Herman Melville and the Problem of Evil

V

HERMAN MELVILLE AND THE
PROBLEM OF EVIL

HERMAN MELVILLE needs, I hope, no introduction.

His position as one of the most important American
writers of the nineteenth century has been pretty well
established since the Melville revival of the 1920’s; my own
belief that he had the most interesting mind among American
writers of the century is the sort of personal opinion that can
never be proved.

His work has been studied from many directions, but
today I should like to look at it from a direction that, I
believe, still remains untried. I propose to examine his prose
work in its relation to a philosophical concept, the problem
of evil. This approach seems to me to place him in his proper
light, not simply as a master teller of sea tales, but in the line
of the great tragic poets, the serious writers who concern
themselves with the central problems of man’s destiny. I
believe that Herman Melville is perhaps the only nineteenth
century American novelist who belongs in this group.

But what is the problem of evil? And why is evil a prob-
lem? Perhaps the simplest way to make clear just what the
problem of evil is, since a problem is after all a question, is to
quote a series of questions from Professor Radoslav Tsanoff’s
The Nature of Evil. Dr. TsanolF points out that the words
optimism and pessimism in general refer to “estimates of the
world and of human life which are dominantly approving or
condemnatory. Philosophically a double problem of evil re-

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