I am going to try to point out a fatal lack of austerity in Sherman, a certain ultimate slackness of mind and purpose. The prose, so lustreless beside Arnold’s, shows that Sherman failed to achieve any of the rarer virtues of verbal deportment: just as clearly one realises that not so superficially, so mushily, could Arnold have defined religion as, in Sherman’s words, “that which binds us and holds us. Religion is that which at heart we do earnestly believe in, whatever it is.” Nor could Arnold, doughty wrestler with himself, so easily drop his hard questions and substitute gentler ones. In the essay quoted from above, Sherman went on to raise the question all great minds have most seriously confronted: “Is life worth living, and for what purpose?” But it did not take him long to say, “Assuming that life is worth living, what are its durable satisfactions?”--a serious enough question, but subtly veering the asker away from any tragic vision of life and encouraging him to settle into a limited pattern of behaviour that happens to appeal to his temperament rather than to go forth and lead the great adventure of pursuing perfection. In his growth Sherman was influenced by the books of three conservative critics, Mr. Paul Elmer More, Mr. Irving Babbitt, and the late W. C. Brownell; and here again his conduct was significant of some lack of desperation in him or of some softening influence on the fibres of his mind. For under the pressure of the ideas of Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt he was a little impatient. They were too austere for his taste, whereas he could not admire Brownell sufficiently. But of the three critics Brownell dealt least in the primary ideas of life: he elaborated with a great deal of fine sense secondary ideas about literature and society. He had, it appears to me, a mind more localised in the nineteenth century than the minds of his two colleagues. And nineteenth-century minded, rather than classical minded, was Stuart P. Sherman: his perennial enthusiasms were for Emerson, Whitman, and Stevenson.