"Herba Santa" and the Bay of Naples

Most of the allusions to smoking we have seen in Melville’s journals, novels, poems, book collection, and pictorial experience seem as random, specific, and miscellaneous as that “mingled brew” in Jan Steen’s tavern: Melville himself smoking in London taverns; seeing smoking scenes in English, Italian, Dutch, and American galleries; aquiring smoking scenes in his book and print collections; creating smoking scenes on a warship in White-Jacket and a whale ship in Moby-Dick; recreating a Teniers tavern scene in “The Bench of Boors”; and inventing the extended tavern scene presided over by Brauwer and Steen in “At the Hostelry” (NN J 102-04; NN PP 297-99: NN BBO 184-86).

Melville did, however, publish one poem, in the last year of his life, whose treatment of the pleasures of smoking is more general, universal, and timeless. “Herba Santa” is a poem of ten stanzas, in five sections, in Timoleon. Here is its first stanza:

After long wars when comes release

Not olive wands proclaiming peace

An import dearer share

Than stems of Herba Santa hazed

In Autunn’s Indian air.

Of moods they breathe that care disarm,

They pledge us lenitive and calm. (NN PP 288-90)

“Lenitive” in the English language is like “Pausilippo” in the Italian language and in Melville’s poem: release or ease from pain or care (see CAT 120).

When young Melville smoked that “long pipe” in a London tavern after seeing Ostade’s Man Smoking (fig. 11 above) on the afternoon of November 17, 1849, after returning from the visit to Dulwich Gallery during which he saw van Ostade’s Man Smoking (fig. 11 above), he had one specific care or concern. He had just realized, after failing to sell the manuscript of White Jacket to another London publisher that “I shall not see Rome” (as he had hoped to do on this voyage to London and the Continent). “I’m floored—appetite unimpaired however—so down to the Edingburgh Castle and paid my compliments to chop. Smoked a long pipe--& then into the adjoining bookstore” (NN J 20).

“Pausilipo” in the Italian language, derived from Greek and Latin, means “respite from worry.” That word became important to Melville when he spent a week in Naples on the way to Rome in February 1857 (after circling the Mediterranean on his restorative voyage as an exhausted middle-aged novelist). He was charmed with the picturesque vista from “Pausilipo,” the “beautiful promontory of villas” the ancient Roman emperors had built “along the sea” to the north of Naples, yet he “found not the cessation which the name expresses” (NN J 102).

Melville preserved the picturesqueness of the scene when he acquired a copy of  the colored lithograph of  The Bay of Naples by Sameul Read that had been published in a Christmas Double issue of the Illustrated London News in 1860 (CAT 120). Melville framed and displayed his copy of The Bay of Naples in the entrance hall of the home on East 26th Street in New York City to which the family moved in 1863. Visitors could see the “beautiful promontory” of Posilipo in the foreground of the print directly overlooking the curve of the shore, the expanse of the bay, and Vesuvius in the distance (fig. 15).

CAT 204 fig 15 bay of naples cropped BA framed.jpg

Figure 15. Samuel Read. The Bay of Naples, lithograph, published in the Illustrated London News, Christmas Double Issue, December 1860. Melville Memorial Room, Berkshire Athenaeum.

During the last few years of Melville’s life, he and his young granddaughter Eleanor Melville Thomas would always stop to look at the spacious bay “dotted” with “tiny white sails” when they returned from one of their afternoon trips to Central Park, “the Mecca of most of our pilgrimages.” Eleanor recalled how he would always point with his cane to those sails and say, “See the little boats sailing hither and thither,” always with “something far away in the tone of voice” (Metcalf 282).

In Melville’s lifetime, the blue of the sea, the white of the sails, and the Vesuvian smoke in The Bay of Naples would have been easier to see than they are today, their colors dimmed by a century of exposure to light (see Otter and Wallace, figures 3, 4, 5).

When Melville published his poem “Pausilippo” just a few pages after “Herba Santa” in Timoleon in 1891, he began with this “lenitive” vision: “A hill there is that laves it feet / In Naples’ bay and lifts its head / In jovial season, curled with vine.” Such a prospect would ideed seem to offer “surcease” from “sorrow.” Once the narrator meets Silvio, however, a broken patriot now supported and sustained only by his daughter, he realizes that the beauty of the prospect “unravels not the pain: / Pausilippo, Pausilippo, / Named benignly if in vain!” (NN PP 297-99).

The published poem “Pausilippo” had an afterlife as section 5 in “An Afternoon in Naples,” the unfinished twelve-section poem that Melville was still revising at the time of his death. In the local context of the longer poem, we are told that the narrator’s “heightened spirits are for the time dashed by a tristful encounter.” He learns from assimilating the sorrow of Silvio that any “dream of years serene” served only to “wake, to dash, delight.”

In the next section of the unpublished poem, this painful contemporary encounter on the hillside of Posilipo involuntarily takes the narrator’s dreamlike, wandering thought back to Ancient Roman history on this very spot:

I mused on Virgil, here inurned

On Pausilippo, history tells—

Here on the slope that pledges to ease the pain,

For him a pledge assuredly true

If here indeed his ashes be.

Melville’s narrator does not pause here to smoke a soothing pipe. But he does look out “across the blue sunned bay” until “the Great Mountain seemed a Claude, / His world a picture of born of Art serene.” Until, that is, he sees, high above the bay, “A scalp-lock of Tartarian smoke / Thin streaming forth” from Vesuvius, that “sulphurious Hill / Whose vent far hellward reaches down” (NN BBO 184-89). In Melville’s “An Afternoon in Naples,” as in Read’s Bay of Naples, Vesuvius does the smoking.

In the closing stanza of “Herba Santa,” Melville’s narrator prepares to inhale the sweet heat he will exhale with pleasure:

Forbear, my soul! And in thine Eastern chamber

Rehearse the dream that brings the long release:

Through jasmine sweet and talismanic amber

Inhaling Herba Santa in the passive Pipe of Peace. (NN PP 290)