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And may- be we, these days, have, too, our own reward—(for there are yet some, in all lands, worthy to be so encouraged.) Though not for us the joy of entering at the last the conquer’d city— not ours the chance ever to see with our own eyes the peerless power and splendid eclat7 of the demo cratic prin- ciple, arriv’d at meridian, Slling the world with effulgence and majesty far beyond those of past history’s kings, or all dynastic sway— there is yet, to whoever is eligible among us, the prophetic vision, the joy of being toss’d in the brave turmoil of these times— the promulgation and the path, obedient, lowly reverent to the voice, the gesture of the god, or holy ghost, which others see not, hear not— with the proud consciousness that amid what ever clouds, seductions, or heart- wearying postponements, we have never deserted, never despair’d, never abandon’d the faith.

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1871, 1892

7. Brilliant success (French).

HERM AN MELVILLE 1819–1891

Herman Melville was born in New York City in 1819, the third of eight children of Allan Melvill, a dry- goods merchant, and Maria Gansevoort, daughter of American Revolutionary hero General Peter Gansevoort. Melville’s father incurred massive debt before dying suddenly and in delirium in 1832, and his wife and chil- dren, then living in Albany, became dependent on the Gansevoorts. Taken out of school when he was twelve, Melville (the e was added in the 1830s) held a succes- sion of jobs: at a bank, at his brother Gansevoort’s fur- cap store in Albany, at his uncle Thomas Melvill’s farm in PittsSeld, Massachusetts, and at a country school near PittsSeld. In 1839 he voyaged to and from Liverpool as a cabin boy, but uncer- tainties about employment continued on his return. At age twenty- one, in January 1841, he sailed on a whaler for the South Seas. After over a year at sea, Melville and a shipmate, Toby Greene, jumped ship at the Marquesas Islands, approximately one thousand miles northeast of Tahiti, and for a few weeks in the summer of 1842 the two lived among the supposedly cannibalistic islanders of Tapai Valley. Picked up by an Australian whaler less than a month after he deserted, Melville signed on as an ordinary seaman with the naval frigate United States, cruised the PaciSc, and arrived at Boston in October 1844.

Melville was twenty- Sve; he later said that from that year he dated the beginning of his life. He apparently did not look for a job after his discharge from the navy; he stayed with his brothers in New York City and began writing Typee, which drew on his experiences in the Marquesas. The book, published in 1846 in En gland and the United States, made a great sensation, capturing the imagination of readers with its combination of anthropological novelty and adventure. Shortly after its publication, Melville began writing a second novel, Omoo, which also drew on his experiences in the South Sea islands. Published in 1847, it was another best-seller. Three days

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after his twenty- eighth birthday and in the ^ush of his success, Melville married Elizabeth Knapp Shaw on August 4, 1847. Her father, Lemuel Shaw, the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, had been a school friend of Alan Melvill’s. After the marriage Shaw provided several advances against his daughter’s inheritance, allowing Melville to establish himself in Manhattan with his bride, his younger brother Allan, Allan’s wife, his mother, his four sisters, and his new manuscript. But instead of supplying his publisher with yet another commercially promising tale of a Polyne- sian adventure, Melville attempted to elevate the travel- narrative genre to the level of spiritual and po liti cal allegory. In this third novel, Mardi, which was published in April 1849, Melville presented travel (as he would in Moby- Dick) as a philosophical journey. It is his longest novel and remains a difScult text for most readers. When Srst published, it sold poorly and received generally unfavorable reviews. After the birth of his Srst son, Malcolm, in 1849, Melville, seeking to regain his reputa- tion, rapidly wrote the more accessible Redburn (1849), which drew on his travels to Liverpool, and White- Jacket (1850), based on his experiences on the man- of- war United States. Both novels were received enthusiastically in En gland and America.

In a buoyant mood, Melville began his whaling novel, Moby- Dick. Like Mardi, Moby- Dick was an enormously ambitious undertaking. There is compelling textual and biographical evidence that Melville wrote the book in stages, radically altering his conception of the novel from a relatively straightforward whaling narrative to something that aspired to be a “Gospels in this century” (as he termed the novel in an 1851 letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne). While composing the novel, Melville came under the spell of Shakespeare, Milton, Emerson, and numerous other writers. Mel- ville was also inspired by his new literary friendship with Hawthorne, whom he had met at an August 1850 picnic in PittsSeld, Massachusetts. Immediately after their meeting, he read Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) and wrote a belated review in which he expressed his thoughts about the challenges facing American writers. Convinced that the day had come when American writers could rival Shake- speare, Melville, in praising Hawthorne’s achievements, also honored that which infused the book he was writing: dark “Shakespearean” truths about human nature and the universe that, “in this world of lies,” can be told only “covertly” and “by snatches.”

As he continued to work on Moby- Dick and struggle with his Snances, Melville late in 1850 moved his family to a farm near PittsSeld, where he was able to keep up his friendship with Hawthorne, who was living in nearby Lenox. In May 1851, Mel- ville borrowed $2,050 from an old acquaintance, and as he anticipated doing Snal work on the galleys of Moby- Dick, he painfully deSned his literary- economic dilemma to Hawthorne: “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,— it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a Snal hash, and all my books are botches.” When Moby- Dick was published in late 1851, a reviewer for the London Britannia declared it “a most extraordinary work”; and a reviewer in the New York Tribune proclaimed that it was “the best production which has yet come from that seething brain, and . . . it gives us a higher opinion of the author’s originality and power than even the favorite and fragrant Srst- fruits of his genius, the never- to- be- forgotten Typee.” Still, there were a number of negative reviews from critics unhappy with the novel’s length, philosophical abstractness, and mixing of genres, and the novel quickly vanished from the literary scene without bringing Melville the critical admiration that he had expected. (For more on Moby- Dick, see p. 1426.)

But Melville was not totally discouraged. Shortly after publishing Moby- Dick, he began Pierre, thinking he could express the agonies of the growth of a human psyche in a domestic novel focusing on the romantic, ethical, and intellectual perplexities attending Pierre Glendinning’s coming into manhood. As he worked on this novel, reviews of Moby- Dick continued to appear. Disturbed by the mixed and sometimes hostile responses (the January 1852 Southern Quarterly Review, for instance, said a

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“writ de lunatic” was justiSed against Melville and his characters), Melville folded into his novel- in- progress a satirical account of the U.S. literary scene in which the timid and genteel succeed and the boldly adventurous fail. With its depictions of clerical hypocrisy, family dishonesty, and seemingly incestuous sexuality, Melville’s wildly inventive and parodic novel was greeted— by those who bothered to take notice of it— as the work of a maniac, and it further hurt his chances for a commercially successful literary career. The novel, published in 1852, was widely denounced as immoral, and one Pierre- inspired account of the author was captioned: “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY.” In a panic, family and friends attempted to get Melville a gov- ernment job, but nothing came of their efforts.

Melville stayed on at the PittsSeld farm with his expanding house hold (his sec- ond son, Stanwix, was born in 1851, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Frances, were born in 1853 and 1855) and began a new career as a writer of short stories and novellas for two major American monthlies, Harper’s and Putnam’s. Paid at modest rates for Sction that was published anonymously, Melville, in works like “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” and “Benito Cereno,” took on such vexing issues of antebellum culture as racial and gender ineq- uities, the social transformations caused by emerging industrial capitalism, and slav- ery. Some critics regard these works as among Melville’s most socially progressive writings; others argue that Melville’s choice of topical subjects should not obscure his metaphysical interest in the situation of individuals who exist, as the narrator of “Bartleby” puts it, “alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of wreck in the mid Atlantic.” In these enigmatic Sctions, Melville seems more intent on exploring and engaging the ideological discourses of his time than on arguing for any par tic u lar reforms. For instance, although there may be no shrewder investigation of white rac- ism and the evils of slavery than “Benito Cereno” (1855), which partly entraps readers in the ste reo typical racist assumptions of the sea captain Amasa Delano, the novella is not an obvious attack on slavery as such, and it was ignored by the abolitionist press.

In 1855 Melville published Israel Potter, a tale of the American Revolution which had been serialized in Putnam’s; and in 1856 he collected his stories in a volume titled The Piazza Tales. One year later he published The Con"dence- Man, an indict- ment of the selSshness and duplicities of his contemporary world in the form of a metaphysical satire, allegory, and low comedy set on a Mississippi steamship. The novel went almost unread in the United States; in En gland the reviews were admiring but sales were disappointing. Deeply depressed by his struggles as a writer, Melville took an extended trip to Eu rope and the Levant, from October 1856 to May 1857, with funds supplied by his father- in- law, who hoped that the trip would lighten Mel- ville’s mood. But in En gland Melville confessed to Hawthorne (at the time U.S. con- sul at Liverpool) that he did not expect to enjoy his travels because “the spirit of adventure” had gone out of him. Upon his return he told a Gansevoort relative that he was “not going to write any more at the present.” Instead, he lectured for small fees in eastern and midwestern states on “Statues in Rome” (1857), “The South Sea” (1858), and “Travel” (1859).

After the death of Judge Shaw in 1861, the Melvilles inherited funds that eased their economic pressures, and by October 1863 they were living in Manhattan. In 1864 Melville and his brother Allan made a trip to the Virginia battleSelds looking for a Gansevoort cousin and (as Allan put it) hoping to “have opportunities to see that they may describe.” Some of those opportunities proved fruitful for Battle- Pieces (1866), Melville’s volume of Civil War poems, which was barely noticed by reviewers. Highly allusive, tightly formal, and marked by a seemingly Olympian detachment, Battle- Pieces is now regarded by many critics, along with Whitman’s Drum- Taps (1865), as among the best volumes of poetry to have come out of the war. In the same year that he published Battle- Pieces, Melville at last obtained a po liti cal job as a deputy

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inspector of customs in New York City. When he had time to write, he worked mostly on his poetry.

These were dreary years for Melville. His job was dull and paid poorly, he had little ability to manage Snances, and he was prone to anger and depression. His wife’s half- brothers even considered him a danger to their sister, and by early 1867 Elizabeth may have begun to believe that he was insane. Her loyalty to him and her horror of gossip, however, kept her from acting on her minister’s suggestion that she seek refuge with her family in Boston. Adding to the misery of the period, Malcolm killed himself late in 1867 at the age of eigh teen. In the aftermath of the suicide, Mel- ville began working on a poem about a diverse group of American and Eu ro pe an pilgrims— and tourists— who talked their way through some of the same Palestinian scenes he had visited in 1857. This poem, Clarel, grew to eigh teen thousand lines and appeared in 1876, paid for by a bequest from Elizabeth’s uncle Peter Gansevoort. Addressing the con^ict between religious faith and Darwinian skepticism that obsessed En glish contemporaries such as Matthew Arnold, the poem found few readers during the nineteenth century and remains one of Melville’s understudied works.

A series of legacies came to the Melvilles in their last years, allowing Melville to retire from the custom house at the beginning of 1886. During the late 1880s Mel- ville and his wife drew closer together, in part out of their grief at the death of their second son, Stanwix, who was found dead in a San Francisco hotel in 1886. Around that time Melville once again began to devote himself to writing and publishing. He put together two volumes of poems, which he published with his own funds. In the mid- 1880s a poem he was working on about a British sailor led him to compose a Sctional narrative that was left nearly Snished at Melville’s death as Billy Budd, Sailor, his Snal study of the tense and ambiguous con^icts between the individual and various forms of authority.

Famously known during the 1840s as the “man who lived among the cannibals,” Melville was neglected in the post– Civil War literary world. Shortly before his death in 1891, however, a revival of interest began, especially in En gland. The true Mel- ville revival, however, took off with essays published on the occasion of Melville’s centennial in 1919 and was given added momentum by the posthumous publication of Billy Budd in 1924. In one of the most curious phenomena of American literary history, the neglected Melville suddenly came to be regarded in the rareSed com- pany of Shakespeare as a writer who, as Melville said of Shakespeare and Haw- thorne, had mastered “the great Art of Telling the Truth” through the dazzling plentitude and sly indirections of his language.

Hawthorne and His Mosses

By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont1

A papered chamber in a Sne old farm- house, a mile from any other dwell- ing, and dipped to the eaves in fo liage— surrounded by mountains, old woods, and Indian ponds,— this, surely, is the place to write of Hawthorne. Some charm is in the northern air, for love and duty seem both impelling to the task. A man of a deep and noble nature has seized me in this seclusion.

1. Adopting the persona of a Virginian, perhaps to suggest the national appeal of Hawthorne, Melville wrote this review- essay of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) shortly after meeting Hawthorne at a picnic in the Mas sa chu-

setts Berkshire Mountains on August 5, 1850. The review appeared anonymously in the August  17 and  25, 1850, issues of The Literary World, the source of the text that follows. Obvious printer’s errors have been corrected.

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