Herman Melville
the letter of his pledge, and yet found himself struggling against its
spirit--struggling and yet paralysed. The sudden opening of passion,
that had begun at lunch this day, as the guests of the house, like the
ladies and gentlemen in the prologue to the Decameron, had lain about
in groups on the grass, this passion, deepening in a secluded glade
under the Mediterranean night, had pulled Melville off his lonely
throne: in a dream he was a king, perhaps, a lonely king--an idiot
crowned with straw! That gust of passion had brought enlightenment:
the fires in him were banked, not dead: but it left him bereaved. He
shrank from its consequences. In this enlightenment he remembered and
magnified other incidents on his journey: the barefoot peasant girl in
Naples who had climbed up the hills near the wheels of his carriage and
had given him the sudden impulse to fire upon her the petty hell within
his own bosom. Hers was a wily innocence, and one can only vaguely
guess at Melville’s memories when he exclaims: “The cheat! On briars
her buds were strung.... To girls, strong man’s a novice weak.” All
this became part of his “sad rosary of belittling pain.”
Melville might seem to others, might in opaque moments seem to himself,
a pale, scholarly man, immersed solely in things of the mind: but what
a caricature that apparition was of the actual man! The pallor did
not mean he could not feel the sun when it shone upon him: “the plain
lone bramble thrills with Spring as much as vines that grapes shall
bring,” and when this mood was uppermost, how gladly would he throw his
arms around some radiant ninny, the first glad, willing girl he might
meet, and buy the veriest wanton’s rose--“would but my bee therein
repose.” If only he could remake himself, or free himself from this
disturbance, this void tormenting urge, this feeling of disunity, this
being but half of a mismatched whole: surely, there was some anarchic
blunder, some rank cosmic jest, in the state that made the single
self incomplete and yet set all the odds against the possibility that
selves who matched should meet and mate. This was part of Melville’s
disillusion, that hot impetus he had felt in that fine Italian garden
promised in ultimate reward no more than his marriage, equally fervid
and romantic at the start, had brought him. And yet--and yet--perhaps
this temporary impulse was an impulse to act upon, whether it had any
cosmic justification or not: the turbulent heart and the rebel brain
did not satisfy themselves so easily with abstract reasons.
For Amor so resents a slight
And hers had been such haught disdain
He long may wreak his boyish spite,
And, boylike, little reck the pain.
When Melville leaves this scene of his thwarted renewal, and comes to
Rome, confronting its pagan statuary and its Christian churches, he has
half an impulse to gather all his doubts and difficulties together and
make a sacrifice of them to the Church, in return for the peace she
gives: but something deeper in him, something reflected in the mighty
statuary and art of the Roman and the Greek, prompts him to turn to
Athene herself, who united power and peace, far from the “sexual feud”
that “clogs the aspirant’s life.” But no outer institution or activity
could share Melville’s burden: at bottom, he feels hopeless of either
Church or of Art. Never, he says, passion peace shall bring, nor art
inanimate for long inspire. Ah, no! because the sick man turns to these
things as to a powerful medicine, to serve as a specific, once and for
all; whereas in health, they must be treated as food, to be welcomed
recurrently. Melville was sick; and he was aware of it. “Nothing may
help or heal while Amor, incensed, remembers wrong.”
For scope to give his vengeance play
Himself he’ll blaspheme and betray.
Then for Urania, virgins everywhere,
O pray! Example take too, and have care.
These last lines were not given to Melville by his experience but
were the fruits of his ultimate reflection: and there was wisdom in
them. Sex is deep and central in every life, and the wrongs that are
committed against Amor, whether they are wrongs of abstention or wrongs
of satiety, whether they are the weakness of a love unpolarized, or
the weakness of a love whose validity is established solely in legal
documents and obligations, these wrongs may exact their revenge on
every phase of a man’s activity. There is no formula for love, except
the tact and usage of lovers. Reserve, indifference, and abstention
destroy that tact: the lover loses his sense of occasion, and is
impassive where he should be quick, or tormented, as Melville was
tormented by the peasant girl, when he should be calm. The matter
of loyalty does not enter here; or rather, all these thoughts were
disloyalties; indeed, Melville was disloyal to the spirit of his
marriage in a thousand repugnances or indifferences that far more
seriously undermined his relations with Elizabeth than the most
outright liaison would have done, had it left Melville poised,
collected, refreshed.
In this experience “After the Pleasure Party,” Melville approached
close to a central dilemma in his life: he approached it, but he was
paralysed, paralysed by the habit of self-control as other men are
thrust into helpless action by their lust. Melville’s career, his
thought, his vision demanded a singleness of purpose: to attain this
singleness he was all eagerness, as he put it in Pierre, “to cast
off the most intense, beloved bond, as a hindrance to the attainment
of whatever transcendental object that usurper mood so tyrannically
suggests. Then the beloved bond seems to hold us to no essential
good; lifted to exalted mounts, we can dispense with all the vale;
endearments we spurn; kisses are blisters to us; and forsaking the
palpitating forms of mortal love, we emptily embrace the boundless
and unbodied air. We think we are not human; we become as immortal
bachelors and gods; but again, like the Greek gods themselves, prone
we descend to earth; glad to be uxorious once more; glad to hide these
godlike heads within the bosoms made of too-seducing clay.”
This pilgrimage of Melville’s, from that high talk with Hawthorne
on the bleak sands of Southport and those unspeakable thoughts that
welled up in him when he confronted the Pyramids, to the sting of a
passing peasant girl or the soft hints and caresses in the arboured
walk by the Mediterranean, had shown Melville the extremes of his own
being: alone with divinity, in solitude, he found himself reaching,
thirstily, eagerly, towards the all-too-seducing clay. For Melville,
unlike Plato, there was no happy union between these opposites: he had
no wise Diotima to teach him how the children of the flesh may lead to
that union with the other self out of which the children of the spirit
are born: nor did he realize that the lust of the satisfied man is
incomparably more cleansing to the spirit than the tormented chastity
of the unsatisfied one. This was a misfortune for Melville. His
salvation would have been to recognize that he had reached the limits
of his own lonely excursion: that all a man can find as a solitary
being, and value, and cleave to, exploring in utter loneliness the
trackless ways of the universe, he had achieved in Moby-Dick: pride and
power and the isolated untouched self had nothing further to teach him,
and there was no dominion more sterile than that long reign. He must
withdraw from this proud isolation, not into the disguised pride and
the equal isolation of humility, but into participation with the life
around him and into what he had inherited from the past--not scorning
Plato or Goethe because their union had been fruitful, whilst his great
immaculacy had proved black and sterile.
In achieving his depths, Melville had missed the surface: he had
brought up fire and lava and ashes, from that deep volcano of his
being, but he had never in maturity properly explored the woods and
groves and gardens that give men peace and untroubled love--and it
was pride, a self-defeating pride, that urged him to return to those
depths, prizing “the clear intelligence alone” and disdaining a love
that was “linked and locked with a self impure.” Partly, Melville
overcame this pride, and he mingled with his fellows and widened his
explorations in the region they had settled and cultivated: but these
new aims did not engross him as the pursuit of Moby-Dick had done. Had
he been able to surrender more easily to love, to his wife, to his
family relations, at thirty-eight, he might have discovered, while his
physical powers were healing, that triumphant serenity and surety of
purpose which did not come to him until his old age had transmuted his
rejected passions and made a fertile union with reality.
Melville left his Italian garden, with chaos still struggling in his
soul. For slighting Amor he was for a while destined to know, not inner
peace, but the sting and poison of every chance arrow: in Venice,
floating on the canal in a “swoon of a noon and a trance of tide” like
calms far off Peru, he was to hear a lattice click and see between the
slats, mutely summoning him, the loveliest eyes of a girl. He who had
faced peril in nature and man, who had swum between the whale’s black
flukes and the white shark’s fin, and who had wandered in the enemy’s
desert, New York, warily scanning the envy and slander that followed
him there, he who had faced these things cannot stand the “basilisk
look” of that girl: he bids his boatman throw off his drowsiness and
shoot quickly by. The wanderer discovers that sirens are real: they do
in fact lie in wait for a man, wooing him by the same deadly muses.
He runs from them--excusing his shame with the memory of Ulysses,
“brave, wise, and Venus’ son,” but the very fact that he imprisons this
incident in verse and publishes it more than thirty years after shows
that he did not escape easily.
“There is no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy,” Melville
wrote in Pierre, “that a mortal man can possibly evoke, which will
stand the final test in a real impassioned onset of Life and Passion
upon him. Then all the fair philosophy or Faith--phantoms that he
raised from the mist, slide away and disappear as ghosts at cock-crow.
For Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass. Amidst his
gray philosophizings, Life breaks upon a man like a morning.” Without
conceiving Melville’s philosophy as a phantom, one may still wish that
it had confronted and not so desperately fled from these enlightening
assaults of life and passion. He needed no further share of restrained
and circumspect virtues: he needed the courage of life, the courage to
be glad with the morning sun, to breathe deeply the fragrance of the
air, to relax his limbs in the heat of noon, to feel again the dear
inner vigour of his manliness, that vigour which a man is conscious of
only in the presence of a woman who rouses him. Denying that vigour,
he found that the dawn was smothered in grey clouds, and the rose had
lost its fragrance, and the sun its power to heal. His journey helped
him recover his interest in life and his poise: it enabled him to carry
on as a man: but, though he resumed his work, that final confidence
or desperation men need if they are to undertake the great labour of
creation was still insufficient. The masculine attack, so bold, so
deep-seated in Mardi, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick, did not wholly come
back--and if one asks the reason for this one will find the answer, in
part, “traced under an image of Amor Threatening.”
7
Melville returned home toward the middle of 1857. Meanwhile, The
Confidence Man, published by Sampson, Low and Company, and not by his
old publishers, Harper’s, had done little to improve his fortunes.