CHAPTER XVII

THE LONG QUIETUS

"The round face of the grub-man peered upon me now. 'His dinner is ready. Won't he dine to-day, either? Or does he live without dining?' 'Lives without dining,' said I, and closed the eyes.

"Eh!-He's asleep, ain't he?'

"With kings and counsellors,' murmured I."

-HERMAN MELVILLE: Bartleby the Scrivener.

"THE death of Herman Melville," wrote Arthur Stedman, "came as a surprise to the public at large, chiefly because it revealed the fact that such a man had lived so long." The New York Times missed the news of Melville's death (on September 28, 1891) and published a few days later an editorial beginning:

"There has died and been buried in this city, during the current week, at an advanced age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the generation now in the vigour of life, that only one newspaper contained an obituary account of him, and this was of but three or four lines."

In 1885, Robert Buchanan published in the London Academy a pasquinade containing the following lines:

"

Melville, sea-compelling man,

Before whose wand Leviathan

Rose hoary white upon the Deep,

With awful sounds that stirred its sleep;
Melville, whose magic drew Typee,

Radiant as Venus, from the sea,

Sits all forgotten or ignored,
While haberdashers are adored!
He, ignorant of the draper's trade,
Indifferent to the art of dress,
Pictured the glorious South Sea maid
Almost in mother nakedness-
Without a hat, or boot, or stocking,
A want of dress to most so shocking,

With just one chemisette to dress her

She lives and still shall live, God bless her,
Long as the sea rolls deep and blue,

While Heaven repeats the thunder of it,
Long as the White Whale ploughs it through,
The shape my sea-magician drew

Shall still endure, or I'm no prophet!

In a footnote, Buchanan added:

"I sought everywhere for this Triton, who is still living somewhere in New York. No one seemed to know anything of the one great writer fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman on that continent."

If this man, who had in mid-career been hailed at home and abroad as one of the glories of our literature, died "forgotten and ignored," it was, after all, in accordance with his own desires. Adventurous life and action was the stuff out of which his reputation had been made. But in the middle of his life, he turned his back upon the world, and in his recoil from life absorbed himself in metaphysics. He avoided all unnecessary associations and absorbed in his own thoughts he lived in sedulous isolation. He resisted all efforts to draw him out of retirement-though such efforts were very few indeed. Arthur Stedman tells us: "It is generally admitted that had Melville been willing to join freely in the literary movements of New York, his name would have remained before the public and a larger sale of his works would have been insured. But more and more, as he grew older, he avoided every action on his part and on the part of his family that might look in this direction, even declining to assist in founding the Authors Club in 1882." With an aggressive indifference he looked back in Clarel to

"Adventures, such as duly shown

Printed in books, seem passing strange
To clerks which read them by the fire,
Yet be the wonted common-place
Of some who in the Orient range,
Free-lances, spendthrifts of their hire,
And who in end, when they retrace
Their lives, see little to admire
Or wonder at, so dull they be."

When Titus Munson Coan was a student at Williams College, prompted by a youthful curiosity to hunt out celebrities, he called upon Melville at Arrowhead. In an undated letter to his mother he thus recounted the experience: "I have made my first literary pilgrimage-a call upon Herman Melville, the renowned author of Typee, &c. He lives in a spacious farm-house about two miles from Pittsfield, a weary walk through the dust. But it was well repaid. I introduced myself as a Hawaiian-American and soon found myself in full tide of talk-or rather of monologue. But he would not repeat the experiences of which I had been reading with rapture in his books. In vain I sought to hear of Typee and those Paradise islands, but he preferred to pour forth his philosophy and his theories of life. The shade of Aristotle arose like a cold mist between myself and Fayaway. We have quite enough of Greek philosophy at Williams College, and I confess I was disappointed in this trend of the talk. But what a talk it was! Melville is transformed from a Marquesan to a gypsy student, the gypsy element still remaining strong in him. And this contradiction gives him the air of one who has suffered from opposition, both literary and social. With his liberal views he is apparently considered by the good people of Pittsfield as little better than a cannibal or a 'beach-comber.' His attitude seemed to me something like that of an Ishmael; but perhaps I judged hastily. I managed to draw him out very freely on everything but the Marquesas Islands, and when I left him he was in full tide of discourse on all things sacred and profane. But he seems to put away the objective side of life and to shut himself up in this cold North as a cloistered thinker."

An article appearing the New York Times, under the initials O. G. H., a week after Melville's death, said of him':

...

"He had shot his arrow and made his mark, and was satisfied. With considerable knowledge of the world, he had preferred to see it from a distance. . . . I asked the loan of some of his books which in early life had given me pleasure and was surprised when he said that he didn't own a single copy of them. . . . I had before noticed that though eloquent in dis

cussing general literature he was dumb when the subject of his own writings was broached."

"In

In her sketch of her husband's life, Mrs. Melville says: February, 1855, he had his first attack of severe rheumatismand in the following June an attack of sciatica. Our neighbour in Pittsfield, Dr. O. W. Holmes, attended and prescribed for him. A severe attack of what he called crick in the back laid him up at his mother's in Gansevoort in March, 1858— and he never regained his former vigour and strength.' In 1863, so runs the account of J. E. A. Smith, while Melville was in process of moving from Arrowhead, "he had occasion for some household articles he left behind, and, with a friend, started in a rudę wagon to procure them. He was driving at a moderate pace over a perfectly smooth and level road, when a sudden start of the horse threw both occupants from the wagon; probably on account of an imperfectly secured seat. Mr. Melville fell with his back in a hollow of the frozen road, and was very severely injured. Being conveyed to his home by Col. George S. Willis, near whose farm on Williams Street the accident happened, he suffered painfully for many weeks. This prolonged agony and the confinement and interruption of.. work which it entailed, affected him strangely. He had been before on mountain excursions a driver daring almost to the i point of recklessness. . . . After this accident he not only abandoned the rides of which he had been so fond, but for a time shrank from entering a carriage. It was long before the shock which his system had received was overcome; and it is doubtful whether it ever was completely." Ill health certainly contributed more to Melville's retirement from letters than any of his critics-Mr. Mather excepted-have ever even remotely suggested.

During the last half of his life, Melville twice journeyed far from home. In her journal Mrs. Melville says: "In October, 1856, his health being impaired by too close application, he again sailed for London. He went up the Mediterranean to Constantinople and the Holy Land. For much of his observation and reflection in that interesting quarter see his poem of Clarel. Sailed for home on the steamer City of Manches