a single beam, itself becomes a shape of beauty. Even the gloom of Pierre, in the intense light of Melville's genius, is figured with shadows of beauty that rejoice the heart and almost justify the darkness. Pierre Glendinning, Yet, nevertheless, who will not deplore the waste of beauty! There are passages of lovely prose in Pierre, leisured, deep-breathed prose; there are tender and gentle episodes—but all wasted. says Melville, "had not as yet procured for himself that enchanter's wand of the soul, which, but touching the humblest experiences in one's life, straightway it starts up all eyes, in every one of which are endless significancies. Not yet had he dropped his angle into the well of his childhood." He had thrown aside the enchanter's wand when he finished Redburn, and now bore a serpent. The psychology is intolerably followed, with the sly and thirsty fury of a stoat; nothing outside the Russians could be more subtle or less scrupulous. "I write precisely as I please," he cries, breaking in on the narrative; and in this scorn of others he has written a book which may move deeply but cannot please any one. And a principal reason for this failure is clear. Granting the subject, Melville's aim could only be achieved in verse. The theme is, essentially, one for an Elizabethan play, in which every emotion is exalted and the large movement of blank verse is ready to sustain vast incredibilities. In a verse-drama Melville would have achieved what he needs but cannot achieve -remoteness; his desperate imagination, hanging above and apart from a creeping reality, might have taken on another reality, that of the poetry which is as remote, as real, and as necessary as the sun. But the faculty was denied to him, and he attempted to do in elaborate prose what he could not do in native verse; and he failed as clearly as Pierre Glendinning failed, and as greatly. England and America in 1852 were unlikely to be forbearing when a writer who had already vexed the conscience of his time now came forward with a romance of unholy passion. Even in the twentieth century, when all things are lawful, all things are not expedient. Melville flung his retroverted idealism in the face of the public, and the public spokesmen were exasperated. His old enemy, the English press, was strong in denunciation, forgetting that if the book was as bad as it was declared to be, no one need waste time in determining its worthlessness very precisely. An image not quite false and not without humour was used by the Athenæum-" it reminds us of a prairie in print, wanting the flowers and freshness of the savannahs, but almost equally puzzling to find a way through it". Second-hand Germanism was the cry, and we take up novels to be amused!" defining its wants Melville now had To a public so nothing to offer. I CHAPTER VII MOBY-DICK AND BILLY BUDD Moby-Dick is a novel, if it can be termed a novel, to consider in isolation. It is lifted above the rest of Melville's work as nobly as the flying sails above the sea. Melville's characteristic faults, his digressions and his delays, are found in Moby-Dick, and are hardly less frequent than in most of his books; but they have little power to retard the reader. Even when he suspends the action, in order to discourse upon the technicalities of whaling, the suspension is not fatal; and though the symbolism is prominent, and readers are impatient of symbolism, it is not capable of marring the drama of Ahab and Moby-Dick, but rather heightens it. Subject and mood are perfectly matched, and since that "matching " is essential to drama, and the form needed here was not verse (as with Pierre) but supple, variable prose, he attained a simple and final felicity in the writing of Moby-Dick. The subject calls out something new in him, a humour which most of his writing lacks and forbids. It is a rather sly, inconstant quality, but it is discovered as soon as the young whaler visits the inn frequented by whaling crews, and finds himself sharing a bed with the apparitional Queequeg, a tatooed savage, once a prince among cannibals, now an emblazoned harpooner with bald purplish skull. More conspicuous is it in the chapter toward the close of the story, when the "Pequod" hails the " Samuel Enderby ", and the grimness of Ahab and his wild crew is dreadfully sharpened by contrast with the extravagant good spirits of the stranger. The height of Melville's great argument-which is Ahab's madness in challenging the world for pride is measured by the simple jolly humour of the English ship, a humour that the author might have borrowed from Marryat if he needed it. But it is not a humorous book, though there is this unfamiliar bright seam in the darkness of the mine. The story that Melville is possessed with is that of the whaler "Pequod ", sailing on its last great voyage one Christmas Day under mad, morose Ahab, with Ishmael the chronicler on board, and a crew vividly presented one after another, Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, the harpooners, the sinister Parsee Fedallah and the inspired idiot Pip. They all alike speak with tongues that were never native to mortal men; every man's lips are at times prophetic, full of dark wisdom and pregnant philosophy; and all alike are subdued to their captain's imperious will. In an earlier voyage he had lost a limb in chasing the monstrous, almost mythical White Whale, Moby-Dick; and now, though his pretext is whale-hunting for profit, his real purpose is to destroy his enemy-Ahab and the whale, the prototypes of an eternal bloody strife between opposites. If you ask for a definition of these opposites, the answer is not very easy; they are, in one view, spirit 8 against flesh, eternity against time; in another view, Of man's first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world and all our woe this is Melville's theme as it was Milton's, but the |