Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
my faculties. Recovering my self-possession, however, and with that, my
good-breeding, I advanced en cavalier and, gracefully sinking on one
knee, I bowed my head and exclaimed ‘Here do I prostrate myself, thou
sweet Divinity, and kneel at the shrine of thy--’”
But here, just at the climax of the quest, the clipping is abruptly
torn, and the reader is left cruelly suspended.
From the publication of _Lalla Rookh_, in 1817, to the publication
of Thackeray’s _Our Street_ in 1847, there settled upon letters and
life in England an epidemic of hankering for the exotic. At the
instigation of _Lalla Rookh_, England made a prim effort to be “purely
and intensely Asiatic,” and this while delicately avoiding “the
childishness, cruelty, and profligacy of Asia.” In the fashionable
literature of the period, the harem and the slave-market unburdened its
gazelles and its interior decorations, and by a resort to divans and
coruscating rubies, and ottar of roses, and lutes, and warm panting
maidens, the “principled goodness” of Anglo-Saxon self-righteousness
was thrilled to a discreet voluptuousness.
In his second _Fragment_, Melville has caught at some of the drift-wood
of this great tidal wave that was washed across the Atlantic. And in
acknowledgment of this early indebtedness, he in _Pierre_ speaks of
Tom Moore with an especial burst of enthusiasm, mating him with Hafiz,
Anacreon, Catullus and Ovid.
Reared in a New England environment that had been soberly tempered by
Mrs. Chapone and Mrs. Barbauld, Melville had, under the goadings of
poverty, the frustrations of his environment, and the teasing lure of
some stupendous discovery awaiting him at the rainbow’s end, plunged
into the hideousness of life in the forecastle of a merchantman.
At both extremes of his journey he reaped only disillusion. As a
practically penniless sailor in Liverpool he enjoyed the freedom of
the streets: and the architecture of the city impressed him less
than did the sights of the poverty and viciousness to which he was
especially exposed. Back he came to Lansingburg, to the old pump in the
yard, the stiff-corseted decorum, and the threadbare and pretentious
proprieties of his mother, to decline into the enforced drudgery
of teaching school. The sights of Liverpool and the forecastle had
given no permanent added beauty to home. He did not comfortably fit
into any recognised socket of New England respectability. He sought
escape in books, in amateur authorship. And Burton, and Anacreon,
and Tom Moore are not guaranteed to reconcile a boy in ferment to a
tame and repugnant environment. He was like a strong wine that clears
with explosive violence. He had been to sea once, and there acquired
some skill as a sailor. The excitement and hardship and downrightness
of ocean life, when viewed through the drab of the ensuing years,
treacherously suffered a sea-change. After three and a half years of
mounting desperation, he was ripe for a transit clean beyond the pale
of civilisation.
“I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote,” he later
wrote in an effort to explain his second hegira; “I love to sail
forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” The trip to Liverpool
had slammed the sash on one magic casement; but the greater part of the
watery world was still to be viewed. “Why,” he asks himself perplexed
at his own mystery, “is almost every healthy boy with a robust healthy
soul, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why did the old
Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate
deity, and own brother to Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning.
And still deeper the story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp
the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and
was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and
oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is
the key to all.” The key he here offers to the heart of his mystery is
itself locked in mystery; though when he compared himself to Narcissus
tormented by the irony of being two, Melville may have been hotter on
the trail of the truth than he was aware. His deepest insight, perhaps,
came to him one midnight, out on the Pacific, where in the glare and
the wild Hindoo odour of the tryworks of a whaler in full operation,
he fell asleep at the helm. “Starting from a brief standing sleep,” he
says, “I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. I thought
my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the
lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite
of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by. Nothing
seemed before me but a jet of gloom, now and then made ghastly by
flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift,
rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as
rushing from all havens astern.”
In a headlong retreat from all havens astern, on January 3, 1841,
Melville shipped on board the _Acushnet_, a whaler bound for the South
Seas.
CHAPTER VII
BLUBBER AND MYSTICISM
“And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet
undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real
repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be
unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that,
upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left
undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors,
find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe
all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale
College and my Harvard.”
--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Moby-Dick_.
In 1892, the year after Melville’s death, Arthur Stedman wrote a
“Biographical and Critical Introduction” to _Typee_. During the final
years of Melville’s sedulous isolation, Arthur Stedman was--with the
minor exception of the late Dr. Titus Munson Coan, whose Missionary
parentage Melville seems never to have quite forgiven him--the single
man who clung to Melville with any semblance of personal loyalty.
Stedman was unwavering in his belief that in his earlier South
Sea novels, Melville had attained to his highest achievement: an
achievement that entitled Melville to more golden opinions, Stedman
believed, than Melville ever reaped from a graceless generation. To
Stedman--as to Dr. Coan--Melville’s later development into mysticism
and metaphysics was a melancholy perversity to be viewed with a
charitable forbearance, and forgiven in the fair name of Fayaway.
Dr. Coan repeatedly used to recount, with a sigh at his frustration,
how he made persistent attempts to inveigle Melville into Polynesian
reminiscences, always to be rebuffed by Melville’s invariable
rejoinder: “That reminds me of the eighth book of Plato’s _Republic_.”
This was a signal for silence and leave-taking. What was the staple
of Stedman’s conversation is not known. But despite the fact that
Melville was to him a crabbed and darkly shadowed hieroglyph, he clung
to Melville with a personal loyalty at once humorous and pathetic.
Melville to him was the “man who lived with the cannibals,” and
merited canonisation because of this intimacy with unholy flesh.
Stedman published in the New York _World_ for October 11, 1891,
a tribute to his dead friend, significantly headed: _“Marquesan”
Melville. A South Sea Prospero who Lived and Died in New York. The
Island Nymphs of Nukuheva’s Happy Valley._ While Stedman was not
necessarily responsible for this caption, it is, nevertheless, a just
summary of the fullest insight he ever got into Melville’s life and
works. The friendship between Petrarch and Boccaccio is hardly less
humorous than the relationship between Melville and Stedman; and surely
Melville has suffered more, in death, if not in life, from the perils
of friendship than did Petrarch: more even than did Baudelaire from the
damaging admiration of Gautier. When one’s enemy writes a book, one’s
reputation is less likely to be jeopardised by literary animosity than
it is by the best superlatives of self-appointed custodians of one’s
good name. But as Francis Thompson has observed, it is a principle
universally conceded that, since the work of a great author is said to
be a monument, the true critic does best evince his taste and sense
by cutting his own name on it. Critical biographers have contrived
a method to hand themselves down to posterity through the gods of
literature, as did the Roman emperors through the gods of Olympus--by
taking the heads off their statues, and clapping on their own instead.
Criticism is a perennial decapitation.
“I have a fancy,” says Stedman, in his _Biographical and Critical
Introduction_, “that it was the reading of Richard Henry Dana’s _Two
Years Before the Mast_ which revived the spirit of adventure in
Melville’s breast. That book was published in 1840, and was at once
talked of everywhere. Melville must have read it at the time, mindful
of his own experience as a sailor. At any rate, he once more signed
a ship’s articles, and on January 1, 1841, sailed from New Bedford
harbour in the whaler _Acushnet_, bound for the Pacific Ocean and the
sperm fishery.”
In the second part of this statement, Stedman attempts to stick to the
letter: but there is a flaw in his text. That Melville sailed in the
_Acushnet_ is corroborated by a statement in the journal of Melville’s
wife; in the record surviving in Melville’s handwriting, headed “what
became of the ship’s company on the whaleship _Acushnet_, according
to Hubbard, who came back in her (more than a four years’ voyage) and
visited me in Pittsfield in 1850;” as well as by surviving letters
written by Richard Tobias Greene, the Toby of _Typee_.
The roster of Melville’s ship is preserved in Alexander Starbuck’s
bulky _History of the American Whale Fishery from its Earliest
Inception to the Year 1876_ (published by the author, Waltham, Mass.,
1878). Starbuck rates the _Acushnet_ as a ship of 359 tons, built in
1840. Her managing owners are reported as having been Bradford Fuller &
Co. Under command of Captain Pease she sailed from Fairhaven, bound for
the whaling grounds of the Pacific, on January 3, 1841, and returned to
Fairhaven on May 13, 1845, laden with 850 barrels of sperm oil, 1350
barrels of whale oil, and 13500 pounds of whale-bone. On July 18, 1845,
she started upon her second voyage, under command of Captain Rogers, to
return June 7, 1848, stocked with 500 barrels of sperm oil, 800 barrels
of whale oil, and 6000 pounds of whale-bone. On December 4, 1847, she
had a boat stove by a whale, with the loss of the third mate and four
of the crew. Her third voyage, begun August 31, 1848, under command
of Captain Bradley, was her last. As by some malicious fatality, the
_Acushnet_ was lost on St. Lawrence Island on August 31, 1851, within a
month of the time when Melville brought _Moby-Dick_ to its tragic close.
Between Stedman’s and Starbuck’s accounts of the time and place of
Melville’s sailing there is a discrepancy of half a mile and two days.
This discrepancy, however, does not necessarily impugn Stedman’s
accuracy. Fairhaven is just across the Acushnet river from New
Bedford, and “sailing from New Bedford” may be like “sailing from New
York”--which is often in reality “sailing from Hoboken.”
Stedman dates Melville’s sailing January 1; Starbuck, January 3.
Melville launches the hero of _Moby-Dick_ neither from New Bedford nor
from Fairhaven, but from Nantucket. Ishmael begins his fatal voyage
aboard the _Pequod_ on December 25; and there is a fitting irony in
the fact that on the day that celebrates the birth of the Saviour
of mankind, the _Pequod_ should sail forth to slay Moby-Dick, the
monstrous symbol and embodiment of unconquerable evil.