Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
is no grace nor polish. Once in a while, his animation gives place
to a singularly quiet expression, out of these eyes to which I have
objected; an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you
feel that he is at that moment taking deepest note of what is before
him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique.
It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself.
I saw him look at Una so, yesterday, several times.”
Mrs. Hawthorne must ever enjoy a lofty eminence as one of Melville’s
most penetrating critics. Her husband dwelt apart, and less because he
found the atmosphere of New England wholly uncongenial than because he
shared his wife’s conviction that he was like a star. And shrewdly his
wife resented the presence of a second luminary--treacherously veiled
and of heaven knows what magnitude!--in her serene New England sky.
Time may yet harp her worst fears aright.
For despite his comparative obscurity, Melville is--as cannot be too
frequently iterated--one of the chief and most unusual figures in our
native literature. And his claim to such high distinction must rest
upon three prime counts.
First--because most obvious--Melville was the literary discoverer of
the South Seas. And though his ample and rapidly multiplying progeny
includes such names as Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Warren Stoddard,
John La Farge, Jack London, Louis Becke, A. Safroni-Middleton, Somerset
Maugham, and Frederick O’Brien, he is still unsurpassed in the manner
he originated. On this point, all competent critics are agreed.
Melville’s second achievement is most adequately stated by the
well-known English sea-writer, W. Clark Russell, in _A Claim of
American Literature_ (reprinted from _The North American Review_ in
_The Critic_ for March 26, 1892). “When Richard Henry Dana, and Herman
Melville wrote,” says Russell, “the commercial sailor of Great Britain
and the United States was without representation in literature.... Dana
and Melville were Americans. They were the first to lift the hatch and
show the world what passes in a ship’s forecastle; how men live down
in that gloomy cave, how and what they eat, and where they sleep;
what pleasures they take, what their sorrows and wrongs are; how they
are used when they quit their black sea-parlours in response to the
boatswain’s silver summons to work on deck by day and by night. These
secrets of the deep Dana and Melville disclosed.... Dana and Melville
created a new world, not by the discovery, but by the interpretation of
it. They gave us a full view of the life led by tens of thousands of
men whose very existence, till these wizards arose, had been as vague
to the general land intelligence as the shadows of clouds moving under
the brightness of the stars.” And to Melville and Dana, so Russell
contends, we owe “the first, the best and most enduring revelation of
these secrets.” On this score, Conrad, Kipling, and Masefield must own
Melville as master.
Melville’s third and supreme claim to distinction rests upon a single
volume, which, after the order of Melchizedek, is without issue and
without descent: “a work which is not only unique in its kind, and a
great achievement” to quote a recent judgment from England, “but is
the expression of an imagination that rises to the highest, and so
is amongst the world’s great works of art.” This book is, of course,
_Moby-Dick_, Melville’s undoubted masterpiece. “In that wild, beautiful
romance”--the words are Mr. Masefield’s--“Melville seems to have spoken
the very secret of the sea, and to have drawn into his tale all the
magic, all the sadness, all the wild joy of many waters. It stands
quite alone; quite unlike any other book known to me. It strikes a note
which no other sea writer has ever struck.”
The organising theme of this unparalleled volume is the hunt by the
mad Captain Ahab after the great white whale which had dismembered
him of his leg; of Captain Ahab’s unwearied pursuit by rumour of its
whereabouts; of the final destruction of himself and his ship by its
savage onslaught. On the white hump of the ancient and vindictive
monster Captain Ahab piles the sum of all the rage and hate of mankind
from the days of Eden down.
Melville expresses an ironical fear lest his book be scouted “as a
monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and
intolerable allegory.” Yet fabulous allegory it is: an allegory of
the demonism at the cankered heart of nature, teaching that “though
in many of its visible aspects the world seems formed in love, the
invisible spheres were formed in fright.” Thou shalt know the truth,
and the truth shall make you mad. To the eye of truth, so Melville
would convince us, “the palsied universe lies before us as a leper;”
“all deified Nature absolutely paints like a harlot, whose allurements
cover nothing but the charnal house within.” To embody this devastating
insight, Melville chooses as a symbol, an albino whale. “Wonder ye then
at the fiery hunt?”
An artist who goes out to find sermons in stones does so at the
peril of converting his stone pile into his mausoleum. His danger is
excessive, if, having his sermons all ready, he makes it his task
to find the stones to fit them. Allegory justifies itself only when
the fiction is the fact and the moral the induction; only when its
representation is as imaginatively real as its meaning; only when the
stones are interesting boulders in a rich and diversified landscape.
So broadly and vividly is _Moby-Dick_ based on solid foundation that
even the most literal-minded, innocent of Melville’s dark intent, have
found this book of the soul’s daring and the soul’s dread a very worthy
volume. One spokesman for this congregation, while admitting that “a
certain absorption of interest lies in the nightmare intensity and
melodramatic climax of the tale,” finds his interest captured and held
far more by “the exposition of fact with which the story is loaded
to the very gunwale. No living thing on earth or in the waters under
the earth is so interesting as the whale. How it is pursued, from the
Arctic to the Antarctic; how it is harpooned, to the peril of boat and
crew; how, when brought to the side, ‘cutting in’ is accomplished;
how the whale’s anatomy is laid bare; how his fat is redeemed--to be
told this in the form of a narrative, with all manner of dramatic but
perfectly plausible incidents interspersed, is enough to make the book
completely engrossing without the white whale and Captain Ahab’s fatal
monomania.”
So diverse are the samples out of which _Moby-Dick_ is compounded, yet
so masterful is each of its samples, that there is still far from
universal agreement as to the ground colour of this rich and towering
fabric. Yet by this very disagreement is its miraculous artistry
affirmed.
In _Moby-Dick_, all the powers and tastes of Melville’s complex genius
are blended. _Moby-Dick_ is at once indisputably the greatest whaling
novel, and “a hideous and intolerable allegory.” As Mr. Frank Jewett
Mather, Jr. has said, “Out of the mere episodes and minor instances of
_Moby-Dick_, a literary reputation might be made. The retired Nantucket
captains Bildad and Peleg might have stepped out of Smollett. Father
Mapple’s sermon on the book of Jonah is in itself a masterpiece, and
I know few sea tales that can hold their own with the blood feud of
Mate Rodney and sailor Steelkilt.” Captain Hook of _Peter Pan_ is
but Captain Boomer of _Moby-Dick_ with another name: and this an
identity founded not on surmise, but on Sir James Barrie’s professed
indebtedness to Melville. There are, in _Moby-Dick_, long digressions,
natural, historical and philosophical, on the person, habits, manners
and ideas of whales; there are long dialogues and soliloquies such as
were never spoken by mortal man in his waking senses, conversations
that for sweetness, strength and courage remind one of passages from
Dekker, Webster, Massinger, Fletcher and the other old dramatists loved
both by Melville and by Charles Lamb; in the discursive tradition of
Fielding, Sir Thomas Browne and the anatomist of melancholy, Melville
indulges freely in independent moralisings, half essay, half rhapsody;
withal, scenes like Ishmael’s experience at the “Spouter-Inn” with a
practising cannibal for bed-fellow, are, for finished humour, among the
most competent in the language. When Melville sat down to write, always
at his knee stood that chosen emissary of Satan, the comic spirit: a
demoniac familiar never long absent from his pages.
There are those, of course, who would hold against Dante his
moralising, and against Rabelais his broad humour. In like manner,
peculiarity of temperament has necessarily coloured critical judgment
of _Moby-Dick_. But though critics may mouth it as they like about
digressions, improbability, moralising reflections, swollen talk, or
the fetish of art now venerated with such articulate inveteracy,
all wonderfully agree upon the elementary force of _Moby-Dick_,
its vitality, its thrilling power. That it achieves the effect of
illusion, and to a degree peculiar to the highest feats of the creative
imagination, is incontestable. No writer has more. On this point it
is simply impossible to praise Melville too highly. What defects
_Moby-Dick_ has are formal rather than substantial. As Thackeray once
impatiently said of Macaulay: “What critic can’t point them out?” It
was the contention of James Thomson that an overweening concern for
formal impeccability is a fatal sign of weakened vitality. Intensity of
imagination--and Melville exhibited it prodigally in _Moby-Dick_--is an
infinitely rarer and more precious gift than technical sophistication.
Shakespeare has survived, despite his “monstrous irregularities.” But
since Shakespeare, as Francis Thompson has observed, there has been a
gradual decline from imperfection. Milton, at his most typical, was
far too perfect; Pope was ruined by his quest for the quality. No
thoughtful person can contemplate without alarm the idolatry bestowed
upon this quality by the contemporary mind: an idolatry that threatens
to reduce all art to the extinction of unendurable excellence. How
insipid would be the mere adventures of a Don Quixote recounted by a
Stevenson.
The astonishing variety of contradictory qualities synthesised in
_Moby-Dick_ exists nowhere else in literature, perhaps, in such
paradoxical harmony. These qualities, in differences of combination and
emphasis, are discoverable, however, in all of Melville’s writings.
And he published, besides anonymous contributions to periodicals, ten
novels and five volumes of poetry (including the two volumes privately
printed at the very close of his life). There survives, too, a bulk
of manuscript material: a novel, short stories, and a body of verse.
And branded on everything that Melville wrote is there the mark of the
extraordinary personality that created _Moby-Dick_.
Though some of Melville’s writing is distinctly disquieting in
devastating insight, and much of it is very uneven in inspiration,
none of it is undistinguished. Yet only four of his books have ever
been reprinted. The rest of his work, long since out of print,
is excessively rare, some of it being practically unavailable.
The scarcity of a book, however, is not invariably a sign of its
insignificance. It is one of the least accessible of Melville’s
books that Mr. Masefield singles out for especial distinction. “The
book I love best of his,” says Mr. Masefield, “is one very difficult
to come by. I think it is his first romance, and I believe it has
never been reprinted here. It is the romance of his own boyhood. I
mean _Redburn_. Any number of good pens will praise the known books,
_Typee_ and _Omoo_ and _Moby-Dick_ and _White-Jacket_, and will tell