Herman Melville
But tools, they say, are to the strong:
Is Satan weak? Weak is the wrong?
No blessed augury overrules:
Your arts advance in faith’s decay:
You are but drilling the new Hun
Whose growl even now can some dismay;
Vindictive in his heart of hearts,
He schools him in your mines and marts--
A skilled destroyer.
These lines were written in the time of the supremest Victorian
confidence. Herbert Spencer had demonstrated, he thought, by revamping
Comte’s generalization, that a military and feudal order, founded
upon a demonistic theology, was inevitably going to be replaced by an
industrial order, inimical to militarism, and founded upon science and
free contract. That the new arts of industrialism had themselves any
capacity for mischief was not hinted at by the dominant prophets of
the day: Ruskin’s warnings were lonely ones, and he was contemptuously
thrust aside as a fanatical aesthete, who understood the stones of
Venice, perhaps, but not the steel of Sheffield. In the passage just
quoted, Melville went quite as far as Ruskin: industrialism, to him,
offered no certain pledge of happiness or welfare: it depended, rather,
upon who used these tools, and how.
The ruthless sweeping away of human values, the sacrifice of the
worker’s welfare to profits, and of general well-being to a bleak
efficiency, and, finally, the sweeping away of all the decencies
of life in a bestial internecine warfare, aggravated by all the
improvements in the arts: Melville saw all these things, and perceived
that a good part of the routine of education, work, and patriotism
could be called, not least in the “advanced” countries, a drilling of
the Hun. Walter Rathenau, one of the great industrial leaders of the
past generation, came to the same conclusion at the end of the World
War, and he pictured its consequences: but Melville anticipated him
there, as he anticipated the disillusion of the social revolutionists.
He saw that unless human values were firmly established, the practice
of the arts was as blind and futile as the firing of a revolver into
empty air: with power and precision at command, the revolver hits
nothing whatever--but in its very aimlessness, it may destroy something
precious, as the blind projection of a concrete road by a half-witted
road engineer may destroy a row of elms in a New England village.
Melville put this thought, it is true, into the mouth of a religious
zealot: but like everything else in Clarel, it belonged to his own
innermost mood.
Melville, it will be seen, did not in Clarel take refuge in any of
the cheap opiates of his time: his scepticisms are as inexorable, as
thoroughgoing, as they had been in the most devastating pages of The
Confidence Man; but, with all this dubiety, there is a difference in
the mood; and though Clarel pictures the thoughts of men unfrocked in
faith, and shows them wandering over many arid deserts and picking
their way through the broken streets of many ruined towns, something
solid, the beginnings of a new faith, kept Melville himself from
slipping into hopeless indifference or more hopeless despair. Whether
Melville intentionally symbolized his dilemma in the fable I do not
know; and in the light of his deliberate subtlety in Moby-Dick one
cannot say positively that he did not: but the unconscious significance
of Clarel’s love affair is perhaps worth speculating upon; for it
affected his attitude and his conclusion.
Clarel fell in love with a Jewish maid, as Melville had fallen in
love with ancient Jewish thought. Christianity was at times repugnant
to Melville, for the highest virtue had for him necessarily some of
the Greek or Hebraic element of power, and the epicene Christ of
mediaeval legend did not attract him; nor was he comforted by supernal
promises of an after-life. If Melville confesses that the truest of
all men was the Man of Sorrows, he added that “the truest of all
books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of
woe.” In the period of his own discomposure, the black aphorisms of
Solomon, Koheleth, and Jesus-ben-Sirach, and the bitter plaints of
Job, were closer to him than anything else in literature. “There is a
wisdom that is woe,” Melville had found, “and there is a woe that is
madness.” He had come to the first, and he had stood on the brink of
madness: looking in the Bible for comfort, Melville had found, in the
greatest of the Jewish writers, only a confirmation of his own fears
and exasperations. “Oppression maketh a wise man mad.” “Man is born to
trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Such sayings deepened his sympathy
with Jewish culture; and, in the sense that they carried the same
burden as his own, they lessened his load. Ruth, Clarel’s love, dies;
and the fulfilment that Clarel had hoped to find there, he must now
find in his own bosom, with only the memory of her spirit to comfort
him.
6
Why then, with all these virtues of thought, is Clarel necessarily
Melville’s most neglected book? The capital difficulty, I think, is
inherent in its very conception as a narrative poem: it is impossible
to carry through so many pages the quick sympathies and empathies
that it is in the nature of verse to give. Wordsworth probably had
as much skill in blank verse as any one since Shakespeare, and he
was unable to avoid long waste tracts in his lengthy philosophic
and biographic poems. Blake and Whitman, with a surer instinct,
developed polyphonic cadences for their long poems, and this is the
only tolerable alternative, I think, at least in English, to the
immeasurable variety of prose itself. Melville’s eight-syllabled lines
in Clarel are monotonous, vary the rhyme scheme as he will; they are
made even more tedious by the stale poetic airs that accompanied it.
Melville’s aloofness and spiritual independence, which cut him off from
his own contemporaries, not merely saved him from their errors and
superstitions: it also prevented him from profiting by their genuine
advances. With the exception of Whitman and Emily Dickinson, scarcely
any of Melville’s contemporaries had participated in that great
refreshment of poetic language, by the fuller use of the vernacular,
by discarding the powdered wig of “poetic diction,” and by the use
of direct and simple word order, that had been made possible by
Wordsworth’s propaganda and example. In his lesser poems Emerson sinned
in this respect almost as much as the poetasters around him; and Poe’s
“tarns” and Nycean barks of yore and his seraphim were typical of the
exaggerations and clichés that afflicted the American poets of his time.
In the verses of his later years, Melville largely escaped from this
fashionable prison; but in Clarel he was too frequently the victim of
his uncertain taste. He tags adjectives on to nouns to eke out the
line; he uses, all too frequently, words like fane and sward and rue
and twain and nigh, and, with unforgivable recurrence, he rhymes elf
and self; above all, not relying on his ear for more subtle quantities,
he fills out lines with redundant words or phrases--or clips them off.
This clumsiness in detail adds to the clumsiness of conception: what
might have been vivid prose became dull verse: what might have been
good Borrow became bad Rogers. Mid all this poetizing there remains,
of course, a little poetry: lines that lift out of the grey pages like
a sudden sea gull from the monotonous surface of the ocean: there
are even whole passages, in particular the Dirge that comes toward
the end, which are veritably moving. But although the materials for
intense feeling or vivid imagism are present, they are spoiled in the
mixing. All this acute observation of men, things, places, seems to
clog Melville’s spirit: when he achieves victory, it is a victory of
thought: an idea becomes pregnant and a dozen good lines are born. But
the detail over-rides the general impression, as the ingenuity of the
Hindu craftsman over-rides the total effect of his wood-carving: the
movement is slow: the aim is dispersed. There is a story and a climax
in Clarel; but we do not feel them in passage. We miss the poignance of
Ruth’s death, by having forgotten her entirely.
It is unfortunate that Melville diverted into the ingenuities of a
foreign versification the energies that should have gone into mastery
of the theme itself. But matter and manner are always one; and because
Melville did not find harmonious form for his intuitions, we are
deprived of a good part of them, and those that remain we must pick,
like precious shards, from the refuse heap of the poem. He was a true
poet; but formal verse was not his medium; and the relentless probity
of his mind, the keen reaching into the heart of a dilemma, lacked in
these lengthy verses an appropriate vehicle. Melville was wrong when
he thought that some of the aroma might have exhaled during the years
Clarel remained unpublished: the aroma had never been there.
7
It was a long, weary pilgrimage, this pilgrimage of Melville’s,
as Clarel is a long, weary poem; but at the end of it, something
crystallized within him, and without blunting his doubts or shutting
off his conflict, at last focussed them. Something happened to Melville
in Palestine, or during the years between, that was the equivalent of
falling in love with a Jewish maiden. Although Clarel returned from
his pilgrimage to find himself bereft, the experience of love had
given him something: the love that would have redeemed the universe
for Captain Ahab and kept him from his deadly contest with the whale,
now was a pledge of his own redemption for Melville. What the nature
of that experience was one does not know: one can only judge by its
final effect; and in the last pages of Clarel the whole weary strife of
debate is suddenly brought to a close, at the end of the lover’s grief,
in the epilogue with its pledge and hope:
Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned--
Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind;
That like the crocus budding through the snow--
That like a swimmer rising from the deep--
That like a burning secret which doth go
Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep;
Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea,
And prove that death but routs life into victory.
The budding crocus, the rising swimmer, the bursting secret were
symbols of a new promise in Melville’s own life: in the Epilogue one
sees the later Melville, who had approached, and was slowly finding
peace, rather than the unsettled, bitter man who wandered through
Palestine, and confronted the “caked depopulated hell” of barren
Judah. There was no verbal answer, no creed, no theology, no orthodoxy
to comfort him and give a final meaning in exchange for his present
soreness and perplexity. God does not answer Job: he overawes and
silences and converts him and suddenly showers him with blessings:
the relief is as mysterious as the oppression which makes a wise man
mad. So with Melville. An animal faith, the dumb belief in all the
immediate presentations of life--this animal faith, quickened by
love, knit together again. Creeds are, after all, only the suspicious
distortions of this dim, plasmal sense that bottoms all of us. When
that faith exists, life even in its humblest aspects is neither black
nor terrible, however heavy its disappointments; without it, all that
the world values is thin, and all that the heart may contemplate is
empty. There is no rational justification for this animal faith; for it
is part of the nature of man and perhaps of all living things, and it
antedates the doubts and difficulties that would disturb it.
Again and again Melville confronted this problem; and much though he
admired the order and art they introduced, he could not accept the
solutions offered by Judaism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, or historic