Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

CHAPTER I. Devil’s Advocate

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE

“If ever, my dear Hawthorne,” wrote Melville in the summer of 1851, “we shall sit down in Paradise in some little shady corner by ourselves; and if we shall by any means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I won’t believe in a Temperance Heaven); and if we shall then cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together till both ring musically in concert: then, O my dear fellow mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now so much distress us.” This serene and laughing desolation--a mood which in Melville alternated with a deepening and less tranquil despair--is a spectacle to inspire with sardonic optimism those who gloat over the vanity of human wishes. For though at that time Melville was only thirty-two years old, he had crowded into that brief space of life a scope of experience to rival Ulysses’, and a literary achievement of a magnitude and variety to merit all but the highest fame. Still did he luxuriate in tribulation. Well-born, and nurtured in good manners and a cosmopolitan tradition, he was, like George Borrow, and Sir Richard Burton, a gentleman adventurer in the barbarous outposts of human experience. Nor was his a kid-gloved and expensively staged dip into studio savagery. “For my part, I abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever,” he declared. And as proof of this abomination he went forth penniless as a common sailor to view the watery world. He spent his youth and early manhood in the forecastles of a merchantman, several whalers, and a man-of-war. He diversified whale-hunting by a sojourn of four months among practising cannibals, and a mutiny off Tahiti. He returned home to New England to marry the daughter of Chief Justice Shaw of Massachusetts, and to win wide distinction as a novelist on both sides of the Atlantic. Though these crowded years had brought with them bitter hardship and keen suffering, he had sown in tears that he might reap in triumph. But when he wrote to Hawthorne he felt that triumph had not been achieved. Yet he needed but one conclusive gesture to provoke the world to cry this as a lie in his throat: one last sure sign to convince all posterity that he was, indeed, one whom the gods loved. But the gods fatally withheld their sign for forty years. Melville did not die until 1891.

None of Melville’s critics seem ever to have been able to forgive him his length of days. “Some men die too soon,” said Nietzsche, “others too late; there is an art in dying at the right time.” Melville’s longevity has done deep harm to his reputation as an artist in dying, and has obscured the phenomenal brilliancy of his early literary accomplishment. The last forty years of his history are a record of a stoical--and sometimes frenzied--distaste for life, a perverse and sedulous contempt for recognition, an interest in solitude, in etchings and in metaphysics. In his writings after 1851 he employed a world of pains to scorn the world: a compliment returned in kind. During the closing years of his life he violated the self-esteem of the world still more by rating it as too inconsequential for condemnation. He earned his living between 1866 and 1886 as inspector of Customs in New York city. His deepest interest came to be in metaphysics: which is but misery dissolved in thought. It may be, to the all-seeing eye of truth, that Melville’s closing years were the most glorious of his life. But to the mere critic of literature, his strange career is like a star that drops a line of streaming fire down the vault of the sky--and then the dark and blasted shape that sinks into the earth.

There are few more interesting problems in biography than this offered by Melville’s paradoxical career: its brilliant early achievement, its long and dark eclipse. Yet in its popular statement, this problem is perverted from the facts by an insufficient knowledge of Melville’s life and works. The current opinion was thus expressed by an uncircumspect critic at the time of Melville’s centenary in 1919: “Owing to some odd psychological experience, that has never been definitely explained, his style of writing, his view of life underwent a complete change. From being a writer of stirring, vivid fiction, he became a dreamer, wrapping himself up in a vague kind of mysticism, that rendered his last few books such as Pierre: or The Ambiguities and The Confidence Man: His Masquerade quite incomprehensible, and certainly most uninteresting for the average reader.”

Unhampered by diffidence--because innocent of the essential facts--critics of Melville have been fluent in hypothesis to account for this “complete change.” A German critic patriotically lays the blame on Kant. English-speaking critics, with insular pride, have found a sufficiency of disruptive agencies nearer at home. Some impute Melville’s decline to Sir Thomas Browne; others to Melville’s intimacy with Hawthorne; others to the dispraise heaped upon Pierre. Though there is a semblance of truth in each, such attempts at explanation are, of course, too shallow and neat to merit reprobation. But there is another group of critics, too considerable in size and substance to be so cavalierly dismissed. This company accounts for Melville’s swift obscuration in a summary and comprehensive manner, by intimating that Melville went insane.

Such an intimation is doubtless highly efficacious to mediocrity in bolstering its own self-esteem. But otherwise it is without precise intellectual content. For insanity is not a definite entity like leprosy, measles, and the bubonic plague, but even in its most precise use, denotes a conglomerate group of phenomena which have but little in common. Science, it is true, speaking through Nordau and Lombroso, has attempted to show an intimate correlation between genius and degeneracy; and if the creative imagination of some of the disciples of Freud is to be trusted, the choir invisible is little more than a glorified bedlam. Plato would have accepted this verdict with approval. “From insanity,” said Plato, “Greece has derived its greatest benefits.” But the dull and decent Philistine, untouched by Platonic heresies, justifies his sterility in a boast of sanity. The America in which Melville was born and died was exuberantly and unquestionably “sane.” Its “sanity” drove Irving abroad and made a recluse of Hawthorne. Cooper alone throve upon it. And of Melville, more ponderous in gifts and more volcanic in energy than any other American writer, it made an Ishmael upon the face of the earth. With its outstanding symptoms of materialism and conformity it drove Emerson to pray for an epidemic of madness: “O Celestial Bacchus! drive them mad.--This multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity to vitalise this too much pasture, and in the long delay indemnifying themselves with the false wine of alcohol, of politics, of money.”

From this it would appear that a taste for insanity has been widespread among poets, prophets and saints: men venerated more by posterity than by their neighbours. It is well for Socrates that Xantippe did not write his memoirs: but there was sufficient libel in hemlock. In ancient and mediæval times, of course, madness, when not abhorred as a demoniac possession, was revered as a holy and mysterious visitation. To-day, witch-burning and canonisation have given place to more refined devices. The herd must always be intolerant of all who violate its sacred and painfully reared traditions. With an easy conscience it has always exterminated in the flesh those who sin in the flesh. In times less timid than the present it dealt with sins of the spirit with similar crude vindictiveness. We boast it as a sign of our progress that we have outgrown the days of jubilant public crucifixions and bumpers of hemlock: and there is ironic justice in the boast. Openly to harbour convictions repugnant to the herd is still the unforgivable sin against that most holy of ghosts--fashionable opinion; and carelessly to let live may be more cruel than officiously to cause to die.

Melville sinned blackly against the orthodoxy of his time. In his earlier works, he confined his sins to an attack upon Missionaries and the starchings of civilisation: sins that won him a succes de scandal. The London Missionary Society charged into the resulting festivities with its flag at half mast. Cased in the armour of the Lord, it with flagrant injustice attacked his morals, because it smarted under his ideas. But when Melville began flooding the very foundations of life with torrents of corrosive pessimism, the world at large found itself more vulnerable in its encasement. It could not, without absurdity obvious even to itself, accuse Melville of any of the cruder crimes against Jehovah or the Public. Judged by the bungling provisions of the thirty-nine articles and the penal code, he was not a bad man: more subtle was his iniquity. As by a divine visitation, the Harper fire of 1853 effectually reduced Pierre--his most frankly poisonous book--to a safely limited edition. And the public, taking the hint, ceased buying his books. In reply, Melville earned his bread as Inspector of Customs. The public, defeated in its righteous attempts at starvation, hit upon a more exquisite revenge. It gathered in elegiacal synods and whispered mysteriously: “He went insane.”

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