Chapter NINE: Timonism

We now draw near the Cape Horn of Melville’s life; and I would remind the reader of Melville’s own prophetic words in White-Jacket: “Sailor or landsman, there is some sort of Cape Horn for all. Boys! beware of it; prepare for it in time. Graybeards! thank God it is passed. And ye lucky livers, to whom, by some rare fatality, your Cape Horns are as placid as Lake Lemans, flatter not yourselves that good luck is judgment and discretion; for all the yolk in your eggs, you might have foundered and gone down had the Spirit of the Cape said the word.”

The evidence for this part of Melville’s history is incomplete and ambiguous: the testimony of his contemporaries is obscure, and what has been handed on to living people has been stated in a fragmentary way by witnesses whose limitations of knowledge and whose emotional bias vitiate their judgment, and rob their testimony of any pretence of impartiality. I do not overlook the value of family tradition in dealing with this part of Melville’s life; but I prefer to use it as I shall use Melville’s own expression in literature, not as recording objective events, but as indicating a certain tendency and direction. The witness of Melville’s own literary works is far more objective evidence than more personal stories which can neither be substantiated nor refuted. “The data which life furnishes towards a true estimate of any being,” Melville himself reminds us, “are as insufficient to that end as in geometry one side given would be to determine a triangle.” During this period the nearest one can come to truth is by avoiding the grosser forms of error.

The last forty years of Melville’s life have been thoroughly misinterpreted, for the reason that after Moby-Dick Melville ceased to be a popular author. This period has been referred to as the long quietus, and even such a just critic as Mr. Percy Boynton could say: “Pierre was Melville’s last real and audible word, and even Pierre was an epilogue.” Such a complete halt in a writer’s life would indeed give reason for grave suspicions; and popular rumour has filled up this dismal gap with tales of Melville’s insanity. That there is a spark of fact beneath this suffocating cloud of conjecture, I am prepared to show: but the spark was magnified into a bonfire by Melville’s own contemporaries, absurdly, maliciously enlarged; and later critics have even been obtuse enough to read back into Mardi the signs of Melville’s mental disruption. As a matter of fact, Melville’s silence was a very audible one; and what is usually looked upon as the dark period of his intellectual quietus is in fact the bleak period of his contemporaries’ neglect. One cannot call silence the reduced but steady output of short stories, novels, poems, which marked the next forty years of Melville’s life.

2

Let us separate the romantic overlay of rumour from the actual facts, and see what is left of the silence and the mystery. The first tangible bit of testimony as to Herman Melville’s condition in the year that followed the publication of Pierre is a note that Elizabeth Melville left in her annotation of his papers: “We all felt anxious about the strain on his health in the spring of 1853.” By now the direct cause of this strain should be fairly plain: Melville had exhausted himself in writing Moby-Dick, and without waiting to recuperate, he had embarked upon another long work: the effort of writing two such books in two successive years was a terrific one. In Pierre, Melville has left more than one picture of his condition. Pierre, writing of his own hero-author, Vivia, says: “Cast the eye in there on Vivia; tell me why those four limbs should be clapt in a dismal jail,--day out, day in--week out, week in--month out, month in--and himself a voluntary jailer! Is this the end of philosophy? This the larger and spiritual life? This your boasted empyrean? Is it for this man should grow wise, and leave off his most excellent and calumniated folly?”

When one pushes the organism so hard, all its latent weaknesses tend to come out. Presently, the long and terrible exposure he had suffered rounding the Horn on his return from the South Seas, came back to exact its physical penalty. As early as 1849, Melville alluded to that experience and its aftermath; and in 1855 he suffered a severe attack of rheumatism, and in June an attack of sciatica. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes attended him, and it is a pity that he did not leave a record of the case: one could have spared a few autocratic conversations for this precious evidence. These attacks continued to undermine Melville: in 1858, he was laid up with a severe attack of “crick in the back” at his mother’s home in Gansevoort. It is difficult, of course, to draw a line between the physical and the psychical aspects of an organism; but the tangible evidence of a drain on Melville’s strength is sufficient to justify us in calling these disabilities primarily physical ones. His perfect health deserted him. He was to know pain, confinement, lassitude; and instead of tanned cheeks and hard muscles, pallor and debility.

In any appraisal of his condition and his fate, this new element of physical weakness must play a part; for Melville, like Whitman, wrote out of his health, and just as the paralysis of Whitman, after the Civil War, resulted in the diminishment of his writing, and a certain curtailment of his creative effort, without any sign of mental decay, so Melville was deprived of his immense physical buoyancy and power. That power had counted for much in his own work. “Real strength,” he wrote in Moby-Dick, “never impairs beauty or harmony, but often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with magic.... As devout Eckermann lifted the linen sheet away from the naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed by the massive chest of the man, that seemed a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute are they of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative feminine ones of submission and endurance....” Melville did not easily submit and endure; but without health he was a shorn giant. His shortened breath would not sustain the long periods of Moby-Dick, nor would his frame suffer that “downright infatuation, and no less [which is] both unavoidable and indispensable in any great deep book, or even any wholly unsuccessful attempt at a great deep book.”

Such an explanation is sound as far as it goes; but one must not ignore the psychological accompaniments of this debility, or all the spiritual obstacles that burked Melville and made him doubly anxious, strained, desperate. Chief among the external obstacles was the chorus of disapproval that had greeted Moby-Dick and grew louder and more universal with Pierre. One London paper denounced it as an “unhealthy, mystic romance,” the Literary World called it “an eccentricity of the imagination,” and Fitz-James O’Brien, writing in Putnam’s Monthly in February, 1853, fresh from a bout with Pierre, described it in the following terms: “Thought staggers through each page like one poisoned. Language is drunken and reeling.... Let Mr. Melville stay his step in time. He totters on the edge of a precipice, over which all his hard-earned fame may tumble with such another weight as Pierre attached to it.”

The worst of it was that the critics were not altogether wrong in their judgment of Pierre alone: what was at fault was their failure to see that the author of Moby-Dick could not be scolded like a child who had mixed up his declensions: he was entitled to the critic’s most patient, sympathetic understanding. To pretend that such a mistake might forfeit Melville’s whole claim to recognition showed that neither O’Brien nor any one else at the time realized what a strong claim Melville had, or what a profound mark he had made on the literature of the world. I have looked in vain through the collected works and biographies of Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Lowell, Holmes, and even Conway and Sanborn, to see if these writers recognized a fellow in Melville, as Emerson had so generously done with Whitman: but except for a brief note on Omoo by Whitman, written in his Brooklyn Eagle days, and a comment in a chance letter by Lowell--exaggerated praise followed by complete indifference to Melville’s worth--there is no sign that the contemporaries he might have respected even knew of his existence.

Melville stood alone, alone in a desert. “Who shall tell all the thoughts and feelings of Pierre in that desolate and shivering room, when at last the idea obtruded, that the wiser and profounder he should grow, the more and more he lessened his chances for bread; that could he now hurl his deep book out of the window, and fall on some shallow nothing of a novel, composable in a month at longest, then could he reasonably hope for appreciation and cash. But the devouring profundities now opened upon him, consuming all his vigor; would he, he could not now be entertainingly and profitably shallow in some pellucid and merry romance.” This conviction, borne in on him perhaps while writing Moby-Dick, now haunted him when Pierre met its disastrous reception. “The brightest success,” he says again in Pierre, “now seemed intolerable to him, since he so plainly saw, that the brightest success could not be the sole offspring of Merit, but of Merit for the one-thousandth part, and nine-hundred and ninety-nine combining and dovetailing accidents for the rest.... So beforehand he felt the unrevealable sting of receiving either plaudits or censures, equally unsought for, and equally loathed ere given. So, beforehand, he felt the pyramidical scorn of the genuine loftiness for the whole infinitesimal company of critics.... In that lonely little closet of his, Pierre foretasted all that this world hath either of praise or dispraise; and thus foretasting both goblets, anticipatingly hurled them both in its teeth. All panegyric, all denunciation, all criticism of any sort would come too late for Pierre.”

Needless to say, Melville’s pyramidical scorn did not disarm the critics, nor did it, one suspects, counteract the effect of the salt that they poured, with such fine antiseptic intentions, into his wounds. He was greeted with the embarrassed shamefulness which sometimes appears upon the faces of sophisticated people when a fresh young girl confesses impulses or desires that her elders are forever discreetly hiding. Melville had revealed too much. His contemporaries, with a feeling of guilty repression, denied that any one had the right to take off his clothes, and they equally denied that such harassed, crippled souls could be found beneath the shapely costumes provided by society. Nervous, these respectable people will be on the watch for any similar performance; more than that, they will read back into Melville’s earlier books the same dangerous, unhealthy innocence and exposure.

One and all, the critics agreed with an English writer whose diatribe on the American psychological writers was reprinted, somewhat pointedly, in the Literary World for August 28, 1852. “It is a melancholy sign for the prospects of a rising American literature that some of its most hopeful professors should have, in recent works of fiction, been evidently laying themselves out for that species of subtle psychological romance, first introduced to the reading world by such authors as Balzac and Sand.... To pass from Scott and Dickens to Sand and Balzac is like giving up the smiling landscape glowing in its freshness and beauty, for the loathly atmosphere, the wretched sights and smells of a dissecting room, or abandoning the busy street or the pleasant social circle for charnels and catacombs. And yet this is what Young America seems bent upon. Instead of sketching the really representative men of their country--instead of conveying to us on this side of the Atlantic a true idea of American society--society in the great seaboard city or in the far west settlement--instead of presenting us with stories racy of the soil and instinct with its vigorous and aggressive theories, the misguided party in question selects some half dozen morbid phases of mind, brings before us some three or four intellectual cripples or moral monsters ... and instead of laying before us a wholesome story of natural character and motive, he lets us into the secret turns and tidings of unhealthy and abnormal mental power and promptings.”

No one saw even dimly then that these psychological novels and short stories, William Wilson, The House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter, Pierre, were signs of the broken American psyche, alienated by its removal from the solid tissue of Europe, and seeking, by further analysis, to establish a more primitive and elementary state, from which a new integration, more satisfactory and complete, could emerge. These relentless psychologists were far more deeply immersed in the American scene than any of the writers who succeeded them in the next generation, however closely Bret Harte and Howells and Mark Twain met the English prescription for natural character and robust health. If anything could have infuriated Melville, it must have been the suggestion that he could write in another fashion than he had done: “In tremendous extremes,” he said in Pierre, “human souls are like drowning men: well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril; nevertheless, the sea is the sea and these drowning men do drown.”

Baffled by his dilemmas, rebuffed by his contemporaries, harassed by financial anxiety, curbed by ill health, kept from the solace of reading by poor eyesight, made doubly desperate by the cold mysteries he had explored--what was there to sustain Herman Melville and bring him back to health? The divided tenderness of a wife who was still bearing children, or the obtuse concern of a mother, a sister, or brother--so far from relieving him, these things only quickened his exasperation and his sense of helplessness.

When harassed by external circumstances, one wants to attack the universe: but, like Ahab, one finds that the universe will not get in one’s way: so one takes revenge on the first creature that crosses one’s path. Too likely it will be a creature one holds dear: the animus is not directed against that one, but it strikes as if it were. An explosion: a blow: a raised hand: an uncontrollable outburst of vituperation--then drink, remorse, repentance, the ugly vanity of it all. The universe is unharmed; one’s own condition is unimproved: there is just one more blight to stand in the way of amelioration. Whatever the outward events that mark Melville’s passage through these frantic waters, there is no doubt of his inward state. In a word he himself coined for Pierre, he became Timonized. In that awful solitude within, the very touch of his fellow creatures became defilement. “He could not bring himself to confront any face or house; a plowed field, any sign of tillage, the rotted stump of a long-felled pine, the slightest passing trace of man was uncongenial and repelling to him. Likewise, in his own mind all remembrances and imaginings, that had to do with the common and general humanity had become, for the first time, in the most singular manner distasteful to him. Still, while thus loathing all that was common in the two different worlds--that without and that within--nevertheless, even in the most withdrawn and subtlest region of his own essential spirit, Pierre could not now find one single agreeable twig of thought whereon to perch his weary soul.”

There was Melville’s own state, I believe, during and after the writing of Pierre, in its uttermost anguish and desolation. His family became apprehensive: his friends dropped away from him, first Hawthorne, then the Duyckincks: and in his sensitive condition, small indifferences became signs of enmity, heartlessness, and alienation. In doubling this inner Cape Horn, Herman Melville may have skirted the jagged rocks of an even deeper disruption: there were moments, perhaps days and months, between 1852 and 1858 when the outcome of his physical and mental condition may well have been in doubt. But with utmost allowance for the horror and collapse of his illness, it was of limited duration, and it could not have been a continuous state, since, throughout this period, he continued to write, to write with clarity, with distinction, and without a visible touch of disorder. Not the least of his literary achievements date from these years of debilitation and infirmity.

The word insanity is far too loose to be used about Melville’s mental illness, even during the limited period we are considering. At the very end of his life, Melville wrote a passage about insanity in his novel, Billy Budd, which puts the biographer’s difficulty in touching this period with great point. “Who,” he asks, “in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly, we see the difference of the colours, but where exactly does the first one visibly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In pronounced cases there is no question about them. But in some cases, in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the line of demarcation few will undertake, though for a fee some professional experts will. There is nothing nameable but that some man will undertake to do for pay. In other words, there are instances where it is next to impossible to determine whether a man is sane, or beginning to be otherwise.”

Melville realized from his own experience, perhaps, what few people understood until Janet and Freud re-interpreted this whole series of disorders, that the line between sanity and insanity is not a line at all but a wide gradient band. Indeed, as early as 1849, in a letter to Mr. Duyckinck written apropos the insanity of Charles Fenno Hoffman, the first editor of The Literary World, Melville had said: “This going mad of a friend or acquaintance comes straight home to every man who feels his soul in him, which but few men do. For in all of us lodges the same fuel to light the same fire. And he who has never felt, momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains. What sort of sensation permanent madness is may be very well imagined just as we imagine how we felt when we were infants, though we cannot recall it. In both conditions we are irresponsible and riot like gods without fear of fate.”

3

The relationship between insanity and art has been the subject of much discussion; and it is important, in appraising Melville’s life and work during this period, that we should avoid the notion that genius and insanity are one, or that the fantasies of the neurotic are the equivalent of a work of art. The difference between insanity and what we agree to call normal conduct is largely one of social utilization: given a similar set of circumstances and stimuli, the distinction between a neurotic reaction and a normal one consists largely in the success a person has in conversion. Had Napoleon, for example, merely dreamt about his conquests, magnifying them year by year as his malady grew, he would have been quite properly confined to an asylum, like so many other “emperors of the world,” as soon as his patent conduct conflicted with other people’s activities. The fact that his particular kind of paranoia was permitted at large was due to his ability to convert it into the forms of contemporary social life, politics and military activity, things which subjected his grandiose dreams to the shock and jar of actuality. This conversion into art signifies health and relative stability, whether the situation that causes the conversion is morbid or not. Indeed, an effectual work of art is not merely a counterpoise to psychal difficulties: it is actually an indication that the artist, during the period of his creation, has had full possession of himself. Insanity in many cases befalls those who cannot make this transposition to art, and who, through inexpertness or inarticulateness, produce therefore unusable fantasies--fantasies that do not meet the impact of reality. There is no mistaking the fantasy of the insane for the fantasy of the artist: issuing from the same headwaters, perhaps, they empty into different oceans. Had Melville remained mute during this period or had his work fallen off we might suspect the worst: his superb craftsmanship, in Bartleby, in The Encantadas, and in Benito Cereno, is, on the contrary, an objective proof--and a reassuring one. The critics and historians of literature who said that his work became “wilder and wilder and more and more turgid in each successive book” after Moby-Dick were either ignorant of his later work, or blind. Wildness and turgidity are the precise opposite of the qualities one finds in these stories and sketches, stories told with delicacy, with restraint, and with great concentration. With the rumour of his insanity in mind, these sympathetic scholars were quick to condemn Melville’s work. We may confidently reverse their logic. With the achieved beauty of Melville’s work before us, we can isolate and reduce the period of his mental exacerbation.

Melville’s own blackness and spiritual desolation, his Timonism, recalls that of Shakespeare himself, from whose play he had taken the word. Their vision of life went through similar stages, and even in their personal affairs some of the same anomalies arise, down to the silent contempt with which Shakespeare apparently dismissed the products of his imagination, not bothering to see that they reached the world at all, still less that they did so in the exact form he had conceived them. In both men, the feeling of a shattered faith and despondency is expressed in the relationship of a young man, Hamlet or Pierre, to a proud and worldly mother; in Pierre and Hamlet, an unconscious incest-wish incapacitates the hero for marriage with the girl he has wooed; and the final result is doubt and deepest anguish, culminating in the death of all involved. Alienated from society, a furious contempt for mankind arises in these writers: Shakespeare carries this contempt into Lear and Timon of Athens, even as Melville did into The Confidence Man: the contempt is mixed with impotence and self-distrust, and the art itself is marred by an uncontrollable sense of outrage: “In Timon,” as Dowden justly says, “we see one way in which a man may make his response to the injuries of life; he may turn upon the world in a fruitless and suicidal rage.” Finally, when each could go no further without outward violence, he recoiled upon himself, and each in a final work expressed a reconciliation, Shakespeare in The Tempest, separating the base, in the form of Caliban, from the spiritual, in the form of Ariel, under the double mastery of a science and virtue embodied in Prospero--a resolution which, we shall come to see, is not singularly different in meaning from Melville’s final work.

What caused this blackness in Shakespeare’s life, what brought him to the crisis recorded in Timon, surely the worst of his plays, we can only speculate upon: but in Melville’s life we are aware of tangible reasons for his frustration, with roots that reach far back into childhood, his disappointed youth, the hardships of early poverty and defeated expectations, his unfortunate experiences on his first sailing voyage, his perpetual feeling of being an Ishmael, through poverty among the gentlefolk at Albany, through intellectual superiority among his shipmates, through spiritual hardihood among his contemporaries in letters, through social isolation in his own neighbourhood, where people looked upon him as cousin german to the cannibals. Melville had witnessed this same Timonism in Jackson, and his words remind us that “there seemed more woe than wickedness about the man; and his wickedness seemed to spring from his woe; and for all his hideousness, there was that in his eye at times, that was ineffably pitiable and touching; and though there were raw moments when I almost hated this Jackson, yet I have pitied no man as I have pitied him.” Jackson would enter into arguments to prove that there was nothing to be believed, nothing to be loved, and nothing worth living for--and during the period of his own Timonism, out of his abysmal woe, Melville felt and wrote, at intervals, particularly in Pierre and in The Confidence Man, the same way.

Of Melville’s blackness there is no doubt. That this blackness would ordinarily have led to downright insanity there is little room for doubt either. But, like Shakespeare and Goethe and many another artist, Melville found a benign and not a baneful outlet for his energies; and every evidence of Melville’s work points to the restoration of his poise and health, intermittently, in the decade we are writing of, and steadily in the years that followed.

4

Returning to 1853, the year that followed Pierre, we find Melville in the midst of a series of disappointments: he was to learn the truth of Hamlet’s observation: misfortunes come not singly but in battalions. Melville sought for a consular appointment in the South Seas, a place where he was fitted by experience and sympathy to perform a decent service, and perhaps, with relief from financial strain, recover a little that joy in the flesh which he had once known, and find again in his bosom the radiance of the landscape itself. Melville had no opportunity to try this remedy. In spite of Richard H. Dana’s intercession, Chief Justice Shaw’s efforts, and Allan’s assiduous canvassing, and Hawthorne’s friendly intercession, he did not get the post, nor did he get a consulship at Antwerp, which for a moment seemed possible. To make matters worse, Harper’s, his publishers, lost the plates of his novels and almost all the copies of his books in a fire that gutted out their quarters. If there was something prophetic in the foundering of the whaler Ann Alexander, and the total disappearance of the old Pequod itself, as Melville was finishing Moby-Dick, there was something equally uncanny in this conflagration. The very elements played against him, as they played against Ahab. His books were put out again by Harper’s, but perfunctorily: they had lost their original momentum. None of Melville’s subsequent books was to meet such eager acceptance.

Another sign of Melville’s weakened health and lessened energies is the fact that during 1853 his entire writing seems to have consisted only of two short stories, Cock-a-Doodle-Do and Bartleby the Scrivener, both published in magazines towards the end of the year. Melville was not at home in the narrow confines of the short story: he had scarcely time to get under way before he was back again in port. The result is that the best of his short stories are really short novels, while the lesser ones, like The Lightning Rod Man, are little more than mediocre anecdotes. I and My Chimney, The Appletree Table, The Paradise of Bachelors, The Tartarus of Maids, are more in the nature of discursive essays, “in character,” than they are of tales: Melville was at his weakest in deliberately symbolic tales, like Cock-a-Doodle-Do and The Bell-Tower; indeed, the latter might be slipped into one of Hawthorne’s volumes, without apology, as a minor work of his youth. When in 1852 Melville equably handed to Hawthorne the circumstances of a story he had gathered from a lawyer in New Bedford, he was so conscious of treading on the master’s ground that he relinquished his own right to exploit this particular plot. But except for the original impulse, his best stories owe nothing to Hawthorne: Melville’s symbolism is more delicately and carefully concealed; and his moral, like Shakespeare’s, rests in the demonstration, not in the conclusion.

Bartleby the Scrivener is one of Melville’s longer stories; and it gains much by its juxtaposition of incongruous personalities. The story is told by a comfortable, pursy old lawyer, with an office in Wall Street; the lawyer and his copyists are hit off with a warm sense of caricature. Into this office comes a pale, bleak creature, Bartleby, to serve as a scrivener. He is quiet and industrious; but he refuses to comply with the routine of the office: he will not compare copy, even for the lawyer himself; and yet there is something in this passive self-assertion and this methodical self-obliteration which makes the lawyer humour Bartleby. With these qualities goes a mystery; and by accident, on a Sunday at church-time, the lawyer discovers, on attempting to enter his office, that Bartleby not only works for him but has quietly occupied his business premises, to eat and sleep there. In spite of this gross irregularity, the lawyer keeps Bartleby, only to have the little man quit work entirely. When the lawyer demands a reason, he answers: I would prefer not to. When the lawyer asks him to move out, he answers: I would prefer not to. There is no getting behind his silence, his dead-wall reveries, his blank self-possession.

The effect of this passive resistance upon the lawyer is upsetting. “My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy verge into fear, that pity into repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible, too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. They err who would assert that invariably this is due to the inherent selfishness of the human heart: it rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succour, common sense bids the soul be rid of it. What I saw that morning convinced me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to the body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.”

The lawyer moves and Bartleby remains on the original premises; but the new tenant is not so patient and he has Bartleby arrested. When Bartleby finds himself in prison, he prefers not to eat. A kind fellow, the lawyer visits him, seeking to restore his confidence and reawaken his manhood. “Nothing reproachful attaches to you being here,” he assures Bartleby. “And see, it is not so sad a place as one might think. Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass.” “I know where I am,” he replied.

Bartleby is a good story in itself: it also affords us a glimpse of Melville’s own drift of mind in this miserable year: the point of the story plainly indicates Melville’s present dilemma. People would admit him to their circle and give him bread and employment only if he would abandon his inner purpose: to this his answer was--I would prefer not to. By his persistence in minding his own spiritual affairs, those who might have helped him on their own terms, like Allan or his father-in-law or his Uncle Peter, inevitably became a little impatient; for in the end, they foresaw they would be obliged to throw him off, and he would find himself in prison, not in the visible prison for restraining criminals, but in the pervasive prison of dull routine and meaningless activity. When that happened there would be no use assuring him that he lived in a kindly world of blue sky and green grass. “I know where I am!” Whether or not Melville consciously projected his own intuition of his fate, there is no doubt in my mind that, as early as 1853, he was already formulating his answer. To those kind, pragmatic friends and relatives who suggested that he go into business and make a good living, or at least write the sort of books that the public would read--it amounts to pretty much the same thing--he kept on giving one stereotyped and monotonous answer: I would prefer not to. The dead-wall reverie would end in a resolution as blank and forbidding as the wall that faced him: a bleak face, a tight wounded mouth, the little blue eyes more dim, remote, and obstinate than ever: I would prefer not to!

During the next year, Melville settled down to a steadier round of work, and one of the best of his narratives, a series of sketches called The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, was published during 1854 under the pseudonym Salvator R. Tarnmoor. Three other sketches followed; and finally, in July, 1854, he began to publish serially the story of Israel Potter, the Revolutionary beggar, for which he had gathered material in London five years before.

In The Encantadas Melville went back again to the ground he had ploughed so well before. He had gone ashore on the Enchanted Isles, the Galapagos, during the early part of his whaling voyage, and now, in his own sable mood--a mood reflected in the very choice of his pseudonym, Tarnmoor--the landscape of these islands corresponded to his inner state; and his description of the scene is as fine as anything in his earlier pages; if anything, there is more studious mastery. The final sketch, the story of Hunilla, who had been left in solitude on one of these islands, when her brother and her husband died, is poignant and terrible, all the more so because of the dark bestiality of the visiting crew, that Melville hints at, and then forgoes telling about, so moved is he by its inhumanity.

“One knows not,” Melville reflects here, “whether nature doth not impose some secrecy upon him who has been privy to certain things. At least, it is to be doubted whether it is good to blazon such. If some books are deemed most baneful and their sale forbid, how, then, with deadlier facts, not dreams of doting men. Those whom books will hurt will not be proof against events. Events, not books, should be forbid; but in all things man sows upon the wind, which bloweth where it listeth; for ill or good men cannot know. Often ill comes from good, as good from the ill.” He has returned to the ultimate moral of Pierre; and it holds good of the tales of the Enchanted Isles: out of its stark ugliness, he breathed beauty. With just as abhorrent an insight into the cruelties of life as he had in Pierre, Melville here had a firmer hand on himself: he ruefully confesses that “in nature, as in law, it may be libellous to speak some truths.” Within the dark rim of the horizon, the words move, like swift white sails on grey waters. The style is again accurate, pliant, subtle, bold; but it is never hectic nor forced, nor does it smell from the mothballs of old costume chests. There is not the faintest sign that his literary powers were falling off, or his voice sinking to a whisper.

5

Israel Potter was a full-length novel, based upon a little memoir of his life, printed for the sake of gathering up a few pennies, in Providence in 1827. The fact that Melville could attempt a long work again is a sign of somewhat restored health, and though the book ranks far below Melville’s best work, it differs from Redburn chiefly in that while based upon a document, it relies even more heavily upon Melville’s own powers of invention. All the good things in Israel Potter come from Melville, not from Potter: the original story provided only the skeleton of events: Melville gives them a setting and a full cast of characters.

Israel Potter is a country bumpkin who is kept by his parents from marrying the girl he loves, goes on a surveying expedition into Vermont and is defrauded of his earnings, ships to sea, returns to the farm, fights gallantly at Bunker Hill, enlists in an American man-of-war, and is captured by the British and taken to England. Escaping from his guards, Israel flees into the countryside, making his way across England by devious passages, until he finally comes upon a kindly English baronet near Brentford, who gives him a job on his country estate. Rumours that he is a spy dog him, so he is compelled to change his situation and finally he achieves safety at Kew, as one of the king’s gardeners. When work slacks off, Israel is again thrown on his resources, and, while hiding, he makes the acquaintance of some secret friends of America, among them, Horne Tooke, the grammarian. These friends equip him and send him on a secret mission to Dr. Franklin in Paris, where he meets Paul Jones; and eventually Israel, by another lucky chance, comes to serve on a privateer with Jones, and to participate in the fight between the Serapis and the Bonhomme Richard. The upshot of these vagrant ups and downs is a long period of toil in a London brickworks, followed by marriage and residence in London. Finally, in his old age, with his English wife dead, Israel returns with his son to his native land, only to find the landmarks of his youth gone, and a pension as a Revolutionary soldier denied him. In this state, the original Israel wrote his book; and at this point of weariness, disillusion, exhaustion, Melville left him.

Israel Potter has suffered, like all Melville’s later books, from the apathy of criticism, quite as much as from its own weaknesses. Mr. Percy Boynton says of Israel Potter that “it was a perfunctory work, not as interesting as the book it was based on,” and while one hesitates to differ with such an able critic, a close comparison of the book seems to me to prove exactly the opposite. Not merely does Israel Potter contain, as Mr. F. J. Mather, Jr., has remarked, one of the best accounts of a sea-fight in history; not merely is its portrait of John Paul Jones a far more illuminating study of that great shark of the seas than Cooper’s picture in The Pilot; but it is one of the few works of American fiction that deal with patriotic episodes in a generous, straightforward way. Melville took a crude, bald narrative and poured life into it: he took a smudgy woodcut and made a living picture out of it, building up the background, creating incident and character where none had existed before, projecting every figure into the third dimension. The account of John Paul Jones occupies a single paragraph in the original: in Melville’s novel, Jones is the largest figure in the book, and nearly runs away with the story. It is the same with Franklin. He is a colourless figure in the original: Melville, with gentle mocking penetration, puts before us the man in full length, with sly characterizations of his paunch and his purse and his methodical parsimony. Melville does so well with these characters that one wishes he had created a whole historical portrait gallery. If any one fancies that Melville’s characters are merely romantic projections of his actual self, here is a clear answer.

Melville’s imaginative life, it is true, flowered only when there was some soil in his own life that nourished it, and when that soil was lacking he found himself forced, again like his Elizabethan exemplar, to pick up the action and the fable in another work. As a writer, he was deprived of the fruitful contacts and adventures he had enjoyed as a common sailor: the inner life grew, but the outer life dwindled and thinned out; and so he was thrown, when he had exhausted his original adventures, upon second-hand experience. This drying up of his sources was a great handicap to him; for while books helped to form and crystallize experience, they were not substitutes for it. He transformed the bald story of Israel Potter: but, had he wholly made it his own, the central character would have been John Paul Jones, and in so far as he was dependent upon the original he was weak. Israel Potter is many removes from Melville at his best; but it would be absurd to throw it out of the Melville canon. It has some of the fine qualities of his art, the mixture of tradition and fresh experience, the purification and heightening of actuality, with a loss of realism and a gain in reality: what it chiefly lacks is centrality. It is Melville _manqué_--but still Melville. His poorest work was many degrees above mediocrity.

6

In 1856, Melville gathered together some of the short stories he had written during the previous three years, and published them as The Piazza Tales. The sketch that gives the volume its title offers us a further glimpse of Melville’s life at Arrowhead.

One pictures him seated on that piazza on an August morning, with the meadow in front of him a little sear from the new-cropped hay, a haze lying over the valley of the Housatonic, and the light lavender hills billowing into Greylock’s double ridge against the horizon. The landscape brings a feeling of outward serenity, unbroken by the faint happy screams of the children playing in the hayloft, or the muted hum of his wife or his sisters in the kitchen, preparing the scant and largely vegetarian meal. What a contrast with the frayed knotty feeling within! Such warm and deeply balmy days should bring peace: but no day, however balmy, can annul the anxiety and weariness of the last five years, the incessant round of writing, and, further plaguing him, instead of giving relief, the equally endless round of the farm, wood to be chopped and sawed, hay to be mowed and gathered, cows and horses to be fed, vegetables to be planted and hoed, cabbage-worms to be fought ... oh! for a little coconut and poee-poee! Emerson had discovered that he could not tend his garden and his mind at the same time; and Melville, though at first robust, doubtless found that two careers were a little too much for a single man, exhausted, half spent. In a pinch, Melville could of course apply to Elizabeth’s father or to Allan for aid; and he did: but he could not continually write out unredeemable notes for their benefit; that was all right in a matter like the mortgage, where there was security; but as a source of daily income, it was little better than outright beggary.

Melville’s eyes would sweep over the valley to the hills beyond. There, ah! there perhaps lay happiness! What charming fairy might be living without relatives and grocers and publishers and promissory notes to harry her, in that little cottage on the mountainside before him? Some day he must find the road to that delectable retreat.... He found it, and to his sorrow and disillusion, instead of an idyllic bower, it was a weather-beaten old place, inhabited by a tired and troubled girl, who dreams of the happiness that lies in a marble palace in the distance below--Melville’s own white house. No fairy maiden she: no fairy prince he: but a sad girl and a tired, dutiful husband, straining night and day for the few pennies that will shoe his children’s feet, replace their tattered home-made clothes, and put bread and milk on the table. These five years, years that have enclosed his highest powers, his consummate manhood, have not left Melville with an eager taste for another fifty of the same pattern. Inevitably, he sought escape; and in his mind, escape meant the sea. Almost any slight change in atmosphere can bring the ocean back to him: the ocean, where physical sustenance, hard-tack and salt rhinoceros, was provided for one, where the hours were long and peaceful, and amid storm and rigour and dangerous courses, there brooded, within, a deep and unbreakable calm.

With a wry smile, Melville exchanges the topmast of reverie for the piazza; but tranquillity does not follow. His very pen lives only when it touches the sea; and when he gathers together these Piazza Tales, he does not bother to include most of his land-stories. He is wise: none of them has a tithe of the interest that Benito Cereno possesses. That story marked the culmination of Melville’s power as a short-story writer, as Moby-Dick marked his triumph as an epic poet.

7

In Benito Cereno, published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1855, Melville was again at home. It is such a tale as one might hear, with good luck, during a gam in the South Seas or at a bar in Callao; and Melville himself took it boldly from a book of voyages by Captain Amasa Delano, published in 1816.

A black, ill-kempt ship, commanded by a young Spanish captain and manned by negroes, is in distress, and calls upon Captain Amasa Delano, a bluff, frank American skipper, for aid. Delano, coming aboard with provisions and water, finds the captain almost down with a fever, and by turns confidential and queerly reserved. The Spaniard is attended by a black slave who almost smothers him with watchful endearments; and he has the air of perpetually manoeuvring, in a way that would seem sinister were his plight not so manifestly pathetic. Delano is a little troubled at heart, but he is free from intellectual suspicions. There is something wrong on the Spaniard’s ship; but it is hard for Delano to put his hand on it. Don Benito is in command: but he seems helpless, and he tolerates ugly disorder even among the black boys. Promising further aid, Delano finally leaves the vessel and is about to pull for his own ship, still powerfully disturbed by the Spanish captain’s pain, trouble, fever, churlishness, courtesy--does it mean some treachery? With a wild leap, the Spaniard throws himself in Delano’s boat, followed by his faithful black, dagger in hand; and the black aims his dagger, not at the Americans, but at his Spanish master. When the American crew finally pulls to safety a harrowing story comes out.

I will not spoil Benito Cereno for those who have not read it by revealing its mystery; it is enough to point out that the interplay of character, the cross-motives, the suspense, the central mystery, are all admirably done: in contrast to some of Melville’s more prosy sketches, there is not a feeble touch in the whole narrative. The following passage, which sets the key of the whole story, reveals Melville’s undiminished ability as an artist:

“Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roads of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter’s mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms.” As in The Encantadas, the writing itself was distinguished: it had a special office of its own to perform, and did not, as in Typee and Redburn, serve merely as carriage for the story. One can mark Melville’s literary powers in the complete transformation of Delano’s patent story: he adds a score of details to heighten the mystery and deepen the sinister aspect of the scene; and by sheer virtuosity he transfers the reader’s sympathies to the Spanish captain, who in the original story is far more cruel, barbarous, and unprincipled than the forces he contends against. In order to effect this change, Melville deliberately omits the last half of the story, in which the Spanish captain ignobly turns upon his benefactor and seeks to deprive him of the rights of salvage. The moral of the original tale is that ingratitude, stirred by cupidity, may follow the most generous act, and that American captains had better beware of befriending too whole-heartedly a foreign vessel. In Benito Cereno the point is that noble conduct and good will, like that Don Benito felt when his whole inner impulse was to save Delano and his crew, may seem sheer guile; and, further, that there is an inscrutable evil that makes the passage of fine souls through the world an endless Calvary. “Even the best men err, in judging the conduct of one with the recesses of whose condition he is not acquainted.” The world is mortified for Don Benito by the remembrance of the human treachery he has encountered: no later benefaction, no radiance of sun and sky, can make him forget it.

Man should offset the malice and evil circumstance one finds in the constitution of the universe: instead, he aggravates it. One does not need to heighten the parallels between Benito Cereno’s fate and Melville’s own life to catch the semblance to his own dilemma and his own bowed and wounded spirit. “Never,” says one of the characters in his next book, “has it been my lot to have been wronged, though but in the smallest degree. Cheating, backbiting, superciliousness, disdain, hard-heartedness, and all that brood, I know but by report. Cold regards tossed over the sinister shoulder of a former friend, ingratitude in a beneficiary, treachery in a confidant--such things may be; but I must take somebody’s word for it.” The irony of that declaration is obvious: Melville had met these things, and, like a splinter of steel in the eye, they tormented him and during these harassed years the memory of them, the anticipation of them, the helpless attempt to guard against them or remove them, directed his whole life towards this single point of exacerbation. The mighty whale aroused Melville’s utmost powers: there was that in man that steaded him manfully for such an encounter: but, like Timon, the spectacle of fair-weather friends and worldly sycophants, turning away from him during his moment of greatest need, unmanned him completely. Moby-Dick might slay one: but the torments of black flies and gnats made life ignoble without bringing death any nearer. Melville did not need to exaggerate these wrongs. It was their very smallness, their unassailableness, that made him desperate.

8

The Confidence Man was written in 1856, and published in the following spring, while Melville was abroad. It is by all odds the most difficult book that confronts Melville’s biographer; for it is possibly a palimpsest, and beneath its obvious legend, one may read indirect revelations of Melville’s own life. With Melville’s actual life and predicament in mind, there are passages in The Confidence Man one cannot read without misgiving: the story of Charlemont, The Gentleman Madman, for one, and the story of the Man in Weeds, wedded to a fiendish woman, Goneril, who covers up her own lecherousness by attributing insanity to her husband. Likewise somewhat mysterious is the story of the Indian-hater, who had been injured in youth by Indians, and never lost a chance to exterminate one. It is hard to fit these incidents into the logic of the plot: and their existence becomes plausible only if one believes Melville’s own torments and suspicions had, for a brief while, taken on a pathological character.

No one who approached The Confidence Man without preoccupation or bias would, I think, impute such personal and neurotic motives to the passages in question; but once the seed of suspicion is sowed, as the misanthropic one-legged man demonstrates in an early chapter, it spreads like the Canada thistle, and is almost as hard to root out. The words suspicion and confidence, that recur in these pages, increase one’s suspicions and weaken one’s confidence; in fact, there is no end to the pathological allusions one may discover, if one begins with the unfavourable hypothesis. Failing positive independent evidence, it would be foolish to build up a card-house of conjecture: enough to say that if Pierre partly reveals the causes of Melville condition, it is in The Confidence Man, if anywhere, that the psychologist will discover, probably, its immediate outward manifestations. The problem, though tantalizing, is not of paramount importance; for there is plenty of independent evidence to show that by 1858 Melville had regained possession of himself, and that his further life, though full of hardship and difficulty, had nothing in it that placed him outside the pale of family life and friendship and decent social intercourse--although it may have been dogged by memories and revulsions from an earlier period, and by the continuation of evil suspicions in the minds of those to whom the normal abstentions and irritations that attend productive literary effort would themselves be an evidence of eccentricity, or something worse.

9

In The Confidence Man Melville went back to the vein of satire he had opened in Mardi. He was shrewd enough, however, to curb the outward extravagance and the aesthetic vagaries of Mardi: the scene is a Mississippi steamboat, the characters are the motley company one might find on such a craft, and the story itself, so far from being incoherent, remains almost monotonously within the frame that Melville set for it in the first chapter.

At St. Louis a deaf-mute in a cream-coloured suit, with flaxen hair and a white fur hat, steps aboard the steamboat Fidele. He circulates among the crowd with a slate on which he writes: Charity thinketh no evil: suffereth long and is kind: endureth all things: believeth all things: never faileth. The passengers look upon this advertiser of St. Paul as a lunatic: that sign fills them with dubiety, although the sign outside the barber-shop, +NO TRUST+, seems to them an obvious and natural one.

Here in a simple image is the moral Melville confronts and elaborates in the rest of the book. This steamer, the Faithful, is the world, with all possible varieties of the human animal on board, natives and foreigners, men of business and men of pleasure, parlour men and backwoods men, farm-hunters, fame-hunters, heiress-hunters, buffalo-hunters, happiness-hunters, fine ladies in slippers and moccasined squaws, Quakers, soldiers, black, white, brown, and every religion and degree of morality. One thing mars their professions and plagues their lives: their suspicion. A wooden-legged man, apparently once a customs-officer, most suspicious of functionaries, denounces a cheery black beggar who has come among them, as an impostor: immediately, almost every man on deck turns against the poor fellow. Even a brawny Methodist minister, who first takes the black’s part, becomes infected: his confidence is gone. A sad demure man in weeds of mourning makes his appearance: with great simplicity of purpose, he insinuates himself into the confidence of a merchant, and gets ten dollars from him. A little later a man in a grey coat and white tie accosts his fellow passengers for contributions to a Widow and Orphan Asylum recently founded among the Seminoles. When rebuffed as a sharper, he asks his denouncer to be more charitable and throw off suspicion. The full title of the story is The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, and one does not go so far without suspecting that the Confidence Man is a protean character and that the mysterious appearance and disappearance of the deaf-mute, the negro beggar, the man in mourning, or the turning up of a seller of quack medicine which cures by establishing confidence, are merely his own mutations--or at least are conducted by him. By a hundred shady devices, he breaks down suspicion, makes men charitable, gives them faith in one another: but always when they are on the point of being completely disarmed, their lurking baseness or suspicion will rise to the surface. The herb-doctor’s pain-dissuader is selling well until a passenger gives him the lie: “Some pains cannot be eased but by producing insensibility, and cannot be cured but by producing death.” That hard truth destroys the whole baseless fabric of confidence he had built up.

Worse doubts intervene. People buy herb remedies because they think these medicines are natural, and what is natural is good. But if man is vile, what about Nature? Is the cough one attempts to cure not natural, and what of the cholera and the rattlesnake and the deadly nightshade? The Missourian, who utters this doctrine, has no more faith in humanity than he has in Nature: he is a bitter heretic, even in politics. What is abolitionism but the expression of fellow feeling of slave for slave? From Maine to Georgia the best breeds are to be bought up for any price from a livelihood to a presidency. “Machines for me!” exclaims the Missourian. So the characters pass, talking, argufying, blasting charity, killing confidence, either unconsciously or deliberately blackening the character of man, and proving the emptiness of all the sweet professions of civilization.

Two men become acquainted and hit up an intimacy over a bottle of wine. One of them, Frank Goodman, a cosmopolitan philanthropist, reeking good-will, professes to be inflamed by his friend’s nobility of mind and his good opinion of his fellow men, and in a sudden burst of confidence throws himself upon his high-minded fellow: he admits he is in want of money and asks for a loan of fifty dollars. Charlie turns away in dudgeon. “Go to the Devil, sir. Beggar, impostor!” Rising quickly from his seat and taking ten half-eagles from his pocket, Frank lays them in a circle around Charlie: with the air of a magician, he summons his friend to reappear. The practical necromancy works. Ha! ha! it was all a joke, of course. Charlie had humoured him. He had played his part to the life!... On top of this the philanthropist has an encounter with Mark Winsome, a mystic philosopher, and his disciple, who state and practice the extreme opposite of philanthropy: his philosophy stands the test of truth: it conforms to the world and does not produce a character at odds with it! This Winsome is no visionary: far from it: “Was not Seneca a usurer? Bacon a courtier? and Swedenborg, though with one eye on the invisible, did he not keep the other on the main chance?” Winsome is the original pragmatist: a man of serviceable knowledge: the doctrines he preaches will lead neither to the mad-house nor the poor-house. When Goodman poses to his disciple a situation like that he had just tested, the disciple handles it with adroit coolness. The loan is not to be thought of: friends do not help friends. If Frank turn beggar, then Charlie for the honour of friendship will turn stranger.

The philanthropist has enough of this icy philosophy: he retreats to the barber shop, his confidence in humanity unshaken. There he arranges with the barber to take down the no trust sign, promising to reimburse the man himself for any loss he may incur through his confidence. Unfortunately, Goodman leaves the shop, after signing the agreement, without paying for his own shave: and the barber, suddenly restored to his senses, tears up the contract and replaces the sign. Finally, Goodman comes to a comely old man, sitting in his berth, reading the Bible by the dim cabin light. Here is a man who has complete faith--yes, and the old man of faith equips himself with a cabin-lock, a counterfeit detector, a money-belt, a life-preserver, and an insurance policy!

It is not hard to see where all this leads, although the story itself ends abruptly. The Confidence Man, in his masquerade, represents all the sweetness and morality of the race, all that professes to see good in the heart of evil, all the benign impulses to succour the poor and heal the sick, all that would place friendliness and natural intimacy above cold circumspection, that would make every alien soul a friend, and would place the needs of man above the safety of property. This sweetness and morality had become for Melville the greatest of frauds. The people who professed it were sharpers and quacks. Nature, life, human institutions, did not encourage this fine morality: they contradicted it. The Pharisee, tightening his purse and disclaiming responsibility for his brother in distress, the old friend permitting the matter of a loan to disrupt a friendship--these things, and a score like them, shrivelled up the outward pretences of social man. Not faith and charity, but +NO TRUST+ was the key to a prosperous and efficient life. There was nothing wrong in the profession: love, faith, and charity might make the worst of ills tolerable; but the miser clung to his money, the merchant to his reputation, the good man to his immaculateness, and he who believed in the Word of God had more faith in the insurance company and the life-preserver. No trust. Man’s soul was lead. Without money or reputation, it sank.

10

I cannot leave The Confidence Man without a word about its incidental characteristics. One of the most important things about the story is that it is unfinished. Melville took leave of The Confidence Man before he had unmasked him: the meaning of the fable is left hanging in the air: the plot, which has neither up nor down, preparation nor climax, suddenly collapses--as if Melville were discouraged or a little bored by his own contrivances, or dismissed the story to his contemporaries with a gesture of contempt, hopeless that they would read it, or confident that, even if they did, they would not know the difference. The last words in the book are--“Something further may follow of this Masquerade”--as if he were waiting for some breath of popular response.

The fable of The Confidence Man is plain as far as it goes: there is nothing obscure or difficult in the symbolism; but it has the abrupt and scanty appearance of a Manx cat. In the individual sections, the writing is always competent; and sometimes far more than that: but the story moves as torpidly and sinuously as the muddy Mississippi itself, and there are repetitions of movement, as when the hypothetical Frank and Charlie go over the same ground as the original ones. Mr. Freeman’s notion that the story was written for the vain purpose of exposing the hypocrisy and assertiveness of passengers on a steamboat is a little beside the point, and his notion that the characters support Dickens’s worst charges in Martin Chuzzlewit is even more amusing; nor is Mr. Mather any more accurate when he speaks of The Confidence Man as “Middle Western character sketches.” One might meet queer, uncouth animals on a Mississippi steamer; doubtless one did; but the queerness Melville satirized he had met in the slums of Liverpool and the drawing-rooms of New York.

When one regards The Confidence Man in its true light, not as a novel, but as a companion volume to Gulliver’s Travels, its whole aspect changes: its turbid, tedious, meandering quality remains: but there are rapids of dangerous and exhilarating satire, as in the humane proposal, not yet wholly adopted, to organize the redemption of the world on strict Wall Street principles by farming out the charity and missionary work to the highest bidder, and forcing the inhabitants of Africa and Asia to pay for their own redemption and the relief of their own poverty. The Confidence Man may be considered as Melville’s own masquerade; his own bitter plea for support, money, confidence. Indeed, a Mississippi steamboat whose passengers quote Zimmermann, Hume, Francis Bacon, Rabelais, Jeremiah, Jeremy Taylor, Diogenes, and Timon could scarcely be anything but Melville’s own heavily laden soul, all its characters and incidents being part of that long soliloquy in which Melville struggled with a cankerous mood that threatened to remove, not merely the clothes, but the epidermis, no, the very bowels of his fellow creatures.

The passionate defiance was gone: a more savage, relentless humour took its place, a humour that stabbed and punctured with intent to kill. Melville’s aim remained good: there is more than one passage like this description of a miser: “A lean old man, whose flesh seemed salted codfish, dry as combustibles; a head like one whittled by an idiot out of a knot; a flat, boney mouth, nipped between buzzard nose and chin.... His eyes were closed, his cheek lay upon an old white moleskin coat, rolled under his head, like a wizened apple upon a grimy snowbank.”

A book with so much of Melville’s ingrained thought and cast of mind cannot be dismissed as a “posthumous book,” nor can it be set to one side because it lacks the human veracity of Life on the Mississippi. The book is without doubt below the level of the great eighteenth century satires; above all, it lacks the virtue of brevity; but as an indictment of humanity, The Confidence Man is far more deeply corrosive than anything in Bierce or Mark Twain. It is hard to refute Melville’s black words, difficult to find an antidote for this spiritual nightshade. Melville’s contemporaries did not try. They applied to the book the same medicine that worked so well in life: they agreed to forget it. Most of the sweetness and decorum of society rests on an agreement to forget. The sewer and the garbage pile and the slaughterhouse, the prison, the hospital, the slum, the asylum, the battlefield, live and flourish behind that agreement. Sometimes, though they are out of sight beyond the city’s limits, their odour is carried on the wind and mingles with the air of the drawing-room. The guests shift a little uneasily in their chairs. The hostess speaks in a loud intent voice: the guests respond with vivacious eagerness: the agreement must be maintained. How that dress shimmers in the soft light! What delicious perfume that bosom exhales! Is there any pleasant sound or sight that riches cannot purchase? The hostess looks uncomfortably at the window: the guests follow her eyes uneasily: the maid closes the window, and, with a touch of finality, draws the curtains again. A long breath of relief: the agreement triumphs: the licence to forget!

Melville could not forget, and yet he could go no further with these observations and memories. He recoiled from his experience into a mournful humility. After The Confidence Man, these terrible blacks softened into greys: the wound whitened into a scar: the eyes automatically shut when the scene they beheld became too painful. When one has found the worst that can be said against the world, one must still live in it, and eventually Melville resigned himself, and lived. The crack which began to open like the gaping earth in Moby-Dick, that widened with a shiver in Pierre, became a foaming abyss in The Confidence Man. As he was on the point of falling into that abyss, Herman Melville withdrew, and the wide fissure closed--or seemed to close.

PILGRIM