Herman Melville
even the principal characters are not primarily men: they are actors
and symbols. The story gains something by this concentration, perhaps:
it is stripped for action, and even Melville’s deliberate digressions
do not halt it. Each of the characters has a Platonic clarity of form.
Captain the Honourable Edward Fairfax Vere, “starry Vere,” is a man
of superior order: humane, reserved, free from cant, fortified by an
equal knowledge of men and books. After the mutiny of the Nore, the
time when this story takes place, the command of a British naval vessel
is no easy one: the officers are tense and expectant, though outwardly
indifferent: mutiny may break out any minute among the “people.” Billy
Budd, a seaman taken over by impressment from The Rights of Man, stands
out from the rest of the crew: one of Nature’s innocents. A fine frame,
yellow hair, an open, almost girlish face, set him off with angelic
beauty: and he is a natural favourite among the crew: the Handsome
Sailor of eighteenth century balladry.
Without overt act, merely by being what he is, the personification
of strength, health, beauty, innocence, Budd incurs the enmity of
Claggart, the master-at-arms. Claggart, with a suspicious past at his
back but with soft humid ways and obsequious intelligence, has quickly
won promotion: he is now the evil agent of discipline, prowling over
the ship, watching for disorder--a sea-bag not stowed away, a sailor
evading work, or a hint of mutiny. It is as natural for Claggart to
hate goodness as it is for Budd to personify it: the evil in the man is
apparently causeless in any immediate sense, like the venom in a snake:
it simply is there. With a benign, ambiguous exterior, he secretly
contrives in small ways to make Billy’s lot miserable; and when Billy,
perplexed, brings the matter before a trusty wizen-mouthed old sailor,
the old fellow tells “Baby Budd” that Claggart has it in for him. In
his simpleness, Budd cannot believe it. How could he?--for he had
given no offence. So Claggart plots more deeply against Budd; through
confederates in the crew, tale-bearers and spies, he tries to bribe
Budd into mutiny. Budd, not realizing the meaning of the suggestion
when it is made to him, still flushes with anger, like a fresh girl
spattered by an obscenity. Then Claggart goes further. He takes
advantage of Budd by wakening him from a sleep and getting him into a
compromising position before he is sufficiently awake to withdraw. Now
Claggart thinks he has Budd in his power. He appears before Captain
Vere and humbly submits his report of Budd’s attempted treachery.
Captain Vere, being a firm man and a sound one, is not greatly
impressed by Claggart’s tale: it looks too thin: but for the sake of
form and discipline, since the customs of the navy make it necessary to
employ such fellows as Claggart, he summons Budd to his own cabin to
confront the master-at-arms, instead of airing the matter by a public
inquiry. When Budd comes, Claggart repeats his lie to Budd’s face.
This poor lad has only one physical blemish: in moments of stress he
stammers, and now, confronted by this sudden, horrifying suspicion,
he can for the moment give no answer. His mouth makes an effort: no
words come forth: the blood mounts up to his head. Captain Vere wisely
attempts to soothe him: “There is no hurry, my boy, take your time.”
These kindly words have just the opposite effect to that intended,
for, touching Billy’s heart to a mighty effort at release, he answers
Claggart’s lie with a cannon-blow from his fists. Budd’s first and only
act of rebellion is fatal: Claggart is instantaneously killed.
Vere has no belief whatever in Budd’s guilt; but this act swiftly
alters the case. The perjurer has been struck dead by an angel of God;
but in this world, the angels must hang. A swift deck court-martial is
held in the captain’s cabin, and Vere is caught by the dual nature of
his position. He is commander of the ship, a captain, a disciplinarian,
responsible for the safety of all aboard, committed by the terms of
his commission to the Articles of War and all that they imply. As a
man, with fatherly feelings toward this innocent boy, he would be
merciful: as commander, he acts against his innermost wishes and
urges his subordinates not to be swayed by motives of compassion. His
fellow officers reluctantly respect their superior’s probity: they
sentence Billy Budd to be hanged for murder. Privately, as man to man,
as father to son, Vere announces the sentence to Budd. Justice done,
pity, magnanimity, stir Vere to the bottom: the feelings of the judge
and the judged are transferred; for the burden now lies on Captain Vere
rather than on the victim; and Vere, in turn, is the instrument of an
institution. When the hemp is placed around Billy Budd’s neck, Billy
turns to the quarter-deck and cries out: God bless Captain Vere. He
dies happily, in the first vapoury glory of the dawn--dies, and becomes
a legend among the sailors, and the spar from which he was hanged is
followed through its vicissitudes, and ballads are sung and tales are
told about him.
Billy Budd is the story of three men in the British Navy: it is
also the story of the world, the spirit, and the devil. Melville
left a note, crossed out in the original manuscript, “Here ends a
story not unwarranted by what happens in this incongruous world of
ours--innocence and infirmity, spiritual depravity and fair respite.”
The meaning is so obvious that one shrinks from underlining it. Good
and evil exist in the nature of things, each forever itself, each
doomed to war with the other. In the working out of human institutions,
evil has a place as well as the good: Vere is contemptuous of Claggart,
but cannot do without him: he loves Budd as a son and must condemn him
to the noose: justice dictates an act abhorrent to his nature, and only
his inner magnanimity keeps it from being revolting. These are the
fundamental ambiguities of life: so long as evil exists, the agents
that intercept it will also be evil, whilst we accept the world’s
conditions: the universal articles of war on which our civilizations
rest. Rascality may be punished; but beauty and innocence will suffer
in that process far more. There is no comfort, in the perpetual Calvary
of the spirit, to find a thief nailed on either side. Melville had
been harried by these paradoxes in Pierre. At last he was reconciled.
He accepted the situation as a tragic necessity; and to meet that
tragedy bravely was to find peace, the ultimate peace of resignation,
even in an incongruous world. As Melville’s own end approached, he
cried out with Billy Budd: God bless Captain Vere! In this final
affirmation Herman Melville died. September 28, 1891, was the date of
the outward event.
EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE
Why does Herman Melville mean so much more to us than he did to his
own contemporaries? What has his thought done for us, and what has his
vision given?
The change that has come about is not merely a change of style,
so that the things which amused Mr. Stedman or Mr. Lowell are now
old-fashioned, like hooped skirts, while the things that concerned
Melville are, like the cubist quilts and coverlets of the 1850’s,
distinctly modern. Typee is still as good a book as Mr. Arthur Stedman
thought it; but we see now that it belongs to a more common order of
literature, whereas Moby-Dick, the more closely we consider it, mounts
to that lonely wind-swept plateau in whose rarefied air only the finest
imaginations can breathe. Distinctly, Moby-Dick belongs with The Divine
Comedy and Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace; and if
it does not establish its right to this company, it must occupy a lower
place than the successful novels of its period, a David Copperfield or
a Pendennis, books written with a complete acceptance of the current
limitations and provincialities.
Melville’s work, taken as a whole, expresses that tragic sense of
life which has always attended the highest triumphs of the race, at
the moments of completest mastery and fulfilment. Where that sense
is lacking, life shrivels into small prudences and weak pleasures
and petty gains, and those great feats of thought and imagination
which transform the very character of the universe and relieve human
purpose from the scant sufficiency of toiling and eating and sleeping,
in a meaningless, reiterative round, shrivel away, too. John Ruskin
saw the truth of this when, in spite of his pacifist convictions, he
praised the art of war, for its effect upon the human spirit: life is
intensified and purposive when the battle with the inimical forces that
surround us, like Ahab’s battle, is a deliberate pursuit and challenge,
and not merely an apathetic waiting for a purely physiological end.
The tragedy of life, its evanescence, its frustrations, its limitations
within physical boundaries almost as narrow as a straitjacket, its
final extinction, becomes, in a day that consciously embraces its
fate, the condition of an heroic effort. Death, which biologically is
merely the terminus of a natural process, acquires significance for
man because he anticipates it and modifies his activities so as to
circumvent it: by memory and foresight, by choosing his ends, dreaming
of immortality, erecting monuments and statues and museums, and above
all, by transmitting the written word, man creates a destiny beyond his
life’s physical span. It is just because the worms lie in wait that man
defies the gods, cherishes the images he has created and the relations
he has solidified in custom and thought, and centres his efforts on
those things which are least given to meaningless change. Though the
sensible world is not derived, as Plato thought, from the heaven of
ideas, the opposite of this is what every culture must strive for: to
derive from the sensible world that which may be translated to a more
durable world of forms.
Within the world of these forms there is Life, a thing of value, and
not merely living, a matter of fact and habit and animal necessity.
Whether one develops this tragic sense of values on a battlefield,
like Sophocles, or in a whaleboat, like Melville, it is a precious
experience: for living, merely living, as every profane writer from
Petronius Arbiter to Theodore Dreiser has shown, brings boredom,
satiety, despair: whereas Life is eternal, and he who has faith in it
and participates in it is saved from the emptiness of the universe
and the pointlessness of his own presence therein. Living, for man, in
all but the most brutish communities, like those of the savages of the
Straits of Magellan or the outcasts of a Liverpool or New York slum,
includes and implies this Life; and when Melville summons into his
whaler the several races of the world, he is expressing the universal
nature of that effort which caps nature with culture, existence
with meaning, and facts with forms. Ahab’s tragic struggle is the
condition of every high endeavour of the mind, even though Death be
its tragic reward; while adjustment, acquiescence, accepting outward
conditions as inward necessities, though they may prolong living in the
physical sense, effectually curtail Life: this attitude, the attitude
of Melville’s contemporaries, the attitude of the routineers and
Philistines of all times--and they have never perhaps been so numerous
as today--disrupts life more completely than illness and death do;
for it brings about a deliquescence of forms, such as the nineteenth
century showed in all its common arts, and a disintegration of human
purposes. When that happens, the White Whale of brute energy reigns
supreme: Life itself is denied: living produces no values, and men hide
their emptiness by embracing dull counterfeits of purpose.