ecause it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair
principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic
continent does not make ivory black.

Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged
perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough
to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder by
which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress should be
something else besides a continual parricide; therefore I have
investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of
them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but
eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter
and diamonds into the sea. I have found that every man is disposed to
call the green leaf of the tree a little less green than it is, and the
snow of Christmas a little less white than it is; therefore I have
imagined that the main business of a man, however humble, is defence. I
have conceived that a defendant is chiefly required when worldlings
despise the world--that a counsel for the defence would not have been
out of place in that terrible day when the sun was darkened over Calvary
and Man was rejected of men.

* * * * *

A DEFENCE OF PENNY DREADFULS

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.

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