Herman Melville
the depth of the houses, the amount of garden space in the rear, the
traffic that would pass in the streets: in the new cities no customs
and habits played a part in the configuration of the city except those
of realty speculation: by 1850, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Chicago
had all forfeited to the land-gambler sites originally set aside for
civic centres. In architecture, the failure to achieve form was equally
conspicuous: windows, doors, rooms, façades, even apart from their
grotesque efforts at decoration, all became gawky and ill-proportioned.
The energies of the country went into purely quantitative achievements:
their only formal equivalent was money. The production in tons of iron,
miles of steel rails, bushels of wheat, went up: cities increased in
size: but the iron was used for the preposterous fronts of office
buildings, the railroad served to deplete the hinterland, and the
cities were dingy firetraps of wood or dingier prisons of brownstone.
The war itself tore up and shot to pieces vast quantities of iron and
many miles of railroad, and sundry towns and villages: but that was
the true destination of all these quantitative efforts even in peace:
for industrialism produced only an occasional genuine form, like the
Eads Bridge, and for the most part its products were fit only to be
consumed hastily and replaced and destroyed again. No wonder this
civilization sweated day and night, without holidays, to produce its
evanescent goods; while, in the Middle Ages, the great cathedrals
and town halls were erected, without labour-saving machinery, in a
rude agricultural society which spent a third of its year in holidays
devoted to prayer, meditation, or festival. Where there is form and
culture, there is true conservation of energy through the arts: where
there is only energy, without end or form, the mechanism may be speeded
up indefinitely without increasing anything except the waste and
lost motion. Southern society, in which a provincial system of caste
and culture held together, produced factories and slave barracks, in
Charleston, for example, that maintained, uncorrupted, the forms of
its classic past: but outside these aristocratic backwaters, chaos was
dominant--and even in the South, one feels, it was only postponed.
In this sprawling, undisciplined America, a new type of character
was uppermost. Melville described this new type when he touched on
Ethan Allen in Israel Potter: “Allen,” he said, “seems to have been
a curious combination of a Hercules, a Joe Miller, a Bayard, and a
Tom Hyer. He was frank, bluff, companionable as a Pagan, convivial, a
Roman, hearty as a harvest. His spirit was essentially Western; and
herein is his peculiar Americanism; for the Western spirit is, or will
yet be (for no other can be) the true American.” It was a sign of the
waning of provincial faith that before the war everybody was eagerly
looking for this individual, this type, who would serve as a symbol
of unity. Even Emerson and Thoreau looked wistfully toward the rough
fellows of the frontier to express what was common to all Americans. A
provincial culture glories in its differences: the power to mould and
express them is its unique quality: a Jefferson, a Franklin, an Adams
were not only as far apart as Virginia, Philadelphia, and Boston: they
were as far apart, in many ways, as London, Paris, and Weimar. But
in the period before the war, the frontier type, Jackson, Harrison,
Clay, Frémont, Lincoln, was put forward as the sum of all our possible
Americas--albeit these figures were as far from the Swedes of Minnesota
or the Germans of Wisconsin as they were from the Gansevoorts and the
Randolphs. In a period of dissolution a false unity seems preferable
to no common bond at all; and in the uncertainty, the disintegration,
the dispersion of American society, under the vast tides of immigration
and the inexorable flow of the coal-and-iron civilization, political
Union became a compensatory symbol for all the social and cultural
fragmentation that existed.
The political and social results of the Civil War, as they have worked
out during the last two generations, have made us a little sceptical
of the sacred, unchallengeable shibboleths under which the war itself
was fought: we see that the prime issues of the great conflict were
silenced, rather than settled, by the decisive victory of the North.
Unfortunately, the South’s political contentions, which were partly
valid, were vitiated by the issue of slavery. Mid all the decisive
statesmanship displayed south of the Mason and Dixon line, no one was
firm enough or far-sighted enough, after Jefferson’s time, to see
that the holding of human beings in bondage, without hope or means
of escape, was an untenable anachronism: even the Russian autocracy
recognized that. The French Revolution had made this particular form of
human degradation unpalatable; like incest or tribal revenge, it could
not be related to a modern society. The burden of that institution,
indeed, belonged to the whole country: the great mistake of the South,
from 1830 onwards, was to assume as a divine necessity or benefit what
should have been shared with the rest of the country as an intolerable
evil--to be disposed of by some direct economic adjustment.
Melville had his misgivings about current political institutions; in
Mardi he pointed out that many of the boasted freedoms of America
were the product of free land and an uncrowded domain; and though he
was a republican, he recognized inequality, and had no hope of doing
away with those distinctions between man and man in a functional
capacity, which separate captain, mates, and crew. His own outlook was
emotionally patrician and aristocratic; but his years in the forecastle
had modified those feelings, and one needs some such compound word as
aristodemocracy to describe his dominant political attitude. Melville
may have had his moments of admiration for the gracious ways of the
South; but, quite properly, he regarded the United States as a place
where narrow tribalisms had been successfully dropped, where the entire
blood of Europe joined together from a thousand sources, the country
being not so much a nation in the old sense, as a world, a neighbourly
world; and he doubtless looked upon the Southern claim to independence
as a return to tribalism and narrowness.
Like most men of good will, Melville looked forward to a time when the
world itself would be federated into a whole, so that the conflicts
between peoples and tribes and communities, the inevitable and salutary
conflicts, would not take place on the physical plane--where they are
disastrous and prove nothing--but on the plane of culture. With this in
view, the breaking up of a federation is a mode of political atavism:
and the attempt reinforced Melville’s natural repugnance to slavery.
Unfortunately, the maintenance of a union by compulsive methods leads
to an enthronement of the powers of the central government, and a
diminution of a regional independence; the military strength of
the central government and its impudence in serving special groups
within the state, in turn becomes an obstacle to the pacification of
the world. Melville could scarcely anticipate this result; but his
philosophy had a place for the evil which dogs the footsteps of the
good, and when he said that America might turn out to be the Paul Jones
of nations, intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless
ambitions, civilized in externals but savage at heart, he may partly
have anticipated the outcome of that political supremacy he expected
the United States finally to attain. By the time the war opened, there
was established a certain fatalism in Melville’s mind which made him
lenient to the forces that seemed to him evil: they, too, in their
inscrutable way were obedient to another power.
Melville’s attitude towards the Civil War was, in sum, just the
opposite of Hawthorne’s; and if the men had been still in communication
during this period, it would probably have opened a final breach
between them. For Hawthorne, New England was as large a piece of
earth as he had any affection for, and whatever happened next, he
asserted in the early days of the conflict, he rejoiced that the old
Union was smashed. “We never were one people, and never really had a
country since the Constitution was founded.” There spoke the shrewd,
unshaken provincial. Hawthorne looked upon John Brown, moreover, as
a poisonous nuisance: for Melville he was a prophetic figure, whose
death made it impossible for the stabs of controversy to heal, whose
streaming beard was the very meteor of war. One may sum up Melville’s
political character by saying that his breeding and instincts were
those of a provincial; his superficial beliefs and attitudes were those
of a political unionist; and during the Civil War the latter were
uppermost, but not wholly so. Well might Walt Whitman describe the
war itself, and the temper of the society that ushered it in, by the
word “convulsiveness.” There was something arcane and uncontrollable
in these partisanships and antipathies: each fragment was thrown about
erratically, tangentially. It was war that produced war; and when the
active state at last came about, men settled to it with a sigh of
relief. War polarized these fragments: it gave an appearance of high
order to this chaos.
2
There is something paradoxical in the fact that Melville’s concern
over slavery and his fervour for the union should have come into
play during a period when he had become indifferent to most of the
nearest issues of life and convinced that existence itself was a
form of slavery. But one must not forget the anomalous nature of war
itself. In its instrumentalities, war is a denial of life: but in mood
and spirit war partly achieves all the things a humane or religious
mind cherishes: selflessness, contempt for creature habits and animal
comforts, nonchalance in the face of death, a willingness to give up
life cheerfully for an ideal end. If it is a sin, war is an heroic sin;
and who, exclaims Melville in Pierre, does not feel more warmly to
the Lord of Evil himself, than towards a petty shopkeeper, who daily
practices all the discreet and serviceable virtues? War is a malign,
ambiguous fulfilment of the things men permanently want in life--and
in its first flush, men forget its sordid accompaniments and its
disastrous results, and respond, not meanly, to its immediate stimulus.
There is no doubt that the prosecution of the war quickened Melville
and made him feel a purpose instead of the dull, fearful hollow of
an empty and respectable life. At forty-two, broken down in health,
unfit for active service, he watched these young men go forth in their
blue uniforms, with flushed faces and eager tread, a little enviously:
comradeship was a warm thing, even among the precious rapscallions
one might find in a whaler: it was an even deeper and warmer matter
among these young men who had shared sport together in their village,
or courted the same girl, or studied together under the same lamp at
college. These happy faces might be going to a picnic, to be pelted
with blossoms, not shrapnel:
Forever they slumber, young and fair,
The smile upon them as they died:
Their end attained, that end a height;
Life was to these a dream fulfilled
And death a starry night.
Unable to throw himself into battle, Melville followed the newspaper
accounts and the bulletins all the more closely. One pictures him
pacing the floor of his room at night, musing over Ball’s Bluff or
Antietam: there is no sleep in him during these racking days: the last
footsteps of a straggler die away in the street: no sound comes through
the air except the distant hoot of a boat on the North River; and