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.”

CHAPTER IV
A SUBSTITUTE FOR PISTOL AND BALL

“When I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you, the transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it.”