Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
smoking a cigar. Would that one I knew were here. Would that the Little
One too were here,--I am in a very painful state of uncertainty. I am
all eagerness to get home--I ought to be home. My absence occasions
uneasiness in a quarter where I most beseech heaven to grant repose.
Yet here I have before me an open prospect to get some curious ideas
of a style of life which in all probability I shall never have again.
I should much like to know what the highest English aristocracy really
and practically is. And the Duke of Rutland’s cordial invitation to
visit him at the castle furnishes me with just the thing I want. If I
do not go, I am confident that hereafter I shall reprimand myself for
neglecting such an opportunity of procuring ‘material.’ And Allan and
others will account me a ninny.--I would not debate the matter a moment
were it not that at least three whole weeks must elapse ere I start
for Belvoir Castle--three weeks! If I could but get over them! And if
the two images would only down for that space of time. I must light a
second cigar and resolve it over again. (1/2 past 6 P. M.) My mind is
made, rather is irrevocably resolved upon my first determination. A
visit into Leicester would be very agreeable--at least very valuable,
and in one respect, to me--but the three weeks are intolerable.
To-morrow I shall go down to London Dock and book myself a state-room
on board the good ship _Independence_. I have just returned from a
lonely dinner at the Adelphi, where I read the Sunday papers. An
article upon the ‘Sunday School Union’ particularly struck me. Would
that I could go home in a steamer--but it would take an extra $100 out
of my pocket. Well, it’s only thirty days--one month--and I can weather
it somehow.”
On Monday, Melville concluded his arrangements with Bentley, who gave
him a note for two hundred pounds sterling at six months. Melville also
walked down to the London Docks to inspect the _Independence_. “She
looks small and smells ancient,” Melville writes. “Only two or three
passengers engaged. I liked Captain Fletcher, however. He enquired
whether I was a relative of Gansevoort Melville and of Herman Melville.
I told him I was. I engaged my passage and paid ten pounds down....
Thence home; and out again, and took a letter for a Duke to the post
office and a pair of pants to be altered to a tailor.”
On Tuesday, Melville made another of his many pilgrimages to the old
book stores about Great Green Street and Lincoln’s Inn. “Looked over
a lot of ancient books of London. Bought one (A. D. 1766) for 3 and 2
pence. I want to use it in case I serve up the Revolutionary narrative
of the beggar.” What was the title of this “ancient book of London”
is not known, and hence it is impossible to know what use he put it
to, when in _Israel Potter_ he did finally “serve up the Revolutionary
narrative of the beggar.” The same day he “stopped at a silversmith’s
(corner of Craven St. & Strand) and bought a solid spoon for the boy
Malcolm--a fork, I mean. When he arrives to years of mastication I
shall invest him with this fork--as in yore they did a young knight,
with his good sword. Spent an hour or so looking over _White-Jacket_
preparatory to sending it finally to Bentley--who, tho he has paid his
money has not received his wares. At 6 I dine with him.”
The dinner with Bentley went off well. Melville “had a very pleasant
evening indeed” and “began to like” his publisher “very much.” Melville
reported that “He seems a very fine, frank, off-handed old gentleman.
We sat down in a fine old room hung round with paintings (dark walls).
A party of fourteen or so. There was a Mr. Bell there--connected with
literature in some way or other. At all events an entertaining man and
a scholar--but looks as if he loved old Pat. Also Alfred Henry Forester
(‘Alfred Crowquill’)--the comic man. He proved a good fellow--free
and easy and no damned nonsense, as there is about so many of these
English. Mr. Bentley has one daughter, a fine woman of 25 and married,
and four sons--young men. They were all at table. Some time after 11,
went home with Crowquill, who invites me to go with him Thursday and
see the Pantomime rehearsal at the Surrey Theatre.”
The following evening Melville dined with Mr. Cook--whom he had
despised, at first meeting, as Murray’s factotum--in Elm Court, Temple,
“and had a glorious time till noon of night. It recalled poor Lamb’s
‘Old Benchers.’ Cunningham the author of _Murray’s London Guide_ was
there and was very friendly. Mr. Rainbow also, and a grandson Woodfall,
the printer of Junius, and a brother-in-law of Leslie the printer.
Leslie was prevented from coming. Up in the 5th story we dined.”
With a typical departure from the conventional orthography, Melville
pronounced the evening, “The Paradise of Batchelors.”
In _Harper’s New Monthly Magazine_ for April, 1854, Melville published
a sketch entitled _Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids_. In
1854 he was living in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in a household of
women and young children--three of his sisters, his mother, his wife,
and three of his own children. So surrounded, he had relinquished
none of the pleasant memories of that December evening, in 1849, in
those high chambers near Temple-Bar. “It was the very perfection of
quiet absorption of good living, good drinking, good feeling, and
good talk,” Melville wrote in 1854. “We were a band of brothers.
Comfort--fraternal, household comfort, was the grand trait of the
affair. Also, you could plainly see that these easy-hearted men had no
wives or children to give an anxious thought. Almost all of them were
travellers, too; for bachelors alone can travel freely, and without
any twinges of their conscience touching desertion of the fireside.”
The antithesis of this, Melville pictures in the second part of his
account--_The Tartarus of Maids_.
Yet just on the eve of his going to these high festivities in the
Temple, a letter was left him--“from home!” The letter reported: “All
well and Barney (“Baby boy,” Mrs. Melville has written in annotation on
the margin of the journal) more bouncing than ever, thank heaven.” On
the following day, Melville began and finished the _Opium Eater_, and
pronounced it “a most wonderful book.”
On December 24, Melville was in Portsmouth. On Christmas morning he
jumped into a small boat with the Captain and a meagre company of
passengers, and “pulled off for the ship about a mile and a half
distant. Upon boarding her we at once set sail with a fair wind, and
in less than 24 hours passed the Land’s End and the Scilly Isle--and
standing boldly out on the ocean stretched away for New York. I shall
keep no further diary. I here close it, with my departure from England,
and my pointing for home.”
On a blank page at end of his journal, he jotted some brief “Memoranda
of things on the voyage.” He noted Sir Thomas Browne’s reference to
cannibals in _Vulgar Errors_, and the fact that Rousseau, as a school
master “could have killed his scholars sometimes.” He observed that “a
Dandy is a good fellow to scout and room with;” and copied out from Ben
Jonson “Talk as much folly as you please--so long as you do it without
blushing, you may do it with impunity.” He itemised in his journal,
too, the books obtained while abroad: a 1692 folio of Ben Jonson;
a 1673 folio of Davenant; a folio of Beaumont and Fletcher; a 1686
folio of Sir Thomas Browne, and a folio of Marlowe’s plays. He brought
with him, also, a _Hudibras_, a _Castle of Otranto_, a _Vathek_, a
_Corinne_, besides the confessions of Rousseau and of DeQuincey, and
the autobiography of Goethe. The other books were guides, old maps, and
other material for _Israel Potter_.
Melville arrived at 103 Fourth Avenue, on February 2, 1850. Mrs.
Melville, in her journal, thus summarises her husband’s trip. “Summer
of 1849 we remained in New York. He wrote _Redburn_ and _White-Jacket_.
Same fall went to England and published the above. Stayed eleven weeks.
Took little satisfaction in it from mere homesickness, and hurried
home, leaving attractive invitations to visit distinguished people--one
from the Duke of Rutland to pass a week at Belvoir Castle--see his
journal.”
Of his life after his return home, she says: “We went to Pittsfield and
boarded in the summer of 1850. Moved to Arrowhead in fall--October,
1850.”
On September 27, 1850, Bayard Taylor dispatched from the Tribune
Office, New York, a note to Mary Angew. “Scarcely a day passes,” Taylor
wrote, “but some pleasant recognition is given me. I was invited last
Friday to dine with Bancroft and Cooper; on Saturday with Sir Edward
Belcher and Herman Melville. These things seem like mockeries, sent to
increase the bitterness of my heart.” It is not unlikely that Melville
and Taylor fed and drank and smoked together on that Saturday evening,
and that they parted, each envying the other as a happy and successful
man.
CHAPTER XV
A NEIGHBOUR OF HAWTHORNE’S
“And here again, not unreasonably, might invocation go up to those
three Weird Ones, that tend Life’s loom. Again we might ask them,
what threads are these, oh, ye Weird Ones, that ye wove in the years
foregone?”
--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Pierre_.
At the time when Melville moved into the Berkshire Hills, the region
around Lenox boasted the descriptive title: “a jungle of literary
lions”--a title amiably ferocious in its provincial vanity. In this
region, it is true, Jonathan Edwards had written his treatises
on predestination, and with sardonic optimism had gloated over
the beauties of hell; here Catherine Sedgewick wrote her amiable
insipidities; here Elihu Burritt, “the learned Blacksmith” wrote out
his _Sparks_; here Bryant composed; here Henry Ward Beecher indited
many _Star-Papers_; here Headley and Holmes, Lowell and Longfellow,
Curtis and G. P. R. James, Audubon and Whipple, Mrs. Sigourney and
Martineau, Fanny Kemble and Frederick Bremer and the Goodale sisters
either visited or lived. Impressed by this array of names--an array
deceptively impressive to the New England imagination,--local pride has
not blushed to explain: “By the river Arno, in the ‘lake region’ of
Cumberland and Westmoreland, or on the placid river which flows through
the Concord meadows, what congestion of literary associations! Like the
instinct of the bee which, separated by great distances from the hive,
possesses the infallible sense of direction for its return, so, too,
the lovely ‘nooks and corners’ on the earth’s surface are irresistibly
and unerringly attracting choice spirits, which some way are sure to
find them out and pre-empt them in the interests of their craft or
clan. Berkshire is no exception to this.”
When, in 1850, both Melville and Hawthorne moved into the Berkshires,
these literary wilds were tamely domesticated, and sadly thinned of
prowling genius. The coming of Melville and Hawthorne, however, marked
the most important advent ever made into these regions. For there
Melville wrote _Moby-Dick_; and there Melville and Hawthorne were to be
thrown into an ironical intimacy.
In the autumn of 1850, Melville bought a spacious gambrel-roofed
farmhouse at Pittsfield, situated along Holmes Road and not far from
Broadhall, formerly the home of his uncle, and familiar to Melville’s
youth. Melville named the place Arrowhead. To Arrowhead he brought his
retinue of female relatives, and set about to alternate farming with
literature.
In the first of the _Piazza Tales_ (1856), in _I and My Chimney_
(_Putnam’s Magazine_, March, 1856), and in _The Rose-wood Table_
(_Putnam’s Magazine_, May, 1856), Melville has left descriptions of
Arrowhead, its inmates, and the surrounding country.
“When I removed into the country,” Melville says in the _Piazza Tales_,