Chapter 2

Elizabeth Melville noted that bad health, following too close application to work, made travel advisable in 1856: that is the outward explanation of Melville’s circumstances. Melville’s father-in-law again came forward with financial aid, and in October Herman Melville set off on a journey to Constantinople and the Holy Land. He had contemplated such a trip in 1849; and now, from a deeper consciousness of his spiritual dilemma, he wished perhaps to prove the advice he had given Taji in the last pages of Mardi—to return and find his Yillah in Serenia. It was characteristic of Melville’s habit of thought that he should seek for Christ’s kingdom in the territory that had known his presence, instead of plying himself with books and spiritual intermediaries: having come upon Moby-Dick on the adventurous voyages of his youth, he was now, as a man of thirty-seven, hopeful to find through another voyage a sufficient antagonist to this Satanic power, with whom he could ally his own faltering, and almost routed, forces. But it was not merely for peace that Melville set out. Beneath the obvious and inevitable retreat was possibly the hope that the old energies would come back again, that the old Titan would re-awake and the old challenge stir again in his bosom—that, with some of his domestic cares relieved or forgotten, the joy of battle would come back to him, the relish for arduous days of creation. Hopes and fears went with Herman Melville across the Atlantic: but unless we misread his words completely, the fears were uppermost. Perhaps life held no answer. It was possible “after all, that spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of commonplaceness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim, cannot resolve.”