Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic
that Allan was not consciously furnishing Miss Gansevoort with any of
the stage-properties of hypocrisy. Mrs. Chapone’s pronouncements were
then being accepted by the adoring middle class as Protestant Bulls.
And Allan purchased Mrs. Chapone’s little volume with his ear to the
verdict of Mrs. Delany, who wrote: “They speak to the heart as well as
to the head; and I know no book (next to the Bible) more entertaining
or edifying.”
It was within a few months before his marriage that Allan, in the most
orthodox manner of that “Happy Half Century” so happily celebrated by
Miss Agnes Repplier, undertook to heighten the virtues of Miss Maria
Gansevoort by exposing her to the “pure and prevailing superiority”
of Mrs. Chapone. For Allan was a cautious man, and marriage, he knew,
was a step not lightly to be made. “I do not want a Helen, or a Saint
Cecilia, or a Madame Dacier,” said Coelebs, in sketching an ideal wife;
“yet must she be elegant or I could not love her; sensible, or I could
not respect her; prudent, or I could not confide in her; well-informed,
or she could not educate my children; well-bred, or she could not
entertain my friends; pious, or I should not be happy with her, because
the prime comfort in a companion for life is the delightful hope that
she will be a companion for eternity.”
Maria was patently elegant, well-bred and pious. The present of Dr.
Akenside and Mrs. Chapone gave her generous opportunity of coming to
be well-informed. But Allan did not hesitate to make further and more
direct contributions to her information. Prudence he rated prime among
virtues; and he approached marriage with Miltonic preconceptions. By
no means confident that the eternal truths enunciated by Mrs. Chapone
would penetrate Maria’s female intellect, Allan prudently summarised
the most sacred verities of the volume in two manuscript introductions.
Maria’s copy of the _Letters_ bears three inscriptions made by Allan on
three separate fly-leaves. The first is in a formal upright hand, rigid
in propriety:
“Prudence should be the governing principle of Woman’s existence,
domestick life her peculiar sphere; no rank can exempt her from an
observation of the laws of the former, from an attention to the
duties of the latter. To neglect both is to violate the sacred
statutes of social happiness, and to frustrate the all-wise intention
of that Providence who framed them.”
In the second inscription, made with acknowledgment to Miss Owensong,
Allan takes all the precautions of a Coelebs to make certain that at
his table “the eulogist of female ignorance might dine in security
against the intrusion and vanity of erudition.” The inscription reads:
“The liberal cultivation of the female _mind_ is the best security
for the virtues of the female _heart_; and genius, talents and grace,
where regulated by prudence and governed by good sense, are never
incompatible with domestic qualities or meek and modest virtues.”
On the third fly-leaf, this double pronouncement is presented to “Miss
Maria Gansevoort” and “from A. M.” Allan had doubtless learned from
Mrs. Chapone that “our feelings are not given us for ornament, but to
spur us on to right action.” And Miss Maria may have taken to heart
Mrs. Chapone’s dictum that “compassion is not impressed upon the human
heart, only to adorn the fair face with tears and to give an agreeable
languor to the eyes.” There survives no trace of a record of Allan’s
indulging emotions for decorative purposes. How far his sentiments were
moved in “right action” to melt Miss Maria to becoming compassion can
never be known. During the months immediately before the marriage,
however, the even tenor of Allan’s journal is jolted by the unusual
acknowledgment of the existence of his sisters, and the bald mention of
a specified number of miles covered in a “pleasure wagon.” Miss Maria,
when not his undisputed property by rites of holy matrimony, he never
mentions in his journal.
Maria kept no journal; if she presented Allan with inscribed volumes,
Allan has eradicated all such breaches of maiden modesty. The only
intimate records of Maria that survive are three of her letters,
comments upon her in Allan’s letters, Melville’s elaborate idealisation
of her in the person of the mother of Pierre, and a vague memory handed
down orally by her descendants.
MARIA GANSEVOORT MELVILLE
Maria was born in 1791 and died in 1871. Of her girlhood, little
or nothing is very specifically known. After Melville’s marriage,
she spent the greater part of the remaining years of her life as a
dependant in his household, and the oral traditions that survive
of her do not halo her memory. She is remembered in such terms as
“cold,” “worldly,” “formal,” “haughty” and “proper”; as putting
the highest premium upon appearances; as frigidly contemptuous of
Melville’s domestic economy, and of the home-made clothes of his four
children. Though she condescended eight times to motherhood, such
was her animal vigour and her ferocity of pride that she preserved
to her death a remarkable regality of appearance. She is said to
have made a completely competent wife to Allan, superior both to any
undue intellectual distractions, and to any of the demoralisations
of domesticity. She managed his household, she bore and reared his
children, and she did both with a vigorous and unruffled efficiency,
without sign of worry or regret. There persists the story--significant
even if apocryphal--that each afternoon, enthroned upon a high
four-poster, she would nap in order to freshen herself for Allan’s
evening arrival, her children seated silently on a row of low stools
ranged on the floor at the side of her bed. In his death, as in his
life, she cherished the image of Allan--with that of her father,
General Gansevoort--as the mirror of manly perfection.
In _Pierre_, Melville is said to have drawn an essentially accurate
portrait of his mother in the character and person of Mrs. Glendinning.
Mrs. Glendinning is presented as a “haughty widow; a lady who
externally furnished a singular example of the preservative and
beautifying influences of unfluctuating rank, health, and wealth, when
joined to a fine mind of medium culture, uncankered by any inconsolable
grief, and never worn by sordid cares. In mature age, the rose still
miraculously clung to her cheek; litheness had not yet completely
uncoiled itself from her waist, nor smoothness unscrolled itself from
her brow, nor diamondness departed from her eyes.” Proudly conscious
of this preservation, never, even in the most intimate associations of
life, did she ever appear “in any dishabille that was not eminently
becoming.” For “she was vividly aware how immense was that influence,
which, even in the closest ties of the heart, the merest appearances
make upon the mind.” And to her pride of appearance she added “her
pride of birth, her pride of affluence, her pride of purity, and all
the Semiramian pride of woman:” a pride “which in a life of nearly
fifty years had never betrayed her into a single published impropriety,
or caused her one known pang of the heart.”... “Infinite Haughtiness
had first fashioned her; and then the haughty world had further moulded
her; nor had a haughty Ritual omitted to finish her.” Nor must Allan’s
moralisings, and Dr. Akenside, and Mrs. Barbauld, and Mrs. Chapone, be
denied their due credit in contributing to the finished product.
Between Maria and her son there existed a striking personal
resemblance. From his mother, too, Melville seems to have inherited a
constitution of very remarkable vigour, and all the white intensity
of the Gansevoort aptitude for anger. But here the resemblance
ceased. In the youthful Pierre, Mrs. Glendinning felt “a triumphant
maternal pride,” for in her son “she saw her own graces strangely
translated into the opposite sex.” But of his mother’s love for
him, Pierre entertained precocious and Meredithian suspicions: “She
loveth me, ay;--but why? Had I been cast in a cripple’s mould, how
then? Now do I remember that in her most caressing love, there ever
gleamed some scaly, glittering folds of pride.... Before my glass she
stands--pride’s priestess--and to her mirrored image, not to me, she
offers up her offering of kisses.”
Strangely must she have been baffled by this mirrored image of
herself,--fascinated, and at the same time contemptuously revolted.
What sympathy, what understanding could she know for this thing of
her blood that in obscurity, in poverty, a failure in the eyes of
the world, returned from barbarism to dream wild dreams that were
increasingly unsalable? As a boy, all his passionate cravings for
sympathy, for affection, were rebuffed by her haughty reserve, and
recoiled within him. Fatherless and so mothered, he felt with Pierre,
“that deep in him lurked some divine unidentifiableness, that owed
no earthly kith or kin. Yet was this feeling entirely lonesome and
orphan-like. He felt himself driven out an infant Ishmael into the
desert, with no maternal Hagar to accompany and comfort him.” In
_Redburn_, with the mother image like a fury in his heart, he describes
himself as “a sort of Ishmael.” “Call me Ishmael,” is the striking
opening sentence of _Moby-Dick_; and its no less striking close: “On
the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last.
It was the devious cruising _Rachel_, that in retracing search after
her missing children, only found another orphan.” Of his mother he is
reported to have said in later life: “She hated me.”
It seems not altogether fantastic to contend that the Gorgon face that
Melville bore in his heart; the goading impalpable image that made
his whole life a pilgrimage of despair: that was the cold beautiful
face of his mother, Maria Gansevoort. One shudders to think how such a
charge would have violated Maria’s proprieties. But in the treacherous
ambiguities of _Pierre_, Melville himself hovers on the verge of this
insight. Pierre is haunted by a mysterious face, which he thus invokes:
“The face!--the face!--The face steals down upon me. Mysterious girl!
who art thou? Take thy thin fingers from me; I am affianced, and not to
thee. Surely, thou lovest not me?--that were most miserable for thee,
and me. What, _who_ art thou? Oh! wretched vagueness--too familiar to
me, yet inexplicable,--unknown, utterly unknown!” To the mind of Pierre
it was a face “backward hinting of some irrevocable sin; forward,
pointing to some inevitable ill; hovering between Tartarian misery and
Paradisaic beauty.” In _Pierre_, this face, “compounded so of hell and
heaven,” is the instrument by which the memory of Pierre’s father is
desecrated, Pierre’s mother is driven to insanity and death, and Pierre
himself is utterly ruined. _Pierre_ is a book to send a Freudian into
ravishment.
Allan Melville, aged thirty-two, and Maria Gansevoort, nine years
younger, were married on the fourth of October, 1814. In his journal,
Allan has left this record of their wedding-trip.
_October 4, 1814_--Left Albany at 11 A.M. in a hack with
Mrs. M. and Helen (his youngest sister, in her
sixteenth year). Dined at Stottard’s, Lapan, &
slept at Beths Lebanon.
_October 5, 1814_--Left Lebanon at 9, dined at Pittsfield
& slept at Worthington.
_October 6, 1814_--Left Worthington at 1/2 past 9, dined at
Southampton & slept at Belchertown.
_October 7, 1814_--Left Belchertown at 9, dined at
Brookfield & slept at Worcester.
_October 8, 1814_--Left Worcester at 1/2 past 9, dined at
Farmingham & arrived at Boston at 5 P.M.
For five years following this initial daily shifting of bed and board,