Herman Melville
he knew the answer: they did. “There is more power and beauty in the
well-kept secret of one’s self and one’s thoughts,” Maurice de Guérin
had written, “than in the display of a whole heaven that one may have
inside one.” Melville underlined those words, and kept his heaven
facing inward.
The monotony brings quiet: the monotony brings peace. On drizzly
mornings, before the ships can drudge up the river through the fog,
there are hours of inward placidity. Melville peers through the pall
on the river outside and sees somewhat more poignantly into his own
position; perhaps the final lines of a poem come to him then:
Nor cringe if come the night:
Walk through the cloud to meet the pall,
Though light forsake thee, never fall
From fealty to light.
While he must serve his sentence in this prison, there is only one
thing to fear: a new Administration; shifting to a new post, learning
new faces, having once more to battle and struggle. Fortunately,
Melville has friends in the department, clever worldly fellows like
Stoddard: a word to him is passed along to the chief; the rumour of a
transfer is quieted. Melville need never leave this cloistered street,
this melancholy examination and appraisal, this even equable round:
this is as good as another Sailors’ Snug Harbor, over which his younger
brother Tom now is governor. Yes, it is good for a lifetime--if one may
call these empty hours life.
Gansevoort Pier at one end: Lizzie and the two girls at the other. The
meagre evening dinner, indifferently cooked, the household gossip, the
strain of observing an emptiness at the table, of Mackie, who is dead,
and Stanwix, who has gone off: the sudden look of tenderness on the
worn face opposite, that stings yet sweetens everything. The customs
office is hell: this family circle is perhaps purgatory: it is only
when Melville withdraws to his room upstairs, and is by himself, that
he can faintly re-enter the heaven that once surrounded him. There,
with his pictures, his books, his glass of brandy to seduce sleep, the
day ends in a solitude and a hush--tolerably. This is the daily round;
but there are better occasions. On a warm summer night Melville might
loll on the canvas steamer-chair placed on the narrow iron balcony,
smoking his pipe, looking at the stars, gently holding Elizabeth’s
hand. Melville’s passion is spent; but affection has deepened. With
the slow renewal of his organic faith, he can accept his wife more
fully and warmly, much more fully and warmly than when sex itself was
primarily a physical irritation that left him disappointed and doubtful
of the very basis of love, when he was tormented by passions at once
inexpressible and unreciprocable.
When one of Melville’s daughters grows up and marries, and Melville
becomes a grandfather, he goes out to these children easily: he bounces
them on his knee, makes noises like wind whistling through the rigging,
sings a stave of an old chanty, walks with them in Central Park. This
is not the tense harassed man his own children bitterly remembered from
their youth: he is benign even when his thoughts are elsewhere, and
occasionally downright jolly. His granddaughter still remembers his
queer, literary words and the wiry feel of his beard: that bespeaks
intimacy. There is a shadow between Melville and his family: they do
not see him as he is, but as he is distorted by their own repulsions,
their own bitterness: but when Melville’s son-in-law casts eyes on
Melville for the first time, buying a cigar in a hotel lobby in the
White Mountains, there is something in the old man’s air, like that
in the man Flammonde, that captivates him and holds his attention: a
distinguished man! In his family, he will remain an exile. They do not
understand his jocularity and his occasional high spirits. They are
offended by his inept sense of humour. In the Berkshire days he had
dubbed one of the village gossips Miss Pecksniff and his mother had
covered herself with mortification by addressing the good lady by
this title when she called. One never could be quite sure about Herman
Melville’s jokes. His notion of a jolly time was to cook up a mess
of crabs and sit around the table for a whole afternoon, picking at
the flesh, drinking ale, telling stories, and haranguing the world in
general, as if his wife and daughters and cousins were in the maintop
of the Neversink. They were bored by these jokes, and indifferent to
Melville’s high spirits. If his daughters had not been reduced to dowdy
dresses, if he had not had the wicked habit of asking belated suitors
whether they preferred hominy or oatmeal for breakfast, if the family
did not all feel that the high spirits of a poor man were purchased
too cheaply, Melville might not have felt the hostile ring around him.
These outbursts would be paid for, perhaps, by depression and inner
exasperation: but they kept the too-even daily round from appalling
Melville like the breath of infinity.
The age was against Melville; and his family were the mirror of the
age: he knew that. They believed in work, in working and keeping up
an appearance: in being respectable and tepid and unemotional and
industrious. Even the nicest of his relatives, like his cousin Kate
Gansevoort, with whom he maintained a desultory correspondence, rather
apologized for being a person of leisure. For them all, doing, not
being, was the main end of life. As if there were any merit in not
being a person of leisure! They talked of the dignity of work. Bosh.
True work is the necessity of humanity’s earthly condition. The dignity
is in leisure. Besides, ninety-nine hundredths of all the work done in
the world is either foolish and unnecessary or harmful and wicked. What
people needed was not work: they needed values. To recite poetry, to
contemplate pictures, to write or to talk briskly or to meditate and
chew one’s own thoughts, quietly, on the maintop--work was good if it
made these things possible, and bad if it blinded one to them, or made
them impossible....
2
People try to break in on Melville’s even round, they seek to intrude
on this cloistral quiet: they try in vain. Melville visits Pittsfield
again, when the Centenary Committee asks him to write a short
biography of his Grand-uncle Thomas for the Memorial Volume, and he
has occasional vacations at Arrowhead or in the White Mountains, or in
Albany or New Bedford, where one of his sisters lives: familiar places,
familiar people. A young man who has read Melville’s books awakes one
morning on a wharf in New Bedford to find himself gazing at a mild-eyed
old man in a blue serge suit with whom he falls into conversation: the
nautical terms on the old man’s tongue betray that he knows the sea;
and the young man, a composer, is delighted to find that he is talking
with his literary hero, Herman Melville. Contacts like these, with
chance acquaintances, Melville did not repel; but those who sought him
more deliberately were rebuffed. If the visitor mentions Mr. Omoo a
cloud of annoyance will pass over Melville’s face and perceptibly cool
the surrounding air. Melville’s public would not have his best: well,
he is proud and will not be accepted for the sake of the least. Such
interest will heal no wounds. Don’t they realize Melville’s contempt?
Don’t they feel who should be the patron and who the patronized?
Doubtless not. Resentment threatened to flare up in Melville, perhaps,
when he contemplated his literary contemporaries; so he did not
contemplate them. The New York writers asked Melville to join the
Authors’ Club when they founded it: he refused. Still assiduous,
towards the end of his life they gave Herman Melville a dinner of
honour. A pleasant irony. Whom did they honour, these fashionable
journalists, these professional diners-out, these men-about-literature?
That dinner did not feed Herman Melville, that admiration did not
console him. Theirs was the outward attentiveness of base neglect.
Melville breaks his own silence to hold out a hand of sympathy to
that honest, hearty Englishman, his junior, Mr. W. Clark Russell; for
Russell knows the sea, too, and though not a writer of equal rank, is
almost a fellow spirit: in his letter of thanks he mentions Moby-Dick:
a true mark of appreciation. These two writers dip flags to each other,
like passing ships; and when Melville, a few years later, in 1888,
publishes his Sea Poems, he dedicates them to this English novelist of
the sea. James Thomson is another kindred soul: all too well Melville
knew the streets and alleys of his City of Dreadful Night. Melville
corresponds for a few years, between 1884 and 1888, with Mr. James
Billson of Leicester, who was Thomson’s friend; and writes warm words
of appreciation about Thomson’s poems. “As to pessimism,” Melville
writes, and these words should be underlined, “as to pessimism,
although neither pessimist nor optimist myself, nevertheless I relish
it in the verse, if for nothing else than as a counterpoise to the
exorbitant hopefulness, juvenile and shallow, that makes such a muster
these days--at least in some quarters.” Neither pessimist nor optimist:
of course: for there is a “light and a shadow on every man who at
last achieves his lifted mark.” We shall see that mood engraved in
Melville’s final verse.
Had contacts not been hard for Melville to make, he might have had a
try at Elihu Vedder, too. Vedder’s picture of The Redeemed Slave, shown
at the Academy Exhibition of 1865, touched something in Melville; and
Vedder had gone on, apparently, a little apart from the beaten track
of veracious scenery and fictional illustration: he seemed to know
that there was more than one level of experience, that there was, so
to say, an immediate “beyond,” grounded in the senses and intuitions
quite as much as the direct work of one’s eye. Where had he acquired
this? In contrast to Vedder, there was another recluse whom Melville
may perchance have brushed by on Fourteenth Street, more than once:
a painter bred in New Bedford, loving the sea, too, and painting its
mystery, much nearer to Melville in his loneliness, his visions, his
love of Shakespeare, his reticences and withdrawals, than any other
soul in America: Albert Pinkham Ryder. Melville was never to meet him,
or as far as one knows, recognize his work. Not finding him, Melville
turned to Vedder, the lesser man, who at many removes was a link
between Melville and Blake.
Blake and Ryder were true fellow spirits: Russell and Vedder were
life’s ironical substitutes; but, lacking knowledge of the spring,
Melville slaked his thirst at the tap. He dedicated his last book of
poems, Timoleon, to Vedder; and it is rather fortunate he died before
he read Vedder’s complacent answer, an answer without the faintest
reference to Melville’s own works. Vedder was not the man to respond to
Melville: he was born half a generation later, and that made a great
difference. Vedder had been attracted by Blake, and in his youth he
found that he, too, had the power of conjuring up visions, as thick
and sensible as the furniture he touched: but Vedder had deliberately
curbed his power because, as he explained, “while if cultivated it
would soon enable me to see as realities most delightful things ... the
reaction would be beyond my control and would inevitably follow and be
sure to create images of horror indescribable. A few experiences have
shown me that that way madness lies, and so, while I have rendered my
Heaven somewhat tame, at least my Hell remains quite endurable.”
What a contrast, this timid “V,” with Melville, who had let his visions
open, and had risked everything to follow them. His magnificent hell
was worth all the placid heavens, with their weak symbolisms, that
Vedder achieved. That Melville did not know Blake until 1874 at