The mild day and the steel-blue sky and the smell of the wind, as if the haymakers had been mowing grass on the slopes of the Andes--this day is scarcely over before Ahab detects a whale in the wind; and at next daybreak, Ahab himself raises the hump-like snow-head--Moby-Dick. In the smoother ocean, Moby-Dick seems as mild as the day, gliding with scarcely a ripple through the water, his wrenched, hideous jaw beneath the surface. Becoming aware of the chase, he sounds--only to return with open jaws beneath the bottom of Ahab’s boat, and, after playing with it as a cat with a mouse, he bites it in twain. The Pequod sails on the whale and drives him off. Ahab and his crew are rescued, Ahab with bloodshot blinded eyes, the white brine caking in his wrinkles, manly wails arising from some far inland part of his being, as desolate as sounds from out ravines.
The second day comes, and the boats lower again. Moby-Dick takes the initiative and plunges immediately towards the boats with open jaws and lashing tail, warping and manoeuvring in such a fashion that the harpoons thrust into him become tangled and the lines shortened: again the whale dives, and again he rises, this time throwing Ahab’s boat topsy-turvy in the air. Ahab’s ivory leg is snapped off; but again he is rescued; and a third day opens. At noon, Ahab, keeping lookout himself, and doubling on his tracks, sights the whale, making towards him in the distance. Again the calm and beauty of the day wake some old humanity in Ahab; but he is churned onward by his purpose.
“Some men die at ebb-tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;--I feel like a billow that’s all one crested comb. I am old;--shake hands with me, man,” says Ahab to his first mate.
Their hands met; their eyes fastened; but Starbuck’s manly tears cannot restrain Ahab’s order to lower away in pursuit, nor can the sharks that crowd around the boat and snap maliciously at the oars, nor can the hawk that tears at the red flag running on the main truck; nothing diverts him. The whale sounds; when he rises, tormented by a mass of harpoons and lines, it is as if a submerged iceberg rose suddenly to the surface, the waters flash like a heap of fountains, break in a shower of flakes, and leave the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale. Moby-Dick, churning his tail among the boats, dashes in the bows of the mate’s boat: Ahab, unscathed, orders them back to the ship, while he keeps to the hunt. The whale, fagged or malicious, permits Ahab to catch up with him: Ahab darts iron and curse into his flanks; but the line snaps loose, and the whale turns upon the Pequod herself, and bears down on her, his solid white buttress of a forehead meeting and shivering the planks. The ship settles. Ahab, cut off from the ship, makes one last thrust at the whale; the line spins out and runs foul, and Ahab, stooping to unsnarl it, is caught round the neck and shot out of the boat, fulfilling the prophecy of Fedallah, who has been drowned before him. The rest of the crew turns towards the Pequod; only its masts remain above the water; and as it goes down, they are carried in the suction. As its final spar settles in the water, a red arm and hammer hover back upliftedly in the air, in the act of nailing the flag faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk, pecking at the flag, intercepts the hammer with his wing; and in the death-grasp of Tashtego, the pinioned bird of heaven, with shrieks, his form folded in Ahab’s flag, is dragged into the water: the boat would not sink to hell until she had carried a living part of heaven with her, and helmeted herself with it.
“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
7
It is absurd and ineffectual to give a summary of Moby-Dick, or to quote, dismembered, some of its great passages. Like the paintings in the Ajanta caves, the beauty of Moby-Dick can be known only to those who will make a pilgrimage to it, and stay within its dark confines until what is darkness has become light, and one can make out, with the help of an occasional torch, its grand design, its complicated arabesque, the minute significance of its parts. No feeble pencil sketch can convey a notion of Moby-Dick’s extravagant beauty; but at the same time, without a hint of its design and its manner of execution, all subsequent commentary must seem flatulent and disproportionate. For three-quarters of a century Moby-Dick has suffered at the hands of the superficial critic: it has been condemned because to one man it seemed confused, to another it was not a novel, to a third the characters were not “real,” and to a fourth it was merely a weird, mystical, impossible tale of dubious veracity, an example of Bedlam literature, while to a fifth, it was just a straightforward account of the whaling industry, marred by a crazy captain and an adventitious plot. The final answer to all these criticisms lies, of course, in the book itself: but the foregoing outline will perhaps aid us a little in defining the qualities and limits of Melville’s vast epic.
Before we can take the measure of Moby-Dick we must, however, throw aside our ordinary measuring-sticks: one does not measure Saturn with the aid of an opera-glass and a dressmaker’s tape. The conventional critic has dismissed Moby-Dick because it is “not a novel,” or if it is a novel, its story is marred by all sorts of extraneous material, history, natural history, philosophy, mythological excursions, what not. This sort of criticism would belittle Moby-Dick by showing that it does not respect canons of a much pettier nature than the work itself, or because its colossal bulk cannot be caught in the herring-net of the commonplace story or romance. Even Mr. John Freeman, one of the most sympathetic interpreters of Melville, falls into this error; for, while acknowledging the great qualities of Moby-Dick, he refers to its “digressions and delays” as if they were in fact digressions and delays; that is, as if the “action” in the common novelist’s development of plot carried the thread of the story.
The matter is very easily put to rights if we simply abandon these false categories altogether. Moby-Dick stands by itself as complete as the Divine Comedy or the Odyssey stands by itself. Benedetto Croce has correctly taught us that every work of art is indeed in this same position: that it is uniquely what it is, and cannot be understood except in terms of its own purpose. If, for purely practical reasons, we ignore this in dealing with the ruck of novels and stories, because their inner purpose is so insignificant, we must respect it strictly when we confront a work that does not conspicuously conform to the established canons; for, needless to say, an imaginative work of the first rank will disclose itself through its differences and its departures, by what it originates, rather than by what it is derived from or akin to. Had Melville seriously sought in Moby-Dick to rival the work of Trollope or Reade or Dickens, had he simply desired to amuse and edify the great bourgeois public that consumed its three-decker novels as it consumed its ten-course public dinners, and wanted no delay in the service, no hitch in the round of food, drink, toasts, speeches, and above all, no unaccustomed victuals on such occasions, then Moby-Dick would have been a mistake and failure. But one cannot count as a failure what was never an attempt. Moby-Dick does not belong to this comfortable bourgeois world, any more than horse-hair shirts or long fasts; it neither aids digestion nor increases the sense of warm drowsy good nature that leads finally to bed: and that is all there is to it.
The same criticism that disposes of the notion that Moby-Dick is a bad novel, by admitting freely that it is not a novel at all, equally disposes of its lack of verisimilitude. Although Melville was at first challenged on his facts, such as the ramming of the Pequod by Moby-Dick, events were just as kind to his reputation here as they were in the case of Typee: for while Moby-Dick was on the press, news came of the sinking of the whaler Ann Alexander by the ferocious attack of a whale. No one of authority has attempted to quarrel with Melville’s descriptions of the life and habits of whalemen and the whale: the testimony of every observer is that Melville left very little for any one else to say about the subject. This does not, however, dispose of the charge; for those who are wisely captious of Melville here will confine themselves to saying that no such crew ever existed, no such words ever passed human mouth, and no such thoughts could enter the mind of a Nantucketer, as entered Ahab’s.
Again, one is tempted to grant the objection; for it makes no difference in the value of Moby-Dick as a work of art. In the realistic convention, Moby-Dick would be a bad book: it happens that the story is projected on more than one plane, and a good part of it belongs to another, and equally valid, convention. Melville himself was aware of the difference, and early in the book he calls upon the Spirit of Equality, which has spread its royal mantle of humanity over all his kind, to defend him against all mortal critics “if, then, to the meanest mariners, and renegades, and castaways, I shall hereafter 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 the rainbow over his disastrous set of sun.” Now, the convention in which Melville cast this part of Moby-Dick was foreign to the nineteenth century; obscure people, like Beddoes, alone essayed it: to create these idealized figures called for such reserves of power that only minor poets, for the most part, unconscious of their weaknesses, attempted the task.