Herman Melville
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