“And during the drowsy stillness of the tropical sea-day, very much such a fancy had I, for prying about our little brigantine, whose tragic hull was haunted by the memory of the massacre, of which it still bore innumerable traces.”
After delightful and exciting, and irresponsible days spent sailing without chart, they find the vessel unseaworthy, leaking in every pore; so again they take to their whale boat soon to fall in with strangers. With this meeting, Mardi swings into allegory,—and then it is that Melville first tries his hand at the orphic style.
This second part of Mardi in its manner defies simple characterisation, though its purpose is simple enough. It is a quest after Yillah, a maiden from Oroolia, the Island of Delight. A voyage is made through the civilised world for her: and though they find occasion for much discourse on international politics, and an array of other topics, Yillah is not found. And in an astonishing variety of fantastic and symbolic scenes—many conceived in the manner of the last three books of Rabelais—they go on in futile search for her. They search among the Islands of “those Scamps the Plujii,” where all evil which the inhabitants could impute neither to the gods nor to themselves were blamed upon the Plujii. There they meet an “old woman almost doubled together, both hands upon her abdomen; in that manner running about distracted.” When asked of the occasion of her distraction she screamed “The Plujii! The Plujii!” affectionately caressing the field of their operations.
“And why do they torment you?” she was soothingly asked.
“How should I know? and what good would it do me if I did?”
And on she ran.
“Hearing that an hour or two previous she had been partaking of some twenty unripe bananas, I rather fancied that that circumstance might have had something to do with her suffering. But whatever it was, all the herb-leeches on the island would not have been able to alter her own opinions on the subject.”
They visit jolly old Borabolla, and discuss the hereafter of fish. “As for the possible hereafter of the whale,” says Melville, “a creature eighty feet long without stockings, and thirty feet round the waist after dinner is not inconsiderably to be consigned to annihilation.” They are entertained by the gentry of Pimminee, and their host, being told they were strolling divinities, demigods from the sun “manifested not the slightest surprise, observing incidentally, however, that the eclipses there must be a sad bore to endure.” They are entertained by the pallid and beautiful youth Donjalolo, with wives thirty in number, corresponding in name to the nights of the moon: wives “blithe as larks, more playful than kittens,” though “but supplied with the thirtieth part of all that Aspasia could desire.” Over flowing calabashes they discourse of super-men, and vitalism, and toad-stools, and fame, and thieves, and teeth, and democracy, and an interminable variety of other irrelevant and diverting matters. Incredible is the rich variety of Mardi.
There is infinite laughter in the book—but the laughter is at bottom the laughter of despair. “It is more pleasing to laugh, than to weep,” Montaigne has said. But Montaigne preferred laughter not for that reason, but because “it is more distainfull, and doth more condemne us than the other. And me thinkes we can never bee sufficiently despised according to our merit.” Melville’s laughter, however, grew out of a desolation less emancipated than Montaigne’s. “Let us laugh: let us roar: let us yell.” Melville makes the philosopher in Mardi say: “Weeds are torn off at a fair; no heart bursts but in secret; it is good to laugh though the laugh be hollow. Women sob, and are rid of their grief; men laugh and retain it. Ha! ha! how demoniacs shout; how all skeletons grin; we all die with a rattle. Humour, thy laugh is divine; hence mirth-making idiots have been revered; and so may I.” And one of the ultimate discoveries of the book is: “Beatitude there is none. And your only Mardian happiness is but exemption from great woes—no more. Great Love is sad; and heaven is Love. Sadness makes the silence throughout the realms of space; sadness is universal and eternal.”