I worked myself up to a climax of eloquence, and thought that I had demolished all possibility of defence of their system. But I had succeeded only by ignoring the vices and weaknesses of society. These wise men quietly and almost unconcernedly took me behind the gaudy theatrical curtain of the world, and smiled to think how like their old social ideals had been to those I had described, and to see the same vanity and posturing in European refinement as in their own evil past. They mourned over my blindness of mind in failing to look through the gorgeous transparency at the tawdry vulgarities behind. Following it through many forms and stages of life, animal and human, they showed me the law of social intercourse; not the highest but the lowest emotional and moral level of a herd or circle do the natures and minds of its members ultimately reach, however lofty the aspirations of some of them may be. A company in which free utterance is the rule is soon mastered by base interpretation of the noblest lives, and it is to guard against the effects of this hydrostatic law of ethics that churches and temples have been erected. There the awe of a higher power and the conventions of worship conceal the inevitability of the law, and save the shyer natures for brief periods from the evil influence of the bold. The most masterful religions have always provided permanent refuges for the finer spirits who dread conflict with the unscrupulous wit or power of the world, and who know how in a struggle of speech or action or even pure thought the wielder of the fouler weapons wins. It has been the rule throughout civilised history that the greatest characters, if they cling to moral principle, at last withdraw into solitude partial or complete, and become the sages of the world; if they remain in action and succeed, the necessity for further success drives them to accept the moral level of the lowest they have to struggle with; for if immoral men of less intellectual power overcome them, defeat means to them ultimate exhaustion of the soul; nothing bleaches the faculties and reduces them to the common level like failure after failure. However great a hero may be to begin with, success in action closes his moral career, whilst failure closes his intellectual. To die in his first great victory is the truest happiness that can befall him.