only so could he finish it, pulled hither and thither as he was by circumstances. "The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,-that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is for ever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar." Domesticity was not a perfect refuge for his inquietude, and it was out of such misgivings, fervour and anguish that his masterpiece was produced. And out of these, too, mingling or intermitting, a mortified pride speaks: he girds at the world, at reputation, at the insecurity of men's creations, and all the while nurses an unconquerable hope. He wrote freely to Hawthorne, eager for intimacy and, as reserved men must needs be, burning with a desire for confession and self-revelation. Here was his elder and his equal, here was another creator, cool and apparently serene; he cannot restrain himself when once the gates are raised, but streams with a candour and fullness all the stronger for many suppressions.

How far Hawthorne responded it is not easy, or essential, to know. Melville had been drawn to Hawthorne's genius before he met him, and had written an astonishingly fervid appreciation of The Scarlet Letter, Twice Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse, for the Literary World. Seldom has a writer praised a contemporary with more ardour; he speaks of "the soft ravishments of the man", of the Indian-summer sunlight on one side of Hawthorne and the blackness ten-times black on the other, and of the great power of the blackness; and he proudly vindicates American literature against ignorant disregard by his assertion of Hawthorne's greatness.

Hawthorne must have glowed-or been shamed-with gratification; but it needed an accidental meeting and two hours' "enforced intercourse" during a kindly thunderstorm to reveal each to the other. The outpourings seem to have been Melville's more than Hawthorne's, for the latter had reached an age when the inhibitions of a saturnine temperament become all-powerful. Hawthorne's singular genius did not ask for space and light, but for darkness and oblivion, for soundless burrows, damp basements, where simple sins grow fungus-like and nature becomes unnatural. His task as a creative artist was to bring to light whatever was hidden, the blanched, monstrous domestic growths; but it was a pallid light or twilight in which he showed them with feminine tremors and delicate revulsions, his own attitude giving half its grace to the story. That he possessed, and was only half-unconscious of, an influence over Melville is to us unmistakable; and it is not surprising if the more delicate writer has power over the stronger. The difference in age and in character, the apparent security and tranquillity of Hawthorne's life, were very likely to impress Melville, and a natural admiration of The Scarlet Letter disposed the younger man to recognize the essential fineness of his new friend's mind. I and my Chimney, a short story of 1856, is an example of Melville writing like Hawthorne-the same fond domestic interior rendered with a hundred light egotistic touches. Melville does not subdue his mind even when he subdues his manner to Hawthorne's influence; his extravagance of feeling and expression, that grew upon him after Redburn, were not easily checked; but none the less, in his choice of subject and meditative gyrations he

writes, in certain of the shorter pieces, with Hawthorne's diligent, queer shade at his elbow.

Except for a preoccupation with the problem of evil, which his elder may have stimulated, there is small sign of Hawthorne's influence upon Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick, although this was written. while contact with Hawthorne was most frequent. For the moment, however, we must note Melville's own letters in estimating the strength of the intimacy between the two. "I mean to continue visiting you", he writes to Hawthorne, "until you tell me that my visits are both supererogatory and superfluous. With no son of man do I stand upon any etiquette or ceremony, except the Christian ones of charity and honesty. I am told, my fellow-man, that there is an aristocracy of the brain. . . . And I can well perceive, I think, how a man of superior mind can, by its intense cultivation, bring himself, as it were, into a certain spontaneous aristocracy of feeling-exceedingly nice and fastidious-similar to that which, in an English Howard, conveys a torpedo-fish thrill at the slightest contact with a social plebeian. So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort. It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail is as honourable a person as Gen. George Washington. This is ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a living by Truth-and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! .

"A presentiment is on me-I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is,

the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write, that is banned-it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches." He admits that he feels cheerfully disposed and therefore (odd perversity!) writes a little bluely, and he proceeds to picture Hawthorne and himself in Paradise, with champagne: "How shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now so distress us,-when all the earth shall be but a reminiscence, yea, its final dissolution an antiquity".

All fame is patronage, he continues, in the same long excited letter of an overwrought mind. "Let me be infamous: there is no patronage in that. What 'reputation' H. M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as a 'man who lived among the cannibals'!" Fame he regards as the most transparent of vanities. He reads Solomon more and more, and sees deep and unspeakable meanings in him; yet even Solomon has "managed" the truth with a view to popular conservatism. His reminiscence becomes more precise when he writes: "I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. my twenty-fifth year [that is, after his return from sea in 1844] I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly

From

the flower must fall to the mould." He was, in fact, completing his "inmost leaf”-Moby-Dick.

Part of the perversity which breaks mockingly through this long letter was due to the circumstances of his life and calling. "What's the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book? Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter." What he would have been in affluence and security, with power to order his life as he liked, it is impossible to decide; but it is clear that circumstances pressed him sorely at times, if only by recalling him from his ideal to this unideal world. In 1855 he published a whimsical sardonic essay, The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, and Mr. Weaver points to the first part of the paper as a recollection of an enchanting evening at the Temple, during the visit to England, and to the second as the antithesis of this; saying that Melville's household now comprised three of his sisters, his mother, his wife, and three of his own children. Whether such a woman'd household proved an intolerable vexation to him it is difficult to say, and we are not called upon to imagine, except in relation to the probable causes of Melville's pessimism; and this we may attribute to the reaction of the mind against the task of incessant composition.

These intimacies were for Hawthorne alone; with others a lighter and happier look is maintained. Thus Mrs. Hawthorne speaks of Melville coming in one evening and telling of a fight he had seen on a Pacific island and of the prodigious blows given by one of the savages who wielded a heavy club; so extremely graphic was the relation that when he had gone and