CHAPTER III
PARENTS AND EARLY YEARS
“In general terms we have been thus decided in asserting the great
genealogical and real-estate dignity of some families in America,
because in so doing we poetically establish the richly aristocratic
condition of Master Pierre Glendinning, for whom we have claimed
some special family distinction. And to the observant reader the
sequel will not fail to show how important is this circumstance,
considered with reference to the singularly developed character and
most singular life-career of our hero. Nor will any man dream that
the last chapter was merely intended for a foolish bravado, and not
with a solid purpose in view.”
--HERMAN MELVILLE: _Pierre_.
Samuel Butler, who with Thomas Huxley cherished certain unorthodox
convictions as to “the unfathomable injustice of the Universe,” found
the make-shift of family life not the least of natural evils. In a
more benevolent adjustment of the human animal to its environment,
so Butler declared, children would be spared the incubus of parents.
After the easeful death of their progenitors, they would be hatched,
cocoon-like, from an ample and comfortable roll of bank-notes of high
denomination. And it is a foregone surety that, had Samuel Butler
known Herman Melville’s parents, he would not have been moved to
soften his impeachment of the way of all flesh. For the household
of Allan Melville bore striking resemblances to that of the most
self-important of the Pontifexes. Both John Pontifex and Allan
Melville, judged either by the accepted standards of their own time
or to-day, were good men: to his God, his neighbours, his wife, his
children, each did his duty relentlessly. And each, as Melville, with
obvious autobiographical reference, says of the father of Pierre, “left
behind him in the general voice of the world, a marked reputation as a
Christian and a gentleman; in the heart of his wife, a green memory of
many healthy days of unclouded and joyful wedded life.” But each also
left behind him a son who in the end was to cherish his memory with
some misgivings. Allan was less fortunate than John Pontifex in that
though he died rich in virtue, he died with no corresponding abundance
of corruptible riches. Nothing in his life so ill became him as his
bequest of poverty to his widow and eight children.
Herman, the second son and third child, was thirteen years old at the
time of Allan’s decease: young enough to cherish up into early manhood
the most fantastic idealisation of his father. “Children begin by
loving their parents,” a modern cynic has said; “later the children
grow to understanding, and sometimes, they forgive.” As Melville grew
in maturity of years, he did not grow in charity toward his parents. In
his novel _Pierre_ he seems to draw malicious delight in pronouncing,
under a thin disguise, an imaginary libel upon his father’s memory.
There he desecrated in fiction what he had once fondly cherished in
life. Aside from its high achievement as a work of art, this dark wild
book of incest and death is of the greatest importance as a document
in autobiography. Most of the characters in _Pierre_ are unmistakably
idealisations of clearly recognisable originals. The hero, Pierre
Glendinning, is a glorification of Melville; the widowed mother, Marie
Glendinning, owes much more to Melville’s mother, Maria Gansevoort,
than the initials of her name. And in this book, Melville exorcises the
ghost of his father, and brings him forth to unearth from the past a
skeleton that Melville seems to have manufactured in the closet of a
vindictive subconsciousness.
“Blessed and glorified in his tomb beyond Prince Mausolus,” wrote
Melville at the age of thirty-three, “is that mortal sire, who, after
an honourable, pure course of life, dies, and is buried, as in a choice
fountain, in the filial breast of a tender-hearted and intellectually
appreciative child. But if fate preserve the father to a later time,
too often the filial obsequies are less profound, the canonisation less
ethereal.”
As has been said, Melville was thirteen when, in 1832, his father
died. And at that time, as for years following, there survived from
Allan in Melville’s memory “the impression of a bodily form of rare
manly virtue and benignity, only rivalled by the supposed perfect
mould in which his virtuous heart had been cast.” In _Redburn_ he
says of his youthful idealisation of Allan: “I always thought him a
marvellous being, infinitely purer and greater than I was, who could
not by any possibility do wrong or say an untruth.” And as a gesture
expressive of this piety for his father’s memory, he took but one
book with him to Liverpool when at the age of seventeen he worked his
way across the Atlantic in a merchantman. This was an old dog-eared
guide-book that had belonged to his father. On the map in this book,
Allan, with characteristic precision, had traced with a pen a number
of dotted lines radiating in all directions from Riddough’s Hotel at
the foot of Lord Street: marks that delineated his various excursions
in the town. As Melville planned his itinerary while in Liverpool, he
was in the first place to visit Riddough’s Hotel, where his father
had stopped more than thirty years before; and then, with the map in
his hand, to follow Allan through the town, according to the dotted
lines in the diagram. “For this,” says Melville, “would be performing
a filial pilgrimage to spots which would be hallowed to my eyes.”
Because Melville had failed to take into account the mutability of
cities, he was disappointed to find some of the shrines hallowed by his
father’s visits no longer in existence. But the very bitterness of his
disappointment was an eloquent tribute to his father’s memory.
Allan himself was born in 1782, second son, and fourth child, in
a family of eleven children. Of his early life, almost nothing is
known. Though he was born into a well-to-do family of considerable
cultivation, he seems never to have been exposed to the boasted
advantages of a university education. He was, however, a rather
extensively travelled man. At the age of eighteen, as if to set a
precedent for his son, he made his first trip abroad. But whereas
Melville went as a sailor before the mast, to land in Liverpool as
a penniless itinerant, Allan was two years in Paris as a guest, in
comfortable circumstances, of a well-to-do uncle. Before his marriage
in 1814, Allan made five other pilgrimages to Europe; and once, after
his marriage, he crossed the Atlantic again. This last trip he would
not have taken but from urgency of business: “It will be a most painful
sacrifice to part from my beloved wife and children,” he says, in
prospect of the journey; “but duty towards them requires it.” Allan
acclimated himself to France as a young man, and so acquired a mastery
of the French language. He is said to have spoken French like a native:
a bilingual accomplishment that Melville never even remotely acquired.
Melville boasted a smattering of a Polynesian dialect or two: but so
imperfect was this smattering that it moved Stevenson to complain that
Melville, like Charles Lamb, “had no ear.”
In the journal which Allan kept from 1800 to 1831, there survives
a meticulously accurate account of his wanderings up and down upon
the face of Christendom. On the fly-leaf of the journal, under the
title “Recapitulations of Voyages and Travels from 1800 to 1822 both
inclusive,” he gives, in ledger-like summary, this statement of his
peregrinations:
“by land 24425 miles.
by water 48460 miles.
days at sea, etc. 643.”
That part of his early life that he spent outside of Europe, he
distributed between Boston and Albany. Allan was a man to turn to
account all of his resources. His knowledge of French he converted into
a business asset, by setting up as a merchant-importer trafficking in
dry-goods and notions from France: “razors, children’s white leather
gloves, leghorn hats, and taffeta ribbons” being a typical shipment.
[Illustration: _From a Painting made in Paris, 1810._]
[Illustration: Signature--Allan Melville]
It was in Albany that Allan met Maria Gansevoort: a meeting of which
his journal is austerely ignorant. If there ever were any romance in
Allan’s life he must have emulated Pepys and recorded it in cipher,
and then, with a caution deeper than Pepys’, have burned the cryptic
revelation. It is true that in _Pierre_, Melville attempts to brighten
his father’s pre-marital years by imputing to him a lively vitality
in his youth: but the evidence for this imputation hangs upon a most
tenuous thread of ambiguities. Yet now that it has transpired that
even the sober Wordsworth under similar circumstances succumbed to
the flesh, it is not impossible, on the face of it, that Allan, in
the unredeemed years before his comparatively late marriage,
may have been anointed in mortality. But in his later life--as was
Wordsworth--he was a paragon of propriety, and he must be acquitted
of indiscretion until more damning facts are mustered to accuse him.
All surviving evidence presents him as a model of rigid decorum. In
so far as he has revealed himself, all but the most restrained and
well-behaved and standardised emotions fell within the forbidden
degrees. It is certain that no flower ever gave _him_ thoughts too deep
for tears.
His courtship seems to have been a model of discretion, and might well
have been modelled after Mrs. Hannah More’s _Coelebs in Search of a
Wife_. There survive two gifts that he made while he was meditating
on the serious verge of matrimony. A year before his marriage he
bought, fresh from the press, a copy of _The Pleasures of Imagination_
by Mark Akenside, M.D., with a critical essay on the poem, by Mrs.
Barbauld, prefixed. Whether either Allan or Maria ever read a line of
Dr. Akenside we do not know: Maria’s copy, it must be confessed, is
suspiciously well-preserved. But Allan had the authority of _Coelebs_
that “the condensed vigour, so indispensable to blank verse, the
skilful variation of the pause, the masterly structure of the period,
and all the occult mysteries of the art, can, perhaps, be best learned
from Akenside.” That the poet’s object was “to establish the infinite
superiority of mind over unconscious matter, even in its fairest
terms,” gave Allan opportunity to pay Maria a veiled compliment.
This same Anna Letitia Barbauld, whose introductory essay gave the
final stamp of respectability to Dr. Akenside, had, in a chapter of
advice to young girls, earlier remarked, and with best-intentioned
seriousness, that “An ass is much better adapted than a horse to
show off a lady.” It may be so. In any event, Allan inscribed on the
fly-leaf of Dr. Akenside’s effusion:
MISS MARIA GANSEVOORT
FROM HER FRIEND
A. M.
The emotions that smouldered beneath this chaste inscription he vented,
and with no compromise to himself, in a tropical tangle of copy-book
flourishes that he made below his initials.
The second gift is also a book--Mrs. Chapone’s _Letters on the
Improvement of the Mind_. Lydia Languish, it is true, had, on a
memorable occasion, with unblushing deceit, placed Mrs. Chapone and the
reverend Fordyce ostentatiously on a table together. But it is certain
that Allan was not consciously furnishing Miss Gansevoort with any of
the stage-properties of hypocrisy. Mrs. Chapone’s pronouncements were
then being accepted by the adoring middle class as Protestant Bulls.
And Allan purchased Mrs. Chapone’s little volume with his ear to the
verdict of Mrs. Delany, who wrote: “They speak to the heart as well as
to the head; and I know no book (next to the Bible) more entertaining
or edifying.”
It was within a few months before his marriage that Allan, in the most
orthodox manner of that “Happy Half Century” so happily celebrated by
Miss Agnes Repplier, undertook to heighten the virtues of Miss Maria
Gansevoort by exposing her to the “pure and prevailing superiority”
of Mrs. Chapone. For Allan was a cautious man, and marriage, he knew,
was a step not lightly to be made. “I do not want a Helen, or a Saint
Cecilia, or a Madame Dacier,” said Coelebs, in sketching an ideal wife;
“yet must she be elegant or I could not love her; sensible, or I could
not respect her; prudent, or I could not confide in her; well-informed,
or she could not educate my children; well-bred, or she could not
entertain my friends; pious, or I should not be happy with her, because
the prime comfort in a companion for life is the delightful hope that
she will be a companion for eternity.”
Maria was patently elegant, well-bred and pious. The present of Dr.
Akenside and Mrs. Chapone gave her generous opportunity of coming to
be well-informed. But Allan did not hesitate to make further and more
direct contributions to her information. Prudence he rated prime among
virtues; and he approached marriage with Miltonic preconceptions. By
no means confident that the eternal truths enunciated by Mrs. Chapone
would penetrate Maria’s female intellect, Allan prudently summarised
the most sacred verities of the volume in two manuscript introductions.
Maria’s copy of the _Letters_ bears three inscriptions made by Allan on
three separate fly-leaves. The first is in a formal upright hand, rigid
in propriety:
“Prudence should be the governing principle of Woman’s existence,
domestick life her peculiar sphere; no rank can exempt her from an
observation of the laws of the former, from an attention to the
duties of the latter. To neglect both is to violate the sacred
statutes of social happiness, and to frustrate the all-wise intention
of that Providence who framed them.”
In the second inscription, made with acknowledgment to Miss Owensong,
Allan takes all the precautions of a Coelebs to make certain that at
his table “the eulogist of female ignorance might dine in security
against the intrusion and vanity of erudition.” The inscription reads:
“The liberal cultivation of the female _mind_ is the best security
for the virtues of the female _heart_; and genius, talents and grace,
where regulated by prudence and governed by good sense, are never
incompatible with domestic qualities or meek and modest virtues.”
On the third fly-leaf, this double pronouncement is presented to “Miss
Maria Gansevoort” and “from A. M.” Allan had doubtless learned from
Mrs. Chapone that “our feelings are not given us for ornament, but to
spur us on to right action.” And Miss Maria may have taken to heart
Mrs. Chapone’s dictum that “compassion is not impressed upon the human
heart, only to adorn the fair face with tears and to give an agreeable
languor to the eyes.” There survives no trace of a record of Allan’s
indulging emotions for decorative purposes. How far his sentiments were
moved in “right action” to melt Miss Maria to becoming compassion can
never be known. During the months immediately before the marriage,
however, the even tenor of Allan’s journal is jolted by the unusual
acknowledgment of the existence of his sisters, and the bald mention of
a specified number of miles covered in a “pleasure wagon.” Miss Maria,
when not his undisputed property by rites of holy matrimony, he never
mentions in his journal.
Maria kept no journal; if she presented Allan with inscribed volumes,
Allan has eradicated all such breaches of maiden modesty. The only
intimate records of Maria that survive are three of her letters,
comments upon her in Allan’s letters, Melville’s elaborate idealisation
of her in the person of the mother of Pierre, and a vague memory handed
down orally by her descendants.
MARIA GANSEVOORT MELVILLE
[Illustration:
In 1820
]
[Illustration:
In 1865
]
Maria was born in 1791 and died in 1871. Of her girlhood, little
or nothing is very specifically known. After Melville’s marriage,
she spent the greater part of the remaining years of her life as a
dependant in his household, and the oral traditions that survive
of her do not halo her memory. She is remembered in such terms as
“cold,” “worldly,” “formal,” “haughty” and “proper”; as putting
the highest premium upon appearances; as frigidly contemptuous of
Melville’s domestic economy, and of the home-made clothes of his four
children. Though she condescended eight times to motherhood, such
was her animal vigour and her ferocity of pride that she preserved
to her death a remarkable regality of appearance. She is said to
have made a completely competent wife to Allan, superior both to any
undue intellectual distractions, and to any of the demoralisations
of domesticity. She managed his household, she bore and reared his
children, and she did both with a vigorous and unruffled efficiency,
without sign of worry or regret. There persists the story--significant
even if apocryphal--that each afternoon, enthroned upon a high
four-poster, she would nap in order to freshen herself for Allan’s
evening arrival, her children seated silently on a row of low stools
ranged on the floor at the side of her bed. In his death, as in his
life, she cherished the image of Allan--with that of her father,
General Gansevoort--as the mirror of manly perfection.
In _Pierre_, Melville is said to have drawn an essentially accurate
portrait of his mother in the character and person of Mrs. Glendinning.
Mrs. Glendinning is presented as a “haughty widow; a lady who
externally furnished a singular example of the preservative and
beautifying influences of unfluctuating rank, health, and wealth, when
joined to a fine mind of medium culture, uncankered by any inconsolable
grief, and never worn by sordid cares. In mature age, the rose still
miraculously clung to her cheek; litheness had not yet completely
uncoiled itself from her waist, nor smoothness unscrolled itself from
her brow, nor diamondness departed from her eyes.” Proudly conscious
of this preservation, never, even in the most intimate associations of
life, did she ever appear “in any dishabille that was not eminently
becoming.” For “she was vividly aware how immense was that influence,
which, even in the closest ties of the heart, the merest appearances
make upon the mind.” And to her pride of appearance she added “her
pride of birth, her pride of affluence, her pride of purity, and all
the Semiramian pride of woman:” a pride “which in a life of nearly
fifty years had never betrayed her into a single published impropriety,
or caused her one known pang of the heart.”... “Infinite Haughtiness
had first fashioned her; and then the haughty world had further moulded
her; nor had a haughty Ritual omitted to finish her.” Nor must Allan’s
moralisings, and Dr. Akenside, and Mrs. Barbauld, and Mrs. Chapone, be
denied their due credit in contributing to the finished product.
Between Maria and her son there existed a striking personal
resemblance. From his mother, too, Melville seems to have inherited a
constitution of very remarkable vigour, and all the white intensity
of the Gansevoort aptitude for anger. But here the resemblance
ceased. In the youthful Pierre, Mrs. Glendinning felt “a triumphant
maternal pride,” for in her son “she saw her own graces strangely
translated into the opposite sex.” But of his mother’s love for
him, Pierre entertained precocious and Meredithian suspicions: “She
loveth me, ay;--but why? Had I been cast in a cripple’s mould, how
then? Now do I remember that in her most caressing love, there ever
gleamed some scaly, glittering folds of pride.... Before my glass she
stands--pride’s priestess--and to her mirrored image, not to me, she
offers up her offering of kisses.”
Strangely must she have been baffled by this mirrored image of
herself,--fascinated, and at the same time contemptuously revolted.
What sympathy, what understanding could she know for this thing of
her blood that in obscurity, in poverty, a failure in the eyes of
the world, returned from barbarism to dream wild dreams that were
increasingly unsalable? As a boy, all his passionate cravings for
sympathy, for affection, were rebuffed by her haughty reserve, and
recoiled within him. Fatherless and so mothered, he felt with Pierre,
“that deep in him lurked some divine unidentifiableness, that owed
no earthly kith or kin. Yet was this feeling entirely lonesome and
orphan-like. He felt himself driven out an infant Ishmael into the
desert, with no maternal Hagar to accompany and comfort him.” In
_Redburn_, with the mother image like a fury in his heart, he describes
himself as “a sort of Ishmael.” “Call me Ishmael,” is the striking
opening sentence of _Moby-Dick_; and its no less striking close: “On
the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last.
It was the devious cruising _Rachel_, that in retracing search after
her missing children, only found another orphan.” Of his mother he is
reported to have said in later life: “She hated me.”
It seems not altogether fantastic to contend that the Gorgon face that
Melville bore in his heart; the goading impalpable image that made
his whole life a pilgrimage of despair: that was the cold beautiful
face of his mother, Maria Gansevoort. One shudders to think how such a
charge would have violated Maria’s proprieties. But in the treacherous
ambiguities of _Pierre_, Melville himself hovers on the verge of this
insight. Pierre is haunted by a mysterious face, which he thus invokes:
“The face!--the face!--The face steals down upon me. Mysterious girl!
who art thou? Take thy thin fingers from me; I am affianced, and not to
thee. Surely, thou lovest not me?--that were most miserable for thee,
and me. What, _who_ art thou? Oh! wretched vagueness--too familiar to
me, yet inexplicable,--unknown, utterly unknown!” To the mind of Pierre
it was a face “backward hinting of some irrevocable sin; forward,
pointing to some inevitable ill; hovering between Tartarian misery and
Paradisaic beauty.” In _Pierre_, this face, “compounded so of hell and
heaven,” is the instrument by which the memory of Pierre’s father is
desecrated, Pierre’s mother is driven to insanity and death, and Pierre
himself is utterly ruined. _Pierre_ is a book to send a Freudian into
ravishment.
Allan Melville, aged thirty-two, and Maria Gansevoort, nine years
younger, were married on the fourth of October, 1814. In his journal,
Allan has left this record of their wedding-trip.
_October 4, 1814_--Left Albany at 11 A.M. in a hack with
Mrs. M. and Helen (his youngest sister, in her
sixteenth year). Dined at Stottard’s, Lapan, &
slept at Beths Lebanon.
_October 5, 1814_--Left Lebanon at 9, dined at Pittsfield
& slept at Worthington.
_October 6, 1814_--Left Worthington at 1/2 past 9, dined at
Southampton & slept at Belchertown.
_October 7, 1814_--Left Belchertown at 9, dined at
Brookfield & slept at Worcester.
_October 8, 1814_--Left Worcester at 1/2 past 9, dined at
Farmingham & arrived at Boston at 5 P.M.
For five years following this initial daily shifting of bed and board,
Allan and his wife lived in Albany. The monotony of this residence was
broken by the birth of two children,--Gansevoort, and Helen Marie,--and
Allan’s trip to Europe in the spring of 1818: the enforced business
trip, already mentioned, that took him to the home of his titled
Scotch cousins. Upon his return he resolved to leave Albany, and
settle in what he appreciatively called “the greatest universal mart
in the world.” On May 12, 1819, he records in his journal: “Commenced
Housekeeping at No. Park Street, New York. Mrs. M. & the children who
had been to a visit to her Mother at Albany since 6th April, having
joined me on this day, to my great joy.”
Three months after Allan’s moving to “the greatest universal mart in
the world,” Maria presented him with a third child, and second son,
who was christened after Maria’s brother, Herman. At this time, Allan
seems to have accepted the excitements of childbirth so casually
that Melville’s birth passed unrecorded in his father’s journal. The
first surviving record of Melville’s existence is unromantic enough.
In a letter dated October 7, 1820, Allan wrote: “Helen Marie suffers
most from what we term the whooping cough but which I am sometimes
suspicious is only influenza. But Gansevoort and Herman are as yet
slightly affected.”
At this time, Allan seems to have prospered in business, for on
September 20, 1820, he reported to his mother: “We have hired a cook &
nurse and only want a waiter to complete our domestic establishment.”
Herman’s infancy seems to have been untroubled by any event more
startling than a growing aggregation of brothers and sisters,
occasional trips to Boston, and periodic pilgrimages to Albany with
his mother to be exhibited to his grandmother Gansevoort. There are
frequent references to his ailing health. In April, 1824, Allan
complains that “Gansevoort has lost much of his ruddy appearance, while
Herman who has never entirely regained his health again looks pale,
thin and dejected.”
At this time Allan signed “a 4 yrs. lease at $300 per annum free of
taxes, for a new brick 2 story house replete with conveniences, to be
handsomely furnished in the most modern style under my own direction &
a vacant lot of equal size attached to it which will be invaluable as
a play ground for the children. It is situated in Bleecker, the first
south, and parallel to Bond St.... An open, dry & elevated location
equidistant from Broadway & the Bowery, in plain sight of both & almost
uniting the advantages of town & country, but its distance from my
store, nearly two miles, will compel me to dine from my family most
of the time, a serious objection to us all, but we shall be amply
compensated by a residence which will obviate the necessity of their
leaving town every summer, which deprives me altogether of their
society. I shall also remove professionally on the 1st of May to No.
102 Pearl St. upstairs in the very focus of Business & surrounded
by the auction rooms which have become the Rialto of the modern
merchants but where I dare say even Shylock would be shy of making his
appearance.”
By December 29, 1824, we hear of Herman that “he attends school
regularly but does not appear so fond of his Book as to injure his
health. He has turned into a great tease & daily puts Gansevoort’s
patience to flight who cannot bear to be plagued by such a little
fellow.”
On the same date, Maria writes to her brother about pickling oysters,
500 of which she sent to Albany as a gift to his family. The picture
of her life that she then gives is evidence that she had cherished the
counsels that “her friend A. M.” had appended to Mrs. Chapone. She
tells of a call she received before eleven o’clock. “Although the hour
was early, all things were neat & in order & my ladyship was dressing
herself preparatory to sitting down to her sewing.” She boasts of this
fact, she says, in shamed recollection of the time her brother and Mr.
Smyth were ushered into a parlour out of order. “It is the first time
a thing of this kind has ever happened to me & for my credit as a good
housekeeper, I hope it will be the last.” In conclusion she reports:
“This afternoon Mr. M. & myself, induced by the enlivening rays of
the setting sun, strolled down the Bowery & after an agreeable walk
returned home with renovated spirits.”
In December, 1825, Allan is moved to “lament little Herman’s melancholy
situation, but we trust in humble confidence that the GOD of the widow
and the fatherless will yet restore him.” By the following May, Allan’s
humble confidence seems to have been rewarded not only by Herman’s
recovery, but by the birth of another child. In the midst of a business
letter--the usual repository of Allan’s raptures--he with unwonted
vivacity so celebrates his paternal felicity: “The Lovely Six!! are
all well, and, while the youngest though both last & least is a sweet
child of promise, & bids fair to become the fairest of the fair--so
much for affection, now for business.”
On August 10, 1826, Melville was sent out upon his first trip from home
unaccompanied by his parents. His destination was his mother’s people
in Albany, and his custodian during the trip a Mr. Walker. Allan shifts
his responsibility for his son on the shoulders of his brother-in-law,
Peter Gansevoort, in these terms:
“I now consign to your especial care & patronage my beloved son Herman,
an honest hearted double-rooted Knickerbocker of the true Albany
stamp, who, I trust, will do equal honour in due time to ancestry,
parentage & kindred. He is very backward in speech & somewhat slow in
comprehension, but you will find him as far as he understands men and
things both solid & profound & of a docile & amiable disposition. If
agreeable, he will pass the vacation with his grandmother & yourself &
I hope he may prove a pleasant auxiliary to the Family circle--I depend
much on your kind attention to our dear Boy who will be truly grateful
to the least favour--let him avoid green fruit & unseasonable exposure
to the Sun & heat, and having taken such good care of Gansevoort
last Summer I commit his Brother to the same hands with unreserved
confidence. & with love to our good mother and yourself in which Maria,
Mary & the children most cordially join I remain very truly Your Friend
& Brother, Allan Melville.”
At the foot of this document, Allan appended in pencil: “please turn
over.” On the reverse of the letter is scribbled a breathless last
request: “Have the goodness to procure a pair of shoes for Herman, time
being insufficient to have a pair made here.”
When Allan here pronounces Melville “very backward in speech & somewhat
slow in comprehension,” he puts his son in a large class of genius
conspicuous for a deferred revelation of promising intelligence. Scott,
occupied in building up romances, was dismissed as a dunce; Hume,
the youthful thinker, was described by his mother as “uncommon weak
minded.” Goldsmith was a stupid child; Fanny Burney did not know her
letters at the age of eight. Byron showed no aptitude for school work.
And Chatterton, up to the age of six and a half, was, on the authority
of his mother, “little better than an absolute fool.” Allan scorned to
take solace from such facts, however. He consoled himself with the fact
that though his son was dull, he was at least “docile & amiable.”
Melville spent the summer of 1826 with the Gansevoorts. And he looked
back upon it as perhaps the most fortunate privilege of his youth, that
this first visit to Albany set the precedent for a whole series of
similar summers. He is idealising from his own experience when he says
of Pierre: “It had been his choice fate to have been born and nurtured
in the country, surrounded by scenery whose uncommon loveliness was the
perfect mould of a delicate and poetic mind; while the popular names
of its finest features appealed to the proudest patriotic and family
associations of the historic line of Glendinning.” Nor does he hesitate
to reiterate that Pierre’s was a “choice fate”: “For to a noble
American youth this indeed--more than in any other land--this indeed
is a most rare and choice lot.” Each summer, for as long as his school
vacations would permit, Melville shared the choice lot of Pierre.
But Allan, unconverted to Melville’s Wordsworthian creed, regularly
recalled his son to the city with the opening of school.
This is the recall for the year 1826, dated “12 Sept. Tuesday, 4 P.M.”:
“We expect Gansevoort on Sunday, at fartherest, when we wish Herman
also to be here, that they may recommence their studies together on
Monday next, with equal chances of preferment, & without any feelings
of jealousy or ideas of favoritism--besides they may thus acquire
a practical lesson whose influence may endure forever, for if they
understand early, that inclination must always yield to Duty, it will
become a matter of course when their vacations expire to bid a fond
adieu to friends & amusements, & return home cheerfully to their books,
& they will consequently imbibe habits of Order & punctuality, which
bear sweet blossoms in the dawn of life, golden fruits in ‘the noon of
manhood’ & a rich harvest for the garners of old age--business is about
as dull and unprofitable as the most bitter foe to general prosperity,
if such a being exists in human shape, could desire it, & it requires
a keener vision than mine, to discern among the signs of the times, any
real symptoms of future improvement.”
The summer of 1827 Melville spent with his grandparents in Boston; the
two following summers in Albany.
On February 28, 1828, Allan reported to his brother-in-law Peter
Gansevoort: “We have taken a house on Broadway (No. 675--if I mistake
not) for 5 years @ $575 without taxes--being the 2d beyond the marble
buildings & nearly opposite Bond Street. The house is a modern 2
stories built 4 years since for the owner & has only been occupied by
his family. The lot is 200 feet deep through to Mercer St., Maria is
charmed with the house & situation.”
But Allan never lived to see this lease expire. The dull business of
which he earlier complained settled upon him, and in 1830 the prospects
in New York were so hopeless that he moved back to Albany, to die two
years later, leaving his wife and eight children practically penniless.
But before Allan moved away from New York, Herman had time to write the
earliest manuscript of his that survives. It reads:
11th of October, 1828.
DEAR GRANDMOTHER
This is the third letter that I ever wrote so you must not think
it very good. I now study geography, gramar, writing, Speaking,
Spelling, and read in the Scientific class book. I enclose in this
letter a drawing for my dear grandmother. Give my love to grandmamma,
Uncle Peter and Aunt Mary. And my Sisters and also to allan,
Your affectionate grandson
HERMAN MELVILLE.
In _Redburn_, Melville speaks “of those delightful days before my
father was a bankrupt, and died, and we moved from the city”; or again,
speaking of Allan: “he had been shaken by many storms of adversity,
and at last died a bankrupt.” Allan’s journal, however, which he
kept until within a few months of his death, is proudly superior to
anything suggestive of the outrageousness of fortune: its hard glazed
surface betrays to the end no crack in the veneer. Beyond a persistent
tradition, and Melville’s iterated statement, no further evidence of
Allan’s financial reverses has transpired.
It is certain, however, that after Allan’s death his family found
themselves in straitened circumstances. After 1830, the most specific
evidence known to exist about the whereabouts and condition of
Melville’s family is preserved in old Albany Directories, as follows:
1830: no Melvilles mentioned.
1831: Melville, Allan, 446 s. Market.
house 338 n. Market.
1832: Melville, Gansevoort, fur store, 364 s. Market.
Melville, widow Maria, cor. of n. Market & Steuben.
1833: Melville, Gansevoort, fur store, 364 s. Market.
Melville, widow Maria, 282 n. Market.
1834: Melville, Gansevoort, fur and cap store, 364 s. Market,
res. 3 Clinton Square n. Pearl.
Melville, Herman, clerk in N. Y. State Bank, res. 3
Clinton Square n. Pearl.
Melville, widow Maria, 3 Clinton Square n. Pearl.
1835: Melville, Gansevoort, fur and cap store, 364 s. Market,
res. 3 Clinton Square n. Pearl.
Melville, Herman, clerk at 364 s. Market, res. 3 Clinton
Square n. Pearl.
Melville, widow Maria, 3 Clinton Square n. Pearl.
After 1835 the family scattered, Melville to begin his wanderings on
land and sea,--Gansevoort to drift about Albany for two years, Maria
and the rest of the children to move to Lansingburg--now a part of
Albany.
The publication of the _Celebration of the Semi-Centennial Anniversary
of the Albany Academy_ (Albany, 1862) in its list of alumni, and the
date of their entrance, offers the following record:
1831: Melville, Allan.
1830: Melville, Gansevoort.
1830: Melville, Herman.
This Semi-Centennial Anniversary Celebration took place in Tweedle
Hall, which, so says the publication, “was crowded with an appropriate
audience.” “The meeting was presided over by the Honourable PETER
GANSEVOORT, the President of the Board of Trustees,” the publication
goes on to say, “and by his side were his associates and the guests of
the festival, among whom was warmly welcomed HERMAN MELVILLE, whose
reputation as an author has honoured the Academy, world-wide.” As
Melville sat there, “the Rev. Doc. FERRIS ... made prayer to Heaven the
source of that knowledge which shall not vanish away;” Orlando Mead,
LL.D., read a Historical Discourse; and “at successive periods the
exercises were diversified by the music of _Home, Sweet Home_ or _Rest,
Spirit, Rest_, and of other appropriate harmonies.” What recollections
of his school-days at the Albany Academy were then passing through
Melville’s head, we haven’t sufficient knowledge of his schooling to
guess. As part of the celebration, Alexander W. Bradford, who was a
student at the Academy between 1825 and 1832, spoke of the “domestic
discords and fights between the Latins and the English, and the more
fierce and bitter foreign conflicts waged between the Hills and the
Creeks, the latter being a pugnacious tribe of barbarians who inhabited
the shores of Fox Creek;” of “the weekly exhibitions in the Gymnasium
grand with the beauty of Albany;” of “the lectures and experiments in
chemistry, which being in the evening, were favoured by the presence of
young ladies as well as gentlemen.” In what capacity, if any, Melville
figured in these activities there is no way of knowing.
Dr. Henry Hun, now President of the Albany Academy, in answer to a
request for information about Melville, answers: “Unfortunately, the
records of the Albany Academy were burned in 1888. It is impossible to
say how long he remained in the school or what results he achieved.
He probably took the Classical Course, as most of the brighter boys
took it. It was really a Collegiate Course, and the Head-master
(or Principal as he was then called) Dr. T. Romeyn Beck was an
extraordinary man, but one who did not spare the rod, but gave daily
exhibitions in its use.” In a postscript Dr. Hun adds: “It was a
God-fearing school.”
Joseph Henry, at one time teacher at the Albany Academy, later head
of the Smithsonian Institute, in an address before the Association
for the Advancement of Science, in session in Albany in 1851, said of
Melville’s Alma Mater: “The Albany Academy was and still is one of the
first, if not the very first, institution of its kind in the United
States. It early opposed the pernicious maxim that a child should be
taught nothing but what it could perfectly understand, and that the
sole object of instruction is to teach a child to think.”
Since Melville was in 1834 employed as clerk in the New York State
Bank (a post he doubtless owed to his uncle, Peter Gansevoort, who
was one of the Trustees) he must have ceased to enjoy the advantages
of the Albany Academy before that date. During the time of Melville’s
attendance, the same texts were used by all students alike during their
first three years at the Albany Academy. This, then, would seem to be
a list of the texts (offered by the courtesy of Dr. Hun) studied by
Melville:
1st Year:
Latin Grammar
Historia Sacra
Turner’s Exercises (begun)
Latin Reader
Irving’s Universal History
2d Year:
Latin Reader continued
Turner’s Exercises
Cornelius Nepos
Irving’s Grecian and Roman Histories
Roman Antiquities
3d Year:
Cæsar, Ovid, Latin Prosody
Turner’s Exercises, Translations
Irving’s Grecian Antiquities
Mythology and Biography
Greek Grammar
J. E. A. Smith, in the _Biographical Sketch of Herman Melville_ that in
1891 he wrote for _The Evening Journal_ of Pittsfield, Massachusetts,
says of Melville’s school-days:
“In 1835, Professor Charles E. West ... was president of the Albany
Classical Institute for boys, and Herman Melville became one of his
pupils. Professor West now remembers him as a favourite pupil, not
distinguished for mathematics, but very much so in the writing of
‘themes’ or ‘compositions’ and fond of doing it, while the great
majority of pupils dreaded it as a task, and would shirk it if they
could.”
In 1835, Melville was clerk in his brother’s shop. If J. E. A. Smith’s
record is accurate, Melville was at the time alternating business with
education.
The greater part of 1836 was spent by Melville, according to his own
account, already quoted, in the household of his uncle Major Thomas
Melville, at Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
J. E. A. Smith in his _Biographical Sketch_ so supplements Melville’s
account: “Besides his labours with his uncle in the hay field, he was
for one term teacher of the common school in the ‘Sykes district’ under
Washington mountain, of which he had some racy memories--one of them
of a rebellion in which some of the bigger boys undertook to ‘lick’
him--with what results, those who remember his physique and character
can well imagine.”
The only other records we have of Melville’s boyhood and early youth
are the scattered recollections preserved in his published works.
Such, throughout his life, were the veering whims of his blood,
that he recalled these earlier years with no unity of retrospect.
The confessions of St. Augustine are a classical warning of the
untrustworthiness of even the most conscientious memory. To call
memory the mother of the Muses, is too frequently but a partial and
euphemistic naming of her offspring. So when Melville writes of early
years, now in rhapsody and then in bitterness, the result, though
always valuable autobiography, is not invariably, of course, strict
history.
Some of his idealisations of his life with the Gansevoorts have
already been given. Through the refracting films of memory he
at times looked back upon “those far descended Dutch meadows ...
steeped in a Hindooish haze” and proud of his name and his “double
revolutionary descent,” he viewed himself with Miltonic self-esteem as
a “fine, proud, loving, docile, vigorous boy.” And there is no reason
to suspect him of perverting the truth. Behind these are “certain
shadowy reminiscences of wharves, and warehouses, and shipping, which
a residence in a seaport during early childhood had supplied me.” And
with them he blended remembrances “of winter evenings in New York,
by the well-remembered sea-coal fire, when my father used to tell my
brother and me of the monstrous waves at sea, mountain high; of the
masts bending like twigs; and all about Havre, and Liverpool, and about
going up into the ball of St. Paul’s in London. Indeed, during my early
life, most of my thoughts of the sea were connected with the land;
but with fine old lands, full of mossy cathedrals and churches, and
long, narrow crooked streets without sidewalks, and lined with strange
houses. And especially I tried hard to think how such places must look
on rainy days and Saturday afternoons; and whether indeed they did have
rainy days and Saturdays there, just as we did here, and whether the
boys went to school there, and studied geography and wore their shirt
collars turned over, and tied with a black ribbon; and whether their
papas allowed them to wear boots instead of shoes, which I so much
disliked, for boots looked so manly.”
Melville confesses here to a precocious exercise of the poetic
imagination: a type of imagination for which the consistent
disappointments of his life were to be the invariable penalty. In
the prosaic man, in Benjamin Franklin, for example, the imagination
does not, as it did with Melville, enrich the immediate facts of
experience with amplifications so vivid that the reality is in danger
of being submerged. In the prosaic man, the imagination works in a
safely utilitarian fashion, combining images for practical purposes
under the supervision of a matter-of-fact judgment. And though it may
indeed bring the lightning from the clouds, it makes the transfer not
to glorify the firmament, but to discipline the lightning and to make
church steeples safe from the wrath of God. Melville’s was the type of
imagination whose extreme operation is exemplified in William Blake.
“I assert for myself,” said Blake, “that I do not behold the outward
creation, and that it is to me hindrance and not action. ‘What,’ it
will be questioned, ‘when the sun rises, do you not see a round disk
of fire something like a guinea?’ Oh! no! no! I see an innumerable
company of the heavenly host, crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord
God Almighty!’ I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would
question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with
it.” Though Allan Melville chose as courtship gift a copy of _Pleasures
of Imagination_, the pleasures he derived from the exercise of this
faculty were of a sort that both Blake and his son would have thought
tame in the extreme. Allan saw the world with his eyes alone, he
proudly believed, the world as it really is. It was both the blessing
and the curse of his son that his was the gift of “second sight.”
“We had several pieces of furniture in the house,” says Melville,
speaking of his childhood days, “which had been brought from Europe”:
furniture that had been imported by Allan, some of which is still in
the possession of Melville’s descendants. “These I examined again and
again, wondering where the wood grew: whether the workmen who made them
still survived, and what they could be doing with themselves now.”
Could Allan have known what was going on in the head of his son, he
would have been as alarmed as was the father of Anatole France when
the young Thibault undertook to emulate St. Nicholas of Patras and
distribute his riches to the poor.
Even as a child, he was lured by the romance of distance, and he
confesses how he used to think “how fine it would be, to be able to
talk about remote barbarous countries; with what reverence and wonder
people would regard me, if I had just returned from the coast of Africa
or New Zealand: how dark and romantic my sunburnt cheeks would look;
how I would bring home with me foreign clothes of rich fabric and
princely make, and wear them up and down the streets, and how grocers’
boys would turn their heads to look at me, as I went by. For I very
well remembered staring at a man myself, who was pointed out to me
by my aunt one Sunday in church, as the person who had been in stony
Arabia and passed through strange adventures there, all of which with
my own eyes I had read in the book which he wrote, an arid-looking book
in a pale yellow cover.
“‘See what big eyes he has,’ whispered my aunt, ‘they got so big,
because when he was almost dead in the desert with famishing, he all
at once caught sight of a date tree, with the ripe fruit hanging on
it.’ Upon this, I stared at him till I thought his eyes were really of
an uncommon size, and stuck out from his head like those of a lobster.
When church was out, I wanted my aunt to take me along and follow the
traveller home. But she said the constables would take us up, if we
did; and so I never saw the wonderful Arabian traveller again. But he
long haunted me; and several times I dreamt of him, and thought his
great eyes were grown still larger and rounder; and once I had a vision
of the date tree.”
It is one of the few certainties of life that a child who has once
stood fixed before a piece of household furniture worrying his head
about whether the workman who made it still be alive; who after seeing
an Arabian traveller in church goes home and has a vision of a date
tree: such a child is not going to die an efficiency expert. At the age
of fifteen Melville found himself faced with the premature necessity of
coming to some sort of terms with life on his own account. Helped by
his uncle, he tried working in a bank. The experiment seems not to have
been a success. His next experiment was clerk in his brother’s store.
But banking and clerking seem to have been equally repugnant. Melville
had a taste for landscape, so his next experiment was as farmer and
country school-keeper. But farming, interspersed with pedagogy and
pugilism, fired Melville to a mood of desperation. “Talk not of the
bitterness of middle age and after-life,” he later wrote; “a boy can
feel all that, and much more, when upon his young soul the mildew has
fallen.... Before the death of my father I never thought of working for
my living, and never knew there were hard hearts in the world.... I had
learned to think much, and bitterly, before my time.” So he decided
to slough off the tame respectabilities of his well-to-do uncles, and
cousins, and aunts. Goaded by hardship, and pathetically lured by the
glamorous mirage of distance, with all the impetuosity of his eighteen
summers he planned a hegira. “With a philosophical flourish Cato
throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. This is my
substitute for pistol and ball.”