Herman Melville
its ambiguities are concerned with nothing else. With experience of
woman in every relationship, daughter, girl, sister, wife, mother,
matron, he described her in only one aspect--that of the remote and
idealized mistress of romantic courtship. Mother, sister, sweetheart,
all appeared to Melville’s hero in this brief and peculiar aspect.
There was, one is driven to believe, something in Herman Melville’s
life that caused him to dissociate woman from his account of man’s
deepest experience. Mr. Waldo Frank has suggested, in general social
terms, that the quest of power, which has preoccupied Western man since
the Renaissance, has incapacitated him as a lover and kept him from
understanding woman and all her essential concerns. If that is true,
Melville pushed his aberration to a logical extremity; and he, who
captured to the full the poetry of the sea, became as bashful as a boy
when he beheld Venus, born of its foam, rising from the waters he knew
so well, the most unexpected of monsters, and the only denizen of the
sea he dared neither snare nor harpoon nor otherwise dispose of, except
by flight....
4
The hero of Pierre is a young patrician, the heir of Saddle Meadows; he
has good looks, health, an historic ancestry, and a warmly humanized
environment. Handicapped in his own inheritance as a youth, Melville
bestowed on Pierre not only all the things he possessed, such as the
Gansevoort heritage, but all the things ill fortune had denied him.
Pierre lives with his mother, a widow; she is proud, fine, and at fifty
still beautiful: he treats her beauty with the attention of a lover
who resents every man that approaches her: she is “sister” and he is
“brother” and there is more than familiar fondness in their touches.
Pierre is on the point of open betrothal to Lucy, a simple, dewy
country girl of good family. Is there to be jealousy between the mother
and Lucy; must he choose between them? No: something more difficult
is in store. At a village sewing-bee, where he has gone to call for
his mother, a girl faints at the sight of Pierre. She seems a farmer’s
daughter and her fainting is mysterious; the mystery becomes oppressive
when Pierre gets a secret summons from her. An interview with Isabel,
the girl, topples the whole Elysium of family relationships within
whose rainbow Pierre had lived. Isabel, a dark, lovely creature, brims
with obscure memories of an almost unintelligible past, memories
that wail through her like the sound of wind in the trees. By hint
and memory and inference, she had found that Pierre’s father, who
had formed a union with a Frenchwoman, was her father--and this girl
was the sole fruit of the union--Pierre’s half-sister. Isabel offers
her orphaned self to her half-brother in complete trust; and he, not
doubting the relationship, although hitherto his father had seemed to
him a flawless being, takes her to his bosom.
In a few hours, Pierre experiences all the perturbations that afflicted
Young Goodman Brown, in Hawthorne’s story, when he discovered all
his respected elders, the personification of virtue and chastity,
participating in a witches’ sabbath. Pierre contemplates his mother,
to see if there is any possible means of making her acknowledge the
relationship and rescue Isabel from the mean lot that is now hers,
in a family that is about to cast off its own daughter, Delly Ulver,
because she has conceived a child out of wedlock. No help there! Pierre
discovers a worldly front of respectability hemming him round. His
mother’s spiritual counsellor, the Reverend Mr. Folsgrave, gives the
world’s reasons for refusing to compound Delly’s mistake: his mother
is even more peremptorily and forbiddingly righteous. Suddenly, Pierre
discovers that the kindness and charity and sweetness of the world is a
poisonous mushroom, whose delicate shape is embedded in the ordure of
malice, pride, cold restraint, heartlessness.
If Mrs. Glendinning acts in this fashion over Delly Ulver’s plight,
what sort of front would she place on Isabel’s and that of Pierre’s
father? Would she acknowledge her husband’s error: would she take to
her bosom this Isabel? Even Pierre, bursting with hope, cannot hope
for this: his faith is shattered: he sees the cold rectitude of his
mother, and a resolution to stand against the world and its ways
takes the place of his original belief that those ways are amiable
and meritorious and virtuous. Pierre resolves to protect Isabel:
but how? To achieve his aim, he conceives the device of living with
her, in strict brotherly aloofness, under the fiction of marriage. A
gallant, quixotic espousal; but not without its own deviousness and
share of infirmity. Would he have been so ready to espouse Isabel, asks
Melville, had she been ugly and crass instead of sombrely beautiful and
delicate? Would he have been so warm in magnanimity if another kind of
warmth had not lain under the surface? Would he, one might add, have
conceived this stratagem of living with Isabel as husband and wife, had
he not lived with his mother as brother and sister?
Pierre does not dare to frame these questions. He is worked up to
a great pitch of nobility and sacrifice: high-handedly, he throws
his whole life into the scales and runs away with Isabel, taking
Delly under his protection, too, and trusting to time and his own
explanations to soften the action to Mrs. Glendinning and make it
palatable. Lucy, to whom he has plighted marriage, he ruthlessly sets
behind him; and, with a few coins in his purse, he makes his way to
New York, to carve out a career as a writer. Troubles swarm about him
like angry hornets, once he destroys the nest of respectability which
had kept them in order. The companion of his youth, a cousin who had
once been a rival for Lucy’s hand, supposing Lucy to be his bride, had
generously placed his town house at Pierre’s disposal. Now he summarily
withdraws his hospitality. The three outcasts reach New York late at
night to find their quarters deserted; Pierre, hunting up his cousin,
is cut dead when he confronts him: from the gutters of the city, all
its noisome human refuse taints the air: Pierre returns to the town
guardhouse, where he had left Delly and Isabel, to find them shrinking
before the profane curses and gestures of a band of drunken prostitutes
and their customers, rounded up in a raid.
This is but a foretaste of the trials that are to overwhelm Pierre
and Isabel. Pierre and his house-mates presently find themselves a
little flat in an old church building that has been remodelled into
offices and apartments, and is occupied by broken-down lawyers,
transcendentalists, vegetarians, faddists of one kind or another,
each encouraging the other’s special lunacy in order to have a kindly
reception for his own. In the midst of this extreme poverty and
disorder, Pierre, who has been a mild minor poet, a writer of aesthetic
jingles which “would offend no one,” probes all the terrors of his new
experience and its revelations, and out of it he writes a book, not
unlike Pierre, with an author for hero. The situation is impossible.
Pierre has no money: his mother freezes up completely in mortification,
and disowns him, keeping even that share of his estate which was
meant for Pierre: the misery and ambiguity of his situation increases
when Lucy, recovered from the first stupor of grief, flies for refuge
to Pierre, to beg a place as humble servitor, in Pierre’s already
crammed and over-womaned household. Worst of all, the dark bottom of
his brotherly relation with Isabel becomes faintly apparent to Pierre
himself: it is reflected in the shadow of jealousy that touches her
reaction to Lucy: such a feeling as Isabel might properly claim if
she were married to Pierre in actuality. Pierre has outlawed himself,
and missed happiness with Lucy, for a distracted passion which can
have no outlet in external relationships: in aiming at purest virtue,
with noble intent, he has committed a deed he cannot confront without
horror. His duty towards his father’s memory and towards Isabel has
been the subtlest of masks for an urge that has its roots in his own
instinctive nature, not solely in the teachings of charity, honesty,
and justice.
Isabel herself has always been uncertainly conscious of this wild
passion: but in her ignorance of the world itself, she is aware of
nothing that runs contrary to the world. What had said yes to Pierre
was not a mere response to his charity; it had implied more. With these
fierce passages of self-revelation, Pierre finishes his own book, and
his author, Vivia, finishes his! In the notion that he was walking in
the highway of the loftiest morality, Pierre has only explored a blind
alley, the blindest of all human alleys. Farcical disappointments
mingle with tragic regrets: his publishers, on getting his masterpiece,
denounce Pierre as a rascally impostor: Lucy’s brother and his cousin
threaten Pierre’s life, treating him as a seducer and a scoundrel: his
mother dies in an insane grief. In self-defence, Pierre arms himself,
and, when attacked in the open by the two virtuous espousers of Lucy’s
honour, Pierre empties a pistol into each of them, and is taken to
jail. Grief after grief, horror after horror, ensue from Pierre’s
original act of virtue. When Lucy learns that Isabel is Pierre’s
half-sister, she collapses in death. There is no issue to this passion
for either Isabel or Pierre but suicide. Pierre and Isabel swallow
poison together in the prison cell, and Pierre passes out, entwined
in Isabel’s dark hair. The fool of fate dies: his love dies with him.
The scene is as freely strewn with corpses as the fifth act of an
Elizabethan tragedy.
5
This story of Pierre, hard to accept in bald summary, is no less
difficult to accept in detail. The plot is forced: the situations
are undeveloped: the dominant colours are as crude as the lithograph
advertisements of a melodrama, although there are subordinate parts
which are as delicately graded as a landscape by Corot. There is no
passage between the various planes of action and mood, as there is in
Moby-Dick: Melville slips from prose into poetry, from realism into
fantasy, from the mood of high tragedy into that of the penny dreadful.
For the moment, Melville had lost the power to fuse these discordant
elements, to reject what could not be fully absorbed: he was at the
mercy of his material. All that lives with a vital unity in Moby-Dick
has become a corpse in Pierre: there is life in the dead members,
but it does not pertain to the body as a whole. The fragments of
Pierre are sometimes marvellous, as the broken leg or arm of a great
piece of sculpture may be: but the whole is lost. From the moment the
story opens to the fatal lines that bring it to a close, one is in an
atmosphere of unreality. I do not mean that the facts are untrue to
life; I mean that the work as a whole is untrue to the imagination. One
accepts Ahab as a demi-god: one cannot accept Pierre as a human being,
although Pierres are plentiful, while one might dredge the five seas
without bringing up the carcass of another Ahab.
The style itself is witness to this psychal disruption, quite as much
as the fable. Pierre is quarried out of the same quarry as Moby-Dick;
but whereas there the texture is even and firm, here it is full of
flaws and intrusive granulations. Moby-Dick, to use another figure,
slides down a long runway before it plunges into its poetic passages:
by the time one reaches Ahab’s great apostrophes, one is all prepared
for the immersion; one’s imagination has reached the same pitch of
intensity and concentration, and nothing but the most rhythmic patterns
will satisfy the mood itself. The common prose in Moby-Dick is but an
interval for breathing: it sustains and carries forward the movement