I
have conceived that a defendant is chiefly required when worldlings
despise the world--that a counsel for the defence would not have been
out of place in that terrible day when the sun was darkened over Calvary
and Man was rejected of men.
* * * * *
A DEFENCE OF PENNY DREADFULS
One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is
undervalued is the example 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 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.
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