Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

by Raymond M. Weaver

As Melville grew away from boyhood, he came to distinguish between the accidentals and the essentials that distinguish man from man. At his mother’s breast he had absorbed with her milk a vivid and exaggerated belief that the accidents concomitant upon birth that range men into artificial classes, were ingrain in the very woof of the universe. When he later discovered that his parents tinted life with a very perishable dye, he also found, set below their cheap calico patterns, an unchangeable texture of sharper and deeper and more variegated colours. And he discovered, too, that his uncritical boyhood pride in his blood was, withal, not entirely a mere savage delight in calico prints.

He was, as he boasts in the sub-title of Redburn, “the son-of-a-gentleman,” reared in an environment rich with the mellowing influences of splendid family traditions. And these associations left an indelible stamp upon him. In Mardi, in speaking of the impossibility of belying one’s true nature while at sea and in the fellowship of sailors, he offers himself as an example to point. “Aboard of all ships in which I have sailed,” he says, “I have invariably been known by a sort of drawing-room title. Not,—let me hurry to say,—that I put hand in tar bucket with a squeamish air, or ascended the rigging with a Chesterfieldian mince. No, no, I was never better than my vocation. I showed as brown a chest, and as hard a hand, as the tarriest tar of them all. And never did shipmate of mine upbraid me with a genteel disinclination to duty, though it carried me to truck of main-mast, or jib-boom-end, in the most wolfish blast that ever howled. Whence, then, this annoying appellation? for annoying it most assuredly was. It was because of something in me that could not be hidden; stealing out in an occasional polysyllable; an otherwise incomprehensible deliberation in dining; remote, unguarded allusions to belle-lettres affairs; and other trifles superfluous to mention.”

Though his grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort, had been dead seven years when Melville was born, so vital were the relics of him that surrounded Melville’s boyhood, so reverently was his memory tended by his first child and only daughter, that the image of Peter Gansevoort was one of the most potent influences during Melville’s most impressionable years. The heroic presence that dominated Melville’s imagination, “measured six feet four inches in height; during a fire in the old manorial mansion, with one dash of the foot, he had smitten down an oaken door, to admit the buckets of his negro slaves; Pierre had often tried on his military vest, which still remained an heirloom at Saddle-Meadows, and found the pockets below his knees, and plenty additional room for a fair-sized quarter-cask within its buttoned girth; in a night scuffle in the wilderness before the Revolutionary War, he had annihilated two Indian savages by making reciprocal bludgeons of their heads. And all this was done by the mildest hearted, the most blue-eyed gentleman in the world, who, according to the patriarchal fashion of those days, was a gentle, white-haired worshipper of all the household gods; the gentlest husband and the gentlest father; the kindest master to his slaves; of the most wonderful unruffledness of temper; a serene smoker of his after dinner pipe; a forgiver of many injuries; a sweet-hearted, charitable Christian; in fine, a pure, cheerful, childlike, blue-eyed, divine old man; in whose meek, majestic soul the lion and the lamb embraced—fit image of his God.” His portrait was to Melville “a glorious gospel framed and hung upon the wall, and declaring to all people, as from the Mount, that man is a noble, god-like being, full of choicest juices; made up of strength and beauty.” Most of the images of God that Melville met in actual secular embodiment, suffered tragically by comparison with this image of mortal perfection which Melville nursed in his heart. Most men that Melville met, in falling short of the mythical excellence of Peter Gansevoort, whom he never knew in the flesh, seemed to Melville, to be libels upon their Divine Original. According to Melville’s account, he could never look upon his grandfather’s military portrait without an infinite and mournful longing to meet his living aspect in actual life. Yet such was the temper of Melville’s mind, his life such a tragic career of dreaming of elusive perfection, dreams invariably to be dashed and bruised and shattered by an incompatible reality, that it is safe to surmise—with no impiety to the memory of Peter Gansevoort—that had Melville known his maternal grandfather, the old General’s six feet four of blood and bone would have shrunk, with his extravagance of all human excellence, to more truly historical dimensions.

MELVILLE’S GRANDFATHERS

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: