Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

by Raymond M. Weaver

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.