Then what _is_ good literature? We can find out this way. Consider all the books that were written a thousand, a hundred, fifty or even twenty-five years ago. How many of them are read now? Comparatively very, very few. Now _why_? Because they weren’t good enough. There is a sure test for you—if a book lives on after its author is dead and buried you can be pretty sure that it is good literature. It had something to say that did more than amuse people for a month. The author had put into it some little bit of _human nature_, of _human life_, that is as true for people a hundred years later as it was for those who first read it. (Mind you, I am talking about novels, stories and plays, about fiction and poetry, not just about such things as histories which are generally preserved anyway because of the cold facts in them.) The authors of such novels or poems have written into them some of their own experience and observation of _life_. The characters in them are real human beings, and the feelings, thoughts, passions, sentiments, actions of the characters, or those expressed by the author without the aid of his characters, are, in general, the same feelings, thoughts, passions, sentiments and actions that you and I and our acquaintances have in us today. Therefore we understand the people in those books and sympathize with them, even though they may have lived centuries ago, in a foreign land, dressed in strange clothes, bound by strange customs and outwardly having very little in common with us. There is only one thing that people are _always_ interested in—human nature. It is according to whether a book gives us a true picture of human nature that it lives or dies, that it is good literature or bad. With new books now appearing by thousands it is almost impossible to tell which will live and which will die, which are really good and which are not. Time is the only sure test. The men talk about Dr. Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” stories now and some of us women like these tales equally well, but will they be alive in 1975 or not? Emile Gaboriau died only twenty-three years ago. His detective stories are better ones than Dr. Conan Doyle’s, but they are no longer read except by the few. Wilkie Collins wrote novels that made you hold your breath with interest and were widely read. He has been dead only seventeen years, yet already “The Moonstone,” “The Woman in White” and his other books are of the past. Both Gaboriau and Collins have some real merit and will probably always be read at least slightly, but what of the thousands of other authors who wrote books twenty-five years ago and whose very names are forgotten?