hand holding a lute." Her fingers, too, "were decorated with a variety of rings, which as she waved her hand to me as I entered, darted forth a thousand coruscations, and gleamed their brilliant splendours to the sight."

"As I entered the apartment, her eyes were downcast, and the expression of her face was mournfully interesting; she had apparently been lost in some melancholy revery. Upon my entrance, however, her countenance brightened, as with a queenly wave of the hand, she motioned my conductress from the room, and left me standing, mute, admiring and bewildered in her presence.'

"For a moment my brain spun round, and I had not at command a single of my faculties. Recovering my self-possession, however, and with that, my good-breeding, I advanced en cavalier and, gracefully sinking on one knee, I bowed my head and exclaimed-'Here do I prostrate myself, thou sweet Divinity, and kneel at the shrine of thy-"

But here, just at the climax of the quest, the clipping is abruptly torn, and the reader is left cruelly suspended.

From the publication of Lalla Rookh, in 1817, to the publication of Thackeray's Our Street in 1847, there settled upon letters and life in England an epidemic of hankering for the exotic. At the instigation of Lalla Rookh, England made a prim effort to be "purely and intensely Asiatic," and this while delicately avoiding "the childishness, cruelty, and profligacy of Asia." In the fashionable literature of the period, the harem and the slave-market unburdened its gazelles and its interior decorations, and by a resort to divans and coruscating rubies, and ottar of roses, and lutes, and warm panting maidens, the "principled goodness" of Anglo-Saxon self-righteousness was thrilled to a discreet voluptuousness.

In his second Fragment, Melville has caught at some of the drift-wood of this great tidal wave that was washed across the Atlantic. And in acknowledgment of this early indebtedness, he in Pierre speaks of Tom Moore with an especial burst of enthusiasm, mating him with Hafiz, Anacreon, Catullus and Ovid.

Reared in a New England environment that had been so

berly tempered by Mrs. Chapone and Mrs. Barbauld, Melville had, under the goadings of poverty, the frustrations of his environment, and the teasing lure of some stupendous discovery awaiting him at the rainbow's end, plunged into the hideousness of life in the forecastle of a merchantman. At both extremes of his journey he reaped only disillusion. As a practically penniless sailor in Liverpool he enjoyed the freedom of the streets: and the architecture of the city impressed him less than did the sights of the poverty and viciousness to which he was especially exposed. Back he came to Lansingburg, to the old pump in the yard, the stiff-corseted decorum, and the threadbare and pretentious proprieties of his mother, to decline into the enforced drudgery of teaching school. The sights of Liverpool and the forecastle had given no permanent added beauty to home. He did not comfortably fit into any recognised socket of New England respectability. He sought escape in books, in amateur authorship. And Burton, and Anacreon, and Tom Moore are not guaranteed to reconcile a boy in ferment to a tame and repugnant environment. He was like a strong wine that clears with explosive violence. He had been to sea once, and there acquired some skill as a sailor. The excitement and hardship and downrightness of ocean life, when viewed through the drab of the ensuing years, treacherously suffered a sea-change. After three and a half years of mounting desperation, he was ripe for a transit clean beyond the pale of civilisation.

"I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote," he later wrote in an effort to explain his second hegira; "I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts." The trip to Liverpool had slammed the sash on one magic casement; but the greater part of the watery world was still to be viewed. "Why," he asks himself perplexed at his own mystery, "is almost every healthy boy with a robust healthy soul, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother to Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he

saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to all." The key he here offers to the heart of his mystery is itself locked in mystery; though when he compared himself to Narcissus tormented by the irony of being two, Melville may have been hotter on the trail of the truth than he was aware. His deepest insight, perhaps, came to him one midnight, out on the Pacific, where in the glare and the wild Hindoo odour of the tryworks of a whaler in full operation, he fell asleep at the helm. "Starting from a brief standing sleep," he says, "I was horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. I thought my eyes were open; I was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by. Nothing seemed before me but a jet of gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern."

In a headlong retreat from all havens astern, on January 3, 1841, Melville shipped on board the Acushnet, a whaler bound for the South Seas.

CHAPTER VII

BLUBBER AND MYSTICISM

"And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard."

-HERMAN MELVILLE: Moby-Dick.

IN 1892, the year after Melville's death, Arthur Stedman wrote a "Biographical and Critical Introduction" to Typee. During the final years of Melville's sedulous isolation, Arthur Stedman was-with the minor exception of the late Dr. Titus Munson Coan, whose Missionary parentage Melville seems never to have quite forgiven him-the single man who clung to Melville with any semblance of personal loyalty. Stedman was unwavering in his belief that in his earlier South Sea novels, Melville had attained to his highest achievement: an achievement that entitled Melville to more golden opinions, Stedman believed, than Melville ever reaped from a graceless generation. To Stedman-as to Dr. Coan-Melville's later development into mysticism and metaphysics was a melancholy perversity to be viewed with a charitable forbearance, and forgiven in the fair name of Fayaway. Dr. Coan repeatedly used to recount, with a sigh at his frustration, how he made persistent attempts to inveigle Melville into Polynesian reminiscences, always to be rebuffed by Melville's invariable rejoinder: "That reminds me of the eighth book of Plato's Republic." This was a signal for silence and leave-taking. What was the staple of Stedman's conversation is not known. But despite the fact that Melville was to him a crabbed and darkly shadowed hieroglyph, he clung to Melville with a personal loyalty at once humorous and pathetic. Melville to him was

the "man who lived with the cannibals," and merited canonisation because of this intimacy with unholy flesh. Stedman published in the New York World for October 11, 1891, a tribute to his dead friend, significantly headed: "Marquesan" Melville. A South Sea Prospero who Lived and Died in New York. The Island Nymphs of Nukuheva's Happy Valley. While Stedman was not necessarily responsible for this caption, it is, nevertheless, a just summary of the fullest insight he ever got into Melville's life and works. The friendship between Petrarch and Boccaccio is hardly less humorous than the relationship between Melville and Stedman; and surely Melville has suffered more, in death, if not in life, from the perils of friendship than did Petrarch: more even than did Baudelaire from the damaging admiration of Gautier. When one's enemy writes a book, one's reputation is less likely to be jeopardised by literary animosity than it is by the best superlatives of self-appointed custodians of one's good name. But as Francis Thompson has observed, it is a principle universally conceded that, since the work of a great author is said to be a monument, the true critic does best evince his taste and sense by cutting his own name on it. Critical biographers have contrived a method to hand themselves down to posterity through the gods of literature, as did the Roman emperors through the gods of Olympus-by taking the heads off their statues, and clapping on their own instead. Criticism is a perennial decapitation.

"I have a fancy," says Stedman, in his Biographical and Critical Introduction, "that it was the reading of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast which revived the spirit of adventure in Melville's breast. That book was published in 1840, and was at once talked of everywhere. Melville must have read it at the time, mindful of his own experience as a sailor. At any rate, he once more signed a ship's articles, and on January 1, 1841, sailed from New Bedford harbour in the whaler Acushnet, bound for the Pacific Ocean and the sperm fishery."

In the second part of this statement, Stedman attempts to stick to the letter: but there is a flaw in his text. That Mel