Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/103

 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