Herman Melville and the Problem of Evil

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find soundings there seems to have produced a profound
spiritual and emotional crisis. He had gone in quest of the
kraken—and the kraken had won. His wife wrote, “We all
felt anxious about the strain on his health in the spring of
1853.”²⁵ But the gods denied him the plea expressed in
Mardi∙. “Better to sink in boundless deeps, than float on
vulgar shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck, if wreck
I do.” Though close to the rocks, he was saved to float for
years on the vulgar shoals he had detested. And in remaining
afloat he perhaps demonstrated a greater nobility of char-
acter than the immature Melville of 1849 could have under-
stood.

Pierre was, of course, unanimously condemned by the
critics, and the two books that followed were almost un-
noticed by American journals. The next book was Israel
Potter, published in 1855 after serialization in Ptttnam s. This
is a good historical novel, the story of a Revolutionary sol-
dier who is captured and taken to England as a prisoner;
various misadventures prevent his return to America for
some forty years, until finally he returns only to die. Melville
has obviously departed from the tremendous theme of the
problem of evil, but his emphasis here is still relevant to our
survey of his growth. For in Israel Potter and in many of the
shorter pieces written about the same time his themes are
obscurity and anonymity, especially the “obscure anony-
mous heroism of life.” As Professor Sedgwick has written,
“His imagination had the virility,” after his own defeat, “to
see heroism in a wholly new perspective and to recognize it
when divorced from all heroic events and circumstances.”²⁸

In The Piazza Tales, however, a collection of short prose
pieces published in 1856, there is one story, “Benito Cereno,”
in which Melville does return directly to the problem of evil.
It is significant, I think, that this is the only short story that

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