The Defendant | Page 4

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 a modern
novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the
astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically--it is the actual

centre of a million flaming imaginations.
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 indifference does not inflate the
character with pride. A man does not walk down the street giving a
haughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority to
some variety of deep-sea fishes. The old scholars left the whole
under-world of popular compositions in a similar darkness.
To-day, however, we have reversed this principle. We do despise
vulgar compositions, and we 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
to examine anything it never gets up again. There is no class of vulgar
publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous
exaggeration and misconception than the current boys' literature of the
lowest stratum. This class of composition has presumably always
existed, and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature than
the daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the
lodging-houses and tenements 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 ideal world in
which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper
and older than the rules of good art, and much more important. Every
one of us in childhood has constructed such an invisible dramatis
personæ, but it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition
by careful comparison with Balzac. In the East the professional
story-teller goes from village to village with a small carpet; and I wish
sincerely that anyone had the moral courage to spread that carpet and
sit on it in Ludgate Circus. But it is not probable that all the tales of the
carpet-bearer are little gems of original artistic workmanship. Literature
and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury;
fiction is a necessity. A work of art can hardly be too short, for its
climax is its merit. A story can never be too long, for its conclusion is
merely to be deplored, like the last halfpenny or the last pipelight. And
so, while the increase of the artistic conscience tends in more ambitious

works to brevity and impressionism, voluminous industry still marks
the producer of the true romantic trash. There was no end to the ballads
of Robin Hood; there is no end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot
and the Avenging Nine. These two heroes are deliberately conceived as
immortal.
But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the
common-sense recognition of this fact--that the youth of the lower
orders always has had and always must have formless and endless
romantic reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision
for its wholesomeness--we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic
abuse of this reading as a whole and indignant surprise that the
errand-boys under discussion do not read 'The Egoist' and 'The Master
Builder.' It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute
half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy
urchin runs away with an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that
the child's knowledge that apples appease hunger is traceable to some
curious literary researches. The boys themselves, when penitent,
frequently accuse the novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to
be expected from young people possessed of no little native humour. If
I had forged a will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident
to the influence of Mr. George Moore's novels, I should find the
greatest entertainment in the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in
the minds of most people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the
community, find their principal motives for conduct in printed books.
Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by
magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is
not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put
in prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory that the
tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing
to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial theory, and this
is rubbish.
So far as I have seen them, in