139

HERMAN MELVILLE

MR. STEVENSON would have deserved well of the republic of letters if he had done nothing but bring the South Seas back into fashion. Our fathers and grandfathers revelled in the stories of that wonderful region 'to the suthard of the line,' where, as De Quincey's sailor-brother declared, the best arguments against ghosts and the voices and strange shapes that haunt the vast solitudes of the sea are of no avail; and where, as a later poet has told us—

The blindest bluffs hold good, dear lass,

And the wildest tales are true.

For some thirty years, however, a strange veil of dulness fell upon the face of the Pacific Ocean; and if we heard at all of its islands and its surf-drenched reefs, it was in the prosaic narratives of Lady Brassey and other such long-distance tourists. A fortunate accident, however, took Mr. Stevenson to the South Seas, and at the magic of his voice the mists of commonplace gathered together and withdrew.

With this renaissance of the South Seas it was inevitable that there should come a demand for the republication of 'Typee' and 'Omoo'- those wonderful 'real romances' in which the inspired usher, who passed

his time between keeping school at Green Bush, N.Y., and sailing among the islands, told the world how he had lived, under the shadow of the bread-fruit trees, a life which, as far as sensuous delight and physical beauty were concerned, could only be compared to that of ancient Hellas. There, in vales lovelier than Tempe, and by waters brighter than those of the Ægean, he had seen the flower-crowned and flower-girdled Mænads weave the meshes of their rhythmic dance. He had sat at feasts with heroes whose forms might have inspired Lysippus and Praxiteles. He had watched in amazement and delight the torches gleaming through the palm groves while the votaries of mysteries, like those of Demeter or Dionysus, performed their solemn rites and meet oblations. Yet, in spite of all, he had yearned always with a passionate yearning for the pleasant fields of New England and the wholesome prose of modern life-the incomparable charities of hearth and home.

Though Melville has not the literary finesse of Mr. Stevenson, the description in 'Typee' of the life he led among a cannibal tribe in the Marquesas Islands has a charm beyond the charm of 'The Wrecker,' the 'Island Nights,' or those studies of the Marquesas which Mr. Stevenson contributed to the earlier numbers of Black and White.' 'Typee' is the 'document' par excellence of savage life, and a document written by one who knew how to write as well as to observe. We have inferred that Mr. Melville does not write as well as Mr. Stevenson, but this does not mean that he is not an artist in words. Mr. Melville is no mean master of prose, and had his judgment been equal to his feeling for form he might

have ranked high in English literature on the ground of style alone. Unfortunately, he was apt to let the last great master of style he had been reading run away with him. For example, in 'Moby Dick'-one of the best and most thrilling sea stories ever written-Mr. Melville has hitched to his car' the fantastic Pegasus of Sir Thomas Browne. With every circumstance of subject favourable it would be madness to imitate the author of Urne Burial.' When his style is made the vehicle for describing the hunting of sperm whales in the Pacific the result cannot but be disastrous. Yet so great an artist is Mr. Melville and so strong are the fascinations of his story that we defy any reader of taste to close this epic of whaling without the exclamation- - With all its faults I would not have it other than it is.' By an act of supreme genius, and by forcing his steed to run a pace for which he was not bred, Mr. Melville contrives, in spite of Sir Thomas Browne, to write a book which is not only enchanting as a romance, but a genuine piece of literature.

No one who has read the chapter on 'Nantucket ' and its seafarers, and has learned how at nightfall the Nantucketer, like 'the landless gull that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows,' 'furls his sails and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales,' will have the heart to cavil at Melville's style. In 'White Jacket' —a marvellous description of life on a man-of-war-we see yet another deflection given to Mr. Melville's style, and with still worse results. He had apparently been reading Carlyle before he wrote it; and Carlylisms, mixed with the dregs of the 'Religio Medici,' every now

and then crop up to annoy the reader. In spite, however, of this heavy burden, 'White Jacket' is excellent reading, and full of the glory of the sea and the spirit of the Viking. And here we may mention a very pleasant thing about Mr. Melville's books. They show throughout a strong feeling of brotherhood with the English. The sea has made him feel the oneness of the English kin, and he speaks of Nelson and the old Admirals like a lover or a child. Though Mr. Melville wrote at a time when English insolence and pig-headedness and Yankee bumptiousness made a good deal of ill-blood between the two peoples, he feels that, on the sea at least, it is the English kin against the world.

We have left ourselves no time to quote, as we fain would, either the enchanting description of how Mr. Melville, while a prisoner in the 'island valley' of Typee, came upon the image of the dead chief seated. in his canoe with his sails set, like a Viking for Valhalla ; or the exquisite picture of the forest glade, in which stood the great monoliths, placed there, like our own Druid stones, by some forgotten and perished people. Nor can we give his picture of Fayaway, the beautiful genius of the vale. Typee and the South Seas our readers must explore for themselves. Instead, we will quote the account of the Quaker whalers who sail out of the Island of Nantucket :

Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same Quakers are the

most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance. So that there are instances among them of men who, named with Scripture names—a singularly common fashion on the island—and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic 'thee' and 'thou' of the Quaker idiom; still, from the audacious daring and boundless adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown peculiarities a thousand bold dashes of character not unworthy a Scandinavian sea-king or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion. of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature's sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin, voluntary, and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language—that man makes one in a whole nation's census—a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if, either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems a half-wilful, overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another; and still a man who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from another phase of the Quaker modified by individual circumstances.

Nantucket itself must also claim notice. Here is the description of the islanders and what they have done :

And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea-hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among