Herman Melville
every year, Melville might have made a pretty good go of it. But there
were handicaps. He had a wife and child to support; other children
came presently, four in all; and Elizabeth Melville was a duffer as a
housekeeper: try as she would, she could not cook without strain nor
manage a servant; and her chief equipment for facing the work and the
winter was an admirable set of party dresses and slippers. Melville’s
picked-up knowledge of cookery must have been called upon for service
during the first weeks they were definitely on their own; and presently
Mrs. Maria Melville and his sisters came to join the household, in
order to teach Elizabeth the rudiments of the household arts. It was
a humiliating experience for Elizabeth; but there was no help for
it: to the end of her days she did not like housekeeping; the art of
“managing” was apparently not in her. The many hands in Arrowhead
doubtless made light work; they also made inroads upon the larder, and
what the Melvilles gained in service they lost in supplies. The house
itself was commodious in rooms, but cramped in space, since it did not
so much exist in its own right, as it did as a sort of annex to the
chimney, a vast brick structure, with a circumference of forty-eight
feet at the base; the chimney was ample enough, but it swallowed wood
on a winter day as a whale swallows little fishes: and the rooms that
were left were none too large.
On any realistic canvas, this new move, with all its unexpected
burdens, was a dubious one. But in 1850 Melville was at the top of
his energies: the impetus from Typee and Omoo had not been lost: the
reception in England had probably added to his confidence: and when he
looked around him, the American scene itself reinforced his courage and
his convictions, and gave him new strength.
2
In the spring of 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter appeared,
and Melville presently awoke to find that Hawthorne, whose books he
had hitherto kept away from, despite the praise of them he had heard,
was a kindred spirit. “A man of deep and noble nature has taken hold
of me in this seclusion,” he exclaimed; “his wild, witch-voice rings
through me; or, in softer cadences, I seem to hear it in the songs of
the hillside birds that sing in the larch trees at my window.” This
discovery must have added to Melville’s refreshing sense of welcome on
coming back to America. Melville had perhaps begun to doubt whether he
could find an audience among his fellow countrymen; and here, at last,
was one man capable of understanding every part of him. America and its
promise were not a fraud: Hawthorne seemed a deeper writer than any one
who had gained the public’s ear in England as a novelist, or, for that
matter, as a Victorian poet. When, this summer, Melville came upon the
Mosses from an Old Manse, which had been published some years before,
he realized he had lost much by his aloofness from the Salem magician.
He hastened to repair his neglect; for he gave to the Literary World
presently one of the best appreciations of Hawthorne, and incidentally
one of the keenest expositions of the situation of the creative writer
in America, that Hawthorne was in his own lifetime to get.
The “soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of
dreams,” Melville announced. In Hawthorne, humour and love were
developed in that high form called genius, and “no such man can exist
without also possessing, as the indispensable complement of these,
a great, deep intellect, which drops down into the universe like a
plummet.”
Hawthorne, without all of Rembrandt’s warmth, had this great quality
of Rembrandt: there were blacks in the midst of his sunlight, as
Melville had found there were blacks in the world. The blackness
fixed and fascinated Melville: it brought Hawthorne to the level of
Shakespeare, not in language and performance, perhaps, but in insight:
“those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive truth in him; those
short, quick probings at the very axis of reality,” the dark things
Shakespeare announced through his dark characters, Hamlet, Timon, Lear,
Iago, “these qualities, in spite of Hawthorne’s quiet temperateness,
so different from Shakespeare’s popularizing noise and show of broad
farce and blood-besmeared tragedy,” brought him on the same level.
Melville had re-discovered Shakespeare only two years before: and that
discovery, reserved happily for maturity, had contributed decisively to
his own rapid burgeoning: “Dolt and ass that I am,” he had exclaimed
then, “I have lived more than twenty-nine years, and until a few days
ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William. Ah, he’s
full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, ay, almost as Jesus. I take
such men to be inspired. I fancy this Mons. Shakespeare in heaven
ranks with Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael. And if another Messiah ever
comes he will be in Shakespeare’s person.” ... “I would to God,” he
wrote shortly after, “Shakespeare had lived later and promenaded in
Broadway. Not that I might have had the pleasure of leaving my card
for him at the Astor, or made merry with him over a bowl of the fine
Duyckinck punch; but that the marble which all men wore on their souls
in the Elizabethan day, might not have intercepted Shakespeare’s fine
articulateness. Now I hold it a verity that even Shakespeare was not
a frank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, [who] in this intolerant
universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a
difference.”
Shakespeare had prepared the way for Hawthorne in Melville’s mind.
If what one could not quite get from the Shakespeare of the printed
page one might get directly from the shy man himself, what great
good fortune to find a similar person, alive and abroad in one’s
own century! And if the Declaration of Independence did make a
difference, if the American had cut loose in more ways than one, and
could face life with a little less show and pretence and caste-spirit
than Europe had known, why, then one might really get to the bottom
of the matter with Hawthorne. That possibility piqued Melville. He
risked much in utterance himself; and he hoped that Hawthorne would
venture much in return. When they at last became friends, he contrived
a hundred different ways of assaulting Hawthorne’s reserve: he
staggered up mountains, uncovered mounds of debris, jumped gaily off
into innumerable abysses, all to excite Hawthorne to some equivalent
disclosure. He did not know at the outset of his enthusiasm for
Hawthorne that nothing would ever shake that mountainous reserve, that
no leaps and sorties of his would stimulate Hawthorne to put one foot
before the other. But Hawthorne caused Melville to hope for much; and
that hope mingled with the plan of Moby-Dick, while he was writing it.
What a difference there was between Hawthorne and the graceful
Washington Irving or the scholarly Longfellow, the men who had
heretofore stood before the world as the highest representatives of
American letters, urbane, elegant, sedulously following foreign models,
and avoiding all topics but smooth ones! Better to fail at times with
such originality as Hawthorne’s than to succeed in the easy, bland,
gentlemanly way--knowing one’s powers, because they are so small, and
keeping within them, because nothing beckons one to stir beyond.
Here, thought Melville, was a fellow spirit at last! Melville had
partly realized before that other men were working below the surface
of things in America; but the transcendentalists had put him off a
little by rallying around them the people who thought they were
lifting themselves above material things by taking cold water rubs, on
principle, or by being dreadfully concerned over the items of their
diet or the cut of their clothes: whereas Melville felt that champagne
and oysters were the proper nourishment for the body, if one could
get them, and he believed that one was less devoted to the material
life when one accepted its daily routine than when one attempted to
substitute plain living for high thinking, and lost true simplicity,
by making its attainment such a complicated matter. Even Hawthorne
at first seemed to lack something. Hawthorne was wonderfully subtle,
Melville wrote to Mr. Duyckinck, and his deeper meanings are worthy of
a Brahmin. Still, there was something lacking--a good deal lacking to
the plump sphericality of the man. What was that? He doesn’t patronize
the butcher--he needs roast beef, done rare.
Hawthorne became Melville’s sole connection with the
transcendentalists, and it never developed into a very deep union.
Melville had listened to a lecture of Emerson’s a year before and
defended Emerson from Mr. Duyckinck’s censure: he respected this Plato
who spoke through his nose. If Emerson was a fool, Melville had rather
be a fool than a wise man, and if he owed much to Sir Thomas Browne,
well, no one was his own sire: the debt was a universal one. Emerson
at least dived; and Melville loved all men who dive. “Any fish can
swim near the surface; but it takes a great whale to go downstairs
five miles or more, and if he don’t attain the bottom, why, all the
lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet that will.” That justified
Emerson: but except as one diver with another, Melville felt no kinship
with him. “I do not oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow, but prefer to hang
myself in mine own halter than to swing in any other man’s swing.”
It was the blandness, the sunniness, the mildness, the absence of
curses, shadows, shipwrecks in Emerson’s philosophy that set Melville
against it: Emerson was the perpetual passenger who stayed below in
bad weather, trusting that the captain would take care of the ship:
Melville was the sailor who climbed aloft, and knew that the captain
was sometimes drunk and that the best of ships might go down. “_All
hands save ship!_ has startled dreamers.”
Hawthorne, then, was a man to be grateful for: the smell of young
beeches and hemlocks was upon him, wrote Melville; the broad prairies
were in his soul; he had these qualities because he was an American
and deeply part of the scene; but, in addition, he had an eye for the
dankness and decay and for the inscrutable malevolence of the universe:
he was no sun-dial that recorded only the smiling hours of life. If the
country could nourish Hawthorne, and if Hawthorne could produce The
Scarlet Letter and the Mosses, well, what might not Melville himself
put forth? Though Hawthorne was a genius, perhaps, like Shakespeare, he
did not appear alone. “Shakespeare cannot be regarded as in himself the
concretion of all the genius of his time; nor as so immeasurably beyond
Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Beaumont, Jonson, that these men can be said
to share none of his power. Would it, indeed, appear so unreasonable
to suppose that this great fullness and overflowing may be, or may be
destined to be, shared by a plurality of men of genius?”
The presence of an Emerson, a Hawthorne, gave all the more reason for
a Melville. So Melville must have felt in his bones; and he was right.
What he could not venture as a perception--for who can see or measure
his contemporaries?--was certainly true as prophecy: in that flood of
intellectual and imaginative power that I have elsewhere called the
Golden Day, Emerson, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, were
all carried along in the same current: each reinforces and rounds out
the others: and it is this corpus of writers, rather than any single
one, that forms what Hawthorne himself called the Master Genius of
America.
Melville did not suppose, when he wrote his encomium of Hawthorne, that
this same summer would bring the two men into contact, that they would
become neighbours, near enough to make occasional visits by horseback
or wagon, and that, despite his premonition that “on a personal