ers. We seem to have been at sea for an age. The exposed fo'castle head with its rusty gear, where I feel most at home, has become curiously friendly and comforting. I feel secluded there, elevated from the sea, and outside the ship.

The big red links of the cable, the ochreous patterns on the plates, the squat black winches like crouched and faithful familiars, the rush and gurgle of fountains in the hawse-pipes when the ship's head dips, the warmth of the rails and the deck, like the grateful heat of a living body, and the ancient smell, as if I can sniff the antiquity of the sea and the personal sweat of a deathless ship on a voyage beyond the counting of mere days, gave me a deeper conviction of immortality than have all the eager arguments from welcome surmises. I was in eternity. There was no time. There was no death. This was not only the Indian Ocean. Those leisurely whitecaps diminishing away

to infinity, the silence except for the monody of the waters, which was really deeper than silence, were Bideford Bay, too, on a summer long past, and the Gulf Stream on a voyage which ended I forget when, and what Magellen saw when he stood west in the Pacific; it was the Channel on the first passage across, and the lure and hope of all the voyagers who ever stood at a ship's prow and looked into the unknown. It was all the seas under the sun, and I was not myself, but the yearning eye of Man.

It was then, when disembodied and immaterial, looking over the ship's stem, both the interrogation and the confident answer to the mystery of the world, that a little flying fish appeared in the heaving glass beneath me, was bewildered by our approaching mass, and got up too late. He emerged from a wave at the wrong angle, and the water and the draught flung him hard against our iron.

MRS. OLWEN WARD CAMPBELL has made a sudden reputation by her brilliant book, Shelley and the Unromantics, which combines careful research and shrewd literary criticism with an almost dangerously incisive style. Few of us had thought that there was so much new to say about Shelley. What are the distinguishing marks of what is called Romanticism? Some will say curiosity and the love of beauty.

Others love of the picturesque and the horrible, deftly mingled. Others a sentimental attraction toward the Middle Ages. Others a return to nature. Others a recovery of the faculty of wonder.

Some of these are the mere trappings which descended to the Victorians and, in the irreverent words of Mrs. Campbell, provided the fancy dress in which intensely Victorian ideas of morality,

passion, and metaphysics masqueraded in the poems of Tennyson, Rossetti, and Browning. Mrs. Campbell, I regret to see, still despises the Victorians, though happily she advises us to go back from them to Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, not forward to the new Georgians, in prose or poetry.

She thinks that the true Romanticism almost died with its creators, to all of whom something happened prematurely. Shelley was drowned; Keats fretted himself into a consumption; Byron sacrificed his life for Greece; Coleridge took to opium, Lamb to alcohol. As for Wordsworth, he simply dried up. Most critics have allowed him twenty years of creativeness; but Professor Garrod is still more severe in his judgment all that is of primary importance in Wordsworth's poetry was written before 1810, during the rather stormy period of the poet's youth.

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There is a false romanticism as well as a true. The eighteenth century, which some love and some hate, Mrs. Campbell has a holy hatred for that period and all its works, naturally to sentimentalism, which agrees fairly well with a comfortable materialism. Artificial Gothic ruins and grottoes, Strawberry Hill villas, and primitive glades laid out by Capability Brown, gave great satisfaction to an age which had no belief in man and very little faith in God. It was in these circles that a dilettante enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, not inspired by any real knowledge of that very uncomfortable period, sprang up. Ossian was the delight of half Europe, and was the favorite reading of Napoleon who, as Mrs. Campbell unkindly suggests, was himself a mock-heroic character on the grand scale. All Germany was in tears over The Sorrows of Young Werther, a book on which few modern readers dare to say all they think, since the author was Goethe.

What, then, are the characteristics of the true Romanticism, which even in its great prophets is sometimes contaminated with the false? Our author tells us that they are hope and love, springing from faith in the greatness of human nature. Christ, she says, was the first and greatest of the Romantics. He first raised love from a mere incident of fleeting human existence to the preoccupation of eternity. He greatly increased the value of human being as such, by finding greatness not only in achievements, but in the emotions which are common to all mankind. The joys and sorrows of men are what redound most to their honor. Consequently Christ was the real founder of a new and great kind of poetry, both in art and in life.

This very interesting thought is illustrated by a consideration of the absence of romance in Greek literature. I have myself been struck, when returning to classical books which I have not read for many years, by the extreme hardness of the Greek view of life, as shown especially in the great tragedians. There is an article in one of the quarterlies this month on the Greek Fear of Life. The Greeks were not pessimists, but they were nearer to the dangers of primitive civilization than we are. They could not forget famine, or pestilence, or the danger of being made prisoner and sold into slavery. They were afraid of provoking the envy of the gods. Man must know his place; wisdom consisted largely in avoiding the falsehood of extremes. To give way to deep passions was undignified, womanish, and foolish. 'Nothing great,' says a chorus in the Antigone, 'enters the life of mortals without a curse.' Violent love was a humiliating disease. Hope also played a small part in Greek thought. The thing that has been is the thing that shall be. History moves in vast cycles,

However that may be, what was best in the Middle Ages was the Romanticism introduced by Catholic Christianity. Their romance was the romance of Christ. Even the heroic folly of the Crusades was Christian knight-errantry, though mixed with much baser metal. Their art, of which the Sienese School of painting is a type, was romantic to the core. The great churches, built when the people lived in squalid huts, testified to much more than the overweening power of the Church. Their legends, which clustered round the beautiful story of the Holy Grail, express the same brooding and visionary devotion in another medium.

Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur is perhaps the supreme classic of Romanticism. Many even of Tennyson's greatest admirers think that he would have been wiser to leave the Arthurian legend where he found it. The story of the guilty love of Lancelot and Guinevere, and of their repentance, too late to save the Table Round, but not too late to save their own souls, is, in Malory's version, one of the most exquisite things in all literature. When we observe the reverence which he pays to a deep emotion, even when wrongly directed, as an error which brings loss and misery, but which can be fully atoned for by deep penitence, we feel that he is not only more romantic than Tennyson, but more pro

foundly Christian. When the hermit has a vision of Sir Lancelot being borne up to Heaven 'by more angels than I ever saw men in one day,' we feel that Lancelot the sinner has deserved the honor.

Mrs. Campbell is an insurgent. She dislikes the eighteenth century for being comfortable, and the generation which followed the Romantics for being complacent. The fat figure of George IV and the bourgeois virtues of the literary Victorians irritate her. But I think we must beware of undue partisanship. Byron, Shelley, and Keats had hard measure from their contemporaries, no doubt; but, after all, it is no joke to be the wife of a Romantic, unless, like Woodsworth, he ceases to be one at an early age. Their private lives, unsympathetically told, are not much more edifying than the Newgate Calendar. Even Mrs. Campbell admits that a review of Shelley's friends is like a march past of the Seven Deadly Sins. It was, after all, a gain when the muses took up their abode in happy homes like those of Tennyson and Browning.

If the disparagement of the Victorians were only a way of exalting Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth, it might be excusable. But it is surely an error to be blind to the quality which Professor Elton emphasizes in all our best literature between 1830 and 1880the quality of nobleness. In that generation we see the prevalence of an ethical, exalted, didactic temper, crossed in poetry by a passion for pure beauty. The seriousness of Victorian literature, its consciousness of a prophetic mission, is an English character of which we have no reason to be ashamed. Pure morality and high aims do not spoil poetry.

This quality of nobleness, Professor Elton thinks, began to decline after 1880, and it has not been recovered

since. Mrs. Campbell, in her slashing style, blames the novel, 'that ramshackle bastard literary form, in which feeble character and diseased action become the centre of interest. The modern play and novel have for the most part about the same relation to literature as a volume by a quack doctor on the symptoms and development of cancer and dropsy.' This is much too indiscriminate, but some shoulders deserve the lash, even when they do not borrow the Idiot motif from Russia or the Bête humaine motif from France or Germany. Hope and love,not lust, and reverence for human

nature, the essential parts of romanticism, are greatly needed in post-war England.

No signs of such a spiritual revival are clearly traceable in the chaos and babel that war has left behind. 'We see not our tokens; there is not one prophet more.' Perhaps he is among us somewhere, unknown; he may be a schoolboy or an apprentice. When he comes I am disposed to think that he will choose to speak to his generation neither from the pulpit, nor from the platform, nor from the printed page, but from the stage. A great dramatist might help us to find our souls.

[FRITZ VON UNRUH, who as a German cavalry officer led his Uhlans through Belgium into France, is more famous as a dramatist. One of his best-known tragedies is Ein Geschlecht. He is also the author of two war books one a dramatic poem, entitled Vor der Entscheidung, and the other Opfergang. His war diary, from which this article is an excerpt, is to be published in full this fall.]

October 1, 1914. A cross stands here, bearing the inscription: 'Madame Charles Payen a fait planter le Calvaire: l'an 1840.' It must have been under fire before this, in 1870. Eight linden trees throw their shadows over it. Knapsacks lie about the roots. From somewhere ahead of me comes the sound of bursting shells. Now the linden trunks are shattered. Crash after crash follows as a full hit is made in the village. Somebody says: "The firing is coming from the left.' A tall column of earth is thrown up after every shellburst. The sun has the cold gleam of autumn. Shadows are outlined harshly on the ground. On the cross Christ's body writhes in torment. How sad and marked with agony his face! Automobiles whirl by. Airplane messages: 'Two new strong defensive positions of the Frenchmen have been discovered.' To my right dead Frenchmen are lying in the trenches. Some men are shoveling dirt in over them.

The Staff has halted under the apple trees. We receive word of a hole in the road ahead- a three and a half metre

ladder does not reach its bottom. Odors of dissolution and decay fill the air. A German plane comes humming back from patrol duty. It lands in a field. The sun gleams on its wings. Little black dots stir in the fuselage. The Staff rises. The General, with his hands in his pockets, walks back and forth. forth. The gold on his shoulder straps glitters. The aviators come toward us across a piece of cultivated ground. Some artillerymen are pulling seven dead horses over a meadow to a big hole. It is cold. We have been in the field two months.

Mist hangs over the meadow. Some of the officers talk about autumn and hunting. Each one tries to avoid the thought of a winter campaign. Reality will bring that all too soon! Some artillery moves through the street. The General says: "This time you shot well!' 'Good fun, good fun,' returns the commander, laughing. The guns roll forward over the dead into a new position. The apples in the autumnlighted trees glisten with a strange redness. The crash of the shells comes nearer. The Staff changes position. A storm of artillery fire breaks over the living and the dead. The sky shines blue and bright through shattered branches and smashed walls. The Staff assembles under a pyramid of pear trees in a farmyard.

Our late Ambassador to England, Prince Lichnowsky, rides up in the uniform of a major of the lifeguard hussars. The General: 'You had better get out of this, Prince, we're under