HERMAN MELVILLE
Mariner and Mystic
RAYMOND M. WEAVER
[Illustration:
_Engraved on wood, by L. F. Grant._
_From a photograph._
]
[Illustration: Signature--Herman Melville]
HERMAN MELVILLE
MARINER AND MYSTIC
BY
RAYMOND M. WEAVER
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
[Illustration]
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
PROFESSOR FRANKLIN T. BAKER
“--_il maestro cortese_”
To Professor Carl Van Doren, to Miss Cora Paget, and to Mrs. Eleanor
Melville Metcalf, I am, in the writing of this book, very especially
indebted. By Professor Van Doren’s enthusiasm and scholarship I was
instigated to a study of Melville. It has been my privilege to enjoy
Miss Paget’s very valuable criticism and assistance throughout the
preparation of this volume. Mrs. Metcalf gave me access to all the
surviving records of her grandfather: Melville manuscripts, letters,
journals, annotated books, photographs, and a variety of other
material. But she did far more. My indebtedness to Mrs. Metcalf’s vivid
interest, her shrewd insight, her keen sympathy can be stated only in
superlatives. To Mrs. and Mr. Metcalf I owe one of the richest and most
pleasant associations of my life.
RAYMOND M. WEAVER.
_October 1, 1921._
Most of the letters of Melville to Hawthorne included in this volume
are quoted from _Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife_, by Julian
Hawthorne. These letters, and other citations from Mr. Hawthorne’s
memoir, are included through the courtesy of Messrs. Houghton Mifflin
Company.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I DEVIL’S ADVOCATE 15
II GHOSTS 33
III PARENTS AND EARLY YEARS 53
IV A SUBSTITUTE FOR PISTOL AND BALL 77
V DISCOVERIES ON TWO CONTINENTS 98
VI PEDAGOGY, PUGILISM AND LETTERS 113
VII BLUBBER AND MYSTICISM 128
VIII LEVIATHAN 153
IX THE PACIFIC 170
X MAN-EATING EPICURES--THE MARQUESAS 194
XI MUTINY AND MISSIONARIES--TAHITI 215
XII ON BOARD A MAN-OF-WAR 233
XIII INTO THE RACING TIDE 250
XIV ACROSS THE ATLANTIC AGAIN 283
XV A NEIGHBOUR OF HAWTHORNE’S 305
XVI THE GREAT REFUSAL 334
XVII THE LONG QUIETUS 349
BIBLIOGRAPHY 385
INDEX OF NAMES 391
ILLUSTRATIONS
HERMAN MELVILLE _Frontispiece_
PAGE
MELVILLE’S GRANDFATHERS 40
GENERAL PETER GANSEVOORT
MAJOR THOMAS MELVILLE
ALLAN MELVILLE 56
MARIA GANSEVOORT MELVILLE 64
IN 1820
IN 1865
A PAGE FROM ONE OF MELVILLE’S JOURNALS 104
THROWING THE HARPOON 136
SOUNDING 136
SPERM WHALING. THE CAPTURE 160
ONE OF SIX WHALING PRINTS 160
“TOBY.” RICHARD TOBIAS GREENE 164
IN 1846
IN 1865
EVANGELISING POLYNESIA 184
RICHARD TOBIAS GREENE. IN 1885 200
FIRST HOME OF THE PROTESTANT MISSIONARIES IN TAHITI 224
THE FLEET OF TAHITI 224
ELIZABETH SHAW MELVILLE 272
ARROWHEAD 312
THE FIREPLACE. ARROWHEAD 312
HERMAN MELVILLE. IN 1868 352
MELVILLE AS ARTIST 368
MELVILLE’S CHILDREN 376
HERMAN MELVILLE
Mariner and Mystic
HERMAN MELVILLE
CHAPTER I
DEVIL’S ADVOCATE
“If ever, my dear Hawthorne,” wrote Melville in the summer of 1851, “we
shall sit down in Paradise in some little shady corner by ourselves;
and if we shall by any means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne
there (I won’t believe in a Temperance Heaven); and if we shall then
cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever
tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together till both
ring musically in concert: then, O my dear fellow mortal, how shall
we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now so much
distress us.” This serene and laughing desolation--a mood which in
Melville alternated with a deepening and less tranquil despair--is a
spectacle to inspire with sardonic optimism those who gloat over the
vanity of human wishes. For though at that time Melville was only
thirty-two years old, he had crowded into that brief space of life a
scope of experience to rival Ulysses’, and a literary achievement of
a magnitude and variety to merit all but the highest fame. Still did
he luxuriate in tribulation. Well-born, and nurtured in good manners
and a cosmopolitan tradition, he was, like George Borrow, and Sir
Richard Burton, a gentleman adventurer in the barbarous outposts of
human experience. Nor was his a kid-gloved and expensively staged
dip into studio savagery. “For my part, I abominate all honourable
respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever,”
he declared. And as proof of this abomination he went forth penniless
as a common sailor to view the watery world. He spent his youth and
early manhood in the forecastles of a merchantman, several whalers,
and a man-of-war. He diversified whale-hunting by a sojourn of four
months among practising cannibals, and a mutiny off Tahiti. He returned
home to New England to marry the daughter of Chief Justice Shaw of
Massachusetts, and to win wide distinction as a novelist on both sides
of the Atlantic. Though these crowded years had brought with them
bitter hardship and keen suffering, he had sown in tears that he might
reap in triumph. But when he wrote to Hawthorne he felt that triumph
had not been achieved. Yet he needed but one conclusive gesture to
provoke the world to cry this as a lie in his throat: one last sure
sign to convince all posterity that he was, indeed, one whom the gods
loved. But the gods fatally withheld their sign for forty years.
Melville did not die until 1891.
None of Melville’s critics seem ever to have been able to forgive him
his length of days. “Some men die too soon,” said Nietzsche, “others
too late; there is an art in dying at the right time.” Melville’s
longevity has done deep harm to his reputation as an artist in dying,
and has obscured the phenomenal brilliancy of his early literary
accomplishment. The last forty years of his history are a record of
a stoical--and sometimes frenzied--distaste for life, a perverse and
sedulous contempt for recognition, an interest in solitude, in etchings
and in metaphysics. In his writings after 1851 he employed a world of
pains to scorn the world: a compliment returned in kind. During the
closing years of his life he violated the self-esteem of the world
still more by rating it as too inconsequential for condemnation. He
earned his living between 1866 and 1886 as inspector of Customs in New
York city. His deepest interest came to be in metaphysics: which is but
misery dissolved in thought. It may be, to the all-seeing eye of truth,
that Melville’s closing years were the most glorious of his life. But
to the mere critic of literature, his strange career is like a star
that drops a line of streaming fire down the vault of the sky--and then
the dark and blasted shape that sinks into the earth.
There are few more interesting problems in biography than this offered
by Melville’s paradoxical career: its brilliant early achievement,
its long and dark eclipse. Yet in its popular statement, this
problem is perverted from the facts by an insufficient knowledge of
Melville’s life and works. The current opinion was thus expressed by
an uncircumspect critic at the time of Melville’s centenary in 1919:
“Owing to some odd psychological experience, that has never been
definitely explained, his style of writing, his view of life underwent
a complete change. From being a writer of stirring, vivid fiction, he
became a dreamer, wrapping himself up in a vague kind of mysticism,
that rendered his last few books such as _Pierre: or The Ambiguities_
and _The Confidence Man: His Masquerade_ quite incomprehensible, and
certainly most uninteresting for the average reader.”
Unhampered by diffidence--because innocent of the essential
facts--critics of Melville have been fluent in hypothesis to account
for this “complete change.” A German critic patriotically lays the
blame on Kant. English-speaking critics, with insular pride, have
found a sufficiency of disruptive agencies nearer at home. Some impute
Melville’s decline to Sir Thomas Browne; others to Melville’s intimacy
with Hawthorne; others to the dispraise heaped upon _Pierre_. Though
there is a semblance of truth in each, such attempts at explanation
are, of course, too shallow and neat to merit reprobation. But there
is another group of critics, too considerable in size and substance to
be so cavalierly dismissed. This company accounts for Melville’s swift
obscuration in a summary and comprehensive manner, by intimating that
Melville went insane.
Such an intimation is doubtless highly efficacious to mediocrity in
bolstering its own self-esteem. But otherwise it is without precise
intellectual content. For insanity is not a definite entity like
leprosy, measles, and the bubonic plague, but even in its most precise
use, denotes a conglomerate group of phenomena which have but little
in common. Science, it is true, speaking through Nordau and Lombroso,
has attempted to show an intimate correlation between genius and
degeneracy; and if the creative imagination of some of the disciples
of Freud is to be trusted, the choir invisible is little more than
a glorified bedlam. Plato would have accepted this verdict with
approval. “From insanity,” said Plato, “Greece has derived its greatest
benefits.” But the dull and decent Philistine, untouched by Platonic
heresies, justifies his sterility in a boast of sanity. The America in
which Melville was born and died was exuberantly and unquestionably
“sane.” Its “sanity” drove Irving abroad and made a recluse of
Hawthorne. Cooper alone throve upon it. And of Melville, more ponderous
in gifts and more volcanic in energy than any other American writer,
it made an Ishmael upon the face of the earth. With its outstanding
symptoms of materialism and conformity it drove Emerson to pray for
an epidemic of madness: “O Celestial Bacchus! drive them mad.--This
multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry,
starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity to vitalise
this too much pasture, and in the long delay indemnifying themselves
with the false wine of alcohol, of politics, of money.”
From this it would appear that a taste for insanity has been widespread
among poets, prophets and saints: men venerated more by posterity
than by their neighbours. It is well for Socrates that Xantippe did
not write his memoirs: but there was sufficient libel in hemlock. In
ancient and mediæval times, of course, madness, when not abhorred as a
demoniac possession, was revered as a holy and mysterious visitation.
To-day, witch-burning and canonisation have given place to more refined
devices. The herd must always be intolerant of all who violate its
sacred and painfully reared traditions. With an easy conscience it has
always exterminated in the flesh those who sin in the flesh. In times
less timid than the present it dealt with sins of the spirit with
similar crude vindictiveness. We boast it as a sign of our progress
that we have outgrown the days of jubilant public crucifixions and
bumpers of hemlock: and there is ironic justice in the boast. Openly to
harbour convictions repugnant to the herd is still the unforgivable sin
against that most holy of ghosts--fashionable opinion; and carelessly
to let live may be more cruel than officiously to cause to die.
Melville sinned blackly against the orthodoxy of his time. In his
earlier works, he confined his sins to an attack upon Missionaries
and the starchings of civilisation: sins that won him a _succes de
scandal_. The London Missionary Society charged into the resulting
festivities with its flag at half mast. Cased in the armour of the
Lord, it with flagrant injustice attacked his morals, because it
smarted under his ideas. But when Melville began flooding the very
foundations of life with torrents of corrosive pessimism, the world at
large found itself more vulnerable in its encasement. It could not,
without absurdity obvious even to itself, accuse Melville of any of the
cruder crimes against Jehovah or the Public. Judged by the bungling
provisions of the thirty-nine articles and the penal code, he was not
a bad man: more subtle was his iniquity. As by a divine visitation,
the Harper fire of 1853 effectually reduced _Pierre_--his most frankly
poisonous book--to a safely limited edition. And the public, taking the
hint, ceased buying his books. In reply, Melville earned his bread as
Inspector of Customs. The public, defeated in its righteous attempts at
starvation, hit upon a more exquisite revenge. It gathered in elegiacal
synods and whispered mysteriously: “He went insane.”
To view Melville’s life as a venturesome romantic idyll frozen in
mid-career by the _deus ex machina_ of some steadily descending Gorgon
is possible only by a wanton misreading of patent facts. Throughout
Melville’s long life his warring and untamed desires were in violent
conflict with his physical and spiritual environment. His whole
history is the record of an attempt to escape from an inexorable and
intolerable world of reality: a quenchless and essentially tragic
Odyssey away from home, out in search of “the unpeopled world behind
the sun.” In the blood and bone of his youth he sailed away in brave
quest of such a harbour, to face inevitable defeat. For this rebuff
he sought both solace and revenge in literature. But by literature he
also sought his livelihood. In the first burst of literary success he
married. Held closer to reality by financial worry and the hostages of
wife and children, the conflict within him was heightened. By a vicious
circle, with brooding disappointment came ill health. “Ah, muskets the
gods have made to carry infinite combustion,” he wrote in _Pierre_,
“and yet made them of clay.” The royalties from his books proved
inadequate for the support of his family, so for twenty years he earned
a frugal living in the customs houses in New York. During his leisure
hours he continued to write, but never for publication. Two volumes of
poetry he privately printed. His last novel, surviving in manuscript,
he finished a few months before his death. Though it is for the second
half that his critics have felt bound to regret, it seems that in
serenity and mental equipoise, the last state of this man was better
than the first.
In his early manhood he wrote in _Mardi_: “Though essaying but a
sportive sail, I was driven from my course by a blast resistless; and
ill-provided, young, and bowed by the brunt of things before my prime,
still fly before the gale.... If after all these fearful fainting
trances, the verdict be, the golden haven was not gained;--yet in bold
quest thereof, better to sink in boundless deeps than float on vulgar
shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do.” To the
world at large, it has been generally believed that the Gods ironically
fulfilled his worst hopes.
One William Cranston Lawton, in an _Introduction to the Study of
American Literature_--a handy relic of the parrot judgment passed
upon Melville during the closing years of his life--so enlightens
young America: “He holds his own beside Cooper and Marryat, and boy
readers, at least, will need no introduction to him. Nor will their
enjoyment ever be alloyed by a Puritan moral or a mystic double
meaning.” And Barrett Wendell, in _A Literary History of America_--a
volume that modestly limits American literature of much value not only
to New England, but even tucks it neatly into the confines of Harvard
College--notes with jaunty patronage: “Herman Melville with his books
about the South Seas, which Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have
declared the best ever written, and his novels of maritime adventure,
began a career of literary promise, which never came to fruition.”
These typical pronouncements, unperverted by the remotest touch of
independent judgment, transcend Melville’s worst fears. “Think of it!”
he once wrote to Hawthorne. “To go down to posterity is bad enough, any
way; but to go down as a ‘man who lived among the cannibals!’ When I
think of posterity in reference to myself, I mean only the babes who
will probably be born in the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving
up the ghost. I shall go down to them, in all likelihood. _Typee_ will
be given to them, perhaps, with their gingerbread.” In that mythical
anomaly known as the “popular mind,” Melville has, indeed, survived as
an obscure adventurer in strange seas and among amiable barbarians.
_Typee_ and _Omoo_ have lived on as minor classics. Though there have
been staccato and sporadic attacks upon the ludicrous inadequacy of the
popular judgment upon Melville, not until recently, and then chiefly
in England has there been any popular and concerted attempt to take
Melville’s truer and more heroic dimensions. An editorial in the London
_Nation_ for January 22, 1921, thus bespeaks the changing temper of the
times:
“It is clear that the wind of the spirit, when it once begins to blow
through the English literary mind, possesses a surprising power of
penetration. A few weeks ago it was pleased to aim a simultaneous
blast in the direction of a book known to some generations of men as
_Moby-Dick_. A member of the staff of _The Nation_ was thereupon moved
in the ancient Hebrew fashion to buy and to read it. He then expressed
himself on the subject, incoherently indeed, but with signs of emotion
as intense and as pleasingly uncouth as Man Friday betrayed at the
sight of his long-lost father. While struggling with his article, and
wondering what the deuce it could mean, I received a letter from a
famous literary man, marked on the outside ‘Urgent,’ and on the inner
scroll of the manuscript itself ‘A Rhapsody.’ It was about _Moby-Dick_.
Having observed a third article on the same subject, of an equally
febrile kind, I began to read _Moby-Dick_ myself. Having done so I
hereby declare, being of sane intellect, that since letters began there
never was such a book, and that the mind of man is not constructed so
as to produce such another; that I put its author with Rabelais, Swift,
Shakespeare, and other minor and disputable worthies; and that I advise
any adventurer of the soul to go at once to the morose and prolonged
retreat necessary for its deglutition.”
Having earlier been hailed in France as an “American Rabelais;” prized
in England by the author of _The City of Dreadful Night_; greeted by
Stevenson with slangy enthusiasm as a “howling cheese;” rated by Mr.
Masefield as unique among writers of the sea; the professed inspirer of
Captain Hook of Sir James Barrie’s _Peter Pan_, Melville is beginning
to appear as being vastly more than merely a “man who lived among the
cannibals” and who returned home to write lively sea stories for boys.
The wholesale neglect of Melville at the hands of his
countrymen--though explained in some part as a consummation of
Melville’s best efforts--has not been merely unintelligent, but
thoroughly discreditable. For Melville, from any point of view, is
one of the most distinguished of our writers, and there is something
ludicrous in being before all the world--as, assuredly, we sometimes
are--in recognising our own merit where it is contestable, and in
neglecting it where it is not.
It has been our tradition to cherish our literature for its embodiment
of Queen Victoria’s fireside qualities. The repudiation of this
tradition--as a part of our repudiation of all tradition--has made
fashionable a wholesale contempt for our native product. “I can’t read
Longfellow” is frequently remarked; “he’s so subtle!” Our critical
estimates have laboured under the incubus of New England provincialism:
a provincialism preserved in miniature in the first pages of
Lowell’s essay on Thoreau. At present we need to have the eminence
of the section recalled to us; but during the period of Melville’s
productivity, it was at its apex, and in its bosom Melville wrote. This
man, whose closest literary affinities were Rabelais, Zola, Sir Thomas
Browne, Rousseau, Meredith, and Dr. John Donne,--a combination to make
the uninitiated blink with incredulity--was indebted to Nathaniel
Hawthorne for the best makeshift for companionship he was ever to
know: one of the most subtly ironical associations the imps of comedy
ever brought about. Nor was the comedy lessened by Mrs. Hawthorne’s
presence upon the scene. Shrewd was her instinctive resentment of
her husband’s friend. Viewed by his neighbours “as little better
than a cannibal and a ‘beach comber’”--such was the report of the
late Titus Munson Coan in a letter to his mother written immediately
after a pilgrimage to Melville in the Berkshires--Melville turned to
Hawthorne for understanding. Frank Preston Stearns, in his _Life and
Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne_ (1906) says that for Hawthorne “the
summer of 1851 in Lenox was by no means brilliant.... Hawthorne’s
chief entertainment seems to have been the congratulatory letters
he received from distinguished people.... For older company he had
Herman Melville and G. P. R. James, whose society he may have found
as interesting as that of more distinguished writers.” But Mrs.
Hawthorne had studied Melville with a closer scrutiny and was not so
easily convinced of Melville’s insignificance. Melville had visited
the Hawthornes in the tiny reception room of the Red House, where Mrs.
Hawthorne “sewed at her stand and read to the children about Christ;”
in the drawing room, where she disposed “the embroidered furniture,”
and where, in the farther corner, stood “Apollo with his head tied on;”
in Hawthorne’s study, which to Mrs. Hawthorne’s wifely adoration was
consecrated by “his presence in the morning.” Mrs. Hawthorne looked
from the “wonderful, wonderful eyes” of her husband--each eye “like a
violet with a soul in it,”--to Melville’s eyes, and confessed to her
mother her grave and jealous suspicion of Melville: “I am not quite
sure that _I do not think him_ a very great man.... A man with a true,
warm heart, and a soul and an intellect,--with life to his finger-tips;
earnest, sincere and reverent; very tender and _modest_.... He has very
keen perceptive power; but what astonishes me is, that his eyes are not
large and deep. He seems to see everything very accurately; and how he
can do so with his small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes,
either, but quite undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and
rather handsome, his mouth expressive of sensibility and emotion. He is
tall, and erect, with an air free, brave and manly. When conversing, he
is full of gesture and force, and loses himself in his subject. There
is no grace nor polish. Once in a while, his animation gives place
to a singularly quiet expression, out of these eyes to which I have
objected; an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you
feel that he is at that moment taking deepest note of what is before
him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique.
It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself.
I saw him look at Una so, yesterday, several times.”
Mrs. Hawthorne must ever enjoy a lofty eminence as one of Melville’s
most penetrating critics. Her husband dwelt apart, and less because he
found the atmosphere of New England wholly uncongenial than because he
shared his wife’s conviction that he was like a star. And shrewdly his
wife resented the presence of a second luminary--treacherously veiled
and of heaven knows what magnitude!--in her serene New England sky.
Time may yet harp her worst fears aright.
For despite his comparative obscurity, Melville is--as cannot be too
frequently iterated--one of the chief and most unusual figures in our
native literature. And his claim to such high distinction must rest
upon three prime counts.
First--because most obvious--Melville was the literary discoverer of
the South Seas. And though his ample and rapidly multiplying progeny
includes such names as Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Warren Stoddard,
John La Farge, Jack London, Louis Becke, A. Safroni-Middleton, Somerset
Maugham, and Frederick O’Brien, he is still unsurpassed in the manner
he originated. On this point, all competent critics are agreed.
Melville’s second achievement is most adequately stated by the
well-known English sea-writer, W. Clark Russell, in _A Claim of
American Literature_ (reprinted from _The North American Review_ in
_The Critic_ for March 26, 1892). “When Richard Henry Dana, and Herman
Melville wrote,” says Russell, “the commercial sailor of Great Britain
and the United States was without representation in literature.... Dana
and Melville were Americans. They were the first to lift the hatch and
show the world what passes in a ship’s forecastle; how men live down
in that gloomy cave, how and what they eat, and where they sleep;
what pleasures they take, what their sorrows and wrongs are; how they
are used when they quit their black sea-parlours in response to the
boatswain’s silver summons to work on deck by day and by night. These
secrets of the deep Dana and Melville disclosed.... Dana and Melville
created a new world, not by the discovery, but by the interpretation of
it. They gave us a full view of the life led by tens of thousands of
men whose very existence, till these wizards arose, had been as vague
to the general land intelligence as the shadows of clouds moving under
the brightness of the stars.” And to Melville and Dana, so Russell
contends, we owe “the first, the best and most enduring revelation of
these secrets.” On this score, Conrad, Kipling, and Masefield must own
Melville as master.
Melville’s third and supreme claim to distinction rests upon a single
volume, which, after the order of Melchizedek, is without issue and
without descent: “a work which is not only unique in its kind, and a
great achievement” to quote a recent judgment from England, “but is
the expression of an imagination that rises to the highest, and so
is amongst the world’s great works of art.” This book is, of course,
_Moby-Dick_, Melville’s undoubted masterpiece. “In that wild, beautiful
romance”--the words are Mr. Masefield’s--“Melville seems to have spoken
the very secret of the sea, and to have drawn into his tale all the
magic, all the sadness, all the wild joy of many waters. It stands
quite alone; quite unlike any other book known to me. It strikes a note
which no other sea writer has ever struck.”
The organising theme of this unparalleled volume is the hunt by the
mad Captain Ahab after the great white whale which had dismembered
him of his leg; of Captain Ahab’s unwearied pursuit by rumour of its
whereabouts; of the final destruction of himself and his ship by its
savage onslaught. On the white hump of the ancient and vindictive
monster Captain Ahab piles the sum of all the rage and hate of mankind
from the days of Eden down.
Melville expresses an ironical fear lest his book be scouted “as a
monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and
intolerable allegory.” Yet fabulous allegory it is: an allegory of
the demonism at the cankered heart of nature, teaching that “though
in many of its visible aspects the world seems formed in love, the
invisible spheres were formed in fright.” Thou shalt know the truth,
and the truth shall make you mad. To the eye of truth, so Melville
would convince us, “the palsied universe lies before us as a leper;”
“all deified Nature absolutely paints like a harlot, whose allurements
cover nothing but the charnal house within.” To embody this devastating
insight, Melville chooses as a symbol, an albino whale. “Wonder ye then
at the fiery hunt?”
An artist who goes out to find sermons in stones does so at the
peril of converting his stone pile into his mausoleum. His danger is
excessive, if, having his sermons all ready, he makes it his task
to find the stones to fit them. Allegory justifies itself only when
the fiction is the fact and the moral the induction; only when its
representation is as imaginatively real as its meaning; only when the
stones are interesting boulders in a rich and diversified landscape.
So broadly and vividly is _Moby-Dick_ based on solid foundation that
even the most literal-minded, innocent of Melville’s dark intent, have
found this book of the soul’s daring and the soul’s dread a very worthy
volume. One spokesman for this congregation, while admitting that “a
certain absorption of interest lies in the nightmare intensity and
melodramatic climax of the tale,” finds his interest captured and held
far more by “the exposition of fact with which the story is loaded
to the very gunwale. No living thing on earth or in the waters under
the earth is so interesting as the whale. How it is pursued, from the
Arctic to the Antarctic; how it is harpooned, to the peril of boat and
crew; how, when brought to the side, ‘cutting in’ is accomplished;
how the whale’s anatomy is laid bare; how his fat is redeemed--to be
told this in the form of a narrative, with all manner of dramatic but
perfectly plausible incidents interspersed, is enough to make the book
completely engrossing without the white whale and Captain Ahab’s fatal
monomania.”
So diverse are the samples out of which _Moby-Dick_ is compounded, yet
so masterful is each of its samples, that there is still far from
universal agreement as to the ground colour of this rich and towering
fabric. Yet by this very disagreement is its miraculous artistry
affirmed.
In _Moby-Dick_, all the powers and tastes of Melville’s complex genius
are blended. _Moby-Dick_ is at once indisputably the greatest whaling
novel, and “a hideous and intolerable allegory.” As Mr. Frank Jewett
Mather, Jr. has said, “Out of the mere episodes and minor instances of
_Moby-Dick_, a literary reputation might be made. The retired Nantucket
captains Bildad and Peleg might have stepped out of Smollett. Father
Mapple’s sermon on the book of Jonah is in itself a masterpiece, and
I know few sea tales that can hold their own with the blood feud of
Mate Rodney and sailor Steelkilt.” Captain Hook of _Peter Pan_ is
but Captain Boomer of _Moby-Dick_ with another name: and this an
identity founded not on surmise, but on Sir James Barrie’s professed
indebtedness to Melville. There are, in _Moby-Dick_, long digressions,
natural, historical and philosophical, on the person, habits, manners
and ideas of whales; there are long dialogues and soliloquies such as
were never spoken by mortal man in his waking senses, conversations
that for sweetness, strength and courage remind one of passages from
Dekker, Webster, Massinger, Fletcher and the other old dramatists loved
both by Melville and by Charles Lamb; in the discursive tradition of
Fielding, Sir Thomas Browne and the anatomist of melancholy, Melville
indulges freely in independent moralisings, half essay, half rhapsody;
withal, scenes like Ishmael’s experience at the “Spouter-Inn” with a
practising cannibal for bed-fellow, are, for finished humour, among the
most competent in the language. When Melville sat down to write, always
at his knee stood that chosen emissary of Satan, the comic spirit: a
demoniac familiar never long absent from his pages.
There are those, of course, who would hold against Dante his
moralising, and against Rabelais his broad humour. In like manner,
peculiarity of temperament has necessarily coloured critical judgment
of _Moby-Dick_. But though critics may mouth it as they like about
digressions, improbability, moralising reflections, swollen talk, or
the fetish of art now venerated with such articulate inveteracy,
all wonderfully agree upon the elementary force of _Moby-Dick_,
its vitality, its thrilling power. That it achieves the effect of
illusion, and to a degree peculiar to the highest feats of the creative
imagination, is incontestable. No writer has more. On this point it
is simply impossible to praise Melville too highly. What defects
_Moby-Dick_ has are formal rather than substantial. As Thackeray once
impatiently said of Macaulay: “What critic can’t point them out?” It
was the contention of James Thomson that an overweening concern for
formal impeccability is a fatal sign of weakened vitality. Intensity of
imagination--and Melville exhibited it prodigally in _Moby-Dick_--is an
infinitely rarer and more precious gift than technical sophistication.
Shakespeare has survived, despite his “monstrous irregularities.” But
since Shakespeare, as Francis Thompson has observed, there has been a
gradual decline from imperfection. Milton, at his most typical, was
far too perfect; Pope was ruined by his quest for the quality. No
thoughtful person can contemplate without alarm the idolatry bestowed
upon this quality by the contemporary mind: an idolatry that threatens
to reduce all art to the extinction of unendurable excellence. How
insipid would be the mere adventures of a Don Quixote recounted by a
Stevenson.
The astonishing variety of contradictory qualities synthesised in
_Moby-Dick_ exists nowhere else in literature, perhaps, in such
paradoxical harmony. These qualities, in differences of combination and
emphasis, are discoverable, however, in all of Melville’s writings.
And he published, besides anonymous contributions to periodicals, ten
novels and five volumes of poetry (including the two volumes privately
printed at the very close of his life). There survives, too, a bulk
of manuscript material: a novel, short stories, and a body of verse.
And branded on everything that Melville wrote is there the mark of the
extraordinary personality that created _Moby-Dick_.
Though some of Melville’s writing is distinctly disquieting in
devastating insight, and much of it is very uneven in inspiration,
none of it is undistinguished. Yet only four of his books have ever
been reprinted. The rest of his work, long since out of print,
is excessively rare, some of it being practically unavailable.
The scarcity of a book, however, is not invariably a sign of its
insignificance. It is one of the least accessible of Melville’s
books that Mr. Masefield singles out for especial distinction. “The
book I love best of his,” says Mr. Masefield, “is one very difficult
to come by. I think it is his first romance, and I believe it has
never been reprinted here. It is the romance of his own boyhood. I
mean _Redburn_. Any number of good pens will praise the known books,
_Typee_ and _Omoo_ and _Moby-Dick_ and _White-Jacket_, and will tell
their qualities of beauty and romance. Perhaps _Redburn_ will have
fewer praises, so here goes for _Redburn_; a boy’s book about running
away to sea.” Even more difficult of access is _Pierre_--a book at
the antipodes from _Redburn_. Far from being a boy’s book, _Pierre_
was prophetic of the pessimism of Hardy and the subtlety of Meredith.
From _Redburn_ to _Pierre_; from _Typee_, a spirited travel-book on
Polynesia, to _Clarel_, an intricate philosophical poem in two volumes:
these mark the antithetical extremes of the art that mated poetry and
blubber, whaling and metaphysics. The very complexity and versatility
of Melville’s achievement has been an obstacle in the way of his just
appreciation. Had Mandeville turned from his _Travels_, to write _The
City of Dreadful Night_, the incompatibility would have been no less
extraordinary or bewildering.
Indeed, Melville’s complete works, in their final analysis, are a
long effort towards the creation of one of the most complex, and
massive, and original characters in literature: the character known
in life as Herman Melville. “I am like one of those seeds taken out
of the Egyptian Pyramids,” he wrote to Hawthorne while he was in the
middle of _Moby-Dick_, “which, after being three thousand years a seed
and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed
itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was
twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I
date my life. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the
bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould. It seems to
me now that Solomon was the truest man who ever spoke, and yet that he
_managed_ the truth with a view to popular conservatism.”
Blighted by disillusionment, and paralysed by doubt, Melville came to
treat as an irrelevancy, the making of books. “He informed me that he
had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated,’” wrote Hawthorne
in his _Note-book_, after Melville visited him in Southport, England,
in 1856; “but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation. It
is strange how he persists--as he has persisted ever since I knew him,
and probably long before--in wandering to and fro over these deserts,
as dismal and monotonous as the sandhills amidst which we were sitting.
He can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is
too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” If,
in contempt for the orthodox interpolations by which pious scribes
attempted to sweeten Solomon’s bitter message, Melville ever _managed_
truth as he saw it, it was more to violate popular conservatism
than to propitiate it. “We incline to think that God cannot explain
His own secrets,” he editorially wrote Hawthorne in 1851, “and that
He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We
mortals astonish Him as much as He us.” And as Melville grew in
disillusionment, he grew in astonishment. In his relentless pessimism
he boasted himself “in the happy condition of judicious, unencumbered
travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with
nothing but a carpet bag,--that is to say, the Ego.” It was his ripest
conviction that the exclamation point and the triumphant perpendicular
pronoun were interchangeable signs. But to the end, he bristled with
minor revelations.
Though he boasted that he crossed the frontier into Eternity with
nothing but a carpet bag, he had, in fact, sent more bulky consignments
on ahead. And at the final crack of doom, this dead and disappointed
mariner may yet rise to an unexpected rejoicing. For at that time of
ultimate reckoning, according to the eschatology of Mr. Masefield,
“then the great white whale, old Moby-Dick, the king of all the whales,
will rise up from his quiet in the sea, and go bellowing to his mates.
And all the whales in the world--the sperm-whales, the razor-back,
the black-fish, the rorque, the right, the forty-barrel Jonah, the
narwhal, the hump-back, the grampus and the thrasher--will come to him,
‘fin-out,’ blowing their spray to the heavens. Then Moby-Dick will call
the roll of them, and from all the parts of the sea, from the north,
from the south, from Callao to Rio, not one whale will be missing. Then
Moby-Dick will trumpet, like a man blowing a horn, and all that company
of whales will ‘sound’ (that is, dive), for it is they that have the
job of raising the wrecks from down below.
“Then when they come up the sun will just be setting in the sea, far
away to the west, like a ball of red fire. And just as the curve of it
goes below the sea, it will stop sinking and lie there like a door.
And the stars and the earth and the wind will stop. And there will be
nothing but the sea, and this red arch of the sun, and the whales with
the wrecks, and a stream of light upon the water. Each whale will have
raised a wreck from among the coral, and the sea will be thick with
them--row-ships and sail-ships, and great big seventy-fours, and big
White Star boats, and battleships, all of them green with the ooze,
but all of them manned by singing sailors. And ahead of them will go
Moby-Dick, towing the ship our Lord was in, with all the sweet apostles
aboard of her. And Moby-Dick will give a great bellow, like a fog-horn
blowing, and stretch ‘fin-out’ for the sun away in the west. And all
the whales will bellow out an answer. And all the drowned sailors will
sing their chanties, and beat the bells into a music. And the whole
fleet of them will start towing at full speed towards the sun, at the
edge of the sky and water. I tell you they will make white water, those
ships and fishes.
“When they have got to where the sun is, the red ball will swing open
like a door, and Moby-Dick, and all the whales, and all the ships
will rush through it into an anchorage in Kingdom Come. It will be
a great calm piece of water, with land close aboard, where all the
ships of the world will lie at anchor, tier upon tier, with the hands
gathered forward, singing. They’ll have no watches to stand, no ropes
to coil, no mates to knock their heads in. Nothing will be to do except
singing and beating on the bell. And all the poor sailors who went
in patched rags, my son, they’ll be all fine in white and gold. And
ashore, among the palm-trees, there’ll be fine inns for the seamen.”
And there, among a numerous company, will be Fayaway, and Captain Ahab,
and Jack Chase, and Jarl, and Toby, and Pierre, and Father Mapple, and
Jackson, and Doctor Long Ghost, and Kory-Kory, and Bildad, and Peleg,
and Fedallah, and Tashetego, and Marnoo, and Queequeg. But it seems
hardly likely that Melville will there find Hawthorne to tempt by a
basket of champagne into some little shady corner, there to cross their
legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and to discourse
pleasantly of all the things manifold which once so much distressed
them. In my Father’s house are many mansions.