Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling.
“Whence came you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my
flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips--lo, they are yours and
not mine. I feel that the God-head is broken up like the bread at the
Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity
of feeling. Now, sympathising with the paper, my angel turns over
another leaf. You did not care a penny for the book. But, now and
then as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled
the book--and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel
enough to praise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul. Once you
hugged the ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in the mouth, and
heard the rushing of the demon,--the familiar,--and recognised the
sound; for you have heard it in your own solitudes.
“My dear Hawthorne, the atmospheric scepticisms steal over me now,
and make me doubtful of my sanity in writing you thus. But, believe
me, I am not mad, most noble Festus! But truth is ever incoherent,
and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little
stunning. Farewell. Don’t write me a word about the book. That
would be robbing me of my miserable delight. I am heartily sorry I
ever wrote anything about you--it was paltry. Lord, when shall we
be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have
done nothing. So, now, let us add _Moby-Dick_ to our blessing, and
step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish;--I have heard of
Krakens.
“This is a long letter, but you are not at all bound to answer it.
Possibly if you do answer it, and direct it to Herman Melville, you
will missend it--for the very fingers that now guide this pen are
not precisely the same that just took it up and put it to the paper.
Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! it is a long stage, and no
inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with you for a
passenger, I am content and can be happy. I shall leave the world,
I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing
you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.
“What a pity that, for your plain, bluff letter, you should get such
gibberish! Mention me to Mrs. Hawthorne and to the children, and so,
good-bye to you, with my blessing.
“HERMAN.
“P. S. I can’t stop yet. If the world was entirely made up of
Magians, I’ll tell you what I should do. I should have a paper-mill
established at one end of the house, and so have an extra riband for
foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I
should write a thousand--a million--a billion thoughts, all under the
form of a letter to you. The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet
responds. Which is the bigger? A foolish question--they are _one_.
“H.
“P. P. S. Don’t think that by writing me a letter, you shall always
be bored with an immediate reply to it--and so keep both of us
delving over a writing-desk eternally. No such thing! I sha’n’t
always answer your letters and you may do just as you please.”
Hawthorne had written Melville a “plain, bluff letter,” and in reply
was to be told, with “infinite fraternity,” that “the god-head is
broken up like the bread at the Supper” and that he was one of the
pieces. Melville had dedicated _Moby-Dick_ to Hawthorne, and Hawthorne
made some sort of acknowledgment of the tribute. Melville, shrewdly
suspected him, however, of caring “not a penny” for the book, but in
archangelical charity praising less the “imperfect body” than the
“pervading thought” which “now and then” he understood.
_Moby-Dick_ was an allegory, of course--but withal an allegory of a
solidity and substance that must have appeared to Hawthorne little
short of grossly shocking. Hawthorne had been praised from his “airy
and charming insubstantiality.” And of himself he wrote, with engaging
candour: “Whether from lack of power, or an unconquerable reserve,
the Author’s touches have often an effect of tameness.” Hawthorne’s
“reserve” is, of course, all myth. Both Hawthorne and Melville, though
each a recluse in life, overflow to the reader. And as Brownell says
of Hawthorne: “He does not tell very much, but apparently he tells
everything.” But to Hawthorne, Melville’s overflowing, like a spring
freshet, or a tidal wave, must have been little less than appalling.
Hawthorne’s was eminently a neat, fastidious style, as free from any
eccentricity or excess as from any particular pungency or colour.
Melville’s was extravagant, capricious, vigorous, and “unliterary”: the
energy of his undisciplined genius is its most significant quality.
After all, was it possible for Hawthorne to feel any deep sympathy for
Melville’s passionate enthusiasms, for Melville’s catholic toleration,
for Melville’s quenchless curiosity, for Melville’s varied laughter,
for Melville’s spiritual daring? It is true that Hawthorne found
Story’s “Cleopatra”--inspired, it might appear, by a fancy of the
young Victoria in discreet negligée--“a terrible, dangerous woman,
quite enough for the moment, but very like to spring upon you like a
tigress.” He never visited George Eliot because there was another Mrs.
Lewes. He was much troubled by the nude in art. He pronounced Margaret
Fuller’s “in many respects,” a “defective and evil nature,” and
“Providence was kind in putting her and her clownish husband and their
child on board that fated ship.” It is true that he wrote a graceful if
not very genial introductory essay--once mistaken for a marvel quite
eclipsing “Elia”--to relieve the dark tone of _The Scarlet Letter_. And
it is also true that he accepted the adoration of his wife with the
utmost gravity and appreciation. Mrs. Hawthorne, in one of her letters
to her mother, by a transition in praise of Hawthorne’s eyes--“They
give, but receive not”--comments at some length, on her husband’s
“mighty heart,” that “opens the bosom of men.” “So Mr. Melville,” she
says, “generally silent and incommunicative, pours out the rich floods
of his mind and experience to him, so sure of appreciation, so sure of
a large and generous interpretation.”
What interpretation Hawthorne gave to _Moby-Dick_ has not transpired.
Hawthorne mentions _Moby-Dick_ once in his published works. In the
_Wonder Book_ he says: “On the hither side of Pittsfield sits Herman
Melville, shaping out the gigantic conception of his white whale, while
the gigantic shape of Greylock looms upon him from his study window.”
Only one available Hawthorne-Melville document is still unprinted: the
“Agatha” letter, mentioned by Mr. Julian Hawthorne. But the “Agatha”
letter says nothing of _Moby-Dick_; and though of impressive bulk, its
biographical interest is too slight to merit its publication.
Born in hell-fire, and baptised in an unspeakable name, _Moby-Dick_
is, with _The Scarlet Letter_, among the few very notable literary
achievements of American literature. There has been published no
criticism of Melville more beautiful or more profound than the essay
of E. L. Grant Watson on _Moby-Dick_ (_London Mercury_, December,
1920). It is Mr. Watson’s contention in this essay, that the _Pequod_,
with her monomaniac captain and all her crew, is representative of
Melville’s own genius, and in the particular sense that each character
is deliberately symbolic of a complete and separate element. Because
of the prodigal richness of material in _Moby-Dick_, the breadth and
vitality and solid substance of the setting of the allegory, the
high quality of _Moby-Dick_ as a psychological synthesis has very
generally been lost sight of. Like Bunyan, or Swift, Melville has
enforced his moral by giving an independent and ideal verisimilitude
to its innocent and unconscious exponents. The self-sustaining
vitality of Melville’s symbols has been magnificently vouched for by
Mr. Masefield in his vision of the final resurrection. And the superb
irony--whether unconscious or intended--of _Moby-Dick’s_ “towing
the ship our Lord was in, with all the sweet apostles aboard of
her,” would surely have delighted Melville. _Pilgrim’s Progress_ is
undoubtedly a tract; but, as Brownell observes, if it had been only
a tract, it would never have achieved universal canonisation. Both
_Pilgrim’s Progress_ and _Moby-Dick_ are works of art in themselves,
each leaning lightly--though of course to all the more purpose--on
its moral. Most persons probably read _Gulliver_ for the story, and
miss the satire. In the same way, a casual reader of _Moby-Dick_
may skip the more transcendental passages and classify it as a book
of adventure. It is indeed a book of adventure, but upon the highest
plane of spiritual daring. Ahab is, of course, the atheistical captain
of the tormented soul; and his crew, so Melville says, is “chiefly
made of mongrel renegades, and cast-aways and cannibals.” And Ahab is
“morally enfeebled, also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or
rightmindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollitry of indifference
or recklessness of Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity of Flash!”
But Ahab is Captain; and his madness is of such a quality that the
white whale and all that is there symbolised, needs must render its
consummation, or its extinction. On the waste of the Pacific, ship
after ship passes the _Pequod_, some well laden, others bearing awful
tidings: yet all are sane. The _Pequod_ alone, against contrary winds,
sails on into that amazing calm, that extraordinary mildness, in which
she is destroyed by _Moby-Dick_. “There is a wisdom that is woe, and
there is a woe that is madness.” And in _Moby-Dick_, the woe and the
wisdom are mingled in the history of a soul’s adventure.
Though _Moby-Dick_ is not only an allegory, but an allegory designed
to teach woeful wisdom, nowhere in literature, perhaps, can one find
such uncompromising despair so genially and painlessly administered.
Indeed, the despair of _Moby-Dick_ is as popularly missed as is the
vitriolic bitterness of _Gulliver_. There is an abundance of humour in
_Moby-Dick_, of course: and there is mirth in much of the laughter.
In _Moby-Dick_, it would appear, Melville has made pessimism a gay
science. “Learn to laugh, my young friends,” Nietzsche counsels, “if
you are at all determined to remain pessimists.” If there are tears,
he smiles gallantly as he brushes them aside. “There are certain
queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life,”
Melville says, “when a man takes this whole universe for a vast
practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discovers, and
more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.
There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and
easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I regard this
whole voyage of the _Pequod_, and the great white whale its object.”
And for the most part, he does. But he declares, withal, that “the
truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books
is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.
All is vanity. ALL.” _Moby-Dick_ was built upon a foundation of this
wisdom, and this woe; and so keenly did Melville feel the poignancy of
this woe, so isolated was he in his surrender to this wisdom, that this
wisdom and this woe, which he had learned from Solomon and from Christ,
he felt to be of that quality which in our cowardice we call madness.
CHAPTER XVI
THE GREAT REFUSAL
“My towers at last! These rovings end,
Their thirst is slacked in larger dearth:
The yearning infinite recoils,
For terrible is earth.”
--HERMAN MELVILLE: _L’Envoi_.
On a bleak and snowy November day in 1851, the Hawthorne family, with