The evidence for this part of Melville’s history is incomplete and ambiguous: the testimony of his contemporaries is obscure, and what has been handed on to living people has been stated in a fragmentary way by witnesses whose limitations of knowledge and whose emotional bias vitiate their judgment, and rob their testimony of any pretence of impartiality. I do not overlook the value of family tradition in dealing with this part of Melville’s life; but I prefer to use it as I shall use Melville’s own expression in literature, not as recording objective events, but as indicating a certain tendency and direction. The witness of Melville’s own literary works is far more objective evidence than more personal stories which can neither be substantiated nor refuted. “The data which life furnishes towards a true estimate of any being,” Melville himself reminds us, “are as insufficient to that end as in geometry one side given would be to determine a triangle.” During this period the nearest one can come to truth is by avoiding the grosser forms of error.
The last forty years of Melville’s life have been thoroughly misinterpreted, for the reason that after Moby-Dick Melville ceased to be a popular author. This period has been referred to as the long quietus, and even such a just critic as Mr. Percy Boynton could say: “Pierre was Melville’s last real and audible word, and even Pierre was an epilogue.” Such a complete halt in a writer’s life would indeed give reason for grave suspicions; and popular rumour has filled up this dismal gap with tales of Melville’s insanity. That there is a spark of fact beneath this suffocating cloud of conjecture, I am prepared to show: but the spark was magnified into a bonfire by Melville’s own contemporaries, absurdly, maliciously enlarged; and later critics have even been obtuse enough to read back into Mardi the signs of Melville’s mental disruption. As a matter of fact, Melville’s silence was a very audible one; and what is usually looked upon as the dark period of his intellectual quietus is in fact the bleak period of his contemporaries’ neglect. One cannot call silence the reduced but steady output of short stories, novels, poems, which marked the next forty years of Melville’s life.
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Let us separate the romantic overlay of rumour from the actual facts, and see what is left of the silence and the mystery. The first tangible bit of testimony as to Herman Melville’s condition in the year that followed the publication of Pierre is a note that Elizabeth Melville left in her annotation of his papers: “We all felt anxious about the strain on his health in the spring of 1853.” By now the direct cause of this strain should be fairly plain: Melville had exhausted himself in writing Moby-Dick, and without waiting to recuperate, he had embarked upon another long work: the effort of writing two such books in two successive years was a terrific one. In Pierre, Melville has left more than one picture of his condition. Pierre, writing of his own hero-author, Vivia, says: “Cast the eye in there on Vivia; tell me why those four limbs should be clapt in a dismal jail,--day out, day in--week out, week in--month out, month in--and himself a voluntary jailer! Is this the end of philosophy? This the larger and spiritual life? This your boasted empyrean? Is it for this man should grow wise, and leave off his most excellent and calumniated folly?”
When one pushes the organism so hard, all its latent weaknesses tend to come out. Presently, the long and terrible exposure he had suffered rounding the Horn on his return from the South Seas, came back to exact its physical penalty. As early as 1849, Melville alluded to that experience and its aftermath; and in 1855 he suffered a severe attack of rheumatism, and in June an attack of sciatica. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes attended him, and it is a pity that he did not leave a record of the case: one could have spared a few autocratic conversations for this precious evidence. These attacks continued to undermine Melville: in 1858, he was laid up with a severe attack of “crick in the back” at his mother’s home in Gansevoort. It is difficult, of course, to draw a line between the physical and the psychical aspects of an organism; but the tangible evidence of a drain on Melville’s strength is sufficient to justify us in calling these disabilities primarily physical ones. His perfect health deserted him. He was to know pain, confinement, lassitude; and instead of tanned cheeks and hard muscles, pallor and debility.
In any appraisal of his condition and his fate, this new element of physical weakness must play a part; for Melville, like Whitman, wrote out of his health, and just as the paralysis of Whitman, after the Civil War, resulted in the diminishment of his writing, and a certain curtailment of his creative effort, without any sign of mental decay, so Melville was deprived of his immense physical buoyancy and power. That power had counted for much in his own work. “Real strength,” he wrote in Moby-Dick, “never impairs beauty or harmony, but often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with magic.... As devout Eckermann lifted the linen sheet away from the naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed by the massive chest of the man, that seemed a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute are they of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative feminine ones of submission and endurance....” Melville did not easily submit and endure; but without health he was a shorn giant. His shortened breath would not sustain the long periods of Moby-Dick, nor would his frame suffer that “downright infatuation, and no less [which is] both unavoidable and indispensable in any great deep book, or even any wholly unsuccessful attempt at a great deep book.”
Such an explanation is sound as far as it goes; but one must not ignore the psychological accompaniments of this debility, or all the spiritual obstacles that burked Melville and made him doubly anxious, strained, desperate. Chief among the external obstacles was the chorus of disapproval that had greeted Moby-Dick and grew louder and more universal with Pierre. One London paper denounced it as an “unhealthy, mystic romance,” the Literary World called it “an eccentricity of the imagination,” and Fitz-James O’Brien, writing in Putnam’s Monthly in February, 1853, fresh from a bout with Pierre, described it in the following terms: “Thought staggers through each page like one poisoned. Language is drunken and reeling.... Let Mr. Melville stay his step in time. He totters on the edge of a precipice, over which all his hard-earned fame may tumble with such another weight as Pierre attached to it.”
The worst of it was that the critics were not altogether wrong in their judgment of Pierre alone: what was at fault was their failure to see that the author of Moby-Dick could not be scolded like a child who had mixed up his declensions: he was entitled to the critic’s most patient, sympathetic understanding. To pretend that such a mistake might forfeit Melville’s whole claim to recognition showed that neither O’Brien nor any one else at the time realized what a strong claim Melville had, or what a profound mark he had made on the literature of the world. I have looked in vain through the collected works and biographies of Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Lowell, Holmes, and even Conway and Sanborn, to see if these writers recognized a fellow in Melville, as Emerson had so generously done with Whitman: but except for a brief note on Omoo by Whitman, written in his Brooklyn Eagle days, and a comment in a chance letter by Lowell--exaggerated praise followed by complete indifference to Melville’s worth--there is no sign that the contemporaries he might have respected even knew of his existence.
Melville stood alone, alone in a desert. “Who shall tell all the thoughts and feelings of Pierre in that desolate and shivering room, when at last the idea obtruded, that the wiser and profounder he should grow, the more and more he lessened his chances for bread; that could he now hurl his deep book out of the window, and fall on some shallow nothing of a novel, composable in a month at longest, then could he reasonably hope for appreciation and cash. But the devouring profundities now opened upon him, consuming all his vigor; would he, he could not now be entertainingly and profitably shallow in some pellucid and merry romance.” This conviction, borne in on him perhaps while writing Moby-Dick, now haunted him when Pierre met its disastrous reception. “The brightest success,” he says again in Pierre, “now seemed intolerable to him, since he so plainly saw, that the brightest success could not be the sole offspring of Merit, but of Merit for the one-thousandth part, and nine-hundred and ninety-nine combining and dovetailing accidents for the rest.... So beforehand he felt the unrevealable sting of receiving either plaudits or censures, equally unsought for, and equally loathed ere given. So, beforehand, he felt the pyramidical scorn of the genuine loftiness for the whole infinitesimal company of critics.... In that lonely little closet of his, Pierre foretasted all that this world hath either of praise or dispraise; and thus foretasting both goblets, anticipatingly hurled them both in its teeth. All panegyric, all denunciation, all criticism of any sort would come too late for Pierre.”