Chapter 2

When the whale enters, the narrative for the first time pauses; and, in the pause, one discovers that the story and the people are secondary matters, while something more wide and reaching comes into the fable. The whale is a symbol in the heart of man; it has its own existence and value there: but the whale is also a creature in natural history, and its shape, its bulk, habits, anatomical characteristics, family relations, its place in politics, economics, history, and human adventure, is a further part of that natural history. The chapter on the whale, in which the various branches are listed under a sort of bookseller’s classification, into Folio, Octavo, and Duodecimo whales, is an excellent example of Melville’s way of assimilating and revaluating knowledge, so that what was extraneous becomes intrinsic, and what was a fact in the history of the whale becomes an element in the myth that he is weaving.

A timid writer would have left these classifications and divisions out: how on earth is one to make interesting reading out of a bare catalogue? But Melville carries the load with Olympian levity: he invents a fresh classification, unknown to Owen or Cuvier, and then, with a final dash of apparent impatience, he leaves the system uncompleted—even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, “with the cranes still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower.” This absurd, bookseller’s classification, and this last touch of impatience are not due to Melville’s incompetence: the first tells us that all systems of thought have in them something arbitrary and human, and the zoologist’s classification and system is no less so than the human foot, as the standard of linear measurement: when one sees objects under the figure of eternity, the scientist’s divisions have the same limitations as the bookseller’s. In a century when only a few rare-minded mathematicians were elaborating the theory that our existing geometry was but one out of a number of possible systems, with different sets of postulates, Melville was slyly demonstrating that all our thought has this conventional basis. One may alter the convention, change the point of approach, and create a different order, equally useful, equally competent, equally true. When Melville stops abruptly without finishing his own work, he points out to us that knowledge of all sorts belongs to an infinite series: there is no final stopping-place: and he who thinks his system is complete has only demonstrated his own limitations.

Although Melville plays with science, he utilizes all that it can give him, and he never seriously departs from its findings except in taking the fisherman’s view that the whale is a fish, and not, as is actually the case, an aquatic mammal. But the whale that science investigates, the whale that is stranded on the beach, or whose skeleton is suspended in mid-air in the natural-history museum, is not, however thoroughly it may be dissected and articulated and labelled, the whole whale, even for science; for a whale, like every other creature, has a habitat, relations with other living creatures, and certain ways of functioning, moving, mating, finding food; and there is a sense in which one is as near to the scientific truth about a whale when one is fighting the creature in an open boat, as when one is counting its vertebrae, examining its tissues under a microscope, or comparing its skull with other mammalian skulls. Melville gives a completer account of the whale than the anatomists: he approaches it with a harpoon as well as a dissecting-knife: he observes its characteristic reaction to stimuli as well as the organs by means of which these reactions are effected. On the other hand, the physical pursuit of the whale is only a part of the story: the more one learns about such a creature, the more widely do its relations ramify, not merely in its own world, but in man’s: and the higher the significance of the hunt itself. These passages about the whale and the methods of whaling, about its dignity and adventure, these comments upon the science of cetology—all these things are not uncouth interruptions in the narrative: they are profoundly part of it: the stream widens here, as the Hudson widens at Tappan Zee, without losing its flow and purpose. From now on the universal, symbolic aspect of the story, and its direct, scientific, practical aspect move in and out like the threads of a complicated pattern: one modifies the other, and is by turns figure and background. The physical expanse of the book, its deliberateness of movement, its slow undulations, are necessary, like the long swells and the wide expanse of the ocean itself, to give a feeling of immensity, immensity and power.