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.