If Mrs. Glendinning acts in this fashion over Delly Ulver’s plight, what sort of front would she place on Isabel’s and that of Pierre’s father? Would she acknowledge her husband’s error: would she take to her bosom this Isabel? Even Pierre, bursting with hope, cannot hope for this: his faith is shattered: he sees the cold rectitude of his mother, and a resolution to stand against the world and its ways takes the place of his original belief that those ways are amiable and meritorious and virtuous. Pierre resolves to protect Isabel: but how? To achieve his aim, he conceives the device of living with her, in strict brotherly aloofness, under the fiction of marriage. A gallant, quixotic espousal; but not without its own deviousness and share of infirmity. Would he have been so ready to espouse Isabel, asks Melville, had she been ugly and crass instead of sombrely beautiful and delicate? Would he have been so warm in magnanimity if another kind of warmth had not lain under the surface? Would he, one might add, have conceived this stratagem of living with Isabel as husband and wife, had he not lived with his mother as brother and sister?
Pierre does not dare to frame these questions. He is worked up to a great pitch of nobility and sacrifice: high-handedly, he throws his whole life into the scales and runs away with Isabel, taking Delly under his protection, too, and trusting to time and his own explanations to soften the action to Mrs. Glendinning and make it palatable. Lucy, to whom he has plighted marriage, he ruthlessly sets behind him; and, with a few coins in his purse, he makes his way to New York, to carve out a career as a writer. Troubles swarm about him like angry hornets, once he destroys the nest of respectability which had kept them in order. The companion of his youth, a cousin who had once been a rival for Lucy’s hand, supposing Lucy to be his bride, had generously placed his town house at Pierre’s disposal. Now he summarily withdraws his hospitality. The three outcasts reach New York late at night to find their quarters deserted; Pierre, hunting up his cousin, is cut dead when he confronts him: from the gutters of the city, all its noisome human refuse taints the air: Pierre returns to the town guardhouse, where he had left Delly and Isabel, to find them shrinking before the profane curses and gestures of a band of drunken prostitutes and their customers, rounded up in a raid.
This is but a foretaste of the trials that are to overwhelm Pierre and Isabel. Pierre and his house-mates presently find themselves a little flat in an old church building that has been remodelled into offices and apartments, and is occupied by broken-down lawyers, transcendentalists, vegetarians, faddists of one kind or another, each encouraging the other’s special lunacy in order to have a kindly reception for his own. In the midst of this extreme poverty and disorder, Pierre, who has been a mild minor poet, a writer of aesthetic jingles which “would offend no one,” probes all the terrors of his new experience and its revelations, and out of it he writes a book, not unlike Pierre, with an author for hero. The situation is impossible. Pierre has no money: his mother freezes up completely in mortification, and disowns him, keeping even that share of his estate which was meant for Pierre: the misery and ambiguity of his situation increases when Lucy, recovered from the first stupor of grief, flies for refuge to Pierre, to beg a place as humble servitor, in Pierre’s already crammed and over-womaned household. Worst of all, the dark bottom of his brotherly relation with Isabel becomes faintly apparent to Pierre himself: it is reflected in the shadow of jealousy that touches her reaction to Lucy: such a feeling as Isabel might properly claim if she were married to Pierre in actuality. Pierre has outlawed himself, and missed happiness with Lucy, for a distracted passion which can have no outlet in external relationships: in aiming at purest virtue, with noble intent, he has committed a deed he cannot confront without horror. His duty towards his father’s memory and towards Isabel has been the subtlest of masks for an urge that has its roots in his own instinctive nature, not solely in the teachings of charity, honesty, and justice.
Isabel herself has always been uncertainly conscious of this wild passion: but in her ignorance of the world itself, she is aware of nothing that runs contrary to the world. What had said yes to Pierre was not a mere response to his charity; it had implied more. With these fierce passages of self-revelation, Pierre finishes his own book, and his author, Vivia, finishes his! In the notion that he was walking in the highway of the loftiest morality, Pierre has only explored a blind alley, the blindest of all human alleys. Farcical disappointments mingle with tragic regrets: his publishers, on getting his masterpiece, denounce Pierre as a rascally impostor: Lucy’s brother and his cousin threaten Pierre’s life, treating him as a seducer and a scoundrel: his mother dies in an insane grief. In self-defence, Pierre arms himself, and, when attacked in the open by the two virtuous espousers of Lucy’s honour, Pierre empties a pistol into each of them, and is taken to jail. Grief after grief, horror after horror, ensue from Pierre’s original act of virtue. When Lucy learns that Isabel is Pierre’s half-sister, she collapses in death. There is no issue to this passion for either Isabel or Pierre but suicide. Pierre and Isabel swallow poison together in the prison cell, and Pierre passes out, entwined in Isabel’s dark hair. The fool of fate dies: his love dies with him. The scene is as freely strewn with corpses as the fifth act of an Elizabethan tragedy.
5
This story of Pierre, hard to accept in bald summary, is no less difficult to accept in detail. The plot is forced: the situations are undeveloped: the dominant colours are as crude as the lithograph advertisements of a melodrama, although there are subordinate parts which are as delicately graded as a landscape by Corot. There is no passage between the various planes of action and mood, as there is in Moby-Dick: Melville slips from prose into poetry, from realism into fantasy, from the mood of high tragedy into that of the penny dreadful.
For the moment, Melville had lost the power to fuse these discordant elements, to reject what could not be fully absorbed: he was at the mercy of his material. All that lives with a vital unity in Moby-Dick has become a corpse in Pierre: there is life in the dead members, but it does not pertain to the body as a whole. The fragments of Pierre are sometimes marvellous, as the broken leg or arm of a great piece of sculpture may be: but the whole is lost. From the moment the story opens to the fatal lines that bring it to a close, one is in an atmosphere of unreality. I do not mean that the facts are untrue to life; I mean that the work as a whole is untrue to the imagination. One accepts Ahab as a demi-god: one cannot accept Pierre as a human being, although Pierres are plentiful, while one might dredge the five seas without bringing up the carcass of another Ahab.
The style itself is witness to this psychal disruption, quite as much as the fable. Pierre is quarried out of the same quarry as Moby-Dick; but whereas there the texture is even and firm, here it is full of flaws and intrusive granulations. Moby-Dick, to use another figure, slides down a long runway before it plunges into its poetic passages: by the time one reaches Ahab’s great apostrophes, one is all prepared for the immersion; one’s imagination has reached the same pitch of intensity and concentration, and nothing but the most rhythmic patterns will satisfy the mood itself. The common prose in Moby-Dick is but an interval for breathing: it sustains and carries forward the movement of the more expressive passages; and as for the words themselves, they are the exact equivalent for the mood and purpose: distended though the envelope may be, they never burst outside it.
In language, Pierre is just the opposite of this: from the first pages, it is perfervid and poetical in a mawkish way. With the disclosure of the two lovers, Pierre and Lucy, in the opening chapter, the style becomes a perfumed silk, taken from an Elizabethan chamber romance: it sounds exactly like Melville’s first effusion in the Lansingburgh Advertiser: “‘Truly,’ thought the youth, with a still gaze of inexpressible fondness, ‘truly the skies do ope: and this invoking angel looks down. I would return these manifold good-mornings, Lucy, did not that presume thou hadst lived through the night; and by heaven, thou belongst to the regions of an infinite day!’” This is a fair sample of what happens in Pierre whenever Melville approaches romantic passion; his reflections were tied with the same ribbons and furbelows, as in his description of love as “a volume bound in rose-leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with peach juice on the leaves of lilies.” In style, Melville had suddenly lost both taste and discretion. He opened on a note that could not be carried through. Lovers may indeed once have used such silly rhetoric, but it would take a more careful hand than Melville’s to persuade us that the rest of the world adopted these affectations: when scene after scene is conducted in the same tone, the style becomes tedious, intolerable, ridiculous. It would be bad if the characters were in the Renaissance costume of Daphnis and Chloe: it is even worse in a novel that contains realistic caricatures of the slums of New York and satiric commentaries upon the bizarre habits of the transcendentalists. Occasionally, by some happy concentration of emotion, Melville either drops these flabby phrases or permits the reader to forget them, and there are passages which, when read as poetry, are almost as fine as Whitman’s verses. But these intervals of good writing do not overcome the main impression; and the main impression is of hectic and overwrought language. With the powerful control he had over Moby-Dick, Melville could never have written in the style that characterizes a large part of Pierre. In Pierre he was no longer the cool rider of words, but the flayed and foaming horse, running away.