Herman Melville
shyly, like a belated crocus, this flower bloomed in Melville’s last
years. When he wished Russell from his heart the most precious things
he knew of in this world, health and content, he wished him the first
because he had once known it in its miraculous fulness, and the second,
I think, because he had at last found it. When on a clear day Melville
would wander through the woody ravines and pastures near Fort George,
or when he would take a ferryboat ride down New York Bay, shifting from
one side of the boat to another, to take in every aspect of the harbour
and every new ship, the old keenness, the old zest, would return. If
his life was still that of the recluse--“I am an old fogy,” he wrote
in 1880, to excuse his staying at home--his feelings were far from
Pierre’s or Timon’s.
There is poetry in parts of John Marr, particularly in The Haglets, not
merely measured lines and rhymed endings. There is even more poetry
perhaps in Timoleon, and perhaps a deeper revelation of Melville’s
inner convictions and strivings. The verses from which the volume
gets its title shoot parallels into Melville’s own life: Timoleon
rescued Timophanes, but it is Timophanes who is his mother’s pride.
She sees herself in him and looks, through him, to become an envied
dame of power, a social queen: Melville, who had once perhaps wanted
his mother’s generous love, realized that his lack of worldly success
had stood in the way of it: a discovery he first announced when he
wrote Pierre. Exiled, Timoleon ceases to hate his fellow citizens;
but, cut off from common membership in the marketplace, in severance
like a pale head found after battle apart from the trunk, he confronts
the gods, not finding the wrong in man, but taking his quarrel to the
Arch-Principals themselves. Has ideality no counterpart except in
man’s mind? Are earnest natures but fatherless shadows? The edges of
Melville’s old torment are here; and I should be inclined to date the
poem from an earlier period; but in other verses one discovers that
his resolution has completely knitted together. Under the title of The
Enthusiast, he places the words: _Though He slay me, yet will I trust
in Him._ It is a poem of brave defiance; and it tells so much about the
man that I must reproduce it.
Shall hearts that beat no base retreat
In Youth’s magnanimous years--
Ignoble hold it, if discreet
When interest tames to fears;
Shall spirits that worship light
Perfidious deem its sacred glow,
Recant and trudge where worldlings go,
Confirmed, and own them right?
Shall Time with creeping influence cold
Unnerve and cow? The heart
Pine for the heartless ones enthralled
With palterers of the mart?
Shall faith abjure her skies,
Or pale probation blench her down
To shrink from Truth, so still, so lone,
Mid loud gregarious lies?
Each burning boat in Caesar’s rear
Flames--No return through me!
So put the torch to ties though dear,
If ties but tempters be.
Nor cringe if come the night:
Walk through the cloud to meet the pall,
Though light forsake thee, never fall
From fealty to light.
Melville did not see in post-bellum America, with its parvenus pining
for distinctions and dignities, its lawmakers “taking the lawless one’s
fee,” in all the sham and shuffle of those guilty days, any pledge for
a happier society. The Age of the Antonines was far behind; and their
return seemed equally distant. “Apollo’s bust makes lime for Mammon’s
tower.” This man of integrity must fortify himself from within; and
when the present offers him no foothold, he must stand with Posterity
or with the Ancients. This was the sort of “adjustment” that Melville
achieved; and it was the only kind, in his position and day, that was
worth working for. There is no notion more delusive or unscientific,
in the strict biological sense, than the belief that a poet may make
a happy “adjustment” to his circumstances by turning bond-salesman,
or the artist by becoming an advertising expert. This course neglects
the elementary fact that the relation between an organism and its
environment is interacting and reciprocal: the best sort of adjustment
is that which tends to preserve life with its highest values intact.
The proper adjustment to a fire is not to plunge into it; and the
response of a poet to an unfavourable environment is not to commit
suicide but to use the most economic means for saving himself. Melville
had done this--and he was saved. “Happiness,” Spinoza said, “consists
in a man’s being able to maintain his own being.” When Melville read
this dictum in Matthew Arnold’s essay on Spinoza, in 1871, he marked
the passage: it described his own effort. In a more fruitful age, his
being would have been maintained in harmony with, not in opposition to,
the community: but at all events his vital duty was to maintain it.
5
We come to Melville’s last verses, those which he gathered in a MS.
called Weeds and Wildings, which remained unpublished until Mr. Raymond
Weaver edited the definitive edition of his work in 1923.
These final poems have all the qualities one cherishes in Melville:
his geniality, his humour, his lofty brooding, and that aloof satiric
eye beneath which his contemporaries shrivelled from the grandeur of
their reputations to the littleness of their deserts. In addition,
another quality of Melville’s personal life wells to the surface and
confirms all one’s other intuitions: a deep affection for his wife,
and a warm sympathy. The “clover dedication to Winnifred”--who was
Lizzie--recalls the old times together at Arrowhead, when the red
clover had blushed through the fields about their house. They had not
exactly lived in clover during those years or the later ones: ah, no!
nor had they known anything of the four-leafed kind, except once, as
he reminded her each year, “on the early forenoon of the fourth day of
a certain bridal month, now four years more than four times ten ago.”
Melville recalls how, after a morning walk in the summer, he would
return home with a handful of clover blossoms, to put on the maplewood
mantel in Lizzie’s south-facing room: her altar. “And in October most
did I please myself in gathering them from the moist-matted aftermath
in an encircled little hollow nearby, soon to be snowed upon.... And
once--you remember it--having culled them in a sunny little flurry of
snow, winter’s frolic skirmishes in advance, the genial warmth of your
chamber melted the fleecy flakes into dewdrops rolling off from their
ruddiness. ‘Tears of the happy,’ you said. Well, and then whom but to
thee, Madonna of the Trefoil, should I now dedicate these Weeds and
Wildings, thriftless children of quite another and yet spontaneous
aftergrowth, and bearing indications, too apparent it may be, of that
terminating season on which the offerer verges. And for aught of the
melting mood that my verses may possibly betray, call to mind the
dissolved snowflakes on the ruddy oblation of old, and remember your
‘Tears of the Happy.’”
There is a story of an acquaintance asking Melville for a copy of one
of his books, and Melville’s answering that he did not have a copy in
the house. One has no reason to suspect “O. G. H.’s” veracity, or that
of Melville: but one would get a false impression of Melville if one
thought that this indicated he had forgotten his work, or its worth, or
his old ambitions. There are a dozen references to his literary fate,
pointed, sardonic, in Weeds and Wildings. One of the most obvious of
these references is a poem entitled The American Aloe on Exhibition.
“It is a floral superstition,” observed Melville in the little
introduction, “as every one knows, that this plant flowers only once in
a century. When in any instance the flowering is for decades delayed
beyond the normal period (eight or ten years at farthest) it is owing
to something retarding in the environment or soil.”
Now, after one has made due allowances for the inner obstructions to
Melville’s further development in the critical period of maturity, one
realizes that Melville and Mr. Van Wyck Brooks are right: for even had
he continued at the level of Moby-Dick--as indeed he did in Benito
Cereno--there was something retarding in the American environment and
soil, in the thirty years that followed the Civil War. One cannot
separate a man from his social environment: a society lives in a man: a
man is a creature in society: the inner world is less private and the
outer world less public than people habitually and carelessly think.
These very words, inner and outer, individual and social, are merely
conveniences of thought: there are no actual lines and borders, except
practical ones. Melville’s triumph, like that of his contemporaries
in the Golden Day, was the last expression of a provincial society,
and the first prophetic achievement in a newer and deeper culture. His
own disaster was an emblem of the disintegration of that provincial
society, and the blight of the new culture, which though fully
conceived in the mind, received neither nourishment, warmth, nor
protection from the narrow, mechanistic, money-bent society that
succeeded the provincial one. If the inner world be not a phantasm,
it must be united to an outer world that nourishes it and supports
it, even when it offers oppositions and antinomies. This relationship
had existed before the Civil War; and when the external milieu became
impoverished, it ceased to exist--and the Aloe ceased to flower.
This poem admits no doubt of the fact that Melville was grimly
describing himself. People came to see the Century Plant on exhibition,
ten cents admission, but seldom more than two came at a time! This was
the homage that Melville met in his old age--and what comfort, what
tender comfort it was! What can the aged stem do? It moans:
At last, at last! but joy and pride,
What part have I with them?
Let be the death that kept me back
Now long from wreath decreed;
But, ah, ye Roses that have passed
Accounting me a weed!
When Melville touches on Captain Vere’s eventual death, in Billy Budd,
he adds that this spirit, in spite of its philosophic austerity, may
yet have indulged the most secret of all passions, ambition, without
attaining the fulness of fame: and one cannot doubt that Melville is
disclosing his own secret. The more violent the pride, the deeper the
ambition, the more fiercely it guards itself. But look more closely at
Melville’s humility: it towers like a mountain! Listen more closely to
his silence: it shouts like an army! He well knew, all the while, how
little the vain roses mattered that accounted him a weed; and we, who
look back upon Melville’s ostensible contemporaries, Lowell, Stedman,
Stoddard, Aldrich, can scarcely help sharing his contemptuous smile.
For these good gentlemen, in their most tolerant mood, Walt Whitman
was the Good Grey Poet, useful to be trotted ceremoniously out on the
platform, once a year, to recite his oration on The Martyred President;
and as for Melville--he was the queer old fellow who had once lived
among the cannibals. One can fancy the superior droop of their lips
when Robert Buchanan, an English writer, told them that these two men
were the supreme imaginative writers America had produced.
Did Melville forget his books or think them paltry? The verses,
Immolated, are an even more direct answer.
Children of my happier prime
When one yet lived with me and threw
Her rainbow over life and time,
Even Hope, my bride, and mother to you!
O, nurtured in sweet pastoral air
And fed on flowers and light and dew
Of morning meadows--spare, ah, spare
Reproach; spare and upbraid me not
That, yielding scarce to reckless mood,
But jealous of your future lot,
I sealed you in a fate subdued,