Read Max on Swinburne in the Fortnightly Review when you get the chance and contrast it with George Moore's account of his visit to Swinburne, in which he can only tell us that he found the poet naked in bed. I forget where it occurs. . . .
In answering this letter I pointed out that
Disraeli avoided the great political issues of
the days in which he was writing and that any
author, such as H. G. Wells in The New
Machiavelli, Granville Barker in Waste and
H. M. Harwood in the Grain of Mustard
Seed, who attempts a political theme is almost
bound to impale himself on one or other
horn of a dilemma; if his novel or play revolve
round a living controversy such as the right
to strike in war-time or the justice of ordering
reprisals in Ireland, the theatre may become
the scene of a nightly riot and the critics
will consider their own political preferences
more earnestly than the literary merits of the
book; if the action of play or novel be based
on a dead or unborn controversy, it will fail
to arouse the faintest interest. I was sure
that the other admirers of the three works
