Chapter FOUR: Azzageddi

In 1847 Herman Melville was twenty-eight years old. Omoo had been finished at the end of the previous year; and, in the excitement of finding himself established as an author and recognized as a man of promise, he was casting about for a theme that would more fully evoke his own proper powers. So far he had been living on his material: it was time for his material to get a living from him. He found the theme in Mardi, the vast allegorical romance of Mardi; but before he settled down to it, the friendship or the affection between him and Judge Shaw’s daughter, Elizabeth, deepened, and in August, 1847, they were married.

One can only dimly speculate upon what manner of girl Elizabeth Shaw was. There is no reason to think that Melville drew her portrait in Pierre, and the “wife” of the stories he wrote in the fifties is always a conventional feminine foil. The letter she wrote to her mother during the first week of her marriage was dutiful, girlish, commonplace; and ten years later her letters were equally inexpressive and jejune. Her freshness or her amiable temper or her capacity for devotion may have attracted Herman; but more likely, he loved her because he loved her; and there is no need or possibility of explaining that. Certainly, there was no intellectual parity between them, as there was between Hawthorne and his linguistic blue-stocking, Sophia--and Elizabeth had none of his ranting high spirits.

Melville probably worshipped Elizabeth at first, and idolized her beyond all reason; for he loved romantically, and romantic courtship is a heightened and extravagant season even for men of less imagination and hot impulse than Melville. He who wishes to keep that original and etherealized image of his lady should run away from her: when he breaks it, he will feel, Melville later declared, like Pluto snatching his Proserpine, and once the image is broken every fragment will be a reproach. It is the romanticized Circe, and not her victim, who under the spell of marriage turns into an animal, not a swine, of course, but a pea-fowl, grey-feathered and not gorgeous, or a hen, clucking over her chicks and moving only within the limits of the farmyard, or a dove, cooing a little plaintively, unable to awaken the proud strut of the eager, following male, who has wooed once too often.

After an arduous honeymoon, by stage-coach and rail through the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, on up through Montreal, and back by Lake Champlain and the Champlain Canal, a rough, jouncing, crowded, distracted sort of journey, and a brief sojourn with Herman’s mother at Lansingburgh, they settled down at 103 Fourth Avenue, New York, in company with Melville’s brother Allan and a swarm of sisters. Elizabeth Melville has left us a picture of that household and her husband’s daily routine; one cannot do better than put it in her own words:

“We breakfast at 8 o’clock, then Herman goes to walk and I fly up to put his room to rights, so that he can sit down to his desk immediately on his return. Then I bid him good-bye, with many charges to be an industrious boy and not upset the inkstand and then flourish the duster, make the bed, etc., in my own room. Then I go downstairs and read the papers a little while, and after that I am ready to sit down to my work--whatever it may be--darning stockings--making or mending for myself or Herman--at all events, I haven’t seen a day yet, without _some_ sewing or other to do. If I have letters to write, as is the case today, I usually do that first--but whatever I am about I do not much more than get thoroughly engaged in it, than ding-dong goes the bell for luncheon. This is half-past 12 o’clock--by this time we must expect callers, and so must be dressed immediately after lunch. Then Herman insists upon taking a walk of an hour’s length at least. So unless I can have rain or snow for an excuse, I usually sally out and make a pedestrian tour a mile or two down Broadway. By the time I come home it is two o’clock and after, and then I must make myself look as bewitchingly as possible to meet Herman at dinner.... At four we dine, and after dinner is over, Herman and I come up to our room and enjoy a cosy chat for an hour or so--or he reads me some of the chapters he has been writing in the day. Then he goes down town for a walk, looks at the papers in the reading room, etc., and returns about half past seven or eight. Then my work or book is laid aside, and as he does not use his eyes but very little by candlelight, I either read to him, or take a hand at whist for his amusement, or he listens to our reading or conversation as best pleases him. For we all collect in the parlour in the evening, and one of us reads aloud for the benefit of the whole. Then we retire very early--at 10 o’clock we all disperse.”

Admirable Elizabeth! In your direct, simple way you have told us 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.’...

“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 the problems of physical immortality; but Azzageddi says, thinking how even the sublimest thoughts fade and are lost, “If the fogs of some few years can make soul linked to matter naught, how can the unhoused spirit hope to live when mildewed in the damps of death.” The sociable townsman continues to correspond with Mr. Duyckinck and respect his judgment; but Azzageddi says: “All round me, my fellow-men are new grafting their vines and dwelling in flourishing arbors; while I am forever pruning mine, till it becomes but a stump. Yet in this pruning I will persist; I will not add, I will diminish; I will trim myself down to the standard of what is unchangeably true. Day by day I drop off my redundancies; ere long I shall have stripped my ribs; when I die, they will but bury my spine. I may have come to the Penultimate ... but where is the Ultimate?”

From Azzageddi’s mouth the deepest perceptions of Melville’s spirit came forth first, in the form of jests and demonic laughter. Azzageddi was free in the only unqualified sense of freedom: he was irresponsible. Nothing will daunt him, no opposition to his conscious habits, statements, prejudices, conventions will prevent him from declaring himself. He was Melville, shorn of everything that might make him circumspect and limited, a skeleton facing the world with its ultimate grin. Azzageddi brought Melville to his supreme triumph in Moby-Dick, and plunged him into temporary disaster in Pierre; for he worked out of the bottomless parts of Melville’s unconscious, and when he was given free line, he might haul up anything out of those depths--a chest of gold or a white whale or a green corpse. His appearance in Mardi was the first sign of Melville’s maturity; and the attempt of the world to rebuff and castigate and repress Azzageddi was excellent proof that Melville had found within himself something worth the saying. Mardi was Melville’s spiritual Omoo. It gave him the courage to be an intellectual rover, and to scorn the easy domesticities in which thought reposes, and snores.

“There are those who falter in the common tongue, because they think in another; and these are accounted stutterers and stammerers,” wrote Melville in Mardi. Melville was plainly aware of the fact that he was now acquiring a new language, not a new set of weaknesses: his inward eye was now keeping pace in its growth with his outward one: he was at last achieving that genuine bi-focal vision wherein “matter” and “spirit” united to give depth and perspective to the world which only through joint effort do they effectually behold. Already, he had eternity in his eye. The easy triumph was no longer for him. Clay crumbled, marble chipped, wood rotted, granite eroded: all the common materials out of which monuments and civilizations are made lie under the doom of a fatal metamorphosis: Melville sought a truth, no matter how infinitely small in quantity and precious, which, like radium, would undergo time and change and emanate energy without losing perceptibly its bulk or its quality. It was useless to tell him that there were no ultimate truths; that itself was perhaps the ultimate truth which he sought. If Mardi were not ready for this search, he would go it alone--and be the unreturning one. No grey shroud of ocean, with threat of storm and sleet, would keep him from setting out for that ultimate destination.

6

“Had I not written and published Mardi,” wrote Melville to Mr. Evert Duyckinck in 1849, “in all likelihood I would not be as wise as I am now, or may be. For that thing was stabbed _at_ (I do not say _through_) and therefore I am the wiser for it.”

The truth is that Mardi got a mixed reception; whereas except for the missionaries and the unco guid his first two books had been hailed and acclaimed with a heartiness that is rarely accorded to a new author with no well-defined connections. Mardi was praised in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and damned as a rubbishing parody in Blackwood’s; the Democratic Review said that it compared to Typee and Omoo as a cartoon of Raphael to a seven-by-nine sketch of a sylvan lake; but the Dublin University Magazine found it one of the saddest, most melancholy, most deplorable and humiliating perversions of genius of a high order in the English language. So it went, hot and cold, huzzas and hisses.

A book that could evoke such different responses must either be a highly original book or a many-sided one; and Mardi has, it seems to me, both qualities. It was, there is reason to believe, the wealth, the profusion, the diversity of ideas in Mardi that brought down on Melville the irritation of contemporary critics: instead of retiring into after-dinner lethargy with Melville’s smoking, calabash-drinking philosopher and king and poet, they were stirred into unaccustomed mental activity. They resented that: they resented above all the fact that Melville played with ideas. One could not be sure whether he was fooling with the ideas or fooling with the audience; besides, respectable ideas should not be played with: there is a time and a place for everything. In the South Seas one expects to fondle brown maidens: in a library, one locks the door on maidens and wrestles with ideas. Their lips were whetted for another Fayaway: she evaporated into Yillah: and Yillah vanished, leaving only a gritty taste in the mouth, criticism, criticism of Christianity, politics, morality, things that gentlemen prefer to take, if at all, in medical capsules, not as food.

Am I wrong in thinking that Mardi has been damned for its virtues? The idea is all the more plausible because for more than a generation, during which Melville’s work almost disappeared from critical notice, Melville was reprobated, when he was noticed at all, for becoming interested in abstruse philosophy and for writing extravagantly. The burden of this criticism was that a writer of South Sea romances had better leave Plato and Spinoza alone, and get his opinion of the universe from professional purveyors, or rather, not be troubled by such foreign interests. This attempt to keep Melville in his place was absurd enough in itself; but it led to further stupidities, far more deplorable in character. “As early as 1848,” wrote an historian of American literature in 1903, “the quasi-speculative romance entitled Mardi gave premonition of aberration and of the eventual frustration of a promising career.” This criticism is nonsense, and libellous nonsense at that: the aberration it refers to did not exist in Melville but in the historian himself. At the very outset of his career, Melville found himself confronting a similar opaqueness, blank as a wall, in his own contemporaries. One remembers Macaulay’s withering condescension over Plato and the scholastic philosophers; and one realizes that any view of life which did not immediately sanction the pragmatism of the nineteenth century was bound to seem an aberration for those who regarded the local values of the time as ultimates. Melville’s “aberration” was his great intellectual distinction: none of his contemporaries had such a broad base in the fundamental activities of the time, and yet rose so loftily above them. He did not rebel against his milieu; like Thoreau, he reached outside of it, and grew beyond it, taking out of the very environment from which he escaped the necessary materials for his own development.

The scene is now set: the struggle in which Melville is to participate is defined. It is a struggle between a plastic, conventional self, moulded in the fashion of his fellow citizens and fellow writers, and a hard, defiant, adamantine self that springs out of his deepest consciousness of life, and is ready to assault, not merely human conventions, but the high gods themselves. In a conflict between his career and his family duties, between pot-boiling and his maturest literary aims, this drama externalizes itself: it is present in the man, and it is present in his outward relationships. Let us make no mistake about it: Melville was not a writer of romances: it was a mere accident of history that turned the world’s attention to him through the charm and tropical radiance of the South Sea adventures. Herman Melville was a thinker, in the sense that Dante was a thinker, who clothed his thoughts in poetic vision. That thought and vision was one of the most important things the century produced. All honour, then, to the few critics who appreciated Mardi when it appeared: for Melville had a greater work in store; and it was out of the freedom and intellectual audacity acquired in writing Mardi, out of the discovery of his Azzageddi, that he achieved the strength to attack it.