"MIRIAM COFFIN, OR THE WHALE-FISHERMAN"
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by the adverb closely. A prototype for Miriam Coffin existed in the person of one of Nantucket's most famous characters, Keziah Folger Coffin; accounts of Nantucket topography, mores, charac ter, and modes of livelihood can be easily authenticated; and the whaling lore and whaling scenes, even to the fatal ramming of a ship by a whale, are essentially valid. He himself asserts in his peroration to the novel that: Fiction has but little to do with our pages. The incidents and the manners of bygone times, which we have shown up to a new generation, are faithful pictures of a past age, and are drawn from materials, which, if not altogether matters of record, still live fresh in the memory of a few persons. . . (II, 205). But apparently he took more pride in what he hoped were his ethical achievements and his skills in entertaining than in docu mentary exactitude: If we have succeeded in conveying a useful moral . . . if we have afforded the reader but a moiety of the pleasure in persuing some of the simple annals of Nantucket, that we have experienced in tracing them, — we shall be satisfied that our time has been spent to some good purpose: — for we have been both instructed and amused, while collecting and putting together the various parts of this tale (II, 205-206). Thus by these lights he would consider the designation "historical novel" wide of the mark, and "semi-romance of the sea" comes to mean a book that is only in part, or in certain parts, a romance of the sea. Yet, by design or accident, Hart employs the term romance meaningfully. Richard Chase in The American Novel and its Tradition says that the term signifies besides the more obvious qualities of the picturesque and the heroic, an assumed freedom from the ordinary novelistic requirements of verisimilitude, development, and continuity; a tendency towards melodrama and idyl; a more or less formal abstractness and, on the other hand, a tendency to plunge into the underside of consciousness;9 Perceiving a "Manichaean sensibility" in the "romancenovel", he observes that the American imagination "seems less in terested in redemption than in the melodrama of the eternal struggle of good and evil, less interested in incarnation and reconciliation than in alienation and disorder."'0 Hart is, of course, self-consciously "moral" to the point of eccentricity, es pecially about "the young and inexperienced female" and her need "properly to appreciate the butterfly acquirements of flippant dealers in mere compliments and insincere protestations"
