Lady Rothermere does not measure her praise of M. Gide, whose _Prometheus Illbound_ she has translated into English. His is “a mind,” she declares, “which must be ranked among the greatest of the world’s literature.” “Must” is a challenging word. Of how many contemporary writers dare we use it in this sense? Dare we use it of Anatole France, or Bergson, or Hardy, or Shaw, or d’Annunzio, or Croce? We should be foolhardy, indeed, much as we rightly admire these authors, to put any of them just yet into the pantheon that contains the images of Plato and Shakespeare and Voltaire. Call no man happy till he is dead, says an old proverb. It would be still wiser to call no man one of the world’s greatest writers till he has been dead a hundred years. One cannot, if one is a quite human being, judge one’s contemporaries with the same impartial scrutiny with which one judges the mighty dead. The great man gives to his own age much to which posterity is indifferent, and gives to posterity much to which his own age may even be hostile. Tennyson served his age as a giant, and he was accepted as a giant by most of the fine critics of his age, from Edgar Allan Poe downwards. If an occasional critic such as Edward FitzGerald came to have doubts about Tennyson, it was because he himself stood monastically aloof from the age. It is one of the functions of criticism, no doubt, to separate the temporary from the immortal elements in the work of contemporary writers. But this is one of the counsels of perfection in criticism. The thing has never been infallibly done. Sainte-Beuve was as ridiculous in writing about Balzac as Lamb was about Shelley. Not that even posterity is capable of pronouncing what we call final judgments. We have a way of turning to posterity in despair for a true verdict on authors. Alas! posterity, though it has not the same reasons for erroneous judgments, is (like ourselves) of a variable and uncertain mind. Posterity has made strange blunders about Euripides, about Ronsard, about Donne, about Pope. Good authors constantly have to be rescued from the neglect of posterity. All we can be sure of is that an author who appeals to a succession of generations has given us something of the true gold of literature. Even if each new generation to some extent re-estimates the world’s classics, it usually leaves them secure in the position of classics. Or almost secure, for who knows whether the world will not one day cease to read Lucian or Virgil, or _The Pilgrim’s Progress_?