Studies in Classic American Literature — DANA'S "TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST"
But this isn't impudent and materialistic, like spiritualism and magic and all that range of pretentious supernaturalism.
IX. DANA'S "TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST"
You can't idealize brute labour.
That is to say, you can't idealize brute labour, without coming undone, as an idealist.
You can't idealize brute labour.
That is to say, you can't idealize brute labour, without coming undone, as an idealist.
The soil!
The great ideal of the soil.
Novels like Thomas Hardy's and pictures like the Frenchman Millet's. The soil.
What happens when you idealize the soil, the mother-earth, and really go back to it?
Then with overwhelming conviction it is borne in upon you, as it was upon Thomas Hardy, that the whole scheme of things is against you.
The whole massive rolling of natural fate is coming down on you like a slow glacier, to crush you to extinction.
As an idealist.
Thomas Hardy's pessimism is an absolutely true finding.
It is the absolutely true statement of the idealist's last realization, as he wrestles with the bitter soil of beloved mother-earth.
He loves her, loves her, loves her.
And she just entangles and crushes him like a slow Laocoön snake.
The idealist must perish, says mother earth.
Then let him perish.
The great imaginative love of the soil itself!
Tolstoi had it, and Thomas Hardy.
And both are driven to a kind of fanatic denial of life, as a result.
You can't idealize mother earth.
You can try.
You can even succeed.
But succeeding, you succumb.
She will have no pure idealist sons.
None.
If you are a child of mother earth, you must learn to discard your ideal self, in season, as you discard your clothes at night.
Americans have never loved the soil of America as Europeans have loved the soil of Europe.
America has never been a blood-home-land.
Only an ideal home-land.
The home-land of the idea, of the _spirit.
_ And of the pocket.
Not of the blood.
That has yet to come, when the idea and the spirit have collapsed from their false tyranny.
Europe has been loved with a blood love.
That has made it beautiful.
In America, you have Fenimore Cooper's beautiful landscape: but that is wish-fulfilment, done from a distance.
And you have Thoreau in Concord.
But Thoreau sort of isolated his own bit of locality and put it under a lens, to examine it.
He almost anatomized it, with his admiration.
America isn't a blood-home-land.
For every American, the blood-home-land is Europe.
The spirit home-land is America.
Transcendentalism.
Transcend this home-land business, exalt the idea of These States till you have made it a universal idea, says the true American.
The oversoul is a world-soul, not a local thing.
So, in the next great move of imaginative conquest, Americans turned to the sea.
Not to the land.
Earth is too specific, too particular.
Besides, the blood of white men is wine of no American soil.
No, no. But the blood of all men is ocean-born.
We have our material universality, our blood-oneness, in the sea.
The salt water.
You can't idealize the soil.
But you've got to try.
And trying, you reap a great imaginative reward.
And the greatest reward is failure.
To know you have failed, that you _must_ fail.
That is the greatest comfort of all, at last.
Tolstoi failed with the soil: Thomas Hardy too: and Giovanni Verga; the three greatest.
The further extreme, the greatest mother, is the sea.
Love the great mother of the sea, the Magna Mater.
And see how bitter it is.
And see how you must fail to win her to your ideal: forever fail.
Absolutely fail.
Swinburne tried in England.
But the Americans made the greatest trial.
The most vivid failure.
At a certain point, human life becomes uninteresting to men.
What then?
They turn to some universal.
The greatest material mother of us all is the sea.
Dana's eyes failed him when he was studying at Harvard.
And suddenly, he turned to the sea, the naked Mother.
He went to sea as a common sailor before the mast.
You can't idealize brute labour.
Yet you can.
You can go through with brute labour, and _know_ what it means.
You can even meet and match the sea, and KNOW her.
This is what Dana wanted: a naked fighting experience with the sea.
KNOW THYSELF.
That means, know the earth that is in your blood.
Know the sea that is in your blood.
The great elementals.
But we must repeat: KNOWING and BEING are opposite, antagonistic states.
The more you know, exactly, the less you _are.
_ The more you _are_, in being, the less you know.
This is the great cross of man, his dualism.
The blood-self, and the nerve-brain self.
Knowing, then, is the slow death of being.
Man has his epochs of being, his epochs of knowing.
It will always be a great oscillation.
The goal is to know how not-to-know.
Dana took another great step in knowing: knowing the mother sea.
But it was a step also in his own undoing.
It was a new phase of dissolution of his own being.
Afterwards, he would be a less human thing.
He would be a knower: but more near to mechanism than before.
That is our cross, our doom.
And so he writes, in his first days at sea, in winter, on the Atlantic: "Nothing can compare with the _early breaking of day_ upon the wide, sad ocean.
There is something in the first grey streaks stretching along the Eastern horizon, and throwing an indistinct light upon the face of the deep, which creates a feeling of loneliness, of dread, and of melancholy foreboding, which nothing else in nature can give."
So he ventures wakeful and alone into the great naked watery universe of the end of life, the twilight place where integral being lapses, and warm life begins to give out.
It is man moving on into the face of death, the great adventure, the great undoing, the strange extension of the consciousness.
The same in his vision of the albatross.
"But one of the finest sights that I have ever seen was an albatross asleep upon the water, off Cape Horn, when a heavy sea was running.
There being no breeze, the surface of the water was unbroken, but a long, heavy swell was rolling, and we saw the fellow, all white, directly ahead of us, asleep upon the waves, with his head under his wing; now rising upon the top of a huge billow, and then falling slowly until he was lost in the hollow between.
He was undisturbed for some time, until the noise of our bows, gradually approaching, roused him; when lifting his head, he stared upon us for a moment, and then spread his wide wings, and took his flight."
We must give Dana credit for a profound mystic vision.
The best Americans are mystics by instinct.
Simple and bare as his narrative is, it is deep with profound emotion and stark comprehension.
He sees the last light-loving incarnation of life exposed upon the eternal waters: a speck, solitary upon the verge of the two naked principles, aerial and watery.
And his own soul is as the soul of the albatross.
It is a storm-bird.
And so is Dana.
He has gone down to fight with the sea.
It is a metaphysical, actual struggle of an integral soul with the vast, non-living, yet potent element.
Dana never forgets, never ceases to watch.
If Hawthorne was a spectre on the land, how much more is Dana a spectre at sea.
But he must watch, he must know, he must conquer the sea in his consciousness.
This is the poignant difference between him and the common sailor.
The common sailor lapses from consciousness, becomes elemental like a seal, a creature.
Tiny and alone Dana watches the great seas mount round his own small body.
If he is swept away, some other man will have to take up what he has begun.
For the sea must be mastered by the human consciousness, in the great fight of the human soul for mastery over life and death, in KNOWLEDGE.
It is the last bitter necessity of the Tree.
The Cross.
Impartial, Dana beholds himself among the elements, calm and fatal.
His style is great and hopeless, the style of a perfect tragic recorder.
"Between five and six the cry of 'All star-bowlines ahoy!'
summoned our watch on deck, and immediately all hands were called.
A great cloud of a dark slate-colour was driving on us from the south-west; and we did our best to take in sail before we were in the midst of it.
We had got the light-sails furled, the courses hauled up, and the top-sail reef tackles hauled out, and were just mounting the forerigging when the storm struck us.
In an instant the sea, which had been comparatively quiet, was running higher and higher; and it became almost as dark as night.
The hail and sleet were harder than I had yet felt them, seeming almost to pin us down to the rigging."
It is in the dispassionate statement of plain material facts that Dana achieves his greatness.
Dana writes from the remoter, non-emotional centres of being--not from the passional emotional self.
So the ship battles on, round Cape Horn, then into quieter seas.
The island of Juan Fernandez, Crusoe's island, rises like a dream from the sea, like a green cloud, and like a ghost Dana watches it, feeling only a faint, ghostly pang of regret for the life that was.
But the strain of the long sea-voyage begins to tell.
The sea is a great disintegrative force.
Its tonic quality is its disintegrative quality.
It burns down the tissue, liberates energy.
And after a long time, this burning-down is destructive.
The pysche becomes destroyed, irritable, frayed, almost dehumanized.
So there is trouble on board the ship, irritating discontent, friction unbearable, and at last a flogging.
This flogging rouses Dana for the first and last time to human and ideal passion.
"Sam was by this time seized up--that is, placed against the shrouds, with his wrists made fast to the shrouds, his jacket off, and his back exposed.
The captain stood on the break of the deck, a few feet from him, and a little raised, so as to have a good swing at him, and held in his hand a light, thick rope.
The officers stood round, and the crew grouped together in the waist.
All these preparations made me feel sick and faint, angry and excited as I was.
A man--a human being made in God's likeness--fastened up and flogged like a beast!
The first and almost uncontrollable impulse was resistance.
But what could be done?
--The time for it had gone by----" So Mr. Dana couldn't act.
He could only lean over the side of the ship and spue.
Whatever made him vomit?
Why shall man not be whipped?
As long as man has a bottom, he must surely be whipped.
It is as if the Lord intended it so.
Why?
For lots of reasons.
Man doth not live by bread alone, to absorb it and to evacuate it.
What is the breath of life?
My dear, it is the strange current of interchange that flows between men and men, and men and women, and men and things.
A constant current of interflow, a constant vibrating interchange.
That is the breath of life.
And this interflow, this electric vibration is polarized.
There is a positive and a negative polarity.
This is a law of life, of vitalism.
Only ideas are final, finite, static, and single.
All life-interchange is a polarized communication.
A circuit.
There are lots of circuits.
Male and female, for example, and master and servant.
The idea, the IDEA, that fixed gorgon monster, and the IDEAL, that great stationary engine, these two gods-of-the-machine have been busy destroying all _natural_ reciprocity and _natural_ circuits, for centuries.
IDEAS have played the very old Harry with sex relationship, that is, with the great circuit of man and woman.
Turned the thing into a wheel on which the human being in both is broken.
And the IDEAL has mangled the blood-reciprocity of master and servant into an abstract horror.
Master and servant--or master and man relationship is, essentially, a polarized flow, like love.
It is a circuit of vitalism which flows between master and man and forms a very precious nourishment to each, and keeps both in a state of subtle, quivering, vital equilibrium.
Deny it as you like, it is so.
But once you _abstract_ both master and man, and make them both serve an idea: production, wage, efficiency, and so on: so that each looks on himself as an instrument performing a certain repeated evolution, then you have changed the vital, quivering circuit of master and man into a mechanical machine unison.
Just another way of life: or anti-life.
You could never quite do this on a sailing ship.
A master had to be master, or it was hell.
That is, there had to be this strange interflow of master-and-man, the strange reciprocity of command and obedience.
The reciprocity of command and obedience is a state of unstable vital equilibrium.
Everything vital, or natural, is unstable, thank God.
The ship had been at sea many weeks.
A great strain on master and men.
An increasing callous indifference in the men, an increasing irritability in the master.
And then what?
A storm.
Don't expect me to say _why_ storms must be.
They just are.
Storms in the air, storms in the water, storms of thunder, storms of anger.
Storms just are.
Storms are a sort of violent readjustment in some polarized flow.
You have a polarized circuit, a circuit of unstable equilibrium.
The instability increases till there is a crash.
Everything seems to break down.
Thunder roars, lightning flashes.
The master roars, the whip whizzes.
The sky sends down sweet rain.
The ship knows a new strange stillness, a readjustment, a refinding of equilibrium.
Ask the Lord Almighty why it is so.
I don't know.
I know it is so.
But flogging?
Why flogging?
Why not use reason or take away jam for tea?
Why not?
Why not ask the thunder please to abstain from this physical violence of crashing and thumping, please to swale away like thawing snow.
Sometimes the thunder _does_ swale away like thawing snow, and then you hate it.
Muggy, sluggish, inert, dreary sky.
Flogging.
You have a Sam, a fat slow fellow, who has got slower and more slovenly as the weeks wear on.
You have a master who has grown more irritable in his authority.
Till Sam becomes simply wallowing in his slackness, makes your gorge rise.
And the master is on red hot iron.
Now these two men, Captain and Sam, are there in a very unsteady equilibrium of command and obedience.
A polarized flow.
Definitely polarized.
The poles of will are the great ganglia of the voluntary nerve system, located beside the spinal column, in the back.
From the poles of will in the backbone of the Captain, to the ganglia of will in the back of the sloucher Sam, runs a frazzled, jagged current, a staggering circuit of vital electricity.
This circuit gets one jolt too many, and there is an explosion.
"Tie up that lousy swine!"
roars the enraged Captain.
And whack!
Whack!
down on the bare back of that sloucher Sam comes the cat.
What does it do?
By Jove, it goes like ice-cold water into his spine.
Down those lashes runs the current of the Captain's rage, right into the blood and into the toneless ganglia of Sam's voluntary system.
Crash!
Crash!
runs the lightning flame, right into the cores of the living nerves.
And the living nerves respond.
They start to vibrate.
They brace up.
The blood begins to go quicker.
The nerves begin to recover their vividness.
It is their tonic.
The man Sam has a new clear day of intelligence, and a smarty back.
The Captain has a new relief, a new ease in his authority, and a sore heart.
There is a new equilibrium, and a fresh start.
The _physical_ intelligence of a Sam is restored, the turgidity is relieved from the veins of the Captain.
It is a natural form of human coition, interchange.
It is good for Sam to be flogged.
It is good, on this occasion, for the Captain to have Sam flogged.
I say so.
Because they were both in that physical condition.
Spare the rod and spoil the _physical_ child.
Use the rod and spoil the _ideal_ child.
There you are.
Dana, as an idealist, refusing the blood-contact of life, leaned over the side of the ship powerless, and vomited: or wanted to.
His solar plexus was getting a bit of its own back.
To him, Sam was an "ideal" being, who should have been approached through the mind, the reason, and the spirit.
That lump of a Sam!
But there was another idealist on board, the seaman John, a Swede.
He wasn't named John for nothing, this Jack-tar of the Logos.
John felt himself called upon to play Mediator, Intercedor, Saviour, on this occasion.
The popular Paraclete.
"Why are you whipping this man, sir?"
But the Captain had got his dander up.
He wasn't going to have his natural passion judged and interfered with by these long-nosed Salvationist Johannuses.
So he had nosey John hauled up and whipped as well.
For which I am very glad.
Alas, however, the Captain got the worst of it in the end.
He smirks longest who smirks lasts.
The Captain wasn't wary enough.
Natural anger, natural passion has its unremitting enemy in the idealist.
And the ship was already tainted with idealism.
A good deal more so, apparently, than Herman Melville's ships were.
Which reminds us that Melville was once going to be flogged.
In _White Jacket.
_ And he, too, would have taken it as the last insult.
In my opinion, there are worse insults than floggings.
I would rather be flogged than have most people "like" me.
Melville too had an Intercedor: a quiet, self-respecting man, not a saviour.
The man spoke in the name of Justice.
Melville was to be unjustly whipped.
The man spoke honestly and quietly.
Not in any Salvationist spirit.
And the whipping did not take place.
Justice is a great and manly thing.
Saviourism is a despicable thing.
Sam was justly whipped.
It was a passional justice.
But Melville's whipping would have been a cold, disciplinary injustice.
A foul thing.
Mechanical _justice_ even is a foul thing.
For true justice makes the heart's fibres quiver.
You can't be cold in a matter of real justice.
Already in those days it was no fun to be a captain.
You had to learn already to abstract yourself into a machine-part, exerting machine-control.
And it is a good deal bitterer to exert machine-control, selfless, ideal control, than it is to have to obey, mechanically.
Because the idealists who mechanically obey almost always hate the _man_ who must give the orders.
