For a few months, we have the rare good luck to follow Melville day by day, almost hour by hour. When, on October 11, 1849, he stepped aboard the Southampton, a regular London liner, on a raw noon, leaving behind his brother Allan and Mr. Duyckinck, who had come to the docks, he began to keep a journal of his voyage. This journal, a later one kept during his trip to the Near East, and a small sheaf of letters, constitute with his books almost the only first-hand material for Melville’s biography. Let us take advantage of this good fortune. The literal, unadorned journal, made up hastily day by day, is the least impeachable sort of testimony, unless the writer has an eye on posterity. One need harbour no such suspicions about Melville’s simple record.
4
(_Enter Herman Melville, in a green overcoat, with polite manners, and a wary reticence underneath his appearance of rank conviviality. He is just past thirty, and at times his grave demeanour and abstracted look might pass him for forty; but there are other moments when the fringe of brown beard seems only a mask, and one detects beneath the thoughtful brow of the author and the anxious brow of the husband and father an irrepressible boy. One wants a name for this combination of outdoor strength and bookishness, this Bohemianism and gentlehood, this mixture of the bronzed god himself and the plaster cast, and, for lack of an epithet, one will have to call it Melvillian._)
What a queer business, this getting away. Yesterday one said a passionate farewell to every one in the morning; but the winds were unfavourable, and in the evening one was back again at home, feeling almost as if one had accomplished the tour of Europe; the final farewell was made a little stale by repetition; one felt relief when the ship was at last under way. For almost the first time, one travels as a passenger, travels alone, in a room as big as one’s own room at home. It is good to be at sea again: one feels it more keenly among the land-lubbers, who make anguished noises at the first choppy water beyond the Narrows. In the morning, one is up early for the sunrise, and, since the captain is friendly, one has the run of the ship. Fine to be up in the rigging again! When a man is overboard one knows how to act promptly: one raises a cry, drops overboard the tackle-fall of the quarter boat, and when he fails to reach it, drops over the side oneself to swing it toward him. Poor fellow: he sees it and does not grasp it: he drowns with a demented smile on his face, when he might have saved himself. The passengers say later he was insane.... To work a boat, to know how to keep it pointed on its course, or to throw out a life-line, this sort of knowledge gives one back one’s old confidence. There’s no gammon about the ocean; it knocks the false bottom right off a pretender’s keel.
The passengers prove better than one had dared hope: there is Adler, a German philologist, who will talk to one till midnight about fixed fate, free will, and foreknowledge absolute: his philosophy is Coleridgian, a sort of friendly bridge between Kant and Hegel and Schelling and Schlegel and one’s own less conscious metaphysics, one’s hitherto dim doubts and intuitions. There is also a genteel sociable youth named McCurdy, whose father is a New York merchant, and there is a cousin of Bayard Taylor, the pedestrian traveller, all good fellows over a bowl of punch. Taylor has a notion of going through the Near East: down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople--Athens, Beyrut, Jerusalem, Cairo, Alexandria. That would be something neither Polynesia nor the Hudson Valley could give: marvellous, if it were not for the strain on one’s purse. Four hundred dollars at least. Already, too--one isn’t a week away from them--Lizzy and Barney the baby begin to tug at one. No: one isn’t free any more. One is going to England to get a little ready cash from Bentley or Murray or Moxon on White-Jacket: one can’t dissipate that in travel. One is tied: there is no getting away from that. One wants to travel far, perhaps; but not with the same old lust and confidence: all paths lead home again. Where’s Lizzie now? Where dat old man? The nice little beggar: those were the first connected words he uttered.
Ah, well: the vacant days, the rough days, the dozy sunlit days: they all relieve the tension a little. Five years ago one scarcely knew that Hegel existed: now one is on one’s way to England--an author! One of the ladies is reading a book by H. M.; she keeps on raising her eyes to take one in, as if comparing the real man with the self-portrait. People say: Are you _the_ Mr. Melville--the man who lived among the cannibals? A fine way to go down to posterity.... What a slack lot of sheep a company of passengers is; one’s sympathies are all with the forecastle. There is the buxom Irish lady who sings, the gushy Miss Wilbur who is so obviously marriageable and who talks of winning souls to Christ, the Frenchmen with the bleak, sea-sick faces. When one goes aloft to muse a little, they stand around and gape, as if one were a performer in Barnum’s museum. Already we are three weeks from home. How quickly time flies when one day is like another. Dear Lizzie: dear little Barney: where dat old man!
With a fresh wind and a clear sky and land near, the passengers suddenly re-galvanize into life: faces appear that had been below decks most of the sail. The food tastes better; one plays shuffleboard gaily, not dutifully; one reads Pickwick Papers and wonders about the England that lies somewhere between one’s father’s journals, one’s own grim memories of Liverpool, and the warm, roast-beef, veal-pie, ale-drinking, punch-sipping, toddy-smacking England of Dickens. At last the cliffs of Portland, where the Portland stone comes from, bleak, melancholy; then the run along the Isle of Wight, past the Needles, with the ploughed fields neatly marked off, and the lower shore of Hampshire with its low cliffs on the other side. Oh, to get ashore, to feel dry land, to quit this endless, tedious tacking: to rush ashore at Portsmouth and let the ship find London by itself! No: it can’t be done: out in the Channel and up to Dover now: one is restless and impatient. Up in the morning in the dark at four, and into the cold cutter, which heads for Deal, not Dover, to make a landing. Well: England at last! Ten years ago, thirteen to be exact, a poor boy, half orphan, teased and tormented by foul-mouthed sailors, young, hopeful, innocent, a mere ship’s monkey--now, Herman Melville, traveller, novelist, romancer, author of Peedee and Hullabaloo and Pog-Dog: the conquering hero, with debts and duns at his back and a potboiler in his carpet-bag. Triumph--and how raw the wind is at dawn!
Through the dark, narrow streets of Deal, the keen air faintly reeking with the first kitchen-coals, then out into the country on foot for a day’s walk to Canterbury with Taylor and Adler. A castle and a Roman fortification before one is two hours ashore! Deal: the square mound of the Roman castra: somehow, these things mean more than a hillful of arrow-heads: the men who built them worried about God and Eternity: a thousand years does not separate one from them. Canterbury is even better: the nave, the cloisters, the queer fine thoughts one finds on some of the tombs. Yes: this is a little nearer the England of one’s dreams. Dinner at the Falstaff Inn, and in the evening a provincial theatre, with a stage that might have been peopled by Dickens, every actor more of a character than the character portrayed: an ineffably funny business all round.
Next day, by train in a third-class open carriage to London: cold to one’s marrow: cold and ravenous. When one arrives at London Bridge one can think of nothing but a chop-house. While the chops and the porter and the treacle pudding are digesting, one realizes that this is England, old England, the dark, slightly grimy eating-stalls, the red-cheeked, pert, coarse, kindly stupid waitress, the silent men eating methodically, piling their forks up like a hod with food, the lawyers’ clerks, shabby, rusty, genteel, the countrymen with leather leggings and purple veins on their cheeks, the bagmen, voluble and expansive for Englishmen, just one remove from the country pedlar, a faint odour of musty paper and soot over one kind of Londoner, or of ploughed fields and manure over the other: in short, England, London--a society like that at Albany, bedded deep in dust, must, precedent, and vast augmentations of gold. One is in it and out of it. The crowd on the Strand stares at one’s green overcoat: some one had ominously warned one on the steamer that it would set one down for a crude American. Colour is already a little old-fashioned in this drab, utilitarian England: this is the City of Dis: black coats, black hats, have survival value in a sulphur-and-brimstone world: the damned need protective colouration. One sinks down at last before a small fire in a tall, draughty room in Craven Street, just off the Strand. One’s journal has been a blank these last three days, and one must catch up with it. Travelling takes the ink out of one’s pen as well as the cash out of one’s purse.