great bear said:
is Moby Dick a veneral disease form the east coast?
It is easy to see why Melville, himself a prey to the deepest forebodings about the optimism of his day, recognized at once his kinship of spirit with Hawthorne. "There is a certain tragic phase of humanity which, in our opinion (he wrote), was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne." A year after Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter, Melville dedicated his own most powerful embodiment of this tragic phase, Moby Dick, to Hawthorne, his acknowledged master. Together the two books are witness to the vitality of the tragic vision, which pierces beneath the "official view" of any culture to the dark realities that can never be permanently hidden, and together they mark a recrudescence of the tragic spirit in what would seem an unlikely time, on unlikely soil, and without benefit of tragic theater or tragic audience.
Both authors were aware of the untimeliness of their books. Hawthorne, in the famous letter to his publisher, Fields, spoke of fearing that his novel would "weary very many people and disgust some" by keeping so close, and with so little diversification, to "the same dark idea." Would he have an audience receptive to his peculiar view of things? The Greek and Elizabethan dramatists or Racine or even the poet of Job could count on an audience culturally predisposed through myth, theater, or racial view to accept at once a drama of direness. Hawthorne had to make his own audience, to lead it by easy stages, as it were, into the dark idea. Hence the familiar, reassuring tone of the Custom House introduction, where the only dire events involve a certain goose of tragic toughness and the routine political loss of a job not worth holding. Hence the whimsical apology, in advance, for the "stern and sombre aspect" of Hester's story--- "too much ungladdened by genial sunshine; to little relieved by the tender and familiar influences which soften almost every scene of nature and real life, and, undoubtedly, should soften every picture of them"--- an apology which we may well regard as almost wholly tactical.
