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- 597
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:26.981Z
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- 542
- text
- Bristol.’
‘_Found_, say you? Well,’ throwing back his head, and looking up and
down the new recruit--‘well, it turns out to have been a pretty good
find. Hope they’ll find some more like you, my man; the fleet sadly
needs them.’
Yes, Billy Budd was a foundling, a presumable by-blow, and, evidently,
no ignoble one. Noble descent was as evident in him as in a blood horse.
For the rest, with little or no sharpness of faculty or any trace of the
wisdom of the serpent, nor yet quite a dove, he possessed a certain
degree of intelligence along with the unconventional rectitude of a
sound human creature--one to whom not yet has been proffered the
questionable apple of knowledge. He was illiterate; he could not read,
but he could sing, and like the illiterate nightingale was sometimes the
composer of his own song.
Of self-consciousness he seemed to have little or none, or about as much
as we may reasonably impute to a dog of St. Bernard’s breed.
Habitually being with the elements and knowing little more of the land
than as a beach, or, rather, that portion of the terraqueous globe
providentially set apart for dance-houses, doxies and tapsters, in
short, what sailors call a ‘fiddlers’ green,’ his simple nature remained
unsophisticated by those moral obliquities which are not in every case
incomparable with that manufacturable thing known as respectability. But
are sailor frequenters of fiddlers’ greens without vices? No; but less
often than with landsmen do their vices, so-called, partake of
crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than
exuberance of vitality after long restraint, frank manifestations in
accordance with natural law. By his original constitution, aided by the
co-operating influences of his lot, Billy in many respects was little
more than a sort of upright barbarian, much such perhaps as Adam
presumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself into
his company.
And here be it submitted that, apparently going to corroborate the
doctrine of man’s fall (a doctrine now popularly ignored), it is
observable that where certain virtues pristine and unadulterate
peculiarly characterise anybody in the external uniform of civilisation,
they will upon scrutiny seem not to be derived from custom or convention
but rather to be out of keeping with these, as if indeed exceptionally
transmitted from a period prior to Cain’s city and citified man. The
character marked by such qualities has to an unvitiated taste an
untampered-with flavour like that of berries, while the man thoroughly
civilised, even in a fair specimen of the breed, has to the same moral
palate a questionable smack as of a compounded wine. To any stray
inheritor of these primitive qualities found, like Caspar Hauser,
wandering dazed in any Christian capital of our time, the poet’s famous
invocation, near two thousand years ago, of the good rustic out of his
latitude in the Rome of the Cæsars, still appropriately holds:--
‘Faithful in word and thought,
What hast Thee, Fabian, to the city brought.’
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