Herman Melville
Melville’s mind plays back and forth across the days. Intermittently,
all the old glow would come back to him in these dark moments: he would
picture himself perhaps, borne by the tide of men at his back over an
earthworks, as he was borne in a whaleboat on the back of the lashing
whale. The reckless lift: the thrust: the yell of defiance: being
thrown down and struggling to rise again through a tangled drift of
legs and bodies: the shout of victory: the feeling of proud defiance:
the knowledge that death does not matter when one is at last, with all
one’s senses quickened, face to face with it. The whaleman’s joy: the
soldier’s joy: the joy of hard living and easy dying!
The war, with its heroism and defeat, was the image of Melville’s own
life; and, in the blackest night, the glow of its fires illumined his
face. The rigid order of warfare gave Melville the sense of a cosmic
purpose at work: in the working out of Dupont’s Round Fight Melville
saw another significance in the struggle for the Union: it was not the
political bond that Melville’s contemporaries alone wanted confirmed:
they desired that the Universe itself should hold together! Melville’s
interpretation is, I think, an illusory one; but one cannot question
the deep need that it expressed.
In time and measure perfect moves
All art whose aim is sure;
Evolving rhyme and stars divine
Have rules and they endure.
Nor less the fleet that warred for Right
And warring so, prevailed,
In geometric beauty curved
And in an orbit sailed.
The Rebel at Port Royal felt
The Unity overawe
And rued the spell. A type was here
And victory of law.
But it was the happy fortune of youth that Melville, betrayed by the
disasters of middle age, returned to when he contemplated the war. Who,
he asked, can remain aloof that shares youth’s ardour, uncooled by the
snows of wisdom or sordid gain? War made life again a great spectacle
and a great adventure: that defiance of the low limitations upon which
life depends, which Melville had expressed in Moby-Dick, came back
again: vanished at last were the doubts, perturbations, speculations,
cynicisms, endless grey questionings. Ten years before Melville might
have been repelled by the evil and ugliness of it: the maimed bodies,
the cruelties, the infamous prison and concentration camps, the furtive
squads of deserters, the hospital agonies, the litany of unknown
soldiers and nameless burial spots that Whitman gravely remembered and
recited. Now Melville was armed for the evil and ugliness of it, and
even for its futility:
No utter surprise can come to him
Who reaches Shakespeare’s core;
That which we seek and shun is there--
Man’s final lore.
Melville was possibly in New York in 1863, when the carnival of looting
and murder and general protest took place over the infliction of the
draft. He pictures himself, oppressed by the sultry air, climbing to
the roof-top and looking over the hushed city: in the distance, he
hears the mixed surf of muffled sound, the roar of riot and the dull
glare of fires. The city was in the hands of the mob, and that mob had
sunk “whole aeons back into nature,” vindictive, cruel, irresponsible,
blind, bloodthirsty. Melville heard the rumble of the artillery which
finally broke up the riot and exacted vengeance on the mob; and,
pondering this event, he was conscious of the grimy slur upon the
Republic’s faith, a slur implied by the cause of the outbreak, by the
outbreak itself, and by the suppression of it. Where was now the belief
in life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness? Where now the conviction
that man is naturally good and--“more--is Nature’s Roman, never to be
scourged”? With all his new enthusiasm, Melville’s deeper perceptions
were never altogether out of sight:
Did the Fathers feel mistrust?
Can no final good be wrought?
Over and over, again and again
Must the fight for the Right be fought?
Were men but strong and wise,
Honest as Grant and calm,
War would be left to the red and black ants
And the happy world disarm.
Even the supremacy of the Union, Melville finally came to see, might
bring some other result than the purpose for which it was conceived.
In one of the prefatory poems in his Battle Pieces, the Conflict of
Convictions 1860-1861, Melville expressed his doubt: from the allusion
to the Iron Dome it is plain that the verse was written later, when
the Dome itself had been put into place on the Capitol at Washington,
by one of those happy accidents that sometimes give an event its exact
appropriate symbol.
Power unannointed may come--
Dominion (unsought by the free)
And the Iron Dome
Stronger for stress and strain
Fling her huge shadow athwart the main;
But the Founders’ dream shall flee.
Age after age shall be
As age after age hath been,
(From man’s changeless heart their way they win);
And death shall be busy with all who strive,
Death, with silent negative.
Yea and Nay,
Each hath his say;
But God he keeps the middle way.
None was by
When he spread the sky;
Wisdom is vain, and prophecy.
Though he was emotionally at one with the war, Melville’s thoughts were
not entirely harmonized with his feelings: his ultimate doubts crept
into his most sanguine reactions to the conflict; and at bottom, the
things that quickened him were not the formal purposes of the conflict
but its incidents--the flashing youths, the gallant charge, the daring
commander, the spirited horse that carried Sheridan to battle. “Nothing
can lift the heart of man like manhood in a fellow man,” he says. The
Civil War satisfied this desperate need in his own soul: but apart from
its animal vigour and glory, even its solidest purposes seemed infirm
and fragile. He pictures an heroic soldier, surviving the carnage,
the Seven Days’ Fight, the Wilderness, the field-hospital, and Libby
Prison--surviving it and reflecting on his experience: “Heaven! what
_truth_ to him!” He himself had already drained the lees of adversity;
the war had nothing to add there, except to make his own experience
that of a whole generation.
3
In the break of emotional tension caused by the fall of Richmond,
Melville wrote most of his verses on the Civil War. A few were printed
in the magazines during the first part of 1866, and later in the year,
Melville collected and published the whole volume of verse, Battle
Pieces and Other Aspects of the War; with a supplement, gravely and
well written, in which he counterbalanced any Unionist fervour and
elation he might have shown in the battle poems, by discussing, with
great sympathy and tact, the plight of the South and the psychological
problems confronting the North, particularly, in dealing with it.
One of the poems in the collection, Sheridan at Cedar Creek, was long
quoted as one of the memorable poems evoked by the war; but, although
Melville’s verses on the war are the only serious contemporary rivals
to Whitman’s Drum-Taps, one cannot, with the most lenient eye, put them
in the same class. Melville rarely achieved form as a poet: he was
often very near to it, as we shall see when we examine his poems about
the sea and his travels: but although the sensitiveness, the emotional
tension, the rough powers of expression, in short, the ingredients of
poetry were there, he permitted himself to be conquered by the external
form of line and stanza: his rhythms are broken, not by their own inner
development, but because they meet a foreign object, and get shattered
against it. These verses are such jewelry as a sculptor might make.
Melville’s mallet and chisel and sinew were of little use with a pitch
block and a graving-tool.
Among these verses there are a few stanzas that give one a hint of
what Melville’s potentialities as a poet were: his poem on John Brown
is one of them, and another occurs in a poem commemorative of a naval
victory--despite the weakness of the second line, it rings like a bell.
But seldom the laurel wreath is seen
Unmixed with pensive pansies dark;
There’s a light and a shadow on every man
Who at last attains his lifted mark--
Nursing through night the ethereal spark.
Elate he never can be;
He feels that spirit which had hailed his worth
Sleep in oblivion.--The shark
Glides white through the sulphurous sea.
It is no accident that this stanza utters Melville’s deepest intuition
of life. Here image is symbol, and the symbol presents, without further
reflection or explanation, the idea in its totality: _the shark glides
white through the sulphurous sea_. There is something final in that.
Melville might hope: he might be stirred up: he might join hands with
his fellows: he might even achieve victory: all these things had
happened in the collective excitement of the Civil War; but in the end
the elation and exaltation were doomed to pass away. In the very act
of achieving personal success, Melville had become aware of something
in the Constitution of the Universe that fatally marred it: the shark
glides white through the sulphurous sea. His demon was not deceived. It
lived in the midst of chaos, and this Civil War, unified, regimented,
ordered, inexorable as it seemed, was chaos, too. Order springs from
within, mixing with circumstance but never carried away by it: in
other words, order is art--and art was the one thing lacking in the
whole plan of life that had arisen to dominate America. Raw power,
raw experience, were uppermost. White sharks swam everywhere: shark
ate shark, and greedily battened upon the refuse of the sinking boat.
No use to fight the White Whale, if the boat that holds human culture
breaks up, and the crew is killed, and only the sharks remain in the
waters. I have expanded Melville’s symbol, perhaps; but one cannot
magnify his disillusion. As early as 1866 he noted in his Supplement
that “for them who are neither partisans nor enthusiasts, nor
theorists, nor cynics, there are some doubts not readily to be solved.
And there are fears. Why is not the cessation of war now at length
attended with the settled calm of peace?”
In his Supplement, Melville pleaded for generosity to the vanquished,
for a spirit of forbearance, for the sort of magnanimity that the
Union soldiers showed at Vicksburg, when they watched the dejected
Confederates file out without raising a shout of triumph. “Let us
pray,” he concluded, “that the terrible historic tragedy of our time
may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved
country through terror and pity; and may fulfillment verify in the end
those expectations which kindle the bards of Progress and Humanity.”
Melville was definitely not one of the bards of progress and humanity;
but in the loose sympathies of wartime, he had listened to all their
righteous self-praise and their optimistic predictions; and though he
did not share their philosophy, he at least joined them in their hopes,
while there was still a possibility that they might be pragmatically
justified.
That weak optimism came to nothing. There was a treachery that annulled
these efforts--the treachery of the madness that resulted in Lincoln’s
death: the vindictive virtue of the Abolitionists, who inflicted
military occupation and carpet-bag governments on their fallen enemies:
and that very tragic topsy-turvydom of war which provides snug berths
and comfortable fortunes to the profiteers and speculators, and offers
a sordid routine and a share in the general bankruptcy to those who are
unfortunate enough to escape a quick and early death.
The Union had perhaps been worth dying for: but nobody could confront
the post-bellum scene, with its Vanderbilts and Jay Cookes and Daniel