. 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