found
a final philosophy of some sort to live by, while Mr. Moore is always
walking the world looking for a new one. Stevenson had found that the
secret of life lies in laughter and humility. Self is the gorgon.
Vanity sees it in the mirror of other men and lives. Pride studies it
for itself and is turned to stone.

It is necessary to dwell on this defect in Mr. Moore, because it is
really the weakness of work which is not without its strength. Mr.
Moore's egoism is not merely a moral weakness, it is a very constant
and influential aesthetic weakness as well. We should really be much
more interested in Mr. Moore if he were not quite so interested in
himself. We feel as if we were being shown through a gallery of really
fine pictures, into each of which, by some useless and discordant
convention, the artist had represented the same figure in the same
attitude. "The Grand Canal with a distant view of Mr. Moore," "Effect
of Mr. Moore through a Scotch Mist," "Mr. Moore by Firelight," "Ruins
of Mr. Moore by Moonlight," and so on, seems to be the endless series.
He would no doubt reply that in such a book as this he intended to
reveal himself. But the answer is that in such a book as this he does
not succeed. One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies
precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys
self-revelation. A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try
to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will
try to be an encyclopaedia of culture, and his own real personality
will be lost in that false universalism. Thinking about himself will
lead to trying to be the universe; trying to be the universe will lead
to ceasing to be anything. If, on the other hand, a man is sensible
enough to think only about the universe; he will think about it in his
own individual way. He will keep virgin the secret of God; he will see
the grass as no other man can see it, and look at a sun that no man has
ever known. This fact is very practically brought out in Mr. Moore's
"Confessions." In reading them we do not feel the presence of a
clean-cut personality like that of Thackeray and Matthew Arnold. We
only read a number of quite clever and largely conflicting opinions
which might be uttered by any clever person, but which we are called
upon to admire specifically, because they are uttered by Mr. Moore. He
is the only thread that connects Catholicism and Protestantism, realism
and m