Chapter 4

Melville’s mind continually played over the sea. As Whitman felt that Leaves of Grass must tally with the earth in its most common and universal aspects, as he confronted all doubts and perturbations with the miracle of a single blade of grass, so Melville perhaps felt that his writing must tally with the sea—that every joy and hope and lust of life must be able to face its terrible realities. Clarel is full of images of the sea. The student, in his vaulted room in Jerusalem, looking over the terraced roofs of the city, is “like some ship-boy at masthead alone, watching the star-rise”; and Melville characterized Vine’s strength by saying that he had supplemented Plato with a “daedal life in tents and boats.” There are a hundred other allusions and images. The sea was the source of Melville’s strength, and even when his daedal life was over, its profound imprint remained.

In the prose preface to John Marr, Melville explained that Marr had left the sea, settled down in the prairie as a pioneer, had lost his wife and child through fever, and remained a lonely soul, cut off by his roving and cosmopolitan past from the farmer-folk, the land animals, around him. In Bridegroom Dick, a longer poem, Melville assumed the guise of an old man-of-war’s man, seated by his wife, sunning himself on an October day, balmy as spring, he with his pipe, she with her tea. The old fellow’s mind goes back over his cruises, his ships, his shipmates: the whole round of the day, polishing the pinnacle, minding the helm, shooting the sun, announcing the time to the quarter-deck at noon—and all his mess-mates and superiors, Old Chuck-a-block, Commander All-a-Tanto, Orlop Bob, Rhyming Ned, Top-gallant Harry and Jack Genteel: the old revels, the old bouts of liquor, the old battles. The words are so salty the fish-bones almost stick in one’s throat; and in the very litany of names Melville achieves poetry; for once, the crabbedness of his verse increases its effect.

In another verse, To Ned, Melville seems to address his old comrade, Toby, recalling the rich isles they roved when they were young, and predicting that the pleasure-hunter, wearying of routine resorts, would at last discover the Marquesas and other authentic Edens in the South Seas. This poem gives one pause. One wonders if Melville’s early disillusion with marriage and success was not, more than one can ever definitely say, due to the fact that he had drunk such a deep draught of beauty in the South Seas that life thereafter, in the dusty, smoky, jangling air of America or Europe, was insipid and brackish. No wife who wore stays and petticoats and flannel nightgowns, and who was laden with household cares, could be another Fayaway: no farm with a cow and a horse and fences to repair could be another palm-grove. The Marquesas had perhaps spoiled his taste for such dreary fare. So delicious is this memory of the past, that Melville even marvels if mortals may twice, here and hereafter, touch a paradise!

In the same spirit, in his later poems, he remembers the happy port of Syra, full of juvenile fun, reminding him of days when trade did not exist, and toil and stress were not overbearing, and life was leisure, merriment, and peace. Melville never deceived himself by dismissing these things as mythical, or by magnifying the importance of sanitation and sound currency. This feeling of animal delight had redeemed him from his own torments; he knew it was one of the permanent blessings of life; and a civilization that knew nothing of it, except through the depravity of complete drunkenness, was in a far lower stage of barbarism than its most vigorous prophets had dared to say. If there were no pleasurable excitements, there would be murderous ones: if there were not dances there would be wars: and, for lack of strong sensual graces, men would become hard, vengeful, stupid, oppressive. Melville turned to Syra, or to Naples in the time of King Bomba, not because he was unaware of poverty, rags, misery, but because he knew there was sadness and misery in New York, too, without the redeeming thoughtlessness and careless pleasure. “A fig for Bomba! Life is fair squandered in superabundant leisure.” That was an answer Clarel had shrunk from accepting from Derwent: but it was not an invalid one. The very virtues of Western civilization, its industry, its thrift, its willingness to postpone present goods for future rewards, tended to degrade life quite as much as its downright vices.

Melville’s sea poems, however, were not all pieces of happy reminiscence. The wreck of a victorious man-of-war, the deserted raft with a signal flying, the disintegration of the figurehead Charles-and-Emma by storm and weather, the mad plunge of a ship against an iceberg: these are images of a different order. Melville did not become weak and sentimental in his old age; but instead of letting the dark background of the universe dominate the composition, he paints in a warm foreground, as in a still-life of Chardin’s, with some sensible, kindly object to capture the interest and reflect the high lights. The sea remains the sea, pitiless, echoless, indifferent to man’s hopes and dreams: but the man in Melville is himself again.

Healed of my hurt, I laud the inhuman Sea— Yea, bless the Angels Four that there convene; For healed I am ever by their pitiless breath Distilled in wholesome dew named rosmarine.

One could tell from these poems, even if one lacked the contemporary testimony of a Pittsfield acquaintance, Mr. J. E. A. Smith, that Melville, in these closing days, was no bitter, defeated old man. Mr. Smith says that in 1885, on Melville’s last visit to Pittsfield, he “bore nothing of the appearance of a man disappointed in life, but rather had an air of perfect contentment, and his conversation had much of his jovial, let-the-world-go-as-it-will spirit. It would,” as Mr. Smith very justly continues, “be well nigh a climatic miracle if a brief ride to Pittsfield and a few snuffs of Berkshire air should so restore to society and its enjoyment a man who had just been the recluse and almost misanthrope pictured by some of the New York newspaper writers.” In his letter dedicating John Marr to Mr. Russell, Melville stresses the quality of geniality, “the flower of life springing from some sense of joy in it, more or less”; and, delicately, shyly, like a belated crocus, this flower bloomed in Melville’s last years. When he wished Russell from his heart the most precious things he knew of in this world, health and content, he wished him the first because he had once known it in its miraculous fulness, and the second, I think, because he had at last found it. When on a clear day Melville would wander through the woody ravines and pastures near Fort George, or when he would take a ferryboat ride down New York Bay, shifting from one side of the boat to another, to take in every aspect of the harbour and every new ship, the old keenness, the old zest, would return. If his life was still that of the recluse—“I am an old fogy,” he wrote in 1880, to excuse his staying at home—his feelings were far from Pierre’s or Timon’s.

There is poetry in parts of John Marr, particularly in The Haglets, not merely measured lines and rhymed endings. There is even more poetry perhaps in Timoleon, and perhaps a deeper revelation of Melville’s inner convictions and strivings. The verses from which the volume gets its title shoot parallels into Melville’s own life: Timoleon rescued Timophanes, but it is Timophanes who is his mother’s pride. She sees herself in him and looks, through him, to become an envied dame of power, a social queen: Melville, who had once perhaps wanted his mother’s generous love, realized that his lack of worldly success had stood in the way of it: a discovery he first announced when he wrote Pierre. Exiled, Timoleon ceases to hate his fellow citizens; but, cut off from common membership in the marketplace, in severance like a pale head found after battle apart from the trunk, he confronts the gods, not finding the wrong in man, but taking his quarrel to the Arch-Principals themselves. Has ideality no counterpart except in man’s mind? Are earnest natures but fatherless shadows? The edges of Melville’s old torment are here; and I should be inclined to date the poem from an earlier period; but in other verses one discovers that his resolution has completely knitted together. Under the title of The Enthusiast, he places the words: Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him. It is a poem of brave defiance; and it tells so much about the man that I must reproduce it.

Shall hearts that beat no base retreat In Youth’s magnanimous years— Ignoble hold it, if discreet When interest tames to fears; Shall spirits that worship light Perfidious deem its sacred glow, Recant and trudge where worldlings go, Confirmed, and own them right?

Shall Time with creeping influence cold Unnerve and cow? The heart Pine for the heartless ones enthralled With palterers of the mart? Shall faith abjure her skies, Or pale probation blench her down To shrink from Truth, so still, so lone, Mid loud gregarious lies?

Each burning boat in Caesar’s rear Flames—No return through me! So put the torch to ties though dear, If ties but tempters be. Nor cringe if come the night: Walk through the cloud to meet the pall, Though light forsake thee, never fall From fealty to light.

Melville did not see in post-bellum America, with its parvenus pining for distinctions and dignities, its lawmakers “taking the lawless one’s fee,” in all the sham and shuffle of those guilty days, any pledge for a happier society. The Age of the Antonines was far behind; and their return seemed equally distant. “Apollo’s bust makes lime for Mammon’s tower.” This man of integrity must fortify himself from within; and when the present offers him no foothold, he must stand with Posterity or with the Ancients. This was the sort of “adjustment” that Melville achieved; and it was the only kind, in his position and day, that was worth working for. There is no notion more delusive or unscientific, in the strict biological sense, than the belief that a poet may make a happy “adjustment” to his circumstances by turning bond-salesman, or the artist by becoming an advertising expert. This course neglects the elementary fact that the relation between an organism and its environment is interacting and reciprocal: the best sort of adjustment is that which tends to preserve life with its highest values intact. The proper adjustment to a fire is not to plunge into it; and the response of a poet to an unfavourable environment is not to commit suicide but to use the most economic means for saving himself. Melville had done this—and he was saved. “Happiness,” Spinoza said, “consists in a man’s being able to maintain his own being.” When Melville read this dictum in Matthew Arnold’s essay on Spinoza, in 1871, he marked the passage: it described his own effort. In a more fruitful age, his being would have been maintained in harmony with, not in opposition to, the community: but at all events his vital duty was to maintain it.