Billy Budd
[In the following essay, Stern explores the nature of sacrifice and the role of the hero in Billy Budd.]
Translated Cross, hast thou withdrawn,
Dim paling too at every dawn,
With symbols vain once counted wise,
And gods declined to heraldries?
.....The atheist cycles—must they be?
Fomenters as forefathers we?
—[Melville,] Clarel
Morally, philosophically, emotionally, socially, Melville's search for the complete man is not the search for the knightly hero, but for the Governor. The Governor must repress man's anarchic atheism and must reorient man's frantic activities.
The quester is an atheist because he denies history and thereby rejects man's only possible God. The quietist is an atheist because he denies human commitments and thereby rejects possibility itself. The banded world is an atheist because it denies reality and thereby rejects the true nature of God and of man's potentialities. All these confidence men-atheists have one denial in common: they reject man. They deny man because they cannot recognize the importance of man-self and the subordinate position of one-self; they cannot recognize anything by means of the naturalistic perception wherein the importance of man's morality shrinks on a cosmic scale, and the importance of man's morality grows on the social and historical scale. That they all perpetuate a crazy history of crime and error. Sacrifice of self to ideal is not self-sacrifice at all, Melville has suggested, but rather it is that indulgence of self which is the ultimate romantic selfishness. What is needed is a tactically wise, if often distasteful and unspectacular, sacrifice of self to the historical moment. Except for King Media, Melville so far has given us no one willing or able to practice this particularly contemporary, larger-and-smaller-than-traditional sacrifice. In Billy Budd he does.
The nature of the governor and the nature of the sacrifice demand an emphasis not on individualism, certainly, or self-expression per se, but on control—which is at the center of Melville's political classicism.
Melville introduces the need for planning by slyly setting the reader at ease with a promise of “that pleasure which is wickedly said to be in [literary] sinning.” With such a sin Melville announces that he is “going to err into … a bypath” which turns out, after all, to be the direct road into the center of this “inside narrative.” Enticed into the bypath, “anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without being inappreciative of the Past,” finds in “the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson's Victory” a symbol of the conditions of victory, of good government, and of the ruler who recognizes the need for altruistic yet impersonal self-sacrifice to the realities of history.
There are some, perhaps, who while not altogether inaccessible [to the beauty of the past] … may yet on behalf of the new order, be disposed to parry it; and this to the extent of iconoclasm, if need be. For example, prompted by the sight of the star inserted into the Victory's quarter-deck designating the spot where the Great Sailor fell, these martial utilitarians may suggest considerations implying that Nelson's ornate publication of his person in battle was not only unnecessary, but not military, nay, savored of foolhardiness and vanity. They may add, too, that at Trafalgar it was in effect nothing less than a challenge to death; and death came; and that but for his bravado the victorious admiral might possibly have survived the battle, and so, instead of having his sagacious dying injunction overruled by his immediate successor in command he himself when the contest was decided might have brought his shattered fleet to anchor, a proceeding which might have averted the deplorable loss of life by shipwreck in the elemental tempest that followed the martial one.
Well, should we set aside the more disputable point whether for various reasons it was possible to anchor the fleet, then plausibly enough the Benthamites of war may urge the above.
But the might have been is but boggy ground to build on. And certainly in foresight as to the larger issue of an encounter, and anxious preparation for it—buoying the deadly way and mapping it out, as at Copenhagen—few commanders have been so painstakingly circumspect as this same reckless declarer of his person in fight.
Personal prudence even when dictated by quite other than selfish considerations is surely no special virtue in a military man; while an excessive love of glory, impassioning a less burning impulse the honest sense of duty, is the first. If the name Wellington is not so much a trumpet to the blood as the simpler name Nelson, the reason for this may perhaps be inferred from the above. Alfred in his funeral ode on the victor of Waterloo ventures not to call him the greatest soldier of all time, though in the same ode he invokes Nelson as “the greatest sailor since the world began.”
At Trafalgar Nelson on the brink of opening the fight sat down and wrote his last brief will and testament. If under the presentiment of the most magnificent of all victories to be crowned by his own glorious death, a sort of priestly motive led him to dress his person in the jewelled vouchers of his own shining deeds; if thus to have adorned himself for the altar and the sacrifice were indeed vainglory, then affectation and fustian is each more heroic line in the great epics and dramas, since in such lines the poet but embodies in verse those exaltations of sentiment that a nature like Nelson, the opportunity being given, vitalizes into acts
[pp. 822–24].
The goal at the end of this bypath is a statement of the kind of heroism that, unlike the quester's courage, may lead to salvation, and that the reader is led to expect to find in the other Great Sailor, Captain Vere. Practical recognition of actualities is not attacked in this brief excursion—“the might have been is but boggy ground to build on.” Both cheap hindsight and absolutist evaluations are tossed aside with the rejection of any should-have-been or might-be or must-be that does not grow out of the conditioning historical facts which inevitably become a particular historical result. Hand in hand with this rejection is the attack on “martial utilitarians,” who, in this context, are the dry tactitians who can see tactics only. Strategy, empiricism, tactics, Melville says here, while of prime importance, cannot be divorced from the greatest communal aspirations—“the larger issue.” The fact of the existence of aspiration, and recognition of larger issues, makes it necessary to reckon with human nobility and heroism as factors in tactical action. The nonrational gloriousness of which man is capable cannot be denied—indeed must be depended upon—in strategy which is to win the greatest human victories. In attacking the might-have-been and the Benthamites of war, Melville attacks the function of head minus heart, the power politics minus the informing vision. And because the informing vision is a social, historical vision, and because man is at once unbelievably heroic and unbelievably blind and base, the leader must combine Machiavellian circumspect foresight with the glorious and heartful act. The Machiavellian prudence channels and controls blind, base man, and the glorious act vitalizes the controlled and channeled man into the proper acts in which his inspired heroism can victoriously operate. The hero thus is a political and moral administrator. The standing in one's fullest magnificence upon the beleaguered quarter-deck of the state stems not from the personal and pathetically heroic idealism of the quester, but from the social and tactical vision of the leader who recognizes that the historical moment demands the sacrifice of self to the possible victory that the combined head and heart may achieve. Thus the shrewdly heroic Nelson, who deliberately and purposefully went out, in the shining medals of his honor, to tempt death.
Thus too, this modern Nelson-hero-Administrator is, like the quester, self-consuming. But unlike the quester, he consumes himself as an inspiration which will result in victory concerning the larger, social issue. He places himself on the altar of “the honest sense of duty,” making his very using up of one-self a man-self triumph which saves rather than destroys the ship. And the difference between the Nelson-Vere-captain and the Ahab-captain exists most centrally in this matter of the empirically, communally, historically centered rather than the idealistically, self-centered predisposition. Indeed, “few commanders have been so painstakingly circumspect as this same reckless declarer of his person in fight,” and “while an excessive love of glory … is the first … special virtue in a military man,” Nelson's love of glory was no more motivated by Ahabian glory, or vainglory, than his painstaking circumspection was motivated by “personal prudence.” The implication is that the gloriousness itself, which was always there, would never have been displayed had it not been the tactical move which resulted in the preservation and triumph of the human community, had it not been the socially conscious, altruistic “exaltations of sentiment … vitalized into acts.” So too, Vere's captaincy is not the glory that leads the Ahab-led Ishmael to utter the Solomonic “All is vanity. ALL.” Not at all vain, when Vere is ashore
in the garb of a civilian scarce any one would have taken him for a sailor, more especially that he never garnished unprofessional talk with nautical terms, and grave in his bearing, evinced little appreciation of mere humor. It was not out of keeping with those traits that on a passage when nothing demanded his paramount action, he was the most undemonstrative of men. Any landsman observing this gentleman not conspicuous by his stature and wearing no pronounced insignia, emerging from his cabin retreat to the open deck and noting the silent deference of the officers retiring to leeward, might have taken him for the King's guest, a civilian aboard the King's ship, some highly honorable discreet envoy on his way to an important post. But in fact this unobtrusiveness of demeanor may have proceeded from a certain unaffected modesty of manhood sometimes accompanying a resolute nature, a modesty evinced at all times not calling for pronounced action, and which shown in any rank of life suggests a virtue aristocratic in kind
[p. 826].
The preparation for Vere made by the Nelson “divergence” exists in more than the nature of self-sacrifice. Not only must Nelson sacrifice the most gloriously beautiful self in order to insure the historically possible larger issue, but so also must Vere, in the rejection of the might-have-been, do the same. But in addition, just as there is no one left to whom Nelson can delegate the proper conduct of the ship of state (“his sagacious dying injunction overruled by his immediate successor”) so there is no one left to whom Vere can delegate the proper power and insight. In the perfectly complete parallel between Nelson and Vere, Melville says that if human society can win a victory over itself, no one man can insure the perpetuity of the outcome. Perhaps the governor must be a community of rule. Perhaps, indeed, lasting victory cannot be achieved from the top down at all. Not only is there the implicit rejection of the great-man theory along with the recognition of the identity of the truly great man, but there is the frustrating irony which places destiny in the hands of the general, common man. Because of his blindness, general, common man cannot be led by his nobility (the administrator's self-sacrifice provides the leadership) and there is no avenue left open to the gregarious advancement, which is the only lasting one. Because in Billy Budd Melville comes most closely to grips with the problem of rule, the political alternative to his metaphysical rejections, and because the facts of his experience showed him no solution to the problem, Billy Budd has the angry, bitter, frustrated tone which too few readers have noticed in their agreement to call the story a testament of acceptance.
Melville orients the elements of Vere's sacrifice as historically as he does Nelson's. He sets up the conditions of Vere's choice in a specific moment which extends to the general history of order and community versus anarchic atheism, in Melville's sense, and atomistic individualism.
Billy himself, as the lure, is a familiar figure. He is the element to which Vere reacts, and it is important that Billy is dragged out of The Rights of Man onto The Indomitable “in the year of the Great Mutiny.” He enters actual rather than theoretical human history at a moment when order is threatened and when the felicities of the rights of man are absent because the whole world is in another Mar-di. In the total historical picture, the man-of-war world, wrong as it is, is all that exists. Man can either, like the quester, renounce it, or can try to preserve order so that the social instruments which are the actuality may be used to attain felicity. Like tactics, order per se is not the point. Melville's political classicism cannot possibly be construed as totalitarianism. Vere, it is stated, does not maintain order for its own sake. Vere sees order as necessary for a reconciliation of opposites and a suppression of chaos-bringing disruption. The paradox is that in the predatory world, in which the gun robs man of his felicities, the wrong instrument is that very felicity itself, which in the character of Billy Budd is characterized as the nonpredatory Typee-child savage “—a Tahitian say of Captain Cook's time. … Out of natural courtesy he received but did not appropriate … like a gift placed on the palm of an outstretched hand upon which the fingers do not close.”
Billy is presented in a world where the Articles of War and the Sermon on the Mount are the two opposites which compose the choice open to man in the universal history of the war. The preface to the novelette brings the choice into immediate focus. “The year 1797, the year of this narrative, belongs to a period which as every thinker now feels, involved a crisis for Christendom not exceeded in its undetermined momentousness at the time by any other era whereof there is record.” It is curious that Melville sums up the universal history in the term “Christendom” (wherein one of the main actors is a pagan “Tahitian,” as it were), for within this “inside narrative” one need go no further than the chaplain's interview with Billy to find Melville's Solomonic, unchristian, cultural relativism, or his view of Christendom (the official term) as a false appearance. The Tahitian is closer to the Sermon on the Mount than to “Christendom's” Articles of War. The clue to Melville's preparation for Billy lies in the assertion that it is Christendom's most momentous time. There are a few alternatives for this assertion, other than the year 1797, but they all add up to the same thing. Immediately suggested are the birth and adoration of the Christ Baby, the Passion, or the Fall. And just as Melville uses Typee or Saddle Meadows or Serenia to demonstrate universal points of development, so in Billy Budd Melville tells his history of humanity in a reworking of the Adam-Christ story, placing prelapsarian Adam and the Christ on a man-of-war, and demonstrating the inevitability of the Fall and the necessity of the Crucifixion.
The Preface is complete in itself as the setting in which that beautiful self, Christ, is introduced. In this setting, the Sermon is as distinct from the Articles as the French Revolution is distinct from Vere's England. The problems of rule are introduced in the implicit question, in the actuality of a world torn by chaos and rules by the gun, what are the proper means and ends?
“Now, as elsewhere hinted, it was something caught from the Revolutionary Spirit that at Spithead emboldened the man-of-war's men to rise against real abuses, long-standing ones, and afterwards at the Nore to make inordinate and aggressive demands, successful resistance to which was confirmed only when the ringleaders were hung for an admonitory spectacle to the anchored fleet. Yet in a way analogous to the operation of the Revolution at large the Great Mutiny, though by Englishmen naturally deemed monstrous at the time, doubtless gave the first latent prompting to most important reforms in the British Navy
[p. 805].
Throughout the story, the quester-like, ideal-seeking destructiveness of the Spirit of the Age broods in the background against which the major action takes place. Despite its good intentions and real justifications, the gun wielded by the spirit championing the rights of man is an emblem of the perpetuation of all the sins of history by the good-badness of tactically misdirected human aspiration. Melville insists so strongly upon the background of the narrative, that, extended as it is by its connection with a retelling of the Christ story, it becomes the actuality of all history. Simply, there is no escaping the conditions in which Vere must act:
[The Nore] was indeed a demonstration more menacing to England than the contemporary manifestoes and conquering and proselyting armies of the French Directory.
To the British Empire the Nore Mutiny was what a strike in the fire-brigade would be to London threatened by general arson. In a crisis when the Kingdom might well have anticipated the famous signal that some years later published along the naval line of battle what it was that upon occasion England expected of Englishmen; that was the time when at the mast-heads of the three-deckers and seventy-fours moored in her own roadstead—a fleet, the right arm of a Power then all but the sole free conservative one of the Old World, the blue-jackets, to be numbered by thousands, ran up with hurras the British colors with the union and cross wiped out; by that cancellation transmuting the flag of founded law and freedom defined, into the enemy's red meteor of unbridled and unbounded revolt. Reasonable discontent growing out of practical grievances in the fleet had been ignited into irrational combustion as by live cinders blown across the Channel from France in flames
[pp. 819–20].
Again, in Chapter V, after the conditions of rule have been explored in the Nelson episode, Melville once more warns that “Discontent foreran the Two Mutinies, and more or less it lurkingly survived them. Hence it was not unreasonable to apprehend some return of trouble sporadic or general.”
Into this history Christ is born. If the fall of man, for Melville, is neither a mythical nor chronological actuality, but is merely a symbol of the beginningless and symbolic facts of all human history, then again, as Typee suggested, Eden never was, fallen man is actual man trapped in his own history, and the prelapsarian and pure must be out of history, indeed out of time. Thus, when Melville introduces Billy as
a sort of upright barbarian, much such perhaps as Adam presumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into his company.
And here be it submitted that apparently going to corroborate the doctrine of man's fall, a doctrine now popularly ignored, it is observable that where certain virtues pristine and unadulterate peculiarly characterize anybody in the external uniform of civilization, they will upon scrutiny seem not to be derived from custom or convention but rather to be out of keeping with these, as if indeed exceptionally transmitted from a period prior to Cain's city and citified man …
[pp. 817–18].
he is implicitly advocating neither the nineteenth-century primitivism that derives from a quester-like insistence upon self, nor the eighteenth-century primitivism that derives from the sensationalism and institutionalism whose political corrolaries were based upon the social compact and the natural rights of man. Especially within the context of Billy Budd's actions it becomes evident that Melville is continuing and summing up what he had said in his other books: given the only actuality of earth and time, then the transcendent purity, the Edenic, absolute morality, is something before history and which therefore comes from nowhere—is something that is literally as impossible as Yillah or Isabel or Billy himself, as impossible as the right-wrongness of the anarchic, individualistic, rebellious insistence upon the eighteenth-century idealism which Vere must oppose. Again, recalling citified man, Melville recalls the fact that like all the other lures, Billy, despite his existence, is devoid of experience, which though it is the hideous experience of “fallen” man, is the only history there is.
The conditions of Vere's choice must be further defined within the opposition of history and ideal. Whereas anarchical revolution is the bête noire of the piece, neither social revolution, nor imposition of order, nor any socio-political instrument per se is defined absolutely. Both Vere and the French seek the rights of man, the lasting peace and welfare of mankind. But in the search for human felicities, uncontrolled and disorderly action ironically has and will result in the denial of those very rights. The Vere will have to suspend the rights in order to institute the communal order which makes those rights attainable. The idealist will ironically defeat those rights just as the quester defeats his own purpose. So Vere recognizes that to speak of the rights of man as an abstract ideal is meaningless. The historical duties and responsibilities of man must be recognized and practiced before the rights of man become significant or can even exist in the actuality of man's “fallen” state. Thus it is not the fact but the tactics of the French Revolution with which Vere has his quarrel, for the Revolution as a justified fact has itself, like Spithead and the Nore, in unanticipated ways, brought about a step toward betterment and the lasting peace and welfare of mankind which Vere champions. “The opening proposition made by the Spirt of the Age involved the rectification of the Old World's hereditary wrongs. In France to some extent this was bloodily effected. But what then? Straightway the Revolution itself became a wrongdoer, one more oppressive than the kings. Under Napoleon it enthroned upstart kings, and initiated that prolonged agony of continual war whose final throe was Waterloo. During those years not the wisest could have foreseen that the outcome of all would be what to some thinkers apparently it has since turned out to be, a political advance along nearly the whole line for Europeans.” In short, the mutinies, the Revolution, the Rights of Man, and ideal aspirations all become merged (like the Sermon on the Mount, in opposition to the Articles of War) in the historical cycles of rightly motivated, morally justified action which is tactically mismanaged and wrongly directed against an order which, nonetheless, had to be challenged in the first place. Ordinary men, Jarl, Starbuck, Charlie Millthorpe, the majority of the ships' “people” in the French and English fleets, want what is good. But absolutely defined good, such as Billy implies, is inoperative in the actualities of history. The good can only be defined by—indeed becomes one with—the proper tactics within the historical moment. Melville is no more absolutist in his political classicism than he is in his cultural relativism; the problem becomes not one of order versus rebellion as such, or of suppression versus mass aspiration, but a problem of the proper tactics versus the improper tactics. As Vere insists in the court-martial scene, it is not the intention, but the consequences of the act that must be weighed. The problem is that of “atheism” (the well-intended but ultimately man-denying idealism) versus true “Godliness” (the communally disciplined use of the gun according to the historical view which uses the gun to destroy the gun). It is not so important that Melville may not have agreed with those thinkers who saw a political advance along the whole line for Europeans, or that he said that 1797 was or was not a year for revolution, or that he agreed or disagreed with the French Directory: the important point is the statement he reached for in using those events as symbols. That is, the moral intention, the absolute goodness by itself, is inapplicable to history and therefore a chaos bringer. The gun itself is sterile rule and power and prerogative for its own sake. Neither quester nor Machiavel, Vere is both. He recognizes that only by wedding the correct, disciplined, forced, social manipulation to a moral goal of social altruism can man achieve his Nelson-Victory over the chaos and atheism of history. Always the implication is that history is not a result of dependence upon or lack of dependence upon an absolute morality; but rather that since no absolute morality governs the cosmos, that the definition and even existence of morality arise from the historical situation which shapes its being.
Having set up the “fallen” state of man as the only context for reality, Melville now has to dramatize the impossible unrealities of man's supranatural, suprahistorical idealism. Billy Budd is first introduced in a view of the Handsome Sailor. The Handsome Sailor is not necessarily white like Billy, but, universalized by the Negro Handsome Sailor, he is the leader of apostles, the informing center whose physical and moral being sets the tone and direction of his universal followers' activity. He is
“a symmetric figure much above the average height. …
“It was a hot noon in July; and his face, lustrous with perspiration, beamed with barbaric good humor. In jovial sallies right and left his white teeth flashing into view, he rollicked along, the center of a company of his shipmates. These were made up of such an assortment of tribes and complexions as would well have fitted them to be marched up by Anacharsis Cloots before the bar of the first French Assembly as Representatives of the Human Race. At each spontaneous tribute rendered by the wayfarers to this black pagod of a fellow—the tribute of a pause and a stare, and less frequent an exclamation,—the motley retinue showed that they took that sort of pride in the evoker of it which the Assyrian priests doubtless showed for their grand sculptored Bull when the faithful prostrated themselves.
“Invariably a proficient in his perilous calling, he was also more or less of a mighty boxer or wrestler. It was strength and beauty. …
“The moral nature was seldom out of keeping with the physical make. Indeed, except as toned by the former, the comeliness and power, always attractive in masculine conjunction could hardly have drawn the sort of honest homage the Handsome Sailor in some examples received from his less gifted associates”
[pp. 807–9].
When Billy himself is presented, he too is the Handsome Sailor characterized by barbaric good humor, by a tall, athletic, symmetric figure, by the ability to box well, by proficiency in his calling, by a highly moral nature. The Handsome Sailor becomes the kind of innocent that the most attractive Typee savage is, and the repeated mention of Billy's barbarian innocence and his magnificent physical appearance predetermines the genre's essential mindlessness. Once more, the prehistoric and griefless Typee mindlessness is associated with the Edenic purity of Christian innocence. Billy is constantly presented as the prelapsarian Adam, indeed, one who “in the nude might have posed for a statue of young Adam before the fall.” Melville repeatedly suggests that innocence, in the need for a knowledge of the history of the only world there is, is not a saving virtue, but a fatal flaw. The very goodness of Billy's ignorance of the world, while in accord with Christian teaching, becomes the sin of nonunderstanding, noncommunicating mindlessness marked by the stutter. Melville writes:
In certain matters, some sailors even in mature life remain unsophisticated enough. But a young seafarer of the disposition of our athletic foretopman is much of a child-man. And yet a child's utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes. But in Billy Budd, intelligence such as it was, had advanced, while yet his simple-mindedness remained for the most part unaffected. Experience is a teacher indeed; yet did Billy's years make his experience small. Besides he had none of that intuitive knowledge of the bad which in natures not good or incompletely so foreruns experience, and therefore may pertain, as in some instances it too clearly does pertain, even to youth
[p. 854].
The problem of Billy's mindlessness is not merely one of the Christ-like purity which is an absolute and predetermining absence of evil. The problem of Billy's mindlessness arises from his typically lure-like inexperience and inability to evaluate the experience he does have. Leaving no doubt at all about the nature of his rejection of ideal, Christly behavior, Melville sums up his statement about Billy by saying, “As it was, innocence was his blinder.”
Billy, then, is particularized as the Adam-Christ within the general type of the Handsome Sailor: “Such a cynosure [the Handsome Sailor], at least in aspect, and something such too in nature, though with important variations made apparent as the story proceeds, was welkin-eyed Billy Budd or Baby Budd …” [italics mine]. Billy immediately is the beauty and childlike purity of the ideal. He is called both Beauty and Baby by his shipmates, and the detail of his “heaven-eyed” face occurs again and again. Even in the ever illuminating matter of origins (on the literal level, Billy's origins will turn out to be something quite different), Melville hints that Billy's unknown mother was one “eminently favored by Love and the Graces,” and—who is his father? Well, “God knows, Sir.” The Baby is not allowed to continue his straight and narrow path within the chronometrical and ideal sermon of the rights of man, but is born into the actualities of the Articles of War. “It was not very long prior to the time of the narration that follows that he had entered the King's service, having been impressed on the Narrow Seas from a homeward bound English merchantman [the Rights of Man] into a seventy-four outward-bound, H.M.S. Indomitable.” In White-Jacket Melville used the ship image precisely in the way it was to be used repeatedly in other books: the homeward bound ship is the ship bound to heaven, to something final and absolute. The outward bound ship, whether wrongly or rightly directed, is the actual state of the world, ever seeking, ever subject to the dark waters of new and unknown experiences, ever plowing new paths in the boundless waters of infinite relativity. In the actual world, Billy continues his behavior of ideal Christliness. Chronometrically and mindlessly he turns the other cheek to all new experiences, accepting everything with animal insightlessness and the childlike faith of innocence. “As to his enforced enlistment, that he seemed to take pretty much as he was wont to take any vicissitude of weather. Like the animals, though no philosopher, he was, without knowing it, practically a fatalist.” The ordinary, hard-working, Jarl-world of common grave-lings depends upon Budd morality for the peaceful pursuits of an unarmed and productive world. When his merchant ship, the Rights of Man, is robbed of “man's earthly household peace” and “domestic felicity” by the arch-thief, the gun, Captain Graveling pleads with Lieutenant Ratcliffe lest the man-of-war remove the very possibility of a peaceful and moral world. “Ay, Lieutenant, you are going to take away the jewel of 'em; you are going to take away my peacemaker!” Immediately the Prince of Peace must be defined within the context of either the ideal, the Sermon and the Rights of Man, or hideous history, the Articles and the Indomitable. Immediately, first things come first, and the needs of the man-of-war world take precedence over the needs of the Ship of Peace. The bitterness of this story's irony and anger first becomes noticeable in the impressment scene. For Ratcliffe, who understands none of the things that Vere understands, and who can use the gun only in order to use the gun, makes the only possible, correct answer for all the wrong reasons. “Well,” says he, “blessed are the peacemakers, especially the fighting peacemakers!” And pointing through the cabin window to the Indomitable, Ratcliffe adds, “And such are the seventy-four beauties some of which you see poking their noses out of the port-holes of yonder warship lying-to for me.” For they, not the meek, inherit the earth.
Characteristically, Billy's transfer of worlds is accompanied by the predatory act of spoilation. Not only is the very act of impressment symbol enough, but the lieutenant bursts unbidden into Graveling's cabin, unbidden takes his ease and pleasure with Graveling's liquor, as though the act of taking were his military, world-wide right. To him Billy's impressment has only the meaning of his own selfish amusement gained by obtaining a prize at the expense of the Rights of Man. “Why, I pledge you in advance the royal approbation,” he says sarcastically to Graveling. Ratcliffe will not allow Billy to transfer his possessions from one ship to the other. The characteristics of the ideal cannot be applied to the characteristics of the real. What Billy can take with him is what Billy—“Apollo with his portmanteau”—can carry in a man-of-war's sea-bag in order to live a man-of-war life. But as for the rest of Billy's possessions, why, “you can't take that big box aboard a warship. The boxes there are mostly shot-boxes.”
And what the thief, Ratcliffe, says about his brother-slave-master thief, the gun, is history's hideous but inescapable truth. In a bit of preparation for Billy's felling Claggart, Melville indicates that when the Christ is a peacemaker, he must be a fighting peacemaker, and must suspend innocent peacefulness for the actuality of the moment. In a mindless parallel to Vere's position, Billy uses his fists as the only means for removing the necessity for using his fists. Talking about the chaotic living conditions aboard ship, Graveling says,
But Billy came; and it was like a Catholic priest striking peace in an Irish shindy. Not that he preached to them or said or did anything in particular; but a virtue went out of him, sugaring the sour ones. They took to him like hornets to treacle; all but the bluffer of the gang, the big shaggy chap with the fire-red whiskers. He indeed out of envy, perhaps, of the newcomer, and thinking such a “sweet and pleasant fellow,” as he mockingly designated him to the others, could hardly have the spirit of a game-cock, must needs bestir himself in trying to get up an ugly row with him. Billy forebore with him and reasoned with him in a pleasant way … but nothing served. So, in the second dog-watch one day the Red Whiskers in presence of the others, under pretense of showing Billy just whence a sirloin steak was cut—for the fellow had once been a butcher—insultingly gave him a dig under the ribs. Quick as lightning Billy let fly his arm. I dare say he never meant to do quite as much as he did, but anyhow he gave the burly fool a terrible drubbing. It took about half a minute, I should think. And, Lord bless you, the lubber was astonished at the celerity. And will you believe it, Lieutenant, the Red Whiskers now really loves Billy—loves him, or is the biggest hypocrite that ever I heard of
[pp. 811–12].
There is therefore, before the story opens, a history of experience to which Billy has been exposed. But his actions, even though dictated by the unchristly actualities of experience, were unplanned, unintended, mindless, and spontaneous as lightning. For Billy, precisely as for Isabel and Yillah, experience might just as well never have been. Billy is incapable of subtleties, “for Billy, though happily endowed with the gaiety of high health, youth and a free heart, was yet by no means of a satirical turn. The will to it and the sinister dexterity were alike wanting. To deal in double meaning and insinuations of any sort was quite foreign to his nature.” Like Isabel, Yillah, and the white whale, Billy is alone in the world, and without connections in his human family. Beneath the exposure to experience—the orange-tawny dye of the tar-bucket and the glow of the seaman's tan—there is the lily and the rose. He is Lily-Yillah's rose-flower in the bud. He is “all but feminine in purity [and] in natural complexion … where, thanks to his seagoing, the lily was quite suppressed and the rose had some ado visibly to flush through the tan.” And despite the life of experience (the seagoing), like the young Pierre, Billy has not had a view of woe.
No merrier man in his mess: in marked contrast to certain other individuals included like himself among the impressed portions of the ship's company; for these when not actively employed were sometimes, and more particularly in the last dog-watch when the drawing near of twilight induced revery, apt to fall into a saddish mood which in some partook of sullenness. But they were not so young as our foretopman, and no few of them must have known a hearth of some sort, others may have had wives and children left, too probably, in uncertain circumstances, and hardly any but must have acknowledged kith and kin, while for Billy, as will shortly be seen, his entire family was practically invested in himself
[p. 814].
Not until it is too late does he recognize the inescapable trap laid for innocence, which initiates him into the wisdom and woe that brings “to [his] face an expression which was as a crucifixion to behold.” Not until touched by the hatred reminiscent of the sons of Aleema does the innocence fade and does “the rose-tan of [Billy's] cheek look struck as by white leprosy.” And it is the innocence which attracts the Satanism of the Ahabian man whose experience has demonized his heart in the fires of the madness that comes from woe. The imagery completes the picture of Billy as the tempted Adam-Christ pursued by the Spoiler, Claggart, for Billy is “as Adam presumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into his company.”
Billy's famous stutter introduces the idea that the inevitable relationship with evil, or history, is precisely what makes the Baby Buddlike Beauty a murderous and murdered thing. For as a man, Billy too is subject to external history, and must learn to evaluate experience. When Melville says that innocence was Billy's blinder, he says that as a behavior pattern for man to “square his life by,” Billy can only offer what is really the original sin of unknowledge. Again Melville uses the Christian mythos and symbology in order to make the empirical reversion of what to the unchristian Solomonic wisdom had been the inversion to begin with. The irony which makes the innocence-stutter a sin is enriched by its inevitable relationship, as a sin, to Satan, suggesting that because of his mindless purity, heartful Billy had always been subject to and would inevitably attract the attention of Claggart. Billy had no
visible blemish … but an occasional liability to a vocal defect. Though in the hour of elemental uproar or peril, he was everything that a sailor should be, yet under sudden provocation of strong heart-feeling his voice otherwise singularly musical, as if expressive of the harmony within, was apt to develop an organic hesitancy, in fact more or less of a stutter or even worse. In this particular Billy was a striking instance that the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet of earth. In every case, one way or another he is sure to slip in his little card as much as to remind us—I too have a hand here
[pp. 818–19].
And Satan sent his subtlest card when he signed his name with innocence.
The man of experience can not believe the reality of the appearance that Billy makes. The Dansker, for instance, at first is merely amused by the incongruity of a being, like Billy, aboard the Indomitable. At first it is merely the amusement of wondering how, when, and where the pretense will be destroyed by the inevitable initiation. But as the Dansker becomes aware that Billy is what he seems to be, the Dansker's amusement disappears in thoughtful consideration of the symbolic situation which innocence and the inevitable initiation imply.
Now the first time that [the Dansker's] small weazel-eyes happened to light on Billy Budd, a certain grim internal merriment set all his ancient wrinkles into antic play. Was it that his eccentric unsentimental old sapience primitive in its kind saw or thought it saw something which in contrast with the warship's environment looked oddly incongruous in the handsome sailor? But after slyly studying him at intervals, the old Merlin's equivocal merriment was modified; for now when the twain would meet, it would start in his face a quizzing sort of look, but it would be momentary and sometimes replaced by an expression of speculative query as to what might eventually befall a nature like that, dropped into a world not without some man-traps and against whose subtleties simple courage lacking experience and address and without any touch of defensive ugliness, is of little avail; and where such innocence as man is capable of does yet in a moral emergency not always sharpen the faculties or enlighten the will
[p. 836].
Thus irony compounds irony; the irony of the man-trap, Claggart's, accusation of Budd, is given the further twist of a truth uttered by the liar, of the sin of innocence attacked by the evil and experienced man: “You have but noted [Budd's] fair cheek,” says Claggart to Vere, “A man-trap may be under his ruddy-tipped daisies.” The Dansker's elemental sapience makes him the man who can see what is going on in the swirling fogs that surround the necessities of action. (Later in the story Melville images the actual, historical present as “obscuring smoke.”) The Dansker is called old Board-her-in-the-smoke because he was wounded in a boarding action upon an enemy vessel. When the Dansker enlightens Billy about Claggart's enmity, Melville directs attention to the old sailor's scar, the emblem of the insights gained through the experience which has earned him his nickname: “The old man, shoving up the front of his tarpaulin and deliberately rubbing the long slant scar at the point where it entered the thin hair, laconically said, ‘Baby Budd, Jemmy Legs’ (meaning the master-at-arms) ‘is down on you.’”
However, the Dansker has not learned the one thing that Nelson and Vere know: sapient empiricism is not enough. Once in a lifetime a man impractically may have to expose himself to the dangers which he had always guarded against with practical strategy. Sometimes a man must chance his own destruction and play the hero. What for the quester is characteristic behavior must sometimes be performed by the true administrator, not as the self-indulgence it may so insidiously appear to be, but as a calculated risk. The Dansker cannot do this. For him the true behavior is the direction of wisdom toward that personal prudence which both Vere and Nelson reject. He is the typical G.I. who knows “the score”: “Years, and those experiences which befall certain shrewder men subordinated life-long to the will of superiors, all this had developed in the Dansker the pithy guarded cynicism that was his leading characteristic.” So he can see the truth, but his resigned and misdirected action is a development of noncommunicative cynicism by means of which he protects himself. “‘Jemmy Legs!’ ejaculated Billy, his welkin eyes expanding; ‘what for?’ …
“Something less unpleasingly oracular [Billy] tried to extract; but the old Chiron thinking perhaps that for the nonce he had sufficiently instructed his young Achilles, pursed his lips, gathered his wrinkles together and would commit himself to nothing further.” He can only hint at murder, but must, in the last analysis, allow the murder to take place nonetheless. Thus he cannot prevent the rising of the issue which may threaten social solidarity and communal order. Because he cannot make the kind of self-sacrifice of which Vere is capable, he can reform nothing.
But Captain the Honorable Edward Fairfax Vere is a man whose experience had not been lost in innocence nor yet sterilized in that cynicism which makes the inactive and practical and circumspect Dansker only a more humane and understandable Plinlimmon. Vere is totally active. He will not delay in making decisions, even when the decision is totally painful and when just a three-day wait would allow him to dump the entire problem in the lap of a superior officer. Yet, like Nelson, he is not the enthusiast or the gloryhog. Totally aware of the fact of consequences, he does not subordinate reflection to physical courage, which, Melville said, is the one characteristic that man shares with the beasts of the field. Vere's is the communal prudence; he is “thoroughly versed in the science of his profession, and intrepid to the verge of temerity, though never injudiciously so.”
As clear as Vere's position may seem to be, however, he, like Claggart, provides a problem. Vere's social philosophy is apparent within the story. His cosmic philosophy is not. Because the reader must supply Vere's and Claggart's cosmic motivations, Billy Budd is incomplete. Yet, although Melville could not justifiably devote space to either Vere's or Claggart's education (Billy Budd is the most impossible thing Melville attempted), Vere's cosmic view can be extrapolated from his social view and from the other books. In brief, the man's moral pragmatism and empiricism and emphasis on social order make it apparent that he has learned from the blank sea, at which he always stares, the same lesson that Pip learned from the blank sea in which he almost drowned. Presumably he has learned history's lesson of a naturalistic universe. In any case, unspecified as it is, his experience has resulted in the wisdom that is woe, and that demands of man a closer scrutiny and control of his own morality and actions than ever before. Vere is neither innocently mirthful like Billy, nor cynical like the Dansker. He is prominently and predominantly serious. His seriousness comes from history, and not from idealism. Hardheadedly realistic, Vere rejects the pretentious Titanism of the quester. Whether he realizes that there is nothing in the blankness to strike, like whether he realizes the fact of a naturalistic universe, is not anchored in direct evidence within the story. One can assume the affirmative in both cases, for in his nonidealistic actions, Vere subordinates self to community and desire to history; thus his wisdom that is woe does not slip over into the woe that is madness. He becomes the one man who sees and who is not the confidence man or the zero or the quester. Unlike Ahab, who is the one man to drive and run the ship, even to the point, Melville realizes, where it can be he alone who first spies the whale, Vere is the administrator who can allow subordinates to help direct affairs no matter how poignant any particular case may be for him. For Ahab the ship and the whale are self. For Vere the ship and naval order are society. Ahab replaces the world with his self and can only disregard the forms and needs and uses of society. Vere also captains society, but he does not misuse it. Ahab would dictatorially sentence or reprieve. Vere, however, feels that he must not only preserve social form by making the proper judgments seen to issue from the social machinery set up to decide upon tactics, but that he must also educate that machinery in the process. The one time Vere is permitted quester-like secrecy is in the closet scene with Billy, where he discloses personal feelings. Because he can force his decisions to surmount personal feelings, and because the consequences of personal and heedless reactions have been demonstrated in Billy's career, the specifics of Vere's personal reactions are not needed in the story. Painfully, Vere the man cannot exist in this story. Vere the administrator is the need. In drawing the curtain of secrecy, Melville evidenced thematic as well as aesthetic taste. Vere and Billy could not have spoken or acted in any way but that which Melville supposes, and the actualization of those actions and words would have broken the story's fine, constant edge of anger with a serrated space of lugubriousness. It would be lugubriousness because one's emotional associations with Vere arise from seeing that Vere does not weep. The entire motifs of appearances and self-consumption demand that Vere not be either in view or in life when he does give in to the heart beneath the tunic of the King's service, for then he would be one of us, not the ruler; his tears would make him but one more of the “people,” who are controlled by, but who do not control, the moment. It is of fundamental importance to know that Vere can weep and wants to weep. It should be (as Melville makes it) impossible to see him weeping. Melville must show only that Vere has earned a right to the ownership of his personal feelings, that he is aware of the demands of the heart and that the relationship those feelings allow Vere to have with the external world is “noble” rather than mad. For “there is no telling the sacrament, seldom if in any case revealed to the gadding world wherever under circumstances at all akin to those here attempted to be set forth, two of great Nature's nobler order embrace. There is privacy at the time, inviolable to the survivor, and holy oblivion the sequel to each diviner magnanimity, providentially covers all at last.”
Indeed the depth and sincerity of Vere's feelings make him the man of necessary heart as well as mind and power. “The first to encounter Captain Vere in act of leaving the compartment was the senior Lieutenant. The face he beheld, for the moment expressive of the agony of the strong, was to that officer, though a man of fifty, a startling revelation. That the condemned one suffered less than he who had mainly effected the condemnation was apparently indicated. …”
Because then, he is not the heartless Machiavel merely, Vere is the man who can understand the beauty of absolute morality, who can stare out at the amoral message of the blank sea, and who can, therefore, weep over Billy. For, as “with some others engaged in various departments of the world's more heroic activities, Captain Vere, though practical enough upon occasion would at times betray a certain dreaminess of mood. Standing alone on the weather-side of the quarter-deck, one hand holding by the rigging he would absently gaze off at the blank sea. At the presentation to him then of some minor matter interrupting the current of his thoughts he would show more or less irascibility; but instantly he would control it.” Personal, nostalgic, romantic, as well as philosophical thought may occupy Vere, but this man is not the Taji or Ahab or Pierre. This man sees himself as the captain of the small bit of man-of-war mortality, the only life there is, caught in the blank, eternal immensity of time. He does not go insane as does poor, weak Pip. He rechannels his thoughts, making earth's needs paramount, and returns to even the minor matter which pertains to the conduct of society. Unlike the quester, Vere does not indulge himself. Only in personal matters, when he is the father rather than the administrator, does he reveal his agony. The quester can never control himself as, Vere knows, the leader must. When faced with an opposition between his personal desires and the demands of his position, he too is dreamily tormented by private yearning, “but instantly he would control it.” As he asks the members of the court-martial, “But something in your aspect seems to urge that it is not solely that heart that moves in you, but also the conscience, the private conscience. But tell me whether or not, occupying the position we do, private conscience should not yield to that imperial one formulated in the code under which alone we officially proceed?” Thus the public man's conscious consuming of his private self. Thus the individualism, the ideal morality, and the primitive heartfulness—the Sermon on the Mount—placed squarely in opposition to public order—the Articles of War. And in one of Vere's speeches, Melville combines privatism, intention, individualistic and personal response (heartful as they may be), with the mindless chaos over which the “forms, measured forms” must triumph by giving effective shape to the idealism and absolute morality which the private self craves:
“Ay, Sir,” emotionally broke in the officer of marines, “in one sense [Billy's blow] was [a capital crime]. But surely Budd purposed neither mutiny nor homicide.”
“Surely not, my good man. And before a court less arbitrary and more merciful than a martial one that plea would largely extenuate. At the last Assizes it shall acquit. But how here? We proceed under the law of the Mutiny Act. In feature no child can resemble his father more than that Act resembles in spirit the thing from which it derives—War. In His Majesty's service—in this ship indeed—there are Englishmen forced to fight for the King against their will. Against their conscience for aught we know. Though as their fellow-creatures some of us may appreciate their position, yet as Navy Officers, what reck we of it? Still less recks the enemy. Our impressed men he would fain cut down in the same swath with our volunteers. As regards the enemy's naval conscripts, some of whom may even share our own abhorrence of the regicidal French Directory, it is the same on our side. War looks but to the frontage, the appearance. And the Mutiny Act, War's child, takes after the father. Budd's intent or non intent is nothing to the purpose”
[p. 881].
In Vere, Melville has the unopportunistic character through whom he can morally pronounce the necessity for pragmatic judgment. Moreover, unlike the bureaucrats who wrote the official version of Budd's deed, Vere sees through official, conventional appearances and does not save the officer caste for its own sake at all—indeed he condemns that caste to the necessities and responsibilities for the public judgments which slay the private judge. He realizes that one must defend the forms and appearances in order to use them in the struggle to reform the actualities which makes the “frontage” necessary. For Vere the historical must always take precedence over the ideal: first things first. “Speculatively regarded,” Vere says, “[Billy's case] might be referred to a jury of casuists. But for us here acting not as casuists or moralists, it is a case practical and under martial law practically to be dealt with. …”
“But … while thus strangely we prolong proceedings that should be summary—the enemy may be sighted and an engagement result. We must do; and one of two things must we do—condemn or let go.”
Placed in the necessity for action, man cannot appeal to anything beyond the wooden walls of his world. He must take his moral basis for acts that would otherwise be meaninglessly cruel from a recognition of the fact that his morality is dictated by history, as well as vice versa, and that he must be obedient—in order to attain anything other than a mere repetition of immorality—to his own relative and immediate actualities in time. “But in natural justice,” asks Vere, “is nothing but the prisoner's overt act to be considered? How can we adjudge to summary and shameful death a fellow-creature innocent before God, and whom we feel to be so?—Does that state it aright? You sign sad assent. Well, I too feel that, the full force of that. It is Nature. But do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King. Though the ocean, which is inviolate Nature primeval, though this be the element where we move and have our being as sailors, yet as the King's officers lies our duty in a sphere correspondingly natural? So little is that true, that in receiving our commissions we in the most important regards ceased to be natural free agents.” One cannot emulate the universe. First of all, nature in man may not be nature in the universe. Secondly, though nature in man may be the spontaneous heartfulness of primitive, childlike, barbaric Typee, two-thirds of nature is dark and Typee cannot cope with it. Time has brought man beyond the point where the simplicities of Typee-relationships are effective any longer. The leader's self-sacrificing allegiance is to a recognition of the historical reality (the King) with which the out-of-time primeval-beneath-the-brass-buttons cannot cope. Thus Vere brings the reader full circle back to the historical reality set up in the Preface, and reveals the lonely, self-denying, self-sterilizing role that must be played by the man that the Good Officer, the Good Administrator, should be.
“Lieutenant,” [Vere replies to that officer's request that Billy's penalty be mitigated] “were that clearly lawful for us under the circumstances consider the consequences of such clemency. The people” (meaning the ship's company) “have native sense; most of them are familiar with our naval usage and tradition; and how would they take it? Even could you explain to them—which our official position forbids—they, long moulded by arbitrary discipline have not that kind of intelligent responsiveness that might qualify them to comprehend and discriminate. No, to the people the foretopman's deed, however it be worded in the announcement will be plain homicide committed in a flagrant act of mutiny. What penalty for that should follow, they know. But it does not follow. Why? They will ruminate. You know what sailors are. Will they not revert to the recent outbreak at the Nore? Ay, they know the well-founded alarm—the panic it struck throughout England. Your clement sentence they would find pusillanimous. They would think that we flinch, that we are afraid of them—afraid of practicing a lawful rigor singularly demanded at this juncture lest it should provoke new troubles. What shame to us such a conjecture on their part, and how deadly to discipline. You see then, whither prompted by duty and the law I steadfastly drive. But I beseech you, my friends, do not take me amiss. I feel as you do for this unfortunate boy. But did he know our hearts, I take him to be of that generous nature that he would feel even for us on whom in this military necessity so heavy a compulsion is laid”
[p. 882].
Just as true individual identity paradoxically results from subordination of one-self to man-self, so Vere's kind of self-sterilizing, unlike the quester's, leads to potent effectiveness.
Vere is Melville's complete man of action, mind, and heart. His experience demands that his acts proceed from an understanding of history, and, empirically, “his bias was toward those books to which every serious mind of superior order occupying any active post of authority in the world, naturally inclines; books treating of actual men and events no matter of what era—history, biography and unconventional writers, who, free from cant and convention, like Montaigne, honestly, and in the spirit of common sense philosophize upon realities” [italics mine]. And coupled with heartful and mindful empiricism is an eclectic time sense which sees all history as the unfolding of a pattern, all aspects of man's life equatable in different eras in the blank and inevitable passage of time. “In illustrating of any point touching the stirring personages and events of the time he would be as apt to cite some historic character or incident of antiquity as that he would cite from the moderns.” Thus, though set off from the rest of mankind as a man of superior insight and power, Vere never passes from the way of understanding. He can effect the kind of border-crossing eclecticism which the quester, who tried to cross borders, needed so desperately. Nonidealistic eclecticism gives men like Vere direct insight into the heart of the matter, and their “honesty prescribes to them directness, sometimes far-reaching like that of a migratory fowl that in its flight never heeds when it crosses a frontier.” His entire rationale for being is based upon the final characteristic necessary for the complete man: his goal is the betterment of the race and the communal attainment of the earthly felicities. Of course, almost every Melvillean character desires this goal, but it is not until Vere that goal and tactics are merged at last. Indeed, others may be political classicists simply because they are conservative or reactionary; but as for Vere, “while other members of that aristocracy to which by birth he belonged were incensed at the innovators mainly because their theories were inimical to the privileged classes, not alone Captain Vere disinterestedly opposed them because they seemed to him incapable of embodiment in lasting institutions, but at war with the peace of the world and the true welfare of mankind.” Vere's own political classicism is based upon a knowledge of tactics which can attain the revolutionary goals of the revolutionaries he opposes.
Because Vere is not primarily concerned with self, he knows when and how to delegate authority. Because he knows that few men can read the sea and human history, he knows the limitations of delegation. He must bear within himself all the tortures of choice and yet present to the ship's people a demeanor of calm decision. His focal realization is that as he goes, so goes the world—always, though, within the moment of history which shapes him.1 The cost, to the leader, of proper leadership is a frightful one, for the administrator must be all work and no play. It is germane to this consideration of sterility that Vere is a bachelor. With one exception, he leaves behind no lasting seed, and cannot delegate self in time. He must feed upon himself. He cannot regenerate; he can only reinform. History makes the man; the man can only choose the size of his own identity in history. Unmarried except to his “honest sense of duty,” Vere can only lead to the statement that Robert Penn Warren concluded from a study of Melville's poetry: Nature is time and cycle. All continues again, and history, as time, is redemption as well as fate. The lessons are lost and only dim myths of the physical struggle remain. In short, meliorism is trapped in determinism just as determinism is trapped in meliorism.2
As the major figure in such a thematic statement, Vere, in the closet interview with the Handsome Sailor, emerges as the story's real central character. Because he understands the beauty of the primitive simplicity and heartful innocence that he must deny, Vere has Billy Budd within his own inner being—there is the primeval beneath the brass buttons just as there is the altruistic motivation beneath the rigorous tactics. There is more to be said of Budd's origins and his relationship to Vere in any consideration of Vere as the central figure, but John Claggart must be scrutinized before that centrality is seen in its clearest light.
The satanic imagery that incessantly characterizes Claggart identifies him as the demonized man, who has always appeared as the quester. Claggart is not engaged in active search, yet, but for his Plinlimmonism, he is the quester reincarnate. His dark pallor, his isolation and “seclusion from the sunlight,” the lurid light that comes to his eyes, the fact that he is an alien about whose origins no truth is known, all indicate the man who has been removed from humanity by a stone heart which has been hardened in the man's own internal hell-fires. The pale, high, forehead to which attention is called as one of Claggart's identifying features, indicates mind and will as leading characteristics. Here is a man whose misty history hints at the quester-like experience which drives one to the woe that is madness. Indeed, if Billy is associated with the pre Cain-city of innocence, Claggart is associated with all the experience of citified man. “Civilization, especially if of the austerer sort, is auspicious” to Claggart's depravity. “It folds itself in the mantle of respectability.” Chapter XI is devoted to the removal of any doubt about the double fact of Claggart's experience and insanity. And this man of woeful experience is driven to longing and to fury by the implications of the looks of Baby Beauty Budd.
Claggart's was no vulgar form of [envy]. Nor, as directed toward Billy Budd did it partake of that streak of apprehensive jealousy which marred Saul's visage perturbedly brooding on the comely young David. Claggart's envy struck deeper. If askance he eyed the good looks, cherry health and frank enjoyment of young life in Billy Budd, it was because these went along with a nature that as Claggart magnetically felt, had in its simplicity never willed malice or experienced the reactionary bite of that serpent. To him, the spirit lodged within Billy, and looking out from his welkin eyes as from windows, that ineffability it was which made the dimple in his dyed cheek, suppled his joints, and dancing in his yellow curls made him preeminently the Handsome Sailor. One person excepted [Vere], the master-at-arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in Billy Budd. And the insight but intensified his passion, which assuming various secret forms within him, at times assumed that of cynic disdain—disdain of innocence—to be nothing more than innocent! Yet in an aesthetic way he saw the charm of it, the courageous free-and-easy temper of it, and fain would have shared it, but he despaired of it
[p. 845].
Again, like the problem of Vere's experience and motivations, the same problem applied to Claggart indicates the incompleteness of this “inside narrative.” The story is the capstone of Melville's thematic structure, and the meaning of the story can only exist “inside” the totality of Melville's works. Taji, Ahab, and Pierre leave no more that need be said to explain Claggart, but in Billy Budd Melville does not and cannot incorporate those characters, which it had taken three novels to develop, into a novelette which does not place Claggart as the central character. Perhaps unconsciously Melville depended upon what he took for granted, by this time, about the demonized man—perhaps consciously. At any rate, he depended—he did not create. Thus in Billy Budd, Claggart can only be another inexplicable heartless creature of the deep, one of the surprises that the universe always sends out from her frozen, teeming north to add to the store of external realities potential in man's experience. Consequently Melville does the only thing he can do. He evades the problem of Claggart by assigning—rightly, but incompletely—to that man a “mystery of iniquity,” a “Natural Depravity.” It is significant, however, that limited as he is by the focus of his story, Melville yet takes time to make it clear that the mystery of Claggart's hatred lies in, and is projected from, the realm of human nature, human experience, human perception, and human idealization. The mystery lies not in the absolute or the supernatural; it lies in the various perceptions of external reality.
Long ago an honest scholar my senior, said to me in reference to one who like himself is now no more, a man so unimpeachably respectable that against him nothing was ever openly said though among the few something was whispered, “Yes, X—is a nut not to be cracked by the tap of a lady's fan. You are aware that I am the adherent of no organized religion much less any philosophy built into a system. Well, for all that, I think that to try and get into X—, enter his labyrinth and get out again, without a clue derived from some source other than what is known as knowledge of the world—that were hardly possible, at least for me.”
“Why,” said I, “X—however singular a study to some, is yet human, and knowledge of the world assuredly implies the knowledge of human nature, and in most of its varieties.”
“Yes, but a superficial knowledge of it, serving ordinary purposes. But for anything deeper, I am not certain whether to know the world and to know human nature may not be two distinct branches of knowledge, which while they may coexist in the same heart, yet either may exist with little or nothing of the other”
[pp. 840–41].
In the chapter (“Lawyers, Experts, Clergy”) immediately following the discussion of X—, Melville makes it clear that neither assumed absolutes, legalities, nor theological idealizations will explain the mystery. Claggart's nature does not depend from any God that Religion assumes; nor does it depend upon the sociologist's “environment.” The demonism of Claggart depends upon the Ahabian perception of what experience teaches about man's cosmic status. This perception is not the sophistication of a Worldly Wise-Man, who would not be able to explain Claggart. It is a philosophical reading of history, not a legalistic recognition of history. The worldly wisdom which knows the artificialities of codes without reading the underlying meanings of human experience, such is not the woeful wisdom of the philosophizing Solomon. “Coke and Blackstone hardly shed so much light into obscure spiritual places as the Hebrew prophets. And who were they? Mostly recluses.”3 Since Melville cannot create Ahab in Billy Budd, he combines the incomplete presentation of the wisdom that is woe (Vere, truth) and the woe that is madness (Claggart) by evaluating Claggart in contrast to Vere. The contrast is an over-all thing, but perhaps is most noticeable in the matter of appearances, whose necessity both Vere and Claggart recognize. Unlike the kind of and use of appearance attributed to Nelson and Vere, Claggart's appearance and his use of appearances suggest anything but the hero. His “chin, beardless as Tecumseh's, had something of the strange protuberant heaviness in its make that recalled the prints of the Rev. Dr. Titus Oates, the historic deponent with the clerical drawl in the times of Charles II and the fraud of the alleged Popish Plot.” The man's studied obsequiousness constantly suggests that he is a prince of lies. He is “Ananias.” Handling his corpse is like handling a dead snake. He is a subtle serpent. “The superior capacity he immediately evinced, his constitutional sobriety, ingratiating deference to superiors, together with a peculiar ferreting genius manifested on a singular occasion, all this capped by a certain austere patriotism abruptly advanced him to the position of master-at-arms.” His iniquity and depravity have “no vulgar alloy of the brute … but invariably are dominated by intellectuality. … There is a phenomenal pride in [them].” Claggart's motivations are set off from Vere's with this: “toward the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of malignity would seem to partake of the insane, he will direct a cool judgment sagacious and sound.” And even the tactics are contrasted, for concerning Claggart, an “uncommon prudence is habitual with the subtler depravity.” The personal circumspection and the monomania mark Claggart as a creature of self. Like the Dansker, he knows the ways of the world, for the mythlike rumors about his past are filled with hints of an experienced, unsavory, woeful murderousness. Urbane, totally disguised, false and unctuous, he uses his knowledge of the world to satisfy his monomania. Vere, however, will not settle for dissemblance in others, for his own dissembling position demands a constant, never relenting, wearing hold of realities. When Claggart tries to play to appearances, softening, he thinks, Vere's disposition by refusing to refer directly to the practice of the pressgangs, then “at this point Captain Vere with some impatience interrupted him:
“‘Be direct, man; say impressed men.’”
In sum, the contrast offers the central reason that neither the existentialist nor the transcendentalist may enlist Melville's aid. Both Vere and Claggart have had and comprehended full experience. But Claggart has made self the instrument of reality, and his woe is madness. Vere has made society the instrument of reality, and his woe is wisdom. For Vere externalities may have a more fundamental reality than the realities of self. Not so for Claggart. Claggart rules his world for his own aims, and Vere rules his world for selfless aims. Claggart feeds himself to his own monomania, and uses appearances to further the reachings of his demonized hatred. Vere feeds himself to an altruistic sense of duty and uses appearances in the staggering attempt to control externalities for the lasting peace and welfare of mankind.
The Claggart-Prince of Liars lies about the appearances of experience—which he knows are lies. Everyone accepts those lies as truths, and Claggart lies when patriotically he seems to accord with what everyone accepts. His relationship to appearances and his relationship to Billy Budd are the same. Budd becomes the surface of an existence whose true facts are anything but handsome, and Claggart would avenge himself upon what drove him to demonism by exposing the lie of the handsome appearances. His feeling for Baby is Ahab's feeling for the whale, with the fury compounded of the added hatred Ahab would have felt had the whale further mocked him by being a smiling mirage of beauty, promising goodness and purity, so that not even other sailors would recognize it for the dangerous thing it was. It would be inexpressibly wonderful to believe in absolute goodness, to know that such chronometrical appearances but mirrored horological facts. But, in “view of the marked contrast between the persons of the twain, it is more than probable that when the master-at-arms … applied to the sailor the proverb Handsome is as handsome does; he there let escape an ironic inkling, not caught by the young sailors who heard it, as to what it was that had first moved him against Billy, namely, his significant personal beauty.” And if Claggart hates the comely visage of the Handsome Sailor, still does he envy the lie which is accepted by all because of its beauty, so that the woeful man's hatred is strengthened. It is all much like the hating, despairing, wistful reaction of the “old” Pierre looking back at the younger Pierre in Saddle Meadows. Thus Claggart looks at Billy Budd yearningly as well as hatefully, wistfully as well as scornfully, lovingly as well as balefully. Claggart knows the mess occasioned by acceptance of an apparently benevolent chronometrical thing. For the apparently inviolable being is himself but a product of mortal origins, (He is not better than I!: the hatred and envy), and he misdirects men's sight of reality (Don't believe him!: the hatred and despair). This is the ironic significance Claggart finds in the scene wherein Billy messes the “mess” by spilling his greasy soup, and which prompts Claggart to say, “Handsomely done, my lad! And handsome is as handsome did it too!” For all men are subject to the same actualities, and no man's appearances make him invulnerable to the pitching and rolling of the ship of life. Had another sailor spilled the soup, Claggart would have proceeded “on his way without comment, since the matter was nothing to take notice of under the circumstances.” He cannot tolerate the sight of the man whose appearances seem to associate him, in men's eyes, with an indulgent reprieve from consequences, an immunity to what experience has proved to be the actuality of existence. Claggart has been driven to madness by whatever his experience has embraced of the two-thirds of the world that is dark. The woe which is his constant bitterness resulting from his own vulnerability to, and consequent insight into, existence, cannot tolerate the Beautybudd appearance which would seem to indicate that three-thirds of the world is light, and to promise an eternally beautiful flower.
The actualities of experience are the inescapable circumstances symbolized in the preface's treatment of the mutiny and the French Revolution. Because Billy's appearance denies the facts of life, Claggart would destroy the appearance by visiting those facts upon the Budd's experience. Precisely like the quester, Claggart, although initially he is right, thus becomes the champion and advocate of the horrors that murder the community. The very circumstances of mutiny and the French Revolution, for instance, are allied to Claggart in the rumors about his foreign birth and in the reintroduction of those circumstances in Chapter VIII, which is devoted to an introduction of Claggart. Thus subtly Claggart, like the Directory, is associated with “an aspect like that of Camoens' Spirit of the Cape, an eclipsing menace mysterious and prodigious …” and with “this French portentous upstart from the revolutionary chaos who seemed in act of fulfilling judgment prefigured in the Apocalypse.” Always the mysteries of iniquity are returned to the human sphere, for like Ahab, Claggart himself becomes agent and principle of the very horrors which drove him to woeful madness in the first place. So every sight of Billy re-intensifies Claggart's envious hatred, and “there can exist no irritating juxtaposition of dissimilar personalities comparable to that which is possible aboard a great warship fully manned and at sea. There, every day among all ranks almost every man comes into more or less of contact with every other man. Wholly there to avoid even the sight of an aggravating object one must needs give it Jonah's toss or jump overboard himself. Imagine how all this might eventually operate on some peculiar human creature the direct reverse of a saint?” Claggart can neither jump nor give the Jonah's toss. Yet he must destroy Billy's innocent appearance and immunity, for they are the lie his madness cannot tolerate. This is the motivation for his actions. And to all the “Pale ire, envy, and despair,” Billy must be blind because he is innocent.
The madness of Claggart is evident in his confusion of what Billy is with what Billy represents to him. Billy is but a husky, primitive child, after all. He is subject to consequences: he fears the whipping he witnesses at a disciplinary exhibition. He is not immune: the Armorer and the Captain of the Hold do distrust him because of Claggart's machinations. The “thews of Billy were hardly compatible with that sort of sensitive spiritual organization which in some cases instinctively conveys to ignorant innocence an admonition of the proximity of the malign.” In short, Claggart commits the same unforgivable sin that the quester does. He identifies the lure only by means of a projection of his own insanity, and would pursue this self-vision to the detriment of all the world. In striking at an idea, Claggart throws open the door to historical chaos by pursuing the idea at the risk of unsettling the necessary order of the ship. And once more the murderous confusion of tactics arises from idealism even if the idealist is not hotly crazy like Ahab, but is capable of a “cool judgment sagacious and sound.” He can not see man-self because one-self is always in the way. He can no longer see history because the ideal—ironically, born of historical man—entirely fills his eye.
Vere, like Claggart, must confront Baby Budd with an ultimate rejection. With pained love rather than with envious hatred Vere must reject what Budd represents to him. As administrator of the society whose order Claggart's machinations have threatened, Vere must condemn the actual as well as the representative Budd. To Claggart, Billy represents the false appearances of the world and is a hateful idea. To the Dansker, Billy represents an anomaly and is a curiosity. To Vere, Billy represents the human heart, and is a beautiful but inoperative idea. Like all Melvillean lures and doubloons, Billy, to the reader, is the totality of all the perceptions of the individual characters. Pragmatically, because he too rejects (albeit reluctantly) the idea and condemns the man, Vere is Claggart. But this is only a surface similarity. The sorrowful man whose wisdom was tutored by experience is also within Vere, so that Claggart, in his initial being, is Vere. It is history that has formed Vere's being. It is Claggart who represents the history which Vere recognizes in order to destroy it. Claggart is the reason just as Billy is the reason, that the brass buttons must take precedence over the primal heart. Claggart is the reason presented by the evils of history which he finally comes to represent, the gun which Vere uses because he hates the gun; Billy is the reason presented by the very definition of the primal heart, the innocence which must always be at the mercy of the gun and is unable to recognize the evils of history in order to use the evils of history in order to destroy the evils of history. Thus Budd and Claggart are at once the idealistic side of the polarities presented in the “Preface.” They are externalizations of Vere, and it is this that makes him the central character. Billy is associated with Vere's beautifully motivated self; Claggart is associated with Vere's harshly necessary tactical self. The difference between Claggart as a being and Claggart as part of Vere is the difference between self-absorption on the one hand and self-dissection, self-control, self-subordination on the other. That is, Vere controls and uses—unlike Claggart he does not become—the hideous truth that both he and Claggart see. Vere controls and uses—unlike Billy he does not become—the ideal love and innocence and goodness that both he and Billy know. The war between Claggart and Billy is the internal war between heart and mind which constantly tears Vere apart in his merger of the two. He needs both; he loves one and hates the activities of the other. He takes his identity from the recognition of what he and Claggart share in common; yet the motivation for his identity is but the desire for the goodness that is the Billy Budd within him. That is, if there is a continuum, a common denominator in humanity, it is the human heart, which desires goodness. But the goodness is redefined by different conditions, so that understanding of conditions, or tactics, is the only method man has with which to identify himself with his underlying self, his heart. Tactics, historical lessons, identity, must all be relearned in each historical moment by each generation. That is the historical identity that dies, like the individual being. But each generation gives birth to new generations, passing on the mystery of the heart-yearning, the aspiration (which is the idealism that makes Melville partly Ahab), along with the historical conditions which the dead identities have created and from which the new men must gain their identities by learning to cope with them (which is the empiricism and materialism that makes Melville Vere). His heart, along with the consequences of history, Vere inevitably leaves as his human heritage to the future. The human heart and the future are heirs of the history he leaves. His own historical identity he cannot leave: the others are inescapable heirlooms, but this must be earned. And the heart of Vere, the inevitable child that each generation leaves to each next generation as part of being human, the heart is the area of Billy's relationship to Vere.
Vere, “the austere devotee of military duty letting himself melt back into what remains primeval in our formalized humanity may in the end have caught Billy to his heart even as Abraham may have caught young Isaac on the brink of resolutely offering him up in obedience to the exacting behest.” Biblical reference of course reemphasizes the fact and nature of Vere's sacrifice. But it also suggests the nature of Billy's relationship to Vere. And Billy, as part of Vere, is suggested in more than the Abraham-Isaac analogy. “Billy Budd was a foundling, a presumable bye-blow, and, evidently, no ignoble one. Noble descent was as evident in him as in a blood horse.” And without really introducing anyone else but Claggart, the Dansker, and Vere, Melville hints, “for Billy, as will shortly be seen, his entire family was practically invested in himself” [italics mine]. The Dansker is old enough to be Billy's father, but he is not noble. Claggart has a certain nobility, but not the right kind, certainly, and he is only “five-and-thirty” besides. But Vere is truly noble, Melville points out more than once, and as for age, “he was old enough to have been Billy's father.” The possibility that Baby is Vere's own natural offspring, the goodness of Vere's own heart, not only sharpens the significance of Vere's sacrifice, but strengthens the thematic consideration of the administrator as the hero, or the only interested God available to man. And even in the extremity of the only choice open to him, when he is robbed of all that his son symbolizes by all that the Satan-gun-thief symbolizes, Vere forces himself to behave according to the need for preservation of the humanity he commands and for which he alone is responsible. For as Father of the Adam who falls and the Christ who is sacrificed, Vere is the only anthropocentric God. He knows that he must control destinies and decide fates in order to gain the goal of the indestructible human heart, and immediately he reverts to the only means for gaining the proper destiny, and he becomes the tactician. He exercises the proper prudence. He forearms against the possible mutinous effect of the court-martial decision. Realizing that intentions make no difference, Vere succeeds in preventing an undesirable consequence of his act. Claggart met the unanticipated consequence of Billy's fist, for all his misdirected personal prudence. His monomania prevented his seeing the wider symbolism, the social vision, that characterizes Vere's every act, and while Claggart's prudence can only result in chaos, Vere's might result in reformation. In this is the note of affirmation that Melville strikes, finally, in his last book: though intentions make no difference in the consequences of an act, the direction of thought which forms the intentions create a different kind of act which, in its administration, brings different consequences.
Vere necessarily kills the chronometrical Christ for man's own good, so that the death of the false Messiah may bring a redemptive horological paradise on earth. For if Billy, in the chronometrical act of killing Claggart, were allowed to set the example for the world, the effect would be tacit permission for the mutiny and the spontaneous, individualistic, idealistic, atheistic anarchy which brings chaos again. Baby Christ learned the lesson Father Vere had to teach him. As Billy's beautifully good and heartbreakingly innocent relationship with that paradox, a man-of-war's chaplain, makes clear, he is too much the primitive child to comprehend anything intellectually. His “sailor way of taking clerical discourse is not wholly unlike the way in which the pioneer of Christianity full of transcendent miracles was received long ago on tropic isles by any superior savage so called.” Robbed of complete innocence by evil, by the fact of the gun (when he lies in the darbies, his glimmering whiteness is now “more or less soiled”), he can only understand what is good and right with the goodness and rightness of his helpless heart. And his “God bless Captain Vere!” is the “I forgive you Father, for you know what you must do,” which not only emphasizes Budd's goodness but which also emphasizes Vere's stature. Billy does not stutter now, but makes the one clear and final statement of the chronometrical innocence by which he lived. He is the Christ who still turns the other cheek to the man-of-war world, and, except for his new knowledge, takes his crucifixion as he took his impressment. And Vere, while recognizing that Billy leads to hopelessly inoperative behavior, also recognizes in Billy the heartful goodness of the primal human heritage. And when Billy blesses Vere, at “the pronounced words and the spontaneous echo that voluminously rebounded them, Captain Vere, either through stoic self-control or a sort of momentary paralysis induced by emotional shock, stood rigidly erect as a musket in the ship-armorer's rack.” Even the simile works. At the moment that he kills the elemental goodness in man, Vere's reaction is both emotional shock and self-control. On the one hand he has his clearest perception of just what it is he kills, and at the same time realizes that if he had to, he would do it all over again. Necessarily he becomes the appearance not of the primal thing inside him, which he sacrifices, but of the gun, the thief-emblem of the world he must preserve, use, and change in order to preclude the conditions of sacrifice. Indeed, when Billy lies in the chains, he lies on the gun deck, which is given the religious imagery of a cathedral—with the gun-bays as the confessionals. Lest the ironic bitterness be lost even here, Melville hints that it is even as Christ hanging between the two thieves that the Baby is “now lying between the two guns, as nipped in the vice of fate.”
When Vere dies, he calls his primal identity, his son-self of the indestructible human heart. Removed finally from the rigors of the gun-bearing world and from the pressures of control and from the self-devouring and self-killing sterility of command, he would relax into the something primeval within him and rejoin the perfection of man's heartfelt aspirations. His historical identity cannot continue. But the human heart does. So Vere goes home. He calls “Billy Budd, Billy Budd.” And his call is an exhortation and a welcome. “That these were not the accents of remorse, would seem clear from what the attendant said to the Indomitable's senior officer of marines who as the most reluctant to condemn of the members of the drumhead court, too well knew though here he kept the knowledge to himself, who Billy Budd was.” Yet, this quotation reintroduces the bitterness which is the closing note of Billy Budd's irony. On the one hand the officer of marines is a good and heartful man, but a man without Vere's historical identity. There is the possibility that this officer does not know Billy's identity any more than Millthorpe knew Plinlimmon or Pierre. Or there is the possibility that in his very heartfulness, the officer of marines, like some of the other crew members, idolized Billy. In this case too, the cycle would be repeated if the man Vere leaves behind him is an embryonic quester. In any case, probably both ironies are intended, for the net result is the final irony that it is the military officer who bears the memory of the chaos-bringing yet primally good Christ. Thus Melville reintroduces the motif of delegated authority. Man, like the Polynesian, is primarily good and primarily blind. The obscuring smoke of the chaos in which man has seasoned himself and his history must be pierced. But even the true hero, who correctly boards in the smoke, cannot as one man redeem the world, for his own historical identity, with all that is involved within it, is the one thing that can not be delegated in time. And, Melville adds, the effective identity must be ready in advance, for “Forty years after a battle it is easy for a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally under fire to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it. Much so with respect to other emergencies involving considerations both practical and moral, and when it is imperative promptly to act. … Little ween the snug card-players in the cabin of the responsibilities of the sleepless man on the bridge.”
That the lessons are lost and that the cycle continues all over again is evident in three “digressions” tacked on to the end of the “inside” narrative.4 The first is the section wherein Vere is killed by the ship named—the Atheiste. The Atheiste continues the wrongs of history, for it takes over from a name which is reminiscent of Isabel's mother and her other-worldly associations: this French ship had formerly been the St. Louis. The wrongs of the prerevolutionary nation are translated into the wrongs of the postrevolutionary nation—one kind of atheist becomes another kind of atheist under new name and management. And those who deny the peace of the world and the true welfare of mankind are those who kill Vere. The paradox is that the seamen of France kill the man whose goals are identical with those for which the tactically misdirected French Revolution had been fought. Vere had always known that men on both sides, wanting but the same goodness for which the human heart hungers, after all, cut each other down in the actualities of all the warfare attendant upon the wrong directions to the common peace and welfare. No final resolution has been effected, for Vere can re-inform so that reformation may be possible; but he himself, limited by time, cannot regenerate.
The second “digression” is the News from the Mediterranean which appears in an authorized “naval chronicle of the time.” The account reports the official version, wherein Claggart is the good but wronged man, and wherein Billy is the villain. Thus appearances for their own sake are preserved. There is even an inversion of origins in the account. Claggart, the alien, is pictured as the true patriot, and Billy, the trueborn Englishman, is made suspect of association with all the dimly French origins that actually characterized Claggart. The very basis of proper behavior is inverted. The official account could never admit that the strong arm of order enforcement itself could allow the officer to be the villain and the impressed man the saint. This is order for its own sake, command for the sake of prerogative, appearances for the protection of privilege. This kind of preservation of official appearances is a mindless thing. It is cast and bureaucracy, but it is not the good administration that carries with it the true motives for Vere's siding with official law. The administrator is no God merely by virtue of his position. If he is heartless or mindless, he can offer only official preference, not truth, and he becomes as much a perpetuator of the wrongs of history as was the dictatorial Mrs. Glendinning or the early king Media.
The third “digression” is most basic to the story, and it comprises the conversation of the Purser and the Surgeon together with the ballad of “Billy in the Darbies.”
Neither the Purser nor the Surgeon are the men to explain what happened at Billy's execution. The Purser is a ruddy and rotund little accountant of a man who in a few words is presented as a man of no mind, insight, or imagination. The Surgeon is the worst kind of pontificator upon dry facts, being able to cope with experience only in the measurable quantities of what is already known, and avoiding all the very real problems which he cannot explain. Neither of these men are capable of aspiration or of evaluating new experience or of re-evaluating the old. Theirs is the meaningless empiricism of the circumscribed prudential. These two men tell the reader that Billy did not die as hanged men always die. There was no spasmodic movement of the corpse. For neither of these men can Billy be a symbol, be anything but a corpse. It is in the irony of presenting the picture of Billy's death through the eyes of men who cannot evaluate what they see that the suggestion is established that Billy is not a corpse. The meaning of this suggestion is intensified in the Ballad. Members of the Indomitable's crew revere Billy's memory and follow the progress of the yard on which Billy was hung, for “to them a chip of it was as a piece of the Cross.” Billy's memory is perpetuated in a kind of Passion-hymn which is narrated in the first person, as if from Billy's point of view. The narrative action of the Ballad seems to be taking place in Billy's mind while he lies in the darbies, just before the execution. But the last two sentences bring the shock of recognition of a type, the realization that this is the voice of the “dead” man in the deep … dormant … waiting.
… Sentry, are you there?
Just ease these darbies at the wrist,
and roll me over fair.
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.
Billy never died. The aspiring yearning and goodness of man's heart is indestructible. So too, as Vere's defeat indicates, is history. Either heartfulness will continue in a new history made by men like Vere, or history will remain unchanged and heartfulness will continue as the chaos of the French Revolution or as the predisposition which will prompt another quester. The furious hopefulness of the work is in the indestructibility of human aspiration. The furious hopelessness of the work is that nothing but the wrong channels for that aspiration remain. So the human heart will continue to be the trap of the lure, the primitive perfection, the chronometrical Adam-Christ, who still exists in the deeps of human history and experience, mired by the oozy weeds and events of the man-of-war world. As lure, it can do nothing to pave the mire and raze the weeds, can be nothing but that which the quester will follow, at which the Satan will spring, by which the ship-world's common “people” will be deceived, and the cycle will continue … and continue … and continue.
This last book is not an “acceptance” either of God or of expediency for its own sake. Billy Budd accepts only what all the books before it accepted: that if history is the determinant of society, so too society is the determinant of history; that if man is not the cosmic creator and killer, he is at least his own social and individual creator and killer. Billy Budd accepts not an absolute fate to which man must bow, but rather it offers the bitterness of the proposition that man may never create the kind of fate that he can place at his own disposal. But for the method for attaining the yearnings of the heart, even in defeat, Melville could easily be entirely characterized by the bitter fatalism which characterized his civil war poem, “The Conflict of Convictions,” in which he wrote,
Power unanointed may come—
Dominion (unsought by the free)
And the Iron Dome,
Stronger for stress and strain,
Fling her huge shadow athwart the main;
But the Founder's dream shall flee.
Age after age shall be
As age after age has been,
(From man's changeless heart their way they win);
And death be busy with all who strive—
Death with silent negative.
Yea And Nay—
Each Hath His Say;
But God He Keeps The Middle Way.
None Was By
When He Spread The Sky:
Wisdom Is Vain, And Prophesy.
Melville was not able to deduce a changed history from the facts of his times, and therefore could not create a Captain Vere who was in charge of not one ship but all of society—for having then created the proper leader, he would have had to create the picture of the Utopian good society, a task for which in his history and his realism Melville could find no justification. It is the mass of men, the society, that holds the choice of fates; so Vere, as hero, could not be allowed to triumph, and he had to die. As an artist Melville was too honest a symbolist—too honest a liar—too realistically immersed in the destructive element of reflection upon truth to create a shallow happy ending of the universally reformed society, which would be a deception to the facts of his world and time. Like Joyce, Melville was trying to create the uncreated conscience of his human race. And he could find that conscience properly directed only in a man like Vere, for the conscience, the morality, and the act could not be divorced one from the other. It is only the Vere who can lead the Jarl and Samoa and Lucy and Starbuck and Bulkington through the correct courses of conscious and heartfelt action, no matter how official and heart-denying those actions might appear to be. It is this implicit prescription for behavior, together with the God-time-zero which facelessly puts forth the face of all the infinite possibilities of phenomena, that accounts for the dualities and “ambiguities,” in all their modifications, in the enormous world of Herman Melville.
Notes
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Wendell Glick notes the problem of prudence. See “Expediency and Absolute Morality in Billy Budd,” PMLA, LXVII (1953), 103–10. The article offers a suggestive presentation of the choices open to Vere.
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“Melville the Poet,” KR, VIII (1946), 208–23.
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Here, because the context of the quester's story is missing, the reintroduction of the isolated Solomonic insight is a jarring error. In the other novels there was needed the honest, nonconformist perception that could stand apart from the banded world and see nature and experience truly. But the story of the false Prometheus, who has the nobility of an honest, if erroneous, perception, as well as the story of the true education (Ishmael, Media) have long since been finished. Melville has already taken these stories for granted in Billy Budd. He had to, for now that the past lessons had been reached and passed, he was writing the corollary of application of that knowledge. Thus, all his “correct” people must now be involved in society, like Vere. Though the Hebrew prophet saw truth, that recluse is an echo from Melville's literary past, whose motivation, but not whose isolation, belongs no longer in the exploration of the political administration of the truths the recluse saw. There is nothing within Billy Budd to provide the proper context for the Hebrew recluse, for the only recluse Billy Budd provides, properly, is the bad man, Claggart.
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My “digressions” are not arranged as Melville lists his. After the “digressions” of the conversation between the Purser and the Surgeon, and the sea burial of Billy, the narrator goes on to say that the further “digressions” of the sequel to the story can be told in three additional short chapters.
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