Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/112

 With this picture of bustling American ennui, which the fiction of recent years has now made so familiar to us, Mr. Brownell's picture of French gayety of heart and intellectual vivacity is in rather painful contrast. Many of our contemporary social doctors diagnose our malady as "too much democracy," and prescribe with various sugarings of the pill an aristocratic reaction, an injection of the superman philosophy, or a revival of the Arnoldian doctrine of "the saving remnant." Now the "saving remnant" is the one Arnoldine doctrine which, in its social and political applications, Mr. Brownell rejects. "We have a 'remnant' of our own," he declares in his essay on Arnold, "whose activities instead of exalting our esteem of 'remnants' tends to make us suspicious of them." "The attractiveness of the doctrine," he remarks with malign acuteness in Standards, "must be measured by the character of the remnant itself—in our case certainly hardly worth the sacrifice of the rest of the nation to achieve." In both these passages there is more than a tincture of irony; for Mr. Brownell is himself a philosophical democrat, and his own measure of national success is simply presented in this sentence from the chapter on "Democracy" in French Traits: "There is by general admission more happiness enjoyed by more people in France than in any other European country."

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