en literature and journalism
which is so often heard is, like most such things, a fallacy, or at
least capable of being made fallacious. Put as it usually is when the
intention is disobliging to the journalist, it comes to this:--that the
_Essays of Elia_, that Southey's _Life of Nelson_, that some of the best
work of Carlyle, Tennyson, Thackeray, and others the list of whom might
be prolonged at pleasure, is not literature. Put as it sometimes is by
extremely foolish people, it would go to the extent that anything which
has _not_ been published in a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly
publication is literature.

There is probably no subject on which it is more necessary to clear the
mind of cant than this. Of course there is journalism in the sense
opposed to literature, though not necessarily opposed in any bad sense.
No wise man intends, and no wise man will ever suffer, articles which
are in the strict sense articles, which are intended to comment on
merely passing events, and to produce a merely immediate effect, to be
extracted from journals and put on record as books. Not only is the
treatment unsuitable for such record, but it may almost be said that the
treatment suitable for things so to be recorded is actually unsuitable
for things ephemeral. But there is a very large amount of writing to
which this does not in the least apply, and in which it can make no kind
of real difference whether the result appears by itself in a bound cloth
volume as a whole, or in parts with other things in a pamphlet, covered
with paper, or not covered at all. The grain of truth which the fallacy
carries is really this:--that the habit of treating some subjects in the
peculiar fashion most effective in journalism may spread disastrously to
the treatment of other subjects which ought to be treated as literature.
This is a truth, but not a large one. There have been at all times, at
least since the invention of printing and probably before it, persons
who, though they may be guiltless of having ever written an article in
their lives, have turned out more or less ponderous library volumes in
which the very worst sins of the worst kind of journalist are rampant.

There are, however, more thoughtful reasons for regarding the
development of periodicals as not an unmixed boon to letters. The more
evanescent kinds of writing are, putting fiction out of the question, so
much the more profitable in journalism that it certainly may tempt--tha