Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
his fellows: “They are just what they seem to be, and that is the worst
that can be said of them.”
As “the man who lived among the cannibals” he was famous by the
age of twenty-eight. But when he attempted to put his earnest
convictions on paper, he was to discover that the value of the paper
deteriorated thereby. When he made this discovery he was married,
and a father: and debtors had to be held at bay by the point of the
pen. On April 30, 1851, Harper and Brothers denied him any further
advance on his royalties: they were making “extensive and expensive
improvements”--and besides, he had already overdrawn nearly seven
hundred dollars.
He had, too, sought personal happiness in the illusion of romantic
love. The romantic lover is in especial peril of finding in marriage
the sobered discovery that all his sublime and heroic effort has
resulted simply in a vulgar satisfaction, and that, taking all things
into consideration, he is no better off than he was before. In his poem
_After the Pleasure Party_ (in _Timoleon_, 1891) Melville tells such
a “sad rosary of belittling pain.” As a rule, Theseus once consoled,
Ariadne is forsaken; and had Petrarch’s passion been requited, his
song would have ceased. Francesca and Paolo, romantic lovers who had
experienced the limits of their desire, were by Dante put in Hell:
and their sufficient punishment was their eternal companionship.
By the very ardour of his idealisation, Melville was foredoomed to
disappointment in marriage. Though both he and his wife were noble
natures--indeed for that very reason--their marriage was for each a
crucifixion. For between them there was deep personal loyalty without
understanding. Bacon once said, “he that hath wife and children
hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great
enterprises, either of virtue or of mischief.” Melville gave such
hostages to fortune: but, such was his temperament, it is difficult
to believe that unencumbered he would have magnified his achievement.
Mrs. Melville is remembered as a gentle, gracious, loyal woman who bore
with him for over forty years, in his disillusion, his loss of health,
his poverty, his obscurity. And his father-in-law, Chief Justice Shaw,
befriended him with forbearance and with more substantial gifts.
With the departure of Hawthorne from Lenox, Melville was left without
companionship and without illusions. And he was aware of the approach
of his Nemesis even before it overtook him. He confessed to Hawthorne
while finishing _Moby-Dick_ his feeling that he was approaching
the limit of his power. And these intimations were prophetic. With
_Moby-Dick_ his creative period closed.
Of the end of this period his wife 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 Spring of 1853.”
In _Pierre_, Melville coiled down into the night of his soul, to
write an anatomy of despair. The purpose of the book was to show
the impracticability of virtue: to give specific evidence, freely
plagiarised from his own psychology, that “the heavenly wisdom of
God is an earthly folly to man,” “that although our blessed Saviour
was full of the wisdom of Heaven, yet his gospel seems lacking in
the practical wisdom of the earth; that his nature was not merely
human--was not that of a mere man of the world”; that to try to live in
this world according to the strict letter of Christianity would result
in “the story of the Ephesian matron, allegorised.” The subtlety of
the analysis is extraordinary; and in its probings into unsuspected
determinants from unconsciousness it is prophetic of some of the
most recent findings in psychology. “Deep, deep, and still deep and
deeper must we go,” Melville says, “if we would find out the heart
of a man; descending into which is as descending a spiral stair in a
shaft, without any end, and where that endlessness is only concealed
by the spiralness of the stair, and the blackness of the shaft.” In
the winding ambiguities of _Pierre_ Melville attempts to reveal man’s
fatal facility at self-deception; to show that the human mind is like
a floating iceberg, hiding below the surface of the sea most of its
bulk; that from a great depth of thought and feeling below the level
of awareness, long silent hands are ever reaching out, urging us to
whims of the blood and tensions of the nerves, whose origins we never
suspect. “In reserves men build imposing characters,” Melville says;
“not in revelations.” _Pierre_ is not conspicuous for its reserves.
_Pierre_ aroused the reviewers to such a storm of abuse that legend
has assigned Melville’s swift obscuration to this dispraise. The
explanation is too simple, as Mr. Mather contends. But there is,
doubtless, more than a half truth in this explanation. The abuse
that _Pierre_ reaped, coming when it did in Melville’s career,
and inspired by a book in which Melville with tragic earnestness
attempted an apologia of worldly defeat, must have seemed to him in
its heartlessness and total blindness to his purpose, a definitive
substantiation of the thesis of his book.
_Pierre_ has been very unsympathetically handled, even by Melville’s
most penetrating and sympathetic critics. Mr. Frank Jewett Mather,
Jr., for example, in the second of his two essays on _Herman Melville_
(_The Review_, August 9 and 16, 1919), says of _Pierre_ that “it is
perhaps the only positively ill-done book” of Melville’s. Mr. Mather
grants power to the book, but he finds it “repellent and overwrought.”
He recommends it only as a literary curiosity. And as a literary
curiosity Mr. Arthur Johnson studied its stylistic convolutions in _The
New Republic_ of August 27, 1919. It is certainly true, as Mr. Johnson
has said, that “the plot or theme, were it not so ‘done’ as to be
hardly decipherable, would be to-day considered rather ‘advanced.’” Mr.
Johnson contends that for morbid unhealthy pathology, it has not been
exceeded even by D. H. Lawrence. All this may be very excellent ethics,
but it is not very enlightening criticism.
Melville wrote _Pierre_ with no intent to reform the ways of the
world. But he did write _Pierre_ to put on record the reminder that
the world’s way is a hypocritic way in so far as it pretends to be any
other than the Devil’s way also. In _Pierre_, Melville undertook to
dramatise this conviction. When he sat down to write, what seemed to
him the holiest part of himself--his ardent aspirations--had wrecked
itself against reality. So he undertook to present, in the character
of Pierre, his own character purged of dross; and in the character of
Pierre’s parents, the essential outlines of his own parents. Then he
started his hero forth upon a career of lofty and unselfish impulse,
intent to show that the more transcendent a man’s ideal, the more
certain and devastating his worldly defeat; that the most innocent
in heart are those most in peril of being eventually involved in
“strange, _unique_ follies and sins, unimagined before.” Incidentally,
Melville undertakes to show, in the tortuous ambiguities of _Pierre_,
that even the purest impulses of Pierre were, in reality, tainted of
clay. _Pierre_ is an apologia of Melville’s own defeat, in the sense
that in _Pierre_ Melville attempts to show that in so far as his own
defeat--essentially paralleling Pierre’s--was unblackened by incest,
murder, and suicide, he had escaped these disasters through accident
and inherent defect, rather than because of superior virtue. Pierre had
followed the heavenly way that leads to damnation.
Such a thesis can be met by the worldly wisdom that Melville slanders
in _Pierre_, only with uncompromising repugnance. There can be no
forgiveness in this world for a man who calls the wisdom of this world
a cowardly lie, and probes clinically into the damning imperfections of
the best. His Kingdom is surely not of this world. And if this world
evinces for his gospel neither understanding nor sympathy, he cannot
reasonably complain if he reaps the natural fruits of his profession.
Melville agreed with the Psalmist: “Verily there is a reward for the
righteous.” But he blasphemed when he dared teach that the reward of
virtue and truth in this world must be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Like Dante, Melville set himself up against the world as a party of
one. A majority judgment, though it has the power, has not necessarily
the truth. It is theoretically possible that Melville, not the world,
is right. But one can assent to Melville’s creed only on penalty
of destruction; and the race does not welcome annihilation. Hence
this world must rejoice in its vengeance upon his blasphemy: and the
self-righteous have washed their feet in the blood of the wicked.
After _Pierre_, any further writing from Melville was both an
impertinence and an irrelevancy. No man who really believes that all
is vanity can consistently go on taking elaborate pains to popularise
his indifference. Schopenhauer did that thing, it is true; but
Schopenhauer was an artist, not a moralist; and he was enchanted with
disenchantment. Carlyle, too, through interminable volumes shrieked
out the necessity of silence. But after _Pierre_, Melville was without
internal urgings to write. “All profound things, and emotions of
things,” he wrote in _Pierre_, “are preceded and attended by silence.”
“When a man is really in a profound mood, then all merely verbal or
written profundities are unspeakably repulsive, and seem downright
childish to him.” Infinitely greater souls than Melville’s seem to
have shared this conviction. Neither Buddha nor Socrates left a single
written word; Christ wrote once only, and then in the sand.
As if the gods themselves were abetting Melville in his recoil from
letters and his contempt for his hard-earned fame, the Harper’s fire
of 1853 destroyed the plates of all his novels, and practically all
of the copies of his books then in stock. One hundred and eighty-five
copies of _Typee_ were burned; 276 copies of _Omoo_; 491 copies of
_Mardi_; 296 copies of _Redburn_; 292 copies of _White-Jacket_; 297
copies of _Moby-Dick_; 494 copies of _Pierre_. There survived only 10
copies of _Mardi_, 60 copies of _Moby-Dick_ and 110 copies of _Pierre_.
All of these books except _Pierre_ were reissued, but with no rich
profit either to Harper’s or to Melville. A typical royalty account is
that covering the period between October 6, 1863, and August 1, 1864.
During this period, 54 copies of _Typee_ were sold; 56 of _Omoo_; 42
of _Redburn_; 49 of _Mardi_; 29 of _White-Jacket_; 48 of _Moby-Dick_;
and 27 of _Pierre_. It was a fortunate year, indeed, for Melville that
brought him in $100 royalties. During most of his life, Melville’s
account with Harper’s was overdrawn: a fact that speaks more for the
generosity of his publisher than for the appreciation of his public.
Melville surely never achieved opulence by his pen. Convinced of the
futility of writing and effort, Melville wanted only tranquillity for
thought. But his health was breaking, and his family had to be fed. So
he looked about him for some unliterary employment.
The following letter from Richard Henry Dana explains itself:
“BOSTON, May 10, 1853.
“DEAR SIR:
“I am informed by the Chief Justice that my friend, Mr. Herman
Melville, has been named to the Government as a suitable person for
the American Consulship at the Sandwich Islands.
“I acknowledge no little personal interest in Mr. Melville, but apart