quote, dismembered, some of its great passages. Like the paintings
in the Ajanta caves, the beauty of Moby-Dick can be known only to
those who will make a pilgrimage to it, and stay within its dark
confines until what is darkness has become light, and one can make
out, with the help of an occasional torch, its grand design, its
complicated arabesque, the minute significance of its parts. No
feeble pencil sketch can convey a notion of Moby-Dick’s extravagant
beauty; but at the same time, without a hint of its design and its
manner of execution, all subsequent commentary must seem flatulent
and disproportionate. For three-quarters of a century Moby-Dick
has suffered at the hands of the superficial critic: it has been
condemned because to one man it seemed confused, to another it was
not a novel, to a third the characters were not “real,” and to a
fourth it was merely a weird, mystical, impossible tale of dubious
veracity, an example of Bedlam literature, while to a fifth, it was
just a straightforward account of the whaling industry, marred by a
crazy captain and an adventitious plot. The final answer to all these
criticisms lies, of course, in the book itself: but the foregoing
outline will perhaps aid us a little in defining the qualities and
limits of Melville’s vast epic.
Before we can take the measure of Moby-Dick we must, however, throw
aside our ordinary measuring-sticks: one does not measure Saturn with
the aid of an opera-glass and a dressmaker’s tape. The conventional
critic has dismissed Moby-Dick because it is “not a novel,” or if it
is a novel, its story is marred by all sorts of extraneous material,
history, natural history, philosophy, mythological excursions, what
not. This sort of criticism would belittle Moby-Dick by showing that it
does not respect canons of a much pettier nature than the work itself,
or because its colossal bulk cannot be caught in the herring-net of
the commonplace story or romance. Even Mr. John Freeman, one of the
most sympathetic interpreters of Melville, falls into this error;
for, while acknowledging the great qualities of Moby-Dick, he refers
to its “digressions and delays” as if they were in fact digressions
and delays; that is, as if the “action” in the common novelist’s
development of plot carried the thread of the story.
The matter is very easily put to rights if we simply abandon these
false categories altogether. Moby-Dick stands by itself as complete
as the Divine Comedy or the Odyssey stands by itself. Benedetto Croce
has correctly taught us that every work of art is indeed in this same
position: that it is uniquely what it is, and cannot be understood
except in terms of its own purpose. If, for purely practical reasons,
we ignore this in dealing with the ruck of novels and stories,
because their inner purpose is so insignificant, we must respect it
strictly when we confront a work that does not conspicuously conform
to the established canons; for, needless to say, an imaginative work
of the first rank will disclose itself through its differences and
its departures, by what it originates, rather than by what it is
derived from or akin to. Had Melville seriously sought in Moby-Dick
to rival the work of Trollope or Reade or Dickens, had he simply
desired to amuse and edify the great bourgeois public that consumed
its three-decker novels as it consumed its ten-course public dinners,
and wanted no delay in the service, no hitch in the round of food,
drink, toasts, speeches, and above all, no unaccustomed victuals on
such occasions, then Moby-Dick would have been a mistake and failure.
But one cannot count as a failure what was never an attempt. Moby-Dick
does not belong to this comfortable bourgeois world, any more than
horse-hair shirts or long fasts; it neither aids digestion nor
increases the sense of warm drowsy good nature that leads finally to
bed: and that is all there is to it.
The same criticism that disposes of the notion that Moby-Dick is a
bad novel, by admitting freely that it is not a novel at all, equally
disposes of its lack of verisimilitude. Although Melville was at
first challenged on his facts, such as the ramming of the Pequod by
Moby-Dick, events were just as kind to his reputation here as they were
in the case of Typee: for while Moby-Dick was on the press, news came
of the sinking of the whaler Ann Alexander by the ferocious attack of
a whale. No one of authority has attempted to quarrel with Melville’s
descriptions of the life and habits of whalemen and the whale: the
testimony of every observer is that Melville left very little for any
one else to say about the subject. This does not, however, dispose of
the charge; for those who are wisely captious of Melville here will
confine themselves to saying that no such crew ever existed, no such
words ever passed human mouth, and no such thoughts could enter the
mind of a Nantucketer, as entered Ahab’s.
Again, one is tempted to grant the objection; for it makes no
difference in the value of Moby-Dick as a work of art. In the realistic
convention, Moby-Dick would be a bad book: it happens that the story
is projected on more than one plane, and a good part of it belongs to
another, and equally valid, convention. Melville himself was aware
of the difference, and early in the book he calls upon the Spirit
of Equality, which has spread its royal mantle of humanity over all
his kind, to defend him against all mortal critics “if, then, to the
meanest mariners, and renegades, and castaways, I shall hereafter
ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if
even the most mournful, perchance the most abased among them all shall
at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that
workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread the rainbow
over his disastrous set of sun.” Now, the convention in which Melville
cast this part of Moby-Dick was foreign to the nineteenth century;
obscure people, like Beddoes, alone essayed it: to create these
idealized figures called for such reserves of power that only minor
poets, for the most part, unconscious of their weaknesses, attempted
the task.
The objections to Melville’s use of this convention would be fair
enough if, like the minor poets, he failed; but, through his success,
one sees that the limitations of naturalism are no closer to reality
than the limitations of poetic tragedy; and, on the contrary,
Melville’s valiant use of this convention enabled him to present a
much fuller picture of reality than the purely external suggestions of
current realism would have permitted him to show. What we call realism
is a method of approaching reality: an external picture of a Cowperwood
or a Gantry may have as little human truth in it as a purely fanciful
description of an elf: and the artist who can draw upon more than one
convention is, at all events, free from the curious illusion, so common
in the nineteenth century, alike in philosophy, with its pragmatism in
science, with its dogmatic materialism, and in imaginative writing,
with its realism, that this convention is not limited, and so far
arbitrary, but the very stuff and vitals of existence. The question
to settle is not: Did an Ahab ever sail from Nantucket? The question
is: Do Ahab and Stubb and Starbuck and Tashtego live within the sphere
where we find them? The answer is that they are tremendously alive; for
they are aspects of the spirit of man. At each utterance, one feels
more keenly their imaginative embodiment; so that by the time Ahab
breaks into his loftiest Titanisms, one accepts his language, as one
accepts his pride: they belong to the fibre and essence of the man.
Ahab is a reality in relation to Moby-Dick; and when Melville projects
him, he ceases to be incredible, because he is alive.
We need not concern ourselves particularly with those who look upon
Moby-Dick solely as a sort of World’s Almanac or Gazetteer of the
Whaling Industry, unhappily marred by the highly seasoned enticements
of the narrative. This criticism is, indeed, but the other side of
the sort of objection I have disposed of; and it tells more about the
limitations of the reader than it does about the quality of Moby-Dick.
For the fact is that this book is a challenge and affront to all the
habits of mind that typically prevailed in the nineteenth century, and
still remain, almost unabated, among us: it comes out of a different
world, and presupposes, for its acceptance, a more integrated life and
consciousness than we have known or experienced, for the most part,
these last three centuries. Moby-Dick is not Victorian; it is not
Elizabethan; it is, rather, prophetic of another quality of life which
Melville had experienced and had a fuller vision of in his own time--a
quality that may again come into the world, when we seek to pass beyond
the harassed specialisms which still hold and preoccupy so many of us.
To fathom this quality of Melville’s experience and imagination, we
must look a little deeper into his myth and his manner of projecting
it. What is its meaning? And first, in what manner is that meaning
conveyed to us?
8
Moby-Dick is a poetic epic. Typographically, Moby-Dick conforms to
prose, and there are long passages, whole chapters, which are wholly
in the mood of prose: but in spirit and in actual rhythm, Moby-Dick
again and again rises to polyphonic verse which resembles passages of
Webster’s in that it can either be considered as broken blank verse,
or as cadenced prose. Mr. Percy Boynton has performed the interesting
experiment of transposing a paragraph in Pierre into excellent free
verse, so strong and subtle are Melville’s rhythms; and one might
garner a whole book of verse from Moby-Dick. Melville, in Moby-Dick,
unconsciously respects Poe’s canon that all true poetry must be short
in length, since the mood cannot be retained, unbroken or undiminished,
over lengthy passages, and if the form itself is preserved, the content
nevertheless is prose. But while Poe himself used this dictum as an
excuse for writing only short lyrics, Melville sustained the poetic
mood through a long narrative by dropping frankly into prose in the
intervening while. As a result, he was under no necessity of clipping
the emotions or of bleaching the imaginative colours of Moby-Dick:
like a flying-boat, he rises from the water to the air and returns to
the water again without losing control over either medium. His prose
is prose: hard, sinewy, compact; and his poetry is poetry, vivid,
surging, volcanic, creating its own form in the very pattern of the
emotional state itself, soaring, towering, losing all respect for the
smaller conventions of veracity, when the inner triumph itself must
be announced. It is in the very rhythm of his language that Ahab’s
mood, and all the devious symbols of Moby-Dick are sustained and made
credible: by no other method could the deeper half of the tale have
been written. In these poetic passages, the phrases are intensified,
stylicized, stripped of their habitual associations. If occasionally,
as with Shakespeare, the thought itself is borne down by the weight of
the gold that decorates it, this is only a similar proof of Melville’s
immense power of expression.
Both Poe and Hawthorne share some of Melville’s power, and both of
them, with varying success, wrought ideality and actuality into the
same figure: but one has only to compare the best of their work with
Moby-Dick to see wherein Melville’s great distinction lies. The Scarlet
Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, William Wilson, like most other
works of fiction, are melodic: a single instrument is sufficient to
carry the whole theme; whereas Moby-Dick is a symphony; every resource
of language and thought, fantasy, description, philosophy, natural
history, drama, broken rhythms, blank verse, imagery, symbol, are
utilized to sustain and expand the great theme. The conception of
Moby-Dick organically demands the expressive interrelation, for a
single total effect, of a hundred different pieces: even in accessory
matters, like the association of the Parsee, the fire-worshipper, with
the death of Ahab, the fire-defier, or in the makeup of the crew, the
officers white men, the harpooneers the savage races, red, black,
brown, and the crew a mixed lot from the separate islands of the
earth, not a stroke is introduced that has not a meaning for the myth
as a whole. Although the savage harpooneers get nearest the whale,
the savage universe, it is Ahab and the Parsee, the European and the
Asiatic, who carry the pursuit to its ultimate end--while a single
American survives to tell the tale!
Melville’s instrumentation is unsurpassed in the writing of the last
century: one must go to a Beethoven or a Wagner for an exhibition of
similar powers: one will not find it among the works of literature.
Here are Webster’s wild violin, Marlowe’s cymbals, Browne’s sonorous
bass viol, Swift’s brass, Smollett’s castanets, Shelley’s flute,
brought together in a single orchestra, complementing each other in
a grand symphony. Melville achieved a similar synthesis in thought;
and that work has proved all the more credible because he achieved it
in language, too. Small wonder that those who were used to elegant
pianoforte solos or barrel-organ instrumentation, were deafened and
surprised and repulsed.
What is the meaning of Moby-Dick? There is not one meaning; there are
many; but in its simplest terms, Moby-Dick is, necessarily, a story of
the sea and its ways, as the Odyssey is a story of strange adventure,
and War and Peace a story of battles and domestic life. The characters
are heightened and slightly distorted: Melville’s quizzical comic
sense is steadily at work on them, and only Ahab escapes: but they all
have their recognizable counterparts in the actual world. Without any
prolonged investigation one could still find a Starbuck on Nantucket or
a Flask on Marthas Vineyard--indeed, as Mr. Thomas Benton’s portraits
properly indicate, queerer fish than they.
On this level, Moby-Dick brings together and focusses in a single
picture the long line of sketches and preliminary portraits Melville
had assembled in Typee, Omoo, Redburn, and White-Jacket. As a story
of the sea, Moby-Dick will always have a call for those who wish to
recapture the magic and terror and stress and calm delight of the
sea and its ships; and not less so because it seizes on a particular
kind of ship, the whaler, and a special occupation, whaling, at the
moment when they were about to pass out of existence, or rather, were
being transformed from a brutal but glorious battle into a methodical,
slightly banal industry. Melville had the singular fortune to pronounce
a valedictory on many ways of life and scenes that were becoming
extinct. He lived among the South Sea Islanders when they were still
pretty much as Captain Cook found them, just before their perversion
and decimation by our exotic Western civilization. He recorded life
on a man-of-war half a generation before the sail gave place to
steam, wood to armour-plate, and grappling-irons to long-range guns.
He described life on a sailing-packet before steam had increased the
speed, the safety, and the pleasant monotony of transatlantic travel:
and finally, he recorded the last heroic days of whaling. Moby-Dick
would have value as first-hand testimony, even if it were negligible as
literature. If this were all, the book would still be important.
But Moby-Dick, admirable as it is as a narrative of maritime adventure,
is far more than that: it is, fundamentally, a parable on the mystery
of evil and the accidental malice of the universe. The white whale
stands for the brute energies of existence, blind, fatal, overpowering,
while Ahab is the spirit of man, small and feeble, but purposive,
that pits its puniness against this might, and its purpose against
the blank senselessness of power. The evil arises with the good: the
white whale grows up among the milder whales which are caught and cut
up and used: one hunts for the one--for a happy marriage, livelihood,
offspring, social companionship and cheer--and suddenly heaving its
white bulk out of the calm sea, one comes upon the other: illness,
accident, treachery, jealousy, vengefulness, dull frustration. The
South Sea savage did not know of the white whale: at least, like death,
it played but a casual part in his consciousness. It is different with
the European: his life is a torment of white whales: the Jobs, the
Aeschyluses, the Dantes, the Shakespeares, pursue him and grapple with
him, as Ahab pursues his antagonist.
All our lesser literature, all our tales of Avalon or Heaven or
ultimate redemption, or, in a later day, the Future, is an evasion of
the white whale: it is a quest of that boyish beginning which we call
a happy ending. But the old Norse myth told that Asgard itself would
be consumed at last, and the very gods would be destroyed: the white
whale is the symbol of that persistent force of destruction, that
meaningless force, which now figures as the outpouring of a volcano or
the atmospheric disruption of a tornado or again as the mere aimless
dissipation of unused energy into an unavailable void--that spectacle
which so disheartened the learned Henry Adams. The whole tale of the
West, in mind and action, in the philosophy and art of the Greeks, in
the organization and technique of the Romans, in the precise skills
and unceasing spiritual quests of the modern man, is a tale of this
effort to combat the whale--to ward off his blows, to counteract his
aimless thrusts, to create a purpose that will offset the empty malice
of Moby-Dick. Without such a purpose, without the belief in such a
purpose, life is neither bearable nor significant: unless one is
polarized by these central human energies and aims, one tends to become
absorbed in Moby-Dick himself, and, becoming a part of his being,
can only maim, slay, butcher, like the shark or the white whale or
Alexander or Napoleon. If there is no God, exclaims Dostoyevsky’s hero,
then we may commit murder: and in the sense that God represents the
totality of human purpose and meaning the conclusion is inevitable.
It is useless to derive man’s purposes from those of the external
universe; he is a figure in the web of life. Except for such kindness
and loyalty as the creatures man has domesticated show, there is, as
far as one can now see, no concern except in man himself over the
ceaseless motions and accidents that take place in nature. Love and
chance, said Charles Peirce, rule the universe: but the love is man’s
love, and although in the very concept of chance, as both Peirce and
Captain Ahab declare, there is some rough notion of fair play, of
fifty-fifty, of an even break, that is small immediate consolation for
the creature that may lose not the game, but his life, by an unlucky
throw of the dice. Ahab has more humanity than the gods he defies:
indeed, he has more power, because he is conscious of the power he
wields, and applies it deliberately, whereas Moby-Dick’s power only
seems deliberate because it cuts across the directed aims of Ahab
himself. And in one sense, Ahab achieves victory: he vanquishes in
himself that which would retreat from Moby-Dick and acquiesce in his
insensate energies and his brutal sway. His end is tragic: evil engulfs
him. But in battling against evil, with power instead of love, Ahab
himself, in A. E.’s phrase, becomes the image of the thing he hates: he
has lost his humanity in the very act of vindicating it. By physical
defiance, by physical combat, Ahab cannot rout and capture Moby-Dick:
the odds are against him; and if his defiance is noble, his methods
are ill chosen. Growth, cultivation, order, art--these are the proper
means by which man displaces accident and subdues the vacant external
powers in the universe: the way of growth is not to become more
powerful but to become more human. Here is a hard lesson to learn: it
is easier to wage war than to conquer in oneself the tendency to be
partial, vindictive, and unjust: it is easier to demolish one’s enemy
than to pit oneself against him in an intellectual combat which will
disclose one’s weaknesses and provincialities. And that evil Ahab seeks
to strike is the sum of one’s enemies. He does not bow down to it and
accept it: therein lies his heroism and virtue: but he fights it with
its own weapons and therein lies his madness. All the things that Ahab
despises when he is about to attack the whale, the love and loyalty
of Pip, the memory of his wife and child, the sextant of science, the
inner sense of calm, which makes all external struggle futile, are the
very things that would redeem him and make him victorious.
Man’s ultimate defence against the Universe, against evil and accident
and malice, is not by any fictitious resolution of these things into an
Absolute which justifies them and utilizes them for its own ends: this
is specious comfort, and Voltaire’s answer to Leibniz in Candide seems
to me a final one. Man’s defence lies within himself, not within the
narrow, isolated ego, which may be overwhelmed, but in that self which
we share with our fellows and which assures us that, whatever happens
to our own carcasses and hides, good men will remain, to carry on the
work, to foster and protect the things we have recognized as excellent.
To make that self more solid, one must advance positive science,
produce formative ideas, and embody ideal forms in which all men may,
to a greater or less degree, participate: in short, one must create a
realm which is independent of the hostile forces in the universe--and
cannot be lightly shaken by their onslaught. Melville’s method, that
of writing Moby-Dick, was correct: as correct as Ahab’s method, taken
literally, that of fighting Moby-Dick, was fallacious. In Moby-Dick,
Melville conquered the white whale in his own consciousness: instead of
blankness there was significance, instead of aimless energy there was
purpose, and instead of random living there was Life. The universe _is_
inscrutable, unfathomable, malicious, _so_--like the white whale and
his element. Art in the broad sense of all humanizing effort is man’s
answer to this condition: for it is the means by which he circumvents
or postpones his doom, and bravely meets his tragic destiny. Not tame
and gentle bliss, but disaster, heroically encountered, is man’s true
happy ending.
9
Here, it seems to me, is the plainest interpretation of Melville’s
fable, and the one he was partly conscious of in the writing of it. But
a great book is more a part of its milieu than either the writer or his
public knows; and there is more in Moby-Dick than the figure of man’s
heroic defiance of brute energy, and evil, and the high gods.
In another sense, the whale stands for the practical life. Mankind
needs food and light and shelter, and, with a little daring and a
little patience, it gains these things from its environment: the
whale that we cut up, dissect, analyse, melt down, pour into casks,
and distribute in cities and households is the whale of industry and
science. The era of whaling which opened only in the late seventeenth
century is timed with the era of modern industry; and in the very year
Melville wrote Moby-Dick, 1851, industry and science were announcing
their triumphs in that great cock-crow of the Crystal Palace Exhibition
in London. Side by side with this purpose, which secures man’s material
existence, is another set of purposes which, though they sometimes take
advantage of the means offered by the practical life, as Ahab takes
advantage of his sordid crew and ordinary whaling to carry out his
private revenge, run counter to the usual flow of our daily efforts.
The white whale cannot be met and captured by the usual means; more
than that: to fulfil man’s own deeper purposes, the captains of the
spirit must oppose the prudence of Starbuck and the common sense
of Stubb. Material sustenance, home, comfort, though their pursuit
occupy the greater part of the daily round of humanity, are sometimes
best forgotten and set at naught: indeed, when nobler human purposes
are uppermost, they must be set at naught. He who steadily seeks to
preserve life and fortify it must be ready to give up his life at a
moment’s notice when a fellow creature is in danger: he who would
provide others with daily bread must be prepared to go hungry if the
wheat that would nourish him is needed for the planting. All the more
does this hold in the affairs of the spirit. When the human spirit
expands itself to the uttermost, to confront the white whale and hew
meaning and form from the blank stone of experience, one must reverse
all the practical maxims: earth’s folly, as Melville says, is Heaven’s
wisdom, and earth’s wisdom is Heaven’s greatest disaster.