No two persons can meet at more than a few points, consciously. If two people can just be together fairly often, so that the presence of each is a sort of balance to the other, that is the basis of perfect relationship. There must be true separatenesses as well. Melville was, at the core, a mystic and an idealist. Perhaps, so am I. And he stuck to his ideal guns. I abandon mine. He was a mystic who raved because the old ideal guns shot havoc. The guns of the "noble spirit." Of "ideal love." I say, let the old guns rot. Get new ones, and shoot straight. XI. HERMAN MELVILLE'S "MOBY DICK" _MOBY DICK, or White Whale._ A hunt. The last great hunt. For what? For Moby Dick, the huge white sperm whale: who is old, hoary, monstrous, and swims alone; who is unspeakably terrible in his wrath, having so often been attacked; and snow-white. Of course he is a symbol. Of what? I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That's the best of it. He is warm-blooded, he is lovable. He is lonely Leviathan, not a Hobbes sort. Or is he? But he is warm-blooded, and lovable. The South Sea Islanders, and Polynesians, and Malays, who worship shark, or crocodile, or weave endless frigate-bird distortions, why did they never worship the whale? So big! Because the whale is not wicked. He doesn't bite. And their gods had to bite. He's not a dragon. He is Leviathan. He never coils like the Chinese dragon of the sun. He's not a serpent of the waters. He is warmblooded, a mammal. And hunted, hunted down. It is a great book. At first you are put off by the style. It reads like journalism. It seems spurious. You feel Melville is trying to put something over you. It won't do. And Melville really is a bit sententious: aware of himself, self-conscious, putting something over even himself. But then it's not easy to get into the swing of a piece of deep mysticism when you just set out with a story. Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in had taste, than Herman Melville, even in a great book like _Moby Dick._ He preaches and holds forth because he's not sure of himself. And he holds forth, often, so amateurishly. The artist was so _much_ greater than the man. The man is rather a tiresome New Englander of the ethical mystical-transcendentalist sort: Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, etc. So unrelieved, the solemn ass even in humour. So hopelessly _au grand serieux_, you feel like saying: Good God, what does it matter? If life is a tragedy, or a farce, or a disaster, or anything else, what do I care! Let life be what it likes. Give me a drink, that's what I want just now. For my part, life is so many things I don't care what it is. It's not my affair to sum it up. Just now it's a cup of tea. This morning it was wormwood and gall. Hand me the sugar. One wearies of the _grand serieux._ There's something false about it. And that's Melville. Oh, dear, when the solemn ass brays! brays! brays!