wealth and station and reputation and family in the county sense, with
its arctic Oh? and its hard, oysterlike rudeness, a stupid England,
but influential in everything, governing its very enemies by choosing
the issues over which they would fight. The England that had kicked
an innocent youth out of a Liverpool club and would doubtless do
the same, with less provocation, to a distinguished American author
whose reputation was growing in France and Germany: the England of
hard-faced men who rolled the wheels of progress over usury and penury
as twin rails: the England that had impressed seamen, struck down
its continental rivals, enclosed the commons, introduced an inhuman
system of industry, and defended privilege and empty title as the
very cornerstones of Civil Order--in short, the England of snobs and
flunkeys and a complacent, servile, self-righteous middle class--New
York, to be sure, without a hinterland that was still free and
unclaimed.
How trivial this other England essentially is. What a stupid lot at
Murray’s party, and what a bore old Lockhart was, with his ghastly,
grinning, mincing way: such a moth-eaten lion! Oh, conventionalism,
what a ninny thou art! How completely one felt out of it, how superior
one felt to these superiorities. Perhaps there was such a thing as
real aristocracy: one wonders if the Scotch Melvilles would show it,
or whether one might get a taste of the real thing at the Duke of
Rutland’s own seat: but these fishy eyes, these stupid faces, this
intellectual torpor, do not reassure one. Blackwood’s had printed a
long ponderous review of Redburn: that was a comical black mark against
the reigning Tory intellect, wasting good white paper on a book one
knows oneself to be trash, which one wrote to buy tobacco with. In
a society where the mask, the reputation, the hallmark count for so
much, how little any one is concerned with the substance beneath! One
is a well-known author: a success: ergo, Blackwood’s takes Redburn
seriously, not fathoming how little it is worth serious criticism.
One meets the publishers one by one, Bentley, who did Mardi, Murray,
who published Typee and Omoo, Mr. Longmans, Mr. Chapman, Mr. Bohn, Mr.
Moxon, who was Charles Lamb’s crony; and when one can’t make the deal
one had hoped for, one goes down the line; but the answer is always
the same: the copyright is unsatisfactory, the work may be pirated in
America; and they cannot risk two hundred pounds on the rights for
the first thousand copies. The prospects are not too pleasant; but
if the matter could be settled at once one wouldn’t have the excuse
and the opportunity to visit the Dulwich Gallery, remote from London,
but full of splendid treasures; one couldn’t sit with the Greenwich
pensioners at Greenwich; one couldn’t spend a Sunday morning, a little
too conspicuous for comfort, at the services in St. Bridget’s; nor
could one discuss metaphysics with Dr. Adler at the Edinburgh Castle,
dark-walled and like a beefsteak in colour, where the ale was so mellow
and the waiters so polite. One absorbs a city by food and drink, as
well as by sight and conversation: the Mitre--Johnson’s tavern--and
the Cock and the Rainbow--Tennyson’s haunts: the little French hotel
in Soho where one has morning coffee and a jelly omelette, or, to know
the worst about life in London, a cup of brackish coffee, a dirty roll,
an unappetizing piece of bacon, on a dank, foggy morning in a cheap
eating-house: such depression of taste, sight, sound, feeling adds a
new circle to life’s possible hells.
There are bright spots that serve for perpetual contrast: hours spent
over the bookstalls in Great Green Street and Lincoln’s Inn, picking
out folios of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Browne, coming,
with a sudden recognition of kinship, upon De Quincey’s dreams of an
Opium Eater, with passages so much like one’s best feats in Mardi;
or a sumptuous dinner with Mr. Bates at East Sheen, nine miles from
Richmond, where one meets Lord Ashburton’s nephew, and Baron This and
Baroness That and Mr. Peabody the Boston merchant, a warm old soul:
where the glasses and the silver are brilliant and the conversation
ripples in reflection of it, or at least seems to, as one intricate
piece of French cookery gives place to another, as white wine,
champagne, hock, claret, port, and Madeira follow in grand procession:
Taji dined no better among the five-and-twenty kings.
Yes: but then the melancholy of a day when one has spoken no more than
“Good morning” to the slavey: when a frightful nightmare fills with a
turbid residue the commonplaces of the diurnal routine: when one feels
lonely and apart in the haunts that thrilled one most: when one sits
at night in a damp chamber, thinking back to poor Gansevoort, who,
two years before, three, was sitting in such a chamber, in the midst
of such a silence, withdrawn, homesick, alone. What deep thoughts one
seems on the brink of in that silence and solitude: no wonder the
Greeks made silence the vestibule of the mysteries. But the weariness
of this inward communion, too--oh, solitude, where are thy charms!
One’s desires are fulfilled indeed: but always wryly, never in the
right proportion....
While one waits around doggedly, hoping for more favourable offers, one
had better seize the opportunity and make a flying trip to France: one
never knows if one is coming this way again; and besides, if one does
that story of the revolutionary beggar, Potter, one ought to be able to
follow him on his French mission. Very well: by steamer to Boulogne,
then by rail to Paris. A lodging-house on the Rue de Bussy, then a
room at Mme. Capelie’s on the Left Bank. This is civilization: the
Rue de Rivoli: the Place de la Concorde: the Tuileries: the Sorbonne:
these things have the imprint of logic and law. Chaos and old time are
somehow set at naught. The Louvre makes the National Gallery itself
seem a little provincial: Notre Dame, under repair, is still a noble
mass: there is a vivacity, an eagerness, an upright peasant homeliness
in the housewives in felt shoes, in the rosy-cheeked market-women,
that makes one feel a little nearer home. Courtesy takes the place
of servility here, innate courtesy; a market-woman may have it as
well as a duchess. The Hôtel de Cluny, on the site of the old Roman
bath, is just such a house as one would like to live in, venerable,
spacious, solid; and the bookstalls by the Palais Royal, with their
Latin translations and their Voltaire and their Fénelon, give one a
sense of a nation bred to thought and expression, not merely sharp and
acquisitive, like the Yankees, although, obviously, they do not let
the sous go by. And yet--well, the devilish nonsense of this passport
business: the tapeworm of an ancient bureaucracy. What a disappointment
to stand on line, once, twice, to get admission to Rachel in Phèdre,
and be turned away. Rachel acting at the Palais Royal: Victor Cousin
lecturing at the Sorbonne--and somehow, one remains out of it, unable
to get sight of, much less to understand, these things. For consolation
one has _eau de vie_ and a metaphysical talk with the ubiquitous Dr.
Adler.
One is a little downcast: but what did one expect? The truth is, one’s
heart is not altogether in it: one wants Lizzie and Barney, now,
far more than one wants Rachel, Cousin, and the triumphs of culture
generally. Still: one will make one last try: by train to Brussels,
that venerable but obviously stodgy place, Paris minor, and then over
into Germany for a little trip up the Rhine to Cologne, an antiquated,
gable-ended town, with the crane still aloft in the unfinished tower
of the Cathedral, full of associations that go back as far as
Charlemagne. How concentrated history becomes in Europe: here Rubens
was born and Marie de Médicis died: much lore and history to interest
a pondering man. Down the Rhine itself at night, between black cliffs
and crags, from Cologne to Coblentz. Metternich was born near this
great fortress, Ehrenbreitstein, but, more significant symbol than
this, the finest Rhenish wine-grapes are grown right under its guns.
Does not that stand for life itself? Our rarest triumphs and ecstasies
are touched with the shadow of ancient death. At dusk one finds oneself
standing in the place where the two rivers meet: opposite towers
the fortress: some four thousand miles away are Lizzie and America.
Tomorrow, the last lap begins: definitely one is homeward bound.
London itself seems halfway home, when one returns to the old chamber
overlooking the Thames. Back in London with a few presents, a pair of
gloves and shoes from Paris for Lizzie, a medallion one bought from
an old woman near the Arc de Triomphe, and a breast-pin one bought in
Cologne from a rascally shopwoman who cheated one, cheated--and by a
woman--and not even a pretty woman! If only one could splurge a little
on presents. No: one must be sensible: a trencher and breadknife,
as used of old at commons in New College: fine thing. One for Mrs.
Shaw, too. At last Mr. Bentley has come around to one’s terms; it
was worth waiting for. Two hundred pounds sterling on a note of
hand for six months, on White-Jacket. If only Lizzie and the Little
One were here--thank heaven for good letters from Lizzie--one might
settle down to a little enjoyment. The Duke of Rutland has sent one a
courteous invitation to visit Belvoir Castle in January. Alas! that
is three weeks ahead. Can one put another three weeks between one and
home? If one does not go, one will miss a royal opportunity to see
the aristocracy under the best possible conditions: not merely an
interesting experience in itself, but--a prudent author mustn’t forget
it--so much good material to be hoarded up for another book. If one
passes this up, Allan, shrewd fellow, will set one down for a ninny.
Ah! if only one could get over the three weeks: if the two images at
home would only down for that space of time. Another cigar: one must
weigh it over carefully. No: no: the visit to Leicester would be very
agreeable--at least very valuable--but the three weeks couldn’t be
borne. It is bad enough to have to go back in a thirty-day boat to
save money, instead of dashing in on a twelve- or fifteen-day packet
steamer. That’s settled: one goes. Yes: one goes. Now one can enjoy a
bright day, and an hour at the National Gallery looking at Rembrandt’s
Jew and the saints of Taddeo Gaddi and Guido’s Murder of the Innocents.
One is going home. Things brighten. Davidson has promised to discount
Bentley’s note at the banker’s; one even begins to enjoy old Bentley:
he is a fine, frank, off-handed old gentleman, opening up gradually,
like all Englishmen, but as solid as oak once he is sure of you and of
his own feelings. One begins to like these English: they are not all
masked and corseted in iron. There is Alfred Crowquill, for example,
Punch’s funny man, whom one meets at Bentley’s--a good fellow, free and
easy, and no damned nonsense. The Benchers at the Temple Bar are men
after one’s own heart: a Paradise of Bachelors, this! Well, one sails
a week hence. Ironically, one leaves for the old home just as one is
beginning to feel settled in the new one! One breakfasts for the last
time at the old place; one says good-bye to Bentley; one has one’s last
dinner at Morley’s; one’s first and last glimpse of the Reform Club, a
last good-bye to the somehow pleasantly dingy room in Craven Street.
Waterloo Station--Portsmouth--and one steps, with Captain Fletcher,
aboard the Independence, a small, ancient-looking wooden ship. In less
than twenty-four hours we are past Land’s End.
Nothing happens between December 26, when one sets sail, and January
30, when one gets sight of a pilot boat: nothing can possibly happen
outside that would compete with the memories, the stimuli, the
anticipations, the impetuous dreams, the regrets at visits forgotten
and experiences omitted, the whole inner tumult of this four months
away from home. Or rather, what happens most importantly now, comes by
way of books: De Quincey, Rousseau’s Confessions, Ben Jonson, Thomas
Browne, The Castle of Otranto, Lamb’s Essays, Hudibras, Marlowe,
Anastasius, Vathek, Goethe’s autobiography. The vessel is again one’s
cloister: but instead of a long, unconscious growth it contains a vivid
and conscious development: every day one is aware of new shoots, ideas,
emotions, feelings, insights, sprouting out of one: why, before one had
reached twenty-five one hardly had any growth one could point to at
all. And now.... If one could not write books one would burst. One is
big with a book; it kicks at the walls of the womb; it wakes one in the
night with its anticipatory motions.
The low-lying hills of Staten Island at last. The clack and clamour
of Whitehall, Broadway. Lizzie. Barney no longer says, “Where dat old
man?” He has a dozen other things to talk about. Lizzie is busy with
the household, her mother, her mother-in-law, Sam, Father, Uncle Peter,
Allan, the sisters: she chatters on about all of them, and about what
baby did last week. She will never quite realize, perhaps, what one
has been through, how deep one’s longing is, how strong one’s need
for escape is, too. She loves one, yes, but not with that gnawing
intensity; she will never appreciate how lonely one has been. Before
a fortnight is over one wonders why one had ever been so feverishly
anxious to come back. Lizzie would have waited another three weeks: an
invitation from the Duke of Rutland is irretrievable. No matter: spring
is coming, and one must get down to work, and be midwife to one’s own
progeny. What earthly shape will this embryo take on?
(_Exit Herman Melville, pondering his future._)
TITAN
CHAPTER SIX: RED CLOVER
It was time for Melville to begin work again. In February, 1850, he
owed his publisher, Harper’s, more than seven hundred dollars in
advances not covered by royalties. He did what he could to reduce
the scale of his living. In the spring, he left New York and went up
to Broadhall with his family--the old homestead that his Grand-Uncle
Thomas had sold when he emigrated to Ohio, had now been converted into
an inn: his grandfather’s old desk was still mildewing in the barn, and
Melville brought it to light, cleaned it up for his own use, and sat
down to it.
The Berkshires were “home” for Melville quite as much as Albany or New
York; perhaps more so, for he had a feeling for the open country and
its ways. By October he had found a near-by farmstead, with a house
that had been an inn during the eighteenth century, an apple orchard on
the south side, broad hay fields to the north, and pasture rising in
back of the house to the west, which ended in a wood lot on the summit
of the hill. The countryside was well cultivated. Maple trees lined the
highroad on each side, the willows dropped lazily over the banks of the
Housatonic, and, on the poorer upland soils, where the amaranth grew,
the white threads of birch trees stood out against the dark pattern of
the woods. Pittsfield, a village with metropolitan pretensions, the
capital of the Berkshires and the resort of palpable celebrities, was
only two miles or so away by a road that led down the valley and across
the river, past a sawmill, and through the parklike streets of the
village itself.
Judge Shaw advanced Melville funds on a friendly sort of mortgage to
purchase Arrowhead; and Melville doubtless intended by modest and
spasmodic farming, with a vegetable garden, hay fields, a wood lot,
a cow, and a horse, to eke out the narrow income derived from his
books. For a man in prime health there was nothing injudicious in
this arrangement: winter leaves a considerable amount of free time
from farm work, and, with only a few hundred dollars in ready cash
every year, Melville might have made a pretty good go of it. But there
were handicaps. He had a wife and child to support; other children
came presently, four in all; and Elizabeth Melville was a duffer as a
housekeeper: try as she would, she could not cook without strain nor
manage a servant; and her chief equipment for facing the work and the
winter was an admirable set of party dresses and slippers. Melville’s
picked-up knowledge of cookery must have been called upon for service
during the first weeks they were definitely on their own; and presently
Mrs. Maria Melville and his sisters came to join the household, in
order to teach Elizabeth the rudiments of the household arts. It was
a humiliating experience for Elizabeth; but there was no help for
it: to the end of her days she did not like housekeeping; the art of
“managing” was apparently not in her. The many hands in Arrowhead
doubtless made light work; they also made inroads upon the larder, and
what the Melvilles gained in service they lost in supplies. The house
itself was commodious in rooms, but cramped in space, since it did not
so much exist in its own right, as it did as a sort of annex to the
chimney, a vast brick structure, with a circumference of forty-eight
feet at the base; the chimney was ample enough, but it swallowed wood
on a winter day as a whale swallows little fishes: and the rooms that
were left were none too large.
On any realistic canvas, this new move, with all its unexpected
burdens, was a dubious one. But in 1850 Melville was at the top of
his energies: the impetus from Typee and Omoo had not been lost: the
reception in England had probably added to his confidence: and when he
looked around him, the American scene itself reinforced his courage and
his convictions, and gave him new strength.
2
In the spring of 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter appeared,
and Melville presently awoke to find that Hawthorne, whose books he
had hitherto kept away from, despite the praise of them he had heard,
was a kindred spirit. “A man of deep and noble nature has taken hold
of me in this seclusion,” he exclaimed; “his wild, witch-voice rings
through me; or, in softer cadences, I seem to hear it in the songs of
the hillside birds that sing in the larch trees at my window.” This
discovery must have added to Melville’s refreshing sense of welcome on
coming back to America. Melville had perhaps begun to doubt whether he
could find an audience among his fellow countrymen; and here, at last,
was one man capable of understanding every part of him. America and its
promise were not a fraud: Hawthorne seemed a deeper writer than any one
who had gained the public’s ear in England as a novelist, or, for that
matter, as a Victorian poet. When, this summer, Melville came upon the
Mosses from an Old Manse, which had been published some years before,
he realized he had lost much by his aloofness from the Salem magician.
He hastened to repair his neglect; for he gave to the Literary World
presently one of the best appreciations of Hawthorne, and incidentally
one of the keenest expositions of the situation of the creative writer
in America, that Hawthorne was in his own lifetime to get.
The “soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of
dreams,” Melville announced. In Hawthorne, humour and love were
developed in that high form called genius, and “no such man can exist
without also possessing, as the indispensable complement of these,
a great, deep intellect, which drops down into the universe like a
plummet.”
Hawthorne, without all of Rembrandt’s warmth, had this great quality
of Rembrandt: there were blacks in the midst of his sunlight, as
Melville had found there were blacks in the world. The blackness
fixed and fascinated Melville: it brought Hawthorne to the level of
Shakespeare, not in language and performance, perhaps, but in insight:
“those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive truth in him; those
short, quick probings at the very axis of reality,” the dark things
Shakespeare announced through his dark characters, Hamlet, Timon, Lear,
Iago, “these qualities, in spite of Hawthorne’s quiet temperateness,
so different from Shakespeare’s popularizing noise and show of broad
farce and blood-besmeared tragedy,” brought him on the same level.
Melville had re-discovered Shakespeare only two years before: and that
discovery, reserved happily for maturity, had contributed decisively to
his own rapid burgeoning: “Dolt and ass that I am,” he had exclaimed
then, “I have lived more than twenty-nine years, and until a few days
ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William. Ah, he’s
full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, ay, almost as Jesus. I take
such men to be inspired. I fancy this Mons. Shakespeare in heaven
ranks with Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael. And if another Messiah ever
comes he will be in Shakespeare’s person.” ... “I would to God,” he
wrote shortly after, “Shakespeare had lived later and promenaded in
Broadway. Not that I might have had the pleasure of leaving my card
for him at the Astor, or made merry with him over a bowl of the fine
Duyckinck punch; but that the marble which all men wore on their souls
in the Elizabethan day, might not have intercepted Shakespeare’s fine
articulateness. Now I hold it a verity that even Shakespeare was not
a frank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, [who] in this intolerant
universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a
difference.”
Shakespeare had prepared the way for Hawthorne in Melville’s mind.
If what one could not quite get from the Shakespeare of the printed
page one might get directly from the shy man himself, what great
good fortune to find a similar person, alive and abroad in one’s
own century! And if the Declaration of Independence did make a
difference, if the American had cut loose in more ways than one, and
could face life with a little less show and pretence and caste-spirit
than Europe had known, why, then one might really get to the bottom
of the matter with Hawthorne. That possibility piqued Melville. He
risked much in utterance himself; and he hoped that Hawthorne would
venture much in return. When they at last became friends, he contrived
a hundred different ways of assaulting Hawthorne’s reserve: he
staggered up mountains, uncovered mounds of debris, jumped gaily off
into innumerable abysses, all to excite Hawthorne to some equivalent
disclosure. He did not know at the outset of his enthusiasm for
Hawthorne that nothing would ever shake that mountainous reserve, that
no leaps and sorties of his would stimulate Hawthorne to put one foot
before the other. But Hawthorne caused Melville to hope for much; and
that hope mingled with the plan of Moby-Dick, while he was writing it.
What a difference there was between Hawthorne and the graceful
Washington Irving or the scholarly Longfellow, the men who had
heretofore stood before the world as the highest representatives of
American letters, urbane, elegant, sedulously following foreign models,
and avoiding all topics but smooth ones! Better to fail at times with
such originality as Hawthorne’s than to succeed in the easy, bland,
gentlemanly way--knowing one’s powers, because they are so small, and
keeping within them, because nothing beckons one to stir beyond.
Here, thought Melville, was a fellow spirit at last! Melville had
partly realized before that other men were working below the surface
of things in America; but the transcendentalists had put him off a
little by rallying around them the people who thought they were
lifting themselves above material things by taking cold water rubs, on
principle, or by being dreadfully concerned over the items of their
diet or the cut of their clothes: whereas Melville felt that champagne
and oysters were the proper nourishment for the body, if one could
get them, and he believed that one was less devoted to the material
life when one accepted its daily routine than when one attempted to
substitute plain living for high thinking, and lost true simplicity,
by making its attainment such a complicated matter. Even Hawthorne
at first seemed to lack something. Hawthorne was wonderfully subtle,
Melville wrote to Mr. Duyckinck, and his deeper meanings are worthy of
a Brahmin. Still, there was something lacking--a good deal lacking to
the plump sphericality of the man. What was that? He doesn’t patronize
the butcher--he needs roast beef, done rare.