physical weakness must play a part; for Melville, like Whitman, wrote
out of his health, and just as the paralysis of Whitman, after the
Civil War, resulted in the diminishment of his writing, and a certain
curtailment of his creative effort, without any sign of mental decay,
so Melville was deprived of his immense physical buoyancy and power.
That power had counted for much in his own work. “Real strength,” he
wrote in Moby-Dick, “never impairs beauty or harmony, but often bestows
it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do
with magic.... As devout Eckermann lifted the linen sheet away from the
naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed by the massive chest of the
man, that seemed a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God
the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever
they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled,
hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most
successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute are they of all
brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative feminine
ones of submission and endurance....” Melville did not easily submit
and endure; but without health he was a shorn giant. His shortened
breath would not sustain the long periods of Moby-Dick, nor would his
frame suffer that “downright infatuation, and no less [which is] both
unavoidable and indispensable in any great deep book, or even any
wholly unsuccessful attempt at a great deep book.”
Such an explanation is sound as far as it goes; but one must not
ignore the psychological accompaniments of this debility, or all the
spiritual obstacles that burked Melville and made him doubly anxious,
strained, desperate. Chief among the external obstacles was the chorus
of disapproval that had greeted Moby-Dick and grew louder and more
universal with Pierre. One London paper denounced it as an “unhealthy,
mystic romance,” the Literary World called it “an eccentricity of the
imagination,” and Fitz-James O’Brien, writing in Putnam’s Monthly in
February, 1853, fresh from a bout with Pierre, described it in the
following terms: “Thought staggers through each page like one poisoned.
Language is drunken and reeling.... Let Mr. Melville stay his step
in time. He totters on the edge of a precipice, over which all his
hard-earned fame may tumble with such another weight as Pierre attached
to it.”
The worst of it was that the critics were not altogether wrong in their
judgment of Pierre alone: what was at fault was their failure to see
that the author of Moby-Dick could not be scolded like a child who had
mixed up his declensions: he was entitled to the critic’s most patient,
sympathetic understanding. To pretend that such a mistake might forfeit
Melville’s whole claim to recognition showed that neither O’Brien nor
any one else at the time realized what a strong claim Melville had, or
what a profound mark he had made on the literature of the world. I have
looked in vain through the collected works and biographies of Emerson,
Whitman, Thoreau, Lowell, Holmes, and even Conway and Sanborn, to see
if these writers recognized a fellow in Melville, as Emerson had so
generously done with Whitman: but except for a brief note on Omoo by
Whitman, written in his Brooklyn Eagle days, and a comment in a chance
letter by Lowell--exaggerated praise followed by complete indifference
to Melville’s worth--there is no sign that the contemporaries he might
have respected even knew of his existence.
Melville stood alone, alone in a desert. “Who shall tell all the
thoughts and feelings of Pierre in that desolate and shivering room,
when at last the idea obtruded, that the wiser and profounder he
should grow, the more and more he lessened his chances for bread;
that could he now hurl his deep book out of the window, and fall on
some shallow nothing of a novel, composable in a month at longest,
then could he reasonably hope for appreciation and cash. But the
devouring profundities now opened upon him, consuming all his vigor;
would he, he could not now be entertainingly and profitably shallow
in some pellucid and merry romance.” This conviction, borne in on
him perhaps while writing Moby-Dick, now haunted him when Pierre met
its disastrous reception. “The brightest success,” he says again in
Pierre, “now seemed intolerable to him, since he so plainly saw, that
the brightest success could not be the sole offspring of Merit, but of
Merit for the one-thousandth part, and nine-hundred and ninety-nine
combining and dovetailing accidents for the rest.... So beforehand he
felt the unrevealable sting of receiving either plaudits or censures,
equally unsought for, and equally loathed ere given. So, beforehand,
he felt the pyramidical scorn of the genuine loftiness for the whole
infinitesimal company of critics.... In that lonely little closet of
his, Pierre foretasted all that this world hath either of praise or
dispraise; and thus foretasting both goblets, anticipatingly hurled
them both in its teeth. All panegyric, all denunciation, all criticism
of any sort would come too late for Pierre.”
Needless to say, Melville’s pyramidical scorn did not disarm the
critics, nor did it, one suspects, counteract the effect of the
salt that they poured, with such fine antiseptic intentions, into
his wounds. He was greeted with the embarrassed shamefulness which
sometimes appears upon the faces of sophisticated people when a fresh
young girl confesses impulses or desires that her elders are forever
discreetly hiding. Melville had revealed too much. His contemporaries,
with a feeling of guilty repression, denied that any one had the right
to take off his clothes, and they equally denied that such harassed,
crippled souls could be found beneath the shapely costumes provided
by society. Nervous, these respectable people will be on the watch
for any similar performance; more than that, they will read back into
Melville’s earlier books the same dangerous, unhealthy innocence and
exposure.
One and all, the critics agreed with an English writer whose diatribe
on the American psychological writers was reprinted, somewhat
pointedly, in the Literary World for August 28, 1852. “It is a
melancholy sign for the prospects of a rising American literature
that some of its most hopeful professors should have, in recent works
of fiction, been evidently laying themselves out for that species of
subtle psychological romance, first introduced to the reading world
by such authors as Balzac and Sand.... To pass from Scott and Dickens
to Sand and Balzac is like giving up the smiling landscape glowing in
its freshness and beauty, for the loathly atmosphere, the wretched
sights and smells of a dissecting room, or abandoning the busy street
or the pleasant social circle for charnels and catacombs. And yet
this is what Young America seems bent upon. Instead of sketching the
really representative men of their country--instead of conveying to us
on this side of the Atlantic a true idea of American society--society
in the great seaboard city or in the far west settlement--instead of
presenting us with stories racy of the soil and instinct with its
vigorous and aggressive theories, the misguided party in question
selects some half dozen morbid phases of mind, brings before us some
three or four intellectual cripples or moral monsters ... and instead
of laying before us a wholesome story of natural character and motive,
he lets us into the secret turns and tidings of unhealthy and abnormal
mental power and promptings.”
No one saw even dimly then that these psychological novels and short
stories, William Wilson, The House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet
Letter, Pierre, were signs of the broken American psyche, alienated by
its removal from the solid tissue of Europe, and seeking, by further
analysis, to establish a more primitive and elementary state, from
which a new integration, more satisfactory and complete, could emerge.
These relentless psychologists were far more deeply immersed in the
American scene than any of the writers who succeeded them in the next
generation, however closely Bret Harte and Howells and Mark Twain met
the English prescription for natural character and robust health.
If anything could have infuriated Melville, it must have been the
suggestion that he could write in another fashion than he had done: “In
tremendous extremes,” he said in Pierre, “human souls are like drowning
men: well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know
the causes of that peril; nevertheless, the sea is the sea and these
drowning men do drown.”
Baffled by his dilemmas, rebuffed by his contemporaries, harassed
by financial anxiety, curbed by ill health, kept from the solace of
reading by poor eyesight, made doubly desperate by the cold mysteries
he had explored--what was there to sustain Herman Melville and bring
him back to health? The divided tenderness of a wife who was still
bearing children, or the obtuse concern of a mother, a sister, or
brother--so far from relieving him, these things only quickened his
exasperation and his sense of helplessness.
When harassed by external circumstances, one wants to attack the
universe: but, like Ahab, one finds that the universe will not get in
one’s way: so one takes revenge on the first creature that crosses
one’s path. Too likely it will be a creature one holds dear: the
animus is not directed against that one, but it strikes as if it were.
An explosion: a blow: a raised hand: an uncontrollable outburst of
vituperation--then drink, remorse, repentance, the ugly vanity of it
all. The universe is unharmed; one’s own condition is unimproved: there
is just one more blight to stand in the way of amelioration. Whatever
the outward events that mark Melville’s passage through these frantic
waters, there is no doubt of his inward state. In a word he himself
coined for Pierre, he became Timonized. In that awful solitude within,
the very touch of his fellow creatures became defilement. “He could
not bring himself to confront any face or house; a plowed field, any
sign of tillage, the rotted stump of a long-felled pine, the slightest
passing trace of man was uncongenial and repelling to him. Likewise,
in his own mind all remembrances and imaginings, that had to do with
the common and general humanity had become, for the first time, in the
most singular manner distasteful to him. Still, while thus loathing
all that was common in the two different worlds--that without and that
within--nevertheless, even in the most withdrawn and subtlest region
of his own essential spirit, Pierre could not now find one single
agreeable twig of thought whereon to perch his weary soul.”
There was Melville’s own state, I believe, during and after the
writing of Pierre, in its uttermost anguish and desolation. His
family became apprehensive: his friends dropped away from him, first
Hawthorne, then the Duyckincks: and in his sensitive condition, small
indifferences became signs of enmity, heartlessness, and alienation.
In doubling this inner Cape Horn, Herman Melville may have skirted
the jagged rocks of an even deeper disruption: there were moments,
perhaps days and months, between 1852 and 1858 when the outcome of his
physical and mental condition may well have been in doubt. But with
utmost allowance for the horror and collapse of his illness, it was
of limited duration, and it could not have been a continuous state,
since, throughout this period, he continued to write, to write with
clarity, with distinction, and without a visible touch of disorder.
Not the least of his literary achievements date from these years of
debilitation and infirmity.
The word insanity is far too loose to be used about Melville’s mental
illness, even during the limited period we are considering. At the very
end of his life, Melville wrote a passage about insanity in his novel,
Billy Budd, which puts the biographer’s difficulty in touching this
period with great point. “Who,” he asks, “in the rainbow can draw the
line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly,
we see the difference of the colours, but where exactly does the first
one visibly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In
pronounced cases there is no question about them. But in some cases,
in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the line of
demarcation few will undertake, though for a fee some professional
experts will. There is nothing nameable but that some man will
undertake to do for pay. In other words, there are instances where it
is next to impossible to determine whether a man is sane, or beginning
to be otherwise.”
Melville realized from his own experience, perhaps, what few people
understood until Janet and Freud re-interpreted this whole series of
disorders, that the line between sanity and insanity is not a line at
all but a wide gradient band. Indeed, as early as 1849, in a letter to
Mr. Duyckinck written apropos the insanity of Charles Fenno Hoffman,
the first editor of The Literary World, Melville had said: “This going
mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who
feels his soul in him, which but few men do. For in all of us lodges
the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt,
momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains. What sort
of sensation permanent madness is may be very well imagined just as we
imagine how we felt when we were infants, though we cannot recall it.
In both conditions we are irresponsible and riot like gods without fear
of fate.”
3
The relationship between insanity and art has been the subject of
much discussion; and it is important, in appraising Melville’s life
and work during this period, that we should avoid the notion that
genius and insanity are one, or that the fantasies of the neurotic
are the equivalent of a work of art. The difference between insanity
and what we agree to call normal conduct is largely one of social
utilization: given a similar set of circumstances and stimuli, the
distinction between a neurotic reaction and a normal one consists
largely in the success a person has in conversion. Had Napoleon, for
example, merely dreamt about his conquests, magnifying them year by
year as his malady grew, he would have been quite properly confined
to an asylum, like so many other “emperors of the world,” as soon as
his patent conduct conflicted with other people’s activities. The fact
that his particular kind of paranoia was permitted at large was due to
his ability to convert it into the forms of contemporary social life,
politics and military activity, things which subjected his grandiose
dreams to the shock and jar of actuality. This conversion into art
signifies health and relative stability, whether the situation that
causes the conversion is morbid or not. Indeed, an effectual work
of art is not merely a counterpoise to psychal difficulties: it is
actually an indication that the artist, during the period of his
creation, has had full possession of himself. Insanity in many cases
befalls those who cannot make this transposition to art, and who,
through inexpertness or inarticulateness, produce therefore unusable
fantasies--fantasies that do not meet the impact of reality. There is
no mistaking the fantasy of the insane for the fantasy of the artist:
issuing from the same headwaters, perhaps, they empty into different
oceans. Had Melville remained mute during this period or had his work
fallen off we might suspect the worst: his superb craftsmanship, in
Bartleby, in The Encantadas, and in Benito Cereno, is, on the contrary,
an objective proof--and a reassuring one. The critics and historians
of literature who said that his work became “wilder and wilder and
more and more turgid in each successive book” after Moby-Dick were
either ignorant of his later work, or blind. Wildness and turgidity
are the precise opposite of the qualities one finds in these stories
and sketches, stories told with delicacy, with restraint, and with
great concentration. With the rumour of his insanity in mind, these
sympathetic scholars were quick to condemn Melville’s work. We may
confidently reverse their logic. With the achieved beauty of Melville’s
work before us, we can isolate and reduce the period of his mental
exacerbation.
Melville’s own blackness and spiritual desolation, his Timonism,
recalls that of Shakespeare himself, from whose play he had taken
the word. Their vision of life went through similar stages, and even
in their personal affairs some of the same anomalies arise, down to
the silent contempt with which Shakespeare apparently dismissed the
products of his imagination, not bothering to see that they reached
the world at all, still less that they did so in the exact form he
had conceived them. In both men, the feeling of a shattered faith and
despondency is expressed in the relationship of a young man, Hamlet
or Pierre, to a proud and worldly mother; in Pierre and Hamlet, an
unconscious incest-wish incapacitates the hero for marriage with the
girl he has wooed; and the final result is doubt and deepest anguish,
culminating in the death of all involved. Alienated from society, a
furious contempt for mankind arises in these writers: Shakespeare
carries this contempt into Lear and Timon of Athens, even as Melville
did into The Confidence Man: the contempt is mixed with impotence and
self-distrust, and the art itself is marred by an uncontrollable sense
of outrage: “In Timon,” as Dowden justly says, “we see one way in which
a man may make his response to the injuries of life; he may turn upon
the world in a fruitless and suicidal rage.” Finally, when each could
go no further without outward violence, he recoiled upon himself,
and each in a final work expressed a reconciliation, Shakespeare in
The Tempest, separating the base, in the form of Caliban, from the
spiritual, in the form of Ariel, under the double mastery of a science
and virtue embodied in Prospero--a resolution which, we shall come to
see, is not singularly different in meaning from Melville’s final work.
What caused this blackness in Shakespeare’s life, what brought him to
the crisis recorded in Timon, surely the worst of his plays, we can
only speculate upon: but in Melville’s life we are aware of tangible
reasons for his frustration, with roots that reach far back into
childhood, his disappointed youth, the hardships of early poverty and
defeated expectations, his unfortunate experiences on his first sailing
voyage, his perpetual feeling of being an Ishmael, through poverty
among the gentlefolk at Albany, through intellectual superiority among
his shipmates, through spiritual hardihood among his contemporaries
in letters, through social isolation in his own neighbourhood, where
people looked upon him as cousin german to the cannibals. Melville
had witnessed this same Timonism in Jackson, and his words remind us
that “there seemed more woe than wickedness about the man; and his
wickedness seemed to spring from his woe; and for all his hideousness,
there was that in his eye at times, that was ineffably pitiable and
touching; and though there were raw moments when I almost hated this
Jackson, yet I have pitied no man as I have pitied him.” Jackson would
enter into arguments to prove that there was nothing to be believed,
nothing to be loved, and nothing worth living for--and during the
period of his own Timonism, out of his abysmal woe, Melville felt and
wrote, at intervals, particularly in Pierre and in The Confidence Man,
the same way.
Of Melville’s blackness there is no doubt. That this blackness would
ordinarily have led to downright insanity there is little room for
doubt either. But, like Shakespeare and Goethe and many another artist,
Melville found a benign and not a baneful outlet for his energies; and
every evidence of Melville’s work points to the restoration of his
poise and health, intermittently, in the decade we are writing of, and
steadily in the years that followed.
4
Returning to 1853, the year that followed Pierre, we find Melville in
the midst of a series of disappointments: he was to learn the truth of
Hamlet’s observation: misfortunes come not singly but in battalions.
Melville sought for a consular appointment in the South Seas, a place
where he was fitted by experience and sympathy to perform a decent
service, and perhaps, with relief from financial strain, recover
a little that joy in the flesh which he had once known, and find
again in his bosom the radiance of the landscape itself. Melville
had no opportunity to try this remedy. In spite of Richard H. Dana’s
intercession, Chief Justice Shaw’s efforts, and Allan’s assiduous
canvassing, and Hawthorne’s friendly intercession, he did not get the
post, nor did he get a consulship at Antwerp, which for a moment seemed
possible. To make matters worse, Harper’s, his publishers, lost the
plates of his novels and almost all the copies of his books in a fire
that gutted out their quarters. If there was something prophetic in the
foundering of the whaler Ann Alexander, and the total disappearance
of the old Pequod itself, as Melville was finishing Moby-Dick, there
was something equally uncanny in this conflagration. The very elements
played against him, as they played against Ahab. His books were put
out again by Harper’s, but perfunctorily: they had lost their original
momentum. None of Melville’s subsequent books was to meet such eager
acceptance.
Another sign of Melville’s weakened health and lessened energies is
the fact that during 1853 his entire writing seems to have consisted
only of two short stories, Cock-a-Doodle-Do and Bartleby the Scrivener,
both published in magazines towards the end of the year. Melville was
not at home in the narrow confines of the short story: he had scarcely
time to get under way before he was back again in port. The result is
that the best of his short stories are really short novels, while the
lesser ones, like The Lightning Rod Man, are little more than mediocre
anecdotes. I and My Chimney, The Appletree Table, The Paradise of
Bachelors, The Tartarus of Maids, are more in the nature of discursive
essays, “in character,” than they are of tales: Melville was at his
weakest in deliberately symbolic tales, like Cock-a-Doodle-Do and The
Bell-Tower; indeed, the latter might be slipped into one of Hawthorne’s
volumes, without apology, as a minor work of his youth. When in 1852
Melville equably handed to Hawthorne the circumstances of a story he
had gathered from a lawyer in New Bedford, he was so conscious of
treading on the master’s ground that he relinquished his own right to
exploit this particular plot. But except for the original impulse, his
best stories owe nothing to Hawthorne: Melville’s symbolism is more
delicately and carefully concealed; and his moral, like Shakespeare’s,
rests in the demonstration, not in the conclusion.
Bartleby the Scrivener is one of Melville’s longer stories; and it
gains much by its juxtaposition of incongruous personalities. The
story is told by a comfortable, pursy old lawyer, with an office in
Wall Street; the lawyer and his copyists are hit off with a warm
sense of caricature. Into this office comes a pale, bleak creature,
Bartleby, to serve as a scrivener. He is quiet and industrious; but he
refuses to comply with the routine of the office: he will not compare
copy, even for the lawyer himself; and yet there is something in this
passive self-assertion and this methodical self-obliteration which
makes the lawyer humour Bartleby. With these qualities goes a mystery;
and by accident, on a Sunday at church-time, the lawyer discovers, on
attempting to enter his office, that Bartleby not only works for him
but has quietly occupied his business premises, to eat and sleep there.
In spite of this gross irregularity, the lawyer keeps Bartleby, only
to have the little man quit work entirely. When the lawyer demands a
reason, he answers: I would prefer not to. When the lawyer asks him to
move out, he answers: I would prefer not to. There is no getting behind
his silence, his dead-wall reveries, his blank self-possession.
The effect of this passive resistance upon the lawyer is upsetting.
“My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest
pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and
grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy verge into fear,
that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible, too, that
up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our
best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it
does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is due to
the inherent selfishness of the human heart: it rather proceeds from
a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To
a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is
perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succour, common sense
bids the soul be rid of it. What I saw that morning convinced me that
the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might
give alms to the body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul
that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.”