A writer in the Democratic Review compared Webber's Old Hicks, The Guide, to Melville's Typee and Omoo, adding, however, that Webber's novel contained "more of earnestness and poetry." Melville's South Sea stories, with their repeated insistence that "the Polynesian savage, surrounded by all the luxurious provisions of nature, enjoyed an infinitely happier, though certainly a less intellectual existence than the self-complacent European," appealed to the same sophisticated primitivism that found expression in the more lyrical versions of the Western myth. That even such an original writer as Melville—a writer, moreover, temperamentally disposed to stress the darker side of things—found it difficult to write about the South Seas without invoking the conventions of pastoralism shows just how tenacious those conventions were, especially at a time when American authors still found it necessary to employ the ornate, euphemistic, and windy style deemed suitable for the well-bred man of letters.

In a primitive state of society, the enjoyments of life, though few and simple, are spread over a great extent, and are unalloyed: but Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve;—the heart-burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissensions, and the thousand self-inflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery, are unknown among these unsophisticated people. ^*

An unsentimental literary treatment of the West—of the confrontation between savagery and civilization, the progress of "improvement," and its devastating impact on earlier ways of life—demanded an imaginative suspension of the self-consciously cultivated point of view and the development of a vernacular style, the "nervous lofty language" of Moby Dick

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Melville's list of civilized "discomforts" clearly derived from the pastoral tradition. Snobbery, social climbing, ostentation, backbiting slander, envy, suspicion, vanity, possessiveness, ambition, and the obsession with appearances were the classic targets of pastoral satire—the classic vices of court life, later generalized to urban civilization as a whole.

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