The distinction between “journalism” and “literature” is quite futile, unless we are drawing such a violent contrast as that between Gibbon’s History and today’s paper; and such a contrast itself is too violent to have meaning. You cannot, that is, draw any useful distinction between journalism and literature merely on a scale of literary values, as a difference between the well-written and the supremely wellwritten: a second-rate novel is not journalism, but it certainly is not literature. The term “journalism” has deteriorated, so let us try to recall it to its more permanent sense. To my thinking, the most accurate as well as most comprehensive definition of the term is to be obtained through considering the type of mind, concerned with writing what all would concede to be the best journalism. There’s a type of mind, and I have a very close sympathy with it, which can only turn to writing, or only produce its best writing, under the pressure of an immediate occasion; and it is this type of mind which I propose to treat as the journalist’s. The underlying causes may differ: the cause may be an ardent preoccupation with affairs of the day, or it may be (as with myself) laziness requiring an immediate stimulus, or a habit formed by early necessity of earning small sums quickly. It is not so much that the journalist works on different material from that of other writers, as that he works from a different, no less and often more honourable, motive.