Aspects of the novel
smash or distort, but perhaps he will illumine. As I said of the
fantasist, he manipulates a beam of light which occasionally touches the
objects so sedulously dusted by the hand of common sense, and renders
them more vivid than they can ever be in domesticity. This intermittent
realism pervades all the greater works of Dostoevsky and Herman
Melville. Dostoevsky can be patiently accurate about a trial or the
appearance of a staircase. Melville can catalogue the products of the
whale ("I have ever found the plain things the knottiest of all," he
remarks). D. H. Lawrence can describe a field of grass and flowers or
the entrance into Fremantle. Little things in the foreground seem to be
all that the prophet cares about at moments--he sits down with them so
quiet and busy like a child between two romps. What does he feel during
these intermittencies? Is it another form of excitement, or is he
resting? We cannot know. No doubt it is what A.E. feels when he is doing
his creameries, or what Claudel feels when he is doing his diplomacy,
but what is that? Anyhow, it characterizes these novels and gives them
what is always provocative in a work of art: roughness of surface. While
they pass under our eyes they are full of dents and grooves and lumps
and spikes which draw from us little cries of approval and disapproval.
When they have past, the roughness is forgotten, they become as smooth
as the moon.
Prophetic fiction, then, seems to have definite characteristics. It
demands humility and the absence of the sense of humour. It reaches
back--though we must not conclude from the example of Dostoevsky that it
always reaches back to pity and love. It is spasmodically realistic. And
it gives us the sensation of a song or of sound. It is unlike fantasy
because its face is towards unity, whereas fantasy glances about. Its
confusion is incidental, whereas fantasy's is fundamental--_Tristram
Shandy_ ought to be a muddle, _Zuleika Dobson_ ought to keep changing
mythologies. Also the prophet--one imagines--has gone "off" more
completely than the fantasist, he is in a remoter emotional state while
he composes. Not many novelists have this aspect. Poe is too incidental.
Hawthorne potters too anxiously round the problem of individual
salvation to get free. Hardy, a philosopher and a great poet, might seem
to have claims, but Hardy's novels are surveys, they do not give out
sounds. The writer sits back, it is true, but the characters do not
reach back. He shows them to us as they let their arms rise and fall in
the air; they may parallel our sufferings but can never extend
them--never, I mean, could Jude step forward like Mitya and release
floods of our emotion by saying "Gentlemen, I've had a bad dream."
Conrad is in a rather similar position. The voice, the voice of Marlow,
is too full of experiences to sing, it is dulled by many reminiscences
of error and beauty, its owner has seen too much to see beyond cause and
effect. To have a philosophy--even a poetic and emotional philosophy
like Hardy's and Conrad's--leads to reflections on life and things. A
prophet does not reflect. And he does not hammer away. That is why we
exclude Joyce. Joyce has many qualities akin to prophecy and he has
shown (especially in the _Portrait of the Artist_) an imaginative grasp
of evil. But he undermines the universe in too workmanlike a manner,
looking round for this tool or that: in spite of all his internal
looseness he is too tight, he is never vague except after due
deliberation; it is talk, talk, never song.
So, though I believe this lecture is on a genuine aspect of the novel,
not a fake aspect, I can only think of four writers to illustrate
it--Dostoevsky, Melville, D. H. Lawrence and Emily Brontë. Emily
Brontë shall be left to the last, Dostoevsky I have alluded to,
Melville is the centre of our picture, and the centre of Melville is
_Moby Dick_.
_Moby Dick_ is an easy book, as long as we read it as a yarn or an
account of whaling interspersed with snatches of poetry. But as soon as
we catch the song in it, it grows difficult and immensely important.
Narrowed and hardened into words the spiritual theme of _Moby Dick_ is
as follows: a battle against evil conducted too long or in the wrong
way. The White Whale is evil, and Captain Ahab is warped by constant
pursuit until his knight-errantry turns into revenge. These are words--a
symbol for the book if we want one--but they do not carry us much
further than the acceptance of the book as a yarn--perhaps they carry us
backwards, for they may mislead us into harmonizing the incidents, and
so losing their roughness and richness. The idea of a contest we may
retain: all action is a battle, the only happiness is peace. But contest
between what? We get false if we say that it is between good and evil or
between two unreconciled evils. The essential in _Moby Dick_, its
prophetic song, flows athwart the action and the surface morality like
an undercurrent. It lies outside words. Even at the end, when the ship
has gone down with the bird of heaven pinned to its mast, and the empty
coffin, bouncing up from the vortex, has carried Ishmael back to the
world--even then we cannot catch the words of the song. There has been
stress, with intervals: but no explicable solution, certainly no
reaching back into universal pity and love; no "Gentlemen, I've had a
good dream."
The extraordinary nature of the book appears in two of its early
incidents--the sermon about Jonah and the friendship with Queequeg.
The sermon has nothing to do with Christianity. It asks for endurance or
loyalty without hope of reward. The preacher "kneeling in the pulpit's
bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed
eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and
praying at the bottom of the sea." Then he works up and up and concludes
on a note of joy that is far more terrifying than a menace.
Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him when the ship of
this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him
who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns and destroys all sin
though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges.
Delight--top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord,
but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to
him, whom all the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob
can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and
deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his
final breath--O Father!--chiefly known to me by thy rod--mortal or
immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this
world's or mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee: for
what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?
I believe it is not a coincidence that the last ship we encounter at the
end of the book before the final catastrophe should be called the
Delight; a vessel of ill omen who has herself encountered Moby Dick and
been shattered by him. But what the connection was in the prophet's mind
I cannot say, nor could he tell us.
Immediately after the sermon, Ishmael makes a passionate alliance with
the cannibal Queequeg, and it looks for a moment that the book is to be
a saga of blood-brotherhood. But human relationships mean little to
Melville, and after a grotesque and violent entry, Queequeg is almost
forgotten. Almost--not quite. Towards the end he falls ill and a coffin
is made for him which he does not occupy, as he recovers. It is this
coffin, serving as a life-buoy, that saves Ishmael from the final
whirlpool, and this again is no coincidence, but an unformulated
connection that sprang up in Melville's mind. _Moby Dick_ is full of
meanings: its meaning is a different problem. It is wrong to turn the
Delight or the coffin into symbols, because even if the symbolism is
correct, it silences the book. Nothing can be stated about _Moby Dick_
except that it is a contest. The rest is song.
It is to his conception of evil that Melville's work owes much of its
strength. As a rule evil has been feebly envisaged in fiction, which
seldom soars above misconduct or avoids the clouds of mysteriousness.
Evil to most novelists is either sexual and social or is something very
vague for which a special style with implications of poetry is thought
suitable. They want it to exist, in order that it may kindly help them
on with the plot, and evil, not being kind, generally hampers them with
a villain--a Lovelace or Uriah Heep, who does more harm to the author
than to the fellow characters. For a real villain we must turn to a
story of Melville's called _Billy Budd_.[7]
It is a short story, but must be mentioned because of the light it
throws on his other work. The scene is on a British man-of-war soon
after the Mutiny at the Nore--a stagey yet intensely real vessel. The
hero, a young sailor, has goodness--which is faint beside the goodness
of Alyosha; still he has goodness of the glowing aggressive sort which
cannot exist unless it has evil to consume. He is not aggressive
himself. It is the light within him that irritates and explodes. On the
surface he is a pleasant, merry, rather insensitive lad, whose perfect
physique is marred by one slight defect, a stammer, which finally
destroys him. He is "dropped into a world not without some mantraps, and
against whose subtleties simple courage without any touch of defensive
ugliness is of little avail; and where such innocence as man is capable
of does yet, in a moral emergency, not always sharpen the faculties or
enlighten the will." Claggart, one of the petty officers, at once sees
in him the enemy--his own enemy, for Claggart is evil. It is again the
contest between Ahab and Moby Dick, though the parts are more clearly
assigned, and we are further from prophecy and nearer to morality and
common sense. But not much nearer. Claggart is not like any other
villain.
Natural depravity has certain negative virtues, serving it as silent
auxiliaries. It is not going too far to say that it is without vices or
small sins. There is a phenomenal pride in it that excludes them from
anything--never mercenary or avaricious. In short, the character here
meant partakes nothing of the sordid or sensual. It is serious, but free
from acerbity.
He accuses Billy of trying to foment a mutiny. The charge is ridiculous,
no one believes it, and yet it proves fatal. For when the boy is
summoned to declare his innocence, he is so horrified that he cannot
speak, his ludicrous stammer seizes him, the power within him explodes,
and he knocks down his traducer, kills him, and has to be hanged.
_Billy Budd_ is a remote unearthly episode, but it is a song not without
words, and should be read both for its own beauty and as an introduction
to more difficult works. Evil is labelled and personified instead of
slipping over the ocean and round the world, and Melville's mind can be
observed more easily. What one notices in him is that his apprehensions
are free from personal worry, so that we become bigger not smaller after
sharing them. He has not got that tiresome little receptacle, a
conscience, which is often such a nuisance in serious writers and so
contracts their effects--the conscience of Hawthorne or of Mark
Rutherford. Melville--after the initial roughness of his
realism--reaches straight back into the universal, to a blackness and
sadness so transcending our own that they are undistinguishable from
glory. He says, "in certain moods no man can weigh this world without
throwing in a something somehow like Original Sin to strike the uneven
balance." He threw it in, that undefinable something, the balance
righted itself, and he gave us harmony and temporary salvation.