nd _The Oxford
Book of Victorian Verse_.]

[Footnote 6: _History of England_, Vol. III, Chap. XI.]

[Footnote 7: Morison's _Life of Macaulay_, p. 139.]

[Footnote 8: _The Idea of a University_ (_Literature: A Lecture_).]

[Footnote 9: _For Claviers_, Letter I.]

[Footnote 10: _Praeterita_, Vol. II., Chap. V.]

[Footnote 11: _Silas Marner_, Chap. VI.]

[Footnote 12: _The Scholar Gypsy_.]

[Footnote 13: _A Southern Light_.]

[Footnote 14: _The Grande Chartreuse_.]

[Footnote 15: _Home Thoughts from Abroad_.]

[Footnote 16: A.C. Benson's _Alfred Tennyson_, p. 157.]

[Footnote 17 & 18: Printed by permission of Rudyard Kipling and
Doubleday, Page and Company.]

[Footnote 19: For full titles, see p. 6.]

CHAPTER X: TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE

Interest in the Present.--One result of the growing scientific
spirit has been an increasing interest in contemporary problems and
literature. At the beginning of the Victorian age, the chief part of
the literature studied in college was nearly two thousand years old.
When English courses were finally added, they frequently ended with
Milton. To-day, however, many colleges have courses in strictly
contemporary literature. The scientific attitude toward life has
caused a recognition of the fact that he who disregards current
literature remains ignorant of a part of the life and thought of
to-day and that he resembles the mathematician who neglects one factor
in the solution of a problem.

It is true that the future may take a different view of all
contemporary things, including literature; but this possibility does
not justify neglect of the present. We should also remember that
different stages in the growth of nations and individuals constantly
necessitate changes in estimating the relative importance of the
thought of former centuries.

The Trend of Contemporary Literature.--The diversity of taste in the
wide circle of twentieth-century readers has encouraged authors of
both the realistic and the romantic schools. The main tendency of
scientific influence and of the new interest in racial welfare is
toward realism. In his stories of the "Five Towns," Arnold Bennett
shows how the dull industrial life affects the character of the
individual. Much of the fiction of H.G. Wells presents matter of
scientific or sociological interest. Poets like John Masefield and
Wilfrid Gibson sing with an almost prosaic sincerity of the life of
workmen and of the squalid city str