Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
wretched inhabitants of the Sandwich islands, to enjoy the mere name
of Christians without experiencing any of the vital operations of true
religion, whilst, at the same time, they are made the victims of the
worst vices and evils of civilised life.”
Paul Gauguin, in his _Intimate Journals_, seems to share Melville’s
conviction that the Polynesians are disqualified by nature to
experience “any of the vital operations of the spirit.” In speaking of
the attempts of the missionaries to introduce marriage into Polynesia
he remarks cynically: “As they are going out of the church, the groom
says to the maid of honour, ‘How pretty you are!’ And the bride says to
the best man ‘How handsome you are!’ Very soon one couple moves off to
the right and another to the left, deep into the underbrush where, in
the shelter of the banana trees and before the Almighty, two marriages
take place instead of one. Monseigneur is satisfied, and says, ‘We are
beginning to civilise them.’”
The good intentions of the Missionaries Melville does not question. But
high faith and low intelligence is a dangerous if not uncommon mating
of qualities. “It matters not,” he says, “that the earlier labourers in
the work, although strictly conscientious, were, as a class, ignorant,
and in many cases, deplorably bigoted: such traits have, in some
degree, characterised the pioneers of all faith. And although in zeal
and disinterestedness, the missionaries now on the island are, perhaps,
inferior to their predecessors, they have, nevertheless, in their
own way, at least, laboured hard to make a Christian people of their
charge.”
As a result of this labour idolatry was done away with; the entire
Bible was translated into Tahitian; the morality of the islanders
was, on the whole, improved. These accomplishments Melville freely
admits. But in temporal felicity, “the Tahitians are far worse off
now than formerly; and although their circumstances, upon the whole,
are bettered by the missionaries, the benefits conferred by the
latter become utterly insignificant, when confronted with the vast
preponderance of evil brought by other means.” Melville found that
there was still at Tahiti freedom and indolence; torches brandished
in the woods at night; dances under the moon, and women decked with
flowers. But he also found the Missionaries intent upon the abolition
of the native amusements and customs--in their crowning efforts,
decking the women out in hats “said to have been first contrived and
recommended by the missionaries’ wives; a report which, I really trust,
is nothing but a scandal.” To Melville’s eyes, Tahiti was neither Pagan
nor Christian, but a bedraggled bastard cross between the vices of two
incompatible traditions. And in this blend he saw the promise of the
certain extinction of the Polynesians. The Polynesians themselves were
not blind to the doom upon them. Melville had heard the aged Tahitians
singing in a low sad tone a song which ran: “The palm trees shall grow,
the coral shall spread, but man shall cease.”
Melville’s plea was that Christendom treat Polynesia with
reasonableness, and Christian charity: perhaps the two rarest qualities
in the world. His plea was not without results; he unloosed upon
himself exhibitions of venom of the whole-hearted sort that enamour
a misanthrope to life. _The Living Age_ (Vol. XXVII) reprinted from
the _Eclectic Review_ a tribute which began: “Falsehood is a thing of
almost invincible courage; overthrow it to-day, and with freshened
vigour it will return to the lists to-morrow. _Omoo_ illustrates this
fact. We were under the illusion that the abettors of infidelity
and the partisans of popery had been put to shame by the repeated
refutation and exposure of their slanders against the Protestant
Missions in Polynesia; but Mr. Melville’s production proves that shame
is a virtue with which these gentry are totally unacquainted, and that
they are resharpening their missiles for another onset.” This review
then made it its object “to show that his statements respecting the
Protestant Mission in Tahiti are perversions of the truth--that
he is guilty of deliberate and elaborate misrepresentation, and ...
that he is a prejudiced, incompetent, and truthless witness.” It was
taken for granted that Melville was guilty of the heinous crime of
being a Catholic. From this presumption it was easy to understand that
Melville’s plea for sweetness and light was but the vicious ravings of
a man “foiled and disappointed by the rejection of Mariolatry and the
worship of wafers and of images, and of dead men by the Bible-reading
Tahitians.” By a convincing--if not cogent--technique of controversy,
Melville’s evidence was impugned by a discounting of the morals of the
witness: a Catholic, and a disseminator of the “worst of European vices
and the most dreadful of European diseases.”
Melville was twenty-eight years old when he Quixotically championed
the heathen in the name of a transcendental charity which he believed
to be Christian. Amiable Protestant brethren undertook to disabuse him
of his naïve belief that the guardians of the faith of Christendom
invariably regulate their conduct in the spirit of Christ. As Melville
grew in wisdom he grew in disillusion: and his early tilt at the
London Missionary Society contributed to his rapid growth. At the
age of thirty-three he wrote in _Pierre_--a book planned to show the
impracticability of virtue--that “God’s truth is one thing, and man’s
truth another.” He then maintained that the history of Christendom for
the last 1800 years showed that “in spite of all the maxims of Christ,
that history is as full of blood, violence, wrong, and iniquity of
every kind, as any previous portion of the world’s story.” He says in
_Clarel_:
“The world is portioned out, believe:
The good have but a patch at best,
The wise their corner; for the rest--
Malice divides with ignorance.”
Melville points out that Christ’s teachings seemed folly to the Jews
because Christ carried Heaven’s time in Jerusalem, while the Jews
carried Jerusalem time there. “Did He not expressly say ‘My wisdom is
not of this world?’ Whatever is really peculiar in the wisdom of Christ
seems precisely the same folly to-day as it did 1850 years ago.” In
_Clarel_, he goes further, and calls the world
“a den
Worse for Christ’s coming, since His love
(Perverted) did but venom prove.”
Though such a heretical idea was, to the Protestant brethren, of
course, clean gone on the farthest side of damnation, yet were Melville
and these same brethren working upon an identical major premise: each
was righteously convinced that he was about his Father’s business--each
was attempting to rout the other in the name of Christ. The brethren
rode forth in the surety of triumph; Melville retired within himself
convinced that defeat was not refutation, and that his way had been,
withal, the way of Heavenly Truth. And since his way bore but bitter
fruit, he shook the dust of the earth from his feet, convinced that
such soil was designed to nourish only iniquity. “Where is the earnest
and righteous philosopher,” he asks, framing his question to include
himself in that glorious minority, “who looking right and left, and up
and down through all the ages of the world, the present included; where
is there such an one who has not a thousand times been struck with a
sort of infidel idea, that whatever other worlds God may be Lord of,
He is not Lord of this: for else this world would seem to give Him the
lie; so utterly repugnant seem its ways to the instinctively known ways
of Heaven.” In this world, he grew to feel, a wise man resigns himself
to the world’s ways. “When we go to heaven,” he taught, “it will be
quite another thing. There, we can freely turn the left cheek, because
the right cheek will never be smitten. There they can freely give all
to the poor, for _there_ there will be no poor to give to.” And this,
he contended, was a salutary doctrine: “I hold up a practical virtue to
the vicious; and interfere not with the eternal truth, that, sooner or
later, downright vice is downright woe.” His milk of human kindness was
not sweetened by the thunder of the Protestant brethren.
Resigned to the insight that while on earth no wise man aims at heaven
except by a virtuous expediency, he accepted the London Missionary
Society as one of the evils inherent in the universe, and leaving it
to its own fate, looked prophetically forward to the Inter-Church
World Movement. In _The Confidence Man_ he makes one of the characters
say: “Missions I would quicken with the Wall Street spirit. For if,
confessedly, certain spiritual ends are to be gained but through
the auxiliary agency of worldly means, then, to the surer gaining
of such spiritual ends, the example of worldly policy in worldly
projects should not by spiritual projectors be slighted. In brief, the
conversion of the heathen, so far, at least, as depending on human
effort, would, by the world’s charity, be let out on contract. So much
by bid for converting India, so much for Borneo, so much for Africa.
You see, this doing good in the world by driblets is just nothing. I
am for doing good in the world with a will. I am for doing good to the
world once for all, and having done with it. Do but think of the eddies
and maelstroms of pagans in China. People here have no conception of
it. Of a frosty morning in Hong Kong, pauper pagans are found dead
in the streets like so many nipped peas in a bin of peas. To be an
immortal being in China is no more distinction than to be a snow-flake
in a snow-squall. What are a score or two of missionaries to such
a people? I am for sending ten thousand missionaries in a body and
converting the Chinese _en masse_ within six months of the debarkation.
The thing is then done, and turn to something else.” And in _Clarel_:
“But preach and work:
You’ll civilise the barbarous Turk--
Nay, all the East may reconcile:
That done, let Mammon take the wings of even,
And mount and civilise the saints in heaven.”
But when Melville was in Tahiti he harboured less emancipated notions
than he later achieved. He was then to all outward seeming little
better than a beach-comber, disciplined for his participation in a
mutiny he and the Long Doctor had ineffectively tried to prevent, and
in the end abandoned by his ecclesiastical guardians to drift among the
natives of Tahiti, and to find his way back home any way he could.
The authorities at Tahiti left the party at the Calabooza to its own
disintegration: a sore on the island cured not by surgery but by
neglect. Gradually the mutineers melted out of sight.
With the Long Doctor, Melville sailed across to the neighbouring island
of Imeeo, there to hire themselves out as field-labourers to two
South Sea planters: one a tall, robust Yankee, born in the backwoods
of Maine, sallow, and with a long face; the other, a short florid
little Cockney. This strange pair had cleared about thirty acres
in the isolation of the wild valley of Martair, where they worked
with invincible energy, and struggling against all odds to farm in
Polynesia, and with Heaven knows what ideas of making a fortune on
their crude plantation.
Melville had tried farming in Pittsfield, and he liked the labour
even less in Polynesia than he did in Christendom. The Long Doctor
throve not at all hoeing potatoes under a tropical sun, all the while
saying masses as he watered the furrows with his sweat. Both Melville