Herman Melville and the Problem of Evil



106           Public Lectures

hearted humanity, a broad sympathy with human suffering.
And he did not give up. He escaped the native optimism that
both Emerson and Whitman lived to repent; as William But-
ler Yeats has said, Emerson and Whitman “have begun to
seem superficial, precisely because they lack the Vision of
Evil.”31 Melville passed through the bleak despair in which
Mark Twain ended his days, but Melville came out the other
side. As even the optimistic Emerson said in his essay “Fate” :
“Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buf-
foons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned
themselves to face it.” In keeping his face Constantlytoward
evil Herman Melville gave us our closest approach to great
tragedy.

William S. Dix

NOTES

1RadosIav Tsanoff, The Nature of Evil (New York, 1931), p. 6.

2Wiilard Thorp, ed., Herman Melville: Representative Selections (New York, 1938),
P- 393-

3Herman Melville, Typee (London, 1922), p. ι8.

iIbid., p. 167.

6Herman Melville, Mardi (London, 1922), II, 276-77.

6Z⅛√., II, 124-25.

2Ibid., II. 358.

8Philo M. Buck, Jr., Literary Criticism (New York, 1930), pp. 259-60.

3Meade Minnigerode, Some Personal Letters of Herman Melville and a Bibliogra-
phy
(New York, 1922), p. 52.

10Tborp, op. cit., p. 333

11Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife (Boston, 1885), I, 404.

12Thorp, op. cit., p. 388.

13Ibid.

11Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (London, 1922), I, 229-30.

16Ibid., I, 204.

“Julian Hawthorne, op. cit., I, 40.

17Thorp, op. cit., p. 390.

13Ibid., pp. 394-95.

19Herman Melville, Pierre (London, 1923), p. 499.

-3Ibid., p. 298.

21Ibid., p. 299.

22Ibid., p. 293.

23Ibid., p. 380-81.

21Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Note-Books, ed. Randall Stewart (NewYork,
i9+ι)> PP- 432^33-



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