“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.”