Melville’s own blackness and spiritual desolation, his Timonism, recalls that of Shakespeare himself, from whose play he had taken the word. Their vision of life went through similar stages, and even in their personal affairs some of the same anomalies arise, down to the silent contempt with which Shakespeare apparently dismissed the products of his imagination, not bothering to see that they reached the world at all, still less that they did so in the exact form he had conceived them. In both men, the feeling of a shattered faith and despondency is expressed in the relationship of a young man, Hamlet or Pierre, to a proud and worldly mother; in Pierre and Hamlet, an unconscious incest-wish incapacitates the hero for marriage with the girl he has wooed; and the final result is doubt and deepest anguish, culminating in the death of all involved. Alienated from society, a furious contempt for mankind arises in these writers: Shakespeare carries this contempt into Lear and Timon of Athens, even as Melville did into The Confidence Man: the contempt is mixed with impotence and self-distrust, and the art itself is marred by an uncontrollable sense of outrage: “In Timon,” as Dowden justly says, “we see one way in which a man may make his response to the injuries of life; he may turn upon the world in a fruitless and suicidal rage.” Finally, when each could go no further without outward violence, he recoiled upon himself, and each in a final work expressed a reconciliation, Shakespeare in The Tempest, separating the base, in the form of Caliban, from the spiritual, in the form of Ariel, under the double mastery of a science and virtue embodied in Prospero--a resolution which, we shall come to see, is not singularly different in meaning from Melville’s final work.
What caused this blackness in Shakespeare’s life, what brought him to the crisis recorded in Timon, surely the worst of his plays, we can only speculate upon: but in Melville’s life we are aware of tangible reasons for his frustration, with roots that reach far back into childhood, his disappointed youth, the hardships of early poverty and defeated expectations, his unfortunate experiences on his first sailing voyage, his perpetual feeling of being an Ishmael, through poverty among the gentlefolk at Albany, through intellectual superiority among his shipmates, through spiritual hardihood among his contemporaries in letters, through social isolation in his own neighbourhood, where people looked upon him as cousin german to the cannibals. Melville had witnessed this same Timonism in Jackson, and his words remind us that “there seemed more woe than wickedness about the man; and his wickedness seemed to spring from his woe; and for all his hideousness, there was that in his eye at times, that was ineffably pitiable and touching; and though there were raw moments when I almost hated this Jackson, yet I have pitied no man as I have pitied him.” Jackson would enter into arguments to prove that there was nothing to be believed, nothing to be loved, and nothing worth living for--and during the period of his own Timonism, out of his abysmal woe, Melville felt and wrote, at intervals, particularly in Pierre and in The Confidence Man, the same way.
Of Melville’s blackness there is no doubt. That this blackness would ordinarily have led to downright insanity there is little room for doubt either. But, like Shakespeare and Goethe and many another artist, Melville found a benign and not a baneful outlet for his energies; and every evidence of Melville’s work points to the restoration of his poise and health, intermittently, in the decade we are writing of, and steadily in the years that followed.
4
Returning to 1853, the year that followed Pierre, we find Melville in the midst of a series of disappointments: he was to learn the truth of Hamlet’s observation: misfortunes come not singly but in battalions. Melville sought for a consular appointment in the South Seas, a place where he was fitted by experience and sympathy to perform a decent service, and perhaps, with relief from financial strain, recover a little that joy in the flesh which he had once known, and find again in his bosom the radiance of the landscape itself. Melville had no opportunity to try this remedy. In spite of Richard H. Dana’s intercession, Chief Justice Shaw’s efforts, and Allan’s assiduous canvassing, and Hawthorne’s friendly intercession, he did not get the post, nor did he get a consulship at Antwerp, which for a moment seemed possible. To make matters worse, Harper’s, his publishers, lost the plates of his novels and almost all the copies of his books in a fire that gutted out their quarters. If there was something prophetic in the foundering of the whaler Ann Alexander, and the total disappearance of the old Pequod itself, as Melville was finishing Moby-Dick, there was something equally uncanny in this conflagration. The very elements played against him, as they played against Ahab. His books were put out again by Harper’s, but perfunctorily: they had lost their original momentum. None of Melville’s subsequent books was to meet such eager acceptance.
Another sign of Melville’s weakened health and lessened energies is the fact that during 1853 his entire writing seems to have consisted only of two short stories, Cock-a-Doodle-Do and Bartleby the Scrivener, both published in magazines towards the end of the year. Melville was not at home in the narrow confines of the short story: he had scarcely time to get under way before he was back again in port. The result is that the best of his short stories are really short novels, while the lesser ones, like The Lightning Rod Man, are little more than mediocre anecdotes. I and My Chimney, The Appletree Table, The Paradise of Bachelors, The Tartarus of Maids, are more in the nature of discursive essays, “in character,” than they are of tales: Melville was at his weakest in deliberately symbolic tales, like Cock-a-Doodle-Do and The Bell-Tower; indeed, the latter might be slipped into one of Hawthorne’s volumes, without apology, as a minor work of his youth. When in 1852 Melville equably handed to Hawthorne the circumstances of a story he had gathered from a lawyer in New Bedford, he was so conscious of treading on the master’s ground that he relinquished his own right to exploit this particular plot. But except for the original impulse, his best stories owe nothing to Hawthorne: Melville’s symbolism is more delicately and carefully concealed; and his moral, like Shakespeare’s, rests in the demonstration, not in the conclusion.
Bartleby the Scrivener is one of Melville’s longer stories; and it gains much by its juxtaposition of incongruous personalities. The story is told by a comfortable, pursy old lawyer, with an office in Wall Street; the lawyer and his copyists are hit off with a warm sense of caricature. Into this office comes a pale, bleak creature, Bartleby, to serve as a scrivener. He is quiet and industrious; but he refuses to comply with the routine of the office: he will not compare copy, even for the lawyer himself; and yet there is something in this passive self-assertion and this methodical self-obliteration which makes the lawyer humour Bartleby. With these qualities goes a mystery; and by accident, on a Sunday at church-time, the lawyer discovers, on attempting to enter his office, that Bartleby not only works for him but has quietly occupied his business premises, to eat and sleep there. In spite of this gross irregularity, the lawyer keeps Bartleby, only to have the little man quit work entirely. When the lawyer demands a reason, he answers: I would prefer not to. When the lawyer asks him to move out, he answers: I would prefer not to. There is no getting behind his silence, his dead-wall reveries, his blank self-possession.
The effect of this passive resistance upon the lawyer is upsetting. “My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy verge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible, too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is due to the inherent selfishness of the human heart: it rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succour, common sense bids the soul be rid of it. What I saw that morning convinced me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to the body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.”
The lawyer moves and Bartleby remains on the original premises; but the new tenant is not so patient and he has Bartleby arrested. When Bartleby finds himself in prison, he prefers not to eat. A kind fellow, the lawyer visits him, seeking to restore his confidence and reawaken his manhood. “Nothing reproachful attaches to you being here,” he assures Bartleby. “And see, it is not so sad a place as one might think. Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass.” “I know where I am,” he replied.