except by giving the family a clear title to Arrowhead; so, until
1866, the background of Melville’s life cannot be painted save in
dark colours. In spite of a personal interview with Lincoln in 1861,
Melville was again turned down for a consular post; and two years later
Melville finally decided to leave the Berkshires. To this end, he
purchased a house at 104 East Twenty-sixth Street, in New York, from
his brother, Allan, to whom he sold Arrowhead in part payment. But
misfortune persisted. In removing his household goods from Arrowhead,
the wagon was upset and he was thrown into the frozen ruts of the road.
The injury was so severe that Melville was forced to lie up for many
weeks in a near-by house, and in addition, to sap further his physical
health, the accident left him with a fear of carriage driving. So his
troubles piled up on him; and in the end, they grew so intolerable
that the humour of the whaleboat would return to him, and he would
smile again. I have painted in every sober and painful detail in the
background; the blacks, the dingy blues, the sear browns are the
dominant colours: true: but against this sordid groundwork one must not
build up a blacker foreground: on the contrary, there are occasional
flashes of warm colour or high light, and to leave them out would
falsify the whole picture.
There is a Micawber in all of us, not unfortunately. We may find
life disappointing without losing our taste for breaded veal cutlets
and stout. Overwhelmed by tragic experience, we may still laugh at
a hundred minor absurdities, as Melville no doubt laughed when he
discovered that in 1865 a firm of Philadelphia publishers, who had
taken over the rights to Israel Potter, had brought it out under the
new title of The Refugee, without Melville’s consent, and had set him
down as the author of two wholly imaginary books, The Two Captains and
The Man of the World! Through all his ailments, one infirmity helped
to counteract them, the infirmity of jocularity. He had one steady
comfort and mainstay which only the blackest incidents could erase for
more than a brief period: he had a sense of humour. More than that,
with a little encouragement, he had positive high spirits. If one
were not fully assured of this from a general knowledge of Melville’s
character, the letter he wrote to his brother Thomas in 1862 would
make this point plain: “Yesterday I received from Gansevoort your long
and very entertaining letter to Mamma from Pernambuco. Yes, it was
very entertaining. Particularly the account of that interesting young
gentleman whom you stigmatise for a jackass, simply because he improves
his opportunities in the way of sleeping, eating, and other commendable
customs. That’s the sort of fellow, it seems to me, to get along with.
For my part I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better.
Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one
of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable
about it, too. Think of those sensible and sociable millions of good
fellows, all taking a long, friendly snooze together, under the sod--no
quarrels, no imaginary grievances, no envies, heartburnings, & thinking
how much better the other chap is off--none of this: but all equally
free-&-easy, they sleep away and reel off their nine knots an hour, in
perfect amity.”
Or again, after his accident in 1862, in a letter to Samuel Shaw, his
brother-in-law, the same grave bantering appears: “... I begin to
indulge in the pleasing idea that my life must needs be of some value.
Probably I consume a certain amount of oxygen, which unconsumed might
create some disturbance in nature. Be that as it may, I am going to
try and stick to the conviction named above. Now I have observed that
such an idea, once well-bedded in a man, is a wonderful conservator of
health and almost a prophecy of long life. I once, like other spoonies,
cherished a loose sort of notion that I did not care to live very long.
But I will frankly own that I have now no serious, no insuperable
objections to a respectable longevity. I don’t like the idea of being
left out night after night in a cold churchyard.”
The humour and the sentiments both remind one of another black writer,
a later one, the author of the Shropshire Lad: without losing his inner
thoughts, Melville could nevertheless paraphrase them into a happier
vernacular. Meanwhile, a deeper blackness had settled over the land,
matching, patch for patch, wound for wound, scar for scar, every ill
in Melville’s own body and soul. That darkness was the darkness of
the Civil War; and when it finally lifted, it disclosed a different
country, a different age, a different series of possibilities. The
Civil War was a dividing point in the life of the country, and a
dividing point in Melville’s life. It widened the distance between
Melville and his younger contemporaries and it sealed, with finality,
his own position in society. The provincial culture was overwhelmed;
and what came to take its place was not a genuine culture, but a shoddy
substitute, mere fustian of the spirit. He looked around him after the
worst had happened; and his words must have been Bartleby’s: I know
where I am. That very consciousness was enough to cut him off from the
new society.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: ALARUMS AND RETREATS
Between the provincial society into which Herman Melville was born and
the America in which he found himself at the time of the Civil War
there was a vast difference. The Civil War may in one sense be looked
upon as an attempt to preserve the ideological framework of the United
States at a time when its institutions were in a state of disruption,
and all its typical ways of life were being transformed. In that
the Civil War preserved this framework, upholding the Constitution,
confirming the union of the states, concentrating the powers of
government, it was successful: the union was saved. But the very act of
prosecuting the war confirmed the chaos and hastened the disruption,
so that what was saved was not freedom and equality, the freedom of
voluntary association and local initiative, the equality of access to
an unlimited amount of utilizable land: what was left was just the
opposite of these things, servility and inequality. Land and natural
resources, scattered broadcast during the Civil War under the Homestead
Act, and under various acts to promote railroad building, were turned
into exacting monopolies; and the government itself became the
principal agent for establishing and extending privilege. In less than
half a generation Walt Whitman was forced to modify many of his fondest
hopes for America: for with all these new agents of exploitation
dominant, there was no longer any way of distinguishing the American
proletariat from that of Europe, except in their independent manners--a
relic of an equality that had once been real.
The disruption symbolized by the Civil War was expressed in a hundred
ways; and when one examines these manifestations carefully they can
all be characterized by a single figure: the failure to achieve form.
One sees the difference between provincial and industrial America in
the political definition of their units: New England, for example, is
a natural region, like Brittany and Provence, with a mode of thought
and an institutional form based upon certain common geographic features
and cultural history; the new states and territories that were founded
beyond the Alleghenies had no form other than that expressed by the
arbitrary lines drawn by the surveyor: their content was simply so
many blank square miles. The older cities of the seaboard, with the
exception of Philadelphia, had a central nucleus which had grown out
of local needs and habits: the size of the blocks was determined by
the depth of the houses, the amount of garden space in the rear, the
traffic that would pass in the streets: in the new cities no customs
and habits played a part in the configuration of the city except those
of realty speculation: by 1850, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Chicago
had all forfeited to the land-gambler sites originally set aside for
civic centres. In architecture, the failure to achieve form was equally
conspicuous: windows, doors, rooms, façades, even apart from their
grotesque efforts at decoration, all became gawky and ill-proportioned.
The energies of the country went into purely quantitative achievements:
their only formal equivalent was money. The production in tons of iron,
miles of steel rails, bushels of wheat, went up: cities increased in
size: but the iron was used for the preposterous fronts of office
buildings, the railroad served to deplete the hinterland, and the
cities were dingy firetraps of wood or dingier prisons of brownstone.
The war itself tore up and shot to pieces vast quantities of iron and
many miles of railroad, and sundry towns and villages: but that was
the true destination of all these quantitative efforts even in peace:
for industrialism produced only an occasional genuine form, like the
Eads Bridge, and for the most part its products were fit only to be
consumed hastily and replaced and destroyed again. No wonder this
civilization sweated day and night, without holidays, to produce its
evanescent goods; while, in the Middle Ages, the great cathedrals
and town halls were erected, without labour-saving machinery, in a
rude agricultural society which spent a third of its year in holidays
devoted to prayer, meditation, or festival. Where there is form and
culture, there is true conservation of energy through the arts: where
there is only energy, without end or form, the mechanism may be speeded
up indefinitely without increasing anything except the waste and
lost motion. Southern society, in which a provincial system of caste
and culture held together, produced factories and slave barracks, in
Charleston, for example, that maintained, uncorrupted, the forms of
its classic past: but outside these aristocratic backwaters, chaos was
dominant--and even in the South, one feels, it was only postponed.
In this sprawling, undisciplined America, a new type of character
was uppermost. Melville described this new type when he touched on
Ethan Allen in Israel Potter: “Allen,” he said, “seems to have been
a curious combination of a Hercules, a Joe Miller, a Bayard, and a
Tom Hyer. He was frank, bluff, companionable as a Pagan, convivial, a
Roman, hearty as a harvest. His spirit was essentially Western; and
herein is his peculiar Americanism; for the Western spirit is, or will
yet be (for no other can be) the true American.” It was a sign of the
waning of provincial faith that before the war everybody was eagerly
looking for this individual, this type, who would serve as a symbol
of unity. Even Emerson and Thoreau looked wistfully toward the rough
fellows of the frontier to express what was common to all Americans. A
provincial culture glories in its differences: the power to mould and
express them is its unique quality: a Jefferson, a Franklin, an Adams
were not only as far apart as Virginia, Philadelphia, and Boston: they
were as far apart, in many ways, as London, Paris, and Weimar. But
in the period before the war, the frontier type, Jackson, Harrison,
Clay, Frémont, Lincoln, was put forward as the sum of all our possible
Americas--albeit these figures were as far from the Swedes of Minnesota
or the Germans of Wisconsin as they were from the Gansevoorts and the
Randolphs. In a period of dissolution a false unity seems preferable
to no common bond at all; and in the uncertainty, the disintegration,
the dispersion of American society, under the vast tides of immigration
and the inexorable flow of the coal-and-iron civilization, political
Union became a compensatory symbol for all the social and cultural
fragmentation that existed.
The political and social results of the Civil War, as they have worked
out during the last two generations, have made us a little sceptical
of the sacred, unchallengeable shibboleths under which the war itself
was fought: we see that the prime issues of the great conflict were
silenced, rather than settled, by the decisive victory of the North.
Unfortunately, the South’s political contentions, which were partly
valid, were vitiated by the issue of slavery. Mid all the decisive
statesmanship displayed south of the Mason and Dixon line, no one was
firm enough or far-sighted enough, after Jefferson’s time, to see
that the holding of human beings in bondage, without hope or means
of escape, was an untenable anachronism: even the Russian autocracy
recognized that. The French Revolution had made this particular form of
human degradation unpalatable; like incest or tribal revenge, it could
not be related to a modern society. The burden of that institution,
indeed, belonged to the whole country: the great mistake of the South,
from 1830 onwards, was to assume as a divine necessity or benefit what
should have been shared with the rest of the country as an intolerable
evil--to be disposed of by some direct economic adjustment.
Melville had his misgivings about current political institutions; in
Mardi he pointed out that many of the boasted freedoms of America
were the product of free land and an uncrowded domain; and though he
was a republican, he recognized inequality, and had no hope of doing
away with those distinctions between man and man in a functional
capacity, which separate captain, mates, and crew. His own outlook was
emotionally patrician and aristocratic; but his years in the forecastle
had modified those feelings, and one needs some such compound word as
aristodemocracy to describe his dominant political attitude. Melville
may have had his moments of admiration for the gracious ways of the
South; but, quite properly, he regarded the United States as a place
where narrow tribalisms had been successfully dropped, where the entire
blood of Europe joined together from a thousand sources, the country
being not so much a nation in the old sense, as a world, a neighbourly
world; and he doubtless looked upon the Southern claim to independence
as a return to tribalism and narrowness.
Like most men of good will, Melville looked forward to a time when the
world itself would be federated into a whole, so that the conflicts
between peoples and tribes and communities, the inevitable and salutary
conflicts, would not take place on the physical plane--where they are
disastrous and prove nothing--but on the plane of culture. With this in
view, the breaking up of a federation is a mode of political atavism:
and the attempt reinforced Melville’s natural repugnance to slavery.
Unfortunately, the maintenance of a union by compulsive methods leads
to an enthronement of the powers of the central government, and a
diminution of a regional independence; the military strength of
the central government and its impudence in serving special groups
within the state, in turn becomes an obstacle to the pacification of
the world. Melville could scarcely anticipate this result; but his
philosophy had a place for the evil which dogs the footsteps of the
good, and when he said that America might turn out to be the Paul Jones
of nations, intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless
ambitions, civilized in externals but savage at heart, he may partly
have anticipated the outcome of that political supremacy he expected
the United States finally to attain. By the time the war opened, there
was established a certain fatalism in Melville’s mind which made him
lenient to the forces that seemed to him evil: they, too, in their
inscrutable way were obedient to another power.
Melville’s attitude towards the Civil War was, in sum, just the
opposite of Hawthorne’s; and if the men had been still in communication
during this period, it would probably have opened a final breach
between them. For Hawthorne, New England was as large a piece of
earth as he had any affection for, and whatever happened next, he
asserted in the early days of the conflict, he rejoiced that the old
Union was smashed. “We never were one people, and never really had a
country since the Constitution was founded.” There spoke the shrewd,
unshaken provincial. Hawthorne looked upon John Brown, moreover, as
a poisonous nuisance: for Melville he was a prophetic figure, whose
death made it impossible for the stabs of controversy to heal, whose
streaming beard was the very meteor of war. One may sum up Melville’s
political character by saying that his breeding and instincts were
those of a provincial; his superficial beliefs and attitudes were those
of a political unionist; and during the Civil War the latter were
uppermost, but not wholly so. Well might Walt Whitman describe the
war itself, and the temper of the society that ushered it in, by the
word “convulsiveness.” There was something arcane and uncontrollable
in these partisanships and antipathies: each fragment was thrown about
erratically, tangentially. It was war that produced war; and when the
active state at last came about, men settled to it with a sigh of
relief. War polarized these fragments: it gave an appearance of high
order to this chaos.
2
There is something paradoxical in the fact that Melville’s concern
over slavery and his fervour for the union should have come into
play during a period when he had become indifferent to most of the
nearest issues of life and convinced that existence itself was a
form of slavery. But one must not forget the anomalous nature of war
itself. In its instrumentalities, war is a denial of life: but in mood
and spirit war partly achieves all the things a humane or religious
mind cherishes: selflessness, contempt for creature habits and animal
comforts, nonchalance in the face of death, a willingness to give up
life cheerfully for an ideal end. If it is a sin, war is an heroic sin;
and who, exclaims Melville in Pierre, does not feel more warmly to
the Lord of Evil himself, than towards a petty shopkeeper, who daily
practices all the discreet and serviceable virtues? War is a malign,
ambiguous fulfilment of the things men permanently want in life--and
in its first flush, men forget its sordid accompaniments and its
disastrous results, and respond, not meanly, to its immediate stimulus.
There is no doubt that the prosecution of the war quickened Melville
and made him feel a purpose instead of the dull, fearful hollow of
an empty and respectable life. At forty-two, broken down in health,
unfit for active service, he watched these young men go forth in their
blue uniforms, with flushed faces and eager tread, a little enviously:
comradeship was a warm thing, even among the precious rapscallions
one might find in a whaler: it was an even deeper and warmer matter
among these young men who had shared sport together in their village,
or courted the same girl, or studied together under the same lamp at
college. These happy faces might be going to a picnic, to be pelted
with blossoms, not shrapnel:
Forever they slumber, young and fair,
The smile upon them as they died:
Their end attained, that end a height;
Life was to these a dream fulfilled
And death a starry night.
Unable to throw himself into battle, Melville followed the newspaper
accounts and the bulletins all the more closely. One pictures him
pacing the floor of his room at night, musing over Ball’s Bluff or
Antietam: there is no sleep in him during these racking days: the last
footsteps of a straggler die away in the street: no sound comes through
the air except the distant hoot of a boat on the North River; and
Melville’s mind plays back and forth across the days. Intermittently,
all the old glow would come back to him in these dark moments: he would
picture himself perhaps, borne by the tide of men at his back over an
earthworks, as he was borne in a whaleboat on the back of the lashing
whale. The reckless lift: the thrust: the yell of defiance: being
thrown down and struggling to rise again through a tangled drift of
legs and bodies: the shout of victory: the feeling of proud defiance:
the knowledge that death does not matter when one is at last, with all
one’s senses quickened, face to face with it. The whaleman’s joy: the
soldier’s joy: the joy of hard living and easy dying!
The war, with its heroism and defeat, was the image of Melville’s own
life; and, in the blackest night, the glow of its fires illumined his
face. The rigid order of warfare gave Melville the sense of a cosmic
purpose at work: in the working out of Dupont’s Round Fight Melville
saw another significance in the struggle for the Union: it was not the
political bond that Melville’s contemporaries alone wanted confirmed:
they desired that the Universe itself should hold together! Melville’s
interpretation is, I think, an illusory one; but one cannot question
the deep need that it expressed.
In time and measure perfect moves
All art whose aim is sure;
Evolving rhyme and stars divine
Have rules and they endure.
Nor less the fleet that warred for Right
And warring so, prevailed,
In geometric beauty curved
And in an orbit sailed.
The Rebel at Port Royal felt
The Unity overawe
And rued the spell. A type was here
And victory of law.
But it was the happy fortune of youth that Melville, betrayed by the
disasters of middle age, returned to when he contemplated the war. Who,
he asked, can remain aloof that shares youth’s ardour, uncooled by the
snows of wisdom or sordid gain? War made life again a great spectacle
and a great adventure: that defiance of the low limitations upon which
life depends, which Melville had expressed in Moby-Dick, came back
again: vanished at last were the doubts, perturbations, speculations,
cynicisms, endless grey questionings. Ten years before Melville might
have been repelled by the evil and ugliness of it: the maimed bodies,
the cruelties, the infamous prison and concentration camps, the furtive
squads of deserters, the hospital agonies, the litany of unknown
soldiers and nameless burial spots that Whitman gravely remembered and
recited. Now Melville was armed for the evil and ugliness of it, and
even for its futility:
No utter surprise can come to him
Who reaches Shakespeare’s core;
That which we seek and shun is there--
Man’s final lore.
Melville was possibly in New York in 1863, when the carnival of looting
and murder and general protest took place over the infliction of the
draft. He pictures himself, oppressed by the sultry air, climbing to
the roof-top and looking over the hushed city: in the distance, he
hears the mixed surf of muffled sound, the roar of riot and the dull
glare of fires. The city was in the hands of the mob, and that mob had
sunk “whole aeons back into nature,” vindictive, cruel, irresponsible,
blind, bloodthirsty. Melville heard the rumble of the artillery which
finally broke up the riot and exacted vengeance on the mob; and,
pondering this event, he was conscious of the grimy slur upon the
Republic’s faith, a slur implied by the cause of the outbreak, by the
outbreak itself, and by the suppression of it. Where was now the belief
in life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness? Where now the conviction
that man is naturally good and--“more--is Nature’s Roman, never to be
scourged”? With all his new enthusiasm, Melville’s deeper perceptions
were never altogether out of sight:
Did the Fathers feel mistrust?
Can no final good be wrought?
Over and over, again and again
Must the fight for the Right be fought?
Were men but strong and wise,
Honest as Grant and calm,
War would be left to the red and black ants
And the happy world disarm.
Even the supremacy of the Union, Melville finally came to see, might
bring some other result than the purpose for which it was conceived.
In one of the prefatory poems in his Battle Pieces, the Conflict of
Convictions 1860-1861, Melville expressed his doubt: from the allusion
to the Iron Dome it is plain that the verse was written later, when
the Dome itself had been put into place on the Capitol at Washington,
by one of those happy accidents that sometimes give an event its exact
appropriate symbol.
Power unannointed may come--
Dominion (unsought by the free)
And the Iron Dome
Stronger for stress and strain
Fling her huge shadow athwart the main;
But the Founders’ dream shall flee.
Age after age shall be
As age after age hath been,
(From man’s changeless heart their way they win);
And death shall be busy with all who strive,
Death, with silent negative.
Yea and Nay,
Each hath his say;
But God he keeps the middle way.
None was by
When he spread the sky;
Wisdom is vain, and prophecy.