Walt Whitman met the Duyckinck brothers: he describes them both as “gentlemanly men” and he could say no worse of any one. “I do not know of any description that it would have pleased them better to hear,” added Whitman. “Both very clerical-looking--thin--wanting in body: men of truly proper style, God help ’em!” But the Duyckincks had a correct, bowing acquaintance with literature: they represented culture, tradition, a knowledge of English grammar; and for a good while they were not the least appreciative of Melville’s critics. If, when they published their Cyclopedia of American Literature, they gave fourteen pages to Longfellow and only three and a half to Melville, they were but reflecting the judgment of gentlemanly men for the next generation. More than thirty years later, Mr. Barrett Wendell and Mr. George Woodberry had advanced no further on the road to appreciation.
6
Melville’s brother, Gansevoort, had procured an advance from Murray on the English edition of Typee; and his new fame and financial success must have made Melville look forward to literature as the source of a permanent livelihood. In that “maturer and larger interior development” that was now taking place in Melville, pride of career supplanted pride of race: it was himself, his own nature, his experiences, his thoughts, that mattered, and not the size of his grandfather’s breeches or the length of that other lineage which perhaps joined him with bonnie Jeanie Melville in the Scots ballad. His racial inheritance had but added to his humiliation; by his own exertions and skill, he had achieved his first triumph. He is now a proper child of the Revolution; he knows, like Napoleon, that men make families quite as much as families make men--and there is no ancestor so powerful as one’s earlier selves.
Melville promptly followed Typee with a sequel of his adventures in the South Seas called Omoo, which signifies rover. In the meanwhile, Gansevoort, who had been the mainstay of the family while Melville was growing up in Albany, had found nothing in the bleak streets and grimy house-fronts of London to lessen his own depression; and he died. The early struggle, which had left such a bitter taste with Herman, had even more fatally taken the heart out of Gansevoort. From the last of his letters home one has the feeling that he resigned from life, rather than that he was suffering from any physical malady. “Selfishly speaking,” he declared, “I have never valued life very much.” The fibre loosened in Gansevoort; the grip relaxed; he passed out. There is no sign in Omoo that Gansevoort’s death was a very profound event for Melville; and yet one suspects that his sadness and hopelessness came in later years to mingle with Melville’s pain.
Omoo is a description of Melville’s life from the day he escaped the Typees to his signing up for another whaling voyage off the coast of Japan: its contents I have already used in telling about his life during that period. The narrative itself is done in the direct, vigorous, rapid style of Typee: if anything, there is more humour in it, and Melville gave himself greater liberties in using the material and embroidering it. Omoo is perhaps the most underrated of Melville’s books. While it solidified the reputation he had gained in Typee, the first book has held first place, because of the unique people and customs Melville dealt with there; whereas Omoo, which is a more raffish tale, and in some respects superior in literary quality, has been treated as if it were but the rinsings of the heady Typeean jug. This is far from being true. The relatively unromantic, if outlandish, quality of these later adventures, with the exception of the mutiny of the Julia’s crew, made him rely more heavily upon his own skill: and although the main incidents are probably accurate, all the characters are focussed with a slight distortion, through Melville’s sense of the comic: Dr. Long Ghost’s adventures and peccadillos are filled out a little, and the venial doctor of Papeetee was treated in such a fashion that the actual character uttered a cry of belligerent protest when the book came to his attention.
Melville’s skill at character-drawing, of which his description of Mehevi and Kory-Kory gave promise in Typee, became in Omoo more firm. Here is a scene in which two minor characters, a land-lubber, Rope Yarn, and an “affable-looking scamp”--Flash Jack--appear only for a minute.
“Flash Jack crosses the forecastle, tin can in hand, and seats himself beside the land-lubber.
“‘Hard fare this, Ropey,’ he begins; ‘hard enough, too, for them that’s knowed better and lived in Lun’nun. I say now, Ropey, s’posing you were back to Holborn this morning, what would you have for breakfast, eh?’
“‘Have for breakfast!’ cried Ropey, in a rapture. ‘Don’t speak of it!’
“‘What ails the fellow?’ here growled an old sea-bear, turning around savagely.
“‘Oh, nothing, nothing,’ said Jack; and then, leaning over to Rope Yarn, he bade him go on, but speak lower.
“‘Well, then,’ said he, in a smugged tone, his eyes lighting up like two lanterns, ‘well, then, I’d go to Mother Mill’s that makes the great muffins: I’d go there, you know, and cock my foot on the ’ob and call for a noggin o’ somethink to begin with.’
“‘And what then, Ropey?’
“‘What then, Flashy,’ continued the poor victim, unconsciously warming up to his theme; ‘why then, I’d draw my chair up and call for Betty, the gal wot tends to the customers. Betty, my dear, says I, you looks charmin’ this mornin’; give me a nice rasher of bacon and h’eggs, Betty, my love; and I wants a pint of h’ale, and three nice hot muffins and butter--and a slice of Cheshire; and Betty, I wants--’
“‘A shark steak and be hanged to you!’ roared Black Dan with an oath.”
This quotation serves not merely to show how immediately and vividly Melville can put before us a forecastle ragging. The passage is interesting for another reason. Despite his admiration for Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson gave rise to one of the parrot judgments about Melville’s work when he said: “At his christening some influential fairy must have been neglected. ‘He shall be able to see, he shall be able to tell, he shall be able to charm,’ said the fairy godmothers; ‘but he shall not be able to _hear_,’ exclaimed the last.” In this passage Stevenson was reproaching Melville for his inadequate rendering of the Marquesan speech, a matter over which there is small cause for wonder, since Melville’s four months among the Typees were followed by four years before he committed the names and words to paper; but the actual fact is just the reverse of Stevenson’s dictum: Melville had a curiously accurate ear; and the little passage just quoted proves it. Here, from an American writer, is perhaps the first clue to the existence of modern cockney. One will not discover that speech in the pages of Thomas Hood’s Punch; one will not discover it in Pickwick Papers or Oliver Twist; what one finds there, as Mr. Bernard Shaw has pointed out, is an earlier urban dialect. In Omoo, on the contrary, Melville gives us the modern forms: the _ink_ ending for _ing_ and the dropped and added aitches. He was almost equally felicitous in rendering the difficult Belfast brogue: his transliteration of _haul_ into _harl_ is a test of it; and only an accurate ear will thus catch the living tongue. Unlike Ruskin, Melville was not a painter with words, but a musician; and in his maturity, his great passages have a musical structure of their own. In a phrase like “a soft seething foamy lull” he uses the sound of lull, rather than its sense, to convey his meaning; and among the modern poets it is natural to find him turning, later in life, to Shelley and to James Thomson.
Omoo was a rambling book: it had in a formal sense neither beginning nor end; but it had something of the bright immediacy of a sketchbook filled with graphic notes that might be worked into a finished picture. There were no clouds over Melville when he wrote Omoo; even its ugly parts were saturated with sunlight; beachcombing left Melville a little brighter for being scoured by the sand. Smollett had taught him all he needed to write this kind of work, Smollett and Defoe. Omoo had the sharpness, the force, the exaggeration of character which the eighteenth century had in its satiric artists; and every episode was carried off with a dry discretion. With the habit of long verbal practice, Melville watched his listeners: he never overloaded Omoo: he knew where to skip and where to elaborate: he is a writer who knows that one wants everything in a travel book except the tedium and fatigue of actuality. Throughout the narrative, one always feels that Melville has more up his sleeve: one is prepared to believe that he has a hundred Omoos in his bosom: perhaps he had, and at all events it required talent to make us believe so. More and more, his speech cleansed itself of affectations: the direct, vigorous lingo of the sea, with all its Elizabethan locutions, was doubtless a sound influence in this part of his development: of the young man who wrote the sublime gibberish in the Lansingburgh newspaper, there is scarcely a trace left. One measures such growth in feet, not in inches: in seven years Melville had not merely renewed his physical body completely: he had acquired an equally complete literary shape.