unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself."

Melville's reserve, in fact, wore anonymity as a mask. An unremarkable man, escaping praise by disdain or indifference, he passed among normal men as one of themselves, as he passed among men of genius as a normal man-unrecognized. He repaid indifference with indifference; almost the only one of his contemporaries that he praised was the one he came to know in the flesh. He wrote of The Scarlet Letter and its predecessors with a lyrical ardency and confidence before he had met Hawthorne ; afterwards he wrote as eagerly of The House with the Seven Gables. Hawthorne finished it in 1851, a few months after his friendship with Melville began, and the latter praised its richness and tragedy, trying to solve what he termed the Hawthorne problem. He finds something definite in Hawthorne's melancholy negations, for the grand truth about him is that he says No! in thunder, and the devil himself cannot make Hawthorne say Yes. All men, he concludes, who say Yes, lie.

How Hawthorne received this is not recorded, nor how he wrote to Melville concerning Moby-Dick; whatever he said was sufficient—and a little from Hawthorne was sufficient-to provoke a gorgeous rhapsody. “Your appreciation," he cried, "is my glorious gratuity. . . . A sense of unspeakable security is in me at this moment, on account of your having understood the book."] He gushed with thanks, as a sudden mountain spring gushes into the lower hollows; he feels, he says, ineffable socialities, an infinite fraternity of feeling. To Hawthorne only of his friends did he thus freely and unrestrainedly loosen his mountain

torrent of affection, pride and gratitude. A letter to Evert Duyckinck, written not long before this friendship with Hawthorne began, shows something of admiration for Emerson, but it is mitigated by sardonic reflections. "I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr. Emerson. I had heard of him as full of transcendentalism, myths and oracular gibberish. . . . To my surprise, I found him quite intelligible, tho' to say truth, they told me that that night he was unusually plain. . . . I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw. It was the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions. These men are all cracked right across the brow."

But his references to contemporaries are few, and even his happy, if not quite equal, intimacy with the author of The Scarlet Letter was brief. Hawthorne left Lenox in the winter of 1851, and in 1853 was appointed American Consul at Liverpool.

CHAPTER IV

THE LONG SECLUSION-DEATH OF MELVILLE

Moby-Dick or The Whale was published on 18th October 1851, the English edition preceding the American. Upon a book at which he had laboured with such tribulation of spirit and body, and which the difficult, coy Hawthorne himself had praised, Melville placed considerable hopes; and his necessities prompted him in this, for a few months earlier he had failed to obtain a further advance on royalties, partly because his account was already overdrawn. MobyDick has come to be acknowledged as his greatest book, one of the noblest of imaginative prose writings, and of recent years it has been reprinted in various popular series of "classics". Its immediate success was, nevertheless, infinitely below its merits, and although it did not slip into oblivion, its public was soon reduced to a remnant. Mr. Weaver is able to refer to a royalty account for ten months in 1863-64, comprising seven books and total sales of three hundred copies.

How great was his discouragement at this time is clearly seen in Pierre, published about a year after Moby-Dick. It is a book of raptures and glooms, in

which all the artillery of circumstance is turned against the innocence and foolishness of youth, to sink it into the mud. Dostoieffsky never wrote a more desperate book, nor the author of Jude the Obscure a more depressing. It is written out of an exhausted imagination and an inflamed nervous system. His eyesight had troubled him, and Mrs. Melville said that they all felt anxious about the strain on Herman's health in the spring following the issue of Pierre ; and this must have been due partly to an inevitable reaction from the inhuman tension of composition, and partly to the abuse which Pierre provoked. The strain on his physical health was cause and effect of the strain on his spiritual health, as shown in his apprehension of the world. His judgement of his readers failed, or he saw and defied it with a fierce surge of the perversity that heaved within him. No book was less likely to conciliate readers than Pierre, and he found that the vast idealism of one part and the abhorrent realism of the other, and the distressing gulf between the two, revolted them all. In a later chapter we shall be looking at Pierre more closely, but it must be said here that this novel is one of the most powerful of all the books neglected by readers avid of an easier delight than Melville offers. Pierre is the spiritual counterpart of Moby-Dick, and like that written from within, with desperate pulse and bitter returns of hope and defeat.

If it revolted his readers, however, they had still to be humoured, for Melville's responsibilities weighed heavily. About two years after Pierre came Israel Potter, a delightful picaresque story, half of it strictly historical. True that the delight is not unshadowed;

poor Israel is as surely a victim of remorseless fate as Pierre Glendinning, and the London of his long exile is as gloomy as the London of "The City of Dreadful Night". But Israel's sufferings are of the body more than the spirit. Melville had uttered his impeachment of the unknown, the unknown within and without, in Pierre, and then subdued his question; he turned to Israel Potter, and in the busy externality of episode and character he was able to put aside the gaunt, hungry face of infinity.

In the years between Moby-Dick (1851) and Israel Potter (1855) Melville sought some occupation which would ease his circumstances. R. H. Dana wrote to Allan Melville concerning a motion to obtain for him an appointment as Consul at the Sandwich Islands, but nothing resulted from this kindly effort. Another letter, from Allan Melville to Herman's father-in-law, refers to the Antwerp consulate: "Should this be tendered, Herman ought to accept it ". Hawthorne, too, it seems, had spoken of the same thing; but once again nothing happened, and Israel Potter was Melville's own effort to supply the vacancy. There were also other stories which, after appearing in magazines, were published in the volume called Piazza Tales, in 1856; and of these "Benito Cereno" is a flaming instance of the author's pure genius. It was originally published in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in the latter part of 1855, an astonishing story which must have brought tears of pride to Melville when he looked back upon it; and only a little less wonderful is an episode in another of the series, "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles ". Yet these stories failed to enlarge appreciably the audience which Melville had painfully won, and the