Bartleby is a good story in itself: it also affords us a glimpse of Melville’s own drift of mind in this miserable year: the point of the story plainly indicates Melville’s present dilemma. People would admit him to their circle and give him bread and employment only if he would abandon his inner purpose: to this his answer was--I would prefer not to. By his persistence in minding his own spiritual affairs, those who might have helped him on their own terms, like Allan or his father-in-law or his Uncle Peter, inevitably became a little impatient; for in the end, they foresaw they would be obliged to throw him off, and he would find himself in prison, not in the visible prison for restraining criminals, but in the pervasive prison of dull routine and meaningless activity. When that happened there would be no use assuring him that he lived in a kindly world of blue sky and green grass. “I know where I am!” Whether or not Melville consciously projected his own intuition of his fate, there is no doubt in my mind that, as early as 1853, he was already formulating his answer. To those kind, pragmatic friends and relatives who suggested that he go into business and make a good living, or at least write the sort of books that the public would read--it amounts to pretty much the same thing--he kept on giving one stereotyped and monotonous answer: I would prefer not to. The dead-wall reverie would end in a resolution as blank and forbidding as the wall that faced him: a bleak face, a tight wounded mouth, the little blue eyes more dim, remote, and obstinate than ever: I would prefer not to!
During the next year, Melville settled down to a steadier round of work, and one of the best of his narratives, a series of sketches called The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, was published during 1854 under the pseudonym Salvator R. Tarnmoor. Three other sketches followed; and finally, in July, 1854, he began to publish serially the story of Israel Potter, the Revolutionary beggar, for which he had gathered material in London five years before.
In The Encantadas Melville went back again to the ground he had ploughed so well before. He had gone ashore on the Enchanted Isles, the Galapagos, during the early part of his whaling voyage, and now, in his own sable mood--a mood reflected in the very choice of his pseudonym, Tarnmoor--the landscape of these islands corresponded to his inner state; and his description of the scene is as fine as anything in his earlier pages; if anything, there is more studious mastery. The final sketch, the story of Hunilla, who had been left in solitude on one of these islands, when her brother and her husband died, is poignant and terrible, all the more so because of the dark bestiality of the visiting crew, that Melville hints at, and then forgoes telling about, so moved is he by its inhumanity.
“One knows not,” Melville reflects here, “whether nature doth not impose some secrecy upon him who has been privy to certain things. At least, it is to be doubted whether it is good to blazon such. If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men. Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid; but in all things man sows upon the wind, which bloweth where it listeth; for ill or good men cannot know. Often ill comes from good, as good from the ill.” He has returned to the ultimate moral of Pierre; and it holds good of the tales of the Enchanted Isles: out of its stark ugliness, he breathed beauty. With just as abhorrent an insight into the cruelties of life as he had in Pierre, Melville here had a firmer hand on himself: he ruefully confesses that “in nature, as in law, it may be libellous to speak some truths.” Within the dark rim of the horizon, the words move, like swift white sails on grey waters. The style is again accurate, pliant, subtle, bold; but it is never hectic nor forced, nor does it smell from the mothballs of old costume chests. There is not the faintest sign that his literary powers were falling off, or his voice sinking to a whisper.
5
Israel Potter was a full-length novel, based upon a little memoir of his life, printed for the sake of gathering up a few pennies, in Providence in 1827. The fact that Melville could attempt a long work again is a sign of somewhat restored health, and though the book ranks far below Melville’s best work, it differs from Redburn chiefly in that while based upon a document, it relies even more heavily upon Melville’s own powers of invention. All the good things in Israel Potter come from Melville, not from Potter: the original story provided only the skeleton of events: Melville gives them a setting and a full cast of characters.
Israel Potter is a country bumpkin who is kept by his parents from marrying the girl he loves, goes on a surveying expedition into Vermont and is defrauded of his earnings, ships to sea, returns to the farm, fights gallantly at Bunker Hill, enlists in an American man-of-war, and is captured by the British and taken to England. Escaping from his guards, Israel flees into the countryside, making his way across England by devious passages, until he finally comes upon a kindly English baronet near Brentford, who gives him a job on his country estate. Rumours that he is a spy dog him, so he is compelled to change his situation and finally he achieves safety at Kew, as one of the king’s gardeners. When work slacks off, Israel is again thrown on his resources, and, while hiding, he makes the acquaintance of some secret friends of America, among them, Horne Tooke, the grammarian. These friends equip him and send him on a secret mission to Dr. Franklin in Paris, where he meets Paul Jones; and eventually Israel, by another lucky chance, comes to serve on a privateer with Jones, and to participate in the fight between the Serapis and the Bonhomme Richard. The upshot of these vagrant ups and downs is a long period of toil in a London brickworks, followed by marriage and residence in London. Finally, in his old age, with his English wife dead, Israel returns with his son to his native land, only to find the landmarks of his youth gone, and a pension as a Revolutionary soldier denied him. In this state, the original Israel wrote his book; and at this point of weariness, disillusion, exhaustion, Melville left him.
Israel Potter has suffered, like all Melville’s later books, from the apathy of criticism, quite as much as from its own weaknesses. Mr. Percy Boynton says of Israel Potter that “it was a perfunctory work, not as interesting as the book it was based on,” and while one hesitates to differ with such an able critic, a close comparison of the book seems to me to prove exactly the opposite. Not merely does Israel Potter contain, as Mr. F. J. Mather, Jr., has remarked, one of the best accounts of a sea-fight in history; not merely is its portrait of John Paul Jones a far more illuminating study of that great shark of the seas than Cooper’s picture in The Pilot; but it is one of the few works of American fiction that deal with patriotic episodes in a generous, straightforward way. Melville took a crude, bald narrative and poured life into it: he took a smudgy woodcut and made a living picture out of it, building up the background, creating incident and character where none had existed before, projecting every figure into the third dimension. The account of John Paul Jones occupies a single paragraph in the original: in Melville’s novel, Jones is the largest figure in the book, and nearly runs away with the story. It is the same with Franklin. He is a colourless figure in the original: Melville, with gentle mocking penetration, puts before us the man in full length, with sly characterizations of his paunch and his purse and his methodical parsimony. Melville does so well with these characters that one wishes he had created a whole historical portrait gallery. If any one fancies that Melville’s characters are merely romantic projections of his actual self, here is a clear answer.
Melville’s imaginative life, it is true, flowered only when there was some soil in his own life that nourished it, and when that soil was lacking he found himself forced, again like his Elizabethan exemplar, to pick up the action and the fable in another work. As a writer, he was deprived of the fruitful contacts and adventures he had enjoyed as a common sailor: the inner life grew, but the outer life dwindled and thinned out; and so he was thrown, when he had exhausted his original adventures, upon second-hand experience. This drying up of his sources was a great handicap to him; for while books helped to form and crystallize experience, they were not substitutes for it. He transformed the bald story of Israel Potter: but, had he wholly made it his own, the central character would have been John Paul Jones, and in so far as he was dependent upon the original he was weak. Israel Potter is many removes from Melville at his best; but it would be absurd to throw it out of the Melville canon. It has some of the fine qualities of his art, the mixture of tradition and fresh experience, the purification and heightening of actuality, with a loss of realism and a gain in reality: what it chiefly lacks is centrality. It is Melville _manqué_--but still Melville. His poorest work was many degrees above mediocrity.