After his return from the Holy Land, Melville tried to eke out the small income from his books and his farm by lecturing. J. E. A. Smith says: “Between 1857 and 1861, a rage for lyceum lectures prevailed all over the northern and western states. In Pittsfield the Burbank hall, now Mead’s carriage repository, was filled at least once every week to its full capacity of over a thousand seats, with eager and intelligent listeners to the most brilliant orators in the country. Some of the most noted authors, as well as orators, were induced to mount the platform partly by the liberal pay which they received directly—and also for the increased sale which it gave their books. Among these was Herman Melville, who lectured in Burbank hall, and in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Montreal, St. Louis, San Francisco as well as intermediate cities and towns. He did not take very kindly to the lecture platform, but had large and well pleased audiences.”
If his audiences were composed of people of the jaunty and shallow provincialism of J. E. A. Smith—and J. E. A. Smith is a very fair product of his country and his time—Melville’s distaste for their prim, bland receptivity does not pass understanding. The place and date of Melville’s lectures, together with the “liberal pay directly received” follows.
For these lyceum gatherings, Melville prepared two lectures: one on the South Seas, one on Statuary in Rome.
On December 2, 1857, in competition with another Melville, a bareback rider, who at the circus at Bingo “nightly performed before the élite and respectability of the city,” Melville lectured on Statuary in Rome. On December 3, 1857, the Boston Journal thus reported Melville’s lecture:
“A large audience assembled last evening to listen to the author of Omoo and Typee. He began by asserting that in the realm of art there was no exclusiveness. Dilettanti might accumulate their technical terms, but that did not interfere with the substantial enjoyment of those who did not understand them. As the beauties of nature could be appreciated without a knowledge of botany, so art could be enjoyed without the artist’s skill. With this principle in view, he, claiming to be neither critic nor artist, would make some plain remarks on the statuary of Rome.
“As you approach the city from Naples, you are first struck by the statues of the Church St. John Lateran. Here you have the sculptured biographies of ancient celebrities. The speaker then vividly described the statues of Demosthenes, Titus Vespasian, Socrates, looking like an Irish comedian. Julius Cæsar, so sensible and business-like of aspect that it might be taken for the bust of a railroad president; Seneca, with the visage of a pawn broker; Nero, the fast young man; Plato, with the locks and air of an exquisite, as if meditating on the destinies of the world under the hand of a hair-dresser. Thus these statues confessed, and, as it were, prattled to us of much that does not appear in history and the written works of those they represent. They seem familiar and natural to us—and yet there is about them all a heroic tone peculiar to ancient life. It is to be hoped that this is not wholly lost from the world, although the sense of earthly vanity inculcated by Christianity may have swallowed it up in humility.
“The lecturer next turned to the celebrated Apollo Belvedere. This stands alone by itself, and the impression made upon all beholders is such as to subdue the feelings with wonder and awe. The speaker gave a very eloquent description of the attitude and the spirit of Apollo. The elevating effect of such statues was exhibited in the influence they exerted upon the mind of Milton during his visit to Italy.
“Among the most wonderful works of statuary is that of Lucifer and his associates cast down from heaven. This is in Padua, and contains three-score figures cut out of solid rock. The variety and power of the group cannot be surpassed. The Venus de Medici, as compared with the Apollo, was lovely and not divine. Mr. Melville said he once surprised a native maiden in the precise attitude of the Venus. He then passed to a rapid review of the Laocoon and other celebrated sculptures, to show the human feeling and genius of the ancient artists. None but a gentle heart could have conceived the idea of the Dying Gladiator. The sculptured monuments of the early Christians, in the vaults of the Vatican, show the joyous triumph of the new religion—quite unlike the sombre momentoes of modern times.
“The lecturer then eloquently sketched the exterior of the Vatican. But nearly the whole of Rome was a Vatican—everywhere were fallen columns and sculptured fragments. Most of these, it is true, were works of Greek artists. And yet the grand spirit of Roman life inspired them. Passing from these ancient sculptures, tribute was paid to the colossal works of Benvenuto Cellini and Michael Angelo. He regretted that the time would not allow him to speak of the scenery and surroundings of the Roman sculptures—the old Coliseum, the gardens, the Forum, and the villas in the environs. He sketched some of the most memorable of the latter, and the best works they contain.
“He concluded by summing up the obvious teachings of these deathless marbles. The lecture was quite interesting to those of artistic tastes, but we fancy the larger part of the audience would have preferred something more modern and personal.”
The report of Melville’s other lecture is quoted from the Boston Journal, January 31, 1859.
“At the Tremont Temple last evening, Herman Melville, Esq., the celebrated author and adventurer, delivered the ninth lecture of the course under the auspices of the Mechanic Apprentices’ Association. Subject—‘The South Seas.’ The audience was not large, but about equal to the usual attendance at this and the Mercantile course.
“On being introduced to the audience, Mr. Melville said that the field of his subject was large, and he should not be expected to go over it all: nor should he be expected to read again what had long been in print, touching his own incidental adventures in Polynesia. But he proposed to view the subject in a general manner, in a random way, with here and there an incident by way of illustration.
“He first referred to the title of the lecture, and the origin and date of the name ‘South Seas’ which was older than the name ‘Pacific,’ to which preference is usually given now. The voyages of early navigators into the South Seas, and especially the Balboa, commander of the petty port of Darien, from whence he had taken formal possession of all the South Seas, and all lands and kingdoms therein, in behalf of his masters, the King of Castile and Leon, were noticed by the lecturer.
“Magellan was the man who, after the first hazardous and tortuous passage through the straits which now bear his name, gave the peaceful ocean to which he came out the name of ‘Pacific.’ It was California, said the lecturer, which first made the Pacific shores the home of the Anglo-Saxons. Even now, there were many places in this wide waste of waters which were not found upon the charts. But what was known, and well known, afforded an abundant theme for a lecture. The fish found in that water would furnish an abundant subject, of which he named the sword fish, a different fish from that of the same name found in our northern latitudes—and the devil fish, over which a mystery hangs, like that over the sea-serpent in northern waters. The birds, also, in those latitudes, might occupy a full hour. The lecturer said he wondered that the renowned Agassiz did not pack his carpet bag and betake himself to Nantucket, and from thence to the South Seas, than which he could find no richer field.
“Full of interest also were the fisheries of the South Seas and the life of the whaling crews on the broad waters, or visiting lands. Seldom, if ever, touched by any but themselves, was covered over with a charm of novelty. Again the islands were an interesting study. Why, asked the lecturer, do northern Englishmen, who own large yachts, with which they sail up the Mediterranean, why don’t they go yachting in the South Seas? The white race have a very bad reputation among the Polynesians. With few exceptions they were considered the most bloodthirsty, atrocious and diabolical race in the world. But there were no dangers to voyagers if they treated the natives with common kindness.
“In the Pacific there were yet unknown and unvisited isles. There were many places where a man might make himself a sylvan retreat and for years, at least, live as much removed from Christendom as if in another world.
“The lecturer described an interview he had with a poetical young man who called upon him to get his opinion upon what would be the prospects of a number, say four score, of disciples of Fourier to settle in the valley of Typee. He had not encouraged the scheme, having too much regard for his old friends, the Polynesians. The Mormons had also such a scheme in view—to discover a large island in the Pacific, upon which they could increase and multiply. The Polynesians themselves have ideas of the same nature. Every one has heard of the voyage of Ponce de Leon to find the fountain of perpetual youth. Equally poetical, and more unfamiliar, was the adventure of Cama Pecar, who set sail alone from Hawaii to find the fount of eternal joy, which was supposed to spring up in some distant island where the people lived in perpetual joy and youth. Like all who go to Paradise, he was never heard from again. A tranquil scene from the South Seas was remembered by the lecturer. In a ship from a port of the Pacific coast he had sailed five months, and came upon an island where the natives lived in a state of total laziness. Here they found a white man who was a permanent inhabitant, and comfortably settled with three wives, who, however, failed to keep his wardrobe in good order.
“Wonderful tales were told of the adventures in the South Seas, and the lecturer said that he believed that the books Typee and Omoo gave scarcely a full idea of them, except that part which tells of the long captivity in the valley of Typee. He had seen many of these story tellers of adventures in the South Seas with good vouchers of their tales in the shape of tattooing. A full and interesting description of the process of tattooing with its various styles was given. Tattooing was sometimes, like dress, an index of character, and worn as an ornament which would never wear off and could not be pawned, lost or stolen. The lecturer had successfully combated all attempts to naturalise him by marks as from a gridiron, on his face, for which he thanked God.
“A brief notice was made of the islands of the Pacific, where the Anglo-Saxons had settled, and civilised the people, and the lecturer had been disgusted, and threw down a paper published in the Sandwich Islands, which suggested the propriety of not having the native language taught in the common schools.
“In conclusion, the lecturer spoke of the desire of the natives of Georges Island to be annexed to the United States. He was sorry to see it, and, as a friend of humanity, and especially as a friend of the South Sea Islanders, he should pray, and call upon all Christians to pray with him, that the Polynesians might be delivered from all foreign and contaminating influences.
“The lecture gave the most ample satisfaction, and was frequently applauded.”
Melville cut short his third year of lecturing to make the trip to California with his brother. Upon his return, he again made an unsuccessful attempt to be appointed to a consularship. Such a mission took him to Washington in 1861. This trip was chiefly notable because of the meeting of Melville and Lincoln. Melville recounted the experience in a letter to his wife: “The night previous to this I was at the second levee at the White House. There was a great crowd and a brilliant scene—ladies in full dress by the hundreds—a steady stream of two-and-two’s wound through the apartments shaking hands with Old Abe and immediately passing on. This continued without cessation for an hour and a half. Of course I was one of the shakers. Old Abe is much better looking than I expected and younger looking. He shook hands like a good fellow—working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord.”
Melville struggled on for two more years at Pittsfield, and in October, 1863, moved with his family to 104 East 26th Street, New York, where he spent the remaining years of his life. His house in New York he bought from his brother Allan, giving $7,750 (covered by mortgages and in time paid for by legacies of his wife) and the Arrowhead place, valued at $3,000.
The last years in Pittsfield and the early years in New York were, in financial hardship, perhaps the darkest in Melville’s life. He was in ill health, and except for the pittance from his books he was without income. His lectures were a desperate if not lucrative measure. But for the generosity of his wife’s father, he would have been in destitution.
On December 5, 1866, he was appointed Inspector of Customs in New York—a post he held until January 1, 1886. He was sixty-seven years old when he resigned. His wife had come into an inheritance that allowed him an ultimate serenity in his closing years.
R. H. Stoddard, in his Recollections, thus speaks of Melville:
“My good friend Benedict sent me, one gloomy November forenoon, this curt announcement of a new appointment in Herman Melville: ‘He seems a good fellow, Dick, and says he knows you, though perhaps he doesn’t, but anyhow be kind to him if this infernal weather will let you be so to anybody.’ I bowed to the gentleman who handed the note to me, in whom I recognised a famous writer whom I had met some twenty-five years before; no American writer was more widely known in the late forties and early fifties in his own country and in England than Melville, who in his earlier books, Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and White Jacket, had made himself the prose poet of the strange islands and peoples of the South Seas.
“Whether any of Melville’s readers understood the real drift of his mind, or whether he understood it himself, has often puzzled me. Next to Emerson he was the American mystic. He was more than that, however, he was one of our great unrecognised poets, as he manifested in his version of ‘Sheridan’s Ride,’ which begins as all students of our serious war poetry ought to know: ‘Shoe the steed with silver that bore him to the fray.’ Melville’s official duty during the last years of my Custom-House life confined him to the foot of Gansevoort Street, North River, and on a report that he might be changed to some district on the East River, he asked me to prevent the change, and Benedict said to me, ‘He shan’t be moved,’ and he was not; and years later, on a second report of the same nature reaching him, I saw Benedict again, who declared with a profane expletive, ‘He shall stay there.’ And if he had not died about a dozen years ago he would probably be there to-day, at the foot of Gansevoort Street.”
It is interesting that a man of the intellect of R. H. Stoddard should have found Melville’s mind such a shadowed hieroglyph. With Stoddard so perplexed, it is less difficult to understand Melville’s preference for solitude.
In his copy of Schopenhauer, Melville underlined the phrase—“this hellish society of men;” and he vigorously underscored the aphorism: “When two or three are gathered together, the devil is among them.” Melville occupied himself with his books, with collecting etchings, with solitary walks; and for companionship he was satisfied with the society of his grandchildren. His grand-daughter, Mrs. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, thus records her recollections of such association:
“I was not yet ten years old when my grandfather died. To put aside all later impressions gathered from those who knew him longer and coloured by their personal reactions, all impressions made by subsequent reading of his books, results in a series of childish recollections, vivid homely scenes wherein he formed a palpable background for my own interested activities.
“Setting forth on a bright spring afternoon for a trip to Central Park, the Mecca of most of our pilgrimages, he made a brave and striking figure as he walked erect, head thrown back, cane in hand, inconspicuously dressed in a dark blue suit and a soft black felt hat. For myself, I skipped gaily beside him, anticipating the long jogging ride in the horse cars, the goats and shanty-topped granite of the upper reaches of our journey, the broad walks of the park, where the joy of all existence was best expressed by running down the hills, head back, skirts flying in the wind. He would follow more slowly and call ‘Look out, or the “cop” may catch you!’ I always thought he used funny words: ‘cop’ was surely a jollier word than ‘policeman.’
“We never came in from a trip of this kind, nor indeed from any walk, but we stopped in the front hall under a coloured engraving of the Bay of Naples, its still blue dotted with tiny white sails. He would point to them with his cane and say, ‘See the little boats sailing hither and thither.’ ‘Hither and thither’—more funny words, thought I, at the same time a little awed by something far away in the tone of voice.
“I remember mornings when even sugar on the oatmeal was not enough to tempt me to finish the last mouthful. It would be spring in the back yard too, and a tin cup full of little stones picked out of the garden meant a penny from my grandmother. He would say in a warning whisper, ‘Jack Smoke will come down the chimney and take what you leave!’ That was another matter. The oatmeal was laughingly finished and the yard gained. Across the back parlour and main hall upstairs ran a narrow iron-trimmed porch, furnished with Windsor and folding canvas chairs. There he would sit with a pipe and his most constant companion—his cane, and watch my busy activity below. Against the wall of the porch hung a match holder, more for ornament than utility, it seems. It was a gay red and blue china butterfly. Invariably he looked to see if it had flown away since we were there last.
“Once in a long while his interest in his grandchildren led him to cross the river and take the suburban train to East Orange, where we lived. He must have been an impressive figure, sitting silently on the piazza of our little house, while my sister and I pranced by with a neighbour’s boy and his express wagon, filled with a satisfied sense of the strength and accomplishment of our years. When he had had enough of such exhibitions, he would suddenly rise and take the next train back to Hoboken.
“Chiefly do I think of him connected with different parts of the 26th Street house.
“His own room was a place of mystery and awe to me; there I never ventured unless invited by him. It looked bleakly north. The great mahogany desk, heavily bearing up four shelves of dull gilt and leather books; the high dim book-case, topped by strange plaster heads that peered along the ceiling level, or bent down, searching blindly with sightless balls; the small black iron bed, covered with dark cretonne; the narrow iron grate; the wide table in the alcove, piled with papers I would not dream of touching—these made a room even more to be fled than the back parlour, by whose door I always ran to escape the following eyes of his portrait, which hung there in a half light. Yet lo, the paper-piled table also held a little bag of figs, and one of the pieces of sweet stickiness was for me. ‘Tittery-Eye’ he called me, and awe melted into glee, as I skipped away to my grandmother’s room, which adjoined.
“That was a very different place—sunny, comfortable and familiar, with a sewing machine and a white bed like other peoples’ In the corner stood a big arm chair, where he always sat when he left the recesses of his own dark privacy. I used to climb on his knee, while he told me wild tales of cannibals and tropic isles. Little did I then know that he was reliving his own past. We came nearest intimacy at these times, and part of the fun was to put my hands in his thick beard and squeeze it hard. It was no soft silken beard, but tight curled like the horse hair breaking out of old upholstered chairs, firm and wiry to the grasp, and squarely chopped.
“Sad it is that he felt his grandchildren would turn against him as they grew older. He used to forebode as much. As it is, I have nothing but a remembrance of glorious fun, mixed with a childish awe, as of some one who knew far and strange things.”
As the last meed of glory, Melville received this flattering letter:
“12 Lucknow Terrace,
“Halifax, N. S.
Nov. 21, 1889.
“Dear Sir:
“Although a stranger, I take the liberty of addressing you on the ground of my ardent admiration for your works. For a number of years I have read and reread Moby-Dick with increasing pleasure in every perusal: and with this study, the conviction has grown up that the unique merits of that book have never received due recognition. I have been a student for ten years and have dabbled in literature more or less myself. And now I find myself in a position which enables me to give myself to literature as a life-work. I am anxious to set the merits of your books before the public and to that end, I beg the honour of corresponding with you. It would be of great assistance to me, if I could gather some particulars of your life and literary methods from you, other than given in such books as Duyckinck’s dictionary. In the matter of style, apart from the matter altogether I consider your books, especially the earlier ones, the most thoroughly New World product in all American literature.
“Hoping that I am not asking too much, I remain,
“Yours most respectfully,
“Archd. MacMeehan, Ph.D.
“Munro Professor of English at Dalhousie University.”
Melville replied:
“104 E. 26th St.
“Dear Sir:
“I beg you to overlook my delay in acknowledging yours of the 12th ult. It was unavoidable.
“Your note gave me pleasure, as how should it not, written in such a spirit.
“But you do not know, perhaps, that I have entered my 8th decade. After 20 years nearly, as an outdoor custom house officer, I have lately come into possession of unobstructed leisure, but only just as, in the course of nature, my vigour sensibly declines. What little of it is left I husband for certain matters as yet incomplete, and which indeed may never be completed.
“I appreciate, quite as much as you would have me, your friendly good will and shrink from any appearance to the contrary.
“Trusting that you will take all this, & what it implies, in the same spirit that prompts it, I am,
“Very truly yours,
“Herman Melville.
“To
“Professor MacMeehan,
“Dec. 5, ’89.”
Melville was using his “unobstructed leisure” in a return to the writing of prose. Ten prose sketches and a novel were the result. But the result is not distinguished. The novel, Billy Budd, is built around the character of Jack Chase, the “Handsome Sailor.” In the character of Billy Budd, Melville attempts to portray the native purity and nobility of the uncorrupted man. Melville spends elaborate pains in analysing “the mystery of iniquity,” and in celebrating by contrast the god-like beauty of body and spirit of his hero. Billy Budd, by his heroic guilelessness is, like an angel of vengeance, precipitated into manslaughter; and for his very righteousness he is hanged. Billy Budd, finished within a few months before the end of Melville’s life, would seem to teach that though the wages of sin is death, that sinners and saints alike toil for a common hire. In Billy Budd the orphic sententiousness is gone, it is true. But gone also is the brisk lucidity, the sparkle, the verve. Only the disillusion abided with him to the last.
Melville died at 104 East 26th Street, New York, on Monday, September 28, 1891. His funeral was attended by his wife and his two daughters—all of his immediate family that survived him—and a meagre scattering of relatives and family friends. The man who had created Moby-Dick died an obscure and elderly private citizen. He had in early manhood prayed that if indeed his soul missed its haven, that his might, at least, be an utter wreck. “All Fame is patronage,” he had once written; “let me be infamous.” But as if in contempt even for this preference, he had, during the last half of his life, cruised off and away upon boundless and uncharted waters; and in the end he sank down into death, without a ripple of renown.
“Oh, what quenchless feud is this, that Time hath with the sons of Men!”