transcendentalists, and it never developed into a very deep union.
Melville had listened to a lecture of Emerson’s a year before and
defended Emerson from Mr. Duyckinck’s censure: he respected this Plato
who spoke through his nose. If Emerson was a fool, Melville had rather
be a fool than a wise man, and if he owed much to Sir Thomas Browne,
well, no one was his own sire: the debt was a universal one. Emerson
at least dived; and Melville loved all men who dive. “Any fish can
swim near the surface; but it takes a great whale to go downstairs
five miles or more, and if he don’t attain the bottom, why, all the
lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet that will.” That justified
Emerson: but except as one diver with another, Melville felt no kinship
with him. “I do not oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow, but prefer to hang
myself in mine own halter than to swing in any other man’s swing.”
It was the blandness, the sunniness, the mildness, the absence of
curses, shadows, shipwrecks in Emerson’s philosophy that set Melville
against it: Emerson was the perpetual passenger who stayed below in
bad weather, trusting that the captain would take care of the ship:
Melville was the sailor who climbed aloft, and knew that the captain
was sometimes drunk and that the best of ships might go down. “_All
hands save ship!_ has startled dreamers.”
Hawthorne, then, was a man to be grateful for: the smell of young
beeches and hemlocks was upon him, wrote Melville; the broad prairies
were in his soul; he had these qualities because he was an American
and deeply part of the scene; but, in addition, he had an eye for the
dankness and decay and for the inscrutable malevolence of the universe:
he was no sun-dial that recorded only the smiling hours of life. If the
country could nourish Hawthorne, and if Hawthorne could produce The
Scarlet Letter and the Mosses, well, what might not Melville himself
put forth? Though Hawthorne was a genius, perhaps, like Shakespeare, he
did not appear alone. “Shakespeare cannot be regarded as in himself the
concretion of all the genius of his time; nor as so immeasurably beyond
Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Beaumont, Jonson, that these men can be said
to share none of his power. Would it, indeed, appear so unreasonable
to suppose that this great fullness and overflowing may be, or may be
destined to be, shared by a plurality of men of genius?”
The presence of an Emerson, a Hawthorne, gave all the more reason for
a Melville. So Melville must have felt in his bones; and he was right.
What he could not venture as a perception--for who can see or measure
his contemporaries?--was certainly true as prophecy: in that flood of
intellectual and imaginative power that I have elsewhere called the
Golden Day, Emerson, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, were
all carried along in the same current: each reinforces and rounds out
the others: and it is this corpus of writers, rather than any single
one, that forms what Hawthorne himself called the Master Genius of
America.
Melville did not suppose, when he wrote his encomium of Hawthorne, that
this same summer would bring the two men into contact, that they would
become neighbours, near enough to make occasional visits by horseback
or wagon, and that, despite his premonition that “on a personal
interview no great author has ever come up to the idea of his reader,”
he would find in Hawthorne, temporarily, that comrade and friend for
whom he had been looking. There was, it is true, only half a generation
between them; and this particular distance makes intimacy difficult,
unless the older man is willing to treat the younger one as an assured
equal. How Hawthorne himself felt about the matter it is hard to tell:
Melville realized that his own boisterous democracy, which recognized
the thief in the jail as the equal of General George Washington, might
grate on Hawthorne a little, and that, like an English Howard in the
presence of a plebeian, Hawthorne’s intellectual aristocracy might
shrink at this claim and this contact. But Melville had no lack of
faith in his own powers; and he put forth the claim to equality with
easy and assured frankness; and unless he was unusually insensitive
at this point, his letter would indicate that Hawthorne accepted the
relationship on Melville’s terms.
On August 5, 1850, Hawthorne noted in his American Notebook that he
drove from Lenox, near which he lived in a penurious red farmhouse,
to Stockbridge, where he found at the house of Fields, the Boston
publisher, Dr. Holmes, Mr. Duyckinck of New York, also Mr. Cornelius
Matthews and Herman Melville. They ascended the Monument Mountain
and the party was caught in a shower: according to tradition, it was
during that summer storm, under a shoulder of rock where they had taken
refuge, that these two stormy souls first overcame their reticence
and shyness, and ploughed through conversation to a deeper intimacy.
The New Yorkers called on Hawthorne in the forenoon, two days later,
and Hawthorne treated them to a couple of bottles of Mr. Mansfield’s
champagne; and from that time on Melville was a familiar visitor
in the Hawthorne household. The family called him Mr. Omoo; young
Julian said that he loved Mr. Melville as well as his Mamma and Papa
and Una; Melville, who had amused the Marquesans with an improvised
popgun, was not likely to fall down in intercourse with children--and
he would sometimes ride over in the evening with his great dog, and
the children would ride on the dog’s back. Even Sophia Hawthorne was
fascinated by Melville: she, who adored her husband’s dark, lustrous
eyes, was puzzled and a little disturbed by Melville’s; and her tribute
to Melville is all the more notable when one remembers her complete
preoccupation with her husband.
“I am not quite sure,” she wrote, “that I do not think him a very
great man.... A man with a true, warm heart, and a soul and an
intellect--with life to his finger-tips; earnest, sincere and reverent;
very tender and modest. He has very keen perceptive power; but what
astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems
to me to see everything accurately; and how he can do so with his
small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite
undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and handsome, his
mouth expressive of sensibility and emotion. He is tall and erect, with
an air free, brave and manly. When conversing, he is full of gesture
and force, and loses himself in his subject. There is no grace or
polish. Once in a while his animation gives place to a singularly quiet
expression, out of these eyes to which I have objected; an indrawn,
dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that
moment taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange,
lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to
penetrate through you, but to take you into itself.”
The opportunity for real intercourse with Hawthorne, for talk about
Time and Eternity and ultimate things, smoking a fragrant cigar,
sipping brandy or cider, meant much to Melville; far more, no doubt,
than it did to Hawthorne. In Melville’s growing spiritual loneliness,
he needed the affection of a sympathetic mind; and for a while he
could persuade himself that, even in Hawthorne’s silences, he had this.
Hawthorne’s example as a novelist was a stimulus: it led Melville
beyond the easy shallows, where one could negligently wade, always
within easy calling distance of the shore; and his philosophical
conversation, or, still more, his apparently absorbed way of listening
to philosophical conversation, encouraged Melville to go further and
deeper along the passage he had begun to make a year before with Adler.
Each conversation opened new vistas: the night talks would often be a
prelude to next morning’s letters, and in those letters, particularly
in those which remain from the period covered by Moby-Dick, Melville
exposed the seamy depths of his own spirit. He had no reticences before
Hawthorne, and above all, no false modesty. Life was becoming a long
stage, with no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But
with Hawthorne for a fellow passenger, Melville was content and could
be happy. “I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for
having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible
of our immortality.” The hectic, desperate, ecstatic letters Melville
wrote his friend during the short year and a half that brought them
together in the Berkshires give one a surer insight into Melville’s
moods and aims than any other pages he ever wrote. Had the neighbourly
relations persisted, had Hawthorne’s response been wholly adequate,
Melville might have weathered more buoyantly the internal tempest that
set in with Moby-Dick. But Hawthorne was essentially as remote from
Melville as he was from the old worthies of the Customs House at Salem
or the old sea-captains he had exchanged civilities with over a mug of
ale. Though one could see daylight and the blue sky from the bottom
of Hawthorne’s well, there was not enough of it to share with any
companion. If he was touched by the homage of the younger man, he could
not fully reciprocate it. He recognized Melville’s moral earnestness
and intellectual vigour; but I doubt if he once suspected that his
extravagant friend was far nearer, by temperament and expression, to
the heart of Shakespeare’s genius than he himself was. In seizing upon
Hawthorne as an other self, Melville more than once did homage to
his own genius: his descriptions of Hawthorne’s powers, Hawthorne’s
achievements, are nearer to his own than to Hawthorne’s.
Melville’s relation with Hawthorne counts as one of the tragedies of
his life; and it was more than a minor one. Friendship itself must
have seemed a mockery, when he found that the dearest friend and
closest intellectual companion he had yet encountered was bound tight
in the arctic ice, and many leagues away. But he had no sense of the
distance between them until he attempted to span it: and it must have
been with amazement, with incredulity, that he finally read the story
of Ethan Brand, written during the prime year of their friendship,
and discovered what in his heart of hearts Hawthorne felt about
Melville’s lofty pride and his extreme spiritual quests. Ethan Brand
is a charcoal-burner, who has left his home in order to discover the
Unpardonable Sin; he finally returns to his kiln and his neighbours to
announce, after his long wanderings, that he has found the sin in his
own breast. Brand’s language is a parody of Ahab’s in Moby-Dick; and
what Hawthorne says about Brand he meant to apply, I have no doubt,
possibly by way of warning, to Melville himself.
Ethan Brand remembered, said Hawthorne, echoing Melville’s words in
the scene where Ahab recalls his first pursuit of the whale, “he
remembered how the night dew had fallen upon him,--how the dark
forest had whispered to him,--how the stars had gleamed upon him,--a
simple and loving man, watching the fire in the years gone by, and
ever musing as it burned. He remembered with what tenderness, with
what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and
woe, he had first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards
became the inspiration of his life; with what reverence he had then
looked into the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally divine,
and, however desecrated, still to be held sacred by his brother; with
what awful fear he had deprecated the success of his pursuit, and
prayed that the Unpardonable Sin might never be revealed to him. Then
ensued that vast intellectual development, which, in its progress,
disturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart. The Idea that
possessed his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone
on cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were
susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer
to stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth,
laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber
after him. So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That,
indeed, had withered,--had contracted,--had hardened,--had perished!
It had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He had lost his hold
of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man,
opening the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key
of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets;
he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his
experiment.... Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from
the moment his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement
with his intellect.”
We do not know when Melville discovered these words or felt their
jagged edges in his bosom: but we can be certain that from that
day forth the friendship between the two men sank like a stone in
quicksand. Hawthorne had committed the unpardonable sin of friendship;
he had failed to understand Melville’s development, or to touch by
sympathy and faith that part of Melville which was beyond his external
reach. All of Melville’s love recoiled, as we shall see presently, from
the icy strangeness of that friendship which was no friendship, from
that understanding which was almost enmity. Perhaps Ethan Brand was
not Melville? Perhaps it was but a shadowy suggestion, influenced more
by Ahab than by his author? Melville must have attempted this sort of
reconciliation more than once: but Hawthorne’s words would stick: yes,
they would stick because of the touch of truth in them, and because,
once Hawthorne’s hand was withdrawn, the magnetic chain of humanity
indeed would seem broken. This, however, was the crisis of their
friendship; and Melville had no inkling of this outcome whilst he was
writing Moby-Dick. There is no doubt that the presence of Hawthorne
fortified him for that endeavour.
3
Some time in 1850, towards the close of summer, Herman Melville must
have begun to write Moby-Dick; for the book, which is a long one, was
finished in the summer of 1851. In back of the actual writing went a
considerable amount of preparation; and one does not know how long
before the theme of the book had begun to root itself in Melville’s
mind. The work itself shows that he had reached out for every book on
whaling he could lay hands on, practically every book that had been
written, and, in addition, he had made note of every quotation and
allusion to the whale he had met in his wide miscellaneous reading.
Scholarship as well as personal experience went into this writing:
one of the best modern writers upon whaling, Frank Bullen, the author
of the Cruise of the Cachalot, confesses he would never have gone
further with his own work had he known about the wealth of information
and detail that went into Moby-Dick before he set out. Did Melville
consciously save the greatest of his ocean experiences for his
maturity? Did he wait for Leviathan to develop in his soul? Did he
begin another White-Jacket or Typee, and become conscious, in the act
of writing, of this deepening of his insight, this integration of his
powers, and of the vast fable that was now at his command?
One cannot even make a reasonable conjecture about the matter. All one
knows are the actual conditions under which Moby-Dick was written,
the reactions of the writing itself upon Melville, and its final
result--the story of the White Whale.
Conceive of Melville in his new home, as he embarks upon the most
extensive of his spiritual voyages. The furniture has been removed
to his new house, the beds put up, the heavier articles shifted and
re-shifted, and, by a month’s work outdoors, the woodpile has grown
and the hay been stowed into the hayloft. For the moment, all his
relations are well poised: Barney is through the period of teething:
Elizabeth has help in her housework and the first tension of removal
is over; Mr. Duyckinck occasionally, with the most tactful sort of
generosity, sends up a case of champagne in a wicker cradle or a fine
bundle of cigars, or he suggests a review to be written. He even tries
to nourish Melville’s reputation by abetting some one who is writing
about him in the papers and who wishes to publish a photograph of the
famous author: here alone Melville’s pride rebuffs this rudimentary
effort at an art which has become a loathsome sore in our own time: he
refuses his picture. “The fact is,” he explains, “almost everybody is
having his ‘mug’ engraved nowadays, so that this test of distinction is
getting to be reversed; and therefore, to see one’s ‘mug’ in a magazine
is presumptive evidence that he’s a nobody.... I respectfully decline
to be _oblivionated_....” But when a journeyman painter made the rounds
of the neighbourhood Melville sat for him--and the portrait, which
slightly resembles Allan’s, remains a just punishment for his vanity.
Below the edge of Melville’s horizon is this new friend, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and, as he raises his eyes from the desk in his second-story
chamber and looks through the single small window that faces the north,
he sees the wide valley sweeping across to successive ridges of hills,
dominated by Mt. Greylock--otherwise called, from the double hump in
the ridge, Saddleback. The red clover that incarnadined the summer
fields is gone; or rather, its colour has mounted to the crown of
the landscape; the maples are a still more glorious red. The spirits
caper in the autumn air; there are glowing Byzantine days when the
heavens reflect the hues of the October apples, when the sky is so
ripe and ruddy it seems there must be harvest home for the angels
and that Charles’ Wain is heaped as high as Saddleback with autumn
sheaves. The sunrises and the sunsets glow side by side in the woods,
and momentarily moult in the falling leaves. Neither the Rhine nor the
Moselle produces anything as heady as the landscape of the Berkshires
in autumn. Now is the time to begin. When Melville writes his first
words, “Call me Ishmael,” he is writing out of his health and ecstasy:
he himself is not an outcast, nor is his spirit drooping with the
“hypos”: his first touch is a black one because his canvas demands
it. He is about to build up a vast pyramid of contrasts, between the
whiteness of external evil and the blackness of man’s inner doom; and
he faces this drama with his full powers.
The apples are gathered; the autumn ploughing is done; Melville is at
work. The mood of creation is upon him: he is ready not for one book
but for fifty books: if Mr. Duyckinck would only send him about fifty
fast-writing youths with an easy style, not averse to polishing their
letters, he might set them all to work. “It is not so much the paucity,
as the superabundance of material that seems to incapacitate modern
authors,” he had written that summer. In this autumn ferment, Melville
has scarcely enough time to think about his future books separately;
in lieu of using fifty youths, he must pack as much as possible into
one book. Melville scarcely breaks his way through a chapter or two
before he realizes that he has found his theme; and the only question
is how to quarry this marble, how to get it out. “Youth,” Melville said
in another place, “must wholly quit, then, the quarry for a while;
and not only go forth and get tools to use in the quarry, but must
go and thoroughly discover architecture. Now the quarry discoverer is
long before the stone-cutter; and the stone-cutter is long before the
architect; and the architect is long before the temple; for the temple
is the crown of the world.” His apprenticeship is at last definitely
over: he is at work on the temple itself--such a temple as Dante,
Shakespeare, Webster, Marlowe, Browne, might each in his way have
conceived and designed.
The days go by; the leaves fall; the candlelight comes early; the mice
creep into the cupboard and make nests for themselves in the woodpile;
the wide meadows become as bleak as a grey sea. In this most inland
scene, with only the Housatonic to connect him with the watery world,
Melville still dreams of the sea: his thought centres on the sea, its
creatures, its boats, its fish, its men, its deeper monsters. Oh!
for a dash of salt spray! he cries; and as substitute he draws upon
experience and memory for the savour. The days grow cold. Snow hems in
the roof and chimney of Arrowhead. Melville has a sea-feeling all the
more: when he looks out of his little window on rising, he feels as if
he were looking out of his port-hole in the midst of the Atlantic: his
room seems a ship’s cabin, and at nights, when he wakes up and hears
the wind shrieking, he can almost fancy there is too much sail on the
house, and he had better go up on the roof and rig in the chimney. On
a winter morning he rises at eight, helps his horse to his hay and the
cow to her pumpkin, stands around to take in the grateful complacency
of the cow, she moves her jaws so mildly and with such sanctity; then,
with his own breakfast over, he goes to his workroom and lights the
fire, runs rapidly through the MS. and starts to work. At half past two
a knock comes. He does not answer. Again the knock and again: till he
rises from his writing, almost mechanically, and resumes the external
round: feed for the horse and cow: then dinner: then he rigs up his
sleigh and goes off to the village for the mail, for supplies, for
a little friendly chaffer perhaps round the tavern bar. So one day
follows another on the surface; but within, there is change and tumult:
Melville, like Ahab, finds a creature tearing at his vitals, and that
creature the thing he has created.
“How then with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously, my
chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill!
Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand. Friends! hold my arms! For in
the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me,
and make me faint with the outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as
if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations
of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all
the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole
universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the
virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce
a mighty volume you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring
volume can ever be written upon the flea, though many there be who have
tried it.”
Such intensity of effort, so many hours of writing and reading, are as
exhausting as the direction of a battle: but there is no lying up in
winter quarters, no delegation of responsibility: the writer does not
live outside his book: the world, the familiar, homely world, becomes
a weak picture, and his imagination is the body and blood of reality.
Taking a book off the brain, Melville exclaims while in the midst of
it, “is akin to the ticklish and dangerous business of taking an old
painting off a panel: you have to scrape off the whole brain in order
to get at it with due safety--and even then the painting may not be
worth the trouble.” Well, Moby-Dick is worth the trouble; the very
writing of it becomes a powerful instrument in his own development:
what absorbs so much of his time and life is not the book alone, “but
the primitive elementalizing of the strange stuff, which in the act of
attempting the book, has upheaved and upgushed in his soul. Two books
are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the
bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for ... his
own private shelf. That it is whose unfathomable cravings drunk his
blood; the other only demands ink.”
Melville knows he must not let up on this work; he flogs himself to
get his uttermost into it; the application ruins his eyesight. This
small aperture and northern light are bad for his eyes: no matter: he
writes with one eye closed and the other blinking. By December, in
the evening, he is exhausted: he spends the aftermath of the day in
a sort of physical trance: but already his mind is anticipating the
developments of the next day, and he is up early, and goes back to his
task.