[Illustration:
_J. O. Eaton, pinx._
HERMAN MELVILLE]
HERMAN
MELVILLE
LEWIS MUMFORD
HARCOURT, BRACE & COMPANY
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC., RAHWAY, N. J.
TYPOGRAPHY BY ROBERT S. JOSEPHY
PREFACE
This is a study of Herman Melville’s life and thought. In interpreting
Melville’s life I have relied primarily on his own writings, including
his letters, some of which are still unpublished, and his notebooks.
There are occasional blank spaces in Melville’s history, but the record
is singularly complete in that part of Melville which most matters: his
ideas, his feelings, his urges, his vision of life. I have verified and
corrected these data by the use of every available piece of independent
evidence; and I must express my hearty thanks to Mrs. Frances Thomas,
Melville’s surviving daughter, for answering my written questions,
and to his granddaughter, Mrs. Eleanor Melville Metcalf, for giving
me the benefit of her own memories and family tradition, as well as
her courtesy and hospitality in placing at my disposal Melville’s
manuscripts. I am likewise indebted to Miss Caroline W. Stewart, an
old friend of the Melville family, for her impressions of the Melville
household during the later period of his life.
These pages could not have been written without Mr. Raymond Weaver’s
pioneer work on Melville. Mr. Weaver not merely brought to light much
important data and cleared up relationships that concerned Melville’s
objective life: he also, through Mrs. Metcalf, discovered Melville’s
unpublished manuscripts and included them in a definitive edition of
his work. For this, he has placed every admirer of Melville in his
debt. In addition to acknowledging this great service, I must thank him
for the scholarly generosity with which he gave me the benefit of his
intimate knowledge of Melville’s remains, and his copies of Melville’s
notebooks. Mr. Weaver’s generosity is equalled only by that of Dr.
Henry A. Murray, Jr., who shared with me his knowledge of certain
Melville letters otherwise inaccessible--an act of pure chivalry, since
Dr. Murray is himself at work on a biography of Herman Melville. Such
deeds sweeten one’s notions of human conduct: they give one not so
much a feeling of gratitude as a renewed sense of human dignity, and I
warmly place them on record.
In describing Melville’s experience and his state of mind, I have taken
the liberty of using his own language wherever possible; and I have
done this so freely that, except where I have quoted whole passages,
I have omitted quotation marks. In condensing and paraphrasing the
notebooks of Melville’s travels, I have usually employed Melville’s
own words; for it would be a vain biographer who did not make full use
of Melville’s sharp descriptions and striking epithets. If I have been
frank and unreserved in dealing with the difficult parts of Melville’s
life, I have been no more so than I think he would have wished, nor
more candid than he himself was in treating Pierre. “In reserves,” he
wrote, “men build imposing characters.” Melville’s worth, as a man and
a poet, has no need for a reputation so created. My purpose has not
been to embalm Melville but to bring him to life; and one cannot know
or sympathize with the man unless one shares his vicissitudes as well
as his triumphs.
Certain portions of this book have appeared, with slight changes and
abbreviations, in The New Republic, The American Mercury, and The
Saturday Review of Literature.
Lewis Mumford.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE 1
OLYMPIAN
CHAPTER ONE: BITTER MORNING 9
CHAPTER TWO: SEA-DRIFT 40
CHAPTER THREE: TROPICAL SUMMER 63
CHAPTER FOUR: AZZAGEDDI 86
CHAPTER FIVE: THE TARTARUS OF AUTHORS 108
TITAN
CHAPTER SIX: RED CLOVER 135
CHAPTER SEVEN: MOBY-DICK 158
CHAPTER EIGHT: AMOR, THREATENING 196
CHAPTER NINE: TIMONISM 223
PILGRIM
CHAPTER TEN: TROUBLED FOOTSTEPS 259
CHAPTER ELEVEN: ALARUMS AND RETREATS 292
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE FLOWERING ALOE 326
EPILOGUE 359
INDEX 371
Your zodiac here is the life of man in
one round chapter; and now I’ll read it
off, straight out of the book. Come,
Almanack! To begin: there’s Aries, or
the Ram--lecherous dog, he begets us;
then Taurus, or the Bull--he bumps us
the first thing; then Gemini, or the
Twins--that is Virtue and Vice; we try
to reach Virtue when lo! comes Cancer
the Crab and drags us back; and here,
going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring lion,
lies in the path--he gives a few fierce
bites and surly dabs with his paw; we
escape and hail Virgo, the Virgin; that’s
our first love; we marry and think to
be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra
or the Scales--happiness weighed and
found wanting! and while we are very sad
about that Lord! how we suddenly jump as
Scorpio or the Scorpion stings us in the
rear; we are curing the wound when whang
come the arrows all round; Sagittarius,
or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we
pluck the shafts, stand aside! here’s the
battering ram, Capricornus or the Goat,
full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong
we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the
Water-bearer, pours out his whole deluge
and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces
or the Fish we sleep.
Moby-Dick.
PROLOGUE
PROLOGUE
When Herman Melville died in 1891, the literary journal of the day,
The Critic, did not even know who he was. The editors rose bravely to
the occasion and copied a paragraph about him from a compendium of
American literature; and in the weeks that followed they reprinted
various commentaries on Melville and his work that were carried in the
correspondence columns of the New York newspapers.
The older generation remembered that Herman Melville had once been
famous. He had adventured in the South Seas on a whaler; he had lived
among the cannibals; and in Typee and Omoo he had made a romantic
pastiche of his experiences. On these books Mr. Melville’s fame had
been founded: it was a pity he had not done more in this line; for
his later books, obscure books, crowded books, books that could be
called neither fiction nor poetry nor philosophy nor downright useful
information, forfeited the interest of a public that liked to take
its pleasures methodically. Both the fame and the later absence of
recognition, Mr. Melville’s commentators agreed, were deserved. By his
interest in Sir Thomas Browne and metaphysics, Mr. Melville had carried
his readers into a realm much too remote, and an air too rarefied: a
flirtation with a South Sea maiden, warm, brown, palpable, was one
thing: but the shark that glides white through the sulphurous sea was
quite another. In Moby-Dick, so criticism went, Melville had become
obscure: and this literary failure condemned him to personal obscurity.
The writer about whom all these sage banalities were written shares
with Walt Whitman, I think, the distinction of being the greatest
imaginative writer that America has produced: his epic, Moby-Dick,
is one of the supreme poetic monuments of the English language: and
in depth of experience and religious insight there is scarcely any
one in the nineteenth century, with the exception of Dostoyevsky,
who can be placed beside him. To his contemporaries, the greatness
of Melville was an enigma: they valued him for those lesser virtues
in which he more closely resembled themselves. They had no place, on
their matter-of-fact plane, with its confident flat-footed science, and
its many odd and useful inventions, for the crosslights of Melville’s
imagination, for his oblique revelations, for his habit of questioning
the foundations upon which their vast superstructure of comfort and
complacency was erected. “What we want, sir, is facts!”--and though
Melville gave them facts, they resented his white vision, because it
froze the facts into a state that defied their easy assimilation. When
they charged Melville with obscurity, they did not realize, perhaps,
that sight demands not merely an object that can be seen, but an eye
that is capable of seeing; and it never occurred to them, with all
their doubts about Melville, that the defective vision might be their
own.
In a great degree, Herman Melville’s life and work were one. A
biography of Melville implies criticism; and no final criticism of his
work is possible that does not bring to it an understanding of his
personal development. The exotic elements in Melville’s experience
have usually been overstressed; the fatality and completeness of
his withdrawal from the contemporary scene have been exaggerated;
the incidental rocks and rapids and whirlpools have diverted the
critic’s attention from the flow of the stream itself. It is with
Herman Melville’s strength and energy on the spiritual plane that I
shall chiefly deal. He lives for us not because he painted South Sea
rainbows, or rectified abuses in authority in the United States Navy:
he lives because he grappled with certain great dilemmas in man’s
spiritual life, and in seeking to answer them, sounded bottom. He left
the clothed and carpeted world of convention, and faced the nakedness
of life, death, energy, evil, love, eternity: he drew back the cosy
hangings of Victorian parlours, and disclosed the black night outside,
dimly lighted with the lights of ancient stars. Had he been a romantic,
he would have lived a happy life, buttering his bread with feeble
dreams, and swallowing down his regrets with consolatory port: he who
wishes to escape the elemental stings of existence need only grasp the
outstretched hands of his contemporaries, accept the subterfuge goals
they call success in business or journalism, and shrink by means of a
padded physical apparatus from the cold reality of the universe itself.
But Melville was a realist, in the sense that the great religious
teachers are realists. He saw that horsehair stuffing did not make the
universe kinder, and that the oblivion of drink did not make the thing
that was forgotten more palatable. His perplexities, his defiances,
his torments, his questions, even his failures, all have a meaning
for us: whether we renounce the world, as Buddha did, affirm a future
transcendence, as Christ did, or, like Whitman, embrace its mingled
good-and-evilness, our choice cannot be called enlightened until it has
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
station in life, to which her maiden name, at least, entitled her; she
valued good food, low voices, courteous servants, correct manners.
An only girl in a family of boys, preening herself with a sense of
her family’s importance, does not profit by sufficient chastenings of
pride: Maria, unfortunately, was such a girl; and to the last she wore
her pride in station like a crest.
Maria had stooped a little to marry a mere trader like Allan, although
he, too, came of good English stock which sided with the colonies
in the Revolutionary War; still, she stooped; and she never quite
recovered from the painful crick in her back. She must have attributed
the misfortunes that followed in her middle age to this original
mistake; at all events, one cannot imagine a woman with such traits
as she left behind in the memory of her contemporaries, taking any
disaster to her station in life or her income with resignation or
becoming meekness. Christianity, for a Gansevoort, meant a prominent
pew in church, not an equal place in heaven; and to deprive her of the
world’s goods was to deprive her of everything she valued.
Both Melville’s father and his mother were monsters; but it took him a
long time to discover this, because they were correct and meritorious
members of society, and it is difficult to believe that the image
of God can err, if it be repeated often enough. In the New York of
the early nineteenth century, Mr. and Mrs. Allan Melville can be
duplicated many times over. Their correctness, their pettiness, their
shallowness, were the correctness and shallowness of a venial society
whose pretensions to culture and civilization were, on the whole,
pretty thin. It was an agreeable society, make no doubt, and Mr. and
Mrs. Melville were just the sort of people to persuade one to accept
its conventions as the very acme of human desire. One visited: one left
one’s card; one entertained at dinner; occasionally one went to the
theatre, or to one of those miscellaneous exhibitions of forgeries and
bad copies and minor masterpieces that served to introduce art into
America: one might even descend a little to that prodigious educational
spectacle, the Cosmorama, or Picture of the World, at Scudder’s Museum.
It was not London or Paris, of course. Allan had seen the paintings in
the Louvre and doubtless knew better than some of his contemporaries:
but it was the outward activity of a great city, with none of the inner
effort that sustained it in Europe. No one in New York, up to 1819, had
dedicated himself to the creative life; and whether one is conscious
of it or not, a great poem, an original thought, an effective piece
of scientific investigation, subtly affect the spirit and tempo of a
place. New York was the counterfeit of a great metropolis, just as the
pictures it looked at were the counterfeits of great painting, just as
the exhibition of a Cosmorama was a counterfeit of a voyage around the
world. Pigs snouted in the gutters; the waterfront had become a jumble
of shipping; the old docks had begun to splinter up and decay; the
Collect Pond was being filled up to make real estate for the growing
city, and later a site for the Tombs; in the vacant fields on the
outskirts of the town, squatters settled in little hovels that reminded
one of a misery and want not yet wholly native to America: in short,
over a vast welter of miscellaneous activities there was only the most
transparent film of a civilized life.
As long as one remained on the surface one could manage one’s time
agreeably; and the refined, fastidious people who constituted
Melville’s social class were unaware of the fact that their provincial
shell was becoming more and more hollow, as the organism within it
died part by part and shrivelled up. The Erie Canal and the general
starvation and impoverishment of Europe after the Napoleonic wars would
draw vast masses of needy men across the Atlantic: the city itself
would lose its waterfronts and pleasances: the trees would make way for
cobblestones and hitching-posts: the area around its little villages
would be broken up into building lots, and it would have to convert its
Potter’s Fields into parks in order to recapture a little open space:
by 1835, dingy-looking tenements, newly built, and made-over “tenant
houses,” abandoned by the original merchants, would spread around and
engulf the neat provincial city. In the twenties, from the overcrowded
slums and the insanitary backyard wells, fever came forth, year after
year: a little later, a wave of cholera caused almost a general exodus.
Eventually, the noses of the respectable would detect the change and
tilt upward in pained appreciation of it; but that the ugliness and
misery and disease were in any way connected with the sources of their
incomes, they would of course indignantly have denied.
3
Allan Melville was not a rich man; but when Herman Melville was born,
on August 1, 1819, Allan Melville was doing well in a modest way: the
family lived at Number Six, Pearl Street, and Herman was the second son
and the third child of this agreeable union. When Herman was a year
old, Allan noted in a letter that he had hired a cook and a nurse, and
wanted only a waiter; and one may take for granted, I think, that such
a household already has its complement of maids, linen, silver, sherry,
port, brocades, and books.
To awake in a home surrounded by the decencies of life must mollify
an infant’s indignation at having to enter the world at all; and in
Herman Melville’s earliest years, nothing ever conveyed a sense of
danger or physical stress. In the even decorum of the days, meals ebbed
and flowed like the tides; the sheets were as white as the tops of
wind-whipt waves off the Battery; clothes sprang into existence out of
the sewing-room as naturally as feathers cover a robin’s back: little
boys had handkerchiefs to blow their noses in and pillows to cuddle
into when they fell asleep in their cribs; in the obscure world that
crowded around little Herman, there were convivial discussions between
his father and strange gentlemen in the library, when he might do no
more than linger in the shadows of the hall or hush his breath at a
crack in the partly opened door; there were visits to relatives and a
few select friends that were as sociable as a regimental inspection
in the army, when he might not get his pinafore mussed, nor bunk up
against the furniture, nor tease his older sister, nor rub shyly into
his mother’s neatly disposed dress, visits with every one sitting
upright, stiff, the spine imitating the rigid line of the chairs, just
blossoming “deportment.”
On the whole, in spite of its high-chokered formalities, it was a kind
world that Melville found himself in: shallow men are not obstacles
to little boys, and as for Mrs. Melville, she had all the affection
for her children that natural instinct and the graces of society
prompted her to have, not a great deal, one suspects, for children,
like servants, are only subordinate ministers to the ego--and one
cannot take pride in satisfying society’s minimal requirements. She
was, however, an intelligent and capable mother: all her eight children
grew to maturity, and that was no little feat, even for an upper-class
family, in the early nineteenth century. Herman must have been a little
starved of affection, I think; for in Pierre he gives his hero no
sisters or brothers, so that Pierre may absorb all his mother’s warmth
for himself; and his hungry claims for sympathy and caresses were no
doubt put off by Mrs. Melville’s aloof rectitude, her concern to keep
part of her energy and sweetness for her husband, and her manifest
partiality to the younger children, when they arrived. Herman stood as
in a cold room before an open fire: one side of him was toasted, and
another side was chilled. That chilliness remained; and in the parts
of his emotional frame that were affected, circulation was never quite
restored.
When Herman was five the family moved two miles uptown, to a house in
Bleecker Street which combined the advantages of town and country. It
was good for Herman that the change was made. He had been ill and had
not regained his health fully: he looked, his father reported then,
pale, thin, and dejected; but the new house had a vacant lot where
children could play; and not far away the farms began to stretch on
each side of the Albany turnpike: despite the activity of the City
Planning Commissioners in laying out rectangular blocks over the hills
and dales and streams and swamps and ponds of the island, the farms
themselves were retreating slowly. Life, for little Herman, was no
longer a matter of sitting and staring at the furniture: he went to
school: he found that c-a-t and d-o-g were a new way of playing with
a dog and a cat: when he was bored he could always practise tricks
on Gansevoort, who was older and more considerate and could not
legitimately hit back.
Still, Herman did not thrive quite as well as he should have. Winter
drew a black curtain between him and all the pleasant things one could
see or find or do in the country: darkness fell much too soon after
school: November’s rains confined him to the house and March’s snows
and slush did the same: as the winter progressed his cheeks would grow
paler and his small blue eyes more wan. His father shook his head
doubtfully and grieved over little Herman’s melancholy situation. As
a result of these stops and gaps in his life Herman “is backward in
speech and somewhat slow in comprehension, but”--so Allan reports to
the Albany Gansevoorts, when Herman in the summer of 1826 is sent
to them on a visit--“you will find him, as far as he understands
men and things, both solid and profound and of a docile and amiable
disposition.”
One is grateful to Allan for using such unusual words as “solid” and
“profound” to describe a child of six: there must have been something
in Herman’s attitude or attack that warranted them: one cannot
altogether lay those adjectives to pompous speech or parental pride.
Is one going back too far if one finds the beginnings of Melville’s
reflective turn in these juvenile illnesses and confinements? The
periods of solitude in bed, the lassitude of recovery, the slow,
patient hours undistracted by physical activity, the rehearsing in the
mind of things done and things seen--these limitations make content
and docile little boys. John Ruskin amused himself, in an enforced
confinement without toys, by tracing minutely the patterns of the
parlour carpet: in such dull, quiet states is the beginning of a
meditative life.
A year later Herman was sent to his Great Uncle Thomas Melville at
Broadhall, near Pittsfield. Uncle Peter, at Albany, was still something
of a countryman: Uncle Thomas was a different sort, more fine, more
polished, with a touch of the old beau about him perhaps and no little
of the courtliness of aristocratic Paris: he had brought home a French
wife, and the undercurrent of French between the old fellow and his
spouse, when Herman was present and not supposed to understand, must
have teased him like a glimpse of a foreign port. Uncle Thomas had
nothing of the boor about him; his manners were mild and kindly, “with
a faded brocade of old French breeding” and a certain daintiness of
gesture, as when he would drop his rake and pause for a pinch of snuff,
that brought the reminder of a society less angular and impetuous than
that which jostled little boys in the streets of Manhattan. It was a
little pathetic, too, to see this fine old gentleman handling a rake or
patiently feeding a cow: he was so manifestly cut out for more urbane
companionship.
In the galaxy of uncles and grandparents and aunts, the patrician
element was dominant: every one of them knew what it was to be well
bred and cultivated in the arts and able to command men. There was
Grandfather Thomas at Boston, he whom Oliver Wendell Holmes poked a
little fun at in the trivial piece of verse called The Last Leaf: he
had been a major, too: he had fought well in the Revolution, too:
a dried-apple sort of man who had lost his juices and perhaps his
sweetness: let the times change as they would, he kept his shape, and
to define it, he wore cocked hat and knee-breeches up to the day of his
death: the eighteenth century was good enough for him. Then there was
Uncle John de Wulf, who dropped in miraculously one day to see Herman’s
father: an old man with hair as white as the pin-feathers on a swan’s
breast, and face as red as a cranberry: he used to sail to a place
called Archangel, and, more marvellous still, he had crossed Russia
with Captain Langsdorff, starting from the Sea of Okhotsk in Asia and
going to St. Petersburg, drawn by large dogs in a sled. What a hearty
old fellow he was! His clothes almost had the smell of the far-off
places he had visited. Ever memorable was that June day when his father
and Uncle John took Herman over to Staten Island, and they explored the
ruin of a fort that had been hastily erected by Governor Tompkins to
defend the city against the British in 1812. Uncle John was a mystery:
the crumbling walls of the fort were a mystery: but the sky above was
as blue and benign as the blue eyes of Herman’s mother, and in the
still air of noon, there was no sound but the twitter of birds, and a
great shout of delight and happiness in the little boy’s heart.
But Manhattan was always full of mysterious strangers and sunburnt
men with a rolling walk and a sea-bag or a chest jauntily carried on
one shoulder. New York did this for Herman Melville: it taught him to
be discontented with New York. There was Liverpool: there was London,
Havre, Paris. The trim little packets down at the docks went back and
forth between Liverpool and New York as regularly as clockwork, or very
nearly: the swift ones could make the journey, with a little luck, in
fifteen or sixteen days, and the best record for a sailing vessel was
considerably under this: they took away wheat and furs and passengers,
and they brought back cloth from the Midlands and carpets from Brussels
and gloves from Paris and knives from Sheffield and cheap gewgaws from
Birmingham and china from Burslem, or even from China itself--and more
passengers. One simply could not forget the wideness of the world in
this wide harbour, edged with green banks and feathery trees. Even some
of the furniture in the house had been made in Europe: Herman looked at
it again and again, wondering where the mahogany grew and whether the
workmen who made the furniture were still alive, and what they might
be doing with themselves now. His papa had been a great traveller; in
a score of years, as he methodically noted down, he had travelled “by
land 24,425 miles, by water 48,460 miles” and had been 643 days at sea;
and once Allan had lived two whole years in Paris. Every stone, every
mast, every stick of furniture, every print had a message for Herman:
Travel!
How the books and prints Allan had brought home fomented Herman’s
dreams! There were prints of French men-of-war, of French fishing
boats, with “high French-like land in one corner and a gray lighthouse
surmounting it. The waves were toasted brown and the whole picture
looked mellow and old. Perhaps a piece of it would taste good.” On
Saturdays, when school didn’t keep, and the rain imprisoned the
children in the house, Augusta and Gansevoort would take out a
French portfolio of coloured prints. More romance! Versailles: grand
drawing-rooms: fountains where writhing Tritons spouted gleefully:
rural scenes: shepherd boys and cottages: above all, there was a
picture of a great whale, as big as a ship, stuck full of harpoons,
and three boats sailing after it as fast as they could fly. Then, too,
there was a tall brown bookcase in the hall; behind its glass doors
one might see long rows of old books that had been printed in Paris
and London and Leipsic. There was the Spectator in six volumes with
“London” on the title page: there was a copy of D’Alembert in the
language Uncle Thomas used to speak to Tante Marie.
Some day Herman would grow up too: he would see the world and have
stories to tell about it: he would confront these marvellous pictures
and find out how real they were. How snug Herman felt on a winter
evening by the old sea-coal fire in Bleecker Street, when his father
would tell the children of monstrous waves at sea, waves mountain-high
and masts bending like twigs. Herman’s stomach curdled pleasantly
at the thought of it, or the equally dizzy but in some ways more
marvellous thought of looking over London from the ball of St. Paul’s,
and picking out the Monument and London Bridge and Blackfriars and
St. Dunstan’s crown, and Southwark, where Shakespeare used to act,
across the Thames. One would risk waves as high as mountains if one
had some assurance of reaching eventually this fine old land, full
of cathedrals and churches that were built before Columbus sailed to
America, and narrow, crooked streets without sidewalks, and fields and
woods that were as tidy as an American garden. That would be Albany or
Gansevoort, prodigiously magnified by age and association. How hard
to remember that little boys went to school in Europe, too, and were
punished if they didn’t learn their lessons. Did they study geography,
grammar, writing, speaking, and spelling there? Did they wear their
shirt collars turned over and tied with a black ribbon; and did their
papas allow them to wear boots, nice manly boots, instead of shoes? A
long breath; a sense of choking anticipation. The days pass so slowly.
Herman will be quite old--he may be twenty or twenty-five at this rate,
before he goes there!
4
In 1828 Allan’s position in society ballooned a little. He moved to
a house on Broadway, with a lot two hundred feet deep, and doubtless
more commodious rooms, for the rent was almost double that of his
old quarters; but whether he was losing hold of his prudence or
miscalculating, or whether circumstances that lay beyond his view were
altering his position as an importer, one does not quite know. It is
possible that, without being fully aware of his losses, he was shaken
by the financial crisis of 1826, or it may be that his importations
became inept, and the old lines were giving out. At all events, his
business became so bad that he moved to Albany in 1830, so that,
perhaps, he might take advantage of the Gansevoort connections. But he
moved too late. He became a bankrupt. In 1832, when Herman Melville was
only thirteen years old, his father gave up the struggle and died.
One suspects from the look of Allan’s portrait that he was a
fair-weather sailor and did not know what to do when the winds began
to blow adversely. He left his loving wife with eight children, and
only the family name to support them. No thanks to Allan that part
of the family name was Gansevoort; but although that name certainly
was an asset, and although Uncle Peter and his wife doubtless did all
that they felt was in their power to make things easier for the proud
widow and her orphans, the morals of bourgeois society are meant, like
Allan’s character, for smooth sailing, and when hardship overtakes
one branch of the family there is usually no such general sharing
round among the surviving groups as there is among the poor, who know
shipwreck perpetually. Herman was going to the Albany Academy when his
father died; he probably knew only by hints and murmurs and brooding
faces that a calamity was approaching--and he suddenly found himself a
half-orphan, with only the dear mild image of his father to comfort him.
This death before Herman had reached intellectual penetration did Allan
a kindness: he became “a shrine in the fresh-foliaged heart of [his
son] up to which he ascended by many tableted steps of remembrance;
and around which annually he ... hung fresh wreaths of a sweet holy
affection. In the shrine stood the perfect marble form of his departed
father, without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, serene ... fond
personification of perfect human goodness and virtue.” But this did
Herman himself an ill turn, for instead of permitting the august image
of his father to experience the vicissitudes of the weather, and ripen
into the natural disillusion that greets a son when he finds his deity
one in flesh with himself, equally mortal, equally fallible--instead
of this, the image became fixed, and when Herman outgrew his father,
he did not simply leave him behind: he rose up and annihilated him,
revenging himself upon the actual Allan for the perfect marble shadow
he had carried in his heart. In the asperities of fortune, Mrs.
Melville, with a hard row of her own to hoe, doubtless fell in Herman’s
heart because she had to face comparison with the marble portrait of
his father: even the best of mothers, under such circumstances, would
seem a little harsh and unkind, beside him who had by his bankruptcy
and his death escaped the dilemmas of both his creditors and his
family. At all events, Herman found himself at thirteen in the midst
of a hard-hearted world; and the shock of that transposition left him
breathless and weak.
The aunts and uncles were kind, of course; but they had cares and
interests of their own; and it needed dire extremity to move them to
action. Herman’s cousins continued to go to school: the cousins had
butter on their bread and cream on their porridge; but the Melvilles
must have known that sinking feeling that comes to a big family at
table when the eye takes in the bowl of stew or the little roast and
the nine plates that wait for it, and knows instantly that no thinning
of slices or spreading of gravy will make the portions large enough
to satisfy a healthy appetite. The summers in the country, the long,
lazy summers, were over: it was winter all the year round. Gansevoort,
dogged, patient, resourceful fellow that he was, opened a hat store
on Market Street, and as soon as Herman was fifteen, he got a job as
clerk in the New York State Bank, of which Uncle Peter was one of the
trustees: a year later, Herman shifted over to the hat store, where
Gansevoort now needed an extra clerk.
This was not the way, Herman doubtless felt, that one’s adolescence
should open. The son of a gentleman can, it is true, remain a
gentleman, even when he adds figures or sells hats: in America, thank
Heaven, every trade is an honorable trade; but there is something wrong
with a world that gives the young Gansevoorts all that their hearts
ask for, and that draws the Melvilles up sharply wherever they turn.
All Herman’s ambitions, to go to college, to become an orator, like
Patrick Henry, to become a great traveller, like Uncle John or Papa, or
to become a great general, like Grandfather Peter, to live in Paris,
like Uncle Thomas, to make the name of Melville somehow glorious--all
these dreams were like great bonfires suddenly drenched by cold rain.
He was as unambitious as a man of sixty. Such careers do not begin
in a hat shop. The stream of life had suddenly stopped; its margins
became stagnant; there was no way out; one might add columns or sell
hats forever. One’s uncles and cousins didn’t care. One’s friends only
said they cared. Cold, bitter cold as December, the world seemed to
young Melville. Fifteen years later, he still felt the bitterness and
sting. He had only a lonely pride to wrap around him; and the world,
not seeing any money in the pockets of that garment, smiled a little
scornfully, and wondered whether it might not be just as well to leave
such wrappings off!
At fifteen a lad can do little more than earn his keep; there was no
question of Herman’s helping to support the family, as Gansevoort
patiently did. Some one must have observed that things were not going
well with Herman in the hat shop; or perhaps there were not enough
hats to be sold to make his presence necessary; in the summer of 1836
he lived with his Uncle Thomas at Broadhall, helping in the hayfields;
and when autumn came he taught school--one needed muscle rather than
letters for teaching school in those days--in the Sykes district,
near by. He spent the winter in the shadow of Washington Mountain,
and when spring came, and his pupils were needed in the fields, he
himself felt a desperate longing to see his mother and his sisters
again, and Gansevoort and young Allan and little Tom; so, presently,
he went back to Lansingburgh, a little river village just outside of
Albany, where his mother had moved. Scarcely had the welcome worn off
before he realized that his existence was a problem: he was another
mouth to feed! What was he going to do? Perhaps Uncle Peter would get
him another chance at the bank. Not that? Well, what then? Gansevoort
is doing bravely: Allan is already thinking of the law: every one must
help.
Young Melville felt the world closing in on him. He had no answer to
the major problem of civilization, namely, how to get a living without
losing all the other things that make life joyful and significant.
Herman’s contemporaries, with all their factories and mines and
new-fangled machinery and speeding ships, were perhaps as far from
solving this problem as any civilization has yet been: the only people
who were contented with the current solution were those whose narrow
aims and limited personalities were completely fulfilled by the
business routine itself. Herman was not of that cast, so he must invent
an alternative. If he cannot go to college, he must at least have that
other advantage of an education: the Grand Tour. He will be his own
tutor, guide, philosopher, and friend. Why should he not ship for a
trip to Europe? He would not merely earn his keep; but at the end of
his voyage he might have a little to spare. Europe itself was at least
a goal, or the promise of a goal; not a dead-end, like the bank.