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 processes 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,