Herman Melville and the Problem of Evil



96            Public Lectures

preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and
they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit
bannister.”17

After the book was published, he wrote a wonderful, ex-
uberant letter to Hawthorne. He says, “A sense of unspeak-
able security is in me at this moment, on account of your
having understood the book. I have written a wicked book,
and feel spotless as the lamb . . .” He concludes, “Lord, when
shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more
to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby
Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not
the biggest fish;—I have heard of Krakens.”18

Thus, he stepped on to his next book, Pierre, which did in
a way turn out to be that fabulous Scandinavian sea monster,
the kraken.
Pierre is also, at bottom, if one can find a bot-
tom, based on the problem of evil. But where
Moby Dick had
been a clear cut struggle of man against fate, going down to a
predictable but somehow glorious defeat,
Pierre is not so
straightforward. Its subtitle,
The Ambigztities, suggests the
approach. Here the author attempts to study something
that had puzzled him since he first saw the missionaries in the
South Pacific. How is it that so often man’s attempt to do
good seems to be the very thing that brings forth evil? This
basic ambiguity in life obviously leads straight to the prob-
lem of evil.

Here is the story: Pierre Glendinning, only son of a doting
mother, whom he idolizes along with the memory of his dead
father, and heir to the vast ancestral estate of Saddle Mead-
ows along the Hudson, is engaged to marry Lucy Tartan.
The future seems to hold for him nothing but beauty and
wealth, when suddenly he meets a poverty-stricken girl
named Isabel, who reveals to him that she is his half-sister,
the illegitimate daughter of his sainted father. His initial



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