First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands,if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, andfeels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; butunder precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from hishammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milkywhiteness- as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed whitebears were swimming round him, then he feels a silent, superstitiousdread; the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is horrible tohim as a real ghost; in vain the lead assures him he is still offsoundings; heart and helm they both go down; he never rests tillblue water is under him again. Yet where is the mariner who willtell thee, "Sir, it was not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks,as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so stirred me?"Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of thesnowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in themere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at suchvast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it wouldbe to lose oneself in such inhuman solitude. Much the same is itwith the backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifferenceviews an unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of treeor twig to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor,beholding the scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by someinfernal trick of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he,shivering and half shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hopeand solace to his misery, views what seems a boundless churchyardgrinning upon him with its lean ice monuments and splintered crosses.
But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness isbut a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to ahypo, Ishmael.
Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peacefulvalley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey- why is it thatupon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behindhim, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animalmuskiness- why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw theground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of anygorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that thestrange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associatedwith the experience of former perils; for what knows he, this NewEngland colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?
No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct ofthe knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands ofmiles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending,goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal ofthe prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust.
Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlingsof the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of thewindrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shakingof that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!
Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which themystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt,somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspectsthis visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres wereformed in fright.
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, andlearned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strangeand far more portentous- why, as we have seen, it is at once themost meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of theChristian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifyingagent in things the most appalling to mankind.
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartlessvoids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behindwith the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths ofthe milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much acolor as the visible absence of color; and at the same time theconcrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such adumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- acolorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when weconsider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all otherearthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges ofsunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies,and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtiledeceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on fromwithout; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot,whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and whenwe proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic whichproduces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for everremains white or colorless in itself, and if operating withoutmedium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses,with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universelies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, whorefuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so thewretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroudthat wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things theAlbino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
