You state, in your issue of today, that I misrepresented you when I said that you suggested that a book so wicked as mine should be ’suppressed and coerced 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 will take action about my book, and remark that the authors of books much less wicked have been proceeded against in law, the suggestion is quite obvious.

In your complaint of misrepresentation you seem to me, Sir, to have been not quite candid.

However, as far as I am concerned, this suggestion is of no importance.  What is of importance is that the editor of a paper like yours should appear to countenance the monstrous theory that the Government of a country should exercise a censorship over imaginative literature.  This is a theory against which I, and 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 to paint, or sculptors how to model, as attempt to interfere with the style, treatment and subject-matter of the literary artist, and no writer, however eminent or obscure, should ever give his sanction to a theory that would degrade literature far more than any didactic or so-called immoral book could possibly do.

You then express your surprise that ‘so experienced a literary gentleman’ as myself should imagine that your critic was animated by any feeling of personal malice towards him.  The phrase ‘literary gentleman’ is a vile phrase, but let that pass.

I accept quite readily your assurance that your critic was simply criticising a work of art in the best way that he could, but I feel that I was fully justified in forming the opinion of him that I did.  He opened his article by a gross personal attack on myself.  This, I need hardly say, was an absolutely unpardonable error of critical taste.

There is no excuse for it except personal malice; and you, Sir, should not have sanctioned it.  A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making 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 made me imagine that he was actuated by malice.  What really confirmed me in my first impression was his reiterated assertion that my book was tedious and dull.

Now, if I were criticising my book, which I have some thoughts of doing, I think I would consider it my duty to point out that it is far too crowded with sensational incident, and far too paradoxical in style, as far, at any rate, as the dialogue goes.  I feel that from a standpoint of art these are true defects in the book.  But tedious and dull the book is not.