the pilgrims, Mortmain, the Swede, who had been a prophet of the new
order and a revolutionary, bent on carrying further the vast abstract
programme of the French revolution, one becomes conscious of the
exceptional maturity of Melville’s social observation. Melville had
reached by sober meditation what Herzen, for example, had achieved
only after a long kindergarten training in ideals and enthusiasms.
Men like Herzen had avoided ultimate issues. They drugged themselves
with plot, conspiracy, oratory, propaganda, every form of verbal
busy work. They ended in total disillusion, without seeing that they
should not have reached this spiritual desert had they started out
with a less abstract and barrenly subjective view of their task. Now,
Melville, too, realized that the social revolution had already taken on
a millennial character by 1848: it was the new democratic equivalent
of the older scheme of salvation by faith, and men like Bakunin and
Louis Blanc and Engels had found in it something that knit their
lives together and gave them significance, as the Civil War did for
Melville, as other-worldly religion did for the orthodox. With this in
mind, Melville’s comments upon Mortmain’s adventures are all the more
pregnant; for Mortmain came to doubt not so much his purposes as his
instruments:
... Wear and tear and jar
He met with coffee and cigar:
These kept awake the man and mood
And dream. That uncreated Good
He sought whose absence is the cause
Of creeds and Atheists, mobs and laws.
Precocities of heart outran
The immaturities of brain.
Along with each superior mind
The vain, foolhardy, worthless, blind,
With Judases, are nothing loath
To clasp pledged hands and take the oath
Of aim, the which, if just, demands
Strong hearts, brows deep, and priestly hands.
* * * * *
Wouldst meddle with the state? Well, mount
Thy guns; how many men dost count?
Besides, there’s more that here belongs:
Be many questionable wrongs:
By yet more questionable war
Prophet of peace, these wouldst thou bar?
The world’s not new, nor new thy plea.
Tho’ even shouldst thou triumph, see:
Victorious right may wild redress:
No failure like a harsh success.
Yea, ponder well the historic page:
Of all who, fired with noble rage,
Have warred for right without reprieve.
* * * * *
The world is portioned out, believe:
The good have but a patch at best,
The wise their corner, for the rest--
Malice divides with ignorance.
Insight like this may be fatal to a weak man, or added poison to a
disappointed one: but when a man well bottomed takes it to his bosom,
he is no longer defenceless against his own inner hopes, desires,
wishes: he goes armed. Such wisdom does not nullify generous efforts:
a Lenin may count his guns and men and still wage revolution: he will
not do this the worse for recognizing, as Lenin grimly did, all the
vain and foolish people who, along with the Judases, divide place with
those who have strong hands and deep brows. Life is stultified by
vacuous dreams, dreams of achievement without effort, pleasure without
satiety, art without discipline, or a better social order without a
moral and metaphysical conversion of the very people who must bring
it about. Besides these dreams, the most gritty reality is a tonic.
To acknowledge these realities, instead of seeking weak consolations
or empty reassurances, is the mark of a mature mind. Melville had
penetrated as far as Herzen the psychological problem of revolutionary
betterment: but he was almost fifty years “before his time” in stating
it. We can understand Melville’s social scepticism today, and we
should not, perhaps, remain so long in the trough of our own wave,
apathetically waiting for a dictatorship or an earthquake or a war to
rouse us and focus our energies once more, had we been able to learn
from Melville the necessary cost of our efforts. For every act of the
wise and the good is nullified by malice and ignorance, unless the wise
and the good learn to reckon these evils among the conditions of their
problem. Melville had faced human nature as a whole: he was not blind
to its inert or irrational elements; nor could he accept “A Reasonable
Constitution” that overlooked them.
What though Reason forged your scheme?
’Twas Reason dreamed the Utopia’s dream:
’Tis dream to think that Reason can
Govern the reasoning creature, man.
Melville’s scepticism did not flinch at even the securest parts of the
conceptual universe.
Canst feel elate
While all the depths of Being moan,
Though luminous on every hand,
The breadths of shallow knowledge more expand?
Much as the light-ship keeper pines
Mid shoals immense, where dreary shines
His lamp, we toss beneath the ray
Of Science’s beacon. This to trim
Is now man’s barren office.
But the tentative nature of science’s triumphs, and the disintegration
of the great religious unity which had heretofore provided an
intelligible framework, still left one possible avenue unexplored.
Perhaps salvation was to be found, as André Gide has suggested
in his study of Dostoyevsky, in the practice of the arts, such
salvation as the great minds of the Renaissance found amid similar
disruption: Wren, with his multitudinous buildings that housed an empty
ecclesiasticism, Leonardo and Michelangelo with the saints that had
lost their ineffable powers and taken on the forms of mighty men and
women, Rembrandt with those thousand enigmatic faces, gazing back, with
questioning eyes, into eyes that still question. Melville did not, I
believe, fully understand this solution or face its possibility: but he
saw one side of it, the advance of the mechanical arts, and there, with
cold acumen, he beheld no happy sequel: rather the contrary:
... Arts are tools;
But tools, they say, are to the strong:
Is Satan weak? Weak is the wrong?
No blessed augury overrules:
Your arts advance in faith’s decay:
You are but drilling the new Hun
Whose growl even now can some dismay;
Vindictive in his heart of hearts,
He schools him in your mines and marts--
A skilled destroyer.
These lines were written in the time of the supremest Victorian
confidence. Herbert Spencer had demonstrated, he thought, by revamping
Comte’s generalization, that a military and feudal order, founded
upon a demonistic theology, was inevitably going to be replaced by an
industrial order, inimical to militarism, and founded upon science and
free contract. That the new arts of industrialism had themselves any
capacity for mischief was not hinted at by the dominant prophets of
the day: Ruskin’s warnings were lonely ones, and he was contemptuously
thrust aside as a fanatical aesthete, who understood the stones of
Venice, perhaps, but not the steel of Sheffield. In the passage just
quoted, Melville went quite as far as Ruskin: industrialism, to him,
offered no certain pledge of happiness or welfare: it depended, rather,
upon who used these tools, and how.
The ruthless sweeping away of human values, the sacrifice of the
worker’s welfare to profits, and of general well-being to a bleak
efficiency, and, finally, the sweeping away of all the decencies
of life in a bestial internecine warfare, aggravated by all the
improvements in the arts: Melville saw all these things, and perceived
that a good part of the routine of education, work, and patriotism
could be called, not least in the “advanced” countries, a drilling of
the Hun. Walter Rathenau, one of the great industrial leaders of the
past generation, came to the same conclusion at the end of the World
War, and he pictured its consequences: but Melville anticipated him
there, as he anticipated the disillusion of the social revolutionists.
He saw that unless human values were firmly established, the practice
of the arts was as blind and futile as the firing of a revolver into
empty air: with power and precision at command, the revolver hits
nothing whatever--but in its very aimlessness, it may destroy something
precious, as the blind projection of a concrete road by a half-witted
road engineer may destroy a row of elms in a New England village.
Melville put this thought, it is true, into the mouth of a religious
zealot: but like everything else in Clarel, it belonged to his own
innermost mood.
Melville, it will be seen, did not in Clarel take refuge in any of
the cheap opiates of his time: his scepticisms are as inexorable, as
thoroughgoing, as they had been in the most devastating pages of The
Confidence Man; but, with all this dubiety, there is a difference in
the mood; and though Clarel pictures the thoughts of men unfrocked in
faith, and shows them wandering over many arid deserts and picking
their way through the broken streets of many ruined towns, something
solid, the beginnings of a new faith, kept Melville himself from
slipping into hopeless indifference or more hopeless despair. Whether
Melville intentionally symbolized his dilemma in the fable I do not
know; and in the light of his deliberate subtlety in Moby-Dick one
cannot say positively that he did not: but the unconscious significance
of Clarel’s love affair is perhaps worth speculating upon; for it
affected his attitude and his conclusion.
Clarel fell in love with a Jewish maid, as Melville had fallen in
love with ancient Jewish thought. Christianity was at times repugnant
to Melville, for the highest virtue had for him necessarily some of
the Greek or Hebraic element of power, and the epicene Christ of
mediaeval legend did not attract him; nor was he comforted by supernal
promises of an after-life. If Melville confesses that the truest of
all men was the Man of Sorrows, he added that “the truest of all
books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of
woe.” In the period of his own discomposure, the black aphorisms of
Solomon, Koheleth, and Jesus-ben-Sirach, and the bitter plaints of
Job, were closer to him than anything else in literature. “There is a
wisdom that is woe,” Melville had found, “and there is a woe that is
madness.” He had come to the first, and he had stood on the brink of
madness: looking in the Bible for comfort, Melville had found, in the
greatest of the Jewish writers, only a confirmation of his own fears
and exasperations. “Oppression maketh a wise man mad.” “Man is born to
trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Such sayings deepened his sympathy
with Jewish culture; and, in the sense that they carried the same
burden as his own, they lessened his load. Ruth, Clarel’s love, dies;
and the fulfilment that Clarel had hoped to find there, he must now
find in his own bosom, with only the memory of her spirit to comfort
him.
6
Why then, with all these virtues of thought, is Clarel necessarily
Melville’s most neglected book? The capital difficulty, I think, is
inherent in its very conception as a narrative poem: it is impossible
to carry through so many pages the quick sympathies and empathies
that it is in the nature of verse to give. Wordsworth probably had
as much skill in blank verse as any one since Shakespeare, and he
was unable to avoid long waste tracts in his lengthy philosophic
and biographic poems. Blake and Whitman, with a surer instinct,
developed polyphonic cadences for their long poems, and this is the
only tolerable alternative, I think, at least in English, to the
immeasurable variety of prose itself. Melville’s eight-syllabled lines
in Clarel are monotonous, vary the rhyme scheme as he will; they are
made even more tedious by the stale poetic airs that accompanied it.
Melville’s aloofness and spiritual independence, which cut him off from
his own contemporaries, not merely saved him from their errors and
superstitions: it also prevented him from profiting by their genuine
advances. With the exception of Whitman and Emily Dickinson, scarcely
any of Melville’s contemporaries had participated in that great
refreshment of poetic language, by the fuller use of the vernacular,
by discarding the powdered wig of “poetic diction,” and by the use
of direct and simple word order, that had been made possible by
Wordsworth’s propaganda and example. In his lesser poems Emerson sinned
in this respect almost as much as the poetasters around him; and Poe’s
“tarns” and Nycean barks of yore and his seraphim were typical of the
exaggerations and clichés that afflicted the American poets of his time.
In the verses of his later years, Melville largely escaped from this
fashionable prison; but in Clarel he was too frequently the victim of
his uncertain taste. He tags adjectives on to nouns to eke out the
line; he uses, all too frequently, words like fane and sward and rue
and twain and nigh, and, with unforgivable recurrence, he rhymes elf
and self; above all, not relying on his ear for more subtle quantities,
he fills out lines with redundant words or phrases--or clips them off.
This clumsiness in detail adds to the clumsiness of conception: what
might have been vivid prose became dull verse: what might have been
good Borrow became bad Rogers. Mid all this poetizing there remains,
of course, a little poetry: lines that lift out of the grey pages like
a sudden sea gull from the monotonous surface of the ocean: there
are even whole passages, in particular the Dirge that comes toward
the end, which are veritably moving. But although the materials for
intense feeling or vivid imagism are present, they are spoiled in the
mixing. All this acute observation of men, things, places, seems to
clog Melville’s spirit: when he achieves victory, it is a victory of
thought: an idea becomes pregnant and a dozen good lines are born. But
the detail over-rides the general impression, as the ingenuity of the
Hindu craftsman over-rides the total effect of his wood-carving: the
movement is slow: the aim is dispersed. There is a story and a climax
in Clarel; but we do not feel them in passage. We miss the poignance of
Ruth’s death, by having forgotten her entirely.
It is unfortunate that Melville diverted into the ingenuities of a
foreign versification the energies that should have gone into mastery
of the theme itself. But matter and manner are always one; and because
Melville did not find harmonious form for his intuitions, we are
deprived of a good part of them, and those that remain we must pick,
like precious shards, from the refuse heap of the poem. He was a true
poet; but formal verse was not his medium; and the relentless probity
of his mind, the keen reaching into the heart of a dilemma, lacked in
these lengthy verses an appropriate vehicle. Melville was wrong when
he thought that some of the aroma might have exhaled during the years
Clarel remained unpublished: the aroma had never been there.
7
It was a long, weary pilgrimage, this pilgrimage of Melville’s,
as Clarel is a long, weary poem; but at the end of it, something
crystallized within him, and without blunting his doubts or shutting
off his conflict, at last focussed them. Something happened to Melville
in Palestine, or during the years between, that was the equivalent of
falling in love with a Jewish maiden. Although Clarel returned from
his pilgrimage to find himself bereft, the experience of love had
given him something: the love that would have redeemed the universe
for Captain Ahab and kept him from his deadly contest with the whale,
now was a pledge of his own redemption for Melville. What the nature
of that experience was one does not know: one can only judge by its
final effect; and in the last pages of Clarel the whole weary strife of
debate is suddenly brought to a close, at the end of the lover’s grief,
in the epilogue with its pledge and hope:
Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned--
Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind;
That like the crocus budding through the snow--
That like a swimmer rising from the deep--
That like a burning secret which doth go
Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep;
Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea,
And prove that death but routs life into victory.
The budding crocus, the rising swimmer, the bursting secret were
symbols of a new promise in Melville’s own life: in the Epilogue one
sees the later Melville, who had approached, and was slowly finding
peace, rather than the unsettled, bitter man who wandered through
Palestine, and confronted the “caked depopulated hell” of barren
Judah. There was no verbal answer, no creed, no theology, no orthodoxy
to comfort him and give a final meaning in exchange for his present
soreness and perplexity. God does not answer Job: he overawes and
silences and converts him and suddenly showers him with blessings:
the relief is as mysterious as the oppression which makes a wise man
mad. So with Melville. An animal faith, the dumb belief in all the
immediate presentations of life--this animal faith, quickened by
love, knit together again. Creeds are, after all, only the suspicious
distortions of this dim, plasmal sense that bottoms all of us. When
that faith exists, life even in its humblest aspects is neither black
nor terrible, however heavy its disappointments; without it, all that
the world values is thin, and all that the heart may contemplate is
empty. There is no rational justification for this animal faith; for it
is part of the nature of man and perhaps of all living things, and it
antedates the doubts and difficulties that would disturb it.
Again and again Melville confronted this problem; and much though he
admired the order and art they introduced, he could not accept the
solutions offered by Judaism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, or historic
Christianity. In his preface to a poetic fragment, Rammon, Melville
puts the dilemma before a son of Solomon’s old age, immoderately
influenced by his father’s despondent philosophy. “Vanity of
vanities--such is this life. As to a translated life in some world
hereafter--far be that thought. A primary law binds the universe. The
worlds are like apples on the tree; in flavour and tint one apple
perchance may somewhat differ from another, but all partake of the same
sap. One of the worlds we know. And what find we here? Much good, a
preponderance of good; that is, good it would be could it be winnowed
from the associate evil that taints it. But evil is no accident. Like
good it is an irremoveable element. Bale out your individual boat if
you can, but the sea remains the sea.”
In his despair, Rammon is attracted to Buddhism by Prince Siddartha’s
personality and by the fact that his high rank had not hardened his
heart to the lot of the mass of mankind, “nor in any wise intercepted a
just view of the immense spectacle of things.” But Rammon is too young
to realize, with Melville, the fallacy of Buddha’s very situation:
it did not occur to him to conjecture “that the more spiritual,
wide-seeing, conscientious and sympathetic the nature, so much the
more spiritually isolated, and isolation is the mother of illusion.”
Melville was on guard against this error: isolated, he had refused
illusion, the last comfort of isolation, and had abandoned all efforts
to explain away man’s helplessness and ignorance, and his corporeal
extinction: he accepted this condition as a datum. And yet life went
on! Far better, this, than a new illusion; for it brought self-respect
and a belief in those forms of ideality which are within man’s power
to achieve or experience. By skilfully managing his little boat, not
by pronouncing metaphysical incantations over the storm, man keeps
afloat mid the vast waters that threaten him. The boat may be swamped,
perhaps; but there is no other way! Life bottomed all formulas: art
fended off catastrophe--if life ebbed or art ceased to be effective,
well, one had faced reality and had respected necessity and one could
meet the end with ironic resignation: in effect, the most dogmatic and
devout could do no more.
At the end of Clarel, Melville found life, not good or bad, malicious
or forbearing, true or false. Something more important had happened:
he found it livable. In that mood the days that followed the Civil War
were spent, quiet, chastened, subdued, temperate days....
8
One may figure Melville’s career as a June evening--the sun glowing
in the sky, the birds darting about the trees, chattering, warbling,
trilling, intensely active. The sky-gold turns to waves of salmon pink:
the pink to lavender: the lavender edges into purple: suddenly dark has
come. The cheerful sounds cease. A belated bird or two silently wings
to his nest: there is blackness, and the hoarse croak of distant frogs
alone breaks the silence. In half an hour the scene changes from the
most brilliant activity and ecstasy to utmost passiveness. Bats swoop
silently in the air; a chill comes up from the river: darkness is cool
as well as silent. Is all over? Not yet. Presently the fireflies make a
warm firmament of the fields, and in the pale rising of the moon, the
earth itself takes on another glory. There are fireflies and moonlight
and the domestic chirp of crickets in the night of Melville’s life, its
last quarter century--not silence and unrelieved blackness. After the
first collapse of day into night, nature stirs again: there is movement
and there is life. A little before the clock tolls the hour of midnight
and the day itself passes, a shower of aerolites falls through the
sky.... We have just seen the afterglow; and we are now to witness the
final brilliance of the night.
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE FLOWERING ALOE
The days pass and one day is like another: there is comfort in
monotony. The brick house in East Twenty-sixth Street, with its
muddy-yellow exterior and its brownstone trim, with its old mahogany
parlour furniture, its towering brown bookcases, its print of the Bay
of Naples hanging in the front hall, has a calm dark gravity which
sets it off from houses that make garish gestures of brightness or
gaiety within. When the sun hits the rear rooms there is warmth;
when geraniums and pansies appear in the yard below there is colour.
Melville’s house is a refuge from the city outside. Looking like every
other house in the row, it has still a quiet interior of its own, an
interior, like Herman Melville’s, acquired before the débâcle of the
Civil War. The brown wallpaper and the black iron bed in the wan north
light of Herman Melville’s room almost alone indicate that a day has
dawned that is somewhat darker than a starless night.
The sixties have passed; the seventies have come. Heroism gives way
to complacency, and courage to chicane. Even General Grant himself,
type of resolute action and manly confidence and dogged devotion
while the war was on, becomes in Presidential office little more
scrupulous than the head of a foraging party: gambling and corruption
take place before the magnanimous man who had been chivalrous to Lee
and thoughtful of the conquered army. Is it any wonder that New York
itself, which had been invaded and seized by people who had left
Europe under stress and poverty, and were thrown into its miserable
tenements and sinister streets, this Salonica of the Western world,
was prey to a ring of politicians as remarkable for their brazenness
as for their peculations? On the edges of the city, near the gas
tanks, but sometimes spilling over into the respectable sections,
gangs line up on each side of the street and exchange bullets. It is
worth one’s life to carry a gold watch through certain parts of the
East Side: Constantinople, twenty years before, was no happier place
for felons and assassins. What superb triumphs offset this brutality,
this degradation! In 1869, an elevated railroad is built; a little
later, a cable car is attached to a cable, and goes; the human voice
finds a means of travelling over an electro-magnetic circuit. Man has
stolen fire from heaven again, and is conquering the world with it;
but, stealing the fire, he has left the more valuable parts of heaven
behind. The voice that travels so far says the same banal things. The
railroad that shuttles men back and forth across the city does not
improve anything except the potentialities for speculation in real
estate.