MELVILLE AS SCRIPTURE
71
the writer (which may be unknown to himself) and our readiness to
apprehend and to share in a consciousness different from our own; it
is the place in space our experience of art immediately occupies.
Bulkington may be "Man fully formed, fully human, fully wise,"
but he is "wonderfully concise" only if one presumes that Melville
calculated every stroke in advance, which is evidently untrue,
and if one sees the book
only
as a 'morality, which belies the fact
that the False Prometheus (Ahab) gets all the great lines, and the
True Prometheus (Bulkington) gets praised (a shade hysterically).
But then, Mr. Chase never permits much to an artist's spontaneity,
or fancy, or caprice; even when he quotes from the beginning of
Billy Budd
Melville's rhapsody over the beauty of a Negro sailor who
wore a Scotch Highland bonnet with a tartan band, he does so to
connect us back to
Pierre-"the
emblem of Lucy Tartan enlightens
the forehead of the Handsome Sailor as he emerges from the depths of
Night into the consciousness of Day.... He moves as ponderously,
but with as much strength and beauty ... as revolutionary America
itself, setting forth on the path of civilization." Is Melville never to
be allowed a memory or a detail or a figure of speech that answers
simply to his own exuberance? Does Mr. Chase think it Melville's
distinction that he had as many symbols at his fingertips as James
Joyce? He tells us, for example, that "a minor theme of
Pierre
is the
theme of the keys. As in Joyce's
Ulysses,
the keys are those of St.
Peter, whose name Melville's hero bears. The key symbolizes the
secret of Pierre's paternity. In his earlier portrait, Pierre's father
wears a seal and a key on his watch chain.... " Or: "etymologically,
we perceive, Pierre Glendinning and Glendinning Stanly are the same
name, since 'Stanly' comes from a Germanic word for 'stone' and
'Pierre' comes from a Greek word meaning the same." Or: "Mrs.
Glendinning in her role as History has reached her state of perfec–
tion (false though it is) by giving birth to Pierre (America) and
making him one true lover.... She is 'not far from her grand
climacteric,' which, as a piece of symbolism, means that she is about
to achieve the perfection of Society."
I mistrust Mr. Chase's understanding of how an artist operates;
he is much too fond of showing that Melville was almost as wise as
Arnold Toynbee. Yet when the works are not identified with their
symbols, Melville is chided for a "deficiency of symbolization," or for
