CHAPTER XVI THE GREAT REFUSAL "My towers at last! These rovings end, For terrible is earth." -HERMAN MELVILLE: L'Envoi. ON a bleak and snowy November day in 1851, the Hawthorne family, with their trunks, got into a large farm wagon and drove away from the little red house. And with the departure of Hawthorne, Melville had dreamed the last of his avenging dreams. There may have been some association between the two men while Hawthorne was in West Newton, and later in Concord, but no records survive. In 1856, on his way to the Holy Land, Melville visited Hawthorne at Southport two days after arriving in Liverpool. Melville's account of the meeting is thus recorded in his journal: "Sunday, Nov. 9: Stayed home till dinner. After dinner took steamboat for Rock Ferry to find Mr. Hawthorne. On getting to R. F. learned he had removed thence 18 months previous and was now residing out of town. "Monday, Nov. 10: Went among the docks to see the Mediterranean steamers. Saw Mr. Hawthorne at Consulate. Invited me to stay with him during my sojourn at Liverpool. Dined at Anderson's, a very nice place, and charges moderate. "Tuesday, Nov. 11: Hawthorne for Southport, 20 miles distant on the seashore, a watering place. Found Mrs. Hawthorne & the rest awaiting tea for us. "Wednesday, Nov. 12: At Southport, an agreeable day. Took a long walk by the sea. Sand & grass. Wild & desolate. A strong wind. Good talk. In the evening stout & fox & geese. Julian grown into a fine lad. Una taller than her brother. Mrs. Hawthorne not in good health. Mr. Hawthorne stayed home with me. "Thursday, Nov. 13: At Southport till noon. Mr. H. & I took train then for Liverpool. Spent rest of day putting enquiries among steamers. "Friday, Nov. 14: Took bus for London Road. Called at Mr. Hawthorne's. Met a Mr. Bright. Took me to his club and luncheoned me there. "Sunday, Nov. 16: Rode in the omnibus. Went out to Foxhill Park, &c. Grand organ at St. George's Hall.” Three days later, Melville was off for Constantinople. In his English Note-book, under November 30th, 1856, Hawthorne wrote: "November 30: A week ago last Monday, Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner. We soon found ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and confidence. . . . He is thus far on his way to Constantinople. I do not wonder that he found it necessary to take an airing through the world, after so many years of toilsome pen-labour, following upon so wild and adventurous a youth as his was. I invited him to come and stay with us at Southport, as long as he might remain in this vicinity, and accordingly he did come the next day. On Wednesday we took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in a hollow among the sand-hills, sheltering ourselves from the high cool wind. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything else that lies beyond human ken. . . . He has a very high and noble nature, and is better worth immortality than the most of us. . . . On Saturday we went to Chester together. I love to take every opportunity of going to Chester; it being the one only place, within easy reach of Liverpool, which possesses any old English interest. We went to the Cathedral."-And then architecture gives place to personal comment. Mr. Julian Hawthorne reports of this meeting: "At Southport the chief event of interest during the winter was a visit from Herman Melville, who turned up at Liverpool on his way to Constantinople, and whom Hawthorne brought out to spend a night or two with us. 'He looked much the same I as he used to do; a little paler, perhaps, and a little sadder, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner. felt rather awkward at first, for this is the first time I have met him since my ineffectual attempt to get him a consular appointment from General Pierce. However, I failed only from real lack of power to serve him; so there was no reason to be ashamed, and we soon found ourselves on pretty much the former terms of sociability and confidence. Melville has not been well, of late; he has been affected with neuralgic complaints, and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind. So he left his place in Pittsfield, and has come to the Old World. He informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation, and I think will never rest until he gets hold of some definite belief. It is strange how he persists and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before-in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sandhills amidst which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, x he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.' "Melville made the rounds of Liverpool under the guidance of Henry Bright; and afterwards Hawthorne took him to Chester; and they parted the same evening, 'at a street corner, in the rainy evening. I saw him again on Monday, however. He said that he already felt much better than in America; but observed that he did not anticipate much pleasure in his rambles, for that the spirit of adventure is gone out of him. He certainly is much overshadowed since I saw him last; but I hope he will brighten as he goes onward. He sailed on Tuesday, leaving a trunk behind him, and taking only a carpetbag to hold all his travelling-gear. This is the next best thing to going naked; and as he wears his beard and moustache, and so needs no dressing-case,-nothing but a toothbrush,-I do not know a more independent personage. He learned his travelling habits by drifting about, all over the South Seas, with no other clothes or equipage than a red flannel shirt and a pair of duck trousers. Yet we seldom see men of less criticisable manners than he.'" There is no record of these two men ever meeting again. From the beginning, there had been, between Melville and Hawthorne, a profound incompatibility. When they met, Melville was within one last step of absolute disenchantment. One illusion, only, was to him still unblasted: The belief in the possibility of a Utopian friendship that might solace all of his earlier defeats. Ravished in solitude by his alienation from hs fellows, Melville discovered that the author of The Scarlet Letter was his neighbour. He came to know Hawthorne: and his eager soul rushed to embrace Hawthorne's as that of a brother in despair. Exultant was his worship of Hawthorne, absolute his desire for surrender. He craved of Hawthorne an understanding and sympathy that neither Hawthorne, nor any other human being, perhaps, could ever have given. His admiration for Hawthorne was, of course, as he inevitably discovered, built upon a mistaken identity. Yet, on the evidence of his letters, he for a time drew from this admiration moments both of tensest excitement and of miraculous and impregnating peace. It would be interesting, indeed, to know what Moby-Dick owed to this inspiration. It is patent fact, however, that with the publication of Moby-Dick, and Hawthorne's departure from Lenox, Melville's creative period was at its close. At the age of thirty-two, so brilliant, so intense, so crowded had been the range of experience that burned through him, that at the period of his life when most men are just beginning to strike their gait, Melville found himself looking forward into utter night. Nearly forty years before his X death, he had come to be the most completely disenchanted of all considerable American writers. From his youth, Melville had felt the flagrant and stubborn discord between aspiration and fact. He was born with an imagination of very extraordinary vigour, and with a constitution of corresponding vitality. (In sheer capacity to feel, most American writers look pale beside him. Fired by his rebellious imagination, and abetted by his animal courage, he sallied forth in quest of happiness. Few men have ever compassed such a span of experience as he crowded within the thirty-two years of his quest; few men have lived with such daring, with such intensity. And one by one, as he put his illusions to the test, the bolts of his imagination, discharged against reality, but blazed out charred avenues to despair. It was Dante, he says in Pierre, who first "opened to his shuddering eyes the infinite cliffs and gulfs of human mystery and misery;—though still more in the way of experimental vision, than of sensational presentiment or experience." By the age of thirty-two, he had, by first-hand knowledge of life, learned to feel the justice of Schopenhauer's statement: "Where did Dante find the material for his Inferno if not from the world; and yet is not his picture exhaustively satisfactory? But look at his Paradise; when he attempted to describe it he had nothing to guide him, this pleasant world could not offer a single suggestion." This passage is marked in Melville's copy of Schopenhauer. And in Pierre he wrote: "By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and nobody is there!—appallingly vacant, as vast as the soul of a man." Melville's disillusionment began at home. The romantic idealisation of his mother gave place to a recoil into a realisation of the cold, "scaly, glittering folds of pride" that rebuffed his tormented love; and he studied the portrait of his father, and found it a defaming image. In Pierre this portrait thus addresses him: "To their young children, fathers are not wont to unfold themselves. . . . Consider this strange, ambiguous, smile; more narrowly regard this mouth. Behold, |