But Melville stuck to his ideal. He wrote _Pierre_ to show that the more you try to be good the more you make a mess of things: that following righteousness is just disastrous. The better you are, the worse things turn out with you. The better you try to be, the bigger mess you make. Your very striving after righteousness only causes your own slow degeneration. Well, it is true. No men are so evil to-day as the idealists: and no women half so evil as your earnest woman, who feels herself a power for good. It is inevitable. After a certain point, the ideal goes dead and rotten. The old pure ideal becomes in itself an impure thing of evil. Charity becomes pernicious, the spirit itself becomes foul. The meek are evil. The pure in heart have base, subtle revulsions: like Dostoevsky's Idiot. The whole Sermon on the Mount becomes a litany of white vice. What then? It's our own fault. It was we who set up the ideals. And if we are such fools, that we aren't able to kick over our ideals in time, the worse for us. Look at Melville's eighty long years of writhing. And to the end he writhed on the ideal pin. From the "perfect woman lover" he passed on to the "perfect friend." He looked and looked for the perfect man friend. Couldn't find him. Marriage was a ghastly disillusion to him, because he looked for perfect marriage. Friendship never even made a real start in him--save perhaps his half-sentimental love for Jack Chase, in _White Jacket._ Yet to the end he pined for this: a perfect relationship: perfect mating: perfect mutual understanding. A perfect friend. Right to the end he could never accept the fact that _perfect_ relationships cannot be. Each soul is alone, and the aloneness of each soul is a double barrier to perfect relationship between two beings. Each soul _should_ be alone. And in the end the desire for a "perfect relationship" is just a vicious, unmanly craving. "_Tous nos malheurs viennent de ne pouvoir être seuls._" Melville, however, refused to draw his conclusion. _Life_ was wrong, he said. He refused Life. But he stuck to his ideal of perfect relationship, possible perfect love. The world _ought_ to be a harmonious loving place. And it _can't_ be. So life itself is wrong. It is silly arguing. Because after all, only temporary man sets up the "oughts." The world ought _not_ to be a harmonious loving place. It ought to be a place of fierce discord and intermittent harmonies: which it is. Love ought _not_ to be perfect. It ought to have perfect moments, and wildernesses of thorn bushes. Which it has. A "perfect" relationship ought _not_ to be possible. Every relationship should have its absolute limits, its absolute reserves, essential to the singleness of the soul in each person. A truly perfect relationship is one in which each party leaves great tracts unknown in the other party.