Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which
could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there
was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him,
which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest;
and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost
despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness
of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to
explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I
must, else all these chapters might be naught.
Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty,
as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles,
japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way
recognised a certain royal pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric,
grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants”
above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the
modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the
royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a
snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Cæsarian, heir to
overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue;
and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself,
giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and
though, besides all this, whiteness has been even made significant of
gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and
though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is
made the emblem of many touching, noble things—the innocence of brides,
the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving
of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in
many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine
of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens
drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of
the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine
spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white
forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek
mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white
bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the
sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology,
that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could
send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity;
and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian
priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb
or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of
the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the
Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are
given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed
in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth
there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations,
with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an
elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more
of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.
This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness,
when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any
object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest
bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of
the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the
transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which
imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific,
to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged
tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded
bear or shark.[4]
[4] With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged
by him who would fain go still deeper into this matter, that
it is not the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens
the intolerable hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that
heightened hideousness, it might be said, only arises from
the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the
creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence
and love; and hence, by bringing together two such opposite
emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so
unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true;
yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that
intensified terror.
As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose
in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely
tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. This
peculiarity is most vividly hit by the French in the name they
bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with
“Requiem eternam” (eternal rest), whence _Requiem_ denominating
the mass itself, and any other funereal music. Now, in allusion
to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and the
mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him _Requin_.
Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual
wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all
imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great,
unflattering laureate, Nature.[5]
[5] I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a
prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my
forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and
there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery
thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill
sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel
wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings
and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered
cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through
its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets
which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed
myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in
those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping
memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that
prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things
that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and turning,
asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney!
I never had heard that name before; is it conceivable that this
glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But
some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman’s name
for albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge’s wild
Rhyme have had aught to do with those mystical impressions
which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our deck. For
neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be an
albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a
little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.
I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the
bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more
evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds
called grey albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but
never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl.
But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and
I will tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl
floated on the sea. At last the Captain made a postman of it;
tying a lettered, leathern tally round its neck, with the
ship’s time and place; and then letting it escape. But I doubt
not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in
Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding, the
invoking, and adoring cherubim!
Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of
the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger,
large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a
thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the
elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those
days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At
their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which
every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his
mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more
resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A
most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western
world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the
glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god,
bluff-bowed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid
his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly
streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his
circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White
Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through
his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to
the bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe.
Nor can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this
noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so
clothed him with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it
which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain
nameless terror.
But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that
accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and
Albatross.
What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks
the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It
is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name
he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men—has no substantive
deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him
more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?
Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but
not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces
this crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the
gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White
Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice
omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of
that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their
faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the
market-place!
Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all
mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It
cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of
the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering
there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of
consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And
from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the
shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail
to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in
a milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that
even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on
his pallid horse.
Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious