“And now for something which I hardly know whether to write you or not I feel so undecided about it. My cold is very bad indeed, perhaps worse than it has ever been so early, and I attribute it entirely to the warm dry atmosphere so different from the salt air I have been accustomed to. And Herman thinks I had better go back to Boston with Sam to see if the change of air will not benefit me. And he will come on for me in two or three weeks, if he can—and then in August when he takes his vacation he will take me there again. But I don’t know as I can make up my mind to go and leave him here—and besides I’m afraid to trust him to finish up the book without me! That is, taking all things into consideration I’m afraid I should not feel at ease enough to enjoy my visit without him with me. But there is time enough to consider about it before Sam goes—and if my cold continues so bad I think I shall go. But I must go to my writing else I shall not get done in time to go to Brooklyn.”
CHAPTER XIV
ACROSS THE ATLANTIC AGAIN
“You said you were married, I think? Well, I suppose it is wise, after all. It settles, centralises, and confirms a man, I have heard. Yes, it makes the world definite to him; it removes his morbid subjectiveness, and makes all things objective; nine small children, for instance, may be considered objective. Marriage, hey!—A fine thing, no doubt, no doubt:—domestic—pretty—nice, all round.—So you are married?”
—Herman Melville: Pierre.
In October, 1849, at the age of thirty, five years after his return from the South Seas, and two years after his marriage, Melville again left home. His departure was not prompted by any lack of diversion at home: there had been plenty of it at 103 Fourth Avenue. Melville’s brothers Allan and Tom, his sisters Augusta, Fanny and Helen, his mother, his wife, and the visits from Boston of the Shaws, had been a sufficiently varied company to divert any lover of humanity, and to enamour a misanthrope to the family hearth. Withal, Melville was not only a husband, but a father: and duties towards the support of the company with whom he lived were blatantly clear. For this support he depended solely upon the earnings from his books. In three years he had published five volumes: Typee, Omoo, Mardi (in two volumes) and Redburn. Though he had attracted wide attention as a writer, he was, nevertheless, in debt to his publishers. Despite sisters, and brothers, and wives, and babies, and mothers, and callers, he had stuck relentlessly to his desk, and another book—White-Jacket—he had finished in manuscript. His, as well as his sister Augusta’s, was “a pressing case.” So he decided to go to England, to make personal intercession with publishers, hoping thereby to improve his income from the other side of the Atlantic.
On October 11, 1849, after a detention of three or four days, owing to wind and weather, he went on board the tug Goliath a little after noon. A violent storm was blowing from the west, and with some confusion the passengers were transferred to the Southampton, a regular London liner that lay in the North River. By half-past five, with yards square, and sailing in half a gale, Melville was again out of sight of land.
“As the ship dashed on,” says Melville in his journal of the trip, “under double-reefed topsails, I walked the deck, thinking of what they might be doing at home, and of the last familiar faces I saw on the wharf—Allan was there, and George Duyckinck, and a Mr. McCurdy, a rich merchant of New York, who had seemed somewhat interested in the prospect of his son (a sickly youth of twenty, bound for the grand tour) being very romantic. But to my great delight, the promise that the Captain had given me at an early day, he now made good; and I find myself in the individual occupancy of a large state-room. It is as big almost as my own room at home; it has a spacious berth, a large wash-stand, a sofa, glass, etc., etc. I am the only person on board who is thus honoured with a room to himself. I have plenty of light, and a little thick glass window in the side, which in fine weather I may open to the air. I have looked out upon the sea from it, often, tho not yet 24 hours on board.”
The George Duyckinck who was among the party that had waved him off was, of course, one of two Duyckinck brothers who published in 1855 the two volume Cyclopædia of American Literature: a work vituperated in its day for shocking omissions and inaccuracies. Both the work and its critics have now fallen into a decent oblivion. Withal, in this same antiquated Cyclopædia is to be found one of the best informed summaries of the first half of Melville’s life ever printed.
On October 12, Melville records in his journal his impressions upon finding himself again on the ocean. “Walked the deck last night till about eight o’clock,” he says, “then made up a whist party and played till one of the number had to visit his room from sickness. Retired early and had a sound sleep. Was up betimes and aloft, to recall the old emotions of being at the mast-head. Found that the ocean looked the same as ever. Have tried to read but find it hard work. However, there are some very pleasant passengers on board, with whom to converse. Chief among these is a Mr. Adler, a German scholar, to whom Duyckinck introduced me. He is author of a formidable lexicon (German or English); in compiling which he almost ruined his health. He was almost crazy, he tells me, for a time. He is full of the German metaphysics and discourses of Kant, Swedenborg, etc. He has been my principal companion thus far. There is also a Mr. Taylor among the passengers, cousin of James Bayard Taylor, the pedestrian traveller. There is a Scotch artist on board, a painter, with a most unpoetical looking child, a young-one all cheeks and forehead, the former preponderating. Young McCurdy I find to be a lisping youth of genteel capacity, but quite disposed to be sociable. We have several Frenchmen and Englishmen. One of the latter has been hunting, and carries over with him two glorious pairs of antlers (moose) as trophies of his prowess in the Woods of Maine. We have also a middle-aged English woman, who sturdily walks the decks and prides herself upon her sea-legs, and being an old tar.” There was also aboard “a Miss Wilbur (I think) of New York.” Melville reports of Miss Wilbur that she “is of a marriageable age, keeps a diary, and talks about ‘winning souls to Christ.’” In the evening, Melville “walked the deck with the German, Mr. Adler, till a late hour, talking of ‘Fixed Fate, Free-will, free-knowledge absolute’ etc. His philosophy is Coleridgean; he accepts the Scriptures as divine, and yet leaves himself free to inquire into Nature. He does not take it, that the Bible is absolutely infallible, and that anything opposed to it in Science must be wrong. He believes that there are things not of God and independent of Him,—things that would have existed were there no God; such as that two and two make four; for it is not that God so decrees mathematically, but that in the very nature of things, the fact is thus.”