[A] In a private letter, from which I am allowed to quote, Mr. Hall
Caine (October 2nd, 1894) explains and (as I think) amends his
position:--"If I had said _time_ instead of _the public_, I should
have expressed myself exactly. It is impossible for me to work up any
enthusiasm for the service done to literature by criticism as a whole.
I have, no doubt, the unenviable advantage over you of having wasted
three mortal months in reading all the literary criticism extant of
the first quarter of this century. It would be difficult to express my
sense of its imbecility, its blundering, and its bad passions. But the
good books it assailed are not lost, and the bad ones it glorified do
not survive. It is not that the public has been the better judge, but
that good work has the seeds of life, while bad work carries with it
the seeds of dissolution. This is the key to the story of Wordsworth
on the one hand, and to the story of Tupper on the other. Tupper did
not topple down because James Hannay smote him. Fifty James Hannays
had shouted him up before. And if there had not been a growing sense
that the big mountain was a mockery, five hundred James Hannays would
not have brought it down. The truth is that it is not the 'critic who
knows' or the public which does not know that determines the ultimate
fate of a book--the immediate fate they may both influence. The book
must do that for itself. If it is right, it lives; if it is wrong, it
dies. And the critic who re-establishes a neglected poet is merely
articulating the growing sense. There have always been a few good
critics, thank God ... but the finest critic is the untutored
sentiment of the public, not of to-day or to-morrow or the next day,
but of all days together--a sentiment which tells if a thing is right
or wrong by holding on to it or letting it drop."
Of course, I agree that a book must ultimately depend for its fate
upon its own qualities. But when Mr. Hall Caine talks of "a growing
sense," I ask, In whom does this sense first grow? And I answer, In
the cultured few who enforce it upon the many--as in this very case of
Wordsworth. And I hold the credit of the result (apart from the
author's share) belongs rather to those few persistent advocates than
to those judges who are only "ultimate" in the sense that they are the
last to be convinced.
[B] If the reader object that I am using the Great Heart and Great
Brain of the Public as interchangeable terms, I would refer him to Mr.
Du Maurier's famous Comic Alphabet, letter Z:--
"Z is a Zoophyte, whose heart's in his head,
And whose head's in his turn--rudimentary Z!"
[C] _Questions at Issue_; by Edmund Gosse. London: William Heinemann.