Chapter SEVEN: Moby-Dick (1)

Moby-Dick is a story of the sea, and the sea is life, “whose waters of deep woe are brackish with the salt of human tears.” Moby-Dick is the story of the eternal Narcissus in man, gazing into all rivers and oceans to grasp the unfathomable phantom of life--perishing in the illusive waters. Moby-Dick is a portrait of the whale and a presentation of the demonic energies in the universe that harass and frustrate and extinguish the spirit of man. We must gather our own strength together if we are to penetrate Moby-Dick: no other fable, except perhaps Dante’s, demands that we open so many doors and turn so many secret keys; for, finally, Moby-Dick is a labyrinth, and that labyrinth is the universe.

Call me Ishmael, says the teller of the story. Ishmael is lured to a whaling voyage by the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself and of the forbidden seas in which he rolls his inland bulk: when Ishmael grows grim around the mouth and feels damp, drizzly November in his soul, he goes to sea. With his carpet-bag he sets out for New Bedford, and takes refuge in the shaggy comfort of Spouter Inn. His companion and bedfellow in the crowded inn is another Ishmael, a cannibal named Queequeg, who brings into the atmosphere of chowders and tarpaulins a wild odour from another continent of the soul. His harpoon, his idol, his sharp filed teeth, the human head he carries around in a bag, for sale, are for Ishmael hints of that horror in the universe which he is quick to perceive and be social with, since it is well to be on friendly terms with the inmates of the place one lodges in.

When Ishmael takes refuge from the driving sleet and mist, on a Sunday morning, in the Whalemen’s Chapel, he finds reminders of luckless voyages on the memorial tablets around the hall, and Father Mapple, who had been a sailor and harpooner in his youth, delivers a sermon on Jonah! What a preacher, and what a sermon! After ascending to the pulpit by a rope ladder, hand over hand, Father Mapple drags the ladder up after him, to signify his spiritual withdrawal from all outward ties and connections; from that pulpit, shaped like a ship’s bow, he expounds the fable of Jonah, seeming, as he describes Jonah’s sea-storm, to be beaten by a storm himself, his deep chest heaving as with a ground-swell, his tossed arms like the warring elements at work, thunders rolling away from his swarthy brow and light leaping from his eye.

Father Mapple’s words and figures belong to the Bible; but their meaning comes from that bottomless ocean of truth where Moby-Dick plies back and forth. I must quote the words: one can give no proper hint of this work, even in its smallest detail, without quoting the language through which it is expressed: and this is particularly true of Father Mapple’s noble tongue.

“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is sure delight; and higher the top of that delight than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the maintruck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him--a far, far upward, and inward delight--who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world goes down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter for the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin, though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight--top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord but the Lord his God, and is only patriot to heaven. Delight is to him whom all the waves and billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath--O Father!--chiefly known to me by Thy rod--mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”

Humbly participating in Queequeg’s heathenish rites, sharing confidences with him, Ishmael pledges friendship with the cannibal: it is the first and almost the last touch of affection in the whole story: a compact between two strays and outcasts! In Heaven, and presumably in Hell, there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage; nor are there all those little mollifications, an eloquent meal or a June garden, which belong to the middle portion of life that has long been domesticated: once Moby-Dick gets under way, the fable itself belongs to Heaven and Hell--all its naturalism, all its accurate detail, are polarized between these two extremes of being, so that everything which would relieve men’s exasperation or take the edge off their lonely delight, disappears, as the land disappears beyond the horizon’s edge. The reason for this is not obscure. In terms of Heaven and Hell this comfortable, understandable, tolerable middle portion of existence--that which we agree to call civilized--is the realm of complete illusion: just as, in terms of immediate animal existence, Heaven and Hell are illusions, and reality belongs to the realm of digestion, tropism, reflex action, muscular movement, tactile and visual adjustments. Melville, as we shall see, comprehended both aspects of existence: but he projected them both on the plane of eternity: domestic life and all it implies is seen through reversed glasses.

On the boat that takes Queequeg and Ishmael to Nantucket, Queequeg performs a daring rescue in the water. The man he brings up is a bumpkin whom he had punished just a little while before for mimicking him: the punishment and the rescue are performed with the indifferent magnanimity of a soft breeze following a cold wreck of tornado. There is the key in which the whole story is set. If we forget it, we shall be disappointed at not finding some continued development of these separate personalities, some further proofs of their friendship and affection. But on the plane of Moby-Dick friendship is a small thing, and heroism a small one, too: the hero is not Ishmael who tells the story, nor Queequeg, who is one of the crew, nor even Captain Ahab who commands the Pequod, on which the two finally embark at Nantucket: the central figure is the whale, and the whale stands for the universe.

The mystery of Captain Ahab and the voyage lies heavy before the sails are set or the anchor lifted. In the dawn, when Ishmael goes aboard, he dimly sees through the mist four or five figures running toward the ship, who completely disappear by the time he gains the decks: the mystery is more vexing because of a cracked old greybeard on the wharf who mutters dreadful hints about Ahab and his voyage, not enough to detain Ishmael, but enough to make him uncomfortable. With a last blessing of the owners, the ship sets out on Christmas Day. The captain remains inviolate in his cabin; and with the crew giving three heavy-hearted cheers, the ship “blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.”

Exit the dry, tight, comfortable land: enter wind and weather and sea and whale. We leave behind the landlord of the Spouter Inn and Mrs. Hosea and the old owners, with their humorous mixture of the Bible and worldly stratagem, and Charity, Captain Bildad’s sister, who places a choice copy of Watts’ hymns in each seaman’s berth: these genre pictures in the manner of Teniers, with a dash of Hogarth or Rowlandson, belong to the land and its ways, little ways. Deliberately, Melville widens the frame of his canvas, and alters the plan of his design: magnifying every figure into its ideal proportions. He is about to picture this “mortally intolerable truth; that all deep earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of the sea; while the wild winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.... Better is it to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety.”

Safety we leave behind: safety and the measures of daily life. The sea is dangerous: the horizon has no bounds: and the fathom-line can never reach the bottom, once land is far astern.

2

When the whale enters, the narrative for the first time pauses; and, in the pause, one discovers that the story and the people are secondary matters, while something more wide and reaching comes into the fable. The whale is a symbol in the heart of man; it has its own existence and value there: but the whale is also a creature in natural history, and its shape, its bulk, habits, anatomical characteristics, family relations, its place in politics, economics, history, and human adventure, is a further part of that natural history. The chapter on the whale, in which the various branches are listed under a sort of bookseller’s classification, into Folio, Octavo, and Duodecimo whales, is an excellent example of Melville’s way of assimilating and revaluating knowledge, so that what was extraneous becomes intrinsic, and what was a fact in the history of the whale becomes an element in the myth that he is weaving.

A timid writer would have left these classifications and divisions out: how on earth is one to make interesting reading out of a bare catalogue? But Melville carries the load with Olympian levity: he invents a fresh classification, unknown to Owen or Cuvier, and then, with a final dash of apparent impatience, he leaves the system uncompleted--even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, “with the cranes still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower.” This absurd, bookseller’s classification, and this last touch of impatience are not due to Melville’s incompetence: the first tells us that all systems of thought have in them something arbitrary and human, and the zoologist’s classification and system is no less so than the human foot, as the standard of linear measurement: when one sees objects under the figure of eternity, the scientist’s divisions have the same limitations as the bookseller’s. In a century when only a few rare-minded mathematicians were elaborating the theory that our existing geometry was but one out of a number of possible systems, with different sets of postulates, Melville was slyly demonstrating that all our thought has this conventional basis. One may alter the convention, change the point of approach, and create a different order, equally useful, equally competent, equally true. When Melville stops abruptly without finishing his own work, he points out to us that knowledge of all sorts belongs to an infinite series: there is no final stopping-place: and he who thinks his system is complete has only demonstrated his own limitations.

Although Melville plays with science, he utilizes all that it can give him, and he never seriously departs from its findings except in taking the fisherman’s view that the whale is a fish, and not, as is actually the case, an aquatic mammal. But the whale that science investigates, the whale that is stranded on the beach, or whose skeleton is suspended in mid-air in the natural-history museum, is not, however thoroughly it may be dissected and articulated and labelled, the whole whale, even for science; for a whale, like every other creature, has a habitat, relations with other living creatures, and certain ways of functioning, moving, mating, finding food; and there is a sense in which one is as near to the scientific truth about a whale when one is fighting the creature in an open boat, as when one is counting its vertebrae, examining its tissues under a microscope, or comparing its skull with other mammalian skulls. Melville gives a completer account of the whale than the anatomists: he approaches it with a harpoon as well as a dissecting-knife: he observes its characteristic reaction to stimuli as well as the organs by means of which these reactions are effected. On the other hand, the physical pursuit of the whale is only a part of the story: the more one learns about such a creature, the more widely do its relations ramify, not merely in its own world, but in man’s: and the higher the significance of the hunt itself. These passages about the whale and the methods of whaling, about its dignity and adventure, these comments upon the science of cetology--all these things are not uncouth interruptions in the narrative: they are profoundly part of it: the stream widens here, as the Hudson widens at Tappan Zee, without losing its flow and purpose. From now on the universal, symbolic aspect of the story, and its direct, scientific, practical aspect move in and out like the threads of a complicated pattern: one modifies the other, and is by turns figure and background. The physical expanse of the book, its deliberateness of movement, its slow undulations, are necessary, like the long swells and the wide expanse of the ocean itself, to give a feeling of immensity, immensity and power.

3

Who are the men summoned together for this voyage? The chief mate, Starbuck, is a Quaker by descent, a “long earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as a twice-baked biscuit.” Starbuck is conscientious, prudent, inclined to respect outward portents and inward presentiments: above all, the memory of his young Cape wife and child bent the welded iron in his soul. Stubb, the second mate, is a different man: “A happy-go-lucky; neither craven nor valiant, taking perils as they came with an indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged by the year.” Beneath these two stands little Flask, the third mate, a native of Tisbury, in Marthas Vineyard. In his poor opinion, the whale was but a species of magnified mouse or at least water-rat. If Starbuck is the prudent imaginative man, and Stubb is the competent sensible matter-of-fact man, Flask is the happy ignorant man, inclined to be waggish in the matter of whales.

Only slightly lower in rank than the mates stand the savage harpooners: Queequeg, and Tashtego, a Gayhead Indian from the Vineyard, and Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black negro savage, with a lion-like tread, moving about the deck in all the pomp of his six feet five in his socks. “A white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress.” As for the crew itself, they were not merely islanders, usually; they were Isolatoes, each man living on a separate continent of his own. Above them all towers Captain Ahab. The first time he appears on deck, a foreboding shiver runs over Ishmael. “Reality outran apprehension.... He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness.” One of Ahab’s legs has been snapped off by a whale: he stands on a stump made of whale ivory, with a crucifixion in his face, in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe. “A Khan of the plank and a king of the sea and a great Lord of Leviathans was Ahab.” In his presence, his mates shrivel and crumple up, like a paper in a fire. Compared with Ahab’s titanic pride, their decent professional self-respect is nothing. There is madness in that pride, the madness of a tormented soul.

What goads Ahab? What goads him is the memory of his encounter with that white whale, Moby-Dick, who, in malice or play or accidental defence, had bitten off Ahab’s leg and left him humiliated and crippled, for long months of days and weeks, stretched in one hammock, his torn body and gashed soul bleeding into one another, and so interfusing, making him mad.... “Ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him not only all his bodily woes but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all the malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the East reverence in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonism of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He piled up on the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

Ahab assembles his crew, and after working them up with a reminder of their common duties, to sing out, to lower away, to get a dead whale or a stove boat, he nails a gold-piece to the main mast and in a high, raised voice exclaims: “Who ever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw ... shall have this gold ounce.” Daggoo recognizes Moby-Dick. Ahab, surprised, confesses his past humiliation and announces his purpose. “This is what we have shipped for, men! to chase the white whale on both sides of the land, and over all sides of the earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out!” The crew is seized with Captain Ahab’s wild purpose. Starbuck alone, prudent, thoughtful, pious, remonstrates with his captain. “‘Vengeance on a dumb brute!’ cries Starbuck, ‘that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.’” And Ahab answers:

“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is what I chiefly hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man: I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealously presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines.”

Ahab pledges his crew; they drink and swear death to Moby-Dick. Ahab withdraws to his cabin, to contemplate his own madness, maddened: there he defies the great gods themselves, mere cricket players and pugilists. “I will not say as schoolboys do to their bullies--Take some one of your size: don’t pommel _me_! No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again, but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags!... Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me.” The crew, lightened by drink, burst into revelry: they jig and frolic and dream about girls. Ishmael’s shouts go up with the rest: his oath had been welded to theirs; a wild mystical feeling is in him: Ahab’s quenchless feud seems his. With greedy ears he learns the story of the monster against whom he and his shipmates have taken the oath of Ahab’s revenge.

4

And now comes Moby-Dick. In all the sperm whale fishery there is no whale more prodigious in magnitude or malignity. All whales are dangerous to hunt with harpoon and spear in a whale-boat; but Moby-Dick multiplies the vicissitudes of the chase: he turns on his pursuers, and again and again escapes them, with an apparently immortal destiny, however accurately the harpoons may have been planted in his side, and however strong the line that makes him fast. A wrinkled forehead, a high white hump, and a streaked and marbled body add to his formidable size: as sperm whales are more dangerous than Right or Greenland whales, so Moby-Dick is more terrifying than the usual sperm whale. The rumours about Moby-Dick raise to enormous dimensions what was already great enough in actuality; but the very whiteness of the whale adds something more.

While white, says Melville, has a hundred fine mythological allusions, conveying some special virtue or perfection to the elephant of Siam or the Imperial charger; while the white wampum of the red man was the deepest pledge of honour, and the most august of religions had made of it a symbol of divine spotlessness and power--for all these accumulated associations with whatever is sweet, and honourable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue which strikes more of a panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. The whiteness of the white shark, the whiteness of the white squall in southern seas, the terror of white breakers when a ship is skirting the coast--all these things gain an element of bleak terror from their cold hue. White is the terrible, elemental truth: all warmer hues and colours are but laid on from without: nature paints like a harlot, and beneath these happy colours is the ghastly white uniformity of the charnel-house. “Pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us like a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured or colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things, the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”

5

Night and day Ahab’s mind broods over Moby-Dick. In his cabin he pores over his charts, endeavouring to follow the seasonal tracks of Moby-Dick from one probable feeding-ground to another; but, as he knows his crew have common daily appetites, and the permanent constitution of the manufactured man is sordidness, although he may occasionally be fired into knight-errantry, on the first raising of a whale, the Pequod goes in pursuit.

In his virgin encounter with the whale, under the “prudent” Starbuck, Ishmael finds himself in a swamped boat, riding through the night in the hope of being picked up in the morning; and on top of the long vigil, the little whale-boat, lost in the mist, is run down by the Pequod, and all the cold, drenched hands take to the water for their lives. It is all in a day’s work. When terror and anguish become unbearable, what seems most momentous becomes part of a general joke. This humour of desperation colours and effervesces through all the bitter potions that the tale itself offers: it does not remove the bitterness, but, as sweet and bitter may mingle in the same draught, it offers a counter-taste: and it keeps the most frenzied blackness from having the unrelieved and inhuman quality of a maniac’s delirium. The men who face death and danger most constantly, the sailor, the miner, the soldier, the lonely pioneer, develop this shrug and grin at the very moment of encountering death--and in the whale fishery, these moments are plentiful. Little Pip, the negro, pops out of his boat in fright, and is left behind in the heat of the chase, and, though finally rescued, is turned into a blank idiot: Tashtego, ladling out the fragrant sperm from the dead whale’s head, falls into it, the entire mass drops into the sea, and the Indian is rescued only by a feat of almost obstetrical skill: any hour, one may drop from a lookout station or get tangled in the whale-line itself, as the whale races with it, and perish in the coils. But what of it? “All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only in the swift, subtle turns of death that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror than though seated before your evening fire with a poker and not a harpoon by your side.”

As the pursuit of the whale goes on, as the Pequod encounters the sperm whale and the right whale, and kills them, fastens them to its side, and dismantles their corpses, getting sperm oil from one and whalebone from the other, as they watch the spout of the whale from the distance, or see, at midnight, an apparition of a spout, perhaps a portent, perhaps jetting from the head of Moby-Dick himself: as they sample the whale as food, as they render down its blubber into oil, as they watch the sharks thrust their slithering upturned mouths at the carcass, as they squeeze the lumps of cold, solidified fat back into liquid; as all the events and preparations take place, the whale finally emerges as a complete body. What the whale is to the whaleman and what he is to the artist; what he is to the naturalist and what he is to the merchant; and what he is in the chase--and in the museum--and in human history--all these things come forth. There is not one method of knowledge: every manifestation in human experience contributes to the reality of the whale itself. No one lives to himself, or comprehends himself, except by establishing relationships with that which is outside himself: man gives to the whale something that the creature is incapable of giving back: his own needs, his own desires, his own understanding. Melville no more forgets the aesthetics of whaling than he forgets the economics. He is a free spirit: he explores everything, embraces everything, reports on everything. We must not confuse Moby-Dick with the monomaniac captain who belongs to the fable: the book itself has a hundred sides, and is the precise opposite of that narrow quest. For immediate action, people forget many of these relations: the artist or the scientist is just as narrow in his interests as Flask, just as single-minded in his pursuit as Ahab. But Melville is neither Flask nor Ahab nor artist nor scientist: he philosophizes out of a completer experience and a more coherent consciousness than any of these partial figures. The whale is no phantom symbol; and this stage is no pasteboard stage. If this is not the universe, the full universe, that Melville embodies under these symbols, no one in our time has had inkling of a fuller one. Moby-Dick is an imaginative synthesis; and every aspect of reality belongs to it, one plane modifying the other and creating the modelled whole.

6

The ship sails on: she meets other ships and the crews mingle in a conversation or “gam.” But Ahab restlessly drives on towards his ultimate goal: to each captain his first question is--“Hast seen the White Whale?”

Passing through the straits of Sunda, which divide Sumatra from Java, the Pequod spies great semi-circles of whale-jets sparkling on the horizon: she spreads sails after the Grand Armada; and presently, the boats are in the midst of it: among sires and cows and calves, the big and the little, spouting, playing, plunging, frantically mobbing the whale-boat, a tumult of power and virile energy on the outskirts of the Armada, but safe within the circle, calm and bliss, dalliance and delight, calves milking their mothers, and amorous bulls warm-bloodedly a-wenching. The boats, luckily, get out of this jam and tumult without damage; but while they set their pennoned poles on many, only one of the drugged whales is captured. This is but one of a score of scenes in Moby-Dick that remain in the memory like a personal experience: one exclaims with Ishmael: I was one of that crew, I pulled in that boat, I floundered around in those waters. A thousand things happen in life with less vividness and impact than they make in these printed pages: the Straits of Sunda are nearer than the neighbouring street.

Shortly after this encounter, the chase grows hotter: the Pequod meets the Samuel Enderby of London, and the Samuel Enderby has met Moby-Dick. Captain Ahab cannot contain himself: his gam with the English captain ends abruptly, and, with the blood pounding in his veins, he springs back to the ship--so precipitately that his ivory leg is shattered and the carpenter must fit him with a new one. The indignity increases Ahab’s impatient pride: “Here I am,” he exclaims, “proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-debtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books.” Ahab causes a new harpoon head to be forged: he mans his own boat with the mysterious figures that had crept on the Pequod in the twilight of the morning they left Nantucket, Orientals, led by a Parsee, Fedallah. But at every move, Ahab stumbles on some new obstruction, or delay; and his words become more frenzied, while the effort of his will leaves a white scar of terror wherever his lightnings momentarily strike. When the Bachelor, homeward bound, full of oil, seeks to detain the Pequod for a friendly parley, Ahab leaves it behind with a curse.

Against the under-chorus of Stubb’s common sense and Starbuck’s prudent humanity, Ahab’s shrieks mount more wildly: he even throws the quadrant overboard, to steer by compass, fathom-line, and dead reckoning. In the last extremity of pursuit, in utter arrogance of purpose, he thrusts aside the quadrant as the foolish toy and baby’s plaything of haughty admirals and commodores and captains: in the final issue of life and death, science is impotent: it can but tell where the ship is on the planet, but not where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be tomorrow noon. Now the Pequod must ride out a typhoon; and in the midst of the electric storm, three corposants, tapers of white flame, appear on the three lightning-rods of the masts. For Ahab, his purpose is only beating nearer its goal: instead of bowing to the blind forces around him, the storm, the sea, the lightning, the whale, his resolution is more deeply fortified. Note his words: there are none more sudden and final with meaning in the whole book.

“Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence will thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there’s that in here that still remains indifferent. O thou clear spirit, of the fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.”

Everything conspires against Ahab’s deed: the compass needle goes wrong: the log and line, hitherto seldom used, snap off when they are heaved: a man is lost overboard and the life-buoy that was sent over after him springs a leak and goes down with him; finally, another whaler, the Rachel, that has lost a boat’s crew with the captain’s son aboard, seeks to stay Ahab, so that the Pequod may help in the search: Ahab refuses this call of humanity. One being alone almost defeats Ahab, not Starbuck, who, rifle in hand, is tempted to kill Ahab and end his crazy pursuit, but Pip, the little Negro idiot, whose devotion rises as the isolation of Ahab grows. Ahab flees from him: his love, faith, devotion move him from his purpose as no disasters or portents have hitherto moved him. “If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab’s purpose keels up in him,” Ahab admonishes himself. The boy is black, and an outcast. The black is an idiot, and so doubly an outcast. From one as mad and isolated as himself, Ahab receives love, a love deep as his own sense of pride and power, and he is almost unmanned by it. “Spite of a million villains,” says Ahab, “this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man.” But love has come too late: the chase goes on.

As Ahab nears Moby-Dick his old humanity comes back to him. He sees his own wife and child in Starbuck’s eye, regrets her perpetual widowhood, and is lenient to Starbuck’s own desire to return to his hearth. No: more: Ahab sees his wasted years: the desolation of their solitude: the slavery of a lonely command: the dry nourishment this isolated soul has fed upon--forty years of waste and forty years of folly since, as a lad of eighteen, on a mild sweet day, he struck his first whale, a boy-harpooner of eighteen. How is it that in spite of all this he pursues his purpose? What keeps him pushing and crowding himself all the time, recklessly making himself ready to do what in his own nature he had no desire to accomplish?

The mild day and the steel-blue sky and the smell of the wind, as if the haymakers had been mowing grass on the slopes of the Andes--this day is scarcely over before Ahab detects a whale in the wind; and at next daybreak, Ahab himself raises the hump-like snow-head--Moby-Dick. In the smoother ocean, Moby-Dick seems as mild as the day, gliding with scarcely a ripple through the water, his wrenched, hideous jaw beneath the surface. Becoming aware of the chase, he sounds--only to return with open jaws beneath the bottom of Ahab’s boat, and, after playing with it as a cat with a mouse, he bites it in twain. The Pequod sails on the whale and drives him off. Ahab and his crew are rescued, Ahab with bloodshot blinded eyes, the white brine caking in his wrinkles, manly wails arising from some far inland part of his being, as desolate as sounds from out ravines.

The second day comes, and the boats lower again. Moby-Dick takes the initiative and plunges immediately towards the boats with open jaws and lashing tail, warping and manoeuvring in such a fashion that the harpoons thrust into him become tangled and the lines shortened: again the whale dives, and again he rises, this time throwing Ahab’s boat topsy-turvy in the air. Ahab’s ivory leg is snapped off; but again he is rescued; and a third day opens. At noon, Ahab, keeping lookout himself, and doubling on his tracks, sights the whale, making towards him in the distance. Again the calm and beauty of the day wake some old humanity in Ahab; but he is churned onward by his purpose.

“Some men die at ebb-tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;--I feel like a billow that’s all one crested comb. I am old;--shake hands with me, man,” says Ahab to his first mate.

Their hands met; their eyes fastened; but Starbuck’s manly tears cannot restrain Ahab’s order to lower away in pursuit, nor can the sharks that crowd around the boat and snap maliciously at the oars, nor can the hawk that tears at the red flag running on the main truck; nothing diverts him. The whale sounds; when he rises, tormented by a mass of harpoons and lines, it is as if a submerged iceberg rose suddenly to the surface, the waters flash like a heap of fountains, break in a shower of flakes, and leave the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale. Moby-Dick, churning his tail among the boats, dashes in the bows of the mate’s boat: Ahab, unscathed, orders them back to the ship, while he keeps to the hunt. The whale, fagged or malicious, permits Ahab to catch up with him: Ahab darts iron and curse into his flanks; but the line snaps loose, and the whale turns upon the Pequod herself, and bears down on her, his solid white buttress of a forehead meeting and shivering the planks. The ship settles. Ahab, cut off from the ship, makes one last thrust at the whale; the line spins out and runs foul, and Ahab, stooping to unsnarl it, is caught round the neck and shot out of the boat, fulfilling the prophecy of Fedallah, who has been drowned before him. The rest of the crew turns towards the Pequod; only its masts remain above the water; and as it goes down, they are carried in the suction. As its final spar settles in the water, a red arm and hammer hover back upliftedly in the air, in the act of nailing the flag faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk, pecking at the flag, intercepts the hammer with his wing; and in the death-grasp of Tashtego, the pinioned bird of heaven, with shrieks, his form folded in Ahab’s flag, is dragged into the water: the boat would not sink to hell until she had carried a living part of heaven with her, and helmeted herself with it.

“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

7

It is absurd and ineffectual to give a summary of Moby-Dick, or to quote, dismembered, some of its great passages. Like the paintings in the Ajanta caves, the beauty of Moby-Dick can be known only to those who will make a pilgrimage to it, and stay within its dark confines until what is darkness has become light, and one can make out, with the help of an occasional torch, its grand design, its complicated arabesque, the minute significance of its parts. No feeble pencil sketch can convey a notion of Moby-Dick’s extravagant beauty; but at the same time, without a hint of its design and its manner of execution, all subsequent commentary must seem flatulent and disproportionate. For three-quarters of a century Moby-Dick has suffered at the hands of the superficial critic: it has been condemned because to one man it seemed confused, to another it was not a novel, to a third the characters were not “real,” and to a fourth it was merely a weird, mystical, impossible tale of dubious veracity, an example of Bedlam literature, while to a fifth, it was just a straightforward account of the whaling industry, marred by a crazy captain and an adventitious plot. The final answer to all these criticisms lies, of course, in the book itself: but the foregoing outline will perhaps aid us a little in defining the qualities and limits of Melville’s vast epic.

Before we can take the measure of Moby-Dick we must, however, throw aside our ordinary measuring-sticks: one does not measure Saturn with the aid of an opera-glass and a dressmaker’s tape. The conventional critic has dismissed Moby-Dick because it is “not a novel,” or if it is a novel, its story is marred by all sorts of extraneous material, history, natural history, philosophy, mythological excursions, what not. This sort of criticism would belittle Moby-Dick by showing that it does not respect canons of a much pettier nature than the work itself, or because its colossal bulk cannot be caught in the herring-net of the commonplace story or romance. Even Mr. John Freeman, one of the most sympathetic interpreters of Melville, falls into this error; for, while acknowledging the great qualities of Moby-Dick, he refers to its “digressions and delays” as if they were in fact digressions and delays; that is, as if the “action” in the common novelist’s development of plot carried the thread of the story.

The matter is very easily put to rights if we simply abandon these false categories altogether. Moby-Dick stands by itself as complete as the Divine Comedy or the Odyssey stands by itself. Benedetto Croce has correctly taught us that every work of art is indeed in this same position: that it is uniquely what it is, and cannot be understood except in terms of its own purpose. If, for purely practical reasons, we ignore this in dealing with the ruck of novels and stories, because their inner purpose is so insignificant, we must respect it strictly when we confront a work that does not conspicuously conform to the established canons; for, needless to say, an imaginative work of the first rank will disclose itself through its differences and its departures, by what it originates, rather than by what it is derived from or akin to. Had Melville seriously sought in Moby-Dick to rival the work of Trollope or Reade or Dickens, had he simply desired to amuse and edify the great bourgeois public that consumed its three-decker novels as it consumed its ten-course public dinners, and wanted no delay in the service, no hitch in the round of food, drink, toasts, speeches, and above all, no unaccustomed victuals on such occasions, then Moby-Dick would have been a mistake and failure. But one cannot count as a failure what was never an attempt. Moby-Dick does not belong to this comfortable bourgeois world, any more than horse-hair shirts or long fasts; it neither aids digestion nor increases the sense of warm drowsy good nature that leads finally to bed: and that is all there is to it.

The same criticism that disposes of the notion that Moby-Dick is a bad novel, by admitting freely that it is not a novel at all, equally disposes of its lack of verisimilitude. Although Melville was at first challenged on his facts, such as the ramming of the Pequod by Moby-Dick, events were just as kind to his reputation here as they were in the case of Typee: for while Moby-Dick was on the press, news came of the sinking of the whaler Ann Alexander by the ferocious attack of a whale. No one of authority has attempted to quarrel with Melville’s descriptions of the life and habits of whalemen and the whale: the testimony of every observer is that Melville left very little for any one else to say about the subject. This does not, however, dispose of the charge; for those who are wisely captious of Melville here will confine themselves to saying that no such crew ever existed, no such words ever passed human mouth, and no such thoughts could enter the mind of a Nantucketer, as entered Ahab’s.

Again, one is tempted to grant the objection; for it makes no difference in the value of Moby-Dick as a work of art. In the realistic convention, Moby-Dick would be a bad book: it happens that the story is projected on more than one plane, and a good part of it belongs to another, and equally valid, convention. Melville himself was aware of the difference, and early in the book he calls upon the Spirit of Equality, which has spread its royal mantle of humanity over all his kind, to defend him against all mortal critics “if, then, to the meanest mariners, and renegades, and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased among them all shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread the rainbow over his disastrous set of sun.” Now, the convention in which Melville cast this part of Moby-Dick was foreign to the nineteenth century; obscure people, like Beddoes, alone essayed it: to create these idealized figures called for such reserves of power that only minor poets, for the most part, unconscious of their weaknesses, attempted the task.

The objections to Melville’s use of this convention would be fair enough if, like the minor poets, he failed; but, through his success, one sees that the limitations of naturalism are no closer to reality than the limitations of poetic tragedy; and, on the contrary, Melville’s valiant use of this convention enabled him to present a much fuller picture of reality than the purely external suggestions of current realism would have permitted him to show. What we call realism is a method of approaching reality: an external picture of a Cowperwood or a Gantry may have as little human truth in it as a purely fanciful description of an elf: and the artist who can draw upon more than one convention is, at all events, free from the curious illusion, so common in the nineteenth century, alike in philosophy, with its pragmatism in science, with its dogmatic materialism, and in imaginative writing, with its realism, that this convention is not limited, and so far arbitrary, but the very stuff and vitals of existence. The question to settle is not: Did an Ahab ever sail from Nantucket? The question is: Do Ahab and Stubb and Starbuck and Tashtego live within the sphere where we find them? The answer is that they are tremendously alive; for they are aspects of the spirit of man. At each utterance, one feels more keenly their imaginative embodiment; so that by the time Ahab breaks into his loftiest Titanisms, one accepts his language, as one accepts his pride: they belong to the fibre and essence of the man. Ahab is a reality in relation to Moby-Dick; and when Melville projects him, he ceases to be incredible, because he is alive.

We need not concern ourselves particularly with those who look upon Moby-Dick solely as a sort of World’s Almanac or Gazetteer of the Whaling Industry, unhappily marred by the highly seasoned enticements of the narrative. This criticism is, indeed, but the other side of the sort of objection I have disposed of; and it tells more about the limitations of the reader than it does about the quality of Moby-Dick. For the fact is that this book is a challenge and affront to all the habits of mind that typically prevailed in the nineteenth century, and still remain, almost unabated, among us: it comes out of a different world, and presupposes, for its acceptance, a more integrated life and consciousness than we have known or experienced, for the most part, these last three centuries. Moby-Dick is not Victorian; it is not Elizabethan; it is, rather, prophetic of another quality of life which Melville had experienced and had a fuller vision of in his own time--a quality that may again come into the world, when we seek to pass beyond the harassed specialisms which still hold and preoccupy so many of us. To fathom this quality of Melville’s experience and imagination, we must look a little deeper into his myth and his manner of projecting it. What is its meaning? And first, in what manner is that meaning conveyed to us?

8

Moby-Dick is a poetic epic. Typographically, Moby-Dick conforms to prose, and there are long passages, whole chapters, which are wholly in the mood of prose: but in spirit and in actual rhythm, Moby-Dick again and again rises to polyphonic verse which resembles passages of Webster’s in that it can either be considered as broken blank verse, or as cadenced prose. Mr. Percy Boynton has performed the interesting experiment of transposing a paragraph in Pierre into excellent free verse, so strong and subtle are Melville’s rhythms; and one might garner a whole book of verse from Moby-Dick. Melville, in Moby-Dick, unconsciously respects Poe’s canon that all true poetry must be short in length, since the mood cannot be retained, unbroken or undiminished, over lengthy passages, and if the form itself is preserved, the content nevertheless is prose. But while Poe himself used this dictum as an excuse for writing only short lyrics, Melville sustained the poetic mood through a long narrative by dropping frankly into prose in the intervening while. As a result, he was under no necessity of clipping the emotions or of bleaching the imaginative colours of Moby-Dick: like a flying-boat, he rises from the water to the air and returns to the water again without losing control over either medium. His prose is prose: hard, sinewy, compact; and his poetry is poetry, vivid, surging, volcanic, creating its own form in the very pattern of the emotional state itself, soaring, towering, losing all respect for the smaller conventions of veracity, when the inner triumph itself must be announced. It is in the very rhythm of his language that Ahab’s mood, and all the devious symbols of Moby-Dick are sustained and made credible: by no other method could the deeper half of the tale have been written. In these poetic passages, the phrases are intensified, stylicized, stripped of their habitual associations. If occasionally, as with Shakespeare, the thought itself is borne down by the weight of the gold that decorates it, this is only a similar proof of Melville’s immense power of expression.

Both Poe and Hawthorne share some of Melville’s power, and both of them, with varying success, wrought ideality and actuality into the same figure: but one has only to compare the best of their work with Moby-Dick to see wherein Melville’s great distinction lies. The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, William Wilson, like most other works of fiction, are melodic: a single instrument is sufficient to carry the whole theme; whereas Moby-Dick is a symphony; every resource of language and thought, fantasy, description, philosophy, natural history, drama, broken rhythms, blank verse, imagery, symbol, are utilized to sustain and expand the great theme. The conception of Moby-Dick organically demands the expressive interrelation, for a single total effect, of a hundred different pieces: even in accessory matters, like the association of the Parsee, the fire-worshipper, with the death of Ahab, the fire-defier, or in the makeup of the crew, the officers white men, the harpooneers the savage races, red, black, brown, and the crew a mixed lot from the separate islands of the earth, not a stroke is introduced that has not a meaning for the myth as a whole. Although the savage harpooneers get nearest the whale, the savage universe, it is Ahab and the Parsee, the European and the Asiatic, who carry the pursuit to its ultimate end--while a single American survives to tell the tale!

Melville’s instrumentation is unsurpassed in the writing of the last century: one must go to a Beethoven or a Wagner for an exhibition of similar powers: one will not find it among the works of literature. Here are Webster’s wild violin, Marlowe’s cymbals, Browne’s sonorous bass viol, Swift’s brass, Smollett’s castanets, Shelley’s flute, brought together in a single orchestra, complementing each other in a grand symphony. Melville achieved a similar synthesis in thought; and that work has proved all the more credible because he achieved it in language, too. Small wonder that those who were used to elegant pianoforte solos or barrel-organ instrumentation, were deafened and surprised and repulsed.

What is the meaning of Moby-Dick? There is not one meaning; there are many; but in its simplest terms, Moby-Dick is, necessarily, a story of the sea and its ways, as the Odyssey is a story of strange adventure, and War and Peace a story of battles and domestic life. The characters are heightened and slightly distorted: Melville’s quizzical comic sense is steadily at work on them, and only Ahab escapes: but they all have their recognizable counterparts in the actual world. Without any prolonged investigation one could still find a Starbuck on Nantucket or a Flask on Marthas Vineyard--indeed, as Mr. Thomas Benton’s portraits properly indicate, queerer fish than they.