Herman Melville and the Problem of Evil

98            Public Lectures

writhe their way to the surface out of Melville’s subcon-
scious. Biographers, reading in various autobiographical
interpretations, have butchered facts to make a Freudian
holiday. Here, however, we are concerned with only one
phase of the book.

Melville is still intent upon the problem of evil. Here he
probes deep into the basic ambiguity of Good and Evil. How
can good produce evil? Halfway through the novel MeIville
discusses an imaginary tract that Pierre reads, a tract that
concludes that “in things terrestrial . . . a man must not be
governed by ideas celestial . . .,”²⁰ that ideal virtue is impos-
sible on the earth, and that “a virtuous expediency, then,
seems the highest desirable or attainable earthly excellence
for the mass of men, and is indeed the only earthly excellence
that their Creator intended for them.”²¹ On this conclusion
Melville comments, “For to me it seems more the excellently
illustrated re-statement of a problem, than the solution of the
problem itself.”²² A virtuous expediency is no solution for the
problem of evil.

As the book is conceived, it is obviously a variation of the
Hamlet theme—a young man is suddenly faced by an aware-
ness of corruption and in his attempt to act brings down ca-
tastrophe on himself and others. The tragic materials are
there; here is a conflict with Fate in which the protagonist
goes down to destruction. Why then is Pierre an artistic
failure? Why does the pile of corpses at the end produce in
the reader only the emotion of laughter, rather than the real
catharsis, the purging of the emotions that is engendered by
Hamlet ?

The principal reason, I believe, is that Melville makes
Pierre hopeless. His struggle with Fate is never lighted by his
belief in his own possible success. In tragedy Fate must win,
of course, but the protagonist must also win some glory, even

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