SOURCE: “Billy Budd: Reclaimed by the Nineteenth Century,” in Essays in Arts and Sciences, Vol. 13, No. 9, 1984, pp. 43–59.

[In the following essay, Cheikin examines Billy Budd from a nineteenth-century perspective, taking into account the literary, cultural, and political circumstances of the time.]

A writer writes and a reader reads at a particular moment in history. With the best intentions to avoid the confines of the calendar, it is difficult to grasp concepts that are alien to our own era, that are dissonant with our own attitudes and ideas. This problem is even more crucial when the work at hand has been written in one century and published in the next. Billy Budd presents such a problem.

Herman Melville's classic tale, left in a “semi-final draft”¹ in the year of his death, 1891, was not published until 1924. While the work has stirred much interest and extensive commentary, its admirers have been trapped by history; twentieth-century readers have different interests and different assumptions from those which prevailed in 1891. The unusual time span of about thirty five years from creation to publication may account for the widely divergent interpretations Billy Budd has generated since it took its place in the American literary canon. How are we to interpret Melville's attitude toward Captain Vere? Did Melville mean the reader to approve of Vere, abhor him, or simply to accept the need for expediency? Part fable, part morality play, part sea adventure, part history, and partly the story of three men, Billy Budd is a work that has persistently resisted a consensual reading.

One avenue that has been left relatively unexplored is to restore Billy Budd to its rightful place—the nineteenth century—and to examine it from that perspective. Although it is impossible to completely surmount the time barrier, it is possible to poke some openings by following Keith Thomas' suggestion to go beyond the text to a “wide reading in the writing of the period”² to attempt to develop something of the image of reality that men carried about in their heads at the time Melville was writing. When we examine the literary, the cultural, the political temper of the time in which Billy Budd was being developed, the work becomes increasingly accessible to our understanding.

Although Billy Budd was developed during the years 1886 to 1891, to allow for a larger overview of the era in which Melville was writing, we can usefully expand the period from 1880 to 1899, a twenty-year span which brought radical changes to America. These changes are readily perceived by the fact that “in world economy, the United States in 1879 was still a country of extractive industries; by 1900 it had become one of the greatest manufacturing nations of the world.”³ With this incredible expansion came unbounded wealth and the corruption that inevitably follows, such extensive corruption in government that in 1883 the first federal civil service commission was formed. The custom house in New York where Melville spent twenty years of his life, from 1866 to 1885, was a “notorious center and symbol of corruption in the United States civil service during many of the years in which he was associated with it.”⁴ It is commonly assumed that Melville led a reclusive life in his last years, going to and from his job in the custom house, unnoticed and, ostensibly, untouched by his associations there; but built into the working of the custom house was a system of forcing contributions to the political coffers that made failure to obey tantamount to a dismissal, something Melville could ill afford.

America was changing. Before the 1880's America had a deep faith in the “average man.” He was the independent explorer-pioneer of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales; he was Emerson's self-reliant American scholar; he was a pilot on the Mississippi; he was a heroic seaman called Bulkington, or Jack Chase, in Melville's works. These figures were rooted in the American belief that the world began anew in the United States, that the old world had been properly cast aside to make way for a fresh beginning. The American Dream, according to Charles Child Walcutt, was the “transcendental ideal of freedom through knowledge which expressed America's belief in science and in physical progress as an image of spiritual progress.”⁵ The endless lands that spread to the west—unknown, rich, exciting—enhanced this image of progress. Indeed, it is Frederick Turner's contention that the sense of infinite and open opportunities for improvement created by the American frontier permeated the American sensibility and, therefore, American literature.

By the 1880's, however, openness of possibility for the “average man” had shrunk before the growth of stronger and powerful interests. Heroic figures of the common man began to disappear from the imagination of American writers because “these characters only appear in books at moments when they exist in life, or in images that are vitally present in the general mind.”⁶ Vernon Parrington characterizes the period under discussion as one of awareness that the “earlier democratic aspirations had somehow failed,” that although we held democracy to be our supreme ideal, we had achieved instead a “rather careless individualism that left society at the mercy of a rapacious middle class.”⁷ This was the era of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Jay Gould, the new heroes of the middle class who dreamed, as did the titans, of enormous wealth and power. There was corruption in government, both local and federal, and all the so-called American examples of right action had been stepped on and kicked aside in the rush for the dollar. Walcutt describes the “new” America:

The old goals of personal fulfillment deteriorates as the economic means have become ends … society depends upon technological powers to the point where individual freedom cannot be tolerated. The little man must be oriented and organized to the machine. As he becomes more dependent upon it and as complexities multiply, society itself becomes part of a mechanism.⁸

But the American Dream was perverted, not dead. To correct this deviation, the conviction began to arise that we must somehow “take our bearing afresh and set forth on a different path to the goal.”⁹

Literature, as always, both anticipated and reacted to the society outside. As the heroic in life was no longer possible, the heroic in fiction was no longer plausible; indeed, any work that depicted one man as inherently superior to another was eyed with suspicion. Literature marched towards “realism” under the probing pen of William Dean Howells who “denied the reality of genius, describing it as a myth kept up to intimidate the modest … it was undemocratic to maintain these suggestions of the more-than-human.”¹⁰ Hand in hand with realism, in actuality part of the same movement, came the regional story-teller such as Bret Harte from California, Mark Twain from the Mississippi and the West, and Southern writers such as Cable. As Parrington explained it, “in fixing attention on narrow and homely fields they were turning towards realism, for the charm of their work lay in fidelity to the milieu, the exact portrayal of character and setting.”¹¹ Despite the ostensible realism in regional literature, Larzar Ziff points out that social conditions were “extraneous to the true moral standards which motivate action and which, ideally, triumph.”¹² Although the realists and regionalists disavowed the heroic possibility in man, in their works the practice of virtue was still a necessity, and morality still came in old-fashioned blacks and whites.

Many critics of the day, such as Henry C. Vedder in 1894, saw realism as obscuring standards of virtue:

… such emphasis as Howells and James were placing on reality and on the pre-eminence of technique obscured for many an American reader the all-important moral standard. … Anything which blurred the standard and suggested that moral decisions were complex was vicious and foreign in origin.¹³

Vedder's concerns, although commonplace, reflected a voice that “was an important element in the climate of the nineties as was the benign encouragement of young artists by Howells. … The voice was the voice of a decency which most Americans cherished as their peculiar contribution to the culture of the world.”¹⁴ Charles Dudley Warner, in an article for the April 1883 issue of Atlantic Monthly, claimed that the realists were immoral as they lowered the “moral tone” of every reader.¹⁵ In 1885, Herbert Brown claimed that the plot of “the great American novel … involves the presence of evil as a disintegrating factor,” but eventually the strength of the American novel depends on “the superior might of goodness which in some shape triumphs at last.”¹⁶ All groups, from the “radical” realists to the traditional thinkers, continued to cling to the belief that literature must uphold a moral truth.

The popularity of Utopias in the eighties and the nineties gave credence to D. H. Lawrence's contention that the “two great American specialties [are] insisting on the plumbing [and] saving the world.”¹⁷ The basis of the American Utopia was an optimistic view of technical and theoretical progress which held that man could triumph if only he would make use of the technical and theoretical instruments developing all around him. The methods proposed by the Utopias were varied:¹⁸ monetary reform in The Great Awakening (1899) by Albert Merrill; the cooperative movement in Bradford Peck's The World a Department Store (1900); the use of electricity as an agent of change in Looking Forward (1906) by H. W. Hillman; even the realistic Howells put his hand in with a fantasy, A Traveller from Altruria (1894). The most popular and influential of these was, of course, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). Although the methods to achieve a perfect world were varied, all demanded a return to past ideals where “right reason,” Christian charity, and the proper use of industrialism could set things straight again. If only man would rip away the tawdry veneer that camouflaged his basic goodness, then the American ideal could again be resurrected. But the Utopians ignored man's passion for power and capacity for selfishness, and while their works were meant to move society forward, their basic premise looked backward.

In the eighties and nineties, therefore, the deterioration of the American Dream was a great wound that continued to fester, but if America was losing its moral health, there were reformers who were pointing a stern finger at the rapid decline. Nevertheless, there were still some who blindly ignored the corruption, and others who regarded the perversion of the dream as a temporary aberration; they refused to believe that the American Dream had been stripped bare. For them the American ideal was evidently immortal, somehow maintaining its vitality despite all the forces that were gnawing away at it. This, then, was the time during which Herman Melville was pondering his Billy Budd. He was aware of all these currents, for he wrote his friend James Billson in 1885 that he was neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but in need of a “counterpoise to the exorbitant hopefulness, juvenile and shallow, that makes such a bluster in these days.”¹⁹ He was not alone.

In 1880, Henry Adams's novel Democracy reflected the current disillusion at the corruption of government, further developing the concerns of Twain in The Gilded Age. The protagonist in Democracy refuses to marry Senator Ratcliffe when she discovers him to be corrupt, but she bitterly notes that most Americans would say that she was wrong, too fastidious. A contemporary review in The Nation regarded the presentation of the senator as a “perversion.” While the reviewer did not deny the reality of corruption, he bristled a bit at the suggestion that it could reach so high.²⁰ Many in the literary world, such as the reviewer of Henry Adams's novel, had yet to relinquish their belief in American moral superiority and would be quick to criticize those who had already taken the step. Irving Howe, in Politics and the Novel, describes Adams's basic disgust at “good-natured mediocrity, sanctioned by the popular will and awesome to its indifference to the idea of self doubt.”²¹

Henry James's response to America's changing scene was to delve deeper into individual motivation and psychology, relegating political and social settings to a lesser role. In a review of Portrait of a Lady (1881) published in The New York Times, the critic notes Ralph's goodness and Isabel's charm. Isabel is to be admired in that her “aspirations are high and pure.” In describing the tone of the novel as “elevated,” the reviewer seeks out the “elevating” moments while closing his eyes to the complexities and torments.²² The Harper review noted that Isabel remained unchanged throughout, despite her brush with brutal reality. Throughout, according to the review, she preserved her illusions and her “winsome individuality.”²³ Contemporary reviewers refused to deal with the effect of moral corruption on a heroine who was so appealingly American in her “high and pure” aspirations.

In 1882, William Dean Howells' A Modern Instance was greeted with mixed reviews. Its realism was derided: “It is a dull imagination which needs all the detail which Mr. Howells has given of cheap boarding houses and restaurants.” The Atlantic Monthly continued by complaining of a literature which “employs so fine a pencil upon that which is ignoble.” However, despite the book's involvement in the “ignoble,” the reviewer elevates it into a morality play with devil and angel vying for an innocent soul. Marcia's passion, or jealousy, is compared to Othello's in that it too is kindled by an evil contact, in her case Bartley Hubbard. She is weak because she is the “product of a life where religion has run to seed, and men and women are living by traditions which have faded into a copybook morality.” Ben Halleck, the “angel” in the struggle, is awarded the laurels in the battle for Marcia's soul, but the book fails, in the reviewer's perception, because it lacks the “joyousness of hope.”²⁴

The reviewer in The New York Times was more astute, although we again see the novel described in moral terms; this time, however, country and city are the metaphors for the confrontation of good and evil rather than individuals. The review ends by sounding a moral note:

Its morality is of the highest grade and not too much forced. Somehow one is the better for having read it for if one is safe against the grosser crimes of Bartley, who can say he or she is not likely to commit the follies and weaknesses of Marcia and her husband.²⁵

If Billy Budd had received contemporary notices by either reviewer, each would have undoubtedly viewed Billy as an angel and Claggart as a devil; but would Captain Vere have been Marcia's equivalent, the object of struggling forces? It could be said that Vere, like Marcia, was weak in that he lived by “traditions which have faded into copybook morality.” But in Billy Budd, who is the victor in the struggle for Vere's soul? From The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times reviews, it seems apparent that victory or defeat would have to be sounded, that neither reviewer would have been satisfied to claim moral ambiguity for Vere. They, like Henry Vedder in 1894, evidently felt that any book that expressed moral complexity and the difficulty of moral decisions was “vicious.” This view is further corroborated by a later article in The Atlantic of October 1885 in which A Modern Instance is deemed offensive because of the lack of “distinction between the little and the great in misdemeanor. … If we are to have a portraiture of moral baseness, we have a right to ask for some shadows so deep as to leave no doubt of their meaning.”²⁶ Henry Vedder was not a voice crying in the wilderness when he stated unequivocally that “the eternal distinction between good and evil, between virtue and vice, cannot be obscured by dilettante theories of art.”²⁷ The twentieth century is comfortable with moral ambiguity, but Billy Budd was written in the nineteenth century; contemporary reviewers would surely have forced Captain Vere into a moral frame, as they did all major characters in books that passed across their desks. If Melville's evaluation of Vere's virtue, or lack of it, was not clear to them, Billy Budd would probably have been sharply criticized on those grounds.

Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884. In the May 1885 issue of Century, Twain's masterpiece was applauded with comments about Huck's “undying fertility of invention, his courage, his manliness in every trial.” The reviewer claimed that the hero was an “incarnation of the better side of the ruffianism that is one result of the independence of Americans, just as hypocrisy is one result of the English respect for civilization.”²⁸ The popularity of this book in which a young boy, responding to the intrinsic goodness of his heart, takes on society and its cruel conventions, illustrates that while American ideals were losing ground in the 1880's, a countervailing voice of moral protest was strong and widespread. How would this same public have regarded the argument of Captain Vere who asserted that the strictures of “forms, measured forms” must dominate the heart? Popular and critical response found Huckleberry innocent when he knowingly broke the law to free a slave; how would it have found for Captain Vere who followed the law and knowingly killed an innocent boy?

In 1886 The New York Times could find nothing of value in Henry James's The Bostonians and dismissed it with annoyance as being too long and too uninteresting.²⁹ The reviewer in The Atlantic, generally “repelled” by the characters because they are pushed “too near the brink of nature,” remarks that the exposure of Miss Chancellor's mind is “almost indecent.”³⁰ Neither reviewer dealt with one of the central concerns of the novel—satirizing the reformers of New England, and by so doing, calling attention to what Irving Howe would later call the “pretension of American society as a whole.”³¹ In addition, according to Howe, the novelist had enunciated the idea that “life in America had gone askew.”³² It was perhaps the fact that these concerns were dealt with in The Bostonians that made the reviewers uncomfortable. The lesbianism evidently troubled them too, but such concerns could not be dealt with at that time. They could barely be imagined.

Periodicals such as The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Nation, all of which commented on James's novel, seemed peculiarly sensitive to what is special in being American. Their readers were told that the American writer should stress the values of being American, should feel pride in America's cutting itself off from Europe and casting aside traditions that have no place in a democracy. This sensitivity to what is peculiarly American is invariably reflected in contemporary reviews of the books of 1880's and 1890's. Senator Ratcliffe, in Democracy, cannot become president of the United States because corruption sinks to the lowest common denominator; it does not rise to the top. Huckleberry Finn's spirit of individuality is special to America. Mark Twain is particularly American in Connecticut Yankee not so much because he exposes the sham in royalty, but more so because he loves freedom. While Rudyard Kipling depicted England carrying the “white man's burden,” it could be said with equal accuracy that America felt itself carrying the world's moral burden.

In The Rise of Silas Lapham, published in 1887, William Dean Howells describes a situation in which a businessman has the opportunity to swindle a huge corporation and save himself from financial ruin; by so doing he will be legally free of any crime. Silas, realizing that although legally right he would be morally wrong, remains the virtuous man he has been from the beginning. The Atlantic reviewer characterized Lapham's dilemma as a war “waged within the conscience of the hero.”³³ In Billy Budd Captain Vere also wages an internal war, but the outcome is different. Vere did what was legally right, but morally wrong. Lapham had chosen to do exactly the opposite. The question here posed is how would Vere's judgment have been greeted by an audience that applauded Silas Lapham's decision?

Howells' A Minister's Charge, published the same year, describes a situation similar to that of The Rise of Silas Lapham in that the “sturdy morals which underlie the American rustic … enable him to rise above social and financial disaster.”³⁴ When confronted by a choice, the minister, although aware that his mistake will prove personally disastrous, chooses what is morally right, not what convention sanctions.

In his later years, however, Howells' belief in the superiority of American ideals and in the intrinsic value of the common man began to falter. Confronted with the unscrupulous plotting of big business and the corruption of government, his firm beliefs wavered and softened. Honest Silas Lapham was replaced in the Howells' canon by more threatening figures such as Dryfoos in A Hazard of New Fortunes, Gerrish in Annie Kilburn, and Northwick in The Quality of Mercy. In his biography of Howells, Kenneth Lynn points out the battle going on within Howells' psyche over the contrast between outside events and his essential beliefs. According to his biographer, Howells made a “defiant but doomed effort in the late eighties and early nineties … to break free of his enveloping sense of isolation and irrelevancy.” He rallied American writers “to concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life” because “American writers live in freedom.”³⁵ Perhaps this desperation on the part of Howells also explains the apparent obtuseness of literary critics who did not see what is so obvious to us today: the hopelessness of Isabel Archer's defeat; the satiric thrust of The Bostonians; the moral ambiguity of A Modern Instance; the political accuracy of Democracy. Perhaps these literary critics shouted so loudly about moral clarity because they saw it slipping away; perhaps it was a form of whistling in the dark.

Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is now viewed as a response to a society in which technology was destroying democracy. Published in 1889, the novel shifts from a rollicking satire to a violent and bloody conclusion, one that contemporary assessment totally ignored. In January 1890, the reviewer in Harper's Magazine asserted that this book “makes us glad of our republic and our epoch,”³⁶ while the Atlantic Monthly, a month later, called it a book in which the “moral purpose shines.”³⁷ The former went on to criticize laws that preserved “things, not men” just as Twain did in the novel. Early in the book the hero explains the ideals held by America, or, perhaps more accurately, the ideals Americans liked to think they lived by:

The country is the real thing … the eternal thing; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged … to be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags—that is loyalty to unreason … it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it.³⁸

The reviewers who admired Twain's Americanism would probably have considered Captain Vere guilty of “loyalty to unreason” as he speaks of loyalty to the “buttons” on his uniform rather than to Nature. Vere uses the law to destroy a man, reasoning that his object is to preserve “things, not men.”

Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage in 1895 was accorded instant critical acclaim. In a perceptive review in The New York Times in October of that year, the book was commended for being so “extraordinarily true … defying every accepted tradition of martial glory.” However, in the closing paragraph the reviewer reverts to nineteenth-century American themes by unequivocally claiming that Private Henry Fleming “has been transformed … he has saved his colors and he has sounded his own depths.”³⁹ There is no whisper of a doubt about the ending, nor a hint of possible irony; for contemporary reviewers, Crane's point of view is clear. In The Nation, a year later, the commentator is satisfied that Fleming has come out “a hero again in the end.”⁴⁰ The English review of Crane's novel could not have been more enthusiastic or admiring; there is barely an adverse word, but again the review ends with the “moral” of the book, that “we may then infer that virtue easy in moments of distress may be useful in everyday experiences.”⁴¹ The reviewer, George Wyndham, admires the realism in the presentation of war and the impressionistic techniques that we admire today, but he sees no irony, no questioning of basic values, as we do today. What would George Wyndham have told us of the “lesson” in Billy Budd? For the nineteenth-century reviewer, the conclusion of The Red Badge of Courage held no mysteries; it is the twentieth-century reader who is uneasy at the end, questioning whether Stephen Crane is being ironic about the experience of war and its power to ennoble. Perhaps for the nineteenth-century audience, Billy Budd would have held no mysteries; is it the twentieth-century reader who questions the character of Captain Vere?

The change in the perception of Crane's book is understandable in historical terms, but how can any reasonable person explain the reception accorded Mark Twain's Joan of Arc in 1896. Today Joan of Arc is condemned for the very reasons it was then praised: Joan is totally unreal; her shining goodness fatigues the modern sensibility with its relentless glare. But perhaps this work was greeted so favorably because it was the work of the most popular author in America and because, in the daily outpouring of evidence that profits were more to be admired than spirit, some reaffirmation of the values of the unselfish life was desperately needed.

The nineteenth-century demand for moral clarity is reaffirmed in an article on Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton in 1897. In The New York Times, the reviewer is distressed at James's “evident” sympathy for Mrs. Gereth despite James's occasional ironic touches; he is further saddened to think that the reader will put down the book “with no definite idea in his mind of the identity of Mrs. Gereth.”⁴² Evidently the confusion lies in James's evocation of a sympathy tinged with irony. The question as to whether or not Mrs. Gereth burned her home to “save” her treasures from the Philistines is never resolved in the novel. What is Mrs. Gereth really about? How is she to be regarded? Although modern skepticism no longer expects books to deliver moral absolutes and, indeed, the seriousness of any book that proposes answers becomes highly suspect, the nineteenth-century had not yet given up the desire for clearly stated standards of behavior.

In a time when realism was the battle cry of an important segment of the literary community, Melville chose to write a story that had many of the elements of a parable. In a time when Howells and others talked about delineating the ordinary concerns of common people, Melville chose to write about an extraordinary event with a title character whose moral virtues far exceed the ordinary, and an evil counterpart whose malignancy is beyond ordinary understanding. Set on a British warship it was, superficially at least, dissociated from any advocacy of those American ideals which were so important to contemporary reviewers; nor did it end with a succinct moral lesson. Apparently isolated from the other serious works published in its day, Billy Budd was, nevertheless, not as alien to its times as it may appear at first.

Melville, after all, had always been responsive to the society in which he lived. Within him burned the same spirit of exploration that fostered the movement west, not only of America, but of all western civilization. While he is strongly critical of the corruption that civilization brings, his heroic figures are the explorer, the adventurer, the pursuer, men who venture into the unknown depths. Even the variety of methods that he used in working out his novels attests to his willingness to take risks.

The setting and raison d'etre of Typee and Omoo depend on Melville's responsiveness to the expansionist movement of the 1840's. In Mardi Melville is deeply involved in political and social satire and criticism. One of the central concerns of White-Jacket is the brutal treatment of seamen in the American navy, and the framework of Moby-Dick is a whaling industry that was itself a symbol of expansionist thinking. In Redburn Melville responded to the poverty in England with his powerful rendering of the hopeless situation of the poor in Liverpool; in “The Tartarus of Maids” he attacked the horrors of the mechanical era in one of the paper mills of the Berkshire region of New England. The focus of the satiric attack in The Confidence-Man is the epidemic of avarice in America, a greed for money that turned all men, with rare exception, into scoundrels or pawns. The events of the day passed through Melville as they do through all men, leaving traces and residues that influenced ideas and actions.

Melville was, as all must be, a man of his times; and Melville responded, as all men must, to his times. It is of some interest, therefore, that he set his last story in the historic past in foreign ships on foreign waters. The possible reasons for this choice make for some useful commentary on the nature of Billy Budd. At the time that Melville was puzzling over Billy Budd, he was also involved in preparing the John Marr collection, poems that were, in part, youthful reminiscences of old sailors whose sailing days had long since past. Melville, now older and enfeebled, felt more kinship with the past than he felt with the present. However, his deliberate dissociation of Billy Budd from the present may have been more a profound response to the present than a retreat. This last work may have expressed Melville's opposition to a world swarming with plotting men, instead of the older world of feeling men. Perhaps Thomas Scorza is right when he claims that for Melville, man's tragedy does not lie in being unable to cope with evil, but rather “in facing evil without the possibility of achieving recognizable and demonstrable glory.”⁴³

Melville persisted in seeing the heroic possibilities in mankind. The poem, Timoleon, published in 1891, is about a heroic man who proves his heroism by acting independently of tradition and responding courageously to inner, purer mandates. This concept of larger-than-life men, “exceptional men,” had no place in the America of the 1880's and 1890's. According to Matthiessen, “Melville could feel that the deepest need of rapaciously individualistic America was a radical affirmation of the heart.”⁴⁴

Matthiessen also points out that at the time that Melville wrote his last sea story, John Jay Chapman was “protesting against the conservative legalistic dryness that characterized our educated class,” and Henry Adams knew that the educated classes “tended too much towards the analytic mind, that it lacked juices.”⁴⁵ The working out of Captain Vere's final decision in Billy Budd could have been Melville's dramatization of the evil produced by the “legalistic dryness” that permeated our civilized classes. In Captain Vere, an educated man, Melville imagined someone who was totally dominated by a morality defined by law rather than one based on the knowledge of the heart. Instead of Melville's paradigm of acceptance, Captain Vere could have represented for Melville what happens when the laws of society become increasingly separated from human feelings and protect the system rather than the individual. Joseph Schiffman reminds us that critics, in claiming that Melville accepts Vere's action as tragically necessary, “isolate Melville from the Gilded Age, the time in which Melville produced Billy Budd.”⁴⁶

Billy Budd, in its concern with the growing split between the intellect and feeling, in portraying man's growing dependence on the forms of morality rather than its essence, in its theme of loss of innocence, both personally and nationally, could be termed a work of the later part of the nineteenth-century in America. Melville evidently believed in the value of the American Dream, but not in its reality.

If Billy Budd had been published in its time it would have been criticized by Howells' school as being unrealistic, dealing with exceptional men and uncommon events. Those who admired the structure of Henry James's novels would have abhorred the digressions. All the reviewers, the followers of Howells' realism and Vedder's moralism included, would have been critical of Herman Melville for concerning himself with affairs in foreign waters. If any single idea is a constant in the book reviews of the 1880's and 1890's, it is that American writers have a particular destiny, an absolute mandate to turn their backs on European concerns and immerse themselves totally in America—its peoples, its ideals, its traditions. In his analysis of the critical writings of the last part of the nineteenth-century, Herbert Brown convincingly demonstrates that “the great American novel was, first of all, to be distinctively American,” and all “avoidance of European background and character is praised.”⁴⁷

According to the contemporary reviews, it seems probable that the readers would have interpreted Melville as condemning Captain Vere, a man who did not think nor act independently and in the process, perpetrated a morally reprehensible act. The critics who admired Silas Lapham, Huck Finn, and the Connecticut Yankee for their independence from society's strictures and for their compassionate and feeling hearts, would probably have been extremely critical of Captain Vere for putting society above conscience, the law above love. And while some of these critics could be considered “hack writers,” they reflected an ambience that prevailed, even for Melville. If anyone had sensed ambiguity, it would have been overlooked, ignored, or most probably, misunderstood.

Despite Melville's retreat into the past in his choice of Billy Budd's setting, his concerns were very contemporary. He deals with moral problems and rather ordinary people, common sailors; but unlike Howells' conception of the common man (often placid and dull), Melville's vision is more acute in that he sees that “down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted.”⁴⁸ Modern in its use of myth and in its structure, fragmented by continual digression, Billy Budd is, nevertheless, irrevocably attached to its own time. Although it was brought to light in this century, Billy Budd was conceived in a time that was already past. Ordinarily, each piece of literature develops a critical history in a process that is evolutionary in nature. Melville's last story was never subjected to this evolutionary process; it was deprived of an orderly critical history, and this lack may have radically altered its initial critical reception. Literature comes down to us hand-in-hand with a critical evaluation that influences our perception of it. We may agree or disagree with past interpretations, we may try to begin afresh and disregard the previous evaluations of a literary work, but each work has a critical history with which we must contend. We build on it, change it, modify it, accept it or reject it, but we respond.

If Billy Budd had had a more conventional literary/critical history, could Lewis Mumford have stated so authoritatively that Billy joined Melville in cheering for Captain Vere? If nineteenth-century critical evaluation had claimed that Captain Vere had made an immoral choice, Mumford would have been more cautious in his estimate of Melville's meaning. Could Grant Watson have called this story Melville's “testament of acceptance” if readers and critics had previously appraised the work differently?⁴⁹ Mumford and Grant might have ultimately arrived at the same interpretation with a full critical history behind Billy Budd, but they would have had to search the work, the Melville canon, and themselves carefully to come up with cogent reasons to break with literary tradition. In this process, which is the period of growth and development of ideas, the literary interpretation thickens, and the work becomes richer. For great works of literature, the process of discovery is never too late, but once delayed, it can never be the same. This can be said of Billy Budd.

Notes

1. Introduction to Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), Ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 1.

2. Keith Thomas, “Politics Recaptured,” New York Review of Books, 17 May 1979, p. 26.

3. Samuel Eliot Morison, Oxford History of the American People (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 761.

4. Stanton Garner, “Melville in the Customhouse, 1881–1882: A Rustic Beauty Among the Highborn Dames of Court,” Melville Society Extracts, No. 35 (1978), p. 12.

5. Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1956), p. 12.

6. Van Wyck Brooks, The Times of Melville and Whitman (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1947), p. 474.

7. Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1958), III, xxvii.

8. Walcutt, p. 14.

9. Parrington, xxvii.

10. Brooks, p. 475.

11. Parrington, 238.

12. Larzar Ziff, The American 1890's: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York: Viking Press, 1966), p. 85.

13. Henry C. Vedder, American Writers of To-day (Boston Burdett and Co., 1894), p. 82.

14. Ziff, p. 64.

15. Charles Dudley Warner, “Modern Fiction,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1883, p. 466.

16. Herbert Brown, “The Great American Novel,” The Critic, April 1885, p. 3.

17. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking Press, 1964), p. vii.

18. For more information see Lyman Tower Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature 1516–1975 (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1979) and Elisabeth Hansot, Perfection and Progress: Two Modes of Utopian Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1974).

19. Herman Melville, Letters of Herman Melville, Ed. Merrell Davis and William Gilman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), p. 277.

20. Review of Democracy by Henry Adams, The Nation, 22 April 1880, p. 312.

21. Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York: A Horizon Press Book, 1957), p. 175.

22. Review of Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, New York Times, 27 Nov. 1881, p. 5, col. 3.

23. Review of Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, Harper's Magazine, February 1882, p. 474.

24. Review of A Modern Instance by William Dean Howells, Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1882,, p. 710.

25. Review of A Modern Instance by William Dean Howells, New York Times, 15 Oct. 1881, p. 6, col. 3.

26. Comments on A Modern Instance by William Dean Howells in a Review of The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells, Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 1885, p. 555.

27. Vedder, p. 82.

28. Review of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, Century, May 1885, p. 171.

29. Review of The Bostonians by Henry James, New York Times, 28 March 1886, p. 12, col. 1.

30. Review of The Bostonians by Henry James, Atlantic Monthly, June 1886, p. 850.

31. Howe, p. 185.

32. Howe, p. 190.

33. Review of The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells, Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 1885, p. 555.

34. Ziff, p. 34.

35. Kenneth Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), p. 12.

36. Review of A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, Harper's Magazine, Jan. 1890, p. 320.

37. Review of A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1890, p. 286.

38. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1962), pp. 81–2.

39. Review of Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, New York Times, 19 Oct. 1895, p. 3, col. 1.

40. Review of Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, The Nation, 2 July 1896, p. 15.

41. George Wyndham, “A Remarkable Book,” review of Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, New Review, Jan. 1896, p. 40.

42. Review of The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James, New York Times Saturday Supplement, 20 Feb. 1897, p. 1, col. 1.

43. Thomas Scorza, In the Time before Steamboats: Billy Budd, The Limits of Politics and Modernity, (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Ill. Univ. Press, 1979), p. 108.

44. F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), p. 513.

45. Matthiessen, p. 514.

46. Joseph Schiffman, “Melville's Final Stage, Irony: A Reexamination of Billy Budd Criticism,” American Literature, 22 (1950), 130.

47. Brown, pp. 2–3.

48. Melville, Billy Budd, p. 78.

49. See Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929) and E. L. Grant Watson, “Melville's Testament of Acceptance,” New England Quarterly, 6 (June, 1933), pp. 319–27.