Melville

“ Melville, a ringleted English lady, or of Portuguese with the Countess, who likewise sipped chocolate and fingered dry toast, and was mournfully melodious. The Hon. Melville, as became a tall islander, carved beef, and ate of it, like a ruler of men. Beautiful to see was the compassionate sympathy of the Countess’s face when Rose offered her plate for a portion of the world-subjugating viand, as who should say: “Sweet child! thou knowest not yet of sorrows, thou canst ballast thy stomach with beef!” ”

“ My own, own Pierre! Pierre, into ten trillion pieces I could now be torn for thee; in my bosom would yet hide thee, and there keep thee warm, though I sat down on Arctic ice-floes, frozen to a corpse. My own, best, blessed Pierre! Now, could I plant some poniard in me, that my silly ailings should have power to move thee thus, and pain thee thus. Forgive me, Pierre; thy changed face hath chased the other from me; the fright of thee exceeds all other frights. It does not so haunt me now. Press hard my hand; look hard on me, my love, that its last trace may pass away. ”

“ But suddenly, upon the wan features turned so anxiously toward Melville, there came a change which even his inexperienced eye was swift to interpret.
With a strength born of excitement,—or given by God,—he forced his useless body downward upon the lounge until he could clasp and hold his grandmother’s head against his breast.
Then a rapture, born of her great love for him and of her gratitude for his unwonted tenderness, illumined the aged face: “My darling—my darling!” she cried faintly. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Our Halbert Melville is famed and honoured; a wise and earnest minister, faithful and fervent in his pulpit, unwearying in daily labour. His gentle Mary becomes the sweet dignity of her matronhood well, rejoicing in the happy guardianship of these fair children. Nor is the other Mary less blessed: the liberal heavens have rained down gifts upon them all; seed-time and harvest, summer and winter, have passed over their heads ”

“ From his youth, Melville had felt the flagrant and stubborn discord between aspiration and fact. He was born with an imagination of very extraordinary vigour, and with a constitution of corresponding vitality. In sheer capacity to feel, most American writers look pale beside him. Fired by his rebellious imagination, and abetted by his animal courage, he sallied forth in quest of happiness. Few men have ever compassed such a span of experience as he crowded within the thirty-two years of his quest; few men have lived with such daring, with such intensity. ”

“ Melville is a calm person, and does not like raptures. His family consists of five children. Christian—whose history we have already glanced at, summed up in her precious relics—is the eldest; then, there is the bridegroom, James, an excellent well-disposed young man, just about to form a connection after his father’s own heart; next in order comes the genius of the family, gay, talented, excitable, generous Halbert, over whose exuberance of heart his correct parent shakes his head ominously. ”

“ But our soul’s arches underfit into its; and so, prevent the upper arch from falling on us with unsustainable inscrutableness. “Explain ye my deeper mystery,” said the shepherd Chaldean king, smiting his breast, lying on his back upon the plain; “and then, I will bestow all my wonderings upon ye, ye stately stars!” So, in some sort, with Pierre. Explain thou this strange integral feeling in me myself, he thought—turning upon the fancied face—and I will then renounce all other wonders, to gaze wonderingly at thee. But thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! ”

“ Again I tell thee, I will do any thing—yes, any thing that Pierre commands—for, though outer ill do lower upon us, still, deep within, thou wilt be careful, very careful with me, Pierre?”
“Thou art made of that fine, unshared stuff of which God makes his seraphim. But thy divine devotedness to me, is met by mine to thee. Well mayest thou trust me, Isabel; and whatever strangest thing I may yet propose to thee, thy confidence,—will it not bear me out? Surely thou will not hesitate to plunge, when I plunge first;—already have I plunged! now thou canst not stay upon the bank. ”

“ There he sits, a strange exotic, transplanted from the delectable alcoves of the old manorial mansion, to take root in this niggard soil. No more do the sweet purple airs of the hills round about the green fields of Saddle Meadows come revivingly wafted to his cheek. Like a flower he feels the change; his bloom is gone from his cheek; his cheek is wilted and pale.
From the lofty window of that beggarly room, what is it that Pierre is so intently eying? There is no street at his feet; like a profound black gulf the open area of the quadrangle gapes beneath him. ”

“ Ah, what a picture of woe we see before us. There in the solemn night, robed in? long, plainly constructed garment of pure white, buttoned at the throat in a negligent manner, stands Mr. Melville with his bare, tall brow glistening in the flickering rays of a kerosene lamp, which he holds in his hand, while on the front porch stands the wife who a few years ago promised to defend and protect him. She is a little unsteady on her feet, and her hat is out of plumb. She tries to be facetious, and asks him if that is where Mr. Melville lives. ”

“ There is a door in Pierre's room opposite the window of Pierre: and now a soft knock is heard in that direction, accompanied by gentle words, asking whether the speaker might enter.
'Yes, always, sweet Isabel,' answered Pierre, rising and approaching the door;—'here: let us drag out the old camp-bed for a sofa; come, sit down now, my sister, and let us fancy ourselves anywhere thou wilt.'
'Then, my brother, let us fancy ourselves in realms of everlasting twilight and peace, where no bright sun shall rise, because the black night is always its follower. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the west pave, up and down, for three long miles, two streams of glossy, shawled, or broadcloth life unceasingly brushed by each other, as long, resplendent, drooping trains of rival peacocks brush.
Mixing with neither of these, Pierre stalked midway between. From his wild and fatal aspect, one way the people took the wall, the other way they took the curb. Unentangledly Pierre threaded all their host, though in its inmost heart. ”

“ To their young children, fathers are not wont to unfold themselves entirely, Pierre. There are a thousand and one odd little youthful peccadilloes, that we think we may as well not divulge to them, Pierre. Consider this strange, ambiguous smile, Pierre; more narrowly regard this mouth. Behold, what is this too ardent and, as it were, unchastened light in these eyes, Pierre? I am thy father, boy. There was once a certain, oh, but too lovely young Frenchwoman, Pierre. Youth is hot, and temptation strong, Pierre; and in the minutest moment momentous things are irrevocably done, Pierre ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Catching that hilly air, the prancing horses neighed; laughed on the ground with gleeful feet. Felt they the gay delightsome spurrings of the day; for the day was mad with excessive joy; and high in heaven you heard the neighing of the horses of the sun; and down dropt their nostrils’ froth in many a fleecy vapor from the hills.
From the plains, the mists rose slowly; reluctant yet to quit so fair a mead. At those green slopings, Pierre reined in his steeds, and soon the twain were seated on the bank, gazing far, and far away ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not day! Were this thing so, I should go mad, and be shut up, and not walk here where every door is open to me.—My own only son married to an unknown—thing! My own only son, false to his holiest plighted public vow—and the wide world knowing to it! He bears my name—Glendinning. I will disown it; were it like this dress, I would tear my name off from me, and burn it till it shrivelled to a crisp!—Pierre! Pierre! come back, come back, and swear it is not so! It cannot be! Wait: I will ring the bell and see if it be so,'
She rung the bell with violence, and soon heard a responsive knock. ”

“ Thou art a visible token, Pierre, of the invisible angel-hoods, which in our darker hours we do sometimes distrust. The gospel of thy acts goes very far, my brother. Were all men like to thee, then were there no men at all,—mankind extinct in seraphim!'
'Praises are for the base, my sister, cunningly to entice them to fair Virtue by our ignorings of the ill in them, and our imputings of the good not theirs. So make not my head to hang, sweet Isabel. ”

“ Through stove, pipe, and flue, it hath mounted in flame, and gone as a scroll to heaven! It shall appear again, my brother.—Woe is me—woe, woe!—woe is me, oh, woe! Do not speak to me, Pierre; leave me now. She shall come. The Bad angel shall tend the Good; she shall dwell with us, Pierre. Mistrust me not; her considerateness to me, shall be outdone by mine to her.—Let me be alone now, my brother. ”

“ In England, Melville was flattered not only by vitriolic evangelistical damnation, and the uncritical flatter of Gansevoort’s friends, but even Blackwood’s, the most anti-American of British journals, said of Omoo: “Musing the other day over our matutinal hyson, the volume itself was laid before us, and we found ourselves in the society of Marquesan Melville, the Phœnix of modern voyages—springing, it would seem, from the mingled ashes of Captain Cook and Robinson Crusoe.” ”

“ The whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the white curling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped—
Melville is a master of violent, chaotic physical motion; he can keep up a whole wild chase without a flaw. He is as perfect at creating stillness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Oh, seems to me, there should be two ceaseless steeds for a bold man to ride,—the Land and the Sea; and like circus-men we should never dismount, but only be steadied and rested by leaping from one to the other, while still, side by side, they both race round the sun. I have been on the Land steed so long, oh I am dizzy!”
“Thou wilt never listen to me, Pierre,” said Lucy lowly; “there is no need of this incessant straining. See, Isabel and I have both offered to be thy amanuenses;—not in mere copying, but in the original writing; I am sure that would greatly assist thee.” ”