Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
their qualities of beauty and romance. Perhaps _Redburn_ will have
fewer praises, so here goes for _Redburn_; a boy’s book about running
away to sea.” Even more difficult of access is _Pierre_--a book at
the antipodes from _Redburn_. Far from being a boy’s book, _Pierre_
was prophetic of the pessimism of Hardy and the subtlety of Meredith.
From _Redburn_ to _Pierre_; from _Typee_, a spirited travel-book on
Polynesia, to _Clarel_, an intricate philosophical poem in two volumes:
these mark the antithetical extremes of the art that mated poetry and
blubber, whaling and metaphysics. The very complexity and versatility
of Melville’s achievement has been an obstacle in the way of his just
appreciation. Had Mandeville turned from his _Travels_, to write _The
City of Dreadful Night_, the incompatibility would have been no less
extraordinary or bewildering.
Indeed, Melville’s complete works, in their final analysis, are a
long effort towards the creation of one of the most complex, and
massive, and original characters in literature: the character known
in life as Herman Melville. “I am like one of those seeds taken out
of the Egyptian Pyramids,” he wrote to Hawthorne while he was in the
middle of _Moby-Dick_, “which, after being three thousand years a seed
and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed
itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was
twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I
date my life. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the
bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould. It seems to
me now that Solomon was the truest man who ever spoke, and yet that he
_managed_ the truth with a view to popular conservatism.”
Blighted by disillusionment, and paralysed by doubt, Melville came to
treat as an irrelevancy, the making of books. “He informed me that he
had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated,’” wrote Hawthorne
in his _Note-book_, after Melville visited him in Southport, England,
in 1856; “but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation. It
is strange how he persists--as he has persisted ever since I knew him,
and probably long before--in wandering to and fro over these deserts,
as dismal and monotonous as the sandhills amidst which we were sitting.
He can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is
too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” If,
in contempt for the orthodox interpolations by which pious scribes
attempted to sweeten Solomon’s bitter message, Melville ever _managed_
truth as he saw it, it was more to violate popular conservatism
than to propitiate it. “We incline to think that God cannot explain
His own secrets,” he editorially wrote Hawthorne in 1851, “and that
He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We
mortals astonish Him as much as He us.” And as Melville grew in
disillusionment, he grew in astonishment. In his relentless pessimism
he boasted himself “in the happy condition of judicious, unencumbered
travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with
nothing but a carpet bag,--that is to say, the Ego.” It was his ripest
conviction that the exclamation point and the triumphant perpendicular
pronoun were interchangeable signs. But to the end, he bristled with
minor revelations.
Though he boasted that he crossed the frontier into Eternity with
nothing but a carpet bag, he had, in fact, sent more bulky consignments
on ahead. And at the final crack of doom, this dead and disappointed
mariner may yet rise to an unexpected rejoicing. For at that time of
ultimate reckoning, according to the eschatology of Mr. Masefield,
“then the great white whale, old Moby-Dick, the king of all the whales,
will rise up from his quiet in the sea, and go bellowing to his mates.
And all the whales in the world--the sperm-whales, the razor-back,
the black-fish, the rorque, the right, the forty-barrel Jonah, the
narwhal, the hump-back, the grampus and the thrasher--will come to him,
‘fin-out,’ blowing their spray to the heavens. Then Moby-Dick will call
the roll of them, and from all the parts of the sea, from the north,
from the south, from Callao to Rio, not one whale will be missing. Then
Moby-Dick will trumpet, like a man blowing a horn, and all that company
of whales will ‘sound’ (that is, dive), for it is they that have the
job of raising the wrecks from down below.
“Then when they come up the sun will just be setting in the sea, far
away to the west, like a ball of red fire. And just as the curve of it
goes below the sea, it will stop sinking and lie there like a door.
And the stars and the earth and the wind will stop. And there will be
nothing but the sea, and this red arch of the sun, and the whales with
the wrecks, and a stream of light upon the water. Each whale will have
raised a wreck from among the coral, and the sea will be thick with
them--row-ships and sail-ships, and great big seventy-fours, and big
White Star boats, and battleships, all of them green with the ooze,
but all of them manned by singing sailors. And ahead of them will go
Moby-Dick, towing the ship our Lord was in, with all the sweet apostles
aboard of her. And Moby-Dick will give a great bellow, like a fog-horn
blowing, and stretch ‘fin-out’ for the sun away in the west. And all
the whales will bellow out an answer. And all the drowned sailors will
sing their chanties, and beat the bells into a music. And the whole
fleet of them will start towing at full speed towards the sun, at the
edge of the sky and water. I tell you they will make white water, those
ships and fishes.
“When they have got to where the sun is, the red ball will swing open
like a door, and Moby-Dick, and all the whales, and all the ships
will rush through it into an anchorage in Kingdom Come. It will be
a great calm piece of water, with land close aboard, where all the
ships of the world will lie at anchor, tier upon tier, with the hands
gathered forward, singing. They’ll have no watches to stand, no ropes
to coil, no mates to knock their heads in. Nothing will be to do except
singing and beating on the bell. And all the poor sailors who went
in patched rags, my son, they’ll be all fine in white and gold. And
ashore, among the palm-trees, there’ll be fine inns for the seamen.”
And there, among a numerous company, will be Fayaway, and Captain Ahab,
and Jack Chase, and Jarl, and Toby, and Pierre, and Father Mapple, and
Jackson, and Doctor Long Ghost, and Kory-Kory, and Bildad, and Peleg,
and Fedallah, and Tashetego, and Marnoo, and Queequeg. But it seems
hardly likely that Melville will there find Hawthorne to tempt by a
basket of champagne into some little shady corner, there to cross their
legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and to discourse
pleasantly of all the things manifold which once so much distressed
them. In my Father’s house are many mansions.
CHAPTER II
GHOSTS
“We are full of ghosts and spirits; we are as grave-yards full of
buried dead, that start to life before us. And all our dead sires,
verily, are in us; _that_ is their immortality. From sire to son,
we go on multiplying corpses in ourselves; for all of which, are
resurrections. Every thought’s a soul of some past poet, hero, sage.
We are fuller than a city.”--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Mardi_.
The High Gods, in a playful and prodigal mood, gave to Melville, to
Julia Ward Howe, to Lowell, to Kingsley, to Ruskin, to Whitman, and to
Queen Victoria, the same birth year. On August 1, 1819, Herman Melville
was born at No. 6 Pearl Street, New York City.
Melville’s vagabondage as a common sailor on a merchantman, on whaling
vessels, and in the United States Navy, together with his Bohemian
associations with cannibals, mutineers, and some of the choicest dregs
of our Christian civilisation, must have wrenched a chorus of groans
from a large congregation of shocked ancestral ghosts. For Melville was
descended from a long and prolific line of the best American stock.
Through his mother, Maria Gansevoort, he traced back to the earliest
Dutch emigrants to New York; through his father, Allan Melville, to
pre-revolutionary Scotch-Irish emigrants to New England. Both of his
grandfathers distinguished themselves in the Revolutionary War. His
ancestors, on both sides, came to this country in the days when some of
the best blood of Europe was being transferred to America.
Though Melville was too ironic a genius ever to have been guilty
of the ill-breeding that makes an ostentation of ancestry, still
he looked back upon his descent with self-conscious pride: a pride
drawn by childhood absorption from his parents who, by resting on the
achievements of their forebears, added several cubits to their stature.
Lacking the prophetic vision to glory in being ancestors, they chose
the more comfortable rôle of parading as descendants. Melville’s
father, Allan, was sufficiently absorbed in his genealogy to compile,
in 1818, an elaborately branching family tree that sent its master
root back to one Sir Richard de Melvill, del Compte de Fife, a worthy
of the thirteenth century. And at the proud conclusion of his labours
he inscribed the Melville motto, _Denique Coelum_--“Heaven at last.”
Melville’s mother, Maria Gansevoort, though too absorbed in domesticity
to compete with Allan in drawing up a parallel document, still sat
opposite her spouse with a stiff spine, conscious that she could
counter his ancestry, grandfather for grandfather. It is true, she had
no thirteenth century count to fall back upon; and though her line lost
itself in a cluster of breweries, they were very substantial breweries,
and owned by a race of stalwart and affluent and uncompromising
burghers. Her ancestor, Harmen Harmense Van Gansevoort, was brewing in
Beverwyck as early as 1660, and with sufficient success to acquire such
extended investments in land that he bequeathed to his heirs a baronial
inheritance. During the centuries following his death his name crossed
itself with that of the Van Rensselaers, the Ten Broeks, the Douws, the
Van Schaicks,--with the proudest names that descended from the earlier
Colonial Dutch families. Melville’s mother, Maria, is remembered as a
cold, proud woman, arrogant in the sense of her name, her blood, and
the affluence of her forebears.
She was the only daughter and oldest child in a family of six, of
General Peter Gansevoort and Catharine Van Schaick. Her father, born
in Albany, New York, July 17, 1749, was among the outstanding patriots
of the American Revolution. He was among the troops which accompanied
Schuyler, in 1775, in his advance towards Canada. In December of the
same year he was with Montgomery, as Major, in the unfortunate assault
upon Quebec. In the summer of 1777, when Burgoyne’s semi-barbarous
invading army was slowly advancing down Lake Champlain and the Hudson,
he was Colonel in command of Fort Stanwix. By his obstinate and gallant
defence of Fort Stanwix in August, 1777, he prevented the juncture
of St. Leger with Burgoyne, and so changed the course of the whole
subsequent campaign. Washington keenly and warmly recognised this,
and Congress passed a vote of thanks to Colonel Gansevoort. Peter
Gansevoort did other brilliant service in the Revolutionary War, and
in 1809, when the War of 1812 was approaching, he was made brigadier
general in the United States army. He was sheriff of Albany County from
1790 to 1792, and regent of the University of New York from 1808 until
his death in 1812.
Of his sons, Hon. Peter Gansevoort, who was born in Albany in 1789, was
long one of the most prominent and honoured citizens of Albany. The
elder son, General Herman Gansevoort, from whom Melville received his