CHAPTER XV
A NEIGHBOUR OF HAWTHORNE’S
“And here again, not unreasonably, might invocation go up to those
three Weird Ones, that tend Life’s loom. Again we might ask them,
what threads are these, oh, ye Weird Ones, that ye wove in the years
foregone?”
--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Pierre_.
At the time when Melville moved into the Berkshire Hills, the region
around Lenox boasted the descriptive title: “a jungle of literary
lions”--a title amiably ferocious in its provincial vanity. In this
region, it is true, Jonathan Edwards had written his treatises
on predestination, and with sardonic optimism had gloated over
the beauties of hell; here Catherine Sedgewick wrote her amiable
insipidities; here Elihu Burritt, “the learned Blacksmith” wrote out
his _Sparks_; here Bryant composed; here Henry Ward Beecher indited
many _Star-Papers_; here Headley and Holmes, Lowell and Longfellow,
Curtis and G. P. R. James, Audubon and Whipple, Mrs. Sigourney and
Martineau, Fanny Kemble and Frederick Bremer and the Goodale sisters
either visited or lived. Impressed by this array of names--an array
deceptively impressive to the New England imagination,--local pride has
not blushed to explain: “By the river Arno, in the ‘lake region’ of
Cumberland and Westmoreland, or on the placid river which flows through
the Concord meadows, what congestion of literary associations! Like the
instinct of the bee which, separated by great distances from the hive,
possesses the infallible sense of direction for its return, so, too,
the lovely ‘nooks and corners’ on the earth’s surface are irresistibly
and unerringly attracting choice spirits, which some way are sure to
find them out and pre-empt them in the interests of their craft or
clan. Berkshire is no exception to this.”
When, in 1850, both Melville and Hawthorne moved into the Berkshires,
these literary wilds were tamely domesticated, and sadly thinned of
prowling genius. The coming of Melville and Hawthorne, however, marked
the most important advent ever made into these regions. For there
Melville wrote _Moby-Dick_; and there Melville and Hawthorne were to be
thrown into an ironical intimacy.
In the autumn of 1850, Melville bought a spacious gambrel-roofed
farmhouse at Pittsfield, situated along Holmes Road and not far from
Broadhall, formerly the home of his uncle, and familiar to Melville’s
youth. Melville named the place Arrowhead. To Arrowhead he brought his
retinue of female relatives, and set about to alternate farming with
literature.
In the first of the _Piazza Tales_ (1856), in _I and My Chimney_
(_Putnam’s Magazine_, March, 1856), and in _The Rose-wood Table_
(_Putnam’s Magazine_, May, 1856), Melville has left descriptions of
Arrowhead, its inmates, and the surrounding country.
“When I removed into the country,” Melville says in the _Piazza Tales_,
“it was to occupy an old-fashioned farmhouse which had no piazza--a
deficiency the more regretted because not only did I like piazzas,
as somehow combining the cosiness of indoors with the freedom of
outdoors, and it is so pleasant to inspect your thermometer there,
but the country round about was such a picture, that in berry time no
boy climbs hill or crosses vale without coming upon easels planted in
every nook, and sunburned painters painting there. A very paradise of
painters. The circle of the stars cut by the circle of the mountains.
At least, so it looks from the house; though once upon the mountains,
no circle of them can you see. Had the site been chosen five rods off,
this charmed circle would not have been.
“The house is old. Seventy years since, from the heart of the Hearth
Stone Hill, they quarried the Kaaba, or Holy Stone, to which, each
Thanksgiving, the social pilgrims used to come. So long ago that
in digging for the foundation, the workmen used both spade and axe
fighting the Troglodytes of those subterranean parts--sturdy roots of
a sturdy wood, encamped upon what is now a long landslide of sleeping
meadow, sloping away off from my poppy bed. Of that knit wood but one
survivor stands--an elm, lonely through steadfastness.
“Whoever built the house, he builded better than he knew; or else Orion
in the zenith flashed down his Damocles’ sword to him some starry
night, and said: ‘Build there.’ For how, otherwise, could it have
entered the builder’s mind that, upon the clearing being made, such a
purple prospect would be his? Nothing less than Greylock, with all his
hills about him, like Charlemagne among his peers.
“A piazza must be had.
“The house was wide--my fortune narrow ... upon but one of the
four sides would prudence grant me what I wanted. Now which side?
Charlemagne, he carried it.
“No sooner was ground broken than all the neighbourhood, neighbour
Dives in particular, broke too--into a laugh. Piazza to the north!
Winter piazza! Wants, of winter midnights, to watch the Aurora
Borealis, I suppose; hope he’s laid in a good store of polar muffs and
mittens.
“That was in the lion month of March. Not forgotten are some of the
blue noses of the carpenters and how they scouted at the greenness of
the cit, who would build his sole piazza to the north. But March don’t
last forever; patience, and August comes. And then, in the cool elysium
of my northern bower, I, Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom, cast down the hill
a pitying glance on poor old Dives, tormented in the purgatory of his
piazza to the south.
“But, even in December, this northern piazza does not repel--nipping
cold and gusty though it be, and the north wind, like any miller,
bolting by the snow in finest flour--for then, once more, with frosted
beard, I pace the sleety deck, weathering Cape Horn.
“In summer, too, Canute-like, sitting here, one is often reminded of
the sea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain,
and little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as
their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray,
and the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and
a still August noon broods over the deep meadows, as a calm upon the
Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the
silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house,
rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the
Barbary coast, an unknown sail.”
In _I and My Chimney_ Melville makes the old chimney at Arrowhead
the chief character in a sketch of his domestic life at Pittsfield:
himself and his wife, both freely idealised, are the other actors.
This chimney, twelve feet square at the base, was built by Capt.
David Bush who erected the house in 1780. It has three fireplaces on
the first floor and the one formerly used for the kitchen fireplace
is large enough for a log four feet long. This fireplace is panelled
in pine, and above it hangs an Indian tomahawk, found and hung there
by Melville. Around it are many nooks and cupboards. In _I and My
Chimney_ Melville wrote: “And here I keep mysterious cordials of a
choice, mysterious flavour, made so by the constant naturing and subtle
ripening of the chimney’s gentle heat, distilled through that warm
mass of masonry. Better for wines it is than voyages to the Indies; my
chimney itself is a tropic. A chair by my chimney in a November day is
as good for an invalid as a long season spent in Cuba. Often I think
how grapes might ripen against my chimney. How my wife’s geraniums bud
there! But in December. Her eggs too--can’t keep them near the chimney
on account of hatching. Ah, a warm heart has my chimney.”
Col. Richard Lathers, in his reminiscences of his Pittsfield residence,
writes: “One of my nearest neighbours at Pittsfield was Herman
Melville, author of the interesting and very original sea tales,
_Typee_ and _Omoo_ (which were among the first books to be published
simultaneously in London and New York), and of various other volumes
of prose and verse. I visited him often in his well-stocked library,
where I listened with intense pleasure to his highly individual views
of society and politics. He always provided a bountiful supply of good
cider--the product of his own orchard--and of tobacco, in the virtues
of which he was a firm believer. Indeed, he prided himself on the
inscription painted over his capacious fireplace: ‘I and my chimney
smoke together,’ an inscription I have seen strikingly verified more
than once when the atmosphere was heavy and the wind was east.”
When Melville set up his family at Arrowhead, Hawthorne had already
been settled at Lenox, some miles away, for a number of months. “I have
taken a house in Lenox”--so he announced his removal--“I long to get
into the country, for my health is not what it has been. An hour or two
in a garden and a daily ramble in country air would keep me all right.”
Though Melville and Hawthorne were at this time neither in very
affluent circumstances, Hawthorne was, to all outward appearances,
the more straitened of the two. He described his new home as “the
very ugliest little bit of an old red farmhouse you ever saw,” “the
most inconvenient and wretched house I ever put my head in.” His
wife, however, was not so precipitous in her damnation, and writing
to her mother on June 23, 1850, said: “We are so beautifully arranged
(excepting the guest-chamber), and we seem to have such a large
house _inside_, though outside the little reddest thing looks like
the smallest of ten-feet houses. Enter our old black tumble-down
gate,--no matter for that,--and you behold a nice yard, with an oval
grass-plot and a gravel walk all round the borders, a flower-bed,
some rose-bushes, a raspberry-bush, and I believe a syringa, and also
a few tiger-lilies; quite a fine bunch of peonies, a stately double
rose-columbine, and one beautiful Balsam Fir tree, of perfect pyramidal
form, and full of a thousand melodies. The front door is wide open.
Enter and welcome.” Mrs. Hawthorne then elaborates upon the wealth
of beauty she finds in her tactful disposition of the pictures, the
furniture, and flowers, in the cramped interior. In this tabernacle
she enshrined her two small children; and in the “immortal endowments”
of her husband, she was inarticulate in felicity. “I cannot possibly
conceive of my happiness,” she wrote, “but, in a blissful kind of
confusion, live on. If I can only be so great, so high, so noble,
so sweet, as he in any phase of my being, I shall be glad. I am not
deluded nor mistaken, as the angels know now, and as all my friends
well know, in open vision!”
Of the actual daily events at Arrowhead and the Red House there is a
great inequality in the wealth of records. Of the Red House we know
much; of Arrowhead we know only too little. Though Mrs. Hawthorne was
always childlike in her modesty and simplicity, “her learning and
her accomplishments were rare and varied.” She not only read Latin,
Greek and Hebrew, but she kept an invaluable journal of the momentous
trifles of her husband’s life; and she wrote letters home that her
Mother very properly preserved for posterity. Mrs. Melville positively
knew no Hebrew; and what accounts of her husband she wrote have all
disappeared. Only one letter of hers of this period survives:
“ARROWHEAD, Aug. 3, 1851.
“MY DEAR MOTHER:
“I have been trying to write to you ever since Sam came, but could
not well find a chance. As it proved, I was not mistaken in supposing
the little parcel he brought was a present from you, though I had no
letter. The contents were beautiful and very acceptable. Do accept my
best thanks for them. We were delighted to see Sam Savage on Tuesday,
but as he did not notify us of the day we were not in waiting for him
at the depot. However, he found his way out to us. To-day he and Sam
have gone over to Lebanon to see the Shakers. The girls were much
pleased with the collars, and Mother M. with her remembrance. The
scarf you sent me was very handsome, but I am almost sorry you did
not keep it for yourself, for it does not seem to me as if I should
ever wear it--and certainly not this summer as I go nowhere not even
to church. It will look very handsome with my new shawl, if ever I do
wear it, though.
“You need not be afraid of the boys staying too long--I am only sorry
that they cannot stay longer, but they think or rather Sam Savage
thinks he must go to Red Hook this week. You know we do not make any
difference for them and let them do just as they please and take
care of themselves. Yesterday they went with Herman and explored a
neighbouring mountain.
“Oh, you will be glad to hear, and I meant to have written it to
father the other day, that in consideration of the recent decisions
with regard to the copyright question, Mr. Bentley is to give Herman
£150 and half profits after, for his new book--a much smaller sum
than before, to be sure, but certainly worth waiting for--and quite
generous on Mr. Bentley’s part considering the unsettled state of
things.
“I cannot write any more--it makes me terribly nervous--I don’t know
as you can read this I have scribbled it so.”
At the time of Melville’s moving to Arrowhead he was writing
_Moby-Dick_. In the brief life of Melville in her journal, Mrs.
Melville says: “Wrote _White-Whale_ or _Moby-Dick_ under unfavourable
circumstances--would sit at his desk all day not writing anything till
four or five o’clock--then ride to the village after dark--would be up
early and out walking before breakfast--sometimes splitting wood for
exercise. Published _White-Whale_ in 1851--wrote _Pierre_, published
1852. We all felt anxious about the strain on his health in the spring
of 1853.”
When Hawthorne moved to Lenox he was forty-six years old--Melville’s
senior by fifteen years. “Bidding good-bye for ever to literary
obscurity and to Salem,” Mr. Julian Hawthorne says in his _Nathaniel
Hawthorne and His Wife_, “Hawthorne now turned his face towards the
mountains. The preceding nine months had told upon his health and
spirits: and, had _The Scarlet Letter_ not achieved so fair a success,
he might have been long in recovering his normal frame of mind. But
the broad murmur of popular applause, coming to his unaccustomed ears
from all parts of his native country, and rolling in across the sea
from academic England, gave him the spiritual refreshment born of the
assurance that our fellow-creatures think well of the work we have
striven to make good. Such assurance is essential, sooner or later, to
soundness and serenity of mind. No man can attain secure repose and
happiness who has never found that what moves and interests him has
power over others likewise. Sooner or later he will begin to doubt
either his own sanity or that of all the rest of the world.” Melville
was never to know any such repose and happiness.
Within the sanctities of the Red House, and among the solitudes of
the surrounding country, Hawthorne enjoyed all the companionship he
desired. In 1842, Mrs. Hawthorne had written to her mother: “Mr.
Hawthorne’s abomination of visiting still holds strong, be it to see
no matter what angel;” and in 1850, Hawthorne was no more eager for
alliances even with celestials. Not, indeed, that he was indifferent to
his fellowmen: that, his literary vocation would not permit. In _Sights
from a Steeple_ he states: “The most desirable mode of existence might
be that of a spiritualised Paul Pry, hovering invisible round men and
women, witnessing their deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing
brightness from their felicity, and shade from their sorrow, and
retaining no emotion peculiar to himself.” Hawthorne’s son writes:
“Now Hawthorne, both by nature and by training, was of a disposition
to throw himself imaginatively into the shoes (as the phrase is) of
whatever person happened to his companion. For the time being, he
would seem to take their point of view and to speak their language;
it was the result partly of a subtle sympathy and partly of a cold
intellectual insight, which led him half consciously to reflect what
he so clearly perceived. Thus, if he chatted with a group of rude
sea-captains in the smoking-room of Mrs. Blodgett’s boarding-house,
or joined a knot of boon companions in a Boston bar-room, or talked
metaphysics with Herman Melville on the hills of Berkshire, he would
aim to appear in each instance a man like as they were; he would have
the air of being interested in their interests and viewing life by
their standards. Of course, this was only apparent; the real man stood
aloof and observant.” “Seeing his congenial aspect towards their little
round of habits and beliefs, they would leap to the conclusion that he
was no more and no less than one of themselves; whereas they formed
but a tiny arc in the great circle of his comprehension.” Yet even
when not in the rôle of unimpassioned spectator, Hawthorne was not
the man to sit in pharisaical judgment upon his fellows. In _Fancy’s
Show-Box_ he wrote: “Man must not disclaim his brotherhood, even
with the guiltiest, since, though his hand be clean, his heart has
surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity.” Emerson
once said that there was no crime he could not commit: an amiable
vanity he shared with many a more prosaic fellow. Hawthorne studied
his own pure heart and learned that “men often over-estimate their
capacity for evil.” “I used to think,” he wrote, “that I could imagine
all feelings, all passions, and states of the heart and mind.” Again:
“Living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept
the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart. Had I sooner made
my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been
covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by
rude encounters with the multitude.” G. P. Lathrop, in his _Study of
Hawthorne_, says: “The visible pageant is only of value to him as it
suggests the viewless host of heavenly shapes that hang above it like
an idealising mirage.” Yet never for a second did he lose himself among
these heavenly visitations. He was eminently a man of sound sense: as
W. C. Brownell has pointed out, he was “distinctly the most hard-headed
of our men of genius.” His son said of him: “He was the slave of no
theory and no emotion; he always knew, so to speak, where he was and
what he was about.” His nature clearly was self-sustaining. He never
felt the need of the support that in the realm of the affections is the
reward of self-surrender. “He had no doubt an ideal family life,” W. C.
Brownell points out--“that is to say, ideal in a peculiar way, for he
had it on rather peculiar terms, one suspects. These were, in brief,
his own terms. He was worshipped, idolised, canonised, and on his side
it probably required small effort worthily to fill the rôle a more
ardent nature would have either merited less or found more irksome. He
responded at any rate with absolute devotion. His domestic periphery
bounded his vital interests.”
[Illustration: ARROWHEAD]
[Illustration: THE FIREPLACE
ARROWHEAD]
J. E. A. Smith, however, who knew Hawthorne in the flesh, undertakes
to portray Hawthorne in less austere outline. In his book _Taghconic:
The Romance and Beauty of the Hills_ (Boston, 1879) J. E. A. Smith,
writing under the pseudonym “Godfrey Greylock,” says: “But that Mr.
Hawthorne’s heart was warm and tender, I am well assured by more than
one circumstance, which I do not know that I am at liberty to recall
here. But there can be no wrong in mentioning the origin, as I have
heard it, of the brotherly friendship between him and Herman Melville.
As the story was told me, Mr. Hawthorne was aware that Melville was
the author of a very appreciative review of the _Scarlet Letter_ which
appeared in the _Literary World_, edited by their common friends, the
Duyckincks; but this very knowledge, perhaps, kept two very sensitive
men shy of each other, although thrown into company. But one day it
chanced that when they were out on a picnic excursion, the two were
compelled by a thunder-shower to take shelter in a narrow recess of the
rocks of Monument Mountain. Two hours of enforced intercourse settled
the matter. They learned so much of each other’s character, and found
that they held so much of thought, feeling and opinion in common, that
the most intimate friendship for the future was inevitable.”
Mr. Julian Hawthorne reports that Herman Melville--or Omoo, as they
called him,--soon became familiar and welcome at the Red House. In
a letter dated September 4, 1850, Mrs. Hawthorne reported to her
mother: “To-day, Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. Melville have gone to dine
at Pittsfield.” It is in this letter that Mrs. Hawthorne wrote the
characterisation of Melville quoted in Chapter I.
Hawthorne finished _The House of the Seven Gables_ on January 27, 1851.
The four months following Hawthorne gave over to a vacation. “He had
recovered his health,” his son says, “he had done his work, he was
famous, and the region in which he dwelt was beautiful and inspiriting.
At all events, he made those spring days memorable to his children. He
made them boats to sail on the lake, and kites to fly in the air; he
took them fishing and flower-gathering, and tried (unsuccessfully for
the present) to teach them swimming. Mr. Melville used to ride or drive
up, in the evenings, with his great dog, and the children used to ride
on the dog’s back.”... “It was with Herman Melville that Hawthorne
held the most familiar intercourse at this time, both personally and
by letter.” Hawthorne’s son quotes “characteristic disquisitions”
by Melville; “but Hawthorne’s answers, if he wrote any,” Mr. Julian
Hawthorne goes on to say, entertaining a philosophical doubt in the
face of Melville’s specific mention of letters from Hawthorne, “were
unfortunately destroyed by fire.”
What would appear to be the earliest of the surviving letters of
Melville to Hawthorne follows:
“PITTSFIELD, Wednesday morning.
“MY DEAR HAWTHORNE,--
“Concerning the young gentleman’s shoes, I desire to say that a
pair to fit him, of the desired pattern, cannot be had in all
Pittsfield,--a fact which sadly impairs that metropolitan pride I
formerly took in the capital of Berkshire. Henceforth Pittsfield must
hide its head. However, if a pair of _bootees_ will at all answer,
Pittsfield will be very happy to provide them. Pray mention all this
to Mrs. Hawthorne, and command me.
“‘_The House of the Seven Gables_: A Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne.
One vol. 16mo, pp. 344.’ The contents of this book do not belie
its rich, clustering, romantic title. With great enjoyment we
spent almost an hour in each separate gable. This book is like a
fine old chamber, abundantly, but still judiciously, furnished
with precisely that sort of furniture best fitted to furnish it.
There are rich hangings, wherein are braided scenes from tragedies!
There is old china with rare devices, set out on the carved buffet;
there are long and indolent lounges to throw yourself upon; there
is an admirable sideboard, plentifully stored with good viands;
there is a smell as of old wine in the pantry; and finally, in one
corner, there is a dark little black-letter volume in golden clasps,
entitled _Hawthorne: A Problem_. It has delighted us; it has piqued
a re-perusal; it has robbed us of a day, and made us a present of
a whole year of thoughtfulness; it has bred great exhilaration and
exultation with the remembrance that the architect of the Gables
resides only six miles off, and not three thousand miles away,
in England, say. We think the book, for pleasantness of running
interest, surpasses the other works of the author. The curtains are
more drawn; the sun comes in more; genialities peep out more. Were
we to particularise what most struck us in the deeper passages, we
would point out the scene where Clifford, for a moment, would fain
throw himself forth from the window to join the procession; or the
scene where the judge is left seated in his ancestral chair. Clifford
is full of an awful truth throughout. He is conceived in the finest,
truest spirit. He is no caricature. He is Clifford. And here we
would say that, did circumstances permit, we should like nothing
better than to devote an elaborate and careful paper to the full
consideration and analysis of the purport and significance of what
so strongly characterises all of this author’s writings. There is a
certain tragic phase of humanity which, in our opinion, was never
more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne. We mean the tragedies of
human thought in its own unbiassed, native, and profounder workings.
We think that into no recorded mind has the intense feeling of the
usable truth ever entered more deeply than into this man’s. By
usable truth, we mean the apprehension of the absolute condition of
present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not,
though they do their worst to him,--the man who, like Russia or the
British Empire, declares himself a sovereign nature (in himself)
amid the powers of heaven, hell, and earth. He may perish; but so
long as he exists he insists upon treating with all Powers upon an
equal basis. If any of those other Powers choose to withhold certain
secrets, let them; that does not impair my sovereignty in myself;
that does not make me tributary. And perhaps, after all, there is
_no_ secret. We incline to think that the Problem of the Universe
is like the Freemason’s mighty secret, so terrible to all children.
It turns out, at last, to consist in a triangle, a mallet, and an
apron,--nothing more! We incline to think that God cannot explain His
own secrets, and that He would like a little information upon certain
points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us. But it is
this _Being_ of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke
ourselves. As soon as you say _Me_, a _God_, a _Nature_, so soon you
jump off from your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is
the hangman. Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him
in the street.
“There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in
thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say _yes_. For all men
who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,--why, they are in the happy
condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross
the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,--that is
to say, the Ego. Whereas those _yes_-gentry, they travel with heaps
of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom
House. What’s the reason, Mr. Hawthorne, that in the last stages of
metaphysics a fellow always falls to _swearing_ so? I could rip an
hour. You see, I began with a little criticism extracted for your
benefit from the _Pittsfield Secret Review_, and here I have landed
in Africa.
“Walk down one of these mornings and see me. No nonsense; come.
Remember me to Mrs. Hawthorne and the children.
“H. MELVILLE.
“P. S. The marriage of Phœbe with the daguerreotypist is a fine
stroke, because of his turning out to be a _Maule_. If you pass
Hepzibah’s cent-shop, buy me a Jim Crow (fresh) and send it to me by
Ned Higgins.”
When, at the end of this letter, Melville found himself in Africa, he
mistook gravely if he imagined he occupied the same continent with
Hawthorne. Emile Montégut, it is true, has described Hawthorne as a
“romancier pessimiste.” Pessimist Hawthorne doubtless was,--a pessimist
being precisely a nature without illusions. Hawthorne of course had,
as Brownell has sufficiently taken pains to show, “the good sense,
the lack of enthusiasm, the disillusioned pessimism of the man of
the world.” Hawthorne did say “No!” to life: but never, as Melville
deceived himself into believing, “in thunder.” Such an emphatic denial
would have been an expression of ardour: and Hawthorne was as without
ardour as he was without illusion. Both Melville and Hawthorne were, in
a sense, pessimists. Both were repelled by reality; both were quite out
of sympathy with their time and its tendencies. But they had arrived at
this centre of meeting from opposite points of the compass. Hawthorne
was a pessimist from lack of illusions; the ardour of illusion,
because of its exuberance in Melville, was at the basis of Melville’s
despair. Hawthorne took the same severely fatalistic view of himself
and the life about him, as he did of life in his books. He accepted
the universe as being unalterable, and towards his own destiny he felt
satisfaction without elation. Like the Mohammedans who believe that
they are preordained--but preordained to conquer,--so Hawthorne in his
Calvinism, despite his depressed moods, had no serious doubts as to his
election. Melville’s endless questioning of “Providence and futurity,
and of everything else that lies beyond human ken” were to Hawthorne
merely a weariness of the flesh: he was satisfied in his fatalism, and
without interest in speculation.
The next two letters announce that _Moby-Dick_ is going through the
press,--but they contain other incidental matter that must have been
interesting--as a “human document” at least--even to Hawthorne. It is
true that at this time, so his own son says, “Hawthorne became a sort
of Mecca of pilgrims with Christian’s burden upon their backs. Secret
criminals of all kinds came to him for counsel and relief.” He was
weary, perhaps, of human documents: and Melville came to him, not for
counsel, but in the intimate fraternity of the disenchanted.
“PITTSFIELD, June 29, 1851.
“MY DEAR HAWTHORNE,--
“The clear air and open window invite me to write to you. For some
time past I have been so busy with a thousand things that I have
almost forgotten when I wrote you last, and whether I received an
answer. This most persuasive season has now for weeks recalled me
from certain crotchety and over-doleful chimeras, the like of which
men like you and me, and some others, forming a chain of God’s
posts round the world, must be content to encounter now and then,
and fight them the best way we can. But come they will,--for in the
boundless, trackless, but still glorious wild wilderness through
which these outposts run, the Indians do sorely abound, as well as
the insignificant but still stinging mosquitoes. Since you have been
here, I have been building some shanties of houses (connected with
the old one) and likewise some shanties of chapters and essays. I
have been ploughing and sowing and raising and printing and praying,
and now begin to come out upon a less bristling time, and to enjoy
the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza at the north of the
old farmhouse here.
“Not entirely yet, though, am I without something to be urgent
with. The _Whale_ is only half through the press; for, wearied with
the long delays of the printers, and disgusted with the heat and
dust of the Babylonish brick-kiln of New York, I came back to the
country to feel the grass, and end the book reclining on it, if I
may. I am sure you will pardon this speaking all about myself; for
if I _say_ so much on that head, be sure all the rest of the world
are thinking about themselves ten times as much. Let us speak,
though we show all our faults and weaknesses,--for it is a sign of
strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it; not in set way and
ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.
But I am falling into my old foible,--preaching. I am busy, but shall
not be very long. Come and spend a day here, if you can and want
to; if not, stay in Lenox, and God give you long life. When I am
quite free of my present engagements, I am going to treat myself to
a ride and a visit to you. Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I
always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological
heroics together. This is rather a crazy letter in some respects,
I apprehend. If so, ascribe it to the intoxicating effects of the
latter end of June operating upon a very susceptible and peradventure
feeble temperament. Shall I send you a fin of the _Whale_ by way of a
specimen mouthful? The tail is not yet cooked, though the hell-fire
in which the whole book is broiled might not unreasonably have
cooked it ere this. This is the book’s motto (the secret one), _Ego
non baptiso te in nomine_--but make out the rest yourself.
“H. M.”
“MY DEAR HAWTHORNE,--
“I should have been rumbling down to you in my pine-board chariot a
long time ago, were it not that for some weeks past I have been more
busy than you can well imagine,--out of doors,--building and patching
and tinkering away in all directions. Besides, I had my crops to
get in,--corn and potatoes (I hope to show you some famous ones
by and by),--and many other things to attend to, all accumulating
upon this one particular season. I work myself; and at night my
bodily sensations are akin to those I have so often felt before,
when a hired man, doing my day’s work from sun to sun. But I mean
to continue visiting you until you tell me that my visits are both
supererogatory and superfluous. With no son of man do I stand upon
any etiquette or ceremony, except the Christian ones of charity and
honesty. I am told, my fellow-man, that there is an aristocracy of
the brain. Some men have boldly advocated and asserted it. Schiller
seems to have done so, though I don’t know much about him. At any
rate, it is true that there have been those who, while earnest in
behalf of political equality, still accept the intellectual estates.
And I can well perceive, I think, how a man of superior mind can,
by its intense cultivation, bring himself, as it were, into a
certain spontaneous aristocracy of feeling,--exceedingly nice and
fastidious,--similar to that which, in an English Howard, conveys a
torpedo-fish thrill at the slightest contact with a social plebeian.
So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you
may possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort.
It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a
thief in jail is as honourable a personage as Gen. George Washington.
This is ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun.
Try to get a living by Truth--and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens!
Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold,
the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own
pulpit bannister. It can hardly be doubted that all Reformers are
bottomed upon the truth, more or less; and to the world at large are
not reformers almost universally laughing-stocks? Why so? Truth is
ridiculous to men. Thus easily in my room here do I, conceited and
garrulous, revere the test of my Lord Shaftesbury.
“It seems an inconsistency to assert unconditional democracy in all
things, and yet confess a dislike to all mankind--in the mass. But
not so.--But it’s an endless sermon,--no more of it. I began by
saying that the reason I have not been to Lenox is this,--in the
evening I feel completely done up, as the phrase is, and incapable
of the long jolting to get to your house and back. In a week or so,
I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and
slave on my _Whale_ while it is driving through the press. _That_ is
the only way I can finish it now,--I am so pulled hither and thither
by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing
mood in which a man _ought_ always to compose,--that, I fear, can
seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is for
ever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a
presentiment is on me,--I shall at last be worn out and perish, like
an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of
the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, that
is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the _other_ way I
cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.
I’m rather sore, perhaps, in this letter; but see my hand!--four
blisters on this palm, made by hoes and hammers within the last few
days. It is a rainy morning; so I am indoors, and all work suspended.
I feel cheerfully disposed, and therefore I write a little bluely.
Would the Gin were here! If ever, my dear Hawthorne, in the eternal
times that are to come, you and I shall sit down in Paradise, in
some little shady corner by ourselves; and if we shall by any means
be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I won’t believe in a
Temperance Heaven), and if we shall then cross our celestial legs in
the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses
and our heads together, till both musically ring in concert,--then,
O my dear fellow-mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all
the things manifold which now so distress us,--when all the earth
shall be but a reminiscence, yea, its final dissolution an antiquity.
Then shall songs be composed as when wars are over; humorous, comic
songs,--‘Oh, when I lived in that queer little hole called the
world,’ or, ‘Oh, when I toiled and sweated below,’ or, ‘Oh, when
I knocked and was knocked in the fight’--yes, let us look forward
to such things. Let us swear that, though now we sweat, yet it is
because of the dry heat which is indispensable to the nourishment
of the vine which is to bear the grapes that are to give us the
champagne hereafter.
“But I was talking about the _Whale_. As the fishermen say, ‘he’s
in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago. I’m going to
take him by his jaw, however, before long, and finish him up in
some fashion or other. What’s the use of elaborating what, in its
very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book? Though I wrote
the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.--I talk
all about myself, and this is selfishness and egotism. Granted.
But how help it? I am writing to you; I know little about you, but
something about myself. So I write about myself,--at least, to you.
Don’t trouble yourself, though, about writing; and don’t trouble
yourself about visiting; and when you _do_ visit, don’t trouble
yourself about talking. I will do all the writing and visiting and
talking myself.--By the way, in the last _Dollar Magazine_ I read
‘The Unpardonable Sin.’ He was a sad fellow, that Ethan Brand. I
have no doubt you are by this time responsible for many a shake and
tremour of the tribe of ‘general readers.’ It is a frightful poetical
creed that the cultivation of the brain eats out the heart. But it’s
my _prose_ opinion that in most cases, in those men who have fine
brains and work them well, the heart extends down to hams. And though
you smoke them with the fire of tribulation, yet, like veritable
hams, the head only gives the richer and the better flavour. I stand
for the heart. To the dogs with the head! I had rather be a fool
with a heart, than Jupiter Olympus with his head. The reason the
mass of men fear God, and _at bottom dislike_ Him, is because they
rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.
(You perceive I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to
the Deity; don’t you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in
that usage?) Another thing. I was in New York for four-and-twenty
hours the other day, and saw a portrait of N. H. And I have seen and
heard many flattering (in a publisher’s point of view) allusions
to the _Seven Gables_. And I have seen _Tales_ and _A New Volume_
announced, by N. H. So upon the whole, I say to myself, this N. H.
is in the ascendant. My dear Sir, they begin to patronise. All Fame
is patronage. Let me be infamous: there is no patronage in _that_.
What ‘reputation’ H. M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down
to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as a ‘man who
lived among the cannibals’! When I speak of posterity, in reference
to myself, I only mean the babies who will probably be born in the
moment immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost. I shall go
down to some of them, in all likelihood. _Typee_ will be given to
them, perhaps, with their gingerbread. I have come to regard this
matter of Fame as the most transparent of all vanities. I read
Solomon more and more, and every time see deeper and deeper and
unspeakable meanings in him. I did not think of Fame, a year ago, as
I do now. My development has been all within a few years past. I am
like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which,
after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being
planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness,
and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no
development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three
weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that
I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to
the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall
to the mould. It seems to me now that Solomon was the truest man who
ever spoke, and yet that he a little _managed_ the truth with a view
to popular conservatism; or else there have been many corruptions and
interpolations of the text--In reading some of Goethe’s sayings, so
worshipped by his votaries, I came across this, ‘_Live in the all_.’
That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched one,--good;
but get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself, and bring to
yourself the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the
woods, that are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Fixed
Stars. What nonsense! Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. ‘My
dear boy,’ Goethe says to him, ‘you are sorely afflicted with that
tooth; but you must _live in the all_, and then you will be happy!’
As with all great genius, there is an immense deal of flummery in
Goethe, and in proportion to my own contact with him, a monstrous
deal of it in me.
“H. MELVILLE.
“P. S. ‘Amen!’ saith Hawthorne.
“N. B. This ‘all’ feeling, though, there is some truth in. You must
often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your
legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like
leaves upon your head. This is the _all_ feeling. But what plays the
mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal
application of a temporary feeling or opinion.
“P. S. You must not fail to admire my discretion in paying the
postage on this letter.”
When Melville speaks of “the calm, the coolness, the silent
grass-growing mood in which a man _ought_ to compose,” he has
caught a demoralisation from Hawthorne. _Moby-Dick_, he says, was
“broiled in hell-fire”; and the complete “possession” that mastered
Hawthorne during the composition of _The Scarlet Letter_ has been
amply attested. Each man once, and once only, wrestled with the angel
of his inspiration gloriously to conquer. But Hawthorne had little
relish for such athletics: he preferred the relaxation of painstaking
placidity. He said of _The Scarlet Letter_ that “he did not think it a
book natural for him to write.” The pity of it is that he was not more
frequently so unnatural. As an old man, Melville looked back upon his
achievement, and recanted the corruption he had learned from Hawthorne:
ART
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate;
A flame to melt--a wind to freeze;
Sad patience--joyous energies;
Humility--yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study;--love and hate:
Audacity--reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel--art.
Apropos of the two letters last quoted, Mr. Julian Hawthorne says: “Mr.
Melville was probably quite as entertaining and somewhat less abstruse,
when his communications were by word of mouth. Mrs. Hawthorne used to
tell of one evening when he came in, and presently began to relate the
story of a fight which he had seen on an island in the Pacific, between
some savages, and of the prodigies of valour one of them performed with
a heavy club. The narrative was extremely graphic; and when Melville
had gone, and Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne were talking over his visit, the
latter said, ‘Where is that club with which Mr. Melville was laying
about him so?’ Mr. Hawthorne thought he must have taken it with him;
Mrs. Hawthorne thought he had put it in the corner; but it was not
to be found. The next time Melville came, they asked him about it;
whereupon it appeared that the club was still in the Pacific island, if
it were anywhere.”
In the entry in his journal for July 30, 1851, Hawthorne wrote:
“Proceeding homeward, we were overtaken by a cavalier on horseback,
who saluted me in Spanish, to which I replied by touching my hat. But,
the cavalier renewing his salutation, I regarded him more attentively,
and saw that it was Herman Melville! So we all went homeward together,
talking as we went. Soon Mr. Melville alighted, and put Julian in the
saddle; and the little man was highly pleased, and sat on the horse
with the freedom and fearlessness of an old equestrian, and had a ride
of at least a mile homeward. I asked Mrs. Peters to make some tea for
Herman Melville, and so she did; and after supper I put Julian to bed,
and Melville and I had a talk about time and eternity, things of this
world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and
impossible matters, that lasted pretty deep into the night. At last he
rose, and saddled his horse and rode off to his own domicile, and I
went to bed....”
On August 8, 1851, Hawthorne reports in his journal: “To-day Herman
Melville and the two Duyckincks came in a barouche, and we all went to
visit the Shaker establishment at Hancock.” Of the Shakers, Hawthorne
wrote: “They are certainly the most singular and bedevilled set of
people that ever existed in a civilised land.” One wonders what would
have been Hawthorne’s report of the valley of Typee.
The next letter acknowledges a lost communication from Hawthorne. It is
dated, in Hawthorne’s writing: “received July 24, 1851.”
“MY DEAR HAWTHORNE: This is not a letter, or even a note, but merely
a passing word to you said over your garden gate. I thank you for
your easy flowing long letter (received yesterday), which flowed
through me, and refreshed all my meadows, as the Housatonic--opposite
me--does in reality. I am now busy with various things, not
incessantly though; but enough to require my frequent tinkering; and
this is the height of the haying season, and my nag is dragging home
his winter’s dinners all the time. And so, one way and another, I am
not a disengaged man, but shall be very soon. Meanwhile, the earliest
good chance I get, I shall roll down to you, my good fellow, seeing
we--that is, you and I--must hit upon some little bit of vagabondage
before autumn comes. Greylock--we must go and vagabondise there. But
ere we start, we must dig a deep hole, and bury all Blue Devils,
there to abide till the last Day.... Good-bye.”
HIS X MARK.
And the last letter is a dithyramb of gratitude to Hawthorne for a
letter of Hawthorne’s (would that it survived!) in appreciation of
_Moby-Dick_.
“PITTSFIELD, Monday Afternoon.
“MY DEAR HAWTHORNE:
“People think that if a man has undergone any hardship he should
have a reward; but for my part, I have done the hardest possible
day’s work, and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper
comfortably--why, then I don’t think I deserve any reward for my hard
day’s work--for am I not at peace? Is not my supper good? My peace
and my supper are my rewards, my dear Hawthorne. So your joy-giving
and exultation-breeding letter is not my reward for my ditcher’s work
with that book, but is the good goddess’s bonus over and above what
was stipulated for--for not one man in five cycles, who is wise,
will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of
them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is love appreciated? Why, ever since
Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory--the world?
Then we pigmies must be content to have our paper allegories but
ill comprehended. I say your appreciation is my glorious gratuity.
In my proud, humble way,--a shepherd-king,--I was lord of a little
vale in the solitary Crimea; but you have now given me the crown of
India. But on trying it on my head, I found it fell down on my ears,
notwithstanding their asinine length--for it’s only such ears that
sustain such crowns.
“Your letter was handed to me last night on the road going to Mr.
Morewood’s, and I read it there. Had I been at home, I would have
sat down at once and answered it. In me divine magnanimities are
spontaneous and instantaneous--catch them while you can. The world
goes round, and the other side comes up. So now I can’t write
what I felt. But I felt pantheistic then--your heart beat in my
ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s. A sense of unspeakable
security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood
the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the
lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine
with you and all the Gods in old Rome’s Pantheon. It is a strange
feeling--no hopelessness is in it, no despair. Content--that is it;
and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now
of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling.
“Whence came you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my
flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips--lo, they are yours and
not mine. I feel that the God-head is broken up like the bread at the
Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity
of feeling. Now, sympathising with the paper, my angel turns over
another leaf. You did not care a penny for the book. But, now and
then as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled
the book--and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel
enough to praise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul. Once you
hugged the ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in the mouth, and
heard the rushing of the demon,--the familiar,--and recognised the
sound; for you have heard it in your own solitudes.
“My dear Hawthorne, the atmospheric scepticisms steal over me now,
and make me doubtful of my sanity in writing you thus. But, believe
me, I am not mad, most noble Festus! But truth is ever incoherent,
and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little
stunning. Farewell. Don’t write me a word about the book. That
would be robbing me of my miserable delight. I am heartily sorry I
ever wrote anything about you--it was paltry. Lord, when shall we
be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have
done nothing. So, now, let us add _Moby-Dick_ to our blessing, and
step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish;--I have heard of
Krakens.
“This is a long letter, but you are not at all bound to answer it.
Possibly if you do answer it, and direct it to Herman Melville, you
will missend it--for the very fingers that now guide this pen are
not precisely the same that just took it up and put it to the paper.
Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! it is a long stage, and no
inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with you for a
passenger, I am content and can be happy. I shall leave the world,
I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing
you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.
“What a pity that, for your plain, bluff letter, you should get such
gibberish! Mention me to Mrs. Hawthorne and to the children, and so,
good-bye to you, with my blessing.
“HERMAN.
“P. S. I can’t stop yet. If the world was entirely made up of
Magians, I’ll tell you what I should do. I should have a paper-mill
established at one end of the house, and so have an extra riband for
foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I
should write a thousand--a million--a billion thoughts, all under the
form of a letter to you. The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet
responds. Which is the bigger? A foolish question--they are _one_.
“H.
“P. P. S. Don’t think that by writing me a letter, you shall always
be bored with an immediate reply to it--and so keep both of us
delving over a writing-desk eternally. No such thing! I sha’n’t
always answer your letters and you may do just as you please.”
Hawthorne had written Melville a “plain, bluff letter,” and in reply
was to be told, with “infinite fraternity,” that “the god-head is
broken up like the bread at the Supper” and that he was one of the
pieces. Melville had dedicated _Moby-Dick_ to Hawthorne, and Hawthorne
made some sort of acknowledgment of the tribute. Melville, shrewdly
suspected him, however, of caring “not a penny” for the book, but in
archangelical charity praising less the “imperfect body” than the
“pervading thought” which “now and then” he understood.
_Moby-Dick_ was an allegory, of course--but withal an allegory of a
solidity and substance that must have appeared to Hawthorne little
short of grossly shocking. Hawthorne had been praised from his “airy
and charming insubstantiality.” And of himself he wrote, with engaging
candour: “Whether from lack of power, or an unconquerable reserve,
the Author’s touches have often an effect of tameness.” Hawthorne’s
“reserve” is, of course, all myth. Both Hawthorne and Melville, though
each a recluse in life, overflow to the reader. And as Brownell says
of Hawthorne: “He does not tell very much, but apparently he tells
everything.” But to Hawthorne, Melville’s overflowing, like a spring
freshet, or a tidal wave, must have been little less than appalling.
Hawthorne’s was eminently a neat, fastidious style, as free from any
eccentricity or excess as from any particular pungency or colour.
Melville’s was extravagant, capricious, vigorous, and “unliterary”: the
energy of his undisciplined genius is its most significant quality.
After all, was it possible for Hawthorne to feel any deep sympathy for
Melville’s passionate enthusiasms, for Melville’s catholic toleration,
for Melville’s quenchless curiosity, for Melville’s varied laughter,
for Melville’s spiritual daring? It is true that Hawthorne found
Story’s “Cleopatra”--inspired, it might appear, by a fancy of the
young Victoria in discreet negligée--“a terrible, dangerous woman,
quite enough for the moment, but very like to spring upon you like a
tigress.” He never visited George Eliot because there was another Mrs.
Lewes. He was much troubled by the nude in art. He pronounced Margaret
Fuller’s “in many respects,” a “defective and evil nature,” and
“Providence was kind in putting her and her clownish husband and their
child on board that fated ship.” It is true that he wrote a graceful if
not very genial introductory essay--once mistaken for a marvel quite
eclipsing “Elia”--to relieve the dark tone of _The Scarlet Letter_. And
it is also true that he accepted the adoration of his wife with the
utmost gravity and appreciation. Mrs. Hawthorne, in one of her letters
to her mother, by a transition in praise of Hawthorne’s eyes--“They
give, but receive not”--comments at some length, on her husband’s
“mighty heart,” that “opens the bosom of men.” “So Mr. Melville,” she
says, “generally silent and incommunicative, pours out the rich floods
of his mind and experience to him, so sure of appreciation, so sure of
a large and generous interpretation.”
What interpretation Hawthorne gave to _Moby-Dick_ has not transpired.
Hawthorne mentions _Moby-Dick_ once in his published works. In the
_Wonder Book_ he says: “On the hither side of Pittsfield sits Herman
Melville, shaping out the gigantic conception of his white whale, while
the gigantic shape of Greylock looms upon him from his study window.”
Only one available Hawthorne-Melville document is still unprinted: the
“Agatha” letter, mentioned by Mr. Julian Hawthorne. But the “Agatha”
letter says nothing of _Moby-Dick_; and though of impressive bulk, its
biographical interest is too slight to merit its publication.
Born in hell-fire, and baptised in an unspeakable name, _Moby-Dick_
is, with _The Scarlet Letter_, among the few very notable literary
achievements of American literature. There has been published no
criticism of Melville more beautiful or more profound than the essay
of E. L. Grant Watson on _Moby-Dick_ (_London Mercury_, December,
1920). It is Mr. Watson’s contention in this essay, that the _Pequod_,
with her monomaniac captain and all her crew, is representative of
Melville’s own genius, and in the particular sense that each character
is deliberately symbolic of a complete and separate element. Because
of the prodigal richness of material in _Moby-Dick_, the breadth and
vitality and solid substance of the setting of the allegory, the
high quality of _Moby-Dick_ as a psychological synthesis has very
generally been lost sight of. Like Bunyan, or Swift, Melville has
enforced his moral by giving an independent and ideal verisimilitude
to its innocent and unconscious exponents. The self-sustaining
vitality of Melville’s symbols has been magnificently vouched for by
Mr. Masefield in his vision of the final resurrection. And the superb
irony--whether unconscious or intended--of _Moby-Dick’s_ “towing
the ship our Lord was in, with all the sweet apostles aboard of
her,” would surely have delighted Melville. _Pilgrim’s Progress_ is
undoubtedly a tract; but, as Brownell observes, if it had been only
a tract, it would never have achieved universal canonisation. Both
_Pilgrim’s Progress_ and _Moby-Dick_ are works of art in themselves,
each leaning lightly--though of course to all the more purpose--on
its moral. Most persons probably read _Gulliver_ for the story, and
miss the satire. In the same way, a casual reader of _Moby-Dick_
may skip the more transcendental passages and classify it as a book
of adventure. It is indeed a book of adventure, but upon the highest
plane of spiritual daring. Ahab is, of course, the atheistical captain
of the tormented soul; and his crew, so Melville says, is “chiefly
made of mongrel renegades, and cast-aways and cannibals.” And Ahab is
“morally enfeebled, also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or
rightmindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollitry of indifference
or recklessness of Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity of Flash!”
But Ahab is Captain; and his madness is of such a quality that the
white whale and all that is there symbolised, needs must render its
consummation, or its extinction. On the waste of the Pacific, ship
after ship passes the _Pequod_, some well laden, others bearing awful
tidings: yet all are sane. The _Pequod_ alone, against contrary winds,
sails on into that amazing calm, that extraordinary mildness, in which
she is destroyed by _Moby-Dick_. “There is a wisdom that is woe, and
there is a woe that is madness.” And in _Moby-Dick_, the woe and the
wisdom are mingled in the history of a soul’s adventure.
Though _Moby-Dick_ is not only an allegory, but an allegory designed
to teach woeful wisdom, nowhere in literature, perhaps, can one find
such uncompromising despair so genially and painlessly administered.
Indeed, the despair of _Moby-Dick_ is as popularly missed as is the
vitriolic bitterness of _Gulliver_. There is an abundance of humour in
_Moby-Dick_, of course: and there is mirth in much of the laughter.
In _Moby-Dick_, it would appear, Melville has made pessimism a gay
science. “Learn to laugh, my young friends,” Nietzsche counsels, “if
you are at all determined to remain pessimists.” If there are tears,
he smiles gallantly as he brushes them aside. “There are certain
queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life,”
Melville says, “when a man takes this whole universe for a vast
practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discovers, and
more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.
There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and
easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I regard this
whole voyage of the _Pequod_, and the great white whale its object.”
And for the most part, he does. But he declares, withal, that “the
truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books
is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.
All is vanity. ALL.” _Moby-Dick_ was built upon a foundation of this
wisdom, and this woe; and so keenly did Melville feel the poignancy of
this woe, so isolated was he in his surrender to this wisdom, that this
wisdom and this woe, which he had learned from Solomon and from Christ,
he felt to be of that quality which in our cowardice we call madness.