Billy Budd

'That is thoughtfully put,' said Captain Vere; 'I see your drift. Ay, there is a mystery; but to use a Scriptural phrase, it is "a mystery of iniquity," a matter for psychological theologians to discuss. But what has a military court to do with it?'

Impressment, Claggart's accusation, Billy's fatal blow, and Vere's drumhead court fuse into a tragedy of innocent violence against naval discipline with classical inevitability, so plot scores 90.

Such a cynosure, at least in aspect, and something such too in nature, though with important variations made apparent as the story proceeds, was welkin-eyed Billy Budd, or Baby Budd, as more familiarly, under circumstances hereafter to be given, he at last came to be called, aged twenty-one, a foretopman of the fleet toward the close of the last decade of the eighteenth century.

Billy, Vere, and Claggart are typed yet philosophically charged — the handsome foretopman against Starry Vere and the master-at-arms — without flattening into allegory only, so cast scores 91.

Though after parleyings between Government and the ringleaders, and concessions by the former as to some glaring abuses, the first uprising—that at Spithead—with difficulty was put down, or matters for a time pacified; yet at the Nore the unforeseen renewal of insurrection on a yet larger scale indicated what was the spirit animating the men.

Digressions on the Nore Mutiny and Nelson slow the novella between impressment and accusation; the final court and execution compress into classical inevitability rather than thriller tempo, so pace scores 86.

Aside from his qualities as a sea-officer Captain Vere was an exceptional character. Unlike no few of England's renowned sailors, long and arduous service with signal devotion to it, had not resulted in absorbing and salting the entire man. He had a marked leaning toward everything intellectual.

Melville's late prose — the Handsome Sailor archetype, Vere's bookish intellect, the dawn execution — fuses allegory with naval realism, so prose scores 92.

But on board the seventy-four in which Billy now swung his hammock very little in the manner of the men and nothing obvious in the demeanour of the officers would have suggested to an ordinary observer that the Great Mutiny was a recent event.

The Indomitable in the shadow of Spithead and the Nore — mutiny memory and Articles of War governing every act — is a morally charged naval stage, so world scores 88.

Plump upon Billy at first sight in the gangway the boarding-officer, Lieutenant Ratcliffe, pounced, even before the merchantman's crew formally was mustered on the quarter-deck for his deliberate inspection. And him only he selected.

The Handsome Sailor on the Liverpool docks and Billy's impressment establish innocence before the Indomitable's discipline closes in — inviting in moral contrast rather than shock, so hook scores 85.

But what has a military court to do with it? Not to add that for us, any possible investigation of it is cut off by the lasting tongue-tie of—him—in yonder. The prisoner's deed. With that alone we have to do.

Innocence condemned by law it cannot comprehend — Billy's stammer and Vere's argument for martial duty anticipate modern legal-moral fiction, so innov scores 90.

At the penultimate moment, his words, his only ones, words wholly unobstructed in the utterance, were these—'God bless Captain Vere!' Syllables so unanticipated coming from one with the ignominious hemp about his neck had a phenomenal effect, not unenhanced by the rare personal beauty of the young sailor.

Billy's benediction at the yard-arm, echoed by the crew, and his ascension into the dawn rose form one of American literature's most compressed tragic finales, so ending scores 93.