Herman Melville
Christianity. In his preface to a poetic fragment, Rammon, Melville
puts the dilemma before a son of Solomon’s old age, immoderately
influenced by his father’s despondent philosophy. “Vanity of
vanities--such is this life. As to a translated life in some world
hereafter--far be that thought. A primary law binds the universe. The
worlds are like apples on the tree; in flavour and tint one apple
perchance may somewhat differ from another, but all partake of the same
sap. One of the worlds we know. And what find we here? Much good, a
preponderance of good; that is, good it would be could it be winnowed
from the associate evil that taints it. But evil is no accident. Like
good it is an irremoveable element. Bale out your individual boat if
you can, but the sea remains the sea.”
In his despair, Rammon is attracted to Buddhism by Prince Siddartha’s
personality and by the fact that his high rank had not hardened his
heart to the lot of the mass of mankind, “nor in any wise intercepted a
just view of the immense spectacle of things.” But Rammon is too young
to realize, with Melville, the fallacy of Buddha’s very situation:
it did not occur to him to conjecture “that the more spiritual,
wide-seeing, conscientious and sympathetic the nature, so much the
more spiritually isolated, and isolation is the mother of illusion.”
Melville was on guard against this error: isolated, he had refused
illusion, the last comfort of isolation, and had abandoned all efforts
to explain away man’s helplessness and ignorance, and his corporeal
extinction: he accepted this condition as a datum. And yet life went
on! Far better, this, than a new illusion; for it brought self-respect
and a belief in those forms of ideality which are within man’s power
to achieve or experience. By skilfully managing his little boat, not
by pronouncing metaphysical incantations over the storm, man keeps
afloat mid the vast waters that threaten him. The boat may be swamped,
perhaps; but there is no other way! Life bottomed all formulas: art
fended off catastrophe--if life ebbed or art ceased to be effective,
well, one had faced reality and had respected necessity and one could
meet the end with ironic resignation: in effect, the most dogmatic and
devout could do no more.
At the end of Clarel, Melville found life, not good or bad, malicious
or forbearing, true or false. Something more important had happened:
he found it livable. In that mood the days that followed the Civil War
were spent, quiet, chastened, subdued, temperate days....
8
One may figure Melville’s career as a June evening--the sun glowing
in the sky, the birds darting about the trees, chattering, warbling,
trilling, intensely active. The sky-gold turns to waves of salmon pink:
the pink to lavender: the lavender edges into purple: suddenly dark has
come. The cheerful sounds cease. A belated bird or two silently wings
to his nest: there is blackness, and the hoarse croak of distant frogs
alone breaks the silence. In half an hour the scene changes from the
most brilliant activity and ecstasy to utmost passiveness. Bats swoop
silently in the air; a chill comes up from the river: darkness is cool
as well as silent. Is all over? Not yet. Presently the fireflies make a
warm firmament of the fields, and in the pale rising of the moon, the
earth itself takes on another glory. There are fireflies and moonlight
and the domestic chirp of crickets in the night of Melville’s life, its
last quarter century--not silence and unrelieved blackness. After the
first collapse of day into night, nature stirs again: there is movement
and there is life. A little before the clock tolls the hour of midnight
and the day itself passes, a shower of aerolites falls through the
sky.... We have just seen the afterglow; and we are now to witness the
final brilliance of the night.
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE FLOWERING ALOE
The days pass and one day is like another: there is comfort in
monotony. The brick house in East Twenty-sixth Street, with its
muddy-yellow exterior and its brownstone trim, with its old mahogany
parlour furniture, its towering brown bookcases, its print of the Bay
of Naples hanging in the front hall, has a calm dark gravity which
sets it off from houses that make garish gestures of brightness or
gaiety within. When the sun hits the rear rooms there is warmth;
when geraniums and pansies appear in the yard below there is colour.
Melville’s house is a refuge from the city outside. Looking like every
other house in the row, it has still a quiet interior of its own, an
interior, like Herman Melville’s, acquired before the débâcle of the
Civil War. The brown wallpaper and the black iron bed in the wan north
light of Herman Melville’s room almost alone indicate that a day has
dawned that is somewhat darker than a starless night.
The sixties have passed; the seventies have come. Heroism gives way
to complacency, and courage to chicane. Even General Grant himself,
type of resolute action and manly confidence and dogged devotion
while the war was on, becomes in Presidential office little more
scrupulous than the head of a foraging party: gambling and corruption
take place before the magnanimous man who had been chivalrous to Lee
and thoughtful of the conquered army. Is it any wonder that New York
itself, which had been invaded and seized by people who had left
Europe under stress and poverty, and were thrown into its miserable
tenements and sinister streets, this Salonica of the Western world,
was prey to a ring of politicians as remarkable for their brazenness
as for their peculations? On the edges of the city, near the gas
tanks, but sometimes spilling over into the respectable sections,
gangs line up on each side of the street and exchange bullets. It is
worth one’s life to carry a gold watch through certain parts of the
East Side: Constantinople, twenty years before, was no happier place
for felons and assassins. What superb triumphs offset this brutality,
this degradation! In 1869, an elevated railroad is built; a little
later, a cable car is attached to a cable, and goes; the human voice
finds a means of travelling over an electro-magnetic circuit. Man has
stolen fire from heaven again, and is conquering the world with it;
but, stealing the fire, he has left the more valuable parts of heaven
behind. The voice that travels so far says the same banal things. The
railroad that shuttles men back and forth across the city does not
improve anything except the potentialities for speculation in real
estate.
Melville had foreseen all the sordid developments of “this dishonorable
epoch” while they were still in the germ, thus fulfilling the Chinese
philosopher’s notion of what a wise man is: he had viewed the myriads
playing pigmy parts, debased into equality, and “in glut of all
material arts” had predicted a civic barbarism, with man disennobled
and brutalized, “dead level of rank commonplace: an Anglo-Saxon
China”--the very Dark Ages of democracy. He had perceived that the
new democracy, fed by the smatterings of newspapers, and moved by the
war-cries of demagogues, was in reality as credulous and foolish as
the polity of the Middle Ages; perhaps more so, because it had lost a
decent and saving sense of its inferiority. What part could Melville
take in this world? How could he cope with the practical men of his
time, and “mix with tempers keen and narrow like a knife”? Or how
could he have any intellectual transactions with such good-hearted but
mushy-minded people as Edmund Clarence Stedman? His new contemporaries
were schoolboys. Howells had the optimism of a boom-town newspaper
or a stock prospectus: Lanier, who deserved better of Fate, wrote a
booster book about Florida for a railroad: and in the decade when
Melville published his own Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, Mark Twain
achieved affluence by producing Innocents Abroad.
Melville himself had hailed the spirit of the West as that which truly
reflected America; but when the spirit actually appeared, in the form
of a Mark Twain or a Bret Harte, he must have had his misgivings. At
thirty, Melville had grappled with spiritual problems that Mark Twain
kept furtively locked in his bosom until his old age, and, for fear
of destroying his reputation, did not publish till after his death.
What did Mark Twain know of “a hell over which mere hell serves for a
heaven”? These new Americans were innocents at home as well as abroad.
Those who knew that darkness existed were afraid of it: they said,
whistling cheerfully, that Progress would do away with darkness in a
year or two: the arc-light would abolish the burglar: the long-range
gun would abolish war: the ocean cable would abolish international
misunderstanding: typewriters would relieve the difficulties of
authorship: divorce would do away with the maladjustments of the
married. Innocents indeed! Is one puzzled that Melville shrank from the
post-war generation?
Melville’s home was a refuge, and his shanty of an office was a refuge
too. While the new parts of the city were exulting in the ugliness of
brownstone fronts, accentuated by perverse cornices and mouldings,
Twenty-sixth Street was still largely red brick, built a little too
late for charm, but early enough to possess iron balconies facing
south, like London in the Regency. Every morning a grave, firm,
square-bearded man leaves Number 104. A little slow and reflective
in gait, as if deliberately setting himself apart in pace as well
as inward gesture from the world about him, Melville turns west
toward Madison Square, passes through its green, and follows Fifth
Avenue, whose ranks of trees are just beginning to be broken, down
to Fourteenth Street, where already the brownstones, though only a
few years old, are being converted into fashionable confectionery
stores, bakeries, jewelry shops. He follows the broad thoroughfare
clear over to Hudson Street, and then turns to the block below, where
the Gansevoort Market and the customs office lie, touching the river.
These brown buildings, these smug garish shops, these crass, dirty
waterfront hotels, are too ugly to attract his attention even if use
and want did not quiet his interest. In five years, ten years, twenty
years, the changes are not very important: the horse-cars become fewer
and the tangle of traffic at Union Square is worse and Broadway from
Fourteenth Street up becomes “Ladies’ Mill,” the fashionable afternoon
thoroughfare for shopping: but on the whole the outer world does not
make any serious claims. The familiarity of everything is reassuring.
The name Gansevoort, on the market at the end of his walk, is a touch
of welcome. There is a Gansevoort Hotel on Little Twelfth Street and
West Street; but when Melville inquires what it stands for, he finds
that the hero of Fort Stanwix is now only a name. Well: names remain!
Gansevoort remains; perhaps Melville will remain, too.
Melville, as customs inspector, has one of the lowest political
positions open to patronage: he is an Ishmael among Ishmaels, and
a pariah among outcasts: impecunious bankers, broken-down sports,
bankrupt merchants, political nondescripts, people who were fit
for nothing elsewhere, in short, as R. H. Stoddard described it,
“an asylum for nonentities.” The scene itself, though mean, brings
Melville close to his element: the ships coming in, the odour of tar,
hemp, rotting wood, brine, the severe manly ways of the captains, the
affable circumspection of the pursers--they remind Melville of another
day and another fortune and another disguise. Best for him to do his
work, to shut his mouth, to get through the day patiently: like Rama,
the Hindu god, misplaced in human lot, discredited, abiding there in
outlawry. “May life and fable so agree?” Melville asked in Clarel, and