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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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?
Note: 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 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!