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Reprinted from Queen's Quarterly, Vol, VII, No. 2. f\c /-; ' I f" >*r ^f ■♦I National Library BIbliothdque nationale of Canada du Canada ♦ Kingston ; PRINTED AT THE DAILY NEWS OFFICE. " THE BEST SEA STORY EVER WRITTEN." A NYONE who undertakes to reverse some judgment in his- -^^ tory or criticism, or to set the public right regarding some neglected manor work, becomes at once an object of suspicion. Nine times out often he is called a literary snob '"or his pains, or a prig who presumes to teach his betters, or a "phrase-monger," or a "young Osric," or something equally soul-subduing. Be- sides, the burden of proof lies heavy upon him. He preaches to a sleeping congregation. The good public has returned its ver- dict upon the case, and is slow to review the evidence in favour of the accused, or, having done so, to confess itself in the wrong. Still, diiflcult as the work of rehabilitation always is, there are cheering instances of its complete success ; notably, the rescue of the Elizabethan dramatists by Lamb and Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. Nor in such a matter is the will always free. As Heine says, ideas take possession of us and force us into the arena, there to fight for them. There is also the possibility of triumph " THE BEST SEA STORY EVER WRITTEN." I2t to Steel the raw recruit against all dangers. Though the world at large may not care, the judicious few may be glad of new light, and may feel satisfaction in seeing even tardy justice meted out to real merit. In my poor opinion much less than justice has been done to an American writer, whose achievement is so considerable that it is hard to account for the neglect into which he has fallen. This writer isiierman Melville, who died in New York in the autumn of i89i,-aged eighty-three. That his death excited little attention is in consonance with the popular apathy towards him and his work. The civil war marks a dividing line in his literary production as well as in his life. His best work belongs to the ante-bellum days, and is cut off in taste and sympathy from the distinctive literary fashions of the present time. To find how complete neglect is, one has only to put question to the most cul- tivated and patriotic Americans north or south, east or west, even professed specialists in the nativist literature, and it will be long before the Melville enthusiast meets either sympathy or under- standing. The present writer made his first acquaintance with Moby Dick in the dim, dusty Mechanics' Institute Library (open- ed once a week by the old doctor) of an obscure Canadian village, nearly twenty years ago ; and since that time he has seen only one copy of the book exposed for sale, and met only one person (and that not an American) who had read it. Though Kingsley has a good word for Melville, the only place where real apprecia- tion of him is to be found of recent years is in one of Mr. Clark Russell's dedications. There occurs the phrase which gives this paper its title. Whoever takes the trouble to read this unique and original book will concede that Mr. Russell knows whereof he affirms. Melville is a man of one book, and this fact accounts possi- bly for much of his unpopularity. The marked inferiority of his work after the war, as well as changes in literary fashion, would drag the rest down with it. Nor are his earliest works, embody- ing personal experience like Redburn and White Jacket, quite worthy of the pen which wrote Moby Dick. Omoo and Typee are little more than sketches, legitimately idealized, of his own ad- ventures in the Marque=;as. They are notable works in that they are the first to reveal to civilized people the charm of life in the 172 giJKFCN'S giJARTKRLV islands of the Pacific, the charm which is so potent in Vailimu Letcrs and T/. Hcack of Falesa. Again. the\,o„ndlL archi- pelagos of Oceamca furnish the scenes of AfunU, Ui, enrious po- ll >cal satire. This contains a prophecy of the war. and a fine example of obsolete oratory in the speech of the great chief Alanno from H.o-Hio. The prologue in a whale-shfp and tie voyage .n an open boat are. perhaps, the most interesting parts None of h.s books are without distinct and peculiar exceUences.' but nearly all have some fatal fault. Melville's seems a case o arrested hterary development. The power and promise of power in h,s bes work are almost unbounded ; but he either did not care to follow them up or he had worked out all hfs rifts of ore 1 he last years of his life he spent as a recluse. His hfe fitted him to write his one book. The representative of a good old Scottish name, his portrait shows distinctively Scottish traits. The head is the sort that goes naturally with a all, powerful figure. The forehead is broad and square ; the l.air IS abundant; the full beard masks the mouth and chin • the general aspect is of great but disciplined strength. The eyes are evel and determined ; they have speculatior: in them. Nor does h.s work behe his blood. It shows the natural bent of the Scot towards metaphysics ; and this thoughtfulness is one pervading quality of Melville's books. In the second place, his family had been so long established in the country (his grandfather was a n ember of the "Boston tea-party") that he secured the benefits ofeducation and inherited culture: and this enlightenment was ndispensable in enabling him to perceive the literary -values" of whVh h'"^' ".?' ''''"^' '''""' ""'^ ^^'-^"^^ ^^^"ts amongst which he was thrown And then, he had the love of adventure which drove h.m forth to gather his material at the ends of the earth. He made two voyages ; first as a green hand of eighteen in one of the old clipper packets to Liverpool and back ; and next, as a young man of twenty-three, in a whaler. The latter was sufficiently adventurous. Wearying of sea-life, he deserted on one of the Marquesas Islands, and came near being killed and eaten by cannibal natives who kept him prisoner for four months. At last he escaped, and worked his way home on a U S man-o' war. This adventure lasted four years and he went no more to sea. " THE I3KST SEA STOkY EVFiR WRITTEN." ,23 After his marriage, he hved at Pittsfield for thirteen years in close intimacy with Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated his cliief work. My copy shows that it was written as early as 1851 but the title page is dated exactly twenty years later. It shows .is its three chief elements this Scottish thoiightfulness, the love of literatnre and the love of adventure. _ When Mr. Clark Russell singles out Mobv Dick {or such high praise as he bestows upon it, we think at once of other sea- stor.es.-his own, Mariyatf s, Smollet's perhaps, and such books as Dana s Two Yean before the Mast. But the last is a plain record of fact ; in Smollet's tales, sea-life is only part of one great round of adventure ; in Mr. Russell's mercantile marine, there IS generally the romantic interest of the way of a man with a maid; and in Marryatt's the rise of a naval officer through var- lous ranks plus a love-story or plenty of fun, fighting and pri^e- money. From all these advantages Melville not only cuts him- self off, but seems to heap all sorts of obstacles in his self appoint- ed path. Great are the prejudices to be overcome ; but he triumphs overall. Whalers are commonly regarded as a sort of sea-scavengers. He convinces you that their business is poetic • and that they are finest fellows afloat. He dispenses with a love-story altogether; there is hardly a flutter of a petticoat from chapter first to last. The book is not a record of fact ; but of fact Idealized, which supplies the frame for a terrible duel to tiie death between a mad whaling-captain and a miraculous white sperm whale. It is oot a love-story but a story of undying hate. In no other tale is one so completely detached from the land, even from the very suggestion of land. Though Nantucket and New Bedford must be mentioned, only their nautical aspects are touched on; they are but the steps of the saddle-block from which the manner vaults upon the back of liis sea-horse. The strange ship "Pequod" is the theatre of all the strange advent- ures. For ever off soundings, she shows but as a centra! speck ma wide circle of blue or stormy sea ; and yet a speck crammed full of human passions, the world itself in little. Comparison brings out only more strongly the unique character of the book Whaling is the most peculiar business done by man upon the deep waters. A war-ship is but a mobile fort or battery ; a merchant- man IS but a floating shop or warehouse : fishing is devoid of any 184 gUKKN'S QUAKTEULV. but the ordinary perils of navigation ; but sperm-whaling, accord- in« to Melville, is the most excitinj; and dangerous kind of big game hunting. One part of the author's triumph consists in li.'iving made the complicated operations of this strange pursuit pcrlectly familiar to the reader; and that not in any dull, ped- antic fashion, but touched with the imagination, the humor, the fiiiicy, the reflection of a poet. His intimate knowledge of his sul)ject and his intense interest in it make the whaler's life in all Its details not only comprehensible but fascinating. A bare outline of the story, though it cannot suggest its peculiar charm, may arouse a desire to know more about it. The book takes its name from a monstrous, invincible, sperm whale of diabolical strength and malice. In an encounter with this eviathan, Ahab, the captain of a Nantucket whaLr, has had his eg torn off. The long illness which ensues drives him mad ; and his one thought upon recovery is vengeance upon the creature that has mutilated him. He gets command of the " Pequod " concealing his purpose with the cunning of insanity until the fitting moment comes : then he swears the whole crew into his fatal vendetta. From this point on, the mad captain bears down all opposition, imposes his own iron will upon the ship's company and affects them with like heat, until they are as one keen weapon fitted to his hand and to his purpose. In spite of all dilhculties, in spite of all signs and portents and warnings, hu- man and divine, he drives on to certain destruction. Everything conduces to one end, a three day's battle with the monster, which staves and sinks the ship, like the ill-fated " Essex." For a tale of such length, Moby Dick is undoubtedly well constructed. Possibly the "Town-Ho's Story," interesting as it IS, somewhat checks the progress of the plot ; but by the time the reader reaches this point, he is infected with the leisurely trade-wind, whaling atmosphere, and has no desire to proceed faster than at the " Pequod's " own cruising rate. Possibly the book might be shoitened by excision, but when one looks over the chapters it is hard to decide which to sacrifice. The interest begins with the quaint words of the opening sentence : "Call me Ishmael " ; and nevei slackens for at least a hundred pages. Ishmael's reasons for going to sea, his sudden friendship with gueecpieg, the Fijian harpooneer, Father Mapple's sermon on iniC |!i:ST SFCA STOHV KVI-I i WUITTKN. 125 Jonah, 111 the seamen's bethel, gueequey's rescue of the country Inunpkin on the way to Nantucket, (,2uee(iueg's Ramadan, the description of the sliip " Pequod " and her two owners, ICIijah's warnnif,', fjottinf,' under way and dropping tlie pilot, make up an introduction of great variety and picturesqueness. The second part deals with all the particulars of the various operations in whaling from manning the mast-heads and lowering the boats to trying out the blubber and cleaning up the ship, when all the oil IS barrelled. In this part Ahab, who has been invisible in the re- tirement of his cabin, comes on deck and in various scenes differ- ent sides of his vehement, iron-willed, yet pathetic nature, are made intelligible. Here also is much learning to be foui. I, and here, if anywhere, the story dawdles. The last part deals' with the fatal three days* chase, the death of Ahab, and the escape of the White Whale. One striking peculiarity of the book is its Americanism— a word which needs definition. The theme and style are peculiar to this country. Nowhere but in America could such a theme have been treated in such a style. Whaling is peculiarly an American industry; and of all whale-men, the Nantucketers were the keen- esN the most daring, and the most successful. Now, though there are still whalers to be found in the New Bedford slips, and mteresiing as it is to clamber about them and hear the uncon- scious confirmation of all Melville's details from the lips of some old harpooneer or boat-header, the industry is almost extinct. The discovery of petroleum did for it. Perhaps Melville went to sea for no other purpose than to construct the monument of whaling in this unique book. Not in his subject alone, but in his style is Melville distinctly American. It is large in idea, ex- pansive ; It has an Elizabethan force and freshness and swing, and is, perhaps, more rich in figures than any style but Emer- son's. It has the picturesqueness of the new world, and, above all, a free-flowing humour, which is the distinct cachet of Ameri- can literature. No one would contend that it is a perfect style ; some mannerisms become tedious, like the constant moral turn, and the curiously coined adverbs placed before the verb.* Occa- sionally there is more than a hint of bombast, as indeed might be expected ; but, upon the whole, it is an extraordinary style, rich, clear, vivid, original. It shows reading and is full of 126 QtJEEN'S QtJARTEt?LV. thought and allusion ; but its chief charm is its freedom from all scholastic rules and conventions. Melville is a Walt Whitman of prose. Like Browning he has a dialect of his own. The poet of The Rtng and the Book translates the different emotions and thoughts and possible words of pope, jurist, murderer, victim, into one level uniform Browningese; reduces them to a common denom- mator. in a way of speaking, and Melville gives us not the actual words of American whalemen, but what they would say under the imagined conditions, translated into one consistent, though var- lous Melvillesque manner of speech. The life he deals with be- ongs already to the legendary past, and he has us completely at his mercy. He is completely successful in creating his "atmos- phere." Granted the conditions, the men and their word- emotions and actions, are all consistent. One powerful scene takes place on the quarter-deck of the " Pequod " one evening when, all hands mustered aft, the Captain Ahab tells of the White Whale, and offers a doubloon to the first man who "raises" him : '"Captain Ahab,' said TaUitego, 'that White Whale must be the same that some call Moby Dick.' ' !V^°l^y Dick ?' shouted Ahab. " ' Do ye know the white whale then, Tash ? 'Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down ?' said the Gay-header, deliberately. 'And has he a curious spout, too,' said Daggoo, ' very bushy, even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab? ' 'And he have one, two, tree-oh good many iron in him hide, too, Ca: tain, cried Queequeg, disjointedly, 'all twisktee be-twisk hke h,m_h,m-' faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as though uncorking a bottle—' like him-him-' 'Corkscrew!' cried Ahab, 'aye, Queequeg, the harpoons li.3 all twisted and wrenched in him ; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one hke a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket woo after the great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tatl\hke a split jil, in a squall.' The first mate, Starbuck, asks him, 'it was not Moby Dick that took off thy leg ? ' ' Who told Ihee that ?" cried Ahab ; then pausing, 'Aye, Starbuck- aye, my hearties all round, it was Moby Dick that dismasted me " THE mtsT SEA STORV EVER WRrrtEN." 12^ Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, oye,' he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-striken moose ; 'Aye, aye ! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me ; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day !' Starbuck alone attempts to withstand him. 'Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, 'that simply smote thee from the blindest instinct ! Madness ; to be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.' 'Hark ye, yet again,_the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event— in the living act, the undoubted deed-there, some unknown but still reasoning thmg puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the un- reasomng mask. If mar 11 strike, strike through the mask !' " Then follows the wiiu ceremony of drinking round the cap- stan-head from the harpoon-sockets to confirm Ahab's curse. " Death to Moby Dick. God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to tlie death ! " The intermezzo of the various sailors on the forecastle which follows until the squall strikes the ship is one of the most suggestive passages in all the literature of the sea. Under the influence of Ahab's can, the men are dancing, on the forecastle. The old Manx sailor says : " I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what they are dancing over. I'll dance over your grave, I will-that's the bit- terest threat of your night-women, that beat head-winds round corners. O, Christ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled crews." Where every page, almost every paragraph, has its quaint or telling phrase, or thought, or suggested picture, it is hard to make a selection ; and even the choicest morsels give you no idea of the richness of the feast. Melville's humour has been mentioned ; it is a constant quantity. Perhaps the statement of his determination after the adventure of the first lowering is as good an example as any : " Here, then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement of the case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and cap- sizings in the water, and consequent bivouacks m the deep, were matters of common occurrence in this kind of life ; considering that at the superlatively critical moment of going on to the whale I must resign my life into the hands of him who steered the boat-often- tmies a fellow who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings ; 128 QUEEN'S yUARTERLV, consK enng that the particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck's driving on to his whale, al- most in the teeth of a squall, and considering that Starbuck, notwith- standing, was famous for his great heedfulness in the fishery; con- sidering that I belonged to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck's boat ; and finally considering in what a devil's chase I was impli- cated touching the White Whale : taking all things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will ' Queequeg,' said I, ' come along and you shall be my lawyer executor and legatee,' " j j ^ The humour has the usual tinge of Northern melancholy, and sometimes a touch of Rabelais. The exhortations of Stubb to his boat's crew, on different occasions, or such chapters as Queen Mab," <• The Cassock," "Leg and Arm," " Stubb's Supper," are good examples of his peculiar style. But, after all, his chief excellence is bringing to the lands- man the very salt of the sea breeze, while to one who has long known the ocean, he is as one praising to the lover the chiefest beauties of the Beloved. The magic of the ship and the mystery of the sea are put into words that form pictures for the dullest eyes. The chapter, " The Spirit Spout," contains these two aquarelles of the moonlit sea and the speeding ship side by side • " It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls ot silver ; and by their soft, suffusing seethings all things made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude ; on such a silent night a sil- very jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow Lit up by the moon it looked celestial ; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. * ■■' =:= * :■. Walking the deck, with quick, side lunging strides, Ahab com- manded the t'gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then with every mast-head manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the tafTrail breeze hlhng the hollows of so many sails made the buoyant, hovering deck to leel like air beneath the fee^." In the chapter called "The Needle," ship and sea and sky are blended in one unforgettable whole : " Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rnllrd in lou^. slow hil lows of mighty bulk, and striving in the " Pequod's " gurgling track, "THE BEST SEA STOKY EVER WRITTEN.' 129 pushed her on hke giants' pahns outspread. The strong, unstagger- ing breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails ; the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread inten- sity of his place ; where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Em- blazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everytl'.ing. The sea was a crucible of molten gold, that bub- blingly leaps with light and heat." It would be hard to find five consecutive sentences any- where containing such pictures and such vivid, pregnant, bold imagery : but this book is made up of such things. The hero of the book is, after all, not Captain Ahab, but his triumphant antagonist, the mystic white monster of the sea, and it is only fitting that he should come for a moment at least into the saga. A complete scientific memoir of the Sperm Whale as known to man might be quarried from this book, for Melville has described the creature from his birth to his death, and even burial in the oil casks and the ocean. He has described him living, dead and anatomized. At least one such description is in place here. The appearance of the whale on the second day of the fatal chase is by '« breaching," and nothing can be clearer than Melville's account of it : '• The triumphant halloo of thirty buckskir lungs was heard, as —much nearer to the ship than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile anead— Moby Dick bodily burst into view ! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings ; not by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal his vi- cinity ; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the dis- tance of seven miles and more. In those moments the torn, enraged waves he shakes off seem his mane ; in some cases this breaching is his act of defiance. 'There she breaches ! there she breaches !' was the cry, as in his immeasurable bravadoes the Wiiite Whale tossed himself salmon-like to heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and re- lieved against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised for the moment intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier ; and stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling intensity ;.i die dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale." 13° QUEEN'S QUARTERLY. This book IS at once the epic and the encyclopaedia of whal- ing. It IS a monument to the honour of an extinct race of daring seamen ; but it is a monument overgrown with the lichen of ne- glect Those who will care to scrape away the moss may be few but they will have their reward. To the class of gentleman- adventurer, to those who love both books and free life under the wide and open sky, it must always appeal. Melville takes rank with Borrow, and Jefferies, and Thoreau, and Sir Richard Hurton ; and his place in this brotherhood of notables is not the lowest. Those who feel the salt in their blood that draws them time and again out of the city to the wharves and the ships al- most without their knowledge or their will ; those who feel' the irresistible lure of the spring, away from the cramped and noisy town, up the long road to the peaceful companionship of the awaking earth and the untainted sky ; all those-and they are many-will find in Melville's great book an ever fresh and con- stant charm. ,-, ,. . ^ „ Archibald Macmechan. Palhousie College, Halifax, N.S. IS 1