This smacks of Edwardes's own fun. Irreverent speculators have often wondered when Delhi would have fallen if Sir Colin Campbell had been in command, and with the means then available. too regular. Nicholson was the man for such a crisis. He was A Trenck was better than a Daun. PATRICK MAXWELL. H "MARQUESAN MELVILLE.” AS America a literature? I am inclined to think it a grave mistake to argue seriously with those afflicted persons who periodically exercise themselves over this idlest of academic questions. It is wiser to meet them with a practical counter-thrust, and pointedly inquire, for example, whether they are familiar with the writings of Herman Melville. Whereupon, confusion will in most cases ensue, and you will go on to suggest that to criticise "Hamlet," with the prince's part omitted, would be no whit more fatuous than to demonstrate the non-existence of an American literature, while taking no account of its true intellectual giants. When it was announced, a few months ago, that "Mr. Herman Melville, the author," had just died in New York at the age of seventy-two, the news excited but little interest on this side of the Atlantic; yet, forty years ago, his name was familiar to English, as to American readers, and there is little or no exaggeration in Robert Buchanan's remark, that he is "the one great imaginative writer fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman on that continent." It was in 1846 that Melville fairly took the world by storm with his "Typee the Narrative of a four months' residence in the Marquesas Islands," the first of a brilliant series of volumes of adventure, in which reality was so deftly encircled with a halo of romance that readers were at once captivated by the force and freshness of the style and puzzled as to the personality of the author. Who and what was this mysterious sojourner in the far islands of the Pacificthis "Marquesan Melville," as a writer in Blackwood denominated him? Speculation was rife, and not unaccompanied by suspicion ; for there were some critics who not only questioned the veracity of Herman Melville's "Narratives," but declared his very name to be fictitious. "Separately," remarked one sagacious reviewer, "the names are not uncommon; we can urge no valid reason against their juncture; yet in this instance they fall suspiciously on our ear." Herman Melville, however, was far from being a mythical personage, though in his early life, as in his later, he seems to have instinctively shrunk from any other publicity than that which was brought him by his books. He was a genuine child of nature, a sort of nautical George Borrow, on whom the irresistible sea-passion had descended in his boyhood, and won him away from the ordinary routine of respectable civilised life, until, to quote his own words, to travel had become a necessity of his existence, "a way of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation." The son of a cultured American merchant, of Scotch extraction, he had early imbibed from his father's anecdotes a romantic attachment to the sea. "Of winter evenings," he says, "by the well-remembered sea-coal fires in old Greenwich Street, New York, he used to tell my brother and me of the monstrous waves at sea, mountain-high, and of the masts bending like twigs." At the age of eighteen, his father having died in bankruptcy, he found himself unexpectedly face to face with poverty and disappointment, and was forced to embark as a common seaman in a merchant vessel bound to Liverpool, a voyage of disillusionment and bitter experience, of which he has left us what is apparently an authentic record in one of his early volumes.1 Returned from this expedition, he essayed for a time to gain a quiet livelihood as a teacher. But destiny and his natural genius had willed it otherwise; it was no academic lecture-room, but the deck of a whale-ship, that was to be "his Yale College and his Harvard." "Oh, give me again the rover's life," he exclaims, "the joy, the thrill, the whirl! Let me feel thee again, old sea! Let me leap into thy saddle once more! I am sick of these terra firma toils and cares, sick of the dust and reek of towns. Let me snuff thee up, sea-breeze, and whinny in thy spray!" So in 1841 the child of nature was again aboard, and off to the Pacific on a whaler; and it was the adventures that befell him, during this absence of nearly four years' duration, that subsequently furnished the material for the chief series of his volumes. In "Typee" he related the story of his romantic captivity among a tribe of noble savages in the Marquesas; in "Omoo" we have his further wanderings in the Society and Sandwich Islands; in "White Jacket," his return voyage as a common sailor in a man-of-war. "Mardi," on the other hand, is a phantasy, in which the imaginative element, having slipped from the control of the narrative, runs riot in the wildest and most extravagant luxuriance. "Typee" must be regarded as, on the whole, the most charming of Melville's writings, and the one which may most surely count on lasting popularity; it is certainly the masterpiece of his earlier 1 Redburn, his First Voyage: being the Sailor-boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son of a Gentleman in the Merchant Service, 1849. VOL. CCLXXII. NO. 1935. S period, during which the artistic sense was still predominant over those transcendental tendencies which characterised his later volumes. Coming at a time when men's minds were filled with a vague, undefined interest in the wonders of the Pacific, and when the French annexation of Tahiti, of which Melville was an eyewitness, had drawn universal attention to that quarter of the globe, it gained an instantaneous and wide-spread success, both in America and England, and was quickly translated into several European tongues. Alike in the calm beauty of its descriptive passages, and in the intense vividness of its character-sketches, it was, and is, and must ever be, a most powerful and fascinating work. Indeed, I think I speak within the mark in saying that nothing better of its kind is to be found in English literature, so firm and clear is it in outline, yet so dreamily suggestive in the dim mystic atmosphere which pervades it. Here is a passage from one of the early chapters, itself as rhythmical as the rhythmical drifting of the whaler "Dolly" under the trade-winds of the Pacific: The sky presented a clear expanse of the most delicate blue, except along the skirts of the horizon, where you might see a thin drapery of pale clouds which never varied their form or colour. The long, measured, dirge-like swell of the Pacific came rolling along with its surface broken by little tiny waves, sparkling in the sunshine. Every now and then a shoal of flying fish, scared from the water under the bows, would leap into the air, and fall the next moment like a shower of silver into the sea. Then you would see the superb albicore, with his glittering sides, sailing aloft, and, often describing an arc in his descent, disappear on the surface of the water. Far off, the lofty jet of the whale might be seen, and nearer at hand the prowling shark, that villainous foot-pad of the seas, would come skulking along, and at a wary distance regard us with his evil eye. At times some shapeless monster of the deep, floating on the surface, would, as we approached, sink slowly into the blue waters, and fade away from the sight. But the most impressive feature of the scene was the almost unbroken silence that reigned over sky and water. Scarcely a sound could be heard but the occasional breathing of the grampus and the rippling at the cutwater. And Typee itself, the scene of Melville's detention, when he and a companion sailor had deserted from the whale-ship-what a fairyland of tropical valleys, and crystal streams, and groves of cocoapalms and bread-fruit trees, is here magically depicted for us! How life-like the portraiture of the innocent, placid, happy islanders, who, albeit cannibals at times, were yet far superior to civilised nations in many of the best qualities by which civilisation is supposed to be distingu shed! And Fayaway-surely never was Indian maiden so glorified by poet or romancer1 as is the gentle, beautiful, faithful Fayaway in Melville's marvellous tale! The strongest and tenderest Unless it be Paquita, in Joaquin Miller's Life among the Modocs, pictures that George Borrow has drawn for us of his friendly relations with the wandering gipsy-folk by roadside or dingle are not more strong and tender than Melville's reminiscences of this "peep at Polynesian life." 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. It is, furthermore, significant that Melville's familiarity with these "noble savages" was productive of a feeling the very opposite of contempt; he bears repeated and explicit testimony to the enviable healthfulness and happiness of the uncivilised society in which he sojourned so long. "The continual happiness," he says, "which, so far as I was able to judge, appeared to prevail in the valley, sprung principally from that all-pervading sensation which Rousseau has told us he at one time experienced, the mere buoyant sense of a healthful, physical existence. And indeed, in this particular, the Typees had ample reason to felicitate themselves, for sickness was almost unknown. During the whole period of my stay, I saw but one invalid among them; and on their smooth, clear skins you observed no blemish or mark of disease." Still more emphatic is his tribute to their moral qualities. "Civilisation does not engross all the virtues of humanity: she has not even her full share of them.... If truth and justice, and the better principles of our nature, cannot exist unless enforced by the statute-book, how are we to account for the social condition of the Typees? So pure and upright were they in all the relations of life, that entering their valley, as I did, under the most erroneous impressions of their character, I was soon led to exclaim in amazement: Are these the ferocious savages, the blood-thirsty cannibals, of whom I have heard such. frightful tales! . . . I will frankly declare that after passing a few weeks in this valley of the Marquesas, I formed a higher estimate of human nature than I had ever before entertained. But, alas! since then I have been one of the crew of a man-of-war, and the pent-up wickedness of five hundred men has nearly overturned all my previous theories." But here it may be asked by later, as by carlier readers, "Was Melville's narrative a true one? Is his testimony on these subjects a testimony of any scientific value?" The answer to this question, despite the suspicion of the critics, is a decided affirmative. Not only is Melville's account of Typee in close agreement with that of earlier voyagers, as, for example, Captain Porter's "Journal of a Cruise to the Pacific Ocean," published in 1822, but it has been expressly |