The power and permanence of Sainte Beuve are due to his having applied this theory to the interpretation of literature. He is not content till he has seen the relation between the conduct and the opinions, the conduct and the art of a character. Or take Emerson himself, why was it that being so much he was not more? How came it that after his magnificent prologue in the Phi Beta Kappa address, which is like the opening of a symphony, he relapsed into iteration and brilliant but momentary visions of his own horizon? He kept repeating his theme till he piped himself into fragmentary inconsequence. The reason is that he had learned all he knew before he retired to Concord and contemplation. Active life would have made him blossom annually and last like Gladstone. Or take Goethe: all that is questionable in him results from his violation of two of Froebel’s laws of psychology. He fixed his attention upon self-development and thereby gradually ossified. Every moment of egotism was an intellectual loss. His contact with people, meanwhile, became more and more formal as he grew older, and his work more and more inexpressive. Give me a man’s beliefs, and I will give you his occupation. What has happened to that radical that he seems to have become so moderate and reasonable? You find that for six months he has been clerk to the Civil Service Reform Club. Why is the mystical poetry of this intellectual man as vacant as the fashion print he edits for his daily bread? His employment has tracked his mind to these unearthly regions. He is dead here too. There is no such thing as independent belief, based on evidence and reflection. The thing we call belief is a mere record left by conduct. If you sincerely go through the regimen of Loyola’s manual, you will come out a Jesuit. You can no more resist it than you can resist the operation of ether. This man is an optimist. It means that he has struggled. That man is a pessimist. It means that he has shirked. Here is one who has been in touch with all movements for good during a dismal era of corruption, and yet he has no faith. It means that the whole of him has not been enlisted. His conscience has drawn him forward. It is not enough. There is compromise in him. He is not an absolute fighter. Here is the most excellent gentleman in America, an old idealist untouchably transcendental, an educated man. To your amazement he thinks that it is occasionally necessary to subsidize the powers of evil. He was bred a banker. Here is a village schoolma’am who from a rag of information in a county paper has divined the true inwardness of a complicated controversy at Washington which you happen to know all about. She has been reforming a poorhouse. A is a clergyman, good but ineffective. He relies on beneficence and persuasion. He does not know the world better than a club loafer knows it. The only entry to it is by attack, the only progress by action.