On a bleak and snowy November day in 1851, the Hawthorne family, with their trunks, got into a large farm wagon and drove away from the little red house. And with the departure of Hawthorne, Melville had dreamed the last of his avenging dreams. There may have been some association between the two men while Hawthorne was in West Newton, and later in Concord, but no records survive. In 1856, on his way to the Holy Land, Melville visited Hawthorne at Southport two days after arriving in Liverpool. Melville’s account of the meeting is thus recorded in his journal:

Three days later, Melville was off for Constantinople. In his English Note-book, under November 30th, 1856, Hawthorne wrote:

Mr. Julian Hawthorne reports of this meeting: “At Southport the chief event of interest during the winter was a visit from Herman Melville, who turned up at Liverpool on his way to Constantinople, and whom Hawthorne brought out to spend a night or two with us. ‘He looked much the same as he used to do; a little paler, perhaps, and a little sadder, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner. I felt rather awkward at first, for this is the first time I have met him since my ineffectual attempt to get him a consular appointment from General Pierce. However, I failed only from real lack of power to serve him; so there was no reason to be ashamed, and we soon found ourselves on pretty much the former terms of sociability and confidence. Melville has not been well, of late; he has been affected with neuralgic complaints, and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind. So he left his place in Pittsfield, and has come to the Old World. He informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation, and I think will never rest until he gets hold of some definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sandhills amidst which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.’

“Melville made the rounds of Liverpool under the guidance of Henry Bright; and afterwards Hawthorne took him to Chester; and they parted the same evening, ‘at a street corner, in the rainy evening. I saw him again on Monday, however. He said that he already felt much better than in America; but observed that he did not anticipate much pleasure in his rambles, for that the spirit of adventure is gone out of him. He certainly is much overshadowed since I saw him last; but I hope he will brighten as he goes onward. He sailed on Tuesday, leaving a trunk behind him, and taking only a carpet-bag to hold all his travelling-gear. This is the next best thing to going naked; and as he wears his beard and moustache, and so needs no dressing-case,—nothing but a toothbrush,—I do not know a more independent personage. He learned his travelling habits by drifting about, all over the South Seas, with no other clothes or equipage than a red flannel shirt and a pair of duck trousers. Yet we seldom see men of less criticisable manners than he.’”

There is no record of these two men ever meeting again.

From the beginning, there had been, between Melville and Hawthorne, a profound incompatibility. When they met, Melville was within one last step of absolute disenchantment. One illusion, only, was to him still unblasted: The belief in the possibility of a Utopian friendship that might solace all of his earlier defeats. Ravished in solitude by his alienation from his fellows, Melville discovered that the author of The Scarlet Letter was his neighbour. He came to know Hawthorne: and his eager soul rushed to embrace Hawthorne’s as that of a brother in despair. Exultant was his worship of Hawthorne, absolute his desire for surrender. He craved of Hawthorne an understanding and sympathy that neither Hawthorne, nor any other human being, perhaps, could ever have given. His admiration for Hawthorne was, of course, as he inevitably discovered, built upon a mistaken identity. Yet, on the evidence of his letters, he for a time drew from this admiration moments both of tensest excitement and of miraculous and impregnating peace. It would be interesting, indeed, to know what Moby-Dick owed to this inspiration. It is patent fact, however, that with the publication of Moby-Dick, and Hawthorne’s departure from Lenox, Melville’s creative period was at its close. At the age of thirty-two, so brilliant, so intense, so crowded had been the range of experience that burned through him, that at the period of his life when most men are just beginning to strike their gait, Melville found himself looking forward into utter night. Nearly forty years before his death, he had come to be the most completely disenchanted of all considerable American writers.

From his youth, Melville had felt the flagrant and stubborn discord between aspiration and fact. He was born with an imagination of very extraordinary vigour, and with a constitution of corresponding vitality. In sheer capacity to feel, most American writers look pale beside him. Fired by his rebellious imagination, and abetted by his animal courage, he sallied forth in quest of happiness. Few men have ever compassed such a span of experience as he crowded within the thirty-two years of his quest; few men have lived with such daring, with such intensity. And one by one, as he put his illusions to the test, the bolts of his imagination, discharged against reality, but blazed out charred avenues to despair. It was Dante, he says in Pierre, who first “opened to his shuddering eyes the infinite cliffs and gulfs of human mystery and misery;—though still more in the way of experimental vision, than of sensational presentiment or experience.” By the age of thirty-two, he had, by first-hand knowledge of life, learned to feel the justice of Schopenhauer’s statement: “Where did Dante find the material for his Inferno if not from the world; and yet is not his picture exhaustively satisfactory? But look at his Paradise; when he attempted to describe it he had nothing to guide him, this pleasant world could not offer a single suggestion.” This passage is marked in Melville’s copy of Schopenhauer. And in Pierre he wrote: “By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and nobody is there!—appallingly vacant, as vast as the soul of a man.”

Melville’s disillusionment began at home. The romantic idealisation of his mother gave place to a recoil into a realisation of the cold, “scaly, glittering folds of pride” that rebuffed his tormented love; and he studied the portrait of his father, and found it a defaming image. In Pierre this portrait thus addresses him: “To their young children, fathers are not wont to unfold themselves.... Consider this strange, ambiguous, smile; more narrowly regard this mouth. Behold, what is this too ardent and, as it were, unchastened light in these eyes. Consider. Is there no mystery here?” In Pierre, he thought that there was.

In his boyhood, poverty added its goad to launch him forth to find happiness in distance. He discovered hideousness; and later, escaped into virgin savagery, he saw by contrast the blatant defaults of civilisation; and he learned that it was the dubious honour of the white civilised man of being “the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.” In Tahiti he was brought face to face with the bigotry and stupid self-righteousness of the proselyting Protestant mind; and there he learned that Christianity—or what passes for it—may under some circumstances be not a blessing but a blight. In Typee and Omoo he innocently turned his hand to right matters to a happier adjustment, soon to reap the reward of such temerity. In the navy he was made hideously aware of the versatility of the human animal in evil. There he found not only a rich panorama of human unloveliness, but “evils which, like the suppressed domestic drama of Horace Walpole, will neither bear representing, nor reading, and will hardly bear thinking of.” There, he was also struck by the criminal stupidity of war. In White-Jacket he asked, “are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilise civilisation and Christianise Christendom?” He was, as he calls himself, a “pondering man”: and in his evaluation of individual human life he soon came to share the judgment of Josiah Royce, another “pondering man”: “Call it human life. You can not find a comparison more thoroughly condemning it.” And he marked Schopenhauer’s tribute to his fellows: “They are just what they seem to be, and that is the worst that can be said of them.”

As “the man who lived among the cannibals” he was famous by the age of twenty-eight. But when he attempted to put his earnest convictions on paper, he was to discover that the value of the paper deteriorated thereby. When he made this discovery he was married, and a father: and debtors had to be held at bay by the point of the pen. On April 30, 1851, Harper and Brothers denied him any further advance on his royalties: they were making “extensive and expensive improvements”—and besides, he had already overdrawn nearly seven hundred dollars.

He had, too, sought personal happiness in the illusion of romantic love. The romantic lover is in especial peril of finding in marriage the sobered discovery that all his sublime and heroic effort has resulted simply in a vulgar satisfaction, and that, taking all things into consideration, he is no better off than he was before. In his poem After the Pleasure Party (in Timoleon, 1891) Melville tells such a “sad rosary of belittling pain.” As a rule, Theseus once consoled, Ariadne is forsaken; and had Petrarch’s passion been requited, his song would have ceased. Francesca and Paolo, romantic lovers who had experienced the limits of their desire, were by Dante put in Hell: and their sufficient punishment was their eternal companionship. By the very ardour of his idealisation, Melville was foredoomed to disappointment in marriage. Though both he and his wife were noble natures—indeed for that very reason—their marriage was for each a crucifixion. For between them there was deep personal loyalty without understanding. Bacon once said, “he that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or of mischief.” Melville gave such hostages to fortune: but, such was his temperament, it is difficult to believe that unencumbered he would have magnified his achievement. Mrs. Melville is remembered as a gentle, gracious, loyal woman who bore with him for over forty years, in his disillusion, his loss of health, his poverty, his obscurity. And his father-in-law, Chief Justice Shaw, befriended him with forbearance and with more substantial gifts.

With the departure of Hawthorne from Lenox, Melville was left without companionship and without illusions. And he was aware of the approach of his Nemesis even before it overtook him. He confessed to Hawthorne while finishing Moby-Dick his feeling that he was approaching the limit of his power. And these intimations were prophetic. With Moby-Dick his creative period closed.

Of the end of this period his wife says: “Wrote White Whale or Moby-Dick under unfavourable circumstances—would sit at his desk all day not writing anything till four or five o’clock—then ride to the village after dark—would be up early and out walking before breakfast—sometimes splitting wood for exercise. Published White Whale in 1851.—Wrote Pierre: published 1852. We all felt anxious about the strain on his health in Spring of 1853.”

In Pierre, Melville coiled down into the night of his soul, to write an anatomy of despair. The purpose of the book was to show the impracticability of virtue: to give specific evidence, freely plagiarised from his own psychology, that “the heavenly wisdom of God is an earthly folly to man,” “that although our blessed Saviour was full of the wisdom of Heaven, yet his gospel seems lacking in the practical wisdom of the earth; that his nature was not merely human—was not that of a mere man of the world”; that to try to live in this world according to the strict letter of Christianity would result in “the story of the Ephesian matron, allegorised.” The subtlety of the analysis is extraordinary; and in its probings into unsuspected determinants from unconsciousness it is prophetic of some of the most recent findings in psychology. “Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go,” Melville says, “if we would find out the heart of a man; descending into which is as descending a spiral stair in a shaft, without any end, and where that endlessness is only concealed by the spiralness of the stair, and the blackness of the shaft.” In the winding ambiguities of Pierre Melville attempts to reveal man’s fatal facility at self-deception; to show that the human mind is like a floating iceberg, hiding below the surface of the sea most of its bulk; that from a great depth of thought and feeling below the level of awareness, long silent hands are ever reaching out, urging us to whims of the blood and tensions of the nerves, whose origins we never suspect. “In reserves men build imposing characters,” Melville says; “not in revelations.” Pierre is not conspicuous for its reserves.

Pierre aroused the reviewers to such a storm of abuse that legend has assigned Melville’s swift obscuration to this dispraise. The explanation is too simple, as Mr. Mather contends. But there is, doubtless, more than a half truth in this explanation. The abuse that Pierre reaped, coming when it did in Melville’s career, and inspired by a book in which Melville with tragic earnestness attempted an apologia of worldly defeat, must have seemed to him in its heartlessness and total blindness to his purpose, a definitive substantiation of the thesis of his book.

Pierre has been very unsympathetically handled, even by Melville’s most penetrating and sympathetic critics. Mr. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., for example, in the second of his two essays on Herman Melville (The Review, August 9 and 16, 1919), says of Pierre that “it is perhaps the only positively ill-done book” of Melville’s. Mr. Mather grants power to the book, but he finds it “repellent and overwrought.” He recommends it only as a literary curiosity. And as a literary curiosity Mr. Arthur Johnson studied its stylistic convolutions in The New Republic of August 27, 1919. It is certainly true, as Mr. Johnson has said, that “the plot or theme, were it not so ‘done’ as to be hardly decipherable, would be to-day considered rather ‘advanced.’” Mr. Johnson contends that for morbid unhealthy pathology, it has not been exceeded even by D. H. Lawrence. All this may be very excellent ethics, but it is not very enlightening criticism.

Melville wrote Pierre with no intent to reform the ways of the world. But he did write Pierre to put on record the reminder that the world’s way is a hypocritic way in so far as it pretends to be any other than the Devil’s way also. In Pierre, Melville undertook to dramatise this conviction. When he sat down to write, what seemed to him the holiest part of himself—his ardent aspirations—had wrecked itself against reality. So he undertook to present, in the character of Pierre, his own character purged of dross; and in the character of Pierre’s parents, the essential outlines of his own parents. Then he started his hero forth upon a career of lofty and unselfish impulse, intent to show that the more transcendent a man’s ideal, the more certain and devastating his worldly defeat; that the most innocent in heart are those most in peril of being eventually involved in “strange, unique follies and sins, unimagined before.” Incidentally, Melville undertakes to show, in the tortuous ambiguities of Pierre, that even the purest impulses of Pierre were, in reality, tainted of clay. Pierre is an apologia of Melville’s own defeat, in the sense that in Pierre Melville attempts to show that in so far as his own defeat—essentially paralleling Pierre’s—was unblackened by incest, murder, and suicide, he had escaped these disasters through accident and inherent defect, rather than because of superior virtue. Pierre had followed the heavenly way that leads to damnation.

Such a thesis can be met by the worldly wisdom that Melville slanders in Pierre, only with uncompromising repugnance. There can be no forgiveness in this world for a man who calls the wisdom of this world a cowardly lie, and probes clinically into the damning imperfections of the best. His Kingdom is surely not of this world. And if this world evinces for his gospel neither understanding nor sympathy, he cannot reasonably complain if he reaps the natural fruits of his profession. Melville agreed with the Psalmist: “Verily there is a reward for the righteous.” But he blasphemed when he dared teach that the reward of virtue and truth in this world must be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Like Dante, Melville set himself up against the world as a party of one. A majority judgment, though it has the power, has not necessarily the truth. It is theoretically possible that Melville, not the world, is right. But one can assent to Melville’s creed only on penalty of destruction; and the race does not welcome annihilation. Hence this world must rejoice in its vengeance upon his blasphemy: and the self-righteous have washed their feet in the blood of the wicked.

After Pierre, any further writing from Melville was both an impertinence and an irrelevancy. No man who really believes that all is vanity can consistently go on taking elaborate pains to popularise his indifference. Schopenhauer did that thing, it is true; but Schopenhauer was an artist, not a moralist; and he was enchanted with disenchantment. Carlyle, too, through interminable volumes shrieked out the necessity of silence. But after Pierre, Melville was without internal urgings to write. “All profound things, and emotions of things,” he wrote in Pierre, “are preceded and attended by silence.” “When a man is really in a profound mood, then all merely verbal or written profundities are unspeakably repulsive, and seem downright childish to him.” Infinitely greater souls than Melville’s seem to have shared this conviction. Neither Buddha nor Socrates left a single written word; Christ wrote once only, and then in the sand.

As if the gods themselves were abetting Melville in his recoil from letters and his contempt for his hard-earned fame, the Harper’s fire of 1853 destroyed the plates of all his novels, and practically all of the copies of his books then in stock. One hundred and eighty-five copies of Typee were burned; 276 copies of Omoo; 491 copies of Mardi; 296 copies of Redburn; 292 copies of White-Jacket; 297 copies of Moby-Dick; 494 copies of Pierre. There survived only 10 copies of Mardi, 60 copies of Moby-Dick and 110 copies of Pierre. All of these books except Pierre were reissued, but with no rich profit either to Harper’s or to Melville. A typical royalty account is that covering the period between October 6, 1863, and August 1, 1864. During this period, 54 copies of Typee were sold; 56 of Omoo; 42 of Redburn; 49 of Mardi; 29 of White-Jacket; 48 of Moby-Dick; and 27 of Pierre. It was a fortunate year, indeed, for Melville that brought him in $100 royalties. During most of his life, Melville’s account with Harper’s was overdrawn: a fact that speaks more for the generosity of his publisher than for the appreciation of his public. Melville surely never achieved opulence by his pen. Convinced of the futility of writing and effort, Melville wanted only tranquillity for thought. But his health was breaking, and his family had to be fed. So he looked about him for some unliterary employment.

The following letter from Richard Henry Dana explains itself:

Melville was not appointed to a consular post in the Pacific: so his brother Allan busied himself in looking for an appointment elsewhere, as the following letter, addressed to Hon. Lemuel Shaw, shows:

Of the domestic happenings at Arrowhead at this time, very little is known. One letter of Mrs. Melville’s survives:

Failing of a consular appointment, Melville was forced to continue writing. He busied himself with the story of the “revolutionary beggar.” Melville based his story upon “a little narrative, forlornly published on sleazy grey paper,” that he had “rescued by the merest chance from the rag-pickers.” Copies of this narrative are not excessively rare. The title page reads: “Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (a native of Cranston, Rhode Island) who was a soldier in the American Revolution, and took a distinguished part in the Battle of Bunker Hill (in which he received three wounds) after which he was taken Prisoner by the British, conveyed to England, where for thirty years he obtained a livelihood for himself and family, by crying ‘Old Chairs to Mend’ through the Streets of London.—In May last, by the assistance of the American Consul, he succeeded (in the 79th year of his age) in obtaining a passage to his native country, after an absence of 48 years. Providence: Printed by Henry Trumbull—1824 (Price 28 cents).” The result was Israel Potter, published in book form by G. P. Putnam in 1855, after having appeared serially in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine. Israel Potter is, in most part, a spirited narrative containing, so Mr. Mather states, “the best account of a sea fight in American fiction.” It was praised, too, by Hawthorne for its delineations of Franklin and John Paul Jones, and doubtless deserves a wider recognition than has ever been given it. Interestingly enough, the book is dedicated to Bunker Hill Monument.

Between 1853 and 1856, Melville published twelve articles, inclusive of Israel Potter, in Putnam’s Magazine and in Harper’s Monthly. Melville made from a selection from these his Piazza Tales (1856), published in New York by Dix and Edwards, in London by Sampson Low. Of these, The Bell Tower, Don Benito Cereno and The Encantadas show the last glow of Melville’s literary glamour, the final momentary brightening of the embers before they sank into blackness and ash. There exists a letter from Putnam’s Monthly, dated May 12, 1854, and signed by Charles T. Briggs—refusing a still unpublished story of Melville’s out of fear of “offending the religious sensibilities of the public and the Congregation of Grace Church.” This letter is less important because of its exquisite sensitiveness, than because of its mention of a letter from Lowell; a letter in which Lowell is reported to have read The Encantadas. According to Briggs’ communication, Lowell was so moved that “the figure of the cross on the ass’ neck brought tears into his eyes, and he thought it the finest touch of genius he had seen in prose.” Swinburne speaks of “the generous pleasure of praising”: this pleasure Lowell indulged frequently, and in his wholesome and whole-hearted way. Of Hawthorne, Lowell said: “The rarest creative imagination of the century, the rarest in some ideal respects since Shakespeare.” The Confidence Man was published in 1857: but it was a posthumous work. Thereafter, Melville was to try his hand at poetry, and with results little meriting the total oblivion into which his poetry has fallen; and in his old age he was again to turn to prose: but before Melville was half through his mortal life his signal literary achievement was done. The rest, if not silence, was whisper.