Herman Melville
Have I not saved you from the dread
Theft and ignoring which need be
The triumph of the insincere
Unanimous mediocrity?
Rest, therefore, free from all despite
Snugged in the arms of comfortable night.
In still another poem, called Thy Aim, Thy Aim? he questions whether
mid the dust and dearth and din he may by some deed prove to be an
exception, and he warns himself to beware of envy, for if striving on
he win the goal, he will get only a flower of reputation, which is cut
down in an hour; but if he survive that, he will still only earn a
funeral flower--the belated funeral flower of fame. Melville was spared
the pillory of being praised as a travel-writer and a humourist, with
Mark Twain, or coupled as a poet with Aldrich; and in the bottom of his
heart, there was an anticipation of his final survival, not without a
feeling of satisfaction. Having prepared his own coffin, like Queequeg
in Moby-Dick, he could even fancy the flowers and wreaths that a later
generation would place over it. Funeral flowers, yes, but even funeral
flowers may solace a man, if he contemplates them before they are cut!
The relief from Melville’s dull grind had come a little too late:
one must not flinch from that fact. He was conscious of his age and
his physical debility; and, so far from railing at youth, he would
not, “reduced to skimmed milk, slander the cream.” Youth, he knew,
was immortal: “’Tis the elderly only grow old.” But age brought one
advantage: it taught him the wisdom of folly. When a spirit appears
and asks him where he would choose to dwell, in the Paradise of Fools
or in Wise Solomon’s Hell, he does not pause to weigh the answer; but,
ironically, he reverses his belief in Moby-Dick and demands the fool’s
paradise! From these sardonic snatches of Melville’s verse one gets
some notion of what his conversation on daily topics, the chicanes,
briberies, corruptions, social follies and stupid observances of his
contemporaries must have been. Melville’s wit was meant for keen
society: small wonder he created Jack Gentian to keep him company.
In The Rose Garden, verses written during the first days of Melville’s
release, one finds him asking himself whether he should turn to verse
or to prose. The question was an important one: he must have known
that his strength lay in prose, if only the theme were big enough to
enlist all his energies; but Melville delayed and dallied, hesitating
to commit himself to an impossible task. In his dilemma, he consults
a friend, asking him whether it is better to have a heap of posies or
a few drops of attar; and his friend tells him that his time has gone
by. To which Melville answers that, unfortunately, he had come into his
roses late; but first he wants to settle this little matter--poetry
or prose? Not being able to decide, he tried his hand at both. His
old eagerness was there; but something had happened. “Age, dull
tranquilliser, and arid years that filed before” had unfitted him for
flowers. Here one feels the final pathos of Melville’s position--the
last foul thrust of fate. In his maturity, he had been cheated of
outer sustenance, and when it finally came to him, he found himself
cheated of inner support. That brambly garden, that sour soil, needed
energy to bring it back into a state of cultivation, and energy, not
the will or the skill or the delight, was the one thing that Melville,
at sixty-seven, lacked. “My dear Sir,” he had once exclaimed to Mr.
Duyckinck, “the two good things to be yet discovered are these--the art
of rejuvenating old age in men, and old-ageifying youth in books.” He
had not altogether failed in the latter: but the first need was beyond
him.
But when energy fails, skill may partly make up for it; and there is a
simplicity and directness in these poems which shows greater control of
his medium: the annoying inversions are fewer, and among the wildings
of Melville’s old age, there is still a rose or two left over from a
more cultivated garden. The poem that fittingly closes this MS. volume,
The Lake, is perhaps the finest Melville wrote: it is a colloquy
between his own spirit and the spirit evoked by the Lake of Pontoosuce.
Melville here faces death and emptiness of being, and he draws his
faith from that spectacle in which the great religions have found their
sustenance, in the march of the seasons, the rhythmic cycle of life,
the ecstasy, the agony, the tragedy of the dying god, and his annual
resurrection and renewal.
“All dies! and not alone
The aspiring trees and men and grass;
The poets’ forms of beauty pass,
And noblest deeds they are undone,
Even truth itself decays, and lo,
From truth’s sad ashes pain and falsehood grow.
All dies!
The workman dies, and after him, the work;
Like to those pines whose graves I trace,
Statue and statuary fall upon their face:
In every amaranth the worm doth lurk,
Even stars, Chaldeans say, fade from the starry space,
Andes and Appalachee tell
Of havoc ere our Adam fell,
And present nature as a moss doth show
Of the ruins of the Nature of the Aeons long ago.
* * * * *
Dies, all dies!
The grass it dies, but in vernal pain
Up it springs and it lives again;
Over and over, again and again,
Who sighs that all dies!
Summer and winter and pleasure and pain,
And everything everywhere in God’s reign,
They end and anon they begin again;
Wane and wax, wax and wane:
Over and over and over again,
End, ever end, and begin again--
End, ever end, and forever, and ever begin again!”
She ceased and nearer slid, and hung
In dewy guise; then softlier sung:
“Since light and shade are equal set,
And all revolves, nor more ye know;
Ah, why should tears the pale cheek fret
For aught that waneth here below?
Let go, let go!”
With that, her warm lips thrilled me through,
She kissed me, while her chaplet cold
Its rootlets brushed against my brow,
With all their humid clinging mould,
She vanished, leaving fragrant breath
And warmth and chill of wedded life and death.
That peace and oneness with Nature, which Isabel had prayed for, came
at last to Melville in the closing years of his life. He had renounced
much; but he had gained much. What is life? the king in Mardi had
asked the philosopher; and the philosopher had said: That question is
more final than any answer. After much doubt, exacerbation, searching,
after a long weary pilgrimage through books and lands, and not a
little intercourse with men, Melville was back to the view of his
youth: he now accepted its finality. What power and heroic defiance
had not accomplished, love, which has its philosophic equivalent in
the desire to merge oneself with the universe and surrender to it, and
accept its purposes, as one accepts the desires and whims and aims
of one’s beloved--love had achieved this. It was no accident that
Melville’s warm attitude toward Elizabeth coincided with this last warm
acceptance of the universe. Melville surrendered to his wife, and he
surrendered to his rough old mother, the earth, owning the primacy of
that ceaseless urge which begets the Ahabs and Babbalanjas and Medias
and Jack Chases and Pierres and Clarels, recognizing that intelligence,
power, virtue, are not prime movers themselves, but derivative
mechanisms that transmit and utilize the energy of life. If one spurn
that energy and deny its sources, one’s dreams are futile and one’s
hopes empty: but when one accepts life itself as the primary fact,
then the dying year brings no grief, and all that fades and decays is
but a pledge of what shall again, one day, live and flourish: the very
universe itself, and space and time, are but modes of being, no more
eternal than the senses that react to them and project upon them the
forms that make them useful and significant to man. Whatever be the
ultimate nature of things, the universe man conceives is still held
together at his own centre: its significance is part and parcel of his
own. And at the centre of that centre is a fertilized ovum. Out of the
egg comes not merely man but his world: the mightiest constellation is
but the ectoderm of man’s original plasm. There is a greater energy
than Moby-Dick’s. The seed that in its growth pries open the rock has
more power than the inert and brutal elements that oppose it, and
there is a seed in man whose growth cannot be denied, a seed that
binds him to all life, and causes him to direct his energies, despite
frustrations, despite warring elements in his own being, towards a
fuller existence marked by love and understanding. The ideality, which
Melville could not find in a cold “external” universe metaphysically
separated from man--and falsely so--is embodied in the common instincts
of animals: it was when he ceased to draw upon these sources that the
world became black and painful and hostile, and ideals seemed ghastly
disembodiments. When the roots of his animal nature were nourished once
more, he leafed again, as the trees leaf in Indian summer, and courage
and faith returned. Melville had faced the colourless, unintegrated,
primal world that underlies and antedates that which we know through
our senses, our feelings, our experiences: he had touched the bare,
unkind beginning of things, that chaos which existed when darkness
reigned over the face of the waters, and only Moby-Dick had stirred
in the deep: he had beheld the white unrefracted truth which exists
before it passes through man’s being and is broken up into the colours
of art and thought and custom and ritual and organized society. But
Nature paints like a harlot, not without reason: she desires to attract
the passions of men, to attract and use them for her own end: life.
Melville’s consciousness of a more primal world made him see more
exhaustively, I think, into the nature of existence: but it was bare
rock-truth, unweathered into soil, still less worked over by plants,
insects, moulds, and the tools of man: and it gave him nothing that
his spirit could feed on. At last he escaped from that bleak ultimate
revelation, and, participating in the ancient cycle of life, he found
his own life renewed once more.
6
Melville’s last poems gain by comparison with his earlier work: but
his prose inevitably loses a little. One does not miss his lack
of energy in a quatrain; it is plain and perceptible even in a
short novel. One notes this falling off of Melville’s prose in the
sketches on the Marquis de Grandvin: it comes out again in the little
addition to Rip van Winkle that he wrote. In his prime, writing about
Hawthorne, Melville had little use for the tepid quality of Irving’s
prose, so genteelly lymphatic; but now, in 1890, he went so far as
to dedicate his addendum to the Happy Shade of Sunnyside. The torrid
tropical sunlight, the violent gold and purple of Melville’s earlier
prose vanished: what was left was the mild pale sunshine cast on
the bronzed oak leaves of a winter landscape. These graceful but
diminished energies properly link Melville’s spirit with Irving’s. The
immediateness of the old narratives was gone. Billy Budd, his final
novel, is not a full-bodied story: there is statement, commentary,
illustration, just statement, wise commentary, apt illustration:
what is lacking is an independent and living creation. The epithets
themselves lack body and colour: Billy Budd has nothing to compare
with the description of boiling whale-oil in Moby-Dick--“a wild Hindoo
odour, like the left wing of the Day of Judgement.”
Billy Budd, which was dedicated to Jack Chase, wherever he might be,
alow or aloft, lacks the fecundity and energy of White-Jacket: the
story itself takes place on the sea, but the sea itself is missing, and