Points of View (Sherman)/W. C. Brownell
In the critical movement which seeks to perfect American literature and make it an adequate expression and mold of American character, there are two curiously antagonistic parties, one of which flies the banner of culture and the other the banner of nature. One party holds that we shall never achieve adequate national expression until we have received the inspiration and mastered the technic of traditional art. The other party holds that we shall never achieve any national expression unless we follow our instincts and fearlessly utilize our fresh experience. Both are right, but each tends to stand apart belligerently upon its own rightness. The leaders of one party sulk, like Achilles, in the universities; the leaders of the other party rail, like Thersites, in the newspapers. "Academics!" cry the journalists. "Barbarians!" cry the professors. The antagonism is acute, and the consequences of this division are a tendency toward sterility in the Party of Culture, and a tendency toward ignorance and rawness in the Party of Nature.
What the situation calls for is a mediator who understands and values that which both parties desire, and who can unite their complimentary virtues in a common purpose. Mr. Brownell has every important qualification for this imperative task of American criticism—except one. In spite of the fact that he is not a professor but was once a journalist—which should disarm the suspicions of every barbaric heart; and in spite of the fact that he has been a lifelong friend and professional counsellor of authors and artists, he appears to lack the confidence of the Party of Nature. This, I think it can be demonstrated, he deserves no less than the confidence of the Party of Culture, which he has long enjoyed. The evidence may be examined in detail in the six distinguished volumes which he has contributed to American critical literature, as follows: French Traits, 1889; French Art, 1892; Victorian Prose Masters, 1901; American Prose Masters, 1909; Criticism, 1914; and Standards, 1917.
We have other literary critics who have written as learnedly, more voluminously, and perhaps on a wider range of topics; and we have other critics who have brought their personalities to play upon their public with more of what is often accepted without scrutiny as "inspirational power." But I doubt whether any other is more abundantly supplied with those general ideas in which the permanent value of critical writing largely resides; and I am not acquainted with any other who has quite so pertinently, intelligently, and intelligibly applied his general ideas to the real cultural problems of our time—I mean the definition of culture's own standards, the creation of a cultural ideal, the description of culture's business in a modern democracy. In these six books, if anywhere, American criticism is ripe. Here one finds extensive and varied learning, unintermitting intelligence, fastidious taste, an exacting artistic conscience, and high technical expertness, engaged in the service of reality and modernity. If I were asked where in American letters a student can obtain, with least admixture of the irrelevant, that discipline of taste and that general sense of initiation which an earlier generation sought in the works of Ruskin, Arnold, and Pater, I should say in the works of Mr. Brownell.
Our first great apostle of modern culture was Emerson. He performed for our grandfathers in America the service which Goethe performed for Germany, Mme. de Staël for France, Coleridge and Carlyle in their fashion for England, till they were "gathered to the bosom of political and social reaction." He initiated them into the modern spirit. He liberated their minds from conventional and shackling forms of thought. He set their original powers to work upon a native and national culture. In many respects he remains our greatest critic, our most fecundating and creative mind in the field of letters. But Emerson established his point of view and developed his methods before the main results of intellectual effort in the nineteenth century were fully accessible. He has suffered a decline in influence attributable to the presence in his work of the disjecta membra of an old-fashioned metaphysical philosophy and attributable still more to his want of a modern critical method and matter to work upon. In 1870 Charles Eliot Norton, an American dedicated to "the study of perfection" who had enjoyed intimate relations with the leaders of culture in England and in Europe, lamented that Emerson was losing his grip and that no one was rising to take his place. "No best man with us," he declared, "has done more to influence the nation than Emerson—but the country has in a sense outgrown him. He was the friend and helper of its youth; but for the difficulties and struggles of its manhood we need the wisdom of the reflective and rational understanding, not that of the intuitions." (My italics.)
It is clear to any reader of Norton's Letters that he would have liked to see Lowell succeed Emerson as leader of the American intelligentsia; but it is also clear, I think, that Lowell in some respects disappointed him. Even when on the occasion of Lowell's death Norton strives to give the fullest possible emphasis to the nation's loss, there is a latent note of dissatisfaction in his tribute: "He has done more than any man of our generation to maintain the level of good sense and right feeling in public affairs." One expects an intellectual leader of the first rank to do more than merely maintain "the level of good sense and right feeling in public affairs." The suggestion is that Lowell failed to rise above an admirable mediocrity; that, industrious reader though he was, he lacked the energy, the 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 self-indulgent 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.
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 chapters on Morality, Intelligence, Sense and Sentiment, Manners, Women, The Art Instinct, The Provincial Spirit, and Democracy. One sees the cathedrals as the "grandiose links in the chain which unites the Revolution to the twelfth-century communal movement for equality." One follows the path that leads from Notre Dame de Paris to the Nouvel Opéra. One perceives the essential continuity of national effort from the Merovingian epoch to "the gayety, the bonhomie, the bright graciousness of a Parisian or provincial crowd." The book is consummately composed. One knows from point to point where one is and whither one is going. Perfect lucidity and firmness of design are united with great richness of detail; for the detail is always subordinated to the total intended effect.
If Mr. Brownell had limited his purpose strictly to displaying the relation between the traditional "instinct" of the French people and their characteristic qualities and defects, he would still have given us the most valuable American book about France that I know anything about—the book, that is which tells us most of that which is best worth knowing. But French Traits is also an "essay in comparative criticism." There are illuminating side flashes upon France from Germany, England, Italy, and Spain, but the national traits which are steadily present in Mr. Brownell's mind for comparison are the American traits. The parallel thesis which he develops by implication is, that America embodies the individualistic instinct, and that the characteristic qualities and defects of her art and letters and morals and manners are consequences of the individualistic instinct. The book comes to its burning focus in the penultimate chapter on "Democracy" and in the final chapter on "New York after Paris," in which he deals with the defects of our civilization with a cutting candor which some of our young people imagine was unknown before 1920. Let us take, for example, this paragraph on our Babbittian activities:
Certainly in New York we are too vain of our bustle to realize how mannerless and motiveless it is. The essence of life is movement, but so is the essence of epilepsy. Moreover, the life of the New Yorker who chases street-cars, eats at a lunch-counter, drinks what will "take hold" quickly at a bar he can quit instantly, reads only the head-lines of his newspaper, keeps abreast of the intellectual movement by inspecting the display of the Elevated Railway newsstands while he fumes at having to wait two minutes for his train, hastily buys his tardy ticket of sidewalk speculators, and leaves the theater as if it were on fire—the life of such a man is, notwithstanding all its futile activity, varied by long spaces of absolute mental stagnation, of moral coma. . . . Owing to this lack of a real, a rational activity, our individual civilization, which seems when successful a scramble, and when unlucky a sauve qui peut, is morally as well as spectacularly, not ill described in so far as its external aspect is concerned by the epithet flat. Enervation seems to menace those whom hyperæsthesia spares.
The happiness enjoyed by the mass of the French people Mr. Brownell attributes to the genuineness of their democracy. The real substance of well-being he finds more evenly distributed among them than among us. "The people, from top to bottom, are far more perfectly humanized than elsewhere. Equality has been such a practical education for them that even the ignorant have attained that intelligence which is the end of formal education in greater measure than the corresponding classes of the most highly educated portions of Prussia itself."
The correction, for us, which this state of affairs suggests to Mr. Brownell is a return to our own religion and philosophy of democracy and a fresh effort to fulfil its promises. "It is perfectly certain," he declares, "that but for Jefferson's French philosophy, called then as now demagogic Quixotism, we should have had as short-lived a democratic republic as Hamilton prophesied and endeavored to compass. Our next epoch made a nation of us, and crystallized the spirit of nationality in democratic forms. But nothing is more significant of the discredit into which democracy as our ideal has fallen among us than the way in which this formative period of the nation's growth has been obscured by the struggle with slavery which immediately followed it. . . . Democratic philosophy nearly perished. It ceased to be propagated among 'the best people,' as they are called. It lost its hold on the mass of intelligence, on the newspapers, on the college graduates, on all those who had not an especial capacity for keeping their heads."
Let the curious person take this chapter on "Democracy," add to it the incidental discussion of the subject in the essay on "Emerson," and then compare the stimulus to thought that he receives from it with the stimulus that he finds in Lowell's "Democracy" or in Arnold's "Democracy," and he will feel for himself, I believe, the decisive superiority of Mr. Brownell's treatment. How little "academic" this chapter is, or indeed for that matter, how little "academic" is the spirit of the entire book—how steadily and with a central sweep of its wisdom it drives at practice, I can best suggest, perhaps, by a final quotation:
"There are no questions," said Gambetta, superbly, "but social questions." The apothegm formulates the spiritual instinct of France since the days of the national beginnings. It formulates also, I think, the instinct of the future. That is why France is so inexhaustibly interesting—because in one way or another she, far more than any other nation, has always represented the aspirations of civilization, because she has always sought development in common, and because in this respect the ideal she has always followed is the ideal of the future. It is, at any rate, inseparable from the visions which a material age permits to the few idealists of to-day.
Mr. Brownell's second book, French Art, 1892, may be regarded, like French Traits, as establishing a new and difficult standard for the American critic. Its significance for us may perhaps be increased if one recalls the fact that the first chair of the history of art in America was established for Charles Eliot Norton in 1875 (seven years after Ruskin's election to the newly founded Slade professorship at Oxford), previous to which time the study of the arts had, in Norton's words, "been relegated to professional artists or to mere dilettanti, and the idea that a complete and satisfactory education could not be obtained without some knowledge of their character and history, and without such culture of the æsthetic faculties as the study of them might afford, appeared strange and inacceptable to many even of the most—enlightened thinkers on the subject of the education of youth." The number of American literary critics capable of writing a critical, historical survey of French or English or American art is not yet excessively numerous. But in France to-day, Mr. Brownell tells us in Criticism, 1914, "no literary critic with a tithe of Sainte-Beuve's authority would be likely to incur the genuine compassion expressed for Sainte-Beuve, when he ventured to talk about art, by the Goncourts in their candid Diary."
French Art traces the evolution of French painting from Claude and Poussin to Degas; and in similar fashion the evolution of French sculpture from Claux Sluters to Rodin—to whom, significantly, the book is dedicated. Neither intimate acquaintance with the galleries of Europe nor technical expertness is prerequisite to the intelligent and appreciative reading of this book. Art, as Mr. Brownell presents it, is only one of the languages or modes of expression at the disposal of the cultivated spirit which animates the various epochs of history. One who has penetrated to this general spirit through one language readily learns to "translate."
In a sense French Art reaffirms the thesis of French Traits—systematically elaborating the earlier chapter on "The Art Instinct." "More than that of any other modern people," begins the argument, "French art is a national expression"; and the rest of the book is the demonstration of that initial propositon. Incidentally or concurrently it is one of the most illuminating discussions ever written of the powers and virtues of a great tradition. Finally, it is a beautiful illustration throughout of intelligence energetically and scrupulously, and I think successfully, applied to understanding and judging a great variety of works to which frequently the critic feels but slight emotional response.
Of French art in general Mr. Brownell is very far from being an unqualified admirer. In the æsthetic field, the French appear to him to be characterized by disciplined taste and high technical competence, rather than by high imaginative inspiration. "We may say, from Poussin to Puvis de Chavannes, from Clouet to Meissonier, taste—a refined and cultivated sense of what is sound, estimable, competent, reserved, satisfactory, up to the mark, and above all, elegant and distinguished—has been at once the arbiter and the stimulus of excellence in French painting."
Among our younger critics at the present time it is little the custom to expend any effort on understanding what one does not admire. The current fashion is to ignore what fails immediately to please or else to mispresent it—with malice or ignorance or with both malice and ignorance. A critic who departs from this fashion and does candid justice to an adversary is at once under suspicion of having espoused his adversary's cause. Discrimination is become the Unpardonable Sin. Mr. Brownell's justice has accordingly confused many people with regard to his own position. He is, for example, nowadays commonly spoken of as a "classicist" or as "mere traditionalist," an upholder of "the academic"—of course in the bad sense. What is the evidence? Nothing but this: he has written with unquestionable insight of classical art and the disciplinary power of tradition. Hear him on the value of tradition and acquaintance with antecedent artists:
They tend to exalt the salutary, the serene, and the important principle of perfection, to keep its worship alive, to pass on its torch to the next hand. They tend to curb the violent, to restrain the exaggerated, to elevate the ignoble. In brief, the office of culture is the same in the province of art as it is elsewhere, the cultivation of the sense of perfection, the sense which nature with its incompleteness and its immense inorganic content of infinite suggestion cannot supply.
Among the obiter dicta on the critic's duty scattered throughout this book none is more devoutly to be commended to contemporary attention than this: "It is a sure mark of narrowness and defective powers of perception to fail to discover the point of view of what one disesteems."
As a matter of fact, the so-called classical art of the French impresses Mr. Brownell as splendidly null; it leaves him cold; it affects him as inane. He does not relish, though he recognizes, the virtues of the classical period till he discovers them transformed, disguised, but still a controlling force for form and measure, beneath the passion and color and romantic "suggestiveness" of Géricault, Delacroix, and Millet. But he is no sworn romanticist either. The temper of his mind is intensely modern, and modern, I venture to say, with a kind of passionate loyalty, which, for its own part, has done with dispellable illusions, which craves only reality. "The entire energy of the era is concentrated," he declares, "upon what is to be discerned in, argued from, and inspired by the tangible, the real, the substantial"; and in that realistic striving of the era he has desired to be a part. He dedicates his book to Rodin, surely not because he loves the smooth academic perfection symbolized, for example, in Mr. Kenyon Cox's "Tradition," but because he responds to "life, personality, originality, vigor, intensity, variety—the best in modern art." It is the false, as he says somewhere, and not the real which is antithetical to the ideal; and his own ideal in art is, I believe, clearly an imaginative realism.
A critic who works with any seriousness and consistency inevitably provides us with the materials for constructing his own ideal artist, his ideal man of letters. In the two books which we have examined we have seen Mr. Brownell bringing the history of French society to a focus in modern democracy and the history of French art to a focus in modern realism. Turning now to his more strictly literary studies, we find him bringing them sharply to bear upon the age in which he has lived. Though an index to his works might serve as a directory to "the best that has been thought and said in the world," he has collected the light from all the luminaries of his intellectual heavens and centered it upon the authors included in his two companion volumes, Victorian Prose Masters and American Prose Masters; and these authors were all of the nineteenth century. They are not, of course, all the men and women of the age who have touched us deeply; but they afford, on the whole, an adequate representation of the literary forces in England and America which have made us what we are. They are sufficient, at any rate, to enable us to indicate clearly the principal features of Mr. Brownell's ideal man of letters. Alike from his reasoned commendations and his reasoned condemnations, one perceives that his ideal man of letters is distinguished by the following traits: truth of substance, intelligent and frequent use of his reason, breadth of culture, the spiritual refinement of his democracy, a high and imaginative seriousness, a sense for form, and a style urbane and adequate to its purposes.
When Mr. Brownell finds a majority of these features present in a single author, as in Thackeray and Arnold in England and Emerson in America, his presentation of the character is finely appreciative and attains a communicable glow of admiration. But one observes that he applies pretty consistently all his tests to all the cases that appear in his court; and the ordeal is a severe one. If the candidate for glory fails on two or three of the cardinal points, as Henry James and George Meredith do, he receives a sharply discriminating verdict. But if he fails on a majority of them, as Poe does, no seductions of style nor brilliance of ratiocinative power can save him; he leaves the court with only the rags of his honors. It would be profitable to examine closely the structure and the detail of these essays; for the structure stands examination, and inspection of the detail can only discover the scrupulosity of its finish, We must content ourselves with a few crucial instances.
Of all the writers of prose fiction Thackeray is manifestly the favorite. The essential soundness and sweetness of his character counts for him. The "effortless ease and simplicity" of his style counts for him. But what counts most decisively for him is this:
He was above all else a lover of truth. The love of truth was with him, indeed, less a sentiment than a passion. It absorbed his mind and inspired its activity. To the moral temperament thus attested falsehood of all kinds seemed the one thing in the universe worth the evocation of militant energy. The exposure of sham enlisted all his artistic faculty. He pursued it with the most searching subtlety ever devoted to a definite aim in all his books. The villain of all his stories is the hypocrite.
I suppose a critic of the strict æsthetic camp would say that Thackeray loved truth because he was an artist. Mr. Brownell, for whom there is neither beauty nor goodness without truth, appears to say that he was an artist because he loved truth and had a fresh vision of it; and that seems to my own sense less like standing the facts on their heads. Keeping the facts right side up does not hinder Mr. Brownell from perceiving the mere æsthetic usefulness of truth as "artistic material":
It need hardly be pointed out that hypocrisy constitutes one of the most effective elements which the novelist can use in portraying human life on a large scale and under civilized conditions. Imposture of one kind or another almost monopolizes the seamy side of any society's existence. In the material of the novelist of manners it has the same place as crime in that of the romance of adventure. . . . Almost inevitably the novelist, who both by predisposition and by practice handles it well, presents a picture of sound and vital verisimilitude, and of profounder and more universal significance than a study of most other social forces.
If one bears in mind Mr. Brownell's almost unqualified admiration for Thackeray's truth of substance and for his effortless ease and simplicity of style, and if one also recalls the other features of his ideal man of letters, it will be evident that his verdicts on the other writers of prose fiction are notably consistent and in accordance with reason. George Eliot receives her qualified diploma with special mention for truth and high seriousness: "No other novelist gives one such a poignant, sometimes such an insupportable sense that life is immensely serious, and no other, in consequence, is surer of being read, and read indefinitely, by serious readers." Cooper, as we have seen, receives a certificate for "truth of substance." Hawthorne, on the other hand, is drastically, and, I think, a bit harshly, reduced as a classic of American letters on the ground of his romantic insubstantiality and his fatalistic confidence in an indolent "genius," resulting in an inadequate culture. Poe is likewise reduced on the same charge and with the additional charge of moral vacuity.
The two novelists whose gravely dubious awards best attest Mr. Brownell's critical integrity are George Meredith and Henry James—both dedicated to truth, as it was given them to see the truth; both highly active intelligences; both distinguished representatives of the Party of Culture, and both eminently refined and adequately serious. Mr. Brownell himself has so many qualities in common with them, he impresses me as so much of a Jamesian and Meredithian character that I could well have understood and indeed have condoned a little more leniency toward them. I explain the ultimate hardening of his heart in their regard primarily by the fact that he is by conviction, if not by instinct, a Thackerayan, and that when he called into mind the effortless ease and simplicity of Thackeray, he took compassion on the younger generation, and prayed that they might be delivered from any further developments of the Meredithian or the later Jacobean manner.
Among the critics and apostles of culture, Arnold is easily the first in his estimation—the most frequently quoted, and the most pervasively present as an invisible influence. The completeness, the roundness, and the essential rightness of his entire conception of the "good life" count for Mr. Brownell, as they count for the rest of us. We do not get far away from him in respect to fundamentals without finding ourselves going wrong. But, significantly, that which in Mr. Brownell's eyes "singularizes Arnold, personally, among the writers of his time and for his public is that, in a more marked and definite way than is to be said of any of them he developed his nature as well as directed his work in accordance with the definite ideal of reason." The high value which he attaches to the exercise of the intellectual faculty appears also in his judgment of Emerson, whose "ideal of reason" was perhaps somewhat less "definite" than Arnold's. Says Mr. Brownell, "Emerson's moral greatness—most conspicuous of all facts about him, as I think it is—receives its essentially individual stamp, aside from its perfection, from its indissoluble marriage with intellect."
For American students of culture the most in teresting trait in Mr. Brownell's ideal man of letters is what I have called the spiritual refinement of his democracy. This conception may be studied profitably in the two complementary essays on Emerson and Carlyle. Carlyle was a great artist malgre lui, but by his paucity of ideas, his violence of temper, his prejudices, his eccentricity of style, his indifference to all the shades of truth—constituting virtually an indifference to truth, and by his reactionary rage against reason, science, and democracy—by all these traits Carlyle represents pretty nearly the antithesis of Mr. Brownell's ideal modern man of letters. Carlyle detested that return of the eighteenth century to reason and nature and that genuine intellectual radicalism which in England, France, and America laid the foundations of our political and social philosophy and liberated the most enlightened spirit of contemporary letters:
Its humanitarianism meant nothing to him. Its reat discovery of the dignity of man, he flouted its substitution of the heart for the soul, its rationalization of the affections, its ideals of freedom of spirit and faculty, of equality of rights and duties, of fraternity of interest and feelings to the end of mutual advantage and coöperative advance, he saw only a chaotic scramble after the ignis fatuus of happiness.
Of hero-worship at the expense of respect for institutions, which all the "strong men" and their advocates, from Frederick and Carlyle to Roosevelt and his biographers, tend to foster and inculcate, Mr. Brownell feels a civilized and, I believe, a profoundly sagacious apprehension:
The same plebeian antagonism to democratic feeling [my italics] that leads him to consider the spirit of the time as negligible except as incarnated in the hero, leads him inevitably to magnify the hero in his purely personal and particular character. Thus, for example, his admiration of Johnson is based on his worshipping according to the old formulas in St. Clement Danes every Sunday in the age of Voltaire; though for his attempt to rationalize the same old formulas he has nothing but ridicule for Coleridge.
So much for the main grounds on which Carlyle is decisively condemned. Now hear Mr. Brownell on Emerson:
Specifically, one of his greatest services both to us and to mankind . . . . is what might be called the rationalization of democracy through the ideal development of the individual. . . . Too fastidious to respond to the elementary appeal of philanthropy, he was yet bold enough and detached enough to recognize the injustice of privilege, and the claims of every human potentiality for development into power. . . . The very fact that he was no respecter of persons protected him from illusions as to classes, and the finality of feudalism was alone enough to lead his revolutionary and independent spirit to see it as an arrest of development and not an ideal. . . . If his emotional nature lacked warmth, what eminently it possessed was an exquisite refinement, and a constituent of his refinement was an instinctive antipathy to ideas of dominance, dictation, patronage, caste and material superiority whose essential grossness repelled him and whose ultimate origin in contemptuousness—probably the one moral state except cravenness that chiefly he deemed contemptible—was plain enough to his penetration.
If Mr. Brownell had struck out no other bold phrase than "plebeian antagonism to democratic feeling," he would deserve to be remembered. If he had developed no other thesis than this, that an instinct for equality is "a constituent of refinement" and sensitiveness a mark of true democracy, he—would still be an important contributor to American—culture. To stigmatize as vulgarity what often masks as aristocratic superiority, and to name as the grace of a beautiful spirit what is often spoken of as the slatternly sentiment of the mob is, in a person of unquestionably distinguished refinement, to perform the service which the prince rendered to Cinderella and her proud stepsisters. To speak less "tropically," it is to begin that elevation of the level of one's private thinking upon which the level of public thought and the increase of charm in our society and in our letters ultimately depend.
One aspect of our subject remaining for consideration is suggested by Criticism and Standards: Mr. Brownell's keen interest in improving the theory and raising the standards of his own art. Various scholars in the universities write at length nowadays on the history and principles of criticism—for scholars. But few are the practising critics who have thought so hard or written so much on the technic and art of criticism that is expert, helpful and stimulating to other practitioners. At exactly what time he dedicated himself to mastering its materials and methods I cannot say, but, as I conjecture, at a fairly early period; for no characteristic of his short row of masterpieces is more marked than their coherent, adequate, yet economical fulfilment of a preconceived design. He must have done these things, I say, for the abstract precepts of Criticism, produced in 1914, are illustrated with precision by his own practice since 1889.
The critic's business, according to this little manual, is to discern and characterize the abstract qualities of the personality which informs every important piece of literature, as every important work of plastic art. His equipment should include, in addition to extensive and intensive acquaintance with belles-lettres, a liberal knowledge of history, acquaintance with the fine arts, a tincture of philosophic training, and a personal "philosophy of life"—the last indispensable if one's work is to have outline and coherence. In his essay on Henry James, I cannot feel that Mr. Brownell has quite justly denied the novelist's possession of a philosophy of life; but in the essay on James he has stated succinctly what the indispensable elements of an artist's "philosophy" are:
It is simply to be profoundly impressed by certain truths. These truths need not be recondite, but they must be deeply felt. They need be in no degree original. The writer's originality will have abundant scope in their expression.
Since the critic's aim is conviction, he must appeal to some accepted standard. He cannot rely upon impressionistic whim nor upon academic authority. He must appeal to the one standard which is generally accepted in a rationalistic age; he must appeal to reason. At this point, Mr. Brownell's precept is less persuasive and less easy to follow than his practice. As I have endeavored to show, in practice his standard is the ideal man of letters, as formulated by a critic of a certain stipulated culture. Reason is merely or mainly the instrument for instructively comparing the personality discoverable in a new work of art with this ideal. By formulating and diligently applying this ideal, by making it very exacting and yet on the whole, I think, very clear, very tangible, very practicable, and very persuasive, Mr. Brownell has shown himself a "creative" critic. It is one of his main contributions.
It may at this point be remarked that his ideal man of letters bears a strong resemblance to his ideal critic. The main features of both are alike, and most of these features are recognizable and definable by purely intellectual processes. The profile of neither his critic nor his man of letters looks to the eye of imagination like that of a lyric poet. If I were to apply to Mr. Brownell his own method, I should say that the characteristic merits and the characteristic defects of his criticism are both attributable to the extraordinary predominance of his intelligence.
"To produce vital and useful criticism," he declares in his "Lowell," where he perhaps treats the subject more effectively because less abstractly—"to produce vital and useful criticism it is necessary to think, think, think, and then, when tired of thinking, to think more." This is doubtless quite true; and it explains the unpopularity of criticism among us, and its rareness. It also explains such unpopularity as Mr. Brownell has enjoyed with the Party of Nature. People do not like to think. People will do almost anything, within the law, to avoid thinking—such things, for example, as making card-indexes and compiling bibliographies and genealogies. But what people really like to do is to feel, to dream, to thrill with delight, or to be diverted with change. Mr. Brownell, nevertheless, relentlessly insists upon thinking. He thinks before he begins to write; each essay opens with a thought, another follows in the succeeding sentence, and so on incessantly to the end. There are no places to rest:—no biographical passages, no merely historical paragraphs, no gossip, scanty anecdotes, no personal digressions, few illustrative extracts from the authors under discussion. No; except one great exhilaration of which I shall speak in a moment, nothing but the steady, remorseless, brilliant business of critical characterization. It is a strain, like reading Meredith and Henry James, which people will not readily undergo unless they are preassured of an unusual reward.
With profound deference, I venture to doubt whether criticism is wisely restricted quite so exclusively to the field of pure knowledge and understanding. I doubt whether the art of criticism can, in the present state of our public, be most effectively practised within the strict limits of this field. His own resolution to admit no taste which he cannot "rationalize," to speak of no elation which he has not a rational "right" to feel, limits his power of communicating some of the undeniable effects which one receives from the immediate presence of unquestionably great personalities and great works of art. In his schedule of values he has, to be sure, made a place for sentiment, the throb of passion, the surge and beating of desire; but he appreciates ecstasy a shade languidly, and one cannot but associate his comparatively incidental treatment of poetry and something like indifference to the remarkable rhythmical qualities of his prose masters to the fact that there is little or nothing thoroughly "rational" to be said about what passion and poetry and rhythm do to "this quintessence of dust" which we are.
But I have said more than enough of the defects attributable to an extraordinarily predominant intelligence. In the main, I think the type of criticism produced by this intelligence is, at the present time, of especial and conspicuous service. In the present state of our letters, I agree with Mr. Brownell, in spite of Pope, that "a little learning is a useful thing," and that a little intelligence is even to be encouraged. For a hundred critical "salesmen" who will cheerfully undertake to communicate the emotion of great works of art, there are one or two who will attempt, beyond the most threadbare platitudes, to utter anything in the similitude of a thought; there are only one or two in a hundred who will jeopardize the favor of their audience or sacrifice their own mental ease to seek a reason for being "bored to extinction" by Pendennis, or for bursting into peans of enthusiasm and rage over the latest bit of pornography suppressed by the censor. There is, after all, a certain very human craving which finds its satisfaction in knowing the causes and reasons of things, and no one has discovered a method of satisfying this craving without effort. A criticism which practises discrimination and high differentiation, and which therefore demands and rewards close attention, a criticism which avowedly emphasizes rather the discipline than the delights of culture, is, as the physicians say, "indicated," and this, beyond all our other practitioners of the art, Mr. Brownell provides.
And, though he gives us charily the first fine careless rapture of the emotional response to letters, he does constantly mingle the pleasant with the useful in the delectable form which intelligence takes in its moments of surplus power—in the form, I mean, of wit. The superiority of Mr. Brownell's intelligence has enabled him to enjoy more of these moments of surplus power than zny other of our critics. His latest book, Standards, a work of strictly contemporaneous satirical inspiration, scintillates with wit from the first page to the last. It is the most continuous and silvery peal of "thoughtful laughter" that ever burst from our American Academy of Arts and Letters to float in hovering echoes over the unheeding heads of our New Barbarians. But wit and epigrammatic force are constant attendants upon Mr. Brownell's most serious analytic processes; they are incidents of his penetration, like the flash of a finely edged instrument. In the "Hawthorne," for example, this rare power of the intelligence is in continuously brilliant play. In this case, indeed, I suspect that it is a little excessively sharpened by a Knickerbocker's anti-New England malice—a malice, one admits, not without provocation in the slightly excessive awe which the old New England group felt toward themselves, and still more in the distinctively Frog-Pondian reverence with which certain wives of our Boston and Cambridge worthies habitually referred to "the awful majesty" of their own husbands. A realist, even an idealistic realist like Mr. Brownell, finds it difficult to swallow all that without a drop of irony in the glass.
Butje suis de ceux qui citent—why stand prating before the curtain, with Cyrano behind it?
Of Hawthorne, Mr. Brownell remarks: "He unquestionably dwelt apart, and partly, perhaps, for this reason his soul was generally believed to be like a star." "A recluse in life, he overflows to the readers. He does not tell very much, but apparently he tells everything." "Instead of reading he reflected—'brooded' perhaps, in his pythian character. But he had very little to brood over. Hence the unsubstantial character of his fanciful progeny." Of Emerson: "Communication was manifestly the last concern of the lecturer. "When he left his church he took his pulpit with him." "He was not so much a delegate of the divine as a part of it." Concerning Poe's Tales this question: "Finally of what value after all is goose-flesh as a guide to correct estimates of art?" Of Lowell: "He had a 'genius' for being perfunctory and genuine at the same time." "He beamed and expanded in a confidence free from the fear of confutation or even contradiction." A consolatory thought in Criticism: "It seems unlikely that the unreal will ever regain the empire it once possessed. Its loss, at all events, is not ours, since it leaves us the universe." I have italicized: the wit in the original context depends upon the fact that this really stupendous consolation steals in like a mouse. Revival of animal worship, with denominational cleavage, noted in Standards: "Two distinct and interhostile sects of secular schismatics, one adoring the golden calf and the other incensing the under dog." A suggestion to the New Barbarians, who constitute the left wing of the Party of Nature: "In the realm of intelligence sincerity is but an elementary virtue. It is often the hardest thing to forgive, as when, for example, it is vaunted as a superior substitute for intelligence itself."
In illustrating the vivacities of Mr. Brownell's manner, I have done what he never does: I have, as he would say, "caressed my predilections"; I have indulged myself in what he would stigmatize as "a Capuan dalliance with detail." But I return now to what I regard as the most distinguished feature of his ideal critic, namely, his method; and to the result of that method, namely, an impressive organic form in the critical essay. The method, as we have seen, begins with thinking, and the principal divisions of the work are as follows. First, the critic is to discover, by analysis or by intuition, in the subject before him, a theme. Toward this theme he is then sharply to define his own total feeling and attitude: thus this theme becomes his thesis. Next, he is to justify and correct his thesis by analysis of the constituting elements of his subject. This accomplished, he proceeds to the disposition of the various members of his discourse for the detailed examination of the "constituting elements." When the members have been rightly ordered and proportions duly kept, the essay appears to be produced from the theme as the fingers are produced from the wrist—with other implications of the image. As the successive members of the discourse are extended, like the gradually opening fingers of a hand, they first entirely disclose, and then, in a conclusive or "synthetic" grip, entirely enclose—what they hold. That which they hold, if the process has been successful, is a personality. As personality is the soul of art, to state it—that is, to produce its characteristics in critical terms—is, as Mr. Brownell declares, "the crown of critical achievement."
It is something to have formulated such a method. That he has applied it with brilliant success to revealing, in turn, the characteristics of the French people, of French painting and sculpture, of the literature of England, and finally of the literature of America, assures to Mr. Brownell, I do not doubt, a secure and distinguished place in the history of our criticism. But if my own analysis has been of any avail, I have disclosed a personality which requires only to be known to them in order to make a wider and wider appeal to all those members of the younger generation who feel any concern in the "study of perfection." There are other living American apostles of culture who profess the power of initiation into that liberty of the spirit which results from knowing and following the law of our own higher natures; but there is no other, as it seems to me, of anything like his eminence, who can give to our somewhat fiercely realistic young people so much which they are now prepared to receive.
No apostle of culture, no one but a king of the South Sea Islands, could conceivably give to the left wing of the Party of Nature all that it desires. But Mr. Brownell has occupied himself for fifty years with that crucial problem which has vexed the best minds of the world since the eighteenth century and which is still before us as the central critical problem of the twentieth: how to return to nature and to reason at the same time! He has found a solution, and the one solution yet proposed which has any prospect of satisfaction in it. The only way, he holds, to bring our nature and our reason together—and the only "fun" which can adequately console us for what Henry James called "the long humiliation of life"—is to set our reason contriving ever more and more difficult human tasks for our nature to perform. This is the solution of a genuine, an intelligent and a cultivated intellectual radicalism as distinguished from an ignorant, an unintelligent, and a false intellectual radicalism: and in this genuine sense Mr. Brownell is an intellectual radical.
Neither an iconoclast nor a reactionary, he has been steadfastly and consistently a man of intensely contemporary sympathies and interests; he has stood unflinchingly for reason as our supreme instrument; eminent in culture, he has valued the past as it could be used in the present; a convinced democrat, he has criticized the brutality of our individualism and has commended the study of French equality and the French social instinct as the means to refine our own society and to make it more delectable; no lover of negation, the main tendency of his work is Positive and affirmative; in every field of art he has turned from academic vacuity and romantic insubstantiality to welcome the modern passion for reality; as a critic of letters he has formulated and applied stapdards which are exacting but both intelligible and attainable; in his own writing he has striven with high seriousness to exemplify the virtues of an idealistic realism; he has declared that the highest service of criticism "is to secure that the true and the beautiful, and not the ugly and the false, may in wider and wider circles of appreciation be esteemed to be the good." If these are not the ideals of the younger generation, so much the worse for the younger generation. But I think they are—or that they will be as soon as the younger generation knows itself.