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tains-in the grouping of clouds-in the twinkling of half-hidden brooks-in the gleaming of silver rivers-in the repose of sequestered lakes—in the star-mirroring depths of lonely wells. He perceives it in the songs of birds-in the harp of Aeolus-in the sighing of the night-wind-in the repining voice of the forest-in the surf that complains to the shore-in the fresh breath of the woods-in the scent of the violet-in the voluptuous perfume of the hyacinthin the suggestive odor that comes to him, at eventide, from fardistant, undiscovered islands, over dim oceans, illimitable and unexplored. He owns it in all noble thoughts-in all unworldly motives -in all holy impulses-in all chivalrous, generous, and self-sacrificing deeds. He feels it in the beauty of woman-in the grace of her step in the lustre of her eye-in the melody of her voice-in her soft laughter-in her sigh-in the harmony of the rustling of her robes. He deeply feels it in her winning endearments—in her burning enthusiasms-in her gentle charities-in her meek and devotional endurances-but above all-ah, far above all-he kneels to it-he worships it in the faith, in the purity, in the strength, in the altogether divine majesty-of her love.1 * 1848

9. Aeolus was the Greek god of the winds; his harp, played by the breezes, became a romantic symbol of spontaneous song.

1850

1. Poe then concludes the "lecture" with a brief "recitation," one of the cavalier ballads of William Motherwell, a Scottish romantic then in vogue.

HERMAN MELVILLE

(1819-1891)

Melville's parents were both of substantial New York families, but his father's bankruptcy, soon followed by his death, left the mother in financial difficulties when the boy was only twelve. She then settled near Albany, where Melville for a time attended the local academy. Following a brief career as a clerk in his brother's store and in a bank, he went to sea at the age of nineteen. His experiences as a merchant sailor on the St. Lawrence and ashore in the slums of Liverpool, later recalled in Redburn, awakened the abhorrence, ex

pressed throughout his fiction, of the darkness of man's deeds, and the evil seemingly inherent in nature itself. After this first brief seafaring interlude, he taught school and began to write sporadically.

In 1841, he shipped once more before the mast, aboard a Fair Haven whaler, Haven whaler, the Acushnet, bound for the Pacific. Altogether, it was nearly four years before he returned from the South Seas. After eighteen months he deserted the whaler, in company with a close friend, at Nukuhiva, in the Marquesas Islands. In

Typee, these adventures are embellished by fictional license, but the author and "Toby" Green certainly spent at least a month among the handsome Marquesan Taipis, whose free and idyllic island life was flawed by their regrettable habit of eating their enemies. A passing whaler provided an "escape" to Tahiti. Melville soon shipped on another whaler, Charles and Henry of Nantucket, which carried him finally to the Hawaiian Islands. In Honolulu he enlisted for naval service, aboard the U.S.S. United States, and was discharged fourteen months later at Boston.

The youth had had a compelling personal experience, and being a natural writer, he at once set to work producing a fiction based in part on his own adventures, employing literary materials which he was the first American writer to exploit. Typee (London and New York, 1846) was the first modern novel of South Seas adventure, as the later Moby-Dick was the first literary classic of whaling. Indeed, his significant novels almost all reflect his experiences prior to his discharge from the Navy. His impulsive literary energies drove him steadily for eleven years, during which he was the author of ten major volumes; after 1857 he published no fiction, and his life fell into seeming confusion, producing an enigma endlessly intriguing to his critics.

In the beginning he was almost embarrassed by success. Typee was at once recognized for the merits which have made it a classic, but its author was notoriously identified as the character who had lived and eaten with

cannibals, and loved the dusky Fayaway-an uncomfortable position for a young New Yorker just married to the daughter of a Boston chief justice. Omoo (1847), somewhat inferior to Typee, was also a successful novel of Pacific adventures. Mardi (1849) began to puzzle a public impatient of symbolic enigmas; but Redburn (1849) and WhiteJacket (1850) were novels of exciting adventure, although the first, as has been suggested above, devotes much of its energy to sociological satire, while the second emphasizes the floggings and other cruelties and degradations then imposed upon enlisted men in naval service and seamen generally.

fury

In 1851, Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick, was published. A robust and realistic novel of adventure, drawing upon the author's fascination with the whale and whaling, it achieves a compelling symbolism in the character of Captain Ahab, whose monomaniacal against the whale, or the evil it represents to him, sends him to his death. This book is now seen as one of a trilogy, including the earlier Mardi and Pierre (1852), but neither of the others is wholly comprehensible or successful. Together, however, they represent the struggle of man against his destiny at various levels of experience.

In 1850, Melville had established a residence at Arrowhead, a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. There, completing MobyDick, with Hawthorne nearby, a stimulating new friend, he was at the height of his career-see his perceptive "Hawthorne," below. Yet he published but one more

distinguished volume of fiction— The Piazza Tales (1856), a collection of such smaller masterpieces as "Benito Cereno,” “Bartleby the Scrivener," and "The Encantadas." Pierre was denounced on moral grounds, and because there was marked confusion of narrative elements and symbolism in that strange novel of incest. Israel Potter (1855) and The Confidence-Man (1857) are now of some interest but were not then successful; they marked his last effort to make a career of literature. Readers in general did not understand the symbolic significance of his works, his sales were unsatisfactory, and when the plates of his volumes were destroyed in a publisher's fire, the books were not reprinted. Four volumes of poems, not then well received, have continued to be better appreciated in recent years.

After some hard and bitter years he settled down humbly in 1866 as a customs inspector in New York, at the foot of Gansevoort Street, which had been named for his mother's distinguished family. Before doing so, however, he launched himself on a pursuit of certainty, a tour to the Holy Land, that inspired Clarel. In this uneven poem there are profound spiritual discoveries and descriptive sketches or lyrics of power substantiating the lyric vision of his novels. His versification anticipated the twentieth century techniques. The Civil War involved him deeply in a human cause and produced a sensitive poetry in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). Besides Clarel (1867), two much smaller volumes of poetry were John Marr and Other Sailors

(1888) and Timoleon (1891).

In Billy Budd, printed below, the novelist recaptured his highest powers during the very last vears of his life. He worked on the novelette from November, 1888, until April, 1891, and the manuscript was not fully prepared for press when he died the following September 28 (see the first note to Billy Budd). The story is related to the author's earliest adventures at sea; its theme has obvious connection with that of Moby-Dick; yet the essential spirit of the work cancels the infuriated rebellion of Captain Ahab. In its reconciliation of the temporal with the eternal there is a sense of luminous peace and atonement.

Melville's greatness is something no commentator has quite explained. It shines above the stylistic awkwardness of many passages, the blurred outlines that result from the confusion of autobiography with invented action, the tendency of the author to lose control of his own symbols, or to set the metaphysical thunderbolt side by side with factual discussion or commonplace realism. Having survived the neglect of his contemporaries and the elaborate attentions of recent critics, he emerges secure in the power and influence of Typee, Moby-Dick, The Piazza Tales, Billy Budd, and a number of poems.

The Complete Writings of Herman Melville, The Northwestern-Newbury Edition, is in progress at Northwestern University under the general editorship of Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and George Thomas Tanselle. The Works of Herman Melville, 16 vols., Lond., 1922-1924, has been standard. A group of scholars has promoted good editions of Collected Poems (H. P. Vincent),

1945; Piazza Tales (E. S. Oliver), 1948; Pierre (H. S. Murray), 1949; Moby-Dick (L. S. Mansfield and H. P. Vincent), 1952; Clarel (W. E. Bezanson), 1960; and The Confidence-Man (E. S. Foster), 1954. A definitive text of Moby-Dick is Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition (Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker), 1967. A good edition. of Moby-Dick is also edited by W. Thorp, 1947. Melville's journals appeared as Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent (Eleanor Melville Metcalf), 1948: and Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant *** (H. C. Horsford), 1955.

R. M. Weaver, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, 1921, was the first full-length biography. Later notable biographies and studies are John Freeman, Herman Melville, 1926: Lewis

Mumford, Herman Melville, 1929, revised, 1963; Charles R. Anderson, Melville in the South Seas, 1939; William Braswell, Melville's Religious Thought, 1943; W. E. Sedgwick, Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind, 1944: H. P. Vincent, The Trying Out of Moby Dick, 1949; Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography, 1951; Jay Leyda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1951; Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle. 1953; E. H. Rosenberry, Melville and the Comic Spirit, 1955; James Baird, Ishmael, 1956; Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale *** 1956: and Newton Arvin, Herman Melville, 1950, 1957. The Letters ***, 1960, is a collection by Merrell R. Davis and W. H. Gilman.

From Hawthorne and His Mosses1

By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont

*** Where Hawthorne is known, he seems to be deemed a pleasant writer, with a pleasant style-a sequestered, harmless man, from whom any deep and weighty thing would hardly be anticipated; a man who means no meanings. But there is no man, in whom humor and love, like mountain peaks, soar to such a rapt height, as to receive the irradiations of the upper skies; there is no man in whom humor and love are developed in that high form called genius-no such man can exist without also possessing, as the indispensable complement of these, a great, deep intellect, which drops down into the universe like a plum

1. Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse, a collection of stories and sketches, was published in 1846, nearly four years before Melville was entranced by reading it in July of 1850. The curious signature which he affixed to the essay signifies a certain comic hesitation; he knew Hawthorne only slightly, except through his writings and that reticent personage had recently made arrangements to become his neighbor. A mutual friend, Evart A. Duyckinck, published the essay in his periodical, The Literary World, in two issues, August 17 and August 24, of 1850.

We may only surmise what was the effect of their association upon the two geniuses at the highest intensity of their powers, when Moby Dick was put into final draft and Hawthorne created The House of the Seven Gables during two years while Melville occupied Arrowhead Farm near Pittsfield, Massa

chusetts, and Hawthorne lived nearby in a farmhouse near Lenox.

Melville did not attempt a systematic criticism of Mosses. He did something better. He went beyond the substance of Hawthorne's works into the psychological sources of their creative vision. Among his insights which interests criticism today is the concept of the work of art as a thing in itself, which once created becomes an objective reality; its universality results from a "spirit of beauty *** ubiquitously possessing men of genius." He finds that the polarities of humor and love charge certain writings "with ponderous import." He, for the first time, identified in Hawthorne "the power of blackness." He thus foresaw the critical approach which would finally give us the meaning of his own writings. He wrote, "it is that blackness in Hawthorne✶✶✶ that so fixes and fascinates me."

met. Or, love and humor are only the eyes, through which such an intellect views this world. The great beauty in such a mind is but the product of its strength. What, to all readers, can be more charming than the piece entitled "Monsieur du Miroir"; and to a reader at all capable of fully fathoming it, what, at the same time, can possess more mystical depth of meaning?-Yes, there he sits, and looks at me-this "shape of mystery," this "identical Monsieur du Miroir."-"Methinks I should tremble now, were his wizard power, of gliding through all impediments in search of me, to place him suddenly before my eyes."

How profound, nay, appalling, is the moral evolved by the "Earth's Holocaust," where-beginning with the hollow follies and affectations of the world-all vanities and empty theories and forms are, one after another, and by an admirably graduated, growing comprehensiveness, thrown into the allegorical fire, till, at length, nothing is left but the all-engendering heart of man; which remaining still unconsumed, the great conflagration is naught.

Of a piece with this is "The Intelligence Office," a wondrous symbolizing of the secret workings in men's souls. There are other sketches, still more charged with ponderous import.

"The Christmas Banquet" and "The Bosom Serpent" would be fine subjects for a curious and elaborate analysis, touching the conjectural parts of the mind that produced them. For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne's soul, the other side-like the dark half of the physical sphereis shrouded in a blackness, ten times black. But this darkness but gives more effect to the ever-moving dawn, that forever advances through it, and circumnavigates his world. Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom-this, I cannot altogether tell. Certain it is, however, that this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world, without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance. At all events, perhaps no writer has ever wielded this terrific thought with greater terror than this same harmless Hawthorne. Still more: this black conceit pervades him, through and through. You may be witched by his sunlight, transported by the bright gildings in the skies he builds over you, but there is the blackness of darkness beyond; and even his bright gildings but fringe and play upon the edges of thunder

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