THE COMPLETE WORKS OF HERMAN MELVILLE.*

THIS handsome and complete- edition of Melville's prose works' was much wanted, and we are very grateful to the publishers. No library, public or private, that professes to represent English literature can possibly be without it. How well worth reading is Redburn, for instance, in spite of all its faults, and they are many, great and instantly apparent. The opening chapter is inimitable. Melville in his prose was not an imitator. He was always a most original man. When, however, he took his walks abroad, whether in ancient or in modern literature, quantities of the paint on the gates he passed through came off on his clothes. Sir Thomas Browne came off. in huge blobs, and in a lesser degree so did The Anatomy of Melancholy. Charles Lamb, Carlyle, and, above all, Borrow—in the case of the moderns—came off ; and, unless I am strangely mistaken, I see a. great many traces of the muddy iridescence of the divine Balzac. I expect Melville read. French ; but that is no matter, for there were plenty of translations about in his days, and to a man like Melville a wink was quite as good as a nod..

It is the same with Melville the poet? In his verse you are not haunted by any references to the past or to contemporary literature. Instead, the poems often contain the most amazing forecast of certain of the moods of quite modern poetry. If you were to turn the pages of this volume without knowing who wrote its contents or where they came from, you would say, " Here is

S-(1) The Works of Herman Melville. Standard Edition. 12 vols. London: Constable and Co. [178. f3d. each.]—(2) Jots. Man and Other Poems. By Merman Melville. With an Introductory Note by_Henry Chapin. vols. Princeton University Press ; London : Humphrey Wiford, Oxford University new. [213• eet.i

a rather clumsy imitator of Hardy, Meredith, Robert Graves, the Sitwells, J. C. Squire and a hundred others, including A. E. Housman and Masefleld." I do not, of course, mean to assert that there is any one sustained poem which looks like a foretaste of the work of any of these authors ; but, as one reads the poems, one is haunted by all sorts of half-recollections, not so much of the words as of the moods of modern poetry.

The best way to illustrate what I mean is to quote an example. Here is one from the poem with which the book opens :—

" Since as in night's deck-watch ye show, Why, lads, so silent here to me, Your watchmate of times long ago ? Once, for all the darkling sea, You your voices raided how clearly, Striking in when tempest sung ; Hoisting up the- storm-sail cheerly, Life is storm—let storm ! you rung."

This, of course, is not great poetry, or intelligible poetry, or well punctuated poetry ; but it seems to me to be alive with echoes of what was to come. The verse with which the poem concludes is equally characteristic :—

" But, gunmates lashed in shotted canvas,

If where long watch-below ye keep,

Never the shrill, ' All hands up hammocks I '

Breaks the spell that charms your sleep, And summoning trumps might vainly call,

And booming guns implore—

A beat, a heart-beat musters all, One heart-beat at heart-core.

It musters. But to clasp, retain ;

To see you at the halyards main—

To hear your chorus once again ! "

Then take one of the very last, the poem called " Bridegroom Dick," written as late as '76, addressed to his wife :—

" The troublous colic o' intestine war

It sets the bowels o' affection ajar.

But, lord, old dame, so spins the whizzing world, A humming-top. ay, for the little boy-gods Flogging it well with their smart little rods, Tittering at time and the coil uncurled."

" The little boy-gods " making the world a whip-top is surely a moving conceit. The poem soon maunders off to reminiscences of old shipmates till you get a banality in the pseudo-Masefleld and Hardy styles. Splendid, if maddening,' is a poem called " The Haglets," an account of the British Admiral who took the Plate Fleet. With Melville at sea the.English and American Navies shade off into each other. It is full of lines such as

" The prow, a scedsenan, sows the spray " ;

Or

" Tokdoes great, grand draperies, too, Spain's steel and silk, and splendors from Peru."

Take this line for the old Admiral lying on his tomb with swords at his feet and trophies at his head :— " He marks the vague reserve of heaven " ; or again :-

Belted he sits in drowsy light, And, hatted, nods—the Admiral of the White."

Here is. a fragment from the end of the poem :— " Imbedded deep with shells And drifted treasure deep, For ever he sinks deeper in Unfathomable sleep—

His cannon round him thrown, His sailors at his feet, The wizard sea enchanting them Where never haglets beat."

Here is moat of a short poem called " The Figure-Head." It seems to me strangely Gravesian :- " The 'Charles-and-Emma' seaward sped (Named from the careen pair at prow), He so smart, and a curly head,

She tricked forth as a bride knows how : Pretty stem for the port, I trow I But iron-rust and alum-spray And chafing-gear, and sun and dew Vexed this lad. and lassie gay,

Tears in their eyes, salt tears nor few ;

And the- hug relaxed with the failing glue."

The embrace dissolving with the glue is admirable. Melville is always at his best when he is inspired by the

freemasonry of the sea. The poem " To Ned " is delightful in its wistful irony and romance. Also, it has a curious

Iloratian touch in the first line :- " Nor less the satiate year impends When, wearying of routine-resorts, The pleasure-hunter shall break loose, Ned, for our Pantheistic ports :— Marquesas and glenned isles that be Authentic Edens in a Pagan sea. • But, tell, shall he, the tourist, find Our isles the same in violet-glow Enamouring us what years and years- Ah, Ned, what years and years ago !

Well, Adam advances, smart in pace, But scarce by violets that advance you trace."

Can you beat " Pantheistic ports " or " Authentic Edens in a Pagan sea " ?

This review is becoming an anthology ! And yet I could quote two or three dozen more strange and haunting lines from thoroughly bad poems.

I shall end my dealings with the poems by quoting the whole of a curious, bad poem. It requires, however, a word or two of comment to make it intelligible. The reader must remember that first, last and all the time Melville, when he was in his poetic moods, was a confirmed and irrational ironist. This does not mean a satirist, or cynic, or critic, but a real taster and enjoyer of the irony of circumstances for its own sake. He was given to irony as other men to the bottle. As an example of how he gets his legs entangled in the gleaming falchion of irony, which occasionally he used so deftly, read, then, the following :— " THE AGE OF THE ANTONINES.

While faith forecasts millennial years Spite Europe's embattled lines,

Back to the Past one glance be cast—

The Age of the Antonines !

0 summit of fate, 0 zenith of time When a pagan gentleman reigned, And the olive was nailed to the inn of the world Nor the peace of the just was feigned.

A halcyon Age, afar it shines, Solstice of Man and the Antonines.

Hymns to the nations' friendly gods Went up from the fellowly shrines, No demagogue beat the pulpit-drum In the Age of the Antonines ! The sting was not dreamed to be taken from death, No Paradise pledged or sought, But they reasoned of fate at the flowing feast, Nor stifled the fluent thought,

We sham, we shuffle while faith declines—

They were frank in the Age of the Antonines."

The ordinary man will say when he reads " When a pagan gentleman reigned," " What a piece of barbarism ! What ridiculous, prosaic vulgarity ! " Yet it is nothing of the kind. If you pass through the overgrown, bramble-eficum- bered labyrinth of Melville's mind, you will find that at the centre he is washing his own hands with ironic soap ! But the poem is not all ironic. In a sense Melville always really hankered after " the pagan gentleman." All the same, he loved to mock himself.

As an addendum, I must notice the very remarkable piece of prose called " Supplement," which was added by Melville to his volume of Battle Pieces. Though very short, it is in its way as great as Wordsworth's immortal letter to Captain Pasley :— " There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual impartiality should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered because not partisan. . . . Some of us are concerned us yet the South shows no penitence. But what exactly do we mean by this ? Since down to the close of the war she never confessed any for braving it, the only penitence now left her is that which springs solely from the sense of discomfiture ; and since this evidently would be a contrition hypocritical, it would be unworthy in us to demand it. Certain it is that penitence, in the sense of voluntary humiliation, will never be displayed. Nor does this afford just ground for unreserved condemnaticn. It is enough, for all practical purposes, if the South have been taught by the terrors of civil war to feel that Secession, like Slavery, is against Destiny ; that both now lie buried in one grave ; that her fate is linked with ours ; and that together we comprise the Nation."

Melville was a fighting man, a hater of slavery, and a lover of the Union ; but he realized when the war was over that the most foolish as well as the most wicked thing was to go on hating the South. Could anything be better than tim passage above, or more timely, not for us—the British

people are not haters—but for our late' Allies ? -

But here comes in the essential irony. We are quite honest in our reftisal to hate, and yet that is the very thing which most exasperates the Latin races. They quite honestly think it is mere selfish, sordid egotism. The grocer refuses to hate others because he wants to get orders

Here is another passage :—

" If George IV. could, out of the graceful instinct of a gentleman, raise an honourable monument in the great fane of Christendom over the remains of the enemy of his dynasty, Charles Edward, the invader of England and victor in the rout of Prestonpans- upon whose head the king's ancestor but one reign removed had set a • price—is it probable that the grandchildren of General Grant will pursue with rancor, or slur by sour neglect, the memory of Stonewall Jackson ? "

Equally admirable is the following :- "Noble was the gesture into which patriotic passion surprised the people in a utilitarian time and country ; yet the glory of the war falls short of its pathos—a pathos which now at last ought to disarm all animosity."

After declaring that " no consideration should tempt us to pervert the national victory into oppression for the van- quished," and the noble declaration that " Rightly will more forbearance be required from the North than the South, for the North is victor," Melville ends with the dignified and noble, if obvious, sentiment :-

" Let us pray that the terrible historic tragedy of our time may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved country through terror and pity ' • and may fulfilment verify in the end those expectations which kindle the bars of Progress and Humanity."

I will end with a verse quotation from one of the War- Poems :-

" A darker side there is ; but doubt

In Nature's charity hovers there :- If men for new agreement yearn, Then 'old upbraiding best forbear : ' The South's the sinner ! ' Well, so let it be ; But shall the North sin worse, and stand the Pharisee ?

0, now that brave men yield the sword, Mine be the manful soldier-view ; By how much more they boldly warred, By so much more is mercy due :

When Vicksburg fell, and the moody files marched out,

Silent the victors stood, scorning to raise a shout."

In this context I may be pardoned a reminiscence. I remember well Lord Cromer telling me his experience of this spirit. As a young Artillery officer he visited New York during what seemed the very darkest part of the war from the point of view of the North. He found, he told me, in the great city an adamantine determination to fight the war through to the end. The merchant princes, whose fortunes were at stake; and whose sons were at the front, would not hear of letting the erring South go in peace to maintain slavery. But he also found the most intense bitterness. He then went up to Grant's army outside Petersburg. Here he lived in the trenches with subalterns of the Northern Artillery.' The moral and psychological change was amazing. There was an equal determination to fight the thing out, to save the Union and to put an end to slavery for ever. But there was no bitterness whatever. Cromer was not merely no militarist but a strong anti- militarist. Also he was no sentimentalist ; yet, as he recalled his experience, you could see how much. he had been moved and how proud he felt of the magnanimity of his old