left the sea, settled down in the prairie as a pioneer, had lost his
wife and child through fever, and remained a lonely soul, cut off
by his roving and cosmopolitan past from the farmer-folk, the land
animals, around him. In Bridegroom Dick, a longer poem, Melville
assumed the guise of an old man-of-war’s man, seated by his wife,
sunning himself on an October day, balmy as spring, he with his pipe,
she with her tea. The old fellow’s mind goes back over his cruises,
his ships, his shipmates: the whole round of the day, polishing the
pinnacle, minding the helm, shooting the sun, announcing the time
to the quarter-deck at noon--and all his mess-mates and superiors,
Old Chuck-a-block, Commander All-a-Tanto, Orlop Bob, Rhyming Ned,
Top-gallant Harry and Jack Genteel: the old revels, the old bouts
of liquor, the old battles. The words are so salty the fish-bones
almost stick in one’s throat; and in the very litany of names Melville
achieves poetry; for once, the crabbedness of his verse increases its
effect.
In another verse, To Ned, Melville seems to address his old comrade,
Toby, recalling the rich isles they roved when they were young, and
predicting that the pleasure-hunter, wearying of routine resorts,
would at last discover the Marquesas and other authentic Edens in the
South Seas. This poem gives one pause. One wonders if Melville’s early
disillusion with marriage and success was not, more than one can ever
definitely say, due to the fact that he had drunk such a deep draught
of beauty in the South Seas that life thereafter, in the dusty, smoky,
jangling air of America or Europe, was insipid and brackish. No wife
who wore stays and petticoats and flannel nightgowns, and who was laden
with household cares, could be another Fayaway: no farm with a cow and
a horse and fences to repair could be another palm-grove. The Marquesas
had perhaps spoiled his taste for such dreary fare. So delicious is
this memory of the past, that Melville even marvels if mortals may
twice, here and hereafter, touch a paradise!
In the same spirit, in his later poems, he remembers the happy port of
Syra, full of juvenile fun, reminding him of days when trade did not
exist, and toil and stress were not overbearing, and life was leisure,
merriment, and peace. Melville never deceived himself by dismissing
these things as mythical, or by magnifying the importance of sanitation
and sound currency. This feeling of animal delight had redeemed him
from his own torments; he knew it was one of the permanent blessings
of life; and a civilization that knew nothing of it, except through
the depravity of complete drunkenness, was in a far lower stage of
barbarism than its most vigorous prophets had dared to say. If there
were no pleasurable excitements, there would be murderous ones: if
there were not dances there would be wars: and, for lack of strong
sensual graces, men would become hard, vengeful, stupid, oppressive.
Melville turned to Syra, or to Naples in the time of King Bomba, not
because he was unaware of poverty, rags, misery, but because he knew
there was sadness and misery in New York, too, without the redeeming
thoughtlessness and careless pleasure. “A fig for Bomba! Life is fair
squandered in superabundant leisure.” That was an answer Clarel had
shrunk from accepting from Derwent: but it was not an invalid one. The
very virtues of Western civilization, its industry, its thrift, its
willingness to postpone present goods for future rewards, tended to
degrade life quite as much as its downright vices.
Melville’s sea poems, however, were not all pieces of happy
reminiscence. The wreck of a victorious man-of-war, the deserted
raft with a signal flying, the disintegration of the figurehead
Charles-and-Emma by storm and weather, the mad plunge of a ship against
an iceberg: these are images of a different order. Melville did not
become weak and sentimental in his old age; but instead of letting the
dark background of the universe dominate the composition, he paints in
a warm foreground, as in a still-life of Chardin’s, with some sensible,
kindly object to capture the interest and reflect the high lights. The
sea remains the sea, pitiless, echoless, indifferent to man’s hopes
and dreams: but the man in Melville is himself again.
Healed of my hurt, I laud the inhuman Sea--
Yea, bless the Angels Four that there convene;
For healed I am ever by their pitiless breath
Distilled in wholesome dew named rosmarine.
One could tell from these poems, even if one lacked the contemporary
testimony of a Pittsfield acquaintance, Mr. J. E. A. Smith, that
Melville, in these closing days, was no bitter, defeated old man. Mr.
Smith says that in 1885, on Melville’s last visit to Pittsfield, he
“bore nothing of the appearance of a man disappointed in life, but
rather had an air of perfect contentment, and his conversation had
much of his jovial, let-the-world-go-as-it-will spirit. It would,” as
Mr. Smith very justly continues, “be well nigh a climatic miracle if
a brief ride to Pittsfield and a few snuffs of Berkshire air should
so restore to society and its enjoyment a man who had just been the
recluse and almost misanthrope pictured by some of the New York
newspaper writers.” In his letter dedicating John Marr to Mr. Russell,
Melville stresses the quality of geniality, “the flower of life
springing from some sense of joy in it, more or less”; and, delicately,
shyly, like a belated crocus, this flower bloomed in Melville’s last
years. When he wished Russell from his heart the most precious things
he knew of in this world, health and content, he wished him the first
because he had once known it in its miraculous fulness, and the second,
I think, because he had at last found it. When on a clear day Melville
would wander through the woody ravines and pastures near Fort George,
or when he would take a ferryboat ride down New York Bay, shifting from
one side of the boat to another, to take in every aspect of the harbour
and every new ship, the old keenness, the old zest, would return. If
his life was still that of the recluse--“I am an old fogy,” he wrote
in 1880, to excuse his staying at home--his feelings were far from
Pierre’s or Timon’s.
There is poetry in parts of John Marr, particularly in The Haglets, not
merely measured lines and rhymed endings. There is even more poetry
perhaps in Timoleon, and perhaps a deeper revelation of Melville’s
inner convictions and strivings. The verses from which the volume
gets its title shoot parallels into Melville’s own life: Timoleon
rescued Timophanes, but it is Timophanes who is his mother’s pride.
She sees herself in him and looks, through him, to become an envied
dame of power, a social queen: Melville, who had once perhaps wanted
his mother’s generous love, realized that his lack of worldly success
had stood in the way of it: a discovery he first announced when he
wrote Pierre. Exiled, Timoleon ceases to hate his fellow citizens;
but, cut off from common membership in the marketplace, in severance
like a pale head found after battle apart from the trunk, he confronts
the gods, not finding the wrong in man, but taking his quarrel to the
Arch-Principals themselves. Has ideality no counterpart except in
man’s mind? Are earnest natures but fatherless shadows? The edges of
Melville’s old torment are here; and I should be inclined to date the
poem from an earlier period; but in other verses one discovers that
his resolution has completely knitted together. Under the title of The
Enthusiast, he places the words: _Though He slay me, yet will I trust
in Him._ It is a poem of brave defiance; and it tells so much about the
man that I must reproduce it.
Shall hearts that beat no base retreat
In Youth’s magnanimous years--
Ignoble hold it, if discreet
When interest tames to fears;
Shall spirits that worship light
Perfidious deem its sacred glow,
Recant and trudge where worldlings go,
Confirmed, and own them right?
Shall Time with creeping influence cold
Unnerve and cow? The heart
Pine for the heartless ones enthralled
With palterers of the mart?
Shall faith abjure her skies,
Or pale probation blench her down
To shrink from Truth, so still, so lone,
Mid loud gregarious lies?
Each burning boat in Caesar’s rear
Flames--No return through me!
So put the torch to ties though dear,
If ties but tempters be.
Nor cringe if come the night:
Walk through the cloud to meet the pall,
Though light forsake thee, never fall
From fealty to light.
Melville did not see in post-bellum America, with its parvenus pining
for distinctions and dignities, its lawmakers “taking the lawless one’s
fee,” in all the sham and shuffle of those guilty days, any pledge for
a happier society. The Age of the Antonines was far behind; and their
return seemed equally distant. “Apollo’s bust makes lime for Mammon’s
tower.” This man of integrity must fortify himself from within; and
when the present offers him no foothold, he must stand with Posterity
or with the Ancients. This was the sort of “adjustment” that Melville
achieved; and it was the only kind, in his position and day, that was
worth working for. There is no notion more delusive or unscientific,
in the strict biological sense, than the belief that a poet may make
a happy “adjustment” to his circumstances by turning bond-salesman,
or the artist by becoming an advertising expert. This course neglects
the elementary fact that the relation between an organism and its
environment is interacting and reciprocal: the best sort of adjustment
is that which tends to preserve life with its highest values intact.
The proper adjustment to a fire is not to plunge into it; and the
response of a poet to an unfavourable environment is not to commit
suicide but to use the most economic means for saving himself. Melville
had done this--and he was saved. “Happiness,” Spinoza said, “consists
in a man’s being able to maintain his own being.” When Melville read
this dictum in Matthew Arnold’s essay on Spinoza, in 1871, he marked
the passage: it described his own effort. In a more fruitful age, his
being would have been maintained in harmony with, not in opposition to,
the community: but at all events his vital duty was to maintain it.
5
We come to Melville’s last verses, those which he gathered in a MS.
called Weeds and Wildings, which remained unpublished until Mr. Raymond
Weaver edited the definitive edition of his work in 1923.
These final poems have all the qualities one cherishes in Melville:
his geniality, his humour, his lofty brooding, and that aloof satiric
eye beneath which his contemporaries shrivelled from the grandeur of
their reputations to the littleness of their deserts. In addition,
another quality of Melville’s personal life wells to the surface and
confirms all one’s other intuitions: a deep affection for his wife,
and a warm sympathy. The “clover dedication to Winnifred”--who was
Lizzie--recalls the old times together at Arrowhead, when the red
clover had blushed through the fields about their house. They had not
exactly lived in clover during those years or the later ones: ah, no!
nor had they known anything of the four-leafed kind, except once, as
he reminded her each year, “on the early forenoon of the fourth day of
a certain bridal month, now four years more than four times ten ago.”
Melville recalls how, after a morning walk in the summer, he would
return home with a handful of clover blossoms, to put on the maplewood
mantel in Lizzie’s south-facing room: her altar. “And in October most
did I please myself in gathering them from the moist-matted aftermath
in an encircled little hollow nearby, soon to be snowed upon.... And
once--you remember it--having culled them in a sunny little flurry of
snow, winter’s frolic skirmishes in advance, the genial warmth of your
chamber melted the fleecy flakes into dewdrops rolling off from their
ruddiness. ‘Tears of the happy,’ you said. Well, and then whom but to
thee, Madonna of the Trefoil, should I now dedicate these Weeds and
Wildings, thriftless children of quite another and yet spontaneous
aftergrowth, and bearing indications, too apparent it may be, of that
terminating season on which the offerer verges. And for aught of the
melting mood that my verses may possibly betray, call to mind the
dissolved snowflakes on the ruddy oblation of old, and remember your
‘Tears of the Happy.’”
There is a story of an acquaintance asking Melville for a copy of one
of his books, and Melville’s answering that he did not have a copy in
the house. One has no reason to suspect “O. G. H.’s” veracity, or that
of Melville: but one would get a false impression of Melville if one
thought that this indicated he had forgotten his work, or its worth, or
his old ambitions. There are a dozen references to his literary fate,
pointed, sardonic, in Weeds and Wildings. One of the most obvious of
these references is a poem entitled The American Aloe on Exhibition.
“It is a floral superstition,” observed Melville in the little
introduction, “as every one knows, that this plant flowers only once in
a century. When in any instance the flowering is for decades delayed
beyond the normal period (eight or ten years at farthest) it is owing
to something retarding in the environment or soil.”
Now, after one has made due allowances for the inner obstructions to
Melville’s further development in the critical period of maturity, one
realizes that Melville and Mr. Van Wyck Brooks are right: for even had
he continued at the level of Moby-Dick--as indeed he did in Benito
Cereno--there was something retarding in the American environment and
soil, in the thirty years that followed the Civil War. One cannot
separate a man from his social environment: a society lives in a man: a
man is a creature in society: the inner world is less private and the
outer world less public than people habitually and carelessly think.
These very words, inner and outer, individual and social, are merely
conveniences of thought: there are no actual lines and borders, except
practical ones. Melville’s triumph, like that of his contemporaries
in the Golden Day, was the last expression of a provincial society,
and the first prophetic achievement in a newer and deeper culture. His
own disaster was an emblem of the disintegration of that provincial
society, and the blight of the new culture, which though fully
conceived in the mind, received neither nourishment, warmth, nor
protection from the narrow, mechanistic, money-bent society that
succeeded the provincial one. If the inner world be not a phantasm,
it must be united to an outer world that nourishes it and supports
it, even when it offers oppositions and antinomies. This relationship
had existed before the Civil War; and when the external milieu became
impoverished, it ceased to exist--and the Aloe ceased to flower.
This poem admits no doubt of the fact that Melville was grimly
describing himself. People came to see the Century Plant on exhibition,
ten cents admission, but seldom more than two came at a time! This was
the homage that Melville met in his old age--and what comfort, what
tender comfort it was! What can the aged stem do? It moans:
At last, at last! but joy and pride,
What part have I with them?
Let be the death that kept me back
Now long from wreath decreed;
But, ah, ye Roses that have passed
Accounting me a weed!
When Melville touches on Captain Vere’s eventual death, in Billy Budd,
he adds that this spirit, in spite of its philosophic austerity, may
yet have indulged the most secret of all passions, ambition, without
attaining the fulness of fame: and one cannot doubt that Melville is
disclosing his own secret. The more violent the pride, the deeper the
ambition, the more fiercely it guards itself. But look more closely at
Melville’s humility: it towers like a mountain! Listen more closely to
his silence: it shouts like an army! He well knew, all the while, how
little the vain roses mattered that accounted him a weed; and we, who
look back upon Melville’s ostensible contemporaries, Lowell, Stedman,
Stoddard, Aldrich, can scarcely help sharing his contemptuous smile.
For these good gentlemen, in their most tolerant mood, Walt Whitman
was the Good Grey Poet, useful to be trotted ceremoniously out on the
platform, once a year, to recite his oration on The Martyred President;
and as for Melville--he was the queer old fellow who had once lived
among the cannibals. One can fancy the superior droop of their lips
when Robert Buchanan, an English writer, told them that these two men
were the supreme imaginative writers America had produced.
Did Melville forget his books or think them paltry? The verses,
Immolated, are an even more direct answer.
Children of my happier prime
When one yet lived with me and threw
Her rainbow over life and time,
Even Hope, my bride, and mother to you!
O, nurtured in sweet pastoral air
And fed on flowers and light and dew
Of morning meadows--spare, ah, spare
Reproach; spare and upbraid me not
That, yielding scarce to reckless mood,
But jealous of your future lot,
I sealed you in a fate subdued,
Have I not saved you from the dread
Theft and ignoring which need be
The triumph of the insincere
Unanimous mediocrity?
Rest, therefore, free from all despite
Snugged in the arms of comfortable night.
In still another poem, called Thy Aim, Thy Aim? he questions whether
mid the dust and dearth and din he may by some deed prove to be an
exception, and he warns himself to beware of envy, for if striving on
he win the goal, he will get only a flower of reputation, which is cut
down in an hour; but if he survive that, he will still only earn a
funeral flower--the belated funeral flower of fame. Melville was spared
the pillory of being praised as a travel-writer and a humourist, with
Mark Twain, or coupled as a poet with Aldrich; and in the bottom of his
heart, there was an anticipation of his final survival, not without a
feeling of satisfaction. Having prepared his own coffin, like Queequeg
in Moby-Dick, he could even fancy the flowers and wreaths that a later
generation would place over it. Funeral flowers, yes, but even funeral
flowers may solace a man, if he contemplates them before they are cut!
The relief from Melville’s dull grind had come a little too late:
one must not flinch from that fact. He was conscious of his age and
his physical debility; and, so far from railing at youth, he would
not, “reduced to skimmed milk, slander the cream.” Youth, he knew,
was immortal: “’Tis the elderly only grow old.” But age brought one
advantage: it taught him the wisdom of folly. When a spirit appears
and asks him where he would choose to dwell, in the Paradise of Fools
or in Wise Solomon’s Hell, he does not pause to weigh the answer; but,
ironically, he reverses his belief in Moby-Dick and demands the fool’s
paradise! From these sardonic snatches of Melville’s verse one gets
some notion of what his conversation on daily topics, the chicanes,
briberies, corruptions, social follies and stupid observances of his
contemporaries must have been. Melville’s wit was meant for keen
society: small wonder he created Jack Gentian to keep him company.
In The Rose Garden, verses written during the first days of Melville’s
release, one finds him asking himself whether he should turn to verse
or to prose. The question was an important one: he must have known
that his strength lay in prose, if only the theme were big enough to
enlist all his energies; but Melville delayed and dallied, hesitating
to commit himself to an impossible task. In his dilemma, he consults
a friend, asking him whether it is better to have a heap of posies or
a few drops of attar; and his friend tells him that his time has gone
by. To which Melville answers that, unfortunately, he had come into his
roses late; but first he wants to settle this little matter--poetry
or prose? Not being able to decide, he tried his hand at both. His
old eagerness was there; but something had happened. “Age, dull
tranquilliser, and arid years that filed before” had unfitted him for
flowers. Here one feels the final pathos of Melville’s position--the
last foul thrust of fate. In his maturity, he had been cheated of
outer sustenance, and when it finally came to him, he found himself
cheated of inner support. That brambly garden, that sour soil, needed
energy to bring it back into a state of cultivation, and energy, not
the will or the skill or the delight, was the one thing that Melville,
at sixty-seven, lacked. “My dear Sir,” he had once exclaimed to Mr.
Duyckinck, “the two good things to be yet discovered are these--the art
of rejuvenating old age in men, and old-ageifying youth in books.” He
had not altogether failed in the latter: but the first need was beyond
him.
But when energy fails, skill may partly make up for it; and there is a
simplicity and directness in these poems which shows greater control of
his medium: the annoying inversions are fewer, and among the wildings
of Melville’s old age, there is still a rose or two left over from a
more cultivated garden. The poem that fittingly closes this MS. volume,
The Lake, is perhaps the finest Melville wrote: it is a colloquy
between his own spirit and the spirit evoked by the Lake of Pontoosuce.
Melville here faces death and emptiness of being, and he draws his
faith from that spectacle in which the great religions have found their
sustenance, in the march of the seasons, the rhythmic cycle of life,
the ecstasy, the agony, the tragedy of the dying god, and his annual
resurrection and renewal.
“All dies! and not alone
The aspiring trees and men and grass;
The poets’ forms of beauty pass,
And noblest deeds they are undone,
Even truth itself decays, and lo,
From truth’s sad ashes pain and falsehood grow.
All dies!
The workman dies, and after him, the work;
Like to those pines whose graves I trace,
Statue and statuary fall upon their face:
In every amaranth the worm doth lurk,
Even stars, Chaldeans say, fade from the starry space,
Andes and Appalachee tell
Of havoc ere our Adam fell,
And present nature as a moss doth show
Of the ruins of the Nature of the Aeons long ago.
* * * * *
Dies, all dies!
The grass it dies, but in vernal pain
Up it springs and it lives again;
Over and over, again and again,
Who sighs that all dies!
Summer and winter and pleasure and pain,
And everything everywhere in God’s reign,
They end and anon they begin again;
Wane and wax, wax and wane:
Over and over and over again,
End, ever end, and begin again--
End, ever end, and forever, and ever begin again!”
She ceased and nearer slid, and hung
In dewy guise; then softlier sung:
“Since light and shade are equal set,
And all revolves, nor more ye know;
Ah, why should tears the pale cheek fret
For aught that waneth here below?
Let go, let go!”
With that, her warm lips thrilled me through,
She kissed me, while her chaplet cold
Its rootlets brushed against my brow,
With all their humid clinging mould,
She vanished, leaving fragrant breath
And warmth and chill of wedded life and death.