The Defendant | Page 5

connection with the dirtiest book-stalls in
the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: The whole bewildering
mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with adventures,

rambling, disconnected and endless. It does not express any passion of
any sort, for there is no human character of any sort. It runs eternally in
certain grooves of local and historical type: the medieval knight, the
eighteenth-century duellist, and the modern cowboy, recur with the
same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures in an Oriental
pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human being kindling wild
appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by such
dehumanized and naked narrative as this.
Among these stories there are a certain number which deal
sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates,
which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers
like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely
the same thing as Scott's 'Ivanhoe,' Scott's 'Rob Roy,' Scott's 'Lady of
the Lake,' Byron's 'Corsair,' Wordsworth's 'Rob Roy's Grave,'
Stevenson's 'Macaire,' Mr. Max Pemberton's 'Iron Pirate,' and a
thousand more works distributed systematically as prizes and
Christmas presents. Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in
'Ivanhoe' will lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in
Richmond Park; no one thinks that the incautious opening of
Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for life as a
blackmailer. In the case of our own class, we recognise that this wild
life is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it is like
their own life, but because it is different from it. It might at least cross
our minds that, for whatever other reason the errand-boy reads 'The
Red Revenge,' it really is not because 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 by
speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus
ourselves. This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is
simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings.
He says, with a modest swagger, 'I have invited twenty-five factory
hands to tea.' If he said 'I have invited twenty-five chartered
accountants to tea,' everyone would see the humour of so simple a
classification. But this is what we have done with this lumberland of
foolish writing: we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new

disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of
man. Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist
is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new
way of expressing them. These common and current publications have
nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and
heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that unless
civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all. Clearly, there could
be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that
murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.
If the authors and publishers of 'Dick Deadshot,' and such remarkable
works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to
take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was
caught at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our
novels and warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously
annoyed. Yet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with
all their idiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern
literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and
aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism,
at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our
drawing-room tables. If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old
bookstall in Whitechapel dared to display works really recommending
polygamy or suicide, his stock would be seized by the police. These
things are our luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be
almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their
immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal
German Professors) whether morality is valid at all. At the very instant
that we curse the Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property,
we canvass the proposition that all property is theft. At the very instant
we accuse it (quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are
cheerfully reading philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency.
At the very instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to
destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life is worth
preserving.
But it is we who are the morbid exceptions; it is we who are