HERMAN
MELVILLE
LEWIS MUMFORD
HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC., RAHWAY, N. J.
TYPOGRAPHY BY ROBERT S. JOSEPHY
PREFACE
This is a study of Herman Melville’s life and thought. In interpreting
Melville’s life I have relied primarily on his own writings, including
his letters, some of which are still unpublished, and his notebooks.
There are occasional blank spaces in Melville’s history, but the record
is singularly complete in that part of Melville which most matters: his
ideas, his feelings, his urges, his vision of life. I have verified and
corrected these data by the use of every available piece of independent
evidence; and I must express my hearty thanks to Mrs. Frances Thomas,
Melville’s surviving daughter, for answering my written questions,
and to his granddaughter, Mrs. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, for giving
me the benefit of her own memories and family tradition, as well as
her courtesy and hospitality in placing at my disposal Melville’s
manuscripts. I am likewise indebted to Miss Caroline W. Stewart, an
old friend of the Melville family, for her impressions of the Melville
household during the later period of his life.
These pages could not have been written without Mr. Raymond Weaver’s
pioneer work on Melville. Mr. Weaver not merely brought to light much
important data and cleared up relationships that concerned Melville’s
objective life: he also, through Mrs. Metcalf, discovered Melville’s
unpublished manuscripts and included them in a definitive edition of
his work. For this, he has placed every admirer of Melville in his
debt. In addition to acknowledging this great service, I must thank him
for the scholarly generosity with which he gave me the benefit of his
intimate knowledge of Melville’s remains, and his copies of Melville’s
notebooks. Mr. Weaver’s generosity is equalled only by that of Dr.
Henry A. Murray, Jr., who shared with me his knowledge of certain
Melville letters otherwise inaccessible--an act of pure chivalry, since
Dr. Murray is himself at work on a biography of Herman Melville. Such
deeds sweeten one’s notions of human conduct: they give one not so
much a feeling of gratitude as a renewed sense of human dignity, and I
warmly place them on record.
In describing Melville’s experience and his state of mind, I have taken
the liberty of using his own language wherever possible; and I have
done this so freely that, except where I have quoted whole passages,
I have omitted quotation marks. In condensing and paraphrasing the
notebooks of Melville’s travels, I have usually employed Melville’s
own words; for it would be a vain biographer who did not make full use
of Melville’s sharp descriptions and striking epithets. If I have been
frank and unreserved in dealing with the difficult parts of Melville’s
life, I have been no more so than I think he would have wished, nor
more candid than he himself was in treating Pierre. “In reserves,” he
wrote, “men build imposing characters.” Melville’s worth, as a man and
a poet, has no need for a reputation so created. My purpose has not
been to embalm Melville but to bring him to life; and one cannot know
or sympathize with the man unless one shares his vicissitudes as well
as his triumphs.
Certain portions of this book have appeared, with slight changes and
abbreviations, in The New Republic, The American Mercury, and The
Saturday Review of Literature.
Lewis Mumford.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE 1
OLYMPIAN
CHAPTER ONE: BITTER MORNING 9
CHAPTER TWO: SEA-DRIFT 40
CHAPTER THREE: TROPICAL SUMMER 63
CHAPTER FOUR: AZZAGEDDI 86
CHAPTER FIVE: THE TARTARUS OF AUTHORS 108
TITAN
CHAPTER SIX: RED CLOVER 135
CHAPTER SEVEN: MOBY-DICK 158
CHAPTER EIGHT: AMOR, THREATENING 196
CHAPTER NINE: TIMONISM 223
PILGRIM
CHAPTER TEN: TROUBLED FOOTSTEPS 259
CHAPTER ELEVEN: ALARUMS AND RETREATS 292
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE FLOWERING ALOE 326
EPILOGUE 359
INDEX 371
Your zodiac here is the life of man in
one round chapter; and now I’ll read it
off, straight out of the book. Come,
Almanack! To begin: there’s Aries, or
the Ram--lecherous dog, he begets us;
then Taurus, or the Bull--he bumps us
the first thing; then Gemini, or the
Twins--that is Virtue and Vice; we try
to reach Virtue when lo! comes Cancer
the Crab and drags us back; and here,
going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring lion,
lies in the path--he gives a few fierce
bites and surly dabs with his paw; we
escape and hail Virgo, the Virgin; that’s
our first love; we marry and think to
be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra
or the Scales--happiness weighed and
found wanting! and while we are very sad
about that Lord! how we suddenly jump as
Scorpio or the Scorpion stings us in the
rear; we are curing the wound when whang
come the arrows all round; Sagittarius,
or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we
pluck the shafts, stand aside! here’s the
battering ram, Capricornus or the Goat,
full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong
we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the
Water-bearer, pours out his whole deluge
and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces
or the Fish we sleep.
Moby-Dick.
PROLOGUE
PROLOGUE
When Herman Melville died in 1891, the literary journal of the day,
The Critic, did not even know who he was. The editors rose bravely to
the occasion and copied a paragraph about him from a compendium of
American literature; and in the weeks that followed they reprinted
various commentaries on Melville and his work that were carried in the
correspondence columns of the New York newspapers.
The older generation remembered that Herman Melville had once been
famous. He had adventured in the South Seas on a whaler; he had lived
among the cannibals; and in Typee and Omoo he had made a romantic
pastiche of his experiences. On these books Mr. Melville’s fame had
been founded: it was a pity he had not done more in this line; for
his later books, obscure books, crowded books, books that could be
called neither fiction nor poetry nor philosophy nor downright useful
information, forfeited the interest of a public that liked to take
its pleasures methodically. Both the fame and the later absence of
recognition, Mr. Melville’s commentators agreed, were deserved. By his
interest in Sir Thomas Browne and metaphysics, Mr. Melville had carried
his readers into a realm much too remote, and an air too rarefied: a
flirtation with a South Sea maiden, warm, brown, palpable, was one
thing: but the shark that glides white through the sulphurous sea was
quite another. In Moby-Dick, so criticism went, Melville had become
obscure: and this literary failure condemned him to personal obscurity.
The writer about whom all these sage banalities were written shares
with Walt Whitman, I think, the distinction of being the greatest
imaginative writer that America has produced: his epic, Moby-Dick,
is one of the supreme poetic monuments of the English language: and
in depth of experience and religious insight there is scarcely any
one in the nineteenth century, with the exception of Dostoyevsky,
who can be placed beside him. To his contemporaries, the greatness
of Melville was an enigma: they valued him for those lesser virtues
in which he more closely resembled themselves. They had no place, on
their matter-of-fact plane, with its confident flat-footed science, and
its many odd and useful inventions, for the crosslights of Melville’s
imagination, for his oblique revelations, for his habit of questioning
the foundations upon which their vast superstructure of comfort and
complacency was erected. “What we want, sir, is facts!”--and though
Melville gave them facts, they resented his white vision, because it
froze the facts into a state that defied their easy assimilation. When
they charged Melville with obscurity, they did not realize, perhaps,
that sight demands not merely an object that can be seen, but an eye
that is capable of seeing; and it never occurred to them, with all
their doubts about Melville, that the defective vision might be their
own.
In a great degree, Herman Melville’s life and work were one. A
biography of Melville implies criticism; and no final criticism of his
work is possible that does not bring to it an understanding of his
personal development. The exotic elements in Melville’s experience
have usually been overstressed; the fatality and completeness of
his withdrawal from the contemporary scene have been exaggerated;
the incidental rocks and rapids and whirlpools have diverted the
critic’s attention from the flow of the stream itself. It is with
Herman Melville’s strength and energy on the spiritual plane that I
shall chiefly deal. He lives for us not because he painted South Sea
rainbows, or rectified abuses in authority in the United States Navy:
he lives because he grappled with certain great dilemmas in man’s
spiritual life, and in seeking to answer them, sounded bottom. He left
the clothed and carpeted world of convention, and faced the nakedness
of life, death, energy, evil, love, eternity: he drew back the cosy
hangings of Victorian parlours, and disclosed the black night outside,
dimly lighted with the lights of ancient stars. Had he been a romantic,
he would have lived a happy life, buttering his bread with feeble
dreams, and swallowing down his regrets with consolatory port: he who
wishes to escape the elemental stings of existence need only grasp the
outstretched hands of his contemporaries, accept the subterfuge goals
they call success in business or journalism, and shrink by means of a
padded physical apparatus from the cold reality of the universe itself.
But Melville was a realist, in the sense that the great religious
teachers are realists. He saw that horsehair stuffing did not make the
universe kinder, and that the oblivion of drink did not make the thing
that was forgotten more palatable. His perplexities, his defiances,
his torments, his questions, even his failures, all have a meaning
for us: whether we renounce the world, as Buddha did, affirm a future
transcendence, as Christ did, or, like Whitman, embrace its mingled
good-and-evilness, our choice cannot be called enlightened until it has