the creations of the spirit. They could not have been written save for Melville's own experience of seas and lands, ships and crews, but no memoir of their author can be based upon them. There is no foothold even for speculation.

CHAPTER III

RETURN TO AMERICA-MELVILLE AND HAWTHORNE

MELLVILLE'S mother was still living in Lansingburgh, Albany, when Herman returned home in 1844, and his brothers were gaining success in politics, law and what not. Mr. Weaver reports him as "effulgent" with stories that made his return incredible and glorious. The impulse to authorship may have come partly from without, but it certainly came mainly from within; the born romantic, the poet, the artist, need no spurring, assuredly not that of circumstance that thwarts as often as it promotes. Before he had been home two years his first book, Typee, was written, despatched to England by the offices of his elder brother Gansevoort and accepted by John Murray. Murray bought the English rights and printed a thousand copies, Melville receiving a hundred pounds. It was published in two volumes of Murray's "Colonial and Home Library," as a truthful account of personal experiences. In New York it was published with a slightly different title, and both in England and America received praise from many and censure from some. The praise was due to the pure delightfulness of the narration, and the censure to Melville's denunciation of missions and the

7

ill effects of contact between civilized and savage beings. Three years later the objections prevailed, and Typee was reissued in an emasculated form for the benefit of those in whom prejudice is supreme; the pleasantness of the narrative is not much diminished by this mutilation, but its integrity is destroyed. Typee, as three generations of American readers have perforce been content to read it, and as it has been reprinted in England of recent years,' is not Melville's book, but Melville's minus that which perturbed a dozen or a thousand obstinate, apprehensive readers.

Twelve months after Typee came Omoo, to share success and opprobrium with his predecessor. American writers did not always find favour with English readers, and both appreciation and money were welcome to the author. Success in the esteem of a few, success as a master of narrative, could not of itself feed and clothe him and remove him from the fear of penury, and it became the more necessary that he should make money when he contemplated marriage. Poe was still alive, and although he was well known in his own country and already begetting a trembling in the pulse of French poetry, his circumstances were as lamentable as ever. If Melville had ever heard of Poe, his reputation and his temporal distress, he could not have been comforted, for his own income fell short of his reputation and of his imminent necessities.

Typee was dedicated to Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts. As a young man he had been engaged to an aunt of Melville's, and the intimacy between the two families which was thus created survived the early death of this lady. Hence Melville 1 The Standard Edition (Constable) prints the full text.

was able to write to the Chief Justice, sending him one of the earliest copies of Typee, and refer in the dedication to "my father's friend and the constant friend of all his family". Elizabeth Shaw's name creeps into the latter part of this letter, and not much more than a year later Melville had married her, and she was writing to his mother telling of the honeymoon and the journey to Concord and the White Mountains. They returned to Lansingburgh for a time and then removed to New York, joining the household of Allan Melville and his sisters. Elizabeth Shaw Melville is not a very clear figure now, but her attractive portrait and letters suggest a quality of mind, a tenderness and attentiveness, of which not even the most engrossed writer could be insensible. She speaks of Herman's habits, his work, and his walks and talks, how he does not use his eyes much by candle-light, but plays cards or listens to reading. While Herman is writing, the effect of late hours is very injurious, for without a full night's rest he feels unfit for work the next day, and the days are too precious to be thrown away. If he goes to parties it is to please her more than himself, but she is contented to stay at home so long as he will stay with her. London publishers have made him liberal offers for his next book (presumably Mardi or Redburn), and Berlin publishers want to translate it into German.

The fruit of his activity was seen in 1849, when Mardi was published with a preface dated January 1849, which said that his two narratives of voyages having been received with incredulity in many quarters, it occurred to him to write a confessed romance of Polynesian adventure. He wanted to see whether his

Sails for

England

III

fiction might not be received for a verity. Mardi, so
high-fantastical, was followed in a few months by
Redburn, so literal and workaday. The latter proved
more immediately popular, as was indeed likely, for
the Defoe-like straightforwardness of Redburn, though
marred by a single prolonged episode, is a more
attractive quality than the waywardness of Mardi,
which begets impatience and provokes question with
all but a loyal intellectual aristocracy. But had these
books been far more popular they would still have
done little beyond satisfying Melville's necessities,
for by this time his first child was born, and his
income from books was encumbered by debts to the
publishers.

He had published four books in three years, using
his reserves of experience freely enough, and then
sinking for his material into the mysterious, uncertain
depths of the imaginative life. He had made reputa-
tion, but fortune was still to make; and now at the age
of thirty, a husband and father, he was driven to leave
America for England with the manuscript of a fifth
book, White Jacket. He sailed on the "Southampton",
and discoursed much with a German scholar, Adler, to
whom he was introduced by one of the Duyckinck
brothers; the latter were friends of Melville and were
responsible for a Cyclopaedia which contained an
account of his early life. With Adler, he says, he
talked philosophy, and found him full of German
metaphysics; the names of Kant, Schlegel, Hegel,
Swedenborg, and Coleridge tripped upon their tongues,
and he admits, in his own person, a concern with
philosophy which he had hitherto shown only in-
directly or dramatically. The meditative, wandering