Melville contrasted these bleak, desolate Aegean Islands with those of the Polynesian archipelago: the former had lost their virginity, whilst the latter were as fresh as at their first creation. Melville knew that withered feeling. To look upon the yellow of Patmos, who would believe that a god had been there; and, one may add, to look upon the sear tint of Melville’s soul, during the strained years that had just passed, who would believe that a god had once reposed there, either?
At last the Alexandrian lighthouse came into view; and shortly after that Pompey’s pillar, looking like a huge stick of candy that had long been sucked. Melville made a quick excursion to Cairo; and spent two nights there, wandering through the streets, where the houses seemed a collection of old orchestras, organs, proscenium boxes, or like masses of old grotesque furniture, lumbering a garret, and covered with dust: the streets, so narrow, through the projection of the upper storeys, that they seemed almost tunnels, made noon itself dim: in the lonelier parts of the city many of the houses were uninhabited and had a ghoulish look: but the city itself, for all these desolate houses and stoved-in domes and rubbish-filled alleys, was alive with bargain and chaffer and shouting camel drivers and whining blind men: desert and verdure clashed together like splendour and squalor, like gloom and gaiety: such violent chiaroscuro in all the senses bewildered one like strong wine on an empty stomach.
The Pyramids completed the effect of this exploration. Together, they made a magnificent, a terrible, an unforgettable day. From the distance, the Pyramids jutted over the sand like purple mountains. To ascend the great Pyramid, there were as many different routes as there are for crossing the Alps: precipice on precipice, cliff on cliff. Nothing in Nature but the sea gives such an idea of vastness; the very grass that grows around the Pyramids does not touch them, as if in awe of them. Exhausted a little with his climb, a pain in his chest, Melville found the Arab guides tender: as he hurried on, for none but the phlegmatic could scale this mound deliberately, the Arabs in their white flowing robes might have been angels conducting him up to heaven. One old man fainted halfway up and had to be brought down: he essayed to go inside and fainted again: it was too much for him.
Well, it was almost too much for Melville: it was not the sense of height but the sense of immensity that was stirred: with all other architecture, however vast, the eye is gradually inured to the sense of magnitude by passing from part to part: but here there was no storey or stage: it was all or nothing, not height or breadth or length or depth but unspeakable vastness, less like courses of masonry than like strata of rocks, a long slope of crags and precipices. As with the ocean, you learned as much of its vastness by the first glance as you would in a month. The great Pyramid refused to be studied or adequately comprehended. Nor had it lost by the tearing away of its casing, though it had scaled enough stone to build a walled town; on the contrary, when it presented a smooth plane it must have lost as much in impressiveness as the ocean does when unfurrowed--a dead calm of masonry. A feeling of awe and terror gradually came over Melville: the Arabs were no longer angels, but seemed, in their soft, imperturbable way, somehow malign. Stooping and doubling in the interior, as in a coal shaft, Melville shuddered at the ancient Egyptians: they had a mixture of the cunning and the awful. Moses learned his lore from the Egyptians: the awful idea of Jehovah was born there. They must needs have been terrible inventors, those ancient wise men: as out of the crude forms of the natural earth they could evoke by art the Pyramids, so, out of the dull elements of the insignificant thoughts that are in all men, they could by analogous art rear the transcendent conception of God. Indeed, the Egyptians had outwitted mortality. The Pyramids were conceived out of an energy as mighty as Nature’s: nought but an earthquake or a geological revolution could smother it up. That was something like an answer to the White Whale--albeit such a distant answer. The pyramidical energy, as well as the pyramidical scorn, were both lacking in Melville now, high though they had towered in Moby-Dick.
Back in his high-ceilinged room of Shepherd’s Hotel, with its almost monkish barrenness, the Pyramids still loomed before Herman Melville--something vast, indefinite, uncomfortable, and awful. Nothing that he met in the holy ways of Jerusalem, on the Mount of Temptation or in the Garden of Gethsemane, compared with the powerful impression left on him by the Pyramids. Did his instinct at last tell him that power was necessary, but that power alone was not enough, that Power and Love must work together, harmoniously married, as in one of the oldest of mythic figures, before man’s triumph is anything but evanescent? The issue of power and love, knowledge and sympathy, contrivance and imagination, is art; and the highest product of art is not a painting, a statue, a book, a pyramid, but a human personality. When power and love were divorced in the personality, love became impotent, and power became malign and unlovely; and the personality itself mouldered, mouldered into a Jackson, a Timon, an Ahab, a Maria Glendinning, a Pierre, an Isabel. The Egyptians certainly had not forgotten love; and the Nile itself, which spread greenness when its floods receded, was the symbol of its benign fertility. Did some hint of this touch Melville in Egypt or in Palestine? Apparently, yes; for in Clarel we shall see the germs of a new feeling about life, and the source of that feeling is love, a clear and unambiguous love.
5
What further impact the journey made upon Melville’s mind, we shall best gather when we come to consider Clarel and some of his minor poems; and the further events of his journey home _via_ Italy, the Netherlands, and England can well be condensed into scattered observations and epigrams that punctuate the account in his journals. Passing Patmos, Melville was again afflicted with the great curse of modern travel--scepticism. “Could no more realize that St. John had ever had revelations here than when off Juan Fernandez could believe in Robinson Crusoe according to Defoe.” “Pompeii like any other town. Same old humanity. All the same whether one be dead or alive. Pompeii comfortable sermon. Like Pompeii better than Paris.” Pisa: “Campanile like pine poised just ere snapping. You wait to hear crack. Like Wordsworth’s mooncloud, it will move all together if it move at all, for Pillars all line with it.” “Rome fell flat on me. Oppressing flat.... Tiber a ditch, yellow as saffron. The whole landscape nothing independent of association. St. Peter’s looks small from tower of Capitol.... Dome not so wonderful as St. Sophia’s.... Went to Baths of Caracalla. Wonderful. Massive. Ruins form as it were natural bridges of thousands of arches. There are glades and thickets among the ruins--high up.--Thought of Shelley. Truly, he got his inspiration here. Corresponded with his drama and mind. Still majesty and desolate grandeur.” “Quirinal Palace.... The Gardens--a paradise without the joy--freaks and caprices of endless wealth ... as stone is sculptured into forms of foliage, so here foliage turned into forms of sculpture.” Florence: “Breughel’s picture much pleased me. Not pleased with the Venus de Medici, but very much astonished at the Wrestlers, and charmed with Titian’s Venus.” “Rather be in Venice on a rainy day than in any other capital on a fine one.” London: “Crystal Palace--digest of the universe. Vast toy. No substance. Such appropriation of space as is made by a rail fence.” Oxford: “It was here I first confessed my gratitude for my motherland and could view her with pride. Oxford to an American as well worth visiting as Paris, though in a different way.”
6
During this crowded journey, while Melville was in Italy, there happened an event, obscure, mysterious, obliquely narrated, and published only at the end of his life, which gives us a further clue to Melville’s character and experience. Knowing Melville’s habits of composition, one is fairly sure that some objective fact lies beneath the surface of the verse called After the Pleasure Party: all the more because he published the poem only after he had reached the serenity and safety of old age. That these verses were not merely the product of untethered imagination one suspects, too, because their theme, remorse and bitter regret after renouncing a passionate experience, is underlined by the words of another poem, Madame Mirror:
What pangs after parties of pleasure, What smiles but disclosures of pain!
This long poem, After the Pleasure Party, stands out with particular boldness because it contains the only direct references to sexual passion that one finds in Melville’s entire work, except for haphazard and unimportant incidents--or the plainly fictitious events in Pierre. It is a faint and intricate clue; but one must not neglect it.