Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
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