The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (25 page)

Melville had promised his publishers for the autumn of 1850 the novel first entitled
The Whale
, finally
Moby Dick
. His delay in submitting it was caused by his explorations into the unsuspected vistas opened for him by Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose
Scarlet Letter
he had read in the spring of 1850 and who became Melville's neighbour when Melville bought a farm near Hawthorne's home. Their relationship reanimated Melville's creative energies. On his side, it was dependent, almost mystically intense. To the cooler, withdrawn Hawthorne, such depth of feeling so persistently and openly declared was uncongenial. The two men gradually drew apart.

Moby Dick
was published in London in October 1851 and a month later in America. It brought its author neither acclaim nor reward. Basically its story is simple. Captain Ahab pursues the white whale, Moby Dick, which finally kills him.
At that level, it is an intense, superbly authentic narrative of whaling. In the perverted grandeur of Captain Ahab and in the beauties and terrors of the voyage of the
Pequod
, however, Melville dramatized his deeper concerns: the equivocal defeats and triumphs of the human spirit and its fusion of creative and murderous urges.

Increasingly a recluse, Melville embarked almost at once on
Pierre
(1852). It was an intensely personal work, revealing the sombre mythology of his private life framed in terms of a story of an artist alienated from his society. When published, it was another critical and financial disaster. Near breakdown, and having to face in 1853 the disaster of a fire at his New York publishers that destroyed most of his books, Melville persevered with writing. His contributions to
Putnam's Monthly Magazine
—“Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853), “The Encantadas” (1854), and “Benito Cereno” (1855)—reflected the despair and the contempt for human hypocrisy and materialism that possessed him increasingly.
The Confidence-Man
(1857), a despairing satire on an America corrupted by the shabby dreams of commerce, was the last of his novels to be published in his lifetime. Three American lecture tours were followed by his final sea journey, in 1860, when he joined his brother Thomas for a voyage around Cape Horn. He abandoned the trip in San Francisco. He then abandoned the novel for poetry for a time.

His return to prose culminated in his last work, the novel
Billy Budd
, which remained unpublished until 1924. Provoked by a false charge, the sailor Billy Budd accidentally kills the satanic master-at-arms. In a time of threatened mutiny he is hanged, going willingly to his fate. The manuscript ends with the date April 19, 1891. Five months later Melville died. By the end of the 1840s he was among the most celebrated of American writers, yet his death evoked but a single obituary notice.

(b. Nov. 22, 1819, Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, Eng.—d. Dec. 22, 1880, London)

G
eorge Eliot, the pseudonym of Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans, was an English Victorian novelist who developed the method of psychological analysis characteristic of modern fiction.

Evans had a strong evangelical piety instilled in her as a girl. In 1841 she moved with her father to Coventry, where she soon broke with her upbringing after she became acquainted with a prosperous ribbon manufacturer, Charles Bray, a self-taught freethinker who campaigned for radical causes.

In 1851 Evans moved to London to become a freelance writer, and, after a brief return to Coventry, she served for three years as subeditor of
The Westminster Review
, which under her influence enjoyed its most brilliant run since the days of John Stuart Mill. At evening parties in London she met many notable literary figures in an atmosphere of political and religious radicalism, including the subeditor of
The Economist
, Herbert Spencer, whose
Social Statics
(1851) had just been published. Evans shared many of Spencer's interests and saw so much of him that it was soon rumoured that they were engaged. Though he did not become her husband, he introduced her to the two men who did.

One of those men was George Henry Lewes, a versatile Victorian journalist. In 1841 he had married Agnes Jervis, by whom he had four sons. But after two subsequent pregnancies by another man, Lewes ceased in 1851 to regard her as his wife. He had, however, condoned the adultery and was therefore precluded from suing for divorce. At this moment of dejection, his home hopelessly broken, he met Evans. They consulted about articles and
went to plays and operas that Lewes reviewed for
The Leader
. Convinced that his break with Agnes was irrevocable, Evans determined to live openly with Lewes as his wife. In July 1854, after the publication of her translation of Feuerbach's
Essence of Christianity
, they went to Germany together. In all but the legal form it was a marriage, and it continued happily until Lewes's death in 1878.

At Weimar and Berlin Evans wrote some of her best essays for
The Westminster
and translated Spinoza's
Ethics
(still unpublished), while Lewes worked on his groundbreaking life of Goethe. By his pen alone he had to support his three surviving sons at school in Switzerland as well as Agnes, whom he gave £100 a year, which was continued until her death in 1902. She turned to early memories and, encouraged by Lewes, wrote a story about a childhood episode in Chilvers Coton parish. Published in
Blackwood's Magazine
(1857) as
The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton
, it was an instant success. Two more tales,
Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story
and
Janet's Repentance
, also based on local events, appeared serially in the same year, and Blackwood republished all three as
Scenes of Clerical Life
, 2 vol. (1858) under the pseudonym George Eliot. It would become her pen name for the rest of her professional career.

Adam Bede
, 3 vol. (1859), her first long novel, she described as “a country story—full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay.” Its masterly realism brought to English fiction the same truthful observation of minute detail that Ruskin was commending in the Pre-Raphaelites. But what was new in this very popular novel was the combination of deep human sympathy and rigorous moral judgment. In
The Mill on the Floss
, 3 vol. (1860), Evans returned again to the scenes of her early life. The first half of the book, with its remarkable portrayal of childhood, is irresistibly appealing, and throughout there are scenes that reach a new level of psychological subtlety.

During their visit to Florence in 1860, Lewes suggested Savonarola as a good subject. Evans grasped it enthusiastically and began to plan
Romola
(1862–63). First, however, she wrote
Silas Marner
(1861). Its brevity and perfection of form made this story of the weaver whose lost gold is replaced by a strayed child the best known of her books.
Romola
was planned as a serial for
Blackwood's
, until an offer of £10,000 from
The Cornhill Magazine
induced Evans to desert her old publisher. Rather than divide the book into the 16 installments the editor wanted, she accepted £3,000 less, an evidence of artistic integrity few writers would have shown. It was published in 14 parts between July 1862 and August 1863.

Her next two novels are laid in England at the time of agitation for passage of the Reform Bill. In
Felix Holt, the Radical
, 3 vol. (1866), she drew the election riot from recollection of one she saw at Nuneaton in December 1832.
Middlemarch
(8 parts, 1871–72) is by general consent George Eliot's masterpiece. Every class of Middlemarch society is depicted from the landed gentry and clergy to the manufacturers and professional men, the shopkeepers, publicans, farmers, and labourers. Several strands of plot are interwoven to reinforce each other by contrast and parallel. Yet the story depends not on close-knit intrigue but on showing the incalculably diffusive effect of the unhistoric acts of anonymous individuals.

Daniel Deronda
(8 parts, 1876) is built on the contrast between Mirah Cohen, a poor Jewish girl, and the upper class Gwendolen Harleth, who marries for money and regrets it. The hero, Daniel, after discovering that he is Jewish, marries Mirah and departs for Palestine to establish a home for his nation. The best part of
Daniel Deronda
is the keen analysis of Gwendolen's character, which seems to many critics the peak of George Eliot's achievement.

In 1863 the Leweses bought the Priory, 21, North Bank, Regent's Park, where their Sunday afternoons became a brilliant feature of Victorian life. There on Nov. 30, 1878, Lewes died. For nearly 25 years he had fostered Evans's genius and managed all the practical details of life, which now fell upon her. Most of all she missed the encouragement that alone made it possible for her to write. For some years her investments had been in the hands of John Walter Cross, a banker introduced to the Leweses by Herbert Spencer. On May 6, 1880, they were married. Cross was 40; she was in her 61st year. After a wedding trip in Italy they returned to her country house at Witley before moving to 4, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where she died in December. She was buried at Highgate Cemetery.

(b. April 9, 1821, Paris, France—d. Aug. 31, 1867, Paris)

C
harles Baudelaire was a French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on
Les Fleurs du mal
(1857;
The Flowers of Evil
), which was perhaps the most important and influential poetry collection published in Europe in the 19th century.

Regular acts of indiscipline led to his being expelled from the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand after a trivial incident in April 1839. After passing his
baccalauréat
examinations while enrolled at the Collège Saint-Louis, Baudelaire became a nominal student of law at the École de Droit while in reality leading a “free life” in the Latin Quarter. There he made his first contacts in the literary world and also contracted the venereal disease that would eventually kill him, probably from a prostitute nicknamed Sarah la Louchette (“Squint-Eyed Sarah”), whom he celebrated in some of his most affecting early poems.

Baudelaire embarked on a protracted voyage to India in June 1841, but he effectively jumped ship in Mauritius and, after a few weeks there and in Réunion, returned to France in February 1842. He came into his inheritance in April 1842 and rapidly proceeded to dissipate it on the life-style of a dandified man of letters, spending freely on clothes, books, paintings, expensive food and wines, and, not least, hashish and opium. It was shortly after returning from the South Seas that Baudelaire met Jeanne Duval, who, first as his mistress and then, after the mid-1850s, as his financial charge, was to dominate his life for the next 20 years. Jeanne would inspire Baudelaire's most anguished and sensual love poetry, her perfume and, above all, her magnificent flowing black hair provoking such masterpieces of the exotic-erotic imagination as
La Chevelure
(“The Head of Hair”). Baudelaire's continuing extravagance exhausted half his fortune in two years, and he also fell prey to cheats and moneylenders, thus laying the foundation for an accumulation of debt that would cripple him for the rest of his life.