Herman Melville
Melville the consular post that would have relieved him so greatly; and
he felt a little responsible for Melville’s financial plight, if not
for his spiritual predicament--although his failure reflected nothing
upon his practical good-will, and there is no sign that Melville was
even faintly reproachful. Perhaps, at bottom, Hawthorne felt guilty
because he could not offer back in friendship all Melville was willing
to give--and craved. Unrequited friendship is no easy state for either
party to bear.
Evening fell: the wind grew raw: the waters became steel-edged at the
horizon with a girder of black: the occasional lights in the town
increased the sense of solitude, as the two dark figures made their
way back to the huddled silhouette of houses. There was no true end
to this talk, but instead of that, the consolations of the table were
presently spread: stout to drink and fox-and-geese to eat. Julian had
grown into a fine lad; and Una was taller than her mother. The food,
the coal-fire, and the chatter of the children before bedtime gave
Melville, if only for a moment, something solid to go on, something he
could not find in Hawthorne’s patient silences. Well, on the morrow,
Melville must say good-bye and go up to Liverpool with Hawthorne to
make inquiries about passage among the steamers. On a rainy night,
standing on a street corner in Liverpool, he took Hawthorne’s hand and
said good-bye to him. Hawthorne was touched. He respected that pale,
brooding spirit, that restless, adventurous, still aimless traveller.
Casually, they shook hands: the night and the rain swallowed up
Melville, and they never met again, and as far as one knows, they never
corresponded.
For Melville this was perhaps a last desperate essay at maintaining
their friendship; and in spite of Hawthorne’s cordial greeting, the
meeting was hollow and it had come to nothing. Each had a secret
locked in his bosom; and, in a sense, each had lost the key. Yet there
was something fine and true between these two men--if only there had
not been the reserve and the distance between them, a reserve that
Melville’s old rollicking ways and easy gipsy friendliness could
not break down. One can scarcely doubt that it was about Hawthorne
Melville wrote the following Monody, included in the sheaf of poems
issued just before Melville’s death:
To have known him, to have loved him
After loneness long;
And then to be estranged in life,
And neither in the wrong;
And now for death to set his seal--
Ease me, a little ease, my song!
By wintry hills his hermit-mound
The sheeted snow-drifts drape
And houseless there the snow-bird flits
Beneath the fir-trees’ crape:
Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine
That hid the shyest grape.
The fatal cold that had struck this friendship, the only deep one that
had sprung up in Melville’s life and attracted all the members of his
personality--if one omits the retrospective warmth of his feeling for
Jack Chase--this fatal cold did not lessen Melville’s inner pangs and
his feeling of desolation.
4
On November eighteenth, Melville finally set sail, passing Cape St.
Vincent and Cape Trafalgar, entering the Straits of Gibraltar about a
week later, and skirting along the coast of Africa. Throughout this
journey, his eyes were keen and eager: when Gibraltar stands lit up by
the sun, and casts a shadow over the rest of the scene, he thinks of
England casting the rest of the world in shade; and when Algiers lies
before him, he remembers a passage in Don Quixote. As the boat sails
out, the town in the distance looks “like a sloping rock covered with
bird-lime.” In Greece, the scene became fantastic and memorable: the
pantaloons and male petticoats, the embroidered jackets, the noble
faces and ferocious moustachios--it is the Greece of Edmond About--and
the town itself, dirty, grimly picturesque, with old men who look like
Pericles reduced to a _charbonnier_.
From Syra to Salonica: at daybreak Melville came on deck to see Mt.
Olympus, covered with snow, and Ossa and Pelion to the south, with Mt.
Atlas, rather conical, on the opposite shore. In port, the same welter
of picturesqueness, dirt, modern needs, ancient beauty. The remains of
a Roman triumphal arch across a street and the fragments of a noble
Greek edifice, three columns and part of a pediment, used as a gateway
and support to the outhouse of a Jew’s abode. The English resident
comes aboard ship: he has that cockney confidence in the rights and
privileges of God’s Englishman that makes the English so comical and so
efficient wherever they go. He tells Melville he has been for a day’s
shooting in the Vale of Tempe. Ye Gods! Whortleberrying on Olympus! The
countryside: hot-houses and trellises. The monastery where Melville was
served with sweetmeats, fruit, and coffee, under an ancient sycamore.
Under all these little odd stimulations, the palate becomes less jaded
and the eyes are refreshed; the spirit itself becomes eager.
When, finally, the ship sets out for Constantinople, Olympus shows in
the moonlight like a ship of white cloud. On deck, the rich Turkish
effendis, in their long, furred robes of yellow, attended by their
harems, securely guarded in tents, give Melville other things to think
about. Orientals have no hearth, no bed, and never blush! The women are
pretty; for the Mohammedan religion disdains the corset, along with a
good part of Western ethics and religion. These creatures are lazy,
gracious, voluptuous; in Constantinople Melville finds that women with
ugly faces are rare, and that every other window shows faces, Jewish,
Grecian, Armenian, which in America would be a cynosure in a ballroom.
Does Melville suspect that enjoyment of the rites of sex, skill and
wisdom in that enjoyment, have contributed by sexual selection and
general good health to this beauty? No: this is one aspect of life
where, as we shall again see later, he observes the facts, but finds no
clues.
As the ship approaches Constantinople, the contrasts pile up: the sail
up the Hellespont is exhilarating, although spoiled a little by the
mists: at night, as the ship is lying by in a fog, he hears only the
bells of the neighbouring ships, and the sharp bark of the pariah dogs
on the shore. The passengers endure sea-sickness, discomfort, and damp
for two days. Melville turns to an old Turk and says: This is very bad.
The Turk answers: God’s will is good, and smokes his pipe in cheerful
resignation. That is the East’s answer to our Western fretfulness,
to our desire to discipline the elements and remove all the natural
obstacles to man’s existence and happiness: but the East pays its price
for it: the beauties of Constantinople are shrouded in dank, odourous
streets that are unmarked and unnamed and lead nowhere: the priests
in the Mosque of St. Sophia sell the precious mosaics as they fall
to the floor, not endeavouring to repair the scaling walls of that
superb interior: the bazaars are a wilderness of traffic. Melville
loses himself and is confounded and bewildered by the din, the barbaric
confusion, of the whole city. At night he does not dare to leave the
hotel, for fear of being assassinated for the sake of a watch or a
ring. In short, failing to struggle against God’s will, the East puts
up, in the same easy spirit, with every species of human roguery: that
is no answer to the White Whale! Indeed, Melville scarcely dares walk
the streets in the daylight without keeping his hand on his purse: for
no discoverable reason whatever, he was followed about for two or three
hours by an infernal Greek and his confederates, whom he could neither
intimidate nor elude. He began to feel nervous, remembering that the
fearful intent of Schiller’s ghost scene hangs upon being followed in
Venice by an Armenian; and he was thankful when he finally escaped.
But the views! The scenes from the steamer up the Bosphorous to
Buykudesh: magnificent! the whole panorama is one pomp of art and
nature. Europe and Asia are here shown at their best: a gallery of
ports and harbours formed by the interchange of promontory and bay:
porpoises sport in the blue, and large flights of pigeons overhead go
through evolutions like those of armies, whilst ships anchor at the
foot of ravines, deep among green basins, where the only canvas one
would expect would be tents. No wonder the Czars have always coveted
the capital of the Sultans: no wonder the Russian, among his firs,
sighs for these myrtles, cedars, cypresses. The green minarets of the
cypress contrast with the gold minarets of the Mosque: so nature and
man, so death and life, intermingle, too. Kiosk and fountain, dark
trees and daisies tipped with crimson, stand out with the jewelled
clearness of a Persian miniature: one would think that these scenes
would melt away like some castle of confectionery if the elements
treated them rudely.
Nearer, Melville is in the atmosphere of the Arabian Nights: the aspect
of the first bridge, coming back, is like that of a Grand Fancy Dress
Ball: the air is an immense Persian rug: 1,500,000 men are the actors
in a vast and endless procession, pedlars, beggars, confectionery
sellers, malefactors chained together with iron necklaces and rings;
porters with immense burdens, military officers, ladies in yellow
slippers, black eunuchs followed by white servants, sherbet sellers,
Georgians, shepherds marching in sheep’s clothing, sheep, droves of
donkeys followed by animated little boys poking them assiduously,
boys with Arabian Nights names, Yusef, Hassan, Hamet. But if it has
the beauty of some colossal London pantomime, it also has its defect:
Melville cannot step over the footlights. He sees these Turks,
Armenians, Georgians, Greeks: he would like to know them better: but
for conversation he must turn to the captain or the English resident,
or the fellow tourist. He wearies of this spectatorial attitude, these
long days when he cannot talk to a sympathetic soul. Melville had got
nearer to the Typees by living among them than he did with these closer
brethren. After six days in Constantinople, he set off by steamer for
Alexandria, via Smyrna; for, though he makes what he can of these
profane diversions, the chief end of these travels is Terra Sancta
itself.
The vessel stopped at Smyrna, and Melville had his first smell of
the nearer East: camel-dung drying against the walls of the houses,
for fuel, and the camel himself, the supercilious ambassador of this
civilization, with his neck out like a tortoise, and his tail like
an eel, by which the driver directed him, the swaying of the rider
increasing with the motion of the camel, as in the mast of a ship, the
higher one climbs. What a unique creature: he carries his neck like a
clergyman in a stiff cravat, his feathery forelegs, his long lank hind
ones, and his spongy hoofs, ploughing through the muddy lanes like four
mops--in short, a cross between an ostrich and a grasshopper! Melville
was thrilled by the curious appearance of strings of laden camels
passing through the narrow, crowded ways of the bazaar--and he learned
that these gorgeous Turkish clothes, many of them, were made of cotton
and silk imported into Lancashire and reproduced and sent back to the
native land, to the ruin of Turkish manufacturers, and the misery of
the Manchester operative, just as pure copper was sent to England, and
after being alloyed and cheapened was returned as unstamped coin to
Constantinople.
The ship steamed out of Smyrna and passed the bleak islands that had
once meant so much in history, Delos, flowery in fable, but desolate at
best and now quite sterile; and Patmos, another disenchanting isle; and
Timos, with its small hamlets and the little churches sticking perkily