Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
always exterminated in the flesh those who sin in the flesh. In times
less timid than the present it dealt with sins of the spirit with
similar crude vindictiveness. We boast it as a sign of our progress
that we have outgrown the days of jubilant public crucifixions and
bumpers of hemlock: and there is ironic justice in the boast. Openly to
harbour convictions repugnant to the herd is still the unforgivable sin
against that most holy of ghosts--fashionable opinion; and carelessly
to let live may be more cruel than officiously to cause to die.
Melville sinned blackly against the orthodoxy of his time. In his
earlier works, he confined his sins to an attack upon Missionaries
and the starchings of civilisation: sins that won him a _succes de
scandal_. The London Missionary Society charged into the resulting
festivities with its flag at half mast. Cased in the armour of the
Lord, it with flagrant injustice attacked his morals, because it
smarted under his ideas. But when Melville began flooding the very
foundations of life with torrents of corrosive pessimism, the world at
large found itself more vulnerable in its encasement. It could not,
without absurdity obvious even to itself, accuse Melville of any of the
cruder crimes against Jehovah or the Public. Judged by the bungling
provisions of the thirty-nine articles and the penal code, he was not
a bad man: more subtle was his iniquity. As by a divine visitation,
the Harper fire of 1853 effectually reduced _Pierre_--his most frankly
poisonous book--to a safely limited edition. And the public, taking the
hint, ceased buying his books. In reply, Melville earned his bread as
Inspector of Customs. The public, defeated in its righteous attempts at
starvation, hit upon a more exquisite revenge. It gathered in elegiacal
synods and whispered mysteriously: “He went insane.”
To view Melville’s life as a venturesome romantic idyll frozen in
mid-career by the _deus ex machina_ of some steadily descending Gorgon
is possible only by a wanton misreading of patent facts. Throughout
Melville’s long life his warring and untamed desires were in violent
conflict with his physical and spiritual environment. His whole
history is the record of an attempt to escape from an inexorable and
intolerable world of reality: a quenchless and essentially tragic
Odyssey away from home, out in search of “the unpeopled world behind
the sun.” In the blood and bone of his youth he sailed away in brave
quest of such a harbour, to face inevitable defeat. For this rebuff
he sought both solace and revenge in literature. But by literature he
also sought his livelihood. In the first burst of literary success he
married. Held closer to reality by financial worry and the hostages of
wife and children, the conflict within him was heightened. By a vicious
circle, with brooding disappointment came ill health. “Ah, muskets the
gods have made to carry infinite combustion,” he wrote in _Pierre_,
“and yet made them of clay.” The royalties from his books proved
inadequate for the support of his family, so for twenty years he earned
a frugal living in the customs houses in New York. During his leisure
hours he continued to write, but never for publication. Two volumes of
poetry he privately printed. His last novel, surviving in manuscript,
he finished a few months before his death. Though it is for the second
half that his critics have felt bound to regret, it seems that in
serenity and mental equipoise, the last state of this man was better
than the first.
In his early manhood he wrote in _Mardi_: “Though essaying but a
sportive sail, I was driven from my course by a blast resistless; and
ill-provided, young, and bowed by the brunt of things before my prime,
still fly before the gale.... If after all these fearful fainting
trances, the verdict be, the golden haven was not gained;--yet in bold
quest thereof, better to sink in boundless deeps than float on vulgar
shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do.” To the
world at large, it has been generally believed that the Gods ironically
fulfilled his worst hopes.
One William Cranston Lawton, in an _Introduction to the Study of
American Literature_--a handy relic of the parrot judgment passed
upon Melville during the closing years of his life--so enlightens
young America: “He holds his own beside Cooper and Marryat, and boy
readers, at least, will need no introduction to him. Nor will their
enjoyment ever be alloyed by a Puritan moral or a mystic double
meaning.” And Barrett Wendell, in _A Literary History of America_--a
volume that modestly limits American literature of much value not only
to New England, but even tucks it neatly into the confines of Harvard
College--notes with jaunty patronage: “Herman Melville with his books
about the South Seas, which Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have
declared the best ever written, and his novels of maritime adventure,
began a career of literary promise, which never came to fruition.”
These typical pronouncements, unperverted by the remotest touch of
independent judgment, transcend Melville’s worst fears. “Think of it!”
he once wrote to Hawthorne. “To go down to posterity is bad enough, any
way; but to go down as a ‘man who lived among the cannibals!’ When I
think of posterity in reference to myself, I mean only the babes who
will probably be born in the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving
up the ghost. I shall go down to them, in all likelihood. _Typee_ will
be given to them, perhaps, with their gingerbread.” In that mythical
anomaly known as the “popular mind,” Melville has, indeed, survived as
an obscure adventurer in strange seas and among amiable barbarians.
_Typee_ and _Omoo_ have lived on as minor classics. Though there have
been staccato and sporadic attacks upon the ludicrous inadequacy of the
popular judgment upon Melville, not until recently, and then chiefly
in England has there been any popular and concerted attempt to take
Melville’s truer and more heroic dimensions. An editorial in the London
_Nation_ for January 22, 1921, thus bespeaks the changing temper of the
times:
“It is clear that the wind of the spirit, when it once begins to blow
through the English literary mind, possesses a surprising power of
penetration. A few weeks ago it was pleased to aim a simultaneous
blast in the direction of a book known to some generations of men as
_Moby-Dick_. A member of the staff of _The Nation_ was thereupon moved
in the ancient Hebrew fashion to buy and to read it. He then expressed
himself on the subject, incoherently indeed, but with signs of emotion
as intense and as pleasingly uncouth as Man Friday betrayed at the
sight of his long-lost father. While struggling with his article, and
wondering what the deuce it could mean, I received a letter from a
famous literary man, marked on the outside ‘Urgent,’ and on the inner
scroll of the manuscript itself ‘A Rhapsody.’ It was about _Moby-Dick_.
Having observed a third article on the same subject, of an equally
febrile kind, I began to read _Moby-Dick_ myself. Having done so I
hereby declare, being of sane intellect, that since letters began there
never was such a book, and that the mind of man is not constructed so
as to produce such another; that I put its author with Rabelais, Swift,
Shakespeare, and other minor and disputable worthies; and that I advise
any adventurer of the soul to go at once to the morose and prolonged
retreat necessary for its deglutition.”
Having earlier been hailed in France as an “American Rabelais;” prized
in England by the author of _The City of Dreadful Night_; greeted by
Stevenson with slangy enthusiasm as a “howling cheese;” rated by Mr.
Masefield as unique among writers of the sea; the professed inspirer of
Captain Hook of Sir James Barrie’s _Peter Pan_, Melville is beginning
to appear as being vastly more than merely a “man who lived among the
cannibals” and who returned home to write lively sea stories for boys.
The wholesale neglect of Melville at the hands of his
countrymen--though explained in some part as a consummation of
Melville’s best efforts--has not been merely unintelligent, but
thoroughly discreditable. For Melville, from any point of view, is
one of the most distinguished of our writers, and there is something
ludicrous in being before all the world--as, assuredly, we sometimes
are--in recognising our own merit where it is contestable, and in
neglecting it where it is not.
It has been our tradition to cherish our literature for its embodiment
of Queen Victoria’s fireside qualities. The repudiation of this
tradition--as a part of our repudiation of all tradition--has made
fashionable a wholesale contempt for our native product. “I can’t read
Longfellow” is frequently remarked; “he’s so subtle!” Our critical
estimates have laboured under the incubus of New England provincialism:
a provincialism preserved in miniature in the first pages of
Lowell’s essay on Thoreau. At present we need to have the eminence
of the section recalled to us; but during the period of Melville’s
productivity, it was at its apex, and in its bosom Melville wrote. This
man, whose closest literary affinities were Rabelais, Zola, Sir Thomas
Browne, Rousseau, Meredith, and Dr. John Donne,--a combination to make
the uninitiated blink with incredulity--was indebted to Nathaniel
Hawthorne for the best makeshift for companionship he was ever to
know: one of the most subtly ironical associations the imps of comedy
ever brought about. Nor was the comedy lessened by Mrs. Hawthorne’s
presence upon the scene. Shrewd was her instinctive resentment of
her husband’s friend. Viewed by his neighbours “as little better
than a cannibal and a ‘beach comber’”--such was the report of the
late Titus Munson Coan in a letter to his mother written immediately
after a pilgrimage to Melville in the Berkshires--Melville turned to
Hawthorne for understanding. Frank Preston Stearns, in his _Life and
Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne_ (1906) says that for Hawthorne “the
summer of 1851 in Lenox was by no means brilliant.... Hawthorne’s
chief entertainment seems to have been the congratulatory letters
he received from distinguished people.... For older company he had
Herman Melville and G. P. R. James, whose society he may have found
as interesting as that of more distinguished writers.” But Mrs.
Hawthorne had studied Melville with a closer scrutiny and was not so
easily convinced of Melville’s insignificance. Melville had visited
the Hawthornes in the tiny reception room of the Red House, where Mrs.
Hawthorne “sewed at her stand and read to the children about Christ;”
in the drawing room, where she disposed “the embroidered furniture,”
and where, in the farther corner, stood “Apollo with his head tied on;”
in Hawthorne’s study, which to Mrs. Hawthorne’s wifely adoration was
consecrated by “his presence in the morning.” Mrs. Hawthorne looked
from the “wonderful, wonderful eyes” of her husband--each eye “like a
violet with a soul in it,”--to Melville’s eyes, and confessed to her
mother her grave and jealous suspicion of Melville: “I am not quite
sure that _I do not think him_ a very great man.... A man with a true,
warm heart, and a soul and an intellect,--with life to his finger-tips;
earnest, sincere and reverent; very tender and _modest_.... He has very
keen perceptive power; but what astonishes me is, that his eyes are not
large and deep. He seems to see everything very accurately; and how he
can do so with his small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes,
either, but quite undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and
rather handsome, his mouth expressive of sensibility and emotion. He is
tall, and erect, with an air free, brave and manly. When conversing, he
is full of gesture and force, and loses himself in his subject. There