Herman Melville
earliest, was a real misfortune, but inevitable; like Melville, he was
not recovered until more than a generation after his death. Blake,
had Melville known him earlier, might have helped him cast off his
paralysing braces, Blake, who turned heaven upside down, showed that
God and the Devil had exchanged costumes, felt that energy was pure
delight, and had none of Melville’s haunting reluctances over sex,
but delighted in his beautiful wife with the fresh naked energy of
Adam’s self. But pictures and books were near to Melville during this
period: he collected and enjoyed prints and reproductions of pictures:
he had a reproduction of one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and The
Woman Taken in Adultery, and if he did not enjoy Blake’s pictures, he
responded to Blake’s shadow, Flaxman. Melville’s taste in landscape
was excellent: Claude and Turner were his masters, Turner as much as
anything, perhaps, for his sea-pictures, his ghostly headlands, his
sun-drenched fogs. Melville reflected on the nature of art; indeed, in
an unimportant set of verses called The Hostelry, he attempts, with
the aid of Hals, Lippi, Spagnoletto, Veronese, Carlo Dolce, Steen,
and Watteau, to define the nature of the picturesque. The verse is
weak: the ideas are obscure: but the selection of characters gives a
further light on Melville’s tastes and interests. In a later verse,
on the boors in a picture by Teniers, we see how his wakeful brain
“elaborating pain” took comfort in the suggestion of the creature-brown
warmth of even the lesser realists; and one may safely say that there
was nothing fine in art that he was not capable of responding to. It
was the accident of living in New York in the seventies and eighties
that kept Melville away from the painters who might have meant more
to him, El Greco, Delacroix, Goya, Daumier, Blake. These all might
have had a more intimate message for him; but, with his feeling for
Rembrandt, he was close to his own kind. In Holland, he had first
noticed Rembrandt’s shadows. Rembrandt’s depth, his torment, and the
warm blood of humanity beneath it all--that was Melville’s, too.
3
The years passed; the dun seventies gave way to the grey eighties; and
at last the prisoner was led out of his cell. In 1886, when Herman
Melville was sixty-seven, his wife received a legacy from her brother,
Lemuel Shaw, and the unremitting routine could at last be broken. The
succour that might have saved Melville some of his worst pangs and
difficulties at thirty-three, came reluctantly more than thirty years
later. He shook his wings, made one or two uncertain steps forward,
doubtful, after all these twenty years of regularity and servitude, if
he could venture flight. A few of these warming-up exercises remain:
the series of prose sketches on the Marquis de Grandvin, Jack Gentian,
Colonel J. Bunkum: they have the air of juvenile compositions, done
just for practice. In a very little while his hand grew more schooled;
slowly, thoughtfully, he began work, revising older poems and writing
new ones. John Marr and Other Sailors he printed privately, two years
after his liberation; and Timoleon he published, even more privately,
in 1891, the year of his death. In November, 1888, Melville began Billy
Budd, the only prose work of any consequence after The Confidence Man:
he started to revise it slowly in March, 1889, and did not finish it
until April, 1891.
In neither the poems nor the sketches was there the furious effort of a
pent-up man, desperately to finish something before his death: for he
had never entirely abandoned literary effort: Bridegroom Dick is dated
1876, the year Clarel was published. Melville worked during these final
years with the firm, methodical concentration of a man taking up a
thread where some purely external circumstance had compelled him to lay
it down. He valued these days: they were to be the crown of his life,
and to give him, at least, the satisfaction of self-vindication. The
hours were so precious that when an admirer, Mr. Archibald MacMechan,
one of the first to revive Melville’s fame in our own day (1914), asked
for further light on Melville’s works and his point of view, Melville
did not answer him, except to express his thanks and to say that
“though his vigour sensibly declines, what little is left he husbands
for certain matters as yet incomplete, and which indeed may never be
completed.” These are the words of a man who has had retirement forced
on him; not those of one who has doubted the office of literature, and
has nothing to say.
Deliberately, Melville wrote his quiet coda: muted, a little lower
in key than his earlier work, these poems and Billy Budd contain the
earlier themes of his life, now transformed and resolved. Let us look
more closely at this final testament. Melville’s life has a beginning,
a middle, and an end. The last twenty years, though tedious, solitary,
insulated, bitter with apples of Sodom, had not been lived in vain: the
verse is more skilled, certain: the poems are crystals, pure if not
unflawed: here at last is that concentration, for the lack of which
Clarel does not live. The prison had left its pallor on the prisoner;
but it had not deprived him of the skill to use his liberty. Had he
written only this handful of verses, this brief novel, Melville would
still, like Stephen Crane, have left something of a mark on American
literature.
4
Melville’s mind continually played over the sea. As Whitman felt that
Leaves of Grass must tally with the earth in its most common and
universal aspects, as he confronted all doubts and perturbations with
the miracle of a single blade of grass, so Melville perhaps felt that
his writing must tally with the sea--that every joy and hope and lust
of life must be able to face its terrible realities. Clarel is full
of images of the sea. The student, in his vaulted room in Jerusalem,
looking over the terraced roofs of the city, is “like some ship-boy at
masthead alone, watching the star-rise”; and Melville characterized
Vine’s strength by saying that he had supplemented Plato with a “daedal
life in tents and boats.” There are a hundred other allusions and
images. The sea was the source of Melville’s strength, and even when
his daedal life was over, its profound imprint remained.
In the prose preface to John Marr, Melville explained that Marr had
left the sea, settled down in the prairie as a pioneer, had lost his
wife and child through fever, and remained a lonely soul, cut off
by his roving and cosmopolitan past from the farmer-folk, the land
animals, around him. In Bridegroom Dick, a longer poem, Melville
assumed the guise of an old man-of-war’s man, seated by his wife,
sunning himself on an October day, balmy as spring, he with his pipe,
she with her tea. The old fellow’s mind goes back over his cruises,
his ships, his shipmates: the whole round of the day, polishing the
pinnacle, minding the helm, shooting the sun, announcing the time
to the quarter-deck at noon--and all his mess-mates and superiors,
Old Chuck-a-block, Commander All-a-Tanto, Orlop Bob, Rhyming Ned,
Top-gallant Harry and Jack Genteel: the old revels, the old bouts
of liquor, the old battles. The words are so salty the fish-bones
almost stick in one’s throat; and in the very litany of names Melville
achieves poetry; for once, the crabbedness of his verse increases its
effect.
In another verse, To Ned, Melville seems to address his old comrade,
Toby, recalling the rich isles they roved when they were young, and
predicting that the pleasure-hunter, wearying of routine resorts,
would at last discover the Marquesas and other authentic Edens in the
South Seas. This poem gives one pause. One wonders if Melville’s early
disillusion with marriage and success was not, more than one can ever
definitely say, due to the fact that he had drunk such a deep draught
of beauty in the South Seas that life thereafter, in the dusty, smoky,
jangling air of America or Europe, was insipid and brackish. No wife
who wore stays and petticoats and flannel nightgowns, and who was laden
with household cares, could be another Fayaway: no farm with a cow and
a horse and fences to repair could be another palm-grove. The Marquesas
had perhaps spoiled his taste for such dreary fare. So delicious is
this memory of the past, that Melville even marvels if mortals may
twice, here and hereafter, touch a paradise!
In the same spirit, in his later poems, he remembers the happy port of
Syra, full of juvenile fun, reminding him of days when trade did not
exist, and toil and stress were not overbearing, and life was leisure,
merriment, and peace. Melville never deceived himself by dismissing
these things as mythical, or by magnifying the importance of sanitation
and sound currency. This feeling of animal delight had redeemed him
from his own torments; he knew it was one of the permanent blessings
of life; and a civilization that knew nothing of it, except through
the depravity of complete drunkenness, was in a far lower stage of
barbarism than its most vigorous prophets had dared to say. If there
were no pleasurable excitements, there would be murderous ones: if
there were not dances there would be wars: and, for lack of strong
sensual graces, men would become hard, vengeful, stupid, oppressive.
Melville turned to Syra, or to Naples in the time of King Bomba, not
because he was unaware of poverty, rags, misery, but because he knew
there was sadness and misery in New York, too, without the redeeming
thoughtlessness and careless pleasure. “A fig for Bomba! Life is fair
squandered in superabundant leisure.” That was an answer Clarel had
shrunk from accepting from Derwent: but it was not an invalid one. The
very virtues of Western civilization, its industry, its thrift, its
willingness to postpone present goods for future rewards, tended to
degrade life quite as much as its downright vices.
Melville’s sea poems, however, were not all pieces of happy
reminiscence. The wreck of a victorious man-of-war, the deserted
raft with a signal flying, the disintegration of the figurehead
Charles-and-Emma by storm and weather, the mad plunge of a ship against
an iceberg: these are images of a different order. Melville did not
become weak and sentimental in his old age; but instead of letting the
dark background of the universe dominate the composition, he paints in
a warm foreground, as in a still-life of Chardin’s, with some sensible,
kindly object to capture the interest and reflect the high lights. The
sea remains the sea, pitiless, echoless, indifferent to man’s hopes
and dreams: but the man in Melville is himself again.
Healed of my hurt, I laud the inhuman Sea--
Yea, bless the Angels Four that there convene;
For healed I am ever by their pitiless breath
Distilled in wholesome dew named rosmarine.
One could tell from these poems, even if one lacked the contemporary
testimony of a Pittsfield acquaintance, Mr. J. E. A. Smith, that
Melville, in these closing days, was no bitter, defeated old man. Mr.
Smith says that in 1885, on Melville’s last visit to Pittsfield, he
“bore nothing of the appearance of a man disappointed in life, but
rather had an air of perfect contentment, and his conversation had
much of his jovial, let-the-world-go-as-it-will spirit. It would,” as
Mr. Smith very justly continues, “be well nigh a climatic miracle if
a brief ride to Pittsfield and a few snuffs of Berkshire air should
so restore to society and its enjoyment a man who had just been the
recluse and almost misanthrope pictured by some of the New York
newspaper writers.” In his letter dedicating John Marr to Mr. Russell,
Melville stresses the quality of geniality, “the flower of life
springing from some sense of joy in it, more or less”; and, delicately,