Herman Melville
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.’...
“Now I am my own soul’s emperor; and my first act is abdication. Hail,
realm of shades! 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 wake, headlong dashed a shallop, three fixed spectres leaning o’er
its prow; three arrows poising.
“And thus, pursuers and pursued flew on, over an endless sea.”
5
Mardi is strong enough as a satire and a criticism of life to stand
a frank admission of its weaknesses; and I shall not try to conceal
them. The book starts about to be one thing; it presently becomes
another; and before Mardi is entirely explored it becomes a third:
the adventure, the strange scenes and personages, the philosophic
reflection, the satire, all accrete together rather than form a single
intermingled whole. Taji, who begins as the hero and narrator, takes a
smaller and smaller part in the actual dialogue; presently the first
person becomes the third, and Taji emerges at the end out of the shadow
of silence. The reader who expected another Omoo was disappointed once
the first quarter of the story was over; the reader who might have
welcomed the dialogues, the political moralizings, the epigrams, was
put off a little by the original sea-yarn.
This is not all. The satire at its best achieves its end by a delicate
parody of actuality, as in the scene where Melville takes off a session
of the United States Congress; but sometimes Melville’s invention
flags, and he repeats actual history, with altered names, instead of
distorting, magnifying, transposing. Verbally, his touch is almost as
uncertain: at times he drops into obvious metres, only to rise into
passages of prose that have far greater claim to be set off as verse
than any of Yoomy’s stanzas. The verses interspersed in these pages
are worthy of the poet laureate that Yoomy is supposed to be; and that
is the best one can say about them. When Taji sits down with the
five-and-twenty kings, the invocation to wine is about at the level of
Peacock’s drinking songs: and the poorest of Yoomy’s songs are poetry
only by typographic courtesy. These are all faults; and not little
ones; but what means infinitely more is the fact that a brave, vigorous
spirit presides over Mardi, appraising all the evil and injustice and
superstition and ugliness in the world--as they masquerade under the
guise of religion and patriotism and economic prudence and political
necessity. In Mardi, one begins to feel Melville’s range, and his depth.
In this satiric fantasy, Melville had not the sure touch he later
achieved in Moby-Dick: but for all that, his thoughts exploded in a
succession of great rockets and Roman candles and flag-bombs; and the
spectacle was a dazzling and beautiful one. Such wit, such humour,
such starry intelligence, such wide knowledge, such resolute diving,
were not known in American literature before; and they are rare enough
in any literature. Much though we value Melville’s great American
contemporaries, he had something to give in Mardi that is beyond
their reach: we will search Emerson in vain for anything like the
Antiquarian’s catalogue; we will run through Hawthorne’s notebooks
without finding anything like the description of authorship in the
chapter on Lombardo. The Literary World said that the public would
discover in the author of Mardi a capital essayist, at least, in
addition to the fascinating novelist and painter of sea-life, and find
that the author had “original powers of high order”--and the praise was
accurate and just.
Mardi performed a more important work for its author than it did
for its immediate readers: it disclosed to him the nature of his
own demon--that deeper other half whom Babbalanja called Azzageddi.
Melville’s thoughts at this period paralleled each other in somewhat
unrelated layers. There was a Babbalanja who reflected the ideas of
his own time and country, who was a thoughtful Christian, a loyal
republican, a solid provincial, who met adversity with a jest or a wry
smile, who drank brandy with Mr. Duyckinck, and paid his respects with
genteel punctuality to all the Gansevoorts and Melvilles and Shaws.
This Melville never entirely disappeared. The pious man who wanted to
return to Serenia made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land: and when the
Civil War came, Melville accepted without question the doctrine of a
single, indivisible nation, as an unshakable postulate. In this aspect
of Melville there was something correct and limited, characteristics
whose chief advantage was that they kept him within speaking distance
of his contemporaries. In Mardi, however, Melville discovered a deeper
self: the unconscious Melville was not a man of his time, and he often
had intuitions which undermined or destroyed his more commonplace
convictions. This deeper Melville did not altogether supplant the man
of convention: they do not represent several and successive phases
of growth: but, as Melville suggested in Moby-Dick, they represented
aspects of a cycle which one goes through again and again, never
reaching a terminus, because there is in a proper sense no terminus, no
ultimate point of rest, or resolution.
Now it is Melville as Azzageddi, the demon who captures and speaks from
within the man, who interests us. The pious Christian is troubled by