ALLAN SILVER
413
against these limits. The lawyer is indeed a limited man, but this is
precisely why his moral career throughout the story commands a
certain respect. We must seek to know him better.
In
response to an advertisement, a stranger appears at an office
door, is hired, sets to work. Melville restricts description to defining
essentials. Bartleby does not enter the lawyer's office and employ; the
door is already open-"for it was summer"-and Bartleby-"a motion–
less young man" -stands at its threshold. He has no prior existence,
implied by passing from the world of anonymous strangers to employ–
ment; he does not approach, knock, seek and gain entrance, state his
purpose. He comes into existence in the very act of employment-itself
pure in its minimal character: "After a few words touching his
qualifications, I engaged him.... " So satisfied is the lawyer with his
scrivener that he places Bartleby's desk in his own office "so as to have
this quiet man within easy call." Moreover:
Still further to a satisfactory arrangement, I procured a high green
folding screen which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight,
though not from my voice. And thus, in a manner, privacy and
society were conjoined.
Association is mediated by the voice of command; proximity con trolled
by separation of function; privacy of person and society of labor are
joined. Bartleby does "an extraordinary quantity of writing," day and
night. The lawyer would have been "quite delighted" save that
Bartleby writes on "silently, palely, mechanically."
It
is from this tableau, framed by the lawyer's benign but firm
moral conventionalism, that the story departs. One rhythm dominates:
the lawyer's widening oscillation between, on one side, resentment,
repugnance and fear; and, on the other, helpfulness, compassion,
increasingly encompassing offers of aid. Each refusal of Bartleby's
provokes greater aversion; each access of frustration or anger, a greater
measure of engagement. At climactic points, the two emotions fuse:
"Strange
to
say," the lawyer remarks, "I tore myself from him whom I
had so longed to be rid of." Between these surges of feeling, the lawyer
accepts Bartleby's silent, unproductive presence on the basis of a
morality which, though conventional, is not quite conventionally
expressed:
He is usefullO me; I can get along with him.
If
I turn him away, the
chances are that he will fall in with some less indulgent employer
