Mardi (1849)

Summary

Athenceum [London], 1117 (24 March 1849), 296-98.

On opening this strange book, the reader will be at once struck by the affectation of its style, in which are mingled many madnesses. Some pages emulate the Ercles' vein of the ‘Wondrous Tale of Alroy’:-not a few paragraphs indicate that the author has been drinking at the well of “English bewitched” of which Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Emerson are the priests. Here and there, in the midst of a most frantic romance, occur dry little digressions showing the magician anxious half to medicine half to bamboozle his readers after the manner of ‘The Doctor.’ In other passages of his voyage, where something very shrewd has been intended, we find nothing more poignant than the vapid philosophy of Mr. Fenimore Cooper's ‘Monikins.’ If this book be meant as a pleasantry, the mirth has been oddly left out-if as an allegory, the key of the casket is “buried in ocean deep”-if as a romance, it fails from tediousness-if as a prosepoem, it is chargeable with puerility. Among the hundred people who will take it up, lured by their remembrances of ‘Typee,’ ninety readers will drop off at the end of the first volume; and the remaining nine will become so weary of the hero when for the seventh time he is assaulted by the three pursuing Duessas who pelt him with symbolical flowers, that they will throw down his chronicle ere the end of its second third is reached-with Mr. Burchel's monosyllable by way of comment.