[Illustration:
_J. O. Eaton, pinx._
HERMAN MELVILLE]
HERMAN MELVILLE
LEWIS MUMFORD
HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC., RAHWAY, N. J. TYPOGRAPHY BY ROBERT S. JOSEPHY
PREFACE
This is a study of Herman Melville’s life and thought. In interpreting Melville’s life I have relied primarily on his own writings, including his letters, some of which are still unpublished, and his notebooks. There are occasional blank spaces in Melville’s history, but the record is singularly complete in that part of Melville which most matters: his ideas, his feelings, his urges, his vision of life. I have verified and corrected these data by the use of every available piece of independent evidence; and I must express my hearty thanks to Mrs. Frances Thomas, Melville’s surviving daughter, for answering my written questions, and to his granddaughter, Mrs. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, for giving me the benefit of her own memories and family tradition, as well as her courtesy and hospitality in placing at my disposal Melville’s manuscripts. I am likewise indebted to Miss Caroline W. Stewart, an old friend of the Melville family, for her impressions of the Melville household during the later period of his life.
These pages could not have been written without Mr. Raymond Weaver’s pioneer work on Melville. Mr. Weaver not merely brought to light much important data and cleared up relationships that concerned Melville’s objective life: he also, through Mrs. Metcalf, discovered Melville’s unpublished manuscripts and included them in a definitive edition of his work. For this, he has placed every admirer of Melville in his debt. In addition to acknowledging this great service, I must thank him for the scholarly generosity with which he gave me the benefit of his intimate knowledge of Melville’s remains, and his copies of Melville’s notebooks. Mr. Weaver’s generosity is equalled only by that of Dr. Henry A. Murray, Jr., who shared with me his knowledge of certain Melville letters otherwise inaccessible--an act of pure chivalry, since Dr. Murray is himself at work on a biography of Herman Melville. Such deeds sweeten one’s notions of human conduct: they give one not so much a feeling of gratitude as a renewed sense of human dignity, and I warmly place them on record.
In describing Melville’s experience and his state of mind, I have taken the liberty of using his own language wherever possible; and I have done this so freely that, except where I have quoted whole passages, I have omitted quotation marks. In condensing and paraphrasing the notebooks of Melville’s travels, I have usually employed Melville’s own words; for it would be a vain biographer who did not make full use of Melville’s sharp descriptions and striking epithets. If I have been frank and unreserved in dealing with the difficult parts of Melville’s life, I have been no more so than I think he would have wished, nor more candid than he himself was in treating Pierre. “In reserves,” he wrote, “men build imposing characters.” Melville’s worth, as a man and a poet, has no need for a reputation so created. My purpose has not been to embalm Melville but to bring him to life; and one cannot know or sympathize with the man unless one shares his vicissitudes as well as his triumphs.
Certain portions of this book have appeared, with slight changes and abbreviations, in The New Republic, The American Mercury, and The Saturday Review of Literature.
Lewis Mumford.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE 1
OLYMPIAN
CHAPTER ONE: BITTER MORNING 9
CHAPTER TWO: SEA-DRIFT 40
CHAPTER THREE: TROPICAL SUMMER 63
CHAPTER FOUR: AZZAGEDDI 86
CHAPTER FIVE: THE TARTARUS OF AUTHORS 108
TITAN
CHAPTER SIX: RED CLOVER 135
CHAPTER SEVEN: MOBY-DICK 158
CHAPTER EIGHT: AMOR, THREATENING 196
CHAPTER NINE: TIMONISM 223
PILGRIM
CHAPTER TEN: TROUBLED FOOTSTEPS 259
CHAPTER ELEVEN: ALARUMS AND RETREATS 292
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE FLOWERING ALOE 326
EPILOGUE 359
INDEX 371
Your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter; and now I’ll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To begin: there’s Aries, or the Ram--lecherous dog, he begets us; then Taurus, or the Bull--he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins--that is Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue when lo! comes Cancer the Crab and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring lion, lies in the path--he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape and hail Virgo, the Virgin; that’s our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra or the Scales--happiness weighed and found wanting! and while we are very sad about that Lord! how we suddenly jump as Scorpio or the Scorpion stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound when whang come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck the shafts, stand aside! here’s the battering ram, Capricornus or the Goat, full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces or the Fish we sleep.
Moby-Dick.
PROLOGUE
PROLOGUE
When Herman Melville died in 1891, the literary journal of the day, The Critic, did not even know who he was. The editors rose bravely to the occasion and copied a paragraph about him from a compendium of American literature; and in the weeks that followed they reprinted various commentaries on Melville and his work that were carried in the correspondence columns of the New York newspapers.
The older generation remembered that Herman Melville had once been famous. He had adventured in the South Seas on a whaler; he had lived among the cannibals; and in Typee and Omoo he had made a romantic pastiche of his experiences. On these books Mr. Melville’s fame had been founded: it was a pity he had not done more in this line; for his later books, obscure books, crowded books, books that could be called neither fiction nor poetry nor philosophy nor downright useful information, forfeited the interest of a public that liked to take its pleasures methodically. Both the fame and the later absence of recognition, Mr. Melville’s commentators agreed, were deserved. By his interest in Sir Thomas Browne and metaphysics, Mr. Melville had carried his readers into a realm much too remote, and an air too rarefied: a flirtation with a South Sea maiden, warm, brown, palpable, was one thing: but the shark that glides white through the sulphurous sea was quite another. In Moby-Dick, so criticism went, Melville had become obscure: and this literary failure condemned him to personal obscurity.
The writer about whom all these sage banalities were written shares with Walt Whitman, I think, the distinction of being the greatest imaginative writer that America has produced: his epic, Moby-Dick, is one of the supreme poetic monuments of the English language: and in depth of experience and religious insight there is scarcely any one in the nineteenth century, with the exception of Dostoyevsky, who can be placed beside him. To his contemporaries, the greatness of Melville was an enigma: they valued him for those lesser virtues in which he more closely resembled themselves. They had no place, on their matter-of-fact plane, with its confident flat-footed science, and its many odd and useful inventions, for the crosslights of Melville’s imagination, for his oblique revelations, for his habit of questioning the foundations upon which their vast superstructure of comfort and complacency was erected. “What we want, sir, is facts!”--and though Melville gave them facts, they resented his white vision, because it froze the facts into a state that defied their easy assimilation. When they charged Melville with obscurity, they did not realize, perhaps, that sight demands not merely an object that can be seen, but an eye that is capable of seeing; and it never occurred to them, with all their doubts about Melville, that the defective vision might be their own.