DISSENT ON BILLY BUDD
volently puts his hand on Billy's shoulder and tells him to take his
time. The blocked utterance bursts forth not in the form of speech
but as a tremendous blow on Claggart's forehead from Billy Budd's
fist-and the master-at-arms is killed on the spot. A drumhead
court is quickly summoned, and though both the court and the cap–
tain himself are tormented with a deep compunction, they soon sen–
tence Billy Budd to be hanged at dawn. Billy Budd dies murmuring
"God bless Captain Vere."
It is often said that
Billy Budd
shows Melville's final admission
of the tragic necessity of law in human society. But Melville had
admitted this forty years earlier in
White-Jacket
and had reaffirmed
it in
Mob y Dick
by showing that the tragic dilemma of Ahab was
in part due to his necessary commitment to the external forms of
command. He makes no
discovery
of law in
Billy Budd;
he simply
deals with the subject more carefully than he had before. Captain
Vere's examination and defense of law in a man-of-war world and
his decision that a human life must be sacrificed to this law is impec–
cable, irrefutable, and fully conscious of the pathetic irony of the
situation. The flaw in the book is that Melville does not fully con–
ceive of that which, in a genuine tragedy, has to be opposed to law.
Captain Vere and Claggart are perfectly portrayed. The cap–
tain's name-Edward Fairfax Vere-indicates that he is Man
(vir),
but civilized Man. Though emotionally superior to the laws of
"Cain's City," he nevertheless lives according to these laws in all
practical matters. Profoundly moved by the plight of Billy Budd,
Captain Vere resolves to communicate the decision of the court to
Billy in person, and in doing so he assumes the relationship we so
often meet in Melville's books: he becomes father to a son. (Billy
Budd is a primordial image of Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd or of
the cartoonist Low's blond young common man, standing with mind–
less, questioning eyes before Hermann Goering or Franklin D. Roose–
velt.)
The possibility that Vere may in fact be Billy Budd's father is
not contradicted by the author; for Billy was a foundling and, as
the author suggests, a by-blow of some English nobleman. Billy
Budd's fate has so shaken Captain Vere that the ship's surgeon
·suspects a touch of madness, a question which Melville carefully
leaves open. Perhaps the captain's touch of madness is only his own
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