Scotsman was not a mere ne'er-do-well. He was a man of humorous
desperation, throwing his life ironically away. Not a mere loose-kneed
loafer, such as the South Seas seem to attract.
That is good about Melville: he never repents. Whatever he did, in Typee
or in Doctor Long Ghost's wicked society, he never repented. If he ate
his snipe, dirt and all, and enjoyed it at the time, he didn't have
bilious bouts afterwards. Which is good.
But it wasn't enough. The Long Doctor was really knocking about in a
sort of despair. He let his ship drift rudderless.
Melville couldn't do this. For a time, yes. For a time, in this Long
Doctor's company, he was rudderless and reckless. Good as an experience.
But a man who will not abandon himself to despair or indifference cannot
keep it up.
Melville would never abandon himself either to despair or indifference.
He always cared. He always cared enough to hate missionaries, and to be
touched by a real act of kindness. He always cared.
When he saw a white man really "gone savage," a white man with a blue
shark tatooed over his brow, gone over to the savages, then Herman's
whole being revolted. He couldn't bear it. He could not bear a renegade.
He enlisted at last on an American man-of-war. You have the record in
_White Jacket._ He was back in civilization, but still at sea. He was in
America, yet loose in the seas. Good regular days, after Doctor Long
Ghost and the _Julia._
As a matter of fact, a long thin chain was round Melville's ankle all
the time, binding him to America, to civilization, to democracy, to the
ideal world. It was a long chain: and it never broke. It pulled him
back.
By the time he was twenty-five his wild oats were sown; his reckless
wanderings were over. At the age of twenty-five he came back to Home and
Mother, to fight it out at close quarters. For you can't fight it out by
running away. When you have run a long way from Home and Mother, then
you realize that the earth is round, and if you keep on running you'll
be back on the same old doorstep. Like a fatality.
Melville came home to face out the long rest of his life. He married and
had an ecstasy of a courtship and fifty years of disillusion.
He had just furnished his home with disillusions. No more Typees. No
more paradises. No more Fayaways. A mother: a gorgon. A home: a torture
box. A wife: a thing with clay feet. Life; a sort of disgrace. Fame:
another disgrace, being patronized by common snobs who just know how to
read.
The whole shameful business just making a man writhe.
Melville writhed for eighty years.
In his soul he was proud and savage.
But in his mind and will, he wanted the perfect fulfilment of love. He
wanted the lovey-doveyness of perfect mutual understanding.
A proud savage-souled man doesn't really want any perfect lovey-dovey
fulfilment in love. No such nonsense. A mountain-lion doesn't mate with
a Persian cat. And when a grizzly bear roars after a mate, it is a
she-grizzly he roars after. Not after a silky sheep.
But Melville stuck to his ideal. He wrote _Pierre_ to show that the more
you try to be good the more you make a mess of things: that following
righteousness is just disastrous. The better you are, the worse things
turn out with you. The better you try to be, the bigger mess you make.
Your very striving after righteousness only causes your own slow
degeneration.
Well, it is true. No men are so evil to-day as the idealists: and no
women half so evil as your earnest woman, who feels herself a power for
good. It is inevitable. After a certain point, the ideal goes dead and
rotten. The old pure ideal becomes in itself an impure thing of evil.
Charity becomes pernicious, the spirit itself becomes foul. The meek are
evil. The pure in heart have base, subtle revulsions: like Dostoevsky's
Idiot. The whole Sermon on the Mount becomes a litany of white vice.
What then?
It's our own fault. It was we who set up the ideals. And if we are such
fools, that we aren't able to kick over our ideals in time, the worse
for us.
Look at Melville's eighty long years of writhing. And to the end he
writhed on the ideal pin.
From the "perfect woman lover" he passed on to the "perfect friend." He
looked and looked for the perfect man friend.
Couldn't find him.
Marriage was a ghastly disillusion to him, because he looked for perfect
marriage.
Friendship never even made a real start in him--save perhaps his
half-sentimental love for Jack Chase, in _White Jacket._
Yet to the end he pined for this: a perfect relationship: perfect
mating: perfect mutual understanding. A perfect friend.
Right to the end he could never accept the fact that _perfect_
relationships cannot be. Each soul is alone, and the aloneness of each
soul is a double barrier to perfect relationship between two beings.
Each soul _should_ be alone. And in the end the desire for a "perfect
relationship" is just a vicious, unmanly craving. "_Tous nos malheurs
viennent de ne pouvoir être seuls._"
Melville, however, refused to draw his conclusion. _Life_ was wrong, he
said. He refused Life. But he stuck to his ideal of perfect
relationship, possible perfect love. The world _ought_ to be a
harmonious loving place. And it _can't_ be. So life itself is wrong.
It is silly arguing. Because after all, only temporary man sets up the
"oughts."
The world ought _not_ to be a harmonious loving place. It ought to be a
place of fierce discord and intermittent harmonies: which it is.
Love ought _not_ to be perfect. It ought to have perfect moments, and
wildernesses of thorn bushes. Which it has.
A "perfect" relationship ought _not_ to be possible. Every relationship
should have its absolute limits, its absolute reserves, essential to the
singleness of the soul in each person. A truly perfect relationship is
one in which each party leaves great tracts unknown in the other party.
No two persons can meet at more than a few points, consciously. If two
people can just be together fairly often, so that the presence of each
is a sort of balance to the other, that is the basis of perfect
relationship. There must be true separatenesses as well.
Melville was, at the core, a mystic and an idealist.
Perhaps, so am I.
And he stuck to his ideal guns.
I abandon mine.
He was a mystic who raved because the old ideal guns shot havoc. The
guns of the "noble spirit." Of "ideal love."
I say, let the old guns rot.
Get new ones, and shoot straight.
XI. HERMAN MELVILLE'S "MOBY DICK"
_MOBY DICK, or White Whale._ A hunt. The last great hunt. For what?
For Moby Dick, the huge white sperm whale: who is old, hoary, monstrous,
and swims alone; who is unspeakably terrible in his wrath, having so
often been attacked; and snow-white.
Of course he is a symbol.
Of what?
I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That's the best of it.
He is warm-blooded, he is lovable. He is lonely Leviathan, not a Hobbes
sort. Or is he?
But he is warm-blooded, and lovable. The South Sea Islanders, and
Polynesians, and Malays, who worship shark, or crocodile, or weave
endless frigate-bird distortions, why did they never worship the whale?
So big!
Because the whale is not wicked. He doesn't bite. And their gods had to
bite.
He's not a dragon. He is Leviathan. He never coils like the Chinese
dragon of the sun. He's not a serpent of the waters. He is warmblooded,
a mammal. And hunted, hunted down.
It is a great book.
At first you are put off by the style. It reads like journalism. It
seems spurious. You feel Melville is trying to put something over you.
It won't do.
And Melville really is a bit sententious: aware of himself,
self-conscious, putting something over even himself. But then it's not
easy to get into the swing of a piece of deep mysticism when you just
set out with a story.
Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in had taste,
than Herman Melville, even in a great book like _Moby Dick._ He preaches
and holds forth because he's not sure of himself. And he holds forth,
often, so amateurishly.
The artist was so _much_ greater than the man. The man is rather a
tiresome New Englander of the ethical mystical-transcendentalist sort:
Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, etc. So unrelieved, the solemn ass even
in humour. So hopelessly _au grand serieux_, you feel like saying: Good
God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy, or a farce, or a
disaster, or anything else, what do I care! Let life be what it likes.
Give me a drink, that's what I want just now.
For my part, life is so many things I don't care what it is. It's not my
affair to sum it up. Just now it's a cup of tea. This morning it was
wormwood and gall. Hand me the sugar.
One wearies of the _grand serieux._ There's something false about it.
And that's Melville. Oh, dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!
But he was a deep, great artist, even if he was rather a sententious
man. He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front
of him. But when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience,
and gives us his sheer apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful,
his book commands a stillness in the soul, an awe.
In his "human" self, Melville is almost dead. That is, he hardly reacts
to human contacts any more: or only ideally: or just for a moment. His
human-emotional self is almost played out. He is abstract,
self-analytical and abstracted. And he is more spell-bound by the
strange slidings and collidings of Matter than by the things men do. In
this he is like Dana. It is the material elements he really has to do
with. His drama is with them. He was a futurist long before futurism
found paint. The sheer naked slidings of the elements. And the human
soul experiencing it all. So often, it is almost over the border:
psychiatry. Almost spurious. Yet so great.
It is the same old thing as in all Americans. They keep their
old-fashioned ideal frock-coat on, and an old-fashioned silk hat, while
they do the most impossible things. There you are: you see Melville
hugged in bed by a huge tattooed South Sea Islander, and solemnly
offering burnt offering to this savage's little idol, and his ideal
frock-coat just hides his shirt-tails and prevents us from seeing his
bare posterior as he salaams, while his ethical silk hat sits correctly
over his brow the while. That is so typically American: doing the most
impossible things without taking off their spiritual get-up. Their
ideals are like armour which has rusted in, and will never more come
off. And meanwhile in Melville his bodily knowledge moves naked, a
living quick among the stark elements. For with sheer physical,
vibrational sensitiveness, like a marvellous wireless-station, he
registers the effects of the outer world. And he records also, almost
beyond pain or pleasure, the extreme transitions of the isolated,
far-driven soul, the soul which is now alone, without any real human
contact.
The first days in New Bedford introduce the only human being who really
enters into the book, namely, Ishmael, the "I" of the book. And then the
moment's hearts-brother, Queequeg, the tattooed, powerful South Sea
harpooner, whom Melville loves as Dana loves "Hope." The advent of
Ishmael's bedmate is amusing and unforgettable. But later the two swear
"marriage," in the language of the savages. For Queequeg has opened
again the flood-gates of love and human connection in Ishmael.
"As I sat there in that now lonely room, the fire burning low, in that
mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then
only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering
round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain: I
began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No
more my splintered hand and maddened heart was turned against the
wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his
very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized
hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to
see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him."--So
they smoke together, and are clasped in each other's arms. The
friendship is finally sealed when Ishmael offers sacrifice to Queequeg's
little idol, Gogo.
"I was a good Christian, born and bred in the bosom of the infallible
Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with the idolater in
worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship?--to do the will of
God--_that_ is worship. And what is the will of God?--to do to my
fellowman what I would have my fellowman do to me--_that_ is the will of
God."--Which sounds like Benjamin Franklin, and is hopelessly bad
theology. But it is real American logic. "Now Queequeg is my fellowman.
And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me. Why, unite with me
in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must
unite with him; ergo, I must turn idolater. So I kindled the shavings;
helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with
Queequeg; salaamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that
done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences
and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.
How it is I know not; but there is no place like bed for confidential
disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, open the very
bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and
chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, lay I and
Queequeg--a cozy, loving pair----"
You would think this relation with Queequeg meant something to Ishmael.
But no. Queequeg is forgotten like yesterday's newspaper. Human things
are only momentary excitements or amusements to the American Ishmael.
Ishmael, the hunted. But much more, Ishmael the hunter. What's a
Queequeg? What's a wife? The white whale must be hunted down. Queequeg
must be just "KNOWN," then dropped into oblivion.
And what in the name of fortune is the white whale?
Elsewhere Ishmael says he loved Queequeg's eyes: "large, deep eyes,
fiery black and bold." No doubt, like Poe, he wanted to get the "clue"
to them. That was all.
The two men go over from New Bedford to Nantucket, and there sign on to
the Quaker whaling ship, the _Pequod._ It is all strangely fantastic,
phantasmagoric. The voyage of the soul. Yet curiously a real whaling
voyage, too. We pass on into the midst of the sea with this strange ship
and its incredible crew. The Argonauts were mild lambs in comparison.
And Ulysses went _defeating_ the Circes and overcoming the wicked
hussies of the isles. But the _Pequod's_ crew is a collection of maniacs
fanatically hunting down a lonely, harmless white whale.
As a soul history, it makes one angry. As a sea yarn, it is marvellous:
there is always something a bit over the mark, in sea yarns. Should be.
Then again the masking up of actual seaman's experience with sonorous
mysticism sometimes gets on one's nerves. And again, as a revelation of
destiny the book is too deep even for sorrow. Profound beyond feeling.
You are some time before you are allowed to see the captain, Ahab: the
mysterious Quaker. Oh, it is a God-fearing Quaker ship.
Ahab, the captain. The captain of the soul.
"I am the master of my fate.
I am the captain of my soul!"
Ahab!
"Oh, captain, my captain, our fearful trip is done."
The gaunt Ahab, Quaker, mysterious person, only shows himself after some
days at sea. There's a secret about him? What?
Oh, he's a portentous person. He stumps about on an ivory stump, made
from sea-ivory. Moby Dick, the great white whale, tore off Ahab's leg at
the knee, when Ahab was attacking him.
Quite right, too. Should have tom off both his legs, and a bit more
besides.
But Ahab doesn't think so. Ahab is now a monomaniac. Moby Dick is his
monomania. Moby Dick must DIE, or Ahab can's live any longer. Ahab is
atheist by this.
All right.
This _Pequod_, ship of the American soul, has three mates.
1. Starbuck: Quaker, Nantucketer, a good responsible man of reason,
forethought, intrepidity, what is called a dependable man. At the
bottom, afraid.
2. Stubb: "Fearless as fire, and as mechanical." Insists on being
reckless and jolly on every occasion. Must be afraid too, really.
3. Flask: Stubborn, obstinate, without imagination. To him "the wondrous
whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or water-rat----"
There you have them: a maniac captain and his three mates, three
splendid seamen, admirable whale-men, first class men at their job.
America!
It is rather like Mr. Wilson and his admirable, "efficient" crew, at the
Peace Conference. Except that none of the Pequodders took their wives
along.
A maniac captain of the soul, and three eminently practical mates.
America!
Then such a crew. Renegades, castaways, cannibals: Ishmael, Quakers.
America!
Three giant harpooners, to spear the great white whale.
1. Queequeg, the South Sea Islander, all tattooed, big and powerful.
2. Tashtego, the Red Indian of the sea-coast, where the Indian meets the
sea.
3. Daggoo, the huge black negro.
There you have them, three savage races, under the American flag, the
maniac captain, with their great keen harpoons, ready to spear the
_White_ whale.
And only after many days at sea does Ahab's own boat-crew appear on
deck. Strange, silent, secret, black-garbed Malays, fire-worshipping
Parsees. These are to man Ahab's boat, when it leaps in pursuit of that
whale.
What do you think of the ship _Pequod_, the ship of the soul of an
American?
Many races, many peoples, many nations, under the Stars and Stripes.
Beaten with many stripes.
Seeing stars sometimes.
And in a mad ship, under a mad captain, in a mad, fanatic's hunt.
For what?
For Moby Dick, the great white whale.
But splendidly handled. Three splendid mates. The whole thing practical,
eminently practical in its working. American industry!
And all this practicality in the service of a mad, mad chase.
Melville manages to keep it a real whaling ship, on a real cruise, in
spite of all fantastics. A wonderful, wonderful voyage. And a beauty
that is so surpassing only because of the author's awful flounderings in
mystical waters. He wanted to get metaphysically deep. And he got deeper
than metaphysics. It is a surpassingly beautiful book. With an awful
meaning. And bad jolts.
It is interesting to compare Melville with Dana, about the albatross.
Melville a bit sententious.--"I remember the first albatross I ever saw.
It was during a prolonged gale in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas.
From my forenoon watch below I ascended to the over-crowded deck, and
there, lashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal feathered thing of
unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked Roman bill sublime. At intervals
it arched forth its vast, archangel wings.--Wondrous throbbings and
flutterings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some
King's ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible strange
eyes methought I peeped to secrets not below the heavens--the white
thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled
waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of
towns.--I assert then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird
chiefly lurks the secret of the spell----"
Melville's albatross is a prisoner, caught by a bait on a hook.
Well, I have seen an albatross, too: following us in waters hard upon
the Antarctic, too, south of Australia. And in the Southern winter. And
the ship, a P. and O. boat, nearly empty. And the lascar crew shivering.
The bird with its long, long wings following, then leaving us. No one
knows till they have tried, how lost, how lonely those Southern waters
are. And glimpses of the Australian coast.
It makes one feel that our day is only a day. That in the dark of the
night ahead other days stir fecund, when we have lapsed from existence.
Who knows how utterly we shall lapse.
But Melville keeps up his disquisition about "whiteness." The great
abstract fascinated him. The abstract where we end, and cease to be.
White or black. Our white, abstract end!
Then again it is lovely to be at sea on the _Pequod_, with never a grain
of earth to us.
"It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging
about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters.
Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat,
for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet
somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie
lurked in the air that each silent sailor seemed reselved into his own
invisible self.--"
In the midst of this preluding silence came the first cry: "There she
blows! there! there! there! She blows!"--And then comes the first chase,
a marvellous piece of true sea-writing, the sea, and sheer sea-beings on
the chase, sea-creatures chased. There is scarcely a taint of
earth,--pure sea-motion.
"'Give way men,' whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet
of his sail; 'there is time to kill fish yet before the squall comes.
There's white water again!--Close to!--Spring!' Soon after, two cries in
quick succession on each side of us denoted that the other boats had got
fast; but hardly were they overheard, when with a lightning-like
hurtling whisper Starbuck said: 'Stand up!' and Queequeg, harpoon in
hand, sprang to his feet.--Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing
the life and death peril so close to them ahead, yet their eyes on the
intense countenance of the mate in the stem of the boat, they knew that
the imminent instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing
sound, as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the
boat was still booming through the mist, the waves curbing and hissing
around us like the erected crests of enraged serpents.
"'That's his hump. _There!_ There, give it to him!' whispered
Starbuck.--A short rushing sound leapt out of the boat; it was the
darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded motion came a push from
astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail
collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapour shot up near by;
something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole
crew were half-suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the
white curling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all
blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped----"
Melville is a master of violent, chaotic physical motion, he can keep up
a whole wild chase without a flaw. He is as perfect at creating
stillness. The ship is cruising on the Carrol Ground, south of St.
Helena.--"It was while gliding through these latter waters that one
serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of
silver; and by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a
silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet
was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow----"
Then there is the description of Brit. "Steering northeastward from the
Crozello we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow
substance upon which the right whale largely feeds. For leagues and
leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through
boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat. On the second day, numbers of
right whales were seen, secure from the attack of a sperm whaler like
the _Pequod._ With open jaws they sluggishly swam through the brit,
which, adhering to the fringed fibres of that wondrous Venetian blind in
their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water that escaped
at the lip. As moving mowers who, side by side, slowly and seethingly
advance their scythes through the long wet grass of the marshy meads;
even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound;
and leaving behind them endless swaths of blue on the yellow sea. But it
was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all
reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they
paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked
more like masses of rock than anything else----"
This beautiful passage brings us to the apparition of the squid.