Chapter 4

(Enter Herman Melville, in a green overcoat, with polite manners, and a wary reticence underneath his appearance of rank conviviality. He is just past thirty, and at times his grave demeanour and abstracted look might pass him for forty; but there are other moments when the fringe of brown beard seems only a mask, and one detects beneath the thoughtful brow of the author and the anxious brow of the husband and father an irrepressible boy. One wants a name for this combination of outdoor strength and bookishness, this Bohemianism and gentlehood, this mixture of the bronzed god himself and the plaster cast, and, for lack of an epithet, one will have to call it Melvillian.)

What a queer business, this getting away. Yesterday one said a passionate farewell to every one in the morning; but the winds were unfavourable, and in the evening one was back again at home, feeling almost as if one had accomplished the tour of Europe; the final farewell was made a little stale by repetition; one felt relief when the ship was at last under way. For almost the first time, one travels as a passenger, travels alone, in a room as big as one’s own room at home. It is good to be at sea again: one feels it more keenly among the land-lubbers, who make anguished noises at the first choppy water beyond the Narrows. In the morning, one is up early for the sunrise, and, since the captain is friendly, one has the run of the ship. Fine to be up in the rigging again! When a man is overboard one knows how to act promptly: one raises a cry, drops overboard the tackle-fall of the quarter boat, and when he fails to reach it, drops over the side oneself to swing it toward him. Poor fellow: he sees it and does not grasp it: he drowns with a demented smile on his face, when he might have saved himself. The passengers say later he was insane.... To work a boat, to know how to keep it pointed on its course, or to throw out a life-line, this sort of knowledge gives one back one’s old confidence. There’s no gammon about the ocean; it knocks the false bottom right off a pretender’s keel.

The passengers prove better than one had dared hope: there is Adler, a German philologist, who will talk to one till midnight about fixed fate, free will, and foreknowledge absolute: his philosophy is Coleridgian, a sort of friendly bridge between Kant and Hegel and Schelling and Schlegel and one’s own less conscious metaphysics, one’s hitherto dim doubts and intuitions. There is also a genteel sociable youth named McCurdy, whose father is a New York merchant, and there is a cousin of Bayard Taylor, the pedestrian traveller, all good fellows over a bowl of punch. Taylor has a notion of going through the Near East: down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople—Athens, Beyrut, Jerusalem, Cairo, Alexandria. That would be something neither Polynesia nor the Hudson Valley could give: marvellous, if it were not for the strain on one’s purse. Four hundred dollars at least. Already, too—one isn’t a week away from them—Lizzy and Barney the baby begin to tug at one. No: one isn’t free any more. One is going to England to get a little ready cash from Bentley or Murray or Moxon on White-Jacket: one can’t dissipate that in travel. One is tied: there is no getting away from that. One wants to travel far, perhaps; but not with the same old lust and confidence: all paths lead home again. Where’s Lizzie now? Where dat old man? The nice little beggar: those were the first connected words he uttered.

Ah, well: the vacant days, the rough days, the dozy sunlit days: they all relieve the tension a little. Five years ago one scarcely knew that Hegel existed: now one is on one’s way to England—an author! One of the ladies is reading a book by H. M.; she keeps on raising her eyes to take one in, as if comparing the real man with the self-portrait. People say: Are you the Mr. Melville—the man who lived among the cannibals? A fine way to go down to posterity.... What a slack lot of sheep a company of passengers is; one’s sympathies are all with the forecastle. There is the buxom Irish lady who sings, the gushy Miss Wilbur who is so obviously marriageable and who talks of winning souls to Christ, the Frenchmen with the bleak, sea-sick faces. When one goes aloft to muse a little, they stand around and gape, as if one were a performer in Barnum’s museum. Already we are three weeks from home. How quickly time flies when one day is like another. Dear Lizzie: dear little Barney: where dat old man!

With a fresh wind and a clear sky and land near, the passengers suddenly re-galvanize into life: faces appear that had been below decks most of the sail. The food tastes better; one plays shuffleboard gaily, not dutifully; one reads Pickwick Papers and wonders about the England that lies somewhere between one’s father’s journals, one’s own grim memories of Liverpool, and the warm, roast-beef, veal-pie, ale-drinking, punch-sipping, toddy-smacking England of Dickens. At last the cliffs of Portland, where the Portland stone comes from, bleak, melancholy; then the run along the Isle of Wight, past the Needles, with the ploughed fields neatly marked off, and the lower shore of Hampshire with its low cliffs on the other side. Oh, to get ashore, to feel dry land, to quit this endless, tedious tacking: to rush ashore at Portsmouth and let the ship find London by itself! No: it can’t be done: out in the Channel and up to Dover now: one is restless and impatient. Up in the morning in the dark at four, and into the cold cutter, which heads for Deal, not Dover, to make a landing. Well: England at last! Ten years ago, thirteen to be exact, a poor boy, half orphan, teased and tormented by foul-mouthed sailors, young, hopeful, innocent, a mere ship’s monkey—now, Herman Melville, traveller, novelist, romancer, author of Peedee and Hullabaloo and Pog-Dog: the conquering hero, with debts and duns at his back and a potboiler in his carpet-bag. Triumph—and how raw the wind is at dawn!

Through the dark, narrow streets of Deal, the keen air faintly reeking with the first kitchen-coals, then out into the country on foot for a day’s walk to Canterbury with Taylor and Adler. A castle and a Roman fortification before one is two hours ashore! Deal: the square mound of the Roman castra: somehow, these things mean more than a hillful of arrow-heads: the men who built them worried about God and Eternity: a thousand years does not separate one from them. Canterbury is even better: the nave, the cloisters, the queer fine thoughts one finds on some of the tombs. Yes: this is a little nearer the England of one’s dreams. Dinner at the Falstaff Inn, and in the evening a provincial theatre, with a stage that might have been peopled by Dickens, every actor more of a character than the character portrayed: an ineffably funny business all round.

Next day, by train in a third-class open carriage to London: cold to one’s marrow: cold and ravenous. When one arrives at London Bridge one can think of nothing but a chop-house. While the chops and the porter and the treacle pudding are digesting, one realizes that this is England, old England, the dark, slightly grimy eating-stalls, the red-cheeked, pert, coarse, kindly stupid waitress, the silent men eating methodically, piling their forks up like a hod with food, the lawyers’ clerks, shabby, rusty, genteel, the countrymen with leather leggings and purple veins on their cheeks, the bagmen, voluble and expansive for Englishmen, just one remove from the country pedlar, a faint odour of musty paper and soot over one kind of Londoner, or of ploughed fields and manure over the other: in short, England, London—a society like that at Albany, bedded deep in dust, must, precedent, and vast augmentations of gold. One is in it and out of it. The crowd on the Strand stares at one’s green overcoat: some one had ominously warned one on the steamer that it would set one down for a crude American. Colour is already a little old-fashioned in this drab, utilitarian England: this is the City of Dis: black coats, black hats, have survival value in a sulphur-and-brimstone world: the damned need protective colouration. One sinks down at last before a small fire in a tall, draughty room in Craven Street, just off the Strand. One’s journal has been a blank these last three days, and one must catch up with it. Travelling takes the ink out of one’s pen as well as the cash out of one’s purse.

But time is limited and one must quickly set to work. Murray is out of town; so is Bentley, the publisher; but Bentley will come up from Brighton to suit one’s convenience. In the meanwhile, one can drop in for Julien’s Promenade Concert at Drury Lane, see the pictures at the National Gallery, prowl through Chancery Lane, or go down into Cheapside to witness the surviving pomp and gilded fustian of the Lord Mayor’s show, exploring the Guildhall the next day, in the company of an affable functionary in the finance department whom one picks up, by chance, in the street, to witness a bit of infernal charity, worthy of Dis itself: a horde of beggars pours into the tawny-warm twilight of the hall, with all its flags and banners and fine timbering, to pick and grab at the remains of hams, fowls, pastries, left over from the high-and-mightinesses of the previous day. A comical sight at first; but on slight reflection, not comical: no, not comical. Thank heaven, civilization has not gone quite that far in America.

The world that holds Lord Mayor’s shows—and the starvation and misery behind the show—also holds a bus-ride, on a mellow autumn Sunday, through Piccadilly, by Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and then on, past red cottages and little taverns and open commons, through Hammersmith, Chiswick, Kew, and across the Thames to Richmond Hill, where, at the crest, overlooking a long stretch of parkland, one can see the distant castle of Windsor in the mist beyond, with the Thames itself flashing occasionally like a fish’s back in the sun, in the valley between. After that, one is ready for the sober crimson of Hampton Court—the Van Dycks and the Titians and the Rembrandts: this is what one means by a cultivated life. Must one be harried, must one struggle over vain things, must one know so much temporal bitterness, hardship, evil, in order to live? Not the Marquesans: not the Olympians of England: they both live as the lilies, planting themselves in a nourishing soil, drinking in the sun, growing, forming pollen and fertilizing and becoming fertilized, flowering and seeding. That is life, not the struggling, the harrying, the deprivation. But tomorrow one must leave Rembrandt and Hampton Court far behind: one must dicker for good terms and a fat advance with Bentley.

The greyness of London comes over one: the glacial greyness of St. Paul’s: the brown greyness of Bloomsbury: the smeary greyness of the Strand: the dank blue greyness of the Temple. The choir chanting in St. Paul’s leaves one feeling wan and unhappy. What is Lizzie doing? Where dat old man? If only they were here, or better, if one could be with them for a little while, and come back to the quiet inwardness of one’s days, warmed, refreshed, revivified. One could absorb so much more, if one were settled and secure.

How near one feels to these English, these people who like good solid food and ale and port, who have a manly straightness in their dealings, merchants whose signature makes paper valuable, poets who have created in words poems that atone for all the pictures that remain unpainted and all the music that remains unsung in the English soul: hearty, robust, gay, ready to turn a farce in Beaumont and Fletcher or in a market Punch and Judy show, but grave, serious, at bottom very deep: no one, not Dante, had struck more ruthlessly at the sinister meanings of life than Shakespeare, no one had been more relentless and sardonic than Swift or Hogarth—and yet with what tenderness, what warm love of life, in Swift’s letters to Stella or Hogarth’s portrait of the Shrimp-girl, as fresh as a newly opened wild-flower. A country of sound men, buxom girls, beautiful tidy fields, snug inns—and terrible revealers of life’s immense blackness. How intense the candle in those brave hands: how sullen and eventful the grave shadows that swarm around it!

But that other England—one was very distant from it. The England of wealth and station and reputation and family in the county sense, with its arctic Oh? and its hard, oysterlike rudeness, a stupid England, but influential in everything, governing its very enemies by choosing the issues over which they would fight. The England that had kicked an innocent youth out of a Liverpool club and would doubtless do the same, with less provocation, to a distinguished American author whose reputation was growing in France and Germany: the England of hard-faced men who rolled the wheels of progress over usury and penury as twin rails: the England that had impressed seamen, struck down its continental rivals, enclosed the commons, introduced an inhuman system of industry, and defended privilege and empty title as the very cornerstones of Civil Order—in short, the England of snobs and flunkeys and a complacent, servile, self-righteous middle class—New York, to be sure, without a hinterland that was still free and unclaimed.

How trivial this other England essentially is. What a stupid lot at Murray’s party, and what a bore old Lockhart was, with his ghastly, grinning, mincing way: such a moth-eaten lion! Oh, conventionalism, what a ninny thou art! How completely one felt out of it, how superior one felt to these superiorities. Perhaps there was such a thing as real aristocracy: one wonders if the Scotch Melvilles would show it, or whether one might get a taste of the real thing at the Duke of Rutland’s own seat: but these fishy eyes, these stupid faces, this intellectual torpor, do not reassure one. Blackwood’s had printed a long ponderous review of Redburn: that was a comical black mark against the reigning Tory intellect, wasting good white paper on a book one knows oneself to be trash, which one wrote to buy tobacco with. In a society where the mask, the reputation, the hallmark count for so much, how little any one is concerned with the substance beneath! One is a well-known author: a success: ergo, Blackwood’s takes Redburn seriously, not fathoming how little it is worth serious criticism.

One meets the publishers one by one, Bentley, who did Mardi, Murray, who published Typee and Omoo, Mr. Longmans, Mr. Chapman, Mr. Bohn, Mr. Moxon, who was Charles Lamb’s crony; and when one can’t make the deal one had hoped for, one goes down the line; but the answer is always the same: the copyright is unsatisfactory, the work may be pirated in America; and they cannot risk two hundred pounds on the rights for the first thousand copies. The prospects are not too pleasant; but if the matter could be settled at once one wouldn’t have the excuse and the opportunity to visit the Dulwich Gallery, remote from London, but full of splendid treasures; one couldn’t sit with the Greenwich pensioners at Greenwich; one couldn’t spend a Sunday morning, a little too conspicuous for comfort, at the services in St. Bridget’s; nor could one discuss metaphysics with Dr. Adler at the Edinburgh Castle, dark-walled and like a beefsteak in colour, where the ale was so mellow and the waiters so polite. One absorbs a city by food and drink, as well as by sight and conversation: the Mitre—Johnson’s tavern—and the Cock and the Rainbow—Tennyson’s haunts: the little French hotel in Soho where one has morning coffee and a jelly omelette, or, to know the worst about life in London, a cup of brackish coffee, a dirty roll, an unappetizing piece of bacon, on a dank, foggy morning in a cheap eating-house: such depression of taste, sight, sound, feeling adds a new circle to life’s possible hells.

There are bright spots that serve for perpetual contrast: hours spent over the bookstalls in Great Green Street and Lincoln’s Inn, picking out folios of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Browne, coming, with a sudden recognition of kinship, upon De Quincey’s dreams of an Opium Eater, with passages so much like one’s best feats in Mardi; or a sumptuous dinner with Mr. Bates at East Sheen, nine miles from Richmond, where one meets Lord Ashburton’s nephew, and Baron This and Baroness That and Mr. Peabody the Boston merchant, a warm old soul: where the glasses and the silver are brilliant and the conversation ripples in reflection of it, or at least seems to, as one intricate piece of French cookery gives place to another, as white wine, champagne, hock, claret, port, and Madeira follow in grand procession: Taji dined no better among the five-and-twenty kings.

Yes: but then the melancholy of a day when one has spoken no more than “Good morning” to the slavey: when a frightful nightmare fills with a turbid residue the commonplaces of the diurnal routine: when one feels lonely and apart in the haunts that thrilled one most: when one sits at night in a damp chamber, thinking back to poor Gansevoort, who, two years before, three, was sitting in such a chamber, in the midst of such a silence, withdrawn, homesick, alone. What deep thoughts one seems on the brink of in that silence and solitude: no wonder the Greeks made silence the vestibule of the mysteries. But the weariness of this inward communion, too—oh, solitude, where are thy charms! One’s desires are fulfilled indeed: but always wryly, never in the right proportion....

While one waits around doggedly, hoping for more favourable offers, one had better seize the opportunity and make a flying trip to France: one never knows if one is coming this way again; and besides, if one does that story of the revolutionary beggar, Potter, one ought to be able to follow him on his French mission. Very well: by steamer to Boulogne, then by rail to Paris. A lodging-house on the Rue de Bussy, then a room at Mme. Capelie’s on the Left Bank. This is civilization: the Rue de Rivoli: the Place de la Concorde: the Tuileries: the Sorbonne: these things have the imprint of logic and law. Chaos and old time are somehow set at naught. The Louvre makes the National Gallery itself seem a little provincial: Notre Dame, under repair, is still a noble mass: there is a vivacity, an eagerness, an upright peasant homeliness in the housewives in felt shoes, in the rosy-cheeked market-women, that makes one feel a little nearer home. Courtesy takes the place of servility here, innate courtesy; a market-woman may have it as well as a duchess. The Hôtel de Cluny, on the site of the old Roman bath, is just such a house as one would like to live in, venerable, spacious, solid; and the bookstalls by the Palais Royal, with their Latin translations and their Voltaire and their Fénelon, give one a sense of a nation bred to thought and expression, not merely sharp and acquisitive, like the Yankees, although, obviously, they do not let the sous go by. And yet—well, the devilish nonsense of this passport business: the tapeworm of an ancient bureaucracy. What a disappointment to stand on line, once, twice, to get admission to Rachel in Phèdre, and be turned away. Rachel acting at the Palais Royal: Victor Cousin lecturing at the Sorbonne—and somehow, one remains out of it, unable to get sight of, much less to understand, these things. For consolation one has eau de vie and a metaphysical talk with the ubiquitous Dr. Adler.

One is a little downcast: but what did one expect? The truth is, one’s heart is not altogether in it: one wants Lizzie and Barney, now, far more than one wants Rachel, Cousin, and the triumphs of culture generally. Still: one will make one last try: by train to Brussels, that venerable but obviously stodgy place, Paris minor, and then over into Germany for a little trip up the Rhine to Cologne, an antiquated, gable-ended town, with the crane still aloft in the unfinished tower of the Cathedral, full of associations that go back as far as Charlemagne. How concentrated history becomes in Europe: here Rubens was born and Marie de Médicis died: much lore and history to interest a pondering man. Down the Rhine itself at night, between black cliffs and crags, from Cologne to Coblentz. Metternich was born near this great fortress, Ehrenbreitstein, but, more significant symbol than this, the finest Rhenish wine-grapes are grown right under its guns. Does not that stand for life itself? Our rarest triumphs and ecstasies are touched with the shadow of ancient death. At dusk one finds oneself standing in the place where the two rivers meet: opposite towers the fortress: some four thousand miles away are Lizzie and America. Tomorrow, the last lap begins: definitely one is homeward bound.

London itself seems halfway home, when one returns to the old chamber overlooking the Thames. Back in London with a few presents, a pair of gloves and shoes from Paris for Lizzie, a medallion one bought from an old woman near the Arc de Triomphe, and a breast-pin one bought in Cologne from a rascally shopwoman who cheated one, cheated—and by a woman—and not even a pretty woman! If only one could splurge a little on presents. No: one must be sensible: a trencher and breadknife, as used of old at commons in New College: fine thing. One for Mrs. Shaw, too. At last Mr. Bentley has come around to one’s terms; it was worth waiting for. Two hundred pounds sterling on a note of hand for six months, on White-Jacket. If only Lizzie and the Little One were here—thank heaven for good letters from Lizzie—one might settle down to a little enjoyment. The Duke of Rutland has sent one a courteous invitation to visit Belvoir Castle in January. Alas! that is three weeks ahead. Can one put another three weeks between one and home? If one does not go, one will miss a royal opportunity to see the aristocracy under the best possible conditions: not merely an interesting experience in itself, but—a prudent author mustn’t forget it—so much good material to be hoarded up for another book. If one passes this up, Allan, shrewd fellow, will set one down for a ninny.

Ah! if only one could get over the three weeks: if the two images at home would only down for that space of time. Another cigar: one must weigh it over carefully. No: no: the visit to Leicester would be very agreeable—at least very valuable—but the three weeks couldn’t be borne. It is bad enough to have to go back in a thirty-day boat to save money, instead of dashing in on a twelve- or fifteen-day packet steamer. That’s settled: one goes. Yes: one goes. Now one can enjoy a bright day, and an hour at the National Gallery looking at Rembrandt’s Jew and the saints of Taddeo Gaddi and Guido’s Murder of the Innocents. One is going home. Things brighten. Davidson has promised to discount Bentley’s note at the banker’s; one even begins to enjoy old Bentley: he is a fine, frank, off-handed old gentleman, opening up gradually, like all Englishmen, but as solid as oak once he is sure of you and of his own feelings. One begins to like these English: they are not all masked and corseted in iron. There is Alfred Crowquill, for example, Punch’s funny man, whom one meets at Bentley’s—a good fellow, free and easy, and no damned nonsense. The Benchers at the Temple Bar are men after one’s own heart: a Paradise of Bachelors, this! Well, one sails a week hence. Ironically, one leaves for the old home just as one is beginning to feel settled in the new one! One breakfasts for the last time at the old place; one says good-bye to Bentley; one has one’s last dinner at Morley’s; one’s first and last glimpse of the Reform Club, a last good-bye to the somehow pleasantly dingy room in Craven Street. Waterloo Station—Portsmouth—and one steps, with Captain Fletcher, aboard the Independence, a small, ancient-looking wooden ship. In less than twenty-four hours we are past Land’s End.

Nothing happens between December 26, when one sets sail, and January 30, when one gets sight of a pilot boat: nothing can possibly happen outside that would compete with the memories, the stimuli, the anticipations, the impetuous dreams, the regrets at visits forgotten and experiences omitted, the whole inner tumult of this four months away from home. Or rather, what happens most importantly now, comes by way of books: De Quincey, Rousseau’s Confessions, Ben Jonson, Thomas Browne, The Castle of Otranto, Lamb’s Essays, Hudibras, Marlowe, Anastasius, Vathek, Goethe’s autobiography. The vessel is again one’s cloister: but instead of a long, unconscious growth it contains a vivid and conscious development: every day one is aware of new shoots, ideas, emotions, feelings, insights, sprouting out of one: why, before one had reached twenty-five one hardly had any growth one could point to at all. And now.... If one could not write books one would burst. One is big with a book; it kicks at the walls of the womb; it wakes one in the night with its anticipatory motions.

The low-lying hills of Staten Island at last. The clack and clamour of Whitehall, Broadway. Lizzie. Barney no longer says, “Where dat old man?” He has a dozen other things to talk about. Lizzie is busy with the household, her mother, her mother-in-law, Sam, Father, Uncle Peter, Allan, the sisters: she chatters on about all of them, and about what baby did last week. She will never quite realize, perhaps, what one has been through, how deep one’s longing is, how strong one’s need for escape is, too. She loves one, yes, but not with that gnawing intensity; she will never appreciate how lonely one has been. Before a fortnight is over one wonders why one had ever been so feverishly anxious to come back. Lizzie would have waited another three weeks: an invitation from the Duke of Rutland is irretrievable. No matter: spring is coming, and one must get down to work, and be midwife to one’s own progeny. What earthly shape will this embryo take on?

(Exit Herman Melville, pondering his future.)

TITAN

CHAPTER SIX: RED CLOVER

It was time for Melville to begin work again. In February, 1850, he owed his publisher, Harper’s, more than seven hundred dollars in advances not covered by royalties. He did what he could to reduce the scale of his living. In the spring, he left New York and went up to Broadhall with his family—the old homestead that his Grand-Uncle Thomas had sold when he emigrated to Ohio, had now been converted into an inn: his grandfather’s old desk was still mildewing in the barn, and Melville brought it to light, cleaned it up for his own use, and sat down to it.

The Berkshires were “home” for Melville quite as much as Albany or New York; perhaps more so, for he had a feeling for the open country and its ways. By October he had found a near-by farmstead, with a house that had been an inn during the eighteenth century, an apple orchard on the south side, broad hay fields to the north, and pasture rising in back of the house to the west, which ended in a wood lot on the summit of the hill. The countryside was well cultivated. Maple trees lined the highroad on each side, the willows dropped lazily over the banks of the Housatonic, and, on the poorer upland soils, where the amaranth grew, the white threads of birch trees stood out against the dark pattern of the woods. Pittsfield, a village with metropolitan pretensions, the capital of the Berkshires and the resort of palpable celebrities, was only two miles or so away by a road that led down the valley and across the river, past a sawmill, and through the parklike streets of the village itself.

Judge Shaw advanced Melville funds on a friendly sort of mortgage to purchase Arrowhead; and Melville doubtless intended by modest and spasmodic farming, with a vegetable garden, hay fields, a wood lot, a cow, and a horse, to eke out the narrow income derived from his books. For a man in prime health there was nothing injudicious in this arrangement: winter leaves a considerable amount of free time from farm work, and, with only a few hundred dollars in ready cash every year, Melville might have made a pretty good go of it. But there were handicaps. He had a wife and child to support; other children came presently, four in all; and Elizabeth Melville was a duffer as a housekeeper: try as she would, she could not cook without strain nor manage a servant; and her chief equipment for facing the work and the winter was an admirable set of party dresses and slippers. Melville’s picked-up knowledge of cookery must have been called upon for service during the first weeks they were definitely on their own; and presently Mrs. Maria Melville and his sisters came to join the household, in order to teach Elizabeth the rudiments of the household arts. It was a humiliating experience for Elizabeth; but there was no help for it: to the end of her days she did not like housekeeping; the art of “managing” was apparently not in her. The many hands in Arrowhead doubtless made light work; they also made inroads upon the larder, and what the Melvilles gained in service they lost in supplies. The house itself was commodious in rooms, but cramped in space, since it did not so much exist in its own right, as it did as a sort of annex to the chimney, a vast brick structure, with a circumference of forty-eight feet at the base; the chimney was ample enough, but it swallowed wood on a winter day as a whale swallows little fishes: and the rooms that were left were none too large.

On any realistic canvas, this new move, with all its unexpected burdens, was a dubious one. But in 1850 Melville was at the top of his energies: the impetus from Typee and Omoo had not been lost: the reception in England had probably added to his confidence: and when he looked around him, the American scene itself reinforced his courage and his convictions, and gave him new strength.