ROGER SHATTUCK
431
Now something such an one was Claggart, in whom was the mania of an evil
nature, not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious liv–
ing, but born with him and innate, in short "a depravity according to nature."
Dark sayings are these, some will say. But why? Is it because they somewhat
savor of Holy Writ in its phrase "mystery of iniquity"?
If
they do, such savor was
far enough from being intended, for little will it commend these passages to
many a reader of today.
The tentative phrasing of the two paragraphs only underlines their
portentousness. The phrase "mystery of iniquity" (2 Thess. 2:7) designates
the problem of the existence of evil in a God-created world, the problem
addressed by Leibnitz with the modern term "theodicy," Milton's
avowed subject in
Paradise Lost.
What absorbs Melville is how Claggart's
evil infects the innocent Billy through an obscure causation we call fate.
The second key passage presents that infection or moral reversal as
tragic and inevitable.
It
takes an attentive reading to follow the paradoxes
and reversals described in these sentences:
In the jugglery of circumstances preceding and attending the event on board the
Bellipotent,
and in the light of that martial code whereby it was formally to be
judged, innocence and guilt personified in Claggart and Budd in effect changed
places. In a legal view the apparent victim of the tragedy was he who had sought
to victimize a man blameless; and the indisputable deed of the latter, navally re–
garded, constituted the most heinous of military crimes. Yet more. The essential
right and wrong involved in the matter, the clearer that might be, so much the
worse for the responsibility of a loyal commander, inasmuch as he was not
authorized to determine the matter on that primitive basis.
Notice that all three characters are arrayed together in this tense pas–
sage.
It
tempts us to make a double allegorical leap. The
Bellipotent
is a
ship of war that represents not only a ship of state in crisis but also the
ship of a divided and unified individual: Claggart as evil, Billy as good or
innocence, Captain Vere as the authority of reason trying to maintain or–
der. The tragedy is not lowly Billy's but Vere's; the captain dies years later
muttering Billy's name. As wartime commander he is duty bound to
judge the killing according to the forms of naval justice. The principle is
not new to him. "'For mankind,' he would say, 'forms, measured forms,
are everything. '" Tocqueville uses the same term, "forms," to designate
the traditions and customs he finds lacking in an open democratic society.
The forms of naval justice are barely adequate to deal with the mystery of
