131 
the white whale 
circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed, he ad- 
dressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or in terrorem, 
or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means unobservant of 
the paramount forms and usages of the sea. 
Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those 
forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself ; incidentally 
making use of them for other and more private ends than they were 
legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, 
which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested ; through 
those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible 
dictatorship. For he a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it 
can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, 
without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, 
in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever 
keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings ; and 
leaves the highest honours that this air can give, to those men who be- 
come famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden 
handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority 
over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these 
small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in 
some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. 
But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of 
geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian 
herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralisation. Nor will 
the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its 
fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so im- 
portant in his art, as the one now alluded to. 
But Ahab, my captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket 
grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching emperors and 
kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old whale- 
hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings and 
housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab, what shall be grand in thee, it 
must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and 
featured in the embodied air ! 
