Billy Budd: And Other Prose Pieces
1924
Billy Budd: And Other Prose Pieces
1924
The story that haunted Herman Melville for decades finally emerged in 1924, a nautical tragedy of unbearable weight. Billy Budd, a young sailor of extraordinary innocence and physical beauty, is pressed into service aboard a British man-of-war in 1797, a year of naval mutinies and political tension. When the ship's calculating master-at-arms falsely accuses him of conspiracy, Billy's inability to defend himself verbally leads to a catastrophic act of violence that forces the upright Captain Vere to choose between mercy and military law. This is Melville's darkest meditation on innocence destroyed by systems it cannot comprehend, a tale that asks whether justice is possible when the machinery of authority demands its pound of flesh. The surrounding prose pieces, including sketches of the sea and fragments of an earlier work, reveal a writer in his final years, still wrestling with the same profound questions. For readers who believe that beauty and goodness can survive against impossible odds.
Editions
X-Ray
“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.””
— Herman Melville
“and yet a child’s utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes.””
— Herman Melville
“But Captain Vere was now again motionless, standing absorbed in thought. Again starting, he vehemently exclaimed, "Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet that angel must hang!””
— Herman Melville
“His duty he always faithfully did; but duty is sometimes a dry obligation, and he was for irrigating its aridity whensoever possible with a fertilizing decoction of strong waters.””
— Herman Melville
“Now envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable in reason, nevertheless in fact may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng in one birth. Is Envy then such a monster? Well, though many an arraigned mortal has in hopes of mitigated penalty pleaded guilty to horrible actions, did anybody ever seriously confess to envy? Something there is in it universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime. And not only does everybody disown it, but the better sort are inclined to incredulity when it is in earnest imputed to an intelligent man. But since it's lodgement is in the heart and not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies a guarantee against it.””
— Herman Melville
“For though consciences are as unlike as foreheads, every intelligence, not including the Scriptural devils who "believe and tremble" has one.””
— Herman Melville
“An uncommon prudence is habtual with the subtler depravity, for it has everything to hide.””
— Herman Melville
“But the thing which in eminent instances signalizes so exceptional a nature is this: Though the man's even temper and discreet bearing would seem to intimate a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason, not the less in heart he would seem to riot in complete exemption from that law, having apparently little to do with reason further than to employ it as an ambidexter implement for effecting the irrational.””
— Herman Melville
“But for anything deeper, I am not certain whether to know the world and to know human nature be not two distinct branches of knowledge, which while they may coexist in the same heart, yet either may exist with little or nothing of the other.””
— Herman Melville
