Chapter 5

Typee was a success, and Melville soon had the consciousness of being an author. He could scarcely mention his book, in passing, without pausing to realize how strange it sounded. All his dispersed interests and his random purposes were suddenly concentrated: his life had the spiritual momentum that a genuine career gives it: he was no longer an outcast Olympian, but one of the great circle, now treated by his elders as an equal, respected, deferred to, genially slapped on the back, welcomed when a group of literary men met for conversation: if an English author came to America, as Thackeray did a little later, Melville was bound to be the most promising younger man in the circle that dined him and gave him welcome.

In Pierre, Melville gives his hero’s sensations at suddenly finding himself quoted in the public press, and urged by various grave societies to lecture before them—little gratuities of attention that afflicted him with a sense of his own insignificance, no matter how inflated he might seem to the world outside: and Pierre’s humility was doubtless Melville’s. He had grown a beard; but he did not need that symbol of years and experience to wear his new honours easily: with his reading and his miscellaneous adventure and the deep or brilliant conversation that might unexpectedly escape from him, he must have been a ready companion in any of the current literary circles: indeed, the difficulty was that, in the particular group where he moved, it was hard to single out any minds that came up to his level: the Manhattan literati of Melville’s heyday were a slick and shallow parcel of journalists, with a few scholars like the learned author of the Lives of the Presidents, as makeweight.

Melville’s quick entry into the literary world was partly furthered by two men who once wielded power in American letters, Messrs. George and Evert Duyckinck; George, a little thin and abstemious and given to pious reflections, Evert, more full-blooded, shrewd, worldly, an energetic hack who accumulated more than a modest competence as an editor and a compiler of ostentatious books of reference. They were busy little moles, these Duyckincks; one can scarcely utter their names or recount their ephemeral glories without smiling a little; but they gave Melville support and sympathy at a time early enough for him to profit by it; and if Melville found Evert Duyckinck worthy of his friendship there was something in the man’s geniality that merited it, and it is not for us to withhold what Melville himself freely gave. Evert Duyckinck had, according to Richard Lathers, one of the choicest libraries in the state: he was literary adviser to Messrs. Wiley and Putnam, and after Charles Fenno Hoffman’s brief editorship, he assumed charge of the Literary World. Until the publication of Pierre, Mr. Duyckinck was intimately associated with Melville’s literary ventures. Melville trusted him the way that a foreigner may trust a native as a guide to a strange country, realizing only after many days that the man he has thrown himself in with, whose company he has enjoyed, would be the most antipathetic of companions if one met him on one’s own ground. Duyckinck helped Melville to find his own depths; and when Melville had found them the two men were, by that simple fact, cut off.

It is not difficult to see how this friendship matured and withered: Duyckinck’s life was devoted to those superficies that Melville dedicated his whole energies to piercing and getting beyond. Lowell hit Evert off in one of his Fables for Critics; it was not the least happy of his arrows:

Good-day, Mr. Duyckinck, I am happy to meet With a scholar so ripe and a critic so neat, Who through Grub Street the soul of a gentleman carries. What news from the suburb of London and Paris?

Walt Whitman met the Duyckinck brothers: he describes them both as “gentlemanly men” and he could say no worse of any one. “I do not know of any description that it would have pleased them better to hear,” added Whitman. “Both very clerical-looking—thin—wanting in body: men of truly proper style, God help ’em!” But the Duyckincks had a correct, bowing acquaintance with literature: they represented culture, tradition, a knowledge of English grammar; and for a good while they were not the least appreciative of Melville’s critics. If, when they published their Cyclopedia of American Literature, they gave fourteen pages to Longfellow and only three and a half to Melville, they were but reflecting the judgment of gentlemanly men for the next generation. More than thirty years later, Mr. Barrett Wendell and Mr. George Woodberry had advanced no further on the road to appreciation.