PILGRIM

CHAPTER TEN: TROUBLED FOOTSTEPS

By 1856 Herman Melville had, I think, reached the bottom of his woe, and he was on the point of resignation—resigning his career, his hope of livelihood and fame, the high place among his peers that his genius entitled him to. His short stories during this period gave hints of his gathering resolution; for he plays with his possible fate again and again, as in the story of the fiddler, Hautboy, who had been a famous prodigy in his youth, and who now, in obscurity, with genius and without fame, was happier than a king. Jimmy Rose is another story of a man who has fallen in the world and sinks into a genteel pauperism, wherein all his old graces become pathetic dodges for filling a hungry stomach. Contemplating this character, Melville became for the first time downright sentimental: one feels tears of self-pity welling into his eyes as he uttered the refrain: “Poor, poor Jimmy—God guard us all—poor Jimmy Rose!”

Melville, at least, was too proud to lift a pitiful false front. He will seek other consolations than as a defunct literary celebrity: the occasional student, like Mr. Titus Munson Coan, who finds him in the Berkshires, does not get a glimpse of the South Sea Melville he admires: instead, he must listen to Kant and Hegel and Plato and all the contemporary mysteries. But won’t you tell me something about the cannibals: that was so interesting. Doubtless the dim Bartleby look would come into Melville’s eyes: “That reminds me of the eighth book of Plato’s Republic.” Or perhaps, from a deeper chasm, would come Bartleby’s own reply: I would prefer not to.

Melville had begun to feel, with Pierre, “what all mature men, who are Magians, sooner or later know, and more or less assuredly—that not always in our actions are we our own factors.” When Melville reached this point, his youth was over; and his manhood, which had just begun, was over, too. From an experience so heavy and overwhelming as Melville’s, there was no alternative but retreat, and complete submission. The Olympian had adventured, an innocent abroad in the morning; the Titan had struggled, a wise, tormented, valiant man, working and battling in the sweat and dust of noon: twilight had fallen early, and in the gloom, he could neither adventure nor struggle: “The power and dominion of the present world,” as Mr. D. S. MacColl has said in describing these three dominant figures of the spirit, “is a vanity to him; the furious energy of retaliation against suffering a trivial folly, because in his vast contempt and renunciation of this and of all life, things visible or attainable, present or to come, the height and depth of any other creature dwindle to nothingness and the least is equal to the greatest.” This is the mood of the Pilgrim: the mood of humility and indifference to outward things. A product of defeat and frustration, this attitude is a last attempt to circumvent it. Buddhism and Christianity represent this mood in the history of communities, racked by war, pestilence, slavery, and sheer fatigue of living and its symbol is the cloister, walled off from the distraction and struggle of the outer world. Melville sought a cloister for his spirit. Unable to batter down the indifference of his contemporaries, he endeavoured to erect within himself a fortress that would keep them at bay.

2

Elizabeth Melville noted that bad health, following too close application to work, made travel advisable in 1856: that is the outward explanation of Melville’s circumstances. Melville’s father-in-law again came forward with financial aid, and in October Herman Melville set off on a journey to Constantinople and the Holy Land. He had contemplated such a trip in 1849; and now, from a deeper consciousness of his spiritual dilemma, he wished perhaps to prove the advice he had given Taji in the last pages of Mardi—to return and find his Yillah in Serenia. It was characteristic of Melville’s habit of thought that he should seek for Christ’s kingdom in the territory that had known his presence, instead of plying himself with books and spiritual intermediaries: having come upon Moby-Dick on the adventurous voyages of his youth, he was now, as a man of thirty-seven, hopeful to find through another voyage a sufficient antagonist to this Satanic power, with whom he could ally his own faltering, and almost routed, forces. But it was not merely for peace that Melville set out. Beneath the obvious and inevitable retreat was possibly the hope that the old energies would come back again, that the old Titan would re-awake and the old challenge stir again in his bosom—that, with some of his domestic cares relieved or forgotten, the joy of battle would come back to him, the relish for arduous days of creation. Hopes and fears went with Herman Melville across the Atlantic: but unless we misread his words completely, the fears were uppermost. Perhaps life held no answer. It was possible “after all, that spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of commonplaceness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim, cannot resolve.”

3

Again we come very close to the external round of Melville, for, after sailing to Glasgow and making his way through Lancaster, he arrived at Liverpool on November 8, 1856. There, at the White Bear, he began a journal which he carried through the better part of his trip. Like his earlier journal, it is chiefly a record of outward impressions: meditation, the working of the inward eye, seems always to have followed much later. He was a good traveller. Hawthorne, whom he hunted up in Liverpool, describes him as making his long journeys with scarcely more than a toothbrush for equipment: Melville still retained the sailor’s knack of stowing away a good deal in a small space, and doing without the landsman’s non-essentials; and, as Hawthorne notes, he always presented the appearance of a well-groomed gentleman. More than this: he struck up acquaintance easily, and at the outset he was tempted, upon meeting an agreeable young Scot, to go east with him forthwith on the same steamer. Melville was always keen to enjoy the contrasts and suggestions of new customs; and he notes, for example, how the landlord in the ordinary of his Liverpool hotel acted as if he were presiding over a private dinner party, all thought of mercenary ends banished, although the wine he offered his guests would later be reckoned in the bill.

Hawthorne, now American Consul at Liverpool, was staying at Southport, a watering-place some twenty miles distant; and Melville sought his old friend out there and stayed with him a few days. The afternoon of his arrival, they walked together along the strand, these two men, both, alas! aging quickly, though Hawthorne was only fifty-two, and Melville was fifteen years younger. The beach was lonely; a strong wind stirred panic in the long grass and occasionally swept the loose sand in their faces; and Melville, a little weariedly, as if somehow the matter must be settled, went back again to the things he used to talk about with Hawthorne in the sunny Berkshire days, things as bleak as the sea-coast itself, and as infinite as the sky: Time and Free-Will, and Eternity, and Faith! Melville cannot believe in Christianity nor be comfortable with his doubts, torments, inner wounds. Hawthorne, as usual, was aloofly sympathetic: it was strange how Melville persisted, had persisted ever since Hawthorne knew him and probably long before, in wandering to and fro in these deserts. If Melville were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential, thinks Hawthorne to himself: for he has a high and noble nature, and is better worth immortality than most of us.

Melville must have looked pleadingly at that grave, heavy-browed face, with its domed forehead, which seemed to promise so much. Did it have no answer for him? Did those intent eyes say to one, as Plinlimmon’s said to Pierre—Vain, vain are all your struggles and endeavours? Except when Hawthorne wrote, how little did he ever give in exchange! Did Melville feel that Hawthorne mutely understood, and had no remedy: that the mind that had seen into Hester Prynne’s heart or Chillingworth’s evil spirit had retreated, hopeless, from his riled depths? If Melville did not feel that, still he needed a confidant, and the wild screams of the gulls over the lonely sands may have awakened to unpremeditated sudden declaration the wild loneliness of his own heart. Melville might as well confess it to Hawthorne: he had about made up his mind to be annihilated. There was no place for him in America: his best and deepest work, his maturest convictions, were lightly tossed aside by his contemporaries: they were interested in whale oil at so much per gallon, not in the quest of Moby-Dick; and they wanted stories that would tickle their vanity, like a mirror, or make the blood course more pleasantly, like a glass of port wine. Melville would not commit suicide: that was a weak way out: but he might deliberately withdraw.

Perhaps Hawthorne looked doubly grave: it is doubtful if he offered any word of countervailing encouragement; for he probably did not have enough confidence in Melville’s genius, much as he respected his probity, to urge him to continue the fight. Besides, he was a little embarrassed; despite his political influence, he had been unable to get Melville the consular post that would have relieved him so greatly; and he felt a little responsible for Melville’s financial plight, if not for his spiritual predicament—although his failure reflected nothing upon his practical good-will, and there is no sign that Melville was even faintly reproachful. Perhaps, at bottom, Hawthorne felt guilty because he could not offer back in friendship all Melville was willing to give—and craved. Unrequited friendship is no easy state for either party to bear.

Evening fell: the wind grew raw: the waters became steel-edged at the horizon with a girder of black: the occasional lights in the town increased the sense of solitude, as the two dark figures made their way back to the huddled silhouette of houses. There was no true end to this talk, but instead of that, the consolations of the table were presently spread: stout to drink and fox-and-geese to eat. Julian had grown into a fine lad; and Una was taller than her mother. The food, the coal-fire, and the chatter of the children before bedtime gave Melville, if only for a moment, something solid to go on, something he could not find in Hawthorne’s patient silences. Well, on the morrow, Melville must say good-bye and go up to Liverpool with Hawthorne to make inquiries about passage among the steamers. On a rainy night, standing on a street corner in Liverpool, he took Hawthorne’s hand and said good-bye to him. Hawthorne was touched. He respected that pale, brooding spirit, that restless, adventurous, still aimless traveller. Casually, they shook hands: the night and the rain swallowed up Melville, and they never met again, and as far as one knows, they never corresponded.

For Melville this was perhaps a last desperate essay at maintaining their friendship; and in spite of Hawthorne’s cordial greeting, the meeting was hollow and it had come to nothing. Each had a secret locked in his bosom; and, in a sense, each had lost the key. Yet there was something fine and true between these two men—if only there had not been the reserve and the distance between them, a reserve that Melville’s old rollicking ways and easy gipsy friendliness could not break down. One can scarcely doubt that it was about Hawthorne Melville wrote the following Monody, included in the sheaf of poems issued just before Melville’s death:

The fatal cold that had struck this friendship, the only deep one that had sprung up in Melville’s life and attracted all the members of his personality—if one omits the retrospective warmth of his feeling for Jack Chase—this fatal cold did not lessen Melville’s inner pangs and his feeling of desolation.

4

On November eighteenth, Melville finally set sail, passing Cape St. Vincent and Cape Trafalgar, entering the Straits of Gibraltar about a week later, and skirting along the coast of Africa. Throughout this journey, his eyes were keen and eager: when Gibraltar stands lit up by the sun, and casts a shadow over the rest of the scene, he thinks of England casting the rest of the world in shade; and when Algiers lies before him, he remembers a passage in Don Quixote. As the boat sails out, the town in the distance looks “like a sloping rock covered with bird-lime.” In Greece, the scene became fantastic and memorable: the pantaloons and male petticoats, the embroidered jackets, the noble faces and ferocious moustachios—it is the Greece of Edmond About—and the town itself, dirty, grimly picturesque, with old men who look like Pericles reduced to a charbonnier.

From Syra to Salonica: at daybreak Melville came on deck to see Mt. Olympus, covered with snow, and Ossa and Pelion to the south, with Mt. Atlas, rather conical, on the opposite shore. In port, the same welter of picturesqueness, dirt, modern needs, ancient beauty. The remains of a Roman triumphal arch across a street and the fragments of a noble Greek edifice, three columns and part of a pediment, used as a gateway and support to the outhouse of a Jew’s abode. The English resident comes aboard ship: he has that cockney confidence in the rights and privileges of God’s Englishman that makes the English so comical and so efficient wherever they go. He tells Melville he has been for a day’s shooting in the Vale of Tempe. Ye Gods! Whortleberrying on Olympus! The countryside: hot-houses and trellises. The monastery where Melville was served with sweetmeats, fruit, and coffee, under an ancient sycamore. Under all these little odd stimulations, the palate becomes less jaded and the eyes are refreshed; the spirit itself becomes eager.

When, finally, the ship sets out for Constantinople, Olympus shows in the moonlight like a ship of white cloud. On deck, the rich Turkish effendis, in their long, furred robes of yellow, attended by their harems, securely guarded in tents, give Melville other things to think about. Orientals have no hearth, no bed, and never blush! The women are pretty; for the Mohammedan religion disdains the corset, along with a good part of Western ethics and religion. These creatures are lazy, gracious, voluptuous; in Constantinople Melville finds that women with ugly faces are rare, and that every other window shows faces, Jewish, Grecian, Armenian, which in America would be a cynosure in a ballroom. Does Melville suspect that enjoyment of the rites of sex, skill and wisdom in that enjoyment, have contributed by sexual selection and general good health to this beauty? No: this is one aspect of life where, as we shall again see later, he observes the facts, but finds no clues.

As the ship approaches Constantinople, the contrasts pile up: the sail up the Hellespont is exhilarating, although spoiled a little by the mists: at night, as the ship is lying by in a fog, he hears only the bells of the neighbouring ships, and the sharp bark of the pariah dogs on the shore. The passengers endure sea-sickness, discomfort, and damp for two days. Melville turns to an old Turk and says: This is very bad. The Turk answers: God’s will is good, and smokes his pipe in cheerful resignation. That is the East’s answer to our Western fretfulness, to our desire to discipline the elements and remove all the natural obstacles to man’s existence and happiness: but the East pays its price for it: the beauties of Constantinople are shrouded in dank, odourous streets that are unmarked and unnamed and lead nowhere: the priests in the Mosque of St. Sophia sell the precious mosaics as they fall to the floor, not endeavouring to repair the scaling walls of that superb interior: the bazaars are a wilderness of traffic. Melville loses himself and is confounded and bewildered by the din, the barbaric confusion, of the whole city. At night he does not dare to leave the hotel, for fear of being assassinated for the sake of a watch or a ring. In short, failing to struggle against God’s will, the East puts up, in the same easy spirit, with every species of human roguery: that is no answer to the White Whale! Indeed, Melville scarcely dares walk the streets in the daylight without keeping his hand on his purse: for no discoverable reason whatever, he was followed about for two or three hours by an infernal Greek and his confederates, whom he could neither intimidate nor elude. He began to feel nervous, remembering that the fearful intent of Schiller’s ghost scene hangs upon being followed in Venice by an Armenian; and he was thankful when he finally escaped.

But the views! The scenes from the steamer up the Bosphorous to Buykudesh: magnificent! the whole panorama is one pomp of art and nature. Europe and Asia are here shown at their best: a gallery of ports and harbours formed by the interchange of promontory and bay: porpoises sport in the blue, and large flights of pigeons overhead go through evolutions like those of armies, whilst ships anchor at the foot of ravines, deep among green basins, where the only canvas one would expect would be tents. No wonder the Czars have always coveted the capital of the Sultans: no wonder the Russian, among his firs, sighs for these myrtles, cedars, cypresses. The green minarets of the cypress contrast with the gold minarets of the Mosque: so nature and man, so death and life, intermingle, too. Kiosk and fountain, dark trees and daisies tipped with crimson, stand out with the jewelled clearness of a Persian miniature: one would think that these scenes would melt away like some castle of confectionery if the elements treated them rudely.

Nearer, Melville is in the atmosphere of the Arabian Nights: the aspect of the first bridge, coming back, is like that of a Grand Fancy Dress Ball: the air is an immense Persian rug: 1,500,000 men are the actors in a vast and endless procession, pedlars, beggars, confectionery sellers, malefactors chained together with iron necklaces and rings; porters with immense burdens, military officers, ladies in yellow slippers, black eunuchs followed by white servants, sherbet sellers, Georgians, shepherds marching in sheep’s clothing, sheep, droves of donkeys followed by animated little boys poking them assiduously, boys with Arabian Nights names, Yusef, Hassan, Hamet. But if it has the beauty of some colossal London pantomime, it also has its defect: Melville cannot step over the footlights. He sees these Turks, Armenians, Georgians, Greeks: he would like to know them better: but for conversation he must turn to the captain or the English resident, or the fellow tourist. He wearies of this spectatorial attitude, these long days when he cannot talk to a sympathetic soul. Melville had got nearer to the Typees by living among them than he did with these closer brethren. After six days in Constantinople, he set off by steamer for Alexandria, via Smyrna; for, though he makes what he can of these profane diversions, the chief end of these travels is Terra Sancta itself.

The vessel stopped at Smyrna, and Melville had his first smell of the nearer East: camel-dung drying against the walls of the houses, for fuel, and the camel himself, the supercilious ambassador of this civilization, with his neck out like a tortoise, and his tail like an eel, by which the driver directed him, the swaying of the rider increasing with the motion of the camel, as in the mast of a ship, the higher one climbs. What a unique creature: he carries his neck like a clergyman in a stiff cravat, his feathery forelegs, his long lank hind ones, and his spongy hoofs, ploughing through the muddy lanes like four mops—in short, a cross between an ostrich and a grasshopper! Melville was thrilled by the curious appearance of strings of laden camels passing through the narrow, crowded ways of the bazaar—and he learned that these gorgeous Turkish clothes, many of them, were made of cotton and silk imported into Lancashire and reproduced and sent back to the native land, to the ruin of Turkish manufacturers, and the misery of the Manchester operative, just as pure copper was sent to England, and after being alloyed and cheapened was returned as unstamped coin to Constantinople.

The ship steamed out of Smyrna and passed the bleak islands that had once meant so much in history, Delos, flowery in fable, but desolate at best and now quite sterile; and Patmos, another disenchanting isle; and Timos, with its small hamlets and the little churches sticking perkily out mid the low huts of the villages. Christmas Day Melville spent at Syra again: he mentions the captain’s mild observance of the feast in a glass of champagne; but he put in the notebook no private or domestic memory. Perhaps he took to heart the advice he had already framed in Pierre: “With a continent and an ocean between him and his wife—thus sundered from her by whatever imperative cause for a long term of years:—the husband, if passionately devoted to her and by nature broodingly sensitive of soul were wise to forget her till he embrace again.”

Melville contrasted these bleak, desolate Aegean Islands with those of the Polynesian archipelago: the former had lost their virginity, whilst the latter were as fresh as at their first creation. Melville knew that withered feeling. To look upon the yellow of Patmos, who would believe that a god had been there; and, one may add, to look upon the sear tint of Melville’s soul, during the strained years that had just passed, who would believe that a god had once reposed there, either?

At last the Alexandrian lighthouse came into view; and shortly after that Pompey’s pillar, looking like a huge stick of candy that had long been sucked. Melville made a quick excursion to Cairo; and spent two nights there, wandering through the streets, where the houses seemed a collection of old orchestras, organs, proscenium boxes, or like masses of old grotesque furniture, lumbering a garret, and covered with dust: the streets, so narrow, through the projection of the upper storeys, that they seemed almost tunnels, made noon itself dim: in the lonelier parts of the city many of the houses were uninhabited and had a ghoulish look: but the city itself, for all these desolate houses and stoved-in domes and rubbish-filled alleys, was alive with bargain and chaffer and shouting camel drivers and whining blind men: desert and verdure clashed together like splendour and squalor, like gloom and gaiety: such violent chiaroscuro in all the senses bewildered one like strong wine on an empty stomach.

The Pyramids completed the effect of this exploration. Together, they made a magnificent, a terrible, an unforgettable day. From the distance, the Pyramids jutted over the sand like purple mountains. To ascend the great Pyramid, there were as many different routes as there are for crossing the Alps: precipice on precipice, cliff on cliff. Nothing in Nature but the sea gives such an idea of vastness; the very grass that grows around the Pyramids does not touch them, as if in awe of them. Exhausted a little with his climb, a pain in his chest, Melville found the Arab guides tender: as he hurried on, for none but the phlegmatic could scale this mound deliberately, the Arabs in their white flowing robes might have been angels conducting him up to heaven. One old man fainted halfway up and had to be brought down: he essayed to go inside and fainted again: it was too much for him.

Well, it was almost too much for Melville: it was not the sense of height but the sense of immensity that was stirred: with all other architecture, however vast, the eye is gradually inured to the sense of magnitude by passing from part to part: but here there was no storey or stage: it was all or nothing, not height or breadth or length or depth but unspeakable vastness, less like courses of masonry than like strata of rocks, a long slope of crags and precipices. As with the ocean, you learned as much of its vastness by the first glance as you would in a month. The great Pyramid refused to be studied or adequately comprehended. Nor had it lost by the tearing away of its casing, though it had scaled enough stone to build a walled town; on the contrary, when it presented a smooth plane it must have lost as much in impressiveness as the ocean does when unfurrowed—a dead calm of masonry. A feeling of awe and terror gradually came over Melville: the Arabs were no longer angels, but seemed, in their soft, imperturbable way, somehow malign. Stooping and doubling in the interior, as in a coal shaft, Melville shuddered at the ancient Egyptians: they had a mixture of the cunning and the awful. Moses learned his lore from the Egyptians: the awful idea of Jehovah was born there. They must needs have been terrible inventors, those ancient wise men: as out of the crude forms of the natural earth they could evoke by art the Pyramids, so, out of the dull elements of the insignificant thoughts that are in all men, they could by analogous art rear the transcendent conception of God. Indeed, the Egyptians had outwitted mortality. The Pyramids were conceived out of an energy as mighty as Nature’s: nought but an earthquake or a geological revolution could smother it up. That was something like an answer to the White Whale—albeit such a distant answer. The pyramidical energy, as well as the pyramidical scorn, were both lacking in Melville now, high though they had towered in Moby-Dick.

Back in his high-ceilinged room of Shepherd’s Hotel, with its almost monkish barrenness, the Pyramids still loomed before Herman Melville—something vast, indefinite, uncomfortable, and awful. Nothing that he met in the holy ways of Jerusalem, on the Mount of Temptation or in the Garden of Gethsemane, compared with the powerful impression left on him by the Pyramids. Did his instinct at last tell him that power was necessary, but that power alone was not enough, that Power and Love must work together, harmoniously married, as in one of the oldest of mythic figures, before man’s triumph is anything but evanescent? The issue of power and love, knowledge and sympathy, contrivance and imagination, is art; and the highest product of art is not a painting, a statue, a book, a pyramid, but a human personality. When power and love were divorced in the personality, love became impotent, and power became malign and unlovely; and the personality itself mouldered, mouldered into a Jackson, a Timon, an Ahab, a Maria Glendinning, a Pierre, an Isabel. The Egyptians certainly had not forgotten love; and the Nile itself, which spread greenness when its floods receded, was the symbol of its benign fertility. Did some hint of this touch Melville in Egypt or in Palestine? Apparently, yes; for in Clarel we shall see the germs of a new feeling about life, and the source of that feeling is love, a clear and unambiguous love.

5

What further impact the journey made upon Melville’s mind, we shall best gather when we come to consider Clarel and some of his minor poems; and the further events of his journey home via Italy, the Netherlands, and England can well be condensed into scattered observations and epigrams that punctuate the account in his journals. Passing Patmos, Melville was again afflicted with the great curse of modern travel—scepticism. “Could no more realize that St. John had ever had revelations here than when off Juan Fernandez could believe in Robinson Crusoe according to Defoe.” “Pompeii like any other town. Same old humanity. All the same whether one be dead or alive. Pompeii comfortable sermon. Like Pompeii better than Paris.” Pisa: “Campanile like pine poised just ere snapping. You wait to hear crack. Like Wordsworth’s mooncloud, it will move all together if it move at all, for Pillars all line with it.” “Rome fell flat on me. Oppressing flat.... Tiber a ditch, yellow as saffron. The whole landscape nothing independent of association. St. Peter’s looks small from tower of Capitol.... Dome not so wonderful as St. Sophia’s.... Went to Baths of Caracalla. Wonderful. Massive. Ruins form as it were natural bridges of thousands of arches. There are glades and thickets among the ruins—high up.—Thought of Shelley. Truly, he got his inspiration here. Corresponded with his drama and mind. Still majesty and desolate grandeur.” “Quirinal Palace.... The Gardens—a paradise without the joy—freaks and caprices of endless wealth ... as stone is sculptured into forms of foliage, so here foliage turned into forms of sculpture.” Florence: “Breughel’s picture much pleased me. Not pleased with the Venus de Medici, but very much astonished at the Wrestlers, and charmed with Titian’s Venus.” “Rather be in Venice on a rainy day than in any other capital on a fine one.” London: “Crystal Palace—digest of the universe. Vast toy. No substance. Such appropriation of space as is made by a rail fence.” Oxford: “It was here I first confessed my gratitude for my motherland and could view her with pride. Oxford to an American as well worth visiting as Paris, though in a different way.”

6

During this crowded journey, while Melville was in Italy, there happened an event, obscure, mysterious, obliquely narrated, and published only at the end of his life, which gives us a further clue to Melville’s character and experience. Knowing Melville’s habits of composition, one is fairly sure that some objective fact lies beneath the surface of the verse called After the Pleasure Party: all the more because he published the poem only after he had reached the serenity and safety of old age. That these verses were not merely the product of untethered imagination one suspects, too, because their theme, remorse and bitter regret after renouncing a passionate experience, is underlined by the words of another poem, Madame Mirror:

This long poem, After the Pleasure Party, stands out with particular boldness because it contains the only direct references to sexual passion that one finds in Melville’s entire work, except for haphazard and unimportant incidents—or the plainly fictitious events in Pierre. It is a faint and intricate clue; but one must not neglect it.

Melville pictures a paradisiac garden in Italy: the upland falling behind the house, fragrant with jasmin and orange blossom, the white marble of the house itself, gleaming between the lanes of austere trees, the green terraces falling in gentle cataracts down to the starlit Mediterranean Sea: a place of beauty and an hour of balm “after long revery’s discontent.” The pilgrim, dusty with travel in barren lands, revels in the sensuous peace: he is not so completely the pilgrim, so thoroughly the hermit, that his heart is entirely his own: on the contrary, it is out of a desperate dryness and loneliness of soul that Melville is suddenly beset by such temptations as the hermits of the Thebaid found in the desert. We have no image of the woman who walked with Melville through these green walks, under the star-bright sky: he himself tried, in the years that followed, to forget “the glade wherein Fate spun Love’s ambuscade,” tempting him to flout pale years of cloistral life and “flush himself in sensuous strife.” We do not know if it was she who repulsed him, as the shore repulses the hungry billows, tired of the homeless deep, or whether it was a resistance within himself that wrecked and scattered the impulses that were driving him against the warm object of his desire: but we know that, flushed perhaps by wine, and stirred by the fragrant spring night, sex asserted itself again in Melville: the “dear desire through love to sway” came over him, and when he found himself baffled, attempting to rule his passion yet not able to reign, neither conquering the woman herself nor the passion she had awakened, he was aware of a dreary shame of frustration. Blocked in his highest powers of thought, in his career as a writer, Melville found himself equally defeated—and perhaps by the same cluster of images—in that other citadel of personality. Bitterly he cries: “And kept I long heaven’s watch for this, contemning love, for this, even this?”

There is the cry of the passionate man who in his marriage had kept to the letter of his pledge, and yet found himself struggling against its spirit—struggling and yet paralysed. The sudden opening of passion, that had begun at lunch this day, as the guests of the house, like the ladies and gentlemen in the prologue to the Decameron, had lain about in groups on the grass, this passion, deepening in a secluded glade under the Mediterranean night, had pulled Melville off his lonely throne: in a dream he was a king, perhaps, a lonely king—an idiot crowned with straw! That gust of passion had brought enlightenment: the fires in him were banked, not dead: but it left him bereaved. He shrank from its consequences. In this enlightenment he remembered and magnified other incidents on his journey: the barefoot peasant girl in Naples who had climbed up the hills near the wheels of his carriage and had given him the sudden impulse to fire upon her the petty hell within his own bosom. Hers was a wily innocence, and one can only vaguely guess at Melville’s memories when he exclaims: “The cheat! On briars her buds were strung.... To girls, strong man’s a novice weak.” All this became part of his “sad rosary of belittling pain.”

Melville might seem to others, might in opaque moments seem to himself, a pale, scholarly man, immersed solely in things of the mind: but what a caricature that apparition was of the actual man! The pallor did not mean he could not feel the sun when it shone upon him: “the plain lone bramble thrills with Spring as much as vines that grapes shall bring,” and when this mood was uppermost, how gladly would he throw his arms around some radiant ninny, the first glad, willing girl he might meet, and buy the veriest wanton’s rose—“would but my bee therein repose.” If only he could remake himself, or free himself from this disturbance, this void tormenting urge, this feeling of disunity, this being but half of a mismatched whole: surely, there was some anarchic blunder, some rank cosmic jest, in the state that made the single self incomplete and yet set all the odds against the possibility that selves who matched should meet and mate. This was part of Melville’s disillusion, that hot impetus he had felt in that fine Italian garden promised in ultimate reward no more than his marriage, equally fervid and romantic at the start, had brought him. And yet—and yet—perhaps this temporary impulse was an impulse to act upon, whether it had any cosmic justification or not: the turbulent heart and the rebel brain did not satisfy themselves so easily with abstract reasons.

When Melville leaves this scene of his thwarted renewal, and comes to Rome, confronting its pagan statuary and its Christian churches, he has half an impulse to gather all his doubts and difficulties together and make a sacrifice of them to the Church, in return for the peace she gives: but something deeper in him, something reflected in the mighty statuary and art of the Roman and the Greek, prompts him to turn to Athene herself, who united power and peace, far from the “sexual feud” that “clogs the aspirant’s life.” But no outer institution or activity could share Melville’s burden: at bottom, he feels hopeless of either Church or of Art. Never, he says, passion peace shall bring, nor art inanimate for long inspire. Ah, no! because the sick man turns to these things as to a powerful medicine, to serve as a specific, once and for all; whereas in health, they must be treated as food, to be welcomed recurrently. Melville was sick; and he was aware of it. “Nothing may help or heal while Amor, incensed, remembers wrong.”

These last lines were not given to Melville by his experience but were the fruits of his ultimate reflection: and there was wisdom in them. Sex is deep and central in every life, and the wrongs that are committed against Amor, whether they are wrongs of abstention or wrongs of satiety, whether they are the weakness of a love unpolarized, or the weakness of a love whose validity is established solely in legal documents and obligations, these wrongs may exact their revenge on every phase of a man’s activity. There is no formula for love, except the tact and usage of lovers. Reserve, indifference, and abstention destroy that tact: the lover loses his sense of occasion, and is impassive where he should be quick, or tormented, as Melville was tormented by the peasant girl, when he should be calm. The matter of loyalty does not enter here; or rather, all these thoughts were disloyalties; indeed, Melville was disloyal to the spirit of his marriage in a thousand repugnances or indifferences that far more seriously undermined his relations with Elizabeth than the most outright liaison would have done, had it left Melville poised, collected, refreshed.

In this experience “After the Pleasure Party,” Melville approached close to a central dilemma in his life: he approached it, but he was paralysed, paralysed by the habit of self-control as other men are thrust into helpless action by their lust. Melville’s career, his thought, his vision demanded a singleness of purpose: to attain this singleness he was all eagerness, as he put it in Pierre, “to cast off the most intense, beloved bond, as a hindrance to the attainment of whatever transcendental object that usurper mood so tyrannically suggests. Then the beloved bond seems to hold us to no essential good; lifted to exalted mounts, we can dispense with all the vale; endearments we spurn; kisses are blisters to us; and forsaking the palpitating forms of mortal love, we emptily embrace the boundless and unbodied air. We think we are not human; we become as immortal bachelors and gods; but again, like the Greek gods themselves, prone we descend to earth; glad to be uxorious once more; glad to hide these godlike heads within the bosoms made of too-seducing clay.”

This pilgrimage of Melville’s, from that high talk with Hawthorne on the bleak sands of Southport and those unspeakable thoughts that welled up in him when he confronted the Pyramids, to the sting of a passing peasant girl or the soft hints and caresses in the arboured walk by the Mediterranean, had shown Melville the extremes of his own being: alone with divinity, in solitude, he found himself reaching, thirstily, eagerly, towards the all-too-seducing clay. For Melville, unlike Plato, there was no happy union between these opposites: he had no wise Diotima to teach him how the children of the flesh may lead to that union with the other self out of which the children of the spirit are born: nor did he realize that the lust of the satisfied man is incomparably more cleansing to the spirit than the tormented chastity of the unsatisfied one. This was a misfortune for Melville. His salvation would have been to recognize that he had reached the limits of his own lonely excursion: that all a man can find as a solitary being, and value, and cleave to, exploring in utter loneliness the trackless ways of the universe, he had achieved in Moby-Dick: pride and power and the isolated untouched self had nothing further to teach him, and there was no dominion more sterile than that long reign. He must withdraw from this proud isolation, not into the disguised pride and the equal isolation of humility, but into participation with the life around him and into what he had inherited from the past—not scorning Plato or Goethe because their union had been fruitful, whilst his great immaculacy had proved black and sterile.

In achieving his depths, Melville had missed the surface: he had brought up fire and lava and ashes, from that deep volcano of his being, but he had never in maturity properly explored the woods and groves and gardens that give men peace and untroubled love—and it was pride, a self-defeating pride, that urged him to return to those depths, prizing “the clear intelligence alone” and disdaining a love that was “linked and locked with a self impure.” Partly, Melville overcame this pride, and he mingled with his fellows and widened his explorations in the region they had settled and cultivated: but these new aims did not engross him as the pursuit of Moby-Dick had done. Had he been able to surrender more easily to love, to his wife, to his family relations, at thirty-eight, he might have discovered, while his physical powers were healing, that triumphant serenity and surety of purpose which did not come to him until his old age had transmuted his rejected passions and made a fertile union with reality.

Melville left his Italian garden, with chaos still struggling in his soul. For slighting Amor he was for a while destined to know, not inner peace, but the sting and poison of every chance arrow: in Venice, floating on the canal in a “swoon of a noon and a trance of tide” like calms far off Peru, he was to hear a lattice click and see between the slats, mutely summoning him, the loveliest eyes of a girl. He who had faced peril in nature and man, who had swum between the whale’s black flukes and the white shark’s fin, and who had wandered in the enemy’s desert, New York, warily scanning the envy and slander that followed him there, he who had faced these things cannot stand the “basilisk look” of that girl: he bids his boatman throw off his drowsiness and shoot quickly by. The wanderer discovers that sirens are real: they do in fact lie in wait for a man, wooing him by the same deadly muses. He runs from them—excusing his shame with the memory of Ulysses, “brave, wise, and Venus’ son,” but the very fact that he imprisons this incident in verse and publishes it more than thirty years after shows that he did not escape easily.

“There is no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy,” Melville wrote in Pierre, “that a mortal man can possibly evoke, which will stand the final test in a real impassioned onset of Life and Passion upon him. Then all the fair philosophy or Faith—phantoms that he raised from the mist, slide away and disappear as ghosts at cock-crow. For Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass. Amidst his gray philosophizings, Life breaks upon a man like a morning.” Without conceiving Melville’s philosophy as a phantom, one may still wish that it had confronted and not so desperately fled from these enlightening assaults of life and passion. He needed no further share of restrained and circumspect virtues: he needed the courage of life, the courage to be glad with the morning sun, to breathe deeply the fragrance of the air, to relax his limbs in the heat of noon, to feel again the dear inner vigour of his manliness, that vigour which a man is conscious of only in the presence of a woman who rouses him. Denying that vigour, he found that the dawn was smothered in grey clouds, and the rose had lost its fragrance, and the sun its power to heal. His journey helped him recover his interest in life and his poise: it enabled him to carry on as a man: but, though he resumed his work, that final confidence or desperation men need if they are to undertake the great labour of creation was still insufficient. The masculine attack, so bold, so deep-seated in Mardi, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick, did not wholly come back—and if one asks the reason for this one will find the answer, in part, “traced under an image of Amor Threatening.”

7

Melville returned home toward the middle of 1857. Meanwhile, The Confidence Man, published by Sampson, Low and Company, and not by his old publishers, Harper’s, had done little to improve his fortunes. Indeed, its English edition was so small that it for long remained unknown to the bibliographer; and in America the work, though it received occasional praise, did not fare much better. Except in the roughest political lampooning, satire did not penetrate the leathery optimism and the cast-iron self-righteousness of antebellum America; and if Melville wanted support and confidence, The Confidence Man was the wrong way to go about it. One need not be surprised that the sequel was never published, and in all likelihood, never written.

Melville’s resolve to be annihilated was lessened by his journey: for though he had not been shattered with light on the road to Damascus, faith flickered and smoked occasionally, like smouldering wood before it is ready to blaze. The shearing of his head, the donning of sackcloth, the last ironic act of renunciation was still almost a decade away: with new resolution, he made a succession of attempts to regain the position he had once occupied.

The lecture lyceum gave him his first opportunity: the Civil War was the second. Between 1857 and 1860 Melville joined the politicians and the woman suffragists and the prohibitionists and the transcendentalists and the Fourierists and the travellers from strange parts of the world and distinguished foreigners, in the one corner of the marketplace where they could all get a living: the public platform. It was not an easy pill for him to swallow, for though he lectured on the sculpture of the Vatican and the sights of Rome, he was known, hailed, gaped at still as the famous author of Peedee, Pog-Dog, and Hullabaloo—the man who had lived among the cannibals. Well might he write in Pierre: “Permanently to alleviate pain, we must first dart some added pangs.” He was brave enough about the whole business; in 1858 he wrote: “I should be glad to lecture there [in Baltimore] or anywhere. If they will pay expenses and give a reasonable fee, I am ready to lecture in Labrador or on the Isle of Desolation off Patagonia.”

Melville showed himself; he lectured; but he stooped no further. Mid all the spellbinders and strutting celebrities of the period, with their characteristic masks, sonorities, grimaces, this quiet man, with the small, fine nose and the weary, whimsical smile, and an air of patient earnestness, could have cut no very great figure to a public that had never been used to the emphasis of under-statement. Indeed, Melville’s lecture fees tell as much: they averaged around fifty dollars a lecture, and at this time Thoreau, with even a narrower reputation, got as much for a reading. The lectures gave Melville an opportunity to travel, and he must have welcomed this: he went as far afield as Montreal and Milwaukee: but in all he gave less than thirty lectures. One wonders about his audiences. Did Thoreau meet him at the station in Concord or did Whitman listen to him in New York? Whom did he fall in with on the Ohio river steamers? What did he make of the emigrant New Englanders, Germans, merchants, farmers, roustabouts, gamblers? Had his Mississippi buffoons touched them off, or did they make his staunchest effects pallid? Did he identify himself with them, share their aims, feel a thrill of anticipation at their destinies—or did he foresee in them the final disruption of the America that had nourished him?

The record is almost a blank; but a newspaper report of one of the lectures, in the Boston Journal, 1857, shows that Melville’s shrewd eye was far from being turned inward. Describing the statues in the Church of St. John Lateran, he observes that “Socrates looks like an Irish comedian, Julius Caesar so sensible and businesslike of aspect it might be taken for the bust of a railroad president; Seneca with the visage of a pawnbroker; Nero a fast young man, Plato with the locks and airs of an exquisite, as if meditating the destinies of the world under the hands of a hair-dresser.” These comments prove, what all the minor documents of Melville’s life during this period show, that the jocular irrepressible spirit—“bear with mine infirmity of jocularity,” he exclaims to Duyckinck—the spirit who had written Omoo and White-Jacket, was not altogether Timonized or defeated. His satire still worked obliquely, touching both his own countrymen and their pragmatic contemporaries, the Romans. Nor did Melville conceal his feelings about the benefits of mickonaree Christianity and “white civilization.” In another lecture, after quoting from a local English paper in one of the South Sea Islands, which suggested the propriety of not having the native language taught in the common schools, he threw down the sheet in plain disgust, and announced to the audience, in allusion to the reputed desire of the natives of Georges Island to be annexed to the United States, that he was sorry to see it, since, as a friend of humanity, and especially a friend of the South Sea Islanders, he would pray, and call upon all Christians to pray with him, that the Polynesians might be delivered from all foreign and contaminating influences.

During this period of lecturing, Melville began to write again, with no hope of profit or fame, but for his own satisfaction; and, anticipating Thomas Hardy’s example, he turned to verse. If one can date his first new essays in verse—for the poems in Mardi show that there were early efforts—one must give the time as probably 1858, and for a while only Elizabeth shared this secret with him. By 1860, before he went for a voyage with his younger brother, now Captain Thomas Melville, commander of the Boston clipper Meteor, his verses were numerous enough to make a volume. The decision to make this voyage came rather suddenly; and one finds Melville writing to Mr. Duyckinck, mid the haste of departure, to see if he will undertake to advise with Allan Melville as to a publisher, and in case of publication, be sure that the printer’s proof-reader is a careful man. Melville, the author of nine books, still deferred to Mr. Duyckinck’s professional experience; and, on getting a favourable reply, he told Duyckinck that “it was quite a wind from the field of old times.”

From this correspondence with Evert Duyckinck—and an allusion in a letter to George about Melville’s own “winter and rough weather”—one gathers that after Pierre there had been an estrangement, or at least a prolonged silence: in 1856 the Duyckincks had recorded in their Cyclopedia their conviction that Pierre was a false step, and only now, after eight years had passed, was the breach healed. As for Melville’s mood in travel, he had this to say: “I anticipate as much pleasure as, at the age of forty, one temperately can, on the voyage I am going. I go under very happy auspices so far as the ship is concerned. A noble ship and a nobler captain—and he my brother. We have the breadth of those tropics before us, to sail over twice, and shall round the world. Our first port is San Francisco, which we shall probably make in 110 days. Thence we go to Manilla—and thence, I hardly know where—I wish devoutly you were going along. I think it would agree with you. The prime requisites for enjoyment on sea-voyages, for passengers, is 1st health—2nd good-nature. Both first rate things, but not universally to be found.—At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.” The good-bye and God bless you, with which Melville closed this letter, showed a sort of solemn warmth. In a lonely life, even an Evert Duyckinck might prove a comrade....

The book of poetry was never published in its original form. Mr. Meade Minnigerode conjectures that the manuscript was that of Clarel; but Melville’s concern, in his memoranda for Allan, that each piece should be printed on a page by itself, however small the piece, shows, apart from anything else, that it could not have been Clarel; and when Melville told his brother, two years later, that he had disposed of his “doggerel” to a trunkmaker, who took the whole lot off his hands at ten cents the pound, one must infer that he himself had become dissatisfied with the bulk of his early work, and destroyed most of it, salvaging a few pieces, like the verse to the Captain of the Meteor, for his later volumes. In the first flush of experiment, however, Melville’s poetry pleased him: the form of verse gave compactness to his thoughts, and the writing of it did not inflict that long continuous drain on his vitality that the larger prose pieces called for. Melville would pace the quarter-deck with his brother, reciting his verses in the moonlight: the joy of creation, even minor creation, could still stir him up, and no doubt the cadences of the moving ship, heaving, falling, rolling, added to the pleasure of the words themselves.

At the end of three months, when they had reached California, Melville had exhausted his supply of books and papers, probably, and his brother’s patience, and his own capacity for boredom: by that time his health had doubtless improved again, and, urging him to break the trip and quicken his return, his old longing for Elizabeth may have come back with greater force. He was never quite happy in her company, nor was he quite happy away from it. All the difficulties of their domestic economy tended to make their relations prosaic and commonplace, for one does not cook for and clean and clothe four children without a considerable amount of unflinching prose; and Elizabeth’s incapacity for domestic duties and her irritations only made matters worse. Yet Melville, as far as one can judge, felt not merely affection for Elizabeth: on these long absences, passion would gather within him again, like lightning in a heavy summer sky. He might resent her obtuseness; he might be disappointed by her failure to respond to his irresponsible hilarity; he might be sobered by the fact that his love had been unfavourably conditioned by financial burdens and a cramped household with a scanty larder; but for all that, he clung to her and needed her. One must take account of this in noting Melville’s moods and moves and decisions in the decade after 1856. Although Melville, unfortunately, felt repulsion in a tie that was so plainly rooted in physical attachment, and longed for a heaven in which there was the marriage of true minds without the “impurities” and impediments of sex, although he distrusted the solace of physical union, as he distrusted all beautiful things which hid the truth from men’s eyes, yet he found himself perpetually driven back to this wiser folly; and, not turning easily to any other woman, he kept his faith with Elizabeth.

The rôle was not an easy one for her to bear: make no mistake about it. Such violence of anticipation and such quick satiety, such tenderness and such easy disappointment, such self-absorption, and, with it all, a certain impatience and resentment of the daily round, with its claims, ceremonies, civilities, annoyances—with all this Elizabeth Melville was probably never to know such deep, enraptured happiness in her marriage as Sophia Hawthorne, who had faced dire poverty, too, had known. Elizabeth was proud of her man: she had faith in him: but it was only in the closing years of their lives, when, through bitter experience, she had acquired much, and he, through bitter experience, had resigned much, that they were on a parity. There is no doubt she encouraged him in his work, and, whether she understood it or not, believed in it. While he was gone in 1860 she assiduously looked after the placing of the manuscript, and would not be put off by the publishers’ flimsy excuses. Still, for all this sympathy and loyalty, on both sides, one feels that strain, depression, tenseness, must have too often marked the life of the Melville household, during these shadowed years of poverty and ill health and dwindling fame.

If Mrs. Melville stood the strain of it, with all the toughness of middle age to bear up under it, the children did not fare so well. The photograph of the Melville children, Malcolm, Frances, Elizabeth, and Stanwix, taken when the oldest was perhaps twelve or thirteen—that is, during the early sixties—tells as much: they are a little peaked and undernourished, and the eldest child’s face is sullen, dour. The racking poverty of his early youth had left an indelible impression on Melville himself, and, in even more depressing circumstances, a worse image was left upon the minds of his growing children. Melville, a man of originality and penetration in almost every other department of life, was, one suspects, a commonplace father: he expected his children to be dutiful and submissive and not to annoy their mother, and he would read them moral lectures on the whole duty of children, fearful of their being corrupted by association and contact with the age, but incapable of directing their impulses into forms of growth except by desperate exhortation—the most blank and sterile of all pedagogical methods. He wanted them to be noble and courageous and honest and indifferent to money, and, dreading the effect of the mean, bourgeois standards that surrounded them, he was too quick to suspect the ignoble and the base, forgetting that growth is a happier sign in childhood than the semblance of perfection. When his little daughter picked up the word “property” and aired it to her family, Melville relentlessly teased her about it: if he handed her the butter, he would hand it to Miss Property: if he met her on the stairs he would mimic Miss Property: he tormented her for the sins of her elders, forgetting the terrible sensitiveness of a child to dogging that has such a bitter animus behind it. This incident will stand for others: the jolly letters he would write home, with pictures and all manner of funny printing, or the stories he would tell in a pleasant hour, did not wipe out the acrid taste or lessen the distance between father and children. There was nothing to lighten the burden of these days: these children were orphaned, even when their father sat among them. One son ran away; another, in 1867, was found dead in his room, of a rifle wound, under circumstances that left doubt as to whether accident or suicide had caused the fatality; and one of his daughters could not recur to the image of her father without a certain painful revulsion. The picture is not a happy one: but a man with high purposes does not always leave behind earthly children to bless him. One remembers how Milton’s daughters cursed him in his own presence, and one realizes that one can draw no valid conclusions from such conduct—except this, that a man immersed in his inner vision is a difficult man to live with, and if he does not renounce his family and its ties at the outset of his quest, they may live to rise up against him before he is ended with it. And who was to blame? Milton and Melville wanted the warmth of domesticity: but their children had no part in the bargain that gave them cold lodgings in the icy chambers of Heaven, and shabby clothes and insufficient food and few opportunities for pleasure on the earth. These children were of Melville’s flesh, but not of his mind: when he purchased a work of art, a print or a statue for ten dollars, when there was scarcely bread enough to go round, who can wonder at their black memories? If they did not understand the need of a famished soul for art, their father had too quickly forgotten his own humiliation when he went to sea in a discarded hunting-jacket. Circumstances drove Melville hard; but poverty alone does not make such a breach between a parent and his children; and though one must pity Melville in this extremity of misunderstanding, one cannot but feel that he himself contributed to it.

The death of Elizabeth’s father in 1860 did not relieve the strain, except by giving the family a clear title to Arrowhead; so, until 1866, the background of Melville’s life cannot be painted save in dark colours. In spite of a personal interview with Lincoln in 1861, Melville was again turned down for a consular post; and two years later Melville finally decided to leave the Berkshires. To this end, he purchased a house at 104 East Twenty-sixth Street, in New York, from his brother, Allan, to whom he sold Arrowhead in part payment. But misfortune persisted. In removing his household goods from Arrowhead, the wagon was upset and he was thrown into the frozen ruts of the road. The injury was so severe that Melville was forced to lie up for many weeks in a near-by house, and in addition, to sap further his physical health, the accident left him with a fear of carriage driving. So his troubles piled up on him; and in the end, they grew so intolerable that the humour of the whaleboat would return to him, and he would smile again. I have painted in every sober and painful detail in the background; the blacks, the dingy blues, the sear browns are the dominant colours: true: but against this sordid groundwork one must not build up a blacker foreground: on the contrary, there are occasional flashes of warm colour or high light, and to leave them out would falsify the whole picture.

There is a Micawber in all of us, not unfortunately. We may find life disappointing without losing our taste for breaded veal cutlets and stout. Overwhelmed by tragic experience, we may still laugh at a hundred minor absurdities, as Melville no doubt laughed when he discovered that in 1865 a firm of Philadelphia publishers, who had taken over the rights to Israel Potter, had brought it out under the new title of The Refugee, without Melville’s consent, and had set him down as the author of two wholly imaginary books, The Two Captains and The Man of the World! Through all his ailments, one infirmity helped to counteract them, the infirmity of jocularity. He had one steady comfort and mainstay which only the blackest incidents could erase for more than a brief period: he had a sense of humour. More than that, with a little encouragement, he had positive high spirits. If one were not fully assured of this from a general knowledge of Melville’s character, the letter he wrote to his brother Thomas in 1862 would make this point plain: “Yesterday I received from Gansevoort your long and very entertaining letter to Mamma from Pernambuco. Yes, it was very entertaining. Particularly the account of that interesting young gentleman whom you stigmatise for a jackass, simply because he improves his opportunities in the way of sleeping, eating, and other commendable customs. That’s the sort of fellow, it seems to me, to get along with. For my part I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible and sociable millions of good fellows, all taking a long, friendly snooze together, under the sod—no quarrels, no imaginary grievances, no envies, heartburnings, & thinking how much better the other chap is off—none of this: but all equally free-&-easy, they sleep away and reel off their nine knots an hour, in perfect amity.”

Or again, after his accident in 1862, in a letter to Samuel Shaw, his brother-in-law, the same grave bantering appears: “... I begin to indulge in the pleasing idea that my life must needs be of some value. Probably I consume a certain amount of oxygen, which unconsumed might create some disturbance in nature. Be that as it may, I am going to try and stick to the conviction named above. Now I have observed that such an idea, once well-bedded in a man, is a wonderful conservator of health and almost a prophecy of long life. I once, like other spoonies, cherished a loose sort of notion that I did not care to live very long. But I will frankly own that I have now no serious, no insuperable objections to a respectable longevity. I don’t like the idea of being left out night after night in a cold churchyard.”

The humour and the sentiments both remind one of another black writer, a later one, the author of the Shropshire Lad: without losing his inner thoughts, Melville could nevertheless paraphrase them into a happier vernacular. Meanwhile, a deeper blackness had settled over the land, matching, patch for patch, wound for wound, scar for scar, every ill in Melville’s own body and soul. That darkness was the darkness of the Civil War; and when it finally lifted, it disclosed a different country, a different age, a different series of possibilities. The Civil War was a dividing point in the life of the country, and a dividing point in Melville’s life. It widened the distance between Melville and his younger contemporaries and it sealed, with finality, his own position in society. The provincial culture was overwhelmed; and what came to take its place was not a genuine culture, but a shoddy substitute, mere fustian of the spirit. He looked around him after the worst had happened; and his words must have been Bartleby’s: I know where I am. That very consciousness was enough to cut him off from the new society.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: ALARUMS AND RETREATS

Between the provincial society into which Herman Melville was born and the America in which he found himself at the time of the Civil War there was a vast difference. The Civil War may in one sense be looked upon as an attempt to preserve the ideological framework of the United States at a time when its institutions were in a state of disruption, and all its typical ways of life were being transformed. In that the Civil War preserved this framework, upholding the Constitution, confirming the union of the states, concentrating the powers of government, it was successful: the union was saved. But the very act of prosecuting the war confirmed the chaos and hastened the disruption, so that what was saved was not freedom and equality, the freedom of voluntary association and local initiative, the equality of access to an unlimited amount of utilizable land: what was left was just the opposite of these things, servility and inequality. Land and natural resources, scattered broadcast during the Civil War under the Homestead Act, and under various acts to promote railroad building, were turned into exacting monopolies; and the government itself became the principal agent for establishing and extending privilege. In less than half a generation Walt Whitman was forced to modify many of his fondest hopes for America: for with all these new agents of exploitation dominant, there was no longer any way of distinguishing the American proletariat from that of Europe, except in their independent manners—a relic of an equality that had once been real.

The disruption symbolized by the Civil War was expressed in a hundred ways; and when one examines these manifestations carefully they can all be characterized by a single figure: the failure to achieve form. One sees the difference between provincial and industrial America in the political definition of their units: New England, for example, is a natural region, like Brittany and Provence, with a mode of thought and an institutional form based upon certain common geographic features and cultural history; the new states and territories that were founded beyond the Alleghenies had no form other than that expressed by the arbitrary lines drawn by the surveyor: their content was simply so many blank square miles. The older cities of the seaboard, with the exception of Philadelphia, had a central nucleus which had grown out of local needs and habits: the size of the blocks was determined by the depth of the houses, the amount of garden space in the rear, the traffic that would pass in the streets: in the new cities no customs and habits played a part in the configuration of the city except those of realty speculation: by 1850, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Chicago had all forfeited to the land-gambler sites originally set aside for civic centres. In architecture, the failure to achieve form was equally conspicuous: windows, doors, rooms, façades, even apart from their grotesque efforts at decoration, all became gawky and ill-proportioned.

The energies of the country went into purely quantitative achievements: their only formal equivalent was money. The production in tons of iron, miles of steel rails, bushels of wheat, went up: cities increased in size: but the iron was used for the preposterous fronts of office buildings, the railroad served to deplete the hinterland, and the cities were dingy firetraps of wood or dingier prisons of brownstone. The war itself tore up and shot to pieces vast quantities of iron and many miles of railroad, and sundry towns and villages: but that was the true destination of all these quantitative efforts even in peace: for industrialism produced only an occasional genuine form, like the Eads Bridge, and for the most part its products were fit only to be consumed hastily and replaced and destroyed again. No wonder this civilization sweated day and night, without holidays, to produce its evanescent goods; while, in the Middle Ages, the great cathedrals and town halls were erected, without labour-saving machinery, in a rude agricultural society which spent a third of its year in holidays devoted to prayer, meditation, or festival. Where there is form and culture, there is true conservation of energy through the arts: where there is only energy, without end or form, the mechanism may be speeded up indefinitely without increasing anything except the waste and lost motion. Southern society, in which a provincial system of caste and culture held together, produced factories and slave barracks, in Charleston, for example, that maintained, uncorrupted, the forms of its classic past: but outside these aristocratic backwaters, chaos was dominant—and even in the South, one feels, it was only postponed.

In this sprawling, undisciplined America, a new type of character was uppermost. Melville described this new type when he touched on Ethan Allen in Israel Potter: “Allen,” he said, “seems to have been a curious combination of a Hercules, a Joe Miller, a Bayard, and a Tom Hyer. He was frank, bluff, companionable as a Pagan, convivial, a Roman, hearty as a harvest. His spirit was essentially Western; and herein is his peculiar Americanism; for the Western spirit is, or will yet be (for no other can be) the true American.” It was a sign of the waning of provincial faith that before the war everybody was eagerly looking for this individual, this type, who would serve as a symbol of unity. Even Emerson and Thoreau looked wistfully toward the rough fellows of the frontier to express what was common to all Americans. A provincial culture glories in its differences: the power to mould and express them is its unique quality: a Jefferson, a Franklin, an Adams were not only as far apart as Virginia, Philadelphia, and Boston: they were as far apart, in many ways, as London, Paris, and Weimar. But in the period before the war, the frontier type, Jackson, Harrison, Clay, Frémont, Lincoln, was put forward as the sum of all our possible Americas—albeit these figures were as far from the Swedes of Minnesota or the Germans of Wisconsin as they were from the Gansevoorts and the Randolphs. In a period of dissolution a false unity seems preferable to no common bond at all; and in the uncertainty, the disintegration, the dispersion of American society, under the vast tides of immigration and the inexorable flow of the coal-and-iron civilization, political Union became a compensatory symbol for all the social and cultural fragmentation that existed.

The political and social results of the Civil War, as they have worked out during the last two generations, have made us a little sceptical of the sacred, unchallengeable shibboleths under which the war itself was fought: we see that the prime issues of the great conflict were silenced, rather than settled, by the decisive victory of the North. Unfortunately, the South’s political contentions, which were partly valid, were vitiated by the issue of slavery. Mid all the decisive statesmanship displayed south of the Mason and Dixon line, no one was firm enough or far-sighted enough, after Jefferson’s time, to see that the holding of human beings in bondage, without hope or means of escape, was an untenable anachronism: even the Russian autocracy recognized that. The French Revolution had made this particular form of human degradation unpalatable; like incest or tribal revenge, it could not be related to a modern society. The burden of that institution, indeed, belonged to the whole country: the great mistake of the South, from 1830 onwards, was to assume as a divine necessity or benefit what should have been shared with the rest of the country as an intolerable evil—to be disposed of by some direct economic adjustment.

Melville had his misgivings about current political institutions; in Mardi he pointed out that many of the boasted freedoms of America were the product of free land and an uncrowded domain; and though he was a republican, he recognized inequality, and had no hope of doing away with those distinctions between man and man in a functional capacity, which separate captain, mates, and crew. His own outlook was emotionally patrician and aristocratic; but his years in the forecastle had modified those feelings, and one needs some such compound word as aristodemocracy to describe his dominant political attitude. Melville may have had his moments of admiration for the gracious ways of the South; but, quite properly, he regarded the United States as a place where narrow tribalisms had been successfully dropped, where the entire blood of Europe joined together from a thousand sources, the country being not so much a nation in the old sense, as a world, a neighbourly world; and he doubtless looked upon the Southern claim to independence as a return to tribalism and narrowness.

Like most men of good will, Melville looked forward to a time when the world itself would be federated into a whole, so that the conflicts between peoples and tribes and communities, the inevitable and salutary conflicts, would not take place on the physical plane—where they are disastrous and prove nothing—but on the plane of culture. With this in view, the breaking up of a federation is a mode of political atavism: and the attempt reinforced Melville’s natural repugnance to slavery. Unfortunately, the maintenance of a union by compulsive methods leads to an enthronement of the powers of the central government, and a diminution of a regional independence; the military strength of the central government and its impudence in serving special groups within the state, in turn becomes an obstacle to the pacification of the world. Melville could scarcely anticipate this result; but his philosophy had a place for the evil which dogs the footsteps of the good, and when he said that America might turn out to be the Paul Jones of nations, intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambitions, civilized in externals but savage at heart, he may partly have anticipated the outcome of that political supremacy he expected the United States finally to attain. By the time the war opened, there was established a certain fatalism in Melville’s mind which made him lenient to the forces that seemed to him evil: they, too, in their inscrutable way were obedient to another power.

Melville’s attitude towards the Civil War was, in sum, just the opposite of Hawthorne’s; and if the men had been still in communication during this period, it would probably have opened a final breach between them. For Hawthorne, New England was as large a piece of earth as he had any affection for, and whatever happened next, he asserted in the early days of the conflict, he rejoiced that the old Union was smashed. “We never were one people, and never really had a country since the Constitution was founded.” There spoke the shrewd, unshaken provincial. Hawthorne looked upon John Brown, moreover, as a poisonous nuisance: for Melville he was a prophetic figure, whose death made it impossible for the stabs of controversy to heal, whose streaming beard was the very meteor of war. One may sum up Melville’s political character by saying that his breeding and instincts were those of a provincial; his superficial beliefs and attitudes were those of a political unionist; and during the Civil War the latter were uppermost, but not wholly so. Well might Walt Whitman describe the war itself, and the temper of the society that ushered it in, by the word “convulsiveness.” There was something arcane and uncontrollable in these partisanships and antipathies: each fragment was thrown about erratically, tangentially. It was war that produced war; and when the active state at last came about, men settled to it with a sigh of relief. War polarized these fragments: it gave an appearance of high order to this chaos.

2

There is something paradoxical in the fact that Melville’s concern over slavery and his fervour for the union should have come into play during a period when he had become indifferent to most of the nearest issues of life and convinced that existence itself was a form of slavery. But one must not forget the anomalous nature of war itself. In its instrumentalities, war is a denial of life: but in mood and spirit war partly achieves all the things a humane or religious mind cherishes: selflessness, contempt for creature habits and animal comforts, nonchalance in the face of death, a willingness to give up life cheerfully for an ideal end. If it is a sin, war is an heroic sin; and who, exclaims Melville in Pierre, does not feel more warmly to the Lord of Evil himself, than towards a petty shopkeeper, who daily practices all the discreet and serviceable virtues? War is a malign, ambiguous fulfilment of the things men permanently want in life—and in its first flush, men forget its sordid accompaniments and its disastrous results, and respond, not meanly, to its immediate stimulus.

There is no doubt that the prosecution of the war quickened Melville and made him feel a purpose instead of the dull, fearful hollow of an empty and respectable life. At forty-two, broken down in health, unfit for active service, he watched these young men go forth in their blue uniforms, with flushed faces and eager tread, a little enviously: comradeship was a warm thing, even among the precious rapscallions one might find in a whaler: it was an even deeper and warmer matter among these young men who had shared sport together in their village, or courted the same girl, or studied together under the same lamp at college. These happy faces might be going to a picnic, to be pelted with blossoms, not shrapnel:

Unable to throw himself into battle, Melville followed the newspaper accounts and the bulletins all the more closely. One pictures him pacing the floor of his room at night, musing over Ball’s Bluff or Antietam: there is no sleep in him during these racking days: the last footsteps of a straggler die away in the street: no sound comes through the air except the distant hoot of a boat on the North River; and Melville’s mind plays back and forth across the days. Intermittently, all the old glow would come back to him in these dark moments: he would picture himself perhaps, borne by the tide of men at his back over an earthworks, as he was borne in a whaleboat on the back of the lashing whale. The reckless lift: the thrust: the yell of defiance: being thrown down and struggling to rise again through a tangled drift of legs and bodies: the shout of victory: the feeling of proud defiance: the knowledge that death does not matter when one is at last, with all one’s senses quickened, face to face with it. The whaleman’s joy: the soldier’s joy: the joy of hard living and easy dying!

The war, with its heroism and defeat, was the image of Melville’s own life; and, in the blackest night, the glow of its fires illumined his face. The rigid order of warfare gave Melville the sense of a cosmic purpose at work: in the working out of Dupont’s Round Fight Melville saw another significance in the struggle for the Union: it was not the political bond that Melville’s contemporaries alone wanted confirmed: they desired that the Universe itself should hold together! Melville’s interpretation is, I think, an illusory one; but one cannot question the deep need that it expressed.

But it was the happy fortune of youth that Melville, betrayed by the disasters of middle age, returned to when he contemplated the war. Who, he asked, can remain aloof that shares youth’s ardour, uncooled by the snows of wisdom or sordid gain? War made life again a great spectacle and a great adventure: that defiance of the low limitations upon which life depends, which Melville had expressed in Moby-Dick, came back again: vanished at last were the doubts, perturbations, speculations, cynicisms, endless grey questionings. Ten years before Melville might have been repelled by the evil and ugliness of it: the maimed bodies, the cruelties, the infamous prison and concentration camps, the furtive squads of deserters, the hospital agonies, the litany of unknown soldiers and nameless burial spots that Whitman gravely remembered and recited. Now Melville was armed for the evil and ugliness of it, and even for its futility:

Melville was possibly in New York in 1863, when the carnival of looting and murder and general protest took place over the infliction of the draft. He pictures himself, oppressed by the sultry air, climbing to the roof-top and looking over the hushed city: in the distance, he hears the mixed surf of muffled sound, the roar of riot and the dull glare of fires. The city was in the hands of the mob, and that mob had sunk “whole aeons back into nature,” vindictive, cruel, irresponsible, blind, bloodthirsty. Melville heard the rumble of the artillery which finally broke up the riot and exacted vengeance on the mob; and, pondering this event, he was conscious of the grimy slur upon the Republic’s faith, a slur implied by the cause of the outbreak, by the outbreak itself, and by the suppression of it. Where was now the belief in life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness? Where now the conviction that man is naturally good and—“more—is Nature’s Roman, never to be scourged”? With all his new enthusiasm, Melville’s deeper perceptions were never altogether out of sight:

Even the supremacy of the Union, Melville finally came to see, might bring some other result than the purpose for which it was conceived. In one of the prefatory poems in his Battle Pieces, the Conflict of Convictions 1860–1861, Melville expressed his doubt: from the allusion to the Iron Dome it is plain that the verse was written later, when the Dome itself had been put into place on the Capitol at Washington, by one of those happy accidents that sometimes give an event its exact appropriate symbol.

Though he was emotionally at one with the war, Melville’s thoughts were not entirely harmonized with his feelings: his ultimate doubts crept into his most sanguine reactions to the conflict; and at bottom, the things that quickened him were not the formal purposes of the conflict but its incidents—the flashing youths, the gallant charge, the daring commander, the spirited horse that carried Sheridan to battle. “Nothing can lift the heart of man like manhood in a fellow man,” he says. The Civil War satisfied this desperate need in his own soul: but apart from its animal vigour and glory, even its solidest purposes seemed infirm and fragile. He pictures an heroic soldier, surviving the carnage, the Seven Days’ Fight, the Wilderness, the field-hospital, and Libby Prison—surviving it and reflecting on his experience: “Heaven! what truth to him!” He himself had already drained the lees of adversity; the war had nothing to add there, except to make his own experience that of a whole generation.

3

In the break of emotional tension caused by the fall of Richmond, Melville wrote most of his verses on the Civil War. A few were printed in the magazines during the first part of 1866, and later in the year, Melville collected and published the whole volume of verse, Battle Pieces and Other Aspects of the War; with a supplement, gravely and well written, in which he counterbalanced any Unionist fervour and elation he might have shown in the battle poems, by discussing, with great sympathy and tact, the plight of the South and the psychological problems confronting the North, particularly, in dealing with it.

One of the poems in the collection, Sheridan at Cedar Creek, was long quoted as one of the memorable poems evoked by the war; but, although Melville’s verses on the war are the only serious contemporary rivals to Whitman’s Drum-Taps, one cannot, with the most lenient eye, put them in the same class. Melville rarely achieved form as a poet: he was often very near to it, as we shall see when we examine his poems about the sea and his travels: but although the sensitiveness, the emotional tension, the rough powers of expression, in short, the ingredients of poetry were there, he permitted himself to be conquered by the external form of line and stanza: his rhythms are broken, not by their own inner development, but because they meet a foreign object, and get shattered against it. These verses are such jewelry as a sculptor might make. Melville’s mallet and chisel and sinew were of little use with a pitch block and a graving-tool.

Among these verses there are a few stanzas that give one a hint of what Melville’s potentialities as a poet were: his poem on John Brown is one of them, and another occurs in a poem commemorative of a naval victory—despite the weakness of the second line, it rings like a bell.

It is no accident that this stanza utters Melville’s deepest intuition of life. Here image is symbol, and the symbol presents, without further reflection or explanation, the idea in its totality: the shark glides white through the sulphurous sea. There is something final in that. Melville might hope: he might be stirred up: he might join hands with his fellows: he might even achieve victory: all these things had happened in the collective excitement of the Civil War; but in the end the elation and exaltation were doomed to pass away. In the very act of achieving personal success, Melville had become aware of something in the Constitution of the Universe that fatally marred it: the shark glides white through the sulphurous sea. His demon was not deceived. It lived in the midst of chaos, and this Civil War, unified, regimented, ordered, inexorable as it seemed, was chaos, too. Order springs from within, mixing with circumstance but never carried away by it: in other words, order is art—and art was the one thing lacking in the whole plan of life that had arisen to dominate America. Raw power, raw experience, were uppermost. White sharks swam everywhere: shark ate shark, and greedily battened upon the refuse of the sinking boat. No use to fight the White Whale, if the boat that holds human culture breaks up, and the crew is killed, and only the sharks remain in the waters. I have expanded Melville’s symbol, perhaps; but one cannot magnify his disillusion. As early as 1866 he noted in his Supplement that “for them who are neither partisans nor enthusiasts, nor theorists, nor cynics, there are some doubts not readily to be solved. And there are fears. Why is not the cessation of war now at length attended with the settled calm of peace?”

In his Supplement, Melville pleaded for generosity to the vanquished, for a spirit of forbearance, for the sort of magnanimity that the Union soldiers showed at Vicksburg, when they watched the dejected Confederates file out without raising a shout of triumph. “Let us pray,” he concluded, “that the terrible historic tragedy of our time may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved country through terror and pity; and may fulfillment verify in the end those expectations which kindle the bards of Progress and Humanity.” Melville was definitely not one of the bards of progress and humanity; but in the loose sympathies of wartime, he had listened to all their righteous self-praise and their optimistic predictions; and though he did not share their philosophy, he at least joined them in their hopes, while there was still a possibility that they might be pragmatically justified.

That weak optimism came to nothing. There was a treachery that annulled these efforts—the treachery of the madness that resulted in Lincoln’s death: the vindictive virtue of the Abolitionists, who inflicted military occupation and carpet-bag governments on their fallen enemies: and that very tragic topsy-turvydom of war which provides snug berths and comfortable fortunes to the profiteers and speculators, and offers a sordid routine and a share in the general bankruptcy to those who are unfortunate enough to escape a quick and early death.

The Union had perhaps been worth dying for: but nobody could confront the post-bellum scene, with its Vanderbilts and Jay Cookes and Daniel Drews, without wondering seriously whether the Union was worth living for. The heroes were dead: dead or incapacitated: incapacitated or tired. Those who had any fight left in them would fight for Civil Service Reform, as Carl Schurz did, or if they had energy, they would go into railroads, like Charles Francis Adams: it was no accident that those who sought a career less in harmony with the accepted good works of industrialism—a Henry Hobbes Richardson, a Mark Twain, a Henry Adams, a William James, a Stanley Hall—were usually men who had by one chance or another lived during the war at a considerable distance from the struggle, and who had missed, not alone the fine heroism of that experience, but the terrible disillusion and collapse that follows such efforts; and who, like Stanley Hall, were moved to expiate their failure to risk death on the battlefield by living a little more arduously and heroically on the plane of daily life. These men might seek patiently to build up their careers; but those who had been buoyed up by the great energies and expectations of provincial America, in that Golden Day when they had grasped power and material mastery without losing hold of culture and form—those earlier writers and makers found themselves sinking helplessly out of sight, battered wrecks, submerged by the tide of industry and finance, whose waves rose higher and higher during the ten years that followed the great storm. There were no quiet waters for these men; or, if they found them, as Emerson did, as Whitman did, they lost the power to go to sea again; and, instead of being beaten to pieces on the treacherous coast, merely rotted at the wharf.

In 1866, at the age of forty-seven, Herman Melville, too, withdrew from the war, defeated. That fine “scorn of life which earns life’s crown”—earns, but does not always win it—had left him with the burdens, difficulties, grievances of a returning soldier. He had fought a not less worthy fight; and now, once for all, he retreated. He did not surrender; for he kept on writing to the end of his days; but he could no more live on his writings than a veteran of the Grand Army could exchange his medals and scars for honest bread. Melville was forced to face this fact, after twenty years of writing and fifteen years of continuous, desperate struggle. He had not given in quickly or petulantly; and when he finally made this decision, one can detect in it no sign of outraged vanity or reproach. He had gauged his position: he knew the worst: he was prepared to meet it. Through the offices of an old travelling companion, he found a place as inspector in the Custom House, a post he had described in Redburn as “a most inglorious one; indeed, worse than driving geese to water.”