Art & Creativity Quote by Herman Melville

Melville is throwing a harpoon at smallness - not the flea itself, but the literary ambition that mistakes minutiae for magnitude. The line lands because it’s both a dare and a diagnosis. He’s not arguing against detail; Moby-Dick is basically a cathedral of detail. He’s arguing against the comforting belief that craft alone can substitute for stakes. You can polish a pamphlet about a flea until it shines, but it won’t develop gravitational pull unless it hooks into something larger: obsession, God, empire, nature’s indifference, the human itch to impose meaning.

The sly bite is in “many there be that have tried it.” Melville knows the type: the earnest pedant, the status-hungry cataloguer, the writer who confuses trivia for profundity because trivia is safer. A flea won’t talk back. A “mighty theme” will. It demands you risk sentimentality, blasphemy, ridicule - the whole public mess of reaching for the big questions.

Context matters: Melville wrote in an America busy inventing itself, with oceans opening into commerce, conquest, and catastrophe. “Mighty theme” isn’t just aesthetic advice; it’s a challenge to write at the scale of the world you’re living in. It’s also self-justification from an author whose own “mighty” book was initially misunderstood. The quote doubles as a manifesto: if you’re going to fail, fail attempting the whale, not the flea.