CHAPTER XV
A NEIGHBOUR OF HAWTHORNE’S
“And here again, not unreasonably, might invocation go up to those three Weird Ones, that tend Life’s loom. Again we might ask them, what threads are these, oh, ye Weird Ones, that ye wove in the years foregone?”
—Herman Melville: Pierre.
At the time when Melville moved into the Berkshire Hills, the region around Lenox boasted the descriptive title: “a jungle of literary lions”—a title amiably ferocious in its provincial vanity. In this region, it is true, Jonathan Edwards had written his treatises on predestination, and with sardonic optimism had gloated over the beauties of hell; here Catherine Sedgewick wrote her amiable insipidities; here Elihu Burritt, “the learned Blacksmith” wrote out his Sparks; here Bryant composed; here Henry Ward Beecher indited many Star-Papers; here Headley and Holmes, Lowell and Longfellow, Curtis and G. P. R. James, Audubon and Whipple, Mrs. Sigourney and Martineau, Fanny Kemble and Frederick Bremer and the Goodale sisters either visited or lived. Impressed by this array of names—an array deceptively impressive to the New England imagination,—local pride has not blushed to explain: “By the river Arno, in the ‘lake region’ of Cumberland and Westmoreland, or on the placid river which flows through the Concord meadows, what congestion of literary associations! Like the instinct of the bee which, separated by great distances from the hive, possesses the infallible sense of direction for its return, so, too, the lovely ‘nooks and corners’ on the earth’s surface are irresistibly and unerringly attracting choice spirits, which some way are sure to find them out and pre-empt them in the interests of their craft or clan. Berkshire is no exception to this.”
When, in 1850, both Melville and Hawthorne moved into the Berkshires, these literary wilds were tamely domesticated, and sadly thinned of prowling genius. The coming of Melville and Hawthorne, however, marked the most important advent ever made into these regions. For there Melville wrote Moby-Dick; and there Melville and Hawthorne were to be thrown into an ironical intimacy.
In the autumn of 1850, Melville bought a spacious gambrel-roofed farmhouse at Pittsfield, situated along Holmes Road and not far from Broadhall, formerly the home of his uncle, and familiar to Melville’s youth. Melville named the place Arrowhead. To Arrowhead he brought his retinue of female relatives, and set about to alternate farming with literature.
In the first of the Piazza Tales (1856), in I and My Chimney (Putnam’s Magazine, March, 1856), and in The Rose-wood Table (Putnam’s Magazine, May, 1856), Melville has left descriptions of Arrowhead, its inmates, and the surrounding country.
“When I removed into the country,” Melville says in the Piazza Tales, “it was to occupy an old-fashioned farmhouse which had no piazza—a deficiency the more regretted because not only did I like piazzas, as somehow combining the cosiness of indoors with the freedom of outdoors, and it is so pleasant to inspect your thermometer there, but the country round about was such a picture, that in berry time no boy climbs hill or crosses vale without coming upon easels planted in every nook, and sunburned painters painting there. A very paradise of painters. The circle of the stars cut by the circle of the mountains. At least, so it looks from the house; though once upon the mountains, no circle of them can you see. Had the site been chosen five rods off, this charmed circle would not have been.
“The house is old. Seventy years since, from the heart of the Hearth Stone Hill, they quarried the Kaaba, or Holy Stone, to which, each Thanksgiving, the social pilgrims used to come. So long ago that in digging for the foundation, the workmen used both spade and axe fighting the Troglodytes of those subterranean parts—sturdy roots of a sturdy wood, encamped upon what is now a long landslide of sleeping meadow, sloping away off from my poppy bed. Of that knit wood but one survivor stands—an elm, lonely through steadfastness.