90 Public Lectures
between Fate and the hero is never clear-cut. Melville does
not yet seem to realize that the tragic protagonist must have
a magnitude, a stature greater than that of Taji if his vain
struggle against Fate is to move his audience. There is in
Mardi little trace of “rebellion with a conscious purpose.”
His contemporary audience, of course, expecting a sea
story, missed the concern with evil and found Mardi merely a
cloudy sort of romance, rather pleasant, but puzzling. His
next two books, however, were what the public wanted, in
spite of the evidence that Melville himself considered them
merely pot-boilers. Redburn is a rather factual account of the
author’s first voyage before the mast to Liverpool and back.
It is a sensitive, rather charming story of a boy’s disillusion-
ment, of his first contact with the evil in the world. In the
light of Melville’s later concern with the subject of this talk
we can see his mind playing back over and illuminating his
earlier experiences, only dimly understood at the time; but
Melville seems to be deliberately reining in the urge to meta-
physical speculation. He is concerned with specific evils—
the starving poor of Liverpool, the horrible sanitary condi-
tions on emigrant ships—rather than with the problem of
evil. It is certainly just as well, for with a wife and a growing
family he needed a book that would sell. He writes to a friend
in December, 1849:
I did not see your say about the book ‘Redburn,’ which to
my surprise (somewhat) seems to have been favorably re-
ceived. I am glad of it, for it puts money into an empty purse.
But I hope I shall never write such a book again.
Tho’ when a poor devil writes with duns all around him,
and looking over the back of his chair, and perching on his
pen, and dancing in his ink-stand—like the devils about St.
Anthony—what can you expect of that poor devil? What but
a beggarly tRedburn.'9 '
White Jacket, which followed immediately, was concerned
with evil, but again only in a practical, reforming sort of way.