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ad gone the way of all flesh. In a paper on _The Shropshire Lad_ (May, 1913), curious both for critical subtlety and the faint taste of disillusion, Sorley was saying: 'His (Masefield's) return (to the earth) was purely emotional, and probably less interesting than the purely intellectual return of Meredith.' At the beginning of 1914, having gained a Scholarship at University College, Oxford, he went to Germany. Just before going he wrote:-- 'I am just discovering Thomas Hardy. There are two methods of discovery. One is when Columbus discovers America. The other is when some one begins to read a famous author who has already run into seventy editions, and refuses to speak about anything else, and considers every one else who reads the author's works his own special converts. Mine is the second method. I am more or less Hardy-drunk.' The humorous exactness and detachment of the description are remarkable, and we feel that there was more than the supersession of a small by a great idol in this second phase. By April he is at Jena, 'only 15 miles from Goethe's grave, whose inhabitant has taken the place of Thomas Hardy (successor to Masefield) as my favourite prophet.' 'I hope (if nothing else) before I leave Germany to get a thorough hang of _Faust_.... The worst of a piece like _Faust_ is that it completely dries up any creative instincts or attempts in oneself. There is nothing that I have ever thought or ever read that is not somewhere contained in it, and (what is worse) explained in it.' He had a sublime contempt for any one with whom he was not drunk. He lumped together 'nasty old Lyttons, Carlyles, and Dickenses.' And the intoxication itself was swift and fleeting. There was something wrong with Goethe by July; it is his 'entirely intellectual' life. 'If Goethe really died saying "more light," it was very silly of him: what _he_ wanted was more warmth.' And he writes home for Richard Jefferies, the man of his own county--for through Marlborough he had made himself the adopted son of the Wiltshire Downs. 'In the midst of my setting up and smashing of deities--Masefield, Hardy, Goethe--I always fall back on Richard Jefferies wandering about in the background. I have at least the tie of locality with him.' A day or two after we incidentally discover that Meredith is up (though not on Olympus) from a denunciation of Browning on the
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