“My Dear Hawthorne: This is not a letter, or even a note, but merely a passing word to you said over your garden gate. I thank you for your easy flowing long letter (received yesterday), which flowed through me, and refreshed all my meadows, as the Housatonic—opposite me—does in reality. I am now busy with various things, not incessantly though; but enough to require my frequent tinkering; and this is the height of the haying season, and my nag is dragging home his winter’s dinners all the time. And so, one way and another, I am not a disengaged man, but shall be very soon. Meanwhile, the earliest good chance I get, I shall roll down to you, my good fellow, seeing we—that is, you and I—must hit upon some little bit of vagabondage before autumn comes. Greylock—we must go and vagabondise there. But ere we start, we must dig a deep hole, and bury all Blue Devils, there to abide till the last Day.... Good-bye.”
His X Mark.
And the last letter is a dithyramb of gratitude to Hawthorne for a letter of Hawthorne’s (would that it survived!) in appreciation of Moby-Dick.
“Pittsfield, Monday Afternoon.
“My Dear Hawthorne:
“People think that if a man has undergone any hardship he should have a reward; but for my part, I have done the hardest possible day’s work, and then come to sit down in a corner and eat my supper comfortably—why, then I don’t think I deserve any reward for my hard day’s work—for am I not at peace? Is not my supper good? My peace and my supper are my rewards, my dear Hawthorne. So your joy-giving and exultation-breeding letter is not my reward for my ditcher’s work with that book, but is the good goddess’s bonus over and above what was stipulated for—for not one man in five cycles, who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows, or any one of them. Appreciation! Recognition! Is love appreciated? Why, ever since Adam, who has got to the meaning of this great allegory—the world? Then we pigmies must be content to have our paper allegories but ill comprehended. I say your appreciation is my glorious gratuity. In my proud, humble way,—a shepherd-king,—I was lord of a little vale in the solitary Crimea; but you have now given me the crown of India. But on trying it on my head, I found it fell down on my ears, notwithstanding their asinine length—for it’s only such ears that sustain such crowns.
“Your letter was handed to me last night on the road going to Mr. Morewood’s, and I read it there. Had I been at home, I would have sat down at once and answered it. In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous—catch them while you can. The world goes round, and the other side comes up. So now I can’t write what I felt. But I felt pantheistic then—your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the Gods in old Rome’s Pantheon. It is a strange feeling—no hopelessness is in it, no despair. Content—that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling.
“Whence came you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the God-head is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling. Now, sympathising with the paper, my angel turns over another leaf. You did not care a penny for the book. But, now and then as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled the book—and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough to praise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul. Once you hugged the ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in the mouth, and heard the rushing of the demon,—the familiar,—and recognised the sound; for you have heard it in your own solitudes.
“My dear Hawthorne, the atmospheric scepticisms steal over me now, and make me doubtful of my sanity in writing you thus. But, believe me, I am not mad, most noble Festus! But truth is ever incoherent, and when the big hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stunning. Farewell. Don’t write me a word about the book. That would be robbing me of my miserable delight. I am heartily sorry I ever wrote anything about you—it was paltry. Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby-Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish;—I have heard of Krakens.
“This is a long letter, but you are not at all bound to answer it. Possibly if you do answer it, and direct it to Herman Melville, you will missend it—for the very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it to the paper. Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! it is a long stage, and no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with you for a passenger, I am content and can be happy. I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.
“What a pity that, for your plain, bluff letter, you should get such gibberish! Mention me to Mrs. Hawthorne and to the children, and so, good-bye to you, with my blessing.
“Herman.
“P. S. I can’t stop yet. If the world was entirely made up of Magians, I’ll tell you what I should do. I should have a paper-mill established at one end of the house, and so have an extra riband for foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I should write a thousand—a million—a billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you. The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the bigger? A foolish question—they are one.
“H.
“P. P. S. Don’t think that by writing me a letter, you shall always be bored with an immediate reply to it—and so keep both of us delving over a writing-desk eternally. No such thing! I sha’n’t always answer your letters and you may do just as you please.”
Hawthorne had written Melville a “plain, bluff letter,” and in reply was to be told, with “infinite fraternity,” that “the god-head is broken up like the bread at the Supper” and that he was one of the pieces. Melville had dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne, and Hawthorne made some sort of acknowledgment of the tribute. Melville, shrewdly suspected him, however, of caring “not a penny” for the book, but in archangelical charity praising less the “imperfect body” than the “pervading thought” which “now and then” he understood.
Moby-Dick was an allegory, of course—but withal an allegory of a solidity and substance that must have appeared to Hawthorne little short of grossly shocking. Hawthorne had been praised from his “airy and charming insubstantiality.” And of himself he wrote, with engaging candour: “Whether from lack of power, or an unconquerable reserve, the Author’s touches have often an effect of tameness.” Hawthorne’s “reserve” is, of course, all myth. Both Hawthorne and Melville, though each a recluse in life, overflow to the reader. And as Brownell says of Hawthorne: “He does not tell very much, but apparently he tells everything.” But to Hawthorne, Melville’s overflowing, like a spring freshet, or a tidal wave, must have been little less than appalling. Hawthorne’s was eminently a neat, fastidious style, as free from any eccentricity or excess as from any particular pungency or colour. Melville’s was extravagant, capricious, vigorous, and “unliterary”: the energy of his undisciplined genius is its most significant quality. After all, was it possible for Hawthorne to feel any deep sympathy for Melville’s passionate enthusiasms, for Melville’s catholic toleration, for Melville’s quenchless curiosity, for Melville’s varied laughter, for Melville’s spiritual daring? It is true that Hawthorne found Story’s “Cleopatra”—inspired, it might appear, by a fancy of the young Victoria in discreet negligée—“a terrible, dangerous woman, quite enough for the moment, but very like to spring upon you like a tigress.” He never visited George Eliot because there was another Mrs. Lewes. He was much troubled by the nude in art. He pronounced Margaret Fuller’s “in many respects,” a “defective and evil nature,” and “Providence was kind in putting her and her clownish husband and their child on board that fated ship.” It is true that he wrote a graceful if not very genial introductory essay—once mistaken for a marvel quite eclipsing “Elia”—to relieve the dark tone of The Scarlet Letter. And it is also true that he accepted the adoration of his wife with the utmost gravity and appreciation. Mrs. Hawthorne, in one of her letters to her mother, by a transition in praise of Hawthorne’s eyes—“They give, but receive not”—comments at some length, on her husband’s “mighty heart,” that “opens the bosom of men.” “So Mr. Melville,” she says, “generally silent and incommunicative, pours out the rich floods of his mind and experience to him, so sure of appreciation, so sure of a large and generous interpretation.”
What interpretation Hawthorne gave to Moby-Dick has not transpired. Hawthorne mentions Moby-Dick once in his published works. In the Wonder Book he says: “On the hither side of Pittsfield sits Herman Melville, shaping out the gigantic conception of his white whale, while the gigantic shape of Greylock looms upon him from his study window.” Only one available Hawthorne-Melville document is still unprinted: the “Agatha” letter, mentioned by Mr. Julian Hawthorne. But the “Agatha” letter says nothing of Moby-Dick; and though of impressive bulk, its biographical interest is too slight to merit its publication.
Born in hell-fire, and baptised in an unspeakable name, Moby-Dick is, with The Scarlet Letter, among the few very notable literary achievements of American literature. There has been published no criticism of Melville more beautiful or more profound than the essay of E. L. Grant Watson on Moby-Dick (London Mercury, December, 1920). It is Mr. Watson’s contention in this essay, that the Pequod, with her monomaniac captain and all her crew, is representative of Melville’s own genius, and in the particular sense that each character is deliberately symbolic of a complete and separate element. Because of the prodigal richness of material in Moby-Dick, the breadth and vitality and solid substance of the setting of the allegory, the high quality of Moby-Dick as a psychological synthesis has very generally been lost sight of. Like Bunyan, or Swift, Melville has enforced his moral by giving an independent and ideal verisimilitude to its innocent and unconscious exponents. The self-sustaining vitality of Melville’s symbols has been magnificently vouched for by Mr. Masefield in his vision of the final resurrection. And the superb irony—whether unconscious or intended—of Moby-Dick’s “towing the ship our Lord was in, with all the sweet apostles aboard of her,” would surely have delighted Melville. Pilgrim’s Progress is undoubtedly a tract; but, as Brownell observes, if it had been only a tract, it would never have achieved universal canonisation. Both Pilgrim’s Progress and Moby-Dick are works of art in themselves, each leaning lightly—though of course to all the more purpose—on its moral. Most persons probably read Gulliver for the story, and miss the satire. In the same way, a casual reader of Moby-Dick may skip the more transcendental passages and classify it as a book of adventure. It is indeed a book of adventure, but upon the highest plane of spiritual daring. Ahab is, of course, the atheistical captain of the tormented soul; and his crew, so Melville says, is “chiefly made of mongrel renegades, and cast-aways and cannibals.” And Ahab is “morally enfeebled, also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or rightmindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollitry of indifference or recklessness of Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity of Flash!” But Ahab is Captain; and his madness is of such a quality that the white whale and all that is there symbolised, needs must render its consummation, or its extinction. On the waste of the Pacific, ship after ship passes the Pequod, some well laden, others bearing awful tidings: yet all are sane. The Pequod alone, against contrary winds, sails on into that amazing calm, that extraordinary mildness, in which she is destroyed by Moby-Dick. “There is a wisdom that is woe, and there is a woe that is madness.” And in Moby-Dick, the woe and the wisdom are mingled in the history of a soul’s adventure.
Though Moby-Dick is not only an allegory, but an allegory designed to teach woeful wisdom, nowhere in literature, perhaps, can one find such uncompromising despair so genially and painlessly administered. Indeed, the despair of Moby-Dick is as popularly missed as is the vitriolic bitterness of Gulliver. There is an abundance of humour in Moby-Dick, of course: and there is mirth in much of the laughter. In Moby-Dick, it would appear, Melville has made pessimism a gay science. “Learn to laugh, my young friends,” Nietzsche counsels, “if you are at all determined to remain pessimists.” If there are tears, he smiles gallantly as he brushes them aside. “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life,” Melville says, “when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discovers, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I regard this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great white whale its object.” And for the most part, he does. But he declares, withal, that “the truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. All is vanity. All.” Moby-Dick was built upon a foundation of this wisdom, and this woe; and so keenly did Melville feel the poignancy of this woe, so isolated was he in his surrender to this wisdom, that this wisdom and this woe, which he had learned from Solomon and from Christ, he felt to be of that quality which in our cowardice we call madness.