editor to print his letter, which he hopes will be copied by Albany, Boston, and New York papers, so that he may find Mr. Melville."

Toby's letter did not persuade anybody; no doubt it was all arranged beforehand. How, indeed, could you put the matter to the proof, and verify the names, facts, and dates ? Toby swears for Melville, and Melville for Toby, and the Buffalo editor for both; whereupon, he too, receives a brevet of veracity. Mascarille answers for Jodelet, and Jodelet for Mascarille. The affair became complicated, and the galleries were very much amused; there was something there for the Americans to guess, speculate, conjecture, calculate about. The chances of betting and the hazard of the stocks had gotten into literature. Mr. Herman Melville pushed his point like a true child of the United States, he went a-head according to the sacramental word. The go-a-head system, the enterprise, the en-avant is everything now with the most going, most active people on the globe, the smartest nation in all creation. "Our mothers," says a clever American, "make haste to get us into the world; we are in a hurry to live; they are in a hurry to bring us up. We make our fortune by a turn of the hand, to lose it again in the twinkling of an eye. Our body goes ten leagues an hour; our spirit is high-pressure; our life goes like a shooting star; our death is like a thunder-clap."

Mr. Herman Melville was then in a hurry to profit by his first success. He produced a sequel to Typee, told how Toby had escaped being eaten, and called this sequel Omoo. About the same may be said of this book as of the others. It had success enough, and the reputation of the teller was made. Every body allowed that Mr. Melville had an infinite imagination; that he invented the most curious possible ex

travaganzas, and that, like Cyrano de Bergerac, he excelled in serious mystification.

After reading Typee and Omoo, I had, as I have said, much doubt as to the justice of the general English and American opinion, which one finds in the majority of the journals and reviews, wherein the "romances" of Mr. Melville are discussed. The freshness and depth of the impressions produced by these books amazed me. I saw a writer, not so capable of amusing himself with a dream, or of playing with a cloud, as oppressed by a powerful memory which beset him. Type of the present anglo-American, living for and by sensation, I found that Mr. Herman Melville had described himself. Yet, I was content to hesitate, when chance brought me in contact with one of the worthiest citizens of the United States, a clever and instructed man, well versed in the intellectual affairs of his race.

"Will you," said I, "tell me the true name of the singular writer who calls himself Herman Melville, and who has published Omoo and Typee?"

"You are," he replied, "much too subtile. You look for deceit everywhere. Mr. Herman Melville's name is Herman Melville. He is the son of one of our old secretaries of legation at the Court of St. James. Fiery and ardent in his temperament, he early went to sea, and, as we say, followed the sea. Were he in the Navy, or in a privateer; what adventures marked his stormy and unclassical studies he only can tell; and if you will visit Massachusetts, where he married and lives, I would recommend you to ask him. He is an athletic man, still young, naturally hardy and enterprising; one of those men all nerve and muscle, who love to struggle with wind and wave, men and seasons. He married the daughter of Judge Shaw, one of the most distinguished magistrates of New England, and now lives a calm, domestic

life, surrounded by a just and singular celebrity, which he accepts, although somewhat equivocal; for he is regarded as a maker of clever, but useless fables. His family, who know that his adventures, as told by him, are true, are not flattered by the eulogium accorded to his imagination, at the expense of his morality. His cousin, with whom I passed last summer, said much about the obstinate refusal of readers to believe in the truth of Typee and Omoo. Said he, 'my cousin writes very well, especially when he re-produces exactly what he has felt; not having studied in the usual way, he preserves the freshness of his impressions. It is precisely because his young life was passed in the midst of savages, that he has an air of reality, and such brilliant coloring. He could not invent the scenes which he describes. Charmed by his improvised reputation, he would be vexed, I think, to lose his reputation as an inventor. The re-appearance of his companion Toby or Richard Green, a real personage, annoyed him to some degree. It made him descend from the pedestal of a romance to the level of a mere narrator.'

"For me, who know Melville, his wild disposition, and the history of his youth-who have actually read his rough notes, now in the hands of his father-in-law, and who have talked twenty times with Richard Green, his fidus Achates, I laugh at the pre-occupation of a public accustomed to see a lie where no lie is, the truth where all is a lie. Read Typee again, I do not speak of Omoo, a pale second impression— read the first of these books, not as a romance, but as a simple picture of Polynesian manners. The new traveller is more truthful than Bougainville, who has changed the groves of Tahiti into Pompadour saloons; than Diderot who takes the voluptuous narratives of Bougainville to embellish and color his sensual materialism; than Ellis or Earle who busied themselves in justifying the English missionaries, and who

lack both strength and style. To be sure Melville's coloring is too violent, but that is not astonishing. At his age, when the first sap of life lends a passionate force to ideas, he must have received emotions, vivid, exaggerated, if you will, from the novelty of the scenes, the singularity of the perils. His style is exuberant; his colors Rubens-like, and his predilection for dramatic effect in bad taste. Nevertheless, there are as many romantic details in the old Spanish doctor, Saaverde de Figueroa, who first described these voluptuous isles. Like all his predecessors, Figueroa, Cook, Bougainville, Melville wrote under the power of an intoxication produced by the prestiges of Nature and the strangeness of customs.

SECTION III.

NEW VOYAGES OF MELVILLE OF HOW, NOT HAVING BEEN

EATEN, HE THROWS HIMSELF INTO THE REGION OF CHIMERA. SYMBOLS.

The real value of the two books aforesaid consists in the vivacity of their impressions, and the lightness of the pencil. Seduced by his first success, the author tried to write a new and singular book "Mardi, and a Voyage thither." Oppressed by the reputation of inventor which men had given him, he determined to merit it: he strove to exhibit all those treasures of imagination which were attributed to him. Let us see how he succeeded.

In the first place, like a good merchant, not wishing to lose the credit that his first affair in the isle of Tior had procured, he stuck to Polynesia-fault the first. Then he tried to be

absolutely original-fault the second. Is one original at will?

We must not reproach the Americans with want of originality in the arts; originality is not to be commanded, and comes late; nations and individuals begin by imitation. Originality is a quality of ripe minds, of such as know thoroughly their own depth and extent; childhood is never original. This excessive pretention to novelty has, of course, ended in a mournful mixture of grotesque comedy and fantastic grandeur, to be found in no other book. There is nothing so wretched as pomposity in what is vulgar, common-place in the unintelligible, an accumulation of catastrophes with emphatically slow description. These vagaries, ornaments, graces; this flowery style, so festooned and scolloped, is like the arabesques of certain writing masters, one cannot read the text.

A humoristic book, a voyage without compass upon a limitless sea, is the rarest product of art: Sterne, Jean Paul, and Cervantes-men of genius—have alone succeeded. What study, reflection, toil, knowledge of style, what power of combination and progress of civilization was necessary to create Rabelais, Swift, Cervantes!

Mr. Melville begins with faery, to continue by romantic fiction and then essays symbolical irony. We are not astonished then that Mardi has all the defects of the infant AngloAmerican literature. We observe the curious development of a nationality of the second creation; and we must remember that there are diseases peculiar to growth, and that men and races do not develope themselves by their virtues alone but also by their vices.

Americans, like all people who have not yet a personal literature, see vulgarity in simplicity. Hyperbole is the common vice of a commencing as of a decaying literature. To this is joined the incorrectness consequent upon too rapid