“In the earlier progress of the book, he had found some relief in making his regular evening walk through the greatest thoroughfares of the city; and so the utter desolation of his soul might feel itself more intensely against the bodies of the hurrying thousands. Then he began to be sensible of more fancying stormy nights than pleasant ones; for then the great thoroughfares were less thronged, and the innumerable shop-awnings flapped and beat like schooners’ broad sails in a gale, and the shutters banged like lashed bulwarks; and the slates fell hurtling like displaced ship’s blocks from aloft. Stemming such tempers through the deserted streets, Pierre felt a dark triumphant joy; that while others had crawled in fear to their kennels, he alone defied the storm-admiral, whose most vindictive pelting of hailstones--striking his iron-framed fiery furnace of a body--melted into soft dew, and so, harmlessly trickled off him. By-and-by, of such howling, pelting nights, he began to bend his steps down the narrow side streets, in quest of the more secluded and mysterious taprooms. There he would feel a singular satisfaction, in sitting down all dripping in a chair, ordering his half pint of ale before him, and drawing over his cap to protect his eyes from the light, eye the varied faces of the social castaways, who here had their haunts from bitterest midnights. But at last he began to feel a distaste for even these; and now nothing but the utter night-desolation of the obscurest warehousing lanes would content him, or be at all sufferable to him.”
“Dollars damn me,” he wrote Hawthorne, “and the malicious devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is upon me.--I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. 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.... But I was talking about the ‘whale.’ As the fishermen say, ‘he was in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago. I’m going to take him up by his jaw, however, before long and finish him up in some fashion or another. What’s the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book? Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter. What reputation H. M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity as the man who lived among the cannibals. When I speak of posterity in reference to myself, I only mean the babies who will probably be born in the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost.... I shall go down to them in all likelihood.... I have come to regard this matter of Fame as the most transparent of all vanities. I read Solomon more and more, and every time see deeper and deeper and unspeakable meanings in him. I did not think of Fame, a year ago, as I do now. My development has all been within a few years past. 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. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the utmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.”
If it was in a mood of confidence and creative delight that he sounded his depths in Moby-Dick, it was in this other mood, chastened, almost fearful, that his stripped ego rose to the surface after this extreme plunge. He had looked into the abyss: he was dizzy, terrified, appalled. His letters to Hawthorne have this mingled sense of awe and exaltation: they are the mood of the last part of Moby-Dick. Melville’s notes to Mr. Duyckinck are still jocular and robust; they might be the words of the imperturbable Stubb or the jaunty Flask: but that is because Melville gave Mr. Duyckinck only a part of himself, the polite, free-and-easy, effervescent side, meant for appreciative eating and solicitous drinking, the side he doubtless turned to his family and housemates, when weariness did not bury him from their sight--the last people who could share or understand his quest, his insight, his triumph. There is no question of wearing a mask: both sides of Melville are authentic, but the deeper part of him, which would under happier circumstances have served as ballast and made him face the waves more steadily, claimed too much of his inner space: he lost buoyancy: the water crept above the waterline: the ship rode dangerously. Now, however, we are speaking of the consequences of Melville’s writing Moby-Dick. The book itself was published towards the end of 1851 by Bentley, in England, and a little later in the same year by Harper’s in New York.
Whether it was an angel or a devil that Melville had struggled with this long year, he had wrestled magnificently, and the book was done. Before we go further with Melville’s life, we must discuss this great fragment of it--the most important of Melville’s books, and surely one of the most important books of the century.
CHAPTER SEVEN: MOBY-DICK
Moby-Dick is a story of the sea, and the sea is life, “whose waters of deep woe are brackish with the salt of human tears.” Moby-Dick is the story of the eternal Narcissus in man, gazing into all rivers and oceans to grasp the unfathomable phantom of life--perishing in the illusive waters. Moby-Dick is a portrait of the whale and a presentation of the demonic energies in the universe that harass and frustrate and extinguish the spirit of man. We must gather our own strength together if we are to penetrate Moby-Dick: no other fable, except perhaps Dante’s, demands that we open so many doors and turn so many secret keys; for, finally, Moby-Dick is a labyrinth, and that labyrinth is the universe.
Call me Ishmael, says the teller of the story. Ishmael is lured to a whaling voyage by the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself and of the forbidden seas in which he rolls his inland bulk: when Ishmael grows grim around the mouth and feels damp, drizzly November in his soul, he goes to sea. With his carpet-bag he sets out for New Bedford, and takes refuge in the shaggy comfort of Spouter Inn. His companion and bedfellow in the crowded inn is another Ishmael, a cannibal named Queequeg, who brings into the atmosphere of chowders and tarpaulins a wild odour from another continent of the soul. His harpoon, his idol, his sharp filed teeth, the human head he carries around in a bag, for sale, are for Ishmael hints of that horror in the universe which he is quick to perceive and be social with, since it is well to be on friendly terms with the inmates of the place one lodges in.
When Ishmael takes refuge from the driving sleet and mist, on a Sunday morning, in the Whalemen’s Chapel, he finds reminders of luckless voyages on the memorial tablets around the hall, and Father Mapple, who had been a sailor and harpooner in his youth, delivers a sermon on Jonah! What a preacher, and what a sermon! After ascending to the pulpit by a rope ladder, hand over hand, Father Mapple drags the ladder up after him, to signify his spiritual withdrawal from all outward ties and connections; from that pulpit, shaped like a ship’s bow, he expounds the fable of Jonah, seeming, as he describes Jonah’s sea-storm, to be beaten by a storm himself, his deep chest heaving as with a ground-swell, his tossed arms like the warring elements at work, thunders rolling away from his swarthy brow and light leaping from his eye.
Father Mapple’s words and figures belong to the Bible; but their meaning comes from that bottomless ocean of truth where Moby-Dick plies back and forth. I must quote the words: one can give no proper hint of this work, even in its smallest detail, without quoting the language through which it is expressed: and this is particularly true of Father Mapple’s noble tongue.
“But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of every woe, there is sure delight; and higher the top of that delight than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the maintruck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him--a far, far upward, and inward delight--who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world goes down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter for the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin, though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight--top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord but the Lord his God, and is only patriot to heaven. Delight is to him whom all the waves and billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath--O Father!--chiefly known to me by Thy rod--mortal or immortal, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world’s or mine own. Yet this is nothing; I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his God?”