* * * I SUPPOSE ONE of the commonest quotations
to be found' in books on journalism—often given a place to itself on a title, page—is Bernard Shaw's 'The highest literature is journalism,' Shaw argued that Aristophanes, Shakespeare ('peopling Athens with Elizabethan mechanics') and Ibsen ('photographing the local doctors and vestrymen') are still in common currency, contrasting them with 'the dust and ashes of many thousands of academically punctilious and archaeologically correct men of letters, avoiding the journalists' obsession with the ephem- eral.' The book in which this Shavian panegyric appeared was The Sanity of Art, published in 1895. Last night 1 was looking through Advice to a Young Critic, a collection of Shaw's letters to Golding Bright, which has just been published by Peter Owen at 16s. In one of them Shaw wrote, 'I cannot bring myself to republish my articles. They appear very entertaining in the context of the events of the week in which they appear; but just because they are good journalism, they are bad literature.' The letter is dated 1895.
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