Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/107

 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;