Page:Chesterton - The Defendant, 1904.djvu/101



A Defence of Farce

I have never been able to understand why certain forms of art should be marked off as something debased and trivial. A comedy is spoken of as 'degenerating into farce'; it would be fair criticism to speak of it 'changing into farce'; but as for degenerating into farce, we might equally reasonably speak of it as degenerating into tragedy. Again, a story is spoken of as 'melodramatic,' and the phrase, queerly enough, is not meant as a compliment. To speak of something as 'pantomimic' or 'sensational' is innocently supposed to be biting, Heaven knows why, for all works of art are sensations, and a good pantomime (now extinct) is one of the pleasantest sensations of all. 'This stuff is fit for a detective story,' is often said, as who should say, 'This stuff is fit for an epic.'

Whatever may be the rights and wrongs of this mode of classification, there can be no doubt about one most practical and disastrous effect of it. These lighter or wilder forms of art, having no standard set