Miscellanies

Gazette, Ju

of the St. J

han before, your attacks on me and my book, you not only conf

ced by a Tory Government.' Now, you did not propose this, but you did suggest it. When you declare that you do not know whether or not the Government wi

entation you seem to me, Sir,

all men of letters of my acquaintance, protest most strongly; and any critic who admits the reasonableness of such a theory shows at once that he is quite incapable of understanding what literature is, and what are the rights that literature possesses. A Government might just as well try to teach painters how t

lf should imagine that your critic was animated by any feeling of personal malice

e could, but I feel that I was fully justified in forming the opinion of him that I did. He opened his article by

king any reference to the personality of the author. This, in fact, is the beginning of criticism. However, it was not merely his personal attack on me that m

that it is far too crowded with sensational incident, and far too paradoxical in style, as far, at any rate, as the dial

atter; but he has done so only by a tacit admission that he has really no critical instinct about literature and liter

ch author, and my book brought out in Paris, there is not a single literary critic in France on any paper of high standing who would think for a moment of criticisin

here that it is radically wrong. It is this Puritanism, to which your critic has given expression, that is always marring the artistic instinct of the English.

tation should be placed on action. It is not proper that limitation should be placed on art. To art belong all things that are and all things that are not, and even the editor of a London paper has no right to restrain the f

R WI

REET, S. W