Chapter 2

In the spring of 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter appeared, and Melville presently awoke to find that Hawthorne, whose books he had hitherto kept away from, despite the praise of them he had heard, was a kindred spirit. “A man of deep and noble nature has taken hold of me in this seclusion,” he exclaimed; “his wild, witch-voice rings through me; or, in softer cadences, I seem to hear it in the songs of the hillside birds that sing in the larch trees at my window.” This discovery must have added to Melville’s refreshing sense of welcome on coming back to America. Melville had perhaps begun to doubt whether he could find an audience among his fellow countrymen; and here, at last, was one man capable of understanding every part of him. America and its promise were not a fraud: Hawthorne seemed a deeper writer than any one who had gained the public’s ear in England as a novelist, or, for that matter, as a Victorian poet. When, this summer, Melville came upon the Mosses from an Old Manse, which had been published some years before, he realized he had lost much by his aloofness from the Salem magician. He hastened to repair his neglect; for he gave to the Literary World presently one of the best appreciations of Hawthorne, and incidentally one of the keenest expositions of the situation of the creative writer in America, that Hawthorne was in his own lifetime to get.

The “soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of dreams,” Melville announced. In Hawthorne, humour and love were developed in that high form called genius, and “no such man can exist without also possessing, as the indispensable complement of these, a great, deep intellect, which drops down into the universe like a plummet.”

Hawthorne, without all of Rembrandt’s warmth, had this great quality of Rembrandt: there were blacks in the midst of his sunlight, as Melville had found there were blacks in the world. The blackness fixed and fascinated Melville: it brought Hawthorne to the level of Shakespeare, not in language and performance, perhaps, but in insight: “those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality,” the dark things Shakespeare announced through his dark characters, Hamlet, Timon, Lear, Iago, “these qualities, in spite of Hawthorne’s quiet temperateness, so different from Shakespeare’s popularizing noise and show of broad farce and blood-besmeared tragedy,” brought him on the same level. Melville had re-discovered Shakespeare only two years before: and that discovery, reserved happily for maturity, had contributed decisively to his own rapid burgeoning: “Dolt and ass that I am,” he had exclaimed then, “I have lived more than twenty-nine years, and until a few days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William. Ah, he’s full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, ay, almost as Jesus. I take such men to be inspired. I fancy this Mons. Shakespeare in heaven ranks with Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael. And if another Messiah ever comes he will be in Shakespeare’s person.” ... “I would to God,” he wrote shortly after, “Shakespeare had lived later and promenaded in Broadway. Not that I might have had the pleasure of leaving my card for him at the Astor, or made merry with him over a bowl of the fine Duyckinck punch; but that the marble which all men wore on their souls in the Elizabethan day, might not have intercepted Shakespeare’s fine articulateness. Now I hold it a verity that even Shakespeare was not a frank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, [who] in this intolerant universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.”

Shakespeare had prepared the way for Hawthorne in Melville’s mind. If what one could not quite get from the Shakespeare of the printed page one might get directly from the shy man himself, what great good fortune to find a similar person, alive and abroad in one’s own century! And if the Declaration of Independence did make a difference, if the American had cut loose in more ways than one, and could face life with a little less show and pretence and caste-spirit than Europe had known, why, then one might really get to the bottom of the matter with Hawthorne. That possibility piqued Melville. He risked much in utterance himself; and he hoped that Hawthorne would venture much in return. When they at last became friends, he contrived a hundred different ways of assaulting Hawthorne’s reserve: he staggered up mountains, uncovered mounds of debris, jumped gaily off into innumerable abysses, all to excite Hawthorne to some equivalent disclosure. He did not know at the outset of his enthusiasm for Hawthorne that nothing would ever shake that mountainous reserve, that no leaps and sorties of his would stimulate Hawthorne to put one foot before the other. But Hawthorne caused Melville to hope for much; and that hope mingled with the plan of Moby-Dick, while he was writing it.

What a difference there was between Hawthorne and the graceful Washington Irving or the scholarly Longfellow, the men who had heretofore stood before the world as the highest representatives of American letters, urbane, elegant, sedulously following foreign models, and avoiding all topics but smooth ones! Better to fail at times with such originality as Hawthorne’s than to succeed in the easy, bland, gentlemanly way—knowing one’s powers, because they are so small, and keeping within them, because nothing beckons one to stir beyond.

Here, thought Melville, was a fellow spirit at last! Melville had partly realized before that other men were working below the surface of things in America; but the transcendentalists had put him off a little by rallying around them the people who thought they were lifting themselves above material things by taking cold water rubs, on principle, or by being dreadfully concerned over the items of their diet or the cut of their clothes: whereas Melville felt that champagne and oysters were the proper nourishment for the body, if one could get them, and he believed that one was less devoted to the material life when one accepted its daily routine than when one attempted to substitute plain living for high thinking, and lost true simplicity, by making its attainment such a complicated matter. Even Hawthorne at first seemed to lack something. Hawthorne was wonderfully subtle, Melville wrote to Mr. Duyckinck, and his deeper meanings are worthy of a Brahmin. Still, there was something lacking—a good deal lacking to the plump sphericality of the man. What was that? He doesn’t patronize the butcher—he needs roast beef, done rare.

Hawthorne became Melville’s sole connection with the transcendentalists, and it never developed into a very deep union. Melville had listened to a lecture of Emerson’s a year before and defended Emerson from Mr. Duyckinck’s censure: he respected this Plato who spoke through his nose. If Emerson was a fool, Melville had rather be a fool than a wise man, and if he owed much to Sir Thomas Browne, well, no one was his own sire: the debt was a universal one. Emerson at least dived; and Melville loved all men who dive. “Any fish can swim near the surface; but it takes a great whale to go downstairs five miles or more, and if he don’t attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet that will.” That justified Emerson: but except as one diver with another, Melville felt no kinship with him. “I do not oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow, but prefer to hang myself in mine own halter than to swing in any other man’s swing.” It was the blandness, the sunniness, the mildness, the absence of curses, shadows, shipwrecks in Emerson’s philosophy that set Melville against it: Emerson was the perpetual passenger who stayed below in bad weather, trusting that the captain would take care of the ship: Melville was the sailor who climbed aloft, and knew that the captain was sometimes drunk and that the best of ships might go down. “All hands save ship! has startled dreamers.”

Hawthorne, then, was a man to be grateful for: the smell of young beeches and hemlocks was upon him, wrote Melville; the broad prairies were in his soul; he had these qualities because he was an American and deeply part of the scene; but, in addition, he had an eye for the dankness and decay and for the inscrutable malevolence of the universe: he was no sun-dial that recorded only the smiling hours of life. If the country could nourish Hawthorne, and if Hawthorne could produce The Scarlet Letter and the Mosses, well, what might not Melville himself put forth? Though Hawthorne was a genius, perhaps, like Shakespeare, he did not appear alone. “Shakespeare cannot be regarded as in himself the concretion of all the genius of his time; nor as so immeasurably beyond Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Beaumont, Jonson, that these men can be said to share none of his power. Would it, indeed, appear so unreasonable to suppose that this great fullness and overflowing may be, or may be destined to be, shared by a plurality of men of genius?”

The presence of an Emerson, a Hawthorne, gave all the more reason for a Melville. So Melville must have felt in his bones; and he was right. What he could not venture as a perception—for who can see or measure his contemporaries?—was certainly true as prophecy: in that flood of intellectual and imaginative power that I have elsewhere called the Golden Day, Emerson, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, were all carried along in the same current: each reinforces and rounds out the others: and it is this corpus of writers, rather than any single one, that forms what Hawthorne himself called the Master Genius of America.

Melville did not suppose, when he wrote his encomium of Hawthorne, that this same summer would bring the two men into contact, that they would become neighbours, near enough to make occasional visits by horseback or wagon, and that, despite his premonition that “on a personal interview no great author has ever come up to the idea of his reader,” he would find in Hawthorne, temporarily, that comrade and friend for whom he had been looking. There was, it is true, only half a generation between them; and this particular distance makes intimacy difficult, unless the older man is willing to treat the younger one as an assured equal. How Hawthorne himself felt about the matter it is hard to tell: Melville realized that his own boisterous democracy, which recognized the thief in the jail as the equal of General George Washington, might grate on Hawthorne a little, and that, like an English Howard in the presence of a plebeian, Hawthorne’s intellectual aristocracy might shrink at this claim and this contact. But Melville had no lack of faith in his own powers; and he put forth the claim to equality with easy and assured frankness; and unless he was unusually insensitive at this point, his letter would indicate that Hawthorne accepted the relationship on Melville’s terms.

On August 5, 1850, Hawthorne noted in his American Notebook that he drove from Lenox, near which he lived in a penurious red farmhouse, to Stockbridge, where he found at the house of Fields, the Boston publisher, Dr. Holmes, Mr. Duyckinck of New York, also Mr. Cornelius Matthews and Herman Melville. They ascended the Monument Mountain and the party was caught in a shower: according to tradition, it was during that summer storm, under a shoulder of rock where they had taken refuge, that these two stormy souls first overcame their reticence and shyness, and ploughed through conversation to a deeper intimacy. The New Yorkers called on Hawthorne in the forenoon, two days later, and Hawthorne treated them to a couple of bottles of Mr. Mansfield’s champagne; and from that time on Melville was a familiar visitor in the Hawthorne household. The family called him Mr. Omoo; young Julian said that he loved Mr. Melville as well as his Mamma and Papa and Una; Melville, who had amused the Marquesans with an improvised popgun, was not likely to fall down in intercourse with children—and he would sometimes ride over in the evening with his great dog, and the children would ride on the dog’s back. Even Sophia Hawthorne was fascinated by Melville: she, who adored her husband’s dark, lustrous eyes, was puzzled and a little disturbed by Melville’s; and her tribute to Melville is all the more notable when one remembers her complete preoccupation with her husband.

“I am not quite sure,” she wrote, “that I do not think him a very great man.... A man with a true, warm heart, and a soul and an intellect—with life to his finger-tips; earnest, sincere and reverent; very tender and modest. He has very keen perceptive power; but what astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems to me to see everything accurately; and how he can do so with his small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and handsome, his mouth expressive of sensibility and emotion. He is tall and erect, with an air free, brave and manly. When conversing, he is full of gesture and force, and loses himself in his subject. There is no grace or polish. Once in a while his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression, out of these eyes to which I have objected; an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that moment taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself.”

The opportunity for real intercourse with Hawthorne, for talk about Time and Eternity and ultimate things, smoking a fragrant cigar, sipping brandy or cider, meant much to Melville; far more, no doubt, than it did to Hawthorne. In Melville’s growing spiritual loneliness, he needed the affection of a sympathetic mind; and for a while he could persuade himself that, even in Hawthorne’s silences, he had this. Hawthorne’s example as a novelist was a stimulus: it led Melville beyond the easy shallows, where one could negligently wade, always within easy calling distance of the shore; and his philosophical conversation, or, still more, his apparently absorbed way of listening to philosophical conversation, encouraged Melville to go further and deeper along the passage he had begun to make a year before with Adler.

Each conversation opened new vistas: the night talks would often be a prelude to next morning’s letters, and in those letters, particularly in those which remain from the period covered by Moby-Dick, Melville exposed the seamy depths of his own spirit. He had no reticences before Hawthorne, and above all, no false modesty. Life was becoming a long stage, with no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with Hawthorne for a fellow passenger, Melville was content and could be happy. “I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.” The hectic, desperate, ecstatic letters Melville wrote his friend during the short year and a half that brought them together in the Berkshires give one a surer insight into Melville’s moods and aims than any other pages he ever wrote. Had the neighbourly relations persisted, had Hawthorne’s response been wholly adequate, Melville might have weathered more buoyantly the internal tempest that set in with Moby-Dick. But Hawthorne was essentially as remote from Melville as he was from the old worthies of the Customs House at Salem or the old sea-captains he had exchanged civilities with over a mug of ale. Though one could see daylight and the blue sky from the bottom of Hawthorne’s well, there was not enough of it to share with any companion. If he was touched by the homage of the younger man, he could not fully reciprocate it. He recognized Melville’s moral earnestness and intellectual vigour; but I doubt if he once suspected that his extravagant friend was far nearer, by temperament and expression, to the heart of Shakespeare’s genius than he himself was. In seizing upon Hawthorne as an other self, Melville more than once did homage to his own genius: his descriptions of Hawthorne’s powers, Hawthorne’s achievements, are nearer to his own than to Hawthorne’s.

Melville’s relation with Hawthorne counts as one of the tragedies of his life; and it was more than a minor one. Friendship itself must have seemed a mockery, when he found that the dearest friend and closest intellectual companion he had yet encountered was bound tight in the arctic ice, and many leagues away. But he had no sense of the distance between them until he attempted to span it: and it must have been with amazement, with incredulity, that he finally read the story of Ethan Brand, written during the prime year of their friendship, and discovered what in his heart of hearts Hawthorne felt about Melville’s lofty pride and his extreme spiritual quests. Ethan Brand is a charcoal-burner, who has left his home in order to discover the Unpardonable Sin; he finally returns to his kiln and his neighbours to announce, after his long wanderings, that he has found the sin in his own breast. Brand’s language is a parody of Ahab’s in Moby-Dick; and what Hawthorne says about Brand he meant to apply, I have no doubt, possibly by way of warning, to Melville himself.

Ethan Brand remembered, said Hawthorne, echoing Melville’s words in the scene where Ahab recalls his first pursuit of the whale, “he remembered how the night dew had fallen upon him,—how the dark forest had whispered to him,—how the stars had gleamed upon him,—a simple and loving man, watching the fire in the years gone by, and ever musing as it burned. He remembered with what tenderness, with what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and woe, he had first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards became the inspiration of his life; with what reverence he had then looked into the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally divine, and, however desecrated, still to be held sacred by his brother; with what awful fear he had deprecated the success of his pursuit, and prayed that the Unpardonable Sin might never be revealed to him. Then ensued that vast intellectual development, which, in its progress, disturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart. The Idea that possessed his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone on cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer to stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth, laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber after him. So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That, indeed, had withered,—had contracted,—had hardened,—had perished! It had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He had lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment.... Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect.”

We do not know when Melville discovered these words or felt their jagged edges in his bosom: but we can be certain that from that day forth the friendship between the two men sank like a stone in quicksand. Hawthorne had committed the unpardonable sin of friendship; he had failed to understand Melville’s development, or to touch by sympathy and faith that part of Melville which was beyond his external reach. All of Melville’s love recoiled, as we shall see presently, from the icy strangeness of that friendship which was no friendship, from that understanding which was almost enmity. Perhaps Ethan Brand was not Melville? Perhaps it was but a shadowy suggestion, influenced more by Ahab than by his author? Melville must have attempted this sort of reconciliation more than once: but Hawthorne’s words would stick: yes, they would stick because of the touch of truth in them, and because, once Hawthorne’s hand was withdrawn, the magnetic chain of humanity indeed would seem broken. This, however, was the crisis of their friendship; and Melville had no inkling of this outcome whilst he was writing Moby-Dick. There is no doubt that the presence of Hawthorne fortified him for that endeavour.