I do not mean to insinuate that strong convictions ordinarily involve a certain dishonesty in reasoning; but they _do_ willingly dispense with intelligence. And yet, M. Barrès is too clever not to have quickly grasped the fact that not by impartial illumination of all its aspects can we ensure the speedy dissemination of an idea, but by giving it a definite bias. If you want ideas to succeed, you must submit them one at a time; or, better, to succeed, submit one idea and no more. It is not enough to invent a good medium of expression; it is a question of never outgrowing it. The public likes to know exactly where it stands when a great name is mentioned. And tolerates ill what would congest its brain! At the mention of Pasteur, it likes to be able to say to itself, without hesitation: Yes, hydrophobia. Nietzsche? the _superman_. Curie? radium. Barrès? France and her dead. Quinton? plasma. Just as if you were to say. Lazenby? pickles. And Parmentier, if so be it that he did “invent” the potato, is better known, thanks to this solitary vegetable, than if we had to thank him for the entire produce of our kitchen gardens. Dostoevsky all but reached success in France, when M. de Vogüé had the bright idea of calling, and thus stereotyping in this handy phrase--_the religion of suffering_--the doctrine he found worked into the closing chapters of _Crime and Punishment_. That it is there, I am willing to concede; also that the phrase was a happy invention.... Unfortunately it did not contain the whole being of the man: he was too great in every way to be compressed into such small bulk. For if he was of these for whom “only one thing is needful: to know God,” at least this knowledge of God he tried to diffuse throughout his works in all its human and anxious complexity. Ibsen was not easy to pin down either; like any other writer whose work is interrogative rather than affirmative. The relative success of the two plays, _A Doll’s House_ and _An Enemy of the People_, is due, certainly not to their outstanding excellence, but to the shadow of a conclusion which escaped Ibsen in them both. The public is but ill-pacified by the author who does not come to a strikingly evident solution. In its eyes, it is the sin of uncertainty, indolence of mind, lukewarmness of convictions. And most often, having little liking for intelligence, the public gauges the strength of a conviction by naught but the violence, persistence, and uniformity of the affirmation.