Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
_May 27, 1818_--Left Melville house at 1/2 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.
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