The question attributed to St. Bernard, ‘Whither hast thou come?’ is agitating critical and literary minds. There has seldom been so much writing about the value and condition of contemporary literature – that is, of contemporary fiction. In English and American journals and magazines a new Battle of the Books is being fought, and the books are the books of the circulating library. Literary persons have always revelled in a brawl, and now they are in the thick of the fray. Across the Atlantic the question of Novel or Romance – of Romance or Realism – appears to be taking the place of the old dispute about State Rights, and is argued by some with polished sarcasm, by others with libellous vigour. One critic and novelist makes charges, as desperate as that of Harry Blount at Flodden, into the serried ranks of the amateurs of adventurous legend. Another novelist and critic compares his comrade to Mrs. Partington with her broom sweeping back the tide of Romance: the comparison is of the mustiest. Surely – a superior person may be excused for hinting – contemporary literature is rather over-valued, when all this pother is made about a few novels. There have been considerable writers before Mr. Marion Crawford, and, if we are to love books, the masterpieces of the past might seem to have most claim on our attention. But the world will not take Mr. Matthew Arnold's advice about neglecting the works of our fleeting age. I would make a faint and hypocritical protest against regarding the novels of the moment as the whole of literature, before I plunge into the eddying fray. ‘Children of an hour,’ I would say to my brethren, ‘it is not of literature ye are writing so busily, but of the bookish diversions of the moment.’ Literature is what endures, and what will endure: of all the novels we fight over in Reviews and at dinner-tables, will even the impulses and methods and sentiments endure? In changed and modified form doubtless they will go on living ‘like the rest of us’, but a little toss of the dust that settles on neglected shelves will silence all our hubbub.