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Content University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, M ichigan
This dissertation has been 65-8927 I
microfilmed exactly as received i
WILLIAMS, John Brindley, 1919- |
THE IMPACT OF TRANSCENDENTALISM ON THE f
NOVELS OF HERMAN MELVILLE. I
!
University of Southern California, Ph. D ., 1965 I
Language and Literature, modern |
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Copyright by
John Brindley Williams
1965
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THE IMPACT OF TRANSCENDENTALISM
ON THE NOVELS OF HERMAN MELVILLE
by
John Brindley Williams
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
June 1965
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UNIVERSITY O F SOU TH ERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
U N IV ER S ITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. C A LIFO R N IA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, w ritten by
---------
under the direction of ïàs Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, in p a rtial fu lfillm en t of requirements
fo r the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y
Dean
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
.......
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I TABLE OF CONTENTS
I :
jchapter Page
I
I. MELVILLE AND TRANSCENDENTALISM: CONFLICTING
I CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES 1
II. CURRENTS OF TRANSCENDENTALISM, 1844-1861:
RELIGION AND E T H I C S ...................... 29
III. CURRENTS OF TRANSCENDENTALISM, 1844-1861:
ESTHETICS................................. 50
IV. POLARITY IN TYPEE AND OMOO.................. 68
V. EARLY SYNTHESIS IN MARDI..................... 98
VI. TRANSCENDENTAL SYMBOLISM IN REDBURN AND
WHITE-JACKET ............................... 126
VII. TRANSCENDENTAL DIMENSIONS OF MORTALITY
IN MOBY-DICK............................... 167
VIII. EMERSON, MELVILLE, AND THE VISION OF EVIL . 222
BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................. 259
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CHAPTER I
I
I MELVILLE AND TRANSCENDENTALISM:
CONFLICTING CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES
In the late summer of 1837, when Herman Melville was an
unsettled youth of eighteen about to begin a short, unsuc
cessful engagement as a teacher in Pittsfield, Massachu
setts, Ralph Waldo Emerson addressed the students and facul
ty at Harvard.^ Though Melville did not hear Emerson's Phi
Beta Kappa oration, "The American Scholar," his future
father-in-law Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of Massachusetts
2
and Fellow of the Harvard Corporation, was present. Shaw
had been a friend and legal adviser of Melville's father,
who died in 1832; and Herman was a frequent visitor in the
Shaw home in later years. Melville must have become famil
iar with Emerson's celebrated portrait of the self-reliant
scholar as Man Thinking, which led Oliver Wendell Holmes to
^Jay Leyda, The Melville Log (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1951), I, 70.
2
Bliss Perry, "Emerson's Most Famous Speech," The
Praise of Folly and Other Papers (New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1923), p. 86. In his reconstruction of the occasion. Perry
writes, "Among the Fellows of the Harvard Corporation, you
will note two of the foremost lawyers of the Commonwealth,
Joseph Story and Lemuel Shaw."
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Characterize this speech as "our intellectual Declaration ofj
Independence."^ i
Emerson’s theme was in part traditional. In 1809, for i
example. Dr. J. S. Buckminster of Boston had delivered the
Phi Beta Kappa oration on "Dangers and Duties of Men of Let-i
ters"; in 1818, Edward Tyrrel Channing, a Harvard teacher of
rhetoric, spoke on "Independence in Literary Pursuits." In
1824, with Lafayette in the audience, Edward Everett spoke
on "The Peculiar Motives to Intellectual Exertion" (Perry,
pp. 97-99). Emerson's plea for an independent national
literature, however, shocked his scholarly audience with its^
bold assertion that the growing mind is influenced funda
mentally by nature rather than by educational systems and
that "books are for the scholar's idle times.Of all
American writers who developed in the twenty years following
this address, Melville best fits Emerson's description of
the great achiever whose vitality is derived primarily from
savage nature. Emerson said:
Not out of those on whom systems of education have ex
hausted their culture comes the helpful giant to destroy
the old or to build the new, but out of the unhandselled
savage nature; out of the terrible Druids and Berserkers
come at last Alfred and Shakespeare. (pp. 99-100)
3
In Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1912), p. 115.
'^The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1903), I, 41. All references to Emerson's
speeches and essays are from this edition.
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3|
Among the acknowledged inheritors of the transcendental
philosophy which Emerson's speech proclaimed, Henry David
Thoreau and Walt Whitman were relatively limited in their
'encounters with savage nature. Thoreau, two years older
jthan Melville, was a Harvard-educated rebel whose residence |
'on Emerson's property at Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847 was
interrupted by occasional visits from friends, walks to
nearby Concord, and a day's imprisonment for his refusal to
pay a poll tax because of his objection to the Mexican War. ■
His brute neighbors were the small creatures close at hand,
such as the ants among chips in his woodpile and the pick
erel in the pond. Whitman, who was the same age as Mel
ville, grew up in Brooklyn and abandoned a newspaper career i
there in 1855 to exalt in poetry the commonplaces of life,
the miracle of leaves of crrass, the dignity of the simple,
separate person whose individuality merges .with the whole of
nature.
Melville, on the other hand, turned to the sea in his
early twenties. The three whalers and the U.S. Navy frigate
on which he served during the years 1841 to 1844 were, as he
5
later indicated, his "Yale College and his Harvard." His
5
The phrase is from Mobv-Dick, ed. Luther S. Mansfield
and Howard P. Vincent (New York: Hendricks House, 1952),
p. 110. In an autobiographical reference, Melville has his
narrator, Ishmael, comment, "If, at my death, my executors, i
or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS, in my ;
desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and
glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and
my Harvard." The whale-ship Pequod in the novel is based in
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4i
elemental experiences of harpooning whales, jumping ship,
and living for nearly four months among savages in the
Marquesas Islands provided raw materials for his romances of
the sea, the best of which illustrate Emerson's intuition
jwith their savage vitality.^ With the publication in 1845
{of his first book, Typee, which he dedicated to Chief Jus
tice Shaw, Melville became known as "the man who lived among
cannibals."^ His masterpiece, Mobv-Dick, completed in the
isummer of 1851 when the author was thirty-two, is appropri
ately characterized by Henry A. Murray as "of one substance
with himself, a wild Everest of art, limit of governable
imagination.
In addition to prophesying the emergence of a literary
giant from the primitive forces of nature, Emerson described
the polarity which would typify his art. The scholar or
artist who lives an active life in contact with nature.
part on the vessels, Acushnet. Lucy Ann, and Charles and
Henry. Melville returned from his travels as a sailor
aboard the frigate U.S.S. United States.
^F. O. Matthiessen titles his introductory section on
Melville, "Out of unhandselled savage nature," In American
Renaissance (New York: Oxford, 1941), pp. 371-376.
7
The phrase is Melville's description of his own repu
tation in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne in early June,
1851. See The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R.
Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale, 1960), p. 130.
Q
"Introduction" to Pierre, ed. Henry A. Murray (New
York : Hendricks House, 1949), p. v.
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5
i
Emerson said, has nature's elemental rhythms as a powerful j
resource:
But the final value of action, like that of books,
I and better than books, is that it is a resource. The
; great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows it-
I self in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in de- i
i sire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea; in day
! and night ; in heat and cold; and, as yet more deeply in-
I grained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us
j under the name of Polarity,— these "fits of easy trans
mission and reflection," as Newton called them, are the
law of nature because they are the law of spirit. ("The
American Scholar," p. 54)
For Melville, the "great principle of Undulation" was
central to his art. Shortly before his death in 1891, Mel
ville summed up his conception of the artist's task in these
lines from his poem, "Art":
What unlike things must meet and mate :
A flame to melt--a wind to freeze;
Sad patience— joyous energies;
Humility— yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity— reverence. These must mate
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart.
To wrestle with the angel— Art.^
Though Melville's statement is not great poetry— his imagi
nation was too untamed for the discipline of poetic form—
his portrayal of the artist wrestling with the paradoxes of
nature and the spirit is in harmony with Emerson's more elo
quently expressed ideas.
It is ironical that despite the abundance of scholar
ship on Melville during the past forty years, there has been
no thorough study of the impact of the American transcen-
9
In Selected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Hennig Cohen
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), p. 140.________________
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I ^ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 5
jdental movement, of which Emerson was the principal spokes-
j !
man, on Melville's art. To be sure, Raymond Weaver's Herman'
j I
Melville. Mariner and Mystic (New York: G. H. Doran, 1921), I
the first important biography of Melville, suggests the sub-j
ject; but the references to Melville's mysticism are vague i
and inconclusive. With few exceptions, later critics have
1
stressed the obvious contrast between Melville's pessimism
and Emerson's optimism. For example, even though Vernon L.
Farrington in Main Currents of American Thought (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1927) acknowledges Melville's "transcen
dental craftsmanship," he observes that it is "something
very different" from that of Emerson and Thoreau. He says :
Transcendentalism in Concord village and at Walden pond
was one thing. Emerson's infrequent anger at the folly
of men was soothed by the perfect art with which he
phrased it, and never seriously ruffled his temperamental
placidity. Thoreau's mystical communings were with the
young god Pan? he was too wise to seek to domesticate a
woodland nymph. . . . But transcendentalism in the fore
castle of the Acushnet. transcendentalism that drove
fiercely into the blood-red sunsets of dwarfing seas,
transcendentalism in the hot and passionate heart of a
man whose vast dreams outran his feet— this was something
very different from the gentle mysticism of cooler na
tures and unembittered hearts where no Promethean fires
were raging. (II, 254)
Farrington's impressionistic comments, which do not de
fine transcendentalism, form the basis for a sharper dis
tinction between Melville and Emerson in F. 0. Matthiessen's
American Renaissance (New York : Oxford, 1941), still the
most comprehensive treatment of the pre-Civil War literary
revival. Matthiessen has set forth the direction of much
subsequent scholarship on Melville's relation to his times
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7
jwith the comment, "You might judge that the era least likely
to have produced a tragic vision of life would have been
dominated by Emerson's doctrine of 'the infinitude of the
i
jprivate man'" (p. 180). Emerson's theory of expression,
Matthiessen writes, "was that on which Thoreau built, to
which Whitman gave extension, and to which Hawthorne and
Melville were indebted by being forced to react against its
philosophical assumptions" (p. xii). Melville and Hawthorne
differ from Emerson and his followers in having a sense of
tragedy, which Matthiessen relates to the practice of both
Shakespeare and Milton. The one common denominator uniting
the transcendental and tragic writers, according to
Matthiessen, is their devotion to the possibilities of de-
10
mocracy.
Although Matthiessen and other critics have extolled
the breadth and complexity of Melville, the essential sepa
ration of Melville and Emerson into opposing literary camps
has persisted without much dissent. A more recent contrast
between Melville and Emerson, which is indebted to Matthies
sen 's classification of the two writers, is Charles Feidel-
son's Symbolism in American Literature (New York, 1953). In
this study, Melville and Emerson are characterized as being
at the opposite poles of the mid-nineteenth century movement
toward symbolism. "Between them," Feidelson observes,
"these two ran the gamut of possibilities created by the
^^American Renaissance, pp. xiii-xv._____________________:
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1
symbolist point of view. Emerson represented the upsurge of I
a capacity, Melville the relapse into doubt. Emerson was
the theorist and advocate, Melville the practicing poet.
Emerson embodied the monistic phase of symbolism, the sweep-
i
ing sense of fusion; Melville lived in a universe of paradox
! :
and knew the struggle to implement the claims of symbolic
Imagination."^^
Among the few studies which have emphasized the common
ground shared by Melville and Emerson, Robert A. Spiller's
chapter, "Democratic Vistas," in Literary History of the
United States (New York: Macmillan, 1953), recognizes the
decisive influence of American transcendentalism on the lit
erature of the period in which the two wrote. Spiller pre
sents his thesis as follows:
For, by reawakening— even among its critics— an interest
in the great problems of human nature and destiny, tran
scendentalism conferred upon American literature a per
spective far wider and deeper than that proposed by its
own formulated doctrines, the perspective of humanity
itself. This perspective it is which gives common pur
pose and meaning to the otherwise divergent achievements
of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman, to
predecessors like Irving and Bryant whose interests were
less profound and more superficially literary. (p. 346)
Although Spiller restates Matthiessen's argument that Mel
ville and Hawthorne were in reaction against transcenden-
In "Toward Melville: Some Versions of Emerson," Sym
bolism in American Literature. Reprinted in Emerson: A Col
lection of Critical Essays, ed. Milton R. Konvitz and Stephen
E. Whicher (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1962),
p. 136.
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I 1
talism, he identifies four conceptions underlying the writ
ings of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman:
man as spiritual center of the universe, the need for self-
realization, the importance of intuition, and the primacy of
I i
the metaphorical and didactic in literature (pp. 351-355).
Since Emerson was the first of these writers to gain promi
nence, Spiller implies that Emerson served as an important
source for the ideas they have in common. Perry Miller is
explicit in developing this relationship in his essay, "Mel
ville and Transcendentalism," in which he reasons that Emer
son was the incuhus for Melville's art and that both writers
were "aware of a configuration of ideas which, popularly
identified with Germany, challenged the regnant ethic and
12
esthetic of nature."
None of these studies, however, has adequately ac
counted for the controlling fact of change, both in the na
ture of American transcendentalism from a religious to a
philosophical and literary movement and in Melville's atti
tudes towards the transcendentalists and their theories.
Neither Melville nor Emerson was static in his assumptions
and practices. Melville especially was aware of shifts in
mood within the passing moment. For example, after complet
ing Mobv-Dick, he wrote to Hawthorne on November 17, 1851:
In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instanta
neous— catch them while you can. The world goes round,
and the other side comes up. So now I can't write what
^^VQR. 29:564, 1953. _______________________
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l O i
I felt. But I felt pantheistic then— your heart heat in
my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God's. (Letters,
I p. 142)
j
At this point, Melville suggests the polarity inherent in
the structure of his novel with the paradoxical comment, "A
isense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on ac
count of your having understood the book. I have written a
wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb" (p. 142). In
the conclusion of his letter, he displays an extraordinary
sensitivity to change, or as Emerson called it, "Undula
tion " :
This is a long letter, but you are not at all bound
to answer it. Possibly, if you do answer it, and direct
it to Herman Melville, you will missend it— for the very
fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the
same that just took it up and put it on this paper.
Lord, when shall we be done chancing? (p. 143) (My
italics)
This sense of change is more than the nervous vacilla
tion of an exhausted author. In the context of this letter,
change is equated with growing. Melville is caught up for
the moment with a conception of an even greater accomplish
ment in a passage which associates the incoherence of his
shifting attitudes with truth :
My dear Hawthorne, the atmospheric skepticisms steal
into me now, and make me doubtful of my sanity in writing
you thus. But, believe me, I am not mad, most noble
Pestusi But truth is ever incoherent, and when the big
hearts strike together, the concussion is a little stun
ning. . . . Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long
as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing.
So, now, let us add Moby Dick to our blessing, and step
from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish;— I have
heard of Krakens. (p. 143) (My italics)
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11
I
Melville's frank confession of inconsistency when "the |
big hearts strike together" is in harmony with Emerson’s
iaphoristic comment in "Self-Reliance":
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the
wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to
morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again,
though it contradict every thing you said to-day.— 'Ah,
so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.'— Is it so bad
then to be misunderstood? . . . To be great is to be mis
understood. (Works, II, 57-58)
Emerson applied this principle to his own writing, which he
said conveyed more of himself than he knew:
let me record day by day my honest thought without pros
pect or retrospect, and, I cannot doubt, it will be found ;
symmetrical, though I mean it not and see it not. . . .
We pass for what we are. (p. 58)
Clearly, any accurate consideration of the transcenden-?
talism in Melville's art must ultimately account for the dy
namic nature of literary influence, which moves through time
in patterns of attraction and repulsion, ranging in emphasis
between the poles of original interpretation and critical
reaction. To deny or ignore such a relationship between
Melville and the American transcendentalists is to assume
his indifference to the most influential literary movement
of the period in which he wrote. Such a position is incon
ceivable in the light of Emerson's stature as philosopher
and poet in the 1840's and 1850's and Melville's voracious
reading habits and his keen interest in the people and ideas;
of his time. For Melville easily fits Henry James' charac- i
terization of the writer as one on whom nothing is lost.
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12j
During the 1830's, when Melville was an adolescent liv-|
ing with his widowed mother in upstate New York, the Ameri
can transcendental movement was emerging as a revolt of
young Unitarian clergymen and intellectuals against what
they considered to be the stagnant rationalization, empty
ritual, and social complacency of Boston Unitarianism. The
nucleus of the movement was an informal organization in
Boston and Concord, whose members reluctantly allowed them-
13
selves to be called "The Transcendental Club." Of the
twenty-six persons who became most active in the group,
seventeen were Unitarian ministers; the oldest was Convers
Francis, forty-one at the time of the first meeting called
on September 19, 1835, in the home of George Ripley, a
Boston clergyman.Members of the club opposed the doctri
naire practices of the church essentially by reasserting a
native religious tradition of "inward communication" and of
"the divine symbolism of nature" originating in the older
New England Puritanism and continuing in Quakerism with the
conception of the "inner light.They were stimulated by
13
William R. Hutchinson, The Transcendental Ministers
(New Haven: Yale, 1959), pp. 22-23.
^^Hutchinson points out that the "elder statesmen of
Unitarianism"— James Walker, Nathaniel Prothingham, and Dr.
Channing— were invited but did not become regular members of
the club. His account of the first meeting and the member
ship of the group is on pp. 30-31.
^^Perry Miller, "From Edwards to Emerson," Interpreta
tions of American Literature, eds. Charles Feidelson, Jr.,
and Paul Brodtkorb, Jr. (New York: Oxford, 1959), pp. 119-
120.
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13
!
the enthusiasm and intuition!sm in post-Kantian idealism,
I
iwhich they received largely at second hand through the writ-
I
i
jings of Coleridge and Carlyle, both of whom Emerson had
yisited on his European tour in 1832 and 1833 after resign- |
ing from the ministry. In addition, they drew upon such
varied other sources as Plato, Neoplatonism, Swedenborg, and
briental philosophy (Hutchinson, p. 28). As a result, the
youthful "protestants" were as much aware of their inconsis
tencies as of their underlying agreement in principle.
James Freeman Clarke remarked that the group was called "the!
Club of the Like-Minded" because "no two of us thought
alike" (Hutchinson, p. 29).
An early sign of this eclecticism was the reluctance of
the members at first to accept the label transcendental,
which their neighbors and the public applied to them; for
the term unfortunately suggested a greater agreement in
technical philosophy than they actually shared. Bronson
Alcott referred to the club as "The Symposium"; Orestes
Brownson tried to popularize the label "Eclecticism. " Other
names tried out without success included "Disciples of the
Newness" and simply the "New School." Occasionally, members
referred to themselves as "Hedge's Club," after the Rev.
Frederic H. Hedge, who proposed the idea for the group in a
The term is used by Charles R. Metzger without capi
tals to signify a larger area of protest than one restricted
to religious doctrine. See his Emerson and Greenough (Ber
keley: University of California, 1954), p. 5.________________
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letter to Emerson (Hutchinson, p. 29). |
The term transcendental as used in this period had at
least two distinct classes of meanings. Popularly, the word
Suggested "any view that is 'enthusiastic,' 'mystical,' ex- ;
travagant, impractical, ethereal, supernatural, vague, ab-
17
istruse, lacking in common sense. " This pejorative mean
ing, which still persists, is perhaps most strikingly con
veyed in Sir William Schwenck Gilbert's satiric patter song
from Patience (1881), which equates transcendental notions
with the exaggerated estheticism of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood:
If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic
line, as a man of culture rare.
You must get up all the germs of the Transcendental
terms, and plant them everywhere. -
You must lie among the daisies and discourse in novel
phrases of your complicated state of mind
(The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of
a transcendental kind) . .
The transcendentalists themselves occasionally used the term
in the popular sense. For example, Theodore Parker in a
letter to George Ripley, dated October 29, 1859, wrote:
"You remember the stuff which Margaret Fuller used to twad
dle forth on that theme ('absence of art' in America), and
what transcendental nonsense got delivered from gawky girls
17
Dagobert D. Runes (ed.). Dictionary of Philosophy
(Ames, Iowa: Littlefield, Adams and Co., 1959), p. 320.
18
Plays and Poems of W. S. Gilbert (New York: Random
House, 1932), p. 199.
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151
19 I
and long-haired men." Similarly, Melville, who was not a !
member of the nucleus organization, wrote in a letter to his
friend Evert Duyckinck, dated March 3, 1849, his admiring
reaction on hearing Emerson speak:
I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr. Emerson. I had
heard of him as full of transcendentalisms, myths and
oracular gibberish; I had only glanced at a book of his
once in Putnam's store— that was all I knew of him, till
I heard him lecture. To my surprise, I found him quite
intelligible, tho' to say truth, they told me that night
he was unusually plain. (Letters, pp. 78-79)
In contrast to this uncomplimentary use of the term,
which Melville did not apply to Emerson, is a cluster of
more or less technical definitions asserting the primacy of
intuition over logic as an interpreter of experience. These
ideas derive indirectly from the philosophy of Immanuel
Kant, who employed the term in his Critique of Pure Reason
to refer to knowledge which is not derived from experience
but which is inherent in the mind and essential for an
understanding of experience. "I call all knowledge tran
scendental, " Kant wrote, "which is occupied not so much with
20
objects, as with our a priori concepts of objects."
Kant's "transcendental philosophy" was in part a reaction to
the extreme empiricism of John Locke, whose Essay Concerning
Human Understanding denied the existence of innate qualities
of the mind and took the position that all knowledge derives
^^Quoted from Harold Clarke Goddard, Studies in New
England Transcendentalism (New York: Hilary House, 1960),
p. 165.
20
Trans. F. Max Muller (New York: Macmillan, 1924), p. 9;
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from particular sensory experience or combinations of expe- '
!. ;
riences, which are formed into concepts through reflection. ;
I ;
■In addition, the empiricist David Hume had drawn the further;
conclusion that if knowledge depends entirely on sensory
perception and reflection, then conceptions of God, the
soul, and total nature are beyond human reason because they
cannot be demonstrated through the senses. Although Kant
agreed with this emphasis on sensory experience as a source
of knowledge, he proposed that the mind itself has inherent
concepts and forms of pure intuition, such as causality,
time, and space, which serve as a patterned screen to give
21
structure to experience.
Kant further distinguished between these transcendental
forms of Pure Reason and transcendent ideas that derive from
Practical Reason or the moral consciousness. Such concepts
as God, freedom, and immortality are extensions of a pos
teriori knowledge abstracted from experience, he reasoned,
since they have the practical purpose of guiding moral ac
tion. These transcendent ideas differ from transcendental
patterns already in the mind because they refer to a level
of reality that goes beyond both sensory experience and the
2 2
limits of human comprehension. In other words, the
21
Frank Thilly and Ledger Wood, A History of Philosophy
(New York : Henry Holt, 1951), pp. 412-424.
22
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Thomas K. ;
Abbott (New York: Longman's, Green, 1909), pp. 131-132; 138.
See also, "Transcendent," OED, XI (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1933) , 233. Runes, p. 319.__ I
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17
transcendent cannot be scientifically described through the j
application of the forms of Pure Reason on the faculties of ;
jsense perception. Immortality, for example, is an implica- !
jtion of experience which cannot be reduced to the measure-
I ;
bent of time.
Kant's careful discrimination between the properties of
Pure Reason and Practical Reason, which properties restrict
the scope of comprehension, led to efforts by successors in
Germany to unify his conception of Reason and thereby extend
the limits of knowledge. Their search for an absolute prin
ciple by which all things would be knowable led to expansive
systems of knowledge in which ultimate reality lay in super-
23
sensual, or transcendental, processes of thought. - Among
the earliest revisers of Kant's philosophy, the poet J. G.
Herder proposed the unity of soul-life, with the faculties
of thought, will, understanding, and sensation depending on
one another and springing from a common source. God is re
vealed in the soul and in nature, particularly in religion,
art, and history, which are evolving toward humanitarian
ideals of harmony and fullness of growth. H. F. Jacobi as
serted that faith and feeling are intuitive sources of
24
knowledge of God and freedom. The most important succes
sors of Kant— Gottlieb Fichte, Freidrich Wilhelm Schelling,
and G. W. F. Hegel— devised complementary philosophies,
^^Thilly and Wood, p. 451.
24
_ Thilly and Wood, pp. 447, 448.________________________
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18
which found their way into the American transcendental move
ment largely through Coleridge and Carlyle. |
Fichte proposed that basic reality is will, or ego,
^hich intuits its own activity as Universal Reason and rises!
I i
above space and time. This transcendental ego produces na- |
1
jhure and expresses itself in moral law. Furthermore, the
individual's inward sense of duty or moral consciousness is
an expression of this absolute purpose. Schelling agreed
i !
with Fichte's conception of Reason as will but broadened it
to include the unconscious. In other words, reality is cre
ative energy; and all nature is an expression of this pur
poseful spiritual force trying to realize itself with the
aid of time in matter. Schelling reasoned that this energy i
is organic and evolutionary in expression and is moving to- '
ward the goal of perfect self-expression and consciousness.
Accordingly, man is capable of imagining better things than
he knows ; therefore, his highest stage of self-realization
is in art, which serves to reveal nature's own art. The
unity in Schelling's philosophy is derived in part from his i
theory of correspondences between matter and spirit, which
provide the basis in nature and art for the reconciliation
of the apparent opposites of form and substance.
Hegel, the most prominent of the post-Kantian idealists,
Thilly and Wood, pp. 450-478; Alban G. Widgery,
"Classical German Idealism," A History of Philosophical Sys
tems, ed. Vergilius Ferm (New York: Philosophical Library,
l^_)_,_PR^_291j 22^ __________________________________________________
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191
I
rejected Schelling's notion of an undifferentiated absolute j
energy, which he described as "the night in which all cows I
25
are black." The universe, he wrote, is basically logical
and moves through space and time in the triadic pattern of
I ;
Ithesis, antithesis, and synthesis. God is the Idea, the ul-
I
jfcimate synthesis or timeless totality of all processes of
evolution, who reveals himself in religion, philosophy, and
art. Hegel's conception of the logic of nature resulted in
a greater emphasis on change and contradiction than Schel
ling had placed, although both proposed that unity is the
result of the reconciliation of opposite qualities in art
and in nature.
These core ideas of German post-Kantian idealism
reached the American transcendentalists through three main
avenues. In the first place, Emerson and his circle read
the German philosophers, either in the original or in trans
lations. Records of Emerson's withdrawals from libraries,
for example, indicate a continuing interest in the philos
ophy of Herder, whose concept of the soul-life suggests
Emerson's Over-Soul. In 1829 Emerson checked out of the
Harvard College Library a translation of Herder's Outlines
of a Philosophy of Man (London, 1800); three years later, he
borrowed this work on two occasions from the Boston Athe
naeum. In addition, Emerson withdrew from the Boston
^^The quotation by Hegel is in Thilly and Wood, p. 478.
_ ^^Thilly and Wood, pp. 476-489.___________________________
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20
Athenaeum in 1837 two volumes of Jacobi's Werke (Leipzig,
28
1812-1815). His extensive personal library contained |
Kant's Critic of Pure Reason (London, 1838), Fichte's The !
I ;
Nature of the Scholar and Its Manifestations (London, 1845),
j ;
and several volumes by Hegel, including Vorlesungen über die
! OÛ
Aesthetic (Berlin, 1842).
i
Of greater significance, however, was the broad avenue
-ko German thought through German romantic literature, which
was permeated with post-Kantian idealism. By 1835, for
example, Emerson had read most of his fifty-five volume set
of Goethe's works in German, which he apparently had pur
chased during his first trip to Europe (Vogel, p. 90)- The
general interest of the American transcendentalists in
German men of letters is readily demonstrated in the twenty
articles and poems about German literature in the Dial, the
transcendental publication issued in sixteen volumes between
1840 and 1844 (Vogel, pp. 74-75). As Stanley Vogel says,
"These New Englanders preferred Herder, Wieland, Schiller
and Goethe to Kant, Fichte and Schelling. When the iron
regulations of Calvinism began to hem them in, the Transcen
dentalists turned to these German literary men and not to
the philosophers for inspiration" (p. xiv).
28
Kenneth W. Cameron, Ralph Waldo Emerson's Reading
(Raleigh, North Carolina: Thistle Press, 1941), pp. 47, 18,
23.
29
Stanley M. Vogel, German Influences on the American
Transcendentalists (New Haven : Yale, 1955), pp. 173-175.
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21
The third and perhaps most important route by which
I
^German idealism reached the American transcendentalists was
[through the writings of Coleridge and Carlyle. Although
i
neither author redefined the term transcendental, both ac
cented particular aspects of the German philosophical sys
tems, which resulted in oversimplifications that appealed to
[the Americans, who were not trained in technical philosophy.
Drawing largely on Schelling's philosophy, Coleridge stressed
the distinction between intuitive Reason and cognitive
Understanding and an evolutionary theory of natural-
spiritual correspondences. Coleridge's conception of the
creative imagination as the shaping power of the mind is a
variant of his idea of Reason. In a celebrated passage in
his Biocrraphia Literaria, which anticipates Emerson's doc
trine of polarity and Melville's conception of paradox,
Coleridge points out that the poetic imagination is acti
vated by the will and "reveals itself in the balance or re
conciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of same
ness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete;
the idea, with the image; the individual, with the repre
sentative."^^ Carlyle, on the other hand, made pronounced
use of Fichte's assertive transcendental ego, the individual
soul merged with the spirit that encompasses and transcends
external nature.
In The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridcre, ed.i
W. G. T. Shedd (New York : Harper, 1854), III, 374.
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22
Emerson's personal meetings in 1833 with Coleridge and
jCarlyle, who are credited with stimulating his interest in
I ;
perman literature and philosophy, were supplemented by ex
tensive reading of their major works and by a lifelong
! ■ !
friendship with Carlyle. During the period from 1825 to
1836, Emerson's journals indicate a pervading interest in
Coleridge's philosophical and critical writings, including
Aids to Reflection, Biographie Literaria, The Friend,
31
Statesman's Manual, and Church and State. Furthermore, in;
1836 Emerson wrote an appreciative preface to the American
edition of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a spiritual autobi
ography disguised as the life and opinions of a German Pro
fessor of Things in General, who acquires a positive phil
osophy in which he sees nature as the "Living Garment of
God."32
The impact of post-Kantian idealism on the American
transcendental movement is perhaps most clearly illustrated
in Emerson's definition of the term transcendental in this
passage from his lecture "The Transcendentalist":
It is well known to most of my audience that the
Idealism of the present day acquired the name Transcen
dental from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of
Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of
Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the in
tellect which was not previously in the experience of the
senses, by showing that there was a very important class
31
Kenneth W. Cameron, Emerson the Essayist (Raleigh,
North Carolina: Thistle Press, 1945), I, 78. I
32
The Works of Thomas Carlyle (New York : Charles Scrib-i
ner's Sons, 1896), I, 150. I
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23
of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by ex
perience, but through which experience was acquired; that I
these were intuitions of the mind itself; and he denomi- |
nated them Transcendental forms. The extraordinary pro- |
foundness and precision of that man's thinking have given
I vogue to his nomenclature, in Europe and America, to the
! extent that whatever belongs to the class of intuitive
; thought is popularly called at the present day Transcen
dental. (Works, I, 339-340)
Instead of limiting the term to Kant's a priori forms and
intuitions in Pure Reason of causality, space, and time,
Emerson broadened its denotation in the manner of Fichte and
Schelling to include supersensual ideas which Kant had de- ■
33
dared were beyond human comprehension. Intuitive thought
was for Emerson, but not for Kant, the basis for transcen
dental knowledge of God, total nature, and immortality.
"Nature is transcendental," Emerson said, "exists primarily,i
necessarily, ever works and advances, yet takes no thought
for the morrow" (p. 339).
Emerson observed that the transcendentalist "adopts the
whole connection of spiritual doctrine. He believes in
miracle, in the perpetual openness of the human mind to new
influx of light and power; he believes in inspiration, and
in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual principle should
be suffered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all pos
sible applications to the state of man, without the admis
sion of anything unspiritual" (pp. 335-336). On the other
hand, Emerson also noted that there were no pure transcen-
33
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, pp. 131-132, 138.
(See footnote 27, p. 19, above.)_______________________________
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I . . 24;
i I
jdentalists. "I mean," he explained, "we have yet no man whoj
has leaned entirely on his character, and eaten angel's
Ifood; who, working for universal aims, found himself fed, he
knew not how; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not
how, and yet it was done by his own hands" (p. 338).
Other transcendentalists offered similar definitions
stressing the reality of spirit over sensory experience.
For example, George Ripley made this comment in his letter
of resignation as pastor of the Unitarian Church in Purchase
Street, Boston:
There is a class of persons who desire a reform in the :
prevailing philosophy of the day. These are called Tran
scendentalists, because they believe in an order of
truths which transcends the sphere of external sense.
Their leading idea is the supremacy of mind over matter.
Hence they maintain that the truth of religion does not
depend on tradition, nor on historical facts, but has an
unerring witness in the soul.34
The value of post-Kantian idealism to the American
transcendentalists, however, was not in offering a ready
made philosophical system that would suit their initial pur-!
pose of church reform but in confirming the faith of the
Americans in the presence of God in nature and in the integ
rity of the individual conscience. These ideas were impli
cit in the stern Calvinistic theology of the colonial period,
which interpreted acts of nature as the Providences of God
^'^The letter, written on May 21, 1840, is quoted from
The Transcendentalists, ed. Perry Miller (Cambridge, Mass.:
1950), p. 255. Of Ripley's resignation, Emerson wrote to
Margaret Fuller, "What a brave thing Mr. Ripley has done.
He stands now at the head of the Church militant and his
step cannot be without an important sequel" (p. 251) . ________;
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25i
and considered the soul as having a being that transcends |
I
the body. Much as Emerson admired the European writers and ■
I :
thinkers, he and his friends denied that the primary sources
Of American transcendentalism were from abroad (Vogel,
p. 104). They believed instead in the power of their own :
intuition to rediscover old truths which had been obscured
rather than preserved by tradition. "How impossible to find
Germany," Emerson reminisced in his journals. "Our young
men went to the Rhine to find the genius which had charmed
them, and it was not there. They hunted it in Heidelberg,
in Gottingen, in Halle, in' Berlin; no one knew where it was;
from Vienna to the frontier, it was not found, and they very
slowly and mournfully learned, that in the speaking it had
escaped, and as it had charmed them in Boston, they must re
turn and look for it there.
American transcendentalism, then, was essentially a
native movement, reinforced though not initiated by ideas
from abroad. One inevitable result of the stimulus of post-
Kantian idealism and other philosophies on members of the
"Transcendental Club" was the early extension of their
interests beyond the narrow limits of religious controversy.
In his history of the movement, O. B. Frothingham observes
that "the ideas entertained by the foreign thinkers took
root in the native soil and blossomed out in every form of
35
In Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. Edward Waldo
Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1912), VII, 532-533.
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26
isocial Although the cluh met infrequently for a
period variously estimated at between four and twelve years,
I
[the energies of members found diversified expression in such
jsecular activities as lecturing, literary criticism, poetry,
I 37
and experiments in communal living. In other words, the
transcendental priest gave way to the poet and reformer in
[what Charles R. Metzger has described as the "delayed secu
larization of New England thought" (Metzger, pp. 5-6).
Ideally, the unifying "spiritual principle" of tran
scendentalism should have provided a single common denomina
tor for the extended interests of the members, harmonizing
their "transcendental faith" or intuition of the true with
their conceptions of the good and the beautiful. These
ideas derive in part from the philosophy of Plato, who rea
soned in The Republic that ultimate reality consists of the
Idea of the Good, the apprehension of which provides knowl-
38
edge of absolute truth and beauty. Frothingham comments,
"The Transcendentalist believed in man's ability to appre
hend absolute ideas of Truth, Justice, Rectitude, Goodness;
he spoke of The Right, The True, The Beautiful, as eternal
^^In Transcendentalism in New England (New York: Harper,
1959), p. 105.
37
Hutchinson, p. 30. He refers to estimates given in
George W. Cooke, An Historical and Biographical Introduction;
to Accompanv the Dial (Cleveland: The Rowfant Club, 1902),
I, 51, 55.
38
Trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (New York: Oxford,
1945), pp. 183, 201, 221.
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27
realities which he perceived" (p. 181).
Actually, however, the shift in emphasis within the
movement accented inconsistencies: the impulse that led to
I
the Utopian experiment in collective living at Brook Farm
lalso resulted in Thoreau's demonstration of individualism at
balden Pond. No transcendentalist expected nor received
unanimous agreement with his views. Even Emerson, who
represents the broadest range of transcendental thought in
America with his clerical background and his activities as a
lecturer, essayist, and poet, did not enjoy complete rapport
with the other transcendentalists. Although his first vol
ume, Nature, published in 1835 shortly before the first
meeting of the club, was accepted with enthusiasm as a mani
festo of the movement, most of the members scrupulously
avoided in their own writings his tendency toward pantheism
(Hutchinson, pp. 29, 34). Furthermore, Emerson appeared to
detach himself from the movement, referring in his lecture,
"The Transcendentalist," to "this class" and "these children"
who have held themselves aloof because "they feel the dis
proportion between their faculties and the work offered
them.
On the other hand, despite the lack of a systematic
philosophy to which all members could agree, the movement
represented a community of loosely-related thought, which
39
Goddard makes this point in his discussion of the
lecture, p. 167.
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! : ^
! i
needs to be summarized under headings that agree with the |
i '■
changing emphases that produced the priest, the reformer,
and the poet. These three overlapping categories— repre
senting the transcendental religion, ethic, and esthetics—
Offer the most realistic way of accounting for Melville's
rejection of Emerson's optimism at the same time that he ap
plied transcendental conceptions of right behavior and art
in his novels of the sea. The central purpose of the fol
lowing chapters, then, is to analyze Melville's access to
the three-fold nature of transcendental thought and to eval
uate the evidences of its shifting impact on his fiction.
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CHAPTER II
CURRENTS OF TRANSCENDENTALISM, 1844-1861:
RELIGION AND ETHICS !
When Melville returned to his mother's home in Lansing-
burgh. New York, in October, 1844, after nearly four years
at sea, the main lines of transcendental thought already had
found their way into print and had become the center of con
troversy. Emerson had acquired an international reputation ;
through the publication of his Essays, first and second
series (1841 and 1844); he had lectured extensively on the
transcendental theme of the infinitude of the private man
conveyed in his essays and poems, and his ideas were further
disseminated through critical reaction in newspapers and
X
magazines. To a lesser extent, Thoreau and other transcen
dentalists also were attracting public attention through
lectures and articles. Although the most significant tran
scendental periodical. The Dial, suspended publication in
that year, a number of its essays on literature and art by
Margaret Fuller were reprinted two years later in the Demo
cratic Review, and made available to Melville, who developed
^Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949), pp. 275-304.
29 _____________________________
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301
I
the habit of reading "profound reviews, abstruse philosophy I
2
in prose or verse" for relaxation. Melville later wrote to;
LHawthorne that his inner life began with his homecoming,
I
when he was twenty-five:
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,
i that I have not unfolded within myself.^
At that time, the transcendental experiment in communal
living at Brook Farm near West Roxbury, Massachusetts, was
in its third year; and its participants were preparing to
publish in 1845 The Harbinger, a weekly newspaper devoted to
social reform under the editorship of George Ripley. The
idealistic community, which originally aimed at combining
the thinker and the worker in a self-sufficient society, was;
struggling to survive by adopting an elaborate social system
for Utopian collectivism based on the theories of Charles
Fourier. Despite this modification of the initial plan of
having intellectuals perform manual labor for which they
were not suited, the Farm was unable to meet its expenses.
After its failure in 1847, when fire destroyed the uninsured
2
The quotation is from Merton M. Sealts, Jr., "Mel
ville's Reading: A Checklist of Books Owned and Borrowed,"
Harvard Library Bulletin, 2:158, Spring 1948. (Sealts is
quoting J. E. H. Smith, a neighbor of Melville in Pittsfield,
Mass.) Evert Duyckinck, Melville's publisher, was a friend
of Margaret Fuller and published her collected Papers on
Literature and Art in 1846. See Perry Miller, The Raven and
the Whale (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955),
p. 170.
^"To Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 1851," Letters of Mel
ville, p. 130. .
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31
I
Phalanstery, its newspaper continued publication for two
more years in New York for the American Union of Associa-
Itionists, a Fourierist organization (Frothingham, pp. 164-
1171) . In contrast, Thoreau was about to begin his private
two-year experiment in deliberate living at Walden Pond,
lalthough he did not publish the results of his efforts until
;1854.
The years immediately following 1844, then, marked not
only a period of active restatement and testing of transcen
dental ideas, but also Melville's intellectual awakening.
Having set forth their basic conceptions of the true, the
good, and the beautiful in the years 1836 to 1844, Emerson
and his circle were vigorously reaffirming their underlying !
belief in intuition and "spiritual principle." Frothingham
observes that the current of transcendentalism was so
strong, "that like the Orinoco rushing down between the
South American continent and the island of Trinidad, it made:
a bright green trail upon the dark sea into which it poured,
but the vehemence of the flood forbade its diffusion"
(pp. 380-381). Although Frothingham concludes that the in
fluence of the movement was largely in philosophy and ethics
and that authors of "elegant literature, essays, romances,
tales, owed to transcendentalism but a trifling debt," he
was writing in 1876, when Melville was all but forgotten,
and the realistic post-Civil War novelists were attempting
to portray the commonplace details of middle class life
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32!
I
without regard to their transcendent spiritual implications |
(p. 382).
Of the three main currents of transcendental thought
available to Melville in 1844, when he began to unfold
within himself, the earliest and most controversial was the
transcendental religious faith. Essentially, the transcen
dental ministers were united against the rationalistic basis
of Unitarianism, which continued to rely on the sensational
ist theories of John Locke, even though these implied the
limited power of the mind to comprehend God. The transcen
dentalists believed that the sensationalist philosophy, with
its denial of knowledge beyond what can be perceived through
the senses and logic, led inevitably to skepticism, which
was concealed in tradition and empty ceremonial forms
(Frothingham, p. 188). On the other hand, the transcenden
tal answer to skepticism was to reject tradition, ritual,
and logic and to assert an optimistic faith that direct
knowledge of God is inherent in the individual conscience
and in nature, both of which are divine. This is the reli
gious message of Emerson's Nature, which has been character
ized as a transcendental declaration of religious independ
ence.^ "Our age is retrospective," Emerson begins. "It
builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies,
histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld ^
4
The phrase is from Harold Clarke Goddard's essay,
"Transcendentalism," in CHAL (New York: Putnam, 1917), I,
328.
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33;
God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why
should not we also enjoy an original relation to the uni- ;
yerse?" (Works, I, 3). '
I ;
I Nature, to Emerson, is an "other me," an externaliza-
jtion of God's mind corresponding also to the individual
5
isoul. For an original relation to the universe, therefore,
Emerson proposes that the individual should seek to adjust
his inner vision to his outward senses, to find an identity
between his own spirit and the unifying transcendent spirit i
in nature. He must subordinate the influences of books and
social pressures, which preserve tradition and at best show
nature at second hand. "To go into solitude," Emerson says,
"a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from so
ciety" (p. 7). The individual who fronts nature directly,
however, is able at times to perceive the spiritual unity in
its diversity, as Emerson suggests in this passage.
The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indu
bitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller ;
owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland be
yond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is a
property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye ;
can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is
the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their
warranty-deeds give no title. (p. 8)
5
Emerson identifies a Neoplatonic source for this idea
in "The Poet" (1844): "'The mighty heaven,' said Proclus,
'exhibits, in its transfigurations, clear images of the
splendor of intellectual perceptions'" (Works, III, 14).
Frederick Ives Carpenter observes that Emerson read The Six ‘
Books of Proclus on the Theology of Plato, trans. by Thomas i
Taylor, 2 vols. (London, 1816). See Carpenter's Emerson and!
Asia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1930), pp. 91, 266._________I
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34
Emerson observes here that the poet, rather than the
pastor, is best suited to see the totality of nature. Few
Others, he continues, can perceive this spiritual principle,
which Emerson compares to the sun in an analogy that recalls
Plato's metaphor for the Idea of the Good in The Republic.^
|"Most persons," Emerson says,
do not see the sun. At least they have a very superfi
cial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye and the
heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose in
ward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each
other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into
the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and
earth become part of his daily food. In the presence of
nature a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of
real sorrows. (pp. 8-9)
In addition to serving as a symbol of the spirit, equat
ing the human with the divine, nature ministers to man's
various material and spiritual needs. It provides commodi
ties to sustain life, beauty to nourish the soul, language
to unify the particular with the general, in the sense that
words symbolize "natural facts," which in turn represent
"spiritual facts." Ultimately, nature cultivates and disci
plines the mind. Emerson's most concise statement of this
generative influence of nature, however, is in "The American
Scholar" address, in which he describes the growth of the
mind in terms of an increasing awareness of the spiritual
unity of the universe. "To the young mind," Emerson ob
serves.
^P%es_219zL2 20 3_5_._
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35;
everything is individual, stands hy itself. By and by, !
it finds how to join two things and see in them one na- i
ture; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized ;
over by its unifying instinct, it goes on tying things !
together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots run
ning under ground whereby contrary and remote things co
here and flower out from one stem. . . . Thus to him, to
i this schoolboy under the bending dome of day, is sug
gested that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf
I and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every
I vein. And what is that root? Is not that the soul of
his soul? (pp. 85-86)
Emerson concludes this passage of his address with the fol
lowing description of the relation between the mature mind
and the spiritual principle in nature:
He shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul,
answering to it part for part. One is seal and one is
print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its
laws are the laws of his own mind. So much of nature as
he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not
yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, "Know
thyself," and the modern precept, "Study nature," become
at last one maxim. (pp. 86-87)
This identification of the soul with nature is the
heart of the transcendental faith. Even though Emerson's
position is more nearly pantheistic than that of most of the
other transcendentalists, they shared the belief in a ben
evolent creator who dwells in the individual conscience,
which is spiritually united with the whole of creation. As
Frothingham says, they "regarded man himself as a super
natural being; not the last product of nature, but the lord
of nature; not the creature of organization, but its cre
ator" (Frothingham, p. 202).
Reactions against this challenge to religious authority
and tradition served to focus public attention on the
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36;
transcendental faith for nearly twenty years after the or- ,
ganization of the Transcendental Club. The religious impli
cations of Emerson's Nature and "The American Scholar" were
made explicit in his "Divinity School Address" of 1838.
Emerson's bold appeal for a faith "like Christ's" rather
I
than the conventional one "in Christ" drew its sharpest re
buttal the following year in the Rev. Andrews W. Norton's
Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity. Although Emer
son withdrew from religious controversy after his speech,
the effect of Norton's conservative Unitarian counterattack
was to arouse the interest of the Boston press, which under
took to satisfy public curiosity about the issues involved.^
Other transcendentalists including George Ripley replied in ;
lectures, sermons, and essays to Norton's charge of heresy;
but the transcendental faith received its most vigorous de
fense from 1841 through 1853 from Theodore Parker, a radical
Unitarian pastor of the church at West Roxbury. A member of
the Transcendental Club, Parker agreed essentially with
Emerson's concept of the infinitude of the private man, but
pointedly denied the existence of any special miraculous
power in the Bible, in the Christian Church, or in the cha
racter of Christ. "I try all things by the human faculties,"
he said. "Has God given us anything better than our nature?"
(Hutchinson, p. 108).
n
Hutchinson presents a detailed analysis of the pub
lished reactions to Emerson's "Divinity School Address" and
Norton's reply, pp. 68-97. ____________________________
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37
Parker's sermon, "The Transient and Permanent in
Christianity," delivered in 1841 at the Hawes Place Church
of South Boston, resulted in a public outcry not only from
conservative Unitarians, but also from Orthodox churches and
I :
newspapers. The ensuing controversy, which ran its course
while Melville was at sea, was rekindled late in December,
1844, shortly after Melville's homecoming. Parker's lec
ture, "The Relation of Jesus to His Age and the Ages," de
livered in the First Church of Boston, produced a public re
action of such intensity that when he spoke the following
month at the invitation of the Rev. James Freeman Clarke,
another member of the Transcendental Club, fifteen leading
families withdrew from Clarke's Church of the Disciples
(pp. 109, 123).
Conservative Unitarian clergymen ostracized Parker but
could not silence him. In February, 1845, Parker accepted
an engagement to preach regularly at the Melodeon Theater in
Washington Street, Boston, where he remained until 1852, a
central figure in what Hutchinson has called "the great
Transcendentalist Controversy" (p. 135). His collected
Sermons of Theism, Atheism, and the Popular Theolocv, pub
lished in the autumn of 1853, amounts to a thorough indict
ment of the conservative Unitarian position (p. 134). Until
his death in 1850, Parker became increasingly involved along
with other transcendentalists in the anti-slavery movement
and other reform activities.
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38
Against this background of conflict over transcendental
preligious conceptions, Melville wrote nearly all of his
novels of the sea, including Tvpee (1845), Omoo (1847),
Mardi (1849), Redbuam (1849), White-Jacket (1850), and Mobv-
I
Dick (1851). Coincidental to the waning of the religious
controversy by the mid-1850's, Melville shifted his interest
away from portraying man in relation to nature. His later
novels— Pierre (1852), Israel Potter (1855), and The Confi
dence Man (1857)— depict instead the tragic disillusionments
of the idealist in society.
In the years following 1844, Melville was a frequent
visitor to Boston, the center of transcendentalist contro
versy, where the family friend Judge Shaw took a paternal
interest in Melville's literary aspirations. Melville was
married to Shaw's daughter, Elizabeth, on August 4, 1847, an
occasion marked by a communion service for the bride admin
istered by the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, the friend of
Parker and Emerson (Log., I, 255) . Although there is no
record that Melville or the Shaws met other transcendental
ists on these visits, Shaw apparently knew Emerson as early
as 1814, when Emerson was eleven years old and Shaw was a
g
boarder in the Emerson home. Shaw himself was a conserva
tive Unitarian with a legal involvement in the religious
controversies of the time. His second opinion as Chief
Justice was on the famous Brookfield Case of 1830, Stebbins
^Rusk, p. 54. See also_Holmes., p_._A3^__________________
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39i
i
y. Jennings, which had far-reaching consequences in deter
mining the validity of the transfer of church property, an
issue in the revolt of protesting Unitarians against the
I . 9
plder Calvinistic churches. Through the Shaw family, Mel-
i
yille undoubtedly had a personal access to developments in
■the transcendental religious controversy.
Implicit in the transcendental faith, however, were
ethical conceptions, which after 1840 produced the second
main current of transcendental thought. In Nature, Emerson
describes ethics as a secular corollary to religion. He ob
serves that one is "the system of human duties commencing
with man; the other from God. Religion includes the person
ality of God; Ethics does not" (Works, I, 58). Emerson pro
poses that the true and the good are identical, or "one to
our design," since "they put nature under foot" (p. 58).
Actually, transcendental ideas of right behavior led to var
ied reform activities in the later stages of the movement as
the religious controversy declined. Dominant, of course,
was the developing interest in the anti-slavery movement,
which engaged Emerson, Thoreau, Parker, and others up to the
9
Leonard W. Le-vy, The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief
Justice Shaw (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard, 1957), pp. 32-36.
When the church in the Third Precinct of Brookfield acquired
a Unitarian pastor, orthodox Trinitarians in the congrega
tion withdrew; and their deacons attempted to retain control
of church property. In deciding in favor of the Unitarian
plaintiff on the grounds that deacons who secede from a
church lose their membership and legal authority. Justice
Shaw confirmed a precedent that affected at least eighty-one
churches involved in similar parish disputes before the
Civil War. _______________________________
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I 5Üj
! I
joutbreak of the Civil War. In addition to the experiments
!
!in communal living at Brook Farm and Fruitlands, transcen-
i
jdentalists also campaigned for women's rights, vegetarian
ism, and other enthusiasms— all of which aimed at making
I ;
over the world by asserting the central ethical principle of
personal integrity or self-reliance. As Frothingham says,
"The method of reform followed from the principle. It was
the method of individual awakening and regeneration, and was
to be conducted 'through the simplest ministries of family, :
neighborhood, fraternity, quite wide of associations and
institutions'" (Frothingham, p. 155). Emerson, for example,;
invited his servants to eat with his family and even tried
out a vegetarian diet, but discarded it as of no value.
If the transcendental faith asserted the divinity of
the individual, the transcendental ethic stressed the good
ness of self-reliant behavior. Imitation, conformity, and
consistency were the sources of evil, which the transcenden
talists defined simply as the absence of good. Since the
Unitarian ministers who initiated the American transcenden- ;
tal movement were in revolt against the Calvinistic concep
tion of the depravity of man, their deliberate strategy was
to emphasize the perfectability of the individual if he
could learn to be himself. They realized, with Emerson,
however, that most people "do not see the sun" (Works, I, 8).
^^"Ralph Waldo Emerson, " Dictionary of American Biocrra-
Phy:, J^_,_137._____ _________ __________________________________________
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41|
I
!
More precisely, evil was to them an imperfect adjustment of |
the inner vision to outward senses which destroys the har
mony between man and nature. In "The American Scholar,"
I .
Emerson boldly asserts, "In self-trust all the virtues are
^comprehended" (p. 104) . He defends the dignity of manual
labor "for the learned as well as the unlearned" because it
contributes to the harmony of man and nature. Society, on
the other hand, too often separates man from nature and con
sequently from himself. "The state of society," Emerson ob
serves, "is one in which the members have suffered amputa
tion from the trunk, and strut about so many walking mon
sters— a food finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never
a man" (p. 83).
Underlying this system of values is a doctrine of com
pensation, a moral law that is higher than the individual
will and parallel to the physical checks and balances in na
ture. "Every excess causes a defect; every defect an ex
cess," Emerson writes in "Compensation" (1841). He de- :
scribes the polarities of good and evil, conscience and con
formity, heart and head in terms of mechanic forces;
Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves of the
sea do not more speedily seek a level from their loftiest
tossing than the varieties of condition tend to equalize
themselves. There is always some levelling circumstance
that puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the
fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all the
others. (II, 98)
This pervading principle governs the relation between the
inner life and external determiners of action, between
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42|
freedom of the will and fate, which Emerson perhaps most
succinctly describes as the difference between "may and i
11
must." Always, however, he asserts the individual's re-
I
sponsibility to establish a rapport with nature. "In the
I
nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequalities
bf condition," he says (II, 123).
These are the basic ethical conceptions which Emerson
repeatedly presents through the brilliant aphorisms of his
essays, lectures, and poems. Because they have an underly
ing singleness of theme, Melville need not have read all of
Emerson or the other transcendentalists to grasp the gist of
their argument. Emerson's power in particular was in the
epigrammatic sentence and evocative metaphor, which could
easily find their way into newspaper articles, reviews, or
casual dinner conversations. In "Self-Reliance" (1841), for
example, Emerson asserts: "Whoso would be a man must be a
nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not
be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it
be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of
your own mind" (Works, II, 50). This idea permeates
Emerson uses these terms in his lecture, "The Fugi
tive Slave Law," March 4, 1854, in this passage: "There are
two forces in Nature, by whose antagonism we exist: the
power of Fate, Fortune, the laws of the world, the order of
things, or however else we choose to phrase it, the material
necessities on the one hand,— and Will or Duty or Freedom on
the other. May and MUst, the sense of right and duty, on
the one hand, and the material necessities on the other :
May and Must" (Works, XI, 231).
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43|
Melville ' s novels of the sea with their focus on social out-!
casts who reject civilization by going to sea or jumping
ship; like Thoreau at Walden, Melville's nonconformist nar- ;
I
gators front essential facts of nature in a search for in-
I 12
tegrity and comment on social evils. '
Melville's greatest interest in transcendental thought
apparently developed between 1849 and 1851, the years of his
most intense literary activity. Early in February, 1849, he
attended his first and probably only lecture by Emerson, who
spoke on the general subject, "Mind and Manners in the Nine
teenth Century," at Rev. James Freeman Clarke's Freeman
Place Chapel on Beacon Street (Locr, I, 287) . Melville was
sufficiently impressed to write enthusiastically to his New
York publisher and friend. Evert Duyckinck: "Yet I think
Emerson is more than a brilliant fellow. Be his stuff
begged, borrowed, or stolen, or of his own domestic manufac
ture he is an uncommon man" (Letters, p. 78).
Later that year, before leaving on a trip to Europe,
Melville wrote to Chief Justice Shaw requesting a letter of
introduction from Emerson to Carlyle, which Emerson probably
did not provide; for Melville did not meet Carlyle (Letters,
p. 90). Evert Duyckinck's brother George, however, intro
duced Melville to a German scholar, George J. Adler, who
12
Among Melville's portraits of nonconformists are Jack;
Chase in White-Jacket. Ahab in Moby-Dick, and Billy Budd in ;
Billy Budd. His conformists include such memorable charac- !
ters as Starbuck in Moby-Dick and Vere in Billy Budd.________^
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44;
became his chief traveling companion on the transatlantic
voyage and in Europe. Melville summarizes an evening of
conversation with Adler in his journal entry of October 22:
. . . last night about 9:30 p.m. Adler and Taylor came
I into my room, and it was proposed to have whisky punches,
which we did have, accordingly. Adler drank about three
table spoons full— Taylor four or five tumblers. We had
an extraordinary time and did not break up till after two
in the morning. We talked metaphysics continually, and
Hegel, Schegel Fsicl, Kant, and others were discussed and
under the influence of the whiskey. I shall not forget
Adler's look when he quoted La Place the French astrono
mer— "It is not necessary, gentlemen, to account for
these worlds by the hypothesis." After Adler retired,
Taylor and I went out on the bowsprit— splendid spec
tacle.^^
Although Melville's primary aim on this trip was to ob
tain the London publication of White-Jacket, his interest in
German romantic philosophy led him to Cologne and the Rhine
land for brief, uneventful visits (Log, I, 192). Like Emer
son and the other transcendentalists, Melville learned of
Kant and his followers largely at second hand, through
translations of German poetry and through the works of
Coleridge and Carlyle. Available records of his reading
show that in 1848 he purchased copies of Coleridge's Bio
graphie Literaria and Plato's Phaedo, which he refers to in
White-Jacket. In the following year, he purchased The
Autobiography of Goethe : Truth and Poetry, translated by the
13
Locr, I, 3 22. Melville's other companion was Dr.
Franklin Taylor, a cousin of the writer James Bayard Taylor
(p. xxxiii).
(Boston, 1892), p. 147. All page references to
White-Jacket are from this edition.
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45|
Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, and Schiller's Poems and Ballads,
translated by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. In 1850, after his i
Ireturn from Europe, he borrowed from Evert Duyckinck six :
books that reflect post-Kantian idealism: Goethe’s Wilhelm
I ;
Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels. Richter's Flower,
I
Fruit and Thorn Pieces: or. The Married Life, Death and Wed
ding of the Advocate of the Poor. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus,
On Heroes and Hero Worship, and The German Romance: Speci
mens of Its Chief Authors, and Thoreau's recently published
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. In 1851, he re
ceived a copy of Goethe's Iphipenia in Taurus, translated by
his friend George J. Adler. This record, despite its incom
pleteness, shows a significant increase in Melville's inter
est in transcendental thought at the time he was planning
and writing Moby-Dick. What it does not indicate is his
almost continual perusal of essays, reviews, and poems,
which were the primary literary forms employed by the Ameri-
15
can transcendentalists.
Melville's preoccupation with post-Kantian idealism
corresponds approximately to the development of his most
sustained personal contact with transcendentalism through
Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia Peabody Hawthorne.
The Hawthornes were personal friends of Emerson and other
transcendentalists and were at one time residents at Brook
^^Sealts, "Melville's Reading: A Checklist of Books
Owned and Borrowed," Harvard Library Bulletin, II (1948),
141-163; III (1949), 119-130, 268-277, 407-421.______________ :
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46!
Farm. Melville's association with the author of The Scarlet'
Letter began in the summer of 1850, when Hawthorne was at
the peak of his fame, and continued for several years after
Ithe publication of Moby-Dick in November, 1851. Although
Frothingham and others have noted Hawthorne's critical atti
tude towards transcendentalism, Hawthorne's entries in his
American Notebooks for these years refer occasionally to
Emerson, Ellery Channing, and others associated with the
movement. Moreover, Sophia Hawthorne wrote to her mother in
the autumn of 1850 about a visit by Melville, who spent half
a day reading Emerson's essays:
[Melville] was very careful not to interrupt Mr. Haw
thorne's mornings— when he was here. He generally walked
off somewhere, and one morning he shut himself into the
boudoir and read Mr. Emerson's Essays in presence of our
beautiful picture. In the afternoon he walked with Mr.
Hawthorne.
Hawthorne and Melville undoubtedly discussed transcendental
conceptions during their frequent meetings; for in 1852,
after the two writers were separated, they both published
novels critical of transcendental idealism: Hawthorne's The
Blithedale Romance is a satire of Brook Farm, and Melville's
Pierre portrays the tragedy of an idealist who becomes the
17
fool of Truth, of Virtue, and of Fate.
The letter is in Eleanor Melville Metcalf's Herman
Melville : Cycle and Epicycle (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 91.
"Our beautiful picture" refers to a portrait of Emerson,
which he had presented to the Hawthornes.
^^See Robert E. Spiller and others, LHUS, p. 457.
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47|
I
Outside of his novels, Melville left few records of his;
reactions to the transcendental faith or to its ethical
principles. The most significant of his comments is in his '
letter of March 3, 1849, to Evert Duyckinck. Melville's
;well-known assertion, "Nay, I do not oscillate in Emerson's :
rainbow, but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter
than swing in any other man's swing," is much more than a
criticism of the transcendental faith. Actually, the remark
is primarily an assertion of Melville's own integrity as an
artist. In the same letter, he also comments enthusiasti
cally about his discovery of Shakespeare, but adds:
And do not think, my boy, that because I, impulsively
broke forth in jubilations at discovering over Shake-
peare, that, therefore, I am of the number of the snobs
who burn their tuns of rancid fat at his shrine. No, I
would stand afar off and alone, and burn some pure Palm
oil, the product of some overtopping trunk. (Letters,
p. 79)
These comments demonstrate Melville's application of the
transcendental ethics of self-reliance, which hold that imi
tation cannot go above its model and that the artist must
follow his own genius. Melville's most penetrating reaction
to the transcendental faith is contained in another passage
from this letter. After admiring Emerson as a "thought
diver," Melville continues:
I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his
merit, a gaping flaw. It was, the insinuation, that had
he lived in those days when the world was made, he might
have offered some valuable suggestions. These men are
all cracked right across the brow. And never will the
pullers-down be able to cope with the builders up. And
this pulling down is easy enough— a keg of powder blew up :
Block's Monument— but the man who applied the match,_______;
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48!
could not, alone, build such a pile to save his soul from :
the sharkmaw of the Devil. But enough of this Plato who
I talks thro' his nose. (p. 79)
I In this passage, Melville's objection to the transcen- :
jdental faith is its insinuation that all things are know-
able. Melville's position, while critical of Emerson's ego-
jtism, is in harmony with the notion of Kant that the ideas
;of God and immortality are unknowable, although they have
the practical function of guiding moral behavior. On the
other hand, Melville does not limit intuition, as Kant did,
to concepts of space and time. He extends it to include
both ethical behavior in the manner of Emersonian self-
reliance and the awareness of human imperfection, that sense
of Original Sin, which he admired as Hawthorne's blackness.
In his review "Hawthorne and His Mosses," published in 1850,
Melville comments:
Certain it is, however, that this great power of black
ness in Hawthorne derives its force from its appeals to
that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original
Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no
deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free. For, in
certain moods, no man can weigh this world, without throw
ing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike
the uneven balance.
Similarly, in the same essay, Melville admires in Shake
speare's tragedies "those occasional flashings forth of the
intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the
very axis of reality;— these are the things that make Shake
speare Shakespeare" (p. 407)..
18
In The Portable Melville, p. 406.
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49;
The essential distinction, then, between Melville and !
I
American transcendentalists during the years of his greatest
literary activity lies in his restricted conception of the
^nowable to intuitions of human frailty. As a tragic novel-
I
list, Melville chose to remind us of our mortality at a time ;
when Emerson and the transcendental priests were proclaiming
I 19
the divinity of the individual. Despite differences in
strategy, however, Melville and Emerson viewed evil as an
imbalance between the individual will and nature; and for
both writers, the greatest good consisted of being one's own
inexorable self.^^
19
For Melville's comment on mortality, see "Etymology"
in Moby-Dick, p. xxxvii.
20
The phrase "his own inexorable self" is from Father
Mapple's sermon in Moby-Dick, p. 48. ____________
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I CHAPTER I I I
I CURRENTS OF TRANSCENDENTALISM, 1844-1861:
ESTHETICS
The native spirit of protest that initiated religious
and ethical currents of American transcendentalism also de
veloped a vigorous esthetic strain, which aimed at estab
lishing an independent national literature. Emerson identi-
i ’
tied this third current of transcendentalism as the equal of
the other two. "For the Universe," he said in "The Poet,"
has three children, born at one time, which reappear
under different names in every system of thought, whether ^
they be called cause, operation and effect; or, more po
etically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the
Father, the Spirit and the Son; but which we will call
here the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These stand re
spectively for the love of truth, for the love of good,
and for the love of beauty. These three are equal. Each
is that which he is, essentially, so that he cannot be
surmounted or analyzed, and each of these three has the
power of the others latent in him and his own, patent.
(Works, III, 12)
In practice, however, neither Emerson nor Melville found the
poet or sayer to be identical with the knower and the doer.
Extending the revolt against tradition into art, the tran
scendental esthetic had two contrasting effects on Melville.
Although never formulated into a consistent doctrine, it
provided Melville with those concepts of language and or
ganic form which he employed— with their characteristic
50 _____________________________ :
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51!
I
deficiencies— in his greatest literary achievements; it also;
formed the basis for his rejection of the transcendental re-j
I
ligion and his unending search for a belief of his own.
I As a novelist, Melville owed little to the theories of :
fiction of most of his contemporaries, with the notable ex- ;
Jception of Hawthorne. The most popular forms of prose fic
tion at mid-century were the historical romance and the
sentimental novel, neither of which attempted to probe be
neath surface realism, as did Melville's novels, to deal S
1
with basic philosophical issues. "I love all men who
dive," Melville wrote of Emerson in 1849. "Any fish can
swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down
stairs five miles or more; and if he don't [sic] attain the |
bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plum
met that will" (Melville's Letters, p. 79). Melville's af
finity for philosophical speculation in terms of symbols
from nature led inevitably to his investigation of transcen
dental esthetic conceptions, even though these found expres
sion primarily in essays and poems.
In its broadest sense, the transcendental theory of art
magnified certain limited features of European romanticism.
Allen Hayman in his unpublished dissertation, "Herman
Melville's Theory of Prose Fiction: In Contrast with Contem
porary Theories" (Illinois, 1951), contrasts Melville's
interest in "vital truth" with the popular demand for real
ism in fiction published between 1844 and 1857. See Direc
tory of Melville Dissertations, compiled for the Melville
Society by Tyrus Hillway and Hershel Parker in 1962, pp. 55-
56.
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52!
I
iLike the English romantic poets, notably Wordsworth and I
Coleridge, Emerson and his circle revolted against static
neoclassical rules for genre, which were derived in part
from ancient classic models; they proposed instead an or
ganic conception of poetry that sought beauty in the expres
sion of moral and spiritual truths of the mind in relation
I
|to the commonplaces of nature. In "The American Scholar,"
Emerson observes: "I embrace the common, I explore and sit
at the feet of the familiar, the low. . . . let me see every
trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly
on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger |
referred to the like cause by which light undulates and
poets sing" (Works, I, 111).
Emerson's comment is parallel to Wordsworth's statement
of purpose in the Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical
Ballads to "choose incidents and situations from common
life" and to relate them "in a selection of language really
used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a
certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things
should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and,
further, and above all, to make these incidents and situa
tions interesting by tracing in them, truly though not os
tentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as
far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a
2
state of excitement." In "Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth
2
The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas
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53
clearly anticipates Emerson's conception of the spiritual
I
and ethical influence of nature on the mind:
i
Therefore am I still I
A lover of the meadows and the woods.
And mountains; and of all that we behold I
From this green earth; of all the mighty world !
Of eye, and ear— both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize |
I In nature and the language of the sense
I The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse.
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
I Of all my moral being. (pp. 164-165)
j In contrast to the carefully integrated phrasing of
[Wordsworth's blank verse, the poetry of Emerson and other
jtranscendentalists reflected a more intense revolt against
neoclassical rationalism, especially its basis in the sensa
tionalist philosophy of Locke, which denied intuition. Un
like the great English romantic poets, who retained an al
most neoclassical respect for internal harmony and consist
ency in structure, Emerson objected to "a foolish consist
ency" as being incompatible with intuition or poetic insight
("Self-Reliance," Works, II, 57). In other words, Emerson's
poet, like the transcendental priest and reformer, relies
essentially on his genius to perceive the transcendental
unity underlying the seeming contradictions and diversity in
nature and art. He allows his thought to develop its own
shape and subordinates logic, which seeks beauty in formal
balance and regularity; for these are the intellectual re
finements of tradition, rather than of nature.
Hutchinson and Ernest De Selincourt (London: Oxford, 1950),
p. 734. ____________________________________________________
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541
One inevitable result of this emphasis on spontaneity
|at the expense of the critical faculties is that the tran
scendental poets, except for Whitman, were less proficient
j
|in writing verse, with its disciplines of rhyme and meter,
than they were in prose. Like Emerson, Melville was unable
to achieve in his verse a functional relationship between
content and form; and despite imaginative power, the poetry
of both writers lacks the technical finish of the master
craftsman. Both writers conceived of poetry as a test of
strength. In "Art," Melville referred to the poet's task
"to wrestle with the angel— Art" (Selected Poems, p. 140).
In "Merlin," Emerson wrote:
The kingly bard
Must smite the chords rudely and hard
As with hammer or with mace . . .
(Works, IX, 120)
Similarly, the diffuseness of form in Emerson's essays has
its counterpart in the digressiveness of Melville's novels.
Among the poets stimulated by transcendental conceptions.
Whitman was the first to succeed in giving verse the rela
tive freedom of prose by replacing rhyme and regular meter
with carefully integrated and sustained patterns of sound
and rhythm.
Not only were the transcendentalists more thorough in
their revolt against neoclassical esthetics than the Euro
peans, but they also rejected such popular romantic conven
tions as the veneration of the ancient and the grotesque.
These had found varied expression in Europe and America in
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" I
historical novels, gothic romances, and poems on classical
and medieval themes. Such conventions were apart from the
transcendental esthetics because they celebrated tradition
;or indulged in emotional excesses based on distortions of
i
nature. Unlike such American writers as Bryant and Irving,
whose art was imbued with neoclassical and romantic elements
even though they portrayed native subjects, transcendental
critics and poets aimed at establishing an independent Amer
ican literature by returning to the fundamental spiritual
and ethical principles of living. As a result of this de
nial of tradition and the purely fanciful as proper themes
for literature, the transcendental writers sought their
eternal values in the present moment. "Give me insight into!
today," Emerson said in "The American Scholar," "and you may
have the antique and future worlds" (Works, I, 111). Simi
larly, Melville restricted his focus to "the apprehension of
the absolute condition of present things as they strike the
3
eye of the man who fears them not. ..."
Emerson pointed up the transcendental rejection of im
ported literary conventions in "The American Scholar." "We
have listened too long," he said,
to the courtly muses of Europe. . . . Young men of the
fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated
^"To Nathaniel Hawthorne, 16? April? 1851," Letters of
Melville, p. 124. In these words praising The House of the
Seven Gables, Melville reveals more of his own attitude than,
that of Hawthorne, whose greatest work. The Scarlet Letter, I
is a historical novel. The House of the Seven Gables drama-!
tizes the influence of the past on the present.
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561
by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of
I God, find the earth below not in unison with these, but
I are hindered from action by the disgust which the princi-
I pies on which business is managed inspire, and turn
I drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What
I is the remedy? They did not yet see, and the thousands
I of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for
I the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant
himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide,
the huge world will come round to him. (Works, I, 115)
i This celebrated portrait of the self-reliant scholar or
poet, who refuses to imitate "the courtly muses" and stands
"indomitably on instinct," is the starting point for the
transcendental conception of an American esthetics. It ap
propriately describes Melville's inwardness and independence
as a writer who "would stand afar off and alone, and burn
some pure Palm oil, the product of some overtopping trunk"
(Letters, p. 79). Melville's attempts to rely essentially
on instinct, however, did not win favor with his publishers,
whose business was to supply the public demand for conven
tional reading matter. In his letter of March 25, 1848, to
John Murray, the English publisher of Tvpee and Omoo, Mel
ville defends his instinct in writing the romance Mardi as
having prophetic quality. "As for the policy," he said,
of putting forth an acknowledged romance upon the heel of
two books of travel which in some quarters have been re
ceived with no small incredulity— That, Sir, is a ques
tion for which I care little, really. My instinct is to
out with the Romance, and let me say that instincts are
prophetic, and better than acquired wisdom— which alludes
remotely to your experience in literature as an eminent
publisher. (Letters, p. 71)
When Murray rejected the book, Melville found another pub
lisher but was disappointed by the public indifference to
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571
his third novel. During the composition of Moby-Dick. Mel- !
ville disclosed to Hawthorne in the letter of June 1, 1851, !
his inability to stand indomitably on instinct and meet the :
publisher's requirements for a salable book:
: What I feel most moved to write, that is banned— it will
not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.
So the product is a final hash, and all my books are
botches. (Letters, p. 128)
On the other hand, Emerson and the transcendentalists
chose not to read popular literature for the same basic rea
son Melville preferred not to write it. "Books are the best
of things, well used," Emerson said in "The American
Scholar"; "abused, among the worst. . . . I had better never
see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of
my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system"
(Works, I, 89-90). A book is impure, Emerson said, to the
extent that it is not an expression of self-reliance: "As
no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so
neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional,
the local, the perishable from his book. ..." (p. 88).
In addition to basing their esthetics on a concept of
artistic integrity, which Melville adopted, Emerson and his
circle asserted theories of language that would appeal to
Melville's intuitive temperament in search of a way to ex
ternalize his spontaneous thoughts and feelings in art. In
Nature, Emerson attributed to language and special function
of linking the mind to external nature through symbols,
which progress through three stages : __________________________
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sq
1. Words are signs of natural facts.
2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular
spiritual facts. ;
3. Nature is the symbol of the spirit. (Works. I, 25) I
For Emerson, the term spirit denotes both the divine mind,
I
jwhich he conceived as a dynamic, moral force that transcends
physical reality, and the human mind, which when properly
related to nature becomes a counterpart of the divine mind,
4
Sharing its power. Emerson explains the complex impact of
nature's symbolic language, which includes words as well as
things, on the human mind as follows:
Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but
what we consciously give them when we employ them as em
blems of our thoughts? The world is emblematic. Parts
of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a
metaphor of the mind. The laws of moral nature answer to
those of matter as face to face in a glass. (Works, I,
32-33)
In other words, man sees in nature and language the emblems
of his own thoughts, which exert a moral and spiritual as
well as a physical pressure on his life. In addition, na
ture in its variety corresponds to the attitude of the ob
server :
“ ^The contemporary poet Wallace Stevens similarly has
conceived of an underlying unity in nature, art, and the
mind. For example, his poem "A Primitive Like an Orb" be
gins :
The essential poem at the centre of things.
The arias that spiritual fiddlings make.
Have gorged the cast-iron of our lives with good
And the cast-iron of our works. But it is, dear sirs
A difficult apperception, this gorging good.
Fetched by such slick-eyed nymphs, this essential gold.
This fortune's finding, disposed and re-disposed
By such slight genii in such pale air.
In The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York : Alfred
A. Knopf, 1957), p. 440. _________ __
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59;
Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man
laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath
sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the
landscape felt by him who had just lost by death a dear
friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less i
I worth in the population. (Works, I, 11)
Words also reflect the character of the user:
The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of
language. When simplicity of character and the sover
eignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of second
ary desires,— the desire of riches, of pleasure, of
power, and of praise,— the duplicity and falsehood take
place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as
an interpreter of the will is in a degree lost; new ima
gery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted
to stand for things which are not. (Works, I, 29-30)
As an artist, Emerson sought to employ language in two :
contrasting ways. In the first place, he advocated that the
thought of a poem should develop naturally, according to its
own design, into a total comment on the relation of man to
nature. "The production of a work of art," he said in
Nature,
throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of
art is an abstract or epitome of the world. For although
the works of nature are innumerable and all different,
the result or expression of them all is similar and
single. (Works, I, 23)
Secondly, he advocated that the artist should seek "to
concentrate this radiance of the world on one point" and "to
satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce"
(Works, I, 24). In this respect, Emerson's special genius
with language was to compress his meaning into sentences
with evocative metaphors from nature, as in this passage
from "Self-Reliance":
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60
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the
water of which it is composed does not. The same par
ticle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its
unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a na
tion today, next year die, and their experience dies with
them. (Works, II, 87)
I
Emerson's conception of a symbol which suggests the whole in
I ;
[the part, as one wave represents society, is an esthetic
parallel with the transcendental religious conception that
bod dwells in "each" as well as "all."
This verbal link between the mind, nature, and art ap- ;
pealed to Melville, despite his limited conception of the
knowable, which did not presume full intuitional knowledge
of divine purpose. Both he and Emerson were dissatisfied,
however, with the inability of words to represent the high
est levels of abstraction. Instead of using the traditional:
terms for the Deity, Emerson frequently employed substitute
labels, notably Over-Soul, One and All, in an effort to
avoid conventional associations when he referred to his in-
tuition of a unifying spiritual principle. In other words,
Emerson would know God through language in part by naming
Him. On the other hand, general terms are more appropriate
for the philosopher and theologian than for the practicing
poet, whose task is, as Emerson said, to "fasten words again
to visible things" (Works, I, 30).. As a poet with an in
stinctive preference for the concrete image, Melville at
times rebelled against the use of any abstract words as
labels for levels of reality that lie beyond human compre
hension. In a letter to Hawthorne dated April 16, 1851,
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5 1 i
i
Melville wrote; "As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, sO
soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam.
| . . . Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him
|in the street" (Letters, p. 125). For Melville, God's real-
I
xty— if it exists at all— is more likely to be found in the
avenues of living men, in the commonplaces of visible exper
ience, than in the language of abstraction.
In the same letter, Melville offered in this apprecia
tion of Hawthorne's genius his conception of the author as
an independent mind who knows his limitation:
We think that into no recorded mind has the intense feel
ing of the visible truth ever entered more deeply than
into this man's [Hawthorne's]. By visible truth, we mean
the apprehension of the absolute condition of present
things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them
not, though they do their worst to him,— the man who,
like Russia or the British Empire, declares himself a
sovereign nature (in himself) amid the powers of heaven,
hell, and earth. He may perish; but so long as he exists
he insists upon treating with all Powers on an equal
basis. If any of those other Powers choose to withhold
certain secrets, let them; that does not impair my sover
eignty in myself; that does not make me tributary.
(pp. 124-125)
The Powers in nature and the mind are of evil as well as
good; they are in part knowable, through the artist's per
ception of symbols in the visible world. For Melville, the
primal forces exist in precarious balance and must receive
in art equal treatment.
Two months later, in a letter to Hawthorne dated
June 1, 1851, Melville attacked the verbal systems of popu
lar theologies, which he felt concealed fear. The real dif
ficulty he found with abstract terms was that they were the
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1
language of the head, rather than of the heart. "I stand
for the heart," Melville said. "To the dogs with the head] ;
|l had rather be a fool with a heart, than a Jupiter Olympus i
j
with his head" (Letters, p. 129). He continued with a com
ment suggesting the underlying weakness of those beliefs,
I
such as Deism and Unitarianism, which rely on logic. "The
reason the mass of men fear God," he said, "and at bottom
dislike Him, is because they rather distrust His Heart and
fancy Him all brain like a watch" (p. 129). Even capitali- ■
zation of terms suggested fear. "You perceive," he observed,
"I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the ;
Deity; don't you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism
in that usage?" (p. 129). This hypersensitive protest
against the conventional language of religion recalls the
more inclusive transcendentalist objection to religious tra
ditions on the grounds that they conceal skepticism.
Melville, however, in the same letter also attacked the;
abstractions of the transcendental faith, which he felt led ;
to self-deception. "In reading some of Goethe's sayings, so
worshipped by his votaries," he said, "I came across this,
'Live in the all.' That is to say, your separate identity
is but a wretched one,— good; but get out of yourself,
spread and expand yourself, and bring to yourself the ting-
lings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods,
that are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Fixed
Stars. What nonsense! Here is a fellow with a raging
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"53Î
1
oothache. 'My dear boy,' Goethe says to him, 'you are L
isorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the
I !
all, and then you will be happy.'" Melville concluded this ’
■demolition of empty abstractions with a grudging admission
I . ;
of admiration: "As with all great genius, there is an im
mense deal of flummery in Goethe, and in proportion to my
own contact with him, a monstrous deal of it in me!" (Let
ters, pp. 129-131).
Melville's objection to the use of language to name the
essentially unknowable, invisible reality is perhaps nowhere
butside of his novels more clearly illustrated than in his
marginalia in the volumes of Emerson's essays, first and
second series. Melville purchased these in March, 1862,
after he had turned from writing novels to poetry. His per
sonal experience with human imperfection, as a sailor and as
a tragic novelist who failed to win lasting public recogni
tion, led him to disagree with Emerson's assumption that the
individual whose inner vision was in harmony with his out
ward senses would see no evil. To Emerson's comment in
"Spiritual Laws" that "The good, compared to the evil which
he sees, is as his own good to his own evil," Melville
noted: "A Perfectly good being, therefore, would see no
evil. But what did Christ see? He saw what made him weep.
However, too, the 'Philanthropist' must have been a very bad
man— he saw, in jails, too much evil. To annihilate all
this nonsense read the Sermon on the Mount, and consider
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64
!
what it implies" (Log./ II/ 648). For Melville, Emerson's I
abstractions were not true to the absolute condition of |
sensory experience.
Even so, Melville agreed with Emerson's comment in "The!
Poet" that language originates in poetic intuition and that |
I I
]"the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one
I
step nearer to it than any other"; however, with intuition
restricted largely to discerning the nature of imperfect
things, Melville in his marginal comment attempted to name
Emerson's defective vision (p. 649). Of Emerson's comment
on language, Melville wrote :
This is admirable, as many other thoughts of Mr. Emerson
are. His gross and astonishing errors and illusions
spring from a self-conceit so intensely intellectual and
calm that at first one hesitates to call it by its right
name. Another species of Mr. Emerson's errors, or
rather, blindness, proceeds from a defect in the region
of the heart. (p. 649)
This sharp criticism of Emerson's "astonishing illu
sions" in 1862, in contrast to Melville's qualified admira
tion of Emerson as a "thought diver" in 1849, can be ex
plained in part by Melville's frustration in the intervening,
years as a novelist who followed his own genius, as Emerson
advocated, and failed to make the world come round to him.
The comment points up Melville's distinction between Emerson,
the transcendental priest, and Emerson, the critic and poet.
Melville's rejection of the transcendental religion and at
traction to transcendental esthetic conceptions corresponds
to the shift in emphasis within the transcendental movement
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65
from the primarily religious to the literary. This change |
in direction is evident in Emerson's own work, which moves |
from such early lectures as "The Divinity School Address" to!
his later criticism and poetry. Also paralleling this in-
! '
creasing secularization of thought is the transition in
Thoreau's essays from the contemplation of spiritual nature
to close observation of natural phenomena as an end in it
self. As Metzger says, "we see Emerson the communicant as
having entered the woods behind Concord and as having re
mained there, half communicant, half observer. And by the
same analogy we recognize Thoreau emerging more the observer,
more the skeptic, more the naturalist, than the communicant
who went in" (p. 137).
Melville's criticism of popular religions, including
the transcendental faith, however, serves to illustrate his
own search for a personal belief related to his conception
of art. Without formal training either in theology or in
esthetics, Melville was inclined to see faith and art as a
struggle, such as Carlyle describes in Sartor Resartus, in
which the individual progresses through three evolutionary
stages of spiritual development— "the Everlasting No" of
disillusionment, "the Center of Indifference" to spiritual
values, and "the Everlasting Yea" of renewed faith. Mel
ville, in fact, admired in Hawthorne a Carlylian ability to
say "No in thunder" to the optimistic conclusions that man
is capable of perfection and that nature is always
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66;
benevolent (Letters, p. 125). Hawthorne, as a sympathetic i
listener to Melville's troubled remarks on religion, noted
the persistence and honesty of Melville's search. After the
last meeting of the two writers in England in 1856, Haw-
bhorne observed;
! Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Provi
dence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond
human ken, and informed me that he had 'pretty much made
up his mind to be annihilated'; but still he does not
seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will
never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It
is strange how he persists— and has persisted ever since
I knew him, and probably long before— in wandering to-
and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as
the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can nei
ther believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he
is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the
other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of
the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very
high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than
most of us.5
Hawthorne's evaluation as an intimate friend with an
artist's perceptiveness suggests that Melville's real prob
lem was to find a definite faith that would agree with the
ethics of his art. Rejecting conventional forms of belief,
as Emerson did, Melville sought to distinguish his own be
lief from that of any group, including the transcendental
ists. Just as his art would not be imitative, so his faith,
whatever its nature, would not be. The resulting privacy of
Melville's faith, like his independence as a writer, is in
dicated in his marginal comment to the Bible verse in
Romans XIV: "Hast thou faith? have it to thyself before ’
^The Portable Hawthorne, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York:
Viking, 1948), pp. 588-589._____________________________________:
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67|
God." To this, Melville wrote in his copy of the New Testa-j
ment: "The only kind of Faith— one's own" (Log, II, 627).
I
Actually, a faith of one's own, rooted in art, is what
I
I
Emerson meant in his comments on the poet's perceptivehess.
L
For Emerson's Over-Soul is Absolute Beauty, which the poet
is more likely to perceive than the conventional clergyman.
Similarly, Melville's angel is Art. One source of the dif
ference between the two writers lies in Melville's more re
stricted conception of language. Where Emerson attempted to
combine the functions of knower, doer and sayer and wrote in
the language of both head and heart, Melville, who was es
sentially a sayer, restricted himself more to the language
of the heart than of the head. Without denying the reality
of supersensual truth, Melville demolished abstract verbal
systems that would attempt to name it. When Emerson advo
cated or employed the language of the artist, with its close
association to visible reality, Melville agreed. For Mel
ville more than Emerson, the unseen world of spirit could
never be perfectly understood, either through logic or in
tuition; but its power must be encased in symbols, which at
their basis are enigmas.
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CHAPTER I V
POLARITY IN TYPEE AND OMOO
Melville's first six novels from Typee through Moby-
Dick reflect a broad symmetry of design that is due at least
in part to his employment of transcendental ethical and es
thetic conceptions. In these novels, Melville employs mate
rials derived not only from personal experiences as a sailor,
but also from extensive reading to convey what W. E. Sedg
wick has appropriately described as the "slowly lengthening
'landscape of the soul.'" The novels fall naturally into a
pattern of inward progression that is too regular to be ex
plained merely by coincidence or by the hasty improvisations
of an author attempting to meet the practical demands of his
publishers. With the sea as a constant background, these
works present increasingly complex symbolic portraits of the
external world in relation to the mind.
Considered together, Melville's early novels form two
groups of three, with each triad corresponding approximately
In Stanley T. Williams, "Melville," Eight American
Authors, ed. J. B. Hubbell and others (New York: Norton,
1963), p. 220. Williams' summary of interpretations of Mel
ville 's novels emphasizes the variety of twentieth century
criticism, which has largely overlooked the transcendental
ism in Melville's art.
____________________________ 6A ___________________________
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69j
to the Hegelian cycle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis !
describing the transcendental processes of thought. The
I
first three novels, for example, focus primarily on con
trasting portraits of Polynesian life. Melville begins his ■
writing career by celebrating in Typee (1845) the wild vir
tue of savage man living in harmony with nature untouched by
civilization; however, in the sequel Omoo (1847)— aside from
the chapters covering a mutiny at sea— he emphasizes the de
basement of native life in Tahiti under the repressive in
fluences of civilization. The verisimilitude of these epi
sodic narratives of adventure contrasts with the fantasy in
Mardi (1849), Melville's initial attempt at an esthetic syn
thesis or total view of man's estate, in which he idealizes
the Polynesians as human archetypes in an allegory of the
mind.
Despite public indifference to Mardi, Melville appar
ently repeats the essential pattern in his next three novels>
which focus mainly on life aboard ship. In Redburn (1849),
Melville returns to his earlier realism in depicting the
initiation of a young sailor into the evils of society on
his first voyage. White-Jacket (1850) extends this theme in
terms of the adventures of a sailor aboard a world-ship, the
U.S.S. Neversink. Supported by the success of these two
hastily written novels, Melville in Moby-Dick (1851) at- ,
tempts a second esthetic synthesis with another comprehen
sive portrait of the mind presented in the context of a long
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70;
whaling cruise. Although the Hegelian cycle does not fully j
explain the complex relationships among:the novels, it is
consistent with Melville's description of his own evolution
ary development during the period extending from his work on;
( :
Tvpee through Moby-Dick. In a letter to Hawthorne dated
June, 1851, Melville observed:
I am like one of those seeds 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
mould. (Letters, p. 130)
Melville continued with a reference to the beginning of his
inward development in his twenty-fifth year, when he wrote
Typee, and then alluded to the approaching completion of
Moby-Dick. "But I feel that I am now come to the inmost
leaf of the bulb," he said, "and that shortly the flower
must fall to the mould" (Letters, p. 130).
Melville's comparison of his artistic development to
the growth of a plant parallels Hegel's conception that na
ture and spirit follow the same triadic cycle of develop
ment. For example, the Hegelian thesis is like the seed,
which contains the initial unity of the plant; the antithe
sis resembles the stem, branches, and leaves that grow from
seed as divergent parts; and the synthesis is the equivalent
of the whole plant, including the flower and the seed it
produces to repeat the process. As Hegel explained in the
introduction to The Philosophy of History:
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71i
The principle of Development involves also the exist
ence of a latent germ of being— a capacity or potential
ity striving to realize itself. This formal conception
finds actual existence in Spirit. . . . Development,
however, is also a property of organized natural objects.
Their existence presents itself, not as an exclusively
dependent one, subjected to external changes, but as one
which expands itself in virtue of an internal unchange
able principle; a simple essence— whose existence, i.e.,
as a germ, is primarily simple— but which subsequently
develops a variety of parts, that become involved with
other objects, and consequently live through a continu
ous process of changes;— a process nevertheless, that
results in the very contrary of change, and is even
transformed into a vis conservatrix of the organic prin
ciple, and the form embodying it. Thus the organized
individuum produces itself ; it expands itself actually to
what it was always potentially. So Spirit is only that
which it attains by its own efforts; it makes itself ac
tually what it always was potentially.^
Even though available records fail to prove that Mel
ville read Hegel, the prominence of the German philosopher
and Melville's affinity for philosophical speculation sug
gest that the author had some knowledge of Hegelian meta
physics. Actually, Melville was sufficiently conversant
with Hegel and the other German transcendentalists to dis
cuss them with friends, including the German scholar, George;
3
J. Adler. Furthermore, Hegel's conception of an evolution
ary progression from initial idea through contrasting parts
toward wholeness corresponds to Emerson's idea of polarity,
or dualism in nature, in which the mind grows by resolving
contradictory qualities into a synthesis or total view of
nature.
Trans. J. Sibree (New York; Dover,. 1956), pp. 54-55.
3
See entry in Lop, I, 392. I have referred to Mel
ville 's acquaintance with post-Kantian idealists on pp. 44-45.
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72;
I
In describing this process, Emerson also employed an
janalogy of the growth of a plant. For example, he indicated
in "The American Scholar" that the boy whose spirit is in
harmony with nature first sees nature in parts but senses
I :
ithe wholeness which the mature scholar or poet later per
ceives. "Thus to him," Emerson said, "to this schoolboy
under the bending dome of day, is suggested that he and it
proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; rela
tion, sympathy, stirring in every vein" (Works, I, 86). In
Representative Men, published in 1850 when Melville was
working on Moby-Dick, Emerson wrote, "Man is that noble en
dogenous plant which grows, like the palm, from within out
ward" (IV, 6) .
If Mobv-Dick represented to Melville "the inmost leaf"
of his development, then Typee suggests the seed and Omoo
the stem. In his first two novels, Melville saw nature in
parts and had yet to see it whole. Although the focus of
narration in these two works is primarily on external
events, supplemented by frequent digressions on the conflict
between civilized and savage customs, each novel has a
slight but clearly defined inward progression, as the narra
tor becomes increasingly preoccupied with the self in rela
tion to the visible world, the Emersonian "me" in relation
to the "not me." In Typee, the narrator returns to the
primeval savage state and experiences both a spiritual re
birth into nature and the resulting bondage of childhood in
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73
the primitive Typee tribe, from which he finally escapes
jwith his life. By contrast, Omoo portrays the more mature
narrator as an outcast wanderer who has outgrown the savage
code but rejects the conventions of civilized society, which
imprison body and mind. At the end of his episodic, pica
resque adventures, in which youthful high spirits mask dis-
! . :
illusionment, he returns to sea in his spiritual cradle, a
whaling ship.
Of the two novels, Typee is more central to an under
standing of the transcendental ethics and esthetics in Mel
ville's art. Melville's underlying subject is the funda
mental relationship of man to nature. Anticipating Thoreau
in Walden, published eight years later in 1854, Melville
portrays an attempt of a self-reliant nonconformist to front
the essential facts of life. Beneath the exciting surface
narrative of adventure in which the rebellious narrator and
his moody companion jump ship in the Marquesas Islands and
live among savages, Melville provides a structure of unre
conciled contrasts of civilized and primitive man that are
parallel to the first step in Emerson's doctrine of polar
ity. As Emerson said in his essay on "Compensation":
Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every
part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold;
in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the
inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the
animal body; in the systole and diastole of the heart;
in the undulations of fluids and of sound; in the centrif
ugal and centripetal gravity; in electricity, galvinism
and chemical affinity. (Works, II, 96)
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74
Melville may not have read this passage, even though the
i
i
essay was published in 1844. The idea, however, permeates |
Emerson's works as a transcendentalist explanation for the i
diversity in unity. Emerson's second step, reunification of
opposites into spiritual oneness, was beyond Melville's !
! !
range in Typee. Without a central character conflict or
[transcendental symbol such as Thoreau provided in Walden
pond, whose waters reflect the universe, Typee conveys a
curious double effect in its sequence of contradictory I
rmages of beauty and savagery in nature and the correspond- ;
ing good and evil in man untouched by civilization. |
Through the eyes of Tommo, a seafaring Everyman, Mel- '
ville analyzes savage man in stages that correspond to I
j
Tommo's descent into primitive nature. In the opening chap-;
ters describing the arrival of the whaler Dolly in Nukuheya i
harbor in the Marquesas Islands, Tommo classifies humanity
into two groups, civilized and savage. In succession, he
!
observes how the three estates of civilized man— church, 1
state, and commons— have each disrupted the savages' simple,;
joyous harmony with nature. The protestant missionaries im-i
pose religious conventions but not the Christian spirit on
the islanders, with no more than superficial success; the
French with their warships subdue the natives and exploit
them. Finally, the sailors aboard the Dolly engage in unre-|
strained riot and debauchery with childlike, unresisting
Polynesian girls, who swim out to meet the ship.
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75;
I
Melville points up this initial contrast between civ
ilized man and savage in his account of the meeting between !
|the French admiral and the native patriarch-sovereign, as
I
|the French take formal possession of Nukuheva:
! The admiral came forward with head uncovered and extended
I hand, while the old king saluted him by a stately flour-
I ish of his weapon. The next moment they stood side by
side, these two extremes of the social scale— the pol
ished, splendid Frenchman, and the poor tattooed savage.
I They were both tall and noble-looking men; but in other
respects how strikingly contrasted! Du Petit Thouars ex
hibited upon his person all the paraphernalia of his
naval rank. He wore a richly decorated admiral's frock
coat, a laced chapeau bras, and upon his breast were a
variety of ribbons and orders; while the simple islander,
with the exception of a slight cincture about his loins,
appeared in all the nakedness of nature.^
Melville's narrator meditates on the difference between the
societies represented by the two men— the Frenchman embody
ing "long centuries of progressive civilization and refine
ment" and the savage conveying nothing but his essential
self (p. 45). "Yet, after all," Tommo observes, "insensible
as he is to a thousand wants, and removed from harassing
cares, may not the savage be the happier of the two?"
(p. 45).
Tommo's question, which suggests the theme of Typee, is
parallel to Thoreau's plea for simplicity in Walden. "Our
life," Thoreau says,
is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly
need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme
cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Sim-
^In The Portable Melville, ed. Jay Leyda (New York :
Viking, 1952), p. 45. All page references to Typee are from
this edition.
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76;
I
plicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs |
be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; in- !
stead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your ac
counts on your thumb-nail.5
Furthermore, in the opening lines of Walden, Thoreau sug-
jgests that his purpose is to apr'v to New England society
isuch a lesson in primitive livi- , as Melville describes in
Typee. "I would fain say something," Thoreau comments, "not
so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you
who read these pages, who are said to live in New England"
(Walden, p. 9).
Melville's criticism also parallels Emerson's objection
in "Self-Reliance" to the refinements of civilization which
have separated man from nature. "The civilized man," Emer
son says,
has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He
is supported on crutches, but loses so much support of
muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost
the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nau
tical almanac he has, as so being sure of the information
when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a
star in the sky. (Works, II, 85)
Having set forth the basic contrast of civilized and
savage man, Melville next examines the basis of primitive
society, with its essential polarity of good and evil. Al
though Melville portrays the natives living close to nature
as happier than civilized men, he extends the transcenden
talist revolt against ritual and convention to include
tribal customs, which like the refinements of civilization
^In The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1893), II, 15._______________________________
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77
I
tend to degrade the individual. This central portion of |
Melville's analysis of savage life begins as Tommo and his
I :
(Companion Toby— "a strange, wayward being, moody, fitful and
melancholy" (p. 49)— jump ship from the Dolly in Nukuheva
j
harbor and head for the wilderness. During the five days
i :
which the two youths spend wandering, as Melville says,
"like babes in the woods," they divide primitive society
into two classes— the friendly Happars representing primal
goodness and the cannibalistic Typees representing evil.
This contradition is the underlying meaning of Tommo's ques
tion "Happar or Typee?" The duality also is present in the
beauty and terror of primitive nature. Tommo, for example,
views from a precipice a peaceful valley, "which swept away ;
in long wavy undulations to the blue waters in the distance"
(p. 72). The "dazzling whiteness" of the native huts forms
a sharp contrast with the black hulls of the French warships
commanding Nukuheva harbor. On the other hand, the youths
descend into the valley by overcoming dangerous obstacles
that cut off their retreat, as nature becomes a symbol of a :
deepening spiritual struggle. With his leg injured in a
fall, Tommo nevertheless follows Toby sliding down long
roots, which break as he grabs for others precariously dang
ling over a rapids.
Tommo's descent suggests his hazardous return to the
roots of things, to face the essential conditions of life.^
6
As Charles R. Anderson has demonstrated in Melville in
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78
j
In this sense, the novel dramatizes the narrator's painful
spiritual rebirth, or initiation into nature. The first
savages which the youths encounter when they reach the val
ley are a naked boy and a girl partly concealed by foliage:
An arm of the boy, half screened from sight by her wild
I tresses, was thrown about the neck of the girl, while
I with the other he held one of her hands in his; and thus
[ they stood together, their heads inclined forward, catch
ing the faint noise we made in our progress, and with one
foot in advance, as if half inclined to fly from our
I presence. (p. 96)
In this description, Melville portrays the childlike beauty
I . ;
jand also the fear of the primitive living in harmony with
Inature. Although the natives turn out to be the feared
Typees, Tommo and Toby receive surprisingly humane treat
ment during their stay in the valley.
The greater part of the novel consists of Melville's
account of life among the cannibalistic Typees, with their
irreducible duality of good and evil. On the one hand, Mel
ville portrays in copious detail the virtuous simplicity of
the savage existence close to nature, which abundantly sup
plies the basic physical necessities. "A gentleman of
Typee," he observes,
can bring up a numerous family of children and give them
all a highly respectable cannibal education, with infi
nitely less toil and anxiety than he expends in the sim
ple process of striking a light; whilst a poor European
artisan, who through the instrumentality of a lucifer
the South Seas (New York: Morningside Heights, 1939),
pp. 114-115, Melville exaggerated facts to suit his dramatic
purposes. Tommo's five days of wandering actually covered
a distance of about five miles.
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79
performs the same operation in one second, is put to his
wits' end to provide for his starving offspring that
food which the children of a Polynesian father, without
troubling their parent, pluck from the branches of every
tree around them. (p. 156)
Melville's description, which relates the simple existence
of the Typees to the complex life of civilized man, is in
7
the pastoral tradition. In digressive essays that fre
quently interrupt the slight narrative thread, Melville
anticipates Thoreau's position in Walden that the mass of
civilized men, unlike primitives, "lead lives of quiet des
peration" weighted with cares of providing for wants in ex
cess of needs (Walden, p. 15). "What is called resigna
tion, " Thoreau writes, "is confirmed desperation. From the
desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have
to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats"
(p. 15). By contrast, Melville comments on "the perpetual
hilarity reigning through the whole extent of the vale.
There seemed to be no cares, griefs, troubles, or vexations
in all Typee. The hours tripped along as gaily as the
laughing couples down a country dance" (Typee, p. 173). In
describing the happiness of the Typees, Melville catalogues
the sources of irritation in civilization that the Typees
had not experienced:
Williams Empson in Some Versions of Pastoral (Norfolk,
Conn.: New Directions, 1950) has shown that the pastoral is
"about" simple folk who live close to nature, but not "by"
or "for" them. It frequently has the purpose of satirizing
the more sophisticated society which its author represents
(pp. 3-16). _____________
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8 01
There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested
notes, no bills payable, no debts of honor in Typee; no
unreasonable tailors and shoemakers, perversely bent on
being paid; no duns of any description; no assault and
battery attorneys, to foment discord, backing their cli
ents up to a quarrel, and then knocking their heads to-
i gether; no poor relations, everlastingly occupying the
i spare bed-chamber, and diminishing the elbow room at the
family table; no destitute widows with their children
starving on the cold charities of the world; no beggars;
no debtors' prisons; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in
Typee; or to sum up all in one word— no Moneyi "That
root of all evil" was not to be found in the valley.
(p. 173)
Emerson offers similar catalogues of the encumbrances
of civilization on the individual man, as in this passage
from "Self-Reliance" (1841):
His notebooks impair his memory; his libraries overload
his wit; the insurance office increases the number of ac
cidents; and it may be a question whether we have not
lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity en
trenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild
virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom
where is the Christian? (Works, II, 85)
Emerson's reference to the "wild virtue" of the savage is
reflected in Melville's assertion that among the Typees
"virtue, without being clamorously invoked, is, as it were
unconsciously practiced" (Typee, p. 261). Civilization,
Melville continues,
does not engross all the virtues of humanity; she has
not even her full share of them. They flourish in
greater abundance and attain greater strength among many
barbarous people. (p. 275)
Melville's cannibal utopia with its childlike simplic
ity, however, stands in ironic contrast to such civilized
utopias as the transcendentalist Brook Farm experiment,
which in 1845 was struggling to survive by adopting a
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81!
!
complicated Fourieristic system for classifying labor. Mel-|
!
ville suggests the difference between the two in his refer- j
! !
pnce to the pleasure of the Typees in trifling activities,
lin contrast to the "more elevated and rarer" interests of
I
I :
intellectuals. "What community," he observes,
I of refined and intellectual mortals would derive the
least satisfaction from shooting pop-guns? The mere sup
position of such a thing being possible would excite
their indignation, and yet the whole population of Typee
did little else for ten days but occupy themselves with
that childish amusement, fairly screaming, too, with the
delight it afforded them. (p. 199)
Except for the occasional cannibalism practiced by priests
and chiefs, the Typees, like many transcendentalists at
8
Brook Farm, were vegetarians. "The marvelous whiteness of
the teeth," Melville comments, "is to be ascribed to the
pure vegetable diet of these people, and the uninterrupted
healthfulness of their natural mode of life" (p. 247).
0. B. Frothingham in his history of transcendentalism in New
England gives the movement credit for inaugurating "a theory
and practice of dietetics which is preached assiduously now
9
by the vegetarian physiologists." In his review of Mel
ville's novel, George Ripley, editor of the Brook Farm news
paper, The Harbinger, praised the verisimilitude of the book,
^John Van Der Zee Sears in My Friends at Brook Farm
(New York: Desmond Fitzgerald, 1912), p. 55, notes that "the
vegetarians matched themselves against the 'cannibals'" and
adds "but I do not believe there was beef enough eaten on
the place to warrant any comparisons ..." Quoted in Auto
biography of Brook Farm, ed. H. W. Sams (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1958), p. 249.
9
Frothingham, p. 150.
— — - — ■ . . I ' — ^ ' II.— .. II. II,■■.■II,, III. ■ .
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82|
adding, "what interested us in Typee is the social state !
which is described" . . . (Log, I, 210).
I ;
I If the primal source of good among the Typees is their ;
simple existence in harmony with nature, evil derives
largely from their customs which regulate behavior and lead -
I :
jultimately to cannibalism. In terms of the structure of the
novel, Melville presents his most inclusive praise of the
Typee "Happy Valley" in Chapter Seventeen, half-way through
the thirty-four chapters of the book. The narrative por
tions in the preceding and following chapters, however,
trace Tommo's growing conflict with tribal conventions.
Tommo's initiation into the tribe begins harmlessly enough
with a naming ceremony that humorously points up the falli
bility of language as a means of knowing. Upon saying the
charmed passwords, "Typee mortarkee," or "Typee good,"
Tommo and Toby receive enthusiastic welcome from otherwise
hostile natives. The chief, Mehevi, then garnishes the name
which the narrator gives with an extra syllable, as though
he were selecting a nickname that had the right sound for
the neophyte :
Laying his hand upon his breast, he now gave me to under
stand that his name was Mehevi, and that, in return, he
wished me to communicate my appelation. I hesitated for
an instant, thinking that it might be difficult for him
to pronounce my real name, and then with the most praise
worthy intentions intimated that I was known as Tom. But
I could not have made a worse selection; the chief could
not master it; "Tommo," "Tomma," "Tommee," everything but
9
Frothingham, p. 150.
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83,
plain "Tom." As he persisted in garnishing the word with '
an extra syllable, I compromised the matter with him at
the word "Tommo." . . . (pp. 101-102)
I i
This primitive identification of the sound of a word with
its referent develops into an amusing hour-long ritual as
the tribesmen introduce themselves with names and titles
that serve to mystify Tommo, rather than inform him:
Reclining upon our mats, we now held a kind of levee,
giving audience to successive troops of natives, who
introduced themselves to us by pronouncing their respec
tive names, and retired in high good humor on receiving
ours in return. During this ceremony the greatest mer
riment prevailed, nearly every anouncement on the part of
the islanders being followed by a fresh sally of gaiety
which induced me to believe that some of them at least
were innocently diverting the company at our expense, by
bestowing upon themselves a string of absurd titles, of
the humor of which we were of course entirely ignorant.
(p. 102)
Implicit in this name-calling ritual is Melville’s criticism
of the language of abstraction, which conceals rather than
illuminates truth.
Tommo’s struggle against savage customs is complicated
by his leg injury, which has rendered him helpless. As a
result, he receives the conventional treatment of an infant
from Kory-Kory, a native assigned to watch over him. "He
brought us various kinds of food," Tommo says,
and, as if I were an infant, insisted upon feeding me
with his own hands. To this procedure. I, of course,
most earnestly objected, but in vain; and having laid a
calabash of kokoo before me, he washed his fingers in a
vessel of water, and putting the hand into the dish and
rolling the food into little balls put them one after
another into my mouth. (p. 124)
Kory-Kory also carries Tommo to a stream and washes him as a
"froward, inexperienced child, whom it was his duty to serve
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84{
at the risk of offending" (p. 126). '
These seemingly innocuous rituals are part of a tribal i
pattern for caring for the young and helpless that culmi-
!
hates in a religious ceremony, an ironic pagan equivalent to
a communion service. Melville describes the "cathedral-like
gloom" of the forest setting, the sacred building, and the
aged priests— "hideous old wretches, on whose decrepit forms
time and tattooing seemed to have obliterated every trace of
humanity" (p. 130). Kory-Kory, addressing these keepers of
primitive tradition, gives "utterance to some unintelligible
gibberish," the Typee version of the ritualistic language of
religion (p. 130). After a ceremonial meal and a pipe,
Tommo and his companion fall into a drugged sleep. Awaken
ing around midnight, they witness a fire ceremony; then
Kory-Kory appears mysteriously to feed Tommo meat, which the
youth suspects is human. Although no harm comes to Tommo
and Toby, the unexplained disappearance of Toby shortly
afterwards increases Tommo's anxiety, despite the kindly
treatment that he continues to receive from the natives.
Melville's satire parallels the transcendentalists' attack
on the rituals of Unitarianism, which they said concealed
fear and skepticism. Emerson, it will be recalled, resigned
from the ministry because he refused to participate in the
Ritual of Communion. In Typee, Melville identifies tribal
ritual with malevolence; it is this evil which Tommo eventu
ally resists.
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I 85:
i !
j The ultimate target of Melville's criticism of primi
tive society is the enigmatic institution of the "Taboo,"
I
jwhich is the central ordering principle of the Typee tribe.
Melville presents it as the prototype of the complicated
isystem of traditions that dominate and dehumanize civilized
man. Of its pervasiveness, Melville comments:
I cannot determine with anything approaching to cer
tainty, what power it is that imposes the taboo. When I
consider the slight disparity of condition among the
islanders— the very limited and inconsiderable preroga
tives of the king and chiefs— and the loose and indefi
nite functions of the priesthood, most of whom were
hardly to be distinguished from the rest of their coun
trymen, I am wholly at a loss where to look for the au
thority which regulates this potent instrument, (pp. 302-
303)
As a nonconformist, Tommo rebels against Typee tradition and
i
manages to free the beautiful native girl Fayaway from the ‘
taboo that prevents her from entering a canoe. He succeeds
by appealing directly to Mehevi instead of Kory-Kory, who is
fanatically rigid in his attitudes towards the taboo. Al
though the chief gives in to Tommo's plea, he defends the
convention in jargon that suggests the evasive language of
civilized men in explaining a custom:
At last Mehevi entered into a long, and I have no doubt
a very learned and eloquent, exposition of the history
and nature of the "taboo" as affecting this particular
case; employing a variety of most extraordinary words,
which, from their amazing length and sonorousness, I have
every reason to believe were of a theological nature.
But all that he said failed to convince me: partly, per
haps, because I could not comprehend a word that he ut
tered; but chiefly, that for the life of me I could not
understand why a woman should not have as much right to
enter a canoe as a man. (p. 182)
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861
I
Melville's criticism anticipates his distinction between !
head and heart, or between the language of abstraction and :
I :
poetry, which he made four years later in a letter of June 1^
|l851, to Hawthorne. "It is a frightful poetical creed that
j i
jthe cultivation of the brain eats out the heart," Melville
10
:said. "I stand for the heart." By comparison, the tran
scendentalists employed the language of the head as well as
of the heart in their writings about the transcendental re
ligion. Hence, the criticism of Mehevi's words contains the
semantic basis of Melville's later attack on Emerson's "de- .
11
feet in the region of the heart."
Melville represents the absolutes of good and evil, na
ture and taboo, which Tommo finds among the Typees in the
characters of the narrator's two closest native companions—
Fayaway and Kory-Kory. The girl is a youthful romantic con
ception of beauty in nature. Decorated with flowers and
partly clad in a tunic of white tappa— the color which Mel- ;
ville consistently uses in the novels through Mobv-Dick to
suggest varied qualities of nature— she accompanies Tommo
everywhere in the valley, except in areas which are taboo to
12
women. Kory-Kory, on the other hand, is Tommo's zealous
^^Letters, p. 129. For my analysis of this letter see
pp. 61-62.
11
Log, II, 648-649. See also my discussion, pp. 63-64.
12
See below, pp. 191-192.
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871
i
puide and interpreter of Typee customs. In contrast to
i '
Fayaway's feminine charm, Kory-Kory is, "alasj a hideous
object to look upon" (p. 116). Tommo's attraction to the
^irl is balanced by his intuitive resistance to his servant,;
jwhom he regards as a captor. Among the other natives,
Mehevi is Melville's conception of the noble savage, por
trayed after the manner of James Fenimore Cooper's Indian
bhiefs. "A superb looking warrior" with imposing aspect,
Mehevi "might certainly have been regarded as one of
Nature's noblemen, and the lines drawn upon his face may
possibly have denoted his exalted rank" (pp. 109-110). De
spite his rare, customary cannibalism, the chief governs the
Typees with a kindly restraint that anticipates Thoreau's
famous aphorism in "Civil Disobedience"; "that government
13
is best which governs least." Mehevi, however, is rela
tively remote from Tommo and takes little part in the action
of the story.
Melville's sense of the polarity in human nature sug
gested by the contrast between Fayaway and Kory-Kory re
sults in two seemingly disconnected portraits of the artist,
both of whom, like Tommo, are protected by the taboo. The
first to appear in the narrative is Marnoo, a roving Poly
nesian Apollo with free access to all tribes. His natural
eloquence produces an electric effect on the natives, who
look forward to his stories of the encroachments of civili-
^^In The Writings of Thoreau, X, 131.
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88|
zation on the primitive society. Melville describes Marnoo ;
as both a seer and a sayer in this passage:
The grace of the attitudes into which he threw his flex
ible figure, the striking gestures of his naked arms, and
above all, the fire which shot from his brilliant eyes,
imparted an effect to the continually changing accents of ;
I his voice, of which the most accomplished orator might
I have been proud. At one moment reclining sideways upon
1 the mat, and leaning calmly upon his bended arm, he re-
I lated circumstantially the aggressions of the French—
their hostile visits to the surrounding bays, enumerating
I each one in succession. . . . he exhorted the Typees to
I resist these encroachments; reminding them, with a fierce
glance of exultation, that as yet the terror of their
name had preserved them from attack. . . . (pp. 189-190)
The character of Marnoo has Melville's gusto and spirit of
protest. Furthermore, Marnoo's eloquence is aimed at ex
pressing the absolute conditions of visible reality. It is
he who convinces Tommo that the Typees are planning to eat
him.
In contrast to the eloquent, primitive social critic is
Karky, the tattooer, who engrafts cryptic designs of reli
gious significance on the skins of natives. He works within
the tradition of "the old masters of the Typee school" on
"human canvas" (p. 294). Melville's own art develops as a
combination of these separate tendencies— Marnoo represents
the independent mind of the artist in protest against the
conforming society; Karky stands for the craftsman who
strives to express the relation between the world of the
senses and spirit in terms of symbols. Together these char-;
acters suggest Emerson's principle in "The American Scholar"
that the source of art is in "unhandselled savage nature"
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89
rather than in the refinements of civilization (Works, I,
99-100).
Tommo'5 escape from the Typees, aided by Marnoo,
amounts to a rejection of the primitive code, which would
have required Tommo to compromise his personal integrity by
fallowing Karky to tattoo him. "I was fairly driven to de
spair, " Tommo says; "nothing but the utter ruin of my 'face
divine,' as the poets call it, would, I perceived, satisfy
the inexorable Mehevi and his chiefs, or rather, that in
fernal Karky, for he was at the bottom of it all" (p. 297).
The whole system of tattooing, Tommo concludes, was "con
nected with their religion; and it was evident, therefore,
that they were resolved to make a convert of me" (p. 297).
Actually, the convention of tattooing among the Marquesans
14
did not have religious significance. Melville's exaggera
tion of fact suggests his aim of portraying primitive con
ventions as a complex social pattern that tends to inhibit
or pervert instinct, much as the more sophisticated patterns
that govern civilized behavior. Tommo's break with primi
tive tradition becomes complete when the youth wounds the
pursuing warrior Mow-Wow with a boat hook while making his
getaway in a whale-boat. In this manner, Tommo becomes an
outcast wanderer, taking on the esthetic role of Marnoo in
the sequel Omoo.
^^Charles R. Anderson, p. 149.
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j 9Ô|
I I
! As Melville explains in the preface to his second ;
novel, the title "is borrowed from the dialect of the Mar-
j ;
guesas Islands, where, among other uses, the word signifies !
a rover, or rather, like some of the natives known among
i
15
their countrymen as 'Taboo kanakes.'" Melville gives two
(Objectives for his sequel— to convey some idea of life
aboard a whaler through an account of his own adventures and
"to give a familiar account of the present condition of the
converted Polynesians, as affected by their promiscuous in
tercourse with foreigners, and the teachings of the mission
aries, combined" (pp. v-vi). Although Melville asserts that
"he has merely described what he has seen," these two aims
are thematically related as complementary portraits of
degradation.
Melville's underlying subject in Omoo is the relation
of man to the conventions of civilization, which he portrays
as debasing the individual, whether civilized or savage.
Like the transcendentalists, Melville attacks customs and
traditions that imprison body and spirit in conforming pat
terns of behavior. As a sequel, however, Omoo is less es-
thetically satisfying than Typee, largely because the narra
tor's wanderings have no clear-cut direction, such as
Tommo's desire to return to primitive nature and later to
escape. On the other hand, despite the lack of suspense in
15
(Boston: L. C. Page, 1951), p. vii. All page refer
ences to Omoo are from this edition.
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91
the episodic narrative, Melville demonstrates a growing
skill in the use of symbols and in characterization to con
vey his social criticism.
He develops his theme of the evils of civilized conven
tions in terms of two contrasting symbols that set off the
i
main divisions of the narrative. The first of these is the
whaler Julia, which Melville describes as representing the
free spirit exploited by a profit-seeking society:
She was a small barque of a beautiful model, something
more than two hundred tons, Yankee-built, and very old.
Fitted for a privateer out of a New England port during
the war of 1812, she had been captured at sea by a
British cruiser, and, after seeing all sorts of service,
was at last employed as a government packet in the Aus
tralian seas. Being condemned, however, about two years
previous, she was purchased at auction by a house in
Sydney, who, after some slight repairs, despatched her on |
her present voyage. (p. 6)
The Julia, more than the Dolly, is a forerunner of the
"world ships" that epitomize civilization in such later
novels as White-Jacket and Mobv-Dick. Stocked with con
demned foods purchased at auction, the Julia is unfit for
sailing. Despite her "free, roving commission," the ship is
a floating prison for the unhappy crew— "wild, haggard-
looking fellows in Scotch caps and faded blue frocks; some
of them with cheeks of mottled bronze, to which sickness
soon changes the rich berry brown of a seaman's complexion
in the tropics" (p. 1). With their sickly, ineffective cap
tain, nicknamed "Paper Jack," the men of the Julia form an
ironic contrast to the noble cannibal chief Mehevi and the
carefree, healthy Typees who sheltered Tommo.________________
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92;
I
Melville's second symbol of civilization is the half-
completed English jail, or Calabooza Beretanee, on Tahiti,
jwhere the narrator and rebellious sailors are confined after
refusing to submit to inhuman conditions aboard the Julia.
I '
Melville's description of the unfinished jail standing in a ;
i
beautiful Polynesian setting ironically suggests the impact
of civilization on the island, in which the natives find
themselves increasingly regimented by the forms of organized
religion and civilized customs introduced by the mission
aries. The building "was a mere shell, recently built and
still unfinished. It was open all around and tufts of grass
were growing here and there under the very roof" (p. 131).
Its only furniture, characteristically, "was the 'stocks,'
a clumsy machine for keeping people in one place. ..."
(p. 131).
By comparison, in the climactic episode of the novel,
Melville depicts the invisible prison of civilized conven
tions that the narrator finds on his visit to the pathetic
court of the queen of Tahiti. The furnishings suggest the
clash of cultures:
The whole scene was a strange one; but what most ex
cited our surprise, was the incongruous assemblage of the
most costly objects from all quarters of the globe.
Cheek by jowl, they lay beside the rudest native articles,
without the slightest attempt at order. Superb writing-
desks of rosewood, inlaid with silver and mother-of-
pearl; decanters and goblets of cut glass; embossed vol
umes of plates; gilded candelabras; sets of globes and
mathematical instruments . . . were strewn about among
greasy calabashes half filled with poee, rolls of old
tappa and matting, paddles and fish-spears, and the ordi
nary furniture of a Tahitian dwelling. (pp. 356-357)_____
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93
Queen Pomaree appears barefooted and wearing a "loose
gown of blue silk, with two rich shawls. . . . She was abouti
the ordinary size, rather matronly; her features not very
handsome; her mouth, voluptuous; but there was a careworn
expression in her face, probably attributable to her late
I
misfortunes. From her appearance, one would judge her about
forty; but she is not so old" (pp. 357-358). Unlike the
kindly Typees and hospitable Tahitians, the troubled queen
is surprised and offended at the intrusion of uninvited
guests to her court and waves them away. "Summary as the
dismissal was," the narrator comments, with a pointed refer
ence to meaningless formality, "court etiquette, no doubt,
required our compliance. We withdrew, making a profound in-|
clination as we disappeared behind the tappa arras" (p. 358).
Melville's satiric portrait of the half-civilized queen
is one of a series of memorable vignettes in the novel sug
gesting the caricatures of Smollett and Dickens. They also i
suggest Emerson's reference in "The American Scholar" to the
divided or degenerate state of the conformist, who lives out
of harmony with nature and consequently with himself (Works,
I, 85). "The tradesman," Emerson observes, "scarcely ever
gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the rou
tine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The
priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute-book; the me
chanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship" (Works, I,
83-84). Melville portrays the missionaries in particular as
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94
forms, whom the natives shun, rather than as men and women:
Of a fine evening in Tahiti— hut they are all fine
evenings there— you may see a bevy of silk bonnets and
parasols passing along the Broom road; perhaps a band of
1 pale, little white urchins— sickly exotics— and, oftener
still, sedate, elderly gentlemen with canes; at whose ap
pearance the natives, here and there, slink into their
I huts. (p. 189)
Among other characterizations is the half-civilized native
jailor of the Calabooza Beretanee, good-natured and indolent
"Capin Bob," or Captain Bob, "a corpulent giant, over six
feet in height, and literally as big round as a hogshead"
(p. 133). In contrast to the grossness of the jailor, his
employer, the English consul Mr. Wilson, "turned out to be
an exceedingly minute 'cove,' with a viciously pugged nose, i
and a decidedly thin pair of legs" (p. 84).
If civilized men are portrayed as being out of harmony
with nature, the natives on the whole are hypocritical in
submitting to western customs, but retaining their supersti
tions. On Sunday, which the natives designate "Taboo Day," :
religious police round up a congregation with whips. "On
week days," Melville says, "they are quite as busy as on
Sundays; to the great terror of the inhabitants, going all
over the island, and spying out the wickedness thereof"
(pp. 203-204). Melville, however, tempers the sharpness of
his criticism with humor. "Capin Bob," for example, angered
at the prying of the missionaries' agents hurls breadfruit
at them as they emerge from his house, while the sailors in
the nearby Calabooza applaud (p. 204).
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95j
As in Typee, Melville extends the transcendentalist
criticism of conventions to include primitive customs. At
Hannamanoo, where the Julia stops to look for seamen who had
jumped ship, the narrator encounters a tattooed renegade
I
white man, Lem Hardy, who had elected to live under the sav
age code. "Some of us," the narrator comments, "gazed upon :
jthis man with a feeling akin to horror, no ways abated when
informed that he had voluntarily submitted to this embel
lishment on his countenance. What an impress! Far worse
than Cain's" (p. 28). Repelled by Hardy's submission to
primitive tradition, the narrator observes:
And for the most part, it is just this sort of man—
so many of whom are found among sailors— uncared for by
a single soul, without ties, reckless, and impatient of
the restraints of civilization, who are occasionally
found quite at home upon the savage islands of the
Pacific. And, glancing at their hard lot in their own
country, what marvel at their choice? (p. 29)
Melville's narrator is more than an observer and
satiric critic in Omoo. Like Tommo, who actively resists
the taboo in Typee, the narrator is also a reformer. Aboard;
the Julia, he takes a leading role in the mutiny. Using a
pen made from "a distended albatross's wing," a Coleridgian
symbol for nature, he writes down the grievances of the crew
in a round robin letter to the English consul (p. 82).
Ironically, he inscribes the letter on blank pages torn from
a volume entitled "A History of the most Atrocious and
Bloody Piracies" (p. 82). The narrator's co-conspirator in
this humanitarian rebellion is the humorous Dr. Long Ghost, ;
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96:
I
"a tower of bones, with a complexion absolutely colourless, I
fair hair, and a light, unscrupulous grey eye, twinkling
occasionally with the very devil of mischief" (pp. 10-11).
In contrast to Tommo's moody companion in Typee, Long Ghost
is a worldly-wise nonconformist, whose name suggests the
enduring spirit of self-reliance.
The adventures of the two, who escape together from the
Calabooza, include an extended sightseeing tour of Tahiti
and adjoining islands, a visit to a plantation, participa
tion in a wild animal hunt, and a variety of beachcombing
escapades among friendly natives. Melville appears to have
no plan other than to give a kaleidoscopic view of Poly
nesian life. Shortly after their disillusioning visit to
the court of Queen Pomaree, the narrator returns to sea
aboard the whaler Leviathan, leaving behind Long Ghost, who
intends to continue his adventures ashore. The novel con
cludes as the narrator finds himself in harmony with the i
polarity or undulations of nature: "Once more the sailor's i
cradle rocked under me, and I found myself rolling in my
gait. By noon, the island had gone down in the horizon; and
all before us was the wide Pacific" (p. 356).
In these first two novels, Melville enlarges on fact to
suggest in diverting, spontaneous fiction the course of his
future development as an artist. In one sense, his progres
sion is in the classical tradition of such great epic poets
as Virgil, Spenser, and Milton, who began their careers with
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97
pastoral poetry. Typee and Omoo. however, also indicate
Melville's agreement with the transcendental ethic that |
identifies instinct or "wild virtue" with primal nature as d
source of wholeness in the individual life. They also re
peal the extent of his revolt against civilized conventions
dnd primitive customs, including the mummery of abstract
language, which protect the pattern at the expense of the
individual. Finally, they show his early inclination to use
symbols to suggest his social criticism. The polarities of :
good and evil, nature and society, instinct and custom,
which Melville explores in Tvpee and Omoo, continue in his
next work. Mardi, with a notable difference. In his third
novel, Melville attempts to reconcile these opposites in the
concrete language of art. The Marnoo strain of social
criticism and the enigmatic craft of Karky, introduced sep
arately in Tvpee and developed in Omoo, achieve a partial
synthesis in Mardi. in which Melville for the first time
portrays nature as a totality with symbols that suggest the
world of the mind.
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CHAPTER V
EARLY SYNTHESIS IN MARDI :
Melville probably began his third novel. Mardi, early
i
in 1847 before Omoo was published; his work, however, was
interrupted by his marriage on August 4 to Elizabeth Hope
Shaw, the daughter of Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massa
chusetts.^ Following the couple's wedding trip to northern
New England and Canada, Melville devoted his full energies
to the book, in an attempt to support his wife with his lit-
2
erary earnings. His letters written in the fall and winter
to John Murray, his London publisher, indicate at first a
desire to write a sequel to Omoo and later a growing reli
ance on transcendental esthetic principles which help to ac
count for the expansiveness and also the obvious lack of co-|
hesiveness that characterize Mardi.
In his letter to Murray dated October 29, 1847, Mel
ville promised merely "another book of South Sea Adventure,"
^Leyda observes that Melville probably worked on Chap
ter II as early as January, 1847. See The Melville Log, I,
232.
2
Elizabeth Melville wrote in a memoir of her husband:
"Winters of '47 and '48 he worked very hard at his books—
sat in a room without fire— wrapped up— wrote Mardi ..."
Loo, I, 268.
98
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99j
which would be "continued from, though wholly independent ofj,
Omoo" (Letters, p. 56). He explained that the work would I
"enter into scenes altogether new" and "possess more inter- ;
est than the former, which treated of subjects comparatively
jtrite" (p. 66) . |
During the following months, however, Melville devel
oped his novel into a comprehensive allegory of the human
spirit that suggests a Transcendentalist Pilgrim's Progress.
Writing to Murray on January 1, 1848, Melville still re
ferred to his novel as "authentic," or close to the factual
basis that he had claimed for his earlier works. On the
other hand, he had "a rather bold aim" for "a continuous
narrative" that "clothes the whole subject in new attrac
tions and combines in one cluster all that is romantic,
whimsical and poetic in Polynesia" (Letters, p. 68). Mel
ville 's wording suggests that the central action in Mardi of
a journey around a cluster of islands was well-advanced,
though he probably had not yet written the chapters satiriz
ing political institutions that appear near the end of the
book.^
He disclosed a substantial change in his purpose for
Mardi in a letter to Murray dated March 25. "To be blunt,"
3
Merrell R. Davis has shown that the chapters describ- ;
ing Franko (France), Porpheero (Europe), Dominera (England),
and Vivenza (the United States) refer to historical events
that occurred between April and October, 1848. See Mel
ville's Mardi: A Chartless Voyage, Yale Studies in English, ■
Vol. 119 (New Haven: Yale, 1952). p p . 81-82._________________ j
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----------------------------------: --------------------------------- loQi
Melville said,
the work I shall next publish will be in downright ear
nest a "Romance of Polynesian Adventure"— But why this? |
I The truth is. Sir, that the reiterated imputation of be
ing a romancer in disguise has at last pricked me into a
I resolution to show those who may take any interest in the
I matter, that a real romance of mine is no Typee or Omoo,
and is made of different stuff altogether. (p. 70) |
Although Melville described this reason as his "main induce
ment" for changing his plan, he continued with other reasons
that illustrate his rebellion against the restraints of form
and his reliance on poetic intuition, both of which charac
terize the work of transcendental writers :
proceeding in my narrative of facts I began to feel an '
incurable distaste for the same; and a longing to plume
my pinions for a flight. . . . So suddenly standing
[abandoning?] the thing altogether, I went to work heart
and soul at a romance which is now in fair progress,
since I had worked at it under an earnest ardor. . . .
My romance I assure you is no dish water nor its model
borrowed from the Circulating Library. . . . It opens
like a true narrative— like Omoo for example, on ship
board— and the romance and poetry of the thing thence
grow continually, till it becomes a story wild enough I
assure you and with a meaning too.
Melville's rejection of trite formula fiction of the
Circulating Library suggests the transcendentalist criticism
of what Thoreau later satirized in Walden as "little read
ing " :
4
Pages 70-71. Melville appears to follow a similar
pattern in Moby-Dick (1851), in which the realism of the
opening chapters contrasts with the "romance and poetry" of
the central narrative. By comparison, Hawthorne in "The
Custom House" introduction to The Scarlet Letter (1850) pre-j
sents not only a realistic account of his routines as a |
government worker but also "evidence" of the truth of his
story. ___ ;
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îûî
I
There is a work in several volumes in our Circulating i
Library entitled Little Reading, which I thought referred !
to a town of that name which I had not been to. There
are those who, like cormorants and ostriches can digest
all sorts of this. . . . If others are the machines to
I provide this provender, they are the machines to read it.
I (Writing's of Thoreau, II, 165)
On the other hand, Melville's conception of a poetic idea
that grows continually and soars like a bird in flight cor
responds to Emerson's idea expressed in "The Poet" that a
poem contains "a thought so passionate and alive that like
the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of
its own, and adorns nature with a new thing" (Works, III, 9-
10) .
Allowing his idea to expand freely, Melville produced
in Mardi the first American novel to reflect Emerson's es
thetic ideal that "a work of art is an abstract or epitome
of the world," which is "the result or expression of nature,
in miniature" (Works, I, 23). Four years later, Melville
alluded to the broad allegorical design for Mardi in his
semi-autobiographical novel Pierre. Observing that "Pierre
immaturely attempts a mature book," Melville described an
effort like his own to encircle "the whole range of all that
can be known or drearned":
perceiving, by presentiment, that the most grand produc
tions of the best human intellects ever are built round
a circle, as atolls (i.e., the primitive coral islets
which, raising themselves in the depths of profoundest
seas, rise funnel-like to the surface, and present there
a hoop of white rock, which though on the outside every
where lashed by the ocean, yet excludes all tempests from ;
the quiet lagoon within), digestively including the whole :
range of all that can be known or dreamed; Pierre was I
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: ï & a
resolved to give the world a book which the world would |
hail with surprise and delight. (Pierre, p. 333) i
Melville's reference to the circle that represents wholeness
jin nature and art resembles Emerson's conception of the self
l a s existing in the center of a circle. "The eye is the
I '
first circle," Emerson said in his essay "Circles"; "the
horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature
this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the
highest emblem in the cipher of the world" (Works, II, 301).
As Melville suggests in Pierre, the underlying unit of ;
structure in Mardi is a transcendental circle, physically
represented by the coral reef surrounding the Mardian Isles.,
Beyond this boundary is the horizon of the sea that undu
lates for Taji, Melville's narrator, like the coils of a
huge serpent :
How undulated the horizon; like a vast serpent with
ten thousand folds coiled all round the globe; yet so
nigh, apparently, that it seemed as if one's hand might
touch it.5
Above this circle of error, the Platonic sun, "a jocund
disk," is a "fellow-voyager" who travels westward towards
truth in the cycle of the day (p. 32). Within the coral
reef, the various islands represent aspects of mortal mind.
In the chapter "Sailing On" near the end of this long, epi
sodic novel, Melville explains the significance of the nar
rator 's travels around Mardi :
^(New York: L. C. Page, 1923), p. 32. All page refer
ences to Mardi are from this edition.
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103]
But this new world here sought , . . is the world of |
the mind; wherein the wanderer may gaze round, with more |
of wonder than Balboa's band roving through the golden |
i Aztec glades. (p. 488) ;
I
The world of Mardi, then, has two dimensions that correspond
I :
to the basic Emersonian polarity of nature and spirit, the
I "other me" and the "me," both of which are part of the tran
scendental "one." Melville's narrator journeys from the
outer circle of nature to the inner circle of the mind in
what may be described as a two-part transcendental quest for
absolute beauty. The theme is suggested in this passage
from Emerson's "Circles":
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around
every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end
to nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is
always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every
deep a lower deep opens. (Works. II, 301)
As the central ordering pattern, however, a circle has
neither climax nor conclusion; it symbolizes endless pur
suit, rather than attainment, as Emerson implies in his
characterization of the circle as "the Unattainable, the
flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never
meet, at once the inspirer and the condemner of every suc
cess" (p. 301). For this reason, the action of Mardi is in
the form of a quest, in which narrative episodes alternate
with meditative passages like undulating waves; the novel
ends, although the pursuit does not, with the narrator con
tinuing his search for his ideal beyond the coral reef "over;
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1041
6 '
an endless sea." |
The two dimensions of Melville's narrative— outside and!
i
inside the reef— correspond to the traditional distinction
between the comic and tragic half-cycles in the revolution
bf the wheel of fortune. In the opening chapters, Melville :
establishes a mood of romantic comedy and adventure, which
evolves from incidents that mildly satirize the transcen
dental doctrine of self-reliance. Melville’s narrator ex
presses his dissatisfaction with the monotony of his deck
hand existence aboard the Arcturion, a ship that sails on a
predictable course like the fixed star for which it is
named. Although the skipper "was a trump," who "stood upon
no quarter-deck dignity," he was too practical: "Could he
talk sentiment or philosophy? Not a bit. His library was
eight inches by four: Bowditch and Hamilton Moor.The
youth casts his eyes "downward to the brown planks of the
dull, plodding ship, silent from stem to stern" and then
looks yearningly to the horizon. In contrast to the
^Mardi, p. 580. The quest in Mobv-Dick also follows a
circular pattern. "Round the world!" Ishmael meditates.
"There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings; but
whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct?" (Mobv-
Dick, p. 236). Unlike Taji's endless pursuit of an ideal,
Ahab's search for the white whale culminates in a climactic
death struggle.
7
Page 3. Bowditch and Moore are authors of navigating
books. Melville refers to Bowditch in Mobv-Dick in again
contrasting the realities of navigation with Platonic ideal-!
ism: "Beware," Ishmael says, "of enlisting in your vigilant!
fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye . . . who
offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his
head" (Mobv-Dick. p. 156). ________________________________
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105|
drabness of his surroundings, he sees a distant spectacle of
I
sunlight and clouds, which blends with his soaring imagina- :
tion:
The entire western horizon high piled with gold and crim- :
I son clouds; airy arches, domes> and minarets; as if the
I yellow, Moorish sun were setting behind some vast Alham-
! bra. Vistas seemed leading to worlds beyond. To and
fro, and all over the towers of this Ninevah in the sky,
flew troops of birds. Watching them long, one crossed by
sight, flew through a low arch, and was lost to view. My
spirit must have sailed in with it; for directly, as in a
trance, came upon me the cadence of mild billows laving a
beach of shells, the waving of boughs, and the voices of
maidens, and the lulled beatings of my own dissolved ;
heart, all blended together. (pp. 6-7)
This harmony which the narrator feels with nature echoes
Emerson's conception that "in the distant line of the hori- ■
zon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature"
and that "nature always wears the colors of the spirit"
(Nature, Works, I, 10-11) .
Just as John Bunyan's Christian turns his back on
worldly concerns to search for the Celestial City, Melville's
idealistic traveler elects to jump ship in mid-ocean to
search for an esthetic principle. The impracticality of
this act, however, is a satire on the transcendental faith
in the underlying divinity of nature. "All things form but
one whole," the young sailor observes with unconscious
irony, "the universe a Judea, and God Jehovah its head.
Then no more let us start with affright. In a theocracy,
what is to fear?" (p. 11).
Although Christian carries a Calvinistic burden of mor
tal woes and follows Scriptural instructions on his journey.
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106:
Melville's narrator eventually assumes the role of Taji, a ;
I :
demigod, in keeping with the transcendentalist conception
[that man is in part divine. The name Taji suggests the
Arabic word taj, which denotes a headdress of distinction.
8
jsuch as a diadem or crown. In addition, Taji describes
himself as having the appearance of a Persian emir, or inde-
9
pendent prince and descendant of Mohammed. "I had very
strikingly improved my costume," he observes, "making it
free, flowing, and eastern. I looked like an Emir" (p. 112).
The symbolism of Taji's name and costume suggests Melville's
familiarity with Carlyle's clothes philosophy in Sartor
Resartus (Boston edition, 1836), in which external nature is
the garment of the spirit. Furthermore, Melville's interest;
in oriental culture corresponds to that of the transcenden-
talists, who looked to the East for evidence outside of the
Christian tradition to confirm their faith in instinct and
the spiritual unity of the universe. Emerson's poem,
"Saadi," celebrating the great Persian poet, suggests the
independence of Melville's narrator in this passage:
Never, son of eastern morning.
Follow falsehood, follow scorning.
Denounce who will, who will deny.
And pile the hills to scale the sky;
Q
See Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein's Melville's
Orienda (New Haven: Yale, 1961), p. 193. See also the defi
nition of taj in Funk and Wacrnall ' s Standard College Dic-
tionarv (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1963),
p. 1365.
9
The definition of emir is from the Funk and Waqnall's ;
Standard College Dictionary, p. 432._______________ ;
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107|
Let theist, atheist, pantheist, I
Define and wrangle how they list, I
Fierce conserver, fierce destroyer,— ;
But thou, joy-giver and enjoyer.
Unknowing war, unknowing crime.
Gentle Saadi, mind thy rhyme;
I Heed not what the brawlers say,
i Heed thou only Saadi's lay.
(Works, IX, 132-133)
Similarly, Taji relies solely on intuition. "Oh, reader,
list!" he says. "I've chartless voyaged. With compass and
lead, we had not found these Mardian Isles. Those who
boldly launch, cast off all cables ; and turning from the
common breeze that's fair for all, with their own breath,
fill their own sails.While Taji follows instinct, the
supposedly secure Arcturion, sailing with compass and
charts, is lost at sea with all hands (pp. 21-22).
Identifying himself also as a sun god, Taji measures
life against the standards of Plato and Emerson, both of
whom employ the sun as a metaphor of ultimate reality.
With his meditative companion Jarl, a Skyeman who impul
sively decides to follow him anywhere, Taji sails in a
flimsy open boat in the direction of the setting sun, which
leads ultimately to the Mardian Isles, or the world of the
Page 487. In Mobv-Dick, Ahab destroys his quadrant
and similarly relies on "dead-reckoning" to guide him to the
white whale (p. 494).
11
See Plato's Republic, pp. 219-220; 230-235, and Emer
son's Nature (Works, I, 8-9). In "Saadi," Emerson writes,
"Suns rise and set in Saadi's speech" (IX, 134). See also
my discussion on p. 34. ;
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I 108
I 2.2
mind. Taji's quest, therefore, is essentially a voyage of
self-discovery, which applies Emerson's principle in "The
l^erican Scholar" that "in fine, the ancient precept, 'Know ^
jthyself, ' and the modern precept, 'Study nature, ' become at
last one maxim" (Works, I, 87).
Along the way, Taji perceives the correspondence of na
ture and the self as he looks out upon the soul-reflecting
sea :
Now, as the face of a mirror is a blank, only borrow
ing character from what it reflects; so in a calm in the
Tropics, a colorless sky overhead, the ocean upon its
surface, hardly presents a sign of existence. The deep
blue is gone; and the glassy element lies tranced; almost ;
viewless in the air.
But that morning, the two gray firmaments of sky and
water seemed collapsed into a vague ellipsis. And alike,
the Chamois [his small boat] seemed drifting in the atmos
phere as in the sea. Everything was fused into the calm:
sky, air, water, and all. Not a fish was to be seen.
The silence was that of a vacuum. No vitality lurked in
the air. And this inert blending and brooding of all
things seemed gray chaos in conception. (Mardi, p. 41)
Studying the ellipsis, the transcendental sailor also per
ceives the esthetic unity of nature :
This sight we beheld. Had old Wouvermans, who once
painted a bull bait, been along with us, a rare chance,
that, for his pencil. And Gudin or Isabey might have
thrown the blue rolling sea into the picture. Lastly,
one of Claude's setting summer suns would have glorified
the whole. Oh, believe me, God's own creatures fighting,
fin for fin, a thousand miles from land, and with the
12
Dorothee Finkelstein observes that the Arabic word
ard denotes "country, earth, and world." Mardi, she sug
gests, is a coined word meaning simply "my world" (Mel-
ville's Orienda, pp. 205-206).
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109
round horizon for an arena, is no ignoble subject for a
masterpiece.13
Two contrasting episodes on the high seas emphasize the
esthetic values of Taji's quest. In each encounter, Mel
ville employs details that reflect his reading of Coleridge's
! !
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," in which the natural
i
blends with the supernatural in nature. The voyagers' ini
tial meeting is with an outcast Polynesian Adam and Eve,
adrift alone on the brigantine Parki. The vessel first ap
pears on the horizon, its spars outlined against the setting
sun :
as the expanded sun touched the horizon's rim, a ship's
uppermost spars were observed, traced like a spider's
web against its crimson disk. It looked like a far-off
craft on fire. (p. 47)
Similarly, Coleridge describes the appearance of the spectre!
bark silhouetted against the sun with its sails like "rest- ’
less gossameres":
The western wave was all a-flame.
The day was well nigh donei
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun;
When that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun.
And straight the Sun was flecked with bars,
(Heaven's Mother send us grace!)
13
Page 37. Philip Wouverman (1519-1668) was a Dutch
painter of spirited battle and hunting scenes; Theodore
Gudin (1802-1880) and Eugene Isabey (1804-1886) were French i
marine painters; and Claude Lorraine (1600-1682) was a
French landscape painter, noted for his effects of golden
sunlight. In Clarence L. Barnhart (ed.). New Centurv Cvclo-I
pedia of Names (New York; Appleton, Century, Crofts, 1954). ■
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11
As if through a dungeon-grate he peered
With broad and burning face.
Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun
I Like restless gossameres?^^
I
jln contrast to the ghostly figures on Coleridge's ship, Taji
land Jarl discover aboard the Parki two flesh and blood cha-
j I
racters representing human imperfection. One-armed Samoa
and his acquisitive wife Annatoo, whose petty bickerings end
when she is washed overboard and lost in a storm, portray
the incongruities of married life. Melville observes:
Very often this husband and wife were no Darby and Joan.
Their married life was one long campaign, whereof the
truces were only by night. They billed and cooed on
their arms, rising fresh in the morning to battle, and
often Samoa got more than a henpecking. To be short,
Annatoo was a Tartar . . . and Samoa— Heaven help him—
her husband.15
Although some critics, including Merrell R. Davis, discount
the Parki episode as an inset story with no direct bearing
on the central narrative, the comic realism of the quarrel- |
ing primitive couple provides an antithesis to the second
episode, in which Taji has an idyllic love affair with the
beautiful Yillah. Her name also has an Arabic source, sug
gesting the Mohammedan word for God, Allah, particularly the
invocation of faith "La ilaha illa-llah" (Finkelstein,
14
The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, VII,
234-235.
15
Mardi, p. 65. Sir Lawrence Harvey describes Darby
and Joan as "a jocose appellation for an attached husband
and wife." In The Oxford Companion to English Literature
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), p. 208.
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I 111
I p . 204) . Taji worships her in terms that suggest a prayer
ful declaration of faith in beauty: "Oh, Yillah, Yillah]
All the woods repeat the sound, the wild, wild woods of my
jwild soul. Yillah] Yillah] cry the small strange voices
I
in me, and evermore, and far and deep, they echo on" (Mardi.
' p . 171) .
The initial appearance of Yillah's canoe, like that of
I
the brigantine Parki, has its parallel in the arrival of the
spectre bark in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In pas
sages that suggest the post-Kantian conception of spiritual ;
nature, Coleridge prepares for the coming of the ghost ship
by describing "death-fires," or phosphorescent lights at
sea :
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch's oils.
Burnt green, and blue and white.
(Coleridge, VII, 233)
Relying in part on details obtained from travel literature,
Melville also describes these phenomena to establish a
supernatural atmosphere for the arrival of Yillah: ;
Starting, we beheld the ocean of a pallid white color,
corruscating all over with tiny golden sparkles. But
the pervading hue of the water cast a cadaverous gleam
upon the boat, so that we looked to each other like
ghosts. For many rods astern our wake was revealed in a
line of rushing illuminated foam; while here and there
beneath the surface, the tracks of sharks were denoted
by vivid, greenish trails, crossing and recrossing each
other in every direction. (Mardi, p. 107)
Of this wonder, Taji comments : "Heretofore, I had beheld
several exhibitions of marine phosphorescence, both in the
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k-
ïï^
.tlantic and Pacific. But nothing in comparison with what
was seen that night" (p. 108).
Afterwards, Taji observes a sea bird with snow-white
plumage suggesting Coleridge's albatross. It lights on the i
I :
Isail as a good omen, but Samoa frightens it away in an ef
fort to catch it. Then Taji sees Yillah's canoe, like a
speck on the horizon:
Just tipping the furthest edge of the sky was a little
speck, dancing into view every time we rose upon the
swells. It looked like one of many birds; for half in
tercepting our view, fell showers of plumage : a flight
of milk-white noddies flying downward to the sea. . . .
But soon the birds are seen no more. Yet there remains
the speck; plainly a sail; but too small for a ship.^°
By comparison, Coleridge describes the appearance of the
ghost ship.
At first it seemed a little speck.
And then it seemed a mist;
It moved and moved, and took at last
A certain shape, I wist.
A speck, a mist, a shape, I wist!
And still it neared and neared;
As if it dodged a water sprite.
It plunged and tacked and veered.
(Coleridge, VII, 234)
Pages 111-112. The "milk-white noddies" of Mel
ville's description apparently refer to a variety of terns, :
either the "white-capped noddy" (Angus tenuirostris), "com
mon noddy" (Anous stolidus), both of which have whitish
crowns, or the "fairy tern" (Gybis alba), snow-white with
black eye, black bill, and feet. These birds average from
thirteen to sixteen inches in length and travel in flocks.
Melville's reference suggests Coleridge's description of the|
albatross (Diomedea), a larger bird than the tern. The "lay-
san albatross" (Diomedea immutabilis Rothschild) has a wing-|
spread of 6 feet 8 inches. See Ernst Mayr, Birds of the
Southwest Pacific (New York: Macmillan, 1945), pp. 4-6, 27. I
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113;
These parallels suggest the otherworldliness of Yillah,i
who has a dual function in the narrative, serving initially ;
as romantic heroine in the manner of Thomas Moore's Lalla
Rookh and later as symbol of the unattainable esthetic prin-;
! ;
Jciple. In the pivotal action of the novel, Taji rescues
i 2 * 7
Yillah by slaying her captor, the Polynesian priest Aleema.
i :
Symbolically, the action signifies the liberation of ideal
beauty from tradition; for Aleema and his seven sons— per
haps representing the seven deadly sins of man's mortal es- ;
tate— were taking the girl to be sacrificed when Taji inter
cepted her canoe. Yillah impresses Taji as being "lovely
enough to be really divine," but he rejects her fanciful
story that Aleema had released her soul from a flower
(pp. 122-123). Though Taji later finds out that Yillah was ;
the child of European parents who were massacred, she tells
him of her life of innocent isolation in the valley of
Ardair (p. 136) . Like Mardi, the term Ardair is composed in;
part of the Arabic ard for world. The addition of the Eng
lish air suggests the meaning, "world of the spirit" (Fin
kelstein, p. 205). The first stage of Taji's quest for
beauty ends with his bringing Yillah to a Polynesian Eden,
"an arbor in the sea," adjoining the Mardian Island of Odo—
"a little round world by itself; full of beauties as a gar
den" (p. 168). Her sudden disappearance, suggesting the
17
The source for the name Aleema may be the Arabic
alim, denoting a man of science or learning. See Finkel
stein, p^^2^j.___________ ;
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114
loss of innocence, since Yillah has no knowledge of her
earthly origin, motivates the second stage of Taji's search.;
In contrast to the romantic comedy and adventure of the;
initial voyage, which can be described as a circular journey
to good fortune, Taji's second voyage, within the coral reef:
I
Surrounding the Mardian Isles, develops a tragic theme. His
tour of Mardi to find Yillah leads him from intuition to a
course "fixed as fate" like that of the lost Arcturion
(p. 566). With the loss of Yillah, Taji changes instantly
from the character of a naively optimistic transcendentalist,
who has successfully relied on instinct and found perfect
harmony with nature, to the prototype of the tragic hero of :
Melville's later romances impelled by an unswerving will to :
be his own soul's emperor (p. 543). "For a time I raved,"
Taji says. "Then falling into outer repose, lived for a
space in moods and reveries with eyes that knew no closing,
one glance forever fixed" (p. 172). Three years later in
Mobv-Dick, Melville expanded this conception of willfulness
in the character of Ahab, whose eyes impress Ishmael with
the "infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate unsurren
der able willfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward
dedication of that glance" (Mobv-Dick, pp. 121-122). Like
Ahab, Melville's greatest character, Taji represents in this
later stage of the narrative the soul obsessed with its
ideal of perfection. As Taji's monomania grows, however, he
becomes increasingly taciturn; and his main companions in
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Il:
his travels around Mardi— Media, the king; Bahbalanja, the
philosopher; Yoomy, the poet; and Mohi, the historian— take
over the story as allegorical projections of his own mind.
Heading Taji's entourage. King Media is the demigod
I
jruler of Odo, who serves as mediator in the frequent debates
linvolving the other three companions of Taji. Considering
himself a divinity. Media reflects the self-assurance of the
earlier Taji. The other travelers correspond approximately
to post-Kantian conceptions of Reason, Imagination, and
X 8
Understanding. The talkative philosopher Babbalanja
represents intuition, the probing, higher function of intel
lect. Like Emerson, Babbalanja is an eclectic philosopher, :
whose wide reading enables him to comment on a broad range I
of philosophical subjects and to quote from authorities.
His favorite source, Bardianna, suggests Coleridge in teach
ing that "we were born with the whole Law in our hearts” and
19
that "reason is the first revelation." Furthermore, Bab- ;
balanja adopts an Emersonian position in identifying himself
with the source of his philosophy:
18
Merlin Bowen in The Long Encounter (Chicago: Univer
sity of Chicago, 1960), p. 141, observes: "Babbalanja is
given the lion's share in the faculty of Reason, the poet
Yoomy is assigned Imagination, Media receives the gift of
Prudence, Mohi the historian is endowed with that lower in
tellectual power which the Transcendentalists called Under
standing, and Taji finally is reduced to the attribute of
pure Will."
19
Merrell R. Davis notes the relationships between
Bardianna and Coleridge, p. 181.
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116!
for I do not so much quote Bardianna as Bardianna quoted |
me, though he flourished before me; and no vanity, but |
honesty to say so. The catalogue of true thoughts is j
but small; they are ubiquitous ; no man's property; and |
unspoken, or bruited, are the same. When we hear them, |
why seem they so natural, receiving our spontaneous ap
proval? why do we think we have heard them before? Be-
I cause they but reiterate ourselves; they were in us, be-
I fore we were born. The truest poets are but mouthpieces; I
I and some men are duplicates of each other; I see myself
I in Bardianna. (p. 346)
I
These lines parallel the initial paragraph in Emerson's
"Self-Reliance," with its aphoristic challenge:
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true
I for you in your private heart is true for all men,— that
I is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be i
I the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes
I the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us ;
by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the
voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we as
cribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at
naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but
what thev thought. . . . In every work of genius we
recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us
with a certain alienated majesty. (Works, II, 45-46)
Babbalanja's debates, however, are in part with his own
doubting spirit, Azzageddi, who represents the power of in- ;
tuition to perceive evil in nature.
This insight into human imperfection corresponds to
Emerson's conception in his essay "Compensation" of mortal- i
ity as a crack in nature. "There is a crack in everything
God has made," Emerson said in a reference to the polarity
of good and evil that characterizes the human condition
(Works, II, 107). Similarly, Babbalanja quotes Bardianna as
saying, "In this cracked sphere we live in, then, cracked I
skulls would seem the inevitable allotments of many" (Mardi,i
p. 385). Babbalanja adds that Bardianna "expressly asserts,!
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1171
that to those identical cracks, was he indebted for what j
little light he had in his brain" (p. 385). Not only do
these comments anticipate Melville's appraisal of Emerson in
March of 1849 that he is "cracked right across the brow," :
but they also help to explain the prominent scars on such
i
jcharacters in later novels as Jackson of Redburn, Ahab of
I
Mobv-Dick, and the Dansker of Billy Budd, each of whom epit-
I 20
omizes an important relation of man to nature.
If Babbalanja is a fanciful conception of mortal Man
Thinking-, Yoomy represents the poetic spirit, though he is a
less interesting character than either Marnoo or Karky in
Typee. The name Yoomy suggests Jami, the last great classi
cal poet of Persia, whom Emerson mentions in "Saadi":
For Saadi's nightly stars did burn
Brighter than Jami's day.
(Works, IX, 132)
Yoomy represents in particular the capacity of the mind to
perceive symbols. It is he who interprets the flower mes
sages from Queen Hautia, or vanity, who would lure Taji from
his course. In addition, the poet's songs are evidence of
Melville's early experiments in verse. Mohi, or Braid-
beard, embodies the lower function of logic in the transcen
dental conception of mind in his attempts to braid facts
20
Melville's half-joking criticism of Emerson is in the
letter to Evert Duyckinck dated March 3, 1849 (Letters.
p. 79). I have discussed the relation of Emerson's idea of
cracked nature to the characters of Jackson and Ahab on
pp. 145-147 and pp. 187-188. For the reference to the
Dansker, whose scar is like "a streak of dawn's light," see
p. 253. _______________________________________________________'
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118
into meaningful historical sequences. His name, as Dorothee
I
{Finkelstein suggests, is possibly based on that of the Turk-i
I
ish historian Muhi-jeddin Dschemali and also that of the
Islamic sheikh, Mohijeddin Al-Arabi.^^ Melville's Mohi
llooks for connections among events and sometimes perceives ;
[their tragic implications. "I will show thee, Taji, " Braid-
beard says, "that the maidens of Hautia are all Yillahs,
held captive, unknown to themselves; and that Hautia, their :
enchantress, is the most treacherous of queens" (Mardi,
p. 573). Although Jarl and Samoa, Taji's companions before
he met Yillah, are members of the party, they recede into
the background, like Taji himself, and eventually are slain
by arrows from the avenging sons of Aleema.
The significance of this second stage of Taji's
travels, which takes him on a tour of the Mardian Isles,
lies not only in the extended social criticism encompassing
the whole of western civilization, but also in the discrimi-i
:
nation which Melville makes between absolute truth and abso
lute beauty. Unlike Emerson, who equated the two concep
tions in theory if not in practice, Melville has Taji search
in vain for Yillah, but perceive instead the whole dark re
ality of man's estate. On the other hand, despite the
21
Dorothee Finkelstein notes that a complete transla
tion of the work of Muhi-jeddin Dschemali, which also re
fers to Mohijeddin Al Arabi, was in the possession of the
New York Society Library. It is entitled Histoire de l'Em
pire Ottoman, trans. Joseph von Hammer, 2 vols. (Paris,
1844). See Melville's Orienda, p. 218._______________________
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---------------------------------------------------------------------ITl
episodic nature of Taji's visits to more than twenty
islands, the underlying allegory corresponds to the Emer-
1
sonian conception of the growth of the mind from partial
awareness to wholeness of vision, which for Taji involves an
intuitive perception of human imperfection. Taji's circular;
I journey follows the cycle of the seasons, which in turn ap
proximates the life cycle. Or, as Babbalanja shrewdly ob
serves: "The world revolves upon an I; and we upon our
selves; for we are our own worlds" (p. 489). His assertion ;
recalls the opening words of Emerson's essay on "Circles":
"The eye is the first circle" (Works, II, 301).
Setting out in the spring, Taji and his entourage stop
first at Valapee, an isle that "seems divided by a strait" |
with "two long parallel elevations, rising some three arrow—
flights into the air" and extending its entire length
(p. 177). The island is Melville's symbol for the divided
state of childhood, before the mind begins to reconcile the ;
polarities of nature. "Little King Peepi," the infant mon
arch, has within him the assorted souls of his ancestors,
who govern him one by one: "Whence, though capable of ac
tion, Peepi, by reason of these revolving souls within him,
was one of the most unreliable of beings" (p. 179). By com
parison, Emerson in "The American Scholar" observes, "To the
young mind every thing is individual, stands by itself. By |
!
and by, it finds how to join two things and see in them one ;
nature . . . discovering roots running under ground whereby
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I20i
contrary and remote things cohere and flower out from one I
stem" (Works, I, 85-86). ;
I
The other islands in succession reflect variations of
I ,
this divided state of the mind as it is perpetuated in the
I . :
adult world by social conventions and traditions. For exam-'
1 :
pie, the Isle of Juam, which Taji next visits, symbolizes
the free spirit enervated by arbitrary restrictions handed
down from the past. King Donjalolo, a young man of twenty-
five, is forced by tradition to rule from the sheltered re
treat of Willamilla, where he lives in sloth and luxury and
bases his decisions on reports from observers. His com
plaint, "Oh Orol how hard is truth to be come at by proxy," :
is in harmony with Emerson's plea in Nature for "an original!
22
relation to the universe."
Taji's allegorical voyage makes up in broadness of
scope for its lack of verisimilitude. There are random
stops at Mondoldo, the island of epicurean living; Maramma,
the island of empty religious conventions; Diranda, the
island of war; and Hooloomooloo, the isolated isle of crip
ples, whose inhabitants consider Taji and his companions to
be monsters. Yillah, of course, is not to be found there.
Nor is she on any of the islands representing the nations of
Western Europe and the United States. Melville's criticism
of the Americans, portrayed as the boastful inhabitants of
Vivenza, and his attack on slavery are in harmony with
22
Mardi, p. 218. Emerson's statement. Works, I, 3.____
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12%{
activities of the transcendentalist reformers, who in the
late 1840's were turning from idealistic experiments in com-
jmunal living to participation in the abolitionist movement. !
|on a tour of the "extreme south of Vivenza," Taji and his
i
I
companions meet Nulli, a caricature of John C. Calhoun, who |
defends the institution of slavery in these words:
I "These serfs are happier than thine, though thine no col
lars wear; more happy as they are, then if free. Are
they not fed, clothed, and cared for? Thy serfs pine for
food: never yet did these; who have no thoughts, no
cares." (p. 466)
Babbalanja answers with a transcendentalist argument:
"Thoughts and cares are life, and liberty, and immor
tality i and are their souls, then, blown out as candles?"
"RanterI they are content," cried Nulli. "They shed
no tears." = :
"Frost never weeps," said Babbalanja; "and tears are !
frozen in those frigid eyes." (p. 467)
Babbalanja's desire on the voyage "to probe the cir
cle's center" in an effort "to evolve the inscrutable" ends
for him on the Isle of Serenia, whose peaceful inhabitants
practice a faith that resembles the transcendental religion '
with its freedom from tradition. Like other Mardians, the
Serenians worship Oro, whose name suggests both the Spanish ■
oro for gold and the transcendental One. Their love of Oro
and his prophet Alma, suggesting the relation of God to
Christ, is intuitive rather than rational. As one apostle
explains :
Though he [Alma] came from Oro, though he did miracles,
though through him is life— not for these things alone,
do we thus love him. We love him from an instinct in us, i
a fond, filial, reverential feeling. And this would yet
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stir in our souls, were death our end; and Alma incapable
of befriending us. We love him because we do. (p. 556)
This reliance on instinct rather than logic and ritual cor
responds to the religious attitudes of Emerson, Thoreau,
Parker, and others participating in the revolt against Uni
tar ianism during "the great Transcendentalist Controversy"
! 23
of the 1840's.
Even though Babbalanja and the other companions of Taji
accept the transcendentalist faith as the closest man can
come to the truth, Taji's dedication to absolute beauty
leads him onward alone on his tragic course. The last
island for him before he heads out to sea beyond the coral
reef is Flozella, ruled by Hautia, who entices him to enjoy
sensual pleasures in an exotic, watery cave, where the sun
does not shine. The circle's center for Taji, however, is
nowhere in Mardi. His fruitless esthetic quest leads him
finally outside the reef separating the mortal from the im
mortal still searching for his Angel, and pursued by the re
lentless sons of Aleema.
The irony of Melville's conclusion, that absolute
beauty is beyond mortal reach, offers an insight into Mel
ville's own quest for a faith that meets the test of art.
Although the narrative is in the tradition of such romantic
searches as the quest for Diana in Keats' Endymion. Melville
was an artist who would follow instinct and was too inde-
23
Hutchinson, p. 135. See also discussion, above.
p. 37.
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Ï23|
pendent to portray any convention, institution, or social |
group as the possessor of absolute beauty. Ultimately, the |
artist must search for it alone, like Taji, at the peril of I
being destroyed either by the primal powers of nature, which
appear to work against the individual in search of perfec
tion, or by the forces of tradition, represented in the
novel by the three poised arrows of Aleema's sons. The
artist's task, as Melville suggested years later in his poem
"Art," which he composed in 1891, is to reconcile "unlike
things," such as elemental nature and tradition or "instinct
land study" : "These must mate, / and fuse with Jacob's mys
tic heart, / To wrestle with the angel— Art" (Selected Poems
of Herman Melville, p. 144).
In the development of Melville's art. Mardi represents
the midpoint between Tvpee and Moby-Dick. It extends the
incipient symbolism and specific social criticism of Mel
ville's first novel into a portrait of the world as inclu
sive as that of Moby-Dick, but without the focus of a sus
penseful plot, fully-developed characters, and an all-inclu—
sive transcendental symbol, which would, as Emerson said in
Nature, "concentrate this radiance of the world on one
point" (Works, I, 24). Though Melville's circles encompass
nature, their center is essentially an abstraction. Yillah,
as beauty, is less romantic heroine than phantom. Her brief
appearance in the novel, with its supernatural overtones, is
hardly sufficient to establish her character as representa-
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124|
fcive of all nature. The other characters and the Mardian |
Isles appear as loosely-connected figments of the mind, j
I
which together offer a composite picture of the world rather;
than a synthesis. At this stage in Melville's development, |
lowever, he defended the lack of cohesiveness of his novel
in a manner that recalls Emerson's remark in "Self-Reliance":
that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds" (Works, II, 57). In an apparent description of his
own work, Melville has Babbalanja comment on the great
Mardian poem, the Koztanza, written by Lombardo:
for though Lombardo abandoned all monitors from without;
he retained one autocrat within— his crowned and scep-
tered instinct. And what, if he pulled down one gross
world, and ransacked the ethereal spheres, to build up
something of his own— a composite:— what then? matter
and mind, though matching not, are mates; and sundered
oft, in his Koztanza they unite:— the airy waist, em
braced by stalwart arms. (p. 526)
Governed by "his crowned and sceptered instinct," searching
for unity in the polarities of nature and the mind, and at
tempting to encompass the world in his art, Lombardo is Mel-;
ville's characterization of the transcendental poet. Lack
ing the discipline of conventional form. Mardi, like the
Koztanza, nevertheless fulfills Emerson's conception of an
imaginative work:
An imaginative book renders us much more service at
first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than after
ward when we arrive at the precise sense of the author.
I think nothing is of any value in books excepting the
transcendental and the extraordinary. If a man is in
flamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree
that he forgets the authors and the public and heeds only
this one dream which holds him like an insanity, let me
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125
read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and
histories and criticism. ("The Poet," Works, III, 32) I
Even though early reviewers of Mardi observed its af
finity to Emersonian thought, the book failed to win public
! 24
approval. Disappointed, Melville re-evaluated his concep-
I !
tion of the artist. His next two novels, Redburn and White-:
■Jacket, illustrate his increasing preoccupation with the
problem of evil and his continuing search for a unifying
transcendental symbol.
24
Evert Duyckinck commented in the Literary World about
"the world of poetical, thoughtful, ingenious moral writing I
in it [Mardi1 which Emerson would not disdain." Quoted from
Hugh W. Hetherington, Melville's Reviewers (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina, 1961), p. 113.
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CHAPTER V I
i TRANSCENDENTAL SYMBOLISM
I !
I IN REDBURN AND WHITE-JACKET
: The year 1849 marks a critical turning point in Mel
ville's development as an artist. Until then, he had writ
ten according to his instinct, in the manner of a self-
reliant transcendentalist, and had acquired international
recognition in Typee and Omoo as a promising novelist and
social critic. Early in the year, while awaiting publica
tion of Mardi, he wrote glowing accounts of hearing Emerson i
for the first time and of discovering Shakespeare.^ In his
letter of March 3 to Evert Duyckinck, his New York publisher,
Melville freely acknowledged his affinity to Emerson and
"the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving
and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world be
gan" (Letters, p. 79). Melville described Emerson as "an
uncommon man," whose ideas come from the common heritage of
all men:
Log-, I, 287: Letters, p. 77. Melville attended a
lecture by Emerson on February 5 in the Rev. James Freeman
Clark's Freeman Place Chapel, Boston. Elizabeth Melville
received communion from the Rev. Mr. Clarke on her wedding
day, Aug. 4, 1847. Log, I, 255. See also my accounts on
pp. 38-39, 43.
126
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127
Lay it down that had not Sir Thomas Browne lived, Emerson I
would not have mystified. . . . The truth is that we are
all sons, grandsons, or nephews or great-nephews of those
who go before us. No one is his own sire. (p. 78)
Melville here is paraphrasing himself in Mardi, in
which he wrote: "All of us have monarchs and sages for
kinsmen; angels and archangels for cousins. . . . Thus all
generations are blended: and heaven and earth of one kin:
the hierarchies of seraphs in the uttermost skies; the
thrones and principalities in the zodiac; the shades that
foam throughout space; the nations and families, flocks and
folds of the earth; one and all, brothers in essence— oh, be;
we then brothers indeed" (Mardi, p. 10). This expansive ex
pression of the transcendental unity of men in nature has
its parallel in Emerson's "The American Scholar," in which
he asserts that the soul which animates all men is to be
compared to a central fire:
For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth the particular
natures of all men. Each philosopher, each bard, each
actor has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one I
day I can do for myself. . . . The human mind cannot be
enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one
side to this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one
central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna,
lightens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat
of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of
Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand
stars. It is one soul which animates all men. (Works.
I, 108)
In the same exuberant letter to Duyckinck, Melville
also echoed Emerson in a transcendentalist criticism of
Shakespeare, whom Melville described as muzzled by conven
tions:
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128|
I would to God Shakespeare had lived later, and prome- j
naded in Broadway. Not that I might have had the plea- |
sure of leaving my card for him at the Astor, or made ;
merry with him over a bowl of fine Duyckinck punch; but
I that the muzzle which all men wore on their souls in the
I Elizabethan day, might not have intercepted Shakespeare's
I full articulations. For I hold it a verity, that even
I Shakespeare was not a frank man to the utmost. And, in-
I deed, who in this intolerant Universe is, or can be’ But |
I the Declaration of Independence makes a difference. ;
I Similarly, Emerson had noted in "The American Scholar"
that "As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum,
so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional,:
the local the perishable from his book. ..." (Works, I,
88). In effect, he warned against reliance on books, col
leges, schools of art or institutions of any kind because
they "stop with some past utterance of genius" (p. 90).
Genius, he continued, "is always sufficiently the enemy of |
genius by over-influence. The literature of every nation
bears me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shake-
spearized now for two hundred years" (p. 91).
Melville's attempt to be self-reliant, however, to be I
utterly frank even as Shakespeare was not, did not guarantee
his continued popularity in his own day. When Mardi failed
later that spring, Melville experienced his first major
2
Letters, p. 80. Whitman also commented on conven
tional attitudes in Shakespeare's art. In Democratic Vistas
(New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1949), Whitman said: "The
great poems, Shakespeare included, are poisonous to the ideal
of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life- i
blood of democracy" (p. 28). The foreign models of our lit-;
erature, he continued, "have had their birth in courts, and ’
basked in crown and castle sunshine; all smells of princes'
favors" (p. 28). ;
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129
setback as an author desiring to support his family with his
literary earnings. Partly because of this failure, Mel-
jville’s buoyancy gave way to disillusionment in the follow
ing months as he forced himself to write two novels, Redburn!
j j
and White-Jacket, which reflect his chanq-e in attitude. He :
i i
completed both in the course of the year.
"They are two jobs, which I have done for money— being
forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood," he wrote to
his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, on October 6. "I have not !
repressed myself much— so far as thev are concerned; but
have spoken pretty much as I feel" (Letters, pp. 91-92). In;
other words, Melville felt that he had to subordinate his
poetic instinct to the conventional taste of his reading
public, which demanded verisimilitude and easily recogniz
able form— neoclassical qualities lacking in Mardi. Mel
ville 's comment that he had not repressed himself much in
writing these books suggests his growing mastery of tech
nique and the disciplines of form. In the same letter, how-;
ever, Melville disclosed his continuing "earnest desire to
write those fsic] sort of books which are said to 'fail'"
(p. 92).
The extent of Melville's disappointment over public
indifference to Mardi is indicated in his letter to Evert
Duyckinck dated December 14: "I admit that I learn by ex
perience and not by divine intuitions," he said. "Had I not
written and published Mardi, in all likelihood, I would not ;
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be as wise as I am now, or may be" (Letters, p. 96). He
Continued with bitter reference to critics who had "stabbed i
I ■ ;
at (I do not say through)" Mardi (p. 96).
In contrast to the unrestrained romanticism of Mardi,
Melville's Redburn and White-Jacket are realistic portrayals;
I I
of the common sailor's life. Both reflect the transcenden
tal protest against convention, since they attack traditions
of shipboard society that tend to debase the individual. As
in Typee and Omoo, Melville derived his materials largely
from his seafaring experiences supplemented by extensive
reading. Redburn recalls Melville's first sea voyage from
New York to Liverpool and return in 1839 as a nineteen-year-
old crewman aboard the trader, St. Lawrence (Log. I, 42).
The close attention to detail in this novel led Evert
Duyckinck to characterize it as "Defoe on the ocean" (Log,
I, 312). White-Jacket, on the other hand, is a fictional
ized account of Melville ' s experience as a sailor aboard the:
frigate United States, which he boarded in Honolulu in the
summer of 1843 for the homeward journey to Boston (Log, I,
102). His vigorous attack on flogging and other inhumane
customs in this novel helped to arouse public indignation
which led to the mid-century reformation of the Navy, in-
3
eluding the abolition of corporeal punishment.
Whatever the importance of Melville's economic and
social reform motives in writing these books, their change
^Spiller, p. 447. ___________________________
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131
in tone marks the beginning of a new creative cycle, paral
leling that of his first three books and culminating in
j
Moby-Dick. Even before the publication of Mardi, Melville
i
noted a basic shift in his own mood. When Duyckinck ex
pressed approval of the proofs of Mardi, Melville replied on!
I !
April 5, about one month after his letter on Emerson and
Shakespeare:
I am glad you like that affair of mine [Mardi1. But
it seems so long now since I wrote it, and my mood has
so changed, that I dread to look into it, and have pur
posely abstained from so doing since I thanked God it
was off my hands. Would that a man could do something
j and then say— It is finished.— not that one thing only,
! but all others— that he has reached his uttermost, and
can never exceed it. But live and push— tho' we put one
leg forward ten miles— its [sic] no reason the other must
lag behind. . . . (Letters, p. 83)
The two novels immediately resulting from this change
in attitude reflect a theme of disillusionment suggested in
a passage which Melville underscored in his copy of Shake
speare 's The Tempest, which he may have read while awaiting
publication of Mardi :
Miranda. O ' , wonderi
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world.
That has such people in't!
Prospero. 'Tis new to thee.^
4
Log, I, 288-289. In a letter to Evert Duyckinck dated
February 24, 1849, Melville comments on "a glorious edition"
of Shakespeare he was then reading. "Dolt and ass that I
am," he said, "that I have lived more than twenty-nine |
years, and until a few days ago, never made close acquaint- ;
ance with the divine William" (Letters, p. 77). The edition
is identified in a footnote as "The Dramatic Works of Wil
liam Shakespeare (7 vols. Boston, Hilliard, Gray, 1837), ex
tensively scored and footnoted."______________________________
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132|
Melville boxed Prospère's remark and wrote in the margin: |
"Consider the character of the persons concerning whom |
Miranda says this— then Prospero's quiet words in comment— :
low terrible! In 'Timon' itself there is nothing like it"
( L o c t , I, 2 8 9 ) .
!
I This knowledge of evil is inherent in Redburn and
i
White-Jacket. both developmental novels in which an innocent
sailor-narrator is initiated into society in terms of life
aboard ship. Although these works, like Melville's earlier
novels, lack sustained dramatic conflicts, they embody two
Significant developments in Melville's art that anticipate I
Moby-Dick. Structurally, Redburn and White-Jacket are more
unified than anything Melville had written previously, since;
the action in each book is restricted to the events of a
single cruise, including stops in port. Instead of portray
ing narrators who follow instinct by jumping ship or taking
part in mutinies, Melville has his narrators participate in |
I
the commonplace routines of shipboard life and report on in
stances of social injustice. More important, however, is
Melville's employment of transcendental symbols that convey
a tragic vision of society and of the mind in a state of war
with nature.
In a literary sense, the term symbol refers to an ob
ject or an image which suggests a meaning beyond itself.
Emerson, however, employed the term in his transcendental
esthetics to denote the concrete language of nature and art
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133!
I
by which the complexity of the invisible whole is concen- j
trated in the visible part. He considered nature, and any
individual detail of nature, as a metaphor of the mind, an
j
externalization of the soul. "A Fact," he said in Nature,
"is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation
' i s the terminus or the circumference of the invisible
I 5
world." No matter how small, "a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a
moment of time, is related to the whole and partakes of the
whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders:
the likeness of the whole" (Works, I, 44). Furthermore, to
I
Emerson the symbols of nature were fluxional, rather than
static, as he suggested in the poem by which he introduces
Nature :
A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings ;
The eye reads omens where it goes.
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.
(Works, I, 1)
Like nature, a work of art also is a metaphor of the '
mind, since it consists, as Emerson said, of a fact of na
ture modified by the will of the artist. Therefore, even
though Emerson advocated in "The American Scholar" that Man
5
Works, I, 35. Emerson's idea that the visible world
is the terminus of the invisible world has a native source
in the writings of Cotton Mather, whose The Wonders of the
Invisible World (1593), an account of the Salem witchcraft |
trials, and Magnalia Christi Americana (1698) portray the
colonial Puritan's sense of the powers of good and evil
underlying external events. Jonathan Edwards' "Personal j
Narrative," probably written in 1739, has passages that re- I
fleet the author's sense of divine symbolism in nature._____ j
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134!
iThinkincr should prefer to read God directly rather than in-
I
jdirectly "in other men's transcripts of their readings,"
Emerson could perceive the universe in a drop of water or in
a poem (Works, I, 91). Similarly, Thoreau could describe
Walden Pond as God's drop and earth's eye because the water !
reflected the heavens; and Whitman could reduce the whole of
life to the common denominator of the blade of grass and
could say of his work, "Gamerado, this is no book, / Who
6
touches this touches a man. ..."
Melville's art shows in gradual development a technique
I [
of using transcendental symbols that would compress a total :
view of nature into a restricted image. In Mardi, he had
described the world of mortal mind in terms of a varied
cluster of islands bounded by a coral reef. In Redburn and
White-Jacket, however, he reduced his vision of the world to
the deck of a ship, although in Redburn he further concen
trated it into the symbol of a single work of art, a glass
model ship, which the youthful narrator admires as a child
before he goes to sea.
Melville described Redburn to his friend Richard Henry
Dana as "a little nursery tale of mine" (Letters, p. 93).
As such it parallels Typee, which portrays the initiation of
a young sailor into primitive nature. Like the Tommo of
Typee, Melville's narrator in Redburn is an outcast in
^"So LongI" Leaves of Grass, ed. Emory Holloway (New
York: Doubleday, Page, 1924), p. 418._______________________
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135
search of basic experience. In going to sea, Wellingborough
Redburn is motivated by unspecified "sad disappointments" ini
h.is plans for the future, "the necessity of doing something"
7
for himself, and a "naturally roving disposition." The
world, as Redburn sees it first in his home, is like a fra- i
i
gile "old-fashioned glass ship, about eighteen inches long,
and of French manufacture, which his father, some thirty
years before, had brought from Hamburgh [sic] as a present
to a great-uncle. ..." (p. 6). Kept in a glass case on a
"little claw-footed Dutch tea-table in one corner of the
sitting room," this international ship named La Reine, or
The Queen, is "the wonder and delight of all the people of
the village" (p. 5). The youth tries "to peep in at the
portholes," to discover its dark mystery and "perhaps some
gold guineas" (p. 7). On one occasion, he feels "a sort of
insane desire to be the death of the glass ship, case and
all, in order to come at the plunder" (p. 7).
In the image of the ship, with its tiny glass sailors
portrayed in the performance of their duties and its captain
"leaning against the bulwark, with one hand to his head;
perhaps he was unwell, for he looked very glassy out of the
eyes," Melville humorously presents a unifying symbol for
the novel (p. 7). The suggestive description of the ship
model anticipates a similar passage in Moby-Dick, in which
^Redburn (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1924),
p. 1. All references to Redburn are from this edition.
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1361
I I
Ishmael, the narrator, upon entering the Spouter Inn sees anj
I :
pnigmatic painting of a whale leaping over a vessel in a j
Storm and becoming impaled on the masts (Moby-Dick, p. 11). j
Although this picture is a dynamic emblem of the awesome
power of nature described in Moby-Dick, the glass ship in
Redburn is no less symbolic of the fragility of man's mortal
state. "A good deal of dust, and fuzzy stuff like down,"
Melville writes,
had in the course of many years worked through the joints ;
of the case, in which the ship was kept, so as to cover
all the sea with a light dash of white, which if anything
improved the general effect, for it looked like the foam
and froth raised by the terrible gale the good Queen was
battling against. (Redburn, p. 8)
Melville devotes more space to describing the appear
ance of the glass ship than he does to the real ship on
which Redburn sails. The youth sees only with the eyes of
innocence when he first steps aboard the merchantman High
lander in New York Harbor. Characteristically, his first
impression is not of the ship as a whole, but of the cap- i
tain's cabin— "a very handsome one, lined with mahogany and
maple; and the steward, an elegant-looking mulatto in a gor-î
geous turban, was setting out on a sort of sideboard some
dinner service which looked like silver, but it was only
Britannia ware highly polished" (p. 15).
Similarly, Redburn's initial impression of the skipper
is one that later proves to be incomplete and misleading.
Captain Riga appears to the youth as "a fine looking man,
about forty, splendidly dressed, with very black whiskers.
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137i
!
and very white teeth, and what I took to be a free, frank |
look out of a large hazel eye. I liked him amazingly. He j
was promenading up and down the cabin, humming some brisk i
air to himself as we entered" (p. 15).
Redburn's subsequent education in the conventions of
shipboard society suggests a parody of Emerson's conception
of the growth of the mind from the partial awareness of
childhood to the wholeness of vision of the adult. As Emer
son said in "The American Scholar," "the self-reliant boy vrho
lives in harmony with nature learns to unify his individual
impressions and to see in nature the beauty of his own mind"
(Works, I, 86-87).
Redburn's first lessons aboard the Highlander, however,
destroy his romantic illusions and sense of wonder. The
first sailor he meets sends him forward to the forecastle,
which resembles a cave:
And with that he directed me to a sort of hole in the
deck in the bow of the ship; but looking down, and seeing ;
how dark it was, I asked him for a light.
"Strike your eyes together and make one," said he, "we
don't have any lights here." So I groped my way down ;
into the forecastle, which smelt so bad of old ropes and
tar, that it almost made me sick. After waiting patient-
ly, I began to see a little; and looking round, at last
perceived I was in a smoky looking place, with twelve
wooden boxes stuck round the sides. In some of these
boxes were large chests, which I at once supposed to be
long to the sailors, who must have taken that method of
appropriating their "bunks," as I afterward found these
boxes were called. And so it turned out. (p. 26)
Beginning his life as a sailor in the darkness of his own I
ignorance, Redburn is treated as a child. The mate nick
names him "Buttons" because of the buttons carved in the
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138
images of fox heads on the hunting jacket that he wears to
sea and assigns him the job of cleaning out the pig-pen in
the long-boat. In his first view of the ocean, Redburn sees
nature as an ironic symbol of his lonely spirit:
At last we got as far as the Narrows, which everybody
knows is the entrance to New York Harbor from sea; and
it may well be called the Narrows, for when you go in or
out, it seems like going in or out of a door-way; and
when you go out of these Narrows on a long voyage like
this of mine, it seems like going out into the broad
highway, where not a soul is to be seen. For far away
and away, stretches the great Atlantic Ocean; and all you
can see beyond is where the sky comes down to the water.
It looks lonely and desolate enough, and I could hardly
believe, as I gazed around me, that there could be land
beyond, or any place like Europe or England or Liverpool
in the great wide world. (p. 37)
The youth's melancholy deepens when he learns that the for- '
mer occupant of his bunk had committed suicide by leaping
overboard.
During the voyage, Redburn's varied individual impres
sions contribute to his growing awareness of human misery
and depravity perpetuated by custom and what Melville de
scribes as "the cold charities" of civilized man (p. 240).
The youth's initiation has three broad stages. On the out- i
ward voyage to Liverpool, Redburn is reduced to the animal
level of experience but endures. "Miserable dog's life is
this of the sea!" he says,
commanded like a slave, and set to work like an ass! |
vulgar and brutal men lording it over me, as if I were
an African in Alabama. Yes, yes, blow on, ye breezes, |
and make a speedy end to this abominable voyage!® |
I
^Page 75. In "Benito Cereno" (1855) Melville drama- |
tizes the evil inherent in the institution of slavery. In i
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1391
I
!
In Liverpool, he discovers the drab realities of slums and j
i
I
the starving poor in contrast to the romantic descriptions
in his father's guidebook. On the other hand, he also notes;
that each Liverpool dock "is a small archipelago, an epitome
bf the world, where all the nations of Christendom, and eveh
I ;
jthose of Heathendom, are represented" (p. 185) . He observes;
that sailors, as a class, are outcasts and at the same time
i
I"the primum mobile of all commerce" (p. 157). Without them,
! " almost everything would stop here on earth except its revo-i
lution on its axis and the orators in the American Congress"
i(p. 157) . On the homeward voyage, Redburn witnesses the
suffering of hundreds of emigrants, roped off from cabin
passengers and reduced by famine and disease to animalism.
Redburn's disillusionment, however, is not so extensive
as to include the ultimate scheme of creation. Despite the
evidences of degradation aboard ship and ashore, Melville's
narrator struggles to retain his faith in an underlying
spiritual brotherhood. Antagonized by the malevolent sailor
Jackson, Redburn says: "at last I found myself a sort of
Ishmael in the ship, without a single friend or companion;
and I began to feel a hatred growing up in me against the
whole crew— so much so, that I prayed against it, that it
might not master my heart completely, and so make a fiend of
contrast to Redburn, however, the ineffective Spanish cap
tain, Benito Cereno, dies as a result of the treatment he
receives from slaves who take over his ship.
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140i
9
me, something like Jackson." The youth retains his faith, |
I ;
as Melville indicates in a passage that anticipates Whit- |
man's celebration of America as a nation of nations. Mel-
yille writes:
I There is something in the contemplation of the mode
I in which America has been settled, that in a noble breast,
should forever extinguish the prejudice of national dis-
I likes.
I Settled by the people of all nations, all nations may
I claim her for their own. You can not spill a drop of
American blood without spilling the blood of the whole
world. . . . We are not a nation, so much as a world; for
unless we may claim all the world for our sire, like Mel- ;
chisedec, we are without father or m o t h e r .
Melville here is echoing his assertion in Mardi— "one and
àll, brothers in essence— oh, be we then brothers indeedi"—
11
and also his comment on Emerson— "No one is his own sire."
The idea was later closely paralleled in Whitman's Preface
to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass :
The Americans of all nations at any time upon the
earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The
United States themselves are essentially the greatest
poem. . . . Here at last is something in the doings of
man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the
day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a teem
ing nation of nations. . . . (Whitman, p. 488)
Page 70. Melville in this passage makes his first
reference to Ishmael, the biblical name which he later chose
for the outcast narrator of Moby-Dick.
10
Redburn, pp. 190-191. Melville is referring to the
Old Testament king of Salem: "And Melchizedek king of Salem|
brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the .
most high God" (Gen. xiv.l8).
11
See Mardi, p. 10, and letter dated March 3, 1849, to
Evert Duyckinck in Letters, p. 78. ___ ________
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141
i
Melville's assertion of spiritual brotherhood is over- |
shadowed by his memorable portraits of three principal kinds:
i
of evil aboard his world-ship. Although these characters !
[reflect in part Melville's Calvinistic notion of man's de
pravity, they also correspond to ethical conceptions in the !
! 12
jwritings of both Emerson and Carlyle. Melville introduces
first Captain Riga, who represents the evil of authority
perpetuated by a heartlessly materialistic code. Polite in
port but a petty tyrant at sea, the skipper of the High
lander conforms to the conventions of the merchant marine,
|in which people have value only as commodities to be used or
transported for profit. Riga suggests Emerson's conception :
in "The American Scholar" of the partial man, "metamorphosed
into a thing," who in "the divided or social state" func
tions according to routines which form his sole basis for
judging the worth of an individual (Works, I, 83). Melville
implies Riga's spiritual emptiness by describing the clothes
that the captain wears once the Highlander leaves port. "I
noticed, " Redburn comments,
that while we were at sea, he wore nothing but old shabby
clothes, very different from the glossy suit I had seen
him in at our first interview, and after that on the
steps of the City Hotel, where he always boarded when in
New York. Now, he wore nothing but old-fashioned snuff-
1 o
Allan Melville, the father of the author, was a Uni- |
tarian; but his wife Maria, like all of the Gansevoorts, was
a member of the Dutch Reformed Church and had all of their
children baptized in that faith. Luther S. Mansfield and
Howard P. Vincent summarize Herman Melville's church affili
ations in a note on pp. 623-624 of Moby-Dick.________________ ^
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colored coats, with high collars and short waists; and
faded, short-legged pantaloons, very tight ahout the
knees; and vests, that did not conceal his waistbands,
owing to their being so short, just like a little boy's.
And his hats were all caved in, and battered, as if they
had been knocked about in a cellar; and his boots were
sadly patched. Indeed, I began to think that he was but
I a shabby fellow after all; particularly as his whiskers
! lost their gloss, and he went days together without shav- -
I ing; and his hair, by a sort of miracle, began to grow
I of a pepper and salt color, which might have been owing,
I though, to his discontinuing the use of some kind of dye
I while at sea. I put him down as a sort of impostor; and
while ashore, a gentleman on false pretenses; for no
! gentleman would have treated another gentleman as he did
me. (pp. 80-81)
!
In this satirical description, Melville's narrator is some
thing of a clothes philosopher in a manner that parodies
Carlyle's Professor Diogenes Teufelsdrockh in Sartor Resar-
tus. The irony of Redburn's conclusion that Captain Riga
was "some sort of impostor" suggests Carlyle's point: "All '
visible things are emblems; what thou seest is not there on
its own account; strictly taken, is not there at all: Mat
ter exists only spiritually, and to represent some Idea, and
body it forth. Hence Clothes, as despicable as we think
13
them, are so unspeakably significant." The difference be
tween Melville's philosophy and Carlyle's, however, is that
Melville restricts his view of clothes to emblems of human
imperfection; Carlyle portrays them in a broader sense as
symbols of the divine spirit.
Captain Riga's arrogance is humorously suggested in the
shabby clothes he wears to escort a young lady passenger in
^^The Works of Thomas Carlyle, I (New York: Scribner's,
1896), p. 57. _____________
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143
I I
walks on the deck. "Considering his beautiful ward," Red
burn comments, I
I thought the captain behaved ungallantly, to say the
least, in availing himself of the opportunity of her
charming society, to wear out his remaining old clothes;
for no gentleman ever pretends to save his best coat
I when a lady is in the case; indeed, he generally thirsts
I for a chance to abase it, by converting it into a pon-
! toon over a puddle, like Sir Walter Raleigh. . . . But
I this Captain Riga was no Raleigh, and hardly any sort of
a true gentleman whatever, as I have formerly declared.
Yet, perhaps, he might have worn his old clothes in this
instance, for the express purpose of proving, by his dis-
I dain for the toilet, that he was nothing but the young
lady's guardian; for many guardians do not care one fig
how shabby they look. (p. 125)
At the end of the voyage, the crew of the Highlander salute
their skipper by turning their backs on him. "True to his
imperturbable politeness while in port," Redburn notes,
"Captain Riga only lifted his hat, smiled very blandly, and
slowly returned into his cabin" (p. 348).
In contrast to the coarse skipper, who is protected by
the heartless code of the merchant marine, is Redburn's
over-refined friend Harry Bolton, a pathetically ineffective!
son of a gentleman, so imprisoned by the conventions of po
lite society that he struggles to escape in a tragic search
for integrity. A less convincing character than Captain
Riga, Harry corresponds to Emerson's conception in "Self-
Reliance" of the civilized man debilitated by society, which
"everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every
one of its members" (Works, II, 49). "His levity of manner,"
Redburn observes, "and sanguine assurance, coupled with the
constant sight of his most unseamanlike person— more suited
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144;
to the Queen's drawing-room than a ship's forecastle— bred i
many misgivings in my mind" (p. 249). Melville attempts to |
convey an impression of Harry's lack of self-reliance by
having him put on false whiskers and mustache to deceive his|
triends (p. 255). In an episode that reflects Carlyle's at-i
tack on wordly pleasures in Sartor Resartus, Harry takes
Redburn to a mysterious and decadent "semi-public place of
opulent entertainment" in London, where the wealthy patrons
"seemed exceedingly animated about concerns of their own.
the vagueness of Melville's description is appropriate to
the innocence of the narrator, who feels out of place.
Harry leaves Redburn alone in a splendidly furnished apart- '
ment and returns mysteriously, "his face rather flushed"
from some undisclosed self-indulgence (p. 259). On the voy
age to New York, Harry as a beginning sailor fails in his
initiation into the routines of shipboard life by refusing
to go aloft into the rigging; as a result, he submits to the
humiliations of the crew. The novel concludes with an
afterword on the fate of this youth who can "sing like a
bird" but is unfit for the rigorous existence of a sailor.
While serving years later as a crewman on the whaler Hunt
ress, Harry is crushed to death by a whale.
14
Redburn, p. 257. In "The Everlasting Yea" of Sartor
Resartus, Carlyle refers to Teufelsdrockh's "Temptations in I
the Wilderness," which in "an Atheistic Century" is "the
populous moral Desert of selfishness and baseness." After a
spiritual struggle, Teufelsdrockh acquires a faith based on
the principle, "Love not Pleasure; love God." Pages 145-
154.
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145!
Melville's most significant portrait of depravity in
Redburn is the diabolical sailor Jackson, who is at war not
only with society represented by the crew of the Highlander,I
but also with nature. Jackson anticipates the character of ;
lAhab in Mobv-Dick as a larger-than-life embodiment of the |
i i
[perverse human will pitted in a death struggle against the
lorder of creation. Redburn fears Jackson's evil eye and
I
characterizes his unrelieved malice as follows:
He [Jackson] seemed to be full of hatred and gall
I against everything and everybody in the world; as if all
i the world was one person, and had done him some dreadful
harm, that was rankling and festering in his heart.
I Sometimes I thought he was really crazy; and often felt
so frightened at him that I thought of going to the cap
tain about it, and telling him Jackson ought to be con
fined, lest he should do some terrible thing at last.
But upon second thoughts, I always gave it up; for the
captain would only have called me a fool, and sent me
forward again. (p. 69)
The resemblances between Jackson and Ahab, as William
H. Gilman has noted, include in addition to a shared sense
of active malice in the universe, several other qualities.
Both are tyrants despite physical debility: Jackson's ill
ness, which causes him to spit blood, compares with Ahab's
handicap of an artificial leg. Both men display practical
knowledge and an intuitive sense of moral weakness, which
they exploit in order to establish their leadership. Jack
son continually insults the sailors aboard the Highlander;
yet despite their resentment, they obey him and let him have
his way, even as the crewmen of the Peguod submit to Ahab's ;
unbending will. As a character, however, Jackson does not
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I Ï46j
match the epic figure of Ahab, whose malice is focused on |
the all-inclusive symbol of the white whale and whose Satan-;
I I
ism has a magnetic appeal as it is translated into dramatic
I . 15
action.
I
I What needs to be shown is that the malevolence of Jack-'
I :
son and Ahab, apparently antithetical to transcendental
idealism, fits into Emerson's description of man in Nature
i
as "a god in ruins" (Works, I, 71). Although Emerson attri
butes this idea to "a certain poet," whom he does not name,
he sets forth explicitly in "Compensation" the moral dimen
sions of human failure represented in the characters of
Jackson and Ahab. In a universe which "globes itself in a
drop of dew," Emerson said, a perfect equity "adjusts its
balance in all parts of life, " and "every act rewards itself,
or in other words integrates itself, in a twofold manner:
first in the thing, or in real nature, and secondly in the
circumstance, or in apparent nature" (Works, II, 101-102).
This polarity invests the individual life, Emerson said:
with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek to
dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know,
that they do not touch him; but the brag is on his lips,
the conditions are in his soul. . . . If he has escaped
them in form and in the appearance, it is because he has
resisted his life and fled from himself, and the retribu
tion is so much death. So signal is the failure of all
attempts to make this separation of the good from the
tax, that the experiment would not be tried— since to
try it is to be mad— but for the circumstance that when
I am indebted in this paragraph to Gilman's detailed
comparison of Jackson and Ahab in Melville's Early Life and |
Redburn (New York: Washington Square, 1951), pp. 272-273.
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147:
the disease began in the will, of rebellion and separa
tion. the intellect is at once infected, so that the man
ceases to see God whole in each object. . . . There is a
crack in everythin? God has made. . . . (Works, II, 105-
107) (My italics)
Melville turned this doctrine of universal human imper
fection on Emerson himself in his letter of March 3 to Evert;
buyckinck. Emerson and "the builders up" who write optimis
tically of man's potential for good, Melville said, "are all
16
cracked right across the brow." Writing in Redburn as a
tragic realist, however, Melville attempted to sum up the
evil of the world in one character, in terms parallel to the
ethical doctrine described in "Compensation."
Even Jackson's appearance suggests the crack in his
nature: "His nose had broken down in the middle, and he
squinted with one eye, and did not look very straight out of
the other" (p. 63). His spiritual isolation among sailor
outcasts also is implied by his clothes: "He dressed a good
deal like a Bowery boy," Redburn observes, "for he despised :
the ordinary sailor-rig; wearing a pair of great over-all
blue trousers, fastened with suspenders, and three red
woolen shirts, one over the other; for he was subject to the
rheumatism, and was not in good health, he said; and he had
a large white wool hat, with a broad rolling brim" (p. 63).
Furthermore, Jackson's own words condemn him in a man
ner presented by Emerson in "Compensation." "Curses,"
^^Letters, p. 79. Babbalanja, the Emersonian philoso- ;
pher in Mardi, makes a similar comment about "the cracked
sphere we live in" (p. 385) . ,
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j Î 4 8 j
Emerson said, "always recoil on the head of him who impre- !
I :
cates them. . . . Every opinion reacts on him who utters it"
(Works, II, 109-110). Melville applies this principle in !
dramatizing Jackson as "Cain afloat": "Don't talk of heaven:
!
to me," Jackson cries:
I — it's a lie— I know it— and they are all fools that be-
I lieve in it. Do you think, you Greek, that there's any
heaven for you? Will they let you in there, with that
tarry hand, and that oily head of hair? Avast! when
some shark gulps you down his hatchway one of these days,
you'll find, that by dying, you'll only go from one gale
of wind to another; mind that, you Irish cockney! Yes,
you'll be bolted down like one of your own pills: and I
should like to see the whole ship swallowed down in the
Norway maelstrom, like_a box on 'em. That would be a
dose of salts for ye!^?
After this outburst, Melville continues, "Jackson seemed to ;
grow worse and worse, both in body and mind. He seldom
spoke, but to contradict, deride, or curse; and all the
time, though his face grew thinner and thinner, his eyes
seemed to kindle more and more, as if he were going to die
out at last, and leave them burning like tapers before a
corpse" (p. 118).
Near the end of the novel, Jackson falls to his death
from the main-topsail-yard in a dramatic moment, in which
his "wild words were hardly out of his mouth, when his hands
dropped to his side, and the bellying sail was spattered
17
Page 118. Jackson's reference to a "Norway mael
strom" recalls Edgar Allan Poe's horror tale "Descent into a
Maelstrom" (1841), in which a Norwegian sailor is sucked
into the whirlpool but survives, although his hair turns
white and his expression completely changes because of his
experience.______________________________________________________
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149
with a torrent of blood from his lungs" (p. 332). His fall
into the ocean, Melville writes,
was seen by the whole upward-gazing crowd on deck, some
of whom were spotted with the blood that trickled from
the sail, while they raised a spontaneous cry, so shrill
and wild, that a blind man might have known something
j deadly has happened. (p. 333)
backson's death plunge, which contrasts with the symbolic,
life-saving fall of the narrator from the main-top in White-
backet, is merely a striking episode rather than the the
matic climax of this plotless novel. Despite the incidental
nature of the effect, however, it anticipates the tragic
mood of Ahab's death moment in Moby-Dick, in which Ahab,
like Jackson, is subject to the law of compensation and de
stroyed by the effects of his own curses.
If Redburn has significance as an experiment with the
use of transcendental symbols and ethical doctrines in de
veloping a tragic portrait of man. White-Jacket demonstrates
Melville's increasing ability to create more fluxional or
dynamic symbols to convey changing relationships between the
individual, society, and nature. A substantially longer
novel than Redburn, it is remarkable as a mixture of narra
tive and philosophical speculation that builds suspense
without the sustained dramatic conflict that later charac
terizes Moby-Dick. Melville's unifying theme is suggested
in the sub-title, "The World of a Man of War," and made ex
plicit in the concluding chapter. "As a man-of-war that
sails through the sea," he writes.
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150
so this earth that sails through the air. We mortals
are all on board a fast-sailing, never-sinking, world- I
frigate, of which God was the shipwright; and she is but I
one craft in a Milky-Way fleet, of which God is the Lord
High Admiral. The port we sail from is forever astern.
And though far out of sight of land, for ages and ages
we continue to sail with sealed orders, and our last des- ;
tination remains a secret to ourselves and our officers; |
I yet our final haven was predestinated ere we slipped from '
I the stocks at Creation.1° i
I Although this representation of a ship that epitomizes
the world is in harmony with Emerson's esthetic ideal, it is
inconsistent with the underlying assumption of Emerson's
transcendental faith that all things are knowable through
intuition. Instead of stressing the divinity of man, Mel
ville dramatizes man's mortality in terms of his limited
self-awareness. "Thus sailing with secret orders," he con
tinues,
we ourselves are the repositories of the secret packet,
whose mysterious contents we long to learn. There are
no mysteries out of ourselves. (p. 372)
Melville's symbol of the world, then, is essentially an
enigma, in which the visible image implies the mystery of
the whole that it represents.
These passages compare with Redburn's youthful specula
tion about the dark interior of the glass ship model. Mel
ville points out in White-Jacket, however, that even though
the individual lacks intuitional knowledge of God, he can
still be self-reliant by living in harmony with nature and
the moral law of compensation. In the rhapsodic concluding
18
(Boston: L. C. Page, 1892), p. 372. All references
to White-Jacket are from this edition._______________________
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151
[paragraph of White-Jacket, Melville reflects the transcen- I
dental ethic by asserting the responsibility of the individ-;
jual for his own welfare, since the source of evil is not
merely in society, but also in the human will:
Oh, shipmates and world-mates, all roundi we the peo- I
I pie suffer many abuses. Our gun-deck is full of com-
I plaints. In vain from Lieutenants do we appeal to the
: Captain; in vain— while on board our wor.ld-frigate— to
I the indefinite Navy Commissioners, so far out of sight
aloft. Yet the worst of our evils we blindly inflict on
ourselves; our officers cannot remove them, even if they
would. From the last ills no being can save another;
therein each man must be his own savior. (p. 374)
In White-Jacket, Melville explores with copious details
every facet of the sailor's life aboard a warship; but the
enduring significance of this novel lies in the extraordi
nary richness and intensity of its transcendental symbolism.;
In no other novel before Moby-Dick has Melville produced
episodes which suggest the sense of dynamic movement in all
of nature in terms of characters in action. The homeward
journey of the frigate Neversink is a metaphor for life, as ;
Melville states in his closing lines: "Whoever afflict us, :
whatever surround, / Life is a voyage that's homeward
bound" (p. 374).
The journey begins for the narrator in "Callao, on the
coast of Peru— her last harbour in the Pacific" (p. 7). It
is there that the youth makes a sailor's surtout, the white-
jacket of the title, which serves in the novel as a Carlyl- !
ian symbol of the self. Like the emblematic hunting jacket
worn by Redburn, which suggests his quest for the absolute
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152
I
condition of things, the white jacket is appropriate to the ;
character of its inquisitive wearer, an individualist who
protests against the evils of institutionalized behavior.
"It was nothing more than a white duck frock," he says,
j or rather shirt; which laying on deck, I folded double
I at the bosom, and by then making a continuation of the
I slit there, opened it lengthwise— much as you would cut
I a leaf in the last new novel. The gash being made, a
I metamorphosis took place, transcending any related by
I Ovid. For, prestoi the shirt was a coati— a strange-
looking coat, to be sure; of a Quakerish amplitude about
the skirts; with an infirm, tumble-down collar; and a
clumsy fullness about the wristbands, and white, yea,
white as a shroud. And my shroud it afterward came very
near proving, as he who reads further will find. (p. 7)
The references to "Quakerish amplitude" suggesting toler
ance, the "tumble-down collar" implying nonconformity, and
whiteness hinting at the mystery of spirit are in keeping
with the narrator's ethical outlook.
Furthermore, the jacket is lined with "many odds and
ends of patches— old socks, old trouser-legs, and the like,"
suggesting the eclecticism of the transcendentalists (p. 8).i
Although it is well-padded— "no buckram or steel hauberk
stood up more stoutly"— it absorbs the weather, rather than
repels it (p. 8). "Of a damp day," White-Jacket says,
my heartless shipmates even used to stand up against me,
so powerful was the capillary attraction between this
luckless jacket of mine and all drops of moisture. I
dripped like a turkey a-roasting; and long after the rain
storms were over, and the sun showed his face, I still
stalked a Scotch mist; and when it was fair weather with
others, alas! it was foul weather with me.
Me! Ah me! Soaked and heavy, what a burden was that
jacket to carry about, especially when I was sent up
aloft; dragging myself up, step by step, as if I were
weighing anchor. . . . And thus, in my own proper person.
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153!
did many showers of rain reascend toward the skies, in |
accordance with the natural laws. (p. 8)
Wearing this porous, self-made garment, the narrator is
symbolically clothed for his primary function in the novel
of absorbing experience, which he attempts to idealize on
his homeward journey.
Shortly before the Neversink arrives at its destina
tion, the narrator loses his unique garment in an episode
that dramatizes his spiritual death and rebirth. Melville
suggests that the crucial event is predestined in his de
scription of how White-Jacket falls into the sea from the
main-top ;
Having reeved the line through all the inferior
blocks, I went out with it to the end of the weather-
top-gallant yard-arm, and was in the act of leaning over
and passing it through the suspended jewel-block there,
when the ship gave a plunge in the sudden swells of the
calm sea, and pitching me still further over the yard,
threw the heavy skirts of my jacket right over my head,
completely muffling me. Somehow I thought it was the
sail that had flapped, and, under that impression, threw
up my hands to drag it from my head, relying upon the
sail itself to support me meanwhile. Just then the ship
gave another sudden jerk, and head foremost, I pitched
from the yard. (p. 367)
The details of the "sudden swells of the calm sea" and the
jacket "completely muffling" the sailor dramatize the impact
of external nature on the mind, as a result of which the
youth throws up his hands in order to see. In other words,
nature and instinct together cause him to plunge into "the
speechless profound of the sea" (p. 367) . As he falls, the :
narrator sums up his life like a dying man:
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3 3 ^
I
A bloody film was before my eyes, through which, ghost- |
like passed and repassed my father, mother, and sisters.
An unutterable nausea oppressed me; I was conscious of
gasping; there seemed no breath in my body. It was over
one hundred feet that I fell— down, down, with lungs col- :
lapsed as in death. . . . All I had seen, and read, and
heard, and all I had thought and felt in my life, seemed
intensified in one fixed idea in my soul. (p. 367)
Striking the water, White-Jacket experiences the transition
between death and birth, as he sinks vertically "toward the
infallible centre of this terraqueous globe" (p. 367).
Then, he reports, "some fashionless form brushed my side—
some inert, coiled fish of the sea; the thrill of being
alive again tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning of
death shocked through me" (p. 368).
Melville expands the moment to suggest its transcenden
tal significance:
For one instant an agonizing revulsion came over me
as I found myself utterly sinking. Next moment the force :
of my fall was expended; and there I hung, vibrating in
the mid-deep. What wild sound then rang in my ear! One
was a soft moaning, as of low waves on the beach; the
other wild and heartlessly jubilant, as of the sea in the ;
height of the tempest. Oh soul! thou then heardest life :
and death: as he who stands upon the Corinthian shore
hears both the Ionian and the Aegean waves. The life-
and-death poise soon passed; and then I found myself
slowly ascending, and caught a dim glimmering of light.
(p. 368)
In this passage, White-Jacket is like Emerson's Man Think
ing, who learns "that in going down into the secrets of his
own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds"
("The American Scholar," Works, I, 103). The world-ship it
self participates in the physical and spiritual movement, in
which the youth must demonstrate complete self-reliance. "I
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155|
had fallen in a line with the main-mast," White-Jacket saysi
I now found myself nearly abreast of the mizzen-mast,
the frigate slowly gliding by like a black world in the
water. Her vast hull loomed out of the night, showing
hundreds of seamen in the hammock nettings, some tossing
over ropes, others madly flinging overboard the hammocks; ;
but I was too far out from them immediately to reach what
they threw. (p. 369)
The porous jacket pinions the yOuth, who resists its down-
i
ward pull toward the mystery of death:
I whipped out my knife, that was tucked at my belt, and
ripped my jacket straight up and down, as if I were rip
ping open myself. With a violent struggle I then burst
out of it, and was free. Heavily soaked, it slowly sank
before my eyes.-^
I In contrast to the death plunge of Jackson in Redburn,
White-Jacket's fall provides a thematic climax for the
novel. Melville describes the jacket, the ship, and the sea
as interrelated facts, in which each trifle, as Emerson pre
scribed in "The American Scholar," bristles "with the polar
ity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law" (Works, I,
111). Within the scope of this comprehensive portrait of
the self in relation to the world, Melville delineates char
acters who represent all levels of shipboard society, which
he divides into the broad transcendental categories of non
conformist and conformist. Unlike Redburn, with its heavy
emphasis on the cracks in human nature, White-Jacket
19
Page 369. This dramatic moment contrasts with the
more complex tun scene in Chapter LXXVII of Moby-Dick, in
which Queequeg with "great skill in obstetrics" rescues
helpless Tashtego from entrapment inside a whale's head in
demonstration of the interdependency of man on his fellow
man (pp. 339-342) .__ ________________________________________
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156:
I
contains several vivid portraits of individuals who live by |
pn Emersonian doctrine of self-reliance by which they spir- ;
itually triumph over the inflexible conventions aboard the
Neversink. Melville describes his basic classification of
I ;
^he crew as follows :
! Oppressed by illiberal laws, and partly oppressed by
! themselves, many of our people are wicked, unhappy, inef-
i ficient. We have skulkers and idlers all round, and
brow-beaten waisters, who, for a pittance, do our craft's
shabby work. Nevertheless, among our people we have gal
lant fore, main, and mizen-top men aloft, who, well
treated or ill, still trim our craft to the blast.
(p. 373)
Melville's noble nonconformists break the rules that
govern shipboard society when these threaten to compromise
their integrity or endanger the world-ship. Foremost among
these men of instinct, who refuse, as Emerson said in "Self-
Reliance, " to "capitulate to badges and names, to large
societies and dead institutions" is Jack Chase, the first
captain of the main top (Works, II, 51). Jack's Carlylian
sense of duty enables him to accept naval discipline afloat;
yet ashore, Melville observes, "he was a stickler for the
Rights of Man and the liberties of the world" (p. 20). Jack
deserts the Neversink "to draw a partisan blade in the civil
commotions of Peru, and befriend, heart and soul, what he
deemed the cause of the Right" (p. 20). Recaptured, he is
reinstated without punishment because of the captain's sus
ceptibility to flattery:
"Your most devoted and penitent captain of the main
top, sir; and one who, in his very humility of contri-
tion, is yet proud to call Captain Claret Fsicl his_______ j
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------------------------------------------------------------------- T 5 T
commander," said Jack, making a glorious bow, and then |
tragically flinging overboard his Peruvian sword. !
"Reinstate him at once," shouted Captain Claret; "and
now, sir, to your duty; and discharge that well to the
end of the cruise, and you will hear no more of your hav- ^
ing run away." (p. 22)
Melville portrays Jack as the kind of successful indi- :
Ividualist whom Emerson described in "Self-Reliance" as being
I
{able "to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as
{if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he" (Works,
III, 51) . "Loved by seamen and admired by officers, " Jack
has "a high conceit of his profession" (p. 16). Melville
continues: "The main-top, over which he presided, was a
1
sort of oracle of Delphi; to which many pilgrims ascended,
to have their perplexities or differences settled" (p. 16).
If Jack Chase is an idealized portrait of the man who
lives by instinct. Mad Jack, a heavy-drinking officer, is a
realistic conception of the individualist who disobeys or
ders to get things done in a crisis. He is a man of action
who displays an intuitive understanding of the primitive
forces of nature. Melville writes:
In a sudden gale, or when a large quantity of sail is
suddenly to be furled, it is the custom for the first
lieutenant to take the trumpet from whoever happens then
to be officer of the deck. But Mad Jack had the trumpet
that watch; nor did the first lieutenant now seek to
wrest it from his hands. Every eye was upon him, as if
we had chosen him from among us all, to decide this bat
tle with the elements, by single combat with the spirit
of the Cape; for Mad Jack was the saving genius of the
ship, and so proved himself that night. . . .
"Hard the helmi" shouted Captain Claret, bursting
from his cabin like a ghost, in his nightdress.
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158i
"Damn youi" raged Mad Jack to the quarter-masters; 2 0 !
"hard down— hard down, I say, and be damned with youI"
j ,
jThese two orders, Melville explains, given by the captain
land his subordinate, exactly contrasted their characters:
I I
'tBy putting the helm hard up, the captain was for scudding;
that is, for flying away from the gale. Whereas, Mad Jack
was for running the ship into its teeth. It is needless to
Isay that, in almost all cases of similar hard squalls and
gales, the latter step, though attended with more appalling
appearances, is, in reality the safer of the two ..."
|(p. 107). Melville’s comment, "But, sailor or landsman,
there is some sort of a Cape Horn for all" (p. 105), sug
gests the comment in Emerson's "The American Scholar" on the
value of facing nature, with its attractions and dangers,
rather than running away from it :
The world,— this shadow of the soul, or other me,—
lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which
unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself.
I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. . . . I pierce ,
its order; I dissipate its fear; I dispose of it within
the circuit of my expanding life. So much only of life
as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have
I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my
being, my dominion. (Works, I, 95)
In contrast to the two Jacks, both men in their prime,
is old Ushant, "a sort of sea-Socrates, in his old age
'pouring out his last philosophy of life' ..." (p. 330).
Melville describes him as a man "of strong natural sense, "
20
Page 103. Joseph Conrad in "The Secret Sharer" por
trays a similar situation in which the narrator, on his
first command, takes his ship on a seemingly hazardous
course and asserts his mastery over the vessel and crew.____
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1591
jwho "had seen nearly the whole terraqueous glohe, and could }
I i
reason of civilised and savage, of Gentile and Jew, of
i :
Christian and Moslem" (p. 330)- Ushant disobeys an order to
jshave his beard before the Neversink enters port. Put in
the brig and flogged by command of Captain Claret, Ushant
! ■ :
stands firm on the principle, "My beard is my own" (p. 343).
His resistance to pressures to conform echoes Emerson's
aphorism in "Self-Reliance," "For nonconformity the world
whips you with its displeasure" (Works, II, 55-56). Mel
ville makes a point of the moral nature of Ushant's victory:
Though, as I afterward learned Ushant was earnestly
entreated to put the case into some lawyer's hands, he
firmly declined, saying, "I have won the battle, my
friends, and I do not care for the prize money." (p. 343)
Opposing these men, yet envying them, are the conform- :
ists in the highly stratified society aboard the Neversink.
To a man, they display what Emerson described in "Self-
Reliance" as the "foolish consistency" which is "the hobgob
lin of little minds" (Works, II, 57). Although Melville !
recognizes the need for discipline and an orderly division
of duties among the five hundred men in a man-of-war's crew,
he attacks "the immutable ceremonies and iron etiquette of a
man-of-war; the spiked barriers separating the various
grades of rank; the delegated absolutism of authority on all
hands; the impossibility, on the part of the common seaman,
of appeal from incidental abuses"— conventions of Navy life
that debase the individual (p. 351). Melville's basic tar- |
get is the inflexible Articles of War, which gives the______
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160:
!
captain the power of a despot to inflict cruel punishments I
on his crew. Melville's attack is similar to Thoreau's
more general criticism of law in "Civil Disobedience," pub
lished in 1849. "Law never made men a whit more just,"
iThoreau said, "and, by means of their respect for it, even
the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.
By comparison, Melville says of the regulations regarding
flogging:
Let us have the charity to believe them— as we do—
when some captains in the Navy say, that the thing of
all others most repulsive to them in the routine of what
they consider their duty, is the administration of cor
poral punishment upon the crew; for, surely, not to be
scarified to the quick at these scenes would argue a man
but a beast.
You see a human being, stripped like a slave; scourged
worse than a hound. And for what? For things not essen- '
tially criminal but only made so by arbitrary laws.
(p. 139)
Unlike the individualists, who preserve their integrity
by breaking the rules, the conformists aboard the Neversink
readily submit to the stereotyped patterns of behavior,
which ultimately serve to exalt the officers or "sea lords"
over the crewmen or "sea commoners." Melville points up
the superficiality of all ritual in this satirical descrip
tion of the captain boarding his ship:
The Captain then slowly mounted the ladder, and
gravely marching through a lane of "side boys," so-
called— all in their best bibs and tuckers, and who stood
making sly faces behind his back— was received by all the
lieutenants in a body, their hats in their hands, and
making a prodigious scraping and bowing, as if they had
^^Writinus of Henry David Thoreau, X, 134.______________
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Ï 6 l ]
just graduated at a French dancing-school. Meanwhile,
preserving an erect, inflexible, and ramrod carriage, and
slightly touching his chapeau, the captain made his cere
monious way to the cabin, disappearing behind the scenes,
like the pasteboard ghost in Hamlet. (p. 155) '
Presented here as a ghost, rather than as a man. Captain
jciaret is king of the world-ship, a heartless administrator
lof rules that cover every convention, including that of
telling time. "It is not twelve o'clock," White-Jacket re
marks :
till he says so. For when the sailing master, whose duty
it is to take the regular observation at noon, touches
his hat, and reports twelve o'clock to the officer of the
; deck, that functionary orders a midshipman to repair to
the captain's cabin, and humbly inform him of the re
spectful suggestion of the sailing master.
"Twelve o'clock reported, sir" says the middy.
"Make it so," replies the captain.
And the bell is struck eight by the messenger-boy, and I
twelve o'clock it is. (p. 25)
On the other hand, despite his absolute authority, which he
sustains by means of flogging and other inhumane punish
ments, Captain Claret is not intrinsically evil. "What he
was," Melville says, "the usages of the Navy had made him.
Had he been a mere landsman— a merchant, say— he would no
doubt have been considered a kind-hearted man" (p. 344).
Melville's satire against the pretentiousness and cru
elty of Navy conventions has neoclassical overtones with its
emphasis on easily-recognizable character types. The little
commodore with eyes like musket balls sustains the dignity
of his rank by remaining aloof aboard the ship, seldom
speaking. "I have serious doubts," White-Jacket comments
ironically, "whether, for the most part, he was not dumb"
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162|
(p. 33)- Rank-conscious officers shun him: "At the first I
^Isign of those epaulets of his on the weather side of the |
poop, the officers there congregated invariably shrunk over
"bo leeward, and left him alone" (p. 24).
I :
I Officers of lesser rank also have appearances that
distinguish them as a class. For example, first lieutenants
walk with one shoulder "disproportionately drooped" because
they wear only one epaulet (p. 50). Furthermore, the
"barons of the gun room— lieutenants, purser, marine offi
cers, sailing master— all of them are gentlemen of stiff
upper lips, and aristocratic noses" (p. 50). Considered as
a class, the crewmen who are most likely to thrive in a man-
of-war are "the Happy Jacks," fellows "without shame, with
out a soul, so dead to the least dignity of manhood" that
any one of them "could hardly be called a man" (p. 360).
All the sailor needs in addition to a healthy body, Melville
says, is "a good memory, and the more of an arithmetician he:
is, the better" (p. 14).
Melville's criticism of types is extended to include
the professions, which he satirizes on the bases of their
heartless attention to empty ceremony and form. In a pas
sage that echoes the caricatures of Smollett and Dickens,
Melville has old Surgeon Cuticle, the senior medical offi
cer, demonstrate how quickly and efficiently he can amputate
the leg of an injured sailor. Before the operation, the
surgeon prepares himself by removing his wig, glass eye, and
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16 3 |
false teeth to stand before the horrified patient and assem-l
bled junior medical officers as an emblem of death: "The I
I ■ !
withered, shrunken, one-eyed, toothless, hairless Cuticle;
jwith a trunk half dead— a memento mori to behold I " White-
I i
packet observes (p. 244). During the operation, in which
the patient dies, the character of Cuticle represents a re-
ductio ad absurdum in Melville's argument against conven
tion:
"And now, young gentlemen," said Cuticle turning to
the Assistant Surgeons, "while the patient is coming to,
permit me to describe to you the highly interesting oper
ation I am about to perform."
"Mr. Surgeon of the Fleet," said Surgeon Bandage, "if
you are about to lecture, permit me to present you with
your teeth; they will make your discourse more readily
understood." And so saying. Bandage, with a bow, placed
the two semicircles of ivory into Cuticle's hands.
"Thank you. Surgeon Bandage," said Cuticle, and
slipped the ivory into its place. (p. 244)
Melville is less severe with the clergy, which he rep
resents in the character of a transcendentalist chaplain—
"a slender, middle-aged man, of an amiable deportment and
irreproachable conversation; but I must say that his sermons
were but ill-calculated to benefit the crew" (p. 147). He
had "drunk at the mystic fountain of Plato; his head had
been turned by the Germans; and this I will say, that White-
Jacket himself saw him with Coleridge's Biographie Literaria
in his hand" (p. 147). In his sermons, the chaplain is
"hard upon the Gnostics and Marcionites of the second cen
tury of the Christian era; but he never, in the remotest
manner, attacked the every-day vices of the nineteenth
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164
century, as eminently illustrated in our man-of-war world"
(p. 148).
This description, which contrasts with Emerson's vigor
ous attack on historical Christianity in "The Divinity
School Address" of 1838, suggests that Melville's real tar-
I
get is religious orthodoxy, oriented as it is to the past.
i
Melville's employment of the term transcendentalist indi
cates his rejection of the transcendental religion, which by
22
1849 had lost most of its initial vitality as a movement.
The minister, however, like the surgeon, is characterized
primarily in terms of the class he represents, rather than
as an individual or as a transcendentalist. "Of all the
noble lords in the ward-room," White-Jacket says,
this lord-spiritual, with the exception of the purser,
was in the highest favour with the commodore, who fre
quently conversed with him in a close and confidential
manner. Nor, upon reflection was this to be marvelled
at, seeing how efficacious, in all despotic governments,
it is for the throne and altar to go hand in hand.
(p. 148)
The evils which Melville perceives in the forms of
civilized behavior are embodied in the character of Bland,
the diabolical master-at-arms, whose type Melville portrays
again in the malevolent Claggart of Billy Budd. As chief
of police on the world-ship, Bland sees that orders are
obeyed and arrests those who break regulations. Although
22
Hutchinson, pp. 98-136, describes Theodore Parker's
role in the "Transcendentalist Controversy" of the 1840's
and early 1850's. Parker was considered a radical partly
because of his rejection of a historical approach to
Chr i^s t i^n i t y. _________________________________________________
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I 165
not as memorable a character as Jackson in Redburn, Bland
jalso is "an organic and irreclaimable scoundrel, who did
wicked deeds as the cattle browse the herbage, because
jwicked deeds seemed the legitimate operation of his whole
infernal organization" (p. 175). Unlike Jackson, whose
cracked nature is suggested in his physical appearance and
I :
words. Bland is a "neat and gentlemanly villain, and broke
his biscuit with a dainty hand. There was a fine polish
about his whole person, and a pliant, insinuating style in
his conversation that was, socially, quite irresistible"
(p. 177). Furthermore, Bland "never swore, and chiefly ‘
abounded in passing puns and witticisms, varied with humor
ous contrasts between ship and shore life, and many agree
able and racy anecdotes, very tastefully narrated" (p. 177).
If Jackson represents the will at war with nature. Bland
portrays Melville's conception of a man completely lacking
in moral sensitivity. In other words, Bland epitomizes con-;
formity. "Save my noble captain. Jack Chase, he proved him-;
self the most entertaining, I had almost said the most com
panionable man in the mess," White-Jacket observes (p. 177).
Though Bland is suspended for smuggling. Captain Claret re
instates him in a public ceremony, perhaps, as the narrator
suggests, as an act of gratitude for a favor (p. 179).
Portrayed as forms, rather than as men, none of the
conformists aboard the Neversink has the stature of Mel
ville's gallant nonconformists. On the other hand.
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166
characters such as Jack Chase, Mad Jack, and Ushant, despite:
I
their self-reliance, lack the fullness of conception of
either the epic or tragic hero. Sailing as they are, under
secret orders, they are ignorant of their destination and
none the wiser for their experiences. White-Jacket alone
grows inwardly; his development, however, is secondary to
I
his role as an observer-commentator.
Although Melville rejected Redburn and White-Jacket as
jobs written for money, through them he regained his popu
larity as a novelist. In addition, they stimulated him to
Experiment further with transcendental symbolism. Again
concentrating his vision of society in the image of a ship,
Melville in his next novel, Moby-Dick, portrays a tragic
guest for wholeness of vision in Ahab's search for the white
whale. In the sinking of the Peguod, another world-ship,
Melville fulfills the promise implicit in the glass ship in
Redburn and the ironically-named Neversink in White-Jacket: :
the destruction of a conforming society.
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CHAPTER V I I
TRANSCENDENTAL DIMENSIONS OF
MORTALITY IN MOBY-DICK
I
"Great geniuses are parts of the times," Melville wrote
I
in the summer of 1850; "they themselves are the times, and
X
possess a correspondent coloring." This comment in the
I
bssay, "Hawthorne and His Mosses, " which Melville composed
\ t
while working on Moby-Dick, indicates Melville's own rela
tion to the predominantly transcendental milieu of the
1840's and early 1850's as much as it does Hawthorne's.
Melville's conception of genius suggests the underlying idea
of Emerson's Representative Men, published early in 1850.
Emerson had written that although a great man "inhabits a
higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with
labor and difficulty," such a unique individual "must be re
lated to us, and our life receive from him some promise of
explanation" (Works, IV, 6). "All men," Emerson continued,
"are at last of a size"; and "the key to the power of the
greatest men" is that "their spirit diffuses itself"
(pp. 31-33).
^In The Portable Melville, p. 410. Further references
to "Hawthorne and His Mosses" are from this source.
162___________________________
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1681
Even though thirteen years had elapsed since Emerson |
summed up the ideals of the period in "The American Scholar " |
address, Melville in praising Hawthorne restated its chal
lenge for an independent national literature. "And we want '
I :
no American Goldsmiths," Melville wrote; "nay, we want no |
^erican Miltons. . . . no American writer should write like
I :
an Englishman, or a Frenchman; let him write like a man, for
i
then he will write like an American" (p. 413). While other
writers such as Irving and Longfellow were adapting European
models to American subjects, Emerson had observed: "We have
listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. . . . We
will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands;
2
we will speak our own minds." Like Emerson, who defined
the poet or scholar as Man Thinkincr, Melville would have the
writer look into his own mind and heart and "write like a
man."^
This transcendentalist respect for personal integrity
permeates Melville's self-revealing comments on Hawthorne. '
In a statement that suggests the thesis of Emerson's "Self- i
Reliance," Melville implies his own recovery of confidence
^Works, I, 114-115. Perry Miller describes in detail
the controversy over America's literary future among mid- |
nineteenth century writers in The Raven and the Whale. In
presenting the variety of conflicting viewpoints, however.
Miller overlooks the parallels in Emerson's and Melville's
attitudes on literary nationalism.
3
Melville's idea that for an American to write like a
man he must reject European conventions also parallels Emer-i
son's precept in "Self-Reliance": "Whoso would be a man
must be a nonconformist" (Works. II, 50)._____________________ I
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169;
after the failure of Mardi. "But it is better to fail in
originality than to succeed in imitation," he wrote. "He
jwho has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great.
Failure is the true test of greatness" (p. 413). In a simi
lar vein, Emerson said, "To be great is to be misunder-
I i
{stood"; and "Insist on yourself; never imitate. . . . Where '
lis the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is
the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washing
ton, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is unique"
i (Works, II, 58, 83).
Although Melville in his essay praised Hawthorne for
the Calvinistic blackness that sets off "the Indian-summer
sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne's soul," Melville's;
language reflects the polarity and reliance on intuition
that characterize Emerson's ethic and esthetic. "But this
darkness," Melville wrote, "gives more effect to the ever-
moving dawn, that forever advances through it, and circum
navigates his world . . . in certain moods, no man can weigh
this world, without throwing in something, somehow like
Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance" (p. 406). The
idea is implicit in Emerson's essay on "Compensation," which
opens with a poem on the polarities in nature:
The wings of Time are black and white.
Pied with morning and with night.
Mountain tall and ocean deep
Trembling balance duly keep.
In changing moon, and tidal wave.
Glows the feud of Want and Have.
Gauge of more and less through space
______ Electric star and pencil plays.___________________
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170i
I
The lonely Earth amid the balls
That hurry through the eternal halls,
A makeweight flying to the void.
Supplemental asteroid.
Or compensatory spark.
Shoots across the neutral Dark.
(Works, II, 91)
Both Melville and Emerson describe the balance of opposites
i
in nature in terms of absolute black and white— Melville's
reference to the darkness of Original Sin or human frailty
corresponds to Emerson's "neutral dark" of skepticism; Mel
ville's "ever-moving dawn" which he sees in Hawthorne's art
parallels Emerson's "compensatory spark" of spiritual prin-
4
ciple. In other words, at the time Melville admired Haw
thorne's black thought and wrote about a white whale, his
thinking reflected the transcendental conception of the art-:
ist, whose task is to see nature whole from an independent
point of view and to represent to the mortal senses this
total vision with its paradoxes and contrasts.
At the beginning of Moby-Dick, Melville suggests this
view of the artist as distinct from that of the transcenden
tal priest, who is concerned primarily with supersensual
reality. In the brief section entitled "Etymology," which
^Melville's references to gray mists, as in the "gray
misty imperfect dawn” when Ishmael and Queequeg board the
Peguod, suggest the mystery and complexity of imperfect per
ception (Moby-Dick, p. 97). Similarly, in the opening lines:
of "Benito Cereno" (1855), Melville establishes an ominous
tone with his description of the slave ship San Dominick
drifting aimlessly through "troubled gray vapors" over a
leaden-hued sea. "Shadows present," Melville comments,
"foreshadowing deeper shadows to come" (The Piazza Tales,
ed. Egbert S. Oliver [New York: Hendricks House, Farrar
Straus ,__19481,__p. . . . 55_)_.__________________________________________:
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171j
[functions as an epic invocation to the Muse, Melville hints i
j '
at both the transcendental significance and the tragic tone :
of the novel:
!
I
The pale Usher— threadbare in coat, heart, body, and
brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexi
cons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly
embellished with all the gay flags of all the known na-
I tions of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars;
I it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality. (Moby-
Dick, p. xxxvii)
Î
Melville, it will be recalled, was himself a "pale Usher,"
or schoolmaster's assistant, in Pittsfield in the fall of
1837 (Log, I, 70). The reference to grammars as reminders
of one's mortality parallels the moral and esthetic link
that Emerson described between words, nature, and the mind. ;
"Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual
fact," Emerson wrote in Nature, "if traced to its root, is
found to be borrowed from some material appearance" (Works.
I, 25). In "The Poet," Emerson observed that "the etymolo
gist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant
picture. Language is fossil poetry" (Works, III, 22).
Any discussion of the transcendentalism in Moby-Dick,
however, must take into account Melville's close personal
association with Hawthorne, which began shortly after Mel
ville moved his family from New York City to Pittsfield in
July 1850 (Log, I, 378). By a fortunate coincidence Haw
thorne lived in nearby Lenox. The ensuing cordial relation-;
ship between the two authors undoubtedly is the primary rea-:
son that Melville delayed the completion of Moby-Dick for
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172
more than half a year. Melville had written in June to
Richard Bentley, the London publisher of Mardi. Redburn, andj
White-Jacket, promising "a new work" in "the latter part of ^
the coming autumn" (Letters, p. 109). He did not complete
the novel, however, until the following summer. During the ;
i :
interval, as Jay Leyda suggests, Hawthorne "compelled Mel
ville to see his task newly, more deeply and daringly"
(Portable Melville, p. 423). Melville inscribed Moby-Dick
to Hawthorne as a "token" of "admiration for his genius"
(Moby-Dick, p. xxxv).
I In Hawthorne, Melville found an example of a self-
reliant author who had overcome early failure to succeed.
The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, was a best-seller of i
the day. It had established Hawthorne's reputation as a
novelist possessing a profound insight into what Hawthorne
called "the truth of the human heart.If Melville needed
a precept on art from a writer of fiction, rather than a
lecturer-poet such as Emerson, it was available to him in
the following passage from Hawthorne's short story "The Art
ist of the Beautiful" in Mosses from an Old Manse:
It is requisite for the ideal artist to possess a force
of character that seems hardly compatible with its deli
cacy; he must keep his faith in himself, while the in
credulous world assails him with its utter disbelief; he
must stand up against mankind and be his own sole
The phrase is in Hawthorne's preface to The House of
the Seven Gables, in The Complete Works of Nathaniel Haw
thorne (New York, 1882), III, 13.____________________________
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1731
j
disciple, both as respects his genius, and the objects
to which it is directed.^
Melville triple-scored this sentence in his copy of Haw
thorne's Mosses, which he received from his Aunt Mary Mel
ville on July 18, 1850, one month before the first install
ment of his review of the book was published in Evert
buyckinck's The Literary World (Log., I, 379, 389).
Had Melville desired, however, he could easily have
found a parallel passage in Emerson's "The Poet," which ap
peared in Essays, Second Series in 1844, the same year Haw-
7
thorne wrote "The Artist of the Beautiful." In "The Poet,"
Emerson also stressed the artist's need to keep faith with
himself in the face of public indifference:
0 poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and
pastures, and not in castles or by swordblade any longer.
The conditions are hard, but equal. . . . The world is
full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is
thine; thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long
season. . . . And this is the reward; that the ideal
shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual
world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not
troublesome to thy invulnerable essence. (Works, III,
41-42)
The conclusion of Hawthorne's story, in which Owen War-
land spiritually triumphs even though he sees the destruc
tion of his mechanical butterfly, so impressed Melville that
he alluded to it in the opening lines of "Hawthorne and His i
Mosses":
^In The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, II, 512.
7
B. R. McElderry, Jr., "The Transcendental Hawthorne,"
MQ, 2:318-319, Summer 1961^____________________________________
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Î74i
I
Would that all excellent books were foundlings with- |
out father or mother, that so it might be, we could glor^ '
ify them, without including their ostensible authors!
Nor would any true man take exception to this— least of
all, he who writes: "When the Artist rises high enough
to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he makes
it perceptible to mortal senses becomes of little value
I in his eyes, while his spirit possesses itself in the
enjoyment of the reality.
These passages linking both Hawthorne and Melville to
Emerson's thought suggest that the friendship which devel
oped between the novelists when Melville was writing Moby-
Dick was based at least in part on their unacknowledged
though genuine appreciation of transcendental ethics and
esthetics. Although Melville particularly admired Haw
thorne's Calvinistic strain, which is appropriate for trag
edy, the evidence indicates that through Hawthorne, Melville
had his most important personal access to American transcen
dentalism. Hawthorne, who was fifteen years older than
Melville, was married to a younger sister of Elizabeth Pea
body, a prominent member of the Transcendental Club
(Hutchinson, p. 32). Furthermore, despite Hawthorne's
satirical treatment of transcendentalism in "The Celestial
Railroad," he and his wife Sophia had a long-standing busi
ness and personal relationship with Emerson, as well as with
Alcott and other transcendentalists. In addition to resid
ing briefly at Brook Farm in 1841 and even serving in the
offices of Trustee and Chairman of the Committee on Finance,
o
Portable Melville, p. 400. Melville is quoting the
last sentence of Hawthorne's story. See The Complete Works :
of Nathaniel Hawthorne, II, 535-536.__________________________ :
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175
i
Hawthorne had rented the "Old Manse" in Concord from Emerson
for three years.
In the fall of 1850, when Hawthorne and Melville were
exchanging neighborly visits, Sophia Hawthorne reported in ai
letter to her mother not only that Melville "shut himself
I
into the boudoir" one morning "and read Mr. Emerson's es
says," but also that Melville described her husband's fea
tures in a manner suggesting Emerson's characterization of
the transcendental poet. Sophia wrote:
[Melville] said Mr. Hawthorne was the first person whose
physical being appeared to him wholly in harmony with
the intellectual and spiritual . . . "the gleam— the sha
dow— and the peace supreme" all were in exact response
to the high calm intellect, the glowing, deep heart—
the purity of actual and spiritual life.^
Similarly, in "The Poet," Emerson referred to the poet as |
one who "stands among partial men for the complete man." He
is "the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man
without impediment, who sees and handles that which others
dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is
representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power
to receive and to impart" (Works, III, 6-7).
Though Emerson did not visit the Hawthornes at Lenox,
he wrote in December of 1850, inviting Hawthorne to join
^Eleanor Melville Metcalf, p. 91. Melville's descrip- ;
tion of Hawthorne suggests a knowledge of physiognomy, a
pseudo-science aimed at discerning character or disposition i
through the study of the face or the form of the body. At
the time of Mrs. Hawthorne's letter, Hawthorne was writing
The House of the Seven Gables, whose hero, the daguerrotyp- |
ist Holgrave, judges the inner traits of his photographic
shbjects by studying their portraits._________________________ ,
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" 1
with Theodore Parker, Thoreau, Holmes, Lowell, and others in
contributing to a projected New England magazine. "So I
hope," Emerson concluded, |
since they proceed so gently, you will not be taught to '
deny them, but will let them lay siege to your heart with :
I their soft approaches. A good magazine we have not in i
! America, and we are all its friends beforehand. If they
j win you, I shall think a great point gained.^0
Nothing resulted from this proposal; but in 1852, Hawthorne
f ■
moved back to Concord, the center of American transcenden
talism. He purchased Bronson Alcott's former residence,
"The Hillside," and renamed it "The Wayside." Emerson, who
was part owner, lived less than a mile away. Though Haw- |
thorne served as American consul in Liverpool from 1854 to
1857, he returned to "The Wayside" in 1850, where he lived
until his death in 1864. Emerson was an honorary pallbearer
at his funeral (Julian Hawthorne, II, 347-348).
Like Melville, Hawthorne expressed a qualified admira
tion for Emerson in a passage which Melville must have read
in Mosses from an Old Manse. "For myself," Hawthorne wrote
in "The Old Manse,"
there had been epochs of my life when I too might have
asked of this prophet the master word that should solve
the riddle of the universe; but now, being happy, I felt
as if there were no questions to be put, and therefore
admired Emerson as poet of deep beauty and austere ten
derness, but sought nothing from him as a philosopher.
It was good, nevertheless, to meet him in the woodpaths,
or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual
^*^In Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife
(Boston, 1884), I, 382. Details of Hawthorne's return to
Concord in 1852 are from this work.
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177;
i
gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a I
shining one; and he so quiet, so simple, so without pre- j
tension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to |
receive more than he could impart. And, in truth, the
heart of many an ordinary man had, perchance, inscrip
tions which he could not read. But it was impossible to
dwell in his vicinity without inhaling more or less the
mountain atmosphere of his lofty thought, which, in the
brains of some people, wrought a singular giddiness,—
new truth being as heady as new wine.^
I Hawthorne's quiet appraisal clearly elevates Emerson
! ;
jthe artist and individualist over Emerson the philosopher
and separates him from other transcendentalists with their
'"singular giddiness." Similarly, Melville refused to
"oscillate in Emerson's rainbow" after hearing him lecture
in 1849. Melville nevertheless noted that Emerson was not
like other transcendentalists with their "oracular gibber
ish, " and praised him in a curious reference to whaling:
"I love all men who dive," Melville wrote to Evert Duyckinck^
"Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great
whale to go down stairs five miles or more; and if he dont
rsicl attain bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't |
fashion the plummet that will" (Letters, p. 79). Implicit
in the comments of both Hawthorne and Melville is a sense of
the limitation of human comprehension. They admired Emerson
not as a divinity, but as a mortal Man Thinking-.
During the latter part of 1850, when Melville exchanged
^^The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, II, 42.
McElderry cites this passage to show that Hawthorne's fre
quently-quoted remark that "he sought for nothing from Emer
son as a philosopher" does not imply Hawthorne's total re
jection of transcendentalism. See "The Transcendental Haw
thorne, " pp. 313-314. ___________
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178
visits with Hawthorne and apparently revised Moby-Dick, Haw-
hhorne was completing The House of the Seven Gables, which i
le regarded as his favorite work. In this popular successor
ifco The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne offset the blackness of his
thought with a portrait of a cheerful transcendental hero-
I
ine, self-reliant Phoebe, who helped to dispel evil influ
ences of the past that haunted the old Pyncheon home. Mel
ville admired Hawthorne's new book in his letter dated
April 16, 1851. He compared the romance to "a fine old
chamber, abundantly, but still judiciously furnished. . . .
j !
There are rich hangings, wherein are braided scenes from the:
tragedies" (Letters, pp. 123-124). Melville especially
praised the character of Clifford and observed in a post- i
script that the marriage of Phoebe with the daguerreotypist ^
"is a fine stroke, because of his turning out to be a Maule"
(p. 124). Melville's comments suggest a second aspect of
Hawthorne's influence: the awakening interest of Melville j
in the relation of setting and character to plot, with its
sustained dramatic conflict and possibilities for ironic
resolution. These very qualities distinguish Moby-Dick from;
Melville's five preceding novels.
In addition to the mixture of Calvinism and transcen
dentalism that Melville admired, Hawthorne's art reflects an
almost neoclassical interest in symmetry of form, which con-:
trasts sharply with Melville's characteristic digressiveness.
As one novelist writing about another, Hawthorne summed up
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179
his attitude towards Melville's art in a letter to Evert
j
jDuyckinck on August 29, 1850: "I have read Melville's work
j I
jwith a progressive appreciation of the author," Hawthorne
1 ;
Isaid. "No writer ever put the reality before the eyes of i
his reader more unflinchingly than he does in 'Redburn,' and
j'White-Jacket. ' 'Mardi ' is a rich book, with depths here
and there that compel a man to swim for his life. It is so
good one scarcely pardons the writer for not having brooded
long over it, so as to make it a great deal better" (Log,
1, 391).
Hawthorne's interest in design, apparent in his comment
on Melville's need to make Mardi "a great deal better," is
perhaps his most important contribution to Melville's growth
as an artist. In contrast to Melville's continuing struggle
to integrate varied materials drawn from experience and
reading into some recognizable form, Hawthorne started with
a design and worked deductively to give it concrete shape in
a story. Edgar Allan Poe had identified Hawthorne's method
of composition in his celebrated review of Hawthorne's
Twice-Told Tales. "In the whole composition," Poe wrote,
"there should be no word written, in which the tendency,
direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established de-
12
sign." Unlike Melville, who relied largely on poetic
intuition, especially in Mardi, Hawthorne kept notebooks as
12
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Redfield,
1859), III, 198.
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18Ü
repositories for ideas and details, many of which he later I
developed in his stories. For example, the underlying mean-l
ing of Hawthorne's story, "The Birthmark," which Melville
I !
apparently admired although he did not mention it in his re-i
jview of Hawthorne's Mosses, is contained in the following
I ' :
|entry in the American Notebooks for 1837 : "A person to be
in possession of something as perfect as mortal man has a
right to demand; he tries to make it better, ruins it en-
13
tirely." The Calvinistic severity of this theme is appar-i
ént: mortal man sins when he attempts to arrogate Godship
by his handiwork, since his action springs from egotism.
Characteristically, Hawthorne modified the design of his
story, before he wrote it. In 1840 he entered in his note
book a second statement of the theme with an added transcen
dental note of comfort and forgiveness : "A person to be the
death of his beloved in trying to raise her to more than
mortal perfection; yet this should be a comfort to him for
having aimed so highly and holily" (p. 210). The finished
story, first published in 1843, closely follows the revised :
plan; Aylmer, a scientist, removes a tiny birthmark shaped
like a hand from the cheek of his beautiful wife, Georgiana,
who dies, although she forgives him for his noble purpose.
In his own copy of Hawthorne's Mosses, Melville checked and :
The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, IX, 105.
Melville marked four passages from the story in his copy of
Hawthorne's Mosses (see Log, I, 380).
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181
underscored these passages in the story describing man's
tragic plight :
[Aylmer's] most splendid successes were almost invari
ably failures, if compared with the ideal at which he
aimed. . . . [Aylmer's journal] was the sad confession,
and continual exemplification, of the short-comings of
the composite man— the spirit burthened with clay and
working in matter; and of the despair that assails the
I higher nature [Melville's scoring], at finding itself so
I miserably thwarted by the earthly part. Perhaps every
I man of genius, in whatever sphere, might recognize the
I image of his own experience in Aylmer's j o u r n a l .
I :
Hawthorne's shadowy portrait of Aylmer as that of a "com
posite man" not only reflects the Emersonian esthetic ideal ;
Of representing a total view of man's estate in a work of ,
art, but also anticipates Melville's far more dynamic Cap
tain Ahab, who also epitomizes the human condition in Moby- :
Dick. Ahab's despair, however, is over his own mortal im
perfection symbolized by physical disfigurement; yet like
Aylmer, he becomes a monomaniac in seeking to impose his
will on nature.
Despite an underlying similarity between Aylmer and
Ahab, the two characters illustrate the essential difference
in the art of the two novelists. If Melville's need as an
artist was to achieve a feeling for design, Hawthorne's
basic problem was to infuse an abstract idea with the flesh
and blood of concrete reality. The charm of "The Birthmark"
I^og., I, 380. Aylmer's tragic quest for perfection
contrasts with the esthetic triumph of Owen Warland in "The
Artist of the Beautiful." Though both men are perfection
ists, the artist governed by the heart succeeds, where the
scientist ruled by intellect, or the head, fails.___________
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182
!
and of most of Hawthorne's fiction lies in an evanescent |
jlream-like quality, an otherworldliness which is typical of ;
llegory. Hawthorne was aware of a lack of vigor character-!
izing many of his stories. In the Preface to the 1851 edi
tion of Twice-Told Tales, which he composed at the time Mel-!
ville was working nearby on Moby-Dick, Hawthorne commented
that his stories "have the pale tint of flowers that bios-
i ■
somed in too retired a shade— the coolness of a meditative
habit, which diffuses itself through the feeling and obser-
i 1 5
vation of every sketch."
I Far from criticizing this lack of texture in Haw
thorne's stories, Melville in his letters to Hawthorne
showed an increasing preoccupation with his own problems of :
form. On June 1, 1851, for example, Melville echoed Haw
thorne 's Preface to Twice-Told Tales in commenting that "the
calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a
man ought always to compose,— that, I fear can seldom be
mine" (Letters, p. 128). He followed this transcendental
reference to the organic conception of a work of art with a
vigorous criticism of his own work: "Dollars damn me. . . .
What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,— it will
The Complete Works of Hawthorne, I, 16. Hawthorne's
reference to his stories as sketches recalls Washington
Irving's use of the term in his famous collection of tales
and essays. The Sketch Book (1819-1820). In comparing the
two writers after reading Twice-Told Tales, Melville wrote
to Evert Duyckinck: "Irving is a grasshopper to him— put
ting the souls of the two men together, I mean" (Letters,
pp. 121-122). ___________________
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I 1831
not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. Sol
the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches" |
(p. 128). In November, after Hawthorne had read Moby-Dick, ;
I ■ ;
Melville wrote to him about imperfections in the design of
I I
his new book : "You were archangel enough to despise the ;
j I
imperfect body, and embrace the soul," he said. "Once you
I
hugged the ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in the
mouth, and heard the rushing of the demon,— the familiar,—
and recognized the sound; for you have heard it in your own ^
solitudes" (p. 142).
I Melville's new self-consciousness over form in the let-!
ters to Hawthorne is in striking opposition to his earlier
apparent indifference to planning in Mardi. In what is |
.
probably an autobiographical passage from that book, Mel
ville speaks through the philosopher Babbalanja in describ
ing the writing methods of the great Mardian poet Lombardo:
When Lombardo set about his work, he knew not what it
would become. He did not build himself in with plans;
he wrote right on; and so doing got deeper and deeper
into himself; and like a resolute traveler, plunging
through baffling woods, at last was rewarded for his
toils. (Mardi, p. 524)
Replacing this oversimplified conception of a transcendental
artist who writes solely by instinct, Melville found in Haw
thorne a more complex living model, who could balance poetic
intuition with critical judgment and employ techniques of
fiction to gain pre-conceived effects.
Partly as a result of Melville's fortunate association
with Hawthorne, Moby-Dick is Melville's most carefully______
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184
constructed novel. With its world view and plot, it repre-
I
sents that point in the development of the American novel at|
^hich the transcendental esthetic ideal of art as an epitome
j
bf the world enters the mainstream of fiction. Hawthorne's
I :
influence on the form of this novel served mainly to inten
sify transcendental elements already inherent in Melville's
work. In the central dramatic conflict between Ahab and the
white whale, Melville sums up the total relationship between
mortal man and the primal powers of creation. By compari
son, even Hawthorne's masterpiece. The Scarlet Letter,
though more symmetrical in structure than any of Melville's
novels, is far more restricted in scope than the all-
encompassing panorama of experience portrayed in Moby-Dick.
Though gaining from Hawthorne's example, Melville retained a
breadth of vision that has its closest parallels in the ex
pansive concepts of nature and the human mind in the writ
ings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.
In conception, the well-plotted voyage of Moby-Dick is
in some respects an inversion of the chartless voyage of
Mardi, which until 1850 was Melville's most ambitious book
and his only failure. Melville had described Mardi as a
"Romance of Polynesian Adventure" with "a story wild enough,
I assure you, and with a meaning too" (Letters, pp. 70-71).
Similarly, he characterized Moby-Dick to Richard Bentley as
"a romance of adventure founded upon certain wild legends in
the Southern Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the
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1851
1
author's own personal experiences of two years and more, as |
a harpooner" (Letters, p. 109). The terms romance, adven
ture, and particularly wild suggest not only a link between Î
i :
the two novels, but also a further association with a tran- ■
I
jscendental conception of the poet ' s frenzy, which Emerson
Expressed in "The Poet":
i
The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when
; he speaks somewhat wildly, or "with the flower of the
mind"; not with the intellect used as an organ, but with
the intellect released from all service and suffered to
take its direction from its celestial life; or as the
ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intel
lect alone but with the intellect inebriated by nectar.
Like Mardi, Moby-Dick begins with a straightforward
narrative of seafaring adventure that satirizes the tran
scendental religion. In contrast to Taji's naive reliance
on intuition which motivates him to jump ship in mid-ocean,
Ishmael's more plausible desire for spiritual renewal impels
him to go to sea. "It is a way I have of driving off the
spleen," Ishmael confides:
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;
whenever it is damp, drizzly November in my soul; when
ever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin
warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I
meet . . . then, I account it high time to get to sea as
soon as I can. (Moby-Dick, p. 1)
Ishmael, whose Biblical name Melville first mentions in Red
burn in a reference to sailors as outcasts, is more direct
Works, III, 27. Frederick Ives Carpenter observes
that Emerson's description of poetic inspiration as "the
flower of the mind" is similar to Plotinus' reference to es-|
thetic experience as "the flower of intellect." See Emerson
and Asia, p. 89. ________________________________________________ j
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186:
than Taji in criticizing the basis for the transcendental
17 !
faith in a benevolent nature. Though a Platonist, like |
laji, in associating the sea with thought, Ishmael neverthe-i
bless respects the validity of sensory experience and warns
I
Pantheists against the dangers of excessive meditation, es- ;
pecially if they are in "the tops" one hundred fifty feet
above the deck:
"Why, thou monkey, " said a harpooner to one of these
lads, "we've been cruising now hard upon three years,
and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce
as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here." Perhaps they
were; . . . but lulled into such an opium-like listless
ness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded
youth by the blending cadence 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, half-seen, 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. . . . But while this sleep, this
dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your
hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror.
Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid
day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled
shriek you drop through the transparent air into the sum- :
mer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye
Pantheists! (pp. 156-157)
Despite Ishmael's realistic warning, the narrator re
cedes into the background midway in the narrative, like Taji
in Mardi, as Melville in the guise of the omniscient author ;
portrays the world of the mind. In Mardi, the shift in
In Redburn, p. 70, the narrator comments, "at last I
found myself a sort of Ishmael in the ship without a single
friend or companion." Sailors as a class, he discovers
later, are outcasts, even though they are the primum mobile
of all commerce (p. 157) ......................................
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187;
focus occurs when Taji and his companions, representing the |
faculties of the mind, set out on a tour of the Mardian
Isles, a microcosm of the world, in search of the blonde
Yillah, whom Taji regards as a symbol of transcendental
beauty. By comparison, in Moby-Dick the shift occurs with
jbhe introduction of Captain Ahab, who directs his world-
! :
Ship, the Peguod, in a single-minded pursuit of the white
■jwhale, whose whiteness containing all colors of the spectrum
epitomizes the totality of nature. Ishmael's philosophical :
meditation on the evil of whiteness in the chapter "The
Whiteness of the Whale" should be read in relation to the
larger context of the novel, in which white is the predomi
nant color. It is represented in the whale-bone fittings on
the Peguod, a dark, melancholy, cannibal of a craft; in
Ahab's livid scar and artificial whalebone leg setting off
his bronzed complexion; in dark Fedallah's turban of white
braided hair resembling a second moon when he is aloft at
night searching for the whalein the waves shining in the
calm moonlit sea like silver scrolls; in the mysterious
18
Fedallah, who is Ahab's demonaic harpooner, is a
Parsee, a believer in the pre-Moslem cult of Zoroastrianism.
The ancient Persians adhering to this faith conceived of two
gods: Ahura Mazda, the god of moral and natural order who
is "the full of light," and Ahriman, the god of darkness.
The two moons of Melville's description suggest the dualism :
of the Parsee's faith. On the other hand, Fedallah's satan-i
ism, which reflects the Zoroastrian sense of evil, contrasts;
with the religious significance of his braided white hair,
the color of Mohammed's. See John B. Noss, "Zoroastrianism:;
the Religion of Ethical Dualism," Man's Religions (New York:
Macmillan, 1963), pp. 464-493._________________________________ ;
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188}
lightness of the squid and in the St. Elmo's fire, balls of i
electricity that illuminate the masts of the Peguod with a |
pallid glow; in the sun that brightens the sea during the
elimactic days of struggle with the whale, and finally in
jthe creamy pool of foam that marks the spot where the Peguod
binks.
' Furthermore, in the broader context of Melville's ear
lier novels, white in Typee is the color of the natives'
thatched huts and of the sacred tappa cloth which Fayaway
I '
wears. In Mardi, Taji accompanied by the Viking Jarl fol
lows first the sun and then the fair Yillah, whose image he ;
pursues into the night over an endless sea; in Redburn with
its allusions to Carlylian clothes philosophy, the evil
Jackson wears a white hat; and in White-Jacket. the self-
reliant narrator's white garment absorbs the weather like a
sponge.
The white whale of Moby-Dick represents nature in its
totality. Although the characters in the novel conjure
their own self-revealing phantoms of the whale, the creature
Melville describes in the climax of the narrative is a syn
thesis of their varied associations of the beauty, savagery,
and final mystery of nature. When the Peguod finally en
counters Moby Dick at the end of a long, circuitous voyage,
the whale first appears as a transcendental symbol suggest
ing the unity of the spiritual and mythical with the visible
world :
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1891
A gentle joyousness— a mighty mildness of repose in
swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white
bull of Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa cling- ■
ing to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes side- |
ways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleet
ness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete;
not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass
the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.
(p. 539)
In contrast to this impression of a "glorified White Whale,"
gliding with "a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness,"
Melville next describes Moby Dick as an embodiment of the
primal animal forces in nature:
And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the
tropical sea, among waves whose hand-clappings were sus
pended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still
withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged
trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his
jaw. But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the
water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a
high arch, like Virginia's Natural Bridge, and warningly '
waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god re
vealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight. (p. 540)
The two passages are complementary in suggesting the polar
ity of the natural with the supernatural, the real with the
ideal. "An inevitable dualism bisects nature," Emerson
wrote in "Compensation," "so that each thing is a half, and
suggests another thing to make it whole . . . " (Works, III,
97) .
Pitted against the whale in a death struggle is Captain
Ahab, who more than any previous character in Melville's
fiction is a composite portrait of mortal man, a representa
tion of Emerson's "god in ruins." Ahab's cracked nature,
like Jackson's in Redburn, corresponds to his physical
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19p
I
19 I
jdisfigurement. The first mention of the skipper in the
novel suggests the transcendental symbolism of his charac-
j !
ter: "He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man. Captain Ahab," '
says Captain Peleg, part owner of the Peguod, to Ishmael.
"Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well
as 'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the
jwaves; fixed his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than
I
whales" (Moby-Dick, p. 79). Ishmael's first glimpse of
Ahab, once the Peguod is at sea, reveals Ahab's white scar
that divides his body like "a perpendicular seam":
He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the
fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without con
suming them, or taking away one particle from their com
pacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form
seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable
mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way
out from among his gray hairs, and continuing right down
one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it
disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like
mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular
seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a
great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down
it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and
grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off
into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but
branded. (pp. 120-121)
Ahab's wound represents the mark of moral imperfection
in man, which Emerson described in "Compensation" as inher
ent in the character of great epic heroes:
Achilles is not quite invulnerable; the sacred waters did ;
not wash the heel by which Thetis held him. Siegfried,
in the Nibelungen, is not quite immortal, for a leaf fell
19
Melville describes Jackson's cracked appearance:
"His nose had broken down in the middle, and he squinted
with one eye, and did not look very straight out of the
other" (Redburn, p. 63) . ________________________________________
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191
on his back whilst he was bathing in the dragon's blood,
and that spot which it covered is mortal. And so it must
be. There is a crack in everything God has made. (Works,
II, 107)
With such a crack extending from Ahab's head to the white
Vhale-bone leg, the skipper resembles a living figurehead
I
tor the doomed Peguod, as he stands on his quarter-deck
steadying his bone leg in an auger hole and "looking
Straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow" (pp. 121-
122) .
In the imperfect world of mortal mind which Melville
portrays in Mobv-Dick, Ahab represents the defective human
will, defying nature rather than submitting to its power.
Having lost a leg in a previous encounter with Moby Dick,
Ahab is motivated to seek physical revenge against the white
whale. His underlying hostility, however, is directed
against the primal cause of his imperfection. Although he
stands before the crew "with a crucifixion in his face, in
all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty
woe," his defiance is absolute (p. 122). Addressing the
spiritual power of nature, he says:
I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that
thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor rev
erence wilt 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. (p. 500)
Ahab first discloses his basic intention in the pivotal
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192
70 I
Chapter XXXVI, "The Quarter Deck." After telling the crew
that they are to search for "a white-headed whale with a
! :
yrinkled brow and a crooked jaw," he says:
Hark ye yet again,— the little lower layer. All vis
ible 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
I 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 be
yond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see
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. (pp. 161-152)
The speech sets forth the basic Emersonian conception that
"the Universe is the externization [sic] of the soul" ("The
Poet," Works, III, 14). The soul one perceives behind ex
ternal appearances, however, ultimately proves to be one's
own self. Nature, as Emerson'said in "The American Scholar,"
provides "the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me
acquainted with myself" (I, 95). Ahab's tirade, therefore,
is the inciting force for a tragic drama of the human will.
Out of harmony with nature, the skipper passes judgment on
himself in a manner that applies the Emersonian doctrine of
compensation. "A man cannot speak but he judges himself,"
20
Ahab appears in the Quarter-Deck scene (p. 158) "with
bent head and half-slouched hat" in a manner paralleling
Father Mapple's description of the defiant Jonah before he
is swallowed by the whale : "Miserable man! Oh! most con
temptible and worthy of all scorn; with slouched hat and
guilty eye, skulking from his God" (p. 41) . _________________
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193
I
Emerson said in "Compensation": "With his will or against i
his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions |
by every word" (II, 110). Because Ahab rebels against na
ture, which to him seems governed by an inscrutable malice, '
I :
he condemns himself to inevitable destruction. The sun that
Ahab in his egotism would strike if it insulted him is more
i
than a pagan deity to be worshipped or defied; it is an
Emersonian and Platonic symbol of moral truth, which most
21
men are unable to face.
Melville depicts the deterioration of Ahab's character
in two broad stages, which suggest the identification of the
self with nature. In Chapter XLI, "Moby Dick," Ahab sees
the whale no longer as a pasteboard mask or wall shoved near,
but as "the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious
agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they
are left living on with half a heart and half a lung"
(p. 181). The whale, to Ahab, becomes a personification of
"all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the
subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil ..."
(p. 181). Consumed by his monomania, Ahab ultimately pro
jects his own uncontrolled ego on the universe. In Chapter
21
Paul W. Miller in "Sun and Fire Worship in Melville's
Mobv-Dick," NCF, 13:139-144, September 1958, points out the
Zoroastrian worship of sun and fire, which helps to explain
Ahab's hatred of the sun. His interpretation, however, does
not take into account the pervasive Emersonian and Platonic
associations of the sun as a symbol of transcendental real- ;
ity. In Nature, Emerson said, "Most people do not see the
sun" (Works, I, 8). See also Plato's Republic, pp. 219-220,
230-235. _____________________________
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194;
XCIX, "The Doubloon," he looks at the gold coin he had
nailed to the mast as a reward for the sailor who first sees
I :
Moby Dick and meditates on its cryptic design:
There‘s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops
! and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look
I here,— three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower,
j that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous,
the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab;
all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of
the rounder globe, which, like a magician's glass, to
each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mys
terious self. (p. 428)
Ahab's reference to the circle of nature recalls Emer
son 's aphorism in "Circles" that "the eye is the first cir
cle, " which represents "the Unattainable, the flying Per
fect, around which the hands of man can never meet" ( Works, :
II, 301). At this point in Ahab's quest, however, the skip
per 's conception is exactly antithetical to the extreme po
sition of the transcendental priest, who rejects the ortho
dox forms of religion and views nature as a window through
which one can see God. Emerson had stated this belief in
Nature in the often-quoted lines: "Standing on the bare
ground,— my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into
infinite space,— all mean egotism vanishes. I become a
transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents
of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and
parcel of God."^^ If Melville through Ahab rejects this
^^Wgrks, I, 10. This transcendental statement of the
ideal relation of God and man has its close parallel in the
writings of Plotinus. In his sixth Ennead, Plotinus de
scribed the relation of the One to the individual in these
words :__"No doubt we should not speak of seeing, but instead
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I I95j
iNeoplatonic idea on the grounds that it exceeds the limits |
I
of mortal comprehension, he nevertheless portrays in Ahab's ;
irelation to nature the Emersonian ethical and esthetic con-
I
Iception that "the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human
i I
mind. The laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as
face to face in a glass" (Nature, in Works, I, 32-33).
Seeing in nature nothing more than an image of himself,
Ahab resembles Narcissus, whose story Melville mentions
early in the narrative as "the key to it all":
And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus,
who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild
image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was
drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all
rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable
phantom of life; and this is the key to it all. (Moby-
Dick, p. 3)
When Ahab finally encounters the whale, he has his private
vision of Moby Dick as he peers over the side of his whale
boat, in the attitude of Narcissus looking at his image in
the water :
But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths,
he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a
white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and mag
nifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were
plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glisten
ing teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom.
It was Moby Dick's open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast,
shadowed bulk still half-blending with the blue of the
of seen and seer speak boldly of a simple unity. For in
this seeing we neither see nor distinguish nor are there
two. The man is changed, no longer himself nor self-belong
ing; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into It, one with
It; only in separation is there duality." Quoted from The
Essence of Plotinus, ed. Grace H. Turnbull and trans.
Stephen MacKenna (New York: Oxford, 1948) , p. 211.___________;
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1 9 6 j
i
sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like |
an open-doored marble tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep I
with his steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside from
this tremendous apparition. (p. 541)
In this moment of encounter between Ahab and the whale,
Melville dramatizes the meeting of the human mind and its
metaphor in nature. Ahab, however, is destroyed not so much
by the whale's intent as by his own actions in a manner
Emerson describes in "Compensation":
Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a
thread-ball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains
in the thrower's bag. Or rather it is a harpoon hurled
at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of cord in
the boat, and, if the harpoon is not good, or not well
thrown, it will go nigh to cut the steersman in twain or
to sink the boat.23
Similarly, Melville portrays Ahab's death as punishment
for a curse. In his last speech Ahab cries:
"I turn my body from the sun . . . from hell's heart
I stab at thee ; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at
thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common
pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then two to
pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee,
thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!" (p. 565) ,
Retribution is instant and complete:
The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew for
ward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the
groove;— ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did
clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck,
and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim,
23
Works, II, 110. Emerson's interest in whaling goes
back at least to 1833, when following his return from Europe
he preached often at New Bedford and lectured at Nantucket.
His journal entry for February 19, 1834, refers to a story
he heard about a white whale named Old Tom, which rushed
attacking boats and sank them (Locr, I, 61-62) . In May of
1847, he wrote to his daughter Ellen about the Essex disas- !
ter, an event which provides the factual basis for the sink
ing of the Peguod (p. 244) . ____________________________________ '
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1571
I
he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was
gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's
final end flew out of the stark empty tub, knocked down
an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its
depths. (p. 565)
This climactic struggle with its transcendental impli- :
cations is the crucial action in Moby-Dick. Considered as a
tragic peripety, or reversal of fortune, it has little re
semblance to the melodramatic death scene in Hawthorne's The
Scarlet Letter, in which the Rev. Dimmesdale makes a public
confession of his sins on the scaffold before he dies in the
arms of Hester Prynne. Despite Melville's indebtedness to
Shakespearean tragedy, especially King Lear, in the employ
ment of theatrical devices in parts of the novel and also in
the obvious parallel of Ahab and his cabin boy Pip to Lear
and his fool, Ahab's death is clearly related to the pattern
of retribution in Emerson's "Compensation," in which words
have the significance of deeds. Unlike Lear and other
tragic heroes, who repent or achieve a measure of painful
insight before they die, Ahab dies as the unredeemed victim
24
of his own thought and language.
24
Luther S. Mansfield and Howard Vincent in their ex
planatory notes on the text of Moby-Dick have numerous ref
erences concerning the relation of Ahab to such traditional
symbols of unrepentant defiance as Prometheus, who disobeys
Zeus but is rescued by Hercules, and Milton's Satan, who
wages endless war against God. Evidence of the rich allu
siveness of Melville's conception of Ahab, however, should
not obscure the transcendental implications of Ahab's death.
Unlike these immortal characters, Ahab is caught up in his
own line and in effect destroys himself.
Dan S. Norton and Peters Rushton in Classical Myths in i
English Literature (New York: Rinehart, 1958), pp. 311-317,
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198|
In describing the moral law that governs the universe, ;
Emerson chose to emphasize in his essays the absolute re
wards of living in harmony with nature. The punishment,
however, for such a mind as Ahab's at war with the scheme of
things is inevitable. "The beautiful laws and substances of
the world," Emerson said in "Compensation," "persecute and
i
whip the traitor. . . . You cannot recall the spoken word,
you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the
ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. Some damning cir
cumstance always transpires" (Works, II, 115-115). Ahab,
who symbolically turns his back on the sun before he curses I
and hurls his harpoon, fits Emerson's concept of human
frailty.
Melville magnifies the central conflict between Ahab
and the whale in two important ways, each of which applies
transcendental ethical and esthetic principles to the pat
tern of tragic fiction. In the first place, the exhaustive
exposition of the whaling industry, which Melville derived
largely from his reading, presents a microcosm of experience.
offer a concise summary of the Promethean myth and its im
pact on English and American poetry.
25
That Ahab is destroyed by his own line almost exactly
in the manner Emerson describes in "Compensation" is crucial
evidence against the assertion of Harry Levin in The Power
of Blackness (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), p. 198: "The ;
booming hope that all is for the best, the Emersonian doc
trine of compensation, is grimly answered by Melville's cult
of revenge ..." Though Levin is writing about Pierre, thé
charge that Emersonian compensation has no tragic implica-
txorL._is_rLefuted_by the drama_of_Ahab ' s death. ________________ _
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199:
I
a part of man's work that epitomizes the whole of life. Th^
expansiveness of Melville's treatment is suggested in the
preliminary section entitled "Extracts," which begins with
jthe Biblical reference, "And God created great whales, " and
concludes with the whaler's song:
I
Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale
j In his ocean home will be
A giant in might, where might is right.
And King of the boundless sea.
(Moby-Dick, pp. xl-lii)
Within the narrative, the chapters on various aspects of
whaling lore serve to separate stages of the action and to
give the impression of the passage of time in the long sea
voyage of the Peguod. Unlike the digressive essays in Mel
ville's earlier plotless novels, these chapters serve in
part to relieve dramatic tension and at the same time to add
to the texture of the novel as a whole. Melville indicates
this functional purpose in the opening lines of the chapter
entitled "Cetology," which follows the introduction of Ahab
and his officers, once the Peguod is at sea:
Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but
soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immen
sities. Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod's weedy
hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the
leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a
matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative
understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations
and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.
Mobv-Dick, p. 129. The term leviathan implies more
than whale in the novel. Melville's allusions to "levia
thanic revelations and allusions of all sorts" suggests
Thomas Hobbes' The Leviathan (1651), in which the term re
fers to the body politic._____________________________________
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200
Secondly, as in all great tragedies, the fall of Ahab
ias as an inevitable consequence the destruction of his
^orld, or more particularly, the unnatural order he has im-
I
posed on men. Ahab's world is the Peguod, named after an
I
extinct tribe of Massachusetts Indians and representing in
27
the novel the evil of conformity. Although the mates and
!
harpooners— "knights and squires" in Ahab's floating realm—
display competence and even heroism in the performance of
the hazardous routines of whaling, they are so caught up in
their traditional beliefs, customs, and superstitions that
they are either unable or unwilling to oppose Ahab's unbend
ing will. As a result of their lack of self-reliance, they
become in effect his accomplices and share his punishment in;
the sinking of the Peguod. Only Ishmael, an orphan in this
degenerate society, is saved.
Melville prepares for his climax with episodes that
radiate outward in significance as transcendental symbols
suggesting the whole of the novel in the part. This ten
dency accounts for the variety of conflicting interpreta
tions in the past forty years based on the close analysis of
individual episodes interpreted as microcosms of the novel.
27
Kenneth W. Cameron in "Etymological Significance of
Melville's Peguod," ESQ, 29:3-4, Fourth Quarter, 1962, notes
that in Hebrew and Chaldee dictionaries the term Peguod de
notes "to strike upon or against," "to be in trepidation,"
"to hasten," "to go in search of," "to fall upon," "to pun
ish, " "to be punished," "to muster," also "fear, terror,
punishment," also "to terrify." These meanings suggest the
tragiC-,_fate__o.£J:h,e__ve.s_SÆl_go3rer:ned_by Ahab ' s i.nflexible will.
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201
such as Father Mapple's sermon, which Ishmael alone hears;
"The Town Ho's Story," which Ahab and his officers do not
hear ; the varied reactions of Ahab and the crew to the cryp
tic doubloon, and the Parsee's prophecy, which the climax
fulfills.
I
I Melville, however, has artfully worked into the struc-
I
ture of his episodes limitations in point of view and inver
sions of details that serve as much to disguise as to reveal
his climax and the essentially transcendental theme. For
example, the symbolic picture which Ishmael alone sees upon
entering the Spouter Inn near the beginning of the novel is
a reversal of the final scene, in which the white whale rams
and sinks the Peguod in daylight on a calm sea. Ishmael's
description of the painting stresses instead the darkness of
the whale and the violent action of a storm:
But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long,
limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in
the center of the picture over three blue, dim, perpen
dicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. . . . It's
the Black Sea in a midnight gale.— It's the unnatural com
bat of the four primal elements.— It's a blasted heath.
— It's a Hyperborean winter scene.— It's the breaking-up
of the ice-bound stream of Time. But at last all these
fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the
picture's midst. That once found out, and all the rest
were plain. . . .
In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final
theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opin
ions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the
subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great
hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with
its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasper
ated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is
in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three
mast-heads. (pp. 10-11)
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202
The alternative explanations leading to the image of a whale
in the masts comprise a fictional technique which Melville S
probably learned from Hawthorne, who also uses inversions
with more than one possible meaning. Midway in The Scarlet i
I
I ' :
Letter, Hawthorne foreshadows his climax by having his
i ;
^uilt-ridden minister stand at midnight with Hester and
Pearl on the scaffold in a symbolic tableau, repeated at the
end in broad daylight before an astonished public. The es
sential difference in the inversions of the two writers lies
in the greater flexibility of Melville's symbols. Where the
dominant images in The Scarlet Letter are the scaffold and
Hester's "A," static reminders of human frailty, in Mobv-
Dick the central image is the white whale, whose varied
qualities serve to reflect in the course of the narrative
each character to himself.
Even when Melville's narrative appears to be clear and
uncomplicated, separate incidents nearly always take on
cryptic significance when considered in relation to the
larger context of the novel. Melville's analogies between
nature and the mind are linked; they lose significance when
considered individually. As an illustration. Father Map
ple ' s seinnon on Jonah and the whale is a vigorous retelling
of the familiar story of God's divine interference in na
ture. The character of the preacher, modeled after Father
Edward Taylor, an acquaintance of Emerson and occasional
visitor to the Transcendental Club, displays a dramatic
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ZOY
fervor and spiritual detachment, especially in his conclu- |
sion, which can be described as a mariner's version of
28 .
Emerson's doctrine of self-reliance. "Delight is to him,".
Father Mapple says, "a far, far upward, inward delight— who
against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever
stands forth his own inexorable self" (p; 48). This defi
ance of worldly authority parallels Emerson's rejection of
conformity in "Self-Reliance": "Nothing is at last sacred
but the integrity of your own mind" (Works, II, 50). Father
I '
Mapple's assertion of the spiritual primacy of the self also
i ^
lis in harmony with Emerson's attack on religious orthodoxy
in "The Divinity School Address" (1838), which led conserva
tive Unitarians such as the Rev. Andrews W. Norton to accuse
29
Emerson of heresy.
Like Emerson, Father Mapple declares his independence
of the ways of men while retaining his allegiance to God:
Delight is to him, whom all the waves of the billows of
the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from his
sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deli
ciousness 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 my
own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for
what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his
God? (p. 48)
28
Van Wyck Brooks characterizes Father Taylor as a
"halleluja Methodist" and the greatest natural orator in
Boston. See The Flowering of New England (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1940), p. 269.
29
Hutchinson, pp. 68-97, analyzes Norton's Discourse
on the Latest Form of Infidelitv, and other reactions to
Emerson's controversial address.
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I 204
Father Mapple's submission to the divine will contrasts with
Ahab's rejection of all authority— man's law as well as na- ;
! !
I 3 0
iture's— in his mad pursuit of the white whale. Ishmael, |
I
however, in the chapter following the sermon worships the
wooden idol Yojo with his cannibal friend Queequeg and says,
I '
l"I ' 11 try a pagan friend, since Christian kindness has
proved but hollow courtesy" (p. 50). Furthermore, the last
i
vessel the Peguod meets before encountering Moby Dick is the
tragic whaler Delight, five of whose crewmen lost their
i '
lives in a struggle with a different kind of whale from the
one described by Father Mapple.
Considered in the context of the novel. Father Mapple's
sermon is part of the larger argument on the limitation of
human comprehension. Father Mapple's spiritual detachment,
however, is also part of Ishmael's world view, which con
trasts sharply with Ahab’s egotistical vision, and contri
butes to Ishmael's spiritual rebirth. Finally, Ishmael's
worshipping in the chapel and later the same day with Quee- !
queg and his idol illustrates his independence of the con
ventions of worship. That is to say, Ishmael is a transcen—
dentalist sailor, who seeks an extra-parochial relation with
the universe.
By contrast, the moral and spiritual limitations of
30
Ahab defies not only physical and spiritual nature as
represented by Moby Dick but also the owners of the Peguod, i
who had commissioned him to sail for the purpose of catching!
whales for a profit. !
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2051
A-hab ' s world aboard the doomed Peguod are perhaps brought |
into sharpest focus preceding the climax in the enigmatic |
chapter, "The Doubloon," in which the leading characters
meditate on the meaning of Ahab's gold coin. As the central
figure in his realm, Ahab sees his unbounded ego. The other
I ;
Characters, however, reflect conventional attitudes of civi
lized and savage man, which illustrate their readiness to
i
conform. Starbuck, the competent though cautious first
mate, reveals the lack of conviction underlying his orthodox
religious point of view in his remarks on the coin:
A dark valley between three mighty, heaven-abiding peaks,
that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint earthly sym
bol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and
over all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines
a beacon and a hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark !
vale shows her mouldy soil; but if we lift them, the •
bright sun meets our glance half way to cheer. Yet, oh,
the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we
would fain snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for
him in vaini This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but
still sadly to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me
falsely. (p. 429)
Concerned with spiritual values, but insecure in his faith, !
Starbuck lacks the will to turn Ahab aside from his revenge
ful pursuit of Moby Dick.
In contrast to Starbuck, whose underlying skepticism
suggests the transcendentalist criticism of Unitarianism,
the two other mates reflect amoral civilized attitudes.
Stubb, the second mate, is a pipe-smoking hedonist, who
makes himself and his men comfortable and takes perils as '
they come with a journeyman's indifference. Looking at the |
design on the doubloon, he concludes : "There's a sermon :
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206
now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through it every |
j
year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jol-
i ;
lily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and i
so, allow here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly's the word for
aye! Adieu, Doubloon" (p. 430). On the other hand. Flask, j
I I
the third mate, is an unimaginative materialist who regards
the doubloon as merely "a round thing made of gold, and who-:
I
bver raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to
him. . . . It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true; and at :
! '
I 3 ] j
two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and sixty cigars."
The two pagan harpooners who next examine the coin do
not use words but reveal in their gestures corresponding
limitations in their attitudes. Queequeg suggests the ani- i
! I
mal nature of man as he tries to compare figures on the coin
with those tattooed on parts of his body. "What says the
Cannibal? As I live he's comparing notes," Flask observes
with a civilized man's air of superiority (p. 431). |
Fedallah, the white-turbaned Parsee, represents primitive
superstition with its intuition of evil. He "makes a sign
to the sign and bows himself" (p. 431). Again Flask re
marks, "There is a sun on the coin— fire worshipper, depend
on it" (p. 431). Actually, in worshipping fire and the sun,
Zoroastrian symbols for Ahura Mazda, the god of light and
morality, Fedallah is opposed to Ahab, who would strike the ;
31 :
Flask's mistake in arithmetic— at two cents a cigar, j
he can buy eight hundred cigars, rather than nine hundred
and sixty— underscores his limited comprehension.____________ I
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i
sun. The Parsee as a man of primitive faith contrasts with j
lis master, who defies God. In the conclusion of the chap- |
Iter, the wisely-mad Pip sums up the scene with a cryptic
reference to the variety of human perception: "I look, you
look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look" (p. 432).
|"Upon my soul," Flask tells himself, "he's been studying
Murray's Grammari Improving his mind, poor fellow" (p. 432).
Flask's ironic comment recalls Melville's reference to the
Muse as a pale usher who likes to dust his old grammars as a;
reminder of man's mortality.
; In a broad sense, the entire novel is a series of self-
revealing looks at nature and the whale. Even Ahab in his
meditation on the secret knowledge of the "black and hooded
head" of a whale in the chapter entitled "The Sphynx" can
32
perceive the transcendental significance of his search.
"0 Nature, and 0 soul of man!" he says, "how far beyond all
utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom
stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in
mind" (p. 310). The linked analogies lead Ahab to self-
destruction, since the nature he perceives wears the colors
of his egotism. For Emerson, however, the "shadow of the
32
Emerson in his poem, "The Sphynx," suggests that the
commonplaces of nature provide the answer to the riddle of
the universe. Ahab's meditation, on the other hand, serves
in part to indicate the extent of his disillusionment with
nature. Addressing a whale head as the Sphynx, the skipper
says: "O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets
and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is
thine" (Mobv-Dick. p. 310) . ____________________________________
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I
soul, or other me” is the basis for positive action, in |
which what he called "mean egotism" vanishes. "I run j
eagerly into this resounding tumult," he said in "The Ameri
can Scholar." "I grasp the hands of those next me, and take
I :
my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an in-
jstinct that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I
pierce its order; I dissipate its fear, I dispose of it
■within the circuit of my expanding life" (I, 95).
Interspersed among events presenting the interactions
of the Peguod's crew is a separate series of episodes which
dramatize the progressive isolation of Ahab and his world
from the broader society of mankind. During the voyage, thé
Peguod has visits or gams with nine other whaleships for the
primary purpose of obtaining information about Moby Dick.
Like the islands Taji visits in Mardi, the gams present
separate points of view toward nature, all of which are un
acceptable to Ahab. These contribute to the composite im
pression of the whale in the climax and to the total world
view of the novel.
The Peguod's first gam is with the appropriately-named
Albatross, a mysterious bleached craft whose skipper acci
dentally drops his speaking trumpet as his ship passes by in
silence. The action suggests both the difficulty of commu
nication between the self and the outer world and the essen
tial enigma of nature. Denied the information he seeks,
Ahab cries "in his old lion voice,— 'Up helm! Keep her off
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33
round the world.'" In the next two gams, however, Mel-
jville presents sharply contrasted religious views, each
dramatizing the whale as an instrument of divine power.
i"The Town Ho ' s Story, " which Ishmael tells to friends in
Lima after the sinking of the Peguod, portrays Moby Dick as
an agent of God's justice in destroying the mate Radney and
ending his tyranny over Steelkilt, a rebellious, self-
reliant seaman. Ahab's ignorance of this exemplum of a rea
sonable God's interference in the affairs of men provides an
instance of dramatic irony that sets off Ishmael's view of
nature from Ahab's monomania. Ahab, however, obtains his
first lead on Moby Dick in the next gam with the Jeroboam, a
ship quarantined with an epidemic and tyrannized by a reli
gious fanatic, who calls himself Gabriel. To the mad sea
man, whose zeal is as intense and irrational as Ahab's
hatred, the white whale is "the Shaker God incarnated"
(p. 314). After hearing of a wrathful God who destroys a
blasphemer, Ahab exchanges curses with Gabriel and continues
his search.
In contrast to these mystical and religious views, the
next three gams offer to Ahab and his crew three wordly at
titudes towards nature represented by whalers from Germany, ;
France, and England. Instead of repeating the thinly dis
guised references to European civilization in Mardi, in !
33
Moby-Dick, p. 236. "An enraged man is a lion," Emery
son said in Nature (Works. I, 26).____________________________ _
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210;
jwhich islands represent national attitudes, Melville employs;
inversions in this second series of gams as instruments of
satire. He represents German culture with its emphasis on
metaphysical learning in terms of its opposite: Derek De
beer (or "die Deem" in low German for "girl"), skipper of |
jthe ship Jungfrau expresses to Ahab "complete ignorance of
I 3 4
the White Whale." He is interested, however, in oil for
his lamp, which Ahab provides; but he later tauntingly
pitches it overboard as the Peguod's whaleboats race his
crew to harpoon a whale. In describing the climax of this
episode, Melville contrasts the awkwardness of Derick's crew:
with the superior skill and instinctive knowledge of the
Peguod's men:
But so decided an original start had Derick had, that
spite of all their gallantry, he would have proved the
victor in this race, had not a righteous judgement de
scended upon him in a crab which caught the blade of his
midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving
to free his white-ash, and while, in consequence,
Derick's boat was nigh to capsizing, and he thundering
away at his men in a mighty rage;— that was a good time
for Starbuck, Stubb and Flask. With a shout, they took
a mortal start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the
German's quarter. (p. 352)
An instant later, Derick chooses to hazard "what to him must
have seemed a most unusually long dart" (p. 353) :
But no sooner did his harpooneer [sic] stand up for
the stroke, than all three tigers— Queequeg, Tashtego,
Dagoo— instinctively sprang to their feet, and standing
34
Mobv-Dick, p. 349. James Dean Young provides the low
German translation of "die Deem" in "The Nine Gams of the
Peguod," in Discussions of Mobv-Dick, ed. Milton R. Stern
(Boston, 1960), p. 102._________________________________________
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211:
in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their barbs;
and darted over the head of the German harpooner, their |
three Nantucket irons entered the whale. (p. 353)
In the "blinding vapors of foam and white-fire" of the
stricken whale's headlong rush, Derick and his harpooner
fall overboard. "Don't be afraid, my butter-boxes," Stubb
I :
I !
cries, as his craft shoots by the floundering Germans;
|"ye ' 11 be picked up presently— all right— I saw some sharks
i
astern— St. Bernard's dogs, you know— relieve distressed
travellers" (p. 353).
Similarly, Melville satirizes French culture with its
reputation for political finesse, refinement, and worldly
experience by means of irony. The whaler Bouton de Rose, or:
Rosebud, whose skipper is a former cologne [sic] manufac
turer out on his first voyage, has alongside two whale
corpses. Their unsavory odor, "worse than an Assyrian city
in the plague," is a subject of humor to Stubb; but of the
French sailors, Melville writes: "All their noses upwardly ;
projected from their faces like so many jib-booms" (p. 403).
Although their spokesman, a Guernsey-man with a knowledge of
English, can find a name for the white whale, "Cachalot
Blanche," this particular whale is beyond his experience.
"Never heard of such a whale," he tells Stubb (p. 402).
Taking advantage of the inexperience of the French, Stubb
through clever negotiation obtains the shriveled second
whale, which he knows despite its odor, contains precious
ambergris used in making perfume.
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2121
With his single-minded desire for complete knowledge ofj
I
the white whale, Ahab understandably remains in his cabin I
during the gams with the Jungfrau and Bouton de Rose; but he!
makes his first visit aboard another whaler in the gam with !
the Samuel B. Enderby of London. Its skipper, having lost |
an arm in an encounter with Moby Dick, has the knowledge
I
born of practical experience, which Ahab also has. In de-
i
scribing this gam, Melville is direct in his portrayal of
British common sense, which contrasts with Ahab's monomania.
Captain Boomer's description of his encounter with Moby Dick
j !
anticipates Ahab's final struggle with the whale. Both epi-i
sodes occur in broad daylight, although Boomer does not turn
his back on the pervading Platonic sun; both characters re- ■
! I
ceive injuries from their harpoons, but the English captain
shows no malice and lives to relate his experience. "As I
was groping at midday," Boomer says:
with a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping,
I say, after the second iron, to toss it overboard— down
comes the tail like a Lima tower, cutting my boat in
two, leaving each half in splinters; and, flukes first,
the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it
were all chips. We all struck out. To escape his ter
rible flailings, I seized hold of my harpoon-pole stick
ing in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking
I fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same
instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went
I down like a flash; and the barb of that cursed second
iron towing along near me caught me here (clapping his
hand just below his shoulder).
35
Page 438. Melville's reference to a falling "Lima
tower" suggests a relationship between Captain Boomer's ac
count of the white whale and "The Town Ho's Story," which
Ishmael tells in Lima. The Peruvian city was struck by sev
er aJL earthquakes, the most famous one in 1746. Melville's
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213
Unlike Captain Ahab, who resents his mortal imperfection, |
I
Captain Boomer replaces his amputated arm with a club-hammeri
fashioned on the end of a whalebone and engages in jovial
banter with the ship's doctor, a rationalist.
In the portrait of the ship's doctor, however, Melville
I :
batirizes the pretension of scientific learning. Like Sur
geon Cuticle in White-Jacket. Dr. Hunger is sure of himself
even though his logic extends beyond the boundaries of his
own experience. Possessing limited data on whales and hav
ing no first-hand knowledge of Moby Dick, he nevertheless
urges Captain Boomer to have a second try. "Do you know,
gentlemen," Dr. Hunger reasons, "that the digestive organs
of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine Provi-;
dence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely
digest even a man's arm. And he knows it too. So that what
you take for the White Whale's malice is only his awkward
ness. For he never means to swallow a single l i m b . Un- '
impressed by this logical speculation about a whale's mo
tives, Captain Boomer prudently declines. "No thank ye,
[Dr.] Hunger, he's welcome to the arm he has, since I can't
friend Robert Tomes reported "a harmless earthquake shock"
occurring there on April 28, 1850, in the Literary World.
8:42-44, January 18, 1851. See note of Luther S. Mansfield
and Howard P. Vincent in Mobv-Dick, p. 806.
^^Pages 438-439. The doctor's account of the whale
contrasts with the portrayals of the whale as an instrument
of divine justice in "The Town Ho's Story" and Father Map
ple 's sermon about Jonah. ___________________________________
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214j
lelp it, and didn't know him then; but not to another one" |
(p. 439). Together the captain and the doctor represent an |
empirical approach to nature, with experience supplemented
I
by logic but restrained by prudence.
I Rejecting this practical accommodation of man to nature,
I
yith its tolerance of human imperfection, Ahab comments that
I
jthe white whale is "all a magnet" to him and angrily breaks
off the interview. "Is your captain crazy?" Boomer whispers
to Fedallah, who is the sailor least capable aboard the
Peguod of answering objectively. The Parsee merely puts a
finger to his lips and follows Ahab into the whaleboat.
Melville concludes this episode with a description of Ahab's
proud indifference to a sane acceptance of man's mortal
state: "In vain the English captain hailed him," Melville
writes. "With back to the stranger ship, and face set like
a flint to his own, Ahab stood upright till alongside of the
Peguod" (p. 440). Ishmael, however, in a later gam with the;
Samuel Enderby after the sinking of the Peguod finds the
English ship "a noble craft in every way. . . . It was a
fine gam we had, and they were all trumps— every soul on
board" (p. 441).
The last'three gams dramatize the alternative results
of man's relation to nature, none of which is acceptable to
Ahab. In the seventh gam, the Bachelor's captain indicates
his disbelief in Moby Dick and reports his amazing good
luck. The ship's hold is full, its decks lined with extra
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215!
I
casks of sperm oil and its crew engaged in revelry:
On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooners were danc
ing with olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from
the Polynesian isles; while suspended in an ornamented
boat, firmly secured aloft between the foremast and main- |
mast, three Long Island negroes, with glittering fiddle-
bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious
jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship's company were tu- |
I multuously busy at the masonry of the tryworks, from
I which the huge pots had been removed. You would have al-
I most thought they were pulling down the cursed Bastille,
such wild cries they raised, as the now useless brick
i and mortar were being hurled into the sea. (p. 488)
In rejecting the hospitality of the Bachelor, Ahab suggests ;
the sterility of his single-minded quest: "Thou art a full
i
bhip and homeward bound, thou sayest; well, then, call me an
empty ship and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will
mine. Forward there! Set all sail and keep her to the
wind" (p. 489). '
Following his refusal to be distracted by the fellow
ship of the fortunate, Ahab meets in the Rachel, a ship which
has encountered the white whale and is involved in a search
for a missing whaleboat with the captain's son aboard. Cap
tain Gardiner, whom Ahab knows, comes aboard the Peguod to
request help in his search for the lost crewmen. Though
Ahab refuses, the Rachel later picks up Ishmael, lone sur
vivor of the Peguod. In contrast to the crewmen of the
Rachel, with their partial knowledge of Moby Dick and pri
mary concern for human welfare, the men aboard the Delight,
the last whaler the Peguod meets, possess the sorrow and
wisdom of tragic insight. Having recovered the body of one
of five crewmen lost in an encounter with the white whale.
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215i
the stunned skipper warns, "God keep thee, old man," when
Ahab arrogantly waves his harpoon (p. 532). The episode is
an ironic reversal of the conclusion of Father Mapple's ser
mon with its celebration of the delight of the faithful.
I In the nine gams, Ahab's world of the Peguod dominated :
by the skipper's perverse will is set off against the prev
alent attitudes and alternative reactions to nature that
I
Characterize the normal human condition. The chapter imme
diately following the meeting with the Delight and preceding
the climactic encounter with Moby Dick brings into focus the
jcentral paradox of Ahab ' s total isolation from the outer
world. "Is Ahab, Ahab?" the skipper meditates:
Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the
great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy
in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some
invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat;
this one small brain think thoughts ; unless God does
that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and
not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in
this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the hand
spike. (p. 535)
In this passage, the most willful of skippers suddenly re
verses his position and denies his own power of self-
determination. Whether willful or merely a victim of fate,
Ahab considers himself to be one or the other and is there
fore out of harmony with the delicate balance of opposites
or polarities in man and nature. His singleness of view
contrasts with Ishmael's reconciliation of the determiners
of action in his meditation on mat making. Free will,
Ishmael says, plies "her shuttle between given threads" from
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2171
I
i
"the straight warp of necessity," while "chance, though re- i
strained in its play" by necessity and free will "by turns
rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events" ;
i
j(p. 213).
I With an integrated vision, Ishmael comes closer to
-reality than does Ahab, whose irreconcilable contradictions
dramatize the crack in Ahab's nature. Inevitably, Ahab and
his world-ship meet in the white whale the nemesis which
Emerson describes in "Compensation":
It would seem there is always this vindictive circum
stance stealing in at unawares even into the wild poesy
i in which the human fancy attempted to make bold holiday '
and to shake itself free of the old laws, this back
stroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that the law is ;
fatal; that in nature nothing can be given, all things
are sold. (Works, II, 107)
Melville's factual basis for the sinking of the Peguod
is Owen Chase's account of the actual destruction of the
whaler Essex by an eighty-five foot sperm whale which rammed
37
it twice on the same day, November 20, 1820. Melville
first heard of this remarkable incident in 1841, while he
was serving on the whaler Acushnet (p. xv). In April 1851,
when he had nearly completed Mobv-Dick, his father-in-law.
Judge Lemuel Shaw, gave him a copy of Chase's narrative to
refresh his memory (p. xv). Melville, however, portrays a
symbolic three-day struggle between the men of the Peguod
and Moby Dick, who flails apart their pursuing whaleboats,
37
Owen Chase, Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex, ed.
B. R. McElderry, Jr. (New York, 1963). pp. 17-22.________
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218i
I
and after snapping Ahab ' s line destroys the Peguod in a sin-'
jgle headlong attack. At the moment Moby Dick rams the
! :
Peguod, the crew display a noticeable inability to act.
jcaught in the middle of their routines, they look up immo
bilized:
! From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung
j inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons,
I mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had
darted from their various employments; all their en
chanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to
side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a
broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him
as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal mal
ice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mor-
j tal man could do, the solid white buttress of his fore-
! head smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers
reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged :
trucks, the heads of the harpooners aloft shook on their
bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the
waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume, (pp. 564- !
565)
Though Melville employed details from Chase's narra
tive, such as the apparent malice of the whale, which
plunged under the sinking ship, the crew of the Essex recov
ered from their shock and reacted with far more presence of ■
mind than the transfixed characters aboard the Peguod. "I
ordered the men to cease pumping," Chase wrote, "and every
one to provide for himself; seizing a hatchet at the same
time, I cut away the lashings of the spare boat, which lay
bottom up across two spars directly over the quarter deck,
and cried out to those near me to take her as she came down"
(Chase, p. 22). As a result of such vigorous emergency mea
sures, all hands aboard the Essex escaped into the boats
(gL._24)_^______________________________________________________________
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219
By contrast, the officers of the Pecruod talk largely to
themselves in the moment of unavoidable disaster, revealing j
the inadequacy of their civilized attitudes. First Mate
Starbuck is beset by self-doubt:
I ;
"The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye
sweet powers of air, now hug me close! Let not Starbuck
die, if die he must, in a woman's fainting fit. Up helm,
I say— ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the end of
all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities?"
I (p. 564)
bn the other hand, Stubb, the second mate, is imprisoned by
his conventional hedonistic attitude. With a foolish con
sistency, he forces himself to grin at death:
"I grin at thee, thou grinning whale! Who ever helped
Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb's own unwinking
eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattress that ,
is all too soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood!
I grin at thee, thou grinning whale!" (p. 564)
The third mate. Flask, is resigned to his fate and says,
"Oh, Stubb, I hope my poor mother’s drawn my part-pay ere
this; if not, few coppers will now come to her, for the voy
age is up" (p. 564). Like Ahab, the officers are condemned
by their language.
Even after Moby Dick strikes the Peguod, no one acts to
save himself. The ship goes down with the pagan harpooners
still at their lookout posts, unable to comprehend their own
imminent destruction:
For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still;
then turned. "The ship? Great God, where is the ship?"
Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her side
long fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only
the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatu
ation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches,
the pagan harpooners still maintained their sinking look-
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220!
i
I
outs on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the i
lone boat itself, with all its crew, and each floating I
oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and in- I
animate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the ;
smallest chip of the Peguod out of sight. (pp. 555-566)
The total inaction of the Peguod's crew dramatizes the de
fect Emerson perceived in traditions, customs, and conven-
j
^ions, which degrade the individual. In "The American
Scholar," Emerson presents action as one of three important
influences on Man Thinking; it enables him to live with the
polarities of nature.
i :
As the Peguod disappears beneath the sea, the harpooner
i ;
Tashtego, still at his post, pins a white shy-hawk to the
mast in a dramatic final gesture. "And so," Melville
writes, "the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and
his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form
folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which,
like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a
living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself
with it" (p. 566). The irony of Tashtego's symbolic gesture
is that the crew of the Peguod, like the bird, were captives
shrouded in Ahab's flag.
Ishmael's rescue provides the final polarity in this
transcendental drama. Though saved in the end by chance, he
floats on a coffin-life buoy made by his cannibal-friend
Queequeg and is picked up by the humanitarian crew of the
Rachel. He survives, however, with a balanced world view;
and he lives in harmony with nature: "The unharming sharks.
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2211
!
they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the
savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks" (p. 567).
Melville's achievement in matching the transcendental
ethic and esthetic with plot and character should be recog- ■
nized as a major development in the history of the American
novel. With its tragic form and symbolism reflecting the
Emersonian doctrine of compensation, Melville's greatest
i
novel provides an insight into the farthest reaches of the
mortal mind, dramatizing its quest for an integrated moral
vision. Since Melville chose to focus on the absolute con
ditions of the present moment, his novel illuminates the
essentially transcendental coloring of the age.
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CHAPTER V I I I
I
I EMERSON, MELVILLE AND THE VISION OF EVIL
j If Melville's literary career had ended in 1851 with
the publication of Mobv-Dick, the transcendental currents in
his early novels probably would be as easily discernible to
contemporary readers as they were to some critics of the
late 1840's and early 1850's. Evert Duyckinck's reviews of
Mardi and Mobv-Dick in The Literarv World referred to Emer
sonian qualities in Melville's language and philosophical
speculation. In the review of Mardi dated April 21, 1849,
Duyckinck observed, "There is a world of poetical, thought
ful, ingenious moral writing in it which Emerson would not
disclaim" (Log., I, 299) . On the other hand, Duyckinck in
his review of Mobv-Dick on November 22, 1851, criticized
portions of the book which attacked conventions with "the
conceited indifferentism of Emerson, or the run-a-muck style
of Carlyle" (p. 437). Melville apparently had become too
much of a literary nonconformist to suit his New York pub
lisher friend. By contrast, George Ripley, the transcenden-
talist reviewer, praised Mobv-Dick without reservation in
the December, 1851, issue of Harper's. "Beneath the whole
story," Ripley said,
222_____________________________
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223;
the subtle and imaginative reader may perhaps find a
pregnant allegory, intended to illustrate the mystery of
human life. Certain it is that the rapid, pointed hints
which are thrown out, with the keenness and velocity of
a harpoon, penetrate deep into the heart of things, show
ing that the genius of the author for moral analysis is
scarcely surpassed by the wizard power of description.
(p. 439)
Overseas, the perceptive French reviewer E.-D. Porgues
pointed out the indebtedness of both Hawthorne and Melville
to Emerson in his article in the February 1, 1853, issue of
Revue des Deux Mondes :
puis comme Nathaniel Hawthorne, auquel est dédié l'ou
vrage que nous venons d'analyser, M. Herman Melville
s'est imbu, peut-être, plus qu'il ne faudrait, de la
prestigieuse philosophie dont Emerson est l'apôtre ins
piré. (p. 467)
What was not apparent then, except to a few readers, is
that Mobv-Dick represents a peak in Melville's art, bringing:
to fulfillment tendencies inherent in the novels from Typee
onward. If the early critics could not agree on the quality
of Melville's work, they were able, nevertheless, to sense
the underlying affinity of Melville and Emerson. Twentieth
century readers, on the other hand, have tended all too
often to view Mobv-Dick primarily in the light of Melville's
later unrelieved pessimism, in Pierre (1852), Israel Potter
(1855), The Piazza Tales (1856), and The Confidence Man
(1857), novels and short stories which are more in harmony
with the mood of our own day than Melville's. With the not
able exception of "Benito Cereno, " a study of evil that com-;
pares with Mobv-Dick, they lack both the vitality and the
scope of Melville's earlier novels of the sea, in which a __
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224!
I
!
transcendental watery world, ringed by an undulating horizon
I !
land illuminated by a Platonic sun, suggests in its vastness ;
the mystery of creation and the self. These later works
tlso lack the variety of characters, civilized and savage,
I ;
who represent all races and points of view and provide a
Composite portrait of human nature. Furthermore, in con
trast to the underlying unity of Melville's first six novels
of the sea, with their approximation to the Hegelian pattern
of growth, Melville's later works have no organic relation
to one another and represent a fragmentation of purpose that
accompanies a general decline in creative power.
The disillusionment which permeates these dissimilar
novels and short fictions probably has its source in a com- !
bination of depressing events in Melville's life during the
months immediately following publication of Mobv-Dick. In
the first place, Elizabeth Melville did not make a normal
recovery following the birth on October 22 of the couple's
second child Stanwix (L o q . I, 430). Dr. Amos Nourse wrote
to Lemuel Shaw, Melville's father-in-law, the following
February 18 that he had "heard indirectly from time to time
of Elizabeth, that she was feeble, and did not regain her
strength after confinement as at the birth of her first
child" (p. 447). Melville's granddaughter Eleanor Melville
Metcalf observes, "Melville, exhausted by his recent inten
sive labor on Mobv-Dick, settled down to a fall and winter
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225
less social, but no less demanding in every way.Worried
about Elizabeth and sensing from the mixed reviews that |
Mobv-Dick would not be a financial success, he plunged im-
i :
mediately into writing another novel, Pierre, completing it
I :
{in approximately five months, as compared to the year and a ;
I 2
half he had spent on Mobv-Dick. "Yet he must go on writ
ing, " Eleanor Metcalf comments, "Where else will bread and
I 3
butter come from?" In the meantime, Melville apparently
was attempting to sustain the high emotional pitch of his
friendship with Hawthorne, which began in the summer of 1850
with Melville's enthusiastic admiration of Hawthorne's self-
reliant artistry in "Hawthorne and His Mosses." During
1851, Melville not only exchanged visits with Hawthorne in
nearby Lenox, but also wrote six letters to him, the last
one dated November 17, 1851, in response to Hawthorne's
praise of Mobv-Dick.'^ The elation Melville displayed in
this letter is phrased in transcendental references to pan
theism, immortality, and even the One, which in this passage
^Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle (Cambridge, Mass.,
1953), p. 124.
2
Melville began Pierre in late autumn, 1851. He sent a
set of proofs of the new novel to Richard Bentley, the Lon
don publisher, on April 16, 1852 (Log, I, 449).
^Herman Melville; Cycle and Epicycle, p. 135.
^Of the ten surviving letters of Melville to Hawthorne,
the first six were written between January 29, 1851, and
November 17, 1851. The remaining four were written between
July 17, 1852, and shortly after November 25, 1852. See
Letters, pp. 118-163.___________________________________________{
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226
Melville describes as a divine magnet uniting his and Haw- I
thorne's genius : Î
P.S. I can't stop yet. If the world was entirely
made up of Magians, I'll tell you what I should do. I
should have a paper-mill established at one end of the
house, and so have an endless riband of foolscap rolling
in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I should
write a thousand— a million— billion thoughts, all in
I the form of a letter to you. The divine magnet is on
you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A
foolish question— they are One. (Letters, pp. 143-144)
; Such unrestrained exuberance could not last. For Mel
ville, emotional exhaustion and the failure of Mobv-Dick to
bring financial security and fame comparable to Hawthorne's
undoubtedly contributed to the mood of black despair which
appears in the later novels without the compensatory spark
of hope for the individual self that characterizes Mel
ville's art in the period before 1852. Furthermore, Haw
thorne moved away from Lenox in late November of 1851, at
approximately the time Melville began to write Pierre (Locr,
I, 358). Randall Stewart observes that Hawthorne's dislike
of the climate, the inconveniences of "the Red House" in
Lenox, and his desire to rejoin his Concord friends moti
vated the change.^ Melville, however, reacted to the move
with a correct politeness and detachment which indicate a
basic change in attitude not only towards his friend, but
also towards the ethic and esthetic of transcendentalism.
After the letter of November 17, Melville apparently did not
^Nathaniel Hawthorne : A Biography (New Haven, 1948),
pp. 118-119.
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227
write again directly to Hawthorne for eight months. In his
next known communication on July 17, 1852, approximately
three months after the completion of Pierre, Melville ac- |
knowledged receipt of Hawthorne's new novel. The Blithedale :
j i
Romance, and courteously refused an invitation to visit Haw-|
j i
jthorne in Concord:
I
Said my lady-wife, "there is Mr. Hawthorne's new book,
j come by mail." And this morning, loi on my table a lit-
; tie note, subscribed by Hawthorne again.— Well, the Haw
thorne is a sweet flower; may it flourish in every hedge.
I am sorry, but I can not at present come to see you
at Concord as you propose.— I am but just returned from
a two weeks' absence; and for the last three months and
i more I have been an utter idler and a savage— out of
doors all the time. So, the hour has come for me to sit
down again.G
Actually, it was Sophia Hawthorne who first wrote to
Melville one month after the Hawthornes moved from Lenox.
In her letter to Melville dated December 29, 1851, she
praised Mobv-Dick. Melville's reply on January 8, 1852, was
cordial, but surprisingly fatalistic, in contrast to his
earlier references to the transcendental One. Although he
admitted that Mobv-Dick "was susceptible of an allegoric
construction" which Hawthorne had apparently recognized,
Melville denied that he had meant to spiritualize nature
^Letters, pp. 152-153. Melville's three remaining let
ters to Hawthorne, dated August 13, October 25, and after
November 25, 1852, concern the "Agatha" story, which Mel
ville offered to Hawthorne, who decided not to write it.
Although Melville may have written other letters, the tone
of these three suggests a friendly professional discussion
lacking the intense personal quality of the letters written ;
in 1851 (Letters, pp. 153-163). Melville visited Hawthorne |
in late November, 1852, in Concord and again in November, !
1856, in Liverpool (Log, I, 464; II, 527-529) . _______________
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2281
(Letters, p. 146). Melville also rejected the transcenden- |
tal ethic of self-reliance in a reference to his continuing i
admiration of Hawthorne:
and so we see how true was that musical sentence of the ;
poet when he sang—
"We can't help ourselves"
For tho' we know what we ought to be ; and what it
I would be very sweet and beautiful to be; yet we can't be
it. That is most sad, too. (Letters, p. 147)
The especial poignancy of this remark, which suggests the
theme of Pierre, is that it is addressed to a transcenden-
talist. Melville concluded his letter with a description of
the helplessness of the individual, who is swept along by
currents which are beyond his power to control:
Life is a long Dardanelles, My Dear Madam, the shores
whereof are bright with flowers, which we want to pluck,
but the bank is too high; and so we float on and on, hop
ing to come to a landing place at last— but swoopi we
launch into the great seai Yet the geographers say, even
then we must not despair, because across the great sea,
however desolate and vacant it may look, lie all Persia
and the delicious lands roundabout Damascus.
So wishing you a pleasant voyage at last to that sweet
and far countree— (p. 147)
Except for the complimentary conclusion, perhaps a belated
farewell to his departed friends, Melville's letter antici
pates the pessimistic tone of his remaining pre-Civil War
fiction.
Two reliable observers expressed their concern for Mel
ville 's health during the trying period that he composed
Pierre. The family friend Sarah Morewood entertained the
Melvilles at Christmas dinner and then reported in a letter
to George Duyckinck, December 28, that "Mr. Herman was more
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2291
I
buiet than usual," but still a pleasant companion (Log, I, |
441). "It is a pity," she continued,
that Mr. Melville so often in conversation uses irrever- !
ent language— he will not be popular in society here on
that account. . . . I think he cares very little as to
what others may think of him or his books so long as they
I sell well. I hear that he is now engaged in a new work
[Pierre] as frequently not to leave his room till quite
dark in the evening— -when he for the first time during
I the whole day partakes of solid food. He must therefore
: write under a state of morbid excitement which will soon
injure his health. . . . (p. 441)
Dr. Nourse wrote again to Judge Shaw on March 1 about Eliza
beth Melville's recovery of health, and added this comment
about Melville: "Her husband I fear is devoting himself to
writing with an assiduity that will cost him dear by and by"
(p. 448).
Melville's new novel, which he ironically alluded to as
"a rural bowl of milk" in his letter to Sophia Hawthorne
(Letters, p. 146), suggests the pessimism of Thomas Hardy,
unrelieved by Hardy's rustic humor. As a negation of abso
lute transcendental moral values in the preceding novels,
Pierre stands in relation to Mobv-Dick as Mark Twain's "The
Mysterious Stranger" to Huckleberry Finn. In his brilliant
introduction to Pierre, Henry A. Murray calls the novel a
"prodigious by-blow of genius whose appearance is marred by
a variety of freakish features and whose organic worth is
invalidated by the sickness of despair" (p. xciii).
Stripped of its copious autobiographical references to
the febrile struggles of an immature young author, the basic
plot of Pierre suggests an ironic reversal of Hawthorne's
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230|
structure of The House of the Seven Gables, which Melville i
7 i
had effusively praised in the spring of 1851. Both novels ;
portray in contrasting ways a controlling idea that Haw
thorne described in the preface to his novel: "the wrong
doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and,'
divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a
8
pure and uncontrollable mischief." Hawthorne might have
I
added that self-reliance and love represented in the romance
of the independent young artist Holgrave and his radiant
Phoebe, whose name means sunlight, is sufficient to dispel
evil. Melville, on the other hand, portrays in the relation
of Pierre to his angelic fiancée Lucy, whose name similarly
means lux or light, the insufficiency of these ideal virtues
in an ambiguous contest with fate.
In Melville's novel, the wrong-doing of the past is the
sin of Pierre's father, whose illegitimate daughter Isabel
suddenly disrupts Pierre's idyllic romance with Lucy in the
Eden-like setting of Saddle Meadows. Acting on impulse
alone, Pierre breaks off the relationship with Lucy to shel
ter his outcast half-sister, with whom he moves into a bi
zarre Melvillian equivalent of the House of the Seven
Gables. It is a seven-storied office and apartment building
constructed in the yard of the former Church of the
7
See "To Nathaniel Hawthorne, April 16, 1851," Letters,
pp. 123-125.
O
Complete Works of Hawthorne, III, 14.
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231|
&postles, which has been converted into a business property I
in a city far from Saddle Meadows. Like the Pyncheon home, |
jwhich Hawthorne describes as a "weather-beaten edifice, " an |
emblem of the past standing "half-way down a by-street" of a
New England town, the Apostles is "a rather singular and
1 '
ancient edifice, a relic of the more primitive time," situ
ated "in the lower old-fashioned part of the city, in a nar
row street— almost a lane— once filled with demure-looking
dwellings."^ On the other hand, the quaintness of Haw
thorne's structure with "an elm tree of wide circumference"
hear the door contrasts with the drabness of the Apostles,
surrounded by the "immense lofty warehouses" of an encroach-
\ _ 10
ing city.
To Melville's symbolic building, a microcosm of civili
zation comparable to the world-ships of White-Jacket and
Mobv-Dick, Lucy comes in an instinctively benevolent effort
to help Pierre, who has concealed his belief that Isabel is
his half-sister. Lucy's self-reliant action, however, re
sults not only in the rejection of her own family, which she
quietly accepts, but also in a fatal quarrel between her new
suitor Glen Stanley and Pierre. In contrast to the conclu
sion of Hawthorne's novel, in which the lovers win the re
ward of marriage and move with their relatives and friends
p. 311.
9
See The House of the Seven Gables, p. 17; Pierre,
^^The House of the Seven Gables, p. 17; Pierre, p. 311.
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2321
from the dark Pyncheon home to a large country estate resem-i
I
jbling Pierre's former home in Saddle Meadows, Melville's I
novel ends with the deaths of all the leading characters :
Pierre kills Stanley; Lucy dies of grief; then Pierre and
Isabel take their own lives in prison.
I Melville's heavy satire against the conventions of
I ;
popular fiction such as Hawthorne followed in The House of
the Seven Gables is part of a more general attack on the
double standards of the successful, who are aware of ideal
Christian virtue but live instead by an empirical code of
social morality. In the character of Plotinus Plinlimmon, a
resident in the old church tower and Grand Master of a mys
tic Society of the Apostles, Melville suggests a composite
portrait of both Hawthorne and Emerson. Plinlimmon, like
Hawthorne, is a detached observer, sheltered from reality
by the window glass through which he constantly watches the
other occupants. He is both cheerful and unapproachable.
On the other hand, he also has a reputation like Emerson's
of being a successful lecturer with an enthusiastic follow
ing. His lecture, "Chronometricals and Horologicals," a
portion of which Pierre reads during his journey from the
country to the city, is exactly antithetical to Father Map-
ple's sermon on the delight of the faithful in Mobv-Dick.
By means of a false analogy, Plinlimmon reasons that ideal
virtue, like Greenwich time, is unsuited to the rest of the
world, which must abide by the practical conditions of
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233
experience, represented by local time. "Bacon's brains," he
says, "were mere watch-maker's brains; but Christ was a
chronometer" (p. 248). |
I Plinlimmon develops his chronometrical and horological i
i I
janalogy to prove "that in things terrestrial (horological) a
! !
man must not be governed by ideas celestial (chronometrical);
that certain minor self-renunciations in this life his own
mere instinct for his own every-day general well-being will
teach him to make, but he must by no means make a complete
unconditional sacrifice of himself in behalf of any other
being, or any cause, or any conceit" (p. 251). The false
ness of the argument, which is itself a conceit, is further
suggested in the inconclusiveness of the last words on
Pierre's town copy, "Moreover: if— " (p. 253). Lastly,
Melville portrays the optimistic Plinlimmon as dehumanized
by his philosophy:
The whole countenance of this man, the whole air and
look of this man, expressed a cheerful content. Cheerful
is the adjective, for it was the contrary of gloom; con
tent— perhaps acquiescence— is the substantive, for it
was not Happiness or Delight. But while the personal
look and air of this man were thus winning, there was
still something latently visible in him which repelled.
That something may best be characterized as non-Benevo-
lence. Non-Benevolence seems the best word, for it was
neither Malice nor Ill-will; but something passive.
(p. 341)
Such an inscrutable figure, whose "clothes seemed to dis
guise this man," brings into focus Melville's criticism of
the rationalistic intelligence that underlies the commer
cialized society of the Apostles (p. 341).
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234
Melville's attack on empiricism with its latent "non-
[Benevolence" parallels his rejection of transcendental ;
jidealism as a lie. Acknowledging the need of "the enthusi-
i
jast youth" to reconcile "this world with his own soul,"
Melville adds that "this Talismanic Secret" has never yet
j
been found. "Certain philosophers," he continues,
have time and again pretended to have found it; but if
they do not in the end discover their own delusion,
other people soon discover it for themselves, and so
those philosophers and their vain philosophy are let
glide away into practical oblivion. Plato, and Spinoza,
and Goethe, and many more belong to this guild of self
imposters, with a preposterous rabble of Muggletonian
Scots and Yankees, whose vile brogue still the more be-
streaks the stripedness of their Greek or German Neopla-
tonic originals. (p. 244)
In Pierre, then, Melville dramatizes the insignificance of
human comprehension and power of self-determination, in con
trast to the Emersonian conception of the infinitude of the
private man.
Although Pierre contains numerous allusions to great
tragedies— Henry A. Murray refers to the title character as
"Oedipus-Romeo-Hamlet-Memnon-Christ-Ishmael-Orestes-Timon-
Satan-Cain-Manfred, or more shortly, an American Fallen and
Crucified Angel"— the novel fails primarily because it lacks
the balance Melville achieved with the application of the
transcendental ethics, especially the doctrine of compensa
tion, in his more successful earlier works (p. xx). In
Pierre, there is"no sense of spiritual renewal to provide
what Emerson described in "The Poet" as the illumination
that "rived the dark with private ray" (Works, III, 1) ._____
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235
Melville's criticism of both the empirical and idealistic
attitudes toward experience provides instead tragic irony
and implausible melodrama without the relief of wonder.
Adverse public reaction to Pierre resulted for Melville
jin the loss of an audience which anticipated sequels to
Typee but tolerated the complex mixture of philosophy and
•whaling in Mobv-Dick. Hugh W. Hetherington adequately
states the critical consensus of the 1850's that Pierre
"was morally vicious, stylistically monstrous, incomprehen-
11
sibly transcendental, and violently mad." Melville's re
maining fiction of the pre-Civil War period received rela
tively little public recognition, despite the brilliance of
individual stories and passages in the novels. Israel
Potter, a plotless historical novel, has a surface simplic
ity of narrative that recalls Typee. This work concerns the
plight of a Revolutionary War hero and exile who was refused
a pension in his old age and died in poverty; its distin
guishing feature, however, is its satirical portraits of
historical figures, including George III, Benjamin Franklin,
John Paul Jones, and Ethan Allen— all of whom are character
ized by their human limitations. Melville concludes his
swiftly-paced narrative with the wandering Israel Potter's
return home after an absence of fifty years. Like Washing
ton Irving's Rip Van Winkle, the old veteran finds himself
^^Melville's Reviewers (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961),
p. 238. ____ ________________________________________
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2361
an outcast in a changed society; but no one recognizes him: |
He was repulsed in efforts after a pension by certain
caprices of law. His scars proved his only medals. He
dictated a little book, the record of his fortunes. But
long ago it faded out of print— himself out of being—
j his name out of memory. He died the same day that the
I oldest oak on his native hills was blown down.
I Melville's reaction against transcendental idealism in
jthe years following 1851, however, was not total. In 1856,
the year after publication of Israel Potter, Melville col
lected six magazine stories and sketches which he had writ
ten since 1852 and republished them as The Piazza Tales. In
the best of these, "Benito Cereno," which first appeared in
Putnam's Monthly Magazine for October, November, and Decem
ber, 1855, Melville continues to reflect his underlying
pessimism; but he reverts to the Emersonian doctrine of com-
13
pensation in this suspenseful story based on fact. As in
Mobv-Dick, the narrative involves a moral conflict between
the individual and society: Benito Cereno, master of the
slave ship San Dominick, representing the general evil of
conformity and the particular evil of slavery, becomes him
self a slave, though he retains the symbols of authority.
The characters of Babo and Captain Delano, leaders of oppos
ing forces, represent polarities in human nature: the
(Boston, 1925), p. 301.
13
The Piazza Tales, p. 230. Melville derived his story
from factual materials in Chapter XVIII of Captain Amasa
Delano's A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern
and Southern Hemisphere (Boston, 1817). See Harold H.
Scudder, "Melville's Benito Cereno and Captain Delano's
Voyages. " PMLA, 43:502-532. June 1928.________________________ _
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237
rebellious slave suggests the malevolence inherent in insti
tutions; the American skipper, on the other hand, portrays
the instinctive self-reliance of the innocent. Delano's
inability to comprehend the degradation of slavery in con- ;
trast to Cereno's tragic awareness of what it means to be a ;
jslave has a striking parallel in Emerson's address on "The
Fugitive Slave Law," which he delivered at the Tabernacle in
New York City, March 4, 1854. In a vigorous attack on
Daniel Webster for backing the Law, Emerson points out the
difference between innocence and experience in relation to
i
the evil of slavery; "I have lived all my life without suf- :
fering any known inconveniences from American Slavery. I
never saw it; I never heard the whip; I never felt the check
bn my free speech and action, until, the other day, when
Mr. Webster, by his personal influence, brought the Fugitive
Slave Law on the country" (Works, XI, 219). It is essen
tially this difference which separates Delano from Cereno in
Melville's tale. Of the malignant principle in slavery,
Emerson continues: "The new Bill made it operative, required
me to hunt slaves, and it found citizens in Massachusetts
willing to act as judges and captors. Moreover, it dis
closes the secret of the new times, that Slavery was no
longer mendicant, but was become aggressive and dangerous"
(pp. 228-229).
Emerson's awareness of evil, which motivated him to
participate vigorously in the abolitionist movement, is
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238
implicit in his concept of moral polarities, which he devel
oped in his essay on "Compensation." In his speech, Emerson
rephrases ideas in the essay to point up the danger of slav-|
I :
ery: "A man who commits a crime defeats the end of his
I I
existence. He was created for benefit, and he exists for ;
harm; and as well-doing makes power and wisdom, ill-doing
takes them away. A man who steals another man's labor
steals away his own faculties; his integrity, his humanity
is flowing away from him. The habit of oppression cuts out ,
the moral eyes, and, though the intellect goes on simulating
the moral as before, its sanity is gradually destroyed"
(p. 237).
In "Benito Cereno," Melville applies this principle of
compensation as Cereno, his integrity compromised through
participation in the slave trade, meets his nemesis in Babo.
Though the Spanish skipper is rescued by Captain Delano,
Cereno dies, like Ahab in Mobv-Dick, as a result of a self
consuming vision of evil:
"You are saved," cried Captain Delano, more and more
astonished and pained; "you are saved: what has cast
such a shadow upon you?"
"The negro."
There was silence, while the moody man sat, slowly
and unconsciously gathering his mantle about him, as if
it were a pall. (The Piazza Tales, pp. 139-140)
Melville's portrayal of malevolence in this story,
though it reverses the usual roles of slave and master, is i
!
certainly no more realistic than Emerson's description in an;
earlier speech on "Emancipation in the British West Indies,
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239i
which he delivered in Concord on August 1, 1844, while Mel- |
ville was still at sea aboard the U.S.S. United States. Of |
the inhumane treatment of human beings aboard slave ships
i
jand ashore, Emerson said:
In consequence of the dangers of the trade growing out
of the act of abolition, ships were built sharp for
I swiftness with a frightful disregard of the comfort of
; the victims they were destined to transport. They car
ried five, six, seven hundred stowed in a ship built so
narrow as to be unsafe, being made just broad enough on
the beam to keep the sea. In attempting to make its es
cape from the pursuit of a man-of-war, one ship flung
five hundred slaves alive into the sea. . . . In the
islands was an ominous state of cruel and licentious so
ciety; every house had a dungeon attached to it; every
slave was worked by the whip. . . . The boy was set to
strip and flog his own mother to blood for a small of
fense. Looking in the face of his master by the negro
was held to be violence by the island courts. He was
worked sixteen hours, and his ration by law, in some is
lands, was a pint of flour and one salt herring a day.
He suffered insult, stripes, mutilation at the humor of
the master; iron collars were riveted on their necks with
iron prongs ten inches long; capsicum pepper was rubbed
in the eyes of the females ; and they were done to death
with the most shocking levity between the master and mana
ger, without fine or inquiry. . . . (Works, XI, 110-111)
This other side of Emerson, which contrasts with the opti
mism of the essays, is nevertheless related to them through
the doctrine of compensation. Emerson's emphasis on the
absolute rewards of self-reliance based on a perfect adjust
ment of the individual to nature in the essays has its im
plied alternative of inevitable punishment for the loss of
integrity such as Melville dramatizes in "Benito Cereno."
Though Emerson could belittle evil in "Spiritual Laws," an
essay which stresses spiritual principle, by calling the
preoccupation with original sin "the soul's mumps and
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240:
I
measles," evil for Emerson, as for Melville, is conformity
(Works, XI, 132). Emerson also said in "The Over-Soul," |
"Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual" (p. 267) . ■
Melville’s application of Emerson's doctrine of compen-
I
jsation in "Benito Cereno" provides an outstanding exception
to his general criticism of transcendental idealism in the
I
years following 1851. Perhaps Melville's most successful
anti-transcendental story is "Bartleby the Scrivener," first
published in Putnam's Monthly Macrazine for November and
December, 1853 (The Piazza Tales, p. 229). The story ridi
cules total self-reliance in the character of an inactive
office worker. Bartleby's humorously pathetic assertion of
independence— his constant refrain is "I would prefer not
to"— amounts to a complete withdrawal from the routines of
living. By contrast, in "The American Scholar" Emerson ad
vocated a life of action for the self-reliant scholar, who
also is influenced by nature and books. "The one thing of
value," Emerson said, "is the active soul" (Works, I, 90).
Even Thoreau, who withdrew from all social routines at Wal
den Pond, studied nature, read the classics, and hoed beans.
In addition to the apparent satire, Melville may have de
signed this story at least in part as a self-portrait. Like
Bartleby, who had worked in the Dead Letter Office, Melville
also withdrew into himself, embittered by his apparent fail
ure as an author.
Despite the merit of individual stories. The Piazza
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2 4 X
Tales was not a financial success. Still in poor health.
though somewhat improved, Melville concluded his profes- |
sional career as a novelist in 1857 with publication of The
Confidence Man, a comprehensive though ineffective satire on
the optimism of the age. If Pierre marks that point in
Melville's career at which he rejects the idea of a moral
order in nature that governs the affairs of men. The Confi
dence Man portrays the logical consequence that there is no
!
basis for trust in human relationships. In contrast to the
tragic melodrama of Pierre, the mood of The Confidence Man
is bitter satire that recalls neoclassical attacks on opti
mism in Voltaire's Candide and Samuel Johnson's Rasselas,
both of which, however, amount to defenses of reason and
common sense.
Melville's last novel to be published during his life
time portrays confidence as a masquerade of the foolish, the
fearful, and the selfish in a series of loosely-related
episodes aboard the white-washed Mississippi steamer Fidèle.
Perhaps because Melville was not familiar with his materi
als, this mock world-ship is hardly more than a stage set
ting for the conversations of the characters, who are pre
sented as static types rather than as developing individu
als. In the opening chapter, Melville establishes a sar
donic tone in his description of a mute with a lamb-like
appearance, who boards the vessel on April Fool's Day and
irritates passengers by holding up a slate on which he has
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242
I
written a series of texts from I Corinthians, Chapter XIII: !
"Charity thinketh no evil. Charity suffereth long and is
kind. Charity endureth all things. Charity believeth all '
[things. Charity never faileth."^^ Regarded as a lunatic,
[the stranger settles down eventually at the foot of a ladder
leading to a deck above and falls asleep, while the ship's
barber hangs out his ironically inoffensive sign, which sug
gests the theme of the novel— "No Trust" (p. 4).
In succeeding chapters, Melville introduces a variety
Of apparently confident men representing all levels of soci
ety and points of view, from Negro beggar to philosopher.
Each in turn is exposed as a sham. Melville ridicules in
particular the cold intellectuality of the metaphysic and
ethic of transcendentalism in the characters of Winsome and
Egbert, a mystic and his practical disciple, who suggest
Emerson and perhaps Thoreau. Winsome, for example, is
easily trapped by inconsistencies in his argument with
another confidence man identified merely as "the cosmopoli
tan"; but he blandly defends himself with a paraphrase of
"Self-Reliance":
Yes, but what of that? I seldom care to be consist
ent. In a philosophical view, consistency is a certain
level at all time, maintained in all the thoughts of
one's mind. But, since nature is nearly all hill and
dale, how can one keep naturally advancing in knowledge
without submitting to the natural inequalities in the
progress? (pp. 216-217)
^^Ed. Elizabeth S. Foster (New York, 1954), pp. 2-3.
All page references to The Confidence Man are from this edi
tion. ______________________
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243
The cosmopolitan rejects Winsome's philosophy as "moonshiny"!
in theory but heartless in practice: "Why wrinkle the brow ;
and waste the oil both of life and lamp," he tells Egbert,
"to turn out a head kept cool by the under ice of the heart?:
^at your illustrious magian has taught you, any poor old
j
broken-down, heart-shrunken dandy might have lisped. Pray,
leave me, and with you take the last dregs of your inhuman
philosophy" (p. 253).
Despite this show of righteous indignation, the cosmo
politan is himself a masquerader. He enters into an agree
ment to repay the barber for any loss "that may come from
trusting mankind, in the way of his vocation, for the resi
due of his trip," provided that the barber keep out of sight
his sign, "No Trust"; then the cosmopolitan departs from the
barber shop without paying for his shave. "Look at your
agreement," he tells the skeptical barber. "You must trust"
(p. 269). The novel concludes abruptly with a conversation ;
between the cosmopolitan and an old man, whose loss of faith
is suggested as the confidence man leads him into the dark,
"money belt in hand, and life-preserver under arm" (p. 285).
The unrelieved pessimism in The Confidence Man. as in
Pierre, indicates Melville's failure to detach himself from
his work, to see his subject whole in terms of moral alter
natives held in delicate balance by an esthetically satisfy-:
ing structure. On the other hand, Melville's simplifica
tions and exaggerations in The Confidence Man, as in
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244
!
I
"Bartleby the Scrivener," are legitimate devices of the
satirist, whose purpose is to ridicule foibles and vices.
As a demolition expert engaged in what James Sutherland has
^escribed as intellectual slum clearance, however, the
i
jsatirist must discriminate between the just and the unjust;
he must have a moral standard by which he measures his sub-
i 1 5
ject in order to justify his attack. In this sense, the
satirist keeps his balance, as Melville fails to do in seem
ing to attack every basis for trust. Emerson suggests in
"Merlin," his poem on the nature of art, the moral and es
thetic equilibrium generally lacking in Melville's fiction
from Pierre through The Confidence Man:
Merlin's mighty line
Extremes of nature reconciled.
Bereaved a tyrant of his will.
And made the lion mild.
Songs can the tempest still.
Scattered on the stormy air.
Mold the year to fair increase.
And bring in poetic peace.
(Works, IX, 122)
In perspective, Melville’s professional career as a
novelist falls into two major phases corresponding to the
growth and, decline in his art. In the developmental phase,
from 1845 to 1851, Melville wrote his six transcendental
novels of the sea, in which he defended self-reliance.
See "The Nature of Satire" in English Satire (Cam
bridge, Eng., 1962), pp. 1-22. "The reader," Sutherland
says, "has to supply the positive from the satirist's nega- :
tive, the desirable from the contemptible" (p. 20). In The
Confidence Man. Melville does not allow for the existence of
a positive value.
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245;
I
attacked conformity, and learned to employ transcendental
symbols of increasing complexity. This phase culminates in !
yiobv-Dick with its remarkable matching of transcendental
idealism with tragic drama under the influence of Hawthorne.
!
After the departure of Hawthorne in the winter of 1851, Mel
ville endeavored to find new ways to express himself, but
with the exception of his short fiction failed to develop
successful techniques of his own to dramatize the moral
deserts he chose to explore. In this period of decline,
from 1852 to 1857, he wrote anti-transcendental fiction at
tacking self-reliance as well as conformity and substituting
fatalism for Emersonian compensation, except in "Benito
Cereno." In terms of representative characters, the two
phases are as different from each other as buoyant Jack
Chase of White-Jacket is from inert Bartleby, both of whom
are portraits of self-reliance.
Melville's weakened health, financial insecurity, and
natural rebelliousness of temper help to account for his re
action against transcendental idealism, and also for his re
jection of his prose fictional art. Eleanor Melville Met
calf best summarizes Melville’s condition at the time he
completed The Confidence Man:
While Samuel Shaw was studying in Berlin and enjoying
theatre and ballet and The Confidence Man was making its
way through the press, Melville was on the ocean bound
for Glasgow. He had recovered from severe attacks of
rheumatism and sciatica, but his plight had become so
desperate (and in consequence, the plight of his family,
who had begun to suffer not only from insufficient funds
f ^ daily needs, but far more from his bursts of nervous
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246
anger and attacks of morose conscience) that his father- I
in-law provided the means for escape— a third Atlantic
crossing.
In the fall of 1857, after his return from an extended
tour of Europe and the Middle East during which he visited
Hawthorne in Liverpool, Melville tried lecturing, as Emersoh
land others had done, but with no great success (Log, II,
496). When he embarked on still another cruise in May,
1860, aboard a merchant ship with his brother Thomas as cap
tain, Melville left behind a manuscript volume of poetry
with instructions to his family for publication (p. 612).
His poetry, which he composed from the late 1850's to the
end of his life in 1891, offers the contemporary scholar a
relatively uncharted and new area of investigation.
Melville, however, relied on other means, including
legacies and a position as a customs officer in New York
City, to support his family. During the years after the
Civil War, Melville gradually restored the creative energies
and sense of balance that he had lost in the period after
Mobv-Dick. Among his poems composed shortly before he died
is "Art," which has a remarkable similarity to Emerson's
"Merlin" in its concept of the artist who struggles to
reconcile extremes of nature:
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create.
What unlike things must meet and mate:
^^Herman Melville: Cvcle and Epicycle, p. 159.
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247!
A flame to melt— a wind to freeze?
Sad patience— joyous energies;
Humility— yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity— reverence. These must mate,
I And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
I To wrestle with the angel— Art.^?
I As one might expect, Melville's last work of fiction,
the short novel Billy Budd, composed in the year of his
death, not only reflects the sense of a moral and esthetic
!
equilibrium in "Art," but also returns to the characteristic
dramatic situation of the early novels— the transcendental
sailor aboard a world-ship. In this unfinished work, which
was not published until 1922, Melville again matches tran
scendental idealism with a tragic plot as in Mobv-Dick and
"Benito Cereno." Setting his tale aboard a British warship
of Nelson's time, Melville focuses his narrative on the
plight of Billy Budd, the "handsome sailor," impressed for
service aboard H.M.S. Indomitable from the merchantman
Rights of Man, during the war with France in 1797.
Billy is a recrudescence of such independent sailor
types as Jack Chase, to whom the novel is dedicated, and
Steelkilt of "The Town Ho's Story" in Mobv-Dick. He also is
the epitome of the innocent, intuitive "Adam before the
fall" that Emerson characterized as the essential man in
this passage from Nature :
^^In Selected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Hennig
Cohen (Garden City, N.Y., 1964), p. 144.
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25^
i
All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and |
can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Caesar
I called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cob-
I bier's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a
! scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point
I your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine
I names. Build therefore your own world. (Works, I, 76)
Billy, who attempts to build his own world aboard the In-
j
Qomitable, is popular with his messmates but lacks the wis
dom of the serpent. "By his original constitution aided by
the cooperating influences of his lot," Melville writes,
"Billy in many respects was little more than an upright bar
barian, much such perhaps as Adam presumably might have been
fere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into his company.
Billy's inability to perceive evil, like Captain Delano's
innocence in "Benito Cereno," corresponds, however, to the
criticism of transcendental optimism which Melville made
with reference to Emerson's essay, "Prudence." In his copy
of Essays, First Series, which he purchased in 1862, Mel
ville checked Emerson's sentence, "Trust men, and they will :
be true to you; treat them greatly, and they will show them
selves great, though they make an exception in your favor to
all their rules of trade." In the margin, he commented,
"God help the poor fellow who squares his life according to
this" (Log, II, 648).
Furthermore, Billy's speech impediment, his single de
fect, is a characteristic which Emerson associated with the
18
Portable Melville, p. 649. All page references to
Billy Budd are from this edition. ___ _______ ____
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. 249
transcendental poet— a child of music, not merely a lyr-
19
1st. In "The American Scholar," for example, Emerson
writes that Man Thinking influenced primarily by nature
"must stammer in his speech, often forego the living for the
dead" in order to perform his duties of inspiring and guid- '
ling men (Works, I, 101). In "The Poet," Emerson challenges
the poet to speak out:
Doubt not, 0 poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me,
and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stutter
ing and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive,
I until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power
which every night shows thee is thine own. (Works, III,
40)
Billy, who acquires the nickname Baby Budd, has the gift of
poetry, though he is illiterate. "He could not read," Mel
ville writes, "but he could sing, and like the illiterate
nightingale was sometimes the composer of his own song"
(p. 549). Of Billy's impediment, Melville observes:
Though our Handsome Sailor had as much of masculine
beauty as one can expect anywhere to see, nevertheless,
like the beautiful woman in one of Hawthorne's minor
tales, there was just one thing amiss in him. No vis
ible blemish, indeed, as with the lady; no, but an occa
sional liability to a vocal defect. Though in the hour
of elemental uproar or peril, he was everything that a
sailor should be, yet under sudden provocation of strong
heart-feeling his voice, otherwise singularly musical,
as if expressive of the harmony within, was apt to de
velop an organic hesitancy, in fact more or less of a
stutter or even worse. (p. 650)
Like the stammer of Emerson's poet, Billy's stutter is
In "The Poet," Emerson contrasts the writer of verses
with the transcendental poet: "Our poets [i.e., lyrists]
are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music" '
(Works, III, 9).________________________________________________ I
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250
organically related to "the harmony within." In addition,
his over-all "masculine beauty" corresponds to his purity of|
i
spirit in the sense that Emerson describes in Nature ;
"Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue. Every natural ac
tion is graceful. Every heroic act is also decent and
causes the place and the bystanders to shine" (Works, I, 19-
20). In "The Transcendentalist," Emerson acknowledges that
there are no pure transcendentalists: "I mean we have yet
no man who has leaned entirely on his character, and eaten
|angels' food. . . . Only in the instinct of the lower ani
mals we find the suggestion of the methods of it, and some- :
thing higher than our understanding" (p. 338). Melville,
however, portrays in the character of Billy the ideal inno- i
cence of the transcendental poet in relation to the knowl
edge of evil that characterizes civilized society. "As the
Handsome Sailor," Melville writes,
Billy Budd's position aboard the seventy-four was some
thing analogous to that of a rustic beauty transplanted
from the provinces and brought into competition with the
high-born dames of the court. But of this change of
circumstances he scarce noted. (The Portable Melville,
p. 647)
Aboard the Indomitable, Billy is involved with three
characters who represent worldly alternatives to the rigid
impersonal conformity imposed by custom and the Articles of
War on the ship society. Claggart, the master-at-arms,
whose duty is to enforce the law, exploits the evil inherent:
in conventions, which serve to conceal and protect his natu
ral depravity. Though Emerson denies the existence of such
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251|
I
an evil principle in his published writings— in "The Divin- ;
ity School Address" he says, "Good is positive. Evil is
merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is
[the privation of heat"— he nevertheless acknowledges the
practical reality of mortal imperfection. "All evil," he
I '
continues, "is so much death or nonentity" (Works, I, 124).
bn the other hand, in his journals, which were not intended
for publication, he sometimes approaches Melville's concep
tion, as in this passage:
The existence of evil and malignant men does not de
pend on themselves or on men; it indicates the virulence
that still remains uncured in the universe, uncured and
corrupting, and hurling out these pestilent rats and
tigers, and men rat-like and wolf-like. (Journals, VIII,
452)
Both Melville and Emerson, however, conceive of malevolence
as an outcome of static rules and regulations, which debase
the individual and punish his nonconformity. Of natural de
pravity, Melville writes, "Civilization, especially if of
the austerer sort, is auspicious to it. It folds itself in
the mantle of respectability" (Billy Budd, pp. 574-675).
The character of Claggart, whose malevolence Billy does not
comprehend, recalls Bland, the master-at-arms in White-
Jacket, another organic scoundrel with the manners of a
gentleman. Bland, however, is recognized by White-Jacket
and the crew for what he is and merely tolerated by friend
and foe aboard the Neversink.
In contrast to Claggart, who uses the law for his own
irrational purposes. Captain Vere is a prisoner of the_____
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252
I
Articles of War and his own logic, which are in conflict I
{with his higher instincts. The skipper of the Indomitable
is perhaps Melville's most realistic tragic character. More
like Benito Cereno than unregenerate Ahab, Captain Vere
represents the plight of the civilized conformist, who sac
rifices his individuality to preserve the traditions and
conventions that comprise the structure of society. As a
man who lives with books, he subordinates the heart to the
head. Melville writes:
He had a marked leaning toward everything intellectual.
He loved books, never going to sea without a newly re
plenished library, compact but of the best. The iso
lated leisure, in some cases so wearisome, falling at
intervals to commanders even during a war cruise, never
was tedious to Captain Vere. (p. 550)
Though inconspicuous in appearance and meditative— his nick
name is "starry Vere"— the skipper also is a man of decisive
action. "This unobtrusiveness of demeanor," Melville ob
serves, "may have proceeded from a certain unaffected mod
esty of manhood sometimes accompanying a resolute nature, a
modesty evinced at all times not calling for pronounced ac
tion, and which shown in any rank of life suggests a virtue
aristocratic in kind" (p. 558). Vere, however, falls short
of Emerson's ideal Man Thinking, who is influenced primarily
by nature and secondarily by books and action. Billy, on
the other hand, lacking an education, also is less than a
whole person. The relation of Billy's innocence to Vere's
worldly experience illustrates two contrasting kinds of
tragic imbalance that characterize the human condition : _____
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253
i
with no sense of evil, Billy as a child of nature is the
victim of a society fraught with mantraps; Vere as an agent
of society dedicated to preserve its inflexible code is out
I
|of harmony with his private conscience.
Aboard the world-ship, wholeness of vision is best rep
resented in the character of the Dansker, an old sailor from
the tragic warship Ag-amemnon. Melville describes him as
"long anglicized in the service, of few words, many wrin
kles, and some honorable scars" (p. 668). He is "the old
Merlin" and "salt seer," who befriends Billy and warns him
of Claggart's malevolence (pp. 668-669). Like Ahab, the
Dansker has a crack in his nature represented by "a long
pale scar like a streak of dawn's light falling athwart the
dark visage"; but he has not lost his perspective on either
the inner or the outer world (p. 668). In contrast to
Billy, an unscarred young Saxon, the Dansker has a knowledge
of evil derived from experience; this tragic wisdom is "the
dawn's light" that cuts across "the dark visage," tanned by
a Platonic sun. On the other hand, in contrast to Captain
Vere, the Dansker retains his individuality and essential
humanity despite the pressures of the conforming society.
While the conformists aboard the Indomitable regard the
Dansker as an eccentric, Billy "revering him as a salt hero,
would make advances, never passing the old Agamemnon man
without a salutation marked by that respect which is seldom
lost on the aged however crabbed at times or whatever their
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2541
j
station in life" (p. 569). !
Of the four principal characters, the Dansker alone is
detached from the dramatic conflict, which begins when
^laggart falsely accuses Billy of fomenting a mutiny.
Billy, who cannot find words to speak in his defense, ans
wers impulsively with his fist, killing the master-at-arms.
Condemned to death by a court-martial only after Captain
Vere points out the responsibility of the officers to uphold
the law, Billy in the climactic scene as he is about to hang
stuns the captain and crew with his clearly spoken last
words: "God bless Captain Vere" (p. 729). Melville de
scribes the poetry of Billy's language: "Syllables, too, de
livered in the clear melody of a singing-bird on the point
of launching from the twig, had a phenomenal effect, not un
enhanced by the rare personal beauty of the young sailor
spiritualized now through late experiences so poignantly
profound" (p. 729). Shortly after Billy's execution. Cap
tain Vere is fatally wounded in an engagement with the
French warship Athêiste and dies murmuring "Billy Budd,
Billy Budd" (p. 736). Although the official record of the
trial and execution portrays Billy as a depraved criminal
and Claggart as a "respectable and discreet" petty-officer,
the crew preserve the memory of Billy's humanity in their
folk song, "Billy in the Darbies," their sentimental fare
well to "the handsome sailor" (pp. 737-738).
In this story, subtitled "an inside narrative,"
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I 255!
Melville ' s most sympathetic characters are Billy and Captain!
Vere, who represent the polarities of intuition and logic
comprising the transcendental world of the mind. In the
jadmirable character of the Dansker, however, Melville por
trays the indomitable human spirit, which endures in spite
bf the hardships of war, savage nature, and the regulations
pf society that, as Emerson said, conspires against the man
hood of the individual. Glued on the inside of Melville's
writing box containing the manuscript of Billy Budd and his
last poems was a motto suggesting the author's identifica
tion with the early transcendental phase of his career:
"Keep true to the dreams of thy youth" (The Portable Mel
ville, p. 740).
The impact of transcendentalism on Melville's fiction
from Typee through Billy Budd is so pervasive that it sug
gests new dimensions in the art of both Emerson and Melville.
Though one readily agrees with the premise of F. 0.
Matthiessen and other critics that Emerson was essentially
an optimist and Melville a pessimist, especially in the per
iod from 1852 to 1857, one cannot conclude that the primary
relation of Melville to Emerson is confirmed in the sharp
rejection of transcendental ideals in Pierre and The Confi
dence Man. It was Matthiessen's attempt in American Renais
sance to determine Emerson's "prevailing tone" and then to
compare it with Melville's that led to his key assertion:
"How an age in which Emerson's was the most articulate voice;
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2 5 i
could also have given hirth to Mobv-Dick can be accounted
20
for only through reaction."
Melville, however, was not one to take Emerson or any
other writer whole, as a less independent author would be
'inclined to do: like Emerson, Melville realized that imita
tion cannot rise above its model. Furthermore, neither
Emerson's most optimistic aphorisms nor Melville's most pes
simistic fiction represents the best work of either author.
Melville's genius was to take the best of Emerson's think
ing— concepts of the symbolic relation of the individual to
hature, society, and the mind— and to make these ideas pe
culiarly his own. The charge that Emerson lacked a vision
of evil is an oversimplification based on a study of Emer
son 's essays and poems apart from the evidence to the con
trary in his lectures on slavery and the comments in his
journals. If Emerson chose to stress in his essays the po
tential for moral and spiritual growth in the individual
life, these essays nevertheless convey in brilliantly evoc
ative language the doctrines of individual integrity, com
pensation, and symbolic correspondences that tragic writers
such as Hawthorne and especially Melville could exploit to
20
American Renaissance, p. 184. Matthiessen observes,
"Many texts could be cited from Emerson to prove that he was
not unconscious that evil existed, but, as always with him,
the significant thing to determine is the prevailing tone"
(p. 181). Melville's rejection of Emerson's prevailing op
timism, however, does not imply a reaction against Emer
son's patterns of thinking on the organic processes of art,
which Melville employed to produce his traq-ic effects.______
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257
enrich the mainstream of American fiction. i
The extraordinary vitality of Melville's greatest nov- |
els is substantially the result of his original interpréta- i
tions of transcendental conceptions, which pervade his
!
jthemes, characters, settings, and plots. His failures in
the depressing period from 1852 to 1857 result essentially
from his rejection of these ideas. Though Melville sought
a faith that would meet the test of art, in Billy Budd he is
closer to the spiritual center of Emerson's thinking than in
any other work. Melville's ultimate concern, like Emerson's,
is with the fleeting perception of beauty in nature and the
human spirit. "In private places," Emerson wrote in Nature,
"among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at
once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its
candle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only
let his thoughts be of equal greatness" (Works, I, 21).
Similarly, in the moment of Billy's death, when the youthful
sailor heroically accepts the tragic inadequacy of man's
law, Melville dramatizes such a union of nature and spirit:
"The hull deliberately recovering from the periodic roll to
leeward was just regaining an even keel, when the last sig
nal, a preconcerted dumb one, was given. At the same moment
it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the east,
was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the
Lamb of God seen in mystical vision and simultaneously
therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces.
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258!
Billy ascended; and, ascending, took the full rose of the
dawn" (p. 730). I
Melville, then, like Emerson, derives his power not
I
jfrom blackness, but from "that gleam of light which flashes
jacross his mind from within" ("Self-Reliance," Works, I,
145). The best of Melville's work reflects this principle of
inward illumination— at times a blazing whiteness— that per
meates the mists, the sea, and the soul of man in the time
less beauty of art.
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B I B L I O G R A P H Y
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Charles R. Melville in the South Seas. New York :
I Morningside Heights, 1939. (Columbia University étud
ies in English and Comparative Literature, No. 138.)
Bowen, Merlin. The Long Encounter. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1960.
Brooks, Van Wyck. The Flowering- of New England. New York:
E. P. Dutton & Co., 1940.
Cameron, Kenneth W. Emerson the Essayist. 2 vols.
Raleigh, North Carolina: Thistle Press, 1945.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's Reading-.
Raleigh, North Carolina: Thistle Press, 1941.
Carlyle, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Carlyle. 30 vols.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896.
Carpenter, Frederic Ives. Emerson and Asia. Cambridge,
Mass.: 1930.
Chase, Owen. Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex, ed. B. R.
McElderry, Jr. New York: Corinth Books, Inc., 1963.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Complete Works of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, ed. W. G. T. Shedd. 7 vols. New
York : Harper, 1854.
Davis, Merrell R. Melville's Mardi: A Chartless Voyape.
New Haven: Yale, 195 2. (Yale Studies in English, Vol.
119.)
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson. 12 vols. New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1903-1921.
______________________. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.
Edward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. 10
vols. New York : Houghton Mifflin, 1909-1914.
260
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261
iEmpson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. Norfolk,
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Creator Williams, John Brindley (author)

Core Title The impact of transcendentalism on the novels of herman melville

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Language and Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

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