But I hear someone say, “Do you mean to tell me that those three little verses that bring the tears to your eyes, will bring them also to mine and my neighbor’s?  I might listen to them appreciatively but dry-eyed; my neighbor might not care for them enough to re-read them once.  All about us we see this personal equation in the appreciation of literature.  Unless you are prepared, then, to maintain that literature may be good for one and bad for another, your contention will scarcely hold water.”

Even so, brother.  The messenger who told me of the safety of my dear one did not thrill your heart as he did mine.  She was dear to me, not to you, and the infinitely delicate yet powerful chain of conditions and relations that operated between the messenger’s voice and my emotional nature did not connect him with yours.  Assuredly, the message that reaches one man may not reach another.  It may even reach a man in his youth and fall short in manhood, or vice versa.  It may be good for him and inoperative on all the rest of the world.  We estimate literature, it is true, by the universality of its appeal or by the character of the persons whom alone that appeal reaches.  The message of literature as art may thus be to the crowd or to a select few.  I could even imagine intellect and feeling of such exquisite fineness, such acknowledged superiority, that appeal to it alone might be enough to fix the status of a work of art, though it might leave all others cold.  Still, in general I believe, that the greatest literature appeals to the greatest number and to the largest number of types.  I believe that there are very few persons to whom Shakespeare, properly presented, will not appeal.  In him, nevertheless, the learned and those of taste also delight.  There are authors like Walter Pater who are a joy to the few but do not please the many.  There are others galore, whom perhaps it would be invidious to name, who inspire joy in the multitude but only distaste in the more discriminating.  We place Pater above these, just as we should always put quality above quantity; but I place Shakespeare vastly higher, because his appeal is to the few and the many at once.

But we must, I think, acknowledge that an author whose value may not appeal to others may be great to one reader; that his influence on that reader may be as strong for good as if it were universal instead of unique.  We may not place such a writer in the Walhalla, but I beseech you, do not let us tear him rudely from the one or two to whom he is good and great.  Do not lop off the clinging arms at the elbow, but rather skilfully present some other object of adoration to the intent that they may voluntarily untwine and enfold this new object more worthily.