Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

“In general terms we have been thus decided in asserting the great genealogical and real-estate dignity of some families in America, because in so doing we poetically establish the richly aristocratic condition of Master Pierre Glendinning, for whom we have claimed some special family distinction. And to the observant reader the sequel will not fail to show how important is this circumstance, considered with reference to the singularly developed character and most singular life-career of our hero. Nor will any man dream that the last chapter was merely intended for a foolish bravado, and not with a solid purpose in view.”

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.

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:

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:

“Prudence should be the governing principle of Woman’s existence, domestick life her peculiar sphere; no rank can exempt her from an observation of the laws of the former, from an attention to the duties of the latter. To neglect both is to violate the sacred statutes of social happiness, and to frustrate the all-wise intention of that Providence who framed them.”

In the second inscription, made with acknowledgment to Miss Owensong, Allan takes all the precautions of a Coelebs to make certain that at his table “the eulogist of female ignorance might dine in security against the intrusion and vanity of erudition.” The inscription reads:

“The liberal cultivation of the female mind is the best security for the virtues of the female heart; and genius, talents and grace, where regulated by prudence and governed by good sense, are never incompatible with domestic qualities or meek and modest virtues.”

On the third fly-leaf, this double pronouncement is presented to “Miss Maria Gansevoort” and “from A. M.” Allan had doubtless learned from Mrs. Chapone that “our feelings are not given us for ornament, but to spur us on to right action.” And Miss Maria may have taken to heart Mrs. Chapone’s dictum that “compassion is not impressed upon the human heart, only to adorn the fair face with tears and to give an agreeable languor to the eyes.” There survives no trace of a record of Allan’s indulging emotions for decorative purposes. How far his sentiments were moved in “right action” to melt Miss Maria to becoming compassion can never be known. During the months immediately before the marriage, however, the even tenor of Allan’s journal is jolted by the unusual acknowledgment of the existence of his sisters, and the bald mention of a specified number of miles covered in a “pleasure wagon.” Miss Maria, when not his undisputed property by rites of holy matrimony, he never mentions in his journal.

Maria kept no journal; if she presented Allan with inscribed volumes, Allan has eradicated all such breaches of maiden modesty. The only intimate records of Maria that survive are three of her letters, comments upon her in Allan’s letters, Melville’s elaborate idealisation of her in the person of the mother of Pierre, and a vague memory handed down orally by her descendants.