courage, and even the sincerity of mind requisite for an elevation of the level. What did he do for the level of private thinking? Even poor Clough, according to Norton, had an intellectual integrity which Lowell lacked. "He was too intellectually sincere to hold the old beliefs in spite of himself, as Lowell tries to do." A docile man of the world himself, Norton remarks that when Lowell appeared in Paris he "managed to make the Quais and the Rue de Rivoli mere continuations of Brattle Street. I wish he had come abroad ten years ago." A genial and lovable man Lowell was and a fine example of American manhood; yet in the eyes of one of the friends who loved him best he was something too much of the flattered don, of the selfindulgent antiquarian, and of the plausible afterdinner speaker ever to feel the necessity of bringing himself and his culture thoroughly abreast of the modern world. This verdict, reluctantly arrived at, and collectible from Norton's letters, was publicly reaffirmed by Mr. Greenslet in his Life of Lowell, 1905, and again in a brilliantly authoritative fashion by Mr. Brownell himself in American Prose Masters.

The place in the history of American culture formerly occupied by Emerson might have been taken in succession by Lowell, had he ever brought his fine talents, as Mr. Hoover would say, "up to the emery-wheel of competition," had he strenuously kept himself in touch with "the best knowledge, the best ideas of his time." As a matter of

fact, Norton, with little of his friend's popularizing power, was a more progressive link between Emerson's time and ours than was Lowell, because his culture was less musty and his intellectual integrity was more earnest. When his mind had gripped what it took for truth, it did not let go out of what it took for good nature. Those whom he could reach in personal contact or by his amazingly faithful and sympathetic correspondence Norton sustained.

But in general, with the decline of Emerson, American seekers for light were obliged to find their account in Arnold, Sainte-Beuve, Taine, Ruskin, and Pater. They had to go abroad. Lowell, to be sure, had praised old books and nature and patriotism with delightful cleverness and charm. "He liked whatever was sure and wholesome," says Mr. Brownell with a touch of malice, "and eulogized it on all occasions with the zest of a discoverer." But for our conceptions of the historical method; for applications of evolutionary theory to the study of belles-lettres; for the doctrine of the "milieu" and the "Zeitgeist"; for our notions of the importance in culture of painting and the plastic arts; for those quickening watchwords "conscience in intellectual matters,' "study of perfection," "urbanity," "amenity," "sweet reasonableness," "grand style," "Hellenism," "curiosity," "free play of mind," and the rest; and for copious illustration of criticism considered as, in itself, a fine art, we turned, we were obliged to turn, to England and to France.

Since the appearance of Mr. Brownell's books, it is no longer necessary to turn to England and France for initiation into modern criticism. He does not begin where Lowell left off; his first book, French Traits, published in the year following Arnold's death, begins where Arnold left off. It probably never occurred to him, as it has occurred to some of the leaders of the Party of Nature, that a certain novelty of position might be achieved by denying all the axioms on which the criticism of the nineteenth century is founded. He took it for granted that the only novelty worth striving for would lie in the path of a critic who came fully abreast of his great predecessors, and then went forward in the general direction which they had indicated. Sporadic reversion to the primitive, romantic truancies to barbarism, never allured him. He took it for granted that the "humanization of man in society" is the established grand social object of the arts and letters, just as modern men of science take for granted evolution and gravitation. "The business of intelligent criticism," says Mr. Brownell, "is to be in touch with everything.'

Accordingly, one finds his books saturated with everything relevant that preceded them. "I emphasize "everything relevant"; for the extensive and accurate scholarship which he has at his command he never employs like a pedant or like an antiquarian, but always like an artist. He loathes. the irrelevant. He has Greek poetry and criticism at his service; English, French, and Italian history;

the evolution of painting and plastic art; European social life and manners, and an acquaintance with American, English, and French literatures adequate, I should say, to qualify him for a professorial chair in any one of the three literatures. Yet his wide and various learning is always actually in service; it illuminates his "special field," the special field of all vital criticism, namely, the contemporary scene; it comes to a focus, as all sound and enduring art must, and perpetually does-no matter what the date of its origin—in the present hour.

II

Let us take for illustration French Traits, An Essay in Comparative Criticism. Mr. Brownell knows everything that foreigners have said about France. He also knows France. He has not studied it like Emerson, who said that Americans go to Europe to be Americanized; nor like Lowell, who made the Quais and the Rue de Rivoli "mere continuations of Brattle Street." He went to France, as Arnold went, as "a merchant of light," to discover its characteristic virtues and powers and superiorities and, so far as possible, to bring them home for the use of his own countrymen. Arnold's exploration of French culture was, however, mainly literary and educational, and his stimulating recommendation of French virtues was, except in the educational field, fragmentary. Mr. Brownell, after long and profound immersion in

his subject, arrives at a central conception of the French national genius which in his introductory pages he presents in the form of a thesis as follows:

The times change, and the most acutely alive change most in them. Since the days of Louis le Gros, when the national unity began, France has most conspicuously of all nations changed with the epoch; in those successive readjustments which we call progress she has almost invariably been in the lead. She was the star of the ages of faith as she is the light of the ages of fellowship. The contrast between her actual self and her monuments is, therefore, most striking; but at the same time it is superficial only and perfectly explicable. And its explanation gives the key to French character; for there is one instinct of human nature, one aspiration of the mind, which France has incarnated with unbroken continuity from the first-since there was a France at all France has embodied the social instinct. It was this instinct which finally triumphed over the barbaric Frankish personality; which during the panic and individualism of the Middle Ages took refuge in the only haven sympathetically disposed to harbor it and produced the finest monuments of Europe by the force of spiritual solidarity; which, so soon as the time was ripe, extended itself temporarily and created a civil organism that rescued the human spirit from servitude, and which, finally, in the great transformation of the Revolution, obtained the noblest victory over the forces of anarchy and unreason that history records.

The thesis thus announced Mr. Brownell sustains in a succession of extraordinarily penetrating chap