Lecture first delivered at the Center for Teaching Excellence, Hillsdale College, July 2006.

 

The challenge of teaching the American Founding is that their political theory was simple—indeed, self-evident—but understanding their actions, their practice, is hard. The notion that no one has the right to murder you, enslave you, or otherwise ruin your life isn’t hard to understand. It’s the way that the Founders acted to secure the unalienable rights of American citizens, and the reasons for their failure fully to secure them that requires intensive study.

The challenge of teaching the Progressives’ re-founding of the American regime is fairly easy to understand in practice. We see their successes all around us in such institutions as the administrative state, in such Constitutional measures as the income tax and the popular election of U. S. Senators, and in our expectation that politicians serve as leaders of their American people. But the political theory animating Progressivism is anything but self-evident. Progressivism breaks radically with previous American political principles. To see this, consider a question I asked students many times, without ever hearing the right answer.

The Declaration of Independence begins: “When in the course of human events.”

Why not, “When in history….”?

Because for the Founders the word ‘history’ did not mean the course of human events. At their time, ‘history’ meant the historia rerum gestarum —the story or account of things that are born and pass away, the story of the course of human events. A ‘history’ was a narrative, a literary genre, and a mode of inquiry.

Philosophy and poetry are also modes of inquiry. Following the well-known imagery of Plato’s Republic philosophy was considered the rational ascent from the cave of conventional opinions, into the daylight of truth. Plato’s Socrates engaged in ‘dialectic’—argumentation governed by logic, which is thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. The first statement of that principle in Western thought is enunciated by Socrates in that dialogue: The same thing will not do, or have done to it, opposites, at the same time, with respect to the same part, or in relation to the same thing. So, for example, an object might be black and white, or gray, but it cannot be ‘blackwhite.’ You can inscribe a circle in a square or a square in a circle, but you can’t draw a square circle. Philosophic inquiry governed by that principle eliminates false or self-contradictory arguments.

Poetry was understood as an imitation or ‘imaging’ of true things—holding the mirror up to nature, as Dr. Samuel Johnson said, around the same time the Declaration was written. The equivalent of dialectic in poetry is drama, a sort of argument in action: Achilles against Hector, God against Satan, Hamlet against himself.

History, however, put into words what had been seen, in the course of human events. Only then can those events last, be remembered, continue to be inquired into. By writing a ‘history,’ the historian fixes events, holds them in place, making the comprehensible to the intellect, which can understand only that which ‘stays put.’ Like philosophic dialectic and poetic drama, a history also presents conflict. Thus Thucydides tells us that he writes a work “for all time,” after having seen “the greatest war of all time.” He chose a course of events—a massive, violent change—which revealed something great and permanent in human nature, which does not change.

Poetic drama, philosophic dialectic, and political history all aim at inquiring about the permanent things by an ascent from the human-all-too-human conflicts or contradictions we see all around us. All of these genres of writing and of thought comport with the doctrine of natural right familiar to us in the Declaration of Independence, because natural right is a permanent thing. In the American regime, the Founders sought to secure the natural rights of citizens by means of a well-defined, limited constitutional government.

But around the same time the Founders lived, ‘history’ began to be redefined not as the story of the course of human events but as the res gestae —the course of events itself. What is more, philosophers soon began to turn to the course of human events not merely as a source of what human nature is, but as something that constituted human nature. That is, they began to think of human nature—and of all nature—as something not fixed but evolving. According to historicism, man is fundamentally a historical being, not a natural being. Nature itself is historical, constantly changing or evolving; nature has no permanent ‘nature,’ so to speak.

Still further, the early nineteenth century philosophers—the greatest of them was the German, G. W. F. Hegel—looked to ‘history’ or the course of events as the source of moral and political authority. Why? European philosophy had already abandoned religion as a source of moral and political authority. The Enlightenment tended toward atheism. The French Revolutionaries’ appeal to moral authority issued in “The Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” that is to say, by the time the United States Constitution had been ratified, ‘enlightened’ Europeans had rejected divine right as a monarchic myth and substituted for it the natural rights of man.

The problem with deriving moral and political authority or rights from nature, for these European philosophers, was simple. They were materialists. And they conceived of matter ‘atomistically.’ If all nature, including human nature, is nothing but matter in motion, how do you get morality out of that? If human beings are nothing but bodies composed of vibrating atoms, if that’s what human nature is, then there is no ‘ought’ to be extracted from it, no right to be derived from it. for human life to have moral significance it needs a purpose, a telos. But if human nature has no built-in purpose, because it’s nothing but matter in motion, and if there is no God to give Creation a purpose, both natural teleology and religious teleology make no sense Enlightenment seems to result in nihilism, in darkness rather than light.

Further, even as the Enlightenment rejected God and began to reject nature as sources of moral and political authority, it also rejected human laws and other conventions. The Enlighteners were, after all, revolutionaries, dissatisfied with the status quo of existing laws and other conventions. Where would human beings turn for guidance, with all the existing sources of authority now discarded?

Here is where the German philosophers stepped in. Hegel contended that the only possible source of moral and political authority remaining to ‘enlightened’ human beings was history itself. Human history, he said, has been working toward an end, a telos, a purpose, all along, although until Hegel’s time no one had been able to see what that purpose is. According to Hegel, human history is the course of events by which human beings have conquered nature, subjecting it more and more to the human will. The story of the conquest of nature is thus the story of human progress toward ever greater freedom of the exercise of the human will over nature or brute matter. The meaning of ‘history’ or the course of events, its purpose, is that progressively unfolding freedom over nature, through time. Doctrines centered on divine revelation and doctrines centered on nature right now must give way to doctrines we may call, as a group, historicist or progressive. The ‘progressive’ person is, to use the word deployed by both Hegel and Marx, conscious of his place in history’s movement; a leader is conscious of how to hasten history’s forward movement toward the end of history.

To see how radical this philosophic turn to historicism was, consider it in contrast to the teaching of the Bible. the Bible also tells us that the course of events has meaning. God guides the course of events. Theologians call this ‘providence.’ How does providentialism differ from historicism?

The God of the Bible creates the heavens and the earth out of nothing. He then forms an out of part of that creation, earth, and breathes His Spirit into that clay, thus creating man as an image of Himself. Thus God differs radically from all of His creation; He did not make the heavens and the earth out of Himself, extruding them in the manner of an amoeba. Again to use theological language, the God of the Bible is not ‘immanent’ in His creation. The created being closest to God, man, derives his authority over the rest of God’s creation from the breath of divine Spirit that constitutes part of him. But this creature quickly learns that he is not God, whatever the Serpent may whisper in his wife’s ear. More, his Creator issues increasingly elaborate sets of commands which serve as standards for his conduct, standards that do not change until the Creator Himself changes them. Both laws and Lawgiver are ‘above’ man.

Hegel’s historicism is entirely different. Hegel argues that the course of human events or history is not guided by a radically separate Creator-God. Hegel teaches that history is infused with rationality, with what Hegel calls the Absolute Spirit. The Absolute Spirit has nothing to do with God, the Holy Spirit. Holiness implies purity, separation from matter; the Absolute Spirit dwells within matter. Indeed, matter is nothing but a congealed form of the Absolute Spirit. Matter evolves in accordance with a logical pattern. Instead of “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” historicism posits laws of history, laws of the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit.

Each historical epoch has its own spirit. The “spirit of the age” or Zeitgeist is the Absolute Spirit in its current stage of evolution or development. As in a logical syllogism, all contradictions will finally disappear. History behaves logically; the clash of opposites—whether opposing ideas, opposing social classes, opposing races, opposing armies—eventually resolves itself into the end of all historical conflict, namely, a world state that results in peace. History consists, therefore, of a logical dialectic, a set of knowable laws of progress. The dialectic previously understood as man’s rational inquiry into the nature of things—in poetry, philosophy, and history—now came to be conceived as the process whereby human beings, over time, mastered nature while disposing of previous systems of thought (including the Bible) as retrograde mythology.

The scholar Eric Voegelin rightly said that historicism “immanentizes the eschaton.” It puts ‘god’ into creation, into the course of events caused by matter in motion. It fuses the ‘is’ with the ‘ought,’ might with right—on this earth, not in Heaven. What happens is also what should happen, because progress, moral rightness, is built into the historical process itself. In Christianity, a religion of the Creator-God, the eschaton has only been ‘immantized’ on one occasion, so far: in the life and person of Jesus Christ. And that life, on this earth, ended with a return to the separation of Creator from created—with the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, that is, with the return of Jesus to His Father in Heaven. Jesus left behind His assembly or church, but, a Paul shows in his epistles, God’s assembly proves eminently fallible. The Kingdom of God on earth will only begin when Jesus rules a new heaven and a new earth—a new creation. And even that new creation won’t be infused with God, who will rule it as the holy God.

Speaking of ruling, I turn from the moral to the political dimension of historicism. Hegel and his philosophic followers understood moral and political authority to consist of this ever-widening sphere of human freedom or human conquest of nature. Intellectually, the saw the locus of the conquest of nature in modern science, and the powerful technologies that already had begun to bring space and time under ever-increasing human control or mastery. They saw the political locus of the conquest of nature in the modern state. The modern state, which crucially centralizes human control of persons and territories in one location, one capital city, and which then extends its administrative power to its borders by means of a rule-governed bureaucracy, struck historicists as the very embodiment of the modern project of freedom or rule over nature.

This means that the highest form of human freedom is located not in the individual or the family, or in the free enterprise of the people, or in the governmental institutions to which the people elect their representatives, but in the state, especially in its ‘technocratic’ element, the bureaucracy, not elected and at best ‘overseen’ by the people’s elected representatives. So constituted, the state masters nature more effectively than any individual or family can ever do.

Historicism also means that the most ‘authoritative’ things will happen in the future. In taking his moral bearings, a historicist does not ‘look back to “In the beginning,” to the Creator-God. Nor does a historicist ‘look around’ to the nature created by that God. Nor does he look within himself, at human nature. A historicist must rather look forward, forward to the ‘end of history’—to the World State, as in Hegel, to communism, as in Marx, or to the supreme Aryan world empire, as in Nazism. To put it another way men are not by nature angels now, but as mankind evolves, becoming more and more masterful, we will become much more like angels. The Absolute Spirit is working itself out in us.

Politically, this means that historicism requires of politicians not governance in accordance with stable principles but leadership. The leader leads his people into the morally authoritative future. The leader is the secular prophet of a promised land to be built entirely with human hands and brains. Human hands and brains are the Absolute Spirit at work.

The leader himself does not suffice to get us there, however. The prophets of God in the Bible know what to do and where to go because God tells them. God knows what to tell them because he is all-knowing: He knows not only the overall goal but He also knows every step of the way, the number of hairs on every head, every sparrow that will fall. A human leader, by contrast, may know the goal but he cannot know every detail that needs tending. For rule over the details, for effective human providence, he needs bureaucracy—a systematic and centralized administrative state.

Here’s where the American Progressives come in. Historicist ideas entered the United States in the early decades of the nineteenth century through a variety of what might be described as ‘cultural middlemen’—intellectuals who studied German philosophy, translating its ideas to the American context. One of the most famous of these figures was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Later on, an important figure in the American historicist movement was the educator William Torrey Harris, among the most prominent of the Saint Louis Hegelians, who served as President Grant’s Education Commissioner in the 1870s; other historicists settled into positions at major universities.

But the ontological historicism of these disparate figures did not yet advocate statism in America. One of Emerson’s most famous essays celebrated American individualism, and Harris was a Social Darwinist. The movement toward an American statism centered in academia, beginning in the decades after the Civil War. Historicism linked itself to statism earlier in Europe because in Europe statism preceded historicism.

Throughout Europe, universities initially had been instituted by the Roman Catholic Church, an eminently international, not statist, institution. When Niccolo Machiavelli conceived of the modern, centralized state in the early sixteenth century, he intended it as the key institutional weapon against the rule of the Church, and therewith the influence of Christianity. But after Machiavelli’s young, and Christian, contemporary Martin Luther broke with the Church, his followers discovered that states could serve as guardians of Protestant Christianity; only states were politically strong enough, because sufficiently centralized, to resist the international Papacy and its military and political allies. This circumstance in turn made the Protestant universities in the German countries ally themselves with their respective states. That is, by the time the Peace of Westphalia solemnized the modern international system of states in 1648, norther German universities had adapted themselves to statism. And when Bismarck and the Hohenzollern monarchy consolidated most of the many German states into one large nation-state in the middle of the nineteenth century the German universities were structured as appendages of that state. The study of political life consisted primarily not of the study of natural rights and regimes but the study of administration or bureaucracy as the authoritative instantiation of historical and dialectical progress.

German academics set themselves the task of finding scientific methods by which the state might rule more efficiently and thus, in the words of University of Nevada Professor John Marini, to “establish the rational structures whereby organized intelligence, or knowledge derived from the scientific method, would begin the process of solving, progressively, the political, social, economic, and cultural problems of the nation.”  As Marini also observes, the young scholars who established political science as a separate discipline within the American universities typically attended graduate school in Germany in the late nineteenth century, thus absorbing the principles of German social science, the handmaiden of German statism. It is important to understand that the German unification of the states via the institutional structures of the administrative state must have looked especially attractive to young Americans who grew up during the Civil War, not only because such a state promised to end the political corruption associated with political parties and the party ‘bosses’ but because rule by professional bureaucrats looked like an efficient way to bind small and medium-sized states into one big national state—precisely the problem the federal republic of the American Founders had solved only at the cost of a catastrophic war. With this institutional reform came the vast reconstruction of philosophic doctrine mentioned earlier, the move from natural right to historical right. By 1895, John J. Lalor’s Cyclopedia of the Social Sciences classified “Natural Law” under “Fictions”—this, in an article assuring readers that “the sphere of fiction must steadily diminish as that of inductive and positive science advances and as man’s mind becomes stronger, clearer, and more discerning.”

The best known of these young American scholars studied politics and administration as a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins University—the first American university modeled after the German research universities, staffed with professors who had done their own graduate studies at those universities. His name was Woodrow Wilson. He of course went on to the presidency of Princeton University, the governorship of New Jersey, and the presidency of the United States.

As a twenty-year-old undergraduate, one who spent ten years of his boyhood and early adolescence in Augusta, Georgia during the Civil War and the hated Reconstruction, Wilson confided to his diary serious reservations about the American regime of 1876: “The American Republic will in my opinion never celebrate another Centennial. At least under its present Constitution and laws.” The United States is only “a miserable delusion of a republic…founded upon the notion of abstract liberty!”—that is, natural right. As had several of his most prominent Southern intellectual forebears, particularly John C. Calhoun, Wilson admired England’s mixed regime; “the English form of government is the only true one.

Any Ivy League education and subsequent graduate training turned this Burkean Southern conservative into a devotee of ‘Germany.’ In a book written for college students, Wilson engaged in that sub-discipline of political science that would come to be called ‘comparative regimes.’ ‘Comparative’ politics as the Germans conceived it compared the supposedly inherent characteristics of different nations or races. Which ones are the strongest, the most vital, the most likely to win the struggle for survival and domination? Nations and states are organisms which interact dialectically. He distinguished political systems that are “defeated or dead” from “those which are alive and triumphant”—a point any American southerner would find compelling. Because peoples of German origin dominated the world at the time, “it is Aryan practice we principally wish to know.” England remained Wilson’s favorite among the Aryan nations, for its gradualism of development. The United States, insofar as it had any political merit at all, derived it from its adaptation of English institutions. Wilson tried to account for the Civil War not at all in terms of unalienable right or of American republicanism but entirely in terms of “national feeling”—nationalism—itself based primarily upon social and economic differences between the North and the South.

Wilson thus took German historicism and democratized it for American use. The esteem for democracy is the distinguishing feature of American Progressivism. Wilson claimed that democracy, not monarchy, was the final stage of human development. Its “true concept…is inseparable from the organic theory of the state.” Wilsonian ‘democracy’ bears as close a resemblance to Hegelian monarchy as it can, without ceasing to be democratic. “Properly organized democracy is the best government of the few,” representative government. But—and here the Hegelian surfaces—bureaucracy or “civil service” is “but another process of representation.” The science of administration is “the latest fruit of [the] science of politics,” a science “developed by French and German professors.” It “must inhale free American air,” but it nonetheless embodies the Hegelian “spirit of the time,” that is, the current stage of the dialectical development of the Absolute Spirit.”

Thus Wilson presented an extraordinary and revolutionary political agendum as an act of incremental conservatism. He cautiously assayed the political difficulties of his project. Convinced that “the democratic state” as yet lacked the means for carrying “those enormous burdens of administration which the needs of this industrial and trading age are so fast accumulating,” yet mindful that “it is harder for democracy to organize administration than [it is] for monarchy” to do so because public opinion rules democracy, often in a “meddlesome” way, Wilson sought to exercise a new kind of statesmanship to found a new kind of regime.

The new, historicist statesmanship would not so much defend the existing regime as lead the people to new modes and orders of life. “Society is not a crowd, but an organism, and, like every organism, it just grow as a whole or else be deformed.” “Leaders of men” precipitate the “evolution of [society’s institutions” with “creative power”—the most recent example of these having been Otto von Bismarck. The leader is a sort of secular prophet: “He must read the common thought: he must calculate very circumspectly the preparation of the nation for the next move in the progress of politics…. the nice point is to distinguish the firm and progressive popular thought from the momentary and whimsical popular mood, the transitory or mistaken popular passion.” The leader is the good shepherd of the spirit of the age.

Thus the new historicist leadership of progress requires a new kind of prudence. The new prudence foresees the course of events; it is literally promethean. Jane Addams, the prominent Progressive reformer whom Wilson cultivated as a political ally, described herself as “a little uneasy in regard to [Wilson’s] theory of self-government.” He seemed “as if he were not so eager for a mandate to carry out the will of the people as for an opportunity to lead the people whither in his judgment their best interest lay.” There has been no more sensible insight.

This also means that the United States Constitution as written and amended simply won’t do. It is ‘Newtonian,’ not ‘Darwinian,’ aimed at balance instead of growth. It is, as Wilson titled an important essay, “The Elastic Constitution.” A more recent jurist called it “the Living Constitution.”

Ultimately, Wilson contended, the best interest of the people lies in socialism, the logical result of ‘democratic’ Hegelianism. If society is an organism, then “the community” has “the absolute right…to determine its own destiny and that of its members,” for “men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.” While “wisdom and convenience” may require the limitation of public control over economic activity, “limits of principle” upon that control “there are, upon strict analysis, none.” Democracy finally requires socialism. To achieve it, an existing political democracy needs a modern bureaucracy founded by a “leader of men”—a new kind aristocracy, eventually calling itself ‘meritocracy,’ claiming to rule not on the basis of warrior and civic virtues or social and intellectual refinement but on technical expertise.

That is to say, political progressivism appropriates two pieces of the modern scientific project. The dramatic and bold part of that project, the conquest of nature, may be seen in the person of the leader. The mundane, routine, precise, and detailed part of the project may be seen in administration. The popular support for the statist project comes not from natural right form the sentiment of nationalism (eventually to be replaced by an international world state), which registers the vitality of the national organism. In contrast to the Declaration of Independence, progressivism substitutes historical progress for natural right, taking the task of government not to be limited to securing the natural rights of individuals and nations but rather as the much more ambitious task of guiding humanity toward the end of history, the unlimited universal state.

In making these changes, in making a mantra of ‘change’ itself, did American Progressivism actually cost Americans anything valuable? Did it cause us to abandon any of the individual and national rights we secured under the Founders’ regime? Consider the first establishment of a solid structure of Progressive institutions during the New Deal, an establishment prepared by the passage of the Constitutional amendments to legalize the income tax and to require popular votes for United States senators, accomplished a generation earlier. The best description of the administrative state Franklin Roosevelt and his allies bequeathed us was published exactly 100 years before his landslide re-election in 1936. It was Alexis de Tocqueville who coined the term “administrative despotism,” which he described in a famous passage near the end of the first volume of Democracy in America:

“I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them…he exists only in himself and for himself alone….

“Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living”

“So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of it from each citizens. Equality has prepared men for all these things: it has disposed them to tolerate them and often even to regard them as a benefit.

“Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the  most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

“Our contemporaries are incessantly racked by two inimical passions: they feel the need to be led and the wish to remain free. Not being able to destroy either one of these contrary instincts, they strive to satisfy both at the same time. They imagine a unique power, tutelary, all powerful, but elected by citizens. They combine centralization and the sovereignty of the people. That gives them some respite. They consoled themselves for being in tutelage by thinking that they themselves have chosen their schoolmasters….

“In our day there are many people who accommodate themselves very easily to this kind of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people, and who think they have guaranteed the freedom of individuals well enough when they deliver it to the national power. That does not suffice for me. The nature of the master is much less important to me than the obedience.”

Many of us here today teach civics. To rebuild an active, civic spirit of self-government—as against the passivity of the administrative state—is what we do. We can only do it effectively if we recall the principles and practices of the American Founders, notice the contrast between them and those of the Progressives, then teach that contrast to our students.

This is the twelfth of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.

 

The Pequod caught a forward breeze. A few days after its gam with the Bachelor the crew killed four whales, one harpooned by Ahab himself, evidently practicing for the anticipated encounter with his nemesis. He considered the way a Sperm Whale dies, turning its head toward the sun: “He too worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!” The seas, “where to traditions no rocks furnish tablets,” “life dies sunwards full of faith,” only to be spun around “some other way” after death, toward the “dark Hindoo half of nature.” “In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith.” Ahab wants nothing of the solid rock of Christ, the Son, turning instead to the larger, darker sea, whose billows “are my foster-brothers.” He seeks a rock in something vast and fluid, a chaos-rock.

One of the whales couldn’t be hauled in immediately, so Ahab and his boat-crew stayed with it. Fedallah watched his fellow-predators, the sharks; Ahab told him of a recurring dream, a dream of hearses. It is time for prophecy. Fedallah reminded him that “neither hearse nor coffin can be thine”; at sea, there are no hearses, but before Ahab can die he must see two hearses at sea, “the first not made by mortal hands,” the second made with wood grown in America. What is more, Fedallah must die before Ahab; he must be Ahab’s “pilot,” his guide into death, if he is to die. In exchange, Fedallah has made two promises: that Ahab shall kill Moby-Dick and survive the killing. Fedallah adds another promise—that “hemp only can kill thee.” Ahab assumed that means the gallows, but should recall that the dangerous, snake-like ropes in the boat he sits in whip dangerously after the harpooneer lances a whale. Does Fedallah lie, or deceive?

In the Sea of Japan, the land of the rising sun, the summer sea under that sun shimmers with an “unrelieved radiance” like “the insufferable splendors of God’s throne,” the white throne of judgment. Fire-worshipping Fedallah gazed at the sun, which Ahab (now changing symbols, so to speak), called “my Pilot.” He asked the sun, “Where is Moby Dick?” Indeed the sun ‘sees’ half the world at a time. But the sun, silent as always, told him nothing. In fury he destroyed the ship’s quadrant, cursing “Science,” the “foolish toy”; “no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee” not because the quadrant is a human instrument but because it “feebly pointest on high,” toward heavenly bodies like the sun, whereas the ship’s other instruments, the compass and the log-and-line, point him along the surface of the sea, his fluid rock. Overhearing the Captain’s tirade, bluff Stubb concurs. “Damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!” Ishmael isn’t the Captain’s only secret sharer.

The sea’s potential chaos overtook the Pequod, struck by a sudden typhoon. Dutiful Starbuck wished they would ride with the gale, towards home, instead of against it, towards Moby-Dick. Ahab had other plans. As lightning sets fire to the three masts, he shrieks to the crew, “The white flame but lights the way to the White Whale!” Ishmael compares the lightning to “God’s burning fingers” as He wrote the words of judgment against Belshazzar as recounted in the Book of Daniel: “MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.” The king calls upon the Chaldeans—Fedallah’s ancestors—to interpret these words, but they fail. They prove poor prophets. Only Daniel can understand truly: That God has numbered the days of Belshazzar’s kingdom; that the king has been weighed in the balance and founding wanting; that his kingdom will be divided and given to the Medes and the Persians. Belshazzar is killed the following night. As the “H” in “UPHARSIN” implies, the sundering of Ahab’s regime will take breath away.

Nonetheless, Ahab follows the Parsee. He prayed to the “trinity of flames,” worshiping them in a reversal of the way a Christian would pray to the Divine Trinity: “O! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance.” There is no kindness in chaos-nature, only “speechless, placeless power.” Therefore, “To the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here.” “A true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.” Stubb had whispered about Ahab’s scar, months before, comparing it to the crack in a tree struck by lightning. If Ahab were an ordinarily evil man, he would lack this nobility, the character of the tragic hero which Ishmael suggests by his periodic allusions to Lear—here, to Ahab’s “beaten brain,” both comparable to and contrasting with the live, “beating” brain of Shakespeare’s king. Ahab’s brain has been beaten, finally, not by Fate or Fedallah but by itself, by its own inner flaw. He had that flaw before he met Fedallah. did Fate give it to him, or did he give it to himself? Having it, did he need to succumb to it?

Ahab regards the Creator-God as mindless. “Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun…. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical.” As humans are to the God of the Bible, so the Biblical God is to—call it Fate. As a personality confronting an impersonal foolishly supposed personal by mythologizing prophets and priests, and their dupes, Ahab worshipped the truly impersonal Fire by defying it. Prudence dictates otherwise, but why would a noble man not defy such a being?

Poor Starbuck read matters differently. When lightning struck Ahab’s steel harpoon with “forked fire” like “a serpent’s tongue,” he told the Captain that “God, God is against thee.” Turn home “while we may,” on “a better voyage than this.” This panicked the crew, who “raised a half mutinous cry.” Immediately recognizing a nascent revolutionary moment, Ahab seized his burning harpoon and “waved it like a torch among them; swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope’s end.” The threat of force stopped them, giving him a chance to reinforce his rule with speech, reminding them of their oath to hunt the White Whale, an oath “as binding as mine”—’totalitarian,’ encompassing “heart, soul, and body, lungs and life.” To these words he added a final action, blowing out the fire on the harpoon and roaring, “Thus I blow out the last fear!” The last fear of God, but not the last fear in the souls of the men. Quite the contrary: Instead of overpowering the tyrant, the men, so threatened and so reminded, fled in terror. Starbuck’s attempt to rally ‘the many’ to his side thus failed. “Oh, none but cowards send down their brain trucks in tempest time,” Ahab said to himself, even as he reminded himself, Lear-like, to “take medicine.” But while Lear takes “physic” in order to expose himself “to feel what wretches feel” and thus dispose himself to charity toward them, Ahab remains a tyrant, not a king, knowing what wretches feel only to rule them for his own purpose, not their succour. As for the officers and the harpooneers, they do not share in the sailors’ panic but neither do their souls have the strength to rebel; Stubb could only say to Flask, “This is a nasty night, lad,” and Tashtego wished for a glass of rum. At this moment, was anyone on the Pequod better than a would-be drunken Indian?

The typhoon passed, the crew cheered and began repairing the ship, as ordered by the officers. The ‘many’ respond to immediate success and failure and except for Starbuck, the ‘few’—officers and harpooneers—were little better. Only the First Mate clearly foresaw the ultimate disaster to which Ahab directed the ship. Only he could act to stop it, and chance now gave him the opportunity.

Starbuck went below deck to report to his Captain on the new conditions on deck. He saw the muskets on the gun rack, including the musket Ahab had aimed at him. “An evil thought” occurred to him, which he found hard to suppress. Should he kill Ahab, as Ahab had been ready to kill him? The gun was already loaded.

How evil is that thought? “Shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?”—effectively murdering more than thirty men. He found Ahab asleep, incapable of resisting. Neither reasoning, nor remonstrance, nor entreaty had swayed the tyrant; Starbuck had tried them all. Alogos, immoralist, and un-agapic, the tyrant demanded only “flat obedience to [his] own flat commands.” As for the vow, the contract Ahab had cited, “Great God forbid!” that we make ourselves lesser Ahabs. Ahab’s real underlying ‘contract,’ the one with Fedallah, ignores the good of ship and crew; a king would rule for the good of his people but the tyrant rules for himself, for an illusory self-interest. Assenting to the contract with Ahab, officers, harpooneers, and crew assented to the contract with Fedallah, a soul reminiscent of the Prince of Liars.

Was there no “lawful way” to proceed? No: restrained, Ahab “would be more hideous than a caged tiger, then, I could not endure the sigh; could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage.” Ahab would murder sleep, as Macbeth’s conscience did; an anti-conscience, Ahab was the monster that would put reason to sleep. There was no law for Starbuck to fear, here on the open sea. “Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer, tindering sheets and skin together?” Surely not: Starbuck might kill with impunity and also without moral hazard. With Ahab dead, Starbuck might see his wife—named Mary, for the mother of Jesus—and child again. Without Ahab dead, he would not. Personal, political, and familial morality alike command tyrannicide.

Starbuck then appealed to the final authority. “Great God, where art thou? Shall I? shall I?” Nowhere in this yarn does God speak to anyone. Events occur, which may or may not be interpreted as providential, but God is always silent. Here, only Ahab spoke, in his unreasoning sleep. After Starbuck made his brief report to the Captain, Ahab in his dream replied, characteristically, with a command: “Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!” It was “as if Starbuck’s voice,” as he softly dialogued with himself and his God, and then to Ahab, “had caused the long dumb dream to speak.” “Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel.” But unlike Jacob, he let go. “He placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.” He went back on deck and told Stubb to wake Ahab and make the report, prevaricating that “I must see to the deck here.” His conscience had made a coward of him. There would be no just coup d’état, no revolution against tyranny on the Pequod. The ship’s ruler pursued defiant rebellion against the personified impersonal; its potential ruler could not bring himself to rebel against that ruler. These two extremes spell catastrophe as surely as MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.

In the aftermath of the natural storm and the political near-storm, the waves still billowed, the sunlight gleaming on the ocean, making it seem “a crucible of molten gold.” Awake and secure in his power, Ahab exclaimed in megalomaniacal exultation, “All ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye!” As Melville’s symbolism would have it, the ship’s compass needle had been deranged by the lightning strike, so Ahab takes charge of adjusting the ship’s course. Officers and men obey; “though some of [the sailors] lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate”—likely not the wiser fear. As for the “pagan harpooneers,” they remained imperturbable; “if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab’s.” As for the tyrant himself, he proclaimed himself “lord of the level loadstone,” overawing “the superstitious sailors” by making a new compass and gesticulating mysteriously over it, as if commanding it to come to life. Having regretfully rejected the human home, the earth, the sands of Nantucket; having defiantly rejected the heavenly God, dashing the quadrant, Ahab claimed mastery over men by controlling power of navigation over the chaos-sea. “In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride.”

The compass became the first of three new instruments Ahab commanded to be made. The second was a log-and-line. As the compass registers direction, the log-and-line registers the velocity of the ship: The line winds around a reel; a piece of wood, the “log,” is tied to the end of the line and is thrown overboard; sailors can then measure the speed at which the ship moves by the length of line pulled from the reel in a given segment of time. The old log-and-line had been damaged by long exposure to the elements; deployed, it snapped. The old Manxman remarked, “To me, the skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world,” but Ahab simply commanded that a new device be made, having concluded from conversing with “the man from Man” that he had no wisdom to offer Ahab, that “the dead, blind wall butts all inquiring heads at last.” When Pip appeared, seeing in the loss of the “log” a picture of his own casting-away, the Manxman would dismiss him, but Ahab intervened and put him under his protection. To Ahab, deranged Pip fell from the “frozen heavens” and therefore “touchest my inmost centre.” Not the sagacious old man but Pip tells the true tale, the tale told by an idiot. “Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor’s!” The Manxman judged them “One daft with strength, the other daft with weakness”—true enough, but not comprehensive. Nor do recent scholars who find in this a stinging critique of American slavery quite see the point. The tyrant has his humanities, but they rule his conduct only when considering a soul that seems to him to mirror his own soul, with its own obsessions. Ahab made Pip his missing leg because Pip was crushed by unknowing, unspeaking ‘gods.’

Steering the ship by the new compass and measuring its speed by the new log-and-line, Ahab set his course toward the equator, the surface-center of the world. At night the sailors heard a cry sounding “like the half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod’s murdered Innocents.” Only the Captain knew what it was: the cries of seals when the mothers lose their cubs. In the New Testament, Herod’s mass murder, a futile attempt to kill the infant Jesus, recalls Jeremiah’s story of Rachel, weeping for her exiled ‘children’—her descendants, to be banished to Babylon by God in punishment for their idolatry. As God promises to redeem the guilty Israelites from their exile, so will His Son redeem guilty humanity, which sins repeatedly against Him. The next gam will be a ship called the Rachel.

The sailors, however, superstitiously took the seal-cries to signify the cries of lost, drowned sailors. Confirming their forebodings, the next day a man fell from the mast-head and drowned in the sea: “Thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the White Whale, on the White Whale’s own peculiar ground; that man was swallowed in the deep.” The sailors dropped the life-buoy for him, but it too, like the log-and-line, proved too weathered to work; it sank, following the man. Queequeg offered his coffin as a replacement. Starbuck fretted over the symbolism of substituting a coffin for a life-buoy; Flask considers the matter materially; Ahab turns again to the carpenter to re-shape the coffin for the new use.

The carpenter again revealed himself as a Jesus according to Ahab, fashioning a means of salvation without knowing what he is doing. To Ahab’s accusation, “Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much a jack-of-all-trades,” the carpenter can only reply, “But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do.” If the Creator-God of the Bible is what He is, willingly shall be what He shall be, the carpenter-god here only does, humbly but mindlessly and will-lessly. Against such a being, Ahab asserts personality—mind and will. “What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts?” “A life-buoy of a coffin!” The coffin, symbol of death, “by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life.” Could this have “some spiritual sense” as “an immortality-preserver”? But as soon as Ahab promises himself to “think on that” he exercises his will to deny it. “So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.” He turns not to Christ but to Pip: “We’ll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous philosophies from thee!” His dialogue will be not with Christ, nor even with Socrates, but with a supposed mirror of himself, self-willed agent of will-less alogos. 

 

This is the eleventh of a series of essays on Melville’s novel.

 

The next gam will return the Pequod and its crew to a glimpse of the American regime in the form of the Bachelor, its crew gladly heading back to Nantucket, loaded with sperm oil and intent on partying all the way back. The chapters leading up to this encounter will (to understate the matter) present a contrast to that spirit of festive superficiality.

Ishmael begins by continuing his anatomization of the Sperm Whale, digging down to its “ultimatum,” the skeleton. “Since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far beneath the skin of the adult whale,” but on a later voyage Ishmael saw a rare, nearly complete skeleton on the island of Tranque (today’s Malaita) in the Solomon Islands. Ishmael uses the French name, Arsacides, which means Island of the Assassins; many French and English missionaries had been killed there, and likely eaten, too. No evangelist, Ishmael was safe, having befriended the king, who had collected the skeleton after a whale washed ashore, dead, during a typhoon. He housed it in a temple; the local priests tended it, worshipping it as a god. There is no suggestion that Ishmael’s “royal friend” thinks of it as such. The Solomon-Island king has none of the reverence of Solomon, although he may have some of his practical wisdom.

But the whale skeleton is a god, in its own way. Vines have grown under and through it; “the industrious earth beneath was as a weaver’s loom, with a gorgeous carpet on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the living flowers the figures…. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure.” This recalls the fate-imagery of the loom worked by Queequeg and Ishmael on the Pequod‘s voyage, but the greater weaver never speaks, and answers no questions. “The weaver-god, he weaves, and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.” Ishmael warns his listeners to be careful, “for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard afar”—the closest readers will come to an explanation of why Ishmael seems to hear not only the speeches of his officers and fellow crewmen, but their whispers and even their thoughts. Somehow, he has escaped the din of the loom, without dying. This Ishmael is an even more thorough exile than his namesake, an observer of the cosmos, outside even while in it—a bit of a philosopher, that way.

The vines and the skeleton: “Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.” When the priests objected to Ishmael’s efforts at obtaining precise measurements of their god, they fell into disputes amongst themselves, enabling him to complete his work without further disturbance. It is a picture of the effects of religious disputation, and although Ishmael dismisses scientific systems as another form of myth, as always he takes the measure of concrete things—a politic if not necessarily a political philosopher, taking advantage of the foolish disputations of priests. Seventy-two feet long, the skeleton would have stretched some ninety feet when the monster was alive; more than a third of the skeleton consists of the skull and jaw. The skeleton resembled “the embryo hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks”; hunted and hunter resemble one another, and at times their roles reverse. But the skeleton proves a disappointment, finally, as it was “by no means the mold of [the whale’] invested form,” covered in life as it is with vast bulks of cartilage, muscle, fat, spermaceti. “How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untraveled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes [no part of the skeleton]; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.” Although the great spine resembles Pompey’s Pillar or a Gothic spire—monuments of triumph and of worship, of reaching to the heavens—”some little cannibal urchins, the priests’ children”—had stolen the smaller vertebrae for their games of marbles. “Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at least into simple child’s play.” And how children of reverent fathers may think of the gods of their fathers.

From the present, Ishmael takes his investigation to the past, the “antediluvian point of view” afforded by examination of whale fossils. In having him do so, Melville has him deliver an apologia for the novel: “In the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and  men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and such throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.” Considering the Flood, for example, returns Ishmael to “Saturn’s grey chaos,” to the ice ages, when “the whole world was the whale’s,” then “king of creation.” and thus outranking man in Ishmael’s unbiblical vision. (And even in Biblical terms, there was a time before Man’s creation, in which the whale might indeed have ruled the world.) “I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all humane ages are over.” Comprehensive, indeed: godlike, though quite impersonal.

Past, present, and to come: Ishmael’s third discussion of the whale looks to the future and dismisses accounts by authorities of the past. Some claim that modern whales are smaller than the ancient species, and that fewer whales exist now than in antiquity. Ishmael denies both claims. The physical evidence suggests that whales are now bigger, despite accounts by Pliny and other ancient writers. Nor are they less numerous; it’s harder to hunt whales than it is to hunt the nearly-exterminated American bison. “For all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality”—immortal as a god, but not as an individual god. The Arsacidian cannibal priests are on to something, but too particular in their worship.

Ahab had incorporated part of an ivory skeleton into his person. Returning to the Pequod‘s deck from the Samuel Enderby, he damaged the leg; it needed replacing. At this point, Ishmael reveals the reason for Ahab’s mysterious delay in appearing on-deck in the initial weeks of the voyage. Shortly before sailing from Nantucket, Ahab was found lying on the ground at night, unconscious, his ivory leg displaced and nearly piercing his groin; he was cured of his injury only with “extreme difficulty.” “That direful mishap was at the bottom of his temporary reclusiveness.” His small circle of acquaintances on-shore invested this “hinted casualty…with terrors, not entirely underived from the land of spirits and of wails,” and “conspired…to muffle up the knowledge of this thing from others.” Fedallah and the Manilan tigers were equally secretive and not at all entirely so underived; a reader might speculate that they bear some responsibility for the direful mishap. Is Ahab’s rumored ‘deal with the devil’ (suggested by down-to-earth Stubb) the result of what amounts to a physical and spiritual protection racket? Ahab himself thinks of such matters as a great-souled man, perverted, might: “While even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them…at bottom, all heart-woes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an arch-angelic grandeur” derive from “the sourceless primogenitures of the gods,” the Saturn-world. “The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.” Readers see yet again the affinity of outlook between Ahab and Ishmael, his chronicler, who concludes, “let the unseen, ambiguous synod of the air, or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain practical procedures;—he called a carpenter.” That sounds very much like one of Ishmael’s calling-down-to earth deflations of metaphysical portents, except that Jesus, the Man of Sorrows as Ishmael has already recalled, was a carpenter. What manner of man will the ship’s carpenter prove?

The carpenter proved omnicompetent in repair work, but also “unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious”—that is, he undertook projects proposed by the sailors, however odd the jobs may be. In this, he did rather resemble Jesus, the supreme Repairer of any and all who come to Him. But unlike Jesus, this carpenter was a stolid man, “with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, at one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world,” an ignorer of persons. “He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers.” If a sort of Creator-Repairer of his creation, he resembled the god of Ishmael’s world, not the Bible’s, with an “unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes…talking all the time to keep himself awake.” Ishmael’s cosmic weaver, whether personified or not, parodies the solitary God of the Bible.

To make his new leg, Ahab employed both the carpenter and the blacksmith. The blacksmith set to work on the buckle-screw, forged with fire. Ahab approved, observing that fire animated man in the Promethean myth. To Ahab, to Fedallah and the Manilans, life is fire, and they are would-be spirits of the air, free spirits.

As for the carpenter, Ahab engaged him in dialogue. “I dare say thou callest thyself a good workmanlike workman, eh?” If so, can you drive away my sensation of the ‘phantom limb’? “Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?”—as the New Testament testifies of Jesus. The carpenter, stolid creator within a cosmos that answers no questions, merely asked if the ‘phantom limb’ story is true. Assuring him that it is, Ahab pressed on: “How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite?” In the gospel according to Ahab, the existence of a soul is an unlifted curse: “If I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!” His laugh is sardonic because Ahab seethed at the thought of needing another being—God or neighbor— for redemption. “Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books.” Wealthy, he nonetheless saw that he “owes for the flesh in the tongue I brag with.” He wished he could “get a crucible, and [go] into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra”—a compact, self-sufficient piece of whale-ivory, and thus like the god of the Arsacidians. Ahab hated Jesus for two things: He hated the God of the Bible because He prevented him from being a fiery air-spirit, free to fly; he hated God also for creating him, thereby incurring a debt, preventing his self-sufficiency. The remedies he sought—demonic freedom and a sort of ‘crucifixion’ that would condense him into a piece of the lifeless, ivory part of the god that is the cosmos, a piece both tiny and “compendious”—flatly contradict themselves, unless the crucifixion proves the gateway to liberation. But only the God of the Bible can effect that. Or is it rather that Ahab wants to become like his leg, dead and unfeeling, relieved of all sorrows and pain? But that doesn’t solve the problem of the phantom limb, the question of the soul.

Ishmael immediately moves to show how Ahab’s rebellious-tyrannical soul ruled in his regime. As the ship neared the whale-rich seas near Formosa, the sperm-oil casks stowed in the hull began to leak. When First Mate Starbuck asked the Captain for permission to pull the casks up with heavy-duty block and tackle and repair the damaged ones, Ahab characteristically related it all to himself. “Let it leak! I’m all aleak myself!” But what will the owners say, Starbuck asked—as he hoped, rhetorically. He provoked a tyrannical riposte: “Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye, my conscience is in this ship’s keel.” Entreatingly, Starbuck said he wanted the two of them “to understand each other better than hitherto,” but the tyrant recurred to force, threatening him with a musket, ordering him back on deck. No coward, Starbuck governed his temper, got up from the cabin chair “half calmly,” and concluded the conversation. “Thou hast outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab.” Alone, Ahab noted that brave Starbuck “nevertheless obeys”—”a most careful bravery, that!” But he also acknowledged to himself that “there’s something there” in the First Mate’s admonition. He followed Starbuck on deck, and made an equally telling, double-edged remark to him: “Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck.” Relenting, Ahab commanded that the casks be lifted. Ishmael, whose knowledge of men’s thoughts seems to come and go, offers two possible explanations for Ahab’s reversal: “It may have been a flash of honesty in him; or a mere prudential policy,” given the urgency of his own mission and his need to avoid any rebellion on board, however remote that possibility may be.

The sailors excavated cask after cask. Queequeg developed a fever caused by “crawling around amid that dampness and slime.” Near death, he too had a request for the carpenter: to build a canoe, so that his body may be placed in it and set adrift, in the way of warriors’ funerals on his native island. He got out of his sickbed long enough to try out the canoe-coffin, which he found satisfactory. Pip hovered nearby, calling himself a coward, Queequeg a general. And if Queequeg reached the Antilles, would he please seek out Pip—who, Pip knew, was lost at sea. But Queequeg wouldn’t be going anywhere; he recovered as suddenly as he had fallen ill, claiming that he willed himself to live, having recalled some duty on-shore. “Mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.” The coffin became his sea-chest, which he marked with same figures and drawings with which he’d been tattooed by “a departed prophet and seer on his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth” in a script Queequeg himself could not read. And so the theory and the treatise alike would perish with him, “unsolved to the last.” Ahab considered him one morning. Never one to overlook yet another source of self-torment, he exclaimed, “Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”—those beings who reveal their secrets in signs no man can comprehend, beyond the prophet who receives the revelations.

The Pequod entered the South Sea, Ishmael’s dreamed-of destination. “This mysterious divine Pacific zones the whole world about, makes all coasts bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.” Pan-like, it also seemed an Arcadia of the water, full of the pleasures of music and nymphs. “But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain” in “that sea in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming.” He turned next to the blacksmith, with his “patient hammer wielded by a patient arm.” No Biblical echoes in him: It was Hephaestus who made weapons for the Olympians before being flung by Zeus from the heavens into the ocean. The same thing happened to blacksmith Perth. On land he had enjoyed a happy home, but met with a double assault from the fates: first, his home was emptied by a burglar whom he “himself did ignorantly conduct” into it. “It was the Bottle Conjuror!”—alcoholic drink, to be sure, but also a reference to a hoax in a London theater in 1749, in which a crowd paid to see a magician place himself into a quart bottle, only to be disappointed. Ahab had wished to perform a similar trick of self-concentration, equally impossible. (Hephaestus too suffered a delusion, marrying seductive Aphrodite only to be cuckolded by warlike Ares.) The blacksmith never regained his prosperity; his older brother died, leaving him with crushing additional responsibilities. Eventually, his wife and two of their children also died. “The houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape.” But like Hephaestus, instead he went to sea; “the all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful new-life adventures.” He is deceived again, but this time by the beckoning mermaids, who promise marriage but only after death.

Ahab met Perth’s patience with impatience. “How can’st thou endure without being mad?” But although he could face agonies imposed by the fates and even by himself, even this blacksmith couldn’t smooth the creases on the Captain’s brow, what Ahab took to be the birth-mark on the brow of man, incised by cruel gods. Perth could obey his captain’s orders, making him a harpoon out of hardest steel, the kind used for the nails in the hooves of race horses. Once the harpoon was forged, Ahab insisted on finishing the job himself, as Fedallah gazed at the flame. Ahab had the finished harpoon tempered with the blood of the pagan harpooneers “in the name of the devil.” The pole was hickory, the hardest American hardwood; new tow-line was braided for the rope. “This done, pole, iron, and rope—like the Three Fates—remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with the weapon,” his “delirious” howls mocked by the “wretched laugh” of mocking Pip. Are the three Fates to doom Moby-Dick, or will they entwine Ahab?

If ivory stands for the lifeless framework of the cosmos, steel for the lifeless thing that kills life, the gold of the sunset on the peaceful Pacific stands for life, giving the ocean the appearance of a “rolling prairie” full of flowers and tall grasses. “All this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate,and form one seamless whole.” “However temporary,” the effects of “such soothing scenes,” they moderated Ahab—the sunlight’s “golden keys” opening “his own secret golden treasuries,” until “his breath upon them prove[d] but tarnishing.” “Would to God these blessed calms would last,” Ishmael mused, but, as the weaver-god would have it, “the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.” There is no progress. In this, Ishmael departs from the optimistic historicism of his century and the next. “Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?” Nowhere: “Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.” As before the other golden thing, the doubloon, Starbuck and Stubb found in the glittering Pacific at sunset a reflection of their own souls. Starbuck piously murmured, “Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye!—Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.” But one can’t really look deep down into water that reflects the sunlight. Stubb also stayed on the surface, in his own less meditative way. “I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly!”

And so to the gam with the Bachelor, her whole crew jolly as Stubb. She was an American ship, out of Nantucket, heading home a “glad ship of good luck,” loaded down with casks of sperm oil, its crew dancing with Polynesian girls, all watched over by their jovial, Pan-like captain, who invited Ahab aboard with glass and bottle aloft. To Ahab’s “gritted” query about the White Whale, the ‘Pan’ happily replied, “No; only heard of him; but don’t believe in him at all.” Hoping for some sign of darkness, Ahab asked if he’d lost any men. “Not enough to speak of—two islanders, that’s all,” ‘Pan’ blithely replied. If Ahab will but come aboard and join the party, “I’ll soon take that black from your brow,” that hitherto ineffaceable birth-mark from the gods. Judging him a fool, which in many respects his counterpart surely is, Ahab told  him, “Thou art a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayst” [perhaps disaster might yet strike them down]; well, call me an empty ship, and outward bound.” This is the only other “call me” command spoken in the yarn, echoing Ishmael’s original. In both cases, they are spoken by a self-understood outcast, and in both cases spoken accurately. “So go thy ways, and I will mine,” Ahab bids—his way against the gentle breeze, the Bachelor‘s ways with it. Reminded of the home toward which the opposite ship was bound, Ahab took a small vial filled with sand, Nantucket sand, the land on which his young wife awaited him. But unlike his pipe, which he disdainfully pitched into the sea because it gave him pleasure, Ahab didn’t empty the vial and throw it away. He did indeed have his humanities.