HERMAN MELVILLE
1819-1891
HERMAN MELVILLE
At intervals during the last forty years, Herman Melville has been discovered by intellectuals, belauded, a little read, and once more forgotten. It is typical of the man and of his perverse withdrawal from the lettered world, that even before his death he was the subject of spasmodic battues by appreciative readers, who sought to startle into activity their idol's reputation by methods suited to the enlivenment of an author long dead and hidden by the undergrowth of time.
The latest and the most thorough stimulation to which the repute of Melville has been subjected is now at full stretch. Whatever its critical shortcomings, this concerted attempt to write a new name on the roll of nineteenth-century genius bids fair to achieve one important triumph—the immortalization of Moby Dick and, consequentially, of the man who wrote it.
A very minor result of the same Melville boom is his inclusion in this book. Save in the matter of date, he has little in common with the other writers here treated. They are of Victorianism Victorian; he, if he belongs to any period or to any genealogy, is of the ageless, race-less family of the lonely giants. That his fellows between these covers are all lesser novelists than he, I am unprepared to admit. Trollope excels him in humour, wisdom and depth of understanding; he must rank, as master of technique, below all save Whyte-Melville and perhaps Disraeli. But he has a quality of grandeur, a majesty of isolation that they lack, and his very inchoate bitterness of spirit transcends by its datelessness their well-rounded friendliness and their complacent wit.
If that were not enough, he differs from them also in the very texture and subject of his work. His mysticism, for all its yearning and its gloom, is of a spiritual quality far rarer than that of their materialism, for all its vivacity and its aspiration. Between him and Reade is a certain soul resemblance, but the advantage in this is Melville's. He directly influenced the Englishman,[[4]] and beside his remote immensity Reade, even at his most massive and his most contentious, seems but a dwarf, roaring disgruntlement against the walls of Grub Street.
[4]. There is in existence the copy of Moby Dick in which Reade made extensive notes and excisions, maybe with the idea of issuing an abbreviated version. Readers of Love Me Little, Love Me Long will immediately detect the influence of Melville's great book on the whaling narrative related by Frank Dodd to Mr. Fountain and to his lovely niece.
Melville's books are the strange mirror of a strange life. The young writer, famous at thirty, who yet lives out a diminuendo of appreciation to an old age of disappointed poverty, is no unfamiliar figure. One thinks immediately of William Harrison Ainsworth, from the foppish eminence of his early twenties to the last sad years in a Tonbridge villa, when he laboured at the regular production of three-volume fiction—one novel a year at seventy-five pounds the time—alone amid the memories of vanished splendour. But the man who as a youth wins reputation in letters and passes, of deliberate purpose, maturity and age in other, non-literary, pursuits is a scarcer type, of which Melville is an unusual example.
Born in 1819, he published Typee at the age of twenty-seven, Moby Dick five years later, and The Piazza Tales in 1856. From then until his death, in 1891, he wrote little, and, to the even greater detriment of his fame, withdrew entirely from the society of writers, hiding his name and his very existence behind the screen of an obstinate reserve.
I have no intention here either of summarizing the life or of passing judgment on the works of Herman Melville. The former is related in detail by Professor Raymond Weaver, whose large biography is of so recent date that any shorter presentment of the facts must merely be a précis of the information therein contained. The respective merits of the outstanding books are already (and will remain for long enough) the sport of literary publicists, to whose views and counter-views I refer the curious. One feature, nevertheless, of contemporary opinion challenges to protest my amateur temerity. Apart from Moby Dick, the neo-Melvillian has little beyond patronizing approval for the books of his hero; Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) are interesting records of travel, remarkable mainly for the early date of their appearance and as forerunners of the South Sea School in letters and in painting. Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849), and White Jacket (1850) claim respect as autobiography and for passages that reveal their author's genius struggling toward a more complete expression. These are the rising steps to the crowning summit of Melville's work. There, unique and peerless, stands Moby Dick; beyond it the terraces fall away again, and even more steeply than they rose.