The success of his first volume encouraged Melville to proceed in his work, and Omoo, the sequel to Typee, appeared in England and America in 1847. Here we leave, for the most part, the dreamy pictures of island life, and find ourselves sharing the extremely realistic discomforts of a Sydney whaler in the early forties. The rebellious crew’s experiences in the Society Islands are quite as realistic as events on board ship and very entertaining, while the whimsical character, Dr. Long Ghost, next to Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, is Melville’s most striking delineation. The errors of the South Sea missions are pointed out with even more force than in Typee, and it is a fact that both these books have ever since been of the greatest value to outgoing missionaries on account of the exact information contained in them with respect to the islanders.
Melville’s power in describing and investing with romance scenes and incidents witnessed and participated in by himself, and his frequent failure of success as an inventor of characters and situations, were early pointed out by his critics. More recently Mr. Henry S. Salt has drawn the same distinction very carefully in an excellent article contributed to the Scottish Art Review. In a prefatory note to Mardi (1849), Melville declares that, as his former books have been received as romance instead of reality, he will now try his hand at pure fiction. Mardi may be called a splendid failure. It must have been soon after the completion of Omoo that Melville began to study the writings of Sir Thomas Browne. Heretofore our author’s style was rough in places, but marvellously simple and direct. Mardi is burdened with an over-rich diction, which Melville never entirely outgrew. The scene of this romance, which opens well, is laid in the South Seas, but everything soon becomes overdrawn and fantastical, and the thread of the story loses itself in a mystical allegory.
Redburn, already mentioned, succeeded Mardi in the same year, and was a partial return to the author’s earlier style. In White Jacket; or, the World in a Man-of-War (1850), Melville almost regained it. This book has no equal as a picture of life aboard a sailing man-of-war, the lights and shadows of naval existence being well contrasted.
With Moby Dick; or, the Whale (1851), Melville reached the topmost notch of his fame. The book represents, to a certain extent, the conflict between the author’s earlier and later methods of composition, but the gigantic conception of the “White Whale,” as Hawthorne expressed it, permeates the whole work, and lifts it bodily into the highest domain of romance. Moby Dick contains an immense amount of information concerning the habits of the whale and the methods of its capture, but this is characteristically introduced in a way not to interfere with the narrative. The chapter entitled “Stubb Kills a Whale” ranks with the choicest examples of descriptive literature.
Moby Dick appeared, and Melville enjoyed to the full the enhanced reputation it brought him. He did not, however, take warning from Mardi, but allowed himself to plunge more deeply into the sea of philosophy and fantasy.
Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (1852) was published, and there ensued a long series of hostile criticisms, ending with a severe, though impartial, article by Fitz-James O’Brien in Putnam’s Monthly. About the same time the whole stock of the author’s books was destroyed by fire, keeping them out of print at a critical moment; and public interest, which until then had been on the increase, gradually began to diminish.
After this Mr. Melville contributed several short stories to Putnam’s Monthly and Harper’s Magazine. Those in the former periodical were collected in a volume as Piazza Tales (1856); and of these “Benito Cereno” and “The Bell Tower” are equal to his best previous efforts.
Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), first printed as a serial in Putnam’s, is an historical romance of the American Revolution, based on the hero’s own account of his adventures, as given in a little volume picked up by Mr. Melville at a bookstall. The story is well told, but the book is hardly worthy of the author of Typee. The Confidence Man (1857), his last serious effort in prose fiction, does not seem to require criticism.
Mr. Melville’s pen had rested for nearly ten years, when it was again taken up to celebrate the events of the Civil War. 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. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), is a long mystical poem requiring, as someone has said, a dictionary, a cyclopaedia, and a copy of the Bible for its elucidation. In the two privately printed volumes, the arrangement of which occupied Mr. Melville during his last illness, there are several fine lyrics. The titles of these books are, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888), and Timoleon (1891).
There is no question that Mr. Melville’s absorption in
