Vincent and Cape Trafalgar, entering the Straits of Gibraltar about a
week later, and skirting along the coast of Africa. Throughout this
journey, his eyes were keen and eager: when Gibraltar stands lit up by
the sun, and casts a shadow over the rest of the scene, he thinks of
England casting the rest of the world in shade; and when Algiers lies
before him, he remembers a passage in Don Quixote. As the boat sails
out, the town in the distance looks “like a sloping rock covered with
bird-lime.” In Greece, the scene became fantastic and memorable: the
pantaloons and male petticoats, the embroidered jackets, the noble
faces and ferocious moustachios--it is the Greece of Edmond About--and
the town itself, dirty, grimly picturesque, with old men who look like
Pericles reduced to a _charbonnier_.
From Syra to Salonica: at daybreak Melville came on deck to see Mt.
Olympus, covered with snow, and Ossa and Pelion to the south, with Mt.
Atlas, rather conical, on the opposite shore. In port, the same welter
of picturesqueness, dirt, modern needs, ancient beauty. The remains of
a Roman triumphal arch across a street and the fragments of a noble
Greek edifice, three columns and part of a pediment, used as a gateway
and support to the outhouse of a Jew’s abode. The English resident
comes aboard ship: he has that cockney confidence in the rights and
privileges of God’s Englishman that makes the English so comical and so
efficient wherever they go. He tells Melville he has been for a day’s
shooting in the Vale of Tempe. Ye Gods! Whortleberrying on Olympus! The
countryside: hot-houses and trellises. The monastery where Melville was
served with sweetmeats, fruit, and coffee, under an ancient sycamore.
Under all these little odd stimulations, the palate becomes less jaded
and the eyes are refreshed; the spirit itself becomes eager.
When, finally, the ship sets out for Constantinople, Olympus shows in
the moonlight like a ship of white cloud. On deck, the rich Turkish
effendis, in their long, furred robes of yellow, attended by their
harems, securely guarded in tents, give Melville other things to think
about. Orientals have no hearth, no bed, and never blush! The women are
pretty; for the Mohammedan religion disdains the corset, along with a
good part of Western ethics and religion. These creatures are lazy,
gracious, voluptuous; in Constantinople Melville finds that women with
ugly faces are rare, and that every other window shows faces, Jewish,
Grecian, Armenian, which in America would be a cynosure in a ballroom.
Does Melville suspect that enjoyment of the rites of sex, skill and
wisdom in that enjoyment, have contributed by sexual selection and
general good health to this beauty? No: this is one aspect of life
where, as we shall again see later, he observes the facts, but finds no
clues.
As the ship approaches Constantinople, the contrasts pile up: the sail
up the Hellespont is exhilarating, although spoiled a little by the
mists: at night, as the ship is lying by in a fog, he hears only the
bells of the neighbouring ships, and the sharp bark of the pariah dogs
on the shore. The passengers endure sea-sickness, discomfort, and damp
for two days. Melville turns to an old Turk and says: This is very bad.
The Turk answers: God’s will is good, and smokes his pipe in cheerful
resignation. That is the East’s answer to our Western fretfulness,
to our desire to discipline the elements and remove all the natural
obstacles to man’s existence and happiness: but the East pays its price
for it: the beauties of Constantinople are shrouded in dank, odourous
streets that are unmarked and unnamed and lead nowhere: the priests
in the Mosque of St. Sophia sell the precious mosaics as they fall
to the floor, not endeavouring to repair the scaling walls of that
superb interior: the bazaars are a wilderness of traffic. Melville
loses himself and is confounded and bewildered by the din, the barbaric
confusion, of the whole city. At night he does not dare to leave the
hotel, for fear of being assassinated for the sake of a watch or a
ring. In short, failing to struggle against God’s will, the East puts
up, in the same easy spirit, with every species of human roguery: that
is no answer to the White Whale! Indeed, Melville scarcely dares walk
the streets in the daylight without keeping his hand on his purse: for
no discoverable reason whatever, he was followed about for two or three
hours by an infernal Greek and his confederates, whom he could neither
intimidate nor elude. He began to feel nervous, remembering that the
fearful intent of Schiller’s ghost scene hangs upon being followed in
Venice by an Armenian; and he was thankful when he finally escaped.
But the views! The scenes from the steamer up the Bosphorous to
Buykudesh: magnificent! the whole panorama is one pomp of art and
nature. Europe and Asia are here shown at their best: a gallery of
ports and harbours formed by the interchange of promontory and bay:
porpoises sport in the blue, and large flights of pigeons overhead go
through evolutions like those of armies, whilst ships anchor at the
foot of ravines, deep among green basins, where the only canvas one
would expect would be tents. No wonder the Czars have always coveted
the capital of the Sultans: no wonder the Russian, among his firs,
sighs for these myrtles, cedars, cypresses. The green minarets of the
cypress contrast with the gold minarets of the Mosque: so nature and
man, so death and life, intermingle, too. Kiosk and fountain, dark
trees and daisies tipped with crimson, stand out with the jewelled
clearness of a Persian miniature: one would think that these scenes
would melt away like some castle of confectionery if the elements
treated them rudely.
Nearer, Melville is in the atmosphere of the Arabian Nights: the aspect
of the first bridge, coming back, is like that of a Grand Fancy Dress
Ball: the air is an immense Persian rug: 1,500,000 men are the actors
in a vast and endless procession, pedlars, beggars, confectionery
sellers, malefactors chained together with iron necklaces and rings;
porters with immense burdens, military officers, ladies in yellow
slippers, black eunuchs followed by white servants, sherbet sellers,
Georgians, shepherds marching in sheep’s clothing, sheep, droves of
donkeys followed by animated little boys poking them assiduously,
boys with Arabian Nights names, Yusef, Hassan, Hamet. But if it has
the beauty of some colossal London pantomime, it also has its defect:
Melville cannot step over the footlights. He sees these Turks,
Armenians, Georgians, Greeks: he would like to know them better: but
for conversation he must turn to the captain or the English resident,
or the fellow tourist. He wearies of this spectatorial attitude, these
long days when he cannot talk to a sympathetic soul. Melville had got
nearer to the Typees by living among them than he did with these closer
brethren. After six days in Constantinople, he set off by steamer for
Alexandria, via Smyrna; for, though he makes what he can of these
profane diversions, the chief end of these travels is Terra Sancta
itself.
The vessel stopped at Smyrna, and Melville had his first smell of
the nearer East: camel-dung drying against the walls of the houses,
for fuel, and the camel himself, the supercilious ambassador of this
civilization, with his neck out like a tortoise, and his tail like
an eel, by which the driver directed him, the swaying of the rider
increasing with the motion of the camel, as in the mast of a ship, the
higher one climbs. What a unique creature: he carries his neck like a
clergyman in a stiff cravat, his feathery forelegs, his long lank hind
ones, and his spongy hoofs, ploughing through the muddy lanes like four
mops--in short, a cross between an ostrich and a grasshopper! Melville
was thrilled by the curious appearance of strings of laden camels
passing through the narrow, crowded ways of the bazaar--and he learned
that these gorgeous Turkish clothes, many of them, were made of cotton
and silk imported into Lancashire and reproduced and sent back to the
native land, to the ruin of Turkish manufacturers, and the misery of
the Manchester operative, just as pure copper was sent to England, and
after being alloyed and cheapened was returned as unstamped coin to
Constantinople.
The ship steamed out of Smyrna and passed the bleak islands that had
once meant so much in history, Delos, flowery in fable, but desolate at
best and now quite sterile; and Patmos, another disenchanting isle; and
Timos, with its small hamlets and the little churches sticking perkily
out mid the low huts of the villages. Christmas Day Melville spent at
Syra again: he mentions the captain’s mild observance of the feast in a
glass of champagne; but he put in the notebook no private or domestic
memory. Perhaps he took to heart the advice he had already framed in
Pierre: “With a continent and an ocean between him and his wife--thus
sundered from her by whatever imperative cause for a long term of
years:--the husband, if passionately devoted to her and by nature
broodingly sensitive of soul were wise to forget her till he embrace
again.”
Melville contrasted these bleak, desolate Aegean Islands with those of
the Polynesian archipelago: the former had lost their virginity, whilst
the latter were as fresh as at their first creation. Melville knew that
withered feeling. To look upon the yellow of Patmos, who would believe
that a god had been there; and, one may add, to look upon the sear tint
of Melville’s soul, during the strained years that had just passed, who
would believe that a god had once reposed there, either?
At last the Alexandrian lighthouse came into view; and shortly after
that Pompey’s pillar, looking like a huge stick of candy that had long
been sucked. Melville made a quick excursion to Cairo; and spent two
nights there, wandering through the streets, where the houses seemed
a collection of old orchestras, organs, proscenium boxes, or like
masses of old grotesque furniture, lumbering a garret, and covered
with dust: the streets, so narrow, through the projection of the upper
storeys, that they seemed almost tunnels, made noon itself dim: in the
lonelier parts of the city many of the houses were uninhabited and had
a ghoulish look: but the city itself, for all these desolate houses and
stoved-in domes and rubbish-filled alleys, was alive with bargain and
chaffer and shouting camel drivers and whining blind men: desert and
verdure clashed together like splendour and squalor, like gloom and
gaiety: such violent chiaroscuro in all the senses bewildered one like
strong wine on an empty stomach.
The Pyramids completed the effect of this exploration. Together,
they made a magnificent, a terrible, an unforgettable day. From the
distance, the Pyramids jutted over the sand like purple mountains. To
ascend the great Pyramid, there were as many different routes as there
are for crossing the Alps: precipice on precipice, cliff on cliff.
Nothing in Nature but the sea gives such an idea of vastness; the very
grass that grows around the Pyramids does not touch them, as if in
awe of them. Exhausted a little with his climb, a pain in his chest,
Melville found the Arab guides tender: as he hurried on, for none but
the phlegmatic could scale this mound deliberately, the Arabs in their
white flowing robes might have been angels conducting him up to heaven.
One old man fainted halfway up and had to be brought down: he essayed
to go inside and fainted again: it was too much for him.
Well, it was almost too much for Melville: it was not the sense of
height but the sense of immensity that was stirred: with all other
architecture, however vast, the eye is gradually inured to the sense of
magnitude by passing from part to part: but here there was no storey
or stage: it was all or nothing, not height or breadth or length or
depth but unspeakable vastness, less like courses of masonry than like
strata of rocks, a long slope of crags and precipices. As with the
ocean, you learned as much of its vastness by the first glance as you
would in a month. The great Pyramid refused to be studied or adequately
comprehended. Nor had it lost by the tearing away of its casing,
though it had scaled enough stone to build a walled town; on the
contrary, when it presented a smooth plane it must have lost as much
in impressiveness as the ocean does when unfurrowed--a dead calm of
masonry. A feeling of awe and terror gradually came over Melville: the
Arabs were no longer angels, but seemed, in their soft, imperturbable
way, somehow malign. Stooping and doubling in the interior, as in a
coal shaft, Melville shuddered at the ancient Egyptians: they had a
mixture of the cunning and the awful. Moses learned his lore from the
Egyptians: the awful idea of Jehovah was born there. They must needs
have been terrible inventors, those ancient wise men: as out of the
crude forms of the natural earth they could evoke by art the Pyramids,
so, out of the dull elements of the insignificant thoughts that are in
all men, they could by analogous art rear the transcendent conception
of God. Indeed, the Egyptians had outwitted mortality. The Pyramids
were conceived out of an energy as mighty as Nature’s: nought but an
earthquake or a geological revolution could smother it up. That was
something like an answer to the White Whale--albeit such a distant
answer. The pyramidical energy, as well as the pyramidical scorn, were
both lacking in Melville now, high though they had towered in Moby-Dick.
Back in his high-ceilinged room of Shepherd’s Hotel, with its
almost monkish barrenness, the Pyramids still loomed before Herman
Melville--something vast, indefinite, uncomfortable, and awful.
Nothing that he met in the holy ways of Jerusalem, on the Mount of
Temptation or in the Garden of Gethsemane, compared with the powerful
impression left on him by the Pyramids. Did his instinct at last tell
him that power was necessary, but that power alone was not enough,
that Power and Love must work together, harmoniously married, as in
one of the oldest of mythic figures, before man’s triumph is anything
but evanescent? The issue of power and love, knowledge and sympathy,
contrivance and imagination, is art; and the highest product of art is
not a painting, a statue, a book, a pyramid, but a human personality.
When power and love were divorced in the personality, love became
impotent, and power became malign and unlovely; and the personality
itself mouldered, mouldered into a Jackson, a Timon, an Ahab, a Maria
Glendinning, a Pierre, an Isabel. The Egyptians certainly had not
forgotten love; and the Nile itself, which spread greenness when its
floods receded, was the symbol of its benign fertility. Did some hint
of this touch Melville in Egypt or in Palestine? Apparently, yes; for
in Clarel we shall see the germs of a new feeling about life, and the
source of that feeling is love, a clear and unambiguous love.
5
What further impact the journey made upon Melville’s mind, we shall
best gather when we come to consider Clarel and some of his minor
poems; and the further events of his journey home _via_ Italy,
the Netherlands, and England can well be condensed into scattered
observations and epigrams that punctuate the account in his journals.
Passing Patmos, Melville was again afflicted with the great curse of
modern travel--scepticism. “Could no more realize that St. John had
ever had revelations here than when off Juan Fernandez could believe
in Robinson Crusoe according to Defoe.” “Pompeii like any other town.
Same old humanity. All the same whether one be dead or alive. Pompeii
comfortable sermon. Like Pompeii better than Paris.” Pisa: “Campanile
like pine poised just ere snapping. You wait to hear crack. Like
Wordsworth’s mooncloud, it will move all together if it move at all,
for Pillars all line with it.” “Rome fell flat on me. Oppressing
flat.... Tiber a ditch, yellow as saffron. The whole landscape nothing
independent of association. St. Peter’s looks small from tower of
Capitol.... Dome not so wonderful as St. Sophia’s.... Went to Baths
of Caracalla. Wonderful. Massive. Ruins form as it were natural
bridges of thousands of arches. There are glades and thickets among
the ruins--high up.--Thought of Shelley. Truly, he got his inspiration
here. Corresponded with his drama and mind. Still majesty and desolate
grandeur.” “Quirinal Palace.... The Gardens--a paradise without the
joy--freaks and caprices of endless wealth ... as stone is sculptured
into forms of foliage, so here foliage turned into forms of sculpture.”
Florence: “Breughel’s picture much pleased me. Not pleased with the
Venus de Medici, but very much astonished at the Wrestlers, and charmed
with Titian’s Venus.” “Rather be in Venice on a rainy day than in
any other capital on a fine one.” London: “Crystal Palace--digest of
the universe. Vast toy. No substance. Such appropriation of space as
is made by a rail fence.” Oxford: “It was here I first confessed my
gratitude for my motherland and could view her with pride. Oxford to an
American as well worth visiting as Paris, though in a different way.”
6
During this crowded journey, while Melville was in Italy, there
happened an event, obscure, mysterious, obliquely narrated, and
published only at the end of his life, which gives us a further clue
to Melville’s character and experience. Knowing Melville’s habits of
composition, one is fairly sure that some objective fact lies beneath
the surface of the verse called After the Pleasure Party: all the more
because he published the poem only after he had reached the serenity
and safety of old age. That these verses were not merely the product
of untethered imagination one suspects, too, because their theme,
remorse and bitter regret after renouncing a passionate experience, is
underlined by the words of another poem, Madame Mirror:
What pangs after parties of pleasure,
What smiles but disclosures of pain!
This long poem, After the Pleasure Party, stands out with particular
boldness because it contains the only direct references to sexual
passion that one finds in Melville’s entire work, except for haphazard
and unimportant incidents--or the plainly fictitious events in Pierre.
It is a faint and intricate clue; but one must not neglect it.
Melville pictures a paradisiac garden in Italy: the upland falling
behind the house, fragrant with jasmin and orange blossom, the white
marble of the house itself, gleaming between the lanes of austere
trees, the green terraces falling in gentle cataracts down to the
starlit Mediterranean Sea: a place of beauty and an hour of balm “after
long revery’s discontent.” The pilgrim, dusty with travel in barren
lands, revels in the sensuous peace: he is not so completely the
pilgrim, so thoroughly the hermit, that his heart is entirely his own:
on the contrary, it is out of a desperate dryness and loneliness of
soul that Melville is suddenly beset by such temptations as the hermits
of the Thebaid found in the desert. We have no image of the woman who
walked with Melville through these green walks, under the star-bright
sky: he himself tried, in the years that followed, to forget “the glade
wherein Fate spun Love’s ambuscade,” tempting him to flout pale years
of cloistral life and “flush himself in sensuous strife.” We do not
know if it was she who repulsed him, as the shore repulses the hungry
billows, tired of the homeless deep, or whether it was a resistance
within himself that wrecked and scattered the impulses that were
driving him against the warm object of his desire: but we know that,
flushed perhaps by wine, and stirred by the fragrant spring night, sex
asserted itself again in Melville: the “dear desire through love to
sway” came over him, and when he found himself baffled, attempting to
rule his passion yet not able to reign, neither conquering the woman
herself nor the passion she had awakened, he was aware of a dreary
shame of frustration. Blocked in his highest powers of thought, in
his career as a writer, Melville found himself equally defeated--and
perhaps by the same cluster of images--in that other citadel of
personality. Bitterly he cries: “And kept I long heaven’s watch for
this, contemning love, for this, even this?”
There is the cry of the passionate man who in his marriage had kept to
the letter of his pledge, and yet found himself struggling against its
spirit--struggling and yet paralysed. The sudden opening of passion,
that had begun at lunch this day, as the guests of the house, like the
ladies and gentlemen in the prologue to the Decameron, had lain about
in groups on the grass, this passion, deepening in a secluded glade
under the Mediterranean night, had pulled Melville off his lonely
throne: in a dream he was a king, perhaps, a lonely king--an idiot
crowned with straw! That gust of passion had brought enlightenment:
the fires in him were banked, not dead: but it left him bereaved. He
shrank from its consequences. In this enlightenment he remembered and
magnified other incidents on his journey: the barefoot peasant girl in
Naples who had climbed up the hills near the wheels of his carriage and
had given him the sudden impulse to fire upon her the petty hell within
his own bosom. Hers was a wily innocence, and one can only vaguely
guess at Melville’s memories when he exclaims: “The cheat! On briars
her buds were strung.... To girls, strong man’s a novice weak.” All
this became part of his “sad rosary of belittling pain.”
Melville might seem to others, might in opaque moments seem to himself,
a pale, scholarly man, immersed solely in things of the mind: but what
a caricature that apparition was of the actual man! The pallor did
not mean he could not feel the sun when it shone upon him: “the plain
lone bramble thrills with Spring as much as vines that grapes shall
bring,” and when this mood was uppermost, how gladly would he throw his
arms around some radiant ninny, the first glad, willing girl he might
meet, and buy the veriest wanton’s rose--“would but my bee therein
repose.” If only he could remake himself, or free himself from this
disturbance, this void tormenting urge, this feeling of disunity, this
being but half of a mismatched whole: surely, there was some anarchic
blunder, some rank cosmic jest, in the state that made the single
self incomplete and yet set all the odds against the possibility that
selves who matched should meet and mate. This was part of Melville’s
disillusion, that hot impetus he had felt in that fine Italian garden
promised in ultimate reward no more than his marriage, equally fervid
and romantic at the start, had brought him. And yet--and yet--perhaps
this temporary impulse was an impulse to act upon, whether it had any
cosmic justification or not: the turbulent heart and the rebel brain
did not satisfy themselves so easily with abstract reasons.
For Amor so resents a slight
And hers had been such haught disdain
He long may wreak his boyish spite,
And, boylike, little reck the pain.
When Melville leaves this scene of his thwarted renewal, and comes to
Rome, confronting its pagan statuary and its Christian churches, he has
half an impulse to gather all his doubts and difficulties together and
make a sacrifice of them to the Church, in return for the peace she
gives: but something deeper in him, something reflected in the mighty
statuary and art of the Roman and the Greek, prompts him to turn to
Athene herself, who united power and peace, far from the “sexual feud”
that “clogs the aspirant’s life.” But no outer institution or activity
could share Melville’s burden: at bottom, he feels hopeless of either
Church or of Art. Never, he says, passion peace shall bring, nor art
inanimate for long inspire. Ah, no! because the sick man turns to these
things as to a powerful medicine, to serve as a specific, once and for
all; whereas in health, they must be treated as food, to be welcomed
recurrently. Melville was sick; and he was aware of it. “Nothing may
help or heal while Amor, incensed, remembers wrong.”
For scope to give his vengeance play
Himself he’ll blaspheme and betray.