Needless to say, Melville’s pyramidical scorn did not disarm the critics, nor did it, one suspects, counteract the effect of the salt that they poured, with such fine antiseptic intentions, into his wounds. He was greeted with the embarrassed shamefulness which sometimes appears upon the faces of sophisticated people when a fresh young girl confesses impulses or desires that her elders are forever discreetly hiding. Melville had revealed too much. His contemporaries, with a feeling of guilty repression, denied that any one had the right to take off his clothes, and they equally denied that such harassed, crippled souls could be found beneath the shapely costumes provided by society. Nervous, these respectable people will be on the watch for any similar performance; more than that, they will read back into Melville’s earlier books the same dangerous, unhealthy innocence and exposure.
One and all, the critics agreed with an English writer whose diatribe on the American psychological writers was reprinted, somewhat pointedly, in the Literary World for August 28, 1852. “It is a melancholy sign for the prospects of a rising American literature that some of its most hopeful professors should have, in recent works of fiction, been evidently laying themselves out for that species of subtle psychological romance, first introduced to the reading world by such authors as Balzac and Sand.... To pass from Scott and Dickens to Sand and Balzac is like giving up the smiling landscape glowing in its freshness and beauty, for the loathly atmosphere, the wretched sights and smells of a dissecting room, or abandoning the busy street or the pleasant social circle for charnels and catacombs. And yet this is what Young America seems bent upon. Instead of sketching the really representative men of their country--instead of conveying to us on this side of the Atlantic a true idea of American society--society in the great seaboard city or in the far west settlement--instead of presenting us with stories racy of the soil and instinct with its vigorous and aggressive theories, the misguided party in question selects some half dozen morbid phases of mind, brings before us some three or four intellectual cripples or moral monsters ... and instead of laying before us a wholesome story of natural character and motive, he lets us into the secret turns and tidings of unhealthy and abnormal mental power and promptings.”
No one saw even dimly then that these psychological novels and short stories, William Wilson, The House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter, Pierre, were signs of the broken American psyche, alienated by its removal from the solid tissue of Europe, and seeking, by further analysis, to establish a more primitive and elementary state, from which a new integration, more satisfactory and complete, could emerge. These relentless psychologists were far more deeply immersed in the American scene than any of the writers who succeeded them in the next generation, however closely Bret Harte and Howells and Mark Twain met the English prescription for natural character and robust health. If anything could have infuriated Melville, it must have been the suggestion that he could write in another fashion than he had done: “In tremendous extremes,” he said in Pierre, “human souls are like drowning men: well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; nevertheless, the sea is the sea and these drowning men do drown.”
Baffled by his dilemmas, rebuffed by his contemporaries, harassed by financial anxiety, curbed by ill health, kept from the solace of reading by poor eyesight, made doubly desperate by the cold mysteries he had explored--what was there to sustain Herman Melville and bring him back to health? The divided tenderness of a wife who was still bearing children, or the obtuse concern of a mother, a sister, or brother--so far from relieving him, these things only quickened his exasperation and his sense of helplessness.
When harassed by external circumstances, one wants to attack the universe: but, like Ahab, one finds that the universe will not get in one’s way: so one takes revenge on the first creature that crosses one’s path. Too likely it will be a creature one holds dear: the animus is not directed against that one, but it strikes as if it were. An explosion: a blow: a raised hand: an uncontrollable outburst of vituperation--then drink, remorse, repentance, the ugly vanity of it all. The universe is unharmed; one’s own condition is unimproved: there is just one more blight to stand in the way of amelioration. Whatever the outward events that mark Melville’s passage through these frantic waters, there is no doubt of his inward state. In a word he himself coined for Pierre, he became Timonized. In that awful solitude within, the very touch of his fellow creatures became defilement. “He could not bring himself to confront any face or house; a plowed field, any sign of tillage, the rotted stump of a long-felled pine, the slightest passing trace of man was uncongenial and repelling to him. Likewise, in his own mind all remembrances and imaginings, that had to do with the common and general humanity had become, for the first time, in the most singular manner distasteful to him. Still, while thus loathing all that was common in the two different worlds--that without and that within--nevertheless, even in the most withdrawn and subtlest region of his own essential spirit, Pierre could not now find one single agreeable twig of thought whereon to perch his weary soul.”
There was Melville’s own state, I believe, during and after the writing of Pierre, in its uttermost anguish and desolation. His family became apprehensive: his friends dropped away from him, first Hawthorne, then the Duyckincks: and in his sensitive condition, small indifferences became signs of enmity, heartlessness, and alienation. In doubling this inner Cape Horn, Herman Melville may have skirted the jagged rocks of an even deeper disruption: there were moments, perhaps days and months, between 1852 and 1858 when the outcome of his physical and mental condition may well have been in doubt. But with utmost allowance for the horror and collapse of his illness, it was of limited duration, and it could not have been a continuous state, since, throughout this period, he continued to write, to write with clarity, with distinction, and without a visible touch of disorder. Not the least of his literary achievements date from these years of debilitation and infirmity.
The word insanity is far too loose to be used about Melville’s mental illness, even during the limited period we are considering. At the very end of his life, Melville wrote a passage about insanity in his novel, Billy Budd, which puts the biographer’s difficulty in touching this period with great point. “Who,” he asks, “in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly, we see the difference of the colours, but where exactly does the first one visibly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In pronounced cases there is no question about them. But in some cases, in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the line of demarcation few will undertake, though for a fee some professional experts will. There is nothing nameable but that some man will undertake to do for pay. In other words, there are instances where it is next to impossible to determine whether a man is sane, or beginning to be otherwise.”
Melville realized from his own experience, perhaps, what few people understood until Janet and Freud re-interpreted this whole series of disorders, that the line between sanity and insanity is not a line at all but a wide gradient band. Indeed, as early as 1849, in a letter to Mr. Duyckinck written apropos the insanity of Charles Fenno Hoffman, the first editor of The Literary World, Melville had said: “This going mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in him, which but few men do. For in all of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt, momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains. What sort of sensation permanent madness is may be very well imagined just as we imagine how we felt when we were infants, though we cannot recall it. In both conditions we are irresponsible and riot like gods without fear of fate.”
3
The relationship between insanity and art has been the subject of much discussion; and it is important, in appraising Melville’s life and work during this period, that we should avoid the notion that genius and insanity are one, or that the fantasies of the neurotic are the equivalent of a work of art. The difference between insanity and what we agree to call normal conduct is largely one of social utilization: given a similar set of circumstances and stimuli, the distinction between a neurotic reaction and a normal one consists largely in the success a person has in conversion. Had Napoleon, for example, merely dreamt about his conquests, magnifying them year by year as his malady grew, he would have been quite properly confined to an asylum, like so many other “emperors of the world,” as soon as his patent conduct conflicted with other people’s activities. The fact that his particular kind of paranoia was permitted at large was due to his ability to convert it into the forms of contemporary social life, politics and military activity, things which subjected his grandiose dreams to the shock and jar of actuality. This conversion into art signifies health and relative stability, whether the situation that causes the conversion is morbid or not. Indeed, an effectual work of art is not merely a counterpoise to psychal difficulties: it is actually an indication that the artist, during the period of his creation, has had full possession of himself. Insanity in many cases befalls those who cannot make this transposition to art, and who, through inexpertness or inarticulateness, produce therefore unusable fantasies--fantasies that do not meet the impact of reality. There is no mistaking the fantasy of the insane for the fantasy of the artist: issuing from the same headwaters, perhaps, they empty into different oceans. Had Melville remained mute during this period or had his work fallen off we might suspect the worst: his superb craftsmanship, in Bartleby, in The Encantadas, and in Benito Cereno, is, on the contrary, an objective proof--and a reassuring one. The critics and historians of literature who said that his work became “wilder and wilder and more and more turgid in each successive book” after Moby-Dick were either ignorant of his later work, or blind. Wildness and turgidity are the precise opposite of the qualities one finds in these stories and sketches, stories told with delicacy, with restraint, and with great concentration. With the rumour of his insanity in mind, these sympathetic scholars were quick to condemn Melville’s work. We may confidently reverse their logic. With the achieved beauty of Melville’s work before us, we can isolate and reduce the period of his mental exacerbation.