Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
but the sunny skies of Spain had shone upon the infancy of the being,
who looks so like her own “dark-glancing daughters.”
* * * * *
And then her eyes! they open their dark, rich orbs upon you like the
full moon of heaven, and blaze into your very soul the fires of day!
Like the offerings laid upon the sacrificial altars of the Hebrew,
when in an instant the divine spark falling from the propitiated
God kindled them in flames; so, a single glance from that Oriental
eye as quickly fires your soul, and leaves your bosom in a perfect
conflagration! Odds Cupids and Darts! with one broad sweep of vision
in a crowded ball-room, that splendid creature would lay around
her like the two-handed sword of Minotti, hearts on hearts, piled
round in semi-circles! But it is well for the more rugged sex that
this glorious being can vary her proud dominion, and give to the
expression of her eye a melting tenderness which dissolves the most
frigid heart and heals the wounds she gave before.
If the devout and exemplary Mussulman who dying fast in the faith of
his Prophet anticipates reclining on beds of roses, gloriously drunk
through all the ages of eternity, is to be waited on by Houris such
as these: waft me ye gentle gales beyond this lower world and
“Lap me in soft Lydian airs!”
But I am falling into I know not what extravagances, so I will
briefly give you a portrait of the last of these three divinities,
and will then terminate my tiresome lucubrations.
* * * * *
Here, my dear M----, closes this catalogue of the Graces, this
chapter of Beauties, and I should implore your pardon for trespassing
so long on your attention. If you, yourself, in whose breast may
possibly be extinguished the amatory flame, should not feel an
interest in these three “counterfeit presentments,” do not fail to
show them to ---- and solicit her opinion as to their respective
merits.
Tender my best acknowledgments to the Major for his prompt attention
to my request, and, for yourself, accept the assurance of my
undiminished regard; and hoping that the smiles of heaven may
continue to illuminate your way,
I remain, ever yours,
L. A. V.
These “chaste and elegant sentiments” are, surely, “embellished with
every polite accomplishment.” Melville called down the Nine Gods, and a
host of minor deities; he ransacked Athens, Rhodes, Cyprus, Circassia,
Lydia, Lilliputia, Damascus, this world and the next, for geographical
adornments; he called up Burton, Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Milton,
Coleridge and Chesterfield, as well as Prometheus and Cinderella,
Mahomet and Cleopatra, Madonnas and Houris, Medici and Mussulman,
to strew carelessly across his pages. “Not in vain,” says Melville
of the idealisation of himself in the character of Pierre, “had he
spent long summer afternoons in the deep recesses of his father’s
fastidiously picked and decorous library.” Not in vain, either, had
he been submitted to three years of elementary drill in the classics
at the Albany Academy. “Not that as yet his young and immature soul
had been accosted by the wonderful Mutes, and through the vast halls
of Silent Truth, had been ushered into the full, secret, eternally
inviolable Sanhedrim, where the Poetic Magi discuss, in glorious
gibberish, the Alpha and Omega of the Universe,” says Melville; “but
among the beautiful imaginings of the second and third degree of
poets he freely and comprehendingly ranged.” Melville was always a
wide if desultory reader, more and more interested after the manner
of Sir Thomas Browne, and the Burton with reference to whom he began
his career in letters, in “remote and curious illusions, wrecks of
forgotten fables, antediluvian computations, obsolete and unfamiliar
problems, riddles that no living Œdipus would care to solve.” And this
preoccupation--first made manifest in _Mardi_ (1849)--must always stand
in the way of his most typical writings ever becoming widely popular.
His earliest known piece of juvenile composition is interesting as
revealing the crude beginnings of one of the manners superbly mastered
in parts of _Moby-Dick_. This early effusion, by revealing so crudely
the defects of his qualities, reads as a dull parody of one of his most
typical later manners.
With a Miltonic confidence in his own gifts, Melville came to view
these earlier pieces as the first “earthly rubbish” of his “immense
quarries of fine marble.” Melville goes on to say that “no commonplace
is ever effectually got rid of, except by essentially emptying one’s
self of it into a book; for once trapped into a book, then the book can
be put into the fire and all will be well.” “But they are not always
put into the fire,” he said with regret. And because of his own laxity
in cremation, his crude first fruits stalk abroad to accuse him.
At this early period, Melville had nothing very significant to say; but
he seems to have been urged to say it with remorseless pertinacity.
In _Pierre_, he satirises his youthful and reckless prolixity where
he speaks of his manuscripts as being of such flying multitudes that
“they were to be found lying all round the house; gave a great deal of
trouble to the housemaids in sweeping; went for kindlings to the fires;
and forever flitting out of the windows, and under the doorsills, into
the faces of people passing the manorial mansion.”
Having nothing very particular to write about, he followed an ancient
tradition, and wrote of love. In _Pierre_, which is Melville’s
spiritual autobiography, and in _Pierre_ alone, does Melville
elaborately busy himself with romantic affection. And in _Pierre_,
his is no sugared and conventional preoccupation. He traces his own
development through the love-friendship of boyhood, the miscellaneous
susceptibility of adolescence, to a crucifixion in manhood between the
images of his wife and his mother. His first _Fragment from a Writing
Desk_ seems to have been conceived at a time before his “innumerable
wandering glances settled upon some one specific object.”
His second _Fragment from a Writing Desk_ concerns itself with an
allegorical quest of elusive feminine loveliness: a kind of _Coelebs
in Search of a Wife_, allegorised and crossed with _Lalla Rookh_.
It survives, as has been said, only as a fragment of a Fragment.
Its conclusion must remain a mystery until some old newspaper file
disgorges its secrets. It begins as follows:
For the Democratic Press
FRAGMENTS FROM A WRITING DESK
No. 2
“Confusion seize the Greek!” exclaimed I, as wrathfully rising from
my chair, I flung my ancient Lexicon across the room and seizing
my hat and cane, and throwing on my cloak, I sallied out into the
clearer air of heaven. The bracing coolness of an April evening
calmed my aching temples, and I slowly wended my way to the river
side. I had promenaded the bank for about half an hour, when
flinging myself upon the grassy turf, I was soon lost in revery, and
up to the lips in sentiment.
I had not lain more than five minutes, when a figure effectually
concealed in the ample folds of a cloak, glided past me, and hastily
dropping something at my feet, disappeared behind the angle of an
adjoining house, ere I could recover from my astonishment at so
singular an occurrence.
“Cerbes!” cried I, springing up, “here is a spice of the marvellous!”
and stooping down, I picked up an elegant little, rose-coloured,
lavender-scented billet-doux, and hurriedly breaking the seal (a
heart, transfixed with an arrow) I read by the light of the moon, the
following:--
“GENTLE SIR:
If my fancy has painted you in genuine colours, you will on the
receipt of this, incontinently follow the bearer where she will lead
you.
INAMORITA.”
“The deuce I will!” exclaimed I,--“But soft!”--And I re-perused this
singular document, turned over the billet in my fingers, and examined
the hand-writing, which was femininely delicate, and I could have sworn
was a woman’s. Is it possible, thought I, that the days of romance are
revived?--No, “The days of chivalry are over!” says Burke.
As I made this reflection, I looked up, and beheld the same figure
which had handed me this questionable missive, beckoning me forward.
I started towards her; but, as I approached, she receded from me,
and fled swiftly along the margin of the river at a pace which,
encumbered as I was with my heavy cloak and boots, I was unable to
follow; and which filled me with sundry misgivings, as to the nature
of the being, who could travel with such amazing celerity. At last,
perfectly breathless, I fell into a walk; which, my mysterious fugitive
perceiving, she likewise lessened her pace, so as to keep herself still
in sight, although at too great a distance to permit me to address
her.”
The hero hastens after his guide but always she eludes him. Piqued by
her repeated escapes, he stops in a rage, and relieves his feelings
in “two or three expressions that savoured somewhat of the jolly
days of the jolly cavaliers.” And under the circumstances, he felt
fully justified in his profanity. “What! to be thwarted by a woman!
Peradventure; baffled by a girl? Confusion! It was too bad! To be
outwitted, generated, routed, defeated, by a mere rib of the earth? It
could not be borne!” Recovering his temper, he followed his capricious
guide out of the town, into a shadowy grove to “an edifice, which
seated on a gentle eminence, and embowered amidst surrounding trees,
bore the appearance of a country villa.”
“The appearance of this spacious habitation was anything but inviting;
it seemed to have been built with a jealous eye to concealment; and its
few, but well-defended windows were sufficiently high from the ground,
as effectually to baffle the prying curiosity of the inquisitive
stranger. Not a single light shone from the narrow casement; but all
was harsh, gloomy and forbidding. As my imagination, ever alert on
such an occasion, was busily occupied in assigning some fearful motive
for such unusual precautions, my leader suddenly halted beneath a
lofty window, and making a low call, I perceived slowly descending
therefrom, a thick silken cord, attached to an ample basket, which
was silently deposited at our feet. Amazed at this apparition, I was
about soliciting an explanation: when laying her fingers impressively
upon her lips, and placing herself in the basket, my guide motioned
me to seat myself beside her. I obeyed; but not without considerable
trepidation: and in obedience to the same low call which had procured
its descent, our curious vehicle, with sundry creakings, rose in air.”
This airy jaunt terminated, of course, in an Arabian Nights exterior,
which Melville particularises after the “voluptuous” traditions of
_Vathek_ and _Lalla Rookh_. “The grandeur of the room,” of course,
“served only to show to advantage the matchless beauty of its inmate.”
This matchless beauty was, after established tradition, “reclining
on an ottoman; in one hand holding a lute.” Her fingers, too, “were
decorated with a variety of rings, which as she waved her hand to me
as I entered, darted forth a thousand coruscations, and gleamed their
brilliant splendours to the sight.”
“As I entered the apartment, her eyes were downcast, and the expression
of her face was mournfully interesting; she had apparently been lost
in some melancholy revery. Upon my entrance, however, her countenance
brightened, as with a queenly wave of the hand, she motioned my
conductress from the room, and left me standing, mute, admiring and
bewildered in her presence.”
“For a moment my brain spun round, and I had not at command a single of