events. He could not tell about the being of men: only about the forces.
He gives another curious instance of the process of recreation, as it
takes place within the very corpuscles of the blood. It is _salt_ this
time which arrests the life-activity, causing a static arrest in Matter,
after a certain sundering of water from the fire of the warm-substantial
body.
"The scurvy had begun to show itself on board. One man had it so badly
as to be disabled and off duty; and the English lad, Ben, was in a
dreadful state, and was gradually growing worse. His legs swelled and
pained him so that he could not walk; his flesh lost its elasticity, so
that if it were pressed in, it would not return to its shape; and his
gums swelled until he could not open his mouth. His breath, too, became
very offensive; he lost all strength and spirit; could eat nothing; grew
worse every day; and, in fact, unless something was done for him, would
be a dead man in a week at the rate at which he was sinking. The
medicines were all gone, or nearly all gone; and if we had had a
chest-full, they would have been of no use; for nothing but fresh
provisions and terra firma has any effect upon the scurvy."
However, a boat-load of potatoes and onions was obtained from a passing
ship. These the men ate raw.
"The freshness and crispness of the raw onion, with the earthy state,
give it a great relish to one who has been a long time on salt
provisions. We were perfectly ravenous after them. We ate them at every
meal, by the dozen; and filled our pockets with them, to eat on the
watch on deck. The chief use, however, of the fresh provisions was for
the men with the scurvy. One was able to eat, and he soon brought
himself to by gnawing upon raw potatoes; but the other, by this time,
was hardly able to open his mouth; and the cook took the potatoes raw,
pounded them in a mortar, and gave him the juice to suck. The strong
earthy taste and smell of this extract of the raw potatoes at first
produced a shuddering through his whole frame, and after drinking it, an
acute pain, which ran through all parts of his body; but knowing by this
that it was taking strong hold, he persevered, drinking a spoonful every
hour or so, until, by the effect of this drink, and of his own restored
hope, he became so well as to be able to move about, and open his mouth
enough to eat the raw potatoes and onions pounded into a soft pulp. This
course soon restored his appetite and strength; and ten days after we
spoke the _Solon_, so rapid was his recovery that, from lying helpless
and almost hopeless in his berth, he was at the masthead, furling a
royal."
This is the strange result of the disintegrating effect of the sea, and
of salt food. We are all sea-born, science tells us. The moon, and the
sea, and salt, and phosphorus, and us: it is a long chain of connection.
And then the earth: mother-earth. Dana talks of the relish which the
_earthy_ taste of the onion gives. The taste of created juice, the
living milk of Gea. And limes, which taste of the sun.
How much stranger is the interplay of _life_ among the elements, than
any chemical interplay among the elements themselves. Life--and
salt--and phosphorus--and the sea--and the moon. Life--and sulphur--and
carbon--and volcanoes--and the sun. The way up, and the way down. The
strange ways of life.
But Dana went home, to be a lawyer, and a rather dull and distinguished
citizen. He was once almost an ambassador. And pre-eminently
respectable.
He had been. He KNEW. He had even told us. It is a great achievement.
And then what?--Why, nothing. The old vulgar hum-drum. That's the worst
of knowledge. It leaves one only the more lifeless. Dana lived his bit
in two years, and knew, and drummed out the rest. Dreary lawyer's years,
afterwards.
We know enough. We know too much. We know nothing.
Let us smash something. Ourselves included. But the machine above all.
Dana's small book is a very great book: contains a great extreme of
knowledge, knowledge of the great element.
And after all, we have to know all before we can know that knowing is
nothing.
Imaginatively, we have to know all: even the elemental waters. And know
and know on, until knowledge suddenly shrivels and we know that forever
we don't know.
Then there is a sort of peace, and we can start afresh, knowing we don't
know.
X. HERMAN MELVILLE'S "TYPEE" AND "OMOO"
The greatest seer and poet of the sea for me is Melville. His vision is
more real than Swinburne's, because he doesn't personify the sea, and
far sounder than Joseph Conrad's, because Melville doesn't
sentimentalize the ocean and the sea's unfortunates. Snivel in a wet
hanky like Lord Jim.
Melville has the strange, uncanny magic of sea-creatures, and some of
their repulsiveness. He isn't quite a land animal. There is something
slithery about him. Something always half-seas-over. In his life they
said he was mad--or crazy. He was neither mad nor crazy. But he was over
the border. He was half a water animal, like those terrible
yellow-bearded Vikings who broke out of the waves in beaked ships.
He was a modern Viking. There is something curious about real blue-eyed
people. They are never quite human, in the good classic sense, human as
brown-eyed people are human: the human of the living humus. About a real
blue-eyed person there is usually something abstract, elemental.
Brown-eyed people are, as it were, like the earth, which is tissue of
bygone life, organic, compound. In blue eyes there is sun and rain and
abstract, uncreate element, water, ice, air, space, but not humanity.
Brown-eyed people are people of the old, old world: _Allzu menschlich._
Blue-eyed people tend to be too keen and abstract.
Melville is like a Viking going home to the sea, encumbered with age and
memories, and a sort of accomplished despair, almost madness. For he
cannot accept humanity. He can't belong to humanity. Cannot.
The great Northern cycle of which he is the returning unit has almost
completed its round, accomplished itself. Balder the beautiful is
mystically dead, and by this time he stinketh. Forget-me-nots and
sea-poppies fall into water. The man who came from the sea to live among
men can stand it no longer. He hears the horror of the cracked
church-bell, and goes back down the shore, back into the ocean again,
home, into the salt water. Human life won't do. He turns back to the
elements. And all the vast sun-and-wheat consciousness of his day he
plunges back into the deeps, burying the flame in the deep,
self-conscious and deliberate. Like blue flax and sea-poppies fall into
the waters and give back their created sun-stuff to the dissolution of
the flood.
The sea-born people, who can meet and mingle no longer: who turn away
from life, to the abstract, to the elements: the sea receives her own.
Let life come asunder, they say. Let water conceive no more with fire.
Let mating finish. Let the elements leave off kissing, and turn their
backs on one another. Let the merman turn away from his human wife and
children, let the seal-woman forget the world of men, remembering only
the waters.
So they go down to the sea, the sea-born people. The Vikings are
wandering again. Homes are broken up. Cross the seas, cross the seas,
urges the heart. Leave love and home. Leave love and home. Love and home
are a deadly illusion. Woman, what have I to do with thee? It is
finished. _Consummmatum est._ The crucifixion into humanity is over. Let
us go back to the fierce, uncanny elements: the corrosive vast sea. Or
Fire.
Basta! It is enough. It is enough of life. Let us have the vast
elements. Let us get out of this loathsome complication of living
humanly with humans. Let the sea wash us dean of the leprosy of our
humanity and humanness.
Melville was a northerner, sea-born. So the sea claimed him. We are most
of us, who use the English language, water-people, sea-derived.
Melville went back to the oldest of all the oceans, to the Pacific. _Der
Grosse oder Stille Ozean._
Without doubt the Pacific Ocean is æons older than the Atlantic or the
Indian Oceans. When we say older, we mean it has not come to any modern
consciousness. Strange convulsions have convulsed the Atlantic and
Mediterranean peoples into phase after phase of consciousness, while the
Pacific and the Pacific peoples have slept. To sleep is to dream: you
can't stay unconscious. And, oh, heaven, for how many thousands of years
has the true Pacific been dreaming, turning over in its sleep and
dreaming again: idylls: nightmares.
The Maoris, the Tongans, the Marquesans, the Fijians, the Polynesians:
holy God, how long have they been turning over in the same sleep, with
varying dreams. Perhaps, to a sensitive imagination, those islands in
the middle of the Pacific are the most unbearable places on earth. It
simply stops the heart, to be translated there, unknown ages back, back
into that life, that pulse, that rhythm. The scientists say the South
Sea Islanders belong to the Stone Age. It seems absurd to class people
according to their implements. And yet there is something in it. The
heart of the Pacific is still the Stone Age; in spite of steamers. The
heart of the Pacific seems like a vast vacuum, in which, mirage-like,
continues the life of myriads of ages back. It is a phantom-persistence
of human beings who should have died, by our chronology, in the Stone
Age. It is a phantom, illusion-like trick of reality: the glamorous
South Seas.
Even Japan and China have been turning over in their sleep for countless
centuries. Their blood is the old blood, their tissue the old soft
tissue. Their busy day was myriads of years ago, when the world was a
softer place, more moisture in the air, more warm mud on the face of the
earth, and the lotus was always in flower. The great bygone world,
before Egypt. And Japan and China have been turning over in their sleep,
while we have "advanced." And now they are starting up into nightmare.
The world isn't what it seems.
The Pacific Ocean holds the dream of immemorial centuries. It is the
great blue twilight of the vastest of all evenings: perhaps of the most
wonderful of all dawns. Who knows.
It must once have been a vast basin of soft, lotus-warm civilization,
the Pacific. Never was such a huge man-day swung down into slow
disintegration, as here. And now the waters are blue and ghostly with
the end of immemorial peoples. And phantom-like the islands rise out of
it, illusions of the glamorous Stone Age.
To this phantom Melville returned. Back, back, away from life. Never man
instinctively hated human life, our human life, as we have it, more than
Melville did. And never was a man so passionately filled with the sense
of vastness and mystery of life which is non-human. He was mad to look
over our horizons. Anywhere, anywhere out of _our_ world. To get away.
To get away, out!
To get away, out of our life. To cross a horizon into another life. No
matter what life, so long as it is another life.
Away, away from humanity. To the sea. The naked, salt, elemental sea. To
go to sea, to escape humanity.
The human heart gets into a frenzy at last, in its desire to dehumanize
itself.
So he finds himself in the middle of the Pacific. Truly over a horizon.
In another world. In another epoch. Back, far back, in the days of palm
trees and lizards and stone implements. The sunny Stone Age.
Samoa, Tahiti, Raratonga, Nukuheva: the very names are a sleep and a
forgetting. The sleep-forgotten past magnificence of human history.
"Trailing clouds of glory."
Melville hated the world: was born hating it. But he was looking for
heaven. That is, choosingly. Choosingly, he was looking for paradise.
Unchoosingly, he was mad with hatred of the world.
Well, the world is hateful. It is as hateful as Melville found it. He
was not wrong in hating the world. _Delenda est Chicago._ He hated it to
a pitch of madness, and not without reason.
But it's no good _persisting_ in looking for paradise "regained."
Melville at his best invariably wrote from a sort of dream-self, so that
events which he relates as actual fact have indeed a far deeper
reference to his own soul, his own inner life.
So in _Typee_ when he tells of his entry into the valley of the dread
cannibals of Nukuheva. Down this narrow, steep, horrible dark gorge he
slides and struggles as we struggle in a dream, or in the act of birth,
to emerge in the green Eden of the Golden Age, the valley of the
cannibal savages. This is a bit of birth-myth, or re-birth myth, on
Melville's part--unconscious, no doubt, because his running
underconsciousness was always mystical and symbolical. He wasn't aware
that he was being mystical.
There he is then, in Typee, among the dreaded cannibal savages. And they
are gentle and generous with him, and he is truly in a sort of Eden.
Here at last is Rousseau's Child of Nature and Chateaubriand's Noble
Savage called upon and found at home. Yes, Melville loves his savage
hosts. He finds them gentle, laughing lambs compared to the ravening
wolves of his white brothers, left behind in America and on an American
whale-ship.
The ugliest beast on earth is the white man, says Melville.
In short, Herman found in Typee the paradise he was looking for. It is
true, the Marquesans were "immoral," but he rather liked that. Morality
was too white a trick to take him in. Then again, they were cannibals.
And it filled him with horror even to think of this. But the savages
were very private and even fiercely reserved in their cannibalism, and
he might have spared himself his shudder. No doubt he had partaken of
the Christian Sacraments many a time. "This is my body, take and eat.
This is my blood. Drink it in remembrance of me." And if the savages
liked to partake of their sacrament without raising the
transubstantiation quibble, and if they liked to say, directly: "This is
thy body, which I take from thee and eat. This is thy blood, which I sip
in annihilation of thee," why surely their sacred ceremony was as
awe-inspiring as the one Jesus substituted. But Herman chose to be
horrified. I confess, I am not horrified. Though of course I am not on
the spot. But the savage sacrament seems to me more valid than the
Christian: less side-tracking about it.--Thirdly he was shocked by their
wild methods of warfare. He died before the great European war, so his
shock was comfortable.
Three little quibbles: morality, cannibal sacrament, and stone axes. You
must have a fly even in Paradisal ointment. And the first was a
ladybird.
But Paradise. He insists on it. Paradise. He could even go stark naked,
like before the Apple episode. And his Fayaway, a laughing little Eve,
naked with him, and hankering after no apple of knowledge, so long as he
would just love her when he felt like it. Plenty to eat, needing no
clothes to wear, sunny, happy people, sweet water to swim in: everything
a man can want. Then why wasn't he happy along with the savages?
Because he wasn't.
He grizzled in secret, and wanted to escape.
He even pined for Home and Mother, the two things he had run away from
as far as ships would carry him. HOME and MOTHER. The two things that
were his damnation.
There on the island, where the golden-green great palm-trees chinked in
the sun, and the elegant reed houses let the sea-breeze through, and
people went naked and laughed a great deal, and Fayaway put flowers in
his hair for him--great red hibiscus flowers, and frangipani--O God, why
wasn't he happy? Why wasn't he?
Because he wasn't.
Well, it's hard to make a man happy.
But I should not have been happy either. One's soul seems under a
vacuum, in the South Seas.
The truth of the matter is, one cannot go back. Some men can: renegade.
But Melville couldn't go back: and Gauguin couldn't really go back: and
I know now that I could never go back. Back towards the past, savage
life. One cannot go back. It is one's destiny inside one.
There are these peoples, these "savages." One does not despise them. One
does not feel superior. But there is a gulf. There is a gulf in time and
being. I cannot commingle my being with theirs.
There they are, these South Sea Islanders, beautiful big men with their
golden limbs and their laughing, graceful laziness. And they will call
you brother, choose you as a brother. But why cannot one truly be
brother?
There is an invisible hand grasps my heart and prevents it opening too
much to these strangers. They are beautiful, they are like children,
they are generous: but they are more than this. They are far off, and in
their eyes is an easy darkness of the soft, uncreate past. In a way,
they are uncreate. Far be it from me to assume any "white" superiority.
But they are savages. They are gentle and laughing and physically very
handsome. But it seems to me, that in living so far, through all our
bitter centuries of civilization, we have still been living onwards,
forwards. God knows it looks like a cul de sac now. But turn to the
first negro, and then listen to your own soul. And your own soul will
tell you that however false and foul our forms and systems are now,
still, through the many centuries since Egypt, we have been living and
struggling forwards along some road that is no road, and yet is a great
life-development. We have struggled on in us that on we must still go.
We may have to smash things. Then let us smash. And our road may have to
take a great swerve, that seems a retrogression.
But we can't go back. Whatever else the South Sea Islander is, he is
centuries and centuries behind us in the life struggle, the
consciousness-struggle, the struggle of the soul into fulness. There is
his woman, with her knotted hair and her dark, inchoate, slightly
sardonic eyes. I like her, she is nice. But I would never want to touch
her. I could not go back on myself so far. Back to their uncreate
condition.
She has soft warm flesh, like warm mud. Nearer the reptile, the Saurian
age. _Noli me tangere._
We can't go back. We can't go back to the savages: not a stride. We can
be in sympathy with them. We can take a great curve in their direction,
onwards. But we cannot turn the current of our life backwards, back
towards their soft warm twilight and uncreate mud. Not for a moment. If
we do it for a moment, it makes us sick.
We can only do it when we are renegade. The renegade hates life itself.
He wants the death of life. So these many "reformers" and "idealists"
who glorify the savages in America. They are death-birds, life-haters.
Renegades.
We can't go back. And Melville couldn't. Much as he hated the civilized
humanity he knew. He couldn't go back to the savages. He wanted to. He
tried to. And he couldn't.
Because, in the first place, it made him sick. It made him physically
ill. He had something wrong with his leg, and this would not heal. It
got worse and worse, during his four months on the island. When he
escaped, he was in a deplorable condition. Sick and miserable. Ill, very
ill.
Paradise!
But there you are. Try to go back to the savages, and you feel as if
your very soul was decomposing inside you. That is what you feel in the
South Seas, anyhow: as if your soul was decomposing inside you. And with
any savages the same, if you try to go their way, take their current of
sympathy.
Yet, as I say, we must make a great swerve in our onward-going
life-course now, to gather up again the savage mysteries. But this does
not mean going back on ourselves.
Going back to the savages made Melville sicker than anything. It made
him feel as if he were decomposing. Worse even than Home and Mother.
And that is what really happens. If you prostitute your psyche by
returning to the savages, you gradually go to pieces. Before you can go
back, you _have_ to decompose. And a white man decomposing is a ghastly
sight. Even Melville in Typee.
We have to go on, on, on, even if we must smash a way ahead.
So Melville escaped. And threw a boat-hook full in the throat of one of
his dearest savage friends, and sank him, because that savage was
swimming in pursuit. That's how he felt about the savages when they
wanted to detain him. He'd have murdered them one and all, vividly,
rather than be kept from escaping. Away from them--he must get away from
them--at any price.
And once he has escaped, immediately he begins to sigh and pine for the
"Paradise." Home and Mother being at the other end even of a whaling
voyage.
When he really was Home with Mother, he found it Purgatory. But Typee
must have been even worse than Purgatory, a soft hell, judging from the
murderous frenzy which possessed him, to escape.
But once aboard the whaler that carried him off from Nukuheva, he looked
back and sighed for the Paradise he had just escaped from in such a
fever.
Poor Melville! He was determined Paradise existed. So he was always in
Purgatory.
He was born for Purgatory. Some souls are purgatorial by destiny.
The very freedom of his Typee was a torture to him. Its ease was slowly
horrible to him. This time he was the fly in the odorous tropical
ointment.
He needed to fight. It was no good to him, the relaxation of the
non-moral tropics. He didn't really want Eden. He wanted to fight. Like
every American. To fight. But with weapons of the spirit, not the flesh.
That was the top and bottom of it. His soul was in revolt, writhing
forever in revolt. When he had something definite to rebel against--like
the bad conditions on a whaling ship--then he was much happier in his
miseries. The mills of God were grinding inside him, and they needed
something to grind on.
When they could grind on the injustice and folly of missionaries, or of
brutal sea-captains, or of governments, he was easier. The mills of God
were grinding inside him.
They are grinding inside every American. And they grind exceeding small.
Why? Heaven knows. But we've got to grind down our old forms, our old
selves, grind them very very small, to nothingness. Whether a new
somethingness will ever start, who knows. Meanwhile the mills of God
grind on, in American Melville, and it was himself he ground small:
himself and his wife, when he was married. For the present, the South
Seas.
He escapes on to the craziest, most impossible of whaling ships. Lucky
for us Melville makes it fantastic. It must have been pretty sordid.
And anyhow, on the crazy _Julia_ his leg, that would never heal in the
paradise of Typee, began quickly to get well. His life was falling into
its normal pulse. The drain back into past centuries was over.
Yet, oh, as he sails away from Nukuheva, on the voyage that will
ultimately take him to America, oh, the acute and intolerable nostalgia
he feels for the island he has left.
The past. The Golden Age of the past. What a nostalgia we all feel for
it. Yet we won't want it when we get it. Try the South Seas.
Melville had to fight, fight against the existing world, against his own
very self. Only he would never quite put the knife in the heart of his
paradisal ideal. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, love should be a
fulfilment, and life should be a thing of bliss. That was his fixed
ideal. Fata Morgana.
That was the pin he tortured himself on, like a pinned-down butterfly.
Love is never a fulfilment. Life is never a thing of continuous bliss.
There is no paradise. Fight and laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss:
and fight again. Fight, fight. That is life.
Why pin ourselves down on a paradisal ideal? It is only ourselves we
torture.
Melville did have one great experience, getting away from humanity: the
experience of the sea.
The South Sea Islands were not his great experience. They were a
glamorous world outside New England. Outside. But it was the sea that
was both outside and inside: the universal experience.
The book that follows on from _Typee_ is _Omoo._
_Omoo_ is a fascinating book: picaresque, rascally, roving. Melville as
a bit of a beachcomber. The crazy ship Julia sails to Tahiti, and the
mutinous crew are put ashore. Put in the Tahitian prison. It is good
reading.
Perhaps Melville is at his best, his happiest, in _Omoo._ For once he is
really reckless. For once he takes life as it comes. For once he is the
gallant rascally epicurean, eating the world like a snipe, dirt and all
baked into one _bonne bouche._
For once he is really careless, roving with that scamp. Doctor Long
Ghost. For once he is careless of his actions, careless of his morals,
careless of his ideals: ironic, as the epicurean must be. The deep irony
of your real scamp: your real epicurean of the moment.