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 which I quoted were unmoved by the endowment of motherhood, by educational reform and by housing schemes.
In reply, Teixeira wrote, 11.8.20:
... Don’t slay the suggestions of the big political novel off-hand or outright. I mean a bigger thing than you do; a thing that not Wells nor Barker nor Harwood ... could write, whereas you, I think, could; a thing as big as Coningsby; a thing called The Secretary of State or The First Lord of the Treasury, or some such frank affair as that.
You have kept up a “very average” logical position in life. You know a number of statesmen, but you know only those whom you like and you like only those whom you esteem. Your portraits of those whom you esteem could not offend them; your sketch even of a genial rogue ... could not offend him; and you don’t or ought not to care if your daguerreotypes of S., M. and B. offended them or not....
Incidentally you might do no little good, to Ireland, which should have been your native land, to England, which by your own choice remains your home, and to the world in general, to which I hope that you bear no ill-will....
In his next letter, 14.8.20, he returns to the same subject:
Your letter ... pretty well convinces me, at any rate about the Coningsby novel. Dizzy never wrote about the period in which he was just then living. All his novels are antedated a good many years. This by way of defending him against any idea that he ever offended by betraying private or official secrets in his novels....