Herman Melville
side because it lacks the human veracity of Life on the Mississippi.
The book is without doubt below the level of the great eighteenth
century satires; above all, it lacks the virtue of brevity; but as
an indictment of humanity, The Confidence Man is far more deeply
corrosive than anything in Bierce or Mark Twain. It is hard to refute
Melville’s black words, difficult to find an antidote for this
spiritual nightshade. Melville’s contemporaries did not try. They
applied to the book the same medicine that worked so well in life:
they agreed to forget it. Most of the sweetness and decorum of society
rests on an agreement to forget. The sewer and the garbage pile and
the slaughterhouse, the prison, the hospital, the slum, the asylum,
the battlefield, live and flourish behind that agreement. Sometimes,
though they are out of sight beyond the city’s limits, their odour is
carried on the wind and mingles with the air of the drawing-room. The
guests shift a little uneasily in their chairs. The hostess speaks
in a loud intent voice: the guests respond with vivacious eagerness:
the agreement must be maintained. How that dress shimmers in the
soft light! What delicious perfume that bosom exhales! Is there any
pleasant sound or sight that riches cannot purchase? The hostess looks
uncomfortably at the window: the guests follow her eyes uneasily:
the maid closes the window, and, with a touch of finality, draws the
curtains again. A long breath of relief: the agreement triumphs: the
licence to forget!
Melville could not forget, and yet he could go no further with
these observations and memories. He recoiled from his experience
into a mournful humility. After The Confidence Man, these terrible
blacks softened into greys: the wound whitened into a scar: the eyes
automatically shut when the scene they beheld became too painful. When
one has found the worst that can be said against the world, one must
still live in it, and eventually Melville resigned himself, and lived.
The crack which began to open like the gaping earth in Moby-Dick,
that widened with a shiver in Pierre, became a foaming abyss in The
Confidence Man. As he was on the point of falling into that abyss,
Herman Melville withdrew, and the wide fissure closed--or seemed to
close.
PILGRIM
CHAPTER TEN: TROUBLED FOOTSTEPS
By 1856 Herman Melville had, I think, reached the bottom of his woe,
and he was on the point of resignation--resigning his career, his hope
of livelihood and fame, the high place among his peers that his genius
entitled him to. His short stories during this period gave hints of
his gathering resolution; for he plays with his possible fate again
and again, as in the story of the fiddler, Hautboy, who had been a
famous prodigy in his youth, and who now, in obscurity, with genius and
without fame, was happier than a king. Jimmy Rose is another story of
a man who has fallen in the world and sinks into a genteel pauperism,
wherein all his old graces become pathetic dodges for filling a hungry
stomach. Contemplating this character, Melville became for the first
time downright sentimental: one feels tears of self-pity welling into
his eyes as he uttered the refrain: “Poor, poor Jimmy--God guard us
all--poor Jimmy Rose!”
Melville, at least, was too proud to lift a pitiful false front. He
will seek other consolations than as a defunct literary celebrity:
the occasional student, like Mr. Titus Munson Coan, who finds him in
the Berkshires, does not get a glimpse of the South Sea Melville he
admires: instead, he must listen to Kant and Hegel and Plato and all
the contemporary mysteries. But won’t you tell me something about the
cannibals: that was _so_ interesting. Doubtless the dim Bartleby look
would come into Melville’s eyes: “That reminds me of the eighth book
of Plato’s Republic.” Or perhaps, from a deeper chasm, would come
Bartleby’s own reply: I would prefer not to.
Melville had begun to feel, with Pierre, “what all mature men, who are
Magians, sooner or later know, and more or less assuredly--that not
always in our actions are we our own factors.” When Melville reached
this point, his youth was over; and his manhood, which had just
begun, was over, too. From an experience so heavy and overwhelming
as Melville’s, there was no alternative but retreat, and complete
submission. The Olympian had adventured, an innocent abroad in the
morning; the Titan had struggled, a wise, tormented, valiant man,
working and battling in the sweat and dust of noon: twilight had fallen
early, and in the gloom, he could neither adventure nor struggle: “The
power and dominion of the present world,” as Mr. D. S. MacColl has said
in describing these three dominant figures of the spirit, “is a vanity
to him; the furious energy of retaliation against suffering a trivial
folly, because in his vast contempt and renunciation of this and of all
life, things visible or attainable, present or to come, the height and
depth of any other creature dwindle to nothingness and the least is
equal to the greatest.” This is the mood of the Pilgrim: the mood of
humility and indifference to outward things. A product of defeat and
frustration, this attitude is a last attempt to circumvent it. Buddhism
and Christianity represent this mood in the history of communities,
racked by war, pestilence, slavery, and sheer fatigue of living and its
symbol is the cloister, walled off from the distraction and struggle of
the outer world. Melville sought a cloister for his spirit. Unable to
batter down the indifference of his contemporaries, he endeavoured to
erect within himself a fortress that would keep them at bay.
2
Elizabeth Melville noted that bad health, following too close
application to work, made travel advisable in 1856: that is the outward
explanation of Melville’s circumstances. Melville’s father-in-law
again came forward with financial aid, and in October Herman Melville
set off on a journey to Constantinople and the Holy Land. He had
contemplated such a trip in 1849; and now, from a deeper consciousness
of his spiritual dilemma, he wished perhaps to prove the advice he had
given Taji in the last pages of Mardi--to return and find his Yillah
in Serenia. It was characteristic of Melville’s habit of thought that
he should seek for Christ’s kingdom in the territory that had known
his presence, instead of plying himself with books and spiritual
intermediaries: having come upon Moby-Dick on the adventurous voyages
of his youth, he was now, as a man of thirty-seven, hopeful to find
through another voyage a sufficient antagonist to this Satanic power,
with whom he could ally his own faltering, and almost routed, forces.
But it was not merely for peace that Melville set out. Beneath the
obvious and inevitable retreat was possibly the hope that the old
energies would come back again, that the old Titan would re-awake and
the old challenge stir again in his bosom--that, with some of his
domestic cares relieved or forgotten, the joy of battle would come
back to him, the relish for arduous days of creation. Hopes and fears
went with Herman Melville across the Atlantic: but unless we misread
his words completely, the fears were uppermost. Perhaps life held no
answer. It was possible “after all, that spite of bricks and shaven
faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all
mankind, beneath our garbs of commonplaceness, conceal enigmas that the
stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim, cannot resolve.”
3
Again we come very close to the external round of Melville, for, after
sailing to Glasgow and making his way through Lancaster, he arrived
at Liverpool on November 8, 1856. There, at the White Bear, he began
a journal which he carried through the better part of his trip. Like
his earlier journal, it is chiefly a record of outward impressions:
meditation, the working of the inward eye, seems always to have
followed much later. He was a good traveller. Hawthorne, whom he
hunted up in Liverpool, describes him as making his long journeys with
scarcely more than a toothbrush for equipment: Melville still retained
the sailor’s knack of stowing away a good deal in a small space, and
doing without the landsman’s non-essentials; and, as Hawthorne notes,
he always presented the appearance of a well-groomed gentleman. More
than this: he struck up acquaintance easily, and at the outset he was
tempted, upon meeting an agreeable young Scot, to go east with him
forthwith on the same steamer. Melville was always keen to enjoy the
contrasts and suggestions of new customs; and he notes, for example,
how the landlord in the ordinary of his Liverpool hotel acted as if he
were presiding over a private dinner party, all thought of mercenary
ends banished, although the wine he offered his guests would later be
reckoned in the bill.
Hawthorne, now American Consul at Liverpool, was staying at Southport,
a watering-place some twenty miles distant; and Melville sought his
old friend out there and stayed with him a few days. The afternoon of
his arrival, they walked together along the strand, these two men,
both, alas! aging quickly, though Hawthorne was only fifty-two, and
Melville was fifteen years younger. The beach was lonely; a strong wind
stirred panic in the long grass and occasionally swept the loose sand
in their faces; and Melville, a little weariedly, as if somehow the
matter must be settled, went back again to the things he used to talk
about with Hawthorne in the sunny Berkshire days, things as bleak as
the sea-coast itself, and as infinite as the sky: Time and Free-Will,
and Eternity, and Faith! Melville cannot believe in Christianity nor
be comfortable with his doubts, torments, inner wounds. Hawthorne, as
usual, was aloofly sympathetic: it was strange how Melville persisted,
had persisted ever since Hawthorne knew him and probably long before,
in wandering to and fro in these deserts. If Melville were a religious
man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential,
thinks Hawthorne to himself: for he has a high and noble nature, and is
better worth immortality than most of us.
Melville must have looked pleadingly at that grave, heavy-browed
face, with its domed forehead, which seemed to promise so much. Did
it have no answer for him? Did those intent eyes say to one, as
Plinlimmon’s said to Pierre--Vain, vain are all your struggles and
endeavours? Except when Hawthorne wrote, how little did he ever give
in exchange! Did Melville feel that Hawthorne mutely understood, and
had no remedy: that the mind that had seen into Hester Prynne’s heart
or Chillingworth’s evil spirit had retreated, hopeless, from his riled
depths? If Melville did not feel that, still he needed a confidant,
and the wild screams of the gulls over the lonely sands may have
awakened to unpremeditated sudden declaration the wild loneliness of
his own heart. Melville might as well confess it to Hawthorne: he had
about made up his mind to be annihilated. There was no place for him
in America: his best and deepest work, his maturest convictions, were
lightly tossed aside by his contemporaries: they were interested in
whale oil at so much per gallon, not in the quest of Moby-Dick; and
they wanted stories that would tickle their vanity, like a mirror,
or make the blood course more pleasantly, like a glass of port wine.
Melville would not commit suicide: that was a weak way out: but he
might deliberately withdraw.
Perhaps Hawthorne looked doubly grave: it is doubtful if he offered
any word of countervailing encouragement; for he probably did not
have enough confidence in Melville’s genius, much as he respected his
probity, to urge him to continue the fight. Besides, he was a little
embarrassed; despite his political influence, he had been unable to get