Herman Melville
suddenly re-galvanize into life: faces appear that had been below
decks most of the sail. The food tastes better; one plays shuffleboard
gaily, not dutifully; one reads Pickwick Papers and wonders about the
England that lies somewhere between one’s father’s journals, one’s
own grim memories of Liverpool, and the warm, roast-beef, veal-pie,
ale-drinking, punch-sipping, toddy-smacking England of Dickens. At last
the cliffs of Portland, where the Portland stone comes from, bleak,
melancholy; then the run along the Isle of Wight, past the Needles,
with the ploughed fields neatly marked off, and the lower shore of
Hampshire with its low cliffs on the other side. Oh, to get ashore, to
feel dry land, to quit this endless, tedious tacking: to rush ashore
at Portsmouth and let the ship find London by itself! No: it can’t
be done: out in the Channel and up to Dover now: one is restless and
impatient. Up in the morning in the dark at four, and into the cold
cutter, which heads for Deal, not Dover, to make a landing. Well:
England at last! Ten years ago, thirteen to be exact, a poor boy, half
orphan, teased and tormented by foul-mouthed sailors, young, hopeful,
innocent, a mere ship’s monkey--now, Herman Melville, traveller,
novelist, romancer, author of Peedee and Hullabaloo and Pog-Dog: the
conquering hero, with debts and duns at his back and a potboiler in
his carpet-bag. Triumph--and how raw the wind is at dawn!
Through the dark, narrow streets of Deal, the keen air faintly reeking
with the first kitchen-coals, then out into the country on foot for a
day’s walk to Canterbury with Taylor and Adler. A castle and a Roman
fortification before one is two hours ashore! Deal: the square mound
of the Roman castra: somehow, these things mean more than a hillful of
arrow-heads: the men who built them worried about God and Eternity:
a thousand years does not separate one from them. Canterbury is even
better: the nave, the cloisters, the queer fine thoughts one finds on
some of the tombs. Yes: this is a little nearer the England of one’s
dreams. Dinner at the Falstaff Inn, and in the evening a provincial
theatre, with a stage that might have been peopled by Dickens, every
actor more of a character than the character portrayed: an ineffably
funny business all round.
Next day, by train in a third-class open carriage to London: cold to
one’s marrow: cold and ravenous. When one arrives at London Bridge
one can think of nothing but a chop-house. While the chops and the
porter and the treacle pudding are digesting, one realizes that this
is England, old England, the dark, slightly grimy eating-stalls, the
red-cheeked, pert, coarse, kindly stupid waitress, the silent men
eating methodically, piling their forks up like a hod with food, the
lawyers’ clerks, shabby, rusty, genteel, the countrymen with leather
leggings and purple veins on their cheeks, the bagmen, voluble and
expansive for Englishmen, just one remove from the country pedlar, a
faint odour of musty paper and soot over one kind of Londoner, or of
ploughed fields and manure over the other: in short, England, London--a
society like that at Albany, bedded deep in dust, must, precedent,
and vast augmentations of gold. One is in it and out of it. The crowd
on the Strand stares at one’s green overcoat: some one had ominously
warned one on the steamer that it would set one down for a crude
American. Colour is already a little old-fashioned in this drab,
utilitarian England: this is the City of Dis: black coats, black hats,
have survival value in a sulphur-and-brimstone world: the damned need
protective colouration. One sinks down at last before a small fire in
a tall, draughty room in Craven Street, just off the Strand. One’s
journal has been a blank these last three days, and one must catch up
with it. Travelling takes the ink out of one’s pen as well as the cash
out of one’s purse.
But time is limited and one must quickly set to work. Murray is out
of town; so is Bentley, the publisher; but Bentley will come up from
Brighton to suit one’s convenience. In the meanwhile, one can drop
in for Julien’s Promenade Concert at Drury Lane, see the pictures at
the National Gallery, prowl through Chancery Lane, or go down into
Cheapside to witness the surviving pomp and gilded fustian of the Lord
Mayor’s show, exploring the Guildhall the next day, in the company of
an affable functionary in the finance department whom one picks up, by
chance, in the street, to witness a bit of infernal charity, worthy of
Dis itself: a horde of beggars pours into the tawny-warm twilight of
the hall, with all its flags and banners and fine timbering, to pick
and grab at the remains of hams, fowls, pastries, left over from the
high-and-mightinesses of the previous day. A comical sight at first;
but on slight reflection, not comical: no, not comical. Thank heaven,
civilization has not gone quite that far in America.
The world that holds Lord Mayor’s shows--and the starvation and misery
behind the show--also holds a bus-ride, on a mellow autumn Sunday,
through Piccadilly, by Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and then
on, past red cottages and little taverns and open commons, through
Hammersmith, Chiswick, Kew, and across the Thames to Richmond Hill,
where, at the crest, overlooking a long stretch of parkland, one can
see the distant castle of Windsor in the mist beyond, with the Thames
itself flashing occasionally like a fish’s back in the sun, in the
valley between. After that, one is ready for the sober crimson of
Hampton Court--the Van Dycks and the Titians and the Rembrandts: this
is what one means by a cultivated life. Must one be harried, must one
struggle over vain things, must one know so much temporal bitterness,
hardship, evil, in order to live? Not the Marquesans: not the Olympians
of England: they both live as the lilies, planting themselves in a
nourishing soil, drinking in the sun, growing, forming pollen and
fertilizing and becoming fertilized, flowering and seeding. That is
life, not the struggling, the harrying, the deprivation. But tomorrow
one must leave Rembrandt and Hampton Court far behind: one must dicker
for good terms and a fat advance with Bentley.
The greyness of London comes over one: the glacial greyness of St.
Paul’s: the brown greyness of Bloomsbury: the smeary greyness of the
Strand: the dank blue greyness of the Temple. The choir chanting in St.
Paul’s leaves one feeling wan and unhappy. What is Lizzie doing? Where
dat old man? If only they were here, or better, if one could be with
them for a little while, and come back to the quiet inwardness of one’s
days, warmed, refreshed, revivified. One could absorb so much more, if
one were settled and secure.
How near one feels to these English, these people who like good solid
food and ale and port, who have a manly straightness in their dealings,
merchants whose signature makes paper valuable, poets who have created
in words poems that atone for all the pictures that remain unpainted
and all the music that remains unsung in the English soul: hearty,
robust, gay, ready to turn a farce in Beaumont and Fletcher or in a
market Punch and Judy show, but grave, serious, at bottom very deep:
no one, not Dante, had struck more ruthlessly at the sinister meanings
of life than Shakespeare, no one had been more relentless and sardonic
than Swift or Hogarth--and yet with what tenderness, what warm love
of life, in Swift’s letters to Stella or Hogarth’s portrait of the
Shrimp-girl, as fresh as a newly opened wild-flower. A country of
sound men, buxom girls, beautiful tidy fields, snug inns--and terrible
revealers of life’s immense blackness. How intense the candle in those
brave hands: how sullen and eventful the grave shadows that swarm
around it!
But that other England--one was very distant from it. The England of
wealth and station and reputation and family in the county sense, with
its arctic Oh? and its hard, oysterlike rudeness, a stupid England,
but influential in everything, governing its very enemies by choosing
the issues over which they would fight. The England that had kicked
an innocent youth out of a Liverpool club and would doubtless do
the same, with less provocation, to a distinguished American author
whose reputation was growing in France and Germany: the England of
hard-faced men who rolled the wheels of progress over usury and penury
as twin rails: the England that had impressed seamen, struck down
its continental rivals, enclosed the commons, introduced an inhuman
system of industry, and defended privilege and empty title as the
very cornerstones of Civil Order--in short, the England of snobs and
flunkeys and a complacent, servile, self-righteous middle class--New
York, to be sure, without a hinterland that was still free and
unclaimed.
How trivial this other England essentially is. What a stupid lot at
Murray’s party, and what a bore old Lockhart was, with his ghastly,
grinning, mincing way: such a moth-eaten lion! Oh, conventionalism,
what a ninny thou art! How completely one felt out of it, how superior
one felt to these superiorities. Perhaps there was such a thing as
real aristocracy: one wonders if the Scotch Melvilles would show it,
or whether one might get a taste of the real thing at the Duke of
Rutland’s own seat: but these fishy eyes, these stupid faces, this
intellectual torpor, do not reassure one. Blackwood’s had printed a
long ponderous review of Redburn: that was a comical black mark against
the reigning Tory intellect, wasting good white paper on a book one
knows oneself to be trash, which one wrote to buy tobacco with. In
a society where the mask, the reputation, the hallmark count for so
much, how little any one is concerned with the substance beneath! One
is a well-known author: a success: ergo, Blackwood’s takes Redburn
seriously, not fathoming how little it is worth serious criticism.
One meets the publishers one by one, Bentley, who did Mardi, Murray,
who published Typee and Omoo, Mr. Longmans, Mr. Chapman, Mr. Bohn, Mr.
Moxon, who was Charles Lamb’s crony; and when one can’t make the deal
one had hoped for, one goes down the line; but the answer is always
the same: the copyright is unsatisfactory, the work may be pirated in
America; and they cannot risk two hundred pounds on the rights for
the first thousand copies. The prospects are not too pleasant; but
if the matter could be settled at once one wouldn’t have the excuse
and the opportunity to visit the Dulwich Gallery, remote from London,
but full of splendid treasures; one couldn’t sit with the Greenwich
pensioners at Greenwich; one couldn’t spend a Sunday morning, a little
too conspicuous for comfort, at the services in St. Bridget’s; nor
could one discuss metaphysics with Dr. Adler at the Edinburgh Castle,
dark-walled and like a beefsteak in colour, where the ale was so mellow
and the waiters so polite. One absorbs a city by food and drink, as
well as by sight and conversation: the Mitre--Johnson’s tavern--and
the Cock and the Rainbow--Tennyson’s haunts: the little French hotel
in Soho where one has morning coffee and a jelly omelette, or, to know
the worst about life in London, a cup of brackish coffee, a dirty roll,
an unappetizing piece of bacon, on a dank, foggy morning in a cheap
eating-house: such depression of taste, sight, sound, feeling adds a
new circle to life’s possible hells.
There are bright spots that serve for perpetual contrast: hours spent
over the bookstalls in Great Green Street and Lincoln’s Inn, picking
out folios of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Browne, coming,
with a sudden recognition of kinship, upon De Quincey’s dreams of an
Opium Eater, with passages so much like one’s best feats in Mardi;
or a sumptuous dinner with Mr. Bates at East Sheen, nine miles from