What interpretation Hawthorne gave to Moby-Dick has not transpired. Hawthorne mentions Moby-Dick once in his published works. In the Wonder Book he says: “On the hither side of Pittsfield sits Herman Melville, shaping out the gigantic conception of his white whale, while the gigantic shape of Greylock looms upon him from his study window.” Only one available Hawthorne-Melville document is still unprinted: the “Agatha” letter, mentioned by Mr. Julian Hawthorne. But the “Agatha” letter says nothing of Moby-Dick; and though of impressive bulk, its biographical interest is too slight to merit its publication.
Born in hell-fire, and baptised in an unspeakable name, Moby-Dick is, with The Scarlet Letter, among the few very notable literary achievements of American literature. There has been published no criticism of Melville more beautiful or more profound than the essay of E. L. Grant Watson on Moby-Dick (London Mercury, December, 1920). It is Mr. Watson’s contention in this essay, that the Pequod, with her monomaniac captain and all her crew, is representative of Melville’s own genius, and in the particular sense that each character is deliberately symbolic of a complete and separate element. Because of the prodigal richness of material in Moby-Dick, the breadth and vitality and solid substance of the setting of the allegory, the high quality of Moby-Dick as a psychological synthesis has very generally been lost sight of. Like Bunyan, or Swift, Melville has enforced his moral by giving an independent and ideal verisimilitude to its innocent and unconscious exponents. The self-sustaining vitality of Melville’s symbols has been magnificently vouched for by Mr. Masefield in his vision of the final resurrection. And the superb irony—whether unconscious or intended—of Moby-Dick’s “towing the ship our Lord was in, with all the sweet apostles aboard of her,” would surely have delighted Melville. Pilgrim’s Progress is undoubtedly a tract; but, as Brownell observes, if it had been only a tract, it would never have achieved universal canonisation. Both Pilgrim’s Progress and Moby-Dick are works of art in themselves, each leaning lightly—though of course to all the more purpose—on its moral. Most persons probably read Gulliver for the story, and miss the satire. In the same way, a casual reader of Moby-Dick may skip the more transcendental passages and classify it as a book of adventure. It is indeed a book of adventure, but upon the highest plane of spiritual daring. Ahab is, of course, the atheistical captain of the tormented soul; and his crew, so Melville says, is “chiefly made of mongrel renegades, and cast-aways and cannibals.” And Ahab is “morally enfeebled, also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or rightmindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollitry of indifference or recklessness of Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity of Flash!” But Ahab is Captain; and his madness is of such a quality that the white whale and all that is there symbolised, needs must render its consummation, or its extinction. On the waste of the Pacific, ship after ship passes the Pequod, some well laden, others bearing awful tidings: yet all are sane. The Pequod alone, against contrary winds, sails on into that amazing calm, that extraordinary mildness, in which she is destroyed by Moby-Dick. “There is a wisdom that is woe, and there is a woe that is madness.” And in Moby-Dick, the woe and the wisdom are mingled in the history of a soul’s adventure.
Though Moby-Dick is not only an allegory, but an allegory designed to teach woeful wisdom, nowhere in literature, perhaps, can one find such uncompromising despair so genially and painlessly administered. Indeed, the despair of Moby-Dick is as popularly missed as is the vitriolic bitterness of Gulliver. There is an abundance of humour in Moby-Dick, of course: and there is mirth in much of the laughter. In Moby-Dick, it would appear, Melville has made pessimism a gay science. “Learn to laugh, my young friends,” Nietzsche counsels, “if you are at all determined to remain pessimists.” If there are tears, he smiles gallantly as he brushes them aside. “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life,” Melville says, “when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discovers, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I regard this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great white whale its object.” And for the most part, he does. But he declares, withal, that “the truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. All is vanity. All.” Moby-Dick was built upon a foundation of this wisdom, and this woe; and so keenly did Melville feel the poignancy of this woe, so isolated was he in his surrender to this wisdom, that this wisdom and this woe, which he had learned from Solomon and from Christ, he felt to be of that quality which in our cowardice we call madness.
CHAPTER XVI
THE GREAT REFUSAL
“My towers at last! These rovings end,
Their thirst is slacked in larger dearth:
The yearning infinite recoils,
For terrible is earth.”
—Herman Melville: L’Envoi.