MELVILLE AS SCRIPTURE
69
did not know
his
greatness, but we have seen
his
face); and Mr.
Chase's many happy insights, his beautiful essay on the moral drama
in
Moby-Dick,
are the richest instance I know of Melville's power to
call out of Americans in this generation a kind of intense personal
relatedness not felt now, in such numbers, for any other American
writer-a claim on
his
uniqueness, I would add, that points up these
"inner estrangements" in the American situation Mr. Chase is so
afraid will keep us from having a "high culture." But this figure is
expected also to consecrate The New Liberalism, and for purposes of
our national self-criticism, to use the phrase with which Mr. Chase
rounds out his hymn to
The Confidence Man,
"ought to be scripture."
And since I do not identify the New Liberalism so complacently as
Mr. Chase does, and indeed, find it hard to think of Melville as a
Liberal, or as "scripture," for to me he is a very great, unstable, fiery
daemonic artist, more akin to Blake and Rimbaud than to academic
humanism, I can only say that I find much of Mr. Chase's exegesis
irrelevant to Melville's marvellous force and energy, to his Ahab–
like creative will, and to that style in which one hears the torrential
rhythms of the creation.
If
there is one thing I am sure about in "The New Liberalism,"
it is its infatuation with abstractions, its wish to believe names equal
to things. This comes, I think, from its extreme self-conscious–
ness as an educational elite, from its exasperated sense of urgency and
protest against shallow views of human nature, from the academic
tendency to see the artist as a corpus of knowledge rather than as a
distinctly individual experience, and from some old alienation that still
cuts deeper than its grateful affection for the American advantage in
the struggle against totalitarianism. Thus we find Mr. Chase raging
rather incoherently at the end against the old liberalism as the lover
of all our estrangements, from "the divorce of parts" to "the hiatus be–
tween the sexes, the abyss that separates generations, the enmity be–
tween the terrified ego and the unconscious, between action and
motive, between reason and myth, between father and son." Is The
New Liberal to heal all this? Mr. Chase is trying to prove too much.
Passionate as he is about Melville's thought, his point of view lacks
emotional authenticity, for Bulkington in
Moby-Dick- "wonderfully
concise.... Man fully formed, fully human, fully wise,"-means
more to him than does Ahab;'
The Confidence Man
becomes Melville's
