and contentment and a greater share of the “lay”; but the Ahabs seek
danger and hardship and a lay that has no value in terms of material
sustenance and magnificence. And the paradox, the hard paradox, is
this: both purposes are essential: Ahab could not set out at all
without the aid of Peleg and Bildad and Charity and his harpooners and
sailors, and they, for their part, would never know anything except
sluggish routine were they not at times stirred up to great efforts
by purposes they do not easily understand or consciously accept. Yet:
there is an Ahab in every man, and the meanest member of the crew
can be awakened to the values that Ahab prizes: given a storm and a
stove boat, and the worst rascal on shipboard may be as magnificent as
Odysseus. All men live most intensely when they are moulded by such
a purpose--or even, wanting that, by an enterprise that counterfeits
it. Art, religion, culture in general, all those intangible triumphs
of the spirit that are embodied in forms and symbols, all that spells
purpose as opposed to senseless energy, and significance as opposed to
routine--these efforts develop human life to its fullest, even when
they work contrary to the ordinary standards of the world.
There, it seems to me, is another meaning in Ahab’s struggle with
Moby-Dick. He represents, not as in the first parable, an heroic
power that misconceives its mission and misapplies itself: here
he rather stands for human purpose in its highest expression. His
pursuit is “futile” because it wrecks the boat and brings home no oil
and causes material loss and extinguishes many human lives; but in
another sense, it is not futile at all, but is the only significant
part of the voyage, since oil is burned and ships eventually break up
and men die and even the towers of proud cities crumble away as the
buildings sink beneath the sand or the jungle, while all that remains,
all that perpetuates the life and the struggle, are their forms and
symbols, their art, their literature, their science, as they have
been incorporated in the social heritage of man. That which is useful
for the moment eventually becomes useless; the mummy’s food and drink
shrivel away or evaporate: but that which is “useless,” the graven
image or the tomb itself, continues to nourish the spirit of man. Life,
Life purposive, Life formative, Life expressive, is more than living,
as living itself is more than the finding of a livelihood. There is
no triumph so petty and evanescent as that involved in capturing the
ordinary whale: the nineteenth century made this triumph the end and
object of all endeavour; and it put the spirit in chains of comfort
and material satisfaction, which were heavier than fetters and harder
to bear than the stake. By the same token, there is no struggle so
permanent and so humanly satisfactory as Ahab’s struggle with the white
whale. In that defeat, in that succession of defeats, is the only
pledge of man’s ultimate victory, and the only final preventive of
emptiness, boredom, and suicide. Battles are lost, as Whitman cried, in
the same spirit that they are won. Some day the physical powers of man
may be commensurate with his utmost spirit, and he will meet Leviathan
on even terms.
10
The epic and mythic quality of Moby-Dick has been misunderstood because
those who examined the book have thought of the epic in terms of Homer,
and the myth itself in relation to some obvious hero of antiquity,
or some modern folk-hero, a Washington, a Boone, raised to enormous
dimensions. “The great mistake seems to be,” as Melville said in his
essay on Hawthorne, “that even with those Americans who look forward
to the coming of a great literary genius among us, they somehow fancy
he will come in the costume of Queen Elizabeth’s day; be a writer of
dramas founded upon old English history or the tales of Boccaccio.
Whereas, great geniuses are parts of the times, they themselves are the
times and possess a corresponding colouring.”
Now, Moby-Dick was written in the best spirit of the nineteenth
century, and though it escaped most of the limitations of that period,
it escaped with its finest qualities intact. Heroes and gods in the
old sense, as Walt Whitman plainly saw, had had their day: they fitted
into a simpler scheme of life and thought, and a more credulous sort of
attitude; so far from representing the ultimate triumph of the human
imagination, from which the scientific mode of thought was not merely
a departure but a falling off, the old myths were but the product of a
juvenile fantasy. One might still use these figures, as Milton used an
Arcadian image to express the corruptions of the Established Church;
but they stood for a mode of consciousness and feeling remote from our
modern experience. Science did not, as has been foolishly believed,
destroy the myth-making power of man, or reduce all his inner strivings
to bleak impotence: this has been the accidental, temporary effect of
a one-sided science, serving, consciously or not, a limited number of
practical activities. What the scientific spirit has actually done
has been to exercise the imagination in finer ways than the autistic
wish--the wish of the infant possessed of the illusion of power and
domination--was able to express. Faraday’s ability to conceive the
lines of force in a magnetic field was quite as great a triumph as
the ability to conceive fairies dancing in a ring: and, as Mr. A. N.
Whitehead has shown, the poets who sympathized with this new sort of
imagination, poets like Shelley, Wordsworth, Whitman, Melville, did not
feel themselves robbed of their specific powers, but rather found them
enlarged and refreshed.
One of the finest love-poems of the nineteenth century, Whitman’s
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, is expressed in such an image
as Darwin or Audubon might have used, were the scientist as capable
of expressing his inner feelings as of noting “external” events: the
poet haunting the sea-shore and observing the mating of the birds, day
after day following their life, could scarcely have existed before the
nineteenth century. In the seventeenth century, such a poet would have
remained in the garden and written about a literary ghost, Philomel,
and not about an actual pair of birds: in Pope’s time, the poet would
have remained in the library and written about the birds on a lady’s
fan. Almost all the important works of the nineteenth century were
cast in this mode and expressed this new imaginative range: they
respect the fact: they are replete with observation: they project an
ideal realm in and through, not over, the landscape of actuality.
Notre Dame might have been written by an historian, War and Peace by a
sociologist, The Idiot might have been created by a psychiatrist, and
Salammbô might have been the work of an archaeologist. I do not say
that these books were scientific by intention, or that they might be
replaced by a work of science without grave loss; far from it. I merely
point out that they are conceived in the same spirit; that they belong
to a similar plane of consciousness. Much as Melville was enriched by
the Elizabethan writers, there is that in Moby-Dick which separates
him completely from the poets of that day--and if one wants a word
to describe the element that makes the difference, one must call it
briefly science.
Now, this respect for fact, as opposed to irresponsible fantasy, did
not of course exist for the first time in the nineteenth century:
Defoe had this habit of mind in quite as great a measure as Melville:
what is important is that in the nineteenth century it was for the
first time completely wedded to the imagination. It no longer means
a restriction, a dried-up quality, an incompleteness; it no longer
deifies the empirical and the practical at the expense of the ideal
and the aesthetic: on the contrary, these qualities are now completely
fused together, as an expression of life’s integrated totality. The
symbolism again becomes equal to the reality. Hercules no longer serves
in this way: although originally he was doubtless as full of immediate
relationships as whaling; and a more complex and diffuse symbol--like
Kutuzov’s army in War and Peace--is necessary. Had Milton sought to
tell this parable of Melville’s, he would probably have recast the
story of Jonah and the whale, making Jonah the hero; but in doing so he
could not help losing all the great imaginative parallels Melville is
able to work out, through using material hitherto untouched by previous
myth or history. For Ahab’s hate and the pursuit of the whale is only
one part of the total symbol: the physiological character of the whale,
its feeding, its mating, its whole life, from whatever sources Melville
drew the data, is equally a part of it. Indeed, the symbol of Moby-Dick
is complete and rounded, expressive of our present relations to the
universe, only through the passages that orthodox criticism, exercised
on lesser works and more meagre traditions, regards as extraneous or
unimportant!
Moby-Dick, then, is one of the first great mythologies to be created
in the modern world, created, that is, out of the stuff of that world,
its science, its exploration, its terrestrial daring, its concentration
upon power and dominion over nature, and not out of ancient symbols,
Prometheus, Endymion, Orestes, or mediaeval folk-legends, like Dr.
Faustus. Moby-Dick lives imaginatively in the newly broken soil of our
own life: its symbols, unlike Blake’s original but mysterious figures,
are direct and explicit: if the story is bedded in facts, the facts
themselves are not lost in the further interpretation. Moby-Dick thus
brings together the two dissevered halves of the modern world and
the modern self--its positive, practical, scientific, externalized
self, bent on conquest and knowledge, and its imaginative, ideal
half, bent on the transposition of conflict into art, and power into
humanity. This resolution is achieved in Moby-Dick itself: it is as if
a Shakespeare and a Bacon, or, to use a more local metaphor, as if an
Eakins and a Ryder, had collaborated on a single work of art, with a
heightening of their several powers. The best handbook on whaling is
also--I say this scrupulously--the best tragic epic of modern times and
one of the fine poetic works of all time.
That is an achievement; and it is also a promise. Whitman went as far
in his best poems, particularly in the Song of Myself; and, with quite
another method, Tolstoy went as far in War and Peace, Dostoyevsky in
the Brothers Karamazov; Hardy, less perfectly, approximated it perhaps
in The Dynasts; but no one went further. It is one of the great
peaks of the modern vision of life. “May God keep us,” wrote Blake,
“from single vision and Newton’s sleep.” We now perhaps see a little
more clearly what Blake’s enigmatic words mean. In Moby-Dick Melville
achieved the deep integrity of that double vision which sees with
both eyes--the scientific eye of actuality, and the illumined eye of
imagination and dream.
11
I have dwelt for a little on some of the meanings of Moby-Dick; but
this does not exhaust the matter. Each man will read into Moby-Dick the
drama of his own experience and that of his contemporaries: Mr. D. H.
Lawrence sees in the conflict a battle between the blood-consciousness
of the white race and its own abstract intellect, which attempts to
hunt and slay it: Mr. Percy Boynton sees in the whale all property and
vested privilege, laming the spirit of man: Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has
found in the white whale an image like that of Grendel in Beowulf,
expressing the Northern consciousness of the hard fight against the
elements; while for the disciple of Jung, the white whale is the symbol
of the Unconscious, which torments man, and yet is the source of all
his proudest efforts.
Each age, one may predict, will find its own symbols in Moby-Dick. Over
that ocean the clouds will pass and change, and the ocean itself will
mirror back those changes from its own depths. All these conscious
interpretations, however, though they serve the book by approaching
its deeper purpose, do not, cannot, quite penetrate the core of its
reality. Moby-Dick has a meaning which cannot be derived or dissociated
from the work itself. Like every great work of art, it summons up
thoughts and feelings profounder than those to which it gives overt
expression. It introduces one, sometimes by simple, bald means, to the
depths of one’s own experience. The book is not an answer, but a clue
that must be carried further and worked out. The Sermon on the Mount
has this quality. It does not answer all the difficult problems of
morality, but it suggests a new point of view in facing them: it leads
one who is sufficiently moved to follow through all the recesses of
conduct which can be influenced by mildness, understanding, and love,
but not otherwise. So with Moby-Dick: the book itself is greater than
the fable it embodies, it foreshadows more than it actually reflects:
as a work of art, Moby-Dick is part of a new integration of thought,
a widening of the fringe of consciousness, a deepening of insight,
through which the modern vision of life will finally be embodied.
The shadow cast by Moby-Dick throws into obscurity not merely the
sand-hills, but likewise some of the mountains, of the last three
centuries. Noting the extent of that shadow, one begins to suspect how
high the mountain itself is, and how great its bulk, how durable its
rock.
CHAPTER EIGHT: AMOR, THREATENING
Moby-Dick was done. In the fall of 1851 it appeared, first in England,
then, a few weeks later, in America. Melville was exhausted, exhausted
and overwrought. In the prodigious orchestration of Moby-Dick, Melville
had drained his energies, and, participating in Ahab’s own pursuit and
defiance, he had reached a point of spiritual exasperation which, like
Ahab’s illness after Moby-Dick had amputated him, was increased by his
lowered physical tone, by his weak eyes. Books like this are written
out of health and energy, but they do not leave health and energy
behind. On the contrary, the aftermath of such an effort is irritation,
debility, impotence.
Melville was worked up, in the writing of Moby-Dick, to the highest
pitch of effort; and he was harried, no doubt, by his ever-present
necessity to keep his public and add to his income. The spiritual
momentum remained, but the force behind it dwindled away. With no
time for recuperation, he plunged into his new work: an unwise
decision. Melville was not without his weaknesses, and they rose to
the surface in his new book, Pierre, or The Ambiguities. Moby-Dick had
disintegrated him: by some interior electrolysis, its sanative salt
was broken up into baneful chemical elements. In this disintegration,
Pierre rises at times as high as Moby-Dick, and sinks lower than any
of Melville’s other books. It contains passages that are the finest
utterances of his spirit; it also has passages that would scarcely
honour Laura Jean Libbey.
What caused this break-up? What value has Pierre in the sum of
Melville’s work? Neither of these questions admits of a quick and
facile answer. One cannot dismiss the novel high-handedly as Melville’s
contemporaries did; and since the relation of the personal life of the
artist to his art is still one of the major ambiguities in psychology,
one cannot give a decisive or confident answer to the first question.
2
Melville’s situation at the time of writing Pierre might have upset him
even in a period of completer poise and more abundant health. He had
written a great book: of that he could not possibly have had any doubt.
Minor writers may think their rhinestones are diamonds, but rarely
does a Shakespeare, a Swift, a Melville make the contrary mistake:
if he speak lightly of his own work, or affect to disregard it, it
is only for the reason that once he has reached the utmost depths of
consciousness and realizes that vast and myriad interior which can
never be fully reported, he begins to realize that diamonds, too, are
only another kind of rhinestone: they are mined too cheaply.
Melville knew that Moby-Dick was bound to be his chief title to fame.
In 1849 he had written to Mr. Duyckinck: “Would that a man could do
something and then say It is finished--not that one thing only, but all
others--that he has reached his uttermost and can never exceed it.”
Melville had done this: he had mined and tunnelled through every part
of his experience to produce this book. “There is a sure, though secret
sign in some works,” he wrote in 1850, “which proves the culmination
of the powers ... that produced them,” and he recognized this secret
sign in Moby-Dick: his letters to Hawthorne announce it. Mid all the
tribulations and vexations of his life, there was, as in the heart of
the whale Armada, a quiet place of calm and inward peace; within that
spot, he had no reason to doubt or be dissatisfied with his work.
Still, what a writer articulates is always, though his words stay
in a private diary, an effort at communication; the very nature of
language makes this inevitable. Melville was necessarily not without
his curiosity as to how the world would greet this magnificent product
of his maturity, the first book in which he was in full command of his
powers. And what was the world’s answer?
The world’s answer was no doubt what was to be expected; but it was no
less discouraging for this reason. The Literary World indeed treated
Moby-Dick with respect, and with as much understanding as a purely
bookish man, like Mr. Duyckinck, could be expected to show: though it
wasted most of the first review telling about the parallel fate of the
Ann Alexander, it made up for this adventitious journalism by a second
article which acknowledged Moby-Dick’s manifold powers and excellences.
“An intellectual chowder of romance, philosophy, natural history, fine
writing, good feeling, bad sayings ... over which, in spite of all
uncertainties, and in spite of the author himself, predominates his
keen perceptive faculties, exhibited in vivid narration.” In the light
of other contemporary reviews, this was fairly handsome. The Dublin
University Magazine, with steady opacity, said Moby-Dick was quite as
eccentric and monstrously extravagant in many of its incidents as even
Mardi, but was a valuable book because it contained an unparalleled
mass of information about the whale. As for the Athenaeum, it
righteously reminded Mr. Melville that he “has to thank himself only if
his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader as
so much trash”--criticism which reached a pinnacle in the New Monthly
Magazine, which described the style of Moby-Dick as “maniacal--mad as a
March hare--moving, gibbering, screaming, like an incurable Bedlamite,
reckless of keeper or strait-waistcoat.”
One need not go into all the forms under which the contemporary critic
disclosed his insensitiveness to great prose and his servile compliance
with the idola of the market; but one must note a singular fact: from
Fitz-James O’Brien’s first criticism of Melville’s work as a whole in
1853 down to Mr. Vernon Parrington’s commentary in 1927, Moby-Dick,
the keystone of Melville’s work, has frequently been left out of
account. The book that triumphantly smothers all the contradictory
opinions about Melville--that he was a romantic, that he could only
portray external scenes, that he was a pure introvert, that he was
an adventurous ne’er-do-well, never happy or at home in a settled
community, that he was irresponsive to the life around him, that he
was a sheer realist who could only record what he had seen--the book
that makes these generalizations silly suffered something worse than
antagonistic criticism: it met with complete neglect. It is only since
1914 in America that this neglect has been even partly atoned for.
Such obtuseness, such flat stupidity, must have had a dismaying
effect upon Melville. The writer begins to doubt the possibility of
literature in a world that so flagrantly misunderstands or ignores its
higher manifestations. Faced with such contemporaries, the artist may
retire within himself, as Bach or Ryder or Cézanne did; but it will
only be a miracle that will keep him from taking into his retirement
a deep contempt for the people around him. That contempt is worse
than isolation; it brings isolation without hope. “I write to please
myself,” exclaimed Melville in one passage in Pierre. In that mood
of wilful defiance, a man may revolt from the good sense of his
contemporaries as well as from their deficiencies. There was nothing in
the reception of Moby-Dick that would have lessened Melville’s scorn,
or helped him to fortify himself against his own weaknesses. Quite the
contrary. Like Pierre himself he was to learn “and very bitterly learn,
that though the world worship mediocrity and commonplace, yet hath it
fire and sword for contemporary grandeur.”
Moby-Dick was too much for them, was it? Well: it was a mere pencilling
of the ultimate blackness that was his to paint: if one were going to
tell the truth at all, one could go much further and be much plainer.
“Henceforth,” proclaimed Pierre, “I will know nothing but Truth; Glad
Truth or Sad Truth; I will know what _is_, and do what my deepest angel
dictates.” And again: “I am more frank with Pierre than the best men
are with themselves. I am all unguarded and magnanimous with Pierre:
therefore you see his weakness, and therefore only. In reserves, men
build imposing characters; not in revelations. He who shall be wholly
honest, though nobler than Ethan Allen that man shall stand in danger
of the meanest mortal’s scorn.”
It was in some such mood of defeat, foreboding, defiant candour,
that Pierre was conceived and written. Meanwhile, in November, 1851,
the Hawthorne family had moved away from the Berkshires and Melville
settled to his work, in the spring of 1852, on the north porch that
faced Mt. Monadnock, with an intense feeling of human isolation which
brought the mountain closer to him, as his only friend. The one
possibility of a friendly, rapturous union of spirits was behind him:
no longer could he write to Hawthorne, as he had done just a few months
before: “Whence came you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my
flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips--lo, they are yours, and
not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the
Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of
feeling.” No: already that was over: dead. If the spirit burned now, it
burned as ice does to the human touch. It was not altogether in irony,
or in wild whimsy, that Melville dedicated his next book, Pierre, to
his one solitary and steadfast companion, Mt. Monadnock.
3
There is a sense in which Pierre is an abortive complement to
Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick, great fable that it is, contains a good part
of human life under one figure or another; but it does not contain
everything. I would claim much for it; I would claim much for
Melville’s work as a whole; but there is still a great segment that
remained unexplored till Melville wrote Pierre, and that, to the end,
he never satisfactorily penetrated or freely brooded upon.