MELVILLE AS SCRIPTURE
73
personal coloring that comes from the juncture of unconscious sym–
bols and the conscious word, to say nothing of that effect of fertility,
from word to word, which is so peculiarly ?is own-even in so in–
tellectualized a work as
Billy Budd.
To Mr. Chase,
The Confidence Man
is the grand justification
of his conception of Melville. Now this book is very plainly the product
of a first-rate imagination;
it
has been unfairly neglected; and it may
very well be almost as political as Mr. Chase says. He has read it far
more patiently and lovingly than anyone else I know, and he has
disentangled from its summary and difficult pages a whole tableau
of native folklore. But it is significant that his argument is based on
the politics of the book, which he interprets very piously, and on
the incidence of folklore types and themes, without proving to us
that the book was fully realized by Melville.
The presence of folklore elements does not of itself establish a
book's value-witness so much of the antiquarian junk in the attic
of American literature, and so, so much of Mark Twain. Mr. Chase
has very understandably been influenced by Constance Rourke, whose
delicate style is the happiest of any American cultural historian, and
from whose harmonious spirit he would seem to have absorbed much
of the economical force and pungency of his own writing here. But
Constance Rourke worked as a reviver, to show the continuity in the
American pattern; she was a historian of materials, who did not pass
judgment on them, except as she showed the different inspirations. In
his own enthusiasm on the subject of folklore, Mr. Chase gets so
rapt proving Melville was an
echt Amerikaner
who worked "in the
American grain," and that his alienation has been overstressed by the
Ordealists, that he never asks himself
what
values are awakened in the
artist by an interest in folklore, or of the different ways in which it
can be applied. The raftmen's speech in
Life On The Mississippi–
Huckleberry Finn
is one of the prime examples of "folklore" in Amer–
ican literature, but it is still bosh, Mark Twain's particular after-dinner
performance; the first meeting of Huck and Tom in
Tom Sawyer
is
incomparable, it truly incarnates a
national
literature, for it represents
an upwelling, from local figures of speech, of all that is most charming,
fresh and free in the nostalgia for the frontier and its legendary youth.
The critic who reduces a work to its elements of folklore or myth
has the advantage over the social critic that he is always inside the
