who hammered nails into a board
won thousands of votes."

Now the whole of this passage is admirably characteristic of the new
journalism which Mr. Pearson represents, the new journalism which has
just purchased the Standard. To take one instance out of hundreds, the
incomparable man with the board and nails is described in the Pearson's
article as calling out (as he smote the symbolic nail), "Lie number
one. Nailed to the Mast! Nailed to the Mast!" In the whole office
there was apparently no compositor or office-boy to point out that we
speak of lies being nailed to the counter, and not to the mast. Nobody
in the office knew that Pearson's Magazine was falling into a stale
Irish bull, which must be as old as St. Patrick. This is the real and
essential tragedy of the sale of the Standard. It is not merely that
journalism is victorious over literature. It is that bad journalism is
victorious over good journalism.

It is not that one article which we consider costly and beautiful is
being ousted by another kind of article which we consider common or
unclean. It is that of the same article a worse quality is preferred to
a better. If you like popular journalism (as I do), you will know that
Pearson's Magazine is poor and weak popular journalism. You will know
it as certainly as you know bad butter. You will know as certainly
that it is poor popular journalism as you know that the Strand, in the
great days of Sherlock Holmes, was good popular journalism. Mr. Pearson
has been a monument of this enormous banality. About everything he says
and does there is something infinitely weak-minded. He clamours for
home trades and employs foreign ones to print his paper. When this
glaring fact is pointed out, he does not say that the thing was an
oversight, like a sane man. He cuts it off with scissors, like a child
of three. His very cunning is infantile. And like a child of three,
he does not cut it quite off. In all human records I doubt if there is
such an example of a profound simplicity in deception. This is the
sort of intelligence which now sits in the seat of the sane and
honourable old Tory journalism. If it were really the triumph of the
tropical exuberance of the Yankee press, it would be vulgar, but still
tropical. But it is not. We are delivered over to the bramble, and
from the meanest of the shrubs comes the fire upon the cedars of
Lebanon.

The only question now is how much longer the fiction will endure t