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“I see your drift. Ay, there is a mystery … a ‘mystery of iniquity,’ a matter for psychologic theologians to discuss.”
“Keep still! … you must keep quite still now, or your screaming will frighten the horses even more, and the coachman will not be able to hold them at all.”
With so much written about Billy Budd, so much subjected to analysis and interpretation, why should a psychologist come to meddle here in this, perhaps, the most poetic of Melville's work? Is it the attraction of an unfinished piece, still germinal and growing? Cut off from the author's labor by his own death, does it call out for a little critical midwifery? Abandoned in the formative stages, we might say, it seems to have been left as on a “good man's door in Bristol,”1 a literary foundling. Does it ask, as Billy himself does, to be fathered, reared, readied for “a world not without some mantraps?” (p. 70). If we are honest, we may admit that here is a matrix of ambiguous motive and intent, which in the father's absence invites our enlightenment, our shaping, our love. The psychologist shares these fantasies no less than most men. But being something of a voyeur, gratuitous interloper in the bedrooms of biography, history, politics, he comes to this little book as to a keyhole, his heart warmed to the task, his head cocked with a professional bias. But this bias he is likely to announce in advance, as well