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.
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