Herman Melville and the Problem of Evil

92            Public Lectures

truth, the “usable truth,” which he defined in another letter
to Hawthorne in March of the same year as “the apprehen-
sion of the absolute condition of present things as they strike
the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do their
worst to him,—the man who, like Russia or the British
Empire, declares himself a sovereign nature (in himself)
amid the powers of heaven, hell, and earth. He may perish;
but so long as he exists he insists upon treating with all
Powers upon an equal basis.”¹²

Getting at this “usable truth,” in Melville’s state of mind
in 1851, involved principally a denial of orthodox beliefs;
Melville’s growth had reached the stage of rebellion against
both Calvinism and the easy optimism that he seemed to
feel was characteristic of Emerson and the Transcendental
group. He writes to Hawthorne:

There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He
says No! in thunder; but the Devil himself Cannotmakehim
say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say
no,—why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unin-
cumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into
Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,—that is to say, the
Ego. Whereas these y½^,r-gentry, they travel with heaps of
baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the
Custom House. What’s the reason, Mr. Hawthorne, that in the
last stages of metaphysics a fellow always falls to swearing so?

I could rip an hour.¹³

It is quite obvious that beneath this youthful jesting there
are strong feelings. Moby Dick was a kind of purge of these
feelings.

Everyone knows the story of Moby Dick. We give the book
to high school and even grade school children to read, just as
we give them Gulliver’s Travels. On the story level, Moby Dick
is a great yarn of adventure at sea, backed up by a thousand
accurate details of the romantic occupation of whaling. A
boy called Ishmael, who tells the story, puts out to sea on a

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