Chapter 6

Chapter 68 of 68 · 26 min read

Melville’s last poems gain by comparison with his earlier work: but his prose inevitably loses a little. One does not miss his lack of energy in a quatrain; it is plain and perceptible even in a short novel. One notes this falling off of Melville’s prose in the sketches on the Marquis de Grandvin: it comes out again in the little addition to Rip van Winkle that he wrote. In his prime, writing about Hawthorne, Melville had little use for the tepid quality of Irving’s prose, so genteelly lymphatic; but now, in 1890, he went so far as to dedicate his addendum to the Happy Shade of Sunnyside. The torrid tropical sunlight, the violent gold and purple of Melville’s earlier prose vanished: what was left was the mild pale sunshine cast on the bronzed oak leaves of a winter landscape. These graceful but diminished energies properly link Melville’s spirit with Irving’s. The immediateness of the old narratives was gone. Billy Budd, his final novel, is not a full-bodied story: there is statement, commentary, illustration, just statement, wise commentary, apt illustration: what is lacking is an independent and living creation. The epithets themselves lack body and colour: Billy Budd has nothing to compare with the description of boiling whale-oil in Moby-Dick—“a wild Hindoo odour, like the left wing of the Day of Judgement.”

Billy Budd, which was dedicated to Jack Chase, wherever he might be, alow or aloft, lacks the fecundity and energy of White-Jacket: the story itself takes place on the sea, but the sea itself is missing, and even the principal characters are not primarily men: they are actors and symbols. The story gains something by this concentration, perhaps: it is stripped for action, and even Melville’s deliberate digressions do not halt it. Each of the characters has a Platonic clarity of form. Captain the Honourable Edward Fairfax Vere, “starry Vere,” is a man of superior order: humane, reserved, free from cant, fortified by an equal knowledge of men and books. After the mutiny of the Nore, the time when this story takes place, the command of a British naval vessel is no easy one: the officers are tense and expectant, though outwardly indifferent: mutiny may break out any minute among the “people.” Billy Budd, a seaman taken over by impressment from The Rights of Man, stands out from the rest of the crew: one of Nature’s innocents. A fine frame, yellow hair, an open, almost girlish face, set him off with angelic beauty: and he is a natural favourite among the crew: the Handsome Sailor of eighteenth century balladry.

Without overt act, merely by being what he is, the personification of strength, health, beauty, innocence, Budd incurs the enmity of Claggart, the master-at-arms. Claggart, with a suspicious past at his back but with soft humid ways and obsequious intelligence, has quickly won promotion: he is now the evil agent of discipline, prowling over the ship, watching for disorder—a sea-bag not stowed away, a sailor evading work, or a hint of mutiny. It is as natural for Claggart to hate goodness as it is for Budd to personify it: the evil in the man is apparently causeless in any immediate sense, like the venom in a snake: it simply is there. With a benign, ambiguous exterior, he secretly contrives in small ways to make Billy’s lot miserable; and when Billy, perplexed, brings the matter before a trusty wizen-mouthed old sailor, the old fellow tells “Baby Budd” that Claggart has it in for him. In his simpleness, Budd cannot believe it. How could he?—for he had given no offence. So Claggart plots more deeply against Budd; through confederates in the crew, tale-bearers and spies, he tries to bribe Budd into mutiny. Budd, not realizing the meaning of the suggestion when it is made to him, still flushes with anger, like a fresh girl spattered by an obscenity. Then Claggart goes further. He takes advantage of Budd by wakening him from a sleep and getting him into a compromising position before he is sufficiently awake to withdraw. Now Claggart thinks he has Budd in his power. He appears before Captain Vere and humbly submits his report of Budd’s attempted treachery.

Captain Vere, being a firm man and a sound one, is not greatly impressed by Claggart’s tale: it looks too thin: but for the sake of form and discipline, since the customs of the navy make it necessary to employ such fellows as Claggart, he summons Budd to his own cabin to confront the master-at-arms, instead of airing the matter by a public inquiry. When Budd comes, Claggart repeats his lie to Budd’s face. This poor lad has only one physical blemish: in moments of stress he stammers, and now, confronted by this sudden, horrifying suspicion, he can for the moment give no answer. His mouth makes an effort: no words come forth: the blood mounts up to his head. Captain Vere wisely attempts to soothe him: “There is no hurry, my boy, take your time.” These kindly words have just the opposite effect to that intended, for, touching Billy’s heart to a mighty effort at release, he answers Claggart’s lie with a cannon-blow from his fists. Budd’s first and only act of rebellion is fatal: Claggart is instantaneously killed.

Vere has no belief whatever in Budd’s guilt; but this act swiftly alters the case. The perjurer has been struck dead by an angel of God; but in this world, the angels must hang. A swift deck court-martial is held in the captain’s cabin, and Vere is caught by the dual nature of his position. He is commander of the ship, a captain, a disciplinarian, responsible for the safety of all aboard, committed by the terms of his commission to the Articles of War and all that they imply. As a man, with fatherly feelings toward this innocent boy, he would be merciful: as commander, he acts against his innermost wishes and urges his subordinates not to be swayed by motives of compassion. His fellow officers reluctantly respect their superior’s probity: they sentence Billy Budd to be hanged for murder. Privately, as man to man, as father to son, Vere announces the sentence to Budd. Justice done, pity, magnanimity, stir Vere to the bottom: the feelings of the judge and the judged are transferred; for the burden now lies on Captain Vere rather than on the victim; and Vere, in turn, is the instrument of an institution. When the hemp is placed around Billy Budd’s neck, Billy turns to the quarter-deck and cries out: God bless Captain Vere. He dies happily, in the first vapoury glory of the dawn—dies, and becomes a legend among the sailors, and the spar from which he was hanged is followed through its vicissitudes, and ballads are sung and tales are told about him.

Billy Budd is the story of three men in the British Navy: it is also the story of the world, the spirit, and the devil. Melville left a note, crossed out in the original manuscript, “Here ends a story not unwarranted by what happens in this incongruous world of ours—innocence and infirmity, spiritual depravity and fair respite.” The meaning is so obvious that one shrinks from underlining it. Good and evil exist in the nature of things, each forever itself, each doomed to war with the other. In the working out of human institutions, evil has a place as well as the good: Vere is contemptuous of Claggart, but cannot do without him: he loves Budd as a son and must condemn him to the noose: justice dictates an act abhorrent to his nature, and only his inner magnanimity keeps it from being revolting. These are the fundamental ambiguities of life: so long as evil exists, the agents that intercept it will also be evil, whilst we accept the world’s conditions: the universal articles of war on which our civilizations rest. Rascality may be punished; but beauty and innocence will suffer in that process far more. There is no comfort, in the perpetual Calvary of the spirit, to find a thief nailed on either side. Melville had been harried by these paradoxes in Pierre. At last he was reconciled. He accepted the situation as a tragic necessity; and to meet that tragedy bravely was to find peace, the ultimate peace of resignation, even in an incongruous world. As Melville’s own end approached, he cried out with Billy Budd: God bless Captain Vere! In this final affirmation Herman Melville died. September 28, 1891, was the date of the outward event.

EPILOGUE

Why does Herman Melville mean so much more to us than he did to his own contemporaries? What has his thought done for us, and what has his vision given?

The change that has come about is not merely a change of style, so that the things which amused Mr. Stedman or Mr. Lowell are now old-fashioned, like hooped skirts, while the things that concerned Melville are, like the cubist quilts and coverlets of the 1850’s, distinctly modern. Typee is still as good a book as Mr. Arthur Stedman thought it; but we see now that it belongs to a more common order of literature, whereas Moby-Dick, the more closely we consider it, mounts to that lonely wind-swept plateau in whose rarefied air only the finest imaginations can breathe. Distinctly, Moby-Dick belongs with The Divine Comedy and Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace; and if it does not establish its right to this company, it must occupy a lower place than the successful novels of its period, a David Copperfield or a Pendennis, books written with a complete acceptance of the current limitations and provincialities.

Melville’s work, taken as a whole, expresses that tragic sense of life which has always attended the highest triumphs of the race, at the moments of completest mastery and fulfilment. Where that sense is lacking, life shrivels into small prudences and weak pleasures and petty gains, and those great feats of thought and imagination which transform the very character of the universe and relieve human purpose from the scant sufficiency of toiling and eating and sleeping, in a meaningless, reiterative round, shrivel away, too. John Ruskin saw the truth of this when, in spite of his pacifist convictions, he praised the art of war, for its effect upon the human spirit: life is intensified and purposive when the battle with the inimical forces that surround us, like Ahab’s battle, is a deliberate pursuit and challenge, and not merely an apathetic waiting for a purely physiological end.

The tragedy of life, its evanescence, its frustrations, its limitations within physical boundaries almost as narrow as a straitjacket, its final extinction, becomes, in a day that consciously embraces its fate, the condition of an heroic effort. Death, which biologically is merely the terminus of a natural process, acquires significance for man because he anticipates it and modifies his activities so as to circumvent it: by memory and foresight, by choosing his ends, dreaming of immortality, erecting monuments and statues and museums, and above all, by transmitting the written word, man creates a destiny beyond his life’s physical span. It is just because the worms lie in wait that man defies the gods, cherishes the images he has created and the relations he has solidified in custom and thought, and centres his efforts on those things which are least given to meaningless change. Though the sensible world is not derived, as Plato thought, from the heaven of ideas, the opposite of this is what every culture must strive for: to derive from the sensible world that which may be translated to a more durable world of forms.

Within the world of these forms there is Life, a thing of value, and not merely living, a matter of fact and habit and animal necessity. Whether one develops this tragic sense of values on a battlefield, like Sophocles, or in a whaleboat, like Melville, it is a precious experience: for living, merely living, as every profane writer from Petronius Arbiter to Theodore Dreiser has shown, brings boredom, satiety, despair: whereas Life is eternal, and he who has faith in it and participates in it is saved from the emptiness of the universe and the pointlessness of his own presence therein. Living, for man, in all but the most brutish communities, like those of the savages of the Straits of Magellan or the outcasts of a Liverpool or New York slum, includes and implies this Life; and when Melville summons into his whaler the several races of the world, he is expressing the universal nature of that effort which caps nature with culture, existence with meaning, and facts with forms. Ahab’s tragic struggle is the condition of every high endeavour of the mind, even though Death be its tragic reward; while adjustment, acquiescence, accepting outward conditions as inward necessities, though they may prolong living in the physical sense, effectually curtail Life: this attitude, the attitude of Melville’s contemporaries, the attitude of the routineers and Philistines of all times—and they have never perhaps been so numerous as today—disrupts life more completely than illness and death do; for it brings about a deliquescence of forms, such as the nineteenth century showed in all its common arts, and a disintegration of human purposes. When that happens, the White Whale of brute energy reigns supreme: Life itself is denied: living produces no values, and men hide their emptiness by embracing dull counterfeits of purpose.

Melville’s younger contemporaries, who fought in the Civil War, knew Life and Death; but those who prospered in the years that followed knew something more dreadful than simple death: they knew chaos and purposelessness and disintegration, such chaos and purposelessness, mixed with a wan, reminiscent hope, as Henry Adams pictured in his Education. Herman Melville portrayed a human purpose, concentrated to almost maniacal intensity, in Moby-Dick; and in Pierre and The Confidence Man, he showed the black aftermath, when the purpose was not sustained and carried out in art, and when he himself was deserted in his extremity, by contemporaries who neither understood nor heeded nor shared his vision. No single mind can hold its own against all that is foreign to it in the universe: Shakespeare’s solitary heroes issue their brief defiance only to be blotted out: such unity of spirit as one may possess, as philosopher or poet, must be sustained in the community itself. Now, a new culture, the product of two hundred and fifty years of settled life in America, had produced Walden, Leaves of Grass, Emerson’s Notebooks, and Moby-Dick; but that culture, instead of supporting and carrying forward the integration of man and nature and society shadowed forth in those books, was completely uprooted by the Civil War, and a material civilization, inimical in many aspects to the forms and symbols of a humane culture, was swept in by the very act of destruction.

Two generations of that material civilization have shown us its lopsidedness, its aimlessness, its grand attempt to conceal its emptiness by extending concrete roads and asphalted streets and vacuum cleaners to more and more remote terrains. Our most humane writers, like Mr. Sherwood Anderson, have proved how mercilessly the whole human being is crippled by this one-sided triumph; and even our most bewildered writers, who have exulted in all these maimed energies, have shown in their very act of deification how brutal and aimless they are. We realize that the effort of culture, the effort to make Life significant and durable, to conquer in ourselves that formidable confusion which threatens from without to overwhelm us—this effort must begin again. And in thus making a beginning we are nearer to Whitman with his cosmic faith and Melville in his cosmic defiance than we are to a good part of the work of our own contemporaries. It is not that we go back to these writers: it is, rather, that we have come abreast of them; for in creating that new synthesis, in lieu of the formless empiricisms and the rootless trancendentalisms of the last three centuries, the writers of our own classic past were nearer to the contemporary problem than almost any of the Europeans have been—since the physical remains of another culture in Europe give the mind a false sense of stability and security.

Herman Melville’s world is our world, magnificently bodied and dimensioned: our synthesis must include and sublimate that very quest of power which Melville portrayed with such unique skill, as a combination of science and adventure and spiritual hardihood, in Typee, Mardi, and Moby-Dick. Melville’s life warns us not to stop here: men must test their strength in surrender as well as in lonely conquest: he who knows neither social union nor sexual passion nor love is indeed an Ishmael, who finds himself an outcast because he has cast out that which was most precious to his own nature: there is love in the universe as well as power: the sun warms and the rain slakes the thirst: the whales dally and the first song of creation is the song of sex.

The synthesis that Melville foreshadowed in his ideas is not simply a logical structure: the search for such an abstract solution of life’s problems is one of the idola of the closet. Melville’s synthesis was embodied in acts and deeds. During the years of his early manhood, as he wandered about the world and contemplated existence under the stars and bore a hand in working the ship, his environment, his experience, and his vital relationships were an integer. He did not lack what libraries and cities and the social heritage of man gives: indeed, he enjoyed fully the resources of a sound literary and philosophic scholarship; but he mixed this with activities that gave back to books the subtle properties that cannot be transmitted to the printed page, but must be derived directly from living. The reviewers in London might well have been shocked by the spectacle of a common sailor writing Typee or White-Jacket. Melville had bridged in his life that great gap between the respectable, learned professions and the common trades that had hitherto been crossed, with rare exceptions, only by those who definitely had lost caste, or who, like Burns, had risen with a sense of uneasy, sullen pride to acceptance among people of high rank.

Melville was an American—and that implied the dissolution of spiritual frontiers. America had taken all the established castes and classifications of Europe and left them to sort themselves out according to nature and ability: this was the true and beneficial result of eighteenth century thinking and its political accompaniments. By a singular dissociation of ideas, which involved the destruction of an old social tissue, it had permitted a free and disinterested creature, a man, to emerge from a conglomeration of classes and practical interests. Melville was not primarily a sailor; he was not an adventurer; he was a man sailing, a man adventuring, a man thinking, proving in his early manhood that a whole and healthy life may involve many functions, without sacrificing its wholeness and health to any one of them. Whitman with his carpentering and his nursing, Thoreau with his pencil-making and gardening, were Herman Melville’s brothers in the way and the life. They did not disdain practical life: they faced it manfully: but instead of neglecting every other activity for “business” they saw that what was called business was only a small part of the totality of living: they behaved toward it as if it were real, as Whitman said, with the knowledge that merely getting a living was not a sufficient contribution to Life. Brutal though Melville found whaling to be, it communicated, nevertheless, a sense of Life: there was astronomy and natural history and art and religion within the bulky hold of a whaler, as well as technics and business and the daily logbook.

The vision that grew out of this experience was a whole one, not, like the science of its time, subordinated to practical interests or even narrower metaphysical schemata. Through its dissociation from inherited values all things began at scratch: no one element in life, except sex, carried a handicap. Melville’s settling down was inevitable, inevitable and difficult: but the difficulty was not due to the inability of a restless adventurer to accept a tamer and more even existence: it was due to the fact that, having known a rounded and cultured life, however savage and exacting, he could not submit to the desiccated routine of Western civilization, with its contempt for art, its gross disregard for the higher manifestations of science, its dislike for meditation, its subservient religion, its frank subordination of all other values to that of Comfort. Melville’s contemporaries, with chance exceptions, neither lived as full a life as he had lived in the South Seas, nor were able to understand it, even as a theory. For these contemporaries, Melville’s vision was an example of Bedlam literature: they did not realize that Bedlam was precisely the world they lived in, and that Melville’s vision, like Emerson’s, like Whitman’s, like Thoreau’s, was a part, and a great part, of a new cultural synthesis.

The stripping down of Herman Melville’s ego, which he began in Mardi and finished in Pierre, was a sloughing away of labels, nicknames, party war-cries, habits, conventions, and acceptances; it was, necessarily, a prelude to that building up of a new ego, a surer and more central, a social and participating self, which is the task of our own time for both men and communities. Melville was crippled in the work of reconstruction by a hiatus in his own career, which was followed and made final by the social hiatus of the Civil War: though he sought to carry the work further in Clarel, one cannot pretend that he did anything but give a hint of this mended psyche, this more richly integrated self: one of his last poems, The Lake of Pontoosuce, perhaps approaches nearer to the goal than any other work of his. Had he built up that ego, his vision might have fully complemented Whitman’s—land and sea, day and night, sunlight and shadow, triumph and tragedy. That union was latent: it is for us to effect it. It is useless, however, to speculate upon what might have been. The accidents that befell Melville, as he rounded his own Cape Horn, were part of that malign doom he himself pictured in Moby-Dick, and they do not affect the essence of his work. Whatever Melville’s life was, his art in Moby-Dick exhibits that integration and synthesis which we seek. Through his art, he escaped the barren destiny of his living: he embraced Life; and we who now follow where his lonely courage led him embrace it, too. This embrace was a fertile one; and in each generation it will bring forth its own progeny. The day of Herman Melville’s vision is now in the beginning. It hangs like a cloud over the horizon at dawn; and as the sun rises, it will become more radiant, and more a part of the living day.

NOTE ON BOOKS

The complete and definitive edition of Melville’s works is that published by Constable and Company, London, 1923-1924. With the exception of Israel Potter, The Confidence Man, Pierre, and the various volumes of verse, all of Melville’s work can now be obtained in contemporary popular editions. Mr. Raymond Weaver’s edition of The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville (Horace Liveright, 1928) and Mr. Henry Chapin’s edition of the Appletree Table and Other Sketches and of John Marr and Other Poems (Princeton University Press, 1922) make almost all of Melville’s significant minor work available. Mr. Meade Minnegrode’s Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville and a Bibliography contains extracts from some of Melville’s Letters to Evert Duyckinck. The bibliography covers in detail all of Melville’s writings, giving both American and English first editions. The first biography of Herman Melville was that of Mr. Raymond Weaver: Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic (Doran, 1921). Mr. John Freeman’s brief critical biography belongs to the new English Men of Letters Series (Macmillan, 1926); Mr. Freeman has the distinction of being the first to deal patiently and critically with Melville’s poetry. Various other volumes on Herman Melville are now in course of preparation. Among the critics whose studies of Melville have contributed to his revival and to a proper evaluation of his work I would mention especially Mr. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., Miss Viola Meynell, Mr. Percy Boynton, Mr. J. W. N. Sullivan, Mr. E. L. Grant Watson, and, not least, Mr. Van Wyck Brooks.

INDEX

Acushnet, ship list, 43

Adams, Henry, chaos and purposelessness pictured by, 360

Adjustment, fallacious interpretation of, 313-344

Adler, Dr., 120

Adolescent purity, 216

After the Pleasure Party, 274

Ahab, Captain, 161 ff.

Alcott, Bronson, 66

Alma, 99

Ambiguities, Melville’s experiences of, 210; Emerson’s expression of, 216

Ambition, Melville’s secret, 347

American Aloe on Exhibition, The, 345

American folk-arts, 45

American psyche, broken, 229

American society, in 1819, 9; in 1844, 63; economic conflict, 63; question of one and many, 63; slavery and industrialism, 64; intrusion of new habits of living, 64; contrast of vital and mechanical, provincial and metropolitan, 66; in 1860, 293; loss of form, 293; wastefulness of industrialism in, 294

Anglo-American Literature and Manners, 74

Anticipation of modern science, Melville’s, 99

Appletree Table, The, 236

Arrowhead, 136

Articles of War, 355

Arts, as means of salvation, 318

Attica, comparison with North Atlantic states, 65

Azzageddi, Melville’s demon, 102

Babbalanja, 95

Barney, 21

Bartleby the Scrivener, 236-239

Battle Pieces and Other Aspects of the War, 303-305

Beddoes, 179

Bell-Tower, 236

Benito Cereno, 244-246

Bentley, 123

Beowulf, 194

Berkshires, 135

Billson, James, 334

Billy Budd, 337, 353-356

Birth, 16

Bitterness of life, 309

Blackness, Melville’s, 233-235

Blake, William, 335

Boynton, Percy, 181, 194

Bridegroom Dick, 337

Broadhall, 135

Brooks, Van Wyck, 110, 194

Bryant, William Cullen, 12

Bullen, Frank, 147

Camoëns, 58

Captain Claret, 59

Captain Riga, 29, 36

Captains, The Two, 290

Centenary Committee, 333

Chapin, Henry, 369

Chaplain Mudge, 44

Charity, 249, 253

Chase, Jack, 57

Chasles, M. Philarète, 74

Children, Melville’s, plight of, 287; fate of Malcolm and Stanwix, 288

Christianity, Melville’s respect for, 103; his repugnance toward, 320

Chronometricals and Horologicals, 214

Civil War, the, a dividing point, 291; attempt to preserve ideological framework by, 292; symbolizes disruption, 293; described by Whitman, 297

Claggart, causeless evil in, 354

Clarel, 307-324

Coan, Titus Munson, 259

Cock-a-doodle-do, 236

Cologne, 128

Colonel J. Bunkum, 337

Confidence, lack of, 248

Confidence Man, The, 247-255

Consular post, Melville’s efforts to secure, 235, 289

Contempt, Melville’s, for contemporaries, 233

Convictions, conflict of, 301

Cousins, their condescension and Melville’s resentment, 75

Critic, The, 3

Critics, their condemnation of Mardi, 105; misconception of Melville, 106

Crystal Palace Exhibition, 188

Culture, new, 361

Customs Office, an asylum, 329

Daggoo, 165

Dana, Richard Henry, 40

Dark Ages of Democracy, 327

Death, biological terminus, 359; spiritual significance, 359

Death, Herman Melville’s, 357

Democratic Press and Lansingburgh Advertiser, 36

De Quincey, 127

Derwent, 311

Dilemma as writer, 221

Dominora, 97

Dowden, quoted, 234

Duke of Rutland, 129

Duyckinck, Evert, 73; expurgates Typee, 76; introduces Melville to literary world, 79; Lowell’s characterization of, 80; correspondence with Melville, 140 ff.

Duyckinck, George, 79

Duyckincks, The, Whitman’s opinion of, 80

Edens, authentic, 339

Emerson, Lectures on the Times, 65; defended by Melville, 140; absence of shadows in, 141

Encantadas, The, or Enchanted Isles, 239-240

England, first impression of, 33; return to, 119 ff.; depth and triviality of, 124, 125

Enthusiast, The, 342

Eternity, 98

Ethan Brand, criticism of Melville in, 145

European observations, 273-274

Evil, discovery in Mardi, 96, 246

Fact, respect for in nineteenth-century literature, 192; in Moby-Dick, 192

Faith, animal, 324

Fantasies, usable and unusable, 233

Father Mapple, 159-160

Father Taylor, prototype of Father Mapple, 44

Fayaway, Melville’s companion, 49, 52

Fiddler, The, 259

Flask, 164

Flogging, Melville’s influence on abolition of, 117

Forms, world of, 359

Forster, E. M., 209

Free verse, in Pierre, 181

Gansevoort Hotel, 329

Gansevoort Market, 329

Gansevoorts, 11

Glendinning, Mrs., 203

Golden Day, The, 141

Goodman, Frank, 250

Grand Armada, 171

Greene, Richard Tobias, 73

Haglets, The, 342

Harper’s, 135, 235

Hautia, symbol of sensual bliss, 51; her attractiveness in Typee, 51

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, first effect on Melville, 137; likeness to Rembrandt, 138, to Shakespeare, 138; first meeting with Melville, 142; last meeting, 262-265

Hawthorne, Sophia, characterization of Melville, 143

Herzen, Alexander, 91, 315

Hiatus, in Melville’s emotional development, 218; in his career, 291

Highlander, The, 28, 32

Human values, sweeping away of, 319

Humiliation, effect of, 31

Humour, of desperation, 169; Melville’s perpetual sense of, 290

I and My Chimney, 236

Ideal life, fantastic notions of, 65

Ideality, embodied in animal instincts, 352

Illness, Melville’s, 224-225

Imaginative synthesis, Moby-Dick as, 170-171

Industrialism, as end in itself, 65; wastefulness of, 294; bleak efficiency and blindness to humane purpose, 319

Inheritance, 336

Innocents Abroad, 328

Insanity, looseness of term, 231; biographer’s difficulty, 231; Melville’s interpretation of, 231-232; relationship with art, 232-233

Institutions, upheaval in 1848, 91; savage parody of in Mardi, 91

Instrumentation of Moby-Dick, 182

Irving, Washington, 139

Isabel, 202

Israel Potter, 240-242

Jack Gentian, 337

Jackson, 29; Melville pities, 235

Jehovah, birth of idea of, 271

Jewish literature, Melville’s sympathies with, 320

Jimmy Rose, 259

Jocularity, infirmity of, 283, 290-291

John Brown, 297

John Marr, 338

Jokes, family’s indifference to, 332

Journals, Melville’s, to England and the Continent, 119-131; to Constantinople and the Holy Land, 261-273

Jung, 194

Juvenile Total Abstinence Association, 29

Kinship with Thoreau, 112

Kory-Kory, manservant, 47

Lake of Pontoosuce, The, 349-350

Lawrence, D. H., 194

Leisure, Melville’s high opinion of, 332

Lenin, 316

Life, implication of ideal ends, 189; as more than living, 190; stultification in vacuous dreams, 316

Life, naïve joy in, 49; sinister meanings of, 124; shadow of death on, 129

Libellous criticism, 106

Lightning Rod Man, The, 236

Literary method, Melville’s conception, 212

Literary World, The, 79

Lockhart, 125

Lombardo, 102

London, greyness of, 124; depression of, 126

Londoners, 123

Lucy, 202

MacMechan, Archibald, 337

Man of the World, The, 290

Manhattan literati, 79

Mardi, characterization of, 93-101

Mark Twain, 328

Marquesas, 46-55

Marquis de Grandvin, 337

Masefield, John, 110

Material civilization, lopsidedness of, 361

Mather, F. J., Jr., 241

Mechanical arts, menace of their perfection, 318

Media, 95

Mehevi, King of Typees, 47

Melville, Allan, brother of Herman, 66

Melville, Allan, father of Herman Melville, characteristics, 13, 14; knowledge of Europe, 15; marriage, 14; traveller, 21; death, 23

Melville, Elizabeth (Shaw), marries Herman, 86; as housekeeper, 136; strain of relationship with Herman, 287; receives affectionate dedication of Weeds and Wildings, 344

Melville, Gansevoort, 25, 67, 80

Melville, Herman, his family, 11-14; birth, 17; birthplace, 17; early impressions, 17; starved of affection, 18; moved to Bleecker Street, 18; melancholy situation, 19; relatives, 20; influence of Manhattan, 21; ambitions, 22; father’s death in 1832, 23; fixation of father’s image, 24; struggle for existence, 25-26; Grand Tour, 27; an infant Ishmael, 28; bitterness of youth, 28; disappointment in Liverpool, 33; exploration of city, 34; first view of misery and degradation, 34-35; essential education, 35; return to Lansingburgh, 36; slow growth, 36; early sexual life, 36-37; first literary effusions, 37-38; beginning of self-consciousness, 39; preparation for literature, 38; attraction to sea, 40; departure from New Bedford, 41; leaves ship at Nukuheva, 46; lives among Typees, 47-52; is rescued by the Julia, 52; makes friends with Dr. Long Ghost, 52; participates in mutiny, 53; is confined in British jail, 54; becomes a rover, 54-55; enjoys idle life, 55; works in Honolulu, 55; becomes sick of adventure, 56; ships on U. S. Frigate, United States, 56; homeward bound, 56-62; discovers abuses in Navy, 57; makes friends with Jack Chase, 57; is influenced in literary taste by ship’s library, 57-58; is condemned to flogging, 58; has impulse to assault Captain, 58; resents “massacre of beards,” 59; falls from yard-arm, 59-60; beginning of manhood, 61; lands at Boston, 62; writes Typee, 67; habit of documentation, 69; accuracy, 70; effect of censorship on, 77; successful author, 78; writes Omoo, 81; marries Elizabeth Shaw, 86; honeymoon, 87; daily routine, 87-89; has weak eyes, 88; writes Mardi, 91; tightening of domestic responsibility, 108; necessity for potboilers, 108; writes Redburn, 108; writes White-Jacket, 114; goes to Europe, 119; becomes acquainted with English society, 122; steady growth and development, 131; return to America, 131; moves to Arrowhead, 136; meets Hawthorne, 142; correspondence with, 144 ff.; discovers Hawthorne’s sentiments, 147; apprenticeship over, 150; intensity of effort in Moby-Dick, 151; ruin of eyesight, 152; feeling of desolation, 154; is damned by dollars, 155; contempt of fame, 155; swift development, 156; exaltation and terror from Moby-Dick, 156; situation after Moby-Dick, 196; culmination of powers, 197; disclosure of weaknesses, 196; his wilful defiance, 199; mood of defeat, 200; betrays himself in Pierre, 218; terrific pressure leads to retreat of, 220; dilemmas as writer, 107, 220; anticipation of defeat, 221; failure to mature in marriage, 222; draws near spiritual Cape Horn, 223; alienation from humanity, 227; scorn of critics, 228; Timonism, 230; meets successive misfortunes, 235, 236; weakened health, 236; writes Piazza Tales, 236; Israel Potter, and The Confidence Man, 236-255; recoils from painful experience, 259; goes on voyage to Holy Land, 261; visits Hawthorne in England, 261; discusses withdrawal from literature, 263; fails to renew friendship, 265; sails for Near East, 265; explores Constantinople, 267, and Cairo, 270; has passionate encounter in Italy, 274-281; returns home, 1857, 281; seeks to gain living in lecture lyceum, 282; voyage to San Francisco in 1860, 284; longing for Elizabeth, 286; commonplaceness as father, 287; sells Arrowhead, meets carriage accident, moves to New York, 289; interest in Civil War, 292-303; eventual disillusion, 303; withdraws from literary struggle, 306; gets inspectorship in Customs House, 307; writes Clarel, 307-308; is indifferent to “recognition,” 333; is released from Customs House, 336; resumes literary work and writes Billy Budd, 337; publishes John Marr, 338; publishes Timoleon, 342; writes Weeds and Wildings, 344; expresses warmth of love for Elizabeth, 345; finds peace, 351; expresses ultimate resignation in Billy Budd, 357; death, 357

Melville, Malcolm, 92

Melville, Maria, mother of Herman Melville, comparison with Mrs. Glendinning, 14

Melville, Stanwix, 287

Melville, Thomas, ambition to become sailor, 67

Men-about-literature, 333

Metcalf, Eleanor Melville, v

Milton, 191

Minnigerode, Meade, 285

Misinterpretation of Melville, 224

Missionaries, 74

Moby-Dick, writing of, 147-157; summary of, 158-176; criticism of, 176-195; symphonic quality, 182; organic conception of, 182; its meaning as story of sea, 183; as parable of evil, 184; as tragedy of man, 187; as contrast of practical and ideal life, 188

Modern vision of life, 194

Mohi, 95

Monody (to Hawthorne), 265

Mortmain, 310

Murray, Dr. Henry A., Jr., vi

Murray, John, 73

Mythology, Moby-Dick as first modern, 193

Nathan, 310

Nature, oneness with, 351; paints like a harlot, 352

New York, in 1819, 15-16; after Civil War, 326; its brutality, 327

New Bedford, centre of whaling industry, 42, 158

No Trust, 249

O’Brien, Fitz-James, 198

Olympians, English, 124

Omoo, 81-84

Orthodox illusions, Melville’s rejection of, 324-325

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, 191

Palestine, effect on Melville, 309

Paradise of Bachelors, 130, 236

Paradox of morality, 216

Passion, reawakening in Italy, 275; frustration, 276-281

Parrington, Vernon, 199

Peace, Melville’s ultimate, 357

Pequod, The, 161

Personal disappointment and bitterness, 109; an Ishmael, 109

Physical characteristics, Melville’s, 119

Physical weakness, 225

Piazza Tales, The, 243

Pictures, Melville’s favourite, 130, 336

Pierre, 196-206

Pilgrims, Melville’s and Chaucer’s, 311-312

Pip, 170

Pittsfield, 135, 341

Plotinus Plinlimmon, 215

Political institutions, Melville’s misgivings over, 295

Post-bellum America, 343

Primal world, Melville’s consciousness of, 353

Progress, its illusory nature, 313-314

Prose-sketches, 337

Provincial society, 9; its economic foundations, 10; mixture of nationalities, 10; reality of family, 11; idealized in Pierre, 13; destruction, 292

Psychological truth, in Pierre, 211

Pyramids, the, effect on Melville, 271

Queequeg, 160

Rama, 330

Rammon, Introduction to, quoted, 323

Realism, 5

Recoil from black experience, 255

Redburn, 108-114

Refugee, The, 290

Rembrandt, 336

Resignation, on point of, 259

Retarding environment, 345

Return of the Sire de Nesle, 90

Revolutionary betterment, psychological problem of, 316

Rip Van Winkle, Melville’s addition to, 353

Rolfe, 310

Rose Garden, The, 348

Rumour of Melville’s insanity, 224

Ruskin, John, in praise of war, 359

Russell, W. Clark, 334

Ruth, 310

Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 335

Sailors, hard life, 30; monotony of pleasures, 31

Salvator R. Tarnmoor, pseudonym for H. M., 239

Satire, perfection in White-Jacket, 116; in The Confidence Man, 253

Science, Melville’s utilization of, 163

Sea Poems, 334, 340

Seaman’s Bethel, 43

Serenia, 99

Sermon on the Mount, 195

Sexual feud, 277

Shakespeare, William, Melville’s discovery of in maturity, 138; Messianic likeness for Melville, 138

Shaw, Lemuel, inheritance left by, 336

Significance, Melville’s, 361-368

Slavery, Melville’s attitude towards, 296; Hawthorne’s attitude, 297

Smith, J. E. A., testimony on Melville, 341

Society, immoral practices of, 111

Social observation, Melville’s, 314-316

Starbuck, 164

Stedman, Arthur, 358

Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 327

Stewart, Miss Caroline, v

Stoddard, R. H., 329

Surgeon Cuticle, his operation, 116

Synthesis, foreshadowed by Melville, 362

Taboo, its caprices, 50; effect of sexual, 78

Taji, 94-101

Tartarus of Maids, The, 64, 236

Tashtego, 165

Thomas, Mrs. Frances, v

Thomson, James, 334

Thoreau, experiment at Walden, 65

Thy Aim, Thy Aim?, 348

Timonism, 233

Toby, 72; story of, 74

Tragic sense of life, the, 358

Transcendentalists, satire on, 213

Travels, to Liverpool, 29; to London, 119; to Paris, 127; to Liverpool (1856), 261; to Greece, 265; to Constantinople, 267; to Cairo, 270; to Jerusalem, 272; through Europe, 273; to California, 284

Turner, 336

Twenty-sixth Street, 104 East, 328

Two Years Before the Mast, effect on Melville, 40

Typee, 68-76

Typees, their cannibalism, 47; customs, 48; superiority to Western Civilization, 48; their beauty, 49; pleasures of their life, 49; Melville’s escape from, 52

Ulver, Delly, 203

Unconscious, discovery of the, 102

Universe, acceptance of, 351; false metaphysical separation of, 352

Vedder, Elihu, 334

Vere, Captain the Honorable Edward Fairfax, 354

Versification, Melville’s weakness in, 303, 320

Vice and Virtue, 217

Victorian confidence, 318

Vine, 310

Vision, wholeness of, 368

Vivenza, 97

Vivia, 205