in the rest of the book. This steamer, the Faithful, is the world,
with all possible varieties of the human animal on board, natives
and foreigners, men of business and men of pleasure, parlour men
and backwoods men, farm-hunters, fame-hunters, heiress-hunters,
buffalo-hunters, happiness-hunters, fine ladies in slippers and
moccasined squaws, Quakers, soldiers, black, white, brown, and every
religion and degree of morality. One thing mars their professions and
plagues their lives: their suspicion. A wooden-legged man, apparently
once a customs-officer, most suspicious of functionaries, denounces
a cheery black beggar who has come among them, as an impostor:
immediately, almost every man on deck turns against the poor fellow.
Even a brawny Methodist minister, who first takes the black’s part,
becomes infected: his confidence is gone. A sad demure man in weeds
of mourning makes his appearance: with great simplicity of purpose,
he insinuates himself into the confidence of a merchant, and gets
ten dollars from him. A little later a man in a grey coat and white
tie accosts his fellow passengers for contributions to a Widow and
Orphan Asylum recently founded among the Seminoles. When rebuffed
as a sharper, he asks his denouncer to be more charitable and throw
off suspicion. The full title of the story is The Confidence Man:
His Masquerade, and one does not go so far without suspecting that
the Confidence Man is a protean character and that the mysterious
appearance and disappearance of the deaf-mute, the negro beggar, the
man in mourning, or the turning up of a seller of quack medicine which
cures by establishing confidence, are merely his own mutations--or
at least are conducted by him. By a hundred shady devices, he breaks
down suspicion, makes men charitable, gives them faith in one another:
but always when they are on the point of being completely disarmed,
their lurking baseness or suspicion will rise to the surface. The
herb-doctor’s pain-dissuader is selling well until a passenger
gives him the lie: “Some pains cannot be eased but by producing
insensibility, and cannot be cured but by producing death.” That hard
truth destroys the whole baseless fabric of confidence he had built up.
Worse doubts intervene. People buy herb remedies because they think
these medicines are natural, and what is natural is good. But if man
is vile, what about Nature? Is the cough one attempts to cure not
natural, and what of the cholera and the rattlesnake and the deadly
nightshade? The Missourian, who utters this doctrine, has no more faith
in humanity than he has in Nature: he is a bitter heretic, even in
politics. What is abolitionism but the expression of fellow feeling of
slave for slave? From Maine to Georgia the best breeds are to be bought
up for any price from a livelihood to a presidency. “Machines for me!”
exclaims the Missourian. So the characters pass, talking, argufying,
blasting charity, killing confidence, either unconsciously or
deliberately blackening the character of man, and proving the emptiness
of all the sweet professions of civilization.
Two men become acquainted and hit up an intimacy over a bottle of
wine. One of them, Frank Goodman, a cosmopolitan philanthropist,
reeking good-will, professes to be inflamed by his friend’s nobility
of mind and his good opinion of his fellow men, and in a sudden burst
of confidence throws himself upon his high-minded fellow: he admits
he is in want of money and asks for a loan of fifty dollars. Charlie
turns away in dudgeon. “Go to the Devil, sir. Beggar, impostor!” Rising
quickly from his seat and taking ten half-eagles from his pocket, Frank
lays them in a circle around Charlie: with the air of a magician, he
summons his friend to reappear. The practical necromancy works. Ha!
ha! it was all a joke, of course. Charlie had humoured him. He had
played his part to the life!... On top of this the philanthropist
has an encounter with Mark Winsome, a mystic philosopher, and his
disciple, who state and practice the extreme opposite of philanthropy:
his philosophy stands the test of truth: it conforms to the world
and does not produce a character at odds with it! This Winsome is no
visionary: far from it: “Was not Seneca a usurer? Bacon a courtier?
and Swedenborg, though with one eye on the invisible, did he not keep
the other on the main chance?” Winsome is the original pragmatist:
a man of serviceable knowledge: the doctrines he preaches will lead
neither to the mad-house nor the poor-house. When Goodman poses to his
disciple a situation like that he had just tested, the disciple handles
it with adroit coolness. The loan is not to be thought of: friends do
not help friends. If Frank turn beggar, then Charlie for the honour of
friendship will turn stranger.
The philanthropist has enough of this icy philosophy: he retreats
to the barber shop, his confidence in humanity unshaken. There he
arranges with the barber to take down the no trust sign, promising
to reimburse the man himself for any loss he may incur through his
confidence. Unfortunately, Goodman leaves the shop, after signing the
agreement, without paying for his own shave: and the barber, suddenly
restored to his senses, tears up the contract and replaces the sign.
Finally, Goodman comes to a comely old man, sitting in his berth,
reading the Bible by the dim cabin light. Here is a man who has
complete faith--yes, and the old man of faith equips himself with a
cabin-lock, a counterfeit detector, a money-belt, a life-preserver, and
an insurance policy!
It is not hard to see where all this leads, although the story itself
ends abruptly. The Confidence Man, in his masquerade, represents all
the sweetness and morality of the race, all that professes to see
good in the heart of evil, all the benign impulses to succour the
poor and heal the sick, all that would place friendliness and natural
intimacy above cold circumspection, that would make every alien soul a
friend, and would place the needs of man above the safety of property.
This sweetness and morality had become for Melville the greatest of
frauds. The people who professed it were sharpers and quacks. Nature,
life, human institutions, did not encourage this fine morality: they
contradicted it. The Pharisee, tightening his purse and disclaiming
responsibility for his brother in distress, the old friend permitting
the matter of a loan to disrupt a friendship--these things, and a score
like them, shrivelled up the outward pretences of social man. Not faith
and charity, but +NO TRUST+ was the key to a prosperous and efficient
life. There was nothing wrong in the profession: love, faith, and
charity might make the worst of ills tolerable; but the miser clung
to his money, the merchant to his reputation, the good man to his
immaculateness, and he who believed in the Word of God had more faith
in the insurance company and the life-preserver. No trust. Man’s soul
was lead. Without money or reputation, it sank.
10
I cannot leave The Confidence Man without a word about its incidental
characteristics. One of the most important things about the story is
that it is unfinished. Melville took leave of The Confidence Man before
he had unmasked him: the meaning of the fable is left hanging in the
air: the plot, which has neither up nor down, preparation nor climax,
suddenly collapses--as if Melville were discouraged or a little bored
by his own contrivances, or dismissed the story to his contemporaries
with a gesture of contempt, hopeless that they would read it, or
confident that, even if they did, they would not know the difference.
The last words in the book are--“Something further may follow of this
Masquerade”--as if he were waiting for some breath of popular response.
The fable of The Confidence Man is plain as far as it goes: there is
nothing obscure or difficult in the symbolism; but it has the abrupt
and scanty appearance of a Manx cat. In the individual sections, the
writing is always competent; and sometimes far more than that: but the
story moves as torpidly and sinuously as the muddy Mississippi itself,
and there are repetitions of movement, as when the hypothetical Frank
and Charlie go over the same ground as the original ones. Mr. Freeman’s
notion that the story was written for the vain purpose of exposing
the hypocrisy and assertiveness of passengers on a steamboat is a
little beside the point, and his notion that the characters support
Dickens’s worst charges in Martin Chuzzlewit is even more amusing; nor
is Mr. Mather any more accurate when he speaks of The Confidence Man
as “Middle Western character sketches.” One might meet queer, uncouth
animals on a Mississippi steamer; doubtless one did; but the queerness
Melville satirized he had met in the slums of Liverpool and the
drawing-rooms of New York.
When one regards The Confidence Man in its true light, not as a novel,
but as a companion volume to Gulliver’s Travels, its whole aspect
changes: its turbid, tedious, meandering quality remains: but there
are rapids of dangerous and exhilarating satire, as in the humane
proposal, not yet wholly adopted, to organize the redemption of the
world on strict Wall Street principles by farming out the charity and
missionary work to the highest bidder, and forcing the inhabitants of
Africa and Asia to pay for their own redemption and the relief of their
own poverty. The Confidence Man may be considered as Melville’s own
masquerade; his own bitter plea for support, money, confidence. Indeed,
a Mississippi steamboat whose passengers quote Zimmermann, Hume,
Francis Bacon, Rabelais, Jeremiah, Jeremy Taylor, Diogenes, and Timon
could scarcely be anything but Melville’s own heavily laden soul, all
its characters and incidents being part of that long soliloquy in which
Melville struggled with a cankerous mood that threatened to remove,
not merely the clothes, but the epidermis, no, the very bowels of his
fellow creatures.
The passionate defiance was gone: a more savage, relentless humour
took its place, a humour that stabbed and punctured with intent to
kill. Melville’s aim remained good: there is more than one passage
like this description of a miser: “A lean old man, whose flesh seemed
salted codfish, dry as combustibles; a head like one whittled by an
idiot out of a knot; a flat, boney mouth, nipped between buzzard nose
and chin.... His eyes were closed, his cheek lay upon an old white
moleskin coat, rolled under his head, like a wizened apple upon a grimy
snowbank.”
A book with so much of Melville’s ingrained thought and cast of mind
cannot be dismissed as a “posthumous book,” nor can it be set to one
side because it lacks the human veracity of Life on the Mississippi.
The book is without doubt below the level of the great eighteenth
century satires; above all, it lacks the virtue of brevity; but as
an indictment of humanity, The Confidence Man is far more deeply
corrosive than anything in Bierce or Mark Twain. It is hard to refute
Melville’s black words, difficult to find an antidote for this
spiritual nightshade. Melville’s contemporaries did not try. They
applied to the book the same medicine that worked so well in life:
they agreed to forget it. Most of the sweetness and decorum of society
rests on an agreement to forget. The sewer and the garbage pile and
the slaughterhouse, the prison, the hospital, the slum, the asylum,
the battlefield, live and flourish behind that agreement. Sometimes,
though they are out of sight beyond the city’s limits, their odour is
carried on the wind and mingles with the air of the drawing-room. The
guests shift a little uneasily in their chairs. The hostess speaks
in a loud intent voice: the guests respond with vivacious eagerness:
the agreement must be maintained. How that dress shimmers in the
soft light! What delicious perfume that bosom exhales! Is there any
pleasant sound or sight that riches cannot purchase? The hostess looks
uncomfortably at the window: the guests follow her eyes uneasily:
the maid closes the window, and, with a touch of finality, draws the
curtains again. A long breath of relief: the agreement triumphs: the
licence to forget!
Melville could not forget, and yet he could go no further with
these observations and memories. He recoiled from his experience
into a mournful humility. After The Confidence Man, these terrible
blacks softened into greys: the wound whitened into a scar: the eyes
automatically shut when the scene they beheld became too painful. When
one has found the worst that can be said against the world, one must
still live in it, and eventually Melville resigned himself, and lived.
The crack which began to open like the gaping earth in Moby-Dick,
that widened with a shiver in Pierre, became a foaming abyss in The
Confidence Man. As he was on the point of falling into that abyss,
Herman Melville withdrew, and the wide fissure closed--or seemed to
close.
PILGRIM
CHAPTER TEN: TROUBLED FOOTSTEPS
By 1856 Herman Melville had, I think, reached the bottom of his woe,
and he was on the point of resignation--resigning his career, his hope
of livelihood and fame, the high place among his peers that his genius
entitled him to. His short stories during this period gave hints of
his gathering resolution; for he plays with his possible fate again
and again, as in the story of the fiddler, Hautboy, who had been a
famous prodigy in his youth, and who now, in obscurity, with genius and
without fame, was happier than a king. Jimmy Rose is another story of
a man who has fallen in the world and sinks into a genteel pauperism,
wherein all his old graces become pathetic dodges for filling a hungry
stomach. Contemplating this character, Melville became for the first
time downright sentimental: one feels tears of self-pity welling into
his eyes as he uttered the refrain: “Poor, poor Jimmy--God guard us
all--poor Jimmy Rose!”
Melville, at least, was too proud to lift a pitiful false front. He
will seek other consolations than as a defunct literary celebrity:
the occasional student, like Mr. Titus Munson Coan, who finds him in
the Berkshires, does not get a glimpse of the South Sea Melville he
admires: instead, he must listen to Kant and Hegel and Plato and all
the contemporary mysteries. But won’t you tell me something about the
cannibals: that was _so_ interesting. Doubtless the dim Bartleby look
would come into Melville’s eyes: “That reminds me of the eighth book
of Plato’s Republic.” Or perhaps, from a deeper chasm, would come
Bartleby’s own reply: I would prefer not to.
Melville had begun to feel, with Pierre, “what all mature men, who are
Magians, sooner or later know, and more or less assuredly--that not
always in our actions are we our own factors.” When Melville reached
this point, his youth was over; and his manhood, which had just
begun, was over, too. From an experience so heavy and overwhelming
as Melville’s, there was no alternative but retreat, and complete
submission. The Olympian had adventured, an innocent abroad in the
morning; the Titan had struggled, a wise, tormented, valiant man,
working and battling in the sweat and dust of noon: twilight had fallen
early, and in the gloom, he could neither adventure nor struggle: “The
power and dominion of the present world,” as Mr. D. S. MacColl has said
in describing these three dominant figures of the spirit, “is a vanity
to him; the furious energy of retaliation against suffering a trivial
folly, because in his vast contempt and renunciation of this and of all
life, things visible or attainable, present or to come, the height and
depth of any other creature dwindle to nothingness and the least is
equal to the greatest.” This is the mood of the Pilgrim: the mood of
humility and indifference to outward things. A product of defeat and
frustration, this attitude is a last attempt to circumvent it. Buddhism
and Christianity represent this mood in the history of communities,
racked by war, pestilence, slavery, and sheer fatigue of living and its
symbol is the cloister, walled off from the distraction and struggle of
the outer world. Melville sought a cloister for his spirit. Unable to
batter down the indifference of his contemporaries, he endeavoured to
erect within himself a fortress that would keep them at bay.
2
Elizabeth Melville noted that bad health, following too close
application to work, made travel advisable in 1856: that is the outward
explanation of Melville’s circumstances. Melville’s father-in-law
again came forward with financial aid, and in October Herman Melville
set off on a journey to Constantinople and the Holy Land. He had
contemplated such a trip in 1849; and now, from a deeper consciousness
of his spiritual dilemma, he wished perhaps to prove the advice he had
given Taji in the last pages of Mardi--to return and find his Yillah
in Serenia. It was characteristic of Melville’s habit of thought that
he should seek for Christ’s kingdom in the territory that had known
his presence, instead of plying himself with books and spiritual
intermediaries: having come upon Moby-Dick on the adventurous voyages
of his youth, he was now, as a man of thirty-seven, hopeful to find
through another voyage a sufficient antagonist to this Satanic power,
with whom he could ally his own faltering, and almost routed, forces.
But it was not merely for peace that Melville set out. Beneath the
obvious and inevitable retreat was possibly the hope that the old
energies would come back again, that the old Titan would re-awake and
the old challenge stir again in his bosom--that, with some of his
domestic cares relieved or forgotten, the joy of battle would come
back to him, the relish for arduous days of creation. Hopes and fears
went with Herman Melville across the Atlantic: but unless we misread
his words completely, the fears were uppermost. Perhaps life held no
answer. It was possible “after all, that spite of bricks and shaven
faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all
mankind, beneath our garbs of commonplaceness, conceal enigmas that the
stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim, cannot resolve.”
3
Again we come very close to the external round of Melville, for, after
sailing to Glasgow and making his way through Lancaster, he arrived
at Liverpool on November 8, 1856. There, at the White Bear, he began
a journal which he carried through the better part of his trip. Like
his earlier journal, it is chiefly a record of outward impressions:
meditation, the working of the inward eye, seems always to have
followed much later. He was a good traveller. Hawthorne, whom he
hunted up in Liverpool, describes him as making his long journeys with
scarcely more than a toothbrush for equipment: Melville still retained
the sailor’s knack of stowing away a good deal in a small space, and
doing without the landsman’s non-essentials; and, as Hawthorne notes,
he always presented the appearance of a well-groomed gentleman. More
than this: he struck up acquaintance easily, and at the outset he was
tempted, upon meeting an agreeable young Scot, to go east with him
forthwith on the same steamer. Melville was always keen to enjoy the
contrasts and suggestions of new customs; and he notes, for example,
how the landlord in the ordinary of his Liverpool hotel acted as if he
were presiding over a private dinner party, all thought of mercenary
ends banished, although the wine he offered his guests would later be
reckoned in the bill.
Hawthorne, now American Consul at Liverpool, was staying at Southport,
a watering-place some twenty miles distant; and Melville sought his
old friend out there and stayed with him a few days. The afternoon of
his arrival, they walked together along the strand, these two men,
both, alas! aging quickly, though Hawthorne was only fifty-two, and
Melville was fifteen years younger. The beach was lonely; a strong wind
stirred panic in the long grass and occasionally swept the loose sand
in their faces; and Melville, a little weariedly, as if somehow the
matter must be settled, went back again to the things he used to talk
about with Hawthorne in the sunny Berkshire days, things as bleak as
the sea-coast itself, and as infinite as the sky: Time and Free-Will,
and Eternity, and Faith! Melville cannot believe in Christianity nor
be comfortable with his doubts, torments, inner wounds. Hawthorne, as
usual, was aloofly sympathetic: it was strange how Melville persisted,
had persisted ever since Hawthorne knew him and probably long before,
in wandering to and fro in these deserts. If Melville were a religious
man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential,
thinks Hawthorne to himself: for he has a high and noble nature, and is
better worth immortality than most of us.
Melville must have looked pleadingly at that grave, heavy-browed
face, with its domed forehead, which seemed to promise so much. Did
it have no answer for him? Did those intent eyes say to one, as
Plinlimmon’s said to Pierre--Vain, vain are all your struggles and
endeavours? Except when Hawthorne wrote, how little did he ever give
in exchange! Did Melville feel that Hawthorne mutely understood, and
had no remedy: that the mind that had seen into Hester Prynne’s heart
or Chillingworth’s evil spirit had retreated, hopeless, from his riled
depths? If Melville did not feel that, still he needed a confidant,
and the wild screams of the gulls over the lonely sands may have
awakened to unpremeditated sudden declaration the wild loneliness of
his own heart. Melville might as well confess it to Hawthorne: he had
about made up his mind to be annihilated. There was no place for him
in America: his best and deepest work, his maturest convictions, were
lightly tossed aside by his contemporaries: they were interested in
whale oil at so much per gallon, not in the quest of Moby-Dick; and
they wanted stories that would tickle their vanity, like a mirror,
or make the blood course more pleasantly, like a glass of port wine.
Melville would not commit suicide: that was a weak way out: but he
might deliberately withdraw.
Perhaps Hawthorne looked doubly grave: it is doubtful if he offered
any word of countervailing encouragement; for he probably did not
have enough confidence in Melville’s genius, much as he respected his
probity, to urge him to continue the fight. Besides, he was a little
embarrassed; despite his political influence, he had been unable to get
Melville the consular post that would have relieved him so greatly; and
he felt a little responsible for Melville’s financial plight, if not
for his spiritual predicament--although his failure reflected nothing
upon his practical good-will, and there is no sign that Melville was
even faintly reproachful. Perhaps, at bottom, Hawthorne felt guilty
because he could not offer back in friendship all Melville was willing
to give--and craved. Unrequited friendship is no easy state for either
party to bear.
Evening fell: the wind grew raw: the waters became steel-edged at the
horizon with a girder of black: the occasional lights in the town
increased the sense of solitude, as the two dark figures made their
way back to the huddled silhouette of houses. There was no true end
to this talk, but instead of that, the consolations of the table were
presently spread: stout to drink and fox-and-geese to eat. Julian had
grown into a fine lad; and Una was taller than her mother. The food,
the coal-fire, and the chatter of the children before bedtime gave
Melville, if only for a moment, something solid to go on, something he
could not find in Hawthorne’s patient silences. Well, on the morrow,
Melville must say good-bye and go up to Liverpool with Hawthorne to
make inquiries about passage among the steamers. On a rainy night,
standing on a street corner in Liverpool, he took Hawthorne’s hand and
said good-bye to him. Hawthorne was touched. He respected that pale,
brooding spirit, that restless, adventurous, still aimless traveller.
Casually, they shook hands: the night and the rain swallowed up
Melville, and they never met again, and as far as one knows, they never
corresponded.
For Melville this was perhaps a last desperate essay at maintaining
their friendship; and in spite of Hawthorne’s cordial greeting, the
meeting was hollow and it had come to nothing. Each had a secret
locked in his bosom; and, in a sense, each had lost the key. Yet there
was something fine and true between these two men--if only there had
not been the reserve and the distance between them, a reserve that
Melville’s old rollicking ways and easy gipsy friendliness could
not break down. One can scarcely doubt that it was about Hawthorne
Melville wrote the following Monody, included in the sheaf of poems
issued just before Melville’s death:
To have known him, to have loved him
After loneness long;
And then to be estranged in life,
And neither in the wrong;
And now for death to set his seal--
Ease me, a little ease, my song!
By wintry hills his hermit-mound
The sheeted snow-drifts drape
And houseless there the snow-bird flits
Beneath the fir-trees’ crape:
Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine
That hid the shyest grape.
The fatal cold that had struck this friendship, the only deep one that
had sprung up in Melville’s life and attracted all the members of his
personality--if one omits the retrospective warmth of his feeling for
Jack Chase--this fatal cold did not lessen Melville’s inner pangs and
his feeling of desolation.
4