Is this to lower literary standards?  I do not think so, for, in cases of this kind, one is not judging literature, 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 denounced by critics whom they have made laugh till their sides ached, and the reason is that, after leaving the theatre, the critics remember that they do not like Mr, Shaw’s moral ideas.  In the same way, it seems to me, a great deal of the praise that has been given to Mr. D.H.  Lawrence as an artist ought really to be given to him as a distributor of certain moral ideas.  That he has studied wonderfully one aspect of human