Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
their trunks, got into a large farm wagon and drove away from the
little red house. And with the departure of Hawthorne, Melville had
dreamed the last of his avenging dreams. There may have been some
association between the two men while Hawthorne was in West Newton,
and later in Concord, but no records survive. In 1856, on his way to
the Holy Land, Melville visited Hawthorne at Southport two days after
arriving in Liverpool. Melville’s account of the meeting is thus
recorded in his journal:
“_Sunday, Nov. 9_: Stayed home till dinner. After dinner took
steamboat for Rock Ferry to find Mr. Hawthorne. On getting to R. F.
learned he had removed thence 18 months previous and was now residing
out of town.
“_Monday, Nov. 10_: Went among the docks to see the Mediterranean
steamers. Saw Mr. Hawthorne at Consulate. Invited me to stay with
him during my sojourn at Liverpool. Dined at Anderson’s, a very nice
place, and charges moderate.
“_Tuesday, Nov. 11_: Hawthorne for Southport, 20 miles distant on the
seashore, a watering place. Found Mrs. Hawthorne & the rest awaiting
tea for us.
“_Wednesday, Nov. 12_: At Southport, an agreeable day. Took a long
walk by the sea. Sand & grass. Wild & desolate. A strong wind. Good
talk. In the evening stout & fox & geese. Julian grown into a fine
lad. Una taller than her brother. Mrs. Hawthorne not in good health.
Mr. Hawthorne stayed home with me.
“_Thursday, Nov. 13_: At Southport till noon. Mr. H. & I took train
then for Liverpool. Spent rest of day putting enquiries among
steamers.
“_Friday, Nov. 14_: Took bus for London Road. Called at Mr.
Hawthorne’s. Met a Mr. Bright. Took me to his club and luncheoned me
there.
“_Sunday, Nov. 16_: Rode in the omnibus. Went out to Foxhill Park,
&c. Grand organ at St. George’s Hall.”
Three days later, Melville was off for Constantinople. In his _English
Note-boo_k, under November 30th, 1856, Hawthorne wrote:
“_November 30_: A week ago last Monday, Herman Melville came to
see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do, and with
his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner.... We soon found
ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and
confidence.... He is thus far on his way to Constantinople. I do
not wonder that he found it necessary to take an airing through
the world, after so many years of toilsome pen-labour, following
upon so wild and adventurous a youth as his was. I invited him to
come and stay with us at Southport, as long as he might remain in
this vicinity, and accordingly he did come the next day.... On
Wednesday we took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in a
hollow among the sand-hills, sheltering ourselves from the high cool
wind. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and
futurity, and of everything else that lies beyond human ken.... He
has a very high and noble nature, and is better worth immortality
than the most of us.... On Saturday we went to Chester together. I
love to take every opportunity of going to Chester; it being the one
only place, within easy reach of Liverpool, which possesses any old
English interest. We went to the Cathedral.”--And then architecture
gives place to personal comment.
Mr. Julian Hawthorne reports of this meeting: “At Southport the chief
event of interest during the winter was a visit from Herman Melville,
who turned up at Liverpool on his way to Constantinople, and whom
Hawthorne brought out to spend a night or two with us. ‘He looked
much the same as he used to do; a little paler, perhaps, and a little
sadder, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner. I
felt rather awkward at first, for this is the first time I have met
him since my ineffectual attempt to get him a consular appointment
from General Pierce. However, I failed only from real lack of power
to serve him; so there was no reason to be ashamed, and we soon
found ourselves on pretty much the former terms of sociability and
confidence. Melville has not been well, of late; he has been affected
with neuralgic complaints, and no doubt has suffered from too constant
literary occupation, pursued without much success latterly; and his
writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of
mind. So he left his place in Pittsfield, and has come to the Old
World. He informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be
annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation,
and I think will never rest until he gets hold of some definite belief.
It is strange how he persists--and 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 he
were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and
reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth
immortality than most of us.’
“Melville made the rounds of Liverpool under the guidance of Henry
Bright; and afterwards Hawthorne took him to Chester; and they parted
the same evening, ‘at a street corner, in the rainy evening. I saw him
again on Monday, however. He said that he already felt much better
than in America; but observed that he did not anticipate much pleasure
in his rambles, for that the spirit of adventure is gone out of him.
He certainly is much overshadowed since I saw him last; but I hope
he will brighten as he goes onward. He sailed on Tuesday, leaving
a trunk behind him, and taking only a carpet-bag to hold all his
travelling-gear. This is the next best thing to going naked; and as he
wears his beard and moustache, and so needs no dressing-case,--nothing
but a toothbrush,--I do not know a more independent personage. He
learned his travelling habits by drifting about, all over the South
Seas, with no other clothes or equipage than a red flannel shirt and
a pair of duck trousers. Yet we seldom see men of less criticisable
manners than he.’”
There is no record of these two men ever meeting again.
From the beginning, there had been, between Melville and Hawthorne, a
profound incompatibility. When they met, Melville was within one last
step of absolute disenchantment. One illusion, only, was to him still
unblasted: The belief in the possibility of a Utopian friendship that
might solace all of his earlier defeats. Ravished in solitude by his
alienation from his fellows, Melville discovered that the author of
_The Scarlet Letter_ was his neighbour. He came to know Hawthorne: and
his eager soul rushed to embrace Hawthorne’s as that of a brother in
despair. Exultant was his worship of Hawthorne, absolute his desire for
surrender. He craved of Hawthorne an understanding and sympathy that
neither Hawthorne, nor any other human being, perhaps, could ever have
given. His admiration for Hawthorne was, of course, as he inevitably
discovered, built upon a mistaken identity. Yet, on the evidence of
his letters, he for a time drew from this admiration moments both
of tensest excitement and of miraculous and impregnating peace. It
would be interesting, indeed, to know what _Moby-Dick_ owed to this
inspiration. It is patent fact, however, that with the publication of
_Moby-Dick_, and Hawthorne’s departure from Lenox, Melville’s creative
period was at its close. At the age of thirty-two, so brilliant, so
intense, so crowded had been the range of experience that burned
through him, that at the period of his life when most men are just
beginning to strike their gait, Melville found himself looking forward
into utter night. Nearly forty years before his death, he had come
to be the most completely disenchanted of all considerable American
writers.
From his youth, Melville had felt the flagrant and stubborn discord
between aspiration and fact. He was born with an imagination of
very extraordinary vigour, and with a constitution of corresponding
vitality. In sheer capacity to feel, most American writers look pale
beside him. Fired by his rebellious imagination, and abetted by his
animal courage, he sallied forth in quest of happiness. Few men have
ever compassed such a span of experience as he crowded within the
thirty-two years of his quest; few men have lived with such daring,
with such intensity. And one by one, as he put his illusions to the
test, the bolts of his imagination, discharged against reality, but
blazed out charred avenues to despair. It was Dante, he says in
_Pierre_, who first “opened to his shuddering eyes the infinite cliffs
and gulfs of human mystery and misery;--though still more in the way of
experimental vision, than of sensational presentiment or experience.”
By the age of thirty-two, he had, by first-hand knowledge of life,
learned to feel the justice of Schopenhauer’s statement: “Where did
Dante find the material for his _Inferno_ if not from the world; and
yet is not his picture exhaustively satisfactory? But look at his
Paradise; when he attempted to describe it he had nothing to guide him,
this pleasant world could not offer a single suggestion.” This passage
is marked in Melville’s copy of Schopenhauer. And in _Pierre_ he wrote:
“By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come
to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the
lid--and nobody is there!--appallingly vacant, as vast as the soul of
a man.”
Melville’s disillusionment began at home. The romantic idealisation
of his mother gave place to a recoil into a realisation of the cold,
“scaly, glittering folds of pride” that rebuffed his tormented love;
and he studied the portrait of his father, and found it a defaming
image. In _Pierre_ this portrait thus addresses him: “To their young
children, fathers are not wont to unfold themselves.... Consider this
strange, ambiguous, smile; more narrowly regard this mouth. Behold,
what is this too ardent and, as it were, unchastened light in these
eyes. Consider. Is there no mystery here?” In _Pierre_, he thought that
there was.
In his boyhood, poverty added its goad to launch him forth to find
happiness in distance. He discovered hideousness; and later, escaped
into virgin savagery, he saw by contrast the blatant defaults of
civilisation; and he learned that it was the dubious honour of the
white civilised man of being “the most ferocious animal on the face
of the earth.” In Tahiti he was brought face to face with the bigotry
and stupid self-righteousness of the proselyting Protestant mind; and
there he learned that Christianity--or what passes for it--may under
some circumstances be not a blessing but a blight. In _Typee_ and
_Omoo_ he innocently turned his hand to right matters to a happier
adjustment, soon to reap the reward of such temerity. In the navy he
was made hideously aware of the versatility of the human animal in
evil. There he found not only a rich panorama of human unloveliness,
but “evils which, like the suppressed domestic drama of Horace Walpole,
will neither bear representing, nor reading, and will hardly bear
thinking of.” There, he was also struck by the criminal stupidity of
war. In _White-Jacket_ he asked, “are there no Moravians in the Moon,
that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours,
to civilise civilisation and Christianise Christendom?” He was, as he
calls himself, a “pondering man”: and in his evaluation of individual
human life he soon came to share the judgment of Josiah Royce, another
“pondering man”: “Call it human life. You can not find a comparison
more thoroughly condemning it.” And he marked Schopenhauer’s tribute to