الفصل الفصل 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 preeminence 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, Cæsarian, heir to

overlording Rome, having for the imperial colour 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 being 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.*

*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 rises 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 funeral 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_.

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.*

*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!

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!

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-browed 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, down-cast 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 unrustlingly 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 churchyard grinning upon him with

its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses.

But thou sayest, methinks that 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 colour as

the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all

colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness,

full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour

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 coloured and colouring

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?