Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

by Raymond M. Weaver

The dinner with Bentley went off well. Melville “had a very pleasant evening indeed” and “began to like” his publisher “very much.” Melville reported that “He seems a very fine, frank, off-handed old gentleman. We sat down in a fine old room hung round with paintings (dark walls). A party of fourteen or so. There was a Mr. Bell there—connected with literature in some way or other. At all events an entertaining man and a scholar—but looks as if he loved old Pat. Also Alfred Henry Forester (‘Alfred Crowquill’)—the comic man. He proved a good fellow—free and easy and no damned nonsense, as there is about so many of these English. Mr. Bentley has one daughter, a fine woman of 25 and married, and four sons—young men. They were all at table. Some time after 11, went home with Crowquill, who invites me to go with him Thursday and see the Pantomime rehearsal at the Surrey Theatre.”

The following evening Melville dined with Mr. Cook—whom he had despised, at first meeting, as Murray’s factotum—in Elm Court, Temple, “and had a glorious time till noon of night. It recalled poor Lamb’s ‘Old Benchers.’ Cunningham the author of Murray’s London Guide was there and was very friendly. Mr. Rainbow also, and a grandson Woodfall, the printer of Junius, and a brother-in-law of Leslie the printer. Leslie was prevented from coming. Up in the 5th story we dined.” With a typical departure from the conventional orthography, Melville pronounced the evening, “The Paradise of Batchelors.”

In Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for April, 1854, Melville published a sketch entitled Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids. In 1854 he was living in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in a household of women and young children—three of his sisters, his mother, his wife, and three of his own children. So surrounded, he had relinquished none of the pleasant memories of that December evening, in 1849, in those high chambers near Temple-Bar. “It was the very perfection of quiet absorption of good living, good drinking, good feeling, and good talk,” Melville wrote in 1854. “We were a band of brothers. Comfort—fraternal, household comfort, was the grand trait of the affair. Also, you could plainly see that these easy-hearted men had no wives or children to give an anxious thought. Almost all of them were travellers, too; for bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their conscience touching desertion of the fireside.” The antithesis of this, Melville pictures in the second part of his account—The Tartarus of Maids.

Yet just on the eve of his going to these high festivities in the Temple, a letter was left him—“from home!” The letter reported: “All well and Barney (“Baby boy,” Mrs. Melville has written in annotation on the margin of the journal) more bouncing than ever, thank heaven.” On the following day, Melville began and finished the Opium Eater, and pronounced it “a most wonderful book.”

On December 24, Melville was in Portsmouth. On Christmas morning he jumped into a small boat with the Captain and a meagre company of passengers, and “pulled off for the ship about a mile and a half distant. Upon boarding her we at once set sail with a fair wind, and in less than 24 hours passed the Land’s End and the Scilly Isle—and standing boldly out on the ocean stretched away for New York. I shall keep no further diary. I here close it, with my departure from England, and my pointing for home.”

On a blank page at end of his journal, he jotted some brief “Memoranda of things on the voyage.” He noted Sir Thomas Browne’s reference to cannibals in Vulgar Errors, and the fact that Rousseau, as a school master “could have killed his scholars sometimes.” He observed that “a Dandy is a good fellow to scout and room with;” and copied out from Ben Jonson “Talk as much folly as you please—so long as you do it without blushing, you may do it with impunity.” He itemised in his journal, too, the books obtained while abroad: a 1692 folio of Ben Jonson; a 1673 folio of Davenant; a folio of Beaumont and Fletcher; a 1686 folio of Sir Thomas Browne, and a folio of Marlowe’s plays. He brought with him, also, a Hudibras, a Castle of Otranto, a Vathek, a Corinne, besides the confessions of Rousseau and of DeQuincey, and the autobiography of Goethe. The other books were guides, old maps, and other material for Israel Potter.

Melville arrived at 103 Fourth Avenue, on February 2, 1850. Mrs. Melville, in her journal, thus summarises her husband’s trip. “Summer of 1849 we remained in New York. He wrote Redburn and White-Jacket. Same fall went to England and published the above. Stayed eleven weeks. Took little satisfaction in it from mere homesickness, and hurried home, leaving attractive invitations to visit distinguished people—one from the Duke of Rutland to pass a week at Belvoir Castle—see his journal.”

Of his life after his return home, she says: “We went to Pittsfield and boarded in the summer of 1850. Moved to Arrowhead in fall—October, 1850.”

On September 27, 1850, Bayard Taylor dispatched from the Tribune Office, New York, a note to Mary Angew. “Scarcely a day passes,” Taylor wrote, “but some pleasant recognition is given me. I was invited last Friday to dine with Bancroft and Cooper; on Saturday with Sir Edward Belcher and Herman Melville. These things seem like mockeries, sent to increase the bitterness of my heart.” It is not unlikely that Melville and Taylor fed and drank and smoked together on that Saturday evening, and that they parted, each envying the other as a happy and successful man.