Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
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HERMAN MELVILLE
Mariner and Mystic
RAYMOND M. WEAVER
HERMAN MELVILLE
MARINER AND MYSTIC
BY
RAYMOND M. WEAVER
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
PROFESSOR FRANKLIN T. BAKER
“--_il maestro cortese_”
To Professor Carl Van Doren, to Miss Cora Paget, and to Mrs. Eleanor
Melville Metcalf, I am, in the writing of this book, very especially
indebted. By Professor Van Doren’s enthusiasm and scholarship I was
instigated to a study of Melville. It has been my privilege to enjoy
Miss Paget’s very valuable criticism and assistance throughout the
preparation of this volume. Mrs. Metcalf gave me access to all the
surviving records of her grandfather: Melville manuscripts, letters,
journals, annotated books, photographs, and a variety of other
material. But she did far more. My indebtedness to Mrs. Metcalf’s vivid
interest, her shrewd insight, her keen sympathy can be stated only in
superlatives. To Mrs. and Mr. Metcalf I owe one of the richest and most
pleasant associations of my life.
RAYMOND M. WEAVER.
_October 1, 1921._
Most of the letters of Melville to Hawthorne included in this volume
are quoted from _Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife_, by Julian
Hawthorne. These letters, and other citations from Mr. Hawthorne’s
memoir, are included through the courtesy of Messrs. Houghton Mifflin
Company.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I DEVIL’S ADVOCATE 15
II GHOSTS 33
III PARENTS AND EARLY YEARS 53
IV A SUBSTITUTE FOR PISTOL AND BALL 77
V DISCOVERIES ON TWO CONTINENTS 98
VI PEDAGOGY, PUGILISM AND LETTERS 113
VII BLUBBER AND MYSTICISM 128
VIII LEVIATHAN 153
IX THE PACIFIC 170
X MAN-EATING EPICURES--THE MARQUESAS 194
XI MUTINY AND MISSIONARIES--TAHITI 215
XII ON BOARD A MAN-OF-WAR 233
XIII INTO THE RACING TIDE 250
XIV ACROSS THE ATLANTIC AGAIN 283
XV A NEIGHBOUR OF HAWTHORNE’S 305
XVI THE GREAT REFUSAL 334
XVII THE LONG QUIETUS 349
BIBLIOGRAPHY 385
INDEX OF NAMES 391
ILLUSTRATIONS
HERMAN MELVILLE _Frontispiece_
PAGE
MELVILLE’S GRANDFATHERS 40
GENERAL PETER GANSEVOORT
MAJOR THOMAS MELVILLE
ALLAN MELVILLE 56
MARIA GANSEVOORT MELVILLE 64
IN 1820
IN 1865
A PAGE FROM ONE OF MELVILLE’S JOURNALS 104
THROWING THE HARPOON 136
SOUNDING 136
SPERM WHALING. THE CAPTURE 160
ONE OF SIX WHALING PRINTS 160
“TOBY.” RICHARD TOBIAS GREENE 164
IN 1846
IN 1865
EVANGELISING POLYNESIA 184
RICHARD TOBIAS GREENE. IN 1885 200
FIRST HOME OF THE PROTESTANT MISSIONARIES IN TAHITI 224
THE FLEET OF TAHITI 224
ELIZABETH SHAW MELVILLE 272
ARROWHEAD 312
THE FIREPLACE. ARROWHEAD 312
HERMAN MELVILLE. IN 1868 352
MELVILLE AS ARTIST 368
MELVILLE’S CHILDREN 376
HERMAN MELVILLE
Mariner and Mystic
HERMAN MELVILLE
CHAPTER I
DEVIL’S ADVOCATE
“If ever, my dear Hawthorne,” wrote Melville in the summer of 1851, “we
shall sit down in Paradise in some little shady corner by ourselves;
and if we shall by any means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne
there (I won’t believe in a Temperance Heaven); and if we shall then
cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever
tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together till both
ring musically in concert: then, O my dear fellow mortal, how shall
we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now so much
distress us.” This serene and laughing desolation--a mood which in
Melville alternated with a deepening and less tranquil despair--is a
spectacle to inspire with sardonic optimism those who gloat over the
vanity of human wishes. For though at that time Melville was only
thirty-two years old, he had crowded into that brief space of life a
scope of experience to rival Ulysses’, and a literary achievement of
a magnitude and variety to merit all but the highest fame. Still did
he luxuriate in tribulation. Well-born, and nurtured in good manners
and a cosmopolitan tradition, he was, like George Borrow, and Sir
Richard Burton, a gentleman adventurer in the barbarous outposts of
human experience. Nor was his a kid-gloved and expensively staged
dip into studio savagery. “For my part, I abominate all honourable
respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever,”
he declared. And as proof of this abomination he went forth penniless
as a common sailor to view the watery world. He spent his youth and
early manhood in the forecastles of a merchantman, several whalers,
and a man-of-war. He diversified whale-hunting by a sojourn of four
months among practising cannibals, and a mutiny off Tahiti. He returned
home to New England to marry the daughter of Chief Justice Shaw of
Massachusetts, and to win wide distinction as a novelist on both sides
of the Atlantic. Though these crowded years had brought with them
bitter hardship and keen suffering, he had sown in tears that he might
reap in triumph. But when he wrote to Hawthorne he felt that triumph
had not been achieved. Yet he needed but one conclusive gesture to
provoke the world to cry this as a lie in his throat: one last sure
sign to convince all posterity that he was, indeed, one whom the gods
loved. But the gods fatally withheld their sign for forty years.
Melville did not die until 1891.
None of Melville’s critics seem ever to have been able to forgive him
his length of days. “Some men die too soon,” said Nietzsche, “others
too late; there is an art in dying at the right time.” Melville’s
longevity has done deep harm to his reputation as an artist in dying,
and has obscured the phenomenal brilliancy of his early literary
accomplishment. The last forty years of his history are a record of
a stoical--and sometimes frenzied--distaste for life, a perverse and
sedulous contempt for recognition, an interest in solitude, in etchings
and in metaphysics. In his writings after 1851 he employed a world of
pains to scorn the world: a compliment returned in kind. During the
closing years of his life he violated the self-esteem of the world
still more by rating it as too inconsequential for condemnation. He
earned his living between 1866 and 1886 as inspector of Customs in New
York city. His deepest interest came to be in metaphysics: which is but
misery dissolved in thought. It may be, to the all-seeing eye of truth,
that Melville’s closing years were the most glorious of his life. But
to the mere critic of literature, his strange career is like a star
that drops a line of streaming fire down the vault of the sky--and then
the dark and blasted shape that sinks into the earth.
There are few more interesting problems in biography than this offered
by Melville’s paradoxical career: its brilliant early achievement,
its long and dark eclipse. Yet in its popular statement, this
problem is perverted from the facts by an insufficient knowledge of
Melville’s life and works. The current opinion was thus expressed by
an uncircumspect critic at the time of Melville’s centenary in 1919:
“Owing to some odd psychological experience, that has never been
definitely explained, his style of writing, his view of life underwent
a complete change. From being a writer of stirring, vivid fiction, he
became a dreamer, wrapping himself up in a vague kind of mysticism,
that rendered his last few books such as _Pierre: or The Ambiguities_
and _The Confidence Man: His Masquerade_ quite incomprehensible, and
certainly most uninteresting for the average reader.”
Unhampered by diffidence--because innocent of the essential
facts--critics of Melville have been fluent in hypothesis to account
for this “complete change.” A German critic patriotically lays the
blame on Kant. English-speaking critics, with insular pride, have
found a sufficiency of disruptive agencies nearer at home. Some impute
Melville’s decline to Sir Thomas Browne; others to Melville’s intimacy
with Hawthorne; others to the dispraise heaped upon _Pierre_. Though
there is a semblance of truth in each, such attempts at explanation
are, of course, too shallow and neat to merit reprobation. But there
is another group of critics, too considerable in size and substance to
be so cavalierly dismissed. This company accounts for Melville’s swift
obscuration in a summary and comprehensive manner, by intimating that
Melville went insane.
Such an intimation is doubtless highly efficacious to mediocrity in
bolstering its own self-esteem. But otherwise it is without precise
intellectual content. For insanity is not a definite entity like
leprosy, measles, and the bubonic plague, but even in its most precise
use, denotes a conglomerate group of phenomena which have but little
in common. Science, it is true, speaking through Nordau and Lombroso,
has attempted to show an intimate correlation between genius and
degeneracy; and if the creative imagination of some of the disciples
of Freud is to be trusted, the choir invisible is little more than
a glorified bedlam. Plato would have accepted this verdict with
approval. “From insanity,” said Plato, “Greece has derived its greatest
benefits.” But the dull and decent Philistine, untouched by Platonic
heresies, justifies his sterility in a boast of sanity. The America in
which Melville was born and died was exuberantly and unquestionably
“sane.” Its “sanity” drove Irving abroad and made a recluse of
Hawthorne. Cooper alone throve upon it. And of Melville, more ponderous
in gifts and more volcanic in energy than any other American writer,
it made an Ishmael upon the face of the earth. With its outstanding
symptoms of materialism and conformity it drove Emerson to pray for
an epidemic of madness: “O Celestial Bacchus! drive them mad.--This
multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry,
starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity to vitalise
this too much pasture, and in the long delay indemnifying themselves
with the false wine of alcohol, of politics, of money.”
From this it would appear that a taste for insanity has been widespread
among poets, prophets and saints: men venerated more by posterity
than by their neighbours. It is well for Socrates that Xantippe did
not write his memoirs: but there was sufficient libel in hemlock. In
ancient and mediæval times, of course, madness, when not abhorred as a
demoniac possession, was revered as a holy and mysterious visitation.
To-day, witch-burning and canonisation have given place to more refined
devices. The herd must always be intolerant of all who violate its
sacred and painfully reared traditions. With an easy conscience it has