Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
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 1/2 past 3
P.M.--10 miles--& met with a very hospitable &
friendly reception from his lordship & family.