Chapter 5

We come to Melville’s last verses, those which he gathered in a MS. called Weeds and Wildings, which remained unpublished until Mr. Raymond Weaver edited the definitive edition of his work in 1923.

These final poems have all the qualities one cherishes in Melville: his geniality, his humour, his lofty brooding, and that aloof satiric eye beneath which his contemporaries shrivelled from the grandeur of their reputations to the littleness of their deserts. In addition, another quality of Melville’s personal life wells to the surface and confirms all one’s other intuitions: a deep affection for his wife, and a warm sympathy. The “clover dedication to Winnifred”—who was Lizzie—recalls the old times together at Arrowhead, when the red clover had blushed through the fields about their house. They had not exactly lived in clover during those years or the later ones: ah, no! nor had they known anything of the four-leafed kind, except once, as he reminded her each year, “on the early forenoon of the fourth day of a certain bridal month, now four years more than four times ten ago.” Melville recalls how, after a morning walk in the summer, he would return home with a handful of clover blossoms, to put on the maplewood mantel in Lizzie’s south-facing room: her altar. “And in October most did I please myself in gathering them from the moist-matted aftermath in an encircled little hollow nearby, soon to be snowed upon.... And once—you remember it—having culled them in a sunny little flurry of snow, winter’s frolic skirmishes in advance, the genial warmth of your chamber melted the fleecy flakes into dewdrops rolling off from their ruddiness. ‘Tears of the happy,’ you said. Well, and then whom but to thee, Madonna of the Trefoil, should I now dedicate these Weeds and Wildings, thriftless children of quite another and yet spontaneous aftergrowth, and bearing indications, too apparent it may be, of that terminating season on which the offerer verges. And for aught of the melting mood that my verses may possibly betray, call to mind the dissolved snowflakes on the ruddy oblation of old, and remember your ‘Tears of the Happy.’”

There is a story of an acquaintance asking Melville for a copy of one of his books, and Melville’s answering that he did not have a copy in the house. One has no reason to suspect “O. G. H.’s” veracity, or that of Melville: but one would get a false impression of Melville if one thought that this indicated he had forgotten his work, or its worth, or his old ambitions. There are a dozen references to his literary fate, pointed, sardonic, in Weeds and Wildings. One of the most obvious of these references is a poem entitled The American Aloe on Exhibition. “It is a floral superstition,” observed Melville in the little introduction, “as every one knows, that this plant flowers only once in a century. When in any instance the flowering is for decades delayed beyond the normal period (eight or ten years at farthest) it is owing to something retarding in the environment or soil.”

Now, after one has made due allowances for the inner obstructions to Melville’s further development in the critical period of maturity, one realizes that Melville and Mr. Van Wyck Brooks are right: for even had he continued at the level of Moby-Dick—as indeed he did in Benito Cereno—there was something retarding in the American environment and soil, in the thirty years that followed the Civil War. One cannot separate a man from his social environment: a society lives in a man: a man is a creature in society: the inner world is less private and the outer world less public than people habitually and carelessly think. These very words, inner and outer, individual and social, are merely conveniences of thought: there are no actual lines and borders, except practical ones. Melville’s triumph, like that of his contemporaries in the Golden Day, was the last expression of a provincial society, and the first prophetic achievement in a newer and deeper culture. His own disaster was an emblem of the disintegration of that provincial society, and the blight of the new culture, which though fully conceived in the mind, received neither nourishment, warmth, nor protection from the narrow, mechanistic, money-bent society that succeeded the provincial one. If the inner world be not a phantasm, it must be united to an outer world that nourishes it and supports it, even when it offers oppositions and antinomies. This relationship had existed before the Civil War; and when the external milieu became impoverished, it ceased to exist—and the Aloe ceased to flower.

This poem admits no doubt of the fact that Melville was grimly describing himself. People came to see the Century Plant on exhibition, ten cents admission, but seldom more than two came at a time! This was the homage that Melville met in his old age—and what comfort, what tender comfort it was! What can the aged stem do? It moans:

At last, at last! but joy and pride, What part have I with them?

Let be the death that kept me back Now long from wreath decreed; But, ah, ye Roses that have passed Accounting me a weed!

When Melville touches on Captain Vere’s eventual death, in Billy Budd, he adds that this spirit, in spite of its philosophic austerity, may yet have indulged the most secret of all passions, ambition, without attaining the fulness of fame: and one cannot doubt that Melville is disclosing his own secret. The more violent the pride, the deeper the ambition, the more fiercely it guards itself. But look more closely at Melville’s humility: it towers like a mountain! Listen more closely to his silence: it shouts like an army! He well knew, all the while, how little the vain roses mattered that accounted him a weed; and we, who look back upon Melville’s ostensible contemporaries, Lowell, Stedman, Stoddard, Aldrich, can scarcely help sharing his contemptuous smile. For these good gentlemen, in their most tolerant mood, Walt Whitman was the Good Grey Poet, useful to be trotted ceremoniously out on the platform, once a year, to recite his oration on The Martyred President; and as for Melville—he was the queer old fellow who had once lived among the cannibals. One can fancy the superior droop of their lips when Robert Buchanan, an English writer, told them that these two men were the supreme imaginative writers America had produced.

Did Melville forget his books or think them paltry? The verses, Immolated, are an even more direct answer.

Children of my happier prime When one yet lived with me and threw Her rainbow over life and time, Even Hope, my bride, and mother to you! O, nurtured in sweet pastoral air And fed on flowers and light and dew Of morning meadows—spare, ah, spare Reproach; spare and upbraid me not That, yielding scarce to reckless mood, But jealous of your future lot, I sealed you in a fate subdued, Have I not saved you from the dread Theft and ignoring which need be The triumph of the insincere Unanimous mediocrity? Rest, therefore, free from all despite Snugged in the arms of comfortable night.

In still another poem, called Thy Aim, Thy Aim? he questions whether mid the dust and dearth and din he may by some deed prove to be an exception, and he warns himself to beware of envy, for if striving on he win the goal, he will get only a flower of reputation, which is cut down in an hour; but if he survive that, he will still only earn a funeral flower—the belated funeral flower of fame. Melville was spared the pillory of being praised as a travel-writer and a humourist, with Mark Twain, or coupled as a poet with Aldrich; and in the bottom of his heart, there was an anticipation of his final survival, not without a feeling of satisfaction. Having prepared his own coffin, like Queequeg in Moby-Dick, he could even fancy the flowers and wreaths that a later generation would place over it. Funeral flowers, yes, but even funeral flowers may solace a man, if he contemplates them before they are cut!

The relief from Melville’s dull grind had come a little too late: one must not flinch from that fact. He was conscious of his age and his physical debility; and, so far from railing at youth, he would not, “reduced to skimmed milk, slander the cream.” Youth, he knew, was immortal: “’Tis the elderly only grow old.” But age brought one advantage: it taught him the wisdom of folly. When a spirit appears and asks him where he would choose to dwell, in the Paradise of Fools or in Wise Solomon’s Hell, he does not pause to weigh the answer; but, ironically, he reverses his belief in Moby-Dick and demands the fool’s paradise! From these sardonic snatches of Melville’s verse one gets some notion of what his conversation on daily topics, the chicanes, briberies, corruptions, social follies and stupid observances of his contemporaries must have been. Melville’s wit was meant for keen society: small wonder he created Jack Gentian to keep him company.

In The Rose Garden, verses written during the first days of Melville’s release, one finds him asking himself whether he should turn to verse or to prose. The question was an important one: he must have known that his strength lay in prose, if only the theme were big enough to enlist all his energies; but Melville delayed and dallied, hesitating to commit himself to an impossible task. In his dilemma, he consults a friend, asking him whether it is better to have a heap of posies or a few drops of attar; and his friend tells him that his time has gone by. To which Melville answers that, unfortunately, he had come into his roses late; but first he wants to settle this little matter—poetry or prose? Not being able to decide, he tried his hand at both. His old eagerness was there; but something had happened. “Age, dull tranquilliser, and arid years that filed before” had unfitted him for flowers. Here one feels the final pathos of Melville’s position—the last foul thrust of fate. In his maturity, he had been cheated of outer sustenance, and when it finally came to him, he found himself cheated of inner support. That brambly garden, that sour soil, needed energy to bring it back into a state of cultivation, and energy, not the will or the skill or the delight, was the one thing that Melville, at sixty-seven, lacked. “My dear Sir,” he had once exclaimed to Mr. Duyckinck, “the two good things to be yet discovered are these—the art of rejuvenating old age in men, and old-ageifying youth in books.” He had not altogether failed in the latter: but the first need was beyond him.

But when energy fails, skill may partly make up for it; and there is a simplicity and directness in these poems which shows greater control of his medium: the annoying inversions are fewer, and among the wildings of Melville’s old age, there is still a rose or two left over from a more cultivated garden. The poem that fittingly closes this MS. volume, The Lake, is perhaps the finest Melville wrote: it is a colloquy between his own spirit and the spirit evoked by the Lake of Pontoosuce. Melville here faces death and emptiness of being, and he draws his faith from that spectacle in which the great religions have found their sustenance, in the march of the seasons, the rhythmic cycle of life, the ecstasy, the agony, the tragedy of the dying god, and his annual resurrection and renewal.

“All dies! and not alone The aspiring trees and men and grass; The poets’ forms of beauty pass, And noblest deeds they are undone, Even truth itself decays, and lo, From truth’s sad ashes pain and falsehood grow.

All dies!

The workman dies, and after him, the work; Like to those pines whose graves I trace, Statue and statuary fall upon their face: In every amaranth the worm doth lurk, Even stars, Chaldeans say, fade from the starry space, Andes and Appalachee tell Of havoc ere our Adam fell, And present nature as a moss doth show Of the ruins of the Nature of the Aeons long ago.

Dies, all dies! The grass it dies, but in vernal pain Up it springs and it lives again; Over and over, again and again, Who sighs that all dies! Summer and winter and pleasure and pain, And everything everywhere in God’s reign, They end and anon they begin again; Wane and wax, wax and wane: Over and over and over again, End, ever end, and begin again— End, ever end, and forever, and ever begin again!” She ceased and nearer slid, and hung In dewy guise; then softlier sung: “Since light and shade are equal set, And all revolves, nor more ye know; Ah, why should tears the pale cheek fret For aught that waneth here below? Let go, let go!” With that, her warm lips thrilled me through, She kissed me, while her chaplet cold Its rootlets brushed against my brow, With all their humid clinging mould, She vanished, leaving fragrant breath And warmth and chill of wedded life and death.

That peace and oneness with Nature, which Isabel had prayed for, came at last to Melville in the closing years of his life. He had renounced much; but he had gained much. What is life? the king in Mardi had asked the philosopher; and the philosopher had said: That question is more final than any answer. After much doubt, exacerbation, searching, after a long weary pilgrimage through books and lands, and not a little intercourse with men, Melville was back to the view of his youth: he now accepted its finality. What power and heroic defiance had not accomplished, love, which has its philosophic equivalent in the desire to merge oneself with the universe and surrender to it, and accept its purposes, as one accepts the desires and whims and aims of one’s beloved—love had achieved this. It was no accident that Melville’s warm attitude toward Elizabeth coincided with this last warm acceptance of the universe. Melville surrendered to his wife, and he surrendered to his rough old mother, the earth, owning the primacy of that ceaseless urge which begets the Ahabs and Babbalanjas and Medias and Jack Chases and Pierres and Clarels, recognizing that intelligence, power, virtue, are not prime movers themselves, but derivative mechanisms that transmit and utilize the energy of life. If one spurn that energy and deny its sources, one’s dreams are futile and one’s hopes empty: but when one accepts life itself as the primary fact, then the dying year brings no grief, and all that fades and decays is but a pledge of what shall again, one day, live and flourish: the very universe itself, and space and time, are but modes of being, no more eternal than the senses that react to them and project upon them the forms that make them useful and significant to man. Whatever be the ultimate nature of things, the universe man conceives is still held together at his own centre: its significance is part and parcel of his own. And at the centre of that centre is a fertilized ovum. Out of the egg comes not merely man but his world: the mightiest constellation is but the ectoderm of man’s original plasm. There is a greater energy than Moby-Dick’s. The seed that in its growth pries open the rock has more power than the inert and brutal elements that oppose it, and there is a seed in man whose growth cannot be denied, a seed that binds him to all life, and causes him to direct his energies, despite frustrations, despite warring elements in his own being, towards a fuller existence marked by love and understanding. The ideality, which Melville could not find in a cold “external” universe metaphysically separated from man—and falsely so—is embodied in the common instincts of animals: it was when he ceased to draw upon these sources that the world became black and painful and hostile, and ideals seemed ghastly disembodiments. When the roots of his animal nature were nourished once more, he leafed again, as the trees leaf in Indian summer, and courage and faith returned. Melville had faced the colourless, unintegrated, primal world that underlies and antedates that which we know through our senses, our feelings, our experiences: he had touched the bare, unkind beginning of things, that chaos which existed when darkness reigned over the face of the waters, and only Moby-Dick had stirred in the deep: he had beheld the white unrefracted truth which exists before it passes through man’s being and is broken up into the colours of art and thought and custom and ritual and organized society. But Nature paints like a harlot, not without reason: she desires to attract the passions of men, to attract and use them for her own end: life. Melville’s consciousness of a more primal world made him see more exhaustively, I think, into the nature of existence: but it was bare rock-truth, unweathered into soil, still less worked over by plants, insects, moulds, and the tools of man: and it gave him nothing that his spirit could feed on. At last he escaped from that bleak ultimate revelation, and, participating in the ancient cycle of life, he found his own life renewed once more.