I can still remember a bad class at Northern Kentucky University about 20 years ago when I was trying to teach Oedipus Rex. The students just weren’t getting it and I wasn’t explaining it any better.
“Why do we have to read this?”
At the time I didn’t respond well. Now I have a dozen rote answers but what I wish I’d said back then was “Ancient literature is a time machine. It shows what people were like 2,500 years ago. And, for the most part, they’re pretty much the same as us.”
I doubt if many people today have the exact problem as Oedipus (I hope not) but politicians still misread situations, still hold themselves to too much importance, and still make promises that they should have thought through.
Our possessions and surroundings change, but the human condition remains the same.
That doesn’t mean that all literature holds up over time. Writing about a topical situation can become dated. Tennyson wrote “Charge of the Light Brigade” after reading about it in the newspaper. It is topical but it holds up.
In the 1970s, many stand-up comedians made jokes about answering machines. Kids don’t know about answering machines so those jokes don’t hold up.
John Ruskin wrote “All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time.” In other words, some books focus on things like answering machines which go out of style and others focus on greed, sex, and murder which are always current.
“The Secret” and “The Lease” seem to focus on social dynamics of the early 20th Century. They don’t hold up.
I think Blackwood would have been just fine with this. His strongest work like “The Willows” and “The Wendigo” are stories for all times. “The Secret” is about a scatter-brained writer trying not to give away a spoiler for his latest story. In “The Lease,” the same friend (or someone who acts just like him) attempts to help with a lease.
Historians might be interested in these two stories but I think everyone else would be better off with Blackwood’s ghost stories.
The New Rambler 
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