the sea from the central, human point of view: one-half of the race,
woman, is left out of it. Melville’s world, all too literally, is a
man-of-war’s world. Woman neither charms nor nurtures nor threatens:
she neither robs man of his strength nor rouses him to heroic frenzy:
she is not Circe: she is not Rosalind or Francesca or even the Wife of
Bath--she simply does not exist. When the Pequod spreads sail, woman
is left behind: she is the phantom of home for Ahab and Starbuck.
The whales dally in Moby-Dick and beget offspring; but all the
trouble, beauty, madness, delight of human love, all that vast range
of experience from the mere touch of the flesh to the most enduring
spiritual loyalty, all that is absent. One looks for some understanding
of woman’s lot and woman’s life in Moby-Dick; and one looks in vain.
One looks for it again in Pierre, and one is disappointed, although
its ambiguities are concerned with nothing else. With experience of
woman in every relationship, daughter, girl, sister, wife, mother,
matron, he described her in only one aspect--that of the remote and
idealized mistress of romantic courtship. Mother, sister, sweetheart,
all appeared to Melville’s hero in this brief and peculiar aspect.
There was, one is driven to believe, something in Herman Melville’s
life that caused him to dissociate woman from his account of man’s
deepest experience. Mr. Waldo Frank has suggested, in general social
terms, that the quest of power, which has preoccupied Western man since
the Renaissance, has incapacitated him as a lover and kept him from
understanding woman and all her essential concerns. If that is true,
Melville pushed his aberration to a logical extremity; and he, who
captured to the full the poetry of the sea, became as bashful as a boy
when he beheld Venus, born of its foam, rising from the waters he knew
so well, the most unexpected of monsters, and the only denizen of the
sea he dared neither snare nor harpoon nor otherwise dispose of, except
by flight....
4
The hero of Pierre is a young patrician, the heir of Saddle Meadows; he
has good looks, health, an historic ancestry, and a warmly humanized
environment. Handicapped in his own inheritance as a youth, Melville
bestowed on Pierre not only all the things he possessed, such as the
Gansevoort heritage, but all the things ill fortune had denied him.
Pierre lives with his mother, a widow; she is proud, fine, and at fifty
still beautiful: he treats her beauty with the attention of a lover
who resents every man that approaches her: she is “sister” and he is
“brother” and there is more than familiar fondness in their touches.
Pierre is on the point of open betrothal to Lucy, a simple, dewy
country girl of good family. Is there to be jealousy between the mother
and Lucy; must he choose between them? No: something more difficult
is in store. At a village sewing-bee, where he has gone to call for
his mother, a girl faints at the sight of Pierre. She seems a farmer’s
daughter and her fainting is mysterious; the mystery becomes oppressive
when Pierre gets a secret summons from her. An interview with Isabel,
the girl, topples the whole Elysium of family relationships within
whose rainbow Pierre had lived. Isabel, a dark, lovely creature, brims
with obscure memories of an almost unintelligible past, memories
that wail through her like the sound of wind in the trees. By hint
and memory and inference, she had found that Pierre’s father, who
had formed a union with a Frenchwoman, was her father--and this girl
was the sole fruit of the union--Pierre’s half-sister. Isabel offers
her orphaned self to her half-brother in complete trust; and he, not
doubting the relationship, although hitherto his father had seemed to
him a flawless being, takes her to his bosom.
In a few hours, Pierre experiences all the perturbations that afflicted
Young Goodman Brown, in Hawthorne’s story, when he discovered all
his respected elders, the personification of virtue and chastity,
participating in a witches’ sabbath. Pierre contemplates his mother,
to see if there is any possible means of making her acknowledge the
relationship and rescue Isabel from the mean lot that is now hers,
in a family that is about to cast off its own daughter, Delly Ulver,
because she has conceived a child out of wedlock. No help there! Pierre
discovers a worldly front of respectability hemming him round. His
mother’s spiritual counsellor, the Reverend Mr. Folsgrave, gives the
world’s reasons for refusing to compound Delly’s mistake: his mother
is even more peremptorily and forbiddingly righteous. Suddenly, Pierre
discovers that the kindness and charity and sweetness of the world is a
poisonous mushroom, whose delicate shape is embedded in the ordure of
malice, pride, cold restraint, heartlessness.
If Mrs. Glendinning acts in this fashion over Delly Ulver’s plight,
what sort of front would she place on Isabel’s and that of Pierre’s
father? Would she acknowledge her husband’s error: would she take to
her bosom this Isabel? Even Pierre, bursting with hope, cannot hope
for this: his faith is shattered: he sees the cold rectitude of his
mother, and a resolution to stand against the world and its ways
takes the place of his original belief that those ways are amiable
and meritorious and virtuous. Pierre resolves to protect Isabel:
but how? To achieve his aim, he conceives the device of living with
her, in strict brotherly aloofness, under the fiction of marriage. A
gallant, quixotic espousal; but not without its own deviousness and
share of infirmity. Would he have been so ready to espouse Isabel, asks
Melville, had she been ugly and crass instead of sombrely beautiful and
delicate? Would he have been so warm in magnanimity if another kind of
warmth had not lain under the surface? Would he, one might add, have
conceived this stratagem of living with Isabel as husband and wife, had
he not lived with his mother as brother and sister?
Pierre does not dare to frame these questions. He is worked up to
a great pitch of nobility and sacrifice: high-handedly, he throws
his whole life into the scales and runs away with Isabel, taking
Delly under his protection, too, and trusting to time and his own
explanations to soften the action to Mrs. Glendinning and make it
palatable. Lucy, to whom he has plighted marriage, he ruthlessly sets
behind him; and, with a few coins in his purse, he makes his way to
New York, to carve out a career as a writer. Troubles swarm about him
like angry hornets, once he destroys the nest of respectability which
had kept them in order. The companion of his youth, a cousin who had
once been a rival for Lucy’s hand, supposing Lucy to be his bride, had
generously placed his town house at Pierre’s disposal. Now he summarily
withdraws his hospitality. The three outcasts reach New York late at
night to find their quarters deserted; Pierre, hunting up his cousin,
is cut dead when he confronts him: from the gutters of the city, all
its noisome human refuse taints the air: Pierre returns to the town
guardhouse, where he had left Delly and Isabel, to find them shrinking
before the profane curses and gestures of a band of drunken prostitutes
and their customers, rounded up in a raid.
This is but a foretaste of the trials that are to overwhelm Pierre
and Isabel. Pierre and his house-mates presently find themselves a
little flat in an old church building that has been remodelled into
offices and apartments, and is occupied by broken-down lawyers,
transcendentalists, vegetarians, faddists of one kind or another,
each encouraging the other’s special lunacy in order to have a kindly
reception for his own. In the midst of this extreme poverty and
disorder, Pierre, who has been a mild minor poet, a writer of aesthetic
jingles which “would offend no one,” probes all the terrors of his new
experience and its revelations, and out of it he writes a book, not
unlike Pierre, with an author for hero. The situation is impossible.
Pierre has no money: his mother freezes up completely in mortification,
and disowns him, keeping even that share of his estate which was
meant for Pierre: the misery and ambiguity of his situation increases
when Lucy, recovered from the first stupor of grief, flies for refuge
to Pierre, to beg a place as humble servitor, in Pierre’s already
crammed and over-womaned household. Worst of all, the dark bottom of
his brotherly relation with Isabel becomes faintly apparent to Pierre
himself: it is reflected in the shadow of jealousy that touches her
reaction to Lucy: such a feeling as Isabel might properly claim if
she were married to Pierre in actuality. Pierre has outlawed himself,
and missed happiness with Lucy, for a distracted passion which can
have no outlet in external relationships: in aiming at purest virtue,
with noble intent, he has committed a deed he cannot confront without
horror. His duty towards his father’s memory and towards Isabel has
been the subtlest of masks for an urge that has its roots in his own
instinctive nature, not solely in the teachings of charity, honesty,
and justice.
Isabel herself has always been uncertainly conscious of this wild
passion: but in her ignorance of the world itself, she is aware of
nothing that runs contrary to the world. What had said yes to Pierre
was not a mere response to his charity; it had implied more. With these
fierce passages of self-revelation, Pierre finishes his own book, and
his author, Vivia, finishes his! In the notion that he was walking in
the highway of the loftiest morality, Pierre has only explored a blind
alley, the blindest of all human alleys. Farcical disappointments
mingle with tragic regrets: his publishers, on getting his masterpiece,
denounce Pierre as a rascally impostor: Lucy’s brother and his cousin
threaten Pierre’s life, treating him as a seducer and a scoundrel: his
mother dies in an insane grief. In self-defence, Pierre arms himself,
and, when attacked in the open by the two virtuous espousers of Lucy’s
honour, Pierre empties a pistol into each of them, and is taken to
jail. Grief after grief, horror after horror, ensue from Pierre’s
original act of virtue. When Lucy learns that Isabel is Pierre’s
half-sister, she collapses in death. There is no issue to this passion
for either Isabel or Pierre but suicide. Pierre and Isabel swallow
poison together in the prison cell, and Pierre passes out, entwined
in Isabel’s dark hair. The fool of fate dies: his love dies with him.
The scene is as freely strewn with corpses as the fifth act of an
Elizabethan tragedy.
5
This story of Pierre, hard to accept in bald summary, is no less
difficult to accept in detail. The plot is forced: the situations
are undeveloped: the dominant colours are as crude as the lithograph
advertisements of a melodrama, although there are subordinate parts
which are as delicately graded as a landscape by Corot. There is no
passage between the various planes of action and mood, as there is in
Moby-Dick: Melville slips from prose into poetry, from realism into
fantasy, from the mood of high tragedy into that of the penny dreadful.
For the moment, Melville had lost the power to fuse these discordant
elements, to reject what could not be fully absorbed: he was at the
mercy of his material. All that lives with a vital unity in Moby-Dick
has become a corpse in Pierre: there is life in the dead members,
but it does not pertain to the body as a whole. The fragments of
Pierre are sometimes marvellous, as the broken leg or arm of a great
piece of sculpture may be: but the whole is lost. From the moment the
story opens to the fatal lines that bring it to a close, one is in an
atmosphere of unreality. I do not mean that the facts are untrue to
life; I mean that the work as a whole is untrue to the imagination. One
accepts Ahab as a demi-god: one cannot accept Pierre as a human being,
although Pierres are plentiful, while one might dredge the five seas
without bringing up the carcass of another Ahab.
The style itself is witness to this psychal disruption, quite as much
as the fable. Pierre is quarried out of the same quarry as Moby-Dick;
but whereas there the texture is even and firm, here it is full of
flaws and intrusive granulations. Moby-Dick, to use another figure,
slides down a long runway before it plunges into its poetic passages:
by the time one reaches Ahab’s great apostrophes, one is all prepared
for the immersion; one’s imagination has reached the same pitch of
intensity and concentration, and nothing but the most rhythmic patterns
will satisfy the mood itself. The common prose in Moby-Dick is but an
interval for breathing: it sustains and carries forward the movement
of the more expressive passages; and as for the words themselves, they
are the exact equivalent for the mood and purpose: distended though the
envelope may be, they never burst outside it.
In language, Pierre is just the opposite of this: from the first pages,
it is perfervid and poetical in a mawkish way. With the disclosure of
the two lovers, Pierre and Lucy, in the opening chapter, the style
becomes a perfumed silk, taken from an Elizabethan chamber romance:
it sounds exactly like Melville’s first effusion in the Lansingburgh
Advertiser: “‘Truly,’ thought the youth, with a still gaze of
inexpressible fondness, ‘truly the skies do ope: and this invoking
angel looks down. I would return these manifold good-mornings, Lucy,
did not that presume thou hadst lived through the night; and by heaven,
thou belongst to the regions of an infinite day!’” This is a fair
sample of what happens in Pierre whenever Melville approaches romantic
passion; his reflections were tied with the same ribbons and furbelows,
as in his description of love as “a volume bound in rose-leaves,
clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with
peach juice on the leaves of lilies.” In style, Melville had suddenly
lost both taste and discretion. He opened on a note that could not be
carried through. Lovers may indeed once have used such silly rhetoric,
but it would take a more careful hand than Melville’s to persuade us
that the rest of the world adopted these affectations: when scene
after scene is conducted in the same tone, the style becomes tedious,
intolerable, ridiculous. It would be bad if the characters were in
the Renaissance costume of Daphnis and Chloe: it is even worse in a
novel that contains realistic caricatures of the slums of New York and
satiric commentaries upon the bizarre habits of the transcendentalists.
Occasionally, by some happy concentration of emotion, Melville either
drops these flabby phrases or permits the reader to forget them,
and there are passages which, when read as poetry, are almost as
fine as Whitman’s verses. But these intervals of good writing do not
overcome the main impression; and the main impression is of hectic and
overwrought language. With the powerful control he had over Moby-Dick,
Melville could never have written in the style that characterizes a
large part of Pierre. In Pierre he was no longer the cool rider of
words, but the flayed and foaming horse, running away.
There is still another unfortunate lapse in Pierre; and that is the
disproportion between stimulus and effect. When Pierre is first beheld
by Isabel, then completely a stranger to him, she shrieks and faints
away. Her own action was not improbable; but there is no reason why
Pierre, healthy, robust, ignorant, should be so profoundly disturbed
by this exhibition. The same is true of Pierre’s heroic resolution to
shield Isabel under the form of wedlock: it is a wild and dangerous
leap out of a much less pressing difficulty. When Pierre finally
comes to town, the disproportion is so broad it is grotesque, almost
comical: his cousin’s turning upon him and cutting him, before a group
of strangers, with a frigid stare and a command to take that fellow
away, does not belong to anything but the pages of crude melodrama. The
turning against Pierre is not the subtle, devious series of rebukes
and frigidities he would actually receive: such an affront as Melville
pictures occurs only in raw dream.
In Moby-Dick, Melville carefully prepared, a hundred pages in advance,
for the final effect: Mr. E. M. Forster has even suggested that
the emphasis upon “delight” in Father Mapple’s sermon is related
to the encountering of a ship called the Delight just before the
final catastrophe. In Pierre all this subtle preparation is lacking:
Melville’s impatience turned a genuine theme, the conflict of
adolescent purity of purpose with the apologetic compromises and
sordid motives of the world, into a crude melodrama. Melville was so
immersed in the dilemma of his hero that he did not observe how often
he failed to satisfy the demands of art, which require that the very
incoherencies of life somehow hang together and be acceptable to the
mind.
Finally, Pierre’s emotional reaction to Isabel is entirely out of
proportion to the fact that he has found a sister whose existence he
had never before suspected. For a young man, filially tied to his
mother, and by active courtship to Lucy, the entrance of another young
woman should not have had such a volcanic effect, since, under the
most ancient of social taboos, the relationship between them precludes
further intimacy. Kindness and fellow feeling might easily arise there:
but what Melville pictures is sudden and violent passion. “Fate,” he
observes, “had separated the brother and sister, till to each they
seemed so not at all. Sisters shrink not from their brother’s kisses.
And Pierre felt that never, never would he be able to embrace Isabel
with the mere brotherly embrace; while the thought of any other caress,
which took hold of any domesticness, was entirely vacant from his
uncontaminated soul, for it had never consciously intruded there.
Therefore, forever unsistered for him by the stroke of Fate, and
apparently for ever, and twice removed from the remotest possibility of
that love which had drawn him to his Lucy; yet still the object of the
ardentest and deepest emotions of his soul; therefore, to him, Isabel
soared out of the realm of mortalness and for him became transfigured
in the highest heaven of uncorrupted love.”
The ambiguity that Melville finally brought his hero to confront
in Pierre is that this highest heaven is not necessarily a heaven
at all: such a transcendental displacement of earthly emotions and
experiences is not the way of “willing, waking love”: it is the mood
of dream, and by continuous dissociation, it may eventually become the
mood of madness. The highest heaven of love does not come with such
romantic fixation upon an unapproachable deity: it comes rather with
diffusion, when all men are brothers, when all women are sisters, when
all children are just as dear as one’s own issue. The fixation on a
remote figure or symbol is in fact just the opposite of this generous
suffusion of love, and of all love’s corruptions it is possibly the
most dangerous. In the thirteenth century, the Queen of Heaven had such
a place, and her almost exclusive worship is perhaps as much a sign of
the breakup of the mediaeval synthesis as any more obvious emblem of
disintegration.
Man’s roots are in the earth; and the effort to concentrate upon an
ideal experience, that seeks no nourishment through these roots, may
be quite as disastrous to spiritual growth as the failure to push
upwards and to rise above the physical bed in which these roots are
laid. In Pierre, Melville explored and followed such a fixation to
its conclusion: disintegration and suicide. Had this been Melville’s
purpose in writing the book, Pierre might, in a decisive figure, have
ended an epoch--the epoch of the romantic hero; for he had probed that
hero’s nobility and virtue and disclosed their deeper ambiguities,
their conflicts, their irreconcilabilities. Pierre might have been a
sort of anti-Werther. Unfortunately, this is just what it is not; for
Melville identified himself with Pierre and defended his immaturity.
How this came about we will inquire later; for we have not yet done
justice to Pierre as a work of art.
6
What did Melville consciously set himself to do when he wrote Pierre?
He sought, I think, to arrive at the same sort of psychological truth
that he had achieved, in metaphysics, in Moby-Dick. His subject was,
not the universe, but the ego; and again, not the obvious ego of the
superficial novelist, but those implicated and related layers of self
which reach from the outer appearances of physique and carriage down
to the recesses of the unconscious personality. “The novel will find
the way to our interiors, one day,” he wrote in Pierre, “and will not
always be a novel of costume merely.” Melville, to use his own words,
had dropped his angle into the well of his childhood, to find out what
fish might be there: before Mardi, he had sought for fish in the outer
world, where swim the golden perch and pickerel: but now he had learned
to dredge his unconscious, and to draw out of it, not the white whale,
but motives, desires, hopes for which there had been no exit in his
actual life. Men had been afraid to face the cold white malignity of
the universe; they were even more reluctant to face their own unkempt,
bewrayed selves. Even Shakespeare, deep as he was, had had reserves:
Melville would set an example.
Melville was not concerned to portray “real life,” for the unconscious
is not for most people part of this reality: in a later book he gave
an explanation of his own literary method. He describes readers after
his own heart who read a novel as they might sit down to a play, with
much the same expectation and feeling. “They look that fancy shall
evoke scenes different from those of the same old crowd round the
Custom House counter, and the same old dishes on the boarding house
table, with characters unlike those of the same old acquaintances they
meet in the same old way every day in the same old street. And as, in
real life, the proprieties will not allow people to set out themselves
with that unreserve permitted to the stage, so in books of fiction,
they look not only for more entertainment, but, at bottom, for more
reality, than real life itself can show. Thus, though they want
novelty, they want nature, too; but nature unfettered, exhilarated, in
effect transformed. In this way of thinking, the people in a fiction,
like the people in a play, must dress as nobody exactly dresses, talk
as nobody exactly talks, act as nobody exactly acts. It is with fiction
as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which
we feel the tie.” For this conception of literary method, there is
much to be said, and had Pierre carried it out with plausibility and
consistency it might have made an even more important contribution to
the art of the novel than George Meredith and Henry James were to make.
If Melville met failure here, it was not because he had chosen a poor
method, but because he lacked adeptness in using it.
As concerns his psychological purpose, however, Pierre for all its
weaknesses will stand comparison with the pioneer works of its period.
Pierre is one of the first novels in which the self is treated as
anything but a unit, whose parts consist of the same material, with
the grain, as it were, running the same way. Pierre’s double relation
towards his father’s image and towards his mother’s actual presence,
his mixed attitudes towards Lucy and Isabel, the conflict between
his latent interests and his actions and rationalizations, all these
things are presented with remarkable penetration: if there is slag at
the entrance of this mine, there is a vein of exceptionally rich ore
running through it. Pierre’s identification of his mother’s love with a
supreme form of egotism, Pierre being the mirror in which she beholds
her own proud grimace, is no less penetrating than Melville’s account
of the relation between Pierre and his cousin, which runs from romantic
love into apathy and enmity. While the action of Pierre is full of
harsh and even absurd contrasts, the psychological mood is portrayed
with infinite retirement and with relentless surgical skill: Melville
does not hold the pulse of his characters: he X-rays their very organs.