Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
Mormons had also such a scheme in view--to discover a large island
in the Pacific, upon which they could increase and multiply. The
Polynesians themselves have ideas of the same nature. Every one
has heard of the voyage of Ponce de Leon to find the fountain of
perpetual youth. Equally poetical, and more unfamiliar, was the
adventure of Cama Pecar, who set sail alone from Hawaii to find the
fount of eternal joy, which was supposed to spring up in some distant
island where the people lived in perpetual joy and youth. Like all
who go to Paradise, he was never heard from again. A tranquil scene
from the South Seas was remembered by the lecturer. In a ship from a
port of the Pacific coast he had sailed five months, and came upon
an island where the natives lived in a state of total laziness.
Here they found a white man who was a permanent inhabitant, and
comfortably settled with three wives, who, however, failed to keep
his wardrobe in good order.
“Wonderful tales were told of the adventures in the South Seas, and
the lecturer said that he believed that the books _Typee_ and _Omoo_
gave scarcely a full idea of them, except that part which tells of
the long captivity in the valley of Typee. He had seen many of these
story tellers of adventures in the South Seas with good vouchers
of their tales in the shape of tattooing. A full and interesting
description of the process of tattooing with its various styles was
given. Tattooing was sometimes, like dress, an index of character,
and worn as an ornament which would never wear off and could not be
pawned, lost or stolen. The lecturer had successfully combated all
attempts to naturalise him by marks as from a gridiron, on his face,
for which he thanked God.
“A brief notice was made of the islands of the Pacific, where the
Anglo-Saxons had settled, and civilised the people, and the lecturer
had been disgusted, and threw down a paper published in the Sandwich
Islands, which suggested the propriety of not having the native
language taught in the common schools.
“In conclusion, the lecturer spoke of the desire of the natives of
Georges Island to be annexed to the United States. He was sorry to
see it, and, as a friend of humanity, and especially as a friend of
the South Sea Islanders, he should pray, and call upon all Christians
to pray with him, that the Polynesians might be delivered from all
foreign and contaminating influences.
* * * * *
“The lecture gave the most ample satisfaction, and was frequently
applauded.”
Melville cut short his third year of lecturing to make the trip
to California with his brother. Upon his return, he again made an
unsuccessful attempt to be appointed to a consularship. Such a mission
took him to Washington in 1861. This trip was chiefly notable because
of the meeting of Melville and Lincoln. Melville recounted the
experience in a letter to his wife: “The night previous to this I was
at the second levee at the White House. There was a great crowd and a
brilliant scene--ladies in full dress by the hundreds--a steady stream
of two-and-two’s wound through the apartments shaking hands with Old
Abe and immediately passing on. This continued without cessation for an
hour and a half. Of course I was one of the shakers. Old Abe is much
better looking than I expected and younger looking. He shook hands like
a good fellow--working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per
cord.”
Melville struggled on for two more years at Pittsfield, and in October,
1863, moved with his family to 104 East 26th Street, New York, where he
spent the remaining years of his life. His house in New York he bought
from his brother Allan, giving $7,750 (covered by mortgages and in time
paid for by legacies of his wife) and the Arrowhead place, valued at
$3,000.
The last years in Pittsfield and the early years in New York were, in
financial hardship, perhaps the darkest in Melville’s life. He was in
ill health, and except for the pittance from his books he was without
income. His lectures were a desperate if not lucrative measure. But for
the generosity of his wife’s father, he would have been in destitution.
On December 5, 1866, he was appointed Inspector of Customs in New
York--a post he held until January 1, 1886. He was sixty-seven years
old when he resigned. His wife had come into an inheritance that
allowed him an ultimate serenity in his closing years.
R. H. Stoddard, in his _Recollections_, thus speaks of Melville:
“My good friend Benedict sent me, one gloomy November forenoon,
this curt announcement of a new appointment in Herman Melville: ‘He
seems a good fellow, Dick, and says he knows you, though perhaps he
doesn’t, but anyhow be kind to him if this infernal weather will
let you be so to anybody.’ I bowed to the gentleman who handed the
note to me, in whom I recognised a famous writer whom I had met some
twenty-five years before; no American writer was more widely known in
the late forties and early fifties in his own country and in England
than Melville, who in his earlier books, _Typee_, _Omoo_, _Mardi_,
and _White Jacket_, had made himself the prose poet of the strange
islands and peoples of the South Seas.
“Whether any of Melville’s readers understood the real drift of his
mind, or whether he understood it himself, has often puzzled me.
Next to Emerson he was the American mystic. He was more than that,
however, he was one of our great unrecognised poets, as he manifested
in his version of ‘Sheridan’s Ride,’ which begins as all students of
our serious war poetry ought to know: ‘Shoe the steed with silver
that bore him to the fray.’ Melville’s official duty during the last
years of my Custom-House life confined him to the foot of Gansevoort
Street, North River, and on a report that he might be changed to
some district on the East River, he asked me to prevent the change,
and Benedict said to me, ‘He shan’t be moved,’ and he was not; and
years later, on a second report of the same nature reaching him, I
saw Benedict again, who declared with a profane expletive, ‘He shall
stay there.’ And if he had not died about a dozen years ago he would
probably be there to-day, at the foot of Gansevoort Street.”
It is interesting that a man of the intellect of R. H. Stoddard should
have found Melville’s mind such a shadowed hieroglyph. With Stoddard so
perplexed, it is less difficult to understand Melville’s preference for
solitude.
In his copy of Schopenhauer, Melville underlined the phrase--“this
hellish society of men;” and he vigorously underscored the aphorism:
“When two or three are gathered together, the devil is among them.”
Melville occupied himself with his books, with collecting etchings,
with solitary walks; and for companionship he was satisfied with the
society of his grandchildren. His grand-daughter, Mrs. Eleanor Melville
Metcalf, thus records her recollections of such association:
“I was not yet ten years old when my grandfather died. To put aside
all later impressions gathered from those who knew him longer and
coloured by their personal reactions, all impressions made by
subsequent reading of his books, results in a series of childish
recollections, vivid homely scenes wherein he formed a palpable
background for my own interested activities.
“Setting forth on a bright spring afternoon for a trip to Central
Park, the Mecca of most of our pilgrimages, he made a brave and
striking figure as he walked erect, head thrown back, cane in hand,
inconspicuously dressed in a dark blue suit and a soft black felt
hat. For myself, I skipped gaily beside him, anticipating the long
jogging ride in the horse cars, the goats and shanty-topped granite
of the upper reaches of our journey, the broad walks of the park,
where the joy of all existence was best expressed by running down the
hills, head back, skirts flying in the wind. He would follow more
slowly and call ‘Look out, or the “cop” may catch you!’ I always
thought he used funny words: ‘cop’ was surely a jollier word than
‘policeman.’
“We never came in from a trip of this kind, nor indeed from any walk,
but we stopped in the front hall under a coloured engraving of the
Bay of Naples, its still blue dotted with tiny white sails. He would
point to them with his cane and say, ‘See the little boats sailing
hither and thither.’ ‘Hither and thither’--more funny words, thought
I, at the same time a little awed by something far away in the tone
of voice.
“I remember mornings when even sugar on the oatmeal was not enough
to tempt me to finish the last mouthful. It would be spring in the
back yard too, and a tin cup full of little stones picked out of
the garden meant a penny from my grandmother. He would say in a
warning whisper, ‘Jack Smoke will come down the chimney and take
what you leave!’ That was another matter. The oatmeal was laughingly
finished and the yard gained. Across the back parlour and main hall
upstairs ran a narrow iron-trimmed porch, furnished with Windsor
and folding canvas chairs. There he would sit with a pipe and his
most constant companion--his cane, and watch my busy activity below.
Against the wall of the porch hung a match holder, more for ornament
than utility, it seems. It was a gay red and blue china butterfly.
Invariably he looked to see if it had flown away since we were there
last.
“Once in a long while his interest in his grandchildren led him to
cross the river and take the suburban train to East Orange, where
we lived. He must have been an impressive figure, sitting silently
on the piazza of our little house, while my sister and I pranced by
with a neighbour’s boy and his express wagon, filled with a satisfied
sense of the strength and accomplishment of our years. When he had
had enough of such exhibitions, he would suddenly rise and take the
next train back to Hoboken.
“Chiefly do I think of him connected with different parts of the 26th
Street house.
“His own room was a place of mystery and awe to me; there I never
ventured unless invited by him. It looked bleakly north. The great
mahogany desk, heavily bearing up four shelves of dull gilt and
leather books; the high dim book-case, topped by strange plaster
heads that peered along the ceiling level, or bent down, searching
blindly with sightless balls; the small black iron bed, covered with
dark cretonne; the narrow iron grate; the wide table in the alcove,
piled with papers I would not dream of touching--these made a room
even more to be fled than the back parlour, by whose door I always
ran to escape the following eyes of his portrait, which hung there
in a half light. Yet lo, the paper-piled table also held a little
bag of figs, and one of the pieces of sweet stickiness was for me.
‘Tittery-Eye’ he called me, and awe melted into glee, as I skipped
away to my grandmother’s room, which adjoined.
“That was a very different place--sunny, comfortable and familiar,
with a sewing machine and a _white_ bed like other peoples’ In the
corner stood a big arm chair, where he always sat when he left the
recesses of his own dark privacy. I used to climb on his knee, while
he told me wild tales of cannibals and tropic isles. Little did I
then know that he was reliving his own past. We came nearest intimacy
at these times, and part of the fun was to put my hands in his thick
beard and squeeze it hard. It was no soft silken beard, but tight