The High Gods, in a playful and prodigal mood, gave to Melville, to Julia Ward Howe, to Lowell, to Kingsley, to Ruskin, to Whitman, and to Queen Victoria, the same birth year. On August 1, 1819, Herman Melville was born at No. 6 Pearl Street, New York City.

Melville’s vagabondage as a common sailor on a merchantman, on whaling vessels, and in the United States Navy, together with his Bohemian associations with cannibals, mutineers, and some of the choicest dregs of our Christian civilisation, must have wrenched a chorus of groans from a large congregation of shocked ancestral ghosts. For Melville was descended from a long and prolific line of the best American stock. Through his mother, Maria Gansevoort, he traced back to the earliest Dutch emigrants to New York; through his father, Allan Melville, to pre-revolutionary Scotch-Irish emigrants to New England. Both of his grandfathers distinguished themselves in the Revolutionary War. His ancestors, on both sides, came to this country in the days when some of the best blood of Europe was being transferred to America.

Though Melville was too ironic a genius ever to have been guilty of the ill-breeding that makes an ostentation of ancestry, still he looked back upon his descent with self-conscious pride: a pride drawn by childhood absorption from his parents who, by resting on the achievements of their forebears, added several cubits to their stature. Lacking the prophetic vision to glory in being ancestors, they chose the more comfortable rÔle of parading as descendants. Melville’s father, Allan, was sufficiently absorbed in his genealogy to compile, in 1818, an elaborately branching family tree that sent its master root back to one Sir Richard de Melvill, del Compte de Fife, a worthy of the thirteenth century. And at the proud conclusion of his labours he inscribed the Melville motto, Denique Coelum—“Heaven at last.” Melville’s mother, Maria Gansevoort, though too absorbed in domesticity to compete with Allan in drawing up a parallel document, still sat opposite her spouse with a stiff spine, conscious that she could counter his ancestry, grandfather for grandfather. It is true, she had no thirteenth century count to fall back upon; and though her line lost itself in a cluster of breweries, they were very substantial breweries, and owned by a race of stalwart and affluent and uncompromising burghers. Her ancestor, Harmen Harmense Van Gansevoort, was brewing in Beverwyck as early as 1660, and with sufficient success to acquire such extended investments in land that he bequeathed to his heirs a baronial inheritance. During the centuries following his death his name crossed itself with that of the Van Rensselaers, the Ten Broeks, the Douws, the Van Schaicks,—with the proudest names that descended from the earlier Colonial Dutch families. Melville’s mother, Maria, is remembered as a cold, proud woman, arrogant in the sense of her name, her blood, and the affluence of her forebears.

She was the only daughter and oldest child in a family of six, of General Peter Gansevoort and Catharine Van Schaick. Her father, born in Albany, New York, July 17, 1749, was among the outstanding patriots of the American Revolution. He was among the troops which accompanied Schuyler, in 1775, in his advance towards Canada. In December of the same year he was with Montgomery, as Major, in the unfortunate assault upon Quebec. In the summer of 1777, when Burgoyne’s semi-barbarous invading army was slowly advancing down Lake Champlain and the Hudson, he was Colonel in command of Fort Stanwix. By his obstinate and gallant defence of Fort Stanwix in August, 1777, he prevented the juncture of St. Leger with Burgoyne, and so changed the course of the whole subsequent campaign. Washington keenly and warmly recognised this, and Congress passed a vote of thanks to Colonel Gansevoort. Peter Gansevoort did other brilliant service in the Revolutionary War, and in 1809, when the War of 1812 was approaching, he was made brigadier general in the United States army. He was sheriff of Albany County from 1790 to 1792, and regent of the University of New York from 1808 until his death in 1812.

Of his sons, Hon. Peter Gansevoort, who was born in Albany in 1789, was long one of the most prominent and honoured citizens of Albany. The elder son, General Herman Gansevoort, from whom Melville received his name, lived at Gansevoort, a village in the township of Northumberland, Saratoga County, New York. In 1832-33, the brothers built on the site of the birthplace of their father what is now the Stanwix Hotel. As a boy, Melville spent most of his summers as guest of the Gansevoorts, and in his novel Pierre, the childhood recollections of his hero are transparent autobiographical references to his own early memories. “On the meadows which sloped away from the shaded rear of the manorial mansion, far to the winding river, an Indian battle had been fought, in the earlier days of the colony, and in that battle the great-grandfather of Pierre, mortally wounded, had sat unhorsed on his saddle in the grass, with his dying voice still cheering his men in the fray.... Far beyond these plains, a day’s walk for Pierre, rose the storied heights, where in the Revolutionary War his grandfather had for several months defended a rude but all-important stockaded fort, against the repeated combined assaults of Indians, Tories and Regulars. From behind that fort, the gentlemanly but murderous half-breed, Brandt, had fled, but survived to dine with General (Gansevoort) in the amiable times that followed that vindictive war. All the associations of Saddle-Meadows were full of pride to Pierre. The (Gansevoort) deeds by which their estate had been so long held, bore the cyphers of three Indian kings, the aboriginal and only conveyancers of those noble woods and plains. Thus loftily, in the days of his circumscribed youth, did Pierre glance along the background of his race.... Or how think you it would be with this youthful Pierre if every day, descending to breakfast, he caught sight of an old tattered British banner or two, hanging over an arched window in the hall: and those banners captured by his grandfather, the general, in fair fight?”

On February 22, 1832, so it is recorded in Joel Munsell, The Annals of Albany (Vol. IX, Albany, 1859) “the military celebrated the centennial anniversary of the birthday of Washington. Col. Peter Gansevoort, on this occasion, presented to the artillery a large brass Drum, a trophy of the revolution, taken from the British on the 22nd August, 1777, at Fort Stanwix, by his father, General Peter Gansevoort.” The sound of this drum was tapping in Melville’s memory, when he goes on to ask: “Or how think you it would be if every time he heard the band of the military company of the village, he should distinctly recognise the peculiar tap of a British kettle-drum also captured by his grandfather in fair fight, and afterwards suitably inscribed on the brass and bestowed upon the Saddle-Meadows Artillery Corps? Or how think you it would be, if sometimes of a mild meditative Fourth of July morning in the country, he carried out with him into the garden by way of ceremonial cane, a long, majestic, silver-tipped staff, a Major-General’s baton, once wielded on the plume-nodding and musket-flashing review by the same grandfather several times here-in-before mentioned?”

Not content to leave this a rhetorical query, Melville answers his own catechism in unambiguous terms: “I should say that considering Pierre was quite young and very unsophisticated as yet, and withal rather high-blooded; and sometimes read the History of the Revolutionary War, and possessed a mother who very frequently made remote social allusions to the epaulettes of the Major-General his grandfather;—I should say that upon all these occasions, the way it must have been with him was a very proud, elated sort of way.”

Melville did not preserve throughout his long life this early and proud elation in his descent, and in later years he thought it necessary to apologise for the short-sighted and provincial self-satisfaction that he absorbed from his parents in his early youth. “And if this seem but too fond and foolish in Pierre,” he pleads in a mood both of apology and of prophecy; “and if you tell me that this sort of thing in him showed him no sterling Democrat, and that a truly noble man should never brag of any arm but his own; then I beg you to consider again that this Pierre was but a youngster as yet. And believe me, you will pronounce Pierre a thorough-going Democrat in time; perhaps a little too Radical altogether to your fancy.”

Radical he came to be, indeed: it was the necessary penalty of being cursed with an intelligence above that of the smug and shallow optimism of his country and his period. Democratic he may have been, but only in the most unpopular meaning of that once noble term. He was a democrat in the same relentless sense that Dante or Milton were democrats. Lucifer rebelled, let it be remembered, to make Heaven “safe for Democracy:” the first experiment in popular government. “Hell,” says Melville, “is a democracy of devils.” In Mardi, Melville indulges lengthy reflections on a certain “chanticleer people” who boast boisterously of themselves: “Saw ye ever such a land as this? Is it not a great and extensive republic? Pray, observe how tall we are; just feel of our thighs; are we not a glorious people? We are all Kings here; royalty breathes in the common air.” Before the spectacle of this lusty republicanism, Melville exhibits unorthodox doubts. “There’s not so much freedom here as these freemen think,” he makes a strolling deity observe; “I laugh and admire.... Freedom is more social than political. And its real felicity is not to be shared. That is of a man’s own individual getting and holding. Little longer, may it please you, can republics subsist now, than in days gone by. Though all men approached sages in wisdom, some would yet be more wise than others; and so, the old degrees would be preserved. And no exemption would an equality of knowledge furnish, from the inbred servility of mortal to mortal; from all the organic causes, which inevitably divide mankind into brigades and battalions, with captains at their heads. Civilisation has not ever been the brother of equality.”

As Melville grew away from boyhood, he came to distinguish between the accidentals and the essentials that distinguish man from man. At his mother’s breast he had absorbed with her milk a vivid and exaggerated belief that the accidents concomitant upon birth that range men into artificial classes, were ingrain in the very woof of the universe. When he later discovered that his parents tinted life with a very perishable dye, he also found, set below their cheap calico patterns, an unchangeable texture of sharper and deeper and more variegated colours. And he discovered, too, that his uncritical boyhood pride in his blood was, withal, not entirely a mere savage delight in calico prints.

He was, as he boasts in the sub-title of Redburn, “the son-of-a-gentleman,” reared in an environment rich with the mellowing influences of splendid family traditions. And these associations left an indelible stamp upon him. In Mardi, in speaking of the impossibility of belying one’s true nature while at sea and in the fellowship of sailors, he offers himself as an example to point. “Aboard of all ships in which I have sailed,” he says, “I have invariably been known by a sort of drawing-room title. Not,—let me hurry to say,—that I put hand in tar bucket with a squeamish air, or ascended the rigging with a Chesterfieldian mince. No, no, I was never better than my vocation. I showed as brown a chest, and as hard a hand, as the tarriest tar of them all. And never did shipmate of mine upbraid me with a genteel disinclination to duty, though it carried me to truck of main-mast, or jib-boom-end, in the most wolfish blast that ever howled. Whence, then, this annoying appellation? for annoying it most assuredly was. It was because of something in me that could not be hidden; stealing out in an occasional polysyllable; an otherwise incomprehensible deliberation in dining; remote, unguarded allusions to belle-lettres affairs; and other trifles superfluous to mention.”

Though his grandfather, General Peter Gansevoort, had been dead seven years when Melville was born, so vital were the relics of him that surrounded Melville’s boyhood, so reverently was his memory tended by his first child and only daughter, that the image of Peter Gansevoort was one of the most potent influences during Melville’s most impressionable years. The heroic presence that dominated Melville’s imagination, “measured six feet four inches in height; during a fire in the old manorial mansion, with one dash of the foot, he had smitten down an oaken door, to admit the buckets of his negro slaves; Pierre had often tried on his military vest, which still remained an heirloom at Saddle-Meadows, and found the pockets below his knees, and plenty additional room for a fair-sized quarter-cask within its buttoned girth; in a night scuffle in the wilderness before the Revolutionary War, he had annihilated two Indian savages by making reciprocal bludgeons of their heads. And all this was done by the mildest hearted, the most blue-eyed gentleman in the world, who, according to the patriarchal fashion of those days, was a gentle, white-haired worshipper of all the household gods; the gentlest husband and the gentlest father; the kindest master to his slaves; of the most wonderful unruffledness of temper; a serene smoker of his after dinner pipe; a forgiver of many injuries; a sweet-hearted, charitable Christian; in fine, a pure, cheerful, childlike, blue-eyed, divine old man; in whose meek, majestic soul the lion and the lamb embraced—fit image of his God.” His portrait was to Melville “a glorious gospel framed and hung upon the wall, and declaring to all people, as from the Mount, that man is a noble, god-like being, full of choicest juices; made up of strength and beauty.” Most of the images of God that Melville met in actual secular embodiment, suffered tragically by comparison with this image of mortal perfection which Melville nursed in his heart. Most men that Melville met, in falling short of the mythical excellence of Peter Gansevoort, whom he never knew in the flesh, seemed to Melville, to be libels upon their Divine Original. According to Melville’s account, he could never look upon his grandfather’s military portrait without an infinite and mournful longing to meet his living aspect in actual life. Yet such was the temper of Melville’s mind, his life such a tragic career of dreaming of elusive perfection, dreams invariably to be dashed and bruised and shattered by an incompatible reality, that it is safe to surmise—with no impiety to the memory of Peter Gansevoort—that had Melville known his maternal grandfather, the old General’s six feet four of blood and bone would have shrunk, with his extravagance of all human excellence, to more truly historical dimensions.

MELVILLE’S GRANDFATHERS

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 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 Moeurs 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:

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.