The Defendant by G.K. Chesterton

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.