Pierre, the Fool of Virtue

IN THE STUDY OF Melville's ideas and mental processes, the first step, I think, must be the total rejection of the prevailing notion that Melville possessed or propagated any philosophical system or achieved for himself, at least during his major period, any satisfactory solution to the spiritual problems with which he struggled. His heroes, generally speaking, are seekers after truth, like Taji, or defiers of fate, like Ahab, or disillusioned idealists, like Pierre. In each case, however, the search for truth proves futile, the defiance of destiny wholly foolhardy, and the apparent distinction between human virtue and vice horrifyingly ambiguous. Melville presents moral and spiritual problems; he rarely solves them. The increasing interest in Melville's thought has resulted in frequent attempts by scholars to define his essential beliefs. And not only literary scholars but students of the history of philosophy as well (to offer two examples, Professor Gabriel of Yale and Professor Schneider of Columbia) have undertaken this task. Thus, when so important and influential a work as Professor Schneider's formal study of American philosophy' includes a section on Melville, we no longer experience any surprise; when it proceeds boldly, however, to describe Melville as a thinker with a fairly well defined system, I am afraid the time to raise a voice of protest has been reached. Schneider considers the famous Plinlimmon lecture in Pierre to be an accurate summary of Melville's philosophy of life. The lecture, he declares, the nearest Melville ever came to making a academic formulation of his philosophical tenets.2 I, for one, am firmly convinced that Melville did not make at any time a technical, academic formulation of a definable philosophy, and that he introduced the Plinlimmon pamphlet for quite another purpose. As Willard Thorp remarks in his admirable preface: So unemphatic is Melville's attitude toward the pamphlet that some

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