n contributions to the drama have been
journalistic in motive and intention, while certain others have been
literary. There is a good deal of journalism in the comedies of
Aristophanes. He often chooses topics mainly for their timeliness, and
gathers and says what happens to be in the air. Many of the Elizabethan
dramatists, like Dekker and Heywood and Middleton for example, looked at
life with the journalistic eye. They collected and disseminated news. They
were, in their own time, much more "up to date" than Shakespeare, who chose
for his material old stories that nearly every one had read. Ben Jonson's
_Bartholomew Fair_ is glorified journalism. It brims over with
contemporary gossip and timely witticisms. Therefore it is out of date
to-day, and is read only by people who wish to find out certain facts of
London life in Jonson's time. _Hamlet_ in 1602 was not a novelty; but it is
still read and seen by people who wish to find out certain truths of life
in general.

At the present day, a very large proportion of the contributions to the
theatre must be classed and judged as journalism. Such plays, for instance,
as _The Lion and the Mouse_ and _The Man of the Hour_ are nothing more or
less than dramatised newspapers. A piece of this sort, however effective it
may be at the moment, must soon suffer the fate of all things timely and
slip behind the times. Whenever an author selects a subject because he
thinks the public wants him to talk about it, instead of because he knows
he wants to talk about it to the public, his motive is journalistic rather
than literary. A timely topic may, however, be used to embody a truly
literary intention. In _The Witching Hour_, for example, journalism was
lifted into literature by the sincerity of Mr. Thomas's conviction that he
had something real and significant to say. The play became important
because there was a man behind it. Individual personality is perhaps the
most dateless of all phenomena. The fact of any great individuality once
accomplished and achieved becomes contemporary with the human race and
sloughs off the usual limits of past and future.

Whatever Mr. J.M. Barrie writes is literature, because he dwells isolate
amidst the world in a wise minority of one. The things that he says are of
importance because nobody else could have said them. He has achieved
individuality, and thereby passed out of hearing of the ticking of clocks
into an ever-ever land where dates are not an