Chapter 14

by Herman Melville

　　WORTH THE CONSIDERATION OF THOSE TO WHOM IT MAY PROVE WORTH CONSIDERING.As the last chapter was begun with a reminder looking forwards, so thepresent must consist of one glancing backwards.To some, it may raise a degree of surprise that one so full ofconfidence, as the merchant has throughout shown himself, up to themoment of his late sudden impulsiveness, should, in that instance, havebetrayed such a depth of discontent. He may be thought inconsistent, andeven so he is. But for this, is the author to be blamed? True, it may beurged that there is nothing a writer of fiction should more carefullysee to, as there is nothing a sensible reader will more carefully lookfor, than that, in the depiction of any character, its consistencyshould be preserved. But this, though at first blush, seeming reasonableenough, may, upon a closer view, prove not so much so. For how does itcouple with another requirement--equally insisted upon, perhaps--that,while to all fiction is allowed some play of invention, yet, fictionbased on fact should never be contradictory to it; and is it not a fact,that, in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis? Whichbeing so, the distaste of readers to the contrary sort in books, canhardly arise from any sense of their untrueness. It may rather be fromperplexity as to understanding them. But if the acutest sage be often athis wits' ends to understand living character, shall those who are notsages expect to run and read character in those mere phantoms which flitalong a page, like shadows along a wall? That fiction, where everycharacter can, by reason of its consistency, be comprehended at aglance, either exhibits but sections of character, making them appearfor wholes, or else is very untrue to reality; while, on the other hand,that author who draws a character, even though to common viewincongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the butterfly is with thecaterpillar into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not falsebut faithful to facts.If reason be judge, no writer has produced such inconsistent charactersas nature herself has. It must call for no small sagacity in a readerunerringly to discriminate in a novel between the inconsistencies ofconception and those of life as elsewhere. Experience is the only guidehere; but as no one man can be coextensive with what is, it may beunwise in every ease to rest upon it. When the duck-billed beaver ofAustralia was first brought stuffed to England, the naturalists,appealing to their classifications, maintained that there was, inreality, no such creature; the bill in the specimen must needs be, insome way, artificially stuck on.But let nature, to the perplexity of the naturalists, produce herduck-billed beavers as she may, lesser authors some may hold, have nobusiness to be perplexing readers with duck-billed characters. Always,they should represent human nature not in obscurity, but transparency,which, indeed, is the practice with most novelists, and is, perhaps, incertain cases, someway felt to be a kind of honor rendered by them totheir kind. But, whether it involve honor or otherwise might be mooted,considering that, if these waters of human nature can be so readily seenthrough, it may be either that they are very pure or very shallow. Uponthe whole, it might rather be thought, that he, who, in view of itsinconsistencies, says of human nature the same that, in view of itscontrasts, is said of the divine nature, that it is past finding out,thereby evinces a better appreciation of it than he who, by alwaysrepresenting it in a clear light, leaves it to be inferred that heclearly knows all about it.But though there is a prejudice against inconsistent characters inbooks, yet the prejudice bears the other way, when what seemed at firsttheir inconsistency, afterwards, by the skill of the writer, turns outto be their good keeping. The great masters excel in nothing so much asin this very particular. They challenge astonishment at the tangled webof some character, and then raise admiration still greater at theirsatisfactory unraveling of it; in this way throwing open, sometimes tothe understanding even of school misses, the last complications of thatspirit which is affirmed by its Creator to be fearfully and wonderfullymade.At least, something like this is claimed for certain psychologicalnovelists; nor will the claim be here disputed. Yet, as touching thispoint, it may prove suggestive, that all those sallies of ingenuity,having for their end the revelation of human nature on fixed principles,have, by the best judges, been excluded with contempt from the ranks ofthe sciences--palmistry, physiognomy, phrenology, psychology. Likewise,the fact, that in all ages such conflicting views have, by the mosteminent minds, been taken of mankind, would, as with other topics, seemsome presumption of a pretty general and pretty thorough ignorance ofit. Which may appear the less improbable if it be considered that, afterporing over the best novels professing to portray human nature, thestudious youth will still run risk of being too often at fault uponactually entering the world; whereas, had he been furnished with a truedelineation, it ought to fare with him something as with a strangerentering, map in hand, Boston town; the streets may be very crooked, hemay often pause; but, thanks to his true map, he does not hopelesslylose his way. Nor, to this comparison, can it be an adequate objection,that the twistings of the town are always the same, and those of humannature subject to variation. The grand points of human nature are thesame to-day they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in themis in expression, not in feature.But as, in spite of seeming discouragement, some mathematicians are yetin hopes of hitting upon an exact method of determining the longitude,the more earnest psychologists may, in the face of previous failures,still cherish expectations with regard to some mode of infalliblydiscovering the heart of man.But enough has been said by way of apology for whatever may have seemedamiss or obscure in the character of the merchant; so nothing remainsbut to turn to our comedy, or, rather, to pass from the comedy ofthought to that of action.