fifty or more characters, rendered
invisible through the uniformity of a narration careful of the
proprieties, came forth in full daylight, each standing out clear in
its countless diversities; how, underneath theological dissertations
and monotonous sermons, we discern the throbbings of ever-breathing
hearts, the excitements and depressions of the religious life,
the unforeseen reaction and pell-mell stir of natural feeling, the
infiltrations of surrounding society, the intermittent triumphs
of grace, presenting so many shades of difference that the fullest
description and most flexible style can scarcely garner in the vast
harvest which the critic has caused to germinate in this abandoned
field. And the same elsewhere. Germany, with its genius, so pliant, so
broad, so prompt in transformations, so fitted for the reproduction of
the remotest and strangest states of human thought; England, with its
matter-of-fact mind, so suited to the grappling with moral problems,
to making them clear by figures, weights, and measures, by geography
and statistics, by texts and common sense; France, at length, with its
Parisian culture and drawing-room habits, with its unceasing analysis
of characters and of works, with its ever ready irony at detecting
weaknesses, with its skilled finesse in discriminating shades of
thought--all have plowed over the same ground, and we now begin
to comprehend that no region of history exists in which this deep
sub-soil should not be reached if we would secure adequate crops
between the furrows.

Such is the second step, and we are now in train to follow it out.
Such is the proper aim of contemporary criticism. No one has done this
work so judiciously and on so grand a scale as Sainte-Beuve; in this
respect, we are all his pupils; literary, philosophic, and religious
criticism in books, and even in the newspapers, is to-day entirely
changed by his method. Ulterior evolution must start from this
point. I have often attempted to expose what this evolution is; in my
opinion, it is a new road open to history and which I shall strive to
describe more in detail.

III

After having observed in a man and noted down one, two, three,
and then a multitude of sentiments, do these suffice and does your
knowledge of him seem complete? Does a memorandum book constitute a
psychology? It is not a psychology, and here, as elsewhere, the search
for causes must follow the collection of facts. It matters not wh