Chapter SIX: Red Clover

It was time for Melville to begin work again. In February, 1850, he owed his publisher, Harper’s, more than seven hundred dollars in advances not covered by royalties. He did what he could to reduce the scale of his living. In the spring, he left New York and went up to Broadhall with his family--the old homestead that his Grand-Uncle Thomas had sold when he emigrated to Ohio, had now been converted into an inn: his grandfather’s old desk was still mildewing in the barn, and Melville brought it to light, cleaned it up for his own use, and sat down to it.

The Berkshires were “home” for Melville quite as much as Albany or New York; perhaps more so, for he had a feeling for the open country and its ways. By October he had found a near-by farmstead, with a house that had been an inn during the eighteenth century, an apple orchard on the south side, broad hay fields to the north, and pasture rising in back of the house to the west, which ended in a wood lot on the summit of the hill. The countryside was well cultivated. Maple trees lined the highroad on each side, the willows dropped lazily over the banks of the Housatonic, and, on the poorer upland soils, where the amaranth grew, the white threads of birch trees stood out against the dark pattern of the woods. Pittsfield, a village with metropolitan pretensions, the capital of the Berkshires and the resort of palpable celebrities, was only two miles or so away by a road that led down the valley and across the river, past a sawmill, and through the parklike streets of the village itself.

Judge Shaw advanced Melville funds on a friendly sort of mortgage to purchase Arrowhead; and Melville doubtless intended by modest and spasmodic farming, with a vegetable garden, hay fields, a wood lot, a cow, and a horse, to eke out the narrow income derived from his books. For a man in prime health there was nothing injudicious in this arrangement: winter leaves a considerable amount of free time from farm work, and, with only a few hundred dollars in ready cash every year, Melville might have made a pretty good go of it. But there were handicaps. He had a wife and child to support; other children came presently, four in all; and Elizabeth Melville was a duffer as a housekeeper: try as she would, she could not cook without strain nor manage a servant; and her chief equipment for facing the work and the winter was an admirable set of party dresses and slippers. Melville’s picked-up knowledge of cookery must have been called upon for service during the first weeks they were definitely on their own; and presently Mrs. Maria Melville and his sisters came to join the household, in order to teach Elizabeth the rudiments of the household arts. It was a humiliating experience for Elizabeth; but there was no help for it: to the end of her days she did not like housekeeping; the art of “managing” was apparently not in her. The many hands in Arrowhead doubtless made light work; they also made inroads upon the larder, and what the Melvilles gained in service they lost in supplies. The house itself was commodious in rooms, but cramped in space, since it did not so much exist in its own right, as it did as a sort of annex to the chimney, a vast brick structure, with a circumference of forty-eight feet at the base; the chimney was ample enough, but it swallowed wood on a winter day as a whale swallows little fishes: and the rooms that were left were none too large.

On any realistic canvas, this new move, with all its unexpected burdens, was a dubious one. But in 1850 Melville was at the top of his energies: the impetus from Typee and Omoo had not been lost: the reception in England had probably added to his confidence: and when he looked around him, the American scene itself reinforced his courage and his convictions, and gave him new strength.

2

In the spring of 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter appeared, and Melville presently awoke to find that Hawthorne, whose books he had hitherto kept away from, despite the praise of them he had heard, was a kindred spirit. “A man of deep and noble nature has taken hold of me in this seclusion,” he exclaimed; “his wild, witch-voice rings through me; or, in softer cadences, I seem to hear it in the songs of the hillside birds that sing in the larch trees at my window.” This discovery must have added to Melville’s refreshing sense of welcome on coming back to America. Melville had perhaps begun to doubt whether he could find an audience among his fellow countrymen; and here, at last, was one man capable of understanding every part of him. America and its promise were not a fraud: Hawthorne seemed a deeper writer than any one who had gained the public’s ear in England as a novelist, or, for that matter, as a Victorian poet. When, this summer, Melville came upon the Mosses from an Old Manse, which had been published some years before, he realized he had lost much by his aloofness from the Salem magician. He hastened to repair his neglect; for he gave to the Literary World presently one of the best appreciations of Hawthorne, and incidentally one of the keenest expositions of the situation of the creative writer in America, that Hawthorne was in his own lifetime to get.

The “soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of dreams,” Melville announced. In Hawthorne, humour and love were developed in that high form called genius, and “no such man can exist without also possessing, as the indispensable complement of these, a great, deep intellect, which drops down into the universe like a plummet.”

Hawthorne, without all of Rembrandt’s warmth, had this great quality of Rembrandt: there were blacks in the midst of his sunlight, as Melville had found there were blacks in the world. The blackness fixed and fascinated Melville: it brought Hawthorne to the level of Shakespeare, not in language and performance, perhaps, but in insight: “those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality,” the dark things Shakespeare announced through his dark characters, Hamlet, Timon, Lear, Iago, “these qualities, in spite of Hawthorne’s quiet temperateness, so different from Shakespeare’s popularizing noise and show of broad farce and blood-besmeared tragedy,” brought him on the same level. Melville had re-discovered Shakespeare only two years before: and that discovery, reserved happily for maturity, had contributed decisively to his own rapid burgeoning: “Dolt and ass that I am,” he had exclaimed then, “I have lived more than twenty-nine years, and until a few days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William. Ah, he’s full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, ay, almost as Jesus. I take such men to be inspired. I fancy this Mons. Shakespeare in heaven ranks with Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael. And if another Messiah ever comes he will be in Shakespeare’s person.” ... “I would to God,” he wrote shortly after, “Shakespeare had lived later and promenaded in Broadway. Not that I might have had the pleasure of leaving my card for him at the Astor, or made merry with him over a bowl of the fine Duyckinck punch; but that the marble which all men wore on their souls in the Elizabethan day, might not have intercepted Shakespeare’s fine articulateness. Now I hold it a verity that even Shakespeare was not a frank man to the uttermost. And, indeed, [who] in this intolerant universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.”

Shakespeare had prepared the way for Hawthorne in Melville’s mind. If what one could not quite get from the Shakespeare of the printed page one might get directly from the shy man himself, what great good fortune to find a similar person, alive and abroad in one’s own century! And if the Declaration of Independence did make a difference, if the American had cut loose in more ways than one, and could face life with a little less show and pretence and caste-spirit than Europe had known, why, then one might really get to the bottom of the matter with Hawthorne. That possibility piqued Melville. He risked much in utterance himself; and he hoped that Hawthorne would venture much in return. When they at last became friends, he contrived a hundred different ways of assaulting Hawthorne’s reserve: he staggered up mountains, uncovered mounds of debris, jumped gaily off into innumerable abysses, all to excite Hawthorne to some equivalent disclosure. He did not know at the outset of his enthusiasm for Hawthorne that nothing would ever shake that mountainous reserve, that no leaps and sorties of his would stimulate Hawthorne to put one foot before the other. But Hawthorne caused Melville to hope for much; and that hope mingled with the plan of Moby-Dick, while he was writing it.

What a difference there was between Hawthorne and the graceful Washington Irving or the scholarly Longfellow, the men who had heretofore stood before the world as the highest representatives of American letters, urbane, elegant, sedulously following foreign models, and avoiding all topics but smooth ones! Better to fail at times with such originality as Hawthorne’s than to succeed in the easy, bland, gentlemanly way--knowing one’s powers, because they are so small, and keeping within them, because nothing beckons one to stir beyond.

Here, thought Melville, was a fellow spirit at last! Melville had partly realized before that other men were working below the surface of things in America; but the transcendentalists had put him off a little by rallying around them the people who thought they were lifting themselves above material things by taking cold water rubs, on principle, or by being dreadfully concerned over the items of their diet or the cut of their clothes: whereas Melville felt that champagne and oysters were the proper nourishment for the body, if one could get them, and he believed that one was less devoted to the material life when one accepted its daily routine than when one attempted to substitute plain living for high thinking, and lost true simplicity, by making its attainment such a complicated matter. Even Hawthorne at first seemed to lack something. Hawthorne was wonderfully subtle, Melville wrote to Mr. Duyckinck, and his deeper meanings are worthy of a Brahmin. Still, there was something lacking--a good deal lacking to the plump sphericality of the man. What was that? He doesn’t patronize the butcher--he needs roast beef, done rare.

Hawthorne became Melville’s sole connection with the transcendentalists, and it never developed into a very deep union. Melville had listened to a lecture of Emerson’s a year before and defended Emerson from Mr. Duyckinck’s censure: he respected this Plato who spoke through his nose. If Emerson was a fool, Melville had rather be a fool than a wise man, and if he owed much to Sir Thomas Browne, well, no one was his own sire: the debt was a universal one. Emerson at least dived; and Melville loved all men who dive. “Any fish can swim near the surface; but it takes a great whale to go downstairs five miles or more, and if he don’t attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet that will.” That justified Emerson: but except as one diver with another, Melville felt no kinship with him. “I do not oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow, but prefer to hang myself in mine own halter than to swing in any other man’s swing.” It was the blandness, the sunniness, the mildness, the absence of curses, shadows, shipwrecks in Emerson’s philosophy that set Melville against it: Emerson was the perpetual passenger who stayed below in bad weather, trusting that the captain would take care of the ship: Melville was the sailor who climbed aloft, and knew that the captain was sometimes drunk and that the best of ships might go down. “_All hands save ship!_ has startled dreamers.”

Hawthorne, then, was a man to be grateful for: the smell of young beeches and hemlocks was upon him, wrote Melville; the broad prairies were in his soul; he had these qualities because he was an American and deeply part of the scene; but, in addition, he had an eye for the dankness and decay and for the inscrutable malevolence of the universe: he was no sun-dial that recorded only the smiling hours of life. If the country could nourish Hawthorne, and if Hawthorne could produce The Scarlet Letter and the Mosses, well, what might not Melville himself put forth? Though Hawthorne was a genius, perhaps, like Shakespeare, he did not appear alone. “Shakespeare cannot be regarded as in himself the concretion of all the genius of his time; nor as so immeasurably beyond Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Beaumont, Jonson, that these men can be said to share none of his power. Would it, indeed, appear so unreasonable to suppose that this great fullness and overflowing may be, or may be destined to be, shared by a plurality of men of genius?”

The presence of an Emerson, a Hawthorne, gave all the more reason for a Melville. So Melville must have felt in his bones; and he was right. What he could not venture as a perception--for who can see or measure his contemporaries?--was certainly true as prophecy: in that flood of intellectual and imaginative power that I have elsewhere called the Golden Day, Emerson, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, were all carried along in the same current: each reinforces and rounds out the others: and it is this corpus of writers, rather than any single one, that forms what Hawthorne himself called the Master Genius of America.

Melville did not suppose, when he wrote his encomium of Hawthorne, that this same summer would bring the two men into contact, that they would become neighbours, near enough to make occasional visits by horseback or wagon, and that, despite his premonition that “on a personal interview no great author has ever come up to the idea of his reader,” he would find in Hawthorne, temporarily, that comrade and friend for whom he had been looking. There was, it is true, only half a generation between them; and this particular distance makes intimacy difficult, unless the older man is willing to treat the younger one as an assured equal. How Hawthorne himself felt about the matter it is hard to tell: Melville realized that his own boisterous democracy, which recognized the thief in the jail as the equal of General George Washington, might grate on Hawthorne a little, and that, like an English Howard in the presence of a plebeian, Hawthorne’s intellectual aristocracy might shrink at this claim and this contact. But Melville had no lack of faith in his own powers; and he put forth the claim to equality with easy and assured frankness; and unless he was unusually insensitive at this point, his letter would indicate that Hawthorne accepted the relationship on Melville’s terms.

On August 5, 1850, Hawthorne noted in his American Notebook that he drove from Lenox, near which he lived in a penurious red farmhouse, to Stockbridge, where he found at the house of Fields, the Boston publisher, Dr. Holmes, Mr. Duyckinck of New York, also Mr. Cornelius Matthews and Herman Melville. They ascended the Monument Mountain and the party was caught in a shower: according to tradition, it was during that summer storm, under a shoulder of rock where they had taken refuge, that these two stormy souls first overcame their reticence and shyness, and ploughed through conversation to a deeper intimacy. The New Yorkers called on Hawthorne in the forenoon, two days later, and Hawthorne treated them to a couple of bottles of Mr. Mansfield’s champagne; and from that time on Melville was a familiar visitor in the Hawthorne household. The family called him Mr. Omoo; young Julian said that he loved Mr. Melville as well as his Mamma and Papa and Una; Melville, who had amused the Marquesans with an improvised popgun, was not likely to fall down in intercourse with children--and he would sometimes ride over in the evening with his great dog, and the children would ride on the dog’s back. Even Sophia Hawthorne was fascinated by Melville: she, who adored her husband’s dark, lustrous eyes, was puzzled and a little disturbed by Melville’s; and her tribute to Melville is all the more notable when one remembers her complete preoccupation with her husband.

“I am not quite sure,” she wrote, “that I do not think him a very great man.... A man with a true, warm heart, and a soul and an intellect--with life to his finger-tips; earnest, sincere and reverent; very tender and modest. He has very keen perceptive power; but what astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems to me to see everything accurately; and how he can do so with his small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and handsome, his mouth expressive of sensibility and emotion. He is tall and erect, with an air free, brave and manly. When conversing, he is full of gesture and force, and loses himself in his subject. There is no grace or polish. Once in a while his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression, out of these eyes to which I have objected; an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that moment taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself.”

The opportunity for real intercourse with Hawthorne, for talk about Time and Eternity and ultimate things, smoking a fragrant cigar, sipping brandy or cider, meant much to Melville; far more, no doubt, than it did to Hawthorne. In Melville’s growing spiritual loneliness, he needed the affection of a sympathetic mind; and for a while he could persuade himself that, even in Hawthorne’s silences, he had this. Hawthorne’s example as a novelist was a stimulus: it led Melville beyond the easy shallows, where one could negligently wade, always within easy calling distance of the shore; and his philosophical conversation, or, still more, his apparently absorbed way of listening to philosophical conversation, encouraged Melville to go further and deeper along the passage he had begun to make a year before with Adler.

Each conversation opened new vistas: the night talks would often be a prelude to next morning’s letters, and in those letters, particularly in those which remain from the period covered by Moby-Dick, Melville exposed the seamy depths of his own spirit. He had no reticences before Hawthorne, and above all, no false modesty. Life was becoming a long stage, with no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with Hawthorne for a fellow passenger, Melville was content and could be happy. “I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.” The hectic, desperate, ecstatic letters Melville wrote his friend during the short year and a half that brought them together in the Berkshires give one a surer insight into Melville’s moods and aims than any other pages he ever wrote. Had the neighbourly relations persisted, had Hawthorne’s response been wholly adequate, Melville might have weathered more buoyantly the internal tempest that set in with Moby-Dick. But Hawthorne was essentially as remote from Melville as he was from the old worthies of the Customs House at Salem or the old sea-captains he had exchanged civilities with over a mug of ale. Though one could see daylight and the blue sky from the bottom of Hawthorne’s well, there was not enough of it to share with any companion. If he was touched by the homage of the younger man, he could not fully reciprocate it. He recognized Melville’s moral earnestness and intellectual vigour; but I doubt if he once suspected that his extravagant friend was far nearer, by temperament and expression, to the heart of Shakespeare’s genius than he himself was. In seizing upon Hawthorne as an other self, Melville more than once did homage to his own genius: his descriptions of Hawthorne’s powers, Hawthorne’s achievements, are nearer to his own than to Hawthorne’s.

Melville’s relation with Hawthorne counts as one of the tragedies of his life; and it was more than a minor one. Friendship itself must have seemed a mockery, when he found that the dearest friend and closest intellectual companion he had yet encountered was bound tight in the arctic ice, and many leagues away. But he had no sense of the distance between them until he attempted to span it: and it must have been with amazement, with incredulity, that he finally read the story of Ethan Brand, written during the prime year of their friendship, and discovered what in his heart of hearts Hawthorne felt about Melville’s lofty pride and his extreme spiritual quests. Ethan Brand is a charcoal-burner, who has left his home in order to discover the Unpardonable Sin; he finally returns to his kiln and his neighbours to announce, after his long wanderings, that he has found the sin in his own breast. Brand’s language is a parody of Ahab’s in Moby-Dick; and what Hawthorne says about Brand he meant to apply, I have no doubt, possibly by way of warning, to Melville himself.

Ethan Brand remembered, said Hawthorne, echoing Melville’s words in the scene where Ahab recalls his first pursuit of the whale, “he remembered how the night dew had fallen upon him,--how the dark forest had whispered to him,--how the stars had gleamed upon him,--a simple and loving man, watching the fire in the years gone by, and ever musing as it burned. He remembered with what tenderness, with what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and woe, he had first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards became the inspiration of his life; with what reverence he had then looked into the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally divine, and, however desecrated, still to be held sacred by his brother; with what awful fear he had deprecated the success of his pursuit, and prayed that the Unpardonable Sin might never be revealed to him. Then ensued that vast intellectual development, which, in its progress, disturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart. The Idea that possessed his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone on cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer to stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth, laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber after him. So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That, indeed, had withered,--had contracted,--had hardened,--had perished! It had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He had lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment.... Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect.”

We do not know when Melville discovered these words or felt their jagged edges in his bosom: but we can be certain that from that day forth the friendship between the two men sank like a stone in quicksand. Hawthorne had committed the unpardonable sin of friendship; he had failed to understand Melville’s development, or to touch by sympathy and faith that part of Melville which was beyond his external reach. All of Melville’s love recoiled, as we shall see presently, from the icy strangeness of that friendship which was no friendship, from that understanding which was almost enmity. Perhaps Ethan Brand was not Melville? Perhaps it was but a shadowy suggestion, influenced more by Ahab than by his author? Melville must have attempted this sort of reconciliation more than once: but Hawthorne’s words would stick: yes, they would stick because of the touch of truth in them, and because, once Hawthorne’s hand was withdrawn, the magnetic chain of humanity indeed would seem broken. This, however, was the crisis of their friendship; and Melville had no inkling of this outcome whilst he was writing Moby-Dick. There is no doubt that the presence of Hawthorne fortified him for that endeavour.

3

Some time in 1850, towards the close of summer, Herman Melville must have begun to write Moby-Dick; for the book, which is a long one, was finished in the summer of 1851. In back of the actual writing went a considerable amount of preparation; and one does not know how long before the theme of the book had begun to root itself in Melville’s mind. The work itself shows that he had reached out for every book on whaling he could lay hands on, practically every book that had been written, and, in addition, he had made note of every quotation and allusion to the whale he had met in his wide miscellaneous reading. Scholarship as well as personal experience went into this writing: one of the best modern writers upon whaling, Frank Bullen, the author of the Cruise of the Cachalot, confesses he would never have gone further with his own work had he known about the wealth of information and detail that went into Moby-Dick before he set out. Did Melville consciously save the greatest of his ocean experiences for his maturity? Did he wait for Leviathan to develop in his soul? Did he begin another White-Jacket or Typee, and become conscious, in the act of writing, of this deepening of his insight, this integration of his powers, and of the vast fable that was now at his command?

One cannot even make a reasonable conjecture about the matter. All one knows are the actual conditions under which Moby-Dick was written, the reactions of the writing itself upon Melville, and its final result--the story of the White Whale.

Conceive of Melville in his new home, as he embarks upon the most extensive of his spiritual voyages. The furniture has been removed to his new house, the beds put up, the heavier articles shifted and re-shifted, and, by a month’s work outdoors, the woodpile has grown and the hay been stowed into the hayloft. For the moment, all his relations are well poised: Barney is through the period of teething: Elizabeth has help in her housework and the first tension of removal is over; Mr. Duyckinck occasionally, with the most tactful sort of generosity, sends up a case of champagne in a wicker cradle or a fine bundle of cigars, or he suggests a review to be written. He even tries to nourish Melville’s reputation by abetting some one who is writing about him in the papers and who wishes to publish a photograph of the famous author: here alone Melville’s pride rebuffs this rudimentary effort at an art which has become a loathsome sore in our own time: he refuses his picture. “The fact is,” he explains, “almost everybody is having his ‘mug’ engraved nowadays, so that this test of distinction is getting to be reversed; and therefore, to see one’s ‘mug’ in a magazine is presumptive evidence that he’s a nobody.... I respectfully decline to be _oblivionated_....” But when a journeyman painter made the rounds of the neighbourhood Melville sat for him--and the portrait, which slightly resembles Allan’s, remains a just punishment for his vanity.

Below the edge of Melville’s horizon is this new friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and, as he raises his eyes from the desk in his second-story chamber and looks through the single small window that faces the north, he sees the wide valley sweeping across to successive ridges of hills, dominated by Mt. Greylock--otherwise called, from the double hump in the ridge, Saddleback. The red clover that incarnadined the summer fields is gone; or rather, its colour has mounted to the crown of the landscape; the maples are a still more glorious red. The spirits caper in the autumn air; there are glowing Byzantine days when the heavens reflect the hues of the October apples, when the sky is so ripe and ruddy it seems there must be harvest home for the angels and that Charles’ Wain is heaped as high as Saddleback with autumn sheaves. The sunrises and the sunsets glow side by side in the woods, and momentarily moult in the falling leaves. Neither the Rhine nor the Moselle produces anything as heady as the landscape of the Berkshires in autumn. Now is the time to begin. When Melville writes his first words, “Call me Ishmael,” he is writing out of his health and ecstasy: he himself is not an outcast, nor is his spirit drooping with the “hypos”: his first touch is a black one because his canvas demands it. He is about to build up a vast pyramid of contrasts, between the whiteness of external evil and the blackness of man’s inner doom; and he faces this drama with his full powers.

The apples are gathered; the autumn ploughing is done; Melville is at work. The mood of creation is upon him: he is ready not for one book but for fifty books: if Mr. Duyckinck would only send him about fifty fast-writing youths with an easy style, not averse to polishing their letters, he might set them all to work. “It is not so much the paucity, as the superabundance of material that seems to incapacitate modern authors,” he had written that summer. In this autumn ferment, Melville has scarcely enough time to think about his future books separately; in lieu of using fifty youths, he must pack as much as possible into one book. Melville scarcely breaks his way through a chapter or two before he realizes that he has found his theme; and the only question is how to quarry this marble, how to get it out. “Youth,” Melville said in another place, “must wholly quit, then, the quarry for a while; and not only go forth and get tools to use in the quarry, but must go and thoroughly discover architecture. Now the quarry discoverer is long before the stone-cutter; and the stone-cutter is long before the architect; and the architect is long before the temple; for the temple is the crown of the world.” His apprenticeship is at last definitely over: he is at work on the temple itself--such a temple as Dante, Shakespeare, Webster, Marlowe, Browne, might each in his way have conceived and designed.

The days go by; the leaves fall; the candlelight comes early; the mice creep into the cupboard and make nests for themselves in the woodpile; the wide meadows become as bleak as a grey sea. In this most inland scene, with only the Housatonic to connect him with the watery world, Melville still dreams of the sea: his thought centres on the sea, its creatures, its boats, its fish, its men, its deeper monsters. Oh! for a dash of salt spray! he cries; and as substitute he draws upon experience and memory for the savour. The days grow cold. Snow hems in the roof and chimney of Arrowhead. Melville has a sea-feeling all the more: when he looks out of his little window on rising, he feels as if he were looking out of his port-hole in the midst of the Atlantic: his room seems a ship’s cabin, and at nights, when he wakes up and hears the wind shrieking, he can almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, and he had better go up on the roof and rig in the chimney. On a winter morning he rises at eight, helps his horse to his hay and the cow to her pumpkin, stands around to take in the grateful complacency of the cow, she moves her jaws so mildly and with such sanctity; then, with his own breakfast over, he goes to his workroom and lights the fire, runs rapidly through the MS. and starts to work. At half past two a knock comes. He does not answer. Again the knock and again: till he rises from his writing, almost mechanically, and resumes the external round: feed for the horse and cow: then dinner: then he rigs up his sleigh and goes off to the village for the mail, for supplies, for a little friendly chaffer perhaps round the tavern bar. So one day follows another on the surface; but within, there is change and tumult: Melville, like Ahab, finds a creature tearing at his vitals, and that creature the thing he has created.

“How then with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously, my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand. Friends! hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with the outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty volume you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written upon the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”

Such intensity of effort, so many hours of writing and reading, are as exhausting as the direction of a battle: but there is no lying up in winter quarters, no delegation of responsibility: the writer does not live outside his book: the world, the familiar, homely world, becomes a weak picture, and his imagination is the body and blood of reality. Taking a book off the brain, Melville exclaims while in the midst of it, “is akin to the ticklish and dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel: you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety--and even then the painting may not be worth the trouble.” Well, Moby-Dick is worth the trouble; the very writing of it becomes a powerful instrument in his own development: what absorbs so much of his time and life is not the book alone, “but the primitive elementalizing of the strange stuff, which in the act of attempting the book, has upheaved and upgushed in his soul. Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for ... his own private shelf. That it is whose unfathomable cravings drunk his blood; the other only demands ink.”

Melville knows he must not let up on this work; he flogs himself to get his uttermost into it; the application ruins his eyesight. This small aperture and northern light are bad for his eyes: no matter: he writes with one eye closed and the other blinking. By December, in the evening, he is exhausted: he spends the aftermath of the day in a sort of physical trance: but already his mind is anticipating the developments of the next day, and he is up early, and goes back to his task.

Spring comes; but it is no spring for Melville. He will not even be bothered for dinner. Some days he sits at his desk till 4:30 without writing a word; in the spring twilight, when the catkins of the maples glow in the mild sunset and the bluebirds dart about the field like unfettered flowers, he at last comes out and creeps about like an owl. If Melville ploughs and plants, he does it mechanically; his heart is not in it; and he is not nourished by it. In the midst of his writing, his soul reaches a pitch of exaltation, as it does defiantly in a terrible gale, when the hand is firmly on the wheel, and the dangerous seas that wash the decks do not loosen the hold: the letters that he writes to Hawthorne then are prophetic, and deep, and full of proud mastery. In building up his vast symbol of the whale, he strips the universe down to his own ego; like Ahab himself, he says no to all the powers and dominions that lie beyond it. Does not Hawthorne do as much?

“There is a certain tragic phase of humanity,” he writes to Hawthorne, “which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne.... He says No in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say No,--why, they are in the happy condition of judicious unencumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity, with nothing but a carpet-bag,--that is to say, the Ego. Whereas, those _yes_-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage and damn them! they will never get through the Custom House.”

But the soft milky air of June gets the better of Melville’s humours: every breath of the warm earth, the spicy perfume of wild strawberries, the honeyed odour of the locust trees, the dank green fragrance of ferns, the sight of buttercups making the fields sunny even on dull days, or the daisies turning the high grass into the whitish green colour of the ocean when the waves disperse on the beach, the warm feeling of animal contentment that the sun itself pours into a man--all these things renewed his energies and revived his spirits. Melville relaxed and refreshed himself in the sunlight, building an addition to the house, and ploughing and sowing, and watching the green shoots rise. He does not doubt the reality of his black moments: for, as he tells Hawthorne, in the boundless, trackless, but still glorious wilderness of the universe, where he and Hawthorne are outposts, there are savage Indians as well as mosquitoes; still, one does not go on fighting them forever. As for the crotchety and overdoleful chimeras, “the like of you and me, and some others, forming a chain of God’s outposts around the world, must be content to encounter now and then, and fight them as best we can.”

Melville goes down to New York to see the first part of Moby-Dick through the press; but the oppressive, humid days in that Babylonish brick-kiln, and the long delays of the printers, disgust him; he comes back to the country, and purposes to end the book, if possible, reclining on the grass, or watching the clouds play on a summer afternoon around old Greylock, from the newly built porch he has added to the north side of the house, where the view lies. The tail of Moby-Dick is not cooked yet; though the hell-fire in which the book was broiled might not unreasonably have charred it before this. Melville’s intention is sane enough, if only he had the leisure to cultivate the calm, grass-growing mood; but no: he must keep on patching and tinkering at his buildings: in July the hay waits for no author to finish his chapter: there are a hundred chores to keep him away from his book, still more from deep questions about the universe and its meaning and evil and truth and all those aspects of reality that need a Hawthorne for perfect communication. There is no help for it; he must go back to New York to finish the book in a third-story room, where there is no cow to milk, no horse to feed, no sister or wife or mother to be a little hurt or concerned by his inattentiveness or moodiness.

These last straining days in New York were not unlike, one might guess, those that Pierre experienced: the book that was begun in health and exuberance in the keen, riotous air of October in the Berkshires was finished in exacerbations and depression and desolation in the humid dog days of a dirty, unkempt city, days of unrelieved sunlight, followed by afternoon thunderstorms that leave the air even heavier than before, the pavements steaming, the waves of warm, unpleasant air, carrying slight odours of putrefaction, wafted upward into even the third story.

“In the earlier progress of the book, he had found some relief in making his regular evening walk through the greatest thoroughfares of the city; and so the utter desolation of his soul might feel itself more intensely against the bodies of the hurrying thousands. Then he began to be sensible of more fancying stormy nights than pleasant ones; for then the great thoroughfares were less thronged, and the innumerable shop-awnings flapped and beat like schooners’ broad sails in a gale, and the shutters banged like lashed bulwarks; and the slates fell hurtling like displaced ship’s blocks from aloft. Stemming such tempers through the deserted streets, Pierre felt a dark triumphant joy; that while others had crawled in fear to their kennels, he alone defied the storm-admiral, whose most vindictive pelting of hailstones--striking his iron-framed fiery furnace of a body--melted into soft dew, and so, harmlessly trickled off him. By-and-by, of such howling, pelting nights, he began to bend his steps down the narrow side streets, in quest of the more secluded and mysterious taprooms. There he would feel a singular satisfaction, in sitting down all dripping in a chair, ordering his half pint of ale before him, and drawing over his cap to protect his eyes from the light, eye the varied faces of the social castaways, who here had their haunts from bitterest midnights. But at last he began to feel a distaste for even these; and now nothing but the utter night-desolation of the obscurest warehousing lanes would content him, or be at all sufferable to him.”

“Dollars damn me,” he wrote Hawthorne, “and the malicious devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is upon me.--I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, altogether write the _other_ way I cannot. So the product is a final hash; and all my books are botches.... But I was talking about the ‘whale.’ As the fishermen say, ‘he was in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago. I’m going to take him up by his jaw, however, before long and finish him up in some fashion or another. What’s the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book? Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter. What reputation H. M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity as the man who lived among the cannibals. When I speak of posterity in reference to myself, I only mean the babies who will probably be born in the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost.... I shall go down to them in all likelihood.... I have come to regard this matter of Fame as the most transparent of all vanities. I read Solomon more and more, and every time see deeper and deeper and unspeakable meanings in him. I did not think of Fame, a year ago, as I do now. My development has all been within a few years past. I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian pyramids which, after being three thousand years a seed, and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the utmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.”

If it was in a mood of confidence and creative delight that he sounded his depths in Moby-Dick, it was in this other mood, chastened, almost fearful, that his stripped ego rose to the surface after this extreme plunge. He had looked into the abyss: he was dizzy, terrified, appalled. His letters to Hawthorne have this mingled sense of awe and exaltation: they are the mood of the last part of Moby-Dick. Melville’s notes to Mr. Duyckinck are still jocular and robust; they might be the words of the imperturbable Stubb or the jaunty Flask: but that is because Melville gave Mr. Duyckinck only a part of himself, the polite, free-and-easy, effervescent side, meant for appreciative eating and solicitous drinking, the side he doubtless turned to his family and housemates, when weariness did not bury him from their sight--the last people who could share or understand his quest, his insight, his triumph. There is no question of wearing a mask: both sides of Melville are authentic, but the deeper part of him, which would under happier circumstances have served as ballast and made him face the waves more steadily, claimed too much of his inner space: he lost buoyancy: the water crept above the waterline: the ship rode dangerously. Now, however, we are speaking of the consequences of Melville’s writing Moby-Dick. The book itself was published towards the end of 1851 by Bentley, in England, and a little later in the same year by Harper’s in New York.

Whether it was an angel or a devil that Melville had struggled with this long year, he had wrestled magnificently, and the book was done. Before we go further with Melville’s life, we must discuss this great fragment of it--the most important of Melville’s books, and surely one of the most important books of the century.