HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)

Hawthorne's close friend Melville was like him an isolated figure, proud and sensitive,

all his life living inward, his ego in fierce rebellion. When his transcendental speculations

came into contact with the hard life of the forecastle, the natural result was pessimism. His

generation, immersed in things, could not understand his trouble about life, and spurned him

as he spurned it; but his genius could not remain hidden and now bids fair to be appreciated.

Melville was born in New York of New England and Dutch stock. He was largely self-

educated. He tried teaching for a time, but early his adventuresome spirit lured him to sea.

After serving on a sailing vessel bound for Liverpool, he went in 1841 with the off-

scourings of humanity on a three-year whaling voyage into the South Pacific. Thrilling

adventures on this trip furnished the basis of material for his noteworthy romances. In Typee

( 1846) he "fictionized" the four months he was "indulged" by cannibals of Marquesas before

he was rescued by an Australian whaler. In Omoo ( 1847) appeared further adventures with

the islanders, romanticised somewhat. Mardi a satiric fantasy, and Redburn followed in 1849;

White Jacket ( 1850), with its diatribes on seamen's flogging, recurred to his life on a warship.

Just before Melville became preoccupied with metaphysics he wrote his masterpiece, Moby

 Dick ( 1851), in which he united his whaling experiences and speculation on the mystery of 

existence with a power hardly equaled in American romance. For forty all but silent years the

author lived on, publishing Pierre ( 1852), a not well understood reference to his unhappy

childhood, and Israel Potter ( 1855); but remained for the most part a disillusioned recluse,

his work almost forgotten; only in recent years, with a revival of interest in the sea by men

like Conrad and Masefield and Kipling, has Melville received the consideration due him.

 Moby Dick , the story of the White Whale, is much more than a nautical romance, and

easily outstrips its author's other work. That is not to say, however, that the idyllic Typee, with

its languorous atmosphere and color and dusky beauties in their Utopian surroundings, its

repudiation of progress and glorification of the primitive, is not without its power to cast a

spell still. But Moby Dick is an epic of the human spirit and its eternal feud with the sheer 

 brute energy of the universe, told in the form of a story of a great white whale pursued with

implacable hatred by Captain Ahab for having bitten off one of the seamen's legs:

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 those

malicious agencies . . . all the subtle demonisms of life and thought.

Like Lucifer's proud hatred of the Almighty is this antagonism between Ahab and

Leviathan. So vivid are the details of the chase and so infernal are the accumulating terror and

grandeur of nature that doom man to defeat in the struggle that, despite devious turns in the

narrative and excrescent chapters that seem to belong in an appendix but give the epic its

 ballast, one follows this chaotic tale to its irresistible end. The very irrelevancies aid somehow

in bringing out the diversity and terror of the whole thing.

 Not a little of the charm lies in the racy style. Moby Dick is poetry in as true a sense as

the King James Bible. The richness of early seventeenth century prose abounds here. Such

 phrases as "gay fowl softly feathering the sea," "the water in his vengeful wake" exhibit the

subtle secrets of the art of alliteration; metaphors like "A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten

out to ages" and the ocean "seemed a noon meadow, so serenely it spread" are constant

features of Melville's rich prose. There is personification: "The day was nearly done; only the

hem of his golden robe was rustling"; there is biblical and classical allusion, the use of 

forceful adjectives, and, no less striking than imagery or vocabulary, rhythm. A short passage

from Chapter CXXXII will suffice to illustrate most of these qualities:

 

It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-

 pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look,

and the robust man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's chest in

his sleep.

There are faults, of course, but they are faults of strength rather than of weakness, and

in so vast a theme hardly out of keeping. In poetic rhapsody and sweep of the imagination

American literature has not its equal. The day is at hand when this powerful allegory will take

its rightful place beside the Faerie Queene, Pilgrim's Progress, and Paradise Lost .