Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

by Raymond M. Weaver

MELVILLE’S GRANDFATHERS

GENERAL PETER GANSEVOORT

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 ½ past 3 P.M.—10 miles—& met with a very hospitable & friendly reception from his lordship & family.

May 27, 1818—Left Melville house at ½ 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.

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.

From a Painting made in Paris, 1810.

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.