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