and none of Melville's poetry could have been found more fit to conclude this elusive collection.

Clarel, a Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, had never been published in England until the collection of Melville's work embraced it in 1924. The author was content, he said, with whatever future awaited Clarel, but contentment might be strained if he were alive now, for what has befallen this enormous poem is nothing, and silence. It has few of the best qualities of the remainder, and it has in an exaggerated degree the worst quality-its fluency. Descriptive verse is no longer in vogue, and the cinema has usurped whatever place it retained until the twentieth century; and it is scarcely too much to say that, as to a large part of Clarel's purpose, it is fulfilled more admirably by the cinema. Melville's pilgrimage is precisely recorded, his itinerary might be set forth log-wise from the verse, and this dull precision perhaps accounts in part for the "boring" power of the poem. "Facile chat" is one of his own phrases, and indeed the chat when it is philosophic becomes so facile that you wish for description; and then the description proves so facile that you plead for philosophy, or your thoughts wander idly from the page. Yet Melville cannot escape his gifts, even in octosyllabic verse of many thousand lines: witness the following opening to "The Site of the Passion":

And wherefore by the convents be
Gardens? Ascetics roses twine?
Nay, but there is a memory.
Within a garden walking see

The angered God. And where the vine

And olive in the darkling hours
Inweave green sepulchres of bowers-
Who, to defend us from despair,

Pale undergoes the Passion there
In solitude? Yes, memory

Links Eden and Gethsemane.

Once or twice the drowsy fetters of the verse are broken and a pure lyric note is breathed in another measure, and finer than all else is the dirge sung by Clarel, bereaved lover of a simple Ruth-not perfect in phrase, but so near perfect that the tenderness is scarcely flawed by the flaws.

How long Melville spent in a reminiscent caressing of his theme I do not know; there are signs of care but not of labour, and there are introductory passages

-one is an avowed ambling in the steps of Chaucer's pilgrims-which show how thoughtfully the poem was planned. A great deal of his own meditative mind. is poured into the poem and intervolved with everybody's musings upon grave matters; and if the verse had really recorded a double journey, through the Holy Land and through philosophic and religious ideas, it might not have been harder to read, but it would certainly have been more valuable. What makes it so curious, however, and its implied “argument" so irresolute, is the way in which one person after another drifts into the company, talks and is talked about for pages, and then disappears, leaving Clarel himself and his fatal love almost the only constant elements in an inconstant and sorry scheme. It would be foolish to stress the faults, yet they cannot be ignored since Melville indulged himself so luxuriously in them. Here, for instance, are a few lines

and so on, even with the horses and their caparison. It is a merely characteristic passage, written, one might fear, in luckless emulation of the nineteenth-century habit of narrative poeticising, and in manner suggesting a pious Byron or a travelled and garrulous Wordsworth. Nor is it merely externals that are thus obstinately laboured: ideas as well, and endless arguments on creeds and disciples, are beaten out to a thinness which conceals not even the shadow of poetry; thus a visit to Bethlehem is preluded by a weary vain discussion of unchristian christian peoples, in phrases that linger vexingly even when you read on the next page of

The Manger in its low remove

Where lay, a thousand years before,

The Child of awful worshipping,
Destined to prove all slights and scorns,
And a God's coronation-thorns.

And often, too often, the discussion takes on the sad colours of dissent and division, and even the Epilogue is choked with phrases of faith v. evolution: "science the feud can only aggravate"-the feud between ape and angel.

When Melville wrote Clarel he tried to recover the

sensations of his journey and relate his personal faith to all that he had seen. There is less of imagination in Clarel than in any other of his verse, and he proved -perhaps to himself, bitterest of proof!—that in vain is memory stimulated if imagination sleeps heavily on and will not be roused; nor can ideas, ethical or religious ideas, vitalize a poem if imagination is fled. He never learned, neither in verse nor in prose, that his philosophy and religion, his transcendentalism and piety, are of little essential value in poetry, and indeed of none if by their presence they exclude imagination.

CHAPTER X

ELEMENTS OF STYLE-CONCLUSION

SUFFICIENT has been shown of the merits of Melville's prose to justify a little closer attention to the elements of his style; and since for this purpose it is convenient to look at the best only, and mark its distinctive qualities, the passage chiefly to be noted will be taken from Moby-Dick.

Melville began by being a writer of simple direct prose, reminding one partly of Defoe and partly of Borrow, and he became a writer of eloquent elaborated prose wantoning in its strength and movement as his whales wanton in water. Something was due to his reading, to his admiration of Sir Thomas Browne, for example; just as that trick of rapidly repeated apostrophe which is found in Moby-Dick among other books is pretty clearly caught from Rabelais and Urquhart. He was not an irregular innovating genius who overthrows idols and breaks up a language in order to build and make anew: he used the things he loved, for they possessed his mind. But he was able to use them because of his own genius, and one of the chief gifts of that genius was his ear for rhythm. Melville adheres to that superb tradition of English