Aspects of Literature eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 195 pages of information about Aspects of Literature.

Aspects of Literature eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 195 pages of information about Aspects of Literature.

Elements of the influence that was are remembered only if they lasted long enough to receive a name.  There was Unanimism.  The name is remembered; perhaps the books are read.  But it will not be found in the books.  They are childish, just as the English novels which endeavoured to portray the soul of the generation were coarse and conceited.  Behind all the conscious manifestations of cleverness and complexity lay a fundamental candour of which only a flickering gleam can now be recaptured.  It glints on a page of M. Romains’s Europe; the memory of it haunts Wilfred Owen’s poems; it touches Keeling’s letters; it hovers over these letters of Charles Sorley.[14] From a hundred strange lurking-places it must be gathered by pious and sensitive fingers and withdrawn from under the very edge of the scythe-blade of time, for if it wander longer without a habitation it will be lost for ever.

   [Footnote 14:  The Letters of Charles Sorley. (Cambridge University
   Press.)]

Charles Sorley was the youngest fringe of the strange unity that included him and men by ten years his senior.  He had not, as they had, plunged with fantastic hopes and unspoken fears into the world.  He had not learned the slogans of the day.  But, seeing that the slogans were only a disguise for the undefined desires which inspired them he lost little and gained much thereby.  The years at Oxford in which he would have taken a temporary sameness, a sameness in the long run protective and strengthening, were spared him.  In his letters we have him unspoiled, as the sentimentalists would say—­not yet with the distraction of protective colouring.

One who knew him better than the mere reader of his letters can pretend to know him declares that, in spite of his poems, which are among the most remarkable of those of the boy-poets killed in the war, Sorley would not have been a man of letters.  The evidence of the letters themselves is heavy against the view; they insist upon being regarded as the letters of a potential writer.  But a passionate interest in literature is not the inevitable prelude to a life as a writer, and although it is impossible to consider any thread in Sorley’s letters as of importance comparable to that which joins the enthronement and dethronement of his literary idols, we shall regard it as the record of a movement of soul which might as easily find expression (as did Keeling’s) in other than literary activities.  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

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Aspects of Literature from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.