ture, but popular books. Those to whom
popular books are anathema have a temperament which will always find it
difficult to fall in with the limitations of the work of a general
reviewer. The curious thing is that this intolerance of easy writing is
most generally found among those who are most opposed to intolerance in
the sphere of morals. It is as though they had escaped from one sort of
Puritanism into another. Personally, I do not see why, if we should be
tolerant of the breach of a moral commandment, we should not be equally
tolerant of the breach of a literary commandment. We should gently scan,
not only our brother man, but our brother author. The aesthete of to-day,
however, will look kindly on adultery, but show all the harshness of a
Pilgrim Father in his condemnation of a split infinitive. I cannot see the
logic of this. If irregular and commonplace people have the right to
exist, surely irregular and commonplace books have a right to exist by
their side.

The reviewer, however, is often led into a false attitude to a book, not
by its bad quality, but by some irrelevant quality--some underlying moral
or political idea. He denounces a novel the moral ideas of which offend
him, without giving sufficient consideration to the success or failure of
the novelist in the effort to make his characters live. Similarly, he
praises a novel with the moral ideas of which he agrees, without
reflecting that perhaps it is as a tract rather than as a work of art that
it has given him pleasure. Both the praise and blame which have been
heaped upon Mr. Kipling are largely due to appreciation or dislike of his
politics. The Imperialist finds his heart beating faster as he reads _The
English Flag_, and he praises Mr. Kipling as an artist when it is really
Mr. Kipling as a propagandist who has moved him. The anti-Imperialist, on
the other hand, is often led by detestation of Mr. Kipling's politics to
deny even the palpable fact that Mr. Kipling is a very brilliant
short-story teller. It is for the reviewer to raise himself above such
prejudices and to discover what are Mr. Kipling's ideas apart from his
art, and what is his art apart from his ideas.

The relation between one and the other is also clearly a relevant matter
for discussion. But the confusion of one with the other is fatal. In the
field of morals we are perhaps led astray in our judgments even more
frequently than in matters of politics. Mr. Shaw's plays are often
de