Herman Melville
depths of one’s own experience. The book is not an answer, but a clue
that must be carried further and worked out. The Sermon on the Mount
has this quality. It does not answer all the difficult problems of
morality, but it suggests a new point of view in facing them: it leads
one who is sufficiently moved to follow through all the recesses of
conduct which can be influenced by mildness, understanding, and love,
but not otherwise. So with Moby-Dick: the book itself is greater than
the fable it embodies, it foreshadows more than it actually reflects:
as a work of art, Moby-Dick is part of a new integration of thought,
a widening of the fringe of consciousness, a deepening of insight,
through which the modern vision of life will finally be embodied.
The shadow cast by Moby-Dick throws into obscurity not merely the
sand-hills, but likewise some of the mountains, of the last three
centuries. Noting the extent of that shadow, one begins to suspect how
high the mountain itself is, and how great its bulk, how durable its
rock.
CHAPTER EIGHT: AMOR, THREATENING
Moby-Dick was done. In the fall of 1851 it appeared, first in England,
then, a few weeks later, in America. Melville was exhausted, exhausted
and overwrought. In the prodigious orchestration of Moby-Dick, Melville
had drained his energies, and, participating in Ahab’s own pursuit and
defiance, he had reached a point of spiritual exasperation which, like
Ahab’s illness after Moby-Dick had amputated him, was increased by his
lowered physical tone, by his weak eyes. Books like this are written
out of health and energy, but they do not leave health and energy
behind. On the contrary, the aftermath of such an effort is irritation,
debility, impotence.
Melville was worked up, in the writing of Moby-Dick, to the highest
pitch of effort; and he was harried, no doubt, by his ever-present
necessity to keep his public and add to his income. The spiritual
momentum remained, but the force behind it dwindled away. With no
time for recuperation, he plunged into his new work: an unwise
decision. Melville was not without his weaknesses, and they rose to
the surface in his new book, Pierre, or The Ambiguities. Moby-Dick had
disintegrated him: by some interior electrolysis, its sanative salt
was broken up into baneful chemical elements. In this disintegration,
Pierre rises at times as high as Moby-Dick, and sinks lower than any
of Melville’s other books. It contains passages that are the finest
utterances of his spirit; it also has passages that would scarcely
honour Laura Jean Libbey.
What caused this break-up? What value has Pierre in the sum of
Melville’s work? Neither of these questions admits of a quick and
facile answer. One cannot dismiss the novel high-handedly as Melville’s
contemporaries did; and since the relation of the personal life of the
artist to his art is still one of the major ambiguities in psychology,
one cannot give a decisive or confident answer to the first question.
2
Melville’s situation at the time of writing Pierre might have upset him
even in a period of completer poise and more abundant health. He had
written a great book: of that he could not possibly have had any doubt.
Minor writers may think their rhinestones are diamonds, but rarely
does a Shakespeare, a Swift, a Melville make the contrary mistake:
if he speak lightly of his own work, or affect to disregard it, it
is only for the reason that once he has reached the utmost depths of
consciousness and realizes that vast and myriad interior which can
never be fully reported, he begins to realize that diamonds, too, are
only another kind of rhinestone: they are mined too cheaply.
Melville knew that Moby-Dick was bound to be his chief title to fame.
In 1849 he had written to Mr. Duyckinck: “Would that a man could do
something and then say It is finished--not that one thing only, but all
others--that he has reached his uttermost and can never exceed it.”
Melville had done this: he had mined and tunnelled through every part
of his experience to produce this book. “There is a sure, though secret
sign in some works,” he wrote in 1850, “which proves the culmination
of the powers ... that produced them,” and he recognized this secret
sign in Moby-Dick: his letters to Hawthorne announce it. Mid all the
tribulations and vexations of his life, there was, as in the heart of
the whale Armada, a quiet place of calm and inward peace; within that
spot, he had no reason to doubt or be dissatisfied with his work.
Still, what a writer articulates is always, though his words stay
in a private diary, an effort at communication; the very nature of
language makes this inevitable. Melville was necessarily not without
his curiosity as to how the world would greet this magnificent product
of his maturity, the first book in which he was in full command of his
powers. And what was the world’s answer?
The world’s answer was no doubt what was to be expected; but it was no
less discouraging for this reason. The Literary World indeed treated
Moby-Dick with respect, and with as much understanding as a purely
bookish man, like Mr. Duyckinck, could be expected to show: though it
wasted most of the first review telling about the parallel fate of the
Ann Alexander, it made up for this adventitious journalism by a second
article which acknowledged Moby-Dick’s manifold powers and excellences.
“An intellectual chowder of romance, philosophy, natural history, fine
writing, good feeling, bad sayings ... over which, in spite of all
uncertainties, and in spite of the author himself, predominates his
keen perceptive faculties, exhibited in vivid narration.” In the light
of other contemporary reviews, this was fairly handsome. The Dublin
University Magazine, with steady opacity, said Moby-Dick was quite as
eccentric and monstrously extravagant in many of its incidents as even
Mardi, but was a valuable book because it contained an unparalleled
mass of information about the whale. As for the Athenaeum, it
righteously reminded Mr. Melville that he “has to thank himself only if
his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader as
so much trash”--criticism which reached a pinnacle in the New Monthly
Magazine, which described the style of Moby-Dick as “maniacal--mad as a
March hare--moving, gibbering, screaming, like an incurable Bedlamite,
reckless of keeper or strait-waistcoat.”
One need not go into all the forms under which the contemporary critic
disclosed his insensitiveness to great prose and his servile compliance
with the idola of the market; but one must note a singular fact: from
Fitz-James O’Brien’s first criticism of Melville’s work as a whole in
1853 down to Mr. Vernon Parrington’s commentary in 1927, Moby-Dick,
the keystone of Melville’s work, has frequently been left out of
account. The book that triumphantly smothers all the contradictory
opinions about Melville--that he was a romantic, that he could only
portray external scenes, that he was a pure introvert, that he was
an adventurous ne’er-do-well, never happy or at home in a settled
community, that he was irresponsive to the life around him, that he
was a sheer realist who could only record what he had seen--the book
that makes these generalizations silly suffered something worse than
antagonistic criticism: it met with complete neglect. It is only since
1914 in America that this neglect has been even partly atoned for.
Such obtuseness, such flat stupidity, must have had a dismaying
effect upon Melville. The writer begins to doubt the possibility of
literature in a world that so flagrantly misunderstands or ignores its
higher manifestations. Faced with such contemporaries, the artist may
retire within himself, as Bach or Ryder or Cézanne did; but it will
only be a miracle that will keep him from taking into his retirement
a deep contempt for the people around him. That contempt is worse
than isolation; it brings isolation without hope. “I write to please
myself,” exclaimed Melville in one passage in Pierre. In that mood
of wilful defiance, a man may revolt from the good sense of his
contemporaries as well as from their deficiencies. There was nothing in
the reception of Moby-Dick that would have lessened Melville’s scorn,
or helped him to fortify himself against his own weaknesses. Quite the
contrary. Like Pierre himself he was to learn “and very bitterly learn,
that though the world worship mediocrity and commonplace, yet hath it
fire and sword for contemporary grandeur.”
Moby-Dick was too much for them, was it? Well: it was a mere pencilling
of the ultimate blackness that was his to paint: if one were going to
tell the truth at all, one could go much further and be much plainer.
“Henceforth,” proclaimed Pierre, “I will know nothing but Truth; Glad
Truth or Sad Truth; I will know what _is_, and do what my deepest angel
dictates.” And again: “I am more frank with Pierre than the best men
are with themselves. I am all unguarded and magnanimous with Pierre:
therefore you see his weakness, and therefore only. In reserves, men
build imposing characters; not in revelations. He who shall be wholly
honest, though nobler than Ethan Allen that man shall stand in danger
of the meanest mortal’s scorn.”
It was in some such mood of defeat, foreboding, defiant candour,
that Pierre was conceived and written. Meanwhile, in November, 1851,
the Hawthorne family had moved away from the Berkshires and Melville
settled to his work, in the spring of 1852, on the north porch that
faced Mt. Monadnock, with an intense feeling of human isolation which
brought the mountain closer to him, as his only friend. The one
possibility of a friendly, rapturous union of spirits was behind him:
no longer could he write to Hawthorne, as he had done just a few months
before: “Whence came you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my
flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips--lo, they are yours, and
not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the
Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of
feeling.” No: already that was over: dead. If the spirit burned now, it
burned as ice does to the human touch. It was not altogether in irony,
or in wild whimsy, that Melville dedicated his next book, Pierre, to
his one solitary and steadfast companion, Mt. Monadnock.
3
There is a sense in which Pierre is an abortive complement to
Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick, great fable that it is, contains a good part
of human life under one figure or another; but it does not contain
everything. I would claim much for it; I would claim much for
Melville’s work as a whole; but there is still a great segment that
remained unexplored till Melville wrote Pierre, and that, to the end,
he never satisfactorily penetrated or freely brooded upon.
All Melville’s books about the sea have the one anomaly and defect of
the sea from the central, human point of view: one-half of the race,
woman, is left out of it. Melville’s world, all too literally, is a
man-of-war’s world. Woman neither charms nor nurtures nor threatens:
she neither robs man of his strength nor rouses him to heroic frenzy:
she is not Circe: she is not Rosalind or Francesca or even the Wife of
Bath--she simply does not exist. When the Pequod spreads sail, woman
is left behind: she is the phantom of home for Ahab and Starbuck.
The whales dally in Moby-Dick and beget offspring; but all the
trouble, beauty, madness, delight of human love, all that vast range
of experience from the mere touch of the flesh to the most enduring
spiritual loyalty, all that is absent. One looks for some understanding
of woman’s lot and woman’s life in Moby-Dick; and one looks in vain.
One looks for it again in Pierre, and one is disappointed, although