Herman Melville
the drugged whales is captured. This is but one of a score of scenes
in Moby-Dick that remain in the memory like a personal experience: one
exclaims with Ishmael: I was one of that crew, I pulled in that boat,
I floundered around in those waters. A thousand things happen in life
with less vividness and impact than they make in these printed pages:
the Straits of Sunda are nearer than the neighbouring street.
Shortly after this encounter, the chase grows hotter: the Pequod
meets the Samuel Enderby of London, and the Samuel Enderby has met
Moby-Dick. Captain Ahab cannot contain himself: his gam with the
English captain ends abruptly, and, with the blood pounding in his
veins, he springs back to the ship--so precipitately that his ivory
leg is shattered and the carpenter must fit him with a new one. The
indignity increases Ahab’s impatient pride: “Here I am,” he exclaims,
“proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for
a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-debtedness which will
not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the
whole world’s books.” Ahab causes a new harpoon head to be forged: he
mans his own boat with the mysterious figures that had crept on the
Pequod in the twilight of the morning they left Nantucket, Orientals,
led by a Parsee, Fedallah. But at every move, Ahab stumbles on some
new obstruction, or delay; and his words become more frenzied, while
the effort of his will leaves a white scar of terror wherever his
lightnings momentarily strike. When the Bachelor, homeward bound, full
of oil, seeks to detain the Pequod for a friendly parley, Ahab leaves
it behind with a curse.
Against the under-chorus of Stubb’s common sense and Starbuck’s prudent
humanity, Ahab’s shrieks mount more wildly: he even throws the quadrant
overboard, to steer by compass, fathom-line, and dead reckoning. In the
last extremity of pursuit, in utter arrogance of purpose, he thrusts
aside the quadrant as the foolish toy and baby’s plaything of haughty
admirals and commodores and captains: in the final issue of life and
death, science is impotent: it can but tell where the ship is on the
planet, but not where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be
tomorrow noon. Now the Pequod must ride out a typhoon; and in the midst
of the electric storm, three corposants, tapers of white flame, appear
on the three lightning-rods of the masts. For Ahab, his purpose is only
beating nearer its goal: instead of bowing to the blind forces around
him, the storm, the sea, the lightning, the whale, his resolution is
more deeply fortified. Note his words: there are none more sudden and
final with meaning in the whole book.
“Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian
once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that
to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit,
and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love
nor reverence will thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but
kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy
speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life
will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst
of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but
a point at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I
earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal
rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of
love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere
supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted
worlds, there’s that in here that still remains indifferent. O thou
clear spirit, of the fire thou madest me, and like a true child of
fire, I breathe it back to thee.”
Everything conspires against Ahab’s deed: the compass needle goes
wrong: the log and line, hitherto seldom used, snap off when they are
heaved: a man is lost overboard and the life-buoy that was sent over
after him springs a leak and goes down with him; finally, another
whaler, the Rachel, that has lost a boat’s crew with the captain’s son
aboard, seeks to stay Ahab, so that the Pequod may help in the search:
Ahab refuses this call of humanity. One being alone almost defeats
Ahab, not Starbuck, who, rifle in hand, is tempted to kill Ahab and
end his crazy pursuit, but Pip, the little Negro idiot, whose devotion
rises as the isolation of Ahab grows. Ahab flees from him: his love,
faith, devotion move him from his purpose as no disasters or portents
have hitherto moved him. “If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s
purpose keels up in him,” Ahab admonishes himself. The boy is black,
and an outcast. The black is an idiot, and so doubly an outcast. From
one as mad and isolated as himself, Ahab receives love, a love deep
as his own sense of pride and power, and he is almost unmanned by it.
“Spite of a million villains,” says Ahab, “this makes me a bigot in the
fadeless fidelity of man.” But love has come too late: the chase goes
on.
As Ahab nears Moby-Dick his old humanity comes back to him. He sees his
own wife and child in Starbuck’s eye, regrets her perpetual widowhood,
and is lenient to Starbuck’s own desire to return to his hearth. No:
more: Ahab sees his wasted years: the desolation of their solitude: the
slavery of a lonely command: the dry nourishment this isolated soul
has fed upon--forty years of waste and forty years of folly since, as
a lad of eighteen, on a mild sweet day, he struck his first whale,
a boy-harpooner of eighteen. How is it that in spite of all this he
pursues his purpose? What keeps him pushing and crowding himself all
the time, recklessly making himself ready to do what in his own nature
he had no desire to accomplish?
The mild day and the steel-blue sky and the smell of the wind, as if
the haymakers had been mowing grass on the slopes of the Andes--this
day is scarcely over before Ahab detects a whale in the wind; and at
next daybreak, Ahab himself raises the hump-like snow-head--Moby-Dick.
In the smoother ocean, Moby-Dick seems as mild as the day, gliding with
scarcely a ripple through the water, his wrenched, hideous jaw beneath
the surface. Becoming aware of the chase, he sounds--only to return
with open jaws beneath the bottom of Ahab’s boat, and, after playing
with it as a cat with a mouse, he bites it in twain. The Pequod sails
on the whale and drives him off. Ahab and his crew are rescued, Ahab
with bloodshot blinded eyes, the white brine caking in his wrinkles,
manly wails arising from some far inland part of his being, as desolate
as sounds from out ravines.
The second day comes, and the boats lower again. Moby-Dick takes the
initiative and plunges immediately towards the boats with open jaws
and lashing tail, warping and manoeuvring in such a fashion that the
harpoons thrust into him become tangled and the lines shortened: again
the whale dives, and again he rises, this time throwing Ahab’s boat
topsy-turvy in the air. Ahab’s ivory leg is snapped off; but again
he is rescued; and a third day opens. At noon, Ahab, keeping lookout
himself, and doubling on his tracks, sights the whale, making towards
him in the distance. Again the calm and beauty of the day wake some old
humanity in Ahab; but he is churned onward by his purpose.
“Some men die at ebb-tide; some at low water; some at the full of
the flood;--I feel like a billow that’s all one crested comb. I am
old;--shake hands with me, man,” says Ahab to his first mate.
Their hands met; their eyes fastened; but Starbuck’s manly tears cannot
restrain Ahab’s order to lower away in pursuit, nor can the sharks
that crowd around the boat and snap maliciously at the oars, nor can
the hawk that tears at the red flag running on the main truck; nothing
diverts him. The whale sounds; when he rises, tormented by a mass of
harpoons and lines, it is as if a submerged iceberg rose suddenly to
the surface, the waters flash like a heap of fountains, break in a
shower of flakes, and leave the circling surface creamed like new milk
round the marble trunk of the whale. Moby-Dick, churning his tail among
the boats, dashes in the bows of the mate’s boat: Ahab, unscathed,
orders them back to the ship, while he keeps to the hunt. The whale,
fagged or malicious, permits Ahab to catch up with him: Ahab darts iron
and curse into his flanks; but the line snaps loose, and the whale
turns upon the Pequod herself, and bears down on her, his solid white
buttress of a forehead meeting and shivering the planks. The ship
settles. Ahab, cut off from the ship, makes one last thrust at the
whale; the line spins out and runs foul, and Ahab, stooping to unsnarl
it, is caught round the neck and shot out of the boat, fulfilling the
prophecy of Fedallah, who has been drowned before him. The rest of the
crew turns towards the Pequod; only its masts remain above the water;
and as it goes down, they are carried in the suction. As its final spar
settles in the water, a red arm and hammer hover back upliftedly in
the air, in the act of nailing the flag faster to the subsiding spar.
A sky-hawk, pecking at the flag, intercepts the hammer with his wing;
and in the death-grasp of Tashtego, the pinioned bird of heaven, with
shrieks, his form folded in Ahab’s flag, is dragged into the water:
the boat would not sink to hell until she had carried a living part of
heaven with her, and helmeted herself with it.
“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen
white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the
great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
7
It is absurd and ineffectual to give a summary of Moby-Dick, or to
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