Herman Melville
charge of the Literary World. Until the publication of Pierre, Mr.
Duyckinck was intimately associated with Melville’s literary ventures.
Melville trusted him the way that a foreigner may trust a native as
a guide to a strange country, realizing only after many days that
the man he has thrown himself in with, whose company he has enjoyed,
would be the most antipathetic of companions if one met him on one’s
own ground. Duyckinck helped Melville to find his own depths; and when
Melville had found them the two men were, by that simple fact, cut off.
It is not difficult to see how this friendship matured and withered:
Duyckinck’s life was devoted to those superficies that Melville
dedicated his whole energies to piercing and getting beyond. Lowell hit
Evert off in one of his Fables for Critics; it was not the least happy
of his arrows:
Good-day, Mr. Duyckinck, I am happy to meet
With a scholar so ripe and a critic so neat,
Who through Grub Street the soul of a gentleman carries.
What news from the suburb of London and Paris?
Walt Whitman met the Duyckinck brothers: he describes them both as
“gentlemanly men” and he could say no worse of any one. “I do not know
of any description that it would have pleased them better to hear,”
added Whitman. “Both very clerical-looking--thin--wanting in body:
men of truly proper style, God help ’em!” But the Duyckincks had a
correct, bowing acquaintance with literature: they represented culture,
tradition, a knowledge of English grammar; and for a good while they
were not the least appreciative of Melville’s critics. If, when they
published their Cyclopedia of American Literature, they gave fourteen
pages to Longfellow and only three and a half to Melville, they were
but reflecting the judgment of gentlemanly men for the next generation.
More than thirty years later, Mr. Barrett Wendell and Mr. George
Woodberry had advanced no further on the road to appreciation.
6
Melville’s brother, Gansevoort, had procured an advance from Murray on
the English edition of Typee; and his new fame and financial success
must have made Melville look forward to literature as the source of a
permanent livelihood. In that “maturer and larger interior development”
that was now taking place in Melville, pride of career supplanted
pride of race: it was himself, his own nature, his experiences, his
thoughts, that mattered, and not the size of his grandfather’s breeches
or the length of that other lineage which perhaps joined him with
bonnie Jeanie Melville in the Scots ballad. His racial inheritance had
but added to his humiliation; by his own exertions and skill, he had
achieved his first triumph. He is now a proper child of the Revolution;
he knows, like Napoleon, that men make families quite as much as
families make men--and there is no ancestor so powerful as one’s
earlier selves.
Melville promptly followed Typee with a sequel of his adventures in
the South Seas called Omoo, which signifies rover. In the meanwhile,
Gansevoort, who had been the mainstay of the family while Melville was
growing up in Albany, had found nothing in the bleak streets and grimy
house-fronts of London to lessen his own depression; and he died. The
early struggle, which had left such a bitter taste with Herman, had
even more fatally taken the heart out of Gansevoort. From the last
of his letters home one has the feeling that he resigned from life,
rather than that he was suffering from any physical malady. “Selfishly
speaking,” he declared, “I have never valued life very much.” The fibre
loosened in Gansevoort; the grip relaxed; he passed out. There is no
sign in Omoo that Gansevoort’s death was a very profound event for
Melville; and yet one suspects that his sadness and hopelessness came
in later years to mingle with Melville’s pain.
Omoo is a description of Melville’s life from the day he escaped the
Typees to his signing up for another whaling voyage off the coast of
Japan: its contents I have already used in telling about his life
during that period. The narrative itself is done in the direct,
vigorous, rapid style of Typee: if anything, there is more humour in
it, and Melville gave himself greater liberties in using the material
and embroidering it. Omoo is perhaps the most underrated of Melville’s
books. While it solidified the reputation he had gained in Typee,
the first book has held first place, because of the unique people
and customs Melville dealt with there; whereas Omoo, which is a more
raffish tale, and in some respects superior in literary quality, has
been treated as if it were but the rinsings of the heady Typeean jug.
This is far from being true. The relatively unromantic, if outlandish,
quality of these later adventures, with the exception of the mutiny of
the Julia’s crew, made him rely more heavily upon his own skill: and
although the main incidents are probably accurate, all the characters
are focussed with a slight distortion, through Melville’s sense of the
comic: Dr. Long Ghost’s adventures and peccadillos are filled out a
little, and the venial doctor of Papeetee was treated in such a fashion
that the actual character uttered a cry of belligerent protest when the
book came to his attention.
Melville’s skill at character-drawing, of which his description of
Mehevi and Kory-Kory gave promise in Typee, became in Omoo more firm.
Here is a scene in which two minor characters, a land-lubber, Rope
Yarn, and an “affable-looking scamp”--Flash Jack--appear only for a
minute.
“Flash Jack crosses the forecastle, tin can in hand, and seats himself
beside the land-lubber.
“‘Hard fare this, Ropey,’ he begins; ‘hard enough, too, for them that’s
knowed better and lived in Lun’nun. I say now, Ropey, s’posing you were
back to Holborn this morning, what would you have for breakfast, eh?’
“‘Have for breakfast!’ cried Ropey, in a rapture. ‘Don’t speak of it!’
“‘What ails the fellow?’ here growled an old sea-bear, turning around
savagely.
“‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ said Jack; and then, leaning over to Rope
Yarn, he bade him go on, but speak lower.
“‘Well, then,’ said he, in a smugged tone, his eyes lighting up like
two lanterns, ‘well, then, I’d go to Mother Mill’s that makes the great
muffins: I’d go there, you know, and cock my foot on the ’ob and call
for a noggin o’ somethink to begin with.’
“‘And what then, Ropey?’
“‘What then, Flashy,’ continued the poor victim, unconsciously warming
up to his theme; ‘why then, I’d draw my chair up and call for Betty,
the gal wot tends to the customers. Betty, my dear, says I, you looks
charmin’ this mornin’; give me a nice rasher of bacon and h’eggs,
Betty, my love; and I wants a pint of h’ale, and three nice hot muffins
and butter--and a slice of Cheshire; and Betty, I wants--’
“‘A shark steak and be hanged to you!’ roared Black Dan with an oath.”
This quotation serves not merely to show how immediately and vividly
Melville can put before us a forecastle ragging. The passage is
interesting for another reason. Despite his admiration for Melville,
Robert Louis Stevenson gave rise to one of the parrot judgments about
Melville’s work when he said: “At his christening some influential
fairy must have been neglected. ‘He shall be able to see, he shall be
able to tell, he shall be able to charm,’ said the fairy godmothers;
‘but he shall not be able to _hear_,’ exclaimed the last.” In this
passage Stevenson was reproaching Melville for his inadequate rendering
of the Marquesan speech, a matter over which there is small cause for
wonder, since Melville’s four months among the Typees were followed by
four years before he committed the names and words to paper; but the
actual fact is just the reverse of Stevenson’s dictum: Melville had
a curiously accurate ear; and the little passage just quoted proves
it. Here, from an American writer, is perhaps the first clue to the
existence of modern cockney. One will not discover that speech in the
pages of Thomas Hood’s Punch; one will not discover it in Pickwick
Papers or Oliver Twist; what one finds there, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has
pointed out, is an earlier urban dialect. In Omoo, on the contrary,
Melville gives us the modern forms: the _ink_ ending for _ing_ and
the dropped and added aitches. He was almost equally felicitous in
rendering the difficult Belfast brogue: his transliteration of _haul_
into _harl_ is a test of it; and only an accurate ear will thus catch
the living tongue. Unlike Ruskin, Melville was not a painter with
words, but a musician; and in his maturity, his great passages have a
musical structure of their own. In a phrase like “a soft seething foamy
lull” he uses the sound of lull, rather than its sense, to convey his
meaning; and among the modern poets it is natural to find him turning,
later in life, to Shelley and to James Thomson.
Omoo was a rambling book: it had in a formal sense neither beginning
nor end; but it had something of the bright immediacy of a sketchbook
filled with graphic notes that might be worked into a finished picture.
There were no clouds over Melville when he wrote Omoo; even its ugly
parts were saturated with sunlight; beachcombing left Melville a
little brighter for being scoured by the sand. Smollett had taught him
all he needed to write this kind of work, Smollett and Defoe. Omoo
had the sharpness, the force, the exaggeration of character which
the eighteenth century had in its satiric artists; and every episode
was carried off with a dry discretion. With the habit of long verbal
practice, Melville watched his listeners: he never overloaded Omoo:
he knew where to skip and where to elaborate: he is a writer who
knows that one wants everything in a travel book except the tedium
and fatigue of actuality. Throughout the narrative, one always feels
that Melville has more up his sleeve: one is prepared to believe
that he has a hundred Omoos in his bosom: perhaps he had, and at all
events it required talent to make us believe so. More and more, his
speech cleansed itself of affectations: the direct, vigorous lingo
of the sea, with all its Elizabethan locutions, was doubtless a sound
influence in this part of his development: of the young man who wrote
the sublime gibberish in the Lansingburgh newspaper, there is scarcely
a trace left. One measures such growth in feet, not in inches: in seven
years Melville had not merely renewed his physical body completely: he
had acquired an equally complete literary shape.
In every sense of the word, Omoo is a companion volume to Typee. It is
not merely that the milieu is still these wild, wooded, mountainous,
sun-drenched islands, with their attractive brown inhabitants: it is
not simply that as soon as Melville steps aboard a boat, the deck
begins to climb and fall under one’s feet and the smell of pitch and
hemp rises to one’s nostrils: it is not merely that this South Sea
Prospero, as Robert Buchanan called him, is a weaver of spells, as full
of happy mischief as a Polynesian maid and as seductive as a tropical
night. In Typee and Omoo, Melville had that superb aplomb--formed by
an athleticism, an inner poise, a dexterity of hand, a sharpness of
eye--which we call Greek because for a little while the Attic peoples
experienced it as a community; the attitude which Whitman valued as
the sign and seal of the new American. Melville is appreciative; he
is humorous; but he is neither a professional funny man nor a syrupy
preserver of glamour. His aplomb never deserts him. He is always in
command. That trait is the key to his early literary success; it
explains the effortless accuracy of his descriptions. Such poise, such
aplomb, such confidence, rest on the nicest sort of spiritual and
physiological interplay: blood and muscle form a part of it as well as