"Humanity, thou strong thing, I worship thee, not in the laurelled victor, but in this vanquished one”.

The rest of Melville's prose is collected into a volume of the standard edition entitled Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces. The title-piece has already been looked at, and the rest are stories or sketches from magazines, and a few previously unpublished articles printed from the author's manuscript. Poor enough in interest are certain of these. One, "Cock-a-DoodleDoo!" shows clearly the influence of Hawthorne, and another, "I and my Chimney", as has already been suggested, shows it even more frankly; each was written after Melville had been drawn into the orbit of Hawthorne, fascinated by that mysterious, supple, sly figure, as some great warrior beast by the apparition of a watching snake in the grass. There are soft meditative passages, languid, faintly humorous passages, and self-portrayal in disguise; but the interest of such sketches is sustained only by the personality of the author, and few will complain that they were so long uncollected. Praise be to God for the failure, cries a character in one of these sketches:-Melville was often contemplating the world. from the point of view of one who had failed, and this phrase falls unambiguously from his lips in a story published three years after Moby-Dick. The same moral, and more explicitly, is shown in "The Fiddler"; "crammed once with fame, he is now hilarious without it. With genius and without fame, he is happier than a king. More a prodigy now than ever." The contrast between the admired and the unesteemed the same man, the same genius, the

different regard-is disclosed in terms that make it irresistible to conclude that the neglected Melville is speaking of the once-admired writer.

It is hardly possible that Melville was unaware of Hawthorne's influence, but he did little, apparently, to suppress it, and paid his friend an unusually confident tribute in the lengthy article to which reference has been made in an earlier chapter. It is the least part of genius that attracts admiration, he cries, speaking of himself in speaking of Hawthorne; and in thinking of Hawthorne, again, he leaps to Shakespeare with, "It is those deep, faraway things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality; these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare". He declares (with the consciousness of all the untold within himself), that the immediate products of a great mind are not so great as the undeveloped or even undevelopable greatness; "in Shakespeare's tomb lies infinitely more than Shakespeare ever wrote". Melville magnifies him not so much for what he did as for what he did not do, or refrained from doing.

"In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, even though it be covertly and by snatches."

It was no matter of surprise, he declared, that Hawthorne was as yet mistaken among men, but content meanwhile with the still rich utterance of a great intellect in repose. And if, as a part of this

general lack of apprehension, men should cavil at the naming of Shakespeare and Hawthorne on the same page, he denies that Shakespeare must needs be regarded as unapproachable, and a national proud fervour seizes him as he proceeds to declare that men not very much inferior to Shakespeare are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio. Alas for prophecy! But he is completely right in repudiating the notion that the great literary genius to come will come as an Elizabethan, for great geniuses are parts of the times, they are the times. "It is of a piece with the Jews, who, while their Shiloh was meekly walking in their streets, were still praying for his magnificent coming; looking for him in a chariot, who was already among them on an ass." Melville was not an analytical critic, but his was the precious gift of sympathetic imagination, by which he divined what others fumble after. His comparisons on Hawthorne's behalf are deadly:-Washington Irving is but a very popular and amiable imitator, and it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. For Melville thirsts after the ultimate success of the imagination, as saints thirst after righteousness.

And more: he asks for no American Goldsmiths or Miltons. Let the American writer write like a man, for then he will be sure to write like an American. England is an alien to America, and China has more bonds of real love for America than England has. "It is for the nation's sake, and not for her authors' sake, that I would have America be heedful of the increasing greatness among her writers. For how

great the shame, if other nations should be before her, in crowning the heroes of the pen!" There were hardly five critics in all America, and of these several were asleep.

This eloquent and passionate plea for a self-reliant spirit, for insularity and nationhood, fell on deaf ears; as a tribute to Hawthorne it may have awakened readers, as a call to the vindication of American genius, and the freeing of genius from foreign fetters, it was unheard. From 1850, when this superb essay was written, to 1926, when the present commentary is published, America has gone like the Jews a-whoring after strange gods, worshipping French idols, Japanese and Chinese idols, even bowing before English idols; forgetting America in a desire to become European or Asiatic. But the strength is within that sustains a man, or a nation.

CHAPTER IX

POEMS

IN 1866, nine years after his last novel, Melville published Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, dedicated to the memory of the three hundred thousand who fell in the war for the maintenance of the Union.

The impulse to verse was not quite so late and sudden as Melville's own phrase suggests when he refers it to the fall of Richmond in April 1865. His wife said in a letter of 1859 that he had taken to writing poetry, and in a letter to his brother in 1862, Melville himself speaks of his own "doggerel". His longest poem, Clarel, recording faithfully his tour in the Holy Land in 1856-57, was not published until after Battle-Pieces, but his diary of the tour, and the obvious faithfulness with which he follows it in the verse, suggests that Clarel may well have been written years before it was printed.

That the impulse prompting Battle-Pieces was sincere and powerful is apparent as soon as the poems are looked at. It is not and could not be wholly a cheerful volume, for the first poem (1860) is called "Misgivings", and the the successive pieces, often