ART
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate;
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study;—love and hate:
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—art.
Apropos of the two letters last quoted, Mr. Julian Hawthorne says: “Mr. Melville was probably quite as entertaining and somewhat less abstruse, when his communications were by word of mouth. Mrs. Hawthorne used to tell of one evening when he came in, and presently began to relate the story of a fight which he had seen on an island in the Pacific, between some savages, and of the prodigies of valour one of them performed with a heavy club. The narrative was extremely graphic; and when Melville had gone, and Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne were talking over his visit, the latter said, ‘Where is that club with which Mr. Melville was laying about him so?’ Mr. Hawthorne thought he must have taken it with him; Mrs. Hawthorne thought he had put it in the corner; but it was not to be found. The next time Melville came, they asked him about it; whereupon it appeared that the club was still in the Pacific island, if it were anywhere.”
In the entry in his journal for July 30, 1851, Hawthorne wrote: “Proceeding homeward, we were overtaken by a cavalier on horseback, who saluted me in Spanish, to which I replied by touching my hat. But, the cavalier renewing his salutation, I regarded him more attentively, and saw that it was Herman Melville! So we all went homeward together, talking as we went. Soon Mr. Melville alighted, and put Julian in the saddle; and the little man was highly pleased, and sat on the horse with the freedom and fearlessness of an old equestrian, and had a ride of at least a mile homeward. I asked Mrs. Peters to make some tea for Herman Melville, and so she did; and after supper I put Julian to bed, and Melville and I had a talk about time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters, that lasted pretty deep into the night. At last he rose, and saddled his horse and rode off to his own domicile, and I went to bed....”
On August 8, 1851, Hawthorne reports in his journal: “To-day Herman Melville and the two Duyckincks came in a barouche, and we all went to visit the Shaker establishment at Hancock.” Of the Shakers, Hawthorne wrote: “They are certainly the most singular and bedevilled set of people that ever existed in a civilised land.” One wonders what would have been Hawthorne’s report of the valley of Typee.
The next letter acknowledges a lost communication from Hawthorne. It is dated, in Hawthorne’s writing: “received July 24, 1851.”
“My Dear Hawthorne: This is not a letter, or even a note, but merely a passing word to you said over your garden gate. I thank you for your easy flowing long letter (received yesterday), which flowed through me, and refreshed all my meadows, as the Housatonic—opposite me—does in reality. I am now busy with various things, not incessantly though; but enough to require my frequent tinkering; and this is the height of the haying season, and my nag is dragging home his winter’s dinners all the time. And so, one way and another, I am not a disengaged man, but shall be very soon. Meanwhile, the earliest good chance I get, I shall roll down to you, my good fellow, seeing we—that is, you and I—must hit upon some little bit of vagabondage before autumn comes. Greylock—we must go and vagabondise there. But ere we start, we must dig a deep hole, and bury all Blue Devils, there to abide till the last Day.... Good-bye.”
His X Mark.
And the last letter is a dithyramb of gratitude to Hawthorne for a letter of Hawthorne’s (would that it survived!) in appreciation of Moby-Dick.
“Pittsfield, Monday Afternoon.
“My Dear Hawthorne:
“People think that if a man has undergone any hardship he should have a reward; but for my part, I have done the hardest possible day’s work, and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper comfortably—why, then I don’t think I deserve any reward for my hard day’s work—for am I not at peace? Is not my supper good? My peace and my supper are my rewards, my dear Hawthorne. So your joy-giving and exultation-breeding letter is not my reward for my ditcher’s work with that book, but is the good goddess’s bonus over and above what was stipulated for—for not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is love appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory—the world? Then we pigmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended. I say your appreciation is my glorious gratuity. In my proud, humble way,—a shepherd-king,—I was lord of a little vale in the solitary Crimea; but you have now given me the crown of India. But on trying it on my head, I found it fell down on my ears, notwithstanding their asinine length—for it’s only such ears that sustain such crowns.
“Your letter was handed to me last night on the road going to Mr. Morewood’s, and I read it there. Had I been at home, I would have sat down at once and answered it. In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous—catch them while you can. The world goes round, and the other side comes up. So now I can’t write what I felt. But I felt pantheistic then—your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the Gods in old Rome’s Pantheon. It is a strange feeling—no hopelessness is in it, no despair. Content—that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling.
“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 God-head is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling. Now, sympathising with the paper, my angel turns over another leaf. You did not care a penny for the book. But, now and then as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled the book—and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough to praise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul. Once you hugged the ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in the mouth, and heard the rushing of the demon,—the familiar,—and recognised the sound; for you have heard it in your own solitudes.
“My dear Hawthorne, the atmospheric scepticisms steal over me now, and make me doubtful of my sanity in writing you thus. But, believe me, I am not mad, most noble Festus! But truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning. Farewell. Don’t write me a word about the book. That would be robbing me of my miserable delight. I am heartily sorry I ever wrote anything about you—it was paltry. Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby-Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish;—I have heard of Krakens.
“This is a long letter, but you are not at all bound to answer it. Possibly if you do answer it, and direct it to Herman Melville, you will missend it—for the very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it to the paper. Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! it is a long stage, and no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with you for a passenger, I am content and can 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.
“What a pity that, for your plain, bluff letter, you should get such gibberish! Mention me to Mrs. Hawthorne and to the children, and so, good-bye to you, with my blessing.
“Herman.
“P. S. I can’t stop yet. If the world was entirely made up of Magians, I’ll tell you what I should do. I should have a paper-mill established at one end of the house, and so have an extra riband for foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I should write a thousand—a million—a billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you. The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the bigger? A foolish question—they are one.
“H.
“P. P. S. Don’t think that by writing me a letter, you shall always be bored with an immediate reply to it—and so keep both of us delving over a writing-desk eternally. No such thing! I sha’n’t always answer your letters and you may do just as you please.”
Hawthorne had written Melville a “plain, bluff letter,” and in reply was to be told, with “infinite fraternity,” that “the god-head is broken up like the bread at the Supper” and that he was one of the pieces. Melville had dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne, and Hawthorne made some sort of acknowledgment of the tribute. Melville, shrewdly suspected him, however, of caring “not a penny” for the book, but in archangelical charity praising less the “imperfect body” than the “pervading thought” which “now and then” he understood.
Moby-Dick was an allegory, of course—but withal an allegory of a solidity and substance that must have appeared to Hawthorne little short of grossly shocking. Hawthorne had been praised from his “airy and charming insubstantiality.” And of himself he wrote, with engaging candour: “Whether from lack of power, or an unconquerable reserve, the Author’s touches have often an effect of tameness.” Hawthorne’s “reserve” is, of course, all myth. Both Hawthorne and Melville, though each a recluse in life, overflow to the reader. And as Brownell says of Hawthorne: “He does not tell very much, but apparently he tells everything.” But to Hawthorne, Melville’s overflowing, like a spring freshet, or a tidal wave, must have been little less than appalling. Hawthorne’s was eminently a neat, fastidious style, as free from any eccentricity or excess as from any particular pungency or colour. Melville’s was extravagant, capricious, vigorous, and “unliterary”: the energy of his undisciplined genius is its most significant quality. After all, was it possible for Hawthorne to feel any deep sympathy for Melville’s passionate enthusiasms, for Melville’s catholic toleration, for Melville’s quenchless curiosity, for Melville’s varied laughter, for Melville’s spiritual daring? It is true that Hawthorne found Story’s “Cleopatra”—inspired, it might appear, by a fancy of the young Victoria in discreet negligée—“a terrible, dangerous woman, quite enough for the moment, but very like to spring upon you like a tigress.” He never visited George Eliot because there was another Mrs. Lewes. He was much troubled by the nude in art. He pronounced Margaret Fuller’s “in many respects,” a “defective and evil nature,” and “Providence was kind in putting her and her clownish husband and their child on board that fated ship.” It is true that he wrote a graceful if not very genial introductory essay—once mistaken for a marvel quite eclipsing “Elia”—to relieve the dark tone of The Scarlet Letter. And it is also true that he accepted the adoration of his wife with the utmost gravity and appreciation. Mrs. Hawthorne, in one of her letters to her mother, by a transition in praise of Hawthorne’s eyes—“They give, but receive not”—comments at some length, on her husband’s “mighty heart,” that “opens the bosom of men.” “So Mr. Melville,” she says, “generally silent and incommunicative, pours out the rich floods of his mind and experience to him, so sure of appreciation, so sure of a large and generous interpretation.”
What interpretation Hawthorne gave to Moby-Dick has not transpired. Hawthorne mentions Moby-Dick once in his published works. In the Wonder Book he says: “On the hither side of Pittsfield sits Herman Melville, shaping out the gigantic conception of his white whale, while the gigantic shape of Greylock looms upon him from his study window.” Only one available Hawthorne-Melville document is still unprinted: the “Agatha” letter, mentioned by Mr. Julian Hawthorne. But the “Agatha” letter says nothing of Moby-Dick; and though of impressive bulk, its biographical interest is too slight to merit its publication.
Born in hell-fire, and baptised in an unspeakable name, Moby-Dick is, with The Scarlet Letter, among the few very notable literary achievements of American literature. There has been published no criticism of Melville more beautiful or more profound than the essay of E. L. Grant Watson on Moby-Dick (London Mercury, December, 1920). It is Mr. Watson’s contention in this essay, that the Pequod, with her monomaniac captain and all her crew, is representative of Melville’s own genius, and in the particular sense that each character is deliberately symbolic of a complete and separate element. Because of the prodigal richness of material in Moby-Dick, the breadth and vitality and solid substance of the setting of the allegory, the high quality of Moby-Dick as a psychological synthesis has very generally been lost sight of. Like Bunyan, or Swift, Melville has enforced his moral by giving an independent and ideal verisimilitude to its innocent and unconscious exponents. The self-sustaining vitality of Melville’s symbols has been magnificently vouched for by Mr. Masefield in his vision of the final resurrection. And the superb irony—whether unconscious or intended—of Moby-Dick’s “towing the ship our Lord was in, with all the sweet apostles aboard of her,” would surely have delighted Melville. Pilgrim’s Progress is undoubtedly a tract; but, as Brownell observes, if it had been only a tract, it would never have achieved universal canonisation. Both Pilgrim’s Progress and Moby-Dick are works of art in themselves, each leaning lightly—though of course to all the more purpose—on its moral. Most persons probably read Gulliver for the story, and miss the satire. In the same way, a casual reader of Moby-Dick may skip the more transcendental passages and classify it as a book of adventure. It is indeed a book of adventure, but upon the highest plane of spiritual daring. Ahab is, of course, the atheistical captain of the tormented soul; and his crew, so Melville says, is “chiefly made of mongrel renegades, and cast-aways and cannibals.” And Ahab is “morally enfeebled, also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or rightmindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollitry of indifference or recklessness of Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity of Flash!” But Ahab is Captain; and his madness is of such a quality that the white whale and all that is there symbolised, needs must render its consummation, or its extinction. On the waste of the Pacific, ship after ship passes the Pequod, some well laden, others bearing awful tidings: yet all are sane. The Pequod alone, against contrary winds, sails on into that amazing calm, that extraordinary mildness, in which she is destroyed by Moby-Dick. “There is a wisdom that is woe, and there is a woe that is madness.” And in Moby-Dick, the woe and the wisdom are mingled in the history of a soul’s adventure.
Though Moby-Dick is not only an allegory, but an allegory designed to teach woeful wisdom, nowhere in literature, perhaps, can one find such uncompromising despair so genially and painlessly administered. Indeed, the despair of Moby-Dick is as popularly missed as is the vitriolic bitterness of Gulliver. There is an abundance of humour in Moby-Dick, of course: and there is mirth in much of the laughter. In Moby-Dick, it would appear, Melville has made pessimism a gay science. “Learn to laugh, my young friends,” Nietzsche counsels, “if you are at all determined to remain pessimists.” If there are tears, he smiles gallantly as he brushes them aside. “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life,” Melville says, “when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discovers, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I regard this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great white whale its object.” And for the most part, he does. But he declares, withal, that “the truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. All is vanity. All.” Moby-Dick was built upon a foundation of this wisdom, and this woe; and so keenly did Melville feel the poignancy of this woe, so isolated was he in his surrender to this wisdom, that this wisdom and this woe, which he had learned from Solomon and from Christ, he felt to be of that quality which in our cowardice we call madness.
CHAPTER XVI
THE GREAT REFUSAL
“My towers at last! These rovings end,
Their thirst is slacked in larger dearth:
The yearning infinite recoils,
For terrible is earth.”
—Herman Melville: L’Envoi.
On a bleak and snowy November day in 1851, the Hawthorne family, with their trunks, got into a large farm wagon and drove away from the little red house. And with the departure of Hawthorne, Melville had dreamed the last of his avenging dreams. There may have been some association between the two men while Hawthorne was in West Newton, and later in Concord, but no records survive. In 1856, on his way to the Holy Land, Melville visited Hawthorne at Southport two days after arriving in Liverpool. Melville’s account of the meeting is thus recorded in his journal:
“Sunday, Nov. 9: Stayed home till dinner. After dinner took steamboat for Rock Ferry to find Mr. Hawthorne. On getting to R. F. learned he had removed thence 18 months previous and was now residing out of town.
“Monday, Nov. 10: Went among the docks to see the Mediterranean steamers. Saw Mr. Hawthorne at Consulate. Invited me to stay with him during my sojourn at Liverpool. Dined at Anderson’s, a very nice place, and charges moderate.
“Tuesday, Nov. 11: Hawthorne for Southport, 20 miles distant on the seashore, a watering place. Found Mrs. Hawthorne & the rest awaiting tea for us.
“Wednesday, Nov. 12: At Southport, an agreeable day. Took a long walk by the sea. Sand & grass. Wild & desolate. A strong wind. Good talk. In the evening stout & fox & geese. Julian grown into a fine lad. Una taller than her brother. Mrs. Hawthorne not in good health. Mr. Hawthorne stayed home with me.
“Thursday, Nov. 13: At Southport till noon. Mr. H. & I took train then for Liverpool. Spent rest of day putting enquiries among steamers.
“Friday, Nov. 14: Took bus for London Road. Called at Mr. Hawthorne’s. Met a Mr. Bright. Took me to his club and luncheoned me there.
“Sunday, Nov. 16: Rode in the omnibus. Went out to Foxhill Park, &c. Grand organ at St. George’s Hall.”
Three days later, Melville was off for Constantinople. In his English Note-book, under November 30th, 1856, Hawthorne wrote:
“November 30: A week ago last Monday, Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner.... We soon found ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and confidence.... He is thus far on his way to Constantinople. I do not wonder that he found it necessary to take an airing through the world, after so many years of toilsome pen-labour, following upon so wild and adventurous a youth as his was. I invited him to come and stay with us at Southport, as long as he might remain in this vicinity, and accordingly he did come the next day.... On Wednesday we took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in a hollow among the sand-hills, sheltering ourselves from the high cool wind. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything else that lies beyond human ken.... He has a very high and noble nature, and is better worth immortality than the most of us.... On Saturday we went to Chester together. I love to take every opportunity of going to Chester; it being the one only place, within easy reach of Liverpool, which possesses any old English interest. We went to the Cathedral.”—And then architecture gives place to personal comment.
Mr. Julian Hawthorne reports of this meeting: “At Southport the chief event of interest during the winter was a visit from Herman Melville, who turned up at Liverpool on his way to Constantinople, and whom Hawthorne brought out to spend a night or two with us. ‘He looked much the same as he used to do; a little paler, perhaps, and a little sadder, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner. I felt rather awkward at first, for this is the first time I have met him since my ineffectual attempt to get him a consular appointment from General Pierce. However, I failed only from real lack of power to serve him; so there was no reason to be ashamed, and we soon found ourselves on pretty much the former terms of sociability and confidence. Melville has not been well, of late; he has been affected with neuralgic complaints, and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind. So he left his place in Pittsfield, and has come to the Old World. He informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation, and I think will never rest until he gets hold of some definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sandhills amidst which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.’
“Melville made the rounds of Liverpool under the guidance of Henry Bright; and afterwards Hawthorne took him to Chester; and they parted the same evening, ‘at a street corner, in the rainy evening. I saw him again on Monday, however. He said that he already felt much better than in America; but observed that he did not anticipate much pleasure in his rambles, for that the spirit of adventure is gone out of him. He certainly is much overshadowed since I saw him last; but I hope he will brighten as he goes onward. He sailed on Tuesday, leaving a trunk behind him, and taking only a carpet-bag to hold all his travelling-gear. This is the next best thing to going naked; and as he wears his beard and moustache, and so needs no dressing-case,—nothing but a toothbrush,—I do not know a more independent personage. He learned his travelling habits by drifting about, all over the South Seas, with no other clothes or equipage than a red flannel shirt and a pair of duck trousers. Yet we seldom see men of less criticisable manners than he.’”
There is no record of these two men ever meeting again.
From the beginning, there had been, between Melville and Hawthorne, a profound incompatibility. When they met, Melville was within one last step of absolute disenchantment. One illusion, only, was to him still unblasted: The belief in the possibility of a Utopian friendship that might solace all of his earlier defeats. Ravished in solitude by his alienation from his fellows, Melville discovered that the author of The Scarlet Letter was his neighbour. He came to know Hawthorne: and his eager soul rushed to embrace Hawthorne’s as that of a brother in despair. Exultant was his worship of Hawthorne, absolute his desire for surrender. He craved of Hawthorne an understanding and sympathy that neither Hawthorne, nor any other human being, perhaps, could ever have given. His admiration for Hawthorne was, of course, as he inevitably discovered, built upon a mistaken identity. Yet, on the evidence of his letters, he for a time drew from this admiration moments both of tensest excitement and of miraculous and impregnating peace. It would be interesting, indeed, to know what Moby-Dick owed to this inspiration. It is patent fact, however, that with the publication of Moby-Dick, and Hawthorne’s departure from Lenox, Melville’s creative period was at its close. At the age of thirty-two, so brilliant, so intense, so crowded had been the range of experience that burned through him, that at the period of his life when most men are just beginning to strike their gait, Melville found himself looking forward into utter night. Nearly forty years before his death, he had come to be the most completely disenchanted of all considerable American writers.
From his youth, Melville had felt the flagrant and stubborn discord between aspiration and fact. He was born with an imagination of very extraordinary vigour, and with a constitution of corresponding vitality. In sheer capacity to feel, most American writers look pale beside him. Fired by his rebellious imagination, and abetted by his animal courage, he sallied forth in quest of happiness. Few men have ever compassed such a span of experience as he crowded within the thirty-two years of his quest; few men have lived with such daring, with such intensity. And one by one, as he put his illusions to the test, the bolts of his imagination, discharged against reality, but blazed out charred avenues to despair. It was Dante, he says in Pierre, who first “opened to his shuddering eyes the infinite cliffs and gulfs of human mystery and misery;—though still more in the way of experimental vision, than of sensational presentiment or experience.” By the age of thirty-two, he had, by first-hand knowledge of life, learned to feel the justice of Schopenhauer’s statement: “Where did Dante find the material for his Inferno if not from the world; and yet is not his picture exhaustively satisfactory? But look at his Paradise; when he attempted to describe it he had nothing to guide him, this pleasant world could not offer a single suggestion.” This passage is marked in Melville’s copy of Schopenhauer. And in Pierre he wrote: “By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings 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 a man.”
Melville’s disillusionment began at home. The romantic idealisation of his mother gave place to a recoil into a realisation of the cold, “scaly, glittering folds of pride” that rebuffed his tormented love; and he studied the portrait of his father, and found it a defaming image. In Pierre this portrait thus addresses him: “To their young children, fathers are not wont to unfold themselves.... Consider this strange, ambiguous, smile; more narrowly regard this mouth. Behold, what is this too ardent and, as it were, unchastened light in these eyes. Consider. Is there no mystery here?” In Pierre, he thought that there was.
In his boyhood, poverty added its goad to launch him forth to find happiness in distance. He discovered hideousness; and later, escaped into virgin savagery, he saw by contrast the blatant defaults of civilisation; and he learned that it was the dubious honour of the white civilised man of being “the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.” In Tahiti he was brought face to face with the bigotry and stupid self-righteousness of the proselyting Protestant mind; and there he learned that Christianity—or what passes for it—may under some circumstances be not a blessing but a blight. In Typee and Omoo he innocently turned his hand to right matters to a happier adjustment, soon to reap the reward of such temerity. In the navy he was made hideously aware of the versatility of the human animal in evil. There he found not only a rich panorama of human unloveliness, but “evils which, like the suppressed domestic drama of Horace Walpole, will neither bear representing, nor reading, and will hardly bear thinking of.” There, he was also struck by the criminal stupidity of war. In White-Jacket he asked, “are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilise civilisation and Christianise Christendom?” He was, as he calls himself, a “pondering man”: and in his evaluation of individual human life he soon came to share the judgment of Josiah Royce, another “pondering man”: “Call it human life. You can not find a comparison more thoroughly condemning it.” And he marked Schopenhauer’s tribute to his fellows: “They are just what they seem to be, and that is the worst that can be said of them.”
As “the man who lived among the cannibals” he was famous by the age of twenty-eight. But when he attempted to put his earnest convictions on paper, he was to discover that the value of the paper deteriorated thereby. When he made this discovery he was married, and a father: and debtors had to be held at bay by the point of the pen. On April 30, 1851, Harper and Brothers denied him any further advance on his royalties: they were making “extensive and expensive improvements”—and besides, he had already overdrawn nearly seven hundred dollars.
He had, too, sought personal happiness in the illusion of romantic love. The romantic lover is in especial peril of finding in marriage the sobered discovery that all his sublime and heroic effort has resulted simply in a vulgar satisfaction, and that, taking all things into consideration, he is no better off than he was before. In his poem After the Pleasure Party (in Timoleon, 1891) Melville tells such a “sad rosary of belittling pain.” As a rule, Theseus once consoled, Ariadne is forsaken; and had Petrarch’s passion been requited, his song would have ceased. Francesca and Paolo, romantic lovers who had experienced the limits of their desire, were by Dante put in Hell: and their sufficient punishment was their eternal companionship. By the very ardour of his idealisation, Melville was foredoomed to disappointment in marriage. Though both he and his wife were noble natures—indeed for that very reason—their marriage was for each a crucifixion. For between them there was deep personal loyalty without understanding. Bacon once said, “he that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or of mischief.” Melville gave such hostages to fortune: but, such was his temperament, it is difficult to believe that unencumbered he would have magnified his achievement. Mrs. Melville is remembered as a gentle, gracious, loyal woman who bore with him for over forty years, in his disillusion, his loss of health, his poverty, his obscurity. And his father-in-law, Chief Justice Shaw, befriended him with forbearance and with more substantial gifts.
With the departure of Hawthorne from Lenox, Melville was left without companionship and without illusions. And he was aware of the approach of his Nemesis even before it overtook him. He confessed to Hawthorne while finishing Moby-Dick his feeling that he was approaching the limit of his power. And these intimations were prophetic. With Moby-Dick his creative period closed.
Of the end of this period his wife says: “Wrote White Whale or Moby-Dick under unfavourable circumstances—would sit at his desk all day not writing anything till four or five o’clock—then ride to the village after dark—would be up early and out walking before breakfast—sometimes splitting wood for exercise. Published White Whale in 1851.—Wrote Pierre: published 1852. We all felt anxious about the strain on his health in Spring of 1853.”
In Pierre, Melville coiled down into the night of his soul, to write an anatomy of despair. The purpose of the book was to show the impracticability of virtue: to give specific evidence, freely plagiarised from his own psychology, that “the heavenly wisdom of God is an earthly folly to man,” “that although our blessed Saviour was full of the wisdom of Heaven, yet his gospel seems lacking in the practical wisdom of the earth; that his nature was not merely human—was not that of a mere man of the world”; that to try to live in this world according to the strict letter of Christianity would result in “the story of the Ephesian matron, allegorised.” The subtlety of the analysis is extraordinary; and in its probings into unsuspected determinants from unconsciousness it is prophetic of some of the most recent findings in psychology. “Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go,” Melville says, “if we would find out the heart of a man; descending into which is as descending a spiral stair in a shaft, without any end, and where that endlessness is only concealed by the spiralness of the stair, and the blackness of the shaft.” In the winding ambiguities of Pierre Melville attempts to reveal man’s fatal facility at self-deception; to show that the human mind is like a floating iceberg, hiding below the surface of the sea most of its bulk; that from a great depth of thought and feeling below the level of awareness, long silent hands are ever reaching out, urging us to whims of the blood and tensions of the nerves, whose origins we never suspect. “In reserves men build imposing characters,” Melville says; “not in revelations.” Pierre is not conspicuous for its reserves.
Pierre aroused the reviewers to such a storm of abuse that legend has assigned Melville’s swift obscuration to this dispraise. The explanation is too simple, as Mr. Mather contends. But there is, doubtless, more than a half truth in this explanation. The abuse that Pierre reaped, coming when it did in Melville’s career, and inspired by a book in which Melville with tragic earnestness attempted an apologia of worldly defeat, must have seemed to him in its heartlessness and total blindness to his purpose, a definitive substantiation of the thesis of his book.
Pierre has been very unsympathetically handled, even by Melville’s most penetrating and sympathetic critics. Mr. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., for example, in the second of his two essays on Herman Melville (The Review, August 9 and 16, 1919), says of Pierre that “it is perhaps the only positively ill-done book” of Melville’s. Mr. Mather grants power to the book, but he finds it “repellent and overwrought.” He recommends it only as a literary curiosity. And as a literary curiosity Mr. Arthur Johnson studied its stylistic convolutions in The New Republic of August 27, 1919. It is certainly true, as Mr. Johnson has said, that “the plot or theme, were it not so ‘done’ as to be hardly decipherable, would be to-day considered rather ‘advanced.’” Mr. Johnson contends that for morbid unhealthy pathology, it has not been exceeded even by D. H. Lawrence. All this may be very excellent ethics, but it is not very enlightening criticism.
Melville wrote Pierre with no intent to reform the ways of the world. But he did write Pierre to put on record the reminder that the world’s way is a hypocritic way in so far as it pretends to be any other than the Devil’s way also. In Pierre, Melville undertook to dramatise this conviction. When he sat down to write, what seemed to him the holiest part of himself—his ardent aspirations—had wrecked itself against reality. So he undertook to present, in the character of Pierre, his own character purged of dross; and in the character of Pierre’s parents, the essential outlines of his own parents. Then he started his hero forth upon a career of lofty and unselfish impulse, intent to show that the more transcendent a man’s ideal, the more certain and devastating his worldly defeat; that the most innocent in heart are those most in peril of being eventually involved in “strange, unique follies and sins, unimagined before.” Incidentally, Melville undertakes to show, in the tortuous ambiguities of Pierre, that even the purest impulses of Pierre were, in reality, tainted of clay. Pierre is an apologia of Melville’s own defeat, in the sense that in Pierre Melville attempts to show that in so far as his own defeat—essentially paralleling Pierre’s—was unblackened by incest, murder, and suicide, he had escaped these disasters through accident and inherent defect, rather than because of superior virtue. Pierre had followed the heavenly way that leads to damnation.
Such a thesis can be met by the worldly wisdom that Melville slanders in Pierre, only with uncompromising repugnance. There can be no forgiveness in this world for a man who calls the wisdom of this world a cowardly lie, and probes clinically into the damning imperfections of the best. His Kingdom is surely not of this world. And if this world evinces for his gospel neither understanding nor sympathy, he cannot reasonably complain if he reaps the natural fruits of his profession. Melville agreed with the Psalmist: “Verily there is a reward for the righteous.” But he blasphemed when he dared teach that the reward of virtue and truth in this world must be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Like Dante, Melville set himself up against the world as a party of one. A majority judgment, though it has the power, has not necessarily the truth. It is theoretically possible that Melville, not the world, is right. But one can assent to Melville’s creed only on penalty of destruction; and the race does not welcome annihilation. Hence this world must rejoice in its vengeance upon his blasphemy: and the self-righteous have washed their feet in the blood of the wicked.
After Pierre, any further writing from Melville was both an impertinence and an irrelevancy. No man who really believes that all is vanity can consistently go on taking elaborate pains to popularise his indifference. Schopenhauer did that thing, it is true; but Schopenhauer was an artist, not a moralist; and he was enchanted with disenchantment. Carlyle, too, through interminable volumes shrieked out the necessity of silence. But after Pierre, Melville was without internal urgings to write. “All profound things, and emotions of things,” he wrote in Pierre, “are preceded and attended by silence.” “When a man is really in a profound mood, then all merely verbal or written profundities are unspeakably repulsive, and seem downright childish to him.” Infinitely greater souls than Melville’s seem to have shared this conviction. Neither Buddha nor Socrates left a single written word; Christ wrote once only, and then in the sand.
As if the gods themselves were abetting Melville in his recoil from letters and his contempt for his hard-earned fame, the Harper’s fire of 1853 destroyed the plates of all his novels, and practically all of the copies of his books then in stock. One hundred and eighty-five copies of Typee were burned; 276 copies of Omoo; 491 copies of Mardi; 296 copies of Redburn; 292 copies of White-Jacket; 297 copies of Moby-Dick; 494 copies of Pierre. There survived only 10 copies of Mardi, 60 copies of Moby-Dick and 110 copies of Pierre. All of these books except Pierre were reissued, but with no rich profit either to Harper’s or to Melville. A typical royalty account is that covering the period between October 6, 1863, and August 1, 1864. During this period, 54 copies of Typee were sold; 56 of Omoo; 42 of Redburn; 49 of Mardi; 29 of White-Jacket; 48 of Moby-Dick; and 27 of Pierre. It was a fortunate year, indeed, for Melville that brought him in $100 royalties. During most of his life, Melville’s account with Harper’s was overdrawn: a fact that speaks more for the generosity of his publisher than for the appreciation of his public. Melville surely never achieved opulence by his pen. Convinced of the futility of writing and effort, Melville wanted only tranquillity for thought. But his health was breaking, and his family had to be fed. So he looked about him for some unliterary employment.
The following letter from Richard Henry Dana explains itself:
“Boston, May 10, 1853.
“Dear Sir:
“I am informed by the Chief Justice that my friend, Mr. Herman Melville, has been named to the Government as a suitable person for the American Consulship at the Sandwich Islands.
“I acknowledge no little personal interest in Mr. Melville, but apart from that, I know, from my early experience, and from a practice of many years in Admiralty & Maritime causes, the great importance of having a consul at the Sandwich Islands who knows the wants of our vast Pacific Marine, and shall stand clear of those inducements of trade consignments which lead so many consuls to neglect seamen and lend their influence indiscriminately in favour of owners and masters.
“Mr. Melville has been all over the Pacific Ocean, in all sorts of maritime service & has the requisite acquaintance & interest to an unusual degree. Beyond this, his reputation, general intelligence & agreeable manners will be sure to make him a popular and useful officer among all our citizens who visit the Islands. I cannot conceive of a more appropriate appointment, & I sincerely hope it will be given him.
“If I knew the President or the Secretary of State, personally, I would take the liberty to write them. As I do not, I beg you will use whatever influence I may have in any quarter in his favour.
“Very truly yours,
“Richard H. Dana, Jr.
“Allan Melville, Esq.”
Melville was not appointed to a consular post in the Pacific: so his brother Allan busied himself in looking for an appointment elsewhere, as the following letter, addressed to Hon. Lemuel Shaw, shows:
“New York, June 11, 1853.
“My Dear Sir:
“Yours of the 8th reached me yesterday advising me of the recent information you have received through a confidential source from Washington respecting a consulate for Herman.
“There can be no consulship in Italy, not even Rome, where the fees would amount to sufficient to make it an object for Herman to accept a position there.
“I have positive information of the value of the Antwerp consulate and understand it to be worth from $2,500 to $3,000. Should this be tendered, Herman ought to accept it.
“I don’t know that I can say anything more on this subject.
“Herman is in town and will see you on your arrival.
“Very truly yours,
“Allan Melville.
“I may add that Herman has been specially urged for the Antwerp position & that Mr. Hawthorne spoke to Mr. Cushing of that place.
“A. M.”
Of the domestic happenings at Arrowhead at this time, very little is known. One letter of Mrs. Melville’s survives:
“Arrowhead, Aug. 10th, 1853.
“My Dear Father:
“I did not mean that so long a time should elapse, of your absence from home, without my writing you, especially when I have two letters of yours to answer. It is not because I have not thought of you much and often, but really because I can not find the time to seat myself quietly down to write a letter—that is more than for a hasty scrawl to mother occasionally—and inasmuch as my occupations are of the useful and not the frivolous kind I know you will appreciate the apology and accept it. Three little ones to look after and ‘do for’ takes up no little portion of the day, and my baby is as restless a little mortal as ever crowed. She is very well and healthy in every respect, but not very fat, as she sleeps very little comparatively and is very active. A few weeks since Malcolm made his début as a scholar at the white school house of Dr. Holmes’. I was afraid he would lose the little he already knew ‘of letters’ and as I could not find the time to give him regular instruction, I sent him to school rather earlier than I should have done otherwise. The neighbours’ children call for him every morning, and he goes off with his pail of dinner in one hand and his primer in the other, to our no small amusement. The grand feature of the day to him seems to be the ‘eating his dinner under the trees’—as he always gives that as his occupation when asked what he does at school—and as his pail is invariably empty when he returns, he does full justice to the noon-tide meal. Stannie begins to talk a great deal, and seems to be uncommonly forward for his age. He has a severe cough, which I think will prove the whooping-cough as there is a great deal of it about at present.”
Failing of a consular appointment, Melville was forced to continue writing. He busied himself with the story of the “revolutionary beggar.” Melville based his story upon “a little narrative, forlornly published on sleazy grey paper,” that he had “rescued by the merest chance from the rag-pickers.” Copies of this narrative are not excessively rare. The title page reads: “Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (a native of Cranston, Rhode Island) who was a soldier in the American Revolution, and took a distinguished part in the Battle of Bunker Hill (in which he received three wounds) after which he was taken Prisoner by the British, conveyed to England, where for thirty years he obtained a livelihood for himself and family, by crying ‘Old Chairs to Mend’ through the Streets of London.—In May last, by the assistance of the American Consul, he succeeded (in the 79th year of his age) in obtaining a passage to his native country, after an absence of 48 years. Providence: Printed by Henry Trumbull—1824 (Price 28 cents).” The result was Israel Potter, published in book form by G. P. Putnam in 1855, after having appeared serially in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine. Israel Potter is, in most part, a spirited narrative containing, so Mr. Mather states, “the best account of a sea fight in American fiction.” It was praised, too, by Hawthorne for its delineations of Franklin and John Paul Jones, and doubtless deserves a wider recognition than has ever been given it. Interestingly enough, the book is dedicated to Bunker Hill Monument.
Between 1853 and 1856, Melville published twelve articles, inclusive of Israel Potter, in Putnam’s Magazine and in Harper’s Monthly. Melville made from a selection from these his Piazza Tales (1856), published in New York by Dix and Edwards, in London by Sampson Low. Of these, The Bell Tower, Don Benito Cereno and The Encantadas show the last glow of Melville’s literary glamour, the final momentary brightening of the embers before they sank into blackness and ash. There exists a letter from Putnam’s Monthly, dated May 12, 1854, and signed by Charles T. Briggs—refusing a still unpublished story of Melville’s out of fear of “offending the religious sensibilities of the public and the Congregation of Grace Church.” This letter is less important because of its exquisite sensitiveness, than because of its mention of a letter from Lowell; a letter in which Lowell is reported to have read The Encantadas. According to Briggs’ communication, Lowell was so moved that “the figure of the cross on the ass’ neck brought tears into his eyes, and he thought it the finest touch of genius he had seen in prose.” Swinburne speaks of “the generous pleasure of praising”: this pleasure Lowell indulged frequently, and in his wholesome and whole-hearted way. Of Hawthorne, Lowell said: “The rarest creative imagination of the century, the rarest in some ideal respects since Shakespeare.” The Confidence Man was published in 1857: but it was a posthumous work. Thereafter, Melville was to try his hand at poetry, and with results little meriting the total oblivion into which his poetry has fallen; and in his old age he was again to turn to prose: but before Melville was half through his mortal life his signal literary achievement was done. The rest, if not silence, was whisper.
CHAPTER XVII
THE LONG QUIETUS
“The round face of the grub-man peered upon me now. ‘His dinner is ready. Won’t he dine to-day, either? Or does he live without dining?’
“‘Lives without dining,’ said I, and closed the eyes.
“‘Eh! He’s asleep, ain’t he?’
“‘With kings and counsellors,’ murmured I.”
—Herman Melville: Bartleby the Scrivener.
“The death of Herman Melville,” wrote Arthur Stedman, “came as a surprise to the public at large, chiefly because it revealed the fact that such a man had lived so long.” The New York Times missed the news of Melville’s death (on September 28, 1891) and published a few days later an editorial beginning:
“There has died and been buried in this city, during the current week, at an advanced age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the generation now in the vigour of life, that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him, and this was of but three or four lines.”
In 1885, Robert Buchanan published in the London Academy a pasquinade containing the following lines:
“... Melville, sea-compelling man,
Before whose wand Leviathan
Rose hoary white upon the Deep,
With awful sounds that stirred its sleep;
Melville, whose magic drew Typee,
Radiant as Venus, from the sea,
Sits all forgotten or ignored,
While haberdashers are adored!
He, ignorant of the draper’s trade,
Indifferent to the art of dress,
Pictured the glorious South Sea maid
Almost in mother nakedness—
Without a hat, or boot, or stocking,
A want of dress to most so shocking,
With just one chemisette to dress her
She lives—and still shall live, God bless her,
Long as the sea rolls deep and blue,
While Heaven repeats the thunder of it,
Long as the White Whale ploughs it through,
The shape my sea-magician drew
Shall still endure, or I’m no prophet!”
In a footnote, Buchanan added:
“I sought everywhere for this Triton, who is still living somewhere in New York. No one seemed to know anything of the one great writer fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman on that continent.”
If this man, who had in mid-career been hailed at home and abroad as one of the glories of our literature, died “forgotten and ignored,” it was, after all, in accordance with his own desires. Adventurous life and action was the stuff out of which his reputation had been made. But in the middle of his life, he turned his back upon the world, and in his recoil from life absorbed himself in metaphysics. He avoided all unnecessary associations and absorbed in his own thoughts he lived in sedulous isolation. He resisted all efforts to draw him out of retirement—though such efforts were very few indeed. Arthur Stedman tells us: “It is generally admitted that had Melville been willing to join freely in the literary movements of New York, his name would have remained before the public and a larger sale of his works would have been insured. But more and more, as he grew older, he avoided every action on his part and on the part of his family that might look in this direction, even declining to assist in founding the Authors Club in 1882.” With an aggressive indifference he looked back in Clarel to
“Adventures, such as duly shown
Printed in books, seem passing strange
To clerks which read them by the fire,
Yet be the wonted common-place
Of some who in the Orient range,
Free-lances, spendthrifts of their hire,
And who in end, when they retrace
Their lives, see little to admire
Or wonder at, so dull they be.”
When Titus Munson Coan was a student at Williams College, prompted by a youthful curiosity to hunt out celebrities, he called upon Melville at Arrowhead. In an undated letter to his mother he thus recounted the experience: “I have made my first literary pilgrimage—a call upon Herman Melville, the renowned author of Typee, &c. He lives in a spacious farm-house about two miles from Pittsfield, a weary walk through the dust. But it was well repaid. I introduced myself as a Hawaiian-American and soon found myself in full tide of talk—or rather of monologue. But he would not repeat the experiences of which I had been reading with rapture in his books. In vain I sought to hear of Typee and those Paradise islands, but he preferred to pour forth his philosophy and his theories of life. The shade of Aristotle arose like a cold mist between myself and Fayaway. We have quite enough of Greek philosophy at Williams College, and I confess I was disappointed in this trend of the talk. But what a talk it was! Melville is transformed from a Marquesan to a gypsy student, the gypsy element still remaining strong in him. And this contradiction gives him the air of one who has suffered from opposition, both literary and social. With his liberal views he is apparently considered by the good people of Pittsfield as little better than a cannibal or a ‘beach-comber.’ His attitude seemed to me something like that of an Ishmael; but perhaps I judged hastily. I managed to draw him out very freely on everything but the Marquesas Islands, and when I left him he was in full tide of discourse on all things sacred and profane. But he seems to put away the objective side of life and to shut himself up in this cold North as a cloistered thinker.”
An article appearing in the New York Times, under the initials O. G. H., a week after Melville’s death, said of him:
“He had shot his arrow and made his mark, and was satisfied. With considerable knowledge of the world, he had preferred to see it from a distance.... I asked the loan of some of his books which in early life had given me pleasure and was surprised when he said that he didn’t own a single copy of them.... I had before noticed that though eloquent in discussing general literature he was dumb when the subject of his own writings was broached.”
In her sketch of her husband’s life, Mrs. Melville says: “In February, 1855, he had his first attack of severe rheumatism—and in the following June an attack of sciatica. Our neighbour in Pittsfield, Dr. O. W. Holmes, attended and prescribed for him. A severe attack of what he called crick in the back laid him up at his mother’s in Gansevoort in March, 1858—and he never regained his former vigour and strength.” In 1863, so runs the account of J. E. A. Smith, while Melville was in process of moving from Arrowhead, “he had occasion for some household articles he left behind, and, with a friend, started in a rude wagon to procure them. He was driving at a moderate pace over a perfectly smooth and level road, when a sudden start of the horse threw both occupants from the wagon; probably on account of an imperfectly secured seat. Mr. Melville fell with his back in a hollow of the frozen road, and was very severely injured. Being conveyed to his home by Col. George S. Willis, near whose farm on Williams Street the accident happened, he suffered painfully for many weeks. This prolonged agony and the confinement and interruption of work which it entailed, affected him strangely. He had been before on mountain excursions a driver daring almost to the point of recklessness.... After this accident he not only abandoned the rides of which he had been so fond, but for a time shrank from entering a carriage. It was long before the shock which his system had received was overcome; and it is doubtful whether it ever was completely.” Ill health certainly contributed more to Melville’s retirement from letters than any of his critics—Mr. Mather excepted—have ever even remotely suggested.
HERMAN MELVILLE IN 1868
During the last half of his life, Melville twice journeyed far from home. In her journal Mrs. Melville says: “In October, 1856, his health being impaired by too close application, he again sailed for London. He went up the Mediterranean to Constantinople and the Holy Land. For much of his observation and reflection in that interesting quarter see his poem of Clarel. Sailed for home on the steamer City of Manchester May 6, 1857. In May, 1860, he made a voyage to San Francisco, sailing from Boston on the 30th of May with his brother Thomas Melville who commanded the Meteor, a fast sailing clipper in the China trade—and returning in November, he being the only passenger. He reached San Francisco Oct. 12th—returned in the Carter Oct. 20 to Panama—crossed the Isthmus & sailed for New York on the North Star. This voyage to San Francisco has been incorrectly given in many of the papers of the day.”
Of this trip to the Holy Land there survive, beside Clarel and Hawthorne’s accounts of the meeting en route, a long and closely written journal that Melville kept during the trip, and twenty-one shorter poems printed in Timoleon under the caption “Fruit of Travel Long Ago.” Typical of these shorter poems is