Chapter ELEVEN: Alarums and Retreats

Between the provincial society into which Herman Melville was born and the America in which he found himself at the time of the Civil War there was a vast difference. The Civil War may in one sense be looked upon as an attempt to preserve the ideological framework of the United States at a time when its institutions were in a state of disruption, and all its typical ways of life were being transformed. In that the Civil War preserved this framework, upholding the Constitution, confirming the union of the states, concentrating the powers of government, it was successful: the union was saved. But the very act of prosecuting the war confirmed the chaos and hastened the disruption, so that what was saved was not freedom and equality, the freedom of voluntary association and local initiative, the equality of access to an unlimited amount of utilizable land: what was left was just the opposite of these things, servility and inequality. Land and natural resources, scattered broadcast during the Civil War under the Homestead Act, and under various acts to promote railroad building, were turned into exacting monopolies; and the government itself became the principal agent for establishing and extending privilege. In less than half a generation Walt Whitman was forced to modify many of his fondest hopes for America: for with all these new agents of exploitation dominant, there was no longer any way of distinguishing the American proletariat from that of Europe, except in their independent manners--a relic of an equality that had once been real.

The disruption symbolized by the Civil War was expressed in a hundred ways; and when one examines these manifestations carefully they can all be characterized by a single figure: the failure to achieve form. One sees the difference between provincial and industrial America in the political definition of their units: New England, for example, is a natural region, like Brittany and Provence, with a mode of thought and an institutional form based upon certain common geographic features and cultural history; the new states and territories that were founded beyond the Alleghenies had no form other than that expressed by the arbitrary lines drawn by the surveyor: their content was simply so many blank square miles. The older cities of the seaboard, with the exception of Philadelphia, had a central nucleus which had grown out of local needs and habits: the size of the blocks was determined by the depth of the houses, the amount of garden space in the rear, the traffic that would pass in the streets: in the new cities no customs and habits played a part in the configuration of the city except those of realty speculation: by 1850, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Chicago had all forfeited to the land-gambler sites originally set aside for civic centres. In architecture, the failure to achieve form was equally conspicuous: windows, doors, rooms, façades, even apart from their grotesque efforts at decoration, all became gawky and ill-proportioned.

The energies of the country went into purely quantitative achievements: their only formal equivalent was money. The production in tons of iron, miles of steel rails, bushels of wheat, went up: cities increased in size: but the iron was used for the preposterous fronts of office buildings, the railroad served to deplete the hinterland, and the cities were dingy firetraps of wood or dingier prisons of brownstone. The war itself tore up and shot to pieces vast quantities of iron and many miles of railroad, and sundry towns and villages: but that was the true destination of all these quantitative efforts even in peace: for industrialism produced only an occasional genuine form, like the Eads Bridge, and for the most part its products were fit only to be consumed hastily and replaced and destroyed again. No wonder this civilization sweated day and night, without holidays, to produce its evanescent goods; while, in the Middle Ages, the great cathedrals and town halls were erected, without labour-saving machinery, in a rude agricultural society which spent a third of its year in holidays devoted to prayer, meditation, or festival. Where there is form and culture, there is true conservation of energy through the arts: where there is only energy, without end or form, the mechanism may be speeded up indefinitely without increasing anything except the waste and lost motion. Southern society, in which a provincial system of caste and culture held together, produced factories and slave barracks, in Charleston, for example, that maintained, uncorrupted, the forms of its classic past: but outside these aristocratic backwaters, chaos was dominant--and even in the South, one feels, it was only postponed.

In this sprawling, undisciplined America, a new type of character was uppermost. Melville described this new type when he touched on Ethan Allen in Israel Potter: “Allen,” he said, “seems to have been a curious combination of a Hercules, a Joe Miller, a Bayard, and a Tom Hyer. He was frank, bluff, companionable as a Pagan, convivial, a Roman, hearty as a harvest. His spirit was essentially Western; and herein is his peculiar Americanism; for the Western spirit is, or will yet be (for no other can be) the true American.” It was a sign of the waning of provincial faith that before the war everybody was eagerly looking for this individual, this type, who would serve as a symbol of unity. Even Emerson and Thoreau looked wistfully toward the rough fellows of the frontier to express what was common to all Americans. A provincial culture glories in its differences: the power to mould and express them is its unique quality: a Jefferson, a Franklin, an Adams were not only as far apart as Virginia, Philadelphia, and Boston: they were as far apart, in many ways, as London, Paris, and Weimar. But in the period before the war, the frontier type, Jackson, Harrison, Clay, Frémont, Lincoln, was put forward as the sum of all our possible Americas--albeit these figures were as far from the Swedes of Minnesota or the Germans of Wisconsin as they were from the Gansevoorts and the Randolphs. In a period of dissolution a false unity seems preferable to no common bond at all; and in the uncertainty, the disintegration, the dispersion of American society, under the vast tides of immigration and the inexorable flow of the coal-and-iron civilization, political Union became a compensatory symbol for all the social and cultural fragmentation that existed.

The political and social results of the Civil War, as they have worked out during the last two generations, have made us a little sceptical of the sacred, unchallengeable shibboleths under which the war itself was fought: we see that the prime issues of the great conflict were silenced, rather than settled, by the decisive victory of the North. Unfortunately, the South’s political contentions, which were partly valid, were vitiated by the issue of slavery. Mid all the decisive statesmanship displayed south of the Mason and Dixon line, no one was firm enough or far-sighted enough, after Jefferson’s time, to see that the holding of human beings in bondage, without hope or means of escape, was an untenable anachronism: even the Russian autocracy recognized that. The French Revolution had made this particular form of human degradation unpalatable; like incest or tribal revenge, it could not be related to a modern society. The burden of that institution, indeed, belonged to the whole country: the great mistake of the South, from 1830 onwards, was to assume as a divine necessity or benefit what should have been shared with the rest of the country as an intolerable evil--to be disposed of by some direct economic adjustment.

Melville had his misgivings about current political institutions; in Mardi he pointed out that many of the boasted freedoms of America were the product of free land and an uncrowded domain; and though he was a republican, he recognized inequality, and had no hope of doing away with those distinctions between man and man in a functional capacity, which separate captain, mates, and crew. His own outlook was emotionally patrician and aristocratic; but his years in the forecastle had modified those feelings, and one needs some such compound word as aristodemocracy to describe his dominant political attitude. Melville may have had his moments of admiration for the gracious ways of the South; but, quite properly, he regarded the United States as a place where narrow tribalisms had been successfully dropped, where the entire blood of Europe joined together from a thousand sources, the country being not so much a nation in the old sense, as a world, a neighbourly world; and he doubtless looked upon the Southern claim to independence as a return to tribalism and narrowness.

Like most men of good will, Melville looked forward to a time when the world itself would be federated into a whole, so that the conflicts between peoples and tribes and communities, the inevitable and salutary conflicts, would not take place on the physical plane--where they are disastrous and prove nothing--but on the plane of culture. With this in view, the breaking up of a federation is a mode of political atavism: and the attempt reinforced Melville’s natural repugnance to slavery. Unfortunately, the maintenance of a union by compulsive methods leads to an enthronement of the powers of the central government, and a diminution of a regional independence; the military strength of the central government and its impudence in serving special groups within the state, in turn becomes an obstacle to the pacification of the world. Melville could scarcely anticipate this result; but his philosophy had a place for the evil which dogs the footsteps of the good, and when he said that America might turn out to be the Paul Jones of nations, intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambitions, civilized in externals but savage at heart, he may partly have anticipated the outcome of that political supremacy he expected the United States finally to attain. By the time the war opened, there was established a certain fatalism in Melville’s mind which made him lenient to the forces that seemed to him evil: they, too, in their inscrutable way were obedient to another power.

Melville’s attitude towards the Civil War was, in sum, just the opposite of Hawthorne’s; and if the men had been still in communication during this period, it would probably have opened a final breach between them. For Hawthorne, New England was as large a piece of earth as he had any affection for, and whatever happened next, he asserted in the early days of the conflict, he rejoiced that the old Union was smashed. “We never were one people, and never really had a country since the Constitution was founded.” There spoke the shrewd, unshaken provincial. Hawthorne looked upon John Brown, moreover, as a poisonous nuisance: for Melville he was a prophetic figure, whose death made it impossible for the stabs of controversy to heal, whose streaming beard was the very meteor of war. One may sum up Melville’s political character by saying that his breeding and instincts were those of a provincial; his superficial beliefs and attitudes were those of a political unionist; and during the Civil War the latter were uppermost, but not wholly so. Well might Walt Whitman describe the war itself, and the temper of the society that ushered it in, by the word “convulsiveness.” There was something arcane and uncontrollable in these partisanships and antipathies: each fragment was thrown about erratically, tangentially. It was war that produced war; and when the active state at last came about, men settled to it with a sigh of relief. War polarized these fragments: it gave an appearance of high order to this chaos.

2

There is something paradoxical in the fact that Melville’s concern over slavery and his fervour for the union should have come into play during a period when he had become indifferent to most of the nearest issues of life and convinced that existence itself was a form of slavery. But one must not forget the anomalous nature of war itself. In its instrumentalities, war is a denial of life: but in mood and spirit war partly achieves all the things a humane or religious mind cherishes: selflessness, contempt for creature habits and animal comforts, nonchalance in the face of death, a willingness to give up life cheerfully for an ideal end. If it is a sin, war is an heroic sin; and who, exclaims Melville in Pierre, does not feel more warmly to the Lord of Evil himself, than towards a petty shopkeeper, who daily practices all the discreet and serviceable virtues? War is a malign, ambiguous fulfilment of the things men permanently want in life--and in its first flush, men forget its sordid accompaniments and its disastrous results, and respond, not meanly, to its immediate stimulus.

There is no doubt that the prosecution of the war quickened Melville and made him feel a purpose instead of the dull, fearful hollow of an empty and respectable life. At forty-two, broken down in health, unfit for active service, he watched these young men go forth in their blue uniforms, with flushed faces and eager tread, a little enviously: comradeship was a warm thing, even among the precious rapscallions one might find in a whaler: it was an even deeper and warmer matter among these young men who had shared sport together in their village, or courted the same girl, or studied together under the same lamp at college. These happy faces might be going to a picnic, to be pelted with blossoms, not shrapnel:

Forever they slumber, young and fair,
The smile upon them as they died:
Their end attained, that end a height;
Life was to these a dream fulfilled
And death a starry night.

Unable to throw himself into battle, Melville followed the newspaper accounts and the bulletins all the more closely. One pictures him pacing the floor of his room at night, musing over Ball’s Bluff or Antietam: there is no sleep in him during these racking days: the last footsteps of a straggler die away in the street: no sound comes through the air except the distant hoot of a boat on the North River; and Melville’s mind plays back and forth across the days. Intermittently, all the old glow would come back to him in these dark moments: he would picture himself perhaps, borne by the tide of men at his back over an earthworks, as he was borne in a whaleboat on the back of the lashing whale. The reckless lift: the thrust: the yell of defiance: being thrown down and struggling to rise again through a tangled drift of legs and bodies: the shout of victory: the feeling of proud defiance: the knowledge that death does not matter when one is at last, with all one’s senses quickened, face to face with it. The whaleman’s joy: the soldier’s joy: the joy of hard living and easy dying!

The war, with its heroism and defeat, was the image of Melville’s own life; and, in the blackest night, the glow of its fires illumined his face. The rigid order of warfare gave Melville the sense of a cosmic purpose at work: in the working out of Dupont’s Round Fight Melville saw another significance in the struggle for the Union: it was not the political bond that Melville’s contemporaries alone wanted confirmed: they desired that the Universe itself should hold together! Melville’s interpretation is, I think, an illusory one; but one cannot question the deep need that it expressed.

In time and measure perfect moves
All art whose aim is sure;
Evolving rhyme and stars divine
Have rules and they endure.

Nor less the fleet that warred for Right
And warring so, prevailed,
In geometric beauty curved
And in an orbit sailed.

The Rebel at Port Royal felt
The Unity overawe
And rued the spell. A type was here
And victory of law.

But it was the happy fortune of youth that Melville, betrayed by the disasters of middle age, returned to when he contemplated the war. Who, he asked, can remain aloof that shares youth’s ardour, uncooled by the snows of wisdom or sordid gain? War made life again a great spectacle and a great adventure: that defiance of the low limitations upon which life depends, which Melville had expressed in Moby-Dick, came back again: vanished at last were the doubts, perturbations, speculations, cynicisms, endless grey questionings. Ten years before Melville might have been repelled by the evil and ugliness of it: the maimed bodies, the cruelties, the infamous prison and concentration camps, the furtive squads of deserters, the hospital agonies, the litany of unknown soldiers and nameless burial spots that Whitman gravely remembered and recited. Now Melville was armed for the evil and ugliness of it, and even for its futility:

No utter surprise can come to him
Who reaches Shakespeare’s core;
That which we seek and shun is there--
Man’s final lore.

Melville was possibly in New York in 1863, when the carnival of looting and murder and general protest took place over the infliction of the draft. He pictures himself, oppressed by the sultry air, climbing to the roof-top and looking over the hushed city: in the distance, he hears the mixed surf of muffled sound, the roar of riot and the dull glare of fires. The city was in the hands of the mob, and that mob had sunk “whole aeons back into nature,” vindictive, cruel, irresponsible, blind, bloodthirsty. Melville heard the rumble of the artillery which finally broke up the riot and exacted vengeance on the mob; and, pondering this event, he was conscious of the grimy slur upon the Republic’s faith, a slur implied by the cause of the outbreak, by the outbreak itself, and by the suppression of it. Where was now the belief in life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness? Where now the conviction that man is naturally good and--“more--is Nature’s Roman, never to be scourged”? With all his new enthusiasm, Melville’s deeper perceptions were never altogether out of sight:

Did the Fathers feel mistrust?
Can no final good be wrought?
Over and over, again and again
Must the fight for the Right be fought?

Were men but strong and wise,
Honest as Grant and calm,
War would be left to the red and black ants
And the happy world disarm.

Even the supremacy of the Union, Melville finally came to see, might bring some other result than the purpose for which it was conceived. In one of the prefatory poems in his Battle Pieces, the Conflict of Convictions 1860-1861, Melville expressed his doubt: from the allusion to the Iron Dome it is plain that the verse was written later, when the Dome itself had been put into place on the Capitol at Washington, by one of those happy accidents that sometimes give an event its exact appropriate symbol.

Power unannointed may come--
Dominion (unsought by the free)
And the Iron Dome
Stronger for stress and strain
Fling her huge shadow athwart the main;
But the Founders’ dream shall flee.
Age after age shall be
As age after age hath been,
(From man’s changeless heart their way they win);
And death shall be busy with all who strive,
Death, with silent negative.

Yea and Nay,
Each hath his say;
But God he keeps the middle way.
None was by
When he spread the sky;
Wisdom is vain, and prophecy.

Though he was emotionally at one with the war, Melville’s thoughts were not entirely harmonized with his feelings: his ultimate doubts crept into his most sanguine reactions to the conflict; and at bottom, the things that quickened him were not the formal purposes of the conflict but its incidents--the flashing youths, the gallant charge, the daring commander, the spirited horse that carried Sheridan to battle. “Nothing can lift the heart of man like manhood in a fellow man,” he says. The Civil War satisfied this desperate need in his own soul: but apart from its animal vigour and glory, even its solidest purposes seemed infirm and fragile. He pictures an heroic soldier, surviving the carnage, the Seven Days’ Fight, the Wilderness, the field-hospital, and Libby Prison--surviving it and reflecting on his experience: “Heaven! what _truth_ to him!” He himself had already drained the lees of adversity; the war had nothing to add there, except to make his own experience that of a whole generation.

3

In the break of emotional tension caused by the fall of Richmond, Melville wrote most of his verses on the Civil War. A few were printed in the magazines during the first part of 1866, and later in the year, Melville collected and published the whole volume of verse, Battle Pieces and Other Aspects of the War; with a supplement, gravely and well written, in which he counterbalanced any Unionist fervour and elation he might have shown in the battle poems, by discussing, with great sympathy and tact, the plight of the South and the psychological problems confronting the North, particularly, in dealing with it.

One of the poems in the collection, Sheridan at Cedar Creek, was long quoted as one of the memorable poems evoked by the war; but, although Melville’s verses on the war are the only serious contemporary rivals to Whitman’s Drum-Taps, one cannot, with the most lenient eye, put them in the same class. Melville rarely achieved form as a poet: he was often very near to it, as we shall see when we examine his poems about the sea and his travels: but although the sensitiveness, the emotional tension, the rough powers of expression, in short, the ingredients of poetry were there, he permitted himself to be conquered by the external form of line and stanza: his rhythms are broken, not by their own inner development, but because they meet a foreign object, and get shattered against it. These verses are such jewelry as a sculptor might make. Melville’s mallet and chisel and sinew were of little use with a pitch block and a graving-tool.

Among these verses there are a few stanzas that give one a hint of what Melville’s potentialities as a poet were: his poem on John Brown is one of them, and another occurs in a poem commemorative of a naval victory--despite the weakness of the second line, it rings like a bell.

But seldom the laurel wreath is seen
Unmixed with pensive pansies dark;
There’s a light and a shadow on every man
Who at last attains his lifted mark--
Nursing through night the ethereal spark.
Elate he never can be;
He feels that spirit which had hailed his worth
Sleep in oblivion.--The shark
Glides white through the sulphurous sea.

It is no accident that this stanza utters Melville’s deepest intuition of life. Here image is symbol, and the symbol presents, without further reflection or explanation, the idea in its totality: _the shark glides white through the sulphurous sea_. There is something final in that. Melville might hope: he might be stirred up: he might join hands with his fellows: he might even achieve victory: all these things had happened in the collective excitement of the Civil War; but in the end the elation and exaltation were doomed to pass away. In the very act of achieving personal success, Melville had become aware of something in the Constitution of the Universe that fatally marred it: the shark glides white through the sulphurous sea. His demon was not deceived. It lived in the midst of chaos, and this Civil War, unified, regimented, ordered, inexorable as it seemed, was chaos, too. Order springs from within, mixing with circumstance but never carried away by it: in other words, order is art--and art was the one thing lacking in the whole plan of life that had arisen to dominate America. Raw power, raw experience, were uppermost. White sharks swam everywhere: shark ate shark, and greedily battened upon the refuse of the sinking boat. No use to fight the White Whale, if the boat that holds human culture breaks up, and the crew is killed, and only the sharks remain in the waters. I have expanded Melville’s symbol, perhaps; but one cannot magnify his disillusion. As early as 1866 he noted in his Supplement that “for them who are neither partisans nor enthusiasts, nor theorists, nor cynics, there are some doubts not readily to be solved. And there are fears. Why is not the cessation of war now at length attended with the settled calm of peace?”

In his Supplement, Melville pleaded for generosity to the vanquished, for a spirit of forbearance, for the sort of magnanimity that the Union soldiers showed at Vicksburg, when they watched the dejected Confederates file out without raising a shout of triumph. “Let us pray,” he concluded, “that the terrible historic tragedy of our time may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved country through terror and pity; and may fulfillment verify in the end those expectations which kindle the bards of Progress and Humanity.” Melville was definitely not one of the bards of progress and humanity; but in the loose sympathies of wartime, he had listened to all their righteous self-praise and their optimistic predictions; and though he did not share their philosophy, he at least joined them in their hopes, while there was still a possibility that they might be pragmatically justified.

That weak optimism came to nothing. There was a treachery that annulled these efforts--the treachery of the madness that resulted in Lincoln’s death: the vindictive virtue of the Abolitionists, who inflicted military occupation and carpet-bag governments on their fallen enemies: and that very tragic topsy-turvydom of war which provides snug berths and comfortable fortunes to the profiteers and speculators, and offers a sordid routine and a share in the general bankruptcy to those who are unfortunate enough to escape a quick and early death.

The Union had perhaps been worth dying for: but nobody could confront the post-bellum scene, with its Vanderbilts and Jay Cookes and Daniel Drews, without wondering seriously whether the Union was worth living for. The heroes were dead: dead or incapacitated: incapacitated or tired. Those who had any fight left in them would fight for Civil Service Reform, as Carl Schurz did, or if they had energy, they would go into railroads, like Charles Francis Adams: it was no accident that those who sought a career less in harmony with the accepted good works of industrialism--a Henry Hobbes Richardson, a Mark Twain, a Henry Adams, a William James, a Stanley Hall--were usually men who had by one chance or another lived during the war at a considerable distance from the struggle, and who had missed, not alone the fine heroism of that experience, but the terrible disillusion and collapse that follows such efforts; and who, like Stanley Hall, were moved to expiate their failure to risk death on the battlefield by living a little more arduously and heroically on the plane of daily life. These men might seek patiently to build up their careers; but those who had been buoyed up by the great energies and expectations of provincial America, in that Golden Day when they had grasped power and material mastery without losing hold of culture and form--those earlier writers and makers found themselves sinking helplessly out of sight, battered wrecks, submerged by the tide of industry and finance, whose waves rose higher and higher during the ten years that followed the great storm. There were no quiet waters for these men; or, if they found them, as Emerson did, as Whitman did, they lost the power to go to sea again; and, instead of being beaten to pieces on the treacherous coast, merely rotted at the wharf.

In 1866, at the age of forty-seven, Herman Melville, too, withdrew from the war, defeated. That fine “scorn of life which earns life’s crown”--earns, but does not always win it--had left him with the burdens, difficulties, grievances of a returning soldier. He had fought a not less worthy fight; and now, once for all, he retreated. He did not surrender; for he kept on writing to the end of his days; but he could no more live on his writings than a veteran of the Grand Army could exchange his medals and scars for honest bread. Melville was forced to face this fact, after twenty years of writing and fifteen years of continuous, desperate struggle. He had not given in quickly or petulantly; and when he finally made this decision, one can detect in it no sign of outraged vanity or reproach. He had gauged his position: he knew the worst: he was prepared to meet it. Through the offices of an old travelling companion, he found a place as inspector in the Custom House, a post he had described in Redburn as “a most inglorious one; indeed, worse than driving geese to water.”

From this time on a sweetness and serenity began to spread over the man. The dark torture of Pierre and The Confidence Man might return in weak moments; there might be hours of stormy egoism or inner defiance; but in the main there was peace. This, too, he had anticipated for himself in Isabel’s words, almost half a generation before: “My spirit seeks different food from happiness; for I think I have a suspicion of what it is. I have suffered wretchedness, but not because of the absence of happiness, and without praying for happiness, I pray for peace--for motionlessness--for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual sensation.” A Hindu sage might have sought this peace in the forest: Melville, with quiet irony, sought it in the Custom House.

4

The decision was made; the door was closed: Melville’s troubles and humiliations could carry him no lower. For the first time in ten years Melville had the means, the energy, the relief from anxiety necessary for the prosecution of a long work, and with indomitable spirit he set to work again. Melville’s retreat was not a withdrawal from his proper self, but a withdrawal from the conditions that hampered its expression--the taste of the public and the predilections of publishers, the demand for warmed-over Peedee and Hullabaloo. “How live at all,” he asks himself, “if once a fugitive from thy own nobler part, though pain be portion inwrought with the grain,” and in this sense Melville was never a fugitive. His next effort was a long narrative poem--the original edition in two volumes numbers 571 pages and about 20,000 lines--based on his Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. In his Constantinople notebook, he had originally set down a suggestion for Frescoes of Travel by Three Brothers, Poet, Painter, and Scholar; and in the intervening years the conception had grown and expanded into a modern Canterbury pilgrimage of the harassed, the faithless, the doubting, the exiled. Clarel, this new work, was not published till 1876; but the book itself was probably written shortly after the Civil War: the heightened skill in verse, the reference to the Civil War in