Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
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
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