THE FLEET OF TAHITI
From an engraving after Hodges, the artist who accompanied Captain Cook to the South Seas.
Melville’s plea was that Christendom treat Polynesia with reasonableness, and Christian charity: perhaps the two rarest qualities in the world. His plea was not without results; he unloosed upon himself exhibitions of venom of the whole-hearted sort that enamour a misanthrope to life. The Living Age (Vol. XXVII) reprinted from the Eclectic Review a tribute which began: “Falsehood is a thing of almost invincible courage; overthrow it to-day, and with freshened vigour it will return to the lists to-morrow. Omoo illustrates this fact. We were under the illusion that the abettors of infidelity and the partisans of popery had been put to shame by the repeated refutation and exposure of their slanders against the Protestant Missions in Polynesia; but Mr. Melville’s production proves that shame is a virtue with which these gentry are totally unacquainted, and that they are resharpening their missiles for another onset.” This review then made it its object “to show that his statements respecting the Protestant Mission in Tahiti are perversions of the truth—that he is guilty of deliberate and elaborate misrepresentation, and ... that he is a prejudiced, incompetent, and truthless witness.” It was taken for granted that Melville was guilty of the heinous crime of being a Catholic. From this presumption it was easy to understand that Melville’s plea for sweetness and light was but the vicious ravings of a man “foiled and disappointed by the rejection of Mariolatry and the worship of wafers and of images, and of dead men by the Bible-reading Tahitians.” By a convincing—if not cogent—technique of controversy, Melville’s evidence was impugned by a discounting of the morals of the witness: a Catholic, and a disseminator of the “worst of European vices and the most dreadful of European diseases.”
Melville was twenty-eight years old when he Quixotically championed the heathen in the name of a transcendental charity which he believed to be Christian. Amiable Protestant brethren undertook to disabuse him of his naïve belief that the guardians of the faith of Christendom invariably regulate their conduct in the spirit of Christ. As Melville grew in wisdom he grew in disillusion: and his early tilt at the London Missionary Society contributed to his rapid growth. At the age of thirty-three he wrote in Pierre—a book planned to show the impracticability of virtue—that “God’s truth is one thing, and man’s truth another.” He then maintained that the history of Christendom for the last 1800 years showed that “in spite of all the maxims of Christ, that history is as full of blood, violence, wrong, and iniquity of every kind, as any previous portion of the world’s story.” He says in Clarel:
“The world is portioned out, believe:
The good have but a patch at best,
The wise their corner; for the rest—
Malice divides with ignorance.”
Melville points out that Christ’s teachings seemed folly to the Jews because Christ carried Heaven’s time in Jerusalem, while the Jews carried Jerusalem time there. “Did He not expressly say ‘My wisdom is not of this world?’ Whatever is really peculiar in the wisdom of Christ seems precisely the same folly to-day as it did 1850 years ago.” In Clarel, he goes further, and calls the world