not entirely harmonized with his feelings: his ultimate doubts crept
into his most sanguine reactions to the conflict; and at bottom, the
things that quickened him were not the formal purposes of the conflict
but its incidents--the flashing youths, the gallant charge, the daring
commander, the spirited horse that carried Sheridan to battle. “Nothing
can lift the heart of man like manhood in a fellow man,” he says. The
Civil War satisfied this desperate need in his own soul: but apart from
its animal vigour and glory, even its solidest purposes seemed infirm
and fragile. He pictures an heroic soldier, surviving the carnage,
the Seven Days’ Fight, the Wilderness, the field-hospital, and Libby
Prison--surviving it and reflecting on his experience: “Heaven! what
_truth_ to him!” He himself had already drained the lees of adversity;
the war had nothing to add there, except to make his own experience
that of a whole generation.
3
In the break of emotional tension caused by the fall of Richmond,
Melville wrote most of his verses on the Civil War. A few were printed
in the magazines during the first part of 1866, and later in the year,
Melville collected and published the whole volume of verse, Battle
Pieces and Other Aspects of the War; with a supplement, gravely and
well written, in which he counterbalanced any Unionist fervour and
elation he might have shown in the battle poems, by discussing, with
great sympathy and tact, the plight of the South and the psychological
problems confronting the North, particularly, in dealing with it.
One of the poems in the collection, Sheridan at Cedar Creek, was long
quoted as one of the memorable poems evoked by the war; but, although
Melville’s verses on the war are the only serious contemporary rivals
to Whitman’s Drum-Taps, one cannot, with the most lenient eye, put them
in the same class. Melville rarely achieved form as a poet: he was
often very near to it, as we shall see when we examine his poems about
the sea and his travels: but although the sensitiveness, the emotional
tension, the rough powers of expression, in short, the ingredients of
poetry were there, he permitted himself to be conquered by the external
form of line and stanza: his rhythms are broken, not by their own inner
development, but because they meet a foreign object, and get shattered
against it. These verses are such jewelry as a sculptor might make.
Melville’s mallet and chisel and sinew were of little use with a pitch
block and a graving-tool.
Among these verses there are a few stanzas that give one a hint of
what Melville’s potentialities as a poet were: his poem on John Brown
is one of them, and another occurs in a poem commemorative of a naval
victory--despite the weakness of the second line, it rings like a bell.
But seldom the laurel wreath is seen
Unmixed with pensive pansies dark;
There’s a light and a shadow on every man
Who at last attains his lifted mark--
Nursing through night the ethereal spark.
Elate he never can be;
He feels that spirit which had hailed his worth
Sleep in oblivion.--The shark
Glides white through the sulphurous sea.
It is no accident that this stanza utters Melville’s deepest intuition
of life. Here image is symbol, and the symbol presents, without further
reflection or explanation, the idea in its totality: _the shark glides
white through the sulphurous sea_. There is something final in that.
Melville might hope: he might be stirred up: he might join hands with
his fellows: he might even achieve victory: all these things had
happened in the collective excitement of the Civil War; but in the end
the elation and exaltation were doomed to pass away. In the very act
of achieving personal success, Melville had become aware of something
in the Constitution of the Universe that fatally marred it: the shark
glides white through the sulphurous sea. His demon was not deceived. It
lived in the midst of chaos, and this Civil War, unified, regimented,
ordered, inexorable as it seemed, was chaos, too. Order springs from
within, mixing with circumstance but never carried away by it: in
other words, order is art--and art was the one thing lacking in the
whole plan of life that had arisen to dominate America. Raw power,
raw experience, were uppermost. White sharks swam everywhere: shark
ate shark, and greedily battened upon the refuse of the sinking boat.
No use to fight the White Whale, if the boat that holds human culture
breaks up, and the crew is killed, and only the sharks remain in the
waters. I have expanded Melville’s symbol, perhaps; but one cannot
magnify his disillusion. As early as 1866 he noted in his Supplement
that “for them who are neither partisans nor enthusiasts, nor
theorists, nor cynics, there are some doubts not readily to be solved.
And there are fears. Why is not the cessation of war now at length
attended with the settled calm of peace?”
In his Supplement, Melville pleaded for generosity to the vanquished,
for a spirit of forbearance, for the sort of magnanimity that the
Union soldiers showed at Vicksburg, when they watched the dejected
Confederates file out without raising a shout of triumph. “Let us
pray,” he concluded, “that the terrible historic tragedy of our time
may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved
country through terror and pity; and may fulfillment verify in the end
those expectations which kindle the bards of Progress and Humanity.”
Melville was definitely not one of the bards of progress and humanity;
but in the loose sympathies of wartime, he had listened to all their
righteous self-praise and their optimistic predictions; and though he
did not share their philosophy, he at least joined them in their hopes,
while there was still a possibility that they might be pragmatically
justified.
That weak optimism came to nothing. There was a treachery that annulled
these efforts--the treachery of the madness that resulted in Lincoln’s
death: the vindictive virtue of the Abolitionists, who inflicted
military occupation and carpet-bag governments on their fallen enemies:
and that very tragic topsy-turvydom of war which provides snug berths
and comfortable fortunes to the profiteers and speculators, and offers
a sordid routine and a share in the general bankruptcy to those who are
unfortunate enough to escape a quick and early death.
The Union had perhaps been worth dying for: but nobody could confront
the post-bellum scene, with its Vanderbilts and Jay Cookes and Daniel
Drews, without wondering seriously whether the Union was worth living
for. The heroes were dead: dead or incapacitated: incapacitated or
tired. Those who had any fight left in them would fight for Civil
Service Reform, as Carl Schurz did, or if they had energy, they would
go into railroads, like Charles Francis Adams: it was no accident
that those who sought a career less in harmony with the accepted good
works of industrialism--a Henry Hobbes Richardson, a Mark Twain, a
Henry Adams, a William James, a Stanley Hall--were usually men who
had by one chance or another lived during the war at a considerable
distance from the struggle, and who had missed, not alone the fine
heroism of that experience, but the terrible disillusion and collapse
that follows such efforts; and who, like Stanley Hall, were moved to
expiate their failure to risk death on the battlefield by living a
little more arduously and heroically on the plane of daily life. These
men might seek patiently to build up their careers; but those who had
been buoyed up by the great energies and expectations of provincial
America, in that Golden Day when they had grasped power and material
mastery without losing hold of culture and form--those earlier writers
and makers found themselves sinking helplessly out of sight, battered
wrecks, submerged by the tide of industry and finance, whose waves rose
higher and higher during the ten years that followed the great storm.
There were no quiet waters for these men; or, if they found them, as
Emerson did, as Whitman did, they lost the power to go to sea again;
and, instead of being beaten to pieces on the treacherous coast, merely
rotted at the wharf.
In 1866, at the age of forty-seven, Herman Melville, too, withdrew
from the war, defeated. That fine “scorn of life which earns life’s
crown”--earns, but does not always win it--had left him with the
burdens, difficulties, grievances of a returning soldier. He had fought
a not less worthy fight; and now, once for all, he retreated. He did
not surrender; for he kept on writing to the end of his days; but he
could no more live on his writings than a veteran of the Grand Army
could exchange his medals and scars for honest bread. Melville was
forced to face this fact, after twenty years of writing and fifteen
years of continuous, desperate struggle. He had not given in quickly or
petulantly; and when he finally made this decision, one can detect in
it no sign of outraged vanity or reproach. He had gauged his position:
he knew the worst: he was prepared to meet it. Through the offices
of an old travelling companion, he found a place as inspector in the
Custom House, a post he had described in Redburn as “a most inglorious
one; indeed, worse than driving geese to water.”
From this time on a sweetness and serenity began to spread over the
man. The dark torture of Pierre and The Confidence Man might return in
weak moments; there might be hours of stormy egoism or inner defiance;
but in the main there was peace. This, too, he had anticipated for
himself in Isabel’s words, almost half a generation before: “My spirit
seeks different food from happiness; for I think I have a suspicion
of what it is. I have suffered wretchedness, but not because of the
absence of happiness, and without praying for happiness, I pray for
peace--for motionlessness--for the feeling of myself, as of some plant,
absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual
sensation.” A Hindu sage might have sought this peace in the forest:
Melville, with quiet irony, sought it in the Custom House.
4
The decision was made; the door was closed: Melville’s troubles and
humiliations could carry him no lower. For the first time in ten
years Melville had the means, the energy, the relief from anxiety
necessary for the prosecution of a long work, and with indomitable
spirit he set to work again. Melville’s retreat was not a withdrawal
from his proper self, but a withdrawal from the conditions that
hampered its expression--the taste of the public and the predilections
of publishers, the demand for warmed-over Peedee and Hullabaloo.
“How live at all,” he asks himself, “if once a fugitive from thy own
nobler part, though pain be portion inwrought with the grain,” and in
this sense Melville was never a fugitive. His next effort was a long
narrative poem--the original edition in two volumes numbers 571 pages
and about 20,000 lines--based on his Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. In
his Constantinople notebook, he had originally set down a suggestion
for Frescoes of Travel by Three Brothers, Poet, Painter, and Scholar;
and in the intervening years the conception had grown and expanded into
a modern Canterbury pilgrimage of the harassed, the faithless, the
doubting, the exiled. Clarel, this new work, was not published till
1876; but the book itself was probably written shortly after the Civil
War: the heightened skill in verse, the reference to the Civil War in
Part IV, the fact that the poem is all of a piece, and the testimony
of Melville’s surviving daughter, all focus on this period; and
Melville’s own reference to the poem’s having been long in existence
before his uncle, Mr. Peter Gansevoort, generously provided money for
its publication, enables one to associate the beginning of this mental
pilgrimage with his withdrawal into the Custom House.
Melville’s short sojourn in Palestine had made a deep impression on
him: the notes that belonged to those weeks were full of observations.
In Jerusalem he had encountered all sorts of queer people: an old
commercial man giving tracts to people whose language he did not
understand; a Philadelphian turned Jew, who had married a Jewess;
a fanatical American missionary going about Jerusalem with an open
Bible, looking forward to the opening asunder of Mount Olivet and
in the meanwhile preparing the highway for the procession of the
dead; a crazy American woman who had opened an agricultural academy
for the Jews without converting a single Jew to either agriculture
or Christianity. Deliberately he had saturated his mind with the
atmosphere of Jerusalem, “offering myself up,” he noted, “as a passive
subject, and no unwilling one, to its weird impression,” and always
rising at dawn and walking outside the city walls. In the afternoon
he would stand by the Shepherd’s Gate, on the spot where Christ was
stoned, and “watch the shadows sliding, sled-like, down the hills of
Beretta and Zion into the valley of Jehoshaphat, then, after resting
awhile, creeping up the opposite side of Olivet, entering tomb after
tomb, and cave after cave.” The Christ-mood sometimes came over
him; he felt in himself the unrecognized god, or the goaded deity,
the mystic scapegoat of an inscrutable patriarchal presence; he too
had climbed the way of Calvary. But the Devil’s ingenuity did not
impress him: the Mount of Temptation was only a black, arid mount
overlooking the Dead Sea: why did the foolish fiend think any one
would value the rulership of such an empire--and if it was only a
vision, why take him up to the Mount? But though every rock and road
had an association, it was the landscape of Palestine that overwhelmed
him: the arid hills, the smell of burning rubbish in Jerusalem, the
melancholy olive tree, the whitish mildew that pervaded whole tracts of
landscape--bleached--leprosy--encrustation of cakes--old cheese--bones
of rocks--crunched, gnawed, and mumbled--mere refuse and rubbish of
creation, comparing with ordinary regions as a skeleton with the
living and rosy man. “Is the desolation of the land,” Melville asked
himself, “the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity? Hapless are
the favourites of Heaven!” Palestine had dissipated his romantic
expectation; but it had reciprocated all the aridness and emptiness
of his spirit. In the antediluvian port of Joppa, just before his
departure, Joppa, which was too ancient to have antiquities, he felt
like Jonah himself, and only strong self-control and grim defiance
enabled him to keep cool and patient. The Dead Sea had concentrated all
these impressions: the foam on the beach and pebbles had been like the
slaver of a mad dog: the water had been swarthy, bitter, and, carrying
the bitter taste in his mouth all day, he had felt the utter bitterness
of life. “Bitter is it to be poor and bitter to be reviled, and oh,
bitter are these waters of death, thought I.”
All these sights and experiences formed the background of Clarel; but
the poem itself is far richer in detail than the notebooks: it is an
imaginative elaboration of his experiences, and not a reproduction
of them. The arid background, which reflected Melville’s own feeling
of hopelessness in 1857, retreated: the foreground is thronged
with people who have independent lives and motives. All the major
characters, Clarel the student, Vine the wanderer, Rolfe, another
uneasy wanderer, Mortmain, the disillusioned Swedish revolutionary, and
Ungar, a Baltimore Catholic with a streak of Indian in him, all these
characters, it is true, centre like focussed rays in Melville’s own
being, baffled by his perplexities, and arguing, like his own doubts,
among themselves. The spirit that pervades Clarel is sober, restrained,
steady-eyed: its failure as poetry is due, in part, to this very
sobriety of thought.
5
The first part discloses Clarel, a student who has abandoned his
preparations for the ministry, in Jerusalem. He has come to lay his
inner questions at the gates of religion’s own city, thinking to find
from an older race, the Jews, with a remoter history, some clue to
the unsettled and uneasy state in which he lives, and some path of
development which will lead again to wholeness. Behind the crumbling
faith of Rome and Luther is the crag of Sinai--adamant! While exploring
Jerusalem, Clarel makes the acquaintance of an American, Nathan, who
has become a convert to Judaism, and falls in love with his daughter,
Ruth. Nathan’s Jewish wife and daughter, though loyal to the faith,
still long for some of the things America had given them--and they do
not altogether share the zeal of the convert. Even in Jerusalem, the
story swarms with characters: Melville tells the history of each chance
acquaintance, as if by a thousand examples from the lives of other men
one might find an answer to one’s own. Most of these lives, though
Melville gives them a foreign birthplace, are touched by the reflected
light of his own history. Thus in Celio’s story, one cannot help
following Melville’s own plight:
Fain had his brothers have him grace
Some civic honorable place:
And interest was there to win
Ample preferment: he as kin
Was loved, if but ill understood:
At heart they had his worldly good:
But he postponed and went his way
Unpledged, unhampered....
Since love, arms, courts abjure--why then
Remaineth to me what? The pen?
Dead feather of ethereal life?
Nor efficacious much, save when
It makes some fallacy more rife.
My kin--I blame them not at heart--
Would have me act some routine part,
Subserving family, and dreams
Alien to me--illusive schemes.
Ruth’s father is killed on his lonely farm by Arab raiders and robbers,
and Clarel is not permitted by Jewish custom to enter the House of
Mourning. Being cut off from his beloved, he decides to ease his
loneliness by joining a cavalcade, going across Palestine to the Dead
Sea, through the wilderness where John wandered, and back again by
Bethlehem. On the journey, we are deliberately reminded of Chaucer’s
Pilgrims, and the robust, full-blooded, healthy, superficial, English
Broad Churchman, Derwent--the most completely embodied character in
the whole book--is described with a little of that soft sweet malice
Chaucer knew so well how to use.
Thought’s last adopted style he showed;
Abreast kept with the age, the year
And each bright optimistic mind,
Nor lagged with Solomon in rear,
And Job, the furthermost behind--
Brisk marching in time’s drum-corps van
Abreast with whistling Jonathan.
But these Pilgrims do not while away the hour with merry tales:
instead of being able to assume the faith, and take life pretty much
as it comes, as Chaucer’s honest folk did, their faith is threatened
and disintegrated, and even life’s happiness is a problem that must
be solved: it exacerbates them almost as much as their emptiness.
Chaucer’s people eat, drink, joke, love, quarrel, cozen, cheat, hate,
envy: living in a world where these things exist, along with chivalry
and nobility and chastity, they are neither saddened nor puzzled,
because the framework of that world is articulated, and each part of
it has its necessary place--even the sins. Among Melville’s pilgrims,
however, not even the virtues are safe: each man lives in a private
world that trembles and dissolves at every shock.
Contrast these pious atheists, these doubtful scholars, these sobered
revolutionaries, with the Mussulman, the orthodox Jew, the bland,
beef-fed English clergyman, or the Roman Catholic abbot. The latter go
through their daily ritual without question or loss of energy: their
orthodoxy is secure and they themselves are untroubled: wrapped in
an absorbing dream, their body is indifferent to the hard pallet on
which they lie. The mocking Jewish atheist is happy, too; as Spinoza,
blessed with a diviner illusion, was happy: but the question is: Can a
Clarel, a Rolfe, a Mortmain, in short, a Melville, acquire that sort of
serenity without cutting himself off from his very flesh and tissue?
Once one has broken out of the orthodoxy, one can no more go back to
it than a disturbed sleeper can resume the thread of a vanished dream,
no more than a grown man can go back to the games of his childhood.
There was once a time no doubt when he could call sand sugar and stones
bread: but now stones were stones, cold, flinty--no doubt about that.
“The pains lie among the pleasures,” Melville noted while in Palestine,
“like sand in rice, not only bad in themselves, but spoiling the good”;
and this held of faith and doubt as well as pain and pleasure.
Melville’s insight no longer shrivelled and blasted the very
constitution of man, as in The Confidence Man; but it pierced,
perhaps, even deeper. An indictment of humanity itself is a blank
indictment which turns the accuser into one of the principal
defendants: one suspects the morals of Juvenal and the kindliness
of Swift, precisely because they see so little of these qualities
in the people about them. In Clarel, Melville went through country
after country, and institution after institution, as he had done
in Mardi: here he points out a weak joint, there a plaster-covered
crack, or in another place a false foundation. One cannot evade these
specific criticisms. From the atheist who jeers at Rome--“patcher of
the rotten cloth, pickier of the wing of the moth, toaster of bread
stale in date”--to the reactionary religionist who attacks Derwent’s
belief in a Christianity blandly coupled with comfort and progress and
toasted muffins and dividends, all working together for the greater
glory of Mammon, scarcely any of the complacencies of Melville’s age
escaped: his chilly wind blew the rotten roof off every house of
refuge. Blake paused at the wonder of life, which had with the same
breath created the tiger and the lamb: but Melville in a mordant line
said: “If true what priests avouch of Thee, the shark Thou madst, yet
claimst the dove.” These lines show, I think, that the consolations of
transcendental religion were always far from Melville. The consolations
of Progress were, alas! equally remote: Melville had small use for
those who heaved contempt on “rite and creed sublime” and yet clung
to their own rank fable, the “latest shame of time.” In the conflict
between a crumbling theology and a cocky, over-confident science,
Melville could take neither side. Melville felt that the scantling of
the contemporary scientific outlook was no equivalent for the massive
architecture of the ancient church; nor could he reassure himself,
when he found cold adverse rains beating down on his head, that the
scantling was a new and finer kind of architecture.
Yea, long as children feel affright
In darkness, men shall fear a God;
And long as daisies yield delight
Shall see His footprints in the sod.
Is’t ignorance? This ignorant state
Science doth but elucidate,
Deepen, enlarge....
Let fools count on faith’s closing knell--
Time, God, are inexhaustible.
Melville was aware of the historic parallel to his own age; and he knew
what its outcome had been. Christ had followed Osiris: Jesus had indeed
come out of Egypt, as the legend said; and in the time of Cicero, when
Roman society was in the same state of doubt, disruption, and despair
as the Western world was in Clarel’s day, a new era of resolution and
faith was beginning to open. Doubt and all its maladies in the moral
life were no more final in society than they were in the individual:
“There is,” Melville said, “no steady unretracing progress in this
life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one
pause:--through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless
faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then
disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But
once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and
men, and Ifs eternally.” Like Matthew Arnold, Melville was keenly aware
of the transition; but, being an American, he could not accept the mere
sense of historic continuity, of a favourable inertia, as a substitute
for a new faith.