and courageous. Had he been religious, it seemed, he would have been truly religious and reverential, for he had a very high and noble nature. Julian Hawthorne adds to our small knowledge of Melville's impression on others when he writes: "There was vivid genius in this man, and he was the strangest being that ever came into our circle. Through all his wild and reckless adventures, of which a small part only got into his fascinating books, he had been unable to rid himself of a Puritan conscience; he afterwards tried to loosen its grip by studying German metaphysics, but in vain. He was restless and disposed to dark hours, and there is reason to suspect that there Pierre was in him a vein of insanity. His later writings were presumab incomprehensible. When I was in New York, in 1884, I met him, looking pale, sombre, nervous, but little touched by age. He died a few years later. He conceived the highest admiration for my father's genius, and a deep affection for him personally; but he told me, during our talk, that he was convinced that there was some secret in my father's life which had never been revealed, and which accounted for the gloomy passages in his books. It was char?acteristic in him to imagine so; there were many secrets untold in his own career. But there were few honester or more lovable men than Herman Melville." It is, I suppose, natural to think a man mad if you cannot understand what he says, but I shall be able to show that his later writings are far from incomprehensible. Julian Hawthorne, nevertheless, is acute in detecting a consciousness of suppression in Melville, and in noting that he imputed it to others; for in 1884 and long before he was suppressing and re nouncing his own genius. It could not have been a bloodless renunciation, for he yearned to speak and all his adult life was a struggle between invincible reserve and eager expressiveness. In one of his letters to Hawthorne he wrote: "Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses-for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it; not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation". His poem L'Envoi (The Return of the Sire de Nesle) is stated to have been written to his wife. It was the last of the poems printed in his lifetime, and the tenderness of its tribute is significant. My towers at last! These rovings end, For terrible is earth. Kaf thrusts his snouted crags through fog: But thou, my stay, thy lasting love One lonely good, let this but be! Weary to view the wide world's swarm, The one lonely good remained his until his death in New York on Monday, the 28th September 1891, at the age of seventy-two. Intellectual seclusion had not wrought an inhuman coldness; the companionship of more than forty years was, in his own phrase, blest. The part that time had in him was buried in earth, not in the sea of his experience and imagination; the part that the human spirit had in him survived, and if it still presents questions which cannot be clearly answered, it is because the heart of man is deep, and the darkness of genius unfathomable. His two sons had died young, and only his wife and two daughters survived him. One of the daughters is still living. CHAPTER V TYPEE, OMOO, REDBURN, AND WHITE JACKET It has already been stated that Typee, as it has sometimes been reprinted, and as it has been mainly known in England at least, is an emasculated work. Shearing away certain passages at the whim of ignorant and timid publishers, Melville himself, or some shameless unknown, has wrought a mischief on the first of his novels. When Typee was published, in 1846, as a "peep" at Polynesian life in the Marquesas, the Pacific islands had not been dragged into popularity. For many, the Pacific is a small sea washing Samoa, and Samoa but the tomb of that later romantic writer, Robert Louis Stevenson; and if Melville is regarded at all he is regarded as Stevenson's precursor, whose food was locusts and wild honey and whose obscurer art was but a preparation for Stevenson's lively and lucid description. But Melville was not concerned to make the Pacific illustrious; he was concerned to tell a plain story of his own exciting sojourn on an island of cannibals. The modern picturesque writer and painter had not discovered himself and his opportunity; half a century was to elapse before the sophisticated sought out these mild and primitive peoples, made holiday in places a little lonelier than the Italian hills, endured pleasant hardships and revived jaded appetites. It was in the summer of 1842 that Herman Melville and Richard Tobias Greene fled from the "Acushnet" and sought refuge in the Marquesas. The personal adventures already glanced at as forming part of the novelist's autobiography here form part of a prolonged, coherent story, so brightly and so simply told that Typee has become a minor classic among those who ask not whether a book be fact or fiction, or both, so long as it is enthralling. But it was not written, nor read, quite so simply, for the many passages suppressed in later editions had aroused doubt, then contention, and then denunciation when they appeared in the first. The full title, including the brief sequel that shortly followed, was Typee, a Peep at Polynesian Life during a Four Months' Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas, with Notices of the French Occupation of Tahiti and the Provisional Cession of the Sandwich Islands to Lord Paulet, and a sequel, the Story of Toby. It was dedicated to Lemuel Shaw, whose daughter Melville was to marry. The author apologises in the preface for what might seem unwarrantable digressions, but since these digressions were afterwards suppressed, since they reveal so much of the author's native attitude towards the movement of his time, and since the movement of his time set so strongly against him because of these digressions, we cannot treat them as other than important parts of his story. Melville was only twenty-six when Typee was published, and few could guess that his steadfast |