74
PARTISAN REVIEW
story; but he may have even less to say
about
it.
In
fact, it is the
specialists in this field who are now farthest from the true spirit of
criticism, for they
ma~e
the fewest discriminations between good
work and bad. The great weakness of the myth approach in criticism
is that it freezes man to the universal, for by showing man everywhere
to be the same, it reduces history to an illustration. The great weakness
of the folklore approach is that it shows man only as a type or cos–
tume of his local culture.
In
the one, history becomes a figure of
speech; in the other, man himself. Yet both these approaches are used
by Mr. Chase throughout his book, for he conceives of Melville's
works as an illustration of the specifically American pattern on the
universal pattern of myth.
Or
as he puts it about
Mob y-Dick,
"What
he had to do was adduce the body of supporting mythology,
clothe the skeleton with flesh and the habiliments of style." No
wonder that he finds so many examples to his purpose in
The Con–
fidence Man,
and can interpret it
ad libitum!
But
The Confidence
Man
marks the full eruption of Melville's wrath against the American
belief-liberal, conservative, and radical-that reality is always cal–
culable, that things are never as desperate as they seem, that the
world is a moral constant in the mind of History or God.
It
is a
book which perhaps only European intellectuals who have passed
through the concentration camps can fully understand, for the heart
of it is anguish, an almost unbearable sense of betrayal before the
inadequacy of the civil human gift to explain what men do feel when
-in Bartleby's words-they know where they are.
It
is an attack
on the spirit of consolation, for consolation justifies the most extreme
violations against the living.
It
is an attack on the spirit of "modera–
tion," on "the picked and prudent sentiments," as the Missourian
calls them in his great attack on the Confidence Man.
It
is not a
"compassionate" book; it is an embittered, tense, splintery book; it
moves with the rapidities of anger. And it is not simply an attack on
the naivete of the old American liberalism, on the strut-and-brag of
American commercialism, on the innocence of transcendentalism; it
is a great cry against the deception appearance practices upon reality.
This is not a Melville Mr. Chase easily tolerates. Melville said of
Matthew Arnold that he had "the prudential worldly element where–
withal [he] has conciliated the conventionalists," but this Mr. Chase
finds "actively offensive," and notes that "Herman Melville might
