OLYMPIAN (continued 2)

The Navy of Melville’s day was not unlike the Navy of today: these saurian institutions do not add to the quantity of brains in their brain-pan, nor do they change the quality of their tissue: it was bound up by red tape, precedent, a stupefying routine, and a set of regulations designed to establish and maintain the authority of those marginal officers who may have neither seamanship nor the gift of command. In addition to the abuses that still exist in the Navy, some of which are inevitable by the mere act of regimentation and by an existence that is purposeless except in terms of slaughter and bellicose action, there was in Melville’s time the further iniquity of flogging. Melville’s words against this institution are in bold contrast to Dana’s. Dana was one of those cautious friends of a cause whose timid counsel is far harder to dispose of than the practices of its enemies: he minced and compromised, and, dealing only with merchant sailors, still recommended merely that flogging be mitigated. To Melville flogging was a degradation of humanity; if discipline could not be maintained without it, discipline was degrading; if the navy of a free community could not be maintained without it, navies were degrading: let us get rid of all these things together.

Life on the man-of-war was difficult and capricious still. Through the mere punctilio of an officer in charge, Melville was unable to give his white jacket a coat of paint; and he suffered from terrible exposure in the journey round the Horn; but after the comparative solitude of his savage Polynesian existence, with just a stray soul for company, the ship had something of the stir and variety of a metropolis: it contained people like Nord, a man of mystery and romance, who, Melville suspected sympathetically, had been bolted in the mill of adversity: and there was Lemsford, the poet, who conceived platitudes in Dionysiac ecstasy, and above all, there was Jack Chase, the captain of the maintop, a simple, hearty, beautiful soul, who gave young Melville all a father could have given him; and to whom Melville clung, at sea, and later, in memory—a starved orphan, finding in Jovian Chase all that his father’s death, and his father’s marble image, denied him. The hours spent with Chase on the maintop were happy hours indeed; and no less so were those that Melville spent with books, Walpole’s Letters and the Jew of Malta and Volpone, as well as earlier books of travel and adventure, such as Morgan’s History of Algiers, and Knox’s Captivity in Ceylon. Coming as they did, after a long period of abstention and thirst, these books had a profound influence upon Melville: and they give his literary pedigree. Through his experience of life, he broke away by necessity from the weak romantics of his youth, and, seeking the nearest parallels to his own adventures and meditations and visions, he found them in the Elizabethan dramatists and the seventeenth-century travellers and literary philosophers. Melville’s genius followed two separate lines of growth, which joined in Moby-Dick: one of them was that of Marlowe and Webster, with their untrammelled emotions, their stertorous vitality, and their keen transposition of dream into reality and of reality into dream—the other was that of Knox’s Captivity, direct, honest, well ballasted. Had not these books been in the ship’s library, Melville might have taken much longer to find himself. Jack Chase himself added to Melville’s literary education: he could recite the Lusiad by heart, and Camoëns made a vivid impression on Melville. In two of his last poems he assumed Camoëns’ personality.

“Mind you, White-Jacket,” Jack Chase would say, “there are many great men in the world besides commodores and captains. I’ve that there, White-Jacket”—touching his forehead—“which under happier skies—perhaps in yon solitary star there, peeping down from those clouds—might have made a Homer of me. But Fate is Fate, White-Jacket; and we Homers who happen to be captains of the tops must write our Odes in our hearts and publish them in our heads.” Did Melville smile at Chase’s conceit, or was he already meditating his own odes and epics? When he wrote Typee, he explained that the incidents of it had been imprinted in his memory by being told over and over again; and one can imagine a hundred places where Melville might have found less incentive to literary activity than he found in the library and the maintop of the U. S. frigate United States.

There were three main events in the voyage. Two of these experiences involved deep personal humiliation. One was the time he was called to the mast and condemned to the scourge for being absent from his post at general quarters, a post to which he had never to his knowledge been assigned: in a panic of righteous anger, he measured the distance between himself and the captain, and had the blind impulse to rush him overboard, and end his own life, too, rather than undergo the degradation of this punishment. By a miracle, he was saved from this fate through the courageous intercession of a corporal of the marines, who spoke up in his behalf and got the order remitted. The other humiliation was the massacre of the beards, when, by the capricious order of “Captain Claret,” the autocrat of the United States, even the oldest veteran, just completing his last voyage, was ordered to shave his beard; and when he would not submit to it, was flogged and put in irons. No one can feel the inner resentment occasioned by such an order who has not been subject to a similar indignity; on such occasions, the spirit boils in helpless rebellion. In civilian life, only the poor and the outcast know this experience; but in every large and regimented organization, military or commercial, such affronts to human dignity and autonomy are commonplace; they characterize the system, rather than the men who conduct it. Had Captain Claret not, on the whole, been a lenient officer, Melville would have had a hundred other occasions for this feeling. In gauging Melville’s conduct at a later period, one must not forget these humiliations; their effect was cumulative.

But the crowning adventure of the voyage happened when the United States was off the capes of Virginia in a calm sea: the ship gave a sudden lurch and he was thrown from the yard-arm into the water. Let him tell the story for himself:

“With a bloody, blind film before my eyes, there was a still stranger hum in my head, as if a hornet were there; and I thought to myself Great God! this is death. Yet these thoughts were unmixed with alarm. Like frostwork that flashes and shifts its scared hues in the sun, all my braided, blended emotions were in themselves icy cold and calm.... As I gushed into the sea, a thunderboom sounded in my ear; my soul seemed flying from my mouth. The feeling of death flooded over me with the billows, the blow from the sea must have turned me, so that I sank almost feet foremost through a soft, seething, foamy lull. Some current seemed hurrying me away; in a trance, I yielded, and sank deeper down with a glide. Purple and pathless was the deep calm around me, flecked by summer lightnings in an azure afar. The horrible nausea was gone; the bloody, blind film turned a pale green; I wondered whether I was yet dead, or still dying. But of a sudden some fashionless form brushed my side—some inert coiled fish of the sea; the thrill of being alive again tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning of death shocked me through. For one instant an agonizing revulsion came over me as I found myself utterly sinking. Next moment the force of my fall was expended; and there I hung, vibrating in the mid-deep.... The Life-and-death poise soon passed; and then I found myself slowly ascending, and caught a dim glimmering of light. Quicker and quicker I mounted; till at last I bounded up like a buoy and my whole head was bathed in the blessed air.” Melville was rescued; but not before he had rid himself of his white jacket forever; the ominous whiteness that he found later in Moby-Dick was accentuated, perhaps, by his memory of that “accursed jacket” which had delivered him up to the elements, rather than protected him, and in the moment of extremity, had nearly proved his shroud.

To have faced life and death, not as abstractions, but as concrete events, when a sinew less of resolution would have meant his extinction, in a stove boat off the coast of Japan, at the hands of the pursuant Typees, or enveloped in the white jacket at sea: to have thrown himself among strange men, and to have kept his own shape, always set apart a little by culture and breeding, but never rebuffed for a feebleness or an unmanliness or inability to bear a hand: to feel the wild throb of a ship in a gale, sea-wracked but magnificent, creaking, whining, wind-whistling, slapping into a trough of wave or climbing dizzily on to a crest, and to feel a wilder, louder, more victorious throb within: to have been attracted by the languors and sensuous jollities of a savage life, but still more attracted by all that civilisation had left with him, in hints and promises, Homer and Dante and Shakespeare and Cervantes: to have left home a boy, innocent and unspoiled, and to have returned a man, toughened, bronzed, firm-fibred, and full of mixed knowledge, yet still essentially innocent and unspoiled—all this had happened to Melville. He had left America to seek adventures. Now he had found adventures; and he left that behind, left the South Seas and the whaleman’s joys and hardships, and the man-of-war’s settled routine, to pursue adventure farther, but on a higher plane.

There comes a time—it is the beginning of manhood or womanhood—when one realizes that adventure is as humdrum as routine unless one assimilates it, unless one relates it to a central core which grows within and gives it contour and significance. Raw experience is empty, just as empty in the forecastle of a whaler as in the chamber of a counting-house; it is not what one does, but in a manifold sense, what one realizes, that keeps existence from being vain and trivial. Mankind moves about in worlds not realized: Wordsworth’s phrase expresses a profound reality, and Melville himself suggests a similar idea in Mardi, when the philosopher points out that ages hence people may realize more keenly what has happened today than our own contemporaries do. It is the artist, the knower, the sayer, who realizes human experience, who takes the raw lump of ore we find in nature, smelts it, refines it, assays it, and stamps it into coins that can pass from hand to hand and make every man who touches them the richer. “No man can live for another” is a true doctrine as far as experience goes; but it is the opposite of true in the life of realization; for into this fuller and more durable apprehension of experience goes our whole social heritage, all the forms and symbols that have aided human expression in the past, the cumulative effect of many cultures and many different modes of life. Those who absorb and reflect and meditate and relate, play an important part in the economy of society; and life is abrupt and incomplete when that part is not performed.

Melville had travelled far and had experienced much; he had run the gamut, or rather, the gauntlet of every sort of human experience except the normal and easy and domestic one promised him by birth and parentage. He will never be a school teacher, a professor, a ship captain, a lawyer, a political leader; however necessary these occupations, there is nothing in Melville’s training or temperament that moves him in one of these directions. What is left? What is left is something he has been silently preparing himself for all along: he must become a writer. Though the society to which he returned, unlike Jack Chase and other humble listeners to Melville’s yarns, regarded that function as a trivial one, compared to accomplishments in a dissociated world of action, and by its contemptuous regard and its dissociation, deprived it of sustenance and made much of it in fact trivial, here is the occupation which will gain in a hundred ways by his experiences.

Melville must have had more than a dim anticipation of this career when he stepped ashore, at Boston, in October, 1844; and had he known where it would lead him he might well have shrunk from following it further. His physical adventures were to be welcomed as romantic myths, and his mental adventures were to be denounced as blasphemies. In short, “the indefinite Navy Commissioners, so far out of sight aloft,” had a mission in store for Melville that Hardy’s ironic President of the Immortals might have concocted in a sinister moment.

CHAPTER THREE: TROPICAL SUMMER

In 1844, when Herman Melville landed in Boston, provincial American society was in that state of uneasy transformation which means either a vaster accomplishment or destruction; and in 1844 it was still possible to think that the result would not be, fatally, destruction. The Mexican War loomed ahead, thanks partly to the itch of Southern planters to extend the territory under cotton, abetted by the belief of men like Seward that by a process of territorial aggrandizement and conquest the conflict between Northern and Southern economic interests could be diverted. The American state had already acquired the desire to crown itself with glory and prestige by conquering one of its disordered neighbours—a process which mixed an ineffable air of virtue with the proud consciousness that we had chosen an opponent who could not possibly lick us.

Already something that aggravated the economic conflict had appeared on the horizon, a breach between the several states over the ancient metaphysical question of the one and the many, somewhat confused by doubts as to whether free institutions could flourish alongside an empire committed to slavery and expansion. These doubts must have been even more confusing to a neutral observer, since cities like Charleston and New Orleans, for all their slavery, were less depressing and barbarous than such proud emporia as New York and such dingy manufacturing hives as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. There was so much right and wrong on both sides of Mason and Dixon’s line that the question could only be decided by furious men of action, who would decisively pound their fist into one side of the scale or the other in order to make weight and register a conclusion.

If slavery showed a dark countenance, beautifully kalsomined by the most solicitous Christian hypocrisy, industrialism showed a dingy one. The little water-driven mill-wheel, which greatly lightened the domestic labour of the early nineteenth-century farm, and which served equally to operate the small mill or factory, had only a brief day of social efficiency: by 1850, Melville could encounter a factory in the Berkshire Hills, turning rags into paper, and call it a Tartarus of Maids. Mechanical instruments, so far from diminishing the amount of servile labour in the world, threatened to turn all industrial operations into a form of servitude: in this middle period, craftsmanship of the hand decayed, and craftsmanship of the machine was subjugated by the demand for the cheap, the shoddy, the ephemeral. The mills at Lowell, which Dickens described with admiration in 1837, were already huge, and it was only by contrast with Bradford or Leeds that they could be called tolerable. In the forties, the concentration of coal and iron was slowly giving Pittsburgh a pre-eminence over the old iron mines and furnaces scattered about the countryside in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. Railroads, first laid where capital and immediate convenience dictated, were now joining along strategic lines of communication, following coast and inland water routes: as the stage-coach disappeared, and the inns ceased to get patronage, the inner parts of the country became inaccessible and they gradually ran down: only the railroad thread prospered.

Was this a triumph or a débâcle, this coming of industrialism, this volcanic intrusion of new methods of living, new means of communication, new habits of work? When one thinks of the countrysides that ran down, the forests that were wantonly destroyed, the soils that were depleted, the towns that were jerry-built and burned and jerry-built again, the public lands that were thrown into the laps of speculators, the industrial population that was starved and depressed in dingy cities, one sees that there is no easy answer to this question; and certainly none of the economists has ever been impartial enough as accountant to tell whether the final result for civilization was a gain or a loss, and if so, how much was gained and how much lost, and where these things happened. But when Melville came back to America, industrialism was a value in itself: people encouraged it as the patrons of the Renaissance encouraged art, not doubting that the activity was a great one, and made for a higher civilization.

It is perhaps a little absurd to speak of such disparate things as Attica and the North Atlantic states in the same breath: but these regions, between 1820 and 1860, which coincided with Melville’s birth and maturity, were in many respects in the same situation as Attica between the birth of Socrates and the death of Plato. An old provincial culture, closely bound to the land, was being overthrown by a new order based upon trade and imperialistic enterprise and military expeditions in support of the prestige of the state; and, at this moment of dissolution, the spirit fulfilled itself in a sudden outburst which expressed, in a new form, all that was valuable in the old culture, with an additional energy, derived partly from the seething activities of the new life that was inimical to it and already threatened it. The gap between Sophocles and Menander was no greater than the gap between Melville and Mark Twain: both these Americans roughed it and travelled much and gave accounts of their adventures; but their feeling and their vision belonged to different worlds.

In the America of the forties there was a sense of poignant expectation which was also a fulfilment. Emerson was giving his lectures on the Times, Thoreau was making his experiment at Walden Pond: warm spirits with thin and fantastic notions about the ideal life were discussing Fourier, welcoming the writings of Cabet, trying by a single gesture to regenerate the morals of society, to get an easier living, reform the diet, and alter the institution of matrimony—absurd, rickety people they were, no doubt, but Bronson Alcott’s preference for the sun-touched fruits and vegetables has turned out not to be so fantastic in fact as it sounds in theory; and if it is possible now to eat food which does not lead inevitably to gout and indigestion, to wear clothes that do not stifle and constrict the human body, and to think candidly about institutions which were once too sacred for rational thought, we owe these improvements not a little to the passionate women who dared to wear trousers and the comical men who listened patiently to Dr. Graham’s famous lecture on the benefits of bran bread and squashes.

In 1844 this mixture in society of new and old, provincial and metropolitan, free and servile, vital and mechanical, was still a turbid one: the elements had not settled; contrast and comparison were difficult; and people stood for one or the other, chiefly by intuition, while perhaps a good part of the population sought both: they wanted the old privileges of birth and the new ones of opportunity, the old stability and order, and all the new fields to conquer and the new positions to occupy. Melville belonged by temperament and shade of interest to the order that was passing, and not to the chaos and dissolution that was to come; still, in so far as he was aware of the change, he accepted it and even took a little pleasure in it, as when he anticipated from the progress of invention that fifty years hence it would be a commonplace for an American to spend the week-end in Honolulu.

2

Melville came back to this turbid spring freshet of a world, and he found that his family, too, was in the process of growth and change. Allan had become the business man of the family, a lawyer, with offices in Wall Street; young Tom already wanted to become a sailor, not just to see new places like Herman but to master the sea as a profession; Gansevoort, who had struggled hard and become a little wan and disappointed, had gone in for a political career, and, like Henry Adams a little later, he went to join the American Legation in London in 1845 as secretary. After a little visiting among his relatives and with Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts, an old friend of the family with a marriageable daughter, Melville settled down for a while in Lansingburgh: he had decided to write an account of his adventures. The lack of any other opening and the promise of some financial return were the external stimuli; but one cannot doubt that there was also an inner need. This loquacious, introspective sailor, who can so vividly hold an audience that, later, when he described for Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne an encounter in which he had used a club, they searched the house on his departure to find the imaginary club he had left behind—this young man had reached a stage where literary expression was inevitable, necessary—indeed, good for the health.

Up to the age of twenty-five Melville had knocked around the world solely for the purpose of making the best of a bad job. At twenty-five he discovered, in writing Typee, that he actually had made the best of it: his roaming, wasted life was all to the good: its idlest moments could be salvaged; for he had come into possession of something he had not deliberately set out to find, and twenty years of sedentary labour at home would not have given him equal experiences or equal leisure to reflect upon them. The wreckage of these Polynesian years was more precious than any cargo he might have punctually guarded in New York or Boston, at some purser’s job like school-teaching. The outcast came into his own; and the prodigal returned with his own fatted calf to give him welcome!

Herman Melville’s first book was a narrative of his Four Months in the Marquesas among the Typees: its American title was Typee. It was at the opposite pole, at the other end of the world, from another book that was being composed during this period, Thoreau’s Walden, but the similarities are no less important than the contrasts. Typee is Melville’s Walden, without the philosophic reflection and without the premeditated purpose to test the benefits of a more primitive life: Walden is Thoreau’s Typee without the physical derring-do and adventure.

Melville had found in the Marquesas the simplicity and directness of livelihood that Thoreau sought nearer at hand; and as for Thoreau, he treated the oak tree as if it were breadfruit, and was glad to find sweet acorns fit to eat, because they diminished the number of enemies in the universe. Both Melville and Thoreau had found out what it meant to throw off the impedimenta of civilization; and though both of them returned to the society of their own kind, they carried back to everyday American life a little contempt. Life at the core was a much simpler matter than the civilizee would admit: for civilization, which creates enjoyable forms for human activity, also creates grotesque ones, which grow up alongside the shapely forms and tend to supplant them: the accumulation of capital comes to mean more than the provision of food and shelter, and the regalia of the book of etiquette means more than friendly intercourse. The Philistines that surrounded Melville knew no more about the great forms of civilization, about the art of Shakespeare or Rembrandt or the philosophy of Spinoza and Goethe, than the naked savages: they were just as destitute in these higher essentials, and, on top of these disabilities, they lacked the savage’s animal health, charm, and good nature. Melville did not set out to test these things, as Thoreau did; but unconsciously, on the mere weight of evidence, he came to the same conclusion.

Writing is not merely a process of explicating what one already knows: it is also a matter of discovering what one is not aware of: it brings to light the hidden loot in that storehouse which psychologists call the Unconscious. In the very act of writing Typee, Melville must have become conscious of his specific equipment and his gifts as a writer; for, though he had been able to make no notes of his adventures while he was undergoing them, they had sorted themselves out and formed a pattern of their own. In his first book, Melville went about his work with a sure instinct. He read up every account of the South Seas he could lay hands on, Captain Cook’s voyages, missionary reports, travellers’ descriptions: he discovered, what some writers find out far too late, that if one trusts to one’s own experience alone, one gets something less than one’s own experience, while, if the background is filled out and enriched, one’s own contribution comes out more copiously. This habit of reference became characteristic of Melville in almost all his later works: Moby-Dick is full of citations, and even in a series of short sketches, like The Encantadas, he mentions as authorities Cowley, The Buccaneer, 1684; Colnet, The Whaling Ground Explorer, 1798, and Porter, The Post Captain, 1813.

It would have been hard to spoil such adventures as Melville’s: he could only have done it by a weak memory or a poor gift of visualization, or, more fatal perhaps than these, a tendency to touch every event with a sentimental gloss. Melville’s Typee was free from these sins. He trusted his eyes completely; he told what he saw. Did he understand everything? By no means; the taboo was a mystery, the religious observances obscure, the exact status of cannibalism hard to define: in his very failure to interpret these data, he gave an account which is still valuable to the anthropologist as a description of the South Sea Islanders in an entirely primitive and untainted state. If Melville had trusted his eyes less and his wits more he might perhaps have disclosed facts which were sealed to him: he might also have muddled and misinterpreted everything. The very limitations of Melville’s descriptions give one confidence in their authenticity: this is not unvarnished truth, perhaps, because unvarnished truth with no inaccuracies and distortions and running together of separate events is impossible without a written record, promptly made; but it is still truth.

Does one want a further guarantee of Melville’s accuracy in Typee? The answer is to be found in the rest of his work. While his powers of invention were not small, it was only with difficulty that he could escape the actual world and create a world sustained by his own fantasy. He tried to do this in Mardi, and he was forced back upon history and fact; by the time he reached the end of the book, he lost his grip entirely and converted his fabulous Mardians into out-and-out Europeans. He tried again in Pierre, and as we shall see, he fell back upon the stereotyped figures of conventional melodrama: he succeeded completely, in fact, only once, and he did this by an heroic effort, for which he had to pay a severe physical penalty. Like Defoe, Melville was closely chained to the document, the fact, the experience; he could endow these things with imaginative life, for all the other instruments of creative writing were at his command; but he was not given to inventive elaboration. Do we not perhaps exaggerate the possibilities of the pure imagination? The recent studies of Poe’s and Coleridge’s fantasies should warn us. Even in the dream, where the imagination works without any obligation to be understood or communicated, the most bizarre effects are a blowing up into a vast bubble, through the mechanism of dream-work, of some tiny drop of actual soapy water. Indeed, the highest imaginations, those of an Aeschylus or a Shakespeare or a Goethe, work upon themes already given in myth and history: they do not waste their energies upon the skeleton of fact, but take whatever lies at hand, cover it with flesh, breathe upon it, and give it life.

In Typee, then, Melville made no attempt to write a pure idyll, compounded of butterfly wings and spiderwebs and rainbows. Fayaway was interesting to him; but so, on reflection, were the misdemeanours of the missionaries in the Marquesas. The dangers of being eaten were horrid: so were the brutalities that whaling captains inflicted on the natives: so was the military overlordship of the French. Everything was told in its place, as far as everything could be told to an already Victorian public. The wonder is that Melville, in the first edition of Typee, was as frank as he was: when Dickens’ Oliver Twist was published in America it was attacked for its immoral picture of Bill Sykes and Nancy, by one of the shrinkingly pure American newspapers of the time, which no doubt carried in the neighbouring columns advertisements of quack doctors, books on “sexology,” and patent medicines to be used as abortifacients. Melville, who was fresh from four years of travel, wrote with easy freedom and candour, forgetting that his audience was Thackeray’s, not Smollett’s.

Typee belongs to the morning of the imagination—like Pickwick Papers. It is direct, fresh, free from self-consciousness, like the healthy youth who experienced these adventures and sat down to write about them. That quality is precious and irretrievable. Dickens lived a whole lifetime without again creating anything so sanative and comic as Pickwick Papers; and though Melville fared farther and pondered more deeply on life, this book and the one that followed, alone had the full bloom of youth upon them. Such books are written without a formula; their essential quality is almost beyond formulation. When one has said youth one has said almost everything. Typee is a book to make one go visiting tropical islands, a book to make one question the well-arranged career, the carefully ironed routine, the dull inevitability of the days one has chosen to lead. A scholarly boy reads Typee, and engages a berth for himself on a ship bound for Madagascar; a young architect reads the book and leaves his drawing-board for a trader’s post in the Marquesas, where he becomes a specialist in Polynesian dialects; another young man reads Typee and decides to bind his Fayaway to him by the tie of marriage. One reads Typee, and life suddenly shows a new vista. Adventure is possible: Eden is real: life need not include time-tables and bank accounts and exercises in physical culture. And unlike romantic fantasies Typee is not itself a narcotic, a form of escape: it suggests appropriate actions and deeds. If one person becomes a philologist through reading it, another takes to anthropology; another buys himself a sailboat; and another suddenly decides to carry out some difficult course he had resolved on and put aside again and again.

Like Pickwick Papers—but how differently!—Typee communicates its own simple health and manly confidence: its keenness, its straightforwardness, its hearty appetite for life. It is written with that skill which disarms skill, with the clarity beside which a more deliberate artifice would be clumsy. The colour of such romantic episodes may be artificially imitated: Kaloolah was such an imitation, and in a very bad light one may not at once detect the difference: but there is no imitating the down on the cheek and the clear eye—the stigmata of unspotted youth. I do not underestimate the charm of his subject; but Melville imparted to it his own candid and buoyant nature, watching this strange delicious world with intent, water-blue eyes. The subject was made for a young man to tell about—and happily the young man appeared. It was matched to this adventurous young American as the England of comfortable inns and Christmas jollity was matched to young Dickens. Melville varied the formula of wishy-washy romance by treating all romantic facts realistically, as he treated brutality and danger, and both the romance and the hard adventures profited by it.

What a contrast Typee is to Robinson Crusoe! Defoe’s prose was a far richer instrument than that Melville used in Typee; but after the first few chapters of Robinson Crusoe one’s mind refuses to follow that plaguy Philistine: nobody but a classical economist would pursue his tedious moralizings and his adept contrivances on his desert island. Defoe set out to teach a lesson, and before Crusoe has his last boatload of wares stowed away, long before he has re-established himself in that middle estate in life from which he originally fled, we are asleep. Melville sets out to teach us nothing: but at every step we follow eagerly and find ourselves making notes, instituting comparisons, seeing the world in fresh perspective. Typee is a magic mirror. In Typee we hold the secret of youth, and hold the world up to its clear surface: for the first time, perhaps, we note its unhealthy complexion, its fat paunch, its jaded smile, its fatuous anxieties, its lack of even animal repose.

3

Typee, which was published in London by John Murray, in his Colonial and Home Library, quickly won a name for itself as a piece of picaresque fiction. The London Times could not believe that a common American seaman could have the style of an educated literary man; and even a friend of the family, Mr. Evert Duyckinck, could hint politely that Melville had manufactured some of his adventures; Typee, literally, seemed too good to be true. The only people who took Typee for what it was were the missionary promoters: they damned the whole account heartily as unfair to the missionaries, and a perversion of Christian teaching, since this impudent and ribald young man pictured evangelical zeal as making no particular improvement in Polynesian morality, and since he even went out of his way to comment sarcastically upon the missionaries in Honolulu, who published a journal in which the doings of the “converted” king were recorded with the unction of an official English court gazette.

Against the charge of untruth and the imputation of fiction, Melville had two answers. One was happily furnished by Richard Tobias Greene, the Toby of Typee, a resident of Buffalo, who had in fact escaped from the Marquesas without being able to effect Melville’s rescue, and who wrote to the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, when Typee was published, verifying Melville’s story and asking Melville to get in touch with him. Melville got from Toby an account of his adventures, and embodied them in a sequel to Typee called The Story of Toby. As for the missionaries, Melville’s instinct in controversy served him well: in his next book, he returned to the misdemeanours of the pious and hit harder in the same place. He had observed that all the eulogistic reports of the missionaries were written by the missionaries themselves: their zeal to propagate Christianity was not unmixed with their concern to get money which would further that fine enterprise: against these glowing reports of conversion and grace and the introduction of shame and sin into the South Seas, Melville pitted his own acrid memories. No animus against Christianity led him to do this; for he had a strong initial bias in its favour: what spurred him was mere honesty of record, and the desire to see the Polynesians left alone in a happier state.

There is one further confirmation of Typee’s verity: one cannot neglect it, though it comes at third hand. M. Philarète Chasles, in his Anglo-American Literature and Mariners, translated and published in New York in 1852, quotes a “well-informed American who reported that a cousin of Melville had said: ‘My cousin writes very well, except when he reproduces exactly what he has felt.... He could not invent the scenes which he describes. Charmed by his improvised reputation, he would be vexed, I think, to lose his reputation as an inventor. The reappearance of his companion, Toby or Richard Greene, a real personage, annoyed him to some degree. It made him descend from the pedestal of romance to the level of mere narrator. For me, who know Melville, his wild disposition, and the history of his youth—who have actually read his rough notes, now in the hands of his father-in-law, and who have talked twenty times with Richard Greene, his fidus Achates, I laugh at the preoccupation of a public accustomed to see a lie where no lie is.’”

A strain of malice lies in this description of Melville’s own reception of praise as an inventor which does not altogether lessen one’s belief in its authenticity. In Redburn, Melville resented his cousins, and in Pierre he made one of his hero’s cousins play the part of a callous betrayer of trust and friendship; one has reason to suspect a little bitterness on Melville’s side, and a little condescension and concealed envy on the other. If the public’s mistake made Melville find more easily his path as an imaginative writer, let us thank the incredulous but forever gullible public: their mistake did him service.

4

The fuss that was raised over Typee was not merely on account of its supposed lack of fidelity. It was also because it had displayed loose and immoral scenes. If people could find looseness and immorality in Melville’s description of sexual customs in the South Seas, or in his anecdote of the proud South Sea queen examining with naïve pleasure the tattooing on a French sailor, and, in all innocence, raising her skirts so as to disclose her own to such a connoisseur of the art, or in the incident of the beautiful yellow-haired wife of a missionary, who was worshipped by the natives as a mysterious goddess until they stripped her of her clothes and discovered that she was even as they—if the public could feel a titillation of wickedness over these things, it must have been in a state of pathological sensitiveness; and no doubt it was, for the exposure of more than the lower part of the female ankle in society was then the mark of a wicked and abandoned woman.

This did not make it any easier for a candid fellow like Melville; and when a new edition was projected in America, the officious and correct Mr. Duyckinck must have suggested, as adviser to Wiley and Putnam, that a little judicious editing would reduce the offence and increase Melville’s audience. The young must be protected; the clergy must be conciliated; just a little pruning here and there would give the book a place on every library table. Melville should not have listened to this nonsense; sooner or later a man with anything worth saying must face the world of Pimminee and be prepared to stuff its prejudices and its gentlemanly objections down its throat: if a young author does not make this stand in his first book, he will increase his difficulties with his fourth or fifth. But in 1846 Melville was still uncertain of himself: a novice in his vocation, he was not aware of all the snares that beset a man of letters: the pressure toward amiable compliance with the all too amiable Mr. Duyckinck must have been pretty stiff; all the more, perhaps, because a Duyckinck might almost be a Gansevoort, and family pressure may have played a part, too. At all events, he consented to let Typee be bowdlerized.

“The Revised (Expurgated?—odious word!) Edition of ‘Typee’ ought to be duly announced—and as the matter (in one respect) is a little delicate, I am happy that the literary tact of Mr. Duyckinck will be exerted on this occasion.” So Melville wrote in the middle of 1846 to Mr. Evert Duyckinck. He grimaced a little at the dose; but unfortunately swallowed it. The anecdote about Queen Pomaree went: the anecdote about the missionary’s wife went; and various other passages were underscored by elimination. What Melville said about the missionaries of the Dollar and the Cross is worth remembering, before Mr. Duyckinck runs his blue pencil through it:

“Look at Honolulu, the metropolis of the Sandwich Islands!—a community of disinterested merchants, and devoted self-exiled heralds of the Cross, located on the very spot that twenty years ago was defiled by the presence of idolatry. What a subject for an eloquent Bible-meeting orator!... But when these philanthropists send us such glowing accounts of one-half of their labors, why does modesty restrain them from publishing the other half of the good they have wrought?—Not until I visited Honolulu was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives had been civilized into draught horses and evangelized into beasts of burden. But so it is. They have been literally broken into the traces and are harnessed to the vehicles of their spiritual instructors like so many dumb brutes.”

I would not say that this bowdlerization ruins the book, or that it materially takes away from its value: that is not the point. Small and “immaterial” suppressions may have no effect upon the literary value of a work: but they cannot help having a subtly corrosive effect upon the man who has created it. As A. E. once pointed out, in discussing the matter of censorship, the spirit of the artist is a sensitive one, and in many cases it works only with great difficulty. If its wings are clipped by so much as a feather-tip, its capacity for flight may be ruined. It is perhaps impossible to say how far Melville was harmed by Mr. Duyckinck’s tactful exertions, or by the hysterical denunciations that prompted them. For objective evidence, we have only the fact that sex, except in remote allusions to debauchery in Redburn or to sodomy in White-Jacket, did not enter into any of Melville’s stories, until it suddenly erupted in 1852 in Pierre with the violence of long repression. Mark Twain was burdened by a similar censorship; and he took refuge in the flat obscenity of “1601.” Melville’s own development as a man and a writer might have been a happier one, had not sex become in his day a sanctimonious ritual, with no middle term between the licence of the brothel and the waxen purity of the home. The censorship which operated on Melville’s books bore equally on his spirit: his libido turned back upon itself, and got lost for a time in the mazes of an infantile life. To take sex easily, naturally, rationally, is to subject it to the refining elements in life: to take it with a sense of unholy attraction and holy repulsion is to dissociate it completely from the normal influence of knowledge and convention and taste: in this dissociated, fragmental state, sex rages irresponsibly like a bolt of lightning in an open field: it may disappear into the ground, it may shatter a tree, it may kill a human being.

Melville had carried back from the South Seas the simplicity of an essentially chaste, but, we must suppose, not altogether inexperienced young man. This simplicity had something valuable in it for Melville’s contemporaries, just as his appreciation of savage society must have warned them about the absurd extravagance of acquiring dyspepsia and hard faces and an incapacity for the arts of living by their concentration upon money-making—and the censorship of Typee kept this part of Melville, I think, from maturing with reflection and experience. Sex was taboo. That element in his growth knew no middle state between greenness and blight. One part of life was locked for him in a dark chamber; one part will die by asphyxiation.

5

Typee was a success, and Melville soon had the consciousness of being an author. He could scarcely mention his book, in passing, without pausing to realize how strange it sounded. All his dispersed interests and his random purposes were suddenly concentrated: his life had the spiritual momentum that a genuine career gives it: he was no longer an outcast Olympian, but one of the great circle, now treated by his elders as an equal, respected, deferred to, genially slapped on the back, welcomed when a group of literary men met for conversation: if an English author came to America, as Thackeray did a little later, Melville was bound to be the most promising younger man in the circle that dined him and gave him welcome.

In Pierre, Melville gives his hero’s sensations at suddenly finding himself quoted in the public press, and urged by various grave societies to lecture before them—little gratuities of attention that afflicted him with a sense of his own insignificance, no matter how inflated he might seem to the world outside: and Pierre’s humility was doubtless Melville’s. He had grown a beard; but he did not need that symbol of years and experience to wear his new honours easily: with his reading and his miscellaneous adventure and the deep or brilliant conversation that might unexpectedly escape from him, he must have been a ready companion in any of the current literary circles: indeed, the difficulty was that, in the particular group where he moved, it was hard to single out any minds that came up to his level: the Manhattan literati of Melville’s heyday were a slick and shallow parcel of journalists, with a few scholars like the learned author of the Lives of the Presidents, as makeweight.

Melville’s quick entry into the literary world was partly furthered by two men who once wielded power in American letters, Messrs. George and Evert Duyckinck; George, a little thin and abstemious and given to pious reflections, Evert, more full-blooded, shrewd, worldly, an energetic hack who accumulated more than a modest competence as an editor and a compiler of ostentatious books of reference. They were busy little moles, these Duyckincks; one can scarcely utter their names or recount their ephemeral glories without smiling a little; but they gave Melville support and sympathy at a time early enough for him to profit by it; and if Melville found Evert Duyckinck worthy of his friendship there was something in the man’s geniality that merited it, and it is not for us to withhold what Melville himself freely gave. Evert Duyckinck had, according to Richard Lathers, one of the choicest libraries in the state: he was literary adviser to Messrs. Wiley and Putnam, and after Charles Fenno Hoffman’s brief editorship, he assumed charge of the Literary World. Until the publication of Pierre, Mr. Duyckinck was intimately associated with Melville’s literary ventures. Melville trusted him the way that a foreigner may trust a native as a guide to a strange country, realizing only after many days that the man he has thrown himself in with, whose company he has enjoyed, would be the most antipathetic of companions if one met him on one’s own ground. Duyckinck helped Melville to find his own depths; and when Melville had found them the two men were, by that simple fact, cut off.

It is not difficult to see how this friendship matured and withered: Duyckinck’s life was devoted to those superficies that Melville dedicated his whole energies to piercing and getting beyond. Lowell hit Evert off in one of his Fables for Critics; it was not the least happy of his arrows:

Walt Whitman met the Duyckinck brothers: he describes them both as “gentlemanly men” and he could say no worse of any one. “I do not know of any description that it would have pleased them better to hear,” added Whitman. “Both very clerical-looking—thin—wanting in body: men of truly proper style, God help ’em!” But the Duyckincks had a correct, bowing acquaintance with literature: they represented culture, tradition, a knowledge of English grammar; and for a good while they were not the least appreciative of Melville’s critics. If, when they published their Cyclopedia of American Literature, they gave fourteen pages to Longfellow and only three and a half to Melville, they were but reflecting the judgment of gentlemanly men for the next generation. More than thirty years later, Mr. Barrett Wendell and Mr. George Woodberry had advanced no further on the road to appreciation.

6

Melville’s brother, Gansevoort, had procured an advance from Murray on the English edition of Typee; and his new fame and financial success must have made Melville look forward to literature as the source of a permanent livelihood. In that “maturer and larger interior development” that was now taking place in Melville, pride of career supplanted pride of race: it was himself, his own nature, his experiences, his thoughts, that mattered, and not the size of his grandfather’s breeches or the length of that other lineage which perhaps joined him with bonnie Jeanie Melville in the Scots ballad. His racial inheritance had but added to his humiliation; by his own exertions and skill, he had achieved his first triumph. He is now a proper child of the Revolution; he knows, like Napoleon, that men make families quite as much as families make men—and there is no ancestor so powerful as one’s earlier selves.

Melville promptly followed Typee with a sequel of his adventures in the South Seas called Omoo, which signifies rover. In the meanwhile, Gansevoort, who had been the mainstay of the family while Melville was growing up in Albany, had found nothing in the bleak streets and grimy house-fronts of London to lessen his own depression; and he died. The early struggle, which had left such a bitter taste with Herman, had even more fatally taken the heart out of Gansevoort. From the last of his letters home one has the feeling that he resigned from life, rather than that he was suffering from any physical malady. “Selfishly speaking,” he declared, “I have never valued life very much.” The fibre loosened in Gansevoort; the grip relaxed; he passed out. There is no sign in Omoo that Gansevoort’s death was a very profound event for Melville; and yet one suspects that his sadness and hopelessness came in later years to mingle with Melville’s pain.

Omoo is a description of Melville’s life from the day he escaped the Typees to his signing up for another whaling voyage off the coast of Japan: its contents I have already used in telling about his life during that period. The narrative itself is done in the direct, vigorous, rapid style of Typee: if anything, there is more humour in it, and Melville gave himself greater liberties in using the material and embroidering it. Omoo is perhaps the most underrated of Melville’s books. While it solidified the reputation he had gained in Typee, the first book has held first place, because of the unique people and customs Melville dealt with there; whereas Omoo, which is a more raffish tale, and in some respects superior in literary quality, has been treated as if it were but the rinsings of the heady Typeean jug. This is far from being true. The relatively unromantic, if outlandish, quality of these later adventures, with the exception of the mutiny of the Julia’s crew, made him rely more heavily upon his own skill: and although the main incidents are probably accurate, all the characters are focussed with a slight distortion, through Melville’s sense of the comic: Dr. Long Ghost’s adventures and peccadillos are filled out a little, and the venial doctor of Papeetee was treated in such a fashion that the actual character uttered a cry of belligerent protest when the book came to his attention.

Melville’s skill at character-drawing, of which his description of Mehevi and Kory-Kory gave promise in Typee, became in Omoo more firm. Here is a scene in which two minor characters, a land-lubber, Rope Yarn, and an “affable-looking scamp”—Flash Jack—appear only for a minute.

“Flash Jack crosses the forecastle, tin can in hand, and seats himself beside the land-lubber.

“‘Hard fare this, Ropey,’ he begins; ‘hard enough, too, for them that’s knowed better and lived in Lun’nun. I say now, Ropey, s’posing you were back to Holborn this morning, what would you have for breakfast, eh?’

“‘Have for breakfast!’ cried Ropey, in a rapture. ‘Don’t speak of it!’

“‘What ails the fellow?’ here growled an old sea-bear, turning around savagely.

“‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ said Jack; and then, leaning over to Rope Yarn, he bade him go on, but speak lower.

“‘Well, then,’ said he, in a smugged tone, his eyes lighting up like two lanterns, ‘well, then, I’d go to Mother Mill’s that makes the great muffins: I’d go there, you know, and cock my foot on the ’ob and call for a noggin o’ somethink to begin with.’

“‘And what then, Ropey?’

“‘What then, Flashy,’ continued the poor victim, unconsciously warming up to his theme; ‘why then, I’d draw my chair up and call for Betty, the gal wot tends to the customers. Betty, my dear, says I, you looks charmin’ this mornin’; give me a nice rasher of bacon and h’eggs, Betty, my love; and I wants a pint of h’ale, and three nice hot muffins and butter—and a slice of Cheshire; and Betty, I wants—’

“‘A shark steak and be hanged to you!’ roared Black Dan with an oath.”

This quotation serves not merely to show how immediately and vividly Melville can put before us a forecastle ragging. The passage is interesting for another reason. Despite his admiration for Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson gave rise to one of the parrot judgments about Melville’s work when he said: “At his christening some influential fairy must have been neglected. ‘He shall be able to see, he shall be able to tell, he shall be able to charm,’ said the fairy godmothers; ‘but he shall not be able to hear,’ exclaimed the last.” In this passage Stevenson was reproaching Melville for his inadequate rendering of the Marquesan speech, a matter over which there is small cause for wonder, since Melville’s four months among the Typees were followed by four years before he committed the names and words to paper; but the actual fact is just the reverse of Stevenson’s dictum: Melville had a curiously accurate ear; and the little passage just quoted proves it. Here, from an American writer, is perhaps the first clue to the existence of modern cockney. One will not discover that speech in the pages of Thomas Hood’s Punch; one will not discover it in Pickwick Papers or Oliver Twist; what one finds there, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has pointed out, is an earlier urban dialect. In Omoo, on the contrary, Melville gives us the modern forms: the ink ending for ing and the dropped and added aitches. He was almost equally felicitous in rendering the difficult Belfast brogue: his transliteration of haul into harl is a test of it; and only an accurate ear will thus catch the living tongue. Unlike Ruskin, Melville was not a painter with words, but a musician; and in his maturity, his great passages have a musical structure of their own. In a phrase like “a soft seething foamy lull” he uses the sound of lull, rather than its sense, to convey his meaning; and among the modern poets it is natural to find him turning, later in life, to Shelley and to James Thomson.

Omoo was a rambling book: it had in a formal sense neither beginning nor end; but it had something of the bright immediacy of a sketchbook filled with graphic notes that might be worked into a finished picture. There were no clouds over Melville when he wrote Omoo; even its ugly parts were saturated with sunlight; beachcombing left Melville a little brighter for being scoured by the sand. Smollett had taught him all he needed to write this kind of work, Smollett and Defoe. Omoo had the sharpness, the force, the exaggeration of character which the eighteenth century had in its satiric artists; and every episode was carried off with a dry discretion. With the habit of long verbal practice, Melville watched his listeners: he never overloaded Omoo: he knew where to skip and where to elaborate: he is a writer who knows that one wants everything in a travel book except the tedium and fatigue of actuality. Throughout the narrative, one always feels that Melville has more up his sleeve: one is prepared to believe that he has a hundred Omoos in his bosom: perhaps he had, and at all events it required talent to make us believe so. More and more, his speech cleansed itself of affectations: the direct, vigorous lingo of the sea, with all its Elizabethan locutions, was doubtless a sound influence in this part of his development: of the young man who wrote the sublime gibberish in the Lansingburgh newspaper, there is scarcely a trace left. One measures such growth in feet, not in inches: in seven years Melville had not merely renewed his physical body completely: he had acquired an equally complete literary shape.

In every sense of the word, Omoo is a companion volume to Typee. It is not merely that the milieu is still these wild, wooded, mountainous, sun-drenched islands, with their attractive brown inhabitants: it is not simply that as soon as Melville steps aboard a boat, the deck begins to climb and fall under one’s feet and the smell of pitch and hemp rises to one’s nostrils: it is not merely that this South Sea Prospero, as Robert Buchanan called him, is a weaver of spells, as full of happy mischief as a Polynesian maid and as seductive as a tropical night. In Typee and Omoo, Melville had that superb aplomb—formed by an athleticism, an inner poise, a dexterity of hand, a sharpness of eye—which we call Greek because for a little while the Attic peoples experienced it as a community; the attitude which Whitman valued as the sign and seal of the new American. Melville is appreciative; he is humorous; but he is neither a professional funny man nor a syrupy preserver of glamour. His aplomb never deserts him. He is always in command. That trait is the key to his early literary success; it explains the effortless accuracy of his descriptions. Such poise, such aplomb, such confidence, rest on the nicest sort of spiritual and physiological interplay: blood and muscle form a part of it as well as mental serenity. We have seen this balance in our own day, embodied in a young man who flew to Europe alone. The gesture surrounding this act was the same precious essence that Typee and Omoo give us in the form of art. I have called this quality youth; but it is what the Athenians called virtue; and as soon as we depart from it we are hoary with sin, and there is no health in us.

CHAPTER FOUR: AZZAGEDDI

In 1847 Herman Melville was twenty-eight years old. Omoo had been finished at the end of the previous year; and, in the excitement of finding himself established as an author and recognized as a man of promise, he was casting about for a theme that would more fully evoke his own proper powers. So far he had been living on his material: it was time for his material to get a living from him. He found the theme in Mardi, the vast allegorical romance of Mardi; but before he settled down to it, the friendship or the affection between him and Judge Shaw’s daughter, Elizabeth, deepened, and in August, 1847, they were married.

One can only dimly speculate upon what manner of girl Elizabeth Shaw was. There is no reason to think that Melville drew her portrait in Pierre, and the “wife” of the stories he wrote in the fifties is always a conventional feminine foil. The letter she wrote to her mother during the first week of her marriage was dutiful, girlish, commonplace; and ten years later her letters were equally inexpressive and jejune. Her freshness or her amiable temper or her capacity for devotion may have attracted Herman; but more likely, he loved her because he loved her; and there is no need or possibility of explaining that. Certainly, there was no intellectual parity between them, as there was between Hawthorne and his linguistic blue-stocking, Sophia—and Elizabeth had none of his ranting high spirits.

Melville probably worshipped Elizabeth at first, and idolized her beyond all reason; for he loved romantically, and romantic courtship is a heightened and extravagant season even for men of less imagination and hot impulse than Melville. He who wishes to keep that original and etherealized image of his lady should run away from her: when he breaks it, he will feel, Melville later declared, like Pluto snatching his Proserpine, and once the image is broken every fragment will be a reproach. It is the romanticized Circe, and not her victim, who under the spell of marriage turns into an animal, not a swine, of course, but a pea-fowl, grey-feathered and not gorgeous, or a hen, clucking over her chicks and moving only within the limits of the farmyard, or a dove, cooing a little plaintively, unable to awaken the proud strut of the eager, following male, who has wooed once too often.

After an arduous honeymoon, by stage-coach and rail through the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, on up through Montreal, and back by Lake Champlain and the Champlain Canal, a rough, jouncing, crowded, distracted sort of journey, and a brief sojourn with Herman’s mother at Lansingburgh, they settled down at 103 Fourth Avenue, New York, in company with Melville’s brother Allan and a swarm of sisters. Elizabeth Melville has left us a picture of that household and her husband’s daily routine; one cannot do better than put it in her own words:

“We breakfast at 8 o’clock, then Herman goes to walk and I fly up to put his room to rights, so that he can sit down to his desk immediately on his return. Then I bid him good-bye, with many charges to be an industrious boy and not upset the inkstand and then flourish the duster, make the bed, etc., in my own room. Then I go downstairs and read the papers a little while, and after that I am ready to sit down to my work—whatever it may be—darning stockings—making or mending for myself or Herman—at all events, I haven’t seen a day yet, without some sewing or other to do. If I have letters to write, as is the case today, I usually do that first—but whatever I am about I do not much more than get thoroughly engaged in it, than ding-dong goes the bell for luncheon. This is half-past 12 o’clock—by this time we must expect callers, and so must be dressed immediately after lunch. Then Herman insists upon taking a walk of an hour’s length at least. So unless I can have rain or snow for an excuse, I usually sally out and make a pedestrian tour a mile or two down Broadway. By the time I come home it is two o’clock and after, and then I must make myself look as bewitchingly as possible to meet Herman at dinner.... At four we dine, and after dinner is over, Herman and I come up to our room and enjoy a cosy chat for an hour or so—or he reads me some of the chapters he has been writing in the day. Then he goes down town for a walk, looks at the papers in the reading room, etc., and returns about half past seven or eight. Then my work or book is laid aside, and as he does not use his eyes but very little by candlelight, I either read to him, or take a hand at whist for his amusement, or he listens to our reading or conversation as best pleases him. For we all collect in the parlour in the evening, and one of us reads aloud for the benefit of the whole. Then we retire very early—at 10 o’clock we all disperse.”

Admirable Elizabeth! In your direct, simple way you have told us everything we need to know. You are busy and happy: you have adapted yourself, with the aid of such extra space as was once enjoyed by all families of moderate means, to the clan of sisters and brothers and cousins and aunts that make up the provincial family of the old kind: you make it possible for Herman to economize all his energies, and go ahead, with gentle resolution, at his work. What a beautifully divided day it is: Herman working behind closed doors, and you yourself, very cheerful and attentive and industrious, cocking your ear occasionally for sounds of restlessness. Then the little breaks: the sociability and—do you not perhaps overestimate a lover’s capacity for conversation?—the hour or two of cosy chat. Already Herman’s eyes must be saved, and you are there to save them. True: he has devoted sisters, too; and they are very nice in their way, all such a jolly, helpful, numerous family. People are a little more punctilious here than they are in New England; that is part of the European air which New York somehow preserves; the men bow lower, make prettier compliments, and get drunk more often. When you go to a dance without Herman, you are treated as one of the sisters, and by virtue of your supposed maidenhood, you are quite a belle again. Herman doesn’t like dances and parties overmuch: the late hours and the late suppers take the edge off his writing next morning: he finds it hard to begin and is a little cross and irritable: but what difference does that make? You would give up all these frivolities for such a shapely, manly, courteous, thoughtful man: if he will stay by, the world may gaily pass.

You are not alone, Elizabeth Melville: Mrs. Darwin feels the same way, too; so, with less satisfaction and complaisance, does Jane Carlyle; so, presently, does Sophia Tolstoy. But such helpfulness and affectionate sacrifice cannot last forever. Children will come; you and your fine, high-spirited boy will see less and less of each other: you will interrupt his deepest intimacy with concern for the baby’s bottle. You will wonder, when you are alone, whether you have any right to thrust these burdens on his shoulders: you will feel that the world is a little cruel, and your being joined to this lover who is so strange and remote, this affectionate man who is also so exacting, is uneasy bewilderment.... I do not understand you, Elizabeth Melville? Reflect again carefully: do not be afraid of your feelings: some of them are still visible in the fading ink of old letters; and some of them are in your heart, because you are a human being. If you do not resent sharing Herman so much with his family, you are a greater angel than you should be.

“How much,” wrote Melville in Pierre, “that goes to make up the deliciousness of a wife already lies in the sister.” Do you sometimes feel, Elizabeth, that Herman has only added another sister to the family; that Lizzie is now but a step away from Kate and Helen and Augusta? It is not that he loves them too tenderly, but that he worships you too much, or, in alternate fits, is far too indifferent and puts you at a sisterly distance from him. Do you feel that he will never get near enough to you, will never appreciate the you that is, although he may be disappointed because of the you that is not? He accepts you, of course, accepts you tenderly: you darn his stockings and sew new tapes in his drawers when he breaks them: you put up patiently with the languors and irritabilities that follow an intense morning at the desk, and at times, you have the power to erase them and make his eyes shine with triumph instead.

But this Herman is not the jovial boy who once played with Fayaway: he has his turns of high spirits, but his humours are a little obscure and beyond you, and his face shades a little with disappointment when he notes that your plain, literal mind does not follow his sallies. He is growing beyond you: in the very act of writing Mardi, Elizabeth ceases to exist: the book is haunted by a phantom called Yillah: a Yillah who will never mend socks or replace broken tapes. Some day he will learn, perhaps, that women, like whales, are objects of natural history; and when he is weary with his wandering and his quests, he will not despise your tired arms: one of the best and tenderest of his poems, The Return of the Sire de Nesle, will be addressed to you. But before that happens, you have both a long hard journey before you. Courage! The burden of writing these books will not fall upon his shoulders alone.

2

The spring of 1848 was full of turbulence all over the world. In Paris the red flag was raised, and in a froth of oratory men dreamed and fought at the barricades and died. Germany seemed on the verge of a republic, and the fragments of Italy made convulsive movements; with these and many other events fomenting, chaos and disorder and perhaps some glorious new society, based on universal suffrage and national workshops and the commune, seemed about to be instituted. One looks back with a tolerant smile to those days, days when a formula seemed as powerful as a siege gun, when the ballot seemed by itself a guarantee of order and justice in human affairs. The effect of the French uprising was the pastry cook’s Empire of Napoleon III; the final result of the German revolution was the brutal, semi-feudal industrialism of Germany after 1870. “I should not be surprised,” said Melville’s Redburn, “if there were more words than things in the world”; and in 1848 there was surely far more Peace, Progress, Political Perfection, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, in the mouths and minds of men, than there was in political society.

The contrasts and absurdities in all our institutions made 1848 a great year for satirical observation, so long as the observer could remain far enough away from humanity to laugh at its errors rather than weep, as Alexander Herzen did, over its sins, and over the dark collapse of hope and ambition that followed. Melville, fortunately, lived in America: its own 1848, namely, the Civil War, was just thirteen years away; and the book which began in 1847 as an adventurous idyll of the South Seas, poetically conceived with a remote allegorical quest running through it, came to an end as a savage parody of the whole economy of Western Civilization, and its lofty Christian professions.

Just as Melville was finishing Mardi, this eventful spring, Elizabeth Melville conceived: and the summer months that followed were devoted to final preparations for the book and the baby. Augusta worked hard to copy Melville’s manuscript for the press; and with even greater zeal she conned the genealogical tables for a name for the infant—having settled in her mind that it would be a boy. Her zeal was justified. When in February, 1849, Herman Melville became a father, Augusta’s name for the child prevailed: it was Malcolm.

If Mardi throws any light upon Melville’s personal relations at all, I think one must acknowledge that the light is a happy one. The true test of a writer’s feelings is not what he says: it is the way in which he says it. Mr. Chesterton once happily pointed out that in Byron’s most melancholy lines the spontaneous gallop and thud of Byron’s metre betrays his sanguine feelings; and I think one can say much the same thing of Mardi. There are large sections of Mardi that are written with a sort of sleepy ease; the words flow so languorously from Melville’s pen that he floats along with them and lets them carry him where they will; the rhythm is not always subtle; the voice lacks modulation and change of tempo: it lulls one like the even murmur of the ocean at low tide on a beach. When lovers are conversing on a summer’s afternoon, it does not occur to them that any one could call such heavenly intimacy tedious: what they would like to prolong for eternity one who did not share their mood would not tolerate for five minutes. And it is so in Mardi. Melville is so happy that he does not notice one cannot always share the emotion with him.

Whether the beginning of Mardi was set up in type before the end was reached one cannot surely tell: Melville made this happen to Pierre, and explained what a handicap this method of production was to the writer, since it did not allow him to work over the earlier parts and create a unity. If the slowness of hand-setting and the customs of the market made Melville actually do this, it would explain a certain inconsequentialness in Mardi as due to external circumstances, and not to Melville’s inability to master his material and criticize his workmanship. But certainly pressure and speed seem absent from Mardi: a soft tropical breeze is all that carries the story on, and more than once this drops to a dead calm. Financial difficulties were not yet pressing in Melville’s domicile when he began Mardi: no baby demanded care: no breach had opened between the writer and his audience: Elizabeth’s approaching confinement doubtless renewed some of the tender, pre-nuptial feeling: these are all fairly objective facts; and if one doubt them, the repeated, even cadences of Mardi, as of a sleeping bosom, slowly heaving and falling, have the value of corroborative testimony.

3

Mardi has been forgotten while lesser books have flourished. Let us see how much we have missed. It is not a perfect book; but it has something in it that defies death; and that something is the presence of Melville himself, now arriving at maturity, a traveller who has gone to the ends of the earth, and has not left his head smugly at home—a vehement, clear-witted, copious, steady-eyed, jocose, untamable man. The poise and completeness of Typee is gone: much as we prize youth, the cost of continuing that balance, without a fresh integration, is arrested development; and Melville went on. Mardi has all the promise of imperfection.

The story begins on the plane of fact. We are off! The courses and topsails are set, and the Arcturion is sailing dead before an equatorial breeze in search of the whale. Overwhelmed by the monotony, the teller of the story escapes at night in a whaleboat, in the company of a faithful, taciturn sailor of the old Norse breed, Jarl. The sun shines; the bonetas and sharks swim around the boat; the devil-fish undulate repulsively in the deeper waters below; or at night the phosphorescence spreads across the surface, and the hand dropped over the side ripples through fluent silver; they sail on and on, making for distant islands, tormented by the lack of water and the unyielding sun, and worse still, by a dead calm, when the grey firmament of sky collapses into the grey firmament of water. When at long last they encounter a sail, it turns out to be an apparently deserted brigantine: they board it and find themselves, after creepy suspicions, in the company of a South Sea Islander and his wife, the sole survivors of a Christian crew.

We are still on the plane of physical adventure: Annatoo is an amusing termagant, and when Samoa, her husband, amputates his own arm by the most primitive surgery and cautery, Melville might still be merely describing curious South Sea customs, as in Omoo. In a little space all this changes. The brigantine is lost, and the shipwrecked sailors, again in a whaleboat, come upon a South Sea priest, with Seven Sons, who is carrying a white maiden with golden hair and blue eyes, Yillah, to another island. The hero rescues Yillah from the priest, and kills him to make good his escape. With Yillah’s advent, the atmosphere changes: a perfumed mist of unreality creeps over the sea from Mardi itself.

Yillah’s mind is a spider-web of myth, in which the butterfly of her spirit has been caught: she has dim recollections of being born in Amma and spirited away, as a child, to Oroolia, the Island of Delights, somewhere in the paradisial archipelago of the Polynesians. The waters of Oroolia turned her olive skin to white and tinged her hair with gold: she was transformed into the blossom of a vine, and hung there in a trance, until the blossom was snapped from its stem and borne away on the ocean, drifting to the island of Amma, where it was taken over by the priest. The whaleboat floats on; the sea-fowls fly above it; the fish dart and ripple and flash in the water: Yillah’s own dreams of her past fade into the sweet vision that had haunted the hero’s earliest thoughts. As love draws near, her divinity languishes: “Love sometimes induced me to prop my failing divinity, though it was I myself who had undermined it.” The Yillah of dream dwarfs into the Yillah of reality.

At last the voyagers reach the coast of Mardi, and, in the guise of the Sun-God, Taji, the hero announces himself to an assemblage of Mardian chiefs. His ruse is accepted; and for a brief while Taji finds himself in Eden. The wide blue lagoon, the froth of breakers at the reef, the milk-white smoke curling up from the volcanoes of Mardi: the nights of starry entrancement, day dawning with Yillah, breaking along the waking face, peeping out from her languid lids, then shining in longer glances, till, like the sun, up comes the soul. All beauty and beatitude Taji finds in Mardi. With Yillah for company, he retires to a wooded islet, fringed with palm trees, watered by brooks. Near by, in Odo, the kingdom of Media, is a harder world, where helots toil at brutal tasks; but for a time Taji is happy with his Yillah. It all ends. One day Taji finds her arbour vacant; she does not return; the world becomes sour and empty; and Taji resolves to rove through Mardi in search of Yillah.

With the disappearance of Yillah, the break from the actual becomes complete: Yillah is a phantom, and Taji follows Yillah, in the company of Media, the king, Mohi or Braidbeard, the historian, Babbalanja, the philosopher, and Yoomy, the poet, through all the kingdoms and principalities of Mardi. Where has Yillah flown, and where is the peace that she gave?

4

Had Melville closed Mardi at this point the book would, I think, have been hailed with delight as another, a purer, Typee: he need only have searched a little farther and finally recaptured Yillah, wiping out the last trace of ethereality and converting her into a less primitive Fayaway—the stolen daughter of a highly respectable missionary, perhaps—to have delighted his contemporaries with the sweet concoction. This was the Melville they knew and could understand. The language of Typee had become freer and in a limited sense more poetical: but that only accentuated the banquet of sunrises and sunsets and starry nights and palm groves and maidens more luscious than Ingres’ odalisques, mixed with an occasional bite of tart adventure or terror—almonds or olives—a banquet of unalloyed deliciousness after the tame domestic lamplight and the corseted and petticoated heroines of Victorian fiction, the Janes, the Doras, and even for that matter the Beckys who were coming into fashion. The exotic has its glamour, and somehow, those distant Polynesian maidens of Melville were a little nearer, a little more thinkable in the flesh, than the Annabel Lees of Poe, however near Adair and Oroolia might be to Aiden.

But Melville had grown. He started from the South Seas in order to have familiar ground to spring from; he had no intention of merely amusing his public with a less literal Omoo. Mardi is the world, and Yillah is not a maiden but the spiritual life, who was brought to Mardi and given a home there, but treacherously treated by the fates: the priests took charge of her and sought to sacrifice her for their own purposes. Taji slew the priest, and though the quest of Yillah is as tormenting as the possession of her is peaceful and replete with happiness, still, he would slay the priest again, if necessary, to bring her back. Once Melville sets out on this quest, the South Seas of the Acushnet and the Julia and Kory-Kory and Dr. Long Ghost vanish: these tropical isles are a counterpart of the Western world, and in a thousand wild metaphors and noble tropes, all the triumphs and follies of our civilization parade again before the mind, clearer because of the disguise, more immediate because they are so distant. Evil has entered Melville’s paradise; evil, that “chronic malady of the universe” which, “checked in one place, breaks forth in another,” and the knowledge of good and evil is the beginning of his own sad wisdom.

Now witness Melville as he becomes conscious of life and history and the recesses of his own spirit. Not for nothing were those brooding hours on the maintop; not for nothing those lonely walks through the crowds of Broadway, smiles, sunshades, shop-fronts, dashing rigs, or, returning in the evening from the reading-room, with the stale smell of wine coming up from the wine-cellars, the prostitutes already ogling in front of the blue and red witches’ bowls in the apothecaries’ shops; not for nothing was it that he had exchanged calls with urbane acquaintances of the family and succumbed to the customs of Pimminee, where the Tapparians, in lieu of brains, carry a drop or two of attar of roses in the corner of their craniums, and are the victims of two incurable maladies, stone in the heart and ossification of the head—with all their fripperies, fopperies, finesses. But I am beginning to anticipate Taji’s Mardian discoveries. Let us retrace our steps and survey this Mardi with Melville.

The isles of Mardi are easily recognized: Dominora, where King Bello lives, is Great Britain: Vivenza is the United States: all the historic states and empires are reduced, by translation into Mardian terms, to something like their proper human proportions. Swift had used this method once; and Melville employed it with little less effect, particularly when he worked out the parallels carefully and retained the South Sea atmosphere. In the guise of king, poet, philosopher, Melville became a philosophic commentator, retelling the story of Europe and Christianity and faith and doubt and religion and science, exploring time, delivering himself through his dreams, disclosing, in Babbalanja’s demonic inner man, Azzageddi, his own ultimate perceptions. It is almost impossible to convey the vastness, the variety, the genuine wealth of these pictures. I will only bring a sample or two of his ore to the surface; the whole book is veined with it.

Time and Eternity come before Melville. “And that which long endures must long have remained in the germ. And duration is not of the future but of the past; and eternity is eternal; because it has been; and though a strong new monument be builded today, it only is lasting because its blocks are as old as the sun. It is not the Pyramids that are ancient, but the eternal granite of which they are made; which had been equally ancient though yet in the quarry. For to make an eternity, we must build with eternities; whence the vanity of the cry for anything alike durable and new, and the folly of the reproach—your granite hath come from the old-fashioned hills.” His copious mind swarms to the idea; he throws fuel on it from a hundred sources. “No fine firm fabric ever yet grew like a gourd. Nero’s House of Gold was not raised in a day; nor the Mexican House of the Sun; nor the Alhambra, nor the Escurial; nor Titus’ Amphitheatre; nor the Illinois Mounds; nor Diana’s great columns at Ephesus; nor Pompey’s proud Pillar; nor the Parthenon; nor the Altar of Belus; nor Stonehenge; nor Solomon’s Temple; nor Tadmore’s Towers; nor Susa’s bastions, nor Persepolis and its pediments.”

So he goes, sentence by sentence, till he has heaped into this fiery furnace of death-defying things the grottos of Elephanta and the Giants’ Causeway and the Grampian Hills and a score of other examples. And at last: “If time was when this great quarry of Assyrias and Rome was not extent; then, time must have been when the whole material universe lived in its Dark Ages; yea, when the ineffable Silence, proceeding from its unimaginable remoteness, espied it as an isle of the sea. And herein is no derogation. For the immeasurable altitude is not heightened by the arches of Mahomet’s heavens; and were all space a vacuum, yet it would be a fulness, for to Himself his own Universe is He. Thus deeper and deeper into Time’s endless tunnel does the winged soul, like a night-hawk, wend her wild way, and finds eternities before and behind; and her last limit is her everlasting beginning.”

When Melville’s French critics called Mardi Rabelaisian, and when the English critics mentioned Sir Thomas Browne, one group was thinking of these solemn, cadenced sentences, piling up phrases swollen with sound like the great stops of an organ; while the other referred to these prodigious catalogues and collocations. In Mardi Melville keeps ideas in the air like a juggler’s balls; the images pass and repass, making in those agile hands a single pattern. Satire is only one of the moods of Mardi: poetic reverie, as in the chapter on Dreams, and philosophic reflection, thread their ways in and out these scattered islands of sense. Far more deeply and authentically than the author of Eureka, Melville had anticipations of the drift of modern science and philosophy. He accepts the notion of evolution, which Chambers had popularized, saying, “Let us be content with the theology in the grass and the flower, in seed-time and harvest.” And Babbalanja says: “I live while consciousness is not mine, while to all appearances I am a clod. And may not this same state of being, though but alternate with me, be continually that of many dumb, passive objects we so carelessly regard. Trust me, there are more things alive than those that crawl, or fly, or swim. Think you, my lord, there is no sensation in being a tree? feeling the sap in one’s boughs, the breeze in one’s foliage? Think you it is nothing to be a world? one of a herd, bison-like, wending its way across boundless meadows of ether? In the sight of a fowl, that sees not our souls, what are our own tokens of animation? That we move, make a noise, have organs, pulses, and are compounded of fluids and solids. And all these are in this Mardi as a unit.”

After much exploration and much disappointment and much wine and witty conversation to pass the time between, the travellers come finally to Serenia, where the dictates of Alma—Christ—are embodied in the polity. Here they find their quest come to an end, or rather, it has lost all reason, “not because what we sought is found; but that I now possess all which may be had of what I sought in Mardi.” Babbalanja tarries there, to grow wiser; he counsels Media to return to Odo and transplant to it the amaranths and myrtles of Serenia, letting no man weep that he may laugh, and no man toil too hard that the king may be idle: “Abdicate thy throne but still retain thy sceptre. None need a king, but many need a ruler.” As for Taji, he will never find Yillah: he may search further on the still unexplored islands; but when all is seen he must “return, and find thy Yillah here.”

On the travellers sail. Their canoe is followed by the three avenging brothers who have lurked in their wake all through the adventure, bent upon taking Taji’s life; whilst the three messengers of Hautia, the enchantress queen, with the iris, the venus-car, and a flower white as alabaster, with forked and crimson stamens, trembling like flame, bade the voyagers follow them to Hautia’s bower. They follow, three pilot-fish in advance, three ravenous sharks astern. In some wild way, Hautia, queen of the senses, has made a captive of Yillah, and into some one of her black-eyed maids the blue-eyed one has been transformed. But Taji could not find Yillah: Hautia claims him, with wine and flowers and love: she offers him all the treasures of the world, Health, Wealth, Long Life, and the Last Hope of Man, if he will take her hands and dive with her into the crystal grotto: she will make it easy to forget Yillah: he will lose his past, and learn to love the living, not the dead. In vain she pleads. “Better to me, oh Hautia, all the bitterness of my buried dead, than all the sweets of life thou canst bestow; even were it eternal.”

All is over: the adventurers must go back to Serenia; they must deliver Taji from Hautia, and save him from the avenging sons of the priest, sin, conscience, remorse. Taji will not go. “‘And why put back? Is a life of dying worth living o’er again? Let me, then, be the unreturning wanderer. The helm! By Oro, I will steel my fate. Mardi, farewell!’

“‘Nay, Taji, commit not the last, last crime!’ cried Yoomy.

“‘He’s seized the helm! Eternity is in his eye! Yoomy, for our lives we must now swim.’...

“Now I am my own soul’s emperor; and my first act is abdication. Hail, realm of shades! and turning my prow into the racing tide, which seized me like a hand omnipotent, I darted through.

“Churned in foam, that outer ocean lashed the clouds; and straight in my wake, headlong dashed a shallop, three fixed spectres leaning o’er its prow; three arrows poising.

“And thus, pursuers and pursued flew on, over an endless sea.”

5

Mardi is strong enough as a satire and a criticism of life to stand a frank admission of its weaknesses; and I shall not try to conceal them. The book starts about to be one thing; it presently becomes another; and before Mardi is entirely explored it becomes a third: the adventure, the strange scenes and personages, the philosophic reflection, the satire, all accrete together rather than form a single intermingled whole. Taji, who begins as the hero and narrator, takes a smaller and smaller part in the actual dialogue; presently the first person becomes the third, and Taji emerges at the end out of the shadow of silence. The reader who expected another Omoo was disappointed once the first quarter of the story was over; the reader who might have welcomed the dialogues, the political moralizings, the epigrams, was put off a little by the original sea-yarn.

This is not all. The satire at its best achieves its end by a delicate parody of actuality, as in the scene where Melville takes off a session of the United States Congress; but sometimes Melville’s invention flags, and he repeats actual history, with altered names, instead of distorting, magnifying, transposing. Verbally, his touch is almost as uncertain: at times he drops into obvious metres, only to rise into passages of prose that have far greater claim to be set off as verse than any of Yoomy’s stanzas. The verses interspersed in these pages are worthy of the poet laureate that Yoomy is supposed to be; and that is the best one can say about them. When Taji sits down with the five-and-twenty kings, the invocation to wine is about at the level of Peacock’s drinking songs: and the poorest of Yoomy’s songs are poetry only by typographic courtesy. These are all faults; and not little ones; but what means infinitely more is the fact that a brave, vigorous spirit presides over Mardi, appraising all the evil and injustice and superstition and ugliness in the world—as they masquerade under the guise of religion and patriotism and economic prudence and political necessity. In Mardi, one begins to feel Melville’s range, and his depth.

In this satiric fantasy, Melville had not the sure touch he later achieved in Moby-Dick: but for all that, his thoughts exploded in a succession of great rockets and Roman candles and flag-bombs; and the spectacle was a dazzling and beautiful one. Such wit, such humour, such starry intelligence, such wide knowledge, such resolute diving, were not known in American literature before; and they are rare enough in any literature. Much though we value Melville’s great American contemporaries, he had something to give in Mardi that is beyond their reach: we will search Emerson in vain for anything like the Antiquarian’s catalogue; we will run through Hawthorne’s notebooks without finding anything like the description of authorship in the chapter on Lombardo. The Literary World said that the public would discover in the author of Mardi a capital essayist, at least, in addition to the fascinating novelist and painter of sea-life, and find that the author had “original powers of high order”—and the praise was accurate and just.

Mardi performed a more important work for its author than it did for its immediate readers: it disclosed to him the nature of his own demon—that deeper other half whom Babbalanja called Azzageddi. Melville’s thoughts at this period paralleled each other in somewhat unrelated layers. There was a Babbalanja who reflected the ideas of his own time and country, who was a thoughtful Christian, a loyal republican, a solid provincial, who met adversity with a jest or a wry smile, who drank brandy with Mr. Duyckinck, and paid his respects with genteel punctuality to all the Gansevoorts and Melvilles and Shaws. This Melville never entirely disappeared. The pious man who wanted to return to Serenia made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land: and when the Civil War came, Melville accepted without question the doctrine of a single, indivisible nation, as an unshakable postulate. In this aspect of Melville there was something correct and limited, characteristics whose chief advantage was that they kept him within speaking distance of his contemporaries. In Mardi, however, Melville discovered a deeper self: the unconscious Melville was not a man of his time, and he often had intuitions which undermined or destroyed his more commonplace convictions. This deeper Melville did not altogether supplant the man of convention: they do not represent several and successive phases of growth: but, as Melville suggested in Moby-Dick, they represented aspects of a cycle which one goes through again and again, never reaching a terminus, because there is in a proper sense no terminus, no ultimate point of rest, or resolution.

Now it is Melville as Azzageddi, the demon who captures and speaks from within the man, who interests us. The pious Christian is troubled by the problems of physical immortality; but Azzageddi says, thinking how even the sublimest thoughts fade and are lost, “If the fogs of some few years can make soul linked to matter naught, how can the unhoused spirit hope to live when mildewed in the damps of death.” The sociable townsman continues to correspond with Mr. Duyckinck and respect his judgment; but Azzageddi says: “All round me, my fellow-men are new grafting their vines and dwelling in flourishing arbors; while I am forever pruning mine, till it becomes but a stump. Yet in this pruning I will persist; I will not add, I will diminish; I will trim myself down to the standard of what is unchangeably true. Day by day I drop off my redundancies; ere long I shall have stripped my ribs; when I die, they will but bury my spine. I may have come to the Penultimate ... but where is the Ultimate?”