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Melville visited Rome on the European sightseeing trip that he took in February and March of 1857. He later wrote up some of his reflec- tions to give as a lecture titled "Statues in Rome" and, beginning in November of that year, he presented this lecture to sixteen or more audiences.1 Although it was almost thirty years between the delivery of "Statues in Rome" and the beginning of the writing of the manuscript text now known as Billy Budd, Sailor: A Inside Narrative, these two texts are linked in important ways. To pursue these links is to arrive at a deeper insight into this later work.
Most obviously, Melville draws analogies between Billy's impressive phys- ical appearance and the form of a variety of statues that Melville had seen in Rome. The statues are remarkable not only aesthetically but also for having survived to the present and, in several cases, for having kept alive the fame of the artists who created them and of their subjects, whose lives and acts were considered worth memorializing. The continuing existence of this ancient art focuses attention on how certain great deeds can outlive their agents and great works of art survive the passage of time.
Yet, given the public neglect of Melville's works by the time that he was writing Billy Budd, the fact that the names of the creators of much of this statuary are now unknown would also have had a sobering impact. That his descriptions of Billy should reflect the impression made upon him, all those years ago, by his encounter with the Roman statues fits with the nostalgic mood both of Melville and of Billy, as Melville appears to have conceived of the sailor at Stage A of the manuscript. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. describe this Billy as similar to the "usually . . . old," reminiscing sailors of the John Marr volume, "musing over bygone days and [their] own approaching end," thinking particularly of "the barbaric good nature and genial fellowship of sailors, and [the] contrast between their simplicity and the way of 'the world'" (Chicago BB 4).
American literary romances, such as Billy Budd, with their combination of realism and symbolism, are amenable to being read from markedly different...