UNITARIANISM
AND
TRANSCENDENTALISM
I. UNITARIANISM: RATIONALITY IN RELIGION
Just as the pervasive spirit of the Enlightenment with its doctrine
of the natural rights of man, made itself manifest in the intellectual and
political trends of the eighteenth century, so did it have a corresponding
effect on orthodox religion. But here, even more than in secular matters,
the rationalistic temper merely revived and gave added force to certain
"heretical" departures from authoritarian interpretation of the
Scriptures that had plagued the church fathers almost from the beginning.
One of the most persistent of these heresies had been that Adam's fall
did not involve the whole human race, and that though men are prone to sine,
they are capable of effecting their own salvation by faith alone, through
baptism,by reason of the work of Christ. St. Augustine himself had to combat
an extreme form of this rationalistic freethinking in Pelagius, a British
monk (d. circa 420), whose whole emphasis in preaching had been appeal to
"the capacity and character of human nature and to show what it is
able to accomplish." The tendency of this doctrine is obviously in
the direction of greater emphasis on the part the individual can play in
working out his spiritual salvation, and as such was vigorously opposed
by the church.
The persecutions suffered by the Anabaptists for their rejection of
infant baptism along with Calvin's having to deal with the radical heresy
in the writings of the Spanish monk Servetus, who had also denied the Immaculate
Conception, and the Trinitarian concept of God as being three persons in
one--Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Servetus suffered martyrdom in 1553 for
his temerity in reinterpreting the Scriptures in accordance with what he
believed he read there, but his statement of his position lived after him:
Your trinity is a product of subtlety and madness. The Gospel
knows nothing of it. The old fathers are strangers to these vain distinctions.
It is from the school of the Greek Sophists that you, Athanasius, prince
of tritheists, have borrowed it.
The idea of the threefold nature of God was one of the main targets of critical
thinking during the Enlightenment both in England and America, and in 1785
King's Chapel in Boston, the Episocopal church in New England, was the first
to be come openly Unitarian. In 1805 Henry Ware, an avowed Unitarian, was
appointed to the Hollis Professorship of Theology at Harvard (founded in
1636 to train young men for the Puritan ministry), and by 1815 fourteen
of the sixteen pre-Revolutionary Congregational churches in Boston had adopted
Unitarian principles. Thus it came about that in 1829, 276 years after
the death of Servetus by fire, Ralph Waldo Emerson could be appointed as
Unitarian minister to the Second Church at Boston (where three generations
of Mathers had preached), free to discourse openly upon doctrines that had
been considered rank heresies in the time of Calvin.
As originally formulated, Unitarianism was dry and rationalistic in
the extreme. It had little concept of religion as a deeply felt psychological
experience, and attempted to approximate the spirit of scientific inquiry
in its approach to the Bible as the word of God. Unitarians, besides denying
the threefold nature of God, hold that Jesus was a man, and therefore, not
divine, and that Christianity is not a series of creeds or definitions,
but a way of life. They prefer to speak of "statements of faith"
rather than doctrines, and they believe in five such statements:
1. The Fatherhood of God.
2. The Brotherhood of Man.
3. The Leadership of Jesus.
4. Salvation by character.
5. The Progress of mankind onward and upward forever.
The similarities between these principles and those of the Deists will be
immediately apparent.
Other ideas of the Unitarians follow naturally. The Bible was written
by men, and therefore is not infallible. There are no states of absolute
salvation or damnation, but man is a progressively spiritual creature who
may continue to develop even after death. Jesus was a man, although a great
and unusual one, for otherwise his life would be impossible of imitation
by other men. His greatness as a leader is stressed, and his death on the
cross is regarded as the inevitable outcome of the implications of his teachings
and life work, and not as a sacrifice for the sins of humanity. The fatherhood
of God is emphasized over his sovereignty, and since he is the universal
Father, all men are brothers.
On the point of salvation Unitariansim is equally consistent. Sin
is a matter of morality, involving human relationships, and is not an offense
against God. Man is responsible for his acts, and few ever achieve complete
goodness in this life. the bible is not inspired, but is only one of many
possible avenues to truth, and is read for ethics rather than for theology.
the church is a purely human institution, and no one church has any monopoly
on the means of salvation, nor is there any mystical "church of the
spirit" behind all the diverse institutions we see around us. Since
god has made man in his own image, man partakes also of the Divine goodness,
and the greatest moral force here on earth is to be found in the example
of the lives of noble men. The sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper
are regarded simply as memorials, and in some Unitarian churches are omitted
altogether as too reminiscent of the theological concepts of election and
vicarious atonement.
Curiously enough this "liberal" version of religion, which
was condemned by the more orthodox Calvinists as not even Christian, soon
became the chosen form of worship for many of the wealthiest and most conservative
citizens of Boston. It was, as one realistic comment put it, "the
church of the arrived." Its cooly rational approach made unnecessary
the agonized soul-searchings of Puritanism, while its concept of man as
a continually developing spiritual creature gave the Boston merchants a
sense of having plenty of room to move around in, unperturbed by vivid anticipations
of wrath and hell-fire to come. The ministers, too, were often more interested
in textual criticism of the Bible than they were in touching the hearts
of their hearers.
But the Unitarianism of the period 1785-1819 is not to be compared
with the militant humanitarian aspects of the denomination from the latter
date up to the Civil War. Many of the younger ministers became increasingly
dissatisfied with what Emerson was later to call its "pale negations,"
and after 1819 William Ellery Channing became the spokesman and the new
leader of the Unitarians. In his sermons and writings he enunciated three
principles of the greatest importance: god is all-loving and all pervading;
the presence of this god in all men makes them divine, and the true worship
of God is good will to all men. Channing fought vigorously to rid Unitarianism
of what he called its "union with a heart-withering philosophy,"
and to open the floodgates of poetry and religious fervor. Not only did
he revitalize Unitarianism by his preaching and the example of his irreproachable
personal character, but he laid the ground work for the moral and spiritual
basis of transcendentalism, the movement for which Emerson was to be the
chief spokesman.
In his recent biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire
(University of California Press, 1995), Robert D. Richardson, Jr. offers
a summary of William Ellery Channing's sermon in Baltimore called "Unitarian
Christianity" which was at once recognized as the defining scripture
of the new movement, institutionalized as a separate denomination in 1825.
Channing's Baltimore sermon asserted a belief in one and only one God.
He objected to the doctrine of the Trinity as "subverting the unity
of God." According to Channing, Unitarians believed in "Jesus
Christ as a being distinct from and inferior to God." They also believed
in the "parental character of God and in this world as a place not
of penance and mourning but of education. Unitarian broke sharply with
Calvinism, were opposed to emotional excesses in religion, and founded their
faith on a belief in that moral sense that Scottish Common Sense said could
be found at in all persons (47). [At Emerson's Harvard, Scottish Common
Sense was the prevailing mode of thought. It is a broad and generous way
of thinking, centered in moral issues and problems in which the main thinkers
insisted on a noumenal self, existing apart from experience, space and time.
In other words the answer to the debate as to whether the human mind possesses
innate ideas and whether or not the mind is essentially active or passive
is sounded by the Scottish Common Sense philosophers with a resounding affirmation
that the mind exists apart from experience, space, and time, not unlike
Locke's description that our knowledge arises both from sensation and reflection--experience
and the soul's innate knowledge. (29-30).] Unitarianism looked on itself
as the true reformation come at last. Channing himself possessed both moral
force and intellectual energy. He was an accomplished and effective speaker,
and he ended "Unitarian Christianity" with a call for revolution:
"Our earnest prayer to God is, that he will overturn and overturn,
and overturn the strong-holds of spiritualusurpation."
The strength of the Unitarian movement lay partly in its intellectual emphasis
on the moral teachings of Jesus, partly in its modernizing of deism to shape
a religion that embraced modern science, and partly in its impassioned rejection
of key elements of Calvin. In 1820 Channing wrote "The Moral Argument
against Calvinism," an angry, ringing call to arms against Calvinism's
roots in fear and terror. Channing rehabilitated fallen natural man. "It
is an important truth that the ultimate reliance of a human being must be
on his own mind." If we don't think, develop our own moral sense,
then God can be totally malignant. "If God's justice and goodness
are consistent with those operations and modes of government [eternal damnation,
hellfire, vengeance] which Calvinism ascribes to him, of what use is our
belief in these perfections? If it consist with divine rectitude to consign
to everlasting misery beings who have come guilty and impotent from his
hand, we beg to know what interest we have in this rectitude, what pledge
of good it contains, or what evil can be imagined which may not be its natural
result?" (48).
II. Transcendentalism: Theory and Practice
While transcendentalism was in may ways peculiar to New England, it
can perhaps be best understood as a somewhat late and localized manifestation
of the European romantic movement. The triumph of feeling and intuition
over reason, the exaltation of the individual over society, the impatience
of any kind of restraint or bondage to custom, the new and thrilling delight
in nature--all these were in some measure characteristic of the American
counterpart of the movement of which Wordsworth and Coleridge were the center
in England and which inspired German idealistic philosophy in Europe. In
New England, however, romanticism assumed a predominantly moral and philosophic
tone, the former having its foundations in the persistence of Puritan Idealism,
the latter springing largely from the writings and personality of Emerson.
But to call transcendentalism a philosophy is to ascribe to it a logical
consistency which it never achieved, even the mind of its chief spokesman.
The three sources most readily discernible are neo-Platonism, German idealist
philosophy, and certain Eastern mystical writings which were introduced
into the Boston area in the early nineteenth century. From the first comes
the belief in the importance of spirit over matter, and an ascending hierarchy
of spiritual values rising to absolute Good, Truth, and Beauty. From the
second, transmitted chiefly through the writings of Coleridge and Carlyle,
came the emphasis on intuition as opposed to intellect as a means of piercing
to the real essence of things; while the last, lifted bodily out of an entirely
alien culture and civilization, contributed a kind of fuzzy mysticism that
helped to bridge over the weak spots in a tenuous and unsystematic philosophy.
Though these diverse elements are identifiable in transcendentalism
its most distinguishing characteristic is undoubtedly its underlying relationship
to the romantic movement as a whole. The transcendentalists insisted on
a complete break with tradition and custom, encouraged individualism and
self-reliance, and rejected a too-intellectual approach to life. To young
people in Concord, Massachusetts in the first decades of the nineteenth
century, spiritually starved in the vacuum left by the decline of the original
Puritan zeal, the emotional fervor and the high idealism of the romantics
were like a great new force in their lives. The west wind had indeed driven
Shelley's thoughts over the universe, and nowhere did they more truly quicken
a new birth than in Concord.
But Concord had once been Puritan, and the impress of Puritanism was
always deep and lasting. Transcendentalism, by the very nature of its environment,
could not plunge into the atheistical radicalism of a Shelley, nor sink
into the melancholy remoteness of a Keats. As formulated by Emerson it
became a trumpet call to action, exorting young men to slough off their
deadening enslavement to the past, to follow the God within, and to live
every moment of life with a strenuousness that rivalled that of the Puritan
fathers. At the same time he insisted on the moral nature of the universe,
and pointed to nature as the great object lesson proving God's presence
everywhere in his creation. It would not be far from wrong to say that
transcendentalism was Calvinism modified by the assumption of the innate
goodness of man.
TRANSCENDENTALISM: EMERSON AND THOREAU
ROMANTICISM IN PHILOSOPHY: THE TRANSCENDENTALISTS
Though it is impossible to outline any single, definite set of transcendentalists
beliefs, it is possible to describe, in general terms, this way of life
which most transcendentalists approved, and the picture of the cosmos which
their minds formed.
Deepest perhaps in the transcendentalist mind was the romantic trust
in human nature, together with a corollary which not all romantics drew--an
absolute reliance upon their own independent thought. Casting aside traditions,
creeds, even history if need be, the transcendentalist was to think and
to live independently, trusting his own inner promptings, confident that
his individual personality would not mislead him. And by the side of this
self-trust was its complementary trait, a pure zeal for the attainment of
the ideal life, both individual and social. To the good life, the individual
might attain through self-culture; society at large, through reform; Hence,
on the one hand, the transcendentalists were readers, conversationalists,
and thinkers; on the other, they were, many of them, advocates of temperance,
anti-slavery, economic, or other reforms.
On broader, more cosmical issues, the transcendentalist views are a
part of that romantic, intuitional philosophy which engaged Europe for the
half-century following Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781).
In this document Kant sought to show how human reason can deal reliably
only with phenomena, and that in the realm of absolute verity reason is
powerless; it can neither prove nor disprove. Nevertheless, our human nature
demands that we live by certain ultrarational ideas--ideas such as God,
Freedom, and immortality. To this realsim where reason is powerless, human
nature has an approach through faith. After Kant, therefore, the fascinating
problem of European philosophers was to explore this world-beyond-phenomena
which he had postulated. To speculate on this ultraphenomenal world, philosophers
were compelled to have recourse not to reason or science, but to intuition;
they became not logicians, but mystics.
the most conservative historian might admit that the transcendentalists
accomplished at least three things: (1) They developed a new and singularly
attractive conception of the good life, characterized by self-trust, a joyous
love of the beautiful, and a sincere altruism. (2) In an age given over
largely to material expansion, they brought to bear on American institutions
from the vantage ground of their idealistic philosophy, a keen and
searching criticism. (3) They formed an environment in which the genius
of an Emerson and a Thoreau could come to flower.
Emerson
"The American Scholar". In 1837 Emerson was invited to deliver
the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard, and his message on "The American
Scholar" proved to be the turning point, if not of his career, at least
in the growth of his reputation. The heart of his message was, as so often
later, an exortation to mental independence. The primary duty of the scholar,
so he maintained, is self-trust--a self-trust which keeps him independent
alike of the enslaving force of tradition and of the materialism of his
own age. Educated by contact with nature, by the stimulus of the mind of
the past, and by action intelligently conscious of the modern interest in
the individual man and in the commonplace, the scholar is to "feel
all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry."
Free and courageous, he is "to cheer, to raise, and to guide men
by showing them facts amidst appearances." Emerson's lecture established
him at once as a leader of New England thought.
"The Divinity School Address". In 1838 Emerson was again invited
to lecture at Harvard, this time before the Divinity School. The message
of mental independence which he had elaborated in "The American Scholar,"
he now applied to religion, urging the students to cast behind them all
creeds and forms, wait for new revelation, and to acquaint themselves at
first hand with Deity. A message so radical, so disintegrating, provoked
a vigorous reaction that finally closed the pulpit to Emerson and came near
excluding him from the lecture platform also.
Emerson's Philosophical Outlook. The central force in all life, as Emerson
conceives it, is THE OVERSOUL--a vast, divine, SPIRITUAL existence--omnipresent,
immanent, and benevolent. To the human mind, knowledge of this Divinity
comes through intuition. Not to reason, as the eighteenth century would
have it, but to the involuntary perceptions of the mind, a perfect faith
is due. Through mysticism alone can man penetrate into that vast realm
of spiritual verities which Kant had described as lying beyond the reach
of reason. From these conceptions of the Over-Soul and of intuition, the
cardinal teaching of Emerson, self-reliance, follows naturally; for , if
the divine mind is indeed present through intuition in the human, reliance
on oneself becomes no less than reliance on the World Soul. And to this
tonic message of self-reliance, Emerson adds the doctrine of a limitless
progress, an unending growth, for the independent spirit. Though society
as a whole does not truly progress, the individual mind, as it gradually
unfolds to a knowledge of God, is limitless in its capacities. "Before
the immense possibilities of men all mere experience, however spotless and
sainted, shrinks away."
Optimism is the outlook on life. Emerson never quite dealt with the
problem of evil.
Nature is central to Emerson's thought. Though the supreme revelation
of the Over-Soul is in the mind of man, there exists in nature, a remoter
and inferior revelation, but one by no means to be neglected. As nature
and man proceed from the same source, mysterious affinities, perhaps even
identity, exist between them. to humankind, nature serves as a source of
useful commodities, an incarnation of sensuous and spiritual beauty, an
exhaustless reservoir of illustrations of the moral life, and a symbolic
revelation of Deity. The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the
apparition of God. To look upon nature in this light means, of course,
to justify the intensest interest in all her visible forms; it means taking
the philosopher out of the library, away from books, into the outdoors,
toward an intimate familiarity with forest, river, and mountain. Ascetically
inclined though he was, Emerson learned to love the outdoors; and he responded
to its beauty with something like abandon. Nature became to him, as to
Wordsworth, his study, and some of his happiest inspirations came to him
during his meditations in field and forest.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862)
Thoreau lived in the Emerson household. After he graduated from Harvard,
he never really worked and this became an object of speculation in his home
town, Concord, Mass. He was, however, deeply interested in life, and he
could not squander much time in merely making a living. By a little surveying
and masonry, he earned enough to support a simple, and outwardly most uneventful,
existence. Inwardly, meanwhile, he had launched out on a career of high
spiritual exploration. In desultory wanderings outdoors, in hours with
his books, and in quiet sessions of thought he came on rich materials for
inward adventure. These materials he recorded in a voluminous Journal,
the making of which came to be his chief business in life. "For a
long time," he remarked dryly, "I was reporter to a journal, of
no very wide circulation." Out of Thoreau's journals came materials
for his essays including "Civil Disobedience," and Walden (1854).
"I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness"--so
he begins his essay on "Walking"--"as contrasted with a freedom
and culture merely civil." "The fact is," he confided to
his Journal, "I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher
to boot." In true transcendentalist fashion, he was interested less
in the fact than in the truth behind it, less in the material world than
in that spiritual world of which nature is but the visible garment. Natural
facts, he felt, have their likeness in spiritual truths; indeed, all perception
of truth is only the detection of analogy. Often, therefore, Thoreau's
observation of nature leads him into poetic speculation. The morning of
a summer's day suggests to him the morning of creation; the evening sunset
suggests a gloriously beautiful promised land of human thought; the freshened
grass in springtime suggests how our human life but dies down to its root,
and still puts forth its blade to eternity. Thoreau's observation of nature
is highly subjective; like Wordsworth, he offers us not nature herself,
butnature as passed through and colored by his own personality. And behind
this subjectivity lies the poetic egotism of his school of thought. "These
regular phenomena of the seasons get at last to be--they were at first,
of course--simply and plainly phenomena or phases of my life. The seasons
and all their changes are in me. I see not a dead eel or floating snake,
or a gull, but it rounds my life and is like a line or accent in its poem....The
perfect correspondence of Nature to man, so that he is at home with her."
THOREAU'S HUMANISM. Thoreau's interest in nature, then, was subordinate
to his interest in the subjective life of man. In common with other transcendentalists,
he desired richness and value of experience; and he would seek that experience
on what are presumably the "higher planes" of human consciousness,
rather than on those which man has in common with the lower animals. Human
nature, as Thoreau understood it, did not prompt any return to nature in
the Rousseauistic sense of the free indulgence of instinct or passion.
What was peculiar to man was his effort so to control his instincts as to
lead a super-natural life. If a man would live the good life, it behooved
him to wake up and live intensely day by day, and at the same time to develop
all the latent possibilities of the soul. "God himself culminates
in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all
the ages." "Be the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher,
of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes."
Communion with nature was to Thoreau, then only one of several means toward
achieving the good life. Other means were study and reflection. Thoreau's
studies took him through a considerable range of Greek literature--he translated
the Prometheus Bound and much of Pindar--and into the oriental scriptures.
His meditations cover an immense scope, from the abstruse speculations
on the laws of chance to plain, forthright judgments of men and politics.
His thought is not systematically directed at establishing some body of
truth; the inner life was to Thoreau an end in itself, apart from any uses
to which it might be put. Nevertheless, with the faith of a true transcendentalist,
Thoreau felt that some golden world of experience, forever just beyond the
horizon of consciousness, would be open in beauty to the observant soul.
"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical
aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn which does not forsake
us in our soundest sleep." "Thee is more day to dawn. The sun
is but a morning star."
THOREAU'S ECONOMY. Two principal obstacles, so Thoreau felt, stood
between man and the good life. One was the business of getting a living,
which took so much time that it left no leisure for cultivating the spirit.
Having thought on the possibility of making the mere getting of one's living
poetic, and not having been satisfied, Thoreau planned to reduce his hours
of work as to leave him a broad margin of leisure. Naturally ascetic, he
found it easy to wear old clothes and to live on the simplest fare. Living
in a culture that was still largely pre-machine, he found it easy to satisfy
his few wants by the occasional practice of his trades, chiefly surveying
and carpentry. The outer life versus the inner, material comforts versus
spiritual enjoyment--Thoreau saw the dilemma more clearly even than Emerson,
and he made his choice even more compromisingly. His remarkable essay,
"Life without Principle," boils down to a study in values--the
value of a richly furnished mind in opposition to the value of that load
of material equipment--houses and furnishings and lands--which ordinarily
men spend their lifetimes to gain.
Thoreau's determination to liberate life from its enslavement to business,
coupled with his fondness for nature, led him to undertake a remarkable
experiment in living. From 1845 to 1847 he lived on the shore of Walden
Pond, near concord, a mile from any neighbor, in a log hut which he built
with his own hands. In going to the woods, Thoreau was not seeking solitude;
he was often in the village, and he entertained many a visitor in his cabin.
Nor was he seeking, much as he loved whatever was wild, to show that a
semi-savage mode of life is superior to a civilized. He was seeking, according
to his own testimony, to front only the essential in life, foregoing whatever
was merely trivial and accessory. He was seeking an escape from the material
burden of life, in order to be freer to taste its spiritual realities. "Our
life," he wrote protestingly, "is frittered away by detail. An
honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme
cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity,
simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred
or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts
on your thumb nail."--"A man is rich in proportion to the number
of things which he can afford to let alone."
From this vantage-ground of plain living and high thinking, Thoreau
studied the nascent machine age, and on the whole condemned it. He anticipated
Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin in insisting that material equipment is at
best only a means to an end. A postal system, even though marvelously efficient,
avails nothing if people have nothing worth while to write. "We are
in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but
Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."
Thoreau saw, moreover, the exploitative character of machinery under the
direction of private capitalism. Having observed the railroad, and the
swarms of Irish immigrants who worked from daylight to dusk at shoveling
gravel and driving spikes, he concluded, "A few are riding, but the
rest are fun over." And Thoreau's conscience, being nonetheless a
sensitive Puritan conscience for all his dislike of formal religion, rebelled
at exploitation, whether by wage slavery or by chattel slavery. If I have
been riding through life on another man's shoulders, he contended, my first
duty is to get down on my own feet.
In short, Thoreau found his enjoyment of the good life early invaded
by the tyranny of "things." To preserve the broad margin of leisure
which he loved, he deliberately embraced poverty, preferring the vagabond
freedom of old clothes and corncake to the comfortable slavery endured by
his fellow townsmen. And he saw, not with any prophetic vision, but with
the clear-headed insight of common sense, that capitalistic industrialism
was to be the foe, rather than the friend, of this freedom.
Thoreau's Politics: His Individualism. A second obstacle to the pursuit
of the good life, Thoreau discovered in formal institutions, particularly
those of government. If Thoreau shared the romantic trust in human nature,
he trusted, like Emerson, the gifted individual rather than the mass of
mankind. Human nature en masse moved Thoreau to something akin to contempt.
"Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like
insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable.
it is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals
that populate the world." To Thoreau's thinking, an institution, whether
church or state, is bound down of necessity to this generally low level
of mankind. To support such institutions is, then, an inferior type of
virtue. It is far better to rise superior to them, pursuing solitary paths
of virtue on heights where the mere formalist, the mere institutionalist,
dares not climb. Not deeply concerned with the social projects fostered
by transcendentalism, Thoreau became the arch-individualist of his time--indeed,
of all American literature.
The length to which Thoreau was ready to press his individualism was
shown during the Mexican War. Recognizing that the war was waged for the
extension of slavery, Thoreau resolved to do nothing to support the government.
Too self-centered to join aggressively with the abolitionists, he nevertheless
thought it his duty to withdraw all support from any system of exploiting
the slave. Accordingly a poll tax having been levied, thoreau refused to
pay it. Having come from Walden Pond to a cobbler's shop in the village,
he was seized by the constable and thrust for the night into Concord jail.
Upon the payment of the tax by his relatives, he was released next day
and went quietly about his business of gathering huckleberries. Quietly
as the little drama had been acted, it led Thoreau to re-examine his political
philosophy and to express it in the essay, "Civil-Disobedience."
"Civil Disobedience" is a brief for the philosophical anarchist.
Assuming that the democratic state reflects the mediocre moral standards
of the mass, thoreau argues the superior claims of a higher moral law.
When civil and moral laws conflict, the man of integrity must obey the latter.
In obeying them, he need wage no aggressive war upon the state; he may
simply withdraw all support from the state and quietly go his own way.
He may thus passively abandon a social compact which he never voluntarily
entered. To this passive resistance, thoreau gave the name, "civil
disobedience." In Thoreau's America, the policy of civil disobedience
bore little fruit; but as late as 1907 a famous East Indian leader adopted
Thoreau's title as the name of his policy toward the British. By a curious
paradox of history one of the greatest mass movements of all time--the civil
disobedience program of Mahatma Gandhi--is indebted to the arch-individualist
of American letters.
THOREAU'S PRINCIPAL VALUES. Almost 150 years have now passed since
Thoreau began hewing the logs for his hut at Walden. His comparative obscurity
is long since over; he is one of the most extensively studied, if not one
of the most widely read, of American authors. It is therefore pertinent
to ask what enduring values are to be found in his work.
Historically, it is quite evident that Thoreau represents the extreme
reach in America of (1) the romantic return to nature, and (2) romantic
individualism. To many readers Thoreau remains primarily a kind of amateur
naturalist who is able to talk as charmingly as John Burroughs or Loren
Eiseley or Lewis Thomas, of his adventures with birds and beasts. And the
classic passages of Thoreau's nature writing are, it must be admitted, perennially
full of curious interest, often beautiful, and above all, youthfully fresh.
No other author conveys such a feeling of auroral intimacy with his subject.
The very winds and mists of morning blow across his pages; birdsongs echo
there; one almost feels that the sun shines and the dew falls there. Really
to read Thoreau is inevitably to grow in powers of observation. The visible
world becomes rich in formerly unnoticed beauties, and the face of nature
takes on a strange freshness and life. Earth is fairer to her human children
because Thoreau lived and wrote.
Romantic individualism, it is now clear, is doomed as a constructive
social force in our generation, though it may retain some stimulus for the
gifted individual. Thoreau's social doctrines, if adaptable to any actual
society, are adaptable only to the society of independent farmers, artisans,
and small merchants in which he lived. To a nation struggling to control
the billion-horsepower forces of the machine age, Thoreau's contention that
the individual should obey a higher law than the civil, sounds somewhat
beside the point. Far more valuable, to us, are the critical viewpoints
suggested by Thoreau's originality--and by his steadfast pursuit of the
good life. Perverse though he can be, his original mind has the faculty
of exhibiting the most commonplace subjects in novel lights. "It is
only necessary," he says, "to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon,
however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from out habitual
path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance."
It is fortunate that this original, acute, self-contained, and stimulating
mind of Thoreau has become part of our American heritage. It is still more
fortunate that, in Thoreau's scale of values, the humane outweigh the materialistic.
"A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he
possesseth."
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864)
HAWTHORNE'S PROVINCILISM. For nurturing the baffling genius of Hawthorne,
friend of Emerson and Thoreau, New England is almost wholly responsible.
Hawthorne's provincialism, it might almost be said, was inherited. His
family had lived in New England since 1630; one of his ancestors had been
a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials; and others, for generations, had
followed the sea out from the Salem wharves. At Salem, within sight of
the gray Atlantic, and at Bowdoin College, up toward the Maine woods, Hawthorne
grew to
maturity. Fishing smack and Yankee clipper, the thrifty village and the
mountain stagecoach--all the drab, crowded panorama of New England life,
as well as the shadowy history of an increasingly remote past, Hawthorne
absorbed through lifelong intimacy. Until his fiftieth year, he never went
farther from New England than Niagra Falls. New England, he wrote, was
quite as large a lump of earth as his heart could readily take in.
New Englander that he was, the Puritan past weighed heavily upon Hawthorne.
Few men knew better than he the pages of Puritan history; none knew so
well that somber thing of iron, the Puritan character. Within Salem, his
own home, lingered the grimmest of Puritan memories. Nearby, at Boston,
was the seat of the Puritans' dogged struggle against royal authority.
All about was a countryside where for generations men had built meeting-houses,
listened to sermons, made holy war on the savages, founded sober households,
and searched their consciences that they might root out the half-concealed
evil. Puritan warfare, the Puritan home, the Puritan conscience--these
were both warp and woof in the cultural pattern which Hawthorne inherited;
and out of these somber materials his delicate art was compelled to take
form.
HAWTHORNE'S PERSONALITY. At the center of the influences on his life, calmly
assimilating them into its own forms, stood a unique personality, as many-sided,
as baffling, as mysterious as that of Poe. Hawthorne knew the Transcendentalists,
and he understood the Gothic tale. Intimate though Hawthorne was with the
shades of the Pilgrim fathers, he held aloof from them. "Most dismal
wretches," he called them, "thanked God for them, and then thanked
God that every generation removed their posterity farther from them. Living
in the midst of a hurly-burly of proposals for reform, he cooly thrust them
aside as superficial. Ancient evils could be changed, he felt, only by
slow change in the subsoil out of which they grew--the human heart. Far
from being either a Puritan or a transcendentalist, Hawthorne was at least
in part, a an idler, a lover of life, a connoisseur of refined beauties
of sensation. Few New England authors were more keenly alive to sensuous
delights--the taste of champagne, or the pagan exhilaration of a plunge
in Walden Pond, or the opulent beauties of nature. Hawthorne's enjoyment
of nature was that of a true artist, exquisitely susceptible to shadings
of hues and forms, to lights, clouds,, shadows, and reflections; to the
picturesque disposal of figures against a shadowy background; to obscure
sounds and delicate motions; even to the intangible atmosphere of emotion
which seems to invest some natural objects. And not only in nature, but
in the fair, crowded show of life in city, village, and highway, Hawthorne
took an artist's delight. He enjoyed the bustle and stir in the lobby of
the Maverick House; he dined with crusty old seamen on shipboard in Boston
harbor; he rode many a mile on the old-fashioned stagecoach, and picked
up many a casual Bohemian acquaintance. In at least one phase of his character,
Hawthorne was a keen observer of people and manners, a mirthful companion,
a lover of life, a potential vagabond.
Not, however, in the predominant phase. From a certain deep, underlying
gravity, Hawthorne never freed himself. He might linger with an artist's
fondness over the picturesque; he might dally with fashion and gaity; but
his profound, enduring interest pierced deeper into the study of the human
soul. Human nature, and especially the interplay of moral forces, he probed
with tireless curiosity. Man's unsuspected weaknesses, his unlooked-for
strength of soul in crucial moments, Hawthorne studied with the grave earnestness,
the sympathy, the sincerity, and the repose of a scientist of the human
heart. The development from moral causes to results, whether directly or
symbolically treated, was with him a favorite theme. In his Notebooks,
for instance, he records a plan--
To picture a virtuous family , the different members examples
of virtuous dispositions in their way; then introduce a vicious person,
and trace out the relations that arise between him and them, and the manner
in which all are affected. Again and again Hawthorne planned to study
a soul in the act of awakening to its own delusions, and discovering in
itself the fool of comic irony.
A person to consider himself as the prime mover of certain
remarkable events, but to discover that his actions have not contributed
in the least thereto. Another person to be the cause, without suspecting
it.
Hawthorne could be, when he chose, the idler, the connoisseur of forms and
fanciful beauties. He was more often the grave student of the human heart
and human fate.
HAWTHORNE'S MATURITY IN THE WRITING OF THE SHORT TALE. The art of Hawthorne
was of slow development. Of the room where he worked so much, alone, he
later wrote: Here I have written many tales--many that
have been burned to ashes--many doubtless deserved the same fate. This
deserves to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of
visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible
to the world. If I ever should have a biographer, he ought to make great
mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth
was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I
have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I
sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes
wondering why it did not know me sooner....By and by the world found me
out in my lonely chamber, and called me
forth,--not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a
still, small voice.
HAWTHORNE'S STORIES: (I) HISTORICAL. Three distinct types of short fiction
were employed by Hawthorne: (1) the historical tale; (2) the moral or symbolic
tale; (3) the pictorial sketch. The historical tale, while remaining true
to the spirit of New England, he treats with the freedom of the mythmaker.
"The Maypole of Merry Mount" relates how the colonists of Thomas
Morton were conquered by the Puritans, with the result that New England
became a "land of clouded visages, of hard toil, of sermon and psalm
forever." (2) The moral or symbolic stories of which "Young
Goodman Brown," "Rappaccini's Daughter," and "The Birthmark"
represent the most powerful ones, are most studied today. "Young Goodman
Brown" has a background in the old superstition of witchcraft, and
a theme of disillusion. In this story Young Goodman Brown comes to realize,
with sickening abruptness, the pollution of sin in the hearts of those whom
he had thought most pure and whom he had most deeply reverenced. The springs
of his nature are embittered and he becomes a "darkly meditative, a
distrustful, if not a desperate man.
"Rappaccini's Daughter" and "The Birthmark" are
wrought not from the stuff of Puritan superstition, but from Gothic mysteries
of pseudo-science. "Rappaccini's Daughter" has the underlying
idea that the overdevelopment of the intellect at the expense of the human
being is deadly. An Italian physician has reared his daughter in seclusion,
among poisonous herbs; so that, while her soul remains pure, her body has
become like the brilliant flowers she tends, a thing of deadly poison.
In "The Birthmark" the core-idea is the struggle between man's
ceaseless aspirations toward perfection, and the inherent, cureless imperfection
of his nature. The desire for perfection is embodied in the scientist,
Alymer; the incurable flaws of humanity, in a slight birthmark on his wife's
cheek, to remove which he expends in vain all the resources of his science.
The situations employed by Hawthorne are, of course, far removed from
actuality. Some of his tales move in an atmosphere of supernaturalism as
mysterious as that of "The Ancient Mariner"; others, though not
supernatural, are just as obviously unreal. Hawthorne has employed his
symbolic method to portray some enduring, profound, genuine trait in human
nature. He might have said, "It is my task to search out and show
you that hidden, complex, and mysterious thing, the human soul. Everything
superficial, every humdrum daily fact and petty annoyance, every wrapper
of familiar custom and usage which might obscure your vision, I will strip
away. And I will paint the soul against a strange dark background of legend,
superstition, and mystery, that is essential colors may glow more vividly
before you. Then, face to face, you may see man's inmost being--its futile
dreams, its hopeless remorse, its disillusions, its fatal flaws, its glorious
if impossible aspirations." In some such manner to fix the essential
spiritual experiences of mankind, separating them sharply from their superficial
and temporary surroundings, is the triumph of Hawthorne's art. THE
SCARLET LETTER (1850). By 1849, Hawthorne had not written a novel of value.
In one his short stories, "Endicott and the Red Cross," he described
in a germinal situation the following:
a young woman with no mean share of beauty, whose doom it
was to wear the letter A on the breast of her gown, in the eyes of all the
world and her own children. And even her own children knew what that initial
signified. Sporting with her infamy, the lost and desperate creature had
embroidered the fatal token in scarlet cloth, with golden thread and the
nicest art of needlework; so that the capital A might have been though to
mean admirable, or anything rather than adultress.
During the years while he worked in the Salem Custom House Hawthorne had
neither leisure nor energy to fill out the outlines of this picture. But
in 1849, owing to the recent victory of the Whigs in the presidential election,
he was dismissed from the service. Free again, though dangerously near
the lee shore of poverty, he responded to his wife's encouragement, began
work, and in a few months completed one of the great tragic romances of
the world, The Scarlet Letter.
The Scarlet Letter turns upon two deep-seated, fundamental struggles--that
between natural impulse and conscience, and that between the individual
and the restraints of society. In the iron age of Puritanism, when the
natural man was regarded as incurably corrupt, and when infractions of the
social code were avenged by barbarous punishments, four people, all tragically
great of soul, find themselves entangled in the mazes of broken law. Hester
Prynne has borne a daughter, Pearl, to an unknown father, who, it is gradually
revealed, is the most brilliant of the younger Puritan divines, Arthur Dimmesdale.
As a token of her sin, Hester is condemned to wear a scarlet A upon her
bosom. Hester's lost husband, Roger Chillingworth, reappears, ferrets out
Hester's partner in sin, and slowly wreaks upon him a revenge of inhuman
subtlety. Merely to tell a story of guilty love and passion, however, is
not Hawthorne's aim. His aim is to follow the history of four human should
as their lives bring forth the slow-maturing, but inevitable, fruits of
sin.
The position of Hester Prynn, Hawthorne feels, is of all four the most
eligible. Publically humiliated though she is, her sin is open and confessed;
she has no rankling secrets to hide. Her place in Puritan society is clearly
defined, and, in the estimation of her time, it is just. Slowly, therefore,
by meek submission and unselfish kindness, she wins back the respect of
even the most iron-clad Puritans. But her submission is only outward.
Left much alone, she develops an independence of mind, poised though repressed,
which the magistracy would have thought a sin more deadly than adultry.
"The world's law was no law for her mind." "The scarlet
letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread."
Strong, passionate, and richly pagan, Hester submits, but never repents,
preferring the sanctity of her sin to the desecration of her loveless marriage.
Far different is the case of Dimmesdale and Chillingworth. Dimmesdale,
constrained to hide his sin, yet reminded of it a every turn; brooding over
the past; despising himself for his hypocrisy, yet too weak to confess;
continually sacrificing honesty to respectability--Dimmisdale is gradually
broken down and brought to the verge of insanity. Chillingworth, once a
just and humane scholar, degenerates into a monomonaniac who lives only
to satisfy his revenge--"a striking evidence of man's faculty of transforming
himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake
a devil's office." And about these three somber characters--Hester,
Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth--flickers the elvish flame of little Pearl,
like the lacework of a fickle sunshine playing over the floor of a northern
forest.
Over Hawthorne's romance of sin and expiation broods an air of ultimate,
tragic inevitability which is comparable only to the chiseled severity of
Milton's Samson Agonistes. So closely woven is the web of causation that
scene after scene unfolds with the unhurried, measured tramp of doom. Once,
indeed, Hester Prynne herself realizes the inevitability of her fate: "There
is no good for him--no good for me,--no good for thee! There is no good
for little Pearl! There is no path to guide us out of this dismal maze."
And Chillingworth, after Hester's futile plea that he forgo his revenge,
replies:
"My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and
explains all that we do, and all we suffer. by thy first step awry thou
didst plant the germ of evil; but since that moment, it has all been a dark
necessity. Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical
illusion; neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend's office from
his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may."
Only in the greatest of literature is this high seriousness, this tragic
sense of life and fate achieved.
Refer to the Text for essays relevant to the discussion of The Scarlet
Letter
HERMAN MELVILLE
M O B Y D I C K
CLASS NOTES
MOBY DICK was written out of the throes of a deep unrest, to which
several causes contributed. Melville was harassed by the need of making
money for his family, and his energy was being sapped by the monotonous
cares of the farm. Moreover, he had loved heartily a few great ideal qualities
of manhood--wisdom, justice, gaiety, purity, and tenderness--and his mind
was seared by a growing conviction that these qualities counted for little
in nature's scheme. Men, at least in the usual American surroundings, were
prevailingly stupid, or unjust, or morose, or vile, or cruel; and in the
system of nature the ignoble man fared as well as the noble. And if Melville
was moved to love an unattainable beauty of character, he was moved by an
even stronger impulse to seek and know the bare, elemental truth, heedless
of the terrors it bore, and heedless of the conventions that might restrain
him from it. In this impulse, Melville was similar to the transcendental
school of Emerson, but his adventurous life had given him another view of
the truth than theirs. Buoyant optimists, the transcendentalists believed
heartily in the goodness of the Creator and the high possibilities of man.
But because Melville had faced the impersonal terrors of storms at sea,
because he knew the savagery of the white shark and the equal savagery of
the renegade white man, he had come to feel that nature is at bottom heartless
and inconceivably cruel. "Oh horrible vulturism of earth!" he
exclaims in Moby Dick. The invisible spheres he tells us, were formed not
in love, but in fright. He agonized over the spectacle of victorious cruelty
in a universe supposedly created by a loving God:
If true what priests avouch of Thee,
The Shark thou didst, by the dove.
Now Melville knew well the danger of uttering to the popular reader
the obscure voyagings of his philosophical spirit. But so imperious was
his impulse to expression that he must perforce reveal at least some of
his thoughts. "What I feel most moved to write," he told Hawthorne,
"that is banned--it will not pay. Yet, altogether write the other
way I cannot. So the product is a final hash; and all my books are botches."
In short, Melville's mind in 1850 was torn between desire and disillusion,
between love of the good and despair over the power of evil, between the
need to write for bread and the imperious urge to write for self-expression.
Out of these conflicts emerged that great tragic novel of the sea, Moby
Dick.
MELVILLE'S MASTERPIECE, MOBY DICK (1851). But Moby Dick is by no means
a philosophical altogether. When Melville wrote, the merchant marine of
New England still swept the seven seas; the flag of the Yankee clipper ship
still flew in every corner of the world. Intrepid captains from Salem and
Nantucket still hunted the whale of the high seas and gave him battle with
harpoons. The romance, the adventure, the courage, the squalor, the brutality
of the great whaling industry, Melville knew from experience, and he fortified
his experience by reading every available book on whales and whaling. As
a result, he wrote the authentic record of a mode of life that has now vanished.
And so concretely does he picture it that the hardy labor of the crews--their
rowing, harpooning, pitchpoling, butchering--stands out in the reader's
mind with the vividness of thrilling personal experience, enhanced by the
significance of art.
Besides being a description of whales and whaling, Moby Dick is a good
sea yarn of humor and adventure; and to many readers, it remains no more
than this. The cannibal Queequeg, for instance, is both humorous and heroic.
Having reverently worshipped his miniature idol, he nonchalantly thrusts
it away into his pocket and forgets it. When offered a wheelbarrow in which
to roll his trunk ashore, he hoists both trunk and wheelbarrow upon his
broad shoulders and goes his way. When the Indian Tashtego falls into the
sperm vat of the whale, Queequeg rescues him by a feat of almost superhuman
agility. Other adventures, such as the capsizing of the whaleboat in a
squall and the capture of the first whale, are as full of rapid action as
any full adventure novel or film.
Moby Dick is, however, only in part an adventure tale and a record
of the vanished industry of whaling. Though only a little is written in
the dramatic form, Moby Dick is in effect a great philosophical drama, concerned,
like Byron's Manfred and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, with man's revolt
against enthroned evil. Captain Ahab, Melville's villain hero, has lost
a leg in an encounter with a huge sperm whale called Moby Dick. With a
monomaniac's avenging energy, he binds his crew by oath to slay the white
whale. Thenceforward Melville's story moves through a symbolism as profound
in its implications. The crew, composed of men of all nations, is in epitome
the human race, pitting its puny force against the incalculable might of
the infinite. The white whale is a symbol of the aimless malice, wielded
by tremendous power, which Melville feared was strongest among the forces
that rule the universe. Ahab comes to identify with the whale not only
his bodily woes, but all his mental and spiritual tortures:
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation
of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them,
till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible
malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the
modern Christians ascribe one-half to the worlds; which the ancient Ophites
of the east reverenced in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and
worship it like them; but deliberately transferring its idea to the abhorred
white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All truth with
malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle
demonisms of life and thought; all evil to crazy Ahab, was visibly personified,
and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.
As Ahab draws near the home of Moby Dick, his frenzy for the chase
intensifies. It overrides all obstacles; it thrusts aside all those securities
which human culture has created as bulwarks against the White Whale. Threatened
by lightnings, Ahab thunders the defiance of his personality against the
impersonal powers that will destroy it. Contemptuous of the scientific
aid of his quadrant, he smashes it and steers by dead reckoning. From the
entreaties of his prudent mate that he turn back, Ahab turns away, though
tears come to his eyes. Disregarding the pleas for succor from the smitten
ship, the Rachel, he hurries onward to raise the whale and join pursuit.
After a terrible three days' chase, the whale entangles and destroys the
pursuing boats, bears down upon the ship in sudden malice, staves her with
his rush, and sinks her. The vengeance of Ahab is quenched in death; serenely
indifferent to the fate of the human mites who wear its waves for graveclothes,
the great shroud of the sea rolls on.
Intermingled with the allegory are philosophical essays brilliant in
exposition and pregnant with meaning: not a dythrambic on the dignity of
human courage; now a parable on fate, necessity, free will, and chance;
now an amazing take-off on the predatory cruelty of man; now a bantering
chapter on Jonah; now a despairing cry that the truest of all books in Solomon's;
and that Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. And wherever Melville's
thought ends, whether to swift naked narrative or to the grave obiter dicta
of philosophy, his style triumphantly envelops it, now tense with speed,
now lucid in exposition, now throbbing in solemn eloquence, now rising to
overwhelming power. Diverse as are the materials which Melville weaves
together, they form a complete whole, even as, in the Midsummer Night's
Dream, Shakespeare's lovers, country churls, and fairies dwell in the same
romantic world, all their incongruities merely rounding out its magical
completeness. In fine, Melville succeeded, like the ancient Greeks, in
embodying his interpretation of life in an original, self-consistent myth,
beautiful, terrible, and profoundly suggestive. Not depending like Shelley,
on the legends of a bygone age, he fashioned from his own race and time
his own Prometheus--a gaunt New Bedford whaling captain who dared more terrors
than the thunderbolts of Jove.
MOBY DICK
CRITICAL COMMENTARY
The class notes for our study of Moby Dick are centered on Professor
Holman's article which I have outlined, below. Study the flow of the argument
and read the portions of the text of the novel which Professor Holman directs
you to.
C. HUGH HOLMAN. "THE RECONCILIATION OF ISHMAEL: MOBY DICK AND
THE BOOK OF JOB." South Atlantic Quarterly LVII (Autumn, 1958) 477-90.
The influence of Job is pervasive and controlling, basic and thematic,
the most informing single principle of the book's composition.
To Melville, who has 47 verses in Job marked or annotated, and all
of them dealing with the darkness of life, the inscrutability of god, the
desire for self-justification, or the mighty attributes of Leviathan, the
Book was apparently an elemental poetic drama of a just man unjustly suffering,
flinging indignantly aside the simple answers of his would-be comforters,
and demanding a hearing and an accountability before his God, finally to
be overwhelmed into awed acceptance when that God spoke through a whirlwind
and pointed to the vastness and inscrutability of His created universe as
proof that His ways are beyond knowing, pointing particularly to Leviathan
of the deep as the most impressive and the vastest of His created things.
This tormented, patriarchal Job, living in the dawn of religious thought,
had no assurance of immortality. Melville marked three times the fourteenth
chapter in which Job asks his dark question about a future life: "But
man dieth, and wasteth away: yea man giveth up the ghost, and where is he?"
He also marked the ninth verse of the despairing seventh chapter: "As
the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away: so he that goeth down to the grave
shall come up no more."
Melville seems to have been speaking much for himself when he praised the
author of the Mosses for having a "touch of Puritanic gloom,"
and said: "this great power of blackness in him derives its force from
its appeal to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin,
from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind
is always and wholly free."
Melville owed the Book of Job for the central fact and symbol of his
novel, the great white whale, Moby Dick. Beginning with the 38th Chapter
of Job, God answers Job out of the whirlwind. The answer consists of a
linked chain of questions, the object of which is to teach Job humility
by making him comprehend that God's power and majesty are unknowable. Beginning,
"Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare,
if thou hast understanding," God moves from the creation, "when
the morning stars sang together," through the marvels of inanimate
nature to those of animate nature--the mountain goat, the wild ass, the
wild ox, the ostrich, the horse, the hawk, and in the 40th chapter, Behemoth,
the greatest land creature. Chapter 41 continues this taunting questioning,
centering it around the symbol of Leviathan, the greatest of all creatures,
described in terms of his physical strength and destructive might. God
concludes, "Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.
He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride."
Job, one of those children of pride, declares, "I uttered that I understood
not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not," and although his
own suffering has not lessened nor the riddle of evil in his world been
answered, he rests, apparently with God's blessing, on an acceptance of
the intermingled good and evil of his world. It was to these last chapters
that Melville was indebted for the primary symbolic value of Moby Dick.
THE LITERAL WHALE REMAINS A PORTION OF THE SOLID BEDROCK ON WHICH MOBY
DICK RESTS; BUT HE IS ALSO TRANSFORMED INTO THE ENCOMPASSING METAPHOR AND
THE CENTRAL IMAGE FOR WHATEVER MEANING THE BOOK HAS. The principal agent
in effecting this transformation is the narrator-hero Ishmael; for it is
the play of mind, wit, of word, and of feeling that invests the comparatively
simple action of the plot and the large masses of factual data in the cetological
chapters with depth and meaning.
Ahab is Shakespearean tragedy, Ishmael is "Divine Comedy"--journey.
Ishmael serves a dual function in the novel. He is first of all the
young Ishmael, a worthy bearer of his Biblical name, for he is a spiritual
outcast, who seems to feel that it may be said of him as it was of his prototype:
"His hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him."
This Ishmael, at the opening of the novel, finding it a "damp, drizzly
November in [his] soul," goes to the sea as a "substitute for
pistol and ball." It is this young, unhappy man who is the center
of the narrative for the first 100 pages but is gradually depressed into
his role as merely one of Ahab's fated crew, while more and more his and
out attention is centered on his monomaniac captain. Yet most of the story
is presented not only through Ishmael's retrospective memory, but with his
comment and interpretation, the interpretation of a mellowed and mature
Ishmael. The young Ishmael in despair and rebellion, had set sail on the
Pequod as a act of symbolic self-destruction; for he said, "With a
philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take
to the ship." The mature narrator has a far different attitude of
spirit: "...amid the tornado Atlantic of my being, do I myself still
for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of
unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe
me in eternal mildness of joy." This later Ishmael it is whose attitudes,
comments, thoughts, and wit lend to a simple narrative a depth of meaning.
From Whale Fact to Whale Symbol, Ishmael accomplishes this through
symbolic language.
Ishmael sees the terrors of the whale universe: see earlier chapters
on his comments of pictures of whales and whale fossils.
"Here then, was this grey-headed ungodly old man, chasing with
curses a Job's whale around the world." Yet Ishmael sees not only
the terrors but also the wonders of this vast creature. The quantities
of his dark and light (and by implication truth) that he provides for man,
the ivory he yields, the vastness of the industry he supports, the extent
to which he has made New England men masters of the seas--these beneficent
aspects of the whale are always before us. And other and calmer attributes
of Leviathan are suggested. When Moby Dick is at last sighted, Ishmael
exclaims: "A gentle joyousness--a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness,
invested the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with
ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns...did surpass the glorified
White Whale as he so divinely swan."
REPOSE IN SWIFTNESS=fundamental ambiguity towards the whale.
The quality of REPOSE often becomes serenity for Ishmael. As he squeezes
the sperm (case), that is kneads sperm oil to prevent its coagulating, he
says, "I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that
sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in
that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice,
of any sort whatsoever." He imagines that devoutness is a characteristic
of the whale, saying, :I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all
heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked
flukes....I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout
of all beings."
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THIS A M B I G U O U S ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE WHALE
IS DEVELOPED STEADILY THROUGHOUT THE BOOK.
At the beginning of the novel Ishmael says that he "could see
naught in that brute but the deadliest ill." Yet when he sees the
great white whale, he exclaims:
On each side...on each bright side, the whale shed off enticings.
No wonder there had been some among the hunters who namelessly transported
and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally
found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes. Nowhere does this quality
of inscrutable ambiguity come out more plainly than in the famous "Whiteness
of the Whale" chapter, where Ishmael tries to explain the "well
nigh ineffable" quality of the white whale to inspire horror. "It
was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me,"
he declares. "This whiteness" he asserts, "is at once the
most meaning symbol of spiritual things...and yet...it is, the intensifying
agent in things the most appalling to mankind." Ishmael concludes,
"...like willful travelers, in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored
and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself
blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around
him." In the novel it is Ahab who is the infidel blind from staring
too long at this inscrutable symbol. There is no question that the
whale, whether agent or principle, is to Captain Ahab a cardboard mask through
which he can strike at the inscrutable malice of the universe. The
White Whale swam before him [Ishmael says] as the monomaniac incarnation
of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them....All
that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all
truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain;
all the subtle demonism of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were
visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick."
And what was Moby Dick to Ishmael? At the beginning of the "Whiteness
of the Whale" chapter, he says, "What the White Whale was to Ahab,
has been hinted; what at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid."
It is not only in this chapter that Ishmael defines the whale for himself;
it is in the entire novel. Early in the voyage he, says, "Ahab's
quenchless feud seemed mine." But this was a position in which he
did not rest. His immense quality of wonder, his ability to look questioningly,
his unwillingness to accept answers as final, enabled him to see Moby Dick
not as evil or as good, but as the "interlinked terrors and wonders
of God." It is these terms that the cetology chapters are an integral
part of the book and not partially digested informational addenda; it is
in these terms that the play of Ishmael's wit and though over the facts
of whaling and of whales is appropriate; and it is in these terms that Ishmael's
inquiring and reflective mind controls and informs the book, becomes both
its center and its hero. Ishmael's problem was RECONCILIATION TO THE
NATURE OF HIS WORLD. The novel had opened when, in his own words, his "hypos"
had got an "upper hand" on him and it required "a strong
moral principle to prevent [him] from deliberately stepping into the street
and methodically knocking people's hats off." Queequeg, the cannibal
harpooner, gives his the first lesson in acceptance, and he doubles his
world by pledging eternal friendship with this heathen seller of shrunken
heads. Early in the novel he is able to see this bond to Queequeg, symbolically
represented by "the monkey rope," and to say, "I seemed distinctly
to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company
of two: that my free will had received a moral wound; and that another's
mistake or misfortune might plunge me into unmerited disaster and death."
See also chapter 10. While squeezing case, he also has what is almost
a mystical experience..."that in all cases man must eventually lower,
or at least shift, his concept of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere
in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bid, the
table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived
all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally." THIS LAST STATEMENT
COMES FROM A MAN WHO HAD THE UNCONTROLLABLE URGE TO KNOCK PEOPLE'S HATS
OFF! The climax of the voyage for, and the intellectual climax of the
novel, occurs when Ishmael, steering the boat, gazes too long into the red
flames of the try-pot fires (flames that are by then established as symbols
of Ahab's madness) and turns himself around, so that recovering himself,
he cannot see the compass. "Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom
now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness," he says. "Uppermost
was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not
so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern."
Then, realizing that he has been turned around, he rights himself just
in time to keep the vessel from capsizing. "How glad and how grateful,"
he exclaims, "the relief from this unnatural hallucination of the night."
Ishmael is going through his BAPTISM OF FIRE. Out of the experience he
brings his redeeming knowledge, and he cries:
Look not too long in the face of fire, O man! Turn not thy back to
the compass...believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all
things look ghastly. Tomorrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright....
Nevertheless the sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of
this earth, and which is two third of this earth....The truest of all men
was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes
is the fine hammered steel of woe.... Give not thyself up, then, to
fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There
is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. (ITALICS, MINE)
That last sentence defines a portion of the thematic organization of
the book. "There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that
is madness." For much of the book is ordered around the idea of a
woe that is madness. Ahab is the "mad old man," whose woe has
driven him to catastrophic insanity; he is, as he declares, "madness
maddened." It is the titanic fury of his insane rage that so compellingly
envelops us that we, like Ishmael, are momentarily blinded by the red flames.
The outgrowth of Ishmael's being the only survivor "buoyed up by [a]
coffin...floated on a soft and dirgelike main" was not madness for
Ishmael; it was wisdom--the wisdom of Job, as bodied forth in the Leviathan
and in Moby Dick. The unique salvation of Ishmael is essential to the theme
of the novel. He alone of those on the Pequod has faced with courage of
humility the facts of his universe; he alone has learned to know woe without
becoming mad. There is no necessity that Ishmael live in the action and
plot of the novel; there is necessity that he survive inherent in the moral
order of the universe in which Melville puts him--the primitive, pre-christian
universe of Job. In that universe he has learned, as man must if he
is to live in his world, the lesson of acceptance. The mixed good and evil
in all things, the prevalence of suffering in the world, the horror in which
at times the universe seems formed--these he has come to take without fright
and without affront. He tells us, "Not ignoring what is good, I am
quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it--would they
let me--since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates
of the place one lodges in." He has discovered how, "amid the
tornadoes Atlantic of [his] being...for ever centrally [to] disport in mute
calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve around [him],"
to meet that woe without madness, and "deep down and deep inland still
[to] bathe [him] in eternal mildness of joy." As it had neither for
him has the riddle of evil and suffering found answer. HE HAS DISCOVERED
A CENTER OF CALM AND REPOSE WITHIN HIMSELF, BUT IS A CALM THAT KNOWS, AS
HE SAYS, "THOUGH IN MANY OF ITS ASPECTS THIS VISIBLE WORLD SEEMS FORMED
IN LOVE, THE INVISIBLE SPHERES WERE FORMED IN FRIGHT." Like Job, Ishmael
has rebelled against the order of the universe; like Job, too, a vast inscrutable
symbol of incomprehensible reality has loomed before him in the form of
a great whale. And like Job, Ishmael has learned that, though in this darkly
imperfect world wisdom is woe, still man must learn to avoid the woe that
is madness. He knows that there is no alternative to shouldering the burden
of this ambiguous and affrightening world.
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