Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

by Raymond M. Weaver

Literature was, of course, already elaborated with fantastic patterns drawn from barbarism, and the Indians of Aphra Behn and Voltaire had given place to the redmen of Cooper. Earlier than this, however, the great discoverers, in their wealth of records, had given many an account of their contacts with savage peoples. But one searches in vain among these records for any very vivid sense that the savage and the Christian belong to the same order of nature. At best, one gathers the impression that in savagery God’s image had been multiplied in an excess of contemptible counterfeits. Melville reports that as late as his day “wanton acts of cruelty are not unusual on the part of sea captains landing at islands comparatively unknown. Indeed, it is almost incredible, the light in which many sailors regard these naked heathens. They hardly consider them human. But it is a curious fact, that the more ignorant and degraded men are, the more contemptuously they look upon those whom they deem their inferiors.” John G. Paton records in his Autobiography how, in 1860, three traders gleefully told him that to humble the natives of Tanna, and to diminish their numbers, they had let out on shore at different ports, four men ill with the measles—an exceedingly virulent disease among savage peoples. “Our watchwords are,” these jolly traders said, “‘sweep the creatures into the sea, and let white men occupy the soil.’” This sentiment belongs more to a fixed human type, than to a period, of course: and that type has frequently taken to sailing strange seas. In treachery, cruelty, and profligacy, the exploits of European discoverers contain some of the rosiest pages in the history of villainy.

These sickening pages of civilised barbarism soon won to the savage ardent apologists, however, who applied an old technique of libel by imputing to the unbreeched heathen a touching array of the superior virtues. Montaigne was among the first to come forward in this capacity. “We may call them barbarous in regard to reasons rules,” he said, “but not in respect to us that exceed them in all kinde of barbarisme. Their warres are noble and generous, and have as much excuse and beautie, as this humane infirmitie may admit: they ayme at nought so much, and have no other foundation amongst them, but the meere jelousie of vertue.” Once in full current of idealisation Montaigne goes on to write as if he soberly believed that savage peoples were descended from a stock that Eve had conceived by an angel before the fall. In his dithyramb on the nobilities of savagery, Montaigne was unhampered by any first-hand dealings with savages, and he was far too wise ever to betray the remotest inclination to improve his state by migrating into the bosom of their uncorrupted nobility.

The myth of the “noble savage” was a taking conceit, however, and when Rousseau taught the world the art of reverie, he taught it also an easy vagabondage into the virgin forest and into the pure heart of the “natural man.” In describing Rousseau’s influence on the drawing rooms, Taine says that “The fops dreamed between two madrigals of the happiness of sleeping naked in the virgin forest.” Rousseau’s savage, “attached to no place, having no prescribed task, obeying no one, having no other law than his own will,” was, of course, a wilful backward glance to the vanished paradise of childhood, not a finding of ethnology. Yet ethnology may prate as it will, the “noble savage” is a myth especially diverting to the over-sophisticated, and like dreams of the virgin forest, thrives irrepressibly among the upholsterings of civilisation. The soft and ardent dreamer, no less than the sleek and parched imagination of Main Street, find compensation for the defeats of civilisation in dreams of a primitive Arcadia. While the kettle is boiling they relax into slippers and make the grand tour. Chateaubriand—whose life, according to Lemaître, was a “magnificent series of attitudes”—showed incredible hardihood of attitudinising in crossing the Atlantic in actual quest of the primitive. In the forest west of Albany he did pretend to find some satisfaction in wild landscape. He showed his “intoxication” at the beauties of wild nature by taking pains to do “various wilful things that made my guide furious.” But Chateaubriand was less fortunate in his contact with savagery than he was with nature. His first savages he found under a shed taking dancing lessons from a little Frenchman, who, “bepowdered and befrizzled” was scraping on a pocket fiddle to the prancings of “ces messieurs sauvages et ces dames sauvagesses.” Chateaubriand concludes with a reflection: “Was it not a crushing circumstance for a disciple of Rousseau?” And it is an indubitable fact that if the present-day disciples of the South Sea myth would show Chateaubriand’s hardihood and migrate to Polynesia, they would find themselves in circumstances no less “crushing.”

Melville was the first competent literary artist to write with authority about the South Seas. In his day, a voyage to those distant parts was a jaunt not lightly to be undertaken. In the Pacific there were islands to be discovered, islands to be annexed, and whales to be lanced. As for the incidental savage life encountered in such enterprise, that, in Montaigne’s phrase, was there to be bastardised, by applying it to the pleasures of our corrupted taste. These attractions of whaling and patriotism—with incidental rites to Priapus—had tempted more than one man away from the comfort of his muffins, and more than one returned to give an inventory of the fruits of the temptation. The knowledge that these men had of Polynesia was ridiculously slight: the regular procedure was to shoot a few cannibals, to make several marriages after the manner of Loti. The result is a monotonous series of reports of the glorious accomplishments of Christians: varied on occasions with lengthy and learned dissertations on heathendom. But they are invariably writers with insular imagination, telling us much of the writer, but never violating the heart of Polynesia.

The Missionaries, discreetly scandalised at the exploitation of unholy flesh, went valiantly forth to fight the battle of righteousness in the midst of the enemy. The missionaries came to be qualified by long first-hand contact to write intimately of the heathen: but their records are redolent with sanctity, not sympathy. The South Sea vagabonds were the best hope of letters: but they all seem to have died without dictating their memoirs. William Mariner, it is true, thanks to a mutiny at the Tongo Islands in 1805, was “several years resident in those islands:” and upon Mariner’s return, Dr. John Martin spent infinite patience in recording every detail of savage life he could draw from Mariner. Dr. Martin’s book is still a classic in its way: detailed, sober, and naked of literary pretensions. This book is the nearest approach to Typee that came out of the South Seas before Melville’s time. So numerous have been the imitators of Melville, so popular has been the manner that he originated, that it is difficult at the present day to appreciate the novelty of Typee at the time of its appearance. When we read Mr. Frederick O’Brien we do not always remember that Mr. O’Brien is playing “sedulous ape”—there is here intended no discourtesy to Mr. O’Brien—to Melville, but that in Typee and Omoo Melville was playing “sedulous ape” to nobody. Only when Typee is seen against the background of A Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean performed in the years 1796, 1797, 1798 in the Ship Duff (1799) and Mariner’s Tonga (1816) (fittingly dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, and companion of Captain Cook in the South Seas) can Melville’s originality begin to transpire.

This originality lies partly, of course, in the novelty of Melville’s experience, partly in the temperament through which this experience was refracted. Melville himself believed his only originality was his loyalty to fact. He bows himself out of the Preface “trusting that his anxious desire to speak the ungarnished truth will gain him the confidence of his readers.”

When Melville’s brother Gansevoort offered Typee for publication in England, it was accepted not as fiction but as ethnology, and was published as Melville’s Marquesas only after Melville had vouched for its entire veracity.

Though Melville published Typee upright in the conviction that he had in its composition been loyal both to veracity and truth, his critics were not prone to take him at his word. And he was to learn, too, that veracity and truth are not interchangeable terms. Men do, in fact, believe pretty much what they find it most advantageous to believe. We live by prejudices, not by syllogisms. In Typee, Melville undertook to show from first-hand observation the obvious fact that there are two sides both to civilisation and to savagery. He was among the earliest of literary travellers to see in barbarians anything but queer folk. He intuitively understood them, caught their point of view, respected and often admired it. He measured the life of the Marquesans against that of civilisation, and wrote: “The term ‘savage’ is, I conceive, often misapplied, and indeed when I consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere of a feverish civilisation, I am inclined to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as missionaries, might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans dispatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.” Civilisation is so inured to anathema,—so reassured by it,—indeed, that Melville could write a vague and sentimental attack upon its obvious imperfections with the cool assurance that each of his readers, applying the charges to some neighbour, would approve in self-righteousness. But one ventures the “ungarnished truth” about any of the vested interests of civilisation at the peril of his peace in this world and the next. It was when Melville focussed his charge and wrote “a few passages which may be thought to bear rather hard upon a reverend order of men” with incidental reflections upon “that glorious cause which has not always been served by the proceedings of some of its advocates,” that all the musketry of the soldiers of the Prince of Peace was aimed at his head. Melville himself was a man whose tolerance provoked those who sat in jealous monopoly upon warring sureties to accuse him of license. He specifies his delight in finding in the valley of Typee that “an unbounded liberty of conscience seemed to prevail. Those who were pleased to do so were allowed to repose implicit faith in an ill-favoured god with a large bottle-nose and fat shapeless arms crossed upon his breast; whilst others worshipped an image which, having no likeness either in heaven or on earth, could hardly be called an idol. As the islanders always maintained a discrete reserve with regard to my own peculiar views on religion, I thought it would be excessively ill-bred in me to pry into theirs.” This boast of delicacy did not pass unnoticed by “a reverend order of men.” The vitriolic rejoinder of the London Missionary Society would seem to indicate that there may be two versions of “the ungarnished truth.” It should be stated, however, that the English editions of Typee contain strictures against the Missionaries that were omitted in the American editions. But even Melville’s unsanctified critics showed an anxiety to repudiate him. Both Typee and Omoo were scouted as impertinent inventions, defying belief in their “cool sneering wit and perfect want of heart.” Melville’s name was suspiciously examined as being a nom de plume used to cover a cowardly and supercilious libel. A gentleman signing himself G. W. P. and writing in the American Review (1847, Vol. IV, pp. 36-46) was scandalised by Melville’s habit of presenting “voluptuous pictures, and with cool deliberate art breaking off always at the right point, so as without offending decency, he may excite unchaste desire.” After discovering in Melville’s writing a boastful lechery, this gentleman undertakes to discountenance Melville on three scores: (1) only the impotent make amorous boasts; (2) Melville had none of Sir Epicure Mammon’s wished-for elixir; (3) the beauty of Polynesian women is all myth.

Unshaken in the conviction of his loyalty to fact, Melville discovered that the essence of originality lies in reporting “the ungarnished truth.”

On the subject of “originality” in literature, Melville says in Pierre: “In the inferior instances of an immediate literary success, in very young writers, it would be almost invariably observable, that for that instant success they were chiefly indebted to some rich and peculiar experience in life, embodied in a book, which because, for that cause, containing original matter, the author himself, forsooth, is to be considered original; in this way, many very original books being the product of very unoriginal minds.” It is none the less true, however, that though Melville and Toby both lived among the cannibals, it was Melville, not Toby, who wrote Typee.