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434 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY a quickening of one's sense of responsibility. It should have wide use as the basis for discussion among groups of university teachers, for one cannot read it without feeling impelled to do something in response to its challenge. THE MAKING AND THE MEANING OF MOBY-DICK* G. ROPER These two books by Professor Vincent and Professor Percival are outstanding in the present in-tide of books and articles on Herman Melville in that they confine themselves to intensive studies of M obyDick . Dr. Vincent began The Trying-out of Moby-Dick as a source study, but soon found himself drawn out of that narrow interest into a comprehensive study of the work of art which Melville finally created. This development of The Trying-out from a one-level description of M oby-Dick into a multi-levelled examination happens to parallel a development in the composition of M oby-Dick itself. Dr. Vincent shows convincingly for the first time that Melville wrote two Moby-Dicks. He argues that Melville first began in early 1850 to write a descriptive book on the American whaling industry dramatized in narrative form. As this manuscript was nearing completion in the late summer of 1850, a spiritual and artistic upheaval occurred in Melville, caused partly by the beginning of his friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Consequently Melville spent another year in rewriting and expanding the original M oby-Dick into the book we now read. After tracing the course and the artistic implications of this theory of the growth of Melville's masterpiece, Dr. Vincent devotes the bulk of The Trying-out to a study of the chapters from XXXII to cv in M oby-Dick which form what he calls "The Cetological Center." In a chapter-by-chapter examination of this central part, Dr. Vincent's chief concern has been to retrace the wide reading which Melville did in books on whaling and travel- Beale, Browne, Bennett, Scoresby, Macy, Cheever, Wilkes, and Maury-and in Bayle's Dictionary, in Sir Thomas Browne, Burton, Rabelais, Shakespeare, and others. Dr. Vincent was able to examine Melville's own copies of several of these sources, in which Melville checked passages and made marginal notes. He has found that Melville drew widely and frequently from these *The Trying-out of Moby-Dick. By HOWARD P. VINCENT. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company [Toronto: Thomas Allen Limited]. 1949. Pp. xvi, 400. $6.00. A Reading 0/ Moby-Dick. By M. O. PERCIVAL. Chicago: University of Chicago Press [Toronto: W. J. Gage and Company Limited)' 1950. Pp. vi, 136. $3.00. REVIEWS 43!> sources, both for information and for narrative structures. He concludes , however, that Melville took only what he could transmute into material usable in expressing his private vision. He also demonstrates how skilfully Melville transmuted his sources into the powerful prose and the searching symbolism which we find in M oby-Dick. Melville found much blubber in his "fish documents," and tried-out (rendered) most of it into poetic prose of high intensity and profundity . And, as a good Melvillean, Dr. Vincent could not stop with this. He goes off in search of the meaning of the Great White Whale, and in the vigour of his able pursuit lies the final value of The Trying-out. He notes to begin with that Melville himself appears to have thought of M oby-Dick not as an allegory but as both realistic and symbolic. Here it is argued that the White Whale is multi-valued, and that its meanings shift. What the White Whale was to Ahab is an expanding thing; what it was to Ishmael and to others is also of vital importance, and must be used to frame and illuminate the story of Ahab in any rich reading of the text. Dr. Vincent has produced an excellent work of Melville scholarship, and also a highly readable book on the universal problem of the mysteries of creative art. Unlike Professor Vincent, Professor Percival in his A Reading of M oby-Dick is only concerned with the meaning of M oby-Dick. He assumes that the greatness of the book is in its inspired boding forth...

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