JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
moral book!' And he orders her out of his sight. You see, Mrs. Stowe
did not hit the sorest spot. She makes Legree a bachelor.
In these people and their documents there is a "literature" ·which
rivals the real literature of the period,
Uncle Tom
and a few other
works excepted. Mr. Wilson makes however, several brilliant analogies
to the work of an American creative writer of genius, namely Mel–
ville. Anyone who has studied
Moby Dick
and becomes aware of its
tremendous stresses and strains, its sense of implacable opposites and
an impending doom, its flights and counterflights, its descents into the
sea, and its contemplation of the Milky Way, is intuitively convinced
that this somehow is
the
literary document of the Civil War, a kind
of uncanny prophecy in art of what was to come in life. Mr. Wilson
apologizes for adding to "the bizarre interpretations" already offered
of
Moby Dick,
but goes on to say that in reading Grant's
Memoirs,
concerning his final pursuit of Lee, one is inescapably reminded of
Ahab's quest. Grant had served with Lee in Mexico and knew, as he
said, that Lee was mortal. They were the two great leaders of their
respective sides and their final confrontation was a /great national
drama. When at last they do meet at Appomattox, it seems as if:
. . . Ahab, stubborn, intent, and tough, crippled by his wooden
leg as Grant had sometimes been by his alcoholic habits, will confront
the smooth and shimmering foe, who so far eluded all hunters. . . .
Then in 1866 in a book of verse Melville published
a
narrative poem,
The Scout Toward Aldie,
which was about Mosby, the famous Con–
federate raider, and his entrapment and destruction of a young Union
officer:
What we recognize, of course, in this story is Melville's familiar
theme: the pursuit or the persecution by one body of another, with
an ambivalent relation between them which mingles repulsion and
attraction but which binds them inescapably together: Captain Ahab
and Moby Dick, Claggart and Billy Budd, Babo and Don Benito.
Finally, the best purely literary analysis in the book is the long,
complex, and wide-ranging analysis of the effect of the Civil War upon
American prose. It is impossible to summarize except to say that Mr.
Wilson accounts for
both
Abraham Lincoln and Henry James.
The great merit of all of Mr. Wilson's reconstructions and criticisms
consists in bringing to light, lucidly and sympathetically, all these much
neglected and quite wonderful documents of the time, known of course
