AUTHORS AND JOURNALISTS
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sm,—Your reviewer has written such a fair and able account of France and the French that I am reluctant to encroach on your space with a correction. It has nothing to do with his appreciation of my book, but with his statement regarding my personal position. My books are not "the spare-time work of a very busy and successful journalist." They have for some years constituted my principal labours—though I should be grieved were the phrase reversed, and my journalism described as "the spare-time work of a writer of books." For better or for worse, with its merits and its demerits, the bulk of my -boolczwork and of my journalistic work is wholehearted and not casual. You would add to my gratitude by allowing me to make clear that neither one nor the other is a by-product of my activities.
I should like also to say a word about the more general - implications of your reviewer's phrase. There is a tendency among journalists to suggest that stockbrokers and diplo- matists and soldiers ao. ;s3liticians may properly write books, but the professional journalist—that is to say the professional writer—never. I am unable to understand this humility of my colleagues. There is, I suppose, hardly a distinguished writer in England to-day who would not proudly claim to be a journalist. At any rate most of them have practised jour- nalism, and most of them practise journalism to-day. One thinks of Shaw, and Wells, and Balm, and Bennett, and Chesterton. . . . Please do not suppose I am putting myself in this illustrious company, but their names, and many others that could be cited, are a reproach to those journalists who seem to cultivate what I believe is called in these 'days an "inferiority complex," and who imagine other journalists who produce books to be merely" spare-time authors."—I am; Sir, &c.,
Previous page
