Herman Melville
Abreast kept with the age, the year
And each bright optimistic mind,
Nor lagged with Solomon in rear,
And Job, the furthermost behind--
Brisk marching in time’s drum-corps van
Abreast with whistling Jonathan.
But these Pilgrims do not while away the hour with merry tales:
instead of being able to assume the faith, and take life pretty much
as it comes, as Chaucer’s honest folk did, their faith is threatened
and disintegrated, and even life’s happiness is a problem that must
be solved: it exacerbates them almost as much as their emptiness.
Chaucer’s people eat, drink, joke, love, quarrel, cozen, cheat, hate,
envy: living in a world where these things exist, along with chivalry
and nobility and chastity, they are neither saddened nor puzzled,
because the framework of that world is articulated, and each part of
it has its necessary place--even the sins. Among Melville’s pilgrims,
however, not even the virtues are safe: each man lives in a private
world that trembles and dissolves at every shock.
Contrast these pious atheists, these doubtful scholars, these sobered
revolutionaries, with the Mussulman, the orthodox Jew, the bland,
beef-fed English clergyman, or the Roman Catholic abbot. The latter go
through their daily ritual without question or loss of energy: their
orthodoxy is secure and they themselves are untroubled: wrapped in
an absorbing dream, their body is indifferent to the hard pallet on
which they lie. The mocking Jewish atheist is happy, too; as Spinoza,
blessed with a diviner illusion, was happy: but the question is: Can a
Clarel, a Rolfe, a Mortmain, in short, a Melville, acquire that sort of
serenity without cutting himself off from his very flesh and tissue?
Once one has broken out of the orthodoxy, one can no more go back to
it than a disturbed sleeper can resume the thread of a vanished dream,
no more than a grown man can go back to the games of his childhood.
There was once a time no doubt when he could call sand sugar and stones
bread: but now stones were stones, cold, flinty--no doubt about that.
“The pains lie among the pleasures,” Melville noted while in Palestine,
“like sand in rice, not only bad in themselves, but spoiling the good”;
and this held of faith and doubt as well as pain and pleasure.
Melville’s insight no longer shrivelled and blasted the very
constitution of man, as in The Confidence Man; but it pierced,
perhaps, even deeper. An indictment of humanity itself is a blank
indictment which turns the accuser into one of the principal
defendants: one suspects the morals of Juvenal and the kindliness
of Swift, precisely because they see so little of these qualities
in the people about them. In Clarel, Melville went through country
after country, and institution after institution, as he had done
in Mardi: here he points out a weak joint, there a plaster-covered
crack, or in another place a false foundation. One cannot evade these
specific criticisms. From the atheist who jeers at Rome--“patcher of
the rotten cloth, pickier of the wing of the moth, toaster of bread
stale in date”--to the reactionary religionist who attacks Derwent’s
belief in a Christianity blandly coupled with comfort and progress and
toasted muffins and dividends, all working together for the greater
glory of Mammon, scarcely any of the complacencies of Melville’s age
escaped: his chilly wind blew the rotten roof off every house of
refuge. Blake paused at the wonder of life, which had with the same
breath created the tiger and the lamb: but Melville in a mordant line
said: “If true what priests avouch of Thee, the shark Thou madst, yet
claimst the dove.” These lines show, I think, that the consolations of
transcendental religion were always far from Melville. The consolations
of Progress were, alas! equally remote: Melville had small use for
those who heaved contempt on “rite and creed sublime” and yet clung
to their own rank fable, the “latest shame of time.” In the conflict
between a crumbling theology and a cocky, over-confident science,
Melville could take neither side. Melville felt that the scantling of
the contemporary scientific outlook was no equivalent for the massive
architecture of the ancient church; nor could he reassure himself,
when he found cold adverse rains beating down on his head, that the
scantling was a new and finer kind of architecture.
Yea, long as children feel affright
In darkness, men shall fear a God;
And long as daisies yield delight
Shall see His footprints in the sod.
Is’t ignorance? This ignorant state
Science doth but elucidate,
Deepen, enlarge....
Let fools count on faith’s closing knell--
Time, God, are inexhaustible.
Melville was aware of the historic parallel to his own age; and he knew
what its outcome had been. Christ had followed Osiris: Jesus had indeed
come out of Egypt, as the legend said; and in the time of Cicero, when
Roman society was in the same state of doubt, disruption, and despair
as the Western world was in Clarel’s day, a new era of resolution and
faith was beginning to open. Doubt and all its maladies in the moral
life were no more final in society than they were in the individual:
“There is,” Melville said, “no steady unretracing progress in this
life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one
pause:--through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless
faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then
disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But
once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and
men, and Ifs eternally.” Like Matthew Arnold, Melville was keenly aware
of the transition; but, being an American, he could not accept the mere
sense of historic continuity, of a favourable inertia, as a substitute
for a new faith.
When one examines the mood of Clarel and the conclusions of one of
the pilgrims, Mortmain, the Swede, who had been a prophet of the new
order and a revolutionary, bent on carrying further the vast abstract
programme of the French revolution, one becomes conscious of the
exceptional maturity of Melville’s social observation. Melville had
reached by sober meditation what Herzen, for example, had achieved
only after a long kindergarten training in ideals and enthusiasms.
Men like Herzen had avoided ultimate issues. They drugged themselves
with plot, conspiracy, oratory, propaganda, every form of verbal
busy work. They ended in total disillusion, without seeing that they
should not have reached this spiritual desert had they started out
with a less abstract and barrenly subjective view of their task. Now,
Melville, too, realized that the social revolution had already taken on
a millennial character by 1848: it was the new democratic equivalent
of the older scheme of salvation by faith, and men like Bakunin and
Louis Blanc and Engels had found in it something that knit their
lives together and gave them significance, as the Civil War did for
Melville, as other-worldly religion did for the orthodox. With this in
mind, Melville’s comments upon Mortmain’s adventures are all the more
pregnant; for Mortmain came to doubt not so much his purposes as his
instruments:
... Wear and tear and jar
He met with coffee and cigar:
These kept awake the man and mood
And dream. That uncreated Good
He sought whose absence is the cause
Of creeds and Atheists, mobs and laws.
Precocities of heart outran
The immaturities of brain.
Along with each superior mind
The vain, foolhardy, worthless, blind,
With Judases, are nothing loath
To clasp pledged hands and take the oath
Of aim, the which, if just, demands
Strong hearts, brows deep, and priestly hands.
* * * * *
Wouldst meddle with the state? Well, mount
Thy guns; how many men dost count?
Besides, there’s more that here belongs:
Be many questionable wrongs:
By yet more questionable war
Prophet of peace, these wouldst thou bar?
The world’s not new, nor new thy plea.
Tho’ even shouldst thou triumph, see:
Victorious right may wild redress:
No failure like a harsh success.
Yea, ponder well the historic page:
Of all who, fired with noble rage,
Have warred for right without reprieve.
* * * * *
The world is portioned out, believe:
The good have but a patch at best,
The wise their corner, for the rest--
Malice divides with ignorance.
Insight like this may be fatal to a weak man, or added poison to a
disappointed one: but when a man well bottomed takes it to his bosom,
he is no longer defenceless against his own inner hopes, desires,
wishes: he goes armed. Such wisdom does not nullify generous efforts:
a Lenin may count his guns and men and still wage revolution: he will
not do this the worse for recognizing, as Lenin grimly did, all the
vain and foolish people who, along with the Judases, divide place with
those who have strong hands and deep brows. Life is stultified by
vacuous dreams, dreams of achievement without effort, pleasure without
satiety, art without discipline, or a better social order without a
moral and metaphysical conversion of the very people who must bring
it about. Besides these dreams, the most gritty reality is a tonic.
To acknowledge these realities, instead of seeking weak consolations
or empty reassurances, is the mark of a mature mind. Melville had
penetrated as far as Herzen the psychological problem of revolutionary
betterment: but he was almost fifty years “before his time” in stating
it. We can understand Melville’s social scepticism today, and we
should not, perhaps, remain so long in the trough of our own wave,
apathetically waiting for a dictatorship or an earthquake or a war to
rouse us and focus our energies once more, had we been able to learn
from Melville the necessary cost of our efforts. For every act of the
wise and the good is nullified by malice and ignorance, unless the wise
and the good learn to reckon these evils among the conditions of their
problem. Melville had faced human nature as a whole: he was not blind
to its inert or irrational elements; nor could he accept “A Reasonable
Constitution” that overlooked them.
What though Reason forged your scheme?
’Twas Reason dreamed the Utopia’s dream:
’Tis dream to think that Reason can
Govern the reasoning creature, man.
Melville’s scepticism did not flinch at even the securest parts of the
conceptual universe.
Canst feel elate
While all the depths of Being moan,
Though luminous on every hand,
The breadths of shallow knowledge more expand?
Much as the light-ship keeper pines
Mid shoals immense, where dreary shines
His lamp, we toss beneath the ray
Of Science’s beacon. This to trim
Is now man’s barren office.
But the tentative nature of science’s triumphs, and the disintegration
of the great religious unity which had heretofore provided an
intelligible framework, still left one possible avenue unexplored.
Perhaps salvation was to be found, as André Gide has suggested
in his study of Dostoyevsky, in the practice of the arts, such
salvation as the great minds of the Renaissance found amid similar
disruption: Wren, with his multitudinous buildings that housed an empty
ecclesiasticism, Leonardo and Michelangelo with the saints that had
lost their ineffable powers and taken on the forms of mighty men and
women, Rembrandt with those thousand enigmatic faces, gazing back, with
questioning eyes, into eyes that still question. Melville did not, I
believe, fully understand this solution or face its possibility: but he
saw one side of it, the advance of the mechanical arts, and there, with
cold acumen, he beheld no happy sequel: rather the contrary:
... Arts are tools;