Among these stories there are a certain number which deal sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates, which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval.  That is to say, they do precisely the same thing as Scott’s ‘Ivanhoe,’ Scott’s ‘Rob Roy,’ Scott’s ’Lady of the Lake,’ Byron’s ‘Corsair,’ Wordsworth’s ‘Rob Roy’s Grave,’ Stevenson’s ‘Macaire,’ Mr. Max Pemberton’s ‘Iron Pirate,’ and a thousand more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents.  Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in ‘Ivanhoe’ will lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinks that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for life as a blackmailer.  In the case of our own class, we recognise that this wild life is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is different from it.  It might at least cross our minds that, for whatever other reason the errand-boy reads ‘The Red Revenge,’ it really is not because he is dripping with the gore of his own friends and relatives.

In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the ‘lower classes’ when we mean humanity minus ourselves.  This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian:  it is simply human.  The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings.  He says, with a modest swagger, ’I have invited twenty-five factory hands to tea.’  If he said ’I have invited twenty-five chartered accountants to tea,’ everyone would see the humour of so simple a classification.  But this is what we have done with this lumberland of foolish writing:  we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of man.  Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists:  for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them.  These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them.  They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all.  Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.

If the authors and publishers of ‘Dick Deadshot,’ and such remarkable works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and warn us all to correct our lives, we should be seriously annoyed.  Yet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their idiotcy, are normal and we are abnormal.  It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively