Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
Arabia and passed through strange adventures there, all of which with
my own eyes I had read in the book which he wrote, an arid-looking book
in a pale yellow cover.
“‘See what big eyes he has,’ whispered my aunt, ‘they got so big,
because when he was almost dead in the desert with famishing, he all
at once caught sight of a date tree, with the ripe fruit hanging on
it.’ Upon this, I stared at him till I thought his eyes were really of
an uncommon size, and stuck out from his head like those of a lobster.
When church was out, I wanted my aunt to take me along and follow the
traveller home. But she said the constables would take us up, if we
did; and so I never saw the wonderful Arabian traveller again. But he
long haunted me; and several times I dreamt of him, and thought his
great eyes were grown still larger and rounder; and once I had a vision
of the date tree.”
It is one of the few certainties of life that a child who has once
stood fixed before a piece of household furniture worrying his head
about whether the workman who made it still be alive; who after seeing
an Arabian traveller in church goes home and has a vision of a date
tree: such a child is not going to die an efficiency expert. At the age
of fifteen Melville found himself faced with the premature necessity of
coming to some sort of terms with life on his own account. Helped by
his uncle, he tried working in a bank. The experiment seems not to have
been a success. His next experiment was clerk in his brother’s store.
But banking and clerking seem to have been equally repugnant. Melville
had a taste for landscape, so his next experiment was as farmer and
country school-keeper. But farming, interspersed with pedagogy and
pugilism, fired Melville to a mood of desperation. “Talk not of the
bitterness of middle age and after-life,” he later wrote; “a boy can
feel all that, and much more, when upon his young soul the mildew has
fallen.... Before the death of my father I never thought of working for
my living, and never knew there were hard hearts in the world.... I had
learned to think much, and bitterly, before my time.” So he decided
to slough off the tame respectabilities of his well-to-do uncles, and
cousins, and aunts. Goaded by hardship, and pathetically lured by the
glamorous mirage of distance, with all the impetuosity of his eighteen
summers he planned a hegira. “With a philosophical flourish Cato
throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. This is my
substitute for pistol and ball.”
CHAPTER IV
A SUBSTITUTE FOR PISTOL AND BALL
“When I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head.
True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to
spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort
of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honour,
particularly if you come of an old established family in the land,
the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than
all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have
been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys
stand in awe of you, the transition is a keen one, I assure you, from
a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca
and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it.”
--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Moby-Dick_.
When, at the age of seventeen, Melville cut loose from his mother, his
kind cousins and aunts, and sympathising sisters, he was stirred by
motives of desperation, and by the immature delusion that happiness
lies elusive and beckoning, just over the world’s rim. It was a
drastic escape from the intolerable monotony of prosaic certainties
and aching frustrations. “Sad disappointments in several plans which
I had sketched for my future life,” says Melville, “the necessity of
doing something for myself, united with a naturally roving disposition,
conspired within me, to send me to sea as a sailor.”
In _Redburn: His First Voyage. Being the Sailor-boy Confessions and
Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman_ (1849) Melville has left what
is the only surviving record of his initial attempt “to sail beyond
the sunset.” Luridly vivid and exuberant was his imagination, flooding
the world of his childhood and fantastically transmuting reality. At
the time of his first voyage, Melville was, it is well to remember, a
boy of seventeen. He was not old enough, not wise enough, to regard
his dreams as impalpable projections of his defeated desires: desires
inflamed by what Dr. Johnson called the “dangerous prevalence of
imagination,” and which, in “sober probability” could find no actual
satisfaction. Had Melville been a nature of less impetuosity, or of
less abundant physical vitality, he might have moped tamely at home and
“yearned.” But with the desperate Quixotic enterprise of a splendid but
embittered boy, he sallied forth into the unknown to put his dreams to
the test. When it was reported to Carlyle that Margaret Fuller made
boast: “I accept the universe,” unimpressed he remarked: “Gad! she’d
better.” Melville, when only seventeen, had not yet come to Carlyle’s
dyspeptic resignation to the cosmic order. “As years and dumps
increase; as reflection lends her solemn pause, then,” so Melville
says, in substance, in a passage on elderly whales, “in the impotent,
repentant, admonitory stage of life, do sulky old souls go about all
alone among the meridians and parallels saying their prayers.” Lacking
Dr. Johnson’s elderly wisdom, Melville believed there to be some
correlation between happiness and geography. He was not willing to
take resignation on faith. Not through “spontaneous striving towards
development,” but through necessity and hard contact with nature and
men does the recalcitrant dreamer accept Carlyle’s dictum. With drastic
experience, most men come at last to have a little commonsense knocked
into their heads,--and a good bit of imagination knocked out, as
Wordsworth, for one, discovered.
Melville’s recourse to the ocean in 1837, as that of Richard Henry
Dana’s three years before, was a heroic measure, calculated either to
take the nonsense out of both of them, or else to drive them straight
either to suicide, madness, or rum-soaked barbarism. To both boys, it
was a crucial test that would have ruined coarser or weaker natures.
Dana came from out the ordeal purged and strengthened, toned up to the
proper level, and no longer too fine for everyday use. Though as years
went by, so says C. F. Adams, his biographer, “the freshness of the
great lesson faded away, and influences which antedated his birth and
surrounded his life asserted themselves, not for his good.”
Because of lack of contemporary evidence, the immediate influences of
Melville’s first experience in the forecastle, cannot be so positively
stated. _Redburn_, the only record of the adventure, was not written
until twelve years after Melville had experienced what it records.
Extraordinarily crowded was this intervening span of twelve years.
But despite the fulness of intervening experience--or, maybe, because
of it--the universe still stuck in his maw: it was a bolus on which
he gagged. _Redburn_ is written in embittered memory of Melville’s
first hegira. In the words of Mr. H. S. Salt: “It is a record of
bitter experience and temporary disillusionment--the confessions of
a poor, proud youth, who goes to sea ‘with a devil in his heart’ and
is painfully initiated into the unforeseen hardships of a sea-faring
life.” In 1849 he was still unadjusted to unpalatable reality, and
in _Redburn_ he seems intent upon revenging himself upon his early
disillusion by an inverted idealism,--by building for himself, “not
castles, but dungeons in Spain,”--as if, failing to reach the moon,
he should determine to make a Cynthia of the first green cheese. And
this inverted idealism he achieves most effectively by recording with
photographic literalness the most hideous details of his penurious
migration. His romantic realism--reminding one of Zola and certain
pages out of Rousseau--he alternates with malicious self-satire,
and its obverse gesture, obtrusive self-pity. To those austere and
classical souls who are proudly impatient of this style of writing,
it must be insisted with what Arnold called “damnable iteration” that
_Redburn_ purports to be the confessions of a seventeen-year-old lad.
Autobiographically, the book is, of course, of superlative interest.
But despite its unaccountable neglect, and Melville’s ostentation of
contempt for it, it is none the less important, in the history of
letters, as a very notable achievement. Mr. Masefield and W. Clark
Russell alone, of competent critics, seem to have been aware of its
existence. It is _Redburn_ that Mr. Masefield confesses to loving
best of Melville’s writings: this “boy’s book about running away to
sea.” Mr. Masefield thinks, however, that “one must know New York and
the haunted sailor-town of Liverpool to appreciate that gentle story
thoroughly.”
When Melville wrote _Redburn_ in 1849, there was no book exactly
like it in our literature, its only possible forerunners being
Nathaniel Ames’ _A Mariner’s Sketches_ (1830) and Dana’s _Two
Years before the Mast_ (1840). The great captains had written of
their voyages, it is true; or when they themselves left no record,
their literary laxity was usually corrected by the querulousness
of some member of their ship’s company. Great compilations such as
Churchill’s, or Harris’, or Hakluyt’s _The Principal Navigations,
Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation: made by
sea or overland to the remotest and farthest different quarters of
the earth at any time within the Compass of these 1600 years_, or
no less luxuriously entitled works, such as the fine old eighteenth
century folio of Captain Charles Johnson’s _A General History of the
Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street
Robbers, etc., To which is added, A Genuine Account of the Voyages
and Plunders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, interspersed with several
diverting tales, and pleasant songs, and adorned with the Heads of
the Most Remarkable Villains, curiously Engraven_, are monuments to
the prodigious wealth of the early literature of sea adventure. The
light of romance colours these maritime exploits, and even upon the
maturest gaze there still lingers something of the radiance with which
the ardent imagination of boyhood gilds the actions and persons of
these fierce sea-warriors, treacherous, cruel and profligate miscreants
though the most picturesque of them were.
But these hardy adventurers were men of action; men proud of their own
exploits, but untouched by any corrupt self-consciousness of their
Gilbert-and-Sullivan, or Byronic possibilities; men untempted to offer
any superfluous encouragement to the deep blue sea to “roll.” And
though many of them--Captain Cook, for example--ran away to sea to ship
before the mast, they in later years betray no temptings to linger with
attention over their days of early obscurity. Even _The Book of Things
Forgotten_ passes over the period of Cook’s life in the forecastle. He
began as an apprentice, he ended as a mate. That is all. As regards
the life he led as a youth on board the merchant ship there is no
account: a silence that forces Walter Besant in his _Captain Cook_ to
a page or two of surmise as a transition to more notable sureties. An
appreciation of the romance of the sea, and of the humbler details of
the life of the common sailor is one of our most recent sophistications.
In fiction, it is true, Smollett had his sailors, as did Scott,
and Marryat, and Cooper,--to mention only the most notable names.