O pray! Example take too, and have care.
These last lines were not given to Melville by his experience but
were the fruits of his ultimate reflection: and there was wisdom in
them. Sex is deep and central in every life, and the wrongs that are
committed against Amor, whether they are wrongs of abstention or wrongs
of satiety, whether they are the weakness of a love unpolarized, or
the weakness of a love whose validity is established solely in legal
documents and obligations, these wrongs may exact their revenge on
every phase of a man’s activity. There is no formula for love, except
the tact and usage of lovers. Reserve, indifference, and abstention
destroy that tact: the lover loses his sense of occasion, and is
impassive where he should be quick, or tormented, as Melville was
tormented by the peasant girl, when he should be calm. The matter
of loyalty does not enter here; or rather, all these thoughts were
disloyalties; indeed, Melville was disloyal to the spirit of his
marriage in a thousand repugnances or indifferences that far more
seriously undermined his relations with Elizabeth than the most
outright liaison would have done, had it left Melville poised,
collected, refreshed.
In this experience “After the Pleasure Party,” Melville approached
close to a central dilemma in his life: he approached it, but he was
paralysed, paralysed by the habit of self-control as other men are
thrust into helpless action by their lust. Melville’s career, his
thought, his vision demanded a singleness of purpose: to attain this
singleness he was all eagerness, as he put it in Pierre, “to cast
off the most intense, beloved bond, as a hindrance to the attainment
of whatever transcendental object that usurper mood so tyrannically
suggests. Then the beloved bond seems to hold us to no essential
good; lifted to exalted mounts, we can dispense with all the vale;
endearments we spurn; kisses are blisters to us; and forsaking the
palpitating forms of mortal love, we emptily embrace the boundless
and unbodied air. We think we are not human; we become as immortal
bachelors and gods; but again, like the Greek gods themselves, prone
we descend to earth; glad to be uxorious once more; glad to hide these
godlike heads within the bosoms made of too-seducing clay.”
This pilgrimage of Melville’s, from that high talk with Hawthorne
on the bleak sands of Southport and those unspeakable thoughts that
welled up in him when he confronted the Pyramids, to the sting of a
passing peasant girl or the soft hints and caresses in the arboured
walk by the Mediterranean, had shown Melville the extremes of his own
being: alone with divinity, in solitude, he found himself reaching,
thirstily, eagerly, towards the all-too-seducing clay. For Melville,
unlike Plato, there was no happy union between these opposites: he had
no wise Diotima to teach him how the children of the flesh may lead to
that union with the other self out of which the children of the spirit
are born: nor did he realize that the lust of the satisfied man is
incomparably more cleansing to the spirit than the tormented chastity
of the unsatisfied one. This was a misfortune for Melville. His
salvation would have been to recognize that he had reached the limits
of his own lonely excursion: that all a man can find as a solitary
being, and value, and cleave to, exploring in utter loneliness the
trackless ways of the universe, he had achieved in Moby-Dick: pride and
power and the isolated untouched self had nothing further to teach him,
and there was no dominion more sterile than that long reign. He must
withdraw from this proud isolation, not into the disguised pride and
the equal isolation of humility, but into participation with the life
around him and into what he had inherited from the past--not scorning
Plato or Goethe because their union had been fruitful, whilst his great
immaculacy had proved black and sterile.
In achieving his depths, Melville had missed the surface: he had
brought up fire and lava and ashes, from that deep volcano of his
being, but he had never in maturity properly explored the woods and
groves and gardens that give men peace and untroubled love--and it
was pride, a self-defeating pride, that urged him to return to those
depths, prizing “the clear intelligence alone” and disdaining a love
that was “linked and locked with a self impure.” Partly, Melville
overcame this pride, and he mingled with his fellows and widened his
explorations in the region they had settled and cultivated: but these
new aims did not engross him as the pursuit of Moby-Dick had done. Had
he been able to surrender more easily to love, to his wife, to his
family relations, at thirty-eight, he might have discovered, while his
physical powers were healing, that triumphant serenity and surety of
purpose which did not come to him until his old age had transmuted his
rejected passions and made a fertile union with reality.
Melville left his Italian garden, with chaos still struggling in his
soul. For slighting Amor he was for a while destined to know, not inner
peace, but the sting and poison of every chance arrow: in Venice,
floating on the canal in a “swoon of a noon and a trance of tide” like
calms far off Peru, he was to hear a lattice click and see between the
slats, mutely summoning him, the loveliest eyes of a girl. He who had
faced peril in nature and man, who had swum between the whale’s black
flukes and the white shark’s fin, and who had wandered in the enemy’s
desert, New York, warily scanning the envy and slander that followed
him there, he who had faced these things cannot stand the “basilisk
look” of that girl: he bids his boatman throw off his drowsiness and
shoot quickly by. The wanderer discovers that sirens are real: they do
in fact lie in wait for a man, wooing him by the same deadly muses.
He runs from them--excusing his shame with the memory of Ulysses,
“brave, wise, and Venus’ son,” but the very fact that he imprisons this
incident in verse and publishes it more than thirty years after shows
that he did not escape easily.
“There is no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy,” Melville
wrote in Pierre, “that a mortal man can possibly evoke, which will
stand the final test in a real impassioned onset of Life and Passion
upon him. Then all the fair philosophy or Faith--phantoms that he
raised from the mist, slide away and disappear as ghosts at cock-crow.
For Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass. Amidst his
gray philosophizings, Life breaks upon a man like a morning.” Without
conceiving Melville’s philosophy as a phantom, one may still wish that
it had confronted and not so desperately fled from these enlightening
assaults of life and passion. He needed no further share of restrained
and circumspect virtues: he needed the courage of life, the courage to
be glad with the morning sun, to breathe deeply the fragrance of the
air, to relax his limbs in the heat of noon, to feel again the dear
inner vigour of his manliness, that vigour which a man is conscious of
only in the presence of a woman who rouses him. Denying that vigour,
he found that the dawn was smothered in grey clouds, and the rose had
lost its fragrance, and the sun its power to heal. His journey helped
him recover his interest in life and his poise: it enabled him to carry
on as a man: but, though he resumed his work, that final confidence
or desperation men need if they are to undertake the great labour of
creation was still insufficient. The masculine attack, so bold, so
deep-seated in Mardi, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick, did not wholly come
back--and if one asks the reason for this one will find the answer, in
part, “traced under an image of Amor Threatening.”
7
Melville returned home toward the middle of 1857. Meanwhile, The
Confidence Man, published by Sampson, Low and Company, and not by his
old publishers, Harper’s, had done little to improve his fortunes.
Indeed, its English edition was so small that it for long remained
unknown to the bibliographer; and in America the work, though it
received occasional praise, did not fare much better. Except in the
roughest political lampooning, satire did not penetrate the leathery
optimism and the cast-iron self-righteousness of antebellum America;
and if Melville wanted support and confidence, The Confidence Man was
the wrong way to go about it. One need not be surprised that the sequel
was never published, and in all likelihood, never written.
Melville’s resolve to be annihilated was lessened by his journey: for
though he had not been shattered with light on the road to Damascus,
faith flickered and smoked occasionally, like smouldering wood
before it is ready to blaze. The shearing of his head, the donning
of sackcloth, the last ironic act of renunciation was still almost a
decade away: with new resolution, he made a succession of attempts to
regain the position he had once occupied.
The lecture lyceum gave him his first opportunity: the Civil
War was the second. Between 1857 and 1860 Melville joined the
politicians and the woman suffragists and the prohibitionists and the
transcendentalists and the Fourierists and the travellers from strange
parts of the world and distinguished foreigners, in the one corner of
the marketplace where they could all get a living: the public platform.
It was not an easy pill for him to swallow, for though he lectured on
the sculpture of the Vatican and the sights of Rome, he was known,
hailed, gaped at still as the famous author of Peedee, Pog-Dog, and
Hullabaloo--the man who had lived among the cannibals. Well might he
write in Pierre: “Permanently to alleviate pain, we must first dart
some added pangs.” He was brave enough about the whole business; in
1858 he wrote: “I should be glad to lecture there [in Baltimore]
or anywhere. If they will pay expenses and give a reasonable fee,
I am ready to lecture in Labrador or on the Isle of Desolation off
Patagonia.”
Melville showed himself; he lectured; but he stooped no further. Mid
all the spellbinders and strutting celebrities of the period, with
their characteristic masks, sonorities, grimaces, this quiet man, with
the small, fine nose and the weary, whimsical smile, and an air of
patient earnestness, could have cut no very great figure to a public
that had never been used to the emphasis of under-statement. Indeed,
Melville’s lecture fees tell as much: they averaged around fifty
dollars a lecture, and at this time Thoreau, with even a narrower
reputation, got as much for a reading. The lectures gave Melville an
opportunity to travel, and he must have welcomed this: he went as far
afield as Montreal and Milwaukee: but in all he gave less than thirty
lectures. One wonders about his audiences. Did Thoreau meet him at the
station in Concord or did Whitman listen to him in New York? Whom did
he fall in with on the Ohio river steamers? What did he make of the
emigrant New Englanders, Germans, merchants, farmers, roustabouts,
gamblers? Had his Mississippi buffoons touched them off, or did they
make his staunchest effects pallid? Did he identify himself with them,
share their aims, feel a thrill of anticipation at their destinies--or
did he foresee in them the final disruption of the America that had
nourished him?
The record is almost a blank; but a newspaper report of one of the
lectures, in the Boston Journal, 1857, shows that Melville’s shrewd
eye was far from being turned inward. Describing the statues in the
Church of St. John Lateran, he observes that “Socrates looks like an
Irish comedian, Julius Caesar so sensible and businesslike of aspect
it might be taken for the bust of a railroad president; Seneca with
the visage of a pawnbroker; Nero a fast young man, Plato with the
locks and airs of an exquisite, as if meditating the destinies of the
world under the hands of a hair-dresser.” These comments prove, what
all the minor documents of Melville’s life during this period show,
that the jocular irrepressible spirit--“bear with mine infirmity of
jocularity,” he exclaims to Duyckinck--the spirit who had written
Omoo and White-Jacket, was not altogether Timonized or defeated. His
satire still worked obliquely, touching both his own countrymen and
their pragmatic contemporaries, the Romans. Nor did Melville conceal
his feelings about the benefits of mickonaree Christianity and “white
civilization.” In another lecture, after quoting from a local English
paper in one of the South Sea Islands, which suggested the propriety of
not having the native language taught in the common schools, he threw
down the sheet in plain disgust, and announced to the audience, in
allusion to the reputed desire of the natives of Georges Island to be
annexed to the United States, that he was sorry to see it, since, as a
friend of humanity, and especially a friend of the South Sea Islanders,
he would pray, and call upon all Christians to pray with him, that
the Polynesians might be delivered from all foreign and contaminating
influences.
During this period of lecturing, Melville began to write again, with no
hope of profit or fame, but for his own satisfaction; and, anticipating
Thomas Hardy’s example, he turned to verse. If one can date his first
new essays in verse--for the poems in Mardi show that there were early
efforts--one must give the time as probably 1858, and for a while only
Elizabeth shared this secret with him. By 1860, before he went for a
voyage with his younger brother, now Captain Thomas Melville, commander
of the Boston clipper Meteor, his verses were numerous enough to make a
volume. The decision to make this voyage came rather suddenly; and one
finds Melville writing to Mr. Duyckinck, mid the haste of departure,
to see if he will undertake to advise with Allan Melville as to a
publisher, and in case of publication, be sure that the printer’s
proof-reader is a careful man. Melville, the author of nine books,
still deferred to Mr. Duyckinck’s professional experience; and, on
getting a favourable reply, he told Duyckinck that “it was quite a wind
from the field of old times.”
From this correspondence with Evert Duyckinck--and an allusion in a
letter to George about Melville’s own “winter and rough weather”--one
gathers that after Pierre there had been an estrangement, or at least
a prolonged silence: in 1856 the Duyckincks had recorded in their
Cyclopedia their conviction that Pierre was a false step, and only now,
after eight years had passed, was the breach healed. As for Melville’s
mood in travel, he had this to say: “I anticipate as much pleasure as,
at the age of forty, one temperately can, on the voyage I am going. I
go under very happy auspices so far as the ship is concerned. A noble
ship and a nobler captain--and he my brother. We have the breadth of
those tropics before us, to sail over twice, and shall round the world.
Our first port is San Francisco, which we shall probably make in 110
days. Thence we go to Manilla--and thence, I hardly know where--I wish
devoutly you were going along. I think it would agree with you. The
prime requisites for enjoyment on sea-voyages, for passengers, is 1st
health--2nd good-nature. Both first rate things, but not universally to
be found.--At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that
respect.” The good-bye and God bless you, with which Melville closed
this letter, showed a sort of solemn warmth. In a lonely life, even an
Evert Duyckinck might prove a comrade....
The book of poetry was never published in its original form. Mr. Meade
Minnigerode conjectures that the manuscript was that of Clarel; but
Melville’s concern, in his memoranda for Allan, that each piece should
be printed on a page by itself, however small the piece, shows, apart
from anything else, that it could not have been Clarel; and when
Melville told his brother, two years later, that he had disposed of his
“doggerel” to a trunkmaker, who took the whole lot off his hands at ten
cents the pound, one must infer that he himself had become dissatisfied
with the bulk of his early work, and destroyed most of it, salvaging
a few pieces, like the verse to the Captain of the Meteor, for his
later volumes. In the first flush of experiment, however, Melville’s
poetry pleased him: the form of verse gave compactness to his thoughts,
and the writing of it did not inflict that long continuous drain on
his vitality that the larger prose pieces called for. Melville would
pace the quarter-deck with his brother, reciting his verses in the
moonlight: the joy of creation, even minor creation, could still stir
him up, and no doubt the cadences of the moving ship, heaving, falling,
rolling, added to the pleasure of the words themselves.
At the end of three months, when they had reached California, Melville
had exhausted his supply of books and papers, probably, and his
brother’s patience, and his own capacity for boredom: by that time his
health had doubtless improved again, and, urging him to break the trip
and quicken his return, his old longing for Elizabeth may have come
back with greater force. He was never quite happy in her company, nor
was he quite happy away from it. All the difficulties of their domestic
economy tended to make their relations prosaic and commonplace, for
one does not cook for and clean and clothe four children without a
considerable amount of unflinching prose; and Elizabeth’s incapacity
for domestic duties and her irritations only made matters worse. Yet
Melville, as far as one can judge, felt not merely affection for
Elizabeth: on these long absences, passion would gather within him
again, like lightning in a heavy summer sky. He might resent her
obtuseness; he might be disappointed by her failure to respond to his
irresponsible hilarity; he might be sobered by the fact that his love
had been unfavourably conditioned by financial burdens and a cramped
household with a scanty larder; but for all that, he clung to her and
needed her. One must take account of this in noting Melville’s moods
and moves and decisions in the decade after 1856. Although Melville,
unfortunately, felt repulsion in a tie that was so plainly rooted in
physical attachment, and longed for a heaven in which there was the
marriage of true minds without the “impurities” and impediments of sex,
although he distrusted the solace of physical union, as he distrusted
all beautiful things which hid the truth from men’s eyes, yet he found
himself perpetually driven back to this wiser folly; and, not turning
easily to any other woman, he kept his faith with Elizabeth.
The rôle was not an easy one for her to bear: make no mistake about it.
Such violence of anticipation and such quick satiety, such tenderness
and such easy disappointment, such self-absorption, and, with it all,
a certain impatience and resentment of the daily round, with its
claims, ceremonies, civilities, annoyances--with all this Elizabeth
Melville was probably never to know such deep, enraptured happiness
in her marriage as Sophia Hawthorne, who had faced dire poverty, too,
had known. Elizabeth was proud of her man: she had faith in him: but
it was only in the closing years of their lives, when, through bitter
experience, she had acquired much, and he, through bitter experience,
had resigned much, that they were on a parity. There is no doubt she
encouraged him in his work, and, whether she understood it or not,
believed in it. While he was gone in 1860 she assiduously looked
after the placing of the manuscript, and would not be put off by the
publishers’ flimsy excuses. Still, for all this sympathy and loyalty,
on both sides, one feels that strain, depression, tenseness, must have
too often marked the life of the Melville household, during these
shadowed years of poverty and ill health and dwindling fame.
If Mrs. Melville stood the strain of it, with all the toughness of
middle age to bear up under it, the children did not fare so well. The
photograph of the Melville children, Malcolm, Frances, Elizabeth, and
Stanwix, taken when the oldest was perhaps twelve or thirteen--that
is, during the early sixties--tells as much: they are a little peaked
and undernourished, and the eldest child’s face is sullen, dour. The
racking poverty of his early youth had left an indelible impression on
Melville himself, and, in even more depressing circumstances, a worse
image was left upon the minds of his growing children. Melville, a
man of originality and penetration in almost every other department
of life, was, one suspects, a commonplace father: he expected his
children to be dutiful and submissive and not to annoy their mother,
and he would read them moral lectures on the whole duty of children,
fearful of their being corrupted by association and contact with the
age, but incapable of directing their impulses into forms of growth
except by desperate exhortation--the most blank and sterile of all
pedagogical methods. He wanted them to be noble and courageous and
honest and indifferent to money, and, dreading the effect of the mean,
bourgeois standards that surrounded them, he was too quick to suspect
the ignoble and the base, forgetting that growth is a happier sign in
childhood than the semblance of perfection. When his little daughter
picked up the word “property” and aired it to her family, Melville
relentlessly teased her about it: if he handed her the butter, he
would hand it to Miss Property: if he met her on the stairs he would
mimic Miss Property: he tormented her for the sins of her elders,
forgetting the terrible sensitiveness of a child to dogging that has
such a bitter animus behind it. This incident will stand for others:
the jolly letters he would write home, with pictures and all manner
of funny printing, or the stories he would tell in a pleasant hour,
did not wipe out the acrid taste or lessen the distance between father
and children. There was nothing to lighten the burden of these days:
these children were orphaned, even when their father sat among them.
One son ran away; another, in 1867, was found dead in his room, of a
rifle wound, under circumstances that left doubt as to whether accident
or suicide had caused the fatality; and one of his daughters could not
recur to the image of her father without a certain painful revulsion.
The picture is not a happy one: but a man with high purposes does not
always leave behind earthly children to bless him. One remembers how
Milton’s daughters cursed him in his own presence, and one realizes
that one can draw no valid conclusions from such conduct--except this,
that a man immersed in his inner vision is a difficult man to live
with, and if he does not renounce his family and its ties at the outset
of his quest, they may live to rise up against him before he is ended
with it. And who was to blame? Milton and Melville wanted the warmth of
domesticity: but their children had no part in the bargain that gave
them cold lodgings in the icy chambers of Heaven, and shabby clothes
and insufficient food and few opportunities for pleasure on the earth.
These children were of Melville’s flesh, but not of his mind: when he
purchased a work of art, a print or a statue for ten dollars, when
there was scarcely bread enough to go round, who can wonder at their
black memories? If they did not understand the need of a famished soul
for art, their father had too quickly forgotten his own humiliation
when he went to sea in a discarded hunting-jacket. Circumstances drove
Melville hard; but poverty alone does not make such a breach between
a parent and his children; and though one must pity Melville in this
extremity of misunderstanding, one cannot but feel that he himself
contributed to it.