The separation of literary criticism from politics appears to have been a gain both to politics and to literature. If Mr. Swinburne, for example, speaks unkindly about kings and priests in one volume, that offence is not remembered against him, even by the most Conservative critic, when he gives us a book like ‘Atalanta’ or ‘Erechtheus.’ If Victor Hugo applauds the Commune, the Conservative M. Paul de Saint Victor freely forgives him. In the earlier part of the century, on the other hand, poems which had no tinge of politics were furiously assailed, for party reasons, by Tory critics if the author was a Whig, or had friends in the ranks of Whiggery. Perhaps the Whiggish critics were not less one-sided, but their exploits (except a few of Jeffrey's) are forgotten. Either there were no Conservative poets to be attacked, or the Whig attack was so weak, and so unlike the fine fury of the Tory reviewers, that it has lapsed into oblivion. Assuredly no Tory Keats died of an article, no Tory Shelley revenged him in a Conservative ‘Adonais,’ and, if Lord Byron struck back at his Scotch reviewers, Lord Byron was no Tory.

In the happy Truce of the Muses, which now enables us to judge a poet on his literary merits, Mr. Courthope has raised a war-cry which will not, I hope, be widely echoed. He has called his reprinted essays ‘The Liberal Movement in English Literature,’3 and has thus brought back the howls of partisans into a region where they had been long silent. One cannot but regret this intrusion of the factions which have ‘no language but a Cry’ into the tranquil regions of verse. Mr. Courthope knows that the title of his essays will be objected to, and he tries to defend it. Cardinal Newman, he says, employs the term ‘Liberalism’ to denote a movement in the region of thought. Would it not be as true to say that Cardinal Newman uses ‘Liberalism’ as ‘short’ for most things that he dislikes? In any case the word ‘Liberal’ is one of those question-begging, popular, political terms which had been expelled from the criticism of poetry.