MELVILLE AND HIS CRITICS
735
ahead." As a fiction the book is "meager and monotonous ... all but
motionless ... a series of conversations rather than an action ... which
keep recurring to the same theme too compulsively, with too few varia–
tions, to be anything but uncndurably repetitious." Arvin pursues his
analysis to the ultimate conclusion that this work is "one of the most
completely nihilistic, morally and metaphysically," of American books,
suffering from a "fatal want of moral chiaroscuro," Melville's
Timon
of Athens
without a Flavius. Its actual effect is more of tameness than
of terror, since what "it expresses, except at rare moments, is not a passion
of bitterness but a dull despondency of mistrust and disbelief." Melville
wrote it in a state of morbid suspiciousness when he had lost the vision
of tragic grandeur that makes
Mohy
Dick
the chief masterpiece of Amer–
ican letters.
The most richly assimilative of his critical tasks Arvin undertakes
in his comprehensive scrutiny of that masterpiece. Varied resources of
literary and philosophical investigation are pressed into service in an
unflagging effort to grasp, to understand, to bring to light. The analysis
is conducted on the four levels of the literal, the psychological, the
moral, and the mythic; and it is so comprehensive an analysis that it
would be impossible to do it justice in a brief resume. Suffice it to say
that it yields a reading of
Mohy
Dick
summing up the best that we have
learned about it at the same time that it establishes some wholly new
relations of meaning and a sharper perception of the coherence of its
parts in the unity of imaginative possession.
The Shakespearean influence on Melville has been sufficiently
charted by scholars like Olson and Matthiessen, and on that score Arvin
has little to add that is newly suggestive. Of more original value
is
his
examination of Melville's problem in seeking to discover the proper form
for his narratives. Melville,. as Arvin sees it, was working in isolation
from the central currents of European writing, an isolation from which
he both lost and gained. As
Pierre
shows, he foundered in attempting to
adopt as his own the typical novelistic forms developed by his contem–
poraries in Europe. The passages in Arvin's study dealing with this prob–
lem and the solutions that Melville came upon, are of far more than
technical importance. It is an aspect of the national literary experience
that indirectly but significantly connects certain elementary considera–
tions of manner and technique with the higher considerations of form
and value.
Philip Rahv
