Herman Melville
faced the gritty, unassimilable substratum Melville explored. Melville,
like Buddha, left a happy and successful career behind him, and
plunged into those cold black depths, the depths of the sunless ocean,
the blackness of interstellar space; and though he proved that life
could not be lived under those conditions, he brought back into the
petty triumphs of the age the one element that it completely lacked:
the tragic sense of life: the sense that the highest human flight is
sustained over an unconquered and perhaps an unconquerable abyss. On
the peak of Melville’s vision, a man stands poised as on the spur of a
glacier: nature offers no shelter, and humanity does not succour him:
he is alone. Will he live or die? One cannot say. But if he returns to
the warm valleys and the friendly villages he will be another man; and
a part of him, a precious part, will forever remain alone, impregnable.
OLYMPIAN
CHAPTER ONE: BITTER MORNING
The society into which Herman Melville was born was in the fullest
sense of the word a provincial one. His heritage and his work united
him with that society; and when its occupations were undermined and its
customs effaced by the great tide of destruction that marked the Civil
War, he himself was intimately involved in its ruin.
By a provincial society I mean one which finds its sources and
motives within its own region, and that achieves a certain balance
and continuity by a restricted development. To understand Melville’s
background, one must think back to a time when New York was only one
of a number of Atlantic ports that claimed the commerce of the seas
and the wealth that it brought: Salem was almost as important: so
were Boston and Baltimore and Charleston: it was little more than the
accident of a regular sailing packet line that made New York take
the lead in attracting population, that, and the opening of a direct
water-route into mid-America, via the Erie Canal, which was still
a-building in 1819, the year that Herman Melville was born.
The United States, except as an abstract political entity, scarcely
existed. There were eagles on the furniture: there were eagles on the
dollars: there were flags and martial birds on mirrors and bedspreads
and glass and china: but a good part of the community, certainly in
the older, more settled regions, was hardly yet political-minded,
still less conscious of a mystic relation with the other parts. During
the War of 1812 New England, threatened with economic ruin, was on
the point of breaking loose from the political union: and though
the national government coined money in quarter dollars, people
still referred to such coins as two shillings. If Rip van Winkle
was surprised at the changes that had taken place during his long
nap, a modern observer of that provincial society would be even more
astounded at the lack of them. Whitman, writing a whole generation
later, and loathing the notion of secession, still had a consciousness
of the individuality and independence of the separate states which the
strongest defender of states’ rights never expressed after the Civil
War.
This provincial society had its own economic foundations, its own
locus, its own seat of authority: it differed in a marked way from
that which was developing on the frontier: the drama of one of
Cooper’s best books, The Pioneers, is chiefly concerned with that
contrast. The frontier society was a flowing and moving one: the
only thing that united it was the common flag that waved over it
and the Constitution, to which its officers paid their superficial
respect. Its members came from anywhere, got a living anyhow, and
pushed on, in an uneasy, restless search for more fertile land, wilder
creatures, greater distance from their neighbours--or merely, from
the habit of locomotion. It was strenuous, uncertain, heroic; but
once the settlement was effected, once the town was founded and the
building-lots divided and the outlaws rounded up, it was unbearably
tame: the excitements of civilized life, the clash of ideas, the
conflict of cultures, the absorption of experience, did not occupy the
pioneer: even when he adopted the external habits of the red man, his
weapons, his tools, his maize and dried meat, he avoided the inner
content of his culture. In provincial society we are nearer to Europe,
that is, nearer to a settled life, to order, authority, tradition. In
every colony there was an historic mixture of nationalities and stocks,
and that peculiar to New York, English and Dutch, with a dash of French
Huguenots, had at last begun to bubble and ferment: presently a
Whitman, a Melville, came out of it.
In provincial society, the family was still a prime reality; and in New
York it was not less so, certainly, because of the fact that the Dutch
had founded great landed proprietorships, like those of the Gansevoorts
to whom Herman Melville belonged on his maternal side. Two hundred
years of inherited wealth create family pride and all the futile
snobberies of caste: they also create a firm sense of self-possession.
Washington Irving, who was one of the conquering English, might laugh
at these Dutch burghers and patroons: but from their manorial seats
along the Hudson and the Mohawk, the Van Rensselaers and the Schuylers
and the Gansevoorts could view this mockery with sleepy disdain. They
had only to sit tight to be eminent; as the population grew, the value
of the land doubled and quadrupled, and in spite of rent wars and the
abolition of feudal privileges, the landed families rose to the top
like cream.
The Dutch throve in this expansive environment, on farms that stretched
from hilltop to hilltop, as they throve by intensive activity in the
lowlands by the Zuyder Zee: if their old canals were covered over and
filled up in New Amsterdam, they still had their commodious stone or
brick houses in the country; there was one such at Gansevoort, where
the Gansevoorts lived, not far from Saratoga. The fine arts did not
find disciples among these great families: the Copleys, Trumbulls,
Stuarts, Peales had English names: but the crafts were cultivated
in great variety: the architecture was straightforward and in minor
matters, like the horizontal windows and the peculiar gambrel roof,
original: the landscape was well treated; and above all, there was
food, wild pigeon and grouse and deer, well-fed beef and succulent
ducks and geese and great handsome cheeses. When Herman is a little boy
his mother will remember Uncle Peter Gansevoort, at Albany, with a tub
of five hundred pickled oysters.
“A thoroughly developed gentleman is always robust and healthy.” When
Melville wrote these words he was thinking of the great gentlemen
between whose legs he had walked as a little boy, and particularly,
perhaps, of one he used to hear about, that grandest of old fellows,
General Peter Gansevoort, a mighty soldier during the Revolution and
a great figure among men. He had died but seven years before Melville
was born; many of his remains, including a portrait by Stuart, were
still visible; and his legend stayed on the tongues of those who had
known him. Six foot four he was, with an appetite and a digestion fit
to keep that colossal frame in motion. Now, among all the pleasures of
life, positive health--not mere freedom from disorder and disease--is
surely the first: living needs no extra justification when the blood is
clear and all the juices are flowing harmoniously. In Melville’s youth
even a city lad could sail a boat, tramp into the country, shoot game,
experience the active, outdoor life which has always been the mainstay
of the aristocracy, and which doubtless explains its ability to conquer
and control the urban populace, habituated to the ledger, the bench,
the desk, and the foul air thereof. Melville had scarcely reached
maturity before some of these natural pleasures were curtailed in the
city of his birth, so that, to preserve them, William Cullen Bryant
launched the campaign to create Central Park.
“Too often,” Melville wrote in 1852, “the American that himself
makes a fortune, builds him a great metropolitan house, in the most
metropolitan street, of the most metropolitan town. Whereas, a European
of the same sort would thereupon migrate into the country. That herein
the European hath the better of it, no poet, no philosopher, and no
aristocrat will deny.” Melville’s ancestors had kept close to the
country: Grandfather Peter and Uncle Herman at Gansevoort, Uncle Peter
at Albany, little more than a country town, Great Uncle Thomas Melville
on his farm, eastward in the Berkshires. Although Melville was born
in New York, he was nourished by the agricultural experience of the
back-country: when he idealized his early life in Pierre, he gave his
hero a twenty-mile ride or a ten-mile walk every day, a turn at felling
a hemlock in the forest, or boxing or fencing or boating. That was
something like a foundation, and it resembled Melville’s own. When we
come to a later period of Melville’s life we will not be tempted, if
we remember these things, to overstress his doldrums or his adolescent
uncertainties: for we shall not forget that he became a magnificently
healthy animal--and healthy animals itch to use their energies and test
their muscles.
2
Against the vigorous, fleshy life of the provincial countryside, the
immediate environment in which Melville was born must seem a little
petty and painful around the neck; and it was. Herman’s father, Allan
Melville, was by trade an importer of French goods, and by every
evidence of physiognomy, notebook, and letter a trivial but not
uncultivated man. The portrait of Allan as a young man that survives
is cruel in its exposure of Allan’s simpering elegance: his lip is
weak and his eye has a vacuous leer, and when one puts these qualities
alongside the careful pedanticism of his letters, one is left with a
mixture of odious characteristics.
Allan was completely given to the outward amenities of life. He valued
name: he was not unconscious of this, perhaps, when he married a
Gansevoort, nor was he less so the year before Herman was born, when
he visited his titled Scotch cousins at the original Melville seat.
Deportment and modest behaviour were only less in Allan’s eyes than
wifely name and beauty: when he married Maria he made sure, remembering
it may be a disturbing levity in Napoleonic France, which he had known
as a young man, that she saw eye to eye with him on every point. He was
the sort of man from whom one expects prudence without imagination.
He doubtless had passionate adventures before he married, for he was
thirty-two when that happened: but he was circumspect in all things,
and if the adventures left any tell-tale traces, we have no better
reason for thinking so than the fact that Melville confronted his
hero with such a crack in his father’s image, in his novel, Pierre.
Such a man may do very well in business, so long as no unforeseen
circumstances occur: not doing the wrong thing will suffice in many
occupations for actually doing the right thing--and one may be sure
that Allan Melville had a sense of gentlemanly correctness in all his
dealings. Business was not yet a ruthless obsession: one expected to
retire from it into a more cultivated existence; indeed, such an early
withdrawal was the capital mark of success.
Maria Melville, born Gansevoort, seems to have been Allan’s counterpart
in many ways: each carried the same tune in a different register. Like
Mrs. Glendinning, in Pierre, she was a noble creature, but “formed
chiefly for the gilded prosperities of life, bred and expanded in
all developments under the sole influence of hereditary forms and
world-usages.” She was correct, formal, proud; she valued a high