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 last diary of Bruce Cummings is sad enough, for he could but lie inert, listen to the last news of the War, and wonder incidentally who would come to him first--the postman bringing the reviews of his first book, or the bony old gentleman bringing the scythe. He felt, of course, the mockery of this frustration of his powers. He thought--and, it seemed, with good reason--that he was a tragic failure. But was he? Read his books, and admit that he accomplished a little that is beautiful and enduring, and that he did it obscurely at a time when they who held most of the fearful attention of the world were but working gravely on what their children would execrate.