epoch” while they were still in the germ, thus fulfilling the Chinese
philosopher’s notion of what a wise man is: he had viewed the myriads
playing pigmy parts, debased into equality, and “in glut of all
material arts” had predicted a civic barbarism, with man disennobled
and brutalized, “dead level of rank commonplace: an Anglo-Saxon
China”--the very Dark Ages of democracy. He had perceived that the
new democracy, fed by the smatterings of newspapers, and moved by the
war-cries of demagogues, was in reality as credulous and foolish as
the polity of the Middle Ages; perhaps more so, because it had lost a
decent and saving sense of its inferiority. What part could Melville
take in this world? How could he cope with the practical men of his
time, and “mix with tempers keen and narrow like a knife”? Or how
could he have any intellectual transactions with such good-hearted but
mushy-minded people as Edmund Clarence Stedman? His new contemporaries
were schoolboys. Howells had the optimism of a boom-town newspaper
or a stock prospectus: Lanier, who deserved better of Fate, wrote a
booster book about Florida for a railroad: and in the decade when
Melville published his own Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, Mark Twain
achieved affluence by producing Innocents Abroad.
Melville himself had hailed the spirit of the West as that which truly
reflected America; but when the spirit actually appeared, in the form
of a Mark Twain or a Bret Harte, he must have had his misgivings. At
thirty, Melville had grappled with spiritual problems that Mark Twain
kept furtively locked in his bosom until his old age, and, for fear
of destroying his reputation, did not publish till after his death.
What did Mark Twain know of “a hell over which mere hell serves for a
heaven”? These new Americans were innocents at home as well as abroad.
Those who knew that darkness existed were afraid of it: they said,
whistling cheerfully, that Progress would do away with darkness in a
year or two: the arc-light would abolish the burglar: the long-range
gun would abolish war: the ocean cable would abolish international
misunderstanding: typewriters would relieve the difficulties of
authorship: divorce would do away with the maladjustments of the
married. Innocents indeed! Is one puzzled that Melville shrank from the
post-war generation?
Melville’s home was a refuge, and his shanty of an office was a refuge
too. While the new parts of the city were exulting in the ugliness of
brownstone fronts, accentuated by perverse cornices and mouldings,
Twenty-sixth Street was still largely red brick, built a little too
late for charm, but early enough to possess iron balconies facing
south, like London in the Regency. Every morning a grave, firm,
square-bearded man leaves Number 104. A little slow and reflective
in gait, as if deliberately setting himself apart in pace as well
as inward gesture from the world about him, Melville turns west
toward Madison Square, passes through its green, and follows Fifth
Avenue, whose ranks of trees are just beginning to be broken, down
to Fourteenth Street, where already the brownstones, though only a
few years old, are being converted into fashionable confectionery
stores, bakeries, jewelry shops. He follows the broad thoroughfare
clear over to Hudson Street, and then turns to the block below, where
the Gansevoort Market and the customs office lie, touching the river.
These brown buildings, these smug garish shops, these crass, dirty
waterfront hotels, are too ugly to attract his attention even if use
and want did not quiet his interest. In five years, ten years, twenty
years, the changes are not very important: the horse-cars become fewer
and the tangle of traffic at Union Square is worse and Broadway from
Fourteenth Street up becomes “Ladies’ Mill,” the fashionable afternoon
thoroughfare for shopping: but on the whole the outer world does not
make any serious claims. The familiarity of everything is reassuring.
The name Gansevoort, on the market at the end of his walk, is a touch
of welcome. There is a Gansevoort Hotel on Little Twelfth Street and
West Street; but when Melville inquires what it stands for, he finds
that the hero of Fort Stanwix is now only a name. Well: names remain!
Gansevoort remains; perhaps Melville will remain, too.
Melville, as customs inspector, has one of the lowest political
positions open to patronage: he is an Ishmael among Ishmaels, and
a pariah among outcasts: impecunious bankers, broken-down sports,
bankrupt merchants, political nondescripts, people who were fit
for nothing elsewhere, in short, as R. H. Stoddard described it,
“an asylum for nonentities.” The scene itself, though mean, brings
Melville close to his element: the ships coming in, the odour of tar,
hemp, rotting wood, brine, the severe manly ways of the captains, the
affable circumspection of the pursers--they remind Melville of another
day and another fortune and another disguise. Best for him to do his
work, to shut his mouth, to get through the day patiently: like Rama,
the Hindu god, misplaced in human lot, discredited, abiding there in
outlawry. “May life and fable so agree?” Melville asked in Clarel, and
he knew the answer: they did. “There is more power and beauty in the
well-kept secret of one’s self and one’s thoughts,” Maurice de Guérin
had written, “than in the display of a whole heaven that one may have
inside one.” Melville underlined those words, and kept his heaven
facing inward.
The monotony brings quiet: the monotony brings peace. On drizzly
mornings, before the ships can drudge up the river through the fog,
there are hours of inward placidity. Melville peers through the pall
on the river outside and sees somewhat more poignantly into his own
position; perhaps the final lines of a poem come to him then:
Nor cringe if come the night:
Walk through the cloud to meet the pall,
Though light forsake thee, never fall
From fealty to light.
While he must serve his sentence in this prison, there is only one
thing to fear: a new Administration; shifting to a new post, learning
new faces, having once more to battle and struggle. Fortunately,
Melville has friends in the department, clever worldly fellows like
Stoddard: a word to him is passed along to the chief; the rumour of a
transfer is quieted. Melville need never leave this cloistered street,
this melancholy examination and appraisal, this even equable round:
this is as good as another Sailors’ Snug Harbor, over which his younger
brother Tom now is governor. Yes, it is good for a lifetime--if one may
call these empty hours life.
Gansevoort Pier at one end: Lizzie and the two girls at the other. The
meagre evening dinner, indifferently cooked, the household gossip, the
strain of observing an emptiness at the table, of Mackie, who is dead,
and Stanwix, who has gone off: the sudden look of tenderness on the
worn face opposite, that stings yet sweetens everything. The customs
office is hell: this family circle is perhaps purgatory: it is only
when Melville withdraws to his room upstairs, and is by himself, that
he can faintly re-enter the heaven that once surrounded him. There,
with his pictures, his books, his glass of brandy to seduce sleep, the
day ends in a solitude and a hush--tolerably. This is the daily round;
but there are better occasions. On a warm summer night Melville might
loll on the canvas steamer-chair placed on the narrow iron balcony,
smoking his pipe, looking at the stars, gently holding Elizabeth’s
hand. Melville’s passion is spent; but affection has deepened. With
the slow renewal of his organic faith, he can accept his wife more
fully and warmly, much more fully and warmly than when sex itself was
primarily a physical irritation that left him disappointed and doubtful
of the very basis of love, when he was tormented by passions at once
inexpressible and unreciprocable.
When one of Melville’s daughters grows up and marries, and Melville
becomes a grandfather, he goes out to these children easily: he bounces
them on his knee, makes noises like wind whistling through the rigging,
sings a stave of an old chanty, walks with them in Central Park. This
is not the tense harassed man his own children bitterly remembered from
their youth: he is benign even when his thoughts are elsewhere, and
occasionally downright jolly. His granddaughter still remembers his
queer, literary words and the wiry feel of his beard: that bespeaks
intimacy. There is a shadow between Melville and his family: they do
not see him as he is, but as he is distorted by their own repulsions,
their own bitterness: but when Melville’s son-in-law casts eyes on
Melville for the first time, buying a cigar in a hotel lobby in the
White Mountains, there is something in the old man’s air, like that
in the man Flammonde, that captivates him and holds his attention: a
distinguished man! In his family, he will remain an exile. They do not
understand his jocularity and his occasional high spirits. They are
offended by his inept sense of humour. In the Berkshire days he had
dubbed one of the village gossips Miss Pecksniff and his mother had
covered herself with mortification by addressing the good lady by
this title when she called. One never could be quite sure about Herman
Melville’s jokes. His notion of a jolly time was to cook up a mess
of crabs and sit around the table for a whole afternoon, picking at
the flesh, drinking ale, telling stories, and haranguing the world in
general, as if his wife and daughters and cousins were in the maintop
of the Neversink. They were bored by these jokes, and indifferent to
Melville’s high spirits. If his daughters had not been reduced to dowdy
dresses, if he had not had the wicked habit of asking belated suitors
whether they preferred hominy or oatmeal for breakfast, if the family
did not all feel that the high spirits of a poor man were purchased
too cheaply, Melville might not have felt the hostile ring around him.
These outbursts would be paid for, perhaps, by depression and inner
exasperation: but they kept the too-even daily round from appalling
Melville like the breath of infinity.
The age was against Melville; and his family were the mirror of the
age: he knew that. They believed in work, in working and keeping up
an appearance: in being respectable and tepid and unemotional and
industrious. Even the nicest of his relatives, like his cousin Kate
Gansevoort, with whom he maintained a desultory correspondence, rather
apologized for being a person of leisure. For them all, doing, not
being, was the main end of life. As if there were any merit in not
being a person of leisure! They talked of the dignity of work. Bosh.
True work is the necessity of humanity’s earthly condition. The dignity
is in leisure. Besides, ninety-nine hundredths of all the work done in
the world is either foolish and unnecessary or harmful and wicked. What
people needed was not work: they needed values. To recite poetry, to
contemplate pictures, to write or to talk briskly or to meditate and
chew one’s own thoughts, quietly, on the maintop--work was good if it
made these things possible, and bad if it blinded one to them, or made
them impossible....
2
People try to break in on Melville’s even round, they seek to intrude
on this cloistral quiet: they try in vain. Melville visits Pittsfield
again, when the Centenary Committee asks him to write a short
biography of his Grand-uncle Thomas for the Memorial Volume, and he
has occasional vacations at Arrowhead or in the White Mountains, or in
Albany or New Bedford, where one of his sisters lives: familiar places,
familiar people. A young man who has read Melville’s books awakes one
morning on a wharf in New Bedford to find himself gazing at a mild-eyed
old man in a blue serge suit with whom he falls into conversation: the
nautical terms on the old man’s tongue betray that he knows the sea;
and the young man, a composer, is delighted to find that he is talking
with his literary hero, Herman Melville. Contacts like these, with
chance acquaintances, Melville did not repel; but those who sought him
more deliberately were rebuffed. If the visitor mentions Mr. Omoo a
cloud of annoyance will pass over Melville’s face and perceptibly cool
the surrounding air. Melville’s public would not have his best: well,
he is proud and will not be accepted for the sake of the least. Such
interest will heal no wounds. Don’t they realize Melville’s contempt?
Don’t they feel who should be the patron and who the patronized?
Doubtless not. Resentment threatened to flare up in Melville, perhaps,
when he contemplated his literary contemporaries; so he did not
contemplate them. The New York writers asked Melville to join the
Authors’ Club when they founded it: he refused. Still assiduous,
towards the end of his life they gave Herman Melville a dinner of
honour. A pleasant irony. Whom did they honour, these fashionable
journalists, these professional diners-out, these men-about-literature?
That dinner did not feed Herman Melville, that admiration did not
console him. Theirs was the outward attentiveness of base neglect.
Melville breaks his own silence to hold out a hand of sympathy to
that honest, hearty Englishman, his junior, Mr. W. Clark Russell; for
Russell knows the sea, too, and though not a writer of equal rank, is
almost a fellow spirit: in his letter of thanks he mentions Moby-Dick:
a true mark of appreciation. These two writers dip flags to each other,
like passing ships; and when Melville, a few years later, in 1888,
publishes his Sea Poems, he dedicates them to this English novelist of
the sea. James Thomson is another kindred soul: all too well Melville
knew the streets and alleys of his City of Dreadful Night. Melville
corresponds for a few years, between 1884 and 1888, with Mr. James
Billson of Leicester, who was Thomson’s friend; and writes warm words
of appreciation about Thomson’s poems. “As to pessimism,” Melville
writes, and these words should be underlined, “as to pessimism,
although neither pessimist nor optimist myself, nevertheless I relish
it in the verse, if for nothing else than as a counterpoise to the
exorbitant hopefulness, juvenile and shallow, that makes such a muster
these days--at least in some quarters.” Neither pessimist nor optimist:
of course: for there is a “light and a shadow on every man who at
last achieves his lifted mark.” We shall see that mood engraved in
Melville’s final verse.
Had contacts not been hard for Melville to make, he might have had a
try at Elihu Vedder, too. Vedder’s picture of The Redeemed Slave, shown
at the Academy Exhibition of 1865, touched something in Melville; and
Vedder had gone on, apparently, a little apart from the beaten track
of veracious scenery and fictional illustration: he seemed to know
that there was more than one level of experience, that there was, so
to say, an immediate “beyond,” grounded in the senses and intuitions
quite as much as the direct work of one’s eye. Where had he acquired
this? In contrast to Vedder, there was another recluse whom Melville
may perchance have brushed by on Fourteenth Street, more than once:
a painter bred in New Bedford, loving the sea, too, and painting its
mystery, much nearer to Melville in his loneliness, his visions, his
love of Shakespeare, his reticences and withdrawals, than any other
soul in America: Albert Pinkham Ryder. Melville was never to meet him,
or as far as one knows, recognize his work. Not finding him, Melville
turned to Vedder, the lesser man, who at many removes was a link
between Melville and Blake.
Blake and Ryder were true fellow spirits: Russell and Vedder were
life’s ironical substitutes; but, lacking knowledge of the spring,
Melville slaked his thirst at the tap. He dedicated his last book of
poems, Timoleon, to Vedder; and it is rather fortunate he died before
he read Vedder’s complacent answer, an answer without the faintest
reference to Melville’s own works. Vedder was not the man to respond to
Melville: he was born half a generation later, and that made a great
difference. Vedder had been attracted by Blake, and in his youth he
found that he, too, had the power of conjuring up visions, as thick
and sensible as the furniture he touched: but Vedder had deliberately
curbed his power because, as he explained, “while if cultivated it
would soon enable me to see as realities most delightful things ... the
reaction would be beyond my control and would inevitably follow and be
sure to create images of horror indescribable. A few experiences have
shown me that that way madness lies, and so, while I have rendered my
Heaven somewhat tame, at least my Hell remains quite endurable.”
What a contrast, this timid “V,” with Melville, who had let his visions
open, and had risked everything to follow them. His magnificent hell
was worth all the placid heavens, with their weak symbolisms, that
Vedder achieved. That Melville did not know Blake until 1874 at
earliest, was a real misfortune, but inevitable; like Melville, he was
not recovered until more than a generation after his death. Blake,
had Melville known him earlier, might have helped him cast off his
paralysing braces, Blake, who turned heaven upside down, showed that
God and the Devil had exchanged costumes, felt that energy was pure
delight, and had none of Melville’s haunting reluctances over sex,
but delighted in his beautiful wife with the fresh naked energy of
Adam’s self. But pictures and books were near to Melville during this
period: he collected and enjoyed prints and reproductions of pictures:
he had a reproduction of one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and The
Woman Taken in Adultery, and if he did not enjoy Blake’s pictures, he
responded to Blake’s shadow, Flaxman. Melville’s taste in landscape
was excellent: Claude and Turner were his masters, Turner as much as
anything, perhaps, for his sea-pictures, his ghostly headlands, his
sun-drenched fogs. Melville reflected on the nature of art; indeed, in
an unimportant set of verses called The Hostelry, he attempts, with
the aid of Hals, Lippi, Spagnoletto, Veronese, Carlo Dolce, Steen,
and Watteau, to define the nature of the picturesque. The verse is
weak: the ideas are obscure: but the selection of characters gives a
further light on Melville’s tastes and interests. In a later verse,
on the boors in a picture by Teniers, we see how his wakeful brain
“elaborating pain” took comfort in the suggestion of the creature-brown
warmth of even the lesser realists; and one may safely say that there
was nothing fine in art that he was not capable of responding to. It
was the accident of living in New York in the seventies and eighties
that kept Melville away from the painters who might have meant more
to him, El Greco, Delacroix, Goya, Daumier, Blake. These all might
have had a more intimate message for him; but, with his feeling for
Rembrandt, he was close to his own kind. In Holland, he had first
noticed Rembrandt’s shadows. Rembrandt’s depth, his torment, and the
warm blood of humanity beneath it all--that was Melville’s, too.
3
The years passed; the dun seventies gave way to the grey eighties; and
at last the prisoner was led out of his cell. In 1886, when Herman
Melville was sixty-seven, his wife received a legacy from her brother,
Lemuel Shaw, and the unremitting routine could at last be broken. The
succour that might have saved Melville some of his worst pangs and
difficulties at thirty-three, came reluctantly more than thirty years
later. He shook his wings, made one or two uncertain steps forward,
doubtful, after all these twenty years of regularity and servitude, if
he could venture flight. A few of these warming-up exercises remain:
the series of prose sketches on the Marquis de Grandvin, Jack Gentian,
Colonel J. Bunkum: they have the air of juvenile compositions, done
just for practice. In a very little while his hand grew more schooled;
slowly, thoughtfully, he began work, revising older poems and writing
new ones. John Marr and Other Sailors he printed privately, two years
after his liberation; and Timoleon he published, even more privately,
in 1891, the year of his death. In November, 1888, Melville began Billy
Budd, the only prose work of any consequence after The Confidence Man:
he started to revise it slowly in March, 1889, and did not finish it
until April, 1891.
In neither the poems nor the sketches was there the furious effort of a
pent-up man, desperately to finish something before his death: for he
had never entirely abandoned literary effort: Bridegroom Dick is dated
1876, the year Clarel was published. Melville worked during these final
years with the firm, methodical concentration of a man taking up a
thread where some purely external circumstance had compelled him to lay
it down. He valued these days: they were to be the crown of his life,
and to give him, at least, the satisfaction of self-vindication. The
hours were so precious that when an admirer, Mr. Archibald MacMechan,
one of the first to revive Melville’s fame in our own day (1914), asked
for further light on Melville’s works and his point of view, Melville
did not answer him, except to express his thanks and to say that
“though his vigour sensibly declines, what little is left he husbands
for certain matters as yet incomplete, and which indeed may never be
completed.” These are the words of a man who has had retirement forced
on him; not those of one who has doubted the office of literature, and
has nothing to say.
Deliberately, Melville wrote his quiet coda: muted, a little lower
in key than his earlier work, these poems and Billy Budd contain the
earlier themes of his life, now transformed and resolved. Let us look
more closely at this final testament. Melville’s life has a beginning,
a middle, and an end. The last twenty years, though tedious, solitary,
insulated, bitter with apples of Sodom, had not been lived in vain: the
verse is more skilled, certain: the poems are crystals, pure if not
unflawed: here at last is that concentration, for the lack of which
Clarel does not live. The prison had left its pallor on the prisoner;
but it had not deprived him of the skill to use his liberty. Had he
written only this handful of verses, this brief novel, Melville would
still, like Stephen Crane, have left something of a mark on American
literature.
4
Melville’s mind continually played over the sea. As Whitman felt that
Leaves of Grass must tally with the earth in its most common and
universal aspects, as he confronted all doubts and perturbations with
the miracle of a single blade of grass, so Melville perhaps felt that
his writing must tally with the sea--that every joy and hope and lust
of life must be able to face its terrible realities. Clarel is full
of images of the sea. The student, in his vaulted room in Jerusalem,
looking over the terraced roofs of the city, is “like some ship-boy at
masthead alone, watching the star-rise”; and Melville characterized
Vine’s strength by saying that he had supplemented Plato with a “daedal
life in tents and boats.” There are a hundred other allusions and
images. The sea was the source of Melville’s strength, and even when
his daedal life was over, its profound imprint remained.