of another, is that Pierre was published in 1852, while she was yet alive and indeed, as Mr. Weaver himself remarks, was living mainly with her son. It is inconceivable that he should write so of her while she lived, or that if the portrait was recognizable it was not recognized, and resented, by his mother herself, and all the more because of that imputed pride and cold arrogance. But there is no reference to a rupture of affection within public knowledge, though Pierre itself provoked asperities on the part of reviewers. Pride indeed there may have been in Mrs. Melville, but of pride outrunning affection and begetting coldness the proofs have yet to be produced. A sense that she might have married better, that Allan was not only a trader but an unsuccessful one, and that the poverty into which his early death plunged her was an unmerited and prolonged trial, may have touched her acutely; and Herman may have been conscious of this. But speculative biography is dangerous.

Melville's mother ended her long life in 1871, after nearly forty years of widowhood; and if, for the reasons just given, the novelist's supposed portrait of her is to be somewhat strictly challenged, it is nevertheless to be remembered that, according to the American biographer of Herman, there still survives a tradition of her remoteness from those idealizations to which Herman's mind always tended. She was known, it appears, as a capable, managing wife and mother, whose present was dominated by her past and who could not forget, in the relative humbleness of her son's career, the lost splendour of her father's. It is said that once, in speaking of her, Melville exclaimed that his mother had hated him; the phrase is reported

by Melville's granddaughter, presumably on the authority of her mother, Melville's sole surviving child.

Allan Melville and Maria had been married nearly five years when Herman was born, the third of their children. During this period their life had been nomadic, and it was not until after Allan's visit of courtesy to the Melvilles in Scotland that they decided to leave Albany and settle in New York. They had already two children, Gansevoort (preserving the name of the mother's family) and Helen Marie, and three months after this settlement Herman was born. He was named Herman after his mother's brother, and inherited with the name the robustness of the Gansevoort physique; and in looks he grew to be strikingly like his mother. Then, and for a while longer, the family affairs were somewhat fortunate and the circumstances easy; and when Herman was five years old his father obtained a lease of a house which almost united, he said, the advantages of town and country, though far enough from his store to compel him to dine from home. Allan Melville loved his home and his children; Herman was the fourth, and seven more were born before Allan's untimely death in 1832.

The young Herman trailed no clouds of glory for our eyes, and few traces of any kind are discoverable. When he was seven years old he was sent on a visit to his mother's brother, Peter Gansevoort. "He is very backward in speech and somewhat slow in comprehension, but you will find him as far as he understands men and things both solid and profound, and of a docile and amiable disposition. . . . Let him avoid green fruit and unseasonable exposure to the sun." It is

hard not to be amused at this injunction to spare one for whom the future held so much green and bitter fruit and whose genius blazed in so sudden a heat; and it is hard not to be amused also at the depreciation of Herman's wits, when we reflect how quickly this backward child ripened, and published the singular Mardi at thirty, the transcendent Moby-Dick at thirtytwo, and the disquieting, significant Pierre at thirtythree-young indeed for the writing of prose masterpieces. And docile and amiable? In later chapters we shall see ample and acute reasons for doubting the docility, and wondering by what suppressions the character of amiable was sustained.

Herman seems to have spent other summer holidays at his uncle's, in Albany, but his school life nevertheless went on normally. "We expect Gansevoort on Sunday, at fartherest," his father wrote, when we wish Herman also to be here, that they may recommence their studies together on Monday next, with equal chances of preferment. . . . 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 and amusements, and return home cheerfully to their books, and they will consequently imbibe habits of order and punctuality." The moral astringency is as powerful as in the case of that later American writer of unsuspected genius, Emily Dickinson; only, in her case, there was an added sharpness of evangelical tyranny which, continuing long after her escape from girlhood, turned the fine edge of her spirit. This tyranny Herman Melville escaped.

When he was little more than eight years old the

family moved again, but the removal this time did not signify increasing prosperity. After two years his father's affairs became so dismal that he removed once more to Albany, and died after another two years, leaving his wife and the eight surviving children sadly impoverished. Herman was thirteen years of age, and remembered enough of the family vicissitudes to be able to record them in Redburn, His First Voyage, being the Sailor-boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman in the Merchant Service. It is a sufficiently explicit title, and the references to his own early years are likewise explicit. He speaks of the days, those delightful days, before his father failed after many adversities and died, and the opening pages are suffused with that tenderest mellow flush which memory and time unite, by a familiar chemistry, to pour upon the obscurities of the past. The literature of remembered childhood, which is the chief part of the literature of childhood, had a strong attraction for Melville, and he employs all his skill in composing a narrative of singular simplicity, relating childish things directly and freshly out of a love which points to happiness in the past and longing in the present. For Wellingborough Redburn is Herman Melville, especially when he writes of his father and his home. "Of winter evenings in New York, by the wellremembered sea-coal fire in old Greenwich-street, he used to tell my brother and me of the monstrous waves at sea, mountains 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 side-walks, and lined with strange houses. And especially I tried hard to think how such places must look of 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." Under this spell of romance, cast by the admired voice of one who had travelled so far, his own thoughts, he says, went travelling yet farther, until, imagination kindling, he saw himself returning over those monstrous waves and reciting the wonders of barbarous countries, himself arrayed like a foreign prince to startle the eyes of all beholders :-" see what big eyes he has," his aunt whispered. He used to examine the furniture brought by his father from foreign parts, paintings, engravings, and what-not, prying into them as if to force their romance from them sea-paintings, French coloured prints, pictures of natural history, books in abundance, and on the title-page of many that mysterious word of Arabian potency, that strange key - name, London. More than all these in the childish eyes was an oldfashioned glass ship, about eighteen inches long, and of French manufacture, which my father, some thirty years before, had brought home from Hamburg as a present to a great-uncle of mine: Senator Wellingborough, who had died a member of Congress in the days of the old Constitution, and after whom I had the