The Defendant by G.K. Chesterton

I have never been able to understand why certain forms of art should be / marked off as something debased and trivial. A comedy is spoken of as / 'degenerating into farce'; it would be fair criticism to speak of it / 'changing into farce'; but as for degenerating into farce, we might / equally reasonably speak of it as degenerating into tragedy. Again, a / story is spoken of as 'melodramatic,' and the phrase, queerly enough, is / not meant as a compliment. To speak of something as 'pantomimic' or / 'sensational' is innocently supposed to be biting, Heaven knows why, for / all works of art are sensations, and a good pantomime (now extinct) is / one of the pleasantest sensations of all. 'This stuff is fit for a / detective story,' is often said, as who should say, 'This stuff is fit / for an epic.'

Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of this mode of classification, / there can be no doubt about one most practical and disastrous effect of / it. These lighter or wilder forms of art, having no standard set up for / them, no gust of generous artistic pride to lift them up, do actually / tend to become as bad as they are supposed to be. Neglected children of / the great mother, they grow up in darkness, dirty and unlettered, and / when they are right they are right almost by accident, because of the / blood in their veins. The common detective story of mystery and murder / seems to the intelligent reader to be little except a strange glimpse of / a planet peopled by congenital idiots, who cannot find the end of their / own noses or the character of their own wives. The common pantomime / seems like some horrible satiric picture of a world without cause or / effect, a mass of 'jarring atoms,' a prolonged mental torture of / irrelevancy. The ordinary farce seems a world of almost piteous / vulgarity, where a half-witted and stunted creature is afraid when his / wife comes home, and amused when she sits down on the doorstep. All this / is, in a sense, true, but it is the fault of nothing in heaven or earth / except the attitude and the phrases quoted at the beginning of this / article.