" "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."
In what sense the Public is the "Ultimate Critic."
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.
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