Melville and the Problem of Evil 87
what the book is about. “I’ve chartless voyaged,” he writes.
“With compass and the lead, we had not found these
Mardian Isles. . . . Hug the shore, naught new is seen.”5
Melville has here, in this intellectual voyage, put out into
unfamiliar scenes of speculation. He goes on, in this passage,
to speak of Columbus:
That voyager steered his bark through seas untracked
before; ploughed his own path mid jeers; though with a heart
that oft was heavy with the thought that he might only be
too bold, and grope where land was none.
' So I.
Now here is obviously a bit of youthful dramatization, but
the fact remains that Melville was, in 1849, alone in seas
unexplored by any other American novelist.
He continues:
But this new world here sought is stranger far than his,
who stretched his vans from Palos. It is the world of mind;
wherein the wanderer may gaze round, with more of wonder
than Balboa’s band roving through the golden Aztec glades.
But fiery yearning their own phantom-future make, and
deem it present. So, if after all these fearful, fainting trances,
the verdict be, the golden haven was not gained;—yet, in
bold quest thereof, better to sink in boundless deeps, than
float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck,
if wreck I do.
This passage is manifestly autobiographical. Thus, Mardi
with its voyage, its quest, is in one sense a record of Melville’s
own mental and spiritual exploration. The “new world here
sought” is “the world of mind,” as he says, and in his quest
he finds it “better to sink in boundless deeps, than float on
vulgar shoals.” Although the sea may lead, as he says, to
“nothing but a world of care and anxiety,” it is infinitely
preferable to burial in animal indolence. The fair Yillah,
then, in Mardi is clearly some kind of ultimate good, and
the fatal quest for her is a voyage of the mind in search of the
answer to intellectual and spiritual problems.