Melville cut short his third year of lecturing to make the trip to California with his brother. Upon his return, he again made an unsuccessful attempt to be appointed to a consularship. Such a mission took him to Washington in 1861. This trip was chiefly notable because of the meeting of Melville and Lincoln. Melville recounted the experience in a letter to his wife: “The night previous to this I was at the second levee at the White House. There was a great crowd and a brilliant scene—ladies in full dress by the hundreds—a steady stream of two-and-two’s wound through the apartments shaking hands with Old Abe and immediately passing on. This continued without cessation for an hour and a half. Of course I was one of the shakers. Old Abe is much better looking than I expected and younger looking. He shook hands like a good fellow—working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord.”
Melville struggled on for two more years at Pittsfield, and in October, 1863, moved with his family to 104 East 26th Street, New York, where he spent the remaining years of his life. His house in New York he bought from his brother Allan, giving $7,750 (covered by mortgages and in time paid for by legacies of his wife) and the Arrowhead place, valued at $3,000.
The last years in Pittsfield and the early years in New York were, in financial hardship, perhaps the darkest in Melville’s life. He was in ill health, and except for the pittance from his books he was without income. His lectures were a desperate if not lucrative measure. But for the generosity of his wife’s father, he would have been in destitution.
On December 5, 1866, he was appointed Inspector of Customs in New York—a post he held until January 1, 1886. He was sixty-seven years old when he resigned. His wife had come into an inheritance that allowed him an ultimate serenity in his closing years.
MELVILLE’S CHILDREN
Malcolm, Frances, Elizabeth, Stanwix
(From left to right)
R. H. Stoddard, in his Recollections, thus speaks of Melville:
“My good friend Benedict sent me, one gloomy November forenoon, this curt announcement of a new appointment in Herman Melville: ‘He seems a good fellow, Dick, and says he knows you, though perhaps he doesn’t, but anyhow be kind to him if this infernal weather will let you be so to anybody.’ I bowed to the gentleman who handed the note to me, in whom I recognised a famous writer whom I had met some twenty-five years before; no American writer was more widely known in the late forties and early fifties in his own country and in England than Melville, who in his earlier books, Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and White Jacket, had made himself the prose poet of the strange islands and peoples of the South Seas.
“Whether any of Melville’s readers understood the real drift of his mind, or whether he understood it himself, has often puzzled me. Next to Emerson he was the American mystic. He was more than that, however, he was one of our great unrecognised poets, as he manifested in his version of ‘Sheridan’s Ride,’ which begins as all students of our serious war poetry ought to know: ‘Shoe the steed with silver that bore him to the fray.’ Melville’s official duty during the last years of my Custom-House life confined him to the foot of Gansevoort Street, North River, and on a report that he might be changed to some district on the East River, he asked me to prevent the change, and Benedict said to me, ‘He shan’t be moved,’ and he was not; and years later, on a second report of the same nature reaching him, I saw Benedict again, who declared with a profane expletive, ‘He shall stay there.’ And if he had not died about a dozen years ago he would probably be there to-day, at the foot of Gansevoort Street.”
It is interesting that a man of the intellect of R. H. Stoddard should have found Melville’s mind such a shadowed hieroglyph. With Stoddard so perplexed, it is less difficult to understand Melville’s preference for solitude.