Herman Melville and the Problem of Evil

104           Public Lectures

sides like an uprooted forest.”²⁹ One reaches truth not by cut-
ting oneself off from life, as Pierre had done, but by embrac-
ing life, by realizing that good and evil are inextricably in-
terwoven.

In 1891 Melville died in obscurity in New York, his work
forgotten except by a few admirers, principally in England.
The New York Times commented, “There has died and been
buried in this city, during the current week, at an advanced
age, a man who is so little known, even by name, to the gen-
eration now in the vigor of life, that only one newspaper con-
tained an obituary account of him, and this was of but three
or four lines.”³⁰

But this was not the end. There was to come, thirty years
later, a voice from the grave. At the beginning of the great
Melville revival of the twenties, which was to brand him as
the greatest American novelist, Raymond Weaver, Melville’s
first biographer, was searching through a box of Melville
manuscripts when he discovered the unpublished Billy Budd.
The manuscript of this short novel was marked by the author
“Friday, Nov. 16, 1888—begun. Finished—April 19, 1891.”
Here then is Melville’s last word, spoken a few months be-
fore his death, a novel that has been compared to Shake-
speare’s Tempest in its ripe maturity, its calm lyricism. And
here again Melville returned directly to the problem of evil.

Billy Budd is the story of a young, innocent, handsome
sailor in the British navy at the time of the famous mutiny
of the Note. Billy, because of his popularity, his very good-
ness, is hounded by the master-at-arms, a man named Clag-
gart, who is a summary, a symbol of all evil. Finally Claggart,
whose duty it is to preserve discipline, arrests Billy, and takes
him before Captain Vere, the master of the ship. There
Claggart accuses the innocent sailor of planning mutiny.
Billy, aghast at the accusation, and unable to speak because

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