Alfred Kazin
ON MELVILLE AS SCRIPTURE
Of
all
the recent studies of Melville I have seen, Richard
Chase's* seems to me the most brilliant; and since it must be taken
very seriously, the most frustrating. For while it is most clearly, and
passionately, concerned with the moral significance of Melville's
symbolism, and is surely the most affirmative statement ever made of
Melville's distinction as a thinker, its conception of his art is static and
even provincial. It
is
a devoted, combative book, with a richly felt
sense of Melville's urgency; anyone who cares for Melville will recog–
nize that it has started up from deep inside his thought. There are
some very moving insights, and a power of hauntingly exact defini–
tion, that could have come only from great devotedness. But I do not
really take in Mr. Chase's subsidiary aim, which is to present Mel–
ville as a supreme example, or moral imagination, for the "New Lib–
eralism." And its critical method, especially on the works after
Mob
y–
Dick,
seems to me astonishingly immature, and is so full of the most
reckless guesses and assumptions, that I wonder if he has not simply
turned in Melville the artist and the man, about whom we know so
little, for the Messiah of the "New Liberalism"-a movement that
seems to exist mostly in the minds of Mr. Chase and of Arthur Schles–
inger, Jr., but to judge by the difference between the moral quality
of this book and that of
The Vital Center,
can hardly be the same
movement.
Mr. Chase's approach to literature is very modishly framed in
myth and folklore; his book is built on personifications. Some are
named after characters, like Ishmael and The Confidence Man;
some after obvious prototypes, like The True Prometheus and The
Handsome Sailor; some from symbolic incidence, like The Christ, The
Maimed Man In The Glen, The False Prometheus. But they are all
generic quantities with a meaning above Melville's works, and are
applied freely to recurrent phases of his mind, and of American
personality, folklore and politics as well. Moreover, the book is ad-
*
Herman Melville: A Critical Study. Macmillan. $4.50.
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