FullReads

The “Outsiders.”

Still, the aristocracy of letters exists: and in it, if nowhere else, titles, social advantages, and commercial success alike count for nothing; while Royalty itself sits in the Court of the Gentiles. And I am afraid we must include in the crowd not only those affable politicians who from time to time open a Public Library and oblige us with their views upon literature, little realizing what Hecuba is to them, and still less what they are to Hecuba, but also those affable teachers of religion, philosophy, and science, who condescend occasionally to amble through the garden of the Muses, and rearrange its labels for us while drawing our attention to the rapid deterioration of the flowerbeds. The author of The Citizen of the World once compared the profession of letters in England to a Persian army, “where there are many pioneers, several suttlers, numberless servants, women and children in abundance, and but few soldiers.” Were he alive to-day he would be forced to include the Volunteers.

FOOTNOTES:

[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.