Go ahead, think about it for a minute. Why is one work of literature great and another not so much? For that matter, why is a work of high culture great compared to a work of popular culture? (Or is it?) The answers to those questions are never obvious. If you think you can tell me in a paragraph why Moby Dick is a greater work of literature than Northanger Abbey, I don’t think you really know what you’re talking about, even though I’d completely agree with the sentiment.
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It is not a question that can be successfully answered through collecting data or assembling evidence. The history of critical judgment does not provide one with any confidence of steady improvement over time in the sorting of great from not-great, even before the dirty hippies and postmodernists wrecked the whole thing. Many works that traditionalists now commonly celebrate as self-evidently “great”, literature that makes its way into Great Books programs, was not infrequently once regarded by expert judgment as derivative, weak, pointlessly transgressive, vulgar, or lowbrow popularizing. Tell me that Dickens is great, and I’ll remind you that there were once expert critics who saw him otherwise. It works as well the other direction as well: there’s a long list of works once lauded as self-evidently great which even the most florid defender of the traditional canon would likely concede are now best forgotten.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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