He [Welles] must choose "Moby Dick," a book whose setting is the open sea, whose hero is more mountain than man and more symbol than either, and whose villain is the supremely unstagable whale. He must take as his raw material Melville's prose, itself as stormy as the sea it speaks of, with a thousand wrecked metaphors clinging on its surface to frail spars of sense. You do not dip into Melville, you jump in, holding your nose and praying not to be drowned. If prose styles were women, Melville's would be painted by Rubens and cartooned by Blake: it is a shot-gun wedding of sensuousness and metaphysics. Yet out of all these impossibilities Mr. Welles has fashioned a piece of pure theatrical megalomania: a sustained assault on the senses which dwarfs anything London has seen since, perhaps, the Great Fire.