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Melville’s immortal Moby Dick ends with the destruction of the whaler Pequod and the loss of all hands save one, Ishmael. His lesser-known novel, Billy Budd, concludes its main action with the sacrifice of only one and the survival of all others. This significant difference has suggested a new, more hopeful aspect of Herman Melville. Billy Budd has therefore been enjoying a re-discovery, or properly speaking a process of discovery since it was not published in America until 1928. The Ustinov film production, released in the Fall of 1962, is most successful and impressive.

The unmistakable religious symbolism in Billy Budd suggests the need for a study of its theological themes and the meanings that they hold for religious liberals. Melville’s character, Billy Budd, represents both the mythological Adam and the figure of the Christ. Before taking up these themes it will be helpful to recount briefly the history of the story and to summarize its contents.

I

Almost all of Melville’s prose fiction was written between 1845 and 1857, a period of only twelve years. From 1857 to 1888 Melville devoted himself almost exclusively to poetry. Then, on November 16, 1888 he began Billy Budd. Although much shorter than his early novels Billy Budd took three years in the writing. It was finished on April 19, 1891. Five months later Melville died.

Thus, Billy Budd occupies a singular position in Melville’s writings. It is the last and apparently most carefully written of his works. As Ronald Mason says in his book, The Spirit Above the Dust, Melville “seems to have taken far more pains with the detailed construction of this story than he ever did with any of his previous writings. . . .” (Mason 1951, 246). It was almost as if he had something very important to say.

In 1949 Billy Budd became the basis of the play “Uniform of Flesh,” written by Louis O. Coxe and Robert Chapman. This play ran for seven performances at the Lenox Hill Playhouse. The play was then re-written and opened at the Biltmore Theatre under the title “Billy Budd.” Here it narrowly missed the Drama Critics Award for the best play in the 1950–951 season.

II

Such is the history of Billy Budd. Before proceeding with an interpretation of its themes, it might be best to summarize the contents of the novel. The action takes place in 1798 on the high seas when England and France are at war. This is the year of the naval mutinies at Spithead and Nore when English sailors, infected by the spirit of revolution, protest such abuses as impressment, flogging and capital punishment.

Billy Budd, a slim, handsome boy of nineteen is impressed from the merchantman, The Rights of Man, to serve on the man-of-war, H.M.S. Indomitable, commanded by Captain Vere. Of a cheerful, cooperative nature, Budd quickly adapts to navy life. His frank, trusting disposition makes him well-liked by his shipmates.

His very presence seems to create a sense of good-will and confidence—with all except one, the ship’s Master-at-Arms, John Claggart. The spiritual antithesis of Budd, Claggart’s nature is sinister and evil. As Melville wrote: “[in Claggart was] an evil nature, not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living, but born with him and innate, in short “a depravity according to nature” (Melville 1952, 843).

Claggart becomes obsessed by the need to hurt Billy Budd. He plots with his assistant, Squeak, to discredit Budd by sabotaging his gear. He insults him and tries to provoke him, but to no avail. Soon it becomes clear that Claggart will not rest until he has destroyed Budd. One night he has Squeak try to tempt Budd into mutinous behavior by offering the young seaman two gold guineas. When this fails, Claggart executes his masterstroke. He goes to Captain Vere and accuses Budd of mutiny. Captain Vere knows Budd is not guilty and has long suspected Claggart of improprieties, so he sees this as an opportunity to catch Claggart on a perjury charge, which is a capital offense.

Summoning Billy to his cabin Vere has Claggart repeat the charges. Standing falsely accused, Billy is shocked, tongue-tied, enraged. Although he had been known to stammer when under stress, this is the first time he completely loses control of himself. Billy is choked with anger, his face twisted, his body almost convulsed. Not able to answer in any other way, his arm strikes out and catches Claggart squarely on the temple. There is a groan and Claggart topples over dead.

Suddenly the plot turns, violently the roles are reversed. Now Budd is guilty of deed if not of intent. A court martial ensues and we cannot believe that Budd will be convicted. But there is no choice for the tormented Captain Vere: Budd has killed a ship’s officer; it is time of war; he must hang. Before we can fully grasp what has happened, the crew is summoned to witness punishment, Budd is marched forward and executed. The crew stands by, fixed in horror. Just before Billy is lifted from the deck he shouts—for he has trusted Captain Vere implicitly and bears him no malice—”God bless Captain Vere!”

The story then follows the history of the H.M.S. Indomitable and Captain Vere, who is soon killed in a naval engagement, but concludes shortly thereafter.

III

Throughout the story certain themes and religious symbolism emerge which we are now in a position to interpret. Two minor images suggested are David felling Goliath and Abraham being called upon to sacrifice his son. The relationship of trust and affection between Vere and Budd is much like that of father and son. As Vere says in the play, “If I had a son, I’d hope for one like Budd” (Gassner 1952, 381). Since Budd is illegitimate yet of noble bearing, the possibility is never dismissed that Vere could in fact be his father.

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.