at last to Melville in the closing years of his life. He had renounced
much; but he had gained much. What is life? the king in Mardi had
asked the philosopher; and the philosopher had said: That question is
more final than any answer. After much doubt, exacerbation, searching,
after a long weary pilgrimage through books and lands, and not a
little intercourse with men, Melville was back to the view of his
youth: he now accepted its finality. What power and heroic defiance
had not accomplished, love, which has its philosophic equivalent in
the desire to merge oneself with the universe and surrender to it, and
accept its purposes, as one accepts the desires and whims and aims
of one’s beloved--love had achieved this. It was no accident that
Melville’s warm attitude toward Elizabeth coincided with this last warm
acceptance of the universe. Melville surrendered to his wife, and he
surrendered to his rough old mother, the earth, owning the primacy of
that ceaseless urge which begets the Ahabs and Babbalanjas and Medias
and Jack Chases and Pierres and Clarels, recognizing that intelligence,
power, virtue, are not prime movers themselves, but derivative
mechanisms that transmit and utilize the energy of life. If one spurn
that energy and deny its sources, one’s dreams are futile and one’s
hopes empty: but when one accepts life itself as the primary fact,
then the dying year brings no grief, and all that fades and decays is
but a pledge of what shall again, one day, live and flourish: the very
universe itself, and space and time, are but modes of being, no more
eternal than the senses that react to them and project upon them the
forms that make them useful and significant to man. Whatever be the
ultimate nature of things, the universe man conceives is still held
together at his own centre: its significance is part and parcel of his
own. And at the centre of that centre is a fertilized ovum. Out of the
egg comes not merely man but his world: the mightiest constellation is
but the ectoderm of man’s original plasm. There is a greater energy
than Moby-Dick’s. The seed that in its growth pries open the rock has
more power than the inert and brutal elements that oppose it, and
there is a seed in man whose growth cannot be denied, a seed that
binds him to all life, and causes him to direct his energies, despite
frustrations, despite warring elements in his own being, towards a
fuller existence marked by love and understanding. The ideality, which
Melville could not find in a cold “external” universe metaphysically
separated from man--and falsely so--is embodied in the common instincts
of animals: it was when he ceased to draw upon these sources that the
world became black and painful and hostile, and ideals seemed ghastly
disembodiments. When the roots of his animal nature were nourished once
more, he leafed again, as the trees leaf in Indian summer, and courage
and faith returned. Melville had faced the colourless, unintegrated,
primal world that underlies and antedates that which we know through
our senses, our feelings, our experiences: he had touched the bare,
unkind beginning of things, that chaos which existed when darkness
reigned over the face of the waters, and only Moby-Dick had stirred
in the deep: he had beheld the white unrefracted truth which exists
before it passes through man’s being and is broken up into the colours
of art and thought and custom and ritual and organized society. But
Nature paints like a harlot, not without reason: she desires to attract
the passions of men, to attract and use them for her own end: life.
Melville’s consciousness of a more primal world made him see more
exhaustively, I think, into the nature of existence: but it was bare
rock-truth, unweathered into soil, still less worked over by plants,
insects, moulds, and the tools of man: and it gave him nothing that
his spirit could feed on. At last he escaped from that bleak ultimate
revelation, and, participating in the ancient cycle of life, he found
his own life renewed once more.
6
Melville’s last poems gain by comparison with his earlier work: but
his prose inevitably loses a little. One does not miss his lack
of energy in a quatrain; it is plain and perceptible even in a
short novel. One notes this falling off of Melville’s prose in the
sketches on the Marquis de Grandvin: it comes out again in the little
addition to Rip van Winkle that he wrote. In his prime, writing about
Hawthorne, Melville had little use for the tepid quality of Irving’s
prose, so genteelly lymphatic; but now, in 1890, he went so far as
to dedicate his addendum to the Happy Shade of Sunnyside. The torrid
tropical sunlight, the violent gold and purple of Melville’s earlier
prose vanished: what was left was the mild pale sunshine cast on
the bronzed oak leaves of a winter landscape. These graceful but
diminished energies properly link Melville’s spirit with Irving’s. The
immediateness of the old narratives was gone. Billy Budd, his final
novel, is not a full-bodied story: there is statement, commentary,
illustration, just statement, wise commentary, apt illustration:
what is lacking is an independent and living creation. The epithets
themselves lack body and colour: Billy Budd has nothing to compare
with the description of boiling whale-oil in Moby-Dick--“a wild Hindoo
odour, like the left wing of the Day of Judgement.”
Billy Budd, which was dedicated to Jack Chase, wherever he might be,
alow or aloft, lacks the fecundity and energy of White-Jacket: the
story itself takes place on the sea, but the sea itself is missing, and
even the principal characters are not primarily men: they are actors
and symbols. The story gains something by this concentration, perhaps:
it is stripped for action, and even Melville’s deliberate digressions
do not halt it. Each of the characters has a Platonic clarity of form.
Captain the Honourable Edward Fairfax Vere, “starry Vere,” is a man
of superior order: humane, reserved, free from cant, fortified by an
equal knowledge of men and books. After the mutiny of the Nore, the
time when this story takes place, the command of a British naval vessel
is no easy one: the officers are tense and expectant, though outwardly
indifferent: mutiny may break out any minute among the “people.” Billy
Budd, a seaman taken over by impressment from The Rights of Man, stands
out from the rest of the crew: one of Nature’s innocents. A fine frame,
yellow hair, an open, almost girlish face, set him off with angelic
beauty: and he is a natural favourite among the crew: the Handsome
Sailor of eighteenth century balladry.
Without overt act, merely by being what he is, the personification
of strength, health, beauty, innocence, Budd incurs the enmity of
Claggart, the master-at-arms. Claggart, with a suspicious past at his
back but with soft humid ways and obsequious intelligence, has quickly
won promotion: he is now the evil agent of discipline, prowling over
the ship, watching for disorder--a sea-bag not stowed away, a sailor
evading work, or a hint of mutiny. It is as natural for Claggart to
hate goodness as it is for Budd to personify it: the evil in the man is
apparently causeless in any immediate sense, like the venom in a snake:
it simply is there. With a benign, ambiguous exterior, he secretly
contrives in small ways to make Billy’s lot miserable; and when Billy,
perplexed, brings the matter before a trusty wizen-mouthed old sailor,
the old fellow tells “Baby Budd” that Claggart has it in for him. In
his simpleness, Budd cannot believe it. How could he?--for he had
given no offence. So Claggart plots more deeply against Budd; through
confederates in the crew, tale-bearers and spies, he tries to bribe
Budd into mutiny. Budd, not realizing the meaning of the suggestion
when it is made to him, still flushes with anger, like a fresh girl
spattered by an obscenity. Then Claggart goes further. He takes
advantage of Budd by wakening him from a sleep and getting him into a
compromising position before he is sufficiently awake to withdraw. Now
Claggart thinks he has Budd in his power. He appears before Captain
Vere and humbly submits his report of Budd’s attempted treachery.
Captain Vere, being a firm man and a sound one, is not greatly
impressed by Claggart’s tale: it looks too thin: but for the sake of
form and discipline, since the customs of the navy make it necessary to
employ such fellows as Claggart, he summons Budd to his own cabin to
confront the master-at-arms, instead of airing the matter by a public
inquiry. When Budd comes, Claggart repeats his lie to Budd’s face.
This poor lad has only one physical blemish: in moments of stress he
stammers, and now, confronted by this sudden, horrifying suspicion,
he can for the moment give no answer. His mouth makes an effort: no
words come forth: the blood mounts up to his head. Captain Vere wisely
attempts to soothe him: “There is no hurry, my boy, take your time.”
These kindly words have just the opposite effect to that intended,
for, touching Billy’s heart to a mighty effort at release, he answers
Claggart’s lie with a cannon-blow from his fists. Budd’s first and only
act of rebellion is fatal: Claggart is instantaneously killed.
Vere has no belief whatever in Budd’s guilt; but this act swiftly
alters the case. The perjurer has been struck dead by an angel of God;
but in this world, the angels must hang. A swift deck court-martial is
held in the captain’s cabin, and Vere is caught by the dual nature of
his position. He is commander of the ship, a captain, a disciplinarian,
responsible for the safety of all aboard, committed by the terms of
his commission to the Articles of War and all that they imply. As a
man, with fatherly feelings toward this innocent boy, he would be
merciful: as commander, he acts against his innermost wishes and
urges his subordinates not to be swayed by motives of compassion. His
fellow officers reluctantly respect their superior’s probity: they
sentence Billy Budd to be hanged for murder. Privately, as man to man,
as father to son, Vere announces the sentence to Budd. Justice done,
pity, magnanimity, stir Vere to the bottom: the feelings of the judge
and the judged are transferred; for the burden now lies on Captain Vere
rather than on the victim; and Vere, in turn, is the instrument of an
institution. When the hemp is placed around Billy Budd’s neck, Billy
turns to the quarter-deck and cries out: God bless Captain Vere. He
dies happily, in the first vapoury glory of the dawn--dies, and becomes
a legend among the sailors, and the spar from which he was hanged is
followed through its vicissitudes, and ballads are sung and tales are
told about him.
Billy Budd is the story of three men in the British Navy: it is
also the story of the world, the spirit, and the devil. Melville
left a note, crossed out in the original manuscript, “Here ends a
story not unwarranted by what happens in this incongruous world of
ours--innocence and infirmity, spiritual depravity and fair respite.”
The meaning is so obvious that one shrinks from underlining it. Good
and evil exist in the nature of things, each forever itself, each
doomed to war with the other. In the working out of human institutions,
evil has a place as well as the good: Vere is contemptuous of Claggart,
but cannot do without him: he loves Budd as a son and must condemn him
to the noose: justice dictates an act abhorrent to his nature, and only
his inner magnanimity keeps it from being revolting. These are the
fundamental ambiguities of life: so long as evil exists, the agents
that intercept it will also be evil, whilst we accept the world’s
conditions: the universal articles of war on which our civilizations
rest. Rascality may be punished; but beauty and innocence will suffer
in that process far more. There is no comfort, in the perpetual Calvary
of the spirit, to find a thief nailed on either side. Melville had
been harried by these paradoxes in Pierre. At last he was reconciled.
He accepted the situation as a tragic necessity; and to meet that
tragedy bravely was to find peace, the ultimate peace of resignation,
even in an incongruous world. As Melville’s own end approached, he
cried out with Billy Budd: God bless Captain Vere! In this final
affirmation Herman Melville died. September 28, 1891, was the date of
the outward event.
EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE
Why does Herman Melville mean so much more to us than he did to his
own contemporaries? What has his thought done for us, and what has his
vision given?
The change that has come about is not merely a change of style,
so that the things which amused Mr. Stedman or Mr. Lowell are now
old-fashioned, like hooped skirts, while the things that concerned
Melville are, like the cubist quilts and coverlets of the 1850’s,
distinctly modern. Typee is still as good a book as Mr. Arthur Stedman
thought it; but we see now that it belongs to a more common order of
literature, whereas Moby-Dick, the more closely we consider it, mounts
to that lonely wind-swept plateau in whose rarefied air only the finest
imaginations can breathe. Distinctly, Moby-Dick belongs with The Divine
Comedy and Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace; and if
it does not establish its right to this company, it must occupy a lower
place than the successful novels of its period, a David Copperfield or
a Pendennis, books written with a complete acceptance of the current
limitations and provincialities.
Melville’s work, taken as a whole, expresses that tragic sense of
life which has always attended the highest triumphs of the race, at
the moments of completest mastery and fulfilment. Where that sense
is lacking, life shrivels into small prudences and weak pleasures
and petty gains, and those great feats of thought and imagination
which transform the very character of the universe and relieve human
purpose from the scant sufficiency of toiling and eating and sleeping,
in a meaningless, reiterative round, shrivel away, too. John Ruskin
saw the truth of this when, in spite of his pacifist convictions, he
praised the art of war, for its effect upon the human spirit: life is
intensified and purposive when the battle with the inimical forces that
surround us, like Ahab’s battle, is a deliberate pursuit and challenge,
and not merely an apathetic waiting for a purely physiological end.
The tragedy of life, its evanescence, its frustrations, its limitations
within physical boundaries almost as narrow as a straitjacket, its
final extinction, becomes, in a day that consciously embraces its
fate, the condition of an heroic effort. Death, which biologically is
merely the terminus of a natural process, acquires significance for
man because he anticipates it and modifies his activities so as to
circumvent it: by memory and foresight, by choosing his ends, dreaming
of immortality, erecting monuments and statues and museums, and above
all, by transmitting the written word, man creates a destiny beyond his
life’s physical span. It is just because the worms lie in wait that man
defies the gods, cherishes the images he has created and the relations
he has solidified in custom and thought, and centres his efforts on
those things which are least given to meaningless change. Though the
sensible world is not derived, as Plato thought, from the heaven of
ideas, the opposite of this is what every culture must strive for: to
derive from the sensible world that which may be translated to a more
durable world of forms.
Within the world of these forms there is Life, a thing of value, and
not merely living, a matter of fact and habit and animal necessity.
Whether one develops this tragic sense of values on a battlefield,
like Sophocles, or in a whaleboat, like Melville, it is a precious
experience: for living, merely living, as every profane writer from
Petronius Arbiter to Theodore Dreiser has shown, brings boredom,
satiety, despair: whereas Life is eternal, and he who has faith in it
and participates in it is saved from the emptiness of the universe
and the pointlessness of his own presence therein. Living, for man, in
all but the most brutish communities, like those of the savages of the
Straits of Magellan or the outcasts of a Liverpool or New York slum,
includes and implies this Life; and when Melville summons into his
whaler the several races of the world, he is expressing the universal
nature of that effort which caps nature with culture, existence
with meaning, and facts with forms. Ahab’s tragic struggle is the
condition of every high endeavour of the mind, even though Death be
its tragic reward; while adjustment, acquiescence, accepting outward
conditions as inward necessities, though they may prolong living in the
physical sense, effectually curtail Life: this attitude, the attitude
of Melville’s contemporaries, the attitude of the routineers and
Philistines of all times--and they have never perhaps been so numerous
as today--disrupts life more completely than illness and death do;
for it brings about a deliquescence of forms, such as the nineteenth
century showed in all its common arts, and a disintegration of human
purposes. When that happens, the White Whale of brute energy reigns
supreme: Life itself is denied: living produces no values, and men hide
their emptiness by embracing dull counterfeits of purpose.
Melville’s younger contemporaries, who fought in the Civil War, knew
Life and Death; but those who prospered in the years that followed
knew something more dreadful than simple death: they knew chaos and
purposelessness and disintegration, such chaos and purposelessness,
mixed with a wan, reminiscent hope, as Henry Adams pictured in his
Education. Herman Melville portrayed a human purpose, concentrated
to almost maniacal intensity, in Moby-Dick; and in Pierre and The
Confidence Man, he showed the black aftermath, when the purpose was
not sustained and carried out in art, and when he himself was deserted
in his extremity, by contemporaries who neither understood nor heeded
nor shared his vision. No single mind can hold its own against all
that is foreign to it in the universe: Shakespeare’s solitary heroes
issue their brief defiance only to be blotted out: such unity of spirit
as one may possess, as philosopher or poet, must be sustained in the
community itself. Now, a new culture, the product of two hundred and
fifty years of settled life in America, had produced Walden, Leaves of
Grass, Emerson’s Notebooks, and Moby-Dick; but that culture, instead of
supporting and carrying forward the integration of man and nature and
society shadowed forth in those books, was completely uprooted by the
Civil War, and a material civilization, inimical in many aspects to the
forms and symbols of a humane culture, was swept in by the very act of
destruction.
Two generations of that material civilization have shown us its
lopsidedness, its aimlessness, its grand attempt to conceal its
emptiness by extending concrete roads and asphalted streets and vacuum
cleaners to more and more remote terrains. Our most humane writers,
like Mr. Sherwood Anderson, have proved how mercilessly the whole
human being is crippled by this one-sided triumph; and even our most
bewildered writers, who have exulted in all these maimed energies,
have shown in their very act of deification how brutal and aimless
they are. We realize that the effort of culture, the effort to make
Life significant and durable, to conquer in ourselves that formidable
confusion which threatens from without to overwhelm us--this effort
must begin again. And in thus making a beginning we are nearer to
Whitman with his cosmic faith and Melville in his cosmic defiance than
we are to a good part of the work of our own contemporaries. It is not
that we go back to these writers: it is, rather, that we have come
abreast of them; for in creating that new synthesis, in lieu of the
formless empiricisms and the rootless trancendentalisms of the last
three centuries, the writers of our own classic past were nearer to the
contemporary problem than almost any of the Europeans have been--since
the physical remains of another culture in Europe give the mind a false
sense of stability and security.
Herman Melville’s world is our world, magnificently bodied and
dimensioned: our synthesis must include and sublimate that very
quest of power which Melville portrayed with such unique skill, as a
combination of science and adventure and spiritual hardihood, in Typee,
Mardi, and Moby-Dick. Melville’s life warns us not to stop here: men
must test their strength in surrender as well as in lonely conquest:
he who knows neither social union nor sexual passion nor love is
indeed an Ishmael, who finds himself an outcast because he has cast
out that which was most precious to his own nature: there is love in
the universe as well as power: the sun warms and the rain slakes the
thirst: the whales dally and the first song of creation is the song of
sex.
The synthesis that Melville foreshadowed in his ideas is not simply a
logical structure: the search for such an abstract solution of life’s
problems is one of the idola of the closet. Melville’s synthesis was
embodied in acts and deeds. During the years of his early manhood, as
he wandered about the world and contemplated existence under the stars
and bore a hand in working the ship, his environment, his experience,
and his vital relationships were an integer. He did not lack what
libraries and cities and the social heritage of man gives: indeed,
he enjoyed fully the resources of a sound literary and philosophic
scholarship; but he mixed this with activities that gave back to books
the subtle properties that cannot be transmitted to the printed page,
but must be derived directly from living. The reviewers in London might
well have been shocked by the spectacle of a common sailor writing
Typee or White-Jacket. Melville had bridged in his life that great gap
between the respectable, learned professions and the common trades that
had hitherto been crossed, with rare exceptions, only by those who
definitely had lost caste, or who, like Burns, had risen with a sense
of uneasy, sullen pride to acceptance among people of high rank.
Melville was an American--and that implied the dissolution of
spiritual frontiers. America had taken all the established castes
and classifications of Europe and left them to sort themselves out
according to nature and ability: this was the true and beneficial
result of eighteenth century thinking and its political accompaniments.
By a singular dissociation of ideas, which involved the destruction
of an old social tissue, it had permitted a free and disinterested
creature, a man, to emerge from a conglomeration of classes and
practical interests. Melville was not primarily a sailor; he was not an
adventurer; he was a man sailing, a man adventuring, a man thinking,
proving in his early manhood that a whole and healthy life may involve
many functions, without sacrificing its wholeness and health to any
one of them. Whitman with his carpentering and his nursing, Thoreau
with his pencil-making and gardening, were Herman Melville’s brothers
in the way and the life. They did not disdain practical life: they
faced it manfully: but instead of neglecting every other activity for
“business” they saw that what was called business was only a small part
of the totality of living: they behaved toward it _as if it were real_,
as Whitman said, with the knowledge that merely getting a living was
not a sufficient contribution to Life. Brutal though Melville found
whaling to be, it communicated, nevertheless, a sense of Life: there
was astronomy and natural history and art and religion within the
bulky hold of a whaler, as well as technics and business and the daily
logbook.
The vision that grew out of this experience was a whole one, not,
like the science of its time, subordinated to practical interests
or even narrower metaphysical schemata. Through its dissociation
from inherited values all things began at scratch: no one element
in life, except sex, carried a handicap. Melville’s settling down
was inevitable, inevitable and difficult: but the difficulty was not
due to the inability of a restless adventurer to accept a tamer and
more even existence: it was due to the fact that, having known a
rounded and cultured life, however savage and exacting, he could not
submit to the desiccated routine of Western civilization, with its
contempt for art, its gross disregard for the higher manifestations
of science, its dislike for meditation, its subservient religion, its
frank subordination of all other values to that of Comfort. Melville’s
contemporaries, with chance exceptions, neither lived as full a life as
he had lived in the South Seas, nor were able to understand it, even as
a theory. For these contemporaries, Melville’s vision was an example
of Bedlam literature: they did not realize that Bedlam was precisely
the world they lived in, and that Melville’s vision, like Emerson’s,
like Whitman’s, like Thoreau’s, was a part, and a great part, of a new
cultural synthesis.