PILGRIM (continued 2)

From this time on a sweetness and serenity began to spread over the man. The dark torture of Pierre and The Confidence Man might return in weak moments; there might be hours of stormy egoism or inner defiance; but in the main there was peace. This, too, he had anticipated for himself in Isabel’s words, almost half a generation before: “My spirit seeks different food from happiness; for I think I have a suspicion of what it is. I have suffered wretchedness, but not because of the absence of happiness, and without praying for happiness, I pray for peace—for motionlessness—for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual sensation.” A Hindu sage might have sought this peace in the forest: Melville, with quiet irony, sought it in the Custom House.

4

The decision was made; the door was closed: Melville’s troubles and humiliations could carry him no lower. For the first time in ten years Melville had the means, the energy, the relief from anxiety necessary for the prosecution of a long work, and with indomitable spirit he set to work again. Melville’s retreat was not a withdrawal from his proper self, but a withdrawal from the conditions that hampered its expression—the taste of the public and the predilections of publishers, the demand for warmed-over Peedee and Hullabaloo. “How live at all,” he asks himself, “if once a fugitive from thy own nobler part, though pain be portion inwrought with the grain,” and in this sense Melville was never a fugitive. His next effort was a long narrative poem—the original edition in two volumes numbers 571 pages and about 20,000 lines—based on his Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. In his Constantinople notebook, he had originally set down a suggestion for Frescoes of Travel by Three Brothers, Poet, Painter, and Scholar; and in the intervening years the conception had grown and expanded into a modern Canterbury pilgrimage of the harassed, the faithless, the doubting, the exiled. Clarel, this new work, was not published till 1876; but the book itself was probably written shortly after the Civil War: the heightened skill in verse, the reference to the Civil War in Part IV, the fact that the poem is all of a piece, and the testimony of Melville’s surviving daughter, all focus on this period; and Melville’s own reference to the poem’s having been long in existence before his uncle, Mr. Peter Gansevoort, generously provided money for its publication, enables one to associate the beginning of this mental pilgrimage with his withdrawal into the Custom House.

Melville’s short sojourn in Palestine had made a deep impression on him: the notes that belonged to those weeks were full of observations. In Jerusalem he had encountered all sorts of queer people: an old commercial man giving tracts to people whose language he did not understand; a Philadelphian turned Jew, who had married a Jewess; a fanatical American missionary going about Jerusalem with an open Bible, looking forward to the opening asunder of Mount Olivet and in the meanwhile preparing the highway for the procession of the dead; a crazy American woman who had opened an agricultural academy for the Jews without converting a single Jew to either agriculture or Christianity. Deliberately he had saturated his mind with the atmosphere of Jerusalem, “offering myself up,” he noted, “as a passive subject, and no unwilling one, to its weird impression,” and always rising at dawn and walking outside the city walls. In the afternoon he would stand by the Shepherd’s Gate, on the spot where Christ was stoned, and “watch the shadows sliding, sled-like, down the hills of Beretta and Zion into the valley of Jehoshaphat, then, after resting awhile, creeping up the opposite side of Olivet, entering tomb after tomb, and cave after cave.” The Christ-mood sometimes came over him; he felt in himself the unrecognized god, or the goaded deity, the mystic scapegoat of an inscrutable patriarchal presence; he too had climbed the way of Calvary. But the Devil’s ingenuity did not impress him: the Mount of Temptation was only a black, arid mount overlooking the Dead Sea: why did the foolish fiend think any one would value the rulership of such an empire—and if it was only a vision, why take him up to the Mount? But though every rock and road had an association, it was the landscape of Palestine that overwhelmed him: the arid hills, the smell of burning rubbish in Jerusalem, the melancholy olive tree, the whitish mildew that pervaded whole tracts of landscape—bleached—leprosy—encrustation of cakes—old cheese—bones of rocks—crunched, gnawed, and mumbled—mere refuse and rubbish of creation, comparing with ordinary regions as a skeleton with the living and rosy man. “Is the desolation of the land,” Melville asked himself, “the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity? Hapless are the favourites of Heaven!” Palestine had dissipated his romantic expectation; but it had reciprocated all the aridness and emptiness of his spirit. In the antediluvian port of Joppa, just before his departure, Joppa, which was too ancient to have antiquities, he felt like Jonah himself, and only strong self-control and grim defiance enabled him to keep cool and patient. The Dead Sea had concentrated all these impressions: the foam on the beach and pebbles had been like the slaver of a mad dog: the water had been swarthy, bitter, and, carrying the bitter taste in his mouth all day, he had felt the utter bitterness of life. “Bitter is it to be poor and bitter to be reviled, and oh, bitter are these waters of death, thought I.”

All these sights and experiences formed the background of Clarel; but the poem itself is far richer in detail than the notebooks: it is an imaginative elaboration of his experiences, and not a reproduction of them. The arid background, which reflected Melville’s own feeling of hopelessness in 1857, retreated: the foreground is thronged with people who have independent lives and motives. All the major characters, Clarel the student, Vine the wanderer, Rolfe, another uneasy wanderer, Mortmain, the disillusioned Swedish revolutionary, and Ungar, a Baltimore Catholic with a streak of Indian in him, all these characters, it is true, centre like focussed rays in Melville’s own being, baffled by his perplexities, and arguing, like his own doubts, among themselves. The spirit that pervades Clarel is sober, restrained, steady-eyed: its failure as poetry is due, in part, to this very sobriety of thought.

5

The first part discloses Clarel, a student who has abandoned his preparations for the ministry, in Jerusalem. He has come to lay his inner questions at the gates of religion’s own city, thinking to find from an older race, the Jews, with a remoter history, some clue to the unsettled and uneasy state in which he lives, and some path of development which will lead again to wholeness. Behind the crumbling faith of Rome and Luther is the crag of Sinai—adamant! While exploring Jerusalem, Clarel makes the acquaintance of an American, Nathan, who has become a convert to Judaism, and falls in love with his daughter, Ruth. Nathan’s Jewish wife and daughter, though loyal to the faith, still long for some of the things America had given them—and they do not altogether share the zeal of the convert. Even in Jerusalem, the story swarms with characters: Melville tells the history of each chance acquaintance, as if by a thousand examples from the lives of other men one might find an answer to one’s own. Most of these lives, though Melville gives them a foreign birthplace, are touched by the reflected light of his own history. Thus in Celio’s story, one cannot help following Melville’s own plight:

Ruth’s father is killed on his lonely farm by Arab raiders and robbers, and Clarel is not permitted by Jewish custom to enter the House of Mourning. Being cut off from his beloved, he decides to ease his loneliness by joining a cavalcade, going across Palestine to the Dead Sea, through the wilderness where John wandered, and back again by Bethlehem. On the journey, we are deliberately reminded of Chaucer’s Pilgrims, and the robust, full-blooded, healthy, superficial, English Broad Churchman, Derwent—the most completely embodied character in the whole book—is described with a little of that soft sweet malice Chaucer knew so well how to use.

But these Pilgrims do not while away the hour with merry tales: instead of being able to assume the faith, and take life pretty much as it comes, as Chaucer’s honest folk did, their faith is threatened and disintegrated, and even life’s happiness is a problem that must be solved: it exacerbates them almost as much as their emptiness. Chaucer’s people eat, drink, joke, love, quarrel, cozen, cheat, hate, envy: living in a world where these things exist, along with chivalry and nobility and chastity, they are neither saddened nor puzzled, because the framework of that world is articulated, and each part of it has its necessary place—even the sins. Among Melville’s pilgrims, however, not even the virtues are safe: each man lives in a private world that trembles and dissolves at every shock.

Contrast these pious atheists, these doubtful scholars, these sobered revolutionaries, with the Mussulman, the orthodox Jew, the bland, beef-fed English clergyman, or the Roman Catholic abbot. The latter go through their daily ritual without question or loss of energy: their orthodoxy is secure and they themselves are untroubled: wrapped in an absorbing dream, their body is indifferent to the hard pallet on which they lie. The mocking Jewish atheist is happy, too; as Spinoza, blessed with a diviner illusion, was happy: but the question is: Can a Clarel, a Rolfe, a Mortmain, in short, a Melville, acquire that sort of serenity without cutting himself off from his very flesh and tissue? Once one has broken out of the orthodoxy, one can no more go back to it than a disturbed sleeper can resume the thread of a vanished dream, no more than a grown man can go back to the games of his childhood. There was once a time no doubt when he could call sand sugar and stones bread: but now stones were stones, cold, flinty—no doubt about that. “The pains lie among the pleasures,” Melville noted while in Palestine, “like sand in rice, not only bad in themselves, but spoiling the good”; and this held of faith and doubt as well as pain and pleasure.

Melville’s insight no longer shrivelled and blasted the very constitution of man, as in The Confidence Man; but it pierced, perhaps, even deeper. An indictment of humanity itself is a blank indictment which turns the accuser into one of the principal defendants: one suspects the morals of Juvenal and the kindliness of Swift, precisely because they see so little of these qualities in the people about them. In Clarel, Melville went through country after country, and institution after institution, as he had done in Mardi: here he points out a weak joint, there a plaster-covered crack, or in another place a false foundation. One cannot evade these specific criticisms. From the atheist who jeers at Rome—“patcher of the rotten cloth, pickier of the wing of the moth, toaster of bread stale in date”—to the reactionary religionist who attacks Derwent’s belief in a Christianity blandly coupled with comfort and progress and toasted muffins and dividends, all working together for the greater glory of Mammon, scarcely any of the complacencies of Melville’s age escaped: his chilly wind blew the rotten roof off every house of refuge. Blake paused at the wonder of life, which had with the same breath created the tiger and the lamb: but Melville in a mordant line said: “If true what priests avouch of Thee, the shark Thou madst, yet claimst the dove.” These lines show, I think, that the consolations of transcendental religion were always far from Melville. The consolations of Progress were, alas! equally remote: Melville had small use for those who heaved contempt on “rite and creed sublime” and yet clung to their own rank fable, the “latest shame of time.” In the conflict between a crumbling theology and a cocky, over-confident science, Melville could take neither side. Melville felt that the scantling of the contemporary scientific outlook was no equivalent for the massive architecture of the ancient church; nor could he reassure himself, when he found cold adverse rains beating down on his head, that the scantling was a new and finer kind of architecture.

Melville was aware of the historic parallel to his own age; and he knew what its outcome had been. Christ had followed Osiris: Jesus had indeed come out of Egypt, as the legend said; and in the time of Cicero, when Roman society was in the same state of doubt, disruption, and despair as the Western world was in Clarel’s day, a new era of resolution and faith was beginning to open. Doubt and all its maladies in the moral life were no more final in society than they were in the individual: “There is,” Melville said, “no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:—through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally.” Like Matthew Arnold, Melville was keenly aware of the transition; but, being an American, he could not accept the mere sense of historic continuity, of a favourable inertia, as a substitute for a new faith.

When one examines the mood of Clarel and the conclusions of one of the pilgrims, Mortmain, the Swede, who had been a prophet of the new order and a revolutionary, bent on carrying further the vast abstract programme of the French revolution, one becomes conscious of the exceptional maturity of Melville’s social observation. Melville had reached by sober meditation what Herzen, for example, had achieved only after a long kindergarten training in ideals and enthusiasms. Men like Herzen had avoided ultimate issues. They drugged themselves with plot, conspiracy, oratory, propaganda, every form of verbal busy work. They ended in total disillusion, without seeing that they should not have reached this spiritual desert had they started out with a less abstract and barrenly subjective view of their task. Now, Melville, too, realized that the social revolution had already taken on a millennial character by 1848: it was the new democratic equivalent of the older scheme of salvation by faith, and men like Bakunin and Louis Blanc and Engels had found in it something that knit their lives together and gave them significance, as the Civil War did for Melville, as other-worldly religion did for the orthodox. With this in mind, Melville’s comments upon Mortmain’s adventures are all the more pregnant; for Mortmain came to doubt not so much his purposes as his instruments:

Insight like this may be fatal to a weak man, or added poison to a disappointed one: but when a man well bottomed takes it to his bosom, he is no longer defenceless against his own inner hopes, desires, wishes: he goes armed. Such wisdom does not nullify generous efforts: a Lenin may count his guns and men and still wage revolution: he will not do this the worse for recognizing, as Lenin grimly did, all the vain and foolish people who, along with the Judases, divide place with those who have strong hands and deep brows. Life is stultified by vacuous dreams, dreams of achievement without effort, pleasure without satiety, art without discipline, or a better social order without a moral and metaphysical conversion of the very people who must bring it about. Besides these dreams, the most gritty reality is a tonic. To acknowledge these realities, instead of seeking weak consolations or empty reassurances, is the mark of a mature mind. Melville had penetrated as far as Herzen the psychological problem of revolutionary betterment: but he was almost fifty years “before his time” in stating it. We can understand Melville’s social scepticism today, and we should not, perhaps, remain so long in the trough of our own wave, apathetically waiting for a dictatorship or an earthquake or a war to rouse us and focus our energies once more, had we been able to learn from Melville the necessary cost of our efforts. For every act of the wise and the good is nullified by malice and ignorance, unless the wise and the good learn to reckon these evils among the conditions of their problem. Melville had faced human nature as a whole: he was not blind to its inert or irrational elements; nor could he accept “A Reasonable Constitution” that overlooked them.

Melville’s scepticism did not flinch at even the securest parts of the conceptual universe.

But the tentative nature of science’s triumphs, and the disintegration of the great religious unity which had heretofore provided an intelligible framework, still left one possible avenue unexplored. Perhaps salvation was to be found, as André Gide has suggested in his study of Dostoyevsky, in the practice of the arts, such salvation as the great minds of the Renaissance found amid similar disruption: Wren, with his multitudinous buildings that housed an empty ecclesiasticism, Leonardo and Michelangelo with the saints that had lost their ineffable powers and taken on the forms of mighty men and women, Rembrandt with those thousand enigmatic faces, gazing back, with questioning eyes, into eyes that still question. Melville did not, I believe, fully understand this solution or face its possibility: but he saw one side of it, the advance of the mechanical arts, and there, with cold acumen, he beheld no happy sequel: rather the contrary:

These lines were written in the time of the supremest Victorian confidence. Herbert Spencer had demonstrated, he thought, by revamping Comte’s generalization, that a military and feudal order, founded upon a demonistic theology, was inevitably going to be replaced by an industrial order, inimical to militarism, and founded upon science and free contract. That the new arts of industrialism had themselves any capacity for mischief was not hinted at by the dominant prophets of the day: Ruskin’s warnings were lonely ones, and he was contemptuously thrust aside as a fanatical aesthete, who understood the stones of Venice, perhaps, but not the steel of Sheffield. In the passage just quoted, Melville went quite as far as Ruskin: industrialism, to him, offered no certain pledge of happiness or welfare: it depended, rather, upon who used these tools, and how.

The ruthless sweeping away of human values, the sacrifice of the worker’s welfare to profits, and of general well-being to a bleak efficiency, and, finally, the sweeping away of all the decencies of life in a bestial internecine warfare, aggravated by all the improvements in the arts: Melville saw all these things, and perceived that a good part of the routine of education, work, and patriotism could be called, not least in the “advanced” countries, a drilling of the Hun. Walter Rathenau, one of the great industrial leaders of the past generation, came to the same conclusion at the end of the World War, and he pictured its consequences: but Melville anticipated him there, as he anticipated the disillusion of the social revolutionists. He saw that unless human values were firmly established, the practice of the arts was as blind and futile as the firing of a revolver into empty air: with power and precision at command, the revolver hits nothing whatever—but in its very aimlessness, it may destroy something precious, as the blind projection of a concrete road by a half-witted road engineer may destroy a row of elms in a New England village. Melville put this thought, it is true, into the mouth of a religious zealot: but like everything else in Clarel, it belonged to his own innermost mood.

Melville, it will be seen, did not in Clarel take refuge in any of the cheap opiates of his time: his scepticisms are as inexorable, as thoroughgoing, as they had been in the most devastating pages of The Confidence Man; but, with all this dubiety, there is a difference in the mood; and though Clarel pictures the thoughts of men unfrocked in faith, and shows them wandering over many arid deserts and picking their way through the broken streets of many ruined towns, something solid, the beginnings of a new faith, kept Melville himself from slipping into hopeless indifference or more hopeless despair. Whether Melville intentionally symbolized his dilemma in the fable I do not know; and in the light of his deliberate subtlety in Moby-Dick one cannot say positively that he did not: but the unconscious significance of Clarel’s love affair is perhaps worth speculating upon; for it affected his attitude and his conclusion.

Clarel fell in love with a Jewish maid, as Melville had fallen in love with ancient Jewish thought. Christianity was at times repugnant to Melville, for the highest virtue had for him necessarily some of the Greek or Hebraic element of power, and the epicene Christ of mediaeval legend did not attract him; nor was he comforted by supernal promises of an after-life. If Melville confesses that the truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, he added that “the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.” In the period of his own discomposure, the black aphorisms of Solomon, Koheleth, and Jesus-ben-Sirach, and the bitter plaints of Job, were closer to him than anything else in literature. “There is a wisdom that is woe,” Melville had found, “and there is a woe that is madness.” He had come to the first, and he had stood on the brink of madness: looking in the Bible for comfort, Melville had found, in the greatest of the Jewish writers, only a confirmation of his own fears and exasperations. “Oppression maketh a wise man mad.” “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Such sayings deepened his sympathy with Jewish culture; and, in the sense that they carried the same burden as his own, they lessened his load. Ruth, Clarel’s love, dies; and the fulfilment that Clarel had hoped to find there, he must now find in his own bosom, with only the memory of her spirit to comfort him.

6

Why then, with all these virtues of thought, is Clarel necessarily Melville’s most neglected book? The capital difficulty, I think, is inherent in its very conception as a narrative poem: it is impossible to carry through so many pages the quick sympathies and empathies that it is in the nature of verse to give. Wordsworth probably had as much skill in blank verse as any one since Shakespeare, and he was unable to avoid long waste tracts in his lengthy philosophic and biographic poems. Blake and Whitman, with a surer instinct, developed polyphonic cadences for their long poems, and this is the only tolerable alternative, I think, at least in English, to the immeasurable variety of prose itself. Melville’s eight-syllabled lines in Clarel are monotonous, vary the rhyme scheme as he will; they are made even more tedious by the stale poetic airs that accompanied it. Melville’s aloofness and spiritual independence, which cut him off from his own contemporaries, not merely saved him from their errors and superstitions: it also prevented him from profiting by their genuine advances. With the exception of Whitman and Emily Dickinson, scarcely any of Melville’s contemporaries had participated in that great refreshment of poetic language, by the fuller use of the vernacular, by discarding the powdered wig of “poetic diction,” and by the use of direct and simple word order, that had been made possible by Wordsworth’s propaganda and example. In his lesser poems Emerson sinned in this respect almost as much as the poetasters around him; and Poe’s “tarns” and Nycean barks of yore and his seraphim were typical of the exaggerations and clichés that afflicted the American poets of his time.

In the verses of his later years, Melville largely escaped from this fashionable prison; but in Clarel he was too frequently the victim of his uncertain taste. He tags adjectives on to nouns to eke out the line; he uses, all too frequently, words like fane and sward and rue and twain and nigh, and, with unforgivable recurrence, he rhymes elf and self; above all, not relying on his ear for more subtle quantities, he fills out lines with redundant words or phrases—or clips them off. This clumsiness in detail adds to the clumsiness of conception: what might have been vivid prose became dull verse: what might have been good Borrow became bad Rogers. Mid all this poetizing there remains, of course, a little poetry: lines that lift out of the grey pages like a sudden sea gull from the monotonous surface of the ocean: there are even whole passages, in particular the Dirge that comes toward the end, which are veritably moving. But although the materials for intense feeling or vivid imagism are present, they are spoiled in the mixing. All this acute observation of men, things, places, seems to clog Melville’s spirit: when he achieves victory, it is a victory of thought: an idea becomes pregnant and a dozen good lines are born. But the detail over-rides the general impression, as the ingenuity of the Hindu craftsman over-rides the total effect of his wood-carving: the movement is slow: the aim is dispersed. There is a story and a climax in Clarel; but we do not feel them in passage. We miss the poignance of Ruth’s death, by having forgotten her entirely.

It is unfortunate that Melville diverted into the ingenuities of a foreign versification the energies that should have gone into mastery of the theme itself. But matter and manner are always one; and because Melville did not find harmonious form for his intuitions, we are deprived of a good part of them, and those that remain we must pick, like precious shards, from the refuse heap of the poem. He was a true poet; but formal verse was not his medium; and the relentless probity of his mind, the keen reaching into the heart of a dilemma, lacked in these lengthy verses an appropriate vehicle. Melville was wrong when he thought that some of the aroma might have exhaled during the years Clarel remained unpublished: the aroma had never been there.

7

It was a long, weary pilgrimage, this pilgrimage of Melville’s, as Clarel is a long, weary poem; but at the end of it, something crystallized within him, and without blunting his doubts or shutting off his conflict, at last focussed them. Something happened to Melville in Palestine, or during the years between, that was the equivalent of falling in love with a Jewish maiden. Although Clarel returned from his pilgrimage to find himself bereft, the experience of love had given him something: the love that would have redeemed the universe for Captain Ahab and kept him from his deadly contest with the whale, now was a pledge of his own redemption for Melville. What the nature of that experience was one does not know: one can only judge by its final effect; and in the last pages of Clarel the whole weary strife of debate is suddenly brought to a close, at the end of the lover’s grief, in the epilogue with its pledge and hope:

The budding crocus, the rising swimmer, the bursting secret were symbols of a new promise in Melville’s own life: in the Epilogue one sees the later Melville, who had approached, and was slowly finding peace, rather than the unsettled, bitter man who wandered through Palestine, and confronted the “caked depopulated hell” of barren Judah. There was no verbal answer, no creed, no theology, no orthodoxy to comfort him and give a final meaning in exchange for his present soreness and perplexity. God does not answer Job: he overawes and silences and converts him and suddenly showers him with blessings: the relief is as mysterious as the oppression which makes a wise man mad. So with Melville. An animal faith, the dumb belief in all the immediate presentations of life—this animal faith, quickened by love, knit together again. Creeds are, after all, only the suspicious distortions of this dim, plasmal sense that bottoms all of us. When that faith exists, life even in its humblest aspects is neither black nor terrible, however heavy its disappointments; without it, all that the world values is thin, and all that the heart may contemplate is empty. There is no rational justification for this animal faith; for it is part of the nature of man and perhaps of all living things, and it antedates the doubts and difficulties that would disturb it.

Again and again Melville confronted this problem; and much though he admired the order and art they introduced, he could not accept the solutions offered by Judaism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, or historic Christianity. In his preface to a poetic fragment, Rammon, Melville puts the dilemma before a son of Solomon’s old age, immoderately influenced by his father’s despondent philosophy. “Vanity of vanities—such is this life. As to a translated life in some world hereafter—far be that thought. A primary law binds the universe. The worlds are like apples on the tree; in flavour and tint one apple perchance may somewhat differ from another, but all partake of the same sap. One of the worlds we know. And what find we here? Much good, a preponderance of good; that is, good it would be could it be winnowed from the associate evil that taints it. But evil is no accident. Like good it is an irremoveable element. Bale out your individual boat if you can, but the sea remains the sea.”

In his despair, Rammon is attracted to Buddhism by Prince Siddartha’s personality and by the fact that his high rank had not hardened his heart to the lot of the mass of mankind, “nor in any wise intercepted a just view of the immense spectacle of things.” But Rammon is too young to realize, with Melville, the fallacy of Buddha’s very situation: it did not occur to him to conjecture “that the more spiritual, wide-seeing, conscientious and sympathetic the nature, so much the more spiritually isolated, and isolation is the mother of illusion.” Melville was on guard against this error: isolated, he had refused illusion, the last comfort of isolation, and had abandoned all efforts to explain away man’s helplessness and ignorance, and his corporeal extinction: he accepted this condition as a datum. And yet life went on! Far better, this, than a new illusion; for it brought self-respect and a belief in those forms of ideality which are within man’s power to achieve or experience. By skilfully managing his little boat, not by pronouncing metaphysical incantations over the storm, man keeps afloat mid the vast waters that threaten him. The boat may be swamped, perhaps; but there is no other way! Life bottomed all formulas: art fended off catastrophe—if life ebbed or art ceased to be effective, well, one had faced reality and had respected necessity and one could meet the end with ironic resignation: in effect, the most dogmatic and devout could do no more.

At the end of Clarel, Melville found life, not good or bad, malicious or forbearing, true or false. Something more important had happened: he found it livable. In that mood the days that followed the Civil War were spent, quiet, chastened, subdued, temperate days....

8

One may figure Melville’s career as a June evening—the sun glowing in the sky, the birds darting about the trees, chattering, warbling, trilling, intensely active. The sky-gold turns to waves of salmon pink: the pink to lavender: the lavender edges into purple: suddenly dark has come. The cheerful sounds cease. A belated bird or two silently wings to his nest: there is blackness, and the hoarse croak of distant frogs alone breaks the silence. In half an hour the scene changes from the most brilliant activity and ecstasy to utmost passiveness. Bats swoop silently in the air; a chill comes up from the river: darkness is cool as well as silent. Is all over? Not yet. Presently the fireflies make a warm firmament of the fields, and in the pale rising of the moon, the earth itself takes on another glory. There are fireflies and moonlight and the domestic chirp of crickets in the night of Melville’s life, its last quarter century—not silence and unrelieved blackness. After the first collapse of day into night, nature stirs again: there is movement and there is life. A little before the clock tolls the hour of midnight and the day itself passes, a shower of aerolites falls through the sky.... We have just seen the afterglow; and we are now to witness the final brilliance of the night.

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE FLOWERING ALOE

The days pass and one day is like another: there is comfort in monotony. The brick house in East Twenty-sixth Street, with its muddy-yellow exterior and its brownstone trim, with its old mahogany parlour furniture, its towering brown bookcases, its print of the Bay of Naples hanging in the front hall, has a calm dark gravity which sets it off from houses that make garish gestures of brightness or gaiety within. When the sun hits the rear rooms there is warmth; when geraniums and pansies appear in the yard below there is colour. Melville’s house is a refuge from the city outside. Looking like every other house in the row, it has still a quiet interior of its own, an interior, like Herman Melville’s, acquired before the débâcle of the Civil War. The brown wallpaper and the black iron bed in the wan north light of Herman Melville’s room almost alone indicate that a day has dawned that is somewhat darker than a starless night.

The sixties have passed; the seventies have come. Heroism gives way to complacency, and courage to chicane. Even General Grant himself, type of resolute action and manly confidence and dogged devotion while the war was on, becomes in Presidential office little more scrupulous than the head of a foraging party: gambling and corruption take place before the magnanimous man who had been chivalrous to Lee and thoughtful of the conquered army. Is it any wonder that New York itself, which had been invaded and seized by people who had left Europe under stress and poverty, and were thrown into its miserable tenements and sinister streets, this Salonica of the Western world, was prey to a ring of politicians as remarkable for their brazenness as for their peculations? On the edges of the city, near the gas tanks, but sometimes spilling over into the respectable sections, gangs line up on each side of the street and exchange bullets. It is worth one’s life to carry a gold watch through certain parts of the East Side: Constantinople, twenty years before, was no happier place for felons and assassins. What superb triumphs offset this brutality, this degradation! In 1869, an elevated railroad is built; a little later, a cable car is attached to a cable, and goes; the human voice finds a means of travelling over an electro-magnetic circuit. Man has stolen fire from heaven again, and is conquering the world with it; but, stealing the fire, he has left the more valuable parts of heaven behind. The voice that travels so far says the same banal things. The railroad that shuttles men back and forth across the city does not improve anything except the potentialities for speculation in real estate.

Melville had foreseen all the sordid developments of “this dishonorable epoch” while they were still in the germ, thus fulfilling the Chinese philosopher’s notion of what a wise man is: he had viewed the myriads playing pigmy parts, debased into equality, and “in glut of all material arts” had predicted a civic barbarism, with man disennobled and brutalized, “dead level of rank commonplace: an Anglo-Saxon China”—the very Dark Ages of democracy. He had perceived that the new democracy, fed by the smatterings of newspapers, and moved by the war-cries of demagogues, was in reality as credulous and foolish as the polity of the Middle Ages; perhaps more so, because it had lost a decent and saving sense of its inferiority. What part could Melville take in this world? How could he cope with the practical men of his time, and “mix with tempers keen and narrow like a knife”? Or how could he have any intellectual transactions with such good-hearted but mushy-minded people as Edmund Clarence Stedman? His new contemporaries were schoolboys. Howells had the optimism of a boom-town newspaper or a stock prospectus: Lanier, who deserved better of Fate, wrote a booster book about Florida for a railroad: and in the decade when Melville published his own Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, Mark Twain achieved affluence by producing Innocents Abroad.

Melville himself had hailed the spirit of the West as that which truly reflected America; but when the spirit actually appeared, in the form of a Mark Twain or a Bret Harte, he must have had his misgivings. At thirty, Melville had grappled with spiritual problems that Mark Twain kept furtively locked in his bosom until his old age, and, for fear of destroying his reputation, did not publish till after his death. What did Mark Twain know of “a hell over which mere hell serves for a heaven”? These new Americans were innocents at home as well as abroad. Those who knew that darkness existed were afraid of it: they said, whistling cheerfully, that Progress would do away with darkness in a year or two: the arc-light would abolish the burglar: the long-range gun would abolish war: the ocean cable would abolish international misunderstanding: typewriters would relieve the difficulties of authorship: divorce would do away with the maladjustments of the married. Innocents indeed! Is one puzzled that Melville shrank from the post-war generation?

Melville’s home was a refuge, and his shanty of an office was a refuge too. While the new parts of the city were exulting in the ugliness of brownstone fronts, accentuated by perverse cornices and mouldings, Twenty-sixth Street was still largely red brick, built a little too late for charm, but early enough to possess iron balconies facing south, like London in the Regency. Every morning a grave, firm, square-bearded man leaves Number 104. A little slow and reflective in gait, as if deliberately setting himself apart in pace as well as inward gesture from the world about him, Melville turns west toward Madison Square, passes through its green, and follows Fifth Avenue, whose ranks of trees are just beginning to be broken, down to Fourteenth Street, where already the brownstones, though only a few years old, are being converted into fashionable confectionery stores, bakeries, jewelry shops. He follows the broad thoroughfare clear over to Hudson Street, and then turns to the block below, where the Gansevoort Market and the customs office lie, touching the river. These brown buildings, these smug garish shops, these crass, dirty waterfront hotels, are too ugly to attract his attention even if use and want did not quiet his interest. In five years, ten years, twenty years, the changes are not very important: the horse-cars become fewer and the tangle of traffic at Union Square is worse and Broadway from Fourteenth Street up becomes “Ladies’ Mill,” the fashionable afternoon thoroughfare for shopping: but on the whole the outer world does not make any serious claims. The familiarity of everything is reassuring. The name Gansevoort, on the market at the end of his walk, is a touch of welcome. There is a Gansevoort Hotel on Little Twelfth Street and West Street; but when Melville inquires what it stands for, he finds that the hero of Fort Stanwix is now only a name. Well: names remain! Gansevoort remains; perhaps Melville will remain, too.

Melville, as customs inspector, has one of the lowest political positions open to patronage: he is an Ishmael among Ishmaels, and a pariah among outcasts: impecunious bankers, broken-down sports, bankrupt merchants, political nondescripts, people who were fit for nothing elsewhere, in short, as R. H. Stoddard described it, “an asylum for nonentities.” The scene itself, though mean, brings Melville close to his element: the ships coming in, the odour of tar, hemp, rotting wood, brine, the severe manly ways of the captains, the affable circumspection of the pursers—they remind Melville of another day and another fortune and another disguise. Best for him to do his work, to shut his mouth, to get through the day patiently: like Rama, the Hindu god, misplaced in human lot, discredited, abiding there in outlawry. “May life and fable so agree?” Melville asked in Clarel, and he knew the answer: they did. “There is more power and beauty in the well-kept secret of one’s self and one’s thoughts,” Maurice de Guérin had written, “than in the display of a whole heaven that one may have inside one.” Melville underlined those words, and kept his heaven facing inward.

The monotony brings quiet: the monotony brings peace. On drizzly mornings, before the ships can drudge up the river through the fog, there are hours of inward placidity. Melville peers through the pall on the river outside and sees somewhat more poignantly into his own position; perhaps the final lines of a poem come to him then:

While he must serve his sentence in this prison, there is only one thing to fear: a new Administration; shifting to a new post, learning new faces, having once more to battle and struggle. Fortunately, Melville has friends in the department, clever worldly fellows like Stoddard: a word to him is passed along to the chief; the rumour of a transfer is quieted. Melville need never leave this cloistered street, this melancholy examination and appraisal, this even equable round: this is as good as another Sailors’ Snug Harbor, over which his younger brother Tom now is governor. Yes, it is good for a lifetime—if one may call these empty hours life.

Gansevoort Pier at one end: Lizzie and the two girls at the other. The meagre evening dinner, indifferently cooked, the household gossip, the strain of observing an emptiness at the table, of Mackie, who is dead, and Stanwix, who has gone off: the sudden look of tenderness on the worn face opposite, that stings yet sweetens everything. The customs office is hell: this family circle is perhaps purgatory: it is only when Melville withdraws to his room upstairs, and is by himself, that he can faintly re-enter the heaven that once surrounded him. There, with his pictures, his books, his glass of brandy to seduce sleep, the day ends in a solitude and a hush—tolerably. This is the daily round; but there are better occasions. On a warm summer night Melville might loll on the canvas steamer-chair placed on the narrow iron balcony, smoking his pipe, looking at the stars, gently holding Elizabeth’s hand. Melville’s passion is spent; but affection has deepened. With the slow renewal of his organic faith, he can accept his wife more fully and warmly, much more fully and warmly than when sex itself was primarily a physical irritation that left him disappointed and doubtful of the very basis of love, when he was tormented by passions at once inexpressible and unreciprocable.

When one of Melville’s daughters grows up and marries, and Melville becomes a grandfather, he goes out to these children easily: he bounces them on his knee, makes noises like wind whistling through the rigging, sings a stave of an old chanty, walks with them in Central Park. This is not the tense harassed man his own children bitterly remembered from their youth: he is benign even when his thoughts are elsewhere, and occasionally downright jolly. His granddaughter still remembers his queer, literary words and the wiry feel of his beard: that bespeaks intimacy. There is a shadow between Melville and his family: they do not see him as he is, but as he is distorted by their own repulsions, their own bitterness: but when Melville’s son-in-law casts eyes on Melville for the first time, buying a cigar in a hotel lobby in the White Mountains, there is something in the old man’s air, like that in the man Flammonde, that captivates him and holds his attention: a distinguished man! In his family, he will remain an exile. They do not understand his jocularity and his occasional high spirits. They are offended by his inept sense of humour. In the Berkshire days he had dubbed one of the village gossips Miss Pecksniff and his mother had covered herself with mortification by addressing the good lady by this title when she called. One never could be quite sure about Herman Melville’s jokes. His notion of a jolly time was to cook up a mess of crabs and sit around the table for a whole afternoon, picking at the flesh, drinking ale, telling stories, and haranguing the world in general, as if his wife and daughters and cousins were in the maintop of the Neversink. They were bored by these jokes, and indifferent to Melville’s high spirits. If his daughters had not been reduced to dowdy dresses, if he had not had the wicked habit of asking belated suitors whether they preferred hominy or oatmeal for breakfast, if the family did not all feel that the high spirits of a poor man were purchased too cheaply, Melville might not have felt the hostile ring around him. These outbursts would be paid for, perhaps, by depression and inner exasperation: but they kept the too-even daily round from appalling Melville like the breath of infinity.

The age was against Melville; and his family were the mirror of the age: he knew that. They believed in work, in working and keeping up an appearance: in being respectable and tepid and unemotional and industrious. Even the nicest of his relatives, like his cousin Kate Gansevoort, with whom he maintained a desultory correspondence, rather apologized for being a person of leisure. For them all, doing, not being, was the main end of life. As if there were any merit in not being a person of leisure! They talked of the dignity of work. Bosh. True work is the necessity of humanity’s earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, ninety-nine hundredths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary or harmful and wicked. What people needed was not work: they needed values. To recite poetry, to contemplate pictures, to write or to talk briskly or to meditate and chew one’s own thoughts, quietly, on the maintop—work was good if it made these things possible, and bad if it blinded one to them, or made them impossible....

2

People try to break in on Melville’s even round, they seek to intrude on this cloistral quiet: they try in vain. Melville visits Pittsfield again, when the Centenary Committee asks him to write a short biography of his Grand-uncle Thomas for the Memorial Volume, and he has occasional vacations at Arrowhead or in the White Mountains, or in Albany or New Bedford, where one of his sisters lives: familiar places, familiar people. A young man who has read Melville’s books awakes one morning on a wharf in New Bedford to find himself gazing at a mild-eyed old man in a blue serge suit with whom he falls into conversation: the nautical terms on the old man’s tongue betray that he knows the sea; and the young man, a composer, is delighted to find that he is talking with his literary hero, Herman Melville. Contacts like these, with chance acquaintances, Melville did not repel; but those who sought him more deliberately were rebuffed. If the visitor mentions Mr. Omoo a cloud of annoyance will pass over Melville’s face and perceptibly cool the surrounding air. Melville’s public would not have his best: well, he is proud and will not be accepted for the sake of the least. Such interest will heal no wounds. Don’t they realize Melville’s contempt? Don’t they feel who should be the patron and who the patronized? Doubtless not. Resentment threatened to flare up in Melville, perhaps, when he contemplated his literary contemporaries; so he did not contemplate them. The New York writers asked Melville to join the Authors’ Club when they founded it: he refused. Still assiduous, towards the end of his life they gave Herman Melville a dinner of honour. A pleasant irony. Whom did they honour, these fashionable journalists, these professional diners-out, these men-about-literature? That dinner did not feed Herman Melville, that admiration did not console him. Theirs was the outward attentiveness of base neglect.

Melville breaks his own silence to hold out a hand of sympathy to that honest, hearty Englishman, his junior, Mr. W. Clark Russell; for Russell knows the sea, too, and though not a writer of equal rank, is almost a fellow spirit: in his letter of thanks he mentions Moby-Dick: a true mark of appreciation. These two writers dip flags to each other, like passing ships; and when Melville, a few years later, in 1888, publishes his Sea Poems, he dedicates them to this English novelist of the sea. James Thomson is another kindred soul: all too well Melville knew the streets and alleys of his City of Dreadful Night. Melville corresponds for a few years, between 1884 and 1888, with Mr. James Billson of Leicester, who was Thomson’s friend; and writes warm words of appreciation about Thomson’s poems. “As to pessimism,” Melville writes, and these words should be underlined, “as to pessimism, although neither pessimist nor optimist myself, nevertheless I relish it in the verse, if for nothing else than as a counterpoise to the exorbitant hopefulness, juvenile and shallow, that makes such a muster these days—at least in some quarters.” Neither pessimist nor optimist: of course: for there is a “light and a shadow on every man who at last achieves his lifted mark.” We shall see that mood engraved in Melville’s final verse.

Had contacts not been hard for Melville to make, he might have had a try at Elihu Vedder, too. Vedder’s picture of The Redeemed Slave, shown at the Academy Exhibition of 1865, touched something in Melville; and Vedder had gone on, apparently, a little apart from the beaten track of veracious scenery and fictional illustration: he seemed to know that there was more than one level of experience, that there was, so to say, an immediate “beyond,” grounded in the senses and intuitions quite as much as the direct work of one’s eye. Where had he acquired this? In contrast to Vedder, there was another recluse whom Melville may perchance have brushed by on Fourteenth Street, more than once: a painter bred in New Bedford, loving the sea, too, and painting its mystery, much nearer to Melville in his loneliness, his visions, his love of Shakespeare, his reticences and withdrawals, than any other soul in America: Albert Pinkham Ryder. Melville was never to meet him, or as far as one knows, recognize his work. Not finding him, Melville turned to Vedder, the lesser man, who at many removes was a link between Melville and Blake.

Blake and Ryder were true fellow spirits: Russell and Vedder were life’s ironical substitutes; but, lacking knowledge of the spring, Melville slaked his thirst at the tap. He dedicated his last book of poems, Timoleon, to Vedder; and it is rather fortunate he died before he read Vedder’s complacent answer, an answer without the faintest reference to Melville’s own works. Vedder was not the man to respond to Melville: he was born half a generation later, and that made a great difference. Vedder had been attracted by Blake, and in his youth he found that he, too, had the power of conjuring up visions, as thick and sensible as the furniture he touched: but Vedder had deliberately curbed his power because, as he explained, “while if cultivated it would soon enable me to see as realities most delightful things ... the reaction would be beyond my control and would inevitably follow and be sure to create images of horror indescribable. A few experiences have shown me that that way madness lies, and so, while I have rendered my Heaven somewhat tame, at least my Hell remains quite endurable.”

What a contrast, this timid “V,” with Melville, who had let his visions open, and had risked everything to follow them. His magnificent hell was worth all the placid heavens, with their weak symbolisms, that Vedder achieved. That Melville did not know Blake until 1874 at earliest, was a real misfortune, but inevitable; like Melville, he was not recovered until more than a generation after his death. Blake, had Melville known him earlier, might have helped him cast off his paralysing braces, Blake, who turned heaven upside down, showed that God and the Devil had exchanged costumes, felt that energy was pure delight, and had none of Melville’s haunting reluctances over sex, but delighted in his beautiful wife with the fresh naked energy of Adam’s self. But pictures and books were near to Melville during this period: he collected and enjoyed prints and reproductions of pictures: he had a reproduction of one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and The Woman Taken in Adultery, and if he did not enjoy Blake’s pictures, he responded to Blake’s shadow, Flaxman. Melville’s taste in landscape was excellent: Claude and Turner were his masters, Turner as much as anything, perhaps, for his sea-pictures, his ghostly headlands, his sun-drenched fogs. Melville reflected on the nature of art; indeed, in an unimportant set of verses called The Hostelry, he attempts, with the aid of Hals, Lippi, Spagnoletto, Veronese, Carlo Dolce, Steen, and Watteau, to define the nature of the picturesque. The verse is weak: the ideas are obscure: but the selection of characters gives a further light on Melville’s tastes and interests. In a later verse, on the boors in a picture by Teniers, we see how his wakeful brain “elaborating pain” took comfort in the suggestion of the creature-brown warmth of even the lesser realists; and one may safely say that there was nothing fine in art that he was not capable of responding to. It was the accident of living in New York in the seventies and eighties that kept Melville away from the painters who might have meant more to him, El Greco, Delacroix, Goya, Daumier, Blake. These all might have had a more intimate message for him; but, with his feeling for Rembrandt, he was close to his own kind. In Holland, he had first noticed Rembrandt’s shadows. Rembrandt’s depth, his torment, and the warm blood of humanity beneath it all—that was Melville’s, too.

3

The years passed; the dun seventies gave way to the grey eighties; and at last the prisoner was led out of his cell. In 1886, when Herman Melville was sixty-seven, his wife received a legacy from her brother, Lemuel Shaw, and the unremitting routine could at last be broken. The succour that might have saved Melville some of his worst pangs and difficulties at thirty-three, came reluctantly more than thirty years later. He shook his wings, made one or two uncertain steps forward, doubtful, after all these twenty years of regularity and servitude, if he could venture flight. A few of these warming-up exercises remain: the series of prose sketches on the Marquis de Grandvin, Jack Gentian, Colonel J. Bunkum: they have the air of juvenile compositions, done just for practice. In a very little while his hand grew more schooled; slowly, thoughtfully, he began work, revising older poems and writing new ones. John Marr and Other Sailors he printed privately, two years after his liberation; and Timoleon he published, even more privately, in 1891, the year of his death. In November, 1888, Melville began Billy Budd, the only prose work of any consequence after The Confidence Man: he started to revise it slowly in March, 1889, and did not finish it until April, 1891.

In neither the poems nor the sketches was there the furious effort of a pent-up man, desperately to finish something before his death: for he had never entirely abandoned literary effort: Bridegroom Dick is dated 1876, the year Clarel was published. Melville worked during these final years with the firm, methodical concentration of a man taking up a thread where some purely external circumstance had compelled him to lay it down. He valued these days: they were to be the crown of his life, and to give him, at least, the satisfaction of self-vindication. The hours were so precious that when an admirer, Mr. Archibald MacMechan, one of the first to revive Melville’s fame in our own day (1914), asked for further light on Melville’s works and his point of view, Melville did not answer him, except to express his thanks and to say that “though his vigour sensibly declines, what little is left he husbands for certain matters as yet incomplete, and which indeed may never be completed.” These are the words of a man who has had retirement forced on him; not those of one who has doubted the office of literature, and has nothing to say.

Deliberately, Melville wrote his quiet coda: muted, a little lower in key than his earlier work, these poems and Billy Budd contain the earlier themes of his life, now transformed and resolved. Let us look more closely at this final testament. Melville’s life has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The last twenty years, though tedious, solitary, insulated, bitter with apples of Sodom, had not been lived in vain: the verse is more skilled, certain: the poems are crystals, pure if not unflawed: here at last is that concentration, for the lack of which Clarel does not live. The prison had left its pallor on the prisoner; but it had not deprived him of the skill to use his liberty. Had he written only this handful of verses, this brief novel, Melville would still, like Stephen Crane, have left something of a mark on American literature.

4

Melville’s mind continually played over the sea. As Whitman felt that Leaves of Grass must tally with the earth in its most common and universal aspects, as he confronted all doubts and perturbations with the miracle of a single blade of grass, so Melville perhaps felt that his writing must tally with the sea—that every joy and hope and lust of life must be able to face its terrible realities. Clarel is full of images of the sea. The student, in his vaulted room in Jerusalem, looking over the terraced roofs of the city, is “like some ship-boy at masthead alone, watching the star-rise”; and Melville characterized Vine’s strength by saying that he had supplemented Plato with a “daedal life in tents and boats.” There are a hundred other allusions and images. The sea was the source of Melville’s strength, and even when his daedal life was over, its profound imprint remained.

In the prose preface to John Marr, Melville explained that Marr had left the sea, settled down in the prairie as a pioneer, had lost his wife and child through fever, and remained a lonely soul, cut off by his roving and cosmopolitan past from the farmer-folk, the land animals, around him. In Bridegroom Dick, a longer poem, Melville assumed the guise of an old man-of-war’s man, seated by his wife, sunning himself on an October day, balmy as spring, he with his pipe, she with her tea. The old fellow’s mind goes back over his cruises, his ships, his shipmates: the whole round of the day, polishing the pinnacle, minding the helm, shooting the sun, announcing the time to the quarter-deck at noon—and all his mess-mates and superiors, Old Chuck-a-block, Commander All-a-Tanto, Orlop Bob, Rhyming Ned, Top-gallant Harry and Jack Genteel: the old revels, the old bouts of liquor, the old battles. The words are so salty the fish-bones almost stick in one’s throat; and in the very litany of names Melville achieves poetry; for once, the crabbedness of his verse increases its effect.

In another verse, To Ned, Melville seems to address his old comrade, Toby, recalling the rich isles they roved when they were young, and predicting that the pleasure-hunter, wearying of routine resorts, would at last discover the Marquesas and other authentic Edens in the South Seas. This poem gives one pause. One wonders if Melville’s early disillusion with marriage and success was not, more than one can ever definitely say, due to the fact that he had drunk such a deep draught of beauty in the South Seas that life thereafter, in the dusty, smoky, jangling air of America or Europe, was insipid and brackish. No wife who wore stays and petticoats and flannel nightgowns, and who was laden with household cares, could be another Fayaway: no farm with a cow and a horse and fences to repair could be another palm-grove. The Marquesas had perhaps spoiled his taste for such dreary fare. So delicious is this memory of the past, that Melville even marvels if mortals may twice, here and hereafter, touch a paradise!

In the same spirit, in his later poems, he remembers the happy port of Syra, full of juvenile fun, reminding him of days when trade did not exist, and toil and stress were not overbearing, and life was leisure, merriment, and peace. Melville never deceived himself by dismissing these things as mythical, or by magnifying the importance of sanitation and sound currency. This feeling of animal delight had redeemed him from his own torments; he knew it was one of the permanent blessings of life; and a civilization that knew nothing of it, except through the depravity of complete drunkenness, was in a far lower stage of barbarism than its most vigorous prophets had dared to say. If there were no pleasurable excitements, there would be murderous ones: if there were not dances there would be wars: and, for lack of strong sensual graces, men would become hard, vengeful, stupid, oppressive. Melville turned to Syra, or to Naples in the time of King Bomba, not because he was unaware of poverty, rags, misery, but because he knew there was sadness and misery in New York, too, without the redeeming thoughtlessness and careless pleasure. “A fig for Bomba! Life is fair squandered in superabundant leisure.” That was an answer Clarel had shrunk from accepting from Derwent: but it was not an invalid one. The very virtues of Western civilization, its industry, its thrift, its willingness to postpone present goods for future rewards, tended to degrade life quite as much as its downright vices.

Melville’s sea poems, however, were not all pieces of happy reminiscence. The wreck of a victorious man-of-war, the deserted raft with a signal flying, the disintegration of the figurehead Charles-and-Emma by storm and weather, the mad plunge of a ship against an iceberg: these are images of a different order. Melville did not become weak and sentimental in his old age; but instead of letting the dark background of the universe dominate the composition, he paints in a warm foreground, as in a still-life of Chardin’s, with some sensible, kindly object to capture the interest and reflect the high lights. The sea remains the sea, pitiless, echoless, indifferent to man’s hopes and dreams: but the man in Melville is himself again.

One could tell from these poems, even if one lacked the contemporary testimony of a Pittsfield acquaintance, Mr. J. E. A. Smith, that Melville, in these closing days, was no bitter, defeated old man. Mr. Smith says that in 1885, on Melville’s last visit to Pittsfield, he “bore nothing of the appearance of a man disappointed in life, but rather had an air of perfect contentment, and his conversation had much of his jovial, let-the-world-go-as-it-will spirit. It would,” as Mr. Smith very justly continues, “be well nigh a climatic miracle if a brief ride to Pittsfield and a few snuffs of Berkshire air should so restore to society and its enjoyment a man who had just been the recluse and almost misanthrope pictured by some of the New York newspaper writers.” In his letter dedicating John Marr to Mr. Russell, Melville stresses the quality of geniality, “the flower of life springing from some sense of joy in it, more or less”; and, delicately, shyly, like a belated crocus, this flower bloomed in Melville’s last years. When he wished Russell from his heart the most precious things he knew of in this world, health and content, he wished him the first because he had once known it in its miraculous fulness, and the second, I think, because he had at last found it. When on a clear day Melville would wander through the woody ravines and pastures near Fort George, or when he would take a ferryboat ride down New York Bay, shifting from one side of the boat to another, to take in every aspect of the harbour and every new ship, the old keenness, the old zest, would return. If his life was still that of the recluse—“I am an old fogy,” he wrote in 1880, to excuse his staying at home—his feelings were far from Pierre’s or Timon’s.

There is poetry in parts of John Marr, particularly in The Haglets, not merely measured lines and rhymed endings. There is even more poetry perhaps in Timoleon, and perhaps a deeper revelation of Melville’s inner convictions and strivings. The verses from which the volume gets its title shoot parallels into Melville’s own life: Timoleon rescued Timophanes, but it is Timophanes who is his mother’s pride. She sees herself in him and looks, through him, to become an envied dame of power, a social queen: Melville, who had once perhaps wanted his mother’s generous love, realized that his lack of worldly success had stood in the way of it: a discovery he first announced when he wrote Pierre. Exiled, Timoleon ceases to hate his fellow citizens; but, cut off from common membership in the marketplace, in severance like a pale head found after battle apart from the trunk, he confronts the gods, not finding the wrong in man, but taking his quarrel to the Arch-Principals themselves. Has ideality no counterpart except in man’s mind? Are earnest natures but fatherless shadows? The edges of Melville’s old torment are here; and I should be inclined to date the poem from an earlier period; but in other verses one discovers that his resolution has completely knitted together. Under the title of The Enthusiast, he places the words: Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him. It is a poem of brave defiance; and it tells so much about the man that I must reproduce it.

Melville did not see in post-bellum America, with its parvenus pining for distinctions and dignities, its lawmakers “taking the lawless one’s fee,” in all the sham and shuffle of those guilty days, any pledge for a happier society. The Age of the Antonines was far behind; and their return seemed equally distant. “Apollo’s bust makes lime for Mammon’s tower.” This man of integrity must fortify himself from within; and when the present offers him no foothold, he must stand with Posterity or with the Ancients. This was the sort of “adjustment” that Melville achieved; and it was the only kind, in his position and day, that was worth working for. There is no notion more delusive or unscientific, in the strict biological sense, than the belief that a poet may make a happy “adjustment” to his circumstances by turning bond-salesman, or the artist by becoming an advertising expert. This course neglects the elementary fact that the relation between an organism and its environment is interacting and reciprocal: the best sort of adjustment is that which tends to preserve life with its highest values intact. The proper adjustment to a fire is not to plunge into it; and the response of a poet to an unfavourable environment is not to commit suicide but to use the most economic means for saving himself. Melville had done this—and he was saved. “Happiness,” Spinoza said, “consists in a man’s being able to maintain his own being.” When Melville read this dictum in Matthew Arnold’s essay on Spinoza, in 1871, he marked the passage: it described his own effort. In a more fruitful age, his being would have been maintained in harmony with, not in opposition to, the community: but at all events his vital duty was to maintain it.

5

We come to Melville’s last verses, those which he gathered in a MS. called Weeds and Wildings, which remained unpublished until Mr. Raymond Weaver edited the definitive edition of his work in 1923.

These final poems have all the qualities one cherishes in Melville: his geniality, his humour, his lofty brooding, and that aloof satiric eye beneath which his contemporaries shrivelled from the grandeur of their reputations to the littleness of their deserts. In addition, another quality of Melville’s personal life wells to the surface and confirms all one’s other intuitions: a deep affection for his wife, and a warm sympathy. The “clover dedication to Winnifred”—who was Lizzie—recalls the old times together at Arrowhead, when the red clover had blushed through the fields about their house. They had not exactly lived in clover during those years or the later ones: ah, no! nor had they known anything of the four-leafed kind, except once, as he reminded her each year, “on the early forenoon of the fourth day of a certain bridal month, now four years more than four times ten ago.” Melville recalls how, after a morning walk in the summer, he would return home with a handful of clover blossoms, to put on the maplewood mantel in Lizzie’s south-facing room: her altar. “And in October most did I please myself in gathering them from the moist-matted aftermath in an encircled little hollow nearby, soon to be snowed upon.... And once—you remember it—having culled them in a sunny little flurry of snow, winter’s frolic skirmishes in advance, the genial warmth of your chamber melted the fleecy flakes into dewdrops rolling off from their ruddiness. ‘Tears of the happy,’ you said. Well, and then whom but to thee, Madonna of the Trefoil, should I now dedicate these Weeds and Wildings, thriftless children of quite another and yet spontaneous aftergrowth, and bearing indications, too apparent it may be, of that terminating season on which the offerer verges. And for aught of the melting mood that my verses may possibly betray, call to mind the dissolved snowflakes on the ruddy oblation of old, and remember your ‘Tears of the Happy.’”

There is a story of an acquaintance asking Melville for a copy of one of his books, and Melville’s answering that he did not have a copy in the house. One has no reason to suspect “O. G. H.’s” veracity, or that of Melville: but one would get a false impression of Melville if one thought that this indicated he had forgotten his work, or its worth, or his old ambitions. There are a dozen references to his literary fate, pointed, sardonic, in Weeds and Wildings. One of the most obvious of these references is a poem entitled The American Aloe on Exhibition. “It is a floral superstition,” observed Melville in the little introduction, “as every one knows, that this plant flowers only once in a century. When in any instance the flowering is for decades delayed beyond the normal period (eight or ten years at farthest) it is owing to something retarding in the environment or soil.”

Now, after one has made due allowances for the inner obstructions to Melville’s further development in the critical period of maturity, one realizes that Melville and Mr. Van Wyck Brooks are right: for even had he continued at the level of Moby-Dick—as indeed he did in Benito Cereno—there was something retarding in the American environment and soil, in the thirty years that followed the Civil War. One cannot separate a man from his social environment: a society lives in a man: a man is a creature in society: the inner world is less private and the outer world less public than people habitually and carelessly think. These very words, inner and outer, individual and social, are merely conveniences of thought: there are no actual lines and borders, except practical ones. Melville’s triumph, like that of his contemporaries in the Golden Day, was the last expression of a provincial society, and the first prophetic achievement in a newer and deeper culture. His own disaster was an emblem of the disintegration of that provincial society, and the blight of the new culture, which though fully conceived in the mind, received neither nourishment, warmth, nor protection from the narrow, mechanistic, money-bent society that succeeded the provincial one. If the inner world be not a phantasm, it must be united to an outer world that nourishes it and supports it, even when it offers oppositions and antinomies. This relationship had existed before the Civil War; and when the external milieu became impoverished, it ceased to exist—and the Aloe ceased to flower.

This poem admits no doubt of the fact that Melville was grimly describing himself. People came to see the Century Plant on exhibition, ten cents admission, but seldom more than two came at a time! This was the homage that Melville met in his old age—and what comfort, what tender comfort it was! What can the aged stem do? It moans:

When Melville touches on Captain Vere’s eventual death, in Billy Budd, he adds that this spirit, in spite of its philosophic austerity, may yet have indulged the most secret of all passions, ambition, without attaining the fulness of fame: and one cannot doubt that Melville is disclosing his own secret. The more violent the pride, the deeper the ambition, the more fiercely it guards itself. But look more closely at Melville’s humility: it towers like a mountain! Listen more closely to his silence: it shouts like an army! He well knew, all the while, how little the vain roses mattered that accounted him a weed; and we, who look back upon Melville’s ostensible contemporaries, Lowell, Stedman, Stoddard, Aldrich, can scarcely help sharing his contemptuous smile. For these good gentlemen, in their most tolerant mood, Walt Whitman was the Good Grey Poet, useful to be trotted ceremoniously out on the platform, once a year, to recite his oration on The Martyred President; and as for Melville—he was the queer old fellow who had once lived among the cannibals. One can fancy the superior droop of their lips when Robert Buchanan, an English writer, told them that these two men were the supreme imaginative writers America had produced.

Did Melville forget his books or think them paltry? The verses, Immolated, are an even more direct answer.

In still another poem, called Thy Aim, Thy Aim? he questions whether mid the dust and dearth and din he may by some deed prove to be an exception, and he warns himself to beware of envy, for if striving on he win the goal, he will get only a flower of reputation, which is cut down in an hour; but if he survive that, he will still only earn a funeral flower—the belated funeral flower of fame. Melville was spared the pillory of being praised as a travel-writer and a humourist, with Mark Twain, or coupled as a poet with Aldrich; and in the bottom of his heart, there was an anticipation of his final survival, not without a feeling of satisfaction. Having prepared his own coffin, like Queequeg in Moby-Dick, he could even fancy the flowers and wreaths that a later generation would place over it. Funeral flowers, yes, but even funeral flowers may solace a man, if he contemplates them before they are cut!

The relief from Melville’s dull grind had come a little too late: one must not flinch from that fact. He was conscious of his age and his physical debility; and, so far from railing at youth, he would not, “reduced to skimmed milk, slander the cream.” Youth, he knew, was immortal: “’Tis the elderly only grow old.” But age brought one advantage: it taught him the wisdom of folly. When a spirit appears and asks him where he would choose to dwell, in the Paradise of Fools or in Wise Solomon’s Hell, he does not pause to weigh the answer; but, ironically, he reverses his belief in Moby-Dick and demands the fool’s paradise! From these sardonic snatches of Melville’s verse one gets some notion of what his conversation on daily topics, the chicanes, briberies, corruptions, social follies and stupid observances of his contemporaries must have been. Melville’s wit was meant for keen society: small wonder he created Jack Gentian to keep him company.

In The Rose Garden, verses written during the first days of Melville’s release, one finds him asking himself whether he should turn to verse or to prose. The question was an important one: he must have known that his strength lay in prose, if only the theme were big enough to enlist all his energies; but Melville delayed and dallied, hesitating to commit himself to an impossible task. In his dilemma, he consults a friend, asking him whether it is better to have a heap of posies or a few drops of attar; and his friend tells him that his time has gone by. To which Melville answers that, unfortunately, he had come into his roses late; but first he wants to settle this little matter—poetry or prose? Not being able to decide, he tried his hand at both. His old eagerness was there; but something had happened. “Age, dull tranquilliser, and arid years that filed before” had unfitted him for flowers. Here one feels the final pathos of Melville’s position—the last foul thrust of fate. In his maturity, he had been cheated of outer sustenance, and when it finally came to him, he found himself cheated of inner support. That brambly garden, that sour soil, needed energy to bring it back into a state of cultivation, and energy, not the will or the skill or the delight, was the one thing that Melville, at sixty-seven, lacked. “My dear Sir,” he had once exclaimed to Mr. Duyckinck, “the two good things to be yet discovered are these—the art of rejuvenating old age in men, and old-ageifying youth in books.” He had not altogether failed in the latter: but the first need was beyond him.

But when energy fails, skill may partly make up for it; and there is a simplicity and directness in these poems which shows greater control of his medium: the annoying inversions are fewer, and among the wildings of Melville’s old age, there is still a rose or two left over from a more cultivated garden. The poem that fittingly closes this MS. volume, The Lake, is perhaps the finest Melville wrote: it is a colloquy between his own spirit and the spirit evoked by the Lake of Pontoosuce. Melville here faces death and emptiness of being, and he draws his faith from that spectacle in which the great religions have found their sustenance, in the march of the seasons, the rhythmic cycle of life, the ecstasy, the agony, the tragedy of the dying god, and his annual resurrection and renewal.

That peace and oneness with Nature, which Isabel had prayed for, came at last to Melville in the closing years of his life. He had renounced much; but he had gained much. What is life? the king in Mardi had asked the philosopher; and the philosopher had said: That question is more final than any answer. After much doubt, exacerbation, searching, after a long weary pilgrimage through books and lands, and not a little intercourse with men, Melville was back to the view of his youth: he now accepted its finality. What power and heroic defiance had not accomplished, love, which has its philosophic equivalent in the desire to merge oneself with the universe and surrender to it, and accept its purposes, as one accepts the desires and whims and aims of one’s beloved—love had achieved this. It was no accident that Melville’s warm attitude toward Elizabeth coincided with this last warm acceptance of the universe. Melville surrendered to his wife, and he surrendered to his rough old mother, the earth, owning the primacy of that ceaseless urge which begets the Ahabs and Babbalanjas and Medias and Jack Chases and Pierres and Clarels, recognizing that intelligence, power, virtue, are not prime movers themselves, but derivative mechanisms that transmit and utilize the energy of life. If one spurn that energy and deny its sources, one’s dreams are futile and one’s hopes empty: but when one accepts life itself as the primary fact, then the dying year brings no grief, and all that fades and decays is but a pledge of what shall again, one day, live and flourish: the very universe itself, and space and time, are but modes of being, no more eternal than the senses that react to them and project upon them the forms that make them useful and significant to man. Whatever be the ultimate nature of things, the universe man conceives is still held together at his own centre: its significance is part and parcel of his own. And at the centre of that centre is a fertilized ovum. Out of the egg comes not merely man but his world: the mightiest constellation is but the ectoderm of man’s original plasm. There is a greater energy than Moby-Dick’s. The seed that in its growth pries open the rock has more power than the inert and brutal elements that oppose it, and there is a seed in man whose growth cannot be denied, a seed that binds him to all life, and causes him to direct his energies, despite frustrations, despite warring elements in his own being, towards a fuller existence marked by love and understanding. The ideality, which Melville could not find in a cold “external” universe metaphysically separated from man—and falsely so—is embodied in the common instincts of animals: it was when he ceased to draw upon these sources that the world became black and painful and hostile, and ideals seemed ghastly disembodiments. When the roots of his animal nature were nourished once more, he leafed again, as the trees leaf in Indian summer, and courage and faith returned. Melville had faced the colourless, unintegrated, primal world that underlies and antedates that which we know through our senses, our feelings, our experiences: he had touched the bare, unkind beginning of things, that chaos which existed when darkness reigned over the face of the waters, and only Moby-Dick had stirred in the deep: he had beheld the white unrefracted truth which exists before it passes through man’s being and is broken up into the colours of art and thought and custom and ritual and organized society. But Nature paints like a harlot, not without reason: she desires to attract the passions of men, to attract and use them for her own end: life. Melville’s consciousness of a more primal world made him see more exhaustively, I think, into the nature of existence: but it was bare rock-truth, unweathered into soil, still less worked over by plants, insects, moulds, and the tools of man: and it gave him nothing that his spirit could feed on. At last he escaped from that bleak ultimate revelation, and, participating in the ancient cycle of life, he found his own life renewed once more.

6

Melville’s last poems gain by comparison with his earlier work: but his prose inevitably loses a little. One does not miss his lack of energy in a quatrain; it is plain and perceptible even in a short novel. One notes this falling off of Melville’s prose in the sketches on the Marquis de Grandvin: it comes out again in the little addition to Rip van Winkle that he wrote. In his prime, writing about Hawthorne, Melville had little use for the tepid quality of Irving’s prose, so genteelly lymphatic; but now, in 1890, he went so far as to dedicate his addendum to the Happy Shade of Sunnyside. The torrid tropical sunlight, the violent gold and purple of Melville’s earlier prose vanished: what was left was the mild pale sunshine cast on the bronzed oak leaves of a winter landscape. These graceful but diminished energies properly link Melville’s spirit with Irving’s. The immediateness of the old narratives was gone. Billy Budd, his final novel, is not a full-bodied story: there is statement, commentary, illustration, just statement, wise commentary, apt illustration: what is lacking is an independent and living creation. The epithets themselves lack body and colour: Billy Budd has nothing to compare with the description of boiling whale-oil in Moby-Dick—“a wild Hindoo odour, like the left wing of the Day of Judgement.”

Billy Budd, which was dedicated to Jack Chase, wherever he might be, alow or aloft, lacks the fecundity and energy of White-Jacket: the story itself takes place on the sea, but the sea itself is missing, and even the principal characters are not primarily men: they are actors and symbols. The story gains something by this concentration, perhaps: it is stripped for action, and even Melville’s deliberate digressions do not halt it. Each of the characters has a Platonic clarity of form. Captain the Honourable Edward Fairfax Vere, “starry Vere,” is a man of superior order: humane, reserved, free from cant, fortified by an equal knowledge of men and books. After the mutiny of the Nore, the time when this story takes place, the command of a British naval vessel is no easy one: the officers are tense and expectant, though outwardly indifferent: mutiny may break out any minute among the “people.” Billy Budd, a seaman taken over by impressment from The Rights of Man, stands out from the rest of the crew: one of Nature’s innocents. A fine frame, yellow hair, an open, almost girlish face, set him off with angelic beauty: and he is a natural favourite among the crew: the Handsome Sailor of eighteenth century balladry.

Without overt act, merely by being what he is, the personification of strength, health, beauty, innocence, Budd incurs the enmity of Claggart, the master-at-arms. Claggart, with a suspicious past at his back but with soft humid ways and obsequious intelligence, has quickly won promotion: he is now the evil agent of discipline, prowling over the ship, watching for disorder—a sea-bag not stowed away, a sailor evading work, or a hint of mutiny. It is as natural for Claggart to hate goodness as it is for Budd to personify it: the evil in the man is apparently causeless in any immediate sense, like the venom in a snake: it simply is there. With a benign, ambiguous exterior, he secretly contrives in small ways to make Billy’s lot miserable; and when Billy, perplexed, brings the matter before a trusty wizen-mouthed old sailor, the old fellow tells “Baby Budd” that Claggart has it in for him. In his simpleness, Budd cannot believe it. How could he?—for he had given no offence. So Claggart plots more deeply against Budd; through confederates in the crew, tale-bearers and spies, he tries to bribe Budd into mutiny. Budd, not realizing the meaning of the suggestion when it is made to him, still flushes with anger, like a fresh girl spattered by an obscenity. Then Claggart goes further. He takes advantage of Budd by wakening him from a sleep and getting him into a compromising position before he is sufficiently awake to withdraw. Now Claggart thinks he has Budd in his power. He appears before Captain Vere and humbly submits his report of Budd’s attempted treachery.

Captain Vere, being a firm man and a sound one, is not greatly impressed by Claggart’s tale: it looks too thin: but for the sake of form and discipline, since the customs of the navy make it necessary to employ such fellows as Claggart, he summons Budd to his own cabin to confront the master-at-arms, instead of airing the matter by a public inquiry. When Budd comes, Claggart repeats his lie to Budd’s face. This poor lad has only one physical blemish: in moments of stress he stammers, and now, confronted by this sudden, horrifying suspicion, he can for the moment give no answer. His mouth makes an effort: no words come forth: the blood mounts up to his head. Captain Vere wisely attempts to soothe him: “There is no hurry, my boy, take your time.” These kindly words have just the opposite effect to that intended, for, touching Billy’s heart to a mighty effort at release, he answers Claggart’s lie with a cannon-blow from his fists. Budd’s first and only act of rebellion is fatal: Claggart is instantaneously killed.