Sept. 29, 1894. The "Great Heart" of the Public.
I observe that our hoary friend, the Great Heart of the Public, has
been taking his annual outing in September. Thanks to the German
Emperor and the new head of the House of Orleans, he has had the
opportunity of a stroll through the public press arm in arm with his
old crony and adversary, the Divine Right of Kings. And the two have
gone once more a-roaming by the light of the moon, to drop a tear,
perchance, on the graves of the Thin End of the Wedge and the Stake in
the Country. You know the unhappy story?--how the Wedge drove its thin
end into the Stake, with fatal results: and how it died of remorse and
was buried at the cross-roads with the Stake in its inside! It is a
pathetic tale, and the Great Heart of the Public can always be trusted
to discriminate true pathos from false.
Miss Marie Corelli's Opinion of it.
It was Mr. G.B. Burgin, in the September number of the _Idler_, who
let the Great Heart loose this time--unwittingly, I am sure; for Mr.
Burgin, when he thinks for himself (as he usually does), writes sound
sense and capital English. But in the service of Journalism Mr. Burgin
called on Miss Marie Corelli, the authoress of _Barabbas_, and asked
what she thought of the value of criticism. Miss Corelli "idealised
the subject by the poetic manner in which she mingled tea and
criticism together." She said--
"I think authors do not sufficiently bear in mind the important
fact that, in this age of ours, the public _thinks for itself_
much more extensively than we give it credit for. It is a
cultured public, and its great brain is fully capable of deciding
things. It rather objects to be treated like a child and told
'what to read and what to avoid'; and, moreover, we must not fail
to note that it mistrusts criticism generally, and seldom reads
'reviews.' And why? Simply 'logrolling.' It is perfectly aware,
for instance, that Mr. Theodore Watts is logroller-in-chief to
Mr. Swinburne; that Mr. Le Gallienne 'rolls' greatly for Mr.
Norman Gale; and that Mr. Andrew Lang tumbles his logs along over
everything for as many as his humour fits...."
--I don't know the proportion of tea to criticism in all this: but
Miss Corelli can hardly be said to "idealise the subject" here:--
"... The public is the supreme critic; and though it does not
write in the _Quarterly_ or the _Nineteenth Century_, it thinks
and talks independently of everything and everybody, and on its
thought and word alone depends the fate of any piece of
literature."
Mr. Hall Caine's View.
Then Mr. Burgin called on Mr. Hall Caine, who "had just finished
breakfast." Mr. Hall Caine gave reasons which compelled him to believe
that "for good or bad, criticism is a tremendous force." But he, too,
confessed that in his opinion the public is the "ultimate critic." "It
often happens that the public takes books on trust from the professed
guides of literature, but if the books are not _right_, it drops
them." And he proceeded to make an observation, with which we may most
cordially agree. "I am feeling," he said, "increasingly, day by day,
that _rightness_ in imaginative writing is more important than
subject, or style, or anything else. If a story is right in its theme,
and the evolution of its theme, it will live; if it is not right, it
will die, whatever its secondary literary qualities."