“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.