But song-services, and copying manuscript, were not enough to fill Augusta’s busy days. In January, 1848, she was commissioned to find a name satisfactory for Melville’s first child. Mrs. Herman Melville was in Boston to be with her mother and family at the time of the childbirth. On January 27, 1849, Augusta wrote from New York to “My dear Lizzie, My sweet Sister,” reporting that she had been “searching the Genealogical Tree” with designs upon an ancestor with a choice name: and she spends two very diverting and animated pages recounting her adventures among the branches. Her search was rewarded to her satisfaction: “Malcolm Melville! how easily it runs from my pen; how sweetly it sounds to my ear; how musically it falls upon my heart. Malcolm Melville! Methinks I see him in his plaided kilts, with his soft blue eyes, & his long flaxen curls. How I long to press him to my heart. There! I can write no more. The last proof sheets are through. Mardi’s a book.” Augusta concludes with a quotation from Mardi: “‘Oh my own Kagtanza, child of my prayers. Oro’s blessing on thee!’”

In her search of the Genealogical Tree, Augusta had contemptuously brushed by all female branches: she had determined that Melville’s first child should be a son—and a son with blue eyes and blond hair—and in her choice of a name for the unborn infant, she contemptuously ignored the possibility of the child turning out to be a girl. On February 16, 1849, was born in Boston, to Melville and his wife, their first child. There was potency in Augusta’s prayers. It was a boy.

On April 14, 1849, Mardi appeared, published, as was Omoo, by Harper and Brothers in America, by Richard Bentley in London. Redburn appeared on August 18 of the same year. By February 22, 1850 (the date of Melville’s fifth royalty account from Harper and Brothers), 2,154 copies of Mardi, and 4,011 copies of Redburn had been sold. On February 1, 1848, Melville had overdrawn his account with Harper’s to the extent of $256.03. On December 5, 1848, Harper’s advanced Melville $500; on April 28, 1848, $300; on July 2, 1849, $300; on September 14, 1849, $500. Though Mardi and Redburn had had a fairly generous sale, the deduction of his royalties on February 22, 1850, left him in debt to Harper’s $733.69. The outlook was not bright for the responsibilities of fatherhood.

On April 23, Melville sent to his father-in-law a note “conveying the intelligence of Lizzie’s improving strength, and Malcolm’s precocious growth. Both are well.” Melville went on to say that Samuel, the brother-in-law for whom he felt not the most enthusiastic affection, was expected by all “to honour us with his presence during the approaching vacation: and I have no doubt he will not find it difficult to spend his time pleasantly with so many companions.” Does Melville here imply that for himself, as a sensible man, he would prefer more solitude? In conclusion, Melville says: “I see that Mardi has been cut into by the London Atheneum, and also burnt by the common hangman by the Boston Post. However, the London Examiner & Literary Gazette & other papers this side of the water have done differently. These attacks are matters of course, and are essential to the building up of any permanent reputation—if such should ever prove to be mine—‘There’s nothing in it!’ cried the dunce when he threw down the 47th problem of the 1st Book of Euclid—‘There’s nothing in it!’—Thus with the posed critic. But Time, which is the solver of all riddles, will solve Mardi.”

The riddle of Mardi goes near to the heart of the riddle of Melville’s life. “Not long ago,” Melville says in the preface to Mardi, “having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my previous experience. This thought was the germ of others, which have resulted in Mardi.”

Mardi, as Moby-Dick, starts off firmly footed in reality. The hero, discontented on board a whaler, hits upon the wild scheme of surreptitiously cutting loose one of the whale boats, and trusting to the chances of the open Pacific. It is sometimes the case that an old mariner will conceive a very strong attachment for some young sailor, his shipmate—a Fidus-Achates-ship, a league of offence and defence, a copartnership of chests and toilets, a bond of love and good-feeling. Such a relationship existed between the hero of Mardi and his Viking shipmate Jarl. Jarl was an old Norseman to behold: his hands as brawny as the paws of a bear; his voice as hoarse as a storm roaring round the peak of Mull; his long yellow hair waving about his head like a sunset. In the crow’s-nest of the ship the project of escape was confided to Jarl. Jarl advised with elderly prudence, but seeing his chummy’s resolution immovable, he changed his wrestling to a sympathetic hug, and bluntly swore he would follow through thick and thin. The escape was successfully made, and for days the two men drifted at sea: and it was an eventful if solitary drifting. After sixteen days in their open boat, “as the expanded sun touched the horizon’s rim, a ship’s uppermost spars were observed, traced like a spider’s web against its crimson disk. It looked like a far-off craft on fire.” Bent upon shunning a meeting—though Jarl “kept looking wistfully over his shoulder; doubtlessly praying Heaven that we might not escape”—they lowered sail. As the ship bore down towards them, they saw her to be no whaler—as they had feared—but a small, two-masted craft in unaccountable disarray. They lay on their oars, and watched her in the starlight. They hailed her loudly. No return. Again. But all was silent. So, armed with a harpoon, they eventually boarded the strange craft. The ship was in a complete litter; the deserted tiller they found lashed. Though it was a nervous sort of business, they explored her interior. Many were the puzzling sights they saw; but except for a supernatural sneeze from the riggings, there was no evidence of life aboard. At dawn, however, they discovered, in the maintop, a pair of South Sea Islanders: Samoa, and Annatoo. “To be short, Annatoo was a Tartar, a regular Calmuc; and Samoa—Heaven help him—her husband.” Upon this pair, Melville has lavished chapter after chapter of the most finished and competent comedy. Annatoo is as perfect, in her way, as is Zuleika Dobson. And Samoa—well, Samoa, on occasion, thinks it discreet to amputate his wounded arm.

“Among savages, severe personal injuries are, for the most part, accounted but trifles. When a European would be taking to his couch in despair, the savage would disdain to recline.

“More yet. In Polynesia, every man is his own barber and surgeon, cutting off his beard or arm, as occasion demands. No unusual thing, for the warriors of Varvoo to saw off their own limbs, desperately wounded in battle. But owing to the clumsiness of the instrument employed—a flinty, serrated shell—the operation has been known to last several days. Nor will they suffer any friend to help them; maintaining, that a matter so nearly concerning a warrior is far better attended to by himself. Hence it may be said, that they amputate themselves at their leisure, and hang up their tools when tired. But, though thus beholden to no one for aught connected with the practice of surgery, they never cut off their own heads, that ever I heard; a species of amputation to which, metaphorically speaking, many would-be independent sort of people in civilised lands are addicted.

“Samoa’s operation was very summary. A fire was kindled in the little caboose, or cook-house, and so made as to produce much smoke. He then placed his arm upon one of the windlass bitts (a short upright timber, breast-high), and seizing the blunt cook’s axe would have struck the blow; but for some reason distrusting the precision of his aim, Annatoo was assigned to the task. Three strokes, and the limb, from just above the elbow, was no longer Samoa’s; and he saw his own bones; which many a centenarian can not say. The very clumsiness of the operation was safety to the subject. The weight and bluntness of the instrument both deadened the pain and lessened the hemorrhage. The wound was then scorched, and held over the smoke of the fire, till all signs of blood vanished. From that day forward it healed, and troubled Samoa but little.

“But shall the sequel be told? How that, superstitiously averse to burying in the sea the dead limb of a body yet living; since in that case Samoa held, that he must very soon drown and follow it; and how, that equally dreading to keep the thing near him, he at last hung it aloft from the topmast-stay; where yet it was suspended, bandaged over and over in cerements. The hand that must have locked many others in friendly clasp, or smote a foe, was no food, thought Samoa, for fowls of the air nor fishes of the sea.

“Now, which was Samoa? The dead arm swinging high as Haman? Or the living trunk below? Was the arm severed from the body, or the body from the arm? The residual part of Samoa was alive, and therefore we say it was he. But which of the writhing sections of a ten times severed worm, is the worm proper?”

There are more cosy pleasures aboard the old ship, however, than amputation: “Every one knows what a fascination there is in wandering up and down in a deserted old tenement in some warm, dreamy country; where the vacant halls seem echoing of silence, and the doors creak open like the footsteps of strangers; and into every window the old garden trees thrust their dark boughs, like the arms of night-burglars; and ever and anon the nails start from the wainscot; while behind it the mice rattle like dice. Up and down in such old spectre houses one loves to wander; and so much the more, if the place be haunted by some marvellous story.

“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.”

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.

“And now for something which I hardly know whether to write you or not I feel so undecided about it. My cold is very bad indeed, perhaps worse than it has ever been so early, and I attribute it entirely to the warm dry atmosphere so different from the salt air I have been accustomed to. And Herman thinks I had better go back to Boston with Sam to see if the change of air will not benefit me. And he will come on for me in two or three weeks, if he can—and then in August when he takes his vacation he will take me there again. But I don’t know as I can make up my mind to go and leave him here—and besides I’m afraid to trust him to finish up the book without me! That is, taking all things into consideration I’m afraid I should not feel at ease enough to enjoy my visit without him with me. But there is time enough to consider about it before Sam goes—and if my cold continues so bad I think I shall go. But I must go to my writing else I shall not get done in time to go to Brooklyn.”