Herman Melville
have their recognizable counterparts in the actual world. Without any
prolonged investigation one could still find a Starbuck on Nantucket or
a Flask on Marthas Vineyard--indeed, as Mr. Thomas Benton’s portraits
properly indicate, queerer fish than they.
On this level, Moby-Dick brings together and focusses in a single
picture the long line of sketches and preliminary portraits Melville
had assembled in Typee, Omoo, Redburn, and White-Jacket. As a story
of the sea, Moby-Dick will always have a call for those who wish to
recapture the magic and terror and stress and calm delight of the
sea and its ships; and not less so because it seizes on a particular
kind of ship, the whaler, and a special occupation, whaling, at the
moment when they were about to pass out of existence, or rather, were
being transformed from a brutal but glorious battle into a methodical,
slightly banal industry. Melville had the singular fortune to pronounce
a valedictory on many ways of life and scenes that were becoming
extinct. He lived among the South Sea Islanders when they were still
pretty much as Captain Cook found them, just before their perversion
and decimation by our exotic Western civilization. He recorded life
on a man-of-war half a generation before the sail gave place to
steam, wood to armour-plate, and grappling-irons to long-range guns.
He described life on a sailing-packet before steam had increased the
speed, the safety, and the pleasant monotony of transatlantic travel:
and finally, he recorded the last heroic days of whaling. Moby-Dick
would have value as first-hand testimony, even if it were negligible as
literature. If this were all, the book would still be important.
But Moby-Dick, admirable as it is as a narrative of maritime adventure,
is far more than that: it is, fundamentally, a parable on the mystery
of evil and the accidental malice of the universe. The white whale
stands for the brute energies of existence, blind, fatal, overpowering,
while Ahab is the spirit of man, small and feeble, but purposive,
that pits its puniness against this might, and its purpose against
the blank senselessness of power. The evil arises with the good: the
white whale grows up among the milder whales which are caught and cut
up and used: one hunts for the one--for a happy marriage, livelihood,
offspring, social companionship and cheer--and suddenly heaving its
white bulk out of the calm sea, one comes upon the other: illness,
accident, treachery, jealousy, vengefulness, dull frustration. The
South Sea savage did not know of the white whale: at least, like death,
it played but a casual part in his consciousness. It is different with
the European: his life is a torment of white whales: the Jobs, the
Aeschyluses, the Dantes, the Shakespeares, pursue him and grapple with
him, as Ahab pursues his antagonist.
All our lesser literature, all our tales of Avalon or Heaven or
ultimate redemption, or, in a later day, the Future, is an evasion of
the white whale: it is a quest of that boyish beginning which we call
a happy ending. But the old Norse myth told that Asgard itself would
be consumed at last, and the very gods would be destroyed: the white
whale is the symbol of that persistent force of destruction, that
meaningless force, which now figures as the outpouring of a volcano or
the atmospheric disruption of a tornado or again as the mere aimless
dissipation of unused energy into an unavailable void--that spectacle
which so disheartened the learned Henry Adams. The whole tale of the
West, in mind and action, in the philosophy and art of the Greeks, in
the organization and technique of the Romans, in the precise skills
and unceasing spiritual quests of the modern man, is a tale of this
effort to combat the whale--to ward off his blows, to counteract his
aimless thrusts, to create a purpose that will offset the empty malice
of Moby-Dick. Without such a purpose, without the belief in such a
purpose, life is neither bearable nor significant: unless one is
polarized by these central human energies and aims, one tends to become
absorbed in Moby-Dick himself, and, becoming a part of his being,
can only maim, slay, butcher, like the shark or the white whale or
Alexander or Napoleon. If there is no God, exclaims Dostoyevsky’s hero,
then we may commit murder: and in the sense that God represents the
totality of human purpose and meaning the conclusion is inevitable.
It is useless to derive man’s purposes from those of the external
universe; he is a figure in the web of life. Except for such kindness
and loyalty as the creatures man has domesticated show, there is, as
far as one can now see, no concern except in man himself over the
ceaseless motions and accidents that take place in nature. Love and
chance, said Charles Peirce, rule the universe: but the love is man’s
love, and although in the very concept of chance, as both Peirce and
Captain Ahab declare, there is some rough notion of fair play, of
fifty-fifty, of an even break, that is small immediate consolation for
the creature that may lose not the game, but his life, by an unlucky
throw of the dice. Ahab has more humanity than the gods he defies:
indeed, he has more power, because he is conscious of the power he
wields, and applies it deliberately, whereas Moby-Dick’s power only
seems deliberate because it cuts across the directed aims of Ahab
himself. And in one sense, Ahab achieves victory: he vanquishes in
himself that which would retreat from Moby-Dick and acquiesce in his
insensate energies and his brutal sway. His end is tragic: evil engulfs
him. But in battling against evil, with power instead of love, Ahab
himself, in A. E.’s phrase, becomes the image of the thing he hates: he
has lost his humanity in the very act of vindicating it. By physical
defiance, by physical combat, Ahab cannot rout and capture Moby-Dick:
the odds are against him; and if his defiance is noble, his methods
are ill chosen. Growth, cultivation, order, art--these are the proper
means by which man displaces accident and subdues the vacant external
powers in the universe: the way of growth is not to become more
powerful but to become more human. Here is a hard lesson to learn: it
is easier to wage war than to conquer in oneself the tendency to be
partial, vindictive, and unjust: it is easier to demolish one’s enemy
than to pit oneself against him in an intellectual combat which will
disclose one’s weaknesses and provincialities. And that evil Ahab seeks
to strike is the sum of one’s enemies. He does not bow down to it and
accept it: therein lies his heroism and virtue: but he fights it with
its own weapons and therein lies his madness. All the things that Ahab
despises when he is about to attack the whale, the love and loyalty
of Pip, the memory of his wife and child, the sextant of science, the
inner sense of calm, which makes all external struggle futile, are the
very things that would redeem him and make him victorious.
Man’s ultimate defence against the Universe, against evil and accident
and malice, is not by any fictitious resolution of these things into an
Absolute which justifies them and utilizes them for its own ends: this
is specious comfort, and Voltaire’s answer to Leibniz in Candide seems
to me a final one. Man’s defence lies within himself, not within the
narrow, isolated ego, which may be overwhelmed, but in that self which
we share with our fellows and which assures us that, whatever happens
to our own carcasses and hides, good men will remain, to carry on the
work, to foster and protect the things we have recognized as excellent.
To make that self more solid, one must advance positive science,
produce formative ideas, and embody ideal forms in which all men may,
to a greater or less degree, participate: in short, one must create a
realm which is independent of the hostile forces in the universe--and
cannot be lightly shaken by their onslaught. Melville’s method, that
of writing Moby-Dick, was correct: as correct as Ahab’s method, taken
literally, that of fighting Moby-Dick, was fallacious. In Moby-Dick,
Melville conquered the white whale in his own consciousness: instead of
blankness there was significance, instead of aimless energy there was
purpose, and instead of random living there was Life. The universe _is_
inscrutable, unfathomable, malicious, _so_--like the white whale and
his element. Art in the broad sense of all humanizing effort is man’s
answer to this condition: for it is the means by which he circumvents
or postpones his doom, and bravely meets his tragic destiny. Not tame
and gentle bliss, but disaster, heroically encountered, is man’s true
happy ending.
9
Here, it seems to me, is the plainest interpretation of Melville’s
fable, and the one he was partly conscious of in the writing of it. But
a great book is more a part of its milieu than either the writer or his
public knows; and there is more in Moby-Dick than the figure of man’s
heroic defiance of brute energy, and evil, and the high gods.
In another sense, the whale stands for the practical life. Mankind
needs food and light and shelter, and, with a little daring and a
little patience, it gains these things from its environment: the
whale that we cut up, dissect, analyse, melt down, pour into casks,
and distribute in cities and households is the whale of industry and
science. The era of whaling which opened only in the late seventeenth
century is timed with the era of modern industry; and in the very year
Melville wrote Moby-Dick, 1851, industry and science were announcing
their triumphs in that great cock-crow of the Crystal Palace Exhibition
in London. Side by side with this purpose, which secures man’s material
existence, is another set of purposes which, though they sometimes take
advantage of the means offered by the practical life, as Ahab takes
advantage of his sordid crew and ordinary whaling to carry out his
private revenge, run counter to the usual flow of our daily efforts.
The white whale cannot be met and captured by the usual means; more
than that: to fulfil man’s own deeper purposes, the captains of the
spirit must oppose the prudence of Starbuck and the common sense
of Stubb. Material sustenance, home, comfort, though their pursuit
occupy the greater part of the daily round of humanity, are sometimes
best forgotten and set at naught: indeed, when nobler human purposes
are uppermost, they must be set at naught. He who steadily seeks to
preserve life and fortify it must be ready to give up his life at a
moment’s notice when a fellow creature is in danger: he who would
provide others with daily bread must be prepared to go hungry if the
wheat that would nourish him is needed for the planting. All the more
does this hold in the affairs of the spirit. When the human spirit
expands itself to the uttermost, to confront the white whale and hew
meaning and form from the blank stone of experience, one must reverse
all the practical maxims: earth’s folly, as Melville says, is Heaven’s
wisdom, and earth’s wisdom is Heaven’s greatest disaster.
The crew of the vessel seek the ordinary whale: they are after comfort
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