Chapter FIVE: The Tartarus of Authors

We return to Herman Melville’s daily life. In January, 1849, Mrs. Melville went up to Boston to live with her mother and await her confinement. At the end of January the last proof-sheets of Mardi were corrected; in the middle of February Malcolm was born. With the coming of the baby, Melville must have felt a certain tightening of responsibility. One knows very little about the economic conditions under which Melville lived during the first years of his marriage, or to what extent Allan may have carried a good part of the burden of the household. But early in 1849 Melville must have begun to write Redburn, which was a potboiler; and before Redburn was printed he wrote, with greater strength and fuller powers, having probably recovered by that time from the strain of writing Mardi, the masterful account of navy life in White-Jacket.

We now have a chance to watch Melville at work under every disadvantage: the distraction of a household with a young baby, the necessity to make a living, and to do this promptly, the handicap of having to produce something on the level of his audience. If there are flaws in the man, they should come out under these conditions. If he has no sense of reality, he will not know how to meet them; if anything has lurked under the surface of his life, it will rise, like dead fish in poisoned water.

2

In Redburn, Melville went back to his youth and traced his feelings about life and his experiences up to his eighteenth year. The book is autobiography, with only the faintest disguises: Bleecker Street becomes Greenwich Street, and the other changes are of similar order. Following Mr. Weaver, I have relied upon Melville’s account of himself in Redburn in giving a picture of his life in the earlier chapters; for it tallies with all the other independently known facts.

For the first time in Melville’s writings, the note of personal disappointment and bitterness appeared. He had, it is true, said in Mardi that the highest happiness known to Mardians was the absence of sorrow, and he had said also, as if to explain his hilarity, that woe is more merry than mirth and only shallow sorrows brought tears. But these observations were not peculiar or original; and they were biographical only in the sense that all a man’s thoughts are autobiographical--whether they arise out of his experience or his reading or a passing mood conditioned by the state of his digestion. In Redburn, Melville discloses to us a disappointed boy, who had hopes of education, cultivation, gentility, and who resented the fate that tore these things from his grasp and made him fight for a living in a fighting world. “Claret for boys, port for men,” he exclaimed in White-Jacket, is a good rule for travel: Mrs. Glendinning uses the same phrase in another application in Pierre: the words took hold of Melville, and one suspects that in his youth he had had an overdose of port, and had participated in experiences that required a stronger stomach.

Now, for the first time, Melville is conscious of the black maggot within him, deposited as a mere egg in his youth, and growing day by day, nourished by his later disappointments and sorrows and frustrations. Things have begun to go badly: he thinks back without difficulty to times when they were even worse. The physical misery of those early years, the patched clothes, the bad food, the rough treatment of the sailors, the feeling of homelessness, the consciousness of being an Ishmael--all these experiences tallied point by point with the world outside, its cruelty, its misery, its sordidness and vice. These events and sights poisoned life for Melville: he had not realized it at the time, he had certainly not realized it while browsing through his father’s books in Lansingburgh, or tramping to school through the wide valleys of the Berkshires or brooding over the calm Pacific seas--but the poison had been slowly working in his bones. Life was not kind. All its hints of kindness, its proffers, its affected politenesses were shams. He had married a divine creature--and she was nearest him when she mended his stockings. The books that he wrote fared best when they revealed least of the author and his deepest thoughts. He wanted something central and solid in life, a house, a family, a sense of continuity and security for his future work--and the baby was an expense, the future was a blank, and instead of being able to plan another Mardi, he must hastily improvise a salable article. “It is not with a hollow purse as with a hollow balloon--for a hollow purse makes the poet _sink_--witness ‘Mardi.’”

“When a poor devil writes with duns all around him, and looking over the back of his chair, and perching on his pen, and dancing in his inkstand--like the Devils about St. Anthony--what can you expect of that poor devil? What but a beggarly Redburn?” So Melville wrote to Mr. Duyckinck in December, 1849. Those were the words of a harassed man. Redburn, recalling the cruel memories of his youth, was also the first bitter cry of his maturity.

We must not, however, take Melville’s disappointment at its face value. On its level, Redburn is a sound, well-written book. Mr. John Masefield has singled it out among Melville’s books, after Moby-Dick; Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has seconded his judgment: with this praise in mind, one cannot dismiss Redburn as contemptuously as Melville himself did. At his lowest stage of strength and confidence, he could not write anything that did not have his signature on every page. The marks of haste in Redburn are in its simplicity and its reliance upon memory: the reflective and critical passages, which are so copious in Melville’s other books, scarcely appear in Redburn. He wrote about a boy’s consciousness of the world, with a boy’s amazement at its cruelty and hard-heartedness, even as he recalled a boy’s confusion when he was placed in the midst of a strange institution like a gambling-house, something outside book, memory or dream. The captain of the ship will not chat with Redburn: Redburn thinks him no gentleman! Redburn is summarily booted out of a Liverpool club when he intrudes: these English, thinks Redburn, have no manners!

These reflections are just and true; but they are true and just by the criterion of a boy’s world, which has not yet learned the pragmatic justification of lies, cheats, hypocrisies, and hard-heartedness. “Unless ye be as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” The kingdom of heaven is this naïve world, where lies are lies, even if they save one’s face; where cruelty is cruelty, even if it be the custom of the club. To treat human beings as human beings, and not as counters, tools, conveniences, is one of the ultimate efforts of morality; but half the practices of society are, from this point of view, definitely immoral. In Redburn, Melville found himself treated, not with respect to his character and needs and spiritual wants: he found himself treated like any other pauper: put to work and told to keep out of sight. He never forgot that lesson; for, in more subtle and various ways, society kept on dinning it into him. If, when he was a sailor-boy, he was not supposed to converse freely with the captain, after he had written Typee he was not supposed to hold conversations with Plato or Sir Thomas Browne. But he was a man! Society denied it; a sailor, yes, a South Sea adventurer, yes, that too: but a boy, a sailor, a South Sea adventurer always, not a brooding, pondering, philosophic, imaginative man, whose further developments lay in seas unvisited by whalers or Captain Cooks.

“We have had vast developments of parts of men,” wrote Melville in Mardi, in words that anticipated Thoreau and Whitman, and show his kinship with them, “not of any wholes. Before a full-developed man, Mardi would fall down and worship.” It was the consciousness of being clipped, deformed, degraded, that made Melville bitter: circumstances had done this to him as a boy, and now, with duns standing over him, it was doing the same trick in his manhood. Better be a full Polynesian, as large as a native can grow, than be the deformed creature who accommodates himself to success in business or letters.

But Redburn is not primarily a book written about a grievance: it is a narrative of a boy’s trip to sea, an honest narrative, with none of the mildewed rainbows and lily-livered romanticism that usually characterize such efforts. As so often happens with mere decent veracity, Redburn, too, was denounced by one of its contemporary critics as “outrageously improbable,” and though the brutality, vice, and misery it pictured were certainly outrageous, there was nothing at all improbable about it. The book, for all its boyish directness, has the wry humour of the grown man, reflecting on his callowness, and the characters it presents are surprisingly realized--surprisingly because one doubts if Melville spent much pains on them. When one compares Redburn to a much more elaborate work, like Two Years Before the Mast, one discovers at once where Melville’s specific talents lay. While Dana wrote directly and straightforwardly, he was not a creator of character, and he had no gift of selection: in order to realize the sea, he scatters tackle, blocks, mainsails, booms, compasses, bulwarks, bulkheads on every page of the narrative: one is perpetually stumbling over some recondite nautical term which Dana had mastered, and, like a true landsman, hastened to exhibit. Two Years Before the Mast sounds like a Bluejacket’s Manual.

Now, Melville, when he wrote Redburn, had seen far more of the sea than Dana had; and since it was impossible to work a sailing-ship without naming every article of its gear and tackle, he knew the names and uses of these things quite as well as Dana did. But in Melville’s work the lingo enters incidentally; and one encounters, not the physical ship of the shipwright, but the ship in action, the ship that is part of the sailor’s consciousness--in brief, the living ship as contrasted with an abstract compendium of names and relationships. The same is true of the characters. Dana describes his shipmates accurately enough: Melville embodies them. The difference is the difference between a commonplace photograph and a significant portrait. One does not forget Harry or Jackson or Captain Riga or the Negro cook: they live as authentically, within their narrow compass, as Colonel Newcome or Samuel Weller. That is art; and even in his minor passages, Melville was an artist.

Redburn, in sum, showed only a portion of Melville; but he had no reason to be ashamed of it, except for the reason that it fell short of the higher standard he had now set himself, and the maturer art he was now capable of creating. By 1850 twice as many copies of Redburn as of Mardi had been sold, a difference accounted for partly by the difference in bulk and price, but even more, I think, by the preferences of Melville’s public. He had accomplished what he set out to do: he had faced his immediate situation and improved it. That Melville was forced to write such a potboiler was bad luck, and nothing to be proud of: but that he met the situation squarely was a mark of his resolution and balance. As long as Melville could fall back upon his adventurous past, he had something to support him, something that was viable in the marketplace. It was only when he had exhausted his accumulated capital, and was forced to mine his ore and smelt it and cast it, all under pressure of financial necessity, that he drew too heavily on his resources. But we must not read back into these earlier years his later difficulties. Redburn was a victory.

3

On the heels of Redburn came White-Jacket, or, the World in a Man-of-War. White-Jacket was the sort of book that Melville could hardly have attempted until he was sure of his capacities as a writer. Although there is more than one adventurous passage in White-Jacket, it is full of sober description and realistic criticism; and it depends for its interest on Melville’s own strength of character, his shrewd, quick insight, and his easy, seamanlike way of taking the world, rather than on the glamour of his adventures.

The young writer casts about for interesting materials; the experienced writer knows that no materials are uninteresting if they are capable of being absorbed in the blood, and pumped through all the organs and chambers of a man’s being: the more command a writer has of his own resources, the more confident is he of his ability to turn any experience to account. White-Jacket shows, I think, a greater art and control over the material than any of Melville’s earlier books: in Typee the art is gracefully unconscious: in White-Jacket it is deliberate. Melville’s personal distinction and his own peculiar adventures were subsumed under the jacket itself: he announced the theme in the first chapter, recurred to it from time to time, when he sought to waterproof the jacket, when he rounded the Horn in it, when he tried to dispose of it at auction, and finally when he was blinded by it and lost his hold on the yard-arm. The white jacket gave the narrative a unity without introducing the extraneous mechanism of a plot: it also symbolized his position as a white sheep in the black flock of a man-of-war. Omoo was more fitful and inconsecutive for lack of such a thread; Mardi did not open, like White-Jacket, on the theme with which it closed. Like Redburn, White-Jacket was written under pressure; but by now Melville knew his business. At thirty he had mastery: he could take the dull routine of the man-of-war and make every part of it live, from the maintop to the hold: he could take a hundred dispersed facts and weave them into a solid pattern.

White-Jacket is a great portrait gallery. From the Commodore to the rascally Master-at-arms, from Jack Chase of the maintop to Mad Jack, the sea-going lieutenant, who, like Jermin, knew his business so well he commanded Melville’s deep respect, from Mr. Pert the Midshipman to Surgeon Cuticle--Melville typified, and yet individualized, every character. The Neversink is an old-fashioned frigate of the line, now long out of date, and it is all warships, down to the latest airplane carrier. Mad Jack is an actual person; and he is all the officers who exercise command by knowledge and capacity, none the less liked for being a strict disciplinarian. Surgeon Cuticle is a man; and he is all professional men who become specialized by their skill into a brief-case or a textbook or an operating knife. Melville, who had found that the world was something of a man-of-war discovered also that a man-of-war’s crew was a pretty good representation of the world. “Wrecked on a desert, a man of war’s crew could quickly found an Alexandria by themselves, and fill it with all the things which go to make up a capital.” Melville conveyed this feeling of richness and varied capacity: every face was accentuated slightly in caricature, except Jack Chase’s for Jack stood out among the officers and crew as the real captain, the one complete, full-bodied man among them all, robust, bearded, Jovian, ready in war or love or seamanship, singing Dibdin’s ballads or reciting Camoëns’ Lusiad with equal gusto. Jack Chase would have pleased Whitman: indeed, they had the same large, sympathetic, readily dramatized personalities.

In White-Jacket, Melville’s power of invention appears only a few times; but when it does, it is magnificent. The chapters on the Surgeon of the Fleet and his operation show Melville’s satire at its acutest: the picture would do honour to the Hogarth Melville loved. One sees Cuticle, the eminent man of science and surgery, languishing for three years in a man-of-war without a single major operation. Fate at last hands Cuticle a poor wretch who has broken his leg; and Cuticle cannot ease the itch to amputate. The consultation with the other, surgeons is handled with cruel fidelity: they are all against the operation; but Cuticle, with great presence, browbeats the junior surgeon into an equivocation which his superior pounces upon as a sufficient sanction for the operation. The grizzly preparation and performance is told with the grizzliest humour; Melville went through every detail of the butchery with a terrible levity, and an eye for the vanity, the professional hypocrisy, the routine which, rather than humanity and understanding, so often decide the issues of life and death. The operation was a triumph for science and Mr. Surgeon Cuticle: incidentally, it happened to be the death of the poor man who was brought needlessly to the operating-table.

The satire is perfect; and it is perfect because, at the broadest extreme of caricature, it does not lose sight of the pathetic reality underneath. Melville did not waste breath dissecting the obvious impostors and charlatans; for all but the simple can escape them. It is the man in command, the man we admire, respect, put all our confidence in, that Melville so skilfully opened up. No one has done a better job of it: Cuticle and his operation must be put alongside the best passages in Molière. If operations cannot now be performed in the Navy without the consent of the principal party, Melville’s account of their professional abuse is perhaps responsible, in part, for the improvement.

Nor was this scene merely a lucky hit by Melville; the scene between the two sailmakers, sewing up the corpse, is equally strong and equally endowed with imaginative life. In his earlier books, Melville had defined his limits: they ranged between utmost fantasy and grossest matter of fact: he could grub with Caliban or fly with Ariel, but when he flew, his course was still a little erratic, and when he remained on the ground, he was tied a little too close to actuality. In White-Jacket his powers did not widen; but they gained firmness and control. He could fly groundwise, giving the commonplace the benefits of his imagination, carrying the double theme, the theme of life itself and naval experience, under the same figure; and when he cut loose, he did not need to throw overboard the ballast of good sense before he could reach the upper air. The prose of White-Jacket is an advance on all his previous writing; it has a richness of texture, a variety of rhythm, a decisiveness of phrase that his earlier work had only promised and that Mardi itself had not quite fulfilled.

White-Jacket is a portrait gallery: but it is more than that: it is one of the best all-round characterizations and criticisms of a powerful human institution that the century produced. Melville dealt with the effect of regimentation, with the relation of superior to underling, with the accidents and mischances and the ordinary routine of a man-of-war’s life, in such a fashion that he included other institutions as well: the human truths and relationships would remain, though all the navies of the world were scrapped next week. The malevolence of the Articles of War, the essential degradation of the whole military process, the hectoring, the arrogance of station (the quarter-deck face!), the military necessity of converting all the variable human potentialities into mechanized patterns--that is, human defectives--are here once and for all coolly observed and demonstrated: White-Jacket forms a sort of illustrated supplement to Blake’s keen and devastating epigrams on war. The fact that flogging was abolished in the Navy as a result of an agitation in Congress that followed directly upon White-Jacket’s publication, is a tribute to the moving truth of what Melville wrote: his words on the sham republicanism of a country that fostered an autocratic navy were a little too sharply aimed for even the military racketeers to dodge. Had Melville’s picture been that of a mere propagandist, I doubt if it would have taken such immediate effect: on the contrary, it was that of a genuine critic, who portrayed the whole truth in such a fashion as to make evasion of the unpleasant parts of it almost impossible. He overreached his antagonists by knowing more about their business than they themselves did: as when he used the example of the British admiral, Collingwood, to show that capable officers could govern the rowdiest crew without the lash. Apart from Moby-Dick, White-Jacket is, I think, Melville’s fullest achievement: and it is the best reasoned and seasoned of all his factual narratives. The charm of youth was gone, perhaps, but the manly grasp of maturity had succeeded it--the manly grasp and the steady, unfaltering eye.

Melville’s appetite for facts, his voracious reading, his wide range of experience, his philosophic brooding, at last had an imagination capable of assimilating all these materials and using them to further its own ends. Now was the time for a great leap, a leap which would gather all these powers together and focus them on an object of epic dimensions, a Typee, a Mardi, a Redburn, a White-Jacket, all in one. Melville gathered himself for the leap; but before he could make it, he was forced to attend to more mundane affairs; and in October, 1849, he went over to England to arrange in person for the English publication of Redburn and White-Jacket.

For a few months, we have the rare good luck to follow Melville day by day, almost hour by hour. When, on October 11, 1849, he stepped aboard the Southampton, a regular London liner, on a raw noon, leaving behind his brother Allan and Mr. Duyckinck, who had come to the docks, he began to keep a journal of his voyage. This journal, a later one kept during his trip to the Near East, and a small sheaf of letters, constitute with his books almost the only first-hand material for Melville’s biography. Let us take advantage of this good fortune. The literal, unadorned journal, made up hastily day by day, is the least impeachable sort of testimony, unless the writer has an eye on posterity. One need harbour no such suspicions about Melville’s simple record.

4

(_Enter Herman Melville, in a green overcoat, with polite manners, and a wary reticence underneath his appearance of rank conviviality. He is just past thirty, and at times his grave demeanour and abstracted look might pass him for forty; but there are other moments when the fringe of brown beard seems only a mask, and one detects beneath the thoughtful brow of the author and the anxious brow of the husband and father an irrepressible boy. One wants a name for this combination of outdoor strength and bookishness, this Bohemianism and gentlehood, this mixture of the bronzed god himself and the plaster cast, and, for lack of an epithet, one will have to call it Melvillian._)

What a queer business, this getting away. Yesterday one said a passionate farewell to every one in the morning; but the winds were unfavourable, and in the evening one was back again at home, feeling almost as if one had accomplished the tour of Europe; the final farewell was made a little stale by repetition; one felt relief when the ship was at last under way. For almost the first time, one travels as a passenger, travels alone, in a room as big as one’s own room at home. It is good to be at sea again: one feels it more keenly among the land-lubbers, who make anguished noises at the first choppy water beyond the Narrows. In the morning, one is up early for the sunrise, and, since the captain is friendly, one has the run of the ship. Fine to be up in the rigging again! When a man is overboard one knows how to act promptly: one raises a cry, drops overboard the tackle-fall of the quarter boat, and when he fails to reach it, drops over the side oneself to swing it toward him. Poor fellow: he sees it and does not grasp it: he drowns with a demented smile on his face, when he might have saved himself. The passengers say later he was insane.... To work a boat, to know how to keep it pointed on its course, or to throw out a life-line, this sort of knowledge gives one back one’s old confidence. There’s no gammon about the ocean; it knocks the false bottom right off a pretender’s keel.

The passengers prove better than one had dared hope: there is Adler, a German philologist, who will talk to one till midnight about fixed fate, free will, and foreknowledge absolute: his philosophy is Coleridgian, a sort of friendly bridge between Kant and Hegel and Schelling and Schlegel and one’s own less conscious metaphysics, one’s hitherto dim doubts and intuitions. There is also a genteel sociable youth named McCurdy, whose father is a New York merchant, and there is a cousin of Bayard Taylor, the pedestrian traveller, all good fellows over a bowl of punch. Taylor has a notion of going through the Near East: down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople--Athens, Beyrut, Jerusalem, Cairo, Alexandria. That would be something neither Polynesia nor the Hudson Valley could give: marvellous, if it were not for the strain on one’s purse. Four hundred dollars at least. Already, too--one isn’t a week away from them--Lizzy and Barney the baby begin to tug at one. No: one isn’t free any more. One is going to England to get a little ready cash from Bentley or Murray or Moxon on White-Jacket: one can’t dissipate that in travel. One is tied: there is no getting away from that. One wants to travel far, perhaps; but not with the same old lust and confidence: all paths lead home again. Where’s Lizzie now? Where dat old man? The nice little beggar: those were the first connected words he uttered.

Ah, well: the vacant days, the rough days, the dozy sunlit days: they all relieve the tension a little. Five years ago one scarcely knew that Hegel existed: now one is on one’s way to England--an author! One of the ladies is reading a book by H. M.; she keeps on raising her eyes to take one in, as if comparing the real man with the self-portrait. People say: Are you _the_ Mr. Melville--the man who lived among the cannibals? A fine way to go down to posterity.... What a slack lot of sheep a company of passengers is; one’s sympathies are all with the forecastle. There is the buxom Irish lady who sings, the gushy Miss Wilbur who is so obviously marriageable and who talks of winning souls to Christ, the Frenchmen with the bleak, sea-sick faces. When one goes aloft to muse a little, they stand around and gape, as if one were a performer in Barnum’s museum. Already we are three weeks from home. How quickly time flies when one day is like another. Dear Lizzie: dear little Barney: where dat old man!

With a fresh wind and a clear sky and land near, the passengers suddenly re-galvanize into life: faces appear that had been below decks most of the sail. The food tastes better; one plays shuffleboard gaily, not dutifully; one reads Pickwick Papers and wonders about the England that lies somewhere between one’s father’s journals, one’s own grim memories of Liverpool, and the warm, roast-beef, veal-pie, ale-drinking, punch-sipping, toddy-smacking England of Dickens. At last the cliffs of Portland, where the Portland stone comes from, bleak, melancholy; then the run along the Isle of Wight, past the Needles, with the ploughed fields neatly marked off, and the lower shore of Hampshire with its low cliffs on the other side. Oh, to get ashore, to feel dry land, to quit this endless, tedious tacking: to rush ashore at Portsmouth and let the ship find London by itself! No: it can’t be done: out in the Channel and up to Dover now: one is restless and impatient. Up in the morning in the dark at four, and into the cold cutter, which heads for Deal, not Dover, to make a landing. Well: England at last! Ten years ago, thirteen to be exact, a poor boy, half orphan, teased and tormented by foul-mouthed sailors, young, hopeful, innocent, a mere ship’s monkey--now, Herman Melville, traveller, novelist, romancer, author of Peedee and Hullabaloo and Pog-Dog: the conquering hero, with debts and duns at his back and a potboiler in his carpet-bag. Triumph--and how raw the wind is at dawn!

Through the dark, narrow streets of Deal, the keen air faintly reeking with the first kitchen-coals, then out into the country on foot for a day’s walk to Canterbury with Taylor and Adler. A castle and a Roman fortification before one is two hours ashore! Deal: the square mound of the Roman castra: somehow, these things mean more than a hillful of arrow-heads: the men who built them worried about God and Eternity: a thousand years does not separate one from them. Canterbury is even better: the nave, the cloisters, the queer fine thoughts one finds on some of the tombs. Yes: this is a little nearer the England of one’s dreams. Dinner at the Falstaff Inn, and in the evening a provincial theatre, with a stage that might have been peopled by Dickens, every actor more of a character than the character portrayed: an ineffably funny business all round.

Next day, by train in a third-class open carriage to London: cold to one’s marrow: cold and ravenous. When one arrives at London Bridge one can think of nothing but a chop-house. While the chops and the porter and the treacle pudding are digesting, one realizes that this is England, old England, the dark, slightly grimy eating-stalls, the red-cheeked, pert, coarse, kindly stupid waitress, the silent men eating methodically, piling their forks up like a hod with food, the lawyers’ clerks, shabby, rusty, genteel, the countrymen with leather leggings and purple veins on their cheeks, the bagmen, voluble and expansive for Englishmen, just one remove from the country pedlar, a faint odour of musty paper and soot over one kind of Londoner, or of ploughed fields and manure over the other: in short, England, London--a society like that at Albany, bedded deep in dust, must, precedent, and vast augmentations of gold. One is in it and out of it. The crowd on the Strand stares at one’s green overcoat: some one had ominously warned one on the steamer that it would set one down for a crude American. Colour is already a little old-fashioned in this drab, utilitarian England: this is the City of Dis: black coats, black hats, have survival value in a sulphur-and-brimstone world: the damned need protective colouration. One sinks down at last before a small fire in a tall, draughty room in Craven Street, just off the Strand. One’s journal has been a blank these last three days, and one must catch up with it. Travelling takes the ink out of one’s pen as well as the cash out of one’s purse.

But time is limited and one must quickly set to work. Murray is out of town; so is Bentley, the publisher; but Bentley will come up from Brighton to suit one’s convenience. In the meanwhile, one can drop in for Julien’s Promenade Concert at Drury Lane, see the pictures at the National Gallery, prowl through Chancery Lane, or go down into Cheapside to witness the surviving pomp and gilded fustian of the Lord Mayor’s show, exploring the Guildhall the next day, in the company of an affable functionary in the finance department whom one picks up, by chance, in the street, to witness a bit of infernal charity, worthy of Dis itself: a horde of beggars pours into the tawny-warm twilight of the hall, with all its flags and banners and fine timbering, to pick and grab at the remains of hams, fowls, pastries, left over from the high-and-mightinesses of the previous day. A comical sight at first; but on slight reflection, not comical: no, not comical. Thank heaven, civilization has not gone quite that far in America.

The world that holds Lord Mayor’s shows--and the starvation and misery behind the show--also holds a bus-ride, on a mellow autumn Sunday, through Piccadilly, by Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and then on, past red cottages and little taverns and open commons, through Hammersmith, Chiswick, Kew, and across the Thames to Richmond Hill, where, at the crest, overlooking a long stretch of parkland, one can see the distant castle of Windsor in the mist beyond, with the Thames itself flashing occasionally like a fish’s back in the sun, in the valley between. After that, one is ready for the sober crimson of Hampton Court--the Van Dycks and the Titians and the Rembrandts: this is what one means by a cultivated life. Must one be harried, must one struggle over vain things, must one know so much temporal bitterness, hardship, evil, in order to live? Not the Marquesans: not the Olympians of England: they both live as the lilies, planting themselves in a nourishing soil, drinking in the sun, growing, forming pollen and fertilizing and becoming fertilized, flowering and seeding. That is life, not the struggling, the harrying, the deprivation. But tomorrow one must leave Rembrandt and Hampton Court far behind: one must dicker for good terms and a fat advance with Bentley.

The greyness of London comes over one: the glacial greyness of St. Paul’s: the brown greyness of Bloomsbury: the smeary greyness of the Strand: the dank blue greyness of the Temple. The choir chanting in St. Paul’s leaves one feeling wan and unhappy. What is Lizzie doing? Where dat old man? If only they were here, or better, if one could be with them for a little while, and come back to the quiet inwardness of one’s days, warmed, refreshed, revivified. One could absorb so much more, if one were settled and secure.

How near one feels to these English, these people who like good solid food and ale and port, who have a manly straightness in their dealings, merchants whose signature makes paper valuable, poets who have created in words poems that atone for all the pictures that remain unpainted and all the music that remains unsung in the English soul: hearty, robust, gay, ready to turn a farce in Beaumont and Fletcher or in a market Punch and Judy show, but grave, serious, at bottom very deep: no one, not Dante, had struck more ruthlessly at the sinister meanings of life than Shakespeare, no one had been more relentless and sardonic than Swift or Hogarth--and yet with what tenderness, what warm love of life, in Swift’s letters to Stella or Hogarth’s portrait of the Shrimp-girl, as fresh as a newly opened wild-flower. A country of sound men, buxom girls, beautiful tidy fields, snug inns--and terrible revealers of life’s immense blackness. How intense the candle in those brave hands: how sullen and eventful the grave shadows that swarm around it!

But that other England--one was very distant from it. The England of wealth and station and reputation and family in the county sense, with its arctic Oh? and its hard, oysterlike rudeness, a stupid England, but influential in everything, governing its very enemies by choosing the issues over which they would fight. The England that had kicked an innocent youth out of a Liverpool club and would doubtless do the same, with less provocation, to a distinguished American author whose reputation was growing in France and Germany: the England of hard-faced men who rolled the wheels of progress over usury and penury as twin rails: the England that had impressed seamen, struck down its continental rivals, enclosed the commons, introduced an inhuman system of industry, and defended privilege and empty title as the very cornerstones of Civil Order--in short, the England of snobs and flunkeys and a complacent, servile, self-righteous middle class--New York, to be sure, without a hinterland that was still free and unclaimed.

How trivial this other England essentially is. What a stupid lot at Murray’s party, and what a bore old Lockhart was, with his ghastly, grinning, mincing way: such a moth-eaten lion! Oh, conventionalism, what a ninny thou art! How completely one felt out of it, how superior one felt to these superiorities. Perhaps there was such a thing as real aristocracy: one wonders if the Scotch Melvilles would show it, or whether one might get a taste of the real thing at the Duke of Rutland’s own seat: but these fishy eyes, these stupid faces, this intellectual torpor, do not reassure one. Blackwood’s had printed a long ponderous review of Redburn: that was a comical black mark against the reigning Tory intellect, wasting good white paper on a book one knows oneself to be trash, which one wrote to buy tobacco with. In a society where the mask, the reputation, the hallmark count for so much, how little any one is concerned with the substance beneath! One is a well-known author: a success: ergo, Blackwood’s takes Redburn seriously, not fathoming how little it is worth serious criticism.

One meets the publishers one by one, Bentley, who did Mardi, Murray, who published Typee and Omoo, Mr. Longmans, Mr. Chapman, Mr. Bohn, Mr. Moxon, who was Charles Lamb’s crony; and when one can’t make the deal one had hoped for, one goes down the line; but the answer is always the same: the copyright is unsatisfactory, the work may be pirated in America; and they cannot risk two hundred pounds on the rights for the first thousand copies. The prospects are not too pleasant; but if the matter could be settled at once one wouldn’t have the excuse and the opportunity to visit the Dulwich Gallery, remote from London, but full of splendid treasures; one couldn’t sit with the Greenwich pensioners at Greenwich; one couldn’t spend a Sunday morning, a little too conspicuous for comfort, at the services in St. Bridget’s; nor could one discuss metaphysics with Dr. Adler at the Edinburgh Castle, dark-walled and like a beefsteak in colour, where the ale was so mellow and the waiters so polite. One absorbs a city by food and drink, as well as by sight and conversation: the Mitre--Johnson’s tavern--and the Cock and the Rainbow--Tennyson’s haunts: the little French hotel in Soho where one has morning coffee and a jelly omelette, or, to know the worst about life in London, a cup of brackish coffee, a dirty roll, an unappetizing piece of bacon, on a dank, foggy morning in a cheap eating-house: such depression of taste, sight, sound, feeling adds a new circle to life’s possible hells.

There are bright spots that serve for perpetual contrast: hours spent over the bookstalls in Great Green Street and Lincoln’s Inn, picking out folios of Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Browne, coming, with a sudden recognition of kinship, upon De Quincey’s dreams of an Opium Eater, with passages so much like one’s best feats in Mardi; or a sumptuous dinner with Mr. Bates at East Sheen, nine miles from Richmond, where one meets Lord Ashburton’s nephew, and Baron This and Baroness That and Mr. Peabody the Boston merchant, a warm old soul: where the glasses and the silver are brilliant and the conversation ripples in reflection of it, or at least seems to, as one intricate piece of French cookery gives place to another, as white wine, champagne, hock, claret, port, and Madeira follow in grand procession: Taji dined no better among the five-and-twenty kings.

Yes: but then the melancholy of a day when one has spoken no more than “Good morning” to the slavey: when a frightful nightmare fills with a turbid residue the commonplaces of the diurnal routine: when one feels lonely and apart in the haunts that thrilled one most: when one sits at night in a damp chamber, thinking back to poor Gansevoort, who, two years before, three, was sitting in such a chamber, in the midst of such a silence, withdrawn, homesick, alone. What deep thoughts one seems on the brink of in that silence and solitude: no wonder the Greeks made silence the vestibule of the mysteries. But the weariness of this inward communion, too--oh, solitude, where are thy charms! One’s desires are fulfilled indeed: but always wryly, never in the right proportion....

While one waits around doggedly, hoping for more favourable offers, one had better seize the opportunity and make a flying trip to France: one never knows if one is coming this way again; and besides, if one does that story of the revolutionary beggar, Potter, one ought to be able to follow him on his French mission. Very well: by steamer to Boulogne, then by rail to Paris. A lodging-house on the Rue de Bussy, then a room at Mme. Capelie’s on the Left Bank. This is civilization: the Rue de Rivoli: the Place de la Concorde: the Tuileries: the Sorbonne: these things have the imprint of logic and law. Chaos and old time are somehow set at naught. The Louvre makes the National Gallery itself seem a little provincial: Notre Dame, under repair, is still a noble mass: there is a vivacity, an eagerness, an upright peasant homeliness in the housewives in felt shoes, in the rosy-cheeked market-women, that makes one feel a little nearer home. Courtesy takes the place of servility here, innate courtesy; a market-woman may have it as well as a duchess. The Hôtel de Cluny, on the site of the old Roman bath, is just such a house as one would like to live in, venerable, spacious, solid; and the bookstalls by the Palais Royal, with their Latin translations and their Voltaire and their Fénelon, give one a sense of a nation bred to thought and expression, not merely sharp and acquisitive, like the Yankees, although, obviously, they do not let the sous go by. And yet--well, the devilish nonsense of this passport business: the tapeworm of an ancient bureaucracy. What a disappointment to stand on line, once, twice, to get admission to Rachel in Phèdre, and be turned away. Rachel acting at the Palais Royal: Victor Cousin lecturing at the Sorbonne--and somehow, one remains out of it, unable to get sight of, much less to understand, these things. For consolation one has _eau de vie_ and a metaphysical talk with the ubiquitous Dr. Adler.

One is a little downcast: but what did one expect? The truth is, one’s heart is not altogether in it: one wants Lizzie and Barney, now, far more than one wants Rachel, Cousin, and the triumphs of culture generally. Still: one will make one last try: by train to Brussels, that venerable but obviously stodgy place, Paris minor, and then over into Germany for a little trip up the Rhine to Cologne, an antiquated, gable-ended town, with the crane still aloft in the unfinished tower of the Cathedral, full of associations that go back as far as Charlemagne. How concentrated history becomes in Europe: here Rubens was born and Marie de Médicis died: much lore and history to interest a pondering man. Down the Rhine itself at night, between black cliffs and crags, from Cologne to Coblentz. Metternich was born near this great fortress, Ehrenbreitstein, but, more significant symbol than this, the finest Rhenish wine-grapes are grown right under its guns. Does not that stand for life itself? Our rarest triumphs and ecstasies are touched with the shadow of ancient death. At dusk one finds oneself standing in the place where the two rivers meet: opposite towers the fortress: some four thousand miles away are Lizzie and America. Tomorrow, the last lap begins: definitely one is homeward bound.

London itself seems halfway home, when one returns to the old chamber overlooking the Thames. Back in London with a few presents, a pair of gloves and shoes from Paris for Lizzie, a medallion one bought from an old woman near the Arc de Triomphe, and a breast-pin one bought in Cologne from a rascally shopwoman who cheated one, cheated--and by a woman--and not even a pretty woman! If only one could splurge a little on presents. No: one must be sensible: a trencher and breadknife, as used of old at commons in New College: fine thing. One for Mrs. Shaw, too. At last Mr. Bentley has come around to one’s terms; it was worth waiting for. Two hundred pounds sterling on a note of hand for six months, on White-Jacket. If only Lizzie and the Little One were here--thank heaven for good letters from Lizzie--one might settle down to a little enjoyment. The Duke of Rutland has sent one a courteous invitation to visit Belvoir Castle in January. Alas! that is three weeks ahead. Can one put another three weeks between one and home? If one does not go, one will miss a royal opportunity to see the aristocracy under the best possible conditions: not merely an interesting experience in itself, but--a prudent author mustn’t forget it--so much good material to be hoarded up for another book. If one passes this up, Allan, shrewd fellow, will set one down for a ninny.

Ah! if only one could get over the three weeks: if the two images at home would only down for that space of time. Another cigar: one must weigh it over carefully. No: no: the visit to Leicester would be very agreeable--at least very valuable--but the three weeks couldn’t be borne. It is bad enough to have to go back in a thirty-day boat to save money, instead of dashing in on a twelve- or fifteen-day packet steamer. That’s settled: one goes. Yes: one goes. Now one can enjoy a bright day, and an hour at the National Gallery looking at Rembrandt’s Jew and the saints of Taddeo Gaddi and Guido’s Murder of the Innocents. One is going home. Things brighten. Davidson has promised to discount Bentley’s note at the banker’s; one even begins to enjoy old Bentley: he is a fine, frank, off-handed old gentleman, opening up gradually, like all Englishmen, but as solid as oak once he is sure of you and of his own feelings. One begins to like these English: they are not all masked and corseted in iron. There is Alfred Crowquill, for example, Punch’s funny man, whom one meets at Bentley’s--a good fellow, free and easy, and no damned nonsense. The Benchers at the Temple Bar are men after one’s own heart: a Paradise of Bachelors, this! Well, one sails a week hence. Ironically, one leaves for the old home just as one is beginning to feel settled in the new one! One breakfasts for the last time at the old place; one says good-bye to Bentley; one has one’s last dinner at Morley’s; one’s first and last glimpse of the Reform Club, a last good-bye to the somehow pleasantly dingy room in Craven Street. Waterloo Station--Portsmouth--and one steps, with Captain Fletcher, aboard the Independence, a small, ancient-looking wooden ship. In less than twenty-four hours we are past Land’s End.

Nothing happens between December 26, when one sets sail, and January 30, when one gets sight of a pilot boat: nothing can possibly happen outside that would compete with the memories, the stimuli, the anticipations, the impetuous dreams, the regrets at visits forgotten and experiences omitted, the whole inner tumult of this four months away from home. Or rather, what happens most importantly now, comes by way of books: De Quincey, Rousseau’s Confessions, Ben Jonson, Thomas Browne, The Castle of Otranto, Lamb’s Essays, Hudibras, Marlowe, Anastasius, Vathek, Goethe’s autobiography. The vessel is again one’s cloister: but instead of a long, unconscious growth it contains a vivid and conscious development: every day one is aware of new shoots, ideas, emotions, feelings, insights, sprouting out of one: why, before one had reached twenty-five one hardly had any growth one could point to at all. And now.... If one could not write books one would burst. One is big with a book; it kicks at the walls of the womb; it wakes one in the night with its anticipatory motions.

The low-lying hills of Staten Island at last. The clack and clamour of Whitehall, Broadway. Lizzie. Barney no longer says, “Where dat old man?” He has a dozen other things to talk about. Lizzie is busy with the household, her mother, her mother-in-law, Sam, Father, Uncle Peter, Allan, the sisters: she chatters on about all of them, and about what baby did last week. She will never quite realize, perhaps, what one has been through, how deep one’s longing is, how strong one’s need for escape is, too. She loves one, yes, but not with that gnawing intensity; she will never appreciate how lonely one has been. Before a fortnight is over one wonders why one had ever been so feverishly anxious to come back. Lizzie would have waited another three weeks: an invitation from the Duke of Rutland is irretrievable. No matter: spring is coming, and one must get down to work, and be midwife to one’s own progeny. What earthly shape will this embryo take on?

(_Exit Herman Melville, pondering his future._)

TITAN