G K Chesterton

The Defendant G K Chesterton

One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is theexample of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy's novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that amodern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomicalsense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically-it is the actual centre of a million flamingimaginations. In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar literature. They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking, despise it. Simple ignorance and indifferencedoes not inflate the character with pride. A man does not walk down the street giving ahaughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority to some variety of deepsea fishes. The old scholars left the whole under-world of popular compositions in a similardarkness. To-day, however, we have reversed this principle. We do despise vulgar compositions, andwe do not ignore them. We are in some danger of becoming petty in our study of pettiness;there is a terrible Circean law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously toexamine anything it never gets up again. There is no class of vulgar publications aboutwhich there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous exaggeration and misconception thanthe current boys' literature of the lowest stratum. This class of composition haspresumably always existed, and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature thanthe daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the lodging-houses andtenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture. But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of idealworld in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and olderthan the rules of good art, and much more important. Every one of us in childhood hasconstructed such an invisible dramatis personæ, but it never occurred to our nurses tocorrect the composition by careful comparison with Balzac. In the East the professionalstory-teller goes from village to village with a small carpet; and I wish sincerely that anyonehad the moral courage to spread that carpet and sit on it in Ludgate Circus. But it is notprobable that all the tales 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.