Chapter 7

Melville returned home toward the middle of 1857. Meanwhile, The Confidence Man, published by Sampson, Low and Company, and not by his old publishers, Harper’s, had done little to improve his fortunes. Indeed, its English edition was so small that it for long remained unknown to the bibliographer; and in America the work, though it received occasional praise, did not fare much better. Except in the roughest political lampooning, satire did not penetrate the leathery optimism and the cast-iron self-righteousness of antebellum America; and if Melville wanted support and confidence, The Confidence Man was the wrong way to go about it. One need not be surprised that the sequel was never published, and in all likelihood, never written.

Melville’s resolve to be annihilated was lessened by his journey: for though he had not been shattered with light on the road to Damascus, faith flickered and smoked occasionally, like smouldering wood before it is ready to blaze. The shearing of his head, the donning of sackcloth, the last ironic act of renunciation was still almost a decade away: with new resolution, he made a succession of attempts to regain the position he had once occupied.

The lecture lyceum gave him his first opportunity: the Civil War was the second. Between 1857 and 1860 Melville joined the politicians and the woman suffragists and the prohibitionists and the transcendentalists and the Fourierists and the travellers from strange parts of the world and distinguished foreigners, in the one corner of the marketplace where they could all get a living: the public platform. It was not an easy pill for him to swallow, for though he lectured on the sculpture of the Vatican and the sights of Rome, he was known, hailed, gaped at still as the famous author of Peedee, Pog-Dog, and Hullabaloo—the man who had lived among the cannibals. Well might he write in Pierre: “Permanently to alleviate pain, we must first dart some added pangs.” He was brave enough about the whole business; in 1858 he wrote: “I should be glad to lecture there [in Baltimore] or anywhere. If they will pay expenses and give a reasonable fee, I am ready to lecture in Labrador or on the Isle of Desolation off Patagonia.”

Melville showed himself; he lectured; but he stooped no further. Mid all the spellbinders and strutting celebrities of the period, with their characteristic masks, sonorities, grimaces, this quiet man, with the small, fine nose and the weary, whimsical smile, and an air of patient earnestness, could have cut no very great figure to a public that had never been used to the emphasis of under-statement. Indeed, Melville’s lecture fees tell as much: they averaged around fifty dollars a lecture, and at this time Thoreau, with even a narrower reputation, got as much for a reading. The lectures gave Melville an opportunity to travel, and he must have welcomed this: he went as far afield as Montreal and Milwaukee: but in all he gave less than thirty lectures. One wonders about his audiences. Did Thoreau meet him at the station in Concord or did Whitman listen to him in New York? Whom did he fall in with on the Ohio river steamers? What did he make of the emigrant New Englanders, Germans, merchants, farmers, roustabouts, gamblers? Had his Mississippi buffoons touched them off, or did they make his staunchest effects pallid? Did he identify himself with them, share their aims, feel a thrill of anticipation at their destinies—or did he foresee in them the final disruption of the America that had nourished him?

The record is almost a blank; but a newspaper report of one of the lectures, in the Boston Journal, 1857, shows that Melville’s shrewd eye was far from being turned inward. Describing the statues in the Church of St. John Lateran, he observes that “Socrates looks like an Irish comedian, Julius Caesar so sensible and businesslike of aspect it might be taken for the bust of a railroad president; Seneca with the visage of a pawnbroker; Nero a fast young man, Plato with the locks and airs of an exquisite, as if meditating the destinies of the world under the hands of a hair-dresser.” These comments prove, what all the minor documents of Melville’s life during this period show, that the jocular irrepressible spirit—“bear with mine infirmity of jocularity,” he exclaims to Duyckinck—the spirit who had written Omoo and White-Jacket, was not altogether Timonized or defeated. His satire still worked obliquely, touching both his own countrymen and their pragmatic contemporaries, the Romans. Nor did Melville conceal his feelings about the benefits of mickonaree Christianity and “white civilization.” In another lecture, after quoting from a local English paper in one of the South Sea Islands, which suggested the propriety of not having the native language taught in the common schools, he threw down the sheet in plain disgust, and announced to the audience, in allusion to the reputed desire of the natives of Georges Island to be annexed to the United States, that he was sorry to see it, since, as a friend of humanity, and especially a friend of the South Sea Islanders, he would pray, and call upon all Christians to pray with him, that the Polynesians might be delivered from all foreign and contaminating influences.

During this period of lecturing, Melville began to write again, with no hope of profit or fame, but for his own satisfaction; and, anticipating Thomas Hardy’s example, he turned to verse. If one can date his first new essays in verse—for the poems in Mardi show that there were early efforts—one must give the time as probably 1858, and for a while only Elizabeth shared this secret with him. By 1860, before he went for a voyage with his younger brother, now Captain Thomas Melville, commander of the Boston clipper Meteor, his verses were numerous enough to make a volume. The decision to make this voyage came rather suddenly; and one finds Melville writing to Mr. Duyckinck, mid the haste of departure, to see if he will undertake to advise with Allan Melville as to a publisher, and in case of publication, be sure that the printer’s proof-reader is a careful man. Melville, the author of nine books, still deferred to Mr. Duyckinck’s professional experience; and, on getting a favourable reply, he told Duyckinck that “it was quite a wind from the field of old times.”

From this correspondence with Evert Duyckinck—and an allusion in a letter to George about Melville’s own “winter and rough weather”—one gathers that after Pierre there had been an estrangement, or at least a prolonged silence: in 1856 the Duyckincks had recorded in their Cyclopedia their conviction that Pierre was a false step, and only now, after eight years had passed, was the breach healed. As for Melville’s mood in travel, he had this to say: “I anticipate as much pleasure as, at the age of forty, one temperately can, on the voyage I am going. I go under very happy auspices so far as the ship is concerned. A noble ship and a nobler captain—and he my brother. We have the breadth of those tropics before us, to sail over twice, and shall round the world. Our first port is San Francisco, which we shall probably make in 110 days. Thence we go to Manilla—and thence, I hardly know where—I wish devoutly you were going along. I think it would agree with you. The prime requisites for enjoyment on sea-voyages, for passengers, is 1st health—2nd good-nature. Both first rate things, but not universally to be found.—At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.” The good-bye and God bless you, with which Melville closed this letter, showed a sort of solemn warmth. In a lonely life, even an Evert Duyckinck might prove a comrade....

The book of poetry was never published in its original form. Mr. Meade Minnigerode conjectures that the manuscript was that of Clarel; but Melville’s concern, in his memoranda for Allan, that each piece should be printed on a page by itself, however small the piece, shows, apart from anything else, that it could not have been Clarel; and when Melville told his brother, two years later, that he had disposed of his “doggerel” to a trunkmaker, who took the whole lot off his hands at ten cents the pound, one must infer that he himself had become dissatisfied with the bulk of his early work, and destroyed most of it, salvaging a few pieces, like the verse to the Captain of the Meteor, for his later volumes. In the first flush of experiment, however, Melville’s poetry pleased him: the form of verse gave compactness to his thoughts, and the writing of it did not inflict that long continuous drain on his vitality that the larger prose pieces called for. Melville would pace the quarter-deck with his brother, reciting his verses in the moonlight: the joy of creation, even minor creation, could still stir him up, and no doubt the cadences of the moving ship, heaving, falling, rolling, added to the pleasure of the words themselves.

At the end of three months, when they had reached California, Melville had exhausted his supply of books and papers, probably, and his brother’s patience, and his own capacity for boredom: by that time his health had doubtless improved again, and, urging him to break the trip and quicken his return, his old longing for Elizabeth may have come back with greater force. He was never quite happy in her company, nor was he quite happy away from it. All the difficulties of their domestic economy tended to make their relations prosaic and commonplace, for one does not cook for and clean and clothe four children without a considerable amount of unflinching prose; and Elizabeth’s incapacity for domestic duties and her irritations only made matters worse. Yet Melville, as far as one can judge, felt not merely affection for Elizabeth: on these long absences, passion would gather within him again, like lightning in a heavy summer sky. He might resent her obtuseness; he might be disappointed by her failure to respond to his irresponsible hilarity; he might be sobered by the fact that his love had been unfavourably conditioned by financial burdens and a cramped household with a scanty larder; but for all that, he clung to her and needed her. One must take account of this in noting Melville’s moods and moves and decisions in the decade after 1856. Although Melville, unfortunately, felt repulsion in a tie that was so plainly rooted in physical attachment, and longed for a heaven in which there was the marriage of true minds without the “impurities” and impediments of sex, although he distrusted the solace of physical union, as he distrusted all beautiful things which hid the truth from men’s eyes, yet he found himself perpetually driven back to this wiser folly; and, not turning easily to any other woman, he kept his faith with Elizabeth.

The rôle was not an easy one for her to bear: make no mistake about it. Such violence of anticipation and such quick satiety, such tenderness and such easy disappointment, such self-absorption, and, with it all, a certain impatience and resentment of the daily round, with its claims, ceremonies, civilities, annoyances—with all this Elizabeth Melville was probably never to know such deep, enraptured happiness in her marriage as Sophia Hawthorne, who had faced dire poverty, too, had known. Elizabeth was proud of her man: she had faith in him: but it was only in the closing years of their lives, when, through bitter experience, she had acquired much, and he, through bitter experience, had resigned much, that they were on a parity. There is no doubt she encouraged him in his work, and, whether she understood it or not, believed in it. While he was gone in 1860 she assiduously looked after the placing of the manuscript, and would not be put off by the publishers’ flimsy excuses. Still, for all this sympathy and loyalty, on both sides, one feels that strain, depression, tenseness, must have too often marked the life of the Melville household, during these shadowed years of poverty and ill health and dwindling fame.

If Mrs. Melville stood the strain of it, with all the toughness of middle age to bear up under it, the children did not fare so well. The photograph of the Melville children, Malcolm, Frances, Elizabeth, and Stanwix, taken when the oldest was perhaps twelve or thirteen—that is, during the early sixties—tells as much: they are a little peaked and undernourished, and the eldest child’s face is sullen, dour. The racking poverty of his early youth had left an indelible impression on Melville himself, and, in even more depressing circumstances, a worse image was left upon the minds of his growing children. Melville, a man of originality and penetration in almost every other department of life, was, one suspects, a commonplace father: he expected his children to be dutiful and submissive and not to annoy their mother, and he would read them moral lectures on the whole duty of children, fearful of their being corrupted by association and contact with the age, but incapable of directing their impulses into forms of growth except by desperate exhortation—the most blank and sterile of all pedagogical methods. He wanted them to be noble and courageous and honest and indifferent to money, and, dreading the effect of the mean, bourgeois standards that surrounded them, he was too quick to suspect the ignoble and the base, forgetting that growth is a happier sign in childhood than the semblance of perfection. When his little daughter picked up the word “property” and aired it to her family, Melville relentlessly teased her about it: if he handed her the butter, he would hand it to Miss Property: if he met her on the stairs he would mimic Miss Property: he tormented her for the sins of her elders, forgetting the terrible sensitiveness of a child to dogging that has such a bitter animus behind it. This incident will stand for others: the jolly letters he would write home, with pictures and all manner of funny printing, or the stories he would tell in a pleasant hour, did not wipe out the acrid taste or lessen the distance between father and children. There was nothing to lighten the burden of these days: these children were orphaned, even when their father sat among them. One son ran away; another, in 1867, was found dead in his room, of a rifle wound, under circumstances that left doubt as to whether accident or suicide had caused the fatality; and one of his daughters could not recur to the image of her father without a certain painful revulsion. The picture is not a happy one: but a man with high purposes does not always leave behind earthly children to bless him. One remembers how Milton’s daughters cursed him in his own presence, and one realizes that one can draw no valid conclusions from such conduct—except this, that a man immersed in his inner vision is a difficult man to live with, and if he does not renounce his family and its ties at the outset of his quest, they may live to rise up against him before he is ended with it. And who was to blame? Milton and Melville wanted the warmth of domesticity: but their children had no part in the bargain that gave them cold lodgings in the icy chambers of Heaven, and shabby clothes and insufficient food and few opportunities for pleasure on the earth. These children were of Melville’s flesh, but not of his mind: when he purchased a work of art, a print or a statue for ten dollars, when there was scarcely bread enough to go round, who can wonder at their black memories? If they did not understand the need of a famished soul for art, their father had too quickly forgotten his own humiliation when he went to sea in a discarded hunting-jacket. Circumstances drove Melville hard; but poverty alone does not make such a breach between a parent and his children; and though one must pity Melville in this extremity of misunderstanding, one cannot but feel that he himself contributed to it.

The death of Elizabeth’s father in 1860 did not relieve the strain, except by giving the family a clear title to Arrowhead; so, until 1866, the background of Melville’s life cannot be painted save in dark colours. In spite of a personal interview with Lincoln in 1861, Melville was again turned down for a consular post; and two years later Melville finally decided to leave the Berkshires. To this end, he purchased a house at 104 East Twenty-sixth Street, in New York, from his brother, Allan, to whom he sold Arrowhead in part payment. But misfortune persisted. In removing his household goods from Arrowhead, the wagon was upset and he was thrown into the frozen ruts of the road. The injury was so severe that Melville was forced to lie up for many weeks in a near-by house, and in addition, to sap further his physical health, the accident left him with a fear of carriage driving. So his troubles piled up on him; and in the end, they grew so intolerable that the humour of the whaleboat would return to him, and he would smile again. I have painted in every sober and painful detail in the background; the blacks, the dingy blues, the sear browns are the dominant colours: true: but against this sordid groundwork one must not build up a blacker foreground: on the contrary, there are occasional flashes of warm colour or high light, and to leave them out would falsify the whole picture.

There is a Micawber in all of us, not unfortunately. We may find life disappointing without losing our taste for breaded veal cutlets and stout. Overwhelmed by tragic experience, we may still laugh at a hundred minor absurdities, as Melville no doubt laughed when he discovered that in 1865 a firm of Philadelphia publishers, who had taken over the rights to Israel Potter, had brought it out under the new title of The Refugee, without Melville’s consent, and had set him down as the author of two wholly imaginary books, The Two Captains and The Man of the World! Through all his ailments, one infirmity helped to counteract them, the infirmity of jocularity. He had one steady comfort and mainstay which only the blackest incidents could erase for more than a brief period: he had a sense of humour. More than that, with a little encouragement, he had positive high spirits. If one were not fully assured of this from a general knowledge of Melville’s character, the letter he wrote to his brother Thomas in 1862 would make this point plain: “Yesterday I received from Gansevoort your long and very entertaining letter to Mamma from Pernambuco. Yes, it was very entertaining. Particularly the account of that interesting young gentleman whom you stigmatise for a jackass, simply because he improves his opportunities in the way of sleeping, eating, and other commendable customs. That’s the sort of fellow, it seems to me, to get along with. For my part I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible and sociable millions of good fellows, all taking a long, friendly snooze together, under the sod—no quarrels, no imaginary grievances, no envies, heartburnings, & thinking how much better the other chap is off—none of this: but all equally free-&-easy, they sleep away and reel off their nine knots an hour, in perfect amity.”

Or again, after his accident in 1862, in a letter to Samuel Shaw, his brother-in-law, the same grave bantering appears: “... I begin to indulge in the pleasing idea that my life must needs be of some value. Probably I consume a certain amount of oxygen, which unconsumed might create some disturbance in nature. Be that as it may, I am going to try and stick to the conviction named above. Now I have observed that such an idea, once well-bedded in a man, is a wonderful conservator of health and almost a prophecy of long life. I once, like other spoonies, cherished a loose sort of notion that I did not care to live very long. But I will frankly own that I have now no serious, no insuperable objections to a respectable longevity. I don’t like the idea of being left out night after night in a cold churchyard.”

The humour and the sentiments both remind one of another black writer, a later one, the author of the Shropshire Lad: without losing his inner thoughts, Melville could nevertheless paraphrase them into a happier vernacular. Meanwhile, a deeper blackness had settled over the land, matching, patch for patch, wound for wound, scar for scar, every ill in Melville’s own body and soul. That darkness was the darkness of the Civil War; and when it finally lifted, it disclosed a different country, a different age, a different series of possibilities. The Civil War was a dividing point in the life of the country, and a dividing point in Melville’s life. It widened the distance between Melville and his younger contemporaries and it sealed, with finality, his own position in society. The provincial culture was overwhelmed; and what came to take its place was not a genuine culture, but a shoddy substitute, mere fustian of the spirit. He looked around him after the worst had happened; and his words must have been Bartleby’s: I know where I am. That very consciousness was enough to cut him off from the new society.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: ALARUMS AND RETREATS

Between the provincial society into which Herman Melville was born and the America in which he found himself at the time of the Civil War there was a vast difference. The Civil War may in one sense be looked upon as an attempt to preserve the ideological framework of the United States at a time when its institutions were in a state of disruption, and all its typical ways of life were being transformed. In that the Civil War preserved this framework, upholding the Constitution, confirming the union of the states, concentrating the powers of government, it was successful: the union was saved. But the very act of prosecuting the war confirmed the chaos and hastened the disruption, so that what was saved was not freedom and equality, the freedom of voluntary association and local initiative, the equality of access to an unlimited amount of utilizable land: what was left was just the opposite of these things, servility and inequality. Land and natural resources, scattered broadcast during the Civil War under the Homestead Act, and under various acts to promote railroad building, were turned into exacting monopolies; and the government itself became the principal agent for establishing and extending privilege. In less than half a generation Walt Whitman was forced to modify many of his fondest hopes for America: for with all these new agents of exploitation dominant, there was no longer any way of distinguishing the American proletariat from that of Europe, except in their independent manners—a relic of an equality that had once been real.

The disruption symbolized by the Civil War was expressed in a hundred ways; and when one examines these manifestations carefully they can all be characterized by a single figure: the failure to achieve form. One sees the difference between provincial and industrial America in the political definition of their units: New England, for example, is a natural region, like Brittany and Provence, with a mode of thought and an institutional form based upon certain common geographic features and cultural history; the new states and territories that were founded beyond the Alleghenies had no form other than that expressed by the arbitrary lines drawn by the surveyor: their content was simply so many blank square miles. The older cities of the seaboard, with the exception of Philadelphia, had a central nucleus which had grown out of local needs and habits: the size of the blocks was determined by the depth of the houses, the amount of garden space in the rear, the traffic that would pass in the streets: in the new cities no customs and habits played a part in the configuration of the city except those of realty speculation: by 1850, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Chicago had all forfeited to the land-gambler sites originally set aside for civic centres. In architecture, the failure to achieve form was equally conspicuous: windows, doors, rooms, façades, even apart from their grotesque efforts at decoration, all became gawky and ill-proportioned.

The energies of the country went into purely quantitative achievements: their only formal equivalent was money. The production in tons of iron, miles of steel rails, bushels of wheat, went up: cities increased in size: but the iron was used for the preposterous fronts of office buildings, the railroad served to deplete the hinterland, and the cities were dingy firetraps of wood or dingier prisons of brownstone. The war itself tore up and shot to pieces vast quantities of iron and many miles of railroad, and sundry towns and villages: but that was the true destination of all these quantitative efforts even in peace: for industrialism produced only an occasional genuine form, like the Eads Bridge, and for the most part its products were fit only to be consumed hastily and replaced and destroyed again. No wonder this civilization sweated day and night, without holidays, to produce its evanescent goods; while, in the Middle Ages, the great cathedrals and town halls were erected, without labour-saving machinery, in a rude agricultural society which spent a third of its year in holidays devoted to prayer, meditation, or festival. Where there is form and culture, there is true conservation of energy through the arts: where there is only energy, without end or form, the mechanism may be speeded up indefinitely without increasing anything except the waste and lost motion. Southern society, in which a provincial system of caste and culture held together, produced factories and slave barracks, in Charleston, for example, that maintained, uncorrupted, the forms of its classic past: but outside these aristocratic backwaters, chaos was dominant—and even in the South, one feels, it was only postponed.

In this sprawling, undisciplined America, a new type of character was uppermost. Melville described this new type when he touched on Ethan Allen in Israel Potter: “Allen,” he said, “seems to have been a curious combination of a Hercules, a Joe Miller, a Bayard, and a Tom Hyer. He was frank, bluff, companionable as a Pagan, convivial, a Roman, hearty as a harvest. His spirit was essentially Western; and herein is his peculiar Americanism; for the Western spirit is, or will yet be (for no other can be) the true American.” It was a sign of the waning of provincial faith that before the war everybody was eagerly looking for this individual, this type, who would serve as a symbol of unity. Even Emerson and Thoreau looked wistfully toward the rough fellows of the frontier to express what was common to all Americans. A provincial culture glories in its differences: the power to mould and express them is its unique quality: a Jefferson, a Franklin, an Adams were not only as far apart as Virginia, Philadelphia, and Boston: they were as far apart, in many ways, as London, Paris, and Weimar. But in the period before the war, the frontier type, Jackson, Harrison, Clay, Frémont, Lincoln, was put forward as the sum of all our possible Americas—albeit these figures were as far from the Swedes of Minnesota or the Germans of Wisconsin as they were from the Gansevoorts and the Randolphs. In a period of dissolution a false unity seems preferable to no common bond at all; and in the uncertainty, the disintegration, the dispersion of American society, under the vast tides of immigration and the inexorable flow of the coal-and-iron civilization, political Union became a compensatory symbol for all the social and cultural fragmentation that existed.

The political and social results of the Civil War, as they have worked out during the last two generations, have made us a little sceptical of the sacred, unchallengeable shibboleths under which the war itself was fought: we see that the prime issues of the great conflict were silenced, rather than settled, by the decisive victory of the North. Unfortunately, the South’s political contentions, which were partly valid, were vitiated by the issue of slavery. Mid all the decisive statesmanship displayed south of the Mason and Dixon line, no one was firm enough or far-sighted enough, after Jefferson’s time, to see that the holding of human beings in bondage, without hope or means of escape, was an untenable anachronism: even the Russian autocracy recognized that. The French Revolution had made this particular form of human degradation unpalatable; like incest or tribal revenge, it could not be related to a modern society. The burden of that institution, indeed, belonged to the whole country: the great mistake of the South, from 1830 onwards, was to assume as a divine necessity or benefit what should have been shared with the rest of the country as an intolerable evil—to be disposed of by some direct economic adjustment.

Melville had his misgivings about current political institutions; in Mardi he pointed out that many of the boasted freedoms of America were the product of free land and an uncrowded domain; and though he was a republican, he recognized inequality, and had no hope of doing away with those distinctions between man and man in a functional capacity, which separate captain, mates, and crew. His own outlook was emotionally patrician and aristocratic; but his years in the forecastle had modified those feelings, and one needs some such compound word as aristodemocracy to describe his dominant political attitude. Melville may have had his moments of admiration for the gracious ways of the South; but, quite properly, he regarded the United States as a place where narrow tribalisms had been successfully dropped, where the entire blood of Europe joined together from a thousand sources, the country being not so much a nation in the old sense, as a world, a neighbourly world; and he doubtless looked upon the Southern claim to independence as a return to tribalism and narrowness.

Like most men of good will, Melville looked forward to a time when the world itself would be federated into a whole, so that the conflicts between peoples and tribes and communities, the inevitable and salutary conflicts, would not take place on the physical plane—where they are disastrous and prove nothing—but on the plane of culture. With this in view, the breaking up of a federation is a mode of political atavism: and the attempt reinforced Melville’s natural repugnance to slavery. Unfortunately, the maintenance of a union by compulsive methods leads to an enthronement of the powers of the central government, and a diminution of a regional independence; the military strength of the central government and its impudence in serving special groups within the state, in turn becomes an obstacle to the pacification of the world. Melville could scarcely anticipate this result; but his philosophy had a place for the evil which dogs the footsteps of the good, and when he said that America might turn out to be the Paul Jones of nations, intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambitions, civilized in externals but savage at heart, he may partly have anticipated the outcome of that political supremacy he expected the United States finally to attain. By the time the war opened, there was established a certain fatalism in Melville’s mind which made him lenient to the forces that seemed to him evil: they, too, in their inscrutable way were obedient to another power.

Melville’s attitude towards the Civil War was, in sum, just the opposite of Hawthorne’s; and if the men had been still in communication during this period, it would probably have opened a final breach between them. For Hawthorne, New England was as large a piece of earth as he had any affection for, and whatever happened next, he asserted in the early days of the conflict, he rejoiced that the old Union was smashed. “We never were one people, and never really had a country since the Constitution was founded.” There spoke the shrewd, unshaken provincial. Hawthorne looked upon John Brown, moreover, as a poisonous nuisance: for Melville he was a prophetic figure, whose death made it impossible for the stabs of controversy to heal, whose streaming beard was the very meteor of war. One may sum up Melville’s political character by saying that his breeding and instincts were those of a provincial; his superficial beliefs and attitudes were those of a political unionist; and during the Civil War the latter were uppermost, but not wholly so. Well might Walt Whitman describe the war itself, and the temper of the society that ushered it in, by the word “convulsiveness.” There was something arcane and uncontrollable in these partisanships and antipathies: each fragment was thrown about erratically, tangentially. It was war that produced war; and when the active state at last came about, men settled to it with a sigh of relief. War polarized these fragments: it gave an appearance of high order to this chaos.