Herman Melville
Drews, without wondering seriously whether the Union was worth living
for. The heroes were dead: dead or incapacitated: incapacitated or
tired. Those who had any fight left in them would fight for Civil
Service Reform, as Carl Schurz did, or if they had energy, they would
go into railroads, like Charles Francis Adams: it was no accident
that those who sought a career less in harmony with the accepted good
works of industrialism--a Henry Hobbes Richardson, a Mark Twain, a
Henry Adams, a William James, a Stanley Hall--were usually men who
had by one chance or another lived during the war at a considerable
distance from the struggle, and who had missed, not alone the fine
heroism of that experience, but the terrible disillusion and collapse
that follows such efforts; and who, like Stanley Hall, were moved to
expiate their failure to risk death on the battlefield by living a
little more arduously and heroically on the plane of daily life. These
men might seek patiently to build up their careers; but those who had
been buoyed up by the great energies and expectations of provincial
America, in that Golden Day when they had grasped power and material
mastery without losing hold of culture and form--those earlier writers
and makers found themselves sinking helplessly out of sight, battered
wrecks, submerged by the tide of industry and finance, whose waves rose
higher and higher during the ten years that followed the great storm.
There were no quiet waters for these men; or, if they found them, as
Emerson did, as Whitman did, they lost the power to go to sea again;
and, instead of being beaten to pieces on the treacherous coast, merely
rotted at the wharf.
In 1866, at the age of forty-seven, Herman Melville, too, withdrew
from the war, defeated. That fine “scorn of life which earns life’s
crown”--earns, but does not always win it--had left him with the
burdens, difficulties, grievances of a returning soldier. He had fought
a not less worthy fight; and now, once for all, he retreated. He did
not surrender; for he kept on writing to the end of his days; but he
could no more live on his writings than a veteran of the Grand Army
could exchange his medals and scars for honest bread. Melville was
forced to face this fact, after twenty years of writing and fifteen
years of continuous, desperate struggle. He had not given in quickly or
petulantly; and when he finally made this decision, one can detect in
it no sign of outraged vanity or reproach. He had gauged his position:
he knew the worst: he was prepared to meet it. Through the offices
of an old travelling companion, he found a place as inspector in the
Custom House, a post he had described in Redburn as “a most inglorious
one; indeed, worse than driving geese to water.”
From this time on a sweetness and serenity began to spread over the
man. The dark torture of Pierre and The Confidence Man might return in
weak moments; there might be hours of stormy egoism or inner defiance;
but in the main there was peace. This, too, he had anticipated for
himself in Isabel’s words, almost half a generation before: “My spirit
seeks different food from happiness; for I think I have a suspicion
of what it is. I have suffered wretchedness, but not because of the
absence of happiness, and without praying for happiness, I pray for
peace--for motionlessness--for the feeling of myself, as of some plant,
absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual
sensation.” A Hindu sage might have sought this peace in the forest:
Melville, with quiet irony, sought it in the Custom House.
4
The decision was made; the door was closed: Melville’s troubles and
humiliations could carry him no lower. For the first time in ten
years Melville had the means, the energy, the relief from anxiety
necessary for the prosecution of a long work, and with indomitable
spirit he set to work again. Melville’s retreat was not a withdrawal
from his proper self, but a withdrawal from the conditions that
hampered its expression--the taste of the public and the predilections
of publishers, the demand for warmed-over Peedee and Hullabaloo.
“How live at all,” he asks himself, “if once a fugitive from thy own
nobler part, though pain be portion inwrought with the grain,” and in
this sense Melville was never a fugitive. His next effort was a long
narrative poem--the original edition in two volumes numbers 571 pages
and about 20,000 lines--based on his Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. In
his Constantinople notebook, he had originally set down a suggestion
for Frescoes of Travel by Three Brothers, Poet, Painter, and Scholar;
and in the intervening years the conception had grown and expanded into
a modern Canterbury pilgrimage of the harassed, the faithless, the
doubting, the exiled. Clarel, this new work, was not published till
1876; but the book itself was probably written shortly after the Civil
War: the heightened skill in verse, the reference to the Civil War in
Part IV, the fact that the poem is all of a piece, and the testimony
of Melville’s surviving daughter, all focus on this period; and
Melville’s own reference to the poem’s having been long in existence
before his uncle, Mr. Peter Gansevoort, generously provided money for
its publication, enables one to associate the beginning of this mental
pilgrimage with his withdrawal into the Custom House.
Melville’s short sojourn in Palestine had made a deep impression on
him: the notes that belonged to those weeks were full of observations.
In Jerusalem he had encountered all sorts of queer people: an old
commercial man giving tracts to people whose language he did not
understand; a Philadelphian turned Jew, who had married a Jewess;
a fanatical American missionary going about Jerusalem with an open
Bible, looking forward to the opening asunder of Mount Olivet and
in the meanwhile preparing the highway for the procession of the
dead; a crazy American woman who had opened an agricultural academy
for the Jews without converting a single Jew to either agriculture
or Christianity. Deliberately he had saturated his mind with the
atmosphere of Jerusalem, “offering myself up,” he noted, “as a passive
subject, and no unwilling one, to its weird impression,” and always
rising at dawn and walking outside the city walls. In the afternoon
he would stand by the Shepherd’s Gate, on the spot where Christ was
stoned, and “watch the shadows sliding, sled-like, down the hills of
Beretta and Zion into the valley of Jehoshaphat, then, after resting
awhile, creeping up the opposite side of Olivet, entering tomb after
tomb, and cave after cave.” The Christ-mood sometimes came over
him; he felt in himself the unrecognized god, or the goaded deity,
the mystic scapegoat of an inscrutable patriarchal presence; he too
had climbed the way of Calvary. But the Devil’s ingenuity did not
impress him: the Mount of Temptation was only a black, arid mount
overlooking the Dead Sea: why did the foolish fiend think any one
would value the rulership of such an empire--and if it was only a
vision, why take him up to the Mount? But though every rock and road
had an association, it was the landscape of Palestine that overwhelmed
him: the arid hills, the smell of burning rubbish in Jerusalem, the
melancholy olive tree, the whitish mildew that pervaded whole tracts of
landscape--bleached--leprosy--encrustation of cakes--old cheese--bones
of rocks--crunched, gnawed, and mumbled--mere refuse and rubbish of
creation, comparing with ordinary regions as a skeleton with the
living and rosy man. “Is the desolation of the land,” Melville asked
himself, “the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity? Hapless are
the favourites of Heaven!” Palestine had dissipated his romantic
expectation; but it had reciprocated all the aridness and emptiness
of his spirit. In the antediluvian port of Joppa, just before his
departure, Joppa, which was too ancient to have antiquities, he felt
like Jonah himself, and only strong self-control and grim defiance
enabled him to keep cool and patient. The Dead Sea had concentrated all
these impressions: the foam on the beach and pebbles had been like the
slaver of a mad dog: the water had been swarthy, bitter, and, carrying
the bitter taste in his mouth all day, he had felt the utter bitterness
of life. “Bitter is it to be poor and bitter to be reviled, and oh,
bitter are these waters of death, thought I.”
All these sights and experiences formed the background of Clarel; but
the poem itself is far richer in detail than the notebooks: it is an
imaginative elaboration of his experiences, and not a reproduction
of them. The arid background, which reflected Melville’s own feeling
of hopelessness in 1857, retreated: the foreground is thronged
with people who have independent lives and motives. All the major
characters, Clarel the student, Vine the wanderer, Rolfe, another
uneasy wanderer, Mortmain, the disillusioned Swedish revolutionary, and
Ungar, a Baltimore Catholic with a streak of Indian in him, all these
characters, it is true, centre like focussed rays in Melville’s own
being, baffled by his perplexities, and arguing, like his own doubts,
among themselves. The spirit that pervades Clarel is sober, restrained,
steady-eyed: its failure as poetry is due, in part, to this very
sobriety of thought.
5
The first part discloses Clarel, a student who has abandoned his
preparations for the ministry, in Jerusalem. He has come to lay his
inner questions at the gates of religion’s own city, thinking to find
from an older race, the Jews, with a remoter history, some clue to
the unsettled and uneasy state in which he lives, and some path of
development which will lead again to wholeness. Behind the crumbling
faith of Rome and Luther is the crag of Sinai--adamant! While exploring
Jerusalem, Clarel makes the acquaintance of an American, Nathan, who
has become a convert to Judaism, and falls in love with his daughter,
Ruth. Nathan’s Jewish wife and daughter, though loyal to the faith,
still long for some of the things America had given them--and they do
not altogether share the zeal of the convert. Even in Jerusalem, the
story swarms with characters: Melville tells the history of each chance
acquaintance, as if by a thousand examples from the lives of other men
one might find an answer to one’s own. Most of these lives, though
Melville gives them a foreign birthplace, are touched by the reflected
light of his own history. Thus in Celio’s story, one cannot help
following Melville’s own plight:
Fain had his brothers have him grace
Some civic honorable place:
And interest was there to win
Ample preferment: he as kin
Was loved, if but ill understood:
At heart they had his worldly good:
But he postponed and went his way
Unpledged, unhampered....
Since love, arms, courts abjure--why then
Remaineth to me what? The pen?
Dead feather of ethereal life?
Nor efficacious much, save when
It makes some fallacy more rife.
My kin--I blame them not at heart--
Would have me act some routine part,
Subserving family, and dreams
Alien to me--illusive schemes.
Ruth’s father is killed on his lonely farm by Arab raiders and robbers,
and Clarel is not permitted by Jewish custom to enter the House of
Mourning. Being cut off from his beloved, he decides to ease his
loneliness by joining a cavalcade, going across Palestine to the Dead
Sea, through the wilderness where John wandered, and back again by
Bethlehem. On the journey, we are deliberately reminded of Chaucer’s
Pilgrims, and the robust, full-blooded, healthy, superficial, English
Broad Churchman, Derwent--the most completely embodied character in
the whole book--is described with a little of that soft sweet malice
Chaucer knew so well how to use.
Thought’s last adopted style he showed;