CHAPTER I

"What a madness and anguish it is, that an author can never-under no conceivable circumstances-be at all frank with his readers!"-Letter from Herman Melville to Evert Duyckinck.

CHILDHOOD-YOUTH-FIRST VOYAGE

HERMAN MELVILLE, the most powerful of all the great American writers, was born on the 1st August 1819, in New York. His father, Allan, was the fourth child of Major Thomas Melville. The family was of old Scots lineage, being descended from that John Melville of Carnbee who was knighted by James the Sixth, and a yet earlier origin has been traced in a Sir Richard Melville who took allegiance to Edward the First in the thirteenth century.

Herman's grandfather, Thomas, was the first of the Melvilles to be born in America. Allan Melville, son of a Scots clergyman of Leven (Fife), had emigrated in 1748 and became a merchant at Boston. Herman's father and grandfather both died in 1832, when he was but thirteen, and while references to his father are to be found-open and veiled-in the novelist's work, there are but few direct indications of a concern with any earlier generation. Herman was not in

sensible to the distinction and privileges of birth, and it may be permitted to trace his mistrust of democracy to an active sense of aristocracy; but in the main he helps a biographer but little to search into family records. His father, Allan, did not share this indifference, for only a year before Herman's birth he visited Scotland in order to make himself known to his distinguished collaterals. The memorials of this visit are brief, but he records that his reception by the Earl of Leven and Melville was very hospitable and friendly. Nevertheless, the visit was not repeated, nor does it seem to have been followed by correspondence. It was a mere "call" of courtesy and curiosity, prompted immediately, no doubt, by Allan's poring over Memoirs of his own Life by Sir James Melvil of Hallhill, a volume published in London in 1683, and a genealogy which he had pleased or teased himself with constructing. Mr. Weaver, Herman Melville's biographer, to whom we owe almost all that American research has been able to achieve for his subject, has stated that this volume contained the autograph of Thomas Melville of Scoonie, Herman's clerical ancestor; and such a book, with such an autograph, would probably suffice to prompt even a faintly romantic exile to an act of recognition and brief reunion with his family.

Allan had travelled a good deal to Europe before his marriage in 1814, and from 1800 to a little before his death in 1832 he kept a journal in which he records his travels and measures their distance-"by land 24,425 miles, by water 48,460 miles", and so on; journeys not at all remarkable in the pursuit of his trade as a general importer. At the age of thirty-two

he married Maria Gansevoort, a lady whose family had won fame and honour in the War of Independence. The Gansevoorts were of Dutch origin, and if the assumption be admitted that the novelist drew his mother when he drew Mrs. Glendinning in Pierrean assumption to be weighed later on-it would be judged that Maria Gansevoort retained a marked pride of family to the end of her days. She was the only daughter of that General Peter Gansevoort who, in the War of Independence, achieved conspicuous service against Burgoyne's forces and was recognized by a Congress vote of thanks. A certain satisfaction in the public services of her father, and in the recognition of them by Washington and the State, may be pardoned in a woman whose lot is cast in a very fluctuant and unstable society; and if Maria Gansevoort was, as she has been reckoned, cold, proud and arrogant, it is possible that these unhappy qualities were assumed for defence and distinction, and only by habit passed into her character. Here again the question of the validity of Melville's portrait of Mrs. Glendinning arises; and it is proper to state at once that while that character, in Pierre, may quite truly contain hints and figures of Melville's mother, a difficulty still remains; for our author was a great imaginative artist, drawing with a free and wanton hand, using the most fantastic liberties when he pleased, and seldom constrained to mere literality. Pierre is a wild, vague, painful book, and of all the "ambiguities" of its alternative title none is so questionable as the identity of Mrs. Glendinning and his mother. Another reason for doubting whether Herman would indeed paint his mother's picture so darkly, under the name

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