Thee had he seen, he might have swerved
In mood nor barked so much at man.
The journal was surely never written with a view to publication. It is a staccato jotting down of impressions, chiefly interesting (as is Dr. Johnson’s French journal) as another evidence of Melville’s scope of curiosity and keenness of observation. A typical entry is that for Saturday, December 13,—Melville’s first day in Constantinople:
“Up early; went out; saw cemeteries where they dumped garbage. Sawing wood over a tomb. Forest of cemeteries. Intricacies of the streets. Started alone for Constantinople and after a terrible long walk found myself back where I started. Just like getting lost in a wood. No plan to streets. Pocket compass. Perfect labyrinth. Narrow. Close, shut in. If one could but get up aloft, it would be easy to see one’s way out. If you could get up into a tree. Soar out of the maze. But no. No names to the streets no more than to natural alleys among the groves. No numbers, no anything. Breakfasted at 10 A. M. Took guide ($1.25 per day) and started for tour. Took Cargua for Seraglio. Holy ground. Crossed some extensive grounds and gardens. Fine buildings of the Saracenic style. Saw the Mosque of St. Sophia. Went in. Rascally priests demanding ‘baksheesh.’ Fleeced me out of ½ dollar; following me round, selling the fallen mosaics. Ascended a kind of hose way leading up, round and round. Came into a gallery fifty feet above the floor. Superb interior. Precious marbles. Prophyry & Verd antique. Immense magnitude of the building. Names of the prophets in great letters. Roman Catholic air to the whole. To the hippodrome, near which stands the six towered mosque of Sultan Achmed; soaring up with its snowy white spires into the pure blue sky. Like light-houses. Nothing finer. In the hippodrome saw the obelisk with Roman inscription on the base. Also a broken monument of bronze, representing three twisted serpents erect upon their tails. Heads broken off. Also a square monument of masoned blocks. Leaning over and frittered away,—like an old chimney stack. A Greek inscription shows it to be of the time of Theodoric. Sculpture about the base of the obelisk, representing Constantine & wife and sons, &c. Then saw the ‘Burnt Column.’ Black and grimy enough & hooped about with iron. Stands soaring up from among a bundle of old wooden stakes. A more striking fire mount than that of London. Then to the cistern of 1001 columns. You see a rounded knoll covered with close herbage. Then a kind of broken cellar-way you go down, and find yourself on a wooden, rickety platform, looking down into a grove of marble pillars, fading away into the darkness. A palatial sort of Tartarus. Two tiers of pillars, one standing on the other; lower tier half buried. Here and there a little light percolates through from breaks in the keys of the arches; where bits of green struggle down. Used to be a reservoir. Now full of boys twisting silk. Great hubbub. Flit about like imps. Whirr of the spinning Jenns. In going down, (as into a ship’s hold) and wandering about, have to beware the innumerable skeins of silk. Terrible place to be robbed or murdered in. At whatever place you look, you see lines of pillars, like trees in an orchard arranged in the quincunx style.—Came out. Overhead looks like a mere shabby common, or worn out sheep pasture.—To the bazaar. A wilderness of traffic. Furniture, arms, silks, confectionery, shoes, saddles,—everything. (Cario) Covered overhead with stone arches, with wide openings. Immense crowds. Georgians, Armenians, Greeks, Jews & Turks are the merchants. Magnificent embroidered silk & gilt sabres & caparisons for horses. You lose yourself & are bewildered and confounded with the labyrinth, the din, the barbaric confusion of the whole.—Went to Watch Tower within a kind of arsenal (Immense arsenal) the tower of vast girth & height in the Saracenic style—a column. From the top, my God, what a view! Surpassing everything. The Propontis, the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, the domes, the minarets, the bridges, the men-of-war, the cypresses.—Indescribable. Went to the Pigeon Mosque. In its court, the pigeons covered the pavement as thick as in the West they fly in hosts. A man feeding them. Some perched upon the roof of the colonnades & upon the fountain in the middle & on the cypresses. Took off my shoes and went in. Pigeons inside, flying round in the dome, in & out the lofty windows. Went to Mosque of Sultan Suleiman. The third one in point of size and splendour. The Mosque is a sort of marble mosque of which the minarets (four or six) are the stakes. In fact when inside it struck me that the idea of this kind of edifice was borrowed from the tent. Though it would make a noble ball room. Off shoes and went in. This custom more sensible than taking off hat. Muddy shoes; but never muddy head. Floor covered with mats & on them beautiful rugs of great size & square. Fine light coming through the side slits below the dome. Blind dome. Many Turks at prayer; lowering head to the floor towards a kind of altar. Charity going on. In a gallery saw lot of portmanteaux, chests & bags; as in a R. R. baggage car. Put there for safe-keeping by men who leave home, or afraid of robbers and taxation. ‘Lay not up your treasures where moth and rust do corrupt’ &c. Fountains (a row of them) outside along the side of the mosque for bathing the feet and hands of worshippers before going in. Natural rock.—Instead of going in in stockings (as I did) the Turks wear overshoes and doff them outside the mosque. The tent-like form of the Mosque broken up & dumbfounded with infinite number of arches, trellises, small domes, colonnades, &c, &c, &c. Went down to the Golden Horn. Crossed bridge of pontoons. Stood in the middle and not a cloud in the sky. Deep blue and clear. Delightful elastic atmosphere, although December. A kind of English June cooled and tempered sherbet-like with an American October; the serenity & beauty of summer without the heat.—Came home through the vast suburbs of Galatea, &c. Great crowds of all nations—money changers coins of all nations circulate—placards in four or five languages: (Turkish, French, Greek, Armenian) Lottery advertisements of boats the same. Sultan’s ship in colours—no atmosphere like this for flags. You feel you are among the nations. Great curse that of Babel; not being able to talk to a fellow being, &c.—Have to tend to your pockets. My guide went with his hands to his.—The horrible grimy tragic air of the Streets. (Ruffians of Galatea) The rotten & wicked looking houses. So gloomy & grimy seem as if a suicide hung from every rafter within.—No open spaces—no squares or parks. You suffocate for room.—You pass close together. The cafés of the Turks. Dingy holes, faded splendour, moth eaten. On both sides rude seats and divans where the old musty Turks sit smoking like conjurers. Saw in certain kiosks (pavilions) the crowns of the late Sultan. You look through gilt gratings & between heavy curtains of lace, at the sparkling things. Near the Mosque of Sultan Suleiman saw the cemetery of his family—big as that of a small village, all his wives and children and servants. All gilt and carved. The women’s tombs carved with heads (women no souls). The Sultan Suleiman’s tomb & that of his three brothers in a kiosk. Gilded like mantel ornaments.”
Clarel was, in 1876, printed at Melville’s expense. More accurately, its printing was made possible by his uncle, Hon. Peter Gansevoort, who, as Melville says in the dedication, “in a personal interview provided for the publication of this poem, known to him by report, as existing in manuscript.”
Not the least impressive thing about Clarel is its length: it extends to 571 pages. Mr. Mather states: “Of those who have actually perused the four books (of verse) and Clarel, I am presumably the only survivor.” Mr. Mather is mistaken: there are two. But since, because of the excessive length of Clarel and the excessive scarcity of John Marr and Timoleon (both privately printed in an edition of only twenty-five copies) it would be over-optimistic to presume that there will soon be a third, some account must be given of Melville’s poetry.
Stevenson once said: “There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must have been neglected; ‘He shall be able to see’; ‘He shall be able to tell’; ‘He shall be able to charm,’ said the friendly godmothers; ‘But he shall not be able to hear!’ exclaimed the last.” When Stevenson wrote his passage, the artist in him seems for the moment to have slept; taking no account of Melville’s frequent mastery of the magic of words, he berates Melville’s genius for misspelling Polynesian names as a defect of genius. That Melville had an ear sensitive to the cadences of prose is shown by the facility with which he on occasion caught the rhythm both of the Psalms and of Sir Thomas Browne. Yet the same man who at his best is equalled only by Poe in the subtle melody of his prose, at times fell into ranting passages of obvious and intolerable parody of blank verse. The following from Mardi is an example: “From dawn till eve, the bright, bright days sped on, chased by the gloomy nights; and, in glory dying, lent their lustre to the starry skies. So, long the radiant dolphins fly before the sable sharks; but seized, and torn in flames—die, burning:—their last splendour left, in sparkling scales that float along the sea.” In his poetry, as in his prose, is the same incongruous mating of astonishing facility and flagrant defect. It is the same paradox that one finds in Browning and in Meredith,—whose poetry Melville’s more than superficially resembles. Melville shared with these men a greater interest in ideas than in verbal prettiness, and like the best of them, when mastered by a refractory idea, he was not over-exquisite in his regard for prosody and syntax in getting it said. When he had a mind to, however, he could pound with a lustiness that should endear him to those who delight in declamation contests: a contemptible distinction, perhaps—but even that has been denied him. The poem to the Swamp Angel, for example, the great gun that reduced Charleston, is fine in its irony and vigour. The poem begins:
There is a coal-black Angel
With a thick Afric lip