Raymond M. Weaver

“ But it was Doctor Long Ghost—he who so mocked the captain—who figures most largely in Melville’s history: a man remarkable both in appearance and in personality. He was over six feet—a tower of bones, with a bloodless complexion, fair hair and a pale unscrupulous grey eye that twinkled occasionally with the very devil of mischief. At the beginning of the cruise of the Julia, as ship’s doctor, he had lived in the cabin with the captain. ”

“ 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 ”

“ But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to all.” The key he here offers to the heart of his mystery is itself locked in mystery; though when he compared himself to Narcissus tormented by the irony of being two, Melville may have been hotter on the trail of the truth than he was aware. His deepest insight, perhaps, came to him one midnight, out on the Pacific, where in the glare and the wild Hindoo odour of the tryworks of a whaler in full operation, he fell asleep at the helm. ”

“ None of Melville’s critics seem ever to have been able to forgive him his length of days. “Some men die too soon,” said Nietzsche, “others too late; there is an art in dying at the right time.” Melville’s longevity has done deep harm to his reputation as an artist in dying, and has obscured the phenomenal brilliancy of his early literary accomplishment. The last forty years of his history are a record of a stoical—and sometimes frenzied—distaste for life, a perverse and sedulous contempt for recognition, an interest in solitude, in etchings and in metaphysics. ”

“ Hawthorne must ever enjoy a lofty eminence as one of Melville’s most penetrating critics. Her husband dwelt apart, and less because he found the atmosphere of New England wholly uncongenial than because he shared his wife’s conviction that he was like a star. And shrewdly his wife resented the presence of a second luminary—treacherously veiled and of heaven knows what magnitude!—in her serene New England sky. Time may yet harp her worst fears aright. ”

“ For though at that time Melville was only thirty-two years old, he had crowded into that brief space of life a scope of experience to rival Ulysses’, and a literary achievement of a magnitude and variety to merit all but the highest fame. Still did he luxuriate in tribulation. Well-born, and nurtured in good manners and a cosmopolitan tradition, he was, like George Borrow, and Sir Richard Burton, a gentleman adventurer in the barbarous outposts of human experience. ”

“ Melville made no such capitulation with reality. Between the obdurate world of facts and his ardent and unclarified desires there was always, to the end of his life, a blatant incompatibility. Alongside the hard and cramping world of reality, and in more or less sharp opposition to it, he set up a fictitious world, a world of heart’s desire; and unlike Thoreau, he hugged his dream in jealous defiance of reality. ”

“ The first emissary from the shore to welcome the Acushnet was a visitor in that interesting state of intoxication when a man is amiable and helpless: a south-sea vagabond, once a lieutenant in the English navy, recently appointed pilot to the harbour by the invincible French. He was aided by some benevolent person out of his whale-boat into the Acushnet, and though utterly unable to stand erect or navigate his own body, he magnanimously proffered to steer the ship to a good anchorage: a feat Captain Pease did for himself, despite the amazing volubility of the visitor in contrary commands. ”

“ Melville bitterly resented the fashionable foreign imputation that his was a rootless and upstart people. Through its grilling of bars sinister, he viewed the superior pretensions of monarchical aristocracy with his finger at his nose. “If in America,” he boasted, “the vast mass of families be as the blades of grass, yet some few there are that stand as the oak; which, instead of decaying, annually puts forth new branches; whereby Time, instead of subtracting, is made to capitulate into a multiple virtue.” ”

“ Melville’s friend Williams “was a thorough-going Yankee from Maine, who had been both a pedlar and a pedagogue in his day. He was honest, acute, witty, full of mirth and good humour—a laughing philosopher.” Beyond these, Melville was chary of his friendship, despite the personal intimacies imposed by the crowded conditions on shipboard. For living on board a man-of-war is like living in a market, where you dress on the doorsteps and sleep in the cellar.
Yet even on board the United States Melville did find it possible to get some solitude. ”

“ He was a democrat in the same relentless sense that Dante or Milton were democrats. Lucifer rebelled, let it be remembered, to make Heaven “safe for Democracy:” the first experiment in popular government. “Hell,” says Melville, “is a democracy of devils.” In Mardi, Melville indulges lengthy reflections on a certain “chanticleer people” who boast boisterously of themselves: “Saw ye ever such a land as this? Is it not a great and extensive republic? Pray, observe how tall we are; just feel of our thighs; are we not a glorious people? We are all Kings here; royalty breathes in the common air.” ”

“ Not until three months after his escape from Typee did he regain his normal strength. And, as always, Melville looked back with regret upon leaving the life he had so wanted to escape from while he was in the midst of it. “As the land faded from my sight,” he says, “I was all alive to the change in my condition. But how far short of our expectations is oftentimes the fulfilment of the most ardent hopes. Safe aboard of a ship—so long my earnest prayer—with home and friends once more in prospect, I nevertheless felt weighed down with a melancholy that could not be shaken off.” ”

“ And since Dante had married Gemma Donati, since Petrarch had had children by an unknown concubine, Maria had reason to congratulate herself that Allan evinced for her no adoration of the kind lavished upon the sainted Beatrice or upon the unattainable Laura.
In his approach to marriage, Melville showed none of the prosaic circumspection of his father. From his idealisation of the proud cold purity of Maria, Melville built up a haloed image of the wonder and mystery of sanctified womanhood: without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, terrible, yet serene. ”

“ For Melville, from any point of view, is one of the most distinguished of our writers, and there is something ludicrous in being before all the world—as, assuredly, we sometimes are—in recognising our own merit where it is contestable, and in neglecting it where it is not.
It has been our tradition to cherish our literature for its embodiment of Queen Victoria’s fireside qualities. The repudiation of this tradition—as a part of our repudiation of all tradition—has made fashionable a wholesale contempt for our native product. ”

“ To embody this devastating insight, Melville chooses as a symbol, an albino whale. “Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”
An artist who goes out to find sermons in stones does so at the peril of converting his stone pile into his mausoleum. His danger is excessive, if, having his sermons all ready, he makes it his task to find the stones to fit them. Allegory justifies itself only when the fiction is the fact and the moral the induction; only when its representation is as imaginatively real as its meaning; only when the stones are interesting boulders in a rich and diversified landscape. ”

“ Throughout the cruise, it seems, for upward of a year he had been an efficient sailor, alert in duties, circumspect in his pleasures, liked and respected by his comrades. The ship homeward bound, and he within a few weeks of being a freeman, he heard the boatswain’s mate bawling his name at all the hatchways and along the furtherest recesses of the ship: the Captain wanted him at the mast. Melville’s heart jumped to his throat at the summons, as he hurriedly asked Fluke, the boatswain’s mate at the fore-hatchway, what was wanted of him. ”

“ On board the Highlander Melville was too young yet to have come to a sense of the iniquity of the deadly virtues. He was not thereby, however, tempted to the optimism of despair that preaches that because God is isolated in His Heaven, all is right with the world. Even at seventeen Melville had keenly felt that much in the world needs mending. And at seventeen—more than at any other period—he felt moved to exert himself to set the world aright. Ashipboard, the field of his operations being very limited, he cast a missionary eye upon the rum-soaked profanity and lechery of his ship-mates. ”

“ In Redburn, Melville spends a generous number of pages in celebrating his encounter with a good-for-nothing but courtly youth whom he calls Harry Bolton. “He was one of those small, but perfectly formed beings with curling hair, and silken muscles, who seem to have been born in cocoons. His complexion was a mantling brunette, feminine as a girl’s; his feet were small; his hands were white; and his eyes were large, black and womanly: and, poetry aside, his voice was as the sound of a harp.” How much of Harry Bolton is fact, how much fiction, is impossible to tell. ”

“ When, from such a port as Nantucket or New Bedford, a whaling vessel was preparing to sail, there would be no house, perhaps, without some interest in the cruise. Each took a personal pride in the success of the whalers: a pride clinched by the economic dependence of nearly every soul in the community upon the whalemen’s luck. During the time of continual fetching and carrying preparatory to the sailing in Moby-Dick, no one was more active, it will be remembered, than Aunt Charity Bildad, that lean though kind-hearted old Quakeress of indefatigable spirit. ”

“ In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.”
When, from the mast-head, eyes less abstracted than Melville’s sighted a whale, the daring and excitement of the ensuing pursuit in the whale-boats left Melville less occasion, during such energetic intervals, to luxuriate in high mysteries. ”

“ The greatest of all dreamers conquer their dreams; others, who are great, but not of the greatest, are mastered by them, and Melville was one of these. There is a passage in the works of Edgar Allan Poe that Melville may well have pondered when he awoke at the helm of the Acushnet after looking too long into the glare of the fire: “There are moments when, even to the sober eye of reason, the world of our sad humanity may assume the semblance of a hell; but the imagination of man is no Carathes to explore with impunity its every cavern. ”

“ It is patent fact, however, that with the publication of Moby-Dick, and Hawthorne’s departure from Lenox, Melville’s creative period was at its close. At the age of thirty-two, so brilliant, so intense, so crowded had been the range of experience that burned through him, that at the period of his life when most men are just beginning to strike their gait, Melville found himself looking forward into utter night. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is theoretically possible that Melville, not the world, is right. But one can assent to Melville’s creed only on penalty of destruction; and the race does not welcome annihilation. Hence this world must rejoice in its vengeance upon his blasphemy: and the self-righteous have washed their feet in the blood of the wicked.
After Pierre, any further writing from Melville was both an impertinence and an irrelevancy. No man who really believes that all is vanity can consistently go on taking elaborate pains to popularise his indifference. Schopenhauer did that thing, it is true ”

“ The Pacific, it would appear, was early a place of refuge for men with an insurmountable homesickness for the mud. Melville soon came to believe that the gifts of civilisation to the South Seas were without exception very doubtful blessings; he came to be a special pleader for the barbaric virtues; when these virtues were practised by legitimate barbarians; but the spectacle of such men as Hardy fell beyond the pale of his unusually broad sympathies. Though he was despairingly alert to the vices of Christendom, never was he betrayed into a corrupt hankering to recapitulate into savagery. ”