‘It appears to be a law,’ he says, ‘that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. Those qualities which bring you near to the one estrange you from the other.’ Perhaps that is true. The greatest passion of his life was his passion for nature. It was more than a passion, indeed; it was an affinity; and in this he differs from men like White and Jefferies. He was gifted, we are told, with an extraordinary keenness of the senses; he could see and hear what other men could not; his touch was so delicate that he could pick up a dozen pencils accurately from a box holding a bushel; he could find his way alone through thick woods at night. He could lift a fish out of the stream with his hands; he could charm a wild squirrel to nestle in his coat; he could sit so still that the animals went on with their play round him. He knew the look of the country so intimately that if he had waked in a meadow he could have told the time of year within a day or two from the flowers at his feet. Nature had made it easy for him to pick up a living without effort. He was so skilled with his hands that by labouring forty days he could live at leisure for the rest of the year. We scarcely know whether to call him the last of an older race of men, or the first of one that is to come. He had the toughness, the stoicism, the unspoilt senses of an Indian, combined with the self-consciousness, the exacting discontent, the susceptibility of the most modern. At times he seems to reach beyond our human powers in what he perceives upon the horizon of humanity. No philanthropist ever hoped more of mankind, or set higher and nobler tasks before him, and those whose ideal of passion and of service is the loftiest are those who have the greatest capacities for giving, although life may not ask of them all that they can give, and forces them to hold in reserve rather than to lavish. However much Thoreau had been able to do, he would still have seen possibilities beyond; he would always have remained, in one sense, unsatisfied. That is one of the reasons why he is able to be the companion of a younger generation.
He died when he was in the full tide of life, and had to endure long illness within doors. But from nature he had learnt both silence and stoicism. He had never spoken of the things that had moved him most in his private fortunes. But from nature, too, he had learnt to be content, not thoughtlessly or selfishly content, and certainly not with resignation, but with a healthy trust in the wisdom of nature, and in nature, as he says, there is no sadness. ‘I am enjoying existence as much as ever,’ he wrote from his deathbed, ‘and regret nothing.’ He was talking to himself of moose and Indian when, without a struggle, he died.
Herman Melville.
Somewhere upon the horizon of the mind, not recognizable yet in existence, ‘Typee’ and ‘Omoo’ together with the name of Herman Melville, float in company. But since Herman Melville is apt to become Whyte Melville or Herman Merivale and ‘Omoo’ for some less obvious reason connects itself with the adventures of an imaginary bushranger who is liable to turn jockey and then play a part in the drama of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, it is evident that a mist, due to ignorance or the lapse of time, must have descended upon those far distant regions. Ignorance we do not scruple to admit; the lapse of time, since the first of August marks the centenary of Melville’s birth, is undeniable; but this haziness may spring in part from a little seed dropped years ago by the books themselves. Was not someone talking about the South Seas? Typee,’ they said, was in their opinion the best account ever written of - something or other. Memory has dropped that half of the sentence, and then, as memory will, has drawn a great blue line and a yellow beach. Waves are breaking; there is a rough white frill of surf; and how to describe it one does not know, but there is, simultaneously, a sense of palm trees, yellow limbs, and coral beneath clear water. This blundering brushwork of memory has been corrected since by Stevenson, Gauguin, Rupert Brooke and many others. Yet, in some important respects, Herman Melville, with his ‘Typee’ and ‘Omoo’ and his ineradicable air of the early forties, has done the business better than the more sophisticated artists of our own day.
He was not sophisticated; perhaps it would be wrong to call him an artist. He came, indeed, to the Marquesas Islands as an ordinary seaman on board a whaling ship in the year 1842. Nor was it a love of the picturesque, but rather a hatred of salt beef, stale water, hard bread, and the cruelty of a captain that led him, in company with another sailor, to try his fortunes inland. They deserted, and, with as much food and calico as they could stow in the front of their frocks, made off into the interior of Nukuheva. But at what point their marvellous adventures in reaching the valley of the Typees cease to be authentic and become, for the sake of an American public, of the heroic order we have no means of saying. The number of days that two strong men, going through incredible exertions meanwhile, can support themselves upon a hunk of bread soaked in sweat and ingrained with shreds of tobacco must be fewer than Melville makes out; and then the cliff down which they lowered themselves by swinging from creeper to creeper with horrid gaps between them - was it as steep as he says, and the creepers as far apart? And did they, on another occasion, as he asserts, break a second gigantic fall by pitching on to the topmost branches of a very high palm tree? It matters little; whatever the proportions of art and truth, each obstacle, and that is all we ask of it, seems impassable. There can be no way out of this, one says for the tenth time, a little grimly, for one has come to feel a kind of comradeship for the poor wretches in their struggles; and then, at the last moment, the incredible sagacity of Toby and the manful endurance of Melville find an outlet, as they deserve to do; and we have just drawn breath and judged them warranted in breaking off another precious crumb of the dwindling loaf when Toby, who has run on a little ahead, gives a shout, and behold, the summit on which they stand is not the end of their journey, but a ravine of immense depth and steepness still separates them from the valley of their desire; the bread must be put back uneaten and, with Melville’s leg getting more and more painful, and nothing to cheer us but the conviction that it is better to die of starvation here than in the hold of a whaling ship, off again we must start. Even when the valley is reached there is a terrible moment while Melville hesitates whether to reply ‘Typee’ or ‘Happar’ to the demand of the native chief, and only by a fluke saves them from instant death; nor need one be a boy in an Eton jacket to skip half a dozen chapters in a frenzy to make sure that the reason of Toby’s disappearance was neither tragic nor in any way to his discredit as a friend.
But then, when they are settled as the guests, or rather as the idolized prisoners, of the Typees, Melville appears to change his mind, as an artist is not generally supposed to do. Dropping his adventures, at which, as Stevenson said, he has proved himself ‘a howling cheese’, he becomes engrossed in the lives and customs of the natives. However much the first half of the book owed to his imagination, the second we should guess to be literally true. This random American sailor, having done his best to excite our interest in the usual way, now has to confess that what he found when he blundered into the midst of this tribe of South Sea islanders was - a little puzzling. They were savages, they were idolaters, they were inhuman beasts who licked their lips over the tender thighs of their kindred; and at the same time they were crowned with flowers, exquisite in beauty, courteous in manner, and engaged all day long in doing not only what they enjoyed doing but what, so far as he could judge, they had every right to enjoy doing. Of course, he had his suspicions. A dish of meat was not to be tasted until he had ascertained that it was pig slaughtered hospitably for him and not human flesh. The almost universal indolence of the natives was another remarkable and not altogether reassuring characteristic. Save for one old lady who busied herself ‘rummaging over bundles of old tappa, or making a prodigious clatter among the calabashes’, no one was ever seen to do anything in the way of work. Nature, of course, abetted them in their indolence. The bread fruit tree, with very little effort on their part, would give them all the food they wanted; the cloth tree, with the same gentle solicitation, provided them with tappa for their clothing. But the work needed for these process
es was light; the climate divine; and the only intimations of industry were the clear musical sounds of the different mallets, one here, one there, beating out the cloth, which rang charmingly in unison throughout the valley.
Being puzzled, Melville, very naturally, did his best to make a joke of it. He has a good laugh at Marheyo for instance, who accepted a pair of mouldy old boots with profound gratitude, and hung them round his neck for an ornament. The ancient naked women who leapt into the air like so many sticks bobbing to the surface, after being pressed perpendicularly into the water’, might be widows mourning their husbands slain in battle, but they did not seem to him decorous; he could not take his eyes off them. And then there were no laws, human or divine, except the queer business of the taboo. Yet what puzzled Herman Melville, as it puzzled Lord Pembroke twenty years later, was that this simple, idle, savage existence was after all remarkably pleasant. There must be something wrong about happiness granted on such easy terms. The earl, being the better educated of the two, puzzled out the reason. He had been smothered with flowers and hung with mats until he looked like a cross between a Roman Catholic priest and a youthful Bacchus. He had enjoyed it immensely.
I was so happy there, that I verily believe I should have been content to dream away my life, without care or ambition... It could not be, and it was best for me as it was... Peace, and quiet, and perfect freedom, are useful medicines, but not wholesome diet. Their charm lies in contrast; there is no spark without the concussion of the flint and steel; there is no fine thought, even no perfect happiness, that is not born of toil, sorrow, and vexation of spirit.
So the earl and the doctor sailed back to Wilton, and Providence saw to it that they were shipwrecked on the way. But Melville only made his escape with the greatest difficulty. He was almost drugged into acquiescence by those useful medicines, peace, quiet and perfect freedom. If there had been no resistance to his going he might have succumbed for ever. Laughter no longer did its office. It is significant that in the preface to his next book he is careful to insist that ‘should a little jocoseness be shown upon some curious traits of the Tahitians, it proceeds from no intention to ridicule’.
Did his account of some curious traits of European sailors, which directly follows, proceed from no intention to satirize? It is difficult to say. Melville reports very vividly and vigorously, but he seldom allows himself to comment. He found the whaling vessel that took him off in ‘a state of the greatest uproar’; the food was rotten; the men riotous; rather than land and lose his crew, who would certainly desert and thus cost him a cargo of whale oil, the captain kept them cruising out at sea. Discipline was maintained by a daily allowance of rum and the kicks and cuffs of the chief mate. When at last the sailors laid their case before the English Consul at Tahiti the fountain of justice seemed to them impure. At any rate, Melville and others who had insisted upon their legal rights found themselves given into the charge of an old native who was directed to keep their legs in the stocks. But his notion of discipline was vague, and somehow or other, what with the beauty of the place and the kindness of the natives, Melville began once more, curiously and perhaps dangerously, to feel content. Again there was freedom and indolence; torches brandished in the woods at night; dances under the moon, rainbow fish sparkling in the water, and women stuck about with variegated flowers. But something was wrong. Listening, Melville heard the aged Tahitians singing in a low, sad tone a song which ran: The palm trees shall grow, the coral shall spread, but man shall cease’; and statistics bore them out. The population had sunk from two hundred thousand to nine thousand in less than a century. The Europeans had brought the diseases of civilization along with its benefits. The missionaries followed, but Melville did not like the missionaries. There is, perhaps, no race on earth,’ he wrote, ‘less disposed, by nature, to the monitions of Christianity’ than the Tahitians, and to teach them any useful trade is an impossibility. Civilization and savagery blended in the strangest way in the palace of Queen Pomaree. The great leaf-hung hall, with its mats and screens and groups of natives, was furnished with rosewood writing desks, cut-glass decanters, and gilded candelabras. A coconut kept open the pages of a volume of Hogarth’s prints. And in the evenings the Queen herself would put on a crown which Queen Victoria had good-naturedly sent her from London, and walk up and down the road raising her hand as people passed her to the symbol of majesty in what she thought a military salute. So Marheyo had been profoundly grateful for the present of a pair of old boots. But this time, somehow, Melville did not laugh.
Rupert Brooke.
This memoir of Rupert Brooke has been delayed, in Mrs Brooke’s words, because of ‘my great desire to obtain the collaboration of some of his contemporaries at Cambridge and during his young manhood, for I strongly believe that they knew the largest part of him’. But his contemporaries are for the most part scattered or dead; and though Mr Marsh has done all that ability or care can do, the memoir which now appears is ‘of necessity incomplete’. It is inevitably incomplete, as Mr Marsh, we are sure, would be the first to agree, if for no other reason because it is the work of an older man. A single sentence brings this clearly before us. No undergraduate of Rupert Brooke’s own age would have seen ‘his radiant youthful figure in gold and vivid red and blue, like a page in the Riccardi Chapel’; that is the impression of an older man. The contemporary version would have been less pictorial and lacking in the half-humorous tenderness which is so natural an element in the mature vision of beautiful and gifted youth. There would have been less of the vivid red and blue and gold, more that was mixed, parti-coloured, and matter for serious debate. In addition Mr Marsh has had to face the enormous difficulties which beset the biographers of those who have died with undeveloped powers, tragically, and in the glory of public gratitude. They leave so little behind them that can serve to recall them with any exactitude. A few letters, written from school and college, a fragment of a diary - that is all. The power of expressing oneself naturally in letters comes to most people late in life. Rupert Brooke wrote freely, but not altogether without self-consciousness, and it is evident that his friends have not cared to publish the more intimate passages in his letters to them. Inevitably, too, they have not been willing to tell the public the informal things by which they remember him best. With these serious and necessary drawbacks Mr Marsh has done his best to present a general survey of Rupert Brooke’s life which those who knew him will be able to fill in here and there more fully, perhaps a little to the detriment of the composition as a whole. But they will be left, we believe, to reflect rather sadly upon the incomplete version which must in future represent Rupert Brooke to those who never knew him.
Nothing, it is true, but his own life prolonged to the usual term, and the work that he would have done, could have expressed all that was latent in the crowded years of his youth - years crowded beyond the measure that is usual even with the young. To have seen a little of him at that time was to have seen enough to be made sceptical of the possibility of any biography of a man dying, as he died, at the age of twenty-eight. The remembrance of a week spent in his company, of a few meetings in London and the country, offers a tantalizing fund of memories at once very definite, very little related to the Rupert Brooke of legend, presenting each one an extremely clear sense of his presence, but depending so much upon that presence and upon other circumstances inextricably involved with it, that one may well despair of rendering a clear account to a third person, let alone to a multiple of many people such as the general public.
But the outline at least is clear enough. So much has been written of his personal beauty that to state one’s own first impression of him in that respect needs some audacity, since the first impression was of a type so conventionally handsome and English as to make it inexpressive or expressive only of something that one might be inclined half-humorously to disparage. He was the type of English young manhood at its healthiest and most vigorous. Perhaps at the particular stage he had then reached, following upon the dec
adent phase of his first Cambridge days, he emphasized this purposely; he was consciously and defiantly pagan. He was living at Grantchester; his feet were permanently bare; he disdained tobacco and butcher’s meat; and he lived all day, and perhaps slept all night, in the open air. You might judge him extreme, and from the pinnacle of superior age assure him that the return to Nature was as sophisticated as any other pose, but you could not from the first moment of speech with him doubt that, whatever he might do, he was an originator, one of those leaders who spring up from time to time and show their power most clearly by subjugating their own generation. Under his influence the country near Cambridge was full of young men and women walking barefoot, sharing his passion for bathing and fish diet, disdaining book learning, and proclaiming that there was something deep and wonderful in the man who brought the milk and in the woman who watched the cows. One may trace some of the effects of this belief in the tone of his letters at this time; their slap-dash method, their hasty scrawled appearance upon the paper, the exclamations and abbreviations were all, in part at least, a means of exorcising the devils of the literary and the cultured. But there was too much vigour in his attitude in this respect, as in all others, to lend it the appearance of affectation. It was an amusing disguise; it was in part, like many of his attitudes, a game played for the fun of it, an experiment in living by one keenly inquisitive and incessantly fastidious; and in part it was the expression of a profound and true sympathy which had to live side by side with highly sophisticated tastes and to be reported upon by a nature that was self-conscious in the highest degree. Analyse it as one may, the whole effect of Rupert Brooke in those days was a compound of vigour and of great sensitiveness. Like most sensitive people, he had his methods of self-protection; his pretence now to be this and now to be that. But, however sunburnt and slap-dash he might choose to appear at any particular moment, no one could know him even slightly without seeing that he was not only very sincere, but passionately in earnest about the things he cared for. In particular, he cared for literature and the art of writing as seriously as it is possible to care for them. He had read everything and he had read it from the point of view of a working writer. As Mrs Cornford says, ‘I can’t imagine him using a word of that emotional jargon in which people usually talk or write of poetry. He made it feel more like carpentering.’ In discussing the work of living writers he gave you the impression that he had the poem or the story before his eyes in a concrete shape, and his judgments were not only very definite but had a freedom and a reality which mark the criticism of those who are themselves working in the same art. You felt that to him literature was not dead nor of the past, but a thing now in process of construction by people many of whom were his friends; and that knowledge, skill, and, above all, unceasing hard work were required of those who attempt to make it. To work hard, much harder than most writers think it necessary, was an injunction of his that remains in memory from a chaos of such discussions.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 504
