The Unknown Sea is a novel, but it is like no other novel. It is the most exquisite allegory that has been written for a long time. In the unhappy and ascetic passion of Christian the fisherman for Diadyomene, the maiden of the sea, we may read obscurely the secular struggle of spirit and flesh. But the allegory may be what it will. The story is justified of itself, and has a certain palely imaginative quality that is of a strange delicacy.