oughout the war. Sorley was fighting for more than he said;
he was fighting for his Wiltshire Downs as well. But he fought in
complete and utter detachment. He died too soon (in October, 1915), to
suffer the cumulative torment of those who lasted into the long agony of
1917. There is little bitterness in his letters; they have to the last
always the crystal clarity of the vision of the unbroken.

His intellectual evolution went on to the end. No wonder that he found
Rupert Brooke's sonnets overpraised:--

'He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice.... It was not that
"they" gave up anything of that list he gives in one sonnet: but
that the essence of these things had been endangered by
circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to
recapture them. He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he
has taken the sentimental attitude.'

Remember that a boy of nineteen is writing, and think how keen is this
criticism of Brooke's war sonnets; the seeker condemns without pity one
who has given up the search. 'There is no such thing as a just war,'
writes this boy. 'What we are doing is casting out Satan by Satan.' From
this position Sorley never flinched. Never for a moment was he renegade
to his generation by taking 'the sentimental attitude.' Neither had he
in him an atom of the narrowness of the straiter sect.

Though space forbids, we will follow out his progress to the last. We do
not receive many such gifts as this book; the authentic voice of those
lost legions is seldom heard. We can afford, surely, to listen to it to
the end. In November, 1914, Sorley turns back to the Hardy of the poems.
After rejecting 'the actual "Satires of Circumstance"' as bad poetry,
and passing an incisive criticism on 'Men who March away,' he
continues:--

'I cannot help thinking that Hardy is the greatest artist of the
English character since Shakespeare; and much of _The Dynasts_
(except its historical fidelity) might be Shakespeare. But I value
his lyrics as presenting himself (the self he does not obtrude into
the comprehensiveness of his novels and _The Dynasts_) as truly, and
with faults as well as strength visible in it, as any character in
his novels. His lyrics have not the spontaneity of Shakespeare's or
Shelley's; they are rough-hewn and jagged: but I like them and they
stick.'

A little later, having finished _The Egoist_,--

'I see now