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.

Melville had foreseen all the sordid developments of “this dishonorable 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.

In the prose preface to John Marr, Melville explained that Marr had 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.

That peace and oneness with Nature, which Isabel had prayed for, came 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.

The stripping down of Herman Melville’s ego, which he began in Mardi and finished in Pierre, was a sloughing away of labels, nicknames, party war-cries, habits, conventions, and acceptances; it was, necessarily, a prelude to that building up of a new ego, a surer and more central, a social and participating self, which is the task of our own time for both men and communities. Melville was crippled in the work of reconstruction by a hiatus in his own career, which was followed and made final by the social hiatus of the Civil War: though he sought to carry the work further in Clarel, one cannot pretend that he did anything but give a hint of this mended psyche, this more richly integrated self: one of his last poems, The Lake of Pontoosuce, perhaps approaches nearer to the goal than any other work of his. Had he built up that ego, his vision might have fully complemented Whitman’s--land and sea, day and night, sunlight and shadow, triumph and tragedy. That union was latent: it is for us to effect it. It is useless, however, to speculate upon what might have been. The accidents that befell Melville, as he rounded his own Cape Horn, were part of that malign doom he himself pictured in Moby-Dick, and they do not affect the essence of his work. Whatever Melville’s life was, his art in Moby-Dick exhibits that integration and synthesis which we seek. Through his art, he escaped the barren destiny of his living: he embraced Life; and we who now follow where his lonely courage led him embrace it, too. This embrace was a fertile one; and in each generation it will bring forth its own progeny. The day of Herman Melville’s vision is now in the beginning. It hangs like a cloud over the horizon at dawn; and as the sun rises, it will become more radiant, and more a part of the living day.

NOTE ON BOOKS

The complete and definitive edition of Melville’s works is that published by Constable and Company, London, 1923-1924. With the exception of Israel Potter, The Confidence Man, Pierre, and the various volumes of verse, all of Melville’s work can now be obtained in contemporary popular editions. Mr. Raymond Weaver’s edition of The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville (Horace Liveright, 1928) and Mr. Henry Chapin’s edition of the Appletree Table and Other Sketches and of John Marr and Other Poems (Princeton University Press, 1922) make almost all of Melville’s significant minor work available. Mr. Meade Minnegrode’s Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville and a Bibliography contains extracts from some of Melville’s Letters to Evert Duyckinck. The bibliography covers in detail all of Melville’s writings, giving both American and English first editions. The first biography of Herman Melville was that of Mr. Raymond Weaver: Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic (Doran, 1921). Mr. John Freeman’s brief critical biography belongs to the new English Men of Letters Series (Macmillan, 1926); Mr. Freeman has the distinction of being the first to deal patiently and critically with Melville’s poetry. Various other volumes on Herman Melville are now in course of preparation. Among the critics whose studies of Melville have contributed to his revival and to a proper evaluation of his work I would mention especially Mr. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., Miss Viola Meynell, Mr. Percy Boynton, Mr. J. W. N. Sullivan, Mr. E. L. Grant Watson, and, not least, Mr. Van Wyck Brooks.

INDEX

Acushnet, ship list, 43

Adams, Henry, chaos and purposelessness pictured by, 360

Adjustment, fallacious interpretation of, 313-344

Adler, Dr., 120

Adolescent purity, 216

After the Pleasure Party, 274

Ahab, Captain, 161 ff.

Alcott, Bronson, 66

Alma, 99

Ambiguities, Melville’s experiences of, 210; Emerson’s expression of, 216

Ambition, Melville’s secret, 347

American Aloe on Exhibition, The, 345

American folk-arts, 45

American psyche, broken, 229

American society, in 1819, 9; in 1844, 63; economic conflict, 63; question of one and many, 63; slavery and industrialism, 64; intrusion of new habits of living, 64; contrast of vital and mechanical, provincial and metropolitan, 66; in 1860, 293; loss of form, 293; wastefulness of industrialism in, 294

Anglo-American Literature and Manners, 74

Anticipation of modern science, Melville’s, 99

Appletree Table, The, 236

Arrowhead, 136

Articles of War, 355

Arts, as means of salvation, 318

Attica, comparison with North Atlantic states, 65

Azzageddi, Melville’s demon, 102

Babbalanja, 95

Barney, 21

Bartleby the Scrivener, 236-239

Battle Pieces and Other Aspects of the War, 303-305

Beddoes, 179

Bell-Tower, 236

Benito Cereno, 244-246

Bentley, 123

Beowulf, 194

Berkshires, 135

Billson, James, 334

Billy Budd, 337, 353-356

Birth, 16

Bitterness of life, 309

Blackness, Melville’s, 233-235

Blake, William, 335

Boynton, Percy, 181, 194

Bridegroom Dick, 337

Broadhall, 135

Brooks, Van Wyck, 110, 194

Bryant, William Cullen, 12

Bullen, Frank, 147

Camoëns, 58

Captain Claret, 59

Captain Riga, 29, 36

Captains, The Two, 290

Centenary Committee, 333

Chapin, Henry, 369

Chaplain Mudge, 44

Charity, 249, 253

Chase, Jack, 57

Chasles, M. Philarète, 74

Children, Melville’s, plight of, 287; fate of Malcolm and Stanwix, 288

Christianity, Melville’s respect for, 103; his repugnance toward, 320

Chronometricals and Horologicals, 214

Civil War, the, a dividing point, 291; attempt to preserve ideological framework by, 292; symbolizes disruption, 293; described by Whitman, 297

Claggart, causeless evil in, 354

Clarel, 307-324

Coan, Titus Munson, 259

Cock-a-doodle-do, 236

Cologne, 128

Colonel J. Bunkum, 337

Confidence, lack of, 248

Confidence Man, The, 247-255

Consular post, Melville’s efforts to secure, 235, 289

Contempt, Melville’s, for contemporaries, 233

Convictions, conflict of, 301

Cousins, their condescension and Melville’s resentment, 75

Critic, The, 3

Critics, their condemnation of Mardi, 105; misconception of Melville, 106

Crystal Palace Exhibition, 188

Culture, new, 361

Customs Office, an asylum, 329

Daggoo, 165

Dana, Richard Henry, 40

Dark Ages of Democracy, 327

Death, biological terminus, 359; spiritual significance, 359

Death, Herman Melville’s, 357

Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser, 36

De Quincey, 127

Derwent, 311

Dilemma as writer, 221

Dominora, 97

Dowden, quoted, 234

Duke of Rutland, 129

Duyckinck, Evert, 73; expurgates Typee, 76; introduces Melville to literary world, 79; Lowell’s characterization of, 80; correspondence with Melville, 140 ff.

Duyckinck, George, 79

Duyckincks, The, Whitman’s opinion of, 80

Edens, authentic, 339

Emerson, Lectures on the Times, 65; defended by Melville, 140; absence of shadows in, 141

Encantadas, The, or Enchanted Isles, 239-240

England, first impression of, 33; return to, 119 ff.; depth and triviality of, 124, 125

Enthusiast, The, 342

Eternity, 98

Ethan Brand, criticism of Melville in, 145

European observations, 273-274

Evil, discovery in Mardi, 96, 246

Fact, respect for in nineteenth-century literature, 192; in Moby-Dick, 192

Faith, animal, 324

Fantasies, usable and unusable, 233

Father Mapple, 159-160

Father Taylor, prototype of Father Mapple, 44

Fayaway, Melville’s companion, 49, 52

Fiddler, The, 259

Flask, 164

Flogging, Melville’s influence on abolition of, 117

Forms, world of, 359

Forster, E. M., 209

Free verse, in Pierre, 181

Gansevoort Hotel, 329

Gansevoort Market, 329

Gansevoorts, 11

Glendinning, Mrs., 203

Golden Day, The, 141

Goodman, Frank, 250

Grand Armada, 171

Greene, Richard Tobias, 73

Haglets, The, 342

Harper’s, 135, 235

Hautia, symbol of sensual bliss, 51; her attractiveness in Typee, 51

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, first effect on Melville, 137; likeness to Rembrandt, 138, to Shakespeare, 138; first meeting with Melville, 142; last meeting, 262-265

Hawthorne, Sophia, characterization of Melville, 143

Herzen, Alexander, 91, 315

Hiatus, in Melville’s emotional development, 218; in his career, 291

Highlander, The, 28, 32

Human values, sweeping away of, 319

Humiliation, effect of, 31

Humour, of desperation, 169; Melville’s perpetual sense of, 290

I and My Chimney, 236

Ideal life, fantastic notions of, 65

Ideality, embodied in animal instincts, 352

Illness, Melville’s, 224-225

Imaginative synthesis, Moby-Dick as, 170-171

Industrialism, as end in itself, 65; wastefulness of, 294; bleak efficiency and blindness to humane purpose, 319

Inheritance, 336

Innocents Abroad, 328

Insanity, looseness of term, 231; biographer’s difficulty, 231; Melville’s interpretation of, 231-232; relationship with art, 232-233

Institutions, upheaval in 1848, 91; savage parody of in Mardi, 91

Instrumentation of Moby-Dick, 182

Irving, Washington, 139

Isabel, 202

Israel Potter, 240-242

Jack Gentian, 337

Jackson, 29; Melville pities, 235

Jehovah, birth of idea of, 271

Jewish literature, Melville’s sympathies with, 320

Jimmy Rose, 259

Jocularity, infirmity of, 283, 290-291

John Brown, 297

John Marr, 338

Jokes, family’s indifference to, 332

Journals, Melville’s, to England and the Continent, 119-131; to Constantinople and the Holy Land, 261-273

Jung, 194

Juvenile Total Abstinence Association, 29

Kinship with Thoreau, 112

Kory-Kory, manservant, 47

Lake of Pontoosuce, The, 349-350

Lawrence, D. H., 194

Leisure, Melville’s high opinion of, 332

Lenin, 316

Life, implication of ideal ends, 189; as more than living, 190; stultification in vacuous dreams, 316

Life, naïve joy in, 49; sinister meanings of, 124; shadow of death on, 129

Libellous criticism, 106

Lightning Rod Man, The, 236

Literary method, Melville’s conception, 212

Literary World, The, 79

Lockhart, 125

Lombardo, 102

London, greyness of, 124; depression of, 126

Londoners, 123

Lucy, 202

MacMechan, Archibald, 337

Man of the World, The, 290

Manhattan literati, 79

Mardi, characterization of, 93-101

Mark Twain, 328

Marquesas, 46-55

Marquis de Grandvin, 337

Masefield, John, 110

Material civilization, lopsidedness of, 361

Mather, F. J., Jr., 241

Mechanical arts, menace of their perfection, 318

Media, 95

Mehevi, King of Typees, 47

Melville, Allan, brother of Herman, 66

Melville, Allan, father of Herman Melville, characteristics, 13, 14; knowledge of Europe, 15; marriage, 14; traveller, 21; death, 23

Melville, Elizabeth (Shaw), marries Herman, 86; as housekeeper, 136; strain of relationship with Herman, 287; receives affectionate dedication of Weeds and Wildings, 344

Melville, Gansevoort, 25, 67, 80

Melville, Herman, his family, 11-14; birth, 17; birthplace, 17; early impressions, 17; starved of affection, 18; moved to Bleecker Street, 18; melancholy situation, 19; relatives, 20; influence of Manhattan, 21; ambitions, 22; father’s death in 1832, 23; fixation of father’s image, 24; struggle for existence, 25-26; Grand Tour, 27; an infant Ishmael, 28; bitterness of youth, 28; disappointment in Liverpool, 33; exploration of city, 34; first view of misery and degradation, 34-35; essential education, 35; return to Lansingburgh, 36; slow growth, 36; early sexual life, 36-37; first literary effusions, 37-38; beginning of self-consciousness, 39; preparation for literature, 38; attraction to sea, 40; departure from New Bedford, 41; leaves ship at Nukuheva, 46; lives among Typees, 47-52; is rescued by the Julia, 52; makes friends with Dr. Long Ghost, 52; participates in mutiny, 53; is confined in British jail, 54; becomes a rover, 54-55; enjoys idle life, 55; works in Honolulu, 55; becomes sick of adventure, 56; ships on U. S. Frigate, United States, 56; homeward bound, 56-62; discovers abuses in Navy, 57; makes friends with Jack Chase, 57; is influenced in literary taste by ship’s library, 57-58; is condemned to flogging, 58; has impulse to assault Captain, 58; resents “massacre of beards,” 59; falls from yard-arm, 59-60; beginning of manhood, 61; lands at Boston, 62; writes Typee, 67; habit of documentation, 69; accuracy, 70; effect of censorship on, 77; successful author, 78; writes Omoo, 81; marries Elizabeth Shaw, 86; honeymoon, 87; daily routine, 87-89; has weak eyes, 88; writes Mardi, 91; tightening of domestic responsibility, 108; necessity for potboilers, 108; writes Redburn, 108; writes White-Jacket, 114; goes to Europe, 119; becomes acquainted with English society, 122; steady growth and development, 131; return to America, 131; moves to Arrowhead, 136; meets Hawthorne, 142; correspondence with, 144 ff.; discovers Hawthorne’s sentiments, 147; apprenticeship over, 150; intensity of effort in Moby-Dick, 151; ruin of eyesight, 152; feeling of desolation, 154; is damned by dollars, 155; contempt of fame, 155; swift development, 156; exaltation and terror from Moby-Dick, 156; situation after Moby-Dick, 196; culmination of powers, 197; disclosure of weaknesses, 196; his wilful defiance, 199; mood of defeat, 200; betrays himself in Pierre, 218; terrific pressure leads to retreat of, 220; dilemmas as writer, 107, 220; anticipation of defeat, 221; failure to mature in marriage, 222; draws near spiritual Cape Horn, 223; alienation from humanity, 227; scorn of critics, 228; Timonism, 230; meets successive misfortunes, 235, 236; weakened health, 236; writes Piazza Tales, 236; Israel Potter, and The Confidence Man, 236-255; recoils from painful experience, 259; goes on voyage to Holy Land, 261; visits Hawthorne in England, 261; discusses withdrawal from literature, 263; fails to renew friendship, 265; sails for Near East, 265; explores Constantinople, 267, and Cairo, 270; has passionate encounter in Italy, 274-281; returns home, 1857, 281; seeks to gain living in lecture lyceum, 282; voyage to San Francisco in 1860, 284; longing for Elizabeth, 286; commonplaceness as father, 287; sells Arrowhead, meets carriage accident, moves to New York, 289; interest in Civil War, 292-303; eventual disillusion, 303; withdraws from literary struggle, 306; gets inspectorship in Customs House, 307; writes Clarel, 307-308; is indifferent to “recognition,” 333; is released from Customs House, 336; resumes literary work and writes Billy Budd, 337; publishes John Marr, 338; publishes Timoleon, 342; writes Weeds and Wildings, 344; expresses warmth of love for Elizabeth, 345; finds peace, 351; expresses ultimate resignation in Billy Budd, 357; death, 357

Melville, Malcolm, 92

Melville, Maria, mother of Herman Melville, comparison with Mrs. Glendinning, 14

Melville, Stanwix, 287

Melville, Thomas, ambition to become sailor, 67

Men-about-literature, 333

Metcalf, Eleanor Melville, v

Milton, 191

Minnigerode, Meade, 285

Misinterpretation of Melville, 224

Missionaries, 74

Moby-Dick, writing of, 147-157; summary of, 158-176; criticism of, 176-195; symphonic quality, 182; organic conception of, 182; its meaning as story of sea, 183; as parable of evil, 184; as tragedy of man, 187; as contrast of practical and ideal life, 188

Modern vision of life, 194

Mohi, 95

Monody (to Hawthorne), 265

Mortmain, 310

Murray, Dr. Henry A., Jr., vi

Murray, John, 73

Mythology, Moby-Dick as first modern, 193

Nathan, 310

Nature, oneness with, 351; paints like a harlot, 352

New York, in 1819, 15-16; after Civil War, 326; its brutality, 327

New Bedford, centre of whaling industry, 42, 158

No Trust, 249

O’Brien, Fitz-James, 198

Olympians, English, 124

Omoo, 81-84

Orthodox illusions, Melville’s rejection of, 324-325

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, 191

Palestine, effect on Melville, 309

Paradise of Bachelors, 130, 236

Paradox of morality, 216

Passion, reawakening in Italy, 275; frustration, 276-281

Parrington, Vernon, 199

Peace, Melville’s ultimate, 357

Pequod, The, 161

Personal disappointment and bitterness, 109; an Ishmael, 109

Physical characteristics, Melville’s, 119

Physical weakness, 225

Piazza Tales, The, 243

Pictures, Melville’s favourite, 130, 336

Pierre, 196-206

Pilgrims, Melville’s and Chaucer’s, 311-312

Pip, 170

Pittsfield, 135, 341

Plotinus Plinlimmon, 215

Political institutions, Melville’s misgivings over, 295

Post-bellum America, 343

Primal world, Melville’s consciousness of, 353

Progress, its illusory nature, 313-314

Prose-sketches, 337

Provincial society, 9; its economic foundations, 10; mixture of nationalities, 10; reality of family, 11; idealized in Pierre, 13; destruction, 292

Psychological truth, in Pierre, 211

Pyramids, the, effect on Melville, 271

Queequeg, 160

Rama, 330

Rammon, Introduction to, quoted, 323

Realism, 5

Recoil from black experience, 255

Redburn, 108-114

Refugee, The, 290

Rembrandt, 336

Resignation, on point of, 259

Retarding environment, 345

Return of the Sire de Nesle, 90

Revolutionary betterment, psychological problem of, 316

Rip Van Winkle, Melville’s addition to, 353

Rolfe, 310

Rose Garden, The, 348

Rumour of Melville’s insanity, 224

Ruskin, John, in praise of war, 359

Russell, W. Clark, 334

Ruth, 310

Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 335

Sailors, hard life, 30; monotony of pleasures, 31

Salvator R. Tarnmoor, pseudonym for H. M., 239

Satire, perfection in White-Jacket, 116; in The Confidence Man, 253

Science, Melville’s utilization of, 163

Sea Poems, 334, 340

Seaman’s Bethel, 43

Serenia, 99

Sermon on the Mount, 195

Sexual feud, 277

Shakespeare, William, Melville’s discovery of in maturity, 138; Messianic likeness for Melville, 138

Shaw, Lemuel, inheritance left by, 336

Significance, Melville’s, 361-368

Slavery, Melville’s attitude towards, 296; Hawthorne’s attitude, 297

Smith, J. E. A., testimony on Melville, 341

Society, immoral practices of, 111

Social observation, Melville’s, 314-316

Starbuck, 164

Stedman, Arthur, 358

Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 327

Stewart, Miss Caroline, v

Stoddard, R. H., 329

Surgeon Cuticle, his operation, 116

Synthesis, foreshadowed by Melville, 362

Taboo, its caprices, 50; effect of sexual, 78

Taji, 94-101

Tartarus of Maids, The, 64, 236

Tashtego, 165

Thomas, Mrs. Frances, v

Thomson, James, 334

Thoreau, experiment at Walden, 65

Thy Aim, Thy Aim?, 348

Timonism, 233

Toby, 72; story of, 74

Tragic sense of life, the, 358

Transcendentalists, satire on, 213

Travels, to Liverpool, 29; to London, 119; to Paris, 127; to Liverpool (1856), 261; to Greece, 265; to Constantinople, 267; to Cairo, 270; to Jerusalem, 272; through Europe, 273; to California, 284

Turner, 336

Twenty-sixth Street, 104 East, 328

Two Years Before the Mast, effect on Melville, 40

Typee, 68-76

Typees, their cannibalism, 47; customs, 48; superiority to Western Civilization, 48; their beauty, 49; pleasures of their life, 49; Melville’s escape from, 52

Ulver, Delly, 203

Unconscious, discovery of the, 102

Universe, acceptance of, 351; false metaphysical separation of, 352

Vedder, Elihu, 334

Vere, Captain the Honorable Edward Fairfax, 354

Versification, Melville’s weakness in, 303, 320

Vice and Virtue, 217

Victorian confidence, 318

Vine, 310

Vision, wholeness of, 368

Vivenza, 97

Vivia, 205

War, its anomalous nature, 298; its arousal of Melville, 298-302 as image of Melville’s life, 299

Watson, E. L. G., 369

Weaver, Raymond, v, 344

Weeds and Wildings, 344

Wendell, Barrett, 80

Whale, first effect on Melville, 41; a New Bedford memory, 42; as symbol, 162; as natural history, 162, 163

Whale ship, Melville’s College, 46

Whaling implements, 45

White, as symbol of elemental truth, 168

White-Jacket, 114-118

Whitehead, A. N., 191

White Whale, incarnation of malicious agencies, 166; symbol of external universe, 167; Ahab’s defiance of, 167

Whitman, Walt, 4, 5

Woman, her absence in Melville’s work, 201

Woodberry, George, 80

Work, dignity of, 332

Wulf, Uncle John de, 20

Yillah, 94; symbol of spiritual quest, 51; beckons Melville, 52

Yoomy, 95

Young Goodman Brown, 203

[Transcriber’s note: Italics are rendered with _underscores_. Small capitals, when used as emphasis, are shown with +plus signs+.

A small number of spelling corrections were made (“ultilizes/utilizes”, “Mappie’s/Mapple’s”, “closses/closes”). Inconsistent hyphenation (e.g., “whale-boat” vs. “whaleboat”) has been retained.]