Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

“It is often to be observed, that as in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthly rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in digging in one’s soul for the fine gold of genius, much dulness and common-place is first brought to light. Happy would it be, if the man possessed in himself some receptacle for his own rubbish of this sort: but he is like the occupant of a dwelling, whose refuse cannot be clapped into his own cellar, but must be deposited in the street before his own door, for the public functionaries to take care of.”

The record of the next three and a half years of Melville’s life is extremely scant. What he was doing and thinking and feeling must be left almost completely to surmise. In the brief record of his life preserved in the Commonplace Book of his wife, this period between Liverpool and the South Seas is dismissed in a single sentence: “Taught school at intervals in Pittsfield and in Greenbush (now East Albany) N. Y.” Arthur Stedman (who got his facts largely from Mrs. Melville), in his “Biographical and Critical Introduction” to Typee, slightly enlarges upon this statement. “A good part of the succeeding three years, from 1837 to 1840,” says Stedman, “was occupied with school teaching. While so engaged at Greenbush, now East Albany, N. Y., he received the munificent salary of ‘six dollars a quarter and board.’ He taught for one term at Pittsfield, Mass., ‘boarding around’ with the families of his pupils, in true American fashion, and early suppressing, on one memorable occasion, the efforts of his larger scholars to inaugurate a rebellion by physical force.” J. E. A. Smith, in his Biographical Sketch already cited, dates this “memorable” mating of pedagogy and pugilism somewhat earlier.

“It still remains to be said,” says Melville, “that Pierre himself had written many a fugitive thing, which had brought him not only vast credit and compliments from his more immediate acquaintances, but the less partial applauses of the always intelligent and extremely discriminating public. In short, Pierre had frequently done that which many other boys have done—published. Not in the imposing form of a book, but in the more modest and becoming way of occasional contributions to magazines and other polite periodicals. Not only the public had applauded his gemmed little sketches of thought and fancy; but the high and mighty Campbell clan of editors of all sorts had bestowed upon them those generous commendations which, with one instantaneous glance, they had immediately perceived was his due.... One, after endorsingly quoting that sapient, suppressed maxim of Dr. Goldsmith’s, which asserts that whatever is new is false, went on to apply it to the excellent productions before him; concluding with this: ‘He has translated the unruffled gentleman from the drawing-room into the general levee of letters; he never permits himself to astonish; is never betrayed into anything coarse or new; as assured that whatever astonishes is vulgar, and whatever is new must be crude. Yes, it is the glory of this admirable young author, that vulgarity and vigour—two inseparable adjuncts—are equally removed from him.’”

In Pierre, Melville spends more than twenty-five closely printed pages—half satirical, half of the utmost seriousness—discussing his own literary growth: a passage of the highest critical and biographical interest. In its satirical parts the passage is consistently double-edged; therein, Melville ironically praises his early writing for possessing those very defects which his maturer work was damned for not exhibiting. It is doubtless true that his juvenile works were “equally removed from vulgarity and vigour.” They were “characterised throughout by Perfect Taste,” as he makes one critic observe “in an ungovernable burst of admiring fury.” But the Perfect Taste was the Perfect Taste of Hannah More, and Dr. Akenside, and Lalla Rookh. With the publication of Typee, Melville was charged not only with the crimes of vulgarity and vigour, but with the milder accompanying vices of indecency and irreverence. His earliest writings were untouched by any of these taints. In Pierre, Melville speaks of “a renowned clerical and philological conductor of a weekly religious periodical, whose surprising proficiency in the Greek, Hebrew and Chaldaic, to which he had devoted by far the greater part of his life, peculiarly fitting him to pronounce unerring judgment upon works of taste in the English.” Melville makes this critic thus deliver himself on Pierre’s early efforts in letters: “He is blameless in morals, and harmless throughout.” Another “unhesitatingly recommended his effusions to the family circle.”

Only two of Melville’s earliest effusions, written before the world had “fairly Timonised him” are known to survive. These appeared in The Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser for May 4, and May 18, 1839. The first is signed “L. A. V.”; the second, known to exist only in a single mutilated clipping, in lacking the closing paragraphs, can give no evidence as to concluding signature. Copies of these two articles are preserved among Melville’s papers, each autographed by him in faded brown ink. The interest of the earlier paper is heightened by this inscription, in Melville’s hand, boldly scrawled across the inner margin: “When I woke up this morning, what the Devil should I see but your cane along in bed with me. I shall keep it for you when you come up here again.” It is more easy to imagine Melville’s astonishment in waking to find such a stately novelty as a walking-stick for a bed-fellow, than to fancy how the walking-stick found itself in such an unusual environment. It is about as futile to inquire into the history and meaning of this incident as soberly to debate “what songs the sirens sang and what name Achilles bore among the daughters of the King of Scyros.” It is certain, however, that the Sirens had little hand in Melville’s juvenile effusions. And of this fact Melville grew to be keenly aware. “In sober earnest,” he says in Pierre, “those papers contained nothing uncommon; indeed, those fugitive things were the veriest commonplace.”

Yet as the initial literary efforts of a man who wrote Typee and Moby-Dick they are intensely interesting: interesting, like the longer prayers of St. Augustine, less because of their content than because of the personality from which they were derived.