Why does Herman Melville mean so much more to us than he did to his own contemporaries? What has his thought done for us, and what has his vision given? The change that has come about is not merely a change of style, so that the things which amused Mr. Stedman and Mr. Lowell are now old-fashioned, like hooped skirts, while the things that concerned Melville are, like the cubist quilts and coverlets of the 1850's, distinctly modern. Typee is still as good a book as Mr. Stedman thought it: we see now that it belongs to a more common order of literature, whereas Moby-Dick, the more closely we consider it, mounts to that lonely, wind-swept plateau in whose rarefied air only the finest imaginations can breathe. Distinctly, Moby-Dick belongs with the Inferno and Hamlet and Lear and the Brothers Karamazov; and if it does not establish its right to this company, it must occupy a lower place than the successful novels of its period, a David Copperfield or a Pendennis, books written with a complete acceptance of the current limitations and provincialities.

Melville's work, taken as a whole, expresses that tragic sense of life which has always attended the highest triumphs of the race, at the moments of completest mastery and fulfillment. Where that sense is lacking, life shrivels into small prudences and petty gains, and those great feats of thought and imagination which transform the very character of the universe and relieve human purpose from the weak sufficiency of toiling and eating and sleeping in a meaningless, reiterative round, shrivel away, too, John Ruskin saw the truth of this when, in spite of his pacifist convictions, he praised the art of war, for its effect upon the human spirit: life becomes intensified and purposive when the battle with the forces of Nature, like Ahab's battle, is a deliberate pursuit and challenge, and not merely an apathetic waiting for a purely physiological end. The tragedy of life, its evanescence, its frustrations, its limitations within physical boundaries almost as narrow as a strait-jacket, its final extinction becomes, in a day that consciously embraces its fate, the condition of an heroic effort. It is just because these things lie in wait that man defies the gods, cherishes the images he has created and the relations he has solidified in custom or thought, and centers his efforts on those things which are least given to change. Though the sensible world is not derived, as Plato thought, from the heaven of ideas, the opposite of this is what every culture must strive for: to derive from the sensible world that which may be translated to a more durable heaven of Forms.





Within the world of these forms there is Life, a tiling of value, and not merely living, a matter of fact and habit and animal necessity. Whether one develops this tragic sense of life on a battlefield, like Sophocles, or in a whaleboat, like Melville, it is a precious experience: for living, merely living, as every profane writer from Petronius Arbiter to Theodore Dreiser has shown, brings boredom, satiety, despair: whereas Life is eternal, and he who has faith in it and participates in it is saved from the emptiness of the universe and the pointlessness of his own presence therein. Living, for man, in all but the most brutish communities, like those of the savages of the Straits of Magellan or the outcasts of a Liverpool or New York slum, includes and implies this Life: and when Melville summons into his whaler die several races of the world, lie is expressing the universal nature of that effort which cups nature with culture, existence with meaning, and facts with forms. Ahab's tragic struggle is the condition of every high endeavor of the mind; while adjustment, acquiescence, accepting outward conditions as inward necessities, though they may prolong living in the physical sense, effectually curtail Life: this attitude, the attitude of Melville's contemporaries, the attitude of the routineers and Philistines at all times—and they have never perhaps seen so numerous as today—disrupts life far more completely than illness and death do; for it brings about a deliquescence of forms, such as the nineteenth century showed in all its common arts, and a disintegration of human purposes. When that happens, the White-Whale of brute energy reigns supreme: Life itself is denied: living produces no values, and men hide their emptiness by embracing weak counterfeits of purpose.

Thoreau, Whitman, Melville: They saw that business was only a small part of the totality of living.

Melville's younger contemporaries, who fought in the Civil War, knew Life and Death; but those who prospered in the years that followed knew something more dreadful than simple death: they knew chaos and purposelessness and disintegration, such chaos and purposelessness, mixed with a wan, reminiscent hope, as Henry Adams pictured in his Education. Herman Melville portrayed a human purpose, concentrated to almost maniacal intensity, in Moby-Dick; and in Benito Cereno, in Bartleby, and in The Confidence Man, he showed the black aftermath, when the purpose is not sustained and carried out in art, and when he himself was deserted in his extremity, by contemporaries who neither understood nor heeded nor shared his vision. No single human mind can hold its own against all that is foreign to it in the universe: Shakespeare's heroes issue their brief defiance, before they are blotted out: such unity of spirit as one may possess, as philosopher or poet, must be sustained in the community itself. A new culture, the product of two hundred and fifty years of settled life in America, had produced Walden, the Leaves of Grass, Emerson's Notebooks, and Moby-Dick; but that culture, instead of sustaining and carrying forward the integration of man and nature and society shadowed forth in those books, was completely uprooted by the Civil War, and a material civilization, inimical in many aspects to the forms and symbols of a humane culture, was swept in by the very act of destruction.

Two generations of that material civilization have shown us its lopsidedness, its aimlessness, its grand attempt to conceal its emptiness by extending concrete roads and asphalted streets and vacuum cleaners to more and more remote terrains: our most humane writers, like Mr. Sherwood Anderson, have shown how mercilessly the whole human being is crippled by this one-sided triumph; and even our most bewildered writers, who have exulted in all these maimed energies, have shown in their very act of deification how brutal and aimless they are. We realize that the effort of culture, the effort to make Life significant and durable, to conquer in ourselves that formidable confusion which threatens from without to overwhelm us—this effort must begin again. And in thus making a beginning we are nearer to Whitman with his cosmic faith and Melville in his cosmic defiance, than we are to a good part of the work of our own contemporaries. It is not that we go back to these writers: it is, rather, that we have come abreast of them; for in creating that new synthesis, in lieu of the formless empiricisms and the rootless transcendentalisms of the last three centuries, the writers of our own classic past were nearer to the contemporary problem than almost any of the Europeans have been—since the physical remains of another culture in Europe give the mind a false sense of stability and security.