Picturing mother with baby, January 1852 (Stanwix Melville born October 22, 1851)

Madonna of the Pinks
Raphael, c. 1506-7 via Wikimedia Commons

"Incomprehensible scheme! Oh! thou beautiful and wonderful Nature!—mother and moulder of the forms, and minds as well, of our wayward race. Now, she smiles in brilliant moonbeams on the grassy meadows, which wave with answering gladness to the whispering air. And the strong river flows as gently as an infant playing on the young mother's breast;—its murmurs as softly musical as that infant's voice!"

--January 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border

 When the above was published, Philip St. George Cooke (1809-1895) was 42 years old. Ages of his four children with wife Rachel Wilt Hertzog Cooke (1807-1896):

John Rodgers (1833-1891): 18
Flora (1836-1923): 16
Maria Pendleton (1840-1926): 12
Julia Turner (1842-1902): 10

So Cooke's youngest child, his daughter Julia, was probably nine years old when the writer of Scenes Beyond the Western Border was moved to picture a young mother with her baby and compared the baby's voice to the sounds of a rippling river. Julia's mother was then 44.

But Herman Melville's wife Elizabeth or "Lizzie" (1822-1906) had recently given birth to the couple's second child: second son (their first was Malcolm) Stanwix (1851-1886), born October 22, 1851.

Born June 13th (same birthday as PSGC!), Lizzie was 29.

Not long after, the July 1852 installment (likely composed in March-April) again refers metaphorically to an infant, this time one who is not happy but crying:

. . . the extra two miles over the lofty dividing ridge was terrible work for wagon mules; and it bruised I fear fatally a pet antelope fawn, which I had in a wagon:—it lies now in a neighboring tent uttering from time to time cries and moans which are distressingly similar to those of a suffering infant; said its soldier nurse, with real pathos, "it is thinking of its mother." I purchased another at the Fort; and a goat foster-mother.
--July 1852 Scenes Beyond the Western Border

Lizze experienced "a good deal of pain" and trouble while nursing Stanwix, as Hershel Parker describes:

But Stanwix's appetite [praised as "famous" by Maria his grandmother] was difficult to satisfy once Lizzie developed a breast infection. . . .

. . . the local physician, Dr. O. S. Root, advised her to continue nursing Stanwix from the left breast, despite the pain. The pain grew so severe that she decided she had to go to Boston to seek the help of the Shaw family physician, her uncle by marriage, Dr. George Hayward. --Herman Melville: A Biography V2.31-32

 Reporting on the follow-up in Boston, Laurie Robertson-Lorant explains:

Dr Hayward allowed her to continue nursing, but before long her right breast became clogged and the nipple cracked, causing her a great deal of pain. When the affliction persisted despite poulticing, he advised her to stop nursing.
--Melville: A Biography pp292-3

 The next and last figurative reference in Scenes Beyond the Border to the musical "prattle of children" occurs in the August 1853 installment. Melville's wife Lizzie gave birth to their third child and first daughter Elizabeth (Bessie) on May 22, 1853.

A gentle air rustles the grass or leaves; the running waters too, give music: and then, they seem the voices of gentle spirits, which may in this hour of calm and loveliness awake to Eden memories. As sometimes suddenly, the innocent prattle of children falls as music on the mother's ears, banishing happily, vexing cares,—so, nature now seems soothed, and harmony reigns. And as the mother, first musing in loving mood, then timidly questioning her happiness; —so too, to the eloquence of this sweet hour, my heart first beats a pleased response . . . . --August 1853 Scenes Beyond the Western Border

Here the maternal imagery seems partly influenced by lines addressed To the Young Mother in Mattie Griffith's Poems. Allusions to Eden also abound in Griffith's 1853 volume. Kind of amazingly (how did I miss this before?), our manly Captain of U. S. Dragoons is once again feeling like a woman--comparing his own tranquilized emotions to those of a pondering mother soothed by the audible presence of her children.

a subject of joke

Herman Melville's wife Elizabeth denied that bad reviews of Pierre (1852) made a hermit of her husband.  No, she wrote a relative in 1901, Herman was "naturally" reclusive and prone to shun "the bustling outside world."  Moreover, according to Melville's wife, the critical failure of Pierre

"was a subject of joke with him..."
(quoted in Pursuing Melville by Merton M. Sealts, Jr. at 215)

A joke!  How might Melville have joked about criticism like this

…Modern readers wish to exercise some little judgment of their own.... We are past the age when an artist superscribed his chef d’oeuvre with the judicious explanation, “this is a horse.” Mr. Melville longs for the good old times when the chorus filled the gaps between the acts with a well-timed commentary on the past, and a shrewd guess at the future.  (New York Herald, September 18, 1852, quoted here)

and these gems from the unfriendly review of Melville's Pierre in the Literary World, August 21, 1852:

"Mark the tragical result..."

"Mr. Melville may have constructed his story upon some new theory of art to a knowledge of which we have not yet transcended; he evidently has not constructed it according to the established principles of the only theory accepted by us until assured of a better, of one more true and natural than truth and nature themselves, which are the germinal principles of all true art.... The most immoral moral of the story, if it has any moral at all, seems to be the impracticability of virtue..."

"All the male characters of the book have a certain robust, animal force and untamed energy, which carry them through their melodramatic parts—no slight duty—with an effect sure to bring down the applause of the excitable and impulsive."

That's Evert Duyckinck coolly damning his sailor pal in print, so you can see why Hershel Parker thinks Melville's stoic joking must have masked a good deal of personal suffering.  (Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 2 at 142)

How to reconcile the reception of Pierre as "a subject of joke" in Elizabeth's memory with the expected, natural human feelings of pain and bitterness?  Here's how:

 Cub, a Tragedy in Three Acts

In crossing the Platte this morning, the grizzly bear cub came on the scene in his final act.

It will be remembered by the patient and attentive future reader of this dry and methodical narrative, that its first appearance on any stage, was in "high" tragedy—that the first act embraced an unusual amount of sanguinary incident—that an innocent brother, (or sister,) being ruthlessly slain, and the baffled lady-mother left (unceremoniously) full of towering and demonstrative rage,— the imprisoned hero himself sank overwhelmed,—or in a well-acted counterfeit of death, (and was borne off, remember, on a "real" horse). That in the next act, (and three acts shall do for the tragedy of my bear,—originally they had but one,—but that was at the sacrifice of a goat,) he came to life in a manner that might very well have been criticized as an overdone piece of stage-effect,—but that in fact, the spectators were much moved, and gave full credit to the dangerous passion of his howl.

To-day, then,—for I scorn anachronism— was performed the final act. The stage (wagon) was on "real water." Enraged at his wrongs, his losses, and his galling chain, the "robustious beast" acted in a ridiculous and unbearable manner; aye, ''tore his passion to tatters, to very rags,"—splinters; the stage (wagon) could not hold him: and finally in despair, he "imitated humanity so abominably," as to throw himself headlong, and so drown—or hang himself: (the author cannot decide which—even after a post mortem examination;—and so leaves the decision of this important point to the commentators).

My tragedy is all true,—and if not quite serious, has, as is proper, its moral;—but rather, as I have alluded to the primitive tragedy, let that "future reader" here imagine the entry of Chorus, and their song to Freedom! That dumb beasts prefer death to slavery! Liberty lost, they can die without the excitement of the world's applause, or hopes of a grateful posterity! (It is not possible, I think, that the cub could have known that I would immortalize him.)

"Scenes Beyond the Western Border," Southern Literary Messenger 19 (March 1853): 159 and
Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857), 390