Chapter XVI: Part IV: , the fact that the poem is all of a piece, and the testimony

of Melville’s surviving daughter, all focus on this period; and Melville’s own reference to the poem’s having been long in existence before his uncle, Mr. Peter Gansevoort, generously provided money for its publication, enables one to associate the beginning of this mental pilgrimage with his withdrawal into the Custom House.

Melville’s short sojourn in Palestine had made a deep impression on him: the notes that belonged to those weeks were full of observations. In Jerusalem he had encountered all sorts of queer people: an old commercial man giving tracts to people whose language he did not understand; a Philadelphian turned Jew, who had married a Jewess; a fanatical American missionary going about Jerusalem with an open Bible, looking forward to the opening asunder of Mount Olivet and in the meanwhile preparing the highway for the procession of the dead; a crazy American woman who had opened an agricultural academy for the Jews without converting a single Jew to either agriculture or Christianity. Deliberately he had saturated his mind with the atmosphere of Jerusalem, “offering myself up,” he noted, “as a passive subject, and no unwilling one, to its weird impression,” and always rising at dawn and walking outside the city walls. In the afternoon he would stand by the Shepherd’s Gate, on the spot where Christ was stoned, and “watch the shadows sliding, sled-like, down the hills of Beretta and Zion into the valley of Jehoshaphat, then, after resting awhile, creeping up the opposite side of Olivet, entering tomb after tomb, and cave after cave.” The Christ-mood sometimes came over him; he felt in himself the unrecognized god, or the goaded deity, the mystic scapegoat of an inscrutable patriarchal presence; he too had climbed the way of Calvary. But the Devil’s ingenuity did not impress him: the Mount of Temptation was only a black, arid mount overlooking the Dead Sea: why did the foolish fiend think any one would value the rulership of such an empire--and if it was only a vision, why take him up to the Mount? But though every rock and road had an association, it was the landscape of Palestine that overwhelmed him: the arid hills, the smell of burning rubbish in Jerusalem, the melancholy olive tree, the whitish mildew that pervaded whole tracts of landscape--bleached--leprosy--encrustation of cakes--old cheese--bones of rocks--crunched, gnawed, and mumbled--mere refuse and rubbish of creation, comparing with ordinary regions as a skeleton with the living and rosy man. “Is the desolation of the land,” Melville asked himself, “the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity? Hapless are the favourites of Heaven!” Palestine had dissipated his romantic expectation; but it had reciprocated all the aridness and emptiness of his spirit. In the antediluvian port of Joppa, just before his departure, Joppa, which was too ancient to have antiquities, he felt like Jonah himself, and only strong self-control and grim defiance enabled him to keep cool and patient. The Dead Sea had concentrated all these impressions: the foam on the beach and pebbles had been like the slaver of a mad dog: the water had been swarthy, bitter, and, carrying the bitter taste in his mouth all day, he had felt the utter bitterness of life. “Bitter is it to be poor and bitter to be reviled, and oh, bitter are these waters of death, thought I.”

All these sights and experiences formed the background of Clarel; but the poem itself is far richer in detail than the notebooks: it is an imaginative elaboration of his experiences, and not a reproduction of them. The arid background, which reflected Melville’s own feeling of hopelessness in 1857, retreated: the foreground is thronged with people who have independent lives and motives. All the major characters, Clarel the student, Vine the wanderer, Rolfe, another uneasy wanderer, Mortmain, the disillusioned Swedish revolutionary, and Ungar, a Baltimore Catholic with a streak of Indian in him, all these characters, it is true, centre like focussed rays in Melville’s own being, baffled by his perplexities, and arguing, like his own doubts, among themselves. The spirit that pervades Clarel is sober, restrained, steady-eyed: its failure as poetry is due, in part, to this very sobriety of thought.

5

The first part discloses Clarel, a student who has abandoned his preparations for the ministry, in Jerusalem. He has come to lay his inner questions at the gates of religion’s own city, thinking to find from an older race, the Jews, with a remoter history, some clue to the unsettled and uneasy state in which he lives, and some path of development which will lead again to wholeness. Behind the crumbling faith of Rome and Luther is the crag of Sinai--adamant! While exploring Jerusalem, Clarel makes the acquaintance of an American, Nathan, who has become a convert to Judaism, and falls in love with his daughter, Ruth. Nathan’s Jewish wife and daughter, though loyal to the faith, still long for some of the things America had given them--and they do not altogether share the zeal of the convert. Even in Jerusalem, the story swarms with characters: Melville tells the history of each chance acquaintance, as if by a thousand examples from the lives of other men one might find an answer to one’s own. Most of these lives, though Melville gives them a foreign birthplace, are touched by the reflected light of his own history. Thus in Celio’s story, one cannot help following Melville’s own plight:

Fain had his brothers have him grace
Some civic honorable place:
And interest was there to win
Ample preferment: he as kin
Was loved, if but ill understood:
At heart they had his worldly good:
But he postponed and went his way
Unpledged, unhampered....
Since love, arms, courts abjure--why then
Remaineth to me what? The pen?
Dead feather of ethereal life?
Nor efficacious much, save when
It makes some fallacy more rife.
My kin--I blame them not at heart--
Would have me act some routine part,
Subserving family, and dreams
Alien to me--illusive schemes.

Ruth’s father is killed on his lonely farm by Arab raiders and robbers, and Clarel is not permitted by Jewish custom to enter the House of Mourning. Being cut off from his beloved, he decides to ease his loneliness by joining a cavalcade, going across Palestine to the Dead Sea, through the wilderness where John wandered, and back again by Bethlehem. On the journey, we are deliberately reminded of Chaucer’s Pilgrims, and the robust, full-blooded, healthy, superficial, English Broad Churchman, Derwent--the most completely embodied character in the whole book--is described with a little of that soft sweet malice Chaucer knew so well how to use.

Thought’s last adopted style he showed;
Abreast kept with the age, the year
And each bright optimistic mind,
Nor lagged with Solomon in rear,
And Job, the furthermost behind--
Brisk marching in time’s drum-corps van
Abreast with whistling Jonathan.

But these Pilgrims do not while away the hour with merry tales: instead of being able to assume the faith, and take life pretty much as it comes, as Chaucer’s honest folk did, their faith is threatened and disintegrated, and even life’s happiness is a problem that must be solved: it exacerbates them almost as much as their emptiness. Chaucer’s people eat, drink, joke, love, quarrel, cozen, cheat, hate, envy: living in a world where these things exist, along with chivalry and nobility and chastity, they are neither saddened nor puzzled, because the framework of that world is articulated, and each part of it has its necessary place--even the sins. Among Melville’s pilgrims, however, not even the virtues are safe: each man lives in a private world that trembles and dissolves at every shock.

Contrast these pious atheists, these doubtful scholars, these sobered revolutionaries, with the Mussulman, the orthodox Jew, the bland, beef-fed English clergyman, or the Roman Catholic abbot. The latter go through their daily ritual without question or loss of energy: their orthodoxy is secure and they themselves are untroubled: wrapped in an absorbing dream, their body is indifferent to the hard pallet on which they lie. The mocking Jewish atheist is happy, too; as Spinoza, blessed with a diviner illusion, was happy: but the question is: Can a Clarel, a Rolfe, a Mortmain, in short, a Melville, acquire that sort of serenity without cutting himself off from his very flesh and tissue? Once one has broken out of the orthodoxy, one can no more go back to it than a disturbed sleeper can resume the thread of a vanished dream, no more than a grown man can go back to the games of his childhood. There was once a time no doubt when he could call sand sugar and stones bread: but now stones were stones, cold, flinty--no doubt about that. “The pains lie among the pleasures,” Melville noted while in Palestine, “like sand in rice, not only bad in themselves, but spoiling the good”; and this held of faith and doubt as well as pain and pleasure.

Melville’s insight no longer shrivelled and blasted the very constitution of man, as in The Confidence Man; but it pierced, perhaps, even deeper. An indictment of humanity itself is a blank indictment which turns the accuser into one of the principal defendants: one suspects the morals of Juvenal and the kindliness of Swift, precisely because they see so little of these qualities in the people about them. In Clarel, Melville went through country after country, and institution after institution, as he had done in Mardi: here he points out a weak joint, there a plaster-covered crack, or in another place a false foundation. One cannot evade these specific criticisms. From the atheist who jeers at Rome--“patcher of the rotten cloth, pickier of the wing of the moth, toaster of bread stale in date”--to the reactionary religionist who attacks Derwent’s belief in a Christianity blandly coupled with comfort and progress and toasted muffins and dividends, all working together for the greater glory of Mammon, scarcely any of the complacencies of Melville’s age escaped: his chilly wind blew the rotten roof off every house of refuge. Blake paused at the wonder of life, which had with the same breath created the tiger and the lamb: but Melville in a mordant line said: “If true what priests avouch of Thee, the shark Thou madst, yet claimst the dove.” These lines show, I think, that the consolations of transcendental religion were always far from Melville. The consolations of Progress were, alas! equally remote: Melville had small use for those who heaved contempt on “rite and creed sublime” and yet clung to their own rank fable, the “latest shame of time.” In the conflict between a crumbling theology and a cocky, over-confident science, Melville could take neither side. Melville felt that the scantling of the contemporary scientific outlook was no equivalent for the massive architecture of the ancient church; nor could he reassure himself, when he found cold adverse rains beating down on his head, that the scantling was a new and finer kind of architecture.

Yea, long as children feel affright
In darkness, men shall fear a God;
And long as daisies yield delight
Shall see His footprints in the sod.
Is’t ignorance? This ignorant state
Science doth but elucidate,
Deepen, enlarge....
Let fools count on faith’s closing knell--
Time, God, are inexhaustible.

Melville was aware of the historic parallel to his own age; and he knew what its outcome had been. Christ had followed Osiris: Jesus had indeed come out of Egypt, as the legend said; and in the time of Cicero, when Roman society was in the same state of doubt, disruption, and despair as the Western world was in Clarel’s day, a new era of resolution and faith was beginning to open. Doubt and all its maladies in the moral life were no more final in society than they were in the individual: “There is,” Melville said, “no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:--through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally.” Like Matthew Arnold, Melville was keenly aware of the transition; but, being an American, he could not accept the mere sense of historic continuity, of a favourable inertia, as a substitute for a new faith.

When one examines the mood of Clarel and the conclusions of one of the pilgrims, Mortmain, the Swede, who had been a prophet of the new order and a revolutionary, bent on carrying further the vast abstract programme of the French revolution, one becomes conscious of the exceptional maturity of Melville’s social observation. Melville had reached by sober meditation what Herzen, for example, had achieved only after a long kindergarten training in ideals and enthusiasms. Men like Herzen had avoided ultimate issues. They drugged themselves with plot, conspiracy, oratory, propaganda, every form of verbal busy work. They ended in total disillusion, without seeing that they should not have reached this spiritual desert had they started out with a less abstract and barrenly subjective view of their task. Now, Melville, too, realized that the social revolution had already taken on a millennial character by 1848: it was the new democratic equivalent of the older scheme of salvation by faith, and men like Bakunin and Louis Blanc and Engels had found in it something that knit their lives together and gave them significance, as the Civil War did for Melville, as other-worldly religion did for the orthodox. With this in mind, Melville’s comments upon Mortmain’s adventures are all the more pregnant; for Mortmain came to doubt not so much his purposes as his instruments:

... Wear and tear and jar
He met with coffee and cigar:
These kept awake the man and mood
And dream. That uncreated Good
He sought whose absence is the cause
Of creeds and Atheists, mobs and laws.
Precocities of heart outran
The immaturities of brain.
Along with each superior mind
The vain, foolhardy, worthless, blind,
With Judases, are nothing loath
To clasp pledged hands and take the oath
Of aim, the which, if just, demands
Strong hearts, brows deep, and priestly hands.

* * * * *

Wouldst meddle with the state? Well, mount
Thy guns; how many men dost count?
Besides, there’s more that here belongs:
Be many questionable wrongs:
By yet more questionable war
Prophet of peace, these wouldst thou bar?
The world’s not new, nor new thy plea.
Tho’ even shouldst thou triumph, see:
Victorious right may wild redress:
No failure like a harsh success.
Yea, ponder well the historic page:
Of all who, fired with noble rage,
Have warred for right without reprieve.

* * * * *

The world is portioned out, believe:
The good have but a patch at best,
The wise their corner, for the rest--
Malice divides with ignorance.

Insight like this may be fatal to a weak man, or added poison to a disappointed one: but when a man well bottomed takes it to his bosom, he is no longer defenceless against his own inner hopes, desires, wishes: he goes armed. Such wisdom does not nullify generous efforts: a Lenin may count his guns and men and still wage revolution: he will not do this the worse for recognizing, as Lenin grimly did, all the vain and foolish people who, along with the Judases, divide place with those who have strong hands and deep brows. Life is stultified by vacuous dreams, dreams of achievement without effort, pleasure without satiety, art without discipline, or a better social order without a moral and metaphysical conversion of the very people who must bring it about. Besides these dreams, the most gritty reality is a tonic. To acknowledge these realities, instead of seeking weak consolations or empty reassurances, is the mark of a mature mind. Melville had penetrated as far as Herzen the psychological problem of revolutionary betterment: but he was almost fifty years “before his time” in stating it. We can understand Melville’s social scepticism today, and we should not, perhaps, remain so long in the trough of our own wave, apathetically waiting for a dictatorship or an earthquake or a war to rouse us and focus our energies once more, had we been able to learn from Melville the necessary cost of our efforts. For every act of the wise and the good is nullified by malice and ignorance, unless the wise and the good learn to reckon these evils among the conditions of their problem. Melville had faced human nature as a whole: he was not blind to its inert or irrational elements; nor could he accept “A Reasonable Constitution” that overlooked them.

What though Reason forged your scheme?
’Twas Reason dreamed the Utopia’s dream:
’Tis dream to think that Reason can
Govern the reasoning creature, man.

Melville’s scepticism did not flinch at even the securest parts of the conceptual universe.

Canst feel elate
While all the depths of Being moan,
Though luminous on every hand,
The breadths of shallow knowledge more expand?
Much as the light-ship keeper pines
Mid shoals immense, where dreary shines
His lamp, we toss beneath the ray
Of Science’s beacon. This to trim
Is now man’s barren office.

But the tentative nature of science’s triumphs, and the disintegration of the great religious unity which had heretofore provided an intelligible framework, still left one possible avenue unexplored. Perhaps salvation was to be found, as André Gide has suggested in his study of Dostoyevsky, in the practice of the arts, such salvation as the great minds of the Renaissance found amid similar disruption: Wren, with his multitudinous buildings that housed an empty ecclesiasticism, Leonardo and Michelangelo with the saints that had lost their ineffable powers and taken on the forms of mighty men and women, Rembrandt with those thousand enigmatic faces, gazing back, with questioning eyes, into eyes that still question. Melville did not, I believe, fully understand this solution or face its possibility: but he saw one side of it, the advance of the mechanical arts, and there, with cold acumen, he beheld no happy sequel: rather the contrary:

... Arts are tools;
But tools, they say, are to the strong:
Is Satan weak? Weak is the wrong?
No blessed augury overrules:
Your arts advance in faith’s decay:
You are but drilling the new Hun
Whose growl even now can some dismay;
Vindictive in his heart of hearts,
He schools him in your mines and marts--
A skilled destroyer.

These lines were written in the time of the supremest Victorian confidence. Herbert Spencer had demonstrated, he thought, by revamping Comte’s generalization, that a military and feudal order, founded upon a demonistic theology, was inevitably going to be replaced by an industrial order, inimical to militarism, and founded upon science and free contract. That the new arts of industrialism had themselves any capacity for mischief was not hinted at by the dominant prophets of the day: Ruskin’s warnings were lonely ones, and he was contemptuously thrust aside as a fanatical aesthete, who understood the stones of Venice, perhaps, but not the steel of Sheffield. In the passage just quoted, Melville went quite as far as Ruskin: industrialism, to him, offered no certain pledge of happiness or welfare: it depended, rather, upon who used these tools, and how.

The ruthless sweeping away of human values, the sacrifice of the worker’s welfare to profits, and of general well-being to a bleak efficiency, and, finally, the sweeping away of all the decencies of life in a bestial internecine warfare, aggravated by all the improvements in the arts: Melville saw all these things, and perceived that a good part of the routine of education, work, and patriotism could be called, not least in the “advanced” countries, a drilling of the Hun. Walter Rathenau, one of the great industrial leaders of the past generation, came to the same conclusion at the end of the World War, and he pictured its consequences: but Melville anticipated him there, as he anticipated the disillusion of the social revolutionists. He saw that unless human values were firmly established, the practice of the arts was as blind and futile as the firing of a revolver into empty air: with power and precision at command, the revolver hits nothing whatever--but in its very aimlessness, it may destroy something precious, as the blind projection of a concrete road by a half-witted road engineer may destroy a row of elms in a New England village. Melville put this thought, it is true, into the mouth of a religious zealot: but like everything else in Clarel, it belonged to his own innermost mood.

Melville, it will be seen, did not in Clarel take refuge in any of the cheap opiates of his time: his scepticisms are as inexorable, as thoroughgoing, as they had been in the most devastating pages of The Confidence Man; but, with all this dubiety, there is a difference in the mood; and though Clarel pictures the thoughts of men unfrocked in faith, and shows them wandering over many arid deserts and picking their way through the broken streets of many ruined towns, something solid, the beginnings of a new faith, kept Melville himself from slipping into hopeless indifference or more hopeless despair. Whether Melville intentionally symbolized his dilemma in the fable I do not know; and in the light of his deliberate subtlety in Moby-Dick one cannot say positively that he did not: but the unconscious significance of Clarel’s love affair is perhaps worth speculating upon; for it affected his attitude and his conclusion.

Clarel fell in love with a Jewish maid, as Melville had fallen in love with ancient Jewish thought. Christianity was at times repugnant to Melville, for the highest virtue had for him necessarily some of the Greek or Hebraic element of power, and the epicene Christ of mediaeval legend did not attract him; nor was he comforted by supernal promises of an after-life. If Melville confesses that the truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, he added that “the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe.” In the period of his own discomposure, the black aphorisms of Solomon, Koheleth, and Jesus-ben-Sirach, and the bitter plaints of Job, were closer to him than anything else in literature. “There is a wisdom that is woe,” Melville had found, “and there is a woe that is madness.” He had come to the first, and he had stood on the brink of madness: looking in the Bible for comfort, Melville had found, in the greatest of the Jewish writers, only a confirmation of his own fears and exasperations. “Oppression maketh a wise man mad.” “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Such sayings deepened his sympathy with Jewish culture; and, in the sense that they carried the same burden as his own, they lessened his load. Ruth, Clarel’s love, dies; and the fulfilment that Clarel had hoped to find there, he must now find in his own bosom, with only the memory of her spirit to comfort him.

6

Why then, with all these virtues of thought, is Clarel necessarily Melville’s most neglected book? The capital difficulty, I think, is inherent in its very conception as a narrative poem: it is impossible to carry through so many pages the quick sympathies and empathies that it is in the nature of verse to give. Wordsworth probably had as much skill in blank verse as any one since Shakespeare, and he was unable to avoid long waste tracts in his lengthy philosophic and biographic poems. Blake and Whitman, with a surer instinct, developed polyphonic cadences for their long poems, and this is the only tolerable alternative, I think, at least in English, to the immeasurable variety of prose itself. Melville’s eight-syllabled lines in Clarel are monotonous, vary the rhyme scheme as he will; they are made even more tedious by the stale poetic airs that accompanied it. Melville’s aloofness and spiritual independence, which cut him off from his own contemporaries, not merely saved him from their errors and superstitions: it also prevented him from profiting by their genuine advances. With the exception of Whitman and Emily Dickinson, scarcely any of Melville’s contemporaries had participated in that great refreshment of poetic language, by the fuller use of the vernacular, by discarding the powdered wig of “poetic diction,” and by the use of direct and simple word order, that had been made possible by Wordsworth’s propaganda and example. In his lesser poems Emerson sinned in this respect almost as much as the poetasters around him; and Poe’s “tarns” and Nycean barks of yore and his seraphim were typical of the exaggerations and clichés that afflicted the American poets of his time.

In the verses of his later years, Melville largely escaped from this fashionable prison; but in Clarel he was too frequently the victim of his uncertain taste. He tags adjectives on to nouns to eke out the line; he uses, all too frequently, words like fane and sward and rue and twain and nigh, and, with unforgivable recurrence, he rhymes elf and self; above all, not relying on his ear for more subtle quantities, he fills out lines with redundant words or phrases--or clips them off. This clumsiness in detail adds to the clumsiness of conception: what might have been vivid prose became dull verse: what might have been good Borrow became bad Rogers. Mid all this poetizing there remains, of course, a little poetry: lines that lift out of the grey pages like a sudden sea gull from the monotonous surface of the ocean: there are even whole passages, in particular the Dirge that comes toward the end, which are veritably moving. But although the materials for intense feeling or vivid imagism are present, they are spoiled in the mixing. All this acute observation of men, things, places, seems to clog Melville’s spirit: when he achieves victory, it is a victory of thought: an idea becomes pregnant and a dozen good lines are born. But the detail over-rides the general impression, as the ingenuity of the Hindu craftsman over-rides the total effect of his wood-carving: the movement is slow: the aim is dispersed. There is a story and a climax in Clarel; but we do not feel them in passage. We miss the poignance of Ruth’s death, by having forgotten her entirely.

It is unfortunate that Melville diverted into the ingenuities of a foreign versification the energies that should have gone into mastery of the theme itself. But matter and manner are always one; and because Melville did not find harmonious form for his intuitions, we are deprived of a good part of them, and those that remain we must pick, like precious shards, from the refuse heap of the poem. He was a true poet; but formal verse was not his medium; and the relentless probity of his mind, the keen reaching into the heart of a dilemma, lacked in these lengthy verses an appropriate vehicle. Melville was wrong when he thought that some of the aroma might have exhaled during the years Clarel remained unpublished: the aroma had never been there.

7

It was a long, weary pilgrimage, this pilgrimage of Melville’s, as Clarel is a long, weary poem; but at the end of it, something crystallized within him, and without blunting his doubts or shutting off his conflict, at last focussed them. Something happened to Melville in Palestine, or during the years between, that was the equivalent of falling in love with a Jewish maiden. Although Clarel returned from his pilgrimage to find himself bereft, the experience of love had given him something: the love that would have redeemed the universe for Captain Ahab and kept him from his deadly contest with the whale, now was a pledge of his own redemption for Melville. What the nature of that experience was one does not know: one can only judge by its final effect; and in the last pages of Clarel the whole weary strife of debate is suddenly brought to a close, at the end of the lover’s grief, in the epilogue with its pledge and hope:

Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned--
Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind;
That like the crocus budding through the snow--
That like a swimmer rising from the deep--
That like a burning secret which doth go
Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep;
Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea,
And prove that death but routs life into victory.

The budding crocus, the rising swimmer, the bursting secret were symbols of a new promise in Melville’s own life: in the Epilogue one sees the later Melville, who had approached, and was slowly finding peace, rather than the unsettled, bitter man who wandered through Palestine, and confronted the “caked depopulated hell” of barren Judah. There was no verbal answer, no creed, no theology, no orthodoxy to comfort him and give a final meaning in exchange for his present soreness and perplexity. God does not answer Job: he overawes and silences and converts him and suddenly showers him with blessings: the relief is as mysterious as the oppression which makes a wise man mad. So with Melville. An animal faith, the dumb belief in all the immediate presentations of life--this animal faith, quickened by love, knit together again. Creeds are, after all, only the suspicious distortions of this dim, plasmal sense that bottoms all of us. When that faith exists, life even in its humblest aspects is neither black nor terrible, however heavy its disappointments; without it, all that the world values is thin, and all that the heart may contemplate is empty. There is no rational justification for this animal faith; for it is part of the nature of man and perhaps of all living things, and it antedates the doubts and difficulties that would disturb it.

Again and again Melville confronted this problem; and much though he admired the order and art they introduced, he could not accept the solutions offered by Judaism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, or historic Christianity. In his preface to a poetic fragment, Rammon, Melville puts the dilemma before a son of Solomon’s old age, immoderately influenced by his father’s despondent philosophy. “Vanity of vanities--such is this life. As to a translated life in some world hereafter--far be that thought. A primary law binds the universe. The worlds are like apples on the tree; in flavour and tint one apple perchance may somewhat differ from another, but all partake of the same sap. One of the worlds we know. And what find we here? Much good, a preponderance of good; that is, good it would be could it be winnowed from the associate evil that taints it. But evil is no accident. Like good it is an irremoveable element. Bale out your individual boat if you can, but the sea remains the sea.”

In his despair, Rammon is attracted to Buddhism by Prince Siddartha’s personality and by the fact that his high rank had not hardened his heart to the lot of the mass of mankind, “nor in any wise intercepted a just view of the immense spectacle of things.” But Rammon is too young to realize, with Melville, the fallacy of Buddha’s very situation: it did not occur to him to conjecture “that the more spiritual, wide-seeing, conscientious and sympathetic the nature, so much the more spiritually isolated, and isolation is the mother of illusion.” Melville was on guard against this error: isolated, he had refused illusion, the last comfort of isolation, and had abandoned all efforts to explain away man’s helplessness and ignorance, and his corporeal extinction: he accepted this condition as a datum. And yet life went on! Far better, this, than a new illusion; for it brought self-respect and a belief in those forms of ideality which are within man’s power to achieve or experience. By skilfully managing his little boat, not by pronouncing metaphysical incantations over the storm, man keeps afloat mid the vast waters that threaten him. The boat may be swamped, perhaps; but there is no other way! Life bottomed all formulas: art fended off catastrophe--if life ebbed or art ceased to be effective, well, one had faced reality and had respected necessity and one could meet the end with ironic resignation: in effect, the most dogmatic and devout could do no more.

At the end of Clarel, Melville found life, not good or bad, malicious or forbearing, true or false. Something more important had happened: he found it livable. In that mood the days that followed the Civil War were spent, quiet, chastened, subdued, temperate days....

8

One may figure Melville’s career as a June evening--the sun glowing in the sky, the birds darting about the trees, chattering, warbling, trilling, intensely active. The sky-gold turns to waves of salmon pink: the pink to lavender: the lavender edges into purple: suddenly dark has come. The cheerful sounds cease. A belated bird or two silently wings to his nest: there is blackness, and the hoarse croak of distant frogs alone breaks the silence. In half an hour the scene changes from the most brilliant activity and ecstasy to utmost passiveness. Bats swoop silently in the air; a chill comes up from the river: darkness is cool as well as silent. Is all over? Not yet. Presently the fireflies make a warm firmament of the fields, and in the pale rising of the moon, the earth itself takes on another glory. There are fireflies and moonlight and the domestic chirp of crickets in the night of Melville’s life, its last quarter century--not silence and unrelieved blackness. After the first collapse of day into night, nature stirs again: there is movement and there is life. A little before the clock tolls the hour of midnight and the day itself passes, a shower of aerolites falls through the sky.... We have just seen the afterglow; and we are now to witness the final brilliance of the night.