book I love best of his,” says Mr. Masefield, “is one very difficult

to come by. I think it is his first romance, and I believe it has

never been reprinted here. It is the romance of his own boyhood. I

mean _Redburn_. Any number of good pens will praise the known books,

_Typee_ and _Omoo_ and _Moby-Dick_ and _White-Jacket_, and will tell

their qualities of beauty and romance. Perhaps _Redburn_ will have

fewer praises, so here goes for _Redburn_; a boy’s book about running

away to sea.” Even more difficult of access is _Pierre_--a book at

the antipodes from _Redburn_. Far from being a boy’s book, _Pierre_

was prophetic of the pessimism of Hardy and the subtlety of Meredith.

From _Redburn_ to _Pierre_; from _Typee_, a spirited travel-book on

Polynesia, to _Clarel_, an intricate philosophical poem in two volumes:

these mark the antithetical extremes of the art that mated poetry and

blubber, whaling and metaphysics. The very complexity and versatility

of Melville’s achievement has been an obstacle in the way of his just

appreciation. Had Mandeville turned from his _Travels_, to write _The

City of Dreadful Night_, the incompatibility would have been no less

extraordinary or bewildering.

Indeed, Melville’s complete works, in their final analysis, are a

long effort towards the creation of one of the most complex, and

massive, and original characters in literature: the character known

in life as Herman Melville. “I am like one of those seeds taken out

of the Egyptian Pyramids,” he wrote to Hawthorne while he was in the

middle of _Moby-Dick_, “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. 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

_managed_ the truth with a view to popular conservatism.”

Blighted by disillusionment, and paralysed by doubt, Melville came to

treat as an irrelevancy, the making of books. “He informed me that he

had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated,’” wrote Hawthorne

in his _Note-book_, after Melville visited him in Southport, England,

in 1856; “but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation. It

is strange how he persists--as he has persisted ever since I knew him,

and probably long before--in wandering to and fro over these deserts,

as dismal and monotonous as the sandhills amidst which we were sitting.

He can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is

too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” If,

in contempt for the orthodox interpolations by which pious scribes

attempted to sweeten Solomon’s bitter message, Melville ever _managed_

truth as he saw it, it was more to violate popular conservatism

than to propitiate it. “We incline to think that God cannot explain

His own secrets,” he editorially wrote Hawthorne in 1851, “and that

He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We

mortals astonish Him as much as He us.” And as Melville grew in

disillusionment, he grew in astonishment. In his relentless pessimism

he boasted himself “in the happy condition of judicious, unencumbered

travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with

nothing but a carpet bag,--that is to say, the Ego.” It was his ripest

conviction that the exclamation point and the triumphant perpendicular

pronoun were interchangeable signs. But to the end, he bristled with

minor revelations.

Though he boasted that he crossed the frontier into Eternity with

nothing but a carpet bag, he had, in fact, sent more bulky consignments

on ahead. And at the final crack of doom, this dead and disappointed

mariner may yet rise to an unexpected rejoicing. For at that time of

ultimate reckoning, according to the eschatology of Mr. Masefield,

“then the great white whale, old Moby-Dick, the king of all the whales,

will rise up from his quiet in the sea, and go bellowing to his mates.

And all the whales in the world--the sperm-whales, the razor-back,

the black-fish, the rorque, the right, the forty-barrel Jonah, the

narwhal, the hump-back, the grampus and the thrasher--will come to him,

‘fin-out,’ blowing their spray to the heavens. Then Moby-Dick will call

the roll of them, and from all the parts of the sea, from the north,

from the south, from Callao to Rio, not one whale will be missing. Then

Moby-Dick will trumpet, like a man blowing a horn, and all that company

of whales will ‘sound’ (that is, dive), for it is they that have the

job of raising the wrecks from down below.

“Then when they come up the sun will just be setting in the sea, far

away to the west, like a ball of red fire. And just as the curve of it

goes below the sea, it will stop sinking and lie there like a door.

And the stars and the earth and the wind will stop. And there will be

nothing but the sea, and this red arch of the sun, and the whales with

the wrecks, and a stream of light upon the water. Each whale will have

raised a wreck from among the coral, and the sea will be thick with

them--row-ships and sail-ships, and great big seventy-fours, and big

White Star boats, and battleships, all of them green with the ooze,

but all of them manned by singing sailors. And ahead of them will go

Moby-Dick, towing the ship our Lord was in, with all the sweet apostles

aboard of her. And Moby-Dick will give a great bellow, like a fog-horn

blowing, and stretch ‘fin-out’ for the sun away in the west. And all

the whales will bellow out an answer. And all the drowned sailors will

sing their chanties, and beat the bells into a music. And the whole

fleet of them will start towing at full speed towards the sun, at the

edge of the sky and water. I tell you they will make white water, those

ships and fishes.

“When they have got to where the sun is, the red ball will swing open

like a door, and Moby-Dick, and all the whales, and all the ships

will rush through it into an anchorage in Kingdom Come. It will be

a great calm piece of water, with land close aboard, where all the

ships of the world will lie at anchor, tier upon tier, with the hands

gathered forward, singing. They’ll have no watches to stand, no ropes

to coil, no mates to knock their heads in. Nothing will be to do except

singing and beating on the bell. And all the poor sailors who went

in patched rags, my son, they’ll be all fine in white and gold. And

ashore, among the palm-trees, there’ll be fine inns for the seamen.”

And there, among a numerous company, will be Fayaway, and Captain Ahab,

and Jack Chase, and Jarl, and Toby, and Pierre, and Father Mapple, and

Jackson, and Doctor Long Ghost, and Kory-Kory, and Bildad, and Peleg,

and Fedallah, and Tashetego, and Marnoo, and Queequeg. But it seems

hardly likely that Melville will there find Hawthorne to tempt by a

basket of champagne into some little shady corner, there to cross their

legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and to discourse

pleasantly of all the things manifold which once so much distressed

them. In my Father’s house are many mansions.