For Mardi, in its intention to show the vanity of human wishes, is a kind of Rasselas; but because of its “dangerous predominance of imagination,” it is a Rasselas Dr. Johnson would have despised. And the happiness sought in Mardi is of a brand of felicity unlike anything the Prince of Abyssinia ever had any itching to enjoy. Mardi is a quest after some total and undivined possession of that holy and mysterious joy that touched Melville during the period of his courtship: a joy he had felt in the crucifixion of his love for his mother; a joy that had dazzled him in his love for Elizabeth Shaw. When he wrote Mardi he was married, and his wife was with child. And Mardi is a pilgrimage for a lost glamour.
In these wanderings in search of Yillah, the symbol of this faded ecstasy, the hero of Mardi is pursued by three shadowy messengers from the temptress Hautia; she who was descended from the queen who had first incited Mardi to wage war against beings with wings. Despairing of ever achieving Yillah, Melville in the end turned towards the island of Hautia, called Flozella-a-Nina, or “The Last-Verse-of-the-Song.” “Yillah was all beauty, and innocence; my crown of felicity; my heaven below:—and Hautia, my whole heart abhorred. Yillah I sought; Hautia sought me. Yet now I was wildly dreaming to find them together. In some mysterious way seemed Hautia and Yillah connected.”
They land on the shore of Hautia’s bower of bliss, when “all the sea, like a harvest plain, was stacked with glittering sheaves of spray. And far down, fathoms on fathoms, flitted rainbow hues:—as seines-full of mermaids; half-screening the bower of the drowned.” Hautia lavished him with flowers, and with wine, that like a blood-freshet ran through his veins, she the vortex that draws all in. “But as my hand touched Hautia’s, down dropped a dead bird from the clouds.” And at the end of the madness into which Hautia had betrayed him, he and she stood together—“snake and victim: life ebbing from out me, to her.”
In Pierre, Melville sadly reflects upon “the inevitable evanescence of all earthly loveliness: which makes the sweetest things of life only food for ever-devouring and omnivorous melancholy.” And the nuptial embrace, he says, breaks love’s airy zone. The etherealisations of the filial breast, he wrote, while contemporary with courtship, preceding the final banns and the rites, “like the bouquet of the costliest German wines, too often evaporate upon pouring love out to drink in the disenchanting glasses of the matrimonial days and nights.” “I am Pluto stealing Proserpine,” says Pierre; “and every accepted lover is. I am of heavy earth, and she of airy light. By heaven, but marriage is an impious thing!”
Yillah was to Melville lost for ever; and in Hautia was a final disillusionment. And on the shore, awaiting to destroy, “stood the three pale sons of him I had slain to gain the lost maiden, sworn to hunt me round eternity.”
“‘Hail! realm of shades!’”—so Mardi concludes—“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 white wake, headlong dashed a shallop, three fixed spectres leaning o’er its prow: three arrows poising. And thus, pursuers and pursued fled on, over an endless sea.”
Within a week of the completion of Mardi, Melville’s wife wrote to her mother:
“I suppose by this time that you have received Sam’s letter and are relieved of anxiety concerning his safe arrival. I was very glad to see him at last & hope he will enjoy his vacation. You need not fear his getting too much excited—he will not take too much exercise, for he can always get in an omnibus when he feels tired of walking. Yesterday he went down town with Tom—to the Battery—and to a gallery of paintings—and in the afternoon took a short walk with the girls. We should have gone to Brooklyn, but it was very cloudy and looked like rain—but we are going to-day as soon as I get done my copying (by the way we are nearly through—shall finish this week). Sam is very well and finds much amusement, especially in the ‘ad-i-s-h-e-e-e-s!’ (radishes) screamed continually under our window in every variety of cracked voices.
“I was very much pleased with my presents especially the ‘boots’ which fit me admirably—but I meant that to be a business transaction—else I should not have sent. ‘Tapes’ are always useful, especially if one has a husband who is continually breaking strings off of drawers as mine is—the cuffs were very pretty also—Herman was very much pleased with his pocket-book & says ‘he has long needed such an article, for his bank bills accumulate to such an extent he can find no place to put them.’
“Mother feels very uneasy because Tom wants to go to sea again—he has been trying for a place in some store ever since he came home but not succeeding, is discouraged and says he must go to sea immediately. Herman has written Mr. Parker (Daniel P.) to see if he can send him out in one of his ships. I hope he will, if Tom must go, for Mr. Parker would be likely to take an interest in him and promote him.