Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

by Raymond M. Weaver

For despite his comparative obscurity, Melville is—as cannot be too frequently iterated—one of the chief and most unusual figures in our native literature. And his claim to such high distinction must rest upon three prime counts.

First—because most obvious—Melville was the literary discoverer of the South Seas. And though his ample and rapidly multiplying progeny includes such names as Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Warren Stoddard, John La Farge, Jack London, Louis Becke, A. Safroni-Middleton, Somerset Maugham, and Frederick O’Brien, he is still unsurpassed in the manner he originated. On this point, all competent critics are agreed.

Melville’s second achievement is most adequately stated by the well-known English sea-writer, W. Clark Russell, in A Claim of American Literature (reprinted from The North American Review in The Critic for March 26, 1892). “When Richard Henry Dana, and Herman Melville wrote,” says Russell, “the commercial sailor of Great Britain and the United States was without representation in literature.... Dana and Melville were Americans. They were the first to lift the hatch and show the world what passes in a ship’s forecastle; how men live down in that gloomy cave, how and what they eat, and where they sleep; what pleasures they take, what their sorrows and wrongs are; how they are used when they quit their black sea-parlours in response to the boatswain’s silver summons to work on deck by day and by night. These secrets of the deep Dana and Melville disclosed.... Dana and Melville created a new world, not by the discovery, but by the interpretation of it. They gave us a full view of the life led by tens of thousands of men whose very existence, till these wizards arose, had been as vague to the general land intelligence as the shadows of clouds moving under the brightness of the stars.” And to Melville and Dana, so Russell contends, we owe “the first, the best and most enduring revelation of these secrets.” On this score, Conrad, Kipling, and Masefield must own Melville as master.

Melville’s third and supreme claim to distinction rests upon a single volume, which, after the order of Melchizedek, is without issue and without descent: “a work which is not only unique in its kind, and a great achievement” to quote a recent judgment from England, “but is the expression of an imagination that rises to the highest, and so is amongst the world’s great works of art.” This book is, of course, Moby-Dick, Melville’s undoubted masterpiece. “In that wild, beautiful romance”—the words are Mr. Masefield’s—“Melville seems to have spoken the very secret of the sea, and to have drawn into his tale all the magic, all the sadness, all the wild joy of many waters. It stands quite alone; quite unlike any other book known to me. It strikes a note which no other sea writer has ever struck.”

The organising theme of this unparalleled volume is the hunt by the mad Captain Ahab after the great white whale which had dismembered him of his leg; of Captain Ahab’s unwearied pursuit by rumour of its whereabouts; of the final destruction of himself and his ship by its savage onslaught. On the white hump of the ancient and vindictive monster Captain Ahab piles the sum of all the rage and hate of mankind from the days of Eden down.

Melville expresses an ironical fear lest his book be scouted “as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.” Yet fabulous allegory it is: an allegory of the demonism at the cankered heart of nature, teaching that “though in many of its visible aspects the world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.” Thou shalt know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. To the eye of truth, so Melville would convince us, “the palsied universe lies before us as a leper;” “all deified Nature absolutely paints like a harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnal house within.” To embody this devastating insight, Melville chooses as a symbol, an albino whale. “Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”

An artist who goes out to find sermons in stones does so at the peril of converting his stone pile into his mausoleum. His danger is excessive, if, having his sermons all ready, he makes it his task to find the stones to fit them. Allegory justifies itself only when the fiction is the fact and the moral the induction; only when its representation is as imaginatively real as its meaning; only when the stones are interesting boulders in a rich and diversified landscape. So broadly and vividly is Moby-Dick based on solid foundation that even the most literal-minded, innocent of Melville’s dark intent, have found this book of the soul’s daring and the soul’s dread a very worthy volume. One spokesman for this congregation, while admitting that “a certain absorption of interest lies in the nightmare intensity and melodramatic climax of the tale,” finds his interest captured and held far more by “the exposition of fact with which the story is loaded to the very gunwale. No living thing on earth or in the waters under the earth is so interesting as the whale. How it is pursued, from the Arctic to the Antarctic; how it is harpooned, to the peril of boat and crew; how, when brought to the side, ‘cutting in’ is accomplished; how the whale’s anatomy is laid bare; how his fat is redeemed—to be told this in the form of a narrative, with all manner of dramatic but perfectly plausible incidents interspersed, is enough to make the book completely engrossing without the white whale and Captain Ahab’s fatal monomania.”

So diverse are the samples out of which Moby-Dick is compounded, yet so masterful is each of its samples, that there is still far from universal agreement as to the ground colour of this rich and towering fabric. Yet by this very disagreement is its miraculous artistry affirmed.

In Moby-Dick, all the powers and tastes of Melville’s complex genius are blended. Moby-Dick is at once indisputably the greatest whaling novel, and “a hideous and intolerable allegory.” As Mr. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. has said, “Out of the mere episodes and minor instances of Moby-Dick, a literary reputation might be made. The retired Nantucket captains Bildad and Peleg might have stepped out of Smollett. Father Mapple’s sermon on the book of Jonah is in itself a masterpiece, and I know few sea tales that can hold their own with the blood feud of Mate Rodney and sailor Steelkilt.” Captain Hook of Peter Pan is but Captain Boomer of Moby-Dick with another name: and this an identity founded not on surmise, but on Sir James Barrie’s professed indebtedness to Melville. There are, in Moby-Dick, long digressions, natural, historical and philosophical, on the person, habits, manners and ideas of whales; there are long dialogues and soliloquies such as were never spoken by mortal man in his waking senses, conversations that for sweetness, strength and courage remind one of passages from Dekker, Webster, Massinger, Fletcher and the other old dramatists loved both by Melville and by Charles Lamb; in the discursive tradition of Fielding, Sir Thomas Browne and the anatomist of melancholy, Melville indulges freely in independent moralisings, half essay, half rhapsody; withal, scenes like Ishmael’s experience at the “Spouter-Inn” with a practising cannibal for bed-fellow, are, for finished humour, among the most competent in the language. When Melville sat down to write, always at his knee stood that chosen emissary of Satan, the comic spirit: a demoniac familiar never long absent from his pages.

There are those, of course, who would hold against Dante his moralising, and against Rabelais his broad humour. In like manner, peculiarity of temperament has necessarily coloured critical judgment of Moby-Dick. But though critics may mouth it as they like about digressions, improbability, moralising reflections, swollen talk, or the fetish of art now venerated with such articulate inveteracy, all wonderfully agree upon the elementary force of Moby-Dick, its vitality, its thrilling power. That it achieves the effect of illusion, and to a degree peculiar to the highest feats of the creative imagination, is incontestable. No writer has more. On this point it is simply impossible to praise Melville too highly. What defects Moby-Dick has are formal rather than substantial. As Thackeray once impatiently said of Macaulay: “What critic can’t point them out?” It was the contention of James Thomson that an overweening concern for formal impeccability is a fatal sign of weakened vitality. Intensity of imagination—and Melville exhibited it prodigally in Moby-Dick—is an infinitely rarer and more precious gift than technical sophistication. Shakespeare has survived, despite his “monstrous irregularities.” But since Shakespeare, as Francis Thompson has observed, there has been a gradual decline from imperfection. Milton, at his most typical, was far too perfect; Pope was ruined by his quest for the quality. No thoughtful person can contemplate without alarm the idolatry bestowed upon this quality by the contemporary mind: an idolatry that threatens to reduce all art to the extinction of unendurable excellence. How insipid would be the mere adventures of a Don Quixote recounted by a Stevenson.