G.K. Chesterton: The Defendant

[Heteronym]

This is a funny little collection of articles in which Chesterton defends all sorts of things, like detective stories, nonsense, baby-worship, slang, patriotism, etc.

This is him defending popular literature:

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.

(...)

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.

(...)

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.

His explanation of the psychological and even moral need ordinary people have of stories is one of the best arguments I've ever read on the great debate between high and low literature, even though I'm one of the elitist snobs he frowns upon :D

[Eric]

These random quotes you mention do make Chesterton look rather sympathetic.

I thínk that one of my key criteria for literature is whether the author had his or her heart in the novel, story, or poem. Sometimes there may be flaws, but they are outweighed by merits. I read a story recently where I thought the author dwelt too much on coincidence. But he was in fact aiming at using coincidence as the backbone of the story, as I realised at the end. Poetry too can describe very banal and everyday occurrences, but from a perceptive perspective. And I think that the borderline between "literary" literature and "popular" literature is not always so easy to delineate. Some people would rather go to a Shakespeare play, without having read the play closely beforehand, with notes, just to boast their cultured nature to their friends. They won't understand half the play, jokes, tragedy, but feel that their are somehow soaking up "culture" by symbiosis. That is snobbery. And obviously, the structure of a Sherlock Holmes story is somewhat preditable and therefore not part of super-sophisticated literature. But sometimes you just want to read such a story for the jigsaw puzzle value.