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:

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 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:

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:

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.

For five years following this initial daily shifting of bed and board, Allan and his wife lived in Albany. The monotony of this residence was broken by the birth of two children,—Gansevoort, and Helen Marie,—and Allan’s trip to Europe in the spring of 1818: the enforced business trip, already mentioned, that took him to the home of his titled Scotch cousins. Upon his return he resolved to leave Albany, and settle in what he appreciatively called “the greatest universal mart in the world.” On May 12, 1819, he records in his journal: “Commenced Housekeeping at No. Park Street, New York. Mrs. M. & the children who had been to a visit to her Mother at Albany since 6th April, having joined me on this day, to my great joy.”

Three months after Allan’s moving to “the greatest universal mart in the world,” Maria presented him with a third child, and second son, who was christened after Maria’s brother, Herman. At this time, Allan seems to have accepted the excitements of childbirth so casually that Melville’s birth passed unrecorded in his father’s journal. The first surviving record of Melville’s existence is unromantic enough. In a letter dated October 7, 1820, Allan wrote: “Helen Marie suffers most from what we term the whooping cough but which I am sometimes suspicious is only influenza. But Gansevoort and Herman are as yet slightly affected.”

At this time, Allan seems to have prospered in business, for on September 20, 1820, he reported to his mother: “We have hired a cook & nurse and only want a waiter to complete our domestic establishment.”

Herman’s infancy seems to have been untroubled by any event more startling than a growing aggregation of brothers and sisters, occasional trips to Boston, and periodic pilgrimages to Albany with his mother to be exhibited to his grandmother Gansevoort. There are frequent references to his ailing health. In April, 1824, Allan complains that “Gansevoort has lost much of his ruddy appearance, while Herman who has never entirely regained his health again looks pale, thin and dejected.”

At this time Allan signed “a 4 yrs. lease at $300 per annum free of taxes, for a new brick 2 story house replete with conveniences, to be handsomely furnished in the most modern style under my own direction & a vacant lot of equal size attached to it which will be invaluable as a play ground for the children. It is situated in Bleecker, the first south, and parallel to Bond St.... An open, dry & elevated location equidistant from Broadway & the Bowery, in plain sight of both & almost uniting the advantages of town & country, but its distance from my store, nearly two miles, will compel me to dine from my family most of the time, a serious objection to us all, but we shall be amply compensated by a residence which will obviate the necessity of their leaving town every summer, which deprives me altogether of their society. I shall also remove professionally on the 1st of May to No. 102 Pearl St. upstairs in the very focus of Business & surrounded by the auction rooms which have become the Rialto of the modern merchants but where I dare say even Shylock would be shy of making his appearance.”

By December 29, 1824, we hear of Herman that “he attends school regularly but does not appear so fond of his Book as to injure his health. He has turned into a great tease & daily puts Gansevoort’s patience to flight who cannot bear to be plagued by such a little fellow.”

On the same date, Maria writes to her brother about pickling oysters, 500 of which she sent to Albany as a gift to his family. The picture of her life that she then gives is evidence that she had cherished the counsels that “her friend A. M.” had appended to Mrs. Chapone. She tells of a call she received before eleven o’clock. “Although the hour was early, all things were neat & in order & my ladyship was dressing herself preparatory to sitting down to her sewing.” She boasts of this fact, she says, in shamed recollection of the time her brother and Mr. Smyth were ushered into a parlour out of order. “It is the first time a thing of this kind has ever happened to me & for my credit as a good housekeeper, I hope it will be the last.” In conclusion she reports: “This afternoon Mr. M. & myself, induced by the enlivening rays of the setting sun, strolled down the Bowery & after an agreeable walk returned home with renovated spirits.”

In December, 1825, Allan is moved to “lament little Herman’s melancholy situation, but we trust in humble confidence that the GOD of the widow and the fatherless will yet restore him.” By the following May, Allan’s humble confidence seems to have been rewarded not only by Herman’s recovery, but by the birth of another child. In the midst of a business letter—the usual repository of Allan’s raptures—he with unwonted vivacity so celebrates his paternal felicity: “The Lovely Six!! are all well, and, while the youngest though both last & least is a sweet child of promise, & bids fair to become the fairest of the fair—so much for affection, now for business.”

On August 10, 1826, Melville was sent out upon his first trip from home unaccompanied by his parents. His destination was his mother’s people in Albany, and his custodian during the trip a Mr. Walker. Allan shifts his responsibility for his son on the shoulders of his brother-in-law, Peter Gansevoort, in these terms:

“I now consign to your especial care & patronage my beloved son Herman, an honest hearted double-rooted Knickerbocker of the true Albany stamp, who, I trust, will do equal honour in due time to ancestry, parentage & kindred. He is very backward in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension, but you will find him as far as he understands men and things both solid & profound & of a docile & amiable disposition. If agreeable, he will pass the vacation with his grandmother & yourself & I hope he may prove a pleasant auxiliary to the Family circle—I depend much on your kind attention to our dear Boy who will be truly grateful to the least favour—let him avoid green fruit & unseasonable exposure to the Sun & heat, and having taken such good care of Gansevoort last Summer I commit his Brother to the same hands with unreserved confidence. & with love to our good mother and yourself in which Maria, Mary & the children most cordially join I remain very truly Your Friend & Brother, Allan Melville.”

At the foot of this document, Allan appended in pencil: “please turn over.” On the reverse of the letter is scribbled a breathless last request: “Have the goodness to procure a pair of shoes for Herman, time being insufficient to have a pair made here.”

When Allan here pronounces Melville “very backward in speech & somewhat slow in comprehension,” he puts his son in a large class of genius conspicuous for a deferred revelation of promising intelligence. Scott, occupied in building up romances, was dismissed as a dunce; Hume, the youthful thinker, was described by his mother as “uncommon weak minded.” Goldsmith was a stupid child; Fanny Burney did not know her letters at the age of eight. Byron showed no aptitude for school work. And Chatterton, up to the age of six and a half, was, on the authority of his mother, “little better than an absolute fool.” Allan scorned to take solace from such facts, however. He consoled himself with the fact that though his son was dull, he was at least “docile & amiable.”

Melville spent the summer of 1826 with the Gansevoorts. And he looked back upon it as perhaps the most fortunate privilege of his youth, that this first visit to Albany set the precedent for a whole series of similar summers. He is idealising from his own experience when he says of Pierre: “It had been his choice fate to have been born and nurtured in the country, surrounded by scenery whose uncommon loveliness was the perfect mould of a delicate and poetic mind; while the popular names of its finest features appealed to the proudest patriotic and family associations of the historic line of Glendinning.” Nor does he hesitate to reiterate that Pierre’s was a “choice fate”: “For to a noble American youth this indeed—more than in any other land—this indeed is a most rare and choice lot.” Each summer, for as long as his school vacations would permit, Melville shared the choice lot of Pierre. But Allan, unconverted to Melville’s Wordsworthian creed, regularly recalled his son to the city with the opening of school.

This is the recall for the year 1826, dated “12 Sept. Tuesday, 4 P.M.”: “We expect Gansevoort on Sunday, at fartherest, when we wish Herman also to be here, that they may recommence their studies together on Monday next, with equal chances of preferment, & without any feelings of jealousy or ideas of favoritism—besides they may thus acquire a practical lesson whose influence may endure forever, for if they understand early, that inclination must always yield to Duty, it will become a matter of course when their vacations expire to bid a fond adieu to friends & amusements, & return home cheerfully to their books, & they will consequently imbibe habits of Order & punctuality, which bear sweet blossoms in the dawn of life, golden fruits in ‘the noon of manhood’ & a rich harvest for the garners of old age—business is about as dull and unprofitable as the most bitter foe to general prosperity, if such a being exists in human shape, could desire it, & it requires a keener vision than mine, to discern among the signs of the times, any real symptoms of future improvement.”

The summer of 1827 Melville spent with his grandparents in Boston; the two following summers in Albany.

On February 28, 1828, Allan reported to his brother-in-law Peter Gansevoort: “We have taken a house on Broadway (No. 675—if I mistake not) for 5 years @ $575 without taxes—being the 2d beyond the marble buildings & nearly opposite Bond Street. The house is a modern 2 stories built 4 years since for the owner & has only been occupied by his family. The lot is 200 feet deep through to Mercer St., Maria is charmed with the house & situation.”

But Allan never lived to see this lease expire. The dull business of which he earlier complained settled upon him, and in 1830 the prospects in New York were so hopeless that he moved back to Albany, to die two years later, leaving his wife and eight children practically penniless.

But before Allan moved away from New York, Herman had time to write the earliest manuscript of his that survives. It reads:

In Redburn, Melville speaks “of those delightful days before my father was a bankrupt, and died, and we moved from the city”; or again, speaking of Allan: “he had been shaken by many storms of adversity, and at last died a bankrupt.” Allan’s journal, however, which he kept until within a few months of his death, is proudly superior to anything suggestive of the outrageousness of fortune: its hard glazed surface betrays to the end no crack in the veneer. Beyond a persistent tradition, and Melville’s iterated statement, no further evidence of Allan’s financial reverses has transpired.

It is certain, however, that after Allan’s death his family found themselves in straitened circumstances. After 1830, the most specific evidence known to exist about the whereabouts and condition of Melville’s family is preserved in old Albany Directories, as follows:

After 1835 the family scattered, Melville to begin his wanderings on land and sea,—Gansevoort to drift about Albany for two years, Maria and the rest of the children to move to Lansingburg—now a part of Albany.

The publication of the Celebration of the Semi-Centennial Anniversary of the Albany Academy (Albany, 1862) in its list of alumni, and the date of their entrance, offers the following record:

This Semi-Centennial Anniversary Celebration took place in Tweedle Hall, which, so says the publication, “was crowded with an appropriate audience.” “The meeting was presided over by the Honourable Peter Gansevoort, the President of the Board of Trustees,” the publication goes on to say, “and by his side were his associates and the guests of the festival, among whom was warmly welcomed Herman Melville, whose reputation as an author has honoured the Academy, world-wide.” As Melville sat there, “the Rev. Doc. Ferris ... made prayer to Heaven the source of that knowledge which shall not vanish away;” Orlando Mead, LL.D., read a Historical Discourse; and “at successive periods the exercises were diversified by the music of Home, Sweet Home or Rest, Spirit, Rest, and of other appropriate harmonies.” What recollections of his school-days at the Albany Academy were then passing through Melville’s head, we haven’t sufficient knowledge of his schooling to guess. As part of the celebration, Alexander W. Bradford, who was a student at the Academy between 1825 and 1832, spoke of the “domestic discords and fights between the Latins and the English, and the more fierce and bitter foreign conflicts waged between the Hills and the Creeks, the latter being a pugnacious tribe of barbarians who inhabited the shores of Fox Creek;” of “the weekly exhibitions in the Gymnasium grand with the beauty of Albany;” of “the lectures and experiments in chemistry, which being in the evening, were favoured by the presence of young ladies as well as gentlemen.” In what capacity, if any, Melville figured in these activities there is no way of knowing.

Dr. Henry Hun, now President of the Albany Academy, in answer to a request for information about Melville, answers: “Unfortunately, the records of the Albany Academy were burned in 1888. It is impossible to say how long he remained in the school or what results he achieved. He probably took the Classical Course, as most of the brighter boys took it. It was really a Collegiate Course, and the Head-master (or Principal as he was then called) Dr. T. Romeyn Beck was an extraordinary man, but one who did not spare the rod, but gave daily exhibitions in its use.” In a postscript Dr. Hun adds: “It was a God-fearing school.”

Joseph Henry, at one time teacher at the Albany Academy, later head of the Smithsonian Institute, in an address before the Association for the Advancement of Science, in session in Albany in 1851, said of Melville’s Alma Mater: “The Albany Academy was and still is one of the first, if not the very first, institution of its kind in the United States. It early opposed the pernicious maxim that a child should be taught nothing but what it could perfectly understand, and that the sole object of instruction is to teach a child to think.”

Since Melville was in 1834 employed as clerk in the New York State Bank (a post he doubtless owed to his uncle, Peter Gansevoort, who was one of the Trustees) he must have ceased to enjoy the advantages of the Albany Academy before that date. During the time of Melville’s attendance, the same texts were used by all students alike during their first three years at the Albany Academy. This, then, would seem to be a list of the texts (offered by the courtesy of Dr. Hun) studied by Melville:

J. E. A. Smith, in the Biographical Sketch of Herman Melville that in 1891 he wrote for The Evening Journal of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, says of Melville’s school-days:

“In 1835, Professor Charles E. West ... was president of the Albany Classical Institute for boys, and Herman Melville became one of his pupils. Professor West now remembers him as a favourite pupil, not distinguished for mathematics, but very much so in the writing of ‘themes’ or ‘compositions’ and fond of doing it, while the great majority of pupils dreaded it as a task, and would shirk it if they could.”

In 1835, Melville was clerk in his brother’s shop. If J. E. A. Smith’s record is accurate, Melville was at the time alternating business with education.

The greater part of 1836 was spent by Melville, according to his own account, already quoted, in the household of his uncle Major Thomas Melville, at Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

J. E. A. Smith in his Biographical Sketch so supplements Melville’s account: “Besides his labours with his uncle in the hay field, he was for one term teacher of the common school in the ‘Sykes district’ under Washington mountain, of which he had some racy memories—one of them of a rebellion in which some of the bigger boys undertook to ‘lick’ him—with what results, those who remember his physique and character can well imagine.”

The only other records we have of Melville’s boyhood and early youth are the scattered recollections preserved in his published works. Such, throughout his life, were the veering whims of his blood, that he recalled these earlier years with no unity of retrospect. The confessions of St. Augustine are a classical warning of the untrustworthiness of even the most conscientious memory. To call memory the mother of the Muses, is too frequently but a partial and euphemistic naming of her offspring. So when Melville writes of early years, now in rhapsody and then in bitterness, the result, though always valuable autobiography, is not invariably, of course, strict history.

Some of his idealisations of his life with the Gansevoorts have already been given. Through the refracting films of memory he at times looked back upon “those far descended Dutch meadows ... steeped in a Hindooish haze” and proud of his name and his “double revolutionary descent,” he viewed himself with Miltonic self-esteem as a “fine, proud, loving, docile, vigorous boy.” And there is no reason to suspect him of perverting the truth. Behind these are “certain shadowy reminiscences of wharves, and warehouses, and shipping, which a residence in a seaport during early childhood had supplied me.” And with them he blended remembrances “of winter evenings in New York, by the well-remembered sea-coal fire, when my father used to tell my brother and me of the monstrous waves at sea, mountain high; of the masts bending like twigs; and all about Havre, and Liverpool, and about going up into the ball of St. Paul’s in London. Indeed, during my early life, most of my thoughts of the sea were connected with the land; but with fine old lands, full of mossy cathedrals and churches, and long, narrow crooked streets without sidewalks, and lined with strange houses. And especially I tried hard to think how such places must look on rainy days and Saturday afternoons; and whether indeed they did have rainy days and Saturdays there, just as we did here, and whether the boys went to school there, and studied geography and wore their shirt collars turned over, and tied with a black ribbon; and whether their papas allowed them to wear boots instead of shoes, which I so much disliked, for boots looked so manly.”

Melville confesses here to a precocious exercise of the poetic imagination: a type of imagination for which the consistent disappointments of his life were to be the invariable penalty. In the prosaic man, in Benjamin Franklin, for example, the imagination does not, as it did with Melville, enrich the immediate facts of experience with amplifications so vivid that the reality is in danger of being submerged. In the prosaic man, the imagination works in a safely utilitarian fashion, combining images for practical purposes under the supervision of a matter-of-fact judgment. And though it may indeed bring the lightning from the clouds, it makes the transfer not to glorify the firmament, but to discipline the lightning and to make church steeples safe from the wrath of God. Melville’s was the type of imagination whose extreme operation is exemplified in William Blake. “I assert for myself,” said Blake, “that I do not behold the outward creation, and that it is to me hindrance and not action. ‘What,’ it will be questioned, ‘when the sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire something like a guinea?’ Oh! no! no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!’ I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it.” Though Allan Melville chose as courtship gift a copy of Pleasures of Imagination, the pleasures he derived from the exercise of this faculty were of a sort that both Blake and his son would have thought tame in the extreme. Allan saw the world with his eyes alone, he proudly believed, the world as it really is. It was both the blessing and the curse of his son that his was the gift of “second sight.”

“We had several pieces of furniture in the house,” says Melville, speaking of his childhood days, “which had been brought from Europe”: furniture that had been imported by Allan, some of which is still in the possession of Melville’s descendants. “These I examined again and again, wondering where the wood grew: whether the workmen who made them still survived, and what they could be doing with themselves now.” Could Allan have known what was going on in the head of his son, he would have been as alarmed as was the father of Anatole France when the young Thibault undertook to emulate St. Nicholas of Patras and distribute his riches to the poor.

Even as a child, he was lured by the romance of distance, and he confesses how he used to think “how fine it would be, to be able to talk about remote barbarous countries; with what reverence and wonder people would regard me, if I had just returned from the coast of Africa or New Zealand: how dark and romantic my sunburnt cheeks would look; how I would bring home with me foreign clothes of rich fabric and princely make, and wear them up and down the streets, and how grocers’ boys would turn their heads to look at me, as I went by. For I very well remembered staring at a man myself, who was pointed out to me by my aunt one Sunday in church, as the person who had been in stony Arabia and passed through strange adventures there, all of which with my own eyes I had read in the book which he wrote, an arid-looking book in a pale yellow cover.

“‘See what big eyes he has,’ whispered my aunt, ‘they got so big, because when he was almost dead in the desert with famishing, he all at once caught sight of a date tree, with the ripe fruit hanging on it.’ Upon this, I stared at him till I thought his eyes were really of an uncommon size, and stuck out from his head like those of a lobster. When church was out, I wanted my aunt to take me along and follow the traveller home. But she said the constables would take us up, if we did; and so I never saw the wonderful Arabian traveller again. But he long haunted me; and several times I dreamt of him, and thought his great eyes were grown still larger and rounder; and once I had a vision of the date tree.”

It is one of the few certainties of life that a child who has once stood fixed before a piece of household furniture worrying his head about whether the workman who made it still be alive; who after seeing an Arabian traveller in church goes home and has a vision of a date tree: such a child is not going to die an efficiency expert. At the age of fifteen Melville found himself faced with the premature necessity of coming to some sort of terms with life on his own account. Helped by his uncle, he tried working in a bank. The experiment seems not to have been a success. His next experiment was clerk in his brother’s store. But banking and clerking seem to have been equally repugnant. Melville had a taste for landscape, so his next experiment was as farmer and country school-keeper. But farming, interspersed with pedagogy and pugilism, fired Melville to a mood of desperation. “Talk not of the bitterness of middle age and after-life,” he later wrote; “a boy can feel all that, and much more, when upon his young soul the mildew has fallen.... Before the death of my father I never thought of working for my living, and never knew there were hard hearts in the world.... I had learned to think much, and bitterly, before my time.” So he decided to slough off the tame respectabilities of his well-to-do uncles, and cousins, and aunts. Goaded by hardship, and pathetically lured by the glamorous mirage of distance, with all the impetuosity of his eighteen summers he planned a hegira. “With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”