CHAPTER XIII

INTO THE RACING TIDE

“As the vine flourishes, and the grape empurples close up to the very

walls and muzzles of cannoned Ehrenbreitstein; so do the sweetest

joys of life grow in the very jaws of its peril.”--HERMAN MELVILLE:

_Pierre_.

“Until I was twenty-five,” Melville once wrote to Hawthorne, “I had no

development at all.” When the cable and anchor of the _United States_

were all clear, and when he bounded ashore on his native soil, Melville

was in his twenty-fifth year. “From my twenty-fifth year,” he wrote

Hawthorne, “I date my life.”

His three years of wandering, crowded as they were with alienating

experiences, had, of course, worked deep changes in him: changes more

radical than in the dizzy whirl of strangely peopled adventures it was

possible for him to gauge. In memory, the fitful fever of the past,

deceitfully seems to strive not. But we delude ourselves when we fancy

that it sleeps well. During his far driftings, Melville had clung

reverently to thoughts of home, his imagination treacherously caressing

those very scenes whose intimate contact had filled him with revulsion.

“Do men ever hate the thing they love?” he asks in _White-Jacket_,

perplexed at the paradox of this perpetual recoil. He was eternally

looking both before and after, but never with the smug and genial

after-dinner optimism of Rabbi Ben Ezra. The insufficient present was

always poisoned, to him, by bitter margins of pining and regret. In

headlong escape from his household gods he had been landed among South

Sea islands that in retrospect he viewed as “authentic Edens.” Yet even

in Paradise did he feel himself an exile, teaching old Marheyo to say

“Home” and “Mother,” converting into sacred words the countersigns of

a former Hell. He tells in _White-Jacket_, how, with the smell of tar

in his nostrils, out of sight of land, with a stout ship under his

feet, and snuffing the ocean air, in the silence and solitude of the

deep, during the long night watches used to come thronging about his

heart “holy home associations.” And he closes _White-Jacket_ with the

reflection that “Life’s a voyage that’s homeward-bound!” But he sailed

with sealed orders.

Of Melville’s impressions upon his return he has left no record. During

his three years of whaling and captivity among cannibals, and mutiny,

and South Sea driftings, and adventures in the Navy, life at home had

gone along in its regular necessary way; and the scenes of his youth,

despite their transformation in his memory, lived on in solid fact

unchanged. The identical trees in the Boston Common blotted out the

same patterns against the New England stars; none of the streets had

swerved from off their prim and angular respectability. His mother he

found living in Lansingburg, just out from Albany, N. Y. There was the

same starched calico smell to his sister’s dresses, the same clang-tint

to his mother’s voice. Such was the calibre of his imagination, that he

must have found life at Lansingburg unbelievably like he knew it must

be, yet very different from what he was prepared to find.

His brothers must have first appeared intimate strangers to him. His

elder brother, Gansevoort, had given up his hat and fur shop, was

well established in law and had won a creditable name for himself

in politics. His younger brother, Allan, was beginning a successful

legal career, with his name emblazoned on a door at 10 Wall Street.

Maria was, after all, a Gansevoort; she was not too proud to keep her

brothers reminded that she had borne sons. Melville’s youngest brother,

Tom, had sprung from boyhood into the self-conscious maturity of youth.

From vagabondage in Polynesia to the stern yoke of self-supporting

citizenship was a dizzy transition. But Melville did not clear it at

a bound. The very violence of the impact between the two antipodal

types of experience for a time must have stunned Melville to their

incompatibility. Tanned with sea-faring, exuberant in health, rosy

with the after-glow of his proud companionship with Jack Chase, and

the respect and affection he had won from his associates on board the

_United States_, he was effulgent with amazing tales--the enviable

hero of endless incredible adventures. His home-coming may well have

been not only a staggering, but a joyous adventure. For he entered

Lansingburg trailing clouds of glory. He was panoplied in romance; and

though bodily he was in a suburb of Albany, his companion image was

the distant adventurer he saw mirrored in the admiring and jealous

imagination of his friends. With what melancholy--if any--he viewed

this reflected image, and to what degree he was, Narcissus-wise,

conscious of its irony, we do not know. But if _Typee_ and _Omoo_ be

any index of his mood, he returned home happier and wholesomer than at

any other period of his life. Before many years, unsolved problems of

his youth were to reassert themselves, heightened in difficulty and in

pertinacity. Yet for a time, at least, so it would appear, he reaped

very substantial benefits from his escape beyond civilisation.

According to J. E. A. Smith, Melville was soon beset by his enthralled

and wide-eyed friends to put his experiences into a book. Even if such

a challenge had never been made, it is difficult to see how Melville

could have escaped plunging into literature. For the hankering for

letters had earlier stirred in Melville’s blood,--a hankering that

he had before succumbed to, swathing a vacuity of experience in the

grave-wrappings of rhetoric and prolixity. Now he was rich in matter;

because of the very straitened circumstances of his family, he was

faced again by the necessity of earning some money if he stayed at

home; and in so far as we know, he was untempted to venture forth

either as vagabond or efficiency expert.

Soon after his arrival home he must have settled down to composition.

For the manuscript of _Typee_ was bought in London by John Murray, by

an agreement dated December, 1845.

At the time of the completion of _Typee_, Melville’s brother,

Gansevoort, was starting for London as Secretary to the American

Legation under Minister McLane. Gansevoort threw _Typee_ in among his

luggage, to try its luck among British publishers. Whether _Typee_ had

previously been refused in the United States has not yet transpired.

In any event, John Murray bought the English rights to print a

thousand copies of _Typee_--a purchase that cost him £100. Murray did

not close the sale, however, until he was assured that _Typee_ was a

sober account of actual experiences. _Typee_ appeared in two parts in

Murray’s “Colonial and Home Library.” Part I appeared on February 26,

1846; Part II on April 1 of the same year.

Encouraged by the temerity of John Murray, Wiley and Putnam of New

York bought the American rights for _Typee_. And by an agreement made

in England, _Typee_ appeared simultaneously in New York and London:

in America under the title, _Typee, a Peep at Polynesian Life During

Four Months’ Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas_. In 1849, Harper

Brothers took over _Typee_, and issued it shorn of some of the passages

the Missionaries had found most objectionable. Up to January 1, 1849,

Wiley and Putnam had sold 6,392 copies of _Typee_: a sale upon which

Melville gained $655.91. Up to April 29, 1851, 7,437 copies of _Typee_

had been sold in England, netting Melville, if accounts surviving in

Allan’s hand be correct, $708.40.

Under the date of April 3, 1846--two days after the appearance in

England of Part II of _Typee_, Gansevoort wrote Melville the following

letter--the last letter, it appears, he ever wrote:

“MY DEAR HERMAN:

“Herewith you have copy of the arrangement with Wiley & Putnam for

the publication in the U. S. of your work on the Marquesas. The

letter of W. & P. under date of Jan. 13th is the result of a previous

understanding between Mr. Putnam and myself. As the correspondence

speaks for itself, it is quite unnecessary to add any comment. By

the steamer of to-morrow I send to your address several newspaper

comments and critiques of your book. The one in the _Sun_ was written

by a gentleman who is very friendly to myself, and who may possibly

for that reason have made it unusually eulogistic.

“Yours of Feb. 28 was rec’d a few days ago by the daily packet

from Joshua Bates. I am happy to learn by it that the previous

intelligence transmitted by me was ‘gratifying enough.’ I am glad

that you continue busy, and on my next or the after that will

venture to make some suggestions about your next book. In a former

letter you informed me that Allan had sent you $100 home, the fruit

of my collection. (I refer to the money sent at your request). It

appears that this was not so, for Allan informs me that the $100

was part of the £90 s 10--making £100 which I sent out by the

Jan. 2 Steamer. Allan seems to find it entirely too much trouble

to send me the monthly accounts of receipts and disbursements. I

have received no accounts from him later than up to Nov. 30th and

consequently am in a state of almost entire ignorance as to what

is transpiring at No. 10, Wall Street. This is very unthinking in

him, for my thoughts are so much at home that much of my time is

spent in disquieting apprehensions as to matters & things there. I

continue to live within my income, but to do so am forced to live

a life of daily self-denial. I do not find my health improved by

the sedentary life I have to lead here. The climate is too damp &

moist for me. I sometimes fear I am gradually breaking up. If it

be so--let it be--God’s will be done. I have already seen about as

much of London society as I care to see. It is becoming a toil to

me to make the exertion necessary to dress to go out, and I am now

leading a life really as quiet as your own in Lansingburg.--I think I

am growing phlegmatic and cold. Man stirs me not, nor women either.

My circulation is languid. My brain is dull. I neither seek to win

pleasure or avoid pain. A degree of insensibility has been long

stealing over me, & now seems completely established, which, to my

understanding, is more akin to death than life. Selfishly speaking,

I never valued life very much--it were impossible to value it less

than I do now. The only personal desire I now have is to be out

of debt. That desire waxes stronger within me as others fade. In

consideration of the little egotism which my previous letters to you

have contained, I hope that mother, brothers & sister will pardon

this babbling about myself.

“Tom’s matter has not been forgotten. You say there is a subject,

etc., etc., ‘on which I intended to write but will defer it.’ What do

you allude to? I am careful to procure all the critical notices of

_Typee_ which appear & transmit them to you. The steamer which left

Boston on the 1st inst. will bring me tidings from the U. S. as to

the success of _Typee_ there. I am, with love and kisses to all,

“Affectionately, Your brother,

“GANSEVOORT MELVILLE.”

With this letter, Gansevoort enclosed fourteen lines from Act III,

Scene I of _Measure for Measure_, beginning “Ah, but to die.” On

May 12, he was dead. His countrymen celebrated his decease. _The

Wisconsin,_ a newspaper published in Milwaukee, for example, published,

on July 1, a florid tribute to his memory, declaring him “dear

to the people of the West.” “And though he died young in years,”

the _Wisconsin_ goes on to say, “for genius, thrilling eloquence

and enlarged patriotism, he was known to the people from Maine to

Louisiana.”

But already had Melville achieved a wider, if less beatified,

reputation. The notice that _Typee_ attracted extended considerably

beyond either Maine or Louisiana. And its success was none the less

brilliant because it was in part a _succes de scandal_. Christendom has

progressed since 1846, and _Typee_ has, for present-day readers, lost

its charm of indelicacy. Yet, despite the violation of the proprieties

of which Melville was accused, Longfellow records in his journal for

July 29, 1846: “In the evening we finished the first volume of _Typee_,

a curious and interesting book with glowing descriptions of life in

the Marquesas.” There is no indication that even Longfellow found it

discreet to omit any passages as he read _Typee_ to his family before

the fire. It is to be remembered, however, that in 1851 the _Scarlet

Letter_ was attacked as being nothing but a deliberate attempt to

attract readers by pandering to the basest taste: “Is the French era

actually begun in our literature?” a shocked reviewer asked.

The appearance of _Omoo_ on January 30, 1847, augmented Melville’s

notoriety, and contributed to his fame. Both _Typee_ and _Omoo_

stirred up a whole regiment of critics, at home, in England and

in France. France was patronising, of course, after the manner of

the period; but France flattered Melville by the prolixity of her

patronage. The interest of France in Melville was not a merely literary

absorption, however. Melville had arrived at the Marquesas in the wake

of Admiral Du Petit-Thouars; and at Tahiti Melville had been a prisoner

on board the _Reine Blanche_. In England, Melville was flattered not

only by vitriolic evangelistical damnation, and the uncritical flatter

of Gansevoort’s friends, but even _Blackwood’s_, the most anti-American

of British journals, said of _Omoo_: “Musing the other day over our

matutinal hyson, the volume itself was laid before us, and we found

ourselves in the society of Marquesan Melville, the Phœnix of modern

voyages--springing, it would seem, from the mingled ashes of Captain

Cook and Robinson Crusoe.” Writing of _Typee_, the insular _John Bull_

said: “Since the joyous moment when we first read _Robinson Crusoe_ and

believed it, we have not met so bewitching a book as this narrative

of Herman Melville’s.” The _London Times_ descended to amiability and

said: “That Mr. Melville will favour us with his further adventures in

the South Seas, we have no doubt whatever. We shall expect them with

impatience, and receive them with pleasure. He is a companion after our

own hearts. His voice is pleasant, and we are sure that if we could

see his face it would be a pleasant one.” While such pronouncements

were no earnest of fame, they may have contributed somewhat to augment

Melville’s royalties. And in _Mardi_--written before Melville’s secular

critics began to assail him--Melville took a violent fling at his

reviewers. “True critics,” he said, “are more rare than true poets. A

great critic is a sultan among satraps; but pretenders are thick as

ants striving to scale a palm after its aerial sweetness. Oh! that an

eagle should be stabbed by a goose-quill!” Withal, when Melville wrote

_Mardi_ he had spent some reflection on the nature of Fame, and mocked

at those who console themselves for the neglect of their contemporaries

by bethinking themselves of the glorious harvest of bravos their ghosts

will reap. And time, he saw, was an undertaker, not a resurrectionist:

“He who on all hands passes for a cipher to-day, if at all remembered,

will be sure to pass to-morrow for the same. For there is more

likelihood of being overrated while living than of being underrated

when dead.”

Noticed by reviewers, and encouraged by payments from his publishers,

Melville began to look more hopefully at the world. In _Clarel_ he

later wrote: “The dagger-icicle draws blood; but give it sun.” He

seemed at last to have stepped decoratively and profitably into his

assigned niche in the cosmic order. It was delightful to rehearse

outlived pleasures and hardships; and it was a lucrative delight:

by writing, too, some men had achieved fame. And so, undeterred

by the wail of the Preacher of Jerusalem, Melville settled to the

multiplication of books. He would perpetuate his reveries--and he

doubted not that sparkling wines would crown his cup. Then it was that

the beckoning image of an ultimate earthly felicity swam over the

beaded brim.

Melville had dedicated _Typee_ to Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of

Massachusetts. The Shaws and the Melvilles were friends of years’

standing. When a student at Amherst, Lemuel Shaw had been engaged to

Melville’s aunt, Nancy. “To his death,” says Frederic Hathway Chase in

his _Lemuel Shaw_, “Shaw carefully preserved two tender notes written

in the delicate hand of his first betrothed, timidly referring to

their immature plans for the future and her admiration and love for

him. The untimely death of the young lady, unhappily cut short their

youthful dreams, and not until he was thirty-seven years of age were

Shaw’s affections again engaged. The intimacy between Shaw and the

Melville family, however, continued after the young lady’s death.” Yet

were the demands of Shaw’s affections not satisfied by his intimacy

with the Melvilles or by the two love-letters among his precious

belongings. He married twice; the first time in 1818 to Elizabeth

Knapp; the second time in 1827 to Hope Savage. By each wife he had two

children. By Elizabeth, John Oakes, who died in 1902; and Elizabeth,

who married Melville. By Hope, was born to him Lemuel, who lived till

1884, and Samuel Savage, born in 1833 in the Shaw home at 49 Mount

Vernon Street, Boston, where he lived till his death in 1915. Melville

heartily detested his brothers-in-law.

On March 19, 1846, Melville wrote from Lansingburg to Chief Justice

Shaw:

“MY DEAR SIR:

“Herewith you have one of the first bound copies of _Typee_ I have

been able to procure--the dedication is very simple, for the world

would hardly have sympathised to the full extent of those feelings

with which I regard my father’s friend and the constant friend of all

his family.

“I hope that the perusal of this little narrative of mine will afford

you some entertainment, even if it should not possess much other

merit. Your knowing the author so well, will impart some interest

to it.--I intended to have sent at the same time with this copies

of _Typee_ for each of my aunts, but have been disappointed in

not receiving as many as I expected.--I mention, however, in the

accompanying letter to my Aunt Priscilla that they shall soon be

forthcoming.

“Remember me most warmly to Mrs. Shaw & Miss Elizabeth, and to all

your family, & tell them I shall not soon forget that agreeable visit

to Boston.

“With sincere respect, Judge Shaw, I remain gratefully & truly yours,

“HERMAN MELVILLE.

“CHIEF JUSTICE SHAW,

”Boston.”

The Aunt Priscilla mentioned in this letter was a sister of Melville’s

father--fifth child of Major Thomas Melville. She was born in 1784, and

upon her death in 1862, she showed that her appreciation of Melville’s

earlier solicitude had been substantial, by bequeathing him nine

hundred dollars. The Miss Elizabeth of the letter, the only daughter of

Chief Justice Shaw, and Melville were married on August 4, 1847.

On the evidence of surviving records, Melville’s father had resigned

himself to the institution of marriage as to one of the established

conveniences of Christendom. Allan was a practical man, and he soberly

saw that he gained more than he lost by generously sharing his bed

and the fireside zone with a competent accessory to his domestic

comforts. If he was ever a romantic lover, it was in the folly of his

youth. Though romantic love be a tingling holiday extravagance, he

mistrusted--and Allan never doubted his wisdom--its everyday useability

for a cautious and peace-loving man. And since Dante had married Gemma

Donati, since Petrarch had had children by an unknown concubine, Maria

had reason to congratulate herself that Allan evinced for her no

adoration of the kind lavished upon the sainted Beatrice or upon the

unattainable Laura.

In his approach to marriage, Melville showed none of the prosaic

circumspection of his father. From his idealisation of the proud

cold purity of Maria, Melville built up a haloed image of the wonder

and mystery of sanctified womanhood: without blemish, unclouded,

snow-white, terrible, yet serene. And before this image Melville

poured out the fulness of his most reverential thoughts and beliefs.

The very profundity of his frustrated love for Maria, and the accusing

incompatibility between the image and the fact, made his early life a

futile and desperate attempt to escape from himself. The peace, and at

the same time the stupendous discovery that he craved: that he found

neither at home nor over the rim of the world. When with Maria, he had

craved to put oceans between them; when so estranged, he was parched to

return.

In his wanderings, he had seen sights, and lived through experiences to

disabuse him of his fantastic idealisation of woman. In fact, however,

such experiences may but tend to heighten idealisation. In the Middle

Age, the Blessed Mother was celebrated in a duality of perplexing

incompatibility: she was at once the Virgin Mother of the Son of God,

and the patron of thieves, harlots and cutthroats. She was at once an

object of worship and a subject of farce. She was woman. Protestantism,

restoring woman to her original Hebraic dignity of a discarded rib,

evinced in marriage an essentially biological interest, and regulated

romantic love into uxoriousness. Allan was a good Protestant. But

neither Mrs. Chapone nor Fayaway were able to precipitate Melville

into that form of heresy. Fayaway was Fayaway: and her father was a

cannibal. Civilisation had given her no veils; Christianity had given

her no compunctons. She was neither a mystery nor a sin. Untouched did

she leave the sacred image in his heart.

To Elizabeth Shaw, Melville transferred his idealisation of his

mother. In _Pierre_ he says: “this softened spell which wheeled the

mother and son in one orbit of joy seemed a glimpse of the glorious

possibility, of the divinest of those emotions which are incident to

the sweetest season of love.” In _Pierre_, Melville declared that the

ideal possibilities of the love between mother and son, seemed “almost

to realise here below the sweet dreams of those religious enthusiasts,

who paint to us a Paradise to come, when etherealised from all dross

and stains, the holiest passion of man shall unite all kindreds and

climes in one circle of pure and unimpaired delight.” And in this

“courteous lover-like adoration” of son for mother, Melville saw the

“highest and airiest thing in the whole compass of the experience of

our mortal life.” And “this heavenly evanescence,” Melville declares,

“this nameless and infinitely delicate aroma of inexpressible

tenderness and attentiveness,” is, “in every refined and honourable

attachment, contemporary with courtship.” In _Pierre_, Melville

spends a chapter of dithyramb in celebration of this sentiment which,

inspired by one’s mother, one transfers to all other women honourably

loved. “Love may end in age, and pain and need, and all other modes

of human mournfulness; but love begins in joy. Love’s first sigh is

never breathed, till after love hath laughed. Love has not hands, but

cymbals; Love’s mouth is chambered like a bugle, and the instinctive

breathings of his life breathe jubilee notes of joy.” And during his

courtship of Elizabeth Shaw, it seems that in Melville were “the

audacious immortalities of divinest love.”

None of Melville’s letters of courtship survive. There are more direct

evidences of the fruits of his love, than of its early bloom. There

are, however, two letters of his wife’s, written during the month of

the marriage. The first was written during the wedding trip.

“CENTER HARBOR, Aug. 6th, 1847.

“MY DEAR MOTHER:

“You know I promised to write you whenever we came to a stopping

place, and remained long enough. We are now at Center Harbor, a most

lonely and romantic spot at the extremity of Winnipiscogee Lake,

having arrived last evening from Concord--and we intend to remain

until to-morrow. One object in stopping so long and indeed principal

one was to visit ‘Red Hill’--a mountain (commanding a most beautiful

view of the lake) about four miles distant. But to-day it is so

cloudy and dull, I am afraid we shall not be able to accomplish

it--so you see I have a little spare time, and improve it by writing

to relieve any anxiety you may feel. Though this is but the third day

since our departure, it seems as if a long time had passed, we have

seen so many places of novelty and interest. The stage ride yesterday

from Franklin here, though rather fatiguing, was one of great

attraction from the beautiful scenery. To-morrow we again intend to

take the stage to Conway, and from there to the White Mountains. I

will write again from there, and tell you more of what I have seen,

but now I send this missive more to let you know of our safety and

well-being than anything else.

“I hope by this time you have quite recovered from your

indisposition, and that I shall soon hear from you to be assured

of it--I hardly dare to trust myself to speak of what I felt in

leaving home, but under the influence of such commingling thoughts,

it entirely escaped me to tell you of any place to which you might

address a letter to me so that I should be sure to get it. Now I

am _very_ anxious and impatient to hear from you, and I hope you

will lose no time in writing if it be only a very few lines. Herman

desires to add a postscript to my letter, and he will tell you when

and where to write so that I may get it.

“Remember me with affection to father and ask him to let me have

a letter from him soon, to all members of the family and to Mrs.

Melville and the girls--my mother and sisters--how strangely it

sounds. Accept a great deal of love for yourself, my dear mother,

and believe me as ever, your affectionate daughter, Elizabeth--even

though I add to it--Melville--for the first time.

“Friday morning.

“MY DEAR SIR:

“At my desire Lizzie has left a small space for a word or two.--We

arrived here last evening after a pleasant ride from Franklin, the

present terminus of the Northern Rail Road. The scenery was in many

places very fine, & we caught some glimpses of the mountain region

to which we are going. Center Harbor where we now are is a very

attractive place for a tourist, having the lake for boating and

trouting, and plenty of rides in the vicinity, besides Red-Hill, the

view from which is said to be equal to anything of the kind in New

England. A rainy day, however, has thus far prevented us from taking

our excursion, to enjoy the country.--To-morrow, I think we shall

leave for Conway and thence to Mt. Washington & so to Canada. I trust

in the course of some two weeks to bring Lizzie to Lansingburgh,

quite refreshed and invigourated from her rambles.--Remember me to

Mrs. Shaw & the family, and tell my mother that I will write to her

in a day or two.

“Sincerely yours,

“HERMAN MELVILLE.

“Letters directed within four or five days from now, will probably

reach us at Montreal.”

The second letter explains itself:

“LANSINGBURGH, Aug. 28th, 1847.

“MY DEAR MOTHER:

“We arrived here safe and well yesterday morning, and I intended to

have written a few lines to you then, but I was so tired, and had

so much to do to unpack and put away my things, I deferred it until

to-day.

“We left Montreal on Tuesday evening and the next day in the

afternoon hailed Whitehall, at the foot of Lake Champlain, after

a very pleasant sail on that beautiful piece of water. The next

question was whether we should proceed to Lansingburgh by stage or

take the canal boat. We thought stage riding would be rather tame

after the beautiful scenery of Vermont, and as I had never been in

a canal boat in my life, Herman thought we had better try it for

the novelty. This would expedite our journeying, too, and having

once set our faces homeward, we were not disposed to delay. Being

fully forewarned of the inconvenience we might expect in passing a

night on board a canal boat--a crowded canal boat, too, and fully

determined to meet them bravely, we stepped on board--not without

some misgivings, however, as we saw the crowds of men, women and

children come pouring in, with trunks and handbags to match. Where so

many people were to store themselves at night was a mystery to be yet

unravelled, and what they all _did_ do with themselves is something

I have not yet found out. Well, night drew on--and after sitting on

deck on trunks or anything we could find (and having to bob our heads

down every few minutes when the helmsman sang out ‘Bridge!’ or ‘Low

Bridge!’) it became so damp and chilly that I was finally driven

below.

“Here was a scene entirely passing description. The Ladies’ ‘Saloon!’

they politely termed it so, so we were informed by a red and gilt

sign over it. A space about as large as my room at home, was

separated from the gentlemen’s ‘Saloon’ by a curtain only. About 20

or 25 women were huddled into this. Each one having two children

apiece of all ages, sexes, and sizes, said children, as is usual on

such occasions, lifting up their respective voices, very loud indeed,

in one united chorus of lamentations.

“A narrow row of shelves was hooked up high on each side and on

these some & more fortunate mothers had closely packed their

sleeping babies while they sat by to prevent their rolling out. I

looked round in vain for a place to stretch my limbs, but it was

not to be thought of--but after a while by a fortunate chance I

got a _leaning_ privilege, and fixing my carpet-bag for a pillow,

I made up my mind to pass the night in this manner. One by one the

wailing children dropped off to sleep and I had actually lost myself

in a sort of doze, when a new feature in the case became apparent.

Stepping carefully over the outstretched forms on the floor came

two men, each bearing a pile of boards or little shelves like those

already suspended. These they hooked up against the sides in the

smallest conceivable spaces, using every available inch of room--and

were intended to sleep (!) upon. I immediately pounced upon one of

them which I thought might be accessible, and was just consulting

with myself as to the best means of getting onto it, when I was

politely requested by one of the sufferers to take the shelf above

from which she wished to remove her children to the one I thought to

occupy--of course I complied, and after failing in several awkward

attempts, I managed to climb and crawl into this narrow aperture like

a bug forcing its way through the boards of a fence. Sweltering and

smothering I watched the weary night hours pass away, for to sleep

in such an atmosphere was impossible. I rose at 3 o’clock, thinking

it was five, spent a couple of hours curled up on the floor, and was

right glad when Herman came for me, with the joyful intelligence that

we were actually approaching Whitehall--the place of our destination.

He also passed a weary night, though his sufferings were of the

opposite order--for while I was suffocating with the heat and bad

atmosphere, he was on deck, chilled and half-frozen with the fog and

penetrating dampness, for the gentlemen’s apartment was even more

crowded than the ladies’--so much so that they did not attempt to

hang any shelves for them to lie upon. All they could do was to sit

bolt upright firmly wedged in and if one of them presumed to _lean_

at all or even to _nod_ out of the perpendicular it was thought

a great infringement of rights, and he was immediately called to

order. So Herman preferred to remain on deck all night to being in

this crowd. We left the boat and took the cars about an hour’s ride

from Lansingburgh, and surprised the family at 6 o’clock in the

morning before they were up. We were very warmly welcomed and cared

for and soon forgot our tribulations of the canal boat. I was much

disappointed to miss the boys--they had only left the day before--it

was too bad--I am looking forward with such impatience to see you

and father, and sincerely hope nothing will happen to prevent your

coming.

“I suppose we shall not be long here. Allan is looking out for a

house in N. Y. and will be married next month.

“You know a proposition was made before I came here that I should

furnish my own room, which for good reasons were then set aside--but

if it is not too late now, I should like very much to do it if we go

to N. Y.--but we can talk about that when I see you. I must bring my

scribbling to a close, after I have begged you or somebody to write

me. I have not received a single line since I left home. How did the

dinner party go off? I want to hear about everything and everybody

at home. Please give my warmest love to all and believe me your

affectionate daughter,

“ELIZABETH S. M.

“Herman desires his kindest remembrances to all.”

Soon after the marriage, Melville and his wife moved from Lansingburg

to New York, where they lived with Melville’s brother, Allan, and his

household of sisters. The letters of Mrs. Melville’s are the only

surviving records of the intimate details of this domestic arrangement.

They are interesting, too, as revelation of the character of Mrs.

Melville. The three following are typical:

“NEW YORK, Dec. 23rd, 1847.

“Thank you, dear Mother, for your nice long letter. I was beginning

to be afraid you had forgotten your part of the contract for that

week, but Saturday brought me evidence to the contrary and made us

even. And I should have written you earlier, but the days are so

short, and I have so much to do, that they fly by without giving me

half the time I want. Perhaps you will wonder what on earth I have

to occupy me. Well in fact I hardly know exactly myself, but true

it is little things constantly present themselves and dinner time

comes before I am aware. We breakfast at 8 o’clock, then Herman goes

to walk and I fly up to put his room to rights, so that he can sit

down to his desk immediately on his return. Then I bid him good-bye,

with many charges to be an industrious boy and not upset the inkstand

and then flourish the duster, make the bed, etc., in my own room.

Then I go downstairs and read the papers a little while, and after

that I am ready to sit down to my work whatever it may be--darning

stockings--making or mending for myself or Herman--at all events,

I haven’t seen a day yet, without _some_ sewing or other to do. If

I have letters to write, as is the case to-day, I usually do that

first--but whatever I am about I do not much more than get thoroughly

engaged in it, than ding-dong goes the bell for luncheon. This is

half-past 12 o’clock--by this time we must expect callers, and so

must be dressed immediately after lunch. Then Herman insists upon

taking a walk of an hour’s length at least. So unless I can have rain

or snow for an excuse, I usually sally out and make a pedestrian

tour a mile or two down Broadway. By the time I come home it is two

o’clock and after, and then I must make myself look as bewitchingly

as possible to meet Herman at dinner. This being accomplished, I

have only about an hour of available time left. At four we dine, and

after dinner is over, Herman and I come up to our room and enjoy a

cosy chat for an hour or so--or he reads me some of the chapters he

has been writing in the day. Then he goes down town for a walk, looks

at the papers in the reading room, etc., and returns about half-past

seven or eight. Then my work or my book is laid aside, and as he does

not use his eyes but very little by candle light, I either read to

him, or take a hand at whist for his amusement, or he listens to our

reading or conversation, as best pleases him. For we all collect in

the parlour in the evening, and generally one of us reads aloud for

the benefit of the whole. Then we retire very early--at 10 o’clock

we all disperse. Indeed we think that quite a late hour to be up.

This is the general course of daily events so you see how my time is

occupied; but sometime--dear me! we have to go and make calls! and

then good-bye to everything else for _that_ day! for upon my word,

it takes the whole day, from 1 o’clock till four! and then perhaps

we don’t accomplish more than two or three, if unluckily they chance

to be in--for everybody lives so far from everybody else, and all

Herman’s and Allan’s friends are _so_ polite, to say nothing of Mrs.

M.’s old acquaintances, that I am fairly sick and tired of returning

calls. And no sooner do we do up a few, than they all come again, and

so it has to be gone over again.

“You know ceremonious calls were always my abomination, and where

they are all utter strangers and we have to send in our cards to

show who we are, it is so much the worse. Excepting calls, I have

scarcely visited at all. Herman is not fond of parties, and I don’t

care anything about them here. To-morrow night, for a great treat, we

are going to the opera--Herman & Fanny and I--and this is the first

place of public amusement I have attended since I have been here but

somehow or other I don’t care much about them now.

“I am glad to hear that father and all are so well--except Sam--how

is his cough now? don’t forget to tell us when you write.

“If Susan Haywood and Fanny Clarke are at our house please give my

love to them and ask Susan to answer my letter. How is Mrs. Marcus

Morton and Mrs. Hawes? I hope you will be able to write me this week

though I know _your_ time is very much occupied--but then you know

any letter--even the shortest and most hurried is acceptable and

better than none--though I must confess my prejudice sins in favour

of _long_ ones--but I am glad to hear _anything_ from home. You

addressed my last letter just right and it came very straight--but

Allan’s name is spelt with an ‘a’ instead of an ‘e’--as Allan--not

Allen--different names, you see--I am hoping that sometime or other

father will find time to write to me--though I know he is so much

occupied with other matters.

“Thank you for your kindness about the picture box--as I do not need

any article at present, I will keep the dollar till I do--it will be

the same thing, you know, and I have already got such a New Year’s

present in the big box upstairs--by the way, in about a week more, it

will be time to open it. Oh, what do you think about my calling on

Mrs. Joe Henshaw and Josephine--they are living here and came here

after I did, so perhaps I ought to call first if it is best for me

to visit them--being connected with the Haywoods perhaps it would be

better to renew the acquaintance. What do you think about it? Please

tell me when you write, and get their address from Aunt Haywood, if

you think I had better call. I am afraid you are tired of this long

letter; but I have done now. Good-bye, and love to all.

“Affectionately yours,

“ELIZABETH S. MELVILLE.

“P. S. I have a letter from Mrs. Warpwell a few days since--I didn’t

know she had lost one of her twins before. Why didn’t you tell me? My

love to Mrs. Sullivan. I hope she is quite well again. Tell Lem we

expect him next month in his mention to make us a visit.”

“NEW YORK, Feb. 4th, 1848.

“103 Fourth Avenue.

“MY DEAR MOTHER:

“Every day for the last week I have been trying to write to you,

but have been prevented. I received your letter by Lemuel with much

pleasure and the next time you write I want you to tell me more about

Carrie--how she and the small baby are getting along--and whether she

took ether when she was sick and if so, with what effect. What they

have decided to name the baby and all about it. Your presents were

very acceptable--Herman was much gratified with your remembrance to

him--and intends to make his acknowledgment for himself. You forgot

Kate in the multitude of Melvilles--so I just gave her my share of

the bill you enclosed without saying anything about it--knowing you

would not intentionally leave her out--or rather I gave the bill to

Helen for herself, Fanny and Kate, as she could get what they most

wanted better than I--so it’s all right now, and I will take the will

for the deed and thank you all the same.

“The key of the basket that you wanted me to send--you know--I have

_no bills_ there whatever--you have them all. I only have an account

of the expenditure and a memorandum of the bills that were paid--not

the item of the bills. If you have an opportunity where it will come

safe I should like to have you send me that basket very much.

“You speak of a Mr. Crocker whom you wish me to receive. If he will

call I shall be very happy to see him. You know we are recently

renumbered and our address now is ‘No. 103 Fourth Avenue’, ‘between

11th & 12th Streets’--it is safer to add for a time.

“Lem seems to be enjoying himself highly with the amusements out of

doors, and the society within. Last night he went to a masked ball,

under the auspices of Mrs. Elwell, through Aunt Marat’s kindness,

and a very fine appearance he presented, I can assure you, in an

old French court dress--with a long curled horse-hair wig, chapeau

bras--knee breeches, long stockings, buckles, snuff box and all--it

was a very becoming dress to him, and exactly suited to his carriage

and manners--I wish you could have seen him. We went to a party

ourselves last evening, but we had a deal of fun helping him to

dress--he went masked of course, but being introduced by Mrs. Elwell

was very kindly received--taking Mrs. Dickinson (the hostess) down

to supper, and doing the polite thing to the nine Misses Dickinson.

He enjoyed it much, as you may suppose, and did not get home till

four o’clock in the morning, and even then the ball had not broken

up. At this present moment--11 o’clock--I believe he is dozing on the

parlour sofa--to gain strength to go to the opera this evening.

“We have been very dissipated this week for us, for usually we are

very quiet. Wednesday evening we passed at Mrs. Thurston’s and were

out quite late--last night at a party--a very pleasant one too, where

by the way--I passed off for Miss Melville and as such was quite a

belle!! And to-night in honour of our guest, we go to the Opera. We

have resolved to stop after this though and not go out at all for

while Herman is writing the effect of keeping late hours is very

injurious to him--if he does not get a full night’s rest or indulges

in a late supper, he does not feel right for writing the next day.

And the days are too precious to be thrown away. And to tell the

truth I don’t think he cares _very_ much about parties either, and

when he goes it is more on my account than his own. And it’s no

sacrifice to me, for I am quite as contented, and more--to stay at

home so long as he will stay with me. He has had communications from

London publishers with very liberal offers for the book in hand--and

one from Berlin to translate from the first sheets into German--but

as yet he has closed with none of them, and will not in a hurry.

“I believe I forgot in my last to acknowledge the receipt of a paper

from father--I was very glad of it--please present my thanks--I

have intended to write to father for a good while--but I like to

have answers to my letters--so if father has not time to write in

reply, you must write for him. Give my love to him and to all the

family--and when you see Susan Morton ask her to write to me.

“Tell Aunt Lucretia I was delighted to get her note, and I will write

to her.

“Now I have written you a famous long letter and I hope you will

write me as long a one very soon, for I have not heard from home for

more than a week now--not since Lem came.

“Give my love to Mrs. Sullivan, and believe me as ever truly yours,

“E. S. MELVILLE.”

“NEW YORK, May 5th, 1848.

“MY DEAR MOTHER:

“I am very much occupied to-day but I snatch a few moments to reply

to your letter which though rather tardy in forthcoming was very

acceptable. But you did not tell me what I most wanted to know--about

Sam. And your indefinite allusion to it, when we were all waiting to

hear, was rather tantalising. Does ‘this season’ means _now_ in his

present vacation, or sometime in the course of the year? I suppose

his vacation has already commenced if he is out at Milton, then why

not let him come immediately and make his visit, because if he waits

till warm weather it will not be nearly so pleasant or so beneficial

for him. Maria Percival writes me that she is coming on soon and he

might come with her. Please write me something _definite_ about it,

as soon as you can, and do let him come. We want him to very much,

and the sooner the better.

“You ask about our coming to Boston but I guess the house will be

ready to _clean again_ by that time--for it will not be before

July, perhaps August. Herman of course will stick to his work till

‘the book’ is published and his services are required till the last

moment--correcting proof, etc. The book is done now, in fact (you

need not mention it) and the copy for the press is in progress, but

when it is published on both sides of the water a great deal of delay

is unavoidable and though Herman will have some spare time after

sending the proof sheets to London which will be next month sometime

probably he will not want to leave New York till the book is actually

on the book-sellers’ shelves. And then I don’t care about leaving

home till my cold is over because I could not enjoy my visit so much.

So though I am very impatient for the time to come I must e’en wait

as best I may and enjoy the anticipation.

“We are looking out for Tom to return every day, his ship has been

reported in the papers several times lately as homeward bound and

Herman wrote to the owner at Westport and received answer that he

looked for the ship the first of May. That has already past and we

are daily expecting a letter to announce her actual arrival. Then

Herman will have to go over to Westport for Tom and see that he is

regularly discharged and paid, and bring him home. As yet he, Tom,

is in entire ignorance of the changes that have taken place in his

family and of their removal to New York. So he will be much surprised

I think. As you may suppose, Mother is watching and counting the days

with great anxiety for he is the baby of the family and his mother’s

pet.

“Augusta is going to Albany in a few days to visit the Van

Renssalaers. They have been at her all winter to go up the river but

she would not, and now Mr. Van Renssalaer is in town and will not go

back without her. And in a few weeks Helen is going to Lansingburgh

to visit Mrs. Jones.

“I should write you a longer letter but I am very busy to-day copying

and cannot spare the time so you must excuse it and all mistakes. I

tore my sheet in two by mistake thinking it was my copying (for we

only write on one side of the page) and if there is no punctuation

marks you must make them yourself for when I copy I do not punctuate

at all but leave it for a final revision for Herman. I have got so

used to write without (.) I cannot always think of it.

“Please write me _very soon_ this week--if only a few lines and tell

me about Sam’s coming.

“My love to all, to father when you write and to Sue Morton if she is

at our house, Mrs. Hawes etc. and believe me as ever your affectionate

“E. S. MELVILLE.

“Miss Savage & Miss Lincoln called to see me a day or two ago.

“Please spell Allan’s name with an A, not E. _Allan_, not _Allen_.”

During this period, the household at 103 Fourth Avenue was busy getting

_Redburn_ and _Mardi_ ready for the press. Melville’s sister Augusta

seems to have been exhaustless in copying manuscript. Melville’s

mother-in-law reports “Miss Augusta is all energy, united with much

kindness.” Augusta also evinced a strong religious bent, and during

song services--which she loved to attend--she used to grip her hymnal

athletically, and beat time with an aggressive rhythm. Her Hymn Book

survives, pasted up with dozens of clippings of hymns and prayers, a

“selection” entitled _The Sinner’s Friend_, and the vivacious couplet:

“Jesus, mine’s a pressing case.

Oh, more grace, _more grace, MORE GRACE_!”

[Illustration: ELIZABETH SHAW MELVILLE]

But song-services, and copying manuscript, were not enough to fill

Augusta’s busy days. In January, 1848, she was commissioned to find

a name satisfactory for Melville’s first child. Mrs. Herman Melville

was in Boston to be with her mother and family at the time of the

childbirth. On January 27, 1849, Augusta wrote from New York to “My

dear Lizzie, My sweet Sister,” reporting that she had been “searching

the Genealogical Tree” with designs upon an ancestor with a choice

name: and she spends two very diverting and animated pages recounting

her adventures among the branches. Her search was rewarded to her

satisfaction: “_Malcolm Melville!_ how easily it runs from my pen; how

sweetly it sounds to my ear; how musically it falls upon my heart.

Malcolm Melville! Methinks I see him in his plaided kilts, with his

soft blue eyes, & his long flaxen curls. How I long to press him to my

heart. There! I can write no more. The last proof sheets are through.

_Mardi’s_ a book.” Augusta concludes with a quotation from _Mardi_:

“‘Oh my own Kagtanza, child of my prayers. Oro’s blessing on thee!’”

In her search of the Genealogical Tree, Augusta had contemptuously

brushed by all female branches: she had determined that Melville’s

first child should be a son--and a son with blue eyes and blond

hair--and in her choice of a name for the unborn infant, she

contemptuously ignored the possibility of the child turning out to be

a girl. On February 16, 1849, was born in Boston, to Melville and his

wife, their first child. There was potency in Augusta’s prayers. It was

a boy.

On April 14, 1849, _Mardi_ appeared, published, as was _Omoo_, by

Harper and Brothers in America, by Richard Bentley in London. _Redburn_

appeared on August 18 of the same year. By February 22, 1850 (the date

of Melville’s fifth royalty account from Harper and Brothers), 2,154

copies of _Mardi_, and 4,011 copies of _Redburn_ had been sold. On

February 1, 1848, Melville had overdrawn his account with Harper’s to

the extent of $256.03. On December 5, 1848, Harper’s advanced Melville

$500; on April 28, 1848, $300; on July 2, 1849, $300; on September 14,

1849, $500. Though _Mardi_ and _Redburn_ had had a fairly generous

sale, the deduction of his royalties on February 22, 1850, left him

in debt to Harper’s $733.69. The outlook was not bright for the

responsibilities of fatherhood.

On April 23, Melville sent to his father-in-law a note “conveying

the intelligence of Lizzie’s improving strength, and Malcolm’s

precocious growth. Both are well.” Melville went on to say that

Samuel, the brother-in-law for whom he felt not the most enthusiastic

affection, was expected by all “to honour us with his presence during

the approaching vacation: and I have no doubt he will not find it

difficult to spend his time pleasantly with so many companions.” Does

Melville here imply that for himself, as a sensible man, he would

prefer more solitude? In conclusion, Melville says: “I see that _Mardi_

has been cut into by the _London Atheneum_, and also burnt by the

common hangman by the _Boston Post_. However, the _London Examiner_

& _Literary Gazette_ & other papers this side of the water have done

differently. These attacks are matters of course, and are essential to

the building up of any permanent reputation--if such should ever prove

to be mine--‘There’s nothing in it!’ cried the dunce when he threw

down the 47th problem of the 1st Book of Euclid--‘There’s nothing in

it!’--Thus with the posed critic. But Time, which is the solver of all

riddles, will solve _Mardi_.”

The riddle of _Mardi_ goes near to the heart of the riddle of

Melville’s life. “Not long ago,” Melville says in the preface to

_Mardi_, “having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific,

which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought

occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure,

and publishing it as such; to see whether the fiction might not,

possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my

previous experience. This thought was the germ of others, which have

resulted in _Mardi_.”

_Mardi_, as _Moby-Dick_, starts off firmly footed in reality. The

hero, discontented on board a whaler, hits upon the wild scheme of

surreptitiously cutting loose one of the whale boats, and trusting to

the chances of the open Pacific. It is sometimes the case that an old

mariner will conceive a very strong attachment for some young sailor,

his shipmate--a Fidus-Achates-ship, a league of offence and defence, a

copartnership of chests and toilets, a bond of love and good-feeling.

Such a relationship existed between the hero of _Mardi_ and his Viking

shipmate Jarl. Jarl was an old Norseman to behold: his hands as brawny

as the paws of a bear; his voice as hoarse as a storm roaring round the

peak of Mull; his long yellow hair waving about his head like a sunset.

In the crow’s-nest of the ship the project of escape was confided to

Jarl. Jarl advised with elderly prudence, but seeing his chummy’s

resolution immovable, he changed his wrestling to a sympathetic hug,

and bluntly swore he would follow through thick and thin. The escape

was successfully made, and for days the two men drifted at sea: and

it was an eventful if solitary drifting. After sixteen days in their

open boat, “as the expanded sun touched the horizon’s rim, a ship’s

uppermost spars were observed, traced like a spider’s web against

its crimson disk. It looked like a far-off craft on fire.” Bent upon

shunning a meeting--though Jarl “kept looking wistfully over his

shoulder; doubtlessly praying Heaven that we might not escape”--they

lowered sail. As the ship bore down towards them, they saw her to

be no whaler--as they had feared--but a small, two-masted craft in

unaccountable disarray. They lay on their oars, and watched her in

the starlight. They hailed her loudly. No return. Again. But all was

silent. So, armed with a harpoon, they eventually boarded the strange

craft. The ship was in a complete litter; the deserted tiller they

found lashed. Though it was a nervous sort of business, they explored

her interior. Many were the puzzling sights they saw; but except for a

supernatural sneeze from the riggings, there was no evidence of life

aboard. At dawn, however, they discovered, in the maintop, a pair of

South Sea Islanders: Samoa, and Annatoo. “To be short, Annatoo was a

Tartar, a regular Calmuc; and Samoa--Heaven help him--her husband.”

Upon this pair, Melville has lavished chapter after chapter of the most

finished and competent comedy. Annatoo is as perfect, in her way, as is

Zuleika Dobson. And Samoa--well, Samoa, on occasion, thinks it discreet

to amputate his wounded arm.

“Among savages, severe personal injuries are, for the most part,

accounted but trifles. When a European would be taking to his couch in

despair, the savage would disdain to recline.

“More yet. In Polynesia, every man is his own barber and surgeon,

cutting off his beard or arm, as occasion demands. No unusual thing,

for the warriors of Varvoo to saw off their own limbs, desperately

wounded in battle. But owing to the clumsiness of the instrument

employed--a flinty, serrated shell--the operation has been known to

last several days. Nor will they suffer any friend to help them;

maintaining, that a matter so nearly concerning a warrior is far better

attended to by himself. Hence it may be said, that they amputate

themselves at their leisure, and hang up their tools when tired. But,

though thus beholden to no one for aught connected with the practice

of surgery, they never cut off their own heads, that ever I heard; a

species of amputation to which, metaphorically speaking, many would-be

independent sort of people in civilised lands are addicted.

“Samoa’s operation was very summary. A fire was kindled in the little

caboose, or cook-house, and so made as to produce much smoke. He then

placed his arm upon one of the windlass bitts (a short upright timber,

breast-high), and seizing the blunt cook’s axe would have struck the

blow; but for some reason distrusting the precision of his aim, Annatoo

was assigned to the task. Three strokes, and the limb, from just above

the elbow, was no longer Samoa’s; and he saw his own bones; which

many a centenarian can not say. The very clumsiness of the operation

was safety to the subject. The weight and bluntness of the instrument

both deadened the pain and lessened the hemorrhage. The wound was then

scorched, and held over the smoke of the fire, till all signs of blood

vanished. From that day forward it healed, and troubled Samoa but

little.

“But shall the sequel be told? How that, superstitiously averse to

burying in the sea the dead limb of a body yet living; since in that

case Samoa held, that he must very soon drown and follow it; and how,

that equally dreading to keep the thing near him, he at last hung it

aloft from the topmast-stay; where yet it was suspended, bandaged over

and over in cerements. The hand that must have locked many others in

friendly clasp, or smote a foe, was no food, thought Samoa, for fowls

of the air nor fishes of the sea.

“Now, which was Samoa? The dead arm swinging high as Haman? Or the

living trunk below? Was the arm severed from the body, or the body from

the arm? The residual part of Samoa was alive, and therefore we say it

was he. But which of the writhing sections of a ten times severed worm,

is the worm proper?”

There are more cosy pleasures aboard the old ship, however, than

amputation: “Every one knows what a fascination there is in wandering

up and down in a deserted old tenement in some warm, dreamy country;

where the vacant halls seem echoing of silence, and the doors creak

open like the footsteps of strangers; and into every window the old

garden trees thrust their dark boughs, like the arms of night-burglars;

and ever and anon the nails start from the wainscot; while behind it

the mice rattle like dice. Up and down in such old spectre houses one

loves to wander; and so much the more, if the place be haunted by some

marvellous story.

“And during the drowsy stillness of the tropical sea-day, very much

such a fancy had I, for prying about our little brigantine, whose

tragic hull was haunted by the memory of the massacre, of which it

still bore innumerable traces.”

After delightful and exciting, and irresponsible days spent sailing

without chart, they find the vessel unseaworthy, leaking in every pore;

so again they take to their whale boat soon to fall in with strangers.

With this meeting, _Mardi_ swings into allegory,--and then it is that

Melville first tries his hand at the orphic style.

This second part of _Mardi_ in its manner defies simple

characterisation, though its purpose is simple enough. It is a quest

after Yillah, a maiden from Oroolia, the Island of Delight. A voyage is

made through the civilised world for her: and though they find occasion

for much discourse on international politics, and an array of other

topics, Yillah is not found. And in an astonishing variety of fantastic

and symbolic scenes--many conceived in the manner of the last three

books of Rabelais--they go on in futile search for her. They search

among the Islands of “those Scamps the Plujii,” where all evil which

the inhabitants could impute neither to the gods nor to themselves were

blamed upon the Plujii. There they meet an “old woman almost doubled

together, both hands upon her abdomen; in that manner running about

distracted.” When asked of the occasion of her distraction she screamed

“The Plujii! The Plujii!” affectionately caressing the field of their

operations.

“And why do they torment you?” she was soothingly asked.

“How should I know? and what good would it do me if I did?”

And on she ran.

“Hearing that an hour or two previous she had been partaking of some

twenty unripe bananas, I rather fancied that that circumstance might

have had something to do with her suffering. But whatever it was, all

the herb-leeches on the island would not have been able to alter her

own opinions on the subject.”

They visit jolly old Borabolla, and discuss the hereafter of fish. “As

for the possible hereafter of the whale,” says Melville, “a creature

eighty feet long without stockings, and thirty feet round the waist

after dinner is not inconsiderably to be consigned to annihilation.”

They are entertained by the gentry of Pimminee, and their host, being

told they were strolling divinities, demigods from the sun “manifested

not the slightest surprise, observing incidentally, however, that the

eclipses there must be a sad bore to endure.” They are entertained

by the pallid and beautiful youth Donjalolo, with wives thirty in

number, corresponding in name to the nights of the moon: wives “blithe

as larks, more playful than kittens,” though “but supplied with

the thirtieth part of all that Aspasia could desire.” Over flowing

calabashes they discourse of super-men, and vitalism, and toad-stools,

and fame, and thieves, and teeth, and democracy, and an interminable

variety of other irrelevant and diverting matters. Incredible is the

rich variety of _Mardi_.

There is infinite laughter in the book--but the laughter is at bottom

the laughter of despair. “It is more pleasing to laugh, than to weep,”

Montaigne has said. But Montaigne preferred laughter not for that

reason, but because “it is more distainfull, and doth more condemne us

than the other. And me thinkes we can never bee sufficiently despised

according to our merit.” Melville’s laughter, however, grew out of a

desolation less emancipated than Montaigne’s. “Let us laugh: let us

roar: let us yell.” Melville makes the philosopher in _Mardi_ say:

“Weeds are torn off at a fair; no heart bursts but in secret; it is

good to laugh 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. Humour, thy laugh is

divine; hence mirth-making idiots have been revered; and so may I.”

And one of the ultimate discoveries of the book is: “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.”

For _Mardi_, in its intention to show the vanity of human wishes, is

a kind of _Rasselas_; but because of its “dangerous predominance of

imagination,” it is a _Rasselas_ Dr. Johnson would have despised.

And the happiness sought in _Mardi_ is of a brand of felicity unlike

anything the Prince of Abyssinia ever had any itching to enjoy. _Mardi_

is a quest after some total and undivined possession of that holy

and mysterious joy that touched Melville during the period of his

courtship: a joy he had felt in the crucifixion of his love for his

mother; a joy that had dazzled him in his love for Elizabeth Shaw.

When he wrote _Mardi_ he was married, and his wife was with child. And

_Mardi_ is a pilgrimage for a lost glamour.

In these wanderings in search of Yillah, the symbol of this faded

ecstasy, the hero of _Mardi_ is pursued by three shadowy messengers

from the temptress Hautia; she who was descended from the queen who had

first incited Mardi to wage war against beings with wings. Despairing

of ever achieving Yillah, Melville in the end turned towards the island

of Hautia, called Flozella-a-Nina, or “The Last-Verse-of-the-Song.”

“Yillah was all beauty, and innocence; my crown of felicity; my heaven

below:--and Hautia, my whole heart abhorred. Yillah I sought; Hautia

sought me. Yet now I was wildly dreaming to find them together. In some

mysterious way seemed Hautia and Yillah connected.”

They land on the shore of Hautia’s bower of bliss, when “all the sea,

like a harvest plain, was stacked with glittering sheaves of spray. And

far down, fathoms on fathoms, flitted rainbow hues:--as seines-full of

mermaids; half-screening the bower of the drowned.” Hautia lavished

him with flowers, and with wine, that like a blood-freshet ran through

his veins, she the vortex that draws all in. “But as my hand touched

Hautia’s, down dropped a dead bird from the clouds.” And at the end

of the madness into which Hautia had betrayed him, he and she stood

together--“snake and victim: life ebbing from out me, to her.”

In _Pierre_, Melville sadly reflects upon “the inevitable evanescence

of all earthly loveliness: which makes the sweetest things of life only

food for ever-devouring and omnivorous melancholy.” And the nuptial

embrace, he says, breaks love’s airy zone. The etherealisations of the

filial breast, he wrote, while contemporary with courtship, _preceding_

the final banns and the rites, “like the bouquet of the costliest

German wines, too often evaporate upon pouring love out to drink in the

disenchanting glasses of the matrimonial days and nights.” “I am Pluto

stealing Proserpine,” says Pierre; “and every accepted lover is. I am

of heavy earth, and she of airy light. By heaven, but marriage is an

impious thing!”

Yillah was to Melville lost for ever; and in Hautia was a final

disillusionment. And on the shore, awaiting to destroy, “stood the

three pale sons of him I had slain to gain the lost maiden, sworn to

hunt me round eternity.”

“‘Hail! realm of shades!’”--so _Mardi_ concludes--“and turning my

prow into the racing tide, which seized me like a hand omnipotent, I

darted through. Churned in foam, that outer ocean lashed the clouds;

and straight in my white wake, headlong dashed a shallop, three fixed

spectres leaning o’er its prow: three arrows poising. And thus,

pursuers and pursued fled on, over an endless sea.”

Within a week of the completion of _Mardi_, Melville’s wife wrote to

her mother:

“I suppose by this time that you have received Sam’s letter and are

relieved of anxiety concerning his safe arrival. I was very glad to

see him at last & hope he will enjoy his vacation. You need not fear

his getting too much excited--he will not take too much exercise,

for he can always get in an omnibus when he feels tired of walking.

Yesterday he went down town with Tom--to the Battery--and to a gallery

of paintings--and in the afternoon took a short walk with the girls. We

should have gone to Brooklyn, but it was very cloudy and looked like

rain--but we are going to-day as soon as I get done my copying (by

the way we are nearly through--shall finish this week). Sam is very

well and finds much amusement, especially in the ‘ad-i-s-h-e-e-e-s!’

(radishes) screamed continually under our window in every variety of

cracked voices.

“I was very much pleased with my presents especially the ‘boots’ which

fit me admirably--but I meant that to be a business transaction--else

I should not have sent. ‘Tapes’ are _always_ useful, especially if one

has a husband who is continually breaking strings off of drawers as

mine is--the cuffs were very pretty also--Herman was very much pleased

with his pocket-book & says ‘he has long needed such an article, for

his bank bills accumulate to such an extent he can find no place to put

them.’

“Mother feels very uneasy because Tom wants to go to sea again--he has

been trying for a place in some store ever since he came home but not

succeeding, is discouraged and says he must go to sea immediately.

Herman has written Mr. Parker (Daniel P.) to see if he can send him out

in one of his ships. I hope he will, if Tom must go, for Mr. Parker

would be likely to take an interest in him and promote him.

“And now for something which I hardly know whether to write you or not

I feel so undecided about it. My cold is very bad indeed, perhaps worse

than it has ever been so early, and I attribute it entirely to the warm

dry atmosphere so different from the salt air I have been accustomed

to. And Herman thinks I had better go back to Boston with Sam to see

if the change of air will not benefit me. And he will come on for me

in two or three weeks, if he can--and then in August when he takes his

vacation he will take me there again. But I don’t know as I can make

up my mind to go and leave him here--and besides I’m afraid to trust

him to finish up the book without me! That is, taking all things into

consideration I’m afraid I should not feel at ease enough to enjoy my

visit without him with me. But there is time enough to consider about

it before Sam goes--and if my cold continues so bad I think I shall go.

But I must go to my writing else I shall not get done in time to go to

Brooklyn.”

CHAPTER XIV

ACROSS THE ATLANTIC AGAIN

“You said you were married, I think? Well, I suppose it is wise,

after all. It settles, centralises, and confirms a man, I have heard.

Yes, it makes the world definite to him; it removes his morbid

subjectiveness, and makes all things objective; nine small children,

for instance, may be considered objective. Marriage, hey!--A fine

thing, no doubt, no doubt:--domestic--pretty--nice, all round.--So

you are married?”

--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Pierre_.

In October, 1849, at the age of thirty, five years after his return

from the South Seas, and two years after his marriage, Melville again

left home. His departure was not prompted by any lack of diversion at

home: there had been plenty of it at 103 Fourth Avenue. Melville’s

brothers Allan and Tom, his sisters Augusta, Fanny and Helen, his

mother, his wife, and the visits from Boston of the Shaws, had been a

sufficiently varied company to divert any lover of humanity, and to

enamour a misanthrope to the family hearth. Withal, Melville was not

only a husband, but a father: and duties towards the support of the

company with whom he lived were blatantly clear. For this support he

depended solely upon the earnings from his books. In three years he

had published five volumes: _Typee_, _Omoo_, _Mardi_ (in two volumes)

and _Redburn_. Though he had attracted wide attention as a writer, he

was, nevertheless, in debt to his publishers. Despite sisters, and

brothers, and wives, and babies, and mothers, and callers, he had

stuck relentlessly to his desk, and another book--_White-Jacket_--he

had finished in manuscript. His, as well as his sister Augusta’s, was

“a pressing case.” So he decided to go to England, to make personal

intercession with publishers, hoping thereby to improve his income from

the other side of the Atlantic.

On October 11, 1849, after a detention of three or four days, owing

to wind and weather, he went on board the tug _Goliath_ a little

after noon. A violent storm was blowing from the west, and with some

confusion the passengers were transferred to the _Southampton_, a

regular London liner that lay in the North River. By half-past five,

with yards square, and sailing in half a gale, Melville was again out

of sight of land.

“As the ship dashed on,” says Melville in his journal of the trip,

“under double-reefed topsails, I walked the deck, thinking of what

they might be doing at home, and of the last familiar faces I saw on

the wharf--Allan was there, and George Duyckinck, and a Mr. McCurdy, a

rich merchant of New York, who had seemed somewhat interested in the

prospect of his son (a sickly youth of twenty, bound for the grand

tour) being very romantic. But to my great delight, the promise that

the Captain had given me at an early day, he now made good; and I find

myself in the individual occupancy of a large state-room. It is as

big almost as my own room at home; it has a spacious berth, a large

wash-stand, a sofa, glass, etc., etc. I am the only person on board who

is thus honoured with a room to himself. I have plenty of light, and a

little thick glass window in the side, which in fine weather I may open

to the air. I have looked out upon the sea from it, often, tho not yet

24 hours on board.”

The George Duyckinck who was among the party that had waved him off

was, of course, one of two Duyckinck brothers who published in 1855

the two volume _Cyclopædia of American Literature_: a work vituperated

in its day for shocking omissions and inaccuracies. Both the work and

its critics have now fallen into a decent oblivion. Withal, in this

same antiquated _Cyclopædia_ is to be found one of the best informed

summaries of the first half of Melville’s life ever printed.

On October 12, Melville records in his journal his impressions upon

finding himself again on the ocean. “Walked the deck last night

till about eight o’clock,” he says, “then made up a whist party and

played till one of the number had to visit his room from sickness.

Retired early and had a sound sleep. Was up betimes and aloft, to

recall the old emotions of being at the mast-head. Found that the

ocean looked the same as ever. Have tried to read but find it hard

work. However, there are some very pleasant passengers on board,

with whom to converse. Chief among these is a Mr. Adler, a German

scholar, to whom Duyckinck introduced me. He is author of a formidable

lexicon (German or English); in compiling which he almost ruined his

health. He was almost crazy, he tells me, for a time. He is full of

the German metaphysics and discourses of Kant, Swedenborg, etc. He

has been my principal companion thus far. There is also a Mr. Taylor

among the passengers, cousin of James Bayard Taylor, the pedestrian

traveller. There is a Scotch artist on board, a painter, with a most

unpoetical looking child, a young-one all cheeks and forehead, the

former preponderating. Young McCurdy I find to be a lisping youth of

genteel capacity, but quite disposed to be sociable. We have several

Frenchmen and Englishmen. One of the latter has been hunting, and

carries over with him two glorious pairs of antlers (moose) as trophies

of his prowess in the Woods of Maine. We have also a middle-aged

English woman, who sturdily walks the decks and prides herself upon

her sea-legs, and being an old tar.” There was also aboard “a Miss

Wilbur (I think) of New York.” Melville reports of Miss Wilbur

that she “is of a marriageable age, keeps a diary, and talks about

‘winning souls to Christ.’” In the evening, Melville “walked the

deck with the German, Mr. Adler, till a late hour, talking of ‘Fixed

Fate, Free-will, free-knowledge absolute’ etc. His philosophy is

_Coleridgean_; he accepts the Scriptures as divine, and yet leaves

himself free to inquire into Nature. He does not take it, that the

Bible is absolutely infallible, and that anything opposed to it in

Science must be wrong. He believes that there are things not of God and

independent of Him,--things that would have existed were there no God;

such as that two and two make four; for it is not that God so decrees

mathematically, but that in the very nature of things, the fact is

thus.”

On the following morning, Melville was up early. “Opened my bull’s

eye window, and looked out to the East. The sun was just rising--the

horizon was red;--a familiar sight to me, reminding me of old times.

Before breakfast, went up to the mast-head by way of gymnastics. About

ten o’clock the wind rose, the sun fell, and the deck looked dismally

empty. By dinner time, it blew half a gale, and the passengers mostly

retired to their rooms, sea-sick. After dinner, the rain ceased, but it

still blew stiffly, and we were slowly forging along under close-reefed

top-sails--mainsail furled. I was walking the deck, when I perceived

one of the steerage passengers looking over the side; I looked too,

and saw a man in the water, his head completely lifted above the

waves,--about twelve feet from the ship, right amast the gangway. For

an instant, I thought I was dreaming; for no one else seemed to see

what I did. Next moment, I shouted ‘Man Overboard!’ and turned to go

aft. I dropped overboard the tackle-fall of the quarter-boat, and swung

it toward the man, who was now drifting close to the ship. He did not

get hold of it, and I got over the side, within a foot or two of the

sea, and again swung the rope toward him. He now got hold of it. By

this time, a crowd of people--sailors and others--were clustering about

the bulwarks; but none seemed very anxious to save him. They warned

_me_, however, not to fall overboard. After holding on to the rope,

about a quarter of a minute, the man let go of it and dropped astern

under the mizzen chains. Four or five of the seamen jumped over into

the chains and swung him more ropes. But his conduct was unaccountable;

he could have saved himself, had he been so minded. I was struck by the

expression of his face in the water. It was merry. At last he dropped

off under the ship’s counter, and all hands cried ‘He’s gone!’ Running

to the taffrail we saw him again, floating off--saw a few bubbles, and

never saw him again. No boat was lowered, no sail was shaken, hardly

any noise was made. The man drowned like a bullock. It afterward turned

out, that he was crazy, and had jumped overboard. He had declared he

would do so, several times; and just before he did jump, he had tried

to get possession of his child, in order to jump into the sea, with the

child in his arms. His wife was miserably sick in her berth.”

In the steerage another crazy man was reported. But his lunacy turned

out to be delirium tremens, consequent upon “keeping drunk for the last

two months.”

Sunday the fourteenth was “a regular blue devil day; a gale of wind,

and everybody sick. Saloons deserted, and all sorts of nausea heard

from the state-rooms. Managed to get thro’ the day somehow, by reading

and walking the deck, tho’ the last was almost as much as my neck was

worth. Saw a lady with a copy of _Omoo_ in her hand two days ago. Now

and then she would look up at me, as if comparing notes. She turns out

to be the wife of a young Scotchman, an artist, going out to Scotland

to sketch scenes for his patrons in Albany, including Dr. Armsby. He

introduced himself to me by mentioning the name of Mr. Twitchell who

painted my portrait gratis. He is a very unpretending young man, and

looks more like a tailor than an artist. But appearances are etc.--”

The portrait painted by Mr. Twitchell is now not known to exist.

Monday broke fair. “By noon the passengers were pretty nearly all on

deck, convalescent. They seem to regard me as a hero, proof against

wind and weather. My occasional feats in the rigging are regarded

as a species of tight-rope dancing. Poor Adler, however, is hardly

himself again. He is an exceedingly amiable man, and a fine scholar

whose society is improving in a high degree. This afternoon Dr.

Taylor and I sketched a plan for going down the Danube from Vienna

to Constantinople; thence to Athens on the steamer; to Beyrout and

Jerusalem--Alexandria and the Pyramids. From what I learn, I have no

doubt this can be done at a comparatively trifling expense. Taylor has

had a good deal of experience in cheap European travel, and from his

knowledge of German is well fitted for a travelling companion thro

Austria and Turkey. I am full (just now) of this glorious Eastern

jaunt. Think of it:--Jerusalem and the Pyramids--Constantinople, the

Egean and also Athens!--The wind is not fair yet, and there is much

growling consequently. Drank a small bottle of London stout to-day for

dinner, and think it did me good. I wonder how much they charge for it?

I must find out.”

On the sixteenth his journal looks back towards home. “What’s little

Barney about?” he asks of his son Malcolm. And of his wife: “Where’s

Orianna?” Four days later, having been “annoyed towards morning by a

crying baby adjoining” he repeats this simple catechism.

The entire morning of the eighteenth--the day delightful and the ship

getting on famously--Melville spent “in the maintop with Adler and Dr.

Taylor, discussing our plans for the grand circuit of Europe and the

East. Taylor, however, has communicated to me a circumstance that may

prevent him from accompanying us--something of a pecuniary nature. He

reckons our expenses at $400.” Though Melville played with this idea

of the trip into the East for some days, he in the end was forced by

lack of funds to give it up. Not until 1856 did he see Greece, and

Constantinople, and the Holy Land, and then under tragic circumstances.

The rest of the week went by eventlessly. Melville read, lounged,

played cards, went into the Ladies’ Saloon for the first time, there

to “hear Mrs. Gould, the opera lady, sing.” When he comes to Sunday,

October 21, he is unusually laconic: on ship board at least, Melville

was in a mood to sympathise with Fielding’s liberties with the

calendar in _Tom Jones_ in counting six secular days as a full week.

“Cannot remember what happened to-day,” he writes; “it came to an end

somehow.” But on the morrow, his memory cleared. “I forgot to mention

that _last night_ about 9:30 P. M., Adler and Taylor came into my

room, and it was proposed to have whiskey punches, which we _did_ have

accordingly. Adler drank about three tablespoons full--Taylor four or

five tumblers, etc. We had an extraordinary time and did not break up

till after two in the morning. We talked metaphysics continually, and

Hegel, Schlegel, Kant, etc., were discussed under the influence of

the whiskey. I shall not forget Adler’s look when he quoted La Place

the French astronomer--‘It is not necessary, gentlemen, to account

for these worlds by the hypothesis’, etc. After Adler retired, Taylor

and I went out on the bowsprit--splendid spectacle.” Three days later

there was further inducement to metaphysical discussion. “By evening

blew a very stiff breeze and we dashed on in magnificent style. Fine

moonlight night, and we rushed on thro’ snow-banks of foam. McCurdy

invited Adler, the Doctor and I into his room and ordered champagne.

Went on deck again and remained till near midnight. The scene was

indescribable--I never saw such sailing before.”

On Saturday, October 27: “Steered our course in a wind. I played

shuffle-board for the first time. Ran about aloft a good deal. McCurdy

invited Adler, Taylor and I to partake of some _mulled wine_ with him,

which we did, in my room. Got--all of us--riding on the German horse

again. Taylor has not been in Germany in vain. We sat down to whist,

and separated at about three in the morning.”

On the morrow, “Decks very wet, and hard work to take exercise. (‘Where

dat old man?’) Read a little, dozed a little and to bed early.” So

passed another vacant Sabbath. In the margin opposite “Where dat old

man?” Melville’s wife has added in pencil: “Macky’s baby words.”

Melville thrice quotes this question of Malcolm’s--and each time Mrs.

Melville explains it in the margin, and initials her explanation each

time. The third time she writes: “First words of baby Malcolm’s. E.S.M.”

Monday was wet and foggy. Some of the passengers were sick. “In the

afternoon tried to create some amusement by arraigning Adler before

the Captain in a criminal charge. In the evening put the Captain in

the chains, and argued the question ‘which was best, a monarchy or

a republic?’ Had some good sport during the debate--the Englishman

wouldn’t take part in it tho’.--After claret and stout with Monsieur

Moran and Taylor, went on deck and found it a moonlight midnight. Wind

astern. Retired at 1 A. M.”

On November 1, Melville wrote: “Just three weeks from home, and made

the land--Start Point--about 3 P. M.--well up channel--passed the

Lizzard. Very fine day--great number of ships in sight. Thro’ these

waters Blake’s and Nelson’s ships once sailed. Taylor suggested that

he and I should return McCurdy’s civilities. We did, and Captain

Griswold joined and ordered a pitcher of his own. The Captain is a

very intelligent and gentlemanly man--converses well and understands

himself. I never was more deceived in a person than I was in him.

Retired about midnight. Taylor played a rare joke upon McCurdy this

evening, passing himself off as Miss Wilbur, having borrowed her cloak,

etc. They walked together. Shall see Portsmouth to-morrow morning.”

Saturday, Nov. 3rd: “Woke about six o’clock with an insane idea that

we were going before the wind, and would be in Portsmouth in an hour’s

time. Soon found out my mistake. About eight o’clock took a pilot, who

brought some papers two weeks old. Made the Isle of Wight about 10 A.

M. High land--the Needles--Wind ahead and tacking. Get in to-night or

to-morrow--or next week or year. Devilish dull, and too bad altogether.

Continued tacking all day with a light wind from West. Isle of Wight

in sight all day and numerous ships. In the evening all hands in high

spirits. Played chess in the ladies’ saloon--another party at cards;

good deal of singing in the gentlemen’s cabin and drinking--very

hilarious and noisy. Last night every one thought. Determined to go

ashore at Portsmouth. Therefore prepared for it, arranged my trunk to

be left behind--put up a shirt or two in Adler’s carpet bag and retired

pretty early.”

Sunday, Nov. 4th: “Looked out of my window first thing upon rising and

saw the Isle of Wight again--very near--ploughed fields, etc. Light

head wind--expected to be in a little after breakfast time. About 10

A. M. rounded the Eastern end of the Isle, when it fell flat calm.

The town in sight by telescope. Were becalmed about three or four

hours. Foggy, drizzly; long faces at dinner--no porter bottles. Wind

came from the West at last. Squared the yards and struck away from

Dover--distant 60 miles. Close reefed the topsails so as not to run too

fast. Expect now to go ashore to-morrow morning early at Dover--and

get to London via Canterbury Cathedral. Mysterious hint dropped me

about my green coat. It is now eight o’clock in the evening. I am alone

in my state-room--lamp in tumbler. Spite of past disappointments,

I _feel_ that this is my last night aboard the _Southampton_. This

time to-morrow I shall be on land, and press English earth after the

lapse of ten years--_then a sailor_, now H. M. author of _Peedee_,

_Hullabaloo_ and _Pog-Dog_. For the last time I lay aside my ‘log’ to

add a line or two to Lizzie’s letter the last I shall write aboard.

(‘Where dat old man?--Where looks?’)”

The account of his experiences in England is preserved in a separate

note-book, formally beginning: “Commenced this journal at 25 Craven

Street at 6-1/2 P. M. on Wednesday, Nov. 7, 1849--being just arrived

from dinner at a chop house, and feeling like it.”

“_Mon. Nov. 5th, 1849_: Having at the invitation of McCurdy cracked

some champagne with him, I returned about midnight to my state-room,

and at four in the morning was wakened by the Captain in person, saying

we were off Dover. Dressed in a hurry, ran on deck, and saw the lights

ashore. A cutter was alongside, and after some confusion in the dark,

we got off in her for the shore. A comical scene ensued, the boatman

saying we could not land at Dover, but only at Deal. So to Deal we

went, and were beached there just at break of day. Some centuries ago a

person called Julius Cæsar jumped ashore about in this place, and took

possession. It was Guy Fawkes day also. Having left our baggage (that

is, Taylor, Adler and myself) to go round by ship to London, we were

wholly non-encumbered, and I proposed walking to Canterbury--distant

18 miles, for an appetite to breakfast. So we strode thru this quaint

old town of Deal, one of the Cinque Ports, I believe, and soon were in

the open country. A fine Autumnal morning and the change from ship to

shore was delightful. Reached Sandwich (6 miles) and breakfasted at a

tumble down old inn. Finished with ale and pipes, visited ‘Richbors’

Castle’--so called--a Roman fortification near the sea shore. An

imposing ruin, the interior was planted with cabbages. The walls

some ten feet thick grown over with ivy. Walked to where they were

digging--and saw, defined by a trench, the exterior wall of a circus.

Met the proprietor--an antiquary--who regaled me with the history of

the place. Strolled about the town, on our return, and found it full of

interest as a fine specimen of the old Elizabethan architecture. Kent

abounds in such towns. At one o’clock took the 2nd class (no 3rd) cars

for Canterbury. The cathedral is on many accounts the most remarkable

in England. Henry II, his wife, and the Black Prince are here--and

Becket. Fine cloisters. There is a fine thought expressed in one of the

inscriptions on a tomb in the nave. Dined at the Falstaff Inn near the

Westgate. Went to the theatre in the evening, & was greatly amused at

the performance: More people on the stage than in the boxes. Ineffably

funny, the whole affair. All three of us slept in one room at the

inn--odd hole.

“_Tuesday, Nov. 6th_: Swallowed a glass of ale and away for the R.

R. Station & off for London, distant some 80 miles. Took the third

class car--exposed to the air, devilish cold riding against the wind.

Fine day--people sociable. Passed thro Penshurst (P. S.’s place &

Tunbridge--fine old ruin that). Arrived at London Bridge at noon.

Crossed at once over into the city and down at a chop-house in the

Poulberry--having eaten nothing since the previous afternoon dinner.

Went and passed St. Paul’s to the Strand to find our house. They

referred us elsewhere. Very full. Secured room at last (one for each)

at a guinea and a half a week. Very cheap. Went down to the Queen’s

Hotel to inquire after our ship friends--(on the way green coat

attracted attention)--not in. Went to Drury Lane at Julien’s Promenade

Concerts (admittance 1 s.) A great crowd and fine music. In the reading

room to see ‘Bentley’s Miscellany’ with something about _Redburn_. (By

the way, stopped at a store in the Row & inquired for the book, to see

whether it had been published. They offered it to me at a guinea). At

Julien’s also saw Blackwoods’ long story about a short book. It’s very

comical. Seemed so, at least, as I had to hurry on it. But the wonder

is that the old Tory should waste so many papers upon a thing which I,

the author, know to be trash, and wrote it to buy some tobacco with. A

good wash & turned in early.

“_Thursday, Nov. 8th_: Dressed, after breakfast at a coffee-house, and

went to Mr. Bentley’s. He was out of town at Brighton. The notices

of _Redburn_ were shown me.--Laughable. Staid awhile, and then to

Mr. Murray’s, out of town. Strolled about and went into the National

Gallery. Dined with the Doctor & Adler, and after dark a ramble thro’

Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, we turned into Holborn & so to

the Princess’s Theatre in Oxford Street. Went into the pit at the hall

price--one shilling. The part of a Frenchman was very well played. So

also, skater on the ice.

“_Friday, Nov. 9th_: Breakfasted late and went into Cheapside to see

the ‘Lord Mayor’s show’ it being the day of the great civic feast &

festivities. A most bloated pomp, to be sure. Went down to the bridge

to see the people crowding there. Crossed by Westminster, thro’ the

Parks to the Edgeware Road, & found the walk delightful, the sun coming

out a little, and the air not cold. While on one of the bridges, the

thought struck me again that a fine story might be written about a Blue

Monday in November London--a City of Dis (Dante’s) Cloud of Smoke--the

damned, etc., coal boxes, oily waters, etc.--its marks are left upon

you, etc., etc., etc.”

In _Israel Potter_ (1855) Melville devoted one chapter to a description

of London Bridge: a chapter entitled: “In the City of Dis.” The

description begins: “It was late on a Monday morning in November--a

Blue Monday--a Fifth of November--Guy Fawkes’ Day!--very blue, foggy,

doleful and gunpowdery, indeed.” Melville had been husbanding for six

years the impressions gathered on November 9, 1849.

On November 10, Melville received a reply to the note he had sent

to Bentley announcing his presence in London. Bentley expressed a

willingness to come up from Brighton to see Melville at any time

convenient to Melville. Melville appointed “Monday noon, in New

Burlington Street,” and went forth again to explore the city. He

visited the Temple Courts. By way of Cock Lane--reflecting on Dr.

Johnson’s Ghost--he walked on to the Charter House, “where I had a

sociable chat with an old pensioner who guided me through some fine old

cloisters, kitchens, chapels.” Saturday night, with Adler, he strolled

over to Holborn “vagabonding thro’ the courts and lanes and looking in

at windows. Stopped at a penny theatre--very comical. Adler afraid. To

bed early.” On Sunday Melville went “down to Temple Church to hear the

music,” looked in at St. Paul’s, and then, with Adler, “took a bus for

Hampton Court.” They enjoyed the ride down, the pictures at Hampton

Court, and then dinner at the Adelphi in the evening.

On Monday, Melville saw Bentley. “Very polite,” says Melville. “Gave

me his note for £100 at ten days for _Redburn_. Couldn’t do better,

he said. He expressed much anxiety and vexation at the state of the

copyright question. Proposed my new book _White-Jacket_ to him and

showed him the table of contents. He was much pleased with it, and

notwithstanding the vexatious and uncertain state of the copyright

matter, he made me the following offer: To pay me £200 for the first

thousand copies of the book (the privilege of publishing that number)

and as we might afterwards arrange concerning subsequent editions. A

liberal offer. But he could make no advance--left him and called upon

Mr. Murray. Not in. Out of town.... Walked to St. Paul’s and sat over

an hour in a dozy state listening to the chanting of the choir. Felt

homesick and sentimentally unhappy.”

To sweeten his blood, he sallied forth, with Adler, early on the

morrow, “to see the last end of the Mannings. An innumerable crowd in

all the streets. Police by hundreds. Men and women fainting. The man

and wife were hung side by side--still unreconciled to each other--what

a change from the time they stood up to be married together! The mob

was brutish. All in all, a most wonderful, horrible, and unspeakable

scene.--Breakfasted about 11 A. M. and went to the Zoological Gardens,

Regent’s Park. Very pretty. Fine giraffes. Dreary and rainy day.”

On the morrow “Rigged up again, and in my _green_ jacket called

upon Mr. Murray in Albemarle Street. He was very civil, much vexed

about copyright matters. I proposed _White-Jacket_ to him--he seemed

decidedly pleased and has since sent for the proof sheets, according

to agreement. That evening we went to the New Strand Theatre, to

see Coleman’s _The Clandestine Marriage_.” Melville’s comment upon

Leigh Murray, who played Melvil, would do credit to the lost diary of

Mrs. Pepys: “the finest leg I ever saw on a man--a devilishly well

turned-out man, upon my soul.”

The day following--November 15--was by the Queen appointed as a day

of special thanksgiving. Melville again sallied forth sight-seeing. On

the morrow he made two attempts to see Murray; the second found him

in. “Very polite--but would not be in his line to publish my book.” On

November 17, Colbour declined Melville’s offer of £200 for a thousand

copies of _White-Jacket_, “and principally because of the cussed

state of the copyright. Bad news enough--I shall not see Rome--I’m

floored--appetite unimpaired, however.” On the 19th, he saw Longman, to

be told “they bided by the original terms.” On the twentieth, he saw

Moxen, the publisher. “Found him in--sitting alone in a back room. He

was at first very stiff, cold, clammy and clumsy. Managed to bring him

to, tho, by clever speeches. Talked of Charles Lamb--he warmed up and

ended by saying he would send me a copy of his works. He said he had

often put Lamb to bed--drunk. He spoke of Dana--he published D’s book

here.” Moxen sent Melville copies of Lamb’s works: but Moxen did not

accept Melville’s invitation to publish _White-Jacket_.

On November 22--after a jovial evening spent over porter, gin, brandy,

whiskey, and cigars--Melville rose late, and with a headache. So he

rode out to Windsor, to inspect the state apartments,--which he found

“cheerlessly damned fine”--and to view the Royal Stables. “On the way

down from the town, met the Queen coming from visiting the sick Queen

Dowager. Carriage and four going past with outriders. The Prince with

her. My English friend bowed, so did I--salute returned by the Queen

but not by the Prince. I would commend to the Queen, Rowland’s Kalydon

for clarifying the complexion. She is an amiable domestic woman though,

I doubt not, and God bless her, say I, and long live the ‘Prince of

Whales’--The stables were splendid.”

On Friday, November 23, at quarter to eleven, Melville “had just

returned from Mr. Murray’s where I dined agreeable to invitation. It

was a most amusing affair. Mr. Murray was there in a short vest and

dress coat, looking quizzical enough; his footman was there also,

habited in small clothes and breeches, revealing a despicable pair

of sheepshanks. The impudence of the fellow in showing his legs, and

such a pair of legs too! in public, I thought extraordinary. The

ladies should have blushed, one would have thought, but they did not.

Lockhart was there also, in a prodigious white cravat (made from Walter

Scott’s shroud, I suppose). He stalked about like a half galvanised

ghost,--gave me the tips of two skinny fingers, when introduced to

me, or rather, I to him. Then there was a round faced chap by the

name of Cook--who seemed to be Murray’s factotum. His duty consisted

in pointing out the portraits on the wall and saying that this or

that one was esteemed a good likeness of the high and mighty ghost

Lockhart. There were four or five others present, nameless, fifth-rate

looking varlets and four lean women. One of them proved agreeable in

the end. She had visited some time in China. I talked with her some

time. Besides these there was a footman or boy in a light jacket with

bell-buttons.”

The lines following, Melville has heavily crossed out. They are,

in most part, decipherable, however, and they are not excessively

complimentary either to his host or the guest of honour. “I managed to

get through, though, somehow,” Melville continues after this blotted

abuse, “by conversing with Dr. Holland, a very eminent physician,

it seems,--and a very affable, intelligent man who has travelled

immensely. After the ladies withdrew, the three decanters, port,

sherry and claret, were kept going the rounds with great regularity.

I sat next to Lockhart and seeing that he was a customer who was

full of himself and expected great homage, and knowing him to be a

thoroughgoing Tory and fish-blooded Churchman and conservative, and

withal editor of the _Quarterly_--I refrained from playing the snob

to him like the rest--and the consequence was he grinned at me his

ghastly smiles. After returning to the drawing-room coffee and tea were

served. I soon after came away.” After two more blotted lines, Melville

concludes: “Oh, Conventionalism, what a ninny thou art, to be sure. And

now I must turn in.”

Melville continued to interview publishers, and publishers continued

to chasten him with reflections on the state of the copyright laws.

Between times he amused himself as best he could; but there was

little novelty, brilliancy or excitement in the amusement. He was once

entertained very formally at dinner, however: a Baroness Somebody

on his left, an anonymous Baron opposite him, and near him at table

“a most lovely young girl, a daughter of Captain Chamier, the sea

novelist.” And in these brilliant surroundings, he saw a copy of

_Typee_ on a table in the drawing room. He ran upon an old friend

of Gansevoort’s, too, and as a result was betrayed into sober and

sentimental reflections. “No doubt, two years ago, or three, Gansevoort

was writing here in London, about the same hour as this--alone in his

chamber, in profound silence, as I am now. This silence, is a strange

thing. No wonder the Greeks deemed it the vestibule to the higher

mysteries.”

He paid for his sentimentality, however, by passing “a most

extraordinary night--one continuous nightmare--till daybreak.

Hereafter, if I should be condemned to purgatory, I shall plead the

night of November 25, 1849, in extenuation of the sentence.”

On November 27, he abruptly left England, to find himself, two days

following, “right snugly roomed in the fifth story of a lodging house

No. 12 & 14 Rue de Bussy, Paris. It is the first night I have taken

possession,” he says, “and the chambermaid has lighted a fire of wood,

lit the candle and left me alone, at 11 o’clock P. M. On first gazing

round, I was struck by the apparition of a bottle containing a dark

fluid, a glass, a decanter of water, and a paper package of sugar

(loaf) with a glass basin next to it. I protest all this was not in the

bond. But tho if I use these things they will doubtless be charged to

me, yet let us be charitable, so I ascribe all this to the benevolence

of Madame Capelle, my most polite, pleasant and Frenchified landlady

below. I shall try the brandy before writing more--and now to resume

my Journal.” The account of Israel Potter’s first night in Paris,

after Benjamin Franklin shows him into lodgings in the Latin Quarter,

is certainly built upon Melville’s experience on this occasion.

Israel finds in his room a heavy plate glass mirror; and among the

articles genially reflected therein, he notes: “seventh, one paper of

loaf sugar, nicely broken into sugar-bowl size; eighth, one silver

teaspoon; ninth, one glass tumbler; tenth, one glass decanter of cool

pure water; eleventh, one sealed bottle containing a richly hued

liquid, and marked ‘Otard.’” Melville makes a chapter out of Israel’s

adventures with this bottle of Otard,--a chapter in which Benjamin

Franklin unburdens himself of much almanac moralising upon the almanac

virtues.

Despite the Otard, and the snug quarters, and the diversions of

Paris--diversions somewhat restricted by Melville’s complete inability

to speak French--Melville was not happy every moment he was in France.

“Fire made, and tried to be comfortable. But this is not home and--but

no repinings.” Adler was in Paris at the time, however, and this

somewhat cheered his solitude. Yet on December 2, when Melville left

Adler after an evening of eau de vie and cigars, he “strolled out into

a dark rainy night and made my melancholy way across the Pont (rather

a biscuit’s toss of the Morgue) to my sixth story apartment.” And once

safely in his room, he complained: “I don’t like that mystic door

tapestry leading out of the closet.” On the following day he “looked in

at the Morgue,” and “bought two pair of gloves and one pair of shoes

for Lizzie.” That night, he dined with Adler, and “talked high German

metaphysics till ten o’clock.”

He visited the Hotel de Cluny, and found “the house just the house

I’d like to live in.” He made a half-hearted effort to see Rachel

at the Theatre Française, but failed. He saw the obvious sights and

on December 6 hurried away from Paris. He closes the record of his

departure with a “Selah!” Even in Paris, he speaks of taking his “usual

bath” upon getting up in the morning.

He touched at Brussels: and despite its architecture, “a more dull,

humdrum place I never saw:” he hurried through Cologne, where he

found “much to interest a pondering man like me.” From Cologne he was

headed for Coblenz: but he looked forward to the voyage with little

eagerness: “I feel homesick to be sure--being all alone with not a soul

to talk to--but the Rhine is before me, and I must on.” Of Coblenz he

wrote: “Most curious that the finest wine of all the Rhine is grown

right under the guns of Ehrenbreitstein.” “Opposite is this frowning

fortress--and some 4000 miles away is America and Lizzie. To-morrow I

am _homeward_-bound! Hurrah and three cheers!” “In the horrible long

dreary cold ride to Ostend on the coach, in a fit of the nightmare

was going to stop at a way-place, taking it for the place of my

destination.”

By December 13, he was back to his old chamber overlooking the Thames.

Upon his arrival he was vaguely told “a gentleman from St. James called

in his coach,” and “was handed, with a meaning flourish, a note sealed

with a coronet.” The note was from the Duke of Rutland,--perversely

called at times by Melville, _Mr._ Rutland--inviting Melville to visit

Belvoir Castle “at any time after a certain day in January.” “Cannot

go,” Melville writes--“I am homeward bound, and Malcolm is growing all

the time.” He called at Bentley’s for letters. “Found one from Lizzie

and Allan. Most welcome but gave me the blues most horribly. Felt like

chartering a small boat and starting down the Thames embarked for New

York.” So he drank some punch to cheer him, and walked down the Strand

to buy a new coat, “so as to look decent--for I found my green coat

plays the devil with my respectability here.” He haunted the bookshops,

and “at last succeeded in getting the much desired copy of Rousseau’s

_Confessions_,” as well as an 1686 folio of Sir Thomas Browne.

On December 15, Melville “rigged for Bentley, whom I expect to meet at

1 P. M. about _White-Jacket_. Called but had not arrived from Brighton.

Walked about a little and bought a cigar case for Allan in Burlington

Arcade. Saw some pretty things for presents--but could not afford to

buy.” So back to his room he came, and filled up the time before four

o’clock, when he was to call again at Bentley’s, by writing up his

journal. “He does not know that I am in town,” Melville writes--“I

earnestly hope that I shall be able to see him and I shall be able to

do something about that ‘pesky’ book.”

At six o’clock, Melville was back again in his room. “Hurrah and three

cheers! I have just returned from Mr. Bentley’s and have concluded an

arrangement with him that gives me to-morrow his note for two hundred

pounds (sterling). It is to be at 6 months and I am almost certain

I shall be able to get it cashed at once. This takes a load off my

heart. The two hundred pounds is in anticipiation, for the book is not

to be published till the last of March next. Hence the long time of the

note. The above mentioned sum is for the first 1000 copies, subsequent

editions (if any) to be jointly divided between us. At eight to-night I

am going to Mrs. Daniels’. What sort of an evening is it going to be?

Mr. Bentley invited me to dinner for Wednesday at 6 P. M. This will do

for a memorandum of the enjoyment. I have just read over the Duke of

Rutland’s note, which I had not fully perused before. It seems very

cordial. I wish the invitation was for next week, instead of being

so long ahead, but this I believe is the mode here for these sort of

invitations into the country. (Memo. At 1 P. M. on Monday am to call at

Mr. Bentley’s.)”

Under Sunday, December 16, Melville wrote: “Last night went in a cab to

Lincoln’s Inn Fields and found Mrs. Daniel and daughters. Very cordial.

The elder ‘daught’ remarkably sprightly and the mother as nice an old

body as any one could desire. Presently there came in several ‘young

gents’ of various complexions. We had some coffee, music, dancing,

and after an agreeable evening I came away at 11 o’clock, and walking

to the Cock near Temple Bar, drank a glass of stout and home to bed

after reading a few chapters in _Tristram Shandy_, which I have never

yet read. This morning breakfasted at 10 at the Hotel De Sabloneue

(very nice cheap little snuggery being closed on Sundays). Had a sweet

omelette which was delicious. Thence walked to St. Thomas’s Church,

Charter House, to hear my famed namesake (almost) ‘The Reverend H.

Melvill.’ I had seen him placarded as to deliver a charity sermon.

The church was crowded--the sermon admirable (granting the Rev.

gentleman’s premises). Indeed he deserves his reputation. I do not

think that I hardly ever heard so good a discourse before--that is for

an ‘orthodox’ divine. It is now 3 P. M. I have had a fire made and am

smoking a cigar. Would that one I knew were here. Would that the Little

One too were here,--I am in a very painful state of uncertainty. I am

all eagerness to get home--I ought to be home. My absence occasions

uneasiness in a quarter where I most beseech heaven to grant repose.

Yet here I have before me an open prospect to get some curious ideas

of a style of life which in all probability I shall never have again.

I should much like to know what the highest English aristocracy really

and practically is. And the Duke of Rutland’s cordial invitation to

visit him at the castle furnishes me with just the thing I want. If I

do not go, I am confident that hereafter I shall reprimand myself for

neglecting such an opportunity of procuring ‘material.’ And Allan and

others will account me a ninny.--I would not debate the matter a moment

were it not that at least three whole weeks must elapse ere I start

for Belvoir Castle--three weeks! If I could but get over them! And if

the two images would only down for that space of time. I must light a

second cigar and resolve it over again. (1/2 past 6 P. M.) My mind is

made, rather is irrevocably resolved upon my first determination. A

visit into Leicester would be very agreeable--at least very valuable,

and in one respect, to me--but the three weeks are intolerable.

To-morrow I shall go down to London Dock and book myself a state-room

on board the good ship _Independence_. I have just returned from a

lonely dinner at the Adelphi, where I read the Sunday papers. An

article upon the ‘Sunday School Union’ particularly struck me. Would

that I could go home in a steamer--but it would take an extra $100 out

of my pocket. Well, it’s only thirty days--one month--and I can weather

it somehow.”

On Monday, Melville concluded his arrangements with Bentley, who gave

him a note for two hundred pounds sterling at six months. Melville also

walked down to the London Docks to inspect the _Independence_. “She

looks small and smells ancient,” Melville writes. “Only two or three

passengers engaged. I liked Captain Fletcher, however. He enquired

whether I was a relative of Gansevoort Melville and of Herman Melville.

I told him I was. I engaged my passage and paid ten pounds down....

Thence home; and out again, and took a letter for a Duke to the post

office and a pair of pants to be altered to a tailor.”

On Tuesday, Melville made another of his many pilgrimages to the old

book stores about Great Green Street and Lincoln’s Inn. “Looked over

a lot of ancient books of London. Bought one (A. D. 1766) for 3 and 2

pence. I want to use it in case I serve up the Revolutionary narrative

of the beggar.” What was the title of this “ancient book of London”

is not known, and hence it is impossible to know what use he put it

to, when in _Israel Potter_ he did finally “serve up the Revolutionary

narrative of the beggar.” The same day he “stopped at a silversmith’s

(corner of Craven St. & Strand) and bought a solid spoon for the boy

Malcolm--a fork, I mean. When he arrives to years of mastication I

shall invest him with this fork--as in yore they did a young knight,

with his good sword. Spent an hour or so looking over _White-Jacket_

preparatory to sending it finally to Bentley--who, tho he has paid his

money has not received his wares. At 6 I dine with him.”

The dinner with Bentley went off well. Melville “had a very pleasant

evening indeed” and “began to like” his publisher “very much.” Melville

reported that “He seems a very fine, frank, off-handed old gentleman.

We sat down in a fine old room hung round with paintings (dark walls).

A party of fourteen or so. There was a Mr. Bell there--connected with

literature in some way or other. At all events an entertaining man and

a scholar--but looks as if he loved old Pat. Also Alfred Henry Forester

(‘Alfred Crowquill’)--the comic man. He proved a good fellow--free

and easy and no damned nonsense, as there is about so many of these

English. Mr. Bentley has one daughter, a fine woman of 25 and married,

and four sons--young men. They were all at table. Some time after 11,

went home with Crowquill, who invites me to go with him Thursday and

see the Pantomime rehearsal at the Surrey Theatre.”

The following evening Melville dined with Mr. Cook--whom he had

despised, at first meeting, as Murray’s factotum--in Elm Court, Temple,

“and had a glorious time till noon of night. It recalled poor Lamb’s

‘Old Benchers.’ Cunningham the author of _Murray’s London Guide_ was

there and was very friendly. Mr. Rainbow also, and a grandson Woodfall,

the printer of Junius, and a brother-in-law of Leslie the printer.

Leslie was prevented from coming. Up in the 5th story we dined.”

With a typical departure from the conventional orthography, Melville

pronounced the evening, “The Paradise of Batchelors.”

In _Harper’s New Monthly Magazine_ for April, 1854, Melville published

a sketch entitled _Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids_. In

1854 he was living in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in a household of

women and young children--three of his sisters, his mother, his wife,

and three of his own children. So surrounded, he had relinquished

none of the pleasant memories of that December evening, in 1849, in

those high chambers near Temple-Bar. “It was the very perfection of

quiet absorption of good living, good drinking, good feeling, and

good talk,” Melville wrote in 1854. “We were a band of brothers.

Comfort--fraternal, household comfort, was the grand trait of the

affair. Also, you could plainly see that these easy-hearted men had no

wives or children to give an anxious thought. Almost all of them were

travellers, too; for bachelors alone can travel freely, and without

any twinges of their conscience touching desertion of the fireside.”

The antithesis of this, Melville pictures in the second part of his

account--_The Tartarus of Maids_.

Yet just on the eve of his going to these high festivities in the

Temple, a letter was left him--“from home!” The letter reported: “All

well and Barney (“Baby boy,” Mrs. Melville has written in annotation on

the margin of the journal) more bouncing than ever, thank heaven.” On

the following day, Melville began and finished the _Opium Eater_, and

pronounced it “a most wonderful book.”

On December 24, Melville was in Portsmouth. On Christmas morning he

jumped into a small boat with the Captain and a meagre company of

passengers, and “pulled off for the ship about a mile and a half

distant. Upon boarding her we at once set sail with a fair wind, and

in less than 24 hours passed the Land’s End and the Scilly Isle--and

standing boldly out on the ocean stretched away for New York. I shall

keep no further diary. I here close it, with my departure from England,

and my pointing for home.”

On a blank page at end of his journal, he jotted some brief “Memoranda

of things on the voyage.” He noted Sir Thomas Browne’s reference to

cannibals in _Vulgar Errors_, and the fact that Rousseau, as a school

master “could have killed his scholars sometimes.” He observed that “a

Dandy is a good fellow to scout and room with;” and copied out from Ben

Jonson “Talk as much folly as you please--so long as you do it without

blushing, you may do it with impunity.” He itemised in his journal,

too, the books obtained while abroad: a 1692 folio of Ben Jonson;

a 1673 folio of Davenant; a folio of Beaumont and Fletcher; a 1686

folio of Sir Thomas Browne, and a folio of Marlowe’s plays. He brought

with him, also, a _Hudibras_, a _Castle of Otranto_, a _Vathek_, a

_Corinne_, besides the confessions of Rousseau and of DeQuincey, and

the autobiography of Goethe. The other books were guides, old maps, and

other material for _Israel Potter_.

Melville arrived at 103 Fourth Avenue, on February 2, 1850. Mrs.

Melville, in her journal, thus summarises her husband’s trip. “Summer

of 1849 we remained in New York. He wrote _Redburn_ and _White-Jacket_.

Same fall went to England and published the above. Stayed eleven weeks.

Took little satisfaction in it from mere homesickness, and hurried

home, leaving attractive invitations to visit distinguished people--one

from the Duke of Rutland to pass a week at Belvoir Castle--see his

journal.”

Of his life after his return home, she says: “We went to Pittsfield and

boarded in the summer of 1850. Moved to Arrowhead in fall--October,

1850.”

On September 27, 1850, Bayard Taylor dispatched from the Tribune

Office, New York, a note to Mary Angew. “Scarcely a day passes,” Taylor

wrote, “but some pleasant recognition is given me. I was invited last

Friday to dine with Bancroft and Cooper; on Saturday with Sir Edward

Belcher and Herman Melville. These things seem like mockeries, sent to

increase the bitterness of my heart.” It is not unlikely that Melville

and Taylor fed and drank and smoked together on that Saturday evening,

and that they parted, each envying the other as a happy and successful

man.

CHAPTER XV

A NEIGHBOUR OF HAWTHORNE’S

“And here again, not unreasonably, might invocation go up to those

three Weird Ones, that tend Life’s loom. Again we might ask them,

what threads are these, oh, ye Weird Ones, that ye wove in the years

foregone?”

--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Pierre_.

At the time when Melville moved into the Berkshire Hills, the region

around Lenox boasted the descriptive title: “a jungle of literary

lions”--a title amiably ferocious in its provincial vanity. In this

region, it is true, Jonathan Edwards had written his treatises

on predestination, and with sardonic optimism had gloated over

the beauties of hell; here Catherine Sedgewick wrote her amiable

insipidities; here Elihu Burritt, “the learned Blacksmith” wrote out

his _Sparks_; here Bryant composed; here Henry Ward Beecher indited

many _Star-Papers_; here Headley and Holmes, Lowell and Longfellow,

Curtis and G. P. R. James, Audubon and Whipple, Mrs. Sigourney and

Martineau, Fanny Kemble and Frederick Bremer and the Goodale sisters

either visited or lived. Impressed by this array of names--an array

deceptively impressive to the New England imagination,--local pride has

not blushed to explain: “By the river Arno, in the ‘lake region’ of

Cumberland and Westmoreland, or on the placid river which flows through

the Concord meadows, what congestion of literary associations! Like the

instinct of the bee which, separated by great distances from the hive,

possesses the infallible sense of direction for its return, so, too,

the lovely ‘nooks and corners’ on the earth’s surface are irresistibly

and unerringly attracting choice spirits, which some way are sure to

find them out and pre-empt them in the interests of their craft or

clan. Berkshire is no exception to this.”

When, in 1850, both Melville and Hawthorne moved into the Berkshires,

these literary wilds were tamely domesticated, and sadly thinned of

prowling genius. The coming of Melville and Hawthorne, however, marked

the most important advent ever made into these regions. For there

Melville wrote _Moby-Dick_; and there Melville and Hawthorne were to be

thrown into an ironical intimacy.

In the autumn of 1850, Melville bought a spacious gambrel-roofed

farmhouse at Pittsfield, situated along Holmes Road and not far from

Broadhall, formerly the home of his uncle, and familiar to Melville’s

youth. Melville named the place Arrowhead. To Arrowhead he brought his

retinue of female relatives, and set about to alternate farming with

literature.

In the first of the _Piazza Tales_ (1856), in _I and My Chimney_

(_Putnam’s Magazine_, March, 1856), and in _The Rose-wood Table_

(_Putnam’s Magazine_, May, 1856), Melville has left descriptions of

Arrowhead, its inmates, and the surrounding country.

“When I removed into the country,” Melville says in the _Piazza Tales_,

“it was to occupy an old-fashioned farmhouse which had no piazza--a

deficiency the more regretted because not only did I like piazzas,

as somehow combining the cosiness of indoors with the freedom of

outdoors, and it is so pleasant to inspect your thermometer there,

but the country round about was such a picture, that in berry time no

boy climbs hill or crosses vale without coming upon easels planted in

every nook, and sunburned painters painting there. A very paradise of

painters. The circle of the stars cut by the circle of the mountains.

At least, so it looks from the house; though once upon the mountains,

no circle of them can you see. Had the site been chosen five rods off,

this charmed circle would not have been.

“The house is old. Seventy years since, from the heart of the Hearth

Stone Hill, they quarried the Kaaba, or Holy Stone, to which, each

Thanksgiving, the social pilgrims used to come. So long ago that

in digging for the foundation, the workmen used both spade and axe

fighting the Troglodytes of those subterranean parts--sturdy roots of

a sturdy wood, encamped upon what is now a long landslide of sleeping

meadow, sloping away off from my poppy bed. Of that knit wood but one

survivor stands--an elm, lonely through steadfastness.

“Whoever built the house, he builded better than he knew; or else Orion

in the zenith flashed down his Damocles’ sword to him some starry

night, and said: ‘Build there.’ For how, otherwise, could it have

entered the builder’s mind that, upon the clearing being made, such a

purple prospect would be his? Nothing less than Greylock, with all his

hills about him, like Charlemagne among his peers.

“A piazza must be had.

“The house was wide--my fortune narrow ... upon but one of the

four sides would prudence grant me what I wanted. Now which side?

Charlemagne, he carried it.

“No sooner was ground broken than all the neighbourhood, neighbour

Dives in particular, broke too--into a laugh. Piazza to the north!

Winter piazza! Wants, of winter midnights, to watch the Aurora

Borealis, I suppose; hope he’s laid in a good store of polar muffs and

mittens.