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ish," says the narrator of "Moby Dick," "Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship." For tales of such prudent suicide there was an abundant audience. Melville could write in the confidence that many others would have shared his impulse and would be interested in his lore. He knew that a whole body of tradition had grown up, particularly along the seaboard, and that it had prepared the soil for his huge epic. Indeed, he attached his fable to a creature already fabulous. There had been talk of a white whale, known to earlier chroniclers as Mocha Dick, which had lived for years as a dangerous Ishmael of the deep and which, though it had eventually been conquered, might easily be chosen as a symbol of the unconquerable perils of the whaler's calling. Of Mocha Dick Melville must have heard, or he would not have chosen for his whale a name so near that of its prototype. And about it he assembled a mass of erudition which he would hardly have dared to assemble in an age to which the facts would most of them seem, as they seem to the present age, remote and quaint.

Something very Yankee in Melville enabled him to take full advantage of his confidence in his public. Though a transcendentalist, he was also a sailor and a scholar, and he wrote his book as if to make all its rivals unnecessary. It is, among other things, a treatise, packed with details. He knew he had no easy task, exact knowledge of his theme being then what it was. "The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.

My object. . . is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology. I am the architect,

not the builder. . . . I have swam through whole libraries and sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible hands; I am in earnest; and I will try." He classifies whales, and names them. He pauses in his narrative to tell ancient stories or to deny mistaken rumors. He describes the manners of his beasts not only when they are in conflict with their pursuers, but, so far as he can learn, when they are at peace in their own affairs. Only a little less systematically does Melville undertake to portray the manners of men when on whaling voyages. He explains the construction of their ships, the discipline of their ordinary routine, the methods of their fierce assaults, their treatment of their prizes, the devices which comfort their hours of leisure, the punctilio which gover..: the society of ships in the whaling fields. He hits off the characters of the men who are brought together in such a venture, reports their speech, and catches up items from their previous careers to fill in the picture. He comments upon the antiquities and landscape and habits of the Pacific.

Often enough his information is interruption, so far as the specific plot is concerned; but Melville never intended to work along one straight line. The universe of whaling is his stage, and its activities all contribute to his plot. "Moby Dick" must be read, in part, as "The Anatomy of Melancholy" is read, for its illustrations and incidents, for its wonder and laughter. When, for instance, Melville touches upon mastheads, he has a cheerful fling through time to prove that "the business of standing mast-heads, afloat or ashore, is a very ancient and interesting one. I take it, that the earliest

...

standers of mast-heads were the old Egyptians; because, in my researches, I find none prior to them. For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia, or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the dread gale of God's wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel builders priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the general belief among archæologists, that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes; a theory singularly supported by the peculiar stair-like formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out at last, literally died at his post. Of modern standersof-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, are still entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering any strange sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the column of

Vendôme, stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the air; careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules' pillars, his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his masthead in Trafalgar Square; and even when most obscured by that London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for where there is smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked to befriend by their counsels the distracted decks upon which they gaze; however it may be surmised, that their spirits penetrate the thick haze of the future, and descry what shoals and what rocks must be shunned."

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At the same time, neither such embroideries as this nor the rich substratum of fact in "Moby Dick" would alone serve to make the book the masterpiece it is. Well above them both stands the plot. It might, in another handling, have been simple. It might have been farcical. Ahab, the captain of the Pequod, has lost one of his legs in an encounter with Moby Dick and has vowed to have revenge. In the imagination of Melville, transcendentalist as well as sailor and scholar, the matter became a tragic, even a cosmic, issue. On his own cruise he had, he seems to hint, begun to brood over symbols. "Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie

is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadences of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, halfseen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. . . . There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hand at all; your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one halfthrottled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists."

And if the matter was cosmic to Melville, so was it tragic, as it would have been to any contemporary transcendentalist. An obscure distemper gnawed everlastingly at the core of Melville's peace. His unsettled youth had, it seems, been due to a natural rebellion which sprang from his animal spirits. Then, after his return to land, he had grown more speculative. The traces of his speculations it is now impossible to study in detail, but their general tendency is clear. They move all in the direction of disillusionment. He looked for a friendship which should combine a perfect fusion of the friends with a perfect independence of the persons involved. He looked for a

love which should be at once a white rapture and a fiery ecstasy, at once a flash and an eternity. He wanted to find life profound and stable and yet infinitely varied. He set himself to reduce the mystery of the world to a single formula, and then to master the formula. In all these things he had been, inevitably, disappointed. Nor was he able to explain his disappointment by reasoning that he must have given too docile a belief to the lessons of idealism. Instead, he clung to his own values and gradually made up his mind to the notion that diabolism was rampant in the universe. How else could he account for the estrangement of friends and the numbing of lovers, for the insecurity and boredom of life, for the multiplied and obstinate riddles of the cosmos which he inhabited? In Ahab he found an opportunity to project his own drama. Once Melville had hit upon this central scheme, he could elaborate it with violent thought, as he elaborated his setting with piled erudition.

Ahab is the Yankee Faust, the Yankee Lucifer. Another of his Nantucket kind, accustomed to the dangers of his occupation, might have been expected to regard the loss of his leg as a mere accident for which nothing could be blamed. Still another, accustomed to the doctrine of predestination, might have been expected to regard his loss as the will of God, working mysteriously, yet somehow righteously. But Ahab, created in Melville's image, cannot be reconciled by either of the orthodoxies in which he has been bred. As he cherishes his mad hatred within him he becomes aware, by its hot light, of depths below depths of fury. "Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cun

ning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so, in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand-fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any reasonable object." No wonder, then, that Ahab, in his narrow-flowing monomania, has raised the white whale to a dignity which alone could justify this rage. "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 reverenced 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 demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in

Moby Dick. He piled upon 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."

And no wonder, too, that Ahab carries his desire for vengeance to lengths which for his creed meant blasphemy. He vows to know the cause of his misfortune and to pay back blow for blow. He is in absolute rebellion against whatever god or godless chaos has wrought this havoc upon him, against whatever it is that Moby Dick represents, against whatever is outside the wall within which mankind is hemmed. "How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall. To me, the whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there 's naught behind. 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 chiefly what I 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 do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealously providing over all creations." "The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and-Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That's more than ye, ye great gods, ever were."

Thus Ahab, lifted by his fury to a sense of equality with the gods, goes on his long hunt. Like Jonah, stifling in the belly of the whale, the prisoner

of the universe fumbles for the whale's proud heart, to destroy it. Nor is Ahab alone. He commands a little world, men of all races and all colors, and ruthlessly employs them to weight his blow. Gradually, as he withdraws them from the land where they were free creatures, he infects them with his horrid will. In the end they are all welded into one fist and one harpoon. The Pequod, which insolently sets sail on Christmas day, becomes an entity, one consolidated will insanely questing for a black grail, as if parodying some holy quest. For all its earlier delays, the story increases its tempo as it advances, and grows sulphurous at the close. The gods, disturbed upon both their upper and their nether thrones, invoke, it seems, thunder, ocean, and the hugest of the brutes of creation to put down this impious man who has tried to crowd so close upon their secrets. Moby Dick, white and silent, still inscrutable, turns upon his enemies and sinks their ship before he glides away, unharmed and unperturbed, to other business. The Pequod goes down, a skyhawk nailed to her mast. With her, for the moment, sink the hopes of man. Evil is God.

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How far Melville meant "Moby Dick" to be a symbol cannot now be discovered. "I had some vague idea while writing it," he told Hawthorne's wife, "that the whole book was susceptible of an allegoric construction, and also that parts of it were—but the speciality of many of the particular subordinate allegories, were first revealed to me, after reading Mr. Hawthorne's letter which, without citing any particular examples, yet intimated the part-and-parcel allegoricalness of

the whole." The spiritual similitudes of the story had their origin, it cannot be doubted, in Melville's bitten soul. Ahab is created with such passion because Melville was nearly, or felt that he might have become, another Ahab. Thus explained, the problem becomes less difficult. Melville had inherited the smooth creed of a respectable Christianity, with its neat schemes of rewards and punishments and its nonsense about the beneficence of the universe toward mankind. He must have noted exceptions to these pretty rules while he was cruising through the Pacific, but he appears to have noted them as specific cases without generalizing from them. On dry land again, settled down to writing about his adventures, he had begun to reflect upon the world at large. “I am like one of those seeds," he said, "taken out of the Egyptian pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mold. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But now I feel that I am come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mold."

Writing to Hawthorne in the midst of "Moby Dick," Melville thus reviewed the seven years since he had felt himself to be alive. Like various other young men of his decade, he had got his vitalizing touch from transcendentalism. It had poured fire into his veins. It had lifted him into a sense of wider human and divine horizons.

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