Herman Melville
of the more expressive passages; and as for the words themselves, they
are the exact equivalent for the mood and purpose: distended though the
envelope may be, they never burst outside it.
In language, Pierre is just the opposite of this: from the first pages,
it is perfervid and poetical in a mawkish way. With the disclosure of
the two lovers, Pierre and Lucy, in the opening chapter, the style
becomes a perfumed silk, taken from an Elizabethan chamber romance:
it sounds exactly like Melville’s first effusion in the Lansingburgh
Advertiser: “‘Truly,’ thought the youth, with a still gaze of
inexpressible fondness, ‘truly the skies do ope: and this invoking
angel looks down. I would return these manifold good-mornings, Lucy,
did not that presume thou hadst lived through the night; and by heaven,
thou belongst to the regions of an infinite day!’” This is a fair
sample of what happens in Pierre whenever Melville approaches romantic
passion; his reflections were tied with the same ribbons and furbelows,
as in his description of love as “a volume bound in rose-leaves,
clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with
peach juice on the leaves of lilies.” In style, Melville had suddenly
lost both taste and discretion. He opened on a note that could not be
carried through. Lovers may indeed once have used such silly rhetoric,
but it would take a more careful hand than Melville’s to persuade us
that the rest of the world adopted these affectations: when scene
after scene is conducted in the same tone, the style becomes tedious,
intolerable, ridiculous. It would be bad if the characters were in
the Renaissance costume of Daphnis and Chloe: it is even worse in a
novel that contains realistic caricatures of the slums of New York and
satiric commentaries upon the bizarre habits of the transcendentalists.
Occasionally, by some happy concentration of emotion, Melville either
drops these flabby phrases or permits the reader to forget them,
and there are passages which, when read as poetry, are almost as
fine as Whitman’s verses. But these intervals of good writing do not
overcome the main impression; and the main impression is of hectic and
overwrought language. With the powerful control he had over Moby-Dick,
Melville could never have written in the style that characterizes a
large part of Pierre. In Pierre he was no longer the cool rider of
words, but the flayed and foaming horse, running away.
There is still another unfortunate lapse in Pierre; and that is the
disproportion between stimulus and effect. When Pierre is first beheld
by Isabel, then completely a stranger to him, she shrieks and faints
away. Her own action was not improbable; but there is no reason why
Pierre, healthy, robust, ignorant, should be so profoundly disturbed
by this exhibition. The same is true of Pierre’s heroic resolution to
shield Isabel under the form of wedlock: it is a wild and dangerous
leap out of a much less pressing difficulty. When Pierre finally
comes to town, the disproportion is so broad it is grotesque, almost
comical: his cousin’s turning upon him and cutting him, before a group
of strangers, with a frigid stare and a command to take that fellow
away, does not belong to anything but the pages of crude melodrama. The
turning against Pierre is not the subtle, devious series of rebukes
and frigidities he would actually receive: such an affront as Melville
pictures occurs only in raw dream.
In Moby-Dick, Melville carefully prepared, a hundred pages in advance,
for the final effect: Mr. E. M. Forster has even suggested that
the emphasis upon “delight” in Father Mapple’s sermon is related
to the encountering of a ship called the Delight just before the
final catastrophe. In Pierre all this subtle preparation is lacking:
Melville’s impatience turned a genuine theme, the conflict of
adolescent purity of purpose with the apologetic compromises and
sordid motives of the world, into a crude melodrama. Melville was so
immersed in the dilemma of his hero that he did not observe how often
he failed to satisfy the demands of art, which require that the very
incoherencies of life somehow hang together and be acceptable to the
mind.
Finally, Pierre’s emotional reaction to Isabel is entirely out of
proportion to the fact that he has found a sister whose existence he
had never before suspected. For a young man, filially tied to his
mother, and by active courtship to Lucy, the entrance of another young
woman should not have had such a volcanic effect, since, under the
most ancient of social taboos, the relationship between them precludes
further intimacy. Kindness and fellow feeling might easily arise there:
but what Melville pictures is sudden and violent passion. “Fate,” he
observes, “had separated the brother and sister, till to each they
seemed so not at all. Sisters shrink not from their brother’s kisses.
And Pierre felt that never, never would he be able to embrace Isabel
with the mere brotherly embrace; while the thought of any other caress,
which took hold of any domesticness, was entirely vacant from his
uncontaminated soul, for it had never consciously intruded there.
Therefore, forever unsistered for him by the stroke of Fate, and
apparently for ever, and twice removed from the remotest possibility of
that love which had drawn him to his Lucy; yet still the object of the
ardentest and deepest emotions of his soul; therefore, to him, Isabel
soared out of the realm of mortalness and for him became transfigured
in the highest heaven of uncorrupted love.”
The ambiguity that Melville finally brought his hero to confront
in Pierre is that this highest heaven is not necessarily a heaven
at all: such a transcendental displacement of earthly emotions and
experiences is not the way of “willing, waking love”: it is the mood
of dream, and by continuous dissociation, it may eventually become the
mood of madness. The highest heaven of love does not come with such
romantic fixation upon an unapproachable deity: it comes rather with
diffusion, when all men are brothers, when all women are sisters, when
all children are just as dear as one’s own issue. The fixation on a
remote figure or symbol is in fact just the opposite of this generous
suffusion of love, and of all love’s corruptions it is possibly the
most dangerous. In the thirteenth century, the Queen of Heaven had such
a place, and her almost exclusive worship is perhaps as much a sign of
the breakup of the mediaeval synthesis as any more obvious emblem of
disintegration.
Man’s roots are in the earth; and the effort to concentrate upon an
ideal experience, that seeks no nourishment through these roots, may
be quite as disastrous to spiritual growth as the failure to push
upwards and to rise above the physical bed in which these roots are
laid. In Pierre, Melville explored and followed such a fixation to
its conclusion: disintegration and suicide. Had this been Melville’s
purpose in writing the book, Pierre might, in a decisive figure, have
ended an epoch--the epoch of the romantic hero; for he had probed that
hero’s nobility and virtue and disclosed their deeper ambiguities,
their conflicts, their irreconcilabilities. Pierre might have been a
sort of anti-Werther. Unfortunately, this is just what it is not; for
Melville identified himself with Pierre and defended his immaturity.
How this came about we will inquire later; for we have not yet done
justice to Pierre as a work of art.
6
What did Melville consciously set himself to do when he wrote Pierre?
He sought, I think, to arrive at the same sort of psychological truth
that he had achieved, in metaphysics, in Moby-Dick. His subject was,
not the universe, but the ego; and again, not the obvious ego of the
superficial novelist, but those implicated and related layers of self
which reach from the outer appearances of physique and carriage down
to the recesses of the unconscious personality. “The novel will find
the way to our interiors, one day,” he wrote in Pierre, “and will not
always be a novel of costume merely.” Melville, to use his own words,
had dropped his angle into the well of his childhood, to find out what
fish might be there: before Mardi, he had sought for fish in the outer
world, where swim the golden perch and pickerel: but now he had learned
to dredge his unconscious, and to draw out of it, not the white whale,
but motives, desires, hopes for which there had been no exit in his
actual life. Men had been afraid to face the cold white malignity of
the universe; they were even more reluctant to face their own unkempt,
bewrayed selves. Even Shakespeare, deep as he was, had had reserves:
Melville would set an example.
Melville was not concerned to portray “real life,” for the unconscious
is not for most people part of this reality: in a later book he gave
an explanation of his own literary method. He describes readers after
his own heart who read a novel as they might sit down to a play, with
much the same expectation and feeling. “They look that fancy shall
evoke scenes different from those of the same old crowd round the
Custom House counter, and the same old dishes on the boarding house
table, with characters unlike those of the same old acquaintances they
meet in the same old way every day in the same old street. And as, in
real life, the proprieties will not allow people to set out themselves
with that unreserve permitted to the stage, so in books of fiction,
they look not only for more entertainment, but, at bottom, for more
reality, than real life itself can show. Thus, though they want
novelty, they want nature, too; but nature unfettered, exhilarated, in
effect transformed. In this way of thinking, the people in a fiction,
like the people in a play, must dress as nobody exactly dresses, talk
as nobody exactly talks, act as nobody exactly acts. It is with fiction
as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which
we feel the tie.” For this conception of literary method, there is
much to be said, and had Pierre carried it out with plausibility and
consistency it might have made an even more important contribution to
the art of the novel than George Meredith and Henry James were to make.
If Melville met failure here, it was not because he had chosen a poor
method, but because he lacked adeptness in using it.
As concerns his psychological purpose, however, Pierre for all its
weaknesses will stand comparison with the pioneer works of its period.
Pierre is one of the first novels in which the self is treated as
anything but a unit, whose parts consist of the same material, with
the grain, as it were, running the same way. Pierre’s double relation
towards his father’s image and towards his mother’s actual presence,
his mixed attitudes towards Lucy and Isabel, the conflict between
his latent interests and his actions and rationalizations, all these
things are presented with remarkable penetration: if there is slag at
the entrance of this mine, there is a vein of exceptionally rich ore
running through it. Pierre’s identification of his mother’s love with a
supreme form of egotism, Pierre being the mirror in which she beholds
her own proud grimace, is no less penetrating than Melville’s account
of the relation between Pierre and his cousin, which runs from romantic
love into apathy and enmity. While the action of Pierre is full of
harsh and even absurd contrasts, the psychological mood is portrayed
with infinite retirement and with relentless surgical skill: Melville
does not hold the pulse of his characters: he X-rays their very organs.
The supreme quality of Pierre is its candour. Like Pierre, the more
Melville wrote, “and the deeper and deeper that he dived, [he] saw that
everlasting elusiveness of Truth: the universal insincerity of even the