framed fiery furnace of a body--melted
into soft dew, and so, harmlessly trickled off him. By-and-by, of such
howling, pelting nights, he began to bend his steps down the narrow
side streets, in quest of the more secluded and mysterious taprooms.
There he would feel a singular satisfaction, in sitting down all
dripping in a chair, ordering his half pint of ale before him, and
drawing over his cap to protect his eyes from the light, eye the varied
faces of the social castaways, who here had their haunts from bitterest
midnights. But at last he began to feel a distaste for even these; and
now nothing but the utter night-desolation of the obscurest warehousing
lanes would content him, or be at all sufferable to him.”

“Dollars damn me,” he wrote Hawthorne, “and the malicious devil is
forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a
presentiment is upon me.--I shall at last be worn out and perish,
like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition
of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write,
that is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, altogether write the _other_
way I cannot. So the product is a final hash; and all my books are
botches.... But I was talking about the ‘whale.’ As the fishermen say,
‘he was in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago. I’m going
to take him up by his jaw, however, before long and finish him up in
some fashion or another. What’s the use of elaborating what, in its
very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book? Though I wrote the
Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter. What reputation H.
M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity as the man who
lived among the cannibals. When I speak of posterity in reference to
myself, I only mean the babies who will probably be born in the moment
immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost.... I shall go down to
them in all likelihood.... I have come to regard this matter of Fame as
the most transparent of all vanities. I read Solomon more and more, and
every time see deeper and deeper and unspeakable meanings in him. I
did not think of Fame, a year ago, as I do now. My development has all
been within a few years past. I am like one of those seeds taken out of
the Egyptian pyramids which, after being three thousand years a seed,
and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed
itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was
twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I
date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between
then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I
am now come to the utmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower
must fall to the mould.”

If it was in a mood of confidence and creative delight that he sounded
his depths in Moby-Dick, it was in this other mood, chastened, almost
fearful, that his stripped ego rose to the surface after this extreme
plunge. He had looked into the abyss: he was dizzy, terrified,
appalled. His letters to Hawthorne have this mingled sense of awe and
exaltation: they are the mood of the last part of Moby-Dick. Melville’s
notes to Mr. Duyckinck are still jocular and robust; they might be
the words of the imperturbable Stubb or the jaunty Flask: but that
is because Melville gave Mr. Duyckinck only a part of himself, the
polite, free-and-easy, effervescent side, meant for appreciative eating
and solicitous drinking, the side he doubtless turned to his family
and housemates, when weariness did not bury him from their sight--the
last people who could share or understand his quest, his insight, his
triumph. There is no question of wearing a mask: both sides of Melville
are authentic, but the deeper part of him, which would under happier
circumstances have served as ballast and made him face the waves more
steadily, claimed too much of his inner space: he lost buoyancy: the
water crept above the waterline: the ship rode dangerously. Now,
however, we are speaking of the consequences of Melville’s writing
Moby-Dick. The book itself was published towards the end of 1851 by
Bentley, in England, and a little later in the same year by Harper’s in
New York.

Whether it was an angel or a devil that Melville had struggled with
this long year, he had wrestled magnificently, and the book was done.
Before we go further with Melville’s life, we must discuss this great
fragment of it--the most important of Melville’s books, and surely one
of the most important books of the century.

CHAPTER SEVEN: MOBY-DICK

Moby-Dick is a story of the sea, and the sea is life, “whose waters
of deep woe are brackish with the salt of human tears.” Moby-Dick is
the story of the eternal Narcissus in man, gazing into all rivers
and oceans to grasp the unfathomable phantom of life--perishing in
the illusive waters. Moby-Dick is a portrait of the whale and a
presentation of the demonic energies in the universe that harass and
frustrate and extinguish the spirit of man. We must gather our own
strength together if we are to penetrate Moby-Dick: no other fable,
except perhaps Dante’s, demands that we open so many doors and turn
so many secret keys; for, finally, Moby-Dick is a labyrinth, and that
labyrinth is the universe.

Call me Ishmael, says the teller of the story. Ishmael is lured to a
whaling voyage by the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself and
of the forbidden seas in which he rolls his inland bulk: when Ishmael
grows grim around the mouth and feels damp, drizzly November in his
soul, he goes to sea. With his carpet-bag he sets out for New Bedford,
and takes refuge in the shaggy comfort of Spouter Inn. His companion
and bedfellow in the crowded inn is another Ishmael, a cannibal named
Queequeg, who brings into the atmosphere of chowders and tarpaulins a
wild odour from another continent of the soul. His harpoon, his idol,
his sharp filed teeth, the human head he carries around in a bag, for
sale, are for Ishmael hints of that horror in the universe which he
is quick to perceive and be social with, since it is well to be on
friendly terms with the inmates of the place one lodges in.

When Ishmael takes refuge from the driving sleet and mist, on a Sunday
morning, in the Whalemen’s Chapel, he finds reminders of luckless
voyages on the memorial tablets around the hall, and Father Mapple,
who had been a sailor and harpooner in his youth, delivers a sermon
on Jonah! What a preacher, and what a sermon! After ascending to the
pulpit by a rope ladder, hand over hand, Father Mapple drags the
ladder up after him, to signify his spiritual withdrawal from all
outward ties and connections; from that pulpit, shaped like a ship’s
bow, he expounds the fable of Jonah, seeming, as he describes Jonah’s
sea-storm, to be beaten by a storm himself, his deep chest heaving as
with a ground-swell, his tossed arms like the warring elements at work,
thunders rolling away from his swarthy brow and light leaping from his
eye.

Father Mapple’s words and figures belong to the Bible; but their
meaning comes from that bottomless ocean of truth where Moby-Dick plies
back and forth. I must quote the words: one can give no proper hint of
this work, even in its smallest detail, without quoting the language
through which it is expressed: and this is particularly true of Father
Mapple’s noble tongue.

“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is sure
delight; and higher the top of that delight than the bottom of the woe
is deep. Is not the maintruck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is
to him--a far, far upward, and inward delight--who against the proud
gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his inexorable
self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the
ship of this base treacherous world goes down beneath him. Delight
is to him, who gives no quarter for the truth, and kills, burns,
and destroys all sin, though he pluck it out from under the robes
of Senators and Judges. Delight--top-gallant delight is to him, who
acknowledges no law or lord but the Lord his God, and is only patriot
to heaven. Delight is to him whom all the waves and billows of the seas
of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages.
And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay
him down, can say with his final breath--O Father!--chiefly known to me
by Thy rod--mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine,
more than to be this world’s or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave
eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime
of his God?”

Humbly participating in Queequeg’s heathenish rites, sharing
confidences with him, Ishmael pledges friendship with the cannibal:
it is the first and almost the last touch of affection in the whole
story: a compact between two strays and outcasts! In Heaven, and
presumably in Hell, there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage;
nor are there all those little mollifications, an eloquent meal or a
June garden, which belong to the middle portion of life that has long
been domesticated: once Moby-Dick gets under way, the fable itself
belongs to Heaven and Hell--all its naturalism, all its accurate
detail, are polarized between these two extremes of being, so that
everything which would relieve men’s exasperation or take the edge
off their lonely delight, disappears, as the land disappears beyond
the horizon’s edge. The reason for this is not obscure. In terms of
Heaven and Hell this comfortable, understandable, tolerable middle
portion of existence--that which we agree to call civilized--is the
realm of complete illusion: just as, in terms of immediate animal
existence, Heaven and Hell are illusions, and reality belongs to the
realm of digestion, tropism, reflex action, muscular movement, tactile
and visual adjustments. Melville, as we shall see, comprehended both
aspects of existence: but he projected them both on the plane of
eternity: domestic life and all it implies is seen through reversed
glasses.

On the boat that takes Queequeg and Ishmael to Nantucket, Queequeg
performs a daring rescue in the water. The man he brings up is a
bumpkin whom he had punished just a little while before for mimicking
him: the punishment and the rescue are performed with the indifferent
magnanimity of a soft breeze following a cold wreck of tornado. There
is the key in which the whole story is set. If we forget it, we shall
be disappointed at not finding some continued development of these
separate personalities, some further proofs of their friendship and
affection. But on the plane of Moby-Dick friendship is a small thing,
and heroism a small one, too: the hero is not Ishmael who tells the
story, nor Queequeg, who is one of the crew, nor even Captain Ahab who
commands the Pequod, on which the two finally embark at Nantucket: the
central figure is the whale, and the whale stands for the universe.

The mystery of Captain Ahab and the voyage lies heavy before the sails
are set or the anchor lifted. In the dawn, when Ishmael goes aboard,
he dimly sees through the mist four or five figures running toward
the ship, who completely disappear by the time he gains the decks:
the mystery is more vexing because of a cracked old greybeard on
the wharf who mutters dreadful hints about Ahab and his voyage, not
enough to detain Ishmael, but enough to make him uncomfortable. With a
last blessing of the owners, the ship sets out on Christmas Day. The
captain remains inviolate in his cabin; and with the crew giving three
heavy-hearted cheers, the ship “blindly plunged like fate into the lone
Atlantic.”

Exit the dry, tight, comfortable land: enter wind and weather and sea
and whale. We leave behind the landlord of the Spouter Inn and Mrs.
Hosea and the old owners, with their humorous mixture of the Bible
and worldly stratagem, and Charity, Captain Bildad’s sister, who
places a choice copy of Watts’ hymns in each seaman’s berth: these
genre pictures in the manner of Teniers, with a dash of Hogarth or
Rowlandson, belong to the land and its ways, little ways. Deliberately,
Melville widens the frame of his canvas, and alters the plan of his
design: magnifying every figure into its ideal proportions. He is
about to picture this “mortally intolerable truth; that all deep
earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the
open independence of the sea; while the wild winds of heaven and earth
conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.... Better is it
to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the
lee, even if that were safety.”

Safety we leave behind: safety and the measures of daily life. The sea
is dangerous: the horizon has no bounds: and the fathom-line can never
reach the bottom, once land is far astern.

When the whale enters, the narrative for the first time pauses; and, in
the pause, one discovers that the story and the people are secondary
matters, while something more wide and reaching comes into the fable.
The whale is a symbol in the heart of man; it has its own existence
and value there: but the whale is also a creature in natural history,
and its shape, its bulk, habits, anatomical characteristics, family
relations, its place in politics, economics, history, and human
adventure, is a further part of that natural history. The chapter
on the whale, in which the various branches are listed under a sort
of bookseller’s classification, into Folio, Octavo, and Duodecimo
whales, is an excellent example of Melville’s way of assimilating and
revaluating knowledge, so that what was extraneous becomes intrinsic,
and what was a fact in the history of the whale becomes an element in
the myth that he is weaving.

A timid writer would have left these classifications and divisions
out: how on earth is one to make interesting reading out of a bare
catalogue? But Melville carries the load with Olympian levity: he
invents a fresh classification, unknown to Owen or Cuvier, and then,
with a final dash of apparent impatience, he leaves the system
uncompleted--even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, “with
the cranes still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower.”
This absurd, bookseller’s classification, and this last touch of
impatience are not due to Melville’s incompetence: the first tells
us that all systems of thought have in them something arbitrary and
human, and the zoologist’s classification and system is no less so
than the human foot, as the standard of linear measurement: when one
sees objects under the figure of eternity, the scientist’s divisions
have the same limitations as the bookseller’s. In a century when only
a few rare-minded mathematicians were elaborating the theory that our
existing geometry was but one out of a number of possible systems,
with different sets of postulates, Melville was slyly demonstrating
that all our thought has this conventional basis. One may alter the
convention, change the point of approach, and create a different
order, equally useful, equally competent, equally true. When Melville
stops abruptly without finishing his own work, he points out to us
that knowledge of all sorts belongs to an infinite series: there is no
final stopping-place: and he who thinks his system is complete has only
demonstrated his own limitations.

Although Melville plays with science, he utilizes all that it can give
him, and he never seriously departs from its findings except in taking
the fisherman’s view that the whale is a fish, and not, as is actually
the case, an aquatic mammal. But the whale that science investigates,
the whale that is stranded on the beach, or whose skeleton is suspended
in mid-air in the natural-history museum, is not, however thoroughly it
may be dissected and articulated and labelled, the whole whale, even
for science; for a whale, like every other creature, has a habitat,
relations with other living creatures, and certain ways of functioning,
moving, mating, finding food; and there is a sense in which one is
as near to the scientific truth about a whale when one is fighting
the creature in an open boat, as when one is counting its vertebrae,
examining its tissues under a microscope, or comparing its skull with
other mammalian skulls. Melville gives a completer account of the whale
than the anatomists: he approaches it with a harpoon as well as a
dissecting-knife: he observes its characteristic reaction to stimuli
as well as the organs by means of which these reactions are effected.
On the other hand, the physical pursuit of the whale is only a part of
the story: the more one learns about such a creature, the more widely
do its relations ramify, not merely in its own world, but in man’s: and
the higher the significance of the hunt itself. These passages about
the whale and the methods of whaling, about its dignity and adventure,
these comments upon the science of cetology--all these things are not
uncouth interruptions in the narrative: they are profoundly part of it:
the stream widens here, as the Hudson widens at Tappan Zee, without
losing its flow and purpose. From now on the universal, symbolic aspect
of the story, and its direct, scientific, practical aspect move in
and out like the threads of a complicated pattern: one modifies the
other, and is by turns figure and background. The physical expanse
of the book, its deliberateness of movement, its slow undulations,
are necessary, like the long swells and the wide expanse of the ocean
itself, to give a feeling of immensity, immensity and power.

Who are the men summoned together for this voyage? The chief mate,
Starbuck, is a Quaker by descent, a “long earnest man, and though born
on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his
flesh being hard as a twice-baked biscuit.” Starbuck is conscientious,
prudent, inclined to respect outward portents and inward presentiments:
above all, the memory of his young Cape wife and child bent the welded
iron in his soul. Stubb, the second mate, is a different man: “A
happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant, taking perils as they came
with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis
of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner
engaged by the year.” Beneath these two stands little Flask, the third
mate, a native of Tisbury, in Marthas Vineyard. In his poor opinion,
the whale was but a species of magnified mouse or at least water-rat.
If Starbuck is the prudent imaginative man, and Stubb is the competent
sensible matter-of-fact man, Flask is the happy ignorant man, inclined
to be waggish in the matter of whales.

Only slightly lower in rank than the mates stand the savage harpooners:
Queequeg, and Tashtego, a Gayhead Indian from the Vineyard, and Daggoo,
a gigantic, coal-black negro savage, with a lion-like tread, moving
about the deck in all the pomp of his six feet five in his socks. “A
white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of
a fortress.” As for the crew itself, they were not merely islanders,
usually; they were Isolatoes, each man living on a separate continent
of his own. Above them all towers Captain Ahab. The first time he
appears on deck, a foreboding shiver runs over Ishmael. “Reality outran
apprehension.... He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the
fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,
or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness.”
One of Ahab’s legs has been snapped off by a whale: he stands on a
stump made of whale ivory, with a crucifixion in his face, in all the
nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe. “A Khan of the
plank and a king of the sea and a great Lord of Leviathans was Ahab.”
In his presence, his mates shrivel and crumple up, like a paper in a
fire. Compared with Ahab’s titanic pride, their decent professional
self-respect is nothing. There is madness in that pride, the madness of
a tormented soul.

What goads Ahab? What goads him is the memory of his encounter with
that white whale, Moby-Dick, who, in malice or play or accidental
defence, had bitten off Ahab’s leg and left him humiliated and
crippled, for long months of days and weeks, stretched in one
hammock, his torn body and gashed soul bleeding into one another,
and so interfusing, making him mad.... “Ever since that almost fatal
encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the
whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last
came to identify with him not only all his bodily woes but all his
intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before
him as the monomaniac incarnation of all the malicious agencies which
some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with
half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has
been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians
ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the East
reverence in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship it
like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white
whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most
maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth
with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all
the subtle demonism of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were
visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He
piled up on the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and
hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest
had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

Ahab assembles his crew, and after working them up with a reminder of
their common duties, to sing out, to lower away, to get a dead whale
or a stove boat, he nails a gold-piece to the main mast and in a high,
raised voice exclaims: “Who ever of ye raises me a white-headed whale
with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw ... shall have this gold ounce.”
Daggoo recognizes Moby-Dick. Ahab, surprised, confesses his past
humiliation and announces his purpose. “This is what we have shipped
for, men! to chase the white whale on both sides of the land, and over
all sides of the earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out!”
The crew is seized with Captain Ahab’s wild purpose. Starbuck alone,
prudent, thoughtful, pious, remonstrates with his captain. “‘Vengeance
on a dumb brute!’ cries Starbuck, ‘that simply smote thee from blindest
instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems
blasphemous.’” And Ahab answers:

“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each
event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but
still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from
behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the
mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through
the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.
Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me;
he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable
malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is what I chiefly hate;
and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will
wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man: I’d strike
the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I
the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealously
presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair
play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines.”

Ahab pledges his crew; they drink and swear death to Moby-Dick. Ahab
withdraws to his cabin, to contemplate his own madness, maddened:
there he defies the great gods themselves, mere cricket players and
pugilists. “I will not say as schoolboys do to their bullies--Take
some one of your size: don’t pommel _me_! No, ye’ve knocked me down,
and I am up again, but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind
your cotton bags!... Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can
swerve me.” The crew, lightened by drink, burst into revelry: they jig
and frolic and dream about girls. Ishmael’s shouts go up with the rest:
his oath had been welded to theirs; a wild mystical feeling is in him:
Ahab’s quenchless feud seems his. With greedy ears he learns the story
of the monster against whom he and his shipmates have taken the oath of
Ahab’s revenge.

And now comes Moby-Dick. In all the sperm whale fishery there is
no whale more prodigious in magnitude or malignity. All whales are
dangerous to hunt with harpoon and spear in a whale-boat; but Moby-Dick
multiplies the vicissitudes of the chase: he turns on his pursuers,
and again and again escapes them, with an apparently immortal destiny,
however accurately the harpoons may have been planted in his side, and
however strong the line that makes him fast. A wrinkled forehead, a
high white hump, and a streaked and marbled body add to his formidable
size: as sperm whales are more dangerous than Right or Greenland
whales, so Moby-Dick is more terrifying than the usual sperm whale. The
rumours about Moby-Dick raise to enormous dimensions what was already
great enough in actuality; but the very whiteness of the whale adds
something more.

While white, says Melville, has a hundred fine mythological allusions,
conveying some special virtue or perfection to the elephant of Siam or
the Imperial charger; while the white wampum of the red man was the
deepest pledge of honour, and the most august of religions had made of
it a symbol of divine spotlessness and power--for all these accumulated
associations with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime,
there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this
hue which strikes more of a panic to the soul than that redness which
affrights in blood. The whiteness of the white shark, the whiteness
of the white squall in southern seas, the terror of white breakers
when a ship is skirting the coast--all these things gain an element
of bleak terror from their cold hue. White is the terrible, elemental
truth: all warmer hues and colours are but laid on from without: nature
paints like a harlot, and beneath these happy colours is the ghastly
white uniformity of the charnel-house. “Pondering all this, the palsied
universe lies before us like a leper; and like wilful travellers in
Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured or colouring glasses upon their
eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental
white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these
things, the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery
hunt?”

Night and day Ahab’s mind broods over Moby-Dick. In his cabin he
pores over his charts, endeavouring to follow the seasonal tracks of
Moby-Dick from one probable feeding-ground to another; but, as he knows
his crew have common daily appetites, and the permanent constitution
of the manufactured man is sordidness, although he may occasionally be
fired into knight-errantry, on the first raising of a whale, the Pequod
goes in pursuit.

In his virgin encounter with the whale, under the “prudent” Starbuck,
Ishmael finds himself in a swamped boat, riding through the night in
the hope of being picked up in the morning; and on top of the long
vigil, the little whale-boat, lost in the mist, is run down by the
Pequod, and all the cold, drenched hands take to the water for their
lives. It is all in a day’s work. When terror and anguish become
unbearable, what seems most momentous becomes part of a general joke.
This humour of desperation colours and effervesces through all the
bitter potions that the tale itself offers: it does not remove the
bitterness, but, as sweet and bitter may mingle in the same draught,
it offers a counter-taste: and it keeps the most frenzied blackness
from having the unrelieved and inhuman quality of a maniac’s delirium.
The men who face death and danger most constantly, the sailor, the
miner, the soldier, the lonely pioneer, develop this shrug and grin
at the very moment of encountering death--and in the whale fishery,
these moments are plentiful. Little Pip, the negro, pops out of his
boat in fright, and is left behind in the heat of the chase, and,
though finally rescued, is turned into a blank idiot: Tashtego, ladling
out the fragrant sperm from the dead whale’s head, falls into it,
the entire mass drops into the sea, and the Indian is rescued only
by a feat of almost obstetrical skill: any hour, one may drop from a
lookout station or get tangled in the whale-line itself, as the whale
races with it, and perish in the coils. But what of it? “All men
live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their
necks; but it is only in the swift, subtle turns of death that mortals
realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be
a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart
feel one whit more of terror than though seated before your evening
fire with a poker and not a harpoon by your side.”

As the pursuit of the whale goes on, as the Pequod encounters the
sperm whale and the right whale, and kills them, fastens them to its
side, and dismantles their corpses, getting sperm oil from one and
whalebone from the other, as they watch the spout of the whale from
the distance, or see, at midnight, an apparition of a spout, perhaps
a portent, perhaps jetting from the head of Moby-Dick himself: as
they sample the whale as food, as they render down its blubber into
oil, as they watch the sharks thrust their slithering upturned mouths
at the carcass, as they squeeze the lumps of cold, solidified fat
back into liquid; as all the events and preparations take place, the
whale finally emerges as a complete body. What the whale is to the
whaleman and what he is to the artist; what he is to the naturalist
and what he is to the merchant; and what he is in the chase--and
in the museum--and in human history--all these things come forth.
There is not one method of knowledge: every manifestation in human
experience contributes to the reality of the whale itself. No one
lives to himself, or comprehends himself, except by establishing
relationships with that which is outside himself: man gives to the
whale something that the creature is incapable of giving back: his
own needs, his own desires, his own understanding. Melville no more
forgets the aesthetics of whaling than he forgets the economics. He is
a free spirit: he explores everything, embraces everything, reports on
everything. We must not confuse Moby-Dick with the monomaniac captain
who belongs to the fable: the book itself has a hundred sides, and
is the precise opposite of that narrow quest. For immediate action,
people forget many of these relations: the artist or the scientist is
just as narrow in his interests as Flask, just as single-minded in his
pursuit as Ahab. But Melville is neither Flask nor Ahab nor artist nor
scientist: he philosophizes out of a completer experience and a more
coherent consciousness than any of these partial figures. The whale is
no phantom symbol; and this stage is no pasteboard stage. If this is
not the universe, the full universe, that Melville embodies under these
symbols, no one in our time has had inkling of a fuller one. Moby-Dick
is an imaginative synthesis; and every aspect of reality belongs to it,
one plane modifying the other and creating the modelled whole.

The ship sails on: she meets other ships and the crews mingle in a
conversation or “gam.” But Ahab restlessly drives on towards his
ultimate goal: to each captain his first question is--“Hast seen the
White Whale?”

Passing through the straits of Sunda, which divide Sumatra from Java,
the Pequod spies great semi-circles of whale-jets sparkling on the
horizon: she spreads sails after the Grand Armada; and presently, the
boats are in the midst of it: among sires and cows and calves, the big
and the little, spouting, playing, plunging, frantically mobbing the
whale-boat, a tumult of power and virile energy on the outskirts of
the Armada, but safe within the circle, calm and bliss, dalliance and
delight, calves milking their mothers, and amorous bulls warm-bloodedly
a-wenching. The boats, luckily, get out of this jam and tumult without
damage; but while they set their pennoned poles on many, only one of
the drugged whales is captured. This is but one of a score of scenes
in Moby-Dick that remain in the memory like a personal experience: one
exclaims with Ishmael: I was one of that crew, I pulled in that boat,
I floundered around in those waters. A thousand things happen in life
with less vividness and impact than they make in these printed pages:
the Straits of Sunda are nearer than the neighbouring street.

Shortly after this encounter, the chase grows hotter: the Pequod
meets the Samuel Enderby of London, and the Samuel Enderby has met
Moby-Dick. Captain Ahab cannot contain himself: his gam with the
English captain ends abruptly, and, with the blood pounding in his
veins, he springs back to the ship--so precipitately that his ivory
leg is shattered and the carpenter must fit him with a new one. The
indignity increases Ahab’s impatient pride: “Here I am,” he exclaims,
“proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for
a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-debtedness which will
not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the
whole world’s books.” Ahab causes a new harpoon head to be forged: he
mans his own boat with the mysterious figures that had crept on the
Pequod in the twilight of the morning they left Nantucket, Orientals,
led by a Parsee, Fedallah. But at every move, Ahab stumbles on some
new obstruction, or delay; and his words become more frenzied, while
the effort of his will leaves a white scar of terror wherever his
lightnings momentarily strike. When the Bachelor, homeward bound, full
of oil, seeks to detain the Pequod for a friendly parley, Ahab leaves
it behind with a curse.

Against the under-chorus of Stubb’s common sense and Starbuck’s prudent
humanity, Ahab’s shrieks mount more wildly: he even throws the quadrant
overboard, to steer by compass, fathom-line, and dead reckoning. In the
last extremity of pursuit, in utter arrogance of purpose, he thrusts
aside the quadrant as the foolish toy and baby’s plaything of haughty
admirals and commodores and captains: in the final issue of life and
death, science is impotent: it can but tell where the ship is on the
planet, but not where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be
tomorrow noon. Now the Pequod must ride out a typhoon; and in the midst
of the electric storm, three corposants, tapers of white flame, appear
on the three lightning-rods of the masts. For Ahab, his purpose is only
beating nearer its goal: instead of bowing to the blind forces around
him, the storm, the sea, the lightning, the whale, his resolution is
more deeply fortified. Note his words: there are none more sudden and
final with meaning in the whole book.

“Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian
once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that
to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit,
and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love
nor reverence will thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but
kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy
speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life
will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst
of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but
a point at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I
earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal
rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of
love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere
supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted
worlds, there’s that in here that still remains indifferent. O thou
clear spirit, of the fire thou madest me, and like a true child of
fire, I breathe it back to thee.”

Everything conspires against Ahab’s deed: the compass needle goes
wrong: the log and line, hitherto seldom used, snap off when they are
heaved: a man is lost overboard and the life-buoy that was sent over
after him springs a leak and goes down with him; finally, another
whaler, the Rachel, that has lost a boat’s crew with the captain’s son
aboard, seeks to stay Ahab, so that the Pequod may help in the search:
Ahab refuses this call of humanity. One being alone almost defeats
Ahab, not Starbuck, who, rifle in hand, is tempted to kill Ahab and
end his crazy pursuit, but Pip, the little Negro idiot, whose devotion
rises as the isolation of Ahab grows. Ahab flees from him: his love,
faith, devotion move him from his purpose as no disasters or portents
have hitherto moved him. “If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s
purpose keels up in him,” Ahab admonishes himself. The boy is black,
and an outcast. The black is an idiot, and so doubly an outcast. From
one as mad and isolated as himself, Ahab receives love, a love deep
as his own sense of pride and power, and he is almost unmanned by it.
“Spite of a million villains,” says Ahab, “this makes me a bigot in the
fadeless fidelity of man.” But love has come too late: the chase goes
on.

As Ahab nears Moby-Dick his old humanity comes back to him. He sees his
own wife and child in Starbuck’s eye, regrets her perpetual widowhood,
and is lenient to Starbuck’s own desire to return to his hearth. No:
more: Ahab sees his wasted years: the desolation of their solitude: the
slavery of a lonely command: the dry nourishment this isolated soul
has fed upon--forty years of waste and forty years of folly since, as
a lad of eighteen, on a mild sweet day, he struck his first whale,
a boy-harpooner of eighteen. How is it that in spite of all this he
pursues his purpose? What keeps him pushing and crowding himself all
the time, recklessly making himself ready to do what in his own nature
he had no desire to accomplish?

The mild day and the steel-blue sky and the smell of the wind, as if
the haymakers had been mowing grass on the slopes of the Andes--this
day is scarcely over before Ahab detects a whale in the wind; and at
next daybreak, Ahab himself raises the hump-like snow-head--Moby-Dick.
In the smoother ocean, Moby-Dick seems as mild as the day, gliding with
scarcely a ripple through the water, his wrenched, hideous jaw beneath
the surface. Becoming aware of the chase, he sounds--only to return
with open jaws beneath the bottom of Ahab’s boat, and, after playing
with it as a cat with a mouse, he bites it in twain. The Pequod sails
on the whale and drives him off. Ahab and his crew are rescued, Ahab
with bloodshot blinded eyes, the white brine caking in his wrinkles,
manly wails arising from some far inland part of his being, as desolate
as sounds from out ravines.

The second day comes, and the boats lower again. Moby-Dick takes the
initiative and plunges immediately towards the boats with open jaws
and lashing tail, warping and manoeuvring in such a fashion that the
harpoons thrust into him become tangled and the lines shortened: again
the whale dives, and again he rises, this time throwing Ahab’s boat
topsy-turvy in the air. Ahab’s ivory leg is snapped off; but again
he is rescued; and a third day opens. At noon, Ahab, keeping lookout
himself, and doubling on his tracks, sights the whale, making towards
him in the distance. Again the calm and beauty of the day wake some old
humanity in Ahab; but he is churned onward by his purpose.

“Some men die at ebb-tide; some at low water; some at the full of
the flood;--I feel like a billow that’s all one crested comb. I am
old;--shake hands with me, man,” says Ahab to his first mate.

Their hands met; their eyes fastened; but Starbuck’s manly tears cannot
restrain Ahab’s order to lower away in pursuit, nor can the sharks
that crowd around the boat and snap maliciously at the oars, nor can
the hawk that tears at the red flag running on the main truck; nothing
diverts him. The whale sounds; when he rises, tormented by a mass of
harpoons and lines, it is as if a submerged iceberg rose suddenly to
the surface, the waters flash like a heap of fountains, break in a
shower of flakes, and leave the circling surface creamed like new milk
round the marble trunk of the whale. Moby-Dick, churning his tail among
the boats, dashes in the bows of the mate’s boat: Ahab, unscathed,
orders them back to the ship, while he keeps to the hunt. The whale,
fagged or malicious, permits Ahab to catch up with him: Ahab darts iron
and curse into his flanks; but the line snaps loose, and the whale
turns upon the Pequod herself, and bears down on her, his solid white
buttress of a forehead meeting and shivering the planks. The ship
settles. Ahab, cut off from the ship, makes one last thrust at the
whale; the line spins out and runs foul, and Ahab, stooping to unsnarl
it, is caught round the neck and shot out of the boat, fulfilling the
prophecy of Fedallah, who has been drowned before him. The rest of the
crew turns towards the Pequod; only its masts remain above the water;
and as it goes down, they are carried in the suction. As its final spar
settles in the water, a red arm and hammer hover back upliftedly in
the air, in the act of nailing the flag faster to the subsiding spar.
A sky-hawk, pecking at the flag, intercepts the hammer with his wing;
and in the death-grasp of Tashtego, the pinioned bird of heaven, with
shrieks, his form folded in Ahab’s flag, is dragged into the water:
the boat would not sink to hell until she had carried a living part of
heaven with her, and helmeted herself with it.

“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen
white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the
great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

It is absurd and ineffectual to give a summary of Moby-Dick, or to
quote, dismembered, some of its great passages. Like the paintings
in the Ajanta caves, the beauty of Moby-Dick can be known only to
those who will make a pilgrimage to it, and stay within its dark
confines until what is darkness has become light, and one can make
out, with the help of an occasional torch, its grand design, its
complicated arabesque, the minute significance of its parts. No
feeble pencil sketch can convey a notion of Moby-Dick’s extravagant
beauty; but at the same time, without a hint of its design and its
manner of execution, all subsequent commentary must seem flatulent
and disproportionate. For three-quarters of a century Moby-Dick
has suffered at the hands of the superficial critic: it has been
condemned because to one man it seemed confused, to another it was
not a novel, to a third the characters were not “real,” and to a
fourth it was merely a weird, mystical, impossible tale of dubious
veracity, an example of Bedlam literature, while to a fifth, it was
just a straightforward account of the whaling industry, marred by a
crazy captain and an adventitious plot. The final answer to all these
criticisms lies, of course, in the book itself: but the foregoing
outline will perhaps aid us a little in defining the qualities and
limits of Melville’s vast epic.

Before we can take the measure of Moby-Dick we must, however, throw
aside our ordinary measuring-sticks: one does not measure Saturn with
the aid of an opera-glass and a dressmaker’s tape. The conventional
critic has dismissed Moby-Dick because it is “not a novel,” or if it
is a novel, its story is marred by all sorts of extraneous material,
history, natural history, philosophy, mythological excursions, what
not. This sort of criticism would belittle Moby-Dick by showing that it
does not respect canons of a much pettier nature than the work itself,
or because its colossal bulk cannot be caught in the herring-net of
the commonplace story or romance. Even Mr. John Freeman, one of the
most sympathetic interpreters of Melville, falls into this error;
for, while acknowledging the great qualities of Moby-Dick, he refers
to its “digressions and delays” as if they were in fact digressions
and delays; that is, as if the “action” in the common novelist’s
development of plot carried the thread of the story.

The matter is very easily put to rights if we simply abandon these
false categories altogether. Moby-Dick stands by itself as complete
as the Divine Comedy or the Odyssey stands by itself. Benedetto Croce
has correctly taught us that every work of art is indeed in this same
position: that it is uniquely what it is, and cannot be understood
except in terms of its own purpose. If, for purely practical reasons,
we ignore this in dealing with the ruck of novels and stories,
because their inner purpose is so insignificant, we must respect it
strictly when we confront a work that does not conspicuously conform
to the established canons; for, needless to say, an imaginative work
of the first rank will disclose itself through its differences and
its departures, by what it originates, rather than by what it is
derived from or akin to. Had Melville seriously sought in Moby-Dick
to rival the work of Trollope or Reade or Dickens, had he simply
desired to amuse and edify the great bourgeois public that consumed
its three-decker novels as it consumed its ten-course public dinners,
and wanted no delay in the service, no hitch in the round of food,
drink, toasts, speeches, and above all, no unaccustomed victuals on
such occasions, then Moby-Dick would have been a mistake and failure.
But one cannot count as a failure what was never an attempt. Moby-Dick
does not belong to this comfortable bourgeois world, any more than
horse-hair shirts or long fasts; it neither aids digestion nor
increases the sense of warm drowsy good nature that leads finally to
bed: and that is all there is to it.

The same criticism that disposes of the notion that Moby-Dick is a
bad novel, by admitting freely that it is not a novel at all, equally
disposes of its lack of verisimilitude. Although Melville was at
first challenged on his facts, such as the ramming of the Pequod by
Moby-Dick, events were just as kind to his reputation here as they were
in the case of Typee: for while Moby-Dick was on the press, news came
of the sinking of the whaler Ann Alexander by the ferocious attack of
a whale. No one of authority has attempted to quarrel with Melville’s
descriptions of the life and habits of whalemen and the whale: the
testimony of every observer is that Melville left very little for any
one else to say about the subject. This does not, however, dispose of
the charge; for those who are wisely captious of Melville here will
confine themselves to saying that no such crew ever existed, no such
words ever passed human mouth, and no such thoughts could enter the
mind of a Nantucketer, as entered Ahab’s.

Again, one is tempted to grant the objection; for it makes no
difference in the value of Moby-Dick as a work of art. In the realistic
convention, Moby-Dick would be a bad book: it happens that the story
is projected on more than one plane, and a good part of it belongs to
another, and equally valid, convention. Melville himself was aware
of the difference, and early in the book he calls upon the Spirit
of Equality, which has spread its royal mantle of humanity over all
his kind, to defend him against all mortal critics “if, then, to the
meanest mariners, and renegades, and castaways, I shall hereafter
ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if
even the most mournful, perchance the most abased among them all shall
at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that
workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread the rainbow
over his disastrous set of sun.” Now, the convention in which Melville
cast this part of Moby-Dick was foreign to the nineteenth century;
obscure people, like Beddoes, alone essayed it: to create these
idealized figures called for such reserves of power that only minor
poets, for the most part, unconscious of their weaknesses, attempted
the task.

The objections to Melville’s use of this convention would be fair
enough if, like the minor poets, he failed; but, through his success,
one sees that the limitations of naturalism are no closer to reality
than the limitations of poetic tragedy; and, on the contrary,
Melville’s valiant use of this convention enabled him to present a
much fuller picture of reality than the purely external suggestions of
current realism would have permitted him to show. What we call realism
is a method of approaching reality: an external picture of a Cowperwood
or a Gantry may have as little human truth in it as a purely fanciful
description of an elf: and the artist who can draw upon more than one
convention is, at all events, free from the curious illusion, so common
in the nineteenth century, alike in philosophy, with its pragmatism in
science, with its dogmatic materialism, and in imaginative writing,
with its realism, that this convention is not limited, and so far
arbitrary, but the very stuff and vitals of existence. The question
to settle is not: Did an Ahab ever sail from Nantucket? The question
is: Do Ahab and Stubb and Starbuck and Tashtego live within the sphere
where we find them? The answer is that they are tremendously alive; for
they are aspects of the spirit of man. At each utterance, one feels
more keenly their imaginative embodiment; so that by the time Ahab
breaks into his loftiest Titanisms, one accepts his language, as one
accepts his pride: they belong to the fibre and essence of the man.
Ahab is a reality in relation to Moby-Dick; and when Melville projects
him, he ceases to be incredible, because he is alive.

We need not concern ourselves particularly with those who look upon
Moby-Dick solely as a sort of World’s Almanac or Gazetteer of the
Whaling Industry, unhappily marred by the highly seasoned enticements
of the narrative. This criticism is, indeed, but the other side of
the sort of objection I have disposed of; and it tells more about the
limitations of the reader than it does about the quality of Moby-Dick.
For the fact is that this book is a challenge and affront to all the
habits of mind that typically prevailed in the nineteenth century, and
still remain, almost unabated, among us: it comes out of a different
world, and presupposes, for its acceptance, a more integrated life and
consciousness than we have known or experienced, for the most part,
these last three centuries. Moby-Dick is not Victorian; it is not
Elizabethan; it is, rather, prophetic of another quality of life which
Melville had experienced and had a fuller vision of in his own time--a
quality that may again come into the world, when we seek to pass beyond
the harassed specialisms which still hold and preoccupy so many of us.
To fathom this quality of Melville’s experience and imagination, we
must look a little deeper into his myth and his manner of projecting
it. What is its meaning? And first, in what manner is that meaning
conveyed to us?

Moby-Dick is a poetic epic. Typographically, Moby-Dick conforms to
prose, and there are long passages, whole chapters, which are wholly
in the mood of prose: but in spirit and in actual rhythm, Moby-Dick
again and again rises to polyphonic verse which resembles passages of
Webster’s in that it can either be considered as broken blank verse,
or as cadenced prose. Mr. Percy Boynton has performed the interesting
experiment of transposing a paragraph in Pierre into excellent free
verse, so strong and subtle are Melville’s rhythms; and one might
garner a whole book of verse from Moby-Dick. Melville, in Moby-Dick,
unconsciously respects Poe’s canon that all true poetry must be short
in length, since the mood cannot be retained, unbroken or undiminished,
over lengthy passages, and if the form itself is preserved, the content
nevertheless is prose. But while Poe himself used this dictum as an
excuse for writing only short lyrics, Melville sustained the poetic
mood through a long narrative by dropping frankly into prose in the
intervening while. As a result, he was under no necessity of clipping
the emotions or of bleaching the imaginative colours of Moby-Dick:
like a flying-boat, he rises from the water to the air and returns to
the water again without losing control over either medium. His prose
is prose: hard, sinewy, compact; and his poetry is poetry, vivid,
surging, volcanic, creating its own form in the very pattern of the
emotional state itself, soaring, towering, losing all respect for the
smaller conventions of veracity, when the inner triumph itself must
be announced. It is in the very rhythm of his language that Ahab’s
mood, and all the devious symbols of Moby-Dick are sustained and made
credible: by no other method could the deeper half of the tale have
been written. In these poetic passages, the phrases are intensified,
stylicized, stripped of their habitual associations. If occasionally,
as with Shakespeare, the thought itself is borne down by the weight of
the gold that decorates it, this is only a similar proof of Melville’s
immense power of expression.

Both Poe and Hawthorne share some of Melville’s power, and both of
them, with varying success, wrought ideality and actuality into the
same figure: but one has only to compare the best of their work with
Moby-Dick to see wherein Melville’s great distinction lies. The Scarlet
Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, William Wilson, like most other
works of fiction, are melodic: a single instrument is sufficient to
carry the whole theme; whereas Moby-Dick is a symphony; every resource
of language and thought, fantasy, description, philosophy, natural
history, drama, broken rhythms, blank verse, imagery, symbol, are
utilized to sustain and expand the great theme. The conception of
Moby-Dick organically demands the expressive interrelation, for a
single total effect, of a hundred different pieces: even in accessory
matters, like the association of the Parsee, the fire-worshipper, with
the death of Ahab, the fire-defier, or in the makeup of the crew, the
officers white men, the harpooneers the savage races, red, black,
brown, and the crew a mixed lot from the separate islands of the
earth, not a stroke is introduced that has not a meaning for the myth
as a whole. Although the savage harpooneers get nearest the whale,
the savage universe, it is Ahab and the Parsee, the European and the
Asiatic, who carry the pursuit to its ultimate end--while a single
American survives to tell the tale!

Melville’s instrumentation is unsurpassed in the writing of the last
century: one must go to a Beethoven or a Wagner for an exhibition of
similar powers: one will not find it among the works of literature.
Here are Webster’s wild violin, Marlowe’s cymbals, Browne’s sonorous
bass viol, Swift’s brass, Smollett’s castanets, Shelley’s flute,
brought together in a single orchestra, complementing each other in
a grand symphony. Melville achieved a similar synthesis in thought;
and that work has proved all the more credible because he achieved it
in language, too. Small wonder that those who were used to elegant
pianoforte solos or barrel-organ instrumentation, were deafened and
surprised and repulsed.

What is the meaning of Moby-Dick? There is not one meaning; there are
many; but in its simplest terms, Moby-Dick is, necessarily, a story of
the sea and its ways, as the Odyssey is a story of strange adventure,
and War and Peace a story of battles and domestic life. The characters
are heightened and slightly distorted: Melville’s quizzical comic
sense is steadily at work on them, and only Ahab escapes: but they all
have their recognizable counterparts in the actual world. Without any
prolonged investigation one could still find a Starbuck on Nantucket or
a Flask on Marthas Vineyard--indeed, as Mr. Thomas Benton’s portraits
properly indicate, queerer fish than they.

On this level, Moby-Dick brings together and focusses in a single
picture the long line of sketches and preliminary portraits Melville
had assembled in Typee, Omoo, Redburn, and White-Jacket. As a story
of the sea, Moby-Dick will always have a call for those who wish to
recapture the magic and terror and stress and calm delight of the
sea and its ships; and not less so because it seizes on a particular
kind of ship, the whaler, and a special occupation, whaling, at the
moment when they were about to pass out of existence, or rather, were
being transformed from a brutal but glorious battle into a methodical,
slightly banal industry. Melville had the singular fortune to pronounce
a valedictory on many ways of life and scenes that were becoming
extinct. He lived among the South Sea Islanders when they were still
pretty much as Captain Cook found them, just before their perversion
and decimation by our exotic Western civilization. He recorded life
on a man-of-war half a generation before the sail gave place to
steam, wood to armour-plate, and grappling-irons to long-range guns.
He described life on a sailing-packet before steam had increased the
speed, the safety, and the pleasant monotony of transatlantic travel:
and finally, he recorded the last heroic days of whaling. Moby-Dick
would have value as first-hand testimony, even if it were negligible as
literature. If this were all, the book would still be important.

But Moby-Dick, admirable as it is as a narrative of maritime adventure,
is far more than that: it is, fundamentally, a parable on the mystery
of evil and the accidental malice of the universe. The white whale
stands for the brute energies of existence, blind, fatal, overpowering,
while Ahab is the spirit of man, small and feeble, but purposive,
that pits its puniness against this might, and its purpose against
the blank senselessness of power. The evil arises with the good: the
white whale grows up among the milder whales which are caught and cut
up and used: one hunts for the one--for a happy marriage, livelihood,
offspring, social companionship and cheer--and suddenly heaving its
white bulk out of the calm sea, one comes upon the other: illness,
accident, treachery, jealousy, vengefulness, dull frustration. The
South Sea savage did not know of the white whale: at least, like death,
it played but a casual part in his consciousness. It is different with
the European: his life is a torment of white whales: the Jobs, the
Aeschyluses, the Dantes, the Shakespeares, pursue him and grapple with
him, as Ahab pursues his antagonist.

All our lesser literature, all our tales of Avalon or Heaven or
ultimate redemption, or, in a later day, the Future, is an evasion of
the white whale: it is a quest of that boyish beginning which we call
a happy ending. But the old Norse myth told that Asgard itself would
be consumed at last, and the very gods would be destroyed: the white
whale is the symbol of that persistent force of destruction, that
meaningless force, which now figures as the outpouring of a volcano or
the atmospheric disruption of a tornado or again as the mere aimless
dissipation of unused energy into an unavailable void--that spectacle
which so disheartened the learned Henry Adams. The whole tale of the
West, in mind and action, in the philosophy and art of the Greeks, in
the organization and technique of the Romans, in the precise skills
and unceasing spiritual quests of the modern man, is a tale of this
effort to combat the whale--to ward off his blows, to counteract his
aimless thrusts, to create a purpose that will offset the empty malice
of Moby-Dick. Without such a purpose, without the belief in such a
purpose, life is neither bearable nor significant: unless one is
polarized by these central human energies and aims, one tends to become
absorbed in Moby-Dick himself, and, becoming a part of his being,
can only maim, slay, butcher, like the shark or the white whale or
Alexander or Napoleon. If there is no God, exclaims Dostoyevsky’s hero,
then we may commit murder: and in the sense that God represents the
totality of human purpose and meaning the conclusion is inevitable.

It is useless to derive man’s purposes from those of the external
universe; he is a figure in the web of life. Except for such kindness
and loyalty as the creatures man has domesticated show, there is, as
far as one can now see, no concern except in man himself over the
ceaseless motions and accidents that take place in nature. Love and
chance, said Charles Peirce, rule the universe: but the love is man’s
love, and although in the very concept of chance, as both Peirce and
Captain Ahab declare, there is some rough notion of fair play, of
fifty-fifty, of an even break, that is small immediate consolation for
the creature that may lose not the game, but his life, by an unlucky
throw of the dice. Ahab has more humanity than the gods he defies:
indeed, he has more power, because he is conscious of the power he
wields, and applies it deliberately, whereas Moby-Dick’s power only
seems deliberate because it cuts across the directed aims of Ahab
himself. And in one sense, Ahab achieves victory: he vanquishes in
himself that which would retreat from Moby-Dick and acquiesce in his
insensate energies and his brutal sway. His end is tragic: evil engulfs
him. But in battling against evil, with power instead of love, Ahab
himself, in A. E.’s phrase, becomes the image of the thing he hates: he
has lost his humanity in the very act of vindicating it. By physical
defiance, by physical combat, Ahab cannot rout and capture Moby-Dick:
the odds are against him; and if his defiance is noble, his methods
are ill chosen. Growth, cultivation, order, art--these are the proper
means by which man displaces accident and subdues the vacant external
powers in the universe: the way of growth is not to become more
powerful but to become more human. Here is a hard lesson to learn: it
is easier to wage war than to conquer in oneself the tendency to be
partial, vindictive, and unjust: it is easier to demolish one’s enemy
than to pit oneself against him in an intellectual combat which will
disclose one’s weaknesses and provincialities. And that evil Ahab seeks
to strike is the sum of one’s enemies. He does not bow down to it and
accept it: therein lies his heroism and virtue: but he fights it with
its own weapons and therein lies his madness. All the things that Ahab
despises when he is about to attack the whale, the love and loyalty
of Pip, the memory of his wife and child, the sextant of science, the
inner sense of calm, which makes all external struggle futile, are the
very things that would redeem him and make him victorious.

Man’s ultimate defence against the Universe, against evil and accident
and malice, is not by any fictitious resolution of these things into an
Absolute which justifies them and utilizes them for its own ends: this
is specious comfort, and Voltaire’s answer to Leibniz in Candide seems
to me a final one. Man’s defence lies within himself, not within the
narrow, isolated ego, which may be overwhelmed, but in that self which
we share with our fellows and which assures us that, whatever happens
to our own carcasses and hides, good men will remain, to carry on the
work, to foster and protect the things we have recognized as excellent.
To make that self more solid, one must advance positive science,
produce formative ideas, and embody ideal forms in which all men may,
to a greater or less degree, participate: in short, one must create a
realm which is independent of the hostile forces in the universe--and
cannot be lightly shaken by their onslaught. Melville’s method, that
of writing Moby-Dick, was correct: as correct as Ahab’s method, taken
literally, that of fighting Moby-Dick, was fallacious. In Moby-Dick,
Melville conquered the white whale in his own consciousness: instead of
blankness there was significance, instead of aimless energy there was
purpose, and instead of random living there was Life. The universe _is_
inscrutable, unfathomable, malicious, _so_--like the white whale and
his element. Art in the broad sense of all humanizing effort is man’s
answer to this condition: for it is the means by which he circumvents
or postpones his doom, and bravely meets his tragic destiny. Not tame
and gentle bliss, but disaster, heroically encountered, is man’s true
happy ending.

Here, it seems to me, is the plainest interpretation of Melville’s
fable, and the one he was partly conscious of in the writing of it. But
a great book is more a part of its milieu than either the writer or his
public knows; and there is more in Moby-Dick than the figure of man’s
heroic defiance of brute energy, and evil, and the high gods.

In another sense, the whale stands for the practical life. Mankind
needs food and light and shelter, and, with a little daring and a
little patience, it gains these things from its environment: the
whale that we cut up, dissect, analyse, melt down, pour into casks,
and distribute in cities and households is the whale of industry and
science. The era of whaling which opened only in the late seventeenth
century is timed with the era of modern industry; and in the very year
Melville wrote Moby-Dick, 1851, industry and science were announcing
their triumphs in that great cock-crow of the Crystal Palace Exhibition
in London. Side by side with this purpose, which secures man’s material
existence, is another set of purposes which, though they sometimes take
advantage of the means offered by the practical life, as Ahab takes
advantage of his sordid crew and ordinary whaling to carry out his
private revenge, run counter to the usual flow of our daily efforts.
The white whale cannot be met and captured by the usual means; more
than that: to fulfil man’s own deeper purposes, the captains of the
spirit must oppose the prudence of Starbuck and the common sense
of Stubb. Material sustenance, home, comfort, though their pursuit
occupy the greater part of the daily round of humanity, are sometimes
best forgotten and set at naught: indeed, when nobler human purposes
are uppermost, they must be set at naught. He who steadily seeks to
preserve life and fortify it must be ready to give up his life at a
moment’s notice when a fellow creature is in danger: he who would
provide others with daily bread must be prepared to go hungry if the
wheat that would nourish him is needed for the planting. All the more
does this hold in the affairs of the spirit. When the human spirit
expands itself to the uttermost, to confront the white whale and hew
meaning and form from the blank stone of experience, one must reverse
all the practical maxims: earth’s folly, as Melville says, is Heaven’s
wisdom, and earth’s wisdom is Heaven’s greatest disaster.

The crew of the vessel seek the ordinary whale: they are after comfort
and contentment and a greater share of the “lay”; but the Ahabs seek
danger and hardship and a lay that has no value in terms of material
sustenance and magnificence. And the paradox, the hard paradox, is
this: both purposes are essential: Ahab could not set out at all
without the aid of Peleg and Bildad and Charity and his harpooners and
sailors, and they, for their part, would never know anything except
sluggish routine were they not at times stirred up to great efforts
by purposes they do not easily understand or consciously accept. Yet:
there is an Ahab in every man, and the meanest member of the crew
can be awakened to the values that Ahab prizes: given a storm and a
stove boat, and the worst rascal on shipboard may be as magnificent as
Odysseus. All men live most intensely when they are moulded by such
a purpose--or even, wanting that, by an enterprise that counterfeits
it. Art, religion, culture in general, all those intangible triumphs
of the spirit that are embodied in forms and symbols, all that spells
purpose as opposed to senseless energy, and significance as opposed to
routine--these efforts develop human life to its fullest, even when
they work contrary to the ordinary standards of the world.

There, it seems to me, is another meaning in Ahab’s struggle with
Moby-Dick. He represents, not as in the first parable, an heroic
power that misconceives its mission and misapplies itself: here
he rather stands for human purpose in its highest expression. His
pursuit is “futile” because it wrecks the boat and brings home no oil
and causes material loss and extinguishes many human lives; but in
another sense, it is not futile at all, but is the only significant
part of the voyage, since oil is burned and ships eventually break up
and men die and even the towers of proud cities crumble away as the
buildings sink beneath the sand or the jungle, while all that remains,
all that perpetuates the life and the struggle, are their forms and
symbols, their art, their literature, their science, as they have
been incorporated in the social heritage of man. That which is useful
for the moment eventually becomes useless; the mummy’s food and drink
shrivel away or evaporate: but that which is “useless,” the graven
image or the tomb itself, continues to nourish the spirit of man. Life,
Life purposive, Life formative, Life expressive, is more than living,
as living itself is more than the finding of a livelihood. There is
no triumph so petty and evanescent as that involved in capturing the
ordinary whale: the nineteenth century made this triumph the end and
object of all endeavour; and it put the spirit in chains of comfort
and material satisfaction, which were heavier than fetters and harder
to bear than the stake. By the same token, there is no struggle so
permanent and so humanly satisfactory as Ahab’s struggle with the white
whale. In that defeat, in that succession of defeats, is the only
pledge of man’s ultimate victory, and the only final preventive of
emptiness, boredom, and suicide. Battles are lost, as Whitman cried, in
the same spirit that they are won. Some day the physical powers of man
may be commensurate with his utmost spirit, and he will meet Leviathan
on even terms.

The epic and mythic quality of Moby-Dick has been misunderstood because
those who examined the book have thought of the epic in terms of Homer,
and the myth itself in relation to some obvious hero of antiquity,
or some modern folk-hero, a Washington, a Boone, raised to enormous
dimensions. “The great mistake seems to be,” as Melville said in his
essay on Hawthorne, “that even with those Americans who look forward
to the coming of a great literary genius among us, they somehow fancy
he will come in the costume of Queen Elizabeth’s day; be a writer of
dramas founded upon old English history or the tales of Boccaccio.
Whereas, great geniuses are parts of the times, they themselves are the
times and possess a corresponding colouring.”

Now, Moby-Dick was written in the best spirit of the nineteenth
century, and though it escaped most of the limitations of that period,
it escaped with its finest qualities intact. Heroes and gods in the
old sense, as Walt Whitman plainly saw, had had their day: they fitted
into a simpler scheme of life and thought, and a more credulous sort of
attitude; so far from representing the ultimate triumph of the human
imagination, from which the scientific mode of thought was not merely
a departure but a falling off, the old myths were but the product of a
juvenile fantasy. One might still use these figures, as Milton used an
Arcadian image to express the corruptions of the Established Church;
but they stood for a mode of consciousness and feeling remote from our
modern experience. Science did not, as has been foolishly believed,
destroy the myth-making power of man, or reduce all his inner strivings
to bleak impotence: this has been the accidental, temporary effect of
a one-sided science, serving, consciously or not, a limited number of
practical activities. What the scientific spirit has actually done
has been to exercise the imagination in finer ways than the autistic
wish--the wish of the infant possessed of the illusion of power and
domination--was able to express. Faraday’s ability to conceive the
lines of force in a magnetic field was quite as great a triumph as
the ability to conceive fairies dancing in a ring: and, as Mr. A. N.
Whitehead has shown, the poets who sympathized with this new sort of
imagination, poets like Shelley, Wordsworth, Whitman, Melville, did not
feel themselves robbed of their specific powers, but rather found them
enlarged and refreshed.

One of the finest love-poems of the nineteenth century, Whitman’s
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, is expressed in such an image
as Darwin or Audubon might have used, were the scientist as capable
of expressing his inner feelings as of noting “external” events: the
poet haunting the sea-shore and observing the mating of the birds, day
after day following their life, could scarcely have existed before the
nineteenth century. In the seventeenth century, such a poet would have
remained in the garden and written about a literary ghost, Philomel,
and not about an actual pair of birds: in Pope’s time, the poet would
have remained in the library and written about the birds on a lady’s
fan. Almost all the important works of the nineteenth century were
cast in this mode and expressed this new imaginative range: they
respect the fact: they are replete with observation: they project an
ideal realm in and through, not over, the landscape of actuality.
Notre Dame might have been written by an historian, War and Peace by a
sociologist, The Idiot might have been created by a psychiatrist, and
Salammbô might have been the work of an archaeologist. I do not say
that these books were scientific by intention, or that they might be
replaced by a work of science without grave loss; far from it. I merely
point out that they are conceived in the same spirit; that they belong
to a similar plane of consciousness. Much as Melville was enriched by
the Elizabethan writers, there is that in Moby-Dick which separates
him completely from the poets of that day--and if one wants a word
to describe the element that makes the difference, one must call it
briefly science.

Now, this respect for fact, as opposed to irresponsible fantasy, did
not of course exist for the first time in the nineteenth century:
Defoe had this habit of mind in quite as great a measure as Melville:
what is important is that in the nineteenth century it was for the
first time completely wedded to the imagination. It no longer means
a restriction, a dried-up quality, an incompleteness; it no longer
deifies the empirical and the practical at the expense of the ideal
and the aesthetic: on the contrary, these qualities are now completely
fused together, as an expression of life’s integrated totality. The
symbolism again becomes equal to the reality. Hercules no longer serves
in this way: although originally he was doubtless as full of immediate
relationships as whaling; and a more complex and diffuse symbol--like
Kutuzov’s army in War and Peace--is necessary. Had Milton sought to
tell this parable of Melville’s, he would probably have recast the
story of Jonah and the whale, making Jonah the hero; but in doing so he
could not help losing all the great imaginative parallels Melville is
able to work out, through using material hitherto untouched by previous
myth or history. For Ahab’s hate and the pursuit of the whale is only
one part of the total symbol: the physiological character of the whale,
its feeding, its mating, its whole life, from whatever sources Melville
drew the data, is equally a part of it. Indeed, the symbol of Moby-Dick
is complete and rounded, expressive of our present relations to the
universe, only through the passages that orthodox criticism, exercised
on lesser works and more meagre traditions, regards as extraneous or
unimportant!

Moby-Dick, then, is one of the first great mythologies to be created
in the modern world, created, that is, out of the stuff of that world,
its science, its exploration, its terrestrial daring, its concentration
upon power and dominion over nature, and not out of ancient symbols,
Prometheus, Endymion, Orestes, or mediaeval folk-legends, like Dr.
Faustus. Moby-Dick lives imaginatively in the newly broken soil of our
own life: its symbols, unlike Blake’s original but mysterious figures,
are direct and explicit: if the story is bedded in facts, the facts
themselves are not lost in the further interpretation. Moby-Dick thus
brings together the two dissevered halves of the modern world and
the modern self--its positive, practical, scientific, externalized
self, bent on conquest and knowledge, and its imaginative, ideal
half, bent on the transposition of conflict into art, and power into
humanity. This resolution is achieved in Moby-Dick itself: it is as if
a Shakespeare and a Bacon, or, to use a more local metaphor, as if an
Eakins and a Ryder, had collaborated on a single work of art, with a
heightening of their several powers. The best handbook on whaling is
also--I say this scrupulously--the best tragic epic of modern times and
one of the fine poetic works of all time.

That is an achievement; and it is also a promise. Whitman went as far
in his best poems, particularly in the Song of Myself; and, with quite
another method, Tolstoy went as far in War and Peace, Dostoyevsky in
the Brothers Karamazov; Hardy, less perfectly, approximated it perhaps
in The Dynasts; but no one went further. It is one of the great
peaks of the modern vision of life. “May God keep us,” wrote Blake,
“from single vision and Newton’s sleep.” We now perhaps see a little
more clearly what Blake’s enigmatic words mean. In Moby-Dick Melville
achieved the deep integrity of that double vision which sees with
both eyes--the scientific eye of actuality, and the illumined eye of
imagination and dream.

I have dwelt for a little on some of the meanings of Moby-Dick; but
this does not exhaust the matter. Each man will read into Moby-Dick the
drama of his own experience and that of his contemporaries: Mr. D. H.
Lawrence sees in the conflict a battle between the blood-consciousness
of the white race and its own abstract intellect, which attempts to
hunt and slay it: Mr. Percy Boynton sees in the whale all property and
vested privilege, laming the spirit of man: Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has
found in the white whale an image like that of Grendel in Beowulf,
expressing the Northern consciousness of the hard fight against the
elements; while for the disciple of Jung, the white whale is the symbol
of the Unconscious, which torments man, and yet is the source of all
his proudest efforts.

Each age, one may predict, will find its own symbols in Moby-Dick. Over
that ocean the clouds will pass and change, and the ocean itself will
mirror back those changes from its own depths. All these conscious
interpretations, however, though they serve the book by approaching
its deeper purpose, do not, cannot, quite penetrate the core of its
reality. Moby-Dick has a meaning which cannot be derived or dissociated
from the work itself. Like every great work of art, it summons up
thoughts and feelings profounder than those to which it gives overt
expression. It introduces one, sometimes by simple, bald means, to the
depths of one’s own experience. The book is not an answer, but a clue
that must be carried further and worked out. The Sermon on the Mount
has this quality. It does not answer all the difficult problems of
morality, but it suggests a new point of view in facing them: it leads
one who is sufficiently moved to follow through all the recesses of
conduct which can be influenced by mildness, understanding, and love,
but not otherwise. So with Moby-Dick: the book itself is greater than
the fable it embodies, it foreshadows more than it actually reflects:
as a work of art, Moby-Dick is part of a new integration of thought,
a widening of the fringe of consciousness, a deepening of insight,
through which the modern vision of life will finally be embodied.

The shadow cast by Moby-Dick throws into obscurity not merely the
sand-hills, but likewise some of the mountains, of the last three
centuries. Noting the extent of that shadow, one begins to suspect how
high the mountain itself is, and how great its bulk, how durable its
rock.

CHAPTER EIGHT: AMOR, THREATENING

Moby-Dick was done. In the fall of 1851 it appeared, first in England,
then, a few weeks later, in America. Melville was exhausted, exhausted
and overwrought. In the prodigious orchestration of Moby-Dick, Melville
had drained his energies, and, participating in Ahab’s own pursuit and
defiance, he had reached a point of spiritual exasperation which, like
Ahab’s illness after Moby-Dick had amputated him, was increased by his
lowered physical tone, by his weak eyes. Books like this are written
out of health and energy, but they do not leave health and energy
behind. On the contrary, the aftermath of such an effort is irritation,
debility, impotence.

Melville was worked up, in the writing of Moby-Dick, to the highest
pitch of effort; and he was harried, no doubt, by his ever-present
necessity to keep his public and add to his income. The spiritual
momentum remained, but the force behind it dwindled away. With no
time for recuperation, he plunged into his new work: an unwise
decision. Melville was not without his weaknesses, and they rose to
the surface in his new book, Pierre, or The Ambiguities. Moby-Dick had
disintegrated him: by some interior electrolysis, its sanative salt
was broken up into baneful chemical elements. In this disintegration,
Pierre rises at times as high as Moby-Dick, and sinks lower than any
of Melville’s other books. It contains passages that are the finest
utterances of his spirit; it also has passages that would scarcely
honour Laura Jean Libbey.

What caused this break-up? What value has Pierre in the sum of
Melville’s work? Neither of these questions admits of a quick and
facile answer. One cannot dismiss the novel high-handedly as Melville’s
contemporaries did; and since the relation of the personal life of the
artist to his art is still one of the major ambiguities in psychology,
one cannot give a decisive or confident answer to the first question.

Melville’s situation at the time of writing Pierre might have upset him
even in a period of completer poise and more abundant health. He had
written a great book: of that he could not possibly have had any doubt.
Minor writers may think their rhinestones are diamonds, but rarely
does a Shakespeare, a Swift, a Melville make the contrary mistake:
if he speak lightly of his own work, or affect to disregard it, it
is only for the reason that once he has reached the utmost depths of
consciousness and realizes that vast and myriad interior which can
never be fully reported, he begins to realize that diamonds, too, are
only another kind of rhinestone: they are mined too cheaply.

Melville knew that Moby-Dick was bound to be his chief title to fame.
In 1849 he had written to Mr. Duyckinck: “Would that a man could do
something and then say It is finished--not that one thing only, but all
others--that he has reached his uttermost and can never exceed it.”
Melville had done this: he had mined and tunnelled through every part
of his experience to produce this book. “There is a sure, though secret
sign in some works,” he wrote in 1850, “which proves the culmination
of the powers ... that produced them,” and he recognized this secret
sign in Moby-Dick: his letters to Hawthorne announce it. Mid all the
tribulations and vexations of his life, there was, as in the heart of
the whale Armada, a quiet place of calm and inward peace; within that
spot, he had no reason to doubt or be dissatisfied with his work.

Still, what a writer articulates is always, though his words stay
in a private diary, an effort at communication; the very nature of
language makes this inevitable. Melville was necessarily not without
his curiosity as to how the world would greet this magnificent product
of his maturity, the first book in which he was in full command of his
powers. And what was the world’s answer?

The world’s answer was no doubt what was to be expected; but it was no
less discouraging for this reason. The Literary World indeed treated
Moby-Dick with respect, and with as much understanding as a purely
bookish man, like Mr. Duyckinck, could be expected to show: though it
wasted most of the first review telling about the parallel fate of the
Ann Alexander, it made up for this adventitious journalism by a second
article which acknowledged Moby-Dick’s manifold powers and excellences.
“An intellectual chowder of romance, philosophy, natural history, fine
writing, good feeling, bad sayings ... over which, in spite of all
uncertainties, and in spite of the author himself, predominates his
keen perceptive faculties, exhibited in vivid narration.” In the light
of other contemporary reviews, this was fairly handsome. The Dublin
University Magazine, with steady opacity, said Moby-Dick was quite as
eccentric and monstrously extravagant in many of its incidents as even
Mardi, but was a valuable book because it contained an unparalleled
mass of information about the whale. As for the Athenaeum, it
righteously reminded Mr. Melville that he “has to thank himself only if
his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader as
so much trash”--criticism which reached a pinnacle in the New Monthly
Magazine, which described the style of Moby-Dick as “maniacal--mad as a
March hare--moving, gibbering, screaming, like an incurable Bedlamite,
reckless of keeper or strait-waistcoat.”

One need not go into all the forms under which the contemporary critic
disclosed his insensitiveness to great prose and his servile compliance
with the idola of the market; but one must note a singular fact: from
Fitz-James O’Brien’s first criticism of Melville’s work as a whole in
1853 down to Mr. Vernon Parrington’s commentary in 1927, Moby-Dick,
the keystone of Melville’s work, has frequently been left out of
account. The book that triumphantly smothers all the contradictory
opinions about Melville--that he was a romantic, that he could only
portray external scenes, that he was a pure introvert, that he was
an adventurous ne’er-do-well, never happy or at home in a settled
community, that he was irresponsive to the life around him, that he
was a sheer realist who could only record what he had seen--the book
that makes these generalizations silly suffered something worse than
antagonistic criticism: it met with complete neglect. It is only since
1914 in America that this neglect has been even partly atoned for.

Such obtuseness, such flat stupidity, must have had a dismaying
effect upon Melville. The writer begins to doubt the possibility of
literature in a world that so flagrantly misunderstands or ignores its
higher manifestations. Faced with such contemporaries, the artist may
retire within himself, as Bach or Ryder or Cézanne did; but it will
only be a miracle that will keep him from taking into his retirement
a deep contempt for the people around him. That contempt is worse
than isolation; it brings isolation without hope. “I write to please
myself,” exclaimed Melville in one passage in Pierre. In that mood
of wilful defiance, a man may revolt from the good sense of his
contemporaries as well as from their deficiencies. There was nothing in
the reception of Moby-Dick that would have lessened Melville’s scorn,
or helped him to fortify himself against his own weaknesses. Quite the
contrary. Like Pierre himself he was to learn “and very bitterly learn,
that though the world worship mediocrity and commonplace, yet hath it
fire and sword for contemporary grandeur.”

Moby-Dick was too much for them, was it? Well: it was a mere pencilling
of the ultimate blackness that was his to paint: if one were going to
tell the truth at all, one could go much further and be much plainer.
“Henceforth,” proclaimed Pierre, “I will know nothing but Truth; Glad
Truth or Sad Truth; I will know what _is_, and do what my deepest angel
dictates.” And again: “I am more frank with Pierre than the best men
are with themselves. I am all unguarded and magnanimous with Pierre:
therefore you see his weakness, and therefore only. In reserves, men
build imposing characters; not in revelations. He who shall be wholly
honest, though nobler than Ethan Allen that man shall stand in danger
of the meanest mortal’s scorn.”

It was in some such mood of defeat, foreboding, defiant candour,
that Pierre was conceived and written. Meanwhile, in November, 1851,
the Hawthorne family had moved away from the Berkshires and Melville
settled to his work, in the spring of 1852, on the north porch that
faced Mt. Monadnock, with an intense feeling of human isolation which
brought the mountain closer to him, as his only friend. The one
possibility of a friendly, rapturous union of spirits was behind him:
no longer could he write to Hawthorne, as he had done just a few months
before: “Whence came you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my
flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips--lo, they are yours, and
not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the
Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of
feeling.” No: already that was over: dead. If the spirit burned now, it
burned as ice does to the human touch. It was not altogether in irony,
or in wild whimsy, that Melville dedicated his next book, Pierre, to
his one solitary and steadfast companion, Mt. Monadnock.

There is a sense in which Pierre is an abortive complement to
Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick, great fable that it is, contains a good part
of human life under one figure or another; but it does not contain
everything. I would claim much for it; I would claim much for
Melville’s work as a whole; but there is still a great segment that
remained unexplored till Melville wrote Pierre, and that, to the end,
he never satisfactorily penetrated or freely brooded upon.

All Melville’s books about the sea have the one anomaly and defect of
the sea from the central, human point of view: one-half of the race,
woman, is left out of it. Melville’s world, all too literally, is a
man-of-war’s world. Woman neither charms nor nurtures nor threatens:
she neither robs man of his strength nor rouses him to heroic frenzy:
she is not Circe: she is not Rosalind or Francesca or even the Wife of
Bath--she simply does not exist. When the Pequod spreads sail, woman
is left behind: she is the phantom of home for Ahab and Starbuck.
The whales dally in Moby-Dick and beget offspring; but all the
trouble, beauty, madness, delight of human love, all that vast range
of experience from the mere touch of the flesh to the most enduring
spiritual loyalty, all that is absent. One looks for some understanding
of woman’s lot and woman’s life in Moby-Dick; and one looks in vain.
One looks for it again in Pierre, and one is disappointed, although
its ambiguities are concerned with nothing else. With experience of
woman in every relationship, daughter, girl, sister, wife, mother,
matron, he described her in only one aspect--that of the remote and
idealized mistress of romantic courtship. Mother, sister, sweetheart,
all appeared to Melville’s hero in this brief and peculiar aspect.

There was, one is driven to believe, something in Herman Melville’s
life that caused him to dissociate woman from his account of man’s
deepest experience. Mr. Waldo Frank has suggested, in general social
terms, that the quest of power, which has preoccupied Western man since
the Renaissance, has incapacitated him as a lover and kept him from
understanding woman and all her essential concerns. If that is true,
Melville pushed his aberration to a logical extremity; and he, who
captured to the full the poetry of the sea, became as bashful as a boy
when he beheld Venus, born of its foam, rising from the waters he knew
so well, the most unexpected of monsters, and the only denizen of the
sea he dared neither snare nor harpoon nor otherwise dispose of, except
by flight....

The hero of Pierre is a young patrician, the heir of Saddle Meadows; he
has good looks, health, an historic ancestry, and a warmly humanized
environment. Handicapped in his own inheritance as a youth, Melville
bestowed on Pierre not only all the things he possessed, such as the
Gansevoort heritage, but all the things ill fortune had denied him.

Pierre lives with his mother, a widow; she is proud, fine, and at fifty
still beautiful: he treats her beauty with the attention of a lover
who resents every man that approaches her: she is “sister” and he is
“brother” and there is more than familiar fondness in their touches.
Pierre is on the point of open betrothal to Lucy, a simple, dewy
country girl of good family. Is there to be jealousy between the mother
and Lucy; must he choose between them? No: something more difficult
is in store. At a village sewing-bee, where he has gone to call for
his mother, a girl faints at the sight of Pierre. She seems a farmer’s
daughter and her fainting is mysterious; the mystery becomes oppressive
when Pierre gets a secret summons from her. An interview with Isabel,
the girl, topples the whole Elysium of family relationships within
whose rainbow Pierre had lived. Isabel, a dark, lovely creature, brims
with obscure memories of an almost unintelligible past, memories
that wail through her like the sound of wind in the trees. By hint
and memory and inference, she had found that Pierre’s father, who
had formed a union with a Frenchwoman, was her father--and this girl
was the sole fruit of the union--Pierre’s half-sister. Isabel offers
her orphaned self to her half-brother in complete trust; and he, not
doubting the relationship, although hitherto his father had seemed to
him a flawless being, takes her to his bosom.

In a few hours, Pierre experiences all the perturbations that afflicted
Young Goodman Brown, in Hawthorne’s story, when he discovered all
his respected elders, the personification of virtue and chastity,
participating in a witches’ sabbath. Pierre contemplates his mother,
to see if there is any possible means of making her acknowledge the
relationship and rescue Isabel from the mean lot that is now hers,
in a family that is about to cast off its own daughter, Delly Ulver,
because she has conceived a child out of wedlock. No help there! Pierre
discovers a worldly front of respectability hemming him round. His
mother’s spiritual counsellor, the Reverend Mr. Folsgrave, gives the
world’s reasons for refusing to compound Delly’s mistake: his mother
is even more peremptorily and forbiddingly righteous. Suddenly, Pierre
discovers that the kindness and charity and sweetness of the world is a
poisonous mushroom, whose delicate shape is embedded in the ordure of
malice, pride, cold restraint, heartlessness.

If Mrs. Glendinning acts in this fashion over Delly Ulver’s plight,
what sort of front would she place on Isabel’s and that of Pierre’s
father? Would she acknowledge her husband’s error: would she take to
her bosom this Isabel? Even Pierre, bursting with hope, cannot hope
for this: his faith is shattered: he sees the cold rectitude of his
mother, and a resolution to stand against the world and its ways
takes the place of his original belief that those ways are amiable
and meritorious and virtuous. Pierre resolves to protect Isabel:
but how? To achieve his aim, he conceives the device of living with
her, in strict brotherly aloofness, under the fiction of marriage. A
gallant, quixotic espousal; but not without its own deviousness and
share of infirmity. Would he have been so ready to espouse Isabel, asks
Melville, had she been ugly and crass instead of sombrely beautiful and
delicate? Would he have been so warm in magnanimity if another kind of
warmth had not lain under the surface? Would he, one might add, have
conceived this stratagem of living with Isabel as husband and wife, had
he not lived with his mother as brother and sister?

Pierre does not dare to frame these questions. He is worked up to
a great pitch of nobility and sacrifice: high-handedly, he throws
his whole life into the scales and runs away with Isabel, taking
Delly under his protection, too, and trusting to time and his own
explanations to soften the action to Mrs. Glendinning and make it
palatable. Lucy, to whom he has plighted marriage, he ruthlessly sets
behind him; and, with a few coins in his purse, he makes his way to
New York, to carve out a career as a writer. Troubles swarm about him
like angry hornets, once he destroys the nest of respectability which
had kept them in order. The companion of his youth, a cousin who had
once been a rival for Lucy’s hand, supposing Lucy to be his bride, had
generously placed his town house at Pierre’s disposal. Now he summarily
withdraws his hospitality. The three outcasts reach New York late at
night to find their quarters deserted; Pierre, hunting up his cousin,
is cut dead when he confronts him: from the gutters of the city, all
its noisome human refuse taints the air: Pierre returns to the town
guardhouse, where he had left Delly and Isabel, to find them shrinking
before the profane curses and gestures of a band of drunken prostitutes
and their customers, rounded up in a raid.

This is but a foretaste of the trials that are to overwhelm Pierre
and Isabel. Pierre and his house-mates presently find themselves a
little flat in an old church building that has been remodelled into
offices and apartments, and is occupied by broken-down lawyers,
transcendentalists, vegetarians, faddists of one kind or another,
each encouraging the other’s special lunacy in order to have a kindly
reception for his own. In the midst of this extreme poverty and
disorder, Pierre, who has been a mild minor poet, a writer of aesthetic
jingles which “would offend no one,” probes all the terrors of his new
experience and its revelations, and out of it he writes a book, not
unlike Pierre, with an author for hero. The situation is impossible.
Pierre has no money: his mother freezes up completely in mortification,
and disowns him, keeping even that share of his estate which was
meant for Pierre: the misery and ambiguity of his situation increases
when Lucy, recovered from the first stupor of grief, flies for refuge
to Pierre, to beg a place as humble servitor, in Pierre’s already
crammed and over-womaned household. Worst of all, the dark bottom of
his brotherly relation with Isabel becomes faintly apparent to Pierre
himself: it is reflected in the shadow of jealousy that touches her
reaction to Lucy: such a feeling as Isabel might properly claim if
she were married to Pierre in actuality. Pierre has outlawed himself,
and missed happiness with Lucy, for a distracted passion which can
have no outlet in external relationships: in aiming at purest virtue,
with noble intent, he has committed a deed he cannot confront without
horror. His duty towards his father’s memory and towards Isabel has
been the subtlest of masks for an urge that has its roots in his own
instinctive nature, not solely in the teachings of charity, honesty,
and justice.

Isabel herself has always been uncertainly conscious of this wild
passion: but in her ignorance of the world itself, she is aware of
nothing that runs contrary to the world. What had said yes to Pierre
was not a mere response to his charity; it had implied more. With these
fierce passages of self-revelation, Pierre finishes his own book, and
his author, Vivia, finishes his! In the notion that he was walking in
the highway of the loftiest morality, Pierre has only explored a blind
alley, the blindest of all human alleys. Farcical disappointments
mingle with tragic regrets: his publishers, on getting his masterpiece,
denounce Pierre as a rascally impostor: Lucy’s brother and his cousin
threaten Pierre’s life, treating him as a seducer and a scoundrel: his
mother dies in an insane grief. In self-defence, Pierre arms himself,
and, when attacked in the open by the two virtuous espousers of Lucy’s
honour, Pierre empties a pistol into each of them, and is taken to
jail. Grief after grief, horror after horror, ensue from Pierre’s
original act of virtue. When Lucy learns that Isabel is Pierre’s
half-sister, she collapses in death. There is no issue to this passion
for either Isabel or Pierre but suicide. Pierre and Isabel swallow
poison together in the prison cell, and Pierre passes out, entwined
in Isabel’s dark hair. The fool of fate dies: his love dies with him.
The scene is as freely strewn with corpses as the fifth act of an
Elizabethan tragedy.

This story of Pierre, hard to accept in bald summary, is no less
difficult to accept in detail. The plot is forced: the situations
are undeveloped: the dominant colours are as crude as the lithograph
advertisements of a melodrama, although there are subordinate parts
which are as delicately graded as a landscape by Corot. There is no
passage between the various planes of action and mood, as there is in
Moby-Dick: Melville slips from prose into poetry, from realism into
fantasy, from the mood of high tragedy into that of the penny dreadful.

For the moment, Melville had lost the power to fuse these discordant
elements, to reject what could not be fully absorbed: he was at the
mercy of his material. All that lives with a vital unity in Moby-Dick
has become a corpse in Pierre: there is life in the dead members,
but it does not pertain to the body as a whole. The fragments of
Pierre are sometimes marvellous, as the broken leg or arm of a great
piece of sculpture may be: but the whole is lost. From the moment the
story opens to the fatal lines that bring it to a close, one is in an
atmosphere of unreality. I do not mean that the facts are untrue to
life; I mean that the work as a whole is untrue to the imagination. One
accepts Ahab as a demi-god: one cannot accept Pierre as a human being,
although Pierres are plentiful, while one might dredge the five seas
without bringing up the carcass of another Ahab.

The style itself is witness to this psychal disruption, quite as much
as the fable. Pierre is quarried out of the same quarry as Moby-Dick;
but whereas there the texture is even and firm, here it is full of
flaws and intrusive granulations. Moby-Dick, to use another figure,
slides down a long runway before it plunges into its poetic passages:
by the time one reaches Ahab’s great apostrophes, one is all prepared
for the immersion; one’s imagination has reached the same pitch of
intensity and concentration, and nothing but the most rhythmic patterns
will satisfy the mood itself. The common prose in Moby-Dick is but an
interval for breathing: it sustains and carries forward the movement
of the more expressive passages; and as for the words themselves, they
are the exact equivalent for the mood and purpose: distended though the
envelope may be, they never burst outside it.

In language, Pierre is just the opposite of this: from the first pages,
it is perfervid and poetical in a mawkish way. With the disclosure of
the two lovers, Pierre and Lucy, in the opening chapter, the style
becomes a perfumed silk, taken from an Elizabethan chamber romance:
it sounds exactly like Melville’s first effusion in the Lansingburgh
Advertiser: “‘Truly,’ thought the youth, with a still gaze of
inexpressible fondness, ‘truly the skies do ope: and this invoking
angel looks down. I would return these manifold good-mornings, Lucy,
did not that presume thou hadst lived through the night; and by heaven,
thou belongst to the regions of an infinite day!’” This is a fair
sample of what happens in Pierre whenever Melville approaches romantic
passion; his reflections were tied with the same ribbons and furbelows,
as in his description of love as “a volume bound in rose-leaves,
clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with
peach juice on the leaves of lilies.” In style, Melville had suddenly
lost both taste and discretion. He opened on a note that could not be
carried through. Lovers may indeed once have used such silly rhetoric,
but it would take a more careful hand than Melville’s to persuade us
that the rest of the world adopted these affectations: when scene
after scene is conducted in the same tone, the style becomes tedious,
intolerable, ridiculous. It would be bad if the characters were in
the Renaissance costume of Daphnis and Chloe: it is even worse in a
novel that contains realistic caricatures of the slums of New York and
satiric commentaries upon the bizarre habits of the transcendentalists.
Occasionally, by some happy concentration of emotion, Melville either
drops these flabby phrases or permits the reader to forget them,
and there are passages which, when read as poetry, are almost as
fine as Whitman’s verses. But these intervals of good writing do not
overcome the main impression; and the main impression is of hectic and
overwrought language. With the powerful control he had over Moby-Dick,
Melville could never have written in the style that characterizes a
large part of Pierre. In Pierre he was no longer the cool rider of
words, but the flayed and foaming horse, running away.

There is still another unfortunate lapse in Pierre; and that is the
disproportion between stimulus and effect. When Pierre is first beheld
by Isabel, then completely a stranger to him, she shrieks and faints
away. Her own action was not improbable; but there is no reason why
Pierre, healthy, robust, ignorant, should be so profoundly disturbed
by this exhibition. The same is true of Pierre’s heroic resolution to
shield Isabel under the form of wedlock: it is a wild and dangerous
leap out of a much less pressing difficulty. When Pierre finally
comes to town, the disproportion is so broad it is grotesque, almost
comical: his cousin’s turning upon him and cutting him, before a group
of strangers, with a frigid stare and a command to take that fellow
away, does not belong to anything but the pages of crude melodrama. The
turning against Pierre is not the subtle, devious series of rebukes
and frigidities he would actually receive: such an affront as Melville
pictures occurs only in raw dream.

In Moby-Dick, Melville carefully prepared, a hundred pages in advance,
for the final effect: Mr. E. M. Forster has even suggested that
the emphasis upon “delight” in Father Mapple’s sermon is related
to the encountering of a ship called the Delight just before the
final catastrophe. In Pierre all this subtle preparation is lacking:
Melville’s impatience turned a genuine theme, the conflict of
adolescent purity of purpose with the apologetic compromises and
sordid motives of the world, into a crude melodrama. Melville was so
immersed in the dilemma of his hero that he did not observe how often
he failed to satisfy the demands of art, which require that the very
incoherencies of life somehow hang together and be acceptable to the
mind.

Finally, Pierre’s emotional reaction to Isabel is entirely out of
proportion to the fact that he has found a sister whose existence he
had never before suspected. For a young man, filially tied to his
mother, and by active courtship to Lucy, the entrance of another young
woman should not have had such a volcanic effect, since, under the
most ancient of social taboos, the relationship between them precludes
further intimacy. Kindness and fellow feeling might easily arise there:
but what Melville pictures is sudden and violent passion. “Fate,” he
observes, “had separated the brother and sister, till to each they
seemed so not at all. Sisters shrink not from their brother’s kisses.
And Pierre felt that never, never would he be able to embrace Isabel
with the mere brotherly embrace; while the thought of any other caress,
which took hold of any domesticness, was entirely vacant from his
uncontaminated soul, for it had never consciously intruded there.
Therefore, forever unsistered for him by the stroke of Fate, and
apparently for ever, and twice removed from the remotest possibility of
that love which had drawn him to his Lucy; yet still the object of the
ardentest and deepest emotions of his soul; therefore, to him, Isabel
soared out of the realm of mortalness and for him became transfigured
in the highest heaven of uncorrupted love.”

The ambiguity that Melville finally brought his hero to confront
in Pierre is that this highest heaven is not necessarily a heaven
at all: such a transcendental displacement of earthly emotions and
experiences is not the way of “willing, waking love”: it is the mood
of dream, and by continuous dissociation, it may eventually become the
mood of madness. The highest heaven of love does not come with such
romantic fixation upon an unapproachable deity: it comes rather with
diffusion, when all men are brothers, when all women are sisters, when
all children are just as dear as one’s own issue. The fixation on a
remote figure or symbol is in fact just the opposite of this generous
suffusion of love, and of all love’s corruptions it is possibly the
most dangerous. In the thirteenth century, the Queen of Heaven had such
a place, and her almost exclusive worship is perhaps as much a sign of
the breakup of the mediaeval synthesis as any more obvious emblem of
disintegration.

Man’s roots are in the earth; and the effort to concentrate upon an
ideal experience, that seeks no nourishment through these roots, may
be quite as disastrous to spiritual growth as the failure to push
upwards and to rise above the physical bed in which these roots are
laid. In Pierre, Melville explored and followed such a fixation to
its conclusion: disintegration and suicide. Had this been Melville’s
purpose in writing the book, Pierre might, in a decisive figure, have
ended an epoch--the epoch of the romantic hero; for he had probed that
hero’s nobility and virtue and disclosed their deeper ambiguities,
their conflicts, their irreconcilabilities. Pierre might have been a
sort of anti-Werther. Unfortunately, this is just what it is not; for
Melville identified himself with Pierre and defended his immaturity.
How this came about we will inquire later; for we have not yet done
justice to Pierre as a work of art.

What did Melville consciously set himself to do when he wrote Pierre?
He sought, I think, to arrive at the same sort of psychological truth
that he had achieved, in metaphysics, in Moby-Dick. His subject was,
not the universe, but the ego; and again, not the obvious ego of the
superficial novelist, but those implicated and related layers of self
which reach from the outer appearances of physique and carriage down
to the recesses of the unconscious personality. “The novel will find
the way to our interiors, one day,” he wrote in Pierre, “and will not
always be a novel of costume merely.” Melville, to use his own words,
had dropped his angle into the well of his childhood, to find out what
fish might be there: before Mardi, he had sought for fish in the outer
world, where swim the golden perch and pickerel: but now he had learned
to dredge his unconscious, and to draw out of it, not the white whale,
but motives, desires, hopes for which there had been no exit in his
actual life. Men had been afraid to face the cold white malignity of
the universe; they were even more reluctant to face their own unkempt,
bewrayed selves. Even Shakespeare, deep as he was, had had reserves:
Melville would set an example.

Melville was not concerned to portray “real life,” for the unconscious
is not for most people part of this reality: in a later book he gave
an explanation of his own literary method. He describes readers after
his own heart who read a novel as they might sit down to a play, with
much the same expectation and feeling. “They look that fancy shall
evoke scenes different from those of the same old crowd round the
Custom House counter, and the same old dishes on the boarding house
table, with characters unlike those of the same old acquaintances they
meet in the same old way every day in the same old street. And as, in
real life, the proprieties will not allow people to set out themselves
with that unreserve permitted to the stage, so in books of fiction,
they look not only for more entertainment, but, at bottom, for more
reality, than real life itself can show. Thus, though they want
novelty, they want nature, too; but nature unfettered, exhilarated, in
effect transformed. In this way of thinking, the people in a fiction,
like the people in a play, must dress as nobody exactly dresses, talk
as nobody exactly talks, act as nobody exactly acts. It is with fiction
as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which
we feel the tie.” For this conception of literary method, there is
much to be said, and had Pierre carried it out with plausibility and
consistency it might have made an even more important contribution to
the art of the novel than George Meredith and Henry James were to make.
If Melville met failure here, it was not because he had chosen a poor
method, but because he lacked adeptness in using it.

As concerns his psychological purpose, however, Pierre for all its
weaknesses will stand comparison with the pioneer works of its period.
Pierre is one of the first novels in which the self is treated as
anything but a unit, whose parts consist of the same material, with
the grain, as it were, running the same way. Pierre’s double relation
towards his father’s image and towards his mother’s actual presence,
his mixed attitudes towards Lucy and Isabel, the conflict between
his latent interests and his actions and rationalizations, all these
things are presented with remarkable penetration: if there is slag at
the entrance of this mine, there is a vein of exceptionally rich ore
running through it. Pierre’s identification of his mother’s love with a
supreme form of egotism, Pierre being the mirror in which she beholds
her own proud grimace, is no less penetrating than Melville’s account
of the relation between Pierre and his cousin, which runs from romantic
love into apathy and enmity. While the action of Pierre is full of
harsh and even absurd contrasts, the psychological mood is portrayed
with infinite retirement and with relentless surgical skill: Melville
does not hold the pulse of his characters: he X-rays their very organs.

The supreme quality of Pierre is its candour. Like Pierre, the more
Melville wrote, “and the deeper and deeper that he dived, [he] saw that
everlasting elusiveness of Truth: the universal insincerity of even the
greatest and purest written thoughts. Like knavish cards, the leaves
of all great books were covertly packed.” Melville did his best to
avoid playing a foul hand: he dealt his cards as they slipped from the
fingers of Fate, Chance, Necessity, Truth; and in this grave honesty
of his the greatest of thinkers seemed little better than fictioneers.
“Plato, Spinoza, and Goethe, and many more belong to this guild of
self-impostors, with a preposterous rabble of muggletonian Scots and
Yankees whose vile brogue still the more bestreaks the stripedness
of their Greek or German Neoplatonic originals.” Not exactly a kind
criticism; but, in Melville’s exacerbated state, he went even further:
not merely did the “compensationists” or the “optimists” seem shallow:
literature itself was a hollow business, too. The ultimate, the
final truth was inexpressible, and even the mere hinting of it was
inadequate: the intensest light of reason did not shed such blazonings
upon the deeper truths in man as the profoundest gloom. Utter darkness
is the wise man’s light; silence his highest utterance. Catlike,
one sees in the dark distinctly objects that are erased by blatant
sunshine; indeed, one calls to one’s aid senses and instincts that are
dormant when one can move and see. “Not to know Gloom and Grief,” said
Melville, in the midst of this illumination, “is not to know aught that
an heroic man should learn.”

But if the gold of the transcendentalists was pewter and brass,
Melville was equally honest about his own treasures. “By vast pains
we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gaspings we come to the central
room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid--and
nobody is there!--appallingly vacant, as vast as the soul of man.”
One threw away literature and philosophy, yes, language itself, only
to find oneself without visible support. One eliminated not merely the
debris and muck: one got rid of the miner, and the very purpose of his
occupation. “In those hyperborean regions to which enthusiastic Truth
and Earnestness and Independence will invariably lead a mind fitted
by nature for profound and fearless thoughts all objects are seen in
a dubious uncertain and refracting light. Viewed through the rarefied
atmosphere, the most immemorially admitted maxims of men begin to slide
and fluctuate and finally become wholly inverted.... But the example
of many minds forever lost, like undiscoverable Arctic explorers,
amid those treacherous regions, warns us entirely away from them and
we learn that it is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far,
since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind,
for, arrived at the Pole, to whose barrenness only it points, there,
the needle indifferently respects all points of the horizon alike.”

Within the heap of fragments in Pierre that mark the thrust and power
of Melville’s mind, there is one fragment, fallen at random in the
mass, that remains embedded in the memory. It is the message of the
pamphlet that comes by accident into Pierre’s hand when he is making
his escape to New York: in his overwrought state, the words have a
peculiar significance for his own purposes; and they are remarkable
enough, in their enigmatic quality, to consider by themselves. The
title of the pamphlet is Chronometricals and Horologicals: in it the
fictitious lecturer purports to set forth his own heretical philosophy.
The moral is embroidered in a single trope: the notion that there are
two kinds of time in the world, that which is established at Greenwich
and kept by chronometers, and that which prevails in other longitudes,
recorded by the local watches. It is a parallel of the philosophic and
practical aspects of life, or rather, of ideal and working morality;
and I know no better exposure of the identity, yet dualism, of thought
and action, ideal and practice.

The philosophic or religious minds are always correcting their watches
by Greenwich time; and, by continuous observation of the heavens, they
are always trying to make Greenwich time itself more correct. They know
that the compromises and conveniences of society are useful: but they
also know that these things have no ultimate reason for existence, and
that one’s employment of them must always be modified by reference
to a scale of values alongside which they are false or meaningless.
Shallow people never make such a correction: they believe in “dress”
or “family” or “prestige” or “success” as if these were the vestments
of eternity. Melville’s error, at least Pierre’s error, was just the
opposite of this: he did not see that watches and local time are
necessary, too, that there is no truth so cruelly meaningless as to
give a person Greenwich time without telling him his longitude and
enabling him to make his correction: that way lies disaster, confusion,
shipwreck. A belief in ideal standards and values with no _via media_
is scarcely better than a superficial life with no standards or
insights at all.

The passage from the universal perception to the common life is
difficult to make: it is the point at which religions and philosophies
perpetually flounder. Melville saw this paradox; and he was plagued
and puzzled by it; he even attributes it to Plotinus Plinlimmon, the
leader of the transcendentalist sect, who drinks wine he forbids to
his disciples, and, following supernal ideas, seems to prize cigars
and food far more; Plinlimmon, whose non-benevolent stare seems to
tell Pierre that all that he does is done in vain; Plinlimmon, the
very embodiment of these ambiguities. Melville tended, with Pierre, to
regard horologicals as a dubious frailty instead of what it actually
is--the way that Greenwich time is universalized and incorporated in
local practice. Human ideals are, as Melville saw, like the points of
the compass: one does not seek the north by going northward: one seeks
to reach a humanly important part of the earth, like Pekin or Paris;
and ideals are the means by which a life that more fully satisfies our
human potentialities can be lived. To observe this paradox without
falling into the rôle of Mr. Worldly Wiseman is the essence of an
active morality. Melville confronted the paradox; but the point of it
eluded him. He idealized ideals as he idealized sexual passion: he
wished both to remain for him in that adolescent state in which they
are pure, remote, untouchable--forgetting that life is impossible in
that sterile and clarified medium. Though Melville had anatomized many
human impulses and probed in many sore and hidden places, one part
of the personality remained sacred to him in Pierre: the sanctum of
adolescence. All the values in the book are distorted, its very purpose
is deflected, by Melville’s unconscious assumption that the romantic
purity of adolescence, the purity that arises not through experience
and fulfilment, that is, through continuous purification, but through
an ignorance and stagnation within sealed vials--that this purity is
central to all the other values. That chronometer was correct enough
at nineteen: at thirty-three it was no longer accurate, for a single
reason--it had stopped. That, we shall see, was the chief ambiguity of
Melville’s personal life.

Melville was not alone in parading these fundamental ambiguities.
In the dissociation of society in America, the American writer was
able to examine all the premises and established truths which a
European ordinarily takes so much for granted that he is not aware of
taking them at all; and he could separate the essence of our human
institutions from their conventional overlayers. Emerson, in Uriel,
gives pithy expression to the same insidious ideas one finds in
Pierre: but in Melville’s novel they are on every page. His mother’s
love for her son is self-love and her admiration for him is vanity.
His father’s rectitude leads to a cold marriage, where an unclerked
love had shown him a little radiant and a little finer at the core.
Pierre’s purest love is a disguised incest; his nobility is a worldly
crime--while a lack of generous impulses would have led to wealth
and honour. Melville’s whole life, indeed, had taught him these
ambiguities: Jack Chase was the real captain of the ship, not Captain
Claret: the surgeon who amputated a living man, Surgeon Cuticle, with
his glass eye, his false teeth, his wig, was more dead than the flesh
he carved into: the cannibals of the South Seas were civilized, and the
civilization of the New York slums was lower than cannibal gluttony:
the missionary of Christ inflicted servitude, and the chief goods
introduced by the trader were diseases: finally, the one civilization
which thoroughly disregards the precepts of Christian morality is that
of the Western world, which professes it.

These paradoxes were disturbing enough; but the fundamental ones were
even worse. “The uttermost ideal of moral perfection in man is wide
of the mark. The demi-gods trample on trash, and Virtue and Vice
are trash!” Vice might lead to virtue; virtue might beget vice: the
prostitute may teach purity and the holy man blasphemy! Where is one
left when Melville and Emerson are through? One is left amid a debris
of institutions and habits. Nothing is safe; nothing is secure: one no
longer looks for the outer label, or believes in it. If north be the
direction of one’s ideal, the virtuous captain may have to tack back
and forth from east to west in order to reach that destination: for
no chart or compass ever enabled a ship to steer blindly for its port
without paying close attention to wind and weather.

Had Pierre, as an imaginative work, been a more sufficient
demonstration of these ambiguities, the book would have had a high
destiny. But although the ideas are clear enough, they remain a
potentiality in Pierre, since the story itself lacks integrity of form.
The book is a precious crystal smashed out of its natural geometrical
shape. Only by a chemical analysis of its elements do we discover what
its primal character might have been.

The failure of Pierre as a work of art gives us a certain licence to
deal with it as biography, all the more because Melville identified
himself with the hero, giving him the initials and the Christian
name of his beloved grandfather, Peter Gansevoort, and attaching
him to objects like the portrait of his father which correspond to
things about whose existence there is no doubt. If, as a work of art,
Pierre was whole, we should have no good reason to suspect Melville’s
wholeness. It is the failure of Pierre as literature that draws our
attention to Melville’s predicament as a man; for in this particular
way, he had not erred before. The young Melville who wrote Typee is not
in Pierre; instead, a much younger self is there, a self erotically
immature, expressing itself in unconscious incest fantasies, and
capable of extravagant rationalizations in its effort to sustain them.
Pierre is not a demonstration because it is a betrayal--and the person
it betrays is Melville. In Pierre, he was an Iago, driven by his own
frustration to betray the Othello who had been such a valiant captain
in all his previous battles.

The significant question for us is what event, or series of
occurrences, caused a hiatus in Melville’s emotional and sexual
development; and this question cannot be lightly answered by pointing
to the obvious symbols in Pierre--for a symbol describes a tendency,
rather than an objective event. We know that Melville’s earliest
associations of sex had been with vice and sexual disease; and in a
sensitive lad, this introduction to passion may place bit and bridle on
his own development. We know, too, that sexual relations in the United
States among respectable people in the fifties were in a starved and
stunted state: Stanley Hall, a boy in this very decade, recalled that
he had never witnessed the slightest passage of affection between his
father and his mother. It may be that Elizabeth, patient as a wife,
was timid and irresponsive as a lover: in short, there are a dozen
possible circumstances occurring long after childhood, which may have
contributed to Melville’s regression: and the incest-attachment, so far
from being the cause of this, may in Pierre only serve as its emotional
equivalent. Wherever sex is mentioned in other passages in Melville’s
books, it is referred to in a mood of disillusion. In Clarel, for
example, he says:

May love’s nice balance, finely slight,
Take tremor from fulfilled delight?
Can nature such a doom dispense
As, after ardor’s tender glow,
To make the rapture more than pall
With evil secrets in the sense,
And guile whose bud is innocence--
Sweet blossom of the flower of gall?

And in one of the few passages in Moby-Dick where sex is referred to,
the Sicilian sailor implies that sexual joy is in swayings, touchings,
cozenings, and that when one tastes it directly, satiety comes. That,
I submit, is not the experience of a healthy and well-mated man, or of
a mature erotic state: to long for the pre-nuptial condition, to wish
for fixation in courtship, is the mark of an immature, or at least an
incomplete, attachment.

When one says that Melville longed for the pre-nuptial state one
does not merely imply that he found his sexual relations difficult
or unsatisfactory: this earlier condition meant something more: it
meant irresponsibility, freedom to roam, carelessness about health
and daily bread, the opportunity to do his work without foreboding
and anxiety. Sex had brought disillusion not merely because the first
ardour and glow had vanished suddenly with the first physical contact:
it had increased all his burdens and threatened to curtail that inner
development which he had come to prize above all things--even more
than the robust outer experience that had produced Typee. Sex meant
marriage; marriage meant a household and a tired wife and children
and debts. No wonder he retreated: no wonder his fantasy attached him
to a mother who could not surrender, to a half-sister who could not
bear children! The ardent impulse remained; he sought only to make it
innocuous to his own spiritual life.

In view of the terrific pressure upon Melville, one can sympathize
with his retreat; but one sees that, so far from aiding his spiritual
development, it halted a good part of it at a critical point: for he
did not carry over into his thought and his work the experiences of
a husband and a father and a happy lover. He does not speak about
these experiences as a mature man: he speaks as an adolescent. At this
point, his self did not grow and expand; rather, it became ingrown
and withdrawn; and the symbol of incest is perhaps the symbol of
this shrinkage, this defeat, and the ultimate blackness of mood that
resulted from it. He associated his career with the deep well of
adolescent purity, instead of with the running stream of maturity,
turbid perhaps, but open to the sunlight, and swift. Doing so, he
blocked his own development instead of releasing it: towards later
experience he said No: No: and again No. For almost a decade after
this, Melville’s principal characters are tired, defeated, harassed,
tormented, lonely men; and to the end of his days children, the
last symbol of maturity, do not, directly or indirectly, enter his
imaginative life.

So closely were Melville’s sexual impulses and his intellectual career
bound up that I am tempted to reverse the more obvious analysis of
Pierre, and to see in its sexual symbols the unconscious revelation of
his dilemmas as a writer. Lucy, then, may signify the naïve writings
of his youth, which promised him happiness, and Isabel, the mysterious
child of a foreign mother, lost in an obscure youth, may stand for
that darker consciousness in himself that goads him to all his most
heroic efforts, that goads him and baffles him, leaving him balked
and sterile, incapable of going further in literature, and yet unable
to retreat to the older and safer relations with Lucy--the Lucy of
Typee and Omoo. We must recall that in writing Moby-Dick Melville had
premonitions of his own final flowering and of his sudden falling into
mould; and if this prospect haunted him, the relationship with Isabel
would be a perfect symbol of it, since it showed him making an effort
to go on with his literary career, living under the form of marriage
with Isabel, but unable, through the very nature of their relationship,
to enjoy the fruits of marriage. In spite of his confidence in
Moby-Dick, a doubt might still lurk: suppose Isabel were an impostor!
He had given up everything for her: he had abandoned the prospects
of a happy literary career, such a career as his family, Elizabeth’s
family, all his friends and relatives, and the reviewers and society
generally would approve of--abandoned it for a mad, chivalrous espousal
of his inner life. He had defied the world for this dark mysterious
girl; and what she was ready to give him in return the world regarded
as an abominable sin. Very well: so much the worse for virtue, if
virtue meant Mrs. Glendinning’s pride or Lucy’s lovely shallowness.
Melville was not without hopes that success might join the unsanctified
household, that Lucy and Isabel might live side by side; but when the
reviewers told him, upon his publishing Mardi and Moby-Dick, that he
had espoused a girl of the streets and seduced a virtuous maiden,
he saw that there was no way out, except to shoot them and take the
consequences.

Pierre itself, then, was a blow, aimed at his family with their cold
pride, and at the critics, with their low standards, their failure to
see where Melville’s true vocation lay, and their hearty recommendation
of “virtuous” courses that promised so little. Melville anticipated
defeat: Lucy dies of shock, and Pierre and Isabel make away with
themselves by poison; for he saw no way to go on with his deepest
self, and still continue obedient to the conventions of society and
the responsibilities of a married man. His failure to mature with his
actual marriage contributed, I think, to his failure to go further with
his spiritual union; but how much it contributed, and by what means the
injury was done, we can still only speculate. There is no doubt about
the final result. The mood of Pierre, the work of art, became the mood
of Herman Melville, the man, for almost a decade. Before another year
was over, he recovered his grip in writing, and his art became whole
and sufficient once more: but his life suffered, and his vision as a
whole suffered: Pierre disclosed a lesion that never entirely healed.

CHAPTER NINE: TIMONISM

We now draw near the Cape Horn of Melville’s life; and I would remind
the reader of Melville’s own prophetic words in White-Jacket: “Sailor
or landsman, there is some sort of Cape Horn for all. Boys! beware of
it; prepare for it in time. Graybeards! thank God it is passed. And
ye lucky livers, to whom, by some rare fatality, your Cape Horns are
as placid as Lake Lemans, flatter not yourselves that good luck is
judgment and discretion; for all the yolk in your eggs, you might have
foundered and gone down had the Spirit of the Cape said the word.”

The evidence for this part of Melville’s history is incomplete and
ambiguous: the testimony of his contemporaries is obscure, and what
has been handed on to living people has been stated in a fragmentary
way by witnesses whose limitations of knowledge and whose emotional
bias vitiate their judgment, and rob their testimony of any pretence
of impartiality. I do not overlook the value of family tradition in
dealing with this part of Melville’s life; but I prefer to use it as
I shall use Melville’s own expression in literature, not as recording
objective events, but as indicating a certain tendency and direction.
The witness of Melville’s own literary works is far more objective
evidence than more personal stories which can neither be substantiated
nor refuted. “The data which life furnishes towards a true estimate of
any being,” Melville himself reminds us, “are as insufficient to that
end as in geometry one side given would be to determine a triangle.”
During this period the nearest one can come to truth is by avoiding the
grosser forms of error.

The last forty years of Melville’s life have been thoroughly
misinterpreted, for the reason that after Moby-Dick Melville ceased
to be a popular author. This period has been referred to as the long
quietus, and even such a just critic as Mr. Percy Boynton could say:
“Pierre was Melville’s last real and audible word, and even Pierre was
an epilogue.” Such a complete halt in a writer’s life would indeed give
reason for grave suspicions; and popular rumour has filled up this
dismal gap with tales of Melville’s insanity. That there is a spark
of fact beneath this suffocating cloud of conjecture, I am prepared
to show: but the spark was magnified into a bonfire by Melville’s own
contemporaries, absurdly, maliciously enlarged; and later critics have
even been obtuse enough to read back into Mardi the signs of Melville’s
mental disruption. As a matter of fact, Melville’s silence was a very
audible one; and what is usually looked upon as the dark period of his
intellectual quietus is in fact the bleak period of his contemporaries’
neglect. One cannot call silence the reduced but steady output of short
stories, novels, poems, which marked the next forty years of Melville’s
life.

Let us separate the romantic overlay of rumour from the actual facts,
and see what is left of the silence and the mystery. The first tangible
bit of testimony as to Herman Melville’s condition in the year that
followed the publication of Pierre is a note that Elizabeth Melville
left in her annotation of his papers: “We all felt anxious about the
strain on his health in the spring of 1853.” By now the direct cause of
this strain should be fairly plain: Melville had exhausted himself in
writing Moby-Dick, and without waiting to recuperate, he had embarked
upon another long work: the effort of writing two such books in two
successive years was a terrific one. In Pierre, Melville has left
more than one picture of his condition. Pierre, writing of his own
hero-author, Vivia, says: “Cast the eye in there on Vivia; tell me
why those four limbs should be clapt in a dismal jail,--day out, day
in--week out, week in--month out, month in--and himself a voluntary
jailer! Is this the end of philosophy? This the larger and spiritual
life? This your boasted empyrean? Is it for this man should grow wise,
and leave off his most excellent and calumniated folly?”

When one pushes the organism so hard, all its latent weaknesses tend
to come out. Presently, the long and terrible exposure he had suffered
rounding the Horn on his return from the South Seas, came back to
exact its physical penalty. As early as 1849, Melville alluded to that
experience and its aftermath; and in 1855 he suffered a severe attack
of rheumatism, and in June an attack of sciatica. Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes attended him, and it is a pity that he did not leave a record
of the case: one could have spared a few autocratic conversations for
this precious evidence. These attacks continued to undermine Melville:
in 1858, he was laid up with a severe attack of “crick in the back” at
his mother’s home in Gansevoort. It is difficult, of course, to draw a
line between the physical and the psychical aspects of an organism; but
the tangible evidence of a drain on Melville’s strength is sufficient
to justify us in calling these disabilities primarily physical ones.
His perfect health deserted him. He was to know pain, confinement,
lassitude; and instead of tanned cheeks and hard muscles, pallor and
debility.

In any appraisal of his condition and his fate, this new element of
physical weakness must play a part; for Melville, like Whitman, wrote
out of his health, and just as the paralysis of Whitman, after the
Civil War, resulted in the diminishment of his writing, and a certain
curtailment of his creative effort, without any sign of mental decay,
so Melville was deprived of his immense physical buoyancy and power.
That power had counted for much in his own work. “Real strength,” he
wrote in Moby-Dick, “never impairs beauty or harmony, but often bestows
it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do
with magic.... As devout Eckermann lifted the linen sheet away from the
naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed by the massive chest of the
man, that seemed a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God
the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever
they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled,
hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most
successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute are they of all
brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative feminine
ones of submission and endurance....” Melville did not easily submit
and endure; but without health he was a shorn giant. His shortened
breath would not sustain the long periods of Moby-Dick, nor would his
frame suffer that “downright infatuation, and no less [which is] both
unavoidable and indispensable in any great deep book, or even any
wholly unsuccessful attempt at a great deep book.”

Such an explanation is sound as far as it goes; but one must not
ignore the psychological accompaniments of this debility, or all the
spiritual obstacles that burked Melville and made him doubly anxious,
strained, desperate. Chief among the external obstacles was the chorus
of disapproval that had greeted Moby-Dick and grew louder and more
universal with Pierre. One London paper denounced it as an “unhealthy,
mystic romance,” the Literary World called it “an eccentricity of the
imagination,” and Fitz-James O’Brien, writing in Putnam’s Monthly in
February, 1853, fresh from a bout with Pierre, described it in the
following terms: “Thought staggers through each page like one poisoned.
Language is drunken and reeling.... Let Mr. Melville stay his step
in time. He totters on the edge of a precipice, over which all his
hard-earned fame may tumble with such another weight as Pierre attached
to it.”

The worst of it was that the critics were not altogether wrong in their
judgment of Pierre alone: what was at fault was their failure to see
that the author of Moby-Dick could not be scolded like a child who had
mixed up his declensions: he was entitled to the critic’s most patient,
sympathetic understanding. To pretend that such a mistake might forfeit
Melville’s whole claim to recognition showed that neither O’Brien nor
any one else at the time realized what a strong claim Melville had, or
what a profound mark he had made on the literature of the world. I have
looked in vain through the collected works and biographies of Emerson,
Whitman, Thoreau, Lowell, Holmes, and even Conway and Sanborn, to see
if these writers recognized a fellow in Melville, as Emerson had so
generously done with Whitman: but except for a brief note on Omoo by
Whitman, written in his Brooklyn Eagle days, and a comment in a chance
letter by Lowell--exaggerated praise followed by complete indifference
to Melville’s worth--there is no sign that the contemporaries he might
have respected even knew of his existence.

Melville stood alone, alone in a desert. “Who shall tell all the
thoughts and feelings of Pierre in that desolate and shivering room,
when at last the idea obtruded, that the wiser and profounder he
should grow, the more and more he lessened his chances for bread;
that could he now hurl his deep book out of the window, and fall on
some shallow nothing of a novel, composable in a month at longest,
then could he reasonably hope for appreciation and cash. But the
devouring profundities now opened upon him, consuming all his vigor;
would he, he could not now be entertainingly and profitably shallow
in some pellucid and merry romance.” This conviction, borne in on
him perhaps while writing Moby-Dick, now haunted him when Pierre met
its disastrous reception. “The brightest success,” he says again in
Pierre, “now seemed intolerable to him, since he so plainly saw, that
the brightest success could not be the sole offspring of Merit, but of
Merit for the one-thousandth part, and nine-hundred and ninety-nine
combining and dovetailing accidents for the rest.... So beforehand he
felt the unrevealable sting of receiving either plaudits or censures,
equally unsought for, and equally loathed ere given. So, beforehand,
he felt the pyramidical scorn of the genuine loftiness for the whole
infinitesimal company of critics.... In that lonely little closet of
his, Pierre foretasted all that this world hath either of praise or
dispraise; and thus foretasting both goblets, anticipatingly hurled
them both in its teeth. All panegyric, all denunciation, all criticism
of any sort would come too late for Pierre.”

Needless to say, Melville’s pyramidical scorn did not disarm the
critics, nor did it, one suspects, counteract the effect of the
salt that they poured, with such fine antiseptic intentions, into
his wounds. He was greeted with the embarrassed shamefulness which
sometimes appears upon the faces of sophisticated people when a fresh
young girl confesses impulses or desires that her elders are forever
discreetly hiding. Melville had revealed too much. His contemporaries,
with a feeling of guilty repression, denied that any one had the right
to take off his clothes, and they equally denied that such harassed,
crippled souls could be found beneath the shapely costumes provided
by society. Nervous, these respectable people will be on the watch
for any similar performance; more than that, they will read back into
Melville’s earlier books the same dangerous, unhealthy innocence and
exposure.

One and all, the critics agreed with an English writer whose diatribe
on the American psychological writers was reprinted, somewhat
pointedly, in the Literary World for August 28, 1852. “It is a
melancholy sign for the prospects of a rising American literature
that some of its most hopeful professors should have, in recent works
of fiction, been evidently laying themselves out for that species of
subtle psychological romance, first introduced to the reading world
by such authors as Balzac and Sand.... To pass from Scott and Dickens
to Sand and Balzac is like giving up the smiling landscape glowing in
its freshness and beauty, for the loathly atmosphere, the wretched
sights and smells of a dissecting room, or abandoning the busy street
or the pleasant social circle for charnels and catacombs. And yet
this is what Young America seems bent upon. Instead of sketching the
really representative men of their country--instead of conveying to us
on this side of the Atlantic a true idea of American society--society
in the great seaboard city or in the far west settlement--instead of
presenting us with stories racy of the soil and instinct with its
vigorous and aggressive theories, the misguided party in question
selects some half dozen morbid phases of mind, brings before us some
three or four intellectual cripples or moral monsters ... and instead
of laying before us a wholesome story of natural character and motive,
he lets us into the secret turns and tidings of unhealthy and abnormal
mental power and promptings.”

No one saw even dimly then that these psychological novels and short
stories, William Wilson, The House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet
Letter, Pierre, were signs of the broken American psyche, alienated by
its removal from the solid tissue of Europe, and seeking, by further
analysis, to establish a more primitive and elementary state, from
which a new integration, more satisfactory and complete, could emerge.
These relentless psychologists were far more deeply immersed in the
American scene than any of the writers who succeeded them in the next
generation, however closely Bret Harte and Howells and Mark Twain met
the English prescription for natural character and robust health.
If anything could have infuriated Melville, it must have been the
suggestion that he could write in another fashion than he had done: “In
tremendous extremes,” he said in Pierre, “human souls are like drowning
men: well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know
the causes of that peril; nevertheless, the sea is the sea and these
drowning men do drown.”

Baffled by his dilemmas, rebuffed by his contemporaries, harassed
by financial anxiety, curbed by ill health, kept from the solace of
reading by poor eyesight, made doubly desperate by the cold mysteries
he had explored--what was there to sustain Herman Melville and bring
him back to health? The divided tenderness of a wife who was still
bearing children, or the obtuse concern of a mother, a sister, or
brother--so far from relieving him, these things only quickened his
exasperation and his sense of helplessness.

When harassed by external circumstances, one wants to attack the
universe: but, like Ahab, one finds that the universe will not get in
one’s way: so one takes revenge on the first creature that crosses
one’s path. Too likely it will be a creature one holds dear: the
animus is not directed against that one, but it strikes as if it were.
An explosion: a blow: a raised hand: an uncontrollable outburst of
vituperation--then drink, remorse, repentance, the ugly vanity of it
all. The universe is unharmed; one’s own condition is unimproved: there
is just one more blight to stand in the way of amelioration. Whatever
the outward events that mark Melville’s passage through these frantic
waters, there is no doubt of his inward state. In a word he himself
coined for Pierre, he became Timonized. In that awful solitude within,
the very touch of his fellow creatures became defilement. “He could
not bring himself to confront any face or house; a plowed field, any
sign of tillage, the rotted stump of a long-felled pine, the slightest
passing trace of man was uncongenial and repelling to him. Likewise,
in his own mind all remembrances and imaginings, that had to do with
the common and general humanity had become, for the first time, in the
most singular manner distasteful to him. Still, while thus loathing
all that was common in the two different worlds--that without and that
within--nevertheless, even in the most withdrawn and subtlest region
of his own essential spirit, Pierre could not now find one single
agreeable twig of thought whereon to perch his weary soul.”

There was Melville’s own state, I believe, during and after the
writing of Pierre, in its uttermost anguish and desolation. His
family became apprehensive: his friends dropped away from him, first
Hawthorne, then the Duyckincks: and in his sensitive condition, small
indifferences became signs of enmity, heartlessness, and alienation.
In doubling this inner Cape Horn, Herman Melville may have skirted
the jagged rocks of an even deeper disruption: there were moments,
perhaps days and months, between 1852 and 1858 when the outcome of his
physical and mental condition may well have been in doubt. But with
utmost allowance for the horror and collapse of his illness, it was
of limited duration, and it could not have been a continuous state,
since, throughout this period, he continued to write, to write with
clarity, with distinction, and without a visible touch of disorder.
Not the least of his literary achievements date from these years of
debilitation and infirmity.

The word insanity is far too loose to be used about Melville’s mental
illness, even during the limited period we are considering. At the very
end of his life, Melville wrote a passage about insanity in his novel,
Billy Budd, which puts the biographer’s difficulty in touching this
period with great point. “Who,” he asks, “in the rainbow can draw the
line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly,
we see the difference of the colours, but where exactly does the first
one visibly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In
pronounced cases there is no question about them. But in some cases,
in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the line of
demarcation few will undertake, though for a fee some professional
experts will. There is nothing nameable but that some man will
undertake to do for pay. In other words, there are instances where it
is next to impossible to determine whether a man is sane, or beginning
to be otherwise.”

Melville realized from his own experience, perhaps, what few people
understood until Janet and Freud re-interpreted this whole series of
disorders, that the line between sanity and insanity is not a line at
all but a wide gradient band. Indeed, as early as 1849, in a letter to
Mr. Duyckinck written apropos the insanity of Charles Fenno Hoffman,
the first editor of The Literary World, Melville had said: “This going
mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who
feels his soul in him, which but few men do. For in all of us lodges
the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt,
momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains. What sort
of sensation permanent madness is may be very well imagined just as we
imagine how we felt when we were infants, though we cannot recall it.
In both conditions we are irresponsible and riot like gods without fear
of fate.”

The relationship between insanity and art has been the subject of
much discussion; and it is important, in appraising Melville’s life
and work during this period, that we should avoid the notion that
genius and insanity are one, or that the fantasies of the neurotic
are the equivalent of a work of art. The difference between insanity
and what we agree to call normal conduct is largely one of social
utilization: given a similar set of circumstances and stimuli, the
distinction between a neurotic reaction and a normal one consists
largely in the success a person has in conversion. Had Napoleon, for
example, merely dreamt about his conquests, magnifying them year by
year as his malady grew, he would have been quite properly confined
to an asylum, like so many other “emperors of the world,” as soon as
his patent conduct conflicted with other people’s activities. The fact
that his particular kind of paranoia was permitted at large was due to
his ability to convert it into the forms of contemporary social life,
politics and military activity, things which subjected his grandiose
dreams to the shock and jar of actuality. This conversion into art
signifies health and relative stability, whether the situation that
causes the conversion is morbid or not. Indeed, an effectual work
of art is not merely a counterpoise to psychal difficulties: it is
actually an indication that the artist, during the period of his
creation, has had full possession of himself. Insanity in many cases
befalls those who cannot make this transposition to art, and who,
through inexpertness or inarticulateness, produce therefore unusable
fantasies--fantasies that do not meet the impact of reality. There is
no mistaking the fantasy of the insane for the fantasy of the artist:
issuing from the same headwaters, perhaps, they empty into different
oceans. Had Melville remained mute during this period or had his work
fallen off we might suspect the worst: his superb craftsmanship, in
Bartleby, in The Encantadas, and in Benito Cereno, is, on the contrary,
an objective proof--and a reassuring one. The critics and historians
of literature who said that his work became “wilder and wilder and
more and more turgid in each successive book” after Moby-Dick were
either ignorant of his later work, or blind. Wildness and turgidity
are the precise opposite of the qualities one finds in these stories
and sketches, stories told with delicacy, with restraint, and with
great concentration. With the rumour of his insanity in mind, these
sympathetic scholars were quick to condemn Melville’s work. We may
confidently reverse their logic. With the achieved beauty of Melville’s
work before us, we can isolate and reduce the period of his mental
exacerbation.

Melville’s own blackness and spiritual desolation, his Timonism,
recalls that of Shakespeare himself, from whose play he had taken
the word. Their vision of life went through similar stages, and even
in their personal affairs some of the same anomalies arise, down to
the silent contempt with which Shakespeare apparently dismissed the
products of his imagination, not bothering to see that they reached
the world at all, still less that they did so in the exact form he
had conceived them. In both men, the feeling of a shattered faith and
despondency is expressed in the relationship of a young man, Hamlet
or Pierre, to a proud and worldly mother; in Pierre and Hamlet, an
unconscious incest-wish incapacitates the hero for marriage with the
girl he has wooed; and the final result is doubt and deepest anguish,
culminating in the death of all involved. Alienated from society, a
furious contempt for mankind arises in these writers: Shakespeare
carries this contempt into Lear and Timon of Athens, even as Melville
did into The Confidence Man: the contempt is mixed with impotence and
self-distrust, and the art itself is marred by an uncontrollable sense
of outrage: “In Timon,” as Dowden justly says, “we see one way in which
a man may make his response to the injuries of life; he may turn upon
the world in a fruitless and suicidal rage.” Finally, when each could
go no further without outward violence, he recoiled upon himself,
and each in a final work expressed a reconciliation, Shakespeare in
The Tempest, separating the base, in the form of Caliban, from the
spiritual, in the form of Ariel, under the double mastery of a science
and virtue embodied in Prospero--a resolution which, we shall come to
see, is not singularly different in meaning from Melville’s final work.

What caused this blackness in Shakespeare’s life, what brought him to
the crisis recorded in Timon, surely the worst of his plays, we can
only speculate upon: but in Melville’s life we are aware of tangible
reasons for his frustration, with roots that reach far back into
childhood, his disappointed youth, the hardships of early poverty and
defeated expectations, his unfortunate experiences on his first sailing
voyage, his perpetual feeling of being an Ishmael, through poverty
among the gentlefolk at Albany, through intellectual superiority among
his shipmates, through spiritual hardihood among his contemporaries
in letters, through social isolation in his own neighbourhood, where
people looked upon him as cousin german to the cannibals. Melville
had witnessed this same Timonism in Jackson, and his words remind us
that “there seemed more woe than wickedness about the man; and his
wickedness seemed to spring from his woe; and for all his hideousness,
there was that in his eye at times, that was ineffably pitiable and
touching; and though there were raw moments when I almost hated this
Jackson, yet I have pitied no man as I have pitied him.” Jackson would
enter into arguments to prove that there was nothing to be believed,
nothing to be loved, and nothing worth living for--and during the
period of his own Timonism, out of his abysmal woe, Melville felt and
wrote, at intervals, particularly in Pierre and in The Confidence Man,
the same way.

Of Melville’s blackness there is no doubt. That this blackness would
ordinarily have led to downright insanity there is little room for
doubt either. But, like Shakespeare and Goethe and many another artist,
Melville found a benign and not a baneful outlet for his energies; and
every evidence of Melville’s work points to the restoration of his
poise and health, intermittently, in the decade we are writing of, and
steadily in the years that followed.

Returning to 1853, the year that followed Pierre, we find Melville in
the midst of a series of disappointments: he was to learn the truth of
Hamlet’s observation: misfortunes come not singly but in battalions.
Melville sought for a consular appointment in the South Seas, a place
where he was fitted by experience and sympathy to perform a decent
service, and perhaps, with relief from financial strain, recover
a little that joy in the flesh which he had once known, and find
again in his bosom the radiance of the landscape itself. Melville
had no opportunity to try this remedy. In spite of Richard H. Dana’s
intercession, Chief Justice Shaw’s efforts, and Allan’s assiduous
canvassing, and Hawthorne’s friendly intercession, he did not get the
post, nor did he get a consulship at Antwerp, which for a moment seemed
possible. To make matters worse, Harper’s, his publishers, lost the
plates of his novels and almost all the copies of his books in a fire
that gutted out their quarters. If there was something prophetic in the
foundering of the whaler Ann Alexander, and the total disappearance
of the old Pequod itself, as Melville was finishing Moby-Dick, there
was something equally uncanny in this conflagration. The very elements
played against him, as they played against Ahab. His books were put
out again by Harper’s, but perfunctorily: they had lost their original
momentum. None of Melville’s subsequent books was to meet such eager
acceptance.

Another sign of Melville’s weakened health and lessened energies is
the fact that during 1853 his entire writing seems to have consisted
only of two short stories, Cock-a-Doodle-Do and Bartleby the Scrivener,
both published in magazines towards the end of the year. Melville was
not at home in the narrow confines of the short story: he had scarcely
time to get under way before he was back again in port. The result is
that the best of his short stories are really short novels, while the
lesser ones, like The Lightning Rod Man, are little more than mediocre
anecdotes. I and My Chimney, The Appletree Table, The Paradise of
Bachelors, The Tartarus of Maids, are more in the nature of discursive
essays, “in character,” than they are of tales: Melville was at his
weakest in deliberately symbolic tales, like Cock-a-Doodle-Do and The
Bell-Tower; indeed, the latter might be slipped into one of Hawthorne’s
volumes, without apology, as a minor work of his youth. When in 1852
Melville equably handed to Hawthorne the circumstances of a story he
had gathered from a lawyer in New Bedford, he was so conscious of
treading on the master’s ground that he relinquished his own right to
exploit this particular plot. But except for the original impulse, his
best stories owe nothing to Hawthorne: Melville’s symbolism is more
delicately and carefully concealed; and his moral, like Shakespeare’s,
rests in the demonstration, not in the conclusion.

Bartleby the Scrivener is one of Melville’s longer stories; and it
gains much by its juxtaposition of incongruous personalities. The
story is told by a comfortable, pursy old lawyer, with an office in
Wall Street; the lawyer and his copyists are hit off with a warm
sense of caricature. Into this office comes a pale, bleak creature,
Bartleby, to serve as a scrivener. He is quiet and industrious; but he
refuses to comply with the routine of the office: he will not compare
copy, even for the lawyer himself; and yet there is something in this
passive self-assertion and this methodical self-obliteration which
makes the lawyer humour Bartleby. With these qualities goes a mystery;
and by accident, on a Sunday at church-time, the lawyer discovers, on
attempting to enter his office, that Bartleby not only works for him
but has quietly occupied his business premises, to eat and sleep there.
In spite of this gross irregularity, the lawyer keeps Bartleby, only
to have the little man quit work entirely. When the lawyer demands a
reason, he answers: I would prefer not to. When the lawyer asks him to
move out, he answers: I would prefer not to. There is no getting behind
his silence, his dead-wall reveries, his blank self-possession.

The effect of this passive resistance upon the lawyer is upsetting.
“My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest
pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and
grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy verge into fear,
that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible, too, that
up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our
best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it
does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is due to
the inherent selfishness of the human heart: it rather proceeds from
a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To
a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is
perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succour, common sense
bids the soul be rid of it. What I saw that morning convinced me that
the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might
give alms to the body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul
that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.”

The lawyer moves and Bartleby remains on the original premises; but
the new tenant is not so patient and he has Bartleby arrested. When
Bartleby finds himself in prison, he prefers not to eat. A kind fellow,
the lawyer visits him, seeking to restore his confidence and reawaken
his manhood. “Nothing reproachful attaches to you being here,” he
assures Bartleby. “And see, it is not so sad a place as one might
think. Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass.” “I know where I
am,” he replied.

Bartleby is a good story in itself: it also affords us a glimpse of
Melville’s own drift of mind in this miserable year: the point of
the story plainly indicates Melville’s present dilemma. People would
admit him to their circle and give him bread and employment only if
he would abandon his inner purpose: to this his answer was--I would
prefer not to. By his persistence in minding his own spiritual affairs,
those who might have helped him on their own terms, like Allan or his
father-in-law or his Uncle Peter, inevitably became a little impatient;
for in the end, they foresaw they would be obliged to throw him off,
and he would find himself in prison, not in the visible prison for
restraining criminals, but in the pervasive prison of dull routine and
meaningless activity. When that happened there would be no use assuring
him that he lived in a kindly world of blue sky and green grass. “I
know where I am!” Whether or not Melville consciously projected his own
intuition of his fate, there is no doubt in my mind that, as early as
1853, he was already formulating his answer. To those kind, pragmatic
friends and relatives who suggested that he go into business and make a
good living, or at least write the sort of books that the public would
read--it amounts to pretty much the same thing--he kept on giving one
stereotyped and monotonous answer: I would prefer not to. The dead-wall
reverie would end in a resolution as blank and forbidding as the wall
that faced him: a bleak face, a tight wounded mouth, the little blue
eyes more dim, remote, and obstinate than ever: I would prefer not to!

During the next year, Melville settled down to a steadier round of
work, and one of the best of his narratives, a series of sketches
called The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, was published during
1854 under the pseudonym Salvator R. Tarnmoor. Three other sketches
followed; and finally, in July, 1854, he began to publish serially the
story of Israel Potter, the Revolutionary beggar, for which he had
gathered material in London five years before.

In The Encantadas Melville went back again to the ground he had
ploughed so well before. He had gone ashore on the Enchanted Isles, the
Galapagos, during the early part of his whaling voyage, and now, in his
own sable mood--a mood reflected in the very choice of his pseudonym,
Tarnmoor--the landscape of these islands corresponded to his inner
state; and his description of the scene is as fine as anything in his
earlier pages; if anything, there is more studious mastery. The final
sketch, the story of Hunilla, who had been left in solitude on one
of these islands, when her brother and her husband died, is poignant
and terrible, all the more so because of the dark bestiality of the
visiting crew, that Melville hints at, and then forgoes telling about,
so moved is he by its inhumanity.

“One knows not,” Melville reflects here, “whether nature doth not
impose some secrecy upon him who has been privy to certain things.
At least, it is to be doubted whether it is good to blazon such. If
some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then,
with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men. Those whom books will
hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be
forbid; but in all things man sows upon the wind, which bloweth where
it listeth; for ill or good men cannot know. Often ill comes from good,
as good from the ill.” He has returned to the ultimate moral of Pierre;
and it holds good of the tales of the Enchanted Isles: out of its
stark ugliness, he breathed beauty. With just as abhorrent an insight
into the cruelties of life as he had in Pierre, Melville here had a
firmer hand on himself: he ruefully confesses that “in nature, as in
law, it may be libellous to speak some truths.” Within the dark rim of
the horizon, the words move, like swift white sails on grey waters. The
style is again accurate, pliant, subtle, bold; but it is never hectic
nor forced, nor does it smell from the mothballs of old costume chests.
There is not the faintest sign that his literary powers were falling
off, or his voice sinking to a whisper.

Israel Potter was a full-length novel, based upon a little memoir
of his life, printed for the sake of gathering up a few pennies, in
Providence in 1827. The fact that Melville could attempt a long work
again is a sign of somewhat restored health, and though the book ranks
far below Melville’s best work, it differs from Redburn chiefly in
that while based upon a document, it relies even more heavily upon
Melville’s own powers of invention. All the good things in Israel
Potter come from Melville, not from Potter: the original story provided
only the skeleton of events: Melville gives them a setting and a full
cast of characters.

Israel Potter is a country bumpkin who is kept by his parents from
marrying the girl he loves, goes on a surveying expedition into Vermont
and is defrauded of his earnings, ships to sea, returns to the farm,
fights gallantly at Bunker Hill, enlists in an American man-of-war,
and is captured by the British and taken to England. Escaping from
his guards, Israel flees into the countryside, making his way across
England by devious passages, until he finally comes upon a kindly
English baronet near Brentford, who gives him a job on his country
estate. Rumours that he is a spy dog him, so he is compelled to change
his situation and finally he achieves safety at Kew, as one of the
king’s gardeners. When work slacks off, Israel is again thrown on
his resources, and, while hiding, he makes the acquaintance of some
secret friends of America, among them, Horne Tooke, the grammarian.
These friends equip him and send him on a secret mission to Dr.
Franklin in Paris, where he meets Paul Jones; and eventually Israel,
by another lucky chance, comes to serve on a privateer with Jones,
and to participate in the fight between the Serapis and the Bonhomme
Richard. The upshot of these vagrant ups and downs is a long period
of toil in a London brickworks, followed by marriage and residence in
London. Finally, in his old age, with his English wife dead, Israel
returns with his son to his native land, only to find the landmarks of
his youth gone, and a pension as a Revolutionary soldier denied him. In
this state, the original Israel wrote his book; and at this point of
weariness, disillusion, exhaustion, Melville left him.

Israel Potter has suffered, like all Melville’s later books, from
the apathy of criticism, quite as much as from its own weaknesses.
Mr. Percy Boynton says of Israel Potter that “it was a perfunctory
work, not as interesting as the book it was based on,” and while one
hesitates to differ with such an able critic, a close comparison of the
book seems to me to prove exactly the opposite. Not merely does Israel
Potter contain, as Mr. F. J. Mather, Jr., has remarked, one of the best
accounts of a sea-fight in history; not merely is its portrait of John
Paul Jones a far more illuminating study of that great shark of the
seas than Cooper’s picture in The Pilot; but it is one of the few works
of American fiction that deal with patriotic episodes in a generous,
straightforward way. Melville took a crude, bald narrative and poured
life into it: he took a smudgy woodcut and made a living picture out
of it, building up the background, creating incident and character
where none had existed before, projecting every figure into the third
dimension. The account of John Paul Jones occupies a single paragraph
in the original: in Melville’s novel, Jones is the largest figure in
the book, and nearly runs away with the story. It is the same with
Franklin. He is a colourless figure in the original: Melville, with
gentle mocking penetration, puts before us the man in full length, with
sly characterizations of his paunch and his purse and his methodical
parsimony. Melville does so well with these characters that one wishes
he had created a whole historical portrait gallery. If any one fancies
that Melville’s characters are merely romantic projections of his
actual self, here is a clear answer.

Melville’s imaginative life, it is true, flowered only when there was
some soil in his own life that nourished it, and when that soil was
lacking he found himself forced, again like his Elizabethan exemplar,
to pick up the action and the fable in another work. As a writer, he
was deprived of the fruitful contacts and adventures he had enjoyed
as a common sailor: the inner life grew, but the outer life dwindled
and thinned out; and so he was thrown, when he had exhausted his
original adventures, upon second-hand experience. This drying up of
his sources was a great handicap to him; for while books helped to
form and crystallize experience, they were not substitutes for it. He
transformed the bald story of Israel Potter: but, had he wholly made it
his own, the central character would have been John Paul Jones, and in
so far as he was dependent upon the original he was weak. Israel Potter
is many removes from Melville at his best; but it would be absurd to
throw it out of the Melville canon. It has some of the fine qualities
of his art, the mixture of tradition and fresh experience, the
purification and heightening of actuality, with a loss of realism and
a gain in reality: what it chiefly lacks is centrality. It is Melville
_manqué_--but still Melville. His poorest work was many degrees above
mediocrity.

In 1856, Melville gathered together some of the short stories he had
written during the previous three years, and published them as The
Piazza Tales. The sketch that gives the volume its title offers us a
further glimpse of Melville’s life at Arrowhead.

One pictures him seated on that piazza on an August morning, with
the meadow in front of him a little sear from the new-cropped hay, a
haze lying over the valley of the Housatonic, and the light lavender
hills billowing into Greylock’s double ridge against the horizon. The
landscape brings a feeling of outward serenity, unbroken by the faint
happy screams of the children playing in the hayloft, or the muted
hum of his wife or his sisters in the kitchen, preparing the scant
and largely vegetarian meal. What a contrast with the frayed knotty
feeling within! Such warm and deeply balmy days should bring peace:
but no day, however balmy, can annul the anxiety and weariness of the
last five years, the incessant round of writing, and, further plaguing
him, instead of giving relief, the equally endless round of the farm,
wood to be chopped and sawed, hay to be mowed and gathered, cows and
horses to be fed, vegetables to be planted and hoed, cabbage-worms
to be fought ... oh! for a little coconut and poee-poee! Emerson had
discovered that he could not tend his garden and his mind at the same
time; and Melville, though at first robust, doubtless found that two
careers were a little too much for a single man, exhausted, half spent.
In a pinch, Melville could of course apply to Elizabeth’s father or
to Allan for aid; and he did: but he could not continually write out
unredeemable notes for their benefit; that was all right in a matter
like the mortgage, where there was security; but as a source of daily
income, it was little better than outright beggary.

Melville’s eyes would sweep over the valley to the hills beyond. There,
ah! there perhaps lay happiness! What charming fairy might be living
without relatives and grocers and publishers and promissory notes to
harry her, in that little cottage on the mountainside before him? Some
day he must find the road to that delectable retreat.... He found
it, and to his sorrow and disillusion, instead of an idyllic bower,
it was a weather-beaten old place, inhabited by a tired and troubled
girl, who dreams of the happiness that lies in a marble palace in the
distance below--Melville’s own white house. No fairy maiden she: no
fairy prince he: but a sad girl and a tired, dutiful husband, straining
night and day for the few pennies that will shoe his children’s feet,
replace their tattered home-made clothes, and put bread and milk on the
table. These five years, years that have enclosed his highest powers,
his consummate manhood, have not left Melville with an eager taste for
another fifty of the same pattern. Inevitably, he sought escape; and in
his mind, escape meant the sea. Almost any slight change in atmosphere
can bring the ocean back to him: the ocean, where physical sustenance,
hard-tack and salt rhinoceros, was provided for one, where the hours
were long and peaceful, and amid storm and rigour and dangerous
courses, there brooded, within, a deep and unbreakable calm.

With a wry smile, Melville exchanges the topmast of reverie for the
piazza; but tranquillity does not follow. His very pen lives only when
it touches the sea; and when he gathers together these Piazza Tales,
he does not bother to include most of his land-stories. He is wise:
none of them has a tithe of the interest that Benito Cereno possesses.
That story marked the culmination of Melville’s power as a short-story
writer, as Moby-Dick marked his triumph as an epic poet.

In Benito Cereno, published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1855,
Melville was again at home. It is such a tale as one might hear, with
good luck, during a gam in the South Seas or at a bar in Callao; and
Melville himself took it boldly from a book of voyages by Captain Amasa
Delano, published in 1816.

A black, ill-kempt ship, commanded by a young Spanish captain and
manned by negroes, is in distress, and calls upon Captain Amasa
Delano, a bluff, frank American skipper, for aid. Delano, coming
aboard with provisions and water, finds the captain almost down with
a fever, and by turns confidential and queerly reserved. The Spaniard
is attended by a black slave who almost smothers him with watchful
endearments; and he has the air of perpetually manoeuvring, in a way
that would seem sinister were his plight not so manifestly pathetic.
Delano is a little troubled at heart, but he is free from intellectual
suspicions. There is something wrong on the Spaniard’s ship; but it
is hard for Delano to put his hand on it. Don Benito is in command:
but he seems helpless, and he tolerates ugly disorder even among the
black boys. Promising further aid, Delano finally leaves the vessel and
is about to pull for his own ship, still powerfully disturbed by the
Spanish captain’s pain, trouble, fever, churlishness, courtesy--does it
mean some treachery? With a wild leap, the Spaniard throws himself in
Delano’s boat, followed by his faithful black, dagger in hand; and the
black aims his dagger, not at the Americans, but at his Spanish master.
When the American crew finally pulls to safety a harrowing story comes
out.

I will not spoil Benito Cereno for those who have not read it by
revealing its mystery; it is enough to point out that the interplay
of character, the cross-motives, the suspense, the central mystery,
are all admirably done: in contrast to some of Melville’s more prosy
sketches, there is not a feeble touch in the whole narrative. The
following passage, which sets the key of the whole story, reveals
Melville’s undiminished ability as an artist:

“Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though
undulated into long roads of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at
the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter’s
mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl,
kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they
were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows
over meadows before storms.” As in The Encantadas, the writing itself
was distinguished: it had a special office of its own to perform,
and did not, as in Typee and Redburn, serve merely as carriage for
the story. One can mark Melville’s literary powers in the complete
transformation of Delano’s patent story: he adds a score of details to
heighten the mystery and deepen the sinister aspect of the scene; and
by sheer virtuosity he transfers the reader’s sympathies to the Spanish
captain, who in the original story is far more cruel, barbarous, and
unprincipled than the forces he contends against. In order to effect
this change, Melville deliberately omits the last half of the story, in
which the Spanish captain ignobly turns upon his benefactor and seeks
to deprive him of the rights of salvage. The moral of the original tale
is that ingratitude, stirred by cupidity, may follow the most generous
act, and that American captains had better beware of befriending too
whole-heartedly a foreign vessel. In Benito Cereno the point is that
noble conduct and good will, like that Don Benito felt when his whole
inner impulse was to save Delano and his crew, may seem sheer guile;
and, further, that there is an inscrutable evil that makes the passage
of fine souls through the world an endless Calvary. “Even the best
men err, in judging the conduct of one with the recesses of whose
condition he is not acquainted.” The world is mortified for Don Benito
by the remembrance of the human treachery he has encountered: no later
benefaction, no radiance of sun and sky, can make him forget it.

Man should offset the malice and evil circumstance one finds in the
constitution of the universe: instead, he aggravates it. One does
not need to heighten the parallels between Benito Cereno’s fate and
Melville’s own life to catch the semblance to his own dilemma and his
own bowed and wounded spirit. “Never,” says one of the characters
in his next book, “has it been my lot to have been wronged, though
but in the smallest degree. Cheating, backbiting, superciliousness,
disdain, hard-heartedness, and all that brood, I know but by report.
Cold regards tossed over the sinister shoulder of a former friend,
ingratitude in a beneficiary, treachery in a confidant--such things
may be; but I must take somebody’s word for it.” The irony of that
declaration is obvious: Melville had met these things, and, like a
splinter of steel in the eye, they tormented him and during these
harassed years the memory of them, the anticipation of them, the
helpless attempt to guard against them or remove them, directed his
whole life towards this single point of exacerbation. The mighty whale
aroused Melville’s utmost powers: there was that in man that steaded
him manfully for such an encounter: but, like Timon, the spectacle
of fair-weather friends and worldly sycophants, turning away from
him during his moment of greatest need, unmanned him completely.
Moby-Dick might slay one: but the torments of black flies and gnats
made life ignoble without bringing death any nearer. Melville did not
need to exaggerate these wrongs. It was their very smallness, their
unassailableness, that made him desperate.

The Confidence Man was written in 1856, and published in the
following spring, while Melville was abroad. It is by all odds the
most difficult book that confronts Melville’s biographer; for it is
possibly a palimpsest, and beneath its obvious legend, one may read
indirect revelations of Melville’s own life. With Melville’s actual
life and predicament in mind, there are passages in The Confidence
Man one cannot read without misgiving: the story of Charlemont, The
Gentleman Madman, for one, and the story of the Man in Weeds, wedded
to a fiendish woman, Goneril, who covers up her own lecherousness by
attributing insanity to her husband. Likewise somewhat mysterious
is the story of the Indian-hater, who had been injured in youth by
Indians, and never lost a chance to exterminate one. It is hard to
fit these incidents into the logic of the plot: and their existence
becomes plausible only if one believes Melville’s own torments and
suspicions had, for a brief while, taken on a pathological character.

No one who approached The Confidence Man without preoccupation or
bias would, I think, impute such personal and neurotic motives to
the passages in question; but once the seed of suspicion is sowed,
as the misanthropic one-legged man demonstrates in an early chapter,
it spreads like the Canada thistle, and is almost as hard to root
out. The words suspicion and confidence, that recur in these pages,
increase one’s suspicions and weaken one’s confidence; in fact,
there is no end to the pathological allusions one may discover,
if one begins with the unfavourable hypothesis. Failing positive
independent evidence, it would be foolish to build up a card-house of
conjecture: enough to say that if Pierre partly reveals the causes
of Melville condition, it is in The Confidence Man, if anywhere,
that the psychologist will discover, probably, its immediate outward
manifestations. The problem, though tantalizing, is not of paramount
importance; for there is plenty of independent evidence to show that by
1858 Melville had regained possession of himself, and that his further
life, though full of hardship and difficulty, had nothing in it that
placed him outside the pale of family life and friendship and decent
social intercourse--although it may have been dogged by memories and
revulsions from an earlier period, and by the continuation of evil
suspicions in the minds of those to whom the normal abstentions and
irritations that attend productive literary effort would themselves be
an evidence of eccentricity, or something worse.

In The Confidence Man Melville went back to the vein of satire he had
opened in Mardi. He was shrewd enough, however, to curb the outward
extravagance and the aesthetic vagaries of Mardi: the scene is a
Mississippi steamboat, the characters are the motley company one
might find on such a craft, and the story itself, so far from being
incoherent, remains almost monotonously within the frame that Melville
set for it in the first chapter.

At St. Louis a deaf-mute in a cream-coloured suit, with flaxen hair and
a white fur hat, steps aboard the steamboat Fidele. He circulates among
the crowd with a slate on which he writes: Charity thinketh no evil:
suffereth long and is kind: endureth all things: believeth all things:
never faileth. The passengers look upon this advertiser of St. Paul as
a lunatic: that sign fills them with dubiety, although the sign outside
the barber-shop, +NO TRUST+, seems to them an obvious and natural one.

Here in a simple image is the moral Melville confronts and elaborates
in the rest of the book. This steamer, the Faithful, is the world,
with all possible varieties of the human animal on board, natives
and foreigners, men of business and men of pleasure, parlour men
and backwoods men, farm-hunters, fame-hunters, heiress-hunters,
buffalo-hunters, happiness-hunters, fine ladies in slippers and
moccasined squaws, Quakers, soldiers, black, white, brown, and every
religion and degree of morality. One thing mars their professions and
plagues their lives: their suspicion. A wooden-legged man, apparently
once a customs-officer, most suspicious of functionaries, denounces
a cheery black beggar who has come among them, as an impostor:
immediately, almost every man on deck turns against the poor fellow.
Even a brawny Methodist minister, who first takes the black’s part,
becomes infected: his confidence is gone. A sad demure man in weeds
of mourning makes his appearance: with great simplicity of purpose,
he insinuates himself into the confidence of a merchant, and gets
ten dollars from him. A little later a man in a grey coat and white
tie accosts his fellow passengers for contributions to a Widow and
Orphan Asylum recently founded among the Seminoles. When rebuffed
as a sharper, he asks his denouncer to be more charitable and throw
off suspicion. The full title of the story is The Confidence Man:
His Masquerade, and one does not go so far without suspecting that
the Confidence Man is a protean character and that the mysterious
appearance and disappearance of the deaf-mute, the negro beggar, the
man in mourning, or the turning up of a seller of quack medicine which
cures by establishing confidence, are merely his own mutations--or
at least are conducted by him. By a hundred shady devices, he breaks
down suspicion, makes men charitable, gives them faith in one another:
but always when they are on the point of being completely disarmed,
their lurking baseness or suspicion will rise to the surface. The
herb-doctor’s pain-dissuader is selling well until a passenger
gives him the lie: “Some pains cannot be eased but by producing
insensibility, and cannot be cured but by producing death.” That hard
truth destroys the whole baseless fabric of confidence he had built up.

Worse doubts intervene. People buy herb remedies because they think
these medicines are natural, and what is natural is good. But if man
is vile, what about Nature? Is the cough one attempts to cure not
natural, and what of the cholera and the rattlesnake and the deadly
nightshade? The Missourian, who utters this doctrine, has no more faith
in humanity than he has in Nature: he is a bitter heretic, even in
politics. What is abolitionism but the expression of fellow feeling of
slave for slave? From Maine to Georgia the best breeds are to be bought
up for any price from a livelihood to a presidency. “Machines for me!”
exclaims the Missourian. So the characters pass, talking, argufying,
blasting charity, killing confidence, either unconsciously or
deliberately blackening the character of man, and proving the emptiness
of all the sweet professions of civilization.

Two men become acquainted and hit up an intimacy over a bottle of
wine. One of them, Frank Goodman, a cosmopolitan philanthropist,
reeking good-will, professes to be inflamed by his friend’s nobility
of mind and his good opinion of his fellow men, and in a sudden burst
of confidence throws himself upon his high-minded fellow: he admits
he is in want of money and asks for a loan of fifty dollars. Charlie
turns away in dudgeon. “Go to the Devil, sir. Beggar, impostor!” Rising
quickly from his seat and taking ten half-eagles from his pocket, Frank
lays them in a circle around Charlie: with the air of a magician, he
summons his friend to reappear. The practical necromancy works. Ha!
ha! it was all a joke, of course. Charlie had humoured him. He had
played his part to the life!... On top of this the philanthropist
has an encounter with Mark Winsome, a mystic philosopher, and his
disciple, who state and practice the extreme opposite of philanthropy:
his philosophy stands the test of truth: it conforms to the world
and does not produce a character at odds with it! This Winsome is no
visionary: far from it: “Was not Seneca a usurer? Bacon a courtier?
and Swedenborg, though with one eye on the invisible, did he not keep
the other on the main chance?” Winsome is the original pragmatist:
a man of serviceable knowledge: the doctrines he preaches will lead
neither to the mad-house nor the poor-house. When Goodman poses to his
disciple a situation like that he had just tested, the disciple handles
it with adroit coolness. The loan is not to be thought of: friends do
not help friends. If Frank turn beggar, then Charlie for the honour of
friendship will turn stranger.

The philanthropist has enough of this icy philosophy: he retreats
to the barber shop, his confidence in humanity unshaken. There he
arranges with the barber to take down the no trust sign, promising
to reimburse the man himself for any loss he may incur through his
confidence. Unfortunately, Goodman leaves the shop, after signing the
agreement, without paying for his own shave: and the barber, suddenly
restored to his senses, tears up the contract and replaces the sign.
Finally, Goodman comes to a comely old man, sitting in his berth,
reading the Bible by the dim cabin light. Here is a man who has
complete faith--yes, and the old man of faith equips himself with a
cabin-lock, a counterfeit detector, a money-belt, a life-preserver, and
an insurance policy!

It is not hard to see where all this leads, although the story itself
ends abruptly. The Confidence Man, in his masquerade, represents all
the sweetness and morality of the race, all that professes to see
good in the heart of evil, all the benign impulses to succour the
poor and heal the sick, all that would place friendliness and natural
intimacy above cold circumspection, that would make every alien soul a
friend, and would place the needs of man above the safety of property.
This sweetness and morality had become for Melville the greatest of
frauds. The people who professed it were sharpers and quacks. Nature,
life, human institutions, did not encourage this fine morality: they
contradicted it. The Pharisee, tightening his purse and disclaiming
responsibility for his brother in distress, the old friend permitting
the matter of a loan to disrupt a friendship--these things, and a score
like them, shrivelled up the outward pretences of social man. Not faith
and charity, but +NO TRUST+ was the key to a prosperous and efficient
life. There was nothing wrong in the profession: love, faith, and
charity might make the worst of ills tolerable; but the miser clung
to his money, the merchant to his reputation, the good man to his
immaculateness, and he who believed in the Word of God had more faith
in the insurance company and the life-preserver. No trust. Man’s soul
was lead. Without money or reputation, it sank.

I cannot leave The Confidence Man without a word about its incidental
characteristics. One of the most important things about the story is
that it is unfinished. Melville took leave of The Confidence Man before
he had unmasked him: the meaning of the fable is left hanging in the
air: the plot, which has neither up nor down, preparation nor climax,
suddenly collapses--as if Melville were discouraged or a little bored
by his own contrivances, or dismissed the story to his contemporaries
with a gesture of contempt, hopeless that they would read it, or
confident that, even if they did, they would not know the difference.
The last words in the book are--“Something further may follow of this
Masquerade”--as if he were waiting for some breath of popular response.

The fable of The Confidence Man is plain as far as it goes: there is
nothing obscure or difficult in the symbolism; but it has the abrupt
and scanty appearance of a Manx cat. In the individual sections, the
writing is always competent; and sometimes far more than that: but the
story moves as torpidly and sinuously as the muddy Mississippi itself,
and there are repetitions of movement, as when the hypothetical Frank
and Charlie go over the same ground as the original ones. Mr. Freeman’s
notion that the story was written for the vain purpose of exposing
the hypocrisy and assertiveness of passengers on a steamboat is a
little beside the point, and his notion that the characters support
Dickens’s worst charges in Martin Chuzzlewit is even more amusing; nor
is Mr. Mather any more accurate when he speaks of The Confidence Man
as “Middle Western character sketches.” One might meet queer, uncouth
animals on a Mississippi steamer; doubtless one did; but the queerness
Melville satirized he had met in the slums of Liverpool and the
drawing-rooms of New York.

When one regards The Confidence Man in its true light, not as a novel,
but as a companion volume to Gulliver’s Travels, its whole aspect
changes: its turbid, tedious, meandering quality remains: but there
are rapids of dangerous and exhilarating satire, as in the humane
proposal, not yet wholly adopted, to organize the redemption of the
world on strict Wall Street principles by farming out the charity and
missionary work to the highest bidder, and forcing the inhabitants of
Africa and Asia to pay for their own redemption and the relief of their
own poverty. The Confidence Man may be considered as Melville’s own
masquerade; his own bitter plea for support, money, confidence. Indeed,
a Mississippi steamboat whose passengers quote Zimmermann, Hume,
Francis Bacon, Rabelais, Jeremiah, Jeremy Taylor, Diogenes, and Timon
could scarcely be anything but Melville’s own heavily laden soul, all
its characters and incidents being part of that long soliloquy in which
Melville struggled with a cankerous mood that threatened to remove,
not merely the clothes, but the epidermis, no, the very bowels of his
fellow creatures.

The passionate defiance was gone: a more savage, relentless humour
took its place, a humour that stabbed and punctured with intent to
kill. Melville’s aim remained good: there is more than one passage
like this description of a miser: “A lean old man, whose flesh seemed
salted codfish, dry as combustibles; a head like one whittled by an
idiot out of a knot; a flat, boney mouth, nipped between buzzard nose
and chin.... His eyes were closed, his cheek lay upon an old white
moleskin coat, rolled under his head, like a wizened apple upon a grimy
snowbank.”

A book with so much of Melville’s ingrained thought and cast of mind
cannot be dismissed as a “posthumous book,” nor can it be set to one
side because it lacks the human veracity of Life on the Mississippi.
The book is without doubt below the level of the great eighteenth
century satires; above all, it lacks the virtue of brevity; but as
an indictment of humanity, The Confidence Man is far more deeply
corrosive than anything in Bierce or Mark Twain. It is hard to refute
Melville’s black words, difficult to find an antidote for this
spiritual nightshade. Melville’s contemporaries did not try. They
applied to the book the same medicine that worked so well in life:
they agreed to forget it. Most of the sweetness and decorum of society
rests on an agreement to forget. The sewer and the garbage pile and
the slaughterhouse, the prison, the hospital, the slum, the asylum,
the battlefield, live and flourish behind that agreement. Sometimes,
though they are out of sight beyond the city’s limits, their odour is
carried on the wind and mingles with the air of the drawing-room. The
guests shift a little uneasily in their chairs. The hostess speaks
in a loud intent voice: the guests respond with vivacious eagerness:
the agreement must be maintained. How that dress shimmers in the
soft light! What delicious perfume that bosom exhales! Is there any
pleasant sound or sight that riches cannot purchase? The hostess looks
uncomfortably at the window: the guests follow her eyes uneasily:
the maid closes the window, and, with a touch of finality, draws the
curtains again. A long breath of relief: the agreement triumphs: the
licence to forget!

Melville could not forget, and yet he could go no further with
these observations and memories. He recoiled from his experience
into a mournful humility. After The Confidence Man, these terrible
blacks softened into greys: the wound whitened into a scar: the eyes
automatically shut when the scene they beheld became too painful. When
one has found the worst that can be said against the world, one must
still live in it, and eventually Melville resigned himself, and lived.
The crack which began to open like the gaping earth in Moby-Dick,
that widened with a shiver in Pierre, became a foaming abyss in The
Confidence Man. As he was on the point of falling into that abyss,
Herman Melville withdrew, and the wide fissure closed--or seemed to
close.

PILGRIM

CHAPTER TEN: TROUBLED FOOTSTEPS

By 1856 Herman Melville had, I think, reached the bottom of his woe,
and he was on the point of resignation--resigning his career, his hope
of livelihood and fame, the high place among his peers that his genius
entitled him to. His short stories during this period gave hints of
his gathering resolution; for he plays with his possible fate again
and again, as in the story of the fiddler, Hautboy, who had been a
famous prodigy in his youth, and who now, in obscurity, with genius and
without fame, was happier than a king. Jimmy Rose is another story of
a man who has fallen in the world and sinks into a genteel pauperism,
wherein all his old graces become pathetic dodges for filling a hungry
stomach. Contemplating this character, Melville became for the first
time downright sentimental: one feels tears of self-pity welling into
his eyes as he uttered the refrain: “Poor, poor Jimmy--God guard us
all--poor Jimmy Rose!”

Melville, at least, was too proud to lift a pitiful false front. He
will seek other consolations than as a defunct literary celebrity:
the occasional student, like Mr. Titus Munson Coan, who finds him in
the Berkshires, does not get a glimpse of the South Sea Melville he
admires: instead, he must listen to Kant and Hegel and Plato and all
the contemporary mysteries. But won’t you tell me something about the
cannibals: that was _so_ interesting. Doubtless the dim Bartleby look
would come into Melville’s eyes: “That reminds me of the eighth book
of Plato’s Republic.” Or perhaps, from a deeper chasm, would come
Bartleby’s own reply: I would prefer not to.

Melville had begun to feel, with Pierre, “what all mature men, who are
Magians, sooner or later know, and more or less assuredly--that not
always in our actions are we our own factors.” When Melville reached
this point, his youth was over; and his manhood, which had just
begun, was over, too. From an experience so heavy and overwhelming
as Melville’s, there was no alternative but retreat, and complete
submission. The Olympian had adventured, an innocent abroad in the
morning; the Titan had struggled, a wise, tormented, valiant man,
working and battling in the sweat and dust of noon: twilight had fallen
early, and in the gloom, he could neither adventure nor struggle: “The
power and dominion of the present world,” as Mr. D. S. MacColl has said
in describing these three dominant figures of the spirit, “is a vanity
to him; the furious energy of retaliation against suffering a trivial
folly, because in his vast contempt and renunciation of this and of all
life, things visible or attainable, present or to come, the height and
depth of any other creature dwindle to nothingness and the least is
equal to the greatest.” This is the mood of the Pilgrim: the mood of
humility and indifference to outward things. A product of defeat and
frustration, this attitude is a last attempt to circumvent it. Buddhism
and Christianity represent this mood in the history of communities,
racked by war, pestilence, slavery, and sheer fatigue of living and its
symbol is the cloister, walled off from the distraction and struggle of
the outer world. Melville sought a cloister for his spirit. Unable to
batter down the indifference of his contemporaries, he endeavoured to
erect within himself a fortress that would keep them at bay.

Elizabeth Melville noted that bad health, following too close
application to work, made travel advisable in 1856: that is the outward
explanation of Melville’s circumstances. Melville’s father-in-law
again came forward with financial aid, and in October Herman Melville
set off on a journey to Constantinople and the Holy Land. He had
contemplated such a trip in 1849; and now, from a deeper consciousness
of his spiritual dilemma, he wished perhaps to prove the advice he had
given Taji in the last pages of Mardi--to return and find his Yillah
in Serenia. It was characteristic of Melville’s habit of thought that
he should seek for Christ’s kingdom in the territory that had known
his presence, instead of plying himself with books and spiritual
intermediaries: having come upon Moby-Dick on the adventurous voyages
of his youth, he was now, as a man of thirty-seven, hopeful to find
through another voyage a sufficient antagonist to this Satanic power,
with whom he could ally his own faltering, and almost routed, forces.
But it was not merely for peace that Melville set out. Beneath the
obvious and inevitable retreat was possibly the hope that the old
energies would come back again, that the old Titan would re-awake and
the old challenge stir again in his bosom--that, with some of his
domestic cares relieved or forgotten, the joy of battle would come
back to him, the relish for arduous days of creation. Hopes and fears
went with Herman Melville across the Atlantic: but unless we misread
his words completely, the fears were uppermost. Perhaps life held no
answer. It was possible “after all, that spite of bricks and shaven
faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all
mankind, beneath our garbs of commonplaceness, conceal enigmas that the
stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim, cannot resolve.”

Again we come very close to the external round of Melville, for, after
sailing to Glasgow and making his way through Lancaster, he arrived
at Liverpool on November 8, 1856. There, at the White Bear, he began
a journal which he carried through the better part of his trip. Like
his earlier journal, it is chiefly a record of outward impressions:
meditation, the working of the inward eye, seems always to have
followed much later. He was a good traveller. Hawthorne, whom he
hunted up in Liverpool, describes him as making his long journeys with
scarcely more than a toothbrush for equipment: Melville still retained
the sailor’s knack of stowing away a good deal in a small space, and
doing without the landsman’s non-essentials; and, as Hawthorne notes,
he always presented the appearance of a well-groomed gentleman. More
than this: he struck up acquaintance easily, and at the outset he was
tempted, upon meeting an agreeable young Scot, to go east with him
forthwith on the same steamer. Melville was always keen to enjoy the
contrasts and suggestions of new customs; and he notes, for example,
how the landlord in the ordinary of his Liverpool hotel acted as if he
were presiding over a private dinner party, all thought of mercenary
ends banished, although the wine he offered his guests would later be
reckoned in the bill.

Hawthorne, now American Consul at Liverpool, was staying at Southport,
a watering-place some twenty miles distant; and Melville sought his
old friend out there and stayed with him a few days. The afternoon of
his arrival, they walked together along the strand, these two men,
both, alas! aging quickly, though Hawthorne was only fifty-two, and
Melville was fifteen years younger. The beach was lonely; a strong wind
stirred panic in the long grass and occasionally swept the loose sand
in their faces; and Melville, a little weariedly, as if somehow the
matter must be settled, went back again to the things he used to talk
about with Hawthorne in the sunny Berkshire days, things as bleak as
the sea-coast itself, and as infinite as the sky: Time and Free-Will,
and Eternity, and Faith! Melville cannot believe in Christianity nor
be comfortable with his doubts, torments, inner wounds. Hawthorne, as
usual, was aloofly sympathetic: it was strange how Melville persisted,
had persisted ever since Hawthorne knew him and probably long before,
in wandering to and fro in these deserts. If Melville were a religious
man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential,
thinks Hawthorne to himself: for he has a high and noble nature, and is
better worth immortality than most of us.

Melville must have looked pleadingly at that grave, heavy-browed
face, with its domed forehead, which seemed to promise so much. Did
it have no answer for him? Did those intent eyes say to one, as
Plinlimmon’s said to Pierre--Vain, vain are all your struggles and
endeavours? Except when Hawthorne wrote, how little did he ever give
in exchange! Did Melville feel that Hawthorne mutely understood, and
had no remedy: that the mind that had seen into Hester Prynne’s heart
or Chillingworth’s evil spirit had retreated, hopeless, from his riled
depths? If Melville did not feel that, still he needed a confidant,
and the wild screams of the gulls over the lonely sands may have
awakened to unpremeditated sudden declaration the wild loneliness of
his own heart. Melville might as well confess it to Hawthorne: he had
about made up his mind to be annihilated. There was no place for him
in America: his best and deepest work, his maturest convictions, were
lightly tossed aside by his contemporaries: they were interested in
whale oil at so much per gallon, not in the quest of Moby-Dick; and
they wanted stories that would tickle their vanity, like a mirror,
or make the blood course more pleasantly, like a glass of port wine.
Melville would not commit suicide: that was a weak way out: but he
might deliberately withdraw.

Perhaps Hawthorne looked doubly grave: it is doubtful if he offered
any word of countervailing encouragement; for he probably did not
have enough confidence in Melville’s genius, much as he respected his
probity, to urge him to continue the fight. Besides, he was a little
embarrassed; despite his political influence, he had been unable to get
Melville the consular post that would have relieved him so greatly; and
he felt a little responsible for Melville’s financial plight, if not
for his spiritual predicament--although his failure reflected nothing
upon his practical good-will, and there is no sign that Melville was
even faintly reproachful. Perhaps, at bottom, Hawthorne felt guilty
because he could not offer back in friendship all Melville was willing
to give--and craved. Unrequited friendship is no easy state for either
party to bear.

Evening fell: the wind grew raw: the waters became steel-edged at the
horizon with a girder of black: the occasional lights in the town
increased the sense of solitude, as the two dark figures made their
way back to the huddled silhouette of houses. There was no true end
to this talk, but instead of that, the consolations of the table were
presently spread: stout to drink and fox-and-geese to eat. Julian had
grown into a fine lad; and Una was taller than her mother. The food,
the coal-fire, and the chatter of the children before bedtime gave
Melville, if only for a moment, something solid to go on, something he
could not find in Hawthorne’s patient silences. Well, on the morrow,
Melville must say good-bye and go up to Liverpool with Hawthorne to
make inquiries about passage among the steamers. On a rainy night,
standing on a street corner in Liverpool, he took Hawthorne’s hand and
said good-bye to him. Hawthorne was touched. He respected that pale,
brooding spirit, that restless, adventurous, still aimless traveller.
Casually, they shook hands: the night and the rain swallowed up
Melville, and they never met again, and as far as one knows, they never
corresponded.

For Melville this was perhaps a last desperate essay at maintaining
their friendship; and in spite of Hawthorne’s cordial greeting, the
meeting was hollow and it had come to nothing. Each had a secret
locked in his bosom; and, in a sense, each had lost the key. Yet there
was something fine and true between these two men--if only there had
not been the reserve and the distance between them, a reserve that
Melville’s old rollicking ways and easy gipsy friendliness could
not break down. One can scarcely doubt that it was about Hawthorne
Melville wrote the following Monody, included in the sheaf of poems
issued just before Melville’s death:

To have known him, to have loved him
After loneness long;
And then to be estranged in life,
And neither in the wrong;
And now for death to set his seal--
Ease me, a little ease, my song!

By wintry hills his hermit-mound
The sheeted snow-drifts drape
And houseless there the snow-bird flits
Beneath the fir-trees’ crape:
Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine
That hid the shyest grape.

The fatal cold that had struck this friendship, the only deep one that
had sprung up in Melville’s life and attracted all the members of his
personality--if one omits the retrospective warmth of his feeling for
Jack Chase--this fatal cold did not lessen Melville’s inner pangs and
his feeling of desolation.

On November eighteenth, Melville finally set sail, passing Cape St.
Vincent and Cape Trafalgar, entering the Straits of Gibraltar about a
week later, and skirting along the coast of Africa. Throughout this
journey, his eyes were keen and eager: when Gibraltar stands lit up by
the sun, and casts a shadow over the rest of the scene, he thinks of
England casting the rest of the world in shade; and when Algiers lies
before him, he remembers a passage in Don Quixote. As the boat sails
out, the town in the distance looks “like a sloping rock covered with
bird-lime.” In Greece, the scene became fantastic and memorable: the
pantaloons and male petticoats, the embroidered jackets, the noble
faces and ferocious moustachios--it is the Greece of Edmond About--and
the town itself, dirty, grimly picturesque, with old men who look like
Pericles reduced to a _charbonnier_.

From Syra to Salonica: at daybreak Melville came on deck to see Mt.
Olympus, covered with snow, and Ossa and Pelion to the south, with Mt.
Atlas, rather conical, on the opposite shore. In port, the same welter
of picturesqueness, dirt, modern needs, ancient beauty. The remains of
a Roman triumphal arch across a street and the fragments of a noble
Greek edifice, three columns and part of a pediment, used as a gateway
and support to the outhouse of a Jew’s abode. The English resident
comes aboard ship: he has that cockney confidence in the rights and
privileges of God’s Englishman that makes the English so comical and so
efficient wherever they go. He tells Melville he has been for a day’s
shooting in the Vale of Tempe. Ye Gods! Whortleberrying on Olympus! The
countryside: hot-houses and trellises. The monastery where Melville was
served with sweetmeats, fruit, and coffee, under an ancient sycamore.
Under all these little odd stimulations, the palate becomes less jaded
and the eyes are refreshed; the spirit itself becomes eager.

When, finally, the ship sets out for Constantinople, Olympus shows in
the moonlight like a ship of white cloud. On deck, the rich Turkish
effendis, in their long, furred robes of yellow, attended by their
harems, securely guarded in tents, give Melville other things to think
about. Orientals have no hearth, no bed, and never blush! The women are
pretty; for the Mohammedan religion disdains the corset, along with a
good part of Western ethics and religion. These creatures are lazy,
gracious, voluptuous; in Constantinople Melville finds that women with
ugly faces are rare, and that every other window shows faces, Jewish,
Grecian, Armenian, which in America would be a cynosure in a ballroom.
Does Melville suspect that enjoyment of the rites of sex, skill and
wisdom in that enjoyment, have contributed by sexual selection and
general good health to this beauty? No: this is one aspect of life
where, as we shall again see later, he observes the facts, but finds no
clues.

As the ship approaches Constantinople, the contrasts pile up: the sail
up the Hellespont is exhilarating, although spoiled a little by the
mists: at night, as the ship is lying by in a fog, he hears only the
bells of the neighbouring ships, and the sharp bark of the pariah dogs
on the shore. The passengers endure sea-sickness, discomfort, and damp
for two days. Melville turns to an old Turk and says: This is very bad.
The Turk answers: God’s will is good, and smokes his pipe in cheerful
resignation. That is the East’s answer to our Western fretfulness,
to our desire to discipline the elements and remove all the natural
obstacles to man’s existence and happiness: but the East pays its price
for it: the beauties of Constantinople are shrouded in dank, odourous
streets that are unmarked and unnamed and lead nowhere: the priests
in the Mosque of St. Sophia sell the precious mosaics as they fall
to the floor, not endeavouring to repair the scaling walls of that
superb interior: the bazaars are a wilderness of traffic. Melville
loses himself and is confounded and bewildered by the din, the barbaric
confusion, of the whole city. At night he does not dare to leave the
hotel, for fear of being assassinated for the sake of a watch or a
ring. In short, failing to struggle against God’s will, the East puts
up, in the same easy spirit, with every species of human roguery: that
is no answer to the White Whale! Indeed, Melville scarcely dares walk
the streets in the daylight without keeping his hand on his purse: for
no discoverable reason whatever, he was followed about for two or three
hours by an infernal Greek and his confederates, whom he could neither
intimidate nor elude. He began to feel nervous, remembering that the
fearful intent of Schiller’s ghost scene hangs upon being followed in
Venice by an Armenian; and he was thankful when he finally escaped.

But the views! The scenes from the steamer up the Bosphorous to
Buykudesh: magnificent! the whole panorama is one pomp of art and
nature. Europe and Asia are here shown at their best: a gallery of
ports and harbours formed by the interchange of promontory and bay:
porpoises sport in the blue, and large flights of pigeons overhead go
through evolutions like those of armies, whilst ships anchor at the
foot of ravines, deep among green basins, where the only canvas one
would expect would be tents. No wonder the Czars have always coveted
the capital of the Sultans: no wonder the Russian, among his firs,
sighs for these myrtles, cedars, cypresses. The green minarets of the
cypress contrast with the gold minarets of the Mosque: so nature and
man, so death and life, intermingle, too. Kiosk and fountain, dark
trees and daisies tipped with crimson, stand out with the jewelled
clearness of a Persian miniature: one would think that these scenes
would melt away like some castle of confectionery if the elements
treated them rudely.

Nearer, Melville is in the atmosphere of the Arabian Nights: the aspect
of the first bridge, coming back, is like that of a Grand Fancy Dress
Ball: the air is an immense Persian rug: 1,500,000 men are the actors
in a vast and endless procession, pedlars, beggars, confectionery
sellers, malefactors chained together with iron necklaces and rings;
porters with immense burdens, military officers, ladies in yellow
slippers, black eunuchs followed by white servants, sherbet sellers,
Georgians, shepherds marching in sheep’s clothing, sheep, droves of
donkeys followed by animated little boys poking them assiduously,
boys with Arabian Nights names, Yusef, Hassan, Hamet. But if it has
the beauty of some colossal London pantomime, it also has its defect:
Melville cannot step over the footlights. He sees these Turks,
Armenians, Georgians, Greeks: he would like to know them better: but
for conversation he must turn to the captain or the English resident,
or the fellow tourist. He wearies of this spectatorial attitude, these
long days when he cannot talk to a sympathetic soul. Melville had got
nearer to the Typees by living among them than he did with these closer
brethren. After six days in Constantinople, he set off by steamer for
Alexandria, via Smyrna; for, though he makes what he can of these
profane diversions, the chief end of these travels is Terra Sancta
itself.

The vessel stopped at Smyrna, and Melville had his first smell of
the nearer East: camel-dung drying against the walls of the houses,
for fuel, and the camel himself, the supercilious ambassador of this
civilization, with his neck out like a tortoise, and his tail like
an eel, by which the driver directed him, the swaying of the rider
increasing with the motion of the camel, as in the mast of a ship, the
higher one climbs. What a unique creature: he carries his neck like a
clergyman in a stiff cravat, his feathery forelegs, his long lank hind
ones, and his spongy hoofs, ploughing through the muddy lanes like four
mops--in short, a cross between an ostrich and a grasshopper! Melville
was thrilled by the curious appearance of strings of laden camels
passing through the narrow, crowded ways of the bazaar--and he learned
that these gorgeous Turkish clothes, many of them, were made of cotton
and silk imported into Lancashire and reproduced and sent back to the
native land, to the ruin of Turkish manufacturers, and the misery of
the Manchester operative, just as pure copper was sent to England, and
after being alloyed and cheapened was returned as unstamped coin to
Constantinople.

The ship steamed out of Smyrna and passed the bleak islands that had
once meant so much in history, Delos, flowery in fable, but desolate at
best and now quite sterile; and Patmos, another disenchanting isle; and
Timos, with its small hamlets and the little churches sticking perkily
out mid the low huts of the villages. Christmas Day Melville spent at
Syra again: he mentions the captain’s mild observance of the feast in a
glass of champagne; but he put in the notebook no private or domestic
memory. Perhaps he took to heart the advice he had already framed in
Pierre: “With a continent and an ocean between him and his wife--thus
sundered from her by whatever imperative cause for a long term of
years:--the husband, if passionately devoted to her and by nature
broodingly sensitive of soul were wise to forget her till he embrace
again.”

Melville contrasted these bleak, desolate Aegean Islands with those of
the Polynesian archipelago: the former had lost their virginity, whilst
the latter were as fresh as at their first creation. Melville knew that
withered feeling. To look upon the yellow of Patmos, who would believe
that a god had been there; and, one may add, to look upon the sear tint
of Melville’s soul, during the strained years that had just passed, who
would believe that a god had once reposed there, either?

At last the Alexandrian lighthouse came into view; and shortly after
that Pompey’s pillar, looking like a huge stick of candy that had long
been sucked. Melville made a quick excursion to Cairo; and spent two
nights there, wandering through the streets, where the houses seemed
a collection of old orchestras, organs, proscenium boxes, or like
masses of old grotesque furniture, lumbering a garret, and covered
with dust: the streets, so narrow, through the projection of the upper
storeys, that they seemed almost tunnels, made noon itself dim: in the
lonelier parts of the city many of the houses were uninhabited and had
a ghoulish look: but the city itself, for all these desolate houses and
stoved-in domes and rubbish-filled alleys, was alive with bargain and
chaffer and shouting camel drivers and whining blind men: desert and
verdure clashed together like splendour and squalor, like gloom and
gaiety: such violent chiaroscuro in all the senses bewildered one like
strong wine on an empty stomach.

The Pyramids completed the effect of this exploration. Together,
they made a magnificent, a terrible, an unforgettable day. From the
distance, the Pyramids jutted over the sand like purple mountains. To
ascend the great Pyramid, there were as many different routes as there
are for crossing the Alps: precipice on precipice, cliff on cliff.
Nothing in Nature but the sea gives such an idea of vastness; the very
grass that grows around the Pyramids does not touch them, as if in
awe of them. Exhausted a little with his climb, a pain in his chest,
Melville found the Arab guides tender: as he hurried on, for none but
the phlegmatic could scale this mound deliberately, the Arabs in their
white flowing robes might have been angels conducting him up to heaven.
One old man fainted halfway up and had to be brought down: he essayed
to go inside and fainted again: it was too much for him.

Well, it was almost too much for Melville: it was not the sense of
height but the sense of immensity that was stirred: with all other
architecture, however vast, the eye is gradually inured to the sense of
magnitude by passing from part to part: but here there was no storey
or stage: it was all or nothing, not height or breadth or length or
depth but unspeakable vastness, less like courses of masonry than like
strata of rocks, a long slope of crags and precipices. As with the
ocean, you learned as much of its vastness by the first glance as you
would in a month. The great Pyramid refused to be studied or adequately
comprehended. Nor had it lost by the tearing away of its casing,
though it had scaled enough stone to build a walled town; on the
contrary, when it presented a smooth plane it must have lost as much
in impressiveness as the ocean does when unfurrowed--a dead calm of
masonry. A feeling of awe and terror gradually came over Melville: the
Arabs were no longer angels, but seemed, in their soft, imperturbable
way, somehow malign. Stooping and doubling in the interior, as in a
coal shaft, Melville shuddered at the ancient Egyptians: they had a
mixture of the cunning and the awful. Moses learned his lore from the
Egyptians: the awful idea of Jehovah was born there. They must needs
have been terrible inventors, those ancient wise men: as out of the
crude forms of the natural earth they could evoke by art the Pyramids,
so, out of the dull elements of the insignificant thoughts that are in
all men, they could by analogous art rear the transcendent conception
of God. Indeed, the Egyptians had outwitted mortality. The Pyramids
were conceived out of an energy as mighty as Nature’s: nought but an
earthquake or a geological revolution could smother it up. That was
something like an answer to the White Whale--albeit such a distant
answer. The pyramidical energy, as well as the pyramidical scorn, were
both lacking in Melville now, high though they had towered in Moby-Dick.

Back in his high-ceilinged room of Shepherd’s Hotel, with its
almost monkish barrenness, the Pyramids still loomed before Herman
Melville--something vast, indefinite, uncomfortable, and awful.
Nothing that he met in the holy ways of Jerusalem, on the Mount of
Temptation or in the Garden of Gethsemane, compared with the powerful
impression left on him by the Pyramids. Did his instinct at last tell
him that power was necessary, but that power alone was not enough,
that Power and Love must work together, harmoniously married, as in
one of the oldest of mythic figures, before man’s triumph is anything
but evanescent? The issue of power and love, knowledge and sympathy,
contrivance and imagination, is art; and the highest product of art is
not a painting, a statue, a book, a pyramid, but a human personality.
When power and love were divorced in the personality, love became
impotent, and power became malign and unlovely; and the personality
itself mouldered, mouldered into a Jackson, a Timon, an Ahab, a Maria
Glendinning, a Pierre, an Isabel. The Egyptians certainly had not
forgotten love; and the Nile itself, which spread greenness when its
floods receded, was the symbol of its benign fertility. Did some hint
of this touch Melville in Egypt or in Palestine? Apparently, yes; for
in Clarel we shall see the germs of a new feeling about life, and the
source of that feeling is love, a clear and unambiguous love.

What further impact the journey made upon Melville’s mind, we shall
best gather when we come to consider Clarel and some of his minor
poems; and the further events of his journey home _via_ Italy,
the Netherlands, and England can well be condensed into scattered
observations and epigrams that punctuate the account in his journals.
Passing Patmos, Melville was again afflicted with the great curse of
modern travel--scepticism. “Could no more realize that St. John had
ever had revelations here than when off Juan Fernandez could believe
in Robinson Crusoe according to Defoe.” “Pompeii like any other town.
Same old humanity. All the same whether one be dead or alive. Pompeii
comfortable sermon. Like Pompeii better than Paris.” Pisa: “Campanile
like pine poised just ere snapping. You wait to hear crack. Like
Wordsworth’s mooncloud, it will move all together if it move at all,
for Pillars all line with it.” “Rome fell flat on me. Oppressing
flat.... Tiber a ditch, yellow as saffron. The whole landscape nothing
independent of association. St. Peter’s looks small from tower of
Capitol.... Dome not so wonderful as St. Sophia’s.... Went to Baths
of Caracalla. Wonderful. Massive. Ruins form as it were natural
bridges of thousands of arches. There are glades and thickets among
the ruins--high up.--Thought of Shelley. Truly, he got his inspiration
here. Corresponded with his drama and mind. Still majesty and desolate
grandeur.” “Quirinal Palace.... The Gardens--a paradise without the
joy--freaks and caprices of endless wealth ... as stone is sculptured
into forms of foliage, so here foliage turned into forms of sculpture.”
Florence: “Breughel’s picture much pleased me. Not pleased with the
Venus de Medici, but very much astonished at the Wrestlers, and charmed
with Titian’s Venus.” “Rather be in Venice on a rainy day than in
any other capital on a fine one.” London: “Crystal Palace--digest of
the universe. Vast toy. No substance. Such appropriation of space as
is made by a rail fence.” Oxford: “It was here I first confessed my
gratitude for my motherland and could view her with pride. Oxford to an
American as well worth visiting as Paris, though in a different way.”

During this crowded journey, while Melville was in Italy, there
happened an event, obscure, mysterious, obliquely narrated, and
published only at the end of his life, which gives us a further clue
to Melville’s character and experience. Knowing Melville’s habits of
composition, one is fairly sure that some objective fact lies beneath
the surface of the verse called After the Pleasure Party: all the more
because he published the poem only after he had reached the serenity
and safety of old age. That these verses were not merely the product
of untethered imagination one suspects, too, because their theme,
remorse and bitter regret after renouncing a passionate experience, is
underlined by the words of another poem, Madame Mirror:

What pangs after parties of pleasure,
What smiles but disclosures of pain!

This long poem, After the Pleasure Party, stands out with particular
boldness because it contains the only direct references to sexual
passion that one finds in Melville’s entire work, except for haphazard
and unimportant incidents--or the plainly fictitious events in Pierre.
It is a faint and intricate clue; but one must not neglect it.

Melville pictures a paradisiac garden in Italy: the upland falling
behind the house, fragrant with jasmin and orange blossom, the white
marble of the house itself, gleaming between the lanes of austere
trees, the green terraces falling in gentle cataracts down to the
starlit Mediterranean Sea: a place of beauty and an hour of balm “after
long revery’s discontent.” The pilgrim, dusty with travel in barren
lands, revels in the sensuous peace: he is not so completely the
pilgrim, so thoroughly the hermit, that his heart is entirely his own:
on the contrary, it is out of a desperate dryness and loneliness of
soul that Melville is suddenly beset by such temptations as the hermits
of the Thebaid found in the desert. We have no image of the woman who
walked with Melville through these green walks, under the star-bright
sky: he himself tried, in the years that followed, to forget “the glade
wherein Fate spun Love’s ambuscade,” tempting him to flout pale years
of cloistral life and “flush himself in sensuous strife.” We do not
know if it was she who repulsed him, as the shore repulses the hungry
billows, tired of the homeless deep, or whether it was a resistance
within himself that wrecked and scattered the impulses that were
driving him against the warm object of his desire: but we know that,
flushed perhaps by wine, and stirred by the fragrant spring night, sex
asserted itself again in Melville: the “dear desire through love to
sway” came over him, and when he found himself baffled, attempting to
rule his passion yet not able to reign, neither conquering the woman
herself nor the passion she had awakened, he was aware of a dreary
shame of frustration. Blocked in his highest powers of thought, in
his career as a writer, Melville found himself equally defeated--and
perhaps by the same cluster of images--in that other citadel of
personality. Bitterly he cries: “And kept I long heaven’s watch for
this, contemning love, for this, even this?”

There is the cry of the passionate man who in his marriage had kept to
the letter of his pledge, and yet found himself struggling against its
spirit--struggling and yet paralysed. The sudden opening of passion,
that had begun at lunch this day, as the guests of the house, like the
ladies and gentlemen in the prologue to the Decameron, had lain about
in groups on the grass, this passion, deepening in a secluded glade
under the Mediterranean night, had pulled Melville off his lonely
throne: in a dream he was a king, perhaps, a lonely king--an idiot
crowned with straw! That gust of passion had brought enlightenment:
the fires in him were banked, not dead: but it left him bereaved. He
shrank from its consequences. In this enlightenment he remembered and
magnified other incidents on his journey: the barefoot peasant girl in
Naples who had climbed up the hills near the wheels of his carriage and
had given him the sudden impulse to fire upon her the petty hell within
his own bosom. Hers was a wily innocence, and one can only vaguely
guess at Melville’s memories when he exclaims: “The cheat! On briars
her buds were strung.... To girls, strong man’s a novice weak.” All
this became part of his “sad rosary of belittling pain.”

Melville might seem to others, might in opaque moments seem to himself,
a pale, scholarly man, immersed solely in things of the mind: but what
a caricature that apparition was of the actual man! The pallor did
not mean he could not feel the sun when it shone upon him: “the plain
lone bramble thrills with Spring as much as vines that grapes shall
bring,” and when this mood was uppermost, how gladly would he throw his
arms around some radiant ninny, the first glad, willing girl he might
meet, and buy the veriest wanton’s rose--“would but my bee therein
repose.” If only he could remake himself, or free himself from this
disturbance, this void tormenting urge, this feeling of disunity, this
being but half of a mismatched whole: surely, there was some anarchic
blunder, some rank cosmic jest, in the state that made the single
self incomplete and yet set all the odds against the possibility that
selves who matched should meet and mate. This was part of Melville’s
disillusion, that hot impetus he had felt in that fine Italian garden
promised in ultimate reward no more than his marriage, equally fervid
and romantic at the start, had brought him. And yet--and yet--perhaps
this temporary impulse was an impulse to act upon, whether it had any
cosmic justification or not: the turbulent heart and the rebel brain
did not satisfy themselves so easily with abstract reasons.

For Amor so resents a slight
And hers had been such haught disdain
He long may wreak his boyish spite,
And, boylike, little reck the pain.

When Melville leaves this scene of his thwarted renewal, and comes to
Rome, confronting its pagan statuary and its Christian churches, he has
half an impulse to gather all his doubts and difficulties together and
make a sacrifice of them to the Church, in return for the peace she
gives: but something deeper in him, something reflected in the mighty
statuary and art of the Roman and the Greek, prompts him to turn to
Athene herself, who united power and peace, far from the “sexual feud”
that “clogs the aspirant’s life.” But no outer institution or activity
could share Melville’s burden: at bottom, he feels hopeless of either
Church or of Art. Never, he says, passion peace shall bring, nor art
inanimate for long inspire. Ah, no! because the sick man turns to these
things as to a powerful medicine, to serve as a specific, once and for
all; whereas in health, they must be treated as food, to be welcomed
recurrently. Melville was sick; and he was aware of it. “Nothing may
help or heal while Amor, incensed, remembers wrong.”

For scope to give his vengeance play
Himself he’ll blaspheme and betray.

Then for Urania, virgins everywhere,
O pray! Example take too, and have care.

These last lines were not given to Melville by his experience but
were the fruits of his ultimate reflection: and there was wisdom in
them. Sex is deep and central in every life, and the wrongs that are
committed against Amor, whether they are wrongs of abstention or wrongs
of satiety, whether they are the weakness of a love unpolarized, or
the weakness of a love whose validity is established solely in legal
documents and obligations, these wrongs may exact their revenge on
every phase of a man’s activity. There is no formula for love, except
the tact and usage of lovers. Reserve, indifference, and abstention
destroy that tact: the lover loses his sense of occasion, and is
impassive where he should be quick, or tormented, as Melville was
tormented by the peasant girl, when he should be calm. The matter
of loyalty does not enter here; or rather, all these thoughts were
disloyalties; indeed, Melville was disloyal to the spirit of his
marriage in a thousand repugnances or indifferences that far more
seriously undermined his relations with Elizabeth than the most
outright liaison would have done, had it left Melville poised,
collected, refreshed.

In this experience “After the Pleasure Party,” Melville approached
close to a central dilemma in his life: he approached it, but he was
paralysed, paralysed by the habit of self-control as other men are
thrust into helpless action by their lust. Melville’s career, his
thought, his vision demanded a singleness of purpose: to attain this
singleness he was all eagerness, as he put it in Pierre, “to cast
off the most intense, beloved bond, as a hindrance to the attainment
of whatever transcendental object that usurper mood so tyrannically
suggests. Then the beloved bond seems to hold us to no essential
good; lifted to exalted mounts, we can dispense with all the vale;
endearments we spurn; kisses are blisters to us; and forsaking the
palpitating forms of mortal love, we emptily embrace the boundless
and unbodied air. We think we are not human; we become as immortal
bachelors and gods; but again, like the Greek gods themselves, prone
we descend to earth; glad to be uxorious once more; glad to hide these
godlike heads within the bosoms made of too-seducing clay.”

This pilgrimage of Melville’s, from that high talk with Hawthorne
on the bleak sands of Southport and those unspeakable thoughts that
welled up in him when he confronted the Pyramids, to the sting of a
passing peasant girl or the soft hints and caresses in the arboured
walk by the Mediterranean, had shown Melville the extremes of his own
being: alone with divinity, in solitude, he found himself reaching,
thirstily, eagerly, towards the all-too-seducing clay. For Melville,
unlike Plato, there was no happy union between these opposites: he had
no wise Diotima to teach him how the children of the flesh may lead to
that union with the other self out of which the children of the spirit
are born: nor did he realize that the lust of the satisfied man is
incomparably more cleansing to the spirit than the tormented chastity
of the unsatisfied one. This was a misfortune for Melville. His
salvation would have been to recognize that he had reached the limits
of his own lonely excursion: that all a man can find as a solitary
being, and value, and cleave to, exploring in utter loneliness the
trackless ways of the universe, he had achieved in Moby-Dick: pride and
power and the isolated untouched self had nothing further to teach him,
and there was no dominion more sterile than that long reign. He must
withdraw from this proud isolation, not into the disguised pride and
the equal isolation of humility, but into participation with the life
around him and into what he had inherited from the past--not scorning
Plato or Goethe because their union had been fruitful, whilst his great
immaculacy had proved black and sterile.

In achieving his depths, Melville had missed the surface: he had
brought up fire and lava and ashes, from that deep volcano of his
being, but he had never in maturity properly explored the woods and
groves and gardens that give men peace and untroubled love--and it
was pride, a self-defeating pride, that urged him to return to those
depths, prizing “the clear intelligence alone” and disdaining a love
that was “linked and locked with a self impure.” Partly, Melville
overcame this pride, and he mingled with his fellows and widened his
explorations in the region they had settled and cultivated: but these
new aims did not engross him as the pursuit of Moby-Dick had done. Had
he been able to surrender more easily to love, to his wife, to his
family relations, at thirty-eight, he might have discovered, while his
physical powers were healing, that triumphant serenity and surety of
purpose which did not come to him until his old age had transmuted his
rejected passions and made a fertile union with reality.

Melville left his Italian garden, with chaos still struggling in his
soul. For slighting Amor he was for a while destined to know, not inner
peace, but the sting and poison of every chance arrow: in Venice,
floating on the canal in a “swoon of a noon and a trance of tide” like
calms far off Peru, he was to hear a lattice click and see between the
slats, mutely summoning him, the loveliest eyes of a girl. He who had
faced peril in nature and man, who had swum between the whale’s black
flukes and the white shark’s fin, and who had wandered in the enemy’s
desert, New York, warily scanning the envy and slander that followed
him there, he who had faced these things cannot stand the “basilisk
look” of that girl: he bids his boatman throw off his drowsiness and
shoot quickly by. The wanderer discovers that sirens are real: they do
in fact lie in wait for a man, wooing him by the same deadly muses.
He runs from them--excusing his shame with the memory of Ulysses,
“brave, wise, and Venus’ son,” but the very fact that he imprisons this
incident in verse and publishes it more than thirty years after shows
that he did not escape easily.

“There is no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy,” Melville
wrote in Pierre, “that a mortal man can possibly evoke, which will
stand the final test in a real impassioned onset of Life and Passion
upon him. Then all the fair philosophy or Faith--phantoms that he
raised from the mist, slide away and disappear as ghosts at cock-crow.
For Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass. Amidst his
gray philosophizings, Life breaks upon a man like a morning.” Without
conceiving Melville’s philosophy as a phantom, one may still wish that
it had confronted and not so desperately fled from these enlightening
assaults of life and passion. He needed no further share of restrained
and circumspect virtues: he needed the courage of life, the courage to
be glad with the morning sun, to breathe deeply the fragrance of the
air, to relax his limbs in the heat of noon, to feel again the dear
inner vigour of his manliness, that vigour which a man is conscious of
only in the presence of a woman who rouses him. Denying that vigour,
he found that the dawn was smothered in grey clouds, and the rose had
lost its fragrance, and the sun its power to heal. His journey helped
him recover his interest in life and his poise: it enabled him to carry
on as a man: but, though he resumed his work, that final confidence
or desperation men need if they are to undertake the great labour of
creation was still insufficient. The masculine attack, so bold, so
deep-seated in Mardi, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick, did not wholly come
back--and if one asks the reason for this one will find the answer, in
part, “traced under an image of Amor Threatening.”

Melville returned home toward the middle of 1857. Meanwhile, The
Confidence Man, published by Sampson, Low and Company, and not by his
old publishers, Harper’s, had done little to improve his fortunes.
Indeed, its English edition was so small that it for long remained
unknown to the bibliographer; and in America the work, though it
received occasional praise, did not fare much better. Except in the
roughest political lampooning, satire did not penetrate the leathery
optimism and the cast-iron self-righteousness of antebellum America;
and if Melville wanted support and confidence, The Confidence Man was
the wrong way to go about it. One need not be surprised that the sequel
was never published, and in all likelihood, never written.

Melville’s resolve to be annihilated was lessened by his journey: for
though he had not been shattered with light on the road to Damascus,
faith flickered and smoked occasionally, like smouldering wood
before it is ready to blaze. The shearing of his head, the donning
of sackcloth, the last ironic act of renunciation was still almost a
decade away: with new resolution, he made a succession of attempts to
regain the position he had once occupied.

The lecture lyceum gave him his first opportunity: the Civil
War was the second. Between 1857 and 1860 Melville joined the
politicians and the woman suffragists and the prohibitionists and the
transcendentalists and the Fourierists and the travellers from strange
parts of the world and distinguished foreigners, in the one corner of
the marketplace where they could all get a living: the public platform.
It was not an easy pill for him to swallow, for though he lectured on
the sculpture of the Vatican and the sights of Rome, he was known,
hailed, gaped at still as the famous author of Peedee, Pog-Dog, and
Hullabaloo--the man who had lived among the cannibals. Well might he
write in Pierre: “Permanently to alleviate pain, we must first dart
some added pangs.” He was brave enough about the whole business; in
1858 he wrote: “I should be glad to lecture there [in Baltimore]
or anywhere. If they will pay expenses and give a reasonable fee,
I am ready to lecture in Labrador or on the Isle of Desolation off
Patagonia.”

Melville showed himself; he lectured; but he stooped no further. Mid
all the spellbinders and strutting celebrities of the period, with
their characteristic masks, sonorities, grimaces, this quiet man, with
the small, fine nose and the weary, whimsical smile, and an air of
patient earnestness, could have cut no very great figure to a public
that had never been used to the emphasis of under-statement. Indeed,
Melville’s lecture fees tell as much: they averaged around fifty
dollars a lecture, and at this time Thoreau, with even a narrower
reputation, got as much for a reading. The lectures gave Melville an
opportunity to travel, and he must have welcomed this: he went as far
afield as Montreal and Milwaukee: but in all he gave less than thirty
lectures. One wonders about his audiences. Did Thoreau meet him at the
station in Concord or did Whitman listen to him in New York? Whom did
he fall in with on the Ohio river steamers? What did he make of the
emigrant New Englanders, Germans, merchants, farmers, roustabouts,
gamblers? Had his Mississippi buffoons touched them off, or did they
make his staunchest effects pallid? Did he identify himself with them,
share their aims, feel a thrill of anticipation at their destinies--or
did he foresee in them the final disruption of the America that had
nourished him?

The record is almost a blank; but a newspaper report of one of the
lectures, in the Boston Journal, 1857, shows that Melville’s shrewd
eye was far from being turned inward. Describing the statues in the
Church of St. John Lateran, he observes that “Socrates looks like an
Irish comedian, Julius Caesar so sensible and businesslike of aspect
it might be taken for the bust of a railroad president; Seneca with
the visage of a pawnbroker; Nero a fast young man, Plato with the
locks and airs of an exquisite, as if meditating the destinies of the
world under the hands of a hair-dresser.” These comments prove, what
all the minor documents of Melville’s life during this period show,
that the jocular irrepressible spirit--“bear with mine infirmity of
jocularity,” he exclaims to Duyckinck--the spirit who had written
Omoo and White-Jacket, was not altogether Timonized or defeated. His
satire still worked obliquely, touching both his own countrymen and
their pragmatic contemporaries, the Romans. Nor did Melville conceal
his feelings about the benefits of mickonaree Christianity and “white
civilization.” In another lecture, after quoting from a local English
paper in one of the South Sea Islands, which suggested the propriety of
not having the native language taught in the common schools, he threw
down the sheet in plain disgust, and announced to the audience, in
allusion to the reputed desire of the natives of Georges Island to be
annexed to the United States, that he was sorry to see it, since, as a
friend of humanity, and especially a friend of the South Sea Islanders,
he would pray, and call upon all Christians to pray with him, that
the Polynesians might be delivered from all foreign and contaminating
influences.

During this period of lecturing, Melville began to write again, with no
hope of profit or fame, but for his own satisfaction; and, anticipating
Thomas Hardy’s example, he turned to verse. If one can date his first
new essays in verse--for the poems in Mardi show that there were early
efforts--one must give the time as probably 1858, and for a while only
Elizabeth shared this secret with him. By 1860, before he went for a
voyage with his younger brother, now Captain Thomas Melville, commander
of the Boston clipper Meteor, his verses were numerous enough to make a
volume. The decision to make this voyage came rather suddenly; and one
finds Melville writing to Mr. Duyckinck, mid the haste of departure,
to see if he will undertake to advise with Allan Melville as to a
publisher, and in case of publication, be sure that the printer’s
proof-reader is a careful man. Melville, the author of nine books,
still deferred to Mr. Duyckinck’s professional experience; and, on
getting a favourable reply, he told Duyckinck that “it was quite a wind
from the field of old times.”

From this correspondence with Evert Duyckinck--and an allusion in a
letter to George about Melville’s own “winter and rough weather”--one
gathers that after Pierre there had been an estrangement, or at least
a prolonged silence: in 1856 the Duyckincks had recorded in their
Cyclopedia their conviction that Pierre was a false step, and only now,
after eight years had passed, was the breach healed. As for Melville’s
mood in travel, he had this to say: “I anticipate as much pleasure as,
at the age of forty, one temperately can, on the voyage I am going. I
go under very happy auspices so far as the ship is concerned. A noble
ship and a nobler captain--and he my brother. We have the breadth of
those tropics before us, to sail over twice, and shall round the world.
Our first port is San Francisco, which we shall probably make in 110
days. Thence we go to Manilla--and thence, I hardly know where--I wish
devoutly you were going along. I think it would agree with you. The
prime requisites for enjoyment on sea-voyages, for passengers, is 1st
health--2nd good-nature. Both first rate things, but not universally to
be found.--At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that
respect.” The good-bye and God bless you, with which Melville closed
this letter, showed a sort of solemn warmth. In a lonely life, even an
Evert Duyckinck might prove a comrade....

The book of poetry was never published in its original form. Mr. Meade
Minnigerode conjectures that the manuscript was that of Clarel; but
Melville’s concern, in his memoranda for Allan, that each piece should
be printed on a page by itself, however small the piece, shows, apart
from anything else, that it could not have been Clarel; and when
Melville told his brother, two years later, that he had disposed of his
“doggerel” to a trunkmaker, who took the whole lot off his hands at ten
cents the pound, one must infer that he himself had become dissatisfied
with the bulk of his early work, and destroyed most of it, salvaging
a few pieces, like the verse to the Captain of the Meteor, for his
later volumes. In the first flush of experiment, however, Melville’s
poetry pleased him: the form of verse gave compactness to his thoughts,
and the writing of it did not inflict that long continuous drain on
his vitality that the larger prose pieces called for. Melville would
pace the quarter-deck with his brother, reciting his verses in the
moonlight: the joy of creation, even minor creation, could still stir
him up, and no doubt the cadences of the moving ship, heaving, falling,
rolling, added to the pleasure of the words themselves.

At the end of three months, when they had reached California, Melville
had exhausted his supply of books and papers, probably, and his
brother’s patience, and his own capacity for boredom: by that time his
health had doubtless improved again, and, urging him to break the trip
and quicken his return, his old longing for Elizabeth may have come
back with greater force. He was never quite happy in her company, nor
was he quite happy away from it. All the difficulties of their domestic
economy tended to make their relations prosaic and commonplace, for
one does not cook for and clean and clothe four children without a
considerable amount of unflinching prose; and Elizabeth’s incapacity
for domestic duties and her irritations only made matters worse. Yet
Melville, as far as one can judge, felt not merely affection for
Elizabeth: on these long absences, passion would gather within him
again, like lightning in a heavy summer sky. He might resent her
obtuseness; he might be disappointed by her failure to respond to his
irresponsible hilarity; he might be sobered by the fact that his love
had been unfavourably conditioned by financial burdens and a cramped
household with a scanty larder; but for all that, he clung to her and
needed her. One must take account of this in noting Melville’s moods
and moves and decisions in the decade after 1856. Although Melville,
unfortunately, felt repulsion in a tie that was so plainly rooted in
physical attachment, and longed for a heaven in which there was the
marriage of true minds without the “impurities” and impediments of sex,
although he distrusted the solace of physical union, as he distrusted
all beautiful things which hid the truth from men’s eyes, yet he found
himself perpetually driven back to this wiser folly; and, not turning
easily to any other woman, he kept his faith with Elizabeth.

The rôle was not an easy one for her to bear: make no mistake about it.
Such violence of anticipation and such quick satiety, such tenderness
and such easy disappointment, such self-absorption, and, with it all,
a certain impatience and resentment of the daily round, with its
claims, ceremonies, civilities, annoyances--with all this Elizabeth
Melville was probably never to know such deep, enraptured happiness
in her marriage as Sophia Hawthorne, who had faced dire poverty, too,
had known. Elizabeth was proud of her man: she had faith in him: but
it was only in the closing years of their lives, when, through bitter
experience, she had acquired much, and he, through bitter experience,
had resigned much, that they were on a parity. There is no doubt she
encouraged him in his work, and, whether she understood it or not,
believed in it. While he was gone in 1860 she assiduously looked
after the placing of the manuscript, and would not be put off by the
publishers’ flimsy excuses. Still, for all this sympathy and loyalty,
on both sides, one feels that strain, depression, tenseness, must have
too often marked the life of the Melville household, during these
shadowed years of poverty and ill health and dwindling fame.

If Mrs. Melville stood the strain of it, with all the toughness of
middle age to bear up under it, the children did not fare so well. The
photograph of the Melville children, Malcolm, Frances, Elizabeth, and
Stanwix, taken when the oldest was perhaps twelve or thirteen--that
is, during the early sixties--tells as much: they are a little peaked
and undernourished, and the eldest child’s face is sullen, dour. The
racking poverty of his early youth had left an indelible impression on
Melville himself, and, in even more depressing circumstances, a worse
image was left upon the minds of his growing children. Melville, a
man of originality and penetration in almost every other department
of life, was, one suspects, a commonplace father: he expected his
children to be dutiful and submissive and not to annoy their mother,
and he would read them moral lectures on the whole duty of children,
fearful of their being corrupted by association and contact with the
age, but incapable of directing their impulses into forms of growth
except by desperate exhortation--the most blank and sterile of all
pedagogical methods. He wanted them to be noble and courageous and
honest and indifferent to money, and, dreading the effect of the mean,
bourgeois standards that surrounded them, he was too quick to suspect
the ignoble and the base, forgetting that growth is a happier sign in
childhood than the semblance of perfection. When his little daughter
picked up the word “property” and aired it to her family, Melville
relentlessly teased her about it: if he handed her the butter, he
would hand it to Miss Property: if he met her on the stairs he would
mimic Miss Property: he tormented her for the sins of her elders,
forgetting the terrible sensitiveness of a child to dogging that has
such a bitter animus behind it. This incident will stand for others:
the jolly letters he would write home, with pictures and all manner
of funny printing, or the stories he would tell in a pleasant hour,
did not wipe out the acrid taste or lessen the distance between father
and children. There was nothing to lighten the burden of these days:
these children were orphaned, even when their father sat among them.
One son ran away; another, in 1867, was found dead in his room, of a
rifle wound, under circumstances that left doubt as to whether accident
or suicide had caused the fatality; and one of his daughters could not
recur to the image of her father without a certain painful revulsion.
The picture is not a happy one: but a man with high purposes does not
always leave behind earthly children to bless him. One remembers how
Milton’s daughters cursed him in his own presence, and one realizes
that one can draw no valid conclusions from such conduct--except this,
that a man immersed in his inner vision is a difficult man to live
with, and if he does not renounce his family and its ties at the outset
of his quest, they may live to rise up against him before he is ended
with it. And who was to blame? Milton and Melville wanted the warmth of
domesticity: but their children had no part in the bargain that gave
them cold lodgings in the icy chambers of Heaven, and shabby clothes
and insufficient food and few opportunities for pleasure on the earth.
These children were of Melville’s flesh, but not of his mind: when he
purchased a work of art, a print or a statue for ten dollars, when
there was scarcely bread enough to go round, who can wonder at their
black memories? If they did not understand the need of a famished soul
for art, their father had too quickly forgotten his own humiliation
when he went to sea in a discarded hunting-jacket. Circumstances drove
Melville hard; but poverty alone does not make such a breach between
a parent and his children; and though one must pity Melville in this
extremity of misunderstanding, one cannot but feel that he himself
contributed to it.

The death of Elizabeth’s father in 1860 did not relieve the strain,
except by giving the family a clear title to Arrowhead; so, until
1866, the background of Melville’s life cannot be painted save in
dark colours. In spite of a personal interview with Lincoln in 1861,
Melville was again turned down for a consular post; and two years later
Melville finally decided to leave the Berkshires. To this end, he
purchased a house at 104 East Twenty-sixth Street, in New York, from
his brother, Allan, to whom he sold Arrowhead in part payment. But
misfortune persisted. In removing his household goods from Arrowhead,
the wagon was upset and he was thrown into the frozen ruts of the road.
The injury was so severe that Melville was forced to lie up for many
weeks in a near-by house, and in addition, to sap further his physical
health, the accident left him with a fear of carriage driving. So his
troubles piled up on him; and in the end, they grew so intolerable
that the humour of the whaleboat would return to him, and he would
smile again. I have painted in every sober and painful detail in the
background; the blacks, the dingy blues, the sear browns are the
dominant colours: true: but against this sordid groundwork one must not
build up a blacker foreground: on the contrary, there are occasional
flashes of warm colour or high light, and to leave them out would
falsify the whole picture.

There is a Micawber in all of us, not unfortunately. We may find
life disappointing without losing our taste for breaded veal cutlets
and stout. Overwhelmed by tragic experience, we may still laugh at
a hundred minor absurdities, as Melville no doubt laughed when he
discovered that in 1865 a firm of Philadelphia publishers, who had
taken over the rights to Israel Potter, had brought it out under the
new title of The Refugee, without Melville’s consent, and had set him
down as the author of two wholly imaginary books, The Two Captains and
The Man of the World! Through all his ailments, one infirmity helped
to counteract them, the infirmity of jocularity. He had one steady
comfort and mainstay which only the blackest incidents could erase for
more than a brief period: he had a sense of humour. More than that,
with a little encouragement, he had positive high spirits. If one
were not fully assured of this from a general knowledge of Melville’s
character, the letter he wrote to his brother Thomas in 1862 would
make this point plain: “Yesterday I received from Gansevoort your long
and very entertaining letter to Mamma from Pernambuco. Yes, it was
very entertaining. Particularly the account of that interesting young
gentleman whom you stigmatise for a jackass, simply because he improves
his opportunities in the way of sleeping, eating, and other commendable
customs. That’s the sort of fellow, it seems to me, to get along with.
For my part I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better.
Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one
of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable
about it, too. Think of those sensible and sociable millions of good
fellows, all taking a long, friendly snooze together, under the sod--no
quarrels, no imaginary grievances, no envies, heartburnings, & thinking
how much better the other chap is off--none of this: but all equally
free-&-easy, they sleep away and reel off their nine knots an hour, in
perfect amity.”

Or again, after his accident in 1862, in a letter to Samuel Shaw, his
brother-in-law, the same grave bantering appears: “... I begin to
indulge in the pleasing idea that my life must needs be of some value.
Probably I consume a certain amount of oxygen, which unconsumed might
create some disturbance in nature. Be that as it may, I am going to
try and stick to the conviction named above. Now I have observed that
such an idea, once well-bedded in a man, is a wonderful conservator of
health and almost a prophecy of long life. I once, like other spoonies,
cherished a loose sort of notion that I did not care to live very long.
But I will frankly own that I have now no serious, no insuperable
objections to a respectable longevity. I don’t like the idea of being
left out night after night in a cold churchyard.”

The humour and the sentiments both remind one of another black writer,
a later one, the author of the Shropshire Lad: without losing his inner
thoughts, Melville could nevertheless paraphrase them into a happier
vernacular. Meanwhile, a deeper blackness had settled over the land,
matching, patch for patch, wound for wound, scar for scar, every ill
in Melville’s own body and soul. That darkness was the darkness of
the Civil War; and when it finally lifted, it disclosed a different
country, a different age, a different series of possibilities. The
Civil War was a dividing point in the life of the country, and a
dividing point in Melville’s life. It widened the distance between
Melville and his younger contemporaries and it sealed, with finality,
his own position in society. The provincial culture was overwhelmed;
and what came to take its place was not a genuine culture, but a shoddy
substitute, mere fustian of the spirit. He looked around him after the
worst had happened; and his words must have been Bartleby’s: I know
where I am. That very consciousness was enough to cut him off from the
new society.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: ALARUMS AND RETREATS

Between the provincial society into which Herman Melville was born and
the America in which he found himself at the time of the Civil War
there was a vast difference. The Civil War may in one sense be looked
upon as an attempt to preserve the ideological framework of the United
States at a time when its institutions were in a state of disruption,
and all its typical ways of life were being transformed. In that
the Civil War preserved this framework, upholding the Constitution,
confirming the union of the states, concentrating the powers of
government, it was successful: the union was saved. But the very act of
prosecuting the war confirmed the chaos and hastened the disruption,
so that what was saved was not freedom and equality, the freedom of
voluntary association and local initiative, the equality of access to
an unlimited amount of utilizable land: what was left was just the
opposite of these things, servility and inequality. Land and natural
resources, scattered broadcast during the Civil War under the Homestead
Act, and under various acts to promote railroad building, were turned
into exacting monopolies; and the government itself became the
principal agent for establishing and extending privilege. In less than
half a generation Walt Whitman was forced to modify many of his fondest
hopes for America: for with all these new agents of exploitation
dominant, there was no longer any way of distinguishing the American
proletariat from that of Europe, except in their independent manners--a
relic of an equality that had once been real.

The disruption symbolized by the Civil War was expressed in a hundred
ways; and when one examines these manifestations carefully they can
all be characterized by a single figure: the failure to achieve form.
One sees the difference between provincial and industrial America in
the political definition of their units: New England, for example, is
a natural region, like Brittany and Provence, with a mode of thought
and an institutional form based upon certain common geographic features
and cultural history; the new states and territories that were founded
beyond the Alleghenies had no form other than that expressed by the
arbitrary lines drawn by the surveyor: their content was simply so
many blank square miles. The older cities of the seaboard, with the
exception of Philadelphia, had a central nucleus which had grown out
of local needs and habits: the size of the blocks was determined by
the depth of the houses, the amount of garden space in the rear, the
traffic that would pass in the streets: in the new cities no customs
and habits played a part in the configuration of the city except those
of realty speculation: by 1850, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Chicago
had all forfeited to the land-gambler sites originally set aside for
civic centres. In architecture, the failure to achieve form was equally
conspicuous: windows, doors, rooms, façades, even apart from their
grotesque efforts at decoration, all became gawky and ill-proportioned.

The energies of the country went into purely quantitative achievements:
their only formal equivalent was money. The production in tons of iron,
miles of steel rails, bushels of wheat, went up: cities increased in
size: but the iron was used for the preposterous fronts of office
buildings, the railroad served to deplete the hinterland, and the
cities were dingy firetraps of wood or dingier prisons of brownstone.
The war itself tore up and shot to pieces vast quantities of iron and
many miles of railroad, and sundry towns and villages: but that was
the true destination of all these quantitative efforts even in peace:
for industrialism produced only an occasional genuine form, like the
Eads Bridge, and for the most part its products were fit only to be
consumed hastily and replaced and destroyed again. No wonder this
civilization sweated day and night, without holidays, to produce its
evanescent goods; while, in the Middle Ages, the great cathedrals
and town halls were erected, without labour-saving machinery, in a
rude agricultural society which spent a third of its year in holidays
devoted to prayer, meditation, or festival. Where there is form and
culture, there is true conservation of energy through the arts: where
there is only energy, without end or form, the mechanism may be speeded
up indefinitely without increasing anything except the waste and
lost motion. Southern society, in which a provincial system of caste
and culture held together, produced factories and slave barracks, in
Charleston, for example, that maintained, uncorrupted, the forms of
its classic past: but outside these aristocratic backwaters, chaos was
dominant--and even in the South, one feels, it was only postponed.

In this sprawling, undisciplined America, a new type of character
was uppermost. Melville described this new type when he touched on
Ethan Allen in Israel Potter: “Allen,” he said, “seems to have been
a curious combination of a Hercules, a Joe Miller, a Bayard, and a
Tom Hyer. He was frank, bluff, companionable as a Pagan, convivial, a
Roman, hearty as a harvest. His spirit was essentially Western; and
herein is his peculiar Americanism; for the Western spirit is, or will
yet be (for no other can be) the true American.” It was a sign of the
waning of provincial faith that before the war everybody was eagerly
looking for this individual, this type, who would serve as a symbol
of unity. Even Emerson and Thoreau looked wistfully toward the rough
fellows of the frontier to express what was common to all Americans. A
provincial culture glories in its differences: the power to mould and
express them is its unique quality: a Jefferson, a Franklin, an Adams
were not only as far apart as Virginia, Philadelphia, and Boston: they
were as far apart, in many ways, as London, Paris, and Weimar. But
in the period before the war, the frontier type, Jackson, Harrison,
Clay, Frémont, Lincoln, was put forward as the sum of all our possible
Americas--albeit these figures were as far from the Swedes of Minnesota
or the Germans of Wisconsin as they were from the Gansevoorts and the
Randolphs. In a period of dissolution a false unity seems preferable
to no common bond at all; and in the uncertainty, the disintegration,
the dispersion of American society, under the vast tides of immigration
and the inexorable flow of the coal-and-iron civilization, political
Union became a compensatory symbol for all the social and cultural
fragmentation that existed.

The political and social results of the Civil War, as they have worked
out during the last two generations, have made us a little sceptical
of the sacred, unchallengeable shibboleths under which the war itself
was fought: we see that the prime issues of the great conflict were
silenced, rather than settled, by the decisive victory of the North.
Unfortunately, the South’s political contentions, which were partly
valid, were vitiated by the issue of slavery. Mid all the decisive
statesmanship displayed south of the Mason and Dixon line, no one was
firm enough or far-sighted enough, after Jefferson’s time, to see
that the holding of human beings in bondage, without hope or means
of escape, was an untenable anachronism: even the Russian autocracy
recognized that. The French Revolution had made this particular form of
human degradation unpalatable; like incest or tribal revenge, it could
not be related to a modern society. The burden of that institution,
indeed, belonged to the whole country: the great mistake of the South,
from 1830 onwards, was to assume as a divine necessity or benefit what
should have been shared with the rest of the country as an intolerable
evil--to be disposed of by some direct economic adjustment.

Melville had his misgivings about current political institutions; in
Mardi he pointed out that many of the boasted freedoms of America
were the product of free land and an uncrowded domain; and though he
was a republican, he recognized inequality, and had no hope of doing
away with those distinctions between man and man in a functional
capacity, which separate captain, mates, and crew. His own outlook was
emotionally patrician and aristocratic; but his years in the forecastle
had modified those feelings, and one needs some such compound word as
aristodemocracy to describe his dominant political attitude. Melville
may have had his moments of admiration for the gracious ways of the
South; but, quite properly, he regarded the United States as a place
where narrow tribalisms had been successfully dropped, where the entire
blood of Europe joined together from a thousand sources, the country
being not so much a nation in the old sense, as a world, a neighbourly
world; and he doubtless looked upon the Southern claim to independence
as a return to tribalism and narrowness.

Like most men of good will, Melville looked forward to a time when the
world itself would be federated into a whole, so that the conflicts
between peoples and tribes and communities, the inevitable and salutary
conflicts, would not take place on the physical plane--where they are
disastrous and prove nothing--but on the plane of culture. With this in
view, the breaking up of a federation is a mode of political atavism:
and the attempt reinforced Melville’s natural repugnance to slavery.
Unfortunately, the maintenance of a union by compulsive methods leads
to an enthronement of the powers of the central government, and a
diminution of a regional independence; the military strength of
the central government and its impudence in serving special groups
within the state, in turn becomes an obstacle to the pacification of
the world. Melville could scarcely anticipate this result; but his
philosophy had a place for the evil which dogs the footsteps of the
good, and when he said that America might turn out to be the Paul Jones
of nations, intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless
ambitions, civilized in externals but savage at heart, he may partly
have anticipated the outcome of that political supremacy he expected
the United States finally to attain. By the time the war opened, there
was established a certain fatalism in Melville’s mind which made him
lenient to the forces that seemed to him evil: they, too, in their
inscrutable way were obedient to another power.

Melville’s attitude towards the Civil War was, in sum, just the
opposite of Hawthorne’s; and if the men had been still in communication
during this period, it would probably have opened a final breach
between them. For Hawthorne, New England was as large a piece of
earth as he had any affection for, and whatever happened next, he
asserted in the early days of the conflict, he rejoiced that the old
Union was smashed. “We never were one people, and never really had a
country since the Constitution was founded.” There spoke the shrewd,
unshaken provincial. Hawthorne looked upon John Brown, moreover, as
a poisonous nuisance: for Melville he was a prophetic figure, whose
death made it impossible for the stabs of controversy to heal, whose
streaming beard was the very meteor of war. One may sum up Melville’s
political character by saying that his breeding and instincts were
those of a provincial; his superficial beliefs and attitudes were those
of a political unionist; and during the Civil War the latter were
uppermost, but not wholly so. Well might Walt Whitman describe the
war itself, and the temper of the society that ushered it in, by the
word “convulsiveness.” There was something arcane and uncontrollable
in these partisanships and antipathies: each fragment was thrown about
erratically, tangentially. It was war that produced war; and when the
active state at last came about, men settled to it with a sigh of
relief. War polarized these fragments: it gave an appearance of high
order to this chaos.

There is something paradoxical in the fact that Melville’s concern
over slavery and his fervour for the union should have come into
play during a period when he had become indifferent to most of the
nearest issues of life and convinced that existence itself was a
form of slavery. But one must not forget the anomalous nature of war
itself. In its instrumentalities, war is a denial of life: but in mood
and spirit war partly achieves all the things a humane or religious
mind cherishes: selflessness, contempt for creature habits and animal
comforts, nonchalance in the face of death, a willingness to give up
life cheerfully for an ideal end. If it is a sin, war is an heroic sin;
and who, exclaims Melville in Pierre, does not feel more warmly to
the Lord of Evil himself, than towards a petty shopkeeper, who daily
practices all the discreet and serviceable virtues? War is a malign,
ambiguous fulfilment of the things men permanently want in life--and
in its first flush, men forget its sordid accompaniments and its
disastrous results, and respond, not meanly, to its immediate stimulus.

There is no doubt that the prosecution of the war quickened Melville
and made him feel a purpose instead of the dull, fearful hollow of
an empty and respectable life. At forty-two, broken down in health,
unfit for active service, he watched these young men go forth in their
blue uniforms, with flushed faces and eager tread, a little enviously:
comradeship was a warm thing, even among the precious rapscallions
one might find in a whaler: it was an even deeper and warmer matter
among these young men who had shared sport together in their village,
or courted the same girl, or studied together under the same lamp at
college. These happy faces might be going to a picnic, to be pelted
with blossoms, not shrapnel:

Forever they slumber, young and fair,
The smile upon them as they died:
Their end attained, that end a height;
Life was to these a dream fulfilled
And death a starry night.

Unable to throw himself into battle, Melville followed the newspaper
accounts and the bulletins all the more closely. One pictures him
pacing the floor of his room at night, musing over Ball’s Bluff or
Antietam: there is no sleep in him during these racking days: the last
footsteps of a straggler die away in the street: no sound comes through
the air except the distant hoot of a boat on the North River; and
Melville’s mind plays back and forth across the days. Intermittently,
all the old glow would come back to him in these dark moments: he would
picture himself perhaps, borne by the tide of men at his back over an
earthworks, as he was borne in a whaleboat on the back of the lashing
whale. The reckless lift: the thrust: the yell of defiance: being
thrown down and struggling to rise again through a tangled drift of
legs and bodies: the shout of victory: the feeling of proud defiance:
the knowledge that death does not matter when one is at last, with all
one’s senses quickened, face to face with it. The whaleman’s joy: the
soldier’s joy: the joy of hard living and easy dying!

The war, with its heroism and defeat, was the image of Melville’s own
life; and, in the blackest night, the glow of its fires illumined his
face. The rigid order of warfare gave Melville the sense of a cosmic
purpose at work: in the working out of Dupont’s Round Fight Melville
saw another significance in the struggle for the Union: it was not the
political bond that Melville’s contemporaries alone wanted confirmed:
they desired that the Universe itself should hold together! Melville’s
interpretation is, I think, an illusory one; but one cannot question
the deep need that it expressed.

In time and measure perfect moves
All art whose aim is sure;
Evolving rhyme and stars divine
Have rules and they endure.

Nor less the fleet that warred for Right
And warring so, prevailed,
In geometric beauty curved
And in an orbit sailed.

The Rebel at Port Royal felt
The Unity overawe
And rued the spell. A type was here
And victory of law.

But it was the happy fortune of youth that Melville, betrayed by the
disasters of middle age, returned to when he contemplated the war. Who,
he asked, can remain aloof that shares youth’s ardour, uncooled by the
snows of wisdom or sordid gain? War made life again a great spectacle
and a great adventure: that defiance of the low limitations upon which
life depends, which Melville had expressed in Moby-Dick, came back
again: vanished at last were the doubts, perturbations, speculations,
cynicisms, endless grey questionings. Ten years before Melville might
have been repelled by the evil and ugliness of it: the maimed bodies,
the cruelties, the infamous prison and concentration camps, the furtive
squads of deserters, the hospital agonies, the litany of unknown
soldiers and nameless burial spots that Whitman gravely remembered and
recited. Now Melville was armed for the evil and ugliness of it, and
even for its futility:

No utter surprise can come to him
Who reaches Shakespeare’s core;
That which we seek and shun is there--
Man’s final lore.

Melville was possibly in New York in 1863, when the carnival of looting
and murder and general protest took place over the infliction of the
draft. He pictures himself, oppressed by the sultry air, climbing to
the roof-top and looking over the hushed city: in the distance, he
hears the mixed surf of muffled sound, the roar of riot and the dull
glare of fires. The city was in the hands of the mob, and that mob had
sunk “whole aeons back into nature,” vindictive, cruel, irresponsible,
blind, bloodthirsty. Melville heard the rumble of the artillery which
finally broke up the riot and exacted vengeance on the mob; and,
pondering this event, he was conscious of the grimy slur upon the
Republic’s faith, a slur implied by the cause of the outbreak, by the
outbreak itself, and by the suppression of it. Where was now the belief
in life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness? Where now the conviction
that man is naturally good and--“more--is Nature’s Roman, never to be
scourged”? With all his new enthusiasm, Melville’s deeper perceptions
were never altogether out of sight:

Did the Fathers feel mistrust?
Can no final good be wrought?
Over and over, again and again
Must the fight for the Right be fought?

Were men but strong and wise,
Honest as Grant and calm,
War would be left to the red and black ants
And the happy world disarm.

Even the supremacy of the Union, Melville finally came to see, might
bring some other result than the purpose for which it was conceived.
In one of the prefatory poems in his Battle Pieces, the Conflict of
Convictions 1860-1861, Melville expressed his doubt: from the allusion
to the Iron Dome it is plain that the verse was written later, when
the Dome itself had been put into place on the Capitol at Washington,
by one of those happy accidents that sometimes give an event its exact
appropriate symbol.

Power unannointed may come--
Dominion (unsought by the free)
And the Iron Dome
Stronger for stress and strain
Fling her huge shadow athwart the main;
But the Founders’ dream shall flee.
Age after age shall be
As age after age hath been,
(From man’s changeless heart their way they win);
And death shall be busy with all who strive,
Death, with silent negative.

Yea and Nay,
Each hath his say;
But God he keeps the middle way.
None was by
When he spread the sky;
Wisdom is vain, and prophecy.

Though he was emotionally at one with the war, Melville’s thoughts were
not entirely harmonized with his feelings: his ultimate doubts crept
into his most sanguine reactions to the conflict; and at bottom, the
things that quickened him were not the formal purposes of the conflict
but its incidents--the flashing youths, the gallant charge, the daring
commander, the spirited horse that carried Sheridan to battle. “Nothing
can lift the heart of man like manhood in a fellow man,” he says. The
Civil War satisfied this desperate need in his own soul: but apart from
its animal vigour and glory, even its solidest purposes seemed infirm
and fragile. He pictures an heroic soldier, surviving the carnage,
the Seven Days’ Fight, the Wilderness, the field-hospital, and Libby
Prison--surviving it and reflecting on his experience: “Heaven! what
_truth_ to him!” He himself had already drained the lees of adversity;
the war had nothing to add there, except to make his own experience
that of a whole generation.

In the break of emotional tension caused by the fall of Richmond,
Melville wrote most of his verses on the Civil War. A few were printed
in the magazines during the first part of 1866, and later in the year,
Melville collected and published the whole volume of verse, Battle
Pieces and Other Aspects of the War; with a supplement, gravely and
well written, in which he counterbalanced any Unionist fervour and
elation he might have shown in the battle poems, by discussing, with
great sympathy and tact, the plight of the South and the psychological
problems confronting the North, particularly, in dealing with it.

One of the poems in the collection, Sheridan at Cedar Creek, was long
quoted as one of the memorable poems evoked by the war; but, although
Melville’s verses on the war are the only serious contemporary rivals
to Whitman’s Drum-Taps, one cannot, with the most lenient eye, put them
in the same class. Melville rarely achieved form as a poet: he was
often very near to it, as we shall see when we examine his poems about
the sea and his travels: but although the sensitiveness, the emotional
tension, the rough powers of expression, in short, the ingredients of
poetry were there, he permitted himself to be conquered by the external
form of line and stanza: his rhythms are broken, not by their own inner
development, but because they meet a foreign object, and get shattered
against it. These verses are such jewelry as a sculptor might make.
Melville’s mallet and chisel and sinew were of little use with a pitch
block and a graving-tool.

Among these verses there are a few stanzas that give one a hint of
what Melville’s potentialities as a poet were: his poem on John Brown
is one of them, and another occurs in a poem commemorative of a naval
victory--despite the weakness of the second line, it rings like a bell.

But seldom the laurel wreath is seen
Unmixed with pensive pansies dark;
There’s a light and a shadow on every man
Who at last attains his lifted mark--
Nursing through night the ethereal spark.
Elate he never can be;
He feels that spirit which had hailed his worth
Sleep in oblivion.--The shark
Glides white through the sulphurous sea.

It is no accident that this stanza utters Melville’s deepest intuition
of life. Here image is symbol, and the symbol presents, without further
reflection or explanation, the idea in its totality: _the shark glides
white through the sulphurous sea_. There is something final in that.
Melville might hope: he might be stirred up: he might join hands with
his fellows: he might even achieve victory: all these things had
happened in the collective excitement of the Civil War; but in the end
the elation and exaltation were doomed to pass away. In the very act
of achieving personal success, Melville had become aware of something
in the Constitution of the Universe that fatally marred it: the shark
glides white through the sulphurous sea. His demon was not deceived. It
lived in the midst of chaos, and this Civil War, unified, regimented,
ordered, inexorable as it seemed, was chaos, too. Order springs from
within, mixing with circumstance but never carried away by it: in
other words, order is art--and art was the one thing lacking in the
whole plan of life that had arisen to dominate America. Raw power,
raw experience, were uppermost. White sharks swam everywhere: shark
ate shark, and greedily battened upon the refuse of the sinking boat.
No use to fight the White Whale, if the boat that holds human culture
breaks up, and the crew is killed, and only the sharks remain in the
waters. I have expanded Melville’s symbol, perhaps; but one cannot
magnify his disillusion. As early as 1866 he noted in his Supplement
that “for them who are neither partisans nor enthusiasts, nor
theorists, nor cynics, there are some doubts not readily to be solved.
And there are fears. Why is not the cessation of war now at length
attended with the settled calm of peace?”

In his Supplement, Melville pleaded for generosity to the vanquished,
for a spirit of forbearance, for the sort of magnanimity that the
Union soldiers showed at Vicksburg, when they watched the dejected
Confederates file out without raising a shout of triumph. “Let us
pray,” he concluded, “that the terrible historic tragedy of our time
may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved
country through terror and pity; and may fulfillment verify in the end
those expectations which kindle the bards of Progress and Humanity.”
Melville was definitely not one of the bards of progress and humanity;
but in the loose sympathies of wartime, he had listened to all their
righteous self-praise and their optimistic predictions; and though he
did not share their philosophy, he at least joined them in their hopes,
while there was still a possibility that they might be pragmatically
justified.

That weak optimism came to nothing. There was a treachery that annulled
these efforts--the treachery of the madness that resulted in Lincoln’s
death: the vindictive virtue of the Abolitionists, who inflicted
military occupation and carpet-bag governments on their fallen enemies:
and that very tragic topsy-turvydom of war which provides snug berths
and comfortable fortunes to the profiteers and speculators, and offers
a sordid routine and a share in the general bankruptcy to those who are
unfortunate enough to escape a quick and early death.

The Union had perhaps been worth dying for: but nobody could confront
the post-bellum scene, with its Vanderbilts and Jay Cookes and Daniel
Drews, without wondering seriously whether the Union was worth living
for. The heroes were dead: dead or incapacitated: incapacitated or
tired. Those who had any fight left in them would fight for Civil
Service Reform, as Carl Schurz did, or if they had energy, they would
go into railroads, like Charles Francis Adams: it was no accident
that those who sought a career less in harmony with the accepted good
works of industrialism--a Henry Hobbes Richardson, a Mark Twain, a
Henry Adams, a William James, a Stanley Hall--were usually men who
had by one chance or another lived during the war at a considerable
distance from the struggle, and who had missed, not alone the fine
heroism of that experience, but the terrible disillusion and collapse
that follows such efforts; and who, like Stanley Hall, were moved to
expiate their failure to risk death on the battlefield by living a
little more arduously and heroically on the plane of daily life. These
men might seek patiently to build up their careers; but those who had
been buoyed up by the great energies and expectations of provincial
America, in that Golden Day when they had grasped power and material
mastery without losing hold of culture and form--those earlier writers
and makers found themselves sinking helplessly out of sight, battered
wrecks, submerged by the tide of industry and finance, whose waves rose
higher and higher during the ten years that followed the great storm.
There were no quiet waters for these men; or, if they found them, as
Emerson did, as Whitman did, they lost the power to go to sea again;
and, instead of being beaten to pieces on the treacherous coast, merely
rotted at the wharf.

In 1866, at the age of forty-seven, Herman Melville, too, withdrew
from the war, defeated. That fine “scorn of life which earns life’s
crown”--earns, but does not always win it--had left him with the
burdens, difficulties, grievances of a returning soldier. He had fought
a not less worthy fight; and now, once for all, he retreated. He did
not surrender; for he kept on writing to the end of his days; but he
could no more live on his writings than a veteran of the Grand Army
could exchange his medals and scars for honest bread. Melville was
forced to face this fact, after twenty years of writing and fifteen
years of continuous, desperate struggle. He had not given in quickly or
petulantly; and when he finally made this decision, one can detect in
it no sign of outraged vanity or reproach. He had gauged his position:
he knew the worst: he was prepared to meet it. Through the offices
of an old travelling companion, he found a place as inspector in the
Custom House, a post he had described in Redburn as “a most inglorious
one; indeed, worse than driving geese to water.”

From this time on a sweetness and serenity began to spread over the
man. The dark torture of Pierre and The Confidence Man might return in
weak moments; there might be hours of stormy egoism or inner defiance;
but in the main there was peace. This, too, he had anticipated for
himself in Isabel’s words, almost half a generation before: “My spirit
seeks different food from happiness; for I think I have a suspicion
of what it is. I have suffered wretchedness, but not because of the
absence of happiness, and without praying for happiness, I pray for
peace--for motionlessness--for the feeling of myself, as of some plant,
absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual
sensation.” A Hindu sage might have sought this peace in the forest:
Melville, with quiet irony, sought it in the Custom House.

The decision was made; the door was closed: Melville’s troubles and
humiliations could carry him no lower. For the first time in ten
years Melville had the means, the energy, the relief from anxiety
necessary for the prosecution of a long work, and with indomitable
spirit he set to work again. Melville’s retreat was not a withdrawal
from his proper self, but a withdrawal from the conditions that
hampered its expression--the taste of the public and the predilections
of publishers, the demand for warmed-over Peedee and Hullabaloo.
“How live at all,” he asks himself, “if once a fugitive from thy own
nobler part, though pain be portion inwrought with the grain,” and in
this sense Melville was never a fugitive. His next effort was a long
narrative poem--the original edition in two volumes numbers 571 pages
and about 20,000 lines--based on his Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. In
his Constantinople notebook, he had originally set down a suggestion
for Frescoes of Travel by Three Brothers, Poet, Painter, and Scholar;
and in the intervening years the conception had grown and expanded into
a modern Canterbury pilgrimage of the harassed, the faithless, the
doubting, the exiled. Clarel, this new work, was not published till
1876; but the book itself was probably written shortly after the Civil
War: the heightened skill in verse, the reference to the Civil War in
Part IV, the fact that the poem is all of a piece, and the testimony
of Melville’s surviving daughter, all focus on this period; and
Melville’s own reference to the poem’s having been long in existence
before his uncle, Mr. Peter Gansevoort, generously provided money for
its publication, enables one to associate the beginning of this mental
pilgrimage with his withdrawal into the Custom House.

Melville’s short sojourn in Palestine had made a deep impression on
him: the notes that belonged to those weeks were full of observations.
In Jerusalem he had encountered all sorts of queer people: an old
commercial man giving tracts to people whose language he did not
understand; a Philadelphian turned Jew, who had married a Jewess;
a fanatical American missionary going about Jerusalem with an open
Bible, looking forward to the opening asunder of Mount Olivet and
in the meanwhile preparing the highway for the procession of the
dead; a crazy American woman who had opened an agricultural academy
for the Jews without converting a single Jew to either agriculture
or Christianity. Deliberately he had saturated his mind with the
atmosphere of Jerusalem, “offering myself up,” he noted, “as a passive
subject, and no unwilling one, to its weird impression,” and always
rising at dawn and walking outside the city walls. In the afternoon
he would stand by the Shepherd’s Gate, on the spot where Christ was
stoned, and “watch the shadows sliding, sled-like, down the hills of
Beretta and Zion into the valley of Jehoshaphat, then, after resting
awhile, creeping up the opposite side of Olivet, entering tomb after
tomb, and cave after cave.” The Christ-mood sometimes came over
him; he felt in himself the unrecognized god, or the goaded deity,
the mystic scapegoat of an inscrutable patriarchal presence; he too
had climbed the way of Calvary. But the Devil’s ingenuity did not
impress him: the Mount of Temptation was only a black, arid mount
overlooking the Dead Sea: why did the foolish fiend think any one
would value the rulership of such an empire--and if it was only a
vision, why take him up to the Mount? But though every rock and road
had an association, it was the landscape of Palestine that overwhelmed
him: the arid hills, the smell of burning rubbish in Jerusalem, the
melancholy olive tree, the whitish mildew that pervaded whole tracts of
landscape--bleached--leprosy--encrustation of cakes--old cheese--bones
of rocks--crunched, gnawed, and mumbled--mere refuse and rubbish of
creation, comparing with ordinary regions as a skeleton with the
living and rosy man. “Is the desolation of the land,” Melville asked
himself, “the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity? Hapless are
the favourites of Heaven!” Palestine had dissipated his romantic
expectation; but it had reciprocated all the aridness and emptiness
of his spirit. In the antediluvian port of Joppa, just before his
departure, Joppa, which was too ancient to have antiquities, he felt
like Jonah himself, and only strong self-control and grim defiance
enabled him to keep cool and patient. The Dead Sea had concentrated all
these impressions: the foam on the beach and pebbles had been like the
slaver of a mad dog: the water had been swarthy, bitter, and, carrying
the bitter taste in his mouth all day, he had felt the utter bitterness
of life. “Bitter is it to be poor and bitter to be reviled, and oh,
bitter are these waters of death, thought I.”

All these sights and experiences formed the background of Clarel; but
the poem itself is far richer in detail than the notebooks: it is an
imaginative elaboration of his experiences, and not a reproduction
of them. The arid background, which reflected Melville’s own feeling
of hopelessness in 1857, retreated: the foreground is thronged
with people who have independent lives and motives. All the major
characters, Clarel the student, Vine the wanderer, Rolfe, another
uneasy wanderer, Mortmain, the disillusioned Swedish revolutionary, and
Ungar, a Baltimore Catholic with a streak of Indian in him, all these
characters, it is true, centre like focussed rays in Melville’s own
being, baffled by his perplexities, and arguing, like his own doubts,
among themselves. The spirit that pervades Clarel is sober, restrained,
steady-eyed: its failure as poetry is due, in part, to this very
sobriety of thought.

The first part discloses Clarel, a student who has abandoned his
preparations for the ministry, in Jerusalem. He has come to lay his
inner questions at the gates of religion’s own city, thinking to find
from an older race, the Jews, with a remoter history, some clue to
the unsettled and uneasy state in which he lives, and some path of
development which will lead again to wholeness. Behind the crumbling
faith of Rome and Luther is the crag of Sinai--adamant! While exploring
Jerusalem, Clarel makes the acquaintance of an American, Nathan, who
has become a convert to Judaism, and falls in love with his daughter,
Ruth. Nathan’s Jewish wife and daughter, though loyal to the faith,
still long for some of the things America had given them--and they do
not altogether share the zeal of the convert. Even in Jerusalem, the
story swarms with characters: Melville tells the history of each chance
acquaintance, as if by a thousand examples from the lives of other men
one might find an answer to one’s own. Most of these lives, though
Melville gives them a foreign birthplace, are touched by the reflected
light of his own history. Thus in Celio’s story, one cannot help
following Melville’s own plight:

Fain had his brothers have him grace
Some civic honorable place:
And interest was there to win
Ample preferment: he as kin
Was loved, if but ill understood:
At heart they had his worldly good:
But he postponed and went his way
Unpledged, unhampered....
Since love, arms, courts abjure--why then
Remaineth to me what? The pen?
Dead feather of ethereal life?
Nor efficacious much, save when
It makes some fallacy more rife.
My kin--I blame them not at heart--
Would have me act some routine part,
Subserving family, and dreams
Alien to me--illusive schemes.

Ruth’s father is killed on his lonely farm by Arab raiders and robbers,
and Clarel is not permitted by Jewish custom to enter the House of
Mourning. Being cut off from his beloved, he decides to ease his
loneliness by joining a cavalcade, going across Palestine to the Dead
Sea, through the wilderness where John wandered, and back again by
Bethlehem. On the journey, we are deliberately reminded of Chaucer’s
Pilgrims, and the robust, full-blooded, healthy, superficial, English
Broad Churchman, Derwent--the most completely embodied character in
the whole book--is described with a little of that soft sweet malice
Chaucer knew so well how to use.

Thought’s last adopted style he showed;
Abreast kept with the age, the year
And each bright optimistic mind,
Nor lagged with Solomon in rear,
And Job, the furthermost behind--
Brisk marching in time’s drum-corps van
Abreast with whistling Jonathan.

But these Pilgrims do not while away the hour with merry tales:
instead of being able to assume the faith, and take life pretty much
as it comes, as Chaucer’s honest folk did, their faith is threatened
and disintegrated, and even life’s happiness is a problem that must
be solved: it exacerbates them almost as much as their emptiness.
Chaucer’s people eat, drink, joke, love, quarrel, cozen, cheat, hate,
envy: living in a world where these things exist, along with chivalry
and nobility and chastity, they are neither saddened nor puzzled,
because the framework of that world is articulated, and each part of
it has its necessary place--even the sins. Among Melville’s pilgrims,
however, not even the virtues are safe: each man lives in a private
world that trembles and dissolves at every shock.

Contrast these pious atheists, these doubtful scholars, these sobered
revolutionaries, with the Mussulman, the orthodox Jew, the bland,
beef-fed English clergyman, or the Roman Catholic abbot. The latter go
through their daily ritual without question or loss of energy: their
orthodoxy is secure and they themselves are untroubled: wrapped in
an absorbing dream, their body is indifferent to the hard pallet on
which they lie. The mocking Jewish atheist is happy, too; as Spinoza,
blessed with a diviner illusion, was happy: but the question is: Can a
Clarel, a Rolfe, a Mortmain, in short, a Melville, acquire that sort of
serenity without cutting himself off from his very flesh and tissue?
Once one has broken out of the orthodoxy, one can no more go back to
it than a disturbed sleeper can resume the thread of a vanished dream,
no more than a grown man can go back to the games of his childhood.
There was once a time no doubt when he could call sand sugar and stones
bread: but now stones were stones, cold, flinty--no doubt about that.
“The pains lie among the pleasures,” Melville noted while in Palestine,
“like sand in rice, not only bad in themselves, but spoiling the good”;
and this held of faith and doubt as well as pain and pleasure.

Melville’s insight no longer shrivelled and blasted the very
constitution of man, as in The Confidence Man; but it pierced,
perhaps, even deeper. An indictment of humanity itself is a blank
indictment which turns the accuser into one of the principal
defendants: one suspects the morals of Juvenal and the kindliness
of Swift, precisely because they see so little of these qualities
in the people about them. In Clarel, Melville went through country
after country, and institution after institution, as he had done
in Mardi: here he points out a weak joint, there a plaster-covered
crack, or in another place a false foundation. One cannot evade these
specific criticisms. From the atheist who jeers at Rome--“patcher of
the rotten cloth, pickier of the wing of the moth, toaster of bread
stale in date”--to the reactionary religionist who attacks Derwent’s
belief in a Christianity blandly coupled with comfort and progress and
toasted muffins and dividends, all working together for the greater
glory of Mammon, scarcely any of the complacencies of Melville’s age
escaped: his chilly wind blew the rotten roof off every house of
refuge. Blake paused at the wonder of life, which had with the same
breath created the tiger and the lamb: but Melville in a mordant line
said: “If true what priests avouch of Thee, the shark Thou madst, yet
claimst the dove.” These lines show, I think, that the consolations of
transcendental religion were always far from Melville. The consolations
of Progress were, alas! equally remote: Melville had small use for
those who heaved contempt on “rite and creed sublime” and yet clung
to their own rank fable, the “latest shame of time.” In the conflict
between a crumbling theology and a cocky, over-confident science,
Melville could take neither side. Melville felt that the scantling of
the contemporary scientific outlook was no equivalent for the massive
architecture of the ancient church; nor could he reassure himself,
when he found cold adverse rains beating down on his head, that the
scantling was a new and finer kind of architecture.

Yea, long as children feel affright
In darkness, men shall fear a God;
And long as daisies yield delight
Shall see His footprints in the sod.
Is’t ignorance? This ignorant state
Science doth but elucidate,
Deepen, enlarge....
Let fools count on faith’s closing knell--
Time, God, are inexhaustible.

Melville was aware of the historic parallel to his own age; and he knew
what its outcome had been. Christ had followed Osiris: Jesus had indeed
come out of Egypt, as the legend said; and in the time of Cicero, when
Roman society was in the same state of doubt, disruption, and despair
as the Western world was in Clarel’s day, a new era of resolution and
faith was beginning to open. Doubt and all its maladies in the moral
life were no more final in society than they were in the individual:
“There is,” Melville said, “no steady unretracing progress in this
life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one
pause:--through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless
faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then
disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But
once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and
men, and Ifs eternally.” Like Matthew Arnold, Melville was keenly aware
of the transition; but, being an American, he could not accept the mere
sense of historic continuity, of a favourable inertia, as a substitute
for a new faith.

When one examines the mood of Clarel and the conclusions of one of
the pilgrims, Mortmain, the Swede, who had been a prophet of the new
order and a revolutionary, bent on carrying further the vast abstract
programme of the French revolution, one becomes conscious of the
exceptional maturity of Melville’s social observation. Melville had
reached by sober meditation what Herzen, for example, had achieved
only after a long kindergarten training in ideals and enthusiasms.
Men like Herzen had avoided ultimate issues. They drugged themselves
with plot, conspiracy, oratory, propaganda, every form of verbal
busy work. They ended in total disillusion, without seeing that they
should not have reached this spiritual desert had they started out
with a less abstract and barrenly subjective view of their task. Now,
Melville, too, realized that the social revolution had already taken on
a millennial character by 1848: it was the new democratic equivalent
of the older scheme of salvation by faith, and men like Bakunin and
Louis Blanc and Engels had found in it something that knit their
lives together and gave them significance, as the Civil War did for
Melville, as other-worldly religion did for the orthodox. With this in
mind, Melville’s comments upon Mortmain’s adventures are all the more
pregnant; for Mortmain came to doubt not so much his purposes as his
instruments:

... Wear and tear and jar
He met with coffee and cigar:
These kept awake the man and mood
And dream. That uncreated Good
He sought whose absence is the cause
Of creeds and Atheists, mobs and laws.
Precocities of heart outran
The immaturities of brain.
Along with each superior mind
The vain, foolhardy, worthless, blind,
With Judases, are nothing loath
To clasp pledged hands and take the oath
Of aim, the which, if just, demands
Strong hearts, brows deep, and priestly hands.

* * * * *

Wouldst meddle with the state? Well, mount
Thy guns; how many men dost count?
Besides, there’s more that here belongs:
Be many questionable wrongs:
By yet more questionable war
Prophet of peace, these wouldst thou bar?
The world’s not new, nor new thy plea.
Tho’ even shouldst thou triumph, see:
Victorious right may wild redress:
No failure like a harsh success.
Yea, ponder well the historic page:
Of all who, fired with noble rage,
Have warred for right without reprieve.

* * * * *

The world is portioned out, believe:
The good have but a patch at best,
The wise their corner, for the rest--
Malice divides with ignorance.

Insight like this may be fatal to a weak man, or added poison to a
disappointed one: but when a man well bottomed takes it to his bosom,
he is no longer defenceless against his own inner hopes, desires,
wishes: he goes armed. Such wisdom does not nullify generous efforts:
a Lenin may count his guns and men and still wage revolution: he will
not do this the worse for recognizing, as Lenin grimly did, all the
vain and foolish people who, along with the Judases, divide place with
those who have strong hands and deep brows. Life is stultified by
vacuous dreams, dreams of achievement without effort, pleasure without
satiety, art without discipline, or a better social order without a
moral and metaphysical conversion of the very people who must bring
it about. Besides these dreams, the most gritty reality is a tonic.
To acknowledge these realities, instead of seeking weak consolations
or empty reassurances, is the mark of a mature mind. Melville had
penetrated as far as Herzen the psychological problem of revolutionary
betterment: but he was almost fifty years “before his time” in stating
it. We can understand Melville’s social scepticism today, and we
should not, perhaps, remain so long in the trough of our own wave,
apathetically waiting for a dictatorship or an earthquake or a war to
rouse us and focus our energies once more, had we been able to learn
from Melville the necessary cost of our efforts. For every act of the
wise and the good is nullified by malice and ignorance, unless the wise
and the good learn to reckon these evils among the conditions of their
problem. Melville had faced human nature as a whole: he was not blind
to its inert or irrational elements; nor could he accept “A Reasonable
Constitution” that overlooked them.

What though Reason forged your scheme?
’Twas Reason dreamed the Utopia’s dream:
’Tis dream to think that Reason can
Govern the reasoning creature, man.

Melville’s scepticism did not flinch at even the securest parts of the
conceptual universe.

Canst feel elate
While all the depths of Being moan,
Though luminous on every hand,
The breadths of shallow knowledge more expand?
Much as the light-ship keeper pines
Mid shoals immense, where dreary shines
His lamp, we toss beneath the ray
Of Science’s beacon. This to trim
Is now man’s barren office.

But the tentative nature of science’s triumphs, and the disintegration
of the great religious unity which had heretofore provided an
intelligible framework, still left one possible avenue unexplored.
Perhaps salvation was to be found, as André Gide has suggested
in his study of Dostoyevsky, in the practice of the arts, such
salvation as the great minds of the Renaissance found amid similar
disruption: Wren, with his multitudinous buildings that housed an empty
ecclesiasticism, Leonardo and Michelangelo with the saints that had
lost their ineffable powers and taken on the forms of mighty men and
women, Rembrandt with those thousand enigmatic faces, gazing back, with
questioning eyes, into eyes that still question. Melville did not, I
believe, fully understand this solution or face its possibility: but he
saw one side of it, the advance of the mechanical arts, and there, with
cold acumen, he beheld no happy sequel: rather the contrary:

... Arts are tools;
But tools, they say, are to the strong:
Is Satan weak? Weak is the wrong?
No blessed augury overrules:
Your arts advance in faith’s decay:
You are but drilling the new Hun
Whose growl even now can some dismay;
Vindictive in his heart of hearts,
He schools him in your mines and marts--
A skilled destroyer.

These lines were written in the time of the supremest Victorian
confidence. Herbert Spencer had demonstrated, he thought, by revamping
Comte’s generalization, that a military and feudal order, founded
upon a demonistic theology, was inevitably going to be replaced by an
industrial order, inimical to militarism, and founded upon science and
free contract. That the new arts of industrialism had themselves any
capacity for mischief was not hinted at by the dominant prophets of
the day: Ruskin’s warnings were lonely ones, and he was contemptuously
thrust aside as a fanatical aesthete, who understood the stones of
Venice, perhaps, but not the steel of Sheffield. In the passage just
quoted, Melville went quite as far as Ruskin: industrialism, to him,
offered no certain pledge of happiness or welfare: it depended, rather,
upon who used these tools, and how.

The ruthless sweeping away of human values, the sacrifice of the
worker’s welfare to profits, and of general well-being to a bleak
efficiency, and, finally, the sweeping away of all the decencies
of life in a bestial internecine warfare, aggravated by all the
improvements in the arts: Melville saw all these things, and perceived
that a good part of the routine of education, work, and patriotism
could be called, not least in the “advanced” countries, a drilling of
the Hun. Walter Rathenau, one of the great industrial leaders of the
past generation, came to the same conclusion at the end of the World
War, and he pictured its consequences: but Melville anticipated him
there, as he anticipated the disillusion of the social revolutionists.
He saw that unless human values were firmly established, the practice
of the arts was as blind and futile as the firing of a revolver into
empty air: with power and precision at command, the revolver hits
nothing whatever--but in its very aimlessness, it may destroy something
precious, as the blind projection of a concrete road by a half-witted
road engineer may destroy a row of elms in a New England village.
Melville put this thought, it is true, into the mouth of a religious
zealot: but like everything else in Clarel, it belonged to his own
innermost mood.

Melville, it will be seen, did not in Clarel take refuge in any of
the cheap opiates of his time: his scepticisms are as inexorable, as
thoroughgoing, as they had been in the most devastating pages of The
Confidence Man; but, with all this dubiety, there is a difference in
the mood; and though Clarel pictures the thoughts of men unfrocked in
faith, and shows them wandering over many arid deserts and picking
their way through the broken streets of many ruined towns, something
solid, the beginnings of a new faith, kept Melville himself from
slipping into hopeless indifference or more hopeless despair. Whether
Melville intentionally symbolized his dilemma in the fable I do not
know; and in the light of his deliberate subtlety in Moby-Dick one
cannot say positively that he did not: but the unconscious significance
of Clarel’s love affair is perhaps worth speculating upon; for it
affected his attitude and his conclusion.

Clarel fell in love with a Jewish maid, as Melville had fallen in
love with ancient Jewish thought. Christianity was at times repugnant
to Melville, for the highest virtue had for him necessarily some of
the Greek or Hebraic element of power, and the epicene Christ of
mediaeval legend did not attract him; nor was he comforted by supernal
promises of an after-life. If Melville confesses that the truest of
all men was the Man of Sorrows, he added that “the truest of all
books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of
woe.” In the period of his own discomposure, the black aphorisms of
Solomon, Koheleth, and Jesus-ben-Sirach, and the bitter plaints of
Job, were closer to him than anything else in literature. “There is a
wisdom that is woe,” Melville had found, “and there is a woe that is
madness.” He had come to the first, and he had stood on the brink of
madness: looking in the Bible for comfort, Melville had found, in the
greatest of the Jewish writers, only a confirmation of his own fears
and exasperations. “Oppression maketh a wise man mad.” “Man is born to
trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Such sayings deepened his sympathy
with Jewish culture; and, in the sense that they carried the same
burden as his own, they lessened his load. Ruth, Clarel’s love, dies;
and the fulfilment that Clarel had hoped to find there, he must now
find in his own bosom, with only the memory of her spirit to comfort
him.

Why then, with all these virtues of thought, is Clarel necessarily
Melville’s most neglected book? The capital difficulty, I think, is
inherent in its very conception as a narrative poem: it is impossible
to carry through so many pages the quick sympathies and empathies
that it is in the nature of verse to give. Wordsworth probably had
as much skill in blank verse as any one since Shakespeare, and he
was unable to avoid long waste tracts in his lengthy philosophic
and biographic poems. Blake and Whitman, with a surer instinct,
developed polyphonic cadences for their long poems, and this is the
only tolerable alternative, I think, at least in English, to the
immeasurable variety of prose itself. Melville’s eight-syllabled lines
in Clarel are monotonous, vary the rhyme scheme as he will; they are
made even more tedious by the stale poetic airs that accompanied it.
Melville’s aloofness and spiritual independence, which cut him off from
his own contemporaries, not merely saved him from their errors and
superstitions: it also prevented him from profiting by their genuine
advances. With the exception of Whitman and Emily Dickinson, scarcely
any of Melville’s contemporaries had participated in that great
refreshment of poetic language, by the fuller use of the vernacular,
by discarding the powdered wig of “poetic diction,” and by the use
of direct and simple word order, that had been made possible by
Wordsworth’s propaganda and example. In his lesser poems Emerson sinned
in this respect almost as much as the poetasters around him; and Poe’s
“tarns” and Nycean barks of yore and his seraphim were typical of the
exaggerations and clichés that afflicted the American poets of his time.

In the verses of his later years, Melville largely escaped from this
fashionable prison; but in Clarel he was too frequently the victim of
his uncertain taste. He tags adjectives on to nouns to eke out the
line; he uses, all too frequently, words like fane and sward and rue
and twain and nigh, and, with unforgivable recurrence, he rhymes elf
and self; above all, not relying on his ear for more subtle quantities,
he fills out lines with redundant words or phrases--or clips them off.
This clumsiness in detail adds to the clumsiness of conception: what
might have been vivid prose became dull verse: what might have been
good Borrow became bad Rogers. Mid all this poetizing there remains,
of course, a little poetry: lines that lift out of the grey pages like
a sudden sea gull from the monotonous surface of the ocean: there
are even whole passages, in particular the Dirge that comes toward
the end, which are veritably moving. But although the materials for
intense feeling or vivid imagism are present, they are spoiled in the
mixing. All this acute observation of men, things, places, seems to
clog Melville’s spirit: when he achieves victory, it is a victory of
thought: an idea becomes pregnant and a dozen good lines are born. But
the detail over-rides the general impression, as the ingenuity of the
Hindu craftsman over-rides the total effect of his wood-carving: the
movement is slow: the aim is dispersed. There is a story and a climax
in Clarel; but we do not feel them in passage. We miss the poignance of
Ruth’s death, by having forgotten her entirely.

It is unfortunate that Melville diverted into the ingenuities of a
foreign versification the energies that should have gone into mastery
of the theme itself. But matter and manner are always one; and because
Melville did not find harmonious form for his intuitions, we are
deprived of a good part of them, and those that remain we must pick,
like precious shards, from the refuse heap of the poem. He was a true
poet; but formal verse was not his medium; and the relentless probity
of his mind, the keen reaching into the heart of a dilemma, lacked in
these lengthy verses an appropriate vehicle. Melville was wrong when
he thought that some of the aroma might have exhaled during the years
Clarel remained unpublished: the aroma had never been there.

It was a long, weary pilgrimage, this pilgrimage of Melville’s,
as Clarel is a long, weary poem; but at the end of it, something
crystallized within him, and without blunting his doubts or shutting
off his conflict, at last focussed them. Something happened to Melville
in Palestine, or during the years between, that was the equivalent of
falling in love with a Jewish maiden. Although Clarel returned from
his pilgrimage to find himself bereft, the experience of love had
given him something: the love that would have redeemed the universe
for Captain Ahab and kept him from his deadly contest with the whale,
now was a pledge of his own redemption for Melville. What the nature
of that experience was one does not know: one can only judge by its
final effect; and in the last pages of Clarel the whole weary strife of
debate is suddenly brought to a close, at the end of the lover’s grief,
in the epilogue with its pledge and hope:

Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned--
Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind;
That like the crocus budding through the snow--
That like a swimmer rising from the deep--
That like a burning secret which doth go
Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep;
Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea,
And prove that death but routs life into victory.

The budding crocus, the rising swimmer, the bursting secret were
symbols of a new promise in Melville’s own life: in the Epilogue one
sees the later Melville, who had approached, and was slowly finding
peace, rather than the unsettled, bitter man who wandered through
Palestine, and confronted the “caked depopulated hell” of barren
Judah. There was no verbal answer, no creed, no theology, no orthodoxy
to comfort him and give a final meaning in exchange for his present
soreness and perplexity. God does not answer Job: he overawes and
silences and converts him and suddenly showers him with blessings:
the relief is as mysterious as the oppression which makes a wise man
mad. So with Melville. An animal faith, the dumb belief in all the
immediate presentations of life--this animal faith, quickened by
love, knit together again. Creeds are, after all, only the suspicious
distortions of this dim, plasmal sense that bottoms all of us. When
that faith exists, life even in its humblest aspects is neither black
nor terrible, however heavy its disappointments; without it, all that
the world values is thin, and all that the heart may contemplate is
empty. There is no rational justification for this animal faith; for it
is part of the nature of man and perhaps of all living things, and it
antedates the doubts and difficulties that would disturb it.

Again and again Melville confronted this problem; and much though he
admired the order and art they introduced, he could not accept the
solutions offered by Judaism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, or historic
Christianity. In his preface to a poetic fragment, Rammon, Melville
puts the dilemma before a son of Solomon’s old age, immoderately
influenced by his father’s despondent philosophy. “Vanity of
vanities--such is this life. As to a translated life in some world
hereafter--far be that thought. A primary law binds the universe. The
worlds are like apples on the tree; in flavour and tint one apple
perchance may somewhat differ from another, but all partake of the same
sap. One of the worlds we know. And what find we here? Much good, a
preponderance of good; that is, good it would be could it be winnowed
from the associate evil that taints it. But evil is no accident. Like
good it is an irremoveable element. Bale out your individual boat if
you can, but the sea remains the sea.”

In his despair, Rammon is attracted to Buddhism by Prince Siddartha’s
personality and by the fact that his high rank had not hardened his
heart to the lot of the mass of mankind, “nor in any wise intercepted a
just view of the immense spectacle of things.” But Rammon is too young
to realize, with Melville, the fallacy of Buddha’s very situation:
it did not occur to him to conjecture “that the more spiritual,
wide-seeing, conscientious and sympathetic the nature, so much the
more spiritually isolated, and isolation is the mother of illusion.”
Melville was on guard against this error: isolated, he had refused
illusion, the last comfort of isolation, and had abandoned all efforts
to explain away man’s helplessness and ignorance, and his corporeal
extinction: he accepted this condition as a datum. And yet life went
on! Far better, this, than a new illusion; for it brought self-respect
and a belief in those forms of ideality which are within man’s power
to achieve or experience. By skilfully managing his little boat, not
by pronouncing metaphysical incantations over the storm, man keeps
afloat mid the vast waters that threaten him. The boat may be swamped,
perhaps; but there is no other way! Life bottomed all formulas: art
fended off catastrophe--if life ebbed or art ceased to be effective,
well, one had faced reality and had respected necessity and one could
meet the end with ironic resignation: in effect, the most dogmatic and
devout could do no more.

At the end of Clarel, Melville found life, not good or bad, malicious
or forbearing, true or false. Something more important had happened:
he found it livable. In that mood the days that followed the Civil War
were spent, quiet, chastened, subdued, temperate days....

One may figure Melville’s career as a June evening--the sun glowing
in the sky, the birds darting about the trees, chattering, warbling,
trilling, intensely active. The sky-gold turns to waves of salmon pink:
the pink to lavender: the lavender edges into purple: suddenly dark has
come. The cheerful sounds cease. A belated bird or two silently wings
to his nest: there is blackness, and the hoarse croak of distant frogs
alone breaks the silence. In half an hour the scene changes from the
most brilliant activity and ecstasy to utmost passiveness. Bats swoop
silently in the air; a chill comes up from the river: darkness is cool
as well as silent. Is all over? Not yet. Presently the fireflies make a
warm firmament of the fields, and in the pale rising of the moon, the
earth itself takes on another glory. There are fireflies and moonlight
and the domestic chirp of crickets in the night of Melville’s life, its
last quarter century--not silence and unrelieved blackness. After the
first collapse of day into night, nature stirs again: there is movement
and there is life. A little before the clock tolls the hour of midnight
and the day itself passes, a shower of aerolites falls through the
sky.... We have just seen the afterglow; and we are now to witness the
final brilliance of the night.

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE FLOWERING ALOE

The days pass and one day is like another: there is comfort in
monotony. The brick house in East Twenty-sixth Street, with its
muddy-yellow exterior and its brownstone trim, with its old mahogany
parlour furniture, its towering brown bookcases, its print of the Bay
of Naples hanging in the front hall, has a calm dark gravity which
sets it off from houses that make garish gestures of brightness or
gaiety within. When the sun hits the rear rooms there is warmth;
when geraniums and pansies appear in the yard below there is colour.
Melville’s house is a refuge from the city outside. Looking like every
other house in the row, it has still a quiet interior of its own, an
interior, like Herman Melville’s, acquired before the débâcle of the
Civil War. The brown wallpaper and the black iron bed in the wan north
light of Herman Melville’s room almost alone indicate that a day has
dawned that is somewhat darker than a starless night.

The sixties have passed; the seventies have come. Heroism gives way
to complacency, and courage to chicane. Even General Grant himself,
type of resolute action and manly confidence and dogged devotion
while the war was on, becomes in Presidential office little more
scrupulous than the head of a foraging party: gambling and corruption
take place before the magnanimous man who had been chivalrous to Lee
and thoughtful of the conquered army. Is it any wonder that New York
itself, which had been invaded and seized by people who had left
Europe under stress and poverty, and were thrown into its miserable
tenements and sinister streets, this Salonica of the Western world,
was prey to a ring of politicians as remarkable for their brazenness
as for their peculations? On the edges of the city, near the gas
tanks, but sometimes spilling over into the respectable sections,
gangs line up on each side of the street and exchange bullets. It is
worth one’s life to carry a gold watch through certain parts of the
East Side: Constantinople, twenty years before, was no happier place
for felons and assassins. What superb triumphs offset this brutality,
this degradation! In 1869, an elevated railroad is built; a little
later, a cable car is attached to a cable, and goes; the human voice
finds a means of travelling over an electro-magnetic circuit. Man has
stolen fire from heaven again, and is conquering the world with it;
but, stealing the fire, he has left the more valuable parts of heaven
behind. The voice that travels so far says the same banal things. The
railroad that shuttles men back and forth across the city does not
improve anything except the potentialities for speculation in real
estate.

Melville had foreseen all the sordid developments of “this dishonorable
epoch” while they were still in the germ, thus fulfilling the Chinese
philosopher’s notion of what a wise man is: he had viewed the myriads
playing pigmy parts, debased into equality, and “in glut of all
material arts” had predicted a civic barbarism, with man disennobled
and brutalized, “dead level of rank commonplace: an Anglo-Saxon
China”--the very Dark Ages of democracy. He had perceived that the
new democracy, fed by the smatterings of newspapers, and moved by the
war-cries of demagogues, was in reality as credulous and foolish as
the polity of the Middle Ages; perhaps more so, because it had lost a
decent and saving sense of its inferiority. What part could Melville
take in this world? How could he cope with the practical men of his
time, and “mix with tempers keen and narrow like a knife”? Or how
could he have any intellectual transactions with such good-hearted but
mushy-minded people as Edmund Clarence Stedman? His new contemporaries
were schoolboys. Howells had the optimism of a boom-town newspaper
or a stock prospectus: Lanier, who deserved better of Fate, wrote a
booster book about Florida for a railroad: and in the decade when
Melville published his own Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, Mark Twain
achieved affluence by producing Innocents Abroad.

Melville himself had hailed the spirit of the West as that which truly
reflected America; but when the spirit actually appeared, in the form
of a Mark Twain or a Bret Harte, he must have had his misgivings. At
thirty, Melville had grappled with spiritual problems that Mark Twain
kept furtively locked in his bosom until his old age, and, for fear
of destroying his reputation, did not publish till after his death.
What did Mark Twain know of “a hell over which mere hell serves for a
heaven”? These new Americans were innocents at home as well as abroad.
Those who knew that darkness existed were afraid of it: they said,
whistling cheerfully, that Progress would do away with darkness in a
year or two: the arc-light would abolish the burglar: the long-range
gun would abolish war: the ocean cable would abolish international
misunderstanding: typewriters would relieve the difficulties of
authorship: divorce would do away with the maladjustments of the
married. Innocents indeed! Is one puzzled that Melville shrank from the
post-war generation?

Melville’s home was a refuge, and his shanty of an office was a refuge
too. While the new parts of the city were exulting in the ugliness of
brownstone fronts, accentuated by perverse cornices and mouldings,
Twenty-sixth Street was still largely red brick, built a little too
late for charm, but early enough to possess iron balconies facing
south, like London in the Regency. Every morning a grave, firm,
square-bearded man leaves Number 104. A little slow and reflective
in gait, as if deliberately setting himself apart in pace as well
as inward gesture from the world about him, Melville turns west
toward Madison Square, passes through its green, and follows Fifth
Avenue, whose ranks of trees are just beginning to be broken, down
to Fourteenth Street, where already the brownstones, though only a
few years old, are being converted into fashionable confectionery
stores, bakeries, jewelry shops. He follows the broad thoroughfare
clear over to Hudson Street, and then turns to the block below, where
the Gansevoort Market and the customs office lie, touching the river.
These brown buildings, these smug garish shops, these crass, dirty
waterfront hotels, are too ugly to attract his attention even if use
and want did not quiet his interest. In five years, ten years, twenty
years, the changes are not very important: the horse-cars become fewer
and the tangle of traffic at Union Square is worse and Broadway from
Fourteenth Street up becomes “Ladies’ Mill,” the fashionable afternoon
thoroughfare for shopping: but on the whole the outer world does not
make any serious claims. The familiarity of everything is reassuring.
The name Gansevoort, on the market at the end of his walk, is a touch
of welcome. There is a Gansevoort Hotel on Little Twelfth Street and
West Street; but when Melville inquires what it stands for, he finds
that the hero of Fort Stanwix is now only a name. Well: names remain!
Gansevoort remains; perhaps Melville will remain, too.

Melville, as customs inspector, has one of the lowest political
positions open to patronage: he is an Ishmael among Ishmaels, and
a pariah among outcasts: impecunious bankers, broken-down sports,
bankrupt merchants, political nondescripts, people who were fit
for nothing elsewhere, in short, as R. H. Stoddard described it,
“an asylum for nonentities.” The scene itself, though mean, brings
Melville close to his element: the ships coming in, the odour of tar,
hemp, rotting wood, brine, the severe manly ways of the captains, the
affable circumspection of the pursers--they remind Melville of another
day and another fortune and another disguise. Best for him to do his
work, to shut his mouth, to get through the day patiently: like Rama,
the Hindu god, misplaced in human lot, discredited, abiding there in
outlawry. “May life and fable so agree?” Melville asked in Clarel, and
he knew the answer: they did. “There is more power and beauty in the
well-kept secret of one’s self and one’s thoughts,” Maurice de Guérin
had written, “than in the display of a whole heaven that one may have
inside one.” Melville underlined those words, and kept his heaven
facing inward.

The monotony brings quiet: the monotony brings peace. On drizzly
mornings, before the ships can drudge up the river through the fog,
there are hours of inward placidity. Melville peers through the pall
on the river outside and sees somewhat more poignantly into his own
position; perhaps the final lines of a poem come to him then:

Nor cringe if come the night:
Walk through the cloud to meet the pall,
Though light forsake thee, never fall
From fealty to light.

While he must serve his sentence in this prison, there is only one
thing to fear: a new Administration; shifting to a new post, learning
new faces, having once more to battle and struggle. Fortunately,
Melville has friends in the department, clever worldly fellows like
Stoddard: a word to him is passed along to the chief; the rumour of a
transfer is quieted. Melville need never leave this cloistered street,
this melancholy examination and appraisal, this even equable round:
this is as good as another Sailors’ Snug Harbor, over which his younger
brother Tom now is governor. Yes, it is good for a lifetime--if one may
call these empty hours life.

Gansevoort Pier at one end: Lizzie and the two girls at the other. The
meagre evening dinner, indifferently cooked, the household gossip, the
strain of observing an emptiness at the table, of Mackie, who is dead,
and Stanwix, who has gone off: the sudden look of tenderness on the
worn face opposite, that stings yet sweetens everything. The customs
office is hell: this family circle is perhaps purgatory: it is only
when Melville withdraws to his room upstairs, and is by himself, that
he can faintly re-enter the heaven that once surrounded him. There,
with his pictures, his books, his glass of brandy to seduce sleep, the
day ends in a solitude and a hush--tolerably. This is the daily round;
but there are better occasions. On a warm summer night Melville might
loll on the canvas steamer-chair placed on the narrow iron balcony,
smoking his pipe, looking at the stars, gently holding Elizabeth’s
hand. Melville’s passion is spent; but affection has deepened. With
the slow renewal of his organic faith, he can accept his wife more
fully and warmly, much more fully and warmly than when sex itself was
primarily a physical irritation that left him disappointed and doubtful
of the very basis of love, when he was tormented by passions at once
inexpressible and unreciprocable.

When one of Melville’s daughters grows up and marries, and Melville
becomes a grandfather, he goes out to these children easily: he bounces
them on his knee, makes noises like wind whistling through the rigging,
sings a stave of an old chanty, walks with them in Central Park. This
is not the tense harassed man his own children bitterly remembered from
their youth: he is benign even when his thoughts are elsewhere, and
occasionally downright jolly. His granddaughter still remembers his
queer, literary words and the wiry feel of his beard: that bespeaks
intimacy. There is a shadow between Melville and his family: they do
not see him as he is, but as he is distorted by their own repulsions,
their own bitterness: but when Melville’s son-in-law casts eyes on
Melville for the first time, buying a cigar in a hotel lobby in the
White Mountains, there is something in the old man’s air, like that
in the man Flammonde, that captivates him and holds his attention: a
distinguished man! In his family, he will remain an exile. They do not
understand his jocularity and his occasional high spirits. They are
offended by his inept sense of humour. In the Berkshire days he had
dubbed one of the village gossips Miss Pecksniff and his mother had
covered herself with mortification by addressing the good lady by
this title when she called. One never could be quite sure about Herman
Melville’s jokes. His notion of a jolly time was to cook up a mess
of crabs and sit around the table for a whole afternoon, picking at
the flesh, drinking ale, telling stories, and haranguing the world in
general, as if his wife and daughters and cousins were in the maintop
of the Neversink. They were bored by these jokes, and indifferent to
Melville’s high spirits. If his daughters had not been reduced to dowdy
dresses, if he had not had the wicked habit of asking belated suitors
whether they preferred hominy or oatmeal for breakfast, if the family
did not all feel that the high spirits of a poor man were purchased
too cheaply, Melville might not have felt the hostile ring around him.
These outbursts would be paid for, perhaps, by depression and inner
exasperation: but they kept the too-even daily round from appalling
Melville like the breath of infinity.

The age was against Melville; and his family were the mirror of the
age: he knew that. They believed in work, in working and keeping up
an appearance: in being respectable and tepid and unemotional and
industrious. Even the nicest of his relatives, like his cousin Kate
Gansevoort, with whom he maintained a desultory correspondence, rather
apologized for being a person of leisure. For them all, doing, not
being, was the main end of life. As if there were any merit in not
being a person of leisure! They talked of the dignity of work. Bosh.
True work is the necessity of humanity’s earthly condition. The dignity
is in leisure. Besides, ninety-nine hundredths of all the work done in
the world is either foolish and unnecessary or harmful and wicked. What
people needed was not work: they needed values. To recite poetry, to
contemplate pictures, to write or to talk briskly or to meditate and
chew one’s own thoughts, quietly, on the maintop--work was good if it
made these things possible, and bad if it blinded one to them, or made
them impossible....

People try to break in on Melville’s even round, they seek to intrude
on this cloistral quiet: they try in vain. Melville visits Pittsfield
again, when the Centenary Committee asks him to write a short
biography of his Grand-uncle Thomas for the Memorial Volume, and he
has occasional vacations at Arrowhead or in the White Mountains, or in
Albany or New Bedford, where one of his sisters lives: familiar places,
familiar people. A young man who has read Melville’s books awakes one
morning on a wharf in New Bedford to find himself gazing at a mild-eyed
old man in a blue serge suit with whom he falls into conversation: the
nautical terms on the old man’s tongue betray that he knows the sea;
and the young man, a composer, is delighted to find that he is talking
with his literary hero, Herman Melville. Contacts like these, with
chance acquaintances, Melville did not repel; but those who sought him
more deliberately were rebuffed. If the visitor mentions Mr. Omoo a
cloud of annoyance will pass over Melville’s face and perceptibly cool
the surrounding air. Melville’s public would not have his best: well,
he is proud and will not be accepted for the sake of the least. Such
interest will heal no wounds. Don’t they realize Melville’s contempt?
Don’t they feel who should be the patron and who the patronized?
Doubtless not. Resentment threatened to flare up in Melville, perhaps,
when he contemplated his literary contemporaries; so he did not
contemplate them. The New York writers asked Melville to join the
Authors’ Club when they founded it: he refused. Still assiduous,
towards the end of his life they gave Herman Melville a dinner of
honour. A pleasant irony. Whom did they honour, these fashionable
journalists, these professional diners-out, these men-about-literature?
That dinner did not feed Herman Melville, that admiration did not
console him. Theirs was the outward attentiveness of base neglect.

Melville breaks his own silence to hold out a hand of sympathy to
that honest, hearty Englishman, his junior, Mr. W. Clark Russell; for
Russell knows the sea, too, and though not a writer of equal rank, is
almost a fellow spirit: in his letter of thanks he mentions Moby-Dick:
a true mark of appreciation. These two writers dip flags to each other,
like passing ships; and when Melville, a few years later, in 1888,
publishes his Sea Poems, he dedicates them to this English novelist of
the sea. James Thomson is another kindred soul: all too well Melville
knew the streets and alleys of his City of Dreadful Night. Melville
corresponds for a few years, between 1884 and 1888, with Mr. James
Billson of Leicester, who was Thomson’s friend; and writes warm words
of appreciation about Thomson’s poems. “As to pessimism,” Melville
writes, and these words should be underlined, “as to pessimism,
although neither pessimist nor optimist myself, nevertheless I relish
it in the verse, if for nothing else than as a counterpoise to the
exorbitant hopefulness, juvenile and shallow, that makes such a muster
these days--at least in some quarters.” Neither pessimist nor optimist:
of course: for there is a “light and a shadow on every man who at
last achieves his lifted mark.” We shall see that mood engraved in
Melville’s final verse.

Had contacts not been hard for Melville to make, he might have had a
try at Elihu Vedder, too. Vedder’s picture of The Redeemed Slave, shown
at the Academy Exhibition of 1865, touched something in Melville; and
Vedder had gone on, apparently, a little apart from the beaten track
of veracious scenery and fictional illustration: he seemed to know
that there was more than one level of experience, that there was, so
to say, an immediate “beyond,” grounded in the senses and intuitions
quite as much as the direct work of one’s eye. Where had he acquired
this? In contrast to Vedder, there was another recluse whom Melville
may perchance have brushed by on Fourteenth Street, more than once:
a painter bred in New Bedford, loving the sea, too, and painting its
mystery, much nearer to Melville in his loneliness, his visions, his
love of Shakespeare, his reticences and withdrawals, than any other
soul in America: Albert Pinkham Ryder. Melville was never to meet him,
or as far as one knows, recognize his work. Not finding him, Melville
turned to Vedder, the lesser man, who at many removes was a link
between Melville and Blake.

Blake and Ryder were true fellow spirits: Russell and Vedder were
life’s ironical substitutes; but, lacking knowledge of the spring,
Melville slaked his thirst at the tap. He dedicated his last book of
poems, Timoleon, to Vedder; and it is rather fortunate he died before
he read Vedder’s complacent answer, an answer without the faintest
reference to Melville’s own works. Vedder was not the man to respond to
Melville: he was born half a generation later, and that made a great
difference. Vedder had been attracted by Blake, and in his youth he
found that he, too, had the power of conjuring up visions, as thick
and sensible as the furniture he touched: but Vedder had deliberately
curbed his power because, as he explained, “while if cultivated it
would soon enable me to see as realities most delightful things ... the
reaction would be beyond my control and would inevitably follow and be
sure to create images of horror indescribable. A few experiences have
shown me that that way madness lies, and so, while I have rendered my
Heaven somewhat tame, at least my Hell remains quite endurable.”

What a contrast, this timid “V,” with Melville, who had let his visions
open, and had risked everything to follow them. His magnificent hell
was worth all the placid heavens, with their weak symbolisms, that
Vedder achieved. That Melville did not know Blake until 1874 at
earliest, was a real misfortune, but inevitable; like Melville, he was
not recovered until more than a generation after his death. Blake,
had Melville known him earlier, might have helped him cast off his
paralysing braces, Blake, who turned heaven upside down, showed that
God and the Devil had exchanged costumes, felt that energy was pure
delight, and had none of Melville’s haunting reluctances over sex,
but delighted in his beautiful wife with the fresh naked energy of
Adam’s self. But pictures and books were near to Melville during this
period: he collected and enjoyed prints and reproductions of pictures:
he had a reproduction of one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and The
Woman Taken in Adultery, and if he did not enjoy Blake’s pictures, he
responded to Blake’s shadow, Flaxman. Melville’s taste in landscape
was excellent: Claude and Turner were his masters, Turner as much as
anything, perhaps, for his sea-pictures, his ghostly headlands, his
sun-drenched fogs. Melville reflected on the nature of art; indeed, in
an unimportant set of verses called The Hostelry, he attempts, with
the aid of Hals, Lippi, Spagnoletto, Veronese, Carlo Dolce, Steen,
and Watteau, to define the nature of the picturesque. The verse is
weak: the ideas are obscure: but the selection of characters gives a
further light on Melville’s tastes and interests. In a later verse,
on the boors in a picture by Teniers, we see how his wakeful brain
“elaborating pain” took comfort in the suggestion of the creature-brown
warmth of even the lesser realists; and one may safely say that there
was nothing fine in art that he was not capable of responding to. It
was the accident of living in New York in the seventies and eighties
that kept Melville away from the painters who might have meant more
to him, El Greco, Delacroix, Goya, Daumier, Blake. These all might
have had a more intimate message for him; but, with his feeling for
Rembrandt, he was close to his own kind. In Holland, he had first
noticed Rembrandt’s shadows. Rembrandt’s depth, his torment, and the
warm blood of humanity beneath it all--that was Melville’s, too.

The years passed; the dun seventies gave way to the grey eighties; and
at last the prisoner was led out of his cell. In 1886, when Herman
Melville was sixty-seven, his wife received a legacy from her brother,
Lemuel Shaw, and the unremitting routine could at last be broken. The
succour that might have saved Melville some of his worst pangs and
difficulties at thirty-three, came reluctantly more than thirty years
later. He shook his wings, made one or two uncertain steps forward,
doubtful, after all these twenty years of regularity and servitude, if
he could venture flight. A few of these warming-up exercises remain:
the series of prose sketches on the Marquis de Grandvin, Jack Gentian,
Colonel J. Bunkum: they have the air of juvenile compositions, done
just for practice. In a very little while his hand grew more schooled;
slowly, thoughtfully, he began work, revising older poems and writing
new ones. John Marr and Other Sailors he printed privately, two years
after his liberation; and Timoleon he published, even more privately,
in 1891, the year of his death. In November, 1888, Melville began Billy
Budd, the only prose work of any consequence after The Confidence Man:
he started to revise it slowly in March, 1889, and did not finish it
until April, 1891.

In neither the poems nor the sketches was there the furious effort of a
pent-up man, desperately to finish something before his death: for he
had never entirely abandoned literary effort: Bridegroom Dick is dated
1876, the year Clarel was published. Melville worked during these final
years with the firm, methodical concentration of a man taking up a
thread where some purely external circumstance had compelled him to lay
it down. He valued these days: they were to be the crown of his life,
and to give him, at least, the satisfaction of self-vindication. The
hours were so precious that when an admirer, Mr. Archibald MacMechan,
one of the first to revive Melville’s fame in our own day (1914), asked
for further light on Melville’s works and his point of view, Melville
did not answer him, except to express his thanks and to say that
“though his vigour sensibly declines, what little is left he husbands
for certain matters as yet incomplete, and which indeed may never be
completed.” These are the words of a man who has had retirement forced
on him; not those of one who has doubted the office of literature, and
has nothing to say.

Deliberately, Melville wrote his quiet coda: muted, a little lower
in key than his earlier work, these poems and Billy Budd contain the
earlier themes of his life, now transformed and resolved. Let us look
more closely at this final testament. Melville’s life has a beginning,
a middle, and an end. The last twenty years, though tedious, solitary,
insulated, bitter with apples of Sodom, had not been lived in vain: the
verse is more skilled, certain: the poems are crystals, pure if not
unflawed: here at last is that concentration, for the lack of which
Clarel does not live. The prison had left its pallor on the prisoner;
but it had not deprived him of the skill to use his liberty. Had he
written only this handful of verses, this brief novel, Melville would
still, like Stephen Crane, have left something of a mark on American
literature.

Melville’s mind continually played over the sea. As Whitman felt that
Leaves of Grass must tally with the earth in its most common and
universal aspects, as he confronted all doubts and perturbations with
the miracle of a single blade of grass, so Melville perhaps felt that
his writing must tally with the sea--that every joy and hope and lust
of life must be able to face its terrible realities. Clarel is full
of images of the sea. The student, in his vaulted room in Jerusalem,
looking over the terraced roofs of the city, is “like some ship-boy at
masthead alone, watching the star-rise”; and Melville characterized
Vine’s strength by saying that he had supplemented Plato with a “daedal
life in tents and boats.” There are a hundred other allusions and
images. The sea was the source of Melville’s strength, and even when
his daedal life was over, its profound imprint remained.

In the prose preface to John Marr, Melville explained that Marr had
left the sea, settled down in the prairie as a pioneer, had lost his
wife and child through fever, and remained a lonely soul, cut off
by his roving and cosmopolitan past from the farmer-folk, the land
animals, around him. In Bridegroom Dick, a longer poem, Melville
assumed the guise of an old man-of-war’s man, seated by his wife,
sunning himself on an October day, balmy as spring, he with his pipe,
she with her tea. The old fellow’s mind goes back over his cruises,
his ships, his shipmates: the whole round of the day, polishing the
pinnacle, minding the helm, shooting the sun, announcing the time
to the quarter-deck at noon--and all his mess-mates and superiors,
Old Chuck-a-block, Commander All-a-Tanto, Orlop Bob, Rhyming Ned,
Top-gallant Harry and Jack Genteel: the old revels, the old bouts
of liquor, the old battles. The words are so salty the fish-bones
almost stick in one’s throat; and in the very litany of names Melville
achieves poetry; for once, the crabbedness of his verse increases its
effect.

In another verse, To Ned, Melville seems to address his old comrade,
Toby, recalling the rich isles they roved when they were young, and
predicting that the pleasure-hunter, wearying of routine resorts,
would at last discover the Marquesas and other authentic Edens in the
South Seas. This poem gives one pause. One wonders if Melville’s early
disillusion with marriage and success was not, more than one can ever
definitely say, due to the fact that he had drunk such a deep draught
of beauty in the South Seas that life thereafter, in the dusty, smoky,
jangling air of America or Europe, was insipid and brackish. No wife
who wore stays and petticoats and flannel nightgowns, and who was laden
with household cares, could be another Fayaway: no farm with a cow and
a horse and fences to repair could be another palm-grove. The Marquesas
had perhaps spoiled his taste for such dreary fare. So delicious is
this memory of the past, that Melville even marvels if mortals may
twice, here and hereafter, touch a paradise!

In the same spirit, in his later poems, he remembers the happy port of
Syra, full of juvenile fun, reminding him of days when trade did not
exist, and toil and stress were not overbearing, and life was leisure,
merriment, and peace. Melville never deceived himself by dismissing
these things as mythical, or by magnifying the importance of sanitation
and sound currency. This feeling of animal delight had redeemed him
from his own torments; he knew it was one of the permanent blessings
of life; and a civilization that knew nothing of it, except through
the depravity of complete drunkenness, was in a far lower stage of
barbarism than its most vigorous prophets had dared to say. If there
were no pleasurable excitements, there would be murderous ones: if
there were not dances there would be wars: and, for lack of strong
sensual graces, men would become hard, vengeful, stupid, oppressive.
Melville turned to Syra, or to Naples in the time of King Bomba, not
because he was unaware of poverty, rags, misery, but because he knew
there was sadness and misery in New York, too, without the redeeming
thoughtlessness and careless pleasure. “A fig for Bomba! Life is fair
squandered in superabundant leisure.” That was an answer Clarel had
shrunk from accepting from Derwent: but it was not an invalid one. The
very virtues of Western civilization, its industry, its thrift, its
willingness to postpone present goods for future rewards, tended to
degrade life quite as much as its downright vices.

Melville’s sea poems, however, were not all pieces of happy
reminiscence. The wreck of a victorious man-of-war, the deserted
raft with a signal flying, the disintegration of the figurehead
Charles-and-Emma by storm and weather, the mad plunge of a ship against
an iceberg: these are images of a different order. Melville did not
become weak and sentimental in his old age; but instead of letting the
dark background of the universe dominate the composition, he paints in
a warm foreground, as in a still-life of Chardin’s, with some sensible,
kindly object to capture the interest and reflect the high lights. The
sea remains the sea, pitiless, echoless, indifferent to man’s hopes
and dreams: but the man in Melville is himself again.

Healed of my hurt, I laud the inhuman Sea--
Yea, bless the Angels Four that there convene;
For healed I am ever by their pitiless breath
Distilled in wholesome dew named rosmarine.

One could tell from these poems, even if one lacked the contemporary
testimony of a Pittsfield acquaintance, Mr. J. E. A. Smith, that
Melville, in these closing days, was no bitter, defeated old man. Mr.
Smith says that in 1885, on Melville’s last visit to Pittsfield, he
“bore nothing of the appearance of a man disappointed in life, but
rather had an air of perfect contentment, and his conversation had
much of his jovial, let-the-world-go-as-it-will spirit. It would,” as
Mr. Smith very justly continues, “be well nigh a climatic miracle if
a brief ride to Pittsfield and a few snuffs of Berkshire air should
so restore to society and its enjoyment a man who had just been the
recluse and almost misanthrope pictured by some of the New York
newspaper writers.” In his letter dedicating John Marr to Mr. Russell,
Melville stresses the quality of geniality, “the flower of life
springing from some sense of joy in it, more or less”; and, delicately,
shyly, like a belated crocus, this flower bloomed in Melville’s last
years. When he wished Russell from his heart the most precious things
he knew of in this world, health and content, he wished him the first
because he had once known it in its miraculous fulness, and the second,
I think, because he had at last found it. When on a clear day Melville
would wander through the woody ravines and pastures near Fort George,
or when he would take a ferryboat ride down New York Bay, shifting from
one side of the boat to another, to take in every aspect of the harbour
and every new ship, the old keenness, the old zest, would return. If
his life was still that of the recluse--“I am an old fogy,” he wrote
in 1880, to excuse his staying at home--his feelings were far from
Pierre’s or Timon’s.

There is poetry in parts of John Marr, particularly in The Haglets, not
merely measured lines and rhymed endings. There is even more poetry
perhaps in Timoleon, and perhaps a deeper revelation of Melville’s
inner convictions and strivings. The verses from which the volume
gets its title shoot parallels into Melville’s own life: Timoleon
rescued Timophanes, but it is Timophanes who is his mother’s pride.
She sees herself in him and looks, through him, to become an envied
dame of power, a social queen: Melville, who had once perhaps wanted
his mother’s generous love, realized that his lack of worldly success
had stood in the way of it: a discovery he first announced when he
wrote Pierre. Exiled, Timoleon ceases to hate his fellow citizens;
but, cut off from common membership in the marketplace, in severance
like a pale head found after battle apart from the trunk, he confronts
the gods, not finding the wrong in man, but taking his quarrel to the
Arch-Principals themselves. Has ideality no counterpart except in
man’s mind? Are earnest natures but fatherless shadows? The edges of
Melville’s old torment are here; and I should be inclined to date the
poem from an earlier period; but in other verses one discovers that
his resolution has completely knitted together. Under the title of The
Enthusiast, he places the words: _Though He slay me, yet will I trust
in Him._ It is a poem of brave defiance; and it tells so much about the
man that I must reproduce it.

Shall hearts that beat no base retreat
In Youth’s magnanimous years--
Ignoble hold it, if discreet
When interest tames to fears;
Shall spirits that worship light
Perfidious deem its sacred glow,
Recant and trudge where worldlings go,
Confirmed, and own them right?

Shall Time with creeping influence cold
Unnerve and cow? The heart
Pine for the heartless ones enthralled
With palterers of the mart?
Shall faith abjure her skies,
Or pale probation blench her down
To shrink from Truth, so still, so lone,
Mid loud gregarious lies?

Each burning boat in Caesar’s rear
Flames--No return through me!
So put the torch to ties though dear,
If ties but tempters be.
Nor cringe if come the night:
Walk through the cloud to meet the pall,
Though light forsake thee, never fall
From fealty to light.

Melville did not see in post-bellum America, with its parvenus pining
for distinctions and dignities, its lawmakers “taking the lawless one’s
fee,” in all the sham and shuffle of those guilty days, any pledge for
a happier society. The Age of the Antonines was far behind; and their
return seemed equally distant. “Apollo’s bust makes lime for Mammon’s
tower.” This man of integrity must fortify himself from within; and
when the present offers him no foothold, he must stand with Posterity
or with the Ancients. This was the sort of “adjustment” that Melville
achieved; and it was the only kind, in his position and day, that was
worth working for. There is no notion more delusive or unscientific,
in the strict biological sense, than the belief that a poet may make
a happy “adjustment” to his circumstances by turning bond-salesman,
or the artist by becoming an advertising expert. This course neglects
the elementary fact that the relation between an organism and its
environment is interacting and reciprocal: the best sort of adjustment
is that which tends to preserve life with its highest values intact.
The proper adjustment to a fire is not to plunge into it; and the
response of a poet to an unfavourable environment is not to commit
suicide but to use the most economic means for saving himself. Melville
had done this--and he was saved. “Happiness,” Spinoza said, “consists
in a man’s being able to maintain his own being.” When Melville read
this dictum in Matthew Arnold’s essay on Spinoza, in 1871, he marked
the passage: it described his own effort. In a more fruitful age, his
being would have been maintained in harmony with, not in opposition to,
the community: but at all events his vital duty was to maintain it.

We come to Melville’s last verses, those which he gathered in a MS.
called Weeds and Wildings, which remained unpublished until Mr. Raymond
Weaver edited the definitive edition of his work in 1923.

These final poems have all the qualities one cherishes in Melville:
his geniality, his humour, his lofty brooding, and that aloof satiric
eye beneath which his contemporaries shrivelled from the grandeur of
their reputations to the littleness of their deserts. In addition,
another quality of Melville’s personal life wells to the surface and
confirms all one’s other intuitions: a deep affection for his wife,
and a warm sympathy. The “clover dedication to Winnifred”--who was
Lizzie--recalls the old times together at Arrowhead, when the red
clover had blushed through the fields about their house. They had not
exactly lived in clover during those years or the later ones: ah, no!
nor had they known anything of the four-leafed kind, except once, as
he reminded her each year, “on the early forenoon of the fourth day of
a certain bridal month, now four years more than four times ten ago.”
Melville recalls how, after a morning walk in the summer, he would
return home with a handful of clover blossoms, to put on the maplewood
mantel in Lizzie’s south-facing room: her altar. “And in October most
did I please myself in gathering them from the moist-matted aftermath
in an encircled little hollow nearby, soon to be snowed upon.... And
once--you remember it--having culled them in a sunny little flurry of
snow, winter’s frolic skirmishes in advance, the genial warmth of your
chamber melted the fleecy flakes into dewdrops rolling off from their
ruddiness. ‘Tears of the happy,’ you said. Well, and then whom but to
thee, Madonna of the Trefoil, should I now dedicate these Weeds and
Wildings, thriftless children of quite another and yet spontaneous
aftergrowth, and bearing indications, too apparent it may be, of that
terminating season on which the offerer verges. And for aught of the
melting mood that my verses may possibly betray, call to mind the
dissolved snowflakes on the ruddy oblation of old, and remember your
‘Tears of the Happy.’”

There is a story of an acquaintance asking Melville for a copy of one
of his books, and Melville’s answering that he did not have a copy in
the house. One has no reason to suspect “O. G. H.’s” veracity, or that
of Melville: but one would get a false impression of Melville if one
thought that this indicated he had forgotten his work, or its worth, or
his old ambitions. There are a dozen references to his literary fate,
pointed, sardonic, in Weeds and Wildings. One of the most obvious of
these references is a poem entitled The American Aloe on Exhibition.
“It is a floral superstition,” observed Melville in the little
introduction, “as every one knows, that this plant flowers only once in
a century. When in any instance the flowering is for decades delayed
beyond the normal period (eight or ten years at farthest) it is owing
to something retarding in the environment or soil.”

Now, after one has made due allowances for the inner obstructions to
Melville’s further development in the critical period of maturity, one
realizes that Melville and Mr. Van Wyck Brooks are right: for even had
he continued at the level of Moby-Dick--as indeed he did in Benito
Cereno--there was something retarding in the American environment and
soil, in the thirty years that followed the Civil War. One cannot
separate a man from his social environment: a society lives in a man: a
man is a creature in society: the inner world is less private and the
outer world less public than people habitually and carelessly think.
These very words, inner and outer, individual and social, are merely
conveniences of thought: there are no actual lines and borders, except
practical ones. Melville’s triumph, like that of his contemporaries
in the Golden Day, was the last expression of a provincial society,
and the first prophetic achievement in a newer and deeper culture. His
own disaster was an emblem of the disintegration of that provincial
society, and the blight of the new culture, which though fully
conceived in the mind, received neither nourishment, warmth, nor
protection from the narrow, mechanistic, money-bent society that
succeeded the provincial one. If the inner world be not a phantasm,
it must be united to an outer world that nourishes it and supports
it, even when it offers oppositions and antinomies. This relationship
had existed before the Civil War; and when the external milieu became
impoverished, it ceased to exist--and the Aloe ceased to flower.

This poem admits no doubt of the fact that Melville was grimly
describing himself. People came to see the Century Plant on exhibition,
ten cents admission, but seldom more than two came at a time! This was
the homage that Melville met in his old age--and what comfort, what
tender comfort it was! What can the aged stem do? It moans:

At last, at last! but joy and pride,
What part have I with them?

Let be the death that kept me back
Now long from wreath decreed;
But, ah, ye Roses that have passed
Accounting me a weed!

When Melville touches on Captain Vere’s eventual death, in Billy Budd,
he adds that this spirit, in spite of its philosophic austerity, may
yet have indulged the most secret of all passions, ambition, without
attaining the fulness of fame: and one cannot doubt that Melville is
disclosing his own secret. The more violent the pride, the deeper the
ambition, the more fiercely it guards itself. But look more closely at
Melville’s humility: it towers like a mountain! Listen more closely to
his silence: it shouts like an army! He well knew, all the while, how
little the vain roses mattered that accounted him a weed; and we, who
look back upon Melville’s ostensible contemporaries, Lowell, Stedman,
Stoddard, Aldrich, can scarcely help sharing his contemptuous smile.
For these good gentlemen, in their most tolerant mood, Walt Whitman
was the Good Grey Poet, useful to be trotted ceremoniously out on the
platform, once a year, to recite his oration on The Martyred President;
and as for Melville--he was the queer old fellow who had once lived
among the cannibals. One can fancy the superior droop of their lips
when Robert Buchanan, an English writer, told them that these two men
were the supreme imaginative writers America had produced.

Did Melville forget his books or think them paltry? The verses,
Immolated, are an even more direct answer.

Children of my happier prime
When one yet lived with me and threw
Her rainbow over life and time,
Even Hope, my bride, and mother to you!
O, nurtured in sweet pastoral air
And fed on flowers and light and dew
Of morning meadows--spare, ah, spare
Reproach; spare and upbraid me not
That, yielding scarce to reckless mood,
But jealous of your future lot,
I sealed you in a fate subdued,
Have I not saved you from the dread
Theft and ignoring which need be
The triumph of the insincere
Unanimous mediocrity?
Rest, therefore, free from all despite
Snugged in the arms of comfortable night.

In still another poem, called Thy Aim, Thy Aim? he questions whether
mid the dust and dearth and din he may by some deed prove to be an
exception, and he warns himself to beware of envy, for if striving on
he win the goal, he will get only a flower of reputation, which is cut
down in an hour; but if he survive that, he will still only earn a
funeral flower--the belated funeral flower of fame. Melville was spared
the pillory of being praised as a travel-writer and a humourist, with
Mark Twain, or coupled as a poet with Aldrich; and in the bottom of his
heart, there was an anticipation of his final survival, not without a
feeling of satisfaction. Having prepared his own coffin, like Queequeg
in Moby-Dick, he could even fancy the flowers and wreaths that a later
generation would place over it. Funeral flowers, yes, but even funeral
flowers may solace a man, if he contemplates them before they are cut!

The relief from Melville’s dull grind had come a little too late:
one must not flinch from that fact. He was conscious of his age and
his physical debility; and, so far from railing at youth, he would
not, “reduced to skimmed milk, slander the cream.” Youth, he knew,
was immortal: “’Tis the elderly only grow old.” But age brought one
advantage: it taught him the wisdom of folly. When a spirit appears
and asks him where he would choose to dwell, in the Paradise of Fools
or in Wise Solomon’s Hell, he does not pause to weigh the answer; but,
ironically, he reverses his belief in Moby-Dick and demands the fool’s
paradise! From these sardonic snatches of Melville’s verse one gets
some notion of what his conversation on daily topics, the chicanes,
briberies, corruptions, social follies and stupid observances of his
contemporaries must have been. Melville’s wit was meant for keen
society: small wonder he created Jack Gentian to keep him company.

In The Rose Garden, verses written during the first days of Melville’s
release, one finds him asking himself whether he should turn to verse
or to prose. The question was an important one: he must have known
that his strength lay in prose, if only the theme were big enough to
enlist all his energies; but Melville delayed and dallied, hesitating
to commit himself to an impossible task. In his dilemma, he consults
a friend, asking him whether it is better to have a heap of posies or
a few drops of attar; and his friend tells him that his time has gone
by. To which Melville answers that, unfortunately, he had come into his
roses late; but first he wants to settle this little matter--poetry
or prose? Not being able to decide, he tried his hand at both. His
old eagerness was there; but something had happened. “Age, dull
tranquilliser, and arid years that filed before” had unfitted him for
flowers. Here one feels the final pathos of Melville’s position--the
last foul thrust of fate. In his maturity, he had been cheated of
outer sustenance, and when it finally came to him, he found himself
cheated of inner support. That brambly garden, that sour soil, needed
energy to bring it back into a state of cultivation, and energy, not
the will or the skill or the delight, was the one thing that Melville,
at sixty-seven, lacked. “My dear Sir,” he had once exclaimed to Mr.
Duyckinck, “the two good things to be yet discovered are these--the art
of rejuvenating old age in men, and old-ageifying youth in books.” He
had not altogether failed in the latter: but the first need was beyond
him.

But when energy fails, skill may partly make up for it; and there is a
simplicity and directness in these poems which shows greater control of
his medium: the annoying inversions are fewer, and among the wildings
of Melville’s old age, there is still a rose or two left over from a
more cultivated garden. The poem that fittingly closes this MS. volume,
The Lake, is perhaps the finest Melville wrote: it is a colloquy
between his own spirit and the spirit evoked by the Lake of Pontoosuce.
Melville here faces death and emptiness of being, and he draws his
faith from that spectacle in which the great religions have found their
sustenance, in the march of the seasons, the rhythmic cycle of life,
the ecstasy, the agony, the tragedy of the dying god, and his annual
resurrection and renewal.

“All dies! and not alone
The aspiring trees and men and grass;
The poets’ forms of beauty pass,
And noblest deeds they are undone,
Even truth itself decays, and lo,
From truth’s sad ashes pain and falsehood grow.

All dies!

The workman dies, and after him, the work;
Like to those pines whose graves I trace,
Statue and statuary fall upon their face:
In every amaranth the worm doth lurk,
Even stars, Chaldeans say, fade from the starry space,
Andes and Appalachee tell
Of havoc ere our Adam fell,
And present nature as a moss doth show
Of the ruins of the Nature of the Aeons long ago.

* * * * *

Dies, all dies!
The grass it dies, but in vernal pain
Up it springs and it lives again;
Over and over, again and again,
Who sighs that all dies!
Summer and winter and pleasure and pain,
And everything everywhere in God’s reign,
They end and anon they begin again;
Wane and wax, wax and wane:
Over and over and over again,
End, ever end, and begin again--
End, ever end, and forever, and ever begin again!”
She ceased and nearer slid, and hung
In dewy guise; then softlier sung:
“Since light and shade are equal set,
And all revolves, nor more ye know;
Ah, why should tears the pale cheek fret
For aught that waneth here below?
Let go, let go!”
With that, her warm lips thrilled me through,
She kissed me, while her chaplet cold
Its rootlets brushed against my brow,
With all their humid clinging mould,
She vanished, leaving fragrant breath
And warmth and chill of wedded life and death.

That peace and oneness with Nature, which Isabel had prayed for, came
at last to Melville in the closing years of his life. He had renounced
much; but he had gained much. What is life? the king in Mardi had
asked the philosopher; and the philosopher had said: That question is
more final than any answer. After much doubt, exacerbation, searching,
after a long weary pilgrimage through books and lands, and not a
little intercourse with men, Melville was back to the view of his
youth: he now accepted its finality. What power and heroic defiance
had not accomplished, love, which has its philosophic equivalent in
the desire to merge oneself with the universe and surrender to it, and
accept its purposes, as one accepts the desires and whims and aims
of one’s beloved--love had achieved this. It was no accident that
Melville’s warm attitude toward Elizabeth coincided with this last warm
acceptance of the universe. Melville surrendered to his wife, and he
surrendered to his rough old mother, the earth, owning the primacy of
that ceaseless urge which begets the Ahabs and Babbalanjas and Medias
and Jack Chases and Pierres and Clarels, recognizing that intelligence,
power, virtue, are not prime movers themselves, but derivative
mechanisms that transmit and utilize the energy of life. If one spurn
that energy and deny its sources, one’s dreams are futile and one’s
hopes empty: but when one accepts life itself as the primary fact,
then the dying year brings no grief, and all that fades and decays is
but a pledge of what shall again, one day, live and flourish: the very
universe itself, and space and time, are but modes of being, no more
eternal than the senses that react to them and project upon them the
forms that make them useful and significant to man. Whatever be the
ultimate nature of things, the universe man conceives is still held
together at his own centre: its significance is part and parcel of his
own. And at the centre of that centre is a fertilized ovum. Out of the
egg comes not merely man but his world: the mightiest constellation is
but the ectoderm of man’s original plasm. There is a greater energy
than Moby-Dick’s. The seed that in its growth pries open the rock has
more power than the inert and brutal elements that oppose it, and
there is a seed in man whose growth cannot be denied, a seed that
binds him to all life, and causes him to direct his energies, despite
frustrations, despite warring elements in his own being, towards a
fuller existence marked by love and understanding. The ideality, which
Melville could not find in a cold “external” universe metaphysically
separated from man--and falsely so--is embodied in the common instincts
of animals: it was when he ceased to draw upon these sources that the
world became black and painful and hostile, and ideals seemed ghastly
disembodiments. When the roots of his animal nature were nourished once
more, he leafed again, as the trees leaf in Indian summer, and courage
and faith returned. Melville had faced the colourless, unintegrated,
primal world that underlies and antedates that which we know through
our senses, our feelings, our experiences: he had touched the bare,
unkind beginning of things, that chaos which existed when darkness
reigned over the face of the waters, and only Moby-Dick had stirred
in the deep: he had beheld the white unrefracted truth which exists
before it passes through man’s being and is broken up into the colours
of art and thought and custom and ritual and organized society. But
Nature paints like a harlot, not without reason: she desires to attract
the passions of men, to attract and use them for her own end: life.
Melville’s consciousness of a more primal world made him see more
exhaustively, I think, into the nature of existence: but it was bare
rock-truth, unweathered into soil, still less worked over by plants,
insects, moulds, and the tools of man: and it gave him nothing that
his spirit could feed on. At last he escaped from that bleak ultimate
revelation, and, participating in the ancient cycle of life, he found
his own life renewed once more.

Melville’s last poems gain by comparison with his earlier work: but
his prose inevitably loses a little. One does not miss his lack
of energy in a quatrain; it is plain and perceptible even in a
short novel. One notes this falling off of Melville’s prose in the
sketches on the Marquis de Grandvin: it comes out again in the little
addition to Rip van Winkle that he wrote. In his prime, writing about
Hawthorne, Melville had little use for the tepid quality of Irving’s
prose, so genteelly lymphatic; but now, in 1890, he went so far as
to dedicate his addendum to the Happy Shade of Sunnyside. The torrid
tropical sunlight, the violent gold and purple of Melville’s earlier
prose vanished: what was left was the mild pale sunshine cast on
the bronzed oak leaves of a winter landscape. These graceful but
diminished energies properly link Melville’s spirit with Irving’s. The
immediateness of the old narratives was gone. Billy Budd, his final
novel, is not a full-bodied story: there is statement, commentary,
illustration, just statement, wise commentary, apt illustration:
what is lacking is an independent and living creation. The epithets
themselves lack body and colour: Billy Budd has nothing to compare
with the description of boiling whale-oil in Moby-Dick--“a wild Hindoo
odour, like the left wing of the Day of Judgement.”

Billy Budd, which was dedicated to Jack Chase, wherever he might be,
alow or aloft, lacks the fecundity and energy of White-Jacket: the
story itself takes place on the sea, but the sea itself is missing, and
even the principal characters are not primarily men: they are actors
and symbols. The story gains something by this concentration, perhaps:
it is stripped for action, and even Melville’s deliberate digressions
do not halt it. Each of the characters has a Platonic clarity of form.
Captain the Honourable Edward Fairfax Vere, “starry Vere,” is a man
of superior order: humane, reserved, free from cant, fortified by an
equal knowledge of men and books. After the mutiny of the Nore, the
time when this story takes place, the command of a British naval vessel
is no easy one: the officers are tense and expectant, though outwardly
indifferent: mutiny may break out any minute among the “people.” Billy
Budd, a seaman taken over by impressment from The Rights of Man, stands
out from the rest of the crew: one of Nature’s innocents. A fine frame,
yellow hair, an open, almost girlish face, set him off with angelic
beauty: and he is a natural favourite among the crew: the Handsome
Sailor of eighteenth century balladry.

Without overt act, merely by being what he is, the personification
of strength, health, beauty, innocence, Budd incurs the enmity of
Claggart, the master-at-arms. Claggart, with a suspicious past at his
back but with soft humid ways and obsequious intelligence, has quickly
won promotion: he is now the evil agent of discipline, prowling over
the ship, watching for disorder--a sea-bag not stowed away, a sailor
evading work, or a hint of mutiny. It is as natural for Claggart to
hate goodness as it is for Budd to personify it: the evil in the man is
apparently causeless in any immediate sense, like the venom in a snake:
it simply is there. With a benign, ambiguous exterior, he secretly
contrives in small ways to make Billy’s lot miserable; and when Billy,
perplexed, brings the matter before a trusty wizen-mouthed old sailor,
the old fellow tells “Baby Budd” that Claggart has it in for him. In
his simpleness, Budd cannot believe it. How could he?--for he had
given no offence. So Claggart plots more deeply against Budd; through
confederates in the crew, tale-bearers and spies, he tries to bribe
Budd into mutiny. Budd, not realizing the meaning of the suggestion
when it is made to him, still flushes with anger, like a fresh girl
spattered by an obscenity. Then Claggart goes further. He takes
advantage of Budd by wakening him from a sleep and getting him into a
compromising position before he is sufficiently awake to withdraw. Now
Claggart thinks he has Budd in his power. He appears before Captain
Vere and humbly submits his report of Budd’s attempted treachery.

Captain Vere, being a firm man and a sound one, is not greatly
impressed by Claggart’s tale: it looks too thin: but for the sake of
form and discipline, since the customs of the navy make it necessary to
employ such fellows as Claggart, he summons Budd to his own cabin to
confront the master-at-arms, instead of airing the matter by a public
inquiry. When Budd comes, Claggart repeats his lie to Budd’s face.
This poor lad has only one physical blemish: in moments of stress he
stammers, and now, confronted by this sudden, horrifying suspicion,
he can for the moment give no answer. His mouth makes an effort: no
words come forth: the blood mounts up to his head. Captain Vere wisely
attempts to soothe him: “There is no hurry, my boy, take your time.”
These kindly words have just the opposite effect to that intended,
for, touching Billy’s heart to a mighty effort at release, he answers
Claggart’s lie with a cannon-blow from his fists. Budd’s first and only
act of rebellion is fatal: Claggart is instantaneously killed.

Vere has no belief whatever in Budd’s guilt; but this act swiftly
alters the case. The perjurer has been struck dead by an angel of God;
but in this world, the angels must hang. A swift deck court-martial is
held in the captain’s cabin, and Vere is caught by the dual nature of
his position. He is commander of the ship, a captain, a disciplinarian,
responsible for the safety of all aboard, committed by the terms of
his commission to the Articles of War and all that they imply. As a
man, with fatherly feelings toward this innocent boy, he would be
merciful: as commander, he acts against his innermost wishes and
urges his subordinates not to be swayed by motives of compassion. His
fellow officers reluctantly respect their superior’s probity: they
sentence Billy Budd to be hanged for murder. Privately, as man to man,
as father to son, Vere announces the sentence to Budd. Justice done,
pity, magnanimity, stir Vere to the bottom: the feelings of the judge
and the judged are transferred; for the burden now lies on Captain Vere
rather than on the victim; and Vere, in turn, is the instrument of an
institution. When the hemp is placed around Billy Budd’s neck, Billy
turns to the quarter-deck and cries out: God bless Captain Vere. He
dies happily, in the first vapoury glory of the dawn--dies, and becomes
a legend among the sailors, and the spar from which he was hanged is
followed through its vicissitudes, and ballads are sung and tales are
told about him.

Billy Budd is the story of three men in the British Navy: it is
also the story of the world, the spirit, and the devil. Melville
left a note, crossed out in the original manuscript, “Here ends a
story not unwarranted by what happens in this incongruous world of
ours--innocence and infirmity, spiritual depravity and fair respite.”
The meaning is so obvious that one shrinks from underlining it. Good
and evil exist in the nature of things, each forever itself, each
doomed to war with the other. In the working out of human institutions,
evil has a place as well as the good: Vere is contemptuous of Claggart,
but cannot do without him: he loves Budd as a son and must condemn him
to the noose: justice dictates an act abhorrent to his nature, and only
his inner magnanimity keeps it from being revolting. These are the
fundamental ambiguities of life: so long as evil exists, the agents
that intercept it will also be evil, whilst we accept the world’s
conditions: the universal articles of war on which our civilizations
rest. Rascality may be punished; but beauty and innocence will suffer
in that process far more. There is no comfort, in the perpetual Calvary
of the spirit, to find a thief nailed on either side. Melville had
been harried by these paradoxes in Pierre. At last he was reconciled.
He accepted the situation as a tragic necessity; and to meet that
tragedy bravely was to find peace, the ultimate peace of resignation,
even in an incongruous world. As Melville’s own end approached, he
cried out with Billy Budd: God bless Captain Vere! In this final
affirmation Herman Melville died. September 28, 1891, was the date of
the outward event.

EPILOGUE

Why does Herman Melville mean so much more to us than he did to his
own contemporaries? What has his thought done for us, and what has his
vision given?

The change that has come about is not merely a change of style,
so that the things which amused Mr. Stedman or Mr. Lowell are now
old-fashioned, like hooped skirts, while the things that concerned
Melville are, like the cubist quilts and coverlets of the 1850’s,
distinctly modern. Typee is still as good a book as Mr. Arthur Stedman
thought it; but we see now that it belongs to a more common order of
literature, whereas Moby-Dick, the more closely we consider it, mounts
to that lonely wind-swept plateau in whose rarefied air only the finest
imaginations can breathe. Distinctly, Moby-Dick belongs with The Divine
Comedy and Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace; and if
it does not establish its right to this company, it must occupy a lower
place than the successful novels of its period, a David Copperfield or
a Pendennis, books written with a complete acceptance of the current
limitations and provincialities.

Melville’s work, taken as a whole, expresses that tragic sense of
life which has always attended the highest triumphs of the race, at
the moments of completest mastery and fulfilment. Where that sense
is lacking, life shrivels into small prudences and weak pleasures
and petty gains, and those great feats of thought and imagination
which transform the very character of the universe and relieve human
purpose from the scant sufficiency of toiling and eating and sleeping,
in a meaningless, reiterative round, shrivel away, too. John Ruskin
saw the truth of this when, in spite of his pacifist convictions, he
praised the art of war, for its effect upon the human spirit: life is
intensified and purposive when the battle with the inimical forces that
surround us, like Ahab’s battle, is a deliberate pursuit and challenge,
and not merely an apathetic waiting for a purely physiological end.

The tragedy of life, its evanescence, its frustrations, its limitations
within physical boundaries almost as narrow as a straitjacket, its
final extinction, becomes, in a day that consciously embraces its
fate, the condition of an heroic effort. Death, which biologically is
merely the terminus of a natural process, acquires significance for
man because he anticipates it and modifies his activities so as to
circumvent it: by memory and foresight, by choosing his ends, dreaming
of immortality, erecting monuments and statues and museums, and above
all, by transmitting the written word, man creates a destiny beyond his
life’s physical span. It is just because the worms lie in wait that man
defies the gods, cherishes the images he has created and the relations
he has solidified in custom and thought, and centres his efforts on
those things which are least given to meaningless change. Though the
sensible world is not derived, as Plato thought, from the heaven of
ideas, the opposite of this is what every culture must strive for: to
derive from the sensible world that which may be translated to a more
durable world of forms.

Within the world of these forms there is Life, a thing of value, and
not merely living, a matter of fact and habit and animal necessity.
Whether one develops this tragic sense of values on a battlefield,
like Sophocles, or in a whaleboat, like Melville, it is a precious
experience: for living, merely living, as every profane writer from
Petronius Arbiter to Theodore Dreiser has shown, brings boredom,
satiety, despair: whereas Life is eternal, and he who has faith in it
and participates in it is saved from the emptiness of the universe
and the pointlessness of his own presence therein. Living, for man, in
all but the most brutish communities, like those of the savages of the
Straits of Magellan or the outcasts of a Liverpool or New York slum,
includes and implies this Life; and when Melville summons into his
whaler the several races of the world, he is expressing the universal
nature of that effort which caps nature with culture, existence
with meaning, and facts with forms. Ahab’s tragic struggle is the
condition of every high endeavour of the mind, even though Death be
its tragic reward; while adjustment, acquiescence, accepting outward
conditions as inward necessities, though they may prolong living in the
physical sense, effectually curtail Life: this attitude, the attitude
of Melville’s contemporaries, the attitude of the routineers and
Philistines of all times--and they have never perhaps been so numerous
as today--disrupts life more completely than illness and death do;
for it brings about a deliquescence of forms, such as the nineteenth
century showed in all its common arts, and a disintegration of human
purposes. When that happens, the White Whale of brute energy reigns
supreme: Life itself is denied: living produces no values, and men hide
their emptiness by embracing dull counterfeits of purpose.

Melville’s younger contemporaries, who fought in the Civil War, knew
Life and Death; but those who prospered in the years that followed
knew something more dreadful than simple death: they knew chaos and
purposelessness and disintegration, such chaos and purposelessness,
mixed with a wan, reminiscent hope, as Henry Adams pictured in his
Education. Herman Melville portrayed a human purpose, concentrated
to almost maniacal intensity, in Moby-Dick; and in Pierre and The
Confidence Man, he showed the black aftermath, when the purpose was
not sustained and carried out in art, and when he himself was deserted
in his extremity, by contemporaries who neither understood nor heeded
nor shared his vision. No single mind can hold its own against all
that is foreign to it in the universe: Shakespeare’s solitary heroes
issue their brief defiance only to be blotted out: such unity of spirit
as one may possess, as philosopher or poet, must be sustained in the
community itself. Now, a new culture, the product of two hundred and
fifty years of settled life in America, had produced Walden, Leaves of
Grass, Emerson’s Notebooks, and Moby-Dick; but that culture, instead of
supporting and carrying forward the integration of man and nature and
society shadowed forth in those books, was completely uprooted by the
Civil War, and a material civilization, inimical in many aspects to the
forms and symbols of a humane culture, was swept in by the very act of
destruction.

Two generations of that material civilization have shown us its
lopsidedness, its aimlessness, its grand attempt to conceal its
emptiness by extending concrete roads and asphalted streets and vacuum
cleaners to more and more remote terrains. Our most humane writers,
like Mr. Sherwood Anderson, have proved how mercilessly the whole
human being is crippled by this one-sided triumph; and even our most
bewildered writers, who have exulted in all these maimed energies,
have shown in their very act of deification how brutal and aimless
they are. We realize that the effort of culture, the effort to make
Life significant and durable, to conquer in ourselves that formidable
confusion which threatens from without to overwhelm us--this effort
must begin again. And in thus making a beginning we are nearer to
Whitman with his cosmic faith and Melville in his cosmic defiance than
we are to a good part of the work of our own contemporaries. It is not
that we go back to these writers: it is, rather, that we have come
abreast of them; for in creating that new synthesis, in lieu of the
formless empiricisms and the rootless trancendentalisms of the last
three centuries, the writers of our own classic past were nearer to the
contemporary problem than almost any of the Europeans have been--since
the physical remains of another culture in Europe give the mind a false
sense of stability and security.

Herman Melville’s world is our world, magnificently bodied and
dimensioned: our synthesis must include and sublimate that very
quest of power which Melville portrayed with such unique skill, as a
combination of science and adventure and spiritual hardihood, in Typee,
Mardi, and Moby-Dick. Melville’s life warns us not to stop here: men
must test their strength in surrender as well as in lonely conquest:
he who knows neither social union nor sexual passion nor love is
indeed an Ishmael, who finds himself an outcast because he has cast
out that which was most precious to his own nature: there is love in
the universe as well as power: the sun warms and the rain slakes the
thirst: the whales dally and the first song of creation is the song of
sex.

The synthesis that Melville foreshadowed in his ideas is not simply a
logical structure: the search for such an abstract solution of life’s
problems is one of the idola of the closet. Melville’s synthesis was
embodied in acts and deeds. During the years of his early manhood, as
he wandered about the world and contemplated existence under the stars
and bore a hand in working the ship, his environment, his experience,
and his vital relationships were an integer. He did not lack what
libraries and cities and the social heritage of man gives: indeed,
he enjoyed fully the resources of a sound literary and philosophic
scholarship; but he mixed this with activities that gave back to books
the subtle properties that cannot be transmitted to the printed page,
but must be derived directly from living. The reviewers in London might
well have been shocked by the spectacle of a common sailor writing
Typee or White-Jacket. Melville had bridged in his life that great gap
between the respectable, learned professions and the common trades that
had hitherto been crossed, with rare exceptions, only by those who
definitely had lost caste, or who, like Burns, had risen with a sense
of uneasy, sullen pride to acceptance among people of high rank.

Melville was an American--and that implied the dissolution of
spiritual frontiers. America had taken all the established castes
and classifications of Europe and left them to sort themselves out
according to nature and ability: this was the true and beneficial
result of eighteenth century thinking and its political accompaniments.
By a singular dissociation of ideas, which involved the destruction
of an old social tissue, it had permitted a free and disinterested
creature, a man, to emerge from a conglomeration of classes and
practical interests. Melville was not primarily a sailor; he was not an
adventurer; he was a man sailing, a man adventuring, a man thinking,
proving in his early manhood that a whole and healthy life may involve
many functions, without sacrificing its wholeness and health to any
one of them. Whitman with his carpentering and his nursing, Thoreau
with his pencil-making and gardening, were Herman Melville’s brothers
in the way and the life. They did not disdain practical life: they
faced it manfully: but instead of neglecting every other activity for
“business” they saw that what was called business was only a small part
of the totality of living: they behaved toward it _as if it were real_,
as Whitman said, with the knowledge that merely getting a living was
not a sufficient contribution to Life. Brutal though Melville found
whaling to be, it communicated, nevertheless, a sense of Life: there
was astronomy and natural history and art and religion within the
bulky hold of a whaler, as well as technics and business and the daily
logbook.

The vision that grew out of this experience was a whole one, not,
like the science of its time, subordinated to practical interests
or even narrower metaphysical schemata. Through its dissociation
from inherited values all things began at scratch: no one element
in life, except sex, carried a handicap. Melville’s settling down
was inevitable, inevitable and difficult: but the difficulty was not
due to the inability of a restless adventurer to accept a tamer and
more even existence: it was due to the fact that, having known a
rounded and cultured life, however savage and exacting, he could not
submit to the desiccated routine of Western civilization, with its
contempt for art, its gross disregard for the higher manifestations
of science, its dislike for meditation, its subservient religion, its
frank subordination of all other values to that of Comfort. Melville’s
contemporaries, with chance exceptions, neither lived as full a life as
he had lived in the South Seas, nor were able to understand it, even as
a theory. For these contemporaries, Melville’s vision was an example
of Bedlam literature: they did not realize that Bedlam was precisely
the world they lived in, and that Melville’s vision, like Emerson’s,
like Whitman’s, like Thoreau’s, was a part, and a great part, of a new
cultural synthesis.

The stripping down of Herman Melville’s ego, which he began in Mardi
and finished in Pierre, was a sloughing away of labels, nicknames,
party war-cries, habits, conventions, and acceptances; it was,
necessarily, a prelude to that building up of a new ego, a surer and
more central, a social and participating self, which is the task of
our own time for both men and communities. Melville was crippled in
the work of reconstruction by a hiatus in his own career, which was
followed and made final by the social hiatus of the Civil War: though
he sought to carry the work further in Clarel, one cannot pretend that
he did anything but give a hint of this mended psyche, this more richly
integrated self: one of his last poems, The Lake of Pontoosuce, perhaps
approaches nearer to the goal than any other work of his. Had he built
up that ego, his vision might have fully complemented Whitman’s--land
and sea, day and night, sunlight and shadow, triumph and tragedy. That
union was latent: it is for us to effect it. It is useless, however,
to speculate upon what might have been. The accidents that befell
Melville, as he rounded his own Cape Horn, were part of that malign
doom he himself pictured in Moby-Dick, and they do not affect the
essence of his work. Whatever Melville’s life was, his art in Moby-Dick
exhibits that integration and synthesis which we seek. Through his art,
he escaped the barren destiny of his living: he embraced Life; and we
who now follow where his lonely courage led him embrace it, too. This
embrace was a fertile one; and in each generation it will bring forth
its own progeny. The day of Herman Melville’s vision is now in the
beginning. It hangs like a cloud over the horizon at dawn; and as the
sun rises, it will become more radiant, and more a part of the living
day.

NOTE ON BOOKS

The complete and definitive edition of Melville’s works is that
published by Constable and Company, London, 1923-1924. With the
exception of Israel Potter, The Confidence Man, Pierre, and the
various volumes of verse, all of Melville’s work can now be obtained
in contemporary popular editions. Mr. Raymond Weaver’s edition of
The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville (Horace Liveright, 1928) and
Mr. Henry Chapin’s edition of the Appletree Table and Other Sketches
and of John Marr and Other Poems (Princeton University Press, 1922)
make almost all of Melville’s significant minor work available. Mr.
Meade Minnegrode’s Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville and a
Bibliography contains extracts from some of Melville’s Letters to
Evert Duyckinck. The bibliography covers in detail all of Melville’s
writings, giving both American and English first editions. The first
biography of Herman Melville was that of Mr. Raymond Weaver: Herman
Melville, Mariner and Mystic (Doran, 1921). Mr. John Freeman’s brief
critical biography belongs to the new English Men of Letters Series
(Macmillan, 1926); Mr. Freeman has the distinction of being the first
to deal patiently and critically with Melville’s poetry. Various other
volumes on Herman Melville are now in course of preparation. Among the
critics whose studies of Melville have contributed to his revival and
to a proper evaluation of his work I would mention especially Mr. Frank
Jewett Mather, Jr., Miss Viola Meynell, Mr. Percy Boynton, Mr. J. W. N.
Sullivan, Mr. E. L. Grant Watson, and, not least, Mr. Van Wyck Brooks.

INDEX

Acushnet, ship list, 43

Adams, Henry, chaos and purposelessness pictured by, 360

Adjustment, fallacious interpretation of, 313-344

Adler, Dr., 120

Adolescent purity, 216

After the Pleasure Party, 274

Ahab, Captain, 161 ff.

Alcott, Bronson, 66

Alma, 99

Ambiguities, Melville’s experiences of, 210;
Emerson’s expression of, 216

Ambition, Melville’s secret, 347

American Aloe on Exhibition, The, 345

American folk-arts, 45

American psyche, broken, 229

American society, in 1819, 9;
in 1844, 63;
economic conflict, 63;
question of one and many, 63;
slavery and industrialism, 64;
intrusion of new habits of living, 64;
contrast of vital and mechanical, provincial and metropolitan, 66;
in 1860, 293;
loss of form, 293;
wastefulness of industrialism in, 294

Anglo-American Literature and Manners, 74

Anticipation of modern science, Melville’s, 99

Appletree Table, The, 236

Arrowhead, 136

Articles of War, 355

Arts, as means of salvation, 318

Attica, comparison with North Atlantic states, 65

Azzageddi, Melville’s demon, 102

Babbalanja, 95

Barney, 21

Bartleby the Scrivener, 236-239

Battle Pieces and Other Aspects of the War, 303-305

Beddoes, 179

Bell-Tower, 236

Benito Cereno, 244-246

Bentley, 123

Beowulf, 194

Berkshires, 135

Billson, James, 334

Billy Budd, 337, 353-356

Birth, 16

Bitterness of life, 309

Blackness, Melville’s, 233-235

Blake, William, 335

Boynton, Percy, 181, 194

Bridegroom Dick, 337

Broadhall, 135

Brooks, Van Wyck, 110, 194

Bryant, William Cullen, 12

Bullen, Frank, 147

Camoëns, 58

Captain Claret, 59

Captain Riga, 29, 36

Captains, The Two, 290

Centenary Committee, 333

Chapin, Henry, 369

Chaplain Mudge, 44

Charity, 249, 253

Chase, Jack, 57

Chasles, M. Philarète, 74

Children, Melville’s, plight of, 287;
fate of Malcolm and Stanwix, 288

Christianity, Melville’s respect for, 103;
his repugnance toward, 320

Chronometricals and Horologicals, 214

Civil War, the, a dividing point, 291;
attempt to preserve ideological framework by, 292;
symbolizes disruption, 293;
described by Whitman, 297

Claggart, causeless evil in, 354

Clarel, 307-324

Coan, Titus Munson, 259

Cock-a-doodle-do, 236

Cologne, 128

Colonel J. Bunkum, 337

Confidence, lack of, 248

Confidence Man, The, 247-255

Consular post, Melville’s efforts to secure, 235, 289

Contempt, Melville’s, for contemporaries, 233

Convictions, conflict of, 301

Cousins, their condescension and Melville’s resentment, 75

Critic, The, 3

Critics, their condemnation of Mardi, 105;
misconception of Melville, 106

Crystal Palace Exhibition, 188

Culture, new, 361

Customs Office, an asylum, 329

Daggoo, 165

Dana, Richard Henry, 40

Dark Ages of Democracy, 327

Death, biological terminus, 359;
spiritual significance, 359

Death, Herman Melville’s, 357

Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser, 36

De Quincey, 127

Derwent, 311

Dilemma as writer, 221

Dominora, 97

Dowden, quoted, 234

Duke of Rutland, 129

Duyckinck, Evert, 73;
expurgates Typee, 76;
introduces Melville to literary world, 79;
Lowell’s characterization of, 80;
correspondence with Melville, 140 ff.

Duyckinck, George, 79

Duyckincks, The, Whitman’s opinion of, 80

Edens, authentic, 339

Emerson, Lectures on the Times, 65;
defended by Melville, 140;
absence of shadows in, 141

Encantadas, The, or Enchanted Isles, 239-240

England, first impression of, 33;
return to, 119 ff.;
depth and triviality of, 124, 125

Enthusiast, The, 342

Eternity, 98

Ethan Brand, criticism of Melville in, 145

European observations, 273-274

Evil, discovery in Mardi, 96, 246

Fact, respect for in nineteenth-century literature, 192;
in Moby-Dick, 192

Faith, animal, 324

Fantasies, usable and unusable, 233

Father Mapple, 159-160

Father Taylor, prototype of Father Mapple, 44

Fayaway, Melville’s companion, 49, 52

Fiddler, The, 259

Flask, 164

Flogging, Melville’s influence on abolition of, 117

Forms, world of, 359

Forster, E. M., 209

Free verse, in Pierre, 181

Gansevoort Hotel, 329

Gansevoort Market, 329

Gansevoorts, 11

Glendinning, Mrs., 203

Golden Day, The, 141

Goodman, Frank, 250

Grand Armada, 171

Greene, Richard Tobias, 73

Haglets, The, 342

Harper’s, 135, 235

Hautia, symbol of sensual bliss, 51;
her attractiveness in Typee, 51

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, first effect on Melville, 137;
likeness to Rembrandt, 138,
to Shakespeare, 138;
first meeting with Melville, 142;
last meeting, 262-265

Hawthorne, Sophia, characterization of Melville, 143

Herzen, Alexander, 91, 315

Hiatus, in Melville’s emotional development, 218;
in his career, 291

Highlander, The, 28, 32

Human values, sweeping away of, 319

Humiliation, effect of, 31

Humour, of desperation, 169;
Melville’s perpetual sense of, 290

I and My Chimney, 236

Ideal life, fantastic notions of, 65

Ideality, embodied in animal instincts, 352

Illness, Melville’s, 224-225

Imaginative synthesis, Moby-Dick as, 170-171

Industrialism, as end in itself, 65;
wastefulness of, 294;
bleak efficiency and blindness to humane purpose, 319

Inheritance, 336

Innocents Abroad, 328

Insanity, looseness of term, 231;
biographer’s difficulty, 231;
Melville’s interpretation of, 231-232;
relationship with art, 232-233

Institutions, upheaval in 1848, 91;
savage parody of in Mardi, 91

Instrumentation of Moby-Dick, 182

Irving, Washington, 139

Isabel, 202

Israel Potter, 240-242

Jack Gentian, 337

Jackson, 29;
Melville pities, 235

Jehovah, birth of idea of, 271

Jewish literature, Melville’s sympathies with, 320

Jimmy Rose, 259

Jocularity, infirmity of, 283, 290-291

John Brown, 297

John Marr, 338

Jokes, family’s indifference to, 332

Journals, Melville’s, to England and the Continent, 119-131;
to Constantinople and the Holy Land, 261-273

Jung, 194

Juvenile Total Abstinence Association, 29

Kinship with Thoreau, 112

Kory-Kory, manservant, 47

Lake of Pontoosuce, The, 349-350

Lawrence, D. H., 194

Leisure, Melville’s high opinion of, 332

Lenin, 316

Life, implication of ideal ends, 189;
as more than living, 190;
stultification in vacuous dreams, 316

Life, naïve joy in, 49;
sinister meanings of, 124;
shadow of death on, 129

Libellous criticism, 106

Lightning Rod Man, The, 236

Literary method, Melville’s conception, 212

Literary World, The, 79

Lockhart, 125

Lombardo, 102

London, greyness of, 124;
depression of, 126

Londoners, 123

Lucy, 202

MacMechan, Archibald, 337

Man of the World, The, 290

Manhattan literati, 79

Mardi, characterization of, 93-101

Mark Twain, 328

Marquesas, 46-55

Marquis de Grandvin, 337

Masefield, John, 110

Material civilization, lopsidedness of, 361

Mather, F. J., Jr., 241

Mechanical arts, menace of their perfection, 318

Media, 95

Mehevi, King of Typees, 47

Melville, Allan, brother of Herman, 66

Melville, Allan, father of Herman Melville, characteristics, 13, 14;
knowledge of Europe, 15;
marriage, 14;
traveller, 21;
death, 23

Melville, Elizabeth (Shaw), marries Herman, 86;
as housekeeper, 136;
strain of relationship with Herman, 287;
receives affectionate dedication of Weeds and Wildings, 344

Melville, Gansevoort, 25, 67, 80

Melville, Herman, his family, 11-14;
birth, 17;
birthplace, 17;
early impressions, 17;
starved of affection, 18;
moved to Bleecker Street, 18;
melancholy situation, 19;
relatives, 20;
influence of Manhattan, 21;
ambitions, 22;
father’s death in 1832, 23;
fixation of father’s image, 24;
struggle for existence, 25-26;
Grand Tour, 27;
an infant Ishmael, 28;
bitterness of youth, 28;
disappointment in Liverpool, 33;
exploration of city, 34;
first view of misery and degradation, 34-35;
essential education, 35;
return to Lansingburgh, 36;
slow growth, 36;
early sexual life, 36-37;
first literary effusions, 37-38;
beginning of self-consciousness, 39;
preparation for literature, 38;
attraction to sea, 40;
departure from New Bedford, 41;
leaves ship at Nukuheva, 46;
lives among Typees, 47-52;
is rescued by the Julia, 52;
makes friends with Dr. Long Ghost, 52;
participates in mutiny, 53;
is confined in British jail, 54;
becomes a rover, 54-55;
enjoys idle life, 55;
works in Honolulu, 55;
becomes sick of adventure, 56;
ships on U. S. Frigate, United States, 56;
homeward bound, 56-62;
discovers abuses in Navy, 57;
makes friends with Jack Chase, 57;
is influenced in literary taste by ship’s library, 57-58;
is condemned to flogging, 58;
has impulse to assault Captain, 58;
resents “massacre of beards,” 59;
falls from yard-arm, 59-60;
beginning of manhood, 61;
lands at Boston, 62;
writes Typee, 67;
habit of documentation, 69;
accuracy, 70;
effect of censorship on, 77;
successful author, 78;
writes Omoo, 81;
marries Elizabeth Shaw, 86;
honeymoon, 87;
daily routine, 87-89;
has weak eyes, 88;
writes Mardi, 91;
tightening of domestic responsibility, 108;
necessity for potboilers, 108;
writes Redburn, 108;
writes White-Jacket, 114;
goes to Europe, 119;
becomes acquainted with English society, 122;
steady growth and development, 131;
return to America, 131;
moves to Arrowhead, 136;
meets Hawthorne, 142;
correspondence with, 144 ff.;
discovers Hawthorne’s sentiments, 147;
apprenticeship over, 150;
intensity of effort in Moby-Dick, 151;
ruin of eyesight, 152;
feeling of desolation, 154;
is damned by dollars, 155;
contempt of fame, 155;
swift development, 156;
exaltation and terror from Moby-Dick, 156;
situation after Moby-Dick, 196;
culmination of powers, 197;
disclosure of weaknesses, 196;
his wilful defiance, 199;
mood of defeat, 200;
betrays himself in Pierre, 218;
terrific pressure leads to retreat of, 220;
dilemmas as writer, 107, 220;
anticipation of defeat, 221;
failure to mature in marriage, 222;
draws near spiritual Cape Horn, 223;
alienation from humanity, 227;
scorn of critics, 228;
Timonism, 230;
meets successive misfortunes, 235, 236;
weakened health, 236;
writes Piazza Tales, 236;
Israel Potter, and The Confidence Man, 236-255;
recoils from painful experience, 259;
goes on voyage to Holy Land, 261;
visits Hawthorne in England, 261;
discusses withdrawal from literature, 263;
fails to renew friendship, 265;
sails for Near East, 265;
explores Constantinople, 267, and Cairo, 270;
has passionate encounter in Italy, 274-281;
returns home, 1857, 281;
seeks to gain living in lecture lyceum, 282;
voyage to San Francisco in 1860, 284;
longing for Elizabeth, 286;
commonplaceness as father, 287;
sells Arrowhead, meets carriage accident, moves to New York, 289;
interest in Civil War, 292-303;
eventual disillusion, 303;
withdraws from literary struggle, 306;
gets inspectorship in Customs House, 307;
writes Clarel, 307-308;
is indifferent to “recognition,” 333;
is released from Customs House, 336;
resumes literary work and writes Billy Budd, 337;
publishes John Marr, 338;
publishes Timoleon, 342;
writes Weeds and Wildings, 344;
expresses warmth of love for Elizabeth, 345;
finds peace, 351;
expresses ultimate resignation in Billy Budd, 357;
death, 357

Melville, Malcolm, 92

Melville, Maria, mother of Herman Melville, comparison with Mrs.
Glendinning, 14

Melville, Stanwix, 287

Melville, Thomas, ambition to become sailor, 67

Men-about-literature, 333

Metcalf, Eleanor Melville, v

Milton, 191

Minnigerode, Meade, 285

Misinterpretation of Melville, 224

Missionaries, 74

Moby-Dick, writing of, 147-157;
summary of, 158-176;
criticism of, 176-195;
symphonic quality, 182;
organic conception of, 182;
its meaning as story of sea, 183;
as parable of evil, 184;
as tragedy of man, 187;
as contrast of practical and ideal life, 188

Modern vision of life, 194

Mohi, 95

Monody (to Hawthorne), 265

Mortmain, 310

Murray, Dr. Henry A., Jr., vi

Murray, John, 73

Mythology, Moby-Dick as first modern, 193

Nathan, 310

Nature, oneness with, 351;
paints like a harlot, 352

New York, in 1819, 15-16;
after Civil War, 326;
its brutality, 327

New Bedford, centre of whaling industry, 42, 158

No Trust, 249

O’Brien, Fitz-James, 198

Olympians, English, 124

Omoo, 81-84

Orthodox illusions, Melville’s rejection of, 324-325

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, 191

Palestine, effect on Melville, 309

Paradise of Bachelors, 130, 236

Paradox of morality, 216

Passion, reawakening in Italy, 275;
frustration, 276-281

Parrington, Vernon, 199

Peace, Melville’s ultimate, 357

Pequod, The, 161

Personal disappointment and bitterness, 109;
an Ishmael, 109

Physical characteristics, Melville’s, 119

Physical weakness, 225

Piazza Tales, The, 243

Pictures, Melville’s favourite, 130, 336

Pierre, 196-206

Pilgrims, Melville’s and Chaucer’s, 311-312

Pip, 170

Pittsfield, 135, 341

Plotinus Plinlimmon, 215

Political institutions, Melville’s misgivings over, 295

Post-bellum America, 343

Primal world, Melville’s consciousness of, 353

Progress, its illusory nature, 313-314

Prose-sketches, 337

Provincial society, 9;
its economic foundations, 10;
mixture of nationalities, 10;
reality of family, 11;
idealized in Pierre, 13;
destruction, 292

Psychological truth, in Pierre, 211

Pyramids, the, effect on Melville, 271

Queequeg, 160

Rama, 330

Rammon, Introduction to, quoted, 323

Realism, 5

Recoil from black experience, 255

Redburn, 108-114

Refugee, The, 290

Rembrandt, 336

Resignation, on point of, 259

Retarding environment, 345

Return of the Sire de Nesle, 90

Revolutionary betterment, psychological problem of, 316

Rip Van Winkle, Melville’s addition to, 353

Rolfe, 310

Rose Garden, The, 348

Rumour of Melville’s insanity, 224

Ruskin, John, in praise of war, 359

Russell, W. Clark, 334

Ruth, 310

Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 335

Sailors, hard life, 30;
monotony of pleasures, 31

Salvator R. Tarnmoor, pseudonym for H. M., 239

Satire, perfection in White-Jacket, 116;
in The Confidence Man, 253

Science, Melville’s utilization of, 163

Sea Poems, 334, 340

Seaman’s Bethel, 43

Serenia, 99

Sermon on the Mount, 195

Sexual feud, 277

Shakespeare, William, Melville’s discovery of in maturity, 138;
Messianic likeness for Melville, 138

Shaw, Lemuel, inheritance left by, 336

Significance, Melville’s, 361-368

Slavery, Melville’s attitude towards, 296;
Hawthorne’s attitude, 297

Smith, J. E. A., testimony on Melville, 341

Society, immoral practices of, 111

Social observation, Melville’s, 314-316

Starbuck, 164

Stedman, Arthur, 358

Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 327

Stewart, Miss Caroline, v

Stoddard, R. H., 329

Surgeon Cuticle, his operation, 116

Synthesis, foreshadowed by Melville, 362

Taboo, its caprices, 50;
effect of sexual, 78

Taji, 94-101

Tartarus of Maids, The, 64, 236

Tashtego, 165

Thomas, Mrs. Frances, v

Thomson, James, 334

Thoreau, experiment at Walden, 65

Thy Aim, Thy Aim?, 348

Timonism, 233

Toby, 72;
story of, 74

Tragic sense of life, the, 358

Transcendentalists, satire on, 213

Travels, to Liverpool, 29;
to London, 119;
to Paris, 127;
to Liverpool (1856), 261;
to Greece, 265;
to Constantinople, 267;
to Cairo, 270;
to Jerusalem, 272;
through Europe, 273;
to California, 284

Turner, 336

Twenty-sixth Street, 104 East, 328

Two Years Before the Mast, effect on Melville, 40

Typee, 68-76

Typees, their cannibalism, 47;
customs, 48;
superiority to Western Civilization, 48;
their beauty, 49;
pleasures of their life, 49;
Melville’s escape from, 52

Ulver, Delly, 203

Unconscious, discovery of the, 102

Universe, acceptance of, 351;
false metaphysical separation of, 352

Vedder, Elihu, 334

Vere, Captain the Honorable Edward Fairfax, 354

Versification, Melville’s weakness in, 303, 320

Vice and Virtue, 217

Victorian confidence, 318

Vine, 310

Vision, wholeness of, 368

Vivenza, 97

Vivia, 205

War, its anomalous nature, 298;
its arousal of Melville, 298-302
as image of Melville’s life, 299

Watson, E. L. G., 369

Weaver, Raymond, v, 344

Weeds and Wildings, 344

Wendell, Barrett, 80

Whale, first effect on Melville, 41;
a New Bedford memory, 42;
as symbol, 162;
as natural history, 162, 163

Whale ship, Melville’s College, 46

Whaling implements, 45

White, as symbol of elemental truth, 168

White-Jacket, 114-118

Whitehead, A. N., 191

White Whale, incarnation of malicious agencies, 166;
symbol of external universe, 167;
Ahab’s defiance of, 167

Whitman, Walt, 4, 5

Woman, her absence in Melville’s work, 201

Woodberry, George, 80

Work, dignity of, 332

Wulf, Uncle John de, 20

Yillah, 94;
symbol of spiritual quest, 51;
beckons Melville, 52

Yoomy, 95

Young Goodman Brown, 203

[Transcriber’s note: Italics are rendered with _underscores_. Small
capitals, when used as emphasis, are shown with +plus signs+.

A small number of spelling corrections were made (“ultilizes/utilizes”,
“Mappie’s/Mapple’s”, “closses/closes”). Inconsistent hyphenation (e.g.,
“whale-boat” vs. “whaleboat”) has been retained.]

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