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-

<<   23   24   25   26   27   >>

More intriguing information