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 vogue; and among people who perhaps did not fully understand it but were merely lulled by its sonorousness, a knowledge of it has passed for the insignia of a love of literature and the possession of literary taste.  But after Fitzgerald—­who?  What poet has commanded the ear of the reading public or even a fraction of it?  Not Swinburne certainly, partly because of his undoubted difficulty, partly because of a suspicion held of his moral and religious tenets, largely from material reasons quite unconnected with the quality of his work; not Morris, nor his followers; none of the so-called minor poets whom we shall notice presently—­poets who have drawn the moods that have nourished their work from the decadents of France.  Probably the only writer of verse who is at the same time a poet and has acquired a large popularity and public influence is Mr. Kipling.  His work as a novelist we mentioned in the last chapter.  It remains to say something of his achievements in verse.

Let us grant at once his faults.  He can be violent, and over-rhetorical; he belabours you with sense impressions, and with the polysyllabic rhetoric he learned from Swinburne—­and (though this is not the place for a discussion of political ideas) he can offend by the sentimental brutalism which too often passes for patriotism in his poetry.  Not that this last represents the total impression of his attitude as an Englishman.  His later work in poetry and prose,