Melville’s “Statues in Rome,” Billy Budd, and the Death of Delight

Melville visited Rome on the European sightseeing trip that he took in February and March of 1857. He later wrote up some of his reflections to give as a lecture titled “Statues in Rome” and, beginning in November of that year, he presented this lecture to sixteen or more audiences.¹ Although it was almost thirty years between the delivery of “Statues in Rome” and the beginning of the writing of the manuscript text now known as Billy Budd, Sailor: A Inside Narrative, these two texts are linked in important ways. To pursue these links is to arrive at a deeper insight into this later work.

Most obviously, Melville draws analogies between Billy’s impressive physical appearance and the form of a variety of statues that Melville had seen in Rome. The statues are remarkable not only aesthetically but also for having survived to the present and, in several cases, for having kept alive the fame of the artists who created them and of their subjects, whose lives and acts were considered worth memorializing. The continuing existence of this ancient art focuses attention on how certain great deeds can outlive their agents and great works of art survive the passage of time.

Yet, given the public neglect of Melville’s works by the time that he was writing Billy Budd, the fact that the names of the creators of much of this statuary are now unknown would also have had a sobering impact. That his descriptions of Billy should reflect the impression made upon him, all those years ago, by his encounter with the Roman statues fits with the nostalgic mood both of Melville and of Billy, as Melville appears to have conceived of the sailor at Stage A of the manuscript. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. describe this Billy as similar to the “usually … old,” reminiscing sailors of the John Marr volume, “musing over bygone days and [their] own approaching end,” thinking particularly of “the barbaric good nature and genial fellowship of sailors, and [the] contrast between their simplicity and the way of ‘the world’” (Chicago BB 4).

American literary romances, such as Billy Budd, with their combination of realism and symbolism, are amenable to being read from markedly different perspectives. Historicist readings of Billy Budd, which are oriented toward realism, give particular emphasis to the novella’s actual setting in 1797 at the time of the British naval mutinies at Spithead and the Nore. This approach, in turn, influences views of the legality of Billy’s trial by drumhead court and of Captain Vere’s culpability for Billy’s death. However, the reading that follows focuses on Billy’s psychological-symbolic significance that is signaled by deviations from the realism in Melville’s characterization of him, such as the hyperbolic and repetitive nature of descriptions of Billy’s incomparable physical beauty. These prominent (and also statue-related) traits make him unlike a character that might appear in a novel.

The focus on the psychological-symbolic or “deep” significances of Billy and of Claggart and on the “inside story” that they generate in their deep mode is a key strategy of a new kind of critical approach I call “Depth Criticism.” This literary-psychological approach, unrelated to Depth Psychology, reads texts with reference to mood rather than desire; it focuses on characters in the American literary romance that, like Billy, have a deeper non-realistic dimension.² Both Pierre; or, the Ambiguities and Moby-Dick include striking examples of such characters, and I discuss the inside stories of these works and the nature of this way of reading in two essays that demonstrate in detail the approach briefly referred to here.

Given the sense in which he is using the term “romance,” Melville is accurate when he has his narrator assert that Billy Budd “is no romance.” Supporting this assertion by pointing to Billy’s stutter as “evidence not alone that he is not presented as a conventional hero” (Chicago BB 53), Melville shows that “the romance,” by this definition, is an idealizing genre whose heroes are without flaws...