In a great degree, Herman Melville’s life and work were one. A biography of Melville implies criticism; and no final criticism of his work is possible that does not bring to it an understanding of his personal development. The exotic elements in Melville’s experience have usually been overstressed; the fatality and completeness of his withdrawal from the contemporary scene have been exaggerated; the incidental rocks and rapids and whirlpools have diverted the critic’s attention from the flow of the stream itself. It is with Herman Melville’s strength and energy on the spiritual plane that I shall chiefly deal. He lives for us not because he painted South Sea rainbows, or rectified abuses in authority in the United States Navy: he lives because he grappled with certain great dilemmas in man’s spiritual life, and in seeking to answer them, sounded bottom. He left the clothed and carpeted world of convention, and faced the nakedness of life, death, energy, evil, love, eternity: he drew back the cosy hangings of Victorian parlours, and disclosed the black night outside, dimly lighted with the lights of ancient stars. Had he been a romantic, he would have lived a happy life, buttering his bread with feeble dreams, and swallowing down his regrets with consolatory port: he who wishes to escape the elemental stings of existence need only grasp the outstretched hands of his contemporaries, accept the subterfuge goals they call success in business or journalism, and shrink by means of a padded physical apparatus from the cold reality of the universe itself.
But Melville was a realist, in the sense that the great religious teachers are realists. He saw that horsehair stuffing did not make the universe kinder, and that the oblivion of drink did not make the thing that was forgotten more palatable. His perplexities, his defiances, his torments, his questions, even his failures, all have a meaning for us: whether we renounce the world, as Buddha did, affirm a future transcendence, as Christ did, or, like Whitman, embrace its mingled good-and-evilness, our choice cannot be called enlightened until it has faced the gritty, unassimilable substratum Melville explored. Melville, like Buddha, left a happy and successful career behind him, and plunged into those cold black depths, the depths of the sunless ocean, the blackness of interstellar space; and though he proved that life could not be lived under those conditions, he brought back into the petty triumphs of the age the one element that it completely lacked: the tragic sense of life: the sense that the highest human flight is sustained over an unconquered and perhaps an unconquerable abyss. On the peak of Melville’s vision, a man stands poised as on the spur of a glacier: nature offers no shelter, and humanity does not succour him: he is alone. Will he live or die? One cannot say. But if he returns to the warm valleys and the friendly villages he will be another man; and a part of him, a precious part, will forever remain alone, impregnable.
OLYMPIAN
CHAPTER ONE: BITTER MORNING
The society into which Herman Melville was born was in the fullest sense of the word a provincial one. His heritage and his work united him with that society; and when its occupations were undermined and its customs effaced by the great tide of destruction that marked the Civil War, he himself was intimately involved in its ruin.
By a provincial society I mean one which finds its sources and motives within its own region, and that achieves a certain balance and continuity by a restricted development. To understand Melville’s background, one must think back to a time when New York was only one of a number of Atlantic ports that claimed the commerce of the seas and the wealth that it brought: Salem was almost as important: so were Boston and Baltimore and Charleston: it was little more than the accident of a regular sailing packet line that made New York take the lead in attracting population, that, and the opening of a direct water-route into mid-America, via the Erie Canal, which was still a-building in 1819, the year that Herman Melville was born.
The United States, except as an abstract political entity, scarcely existed. There were eagles on the furniture: there were eagles on the dollars: there were flags and martial birds on mirrors and bedspreads and glass and china: but a good part of the community, certainly in the older, more settled regions, was hardly yet political-minded, still less conscious of a mystic relation with the other parts. During the War of 1812 New England, threatened with economic ruin, was on the point of breaking loose from the political union: and though the national government coined money in quarter dollars, people still referred to such coins as two shillings. If Rip van Winkle was surprised at the changes that had taken place during his long nap, a modern observer of that provincial society would be even more astounded at the lack of them. Whitman, writing a whole generation later, and loathing the notion of secession, still had a consciousness of the individuality and independence of the separate states which the strongest defender of states’ rights never expressed after the Civil War.
This provincial society had its own economic foundations, its own locus, its own seat of authority: it differed in a marked way from that which was developing on the frontier: the drama of one of Cooper’s best books, The Pioneers, is chiefly concerned with that contrast. The frontier society was a flowing and moving one: the only thing that united it was the common flag that waved over it and the Constitution, to which its officers paid their superficial respect. Its members came from anywhere, got a living anyhow, and pushed on, in an uneasy, restless search for more fertile land, wilder creatures, greater distance from their neighbours--or merely, from the habit of locomotion. It was strenuous, uncertain, heroic; but once the settlement was effected, once the town was founded and the building-lots divided and the outlaws rounded up, it was unbearably tame: the excitements of civilized life, the clash of ideas, the conflict of cultures, the absorption of experience, did not occupy the pioneer: even when he adopted the external habits of the red man, his weapons, his tools, his maize and dried meat, he avoided the inner content of his culture. In provincial society we are nearer to Europe, that is, nearer to a settled life, to order, authority, tradition. In every colony there was an historic mixture of nationalities and stocks, and that peculiar to New York, English and Dutch, with a dash of French Huguenots, had at last begun to bubble and ferment: presently a Whitman, a Melville, came out of it.
In provincial society, the family was still a prime reality; and in New York it was not less so, certainly, because of the fact that the Dutch had founded great landed proprietorships, like those of the Gansevoorts to whom Herman Melville belonged on his maternal side. Two hundred years of inherited wealth create family pride and all the futile snobberies of caste: they also create a firm sense of self-possession. Washington Irving, who was one of the conquering English, might laugh at these Dutch burghers and patroons: but from their manorial seats along the Hudson and the Mohawk, the Van Rensselaers and the Schuylers and the Gansevoorts could view this mockery with sleepy disdain. They had only to sit tight to be eminent; as the population grew, the value of the land doubled and quadrupled, and in spite of rent wars and the abolition of feudal privileges, the landed families rose to the top like cream.
The Dutch throve in this expansive environment, on farms that stretched from hilltop to hilltop, as they throve by intensive activity in the lowlands by the Zuyder Zee: if their old canals were covered over and filled up in New Amsterdam, they still had their commodious stone or brick houses in the country; there was one such at Gansevoort, where the Gansevoorts lived, not far from Saratoga. The fine arts did not find disciples among these great families: the Copleys, Trumbulls, Stuarts, Peales had English names: but the crafts were cultivated in great variety: the architecture was straightforward and in minor matters, like the horizontal windows and the peculiar gambrel roof, original: the landscape was well treated; and above all, there was food, wild pigeon and grouse and deer, well-fed beef and succulent ducks and geese and great handsome cheeses. When Herman is a little boy his mother will remember Uncle Peter Gansevoort, at Albany, with a tub of five hundred pickled oysters.
“A thoroughly developed gentleman is always robust and healthy.” When Melville wrote these words he was thinking of the great gentlemen between whose legs he had walked as a little boy, and particularly, perhaps, of one he used to hear about, that grandest of old fellows, General Peter Gansevoort, a mighty soldier during the Revolution and a great figure among men. He had died but seven years before Melville was born; many of his remains, including a portrait by Stuart, were still visible; and his legend stayed on the tongues of those who had known him. Six foot four he was, with an appetite and a digestion fit to keep that colossal frame in motion. Now, among all the pleasures of life, positive health--not mere freedom from disorder and disease--is surely the first: living needs no extra justification when the blood is clear and all the juices are flowing harmoniously. In Melville’s youth even a city lad could sail a boat, tramp into the country, shoot game, experience the active, outdoor life which has always been the mainstay of the aristocracy, and which doubtless explains its ability to conquer and control the urban populace, habituated to the ledger, the bench, the desk, and the foul air thereof. Melville had scarcely reached maturity before some of these natural pleasures were curtailed in the city of his birth, so that, to preserve them, William Cullen Bryant launched the campaign to create Central Park.