Herman Melville
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