1.8
PARTISAN REVIEW
dressed to a personified reader, The Chastened American Liberal
Who Has Turned His Back On Stalinism And Progressivism-The
New Liberal-and is an onslaught on The False Liberal, and less sev–
erely but firmly, on still another, The Ordealist Critic, or The Preacher
of Alienation. So that in a very real sense the book is a morality play,
in which The True Prometheus, The False Prometheus, The Confi–
dence Man, The Ordealist Critic and The New Liberal vie with
each other, in this period of intense political introspection, for the Soul
of America the Alienated at the Mid-Century.
They are very large, these personifications; some are original, and
all are provoking; they surely exist, to speak here only of the Mel–
villean ones, as those archetypal images of the self's divisions which are
very real to anyone who has read through Melville. But they are ap–
plied with such finality to the American scene, move so autonomously
across Melville's works, and are obviously so much more stimulating
to Mr. Chase's mind than the concrete artistic experiences from which
they have been taken, that Melville as man and practicing artist gets
lost from sight, for he is always too diffusely and superhumanly in
sight. Of all Mr. Chase's personifications, he is the mightiest-a kind
of brooding Promethean intelligence, Our Tattooed Titan On Whose
Skin May Be Deciphered The General Myths and The Local Folklore
-the peak of the American ordeal, and its moral victory. He is now
the Young American Wanderer, now the Maimed Man in the Glen,
now Ishmael of course, but always Prometheus the Humanist-a fig–
ure often in suffering, but heroic; sometimes imperfect, but cumu–
latively glorious. He is a personification, in fact, in whom it is dif–
ficult to see the young roustabout, for here he is all the young men
out in the world; or the harried husband and father who cried out
in
Moby-Dick
for "Time, Strength, Cash and Patience," for here he
turns up as the Successful Family Man; or the solitary who in those
magnificent letters of the period (far better literature than several
items on which Mr. Chase has trained his symbol-extracting machin–
ery) proudly asked for Hawthorne's friendship, for to Mr. Chase's
mind Melville's loneliness is somehow diminished if we show him im–
mersed in native materials; but who does emerge, sometimes very
movingly, as our Wisest Man of Sorrows, our Prometheus, our greatest
Light-Bearer.
Now this Prometheus is a very appealing figure to us (our fathers
