Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/133

 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