using
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.

Astounding as the statement must appear to any constant reader of
the Monthly Reviews, it is mainly because Mr. Gosse happens to be
a man of letters that his opinion upon literary questions is worth
listening to. In his new book[C] he discusses a dozen or so: and
one of them--the question, "What Influence has Democracy upon
Literature?"--not only has a chapter to itself, but seems to lie at
the root of all the rest. I may add that Mr. Gosse's answer is a
trifle gloomy.

"As we filed slowly out of the Abbey on the afternoon of
Wednesday, the 12th of October, 1892, there must have occurred to
others, I think, as to myself, a whimsical and half-terrifying
sense of the symbolic contrast between what we had left and what
we had emerged upon. Inside, the grey and vitreous atmosphere,
the reverberations of music moaning somewhere out of sight, the
bones and monuments of the noble dead, reverence, antiquity,
beauty, rest. Outside, in the raw air, a tribe of hawkers urging
upon the edges of a dense and inquisitive crowd a large sheet of
pictures of the pursuit of a flea by a 'lady,' and more insidious
salesmen doing a brisk trade in what they falsely pretended to be
'Tennyson's last poem.' Next day we read in our newspapers
affecting accounts of the emotion displayed by the vast crowd
outside the Abbey--horny hands dashing away the tear,
seamstresses holding 'the little green volumes' to their faces to
hide their agitation. Happy for those who could see these with
the