Dana had; and since it was impossible to work a sailing-ship without
naming every article of its gear and tackle, he knew the names and uses
of these things quite as well as Dana did. But in Melville’s work the
lingo enters incidentally; and one encounters, not the physical ship of
the shipwright, but the ship in action, the ship that is part of the
sailor’s consciousness--in brief, the living ship as contrasted with an
abstract compendium of names and relationships. The same is true of the
characters. Dana describes his shipmates accurately enough: Melville
embodies them. The difference is the difference between a commonplace
photograph and a significant portrait. One does not forget Harry or
Jackson or Captain Riga or the Negro cook: they live as authentically,
within their narrow compass, as Colonel Newcome or Samuel Weller. That
is art; and even in his minor passages, Melville was an artist.
Redburn, in sum, showed only a portion of Melville; but he had no
reason to be ashamed of it, except for the reason that it fell short
of the higher standard he had now set himself, and the maturer art
he was now capable of creating. By 1850 twice as many copies of
Redburn as of Mardi had been sold, a difference accounted for partly
by the difference in bulk and price, but even more, I think, by the
preferences of Melville’s public. He had accomplished what he set out
to do: he had faced his immediate situation and improved it. That
Melville was forced to write such a potboiler was bad luck, and nothing
to be proud of: but that he met the situation squarely was a mark of
his resolution and balance. As long as Melville could fall back upon
his adventurous past, he had something to support him, something that
was viable in the marketplace. It was only when he had exhausted his
accumulated capital, and was forced to mine his ore and smelt it and
cast it, all under pressure of financial necessity, that he drew too
heavily on his resources. But we must not read back into these earlier
years his later difficulties. Redburn was a victory.
3
On the heels of Redburn came White-Jacket, or, the World in a
Man-of-War. White-Jacket was the sort of book that Melville could
hardly have attempted until he was sure of his capacities as a writer.
Although there is more than one adventurous passage in White-Jacket, it
is full of sober description and realistic criticism; and it depends
for its interest on Melville’s own strength of character, his shrewd,
quick insight, and his easy, seamanlike way of taking the world, rather
than on the glamour of his adventures.
The young writer casts about for interesting materials; the experienced
writer knows that no materials are uninteresting if they are capable
of being absorbed in the blood, and pumped through all the organs
and chambers of a man’s being: the more command a writer has of his
own resources, the more confident is he of his ability to turn any
experience to account. White-Jacket shows, I think, a greater art
and control over the material than any of Melville’s earlier books:
in Typee the art is gracefully unconscious: in White-Jacket it is
deliberate. Melville’s personal distinction and his own peculiar
adventures were subsumed under the jacket itself: he announced the
theme in the first chapter, recurred to it from time to time, when he
sought to waterproof the jacket, when he rounded the Horn in it, when
he tried to dispose of it at auction, and finally when he was blinded
by it and lost his hold on the yard-arm. The white jacket gave the
narrative a unity without introducing the extraneous mechanism of a
plot: it also symbolized his position as a white sheep in the black
flock of a man-of-war. Omoo was more fitful and inconsecutive for lack
of such a thread; Mardi did not open, like White-Jacket, on the theme
with which it closed. Like Redburn, White-Jacket was written under
pressure; but by now Melville knew his business. At thirty he had
mastery: he could take the dull routine of the man-of-war and make
every part of it live, from the maintop to the hold: he could take a
hundred dispersed facts and weave them into a solid pattern.
White-Jacket is a great portrait gallery. From the Commodore to the
rascally Master-at-arms, from Jack Chase of the maintop to Mad Jack,
the sea-going lieutenant, who, like Jermin, knew his business so well
he commanded Melville’s deep respect, from Mr. Pert the Midshipman
to Surgeon Cuticle--Melville typified, and yet individualized, every
character. The Neversink is an old-fashioned frigate of the line, now
long out of date, and it is all warships, down to the latest airplane
carrier. Mad Jack is an actual person; and he is all the officers
who exercise command by knowledge and capacity, none the less liked
for being a strict disciplinarian. Surgeon Cuticle is a man; and he
is all professional men who become specialized by their skill into
a brief-case or a textbook or an operating knife. Melville, who had
found that the world was something of a man-of-war discovered also
that a man-of-war’s crew was a pretty good representation of the
world. “Wrecked on a desert, a man of war’s crew could quickly found
an Alexandria by themselves, and fill it with all the things which go
to make up a capital.” Melville conveyed this feeling of richness and
varied capacity: every face was accentuated slightly in caricature,
except Jack Chase’s for Jack stood out among the officers and crew as
the real captain, the one complete, full-bodied man among them all,
robust, bearded, Jovian, ready in war or love or seamanship, singing
Dibdin’s ballads or reciting Camoëns’ Lusiad with equal gusto. Jack
Chase would have pleased Whitman: indeed, they had the same large,
sympathetic, readily dramatized personalities.
In White-Jacket, Melville’s power of invention appears only a few
times; but when it does, it is magnificent. The chapters on the
Surgeon of the Fleet and his operation show Melville’s satire at its
acutest: the picture would do honour to the Hogarth Melville loved.
One sees Cuticle, the eminent man of science and surgery, languishing
for three years in a man-of-war without a single major operation.
Fate at last hands Cuticle a poor wretch who has broken his leg; and
Cuticle cannot ease the itch to amputate. The consultation with the
other, surgeons is handled with cruel fidelity: they are all against
the operation; but Cuticle, with great presence, browbeats the junior
surgeon into an equivocation which his superior pounces upon as a
sufficient sanction for the operation. The grizzly preparation and
performance is told with the grizzliest humour; Melville went through
every detail of the butchery with a terrible levity, and an eye for
the vanity, the professional hypocrisy, the routine which, rather than
humanity and understanding, so often decide the issues of life and
death. The operation was a triumph for science and Mr. Surgeon Cuticle:
incidentally, it happened to be the death of the poor man who was
brought needlessly to the operating-table.
The satire is perfect; and it is perfect because, at the broadest
extreme of caricature, it does not lose sight of the pathetic reality
underneath. Melville did not waste breath dissecting the obvious
impostors and charlatans; for all but the simple can escape them. It is
the man in command, the man we admire, respect, put all our confidence
in, that Melville so skilfully opened up. No one has done a better
job of it: Cuticle and his operation must be put alongside the best
passages in Molière. If operations cannot now be performed in the Navy
without the consent of the principal party, Melville’s account of their
professional abuse is perhaps responsible, in part, for the improvement.
Nor was this scene merely a lucky hit by Melville; the scene between
the two sailmakers, sewing up the corpse, is equally strong and equally
endowed with imaginative life. In his earlier books, Melville had
defined his limits: they ranged between utmost fantasy and grossest
matter of fact: he could grub with Caliban or fly with Ariel, but
when he flew, his course was still a little erratic, and when he
remained on the ground, he was tied a little too close to actuality.
In White-Jacket his powers did not widen; but they gained firmness and
control. He could fly groundwise, giving the commonplace the benefits
of his imagination, carrying the double theme, the theme of life itself
and naval experience, under the same figure; and when he cut loose,
he did not need to throw overboard the ballast of good sense before
he could reach the upper air. The prose of White-Jacket is an advance
on all his previous writing; it has a richness of texture, a variety
of rhythm, a decisiveness of phrase that his earlier work had only
promised and that Mardi itself had not quite fulfilled.
White-Jacket is a portrait gallery: but it is more than that: it
is one of the best all-round characterizations and criticisms of a
powerful human institution that the century produced. Melville dealt
with the effect of regimentation, with the relation of superior
to underling, with the accidents and mischances and the ordinary
routine of a man-of-war’s life, in such a fashion that he included
other institutions as well: the human truths and relationships would
remain, though all the navies of the world were scrapped next week.
The malevolence of the Articles of War, the essential degradation of
the whole military process, the hectoring, the arrogance of station
(the quarter-deck face!), the military necessity of converting all the
variable human potentialities into mechanized patterns--that is, human
defectives--are here once and for all coolly observed and demonstrated:
White-Jacket forms a sort of illustrated supplement to Blake’s keen and
devastating epigrams on war. The fact that flogging was abolished in
the Navy as a result of an agitation in Congress that followed directly
upon White-Jacket’s publication, is a tribute to the moving truth of
what Melville wrote: his words on the sham republicanism of a country
that fostered an autocratic navy were a little too sharply aimed for
even the military racketeers to dodge. Had Melville’s picture been
that of a mere propagandist, I doubt if it would have taken such
immediate effect: on the contrary, it was that of a genuine critic,
who portrayed the whole truth in such a fashion as to make evasion
of the unpleasant parts of it almost impossible. He overreached his
antagonists by knowing more about their business than they themselves
did: as when he used the example of the British admiral, Collingwood,
to show that capable officers could govern the rowdiest crew without
the lash. Apart from Moby-Dick, White-Jacket is, I think, Melville’s
fullest achievement: and it is the best reasoned and seasoned of all
his factual narratives. The charm of youth was gone, perhaps, but the
manly grasp of maturity had succeeded it--the manly grasp and the
steady, unfaltering eye.
Melville’s appetite for facts, his voracious reading, his wide range
of experience, his philosophic brooding, at last had an imagination
capable of assimilating all these materials and using them to further
its own ends. Now was the time for a great leap, a leap which would
gather all these powers together and focus them on an object of epic
dimensions, a Typee, a Mardi, a Redburn, a White-Jacket, all in one.
Melville gathered himself for the leap; but before he could make it, he
was forced to attend to more mundane affairs; and in October, 1849, he
went over to England to arrange in person for the English publication
of Redburn and White-Jacket.
For a few months, we have the rare good luck to follow Melville day
by day, almost hour by hour. When, on October 11, 1849, he stepped
aboard the Southampton, a regular London liner, on a raw noon, leaving
behind his brother Allan and Mr. Duyckinck, who had come to the docks,
he began to keep a journal of his voyage. This journal, a later one
kept during his trip to the Near East, and a small sheaf of letters,
constitute with his books almost the only first-hand material for
Melville’s biography. Let us take advantage of this good fortune.
The literal, unadorned journal, made up hastily day by day, is the
least impeachable sort of testimony, unless the writer has an eye on
posterity. One need harbour no such suspicions about Melville’s simple
record.
4
(_Enter Herman Melville, in a green overcoat, with polite manners, and
a wary reticence underneath his appearance of rank conviviality. He
is just past thirty, and at times his grave demeanour and abstracted
look might pass him for forty; but there are other moments when the
fringe of brown beard seems only a mask, and one detects beneath the
thoughtful brow of the author and the anxious brow of the husband and
father an irrepressible boy. One wants a name for this combination of
outdoor strength and bookishness, this Bohemianism and gentlehood, this
mixture of the bronzed god himself and the plaster cast, and, for lack
of an epithet, one will have to call it Melvillian._)
What a queer business, this getting away. Yesterday one said a
passionate farewell to every one in the morning; but the winds were
unfavourable, and in the evening one was back again at home, feeling
almost as if one had accomplished the tour of Europe; the final
farewell was made a little stale by repetition; one felt relief when
the ship was at last under way. For almost the first time, one travels
as a passenger, travels alone, in a room as big as one’s own room at
home. It is good to be at sea again: one feels it more keenly among
the land-lubbers, who make anguished noises at the first choppy water
beyond the Narrows. In the morning, one is up early for the sunrise,
and, since the captain is friendly, one has the run of the ship. Fine
to be up in the rigging again! When a man is overboard one knows how
to act promptly: one raises a cry, drops overboard the tackle-fall of
the quarter boat, and when he fails to reach it, drops over the side
oneself to swing it toward him. Poor fellow: he sees it and does not
grasp it: he drowns with a demented smile on his face, when he might
have saved himself. The passengers say later he was insane.... To work
a boat, to know how to keep it pointed on its course, or to throw out a
life-line, this sort of knowledge gives one back one’s old confidence.
There’s no gammon about the ocean; it knocks the false bottom right off
a pretender’s keel.
The passengers prove better than one had dared hope: there is Adler,
a German philologist, who will talk to one till midnight about fixed
fate, free will, and foreknowledge absolute: his philosophy is
Coleridgian, a sort of friendly bridge between Kant and Hegel and
Schelling and Schlegel and one’s own less conscious metaphysics, one’s
hitherto dim doubts and intuitions. There is also a genteel sociable
youth named McCurdy, whose father is a New York merchant, and there is
a cousin of Bayard Taylor, the pedestrian traveller, all good fellows
over a bowl of punch. Taylor has a notion of going through the Near
East: down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople--Athens, Beyrut,
Jerusalem, Cairo, Alexandria. That would be something neither Polynesia
nor the Hudson Valley could give: marvellous, if it were not for the
strain on one’s purse. Four hundred dollars at least. Already, too--one
isn’t a week away from them--Lizzy and Barney the baby begin to tug
at one. No: one isn’t free any more. One is going to England to get a
little ready cash from Bentley or Murray or Moxon on White-Jacket: one
can’t dissipate that in travel. One is tied: there is no getting away
from that. One wants to travel far, perhaps; but not with the same
old lust and confidence: all paths lead home again. Where’s Lizzie
now? Where dat old man? The nice little beggar: those were the first
connected words he uttered.
Ah, well: the vacant days, the rough days, the dozy sunlit days: they
all relieve the tension a little. Five years ago one scarcely knew that
Hegel existed: now one is on one’s way to England--an author! One of
the ladies is reading a book by H. M.; she keeps on raising her eyes
to take one in, as if comparing the real man with the self-portrait.
People say: Are you _the_ Mr. Melville--the man who lived among the
cannibals? A fine way to go down to posterity.... What a slack lot of
sheep a company of passengers is; one’s sympathies are all with the
forecastle. There is the buxom Irish lady who sings, the gushy Miss
Wilbur who is so obviously marriageable and who talks of winning souls
to Christ, the Frenchmen with the bleak, sea-sick faces. When one goes
aloft to muse a little, they stand around and gape, as if one were a
performer in Barnum’s museum. Already we are three weeks from home.
How quickly time flies when one day is like another. Dear Lizzie: dear
little Barney: where dat old man!
With a fresh wind and a clear sky and land near, the passengers
suddenly re-galvanize into life: faces appear that had been below
decks most of the sail. The food tastes better; one plays shuffleboard
gaily, not dutifully; one reads Pickwick Papers and wonders about the
England that lies somewhere between one’s father’s journals, one’s
own grim memories of Liverpool, and the warm, roast-beef, veal-pie,
ale-drinking, punch-sipping, toddy-smacking England of Dickens. At last
the cliffs of Portland, where the Portland stone comes from, bleak,
melancholy; then the run along the Isle of Wight, past the Needles,
with the ploughed fields neatly marked off, and the lower shore of
Hampshire with its low cliffs on the other side. Oh, to get ashore, to
feel dry land, to quit this endless, tedious tacking: to rush ashore
at Portsmouth and let the ship find London by itself! No: it can’t
be done: out in the Channel and up to Dover now: one is restless and
impatient. Up in the morning in the dark at four, and into the cold
cutter, which heads for Deal, not Dover, to make a landing. Well:
England at last! Ten years ago, thirteen to be exact, a poor boy, half
orphan, teased and tormented by foul-mouthed sailors, young, hopeful,
innocent, a mere ship’s monkey--now, Herman Melville, traveller,
novelist, romancer, author of Peedee and Hullabaloo and Pog-Dog: the
conquering hero, with debts and duns at his back and a potboiler in
his carpet-bag. Triumph--and how raw the wind is at dawn!
Through the dark, narrow streets of Deal, the keen air faintly reeking
with the first kitchen-coals, then out into the country on foot for a
day’s walk to Canterbury with Taylor and Adler. A castle and a Roman
fortification before one is two hours ashore! Deal: the square mound
of the Roman castra: somehow, these things mean more than a hillful of
arrow-heads: the men who built them worried about God and Eternity:
a thousand years does not separate one from them. Canterbury is even
better: the nave, the cloisters, the queer fine thoughts one finds on
some of the tombs. Yes: this is a little nearer the England of one’s
dreams. Dinner at the Falstaff Inn, and in the evening a provincial
theatre, with a stage that might have been peopled by Dickens, every
actor more of a character than the character portrayed: an ineffably
funny business all round.
Next day, by train in a third-class open carriage to London: cold to
one’s marrow: cold and ravenous. When one arrives at London Bridge
one can think of nothing but a chop-house. While the chops and the
porter and the treacle pudding are digesting, one realizes that this
is England, old England, the dark, slightly grimy eating-stalls, the
red-cheeked, pert, coarse, kindly stupid waitress, the silent men
eating methodically, piling their forks up like a hod with food, the
lawyers’ clerks, shabby, rusty, genteel, the countrymen with leather
leggings and purple veins on their cheeks, the bagmen, voluble and
expansive for Englishmen, just one remove from the country pedlar, a
faint odour of musty paper and soot over one kind of Londoner, or of
ploughed fields and manure over the other: in short, England, London--a
society like that at Albany, bedded deep in dust, must, precedent,
and vast augmentations of gold. One is in it and out of it. The crowd
on the Strand stares at one’s green overcoat: some one had ominously
warned one on the steamer that it would set one down for a crude
American. Colour is already a little old-fashioned in this drab,
utilitarian England: this is the City of Dis: black coats, black hats,
have survival value in a sulphur-and-brimstone world: the damned need
protective colouration. One sinks down at last before a small fire in
a tall, draughty room in Craven Street, just off the Strand. One’s
journal has been a blank these last three days, and one must catch up
with it. Travelling takes the ink out of one’s pen as well as the cash
out of one’s purse.
But time is limited and one must quickly set to work. Murray is out
of town; so is Bentley, the publisher; but Bentley will come up from
Brighton to suit one’s convenience. In the meanwhile, one can drop
in for Julien’s Promenade Concert at Drury Lane, see the pictures at
the National Gallery, prowl through Chancery Lane, or go down into
Cheapside to witness the surviving pomp and gilded fustian of the Lord
Mayor’s show, exploring the Guildhall the next day, in the company of
an affable functionary in the finance department whom one picks up, by
chance, in the street, to witness a bit of infernal charity, worthy of
Dis itself: a horde of beggars pours into the tawny-warm twilight of
the hall, with all its flags and banners and fine timbering, to pick
and grab at the remains of hams, fowls, pastries, left over from the
high-and-mightinesses of the previous day. A comical sight at first;
but on slight reflection, not comical: no, not comical. Thank heaven,
civilization has not gone quite that far in America.
The world that holds Lord Mayor’s shows--and the starvation and misery
behind the show--also holds a bus-ride, on a mellow autumn Sunday,
through Piccadilly, by Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and then
on, past red cottages and little taverns and open commons, through
Hammersmith, Chiswick, Kew, and across the Thames to Richmond Hill,
where, at the crest, overlooking a long stretch of parkland, one can
see the distant castle of Windsor in the mist beyond, with the Thames
itself flashing occasionally like a fish’s back in the sun, in the
valley between. After that, one is ready for the sober crimson of
Hampton Court--the Van Dycks and the Titians and the Rembrandts: this
is what one means by a cultivated life. Must one be harried, must one
struggle over vain things, must one know so much temporal bitterness,
hardship, evil, in order to live? Not the Marquesans: not the Olympians
of England: they both live as the lilies, planting themselves in a
nourishing soil, drinking in the sun, growing, forming pollen and
fertilizing and becoming fertilized, flowering and seeding. That is
life, not the struggling, the harrying, the deprivation. But tomorrow
one must leave Rembrandt and Hampton Court far behind: one must dicker
for good terms and a fat advance with Bentley.
The greyness of London comes over one: the glacial greyness of St.
Paul’s: the brown greyness of Bloomsbury: the smeary greyness of the
Strand: the dank blue greyness of the Temple. The choir chanting in St.
Paul’s leaves one feeling wan and unhappy. What is Lizzie doing? Where
dat old man? If only they were here, or better, if one could be with
them for a little while, and come back to the quiet inwardness of one’s
days, warmed, refreshed, revivified. One could absorb so much more, if
one were settled and secure.
How near one feels to these English, these people who like good solid
food and ale and port, who have a manly straightness in their dealings,
merchants whose signature makes paper valuable, poets who have created
in words poems that atone for all the pictures that remain unpainted
and all the music that remains unsung in the English soul: hearty,
robust, gay, ready to turn a farce in Beaumont and Fletcher or in a
market Punch and Judy show, but grave, serious, at bottom very deep:
no one, not Dante, had struck more ruthlessly at the sinister meanings
of life than Shakespeare, no one had been more relentless and sardonic
than Swift or Hogarth--and yet with what tenderness, what warm love
of life, in Swift’s letters to Stella or Hogarth’s portrait of the
Shrimp-girl, as fresh as a newly opened wild-flower. A country of
sound men, buxom girls, beautiful tidy fields, snug inns--and terrible
revealers of life’s immense blackness. How intense the candle in those
brave hands: how sullen and eventful the grave shadows that swarm
around it!