I know I shouldn’t keep just retyping passages from Chesterton and Lewis and calling them blog entries, but really — Lewis is just too clear-sighted not to use.
Another common way of using the distinction tends to fix on ‘popular’ as the best adjective for class A [i.e. lowbrow books]. “Popular’ art is supposed to aim at mere entertainment, while ‘real’ or ‘serious’ art aims at some more specific ‘artistic’ or ‘aesthetic’ or even ‘spiritual’ satisfaction. This is an attractive view because it would give those who hold it a ground for maintaining that popular literature has its own good or bad, according to its own rules, distinct from those of Literature proper. […] And since I observe that many my highest-browed acquaintances spend much of their time in talking of the vulgarity of popular art, and therefore must know it well, and could not have acquired that knowledge unless they enjoyed it, I must assume that they would welcome a theory which justified them in drinking freely of that fountain without forfeiting their superiority
— C. S. Lewis, High and Low Brows.
And a little later in the same essay:
What survives from most ages is chiefly either the work that had some religious or national appeal, or else the popular, commercial work produced for entertainment. I say ‘chiefly’ because the work of the ‘pure’ artists is not always ephemeral; a little, a very little, of it survives. But the great mass of literature which now fills class B [i.e. works now considered highbrow] is the work of men who wrote either piously, to edify their follows, or commercially, to earn their living by ‘giving the public what it wanted’.
— C. S. Lewis, High and Low Brows.
It’s striking that that last quote is so near to be being exactly what Ian Harac wrote in his comment on the Chesterton post.
The Reinvigorated Programmer 