SOURCE: “Expediency and Absolute Morality in Billy Budd,” in PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 68, No. 1, March, 1953, pp. 103–10.

In the following essay, Glick asserts that Billy Budd “is the cogent fruition of a lifetime of observation and study of the eternal conflict between absolute morality and social expediency; and the digression on Nelson, though it intrudes upon the plot, is central to an understanding of Melville's final resolution of this crucial problem.”

“Resolve as one may to keep to the main road,” Melville wrote in Billy Budd, “some bypaths have an enticement not readily to be withstood. Beckoned by the genius of Nelson, knowingly, I am going to err in such a bypath.”¹ With these words of caution to the reader who might object to the “literary sin” of digression, the author of Moby Dick launched into a spirited encomium upon the heroism of Lord Nelson...