Right to the end he could never accept the fact that perfect relationships cannot be. Each soul is alone, and the aloneness of each soul is a double barrier to perfect relationship between two beings.
Each soul should be alone. And in the end the desire for a "perfect relationship" is just a vicious, unmanly craving. "Tous nos malheurs viennent de ne pouvoir être seuls."
Melville, however, refused to draw his conclusion. Life was wrong, he said. He refused Life. But he stuck to his ideal of perfect relationship, possible perfect love. The world ought to be a harmonious loving place. And it can't be. So life itself is wrong.
It is silly arguing. Because after all, only temporary man sets up the "oughts."
The world ought not to be a harmonious loving place. It ought to be a place of fierce discord and intermittent harmonies: which it is.
Love ought not to be perfect. It ought to have perfect moments, and wildernesses of thorn bushes. Which it has.
A "perfect" relationship ought not to be possible. Every relationship should have its absolute limits, its absolute reserves, essential to the singleness of the soul in each person. A truly perfect relationship is one in which each party leaves great tracts unknown in the other party.
No two persons can meet at more than a few points, consciously. If two people can just be together fairly often, so that the presence of each is a sort of balance to the other, that is the basis of perfect relationship. There must be true separatenesses as well.
Melville was, at the core, a mystic and an idealist.
Perhaps, so am I.