Melville's Billy Budd is the culmination of a lifetime's spiritual agony, and it is impossible to value this curious allegory at its true worth without studying it carefully in the light of its author's private despairs. It may be that the publicity that Britten's opera is sure to attract will focus the reluctant interest of the public at last upon a writer who for nearly a century (though he has been only sixty years dead) has been the dimmest of shadows for all but the occasional addict. In England his name is still the barest rumour. Moby Dick has had its boosts, Typee the popular reprintings owed to an entertaining travelogue; yet none of these temporary quirks of fortune has aroused more than the most cursory interest in the mind that created them. Projected into posterity as a crude adventurer who had lived among cannibals and hunted whales before turning these experiences into pleasurable adventure-stories, the richest and profoundest imagination in American literature still remains virtually unrecognised over half the English-speaking world. America is beginning to acknowledge him at last; but in this country indifference is still his lot. Some of his works, I am glad to say, are being reprinted and enjoyed again; but until he is accepted and appreciated as a coherent whole, the understanding given to isolated parts of his work will be at best partial and inadequate.