Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
Rensselaers, the Ten Broecks, the Van Schaicks--the proudest families
of the old Dutch _régime_--and was deeply imbued with the distinction
of her patroon ancestry--“a cold, proud woman, arrogant in the sense
of her name, her blood, and the affluence of her forebears” (Weaver,
_Herman Melville_, p. 34). His debt to the New England strain is not so
easily appraised. His paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melville of
Boston, a graduate of Princeton and wealthy in his own name and through
his wife Priscilla Scollay, was not without his flashes of enthusiasm
in early life, taking part with Joseph Story’s father in the Boston
Tea Party. But his incipient radicalism was soon washed out of him; he
turned rigidly conservative, and to his death in 1832 he lingered in
the twilight of the eighteenth century. As Federal naval officer of the
port of Boston, he was a familiar figure in his cocked hat and knee
breeches; and it was of him that Holmes wrote the verses, _The Last
Leaf_.
He was of Scotch descent, and Melville’s father traced the family
line back to the thirteenth century, Herman Melville being twentieth
in direct descent from Sir Richard Melvill, who in 1296 was forced
to swear allegiance to Edward I of England. The blood seems to have
run somewhat thin in Allan Melville, a conventional, pragmatic soul,
who after making five trips to Europe, at the age of thirty-two,
having carefully weighed the advantages, fixed his affections on Maria
Gansevoort whom he met at Albany, and wooed with more propriety than
passion. He entered business in New York city as an importer of French
goods; but hard times descended on “the greatest universal mart in
the world,” and in 1832, when Herman was thirteen, Allan Melville
died leaving Maria Gansevoort and her eight children pretty nearly
penniless. The struggle with poverty set its mark on the cold, proud
woman whose ambitions centered about the success of affluence; and it
left a mark of quite another sort on the son who was soon to measure
her ideals with devastatingly critical eyes. The ways of mother and son
were at the parting.
The volcanic passions pent up in Herman Melville’s heart, the ardent
imagination that sent him forth on long quests and brought him home
empty-handed, can scarcely be traced to any source in Maria Gansevoort
or Allan Melville. A strange, incomprehensible child he seemed to his
mother, and strange and incomprehensible he remained in the eyes of
the family--an ugly duckling of another breed than theirs. A bitter
sense of aloofness and alienation from the intimacies of family
sympathy seems early to have taken possession of him, and he felt
himself quietly thrust out of the circle of respectable contacts.
Melville’s writings are filled with thinly veiled autobiography, and
it is a careless reader who does not see in _Pierre_ and _Moby Dick_
confessions as frank as Rousseau’s. “Call me Ishmael,” is the opening
injunction of the latter, and the book closes with a glimpse of “the
devious cruising _Rachel_, that in retracing search after her missing
children, only found another orphan” (Weaver, _Herman Melville_, p.
62). An Ishmael Melville unhappily conceived himself to be, an outcast
and wanderer on the earth because man is an outcast and wanderer,
to whom Nirvana is the only comfort and hope; and when he returned
disillusioned from the South Seas, when he found no home by his own
fireside, when he discovered his transcendental craftsmanship driving
on the rocks of economic necessity, when the public rejected his
mystical dreams and he was inexorably “damned by dollars,” he perforce
turned in upon his own broodings and sought solace in Plato. Driven by
need from his hill farm in the Berkshires, he buried himself in the
“Babylonish brick-kiln of New York,” to pass long years pottering about
the customhouse. It was the vast futility of life as he experienced it,
that sent him to his study to find there such compensation as he might.
The stages in Melville’s progress towards Nirvana are sufficiently
marked by the four books, _Typee_, _Mardi_, _Moby Dick_, and _Pierre_.
The first is his answer to the French romantic Utopia of man in a
state of nature. That the rankling wounds in man’s heart are poisoned,
if not originally inflicted, by social institutions, he was partly
convinced, and he felt a lively concern lest western civilization
should bring its futile restlessness to the simple island people.
The kindliness and simplicity of life in the valley of Typee, the
compensating virtues of the unsophisticated primitive, he found
lovable; but as the unhappy heir of centuries of Christian conscience,
as a child of Hebraic ideals of righteousness, he could not eradicate
the deep roots of ethical unrest. With Fayaway it was different.
“Civilization had given her no veils; Christianity had given her
no compunctions. She was neither a mystery nor a sin” (_ibid._, p.
260). But he could not become a simple child of nature had he wanted
to. He could never find his Nirvana in mere sensuousness; he could
not sink into the mud of animal existence. Even while he bathed in
the languorous calm of Typee, floating idly with Fayaway on the
stream of being, his heart was beyond the narrow hills, and a cosmic
nostalgia seized upon him. That chapter of his life ended in futility,
and so he made his way back once more to the familiar places, with
expectation still undaunted. Certain of his experiences on that return
journey he has recorded in _White Jacket_, the story of his cruise
on a man-of-war; and how near it brought him to oblivion is told in
the episode of the threatened flogging before the mast, when fate
intervened to save Melville from flinging himself overboard, carrying
with him the brutal captain of the _Neversink_.
Amidst the constrictions of the old world to which he had come back, a
fresh vision of happiness opened to him in his love for Elizabeth Shaw,
and he made a desperate plunge into marriage. The post-thalamion of
that thwarted romance was _Mardi_--a far-ranging “pilgrimage for a lost
glamour,” “a quest after some total and undivined possession of that
holy and mysterious joy that touched Melville during the period of his
courtship” (_ibid._, p. 279). _Mardi_ is a vast welter of satire and
idealism, formless and wild, which in turn was no more than prologue
to _Moby Dick_. This colossal book, fierce as _Gulliver_, broad as
Rabelais, with its _saeva indignatio_ that laughs as it rends life, is
the great confession of his defeat. “It is good to laugh,” he says in
_Mardi_, “though the laugh be hollow. Women sob, and are rid of their
grief; men laugh and retain it. Ha! ha! how demoniacs shout; how all
skeletons grin; we all die with a rattle. Humor, thy laugh is divine.”
And the conclusion to which the philosopher comes is this: “Beatitude
there is none. And your only Mardian happiness is but exemption from
great woes--no more. Great Love is sad; and heaven is Love. Sadness
makes the silence throughout the realms of space; sadness is universal
and eternal” (_ibid._, p. 279).
After _Moby Dick_, what remained but to put the external world of
experience aside and turn in upon his own thwarted hopes to analyze
them? _Pierre, or the Ambiguities_ is his spiritual autobiography,
the confession of a stricken soul. In the inconsequential matter of
plot, a story of incest and murder and suicide, in its deeper purpose,
it is a wild fierce tale of mortal passions, that traces the _élan_
of mystical idealism to the buried depths of procreative instinct.
It is the last bewildering attempt to understand the sources of the
dream that had ridden him, and it is discovered in the passionate
struggles of Enceladus, titanic offspring of the incestuous union
between Heaven and Earth, to regain the kingdom from which he has been
thrust. In _Mardi_ the search for Yillah had been carried on under the
watchful eye of Hautia, the temptress, whom “his whole heart abhorred,”
yet to whom at last he went in her bower of Flozella-a-Nina--“The
Last-Verse-of-the-Song”; for in “some mysterious way seemed Hautia and
Yillah connected.” In _Pierre_ Hautia reappears as Isabel, likewise
a child of Heaven and Earth, who is set over against Lucy--the pure
daughter of Heaven alone; and this dark Isabel robed in the midnight
of her hair, by appealing unconsciously to Pierre’s noblest impulses,
draws him from the safe orbit of the Gansevoort moralities, and makes
of him “the fool of Truth, the fool of Virtue, the fool of Fate.”
Isabel is wild, unquestioning, mysterious passion, untouched by any
Hebraisms; and this half-sister of his blood, this lovely embodiment of
his star-crossed dreams, drives him unwittingly to destruction. Pierre
learns at last that the vision brings poison in its kisses, for the
divine in the heart of Enceladus is mingled with the clay of earth. The
dream is man’s final ironical curse; Yillah and Hautia and Lucy and
Isabel--changing embodiments of the same mystical idealism--bring death
to their lovers--this is the conclusion of _Pierre_, a conclusion that
Mr. Cabell would not take kindly to. It was a black and bitter book,
like _Moby Dick_ “broiled in hell-fire,” to fling at an easy-going
public that cherished its Gansevoort conventions. With its fierce
disillusions _Pierre_ is the apogee and Nirvana of the spiritual
romanticisms of the day.
That Melville was the spiritual child of Jean Jacques, that the
consuming nostalgia he suffered from was mortal, the most casual
acquaintance with his passionate rebellions should make clear; and
that his pessimism was a natural end and outcome of his transcendental
speculations, once those speculations had come to intimate contact with
life, is perhaps equally clear. Transcendentalism in Concord village
and at Walden pond, was one thing. Emerson’s infrequent anger at the
folly of men was soothed by the perfect art with which he phrased it,
and never seriously ruffled his temperamental placidity. Thoreau’s
mystical communings were with the young god Pan; he was too wise to
seek to domesticate a woodland nymph, and he was fortunate in escaping
the dun twilight that gathers about the slow years of physical decay.
But transcendentalism in the forecastle of the whaler _Acushnet_,
transcendentalism that drove fiercely into the blood-red sunsets of
dwarfing seas, transcendentalism in the hot and passionate heart of
a man whose vast dreams outran his feet--this was something very
different from the gentle mysticism of cooler natures and unembittered
hearts where no Promethean fires were raging.
For Herman Melville, amidst the nameless obscenities of an alien
environment, to keep his faith in the goodness of life strong and
sweet, would have needed the boundless charity and simple paganism
of Walt Whitman. But unfortunately for his peace of mind, though he
might immerse himself in Plato, Melville was no Greek; he was Hebraic
rather, out of Ecclesiastes, and Solomon and Jesus. “Away,” he cries
in _Pierre_, “ye chattering apes of a sophomorean Spinoza and Plato,
who once did all but delude me that the night was day, and pain only a
tickle. Explain this darkness, exorcise this devil, ye cannot. Tell me
not, thou inconceivable coxcomb of a Goethe, that the universe cannot
spare thee and thy immortality.... Already the universe gets on without
thee.... Thou wert but the pretentious, heartless part of a man. Lo!
I hold thee in this hand, and thou art crushed in it like an egg from
which the meat hath been sucked” (Chapter XXII--3). From the lips of
the ancient Preacher he had learned that all is vanity--even Pan. “The
truest of men was the Man of Sorrows,” he says, “and the truest of all
books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of
woe. All is vanity. +ALL+.... He who ... calls Cowper, Young, Pascal,