One need not go into all the forms under which the contemporary critic disclosed his insensitiveness to great prose and his servile compliance with the idola of the market; but one must note a singular fact: from Fitz-James O’Brien’s first criticism of Melville’s work as a whole in 1853 down to Mr. Vernon Parrington’s commentary in 1927, Moby-Dick, the keystone of Melville’s work, has frequently been left out of account. The book that triumphantly smothers all the contradictory opinions about Melville--that he was a romantic, that he could only portray external scenes, that he was a pure introvert, that he was an adventurous ne’er-do-well, never happy or at home in a settled community, that he was irresponsive to the life around him, that he was a sheer realist who could only record what he had seen--the book that makes these generalizations silly suffered something worse than antagonistic criticism: it met with complete neglect. It is only since 1914 in America that this neglect has been even partly atoned for.
Such obtuseness, such flat stupidity, must have had a dismaying effect upon Melville. The writer begins to doubt the possibility of literature in a world that so flagrantly misunderstands or ignores its higher manifestations. Faced with such contemporaries, the artist may retire within himself, as Bach or Ryder or Cézanne did; but it will only be a miracle that will keep him from taking into his retirement a deep contempt for the people around him. That contempt is worse than isolation; it brings isolation without hope. “I write to please myself,” exclaimed Melville in one passage in Pierre. In that mood of wilful defiance, a man may revolt from the good sense of his contemporaries as well as from their deficiencies. There was nothing in the reception of Moby-Dick that would have lessened Melville’s scorn, or helped him to fortify himself against his own weaknesses. Quite the contrary. Like Pierre himself he was to learn “and very bitterly learn, that though the world worship mediocrity and commonplace, yet hath it fire and sword for contemporary grandeur.”
Moby-Dick was too much for them, was it? Well: it was a mere pencilling of the ultimate blackness that was his to paint: if one were going to tell the truth at all, one could go much further and be much plainer. “Henceforth,” proclaimed Pierre, “I will know nothing but Truth; Glad Truth or Sad Truth; I will know what _is_, and do what my deepest angel dictates.” And again: “I am more frank with Pierre than the best men are with themselves. I am all unguarded and magnanimous with Pierre: therefore you see his weakness, and therefore only. In reserves, men build imposing characters; not in revelations. He who shall be wholly honest, though nobler than Ethan Allen that man shall stand in danger of the meanest mortal’s scorn.”
It was in some such mood of defeat, foreboding, defiant candour, that Pierre was conceived and written. Meanwhile, in November, 1851, the Hawthorne family had moved away from the Berkshires and Melville settled to his work, in the spring of 1852, on the north porch that faced Mt. Monadnock, with an intense feeling of human isolation which brought the mountain closer to him, as his only friend. The one possibility of a friendly, rapturous union of spirits was behind him: no longer could he write to Hawthorne, as he had done just a few months before: “Whence came you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips--lo, they are yours, and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.” No: already that was over: dead. If the spirit burned now, it burned as ice does to the human touch. It was not altogether in irony, or in wild whimsy, that Melville dedicated his next book, Pierre, to his one solitary and steadfast companion, Mt. Monadnock.
3
There is a sense in which Pierre is an abortive complement to Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick, great fable that it is, contains a good part of human life under one figure or another; but it does not contain everything. I would claim much for it; I would claim much for Melville’s work as a whole; but there is still a great segment that remained unexplored till Melville wrote Pierre, and that, to the end, he never satisfactorily penetrated or freely brooded upon.
All Melville’s books about the sea have the one anomaly and defect of the sea from the central, human point of view: one-half of the race, woman, is left out of it. Melville’s world, all too literally, is a man-of-war’s world. Woman neither charms nor nurtures nor threatens: she neither robs man of his strength nor rouses him to heroic frenzy: she is not Circe: she is not Rosalind or Francesca or even the Wife of Bath--she simply does not exist. When the Pequod spreads sail, woman is left behind: she is the phantom of home for Ahab and Starbuck. The whales dally in Moby-Dick and beget offspring; but all the trouble, beauty, madness, delight of human love, all that vast range of experience from the mere touch of the flesh to the most enduring spiritual loyalty, all that is absent. One looks for some understanding of woman’s lot and woman’s life in Moby-Dick; and one looks in vain. One looks for it again in Pierre, and one is disappointed, although its ambiguities are concerned with nothing else. With experience of woman in every relationship, daughter, girl, sister, wife, mother, matron, he described her in only one aspect--that of the remote and idealized mistress of romantic courtship. Mother, sister, sweetheart, all appeared to Melville’s hero in this brief and peculiar aspect.
There was, one is driven to believe, something in Herman Melville’s life that caused him to dissociate woman from his account of man’s deepest experience. Mr. Waldo Frank has suggested, in general social terms, that the quest of power, which has preoccupied Western man since the Renaissance, has incapacitated him as a lover and kept him from understanding woman and all her essential concerns. If that is true, Melville pushed his aberration to a logical extremity; and he, who captured to the full the poetry of the sea, became as bashful as a boy when he beheld Venus, born of its foam, rising from the waters he knew so well, the most unexpected of monsters, and the only denizen of the sea he dared neither snare nor harpoon nor otherwise dispose of, except by flight....
4
The hero of Pierre is a young patrician, the heir of Saddle Meadows; he has good looks, health, an historic ancestry, and a warmly humanized environment. Handicapped in his own inheritance as a youth, Melville bestowed on Pierre not only all the things he possessed, such as the Gansevoort heritage, but all the things ill fortune had denied him.
Pierre lives with his mother, a widow; she is proud, fine, and at fifty still beautiful: he treats her beauty with the attention of a lover who resents every man that approaches her: she is “sister” and he is “brother” and there is more than familiar fondness in their touches. Pierre is on the point of open betrothal to Lucy, a simple, dewy country girl of good family. Is there to be jealousy between the mother and Lucy; must he choose between them? No: something more difficult is in store. At a village sewing-bee, where he has gone to call for his mother, a girl faints at the sight of Pierre. She seems a farmer’s daughter and her fainting is mysterious; the mystery becomes oppressive when Pierre gets a secret summons from her. An interview with Isabel, the girl, topples the whole Elysium of family relationships within whose rainbow Pierre had lived. Isabel, a dark, lovely creature, brims with obscure memories of an almost unintelligible past, memories that wail through her like the sound of wind in the trees. By hint and memory and inference, she had found that Pierre’s father, who had formed a union with a Frenchwoman, was her father--and this girl was the sole fruit of the union--Pierre’s half-sister. Isabel offers her orphaned self to her half-brother in complete trust; and he, not doubting the relationship, although hitherto his father had seemed to him a flawless being, takes her to his bosom.
In a few hours, Pierre experiences all the perturbations that afflicted Young Goodman Brown, in Hawthorne’s story, when he discovered all his respected elders, the personification of virtue and chastity, participating in a witches’ sabbath. Pierre contemplates his mother, to see if there is any possible means of making her acknowledge the relationship and rescue Isabel from the mean lot that is now hers, in a family that is about to cast off its own daughter, Delly Ulver, because she has conceived a child out of wedlock. No help there! Pierre discovers a worldly front of respectability hemming him round. His mother’s spiritual counsellor, the Reverend Mr. Folsgrave, gives the world’s reasons for refusing to compound Delly’s mistake: his mother is even more peremptorily and forbiddingly righteous. Suddenly, Pierre discovers that the kindness and charity and sweetness of the world is a poisonous mushroom, whose delicate shape is embedded in the ordure of malice, pride, cold restraint, heartlessness.