Chapter 3

In the break of emotional tension caused by the fall of Richmond, Melville wrote most of his verses on the Civil War. A few were printed in the magazines during the first part of 1866, and later in the year, Melville collected and published the whole volume of verse, Battle Pieces and Other Aspects of the War; with a supplement, gravely and well written, in which he counterbalanced any Unionist fervour and elation he might have shown in the battle poems, by discussing, with great sympathy and tact, the plight of the South and the psychological problems confronting the North, particularly, in dealing with it.

One of the poems in the collection, Sheridan at Cedar Creek, was long quoted as one of the memorable poems evoked by the war; but, although Melville’s verses on the war are the only serious contemporary rivals to Whitman’s Drum-Taps, one cannot, with the most lenient eye, put them in the same class. Melville rarely achieved form as a poet: he was often very near to it, as we shall see when we examine his poems about the sea and his travels: but although the sensitiveness, the emotional tension, the rough powers of expression, in short, the ingredients of poetry were there, he permitted himself to be conquered by the external form of line and stanza: his rhythms are broken, not by their own inner development, but because they meet a foreign object, and get shattered against it. These verses are such jewelry as a sculptor might make. Melville’s mallet and chisel and sinew were of little use with a pitch block and a graving-tool.

Among these verses there are a few stanzas that give one a hint of what Melville’s potentialities as a poet were: his poem on John Brown is one of them, and another occurs in a poem commemorative of a naval victory—despite the weakness of the second line, it rings like a bell.

But seldom the laurel wreath is seen Unmixed with pensive pansies dark; There’s a light and a shadow on every man Who at last attains his lifted mark— Nursing through night the ethereal spark. Elate he never can be; He feels that spirit which had hailed his worth Sleep in oblivion.—The shark Glides white through the sulphurous sea.

It is no accident that this stanza utters Melville’s deepest intuition of life. Here image is symbol, and the symbol presents, without further reflection or explanation, the idea in its totality: the shark glides white through the sulphurous sea. There is something final in that. Melville might hope: he might be stirred up: he might join hands with his fellows: he might even achieve victory: all these things had happened in the collective excitement of the Civil War; but in the end the elation and exaltation were doomed to pass away. In the very act of achieving personal success, Melville had become aware of something in the Constitution of the Universe that fatally marred it: the shark glides white through the sulphurous sea. His demon was not deceived. It lived in the midst of chaos, and this Civil War, unified, regimented, ordered, inexorable as it seemed, was chaos, too. Order springs from within, mixing with circumstance but never carried away by it: in other words, order is art—and art was the one thing lacking in the whole plan of life that had arisen to dominate America. Raw power, raw experience, were uppermost. White sharks swam everywhere: shark ate shark, and greedily battened upon the refuse of the sinking boat. No use to fight the White Whale, if the boat that holds human culture breaks up, and the crew is killed, and only the sharks remain in the waters. I have expanded Melville’s symbol, perhaps; but one cannot magnify his disillusion. As early as 1866 he noted in his Supplement that “for them who are neither partisans nor enthusiasts, nor theorists, nor cynics, there are some doubts not readily to be solved. And there are fears. Why is not the cessation of war now at length attended with the settled calm of peace?”

In his Supplement, Melville pleaded for generosity to the vanquished, for a spirit of forbearance, for the sort of magnanimity that the Union soldiers showed at Vicksburg, when they watched the dejected Confederates file out without raising a shout of triumph. “Let us pray,” he concluded, “that the terrible historic tragedy of our time may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved country through terror and pity; and may fulfillment verify in the end those expectations which kindle the bards of Progress and Humanity.” Melville was definitely not one of the bards of progress and humanity; but in the loose sympathies of wartime, he had listened to all their righteous self-praise and their optimistic predictions; and though he did not share their philosophy, he at least joined them in their hopes, while there was still a possibility that they might be pragmatically justified.

That weak optimism came to nothing. There was a treachery that annulled these efforts—the treachery of the madness that resulted in Lincoln’s death: the vindictive virtue of the Abolitionists, who inflicted military occupation and carpet-bag governments on their fallen enemies: and that very tragic topsy-turvydom of war which provides snug berths and comfortable fortunes to the profiteers and speculators, and offers a sordid routine and a share in the general bankruptcy to those who are unfortunate enough to escape a quick and early death.

The Union had perhaps been worth dying for: but nobody could confront the post-bellum scene, with its Vanderbilts and Jay Cookes and Daniel Drews, without wondering seriously whether the Union was worth living for. The heroes were dead: dead or incapacitated: incapacitated or tired. Those who had any fight left in them would fight for Civil Service Reform, as Carl Schurz did, or if they had energy, they would go into railroads, like Charles Francis Adams: it was no accident that those who sought a career less in harmony with the accepted good works of industrialism—a Henry Hobbes Richardson, a Mark Twain, a Henry Adams, a William James, a Stanley Hall—were usually men who had by one chance or another lived during the war at a considerable distance from the struggle, and who had missed, not alone the fine heroism of that experience, but the terrible disillusion and collapse that follows such efforts; and who, like Stanley Hall, were moved to expiate their failure to risk death on the battlefield by living a little more arduously and heroically on the plane of daily life. These men might seek patiently to build up their careers; but those who had been buoyed up by the great energies and expectations of provincial America, in that Golden Day when they had grasped power and material mastery without losing hold of culture and form—those earlier writers and makers found themselves sinking helplessly out of sight, battered wrecks, submerged by the tide of industry and finance, whose waves rose higher and higher during the ten years that followed the great storm. There were no quiet waters for these men; or, if they found them, as Emerson did, as Whitman did, they lost the power to go to sea again; and, instead of being beaten to pieces on the treacherous coast, merely rotted at the wharf.

In 1866, at the age of forty-seven, Herman Melville, too, withdrew from the war, defeated. That fine “scorn of life which earns life’s crown”—earns, but does not always win it—had left him with the burdens, difficulties, grievances of a returning soldier. He had fought a not less worthy fight; and now, once for all, he retreated. He did not surrender; for he kept on writing to the end of his days; but he could no more live on his writings than a veteran of the Grand Army could exchange his medals and scars for honest bread. Melville was forced to face this fact, after twenty years of writing and fifteen years of continuous, desperate struggle. He had not given in quickly or petulantly; and when he finally made this decision, one can detect in it no sign of outraged vanity or reproach. He had gauged his position: he knew the worst: he was prepared to meet it. Through the offices of an old travelling companion, he found a place as inspector in the Custom House, a post he had described in Redburn as “a most inglorious one; indeed, worse than driving geese to water.”

From this time on a sweetness and serenity began to spread over the man. The dark torture of Pierre and The Confidence Man might return in weak moments; there might be hours of stormy egoism or inner defiance; but in the main there was peace. This, too, he had anticipated for himself in Isabel’s words, almost half a generation before: “My spirit seeks different food from happiness; for I think I have a suspicion of what it is. I have suffered wretchedness, but not because of the absence of happiness, and without praying for happiness, I pray for peace—for motionlessness—for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual sensation.” A Hindu sage might have sought this peace in the forest: Melville, with quiet irony, sought it in the Custom House.