MELVILLE AS SCRIPTURE
75
have done better and been happier if he had not shied quite so readily
from the ways of the world.... " Necessarily, Mr. Chase applies
The
Confidence Man
against Henry Wallace and the fellow-travelers; but
never on the "sweet voice" which crooned at the beginning of the
Roosevelt era that our crisis was only economic, not spiritual; and at
the end, had the atom bomb tested on eighty thousand human beings
at Hiroshima. I do not find
The Confidence Man
so great a work
as Mr. Chase does, for I find it too full of the "organic disorder," too
blinding an excess of rage; it moves so quickly that it ends, literally, by
putting out the light of the world. But if
T~e
New Liberalism wants
to make scripture out of it, it will have to look below its "folklore" to
Melville's unappeasable fury against the human situation.
Still, these are criticisms one raises only because Mr. Chase insists
on bringing us Melville as scripture. For
if
it
is
lessons for a new
liberal humanism we seek from literature, there are several writers
rather more harmonious and dependable in this regard; and if it is
"scripture," we shall have to make up our minds what our religion is,
and what it is we do believe. The great advantage of myth to the lib–
eral mind is that it presents so many gods, one need not believe in
anyone. It is the agnostic's theology. Melville is not an agnostic: he
said that man's life was haunted by divinity, but that God could no
longer cope with the human claim upon Him. Melville was not a
liberal: he believed that reality was not susceptible to a political in–
terpretation. Melville is not a reconciler: he did not try to weld appear–
ances together; he pierces through. His love for the world was very
uncertain; and
in
fact, love is hardly his strong point. But he is one
of the few men in America who ever sounded, to the depths, the
transcendental ache at the heart of being; and he has that peculiar
gift-not necessarily the most valuable in literature, but distinctly his
-which is concerned with the "soul" of man, not with his "heart";
with his attitude toward the creation, not with his relationship to
other men. It is what Ezra Pound, in another connection, tried to
convey when he spoke of "the raw cut out of concrete reality, com–
bined with the tremendous energy, the contact with the natural force."
Melville had that contact; and while it is not necessarily better than
Liberalism, than scripture, than a "high culture," at least let us not
sacrifice a unique experience to the abstracts of a moral lesson or
ideology.
