Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

At the time when Melville moved into the Berkshire Hills, the region around Lenox boasted the descriptive title: “a jungle of literary lions”—a title amiably ferocious in its provincial vanity. In this region, it is true, Jonathan Edwards had written his treatises on predestination, and with sardonic optimism had gloated over the beauties of hell; here Catherine Sedgewick wrote her amiable insipidities; here Elihu Burritt, “the learned Blacksmith” wrote out his Sparks; here Bryant composed; here Henry Ward Beecher indited many Star-Papers; here Headley and Holmes, Lowell and Longfellow, Curtis and G. P. R. James, Audubon and Whipple, Mrs. Sigourney and Martineau, Fanny Kemble and Frederick Bremer and the Goodale sisters either visited or lived. Impressed by this array of names—an array deceptively impressive to the New England imagination,—local pride has not blushed to explain: “By the river Arno, in the ‘lake region’ of Cumberland and Westmoreland, or on the placid river which flows through the Concord meadows, what congestion of literary associations! Like the instinct of the bee which, separated by great distances from the hive, possesses the infallible sense of direction for its return, so, too, the lovely ‘nooks and corners’ on the earth’s surface are irresistibly and unerringly attracting choice spirits, which some way are sure to find them out and pre-empt them in the interests of their craft or clan. Berkshire is no exception to this.”

When, in 1850, both Melville and Hawthorne moved into the Berkshires, these literary wilds were tamely domesticated, and sadly thinned of prowling genius. The coming of Melville and Hawthorne, however, marked the most important advent ever made into these regions. For there Melville wrote Moby-Dick; and there Melville and Hawthorne were to be thrown into an ironical intimacy.

In the autumn of 1850, Melville bought a spacious gambrel-roofed farmhouse at Pittsfield, situated along Holmes Road and not far from Broadhall, formerly the home of his uncle, and familiar to Melville’s youth. Melville named the place Arrowhead. To Arrowhead he brought his retinue of female relatives, and set about to alternate farming with literature.

In the first of the Piazza Tales (1856), in I and My Chimney (Putnam’s Magazine, March, 1856), and in The Rose-wood Table (Putnam’s Magazine, May, 1856), Melville has left descriptions of Arrowhead, its inmates, and the surrounding country.

“When I removed into the country,” Melville says in the Piazza Tales, “it was to occupy an old-fashioned farmhouse which had no piazza—a deficiency the more regretted because not only did I like piazzas, as somehow combining the cosiness of indoors with the freedom of outdoors, and it is so pleasant to inspect your thermometer there, but the country round about was such a picture, that in berry time no boy climbs hill or crosses vale without coming upon easels planted in every nook, and sunburned painters painting there. A very paradise of painters. The circle of the stars cut by the circle of the mountains. At least, so it looks from the house; though once upon the mountains, no circle of them can you see. Had the site been chosen five rods off, this charmed circle would not have been.

“The house is old. Seventy years since, from the heart of the Hearth Stone Hill, they quarried the Kaaba, or Holy Stone, to which, each Thanksgiving, the social pilgrims used to come. So long ago that in digging for the foundation, the workmen used both spade and axe fighting the Troglodytes of those subterranean parts—sturdy roots of a sturdy wood, encamped upon what is now a long landslide of sleeping meadow, sloping away off from my poppy bed. Of that knit wood but one survivor stands—an elm, lonely through steadfastness.

“Whoever built the house, he builded better than he knew; or else Orion in the zenith flashed down his Damocles’ sword to him some starry night, and said: ‘Build there.’ For how, otherwise, could it have entered the builder’s mind that, upon the clearing being made, such a purple prospect would be his? Nothing less than Greylock, with all his hills about him, like Charlemagne among his peers.

“No sooner was ground broken than all the neighbourhood, neighbour Dives in particular, broke too—into a laugh. Piazza to the north! Winter piazza! Wants, of winter midnights, to watch the Aurora Borealis, I suppose; hope he’s laid in a good store of polar muffs and mittens.

“That was in the lion month of March. Not forgotten are some of the blue noses of the carpenters and how they scouted at the greenness of the cit, who would build his sole piazza to the north. But March don’t last forever; patience, and August comes. And then, in the cool elysium of my northern bower, I, Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom, cast down the hill a pitying glance on poor old Dives, tormented in the purgatory of his piazza to the south.

“But, even in December, this northern piazza does not repel—nipping cold and gusty though it be, and the north wind, like any miller, bolting by the snow in finest flour—for then, once more, with frosted beard, I pace the sleety deck, weathering Cape Horn.

“In summer, too, Canute-like, sitting here, one is often reminded of the sea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain, and little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still August noon broods over the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbary coast, an unknown sail.”

In I and My Chimney Melville makes the old chimney at Arrowhead the chief character in a sketch of his domestic life at Pittsfield: himself and his wife, both freely idealised, are the other actors. This chimney, twelve feet square at the base, was built by Capt. David Bush who erected the house in 1780. It has three fireplaces on the first floor and the one formerly used for the kitchen fireplace is large enough for a log four feet long. This fireplace is panelled in pine, and above it hangs an Indian tomahawk, found and hung there by Melville. Around it are many nooks and cupboards. In I and My Chimney Melville wrote: “And here I keep mysterious cordials of a choice, mysterious flavour, made so by the constant naturing and subtle ripening of the chimney’s gentle heat, distilled through that warm mass of masonry. Better for wines it is than voyages to the Indies; my chimney itself is a tropic. A chair by my chimney in a November day is as good for an invalid as a long season spent in Cuba. Often I think how grapes might ripen against my chimney. How my wife’s geraniums bud there! But in December. Her eggs too—can’t keep them near the chimney on account of hatching. Ah, a warm heart has my chimney.”

Col. Richard Lathers, in his reminiscences of his Pittsfield residence, writes: “One of my nearest neighbours at Pittsfield was Herman Melville, author of the interesting and very original sea tales, Typee and Omoo (which were among the first books to be published simultaneously in London and New York), and of various other volumes of prose and verse. I visited him often in his well-stocked library, where I listened with intense pleasure to his highly individual views of society and politics. He always provided a bountiful supply of good cider—the product of his own orchard—and of tobacco, in the virtues of which he was a firm believer. Indeed, he prided himself on the inscription painted over his capacious fireplace: ‘I and my chimney smoke together,’ an inscription I have seen strikingly verified more than once when the atmosphere was heavy and the wind was east.”

When Melville set up his family at Arrowhead, Hawthorne had already been settled at Lenox, some miles away, for a number of months. “I have taken a house in Lenox”—so he announced his removal—“I long to get into the country, for my health is not what it has been. An hour or two in a garden and a daily ramble in country air would keep me all right.”

Though Melville and Hawthorne were at this time neither in very affluent circumstances, Hawthorne was, to all outward appearances, the more straitened of the two. He described his new home as “the very ugliest little bit of an old red farmhouse you ever saw,” “the most inconvenient and wretched house I ever put my head in.” His wife, however, was not so precipitous in her damnation, and writing to her mother on June 23, 1850, said: “We are so beautifully arranged (excepting the guest-chamber), and we seem to have such a large house inside, though outside the little reddest thing looks like the smallest of ten-feet houses. Enter our old black tumble-down gate,—no matter for that,—and you behold a nice yard, with an oval grass-plot and a gravel walk all round the borders, a flower-bed, some rose-bushes, a raspberry-bush, and I believe a syringa, and also a few tiger-lilies; quite a fine bunch of peonies, a stately double rose-columbine, and one beautiful Balsam Fir tree, of perfect pyramidal form, and full of a thousand melodies. The front door is wide open. Enter and welcome.” Mrs. Hawthorne then elaborates upon the wealth of beauty she finds in her tactful disposition of the pictures, the furniture, and flowers, in the cramped interior. In this tabernacle she enshrined her two small children; and in the “immortal endowments” of her husband, she was inarticulate in felicity. “I cannot possibly conceive of my happiness,” she wrote, “but, in a blissful kind of confusion, live on.

Of the actual daily events at Arrowhead and the Red House there is a great inequality in the wealth of records. Of the Red House we know much; of Arrowhead we know only too little. Though Mrs. Hawthorne was always childlike in her modesty and simplicity, “her learning and her accomplishments were rare and varied.” She not only read Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but she kept an invaluable journal of the momentous trifles of her husband’s life; and she wrote letters home that her Mother very properly preserved for posterity. Mrs. Melville positively knew no Hebrew; and what accounts of her husband she wrote have all disappeared. Only one letter of hers of this period survives:

“I have been trying to write to you ever since Sam came, but could not well find a chance. As it proved, I was not mistaken in supposing the little parcel he brought was a present from you, though I had no letter. The contents were beautiful and very acceptable. Do accept my best thanks for them. We were delighted to see Sam Savage on Tuesday, but as he did not notify us of the day we were not in waiting for him at the depot. However, he found his way out to us. To-day he and Sam have gone over to Lebanon to see the Shakers. The girls were much pleased with the collars, and Mother M. with her remembrance. The scarf you sent me was very handsome, but I am almost sorry you did not keep it for yourself, for it does not seem to me as if I should ever wear it—and certainly not this summer as I go nowhere not even to church. It will look very handsome with my new shawl, if ever I do wear it, though.

“You need not be afraid of the boys staying too long—I am only sorry that they cannot stay longer, but they think or rather Sam Savage thinks he must go to Red Hook this week. You know we do not make any difference for them and let them do just as they please and take care of themselves. Yesterday they went with Herman and explored a neighbouring mountain.

“Oh, you will be glad to hear, and I meant to have written it to father the other day, that in consideration of the recent decisions with regard to the copyright question, Mr. Bentley is to give Herman £150 and half profits after, for his new book—a much smaller sum than before, to be sure, but certainly worth waiting for—and quite generous on Mr. Bentley’s part considering the unsettled state of things.

At the time of Melville’s moving to Arrowhead he was writing Moby-Dick. In the brief life of Melville in her journal, Mrs. Melville says: “Wrote White-Whale or Moby-Dick under unfavourable circumstances—would sit at his desk all day not writing anything till four or five o’clock—then ride to the village after dark—would be up early and out walking before breakfast—sometimes splitting wood for exercise. Published White-Whale in 1851—wrote Pierre, published 1852. We all felt anxious about the strain on his health in the spring of 1853.”

When Hawthorne moved to Lenox he was forty-six years old—Melville’s senior by fifteen years. “Bidding good-bye for ever to literary obscurity and to Salem,” Mr. Julian Hawthorne says in his Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, “Hawthorne now turned his face towards the mountains. The preceding nine months had told upon his health and spirits: and, had The Scarlet Letter not achieved so fair a success, he might have been long in recovering his normal frame of mind. But the broad murmur of popular applause, coming to his unaccustomed ears from all parts of his native country, and rolling in across the sea from academic England, gave him the spiritual refreshment born of the assurance that our fellow-creatures think well of the work we have striven to make good. Such assurance is essential, sooner or later, to soundness and serenity of mind. No man can attain secure repose and happiness who has never found that what moves and interests him has power over others likewise. Sooner or later he will begin to doubt either his own sanity or that of all the rest of the world.” Melville was never to know any such repose and happiness.

Within the sanctities of the Red House, and among the solitudes of the surrounding country, Hawthorne enjoyed all the companionship he desired. In 1842, Mrs. Hawthorne had written to her mother: “Mr. Hawthorne’s abomination of visiting still holds strong, be it to see no matter what angel;” and in 1850, Hawthorne was no more eager for alliances even with celestials. Not, indeed, that he was indifferent to his fellowmen: that, his literary vocation would not permit. In Sights from a Steeple he states: “The most desirable mode of existence might be that of a spiritualised Paul Pry, hovering invisible round men and women, witnessing their deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing brightness from their felicity, and shade from their sorrow, and retaining no emotion peculiar to himself.” Hawthorne’s son writes: “Now Hawthorne, both by nature and by training, was of a disposition to throw himself imaginatively into the shoes (as the phrase is) of whatever person happened to his companion. For the time being, he would seem to take their point of view and to speak their language; it was the result partly of a subtle sympathy and partly of a cold intellectual insight, which led him half consciously to reflect what he so clearly perceived. Thus, if he chatted with a group of rude sea-captains in the smoking-room of Mrs.

Blodgett’s boarding-house, or joined a knot of boon companions in a Boston bar-room, or talked metaphysics with Herman Melville on the hills of Berkshire, he would aim to appear in each instance a man like as they were; he would have the air of being interested in their interests and viewing life by their standards. Of course, this was only apparent; the real man stood aloof and observant.” “Seeing his congenial aspect towards their little round of habits and beliefs, they would leap to the conclusion that he was no more and no less than one of themselves; whereas they formed but a tiny arc in the great circle of his comprehension.” Yet even when not in the rôle of unimpassioned spectator, Hawthorne was not the man to sit in pharisaical judgment upon his fellows. In Fancy’s Show-Box he wrote: “Man must not disclaim his brotherhood, even with the guiltiest, since, though his hand be clean, his heart has surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity.” Emerson once said that there was no crime he could not commit: an amiable vanity he shared with many a more prosaic fellow. Hawthorne studied his own pure heart and learned that “men often over-estimate their capacity for evil.” “I used to think,” he wrote, “that I could imagine all feelings, all passions, and states of the heart and mind.” Again: “Living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart.

Had I sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude.” G. P. Lathrop, in his Study of Hawthorne, says: “The visible pageant is only of value to him as it suggests the viewless host of heavenly shapes that hang above it like an idealising mirage.” Yet never for a second did he lose himself among these heavenly visitations. He was eminently a man of sound sense: as W. C. Brownell has pointed out, he was “distinctly the most hard-headed of our men of genius.” His son said of him: “He was the slave of no theory and no emotion; he always knew, so to speak, where he was and what he was about.” His nature clearly was self-sustaining. He never felt the need of the support that in the realm of the affections is the reward of self-surrender. “He had no doubt an ideal family life,” W. C. Brownell points out—“that is to say, ideal in a peculiar way, for he had it on rather peculiar terms, one suspects. These were, in brief, his own terms. He was worshipped, idolised, canonised, and on his side it probably required small effort worthily to fill the rôle a more ardent nature would have either merited less or found more irksome. He responded at any rate with absolute devotion. His domestic periphery bounded his vital interests.”

J. E. A. Smith, however, who knew Hawthorne in the flesh, undertakes to portray Hawthorne in less austere outline. In his book Taghconic: The Romance and Beauty of the Hills (Boston, 1879) J. E. A. Smith, writing under the pseudonym “Godfrey Greylock,” says: “But that Mr. Hawthorne’s heart was warm and tender, I am well assured by more than one circumstance, which I do not know that I am at liberty to recall here. But there can be no wrong in mentioning the origin, as I have heard it, of the brotherly friendship between him and Herman Melville. As the story was told me, Mr. Hawthorne was aware that Melville was the author of a very appreciative review of the Scarlet Letter which appeared in the Literary World, edited by their common friends, the Duyckincks; but this very knowledge, perhaps, kept two very sensitive men shy of each other, although thrown into company. But one day it chanced that when they were out on a picnic excursion, the two were compelled by a thunder-shower to take shelter in a narrow recess of the rocks of Monument Mountain. Two hours of enforced intercourse settled the matter. They learned so much of each other’s character, and found that they held so much of thought, feeling and opinion in common, that the most intimate friendship for the future was inevitable.”

Mr. Julian Hawthorne reports that Herman Melville—or Omoo, as they called him,—soon became familiar and welcome at the Red House. In a letter dated September 4, 1850, Mrs. Hawthorne reported to her mother: “To-day, Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. Melville have gone to dine at Pittsfield.” It is in this letter that Mrs. Hawthorne wrote the characterisation of Melville quoted in Chapter I.

Hawthorne finished The House of the Seven Gables on January 27, 1851. The four months following Hawthorne gave over to a vacation. “He had recovered his health,” his son says, “he had done his work, he was famous, and the region in which he dwelt was beautiful and inspiriting. At all events, he made those spring days memorable to his children. He made them boats to sail on the lake, and kites to fly in the air; he took them fishing and flower-gathering, and tried (unsuccessfully for the present) to teach them swimming. Mr. Melville used to ride or drive up, in the evenings, with his great dog, and the children used to ride on the dog’s back.”... “It was with Herman Melville that Hawthorne held the most familiar intercourse at this time, both personally and by letter.” Hawthorne’s son quotes “characteristic disquisitions” by Melville; “but Hawthorne’s answers, if he wrote any,” Mr. Julian Hawthorne goes on to say, entertaining a philosophical doubt in the face of Melville’s specific mention of letters from Hawthorne, “were unfortunately destroyed by fire.”