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.
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