tery behind whose apparent commonplaceness lie magic possibilities
beyond all telling; not one but may be the agent of the Prince of
Bohemia, ready to drive you off to some mad and magic adventure in a
street which is just as commonplace to the outward eye as the cab-driver
himself, but which implicates by its very deceitful commonness whole
volumes of romance. The novel-reader to whom _Demos_ 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
th