Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
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