Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
“it was to occupy an old-fashioned farmhouse which had no piazza--a
deficiency the more regretted because not only did I like piazzas,
as somehow combining the cosiness of indoors with the freedom of
outdoors, and it is so pleasant to inspect your thermometer there,
but the country round about was such a picture, that in berry time no
boy climbs hill or crosses vale without coming upon easels planted in
every nook, and sunburned painters painting there. A very paradise of
painters. The circle of the stars cut by the circle of the mountains.
At least, so it looks from the house; though once upon the mountains,
no circle of them can you see. Had the site been chosen five rods off,
this charmed circle would not have been.
“The house is old. Seventy years since, from the heart of the Hearth
Stone Hill, they quarried the Kaaba, or Holy Stone, to which, each
Thanksgiving, the social pilgrims used to come. So long ago that
in digging for the foundation, the workmen used both spade and axe
fighting the Troglodytes of those subterranean parts--sturdy roots of
a sturdy wood, encamped upon what is now a long landslide of sleeping
meadow, sloping away off from my poppy bed. Of that knit wood but one
survivor stands--an elm, lonely through steadfastness.
“Whoever built the house, he builded better than he knew; or else Orion
in the zenith flashed down his Damocles’ sword to him some starry
night, and said: ‘Build there.’ For how, otherwise, could it have
entered the builder’s mind that, upon the clearing being made, such a
purple prospect would be his? Nothing less than Greylock, with all his
hills about him, like Charlemagne among his peers.
“A piazza must be had.
“The house was wide--my fortune narrow ... upon but one of the
four sides would prudence grant me what I wanted. Now which side?
Charlemagne, he carried it.
“No sooner was ground broken than all the neighbourhood, neighbour
Dives in particular, broke too--into a laugh. Piazza to the north!
Winter piazza! Wants, of winter midnights, to watch the Aurora
Borealis, I suppose; hope he’s laid in a good store of polar muffs and
mittens.
“That was in the lion month of March. Not forgotten are some of the
blue noses of the carpenters and how they scouted at the greenness of
the cit, who would build his sole piazza to the north. But March don’t
last forever; patience, and August comes. And then, in the cool elysium
of my northern bower, I, Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom, cast down the hill
a pitying glance on poor old Dives, tormented in the purgatory of his
piazza to the south.
“But, even in December, this northern piazza does not repel--nipping
cold and gusty though it be, and the north wind, like any miller,
bolting by the snow in finest flour--for then, once more, with frosted
beard, I pace the sleety deck, weathering Cape Horn.
“In summer, too, Canute-like, sitting here, one is often reminded of
the sea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain,
and little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as
their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray,
and the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and
a still August noon broods over the deep meadows, as a calm upon the
Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the
silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house,
rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the
Barbary coast, an unknown sail.”
In _I and My Chimney_ Melville makes the old chimney at Arrowhead
the chief character in a sketch of his domestic life at Pittsfield:
himself and his wife, both freely idealised, are the other actors.
This chimney, twelve feet square at the base, was built by Capt.
David Bush who erected the house in 1780. It has three fireplaces on
the first floor and the one formerly used for the kitchen fireplace
is large enough for a log four feet long. This fireplace is panelled
in pine, and above it hangs an Indian tomahawk, found and hung there
by Melville. Around it are many nooks and cupboards. In _I and My
Chimney_ Melville wrote: “And here I keep mysterious cordials of a
choice, mysterious flavour, made so by the constant naturing and subtle
ripening of the chimney’s gentle heat, distilled through that warm
mass of masonry. Better for wines it is than voyages to the Indies; my
chimney itself is a tropic. A chair by my chimney in a November day is
as good for an invalid as a long season spent in Cuba. Often I think
how grapes might ripen against my chimney. How my wife’s geraniums bud
there! But in December. Her eggs too--can’t keep them near the chimney
on account of hatching. Ah, a warm heart has my chimney.”
Col. Richard Lathers, in his reminiscences of his Pittsfield residence,
writes: “One of my nearest neighbours at Pittsfield was Herman
Melville, author of the interesting and very original sea tales,
_Typee_ and _Omoo_ (which were among the first books to be published
simultaneously in London and New York), and of various other volumes
of prose and verse. I visited him often in his well-stocked library,
where I listened with intense pleasure to his highly individual views
of society and politics. He always provided a bountiful supply of good
cider--the product of his own orchard--and of tobacco, in the virtues
of which he was a firm believer. Indeed, he prided himself on the
inscription painted over his capacious fireplace: ‘I and my chimney
smoke together,’ an inscription I have seen strikingly verified more
than once when the atmosphere was heavy and the wind was east.”
When Melville set up his family at Arrowhead, Hawthorne had already
been settled at Lenox, some miles away, for a number of months. “I have
taken a house in Lenox”--so he announced his removal--“I long to get
into the country, for my health is not what it has been. An hour or two
in a garden and a daily ramble in country air would keep me all right.”
Though Melville and Hawthorne were at this time neither in very
affluent circumstances, Hawthorne was, to all outward appearances,
the more straitened of the two. He described his new home as “the
very ugliest little bit of an old red farmhouse you ever saw,” “the
most inconvenient and wretched house I ever put my head in.” His
wife, however, was not so precipitous in her damnation, and writing
to her mother on June 23, 1850, said: “We are so beautifully arranged
(excepting the guest-chamber), and we seem to have such a large
house _inside_, though outside the little reddest thing looks like
the smallest of ten-feet houses. Enter our old black tumble-down
gate,--no matter for that,--and you behold a nice yard, with an oval
grass-plot and a gravel walk all round the borders, a flower-bed,
some rose-bushes, a raspberry-bush, and I believe a syringa, and also
a few tiger-lilies; quite a fine bunch of peonies, a stately double
rose-columbine, and one beautiful Balsam Fir tree, of perfect pyramidal
form, and full of a thousand melodies. The front door is wide open.
Enter and welcome.” Mrs. Hawthorne then elaborates upon the wealth
of beauty she finds in her tactful disposition of the pictures, the
furniture, and flowers, in the cramped interior. In this tabernacle
she enshrined her two small children; and in the “immortal endowments”
of her husband, she was inarticulate in felicity. “I cannot possibly
conceive of my happiness,” she wrote, “but, in a blissful kind of
confusion, live on. If I can only be so great, so high, so noble,
so sweet, as he in any phase of my being, I shall be glad. I am not
deluded nor mistaken, as the angels know now, and as all my friends
well know, in open vision!”
Of the actual daily events at Arrowhead and the Red House there is a
great inequality in the wealth of records. Of the Red House we know
much; of Arrowhead we know only too little. Though Mrs. Hawthorne was
always childlike in her modesty and simplicity, “her learning and
her accomplishments were rare and varied.” She not only read Latin,
Greek and Hebrew, but she kept an invaluable journal of the momentous
trifles of her husband’s life; and she wrote letters home that her
Mother very properly preserved for posterity. Mrs. Melville positively
knew no Hebrew; and what accounts of her husband she wrote have all
disappeared. Only one letter of hers of this period survives:
“ARROWHEAD, Aug. 3, 1851.
“MY DEAR MOTHER:
“I have been trying to write to you ever since Sam came, but could
not well find a chance. As it proved, I was not mistaken in supposing
the little parcel he brought was a present from you, though I had no
letter. The contents were beautiful and very acceptable. Do accept my
best thanks for them. We were delighted to see Sam Savage on Tuesday,
but as he did not notify us of the day we were not in waiting for him
at the depot. However, he found his way out to us. To-day he and Sam
have gone over to Lebanon to see the Shakers. The girls were much
pleased with the collars, and Mother M. with her remembrance. The
scarf you sent me was very handsome, but I am almost sorry you did
not keep it for yourself, for it does not seem to me as if I should
ever wear it--and certainly not this summer as I go nowhere not even
to church. It will look very handsome with my new shawl, if ever I do
wear it, though.
“You need not be afraid of the boys staying too long--I am only sorry
that they cannot stay longer, but they think or rather Sam Savage
thinks he must go to Red Hook this week. You know we do not make any
difference for them and let them do just as they please and take
care of themselves. Yesterday they went with Herman and explored a
neighbouring mountain.
“Oh, you will be glad to hear, and I meant to have written it to
father the other day, that in consideration of the recent decisions
with regard to the copyright question, Mr. Bentley is to give Herman
£150 and half profits after, for his new book--a much smaller sum
than before, to be sure, but certainly worth waiting for--and quite
generous on Mr. Bentley’s part considering the unsettled state of
things.
“I cannot write any more--it makes me terribly nervous--I don’t know
as you can read this I have scribbled it so.”
At the time of Melville’s moving to Arrowhead he was writing
_Moby-Dick_. In the brief life of Melville in her journal, Mrs.
Melville says: “Wrote _White-Whale_ or _Moby-Dick_ under unfavourable
circumstances--would sit at his desk all day not writing anything till
four or five o’clock--then ride to the village after dark--would be up
early and out walking before breakfast--sometimes splitting wood for
exercise. Published _White-Whale_ in 1851--wrote _Pierre_, published
1852. We all felt anxious about the strain on his health in the spring
of 1853.”
When Hawthorne moved to Lenox he was forty-six years old--Melville’s
senior by fifteen years. “Bidding good-bye for ever to literary
obscurity and to Salem,” Mr. Julian Hawthorne says in his _Nathaniel
Hawthorne and His Wife_, “Hawthorne now turned his face towards the
mountains. The preceding nine months had told upon his health and
spirits: and, had _The Scarlet Letter_ not achieved so fair a success,
he might have been long in recovering his normal frame of mind. But
the broad murmur of popular applause, coming to his unaccustomed ears
from all parts of his native country, and rolling in across the sea
from academic England, gave him the spiritual refreshment born of the
assurance that our fellow-creatures think well of the work we have
striven to make good. Such assurance is essential, sooner or later, to
soundness and serenity of mind. No man can attain secure repose and
happiness who has never found that what moves and interests him has