Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

My Dear M——, I can imagine you seated on that dear, delightful, old-fashioned sofa; your head supported by its luxurious padding, and with feet perched aloft on the aspiring back of that straight limbed, stiff-necked, quaint old chair, which, as our facetious W—— assured me, was the identical seat in which old Burton composed his Anatomy of Melancholy. I see you reluctantly raise your optics from the huge-clasped quarto which encumbers your lap, to receive the package which the servant hands you, and can almost imagine that I see those beloved features illumined for a moment with an expression of joy, as you read the superscription of your gentle protégé. Lay down I beseech you that odious black-lettered volume and let not its musty and withered leaves sully the virgin purity and whiteness of the sheet which is the vehicle of so much good sense, sterling thought, and chaste and elegant sentiment.

You remember how you used to rate me for my hang-dog modesty, my mauvaise honte, as my Lord Chesterfield would style it. Well! I have determined that hereafter you shall not have occasion to inflict upon me those flattering appellations of “Fool!” “Dolt!” “Sheep!” which in your indignation you used to shower upon me, with a vigour and a facility which excited my wonder, while it provoked my resentment.

And how do you imagine that I rid myself of this annoying hindrance? Why, truly, by coming to the conclusion that in this pretty corpus of mine was lodged every manly grace; that my limbs were modelled in the symmetry of the Phidian Jupiter; my countenance radiant with the beams of wit and intelligence, the envy of the beaux, the idol of the women and the admiration of the tailor. And then my mind! why, sir, I have discovered it to be endowed with the most rare and extraordinary powers, stored with universal knowledge, and embellished with every polite accomplishment.

Pollux! what a comfortable thing is a good opinion of one’s self when I walk the Broadway of our village with a certain air, that puts me down at once in the estimation of any intelligent stranger who may chance to meet me, as a distingué of the purest water, a blade of the true temper, a blood of the first quality! Lord! how I despise the little sneaking vermin who dodge along the street as though they were so many footmen or errand boys; who have never learned to carry the head erect in conscious importance, but hang that noblest of the human members as though it had been boxed by some virago of an Amazon; who shuffle along the walk with a quick uneasy step, a hasty clownish motion, which by the magnitude of the contrast, set off to advantage my own slow and magisterial gait, which I can at pleasure vary to an easy, abandoned sort of carriage, or to the more engaging alert and lively walk, to suit the varieties of time, occasion, and company.

And in society, too—how often have I commiserated the poor wretches who stood aloof, in a corner, like a flock of scared sheep; while myself, beautiful as Apollo, dressed in a style which would extort admiration from a Brummel, and belted round with self-esteem as with a girdle, sallied up to the ladies—complimenting one, exchanging a repartee with another; tapping this one under the chin, and clasping this one round the waist; and finally, winding up the operation by kissing round the whole circle to the great edification of the fair, and to the unbounded horror, amazement and ill-suppressed chagrin of the aforesaid sheepish multitude; who with eyes wide open and mouths distended, afforded good subjects on whom to exercise my polished wit, which like the glittering edge of a Damascus sabre “dazzled all it shone upon.”

By my halidome, sir, this same village of Lansingburgh contains within its pretty limits as fair a set of blushing damsels as one would wish to look upon on a dreamy summer day!—When I traverse the broad pavements of my own metropolis, my eyes are arrested by beautiful forms flitting hither and thither; and I pause to admire the elegance of their attire, the taste displayed in their embellishments; the rich mass of the material; and sometimes, it may be, at the loveliness of the features, which no art can heighten and no negligence conceal.

But here, sir, here—where woman seems to have erected her throne, and established her empire; here, where all feel and acknowledge her sway, she blooms in unborrowed charms; and the eye undazzled by the profusion of extraneous ornament, settles at once upon the loveliest faces which our clayey natures can assume.

Nor, my dear M., does there reign in all this bright display, that same monotony of feature, form, complexion, which elsewhere is beheld; no, here are all varieties, all the orders of Beauty’s architecture; the Doric, the Ionic, the Corinthian, all are here.

When I venture to describe the second of this beautiful trinity, I feel my powers of delineation inadequate to the task; but nevertheless I will try my hand at the matter, although like an unskilful limner, I am fearful I shall but scandalise the charms I endeavour to copy.

Come to my aid, ye guardian spirits of the Fair! Guide my awkward hand, and preserve from mutilation the features ye hover over and protect! Pour down whole floods of sparkling champagne, my dear M——, until your brain grows giddy with emotion; con over the latter portion of the first Canto of Childe Harold, and ransack your intellectual repository for the loveliest visions of the Fairy Land, and you will be in a measure prepared to relish the epicurean banquet I shall spread.

The stature of this beautiful mortal (if she be indeed of earth) is of that perfect height which, while it is freed from the charge of being low, cannot with propriety be denominated tall. Her figure is slender almost to fragility but strikingly modelled in spiritual elegance, and is the only form I ever saw which could bear the trial of a rigid criticism.

Every man who is gifted with the least particle of imagination, must in some of his reveries have conjured up from the realms of fancy, a being bright and beautiful beyond everything he had ever before apprehended, whose main and distinguishing attribute invariably proves to be a form the indescribable loveliness of which seems to

The realisation of these seraphic visions is seldom permitted us; but I can truly say that when my eyes for the first time fell upon this lovely creature, I thought myself transported to the land of Dreams, where lay embodied, the most brilliant conceptions of the wildest fancy. Indeed, could the Promethean spark throw life and animation into the Venus de Medici, it would but present the counterpart of ——.

Her complexion has the delicate tinge of the Brunett, with a little of the roseate hue of the Circassian; and one would swear that none but the sunny skies of Spain had shone upon the infancy of the being, who looks so like her own “dark-glancing daughters.”

And then her eyes! they open their dark, rich orbs upon you like the full moon of heaven, and blaze into your very soul the fires of day! Like the offerings laid upon the sacrificial altars of the Hebrew, when in an instant the divine spark falling from the propitiated God kindled them in flames; so, a single glance from that Oriental eye as quickly fires your soul, and leaves your bosom in a perfect conflagration! Odds Cupids and Darts! with one broad sweep of vision in a crowded ball-room, that splendid creature would lay around her like the two-handed sword of Minotti, hearts on hearts, piled round in semi-circles! But it is well for the more rugged sex that this glorious being can vary her proud dominion, and give to the expression of her eye a melting tenderness which dissolves the most frigid heart and heals the wounds she gave before.

If the devout and exemplary Mussulman who dying fast in the faith of his Prophet anticipates reclining on beds of roses, gloriously drunk through all the ages of eternity, is to be waited on by Houris such as these: waft me ye gentle gales beyond this lower world and

Here, my dear M——, closes this catalogue of the Graces, this chapter of Beauties, and I should implore your pardon for trespassing so long on your attention. If you, yourself, in whose breast may possibly be extinguished the amatory flame, should not feel an interest in these three “counterfeit presentments,” do not fail to show them to —— and solicit her opinion as to their respective merits.

These “chaste and elegant sentiments” are, surely, “embellished with every polite accomplishment.” Melville called down the Nine Gods, and a host of minor deities; he ransacked Athens, Rhodes, Cyprus, Circassia, Lydia, Lilliputia, Damascus, this world and the next, for geographical adornments; he called up Burton, Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Milton, Coleridge and Chesterfield, as well as Prometheus and Cinderella, Mahomet and Cleopatra, Madonnas and Houris, Medici and Mussulman, to strew carelessly across his pages. “Not in vain,” says Melville of the idealisation of himself in the character of Pierre, “had he spent long summer afternoons in the deep recesses of his father’s fastidiously picked and decorous library.” Not in vain, either, had he been submitted to three years of elementary drill in the classics at the Albany Academy. “Not that as yet his young and immature soul had been accosted by the wonderful Mutes, and through the vast halls of Silent Truth, had been ushered into the full, secret, eternally inviolable Sanhedrim, where the Poetic Magi discuss, in glorious gibberish, the Alpha and Omega of the Universe,” says Melville; “but among the beautiful imaginings of the second and third degree of poets he freely and comprehendingly ranged.”

Melville was always a wide if desultory reader, more and more interested after the manner of Sir Thomas Browne, and the Burton with reference to whom he began his career in letters, in “remote and curious illusions, wrecks of forgotten fables, antediluvian computations, obsolete and unfamiliar problems, riddles that no living Œdipus would care to solve.” And this preoccupation—first made manifest in Mardi (1849)—must always stand in the way of his most typical writings ever becoming widely popular. His earliest known piece of juvenile composition is interesting as revealing the crude beginnings of one of the manners superbly mastered in parts of Moby-Dick. This early effusion, by revealing so crudely the defects of his qualities, reads as a dull parody of one of his most typical later manners.

With a Miltonic confidence in his own gifts, Melville came to view these earlier pieces as the first “earthly rubbish” of his “immense quarries of fine marble.” Melville goes on to say that “no commonplace is ever effectually got rid of, except by essentially emptying one’s self of it into a book; for once trapped into a book, then the book can be put into the fire and all will be well.” “But they are not always put into the fire,” he said with regret. And because of his own laxity in cremation, his crude first fruits stalk abroad to accuse him.

At this early period, Melville had nothing very significant to say; but he seems to have been urged to say it with remorseless pertinacity. In Pierre, he satirises his youthful and reckless prolixity where he speaks of his manuscripts as being of such flying multitudes that “they were to be found lying all round the house; gave a great deal of trouble to the housemaids in sweeping; went for kindlings to the fires; and forever flitting out of the windows, and under the doorsills, into the faces of people passing the manorial mansion.”

Having nothing very particular to write about, he followed an ancient tradition, and wrote of love. In Pierre, which is Melville’s spiritual autobiography, and in Pierre alone, does Melville elaborately busy himself with romantic affection. And in Pierre, his is no sugared and conventional preoccupation. He traces his own development through the love-friendship of boyhood, the miscellaneous susceptibility of adolescence, to a crucifixion in manhood between the images of his wife and his mother. His first Fragment from a Writing Desk seems to have been conceived at a time before his “innumerable wandering glances settled upon some one specific object.”

His second Fragment from a Writing Desk concerns itself with an allegorical quest of elusive feminine loveliness: a kind of Coelebs in Search of a Wife, allegorised and crossed with Lalla Rookh. It survives, as has been said, only as a fragment of a Fragment. Its conclusion must remain a mystery until some old newspaper file disgorges its secrets. It begins as follows: