Billy Budd, a big, fair, good-looking sailor on board a merchantman, is impressed into the Royal Navy. His captain complains to the naval officer of the great loss this means to him. In Budd he is losing one of his best sailors and one who, by sheer kindness and availability, has made a peaceful crew of the wild rabble on board. When Budd first arrived, the captain says, only one person took an immediate dislike to him, a bad character whose motive he states precisely: envy of the newcomer because everyone else liked him so much.[1] After picking a quarrel with Billy Budd, however, the envious character was so promptly and thoroughly thrashed that from then on he, also, was one of his friends. The captain fears unrest in his crew if Budd, the peacemaker, leaves it. But characteristically Budd himself voluntarily submits to conscription aboard the warship.
Melville depicts Budd not only as an exceptionally handsome and skilled young seaman; we are also told that he is probably a foundling of aristocratic birth. But Budd has a slight impediment—excitement deprives him of the power of speech. Billy Budd’s downfall stems from the person of the master-at-arms, John Claggart. Melville intimates by hints about Claggart’s origins and his civilian career that this is a man who, on several counts, is seething with resentment against society and life in general.
Billy Budd gets on well with his shipmates. He is popular and in addition does his utmost to carry out his duties with painstaking efficiency. Having, at the very beginning of his service, witnessed the flogging of a sailor for a minor mistake, Billy seeks to avoid attracting the attention of his superiors. But he soon notices that minor accidents keep befalling him. His gear, carefully stowed, is in disorder. The malice of inanimate objects constantly thwarts his endeavour to be a perfect seaman. He discusses this with an old sailor who explains that the master-at-arms is down on him. This Billy cannot believe, since his shipmates have told him that the master-at-arms always calls him ‘the sweet and pleasant young fellow.’ For Billy, Claggart always has a friendly word and a smile.
Melville several times describes the petty officer’s envious look of hatred when he knows himself unobserved either by his victim or by the other sailors. Melville also muses on the fact that the envious man’s chosen victim is seldom able to detect the intentions and feelings of his persecutor from his expression or behaviour. Resentment and envy are hostile feelings that are easily concealed, and which it is often essential to disguise if the plot is to succeed.
Billy Budd, Melville’s embodiment of everything that is innocent, good and harmless, cannot comprehend why Claggart, whom he seeks to please by the exemplary performance of his duties, pursues him with the bitterest envy simply because Billy is the man he is. Thus, before relating the tragic events, Melville interpolates an analysis of envy.
After Melville has shown the reader what Billy and a number of his shipmates refuse to believe, namely, that ‘Claggart is down on him,’ and has confirmed this through the mouth of one of the crew, he looks for possible motives. Several are discussed and rejected before, very cautiously and gradually, Melville advances envy. At first, all he says is:
. . . yet the cause [of Billy’s persecution by the master-at-arms], necessarily to be assumed as the sole one assignable, is in its very realism as much charged with that prime element of Radcliffian romance, the mysterious, as any that the ingenuity of the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho could devise. For what can more partake of the mysterious than an antipathy spontaneous and profound, such as is evoked in certain exceptional mortals by the mere aspect of some other mortal, however harmless he may be, if not called forth by this very harmlessness itself?[2]The novelist thus perceives something that the modern social scientist is seldom able to perceive, because the latter seeks the primary cause of evil outside the perpetrator. Envy, hatred and hostility may be provoked in the aggressor while the man with whom the stimuli originated can in no way prevent this from happening. Only self-disfigurement or self-abasement might prevent envy in the other. With an understanding of the problems of human relations on board a warship—problems which modern small-group research, in costly and laborious experiments, claims to have solved anew—Melville describes the social climate in which the drama is played out:
Now there can exist no irritating juxtaposition of dissimilar personalities comparable to that which is possible aboard a great warship fully manned and at sea. There, every day among all ranks almost every man comes into more or less of contact with almost every other man. Wholly there to avoid even the sight of an aggravating object one must needs give it Jonah’s toss or jump overboard himself. Imagine how all this might eventually operate on some peculiar human creature the direct reverse of a saint.[3]
Many a novelist and most sociologists of our time would be content to cut short the analysis of Claggart at this point. Melville continues: ‘But for the adequate comprehending of Claggart by a normal nature these hints are insufficient. To pass from a normal nature to him one must cross “the deadly space between.” And this is best done by indirection.’[4]So far, Melville has not introduced the concept of envy or resentment. He first recounts a conversation he had once had with a scholar on the subject of worldly wisdom and the understanding of human nature. The scholar seeks to convince Melville that worldly experience does not of itself entail knowledge of the deeper labyrinths of human nature. He concludes with the remark: ‘Coke and Blackstone [jurists whose writings are legal classics] hardly shed so much light into obscure spiritual places as the Hebrew prophets. And who were they? Mostly recluses.’ At first, Melville says, he did not see this. Now, faced with the task of explaining Claggart’s antipathy to Billy Budd, he believes he understands his old friend’s advice and says:
‘And indeed, if that lexicon which is based on Holy Writ were any longer popular, one might with less difficulty define and denominate certain phenomenal men. As it is, one must turn to some authority not liable to the charge of being tinctured with the Biblical element.’[5] Melville is no doubt inferring that the problem of envy is frequently discussed in the Old and New Testaments. Yet he himself goes on for nearly three more pages before he lets fall the decisive word. He is set to prove conclusively that the malice in Claggart is something which the environmental theory, later so popular, cannot explain. The evil in Claggart lies at his very core, quite independent of the world around him.
Melville quotes a definition of ‘natural depravity’ attributed to Plato: ‘Natural Depravity: a depravity according to nature.’ Melville hastens to warn us against the error of believing that what is meant here is the depravity of the whole of mankind, in Calvin’s sense. It is found only in certain individuals. And ‘Not many are the examples of this depravity which the gallows and jail supply.’ Claggart’s depravity, for which Melville is seeking the right word, is always dominated by the intellect. In a brief and masterly paragraph that might have come from the pen of a Scheler or a Nietzsche, the author of Billy Budd takes us into the phenomenological sphere of the envious personality—without having once mentioned the word ‘envy’:
Civilization [by which Melville clearly means something like the educated, worldly-wise, urbane man], especially if of the austerer sort, is auspicious to it. It folds itself in the mantle of respectability. It has its certain negative virtues serving as silent auxiliaries. It never allows wine to get within its guard. It is not going too far to say that it is without vices or small sins. There is a phenomenal pride in it that excludes them from anything mercenary or avaricious. In short the depravity here meant partakes nothing of the sordid or sensual. It is serious, but free from acerbity. Though no flatterer of mankind it never speaks ill of it.[6]A man so endowed by nature should, Melville thinks, be altogether subject to the law of reason. In reality, however, such natures are capable of the greatest irrationality, and such a man will, ‘toward the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of malignity would seem to partake of the insane. . . direct a cool judgement, sagacious and sound.’[7] Melville sees such people as blinded by their madness, though to the ordinary observer their actions are indistinguishable from the normal. They never announce their true aim, yet their methods and mode of behaviour are always completely rational. Claggart was that kind of man, possessed of an inward malice not wholly explicable from his environment, but which, as Melville writes, was innate—in other words, ‘a depravity according to nature.’[8]The reluctance to attribute envy
Up to this point the author has not once used the word ‘envy.’ But in Claggart’s characterization there is some evidence of those envious characteristics so often found in literature: he hides behind the mask of negative virtues such as spartan asceticism, his malignity is not to be bought off, he is unbribable, he never speaks ill of mankind, he appears to be extremely reasonable and yet is capable of the folly of self-injury if he can thus get at the object of his envy.
Here Melville interposes the digression on lawyers, experts and clerics. He asks whether the phenomenon (still not called envy) just described in Claggart which is always denied, or at least concealed, is not the motive behind the deed for which juries in many a criminal case vainly rack their brains. Surely, then, recourse should be had to men who know about the ‘rabies of the heart,’ rather than to ordinary doctors?[9]This shows remarkable insight in Melville. There has remained in criminological literature and practice up to the present a noticeable aversion towards express reference to the envy-motive, although there is convincing evidence in other sources of its significance in crime.
Not till now, forty pages after the beginning of the story, does Melville introduce the concept of envy, in a section headed ‘Pale ire, envy, and despair,’ the words Milton uses to characterize Satan. From this point, envy recurs again and again as the motive behind the master-at-arms’ persecution of Billy Budd. Claggart is himself handsome, but his frequent ironic remarks about the sailor’s beauty are explained by the author as envy:
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 ever anybody 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 its lodgement is in the heart not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies a guarantee against it.[10]The passion of envy is kept secret by all men, regardless of their culture and language, more fearfully and shamefully than any form of erotic passion or perversion. To become a topic for literature and polite conversation, the latter needed a Sigmund Freud and his school. And it is no coincidence that Melville wrote this novel, in which envy is depicted in all its dangerous ugliness, at the end of his very long life fraught with privation and disappointment; for he must completely have resigned himself to his personal fate and to his lack of success in his own time.
In Claggart it was no vulgar envy that the author depicted, not just morbid jealousy which ‘marred Saul’s visage perturbedly brooding on the comely young David.’ ‘Claggart’s envy struck deeper.’ He sensed that Billy’s outward beauty was related to a nature innocent of evil and envy. It was this strange moral phenomenon that drove Claggart to extremes of envy.
Melville even recognizes the paranoid aspect of such envy; because Claggart found it both inconceivable and intolerable that Billy should fail entirely to return his hatred, he read deliberate insults into chance happenings, like the spilling of the soup, so that his envy of Billy could find nourishment in self-righteous contempt and indignation.[11]The blind spot in Melville scholars towards the envy-motive in
Billy BuddIt is not just the social sciences of this century that exhibit a blind spot so far as envy is concerned, but also its literary criticism. When a writer of Herman Melville’s standing devotes many pages of his last work to preparing the reader, in exemplary fashion, for the dominant motive of the drama’s enigmatic central character, when he provides in addition what amounts to a phenomenology of envy from the standpoint of depth psychology, and when he chooses this concept, in a special series of words taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost, as a chapter heading, it might be supposed that Melville scholars, at least when treating of this novel, would be bound to mention, if only once, Melville’s attempt to solve the riddle of envy and of crime resulting from it. We look in vain for any such mention. A systematic survey of works on Billy Budd reveals that most of them totally disregard the problem of envy. This is the more surprising in that Melville repeatedly referred to the motive in other works, and was concerned with its metaphysics in discussing John Milton.[12]In some 280 pages of what is now apparently a manual much used by American college students, Merlin Bowen offers an analysis of Melville. It deals exhaustively with Billy Budd, from page 216 to 233, and in ten other passages in various parts of the book. While there is frequent mention of Claggart as the symbol of evil, there is not one word about the envy-motive, so unmistakably stressed and carefully developed by Melville.
Bowen avoids the term, stating only that Claggart is filled with malice and evil. His longest section concerns the conflict of motives in Captain Vere. And even when he returns on occasion to the supposed motives of the informer, Claggart, he does not get beyond generalizations (the puzzle of depravity), or mentions only that most superficial motive, shown clearly enough by Melville to derive from envy: ‘. . . Claggart whose covert hatred, feeding upon a supposed injury . . .’[13] Melville would not have had to construct half the novel upon the envy-motive had he merely intended to explain Claggart’s hatred of Billy Budd in terms of what Claggart supposed to be insolence on Billy’s part. No reader, indeed, could possibly deduce from Bowen’s book that in Billy Budd Melville had given one of the most detailed analyses of envy and one, moreover, of crucial importance in the plot.
A. R. Humphrey’s Melville comprises 114 pages, more than three of which are devoted to Billy Budd. The author leaves no doubt as to the importance attached by Melville to the analysis of Claggart’s character: Among the finest things in Melville’s work is the analysis of Claggart’s mixed yearning and malice, real in its strangeness. . . . The analysis is probing, adumbrative, quietly troubled, and more interesting than any sensationalism could be. It presents, one might say, original sin according to agnosticism.’[14] There is no mention of envy in Humphrey’s work.
In a study devoted to Melville’s shorter works, Richard Harter Fogle has occasion to mention Claggart only once. All he says is: ‘Claggart, the master-at-arms . . . who is pure evil according to nature.’[15] The nature of this evil, made so plain by Melville, is not mentioned.
Tyrus Hillway, in the 176 pages given to the novelist’s work, unreservedly considers Billy Budd to be Melville’s best and most mature achievement. It is not only his final work, the product of the decade between his seventieth and eightieth birthdays, but a statement of his philosophy, a novel written without any thought of financial gain, or contemporary readership, a work hastened only by the prospect of premature death. One would have thought that Hillway would, if only in one sentence or phrase, have intimated to the reader that Melville discusses the problem of envy. But the word ‘envy’ does not appear even once. Claggart is the embodiment of evil—nothing more.[16]
Geoffrey Stone’s depiction of Melville, more than three hundred pages long, is aimed at the general reader. Billy Budd and Claggart are dealt with at length. The latter is one of the only two characters in the whole of Melville’s opus to be dominated by evil.[17]Yet here, too, we look in vain for an indication that in this novel and Claggart’s character Melville is investigating the problem of envy. Stone quotes long passages from the novel on the subject of the master-at-arms’ motivation, but avoids all those in which Melville uses the term ‘envy.’ Stone even goes into what he declares to be the modern interpretation of Claggart, according to which he is a homosexual, no less, whose unrequited love for the beautiful sailor turns into ambivalent love-hate and eventually into mortal hatred. This interpretation Stone rejects: ‘Melville constantly addresses himself to the metaphysical implications of Claggart’s depravity, and if these are not his chief concern with the matter, we are left with the curious spectacle of a highly intelligent old man devoting the last three years of his life to pondering a simple case of thwarted pederasty.’[18] Here Stone is right, but there is not a single word to suggest that Melville devoted three years of his life to the anatomy of envy. The few authors, however, who have gone into the matter, demonstrate how obvious the chief subject of Melville’s concern really is.
Milton R. Stern, for instance, devotes seven pages to a detailed interpretation of Claggart, mentioning the envious element several times.[19] F. O. Matthiessen puts it most clearly, perhaps, in his work on American literature: ‘. . . Claggart . . . whose malignity seems to be stirred most by the envious sight of virtue in others, as Iago’s was.’ And elsewhere:
To characterize what Claggart feels, Melville has recourse to the quotation, ‘Pale ire, envy and despair,’ the forces that were working in Milton’s Satan as he first approached the Garden of Eden. Melville has also jotted down, on the back of his manuscript, some remembered details about Spenser’s ‘Envy’: and in his depiction of Claggart’s inextricable mixture—longing and malice—he would seem to be reverting likewise to the properties he had noted in Shakespeare’s conception of this deadly sin.[20].
ENVY
A Theory of Social Behaviour
by Helmut Schoeck
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