Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/118

 "Away with him!" exclaim our hasty leaders of the Party of Nature. "How can any one who pretends to see such virtues in tradition be anything but a traditionalist?" A question, to which the answer is: No one can—unless he possess critical poise. If he does possess critical poise, however, he is capable of observing with Mr. Brownell: "The peril of the pursuit of perfection is inanity, the peril of nature-worship is eccentricity. Opposite temperaments will always differ as to the comparative value of the two." As for tradition, furthermore: "Everything depends upon the way in which one makes use of his patrimony. There is an eternal opposition between using it in a routine and mechanical way, drawing the interest on it, so to speak, from time to time on the one hand, and on the other reinvesting it according to the dictates of one's own feeling and faculty. This latter is what every great artist has done. . . . It is what Rodin has done with what the forerunners of Greece and Italy devised him. It is exactly what the Institute sculpture does not do." A mere academician would scent something like heresy here.

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