Symbolism in Moby-DickAuthor(s): Elmer E. StollSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Jun., 1951), pp. 440-465Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2707754Accessed: 30/08/2010 02:31

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SYMBOLISM IN MOBY-DICK

BY ELMER E. STOLL

Our critics are often interested in extracting something from their subject which is not fairly in it.-T. S. Eliot, " Imperfect Critics," The Sacred Wood (1920).

[Of works of art] at the first view of them they are apprehended, not as appearances with an unknown reality behind them, but as appearances whose reality is in their appearance; not as problematic things, but as the solution of a problem.-W. P. Ker, Collected Essays (1925), II, 252.

I In my article " Symbolism in Coleridge " I said that, after The

Tempest, The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan were the happiest hunting-ground of the symbolist critic. The honor may, of late, be disputed by Moby-Dick. In his Herman Melville 2 Mr. Lewis Mum- ford has observed:

Mr. D. H. Lawrence sees in the conflict a battle between the blood- consciousness of the white race and its own abstract intellect, which at- tempts to hunt and slay it: Mr. Percy Boynton sees in the whale all prop- erty and vested privilege, laming the spirit of man: Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has found in the white whale an image like that of Grendel in Beowulf, ex- pressing the Northern consciousness of the hard fight against the elements; while for the disciple of Jung, the white whale is the symbol of the Uncon- scious, which torments man, and yet is the source of all his proudest efforts.

"Each age," Mr. Mumford added, the subsequent years fully justi- fying him, "will find its own symbols in Moby-Dick. Over that ocean the clouds will pass and change, and the ocean itself will mirror back those changes from its own depths." A criticism, in short, that is Narcissism! A reading that is a reverie! The story given mean- ings instead of imparting its own, as for a century and a half has been the lot of Hamlet! For it is more blessed to give than receive-to find (as, intellectually, spiritually, most of us manage to do) what we are looking for.

Generally the critics of Hamlet have not known they were doing that, nor, perhaps, the critics of Moby-Dick; if questioned, they might, most of them, have openly adhered to the principle of the far from conservative Mr. Herbert Read, "that the real function of art is to express feeling and transmit understanding."3 Mr. Mumford,

1PMLA, March, 1948. 2 (1926), 194. 3 Anatomy of Art (1932), 198.

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SYMBOLISM IN MOBY-DICK 441

however, would not have; and to the four above cited, apparently, no understanding has been transmitted at all. Here the strangest thing is not that these interpretations are incompatible with one an- other, nor even that they are incompatible with the text: in the criticism by those not symbolists, both incongruities are nowadays common enough. The strangest thing is the symbolists' mutual satis- faction. Poets often like other poets' poetry; but not so often do critics like other critics' criticism. Symbolist critics, on the other hand, as other critics cannot, can agree to disagree.

This is not mainly owing to their tolerance or magnanimity: bare consistency requires it. Since " each age will find its own symbols in Moby-Dick," each age must, then, put up with the symbols of other ages. Nay, since the symbolists' meanings, so little dependent upon the text or the author's intention, thus virtually are no meanings, the consequent " meaningfulness " (to use the word of one of them) must not only be put up with but become a matter of congratulation to the symbolists themselves. All, then, are right, in their tenuous rele- vance. " Truth in advertising "? The difference between advertiser and critic is getting to be that the former sometimes knows he is lying; the latter, for whom " truth is what a man troweth," does not know.

In this day, moreover, when in both criticism and creation sym- bolism abounds and flourishes, it is natural that Moby-Dick, written nearer our own time than The Ancient Mariner or Kubla Khan, and at about the time of The Marble Faun, should be considered open and liable to such interpretation. A story presented at such length and (frequently) with such poetical or rhetorical pomp and circumstance, about a man's losing his leg to a whale he had been attacking for its blubber, and his spending the remainder of his life in the effort to find and attack it again, may well seem to cry out for an under-mean- ing, or seem rather silly without one. Many readers nowadays (though not, I think, the wisest) are too brainy and sophisticated readily to let such a story pass at par. In verse, perhaps, they might more flexibly accept it, where, "liberated from reality," they may more easily become as little children, which (Macaulay thinks) poets themselves, to be great, must do, and thus enter into the kingdom of poetry. " In poetry," says Longinus,4 "a certain mythical exaggera- tion is allowable, transcending mere logical credence." "In fine literature," says Yeats, like Mr. Eliot recently, who would have (very remarkably for him!) an audience who could neither read nor write, " there is something of an old wives' tale." In Moby-Dick at its best, I think, there is something of that as well.

4 On the Sublime, XV.-Macaulay, Essay on Milton.

442 ELMER E. STOLL

This, however, is prose; in the text itself, furthermore, the author, taking the most downright and elaborate pains to convince us of his fidelity to fact, warns us against " scouting at Moby-Dick as a mon- strous fable, or, still worse and more detestable, a hideous and in- tolerable allegory" (ch. 45). Under allegory, which says one thing but means another, Melville almost certainly includes symbolism (not so much practised or so clearly distinguished in his day), which means, not another thing, but what it says and another thing besides, or as Coleridge has it, is " a part of some whole that it represents." 5 In any case, by the symbolists Melville's caveat has been deliberately discounted or ignored. If the author had said it, instead of writing it, or had written it before the book or after, there might have been some justification for such treatment; for authors sometimes fumble or forget. Both Abercrombie and Spingarn (and at about the same time) in taking account of Pope's, Manzoni's, and Goethe's pro- nouncements on the importance, to the critic, of the author's purpose, make the reservation that "the poet's aim must be judged at the moment of the creative act . . . not by the vague ambitions which he imagines to be his real intentions before or after the creative act is achieved." 6 Ordinarily, as Abercrombie says, "if we know the author's intentions, we only do so because he has, somehow or other, carried them out." In his own time, at any rate, no research is neces- sary: we need only perceive and respond. Here, moreover, it is not a case of the author's imagining or forgetting but of his bidding, at the moment, his reader himself not to imagine or forget; and cer- tainly that carries more weight than his admission to the wife of the allegorizing Hawthorne: " I had some vague idea while writing it that the whole book was susceptible of an allegorizing construction." Hence, indeed, one would think, the warning in the first place. Mr. Maugham,7 who rejects the symbolists' theories without dwelling upon them, raises the question whether by Mrs. Hawthorne's sugges- tion Melville is not surprised. And as for the downright disavowal in the text, he naturally enough presumes that "where a practised writer says a thing he is more likely to mean what he says than what his commentators think he means." All that by his contradictory concession to Mrs. Hawthorne Melville may have meant was that his story was " susceptible of such a construction " only like many others,

Quoted by O. F. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (1941), 249. Cf. my "Symbolism in Coleridge," 216.

6 Abercrombie, Plea for the Liberty of Interpreting (1930), 21, 29. Principles of Literary Criticism (1932), 157-59; Spingarn, Creative Criticism (1931), 18.

7 " Moby Dick," Atlantic (June, 1948), 103-104.

SYMBOLISM IN MOBY-DICK 443

imaginary or real. Those of Abraham and Isaac, of Jephtha and his daughter, for instance, in the hands of a preacher; and as for the real (not impossibly), the last King Edward giving up his throne for an American divorcee or the heiress of the dime-store millions marrying princes. Goethe himself once said that his own life might be con- sidered in a high degree symbolical. Into a fable almost any story or incident can be turned, and upside down. By a really very intelligent writer King Lear has of late been made out to present " a new order," " a new conception of society "; and when the marble-hearted Regan shuts her father out in the storm "her action is symbolical." "His daughters are inside: he is outside," being of the old order.

Most authors are not so frank and explicit as Melville; yet as most sound critics still think-even advanced ones like Mr. Her- bert Read and the poet Mr. Day Lewis--art is "a communication." Now to misinterpret a communication-to make a person seem to say what he does not say or what we would say ourselves-is ordinarily considered highly improper. But by critics like Mr. G. W. Knight, Mr. Bonamy Dobree, and many another today, it apparently is not. Necessarily-in order to have scope for their own interpretations; but they are encouraged by Croce as he declares that "it does not matter what the poet intends to do or thinks he is doing but only what he does." And even Spingarn and Abercrombie, as, following not only Goethe and Manzoni but also Pope and Maupassant, and preceding Mr. Day Lewis, they insist on the importance of the inten- tion, may appear to be saying the same. "To be judged . . . by the art of the poem itself," says Spingarn; " everything is excluded which is not given by the author's technique," says Abercrombie; or as Mr. George Sampson 8 puts it, " the purpose of any utterance [and here even in the criticism, as from the preceding sentence is apparent] is a most important element of its form." (Of the most casual and com- monplace it is. " I have a new hat," said today one lady to another. " I am so glad " was the reply, where, happily, more was not meant, though it might have been, than met the ear.) The more sensible of the skeptics give the reason that the intention of the author, particu-

8 Dobree, reviewing Knight, Spectator, Sept. 27, 1930; Croce, Poesia (1946), 297; Spingarn, Creative Criticism (1931), 18; Abercrombie, A Plea for Liberty (1930), 21, 29; Maupassant, Preface to Pierre et Jean; Sampson, Seven Essays (1947), 70; Day Lewis, Poetic Image (1947), 55, 95. Cf. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism, ch. III, first paragraph: "the rapidity with which many readers leap to a conviction as to a poem's general intention, and the ease with which this as-

sumption can distort their whole reading."-What Croce says is really the same as Abercrombie above: "carried them out."

444 ELMER E. STOLL

larly that of early authors, is unascertainable or else beyond our sym- pathy. "We cannot become contemporary readers of Homer or Chaucer or members of the audience at the theater of Dionysius [misprint, of course] in Athens or of the Globe in London. There will always be a decisive difference between an act of imaginative re- construction and actual participation in a past point of view. We cannot really believe in Dionysius [again, for to misprinters con- sistency is a jewel] and laugh at him at the same time as the audience of Euripides' Bacchae seem to have done." 9 No one expects us to, however; nor to share Pindar's religious interest in athletic exploits, nor to applaud Achilles as he cuts the throats of Trojan captives in honor of the dead Patroclus, nor Dante as he and Virgil thrust Fi- lippo Argenti back from the boat into the river; but we need to understand, though not participate in, the spirit of Achilles or Virgil and Dante as it is done. As both Mr. Richards and Mr. Eliot have recognized, there is, in the words of the latter upon the Tuscan, "a difference between philosophical belief and poetic assent"; and critics like Goethe, Shelley, Arnold, or Charles Eliot Norton read Dante with delight, no more believing in Christ than (the stumbling- block here avoided) in Bacchus, and not laughing, either, though in Italy even today there are, among the less cultivated believers, those who joke about him or the saints. "The poem belongs to the pub- lic," say Messrs. Wimsatt and Beardsley; "as a system of values [the meaning] leads an independent life," say Messrs. Wellek and Warren; but thus it is laid liable to almost any whimsical or arbitrary interpretation, however foreign to the poet's way of thinking and feeling or that of his time.l0

The two opinions just now quoted might not be quite equivalent, but (even here is a matter of intention!) in the context they seem to be. In itself, the first is, I think, utterly fallacious; the other might only be the expression of artistic autonomy, justified so long as con- sistent and masterly, which critics since the time of Kant and Schell- ing, Schiller and Goethe, have more or less explicitly recognized and nearly all great poets have in part practised. Both at bottom are involved in l'art pour l'art; and something of both appears in Mr.

9 Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature (1949), 34, 156. 1?This Messrs. Wellek and Warren deny (34-35, 148-58), but I do not see

how these learned and ingenious critics avoid it.-For Messrs. Wimsatt and Beards- ley see the Sewanee Review (July, 1946), 470. They seem not to have been af- fected by the late Coomaraswamy's reply to their earlier pronouncements, Ameri- can Bookman I (1944), 41-48.

SYMBOLISM IN MOBY-DICK 445

MacLeish's versified Ars Poetica, which I have discussed elsewhere.1l This notion of the poem's independence of the poet is almost that of giving birth to a child, who, though he may inherit some of the parent's traits, thinks and feels, acts and speaks, of course, as he pleases. Only, according to Mr. MacLeish this offspring does not speak or think-" should not mean but be "-while according to the symbolist critic it means as the critic pleases.

Now it is quite true that often we cannot exactly determine what the author's intention was, but we can at least what it was not:-that Hector, instead of Achilles, should be the hero; that Hamlet, as a sufferer from the CEdipus complex, should be a rival of his father in the affections of his mother, sparing now his uncle as "his buried self," or, as the hero of a popular Elizabethan romantic tragedy, have seduced the heroine; that Falstaff should have recognized the rob- bers of the robbers as Prince Hal and Poins; or that Moby-Dick, either, should embody any of the entities listed by Mr. Mumford above. Here, indeed, concerning what the intention was not there should be no question-if only we will listen to what Melville has so clearly and emphatically said. But if even Homer or Shakespeare could arise and tell us, his words in this our Freudian day would not avail.

In general, obviously, earlier literature should not be mistaken for what is peculiar to our present-day notions or practices in politics, ethics, or esthetics, in philosophy or psychology. Yet we need not content ourselves with mere denial. To what earlier literature is we need no guide:-to the poetry, in its imaginative fervor, pattern and rhythm; to the narrative or dramatic art, in character and situation. Nor is that all; and, here again, we need no guide. For Moby-Dick as (I cannot but believe) for all writing worthy of consideration, "meaning " has a meaning; that is to say, it is one, as Mr. Read says, "transmitted "-conveyed or else perceptibly suggested-by the writer to the reader, not (as above) concocted in the latter's indi- vidual, independent brain. The makings of it, to be sure, are there- must be there-involved in the reader's own intelligence and experi- ence or preserved in his memory. As Sir Walter Raleigh says, " the reader can only go to poetry [as not to prose] to be told something he knew already." But even if now merely by means of a symbol, still the " something " must be told; and by that is simply recalled the other thing, the whole of which the symbol is " a part." Without any brain-cudgelling of ours Tennyson's Ulysses is not only a flesh-

11 Journal of the History of Ideas (Jan., 1946), 25-27.

446 ELMER E. STOLL

and-blood adventurer but a philosophical explorer; Ibsen's Solness, not only a builder but an aspirer. "A good allegory," it has been

said, "is clearer than any explanation of it would be." Why, then, explain it, the good or (which alone needs it, whether in Spenser or in Dante) the bad? So with a good symbol. As both Chesterton and Mr. C. S. Lewis have lately insisted, it is not a puzzle, a riddle; is meant not to conceal but delicately though effectively to reveal; and the reader should only remember and respond, not bestir or exert himself, not thrust himself forward, as in the interpretations men- tioned by Mr. Mumford. The same holds true of painting and sculp- ture, and the artist as well as the writer should not need to explain it. As Mr. Belgion says of Epstein's Night and Day, " if Mr. Epstein has to tell us all this [" a variety of meanings "] after we have seen his groups, the groups cannot be symbols. For what is a symbol? Something by means of which one is led to recall something else; and one can only recall what has already been made known to one." Such "meaningfulness," moreover, amounts, as Mr. Belgion thinks, to " meaninglessness." 12

Here, it would seem, however, the actual meaning is not told by a symbol. It is not covert or elusive; but is, like the story itself, simple and human, and is not at all so personal or far-fetched as any of those mentioned at the outset. As in The Ancient Mariner, it is involved in the story, is expressed by it, does not play hide-and-seek behind it; and this story is one of vengeance, as the other is one of retribution. For though outwardly prose, the story has in both sub- ject and style something in common with poetry, which is, as the greatest critics have in some form or other acknowledged, simple as well as sensuous and passionate. That deals frankly, though freshly, "with stock themes and commonplaces," as Chesterton, Mr. Maug- ham, Mr. Belgion, and even the poet Mr. Day Lewis alike have lately said; and in France, it appears, a repertory of these has recently been projected.13 Yet all this is nothing new. What in poetry is of the reader required, is, as Wordsworth said a hundred and fifty years ago, but now, strange to say, more than ever needs repetition, " what may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man."

12 Montgomery Belgion, The Human Parrot (1931), 51-52. Mr. Belgion, 72, quotes Raleigh. For Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, cf. my " Symbolism in Coleridge," 218.

13Belgion, Ibid., 105-106. Day Lewis, London Times Lit. Supp. (April 5, 1947), 156.

SYMBOLISM IN MOBY-DICK 447

Since here, then, the meaning is so simple, the interest lies, as also in the poem just mentioned, in the treatment, the development, the situation. This is that of an old man eager to wreak himself on a not unresentful yet quite natural and pretty excusable aquatic mam- mal (which he in his mania, however, considers the incarnation of evil), and to the point (in his pursuit) of waving aside (though touched by them) the claims of wife and child, of friends, officers, and crew. He even turns a deaf ear to the Captain of the Rachel, who appeals to him for assistance as he is scouring the sea for the boat containing his sons. Ahab is a "monomaniac," a "demoniac," as Ishmael, the narrator, repeatedly calls him; and our sympathies go to those he brushes out of the way. Still, at the same time, we bear in mind that they respect and admire as well as fear him, and that he has a tenderness for those human beings at least whom he makes to suffer. It is as in tragedy; and our chief interest is in the active character, even though terrible and in the wrong.

In his desperate resolution and pertinacity the hero is something of a Titan, challenging both Fate and the dictates of prudence and reason; but for all that he is not to be likened, as by several critics he has been, to the rebel who stole fire from Heaven to save mankind from the Olympian bent upon destroying them, and who under tor- ture defied him. Prometheus is not, like Ahab, self-centered. He had served Zeus, but he loved mankind; and apart from his inflexible, in- vincible will, about the only point of likeness is that which the author himself once notices-the vulture-and Ahab by his intense thinking himself " creates" (ch. 44). Nor is Prometheus, as the other is re- peatedly said to be, nearly crazy. That the Captain is so might seem to diminish our interest in him; but this state of mind is here for the mere story necessary. He is pursuing, not resisting, and not Zeus, but a fish; and the mania itself is what in part saves him from our contempt. It is partly to this end, indeed, that the creature has, as we have seen above, been turned into a symbol.

Some of the interpretations, to be sure, are much less improbable and remote than the " blood-consciousness of the white race," or than "all property and vested privilege," or than " the Unconscious which torments man and yet is the source of his proudest efforts "; and they deserve consideration. Mr. Mumford, for instance, finds in him " empty malice " (p. 165); and Mr. Matthiessen,14 " unexampled, in- telligent malignity," as Ishmael himself at times seems to do (ch. 41), though Starbuck, the sensible first mate, does not. Ishmael, how-

14 The American Renaissance (1941), 437-38.

448 ELMER E. STOLL

ever, though narrator, is not a judicial, impartial, unparticipating or, indeed, quite consistent raisonneur. Back in chapter 36 there was the oath of allegiance and vengeance, in which he had joined, as he ac- knowledges at the beginning of the later chapter, now saying that " a wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quench- less feud seemed mine." A little after there he speaks of Ahab's " deliriously transferring" the idea of malignity " to the abhorred white whale," and of " all evil to crazy Ahab visibly personified . . . in Moby-Dick." Starbuck from the outset declares it insane to un- dertake vengeance on a " dumb brute that simply smote thee from blindest instinct" (ch. 36), and in self-defence, he might well have added. Of the same opinion is Bunger, the Surgeon of the Enderby (ch. 100); and the facts, obviously, are for both him and Starbuck. As Ishmael himself reports the first encounter, Ahab, "seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, and then it was that suddenly sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass on the field." Whereupon he adds, however, though somewhat ambiguously: " No turban'd Turk, no hard Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice " (ch. 41).

As D. H. Lawrence, on the contrary, has it, "he tore off Ahab's leg at the knee when Ahab was attacking him. Quite right, too. Should have torn off both his legs, and a bit more besides." 15 Only Ahab thinks this "malice" "inscrutable" (ch. 36); only Ishmael, apparently under his influence, thinks it "unexampled" (ch. 41), and in chapter 135 (naturally enough now, with additional harpoons sticking in him) "eternal." On the third day of the final combat, moreover, Starbuck calls out to Ahab in his boat when Moby-Dick has changed his course and is swimming directly away, " See, Moby- Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him " (ch. 135). The Captain's " resolve to take it upon himself to seek out and annihilate the source of malignity, is godlike, for it represents human effort in its highest reach,"-to that opinion of Mr. Matthiessen's we must subjoin, I think, not only his own qualification that the resolve "is likewise demoniac," but also another, that it is manifestly mis- applied. The objective is as crazy as the motive: the pursuit of one particular whale, encountered years before, seems little better than a wild-goose chase; and so careful as Melville is about the actualities of whale habits and whale-hunting, he cannot consistently (if really

15 Studies in Classic American Literature, ch. XI.

SYMBOLISM IN MOBY-DICK 449

he does) expect the reader to believe in either Moby's ingrained and unprovoked malice or (except, as we shall see, by his story-telling art) in Ahab's ever finding him. Mere fact, sober report, would not bear him out. And symbolism? That at bottom must have some point or reason, some warrant in the text, or at least in the author's way of thinking or writing, here or elsewhere.

II

Why, now, one wonders, all this great to-do of late years about Moby-Dick; Melville's name, in the process, being coupled with those of AEschylus and Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton; Ahab's, at the same time, with that of Prometheus? " Distinctly," says Mr. Mumford, " Moby-Dick belongs with the Divine Comedy and Ham- let and the Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace " (p. 361). In- distinctly, I should prefer to say. That surely is not what Arnold would have called the "real estimate," the " disinterested "; and it almost seems as if there had been a conspiracy among American critics, with a few of the British complaisantly joining in. Now that we are the greatest of peoples, we must have a literature to match: by Melville's own Whitman-like Americanism, both in Moby-Dick and elsewhere, the critics are encouraged to think we have.16 But the story of a man's lifelong revenge upon a whale for thwarting him in his money-making designs upon its blubber would inadequately furnish forth a national epic, or one, as Mr. Mumford fancies, for the "ages." Grendel, in Beowulf, whom Mr. Van Wyck Brooks is moved to think of, is evil and malicious unmistakably-a "public enemy no. 1," carrying off thirty thanes at a swoop. He is quite worth the hating, the chasing and slaying.

There is probably, however, a deeper cause for the to-do-the prevalent taste for symbolism itself. Here is a conspiracy of a dif- ferent sort-that of the present-day tastes for symbolism, the detec- tive story, and (in its various forms) ambiguity. On Moby-Dick as a "mystery story" a whole book has lately been written; but as I

16 In Mr. Sedgwick's book, cited at the end of the article, there is at pp. 86, 88, 90 considerable evidence for this; particularly in the quotation from Melville's essay on Hawthorne: " Believe me, my friends," he cries, " that men not very much inferior to Shakespeare are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio. And the

day will come when you shall say, Who reads a book by an Englishman that is modern? " In somewhat the same spirit (88) he sets store by the Declaration of Independence and (cf. below) by the "democratic God." "We Americans," he

says in White Jacket, " are the peculiar, chosen people-the Israel of our time."

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have said of The Turn of the Screw so treated,17 in the real detective stories the mystery is, at the end, no longer " hidden," but cleared up or away. Here is none to clear up or away. Of ambiguity, to be sure, there is plenty-contradiction and paradox, dualism and antinomy. Ahab is, according to Captain Peleg " a grand ungodly, godlike man " (ch. 16); the whiteness of the whale is dubious-fair or foul (ch. 42). And to the ambiguous or paradoxical the symbolist critics particu- larly take,18 for latitude much eases the path of interpretation. All round us today there is the Ambivalenz of the Freudians, though I have not myself seen the symbolizing mythology of the Unconscious here directly applied. That, moreover, is for the highbrows; the in- terest here in question is far, far older and deeper-seated than that in either Freud or Conan Doyle-is that in riddle or enigma and in poetry as the finest form of it. Even authorship, without a ghost of a reason, has become for some people a problem; and no insignificant number have thought, and think still, that Bacon, or Oxford, or Rut- land penned the plays.

It is, of course, a good story, even a great one; but not, I think, one of really ecumenical or perennial importance. And a story it is, as we have seen, not a monstrous fable or hideous and intolerable al- legory; as such, moreover, it has the appropriate properties or vir- tues: suspense and momentum, both acceleration and also the requi- site retardation, an artfully accumulated volume of interest, and a prolonged, prodigious climax. The preparations are almost without number-predictions or omens, misgivings or forebodings-some de- pending upon superstition, some merely upon our common human nature. And what is more important, there are such preparations- such discreet and gradual approaches-as are calculated to make the improbable probable. Though in prose, there is, as I said, something of poetry. It is well ordered that like the other great tales of ad- venture and marvel, such as the Divine Comedy, Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver's Travels, this one should be told in the first person, by a participant and eye-witness, who can be definite and circumstantial, yet only within the limits of his own vision or surmise. It is well ordered that we are not permitted to see or suspect what is going on under cover any more than he does; and also that he is, as we have seen, a spectator not impartial, not unadaptable. For this too we are

17 Cf. " Symbolism in Coleridge," 230. 18 Cf. my " Symbolism in Shakespeare," Mod. Lang. Rev. (Jan., 1947), 8-20.

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prepared: had he not been equal, near the outset, to sleeping in the same bed with an idolatrous head-peddling cannibal, a tomahawk be- tween his teeth? It is, moreover, at the comparatively sober New Bedford that the story starts, then moves on to Nantucket Island, then to the Pequod, with its crazy captain and motley, mostly half- mad crew; and somewhat as in The Ancient Mariner it is by stages that we leave everyday reality and enter into a world where not so unplausibly one particular whale in the wide world can be caught or sought. That chimerical project is not proposed at the outset. Cap- tains Peleg and Bildad, part-owners, on shipboard till the pilot is dropped, know nothing of it; nor do any of the crew except the Parsee and (perhaps) the mysterious tiger-yellow set smuggled in below hatches; and fully to the light it comes, though there have been glimpses of it already, not before Chapter 36, when Ahab nails the gold doubloon, the prize for him who first espies the monster, to the mainmast. That is a scene a faire, a minor climax. At the words " white whale " and " Moby-Dick," only the queerest of the crew prick up their ears. They too have seen or heard of him; for them he is not altogether a myth; and as the excitement mounts, the oath of vengeance is given and taken. Crescit eundo. For in Chapter 31, when Ahab had come out with the order, " If ye see a white whale split your lungs for him," Stubb exclaimed, "What do you think of that now, Flask? Aint there a small drop of something queer about that, eh? A white whale-did ye mark that, man?" As about the Ghost in Hamlet when first mentioned-the right preparation!-at first there is scepticism.

Also, the characters in themselves make one another more plausi- ble, by parallel or by contrast. The harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo, as Mr. Erskine says, "follow fixed ideas " 19 somewhat like Ahab, and the Parsee is quite as fanatical as he. Starbuck, on the other hand, is sensible and judicious; Stubb and Flask, sensible and humorous. By Ahab, however, the narrative interest is en- grossed. In him there is dramatic development. Though with re- vulsions of tenderness or affection, he becomes continually more reck- less and ruthless, to the growing concern and anxiety of Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. Starbuck he threatens with a musket (ch. 109); the harpoon for the whale he tempers in the blood of the pagan Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo, baptizing it in a blasphemous

19 The Delight of Great Books (1928), 223.

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Latin (ch. 113); in his impatience he dashes the quadrant to the deck (ch. 118); he refuses help to the Captain of the Rachel (ch. 128); he will " murder" Pip the lunatic negro boy he is so fond of, should he not obey him (ch. 129); like Macbeth in his hybris, he trusts to the end in the Parsee's riddling prophecies. And the style? That too helps make the improbable probable-matter-of-fact or grotesque at New Bedford and Nantucket, imaginative and fantastic, high-flying and rhythmical at sea.

Still, as I read the book, it is not by any means to be accounted an immortal masterpiece; nor does it much remind me, I must con- fess, of AEschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, or even the two Russians of our latter day. Of such a quest or mission what would Tolstoy have thought or said? And though as a whole the story is well con- structed, it suffers at times from two not inconsiderable defects: pad- ding and sensationalism. As for the latter, there is Tashtego, the Indian, desperately nailing the flag to the masthead that, true to his master, he might keep to the last the colours flying, though his master is drowning, as is he himself:

at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommod- ing Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that ethereal thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so 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 hel- meted herself with it. (World Classics Ed., Oxford, 1920, p. 674)

That is somewhat after the order of the stagy climax which Steven- son complains of in Hugo's Travailleurs, where at one and the same moment the sloop disappears over the horizon and Gilliat's suicidal head under water. A much milder but sentimental coincidence pre- cedes this, where, floating in the lovely sunset, sea and sky, sun and whale (not Moby here) " stilly died together." In either case it is of "at that instant," and in Tashtego's, of his being already submerged and "in his death-gasp," that I am complaining: the climax (of course) is waranted by the multitude of preparations and the steadily accelerated action before it as well as by the fanaticism in both

SYMBOLISM IN MOBY-DICK 453

Ahab's hatred and the savage's devotion. Of the climax and the battle before it even Longinus (and what more could be said?) might have approved.

This "avidity after effect," however, (as Stevenson describes it in Hugo) is by Melville outdone shortly before, as on this, the third and last day of the combat, the Parsee, killed on the second, thus re- appears:

Lashed round and round to the fish's back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable rai- ment frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab. (p. 668)

That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Fedallah the prophet. For he was to " go before," says Ahab, and yet reappear, to " pilot me still" (ch. 117). This prophesying itself, with its "paltering in a double sense "-" two hearses" to be seen, which turn out to be the Whale's body and the sinking ship, and the fatal hemp, which turns out to be the harpoon line caught round Ahab's neck-such proph- esying, I say, falls far less plausibly from the lips of a latter-day fire- worshipping whale-hunter than from those of the Weird Sisters, " goddesses of destiny," in the days of Duncan and Edward the Con- fessor. No Fate has the Parsee at his beck and call. And in reading Macbeth, as not Moby-Dick, there can be a Coleridgian "willing suspension of disbelief "; but in regard to the Parsee's reappearance, after all the creature's swimming and plunging with him in the in- terval, his orbs turned " full upon old Ahab," that question does not even arise. The fulfilment of the prediction is in itself improbable, as not in Birnam Wood's coming to Dunsinane or in " none of woman born." And here incredulus odi.

As for padding or irrelevance, there is, in the middle, chapter after chapter on " cetology " (32), on whaling practices (33), on cutting-up, trying-out, and storing; single ones on ambergris, Jonah (83), and (with a ponderous humour) the cetaceans' amorous habits (88), foreign whaleships' cellars and larders (101), and a Bower in the Arsacides (102); most of which has little or no justification in nar- rative art. Mr. Belgion's suggestion, which Mr. Maugham repro- duces, is that, "since it is a tale of pursuit, the end of the pursuit must be perpetually delayed." To be sure; but, as also Mr. Maug- ham seems to think, not after such a fashion as this. It is a different matter, of course, when meantime ordinary whales, with difficulty

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and danger, are killed, and Ishmael dwells upon the enormous size of them, by comparison measures for us the proportions of their skele- tons, or reports previous cases of their prodigious destructiveness (ch. 45). Hereby he is preparing us for the entry of the portentous monster and making the subsequent catastrophe more acceptable.2 Also by the chapter on the Whiteness of the Whale (42) he renders him not only more portentous and mysterious but (though, as we have seen, less credible) more susceptible of discovery. Likewise, by his " Chart " (ch. 44) and his " Affidavit" (45), with the account of whale haunts, feeding-grounds, and itineraries, the author endeavors to reconcile the reader to the project of finding and recognizing one particular whale, encountered years before, and obviously at liberty meanwhile (if not killed and boiled already) to swim far and wide, up and down, within as well as over, the limitless waters of the earth. But argument, with documentary evidence, however con- vincing; an affidavit as in Chapter 45 or a " So help me Heaven " as at the close of the Town Ho's story (oh. 54);-these all are not im- aginative, artistic methods of reconcilement. Not demonstration or adjuration, but suggestion and contrast are the way. So it is with Dante, Shakespeare, or Coleridge himself, who really produce the "willing suspension of disbelief," as I have shown elsewhere,21 while they deal with still greater marvels. By the example in Hamlet Mel- ville does not sufficiently profit. "Tush, tush," Horatio protests,

'twill not appear."

Most like; it harrows me with fear and wonder. How now, Horatio! you tremble and look pale. Is not this something more than fantasy? Before my God. I might not this believe Without the sensible and true avouch Of mine own eyes.

And Dante? As I have said before, when, at the outset, in the "selva oscura," the poet meets the being who later turns out to be the shade of Virgil:

"Have pity on me," I cried to him, " what so thou art, or shade or real man." Like the ghosts of folklore and of Shakespeare, only then does he speak when " spoke to." But then

Risposemi: " Non uomo, uomo gia fui." 20 Cf. Erskine, op. cit., 230. 21 Shakespeare Studies (1927), 206-210.

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It is all done indirectly, dramatically, by silence and speech and the effect of both together. There is no attempt to picture his shadowy, transparent form. Dante thought him a spirit, possibly a man.-" No man, a man I was," is (in the original) the eerie and penetrating reply. But the most con- vincing thing is the question " or shade or real man "-od ombra od uomo certo. The order is unusual, upsetting-his first thought is of a shade, he is in the land of shades already. (Poets and Playwrights, p. 283)

Something of the same " avidity after effect," noticed already in incident and in preparation for it by prophecy and omen, is to be found also in the style, which has been somewhat undiscriminatingly admired. Melville is, of course, a good writer, and in narrative at times a powerful one; but he is very uneven, uncertain. Once on the

sea, Ishmael often becomes highly rhetorical, poetical, and rhythmi- cal; and this may be not inappropriate as he presents emotional situations and dwells upon the wonders of the deep; but too little does he know the virtues and charms of reticence or restraint. He is often stilted or (to change the figure) inflated, abounds in interroga- tions and exclamations, apostrophes and imperatives-" oh man! " "oh whale!" "oh young ambition! "stay! "think! "con- sider! " What must Hawthorne have thought of Melville in his

resounding dithyrambic, somewhat incoherent extravagances, as in

apostrophes such as this where the old tar sentimentalizes over the

dying whale (not the white one of course) and himself:

He turns and turns him to it,-how slowly, but how steadfastly, his homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!-Oh that these too-favoring eyes should see these too-favoring sights. Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe; in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the Niger's unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it heads some other way.-

Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the wide- slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round again, with- out a lesson to me.

Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rain-

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bowed jet!-that one strivest,22 this one jettest22 all in vain! In vain, oh whale, [etc. etc. ] (pp. 586-87)

A strange style too, for a sea-captain; and, though he is educated enough, out of keeping with his attitude to whales elsewhere. (It sounds more like Ishmael, as below.) Or what must Hawthorne have thought of the following, on democracy, which, because of that and its eloquence, has recently been picked out for praise?

If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall here- after ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe, with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, 0 God! (pp. 143-44)

In this the writer's own eloquence I myself find it hard to bear either him or his admirers out; and it is probably of such passages as the two above that D. H. Lawrence, who delights in the mere story, would say that "the style seems spurious. . . . You feel Melville is

trying to put something over you. It won't do." "Greeny," the complaint which the Americans whom Arnold met at Malta made against Emerson's style, to this far more justly applies. Or as Henry James said of Whitman's verse, "Prose, in order to be good poetry, must first be good prose." Nor is it a matter of style alone. Mel- ville's sympathies here are not much more admirable than his anti- pathies, which are rather inconsistent with his thoughts. Somewhat similarly the late Kaiser invoked or dilated on the German God, who, though not " democratic," seems to have had something in common with Jackson's. How any quite adorable one, whatever his politics, could have stooped to hurl upon a war-horse the "violent, perverse, quarrelsome " duelling champion of Aaron Burr, the political spoils- man, advocate of slavery, and enemy of the red man, I myself alto- gether fail to see.

22 Misprints, presumably, though so I find them in every edition I have seen but Dr. Rosenbach's (1938).

SYMBOLISM IN MOBY-DICK 457

One of the admirers, with some justification, relishes the rhythm of the following, the conclusion of a paean upon the Pacific:

The same waves wash the moles of the new-built California towns, but yes- terday planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide- beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan. (p. 572)

But there is a similar oratorical dilatation; and the endings of the two sentences, "Japans " and " Pan," make me, I must say, grit my teeth.

The interest of the critics in Melville's rhythms I can understand; although these not infrequently fall into metre, which in Dickens is continually remembered as a reproach. But his inflated, highfalutin diction I wonder that they can so readily accept. The " thou " and " thee " in the dialogue are somewhat justified by the Quakers in the story, and by the heathen, who are speaking an alien tongue. Also, as Mr. Maugham suggests, Melville "may have felt. that they gave something of a hieratic turn to the conversations so reported and a poetic flavor to the words used." But Ishmael himself uses them in narrative, comment, and apostrophe, besides "ye" not only as a nominative but also-" in ye "-as an accusative (ch. 114, bis). He has, moreover, a perceptible preference for archaic words and some that are pseudo-poetic: "meet" (for "fitting"), "ere," "o'er," "nigh," " anon." In the same spirit he takes to inversions such as " Gropes he not? " (p. 605), or " Meet it is that " I should do so and so. What is more objectionable is the pseudo-poetic, such as (in its misuse) " mystic," which is applied-so variously-to " the ocean at his feet," to Ahab's "aspect" as he makes the crew swear; to the "modes" whereby "the whale transports himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points"; to the whale's head, "sending forth its vapory spout"; to anybody's "mood" when at sea in the Orient; to the Parsee's watch on deck; to Moby-Dick's " fountain " in his head, the second day.23 Perhaps of a similar sort is the writer's predilection for adverbs coined out of participles, of which there are sometimes two or three to a page. For instance: tearingly (151), deepeningly (223), aboundingly (225), expandingly (328), burstingly (282), warringly (469), stoopingly (526), trans-

23 Oxford World's Classics Edition, 193, 201, 219, 534, 581, 630.

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ferringly (568), postponedly (574), glitteringly gazing (575), reel- ingly, shiningly (603-4), bubblingly, loweringly (607), unmurmur- ingly (609), peeringly (616), foamingly (637), warningly, hoveringly, longingly (643), sidelingly (644), outspreadingly (653), ripplingly, dazzlingly, revolvingly (646-47), unrestingly (649), combinedly (666), interminglingly (674), suckingly, livingly, and the rest.

What is most objectionable of all, however, is not the mere word- ing but the sentimentality that now and then suffuses it. Above there are apparent examples; and what shall be said, shades of Dante and iEschylus, of this?

the step-mother world, so long cruel-forbidding-now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that, however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop. (p. 636)

There, as never before or since perhaps in the history of the world, a sea-captain and his stepmother sob together! Then, turning, he asks, "Do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? " though this self- pity even sophisticated Lawrence finds it in his heart to call "the Gethsemane of Ahab." Or what shall be said of this at the beginning of the third day of the combat, as Ahab bids Starbuck, who is to keep the ship, goodbye?

Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue. (p. 665)

Which likewise is not meant to be funny. Nor is this account, in retrospect, of the blacksmith Perth, which is unimportant, if not quite extraneous, to the narrative:

He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly en- countered that thing in sorrow's technicals called ruin. He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family's heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home.24 (p. 574)

24 Melville seems to have been an emphatic teetotaller; at the Spouter-Inn the little withered old man " dearly sells the sailors delirium and death" (Ch. III).

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Of which there is here much more, in similar naively inflated, edi- fying vein. When, indeed, Melville does not mean to be funny he often is more so than when he does, as when, for instance, of pirates he lumberingly observes:

I should like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Etc. (p. 289)

It is particularly in the chapters where he cuts loose from the story, such as the one in "The Fountain" (85) (which is any whale's spout), or as the one upon his amorousness (88), that the author most often feels free to indulge his humorous or his sentimental taste. The whale Ishmael takes to be " profound," for he is " convinced that there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. The invariable moisture of my hair while plunged in deep thought" . . . this seems an additional argument for the above supposition:

And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to be- hold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable con- templations, and that vapor-as you will sometimes see it-glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Etc. (p. 446)

The touch is then still heavier as the narrator winds up with an ap- plication. And see pp. 469-70, where he dilates upon your whale as a " young Lothario," and then as the " sated Turk," who, " dis- banding his harem," " goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels, saying his prayers and warning each young Leviathan from his amorous errors."

Even amid the excitement of the first day of the final chase, Ishmael (or perhaps Melville himself), forgetting about the malice "unexampled" and "eternal," pauses thus to rhapsodize:

A gentle joyousness-a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways in- tent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for

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the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme l did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.

On each soft side-coincident with the parted swell, that but only leaving him, then flowed so wide away-on each bright side, the whale shed off en- ticings. Etc. (p. 643)

Which gentle joyousness and mildness are all the more extraordinary (or admirable) immediately after we have learned of " the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projecting from the white whale's back" (p. 642). Here Moby-Dick certainly rises high above both " malice " and misery, to the incredible pitch of voluptuousness, but still, unlike the dying whale, does it "without a lesson" to either Ahab or Ishmael; and if Prometheus, not offending yet resisting, not retaliating yet defying, must be brought into comparison, I would vote, despite the leering and enticing, not for the Nantucketer but the fish.

III

In this discussion I have been attempting (" In every work regard the writer's end"!) not to offer any adequate appreciation of the story, but only a protest against the present-day criticism in its ex- cesses or vagaries. Now our critics generally are in sympathy with our present-day authors; and though not much acquainted with con- temporary imaginative writing in verse or prose, I feel pretty confi- dent that, in such of it as the critics care to consider, expensive jocularity and expansive sentimentality, high-flying rhetoric and theatrical sensationalism are not frequent or much in favor. Our critics, like our authors, whether conservative or radical, ordinarily insist upon the intellectual-the complicated but compact, the diffi- cult but edged or pointed-which all are in Moby-Dick, as we have seen, perceptibly wanting. The Americans, then, without avowing it, have, so far, overruled themselves and made of the story an excep- tion. Why (in part) they have done it I have already intimated; but also of their present-day fashion or formula some of them may have wearied, and this may be a case not so much of patriotic con- spiracy as of momentary revulsion or " escape." To their symbolism, however, they have meantime clung; and indeed I do not well see how they could have managed to make the exception, and still keep the impression of the story's superlative importance, without it. By symbolism can, illegitimately, be done to any writing today what in the late Roman period and the Middle Ages often was done to Homer and Virgil by allegory. For commonly what is not ignored is as-

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similated, incorporated, instead of being (as by the true critic it is) disinterestedly, discriminatingly enjoyed and judged. We hear much nowadays, with various meanings, of the creative critic; as I under- stand the matter, however, the critic's function is not creation but open-minded reception and a judicial, though sympathetic, response. Quite apart from any philosophy of innate ideas, it is true that, as in Sir Walter Raleigh's words, " the reader can only go to poetry to be told something he knew already." Elsewhere the great critic also quotes Emerson: "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." So say, less positively, Synge the dramatist and the poet Lascelles Abercrombie, as I have several times quoted him: "Liter- ature exists not only in expressing a thing; it equally exists in the receiving of the thing expressed." 25 Which means not only accept- ing but also understanding it. And not only of the lyric is that true, but also of drama or the imaginative novel. To be acceptable, credible, a character, even a situation, must be not much out of harmony with what is already within us or our reach. Yet that is not active, but static, slumbering; and when it is by the poet awakened, it is not creative but either responsive or resistant, or else-as frequently by the prophetic finger of the symbolist poet or critic nowadays-be- wildered. If to this last result, however, why read criticism or write it in the first place?

IV Since finishing the article, I have come upon the late W. E. Sedg-

wick's discussion, in his Herman Melville (1944). Though the writer is something of a symbolist too, he takes no notice at all of the in- terpretations of the whale mentioned by Mr. Mumford-producing none like them himself-and he goes still farther, in this the opposite direction:

The White Whale is all evil to Ahab. Nevertheless it is wrong to say, as do almost all the critics of Moby-Dick that Melville intended him to represent evil. (p. 111)

That is, Mr. Sedgwick is, comparatively, a little more faithful to the text and the intention of the author, distinguishing between what Ahab thinks, what Ishmael thinks under his influence, and what the author would have us think ourselves. He calls Ishmael Ahab's "shadow" (p. 87) and considers him at times under his spell (107,

25 Principles of Literary Criticism (1932), p. 23; cf. my Othello (1915), p. 62: " an artist can give us only what was fairly ours before."

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120, 122). In "the terrible White Whale" he does find "the mys- tery of creation " (87, 107, 112); but that, though unplausible, is not so remote from the author's own apparent intention in Chapter 42, where he discusses the creature's whiteness. And in general the critic deals in symbolism rather sparely, reticently. My main ob- jection is to his undue stressing of ambiguity,26 to the point of ambi- valence, and to his Ahab resembling (again) Prometheus, as well as Job, Orestes, Hamlet, and Lear, with Melville himself (again) nearly on a level with Eschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare. "Worship," the critic himself strangely says, though echoing his author, "is usually disguised enmity" (102). "And if he resembles Prometheus," of the frantic, vindictive captain the critic observes, echoing again, "it is not too much to say that he resembles a far more poignant divin- ity, standing 'with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe' " (109, ch. 28). For critic or author, either, it is too much to say, and not so much because of religion as of art.

Gethsemane again! That observation, if no other, identifies Mr. Sedgwick with the symbolist school. What has the demoniac Cap- tain, bent upon revenging himself, though the offender, in common with the Crucified? But in the same spirit even Lawrence, as the Pequod goes down, exclaims, "to use the words of Jesus, 'IT IS FINISHED.' Consummatum est." For the supreme symbol, they cannot pass him by. Likewise Mr. Kenneth Burke thinks he might call " Hamlet the perfect liberal Christ, whose agony inaugurated the liberal era"; and Professor G. W. Knight twice likens to Christ Shakespeare's misanthropic Timon, and, though less definitely, does the same with Cleopatra. That is not, to be sure, in the spirit of a Baudelairean fin de siecle blasphemy, but of a high-flying poetical idealism, or else of a deep-lying mental confusion. Like a poet, the critic looks in his heart and writes, instead of in the poet's heart, on the poet's page.

Later I have got into my hands Mr. Belgion's " Introduction." 27

Like Mr. Maugham (p. 103), as we have seen, he takes no stock in the symbolism, not even in Mr. Sedgwick's:-the whale as the mys- tery of creation; Ahab as Man-" man sentient, speculative, pur- posive, religious," "bent on penetrating and conquering this mys-

26This is rife in current criticism: Byron and Housman fearing-even hating -poetry, each his own. Cf. H. W. Garrod, Profession of Poetry and Other Lec- tures (1929).

27 Moby-Dick, or the Whale (Cresset Press, London, 1946).

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tery "; the sea, the " ocean of truth in which the mystery has to be sought and met" (p. xxii). As Mr. Belgion well says, "Ahab does not gain in status or compel a more intense interest from being viewed as Man with a capital M "; and the sea " is only belittled in being translated into the waters of truth " (xxiii).

In dealing with the structure of the story, however, Mr. Belgion is, I think, not quite so satisfactory. Certainly he is right in saying that " Every tale of pursuit must be a tale in which the main action is perpetually delayed " (xiii, xxi). In this respect it is like a tale of revenge (and that Moby-Dick is besides) as rightly conceived-and obviously, too, if the climax is not to be surrendered, of villain and hero perishing together-by the first of historical Shakespeare critics in Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, published in 1736. But the only justification produced for what to most readers is little bet- ter than padding, seems to be, on the one hand, Melville's own inter- est in the details of seafaring and whaling, and on the other hand, his pronouncedly American philosophical bent, like Thoreau's and Hawthorne's, Emerson's and Whitman's (xxi). This, even on the surface, is inadequate: it does not cover "the dozen, out of the one hundred and thirty-five chapters, devoted to the zoology and anat- omy of the sperm whale and to the historical element in whaling" (p. xxii). Nor does it cover Jonah. And under the surface it is more inadequate still. By such reasoning almost any irrelevance can be warranted. What is to the point is the interest of the reader, not that of the author; and the only appropriate question is whether the story is a coherent structure-whether incident or information, ap- parently irrelevant, really contributes to the effect of the whole. It does not, as Mr. Maugham seems to admit, here and there. It does not, I myself think, a little oftener than that.

Later still I have come upon Mr. Clifton Fadiman's brief intro- duction to an edition of 1943. Mr. Fadiman and I are (if I may be permitted to say so) fairly at one in the matter of Melville's lacking a sense of humour and in Moby-Dick's being (though with " tower- ing faults of taste ") poetic, " something of an old wives' tale." He uses the word " myth " instead, yet at first that seems almost equiva- lent. "If we applied [the canons of the ordinary novel] we should be forced to put [the book] down as an inept, occasionally powerful, but on the whole puzzling affair." In the critic's hands, however, the myth soon becomes a "monstrous faible," such as Melville would have abhorred but dreamt not of; and the book thus turns out, I cannot but think, more puzzling than ever. Not only is it " a myth

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of Evil," but the "sub-surface meaning of the Ahab-Moby-Dick rela- tionship is that the two [like Othello and Iago for another critic of late!] are one. Moby-Dick is a monster thrashing about in the Pacific of Ahab's brain." Even Ishmael and Ahab are one; and " no one on the Pequod, however brave he be, can overcome his fear of Ahab because the fear is seated in himself." What is more-much more-" the whole complex narrative, with all its cetology and its digressions is but a cunningly disguised soliloquy of a man in direst pain." So, at least twice, has Hamlet been interpreted, the last time, quite recently, by Don Salvador de Madariaga: "What makes this play so haunting is that it really does not happen on the stage but within Hamlet's soul." Here, then, again, but still more abundantly than above, and how often elsewhere in criticism (to apply the words of Feste the Clown) " Nothing that is so, is so."

Even later I have come upon Mr. Yvor Winters' discussion of Moby-Dick, in Maule's Curse (1938). Elsewhere I have occasion to speak with (I trust) due appreciation of Mr. Winters' criticism; but his treatment of Moby-Dick seems to me another case of the pa- triotic " estimate." This prose, he says, " even when we are familiar with the great prose of the seventeenth century [shades of Donne, Browne, and Taylor!] as its background, is essentially as original and powerful an invention as the blank verse of Milton. . . . Form and subject are wedded with a success equal to that observable in Milton, Virgil, or Shakespeare" (pp. 74-75). Of the description of the whale himself as, like Jove ravishing Europa, he "sheds entic- ings," which is cited above but by Mr. Winters more extensively, he declares that "it reaches a sublimity and terror never surpassed in literature and but seldom equalled " (p. 71). Possibly this " terror " may come of the critic's here recalling, though in the text there is nothing of it, that Moby is "the spirit of evil" (p. 57), "who has destroyed or seriously injured every whaler who has sought to kill him" (p. 67); though the terror of whalers does not necessarily bring terror upon the readers, and even when it does, still more is needed to make it sublime. And Ahab? He, too, "is damned " (pp. 59, 61), and because of his " will to destroy the spirit of evil itself, an intention blasphemous because beyond human powers and infring- ing upon the purposes of God" (pp. 65-66, 68). Damned for one critic and a Christ for another, and in neither case with much show of reason! So far as the mere criticism is concerned, and not only that of Moby-Dick either, Mr. Mumford is right. "Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you."

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Last of all comes a book of four hundred big pages on Moby-Dick alone. Mr. Vincent's Trying-Out (1949) is both a painstaking in- vestigation of origins and processes and also in some measure of artistic effect; but like nearly all the appreciations above discussed, this is extravagant. Once more the author is set alongside AEschy- lus and Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, Ahab being now coupled with Orestes and Hamlet, and there is a nearly unbridled admira- tion of both structure and style. Though first the critic hesitatingly recognizes that a novel should not be "a source of information," and he then admits that this one is a whaling-handbook (p. 124), still he quite illogically but insistently endeavors at length to prove that here is no padding or digression (p. 125). All this discussion- of not only the sperm sort but the others, of whaling laws and prac- tices, whether American, British, Dutch, French, or Scandinavian, of the whale-line (p. 227) and the Specksynder (p. 125), of the crea- ture's physiology and phrenology, mythology and iconography, of the food of the whale and the whale as food, including even the milk of the female, "sweet and rich," as possibly " doing well with straw- berries " (p. 307)-all this and much more are really to the point! And in the style he too rejoices, though now and then he has, like Mr. Fadiman, some momentary misgivings about the wit or humor.

In the matter of symbolism, however, he is rather discreet. He is critical of such farfetched interpretations as those cited by Mr. Mum- ford. And like Sedgwick and Lawrence, he refuses to take the whale for the incarnation of evil. Yet in his own symbolism replacing this one he seems to me still farther astray. Ahab is engaged, he thinks, in the pursuit of truth, which is the White Whale (pp. 115-16, 252, 260-61, 298). No wonder, then, that with this critic the word is " capture "; in which enterprise, however, Ahab does not succeed, in- stead of killing or revenge, in which he does. The explanation is that it is " the truth, regardless," " the Demon of the Absolute " (pp. 115-16, 252), the pursuit of which is reprehensible, somewhat as in Eden, I suppose. "Ahab has not learned what Jonathan Swift found, that happiness is the state of being perpetually well deceived " (p. 115). A critic who should happen upon this strange interpreta- tion might then, naturally yet sadly, wonder to which of the sects he or another of the craft belongs. In any case the truth at last is out-that Truth herself, in many high quarters now, plays little part in criticism.

University of Minnesota.