In the html version of this eBook, images with blue borders are linked to larger versions of the illustrations.

HERMAN MELVILLE
Mariner and Mystic

RAYMOND M. WEAVER

Engraved on wood, by L. F. Grant.
From a photograph.

HERMAN MELVILLE
MARINER AND MYSTIC

BY
RAYMOND M. WEAVER

COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
PROFESSOR FRANKLIN T. BAKER
“—il maestro cortese”

To Professor Carl Van Doren, to Miss Cora Paget, and to Mrs. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, I am, in the writing of this book, very especially indebted. By Professor Van Doren’s enthusiasm and scholarship I was instigated to a study of Melville. It has been my privilege to enjoy Miss Paget’s very valuable criticism and assistance throughout the preparation of this volume. Mrs. Metcalf gave me access to all the surviving records of her grandfather: Melville manuscripts, letters, journals, annotated books, photographs, and a variety of other material. But she did far more. My indebtedness to Mrs. Metcalf’s vivid interest, her shrewd insight, her keen sympathy can be stated only in superlatives. To Mrs. and Mr. Metcalf I owe one of the richest and most pleasant associations of my life.

Raymond M. Weaver.
October 1, 1921.

Most of the letters of Melville to Hawthorne included in this volume are quoted from Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, by Julian Hawthorne. These letters, and other citations from Mr. Hawthorne’s memoir, are included through the courtesy of Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Company.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

HERMAN MELVILLE
Mariner and Mystic

HERMAN MELVILLE

CHAPTER I
DEVIL’S ADVOCATE

“If ever, my dear Hawthorne,” wrote Melville in the summer of 1851, “we shall sit down in Paradise in some little shady corner by ourselves; and if we shall by any means be able to smuggle a basket of champagne there (I won’t believe in a Temperance Heaven); and if we shall then cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together till both ring musically in concert: then, O my dear fellow mortal, how shall we pleasantly discourse of all the things manifold which now so much distress us.” This serene and laughing desolation—a mood which in Melville alternated with a deepening and less tranquil despair—is a spectacle to inspire with sardonic optimism those who gloat over the vanity of human wishes. For though at that time Melville was only thirty-two years old, he had crowded into that brief space of life a scope of experience to rival Ulysses’, and a literary achievement of a magnitude and variety to merit all but the highest fame. Still did he luxuriate in tribulation. Well-born, and nurtured in good manners and a cosmopolitan tradition, he was, like George Borrow, and Sir Richard Burton, a gentleman adventurer in the barbarous outposts of human experience. Nor was his a kid-gloved and expensively staged dip into studio savagery. “For my part, I abominate all honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever,” he declared. And as proof of this abomination he went forth penniless as a common sailor to view the watery world. He spent his youth and early manhood in the forecastles of a merchantman, several whalers, and a man-of-war. He diversified whale-hunting by a sojourn of four months among practising cannibals, and a mutiny off Tahiti. He returned home to New England to marry the daughter of Chief Justice Shaw of Massachusetts, and to win wide distinction as a novelist on both sides of the Atlantic. Though these crowded years had brought with them bitter hardship and keen suffering, he had sown in tears that he might reap in triumph. But when he wrote to Hawthorne he felt that triumph had not been achieved. Yet he needed but one conclusive gesture to provoke the world to cry this as a lie in his throat: one last sure sign to convince all posterity that he was, indeed, one whom the gods loved. But the gods fatally withheld their sign for forty years. Melville did not die until 1891.

None of Melville’s critics seem ever to have been able to forgive him his length of days. “Some men die too soon,” said Nietzsche, “others too late; there is an art in dying at the right time.” Melville’s longevity has done deep harm to his reputation as an artist in dying, and has obscured the phenomenal brilliancy of his early literary accomplishment. The last forty years of his history are a record of a stoical—and sometimes frenzied—distaste for life, a perverse and sedulous contempt for recognition, an interest in solitude, in etchings and in metaphysics. In his writings after 1851 he employed a world of pains to scorn the world: a compliment returned in kind. During the closing years of his life he violated the self-esteem of the world still more by rating it as too inconsequential for condemnation. He earned his living between 1866 and 1886 as inspector of Customs in New York city. His deepest interest came to be in metaphysics: which is but misery dissolved in thought. It may be, to the all-seeing eye of truth, that Melville’s closing years were the most glorious of his life. But to the mere critic of literature, his strange career is like a star that drops a line of streaming fire down the vault of the sky—and then the dark and blasted shape that sinks into the earth.

There are few more interesting problems in biography than this offered by Melville’s paradoxical career: its brilliant early achievement, its long and dark eclipse. Yet in its popular statement, this problem is perverted from the facts by an insufficient knowledge of Melville’s life and works. The current opinion was thus expressed by an uncircumspect critic at the time of Melville’s centenary in 1919: “Owing to some odd psychological experience, that has never been definitely explained, his style of writing, his view of life underwent a complete change. From being a writer of stirring, vivid fiction, he became a dreamer, wrapping himself up in a vague kind of mysticism, that rendered his last few books such as Pierre: or The Ambiguities and The Confidence Man: His Masquerade quite incomprehensible, and certainly most uninteresting for the average reader.”

Unhampered by diffidence—because innocent of the essential facts—critics of Melville have been fluent in hypothesis to account for this “complete change.” A German critic patriotically lays the blame on Kant. English-speaking critics, with insular pride, have found a sufficiency of disruptive agencies nearer at home. Some impute Melville’s decline to Sir Thomas Browne; others to Melville’s intimacy with Hawthorne; others to the dispraise heaped upon Pierre. Though there is a semblance of truth in each, such attempts at explanation are, of course, too shallow and neat to merit reprobation. But there is another group of critics, too considerable in size and substance to be so cavalierly dismissed. This company accounts for Melville’s swift obscuration in a summary and comprehensive manner, by intimating that Melville went insane.

Such an intimation is doubtless highly efficacious to mediocrity in bolstering its own self-esteem. But otherwise it is without precise intellectual content. For insanity is not a definite entity like leprosy, measles, and the bubonic plague, but even in its most precise use, denotes a conglomerate group of phenomena which have but little in common. Science, it is true, speaking through Nordau and Lombroso, has attempted to show an intimate correlation between genius and degeneracy; and if the creative imagination of some of the disciples of Freud is to be trusted, the choir invisible is little more than a glorified bedlam. Plato would have accepted this verdict with approval. “From insanity,” said Plato, “Greece has derived its greatest benefits.” But the dull and decent Philistine, untouched by Platonic heresies, justifies his sterility in a boast of sanity. The America in which Melville was born and died was exuberantly and unquestionably “sane.” Its “sanity” drove Irving abroad and made a recluse of Hawthorne. Cooper alone throve upon it. And of Melville, more ponderous in gifts and more volcanic in energy than any other American writer, it made an Ishmael upon the face of the earth. With its outstanding symptoms of materialism and conformity it drove Emerson to pray for an epidemic of madness: “O Celestial Bacchus! drive them mad.—This multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity to vitalise this too much pasture, and in the long delay indemnifying themselves with the false wine of alcohol, of politics, of money.”

From this it would appear that a taste for insanity has been widespread among poets, prophets and saints: men venerated more by posterity than by their neighbours. It is well for Socrates that Xantippe did not write his memoirs: but there was sufficient libel in hemlock. In ancient and mediæval times, of course, madness, when not abhorred as a demoniac possession, was revered as a holy and mysterious visitation. To-day, witch-burning and canonisation have given place to more refined devices. The herd must always be intolerant of all who violate its sacred and painfully reared traditions. With an easy conscience it has always exterminated in the flesh those who sin in the flesh. In times less timid than the present it dealt with sins of the spirit with similar crude vindictiveness. We boast it as a sign of our progress that we have outgrown the days of jubilant public crucifixions and bumpers of hemlock: and there is ironic justice in the boast. Openly to harbour convictions repugnant to the herd is still the unforgivable sin against that most holy of ghosts—fashionable opinion; and carelessly to let live may be more cruel than officiously to cause to die.

Melville sinned blackly against the orthodoxy of his time. In his earlier works, he confined his sins to an attack upon Missionaries and the starchings of civilisation: sins that won him a succes de scandal. The London Missionary Society charged into the resulting festivities with its flag at half mast. Cased in the armour of the Lord, it with flagrant injustice attacked his morals, because it smarted under his ideas. But when Melville began flooding the very foundations of life with torrents of corrosive pessimism, the world at large found itself more vulnerable in its encasement. It could not, without absurdity obvious even to itself, accuse Melville of any of the cruder crimes against Jehovah or the Public. Judged by the bungling provisions of the thirty-nine articles and the penal code, he was not a bad man: more subtle was his iniquity. As by a divine visitation, the Harper fire of 1853 effectually reduced Pierre—his most frankly poisonous book—to a safely limited edition. And the public, taking the hint, ceased buying his books. In reply, Melville earned his bread as Inspector of Customs. The public, defeated in its righteous attempts at starvation, hit upon a more exquisite revenge. It gathered in elegiacal synods and whispered mysteriously: “He went insane.”

To view Melville’s life as a venturesome romantic idyll frozen in mid-career by the deus ex machina of some steadily descending Gorgon is possible only by a wanton misreading of patent facts. Throughout Melville’s long life his warring and untamed desires were in violent conflict with his physical and spiritual environment. His whole history is the record of an attempt to escape from an inexorable and intolerable world of reality: a quenchless and essentially tragic Odyssey away from home, out in search of “the unpeopled world behind the sun.” In the blood and bone of his youth he sailed away in brave quest of such a harbour, to face inevitable defeat. For this rebuff he sought both solace and revenge in literature. But by literature he also sought his livelihood. In the first burst of literary success he married. Held closer to reality by financial worry and the hostages of wife and children, the conflict within him was heightened. By a vicious circle, with brooding disappointment came ill health. “Ah, muskets the gods have made to carry infinite combustion,” he wrote in Pierre, “and yet made them of clay.” The royalties from his books proved inadequate for the support of his family, so for twenty years he earned a frugal living in the customs houses in New York. During his leisure hours he continued to write, but never for publication. Two volumes of poetry he privately printed. His last novel, surviving in manuscript, he finished a few months before his death. Though it is for the second half that his critics have felt bound to regret, it seems that in serenity and mental equipoise, the last state of this man was better than the first.

In his early manhood he wrote in Mardi: “Though essaying but a sportive sail, I was driven from my course by a blast resistless; and ill-provided, young, and bowed by the brunt of things before my prime, still fly before the gale.... If after all these fearful fainting trances, the verdict be, the golden haven was not gained;—yet in bold quest thereof, better to sink in boundless deeps than float on vulgar shoals; and give me, ye gods, an utter wreck, if wreck I do.” To the world at large, it has been generally believed that the Gods ironically fulfilled his worst hopes.

One William Cranston Lawton, in an Introduction to the Study of American Literature—a handy relic of the parrot judgment passed upon Melville during the closing years of his life—so enlightens young America: “He holds his own beside Cooper and Marryat, and boy readers, at least, will need no introduction to him. Nor will their enjoyment ever be alloyed by a Puritan moral or a mystic double meaning.” And Barrett Wendell, in A Literary History of America—a volume that modestly limits American literature of much value not only to New England, but even tucks it neatly into the confines of Harvard College—notes with jaunty patronage: “Herman Melville with his books about the South Seas, which Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have declared the best ever written, and his novels of maritime adventure, began a career of literary promise, which never came to fruition.”

These typical pronouncements, unperverted by the remotest touch of independent judgment, transcend Melville’s worst fears. “Think of it!” he once wrote to Hawthorne. “To go down to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as a ‘man who lived among the cannibals!’ When I think of posterity in reference to myself, I mean only the babes who will probably be born in the moment immediately ensuing upon my giving up the ghost. I shall go down to them, in all likelihood. Typee will be given to them, perhaps, with their gingerbread.” In that mythical anomaly known as the “popular mind,” Melville has, indeed, survived as an obscure adventurer in strange seas and among amiable barbarians. Typee and Omoo have lived on as minor classics. Though there have been staccato and sporadic attacks upon the ludicrous inadequacy of the popular judgment upon Melville, not until recently, and then chiefly in England has there been any popular and concerted attempt to take Melville’s truer and more heroic dimensions. An editorial in the London Nation for January 22, 1921, thus bespeaks the changing temper of the times:

“It is clear that the wind of the spirit, when it once begins to blow through the English literary mind, possesses a surprising power of penetration. A few weeks ago it was pleased to aim a simultaneous blast in the direction of a book known to some generations of men as Moby-Dick. A member of the staff of The Nation was thereupon moved in the ancient Hebrew fashion to buy and to read it. He then expressed himself on the subject, incoherently indeed, but with signs of emotion as intense and as pleasingly uncouth as Man Friday betrayed at the sight of his long-lost father. While struggling with his article, and wondering what the deuce it could mean, I received a letter from a famous literary man, marked on the outside ‘Urgent,’ and on the inner scroll of the manuscript itself ‘A Rhapsody.’ It was about Moby-Dick. Having observed a third article on the same subject, of an equally febrile kind, I began to read Moby-Dick myself. Having done so I hereby declare, being of sane intellect, that since letters began there never was such a book, and that the mind of man is not constructed so as to produce such another; that I put its author with Rabelais, Swift, Shakespeare, and other minor and disputable worthies; and that I advise any adventurer of the soul to go at once to the morose and prolonged retreat necessary for its deglutition.”

Having earlier been hailed in France as an “American Rabelais;” prized in England by the author of The City of Dreadful Night; greeted by Stevenson with slangy enthusiasm as a “howling cheese;” rated by Mr. Masefield as unique among writers of the sea; the professed inspirer of Captain Hook of Sir James Barrie’s Peter Pan, Melville is beginning to appear as being vastly more than merely a “man who lived among the cannibals” and who returned home to write lively sea stories for boys.

The wholesale neglect of Melville at the hands of his countrymen—though explained in some part as a consummation of Melville’s best efforts—has not been merely unintelligent, but thoroughly discreditable. For Melville, from any point of view, is one of the most distinguished of our writers, and there is something ludicrous in being before all the world—as, assuredly, we sometimes are—in recognising our own merit where it is contestable, and in neglecting it where it is not.

It has been our tradition to cherish our literature for its embodiment of Queen Victoria’s fireside qualities. The repudiation of this tradition—as a part of our repudiation of all tradition—has made fashionable a wholesale contempt for our native product. “I can’t read Longfellow” is frequently remarked; “he’s so subtle!” Our critical estimates have laboured under the incubus of New England provincialism: a provincialism preserved in miniature in the first pages of Lowell’s essay on Thoreau. At present we need to have the eminence of the section recalled to us; but during the period of Melville’s productivity, it was at its apex, and in its bosom Melville wrote. This man, whose closest literary affinities were Rabelais, Zola, Sir Thomas Browne, Rousseau, Meredith, and Dr. John Donne,—a combination to make the uninitiated blink with incredulity—was indebted to Nathaniel Hawthorne for the best makeshift for companionship he was ever to know: one of the most subtly ironical associations the imps of comedy ever brought about. Nor was the comedy lessened by Mrs. Hawthorne’s presence upon the scene. Shrewd was her instinctive resentment of her husband’s friend. Viewed by his neighbours “as little better than a cannibal and a ‘beach comber’”—such was the report of the late Titus Munson Coan in a letter to his mother written immediately after a pilgrimage to Melville in the Berkshires—Melville turned to Hawthorne for understanding. Frank Preston Stearns, in his Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1906) says that for Hawthorne “the summer of 1851 in Lenox was by no means brilliant.... Hawthorne’s chief entertainment seems to have been the congratulatory letters he received from distinguished people.... For older company he had Herman Melville and G. P. R. James, whose society he may have found as interesting as that of more distinguished writers.” But Mrs. Hawthorne had studied Melville with a closer scrutiny and was not so easily convinced of Melville’s insignificance. Melville had visited the Hawthornes in the tiny reception room of the Red House, where Mrs. Hawthorne “sewed at her stand and read to the children about Christ;” in the drawing room, where she disposed “the embroidered furniture,” and where, in the farther corner, stood “Apollo with his head tied on;” in Hawthorne’s study, which to Mrs. Hawthorne’s wifely adoration was consecrated by “his presence in the morning.” Mrs. Hawthorne looked from the “wonderful, wonderful eyes” of her husband—each eye “like a violet with a soul in it,”—to Melville’s eyes, and confessed to her mother her grave and jealous suspicion of Melville: “I am not quite sure that I do not think him a very great man.... A man with a true, warm heart, and a soul and an intellect,—with life to his finger-tips; earnest, sincere and reverent; very tender and modest.... He has very keen perceptive power; but what astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems to see everything very accurately; and how he can do so with his small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and rather handsome, his mouth expressive of sensibility and emotion. He is tall, and erect, with an air free, brave and manly. When conversing, he is full of gesture and force, and loses himself in his subject. There is no grace nor polish. Once in a while, his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression, out of these eyes to which I have objected; an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that moment taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself. I saw him look at Una so, yesterday, several times.”

Mrs. Hawthorne must ever enjoy a lofty eminence as one of Melville’s most penetrating critics. Her husband dwelt apart, and less because he found the atmosphere of New England wholly uncongenial than because he shared his wife’s conviction that he was like a star. And shrewdly his wife resented the presence of a second luminary—treacherously veiled and of heaven knows what magnitude!—in her serene New England sky. Time may yet harp her worst fears aright.

For despite his comparative obscurity, Melville is—as cannot be too frequently iterated—one of the chief and most unusual figures in our native literature. And his claim to such high distinction must rest upon three prime counts.

First—because most obvious—Melville was the literary discoverer of the South Seas. And though his ample and rapidly multiplying progeny includes such names as Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Warren Stoddard, John La Farge, Jack London, Louis Becke, A. Safroni-Middleton, Somerset Maugham, and Frederick O’Brien, he is still unsurpassed in the manner he originated. On this point, all competent critics are agreed.

Melville’s second achievement is most adequately stated by the well-known English sea-writer, W. Clark Russell, in A Claim of American Literature (reprinted from The North American Review in The Critic for March 26, 1892). “When Richard Henry Dana, and Herman Melville wrote,” says Russell, “the commercial sailor of Great Britain and the United States was without representation in literature.... Dana and Melville were Americans. They were the first to lift the hatch and show the world what passes in a ship’s forecastle; how men live down in that gloomy cave, how and what they eat, and where they sleep; what pleasures they take, what their sorrows and wrongs are; how they are used when they quit their black sea-parlours in response to the boatswain’s silver summons to work on deck by day and by night. These secrets of the deep Dana and Melville disclosed.... Dana and Melville created a new world, not by the discovery, but by the interpretation of it. They gave us a full view of the life led by tens of thousands of men whose very existence, till these wizards arose, had been as vague to the general land intelligence as the shadows of clouds moving under the brightness of the stars.” And to Melville and Dana, so Russell contends, we owe “the first, the best and most enduring revelation of these secrets.” On this score, Conrad, Kipling, and Masefield must own Melville as master.

Melville’s third and supreme claim to distinction rests upon a single volume, which, after the order of Melchizedek, is without issue and without descent: “a work which is not only unique in its kind, and a great achievement” to quote a recent judgment from England, “but is the expression of an imagination that rises to the highest, and so is amongst the world’s great works of art.” This book is, of course, Moby-Dick, Melville’s undoubted masterpiece. “In that wild, beautiful romance”—the words are Mr. Masefield’s—“Melville seems to have spoken the very secret of the sea, and to have drawn into his tale all the magic, all the sadness, all the wild joy of many waters. It stands quite alone; quite unlike any other book known to me. It strikes a note which no other sea writer has ever struck.”

The organising theme of this unparalleled volume is the hunt by the mad Captain Ahab after the great white whale which had dismembered him of his leg; of Captain Ahab’s unwearied pursuit by rumour of its whereabouts; of the final destruction of himself and his ship by its savage onslaught. On the white hump of the ancient and vindictive monster Captain Ahab piles the sum of all the rage and hate of mankind from the days of Eden down.

Melville expresses an ironical fear lest his book be scouted “as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.” Yet fabulous allegory it is: an allegory of the demonism at the cankered heart of nature, teaching that “though in many of its visible aspects the world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.” Thou shalt know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. To the eye of truth, so Melville would convince us, “the palsied universe lies before us as a leper;” “all deified Nature absolutely paints like a harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnal house within.” To embody this devastating insight, Melville chooses as a symbol, an albino whale. “Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”

An artist who goes out to find sermons in stones does so at the peril of converting his stone pile into his mausoleum. His danger is excessive, if, having his sermons all ready, he makes it his task to find the stones to fit them. Allegory justifies itself only when the fiction is the fact and the moral the induction; only when its representation is as imaginatively real as its meaning; only when the stones are interesting boulders in a rich and diversified landscape. So broadly and vividly is Moby-Dick based on solid foundation that even the most literal-minded, innocent of Melville’s dark intent, have found this book of the soul’s daring and the soul’s dread a very worthy volume. One spokesman for this congregation, while admitting that “a certain absorption of interest lies in the nightmare intensity and melodramatic climax of the tale,” finds his interest captured and held far more by “the exposition of fact with which the story is loaded to the very gunwale. No living thing on earth or in the waters under the earth is so interesting as the whale. How it is pursued, from the Arctic to the Antarctic; how it is harpooned, to the peril of boat and crew; how, when brought to the side, ‘cutting in’ is accomplished; how the whale’s anatomy is laid bare; how his fat is redeemed—to be told this in the form of a narrative, with all manner of dramatic but perfectly plausible incidents interspersed, is enough to make the book completely engrossing without the white whale and Captain Ahab’s fatal monomania.”

So diverse are the samples out of which Moby-Dick is compounded, yet so masterful is each of its samples, that there is still far from universal agreement as to the ground colour of this rich and towering fabric. Yet by this very disagreement is its miraculous artistry affirmed.

In Moby-Dick, all the powers and tastes of Melville’s complex genius are blended. Moby-Dick is at once indisputably the greatest whaling novel, and “a hideous and intolerable allegory.” As Mr. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. has said, “Out of the mere episodes and minor instances of Moby-Dick, a literary reputation might be made. The retired Nantucket captains Bildad and Peleg might have stepped out of Smollett. Father Mapple’s sermon on the book of Jonah is in itself a masterpiece, and I know few sea tales that can hold their own with the blood feud of Mate Rodney and sailor Steelkilt.” Captain Hook of Peter Pan is but Captain Boomer of Moby-Dick with another name: and this an identity founded not on surmise, but on Sir James Barrie’s professed indebtedness to Melville. There are, in Moby-Dick, long digressions, natural, historical and philosophical, on the person, habits, manners and ideas of whales; there are long dialogues and soliloquies such as were never spoken by mortal man in his waking senses, conversations that for sweetness, strength and courage remind one of passages from Dekker, Webster, Massinger, Fletcher and the other old dramatists loved both by Melville and by Charles Lamb; in the discursive tradition of Fielding, Sir Thomas Browne and the anatomist of melancholy, Melville indulges freely in independent moralisings, half essay, half rhapsody; withal, scenes like Ishmael’s experience at the “Spouter-Inn” with a practising cannibal for bed-fellow, are, for finished humour, among the most competent in the language. When Melville sat down to write, always at his knee stood that chosen emissary of Satan, the comic spirit: a demoniac familiar never long absent from his pages.

There are those, of course, who would hold against Dante his moralising, and against Rabelais his broad humour. In like manner, peculiarity of temperament has necessarily coloured critical judgment of Moby-Dick. But though critics may mouth it as they like about digressions, improbability, moralising reflections, swollen talk, or the fetish of art now venerated with such articulate inveteracy, all wonderfully agree upon the elementary force of Moby-Dick, its vitality, its thrilling power. That it achieves the effect of illusion, and to a degree peculiar to the highest feats of the creative imagination, is incontestable. No writer has more. On this point it is simply impossible to praise Melville too highly. What defects Moby-Dick has are formal rather than substantial. As Thackeray once impatiently said of Macaulay: “What critic can’t point them out?” It was the contention of James Thomson that an overweening concern for formal impeccability is a fatal sign of weakened vitality. Intensity of imagination—and Melville exhibited it prodigally in Moby-Dick—is an infinitely rarer and more precious gift than technical sophistication. Shakespeare has survived, despite his “monstrous irregularities.” But since Shakespeare, as Francis Thompson has observed, there has been a gradual decline from imperfection. Milton, at his most typical, was far too perfect; Pope was ruined by his quest for the quality. No thoughtful person can contemplate without alarm the idolatry bestowed upon this quality by the contemporary mind: an idolatry that threatens to reduce all art to the extinction of unendurable excellence. How insipid would be the mere adventures of a Don Quixote recounted by a Stevenson.

The astonishing variety of contradictory qualities synthesised in Moby-Dick exists nowhere else in literature, perhaps, in such paradoxical harmony. These qualities, in differences of combination and emphasis, are discoverable, however, in all of Melville’s writings. And he published, besides anonymous contributions to periodicals, ten novels and five volumes of poetry (including the two volumes privately printed at the very close of his life). There survives, too, a bulk of manuscript material: a novel, short stories, and a body of verse. And branded on everything that Melville wrote is there the mark of the extraordinary personality that created Moby-Dick.

Though some of Melville’s writing is distinctly disquieting in devastating insight, and much of it is very uneven in inspiration, none of it is undistinguished. Yet only four of his books have ever been reprinted. The rest of his work, long since out of print, is excessively rare, some of it being practically unavailable. The scarcity of a book, however, is not invariably a sign of its insignificance. It is one of the least accessible of Melville’s books that Mr. Masefield singles out for especial distinction. “The book I love best of his,” says Mr. Masefield, “is one very difficult to come by. I think it is his first romance, and I believe it has never been reprinted here. It is the romance of his own boyhood. I mean Redburn. Any number of good pens will praise the known books, Typee and Omoo and Moby-Dick and White-Jacket, and will tell their qualities of beauty and romance. Perhaps Redburn will have fewer praises, so here goes for Redburn; a boy’s book about running away to sea.” Even more difficult of access is Pierre—a book at the antipodes from Redburn. Far from being a boy’s book, Pierre was prophetic of the pessimism of Hardy and the subtlety of Meredith. From Redburn to Pierre; from Typee, a spirited travel-book on Polynesia, to Clarel, an intricate philosophical poem in two volumes: these mark the antithetical extremes of the art that mated poetry and blubber, whaling and metaphysics. The very complexity and versatility of Melville’s achievement has been an obstacle in the way of his just appreciation. Had Mandeville turned from his Travels, to write The City of Dreadful Night, the incompatibility would have been no less extraordinary or bewildering.

Indeed, Melville’s complete works, in their final analysis, are a long effort towards the creation of one of the most complex, and massive, and original characters in literature: the character known in life as Herman Melville. “I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids,” he wrote to Hawthorne while he was in the middle of Moby-Dick, “which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould. It seems to me now that Solomon was the truest man who ever spoke, and yet that he managed the truth with a view to popular conservatism.”

Blighted by disillusionment, and paralysed by doubt, Melville came to treat as an irrelevancy, the making of books. “He informed me that he had ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated,’” wrote Hawthorne in his Note-book, after Melville visited him in Southport, England, in 1856; “but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation. It is strange how he persists—as he has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sandhills amidst which we were sitting. He can neither believe nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.” If, in contempt for the orthodox interpolations by which pious scribes attempted to sweeten Solomon’s bitter message, Melville ever managed truth as he saw it, it was more to violate popular conservatism than to propitiate it. “We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets,” he editorially wrote Hawthorne in 1851, “and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us.” And as Melville grew in disillusionment, he grew in astonishment. In his relentless pessimism he boasted himself “in the happy condition of judicious, unencumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet bag,—that is to say, the Ego.” It was his ripest conviction that the exclamation point and the triumphant perpendicular pronoun were interchangeable signs. But to the end, he bristled with minor revelations.

Though he boasted that he crossed the frontier into Eternity with nothing but a carpet bag, he had, in fact, sent more bulky consignments on ahead. And at the final crack of doom, this dead and disappointed mariner may yet rise to an unexpected rejoicing. For at that time of ultimate reckoning, according to the eschatology of Mr. Masefield, “then the great white whale, old Moby-Dick, the king of all the whales, will rise up from his quiet in the sea, and go bellowing to his mates. And all the whales in the world—the sperm-whales, the razor-back, the black-fish, the rorque, the right, the forty-barrel Jonah, the narwhal, the hump-back, the grampus and the thrasher—will come to him, ‘fin-out,’ blowing their spray to the heavens. Then Moby-Dick will call the roll of them, and from all the parts of the sea, from the north, from the south, from Callao to Rio, not one whale will be missing. Then Moby-Dick will trumpet, like a man blowing a horn, and all that company of whales will ‘sound’ (that is, dive), for it is they that have the job of raising the wrecks from down below.

“Then when they come up the sun will just be setting in the sea, far away to the west, like a ball of red fire. And just as the curve of it goes below the sea, it will stop sinking and lie there like a door. And the stars and the earth and the wind will stop. And there will be nothing but the sea, and this red arch of the sun, and the whales with the wrecks, and a stream of light upon the water. Each whale will have raised a wreck from among the coral, and the sea will be thick with them—row-ships and sail-ships, and great big seventy-fours, and big White Star boats, and battleships, all of them green with the ooze, but all of them manned by singing sailors. And ahead of them will go Moby-Dick, towing the ship our Lord was in, with all the sweet apostles aboard of her. And Moby-Dick will give a great bellow, like a fog-horn blowing, and stretch ‘fin-out’ for the sun away in the west. And all the whales will bellow out an answer. And all the drowned sailors will sing their chanties, and beat the bells into a music. And the whole fleet of them will start towing at full speed towards the sun, at the edge of the sky and water. I tell you they will make white water, those ships and fishes.

“When they have got to where the sun is, the red ball will swing open like a door, and Moby-Dick, and all the whales, and all the ships will rush through it into an anchorage in Kingdom Come. It will be a great calm piece of water, with land close aboard, where all the ships of the world will lie at anchor, tier upon tier, with the hands gathered forward, singing. They’ll have no watches to stand, no ropes to coil, no mates to knock their heads in. Nothing will be to do except singing and beating on the bell. And all the poor sailors who went in patched rags, my son, they’ll be all fine in white and gold. And ashore, among the palm-trees, there’ll be fine inns for the seamen.” And there, among a numerous company, will be Fayaway, and Captain Ahab, and Jack Chase, and Jarl, and Toby, and Pierre, and Father Mapple, and Jackson, and Doctor Long Ghost, and Kory-Kory, and Bildad, and Peleg, and Fedallah, and Tashetego, and Marnoo, and Queequeg. But it seems hardly likely that Melville will there find Hawthorne to tempt by a basket of champagne into some little shady corner, there to cross their legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and to discourse pleasantly of all the things manifold which once so much distressed them. In my Father’s house are many mansions.

CHAPTER II
GHOSTS

“We are full of ghosts and spirits; we are as grave-yards full of buried dead, that start to life before us. And all our dead sires, verily, are in us; that is their immortality. From sire to son, we go on multiplying corpses in ourselves; for all of which, are resurrections. Every thought’s a soul of some past poet, hero, sage. We are fuller than a city.” —Herman Melville: Mardi.

The High Gods, in a playful and prodigal mood, gave to Melville, to Julia Ward Howe, to Lowell, to Kingsley, to Ruskin, to Whitman, and to Queen Victoria, the same birth year. On August 1, 1819, Herman Melville was born at No. 6 Pearl Street, New York City.

Melville’s vagabondage as a common sailor on a merchantman, on whaling vessels, and in the United States Navy, together with his Bohemian associations with cannibals, mutineers, and some of the choicest dregs of our Christian civilisation, must have wrenched a chorus of groans from a large congregation of shocked ancestral ghosts. For Melville was descended from a long and prolific line of the best American stock. Through his mother, Maria Gansevoort, he traced back to the earliest Dutch emigrants to New York; through his father, Allan Melville, to pre-revolutionary Scotch-Irish emigrants to New England. Both of his grandfathers distinguished themselves in the Revolutionary War. His ancestors, on both sides, came to this country in the days when some of the best blood of Europe was being transferred to America.

Though Melville was too ironic a genius ever to have been guilty of the ill-breeding that makes an ostentation of ancestry, still he looked back upon his descent with self-conscious pride: a pride drawn by childhood absorption from his parents who, by resting on the achievements of their forebears, added several cubits to their stature. Lacking the prophetic vision to glory in being ancestors, they chose the more comfortable rôle of parading as descendants. Melville’s father, Allan, was sufficiently absorbed in his genealogy to compile, in 1818, an elaborately branching family tree that sent its master root back to one Sir Richard de Melvill, del Compte de Fife, a worthy of the thirteenth century. And at the proud conclusion of his labours he inscribed the Melville motto, Denique Coelum—“Heaven at last.” Melville’s mother, Maria Gansevoort, though too absorbed in domesticity to compete with Allan in drawing up a parallel document, still sat opposite her spouse with a stiff spine, conscious that she could counter his ancestry, grandfather for grandfather. It is true, she had no thirteenth century count to fall back upon; and though her line lost itself in a cluster of breweries, they were very substantial breweries, and owned by a race of stalwart and affluent and uncompromising burghers. Her ancestor, Harmen Harmense Van Gansevoort, was brewing in Beverwyck as early as 1660, and with sufficient success to acquire such extended investments in land that he bequeathed to his heirs a baronial inheritance. During the centuries following his death his name crossed itself with that of the Van Rensselaers, the Ten Broeks, the Douws, the Van Schaicks,—with the proudest names that descended from the earlier Colonial Dutch families. Melville’s mother, Maria, is remembered as a cold, proud woman, arrogant in the sense of her name, her blood, and the affluence of her forebears.

She was the only daughter and oldest child in a family of six, of General Peter Gansevoort and Catharine Van Schaick. Her father, born in Albany, New York, July 17, 1749, was among the outstanding patriots of the American Revolution. He was among the troops which accompanied Schuyler, in 1775, in his advance towards Canada. In December of the same year he was with Montgomery, as Major, in the unfortunate assault upon Quebec. In the summer of 1777, when Burgoyne’s semi-barbarous invading army was slowly advancing down Lake Champlain and the Hudson, he was Colonel in command of Fort Stanwix. By his obstinate and gallant defence of Fort Stanwix in August, 1777, he prevented the juncture of St. Leger with Burgoyne, and so changed the course of the whole subsequent campaign. Washington keenly and warmly recognised this, and Congress passed a vote of thanks to Colonel Gansevoort. Peter Gansevoort did other brilliant service in the Revolutionary War, and in 1809, when the War of 1812 was approaching, he was made brigadier general in the United States army. He was sheriff of Albany County from 1790 to 1792, and regent of the University of New York from 1808 until his death in 1812.

Of his sons, Hon. Peter Gansevoort, who was born in Albany in 1789, was long one of the most prominent and honoured citizens of Albany. The elder son, General Herman Gansevoort, from whom Melville received his name, lived at Gansevoort, a village in the township of Northumberland, Saratoga County, New York. In 1832-33, the brothers built on the site of the birthplace of their father what is now the Stanwix Hotel. As a boy, Melville spent most of his summers as guest of the Gansevoorts, and in his novel Pierre, the childhood recollections of his hero are transparent autobiographical references to his own early memories. “On the meadows which sloped away from the shaded rear of the manorial mansion, far to the winding river, an Indian battle had been fought, in the earlier days of the colony, and in that battle the great-grandfather of Pierre, mortally wounded, had sat unhorsed on his saddle in the grass, with his dying voice still cheering his men in the fray.... Far beyond these plains, a day’s walk for Pierre, rose the storied heights, where in the Revolutionary War his grandfather had for several months defended a rude but all-important stockaded fort, against the repeated combined assaults of Indians, Tories and Regulars. From behind that fort, the gentlemanly but murderous half-breed, Brandt, had fled, but survived to dine with General (Gansevoort) in the amiable times that followed that vindictive war. All the associations of Saddle-Meadows were full of pride to Pierre. The (Gansevoort) deeds by which their estate had been so long held, bore the cyphers of three Indian kings, the aboriginal and only conveyancers of those noble woods and plains. Thus loftily, in the days of his circumscribed youth, did Pierre glance along the background of his race.... Or how think you it would be with this youthful Pierre if every day, descending to breakfast, he caught sight of an old tattered British banner or two, hanging over an arched window in the hall: and those banners captured by his grandfather, the general, in fair fight?”

On February 22, 1832, so it is recorded in Joel Munsell, The Annals of Albany (Vol. IX, Albany, 1859) “the military celebrated the centennial anniversary of the birthday of Washington. Col. Peter Gansevoort, on this occasion, presented to the artillery a large brass Drum, a trophy of the revolution, taken from the British on the 22nd August, 1777, at Fort Stanwix, by his father, General Peter Gansevoort.” The sound of this drum was tapping in Melville’s memory, when he goes on to ask: “Or how think you it would be if every time he heard the band of the military company of the village, he should distinctly recognise the peculiar tap of a British kettle-drum also captured by his grandfather in fair fight, and afterwards suitably inscribed on the brass and bestowed upon the Saddle-Meadows Artillery Corps? Or how think you it would be, if sometimes of a mild meditative Fourth of July morning in the country, he carried out with him into the garden by way of ceremonial cane, a long, majestic, silver-tipped staff, a Major-General’s baton, once wielded on the plume-nodding and musket-flashing review by the same grandfather several times here-in-before mentioned?”

Not content to leave this a rhetorical query, Melville answers his own catechism in unambiguous terms: “I should say that considering Pierre was quite young and very unsophisticated as yet, and withal rather high-blooded; and sometimes read the History of the Revolutionary War, and possessed a mother who very frequently made remote social allusions to the epaulettes of the Major-General his grandfather;—I should say that upon all these occasions, the way it must have been with him was a very proud, elated sort of way.”

Melville did not preserve throughout his long life this early and proud elation in his descent, and in later years he thought it necessary to apologise for the short-sighted and provincial self-satisfaction that he absorbed from his parents in his early youth. “And if this seem but too fond and foolish in Pierre,” he pleads in a mood both of apology and of prophecy; “and if you tell me that this sort of thing in him showed him no sterling Democrat, and that a truly noble man should never brag of any arm but his own; then I beg you to consider again that this Pierre was but a youngster as yet. And believe me, you will pronounce Pierre a thorough-going Democrat in time; perhaps a little too Radical altogether to your fancy.”

Radical he came to be, indeed: it was the necessary penalty of being cursed with an intelligence above that of the smug and shallow optimism of his country and his period. Democratic he may have been, but only in the most unpopular meaning of that once noble term. He was a democrat in the same relentless sense that Dante or Milton were democrats. Lucifer rebelled, let it be remembered, to make Heaven “safe for Democracy:” the first experiment in popular government. “Hell,” says Melville, “is a democracy of devils.” In Mardi, Melville indulges lengthy reflections on a certain “chanticleer people” who boast boisterously of themselves: “Saw ye ever such a land as this? Is it not a great and extensive republic? Pray, observe how tall we are; just feel of our thighs; are we not a glorious people? We are all Kings here; royalty breathes in the common air.” Before the spectacle of this lusty republicanism, Melville exhibits unorthodox doubts. “There’s not so much freedom here as these freemen think,” he makes a strolling deity observe; “I laugh and admire.... Freedom is more social than political. And its real felicity is not to be shared. That is of a man’s own individual getting and holding. Little longer, may it please you, can republics subsist now, than in days gone by. Though all men approached sages in wisdom, some would yet be more wise than others; and so, the old degrees would be preserved. And no exemption would an equality of knowledge furnish, from the inbred servility of mortal to mortal; from all the organic causes, which inevitably divide mankind into brigades and battalions, with captains at their heads. Civilisation has not ever been the brother of equality.”

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:

“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.

MARIA GANSEVOORT MELVILLE

In 1820

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 ½ 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 ½ 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.”

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.”

—Herman Melville: Moby-Dick.

When, at the age of seventeen, Melville cut loose from his mother, his kind cousins and aunts, and sympathising sisters, he was stirred by motives of desperation, and by the immature delusion that happiness lies elusive and beckoning, just over the world’s rim. It was a drastic escape from the intolerable monotony of prosaic certainties and aching frustrations. “Sad disappointments in several plans which I had sketched for my future life,” says Melville, “the necessity of doing something for myself, united with a naturally roving disposition, conspired within me, to send me to sea as a sailor.”

In Redburn: His First Voyage. Being the Sailor-boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman (1849) Melville has left what is the only surviving record of his initial attempt “to sail beyond the sunset.” Luridly vivid and exuberant was his imagination, flooding the world of his childhood and fantastically transmuting reality. At the time of his first voyage, Melville was, it is well to remember, a boy of seventeen. He was not old enough, not wise enough, to regard his dreams as impalpable projections of his defeated desires: desires inflamed by what Dr. Johnson called the “dangerous prevalence of imagination,” and which, in “sober probability” could find no actual satisfaction. Had Melville been a nature of less impetuosity, or of less abundant physical vitality, he might have moped tamely at home and “yearned.” But with the desperate Quixotic enterprise of a splendid but embittered boy, he sallied forth into the unknown to put his dreams to the test. When it was reported to Carlyle that Margaret Fuller made boast: “I accept the universe,” unimpressed he remarked: “Gad! she’d better.” Melville, when only seventeen, had not yet come to Carlyle’s dyspeptic resignation to the cosmic order. “As years and dumps increase; as reflection lends her solemn pause, then,” so Melville says, in substance, in a passage on elderly whales, “in the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life, do sulky old souls go about all alone among the meridians and parallels saying their prayers.” Lacking Dr. Johnson’s elderly wisdom, Melville believed there to be some correlation between happiness and geography. He was not willing to take resignation on faith. Not through “spontaneous striving towards development,” but through necessity and hard contact with nature and men does the recalcitrant dreamer accept Carlyle’s dictum. With drastic experience, most men come at last to have a little commonsense knocked into their heads,—and a good bit of imagination knocked out, as Wordsworth, for one, discovered.

Melville’s recourse to the ocean in 1837, as that of Richard Henry Dana’s three years before, was a heroic measure, calculated either to take the nonsense out of both of them, or else to drive them straight either to suicide, madness, or rum-soaked barbarism. To both boys, it was a crucial test that would have ruined coarser or weaker natures. Dana came from out the ordeal purged and strengthened, toned up to the proper level, and no longer too fine for everyday use. Though as years went by, so says C. F. Adams, his biographer, “the freshness of the great lesson faded away, and influences which antedated his birth and surrounded his life asserted themselves, not for his good.”

Because of lack of contemporary evidence, the immediate influences of Melville’s first experience in the forecastle, cannot be so positively stated. Redburn, the only record of the adventure, was not written until twelve years after Melville had experienced what it records. Extraordinarily crowded was this intervening span of twelve years. But despite the fulness of intervening experience—or, maybe, because of it—the universe still stuck in his maw: it was a bolus on which he gagged. Redburn is written in embittered memory of Melville’s first hegira. In the words of Mr. H. S. Salt: “It is a record of bitter experience and temporary disillusionment—the confessions of a poor, proud youth, who goes to sea ‘with a devil in his heart’ and is painfully initiated into the unforeseen hardships of a sea-faring life.” In 1849 he was still unadjusted to unpalatable reality, and in Redburn he seems intent upon revenging himself upon his early disillusion by an inverted idealism,—by building for himself, “not castles, but dungeons in Spain,”—as if, failing to reach the moon, he should determine to make a Cynthia of the first green cheese. And this inverted idealism he achieves most effectively by recording with photographic literalness the most hideous details of his penurious migration. His romantic realism—reminding one of Zola and certain pages out of Rousseau—he alternates with malicious self-satire, and its obverse gesture, obtrusive self-pity. To those austere and classical souls who are proudly impatient of this style of writing, it must be insisted with what Arnold called “damnable iteration” that Redburn purports to be the confessions of a seventeen-year-old lad. Autobiographically, the book is, of course, of superlative interest. But despite its unaccountable neglect, and Melville’s ostentation of contempt for it, it is none the less important, in the history of letters, as a very notable achievement. Mr. Masefield and W. Clark Russell alone, of competent critics, seem to have been aware of its existence. It is Redburn that Mr. Masefield confesses to loving best of Melville’s writings: this “boy’s book about running away to sea.” Mr. Masefield thinks, however, that “one must know New York and the haunted sailor-town of Liverpool to appreciate that gentle story thoroughly.”

When Melville wrote Redburn in 1849, there was no book exactly like it in our literature, its only possible forerunners being Nathaniel Ames’ A Mariner’s Sketches (1830) and Dana’s Two Years before the Mast (1840). The great captains had written of their voyages, it is true; or when they themselves left no record, their literary laxity was usually corrected by the querulousness of some member of their ship’s company. Great compilations such as Churchill’s, or Harris’, or Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation: made by sea or overland to the remotest and farthest different quarters of the earth at any time within the Compass of these 1600 years, or no less luxuriously entitled works, such as the fine old eighteenth century folio of Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street Robbers, etc., To which is added, A Genuine Account of the Voyages and Plunders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, interspersed with several diverting tales, and pleasant songs, and adorned with the Heads of the Most Remarkable Villains, curiously Engraven, are monuments to the prodigious wealth of the early literature of sea adventure. The light of romance colours these maritime exploits, and even upon the maturest gaze there still lingers something of the radiance with which the ardent imagination of boyhood gilds the actions and persons of these fierce sea-warriors, treacherous, cruel and profligate miscreants though the most picturesque of them were.

But these hardy adventurers were men of action; men proud of their own exploits, but untouched by any corrupt self-consciousness of their Gilbert-and-Sullivan, or Byronic possibilities; men untempted to offer any superfluous encouragement to the deep blue sea to “roll.” And though many of them—Captain Cook, for example—ran away to sea to ship before the mast, they in later years betray no temptings to linger with attention over their days of early obscurity. Even The Book of Things Forgotten passes over the period of Cook’s life in the forecastle. He began as an apprentice, he ended as a mate. That is all. As regards the life he led as a youth on board the merchant ship there is no account: a silence that forces Walter Besant in his Captain Cook to a page or two of surmise as a transition to more notable sureties. An appreciation of the romance of the sea, and of the humbler details of the life of the common sailor is one of our most recent sophistications.

In fiction, it is true, Smollett had his sailors, as did Scott, and Marryat, and Cooper,—to mention only the most notable names. Provoked to originality by a defiant boast, Cooper wrote the earliest first-rate sea-novel: a story concerning itself exclusively with the sea. Remarkable is the clearness and accuracy of his description of the manœuvres of his ships. He makes his vessels “walk the waters like a thing of life.” “I have loved ships as I have loved men,” says Melville. And Cooper before him, as Conrad after him, have by similar love given personality to vessels. Among his company of able seamen, Cooper has his Long Tom Coffin: and these are more picturesque, and perhaps more real than his Lord Geoffrey Cleveland, his Admiral Bluewater, his Griffith, and his other quarterdeck people. But sea-life as Cooper knew it was sea-life as seen from the quarterdeck, and from the quarterdeck of the United States navy.

Marryat, it is true, makes his Newton Foster a merchant sailor. But Marryat knew nothing of the hidden life of the merchant service. He had passed his sea-life in the ships of the States, and he knew no more of what passed in a merchantman’s forecastle than the general present day land intelligence knows of what passes in a steamer’s engine room. Dana and Melville were the first to lift the hatch and show the world what passes in a ship’s forecastle. Dana disclosed these secrets in a single volume; Melville in a number of remarkable narratives, the first of which was Redburn.

Dana’s is a trustworthy and matter-of-fact account in the form of a journal; a vigorous, faithful, modest narrative. With very little interest exhibited in the feeling of his own pulse, he recounts the happenings aboard the ship from day to day. Melville’s account is more vivid because more intimate. As is the case with George Borrow, his eye is always riveted upon himself. He minutely amplifies his own emotions and sensations, and with an incalculable gain over Dana in descriptive vividness. One would have to be colour blind to purple patches to fail to recognise in Redburn streaks of the purest Tyrean dye. Between Melville and Dana the answer is obvious as to “who fished the murex up?”

“It was with a heavy heart and full eyes,” says Melville, “that my mother parted from me; perhaps she thought me an erring and a wilful boy, and perhaps I was; but if I was, it had been a hard-hearted world, and hard times that had made me so.”

Dressed in a hunting jacket; one leg of his trousers adorned with an ample and embarrassing patch; armed with a fowling piece which his older brother Gansevoort had given him, in lieu of cash, to sell in New York; without a penny in his pocket: Melville arrived in New York on a fine rainy day in the late spring of 1837. Dripping like a seal, and garbed like a housebreaker, he walked across town to the home of a friend of Gansevoort’s, where he was dried, warmed and fed.

Philo of Judea has descended to posterity blushing because he had a body. Melville survives, rosy in animality: but his was never Philo’s scarlet of shame. Melville was a boy of superb physical vigour: and his blackest plunges of discouragement and philosophical despair were always wholesomely amenable to the persuasions of food and drink. It was Carlyle’s conviction that with stupidity and a good digestion man can bear much: had Melville been gifted with stupidity, he would have needed only regular meals to convert him into a miracle of cheerful endurance. “There is a savour of life and immortality in substantial fare,” he later wrote; “we are like balloons, which are nothing till filled.” When Melville sat down to the well-stocked table at his friend’s house in New York he was a very miserable boy. But his misery was not invulnerable. “Every mouthful pushed the devil that had been tormenting me all day farther and farther out of me, till at last I entirely ejected him with three successive bowls of Bohea. That night I went to bed thinking the world pretty tolerable after all.”

Next day, accompanied by his brother’s friend, whose true name Melville disguises under the anonymity of Jones, Melville walked down to the water front.

At that time, and indeed until as recently as thirty years ago, the water front of a great sea-port town like New York showed a towering forest of tall and tapering masts reaching high up above the roofs of the water-side buildings, crossed with slender spars hung with snowy canvas, and braced with a maze of cordage: a brave sight that Melville passes over in morose silence. He postpones until his arrival in Liverpool the spicing of his account with the blended smells of pitch, and tar, and old-ropes, and wet-wood, and resin and the sharp cool tang of brine. Nor does Melville pause to conjure up the great bowsprits and jib-booms that stretched across the street that passed the foot of the slips. Though Melville has left a detailed description of the Liverpool docks—not failing to paint in with a dripping brush the blackest shadows of the low life framing that picturesque scene—it was outside his purpose to give any hint of the maritime achievement of the merchant service in which he was such an insignificant unit.

The maritime achievement of the United States was then almost at the pinnacle of its glory. At that time, the topsails of the United States flecked every ocean, and their captains courageous left no lands unvisited, no sea unexplored. From New England in particular sailed ships where no other ships dared to go, anchoring where no one else ever dreamed of looking for trade. And so it happened, as Ralph D. Paine in his The Old Merchant Marine has pointed out, that “in the spicy warehouses that overlooked Salem Harbour there came to be stored hemp from Luzon, gum copal from Zanzibar, palm oil from Africa, coffee from Arabia, tallow from Madagascar, whale oil from the Antarctic, hides and wool from the Rio de la Plata, nutmeg and cloves from Malaysia.” With New England originality and audacity, Boston shipped cargoes of ice to Calcutta. And for thirty years a regular trade in Massachusetts ice remained active and lucrative: such perishable freight out upon a four or five months’ voyage across the fiery Equator, doubling Da Gama’s cape and steering through the furnace heat of the Indian Ocean. In those days the people of the Atlantic seacoast from Maryland northward found their interests vitally allied with maritime adventure. There was a generous scattering of sea-faring folk among Melville’s forebears of our early national era; and Melville’s father, an importing merchant, owed his fortunes in important part, to the chances of the sea. The United States, without railroads, and with only the most wretched excuses for post-roads, were linked together by coasting ships. And thousands of miles of ocean separated Americans from the markets in which they must sell their produce and buy their luxuries. Down to the middle of the last century, one of the most vital interests of the United States was in the sea: an interest that deeply influenced the thought, the legislature and the literature of our people. And during this period, as Willis J. Abbott, in his American Merchant Ships and Sailors has noted, “the sea was a favourite career, not only for American boys with their way to make in the world, but for the sons of wealthy men as well. That classic of New England seamanship Two Years Before the Mast was not written until the middle of the 19th century, and its author went to sea, not in search of wealth, but of health. But before the time of Richard Henry Dana, many a young man of good family and education—a Harvard graduate, like him, perhaps—bade farewell to a home of comfort and refinement and made his berth in a smoky, fetid forecastle to learn the sailor’s calling. There was at that time less to engage the activities and arouse the ambitions of youth than now, and the sea offered a most promising career.... Ships were multiplying fast, and no really lively and alert seaman need stay long in the forecastle.” The brilliant maritime growth of the United States, after a steady development for two hundred years, was, when Melville sailed in 1837, within twenty-five years of its climax. It was to reach its peak in 1861, when the aggregate tonnage belonging to the United States was but a little smaller than that of Great Britain and her dependencies, and nearly as large as the combined tonnage of all other nations of the world, Great Britain excepted. Vanished fleets and brave memories—a chronicle of America which had written its closing chapters before the Civil War!

But this state of affairs,—if, indeed, he was even vaguely conscious of its existence,—left Melville at the time of his first shipping, completely cold. It is doubtless true that Maria would have respected him more if he had attempted to justify his sea-going by assuring her that at that time it was to no degree remarkable for seamen to become full-fledged captains and part owners at the age of twenty-one, or even earlier. And Maria would have listened impressed to such cogent evidence as the case of Thomas T. Forbes, for example, who shipped before the mast at the age of thirteen, and was commander of the Levant at twenty; or the case of William Sturges, afterwards the head of a firm which at one time controlled half the trade between the United States and China, who shipped at seventeen, and was a captain and manager in the China trade at nineteen. But such facts touched Melville not at all. “At that early age,” he says, “I was as unambitious as a man of sixty.” Melville’s brother, Tom, came to be a sea-captain. Melville’s was a different destiny.

So he trudged with his friend among the boats along the water front, where, after some little searching, they hit upon a ship for Liverpool. In the cabin they found the suave and bearded Captain, dapperly dressed, and humming a brisk air as he promenaded up and down: not such a completely odious creature, despite Melville’s final contempt for him. The conversation was concluded by Melville signing up as a “boy,” at terms not wildly lucrative for Melville.

“Pray, captain,” said Melville’s amiable bungling friend, “how much do you generally pay a handsome fellow like this?”

“Well,” said the captain, looking grave and profound, “we are not so particular about beauty, and we never give more than three dollars to a green lad.”

Melville’s next move was to sell his gun: an experience which gives him occasion to discourse on pawn shops and the unenviable hardships of paupers. With the two and a half dollars that he reaped by the sale of his gun, and in almost criminal innocence of the outfit he would need, he bought a red woollen shirt, a tarpaulin hat, a belt, and a jack-knife. In his improvidence, he was ill provided, indeed, with everything calculated to make his situation aboard ship at all comfortable, or even tolerable. He was without mattress or bed-clothes, or table-tools; without pilot-cloth jackets, or trousers, or guernsey frocks, or oil-skin suits, or sea-boots and the other things which old seamen used to carry in their chests. As he himself says, his sea-outfit was “something like that of the Texan rangers, whose uniform, they say, consists of a shirt collar and a pair of spurs.” His purchases made, he did a highly typical thing: “I had only one penny left, so I walked out to the end of the pier, and threw the penny into the water.”

That night, after dinner, Melville went to his room to try on his red woollen shirt before the glass, to see what sort of a looking sailor he would make. But before beginning this ritual before the mirror, he “locked the door carefully, and hung a towel over the knob, so that no one could peep through the keyhole.” It is said that throughout his life Melville clung to this practice of draping door-knobs. “As soon as I got into the shirt,” Melville goes on to say, “I began to feel sort of warm and red about the face, which I found was owing to the reflection of the dyed wool upon my skin. After that, I took a pair of scissors and went to cutting my hair, which was very long. I thought every little would help in making me a light hand to run aloft.”

Next morning, before he reached the ship, it began raining hard, so it was plain there would be no getting to sea that day. But having once said farewell to his friends, and feeling a repetition of the ceremony would be awkward, Melville boarded the ship, where a large man in a large dripping pea-jacket, who was calking down the main-hatches, directed him in no cordial terms to the forecastle. Rather different was Dana’s appearance on board the brig Pilgrim on August 14, 1834, “in full sea-rig, with my chest containing an outfit for a two or three years’ voyage.” Nor did Dana begin in the forecastle.

In the dark damp stench of that deserted hole, Melville selected an empty bunk. In the middle of this he deposited the slim bundle of his belongings, and penniless and dripping spent the day walking hungry among the wharves: a day’s peregrination that he recounts with vivid and remorseless realism.

At night he returned to the forecastle, where he met a thick-headed lad from Lancaster of about his own years. Glad of any companionship, Melville and this lubber boy crawled together in the same bunk. But between the high odour of the forecastle, the loud snoring of his bed-fellow, wet, cold and hungry, he went up on deck, where he walked till morning. When the groceries on the wharf opened, he went to make a breakfast of a glass of water. This made him qualmish. “My head was dizzy, and I went staggering along the walk, almost blind.”

By the time Melville got back to the ship, everything was in an uproar. The pea-jacket man was there ordering about men in the riggings, and people were bringing off chickens, and pigs, and beef, and vegetables from the shore. Melville’s initial task was the cleaning out of the pig-pen; after this he was sent up the top-mast with a bucket of a thick lobbered gravy, which slush he dabbed over the mast. This over, and, in the increasing bustle everything having been made ready to sail, the word was passed to go to dinner fore and aft. “Though the sailors surfeited with eating and drinking ashore did not touch the salt beef and potatoes which the black cook handed down into the forecastle: and though this left the whole allowance to me; to my surprise, I found that I could eat little or nothing; for now I only felt deadly faint, but not hungry.”

Only a lunatic, of course, would expect to find very commodious or airy quarters, any drawing-room amenities, Chautauqua uplift, or Y.M.C.A. insipidities aboard a merchantman of the old sailing days. Nathaniel Ames, a Harvard graduate who a little before Melville’s time shipped before the mast, records that on his first vessel, men seeking berths in the forecastle were ordered to bring certificates of good character from their clergymen: an unusual requirement, surely. In more than one memoir, there is mention of a “religious ship”: an occasional mention that speaks volumes for the heathenism of the majority. Dana says of one of the mates aboard the Pilgrim: “He was too easy and amiable for the mate of a merchantman. He was not the man to call a sailor a ‘son of a bitch’ and knock him down with a hand-spike.” And J. Grey Jewell, sometime United States Consul at Singapore, in his book Among Our Sailors makes a sober and elaborately documented attempt to strip the life of a sailor of its romantic glamour, to show that it is not a “round of fun and frolic and jollity with the advantages of seeing many distant lands and people thrown in”: an effort that would seem to be unnecessary except to boy readers of Captain Marryat and dime thrillers.

Melville’s shipmates were, it goes without saying, rough and illiterate men. With typical irony, he says that with a good degree of complacency and satisfaction he compared his own character with that of his shipmates: “for I had previously associated with persons of a very discreet life, so that there was little opportunity to magnify myself by comparing myself with my neighbours.” In a more serious mood, he says of sailors as a class: “the very fact of their being sailors argues a certain restlessness and sensualism of character, ignorance, and depravity. They are deemed almost the refuse of the earth; and the romantic view of them is principally had through romances.” And their chances of improvement are not increased, he contends, by the fact that “after the vigorous discipline, hardships, dangers and privations of a voyage, they are set adrift in a foreign port, and exposed to a thousand enticements, which, under the circumstances, would be hard even for virtue to withstand, unless virtue went about on crutches.” It was a tradition for centuries fostered in the naval service that the sailor was a dog, a different human species from the landsman, without laws and usages to protect him. This tradition survived among merchant sailors as an unhappy anachronism even into the twentieth century, when an American Congress was reluctant to bestow upon seamen the decencies of existence enjoyed by the poorest labourer ashore. Melville’s shipmates did not promise to be men of the calibre of which Maria Gansevoort would have approved.

With his ship, the Highlander, streaming out through the Narrows, past sights rich in association to his boyish recollection; streaming out and away from all familiar smells and sights and sounds, Melville found himself “a sort of Ishmael in the ship, without a single friend or companion, and I began to feel a hatred growing up in me against the whole crew.” In other words, Melville was a very homesick boy. But he blended common sense with homesickness. “My heart was like lead, and I felt bad enough, Heaven knows; but I soon learnt that sailors breathe nothing about such things, but strive their best to appear all alive and hearty.” And circumstances helped him live up to this gallant insight. For, as he says, “there was plenty of work to be done, which kept my thoughts from becoming too much for me.”