ink for ourselves. No notion is so destructive to the formation of a
sound literary taste as the notion that books become literature only
when their authors are dead. Round us men and women are putting into
plays and poetry and novels the best that they can or know. They are
writing not for a dim and uncertain future but for us, and on our
recognition and welcome they depend, sometimes for their livelihood,
always for the courage which carries them on to fresh endeavour.
Literature is an ever-living and continuous thing, and we do it less
than its due service if we are so occupied reading Shakespeare and
Milton and Scott that we have no time to read Mr. Yeats, Mr. Shaw or Mr.
Wells. Students of literature must remember that classics are being
manufactured daily under their eyes, and that on their sympathy and
comprehension depends whether an author receives the success he merits
when he is alive to enjoy it.

The purpose of this chapter, then, is to draw a rough picture of some of
the lines or schools of contemporary writing--of the writing mainly,
though not altogether, of living authors. It is intended to indicate
some characteristics of the general trend or drift of literary effort as
a whole. The most remarkable feature of the age, as far as writing is
concerned, is without doubt its inattention to poetry. Tennyson was a
popular author; his books sold in thousands; his lines passed into that
common conversational currency of unconscious quotation which is the
surest testimony to the permeation of a poet's influence. Even Browning,
though his popularity came late, found himself carried into all the
nooks and corners of the reading public. His robust and masculine
morality, understood at last, or expounded by a semi-priestly class of
interpreters, made him popular with those readers--and they are the
majority--who love their reading to convey a moral lesson, just as
Tennyson's reflection of his time's distraction between science and
religion endeared them to those who found in him an answer or at least
an echo to their own perplexities. A work widely different from either
of these, Fitzgerald's _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_, shared and has
probably exceeded their popularity for similar reasons. Its easy
pessimism and cult of pleasure, its delightful freedom from any demand
for continuous thought from its readers, its appeal to the indolence and
moral flaccidity which is implicit in all men, all contributed to its
immense