Chapter 3

Again we come very close to the external round of Melville, for, after sailing to Glasgow and making his way through Lancaster, he arrived at Liverpool on November 8, 1856. There, at the White Bear, he began a journal which he carried through the better part of his trip. Like his earlier journal, it is chiefly a record of outward impressions: meditation, the working of the inward eye, seems always to have followed much later. He was a good traveller. Hawthorne, whom he hunted up in Liverpool, describes him as making his long journeys with scarcely more than a toothbrush for equipment: Melville still retained the sailor’s knack of stowing away a good deal in a small space, and doing without the landsman’s non-essentials; and, as Hawthorne notes, he always presented the appearance of a well-groomed gentleman. More than this: he struck up acquaintance easily, and at the outset he was tempted, upon meeting an agreeable young Scot, to go east with him forthwith on the same steamer. Melville was always keen to enjoy the contrasts and suggestions of new customs; and he notes, for example, how the landlord in the ordinary of his Liverpool hotel acted as if he were presiding over a private dinner party, all thought of mercenary ends banished, although the wine he offered his guests would later be reckoned in the bill.

Hawthorne, now American Consul at Liverpool, was staying at Southport, a watering-place some twenty miles distant; and Melville sought his old friend out there and stayed with him a few days. The afternoon of his arrival, they walked together along the strand, these two men, both, alas! aging quickly, though Hawthorne was only fifty-two, and Melville was fifteen years younger. The beach was lonely; a strong wind stirred panic in the long grass and occasionally swept the loose sand in their faces; and Melville, a little weariedly, as if somehow the matter must be settled, went back again to the things he used to talk about with Hawthorne in the sunny Berkshire days, things as bleak as the sea-coast itself, and as infinite as the sky: Time and Free-Will, and Eternity, and Faith! Melville cannot believe in Christianity nor be comfortable with his doubts, torments, inner wounds. Hawthorne, as usual, was aloofly sympathetic: it was strange how Melville persisted, had persisted ever since Hawthorne knew him and probably long before, in wandering to and fro in these deserts. If Melville were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential, thinks Hawthorne to himself: for he has a high and noble nature, and is better worth immortality than most of us.

Melville must have looked pleadingly at that grave, heavy-browed face, with its domed forehead, which seemed to promise so much. Did it have no answer for him? Did those intent eyes say to one, as Plinlimmon’s said to Pierre—Vain, vain are all your struggles and endeavours? Except when Hawthorne wrote, how little did he ever give in exchange! Did Melville feel that Hawthorne mutely understood, and had no remedy: that the mind that had seen into Hester Prynne’s heart or Chillingworth’s evil spirit had retreated, hopeless, from his riled depths? If Melville did not feel that, still he needed a confidant, and the wild screams of the gulls over the lonely sands may have awakened to unpremeditated sudden declaration the wild loneliness of his own heart. Melville might as well confess it to Hawthorne: he had about made up his mind to be annihilated. There was no place for him in America: his best and deepest work, his maturest convictions, were lightly tossed aside by his contemporaries: they were interested in whale oil at so much per gallon, not in the quest of Moby-Dick; and they wanted stories that would tickle their vanity, like a mirror, or make the blood course more pleasantly, like a glass of port wine. Melville would not commit suicide: that was a weak way out: but he might deliberately withdraw.

Perhaps Hawthorne looked doubly grave: it is doubtful if he offered any word of countervailing encouragement; for he probably did not have enough confidence in Melville’s genius, much as he respected his probity, to urge him to continue the fight. Besides, he was a little embarrassed; despite his political influence, he had been unable to get Melville the consular post that would have relieved him so greatly; and he felt a little responsible for Melville’s financial plight, if not for his spiritual predicament—although his failure reflected nothing upon his practical good-will, and there is no sign that Melville was even faintly reproachful. Perhaps, at bottom, Hawthorne felt guilty because he could not offer back in friendship all Melville was willing to give—and craved. Unrequited friendship is no easy state for either party to bear.

Evening fell: the wind grew raw: the waters became steel-edged at the horizon with a girder of black: the occasional lights in the town increased the sense of solitude, as the two dark figures made their way back to the huddled silhouette of houses. There was no true end to this talk, but instead of that, the consolations of the table were presently spread: stout to drink and fox-and-geese to eat. Julian had grown into a fine lad; and Una was taller than her mother. The food, the coal-fire, and the chatter of the children before bedtime gave Melville, if only for a moment, something solid to go on, something he could not find in Hawthorne’s patient silences. Well, on the morrow, Melville must say good-bye and go up to Liverpool with Hawthorne to make inquiries about passage among the steamers. On a rainy night, standing on a street corner in Liverpool, he took Hawthorne’s hand and said good-bye to him. Hawthorne was touched. He respected that pale, brooding spirit, that restless, adventurous, still aimless traveller. Casually, they shook hands: the night and the rain swallowed up Melville, and they never met again, and as far as one knows, they never corresponded.

For Melville this was perhaps a last desperate essay at maintaining their friendship; and in spite of Hawthorne’s cordial greeting, the meeting was hollow and it had come to nothing. Each had a secret locked in his bosom; and, in a sense, each had lost the key. Yet there was something fine and true between these two men—if only there had not been the reserve and the distance between them, a reserve that Melville’s old rollicking ways and easy gipsy friendliness could not break down. One can scarcely doubt that it was about Hawthorne Melville wrote the following Monody, included in the sheaf of poems issued just before Melville’s death:

To have known him, to have loved him After loneness long; And then to be estranged in life, And neither in the wrong; And now for death to set his seal— Ease me, a little ease, my song!

By wintry hills his hermit-mound The sheeted snow-drifts drape And houseless there the snow-bird flits Beneath the fir-trees’ crape: Glazed now with ice the cloistral vine That hid the shyest grape.

The fatal cold that had struck this friendship, the only deep one that had sprung up in Melville’s life and attracted all the members of his personality—if one omits the retrospective warmth of his feeling for Jack Chase—this fatal cold did not lessen Melville’s inner pangs and his feeling of desolation.