Melville sinned blackly against the orthodoxy of his time. In his earlier works, he confined his sins to an attack upon Missionaries and the starchings of civilisation: sins that won him a succes de scandal. The London Missionary Society charged into the resulting festivities with its flag at half mast. Cased in the armour of the Lord, it with flagrant injustice attacked his morals, because it smarted under his ideas. But when Melville began flooding the very foundations of life with torrents of corrosive pessimism, the world at large found itself more vulnerable in its encasement. It could not, without absurdity obvious even to itself, accuse Melville of any of the cruder crimes against Jehovah or the Public. Judged by the bungling provisions of the thirty-nine articles and the penal code, he was not a bad man: more subtle was his iniquity. As by a divine visitation, the Harper fire of 1853 effectually reduced Pierre—his most frankly poisonous book—to a safely limited edition. And the public, taking the hint, ceased buying his books. In reply, Melville earned his bread as Inspector of Customs. The public, defeated in its righteous attempts at starvation, hit upon a more exquisite revenge. It gathered in elegiacal synods and whispered mysteriously: “He went insane.”
To view Melville’s life as a venturesome romantic idyll frozen in mid-career by the deus ex machina of some steadily descending Gorgon is possible only by a wanton misreading of patent facts. Throughout Melville’s long life his warring and untamed desires were in violent conflict with his physical and spiritual environment. His whole history is the record of an attempt to escape from an inexorable and intolerable world of reality: a quenchless and essentially tragic Odyssey away from home, out in search of “the unpeopled world behind the sun.” In the blood and bone of his youth he sailed away in brave quest of such a harbour, to face inevitable defeat. For this rebuff he sought both solace and revenge in literature. But by literature he also sought his livelihood. In the first burst of literary success he married. Held closer to reality by financial worry and the hostages of wife and children, the conflict within him was heightened. By a vicious circle, with brooding disappointment came ill health. “Ah, muskets the gods have made to carry infinite combustion,” he wrote in Pierre, “and yet made them of clay.” The royalties from his books proved inadequate for the support of his family, so for twenty years he earned a frugal living in the customs houses in New York. During his leisure hours he continued to write, but never for publication. Two volumes of poetry he privately printed. His last novel, surviving in manuscript, he finished a few months before his death. Though it is for the second half that his critics have felt bound to regret, it seems that in serenity and mental equipoise, the last state of this man was better than the first.
In his early manhood he wrote in Mardi: “Though essaying but a sportive sail, I was driven from my course by a blast resistless; and ill-provided, young, and bowed by the brunt of things before my prime, still fly before the gale.... If after all these fearful fainting trances, the verdict be, the golden haven was not gained;—yet in bold quest thereof, better to sink in boundless deeps than float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do.” To the world at large, it has been generally believed that the Gods ironically fulfilled his worst hopes.
One William Cranston Lawton, in an Introduction to the Study of American Literature—a handy relic of the parrot judgment passed upon Melville during the closing years of his life—so enlightens young America: “He holds his own beside Cooper and Marryat, and boy readers, at least, will need no introduction to him. Nor will their enjoyment ever be alloyed by a Puritan moral or a mystic double meaning.” And Barrett Wendell, in A Literary History of America—a volume that modestly limits American literature of much value not only to New England, but even tucks it neatly into the confines of Harvard College—notes with jaunty patronage: “Herman Melville with his books about the South Seas, which Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have declared the best ever written, and his novels of maritime adventure, began a career of literary promise, which never came to fruition.”
These typical pronouncements, unperverted by the remotest touch of independent judgment, transcend Melville’s worst fears. “Think of it!” he once wrote to Hawthorne. “To go down to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as a ‘man who lived among the cannibals!’ When I think of posterity in reference to myself, I mean only the babes who will probably be born in the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost. I shall go down to them, in all likelihood. Typee will be given to them, perhaps, with their gingerbread.” In that mythical anomaly known as the “popular mind,” Melville has, indeed, survived as an obscure adventurer in strange seas and among amiable barbarians. Typee and Omoo have lived on as minor classics. Though there have been staccato and sporadic attacks upon the ludicrous inadequacy of the popular judgment upon Melville, not until recently, and then chiefly in England has there been any popular and concerted attempt to take Melville’s truer and more heroic dimensions. An editorial in the London Nation for January 22, 1921, thus bespeaks the changing temper of the times:
“It is clear that the wind of the spirit, when it once begins to blow through the English literary mind, possesses a surprising power of penetration. A few weeks ago it was pleased to aim a simultaneous blast in the direction of a book known to some generations of men as Moby-Dick. A member of the staff of The Nation was thereupon moved in the ancient Hebrew fashion to buy and to read it. He then expressed himself on the subject, incoherently indeed, but with signs of emotion as intense and as pleasingly uncouth as Man Friday betrayed at the sight of his long-lost father. While struggling with his article, and wondering what the deuce it could mean, I received a letter from a famous literary man, marked on the outside ‘Urgent,’ and on the inner scroll of the manuscript itself ‘A Rhapsody.’ It was about Moby-Dick. Having observed a third article on the same subject, of an equally febrile kind, I began to read Moby-Dick myself. Having done so I hereby declare, being of sane intellect, that since letters began there never was such a book, and that the mind of man is not constructed so as to produce such another; that I put its author with Rabelais, Swift, Shakespeare, and other minor and disputable worthies; and that I advise any adventurer of the soul to go at once to the morose and prolonged retreat necessary for its deglutition.”
Having earlier been hailed in France as an “American Rabelais;” prized in England by the author of The City of Dreadful Night; greeted by Stevenson with slangy enthusiasm as a “howling cheese;” rated by Mr. Masefield as unique among writers of the sea; the professed inspirer of Captain Hook of Sir James Barrie’s Peter Pan, Melville is beginning to appear as being vastly more than merely a “man who lived among the cannibals” and who returned home to write lively sea stories for boys.
The wholesale neglect of Melville at the hands of his countrymen—though explained in some part as a consummation of Melville’s best efforts—has not been merely unintelligent, but thoroughly discreditable. For Melville, from any point of view, is one of the most distinguished of our writers, and there is something ludicrous in being before all the world—as, assuredly, we sometimes are—in recognising our own merit where it is contestable, and in neglecting it where it is not.
It has been our tradition to cherish our literature for its embodiment of Queen Victoria’s fireside qualities. The repudiation of this tradition—as a part of our repudiation of all tradition—has made fashionable a wholesale contempt for our native product. “I can’t read Longfellow” is frequently remarked; “he’s so subtle!” Our critical estimates have laboured under the incubus of New England provincialism: a provincialism preserved in miniature in the first pages of Lowell’s essay on Thoreau. At present we need to have the eminence of the section recalled to us; but during the period of Melville’s productivity, it was at its apex, and in its bosom Melville wrote. This man, whose closest literary affinities were Rabelais, Zola, Sir Thomas Browne, Rousseau, Meredith, and Dr. John Donne,—a combination to make the uninitiated blink with incredulity—was indebted to Nathaniel Hawthorne for the best makeshift for companionship he was ever to know: one of the most subtly ironical associations the imps of comedy ever brought about. Nor was the comedy lessened by Mrs. Hawthorne’s presence upon the scene. Shrewd was her instinctive resentment of her husband’s friend. Viewed by his neighbours “as little better than a cannibal and a ‘beach comber’”—such was the report of the late Titus Munson Coan in a letter to his mother written immediately after a pilgrimage to Melville in the Berkshires—Melville turned to Hawthorne for understanding. Frank Preston Stearns, in his Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1906) says that for Hawthorne “the summer of 1851 in Lenox was by no means brilliant.... Hawthorne’s chief entertainment seems to have been the congratulatory letters he received from distinguished people.... For older company he had Herman Melville and G. P. R. James, whose society he may have found as interesting as that of more distinguished writers.” But Mrs. Hawthorne had studied Melville with a closer scrutiny and was not so easily convinced of Melville’s insignificance. Melville had visited the Hawthornes in the tiny reception room of the Red House, where Mrs. Hawthorne “sewed at her stand and read to the children about Christ;” in the drawing room, where she disposed “the embroidered furniture,” and where, in the farther corner, stood “Apollo with his head tied on;” in Hawthorne’s study, which to Mrs. Hawthorne’s wifely adoration was consecrated by “his presence in the morning.” Mrs. Hawthorne looked from the “wonderful, wonderful eyes” of her husband—each eye “like a violet with a soul in it,”—to Melville’s eyes, and confessed to her mother her grave and jealous suspicion of Melville: “I am not quite sure that I do not think him a very great man.... A man with a true, warm heart, and a soul and an intellect,—with life to his finger-tips; earnest, sincere and reverent; very tender and modest.... He has very keen perceptive power; but what astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems to see everything very accurately; and how he can do so with his small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and rather handsome, his mouth expressive of sensibility and emotion. He is tall, and erect, with an air free, brave and manly. When conversing, he is full of gesture and force, and loses himself in his subject. There is no grace nor polish. Once in a while, his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression, out of these eyes to which I have objected; an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that moment taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself. I saw him look at Una so, yesterday, several times.”
Mrs. Hawthorne must ever enjoy a lofty eminence as one of Melville’s most penetrating critics. Her husband dwelt apart, and less because he found the atmosphere of New England wholly uncongenial than because he shared his wife’s conviction that he was like a star. And shrewdly his wife resented the presence of a second luminary—treacherously veiled and of heaven knows what magnitude!—in her serene New England sky. Time may yet harp her worst fears aright.