THE CONTEMPORARY REVIEWER OF Moby-Dick in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for December 1851—perhaps George Ripley—showed his consciousness of the illustrative and descriptive powers of the novel by commenting on its many characters as “a succession of portraitures” and claiming that they “all stand before us in the strongest individual relief, presenting a unique picture gallery, which every artist must despair of rivaling.” And, indeed, the novel is a picture gallery, not only for its portraiture of human characters but for its brave attempts to portray the whale, for its splendid seascapes, for its narrational pictures delineating scenes that marine painters like Gudin and Isabey, otherwise very praiseworthy, had neglected, and for its sense, often elicited from Ishmael, of the powerful force of Nature as artist.
Like Redburn, Ishmael loves art and sees objects and scenes as art objects. Because Melville learned a great deal about art after completing Redburn, read much, and visited English and European museums, galleries, and exhibitions during his 1849–50 voyage, it is inevitable that Ishmael will be more knowledgeable than his predecessor.1 At the very beginning of Moby-Dick, Ishmael tries to account for his deep feelings about the sea, and one of his examples evokes, by means of an ekphrastic description, a typical landscape. “But here is an artist,” he says. “He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco.” There follows a careful delineation of the elements that would go into such a painting—trees, hermit, cottage, meadow, and cattle. This is simply the foreground of a rather complicated picture; in the distant background are woodlands and mountains. But the central feature of the painting is water, and “all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eyes were fixed upon the magic stream before him” (4–5).
Ishmael, the connoisseur, gives precise details of his imagined painting, using the language of nineteenth-century art criticism to enumerate its beauties. The essence of this “romantic landscape” is its air of timelessness and repose; variants of the word “sleep” appear three times within one sentence, and the picture itself is said to lie “thus tranced,” as if in a dazed state between sleep and waking. The pine tree, in a favored form of the pathetic fallacy, “shakes down its sighs like leaves.” The diction has a Tennysonian ring, and the landscape is somewhat like that of “The Lotos-Eaters,” where “the languid air did swoon, / Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.” The stream in Ishmael’s picture does not move, but the artist must give it the sense of movement, for that is its magic in an otherwise tranced effect. Melville, fond of langorous landscapes, uses such a one in a late poem, “Pontoosuc,” where a lake substitutes for a stream and “further fainter mountains keep / Hazed in romance impenetrably deep” (Collected Poems 248). Such a Melvillean landscape aims for the picturesquely beautiful rather than the sublime, a view not only of the Saco Valley but also one he will observe in the Berkshires, at Lake Pontoosuc and at Arrowhead.2
This early sortie into the critiquing of landscape art establishes Ishmael’s credentials as an experienced observer, able to find the exact words to describe the effects of a painting upon the viewer. Behind his confident language is an impressive amount of writing about the picturesque and the beautiful in the works of William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight, among others, and in the British poetry of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.3 Much of what had then been said earned the scorn heaped on it by Ruskin, the “graduate of Oxford,” whose Modern Painters Melville must have read by 1849. The book would have had a powerful effect upon his thinking about art, for he is caught between the older views of the lovers of the picturesque and the modernism of Ruskinian thought. In the landscape he writes of in Moby-Dick, he is describing a typical scene, possibly a Claude, a Cuyp, or a Constable painting. Or he could have in mind the work of an American contemporary, an Asher Durand, a John Frederick Kensett, or almost any of the more or less anonymous painters exhibited by the Art-Union and praised or scoffed at by the art critic of The Literary World.
Ishmael’s pictorial imagination, exercised by the connection of landscape to water, finds itself challenged by the painting in the Spouter-Inn, “a very large oil-painting” that at first baffles his eye and his cognitive faculties. He offers the acute suggestion that “at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched.”4 The picture, he finds, demands careful study, repeated viewings, and questions posed to others who have seen it. It is, indeed, a paradoxical work of art, a “boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly” that nevertheless possesses “a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity” that makes it, finally, into a “marvelous painting.” Since the picture is both soggy and squitchy (or perhaps squishy), its chiaroscuro mostly the result of dirty smoke, defacement, and bad lighting in the entryway, Ishmael’s excuse for its sublimity is even more marvelous than the canvas itself.
In Melville and Turner, Robert Wallace presents a complex interpretation of the Spouter-Inn painting as “arguably the most significant of Ishmael’s many attempts to ‘paint’ the whale in words” (324). Since rendering a portrait of the elusive whale is one of Ishmael’s chief concerns, this picture and his comments on it are crucial to the development of the novel. Wallace’s study is an intricate demonstration of Melville’s understanding of and practice of J. M. W. Turner’s “powerful aesthetic of the indistinct” (3). Because the picture itself is a demonstrable exhibit of the indistinct and the indefinite, Wallace’s argument that Ishmael’s description “establishes the aesthetic of the entire novel” is forceful (325). He convincingly displays Melville’s debt, not to any specific Turner painting, but to a review that Thackeray contributed in 1845 to Fraser’s Magazine (325–27). Manfred Putz rightly discusses the passage as showing Ishmael in “the role of reviewer and outspoken critic of non-verbal presentations of art” who spends time describing his reactions to the picture rather than offering a description of the art object itself (160–62). What might be added, though Putz does not do so, is that the picture is almost certainly a poor one; we could hardly expect the entryway of the cheapest inn in New Bedford, “a queer sort of place—a gable-ended old house, one side palsied as it were,” to be graced by a marine masterpiece.
However, there are other dimensions to this unique painting. The elements of Ishmael’s description offer a humorously inclined observer, puzzled but earnest. Since the whole narrative is presented as that of a worldly and wise older speaker, he might well have gotten, and revealed, the point immediately, but instead he leaves his younger self poised on the dilemmas of the unresolved negatives, whose wild conclusions about the picture “might not be altogether unwarranted.” Recognizing that his first, rather lewd, impression of the central figure as a “long, limber, portentous, black mass of something” might discredit the painting, he looks at it with an eye to its “half-attained, unimaginable sublimity” and begins to see new possibilities—”the Black Sea in a midnight gale,” which would surely be a dark picture, or the elements in “unnatural combat,” exaggerated and grotesque, or, better still, “a blasted heath,” a Salvatorean land scape, or, best of all, “a Hyperborean winter scene” or an allegorical “breaking up of the ice-bound stream of Time”—all excellent possibilities for the portrayal of the sublime. But the sublimity is in question, and the terminology is self-defeating. Either the sublime is attained or it is not; and the sublime, however remote, must be, at the very least, imaginable. The reader, who cannot see the picture and can hardly visualize it by using Ishmael’s determinedly false disclosures, is at the mercy of this imaginative art critic and is thus at the disadvantage of having to accept Ishmael’s conclusion that “In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads” (13). With all its potential for sensationalism, this portrait of an exasperated leviathan is nearer to one of Ishmael’s “monstrous pictures of whales” than the wonderfully “bright, but, alas, deceptive” themes that Ishmael has already conceived for it.
Melville’s pointed satire in his ekphrasis of the whale painting is so gratifying that it takes attention from Ishmael’s study of other art objects in the inn, of which there are many, including examples of primitive art like “monstrous clubs and spears” and the more modern “whaling lances and harpoons,” all utilitarian instruments of destruction. Nevertheless, unlike modern tools, primitive ones are aesthetically improved with the embellishment of teeth and hair. In the public room of the inn, itself an architectural maze of ponderous beams and wrinkled planks, are glass cases of “dusty rarities,” never enumerated. The bar itself is a masterpiece of folkish art, “a rude attempt at a right whale’s head,” containing “the vast arched bone of the whale’s jaw.” The sailors in the bar compare pieces of scrimshaw and “a ruminating tar” is busy carving the likeness of “a ship under full sail” upon the old wooden settle. The sublimity of the whaling painting has been “unimaginable” because Ishmael’s description has undercut the sublime with his reductive humor. In the account of the other art objects in the inn, the sublime is domesticated and given a humanizing dimension by being reduced to the rough picturesque. The whale’s jaws, which could be fearful, become decorative. The weapons are simply colorful. The menacing teeth of the whale have to give way to the attractions of scrimshaw. Nevertheless, the passage is important to the novel’s major themes. By entering the public room, one gains access to “some old craft’s cockpits.” The bar, however, entered through the whale’s mouth, is the comic representation of the belly of Jonah’s whale, where the bartender “sells the sailors deliriums and death.”5
Queequeg, Ishmael’s roommate for the night at the inn, is himself a work of art. Adorned with tattoos, his face presents an aspect that, to Ishmael’s first astonished view, is repellent. Even upon later and more reasoned observation, he seems “hideously marred about the face,” as Ishmael puts it, being careful to add—in the best tradition of the dilettante art observer—”at least to my taste” (49). Ishmael’s taste, formed in the raw and rural America of the 1830s, is unprepared for the combination of primitivism and sophistication in the art of an island like Kokovoko, the “true place” that is not on any map. Some of the young Ishmael’s art education consists of dropping his provincialism and coming to some understanding of what he sees in a larger world, and he begins well by recognizing that “through his unearthly tattooings,” Queequeg “reminded me of General Washington’s head, as seen in the popular busts of him” (49–50), possibly one of the many busts of the general executed by Jean-Antoine Houdon. The whiteness of the marble bust and its insistence upon structure and contour make it “an object of virtu.” The sculptural refinement of the savage’s head, “phrenologically an excellent one,” is a triumph of form over mere surface colors and shadings.
In addition to being a highly embellished objet d’art, Queequeg is also an artist. His ebony idol, the object of his devotions, is not, to his way of thinking, complete and self-sustaining. At intervals, he whittles away at its nose to improve the appearance of its little face. This revelation is momentous, although Ishmael does not at first comprehend it. The ebony image is like the vast cathedral at Cologne, an unfinished and never-to-be-finished work of reverential art and an answer to Ishmael’s prayer, “God keep me from ever completing anything” (145). Like the cathedral builders, Queequeg locates his artistic ambition close to the facts of his physical and religious life, shaping and reshaping the source of his reverence. He does something quite similar after recovering from his terrible illness, embellishing his coffin lid “with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth” (480). “Such artist-savages,” says Paul Brodtkorb, “make material worthless in itself into things of value as, patiently, they literally fill their time with meaning” (133). Because Queequeg, “in his own proper person,” is a riddle “whose mysteries not even himself could read,” the hieroglyphs upon his body are incomprehensible except as art, “a set of empty signs,” as Peter J. Bellis suggests, “inscribed on a hollow, lifeless text” (63). After the meanings that once connected the artwork with faith have been lost, the art remains, ineluctably. Queequeg’s hieroglyphic and artistic tattoo matches the hieroglyphs carved by Nature upon the visible surface of the whale, and both adumbrate a cosmology and a belief inexplicable because they have become lost mysteries. Ahab realizes with keen distress that these markings are like the water and fruits of King Tantalus, receding when reached for, and thus he exclaims, “when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg—‘Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods’” (481).6
In what seems to be a less exalted position as artist, Queequeg collaborates with Ishmael to create an object that, by its most superficial description, barely qualifies as an objet d’art. This is the mat in chapter 47, “The Mat-Maker.” The sword-mat is work for a lazy day, and the two men are only “mildly employed” in their work. Queequeg, while using the sword and “idly looking off upon the water,” now and then “carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn” (214). Nevertheless, this rather crude object evokes, in Melville’s ekphrasis, the most carefully calculated and measured of philosophical reflections upon fate and necessity. In John Wenke’s perceptive analysis of the passage, “Melville’s narrator is alert to the mind’s ability to forge symbolic correspondences” (103), and Wenke links this passage with the figural language of weaving that appears in the description of the bower in the Arsacides (109). The careful and elaborate ekphrasis of the temple fashioned from the whale’s skeleton is the motive for the introduction of the “weaver-god,” who, deafened by his weaving, cannot hear his mortal dependents (Moby-Dick 450).
Ishmael, self-styled painter in words and our cicerone in the joined worlds of whaling and art, has read and seen all that Melville has read and seen and seems determined that we shall learn all that he has learned. It is easy to tell that he has become fascinated by all the dimensions of the whaling industry, and if he must give us an enormous volume of information, speculation, and myth, well and good. But if he can also pack in the memoirs of travelers, explorers, and whalers, Kantian, Lockean, and Cartesian philosophy, nineteenth-century science, a personal view of free will and necessity, the glories of Shakespearean and Hawthornesque literary art, the exotic thought of Pierre Bayle and Thomas Browne, so much the better. And if, like Melville, he has been studying art and seeing paintings, statues, palaces, and cathedrals, he will certainly want to get in everything he has learned, thought about, and guessed. A great autodidact, Ishmael is also an incorrigible pedagogue.
In Nantucket, there is a choice of whaling ships, but after Ishmael has “peered and pryed about the Devil-Dam” and “hopped over to the Tit-Bit,” appropriate activities for a curious young man, given the sexual attractions of ships’ names, he observes the Pequod, and, “having looked around her for a moment,” decides quickly. Given his penchant for art, and even the odd and exotic in art, his quick decision seems inevitable, for the ship is a work of nautical art, designed as much for her odd beauty as for her function. Ishmael’s language blooms into metaphor as he tries to describe her. She has “an old fashioned clawfooted look about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened like a French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia” (69). As an epithet for the ship, “claw-footed” may have something to do with the characteristic form of furniture legs, and cabriole is the description of the shape that curves outward and then narrows into an ornamental foot, resembling “the foreleg of a capering animal.” The most distinctive of ornamental feet is the claw and ball, or clawfoot shape, found often in Queen Anne and Chippendale pieces. The origins of the clawfoot are not clear but seem to rise from Oriental sources portraying a dragon claw holding a jewel. The sphere held in the claw may be the great sphere of the world, but, like other meaningful art objects, it has lost meaning and is sometimes reduced to simple embellishment. Still, as Ishmael recognizes, the clawfooted little ship does have its claws into the world of oceanic terrors.
The Pequod’s complexion, dark “like a French grenadier’s,” takes its coloration from paintings of the Napoleonic period and the monarchical restoration. The historical canvases of Horace Vernet and Paul Delaroche were popular in the gallery of Goupil and Vibert in New York during the 1840s, where Melville could have studied them. During his European visit, Melville went to the Luxembourg Palace, where he saw pictures “of modern French school,” and at Versailles, on December 6, 1849, he viewed “Splendid paintings of battles” (Journals 32–33). In their “Explanatory Notes” for Moby-Dick, Mansfield and Vincent add the names of Eugène Delacroix, Francois Gerard, and Ary Scheffer to those of Vernet and Delaroche as artists whose work Melville would have seen at the palace (749–50), and in the novel there is a reference to the paintings at Versailles, “where the beholder fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of France” (230). The military paintings of Théodore Géricault may well have been a part of Melville’s experience at this time. Two versions of Géricault’s Portrait of a Carabinier and one of a Wounded Cuirassier present the darkened coloration that Ishmael finds so characteristic of the Pequod.
Ishmael’s next observation has to do with some architectural effects, for the masts of the ship “stood stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne.” This is an allusion to something that Melville did not see. Reaching Cologne on December 9, 1849, he visited the cathedral, whose “everlasting ‘crane’ stands on the tower,” and inside “saw the tomb of the Three Kings of Cologne— their skulls.” Horsford indicates that a chapel held “three skulls with the names of Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar spelled out on the reliquary in precious stones” and speculates that Melville’s reference to spines could be “in allusion to their upright figures in relief on the reliquary” (Journals 35–36, 348–49). Whatever the case, Ishmael is conjoining this view of masts to the Spouter-Inn picture, in which the “half-foundered ship” does not appear and only its spiny masts are visible. Skulls and spines are death images that will be part of his iconography of ships’ masts and look ahead to the tremendous image of the Pequod, at last, foundered with only its masts showing. Spines and vertebrae (at least the whale’s vertebrae) are featured later in the book as works of art, intimations of the past, objects of child’s play, and refuge for the noble Ahab, victim of the quotidian. Another deeply disturbing allusion to death occurs in Ishmael’s comparison of the ship’s decks to “the pilgrim-worshipped flagstone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled.” On November 6, 1849, Melville visited the cathedral and stood in the “Ugly place where they killed him” (Journals 13, 260). The complexity of Melville’s iconographic thinking appears in his exposition of the kinds of knowledge that Ishmael, as an older narrator, possesses. He later reminds us of “one of the most remarkable incidents in all the business of whaling…. the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil” during the slaughter and beheading of the whale, “condemned to the pots” (356). The murder of Becket, as Melville knew, was a well-known iconographic topic.
So far, the pictorial relationships recalled to Ishmael are the ship’s “old antiquities.” But the new features that he now addresses are the work of Peleg and others, “pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed.” Peleg’s adornment of the vessel recalls the great geographical and cultural range of Melville’s allusive pictorialism, for the “grotesqueness” and “quaintness, both of material and device,” are inlaid as “marvellous features” and are “unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake’s carved buckler or bedstead.” And, further, he notes the resemblance to the “pendants of polished ivory” that would deck an Ethopian emperor (69–70). Ishmael is well equipped to handle the niceties of art description, moving easily from a term like “device” to the specifics of bucklers, bedsteads, and pendants. The geographical breadth is justified in the case of Peleg, the biblical figure, “for in his days was the earth divided” (Gen. 10:25). This division is the dispersal of populations after the deluge, and, through their arts, the diverse peoples of the world are more closely drawn together, a theme omnipresent in the novel.
Horsford conjectures that the Independence, the ship on which Melville returned from his 1849–50 journey, served, at least in part, as a model for the Pequod. Melville recorded that the ship “looks small—& smells ancient” (Journals 42, 362). The factual basis may certainly be there, but the ekphrastic passage reveals Melville’s intention to create, in painterly and sculptural terms, a work of art mythic in its dimensions. The ship is “a cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies.” Chasing is a form of ornamentation achieved by engraving or embossing. The bulwarks are “garnished,” or adorned, with the sperm whale’s teeth so that they resemble a whale’s jaw. We are meant to remember the bar of the Spouter-Inn, with its adornment of the whale’s jaw. As a final decorative note, there is a tiller the ship “sported,” “curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe,” for she scorns “a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm.” The ship has become a personage by tricking, sporting, and scorning, and with good reason, since she is characterized much as are the cathedrals of Cologne and Canterbury. Her helm is reverend, as, indeed, she must be in her resemblance to these massive, revered, and ancient structures dedicated in some way to murder and death. This rich embellishment of the Pequod, like the richness of Queequeg’s tattoo and the elaborate carving of his coffin lid, as well as the intricacy of scrimshaw, is intended to make the point that, often, the most sophisticated artistry of execution is the province of the artist whose skills are part of his life, work, and spiritual condition and thus worth more than the formal results of the trained artist. The builders of the ship have lavished the best of their craftsmanship upon its construction and thus created a work of nautical architecture. Peleg, unconscious of his artistry, has made her into a jewel that would delight the eye of anyone as intoxicated by art as Ishmael clearly is.
The interest in architectural and sculptural effects extends, as we have seen, to the public room of the Spouter-Inn, but it hardly surfaces in the description of the exterior of the Whaleman’s Chapel. Considering Melville’s fondness for topographical and architectural prints, this seems strange.7 Once in the chapel, however, Ishmael sees much to attract his eye. The marble cenotaphs and their inscriptions engage his attention and he is moved to careful notice of the pulpit, whose “panelled front was in the likeness of a ship’s fluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship’s fiddle-headed beak” (43). The ladder, “by no means in bad taste,” is part of the general embellishment, with red-worsted man-ropes and mahogany-colored rungs. Ishmael, always drawn to paintings, pays special attention to the picture on the wall behind the pulpit, lavishing some of his best language upon it. It represents
a gallant ship beating against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy breakers. But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel’s face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance from the ship’s tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into the Victory’s plank where Nelson fell. “Ah, noble ship,” the angel seemed to say, “beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling off—serenest azure is at hand.” (39–40)
Behind this typical piece of American nautical and religious painting is a solid basis in fact. Mansfield and Vincent point out that a painting somewhat like this was to be found in the Boston church of Father Edward Taylor, a picture “representing a ship in a stiff breeze off a lee shore” (615–16).
This ekphrasis is of great interest because of the contradictory elements depicted in its description. The storm-driven ship could be right out of one of Salvator Rosa’s paintings, or it could be an iconographic representation of the scene in chapter 23, “The Lee Shore,” which also features “the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land.”8 Melville introduces Jean Hagstrum’s version of ecphrasis, the procedure of “giving voice and language to the otherwise mute art object” (18), and thus the angel can offer a cheering message to the ship, even in its fearsome danger. But, in a remarkable metaphorical turnabout, the cheering angel has a tiny face that reminds the viewer of the silver plate on Nelson’s ship, commemorating the death of the admiral and much more in keeping with the somber memorial tablets that decorate the walls of the chapel with their chilling messages.
The tone of the passage is perfectly deadpan, but the painting, as one might expect from a picture stowed away in a New Bedford chapel, is certainly an insipid piece of chapel art that lapses into a foolish sentimentality. It must be compared, for the best effect, with a painting that Melville could have known, J. M. W. Turner’s Fisherman upon a Lee Shore, in Squally Weather. The painting depicts the violence of the storm, the beleaguered sailors, and even the sunlight breaking through the dark clouds. There is no angel to cheer anyone on, and the conclusion looks perilous.9 The chapel’s painting reflects a complex of Melvillean tone and substance. Ishmael’s interpretation of this artwork, like his commentary on the Spouter-Inn picture, shows the thinking of a young man untested by ocean and danger and reasonably comfortable in his superficial religious belief. His creation of the sugary angelic injunction, as suggested by a mawkish picture, is typical of some of the art and art criticism in midcentury America. Painted angels do not—or should not—speak to the beholder, and to pretend that they do is to import an element foreign to the proper study of an art object. Melville is playing off the poorer passages of art critique from The Literary World and other journals and, at the same time, slapping the wrist of the American painter who muddies an original conception, a ship in distress from a powerful onshore storm, with false symbolic values. Ishmael will later criticize the “monstrous pictures of whales” when he has grown in wisdom and experience. The chapel painting is a monstrous distortion of the truth, a pictorial delusion that will have to be corrected to something more closely resembling the true form of a seagoing experience. That will come in “The First Lowering” when, fastened to a whale, Ishmael’s boat is swamped in a real squall. It will come, with even greater force, in the finale when the Pequod sinks and the whaleboats are splintered and drawn into a destructive maelstrom, and Ishmael is just barely rescued by that harbinger of death, a coffin.
Portraiture is a major consideration for Ishmael. He promises to offer a portrait of the whale and labors mightily, in many chapters, to redeem his pledge. Without offering a specific assurance, he does a careful job of depicting his companions on the Pequod’s voyage, or, at least, considering such portrayals. Through his allusive vignette of Bulkington, for example, he prepares us for a fuller picture that never emerges but would probably have developed clearly if Melville had found room for that sailor in the novel. Ishmael’s several observations of Queequeg give a clear picture of that noble and sturdy man “who has never cringed and never had a creditor.” Other characters are embodied in the quick pen strokes of Ishmael’s sketchbook. Starbuck’s thin aridity, Stubb’s attitude and pipe, and Flask’s stoutness and irreverence are captured with ease. The tawny color, sable hair, high cheekbones, and “black rounding eyes” of Tashtego and the gigantic coal-blackness of Daggoo belong to this genre of character description, partly pictorial and partly novelistic. Ahab, however, is given the full ekphrasis of a virtually uninterrupted portrait and, as Edgar Dryden rightly notes, “owes his existence to the creative voice of Ishmael” (90). This creative voice delineates as art experience what it sees of the world and people.
Ishmael is aboard the Pequod for some time before he sees his captain. He has been learning how to cope with the sailor’s life and, from what he has heard and imagined, has constructed a preliminary portrait. But when he sees Ahab, “reality,” he admits, “outran apprehension.” This reality brings forth a rich out-pouring of pictorial elements, some relatively straightforward, some complex and tangled. The captain “looked like a man cut away from the stake when the fire has overruningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them” (123). Here is an imaginative reworking of one of many martyrdom pictures, or perhaps of some art criticism of martyrdom paintings. A typical article that Melville may or may not have seen appeared in the North American Review in October 1830 and offered a lengthy discussion of an exhibition of paintings at the Boston Athenaeum. Commenting upon Titian’s The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, the writer observed that “In the painting, there is, however, no effect of fire observable, either on the person or drapery of the martyr, and his face is turned upward with a perfectly serene and tranquil expression.” The author then remarks upon the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, “when the flames that were kindled at the foot of the stake to which he was attached, retired as they rose from the person of the holy man, and formed a sort of hollow sphere around him, refusing even to singe a hair of his head” (311–12).10 Ahab as fire-consumed martyr is a fitting subject for a remarkable picture, but it is different from Titian’s painting, which shows the saint still upon his torture rack. A major theme in martyrdom paintings is the serenity of the saints during their torture; Ahab, however, is not exactly serene, though he can maintain a posture of repose standing on the quarter deck.
Moving from the haunting images of fire and martyrdom, Ishmael then sees the heroic in Ahab: “His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus.” While Melville first saw Cellini’s Perseus on March 24, 1857, at the Uffizi Palace in Florence, the famous statue was already familiar to him through reproductions in bronze and other materials as well as through prints. Ishmael’s view of Ahab as Perseus is filtered through a complex web of mythopoeia. Guido Reni’s “picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea monster or whale” (261) is a prominent feature of that mythic image. Perseus, “the prince of whalemen” (361), the slayer of Medusa, is fashioned by the cunning art of Cellini into the epitome of the heroic act. For Melville, he is the counterpoise to Laocoön, the hero as sufferer.
As Ishmael traces a visual course from his sculptural consideration of Ahab, his description detailing the “rod-like mark” shifts to painterly language. The tree blasted with lightning is a trademark of “savage” Salvator Rosa’s landscapes and the common property of writers who compose in the rough picturesque. Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley all find room for the Salvatorean landscape in their novels. The tree that grows out of tumbled rocks, its livid mark emphasizing the green life within that persists after disaster, is deeply embedded in Melville’s literary consciousness. Mansfield and Vincent call attention to a lightning-scarred elm that Melville saw in Pittsfield, as well as the ship’s figurehead in Redburn, “seamed and blasted by lightning” (670–71), a landscape effect that Redburn associates with Salvator. In spite of Ruskin’s derisive remarks in Modern Painters about the “ignorance of tree structure,” of which “the most gross examples are in the works of Salvator” (sect. 6, chap. 1), and Melville’s ready assimilation of Ruskinian dicta about the truth of Turner’s paintings, Ishmael, like his creator, comes partly from a pre-Ruskinian era of art appreciation and has been brought up to love the ghastly landscapes of the Neapolitan master, whatever their faults of falseness to nature.
This great scar that winds its way down the captain’s body is quite properly identified with a paradoxical likeness of the portrait of the captain with that of Moby Dick. Clark Davis notes that “Ahab has gradually grown into a reflection of the White Whale” and adds that “the physical precedes, generates the spiritual ailment, at the same time that the recognition of the cosmic body, if repressed, reshapes the warped perceiver” (8). The mutilated figure of Ahab, so prominent in this ekphrasis of his first appearance, and so branded by what may be a birth-mark or the mark “of an elemental strife at sea” (124) associates his portrait with other examples of the horrific sublime that Melville is likely to have known, the horrifying family portrait in Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth, the Wanderer, the loathesome form of the created creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the scenes imprinted upon the tapestries in Poe’s “Metzengerstein,” and the marking of a cursed figure in Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand.”
As Ishmael continues to regard Ahab, he is much struck by the “singular posture” of the captain, who stands, bone leg steadied in an auger hole, “one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud.” Ishmael interprets this posture as showing “an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance” (124). This is a created picture, perhaps without an exact source, but it has something in common with Melville’s view and conception of the statue of Laocoön. The standard view of that artwork is from the much-quoted passage in Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in Murray’s guidebooks, which details the old man’s tragic predicament: “vain / The struggle; vain, against the coiling strain / And gripe, and deepening of the dragon’s grasp.” After seeing the statue itself in 1857, Melville immediately converted his deeply rooted impressions for his “Statues in Rome” lecture, describing the Laocoön as “the very semblance of a great and powerful man writhing with the inevitable destiny which he cannot throw off.”11 There are clearly other elements in this first comprehensive view of Ahab, standing “with a crucifixion in his face,” but there is something Laocoön-like in his “nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.”
Later impressions of Ahab paint him as a Faustian or Promethean figure, even, perhaps, as a Miltonic Satan, surely a monomaniac driven to madness by his external and internal wounds. However, the pictorial complexity of this first representation offers a view somewhat oddly at sorts with later depictions, fastening as it does upon the captain as a martyred saint, a crucified Christ, a mythic hero, and an aged but powerful Laocoön-like figure struggling in the grip of destiny. This earliest impression bears out Ishmael’s first feelings—even before he has seen his captain—that “I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him … and it did not disincline me towards him” (79). In his later observations, Ishmael draws upon a fund of architectural and sculptural terminology to attempt a revelation, in some measure, of Ahab’s “profundities” by taking us to “those vast Roman halls of Thermes” below the “spiked Hotel de Cluny” (185).
A Melvillean journey into these depths is disappointingly recorded in his 1849 journal as “Descended into the vaults of the old Roman palace of Thermis. Baths &c” (Journals 33), but his observations, carefully stored, bloom in this dense pictorial limning of “Ahab’s larger, darker, deeper part.” The monomania is merely a visible level, whereas the chthonic level, man’s “awful essence,” is the part unseen by the casual tourist, as it were, of human feelings and ailments. Ahab’s “awful essence,” in state, is “throned on torsoes,” the stone-carved bodies of sculptures sheared of heads and limbs. Ahab himself is another such torso, completed in the ivory of his leg, which supports, “like a Caryatid,” another broken figure, the architrave, frieze, and cornice of “the piled entablatures of ages.” The passage underlines Melville’s deep involvement with the appearance and language of architecture, an art form of which he sometimes had, as Bryan C. Short aptly puts it, a “visionary rather than visual orientation.”12 He is eager to use the descriptive language of the art, which he has picked up from reading about antiquities, those of Pompeii, Greece, Petra, and Nineveh, and there is sometimes a tinge of the spurious in his easy assumption of the mantle of omniscience, but his splendid rhetorical dominance makes all seem right.
Through his persistent recurrence to the art analogy, Melville gives Ishmael the resources to put Ahab before the reader in something like his astonishing intricacy. The captain is not to be another Enceladus, the sky-storming hero whose leaden visage Melville would examine at Versailles, and there is no one figure whom he can be made to resemble. He has been struck by the derisive gods but has not been made impotent, however awkward his wounded movement upon his ivory leg.
Ahab’s conceptualization of artworks is sometimes as disfigured as his body. His speech to Starbuck on the quarter-deck offers a strangely reductive sense of the pictorialism of the quotidian: “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.” To see the magnificent pageant of life, the sea, its creatures, humankind and the creations of humankind shrunken into something essentially as crude as images drawn upon pasteboard is to fail terribly the test of vision, betrayed by what Wenke calls “Ahab’s fixed theory of reality” (139). A fixed theory becomes an intolerable fixation that excludes seeing and loving. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, for instance, cannot, at first, see the beauty of the natural and thus acts criminally. But he is eventually eased in his suffering by wandering about and teaching “by his own example love and reverence to all things,” as the prose gloss reminds us near the end of the poem. Ahab fails to comprehend some such attachment to the world and suffers for his failure.
Ishmael, artist without brush or palette, depicts the Pequod and Ahab in ekphrastic terms and then turns to the more difficult task he has set for himself, to “paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the whale” (224). His cautionary “as well as one can” and “something like” give indications of his hesitancy and his sense that the task may be overwhelming. Before he makes his own attempt, he finds it necessary to review what other painters have made of Leviathan and, in three successive chapters, displays his knowledge of monstrous pictures, less erroneous pictures, and a wide array of examples of leviathanic iconography in many materials and forms. He again takes the stance of art critic, a part he has already acted out in the first chapter and in the depiction of the Spouter-Inn picture, but the differences in Melville’s presentation of him as character and speaker are clear. A competent, thoughtful youth puts the Saco Valley painting before the reader, but the man who shoulders his way into the New Bedford inn stares mystified at the picture of a whale engaged in the perilous and pointless task of impaling itself upon the masts of an invisible ship. The Spouter-Inn painting is the first in Ishmael’s collection of monstrous pictures of whales, his earliest invitation to correct the predominant images of the salt sea mastodon.
By the time he fronts his huge task, Ishmael has become a confident pilot capable of leading his reader through the shoals of misrepresentation. As Sten rightly observes, the young man does have a “fixation on the question of what distinguishes a true picture from a false one” (Weaver-God 176). His casual display of learning and his capacity for puncturing the pretensions of artists are signs of a growing sophistication in worldly matters. His magisterial tone invites trust as he generalizes about “the natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of things” (Moby-Dick 230), and the reader is hardly surprised at his audacity in ascribing the skills of artists to some concept of national character traits. Suffering, or perhaps profiting, from what Arthur Mizener calls a “pedantry of the particular” (112), he dates matters like “a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671” or the outline of a whale “killed on the coast of Mexico, August 1793” or Goldsmith in “the abridged London edition of 1807” with a certainty that overcomes any possible objections. He is the well-traveled envoy who insouciantly drops place names like London, Saratoga, Baden-Baden, Versailles, Nantucket, the Solomon Islands, and Wapping. He has an easy familiarity with important names in art, like “that fine old German savage, Albert Durer,” Guido Reni, and William Hogarth; and he has looked at engravings after paintings by Ambroise Garneray and “some one who subscribes himself ‘H. Durand,’” an admirably brief notation of the much more impressive name of Jean-Baptiste-Henri Durand-Brager. Ishmael is a voracious reader of travel narratives and knows “old Harris’s collection of voyages” and Colnett’s “Voyage round Cape Horn.” Apparently he has studied Pliny, Hakluyt, Lacépède, Cuvier’s brother, and Beale and knows what has become of Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton.
The three chapters criticize artistic and technical representations of whales, renderings of the whale hunt, and examples of folk art notable for the patience and perseverance that have gone into their creation. As Stuart Frank’s gallery demonstrates, Melville is a careful observer who can find the appropriate terms for representing what he observes and allows Ishmael to find images of the whale in rock groupings and mountains, a discovery that permits the contemplation of Nature as artist and the whale itself as an artwork.13 He has already given some intimations of this art theory in his portrayals of Queequeg and Ahab and will now apply painterly terms to natural attributes. Robert Zoellner makes the useful distinction between “the whale as experienced rather than as conceived” (150). What is experienced or perceived is the material of art, and, seeing pictures, carvings, clouds, and real whales, Ishmael the art critic can get proportions, shapes, light, shadow, and a general sort of framing into proper focus. His intent is to paint the whale in scientifically correct terms, but he will not be satisfied with “the mechanical outline of things” and is more interested in “life-like” presentation and “a truthful idea of the living whale.” His high praise for Garneray’s pictures results from his conclusion that the “action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and true.” When that is so, he is not really concerned about accuracy and is willing to pass over the fact that “Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details” (216–17). He recognizes that perfect accuracy is not the usual aim of portraiture, for the spirit must be there, along with a liveliness of conception. Here, Melville’s reading about the visual arts helps him to be clear about the validity of such ideas. As early as the second chapter of Modern Painters, Ruskin, citing Sir Joshua Reynolds as his authority, offers a “Distinction between the painter’s intellectual power and technical knowledge” and claims that art is but a language, “invaluable as the vehicle of thought, but by itself nothing.” Supporting his view with commentary upon the works of Landseer, the Dutch school, Cimabue, and Giotto, Ruskin arrives at a definition designed to satisfy his own standards: the greatest art has to convey to the spectator “the greatest number of the greatest ideas.” Such a definition is an approximation of the program that Ishmael undertakes in presenting the whale.
But before anatomizing his subject, Ishmael draws upon his experience to present in “The First Lowering” a scene from a whale hunt that Garneray might have painted. All the elements are there, whaleboats with oarsmen and harpooneers and “the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood” (223). This picture, handled in vivid painterly terms, is “a sight full of wonder and awe,” a rich canvas of a seascape full of glens and hollows, color and movement. But we should notice that the stance of the scene painter is quite different from that taken by Garneray, Turner, and other artists of whaling scenes. Removed from the action, they look into a framed depiction of whales, whaleboats, and ships usually at rest. However, since Ishmael is an oarsman, he must face away from the whale and sees only what is behind his whaleboat or to his sides. As a result, we are given a picture depending often upon sounds for its effects—the gasps of oarsmen, the hiss of the harpoon being darted. The whale, absent from the picture, is “something” that “rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us.” The whaleboat is pulled into the sort of squall that, in Garneray’s picture, only distantly threatens a whaleship and boats.
After depicting what a whale hunt is actually like instead of having to conceive it from other artworks, Ishmael proceeds to offer picture after picture of his subject. The skin, the whale’s “visible surface,” is marked by lines “as in a veritable engraving” (306). Nature, the violent and abusive artist, has incised upon this ready surface “numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect.” Whatever has created this picture, the scratches of rocks, icebergs, or “hostile contact with other whales,” Ishmael is surrendering to the human tendency to regard as hieroglyphic, or indecipherable, anything that lies beyond the human system of symbols. But Melville’s metaphor of hieroglyphs represents the engraved symbols on the whale’s visible surface as sacred and holy, and hence the reference to “the mystic-marked whale.” Nature, as an artist, produces objects like stone cliffs that resemble whales or constellations that stimulate the imagination to fanciful imagery, and these are decipherable by humans. But it also produces pictures beyond the human capacity of recognition. Ruskin makes this point early in Modern Painters when he asserts that “The first great mistake that people make is the supposition that they must see a thing if it is before their eyes.” Ishmael can observe but, in a typical human failing, does not always see.14
Crucial elements in any portrait are the head and features of the subject, and Ishmael has a difficult task in attempting to depict the inhuman heads of sperm whale and right whale. Phrenology and physiognomy, “two semi-sciences,” would not, it appears, work very well, but Ishmael is content to try them and “achieve what I can” (345). The trouble with physiognomy is that it, “like every other human science, is but a passing fable” (347) and is not likely to give helpful results. But he does observe that “the whale’s vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematical adornment of the wondrous tun” (340). Devices and emblems are part of the language of heraldry, a topic that seems to haunt Melville’s thinking, though he does not tell us here what specific devices embellish his whale’s giant forehead. To describe properly, one must see, and fortunately he is given a dramatic opportunity to observe two whale heads at one time and can use the contrast to great advantage. The sperm whale offers “mathematical symmetry,” “more character,” the superiority of “pervading dignity,” and an aged and experienced look, the result of his greyish “pepper and salt” coloration (329). Each term is verifiable by observation and offers a few strokes to a picture that could match for its psychological correctness the best portraiture of Italian, Dutch, and English artists. The notable difference between human and leviathanic portraits must be in the placement and appearance of the eyes, and here Ishmael reverts to landscape description to catch the peculiarity that an art lover is unprepared to notice: the whale’s eyes are separated by the bulk of the head, which “towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys” (330). If this is so, then the scene directly before the great creature “must be profound darkness and nothingness to him.” The question of the whale’s eyes leads Ishmael to offer a pattern of inconclusive language: the separation of eyes “must wholly separate the impressions” that each organ presents; “a curious and most puzzling question might be started”; and “It may be but an idle whim,” this “helpless perplexity of volition” in the whale. His language underlines the essentially alien element in the task he has set for himself. Of all pictures, the portrait is the most easily assimilated, the most familiar, in its laying down of forms and colors, for the viewer. Melville would make this point in his later lecture on statuary, that “the aspect of the human countenance is the same in all ages,” and would dwell upon the expressive faces of the subjects.15 Inexpressive in human terms, even if it can possess “more character” and a “pervading dignity,” the whale’s head will puzzle even its most sympathetic delineator.
Leaving such speculation, Ishmael moves easily from the arts to the practical crafts. The lower jaw of the sperm whale, “like the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box,” is also like a portcullis, a defense mechanism. The whale’s extracted teeth are the stuff of decorative crafts, producing “curious articles, including canes, umbrella stocks, and handles to riding whips.” The jaw itself is “sawn into slabs, and piled away like joists for building houses” (332). Consideration of the sperm whale’s head, beginning in its dignity and character and proceeding into the mystery of its gigantic receptacle for thought and feeling, now dissolves, rather cheerfully, into the business of the useful. But this is an integral part of Melville’s pictorial plan, for the two pictures of the heads of sperm whale and right whale form a contrasting diptych.
The “noble Sperm Whale’s head” has distinction and “may be compared to a Roman war-chariot.” On the other hand, the poor right whale’s head “bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe,” and “an old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker’s last” (333). Melville here evokes an important part of his art knowledge, the works of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters. The resemblance of the head to a shoe or a last might have been sufficient to make Ishmael’s point, but he adds visual confirmation by calling it “galliot-toed.” The galliot is a single-masted flat-bottomed Dutch merchant ship or seagoing barge, its flatness and amplitude contrasting with the slimmer lines of other vessels. Redburn had seen a galliot in Liverpool harbor, looking like “an old-fashioned looking gentleman, with hollow waist, high prow and stern,” and so, probably, had Melville. The galliot is also a prominent feature in Dutch seascapes that Melville might have seen.
His interest in Dutch art comes to light as early as Typee and continues in allusions in Mardi and White-Jacket. In his excellent summary of this aspect of Melville’s art knowledge, Dennis Berthold calls attention to “the genre painting in prose that informs much of Melville’s work during the 1850s” (“Dutch Genre Painting” 219) and offers an illustrated catalog of such works that may have influenced Melville’s writing, including the somewhat “inelegant” The Fiddler and The Drinkers by Adrian Brouwer and The Smoker by David Teniers (233–34, 242). To these might be added such pictures as the Country Inn by Adriaen van Ostade and Jan Steen’s Self Portrait and The Poultry Yard. All of these feature the clumsy Dutch shoe prominently. Seeing Dutch paintings at Dulwich on November 17, 1849, Melville mentioned only a painting by Phillips Wouverman by name but was also struck by “The old man & pipe” (Journals 20, 298–99). Horsford conjectures that this painting might have been Ostade’s Man Smoking. It bears some resemblance to the central figure among Brouwer’s drinkers, a man who sits on a bench holding a pipe in his mouth, his leg with the inelegant shoe stretched out on the long seat. How many of these or similar paintings Melville saw, or how many prints he may have owned or seen, is guesswork. But Berthold indicates a source for Brouwer, and we know of Melville’s attraction to the paintings of Jan Steen.16
As we see, the picture of the sperm whale’s head begins with nobility, dignity, and aged wisdom, but this impressive vision is undercut by the practical comedy of trade and commerce. By contrast, the picture of the right whale’s head begins with comedy, in Ishmael’s wry comparison of it to something as clumsy as a galliot or a Dutch shoe, but, as the depiction continues, the head becomes a thing of marvelous beauty. His careful metaphors exhibit it as a bass viol, its spiracles as apertures in an aesthetically pleasing sounding board. The crown of the head resembles “the trunk of some huge oak.” The slats of whalebone within the mouth are like Venetian blinds or, in a more elegant analogy, like “the inside of the great Haarlem organ.”17 The contrasts are enriched, finally, by Ishmael’s whimsical contemplation: “This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his later years” (335). As philosophers, the whales have approached the assurance of death in typical manners, the sperm whale viewing it with “speculative indifference,” the right whale with “an enormous practical resolution.” Melville would later complete this analogy in art terms, seeing the bust of Plato as an “aristocratic transcendentalist” with “long flowing locks” and a beard that “would have graced a Venetian exquisite.” By contrast, the bust of the Stoic Seneca offers a face “like that of a disappointed pawnbroker” (Piazza Tales 401). These Melvillean conclusions come nearly a decade after Moby-Dick, but his seeing the busts in Rome only confirms a long-held art adept’s view.
Because the head is the most important feature in the portrait, nearly all of Ishmael’s dealings with the leviathanic head are artistic matters. Seeing the whale’s head, severed from the body and “hung to the Pequod’s waist like the giant Holofernes’s from the girdle of Judith” (311), he is possibly recalling a picture by Christofano Allori or the great painting by Paul Veronese.18 Ahab regards the head as a sculptural masterpiece, “the Sphynx’s in the desert,” and Ishmael later considers that the sperm whale is “physiognomically a Sphinx” (348)—that is, a hooded mysterious artwork. The physiognomist plays a technical role in portraiture by showing, through descriptions and sketches, the conformations and lines of the face in portraying the subject’s character. In the chapter called “The Prairie,” Melville has Ishmael consider what can be made of this science in the portraiture of whales. Indicating that Lavater had studied animals as well as men and looked at “the faces of horses, birds, serpents, and fish” for the “modifications of expression discernible therein,” he creates a physiognomical sketch of the “anomalous creature,” the sperm whale, who does not possess a nose. To emphasize the point that the leviathan must not have a nose, Ishmael has recourse to “landscape gardening, a spire, cupola, monument, or tower of some sort” as well as the sculptural detail of “the nose from Phidias’s marble Jove” (345–46).
Moving from the head to the magnificent tail that “analogizes cosmic power in its aesthetic manifestations” (Zoellner 162) brings on an outburst of Ishmael’s most impressive art allusion:
Take away the tied tendons that all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its charm would be gone. As devout Eckermann lifted the linen sheet from the naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the man, that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative, feminine one of submission and endurance, which on all hands, it is conceded, form the peculiar practical virtues of his teaching. (376)
At least part of the passage may come from Melville’s reading of Madame de Staël’s novel Corinne. Aboard the ship that took him to England in 1849, Melville had heard “another curious discussion between the Swede & the Frenchman about Lamertine [sic] and Corinne.” His curiosity aroused, he purchased a copy of the novel (Journals 9, 144). Like the Italian Journey, part of Goethe’s autobiographical works that he acquired at about the same time, Corinne provides nuggets of information about the arts, for much of the book takes the form of an art pilgrimage in which Lord Nevil is led by his lover, the heroine, to observe Italian artworks.
In the eighth book of Corinne, entitled “The Statues and the Pictures,” the two travel through Rome, where they view the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, the foot of an enormous Jupiter, the Castor and Pollux, and “among broken statues, the torso of Hercules.” These lead them to conjecture that, “as the gods wore our shape, every attribute appears symbolical; the ‘brawns of Hercules’ suggest no recollections of vulgar life, but of divine, almighty will, clothed in supernatural grandeur” (8:126). In the next chapter they look at paintings, and Lord Nevil is “almost scandalized at seeing that Michael Angelo had attempted to represent the Deity himself in mortal shape.” A few lines further on, he and Corinne believe “that religious meditation is the most heartfelt sentiment we can experience and that which supplies a painter with the grandest physiognomical mysteries.” The Melvillean passage, subtle and seamless, is woven from fabrics of reading, seeing artworks, and contemplating their pictorial values.
The skeletal whale is also to be comprehended as a work of art. King Tranquo, “gifted with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertù,” is an art collector who has brought together “carved woods of wonderful devices, chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes.” Respecting Nature as the greatest of artists, he saves “whatever natural wonders, the wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores,” including the skeleton of a whale. The skeleton, already a work of natural art, forms a chapel, an architectural artwork, its ribs furnished with trophies, its vertebrae carved “in strange hieroglyphics” (449).19 Its location, in the middle of a wood “green as the mosses of the Icy Glen,” places death in the midst of life where, “Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure.” The result is a complex, paradoxical, parabolical objet d’art where “Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories” (450).
Throughout his lengthy word-painting of the leviathan, Melville has alternated between the generality of portraying “the whale” and depicting one particular whale. He fastens upon characteristics that the visual artist would consider in his work. Shape and form are as important and as Ionian as any columns, but the painter would have to give thought to color and chiaroscuro, the shadings of light and dark in a picture. Blackness is predominant in the Spouter-Inn picture, while, in the whaling chapel painting, the blackness of rock and breakers contrasts with the radiance of the sunlit angel’s face. The Pequod, viewed as a work of marine art, has a darkened complexion relieved by the whiteness of sea ivory and whale teeth. Considering the most prominent feature of Moby Dick, his whiteness, which is hardly a “Venetian tint,” Ishmael discourses upon this color, or noncolor, in works of art. Jove, “incarnate in a snow-white bull,” is represented in paintings by Titian and Veronese (189). White is present in “the celebration of the Passion of our Lord” and in “the Vision of St. John,” two scenes prominent in Italian paintings.20 The White Steed of the prairies sounds like the subject of a painting, with “the flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail” (191). But the white horse, a magnificent exhibit of life, quickly metamorphoses into a picture of death where we “throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog,” and it is inevitable that Ishmael will be reminded that “the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse” (192), a subject familiar enough in Revelations 6:8 and portrayed in Benjamin West’s Death on the Pale Horse, much admired for what Washington Allston called its “visions of sublimity.”21
The indefiniteness of white, its noncolor, as of “the charnel-house” or “the monumental white shroud,” is “most appalling to mankind” and fuels “the fiery hunt” for the whale. In Melville and Turner, Wallace cites the Goethean theory of colors and Charles Eastlake’s translation and notes to Goethe’s writings as influential in Melville’s thinking (396–99). Melville may also be considering a reply to Ruskin’s assertion that “truths of colours are the least important of all truths,” an idea he develops in Modern Painters (sect. 1, chap. 5). Since colors change, and since it is hardly certain that any two persons see the same colors in objects, Ruskin argues that “the artist who sacrifices or forgets a truth of form in the pursuit of a truth of color, sacrifices what is definite to what is uncertain, and what is essential to what is accidental.” It can hardly be said that Ishmael neglects form in his chapters on the whale, but, recognizing at all times that his thoughts on color are vague and “so mystical and well nigh ineffable” (188), he still gives it a primary place in his repertory of painterly effects.
Ishmael takes great interest in such aspects of the art analogy as the function of the artist who doubles as artisan and the transcendental importance of the visual arts as a description of man the microcosm in the macrocosmic world. From the first, he presents characters who attempt to codify their experiences in suitable artworks. The sailor in the Spouter-Inn who carves a ship under sail on his bench, the sailors who examine their carved pieces of scrimshaw, and the landlord who decks his public room to as to make it resemble the whale’s head are all trying to give voice to the facts of their existence. The innumerable creators of “monstrous pictures” of whales and “less erroneous pictures” are engaged in similar ventures, as are the savage and the “white sailor savage” who patiently carve bone sculpture “as close packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles’ shield; and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer” (270).
The Pequod’s blacksmith, constantly engaged in the useful task of repairing the weapons of whaling and the metal boat furniture, is a further example. Working with great patience, he shapes forms “as if toil were life itself.” Ahab calls him to an artistic task far beyond the usual human need, to create a magic weapon from fabulous materials, from the nailstubs of the shoes of racing horses that “will weld together like glue from the melted bones of murderers” and from the steel of razors barbs “sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea” (488–89). In this venture, Ahab acts as monitor and art critic, accepting or rejecting parts of the sculptural construct as they are fashioned into portions of the harpoon. An even more pointed example of the artisan as artist is the carpenter, “unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and capricious” (467). His useful aptitude is easily characterized by his work with stove whaleboats, belaying pins, sprung spars, and clumsy-bladed oars. His capricious aptitude takes other forms, in the fashioning of an exotic birdcage from “right-whale bone, and cross-beams of sperm whale ivory,” and the decoration of Stubb’s whaleboat oars with stars, painted by the carpenter into an unnamed constellation. The capricious aptitude is the aesthetic side of the carpenter’s nature, for, like the primitive natives of Queequeg’s island or other places in the South Seas, he embellishes the practical object with the artistic flourish, dispensable for its use but vital for the spirit.
Since the carpenter has such an artistic side to his nature, he tends to regard human and animal parts as the materials for practical and artistic use: “Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he deemed but top-blocks; men themselves, he lightly held for capstans” (467). His reductive view of the human goes too far. Man, created by the greatest of artists, is a beautifully articulated version of the practical but clumsy capstan, and so Ishmael reverses the carpenter’s criticism, finding him something like “a common pocket knife,” omnitooled and useful but, to an extent, at the mercy of his user (468). Looking deeper, however, Ishmael does not let his simple reversal stand. Although the carpenter seems to work “by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process,” he is a mysterious figure, part manipulated tool and part artist. Ishmael admits that the man “had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty.” This something may be “essence of quicksilver” or “a few drops of hartshorn,” a product of natural or animal magic and thus an “unaccountable, cunning life-principle” (468).
The spontaneous and literal art procedure of the carpenter has its counterbalance in the more conscious artistry of Queequeg. Desperately ill and wanting a coffin that resembles “certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich war-wood of his native isles,” Queequeg applies to the carpenter, who chooses “some heathenish, coffin-colored old lumber” to get the desired effect as he builds the coffin. Queequeg, superior as artist, gets well and carves the lid of the coffin, now turned into a sea-chest:
Many hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing in his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by these hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth. (480–81)
The purpose of all art is the art of attaining truth, and in his endeavors Queequeg is following the dictates of natural magic. It is hard to tell what Melville read and studied of this exotic subject, but some of the ideas he touches upon can be found in Francis Barrett’s The Magus (1802), a compendium of natural, talismanic, and cabalistical magic, forming “a complete system of occult philosophy,” as the main title page assures the prospective reader.22 Barrett defines natural magic as “a comprehensive knowledge of all Nature, by which we search out her secret and occult operations throughout her vast and spacious elaboratory [sic].” The Lord, having created the macrocosmic world, made, “in man, likewise, an exact model of the great world … in which we may trace in miniature the exact resemblance or copy of the universe” (1:13). This miniaturization, in artistic form, of a theory that was once generally understood is part of Queequeg’s outward appearance, couched in a language that he cannot understand. It is a hieroglphyic in the same sense that the markings on the “visible surface” of the whale are hieroglphyics. Queequeg, like most artists, is highly skilled in reproducing the talismanic pictures that no longer have any real meaning or substance.
The matter of meaning in art is given further interpretation in the treatment of the doubloon, a fine artwork that Ahab has nailed to the mainmast. It is not simply payment for an accomplished act, for Ahab seems “to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it” and desires to interpret “whatever significance might lurk in them.” Observing him at his new task, Ishmael conjectures that “some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher” (430). The coin is as much a cipher, whether an empty one or not, as the hieroglyphic markings upon the whale, Queequeg, and the coffin lid. As pieces of numismatic art, South American coins contain a bewildering variety of images, “palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun’s disks and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving” (431). As he did in painting the whale, Melville proceeds from the general, offering the varied characteristics of many exemplary coins, for not all the coins that Ishmael has seen contain all of the signs and symbols that he here enumerates. Mansfield and Vincent point out that perhaps seven South American countries are represented in this generous all-embracing description (804).
Beyond such generalizations, Ishmael’s ekphrasis of one particular coin of Ecuador reproduces the lettered inscription that places its minting at Quito. The description is a curious one, specific and detailed in some matters and vague in others: “Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra” (431). The reader can easily visualize parts of this miniature artwork, for the mountains with their decorations are vividly rendered; but the phrase “usual cabalistics” betrays some impatience with occult interpretations. The pretensions of cabalistical and zodiacal symbolism offer only “some certain significance” in all things, not a universal or even comprehensible significance.
Whatever its significance, the coin is a work of art possessing beauty and integrity. In her elaborate study of the “ciphered text” of Moby-Dick, Viola Sachs relates the novel to a particular work of art, Albrecht Dürer’s print Melencolia and offers a wide range of talismanic and cabalistic illustrations in her interpretation. The Dürer print, which Melville may have seen by 1851, is something like the Ecuadorian coin, a work of art that can give rise to meditative consideration of the human mystery. Melville dismisses much of the mystery, however, for, after letting Ahab find the coin a kind of looking glass in which a man “but mirrors back his mysterious self” and allowing Starbuck to see religious significance, Flask to see it as nothing more than money, and Pip to indulge in “crazy-witty” interpretation, he gives the last word to Stubb, who compares the doubloon to “the ship’s navel” and warns of the consequences of unscrewing your navel (435).
The “omnisciently exhaustive” presentation of the whale leads Ishmael to “magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view” (455), and the quest results in a chapter rich in eighteenth- and ninteenth-century geological evidence and guesswork, art allusions, and cosmological speculation. Ishmael is almost overcome by his announced program, for his thoughts “include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth” (456). The word “panoramas” has a specialized significance. A panorama was a combination of art show and theatrical spectacle attended by large audiences who saw what amounted to an early version of a “moving picture.” Melville was well acquainted with these spectacular artistic exhibitions. He knew the work of John Banvard, one of the most famous of panorama painters, and thought that Constantinople in 1856 was a subject for Banvard, who “should paint a few hundred miles of this pageant of moving processions” (Journals 65, 406). In Clarel, there is a description of “The Latin Organ,” which is probably suggested by Banvard’s panoramic painting of the Holy Land.23
As he proceeded with the composition of Moby-Dick, Melville had panoramas on his mind. Since a panoramic painting, sometimes hundreds of feet long, was mounted on spindles and turned so that audiences could view an ever-changing picture, a tale of whaling could easily resemble the panoramas of the subject. The Benjamin Russell-Caleb Purrington panorama “A Whaling Voyage Round the World” was shown in Boston in 1849 at a time when the Melvilles were visiting the Shaws (Carothers and Marsh 319ff), and it seems likely that Melville attended a showing. The Confidence-Man, like Moby-Dick, could qualify as a panoramic novel. Like Banvard’s panorama of the Mississippi, displayed in 1847 and later, it needed a wide stretch of canvas. An 1848 review of the Banvard painting noted that “The romantic scenery, the bold bluffs, the towering hills, and the elevated shot-towers between the mouth of the Ohio and St. Louis, are transferred to the canvas with wonderful force, effect, and truthfulness” (McDermott 28). The Mississippi River was a popular subject for panorama painters. Before doing his own panorama, Henry Lewis took a river tour in 1840, making sketches for his painting.24
Moby-Dick is cast as a panorama that encompasses the entire novel, and within it are smaller but still extensive panoramas. The narrator announces one in the first chapter as “WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL,” which could have matched the Russell panorama in many of its details, but would include plot elements that Russell would not have envisioned.25 Another topic treated in a panoramic manner would have included “Cetology,” an unfolding of kinds of whales; to it might be added the account of portraits of whales, monstrous, less erroneous, and correct. In chapter 104 Melville seems to have a paleontological panorama in mind as he lays out his subject, fossils found in Lombardy, England, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, along with “pre-adamite” traces “upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim for them an almost fossiliferous character” (457).
Following the mention of Egyptian tablets, Melville offers a remarkable passage of ekphrasis: “In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled” (457–58). Melville is fond of describing apartments that house rich and unusual works of art. His juvenile “Fragments from a Writing Desk” features one. Redburn encounters a room filled with art that reminds him of pornographic and obscene pictures. Others will come in works written after Moby-Dick: Pierre Glendenning’s closet, in which is contained the mysterious portrait of his father; in Clarel the apartment of Abdon, the innkeeper (1.2) and the rich apartment of the abbot at Mar Saba (3.23). Melville’s descriptions become topographies, made opulent by their keen sense of attendant subjects, the history, myth, and ambiance of a place. Some of these descriptions perform as strong thematic elements in the whole literary work, but the description of the Temple of Denderah, for all its richness, is simply one more item in the long chain of evidence Ishmael cites in his portrait of the whale.
Nevertheless, the passage displays Melville’s characteristic technique of tossing off some enigmatic bit of erudition. John Gretchko’s essay on the Temple of Denderah identifies a likely source, Vivant Denon’s illustrated Egypt Delineated, a volume about the “Scenery, Antiquities, Architecture, Hieroglyphics, Costume, Inhabitants, Animals, etc., of that Country,” published in 1818 and republished several times subsequently (51ff). In this book, Melville could have seen pictures of the temple and the planisphere and could have read, in Denon’s text, about the architectural and sculptural masterpieces found there.26 With his customary adeptness in reading, observing, and transforming his miscellaneous materials into closely woven texture of his prose, Melville convinces one that Ishmael has some special knowledge to bring to bear upon his exotic subject.
Just as the Egyptological sources reach their best expression in Melville’s use of the art analogy, so do his Oriental sources. The earliest of the monstrous pictures of whales involves “the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures” and describes the “famous cavern-pagods of Elephanta, in India,” with its statues. The whale is an incarnation of Vishnu, “learnedly known as the Matse Avatar,” and “half man and half whale” is wrong, for the tail does not resemble “the broad palms of the true whale’s majestic flukes” (261). Examination of the sources gives further insight into the workings of Melville’s visual imagination.27 A passage like this consists of a melding of bits and pieces, and he willfully falsifies his sources, changing things about to get the effect that he desires. The desire for literal truth does not give him pause. He will be truthful if truth works but will, if necessary, depart from truth if the departure ensures beauty.
This intense concentration upon seeing a world of art in the world of shipboard continues to the end of Moby-Dick. In chapter 130, “The Hat,” Ahab’s “slouching hat” is given what almost amounts to the validity of an artwork as it is stolen by a sea-hawk and Ishmael is made to link its fate to the mythic story wherein “An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin’s head, removing his cap to replace it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome” (539). Ahab’s fate is predicted by the loss of his hat, stolen and “falling from that vast height into the sea.” In chapter 133, “The Chase—First Day,” upon the first real appearance of the fabled white whale, Ishmael finds a remarkable art allusion to describe the vision: “Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete” (548). Gretchko has pointed out, in Melvillean Loomings, that Melville seems to be alluding to a painting by Titian, The Rape of Europa, and ingeniously suggests that this allusion foreshadows the “abduction” of Ahab by the whale (34–37).
In the last agonistic scene of the encounter with the whale, there is a reprise of the Spouter-Inn painting as the Pequod sinks so that the men in the lifeboat see “only the uppermost masts out of water.” The tiny drama of the sky-hawk who pecks at the flag and is caught by Tashtego’s hammer, held to the mast, and dragged, “a living part of heaven,” recapitulates in ironic reversal the scene of the sea-hawk and Ahab’s hat and mimics, in tableau style, the art symbol of the eagle and flag upon the mast “whose wood could only be American” (571–72). And, as a final act of heavenly grace, Ishmael, art lover and artist possessed of a remarkable word-hoard, is saved by a magnificent objet d’art now converted to daily uses, the coffin buoy whose lid Queequeg has lovingly carved as some part of “a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth,” though its “mysteries not even himself could read.”