Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
from that, I know, from my early experience, and from a practice of
many years in Admiralty & Maritime causes, the great importance of
having a consul at the Sandwich Islands who knows the wants of our
vast Pacific Marine, and shall stand clear of those inducements of
trade consignments which lead so many consuls to neglect seamen and
lend their influence indiscriminately in favour of owners and masters.
“Mr. Melville has been all over the Pacific Ocean, in all sorts of
maritime service & has the requisite acquaintance & interest to an
unusual degree. Beyond this, his reputation, general intelligence
& agreeable manners will be sure to make him a popular and useful
officer among all our citizens who visit the Islands. I cannot
conceive of a more appropriate appointment, & I sincerely hope it
will be given him.
“If I knew the President or the Secretary of State, personally, I
would take the liberty to write them. As I do not, I beg you will use
whatever influence I may have in any quarter in his favour.
“Very truly yours,
“RICHARD H. DANA, JR.
“ALLAN MELVILLE, ESQ.”
Melville was not appointed to a consular post in the Pacific: so his
brother Allan busied himself in looking for an appointment elsewhere,
as the following letter, addressed to Hon. Lemuel Shaw, shows:
“NEW YORK, June 11, 1853.
“MY DEAR SIR:
“Yours of the 8th reached me yesterday advising me of the recent
information you have received through a confidential source from
Washington respecting a consulate for Herman.
“There can be no consulship in Italy, not even Rome, where the fees
would amount to sufficient to make it an object for Herman to accept
a position there.
“I have positive information of the value of the Antwerp consulate
and understand it to be worth from $2,500 to $3,000. Should this be
tendered, Herman ought to accept it.
“I don’t know that I can say anything more on this subject.
“Herman is in town and will see you on your arrival.
“Very truly yours,
“ALLAN MELVILLE.
“I may add that Herman has been specially urged for the Antwerp
position & that Mr. Hawthorne spoke to Mr. Cushing of that place.
“A. M.”
Of the domestic happenings at Arrowhead at this time, very little is
known. One letter of Mrs. Melville’s survives:
“ARROWHEAD, Aug. 10th, 1853.
“MY DEAR FATHER:
“I did not mean that so long a time should elapse, of your absence
from home, without my writing you, especially when I have two letters
of yours to answer. It is not because I have not thought of you much
and often, but really because I can not find the time to seat myself
quietly down to write a letter--that is more than for a hasty scrawl
to mother occasionally--and inasmuch as my occupations are of the
useful and not the frivolous kind I know you will appreciate the
apology and accept it. Three little ones to look after and ‘do for’
takes up no little portion of the day, and my baby is as restless a
little mortal as ever crowed. She is very well and healthy in every
respect, but not very fat, as she sleeps very little comparatively
and is very active. A few weeks since Malcolm made his début as a
scholar at the white school house of Dr. Holmes’. I was afraid he
would lose the little he already knew ‘of letters’ and as I could not
find the time to give him regular instruction, I sent him to school
rather earlier than I should have done otherwise. The neighbours’
children call for him every morning, and he goes off with his pail
of dinner in one hand and his primer in the other, to our no small
amusement. The grand feature of the day to him seems to be the
‘eating his dinner under the trees’--as he always gives that as
his occupation when asked what he does at school--and as his pail
is invariably empty when he returns, he does full justice to the
noon-tide meal. Stannie begins to talk a great deal, and seems to be
uncommonly forward for his age. He has a severe cough, which I think
will prove the whooping-cough as there is a great deal of it about at
present.”
Failing of a consular appointment, Melville was forced to continue
writing. He busied himself with the story of the “revolutionary
beggar.” Melville based his story upon “a little narrative, forlornly
published on sleazy grey paper,” that he had “rescued by the
merest chance from the rag-pickers.” Copies of this narrative are
not excessively rare. The title page reads: “_Life and Remarkable
Adventures of Israel R. Potter_ (a native of Cranston, Rhode Island)
who was a soldier in the American Revolution, and took a distinguished
part in the Battle of Bunker Hill (in which he received three wounds)
after which he was taken Prisoner by the British, conveyed to England,
where for thirty years he obtained a livelihood for himself and family,
by crying ‘_Old Chairs to Mend_’ through the Streets of London.--In
May last, by the assistance of the American Consul, he succeeded
(in the 79th year of his age) in obtaining a passage to his native
country, after an absence of 48 years. Providence: Printed by Henry
Trumbull--1824 (Price 28 cents).” The result was _Israel Potter_,
published in book form by G. P. Putnam in 1855, after having appeared
serially in _Putnam’s Monthly Magazine_. _Israel Potter_ is, in most
part, a spirited narrative containing, so Mr. Mather states, “the best
account of a sea fight in American fiction.” It was praised, too, by
Hawthorne for its delineations of Franklin and John Paul Jones, and
doubtless deserves a wider recognition than has ever been given it.
Interestingly enough, the book is dedicated to Bunker Hill Monument.
Between 1853 and 1856, Melville published twelve articles, inclusive
of _Israel Potter_, in _Putnam’s Magazine_ and in _Harper’s Monthly_.
Melville made from a selection from these his _Piazza Tales_ (1856),
published in New York by Dix and Edwards, in London by Sampson Low.
Of these, _The Bell Tower_, _Don Benito Cereno_ and _The Encantadas_
show the last glow of Melville’s literary glamour, the final momentary
brightening of the embers before they sank into blackness and ash.
There exists a letter from _Putnam’s Monthly_, dated May 12, 1854, and
signed by Charles T. Briggs--refusing a still unpublished story of
Melville’s out of fear of “offending the religious sensibilities of
the public and the Congregation of Grace Church.” This letter is less
important because of its exquisite sensitiveness, than because of its
mention of a letter from Lowell; a letter in which Lowell is reported
to have read _The Encantadas_. According to Briggs’ communication,
Lowell was so moved that “the figure of the cross on the ass’ neck
brought tears into his eyes, and he thought it the finest touch of
genius he had seen in prose.” Swinburne speaks of “the generous
pleasure of praising”: this pleasure Lowell indulged frequently, and
in his wholesome and whole-hearted way. Of Hawthorne, Lowell said:
“The rarest creative imagination of the century, the rarest in some
ideal respects since Shakespeare.” _The Confidence Man_ was published
in 1857: but it was a posthumous work. Thereafter, Melville was to try
his hand at poetry, and with results little meriting the total oblivion
into which his poetry has fallen; and in his old age he was again to
turn to prose: but before Melville was half through his mortal life his
signal literary achievement was done. The rest, if not silence, was
whisper.
CHAPTER XVII
THE LONG QUIETUS
“The round face of the grub-man peered upon me now. ‘His dinner is
ready. Won’t he dine to-day, either? Or does he live without dining?’
“‘Lives without dining,’ said I, and closed the eyes.
“‘Eh! He’s asleep, ain’t he?’
“‘With kings and counsellors,’ murmured I.”
--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Bartleby the Scrivener_.
“The death of Herman Melville,” wrote Arthur Stedman, “came as a
surprise to the public at large, chiefly because it revealed the fact
that such a man had lived so long.” The New York _Times_ missed the
news of Melville’s death (on September 28, 1891) and published a few
days later an editorial beginning:
“There has died and been buried in this city, during the current week,
at an advanced age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the
generation now in the vigour of life, that only one newspaper contained
an obituary account of him, and this was of but three or four lines.”
In 1885, Robert Buchanan published in the London _Academy_ a pasquinade
containing the following lines:
“... Melville, sea-compelling man,
Before whose wand Leviathan
Rose hoary white upon the Deep,
With awful sounds that stirred its sleep;
Melville, whose magic drew Typee,
Radiant as Venus, from the sea,
Sits all forgotten or ignored,
While haberdashers are adored!
He, ignorant of the draper’s trade,
Indifferent to the art of dress,
Pictured the glorious South Sea maid
Almost in mother nakedness--
Without a hat, or boot, or stocking,
A want of dress to most so shocking,
With just one chemisette to dress her
She _lives_--and still shall live, God bless her,
Long as the sea rolls deep and blue,
While Heaven repeats the thunder of it,
Long as the White Whale ploughs it through,
The shape my sea-magician drew
Shall still endure, or I’m no prophet!”
In a footnote, Buchanan added:
“I sought everywhere for this Triton, who is still living somewhere in
New York. No one seemed to know anything of the one great writer fit to
stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman on that continent.”
If this man, who had in mid-career been hailed at home and abroad as
one of the glories of our literature, died “forgotten and ignored,” it
was, after all, in accordance with his own desires. Adventurous life
and action was the stuff out of which his reputation had been made.
But in the middle of his life, he turned his back upon the world, and
in his recoil from life absorbed himself in metaphysics. He avoided
all unnecessary associations and absorbed in his own thoughts he lived
in sedulous isolation. He resisted all efforts to draw him out of
retirement--though such efforts were very few indeed. Arthur Stedman
tells us: “It is generally admitted that had Melville been willing to
join freely in the literary movements of New York, his name would have
remained before the public and a larger sale of his works would have
been insured. But more and more, as he grew older, he avoided every
action on his part and on the part of his family that might look in
this direction, even declining to assist in founding the Authors Club
in 1882.” With an aggressive indifference he looked back in _Clarel_ to
“Adventures, such as duly shown
Printed in books, seem passing strange
To clerks which read them by the fire,
Yet be the wonted common-place
Of some who in the Orient range,
Free-lances, spendthrifts of their hire,
And who in end, when they retrace
Their lives, see little to admire
Or wonder at, so dull they be.”
When Titus Munson Coan was a student at Williams College, prompted by
a youthful curiosity to hunt out celebrities, he called upon Melville
at Arrowhead. In an undated letter to his mother he thus recounted
the experience: “I have made my first literary pilgrimage--a call
upon Herman Melville, the renowned author of _Typee_, &c. He lives in
a spacious farm-house about two miles from Pittsfield, a weary walk
through the dust. But it was well repaid. I introduced myself as a
Hawaiian-American and soon found myself in full tide of talk--or rather
of monologue. But he would not repeat the experiences of which I had
been reading with rapture in his books. In vain I sought to hear of