9 - Measured Forms

Summary

With Billy Budd, Sailor we return to a compelling but familiar story, the story told by James Fenimore Cooper in The Pioneers and repeated in America throughout the nineteenth century about the conflict between the demands of individual freedom and the need of society to be governed by rational, impartial laws. In Billy, Melville presents us with one of his most sympathetic individual characters, and in Captain Vere he presents us with his most eloquent spokesman for social order. Captain Vere is highly persuasive because he defends social order in the name of mankind, not a specific class interest. Describing Vere's response to the disruption of rule by law during the French Revolution, the narrator writes,

His settled convictions were as a dike against those invading waters of novel opinion social, political, and otherwise, which carried away as in a torrent no few minds in those days, minds by nature not inferior to his own. While other members of that aristocracy to which by birth he belonged were incensed at the innovators mainly because their theories were inimical to the privileged classes, Captain Vere disinterestedly opposed them not alone because they seemed to him insusceptible of embodiment in lasting institutions, but at war with the peace of the world and the true welfare of mankind.

In Lemuel Shaw, Melville had a convenient model for his fictional captain. According to Shaw's modern biographer, Shaw was as impartial as Captain Vere. “He made his name a synonym for integrity, impartiality, and independence.