Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Wherein do these paragraphs from Moby Dick reveal the fact thatMelville was addressing an undifferentiated audience? They are certainlyhighly “bookish”—what with that elaborated classical allusion, that stylishsubjunctive, and their high percentage of words from the Latin.First, we observe that elevation and intensity are not solely andinseparably associated with noble images. The sublime does not wear acothurnus. There are not two doors for words in America, no tradesmen’sentrance: all can go in the front door. In the very same sentence in whichMelville apostrophizes divinity, we are told that God has “bejuggled” manya man. It is a word from the skulduggeries of the country fair and the cardgame at the livery stable. We remember the horror with which Racine’scontemporaries greeted the mention of a dog in tragedy, the protest of theaudience against Hugo’s use of the humble phrase, “Quelle heure est-il?”in Hernani. Generations of critics deplored the drunken porter in Macbeth.What better illustration of the limited gamut of tones available for Europeanfull-throated utterance than the observation that so many of the words thatdescribe lofty moods are also words that stem from the designations of socialrank, or that run concurrently with them and derive much of their force fromconnotations of status: “noble” and “herrlich” and “edel” and “magnifico” and“grande” and “soberano” and “majestic” and even “gentle.” The United Statesis a middle-class nation and has widened and broadened and deepened theconcepts of the wide and the broad and the deep without diminishing theconcept of the high. We notice that the angelic host of birds that glorify theWhite Whale have soft toes. Toes, like noses, have not hitherto entered theexalted, the dithyrambic style. This page did not have the drawing room inview.Second, most European exercises in the sublime, in avoiding thecommon and humble, avoid the specific. In the tirades of Burke and Carlyleon the French Revolution, in the impassioned visions of DeQuincey andChateaubriand, the noble is associated with a high vagueness. Audienceswhich are composed of the selected and the cultivated and the Gehildetenand the honnêtes gens and the cognoscenti are not interested in life’s diversity;the pressures upon them work toward the formulation of taste and conventionand the Rules of the Beautiful and an ever-narrowing purity (i.e.,economy) in the selection of detail. But the American public was one andone and one … to an unlimited number. Their taste could never be codified,for it was overwhelmed by an ever-enlarging vision of the universe and itsmultifarious character. The bigger the world is, the less one can be contentwith vagueness. The catalogs of Walt Whitman, which have displeased so205