Yet out of a thousand fragments this memory must be created anew in a form that will outlast the years, for it was precious. It was something that would vindicate an epoch against the sickening adulation of the hero-makers and against the charge of spiritual sterility; a light in whose gleam the bewildering non-achievements of the present age, the art which seems not even to desire to be art, the faith which seems not to desire to be faith, have substance and meaning. It was shot through and through by an impulse of paradox, an unconscious straining after the impossible, gathered into two or three tremulous years which passed too swiftly to achieve their own expression. Now, what remains of youth is cynical, is successful, publicly exploits itself. It was not cynical then. 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of Charles Sorley.[14] From a hundred strange lurking-places it must be gathered by pious and sensitive fingers and withdrawn from under the very edge of the scythe-blade of time, for if it wander longer without a habitation it will be lost for ever.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.