We speak of the classics, of ancient literature, and of contemporary literature, but in reality all literature is one. We divide it into sections for convenience of study, but it is a notable error to forget that it is consecutive from the dawn of civilization to the present. It is true that in applying the term to works of our own time it is both customary and necessary to employ the word with a meaning wider than that which it has elsewhere. It is often difficult to distinguish in contemporary productions that which is of genuine and lasting merit from that which is simply meretricious and momentary, and still harder to force others to recognize such distinction when made. It is therefore inevitable that the name literature should have a broader signification than when applied to work which has been tested and approved by time.

There are few things more perplexing than the attempt to choose from the all but innumerable books of our own day those which are to be considered as genuine. If we are able to keep vividly in mind what qualities make a thing literature, it is possible to have some not inadequate idea of what contemporary writings most completely fulfill the given conditions. We are able to speak with assurance of the work of a Tennyson or a Browning; and to feel that we have witnessed the birth of classics of the future. Beside these, however, stand the enormous multitude of books which are widely read, much talked about, and voluminously advertised; books which we cannot openly dispraise without the risk of being sneered at as captious or condemned as conceited. There are the poems which publishers inform the public in column-long advertisements, bristling with the testimonials of men and women who make writing their business, are the finest productions since Shakespeare; there are the novels which prove themselves to be works of genius by selling by the hundreds of thousands of copies and very likely being given to the purchasers of six bars of some patent soap; there are the thin and persecuted looking volumes of "prose poems" or rhyming prose which are looked upon by small bands of devoted followers as the morsel of leaven which is to leaven the whole lump; there are, in short, all those perplexing writings which have merit of some kind and in some degree, yet to decide the genuine and lasting merit of which might tax the wisdom and the patience of a Solomon of Solomons.

I have already spoken of the effect which temporary qualities are sure to have in determining the success of an author. The history of books is full of instances of works which have in their brief day filled the reading world with noisy admiration, but which have in the end been found destitute of enduring merit. While transient fame is at its height, while enthusiastically injudicious admirers are praising and judiciously enthusiastic publishers are reËchoing their plaudits, it is a well-trained mind that is able to form a sound and rational judgment, and to distinguish between the ephemeral and the abiding. The only hope lies in a careful and discriminating application of standards deduced from the classics. He who desires to judge the books of to-day must depend upon comparison with the books of yesterday. He must be able to feel toward the literature of the past as if it were of the present, and toward that of the present as if it were of the past.

It is not to the popular verdict upon a work that one can look for aid in deciding upon real merit. In time the general public accepts the verdict of the few, but at first it is the noisy opinion of the many, voluble and undiscriminating, which is heard. The general public is always affected more by the accidental than by the permanent qualities of a work, and it is more often imposed upon by shams than touched by real feeling. It is easy to recognize conventional signs for sentiment, and it is not difficult for the ordinary reader to persuade himself that he experiences emotions which are explicitly set forth for him. Popular taste and popular power of appreciation are not inaccurately represented by those eminently successful journals which in one column give the fashions and receipts for cake and in the next detailed directions for experiencing all the sensations of culture. Sentimentality is always more instantly and more widely effective than sentiment. Sentimentality finds a ready response from the fact that it only calls upon us to seem, while sentiment demands that for the time being at least we shall be.

It is necessary here to say that I do not wish to be misunderstood. I do not mean in the least to speak with scorn or contempt of the lack of power justly to discriminate and to appreciate which comes from either natural disability or lack of opportunities of cultivation. Narrowness of comprehension and appreciation is a misfortune, but it is not necessarily a fault. I mean only to point out that it is a thing to be outgrown if possible. Of the pathos of lives which are denied their desire in this I am too keenly aware to speak of such otherwise than tenderly. For the young women who put their sentiments up in curl-papers and the young men who wax the mustaches of their minds I have no patience whatever; but for those who are seeking that which seems to them the best, even though they blunder and mistakenly fall prostrate before Dagon, the great god of the Philistines, it is impossible not to feel sympathy and even admiration. In what I have been saying of the fallibility of popular opinion I have not meant to cast scorn on any sincerity, no matter where it is to be found; but merely to point out that the general voice of the public, even when sincere, is greatly to be distrusted.

Whatever contemporary literature may be, however mistaken may be the popular verdict, and however difficult it may be for the most careful criticism to determine what is of lasting and what of merely ephemeral merit, the fact remains that it is the voice of our own time, and as such cannot be disregarded. To devote attention exclusively to the classics is to get out of sympathy with the thought of our own generation. It is idle to expend energy in learning how to live if one does not go on to live. The true use of literature is not to make dreamers; it is not to make the hold upon actual existence less firm. In the classics one learns what life is, but one lives in his own time. It follows that no man can make his intellectual life full and round who does not keep intelligently in touch with what is thought and what is written by the men who are alive and working under the same conditions.

Contemporary literature is the expression of the convictions of the time in which it is written. The race having advanced so far, this is the conclusion to which thinkers have come in regard to the meaning of life. Contemporary literature is like news from the front in war-time. It is sometimes cheering, sometimes depressing, often enough inaccurate, but continually exciting. It is the word which comes to us of the progress of the eternal combat against the unknown forces of darkness which compass humanity around. There are many men who make a good deal of parade of never reading books of their own time. They are sometimes men of no inconsiderable powers of intellect and of much cultivation; but it is hardly possible to regard them as of greater contemporary interest than are the mummies of the Pharaohs. They may be excellent in their day and generation, but they have deliberately chosen that their generation shall be one that is gone and their day a day that is ended. They may be interesting relics, but relics they are. It is often wise to wait a time for the subsiding of the frenzy of applause which greets a book that is clever or merely startling. It is not the lover of literature who reads all the new books because they are new, any more than it is he who neglects the old because they are old; but if we are alive and in sympathy with our kind, we cannot but be eager to know what the intellectual world is thinking, what are the fresh theories of life, born of added experience, what are the emotions of our own generation. We cannot, in a word, be in tune with our time without being interested in contemporary literature.

It is here that the intellectual character of a man is most severely tested. Here he is tried as by fire, and if there be in him anything of sham or any flaw in his cultivation it is inevitably manifest. It is easy to know what to read in the classics; they are all explicitly labeled by the critics of succeeding generations. When it comes to contemporary work a reader is forced largely to depend upon himself. Here he must judge by his individual standards; and here he both must and will follow his own inclinations. It is not always possible for a man accurately to appraise his mental advancement by the classics he reads, because his choice may there be influenced by conventional rather than by personal valuation; but if he will compare with the established classics the books which he genuinely likes and admires among the writings of his own time, he may come at an estimate of his mental state as fair as a man is ever likely to form of himself.

It is, then, easy to see that there is a good deal of danger in dealing with current work. It is necessary to be in sympathy with the thought of the day, but it is only too common to pay too dear for this. It is extremely hard, for instance, to distinguish between genuine literary taste and curiosity when writings are concerned which have the fresh and lively interest which attaches to those things about which our fellows are actually talking and thinking. It is of course allowable to gratify a healthy curiosity, but it is well to recognize that such reading is hardly likely to promote mental growth. There is no law, civil or moral, against indulging the desire to know what is in any one of those books which are written to be talked about at ladies' luncheons; and it is not impossible that the readers who give their time to this unwholesome stuff would be doing something worse if they were not reading it. The only point upon which I wish to insist is that such amusement is neither literary nor intellectual.

There is, moreover, the danger of allowing the mind to become fixed upon the accidental instead of the permanent. I have spoken of the fact that the temporary interest of a book may be so great as to blind the reader to all else. When "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was new, it was practically impossible for the readers of that day to see in it anything but a fiery tract against slavery. To-day who reads "Ground Arms" without being chiefly impressed with its arguments against war? It is as controversial documents that these books were written. If they have truth to life, if they adequately express human emotion, they will be of permanent value after this temporary interest has passed. The danger is that the passing interest, which is natural and proper in itself, shall blind us to false sentiment, to unjust views of life, to sham emotion. We are constantly led to forget the important principle that books of our own time must be judged by the standards which are afforded by the books which are of all time.

There has never been a time when self-possession and sound judgment in dealing with contemporary literature were more important than they are to-day. The immeasurably prolific press of the nineteenth century is like a fish-breeding establishment where minnows are born by the million a minute. There are so many books that the mind becomes bewildered. The student who might have the strength of mind to form an intelligent opinion of five books is utterly incapable of doing the same by five thousand. We are all constantly led on to read too many things. It has been again and again remarked that our grandfathers were better educated than their grandsons because they knew thoroughly the few works which came in their way. We have become the victims of over-reading until the modern mind seems in danger of being destroyed by literary gluttony.

It is well in dealing with contemporary work to be especially self-exacting in insisting that a book is not to be read once which is not to be read a second time. This may seem to be a rule made merely for the sake of having a proper theory, yet it is to be taken literally and observed exactly. It is true that the temptation is so great to read books which are talked about, that we are all likely to run through a good many things which we know to be really unworthy of a single perusal, and of course to go over them again would be a waste of more time. Where to draw the line between the permanent and the ephemeral is a point which each must settle for himself. If, on the whole, it seem to a man well to pay the price in time and in the risk of forming bad mental habits, it is his right to do this, but pay the price he must and will.

It is hardly possible to discuss contemporary literature without speaking of that which is not literature,—the periodicals. One of the conditions of the present time which most strongly affects the relations of ordinary readers to reading in general is the part which periodicals of one sort or another play in modern life. The newspaper enters so intimately into existence to-day that no man can escape it if he would, and with innumerable readers it is practically the sole mental food. It is hardly necessary to say that there is no more relation between the newspaper and literature than there would be between two persons because they both wear hats. Both books and journals are expressed in printed words, and that is about all that there is in common. It is necessary to use the daily paper, but its office is chiefly a mechanical one. It is connected with the purely material side of life. This is not a fault, any more than it is the fault of a spade that it is employed to dig the earth instead of being used to serve food with. It is not the function of the newspapers to minister to the intellect or the imagination in any high sense. They fulfill their mission when they are clean and reliable in material affairs. What is beyond this is a pretense at literature under impossible conditions, assumed to beguile the unwary, and harmless or vicious, according to circumstances. It is seen at its worst in the Sunday editions, with their sheets as many

It is safe to say that for the faithful reader of the Sunday newspaper there is no intellectual salvation. Like the Prodigal Son, he is fain to fill his belly with the husks which the swine do eat, and he has not the grace even to long for the more dignified diet of fatted calf.

The newspaper habit is pretty generally recognized as demoralizing, and in so far it may be in a literary point of view less dangerous than the magazine habit. The latter is often accompanied by a self-righteous conviction that it is a virtue. There is a class who take on airs of being of the intellectual elect on the strength of reading all the leading magazines; who are as proud of having four serials in hand at once as is a society belle of being able to drive as many horses; who look with a sort of pitying contempt upon persons so old-fashioned as to neglect the magazines in favor of books, and who in general are as proudly patronizing in their attitude toward literature as they are innocent of any connection with it. This is worse than too great a fondness for journalism, and of course this is an extreme type; but it is to be feared that at their best the magazines represent mental dissipation.

It is true that genuine literature is often published in periodicals; and there are many editors who deeply regret that the public will not allow them to print a great deal more. As things are, real literature in the magazines is the exception rather than the rule. The general standard of magazine excellence is the taste of the intellectually nouveaux riches—for persons who have entered upon an intellectual heritage which they are not fitted rightly to understand or employ are as common as those who come to material wealth under the same conditions. It is to this class, which is one of the most numerous, and still more one of the most conspicuous in our present civilization, that most of the magazines address themselves. The genuinely cultivated reader finds in the monthlies many papers which he looks through as he looks through the newspaper, for the sake of information, and less often he comes upon imaginative work. The serials which are worth reading at all are worthy of being read as a whole, and not in the distorted and distorting fashion of so many words a month, according to the size of the page of a particular periodical. Reading a serial is like plucking a rose petal by petal; the whole of the flower may be gathered, but its condition is little likely to be satisfactory. While the magazines, moreover, are not to be looked to for a great deal of literature of lasting value, they not only encourage the habit of reading indifferent imitations, but they foster a dangerous and demoralizing inability to fix the attention for any length of time. The magazine-mind is a thing of shreds and patches at best; incapable of grasping as a whole any extended work. Literature holds the mirror up to nature, but the magazine is apt to show the world through a toy multiplying-glass, which gives to the eye a hundred minute and distorted images.

It may seem that I do scant justice to the magazines. It is certainly to be remembered that in the less thickly settled parts of this great inchoate country, where libraries are not, the magazine is often a comfort and even an inspiration. It is to be acknowledged that, with the enormous mass of half-educated but often earnest and sincere souls, the periodical has done and may still do a great deal of good. The child must play with toys before it is fitted to grasp the tools of handicraft, and enjoyment of the chromo may be a healthy and legitimate stage on the way to an appreciation of the masters of painting. It is not a reproach to call a man a toy-vender or a maker of chromos; nor do I see that what I have been saying is to be interpreted as reflecting on the makers of periodicals. It must be remembered that the publication of a magazine is a business enterprise in the same sense that the selling of carpets or calicoes is a business enterprise. The manufacturer of magazines must please the general public with what he prints, as the manufacturer must satisfy the ordinary buyer by the designs of his fabrics. In either case it is the taste of the intellectual bourgeoisie which is the standard of success. The maker of periodicals can no more afford to appeal to the taste of the cultivated few than can the thrifty maker of stuffs. What is sold in open market must be adapted to the demands of the open market. It is simply legitimate business prudence which keeps most magazines from attempting to print literature. They publish, as a rule, all the literature that the public will have,—modified, unhappily, by the difficulty of getting it to publish in a world where literature cannot be made to order. A book, it is to be remembered, is a venture; a magazine is an enterprise. The periodical must pay or it must be discontinued.

The moral of the whole matter is that the only thing to do is to accept magazines for what they are; neither to neglect them completely, nor to give to them that abundant or exclusive attention which they cannot even aim under existing conditions at deserving. They may easily be dangerous intellectual snares; but the wise student will often find them enjoyable, and sometimes useful.