“The death of Herman Melville,” wrote Arthur Stedman, “came as a surprise to the public at large, chiefly because it revealed the fact that such a man had lived so long.” The New York Times missed the news of Melville’s death (on September 28, 1891) and published a few days later an editorial beginning:

“There has died and been buried in this city, during the current week, at an advanced age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the generation now in the vigour of life, that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him, and this was of but three or four lines.”

In 1885, Robert Buchanan published in the London Academy a pasquinade containing the following lines:

In a footnote, Buchanan added:

“I sought everywhere for this Triton, who is still living somewhere in New York. No one seemed to know anything of the one great writer fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman on that continent.”

If this man, who had in mid-career been hailed at home and abroad as one of the glories of our literature, died “forgotten and ignored,” it was, after all, in accordance with his own desires. Adventurous life and action was the stuff out of which his reputation had been made. But in the middle of his life, he turned his back upon the world, and in his recoil from life absorbed himself in metaphysics. He avoided all unnecessary associations and absorbed in his own thoughts he lived in sedulous isolation. He resisted all efforts to draw him out of retirement—though such efforts were very few indeed. Arthur Stedman tells us: “It is generally admitted that had Melville been willing to join freely in the literary movements of New York, his name would have remained before the public and a larger sale of his works would have been insured. But more and more, as he grew older, he avoided every action on his part and on the part of his family that might look in this direction, even declining to assist in founding the Authors Club in 1882.” With an aggressive indifference he looked back in Clarel to

When Titus Munson Coan was a student at Williams College, prompted by a youthful curiosity to hunt out celebrities, he called upon Melville at Arrowhead. In an undated letter to his mother he thus recounted the experience: “I have made my first literary pilgrimage—a call upon Herman Melville, the renowned author of Typee, &c. He lives in a spacious farm-house about two miles from Pittsfield, a weary walk through the dust. But it was well repaid. I introduced myself as a Hawaiian-American and soon found myself in full tide of talk—or rather of monologue. But he would not repeat the experiences of which I had been reading with rapture in his books. In vain I sought to hear of Typee and those Paradise islands, but he preferred to pour forth his philosophy and his theories of life. The shade of Aristotle arose like a cold mist between myself and Fayaway. We have quite enough of Greek philosophy at Williams College, and I confess I was disappointed in this trend of the talk. But what a talk it was! Melville is transformed from a Marquesan to a gypsy student, the gypsy element still remaining strong in him. And this contradiction gives him the air of one who has suffered from opposition, both literary and social. With his liberal views he is apparently considered by the good people of Pittsfield as little better than a cannibal or a ‘beach-comber.’ His attitude seemed to me something like that of an Ishmael; but perhaps I judged hastily. I managed to draw him out very freely on everything but the Marquesas Islands, and when I left him he was in full tide of discourse on all things sacred and profane. But he seems to put away the objective side of life and to shut himself up in this cold North as a cloistered thinker.”

An article appearing in the New York Times, under the initials O. G. H., a week after Melville’s death, said of him:

“He had shot his arrow and made his mark, and was satisfied. With considerable knowledge of the world, he had preferred to see it from a distance.... I asked the loan of some of his books which in early life had given me pleasure and was surprised when he said that he didn’t own a single copy of them.... I had before noticed that though eloquent in discussing general literature he was dumb when the subject of his own writings was broached.”

In her sketch of her husband’s life, Mrs. Melville says: “In February, 1855, he had his first attack of severe rheumatism—and in the following June an attack of sciatica. Our neighbour in Pittsfield, Dr. O. W. Holmes, attended and prescribed for him. A severe attack of what he called crick in the back laid him up at his mother’s in Gansevoort in March, 1858—and he never regained his former vigour and strength.” In 1863, so runs the account of J. E. A. Smith, while Melville was in process of moving from Arrowhead, “he had occasion for some household articles he left behind, and, with a friend, started in a rude wagon to procure them. He was driving at a moderate pace over a perfectly smooth and level road, when a sudden start of the horse threw both occupants from the wagon; probably on account of an imperfectly secured seat. Mr. Melville fell with his back in a hollow of the frozen road, and was very severely injured. Being conveyed to his home by Col. George S. Willis, near whose farm on Williams Street the accident happened, he suffered painfully for many weeks. This prolonged agony and the confinement and interruption of work which it entailed, affected him strangely. He had been before on mountain excursions a driver daring almost to the point of recklessness.... After this accident he not only abandoned the rides of which he had been so fond, but for a time shrank from entering a carriage. It was long before the shock which his system had received was overcome; and it is doubtful whether it ever was completely.” Ill health certainly contributed more to Melville’s retirement from letters than any of his critics—Mr. Mather excepted—have ever even remotely suggested.

During the last half of his life, Melville twice journeyed far from home. In her journal Mrs. Melville says: “In October, 1856, his health being impaired by too close application, he again sailed for London. He went up the Mediterranean to Constantinople and the Holy Land. For much of his observation and reflection in that interesting quarter see his poem of Clarel. Sailed for home on the steamer City of Manchester May 6, 1857. In May, 1860, he made a voyage to San Francisco, sailing from Boston on the 30th of May with his brother Thomas Melville who commanded the Meteor, a fast sailing clipper in the China trade—and returning in November, he being the only passenger. He reached San Francisco Oct. 12th—returned in the Carter Oct. 20 to Panama—crossed the Isthmus & sailed for New York on the North Star. This voyage to San Francisco has been incorrectly given in many of the papers of the day.”

Of this trip to the Holy Land there survive, beside Clarel and Hawthorne’s accounts of the meeting en route, a long and closely written journal that Melville kept during the trip, and twenty-one shorter poems printed in Timoleon under the caption “Fruit of Travel Long Ago.” Typical of these shorter poems is

The journal was surely never written with a view to publication. It is a staccato jotting down of impressions, chiefly interesting (as is Dr. Johnson’s French journal) as another evidence of Melville’s scope of curiosity and keenness of observation. A typical entry is that for Saturday, December 13,—Melville’s first day in Constantinople:

“Up early; went out; saw cemeteries where they dumped garbage. Sawing wood over a tomb. Forest of cemeteries. Intricacies of the streets. Started alone for Constantinople and after a terrible long walk found myself back where I started. Just like getting lost in a wood. No plan to streets. Pocket compass. Perfect labyrinth. Narrow. Close, shut in. If one could but get up aloft, it would be easy to see one’s way out. If you could get up into a tree. Soar out of the maze. But no. No names to the streets no more than to natural alleys among the groves. No numbers, no anything. Breakfasted at 10 A. M. Took guide ($1.25 per day) and started for tour. Took Cargua for Seraglio. Holy ground. Crossed some extensive grounds and gardens. Fine buildings of the Saracenic style. Saw the Mosque of St. Sophia. Went in. Rascally priests demanding ‘baksheesh.’ Fleeced me out of ½ dollar; following me round, selling the fallen mosaics. Ascended a kind of hose way leading up, round and round. Came into a gallery fifty feet above the floor. Superb interior. Precious marbles. Prophyry & Verd antique. Immense magnitude of the building. Names of the prophets in great letters. Roman Catholic air to the whole. To the hippodrome, near which stands the six towered mosque of Sultan Achmed; soaring up with its snowy white spires into the pure blue sky. Like light-houses. Nothing finer. In the hippodrome saw the obelisk with Roman inscription on the base. Also a broken monument of bronze, representing three twisted serpents erect upon their tails. Heads broken off. Also a square monument of masoned blocks. Leaning over and frittered away,—like an old chimney stack. A Greek inscription shows it to be of the time of Theodoric. Sculpture about the base of the obelisk, representing Constantine & wife and sons, &c. Then saw the ‘Burnt Column.’ Black and grimy enough & hooped about with iron. Stands soaring up from among a bundle of old wooden stakes. A more striking fire mount than that of London. Then to the cistern of 1001 columns. You see a rounded knoll covered with close herbage. Then a kind of broken cellar-way you go down, and find yourself on a wooden, rickety platform, looking down into a grove of marble pillars, fading away into the darkness. A palatial sort of Tartarus. Two tiers of pillars, one standing on the other; lower tier half buried. Here and there a little light percolates through from breaks in the keys of the arches; where bits of green struggle down. Used to be a reservoir. Now full of boys twisting silk. Great hubbub. Flit about like imps. Whirr of the spinning Jenns. In going down, (as into a ship’s hold) and wandering about, have to beware the innumerable skeins of silk. Terrible place to be robbed or murdered in. At whatever place you look, you see lines of pillars, like trees in an orchard arranged in the quincunx style.—Came out. Overhead looks like a mere shabby common, or worn out sheep pasture.—To the bazaar. A wilderness of traffic. Furniture, arms, silks, confectionery, shoes, saddles,—everything. (Cario) Covered overhead with stone arches, with wide openings. Immense crowds. Georgians, Armenians, Greeks, Jews & Turks are the merchants. Magnificent embroidered silk & gilt sabres & caparisons for horses. You lose yourself & are bewildered and confounded with the labyrinth, the din, the barbaric confusion of the whole.—Went to Watch Tower within a kind of arsenal (Immense arsenal) the tower of vast girth & height in the Saracenic style—a column. From the top, my God, what a view! Surpassing everything. The Propontis, the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, the domes, the minarets, the bridges, the men-of-war, the cypresses.—Indescribable. Went to the Pigeon Mosque. In its court, the pigeons covered the pavement as thick as in the West they fly in hosts. A man feeding them. Some perched upon the roof of the colonnades & upon the fountain in the middle & on the cypresses. Took off my shoes and went in. Pigeons inside, flying round in the dome, in & out the lofty windows. Went to Mosque of Sultan Suleiman. The third one in point of size and splendour. The Mosque is a sort of marble mosque of which the minarets (four or six) are the stakes. In fact when inside it struck me that the idea of this kind of edifice was borrowed from the tent. Though it would make a noble ball room. Off shoes and went in. This custom more sensible than taking off hat. Muddy shoes; but never muddy head. Floor covered with mats & on them beautiful rugs of great size & square. Fine light coming through the side slits below the dome. Blind dome. Many Turks at prayer; lowering head to the floor towards a kind of altar. Charity going on. In a gallery saw lot of portmanteaux, chests & bags; as in a R. R. baggage car. Put there for safe-keeping by men who leave home, or afraid of robbers and taxation. ‘Lay not up your treasures where moth and rust do corrupt’ &c. Fountains (a row of them) outside along the side of the mosque for bathing the feet and hands of worshippers before going in. Natural rock.—Instead of going in in stockings (as I did) the Turks wear overshoes and doff them outside the mosque. The tent-like form of the Mosque broken up & dumbfounded with infinite number of arches, trellises, small domes, colonnades, &c, &c, &c. Went down to the Golden Horn. Crossed bridge of pontoons. Stood in the middle and not a cloud in the sky. Deep blue and clear. Delightful elastic atmosphere, although December. A kind of English June cooled and tempered sherbet-like with an American October; the serenity & beauty of summer without the heat.—Came home through the vast suburbs of Galatea, &c. Great crowds of all nations—money changers coins of all nations circulate—placards in four or five languages: (Turkish, French, Greek, Armenian) Lottery advertisements of boats the same. Sultan’s ship in colours—no atmosphere like this for flags. You feel you are among the nations. Great curse that of Babel; not being able to talk to a fellow being, &c.—Have to tend to your pockets. My guide went with his hands to his.—The horrible grimy tragic air of the Streets. (Ruffians of Galatea) The rotten & wicked looking houses. So gloomy & grimy seem as if a suicide hung from every rafter within.—No open spaces—no squares or parks. You suffocate for room.—You pass close together. The cafés of the Turks. Dingy holes, faded splendour, moth eaten. On both sides rude seats and divans where the old musty Turks sit smoking like conjurers. Saw in certain kiosks (pavilions) the crowns of the late Sultan. You look through gilt gratings & between heavy curtains of lace, at the sparkling things. Near the Mosque of Sultan Suleiman saw the cemetery of his family—big as that of a small village, all his wives and children and servants. All gilt and carved. The women’s tombs carved with heads (women no souls). The Sultan Suleiman’s tomb & that of his three brothers in a kiosk. Gilded like mantel ornaments.”

Clarel was, in 1876, printed at Melville’s expense. More accurately, its printing was made possible by his uncle, Hon. Peter Gansevoort, who, as Melville says in the dedication, “in a personal interview provided for the publication of this poem, known to him by report, as existing in manuscript.”

Not the least impressive thing about Clarel is its length: it extends to 571 pages. Mr. Mather states: “Of those who have actually perused the four books (of verse) and Clarel, I am presumably the only survivor.” Mr. Mather is mistaken: there are two. But since, because of the excessive length of Clarel and the excessive scarcity of John Marr and Timoleon (both privately printed in an edition of only twenty-five copies) it would be over-optimistic to presume that there will soon be a third, some account must be given of Melville’s poetry.

Stevenson once said: “There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must have been neglected; ‘He shall be able to see’; ‘He shall be able to tell’; ‘He shall be able to charm,’ said the friendly godmothers; ‘But he shall not be able to hear!’ exclaimed the last.” When Stevenson wrote his passage, the artist in him seems for the moment to have slept; taking no account of Melville’s frequent mastery of the magic of words, he berates Melville’s genius for misspelling Polynesian names as a defect of genius. That Melville had an ear sensitive to the cadences of prose is shown by the facility with which he on occasion caught the rhythm both of the Psalms and of Sir Thomas Browne. Yet the same man who at his best is equalled only by Poe in the subtle melody of his prose, at times fell into ranting passages of obvious and intolerable parody of blank verse. The following from Mardi is an example: “From dawn till eve, the bright, bright days sped on, chased by the gloomy nights; and, in glory dying, lent their lustre to the starry skies. So, long the radiant dolphins fly before the sable sharks; but seized, and torn in flames—die, burning:—their last splendour left, in sparkling scales that float along the sea.” In his poetry, as in his prose, is the same incongruous mating of astonishing facility and flagrant defect. It is the same paradox that one finds in Browning and in Meredith,—whose poetry Melville’s more than superficially resembles. Melville shared with these men a greater interest in ideas than in verbal prettiness, and like the best of them, when mastered by a refractory idea, he was not over-exquisite in his regard for prosody and syntax in getting it said. When he had a mind to, however, he could pound with a lustiness that should endear him to those who delight in declamation contests: a contemptible distinction, perhaps—but even that has been denied him. The poem to the Swamp Angel, for example, the great gun that reduced Charleston, is fine in its irony and vigour. The poem begins:

Though there are memorable lines and stanzas in Battle-Pieces, only one of the poems in the volume has ever been at all noticed: Sheridan at Cedar Creek, beginning:

The following letter to his brother Tom bears upon Melville’s Battle-Pieces.

Melville’s family seem all to have been more sceptical of his verse than they were of his prose. In 1859 Mrs. Melville wrote to her mother “Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell any one, for you know how such things get around.” Mrs. Melville was too optimistic: her husband’s indiscreet practice is still pretty much a secret to the world at large. And Clarel, his longest and most important poem, is practically impossible to come by.

In 1884, Melville said of Clarel in a letter to Mr. James Billson: “a metrical affair, a pilgrimage or what not, of several thousand lines, eminently adapted for unpopularity.” Though this is completely true, Melville used in Clarel more irony, vividness, and intellect than the whole congregation of practising poets of the present day (a few notable names excepted) could muster in aggregate. Yet with all this wealth of the stuff of poetry, the poem never quite fulfils itself. In Clarel Melville brings together in the Holy Land a group of pilgrims; pilgrims nearly all drawn from the life, as a study of his Journal of 1856-7 shows. In this group there are men devout and men sceptical, some suave in orthodoxy, and some militant in doubt. There are dreamers and men of action; unprincipled saints, and rakes without vice. In the bleak and legend-haunted Holy Land Melville places these men, and dramatises his own reactions to life in this setting. The problem of faith is the pivot of endless discussion: and upon this pivot is made to turn all of the problems of destiny that engage a “pondering man.” These discussions take place against a panorama of desert and monastery and shrine. In some of the interpolated songs of Clarel, Melville almost achieved the lyric mood.

And there are, too, incidental legends and saints’ tales:

Clarel is by all odds the most important record we have of what was the temper of Melville’s deeper thoughts during his long metaphysical period. Typical quotations have already been made.

The most recurrent note of the poem is a parched desire for companionship; a craving for

Though Clarel is unconscionably long, and though there are arid wastes strewn throughout its length, a patient reading is rewarded by passages of beauty, and more frequently by passages of astonishing vigour and daring. And it speaks more for the orthodoxy of America than for her intellect, that Clarel—which reposes in the outer limbo of oblivion—is about all she has to show, as Mr. Mather has observed, for the poetical stirrings of the deeper theological waters which marked the age of Matthew Arnold, Clough, Tennyson, and Browning. We should blush for our neglect of a not unworthy representative.

Besides Battle-Pieces and Clarel, Melville printed for private circulation two slender volumes: John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and Timoleon (1891): selections from a larger body of poetry, the remainder of which is still preserved in manuscript. In these, the inspiration flags throughout. Two of the better poems have already been quoted. John Marr was dedicated to W. Clark Russell, Timoleon to Elihu Vedder.

In 1886, according to Arthur Stedman, Melville “felt impelled to write Mr. Russell in regard to one of his newly published novels.” This was the beginning of a correspondence between Russell and Melville. Melville’s letters are not available. Russell’s reply to Melville’s first letter follows:

Elihu Vedder and Melville never met or corresponded. The acknowledgment of the dedication came only after Melville’s death. “I may not have been very successful in a worldly way,” he said, “but the knowledge that my art has gained me so many friends—even if unknown to me—makes ample amends.”

Schopenhauer was enabled to preserve his disillusions because he also preserved his income. If a man is blessed with a comfortable fortune, then it is easy for him to lead a tranquil and unpretentious existence, sheltered from all intruders. But for an unsuccessful writer with a wife, four children, and no income, to throw down the pen and retire from the world (except for a season in California and another in the Holy Land); the secret of such a feat should be popularised. The secret transpires in the following letter to Melville from his father-in-law, Justice Shaw.