SOURCE: Haydock, John S. “Melville's Séraphita: Billy Budd, Sailor.” Melville Society Extracts, no. 104 (March 1996): 2-13.

In the following essay, Haydock considers the influence of the novella Séraphita on Melville's novella Billy Budd, Sailor.

Melville had in his library at the time of his death fifteen books of short stories and novels by Honoré de Balzac. One of them was the “philosophical study” Séraphita.¹ The novel represents the third and culminating volume of Balzac's trilogy on the power of human will that begins with The Magic Skin and Louis Lambert, both of which Melville also kept on his bookshelf (MR, 153). Melville had always read philosophy, but in his later years, philosophy became an absorbing interest (MR, 130). As always, he was insistently curious about the relationship between free will and necessity, between individual freedom and impersonal fate. These three novels by Balzac deal profoundly with the advantages...