everything we need to know. You are busy and happy: you have adapted
yourself, with the aid of such extra space as was once enjoyed by
all families of moderate means, to the clan of sisters and brothers
and cousins and aunts that make up the provincial family of the old
kind: you make it possible for Herman to economize all his energies,
and go ahead, with gentle resolution, at his work. What a beautifully
divided day it is: Herman working behind closed doors, and you
yourself, very cheerful and attentive and industrious, cocking your ear
occasionally for sounds of restlessness. Then the little breaks: the
sociability and--do you not perhaps overestimate a lover’s capacity
for conversation?--the hour or two of cosy chat. Already Herman’s
eyes must be saved, and you are there to save them. True: he has
devoted sisters, too; and they are very nice in their way, all such a
jolly, helpful, numerous family. People are a little more punctilious
here than they are in New England; that is part of the European air
which New York somehow preserves; the men bow lower, make prettier
compliments, and get drunk more often. When you go to a dance without
Herman, you are treated as one of the sisters, and by virtue of your
supposed maidenhood, you are quite a belle again. Herman doesn’t like
dances and parties overmuch: the late hours and the late suppers take
the edge off his writing next morning: he finds it hard to begin and
is a little cross and irritable: but what difference does that make?
You would give up all these frivolities for such a shapely, manly,
courteous, thoughtful man: if he will stay by, the world may gaily pass.
You are not alone, Elizabeth Melville: Mrs. Darwin feels the same
way, too; so, with less satisfaction and complaisance, does Jane
Carlyle; so, presently, does Sophia Tolstoy. But such helpfulness and
affectionate sacrifice cannot last forever. Children will come; you and
your fine, high-spirited boy will see less and less of each other: you
will interrupt his deepest intimacy with concern for the baby’s bottle.
You will wonder, when you are alone, whether you have any right to
thrust these burdens on his shoulders: you will feel that the world is
a little cruel, and your being joined to this lover who is so strange
and remote, this affectionate man who is also so exacting, is uneasy
bewilderment.... I do not understand you, Elizabeth Melville? Reflect
again carefully: do not be afraid of your feelings: some of them are
still visible in the fading ink of old letters; and some of them are in
your heart, because you are a human being. If you do not resent sharing
Herman so much with his family, you are a greater angel than you should
be.
“How much,” wrote Melville in Pierre, “that goes to make up the
deliciousness of a wife already lies in the sister.” Do you sometimes
feel, Elizabeth, that Herman has only added another sister to the
family; that Lizzie is now but a step away from Kate and Helen and
Augusta? It is not that he loves them too tenderly, but that he
worships you too much, or, in alternate fits, is far too indifferent
and puts you at a sisterly distance from him. Do you feel that he will
never get near enough to you, will never appreciate the you that is,
although he may be disappointed because of the you that is not? He
accepts you, of course, accepts you tenderly: you darn his stockings
and sew new tapes in his drawers when he breaks them: you put up
patiently with the languors and irritabilities that follow an intense
morning at the desk, and at times, you have the power to erase them and
make his eyes shine with triumph instead.
But this Herman is not the jovial boy who once played with Fayaway: he
has his turns of high spirits, but his humours are a little obscure and
beyond you, and his face shades a little with disappointment when he
notes that your plain, literal mind does not follow his sallies. He is
growing beyond you: in the very act of writing Mardi, Elizabeth ceases
to exist: the book is haunted by a phantom called Yillah: a Yillah who
will never mend socks or replace broken tapes. Some day he will learn,
perhaps, that women, like whales, are objects of natural history; and
when he is weary with his wandering and his quests, he will not despise
your tired arms: one of the best and tenderest of his poems, The
Return of the Sire de Nesle, will be addressed to you. But before that
happens, you have both a long hard journey before you. Courage! The
burden of writing these books will not fall upon his shoulders alone.
2
The spring of 1848 was full of turbulence all over the world. In Paris
the red flag was raised, and in a froth of oratory men dreamed and
fought at the barricades and died. Germany seemed on the verge of a
republic, and the fragments of Italy made convulsive movements; with
these and many other events fomenting, chaos and disorder and perhaps
some glorious new society, based on universal suffrage and national
workshops and the commune, seemed about to be instituted. One looks
back with a tolerant smile to those days, days when a formula seemed as
powerful as a siege gun, when the ballot seemed by itself a guarantee
of order and justice in human affairs. The effect of the French
uprising was the pastry cook’s Empire of Napoleon III; the final result
of the German revolution was the brutal, semi-feudal industrialism
of Germany after 1870. “I should not be surprised,” said Melville’s
Redburn, “if there were more words than things in the world”; and in
1848 there was surely far more Peace, Progress, Political Perfection,
Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, in the mouths and minds of men, than
there was in political society.
The contrasts and absurdities in all our institutions made 1848 a great
year for satirical observation, so long as the observer could remain
far enough away from humanity to laugh at its errors rather than weep,
as Alexander Herzen did, over its sins, and over the dark collapse
of hope and ambition that followed. Melville, fortunately, lived in
America: its own 1848, namely, the Civil War, was just thirteen years
away; and the book which began in 1847 as an adventurous idyll of
the South Seas, poetically conceived with a remote allegorical quest
running through it, came to an end as a savage parody of the whole
economy of Western Civilization, and its lofty Christian professions.
Just as Melville was finishing Mardi, this eventful spring, Elizabeth
Melville conceived: and the summer months that followed were devoted to
final preparations for the book and the baby. Augusta worked hard to
copy Melville’s manuscript for the press; and with even greater zeal
she conned the genealogical tables for a name for the infant--having
settled in her mind that it would be a boy. Her zeal was justified.
When in February, 1849, Herman Melville became a father, Augusta’s name
for the child prevailed: it was Malcolm.
If Mardi throws any light upon Melville’s personal relations at all,
I think one must acknowledge that the light is a happy one. The true
test of a writer’s feelings is not what he says: it is the way in which
he says it. Mr. Chesterton once happily pointed out that in Byron’s
most melancholy lines the spontaneous gallop and thud of Byron’s metre
betrays his sanguine feelings; and I think one can say much the same
thing of Mardi. There are large sections of Mardi that are written with
a sort of sleepy ease; the words flow so languorously from Melville’s
pen that he floats along with them and lets them carry him where they
will; the rhythm is not always subtle; the voice lacks modulation and
change of tempo: it lulls one like the even murmur of the ocean at low
tide on a beach. When lovers are conversing on a summer’s afternoon, it
does not occur to them that any one could call such heavenly intimacy
tedious: what they would like to prolong for eternity one who did not
share their mood would not tolerate for five minutes. And it is so in
Mardi. Melville is so happy that he does not notice one cannot always
share the emotion with him.
Whether the beginning of Mardi was set up in type before the end was
reached one cannot surely tell: Melville made this happen to Pierre,
and explained what a handicap this method of production was to the
writer, since it did not allow him to work over the earlier parts and
create a unity. If the slowness of hand-setting and the customs of
the market made Melville actually do this, it would explain a certain
inconsequentialness in Mardi as due to external circumstances, and
not to Melville’s inability to master his material and criticize
his workmanship. But certainly pressure and speed seem absent from
Mardi: a soft tropical breeze is all that carries the story on, and
more than once this drops to a dead calm. Financial difficulties were
not yet pressing in Melville’s domicile when he began Mardi: no
baby demanded care: no breach had opened between the writer and his
audience: Elizabeth’s approaching confinement doubtless renewed some
of the tender, pre-nuptial feeling: these are all fairly objective
facts; and if one doubt them, the repeated, even cadences of Mardi,
as of a sleeping bosom, slowly heaving and falling, have the value of
corroborative testimony.
3
Mardi has been forgotten while lesser books have flourished. Let us
see how much we have missed. It is not a perfect book; but it has
something in it that defies death; and that something is the presence
of Melville himself, now arriving at maturity, a traveller who has gone
to the ends of the earth, and has not left his head smugly at home--a
vehement, clear-witted, copious, steady-eyed, jocose, untamable man.
The poise and completeness of Typee is gone: much as we prize youth,
the cost of continuing that balance, without a fresh integration, is
arrested development; and Melville went on. Mardi has all the promise
of imperfection.
The story begins on the plane of fact. We are off! The courses
and topsails are set, and the Arcturion is sailing dead before an
equatorial breeze in search of the whale. Overwhelmed by the monotony,
the teller of the story escapes at night in a whaleboat, in the company
of a faithful, taciturn sailor of the old Norse breed, Jarl. The sun
shines; the bonetas and sharks swim around the boat; the devil-fish
undulate repulsively in the deeper waters below; or at night the
phosphorescence spreads across the surface, and the hand dropped over
the side ripples through fluent silver; they sail on and on, making
for distant islands, tormented by the lack of water and the unyielding
sun, and worse still, by a dead calm, when the grey firmament of sky
collapses into the grey firmament of water. When at long last they
encounter a sail, it turns out to be an apparently deserted brigantine:
they board it and find themselves, after creepy suspicions, in the
company of a South Sea Islander and his wife, the sole survivors of a
Christian crew.
We are still on the plane of physical adventure: Annatoo is an amusing
termagant, and when Samoa, her husband, amputates his own arm by the
most primitive surgery and cautery, Melville might still be merely
describing curious South Sea customs, as in Omoo. In a little space
all this changes. The brigantine is lost, and the shipwrecked sailors,
again in a whaleboat, come upon a South Sea priest, with Seven Sons,
who is carrying a white maiden with golden hair and blue eyes, Yillah,
to another island. The hero rescues Yillah from the priest, and kills
him to make good his escape. With Yillah’s advent, the atmosphere
changes: a perfumed mist of unreality creeps over the sea from Mardi
itself.
Yillah’s mind is a spider-web of myth, in which the butterfly of her
spirit has been caught: she has dim recollections of being born in Amma
and spirited away, as a child, to Oroolia, the Island of Delights,
somewhere in the paradisial archipelago of the Polynesians. The waters
of Oroolia turned her olive skin to white and tinged her hair with
gold: she was transformed into the blossom of a vine, and hung there in
a trance, until the blossom was snapped from its stem and borne away on
the ocean, drifting to the island of Amma, where it was taken over by
the priest. The whaleboat floats on; the sea-fowls fly above it; the
fish dart and ripple and flash in the water: Yillah’s own dreams of her
past fade into the sweet vision that had haunted the hero’s earliest
thoughts. As love draws near, her divinity languishes: “Love sometimes
induced me to prop my failing divinity, though it was I myself who had
undermined it.” The Yillah of dream dwarfs into the Yillah of reality.
At last the voyagers reach the coast of Mardi, and, in the guise of
the Sun-God, Taji, the hero announces himself to an assemblage of
Mardian chiefs. His ruse is accepted; and for a brief while Taji finds
himself in Eden. The wide blue lagoon, the froth of breakers at the
reef, the milk-white smoke curling up from the volcanoes of Mardi: the
nights of starry entrancement, day dawning with Yillah, breaking along
the waking face, peeping out from her languid lids, then shining in
longer glances, till, like the sun, up comes the soul. All beauty and
beatitude Taji finds in Mardi. With Yillah for company, he retires to
a wooded islet, fringed with palm trees, watered by brooks. Near by,
in Odo, the kingdom of Media, is a harder world, where helots toil at
brutal tasks; but for a time Taji is happy with his Yillah. It all
ends. One day Taji finds her arbour vacant; she does not return; the
world becomes sour and empty; and Taji resolves to rove through Mardi
in search of Yillah.
With the disappearance of Yillah, the break from the actual becomes
complete: Yillah is a phantom, and Taji follows Yillah, in the company
of Media, the king, Mohi or Braidbeard, the historian, Babbalanja,
the philosopher, and Yoomy, the poet, through all the kingdoms and
principalities of Mardi. Where has Yillah flown, and where is the peace
that she gave?
4
Had Melville closed Mardi at this point the book would, I think,
have been hailed with delight as another, a purer, Typee: he need
only have searched a little farther and finally recaptured Yillah,
wiping out the last trace of ethereality and converting her into a
less primitive Fayaway--the stolen daughter of a highly respectable
missionary, perhaps--to have delighted his contemporaries with the
sweet concoction. This was the Melville they knew and could understand.
The language of Typee had become freer and in a limited sense more
poetical: but that only accentuated the banquet of sunrises and sunsets
and starry nights and palm groves and maidens more luscious than
Ingres’ odalisques, mixed with an occasional bite of tart adventure or
terror--almonds or olives--a banquet of unalloyed deliciousness after
the tame domestic lamplight and the corseted and petticoated heroines
of Victorian fiction, the Janes, the Doras, and even for that matter
the Beckys who were coming into fashion. The exotic has its glamour,
and somehow, those distant Polynesian maidens of Melville were a little
nearer, a little more thinkable in the flesh, than the Annabel Lees of
Poe, however near Adair and Oroolia might be to Aiden.
But Melville had grown. He started from the South Seas in order to have
familiar ground to spring from; he had no intention of merely amusing
his public with a less literal Omoo. Mardi is the world, and Yillah is
not a maiden but the spiritual life, who was brought to Mardi and given
a home there, but treacherously treated by the fates: the priests took
charge of her and sought to sacrifice her for their own purposes. Taji
slew the priest, and though the quest of Yillah is as tormenting as
the possession of her is peaceful and replete with happiness, still,
he would slay the priest again, if necessary, to bring her back. Once
Melville sets out on this quest, the South Seas of the Acushnet and the
Julia and Kory-Kory and Dr. Long Ghost vanish: these tropical isles are
a counterpart of the Western world, and in a thousand wild metaphors
and noble tropes, all the triumphs and follies of our civilization
parade again before the mind, clearer because of the disguise, more
immediate because they are so distant. Evil has entered Melville’s
paradise; evil, that “chronic malady of the universe” which, “checked
in one place, breaks forth in another,” and the knowledge of good and
evil is the beginning of his own sad wisdom.
Now witness Melville as he becomes conscious of life and history and
the recesses of his own spirit. Not for nothing were those brooding
hours on the maintop; not for nothing those lonely walks through the
crowds of Broadway, smiles, sunshades, shop-fronts, dashing rigs,
or, returning in the evening from the reading-room, with the stale
smell of wine coming up from the wine-cellars, the prostitutes already
ogling in front of the blue and red witches’ bowls in the apothecaries’
shops; not for nothing was it that he had exchanged calls with urbane
acquaintances of the family and succumbed to the customs of Pimminee,
where the Tapparians, in lieu of brains, carry a drop or two of
attar of roses in the corner of their craniums, and are the victims
of two incurable maladies, stone in the heart and ossification of
the head--with all their fripperies, fopperies, finesses. But I am
beginning to anticipate Taji’s Mardian discoveries. Let us retrace our
steps and survey this Mardi with Melville.
The isles of Mardi are easily recognized: Dominora, where King Bello
lives, is Great Britain: Vivenza is the United States: all the historic
states and empires are reduced, by translation into Mardian terms,
to something like their proper human proportions. Swift had used
this method once; and Melville employed it with little less effect,
particularly when he worked out the parallels carefully and retained
the South Sea atmosphere. In the guise of king, poet, philosopher,
Melville became a philosophic commentator, retelling the story of
Europe and Christianity and faith and doubt and religion and science,
exploring time, delivering himself through his dreams, disclosing,
in Babbalanja’s demonic inner man, Azzageddi, his own ultimate
perceptions. It is almost impossible to convey the vastness, the
variety, the genuine wealth of these pictures. I will only bring a
sample or two of his ore to the surface; the whole book is veined with
it.
Time and Eternity come before Melville. “And that which long endures
must long have remained in the germ. And duration is not of the future
but of the past; and eternity is eternal; because it has been; and
though a strong new monument be builded today, it only is lasting
because its blocks are as old as the sun. It is not the Pyramids that
are ancient, but the eternal granite of which they are made; which
had been equally ancient though yet in the quarry. For to make an
eternity, we must build with eternities; whence the vanity of the cry
for anything alike durable and new, and the folly of the reproach--your
granite hath come from the old-fashioned hills.” His copious mind
swarms to the idea; he throws fuel on it from a hundred sources. “No
fine firm fabric ever yet grew like a gourd. Nero’s House of Gold
was not raised in a day; nor the Mexican House of the Sun; nor the
Alhambra, nor the Escurial; nor Titus’ Amphitheatre; nor the Illinois
Mounds; nor Diana’s great columns at Ephesus; nor Pompey’s proud
Pillar; nor the Parthenon; nor the Altar of Belus; nor Stonehenge;
nor Solomon’s Temple; nor Tadmore’s Towers; nor Susa’s bastions, nor
Persepolis and its pediments.”
So he goes, sentence by sentence, till he has heaped into this fiery
furnace of death-defying things the grottos of Elephanta and the
Giants’ Causeway and the Grampian Hills and a score of other examples.
And at last: “If time was when this great quarry of Assyrias and Rome
was not extent; then, time must have been when the whole material
universe lived in its Dark Ages; yea, when the ineffable Silence,
proceeding from its unimaginable remoteness, espied it as an isle of
the sea. And herein is no derogation. For the immeasurable altitude is
not heightened by the arches of Mahomet’s heavens; and were all space a
vacuum, yet it would be a fulness, for to Himself his own Universe is
He. Thus deeper and deeper into Time’s endless tunnel does the winged
soul, like a night-hawk, wend her wild way, and finds eternities before
and behind; and her last limit is her everlasting beginning.”
When Melville’s French critics called Mardi Rabelaisian, and when the
English critics mentioned Sir Thomas Browne, one group was thinking
of these solemn, cadenced sentences, piling up phrases swollen with
sound like the great stops of an organ; while the other referred to
these prodigious catalogues and collocations. In Mardi Melville keeps
ideas in the air like a juggler’s balls; the images pass and repass,
making in those agile hands a single pattern. Satire is only one of
the moods of Mardi: poetic reverie, as in the chapter on Dreams, and
philosophic reflection, thread their ways in and out these scattered
islands of sense. Far more deeply and authentically than the author
of Eureka, Melville had anticipations of the drift of modern science
and philosophy. He accepts the notion of evolution, which Chambers had
popularized, saying, “Let us be content with the theology in the grass
and the flower, in seed-time and harvest.” And Babbalanja says: “I live
while consciousness is not mine, while to all appearances I am a clod.
And may not this same state of being, though but alternate with me, be
continually that of many dumb, passive objects we so carelessly regard.
Trust me, there are more things alive than those that crawl, or fly,
or swim. Think you, my lord, there is no sensation in being a tree?
feeling the sap in one’s boughs, the breeze in one’s foliage? Think you
it is nothing to be a world? one of a herd, bison-like, wending its way
across boundless meadows of ether? In the sight of a fowl, that sees
not our souls, what are our own tokens of animation? That we move, make
a noise, have organs, pulses, and are compounded of fluids and solids.
And all these are in this Mardi as a unit.”
After much exploration and much disappointment and much wine and witty
conversation to pass the time between, the travellers come finally
to Serenia, where the dictates of Alma--Christ--are embodied in the
polity. Here they find their quest come to an end, or rather, it has
lost all reason, “not because what we sought is found; but that I now
possess all which may be had of what I sought in Mardi.” Babbalanja
tarries there, to grow wiser; he counsels Media to return to Odo and
transplant to it the amaranths and myrtles of Serenia, letting no man
weep that he may laugh, and no man toil too hard that the king may be
idle: “Abdicate thy throne but still retain thy sceptre. None need a
king, but many need a ruler.” As for Taji, he will never find Yillah:
he may search further on the still unexplored islands; but when all is
seen he must “return, and find thy Yillah here.”
On the travellers sail. Their canoe is followed by the three avenging
brothers who have lurked in their wake all through the adventure,
bent upon taking Taji’s life; whilst the three messengers of Hautia,
the enchantress queen, with the iris, the venus-car, and a flower
white as alabaster, with forked and crimson stamens, trembling like
flame, bade the voyagers follow them to Hautia’s bower. They follow,
three pilot-fish in advance, three ravenous sharks astern. In some
wild way, Hautia, queen of the senses, has made a captive of Yillah,
and into some one of her black-eyed maids the blue-eyed one has been
transformed. But Taji could not find Yillah: Hautia claims him, with
wine and flowers and love: she offers him all the treasures of the
world, Health, Wealth, Long Life, and the Last Hope of Man, if he will
take her hands and dive with her into the crystal grotto: she will make
it easy to forget Yillah: he will lose his past, and learn to love the
living, not the dead. In vain she pleads. “Better to me, oh Hautia,
all the bitterness of my buried dead, than all the sweets of life thou
canst bestow; even were it eternal.”
All is over: the adventurers must go back to Serenia; they must deliver
Taji from Hautia, and save him from the avenging sons of the priest,
sin, conscience, remorse. Taji will not go. “‘And why put back? Is
a life of dying worth living o’er again? Let _me_, then, be the
unreturning wanderer. The helm! By Oro, I will steel my fate. Mardi,
farewell!’
“‘Nay, Taji, commit not the last, last crime!’ cried Yoomy.
“‘He’s seized the helm! Eternity is in his eye! Yoomy, for our lives we
must now swim.’...