A DEFENCE OF PENNY DREADFULS
G.K. Chesterton
(From “The Defendant” published in “The Wayfarer’s Library” by J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, London, 1901)
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 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 personae, 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 any one 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 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 dehumanised 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 what ever 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,” every one 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 civilisation is built; for it is clear that unless civilisation 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 he seriously annoyed. Yet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their idiocy, 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 book stall 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 the criminal class. This should be our great comfort. The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a “many faced and fickle traitor,” but at least it is a better aim than to be a many faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many modern systems from Mr. d’Annunzio’s downwards. So long as the coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched by a paltry culture it will never he vitally immoral. It is always on the side of life. The poor—the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life— have often been mad, scatter-brained, and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling literature will always be a “blood and thunder” literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.
[Scanned by Georges Allaire (gall@globetrotter.net)]
A DEFENCE OF PENNY DREADFULS
G.K. Chesterton
(From “The Defendant” published in “The Wayfarer’s Library” by J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, London, 1901)
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 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 personae, 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 any one 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 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 dehumanised and naked narrative as this.
IN DIFESA DEI PENNY DREADFUL
G.K. Chesterton
(Da “The Defendant”, pubblicato in “The Wayfarer’s Library” da J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, Londra, 1901)
Uno dei più strani esempi del grado in cui la vita ordinaria viene sottovalutata è l’esempio della letteratura popolare, la cui immensa massa noi ci accontentiamo di definire volgare. Il romanzetto per ragazzi può essere ignorante in senso letterario, il che equivale soltanto a dire che il romanzo moderno è ignorante in senso chimico, o economico, o astronomico; ma non è volgare intrinsecamente — è il vero e proprio centro di un milione di fantasie ardenti.
Nei secoli passati la classe colta ignorava la massa informe della letteratura volgare. La ignorava, e perciò, propriamente parlando, non la disprezzava. La semplice ignoranza e l’indifferenza non gonfiano il carattere d’orgoglio. Un uomo non cammina per la strada arricciandosi con alterigia i baffi al pensiero della propria superiorità rispetto a qualche varietà di pesci degli abissi. I vecchi studiosi lasciavano tutto il sottomondo delle composizioni popolari in una tenebra simile.
Oggi, però, abbiamo rovesciato questo principio. Disprezziamo le composizioni volgari, e non le ignoriamo. Corriamo il pericolo di diventare meschini nel nostro studio della meschinità; c’è sullo sfondo una terribile legge circea, per cui se l’anima si china troppo ostentatamente a esaminare qualcosa non si rialza più. Non c’è classe di pubblicazioni volgari attorno alla quale vi sia, a mio avviso, esagerazione ed equivoco più assolutamente ridicoli che l’odierna letteratura per ragazzi dello strato più basso. Questo genere di composizione è presumibilmente esistito sempre, e deve esistere. Non ha diritto a essere buona letteratura più di quanto la conversazione quotidiana dei suoi lettori abbia diritto a essere fine oratoria, o le pensioni e i casamenti che essi abitano abbiano diritto a essere architettura sublime. Ma la gente deve pur conversare, deve pur avere case, e deve pur avere storie. Il semplice bisogno di una qualche specie di mondo ideale in cui persone fittizie recitino una parte senza impacci è infinitamente più profondo e più antico delle regole dell’arte buona, e assai più importante. Ognuno di noi, nell’infanzia, ha costruito un simile invisibile elenco di personaggi, ma alle nostre balie non venne mai in mente di correggere la composizione mediante un attento confronto con Balzac. In Oriente il narratore di professione va di villaggio in villaggio con un piccolo tappeto; e desidero sinceramente che qualcuno abbia il coraggio morale di stendere quel tappeto e di sedervisi sopra a Ludgate Circus. Ma non è probabile che tutti i racconti del portatore di tappeto siano piccole gemme di originale lavorazione artistica. Letteratura e narrativa sono due cose interamente diverse. La letteratura è un lusso; la narrativa è una necessità. Un’opera d’arte non può quasi mai essere troppo breve, perché il suo culmine è il suo pregio. Una storia non può mai essere troppo lunga, perché la sua conclusione è soltanto da deplorare, come l’ultimo mezzo penny o l’ultima pipata. E così, mentre l’accrescersi della coscienza artistica tende, nelle opere più ambiziose, alla brevità e all’impressionismo, un’industria voluminosa contrassegna ancora il produttore della vera paccottiglia romanzesca. Non c’era fine alle ballate di Robin Hood; non c’è fine ai volumi su Dick Deadshot e i Nove Vendicatori. Questi due eroi sono deliberatamente concepiti come immortali.
Ma invece di fondare ogni discussione del problema sul riconoscimento di buon senso di questo fatto — che la gioventù dei ceti inferiori ha sempre avuto e sempre dovrà avere una qualche specie di lettura romanzesca informe e senza fine, e poi passare a provvedere alla sua salubrità — cominciamo, in generale, con un abuso fantastico di questa lettura nel suo complesso e con un indignato stupore che i fattorini in questione non leggano The Egoist e The Master Builder. È costume, soprattutto tra i magistrati, attribuire metà dei delitti della Metropoli ai romanzetti da quattro soldi. Se qualche monello sudicio scappa via con una mela, il magistrato osserva acutamente che la conoscenza del bambino che le mele placano la fame è riconducibile a certe curiose ricerche letterarie. I ragazzi stessi, quando sono pentiti, accusano spesso i romanzetti con grande amarezza, cosa che c’è solo da aspettarsi da giovani dotati di non poco umorismo innato. Se avessi falsificato un testamento, e potessi ottenere comprensione facendo risalire l’accaduto all’influenza dei romanzi di Mr. George Moore, troverei il più grande divertimento in quel diversivo. In ogni caso, è saldamente fissato nella mente della maggior parte della gente che i monelli di strada, a differenza di chiunque altro nella comunità, trovino i loro principali moventi di condotta nei libri stampati.
Ora è del tutto chiaro che questa obiezione, l’obiezione mossa dai magistrati, non ha nulla a che fare con il merito letterario. Scrivere male una storia non è un delitto. Mr. Hall Caine cammina per le strade apertamente, e non può essere messo in prigione per un anticlimax. L’obiezione poggia sulla teoria che il tono della massa dei romanzetti per ragazzi sia criminale e degradato, che faccia appello alla bassa cupidigia e alla bassa crudeltà. Questa è la teoria magistrale, e questa è una sciocchezza.
Per quanto io li abbia visti, in rapporto con le più sudicie bancarelle di libri dei quartieri più poveri, i fatti sono semplicemente questi: l’intera sconcertante massa della volgare letteratura giovanile ha per oggetto avventure, vaganti, sconnesse e senza fine. Non esprime alcuna passione di alcun genere, perché non vi è carattere umano di alcun genere. Corre eternamente entro certi solchi di tipo locale e storico: il cavaliere medievale, il duellante del Settecento e il moderno cowboy ricorrono con la stessa rigida semplicità delle convenzionali figure umane in un disegno orientale. Posso immaginare, con altrettanta facilità, un essere umano che accenda selvagge brame contemplando il suo tappeto turco, quanto contemplando una narrazione disumanizzata e nuda come questa.
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 what ever 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,” every one 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 civilisation is built; for it is clear that unless civilisation 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 he seriously annoyed. Yet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their idiocy, 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 book stall 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 the criminal class. This should be our great comfort. The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a “many faced and fickle traitor,” but at least it is a better aim than to be a many faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many modern systems from Mr. d’Annunzio’s downwards. So long as the coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched by a paltry culture it will never he vitally immoral. It is always on the side of life. The poor—the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life— have often been mad, scatter-brained, and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling literature will always be a “blood and thunder” literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.
[Scanned by Georges Allaire (gall@globetrotter.net)]
Fra queste storie ve n’è un certo numero che tratta con simpatia le avventure di rapinatori, fuorilegge e pirati, che presenta in una luce dignitosa e romantica ladri e assassini come Dick Turpin e Claude Duval. Vale a dire, fanno esattamente la stessa cosa dell’Ivanhoe di Scott, del Rob Roy di Scott, della Donna del Lago di Scott, del Corsaro di Byron, della Tomba di Rob Roy di Wordsworth, del Macaire di Stevenson, del Pirata di Ferro di Mr. Max Pemberton, e di mille altre opere distribuite sistematicamente come premi e regali di Natale. Nessuno immagina che un’ammirazione per Locksley nell’Ivanhoe induca un ragazzo a scagliare frecce giapponesi contro i cervi di Richmond Park; nessuno pensa che l’incauta apertura di Wordsworth alla poesia su Rob Roy lo avvii a una vita da ricattatore. Nel caso della nostra classe, riconosciamo che questa vita selvaggia è contemplata con piacere dai giovani, non perché sia simile alla loro vita, ma perché ne è diversa. Potrebbe almeno balenarci nella mente che, per qualunque altra ragione il fattorino legga The Red Revenge, non è di certo perché grondi del sangue dei propri amici e parenti.
In questa faccenda, come in tutte le faccende del genere, perdiamo interamente l’orientamento parlando delle «classi inferiori» quando intendiamo l’umanità meno noi stessi. Questa banale letteratura romanzesca non è particolarmente plebea: è semplicemente umana. Il filantropo non riesce mai a dimenticare classi e mestieri. Dice, con modesta spavalderia: «Ho invitato a tè venticinque operai di fabbrica.» Se dicesse: «Ho invitato a tè venticinque ragionieri iscritti all’albo», tutti coglierebbero l’umorismo di una classificazione tanto semplice. ma è proprio ciò che abbiamo fatto con questo ammasso di scritture sciocche: abbiamo sondato, come se fosse una mostruosa nuova malattia, ciò che in realtà non è altro che lo sciocco e valoroso cuore dell’uomo. Gli uomini comuni saranno sempre sentimentali: perché un sentimentale è semplicemente un uomo che ha dei sentimenti e non si prende la briga di inventare un modo nuovo di esprimerli. Queste comuni e correnti pubblicazioni non hanno nulla di essenzialmente malvagio. Esprimono i truismi sanguigni ed eroici su cui è edificata la civiltà; perché è chiaro che se la civiltà non è edificata sui truismi, non è edificata affatto. Chiaramente, non potrebbe esservi sicurezza alcuna in una società in cui l’osservazione del Presidente della Corte che l’assassinio è male fosse considerata un epigramma originale e abbagliante.
Se gli autori e gli editori di Dick Deadshot, e di simili notevoli opere, dovessero all’improvviso fare una scorreria contro la classe colta, dovessero prendere i nomi di ogni uomo, per quanto illustre, colto in flagrante a una Conferenza di Estensione Universitaria, dovessero confiscare tutti i nostri romanzi e ammonirci tutti a correggere la nostra vita, ne saremmo seriamente contrariati. Eppure essi hanno ben più diritto di farlo che non noi; perché essi, con tutta la loro idiozia, sono normali e noi siamo anormali. È la letteratura moderna dei colti, non degli incolti, a essere dichiaratamente e aggressivamente criminale. Libri che raccomandano la dissolutezza e il pessimismo, dinanzi ai quali il fattorino dall’anima elevata rabbrividirebbe, giacciono su tutti i tavoli dei nostri salotti. Se il più sudicio vecchio proprietario della più sudicia vecchia bancarella di libri di Whitechapel osasse esporre opere che raccomandino davvero la poligamia o il suicidio, la sua merce verrebbe sequestrata dalla polizia. Queste cose sono i nostri lussi. E con un’ipocrisia tanto ridicola da essere quasi senza pari nella storia, sgridiamo i monelli di strada per la loro immoralità proprio nel momento in cui discutiamo (con equivoci professori tedeschi) se la moralità sia valida del tutto. Nell’istante stesso in cui malediciamo il Penny Dreadful perché incoraggia i furti alla proprietà, dibattiamo la proposizione che ogni proprietà è furto. Nell’istante stesso in cui lo accusiamo (assai ingiustamente) di lascivia e indecenza, leggiamo allegramente filosofie che si gloriano di lascivia e indecenza. Nell’istante stesso in cui gli imputiamo di incoraggiare i giovani a distruggere la vita, discutiamo placidamente se la vita valga la pena di essere conservata.
Ma siamo noi le eccezioni morbose; siamo noi la classe criminale. Questo dovrebbe essere il nostro grande conforto. La vasta massa dell’umanità, con la sua vasta massa di libri oziosi e di parole oziose, non ha mai dubitato e mai dubiterà che il coraggio sia splendido, che la fedeltà sia nobile, che le dame in pena debbano essere soccorse, e i nemici vinti risparmiati. C’è un gran numero di persone colte che dubitano di queste massime della vita quotidiana, proprio come c’è un gran numero di persone che credono di essere il Principe di Galles; e mi si dice che entrambe le categorie di persone sono conversatori divertenti. Ma l’uomo o il ragazzo medio scrive ogni giorno, in questi grandi sgargianti diari della sua anima, che noi chiamiamo Penny Dreadful, un vangelo più schietto e migliore di qualunque di quei paradossi etici iridescenti che i gente alla moda cambia con la stessa frequenza delle proprie cuffiette. Può essere uno scopo molto limitato, in fatto di moralità, sparare a un «traditore dai molti volti e volubile», ma è pur sempre uno scopo migliore che essere un traditore dai molti volti e volubile, il che è un semplice riassunto di parecchi sistemi moderni, a partire da quello di Mr. d’Annunzio in giù. Finché la tessitura rozza e sottile del semplice romanzo popolare corrente non viene toccata da una cultura meschina, esso non sarà mai vitalmente immorale. È sempre dalla parte della vita. I poveri — gli schiavi che davvero si piegano sotto il peso della vita — sono stati spesso folli, sventati e crudeli, ma mai disperati. È un privilegio di classe, come i sigari. La loro sbrodolante letteratura sarà sempre una letteratura di «sangue e tuono», semplice come il tuono del cielo e il sangue degli uomini.
[Scansionato da Georges Allaire (gall@globetrotter.net)]