Chapter 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.