Introduction

This is a study of Herman Melville’s life and thought. In interpreting Melville’s life I have relied primarily on his own writings, including his letters, some of which are still unpublished, and his notebooks. There are occasional blank spaces in Melville’s history, but the record is singularly complete in that part of Melville which most matters: his ideas, his feelings, his urges, his vision of life. I have verified and corrected these data by the use of every available piece of independent evidence; and I must express my hearty thanks to Mrs. Frances Thomas, Melville’s surviving daughter, for answering my written questions, and to his granddaughter, Mrs. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, for giving me the benefit of her own memories and family tradition, as well as her courtesy and hospitality in placing at my disposal Melville’s manuscripts. I am likewise indebted to Miss Caroline W. Stewart, an old friend of the Melville family, for her impressions of the Melville household during the later period of his life.

These pages could not have been written without Mr. Raymond Weaver’s pioneer work on Melville. Mr. Weaver not merely brought to light much important data and cleared up relationships that concerned Melville’s objective life: he also, through Mrs. Metcalf, discovered Melville’s unpublished manuscripts and included them in a definitive edition of his work. For this, he has placed every admirer of Melville in his debt. In addition to acknowledging this great service, I must thank him for the scholarly generosity with which he gave me the benefit of his intimate knowledge of Melville’s remains, and his copies of Melville’s notebooks. Mr. Weaver’s generosity is equalled only by that of Dr. Henry A. Murray, Jr., who shared with me his knowledge of certain Melville letters otherwise inaccessible—an act of pure chivalry, since Dr. Murray is himself at work on a biography of Herman Melville. Such deeds sweeten one’s notions of human conduct: they give one not so much a feeling of gratitude as a renewed sense of human dignity, and I warmly place them on record.

In describing Melville’s experience and his state of mind, I have taken the liberty of using his own language wherever possible; and I have done this so freely that, except where I have quoted whole passages, I have omitted quotation marks. In condensing and paraphrasing the notebooks of Melville’s travels, I have usually employed Melville’s own words; for it would be a vain biographer who did not make full use of Melville’s sharp descriptions and striking epithets. If I have been frank and unreserved in dealing with the difficult parts of Melville’s life, I have been no more so than I think he would have wished, nor more candid than he himself was in treating Pierre. “In reserves,” he wrote, “men build imposing characters.” Melville’s worth, as a man and a poet, has no need for a reputation so created. My purpose has not been to embalm Melville but to bring him to life; and one cannot know or sympathize with the man unless one shares his vicissitudes as well as his triumphs.

Certain portions of this book have appeared, with slight changes and abbreviations, in The New Republic, The American Mercury, and The Saturday Review of Literature.

Your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter; and now I’ll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To begin: there’s Aries, or the Ram—lecherous dog, he begets us; then Taurus, or the Bull—he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins—that is Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue when lo! comes Cancer the Crab and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring lion, lies in the path—he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape and hail Virgo, the Virgin; that’s our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra or the Scales—happiness weighed and found wanting! and while we are very sad about that Lord! how we suddenly jump as Scorpio or the Scorpion stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound when whang come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck the shafts, stand aside! here’s the battering ram, Capricornus or the Goat, full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces or the Fish we sleep.

When Herman Melville died in 1891, the literary journal of the day, The Critic, did not even know who he was. The editors rose bravely to the occasion and copied a paragraph about him from a compendium of American literature; and in the weeks that followed they reprinted various commentaries on Melville and his work that were carried in the correspondence columns of the New York newspapers.

The older generation remembered that Herman Melville had once been famous. He had adventured in the South Seas on a whaler; he had lived among the cannibals; and in Typee and Omoo he had made a romantic pastiche of his experiences. On these books Mr. Melville’s fame had been founded: it was a pity he had not done more in this line; for his later books, obscure books, crowded books, books that could be called neither fiction nor poetry nor philosophy nor downright useful information, forfeited the interest of a public that liked to take its pleasures methodically. Both the fame and the later absence of recognition, Mr. Melville’s commentators agreed, were deserved. By his interest in Sir Thomas Browne and metaphysics, Mr. Melville had carried his readers into a realm much too remote, and an air too rarefied: a flirtation with a South Sea maiden, warm, brown, palpable, was one thing: but the shark that glides white through the sulphurous sea was quite another. In Moby-Dick, so criticism went, Melville had become obscure: and this literary failure condemned him to personal obscurity.

The writer about whom all these sage banalities were written shares with Walt Whitman, I think, the distinction of being the greatest imaginative writer that America has produced: his epic, Moby-Dick, is one of the supreme poetic monuments of the English language: and in depth of experience and religious insight there is scarcely any one in the nineteenth century, with the exception of Dostoyevsky, who can be placed beside him. To his contemporaries, the greatness of Melville was an enigma: they valued him for those lesser virtues in which he more closely resembled themselves. They had no place, on their matter-of-fact plane, with its confident flat-footed science, and its many odd and useful inventions, for the crosslights of Melville’s imagination, for his oblique revelations, for his habit of questioning the foundations upon which their vast superstructure of comfort and complacency was erected. “What we want, sir, is facts!”—and though Melville gave them facts, they resented his white vision, because it froze the facts into a state that defied their easy assimilation. When they charged Melville with obscurity, they did not realize, perhaps, that sight demands not merely an object that can be seen, but an eye that is capable of seeing; and it never occurred to them, with all their doubts about Melville, that the defective vision might be their own.

In a great degree, Herman Melville’s life and work were one. A biography of Melville implies criticism; and no final criticism of his work is possible that does not bring to it an understanding of his personal development. The exotic elements in Melville’s experience have usually been overstressed; the fatality and completeness of his withdrawal from the contemporary scene have been exaggerated; the incidental rocks and rapids and whirlpools have diverted the critic’s attention from the flow of the stream itself. It is with Herman Melville’s strength and energy on the spiritual plane that I shall chiefly deal. He lives for us not because he painted South Sea rainbows, or rectified abuses in authority in the United States Navy: he lives because he grappled with certain great dilemmas in man’s spiritual life, and in seeking to answer them, sounded bottom. He left the clothed and carpeted world of convention, and faced the nakedness of life, death, energy, evil, love, eternity: he drew back the cosy hangings of Victorian parlours, and disclosed the black night outside, dimly lighted with the lights of ancient stars. Had he been a romantic, he would have lived a happy life, buttering his bread with feeble dreams, and swallowing down his regrets with consolatory port: he who wishes to escape the elemental stings of existence need only grasp the outstretched hands of his contemporaries, accept the subterfuge goals they call success in business or journalism, and shrink by means of a padded physical apparatus from the cold reality of the universe itself.

But Melville was a realist, in the sense that the great religious teachers are realists. He saw that horsehair stuffing did not make the universe kinder, and that the oblivion of drink did not make the thing that was forgotten more palatable. His perplexities, his defiances, his torments, his questions, even his failures, all have a meaning for us: whether we renounce the world, as Buddha did, affirm a future transcendence, as Christ did, or, like Whitman, embrace its mingled good-and-evilness, our choice cannot be called enlightened until it has faced the gritty, unassimilable substratum Melville explored. Melville, like Buddha, left a happy and successful career behind him, and plunged into those cold black depths, the depths of the sunless ocean, the blackness of interstellar space; and though he proved that life could not be lived under those conditions, he brought back into the petty triumphs of the age the one element that it completely lacked: the tragic sense of life: the sense that the highest human flight is sustained over an unconquered and perhaps an unconquerable abyss. On the peak of Melville’s vision, a man stands poised as on the spur of a glacier: nature offers no shelter, and humanity does not succour him: he is alone. Will he live or die? One cannot say. But if he returns to the warm valleys and the friendly villages he will be another man; and a part of him, a precious part, will forever remain alone, impregnable.

The society into which Herman Melville was born was in the fullest sense of the word a provincial one. His heritage and his work united him with that society; and when its occupations were undermined and its customs effaced by the great tide of destruction that marked the Civil War, he himself was intimately involved in its ruin.

By a provincial society I mean one which finds its sources and motives within its own region, and that achieves a certain balance and continuity by a restricted development. To understand Melville’s background, one must think back to a time when New York was only one of a number of Atlantic ports that claimed the commerce of the seas and the wealth that it brought: Salem was almost as important: so were Boston and Baltimore and Charleston: it was little more than the accident of a regular sailing packet line that made New York take the lead in attracting population, that, and the opening of a direct water-route into mid-America, via the Erie Canal, which was still a-building in 1819, the year that Herman Melville was born.

The United States, except as an abstract political entity, scarcely existed. There were eagles on the furniture: there were eagles on the dollars: there were flags and martial birds on mirrors and bedspreads and glass and china: but a good part of the community, certainly in the older, more settled regions, was hardly yet political-minded, still less conscious of a mystic relation with the other parts. During the War of 1812 New England, threatened with economic ruin, was on the point of breaking loose from the political union: and though the national government coined money in quarter dollars, people still referred to such coins as two shillings. If Rip van Winkle was surprised at the changes that had taken place during his long nap, a modern observer of that provincial society would be even more astounded at the lack of them. Whitman, writing a whole generation later, and loathing the notion of secession, still had a consciousness of the individuality and independence of the separate states which the strongest defender of states’ rights never expressed after the Civil War.

This provincial society had its own economic foundations, its own locus, its own seat of authority: it differed in a marked way from that which was developing on the frontier: the drama of one of Cooper’s best books, The Pioneers, is chiefly concerned with that contrast. The frontier society was a flowing and moving one: the only thing that united it was the common flag that waved over it and the Constitution, to which its officers paid their superficial respect. Its members came from anywhere, got a living anyhow, and pushed on, in an uneasy, restless search for more fertile land, wilder creatures, greater distance from their neighbours—or merely, from the habit of locomotion. It was strenuous, uncertain, heroic; but once the settlement was effected, once the town was founded and the building-lots divided and the outlaws rounded up, it was unbearably tame: the excitements of civilized life, the clash of ideas, the conflict of cultures, the absorption of experience, did not occupy the pioneer: even when he adopted the external habits of the red man, his weapons, his tools, his maize and dried meat, he avoided the inner content of his culture. In provincial society we are nearer to Europe, that is, nearer to a settled life, to order, authority, tradition. In every colony there was an historic mixture of nationalities and stocks, and that peculiar to New York, English and Dutch, with a dash of French Huguenots, had at last begun to bubble and ferment: presently a Whitman, a Melville, came out of it.

In provincial society, the family was still a prime reality; and in New York it was not less so, certainly, because of the fact that the Dutch had founded great landed proprietorships, like those of the Gansevoorts to whom Herman Melville belonged on his maternal side. Two hundred years of inherited wealth create family pride and all the futile snobberies of caste: they also create a firm sense of self-possession. Washington Irving, who was one of the conquering English, might laugh at these Dutch burghers and patroons: but from their manorial seats along the Hudson and the Mohawk, the Van Rensselaers and the Schuylers and the Gansevoorts could view this mockery with sleepy disdain. They had only to sit tight to be eminent; as the population grew, the value of the land doubled and quadrupled, and in spite of rent wars and the abolition of feudal privileges, the landed families rose to the top like cream.

The Dutch throve in this expansive environment, on farms that stretched from hilltop to hilltop, as they throve by intensive activity in the lowlands by the Zuyder Zee: if their old canals were covered over and filled up in New Amsterdam, they still had their commodious stone or brick houses in the country; there was one such at Gansevoort, where the Gansevoorts lived, not far from Saratoga. The fine arts did not find disciples among these great families: the Copleys, Trumbulls, Stuarts, Peales had English names: but the crafts were cultivated in great variety: the architecture was straightforward and in minor matters, like the horizontal windows and the peculiar gambrel roof, original: the landscape was well treated; and above all, there was food, wild pigeon and grouse and deer, well-fed beef and succulent ducks and geese and great handsome cheeses. When Herman is a little boy his mother will remember Uncle Peter Gansevoort, at Albany, with a tub of five hundred pickled oysters.

“A thoroughly developed gentleman is always robust and healthy.” When Melville wrote these words he was thinking of the great gentlemen between whose legs he had walked as a little boy, and particularly, perhaps, of one he used to hear about, that grandest of old fellows, General Peter Gansevoort, a mighty soldier during the Revolution and a great figure among men. He had died but seven years before Melville was born; many of his remains, including a portrait by Stuart, were still visible; and his legend stayed on the tongues of those who had known him. Six foot four he was, with an appetite and a digestion fit to keep that colossal frame in motion. Now, among all the pleasures of life, positive health—not mere freedom from disorder and disease—is surely the first: living needs no extra justification when the blood is clear and all the juices are flowing harmoniously. In Melville’s youth even a city lad could sail a boat, tramp into the country, shoot game, experience the active, outdoor life which has always been the mainstay of the aristocracy, and which doubtless explains its ability to conquer and control the urban populace, habituated to the ledger, the bench, the desk, and the foul air thereof. Melville had scarcely reached maturity before some of these natural pleasures were curtailed in the city of his birth, so that, to preserve them, William Cullen Bryant launched the campaign to create Central Park.

“Too often,” Melville wrote in 1852, “the American that himself makes a fortune, builds him a great metropolitan house, in the most metropolitan street, of the most metropolitan town. Whereas, a European of the same sort would thereupon migrate into the country. That herein the European hath the better of it, no poet, no philosopher, and no aristocrat will deny.” Melville’s ancestors had kept close to the country: Grandfather Peter and Uncle Herman at Gansevoort, Uncle Peter at Albany, little more than a country town, Great Uncle Thomas Melville on his farm, eastward in the Berkshires. Although Melville was born in New York, he was nourished by the agricultural experience of the back-country: when he idealized his early life in Pierre, he gave his hero a twenty-mile ride or a ten-mile walk every day, a turn at felling a hemlock in the forest, or boxing or fencing or boating. That was something like a foundation, and it resembled Melville’s own. When we come to a later period of Melville’s life we will not be tempted, if we remember these things, to overstress his doldrums or his adolescent uncertainties: for we shall not forget that he became a magnificently healthy animal—and healthy animals itch to use their energies and test their muscles.