Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

by Raymond M. Weaver

Melville satirically pictures himself as pathetically innocent to the iniquities of the flesh and the Devil when he left home to view the world. He was, he says, a member both of a Juvenile Total Abstinence Association and of an Anti-Smoking Society organised by the Principal of his Sunday School. With dire compunctions of conscience—which had been considerably weakened by sea-sickness—Melville had his first swig of spirits—administered medicinally to him by a paternal old tar,—before they were many hours out upon the Atlantic. But neither on the high seas nor in England does he seem to have been prematurely tempted by the bottle. And this, for the adequate reason that united to his innocence of years, his very limited finances spared him the solicitations of toping companions as well as the luxury of precocious solitary tippling. Though at the beginning of the voyage he refused the friendly offer of a cigar, he less austerely eschewed tobacco by the time he again struck land. Melville did not, throughout his life, hold so strictly to the puritanical prohibitions of his boyhood.

A PAGE FROM ONE OF MELVILLE’S JOURNALS

The youthful member of the Anti-Smoking Society came in later years to be a heroic consumer of tobacco, and the happiest hours of his life were haloed with brooding blue haze. “Nothing so beguiling,” he wrote in 1849, “as the fumes of tobacco, whether inhaled through hookah, narghil, chibouque, Dutch porcelain, pure Principe, or Regalia.” On another occasion he expressed a desire to “sit cross-legged and smoke out eternity.” And the youthful pillar of the Juvenile Total Abstinence Association, growing in wisdom as he took on years, lived to do regal penance for his unholy childhood pledge. His avowed refusal to believe in a Temperance Heaven would seem to imply a conviction that it is only the damned who never drink. In his amazing novel Mardi—which won him acclaim in France as “un Rabelais Americain”—wine flows in ruddy and golden rivers. And the most brilliantly fantastic philosophising, the keenest wit of the demi-gods that lounge through this wild novel, are concomitant upon the heroic draining of beaded bumpers. In Mardi, Melville celebrates the civilising influences of wine with the same devout and urbane affection to be found in Horace and Meredith. On occasion, however, he seems to share Baudelaire’s conviction that “one should be drunk always”—and drunk on wine in the manner of the best period. He quotes with approval the epitaph of Cyrus the Great: “I could drink a great deal of wine, and it did me a great deal of good.” In Clarel he asks: “At Cana, who renewed the wine?” In the riotous chapter wherein “Taji sits down to Dinner with five-and-twenty Kings, and a royal Time they have,” there is an exuberant tilting of calabashes that would have won the esteem even of Socrates and Pantagruel. One wonders if Rabelais, in his youth, did not belong to some Juvenile Total Abstinence Society, or if Socrates, who both lived and died over a cup, had not as a boy committed an equally heinous sacrilege to Dionysus.

On board the Highlander Melville was too young yet to have come to a sense of the iniquity of the deadly virtues. He was not thereby, however, tempted to the optimism of despair that preaches that because God is isolated in His Heaven, all is right with the world. Even at seventeen Melville had keenly felt that much in the world needs mending. And at seventeen—more than at any other period—he felt moved to exert himself to set the world aright. Ashipboard, the field of his operations being very limited, he cast a missionary eye upon the rum-soaked profanity and lechery of his ship-mates. “I called to mind a sermon I had once heard in a church in behalf of sailors,” says Melville, “when the preacher called them strayed lambs from the fold, and compared them to poor lost children, babes in the wood, or orphans without fathers or mothers.” Overflowing with the milk of human kindness at the sad condition of these amiable outcasts, Melville, during his first watch, made bold to ask one of them if he was in the habit of going to church. The sailor answered that “he had been in a church once, some ten or twelve years before, in London, and on a week-day had helped to move the Floating Chapel round the Battery from North River.” This first and last effort of Melville’s to evangelise a shipmate ended in winning Melville hearty ridicule. “If I had not felt so terribly angry,” he says, “I should certainly have felt very much like a fool. But my being so angry prevented me from feeling foolish, which is very lucky for people in a passion.” Though Melville made no further effort to save the souls of his shipmates, his own seems not to have been jeopardised by any hankering after the instruments of damnation.

As has been said, he was without friends, both ashipboard and later ashore; a complete absence of companionship that on occasion inspired him with a parched desire for some friend to whom to say “how sweet is solitude.” He craved in his isolation, he says, “to give his whole soul to another; in its loneliness it was yearning to throw itself into the unbounded bosom of some immaculate friend.” In Redburn, Melville spends a generous number of pages in celebrating his encounter with a good-for-nothing but courtly youth whom he calls Harry Bolton. “He was one of those small, but perfectly formed beings with curling hair, and silken muscles, who seem to have been born in cocoons. His complexion was a mantling brunette, feminine as a girl’s; his feet were small; his hands were white; and his eyes were large, black and womanly: and, poetry aside, his voice was as the sound of a harp.” How much of Harry Bolton is fact, how much fiction, is impossible to tell. The most significant thing about him is Melville’s evident affection for him, no matter who made him. In Redburn, this engaging dandy kidnaps Melville, and takes him for a mysterious night up to London: a night spent, to Melville’s consternation, in a gambling palace of the sort that exists only in the febrile and envious imagination of vitriolic puritans. In his description of this escapade, Melville owes more, perhaps, to his early spiritual guides than to any first-hand observation. This flight to London in Redburn, its abrupt reversal, and the escape to America of Harry Bolton, may, of course, all be founded on sober fact. But there is a lack of verisimilitude in the recounting that prompts to the suspicion that in this part of the narrative, Melville is making brave and unconvincing concessions to romance. Not, of course, that Melville in his youth was incapable of the wild impetuosity of suddenly leaving his ship and running up to London with an engagingly romantic stranger: he did more impulsive and far more surprising things than that before he died. But his account of this adventure in Redburn reads hollow and false. Harry Bolton must be discounted as myth until he is more cogently substantiated as history.

In Liverpool Melville seems to have spent his leisure in company with his thoughts, wandering along the docks and about the city. Each Sunday morning he went regularly to church; Sunday afternoons he spent walking in the neighbouring country. His most vivid impressions of Liverpool were of the terrible poverty he saw, and it is doubtful if there is a more ruthless piece of realism in the language than his account in Redburn of the slow death through starvation of the mother and children that Melville found lying in a cellar, and whose lives he tried in vain to save. The green cold bodies in the morgue, the ragpickers, the variety of criminals that haunt the shadows of the docks: these too came in for characterisation.

The noblest sight that Melville found in England, it would seem, was the truck-horses he saw round the docks. “So grave, dignified, gentlemanly and courteous did these fine truck horses look—so full of calm intelligence and sagacity, that often I endeavoured to get into conversation with them as they stood in contemplative attitudes while their loads were preparing.” And Melville admired the truckmen also. “Their spending so much of their valuable lives in the high-bred company of their horses seems to have mended their manners and improved their taste; but it has also given to them a sort of refined and unconscious aversion to human society.” Though Melville grew to a most uncomplimentary rating of the human biped, he always cherished a very deep reverence for some of his four-footed brothers. “There are unknown worlds of knowledge in brutes,” he wrote; “and whenever you mark a horse, or a dog, with a peculiarly mild, calm, deep-seated eye, be sure he is an Aristotle or a Kant, tranquilly speculating upon the mysteries in man.”

The trip back across the Atlantic, after six weeks in Liverpool, though longer than the out-bound passage, was for Melville less of an ordeal. He was no longer a bewildered stranger in the forecastle or in the riggings, so he turned his eye to other parts of the ship. It was the steerage of the Highlander packed with its four or five hundred emigrants, that gave him most bitter occasion to reflect on the criminal nature of the universe. Because of insufficient provisions in food for an unexpectedly prolonged voyage, the dirty weather, and the absence of the most indispensable conveniences, these emigrants suffered almost incredible hardships. Before they had been at sea a week, to hold one’s head down the fore hatchway, Melville says, was like holding it down a suddenly opened cesspool. The noisome confinement in this close unventilated and crowded den, and the deprivation of sufficient food, helped by personal uncleanliness, brought on a malignant fever among the emigrants. The result was the death of some dozens of them, a panic throughout the ship, and a novel indulgence in spasmodic devotions. “Horrible as the sights of the steerage were, the cabin, perhaps, presented a scene equally despairing. Trunks were opened for Bibles; and at last, even prayer-meetings were held over the very tables across which the loud jest had been so often heard.”

But with the coming of fair winds and fine weather the pestilence subsided, and the ship steered merrily towards New York. The steerage was cleaned thoroughly with sand and water. The place was then fumigated, and dried with pieces of coal from the gallery: so that when the Highlander streamed into New York harbour no stranger would have imagined, from her appearance, that the Highlander had made other than a tidy and prosperous voyage. “Thus, some sea-captains take good heed that benevolent citizens shall not get a glimpse of the true condition of the steerage while at sea.”