Chapter 2

People try to break in on Melville’s even round, they seek to intrude on this cloistral quiet: they try in vain. Melville visits Pittsfield again, when the Centenary Committee asks him to write a short biography of his Grand-uncle Thomas for the Memorial Volume, and he has occasional vacations at Arrowhead or in the White Mountains, or in Albany or New Bedford, where one of his sisters lives: familiar places, familiar people. A young man who has read Melville’s books awakes one morning on a wharf in New Bedford to find himself gazing at a mild-eyed old man in a blue serge suit with whom he falls into conversation: the nautical terms on the old man’s tongue betray that he knows the sea; and the young man, a composer, is delighted to find that he is talking with his literary hero, Herman Melville. Contacts like these, with chance acquaintances, Melville did not repel; but those who sought him more deliberately were rebuffed. If the visitor mentions Mr. Omoo a cloud of annoyance will pass over Melville’s face and perceptibly cool the surrounding air. Melville’s public would not have his best: well, he is proud and will not be accepted for the sake of the least. Such interest will heal no wounds. Don’t they realize Melville’s contempt? Don’t they feel who should be the patron and who the patronized? Doubtless not. Resentment threatened to flare up in Melville, perhaps, when he contemplated his literary contemporaries; so he did not contemplate them. The New York writers asked Melville to join the Authors’ Club when they founded it: he refused. Still assiduous, towards the end of his life they gave Herman Melville a dinner of honour. A pleasant irony. Whom did they honour, these fashionable journalists, these professional diners-out, these men-about-literature? That dinner did not feed Herman Melville, that admiration did not console him. Theirs was the outward attentiveness of base neglect.

Melville breaks his own silence to hold out a hand of sympathy to that honest, hearty Englishman, his junior, Mr. W. Clark Russell; for Russell knows the sea, too, and though not a writer of equal rank, is almost a fellow spirit: in his letter of thanks he mentions Moby-Dick: a true mark of appreciation. These two writers dip flags to each other, like passing ships; and when Melville, a few years later, in 1888, publishes his Sea Poems, he dedicates them to this English novelist of the sea. James Thomson is another kindred soul: all too well Melville knew the streets and alleys of his City of Dreadful Night. Melville corresponds for a few years, between 1884 and 1888, with Mr. James Billson of Leicester, who was Thomson’s friend; and writes warm words of appreciation about Thomson’s poems. “As to pessimism,” Melville writes, and these words should be underlined, “as to pessimism, although neither pessimist nor optimist myself, nevertheless I relish it in the verse, if for nothing else than as a counterpoise to the exorbitant hopefulness, juvenile and shallow, that makes such a muster these days—at least in some quarters.” Neither pessimist nor optimist: of course: for there is a “light and a shadow on every man who at last achieves his lifted mark.” We shall see that mood engraved in Melville’s final verse.

Had contacts not been hard for Melville to make, he might have had a try at Elihu Vedder, too. Vedder’s picture of The Redeemed Slave, shown at the Academy Exhibition of 1865, touched something in Melville; and Vedder had gone on, apparently, a little apart from the beaten track of veracious scenery and fictional illustration: he seemed to know that there was more than one level of experience, that there was, so to say, an immediate “beyond,” grounded in the senses and intuitions quite as much as the direct work of one’s eye. Where had he acquired this? In contrast to Vedder, there was another recluse whom Melville may perchance have brushed by on Fourteenth Street, more than once: a painter bred in New Bedford, loving the sea, too, and painting its mystery, much nearer to Melville in his loneliness, his visions, his love of Shakespeare, his reticences and withdrawals, than any other soul in America: Albert Pinkham Ryder. Melville was never to meet him, or as far as one knows, recognize his work. Not finding him, Melville turned to Vedder, the lesser man, who at many removes was a link between Melville and Blake.

Blake and Ryder were true fellow spirits: Russell and Vedder were life’s ironical substitutes; but, lacking knowledge of the spring, Melville slaked his thirst at the tap. He dedicated his last book of poems, Timoleon, to Vedder; and it is rather fortunate he died before he read Vedder’s complacent answer, an answer without the faintest reference to Melville’s own works. Vedder was not the man to respond to Melville: he was born half a generation later, and that made a great difference. Vedder had been attracted by Blake, and in his youth he found that he, too, had the power of conjuring up visions, as thick and sensible as the furniture he touched: but Vedder had deliberately curbed his power because, as he explained, “while if cultivated it would soon enable me to see as realities most delightful things ... the reaction would be beyond my control and would inevitably follow and be sure to create images of horror indescribable. A few experiences have shown me that that way madness lies, and so, while I have rendered my Heaven somewhat tame, at least my Hell remains quite endurable.”

What a contrast, this timid “V,” with Melville, who had let his visions open, and had risked everything to follow them. His magnificent hell was worth all the placid heavens, with their weak symbolisms, that Vedder achieved. That Melville did not know Blake until 1874 at earliest, was a real misfortune, but inevitable; like Melville, he was not recovered until more than a generation after his death. Blake, had Melville known him earlier, might have helped him cast off his paralysing braces, Blake, who turned heaven upside down, showed that God and the Devil had exchanged costumes, felt that energy was pure delight, and had none of Melville’s haunting reluctances over sex, but delighted in his beautiful wife with the fresh naked energy of Adam’s self. But pictures and books were near to Melville during this period: he collected and enjoyed prints and reproductions of pictures: he had a reproduction of one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and The Woman Taken in Adultery, and if he did not enjoy Blake’s pictures, he responded to Blake’s shadow, Flaxman. Melville’s taste in landscape was excellent: Claude and Turner were his masters, Turner as much as anything, perhaps, for his sea-pictures, his ghostly headlands, his sun-drenched fogs. Melville reflected on the nature of art; indeed, in an unimportant set of verses called The Hostelry, he attempts, with the aid of Hals, Lippi, Spagnoletto, Veronese, Carlo Dolce, Steen, and Watteau, to define the nature of the picturesque. The verse is weak: the ideas are obscure: but the selection of characters gives a further light on Melville’s tastes and interests. In a later verse, on the boors in a picture by Teniers, we see how his wakeful brain “elaborating pain” took comfort in the suggestion of the creature-brown warmth of even the lesser realists; and one may safely say that there was nothing fine in art that he was not capable of responding to. It was the accident of living in New York in the seventies and eighties that kept Melville away from the painters who might have meant more to him, El Greco, Delacroix, Goya, Daumier, Blake. These all might have had a more intimate message for him; but, with his feeling for Rembrandt, he was close to his own kind. In Holland, he had first noticed Rembrandt’s shadows. Rembrandt’s depth, his torment, and the warm blood of humanity beneath it all—that was Melville’s, too.