Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
by the pallid and beautiful youth Donjalolo, with wives thirty in
number, corresponding in name to the nights of the moon: wives “blithe
as larks, more playful than kittens,” though “but supplied with
the thirtieth part of all that Aspasia could desire.” Over flowing
calabashes they discourse of super-men, and vitalism, and toad-stools,
and fame, and thieves, and teeth, and democracy, and an interminable
variety of other irrelevant and diverting matters. Incredible is the
rich variety of _Mardi_.
There is infinite laughter in the book--but the laughter is at bottom
the laughter of despair. “It is more pleasing to laugh, than to weep,”
Montaigne has said. But Montaigne preferred laughter not for that
reason, but because “it is more distainfull, and doth more condemne us
than the other. And me thinkes we can never bee sufficiently despised
according to our merit.” Melville’s laughter, however, grew out of a
desolation less emancipated than Montaigne’s. “Let us laugh: let us
roar: let us yell.” Melville makes the philosopher in _Mardi_ say:
“Weeds are torn off at a fair; no heart bursts but in secret; it is
good to laugh though the laugh be hollow. Women sob, and are rid of
their grief; men laugh and retain it. Ha! ha! how demoniacs shout; how
all skeletons grin; we all die with a rattle. Humour, thy laugh is
divine; hence mirth-making idiots have been revered; and so may I.”
And one of the ultimate discoveries of the book is: “Beatitude there
is none. And your only Mardian happiness is but exemption from great
woes--no more. Great Love is sad; and heaven is Love. Sadness makes
the silence throughout the realms of space; sadness is universal and
eternal.”
For _Mardi_, in its intention to show the vanity of human wishes, is
a kind of _Rasselas_; but because of its “dangerous predominance of
imagination,” it is a _Rasselas_ Dr. Johnson would have despised.
And the happiness sought in _Mardi_ is of a brand of felicity unlike
anything the Prince of Abyssinia ever had any itching to enjoy. _Mardi_
is a quest after some total and undivined possession of that holy
and mysterious joy that touched Melville during the period of his
courtship: a joy he had felt in the crucifixion of his love for his
mother; a joy that had dazzled him in his love for Elizabeth Shaw.
When he wrote _Mardi_ he was married, and his wife was with child. And
_Mardi_ is a pilgrimage for a lost glamour.
In these wanderings in search of Yillah, the symbol of this faded
ecstasy, the hero of _Mardi_ is pursued by three shadowy messengers
from the temptress Hautia; she who was descended from the queen who had
first incited Mardi to wage war against beings with wings. Despairing
of ever achieving Yillah, Melville in the end turned towards the island
of Hautia, called Flozella-a-Nina, or “The Last-Verse-of-the-Song.”
“Yillah was all beauty, and innocence; my crown of felicity; my heaven
below:--and Hautia, my whole heart abhorred. Yillah I sought; Hautia
sought me. Yet now I was wildly dreaming to find them together. In some
mysterious way seemed Hautia and Yillah connected.”
They land on the shore of Hautia’s bower of bliss, when “all the sea,
like a harvest plain, was stacked with glittering sheaves of spray. And
far down, fathoms on fathoms, flitted rainbow hues:--as seines-full of
mermaids; half-screening the bower of the drowned.” Hautia lavished
him with flowers, and with wine, that like a blood-freshet ran through
his veins, she the vortex that draws all in. “But as my hand touched
Hautia’s, down dropped a dead bird from the clouds.” And at the end
of the madness into which Hautia had betrayed him, he and she stood
together--“snake and victim: life ebbing from out me, to her.”
In _Pierre_, Melville sadly reflects upon “the inevitable evanescence
of all earthly loveliness: which makes the sweetest things of life only
food for ever-devouring and omnivorous melancholy.” And the nuptial
embrace, he says, breaks love’s airy zone. The etherealisations of the
filial breast, he wrote, while contemporary with courtship, _preceding_
the final banns and the rites, “like the bouquet of the costliest
German wines, too often evaporate upon pouring love out to drink in the
disenchanting glasses of the matrimonial days and nights.” “I am Pluto
stealing Proserpine,” says Pierre; “and every accepted lover is. I am
of heavy earth, and she of airy light. By heaven, but marriage is an
impious thing!”
Yillah was to Melville lost for ever; and in Hautia was a final
disillusionment. And on the shore, awaiting to destroy, “stood the
three pale sons of him I had slain to gain the lost maiden, sworn to
hunt me round eternity.”
“‘Hail! realm of shades!’”--so _Mardi_ concludes--“and turning my
prow into the racing tide, which seized me like a hand omnipotent, I
darted through. Churned in foam, that outer ocean lashed the clouds;
and straight in my white wake, headlong dashed a shallop, three fixed
spectres leaning o’er its prow: three arrows poising. And thus,
pursuers and pursued fled on, over an endless sea.”
Within a week of the completion of _Mardi_, Melville’s wife wrote to
her mother:
“I suppose by this time that you have received Sam’s letter and are
relieved of anxiety concerning his safe arrival. I was very glad to
see him at last & hope he will enjoy his vacation. You need not fear
his getting too much excited--he will not take too much exercise,
for he can always get in an omnibus when he feels tired of walking.
Yesterday he went down town with Tom--to the Battery--and to a gallery
of paintings--and in the afternoon took a short walk with the girls. We
should have gone to Brooklyn, but it was very cloudy and looked like
rain--but we are going to-day as soon as I get done my copying (by
the way we are nearly through--shall finish this week). Sam is very
well and finds much amusement, especially in the ‘ad-i-s-h-e-e-e-s!’
(radishes) screamed continually under our window in every variety of
cracked voices.
“I was very much pleased with my presents especially the ‘boots’ which
fit me admirably--but I meant that to be a business transaction--else
I should not have sent. ‘Tapes’ are _always_ useful, especially if one
has a husband who is continually breaking strings off of drawers as
mine is--the cuffs were very pretty also--Herman was very much pleased
with his pocket-book & says ‘he has long needed such an article, for
his bank bills accumulate to such an extent he can find no place to put
them.’
“Mother feels very uneasy because Tom wants to go to sea again--he has
been trying for a place in some store ever since he came home but not
succeeding, is discouraged and says he must go to sea immediately.
Herman has written Mr. Parker (Daniel P.) to see if he can send him out
in one of his ships. I hope he will, if Tom must go, for Mr. Parker
would be likely to take an interest in him and promote him.
“And now for something which I hardly know whether to write you or not
I feel so undecided about it. My cold is very bad indeed, perhaps worse
than it has ever been so early, and I attribute it entirely to the warm
dry atmosphere so different from the salt air I have been accustomed
to. And Herman thinks I had better go back to Boston with Sam to see
if the change of air will not benefit me. And he will come on for me
in two or three weeks, if he can--and then in August when he takes his
vacation he will take me there again. But I don’t know as I can make
up my mind to go and leave him here--and besides I’m afraid to trust
him to finish up the book without me! That is, taking all things into
consideration I’m afraid I should not feel at ease enough to enjoy my
visit without him with me. But there is time enough to consider about
it before Sam goes--and if my cold continues so bad I think I shall go.
But I must go to my writing else I shall not get done in time to go to
Brooklyn.”
CHAPTER XIV
ACROSS THE ATLANTIC AGAIN
“You said you were married, I think? Well, I suppose it is wise,
after all. It settles, centralises, and confirms a man, I have heard.
Yes, it makes the world definite to him; it removes his morbid
subjectiveness, and makes all things objective; nine small children,
for instance, may be considered objective. Marriage, hey!--A fine
thing, no doubt, no doubt:--domestic--pretty--nice, all round.--So
you are married?”
--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Pierre_.
In October, 1849, at the age of thirty, five years after his return
from the South Seas, and two years after his marriage, Melville again
left home. His departure was not prompted by any lack of diversion at
home: there had been plenty of it at 103 Fourth Avenue. Melville’s
brothers Allan and Tom, his sisters Augusta, Fanny and Helen, his
mother, his wife, and the visits from Boston of the Shaws, had been a
sufficiently varied company to divert any lover of humanity, and to
enamour a misanthrope to the family hearth. Withal, Melville was not
only a husband, but a father: and duties towards the support of the
company with whom he lived were blatantly clear. For this support he
depended solely upon the earnings from his books. In three years he
had published five volumes: _Typee_, _Omoo_, _Mardi_ (in two volumes)
and _Redburn_. Though he had attracted wide attention as a writer, he
was, nevertheless, in debt to his publishers. Despite sisters, and
brothers, and wives, and babies, and mothers, and callers, he had
stuck relentlessly to his desk, and another book--_White-Jacket_--he
had finished in manuscript. His, as well as his sister Augusta’s, was
“a pressing case.” So he decided to go to England, to make personal
intercession with publishers, hoping thereby to improve his income from
the other side of the Atlantic.
On October 11, 1849, after a detention of three or four days, owing
to wind and weather, he went on board the tug _Goliath_ a little
after noon. A violent storm was blowing from the west, and with some
confusion the passengers were transferred to the _Southampton_, a
regular London liner that lay in the North River. By half-past five,
with yards square, and sailing in half a gale, Melville was again out
of sight of land.
“As the ship dashed on,” says Melville in his journal of the trip,
“under double-reefed topsails, I walked the deck, thinking of what
they might be doing at home, and of the last familiar faces I saw on
the wharf--Allan was there, and George Duyckinck, and a Mr. McCurdy, a
rich merchant of New York, who had seemed somewhat interested in the
prospect of his son (a sickly youth of twenty, bound for the grand
tour) being very romantic. But to my great delight, the promise that
the Captain had given me at an early day, he now made good; and I find
myself in the individual occupancy of a large state-room. It is as
big almost as my own room at home; it has a spacious berth, a large
wash-stand, a sofa, glass, etc., etc. I am the only person on board who
is thus honoured with a room to himself. I have plenty of light, and a
little thick glass window in the side, which in fine weather I may open
to the air. I have looked out upon the sea from it, often, tho not yet
24 hours on board.”
The George Duyckinck who was among the party that had waved him off
was, of course, one of two Duyckinck brothers who published in 1855
the two volume _Cyclopædia of American Literature_: a work vituperated
in its day for shocking omissions and inaccuracies. Both the work and
its critics have now fallen into a decent oblivion. Withal, in this
same antiquated _Cyclopædia_ is to be found one of the best informed
summaries of the first half of Melville’s life ever printed.
On October 12, Melville records in his journal his impressions upon
finding himself again on the ocean. “Walked the deck last night