Herman Melville
copy, even for the lawyer himself; and yet there is something in this
passive self-assertion and this methodical self-obliteration which
makes the lawyer humour Bartleby. With these qualities goes a mystery;
and by accident, on a Sunday at church-time, the lawyer discovers, on
attempting to enter his office, that Bartleby not only works for him
but has quietly occupied his business premises, to eat and sleep there.
In spite of this gross irregularity, the lawyer keeps Bartleby, only
to have the little man quit work entirely. When the lawyer demands a
reason, he answers: I would prefer not to. When the lawyer asks him to
move out, he answers: I would prefer not to. There is no getting behind
his silence, his dead-wall reveries, his blank self-possession.
The effect of this passive resistance upon the lawyer is upsetting.
“My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest
pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and
grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy verge into fear,
that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible, too, that
up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our
best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it
does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is due to
the inherent selfishness of the human heart: it rather proceeds from
a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To
a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is
perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succour, common sense
bids the soul be rid of it. What I saw that morning convinced me that
the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might
give alms to the body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul
that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.”
The lawyer moves and Bartleby remains on the original premises; but
the new tenant is not so patient and he has Bartleby arrested. When
Bartleby finds himself in prison, he prefers not to eat. A kind fellow,
the lawyer visits him, seeking to restore his confidence and reawaken
his manhood. “Nothing reproachful attaches to you being here,” he
assures Bartleby. “And see, it is not so sad a place as one might
think. Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass.” “I know where I
am,” he replied.
Bartleby is a good story in itself: it also affords us a glimpse of
Melville’s own drift of mind in this miserable year: the point of
the story plainly indicates Melville’s present dilemma. People would
admit him to their circle and give him bread and employment only if
he would abandon his inner purpose: to this his answer was--I would
prefer not to. By his persistence in minding his own spiritual affairs,
those who might have helped him on their own terms, like Allan or his
father-in-law or his Uncle Peter, inevitably became a little impatient;
for in the end, they foresaw they would be obliged to throw him off,
and he would find himself in prison, not in the visible prison for
restraining criminals, but in the pervasive prison of dull routine and
meaningless activity. When that happened there would be no use assuring
him that he lived in a kindly world of blue sky and green grass. “I
know where I am!” Whether or not Melville consciously projected his own
intuition of his fate, there is no doubt in my mind that, as early as
1853, he was already formulating his answer. To those kind, pragmatic
friends and relatives who suggested that he go into business and make a
good living, or at least write the sort of books that the public would
read--it amounts to pretty much the same thing--he kept on giving one
stereotyped and monotonous answer: I would prefer not to. The dead-wall
reverie would end in a resolution as blank and forbidding as the wall
that faced him: a bleak face, a tight wounded mouth, the little blue
eyes more dim, remote, and obstinate than ever: I would prefer not to!
During the next year, Melville settled down to a steadier round of
work, and one of the best of his narratives, a series of sketches
called The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, was published during
1854 under the pseudonym Salvator R. Tarnmoor. Three other sketches
followed; and finally, in July, 1854, he began to publish serially the
story of Israel Potter, the Revolutionary beggar, for which he had
gathered material in London five years before.
In The Encantadas Melville went back again to the ground he had
ploughed so well before. He had gone ashore on the Enchanted Isles, the
Galapagos, during the early part of his whaling voyage, and now, in his
own sable mood--a mood reflected in the very choice of his pseudonym,
Tarnmoor--the landscape of these islands corresponded to his inner
state; and his description of the scene is as fine as anything in his
earlier pages; if anything, there is more studious mastery. The final
sketch, the story of Hunilla, who had been left in solitude on one
of these islands, when her brother and her husband died, is poignant
and terrible, all the more so because of the dark bestiality of the
visiting crew, that Melville hints at, and then forgoes telling about,
so moved is he by its inhumanity.
“One knows not,” Melville reflects here, “whether nature doth not
impose some secrecy upon him who has been privy to certain things.
At least, it is to be doubted whether it is good to blazon such. If
some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then,
with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men. Those whom books will
hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be
forbid; but in all things man sows upon the wind, which bloweth where
it listeth; for ill or good men cannot know. Often ill comes from good,
as good from the ill.” He has returned to the ultimate moral of Pierre;
and it holds good of the tales of the Enchanted Isles: out of its
stark ugliness, he breathed beauty. With just as abhorrent an insight
into the cruelties of life as he had in Pierre, Melville here had a
firmer hand on himself: he ruefully confesses that “in nature, as in
law, it may be libellous to speak some truths.” Within the dark rim of
the horizon, the words move, like swift white sails on grey waters. The
style is again accurate, pliant, subtle, bold; but it is never hectic
nor forced, nor does it smell from the mothballs of old costume chests.
There is not the faintest sign that his literary powers were falling
off, or his voice sinking to a whisper.
5
Israel Potter was a full-length novel, based upon a little memoir
of his life, printed for the sake of gathering up a few pennies, in
Providence in 1827. The fact that Melville could attempt a long work
again is a sign of somewhat restored health, and though the book ranks
far below Melville’s best work, it differs from Redburn chiefly in
that while based upon a document, it relies even more heavily upon
Melville’s own powers of invention. All the good things in Israel
Potter come from Melville, not from Potter: the original story provided
only the skeleton of events: Melville gives them a setting and a full
cast of characters.
Israel Potter is a country bumpkin who is kept by his parents from
marrying the girl he loves, goes on a surveying expedition into Vermont
and is defrauded of his earnings, ships to sea, returns to the farm,
fights gallantly at Bunker Hill, enlists in an American man-of-war,
and is captured by the British and taken to England. Escaping from
his guards, Israel flees into the countryside, making his way across
England by devious passages, until he finally comes upon a kindly
English baronet near Brentford, who gives him a job on his country
estate. Rumours that he is a spy dog him, so he is compelled to change
his situation and finally he achieves safety at Kew, as one of the
king’s gardeners. When work slacks off, Israel is again thrown on
his resources, and, while hiding, he makes the acquaintance of some
secret friends of America, among them, Horne Tooke, the grammarian.
These friends equip him and send him on a secret mission to Dr.
Franklin in Paris, where he meets Paul Jones; and eventually Israel,
by another lucky chance, comes to serve on a privateer with Jones,
and to participate in the fight between the Serapis and the Bonhomme
Richard. The upshot of these vagrant ups and downs is a long period
of toil in a London brickworks, followed by marriage and residence in
London. Finally, in his old age, with his English wife dead, Israel
returns with his son to his native land, only to find the landmarks of
his youth gone, and a pension as a Revolutionary soldier denied him. In
this state, the original Israel wrote his book; and at this point of
weariness, disillusion, exhaustion, Melville left him.
Israel Potter has suffered, like all Melville’s later books, from
the apathy of criticism, quite as much as from its own weaknesses.
Mr. Percy Boynton says of Israel Potter that “it was a perfunctory
work, not as interesting as the book it was based on,” and while one
hesitates to differ with such an able critic, a close comparison of the
book seems to me to prove exactly the opposite. Not merely does Israel
Potter contain, as Mr. F. J. Mather, Jr., has remarked, one of the best
accounts of a sea-fight in history; not merely is its portrait of John
Paul Jones a far more illuminating study of that great shark of the
seas than Cooper’s picture in The Pilot; but it is one of the few works
of American fiction that deal with patriotic episodes in a generous,
straightforward way. Melville took a crude, bald narrative and poured
life into it: he took a smudgy woodcut and made a living picture out
of it, building up the background, creating incident and character
where none had existed before, projecting every figure into the third
dimension. The account of John Paul Jones occupies a single paragraph
in the original: in Melville’s novel, Jones is the largest figure in
the book, and nearly runs away with the story. It is the same with
Franklin. He is a colourless figure in the original: Melville, with
gentle mocking penetration, puts before us the man in full length, with
sly characterizations of his paunch and his purse and his methodical
parsimony. Melville does so well with these characters that one wishes
he had created a whole historical portrait gallery. If any one fancies
that Melville’s characters are merely romantic projections of his
actual self, here is a clear answer.
Melville’s imaginative life, it is true, flowered only when there was
some soil in his own life that nourished it, and when that soil was
lacking he found himself forced, again like his Elizabethan exemplar,
to pick up the action and the fable in another work. As a writer, he
was deprived of the fruitful contacts and adventures he had enjoyed
as a common sailor: the inner life grew, but the outer life dwindled
and thinned out; and so he was thrown, when he had exhausted his
original adventures, upon second-hand experience. This drying up of
his sources was a great handicap to him; for while books helped to
form and crystallize experience, they were not substitutes for it. He
transformed the bald story of Israel Potter: but, had he wholly made it
his own, the central character would have been John Paul Jones, and in
so far as he was dependent upon the original he was weak. Israel Potter
is many removes from Melville at his best; but it would be absurd to
throw it out of the Melville canon. It has some of the fine qualities
of his art, the mixture of tradition and fresh experience, the
purification and heightening of actuality, with a loss of realism and
a gain in reality: what it chiefly lacks is centrality. It is Melville
_manqué_--but still Melville. His poorest work was many degrees above
mediocrity.
6