One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life isundervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of whichwe contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy's novelette may be ignorantin a literary sense, which is only like saying that a modern novel isignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or theastronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically--it is the actualcentre of a million flaming imaginations.

In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgarliterature. They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking,despise it. Simple ignorance and indifference does not inflate thecharacter with pride. A man does not walk down the street giving ahaughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority tosome variety of deep-sea fishes. The old scholars left the wholeunder-world of popular compositions in a similar darkness.

To-day, however, we have reversed this principle. We do despise vulgarcompositions, and we do not ignore them. We are in some danger ofbecoming petty in our study of pettiness; there is a terrible Circeanlaw in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously toexamine anything it never gets up again. There is no class of vulgarpublications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculousexaggeration and misconception than the current boys' literature of thelowest stratum. This class of composition has presumably always existed,and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature than thedaily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or thelodging-houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture.But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they musthave stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in whichfictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper andolder than the rules of good art, and much more important. Every one ofus in childhood has constructed such an invisible _dramatis personæ_,but it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition bycareful comparison with Balzac. In the East the professionalstory-teller goes from village to village with a small carpet; and Iwish sincerely that anyone had the moral courage to spread that carpetand sit on it in Ludgate Circus. But it is not probable that all thetales of the carpet-bearer are little gems of original artisticworkmanship. Literature and fiction are two entirely different things.Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. A work of art can hardlybe too short, for its climax is its merit. A story can never be toolong, for its conclusion is merely to be deplored, like the lasthalfpenny or the last pipelight. And so, while the increase of theartistic conscience tends in more ambitious works to brevity andimpressionism, voluminous industry still marks the producer of the trueromantic trash. There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood; there isno end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine. Thesetwo heroes are deliberately conceived as immortal.

But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon thecommon-sense recognition of this fact--that the youth of the lowerorders always has had and always must have formless and endless romanticreading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for itswholesomeness--we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of thisreading as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys underdiscussion do not read 'The Egoist' and 'The Master Builder.' It is thecustom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes ofthe Metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs away withan apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child's knowledgethat apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious literaryresearches. The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse thenovelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected fromyoung people possessed of no little native humour. If I had forged awill, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to the influenceof Mr. George Moore's novels, I should find the greatest entertainmentin the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the minds of mostpeople that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the community, findtheir principal motives for conduct in printed books.

Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought bymagistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing isnot a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be putin prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory thatthe tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded,appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterialtheory, and this is rubbish.

So far as I have seen them, in connection with the dirtiest book-stallsin the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: The wholebewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned withadventures, rambling, disconnected and endless. It does not express anypassion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort. Itruns eternally in certain grooves of local and historical type: themedieval knight, the eighteenth-century duellist, and the modern cowboy,recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figuresin an Oriental pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human beingkindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as bysuch dehumanized and naked narrative as this.

Among these stories there are a certain number which dealsympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates,which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murdererslike Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely thesame thing as Scott's 'Ivanhoe,' Scott's 'Rob Roy,' Scott's 'Lady ofthe Lake,' Byron's 'Corsair,' Wordsworth's 'Rob Roy's Grave,'Stevenson's 'Macaire,' Mr. Max Pemberton's 'Iron Pirate,' and a thousandmore works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents.Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in 'Ivanhoe' will lead aboy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinksthat the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy willset him up for life as a blackmailer. In the case of our own class, werecognise that this wild life is contemplated with pleasure by theyoung, not because it is like their own life, but because it isdifferent from it. It might at least cross our minds that, for whateverother reason the errand-boy reads 'The Red Revenge,' it really is notbecause he is dripping with the gore of his own friends and relatives.

In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely byspeaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves.This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it issimply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings.He says, with a modest swagger, 'I have invited twenty-five factoryhands to tea.' If he said 'I have invited twenty-five charteredaccountants to tea,' everyone would see the humour of so simple aclassification. But this is what we have done with this lumberland offoolish writing: we have probed, as if it were some monstrous newdisease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart ofman. Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalistis simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a newway of expressing them. These common and current publications havenothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine andheroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear thatunless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all.Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark bythe Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original anddazzling epigram.

If the authors and publishers of 'Dick Deadshot,' and such remarkableworks, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were totake down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caughtat a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels andwarn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed. Yetthey have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all theiridiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature ofthe educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressivelycriminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which thehigh-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-roomtables. If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old bookstall inWhitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy orsuicide, his stock would be seized by the police. These things are ourluxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleledin history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the verytime that we are discussing (with equivocal German Professors) whethermorality is valid at all. At the very instant that we curse the PennyDreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass theproposition that all property is theft. At the very instant we accuse it(quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully readingphilosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency. At the very instantthat we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we areplacidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.

But it is we who are the morbid exceptions; it is we who are thecriminal class. This should be our great comfort. The vast mass ofhumanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have neverdoubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity isnoble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemiesspared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt thesemaxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons whobelieve they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes ofpeople are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boywrites daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we callPenny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of thoseiridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often astheir bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a'many-faced and fickle traitor,' but at least it is a better aim than tobe a many-faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a goodmany modern systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards. So long as thecoarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touchedby a paltry culture it will never be vitally immoral. It is always onthe side of life. The poor--the slaves who really stoop under theburden of life--have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, butnever hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivellingliterature will always be a 'blood and thunder' literature, as simple asthe thunder of heaven and the blood of men.

— G. K. Chesterton, c. 1901.