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Table of Contents
Chapter 42
THE WHITENESS
OF THE WHALE
What the white whale was to
Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could
not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another
thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by
its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and
well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a
comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things
appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim,
random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.
Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if
imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and
pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal
pre-eminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing
the title Lord of the White Elephants above all their other magniloquent
ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same
snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing
the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire,
Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same
imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race
itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and
though, besides all this, whiteness has been ..
2 even made significant
of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and
though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the
emblem of many touching, noble things --the innocence of brides, the benignity
of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of
wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness
typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to
the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in
the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol
of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the
white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek
mythologies, Great Jove himself made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and
though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog
was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful
creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with
the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin
word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their
sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among
the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the
celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John,
white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand
clothed in white before the great white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth
there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with
whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive
something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to
the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. This elusive quality it
is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly
associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that
terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the
white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them
the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts
such an abhorrent mildness, even ..
3 more loathsome than
terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged
tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear
or shark. Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual
wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all
imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's great,
unflattering laureate, Nature. ..
4 Most famous in our
Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White Steed of the
Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger, large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested,
and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning
carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose
pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the
Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen
star which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of
his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more
resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A most
imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western world, which
to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the glories of those
primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god, bluff-bowed and fearless as
this mighty steed. Whether marching amid his aides and marshals in the van of
countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or
whether with his circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon,
the White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through
his cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the
bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it
be questioned from what stands on legendary record of ..
5 this noble horse, that
it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him with divineness;
and that this divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at
the same time enforced a certain nameless terror. But there are other
instances where this whiteness loses all that accessory and strange glory
which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross. What is it that in the
Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that sometimes he
is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests him, a
thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men
--has no substantive deformity --and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading
whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why
should this be so? Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least
palpable but not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces
this crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted
ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some
historic instances, has the art of human malice omitted so potent an
auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart,
when, masked in the snowy symbol of their faction, the desperate White Hoods
of Ghent murder their bailiff in the market-place! Nor, in some things, does
the common, hereditary experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the
supernaturalism of this hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible
quality in the aspect of the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble
pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge
of consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And from
that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which
we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy
mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog --Yea, while
these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when
personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse. Therefore, in his
other moods, symbolize whatever grand or ..
6 gracious thing he will
by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest idealized significance
it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul. But though without dissent this
point be fixed, how is mortal man to account for it? To analyse it, would seem
impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of some of those instances wherein
this thing of whiteness --though for the time either wholly or in great part
stripped of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful,
but, nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however
modified; --can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to
the hidden cause we seek? Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety
appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into
these halls. And though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative
impressions about to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few
perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be
able to recall them now. Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to
be but loosely acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the
bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless
processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, downcast and hooded with new-fallen snow?
Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the Middle American States,
why does the passing mention of a White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an
eyeless statue in the soul? Or what is there apart from the traditions of
dungeoned warriors and kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes
the White Tower of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of an
untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its neighbors --the
Byward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer towers, the White
Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic
ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention of that name, while the thought
of Virginia's Blue Ridge is full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why,
irrespective of all latitudes and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea
exert such a spectralness ..
7 over the fancy, while
that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of long lacquered mild
afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of
sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to
the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does the
tall pale man of the Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrestingly glides
through the green of the groves --why is this phantom more terrible than all
the whooping imps of the Blocksburg? Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of
her cathedral-toppling earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas:
nor the tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide
field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop (like
canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of house-walls
lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards; --it is not these
things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest, saddest city thou can'st
see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and there is a higher horror in this
whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever
new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay; spreads over her
broken ramparts the rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own
distortions. I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of
whiteness is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of
objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught of
terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost solely
consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under any form at
all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean by these two
statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the following examples.
First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by night
he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just enough of
trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely similar
circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his ship sailing
through a midnight sea of milky whiteness --as if from encircling headlands
shoals of combed white bears were swimming round him, then he feels ..
8 a silent,
superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible
to him as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still off
soundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests till blue water is
under him again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, Sir, it was not
so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous
whiteness that so stirred me? Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the
continual sight of the snow-howdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except,
perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at
such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be
to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the
backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an unbounded
prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to break the fixed
trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the scenery of the Antarctic
seas; where at times, by some infernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of
frost and air, he, shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows
speaking hope and solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless
church-yard grinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered
crosses. But thou sayest, methinks this white-lead chapter about whiteness is
but a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo,
Ishmael. Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley
of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey --why is it that upon the
sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he
cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness --why will he
start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright?
There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green
northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him
anything associated with the experience of former perils; for what knows he,
this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant oregon? no: but here
thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge of the
demonism in the world. Though ..
9 thousands of miles
from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison
herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which this
instant they may be trampling into dust. Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a
milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the
desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael,
are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt! Though neither
knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such
hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist.
Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the
invisible spheres were formed in fright. But not yet have we solved the
incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to
the soul; and more strange and far more portentous --why, as we have seen, it
is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of
the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in
things the most appalling to mankind. Is it that by its indefiniteness it
shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus
stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the
white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not
so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the
concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb
blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows --a colorless,
all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other
theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues --every
stately or lovely emblazoning --the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods;
yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young
girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances,
but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints
like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within;
and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which
produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains
white or colorless in itself, and if ..
10 operating
without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses,
with its own blank tinge --pondering all this, the palsied universe lies
before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear
colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes
himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect
around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye
then at the fiery hunt? ..
11 With reference to
the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would fain go still deeper
into this matter, that it is not the whiteness, separately regarded, which
heightens the intolerable hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that
heightened hideousness, it might be said, only arises from the circumstance,
that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the
fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together two
such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so
unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not
for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified terror. As for the
white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that creature, when
beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the same quality in the
Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly hit by the French in the
name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with
Requiem eternam (eternal rest), whence Requiem denominating the mass itself,
and any other funereal music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness
of death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call
him Requin. I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a
prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch
below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the main
hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a
hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel
wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings
shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king's ghost in
supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I
peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I
bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those
for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of
traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot
tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me then. But at last I
awoke; and turning, asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied.
Goney! I never had heard that name before; is it conceivable that this
glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I
learned that goney was some seaman's name for albatross. So that by no
possibility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had ..
12 aught to do with
those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our
deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be an
albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little brighter
the noble merit of the poem and the poet. I assert, then, that in the wondrous
bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth
the more evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called
grey albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such
emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl. But how had the mystic thing
been caught? Whisper it not, and I will tell; with a treacherous hook and
line, as the fowl floated on the sea. At last the Captain made a postman of
it; tying a lettered, leathern tally round its neck, with the ship's time and
place; and then letting it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant
for man, was taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the
wing-folding, the invoking, and adoring cherubim! ..
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