MELVILLE ANO HIS CR.ITICS
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removed from the shirting and perilous terrain of history and safely com–
mitted to a transcendent realm where, ceasing to be fallible and alive, no
longer desperately striving for illumination in a siege of darkness, he is
canonised as an exalted witness to metaphysical faith and aesthetic order.
The traditionalist aesthetic, with its profound revulsion from histori–
cism and psychology and its inner drive toward standards of the norma–
tive-classicist type, cannot accept the real Melville or sustain him without
doing violence to itself. Hence it constructs an ideal figure who is but a
ghost of the man of whom Hawthorne wrote that he could neither believe
nor be comfortable in his unbelief, reasoning endlessly about "everything
that lies beyond human ken" even as he despaired of immortality and
"pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated." Hawthorne, who was
so frequently made inaccessible by the cold clarity of his nature, was
moved by Melville's passion and believed in his integrity. None would
now deny that integrity, but what is it, actually, if not the integrity of
his riven and dissonant consciousness? This consciousness is inseparable
from his art-an art which, in transforming the business of whaling into
a fiery hunt ("wonder ye at the fiery hunt?") makes us see the artist
in the image of those sea-captains of whom he said in
Moby Dick
that
though they sailed anonymously out of Nantucket they yet became "as
great and greater than your Cooke and your Krusenstern, for in their suc–
corless emptyhandedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by
the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and
terrors." Conrad's dictum, "In the destructive element immerse," comes to
much the same thing. These "heathenish sharked waters" compose an ele–
ment situated on the other side of the planet from the inland lakes of
traditionalism.
Arvin, who in his present phase is perhaps freer of confining alle–
giances than most critics, is able to lay hold of the contradictions in
Melville and to disclose their psychodynamic meaning without any squea–
mishness or failure in sympathy. There is no separation of man and
artist in this critical portrait but an integration of the two which enforces
the understanding of both in their organic unity. Eschewing all stress on
biographical and historical facts for their own sake, and so controlling
his account of the man Melville, of his background and character, as to
enable the reader to see more clearly into his art, Arvin demonstrates
anew the relevance of the biographical mode to the job of criticism when
it is properly utilized and not made an end in itself. Equally credible
is Arvin's use of the Freudian psychology.
It
is brought to bear upon
Melville's experience with a maturity of judgment and power of modula–
tion rarely found in literary contexts, where the amateurish shuffling
