With the departure of Hawthorne from Lenox, Melville was left without companionship and without illusions. And he was aware of the approach of his Nemesis even before it overtook him. He confessed to Hawthorne while finishing Moby-Dick his feeling that he was approaching the limit of his power. And these intimations were prophetic. With Moby-Dick his creative period closed.
Of the end of this period his wife says: “Wrote White Whale or Moby-Dick under unfavourable circumstances—would sit at his desk all day not writing anything till four or five o’clock—then ride to the village after dark—would be up early and out walking before breakfast—sometimes splitting wood for exercise. Published White Whale in 1851.—Wrote Pierre: published 1852. We all felt anxious about the strain on his health in Spring of 1853.”
In Pierre, Melville coiled down into the night of his soul, to write an anatomy of despair. The purpose of the book was to show the impracticability of virtue: to give specific evidence, freely plagiarised from his own psychology, that “the heavenly wisdom of God is an earthly folly to man,” “that although our blessed Saviour was full of the wisdom of Heaven, yet his gospel seems lacking in the practical wisdom of the earth; that his nature was not merely human—was not that of a mere man of the world”; that to try to live in this world according to the strict letter of Christianity would result in “the story of the Ephesian matron, allegorised.” The subtlety of the analysis is extraordinary; and in its probings into unsuspected determinants from unconsciousness it is prophetic of some of the most recent findings in psychology. “Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go,” Melville says, “if we would find out the heart of a man; descending into which is as descending a spiral stair in a shaft, without any end, and where that endlessness is only concealed by the spiralness of the stair, and the blackness of the shaft.” In the winding ambiguities of Pierre Melville attempts to reveal man’s fatal facility at self-deception; to show that the human mind is like a floating iceberg, hiding below the surface of the sea most of its bulk; that from a great depth of thought and feeling below the level of awareness, long silent hands are ever reaching out, urging us to whims of the blood and tensions of the nerves, whose origins we never suspect. “In reserves men build imposing characters,” Melville says; “not in revelations.” Pierre is not conspicuous for its reserves.
Pierre aroused the reviewers to such a storm of abuse that legend has assigned Melville’s swift obscuration to this dispraise. The explanation is too simple, as Mr. Mather contends. But there is, doubtless, more than a half truth in this explanation. The abuse that Pierre reaped, coming when it did in Melville’s career, and inspired by a book in which Melville with tragic earnestness attempted an apologia of worldly defeat, must have seemed to him in its heartlessness and total blindness to his purpose, a definitive substantiation of the thesis of his book.
Pierre has been very unsympathetically handled, even by Melville’s most penetrating and sympathetic critics. Mr. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., for example, in the second of his two essays on Herman Melville (The Review, August 9 and 16, 1919), says of Pierre that “it is perhaps the only positively ill-done book” of Melville’s. Mr. Mather grants power to the book, but he finds it “repellent and overwrought.” He recommends it only as a literary curiosity. And as a literary curiosity Mr. Arthur Johnson studied its stylistic convolutions in The New Republic of August 27, 1919. It is certainly true, as Mr. Johnson has said, that “the plot or theme, were it not so ‘done’ as to be hardly decipherable, would be to-day considered rather ‘advanced.’” Mr. Johnson contends that for morbid unhealthy pathology, it has not been exceeded even by D. H. Lawrence. All this may be very excellent ethics, but it is not very enlightening criticism.
Melville wrote Pierre with no intent to reform the ways of the world. But he did write Pierre to put on record the reminder that the world’s way is a hypocritic way in so far as it pretends to be any other than the Devil’s way also. In Pierre, Melville undertook to dramatise this conviction. When he sat down to write, what seemed to him the holiest part of himself—his ardent aspirations—had wrecked itself against reality. So he undertook to present, in the character of Pierre, his own character purged of dross; and in the character of Pierre’s parents, the essential outlines of his own parents. Then he started his hero forth upon a career of lofty and unselfish impulse, intent to show that the more transcendent a man’s ideal, the more certain and devastating his worldly defeat; that the most innocent in heart are those most in peril of being eventually involved in “strange, unique follies and sins, unimagined before.” Incidentally, Melville undertakes to show, in the tortuous ambiguities of Pierre, that even the purest impulses of Pierre were, in reality, tainted of clay. Pierre is an apologia of Melville’s own defeat, in the sense that in Pierre Melville attempts to show that in so far as his own defeat—essentially paralleling Pierre’s—was unblackened by incest, murder, and suicide, he had escaped these disasters through accident and inherent defect, rather than because of superior virtue. Pierre had followed the heavenly way that leads to damnation.
Such a thesis can be met by the worldly wisdom that Melville slanders in Pierre, only with uncompromising repugnance. There can be no forgiveness in this world for a man who calls the wisdom of this world a cowardly lie, and probes clinically into the damning imperfections of the best. His Kingdom is surely not of this world. And if this world evinces for his gospel neither understanding nor sympathy, he cannot reasonably complain if he reaps the natural fruits of his profession. Melville agreed with the Psalmist: “Verily there is a reward for the righteous.” But he blasphemed when he dared teach that the reward of virtue and truth in this world must be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Like Dante, Melville set himself up against the world as a party of one. A majority judgment, though it has the power, has not necessarily the truth. It is theoretically possible that Melville, not the world, is right. But one can assent to Melville’s creed only on penalty of destruction; and the race does not welcome annihilation. Hence this world must rejoice in its vengeance upon his blasphemy: and the self-righteous have washed their feet in the blood of the wicked.
After Pierre, any further writing from Melville was both an impertinence and an irrelevancy. No man who really believes that all is vanity can consistently go on taking elaborate pains to popularise his indifference. Schopenhauer did that thing, it is true; but Schopenhauer was an artist, not a moralist; and he was enchanted with disenchantment. Carlyle, too, through interminable volumes shrieked out the necessity of silence. But after Pierre, Melville was without internal urgings to write. “All profound things, and emotions of things,” he wrote in Pierre, “are preceded and attended by silence.” “When a man is really in a profound mood, then all merely verbal or written profundities are unspeakably repulsive, and seem downright childish to him.” Infinitely greater souls than Melville’s seem to have shared this conviction. Neither Buddha nor Socrates left a single written word; Christ wrote once only, and then in the sand.
As if the gods themselves were abetting Melville in his recoil from letters and his contempt for his hard-earned fame, the Harper’s fire of 1853 destroyed the plates of all his novels, and practically all of the copies of his books then in stock. One hundred and eighty-five copies of Typee were burned; 276 copies of Omoo; 491 copies of Mardi; 296 copies of Redburn; 292 copies of White-Jacket; 297 copies of Moby-Dick; 494 copies of Pierre. There survived only 10 copies of Mardi, 60 copies of Moby-Dick and 110 copies of Pierre. All of these books except Pierre were reissued, but with no rich profit either to Harper’s or to Melville. A typical royalty account is that covering the period between October 6, 1863, and August 1, 1864. During this period, 54 copies of Typee were sold; 56 of Omoo; 42 of Redburn; 49 of Mardi; 29 of White-Jacket; 48 of Moby-Dick; and 27 of Pierre. It was a fortunate year, indeed, for Melville that brought him in $100 royalties. During most of his life, Melville’s account with Harper’s was overdrawn: a fact that speaks more for the generosity of his publisher than for the appreciation of his public. Melville surely never achieved opulence by his pen. Convinced of the futility of writing and effort, Melville wanted only tranquillity for thought. But his health was breaking, and his family had to be fed. So he looked about him for some unliterary employment.
The following letter from Richard Henry Dana explains itself: