It was not cynical
then.

Elements of the influence that was are remembered only if they lasted
long enough to receive a name. There was Unanimism. The name is
remembered; perhaps the books are read. But it will not be found in the
books. They are childish, just as the English novels which endeavoured
to portray the soul of the generation were coarse and conceited. Behind
all the conscious manifestations of cleverness and complexity lay a
fundamental candour of which only a flickering gleam can now be
recaptured. It glints on a page of M. Romains's _Europe_; the memory of
it haunts Wilfred Owen's poems; it touches Keeling's letters; it hovers
over these letters of Charles Sorley.[14] From a hundred strange
lurking-places it must be gathered by pious and sensitive fingers and
withdrawn from under the very edge of the scythe-blade of time, for if
it wander longer without a habitation it will be lost for ever.

[Footnote 14: _The Letters of Charles Sorley_. (Cambridge University
Press.)]

Charles Sorley was the youngest fringe of the strange unity that
included him and men by ten years his senior. He had not, as they had,
plunged with fantastic hopes and unspoken fears into the world. He had
not learned the slogans of the day. But, seeing that the slogans were
only a disguise for the undefined desires which inspired them he lost
little and gained much thereby. The years at Oxford in which he would
have taken a temporary sameness, a sameness in the long run protective
and strengthening, were spared him. In his letters we have him
unspoiled, as the sentimentalists would say--not yet with the
distraction of protective colouring.

One who knew him better than the mere reader of his letters can pretend
to know him declares that, in spite of his poems, which are among the
most remarkable of those of the boy-poets killed in the war, Sorley
would not have been a man of letters. The evidence of the letters
themselves is heavy against the view; they insist upon being regarded as
the letters of a potential writer. But a passionate interest in
literature is not the inevitable prelude to a life as a writer, and
although it is impossible to consider any thread in Sorley's letters as
of importance comparable to that which joins the enthronement and
dethronement of his literary idols, we shall regard it as the record of
a movement of soul which might as easily find expression (as did
Keeling's) in other than literary activities