eness, and not seldom,
as in the description of a quarry, of a Beethoven Symphony, of a
rock-pool of the Devon coast, with a beauty that is startling.

Keeling was killed in the War. Barbellion (who, as we know now, was Bruce
Cummings) never went to France, for he was dying, though he did not know
it, when he presented himself for medical examination. But it is clear
that though secluded from the turmoil in a country cottage, paralyzed,
and his trunk already dead, Barbellion's sensitive mind and imaginative
sympathy knew more of what was happening to his fellows in France, and
what it meant for us all, than the combined Cabinet in Downing Street.
That spark of dying light was aware when the luminaries on whom we
depended were blind and ignorant. In his _Last Diary_, and within a day
or two of his death, he wrote of the Peace Treaty (May, 1919): "After all
the bright hopes of last autumn, justice will be done only when all the
power is vested in the people. Every liberal-minded man must feel the
shame of it." But did such men feel the shame of it? Refer to what the
popular writers, often liberal-minded, said about the shame they felt at
the time, and compare. To Barbellion, by the light of his expiring lamp,
was revealed what was hidden from nearly all experienced and active
publicists. Is there any doubt still of the superiority of imagination
over hard-headedness?

Imagination instantly responds. Percolation is a slow process in the hard
head of the worldly-wise. When we know that in the elderly, the shrewd,
and the practical, the desire for material power and safety, qualified
only by fear, served as their substitute for the City of God during the
War, it is heartening to remember that there were select though unknown
young men, mere subjects for "combing" like Barbellion, who made
articulate an immense rebellious protest that was in the best of our
boys; who showed a mocking intuition into us and our motives, as though
we were a species apart; a scorn of the world we had made for them, a
cruel knowledge of the cowardice and meanness at the back of our warlike
minds, and a yearning for that world of beauty which might have been, but
which the acts of the clever and the practical have turned into carrion
among the ruins. Would it matter now if we were bankrupt, and our Empire
among the things that were, if only we were turning to sackcloth and
ashes because of that dousing of the glim in the heart of the young?

This