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Herman Melville (1819-1891). Library of Literary Criticism. 1901-05

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Herman Melville (1819-1891). Library of Literary Criticism. 1901-05 Dictionary Biographies Literary Criticism Welcome Terms of Service ⧏ Previous Next ⧐ Contents Bibliographic Record Charles Wells Moulton, ed.  Library of Literary Criticism.  1901–05. Herman Melville (1819–1891) Born, in New York City, 1 Aug. 1819. Went to sea, 1836. Schoolmaster, 1837–40. To sea again Jan. 1841. Ran away from ship on Marquesas Islands, 1842. Rescued after four months’ captivity among the Typees. For a short time clerk at Honolulu. Returned to Boston, 1844. Married Elizabeth Shaw, 4 Aug. 1847. Lived in New York, 1847–50; at Pittsfield, Mass., 1850–63. Visits to Europe, 1849 and 1856. Frequently lectured in America, 1857–60. Returned to New York, 1863. District Officer, New York Custom House, Dec. 1866–86. Died, in New York, 28 Sept. 1891. Works: “Typee,” 1846; “Omoo,” 1847; “Mardi,” 1849; “Redburn,” 1849; “White Jacket,” 1850; “Moby Dick,” 1851 (English edn., called; “The Whale,” same year); “Pierre,” 1852; “Israel Potter,” 1855 (in 1865 edn. called: “The Refugee”); “Piazza Tales,” 1856; “The Confidence Man,” 1857; “Battle-Pieces,” 1866; “Clarel,” 1876; “John Marr and Other Sailors” (priv. ptd.), 1888; “Timoleon” (priv. ptd.), 1891.—Sharp, R. Farquharson, 1897, A Dictionary of English Authors, p. 193.    

1 Personal

  Duyckinck, of the Literary World, and Herman Melville are in Berkshire, and I expect them to call here this morning. I met Melville the other day, and liked him so much that I have asked him to spend a few days with me before leaving these parts.—Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1850, Letter to Horatio Bridge, Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne, p. 123.    

2   His extremely proud and sensitive nature and his studious habits led to the seclusion of his later years…. This seclusion endured to the end. He never denied himself to his friends; but he sought no one. I visited him repeatedly in New York, and had the most interesting talks with him. What stores of reading, what reaches of philosophy, were his! He took the attitude of absolute independence towards the world. He said, “My books will speak for themselves, and all the better if I avoid the rattling egotism by which so many win a certain vogue for a certain time.” He missed immediate success; he won the distinction of a hermit. It may appear, in the end, that he was right. No other autobiographical books in our literature suggest more vividly than “Typee,” “Omoo,” “White Jacket,” and “Moby Dick,” the title of Goethe, “Truth and Beauty from my own life.” “Typee,” at least, is one of those books that the world cannot let die.—Coan, Titus Munson, 1891, Herman Melville, Literary World, vol. 22, p. 493.    

3   As Borrow possessed the secret of winning the confidence of the gipsies, so Melville, by the same talisman of utter simplicity and naturalness, was able to fraternise in perfect good fellowship with the so-called savages of the Pacific.—Salt, Henry S., 1892, “Marquesan Melville,” Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 272, p. 251.    

4 General

  We first examined its merits [“Omoo”] as a piece of description, then considered it more especially with reference to its spirit, in what it leaves us to infer of the writer’s intercourse with the natives, and what he tells us of their religious condition…. “Omoo” is a book one may read once with interest and pleasure, but with a perpetual recoil. It is poetically written, but yet carelessly, and in a bad spirit.—Peck, G. W., 1847, Omoo, American Review, vol. 6, p. 45.    

5   Mr. Melville lived for four months, absolutely like a primitive man, in Noukahiva, a Polynesian island, and it is his adventures while there that form the subject of his first books, the narratives of his actual voyages…. Unfortunately, Mr. Melville’s style is so ornate, his Rubens-like tints are so vivid and warm, and he has so strong a predilection for dramatic effects, that one does not know exactly how much confidence to repose in his narrative. We do not take except cum grano salis, his florid descriptions.—Chasles, Philarète, 1852, Anglo-American Literature and Manners, p. 118.    

6   “Typee” told nothing. It had no antecedents. It might have been an animal, or it might have been a new game, or it might have been a treatise on magic. Did they open the book, and look over the chapters, they were not much wiser. Barbarous congregations of syllables, such as Kory-Kory, Nukuheva, Moa Artua, met their eyes. The end of it was, that the whole tribe of London and American critics had to sit down and read it all, before they dared speak of a book filled with such mysterious syllables. From reading they began to like it. There was a great deal of rich, rough talent about it. The scenes were fresh, and highly colored; the habits and manners described had the charm of novelty; and the style, though not the purest or most elegant, had a fine narrative facility about it, that rendered it very pleasurable reading…. “Typee,” the first and most successful of Mr. Melville’s books, commands attention for the clearness of its narrative, the novelty of its scenery, and the simplicity of its style, in which latter feature it is a wondrous contrast to “Mardi,” “Moby Dick,” and “Pierre.”—O’Brien, Fitz-James, 1853, Our Young Authors, Putnam’s Magazine, vol. 1, pp. 155, 160.    

7   Melville’s own adventures had been those of a modern Captain John Smith in the Pacific islands and waters; so that the pars magna fui of his lively books gave them the needed fillip of personality, and duly magnified their elements of wonder. That brilliant power of delineation which, in Melville’s conversation, so charmed his warm friends the Hawthornes, is apparently not heightened in his books, but would seem to be rather diminished by the exigencies of writing. But the personal narrative or fiction of “Typee,” “Omoo,” and “Moby Dick,” with their adventurous rapidity of description of Pacific seas, ships, savages and whales, represented the restless facility which has always been an American trait, and which occasionally develops into some enduring literary success.—Richardson, Charles F., 1888, American Literature, 1607–1885, vol. II, p. 404.    

8   There was a wealth of imagination in the mind of Mr. Melville, but it was an untrained imagination, and a world of the stuff out of which poetry is made, but no poetry, which is creation and not chaos. He saw like a poet, felt like a poet, thought like a poet, but he never attained any proficiency in verse, which was not among his natural gifts. His vocabulary was large, fluent, eloquent, but it was excessive, inaccurate and unliterary. He wrote too easily, and at too great length, his pen sometimes running away with him, and from his readers. There were strange, dark, mysterious elements in his nature, as there were in Hawthorne’s, but he never learned to control them, as Hawthorne did from the beginning, and never turned their possibilities into actualities.—Stoddard, Richard Henry, 1891, The Mail and Express.    

9   “Typee” and “Omoo,” mistaken by the public for fiction, were, on the contrary, the most vivid truth expressed in the most telling and poetic manner. My father, the Rev. Titus Coan, went over Melville’s ground in 1867, and while he has criticized the topography of “Typee” as being somewhat exaggerated in the mountain distances, a very natural mistake, he told me that the descriptions were admirably true and the characterizations faultless in the main. The book is a masterpiece, the outcome of an opportunity that will never be repeated. Melville was the first and only man ever made captive in a valley full of Polynesian cannibals, who had the genius to describe the situation, and who got away alive to write his book.—Coan, Titus Munson, 1891, Herman Melville, Literary World, vol. 22, p. 493.    

10   Melville’s most artistic work is to be found in “Typee,” the first blossom of his youthful genius. This idyl, which set all the world to talking, undoubtedly will hold a permanent position in American literature, and most people will wish to read its sequel, “Omoo.” The character of “Fayaway” and, no less, William S. Mayo’s “Kaloolah,” the enchanting dreams of many a youthful heart, will retain their charm; and this in spite of endless variations by modern explorers in the same domain…. The events of the Civil War gave a strong lyrical movement to Melville’s pen, which had rested for nearly ten years when the volume of “Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War” appeared in 1866. Most of these poems originated, according to the author, “in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond,” but they have as subjects all the chief incidents of the struggle. The best of them are “The Stone Fleet,” “In the Prison Pen,” “The College Colonel,” “The March to the Sea,” “Running the Batteries,” and “Sheridan at Cedar Creek.” Some of these had a wide circulation in the press, and were preserved in various anthologies. Mr. Stoddard has called “Sheridan” the “second best cavalry poem in the English language, the first being Browning’s, ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.’” There are in this poem lines as lofty in sentiment and expression as Bryant, or the author of “Lines on a Bust of Dante,” or Mr. Stoddard himself could have written.—Stedman, Arthur, 1891, Melville of Marquesas, Review of Reviews, American ed., vol. 4, p. 429.    

11   In spite of all the obscurities and mannerisms which confessedly deform his later writings, it remains true that naturalness is, on the whole, Melville’s prime characteristic, both in the tone and in the style of his productions. His narratives are as racy and vigorous as those of Defoe or Smollett or Marryat; his character-sketches are such as only a man of keen observation, and as keen a sense of humour, could have realised and depicted. His seamen and his sea captains all, his savages ashore and aboard, from the noble unsophisticated Mehevi in “Typee” to the semi-civilised comical Queequeg in “The Whale,” are admirably vivid and impressive, and the reader who shall once have made their acquaintance will thenceforward in no wise be persuaded that they are not real and living personages. Moreover, there is a large-souled humanity in Melville—the direct outcome of his generous, emotional, yet uniformly sane temperament—which differentiates him entirely from the mere artist or littérateur.—Salt, Henry S., 1892, “Marquesan Melville,” Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 272, p. 254.    

12   His masterpiece, “Moby Dick, or the White Whale.” If it were not for its inordinate length, its frequently inartistic heaping up of details, and its obvious imitation of Carlylean tricks of style and construction, this narrative of tremendous power and wide knowledge might be perhaps pronounced the greatest sea story in literature. The breath of the sea is in it and much of the passion and charm of the most venturous callings plied upon the deep. It is a cool reader that does not become almost as eager as the terrible Captain Ahab in his demoniacal pursuit of Moby Dick, the invincible whale, a creation of the imagination not unworthy of a great poet.—Trent, William P., 1903, A History of American Literature, p. 390.    

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