CHAPTER III

RETURN TO AMERICA-MELVILLE AND HAWTHORNE

MELVILLE'S mother was still living in Lansingburgh, Albany, when Herman returned home in 1844, and his brothers were gaining success in politics, law and what not. Mr. Weaver reports him as "effulgent " with stories that made his return incredible and glorious. The impulse to authorship may have come partly from without, but it certainly came mainly from within; the born romantic, the poet, the artist, need no spurring, assuredly not that of circumstance that thwarts as often as it promotes. Before he had been home two years his first book, Typee, was written, despatched to England by the offices of his elder brother Gansevoort and accepted by John Murray. Murray bought the English rights and printed a thousand copies, Melville receiving a hundred pounds. It was published in two volumes of Murray's “Colonial and Home Library as a truthful account of personal experiences. In New York it was published with a slightly different title, and both in England and America received praise from many and censure from some. The praise was due to the pure delightfulness of the narration, and the censure to Melville's denunciation of missions and the

ill effects of contact between civilized and savage beings. Three years later the objections prevailed, and Typee was reissued in an emasculated form for the benefit of those in whom prejudice is supreme; the pleasantness of the narrative is not much diminished by this mutilation, but its integrity is destroyed. Typee, as three generations of American readers have perforce been content to read it, and as it has been reprinted in England of recent years,1 is not Melville's book, but Melville's minus that which perturbed a dozen or a thousand obstinate, apprehensive readers.

Twelve months after Typee came Omoo, to share success and opprobrium with its predecessor. American writers did not always find favour with English readers, and both appreciation and money were welcome to the author. Success in the esteem of a few, success as a master of narrative, could not of itself feed and clothe him and remove him from the fear of penury, and it became the more necessary that he should make money when he contemplated marriage. Poe was still alive, and although he was well known in his own country and already begetting a trembling in the pulse of French poetry, his circumstances were as lamentable as ever. If Melville had ever heard of Poe, his reputation and his temporal distress, he could not have been comforted, for his own income fell short of his reputation and of his imminent necessities.

Typee was dedicated to Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts. As a young man he had been engaged to an aunt of Melville's, and the intimacy between the two families which was thus created survived the early death of this lady. Hence Melville 1 The Standard Edition (Constable) prints the full text.

was able to write to the Chief Justice, sending him one of the earliest copies of Typee, and refer in the dedication to my father's friend and the constant friend of all his family". Elizabeth Shaw's name creeps into the latter part of this letter, and not much more than a year later Melville had married her, and she was writing to his mother telling of the honeymoon and the journey to Concord and the White Mountains. They returned to Lansingburgh for a time and then removed to New York, joining the household of Allan Melville and his sisters. Elizabeth Shaw Melville is not a very clear figure now, but her attractive portrait and letters suggest a quality of mind, a tenderness and attentiveness, of which not even the most engrossed writer could be insensible. She speaks of Herman's habits, his work, and his walks and talks, how he does not use his eyes much by candle-light, but plays cards or listens to reading. While Herman is writing, the effect of late hours is very injurious, for without a full night's rest he feels unfit for work the next day, and the days are too precious to be thrown away. If he goes to parties it is to please her more than himself, but she is contented to stay at home so long as he will stay with her. London publishers have made him liberal offers for his next book (presumably Mardi or Redburn), and Berlin publishers want to translate it into German.

The fruit of his activity was seen in 1849, when Mardi was published with a preface dated January 1849, which said that his two narratives of voyages having been received with incredulity in many quarters, it occurred to him to write a confessed romance of Polynesian adventure. He wanted to see whether his

fiction might not be received for a verity. Mardi, so high-fantastical, was followed in a few months by Redburn, so literal and workaday. The latter proved more immediately popular, as was indeed likely, for the Defoe-like straightforwardness of Redburn, though marred by a single prolonged episode, is a more attractive quality than the waywardness of Mardi, which begets impatience and provokes question with all but a loyal intellectual aristocracy. But had these books been far more popular they would still have done little beyond satisfying Melville's necessities, for by this time his first child was born, and his income from books was encumbered by debts to the publishers.

He had published four books in three years, using his reserves of experience freely enough, and then sinking for his material into the mysterious, uncertain depths of the imaginative life. He had made reputation, but fortune was still to make; and now at the age of thirty, a husband and father, he was driven to leave America for England with the manuscript of a fifth book, White Jacket. He sailed on the " Southampton ", and discoursed much with a German scholar, Adler, to whom he was introduced by one of the Duyckinck brothers; the latter were friends of Melville and were responsible for a Cyclopaedia which contained an account of his early life. With Adler, he says, he talked philosophy, and found him full of German metaphysics; the names of Kant, Schlegel, Hegel, Swedenborg, and Coleridge tripped upon their tongues, and he admits, in his own person, a concern with philosophy which he had hitherto shown only indirectly or dramatically. The meditative, wandering

mind was touching at dangerous ports, where others had stayed for years bemused-ports hung with drowsy clouds; and he indulged a tendency to speculation on the most abstract of themes and the most insecure of ideas. Another direct result of conversations on board the " Southampton " was that he formed plans for a tour to Palestine, Greece and Egypt. "I am full (just now) of this glorious Eastern jaunt. Think of it:-Jerusalem and the Pyramids-Constantinople, the Aegean and also Athens!" The fulfilment of this dream was deferred, but, as will be noted, when the dream was at length realized the journey was essentially a mental rather than a physical one; he moved, as he remained still, in order that he might think-a mental traveller, truly. He discussed this tour eagerly, and between whiles talked for hours again and again upon high metaphysical themes; and then would become suddenly aware that in a little while he would again be pressing English earth after an absence of ten years—then a sailor and now the author of four books. His journal of the visit to England and the travelling through English counties shows a fondness of touch as though here and not yonder was his true home; but nothing is so eloquent as a brief phrase written before he landed-" Thro' these waters Blake's and Nelson's ships once sailed ". The feeling of" home", nevertheless, did not displace the feeling for his own America: of his few confessed occasions for pride one was certainly the consciousness, expressed often enough, that as an American he was a citizen of no mean city.

The brief journal was continued while he stayed in England, and affords hints of his pleasure in London,