CHAPTER III.

SECTION I.

HERMAN MELVILLE AND HIS REAL VOYAGES.

MR. MELVILLE lived for four months, absolutely like a primitive man, in Noukahiva, a Polynesian island, and it is his adventures while there that form the subject of his first books, the narratives of his actual voyages. He lived in an unknown valley in one of the Marquesas Isles, in the midst of an inland tribe, scarcely visited by the missionary, and which has not yet undergone that half-civilization which is imposed upon the savages of the coast by their contact with Europeans. These latter have, as we know, become strange samples of pretentious barbarism, and coquettish ignorance. Mr. Melville, who lived very little among the half-civilized, knew well the savages who ate up his comrade, and intended to eat him.

Unfortunately, Mr. Melville's style is so ornate, his Rubens-like tints are so vivid and warm, and he has so strong a predilection for dramatic effects, that one does not know exactly how much confidence to repose in his narrative. We do not take except cum grano salis, his florid descriptions.

Like all travellers, he is an enthusiast for Noukahiva. Since Doctor Saaverde described these scenes, down to the aphrodisiac narratives of Bougainville, these latitudes have had the singular property of warming the traveller's pen. Mr. Melville has felt the same influence; he writes like his predecessors, except that Don Christoval Saaverde de Figueroa was more mystic, that is, more a man of his age; Cook more simply, naïve, and sailor-like; Bougainville more ornate, more eighteenth-century-like and refined; while our cotemporary, Mr. Melville, is hardy, violent, and brusque, with a tendency to the terrible, the interesting, the unforeseen. It is, however, for him, not for us, to answer for the truth of

his story.

Certainly he tells rather romantic stories; but the violence of his coloring, natural in a sailor, takes its source from the force and variety of his impressions. The sailor does not proceed gently and gradually from one degree of latitude to a neighboring one; there are no shades for him; nothing prepares his imagination to receive the shock of those energetic oppositions which shake it incessantly; he passes without preparation from the activity of a European port, Liverpool or Brest, to the flowering and silent solitudes of Noukahiva; from the charms of Mexico to the Polar ices which beat his

ship and imprison it in their silent desolation. Thus no one can more closely resemble an Arabian Night's story-teller, than a genuine sailor. Mr. Herman Melville, endowed with a strong taste for the marvellous, found himself on board of the Dolly; he does not say in what rank; perhaps he was making for his special diversion one of those voyages to which Americans willingly consecrate their pocket-money.

Be it as it may, he had accompanied the Dolly in her previous voyages. Turn by turn, with her, he had visited the icy coasts of the Atlantic regions, the scenes of mad cannibalism

at the Viti Islands, the Spanish Tertullias and Alamedas at Manilla, strange strand, where the guitar of Seville resounds. beneath the fingers of women, barely clothed; and finally he he had seen the lake festivals of Soulou, draped in muslin and leading the indolent life of a Rajah of Hindostan.

Then the Dolly carried Mr. Melville to New South Wales, whose ferocious tribes made the crew associate in their warceremonial and their death-dances. The Dolly's relaxation at Noukahiva succeeded to so many and various impressions and emotions, to six months of danger and fatigue.

[Note. This is followed in the original by the complete substance of Typee, which we do not of course reproduce here, but give only the criticism of Mr. Chasles.]

Taipee is a work in which we find most abundant details, new and circumstantial of the Pacific archipelago, a world held in reserve for future civilization. In reading it, one cannot avoid being surprised at the immensity of the margin still left for the development of the human race.

A fiftieth part of the globe is nearly civilized. Already we see, in certain groups, in the zones of which we speak, some germs, rather grotesque, of imitation of Europe; by the side of the entirely savage chiefs of Ambao, the king of the Sandwich Isles, Kamehameha III., in his capital of Honolula, wears the slight Spanish moustache, the uniform à la française, the beard close shaved, yellow gloves, and no shoes nor stockings. The Kanakas of Sandwich, and the habitants of Tahiti, the most advanced in their social education, are amusing models of an incomplete sociality. As for the Typees of Noukahiva, among whom Mr. Melville has lived, they preserve the ancient characteristics of their race; they are very lazy, simple, and limited of intellect, adroit with their hands, voluptuous and fond of eating their fellow creatures—in other respects, the best fellows in the world.

What may be doubted by the readers of the Taipee is that human races are elevated only slowly and with difficulty; that the progress of their education is the work of time and circumstances, and the ideal type of physical and moral beauty is no more found upon the shores of unknown seas, nor in virgin forests than the hundred-leaved rose, or the savory peach in the pampas of America or the primitive shadows of Australia. I have always suspected that MM. de Bougainville, Maupertuis, Rousseau and Diderot did not tell us the truth; that one was of powerful imagination, and that another cmbellished the facts, covered them with an agreeable warmth and gave us false pictures of savage life.

Virtue for virtue Malesherbes is much greater than Tongatabou or the Great Black-snake; pleasure for pleasure, the ballet at the Opera is finer than the naïve dances and graceful entwinings of the Hamadryads of Otaheite. The work of our American proves this. If he exaggerate his coloring and strive after effect, still you see that he is a truthful man, who will have sensation, at any price; excitement gives him life, he must have its seasoning even at the peril of death. Curious as a child, adventurous as a savage, he goes head foremost into objectless enterprises and executes them bravely. What he begins in the blundering headlong way of a beetle, he achieves with the courage of a man.

It is the same spirit of violence, enterprise, and disdain for the consequences, which the Americans have borrowed from their Saxon ancestors and from the savage tribes indigenous to the land which they inhabit; it is the same thirst for emotions which is shown in their commercial and industrial speculations-which makes them prefer national bankruptcy to the ennui of economical repose-which urges them forward on the inclined plane of amelioration, and which exhibits to amazed travellers, those thousand leagues of rail-road, those

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immense streams covered with steamers which jostle each other on the route, sink one another, or take unexpected leaps into the air.

SECTION II.

ARE MR. MELVILLE'S VOYAGES APOCRYPHAL?

I took these voyages for a reality. The English critics said that I deceived myself; that Herman Melville was but a nom de plume, and that his romance-travels merely showed a vigorous power of imagination, and a great skill in drawing the long-bow.

I was not of the same mind as the English critics. Certainly he has told a thousand very strange stories; he spoke of erotic and savage nymphs, idylic cannibals, temples hidden in forests and perched upon rocks of Noukahiva, handsome morais in the valleys and anthropophogy mixed with sentimental dances; but nearly all this may be found in de Bougainville, Ongas, Ellis, and Earle. He had too a stamp of verity, a savor of unknown and primitive nature, and a vivacity of impression which struck me. The shades appeared to me real, even if rather warm and for effect; and to me, the romantic adventures of the author were given with a sufficient air of truth.

Still they obstinately laughed at my credulous eulogies, and took the book for a hoax of the largest calibre. The style, without being pure and elegant, had vivacity and interest. You were astonished to see so imaginative and so gascon an American, but you admired him. The Americans understand pleasantry, except when it touches the national pride;