Herman Melville and the Problem of Evil



84            Public Lectures

ship,” he says in Moiy Dick, “was my Yale College and my
Harvard.” On the other hand, what we may call his adult
education, his ransacking of libraries in search of the answers
to the questions that had begun to plague him, had just
begun. In his thirty-first year he writes to his confidant,
Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Until I was twenty-five, I had no
development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my
life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between
then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself.”2
It was in his twenty-fifth year that he returned from the
South Seas;
Typee appeared two years later.

I believe, therefore, that we will not be far wrong in expect-
ing to find in
Typee the first record of the problems that were
to concern Melville for the remainder of his life. In fixing in
the matrix of print his fantastic experiences in the Mar-
quesas, one thing especially seems to have caught the mind
of Melville. This was a paradox. How did it happen that
civilization, with all of the implications of physical and
spiritual improvement that accompany the word, brought to
the primitive natives only disease and degradation?

He writes:

Alas for the poor savages when exposed to the influence of
these polluting examples! Unsophisticated and confiding, they
are easily led into every vice, and humanity weeps over the
ruin thus remorselessly inflicted upon them by European
civilisers. Thrice happy are they who, inhabiting some yet
undiscovered island in the midst of the ocean, have never
been brought into contaminating contact with the white man.3

Now Melville had read Rousseau, and his attitude is no
doubt in part a product of the traditional primitivistic con-
cept of the noble savage, but his feeling in
Typee is more than
a conventional literary attitude. One is constantly aware in
reading the book that the author is profoundly shocked by
the fact that what ought to be good is evil. To say that he is



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