The Defendant

The Defendant by G.K. Chesterton

The Defendant is a collection of essays by G. K. Chesterton, each defending some person, thing, or idea commonly dismissed or despised. The opening essay defends "penny dreadfuls" and cheap boys' novelettes, arguing they are formless, endless romantic fiction rather than art, but not therefore criminal or degrading; magistrates who blame crime on such literature mistake its nature, since it deals in bloodless adventure — knights, duellists, cowboys — no different in kind from Scott's "Ivanhoe" or Byron's "Corsair." Chesterton contends the educated class, not the errand-boy, produces literature that is genuinely immoral, and that ordinary "vulgar" romance expresses sound, sanguine truisms on which civilization rests. He then defends "ugly things" and, more particularly, vows: chaining mountains together, swearing pilgrimage to Jerusalem under absurd handicaps. He argues such vows are sane, healthy expressions of great moments, contrasted with the "decadent" horror of constancy, the "free-lover" who fears losing himself, and marriage, which he calls the honoring of a lover's own wish to bind himself. He cites Bernard Shaw's "The Philanderer" and Suckling's verse against "free-love." A defense of skeletons and bare winter trees follows: he argues bareness is not ugliness, that dread of the skeleton is really dread of indignity rather than of death, and that nature's ugliness (rooks, pigs) is as valuable as her beauty. He defends public statuary against the charge of being "pompous," praising the statues of Darwin and Gordon over gloomy Victorian monuments, and argues that sanctity, like the martyrdoms of early Christians, was always meant to be public, not secret. He defends nonsense literature (Edward Lear over Lewis Carroll), arguing nonsense is allied to religious wonder, both refusing to reduce the world to syllogism, illustrated via the Book of Job. He defends the "flat-earth" book by Mr. D. Wardlaw Scott only insofar as it exposes how little modern imagination has absorbed the Copernican universe poetically, contrasting this with the Hebrew sentiment in "Thou hast hanged the world upon nothing." He defends the "Ideal Shepherd" of pastoral literature, regretting no comparable ideal exists for the postman, grocer, or plumber. He defends "useless" facts and the popular taste for miscellaneous information (as in Tit-Bits), tracing it to childlike wonder rather than vulgarity, illustrated by an anecdote of a friend whose tedious factual talk turned out to be pure invented poetry. He defends heraldry, arguing democracy erred by leveling down rather than extending aristocratic pageantry to all trades, and praises the French Revolutionaries' instinct for symbolic ceremony. He defends slang as genuine, allusive poetry, contrasting the vivid metaphor of an omnibus conductor's insult with the lifeless slang of fashionable society, quoting Cyrano de Bergerac and citing Douglas's cry over Bruce's heart. He defends farce and pantomime as a serious, joyful art form unfairly ranked below tragedy, arguing joy is harder to write than pain. He defends baby worship, arguing children's gravity and wonder before an unexplained universe represent transcendent common sense, and that adults should extend to all people the same startled reverence given to infants. He defends detective stories, calling them the first popular literature to find poetry in the modern city, and framing the policeman as guardian of civilization's own romantic rebellion against chaos. The final essay, "A Defence of Patriotism," argues that current English "patriotism" is really pride in territory and force rather than true love of country, contrasting it with French and German nationalism, which are rooted in national literature and philosophy taught to children. Chesterton attributes England's shallow patriotism to its schools' neglect of teaching English literature and history, arguing the nation fails to appreciate its own intellectual glories (Shakespeare, Newton, Burke, Darwin) and so falls back on boasting of colonies and conquest. The text ends here.

By G.K. Chesterton · First published 1901 · Genre: Essay, Philosophy, Humor · 16 chapters · 33,043 words

First lines

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.

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mystery · crime · justice · philosophy · satire · law · morality · detective · narrative · suspense · social commentary · character study

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