1424 HERMAN MELVILLE

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 eclat 7 of the democratic prin-
ciple, arriv'd at meridian, filling 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 whatever clouds,
seductions, or heart-wearying postponements, we have never deserted, never
despair'd, never abandon'd the faith.

1871, 1892
7. Drillianl success. (French).

HERMAN MELVILLE
1819-1891

H erman 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 Mclvill's farm in Pittslleld, Massachusetts, and at a country school
near Pittslleld. 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 \'ear at sea, Melville and
a shipmate, Toby Greene, jumped ship at the l\larquesus lsl~nds, 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 Pacillc, and
arrived at Boston in October 1844.
Melville was twenty-llve; 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 T)•pee, which drew on
his experiences in the Marquesas. The book, published in 1846 in Englund and the
United States, made a great sensation, capturing the imagination of readers with its
combination of anthropological no\'City and adventure. Shortly after its publication,
Melville began writing a second novel, Onaoo, which also drew on his experiences
in the South Sea islands. Published in 1847, it was another best seller. Three days
 HERMAN MELVILLE 1425

after his twenty-eighth birthday and in the flush of his success, Melville married
Elizabeth Knapp Shaw on August 4, 1847. Her father, Lemuel Shaw, the chief justice
of the l\'fassachusetts Supreme Court, had been a school friend of Alan Meh•ill'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 talc of a Polyne-
sian adventure, Melville attempted to elevate the travel-narrative genre to the level
of spiritual and political allegory. In this third novel, Mardi, which was published in
April 1849, Melville presented travel (as he would in Mob)··Dick) as a philosophical
journey. It is his longest novel and remains a difficult text for most readers. When
first published, it sold poorly and received generally unfavorable reviews. After the
birth of his first son, Malcolm, in 1849, Melville, seeking to regain his reputation,
rapidly wrote the more accessible Redbum (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 England and America.
In a buoyant mood, Melville began his whaling novel, 1\-foby-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 relath·ely 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 Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Immediately after their
meeting, he read Hawthorne's iUossesfrom an Old Mause (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, honored what he believed
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 finances, Melville
late in 1850 moved his family to a farm near Pittsfield, 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 final
work on the galleys of Moby-Dick, he painfully defined 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 final hash, and all my
books are botches." When Moby-Dick was published in late 1851, a reviewer for the
Londo" 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 und fragrant first-fruits of his genius, the never-to-he·
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 l\lelville the critical
admiration that he had expected. (For more on Mob)··Dick, see p. 1440.)
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 ps)·che
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 Soutltem Quarterl)' Review, for instance, said a
"writ de lunatic" was justified against l\'lelville and his characters), Melville folded
1426 HERMAN MELVILLE

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 maniuc, 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: "HER!\IAN
MELVILLE CRAZY." In a panic, family and friends attempted to get Melville a gm·-
ernment job, but nothing came of their efforts.
Melville stayed on at the Pittsfield farm with his expanding household (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 ns a writer of short stories and
novellas for two major American monthlies, Harper's and Putnam's. Paid at modest
rates for fiction 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 slll\•-
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
"Bartlcby" puts it, "alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of wreck in the mid
Atlantic." In these enigmatic fictions, Melville seems more intent on exploring und
engaging the ideological discourses of his time than on arguing for any particular
reforms. For instance, although there may be no shrewder investigation of white rue-
ism and the evils of slavery than "Benito Cereno" ( 1855), which partly entraps renders
in the stereotypical 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 Confidence-Mmz, an indict-
ment of the selfishness 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 England the reviews were admiring
hut sales were disappointing. Deeply depressed by his struggles as a writer, Melville
took an extended trip to Europe and the Levant, from October 1856 to May 185i,
with funds supplied by his father-in-law, who hoped that the trip would lighten Mel-
ville's mood. But in England Mel\·ille confessed to Hawthorne (at the time U.S. con-
sul at Liverpool) that he did not expect to enjoy his tra\•els because "the spirit of
adventure" had gone out of him. Upon his return he told a Ganse\'Oort relative that he
was "not going to write any more at the present." Instead, he lectured for small fees in
eastern and midwestern stntes on "Statues in Rome" (185i), "The South Sea" (1858),
and "Travel" (1859).
After the death of Judge Shaw in 1861, the Melvilles inherited funds that cased
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 battlefields 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-Tnps
(1865), as among the best volumes of poetry to have come out of the war. In the same
year that he published Hnttle-Pieces, Melville at lust obtained a political job liS 11 dep-
 HAWTHORNE AND HIS MOSSES 1427

uty 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 puid poorly, he hud
little ability to manage finances, and he was prone to anger and depression. His
wife's half-brothers even considered him a dunger to their sister, and by early 1867
Elizabeth may have begun to believe thut 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 eighteen. In the aftermath of the suicide, Mel-
ville began working on u poem about a diverse group of American and European
pilgrims-and tourists-who talked their way through some of the same Palestinian
scenes he had visited in 1857. This poem, Clarel, grew to eighteen thousund lines and
appeared in 1876, paid for by a bequest from Elizabeth's uncle Peter Gansevoort.
Addressing the conflict between religious faith and Darwinian skepticism that obsessed
English 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 I heir last years, allowing Melville to
retire from the customhouse at the beginning of 1886. During the late 1880s Mel-
\'ille 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
fictional narrative that was left nearly finished at Melville's death as Billy Budd,
Sailor, his final study of the tense and ambiguous conflicts between the individual
and various forms of authority.
Famously known during the 1840s as the "mun 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 begun, especially in England. 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 rarefied com-
pany of Shakespeare as a writer who, us 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

B)' a Virgilzian Spending July in Vennmzt 1
A papered chamber in a fine old farm-house-a mile from any other dwell-
ing, and dipped to the eaves in foliage-surrounded by mountains, old
woods, and Indian ponds,-this, surely, is the place to write of Hawthorne.
Some charm is in this northern air, for love and duty seem both impelling

I. Adopting th<· persona of a Virginian, perhaps
to suggest the national app<"al of Hawthorn<",
:\lt'h·illt' wrote this re,·it•W·l'..a)' uf Hawthorne's
.\losses from an Old .\lanse ( 1846) short I)' after
mt'eting Hawthorne at a picnic in the !\lassachu·
sells Berkshire l\luuntains un August 5, 1850.
The rc\·iew first appeared anonymously in the
,'\lew lark Lilemry World on t\ugust li and 25,
IR50. Thl' text is taken frnm the Northwestern·
:-J..wberry t'dition of 1he Writings uf Herman Mel·
villl', Tlae PiD::::a Tales and 01/aer l'rose Pieces,
IIB9-IR60 (198i).