Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

“Until I was twenty-five,” Melville once wrote to Hawthorne, “I had no development at all.” When the cable and anchor of the United States were all clear, and when he bounded ashore on his native soil, Melville was in his twenty-fifth year. “From my twenty-fifth year,” he wrote Hawthorne, “I date my life.”

His three years of wandering, crowded as they were with alienating experiences, had, of course, worked deep changes in him: changes more radical than in the dizzy whirl of strangely peopled adventures it was possible for him to gauge. In memory, the fitful fever of the past, deceitfully seems to strive not. But we delude ourselves when we fancy that it sleeps well. During his far driftings, Melville had clung reverently to thoughts of home, his imagination treacherously caressing those very scenes whose intimate contact had filled him with revulsion. “Do men ever hate the thing they love?” he asks in White-Jacket, perplexed at the paradox of this perpetual recoil. He was eternally looking both before and after, but never with the smug and genial after-dinner optimism of Rabbi Ben Ezra. The insufficient present was always poisoned, to him, by bitter margins of pining and regret. In headlong escape from his household gods he had been landed among South Sea islands that in retrospect he viewed as “authentic Edens.” Yet even in Paradise did he feel himself an exile, teaching old Marheyo to say “Home” and “Mother,” converting into sacred words the countersigns of a former Hell. He tells in White-Jacket, how, with the smell of tar in his nostrils, out of sight of land, with a stout ship under his feet, and snuffing the ocean air, in the silence and solitude of the deep, during the long night watches used to come thronging about his heart “holy home associations.” And he closes White-Jacket with the reflection that “Life’s a voyage that’s homeward-bound!”

Of Melville’s impressions upon his return he has left no record. During his three years of whaling and captivity among cannibals, and mutiny, and South Sea driftings, and adventures in the Navy, life at home had gone along in its regular necessary way; and the scenes of his youth, despite their transformation in his memory, lived on in solid fact unchanged. The identical trees in the Boston Common blotted out the same patterns against the New England stars; none of the streets had swerved from off their prim and angular respectability. His mother he found living in Lansingburg, just out from Albany, N. Y. There was the same starched calico smell to his sister’s dresses, the same clang-tint to his mother’s voice. Such was the calibre of his imagination, that he must have found life at Lansingburg unbelievably like he knew it must be, yet very different from what he was prepared to find.

His brothers must have first appeared intimate strangers to him. His elder brother, Gansevoort, had given up his hat and fur shop, was well established in law and had won a creditable name for himself in politics. His younger brother, Allan, was beginning a successful legal career, with his name emblazoned on a door at 10 Wall Street. Maria was, after all, a Gansevoort; she was not too proud to keep her brothers reminded that she had borne sons. Melville’s youngest brother, Tom, had sprung from boyhood into the self-conscious maturity of youth.

From vagabondage in Polynesia to the stern yoke of self-supporting citizenship was a dizzy transition. But Melville did not clear it at a bound. The very violence of the impact between the two antipodal types of experience for a time must have stunned Melville to their incompatibility. Tanned with sea-faring, exuberant in health, rosy with the after-glow of his proud companionship with Jack Chase, and the respect and affection he had won from his associates on board the United States, he was effulgent with amazing tales—the enviable hero of endless incredible adventures. His home-coming may well have been not only a staggering, but a joyous adventure. For he entered Lansingburg trailing clouds of glory. He was panoplied in romance; and though bodily he was in a suburb of Albany, his companion image was the distant adventurer he saw mirrored in the admiring and jealous imagination of his friends. With what melancholy—if any—he viewed this reflected image, and to what degree he was, Narcissus-wise, conscious of its irony, we do not know. But if Typee and Omoo be any index of his mood, he returned home happier and wholesomer than at any other period of his life. Before many years, unsolved problems of his youth were to reassert themselves, heightened in difficulty and in pertinacity. Yet for a time, at least, so it would appear, he reaped very substantial benefits from his escape beyond civilisation.

According to J. E. A. Smith, Melville was soon beset by his enthralled and wide-eyed friends to put his experiences into a book. Even if such a challenge had never been made, it is difficult to see how Melville could have escaped plunging into literature. For the hankering for letters had earlier stirred in Melville’s blood,—a hankering that he had before succumbed to, swathing a vacuity of experience in the grave-wrappings of rhetoric and prolixity. Now he was rich in matter; because of the very straitened circumstances of his family, he was faced again by the necessity of earning some money if he stayed at home; and in so far as we know, he was untempted to venture forth either as vagabond or efficiency expert.

At the time of the completion of Typee, Melville’s brother, Gansevoort, was starting for London as Secretary to the American Legation under Minister McLane. Gansevoort threw Typee in among his luggage, to try its luck among British publishers. Whether Typee had previously been refused in the United States has not yet transpired. In any event, John Murray bought the English rights to print a thousand copies of Typee—a purchase that cost him £100. Murray did not close the sale, however, until he was assured that Typee was a sober account of actual experiences. Typee appeared in two parts in Murray’s “Colonial and Home Library.” Part I appeared on February 26, 1846; Part II on April 1 of the same year.

Encouraged by the temerity of John Murray, Wiley and Putnam of New York bought the American rights for Typee. And by an agreement made in England, Typee appeared simultaneously in New York and London: in America under the title, Typee, a Peep at Polynesian Life During Four Months’ Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas. In 1849, Harper Brothers took over Typee, and issued it shorn of some of the passages the Missionaries had found most objectionable. Up to January 1, 1849, Wiley and Putnam had sold 6,392 copies of Typee: a sale upon which Melville gained $655.91. Up to April 29, 1851, 7,437 copies of Typee had been sold in England, netting Melville, if accounts surviving in Allan’s hand be correct, $708.40.

“Herewith you have copy of the arrangement with Wiley & Putnam for the publication in the U. S. of your work on the Marquesas. The letter of W. & P. under date of Jan. 13th is the result of a previous understanding between Mr. Putnam and myself. As the correspondence speaks for itself, it is quite unnecessary to add any comment. By the steamer of to-morrow I send to your address several newspaper comments and critiques of your book. The one in the Sun was written by a gentleman who is very friendly to myself, and who may possibly for that reason have made it unusually eulogistic.

“Yours of Feb. 28 was rec’d a few days ago by the daily packet from Joshua Bates. I am happy to learn by it that the previous intelligence transmitted by me was ‘gratifying enough.’ I am glad that you continue busy, and on my next or the after that will venture to make some suggestions about your next book. In a former letter you informed me that Allan had sent you $100 home, the fruit of my collection. (I refer to the money sent at your request). It appears that this was not so, for Allan informs me that the $100 was part of the £90 s 10—making £100 which I sent out by the Jan. 2 Steamer. Allan seems to find it entirely too much trouble to send me the monthly accounts of receipts and disbursements. I have received no accounts from him later than up to Nov. 30th and consequently am in a state of almost entire ignorance as to what is transpiring at No. 10, Wall Street. This is very unthinking in him, for my thoughts are so much at home that much of my time is spent in disquieting apprehensions as to matters & things there. I continue to live within my income, but to do so am forced to live a life of daily self-denial. I do not find my health improved by the sedentary life I have to lead here. The climate is too damp & moist for me. I sometimes fear I am gradually breaking up. If it be so—let it be—God’s will be done. I have already seen about as much of London society as I care to see.

It is becoming a toil to me to make the exertion necessary to dress to go out, and I am now leading a life really as quiet as your own in Lansingburg.—I think I am growing phlegmatic and cold. Man stirs me not, nor women either. My circulation is languid. My brain is dull. I neither seek to win pleasure or avoid pain. A degree of insensibility has been long stealing over me, & now seems completely established, which, to my understanding, is more akin to death than life. Selfishly speaking, I never valued life very much—it were impossible to value it less than I do now. The only personal desire I now have is to be out of debt. That desire waxes stronger within me as others fade. In consideration of the little egotism which my previous letters to you have contained, I hope that mother, brothers & sister will pardon this babbling about myself.

“Tom’s matter has not been forgotten. You say there is a subject, etc., etc., ‘on which I intended to write but will defer it.’ What do you allude to? I am careful to procure all the critical notices of Typee which appear & transmit them to you. The steamer which left Boston on the 1st inst. will bring me tidings from the U. S. as to the success of Typee there. I am, with love and kisses to all,

With this letter, Gansevoort enclosed fourteen lines from Act III, Scene I of Measure for Measure, beginning “Ah, but to die.” On May 12, he was dead. His countrymen celebrated his decease. The Wisconsin, a newspaper published in Milwaukee, for example, published, on July 1, a florid tribute to his memory, declaring him “dear to the people of the West.” “And though he died young in years,” the Wisconsin goes on to say, “for genius, thrilling eloquence and enlarged patriotism, he was known to the people from Maine to Louisiana.”

But already had Melville achieved a wider, if less beatified, reputation. The notice that Typee attracted extended considerably beyond either Maine or Louisiana. And its success was none the less brilliant because it was in part a succes de scandal. Christendom has progressed since 1846, and Typee has, for present-day readers, lost its charm of indelicacy. Yet, despite the violation of the proprieties of which Melville was accused, Longfellow records in his journal for July 29, 1846: “In the evening we finished the first volume of Typee, a curious and interesting book with glowing descriptions of life in the Marquesas.” There is no indication that even Longfellow found it discreet to omit any passages as he read Typee to his family before the fire. It is to be remembered, however, that in 1851 the Scarlet Letter was attacked as being nothing but a deliberate attempt to attract readers by pandering to the basest taste: “Is the French era actually begun in our literature?” a shocked reviewer asked.

The appearance of Omoo on January 30, 1847, augmented Melville’s notoriety, and contributed to his fame. Both Typee and Omoo stirred up a whole regiment of critics, at home, in England and in France. France was patronising, of course, after the manner of the period; but France flattered Melville by the prolixity of her patronage. The interest of France in Melville was not a merely literary absorption, however. Melville had arrived at the Marquesas in the wake of Admiral Du Petit-Thouars; and at Tahiti Melville had been a prisoner on board the Reine Blanche. In England, Melville was flattered not only by vitriolic evangelistical damnation, and the uncritical flatter of Gansevoort’s friends, but even Blackwood’s, the most anti-American of British journals, said of Omoo: “Musing the other day over our matutinal hyson, the volume itself was laid before us, and we found ourselves in the society of Marquesan Melville, the Phœnix of modern voyages—springing, it would seem, from the mingled ashes of Captain Cook and Robinson Crusoe.” Writing of Typee, the insular John Bull said: “Since the joyous moment when we first read Robinson Crusoe and believed it, we have not met so bewitching a book as this narrative of Herman Melville’s.” The London Times descended to amiability and said: “That Mr. Melville will favour us with his further adventures in the South Seas, we have no doubt whatever. We shall expect them with impatience, and receive them with pleasure. He is a companion after our own hearts.

His voice is pleasant, and we are sure that if we could see his face it would be a pleasant one.” While such pronouncements were no earnest of fame, they may have contributed somewhat to augment Melville’s royalties. And in Mardi—written before Melville’s secular critics began to assail him—Melville took a violent fling at his reviewers. “True critics,” he said, “are more rare than true poets. A great critic is a sultan among satraps; but pretenders are thick as ants striving to scale a palm after its aerial sweetness. Oh! that an eagle should be stabbed by a goose-quill!” Withal, when Melville wrote Mardi he had spent some reflection on the nature of Fame, and mocked at those who console themselves for the neglect of their contemporaries by bethinking themselves of the glorious harvest of bravos their ghosts will reap. And time, he saw, was an undertaker, not a resurrectionist: “He who on all hands passes for a cipher to-day, if at all remembered, will be sure to pass to-morrow for the same. For there is more likelihood of being overrated while living than of being underrated when dead.”

Noticed by reviewers, and encouraged by payments from his publishers, Melville began to look more hopefully at the world. In Clarel he later wrote: “The dagger-icicle draws blood; but give it sun.” He seemed at last to have stepped decoratively and profitably into his assigned niche in the cosmic order. It was delightful to rehearse outlived pleasures and hardships; and it was a lucrative delight: by writing, too, some men had achieved fame. And so, undeterred by the wail of the Preacher of Jerusalem, Melville settled to the multiplication of books. He would perpetuate his reveries—and he doubted not that sparkling wines would crown his cup. Then it was that the beckoning image of an ultimate earthly felicity swam over the beaded brim.

Melville had dedicated Typee to Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts. The Shaws and the Melvilles were friends of years’ standing. When a student at Amherst, Lemuel Shaw had been engaged to Melville’s aunt, Nancy. “To his death,” says Frederic Hathway Chase in his Lemuel Shaw, “Shaw carefully preserved two tender notes written in the delicate hand of his first betrothed, timidly referring to their immature plans for the future and her admiration and love for him. The untimely death of the young lady, unhappily cut short their youthful dreams, and not until he was thirty-seven years of age were Shaw’s affections again engaged. The intimacy between Shaw and the Melville family, however, continued after the young lady’s death.” Yet were the demands of Shaw’s affections not satisfied by his intimacy with the Melvilles or by the two love-letters among his precious belongings. He married twice; the first time in 1818 to Elizabeth Knapp; the second time in 1827 to Hope Savage. By each wife he had two children. By Elizabeth, John Oakes, who died in 1902; and Elizabeth, who married Melville. By Hope, was born to him Lemuel, who lived till 1884, and Samuel Savage, born in 1833 in the Shaw home at 49 Mount Vernon Street, Boston, where he lived till his death in 1915. Melville heartily detested his brothers-in-law.

“Herewith you have one of the first bound copies of Typee I have been able to procure—the dedication is very simple, for the world would hardly have sympathised to the full extent of those feelings with which I regard my father’s friend and the constant friend of all his family.

“I hope that the perusal of this little narrative of mine will afford you some entertainment, even if it should not possess much other merit. Your knowing the author so well, will impart some interest to it.—I intended to have sent at the same time with this copies of Typee for each of my aunts, but have been disappointed in not receiving as many as I expected.—I mention, however, in the accompanying letter to my Aunt Priscilla that they shall soon be forthcoming.

The Aunt Priscilla mentioned in this letter was a sister of Melville’s father—fifth child of Major Thomas Melville. She was born in 1784, and upon her death in 1862, she showed that her appreciation of Melville’s earlier solicitude had been substantial, by bequeathing him nine hundred dollars. The Miss Elizabeth of the letter, the only daughter of Chief Justice Shaw, and Melville were married on August 4, 1847.

On the evidence of surviving records, Melville’s father had resigned himself to the institution of marriage as to one of the established conveniences of Christendom. Allan was a practical man, and he soberly saw that he gained more than he lost by generously sharing his bed and the fireside zone with a competent accessory to his domestic comforts. If he was ever a romantic lover, it was in the folly of his youth. Though romantic love be a tingling holiday extravagance, he mistrusted—and Allan never doubted his wisdom—its everyday useability for a cautious and peace-loving man. And since Dante had married Gemma Donati, since Petrarch had had children by an unknown concubine, Maria had reason to congratulate herself that Allan evinced for her no adoration of the kind lavished upon the sainted Beatrice or upon the unattainable Laura.

In his approach to marriage, Melville showed none of the prosaic circumspection of his father. From his idealisation of the proud cold purity of Maria, Melville built up a haloed image of the wonder and mystery of sanctified womanhood: without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, terrible, yet serene. And before this image Melville poured out the fulness of his most reverential thoughts and beliefs. The very profundity of his frustrated love for Maria, and the accusing incompatibility between the image and the fact, made his early life a futile and desperate attempt to escape from himself. The peace, and at the same time the stupendous discovery that he craved: that he found neither at home nor over the rim of the world. When with Maria, he had craved to put oceans between them; when so estranged, he was parched to return.

In his wanderings, he had seen sights, and lived through experiences to disabuse him of his fantastic idealisation of woman. In fact, however, such experiences may but tend to heighten idealisation. In the Middle Age, the Blessed Mother was celebrated in a duality of perplexing incompatibility: she was at once the Virgin Mother of the Son of God, and the patron of thieves, harlots and cutthroats. She was at once an object of worship and a subject of farce. She was woman. Protestantism, restoring woman to her original Hebraic dignity of a discarded rib, evinced in marriage an essentially biological interest, and regulated romantic love into uxoriousness. Allan was a good Protestant. But neither Mrs. Chapone nor Fayaway were able to precipitate Melville into that form of heresy. Fayaway was Fayaway: and her father was a cannibal. Civilisation had given her no veils; Christianity had given her no compunctons. She was neither a mystery nor a sin. Untouched did she leave the sacred image in his heart.

To Elizabeth Shaw, Melville transferred his idealisation of his mother. In Pierre he says: “this softened spell which wheeled the mother and son in one orbit of joy seemed a glimpse of the glorious possibility, of the divinest of those emotions which are incident to the sweetest season of love.” In Pierre, Melville declared that the ideal possibilities of the love between mother and son, seemed “almost to realise here below the sweet dreams of those religious enthusiasts, who paint to us a Paradise to come, when etherealised from all dross and stains, the holiest passion of man shall unite all kindreds and climes in one circle of pure and unimpaired delight.” And in this “courteous lover-like adoration” of son for mother, Melville saw the “highest and airiest thing in the whole compass of the experience of our mortal life.” And “this heavenly evanescence,” Melville declares, “this nameless and infinitely delicate aroma of inexpressible tenderness and attentiveness,” is, “in every refined and honourable attachment, contemporary with courtship.” In Pierre, Melville spends a chapter of dithyramb in celebration of this sentiment which, inspired by one’s mother, one transfers to all other women honourably loved. “Love may end in age, and pain and need, and all other modes of human mournfulness; but love begins in joy. Love’s first sigh is never breathed, till after love hath laughed. Love has not hands, but cymbals; Love’s mouth is chambered like a bugle, and the instinctive breathings of his life breathe jubilee notes of joy.”

None of Melville’s letters of courtship survive. There are more direct evidences of the fruits of his love, than of its early bloom. There are, however, two letters of his wife’s, written during the month of the marriage. The first was written during the wedding trip.

“You know I promised to write you whenever we came to a stopping place, and remained long enough. We are now at Center Harbor, a most lonely and romantic spot at the extremity of Winnipiscogee Lake, having arrived last evening from Concord—and we intend to remain until to-morrow. One object in stopping so long and indeed principal one was to visit ‘Red Hill’—a mountain (commanding a most beautiful view of the lake) about four miles distant. But to-day it is so cloudy and dull, I am afraid we shall not be able to accomplish it—so you see I have a little spare time, and improve it by writing to relieve any anxiety you may feel. Though this is but the third day since our departure, it seems as if a long time had passed, we have seen so many places of novelty and interest. The stage ride yesterday from Franklin here, though rather fatiguing, was one of great attraction from the beautiful scenery. To-morrow we again intend to take the stage to Conway, and from there to the White Mountains. I will write again from there, and tell you more of what I have seen, but now I send this missive more to let you know of our safety and well-being than anything else.