Herman Melville
interview no great author has ever come up to the idea of his reader,”
he would find in Hawthorne, temporarily, that comrade and friend for
whom he had been looking. There was, it is true, only half a generation
between them; and this particular distance makes intimacy difficult,
unless the older man is willing to treat the younger one as an assured
equal. How Hawthorne himself felt about the matter it is hard to tell:
Melville realized that his own boisterous democracy, which recognized
the thief in the jail as the equal of General George Washington, might
grate on Hawthorne a little, and that, like an English Howard in the
presence of a plebeian, Hawthorne’s intellectual aristocracy might
shrink at this claim and this contact. But Melville had no lack of
faith in his own powers; and he put forth the claim to equality with
easy and assured frankness; and unless he was unusually insensitive
at this point, his letter would indicate that Hawthorne accepted the
relationship on Melville’s terms.
On August 5, 1850, Hawthorne noted in his American Notebook that he
drove from Lenox, near which he lived in a penurious red farmhouse,
to Stockbridge, where he found at the house of Fields, the Boston
publisher, Dr. Holmes, Mr. Duyckinck of New York, also Mr. Cornelius
Matthews and Herman Melville. They ascended the Monument Mountain
and the party was caught in a shower: according to tradition, it was
during that summer storm, under a shoulder of rock where they had taken
refuge, that these two stormy souls first overcame their reticence
and shyness, and ploughed through conversation to a deeper intimacy.
The New Yorkers called on Hawthorne in the forenoon, two days later,
and Hawthorne treated them to a couple of bottles of Mr. Mansfield’s
champagne; and from that time on Melville was a familiar visitor
in the Hawthorne household. The family called him Mr. Omoo; young
Julian said that he loved Mr. Melville as well as his Mamma and Papa
and Una; Melville, who had amused the Marquesans with an improvised
popgun, was not likely to fall down in intercourse with children--and
he would sometimes ride over in the evening with his great dog, and
the children would ride on the dog’s back. Even Sophia Hawthorne was
fascinated by Melville: she, who adored her husband’s dark, lustrous
eyes, was puzzled and a little disturbed by Melville’s; and her tribute
to Melville is all the more notable when one remembers her complete
preoccupation with her husband.
“I am not quite sure,” she wrote, “that I do not think him a very
great man.... A man with a true, warm heart, and a soul and an
intellect--with life to his finger-tips; earnest, sincere and reverent;
very tender and modest. He has very keen perceptive power; but what
astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems
to me to see everything accurately; and how he can do so with his
small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite
undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and handsome, his
mouth expressive of sensibility and emotion. He is tall and erect, with
an air free, brave and manly. When conversing, he is full of gesture
and force, and loses himself in his subject. There is no grace or
polish. Once in a while his animation gives place to a singularly quiet
expression, out of these eyes to which I have objected; an indrawn,
dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that
moment taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange,
lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to
penetrate through you, but to take you into itself.”
The opportunity for real intercourse with Hawthorne, for talk about
Time and Eternity and ultimate things, smoking a fragrant cigar,
sipping brandy or cider, meant much to Melville; far more, no doubt,
than it did to Hawthorne. In Melville’s growing spiritual loneliness,
he needed the affection of a sympathetic mind; and for a while he
could persuade himself that, even in Hawthorne’s silences, he had this.
Hawthorne’s example as a novelist was a stimulus: it led Melville
beyond the easy shallows, where one could negligently wade, always
within easy calling distance of the shore; and his philosophical
conversation, or, still more, his apparently absorbed way of listening
to philosophical conversation, encouraged Melville to go further and
deeper along the passage he had begun to make a year before with Adler.
Each conversation opened new vistas: the night talks would often be a
prelude to next morning’s letters, and in those letters, particularly
in those which remain from the period covered by Moby-Dick, Melville
exposed the seamy depths of his own spirit. He had no reticences before
Hawthorne, and above all, no false modesty. Life was becoming a long
stage, with no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But
with Hawthorne for a fellow passenger, Melville was content and could
be happy. “I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for
having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible
of our immortality.” The hectic, desperate, ecstatic letters Melville
wrote his friend during the short year and a half that brought them
together in the Berkshires give one a surer insight into Melville’s
moods and aims than any other pages he ever wrote. Had the neighbourly
relations persisted, had Hawthorne’s response been wholly adequate,
Melville might have weathered more buoyantly the internal tempest that
set in with Moby-Dick. But Hawthorne was essentially as remote from
Melville as he was from the old worthies of the Customs House at Salem
or the old sea-captains he had exchanged civilities with over a mug of
ale. Though one could see daylight and the blue sky from the bottom
of Hawthorne’s well, there was not enough of it to share with any
companion. If he was touched by the homage of the younger man, he could
not fully reciprocate it. He recognized Melville’s moral earnestness
and intellectual vigour; but I doubt if he once suspected that his
extravagant friend was far nearer, by temperament and expression, to
the heart of Shakespeare’s genius than he himself was. In seizing upon
Hawthorne as an other self, Melville more than once did homage to
his own genius: his descriptions of Hawthorne’s powers, Hawthorne’s
achievements, are nearer to his own than to Hawthorne’s.
Melville’s relation with Hawthorne counts as one of the tragedies of
his life; and it was more than a minor one. Friendship itself must
have seemed a mockery, when he found that the dearest friend and
closest intellectual companion he had yet encountered was bound tight
in the arctic ice, and many leagues away. But he had no sense of the
distance between them until he attempted to span it: and it must have
been with amazement, with incredulity, that he finally read the story
of Ethan Brand, written during the prime year of their friendship,
and discovered what in his heart of hearts Hawthorne felt about
Melville’s lofty pride and his extreme spiritual quests. Ethan Brand
is a charcoal-burner, who has left his home in order to discover the
Unpardonable Sin; he finally returns to his kiln and his neighbours to
announce, after his long wanderings, that he has found the sin in his
own breast. Brand’s language is a parody of Ahab’s in Moby-Dick; and
what Hawthorne says about Brand he meant to apply, I have no doubt,
possibly by way of warning, to Melville himself.
Ethan Brand remembered, said Hawthorne, echoing Melville’s words in
the scene where Ahab recalls his first pursuit of the whale, “he
remembered how the night dew had fallen upon him,--how the dark
forest had whispered to him,--how the stars had gleamed upon him,--a
simple and loving man, watching the fire in the years gone by, and
ever musing as it burned. He remembered with what tenderness, with
what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and
woe, he had first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards
became the inspiration of his life; with what reverence he had then
looked into the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally divine,
and, however desecrated, still to be held sacred by his brother; with
what awful fear he had deprecated the success of his pursuit, and
prayed that the Unpardonable Sin might never be revealed to him. Then
ensued that vast intellectual development, which, in its progress,
disturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart. The Idea that
possessed his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone
on cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were
susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer
to stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth,
laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber
after him. So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That,
indeed, had withered,--had contracted,--had hardened,--had perished!
It had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He had lost his hold
of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man,
opening the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key
of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets;
he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his
experiment.... Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from
the moment his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement
with his intellect.”
We do not know when Melville discovered these words or felt their
jagged edges in his bosom: but we can be certain that from that
day forth the friendship between the two men sank like a stone in
quicksand. Hawthorne had committed the unpardonable sin of friendship;
he had failed to understand Melville’s development, or to touch by
sympathy and faith that part of Melville which was beyond his external
reach. All of Melville’s love recoiled, as we shall see presently, from
the icy strangeness of that friendship which was no friendship, from
that understanding which was almost enmity. Perhaps Ethan Brand was
not Melville? Perhaps it was but a shadowy suggestion, influenced more
by Ahab than by his author? Melville must have attempted this sort of
reconciliation more than once: but Hawthorne’s words would stick: yes,
they would stick because of the touch of truth in them, and because,
once Hawthorne’s hand was withdrawn, the magnetic chain of humanity
indeed would seem broken. This, however, was the crisis of their
friendship; and Melville had no inkling of this outcome whilst he was
writing Moby-Dick. There is no doubt that the presence of Hawthorne
fortified him for that endeavour.
3
Some time in 1850, towards the close of summer, Herman Melville must
have begun to write Moby-Dick; for the book, which is a long one, was
finished in the summer of 1851. In back of the actual writing went a
considerable amount of preparation; and one does not know how long
before the theme of the book had begun to root itself in Melville’s
mind. The work itself shows that he had reached out for every book on
whaling he could lay hands on, practically every book that had been
written, and, in addition, he had made note of every quotation and
allusion to the whale he had met in his wide miscellaneous reading.
Scholarship as well as personal experience went into this writing:
one of the best modern writers upon whaling, Frank Bullen, the author
of the Cruise of the Cachalot, confesses he would never have gone
further with his own work had he known about the wealth of information
and detail that went into Moby-Dick before he set out. Did Melville
consciously save the greatest of his ocean experiences for his
maturity? Did he wait for Leviathan to develop in his soul? Did he