But here, just at the climax of the quest, the clipping is abruptly torn, and the reader is left cruelly suspended.
From the publication of Lalla Rookh, in 1817, to the publication of Thackeray’s Our Street in 1847, there settled upon letters and life in England an epidemic of hankering for the exotic. At the instigation of Lalla Rookh, England made a prim effort to be “purely and intensely Asiatic,” and this while delicately avoiding “the childishness, cruelty, and profligacy of Asia.” In the fashionable literature of the period, the harem and the slave-market unburdened its gazelles and its interior decorations, and by a resort to divans and coruscating rubies, and ottar of roses, and lutes, and warm panting maidens, the “principled goodness” of Anglo-Saxon self-righteousness was thrilled to a discreet voluptuousness.
In his second Fragment, Melville has caught at some of the drift-wood of this great tidal wave that was washed across the Atlantic. And in acknowledgment of this early indebtedness, he in Pierre speaks of Tom Moore with an especial burst of enthusiasm, mating him with Hafiz, Anacreon, Catullus and Ovid.
Reared in a New England environment that had been soberly tempered by Mrs. Chapone and Mrs. Barbauld, Melville had, under the goadings of poverty, the frustrations of his environment, and the teasing lure of some stupendous discovery awaiting him at the rainbow’s end, plunged into the hideousness of life in the forecastle of a merchantman. At both extremes of his journey he reaped only disillusion. As a practically penniless sailor in Liverpool he enjoyed the freedom of the streets: and the architecture of the city impressed him less than did the sights of the poverty and viciousness to which he was especially exposed. Back he came to Lansingburg, to the old pump in the yard, the stiff-corseted decorum, and the threadbare and pretentious proprieties of his mother, to decline into the enforced drudgery of teaching school. The sights of Liverpool and the forecastle had given no permanent added beauty to home. He did not comfortably fit into any recognised socket of New England respectability. He sought escape in books, in amateur authorship. And Burton, and Anacreon, and Tom Moore are not guaranteed to reconcile a boy in ferment to a tame and repugnant environment. He was like a strong wine that clears with explosive violence. He had been to sea once, and there acquired some skill as a sailor. The excitement and hardship and downrightness of ocean life, when viewed through the drab of the ensuing years, treacherously suffered a sea-change. After three and a half years of mounting desperation, he was ripe for a transit clean beyond the pale of civilisation.
“I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote,” he later wrote in an effort to explain his second hegira; “I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” The trip to Liverpool had slammed the sash on one magic casement; but the greater part of the watery world was still to be viewed. “Why,” he asks himself perplexed at his own mystery, “is almost every healthy boy with a robust healthy soul, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother to Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to all.” The key he here offers to the heart of his mystery is itself locked in mystery; though when he compared himself to Narcissus tormented by the irony of being two, Melville may have been hotter on the trail of the truth than he was aware. His deepest insight, perhaps, came to him one midnight, out on the Pacific, where in the glare and the wild Hindoo odour of the tryworks of a whaler in full operation, he fell asleep at the helm. “Starting from a brief standing sleep,” he says, “I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by. Nothing seemed before me but a jet of gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.”
In a headlong retreat from all havens astern, on January 3, 1841, Melville shipped on board the Acushnet, a whaler bound for the South Seas.
CHAPTER VII
BLUBBER AND MYSTICISM
“And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”
—Herman Melville: Moby-Dick.