Chapter 6

During this crowded journey, while Melville was in Italy, there happened an event, obscure, mysterious, obliquely narrated, and published only at the end of his life, which gives us a further clue to Melville’s character and experience. Knowing Melville’s habits of composition, one is fairly sure that some objective fact lies beneath the surface of the verse called After the Pleasure Party: all the more because he published the poem only after he had reached the serenity and safety of old age. That these verses were not merely the product of untethered imagination one suspects, too, because their theme, remorse and bitter regret after renouncing a passionate experience, is underlined by the words of another poem, Madame Mirror:

What pangs after parties of pleasure, What smiles but disclosures of pain!

This long poem, After the Pleasure Party, stands out with particular boldness because it contains the only direct references to sexual passion that one finds in Melville’s entire work, except for haphazard and unimportant incidents—or the plainly fictitious events in Pierre. It is a faint and intricate clue; but one must not neglect it.

Melville pictures a paradisiac garden in Italy: the upland falling behind the house, fragrant with jasmin and orange blossom, the white marble of the house itself, gleaming between the lanes of austere trees, the green terraces falling in gentle cataracts down to the starlit Mediterranean Sea: a place of beauty and an hour of balm “after long revery’s discontent.” The pilgrim, dusty with travel in barren lands, revels in the sensuous peace: he is not so completely the pilgrim, so thoroughly the hermit, that his heart is entirely his own: on the contrary, it is out of a desperate dryness and loneliness of soul that Melville is suddenly beset by such temptations as the hermits of the Thebaid found in the desert. We have no image of the woman who walked with Melville through these green walks, under the star-bright sky: he himself tried, in the years that followed, to forget “the glade wherein Fate spun Love’s ambuscade,” tempting him to flout pale years of cloistral life and “flush himself in sensuous strife.” We do not know if it was she who repulsed him, as the shore repulses the hungry billows, tired of the homeless deep, or whether it was a resistance within himself that wrecked and scattered the impulses that were driving him against the warm object of his desire: but we know that, flushed perhaps by wine, and stirred by the fragrant spring night, sex asserted itself again in Melville: the “dear desire through love to sway” came over him, and when he found himself baffled, attempting to rule his passion yet not able to reign, neither conquering the woman herself nor the passion she had awakened, he was aware of a dreary shame of frustration. Blocked in his highest powers of thought, in his career as a writer, Melville found himself equally defeated—and perhaps by the same cluster of images—in that other citadel of personality. Bitterly he cries: “And kept I long heaven’s watch for this, contemning love, for this, even this?”

There is the cry of the passionate man who in his marriage had kept to the letter of his pledge, and yet found himself struggling against its spirit—struggling and yet paralysed. The sudden opening of passion, that had begun at lunch this day, as the guests of the house, like the ladies and gentlemen in the prologue to the Decameron, had lain about in groups on the grass, this passion, deepening in a secluded glade under the Mediterranean night, had pulled Melville off his lonely throne: in a dream he was a king, perhaps, a lonely king—an idiot crowned with straw! That gust of passion had brought enlightenment: the fires in him were banked, not dead: but it left him bereaved. He shrank from its consequences. In this enlightenment he remembered and magnified other incidents on his journey: the barefoot peasant girl in Naples who had climbed up the hills near the wheels of his carriage and had given him the sudden impulse to fire upon her the petty hell within his own bosom. Hers was a wily innocence, and one can only vaguely guess at Melville’s memories when he exclaims: “The cheat! On briars her buds were strung.... To girls, strong man’s a novice weak.” All this became part of his “sad rosary of belittling pain.”

Melville might seem to others, might in opaque moments seem to himself, a pale, scholarly man, immersed solely in things of the mind: but what a caricature that apparition was of the actual man! The pallor did not mean he could not feel the sun when it shone upon him: “the plain lone bramble thrills with Spring as much as vines that grapes shall bring,” and when this mood was uppermost, how gladly would he throw his arms around some radiant ninny, the first glad, willing girl he might meet, and buy the veriest wanton’s rose—“would but my bee therein repose.” If only he could remake himself, or free himself from this disturbance, this void tormenting urge, this feeling of disunity, this being but half of a mismatched whole: surely, there was some anarchic blunder, some rank cosmic jest, in the state that made the single self incomplete and yet set all the odds against the possibility that selves who matched should meet and mate. This was part of Melville’s disillusion, that hot impetus he had felt in that fine Italian garden promised in ultimate reward no more than his marriage, equally fervid and romantic at the start, had brought him. And yet—and yet—perhaps this temporary impulse was an impulse to act upon, whether it had any cosmic justification or not: the turbulent heart and the rebel brain did not satisfy themselves so easily with abstract reasons.

For Amor so resents a slight And hers had been such haught disdain He long may wreak his boyish spite, And, boylike, little reck the pain.

When Melville leaves this scene of his thwarted renewal, and comes to Rome, confronting its pagan statuary and its Christian churches, he has half an impulse to gather all his doubts and difficulties together and make a sacrifice of them to the Church, in return for the peace she gives: but something deeper in him, something reflected in the mighty statuary and art of the Roman and the Greek, prompts him to turn to Athene herself, who united power and peace, far from the “sexual feud” that “clogs the aspirant’s life.” But no outer institution or activity could share Melville’s burden: at bottom, he feels hopeless of either Church or of Art. Never, he says, passion peace shall bring, nor art inanimate for long inspire. Ah, no! because the sick man turns to these things as to a powerful medicine, to serve as a specific, once and for all; whereas in health, they must be treated as food, to be welcomed recurrently. Melville was sick; and he was aware of it. “Nothing may help or heal while Amor, incensed, remembers wrong.”

For scope to give his vengeance play Himself he’ll blaspheme and betray.

Then for Urania, virgins everywhere, O pray! Example take too, and have care.

These last lines were not given to Melville by his experience but were the fruits of his ultimate reflection: and there was wisdom in them. Sex is deep and central in every life, and the wrongs that are committed against Amor, whether they are wrongs of abstention or wrongs of satiety, whether they are the weakness of a love unpolarized, or the weakness of a love whose validity is established solely in legal documents and obligations, these wrongs may exact their revenge on every phase of a man’s activity. There is no formula for love, except the tact and usage of lovers. Reserve, indifference, and abstention destroy that tact: the lover loses his sense of occasion, and is impassive where he should be quick, or tormented, as Melville was tormented by the peasant girl, when he should be calm. The matter of loyalty does not enter here; or rather, all these thoughts were disloyalties; indeed, Melville was disloyal to the spirit of his marriage in a thousand repugnances or indifferences that far more seriously undermined his relations with Elizabeth than the most outright liaison would have done, had it left Melville poised, collected, refreshed.

In this experience “After the Pleasure Party,” Melville approached close to a central dilemma in his life: he approached it, but he was paralysed, paralysed by the habit of self-control as other men are thrust into helpless action by their lust. Melville’s career, his thought, his vision demanded a singleness of purpose: to attain this singleness he was all eagerness, as he put it in Pierre, “to cast off the most intense, beloved bond, as a hindrance to the attainment of whatever transcendental object that usurper mood so tyrannically suggests. Then the beloved bond seems to hold us to no essential good; lifted to exalted mounts, we can dispense with all the vale; endearments we spurn; kisses are blisters to us; and forsaking the palpitating forms of mortal love, we emptily embrace the boundless and unbodied air. We think we are not human; we become as immortal bachelors and gods; but again, like the Greek gods themselves, prone we descend to earth; glad to be uxorious once more; glad to hide these godlike heads within the bosoms made of too-seducing clay.”

This pilgrimage of Melville’s, from that high talk with Hawthorne on the bleak sands of Southport and those unspeakable thoughts that welled up in him when he confronted the Pyramids, to the sting of a passing peasant girl or the soft hints and caresses in the arboured walk by the Mediterranean, had shown Melville the extremes of his own being: alone with divinity, in solitude, he found himself reaching, thirstily, eagerly, towards the all-too-seducing clay. For Melville, unlike Plato, there was no happy union between these opposites: he had no wise Diotima to teach him how the children of the flesh may lead to that union with the other self out of which the children of the spirit are born: nor did he realize that the lust of the satisfied man is incomparably more cleansing to the spirit than the tormented chastity of the unsatisfied one. This was a misfortune for Melville. His salvation would have been to recognize that he had reached the limits of his own lonely excursion: that all a man can find as a solitary being, and value, and cleave to, exploring in utter loneliness the trackless ways of the universe, he had achieved in Moby-Dick: pride and power and the isolated untouched self had nothing further to teach him, and there was no dominion more sterile than that long reign. He must withdraw from this proud isolation, not into the disguised pride and the equal isolation of humility, but into participation with the life around him and into what he had inherited from the past—not scorning Plato or Goethe because their union had been fruitful, whilst his great immaculacy had proved black and sterile.

In achieving his depths, Melville had missed the surface: he had brought up fire and lava and ashes, from that deep volcano of his being, but he had never in maturity properly explored the woods and groves and gardens that give men peace and untroubled love—and it was pride, a self-defeating pride, that urged him to return to those depths, prizing “the clear intelligence alone” and disdaining a love that was “linked and locked with a self impure.” Partly, Melville overcame this pride, and he mingled with his fellows and widened his explorations in the region they had settled and cultivated: but these new aims did not engross him as the pursuit of Moby-Dick had done. Had he been able to surrender more easily to love, to his wife, to his family relations, at thirty-eight, he might have discovered, while his physical powers were healing, that triumphant serenity and surety of purpose which did not come to him until his old age had transmuted his rejected passions and made a fertile union with reality.

Melville left his Italian garden, with chaos still struggling in his soul. For slighting Amor he was for a while destined to know, not inner peace, but the sting and poison of every chance arrow: in Venice, floating on the canal in a “swoon of a noon and a trance of tide” like calms far off Peru, he was to hear a lattice click and see between the slats, mutely summoning him, the loveliest eyes of a girl. He who had faced peril in nature and man, who had swum between the whale’s black flukes and the white shark’s fin, and who had wandered in the enemy’s desert, New York, warily scanning the envy and slander that followed him there, he who had faced these things cannot stand the “basilisk look” of that girl: he bids his boatman throw off his drowsiness and shoot quickly by. The wanderer discovers that sirens are real: they do in fact lie in wait for a man, wooing him by the same deadly muses. He runs from them—excusing his shame with the memory of Ulysses, “brave, wise, and Venus’ son,” but the very fact that he imprisons this incident in verse and publishes it more than thirty years after shows that he did not escape easily.

“There is no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy,” Melville wrote in Pierre, “that a mortal man can possibly evoke, which will stand the final test in a real impassioned onset of Life and Passion upon him. Then all the fair philosophy or Faith—phantoms that he raised from the mist, slide away and disappear as ghosts at cock-crow. For Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass. Amidst his gray philosophizings, Life breaks upon a man like a morning.” Without conceiving Melville’s philosophy as a phantom, one may still wish that it had confronted and not so desperately fled from these enlightening assaults of life and passion. He needed no further share of restrained and circumspect virtues: he needed the courage of life, the courage to be glad with the morning sun, to breathe deeply the fragrance of the air, to relax his limbs in the heat of noon, to feel again the dear inner vigour of his manliness, that vigour which a man is conscious of only in the presence of a woman who rouses him. Denying that vigour, he found that the dawn was smothered in grey clouds, and the rose had lost its fragrance, and the sun its power to heal. His journey helped him recover his interest in life and his poise: it enabled him to carry on as a man: but, though he resumed his work, that final confidence or desperation men need if they are to undertake the great labour of creation was still insufficient. The masculine attack, so bold, so deep-seated in Mardi, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick, did not wholly come back—and if one asks the reason for this one will find the answer, in part, “traced under an image of Amor Threatening.”