Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross
the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,--that is
to say, the Ego. Whereas those _yes_-gentry, they travel with heaps
of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom
House. What’s the reason, Mr. Hawthorne, that in the last stages of
metaphysics a fellow always falls to _swearing_ so? I could rip an
hour. You see, I began with a little criticism extracted for your
benefit from the _Pittsfield Secret Review_, and here I have landed
in Africa.
“Walk down one of these mornings and see me. No nonsense; come.
Remember me to Mrs. Hawthorne and the children.
“H. MELVILLE.
“P. S. The marriage of Phœbe with the daguerreotypist is a fine
stroke, because of his turning out to be a _Maule_. If you pass
Hepzibah’s cent-shop, buy me a Jim Crow (fresh) and send it to me by
Ned Higgins.”
When, at the end of this letter, Melville found himself in Africa, he
mistook gravely if he imagined he occupied the same continent with
Hawthorne. Emile Montégut, it is true, has described Hawthorne as a
“romancier pessimiste.” Pessimist Hawthorne doubtless was,--a pessimist
being precisely a nature without illusions. Hawthorne of course had,
as Brownell has sufficiently taken pains to show, “the good sense,
the lack of enthusiasm, the disillusioned pessimism of the man of
the world.” Hawthorne did say “No!” to life: but never, as Melville
deceived himself into believing, “in thunder.” Such an emphatic denial
would have been an expression of ardour: and Hawthorne was as without
ardour as he was without illusion. Both Melville and Hawthorne were, in
a sense, pessimists. Both were repelled by reality; both were quite out
of sympathy with their time and its tendencies. But they had arrived at
this centre of meeting from opposite points of the compass. Hawthorne
was a pessimist from lack of illusions; the ardour of illusion,
because of its exuberance in Melville, was at the basis of Melville’s
despair. Hawthorne took the same severely fatalistic view of himself
and the life about him, as he did of life in his books. He accepted
the universe as being unalterable, and towards his own destiny he felt
satisfaction without elation. Like the Mohammedans who believe that
they are preordained--but preordained to conquer,--so Hawthorne in his
Calvinism, despite his depressed moods, had no serious doubts as to his
election. Melville’s endless questioning of “Providence and futurity,
and of everything else that lies beyond human ken” were to Hawthorne
merely a weariness of the flesh: he was satisfied in his fatalism, and
without interest in speculation.
The next two letters announce that _Moby-Dick_ is going through the
press,--but they contain other incidental matter that must have been
interesting--as a “human document” at least--even to Hawthorne. It is
true that at this time, so his own son says, “Hawthorne became a sort
of Mecca of pilgrims with Christian’s burden upon their backs. Secret
criminals of all kinds came to him for counsel and relief.” He was
weary, perhaps, of human documents: and Melville came to him, not for
counsel, but in the intimate fraternity of the disenchanted.
“PITTSFIELD, June 29, 1851.
“MY DEAR HAWTHORNE,--
“The clear air and open window invite me to write to you. For some
time past I have been so busy with a thousand things that I have
almost forgotten when I wrote you last, and whether I received an
answer. This most persuasive season has now for weeks recalled me
from certain crotchety and over-doleful chimeras, the like of which
men like you and me, and some others, forming a chain of God’s
posts round the world, must be content to encounter now and then,
and fight them the best way we can. But come they will,--for in the
boundless, trackless, but still glorious wild wilderness through
which these outposts run, the Indians do sorely abound, as well as
the insignificant but still stinging mosquitoes. Since you have been
here, I have been building some shanties of houses (connected with
the old one) and likewise some shanties of chapters and essays. I
have been ploughing and sowing and raising and printing and praying,
and now begin to come out upon a less bristling time, and to enjoy
the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza at the north of the
old farmhouse here.
“Not entirely yet, though, am I without something to be urgent
with. The _Whale_ is only half through the press; for, wearied with
the long delays of the printers, and disgusted with the heat and
dust of the Babylonish brick-kiln of New York, I came back to the
country to feel the grass, and end the book reclining on it, if I
may. I am sure you will pardon this speaking all about myself; for
if I _say_ so much on that head, be sure all the rest of the world
are thinking about themselves ten times as much. Let us speak,
though we show all our faults and weaknesses,--for it is a sign of
strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it; not in set way and
ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.
But I am falling into my old foible,--preaching. I am busy, but shall
not be very long. Come and spend a day here, if you can and want
to; if not, stay in Lenox, and God give you long life. When I am
quite free of my present engagements, I am going to treat myself to
a ride and a visit to you. Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I
always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological
heroics together. This is rather a crazy letter in some respects,
I apprehend. If so, ascribe it to the intoxicating effects of the
latter end of June operating upon a very susceptible and peradventure
feeble temperament. Shall I send you a fin of the _Whale_ by way of a
specimen mouthful? The tail is not yet cooked, though the hell-fire
in which the whole book is broiled might not unreasonably have
cooked it ere this. This is the book’s motto (the secret one), _Ego
non baptiso te in nomine_--but make out the rest yourself.
“H. M.”
“MY DEAR HAWTHORNE,--
“I should have been rumbling down to you in my pine-board chariot a
long time ago, were it not that for some weeks past I have been more
busy than you can well imagine,--out of doors,--building and patching
and tinkering away in all directions. Besides, I had my crops to
get in,--corn and potatoes (I hope to show you some famous ones
by and by),--and many other things to attend to, all accumulating
upon this one particular season. I work myself; and at night my
bodily sensations are akin to those I have so often felt before,
when a hired man, doing my day’s work from sun to sun. But I mean
to continue visiting you until you tell me that my visits are both
supererogatory and superfluous. With no son of man do I stand upon
any etiquette or ceremony, except the Christian ones of charity and
honesty. I am told, my fellow-man, that there is an aristocracy of
the brain. Some men have boldly advocated and asserted it. Schiller
seems to have done so, though I don’t know much about him. At any
rate, it is true that there have been those who, while earnest in
behalf of political equality, still accept the intellectual estates.
And I can well perceive, I think, how a man of superior mind can,
by its intense cultivation, bring himself, as it were, into a
certain spontaneous aristocracy of feeling,--exceedingly nice and
fastidious,--similar to that which, in an English Howard, conveys a
torpedo-fish thrill at the slightest contact with a social plebeian.
So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you
may possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort.
It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a
thief in jail is as honourable a personage as Gen. George Washington.
This is ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun.
Try to get a living by Truth--and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens!
Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold,
the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own
pulpit bannister. It can hardly be doubted that all Reformers are
bottomed upon the truth, more or less; and to the world at large are
not reformers almost universally laughing-stocks? Why so? Truth is
ridiculous to men. Thus easily in my room here do I, conceited and
garrulous, revere the test of my Lord Shaftesbury.
“It seems an inconsistency to assert unconditional democracy in all
things, and yet confess a dislike to all mankind--in the mass. But
not so.--But it’s an endless sermon,--no more of it. I began by
saying that the reason I have not been to Lenox is this,--in the
evening I feel completely done up, as the phrase is, and incapable
of the long jolting to get to your house and back. In a week or so,
I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and
slave on my _Whale_ while it is driving through the press. _That_ is
the only way I can finish it now,--I am so pulled hither and thither
by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing
mood in which a man _ought_ always to compose,--that, I fear, can
seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is for
ever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a
presentiment is on me,--I shall at last be worn out and perish, like
an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of
the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, that
is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the _other_ way I
cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.
I’m rather sore, perhaps, in this letter; but see my hand!--four
blisters on this palm, made by hoes and hammers within the last few
days. It is a rainy morning; so I am indoors, and all work suspended.
I feel cheerfully disposed, and therefore I write a little bluely.
Would the Gin were here! If ever, my dear Hawthorne, in the eternal
times that are to come, you and I shall sit down in Paradise, in
some little shady corner by ourselves; and if we shall by any means
be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I won’t believe in a
Temperance Heaven), and if we shall then cross our celestial legs in
the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses
and our heads together, till both musically ring in concert,--then,
O my dear fellow-mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all
the things manifold which now so distress us,--when all the earth
shall be but a reminiscence, yea, its final dissolution an antiquity.
Then shall songs be composed as when wars are over; humorous, comic
songs,--‘Oh, when I lived in that queer little hole called the
world,’ or, ‘Oh, when I toiled and sweated below,’ or, ‘Oh, when
I knocked and was knocked in the fight’--yes, let us look forward
to such things. Let us swear that, though now we sweat, yet it is
because of the dry heat which is indispensable to the nourishment
of the vine which is to bear the grapes that are to give us the
champagne hereafter.
“But I was talking about the _Whale_. As the fishermen say, ‘he’s
in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago. I’m going to
take him by his jaw, however, before long, and finish him up in
some fashion or other. What’s the use of elaborating what, in its
very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book? Though I wrote
the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.--I talk
all about myself, and this is selfishness and egotism. Granted.