Herman Melville
out mid the low huts of the villages. Christmas Day Melville spent at
Syra again: he mentions the captain’s mild observance of the feast in a
glass of champagne; but he put in the notebook no private or domestic
memory. Perhaps he took to heart the advice he had already framed in
Pierre: “With a continent and an ocean between him and his wife--thus
sundered from her by whatever imperative cause for a long term of
years:--the husband, if passionately devoted to her and by nature
broodingly sensitive of soul were wise to forget her till he embrace
again.”
Melville contrasted these bleak, desolate Aegean Islands with those of
the Polynesian archipelago: the former had lost their virginity, whilst
the latter were as fresh as at their first creation. Melville knew that
withered feeling. To look upon the yellow of Patmos, who would believe
that a god had been there; and, one may add, to look upon the sear tint
of Melville’s soul, during the strained years that had just passed, who
would believe that a god had once reposed there, either?
At last the Alexandrian lighthouse came into view; and shortly after
that Pompey’s pillar, looking like a huge stick of candy that had long
been sucked. Melville made a quick excursion to Cairo; and spent two
nights there, wandering through the streets, where the houses seemed
a collection of old orchestras, organs, proscenium boxes, or like
masses of old grotesque furniture, lumbering a garret, and covered
with dust: the streets, so narrow, through the projection of the upper
storeys, that they seemed almost tunnels, made noon itself dim: in the
lonelier parts of the city many of the houses were uninhabited and had
a ghoulish look: but the city itself, for all these desolate houses and
stoved-in domes and rubbish-filled alleys, was alive with bargain and
chaffer and shouting camel drivers and whining blind men: desert and
verdure clashed together like splendour and squalor, like gloom and
gaiety: such violent chiaroscuro in all the senses bewildered one like
strong wine on an empty stomach.
The Pyramids completed the effect of this exploration. Together,
they made a magnificent, a terrible, an unforgettable day. From the
distance, the Pyramids jutted over the sand like purple mountains. To
ascend the great Pyramid, there were as many different routes as there
are for crossing the Alps: precipice on precipice, cliff on cliff.
Nothing in Nature but the sea gives such an idea of vastness; the very
grass that grows around the Pyramids does not touch them, as if in
awe of them. Exhausted a little with his climb, a pain in his chest,
Melville found the Arab guides tender: as he hurried on, for none but
the phlegmatic could scale this mound deliberately, the Arabs in their
white flowing robes might have been angels conducting him up to heaven.
One old man fainted halfway up and had to be brought down: he essayed
to go inside and fainted again: it was too much for him.
Well, it was almost too much for Melville: it was not the sense of
height but the sense of immensity that was stirred: with all other
architecture, however vast, the eye is gradually inured to the sense of
magnitude by passing from part to part: but here there was no storey
or stage: it was all or nothing, not height or breadth or length or
depth but unspeakable vastness, less like courses of masonry than like
strata of rocks, a long slope of crags and precipices. As with the
ocean, you learned as much of its vastness by the first glance as you
would in a month. The great Pyramid refused to be studied or adequately
comprehended. Nor had it lost by the tearing away of its casing,
though it had scaled enough stone to build a walled town; on the
contrary, when it presented a smooth plane it must have lost as much
in impressiveness as the ocean does when unfurrowed--a dead calm of
masonry. A feeling of awe and terror gradually came over Melville: the
Arabs were no longer angels, but seemed, in their soft, imperturbable
way, somehow malign. Stooping and doubling in the interior, as in a
coal shaft, Melville shuddered at the ancient Egyptians: they had a
mixture of the cunning and the awful. Moses learned his lore from the
Egyptians: the awful idea of Jehovah was born there. They must needs
have been terrible inventors, those ancient wise men: as out of the
crude forms of the natural earth they could evoke by art the Pyramids,
so, out of the dull elements of the insignificant thoughts that are in
all men, they could by analogous art rear the transcendent conception
of God. Indeed, the Egyptians had outwitted mortality. The Pyramids
were conceived out of an energy as mighty as Nature’s: nought but an
earthquake or a geological revolution could smother it up. That was
something like an answer to the White Whale--albeit such a distant
answer. The pyramidical energy, as well as the pyramidical scorn, were
both lacking in Melville now, high though they had towered in Moby-Dick.
Back in his high-ceilinged room of Shepherd’s Hotel, with its
almost monkish barrenness, the Pyramids still loomed before Herman
Melville--something vast, indefinite, uncomfortable, and awful.
Nothing that he met in the holy ways of Jerusalem, on the Mount of
Temptation or in the Garden of Gethsemane, compared with the powerful
impression left on him by the Pyramids. Did his instinct at last tell
him that power was necessary, but that power alone was not enough,
that Power and Love must work together, harmoniously married, as in
one of the oldest of mythic figures, before man’s triumph is anything
but evanescent? The issue of power and love, knowledge and sympathy,
contrivance and imagination, is art; and the highest product of art is
not a painting, a statue, a book, a pyramid, but a human personality.
When power and love were divorced in the personality, love became
impotent, and power became malign and unlovely; and the personality
itself mouldered, mouldered into a Jackson, a Timon, an Ahab, a Maria
Glendinning, a Pierre, an Isabel. The Egyptians certainly had not
forgotten love; and the Nile itself, which spread greenness when its
floods receded, was the symbol of its benign fertility. Did some hint
of this touch Melville in Egypt or in Palestine? Apparently, yes; for
in Clarel we shall see the germs of a new feeling about life, and the
source of that feeling is love, a clear and unambiguous love.
5
What further impact the journey made upon Melville’s mind, we shall
best gather when we come to consider Clarel and some of his minor
poems; and the further events of his journey home _via_ Italy,
the Netherlands, and England can well be condensed into scattered
observations and epigrams that punctuate the account in his journals.
Passing Patmos, Melville was again afflicted with the great curse of
modern travel--scepticism. “Could no more realize that St. John had
ever had revelations here than when off Juan Fernandez could believe
in Robinson Crusoe according to Defoe.” “Pompeii like any other town.
Same old humanity. All the same whether one be dead or alive. Pompeii
comfortable sermon. Like Pompeii better than Paris.” Pisa: “Campanile
like pine poised just ere snapping. You wait to hear crack. Like
Wordsworth’s mooncloud, it will move all together if it move at all,
for Pillars all line with it.” “Rome fell flat on me. Oppressing
flat.... Tiber a ditch, yellow as saffron. The whole landscape nothing
independent of association. St. Peter’s looks small from tower of
Capitol.... Dome not so wonderful as St. Sophia’s.... Went to Baths
of Caracalla. Wonderful. Massive. Ruins form as it were natural
bridges of thousands of arches. There are glades and thickets among
the ruins--high up.--Thought of Shelley. Truly, he got his inspiration
here. Corresponded with his drama and mind. Still majesty and desolate
grandeur.” “Quirinal Palace.... The Gardens--a paradise without the
joy--freaks and caprices of endless wealth ... as stone is sculptured
into forms of foliage, so here foliage turned into forms of sculpture.”
Florence: “Breughel’s picture much pleased me. Not pleased with the
Venus de Medici, but very much astonished at the Wrestlers, and charmed
with Titian’s Venus.” “Rather be in Venice on a rainy day than in
any other capital on a fine one.” London: “Crystal Palace--digest of
the universe. Vast toy. No substance. Such appropriation of space as
is made by a rail fence.” Oxford: “It was here I first confessed my
gratitude for my motherland and could view her with pride. Oxford to an
American as well worth visiting as Paris, though in a different way.”
6
During this crowded journey, while Melville was in Italy, there
happened an event, obscure, mysterious, obliquely narrated, and
published only at the end of his life, which gives us a further clue
to Melville’s character and experience. Knowing Melville’s habits of
composition, one is fairly sure that some objective fact lies beneath
the surface of the verse called After the Pleasure Party: all the more
because he published the poem only after he had reached the serenity
and safety of old age. That these verses were not merely the product
of untethered imagination one suspects, too, because their theme,
remorse and bitter regret after renouncing a passionate experience, is
underlined by the words of another poem, Madame Mirror:
What pangs after parties of pleasure,
What smiles but disclosures of pain!
This long poem, After the Pleasure Party, stands out with particular
boldness because it contains the only direct references to sexual
passion that one finds in Melville’s entire work, except for haphazard
and unimportant incidents--or the plainly fictitious events in Pierre.
It is a faint and intricate clue; but one must not neglect it.
Melville pictures a paradisiac garden in Italy: the upland falling
behind the house, fragrant with jasmin and orange blossom, the white
marble of the house itself, gleaming between the lanes of austere
trees, the green terraces falling in gentle cataracts down to the
starlit Mediterranean Sea: a place of beauty and an hour of balm “after
long revery’s discontent.” The pilgrim, dusty with travel in barren
lands, revels in the sensuous peace: he is not so completely the
pilgrim, so thoroughly the hermit, that his heart is entirely his own:
on the contrary, it is out of a desperate dryness and loneliness of
soul that Melville is suddenly beset by such temptations as the hermits
of the Thebaid found in the desert. We have no image of the woman who
walked with Melville through these green walks, under the star-bright
sky: he himself tried, in the years that followed, to forget “the glade
wherein Fate spun Love’s ambuscade,” tempting him to flout pale years
of cloistral life and “flush himself in sensuous strife.” We do not
know if it was she who repulsed him, as the shore repulses the hungry
billows, tired of the homeless deep, or whether it was a resistance
within himself that wrecked and scattered the impulses that were
driving him against the warm object of his desire: but we know that,
flushed perhaps by wine, and stirred by the fragrant spring night, sex
asserted itself again in Melville: the “dear desire through love to
sway” came over him, and when he found himself baffled, attempting to
rule his passion yet not able to reign, neither conquering the woman
herself nor the passion she had awakened, he was aware of a dreary
shame of frustration. Blocked in his highest powers of thought, in
his career as a writer, Melville found himself equally defeated--and
perhaps by the same cluster of images--in that other citadel of
personality. Bitterly he cries: “And kept I long heaven’s watch for
this, contemning love, for this, even this?”
There is the cry of the passionate man who in his marriage had kept to