Herman Melville
stove boat, and the worst rascal on shipboard may be as magnificent as
Odysseus. All men live most intensely when they are moulded by such
a purpose--or even, wanting that, by an enterprise that counterfeits
it. Art, religion, culture in general, all those intangible triumphs
of the spirit that are embodied in forms and symbols, all that spells
purpose as opposed to senseless energy, and significance as opposed to
routine--these efforts develop human life to its fullest, even when
they work contrary to the ordinary standards of the world.
There, it seems to me, is another meaning in Ahab’s struggle with
Moby-Dick. He represents, not as in the first parable, an heroic
power that misconceives its mission and misapplies itself: here
he rather stands for human purpose in its highest expression. His
pursuit is “futile” because it wrecks the boat and brings home no oil
and causes material loss and extinguishes many human lives; but in
another sense, it is not futile at all, but is the only significant
part of the voyage, since oil is burned and ships eventually break up
and men die and even the towers of proud cities crumble away as the
buildings sink beneath the sand or the jungle, while all that remains,
all that perpetuates the life and the struggle, are their forms and
symbols, their art, their literature, their science, as they have
been incorporated in the social heritage of man. That which is useful
for the moment eventually becomes useless; the mummy’s food and drink
shrivel away or evaporate: but that which is “useless,” the graven
image or the tomb itself, continues to nourish the spirit of man. Life,
Life purposive, Life formative, Life expressive, is more than living,
as living itself is more than the finding of a livelihood. There is
no triumph so petty and evanescent as that involved in capturing the
ordinary whale: the nineteenth century made this triumph the end and
object of all endeavour; and it put the spirit in chains of comfort
and material satisfaction, which were heavier than fetters and harder
to bear than the stake. By the same token, there is no struggle so
permanent and so humanly satisfactory as Ahab’s struggle with the white
whale. In that defeat, in that succession of defeats, is the only
pledge of man’s ultimate victory, and the only final preventive of
emptiness, boredom, and suicide. Battles are lost, as Whitman cried, in
the same spirit that they are won. Some day the physical powers of man
may be commensurate with his utmost spirit, and he will meet Leviathan
on even terms.
10
The epic and mythic quality of Moby-Dick has been misunderstood because
those who examined the book have thought of the epic in terms of Homer,
and the myth itself in relation to some obvious hero of antiquity,
or some modern folk-hero, a Washington, a Boone, raised to enormous
dimensions. “The great mistake seems to be,” as Melville said in his
essay on Hawthorne, “that even with those Americans who look forward
to the coming of a great literary genius among us, they somehow fancy
he will come in the costume of Queen Elizabeth’s day; be a writer of
dramas founded upon old English history or the tales of Boccaccio.
Whereas, great geniuses are parts of the times, they themselves are the
times and possess a corresponding colouring.”
Now, Moby-Dick was written in the best spirit of the nineteenth
century, and though it escaped most of the limitations of that period,
it escaped with its finest qualities intact. Heroes and gods in the
old sense, as Walt Whitman plainly saw, had had their day: they fitted
into a simpler scheme of life and thought, and a more credulous sort of
attitude; so far from representing the ultimate triumph of the human
imagination, from which the scientific mode of thought was not merely
a departure but a falling off, the old myths were but the product of a
juvenile fantasy. One might still use these figures, as Milton used an
Arcadian image to express the corruptions of the Established Church;
but they stood for a mode of consciousness and feeling remote from our
modern experience. Science did not, as has been foolishly believed,
destroy the myth-making power of man, or reduce all his inner strivings
to bleak impotence: this has been the accidental, temporary effect of
a one-sided science, serving, consciously or not, a limited number of
practical activities. What the scientific spirit has actually done
has been to exercise the imagination in finer ways than the autistic
wish--the wish of the infant possessed of the illusion of power and
domination--was able to express. Faraday’s ability to conceive the
lines of force in a magnetic field was quite as great a triumph as
the ability to conceive fairies dancing in a ring: and, as Mr. A. N.
Whitehead has shown, the poets who sympathized with this new sort of
imagination, poets like Shelley, Wordsworth, Whitman, Melville, did not
feel themselves robbed of their specific powers, but rather found them
enlarged and refreshed.
One of the finest love-poems of the nineteenth century, Whitman’s
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, is expressed in such an image
as Darwin or Audubon might have used, were the scientist as capable
of expressing his inner feelings as of noting “external” events: the
poet haunting the sea-shore and observing the mating of the birds, day
after day following their life, could scarcely have existed before the
nineteenth century. In the seventeenth century, such a poet would have
remained in the garden and written about a literary ghost, Philomel,
and not about an actual pair of birds: in Pope’s time, the poet would
have remained in the library and written about the birds on a lady’s
fan. Almost all the important works of the nineteenth century were
cast in this mode and expressed this new imaginative range: they
respect the fact: they are replete with observation: they project an
ideal realm in and through, not over, the landscape of actuality.
Notre Dame might have been written by an historian, War and Peace by a
sociologist, The Idiot might have been created by a psychiatrist, and
Salammbô might have been the work of an archaeologist. I do not say
that these books were scientific by intention, or that they might be
replaced by a work of science without grave loss; far from it. I merely
point out that they are conceived in the same spirit; that they belong
to a similar plane of consciousness. Much as Melville was enriched by
the Elizabethan writers, there is that in Moby-Dick which separates
him completely from the poets of that day--and if one wants a word
to describe the element that makes the difference, one must call it
briefly science.
Now, this respect for fact, as opposed to irresponsible fantasy, did
not of course exist for the first time in the nineteenth century:
Defoe had this habit of mind in quite as great a measure as Melville:
what is important is that in the nineteenth century it was for the
first time completely wedded to the imagination. It no longer means
a restriction, a dried-up quality, an incompleteness; it no longer
deifies the empirical and the practical at the expense of the ideal
and the aesthetic: on the contrary, these qualities are now completely
fused together, as an expression of life’s integrated totality. The
symbolism again becomes equal to the reality. Hercules no longer serves
in this way: although originally he was doubtless as full of immediate
relationships as whaling; and a more complex and diffuse symbol--like
Kutuzov’s army in War and Peace--is necessary. Had Milton sought to
tell this parable of Melville’s, he would probably have recast the
story of Jonah and the whale, making Jonah the hero; but in doing so he
could not help losing all the great imaginative parallels Melville is
able to work out, through using material hitherto untouched by previous
myth or history. For Ahab’s hate and the pursuit of the whale is only
one part of the total symbol: the physiological character of the whale,
its feeding, its mating, its whole life, from whatever sources Melville
drew the data, is equally a part of it. Indeed, the symbol of Moby-Dick
is complete and rounded, expressive of our present relations to the
universe, only through the passages that orthodox criticism, exercised
on lesser works and more meagre traditions, regards as extraneous or
unimportant!
Moby-Dick, then, is one of the first great mythologies to be created
in the modern world, created, that is, out of the stuff of that world,
its science, its exploration, its terrestrial daring, its concentration
upon power and dominion over nature, and not out of ancient symbols,
Prometheus, Endymion, Orestes, or mediaeval folk-legends, like Dr.
Faustus. Moby-Dick lives imaginatively in the newly broken soil of our
own life: its symbols, unlike Blake’s original but mysterious figures,
are direct and explicit: if the story is bedded in facts, the facts
themselves are not lost in the further interpretation. Moby-Dick thus
brings together the two dissevered halves of the modern world and
the modern self--its positive, practical, scientific, externalized
self, bent on conquest and knowledge, and its imaginative, ideal
half, bent on the transposition of conflict into art, and power into
humanity. This resolution is achieved in Moby-Dick itself: it is as if
a Shakespeare and a Bacon, or, to use a more local metaphor, as if an
Eakins and a Ryder, had collaborated on a single work of art, with a
heightening of their several powers. The best handbook on whaling is
also--I say this scrupulously--the best tragic epic of modern times and
one of the fine poetic works of all time.
That is an achievement; and it is also a promise. Whitman went as far
in his best poems, particularly in the Song of Myself; and, with quite
another method, Tolstoy went as far in War and Peace, Dostoyevsky in
the Brothers Karamazov; Hardy, less perfectly, approximated it perhaps
in The Dynasts; but no one went further. It is one of the great
peaks of the modern vision of life. “May God keep us,” wrote Blake,
“from single vision and Newton’s sleep.” We now perhaps see a little
more clearly what Blake’s enigmatic words mean. In Moby-Dick Melville
achieved the deep integrity of that double vision which sees with
both eyes--the scientific eye of actuality, and the illumined eye of
imagination and dream.
11
I have dwelt for a little on some of the meanings of Moby-Dick; but
this does not exhaust the matter. Each man will read into Moby-Dick the
drama of his own experience and that of his contemporaries: Mr. D. H.
Lawrence sees in the conflict a battle between the blood-consciousness
of the white race and its own abstract intellect, which attempts to
hunt and slay it: Mr. Percy Boynton sees in the whale all property and
vested privilege, laming the spirit of man: Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has
found in the white whale an image like that of Grendel in Beowulf,
expressing the Northern consciousness of the hard fight against the
elements; while for the disciple of Jung, the white whale is the symbol
of the Unconscious, which torments man, and yet is the source of all
his proudest efforts.
Each age, one may predict, will find its own symbols in Moby-Dick. Over
that ocean the clouds will pass and change, and the ocean itself will
mirror back those changes from its own depths. All these conscious
interpretations, however, though they serve the book by approaching
its deeper purpose, do not, cannot, quite penetrate the core of its
reality. Moby-Dick has a meaning which cannot be derived or dissociated
from the work itself. Like every great work of art, it summons up
thoughts and feelings profounder than those to which it gives overt
expression. It introduces one, sometimes by simple, bald means, to the