Hawthorne became Melville’s sole connection with the transcendentalists, and it never developed into a very deep union. Melville had listened to a lecture of Emerson’s a year before and defended Emerson from Mr. Duyckinck’s censure: he respected this Plato who spoke through his nose. If Emerson was a fool, Melville had rather be a fool than a wise man, and if he owed much to Sir Thomas Browne, well, no one was his own sire: the debt was a universal one. Emerson at least dived; and Melville loved all men who dive. “Any fish can swim near the surface; but it takes a great whale to go downstairs five miles or more, and if he don’t attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet that will.” That justified Emerson: but except as one diver with another, Melville felt no kinship with him. “I do not oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow, but prefer to hang myself in mine own halter than to swing in any other man’s swing.” It was the blandness, the sunniness, the mildness, the absence of curses, shadows, shipwrecks in Emerson’s philosophy that set Melville against it: Emerson was the perpetual passenger who stayed below in bad weather, trusting that the captain would take care of the ship: Melville was the sailor who climbed aloft, and knew that the captain was sometimes drunk and that the best of ships might go down. “_All hands save ship!_ has startled dreamers.”
Hawthorne, then, was a man to be grateful for: the smell of young beeches and hemlocks was upon him, wrote Melville; the broad prairies were in his soul; he had these qualities because he was an American and deeply part of the scene; but, in addition, he had an eye for the dankness and decay and for the inscrutable malevolence of the universe: he was no sun-dial that recorded only the smiling hours of life. If the country could nourish Hawthorne, and if Hawthorne could produce The Scarlet Letter and the Mosses, well, what might not Melville himself put forth? Though Hawthorne was a genius, perhaps, like Shakespeare, he did not appear alone. “Shakespeare cannot be regarded as in himself the concretion of all the genius of his time; nor as so immeasurably beyond Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Beaumont, Jonson, that these men can be said to share none of his power. Would it, indeed, appear so unreasonable to suppose that this great fullness and overflowing may be, or may be destined to be, shared by a plurality of men of genius?”
The presence of an Emerson, a Hawthorne, gave all the more reason for a Melville. So Melville must have felt in his bones; and he was right. What he could not venture as a perception--for who can see or measure his contemporaries?--was certainly true as prophecy: in that flood of intellectual and imaginative power that I have elsewhere called the Golden Day, Emerson, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, were all carried along in the same current: each reinforces and rounds out the others: and it is this corpus of writers, rather than any single one, that forms what Hawthorne himself called the Master Genius of America.
Melville did not suppose, when he wrote his encomium of Hawthorne, that this same summer would bring the two men into contact, that they would become neighbours, near enough to make occasional visits by horseback or wagon, and that, despite his premonition that “on a personal interview no great author has ever come up to the idea of his reader,” he would find in Hawthorne, temporarily, that comrade and friend for whom he had been looking. There was, it is true, only half a generation between them; and this particular distance makes intimacy difficult, unless the older man is willing to treat the younger one as an assured equal. How Hawthorne himself felt about the matter it is hard to tell: Melville realized that his own boisterous democracy, which recognized the thief in the jail as the equal of General George Washington, might grate on Hawthorne a little, and that, like an English Howard in the presence of a plebeian, Hawthorne’s intellectual aristocracy might shrink at this claim and this contact. But Melville had no lack of faith in his own powers; and he put forth the claim to equality with easy and assured frankness; and unless he was unusually insensitive at this point, his letter would indicate that Hawthorne accepted the relationship on Melville’s terms.
On August 5, 1850, Hawthorne noted in his American Notebook that he drove from Lenox, near which he lived in a penurious red farmhouse, to Stockbridge, where he found at the house of Fields, the Boston publisher, Dr. Holmes, Mr. Duyckinck of New York, also Mr. Cornelius Matthews and Herman Melville. They ascended the Monument Mountain and the party was caught in a shower: according to tradition, it was during that summer storm, under a shoulder of rock where they had taken refuge, that these two stormy souls first overcame their reticence and shyness, and ploughed through conversation to a deeper intimacy. The New Yorkers called on Hawthorne in the forenoon, two days later, and Hawthorne treated them to a couple of bottles of Mr. Mansfield’s champagne; and from that time on Melville was a familiar visitor in the Hawthorne household. The family called him Mr. Omoo; young Julian said that he loved Mr. Melville as well as his Mamma and Papa and Una; Melville, who had amused the Marquesans with an improvised popgun, was not likely to fall down in intercourse with children--and he would sometimes ride over in the evening with his great dog, and the children would ride on the dog’s back. Even Sophia Hawthorne was fascinated by Melville: she, who adored her husband’s dark, lustrous eyes, was puzzled and a little disturbed by Melville’s; and her tribute to Melville is all the more notable when one remembers her complete preoccupation with her husband.
“I am not quite sure,” she wrote, “that I do not think him a very great man.... A man with a true, warm heart, and a soul and an intellect--with life to his finger-tips; earnest, sincere and reverent; very tender and modest. He has very keen perceptive power; but what astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems to me to see everything accurately; and how he can do so with his small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and handsome, his mouth expressive of sensibility and emotion. He is tall and erect, with an air free, brave and manly. When conversing, he is full of gesture and force, and loses himself in his subject. There is no grace or polish. Once in a while his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression, out of these eyes to which I have objected; an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that moment taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself.”
The opportunity for real intercourse with Hawthorne, for talk about Time and Eternity and ultimate things, smoking a fragrant cigar, sipping brandy or cider, meant much to Melville; far more, no doubt, than it did to Hawthorne. In Melville’s growing spiritual loneliness, he needed the affection of a sympathetic mind; and for a while he could persuade himself that, even in Hawthorne’s silences, he had this. Hawthorne’s example as a novelist was a stimulus: it led Melville beyond the easy shallows, where one could negligently wade, always within easy calling distance of the shore; and his philosophical conversation, or, still more, his apparently absorbed way of listening to philosophical conversation, encouraged Melville to go further and deeper along the passage he had begun to make a year before with Adler.
Each conversation opened new vistas: the night talks would often be a prelude to next morning’s letters, and in those letters, particularly in those which remain from the period covered by Moby-Dick, Melville exposed the seamy depths of his own spirit. He had no reticences before Hawthorne, and above all, no false modesty. Life was becoming a long stage, with no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with Hawthorne for a fellow passenger, Melville was content and could be happy. “I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.” The hectic, desperate, ecstatic letters Melville wrote his friend during the short year and a half that brought them together in the Berkshires give one a surer insight into Melville’s moods and aims than any other pages he ever wrote. Had the neighbourly relations persisted, had Hawthorne’s response been wholly adequate, Melville might have weathered more buoyantly the internal tempest that set in with Moby-Dick. But Hawthorne was essentially as remote from Melville as he was from the old worthies of the Customs House at Salem or the old sea-captains he had exchanged civilities with over a mug of ale. Though one could see daylight and the blue sky from the bottom of Hawthorne’s well, there was not enough of it to share with any companion. If he was touched by the homage of the younger man, he could not fully reciprocate it. He recognized Melville’s moral earnestness and intellectual vigour; but I doubt if he once suspected that his extravagant friend was far nearer, by temperament and expression, to the heart of Shakespeare’s genius than he himself was. In seizing upon Hawthorne as an other self, Melville more than once did homage to his own genius: his descriptions of Hawthorne’s powers, Hawthorne’s achievements, are nearer to his own than to Hawthorne’s.