Timonism

We now draw near the Cape Horn of Melville’s life; and I would remind the reader of Melville’s own prophetic words in White-Jacket: “Sailor or landsman, there is some sort of Cape Horn for all. Boys! beware of it; prepare for it in time. Graybeards! thank God it is passed. And ye lucky livers, to whom, by some rare fatality, your Cape Horns are as placid as Lake Lemans, flatter not yourselves that good luck is judgment and discretion; for all the yolk in your eggs, you might have foundered and gone down had the Spirit of the Cape said the word.”

The evidence for this part of Melville’s history is incomplete and ambiguous: the testimony of his contemporaries is obscure, and what has been handed on to living people has been stated in a fragmentary way by witnesses whose limitations of knowledge and whose emotional bias vitiate their judgment, and rob their testimony of any pretence of impartiality. I do not overlook the value of family tradition in dealing with this part of Melville’s life; but I prefer to use it as I shall use Melville’s own expression in literature, not as recording objective events, but as indicating a certain tendency and direction. The witness of Melville’s own literary works is far more objective evidence than more personal stories which can neither be substantiated nor refuted. “The data which life furnishes towards a true estimate of any being,” Melville himself reminds us, “are as insufficient to that end as in geometry one side given would be to determine a triangle.” During this period the nearest one can come to truth is by avoiding the grosser forms of error.

The last forty years of Melville’s life have been thoroughly misinterpreted, for the reason that after Moby-Dick Melville ceased to be a popular author. This period has been referred to as the long quietus, and even such a just critic as Mr. Percy Boynton could say: “Pierre was Melville’s last real and audible word, and even Pierre was an epilogue.” Such a complete halt in a writer’s life would indeed give reason for grave suspicions; and popular rumour has filled up this dismal gap with tales of Melville’s insanity. That there is a spark of fact beneath this suffocating cloud of conjecture, I am prepared to show: but the spark was magnified into a bonfire by Melville’s own contemporaries, absurdly, maliciously enlarged; and later critics have even been obtuse enough to read back into Mardi the signs of Melville’s mental disruption. As a matter of fact, Melville’s silence was a very audible one; and what is usually looked upon as the dark period of his intellectual quietus is in fact the bleak period of his contemporaries’ neglect. One cannot call silence the reduced but steady output of short stories, novels, poems, which marked the next forty years of Melville’s life.