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