hat
journalists of this order represent public opinion. It may be doubted
whether any honest and serious Tariff Reformer would for a moment
maintain that there was any majority for Tariff Reform in the country
comparable to the ludicrous preponderance which money has given it
among the great dailies. The only inference is that for purposes of
real public opinion the press is now a mere plutocratic oligarchy.
Doubtless the public buys the wares of these men, for one reason or
another. But there is no more reason to suppose that the public admires
their politics than that the public admires the delicate philosophy of
Mr. Crosse or the darker and sterner creed of Mr. Blackwell. If these
men are merely tradesmen, there is nothing to say except that there are
plenty like them in the Battersea Park Road, and many much better. But
if they make any sort of attempt to be politicians, we can only point
out to them that they are not as yet even good journalists.

IX. The Moods of Mr. George Moore

Mr. George Moore began his literary career by writing his personal
confessions; nor is there any harm in this if he had not continued them
for the remainder of his life. He is a man of genuinely forcible mind
and of great command over a kind of rhetorical and fugitive conviction
which excites and pleases. He is in a perpetual state of temporary
honesty. He has admired all the most admirable modern eccentrics until
they could stand it no longer. Everything he writes, it is to be fully
admitted, has a genuine mental power. His account of his reason for
leaving the Roman Catholic Church is possibly the most admirable
tribute to that communion which has been written of late years. For the
fact of the matter is, that the weakness which has rendered barren the
many brilliancies of Mr. Moore is actually that weakness which the
Roman Catholic Church is at its best in combating. Mr. Moore hates
Catholicism because it breaks up the house of looking-glasses in which
he lives. Mr. Moore does not dislike so much being asked to believe in
the spiritual existence of miracles or sacraments, but he does
fundamentally dislike being asked to believe in the actual existence of
other people. Like his master Pater and all the aesthetes, his real
quarrel with life is that it is not a dream that can be moulded by the
dreamer. It is not the dogma of the reality of the other world that
troubles him, but the dogma of the reality of this world.

The t