Herman Melville
reflect and meditate and relate, play an important part in the economy
of society; and life is abrupt and incomplete when that part is not
performed.
Melville had travelled far and had experienced much; he had run the
gamut, or rather, the gauntlet of every sort of human experience
except the normal and easy and domestic one promised him by birth
and parentage. He will never be a school teacher, a professor, a
ship captain, a lawyer, a political leader; however necessary these
occupations, there is nothing in Melville’s training or temperament
that moves him in one of these directions. What is left? What is left
is something he has been silently preparing himself for all along: he
must become a writer. Though the society to which he returned, unlike
Jack Chase and other humble listeners to Melville’s yarns, regarded
that function as a trivial one, compared to accomplishments in a
dissociated world of action, and by its contemptuous regard and its
dissociation, deprived it of sustenance and made much of it in fact
trivial, here is the occupation which will gain in a hundred ways by
his experiences.
Melville must have had more than a dim anticipation of this career when
he stepped ashore, at Boston, in October, 1844; and had he known where
it would lead him he might well have shrunk from following it further.
His physical adventures were to be welcomed as romantic myths, and
his mental adventures were to be denounced as blasphemies. In short,
“the indefinite Navy Commissioners, so far out of sight aloft,” had
a mission in store for Melville that Hardy’s ironic President of the
Immortals might have concocted in a sinister moment.
CHAPTER THREE: TROPICAL SUMMER
In 1844, when Herman Melville landed in Boston, provincial American
society was in that state of uneasy transformation which means either
a vaster accomplishment or destruction; and in 1844 it was still
possible to think that the result would not be, fatally, destruction.
The Mexican War loomed ahead, thanks partly to the itch of Southern
planters to extend the territory under cotton, abetted by the belief
of men like Seward that by a process of territorial aggrandizement and
conquest the conflict between Northern and Southern economic interests
could be diverted. The American state had already acquired the desire
to crown itself with glory and prestige by conquering one of its
disordered neighbours--a process which mixed an ineffable air of virtue
with the proud consciousness that we had chosen an opponent who could
not possibly lick us.
Already something that aggravated the economic conflict had appeared
on the horizon, a breach between the several states over the ancient
metaphysical question of the one and the many, somewhat confused by
doubts as to whether free institutions could flourish alongside an
empire committed to slavery and expansion. These doubts must have
been even more confusing to a neutral observer, since cities like
Charleston and New Orleans, for all their slavery, were less depressing
and barbarous than such proud emporia as New York and such dingy
manufacturing hives as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. There was so much
right and wrong on both sides of Mason and Dixon’s line that the
question could only be decided by furious men of action, who would
decisively pound their fist into one side of the scale or the other in
order to make weight and register a conclusion.
If slavery showed a dark countenance, beautifully kalsomined by the
most solicitous Christian hypocrisy, industrialism showed a dingy
one. The little water-driven mill-wheel, which greatly lightened
the domestic labour of the early nineteenth-century farm, and which
served equally to operate the small mill or factory, had only a
brief day of social efficiency: by 1850, Melville could encounter a
factory in the Berkshire Hills, turning rags into paper, and call it
a Tartarus of Maids. Mechanical instruments, so far from diminishing
the amount of servile labour in the world, threatened to turn all
industrial operations into a form of servitude: in this middle period,
craftsmanship of the hand decayed, and craftsmanship of the machine was
subjugated by the demand for the cheap, the shoddy, the ephemeral. The
mills at Lowell, which Dickens described with admiration in 1837, were
already huge, and it was only by contrast with Bradford or Leeds that
they could be called tolerable. In the forties, the concentration of
coal and iron was slowly giving Pittsburgh a pre-eminence over the old
iron mines and furnaces scattered about the countryside in Connecticut,
New York, and New Jersey. Railroads, first laid where capital and
immediate convenience dictated, were now joining along strategic lines
of communication, following coast and inland water routes: as the
stage-coach disappeared, and the inns ceased to get patronage, the
inner parts of the country became inaccessible and they gradually ran
down: only the railroad thread prospered.
Was this a triumph or a _débâcle_, this coming of industrialism,
this volcanic intrusion of new methods of living, new means of
communication, new habits of work? When one thinks of the countrysides
that ran down, the forests that were wantonly destroyed, the soils
that were depleted, the towns that were jerry-built and burned and
jerry-built again, the public lands that were thrown into the laps of
speculators, the industrial population that was starved and depressed
in dingy cities, one sees that there is no easy answer to this
question; and certainly none of the economists has ever been impartial
enough as accountant to tell whether the final result for civilization
was a gain or a loss, and if so, how much was gained and how much
lost, and where these things happened. But when Melville came back to
America, industrialism was a value in itself: people encouraged it as
the patrons of the Renaissance encouraged art, not doubting that the
activity was a great one, and made for a higher civilization.
It is perhaps a little absurd to speak of such disparate things as
Attica and the North Atlantic states in the same breath: but these
regions, between 1820 and 1860, which coincided with Melville’s birth
and maturity, were in many respects in the same situation as Attica
between the birth of Socrates and the death of Plato. An old provincial
culture, closely bound to the land, was being overthrown by a new order
based upon trade and imperialistic enterprise and military expeditions
in support of the prestige of the state; and, at this moment of
dissolution, the spirit fulfilled itself in a sudden outburst which
expressed, in a new form, all that was valuable in the old culture,
with an additional energy, derived partly from the seething activities
of the new life that was inimical to it and already threatened it. The
gap between Sophocles and Menander was no greater than the gap between
Melville and Mark Twain: both these Americans roughed it and travelled
much and gave accounts of their adventures; but their feeling and their
vision belonged to different worlds.
In the America of the forties there was a sense of poignant expectation
which was also a fulfilment. Emerson was giving his lectures on the
Times, Thoreau was making his experiment at Walden Pond: warm spirits
with thin and fantastic notions about the ideal life were discussing
Fourier, welcoming the writings of Cabet, trying by a single gesture
to regenerate the morals of society, to get an easier living, reform
the diet, and alter the institution of matrimony--absurd, rickety
people they were, no doubt, but Bronson Alcott’s preference for the
sun-touched fruits and vegetables has turned out not to be so fantastic
in fact as it sounds in theory; and if it is possible now to eat food
which does not lead inevitably to gout and indigestion, to wear clothes
that do not stifle and constrict the human body, and to think candidly
about institutions which were once too sacred for rational thought, we
owe these improvements not a little to the passionate women who dared
to wear trousers and the comical men who listened patiently to Dr.
Graham’s famous lecture on the benefits of bran bread and squashes.
In 1844 this mixture in society of new and old, provincial and
metropolitan, free and servile, vital and mechanical, was still a
turbid one: the elements had not settled; contrast and comparison were
difficult; and people stood for one or the other, chiefly by intuition,
while perhaps a good part of the population sought both: they wanted
the old privileges of birth and the new ones of opportunity, the
old stability and order, and all the new fields to conquer and the
new positions to occupy. Melville belonged by temperament and shade
of interest to the order that was passing, and not to the chaos and
dissolution that was to come; still, in so far as he was aware of the
change, he accepted it and even took a little pleasure in it, as when
he anticipated from the progress of invention that fifty years hence
it would be a commonplace for an American to spend the week-end in
Honolulu.
2
Melville came back to this turbid spring freshet of a world, and he
found that his family, too, was in the process of growth and change.
Allan had become the business man of the family, a lawyer, with offices
in Wall Street; young Tom already wanted to become a sailor, not just
to see new places like Herman but to master the sea as a profession;
Gansevoort, who had struggled hard and become a little wan and
disappointed, had gone in for a political career, and, like Henry Adams
a little later, he went to join the American Legation in London in 1845
as secretary. After a little visiting among his relatives and with
Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts, an old friend of the family
with a marriageable daughter, Melville settled down for a while in
Lansingburgh: he had decided to write an account of his adventures. The
lack of any other opening and the promise of some financial return were
the external stimuli; but one cannot doubt that there was also an inner
need. This loquacious, introspective sailor, who can so vividly hold
an audience that, later, when he described for Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne
an encounter in which he had used a club, they searched the house on
his departure to find the imaginary club he had left behind--this young
man had reached a stage where literary expression was inevitable,
necessary--indeed, good for the health.
Up to the age of twenty-five Melville had knocked around the world
solely for the purpose of making the best of a bad job. At twenty-five
he discovered, in writing Typee, that he actually had made the best of
it: his roaming, wasted life was all to the good: its idlest moments
could be salvaged; for he had come into possession of something he had
not deliberately set out to find, and twenty years of sedentary labour
at home would not have given him equal experiences or equal leisure
to reflect upon them. The wreckage of these Polynesian years was more
precious than any cargo he might have punctually guarded in New York
or Boston, at some purser’s job like school-teaching. The outcast came
into his own; and the prodigal returned with his own fatted calf to
give him welcome!
Herman Melville’s first book was a narrative of his Four Months in the
Marquesas among the Typees: its American title was Typee. It was at
the opposite pole, at the other end of the world, from another book
that was being composed during this period, Thoreau’s Walden, but
the similarities are no less important than the contrasts. Typee is
Melville’s Walden, without the philosophic reflection and without the
premeditated purpose to test the benefits of a more primitive life:
Walden is Thoreau’s Typee without the physical derring-do and adventure.