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. It takes more than literary men to make a generation, after all. And Sorley was typical above all in this, that, passionate and penetrating as was his devotion to literature, he never looked upon it as a thing existing in and for itself. It was, to him and his kind, the satisfaction of an impulse other and more complex than the aesthetic. Art was a means and not an end to him, and it is perhaps the apprehension of this that has led one who endeavoured in vain to reconcile Sorley to Pater into rash prognostication. Sorley would never have been an artist in Pater's way; he belonged to his own generation, to which _l'art pour l'art_ had ceased to have meaning. There had come a pause, a throbbing silence, from which art might have emerged, may even now after the appointed time arise, with strange validities undreamed of or forgotten. Let us not prophesy; let us be content with the recognition that Sorley's generation was too keenly, perhaps too disastrously aware of destinies, of 'the beating of the wings of Love Shut out from his creation,' to seek the comfort of the ivory tower. Sorley first appears before us radiant with the white-heat of a schoolboy enthusiasm for Masefield. Masefield is--how we remember the feeling!--the poet who has lived; his naked reality tears through 'the lace of putrid sentimentalism (educing the effeminate in man) which rotters like Tennyson and Swinburne have taught his (the superficial man's) soul to love.' It tears through more than Tennyson and Swinburne. The greatest go down before him. 'So you see what I think of John Masefield. When I say that he has the rapidity, simplicity, nobility of Homer, with the power of drawing character, the dramatic truth to life of Shakespeare, along with a moral and emotional strength and elevation which is all his own, and therefore I am prepared to put him above the level of these two great men--I do not expect you to agree with me.'--(From a paper read at Marlborough, November, 1912.) That was Sorley at seventeen, and that, it seems to us, is the quality of enthusiasm which should be felt by a boy of seventeen if he is to make his mark. It is infinitely more important to have felt that flaming enthusiasm for an idol who will be cast down than to have felt what we ought to feel for Shakespeare and Homer. The gates of heaven are opened by strange keys, but they must be our own. Within six months Masefield h
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