affections of man. In this, the simplest of stories, told with but little of the old digressive vexatiousness, and based upon recorded incidents, Herman Melville uttered his everlasting yea, and died before a soul had been allowed to hear him.

CHAPTER VIII

OTHER PROSE

WITH the exception of Pierre, already noticed, Israel Potter is the chief of the prose works published in Melville's lifetime after Moby-Dick. Its sub-title, "Fifty Years of Exile", indicates accurately the fortune that fell to Israel and the point of view from which it is told. A subdued ironical note is heard, but nowhere in the story so clearly as in the Dedication of this tribute to "a private of Bunker Hill, who for his faithful services was years ago promoted to a still deeper privacy under the ground, with a posthumous pension, in default of any during life, annually paid him by the spring in ever-new mosses and sward". No one, he owns, can complain of the gloom of the closing chapters more profoundly than the author; but what can he do? The story is a true one, he avers, and he dare not substitute for God's justice any artistic recompense of poetic justice.

The irony is not confined to the story; it extends to the habit assumed by the author in writing it. As if the attacks and sneers at his natural exuberance had indeed entered his soul, he resolved no more to cast his style to the swine but to restrict himself to the dry

husks of language, putting an unnatural constraint upon his genius. In part this constraint brings a benefit to the reader, but it makes Israel Potter a much less characteristic book than its predecessors. The story (founded upon a life published in 1824) opens a little before the American War, in which Israel is found fighting at Bunker Hill against the English forces; he was wounded, recovered, volunteered for the American navy, was immediately captured and sent to England, and endured the horrors of the hulks. It was the beginning of lifelong vicissitudes with little intermission, vicissitudes admirably followed in a manner that makes the story almost as faithful but, alas, less attractive than Colonel Jack. Admirable,

above all, is the account of the humble American rebel's interviews with George the Third, Horne Tooke, Paul Jones, and Benjamin Franklin; to the last of whom he had been sent as a secret agent with despatches to Paris from Horne Tooke's group. Scarce anything extraneous is permitted, but Melville is indulgent in his portrait of Franklin and Paul Jones, giving these at full length-Franklin the serene, cool, ripe old philosopher, "everything but a poet"; and the adventurer, "a rather small, elastic, swarthy man, with an aspect as of a disinherited chief in European clothes. An unvanquishable enthusiasm, intensified to perfect sobriety, couched in his savage, selfpossessed eye". It is only when he writes of Paul Jones that Melville's style rises to the familiar exaltation, as if the vehemence of the varnished savage were still irresistible.

The visits to Paris are clearly reminiscences of Melville's own brief sojourn there a few years before

the publication of Israel Potter in 1855, and this is another reminder of his readiness to use his experìences directly and freshly, with but little attempt at disguise; and whenever his narrative requires, he will use historical incidents no less simply, though with an apology. Thus with the magnificent account of the battle between "Bon Homme Richard" and the "Serapis": he mentions it only because he must needs follow in every event the fortunes of Israel himself, but the apology does not prevent his describing it with intensest vividness, nor asking at the end, "What separates the enlightened man from the savage? Is civilization a thing distinct, or is it an advanced stage of barbarism?" The grim texture of Israel Potter makes it difficult to doubt the author's conviction.

At times Melville's reliance upon the inventions of history seems curious enough, as though he thought that, in the new effort to be plain and realistic, he must needs adopt the facts themselves as well as the manner of relating them. When Israel, wonderfully imposing upon a British warship, is carried to Falmouth, he sees "Ethan (Ticonderoga) Allen, the unconquered soldier”, in captivity, a New England officer of gigantic strength and courage, whose confinement in fetters was a dishonour, scarce redeemed by his exchange after more than two-and-a-half years' restraint. This, however, was to be the last of the unfortunate Israel's encounters with daylight characters; he was for more than forty years to disappear, "as one entering at dusk into a thick wood". And there, his chronicler adds, were to be revealed to him, in the secret clefts, gulfs, caves, and dens of London, things of unsurpassed horror.

It fits with this dark dishumour that Melville should afterwards have been strongly attracted to James Thomson and his grim City of Dreadful Night. . . . Happily, this record is condensed into a few pages; the most sombre chapters are short ones, as though Melville himself could not for long face the misery he had conjured up; it was Israel in Egypt indeed, the Egypt being London of filth, fog and sewerage, and his exile, like that of the Hebrews, lasting forty years, only sweetened at the end by the unanticipated good fortune of returning to Boston half a century after he had been torn away as a prisoner of war. "He died the same day that the oldest oak on his native hills was blown down." The end closes a page of simplest pathos, and a story chiefly remarkable for what is suppressed, and the difficult restraint of its telling. That the restraint was galling, and the result not justified in his own eyes or the public's, may be assumed from the fact that the experiment of Israel Potter was not repeated. The book is of a singular and rapid interest, but it is far from being valuably and typically Herman Melville's, for in it he is exiled from the native world of his imagination.

The Confidence-Man of 1857 was the last lengthy novel of Melville's. He was to live between thirty and forty years longer, in a hushed life of which the external world could see only the externals, and the last intimacy offered to his readers, on any considerable scale, was this novel which showed-so surely that you might think it deliberate that the writer of the noblest of prose epics was the writer also of the vainest of satires.