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.
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.
He was a mystic who raved because the old ideal guns shot havoc. The guns of the "noble spirit." Of "ideal love."
_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.
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!