CHAPTER II
GHOSTS
“We are full of ghosts and spirits; we are as grave-yards full of
buried dead, that start to life before us. And all our dead sires,
verily, are in us; _that_ is their immortality. From sire to son,
we go on multiplying corpses in ourselves; for all of which, are
resurrections. Every thought’s a soul of some past poet, hero, sage.
We are fuller than a city.”--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Mardi_.
The High Gods, in a playful and prodigal mood, gave to Melville, to
Julia Ward Howe, to Lowell, to Kingsley, to Ruskin, to Whitman, and to
Queen Victoria, the same birth year. On August 1, 1819, Herman Melville
was born at No. 6 Pearl Street, New York City.
Melville’s vagabondage as a common sailor on a merchantman, on whaling
vessels, and in the United States Navy, together with his Bohemian
associations with cannibals, mutineers, and some of the choicest dregs
of our Christian civilisation, must have wrenched a chorus of groans
from a large congregation of shocked ancestral ghosts. For Melville was
descended from a long and prolific line of the best American stock.
Through his mother, Maria Gansevoort, he traced back to the earliest
Dutch emigrants to New York; through his father, Allan Melville, to
pre-revolutionary Scotch-Irish emigrants to New England. Both of his
grandfathers distinguished themselves in the Revolutionary War. His
ancestors, on both sides, came to this country in the days when some of
the best blood of Europe was being transferred to America.
Though Melville was too ironic a genius ever to have been guilty
of the ill-breeding that makes an ostentation of ancestry, still
he looked back upon his descent with self-conscious pride: a pride
drawn by childhood absorption from his parents who, by resting on the
achievements of their forebears, added several cubits to their stature.
Lacking the prophetic vision to glory in being ancestors, they chose
the more comfortable rôle of parading as descendants. Melville’s
father, Allan, was sufficiently absorbed in his genealogy to compile,
in 1818, an elaborately branching family tree that sent its master
root back to one Sir Richard de Melvill, del Compte de Fife, a worthy
of the thirteenth century. And at the proud conclusion of his labours
he inscribed the Melville motto, _Denique Coelum_--“Heaven at last.”
Melville’s mother, Maria Gansevoort, though too absorbed in domesticity
to compete with Allan in drawing up a parallel document, still sat
opposite her spouse with a stiff spine, conscious that she could
counter his ancestry, grandfather for grandfather. It is true, she had
no thirteenth century count to fall back upon; and though her line lost
itself in a cluster of breweries, they were very substantial breweries,
and owned by a race of stalwart and affluent and uncompromising
burghers. Her ancestor, Harmen Harmense Van Gansevoort, was brewing in
Beverwyck as early as 1660, and with sufficient success to acquire such
extended investments in land that he bequeathed to his heirs a baronial
inheritance. During the centuries following his death his name crossed
itself with that of the Van Rensselaers, the Ten Broeks, the Douws, the
Van Schaicks,--with the proudest names that descended from the earlier
Colonial Dutch families. Melville’s mother, Maria, is remembered as a
cold, proud woman, arrogant in the sense of her name, her blood, and
the affluence of her forebears.
She was the only daughter and oldest child in a family of six, of
General Peter Gansevoort and Catharine Van Schaick. Her father, born
in Albany, New York, July 17, 1749, was among the outstanding patriots
of the American Revolution. He was among the troops which accompanied
Schuyler, in 1775, in his advance towards Canada. In December of the
same year he was with Montgomery, as Major, in the unfortunate assault
upon Quebec. In the summer of 1777, when Burgoyne’s semi-barbarous
invading army was slowly advancing down Lake Champlain and the Hudson,
he was Colonel in command of Fort Stanwix. By his obstinate and gallant
defence of Fort Stanwix in August, 1777, he prevented the juncture
of St. Leger with Burgoyne, and so changed the course of the whole
subsequent campaign. Washington keenly and warmly recognised this,
and Congress passed a vote of thanks to Colonel Gansevoort. Peter
Gansevoort did other brilliant service in the Revolutionary War, and
in 1809, when the War of 1812 was approaching, he was made brigadier
general in the United States army. He was sheriff of Albany County from
1790 to 1792, and regent of the University of New York from 1808 until
his death in 1812.
Of his sons, Hon. Peter Gansevoort, who was born in Albany in 1789, was
long one of the most prominent and honoured citizens of Albany. The
elder son, General Herman Gansevoort, from whom Melville received his
name, lived at Gansevoort, a village in the township of Northumberland,
Saratoga County, New York. In 1832-33, the brothers built on the
site of the birthplace of their father what is now the Stanwix
Hotel. As a boy, Melville spent most of his summers as guest of the
Gansevoorts, and in his novel _Pierre_, the childhood recollections of
his hero are transparent autobiographical references to his own early
memories. “On the meadows which sloped away from the shaded rear of
the manorial mansion, far to the winding river, an Indian battle had
been fought, in the earlier days of the colony, and in that battle the
great-grandfather of Pierre, mortally wounded, had sat unhorsed on his
saddle in the grass, with his dying voice still cheering his men in the
fray.... Far beyond these plains, a day’s walk for Pierre, rose the
storied heights, where in the Revolutionary War his grandfather had
for several months defended a rude but all-important stockaded fort,
against the repeated combined assaults of Indians, Tories and Regulars.
From behind that fort, the gentlemanly but murderous half-breed,
Brandt, had fled, but survived to dine with General (Gansevoort) in the
amiable times that followed that vindictive war. All the associations
of Saddle-Meadows were full of pride to Pierre. The (Gansevoort) deeds
by which their estate had been so long held, bore the cyphers of three
Indian kings, the aboriginal and only conveyancers of those noble woods
and plains. Thus loftily, in the days of his circumscribed youth,
did Pierre glance along the background of his race.... Or how think
you it would be with this youthful Pierre if every day, descending to
breakfast, he caught sight of an old tattered British banner or two,
hanging over an arched window in the hall: and those banners captured
by his grandfather, the general, in fair fight?”
On February 22, 1832, so it is recorded in Joel Munsell, _The Annals
of Albany_ (Vol. IX, Albany, 1859) “the military celebrated the
centennial anniversary of the birthday of Washington. Col. Peter
Gansevoort, on this occasion, presented to the artillery a large
_brass Drum_, a trophy of the revolution, taken from the British on
the 22nd August, 1777, at Fort Stanwix, by his father, General Peter
Gansevoort.” The sound of this drum was tapping in Melville’s memory,
when he goes on to ask: “Or how think you it would be if every time
he heard the band of the military company of the village, he should
distinctly recognise the peculiar tap of a British kettle-drum also
captured by his grandfather in fair fight, and afterwards suitably
inscribed on the brass and bestowed upon the Saddle-Meadows Artillery
Corps? Or how think you it would be, if sometimes of a mild meditative
Fourth of July morning in the country, he carried out with him into
the garden by way of ceremonial cane, a long, majestic, silver-tipped
staff, a Major-General’s baton, once wielded on the plume-nodding
and musket-flashing review by the same grandfather several times
here-in-before mentioned?”
Not content to leave this a rhetorical query, Melville answers his own
catechism in unambiguous terms: “I should say that considering Pierre
was quite young and very unsophisticated as yet, and withal rather
high-blooded; and sometimes read the History of the Revolutionary War,
and possessed a mother who very frequently made remote social allusions
to the epaulettes of the Major-General his grandfather;--I should say
that upon all these occasions, the way it must have been with him was
a very proud, elated sort of way.”
Melville did not preserve throughout his long life this early and proud
elation in his descent, and in later years he thought it necessary to
apologise for the short-sighted and provincial self-satisfaction that
he absorbed from his parents in his early youth. “And if this seem but
too fond and foolish in Pierre,” he pleads in a mood both of apology
and of prophecy; “and if you tell me that this sort of thing in him
showed him no sterling Democrat, and that a truly noble man should
never brag of any arm but his own; then I beg you to consider again
that this Pierre was but a youngster as yet. And believe me, you will
pronounce Pierre a thorough-going Democrat in time; perhaps a little
too Radical altogether to your fancy.”
Radical he came to be, indeed: it was the necessary penalty of being
cursed with an intelligence above that of the smug and shallow
optimism of his country and his period. Democratic he may have been,
but only in the most unpopular meaning of that once noble term. He
was a democrat in the same relentless sense that Dante or Milton were
democrats. Lucifer rebelled, let it be remembered, to make Heaven
“safe for Democracy:” the first experiment in popular government.
“Hell,” says Melville, “is a democracy of devils.” In _Mardi_, Melville
indulges lengthy reflections on a certain “chanticleer people” who
boast boisterously of themselves: “Saw ye ever such a land as this?
Is it not a great and extensive republic? Pray, observe how tall we
are; just feel of our thighs; are we not a glorious people? We are all
Kings here; royalty breathes in the common air.” Before the spectacle
of this lusty republicanism, Melville exhibits unorthodox doubts.
“There’s not so much freedom here as these freemen think,” he makes a
strolling deity observe; “I laugh and admire.... Freedom is more social
than political. And its real felicity is not to be shared. _That_ is
of a man’s own individual getting and holding. Little longer, may it
please you, can republics subsist now, than in days gone by. Though
all men approached sages in wisdom, some would yet be more wise than
others; and so, the old degrees would be preserved. And no exemption
would an equality of knowledge furnish, from the inbred servility of
mortal to mortal; from all the organic causes, which inevitably divide
mankind into brigades and battalions, with captains at their heads.
Civilisation has not ever been the brother of equality.”
As Melville grew away from boyhood, he came to distinguish between the
accidentals and the essentials that distinguish man from man. At his
mother’s breast he had absorbed with her milk a vivid and exaggerated
belief that the accidents concomitant upon birth that range men into
artificial classes, were ingrain in the very woof of the universe.
When he later discovered that his parents tinted life with a very
perishable dye, he also found, set below their cheap calico patterns,
an unchangeable texture of sharper and deeper and more variegated
colours. And he discovered, too, that his uncritical boyhood pride in
his blood was, withal, not entirely a mere savage delight in calico
prints.
He was, as he boasts in the sub-title of _Redburn_, “the
son-of-a-gentleman,” reared in an environment rich with the mellowing
influences of splendid family traditions. And these associations
left an indelible stamp upon him. In _Mardi_, in speaking of the
impossibility of belying one’s true nature while at sea and in the
fellowship of sailors, he offers himself as an example to point.
“Aboard of all ships in which I have sailed,” he says, “I have
invariably been known by a sort of drawing-room title. Not,--let me
hurry to say,--that I put hand in tar bucket with a squeamish air, or
ascended the rigging with a Chesterfieldian mince. No, no, I was never
better than my vocation. I showed as brown a chest, and as hard a
hand, as the tarriest tar of them all. And never did shipmate of mine
upbraid me with a genteel disinclination to duty, though it carried me
to truck of main-mast, or jib-boom-end, in the most wolfish blast that
ever howled. Whence, then, this annoying appellation? for annoying it
most assuredly was. It was because of something in me that could not
be hidden; stealing out in an occasional polysyllable; an otherwise
incomprehensible deliberation in dining; remote, unguarded allusions to
belle-lettres affairs; and other trifles superfluous to mention.”
Though his grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort, had been dead
seven years when Melville was born, so vital were the relics of him
that surrounded Melville’s boyhood, so reverently was his memory
tended by his first child and only daughter, that the image of Peter
Gansevoort was one of the most potent influences during Melville’s most
impressionable years. The heroic presence that dominated Melville’s
imagination, “measured six feet four inches in height; during a
fire in the old manorial mansion, with one dash of the foot, he had
smitten down an oaken door, to admit the buckets of his negro slaves;
Pierre had often tried on his military vest, which still remained an
heirloom at Saddle-Meadows, and found the pockets below his knees,
and plenty additional room for a fair-sized quarter-cask within its
buttoned girth; in a night scuffle in the wilderness before the
Revolutionary War, he had annihilated two Indian savages by making
reciprocal bludgeons of their heads. And all this was done by the
mildest hearted, the most blue-eyed gentleman in the world, who,
according to the patriarchal fashion of those days, was a gentle,
white-haired worshipper of all the household gods; the gentlest
husband and the gentlest father; the kindest master to his slaves;
of the most wonderful unruffledness of temper; a serene smoker of
his after dinner pipe; a forgiver of many injuries; a sweet-hearted,
charitable Christian; in fine, a pure, cheerful, childlike, blue-eyed,
divine old man; in whose meek, majestic soul the lion and the lamb
embraced--fit image of his God.” His portrait was to Melville “a
glorious gospel framed and hung upon the wall, and declaring to all
people, as from the Mount, that man is a noble, god-like being, full
of choicest juices; made up of strength and beauty.” Most of the
images of God that Melville met in actual secular embodiment, suffered
tragically by comparison with this image of mortal perfection which
Melville nursed in his heart. Most men that Melville met, in falling
short of the mythical excellence of Peter Gansevoort, whom he never
knew in the flesh, seemed to Melville, to be libels upon their Divine
Original. According to Melville’s account, he could never look upon
his grandfather’s military portrait without an infinite and mournful
longing to meet his living aspect in actual life. Yet such was the
temper of Melville’s mind, his life such a tragic career of dreaming
of elusive perfection, dreams invariably to be dashed and bruised and
shattered by an incompatible reality, that it is safe to surmise--with
no impiety to the memory of Peter Gansevoort--that had Melville known
his maternal grandfather, the old General’s six feet four of blood and
bone would have shrunk, with his extravagance of all human excellence,
to more truly historical dimensions.
MELVILLE’S GRANDFATHERS
[Illustration: GENERAL PETER GANSEVOORT]
[Illustration: MAJOR THOMAS MELVILLE]
Melville’s paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melville, who died in
1832, when Melville was thirteen years old, inspired his grandson to
no such glowing tributes. Born in Boston, in 1751, an only child,
he was left an orphan at the age of ten. It appears by the probate
records on the appointment of his guardian in 1761, that he inherited
a considerable fortune from his father. He was reared by his maternal
grandmother, Mrs. Mary Cargill. Mrs. Mary Cargill’s brother was the
celebrated and eccentric dissenter and polemic writer, John Abernethy
of Dublin, who in his _Tracts_ (collected in 1751) measured swords
with Swift himself triumphantly; her son, David, was both a celebrated
warrior against the Indians, and the father of twenty-three children,
fifteen of whom were sons. Whatever the immediate male relatives of
Mrs. Mary Cargill did, it would appear, they did vigorously, and on an
enterprising scale. She was herself an old lady of very independent
ideas about the universe, and her grandson, Thomas Melville--Melville’s
grandfather,--perpetuated much of her independence. Indifferent to
the caprices of fashion, Thomas Melville persisted until his death in
1832, in wearing the old-fashioned cocked hat and knee breeches. Oliver
Holmes said of him: “His aspect among the crowds of a later generation
reminded me of a withered leaf which has held to its stem through the
storms of autumn and winter, and finds itself still clinging to its
bough while the new growths of spring are bursting their buds and
spreading their foliage all around it.”
And so the Autocrat wrote:
“I saw him once before,
As he passed by the door,
And again
The pavement stones resound
As he totters o’er the ground
With his cane.
They say that in his prime,
Ere the pruning-knife of Time
Cut him down,
Not a better man was found
By the Crier on his round
Through the town.
But now he walks the streets,
And he looks at all he meets
Sad and wan.
And he shakes his feeble head
And it seems as if he said,
‘They are gone.’
The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has pressed
In their bloom,
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.
My grandmamma has said,--
Poor old lady, she is dead
Long ago--
That he had a Roman nose,
And his cheek was like a rose
In the snow:
But now his nose is thin,
And it rests upon his chin
Like a staff,
And a crook is in his back,
And a melancholy crack
In his laugh.
I know it is a sin
For me to sit and grin
At him here;
But the old three-cornered hat,
And the breeches, and all that,
Are so queer!
And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring,
Let them smile as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough,
Where I cling.”
In his boyhood, Thomas Melville was sent by his grandmother (who lived
on till her grandson was thirty years old, clinging as tenaciously to
life as to every other good thing she set hands upon) to the College
of New Jersey, now Princeton. He was graduated in 1769. From both
Princeton and Harvard he later received an M.A. Between 1771 and
1773 he visited his relatives in Scotland. During this visit he was
presented with the freedom of the city of St. Andrews and of Renfrew.
He returned to Boston to become a merchant and to enter with spirit
into the patriotic ferment then so actively brewing. He was a member of
the Long Room Club, in sympathy with the Sons of Liberty, and with Paul
Revere, one of the “Indians” to take part in the Boston Tea Party of
December 16, 1773. There still survive a few unbrewed leaves from this
cargo of tea: the carefully preserved shakings from Major Melville’s
shoes, resurrected when he relaxed into slippers immediately upon his
return home from the excitements of revolutionary defiance. Though
Major Melville was, throughout his life, an extreme conservative, it
was his very conservatism that fired him to revolution. He believed
that what needed to be conserved was the constitutional--British
constitutional--rights of his country, not the innovation of Hanoverian
tyranny. He commanded a detachment sent to Nantucket, the centre of
whaling, to watch the movement of the British fleet; in the expedition
into Rhode Island, in 1778, he took the rank of Major in Croft’s
regiment of Massachusetts artillery. His resignation, dated Boston,
Oct. 21, 1778, states “that he had been almost three years in said
service and would willingly continue to serve, but owing to inadequate
pay and subsequent inability to support his family he felt compelled
to resign his commission.” In 1789 he was commissioned by Washington
as naval officer of the port of Boston: a commission renewed by all
succeeding presidents down to Andrew Jackson’s time in 1824. Major
Melville was the nearest surviving male relative of the picturesque
General Robert Melville, who was the first and only Captain General and
Governor-in-Chief of the islands ceded to England by France in 1763,
and at the time of his death in 1809, with one exception, the oldest
General in the British Army.
In 1779, Major Melville was elected fire ward of Boston, and when
he resigned in 1825, he was offered a vote of thanks “for the zeal,
intrepidity and judgment with which he has on all occasions discharged
his duties as fire ward for forty-six years in succession, and for
twenty-six as chairman of the board.” In those days, volunteer fire
companies were fashionable sporting clubs, and such was the distinction
attached to membership that a premium was often paid for the privilege
of belonging to such an exclusive and diverting fraternity. Melville’s
father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of Massachusetts, was Fire
Warden between 1818 and 1821. Melville’s grandfather and future
father-in-law may have met at many a fire and, for all we know to
the contrary, the intimacy between the Shaws and the Melvilles that
culminated in Herman’s marriage, may have been first kindled by a
burning house.
The tradition survives of Major Melville that the excitement of running
to fire grew upon him like gambling upon more sedentary mortals, and
that his death was caused by over-fatigue and exposure at a fire near
his house he attended at the age of eighty-one.
Of Melville’s two grandmothers, Catharine Van Schaick and Priscilla
Scollay, there is no mention in any of his writings. It is a
peculiarity of Melville’s writings indeed, completely to disregard all
of his female relatives,--with the notable exceptions of his mother,
his mother-in-law, and his wife.
Major Thomas Melville, by his marriage with Priscilla Scollay, is said
to have aggravated an already ample fortune, though the terms of his
resignation from the Revolutionary army argue a dwindling of income
during unsettled times. The Scollays, one of the oldest of Boston
families, were related to Melville not only by direct blood descent,
but Melville’s great-great-uncle, John Melville (who died in London in
1798) married Deborah Scollay, Melville’s great-aunt. Deborah Scollay,
Priscilla’s sister, was the first of thirteen children; Priscilla the
tenth. The Scollays, in brave competition with the Melvilles and
the Gansevoorts, seem to have devoutly accepted the Mosaic edict to
increase and multiply: they were, as Carlyle says of Dr. Thomas Arnold,
of “unhastening, unresting diligence.” Major Thomas Melville had
eleven children by his wife Priscilla, Melville’s father Allan being
the fourth child and second son. Of the influence of Allan’s numerous
brothers and sisters upon Melville there are scant records to show. His
aunt Priscilla, however, mentioned him in her will.
Allan’s oldest sister, Mary (1778-1859) married Captain John DeWolf
II. of Bristol, Rhode Island. In _Moby-Dick_, in offering instances
of ships being charged upon by whales, Melville quotes from the
_Voyages_ of Captain Langsdorff, a member of Admiral Krusenstern’s
famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the last century. In
the passage quoted by Melville is mentioned a Captain D’Wolf. “Now, the
Captain D’Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship in question,”
says Melville, “is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual
adventures as a sea captain, this day resides in the village of
Dorchester, near Boston. I have the honour of being a nephew of his. I
have particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff.
He substantiates every word.” In _Redburn_, Melville speaks of “an
uncle of mine, an old sea-captain, with white hair, who used to sail
to a place called Archangel in Russia, and who used to tell me that
he was with Captain Langsdorff, when Captain Langsdorff crossed over
by land from the sea of Okotsk in Asia to St. Petersburg, drawn by
large dogs in a sled.... He was the very first sea captain I had ever
seen, and his white hair and fine handsome florid face made so strong
an impression upon me that I have never forgotten him, though I only
saw him during this one visit of his to New York, for he was lost in
the White Sea some years after.” Just what, if anything besides two
contradictory statements--Melville owed to this uncle it would be
worthless to surmise.
Another of Melville’s uncles, however, Thomas--Allan’s older
brother--played an important rôle in Melville’s development. After an
eventful residence of twenty-one years in France, Thomas returned to
America with his wife Françoise Raymonde Eulogie Marie des Douleurs
Lamé Fleury, shortly before the War of 1812. Enlisted in the army, he
was sent to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with the rank of Major. After
the war he continued in Pittsfield, and with his family set up at what
is now Broadhall.
Broadhall, built by Henry Van Schaek in 1781, bought by Elkanah Watson
in 1807, was, in 1816, acquired by Major Thomas Melville of the cocked
hat. His son, Major Thomas Melville of the French wife, lived in
Broadhall until 1837, when he moved to Galena, Illinois, where he died
on August 1--Melville’s birthday--1845. By a parallel irony of fate,
just as the Stanwix House of the Gansevoorts is now a hotel, Broadhall
of the Melvilles is now a country club.
It was a strange transplanting, that of Major Thomas Melville and
his wife, Marie des Douleurs, from Paris to the rustic crudities of
the farming outskirts of civilisation. Marie des Douleurs rapidly
pined and wilted in the harsh brusque air. A bundle of her letters
survive, written in a delicate drooping hand: letters that might have
been written by a wasted and homesick nun. In 1814, within the space
of a single month, Mrs. Thomas Melville and two of her children died
of consumption. Thomas, of more vigorous stock, survived to marry
again--this time to Mary Anna Augusta Hobard, and to take actively to
farming. He achieved a local reputation for his successful devotion
to the soil; presiding at meetings of the Berkshire Agricultural
Association, and winning a first prize at a ploughing match at the
Berkshire Fair. As a boy, Melville was sent to alternate his visits to
the Gansevoorts by trips to his uncle at Pittsfield. The single record
of his life at Broadhall is preserved in _The History of Pittsfield_
(1876) “compiled and written, under the general direction of a
committee, by J. E. A. Smith.” Melville says:
“In 1836 circumstances made me the greater portion of a year an inmate
of my uncle’s family, and an active assistant upon the farm. He was
then grey haired, but not wrinkled; of a pleasing complexion, but
little, if any, bowed in figure; and preserving evident traces of the
prepossessing good looks of his youth. His manners were mild and
kindly, with a faded brocade of old French breeding, which--contrasted
with his surroundings at the time--impressed me as not a little
interesting, not wholly without a touch of pathos.
“He never used the scythe, but I frequently raked with him in the hay
field. At the end of the swath he would at times pause in the sun and,
taking out his smooth worn box of satinwood, gracefully help himself to
a pinch of snuff, while leaning on his rake; quite naturally: and yet
with a look, which--as I recall it--presents him in the shadowy aspect
of a courtier of Louis XVI, reduced as a refugee to humble employment
in a region far from gilded Versailles.
“By the late October fire, in the great hearth of the capacious kitchen
of the old farm mansion, I remember to have seen him frequently sitting
just before early bed time, gazing into the embers, while his face
plainly expressed to a sympathetic observer that his heart, thawed to
the core under the influence of the general flame--carried him far away
over the ocean to the gay boulevards.
“Suddenly, under the accumulation of reminiscences, his eye would
glisten and become humid. With a start he would check himself in his
reverie, and give an ultimate sigh; as much as to say ‘ah, well!’ and
end with an aromatic pinch of snuff. It was the French graft upon the
New England stock, which produced this autumnal apple: perhaps the
mellower for the frost.”
It was immediately following upon the heels of this sojourn in
Pittsfield in 1836, that Melville went down to the sea and shipped
before the mast. Of Melville’s companionship with his Pittsfield
cousins during this visit, nothing seems to be known. Melville’s uncle,
Thomas, had two children living at the time: Anna Marie Priscilla, who
died in Pittsfield in 1858, and Pierre François Henry Thomas Wilson,
thirteen years Melville’s senior, who in 1842 died in the Sandwich
Islands. That Pierre’s adventures to the far corners of the earth may
have had some influence upon Melville’s taking to a ship is a tempting
surmise; but a surmise whose only cogency is its possibility.
Whatever the influence of Pittsfield in sending Melville to sea, it
was to Pittsfield he finally returned, when, after wide wanderings,
he faced homeward. The old Major, his uncle, was dead, and Broadhall,
descended to one of his sons, was rented as a hotel. During the summer
of 1850, Melville and his wife boarded at Broadhall. In October of the
same year, they settled in Pittsfield, not at Broadhall, as has been
repeatedly stated, but at a neighbouring farm, christened Arrowhead
by Melville. Arrowhead was Melville’s home for the following thirteen
years.
Melville’s great-grandfather, Allan--father of _The Last Leaf_--came to
America in 1748, and settled in Boston as a merchant. This Allan was
the son of Thomas Melville, a clergyman of the Scotch Kirk. This Thomas
Melville was from 1718 to 1764 minister of Scoonie Parish, Levin,
Fifeshire. In 1769 he “ended his days in a state of most cheerful
tranquillity.”
Thomas Melville of Scoonie was second in lineal descent from Sir John
Melville of Carnbee: a worthy knighted by James VI. According to Sir
Robert Douglas’ _The Baronage of Scotland_ (Edinburgh, 1798), this Sir
John Melville of Carnbee was thirteenth in direct blood descent from
one Sir Richard Melvill, a man of distinction in the reign of Alexander
III, and who in 1296 was compelled to swear allegiance to Edward I of
England when he overran Scotland.
If this remote tracing of Melville’s descent were a discovery of facts
unknown to Melville, it would be an ostentatious irrelevancy to flaunt
it in his biography. But Melville was ironically conscious of his
lineage, and when his earlier novels had won him reputation at home
and in England as an entertaining literary vagabond, in France (see
the typically patronising _Études sur la Littérature et les Mœurs des
Anglo-Américains du XIXe Siècle_--Paris, 1851--by M. Philarete Chasles)
as a representative product of a crude and traditionless civilisation,
he took satirical unction to his soul at the illustrious associations
that clung around his ancient name. In his own person he felt that he
contradicted the conceit of the European world “that in demagogical
America the sacred Past hath no fixed statues erected to it, but (that)
all things irreverently seethe and boil in the vulgar caldron of
an everlasting, uncrystallising Present.” Founding his defence upon
the knowledge of his own ancestry, he maintained in _Pierre_ that if
America so chose to glorify herself, she could make out a good general
case with England in the little matter of long pedigrees--pedigrees,
that is, without a flaw. In monarchical Europe, Melville takes pains
to contend, the proudest families are but grafted families that
successively live and die on the eternal soil of a name. In the pride
of unbroken lineal blood descent from a thirteenth century count, he
matched his blood and patronym with the most honoured in England. “If
Richmond, and St. Albans, and Grafton, and Portland, and Buccleugh,
be names almost as old as England herself, the present Dukes of those
names stop in their own genuine pedigrees at Charles II., and there
find no very fine fountain; since what we would deem the least glorious
parentage under the sun, is precisely the parentage of a Buccleugh,
for example; whose ancestress could not well avoid being a mother, it
is true, but had incidentally omitted the preliminary rites. Yet a
King was the sire.... All honour to the names, and all courtesy to the
men; but if St. Albans tell me he is all-honourable and all-eternal,
I must politely refer him to Nell Gwynne.” Melville bitterly resented
the fashionable foreign imputation that his was a rootless and upstart
people. Through its grilling of bars sinister, he viewed the superior
pretensions of monarchical aristocracy with his finger at his nose. “If
in America,” he boasted, “the vast mass of families be as the blades of
grass, yet some few there are that stand as the oak; which, instead of
decaying, annually puts forth new branches; whereby Time, instead of
subtracting, is made to capitulate into a multiple virtue.”
If Melville took over-elaborate pains to point to himself as swinging
at the dizzy crest of such a patriarchal tree, it was not to derive
personal glory from mere altitude. By exhibiting the humorous
incompatibility between his destiny and his descent, he strove to show,
at one and the same time, both the absurdity of all pride in blood, and
the ironic poignancy of his own apparent defeat.
Melville’s parents, however, qualified their ancestral pride with no
such ironic considerations. With whole-hearted gratitude they thanked
God for their descent; nor did they, in their thanksgiving, fail to
acknowledge, with becoming humility, a Heavenly Father who, in power
and glory, transcended even terrestrial counts and brewers.
Allan was always a man of devout protestations; and although he always
signed his own name with an underscoring of tangled flourishes, he
wrote the name of God--and his correspondence is liberally scattered
with Deity--with three conspicuous capitals of his most ornate
penmanship. Melville was patently modelling the father of Pierre after
his own male parent, when he recorded Pierre’s father’s platitudinous
insistence “that all gentlemanhood was vain, all claims to it
preposterous and absurd, unless the primeval gentleness and golden
humanities of religion had been so thoroughly wrought into the complete
texture of the character, that he who pronounced himself gentleman,
could also rightly assume the meek but knightly style of Christian.”
Allan, proud in the sense of this humility, in untangling his descent
back to Sir John Melville of Carnbee, seems to have rested serenely in
the pious faith that he had established his kinship to all the titled
and illustrious Melvilles in history. So he carried his head high--as
he felt a republican should--and with a generous and comprehensive
fraternity claimed as his more than kith--as indeed they were--an
impressive congregation of courtiers, scholars and divines.
So prolific has been the Melville family, so extended its history, that
its intricate branchings from the veritable Aaron’s rod in which it
had its source, have never been completely untangled by even the most
arduous genealogical historians. With what directness and potency the
different Melville strains were active in Melville’s blood it would be
utterly absurd to pretend to determine. But if not forces in Melville’s
blood, Allan made them vital presences in his son’s boyhood imagination.
The most illustrious of this shadowy company of adopted ancestors
was the old Viking, Andrew Melville (1545-1622), the dauntless
“Episcopomastrix” or “Scourge of Bishops,” second in fame among Scotch
reformers only to John Knox. In October, 1577, at an interview between
Andrew and the Regent Morton, the latter, irritated at the intrepidity
of the assembly, exclaimed: “There will never be quiet in this country
till half a dozen of you be hanged!” Whereupon Andrew, in language
Morton dared not resent, exclaimed: “Hark! Sir; threaten your courtiers
after that manner. It is the same to me whether I rot in the air or in
the ground. The earth is the Lord’s. Patria est ubicunque est bene.”
Another Andrew (1624-1706) among these ghostly presences was a soldier
of fortune who in the preface of his _Memoires de M. de Chevalier
de Melville_ (Amsterdam, 1704) was eulogised for his valour and his
protestantism.
Conspicuous in Allan’s library was a copy of the _Memoirs of His Own
Life by Sir James Melvil of Hallhill_ (London, 1683), bearing the
autograph of Allan’s great-grandfather, Thomas Melville of Scoonie.
This volume had been brought to America by Allan’s grandfather in
1746, and was cherished by Melville’s father as a record of the part
played by his exuberant ancestors in the turbulent affairs of Elizabeth
and Mary, Queen of Scots. From this volume Allen taught his children
of Sir James’ father, John Melville, Lord of Raith in Fife, who,
“although there was not the least suspicion of anie fault, yitt lost
he his head, becaus he was known to be one that unfainedlie favoured
the truthe;” of Sir James’ brother, William, who was able to speak
perfectly “the Latin, the Dutche, the Flemyn, and the Frenche tongue;”
of another brother of Sir James, Sir Robert Melville, who “spak brave
and stout language to the consaill of England, so that the quen herself
boisted him of his lyf.” But all of the details of Sir James’ racy
account of his own adventures were not fit entertainment for the sons
of New England Unitarians. Yet many of these unpuritan accounts are
in Melville’s own vein, as witness the recounting of the incident
that befell Sir James at the age of fourteen, when, in company with
the French Ambassador, Monluc, Bishop of Valence, he was entertained
in Ireland by one O’Docherty who lived in “a dark tour.” It appears
that the Bishop paid such disquieting attention to O’Docherty’s
daughter that the father substituted another bait to the Prelate’s
susceptibilities: a substitution that produced an awkward scene in
etiquette. For the second lady mistook a phial “of the maist precious
balm that grew in Egypt, which Soliman the great Turc had given in a
present to the same bishop” for something to eat; and this “because it
had an odoriphant smell.” “Therefore she licked it clean out.” During
this process of consumption, O’Docherty’s daughter, disengaged from the
Bishop, turned to Sir James for solace, with an offer to elope. Sir
James was cautious for his fourteen years, and convinced the lady of
the superfluousness of migratory impulses.
Contemporary with Allan, there lived in Scotland, direct descendants
of these Elizabethan Melvilles. One year before Herman’s birth,
Allan, with admirable republican simplicity, decided, during one of
the frequent business trips that took him across the Atlantic, to
look up his titled Scotch cousins, and pay them the compliments of
his dutiful respects. The record of this adventure is preserved in
Allan’s journal, bound in vellum of a lurid emerald green. The entries
are characteristically business-like, and stoically naked of personal
reflections:
_May 22, 1818_--Visited Melville house, the seat of the
Earl of Leven & Melville at 2 P.M., 14 miles--the
Earl & Family being absent, left them at 4 A.M. &
dined at the New Inn at the Junction of the Perth,
Cupar & Dundee Roads, 6 miles.
_May 26, 1818_--Reached Melville house at 1/2 past 3
P.M.--10 miles--& met with a very hospitable &
friendly reception from his lordship & family.
_May 27, 1818_--Left Melville house at 1/2 past 11 in
his lordship’s gig with a lacquey to meet the coach
at the New Inn.
It would, perhaps, be entertaining to know just exactly what Alexander,
7th Earl of Levin and 6th Earl of Melville, who was also Viscount
Kirkaldie, Lord Melville of Monymaill, Lord Bolgonie, and Lord Raith,
Monyraill and Balwearie, thought in his heart of Allan Melville of
Boston, merchant, and importer of commodities from France.