was the repetition of what he had seen and known, and what had planted sickness in his soul, found the New Arabian Nights a refreshing miracle.  Stevenson had discovered that modern London had its possibilities of romance.  To these two elements of his romantic equipment must be added a third—­travel.  Defoe never left England, and other early romanticists less gifted with invention than he wrote from the mind’s eye and from books.  To Stevenson, and to his successor Mr. Kipling, whose “discovery” of India is one of the salient facts of modern English letters, and to Mr. Conrad belongs the credit of teaching novelists to draw on experience for the scenes they seek to present.  A fourth element in the equipment of modern romanticism—­that which draws its effects from the “miracles” of modern science, has been added since by Mr. H. G. Wells, in whose latest work the realistic and romantic schools seem to have united.

CHAPTER X

THE PRESENT AGE

We have carried our study down to the death of Ruskin and included in it authors like Swinburne and Meredith who survived till recently; and in discussing the novel we have included men like Kipling and Hardy—­living authors.  It would be possible and perhaps safer to stop there and make no attempt to bring writers later than these into our survey.  To do so is to court an easily and quickly stated objection.  One is anticipating the verdict of posterity.  How can we who are contemporaries tell whether an author’s work is permanent or no?

Of course, in a sense the point of view expressed by these questions is true enough.  It is always idle to anticipate the verdict of posterity.  Remember Matthew Arnold’s prophecy that at the end of the nineteenth century Wordsworth and Byron would be the two great names in Romantic poetry.  We are ten years and more past that date now, and so far as Byron is concerned, at any rate, there is no sign that Arnold’s prediction has come true.  But the obvious fact that we cannot do our grandchildren’s thinking for them, is no reason why we should refuse to think 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.