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