the new tenant is not so patient and he has Bartleby arrested. When
Bartleby finds himself in prison, he prefers not to eat. A kind fellow,
the lawyer visits him, seeking to restore his confidence and reawaken
his manhood. “Nothing reproachful attaches to you being here,” he
assures Bartleby. “And see, it is not so sad a place as one might
think. Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass.” “I know where I
am,” he replied.
Bartleby is a good story in itself: it also affords us a glimpse of
Melville’s own drift of mind in this miserable year: the point of
the story plainly indicates Melville’s present dilemma. People would
admit him to their circle and give him bread and employment only if
he would abandon his inner purpose: to this his answer was--I would
prefer not to. By his persistence in minding his own spiritual affairs,
those who might have helped him on their own terms, like Allan or his
father-in-law or his Uncle Peter, inevitably became a little impatient;
for in the end, they foresaw they would be obliged to throw him off,
and he would find himself in prison, not in the visible prison for
restraining criminals, but in the pervasive prison of dull routine and
meaningless activity. When that happened there would be no use assuring
him that he lived in a kindly world of blue sky and green grass. “I
know where I am!” Whether or not Melville consciously projected his own
intuition of his fate, there is no doubt in my mind that, as early as
1853, he was already formulating his answer. To those kind, pragmatic
friends and relatives who suggested that he go into business and make a
good living, or at least write the sort of books that the public would
read--it amounts to pretty much the same thing--he kept on giving one
stereotyped and monotonous answer: I would prefer not to. The dead-wall
reverie would end in a resolution as blank and forbidding as the wall
that faced him: a bleak face, a tight wounded mouth, the little blue
eyes more dim, remote, and obstinate than ever: I would prefer not to!
During the next year, Melville settled down to a steadier round of
work, and one of the best of his narratives, a series of sketches
called The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, was published during
1854 under the pseudonym Salvator R. Tarnmoor. Three other sketches
followed; and finally, in July, 1854, he began to publish serially the
story of Israel Potter, the Revolutionary beggar, for which he had
gathered material in London five years before.
In The Encantadas Melville went back again to the ground he had
ploughed so well before. He had gone ashore on the Enchanted Isles, the
Galapagos, during the early part of his whaling voyage, and now, in his
own sable mood--a mood reflected in the very choice of his pseudonym,
Tarnmoor--the landscape of these islands corresponded to his inner
state; and his description of the scene is as fine as anything in his
earlier pages; if anything, there is more studious mastery. The final
sketch, the story of Hunilla, who had been left in solitude on one
of these islands, when her brother and her husband died, is poignant
and terrible, all the more so because of the dark bestiality of the
visiting crew, that Melville hints at, and then forgoes telling about,
so moved is he by its inhumanity.
“One knows not,” Melville reflects here, “whether nature doth not
impose some secrecy upon him who has been privy to certain things.
At least, it is to be doubted whether it is good to blazon such. If
some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then,
with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men. Those whom books will
hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be
forbid; but in all things man sows upon the wind, which bloweth where
it listeth; for ill or good men cannot know. Often ill comes from good,
as good from the ill.” He has returned to the ultimate moral of Pierre;
and it holds good of the tales of the Enchanted Isles: out of its
stark ugliness, he breathed beauty. With just as abhorrent an insight
into the cruelties of life as he had in Pierre, Melville here had a
firmer hand on himself: he ruefully confesses that “in nature, as in
law, it may be libellous to speak some truths.” Within the dark rim of
the horizon, the words move, like swift white sails on grey waters. The
style is again accurate, pliant, subtle, bold; but it is never hectic
nor forced, nor does it smell from the mothballs of old costume chests.
There is not the faintest sign that his literary powers were falling
off, or his voice sinking to a whisper.
5
Israel Potter was a full-length novel, based upon a little memoir
of his life, printed for the sake of gathering up a few pennies, in
Providence in 1827. The fact that Melville could attempt a long work
again is a sign of somewhat restored health, and though the book ranks
far below Melville’s best work, it differs from Redburn chiefly in
that while based upon a document, it relies even more heavily upon
Melville’s own powers of invention. All the good things in Israel
Potter come from Melville, not from Potter: the original story provided
only the skeleton of events: Melville gives them a setting and a full
cast of characters.
Israel Potter is a country bumpkin who is kept by his parents from
marrying the girl he loves, goes on a surveying expedition into Vermont
and is defrauded of his earnings, ships to sea, returns to the farm,
fights gallantly at Bunker Hill, enlists in an American man-of-war,
and is captured by the British and taken to England. Escaping from
his guards, Israel flees into the countryside, making his way across
England by devious passages, until he finally comes upon a kindly
English baronet near Brentford, who gives him a job on his country
estate. Rumours that he is a spy dog him, so he is compelled to change
his situation and finally he achieves safety at Kew, as one of the
king’s gardeners. When work slacks off, Israel is again thrown on
his resources, and, while hiding, he makes the acquaintance of some
secret friends of America, among them, Horne Tooke, the grammarian.
These friends equip him and send him on a secret mission to Dr.
Franklin in Paris, where he meets Paul Jones; and eventually Israel,
by another lucky chance, comes to serve on a privateer with Jones,
and to participate in the fight between the Serapis and the Bonhomme
Richard. The upshot of these vagrant ups and downs is a long period
of toil in a London brickworks, followed by marriage and residence in
London. Finally, in his old age, with his English wife dead, Israel
returns with his son to his native land, only to find the landmarks of
his youth gone, and a pension as a Revolutionary soldier denied him. In
this state, the original Israel wrote his book; and at this point of
weariness, disillusion, exhaustion, Melville left him.
Israel Potter has suffered, like all Melville’s later books, from
the apathy of criticism, quite as much as from its own weaknesses.
Mr. Percy Boynton says of Israel Potter that “it was a perfunctory
work, not as interesting as the book it was based on,” and while one
hesitates to differ with such an able critic, a close comparison of the
book seems to me to prove exactly the opposite. Not merely does Israel
Potter contain, as Mr. F. J. Mather, Jr., has remarked, one of the best
accounts of a sea-fight in history; not merely is its portrait of John
Paul Jones a far more illuminating study of that great shark of the
seas than Cooper’s picture in The Pilot; but it is one of the few works
of American fiction that deal with patriotic episodes in a generous,
straightforward way. Melville took a crude, bald narrative and poured
life into it: he took a smudgy woodcut and made a living picture out
of it, building up the background, creating incident and character
where none had existed before, projecting every figure into the third
dimension. The account of John Paul Jones occupies a single paragraph
in the original: in Melville’s novel, Jones is the largest figure in
the book, and nearly runs away with the story. It is the same with
Franklin. He is a colourless figure in the original: Melville, with
gentle mocking penetration, puts before us the man in full length, with
sly characterizations of his paunch and his purse and his methodical
parsimony. Melville does so well with these characters that one wishes
he had created a whole historical portrait gallery. If any one fancies
that Melville’s characters are merely romantic projections of his
actual self, here is a clear answer.
Melville’s imaginative life, it is true, flowered only when there was
some soil in his own life that nourished it, and when that soil was
lacking he found himself forced, again like his Elizabethan exemplar,
to pick up the action and the fable in another work. As a writer, he
was deprived of the fruitful contacts and adventures he had enjoyed
as a common sailor: the inner life grew, but the outer life dwindled
and thinned out; and so he was thrown, when he had exhausted his
original adventures, upon second-hand experience. This drying up of
his sources was a great handicap to him; for while books helped to
form and crystallize experience, they were not substitutes for it. He
transformed the bald story of Israel Potter: but, had he wholly made it
his own, the central character would have been John Paul Jones, and in
so far as he was dependent upon the original he was weak. Israel Potter
is many removes from Melville at his best; but it would be absurd to
throw it out of the Melville canon. It has some of the fine qualities
of his art, the mixture of tradition and fresh experience, the
purification and heightening of actuality, with a loss of realism and
a gain in reality: what it chiefly lacks is centrality. It is Melville
_manqué_--but still Melville. His poorest work was many degrees above
mediocrity.
6
In 1856, Melville gathered together some of the short stories he had
written during the previous three years, and published them as The
Piazza Tales. The sketch that gives the volume its title offers us a
further glimpse of Melville’s life at Arrowhead.
One pictures him seated on that piazza on an August morning, with
the meadow in front of him a little sear from the new-cropped hay, a
haze lying over the valley of the Housatonic, and the light lavender
hills billowing into Greylock’s double ridge against the horizon. The
landscape brings a feeling of outward serenity, unbroken by the faint
happy screams of the children playing in the hayloft, or the muted
hum of his wife or his sisters in the kitchen, preparing the scant
and largely vegetarian meal. What a contrast with the frayed knotty
feeling within! Such warm and deeply balmy days should bring peace:
but no day, however balmy, can annul the anxiety and weariness of the
last five years, the incessant round of writing, and, further plaguing
him, instead of giving relief, the equally endless round of the farm,
wood to be chopped and sawed, hay to be mowed and gathered, cows and
horses to be fed, vegetables to be planted and hoed, cabbage-worms
to be fought ... oh! for a little coconut and poee-poee! Emerson had
discovered that he could not tend his garden and his mind at the same
time; and Melville, though at first robust, doubtless found that two
careers were a little too much for a single man, exhausted, half spent.
In a pinch, Melville could of course apply to Elizabeth’s father or
to Allan for aid; and he did: but he could not continually write out
unredeemable notes for their benefit; that was all right in a matter
like the mortgage, where there was security; but as a source of daily
income, it was little better than outright beggary.
Melville’s eyes would sweep over the valley to the hills beyond. There,
ah! there perhaps lay happiness! What charming fairy might be living
without relatives and grocers and publishers and promissory notes to
harry her, in that little cottage on the mountainside before him? Some
day he must find the road to that delectable retreat.... He found
it, and to his sorrow and disillusion, instead of an idyllic bower,
it was a weather-beaten old place, inhabited by a tired and troubled
girl, who dreams of the happiness that lies in a marble palace in the
distance below--Melville’s own white house. No fairy maiden she: no
fairy prince he: but a sad girl and a tired, dutiful husband, straining
night and day for the few pennies that will shoe his children’s feet,
replace their tattered home-made clothes, and put bread and milk on the
table. These five years, years that have enclosed his highest powers,
his consummate manhood, have not left Melville with an eager taste for
another fifty of the same pattern. Inevitably, he sought escape; and in
his mind, escape meant the sea. Almost any slight change in atmosphere
can bring the ocean back to him: the ocean, where physical sustenance,
hard-tack and salt rhinoceros, was provided for one, where the hours
were long and peaceful, and amid storm and rigour and dangerous
courses, there brooded, within, a deep and unbreakable calm.
With a wry smile, Melville exchanges the topmast of reverie for the
piazza; but tranquillity does not follow. His very pen lives only when
it touches the sea; and when he gathers together these Piazza Tales,
he does not bother to include most of his land-stories. He is wise:
none of them has a tithe of the interest that Benito Cereno possesses.
That story marked the culmination of Melville’s power as a short-story
writer, as Moby-Dick marked his triumph as an epic poet.
7
In Benito Cereno, published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1855,
Melville was again at home. It is such a tale as one might hear, with
good luck, during a gam in the South Seas or at a bar in Callao; and
Melville himself took it boldly from a book of voyages by Captain Amasa
Delano, published in 1816.
A black, ill-kempt ship, commanded by a young Spanish captain and
manned by negroes, is in distress, and calls upon Captain Amasa
Delano, a bluff, frank American skipper, for aid. Delano, coming
aboard with provisions and water, finds the captain almost down with
a fever, and by turns confidential and queerly reserved. The Spaniard
is attended by a black slave who almost smothers him with watchful
endearments; and he has the air of perpetually manoeuvring, in a way
that would seem sinister were his plight not so manifestly pathetic.
Delano is a little troubled at heart, but he is free from intellectual
suspicions. There is something wrong on the Spaniard’s ship; but it
is hard for Delano to put his hand on it. Don Benito is in command:
but he seems helpless, and he tolerates ugly disorder even among the
black boys. Promising further aid, Delano finally leaves the vessel and
is about to pull for his own ship, still powerfully disturbed by the
Spanish captain’s pain, trouble, fever, churlishness, courtesy--does it
mean some treachery? With a wild leap, the Spaniard throws himself in
Delano’s boat, followed by his faithful black, dagger in hand; and the
black aims his dagger, not at the Americans, but at his Spanish master.
When the American crew finally pulls to safety a harrowing story comes
out.
I will not spoil Benito Cereno for those who have not read it by
revealing its mystery; it is enough to point out that the interplay
of character, the cross-motives, the suspense, the central mystery,
are all admirably done: in contrast to some of Melville’s more prosy
sketches, there is not a feeble touch in the whole narrative. The
following passage, which sets the key of the whole story, reveals
Melville’s undiminished ability as an artist:
“Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though
undulated into long roads of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at
the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter’s
mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl,
kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they
were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows
over meadows before storms.” As in The Encantadas, the writing itself
was distinguished: it had a special office of its own to perform,
and did not, as in Typee and Redburn, serve merely as carriage for
the story. One can mark Melville’s literary powers in the complete
transformation of Delano’s patent story: he adds a score of details to
heighten the mystery and deepen the sinister aspect of the scene; and
by sheer virtuosity he transfers the reader’s sympathies to the Spanish
captain, who in the original story is far more cruel, barbarous, and
unprincipled than the forces he contends against. In order to effect
this change, Melville deliberately omits the last half of the story, in
which the Spanish captain ignobly turns upon his benefactor and seeks
to deprive him of the rights of salvage. The moral of the original tale
is that ingratitude, stirred by cupidity, may follow the most generous
act, and that American captains had better beware of befriending too
whole-heartedly a foreign vessel. In Benito Cereno the point is that
noble conduct and good will, like that Don Benito felt when his whole
inner impulse was to save Delano and his crew, may seem sheer guile;
and, further, that there is an inscrutable evil that makes the passage
of fine souls through the world an endless Calvary. “Even the best
men err, in judging the conduct of one with the recesses of whose
condition he is not acquainted.” The world is mortified for Don Benito
by the remembrance of the human treachery he has encountered: no later
benefaction, no radiance of sun and sky, can make him forget it.
Man should offset the malice and evil circumstance one finds in the
constitution of the universe: instead, he aggravates it. One does
not need to heighten the parallels between Benito Cereno’s fate and
Melville’s own life to catch the semblance to his own dilemma and his
own bowed and wounded spirit. “Never,” says one of the characters
in his next book, “has it been my lot to have been wronged, though
but in the smallest degree. Cheating, backbiting, superciliousness,
disdain, hard-heartedness, and all that brood, I know but by report.
Cold regards tossed over the sinister shoulder of a former friend,
ingratitude in a beneficiary, treachery in a confidant--such things
may be; but I must take somebody’s word for it.” The irony of that
declaration is obvious: Melville had met these things, and, like a
splinter of steel in the eye, they tormented him and during these
harassed years the memory of them, the anticipation of them, the
helpless attempt to guard against them or remove them, directed his
whole life towards this single point of exacerbation. The mighty whale
aroused Melville’s utmost powers: there was that in man that steaded
him manfully for such an encounter: but, like Timon, the spectacle
of fair-weather friends and worldly sycophants, turning away from
him during his moment of greatest need, unmanned him completely.
Moby-Dick might slay one: but the torments of black flies and gnats
made life ignoble without bringing death any nearer. Melville did not
need to exaggerate these wrongs. It was their very smallness, their
unassailableness, that made him desperate.
8
The Confidence Man was written in 1856, and published in the
following spring, while Melville was abroad. It is by all odds the
most difficult book that confronts Melville’s biographer; for it is
possibly a palimpsest, and beneath its obvious legend, one may read
indirect revelations of Melville’s own life. With Melville’s actual
life and predicament in mind, there are passages in The Confidence
Man one cannot read without misgiving: the story of Charlemont, The
Gentleman Madman, for one, and the story of the Man in Weeds, wedded
to a fiendish woman, Goneril, who covers up her own lecherousness by
attributing insanity to her husband. Likewise somewhat mysterious
is the story of the Indian-hater, who had been injured in youth by
Indians, and never lost a chance to exterminate one. It is hard to
fit these incidents into the logic of the plot: and their existence
becomes plausible only if one believes Melville’s own torments and
suspicions had, for a brief while, taken on a pathological character.
No one who approached The Confidence Man without preoccupation or
bias would, I think, impute such personal and neurotic motives to
the passages in question; but once the seed of suspicion is sowed,
as the misanthropic one-legged man demonstrates in an early chapter,
it spreads like the Canada thistle, and is almost as hard to root
out. The words suspicion and confidence, that recur in these pages,
increase one’s suspicions and weaken one’s confidence; in fact,
there is no end to the pathological allusions one may discover,
if one begins with the unfavourable hypothesis. Failing positive
independent evidence, it would be foolish to build up a card-house of
conjecture: enough to say that if Pierre partly reveals the causes
of Melville condition, it is in The Confidence Man, if anywhere,
that the psychologist will discover, probably, its immediate outward
manifestations. The problem, though tantalizing, is not of paramount
importance; for there is plenty of independent evidence to show that by
1858 Melville had regained possession of himself, and that his further
life, though full of hardship and difficulty, had nothing in it that
placed him outside the pale of family life and friendship and decent
social intercourse--although it may have been dogged by memories and
revulsions from an earlier period, and by the continuation of evil
suspicions in the minds of those to whom the normal abstentions and
irritations that attend productive literary effort would themselves be
an evidence of eccentricity, or something worse.
9
In The Confidence Man Melville went back to the vein of satire he had
opened in Mardi. He was shrewd enough, however, to curb the outward
extravagance and the aesthetic vagaries of Mardi: the scene is a
Mississippi steamboat, the characters are the motley company one
might find on such a craft, and the story itself, so far from being
incoherent, remains almost monotonously within the frame that Melville
set for it in the first chapter.
At St. Louis a deaf-mute in a cream-coloured suit, with flaxen hair and
a white fur hat, steps aboard the steamboat Fidele. He circulates among
the crowd with a slate on which he writes: Charity thinketh no evil:
suffereth long and is kind: endureth all things: believeth all things:
never faileth. The passengers look upon this advertiser of St. Paul as
a lunatic: that sign fills them with dubiety, although the sign outside
the barber-shop, +NO TRUST+, seems to them an obvious and natural one.