Herman Melville
Melville’s younger contemporaries, who fought in the Civil War, knew
Life and Death; but those who prospered in the years that followed
knew something more dreadful than simple death: they knew chaos and
purposelessness and disintegration, such chaos and purposelessness,
mixed with a wan, reminiscent hope, as Henry Adams pictured in his
Education. Herman Melville portrayed a human purpose, concentrated
to almost maniacal intensity, in Moby-Dick; and in Pierre and The
Confidence Man, he showed the black aftermath, when the purpose was
not sustained and carried out in art, and when he himself was deserted
in his extremity, by contemporaries who neither understood nor heeded
nor shared his vision. No single mind can hold its own against all
that is foreign to it in the universe: Shakespeare’s solitary heroes
issue their brief defiance only to be blotted out: such unity of spirit
as one may possess, as philosopher or poet, must be sustained in the
community itself. Now, a new culture, the product of two hundred and
fifty years of settled life in America, had produced Walden, Leaves of
Grass, Emerson’s Notebooks, and Moby-Dick; but that culture, instead of
supporting and carrying forward the integration of man and nature and
society shadowed forth in those books, was completely uprooted by the
Civil War, and a material civilization, inimical in many aspects to the
forms and symbols of a humane culture, was swept in by the very act of
destruction.
Two generations of that material civilization have shown us its
lopsidedness, its aimlessness, its grand attempt to conceal its
emptiness by extending concrete roads and asphalted streets and vacuum
cleaners to more and more remote terrains. Our most humane writers,
like Mr. Sherwood Anderson, have proved how mercilessly the whole
human being is crippled by this one-sided triumph; and even our most
bewildered writers, who have exulted in all these maimed energies,
have shown in their very act of deification how brutal and aimless
they are. We realize that the effort of culture, the effort to make
Life significant and durable, to conquer in ourselves that formidable
confusion which threatens from without to overwhelm us--this effort
must begin again. And in thus making a beginning we are nearer to
Whitman with his cosmic faith and Melville in his cosmic defiance than
we are to a good part of the work of our own contemporaries. It is not
that we go back to these writers: it is, rather, that we have come
abreast of them; for in creating that new synthesis, in lieu of the
formless empiricisms and the rootless trancendentalisms of the last
three centuries, the writers of our own classic past were nearer to the
contemporary problem than almost any of the Europeans have been--since
the physical remains of another culture in Europe give the mind a false
sense of stability and security.
Herman Melville’s world is our world, magnificently bodied and
dimensioned: our synthesis must include and sublimate that very
quest of power which Melville portrayed with such unique skill, as a
combination of science and adventure and spiritual hardihood, in Typee,
Mardi, and Moby-Dick. Melville’s life warns us not to stop here: men
must test their strength in surrender as well as in lonely conquest:
he who knows neither social union nor sexual passion nor love is
indeed an Ishmael, who finds himself an outcast because he has cast
out that which was most precious to his own nature: there is love in
the universe as well as power: the sun warms and the rain slakes the
thirst: the whales dally and the first song of creation is the song of
sex.
The synthesis that Melville foreshadowed in his ideas is not simply a
logical structure: the search for such an abstract solution of life’s
problems is one of the idola of the closet. Melville’s synthesis was
embodied in acts and deeds. During the years of his early manhood, as
he wandered about the world and contemplated existence under the stars
and bore a hand in working the ship, his environment, his experience,
and his vital relationships were an integer. He did not lack what
libraries and cities and the social heritage of man gives: indeed,
he enjoyed fully the resources of a sound literary and philosophic
scholarship; but he mixed this with activities that gave back to books
the subtle properties that cannot be transmitted to the printed page,
but must be derived directly from living. The reviewers in London might
well have been shocked by the spectacle of a common sailor writing
Typee or White-Jacket. Melville had bridged in his life that great gap
between the respectable, learned professions and the common trades that
had hitherto been crossed, with rare exceptions, only by those who
definitely had lost caste, or who, like Burns, had risen with a sense
of uneasy, sullen pride to acceptance among people of high rank.
Melville was an American--and that implied the dissolution of
spiritual frontiers. America had taken all the established castes
and classifications of Europe and left them to sort themselves out
according to nature and ability: this was the true and beneficial
result of eighteenth century thinking and its political accompaniments.
By a singular dissociation of ideas, which involved the destruction
of an old social tissue, it had permitted a free and disinterested
creature, a man, to emerge from a conglomeration of classes and
practical interests. Melville was not primarily a sailor; he was not an
adventurer; he was a man sailing, a man adventuring, a man thinking,
proving in his early manhood that a whole and healthy life may involve
many functions, without sacrificing its wholeness and health to any
one of them. Whitman with his carpentering and his nursing, Thoreau
with his pencil-making and gardening, were Herman Melville’s brothers
in the way and the life. They did not disdain practical life: they
faced it manfully: but instead of neglecting every other activity for
“business” they saw that what was called business was only a small part
of the totality of living: they behaved toward it _as if it were real_,
as Whitman said, with the knowledge that merely getting a living was
not a sufficient contribution to Life. Brutal though Melville found
whaling to be, it communicated, nevertheless, a sense of Life: there
was astronomy and natural history and art and religion within the
bulky hold of a whaler, as well as technics and business and the daily
logbook.
The vision that grew out of this experience was a whole one, not,
like the science of its time, subordinated to practical interests
or even narrower metaphysical schemata. Through its dissociation
from inherited values all things began at scratch: no one element
in life, except sex, carried a handicap. Melville’s settling down
was inevitable, inevitable and difficult: but the difficulty was not
due to the inability of a restless adventurer to accept a tamer and
more even existence: it was due to the fact that, having known a
rounded and cultured life, however savage and exacting, he could not
submit to the desiccated routine of Western civilization, with its
contempt for art, its gross disregard for the higher manifestations
of science, its dislike for meditation, its subservient religion, its
frank subordination of all other values to that of Comfort. Melville’s
contemporaries, with chance exceptions, neither lived as full a life as
he had lived in the South Seas, nor were able to understand it, even as
a theory. For these contemporaries, Melville’s vision was an example
of Bedlam literature: they did not realize that Bedlam was precisely
the world they lived in, and that Melville’s vision, like Emerson’s,
like Whitman’s, like Thoreau’s, was a part, and a great part, of a new
cultural synthesis.
The stripping down of Herman Melville’s ego, which he began in Mardi
and finished in Pierre, was a sloughing away of labels, nicknames,
party war-cries, habits, conventions, and acceptances; it was,
necessarily, a prelude to that building up of a new ego, a surer and
more central, a social and participating self, which is the task of
our own time for both men and communities. Melville was crippled in
the work of reconstruction by a hiatus in his own career, which was
followed and made final by the social hiatus of the Civil War: though
he sought to carry the work further in Clarel, one cannot pretend that
he did anything but give a hint of this mended psyche, this more richly
integrated self: one of his last poems, The Lake of Pontoosuce, perhaps
approaches nearer to the goal than any other work of his. Had he built
up that ego, his vision might have fully complemented Whitman’s--land
and sea, day and night, sunlight and shadow, triumph and tragedy. That
union was latent: it is for us to effect it. It is useless, however,
to speculate upon what might have been. The accidents that befell
Melville, as he rounded his own Cape Horn, were part of that malign
doom he himself pictured in Moby-Dick, and they do not affect the
essence of his work. Whatever Melville’s life was, his art in Moby-Dick
exhibits that integration and synthesis which we seek. Through his art,
he escaped the barren destiny of his living: he embraced Life; and we
who now follow where his lonely courage led him embrace it, too. This
embrace was a fertile one; and in each generation it will bring forth
its own progeny. The day of Herman Melville’s vision is now in the
beginning. It hangs like a cloud over the horizon at dawn; and as the
sun rises, it will become more radiant, and more a part of the living
day.
NOTE ON BOOKS
The complete and definitive edition of Melville’s works is that
published by Constable and Company, London, 1923-1924. With the
exception of Israel Potter, The Confidence Man, Pierre, and the
various volumes of verse, all of Melville’s work can now be obtained
in contemporary popular editions. Mr. Raymond Weaver’s edition of
The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville (Horace Liveright, 1928) and
Mr. Henry Chapin’s edition of the Appletree Table and Other Sketches
and of John Marr and Other Poems (Princeton University Press, 1922)
make almost all of Melville’s significant minor work available. Mr.
Meade Minnegrode’s Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville and a
Bibliography contains extracts from some of Melville’s Letters to
Evert Duyckinck. The bibliography covers in detail all of Melville’s
writings, giving both American and English first editions. The first
biography of Herman Melville was that of Mr. Raymond Weaver: Herman
Melville, Mariner and Mystic (Doran, 1921). Mr. John Freeman’s brief
critical biography belongs to the new English Men of Letters Series
(Macmillan, 1926); Mr. Freeman has the distinction of being the first
to deal patiently and critically with Melville’s poetry. Various other
volumes on Herman Melville are now in course of preparation. Among the
critics whose studies of Melville have contributed to his revival and
to a proper evaluation of his work I would mention especially Mr. Frank
Jewett Mather, Jr., Miss Viola Meynell, Mr. Percy Boynton, Mr. J. W. N.
Sullivan, Mr. E. L. Grant Watson, and, not least, Mr. Van Wyck Brooks.
INDEX
Acushnet, ship list, 43
Adams, Henry, chaos and purposelessness pictured by, 360
Adjustment, fallacious interpretation of, 313-344
Adler, Dr., 120
Adolescent purity, 216
After the Pleasure Party, 274
Ahab, Captain, 161 ff.
Alcott, Bronson, 66
Alma, 99
Ambiguities, Melville’s experiences of, 210;
Emerson’s expression of, 216
Ambition, Melville’s secret, 347
American Aloe on Exhibition, The, 345
American folk-arts, 45
American psyche, broken, 229
American society, in 1819, 9;
in 1844, 63;
economic conflict, 63;