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- 1517
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T03:48:16.150Z
- extracted_by
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- 1467
- text
- In view of the marked contrast between the persons of the twain, it is
more than probable that when the master-at-arms in the scene last given
applied to the sailor the proverb ‘_Handsome is as handsome does_,’ he
there let escape an ironic inkling, not caught by the young sailors who
heard it, as to what it was that had first moved him against Billy,
namely, his significant personal beauty.
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
lodgment is in the heart, not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies
a guarantee against it. But Claggart’s was no vulgar form of the
passion. Nor, as directed toward Billy Budd, did it partake of that
streak of apprehensive jealousy that marred Saul’s visage perturbedly
brooding on the comely young David. Claggart’s envy struck deeper. If
askance he eyed the good looks, cheery health, and frank enjoyment of
young life in Billy Budd, it was because these happened to go along with
a nature that, as Claggart magnetically felt, had in its simplicity
never willed malice, or experienced the reactionary bite of that
serpent. To him, the spirit lodged within Billy and looking out from his
welkin eyes as from windows, that ineffability which made the dimple in
his dyed cheek, suppled his joints, and danced in his yellow curls, made
him pre-eminently the Handsome Sailor. One person excepted, the
master-at-arms was perhaps the only man in the ship intellectually
capable of adequately appreciating the moral phenomenon presented in
Billy Budd, and the insight but intensified his passion, which assuming
various secret forms within him, at times assumed that of cynic
disdain--disdain of innocence. To be nothing more than innocent! Yet in
an æsthetic way he saw the charm of it, the courageous free-and-easy
temper of it, and fain would have shared it, but he despaired of it.
With no power to annul the elemental evil in himself, though he could
hide it readily enough; apprehending the good, but powerless to be it;
what recourse is left to a nature like Claggart’s, surcharged with
energy as such natures almost invariably are, but to recoil upon itself,
and, like the scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible, act
out to the end its allotted part.
Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a
palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings,
among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is
enacted. And the circumstances that provoke it, however trivial or mean,
are no measure of its power. In the present instance the stage is a
scrubbed gun-deck, and one of the external provocations a man-of-war’s
man’s spilled soup.
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