Chapter 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.