February 17, 2008
Heretics 15 : On Smart Novelists and the Smart Set
“In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man, but bad literature tells us the mind of many men. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture.”
Marco said,
February 22, 2008 @ 5:11 pm
Would this be Mencken’s Smart Set?
chestercast said,
February 22, 2008 @ 10:15 pm
I’m really not familiar enough with Mencken to know. It seems unlikely that Chesterton was referring to him explicitly though, since he doesn’t mention him, and the Wikipedia entry on Mencken has his first work being published in the same year that Heretics was published, hardly giving Chesterton much time to react to him with an essay.