Herman Melville and the Problem of Evil



Melville and the Problem of Evil 103
For Christianity’s answer, as Melville had admitted in ‘Mar-
di,’ was not easily brushed aside; it had something worth
saying concerning the problem of evil which, after all, is the
inner theme of ‘Benito Cereno.”’28 Melville had passed the
apex of his great quest and was now willing to consider solu-
tions which in his youthful impatience he had brushed aside.

The Confidence Man, however, published in 1857, is more
pessimistic, less philosophical. Here, in a wordy, repetitious
story of a swindler and his victims on a Mississippi steamer,
Melville transfers his distrust of the creator to the created,
man. The characters in the book are all either shrewd and
vicious or innocent, stupid, and gullible. Melville is never un-
interesting, for there is an electric mental vigor behind all of
his work, but here he is almost unreadable.
The Confidence
Man
is at the opposite pole from great tragedy.

This was the last prose published by Melville during his
lifetime. I hurry over the next thirty years, full of interest
to the biographer and the psychologist, but as yet incom-
pletely studied. Melville, his early reputation forgotten, bur-
ied in the anonymity of an obscure customs house job, re-
mained silent, but still thinking, still studying.

He did publish quietly several volumes of poems, which
were unnoticed by his contemporaries and which there is not
time to consider here. I should point out, nevertheless, that
one very long poem,
Clarel, does consider the problem of evil.
One cannot adequately paraphrase such a work in a sentence,
but one conclusion is that if good cannot exist without evil,
neither can evil exist without good. Melville is turning, look-
ing at the other side of the picture. As Professor Sedgwick
has said, “His criticism of the nineteenth century may be
restated thus: in its materialism it denied the good; in its
idealism it denied the evil. In either case it denied the reality
of life, and, denying this reality, humanity withered on all



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