From the New Monthly Magazine. AMERICAN AUTHORSHIP, NO. IV. HERMAN MELVILLE. - THE Muses, it was once alleged by Christopher North, have but scantly patronized seafaring verse; they have neglected ship-building, and deserted the dockyards though in Homer's days they kept a private yacht, of which he was captain. "But their attempts to reestablish anything like a club, these two thousand years or so, have miserably failed; and they have never quite recovered their nerves since the loss of poor Falconer, and their disappointment at the ingratitude shown to Dibdin." And Sir Kit adds, that though they do indeed now and then talk of the "deep blue sea," and occasionally, perhaps, skim over it like sea-plovers, yet they avoid the quarter-deck and all its discipline, and decline the dedication of the cat-o'-nine-tails, in spite of their number. romances. -some the tuition of a Herman Melville. This graphic narrator assures us, and there needs no additional witness to make the assurance doubly sure, that his sea adventures have often served, when spun as a yarn, not only to relieve the weariness of many a night-watch, but to excite the warmest sympathies of his shipmates. Not that we vouch for the fact of his having experienced the adventures in literal truth, or even of being the pet of the fo'castle as yarn-spinner extraordinary. But we do recognize in him and in his narratives (the earlier ones, at least) a "capital" fund of even untold "interest," and so richly veined a nugget of the ben trovato as to "take the shine out of" many a golden vero. Readers there are, who, having been enchanted by a perusal of " Typee" and "Omoo," have turned again and rent the author, when they heard a surmise, or an assertion, that Others there are, and we are of them, whose his tales were more or less imagination. enjoyment of the history was little affected by a suspicion of the kind during perusal (which few can evade), or an affirmation of it afterwards. "And if a little more romantic than truth may warrant, it will be no harm," is Miles Coverdale's morality, when projecting Miles a a chronicle of life at Blithedale. raison. Life in the Marquesas Islands! - how attractive the theme in capable hands! And here it was treated by a man "out of the ordinary," who had contrived, as Tennyson sings, By them, nevertheless, must have been inspired in fitful and irregular afflatus of the prose-poetry of Herman Melville's seaOcean breezes blow from his tales of Atlantic and Pacific cruises. Instead of landsman's gray goose quill, he seems to have plucked a quill from skimming curlew, or to have snatched it, a fearful Joy, from hovering albatross, if not from the wings of the wind itself. The superstition of life on the waves has no abler interpreter, unequal and undisciplined as he is that superstition almost inevitably engendered among men who live, as it has been said, "under a solemn To burst all links of habit-there to wander far sense of eternal danger, one inch only of plank (often worm-eaten) between themselves and the grave; and who see forever one wilderness of waters." His intimacy with the sights and sounds of that wilderness almost entitles him to the reversion of the mystic "blue cloak" of Keats' submarine graybeard, in which every ocean form Was woven with a black distinctness; storm, away, On from island unto island at the gateways of the day. Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, knots of Paradise Breadths of tropic shade, and palms in cluster, Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy-fruited tree Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea. outlandish things," exclaims Tommo himself, "The Marquesas! what strange visions of "does the very name spirit up! Lovely houris- cannibal banquets groves of cocoaA landsman, somewhere observes Mr. Tuck-nuts - coral reefs tattooed chiefs, and bamerman, can have no conception of the fondness boo temples; sunny valleys planted with a ship may inspire, before he listens, on a bread-fruit trees- carved canoes dancing on moonlight night, amid the lonely sea, to the the flashing blue waters - savage woodlands details of her build and workings, unfolded by guarded by horrible idols-heathenish rites a complacent tar. Moonlight and midseas are and human sacrifices." And then the zest much, and a complacent tar is something; with which Tommo and Toby, having debut we "calculate" a landsman can get some serted the ship, plunge into the midst of conception of the true-blue enthusiasm in these oddly-assorted charms-cutting themquestion, and even become slightly inoculated selves a path through cane-brakes - living with it in his own terra firma person, under day by day on a stinted table-spoonful of “a hash of soaked bread and bits of tobacco" shivering the livelong night under drenching * Thomas de Quincey. "Endymion," Book III. LIVING AGE. VOL. II. 31 CCCCLXXXIII. 66 rain traversing a fearful series of dark | ship's carpenter, "Chips," ironically styled chasms, separated by sharp-crested perpen-"Beauty" on strict lucus à non lucendo prindicular ridges leaping from precipice above ciples as ugly in temper as in visage. to palm-tree below and then their entrance Bungs, the cooper, a man after a bar-keeper's into the Typee valley, and introduction to own heart; who, when he felt, as he said, King Mehevi, and initiation into Typee man-just about right," was characterized by a ners, and willy-nilly experiences of Typee free lurch in his gait, a queer way of hitchhospitality. Memorable is the portrait-gal- ing up his waistbands, and looking unneceslery of the natives; Mehevi, towering with sarily steady at you when speaking. Bembo, royal dignity above his faithful commons; the harpooner, a dark, moody savage-none Marnoo, that all-influential Polynesian Apol- of your effeminate barbarians, but a shaggylo, whose tattooing was the best specimen of browed, glaring-eyed, crisp-haired fellow. the fine arts in that region, and whose elo-under whose swart, tattooed skin the muscles quence wielded at will that fierce anthropoph- worked like steel rods. Rope Yarn, or Ropey, agic demos; Marheyo, paternal and warm-the poor distraught land-lubber—a forlorn, hearted old savage, a time-stricken giant stunted, hook-visaged creature, erst a journey. and his wife, Timor, genuine busybody, most man baker in Holborn, with a soft, and undernotable and exacting of housewives, but no done heart, whom a kind word made a fool termagant or shrew for all that; and their ad- of. And, best of all, Doctor Long Ghost, a mirable son, Kory-Kory his face tattooed six-feet tower of bones, who quotes Virgil, with such a host of pictured birds and fishes, talks of Hobbes of Malmesbury, and repeats that he resembled a pictorial museum of natural poetry by the canto, especially Hudibras ;' history, or an illuminated copy of Goldsmith's and who sings mellow old songs, in a voice so "Animated Nature" - and whose devotion round and racy, the real juice of sound; and to the stranger no time could wither nor cus-who has seen the world from so many angles, tom stale. And poor Fayaway, olive-cheeked the acute of civilization and the obtuse of nymph, with sweet blue eyes of unfathoma- savagedom; and who is as inventive as he is ble depth, a child of nature with easy, un- incurable in the matter of practical jokes studied graces, breathing from infancy an all effervescent with animal spirits and tricksy atmosphere of perpetual summer whom, good-humor. Of the Tahiti folks, Captain deserted by the roving Tommo, we are led to Bob is an amusing personage, a corpulent compare (to his prejudice) with Frederika giant, of three-alderman power in gormandizforsaken by Goethe- -an episode in the ma-ing feats, and so are Po-po and his family, ny-sided baron's life which we have not yet come to regard so tolerantly as Mr. Carlyle. "Omoo," the Rover, keeps up the spirit of "Typee" in a new form. Nothing can be livelier than the sketches of ship and ship's company. "Brave Little Jule, plump Little Jule," a very witch at sailing, despite her crazy rigging and rotten bulwarks- blow high, blow low, always ready for the breeze, and making you forget her patched sails and blistered hull when she was dashing the waves from her prow, and prancing, and pawing the sea-flying before the wind-rolling now and then, to be sure, but in very playfulness - with spars erect, looking right up into the wind's eye, the pride of her crew; albeit they had their misgivings that this playful craft, like some vivacious old mortal all at once sinking into a decline, might, some dark night, spring a leak, and carry them all to the bottom. The captain, or "Miss Guy" essentially a cockney, and no more meant For does not even so unexceptionable a pillar for the sea than a hairdresser. The bluff of orthodoxy as Sir Archibald Alison express mate, John Jermin, with his squinting eye, doubt as to the promise of Missions in relation and rakishly-twisted nose, and gray-ringleted to any but European ethnology? affirming, inbullet head, and generally pugnacious looks, deed, that had Christianity been adapted to but with a heart as big as a bullock-obman in his rude and primeval state, it would streperous in his cups, and always for having have been revealed at an earlier period, and a fight, but loved as a brother by the very men he flogged, for his irresistibly good-natured way of knocking them down. The and the irreverently-ridiculed court of Queen Pomare. It is uncomfortable to be assured in the preface, that, " in every statement connected with missionary operations, a strict adherence to facts has, of course, been scrupulously observed"—and the satirist's rather flippant air in treating this subject makes his protestation not unnecessary, that "nothing but an earnest desire for truth and good has led him to touch upon it at all." Nevertheless, there is mournful emphasis in these revelations of mickonaree progress, and too much reason to accept the tenor of his remarks as correct, and to bewail the inapplicability to modern missionaries in general of Wordsworth's lines — Rich conquest waits them; the tempestuous sea * *See "Alison History of Europe" (New Series), vol. i., p. 74. would have appeared in the age of Moses, not the author gifted with a scrutinizing gaze, in that of Cæsar; a dogmatic assertion, by and a habit of taking notes as well as "prentthe way, highly characteristic of the some- ing" them, which ensures his readers against what peremptory baronet, and not very har- absolute common-place. It is true, he more monious, either in letter or spirit, with the than once plunges into episodic extravaganzas broad text on which world-wide missionary - such as the gambling-house frenzy of enterprise is founded, and for which Sir Harry Bolton but these are, in effect, the Archibald must surely have an ethnic gloss of dullest of all his moods; and tend to produce, his own private interpretation: Hoguerres what surely they are inspired by, blue devils. μαθητεύσατε πάντα τα έθνη. Nor is he over chary of introducing the But to Mr. Melville. And in a new and repulsive-notwithstanding his disclaimer, not improved aspect. Exit Omoo; enter"Such is the fastidiousness of some readers, Mardi. And the cry is, Heu! quantum mutatus ab illo Alas, how changed from him, This vein of Ercles, and this soul of whim! changed enough to threaten an exeunt omnes of his quondam admirers. The first part of "Mardi" is worthy of its antecedents; but too soon we are hurried whither we would not, and subjected to the caprices, velut agri somnia, of one who, of malice aforethought, Delphinum silvis appingit, fluctibus aprumthe last clause signifying that he bores us with his " sea of troubles," and provokes us to take arns against, and (if possible) by opposing, end them. Yet do some prefer his new shade of marine blue, and exult in this his " sea-change into something rich and strange." And the author of "Nile Notes" defines "Mardi," as a whole, to be unrhymed poetry, rhythmical and measured the swell of its sentences having a low, lapping cadence, like the dip of the sun-stilled Pacific waves and sometimes the grave music of Bacon's Essays! Thou wert right, O Howadji, to add, Who but an American could have written them?" Alas, Cis-Atlantic criticism compared them to Foote's " What, no soap? So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber" with the wedding concomitants of the Picninnies and Great Panjandrum and gunpowder-heeled terpsichorics-Foote being, inoreover, preferred to Melville, on the score of superiority in sense, diversion, and brevity. Nevertheless, subsequent productions have proved the author of " Mardi" to plume himself on his craze, and love to have it so. And what will he do in the end thereof? 66 In tone and taste "Redburn" was an improvement upon "Mardi," but was as deficient as the latter was overfraught with romance and adventure. Whether fiction or fact, this narrative of the first voyage of Wellingborough Redburn,* a New York merchant's son, as sailor-boy in a merchant-vessel, is even prosy, bald, and eventless; and would be dull beyond redemption, as a story, were not The hero himself is a sort of amalgam of Perceval Keene and Peter Simple- the keenness strangely antedating the simplicity. that, many times, they must lose the most striking incidents in a narrative like mine;" for not only some, but most readers are too fastidious to enjoy such scenes as that of the starving, dying mother and children in a Liverpool cellar, and that of the dead mariner, from whose lips darted out, when the light touched them, "threads of greenish fire, like a forked tongue," till the cadaverous face was "crawled over by a swarm of worm-like flames" - a hideous picture, as deserving of a letter of remonstrance on æsthetic grounds, as Mr. Dickens' spontaneous combustion case (Krook) on physical. Apart from these exceptions, the experiences of Redburn during his "first voyage" are singularly free from excitement, and even incident. We have one or two "marine views" happily done, though not in the artist's very happiest style. The picture of a wreck may be referred to that of a dismantled, water-logged schooner, that had been drifting about for weeks; her bulwarks all but gone- - the bare stanchions, or posts, left standing here and there, splitting in two the waves which broke clear over the deck- her open main-hatchway yawning into view every time she rolled in the trough of the sea, and submerged again, with a rushing, gurgling sound of many waters; the relic of a jacket nailed atop of the broken mainmast, for a signal; and, sad, stern sight - most strange and most unnatural "three dark, green, grassy objects," lashed, and leaning over sideways against the taffrailslowly swaying with every roll, but otherwise motionless! There is a spirited sketch, too, of the sailor-boy's first ascent to "loose the main-skysail". not daring to look down, but keeping his eyes glued to the shrouds panting and breathing hard before he is halfway up-reaching the "Jacob's ladder," and at last, to his own amazement, finding himself hanging on the skysail yard, holding on might and main to the mast, and curling his feet round the rigging, as if they were another pair of hands; thence gazing at length, mute and awe-stricken, on the dark midnight sea beneath, which looks like a great, black gulf, hemmed in all round by * "Redburn," vol. ii., ch. 27. about the heart -- 66 beetling black cliffs - the ship below, seem- his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse; ing like a long narrow plank in the water and going about corrupting and searing every the boy above, seeming in utter loneliness to heart that beat near him." There is Jack tread the swart night clouds, and every Blunt, the "Irish Cockney," with his round second expecting to find himself falling- face like a walrus, and his stumpy figure like falling-falling, as he used to feel when the a porpoise standing on end-full of dreams nightmare was on him. Redburn managed and marine romance singing songs about his first ascent deftly, and describes it ad- susceptible mermaids - and holding fast a mirably. We, indeed, never have been sed- comfortable creed that all sailors are saved, entary dia ruxTos on a main sky-sail; but having plenty of squalls here below, but fair are pretty sure, from these presents, that Mr. weather aloft. There is Larry, the whaleMelville has. Equally sure, in our own case, man, 66 or blubber-boiler," ever extolling the are we that, had we attained that giddy emi- delights of the free and easy Indian Ocean, nence, not only should we have expected to find and deprecating civilized life, or, as he styles ourself falling- falling-falling, but would it, "snivelization," which has " spiled him have found ourself, or been found, fallen; which complete, when he might have been a great Redburn was not. Gallant boy-clear- man in Madagasky." There is Dutch Max, headed, light-hearted, fast-handed, nimble- stolid and seemingly respectable, but a sysfooted!- he deserved to reach the top of the tematic bi-(if not poly-)gamist. And there tree, and, having reached, to enjoy the sweet is the black cook, serious, metaphysical, peril, like blossom that hangs on the bough; and given to talk about original sin". and that in time he did come to enjoy it we sitting all Sunday morning over his boiling find from his record of the wild delirium there pots, and reading grease-spotted good books; is about it the fine rushing of the blood yet tempted to use some bad language occathe glad thrilling and sionally, when the sea dashes into his stove, throbbing of the whole system, to find your-of cold, wet, stormy mornings. And, to conself tossed up at every pitch into the clouds clude, there is the steward, a dandy mulatto, of a stormy sky, and hovering like a judg-yclept Lavender; formerly a barber in Westment angel between heaven and earth; both Broadway, and still redolent of Cologne water hands free, with one foot in the rigging, and and relics of his stock-in-trade there a senone somewhere behind you in the air. timental darky, fond of reading "Charlotte The crew, again, are sketched by a true Temple," and carrying a lock of frizzled hair draughtsman-though one misses the breadth in his waistcoat pocket, which he volunteers and finish of his corresponding descriptions in to show you, with his handkerchief to his "Omoo." There is Captain Riga, all soft- eyes. Mr. Melville is perfectly au fait in sawder ashore, all vinegar and mustard at sea nautical characterization of this kind, and as -a gay Lothario of all inexperienced, sea- thoroughly vapid when essaying revelations going youths, from the capital or the country of English aristocratic life, and rhapsodies who condoles and sympathizes with them about Italian organ-boys, whose broken Engin dock, but whom they will not know again lish resembles a mixture of "the potent wine when he gets out of sight of land, and mounts of Oporto with some delicious syrup," and his cast-off clothes, and adjusts his character to who discourse transcendentally and ravishthe shabbiness of his coat, and holds the per-ingly about their mission, and impel the auplexed lads a little better than his boots, and thor to affirm that a Jew's-harp hath power will no more think of addressing them than of invoking wooden Donald, the figure-head at the ship's bows. There is Jackson meagre, consumptive, overbearing bully squinting, broken-nosed, rheumatic the weakest body and strongest will on board "one glance of whose squinting eye was as good as a knock-down, for it was the most subtle, deep, infernal-looking eye ever lodged in a human head," and must have once belonged to a wolf, or starved tiger - no oculist could ever turn out a glass eye half so cold, and snaky, and deadly". fit symbol of a man who, "though he could not read a word, was spontaneously an atheist," and who, during the long night-watches, would enter into arguments to prove that there was nothing to be believed, or loved, or worth living for, but everything to be hated, in the wide world in short, "a Cain afloat; branded on a to awaken all the fairies in our soul, and make them dance there, "as on a moonlit sward of violets ;" and that there is no humblest thing with music in it, not a fife, not a negrofiddle, that is not to be reverenced* as much as the grandest organ that ever rolled its flood-tide of harmony down a cathedral nave! What will Mr. Melville think of our taste, when we own to a delight in the cathedral organ, but also to an incurable irreverence towards street-organ, vagrant fiddle, and perambulatory fife? against which we have a habit of shutting the window, and retiring to a back room. That we are moved by their concord of sweet sounds, we allow; but it is to a wish that they would "move on," and sometimes to a mental invocation of the police. Thomas Browne in "Religio Medici," ii., 9. Whence, possibly, Mr. Melville will infer, on | seized with spasms, acute and convulsive Shakspearian authority, that we are meet only enough to excite bewilderment in all befor Treasons, stratagems, and spoils ; and will demand, quoad our critical taste, Let no such man be trusted. - the other holders. When he pleases, Mr. Melville can be so lucid, straightforward, hearty, and unaffected, and displays so unmistakable a shrewdness, and satirical sense of the ridiculous, that it is hard to suppose that he can Next came "White Jacket; or, the World have indited the rhodomontade to which we in a Man-of-War." The hero's soubriquet is allude. Surely the man is a Doppelganger · derived from his-shirt, or "white duck a dual number incarnate (singular though he frock," his only wrap-rascal -a garment be, in and out of all conscience): -surely he patched with old socks and old trouser-legs, is two single gentlemen rolled into one, but bedarned and bequilted till stiff as King retaining their respective idiosyncrasies - the James' cotton-stuffed and dagger-proof doub- one sensible, sagacious, observant, graphic, let provided, moreover, with a great variety and producing admirable matter of pockets, pantries, clothes-presses, and maundering, drivelling, subject to paroxysms, cupboards, and "several unseen recesses cramps, and total collapse, and penning exceedbehind the arras,' insomuch, exclaims the ing many pages of unaccountable" bosh." proud, glad owner," that my jacket, like an So that in tackling every new chapter, one is old castle, was full of winding stairs, and disposed to question it beforehand, "Under mysterious closets, crypts, and cabinets; and which king, Bezonian?" the sane or the inlike a confidential writing-desk, abounded in sane; the constitutional and legitimate, or the snug little out-of-the-way lairs and hiding- absolute and usurping? Writing of Leviaplaces, for the storage of valuables." The than, he exclaims, "Unconsciously my chiadventures of the adventurous proprietor of rography expands into placard capitals. Give this encyclopaedic toga, this cheap magazine me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius craof a coat, are detailed with that eager vivaci- ter for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms!” ty, and sometimes that unlicensed extrava- O that his friends had obeyed that summons! gance, which are characteristic of the scribe. They might have saved society from a huge Some of the sea-pictures are worthy of his dose of hyperbolical slang, maudlin sentimenthighest mood- when a fine imagination over- alism, and tragi-comic bubble and squeak. rides and represses the chaos of a wanton fancy. Give him to describe a storm on the wide waters—the gallant ship laboring for life and against hope the gigantic masts snapping almost under the strain of the top-sails the ship's bell dismally tolling, and this at murk midnight the rampant billows curling their crests in triumph-the gale flattening the mariners against the rigging as they toil upwards, while a hurricane of slanting sleet and hail pelts them in savage wrath; and he will thrill us quiet landsmen who dwell at home at ease. His Yankeeisms are plentiful as blackberries. "I am tormented," quoth he, “with an everlasting itch for things remote." Remote, too frequently, from good taste, good manners, and good sense. We need not pause at such expressions as " looking a sort of diabolically funny;" "beefsteaks done rare ;" "a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into eternity;" "bidding adieu to circumspect life, to exist only in a delirious throb." But why wax fast and furious in a thousand such paragraphs as these? —" In landlessness alone resides the highest truth, indefinite as the Almighty Take For so successful a trader in "marine stores" as Mr. Melville, "The Whale" seemed heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee a speculation every way big with promise. grimly, demi-god! Up from the spray of thy From such a master of his harpoon might ocean-perishing-straight up, leaps thy have been expected a prodigious hit. There apotheosis!" "Thou [scil. Spirit of Equalwas about blubber and spermaceti something ity] great God! who didst not refuse to the unctuously suggestive, with him for whale swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic man. And his three volumes entitled "The pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly Whale" undoubtedly contain much vigorous hammered leaves of finest gold the stumped description, much wild power, many striking and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou details. But the effect is distressingly marred who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the throughout by an extravagant treatment of pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a warthe subject. The style is maniacal-mad as horse; who didst thunder him higher than a a March haremowing, gibbering, scream- throne!"-"If such a furious trope may ing, like an incurable Bedlamite, reckless of stand, his [Captain Ahab's] special lunacy keeper or strait-waistcoat. Now it vaults on stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and stilts, and performs Bombastes Furioso with turned all its concentrated cannon upon its. contortions of figure, and straining strides, own mad mark then it was, that and swashbuckler fustian, far beyond Pistol in his torn body and gashed soul bled into one that Ancient's happiest mood. Now it is another; and so interfusing made him mad." |