I say that we may agree with this most cordially:  and it need not cost us much to own that the public is the “ultimate critic,” if we mean no more than this, that, since the public holds the purse, it rests ultimately with the public to buy, or neglect to buy, an author’s books.  That, surely, is obvious enough without the aid of fine language.  But if Mr. Hall Caine mean that the public, without instruction from its betters, is the best judge of a book; if he consent with Miss Corelli that the general public is a cultured public with a great brain, and by the exercise of that great brain approves itself an infallible judge of the rightness or wrongness of a book, then I would respectfully ask for evidence.  The poets and critics of his time united in praising Campion as a writer of lyrics:  the Great Brain and Heart of the Public neglected him utterly for three centuries:  then a scholar and critic arose and persuaded the public that Campion was a great lyrical writer:  and now the public accepts him as such.  Shall we say, then, the Great Heart of the Public is the “ultimate judge” of Campion’s lyrics?  Perhaps:  but we might as well praise for his cleanliness a boy who has been held under the pump.  When Martin Farquhar Tupper wrote, the Great Heart of the Public expanded towards him at once.  The public bought his effusions by tens of thousands.  Gradually the small voice of skilled criticism made itself heard, and the public grew ashamed of itself; and, at length, laughed at Tupper.  Shall we, then, call the public the ultimate judge of Tupper?  Perhaps:  but we might as well praise the continence of a man who turns in disgust from drink on the morning after a drunken fit.[A]

What is “The Public”?

The proposition that the Man in the Street is a better judge of literature than the Critic—­the man who knows little than the man who knows more—­wears (to my mind, at least) a slightly imbecile air on the face of it.  It also appears to me that people are either confusing thought or misusing language when they confer the title of “supreme critic” on the last person to be persuaded.  And, again, what is “the public?” I gather that Miss Corelli’s story of Barabbas has had an immense popular success.  But so, I believe, has the Deadwood Dick series of penny dreadfuls.  And the gifted author of Deadwood Dick may console himself (as I daresay he does) for the neglect of the critics by the thought that the Great Brain[B] of the Public is the supreme judge of literature.  But obviously he and Miss Corelli will not have the same Public in their mind.  If for “the Great Brain of the Public” we substitute “the Great Brain of that Part of the Public which subscribes to Mudie’s,” we may lose something of impressiveness, but we shall at least know what we are talking about.

* * * * *

June 17, 1893.  Mr. Gosse’s View.