Billy Budd as Political Thought

Art by Elliot Skow

If Moby Dick lets its enthusiasm run wild, Billy Budd, written at the other end of Melville’s life, is carefully held to leash. But neither book tells its tale straight; both are driven to pause and elaborate each moment’s significance, psychological, political, and spiritual. Near its end Billy Budd says this out loud: the incidents left to be related happen “within a brief term,” but their

adequate narration may take up a term less brief, especially as explanation or comment here and there seem requisite to the better understanding of such incidents.

The story’s incidents are quickly summarized. An innocent, good-hearted sailor, the “Handsome Sailor,” Billy Budd, sailing on a merchant ship, is impressed (forced) into service in the English navy. Claggart, the navy ship’s master-at-arms, evil by nature, perceives Billy’s goodness, hates it, and sets out to destroy it. He falsely accuses Billy of plotting mutiny, and the Captain urges Billy to respond; but Billy, who stutters under stress, finds himself unable to speak, and instead reflexively punches Claggart, killing him. Captain Vere, knowing Billy innocent of the accusation, and the killing to be a mistake, nevertheless has Billy hung.

The narrator’s expansions and digressions indicate that the story aims at something larger than a simple tale of a sailor’s tragic death. Maybe that something is just Pessimism, or Tragedy with a capital “T”: Pure innocence always meets Evil at a disadvantage, and loses the confrontation; good can only survive if it is not wholly Good. One character wonders, of Budd,

what might eventually befall a nature like that, dropped into a world not without some mantraps and against whose subtleties simple courage lacking experience and address, and without any touch of defensive ugliness, is of little avail.

But there’s another Something Larger in the story: a contribution to political thought. The story, we are reminded many times, is set during the French Revolution. England is at war with France, and the merchant ship from which Budd is taken is called the Rights of Man, the name of Thomas Paine’s radical tract defending the Revolution against Conservatism’s founding text, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Budd’s physical removal from the Rights signifies a shift to a legal and political climate opposed to the Revolution’s ideals. Indeed Vere, Budd’s new Captain, seems a Burkean, even if Burke’s name goes unmentioned:

his settled convictions were as a dike against those invading waters of novel opinion social, political, and otherwise, which carried away as in a torrent no few minds in those days...Captain Vere disinterestedly opposed [French political innovations] not alone because they seemed to him insusceptible of embodiment in lasting institutions, but at war with the peace of the world and the true welfare of mankind.

“These innovations cannot be embodied in lasting institutions”: a sentence that could have appeared in Burke’s Reflections. Later we learn that Vere would often say, “With mankind, forms, measured forms, are everything.” Vere would apply this principle “to the disruption of forms going on across the Channel and the consequences thereof.” The dismantling of settled institutions, even in the name of social justice, Vere thinks (with Burke), almost always causes even greater damage.

The story builds to a climatic scene: Vere assembles a tribunal to judge Billy’s guilt and pronounce a sentence. None think he deserves to die. But Vere stands to persuade them to condemn him anyway. He speech is worth quoting at length:

do these buttons that we wear attest that our allegiance is to Nature? No, to the King....When war is declared are we the commissioned fighters previously consulted? [No.] We fight at command. If our judgments approve the war, that is but coincidence. So in other particulars. So now. [If we condemn Billy to death,] would it be so much we ourselves that would condemn as it would be martial law operating through us? For that law and the rigor of it, we are not responsible. Our vowed responsibility is in this: That however pitilessly that law may operate in any instances, we nevertheless adhere to it and administer it.

Vere then develops the dangerous consequences of leniency. We have been reminded, throughout the story, of a recent mutiny—a danger always there and still to be guarded against, when so many sailors are serving against their will:

to the people the foretopman’s deed...will be [thought] 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. ... Will they not revert to the recent outbreak at the [navy ship] Nore? Ay...They would think that we flinch, that we are afraid of them. [And that thought, spreading, would be] deadly to discipline.

If the French revolutionaries, and Thomas Paine, proclaimed the inviolability of individual rights, Vere stands so far for the rule of law, a rule threatened by even the false perception of exceptions, that the rights of the innocent may need to give way before it. As one critic wrote: for Vere,

justice to the individual is not the ultimate loyalty in a complex culture; the stability of the culture has the higher claim, and when the two conflict, justice to the individual must be abrogated to keep the order of society intact.

Was Vere right? Did Melville think Vere was right? He’s careful not to tell us, and explicitly instructs us to make up our own minds. The author hints that, in acting as he did, Vere was mad; but

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins?...So with sanity and insanity...Whether Captain Vere...was really the sudden victim of any degree of aberration, every one must determine for himself by such light as this narrative may afford.

Another hint may be Billy Budd’s character itself. If the bad effects on the crew of leniency must be counted, surely the good ones must as well? Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, Captain Vere’s Burkean/Conservative conviction that preserving social order is more important than abstractly-conceived individual rights, Conservatives also think that social order depends as much on a people’s trust and affection for each other as on the strict punishment of law-breaking by the state. But Billy, we are told, was not just Good; he brought goodness forth in others. Before Billy joined the crew of the Rights of Man, that ship’s captain relates to the navy Lieutenant,

my forecastle was a rat-pit of quarrels. It was black times, I tell you....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....Anybody will do anything for Billy Budd; and it’s the happy family here...Ay, Lieutenant, you are going to take away the jewel of ‘em; you are going to take away my peacemaker!

Postscript. Vere’s speech could well have been written by Aaron Sorkin, and in fact reminds one of Sorkin’s drama, A Few Good Men, especially Colonel Jessup’s (Jack Nicholson’s) speech at the end, defending an innocent death he caused, as an unfortunate consequence of policies necessary for the preservation of society:

Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.

... I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it.

But in Sorkin’s world, Jessup’s decision was subject to a higher tribunal, which ruled against him. Melville provides us no such moment of moral clarity in the aftermath of Captain Vere’s decision.

---

See also: “In Moby Dick, he swallows Shakespeare…”; Conservatism as Skeptical Solution to Life.