Herman Melville
an Alexandria by themselves, and fill it with all the things which go
to make up a capital.” Melville conveyed this feeling of richness and
varied capacity: every face was accentuated slightly in caricature,
except Jack Chase’s for Jack stood out among the officers and crew as
the real captain, the one complete, full-bodied man among them all,
robust, bearded, Jovian, ready in war or love or seamanship, singing
Dibdin’s ballads or reciting Camoëns’ Lusiad with equal gusto. Jack
Chase would have pleased Whitman: indeed, they had the same large,
sympathetic, readily dramatized personalities.
In White-Jacket, Melville’s power of invention appears only a few
times; but when it does, it is magnificent. The chapters on the
Surgeon of the Fleet and his operation show Melville’s satire at its
acutest: the picture would do honour to the Hogarth Melville loved.
One sees Cuticle, the eminent man of science and surgery, languishing
for three years in a man-of-war without a single major operation.
Fate at last hands Cuticle a poor wretch who has broken his leg; and
Cuticle cannot ease the itch to amputate. The consultation with the
other, surgeons is handled with cruel fidelity: they are all against
the operation; but Cuticle, with great presence, browbeats the junior
surgeon into an equivocation which his superior pounces upon as a
sufficient sanction for the operation. The grizzly preparation and
performance is told with the grizzliest humour; Melville went through
every detail of the butchery with a terrible levity, and an eye for
the vanity, the professional hypocrisy, the routine which, rather than
humanity and understanding, so often decide the issues of life and
death. The operation was a triumph for science and Mr. Surgeon Cuticle:
incidentally, it happened to be the death of the poor man who was
brought needlessly to the operating-table.
The satire is perfect; and it is perfect because, at the broadest
extreme of caricature, it does not lose sight of the pathetic reality
underneath. Melville did not waste breath dissecting the obvious
impostors and charlatans; for all but the simple can escape them. It is
the man in command, the man we admire, respect, put all our confidence
in, that Melville so skilfully opened up. No one has done a better
job of it: Cuticle and his operation must be put alongside the best
passages in Molière. If operations cannot now be performed in the Navy
without the consent of the principal party, Melville’s account of their
professional abuse is perhaps responsible, in part, for the improvement.
Nor was this scene merely a lucky hit by Melville; the scene between
the two sailmakers, sewing up the corpse, is equally strong and equally
endowed with imaginative life. In his earlier books, Melville had
defined his limits: they ranged between utmost fantasy and grossest
matter of fact: he could grub with Caliban or fly with Ariel, but
when he flew, his course was still a little erratic, and when he
remained on the ground, he was tied a little too close to actuality.
In White-Jacket his powers did not widen; but they gained firmness and
control. He could fly groundwise, giving the commonplace the benefits
of his imagination, carrying the double theme, the theme of life itself
and naval experience, under the same figure; and when he cut loose,
he did not need to throw overboard the ballast of good sense before
he could reach the upper air. The prose of White-Jacket is an advance
on all his previous writing; it has a richness of texture, a variety
of rhythm, a decisiveness of phrase that his earlier work had only
promised and that Mardi itself had not quite fulfilled.
White-Jacket is a portrait gallery: but it is more than that: it
is one of the best all-round characterizations and criticisms of a
powerful human institution that the century produced. Melville dealt
with the effect of regimentation, with the relation of superior
to underling, with the accidents and mischances and the ordinary
routine of a man-of-war’s life, in such a fashion that he included
other institutions as well: the human truths and relationships would
remain, though all the navies of the world were scrapped next week.
The malevolence of the Articles of War, the essential degradation of
the whole military process, the hectoring, the arrogance of station
(the quarter-deck face!), the military necessity of converting all the
variable human potentialities into mechanized patterns--that is, human
defectives--are here once and for all coolly observed and demonstrated:
White-Jacket forms a sort of illustrated supplement to Blake’s keen and
devastating epigrams on war. The fact that flogging was abolished in
the Navy as a result of an agitation in Congress that followed directly
upon White-Jacket’s publication, is a tribute to the moving truth of
what Melville wrote: his words on the sham republicanism of a country
that fostered an autocratic navy were a little too sharply aimed for
even the military racketeers to dodge. Had Melville’s picture been
that of a mere propagandist, I doubt if it would have taken such
immediate effect: on the contrary, it was that of a genuine critic,
who portrayed the whole truth in such a fashion as to make evasion
of the unpleasant parts of it almost impossible. He overreached his
antagonists by knowing more about their business than they themselves
did: as when he used the example of the British admiral, Collingwood,
to show that capable officers could govern the rowdiest crew without
the lash. Apart from Moby-Dick, White-Jacket is, I think, Melville’s
fullest achievement: and it is the best reasoned and seasoned of all
his factual narratives. The charm of youth was gone, perhaps, but the
manly grasp of maturity had succeeded it--the manly grasp and the
steady, unfaltering eye.
Melville’s appetite for facts, his voracious reading, his wide range
of experience, his philosophic brooding, at last had an imagination
capable of assimilating all these materials and using them to further
its own ends. Now was the time for a great leap, a leap which would
gather all these powers together and focus them on an object of epic
dimensions, a Typee, a Mardi, a Redburn, a White-Jacket, all in one.
Melville gathered himself for the leap; but before he could make it, he
was forced to attend to more mundane affairs; and in October, 1849, he
went over to England to arrange in person for the English publication
of Redburn and White-Jacket.
For a few months, we have the rare good luck to follow Melville day
by day, almost hour by hour. When, on October 11, 1849, he stepped
aboard the Southampton, a regular London liner, on a raw noon, leaving
behind his brother Allan and Mr. Duyckinck, who had come to the docks,
he began to keep a journal of his voyage. This journal, a later one
kept during his trip to the Near East, and a small sheaf of letters,
constitute with his books almost the only first-hand material for
Melville’s biography. Let us take advantage of this good fortune.
The literal, unadorned journal, made up hastily day by day, is the
least impeachable sort of testimony, unless the writer has an eye on
posterity. One need harbour no such suspicions about Melville’s simple
record.
4
(_Enter Herman Melville, in a green overcoat, with polite manners, and
a wary reticence underneath his appearance of rank conviviality. He
is just past thirty, and at times his grave demeanour and abstracted
look might pass him for forty; but there are other moments when the
fringe of brown beard seems only a mask, and one detects beneath the
thoughtful brow of the author and the anxious brow of the husband and
father an irrepressible boy. One wants a name for this combination of
outdoor strength and bookishness, this Bohemianism and gentlehood, this
mixture of the bronzed god himself and the plaster cast, and, for lack
of an epithet, one will have to call it Melvillian._)
What a queer business, this getting away. Yesterday one said a
passionate farewell to every one in the morning; but the winds were
unfavourable, and in the evening one was back again at home, feeling
almost as if one had accomplished the tour of Europe; the final
farewell was made a little stale by repetition; one felt relief when
the ship was at last under way. For almost the first time, one travels
as a passenger, travels alone, in a room as big as one’s own room at
home. It is good to be at sea again: one feels it more keenly among
the land-lubbers, who make anguished noises at the first choppy water
beyond the Narrows. In the morning, one is up early for the sunrise,
and, since the captain is friendly, one has the run of the ship. Fine
to be up in the rigging again! When a man is overboard one knows how
to act promptly: one raises a cry, drops overboard the tackle-fall of
the quarter boat, and when he fails to reach it, drops over the side
oneself to swing it toward him. Poor fellow: he sees it and does not
grasp it: he drowns with a demented smile on his face, when he might
have saved himself. The passengers say later he was insane.... To work
a boat, to know how to keep it pointed on its course, or to throw out a
life-line, this sort of knowledge gives one back one’s old confidence.
There’s no gammon about the ocean; it knocks the false bottom right off
a pretender’s keel.
The passengers prove better than one had dared hope: there is Adler,
a German philologist, who will talk to one till midnight about fixed
fate, free will, and foreknowledge absolute: his philosophy is
Coleridgian, a sort of friendly bridge between Kant and Hegel and
Schelling and Schlegel and one’s own less conscious metaphysics, one’s
hitherto dim doubts and intuitions. There is also a genteel sociable
youth named McCurdy, whose father is a New York merchant, and there is
a cousin of Bayard Taylor, the pedestrian traveller, all good fellows
over a bowl of punch. Taylor has a notion of going through the Near
East: down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople--Athens, Beyrut,
Jerusalem, Cairo, Alexandria. That would be something neither Polynesia
nor the Hudson Valley could give: marvellous, if it were not for the
strain on one’s purse. Four hundred dollars at least. Already, too--one
isn’t a week away from them--Lizzy and Barney the baby begin to tug
at one. No: one isn’t free any more. One is going to England to get a
little ready cash from Bentley or Murray or Moxon on White-Jacket: one
can’t dissipate that in travel. One is tied: there is no getting away
from that. One wants to travel far, perhaps; but not with the same
old lust and confidence: all paths lead home again. Where’s Lizzie
now? Where dat old man? The nice little beggar: those were the first
connected words he uttered.
Ah, well: the vacant days, the rough days, the dozy sunlit days: they
all relieve the tension a little. Five years ago one scarcely knew that
Hegel existed: now one is on one’s way to England--an author! One of
the ladies is reading a book by H. M.; she keeps on raising her eyes
to take one in, as if comparing the real man with the self-portrait.
People say: Are you _the_ Mr. Melville--the man who lived among the
cannibals? A fine way to go down to posterity.... What a slack lot of
sheep a company of passengers is; one’s sympathies are all with the
forecastle. There is the buxom Irish lady who sings, the gushy Miss
Wilbur who is so obviously marriageable and who talks of winning souls
to Christ, the Frenchmen with the bleak, sea-sick faces. When one goes
aloft to muse a little, they stand around and gape, as if one were a
performer in Barnum’s museum. Already we are three weeks from home.
How quickly time flies when one day is like another. Dear Lizzie: dear
little Barney: where dat old man!
With a fresh wind and a clear sky and land near, the passengers