Herman Melville
mental serenity. We have seen this balance in our own day, embodied in
a young man who flew to Europe alone. The gesture surrounding this act
was the same precious essence that Typee and Omoo give us in the form
of art. I have called this quality youth; but it is what the Athenians
called virtue; and as soon as we depart from it we are hoary with sin,
and there is no health in us.
CHAPTER FOUR: AZZAGEDDI
In 1847 Herman Melville was twenty-eight years old. Omoo had been
finished at the end of the previous year; and, in the excitement of
finding himself established as an author and recognized as a man of
promise, he was casting about for a theme that would more fully evoke
his own proper powers. So far he had been living on his material: it
was time for his material to get a living from him. He found the theme
in Mardi, the vast allegorical romance of Mardi; but before he settled
down to it, the friendship or the affection between him and Judge
Shaw’s daughter, Elizabeth, deepened, and in August, 1847, they were
married.
One can only dimly speculate upon what manner of girl Elizabeth Shaw
was. There is no reason to think that Melville drew her portrait in
Pierre, and the “wife” of the stories he wrote in the fifties is always
a conventional feminine foil. The letter she wrote to her mother during
the first week of her marriage was dutiful, girlish, commonplace; and
ten years later her letters were equally inexpressive and jejune. Her
freshness or her amiable temper or her capacity for devotion may have
attracted Herman; but more likely, he loved her because he loved her;
and there is no need or possibility of explaining that. Certainly,
there was no intellectual parity between them, as there was between
Hawthorne and his linguistic blue-stocking, Sophia--and Elizabeth had
none of his ranting high spirits.
Melville probably worshipped Elizabeth at first, and idolized her
beyond all reason; for he loved romantically, and romantic courtship is
a heightened and extravagant season even for men of less imagination
and hot impulse than Melville. He who wishes to keep that original
and etherealized image of his lady should run away from her: when he
breaks it, he will feel, Melville later declared, like Pluto snatching
his Proserpine, and once the image is broken every fragment will be a
reproach. It is the romanticized Circe, and not her victim, who under
the spell of marriage turns into an animal, not a swine, of course,
but a pea-fowl, grey-feathered and not gorgeous, or a hen, clucking
over her chicks and moving only within the limits of the farmyard, or a
dove, cooing a little plaintively, unable to awaken the proud strut of
the eager, following male, who has wooed once too often.
After an arduous honeymoon, by stage-coach and rail through the
mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, on up through Montreal, and
back by Lake Champlain and the Champlain Canal, a rough, jouncing,
crowded, distracted sort of journey, and a brief sojourn with Herman’s
mother at Lansingburgh, they settled down at 103 Fourth Avenue, New
York, in company with Melville’s brother Allan and a swarm of sisters.
Elizabeth Melville has left us a picture of that household and her
husband’s daily routine; one cannot do better than put it in her own
words:
“We breakfast at 8 o’clock, then Herman goes to walk and I fly up to
put his room to rights, so that he can sit down to his desk immediately
on his return. Then I bid him good-bye, with many charges to be an
industrious boy and not upset the inkstand and then flourish the
duster, make the bed, etc., in my own room. Then I go downstairs and
read the papers a little while, and after that I am ready to sit down
to my work--whatever it may be--darning stockings--making or mending
for myself or Herman--at all events, I haven’t seen a day yet, without
_some_ sewing or other to do. If I have letters to write, as is the
case today, I usually do that first--but whatever I am about I do not
much more than get thoroughly engaged in it, than ding-dong goes the
bell for luncheon. This is half-past 12 o’clock--by this time we must
expect callers, and so must be dressed immediately after lunch. Then
Herman insists upon taking a walk of an hour’s length at least. So
unless I can have rain or snow for an excuse, I usually sally out and
make a pedestrian tour a mile or two down Broadway. By the time I come
home it is two o’clock and after, and then I must make myself look as
bewitchingly as possible to meet Herman at dinner.... At four we dine,
and after dinner is over, Herman and I come up to our room and enjoy
a cosy chat for an hour or so--or he reads me some of the chapters he
has been writing in the day. Then he goes down town for a walk, looks
at the papers in the reading room, etc., and returns about half past
seven or eight. Then my work or book is laid aside, and as he does not
use his eyes but very little by candlelight, I either read to him, or
take a hand at whist for his amusement, or he listens to our reading or
conversation as best pleases him. For we all collect in the parlour in
the evening, and one of us reads aloud for the benefit of the whole.
Then we retire very early--at 10 o’clock we all disperse.”
Admirable Elizabeth! In your direct, simple way you have told us
everything we need to know. You are busy and happy: you have adapted
yourself, with the aid of such extra space as was once enjoyed by
all families of moderate means, to the clan of sisters and brothers
and cousins and aunts that make up the provincial family of the old
kind: you make it possible for Herman to economize all his energies,
and go ahead, with gentle resolution, at his work. What a beautifully
divided day it is: Herman working behind closed doors, and you
yourself, very cheerful and attentive and industrious, cocking your ear
occasionally for sounds of restlessness. Then the little breaks: the
sociability and--do you not perhaps overestimate a lover’s capacity
for conversation?--the hour or two of cosy chat. Already Herman’s
eyes must be saved, and you are there to save them. True: he has
devoted sisters, too; and they are very nice in their way, all such a
jolly, helpful, numerous family. People are a little more punctilious
here than they are in New England; that is part of the European air
which New York somehow preserves; the men bow lower, make prettier
compliments, and get drunk more often. When you go to a dance without
Herman, you are treated as one of the sisters, and by virtue of your
supposed maidenhood, you are quite a belle again. Herman doesn’t like
dances and parties overmuch: the late hours and the late suppers take
the edge off his writing next morning: he finds it hard to begin and
is a little cross and irritable: but what difference does that make?
You would give up all these frivolities for such a shapely, manly,
courteous, thoughtful man: if he will stay by, the world may gaily pass.
You are not alone, Elizabeth Melville: Mrs. Darwin feels the same
way, too; so, with less satisfaction and complaisance, does Jane
Carlyle; so, presently, does Sophia Tolstoy. But such helpfulness and
affectionate sacrifice cannot last forever. Children will come; you and
your fine, high-spirited boy will see less and less of each other: you
will interrupt his deepest intimacy with concern for the baby’s bottle.
You will wonder, when you are alone, whether you have any right to
thrust these burdens on his shoulders: you will feel that the world is
a little cruel, and your being joined to this lover who is so strange
and remote, this affectionate man who is also so exacting, is uneasy
bewilderment.... I do not understand you, Elizabeth Melville? Reflect
again carefully: do not be afraid of your feelings: some of them are
still visible in the fading ink of old letters; and some of them are in
your heart, because you are a human being. If you do not resent sharing
Herman so much with his family, you are a greater angel than you should
be.
“How much,” wrote Melville in Pierre, “that goes to make up the
deliciousness of a wife already lies in the sister.” Do you sometimes
feel, Elizabeth, that Herman has only added another sister to the
family; that Lizzie is now but a step away from Kate and Helen and
Augusta? It is not that he loves them too tenderly, but that he
worships you too much, or, in alternate fits, is far too indifferent
and puts you at a sisterly distance from him. Do you feel that he will
never get near enough to you, will never appreciate the you that is,
although he may be disappointed because of the you that is not? He
accepts you, of course, accepts you tenderly: you darn his stockings
and sew new tapes in his drawers when he breaks them: you put up
patiently with the languors and irritabilities that follow an intense
morning at the desk, and at times, you have the power to erase them and
make his eyes shine with triumph instead.
But this Herman is not the jovial boy who once played with Fayaway: he
has his turns of high spirits, but his humours are a little obscure and
beyond you, and his face shades a little with disappointment when he
notes that your plain, literal mind does not follow his sallies. He is
growing beyond you: in the very act of writing Mardi, Elizabeth ceases
to exist: the book is haunted by a phantom called Yillah: a Yillah who
will never mend socks or replace broken tapes. Some day he will learn,
perhaps, that women, like whales, are objects of natural history; and
when he is weary with his wandering and his quests, he will not despise
your tired arms: one of the best and tenderest of his poems, The
Return of the Sire de Nesle, will be addressed to you. But before that
happens, you have both a long hard journey before you. Courage! The
burden of writing these books will not fall upon his shoulders alone.
2
The spring of 1848 was full of turbulence all over the world. In Paris
the red flag was raised, and in a froth of oratory men dreamed and
fought at the barricades and died. Germany seemed on the verge of a
republic, and the fragments of Italy made convulsive movements; with
these and many other events fomenting, chaos and disorder and perhaps
some glorious new society, based on universal suffrage and national
workshops and the commune, seemed about to be instituted. One looks
back with a tolerant smile to those days, days when a formula seemed as
powerful as a siege gun, when the ballot seemed by itself a guarantee
of order and justice in human affairs. The effect of the French
uprising was the pastry cook’s Empire of Napoleon III; the final result
of the German revolution was the brutal, semi-feudal industrialism
of Germany after 1870. “I should not be surprised,” said Melville’s
Redburn, “if there were more words than things in the world”; and in
1848 there was surely far more Peace, Progress, Political Perfection,
Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, in the mouths and minds of men, than
there was in political society.
The contrasts and absurdities in all our institutions made 1848 a great
year for satirical observation, so long as the observer could remain
far enough away from humanity to laugh at its errors rather than weep,
as Alexander Herzen did, over its sins, and over the dark collapse
of hope and ambition that followed. Melville, fortunately, lived in
America: its own 1848, namely, the Civil War, was just thirteen years
away; and the book which began in 1847 as an adventurous idyll of
the South Seas, poetically conceived with a remote allegorical quest
running through it, came to an end as a savage parody of the whole
economy of Western Civilization, and its lofty Christian professions.
Just as Melville was finishing Mardi, this eventful spring, Elizabeth
Melville conceived: and the summer months that followed were devoted to