The Truth About Popular Literature
I.-Its General Character
The Speaker, June 8, 1901

In asking the reader to follow me in a serious and sympathetic study of what the people do actually read, I must ask him to put aside for the moment many critical habits that have become second nature, many noble and austere ideals of what literature ought to be. For it will require more true humility to look through the eyes of millions than to look through the eyes of one.

Primarily, we must, in studying anything so widespread as printed matter, get rid of one fundamental error in our use of the words good and bad. We speak of a knife that is blunt as a bad knife or a paint-box that yields hard and weak colour as a bad paint-box. For practical purposes this is right enough. Compared with other objects of the same class these things are bad. But for all that the word bad is a misnomer; for bad things are things that hurt us, not things that please us insufficiently. A blunt knife is not bad, unless it cuts us, and then, for the matter of that, it is not so bad as a sharp knife would be. A paint-box is not bad, unless we eat the paints, and even the most exquisite greens and purples may be discordant if mingled internally. A common knife is good because however hard it may be to carve a joint with it, it would be much harder to carve it with an umbrella. A common paint-box is good, because however hard it may be to extract paint out of it, it would be much harder to extract it out of a lump of red sandstone. These things, however rude, are inventions. The most forbearing British father would complain if he were asked to carve the joint with one of the primitive flint-knives of the British Museum. But in their cases in the British Museum we respect them as if they were the relics of a saint.

So it is with the great miracle of letters. We must remember that the whole discovery of reading is new to great classes of the community; they are still in the time of Caxton. It is not strictly true to say that any of their reading is bad; for it is entirely good that there is an ingenious code of signals by which are conveyed to them the inmost thoughts and secrets of men long in their graves. It is not true, strictly speaking, that any of the fiction they read is bad for it is altogether a good thing that they should, in any shape or form, live that mystical double life that separates man from the beasts, one life in the daily duty of selfishness, the other in that strange and fantastic unselfishness which makes the fate of some non-existent hero, the creature of an idle brain, almost as important as our own. It is not, strictly speaking, true that any of the politics they read are bad, for it is an entirely good thing that they should have, for an abstract thing outside them like the State, enough sensibility to be bullied or enough enthusiasm to be duped. These things are not, in the proper meaning of the word, bad, any more than a man is bad for not being Shakespeare, or a hill bad for not being Mount Everest.

In this spirit, therefore, we must approach the problem of popular literature. We must realise that the need for literature is a universal hunger, and has nothing in the world to do with good literature, which is a special and slightly depraved taste. We can, of course, if we like, judge ordinary men by the test of whether they are what is called "cultured," just as we can if we like judge negroes by whether they have a delicate complexion, or jockeys by whether they are six-foot high. The only objection is that upon that particular class of persons the test has no value whatever. What we have really to discover is not whether these men have reached the peaks which only a few can reach, but whether they are on the right road. The literature which the uneducated man studies is certain to be mean to us; the supremely important thing is that it should not be mean to him.

There is hardly, to my fancy, a poorer figure cut in the world than that of the artist complaining of the ignorance of the Philistines. Of course, the average man does not understand art, any more than the average artist understands grocery. But the artist is far better off than innumerable other intellectual professions. While he is whining, the man of science or mathematician is quietly exulting in radiant and irrefragable truths, which not only can no one understand, but which it is excessively improbable that anyone ever will understand. Even his nearest and dearest are to the astronomer often as remote as the most solitary star. If his friends do not assist the painter with his picture, at least they talk nonsense about it. But a person of quite exceptional mind would be needed even to talk nonsense about the Differential Calculus or the Transit of Venus. Men of science submit nobly to this isolation because they feel that they are specialists on whom is laid the burden of that higher life of which the old saints and ascetics spoke truly enough. But they know that ordinary people have a science which is sound as far as it goes: they know that neither physiology nor botany are needed to prove the gastronomic effect of unripe apples, no abysmal mathematics required to establish how many beans make five.

Such should be the general preliminary attitude of anyone really wishing to understand the literature of the people. He should realise that, although an epicure might call bacon and cabbages a bad dinner, the phrase is merely a comparative one, and does not really constitute those excellent creatures, the cabbage and the pig, elaborate inventions of the devil. Similarly a penny dreadful is not really bad: its fault is merely that its holiness is faint and ineffectual.

There are, as I hope to show in a subsequent article, many really bad forces operating in popular literature. Worst of all, beyond a doubt, is that new growth of Yankee cynicism, in which ideals are not so much scoffed at as ignored. This frigid and innocent materialism is worse than any profligacy. A hot revolt against morality might be excused by all of us; but what condition can be conceived as viler than a condition of cold revolt?

But though there are, as I shall show, many bad tendencies in the popular writings, I doubt beforehand whether I shall be able to echo the general condemnation on vulgar work which is pronounced almost with one voice by the cultivated class. I am prevented from trusting entirely in this class by two facts. Firstly, because this class has in all ages been almost invariably wrong about popular literature. It was the cultivated class which dismissed the old ballads as barbarous and Gothic architecture as gothic. It is at least tenable that some great critic of future ages may find in "My Old Dutch" something of what we find in "Sir Cauline" and "The Heir of Linne." And, secondly, the cultivated class put themselves, to my mind, clearly in the wrong by their one persistent habit of classing popular literature by certain broad distinctive terms which they intend as denunciatory but which are in truth at once universal and eulogistic. Thus they speak contemptuously of "sensational" literature, as if all literature were not sensational and good exactly in so far as it is sensational. If the last scene of Ghosts produces a profound sensation, it is preciser because it is sensational. If a scene in one of Miss Marie Corelli's novels is an extravagant bathos, it fails, not because it is sensational, but because it is not.

As the critical class, with their loose and crude classifications give me no assistance in this matter, as indeed (as I have said) they appear to have an entirely wandering and misleading classification of the matter, I have fallen back on the project of trying to form an opinion for myself. I have read magazines of a diabolical cheapness and novelettes the names of which are too absurd to be uttered except in the glimpses of the moon. I have absorbed more imbecility into mv system than I should have thought it possible for that alreadv well-stocked organism to endure. And I have, rightly or wrongly, come to a conclusion about popular literature. What it is I hope to explain in an ensuing article. The conception of leaving off at this exciting point I owe to several serials that I have recently studied.