By far, however, the dominant images which Budd embodies are those of the mythological Adam before the Fall, and the Christ figure. Billy Budd clearly embodies the qualities of Adam. Budd, as he arrives from The Rights of Man, is simple, completely natural. His innocence, carried almost to the point of naivete, make this association with Adam inescapable. In this handsome young sailor there is only one flaw, an impediment of speech which proves his undoing, as did the fatal flaw of Adam, curiosity. Melville himself calls attention to this similarity at several points in the text of the novel. Melville describes Billy as “a sort of upright barbarian, much such perhaps as Adam presumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into his company” (Melville 1952, 817).
Yet the serpent does find his way into Budd’s company: in the form of Claggart and his false accusations Budd is tempted to the limit of his endurance and commits an act of anger and violence. In striking Claggart, Budd has finally recognized the evil in the Master-at-Arms and found the potential for it in himself, and in this knowledge he falls from the state of innocence that he previously held.
So, the Adam theme is completed. This would be story enough. For the first time the character of Budd is believable, but Melville is not content to leave him as the Fallen Adam. It would have been enough to affect the Fall if Budd simply struck Claggart out of hatred and anger, but through a quirk of fate Melville has Budd kill him. Nor is Melville going to let him off at the court martial to live as Fallen Man. Captain Vere asserts the need to fulfill the law, and Budd, because of his human failing, is condemned and sacrificed.
Thus, Melville sets into motion yet another theme, that of the Christ. Budd’s character is still one somewhat of innocence, but it is described by one critic as a “dynamic pervasive innocence credited to Jesus” (Mason 1951, 250). Throughout the entire story, as with the Adam theme, there are frequent parallels between Budd and Jesus. Budd is confronted with the temptation of the two gold guineas, as Jesus is said to have been tempted by Satan. Both Budd and Jesus were falsely accused of the same crime—treason. Both were equally innocent. One was convicted under Mosaic law and the other under the Mutiny Act. Neither, when accused, uttered a word in his own defense. The friends of both stood by helplessly while they were killed. When the chaplain saw Billy before the execution, he stooped and kissed him on the cheek, reminiscent of the act of Judas. Budd’s cry as he was being executed, “God Bless Captain Vere!” echoes that other cry of compassion, “Forgive them! For they know not what they do!” Melville’s own description of Budd’s execution and the appearance of the early morning sky cannot be ignored:
. . . it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East, was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and, ascending, took the full rose of the dawn. (Melville 1952, 894)
Following his death Melville reports that sailors followed the spar from which Budd was hanged “from ship to dock-yard and again from dock-yard to ship, still pursuing it even when at last reduced to a mere dock-yard boom. To them a chip of it was as a piece of the Cross” (Melville 1952, 902).
In Billy Budd, then, we have a figure who was admired by his fellows for his strength and goodness and who was revered after his tragic death. Throughout his time aboard the Indomitable, his spirit was one that transformed the circumstances of hardship and suffering into joy and hope. There is even reason to believe that death was for him something that could be accepted with trust, something that did not vanquish his sense of good-will and serenity. Thus, his final words were unmarked by a trace of stammer.
Our interpretation, then, is that Billy Budd represents both Adam and Christ. He is not completely either, yet a curious combination of both. By character he is very much Adam; by circumstances he is forced to play out the role of the Christ. As Milton Stern said in his excellent work, The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville: “. . . in Billy Budd Melville tells his history of humanity in a reworking of the Adam-Christ story, placing prelapsarian Adam and the Christ on a man-of-war, and demonstrating the inevitability of the Fall and the necessity of the Crucifixion” (Stern 1957, 211).
IV
This being our interpretation, what does it mean to Melville, and to us? If the Adam-Christ interpretation of Billy Budd is as Melville intended, it is clear that this final work is categorically different from his earlier novels. In the earlier works man is locked in deadly combat with the inscrutable forces of evil. In Ahab’s defiance and Pierre’s despair there is no reconciliation to life, only struggle and crushing defeat. In Billy Budd, however, Melville suggests a degree of resolution and transcendence over the forces of evil not hitherto expressed. Billy Budd rises above the annihilating circumstances of life and death, and asserts his spirit of goodness and acceptance.
If this is the meaning Melville intended, the consequences are far-reaching. It means that Melville underwent a transition not only in literary out-look but in his own convictions about life. “Towards the end,” said Auden in his poem on Melville, “he sailed into an extraordinary mildness” (Mason 1951, 246). Ronald Mason remarked, “[Billy Budd] is a calm and authoritative revelation; the doubts which had tormented [Melville’s] . . . most vigorous and productive moments have by years and years of unrecorded wrestling, both of intellect and imagination, been resolved” (Mason 1951, 245).
If this is so, it means that Billy Budd is one of Melville’s most important novels, that it cannot be ignored as a natural sequel to the greatest of the earlier works such as Moby Dick. Some scholars are skeptical, however, whether Melville intended Billy Budd to be taken seriously, or whether instead the work is a misleading effort at ironic, satiric comedy. They suggest that since Melville was negative about religion and Christianity throughout his life it is too much to expect that he could make such a transition; they feel that a deathbed recantation is somehow too pat. Lawrance Thompson, a chief spokesman of this point of view, states in his book, Melville’s Quarrel With God:
My suggestion is that Billy Budd should be viewed as Melville’s most subtle triumph in triple-talk; that it was designed to conceal and reveal much the same notions as expressed years earlier in Moby Dick and Pierre and The Confidence-Man; that Melville came to the end of his life still harping on the notion that the world was put together wrong and that God was to blame. (Thompson 1952, 332)
We could understand such skepticism if Billy Budd were something Melville dashed off in a few months. We could imagine him spending no more time on a satiric comedy. But it is improbable that Melville would take longer than he ever had taken on works many times the size, that he would summon the last of his strength and occupy his final moments simply restating what had earlier received classic form.
What Melville intended is perhaps something we shall never know. What the story means to us, however, is another matter. We are free to accept it at face value, as this writer is inclined to, as a positive treatment of the Adam and Christ themes and for the meaning these symbols hold. As such the story becomes a commentary on man’s epic struggle for goodness. The struggle takes place in a world of imperfection and human failings—but it is not without hope. Man has resources of compassion, joy, and courage upon which he may draw. In Billy Budd we have the promise that even in the stark world of Herman Melville the goodness in man’s heart cannot be vanquished.
4. Sermon delivered by the author at the Church of the Reconciliation Unitarian Universalist, Utica, New York. Printed in The Crane Review (Winter 1965), pp. 62–67. Reprinted in the following: Walter K. Gordon (ed.), Literature in Critical Perspectives: An Anthology, 1968, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, pp. 753–57.
5
The Paradox of Theodore Parker5
To be human is to be paradoxical. To be human is to contain many forces, anyone of which may appear ambiguously weak or strong, beautiful or ugly, creative