So diverse are the samples out of which _Moby-Dick_ is compounded, yet so masterful is each of its samples, that there is still far from universal agreement as to the ground colour of this rich and towering fabric. Yet by this very disagreement is its miraculous artistry affirmed.
In _Moby-Dick_, all the powers and tastes of Melville’s complex genius are blended. _Moby-Dick_ is at once indisputably the greatest whaling novel, and “a hideous and intolerable allegory.” As Mr. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. has said, “Out of the mere episodes and minor instances of _Moby-Dick_, a literary reputation might be made. The retired Nantucket captains Bildad and Peleg might have stepped out of Smollett. Father Mapple’s sermon on the book of Jonah is in itself a masterpiece, and I know few sea tales that can hold their own with the blood feud of Mate Rodney and sailor Steelkilt.” Captain Hook of _Peter Pan_ is but Captain Boomer of _Moby-Dick_ with another name: and this an identity founded not on surmise, but on Sir James Barrie’s professed indebtedness to Melville. There are, in _Moby-Dick_, long digressions, natural, historical and philosophical, on the person, habits, manners and ideas of whales; there are long dialogues and soliloquies such as were never spoken by mortal man in his waking senses, conversations that for sweetness, strength and courage remind one of passages from Dekker, Webster, Massinger, Fletcher and the other old dramatists loved both by Melville and by Charles Lamb; in the discursive tradition of Fielding, Sir Thomas Browne and the anatomist of melancholy, Melville indulges freely in independent moralisings, half essay, half rhapsody; withal, scenes like Ishmael’s experience at the “Spouter-Inn” with a practising cannibal for bed-fellow, are, for finished humour, among the most competent in the language. When Melville sat down to write, always at his knee stood that chosen emissary of Satan, the comic spirit: a demoniac familiar never long absent from his pages.
There are those, of course, who would hold against Dante his moralising, and against Rabelais his broad humour. In like manner, peculiarity of temperament has necessarily coloured critical judgment of _Moby-Dick_. But though critics may mouth it as they like about digressions, improbability, moralising reflections, swollen talk, or the fetish of art now venerated with such articulate inveteracy, all wonderfully agree upon the elementary force of _Moby-Dick_, its vitality, its thrilling power. That it achieves the effect of illusion, and to a degree peculiar to the highest feats of the creative imagination, is incontestable. No writer has more. On this point it is simply impossible to praise Melville too highly. What defects _Moby-Dick_ has are formal rather than substantial. As Thackeray once impatiently said of Macaulay: “What critic can’t point them out?” It was the contention of James Thomson that an overweening concern for formal impeccability is a fatal sign of weakened vitality. Intensity of imagination--and Melville exhibited it prodigally in _Moby-Dick_--is an infinitely rarer and more precious gift than technical sophistication. Shakespeare has survived, despite his “monstrous irregularities.” But since Shakespeare, as Francis Thompson has observed, there has been a gradual decline from imperfection. Milton, at his most typical, was far too perfect; Pope was ruined by his quest for the quality. No thoughtful person can contemplate without alarm the idolatry bestowed upon this quality by the contemporary mind: an idolatry that threatens to reduce all art to the extinction of unendurable excellence. How insipid would be the mere adventures of a Don Quixote recounted by a Stevenson.