Chapter 9

Here, it seems to me, is the plainest interpretation of Melville’s fable, and the one he was partly conscious of in the writing of it. But a great book is more a part of its milieu than either the writer or his public knows; and there is more in Moby-Dick than the figure of man’s heroic defiance of brute energy, and evil, and the high gods.

In another sense, the whale stands for the practical life. Mankind needs food and light and shelter, and, with a little daring and a little patience, it gains these things from its environment: the whale that we cut up, dissect, analyse, melt down, pour into casks, and distribute in cities and households is the whale of industry and science. The era of whaling which opened only in the late seventeenth century is timed with the era of modern industry; and in the very year Melville wrote Moby-Dick, 1851, industry and science were announcing their triumphs in that great cock-crow of the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. Side by side with this purpose, which secures man’s material existence, is another set of purposes which, though they sometimes take advantage of the means offered by the practical life, as Ahab takes advantage of his sordid crew and ordinary whaling to carry out his private revenge, run counter to the usual flow of our daily efforts. The white whale cannot be met and captured by the usual means; more than that: to fulfil man’s own deeper purposes, the captains of the spirit must oppose the prudence of Starbuck and the common sense of Stubb. Material sustenance, home, comfort, though their pursuit occupy the greater part of the daily round of humanity, are sometimes best forgotten and set at naught: indeed, when nobler human purposes are uppermost, they must be set at naught. He who steadily seeks to preserve life and fortify it must be ready to give up his life at a moment’s notice when a fellow creature is in danger: he who would provide others with daily bread must be prepared to go hungry if the wheat that would nourish him is needed for the planting. All the more does this hold in the affairs of the spirit. When the human spirit expands itself to the uttermost, to confront the white whale and hew meaning and form from the blank stone of experience, one must reverse all the practical maxims: earth’s folly, as Melville says, is Heaven’s wisdom, and earth’s wisdom is Heaven’s greatest disaster.

The crew of the vessel seek the ordinary whale: they are after comfort and contentment and a greater share of the “lay”; but the Ahabs seek danger and hardship and a lay that has no value in terms of material sustenance and magnificence. And the paradox, the hard paradox, is this: both purposes are essential: Ahab could not set out at all without the aid of Peleg and Bildad and Charity and his harpooners and sailors, and they, for their part, would never know anything except sluggish routine were they not at times stirred up to great efforts by purposes they do not easily understand or consciously accept. Yet: there is an Ahab in every man, and the meanest member of the crew can be awakened to the values that Ahab prizes: given a storm and a stove boat, and the worst rascal on shipboard may be as magnificent as Odysseus. All men live most intensely when they are moulded by such a purpose—or even, wanting that, by an enterprise that counterfeits it. Art, religion, culture in general, all those intangible triumphs of the spirit that are embodied in forms and symbols, all that spells purpose as opposed to senseless energy, and significance as opposed to routine—these efforts develop human life to its fullest, even when they work contrary to the ordinary standards of the world.

There, it seems to me, is another meaning in Ahab’s struggle with Moby-Dick. He represents, not as in the first parable, an heroic power that misconceives its mission and misapplies itself: here he rather stands for human purpose in its highest expression. His pursuit is “futile” because it wrecks the boat and brings home no oil and causes material loss and extinguishes many human lives; but in another sense, it is not futile at all, but is the only significant part of the voyage, since oil is burned and ships eventually break up and men die and even the towers of proud cities crumble away as the buildings sink beneath the sand or the jungle, while all that remains, all that perpetuates the life and the struggle, are their forms and symbols, their art, their literature, their science, as they have been incorporated in the social heritage of man. That which is useful for the moment eventually becomes useless; the mummy’s food and drink shrivel away or evaporate: but that which is “useless,” the graven image or the tomb itself, continues to nourish the spirit of man. Life, Life purposive, Life formative, Life expressive, is more than living, as living itself is more than the finding of a livelihood. There is no triumph so petty and evanescent as that involved in capturing the ordinary whale: the nineteenth century made this triumph the end and object of all endeavour; and it put the spirit in chains of comfort and material satisfaction, which were heavier than fetters and harder to bear than the stake. By the same token, there is no struggle so permanent and so humanly satisfactory as Ahab’s struggle with the white whale. In that defeat, in that succession of defeats, is the only pledge of man’s ultimate victory, and the only final preventive of emptiness, boredom, and suicide. Battles are lost, as Whitman cried, in the same spirit that they are won. Some day the physical powers of man may be commensurate with his utmost spirit, and he will meet Leviathan on even terms.