Is this opinion a just one? I am a little uncertain. With no desire to denigrate Moby Dick or to deny it the first place in importance among Melville's books, I would venture that his genius is more perfectly and skilfully revealed in a volume of stories belonging to the so-called decadence. The Piazza Tales are liable to be dismissed by the critic of to-day with kindly condescension as “the best of the later work,” a judgment as misleading as it is easily explained. In some degree the worship of Moby Dick and the comparative neglect of the other work are inevitable corollaries to the Melville boom at its present stage. During the first period of any new æsthetic wonder, the peculiar transcends the normal in the imagination of disciples. Let the case of Melville be paralleled with that of Tintoretto's pupil, Greco. When first set in the revival of interest in this painter's work, he was most admired when most bizarre. He won favour for the contrast he presented to his immediate forerunners and his contemporaries. The name of Greco stood for certain mannerisms in colour and composition, and, the more a Greco picture revealed those mannerisms, the better a Greco it was judged to be. Already, from the hand of time, this formula of appreciation is suffering adjustment, but Melville is to-day precisely at the point where yesterday Greco stood. Like the master of Toledo, he has peculiar and noticeable tricks of matter and of style. Because Moby Dick is of these tricks more redolent than the author's other books, it tickles the palate of contemporary enthusiasm more thoroughly than do they.
Such preference is by its very nature tenacious. Moby Dick, for all that it is unmistakably Melville, is far from flawless. What if Melville recognized its weaknesses? What if he deplored those very characteristics that are to-day lauded as his priceless individuality and chief claim to fame? With all its vastness and its wonder, the epic story of Ahab and the great white whale displays the faults of its author as strikingly as it reveals his talents. In years to come, when the glamour of oddity has paled a little, it will be admitted that the book labours under a sad weight of intolerable prolixity. Nor is this prolixity implicit in the greatness of Melville's writing. This is proved by the two chief stories in The Piazza Tales. Benito Cereno and The Encatadas hold in the small compass of their beauty the essence of their author's supreme artistry. They are profound and lovely and tenderly robust, but they are never tedious and never wilful. Surely it were generous to admit that Melville sought to improve on Moby Dick and that, in the matter of technical control, he succeeded? These two stories cannot as literary achievement compare with their vast and teeming predecessor. That is natural. But they may not be ignored as the last glimmer of a dying lamp. They mark the highest technical level of their author's work, and, had not within a year or two of their appearance the darkness of self-distrust descended on him, might well have proved a revelation of something yet to come from the brain of Herman Melville, something destined—but for the treacherous inhibition of human frailty—to excel in power everything to which that brain had previously given birth.
BIOGRAPHY
HERMAN MELVILLE, MARINER AND MYSTIC. By Raymond M. Weaver. New York. Doran. 1921. London: Humphrey Milford. 1922.
This long and careful book is based on the papers and information of the Melville family and represents the sum of present-day knowledge of Melville's life and ideas.
NOTE
Collectors should observe the fact that it was the custom of American publishers in the fifties and sixties to bind one edition in cloths of various colours for the purposes of window display. Consequently Melville's first American editions are met with in a variety of colourings which, in the matter of date of issue, rank equally.
I.—EDITIONES PRINCIPES
FICTION, POETRY, TRAVEL
1846
[*]TYPEE: A Peep at Polynesian Life during a Four Months Residence in A Valley of the Marquesas with notices of the French Occupation of Tahiti and the Provisional Cession of the Sandwich Islands to Lord Paulet. By Herman Melville. Part One. (Part Two.) New York. Wiley and Putnam, London: John Murray, Albemarle Street. 1846. 2 vols. Sm. Cr. 8vo (5 × 7¼).