Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/137

 critical problem of the twentieth: how to return to nature and to reason at the same time! He has found a solution, and the one solution yet proposed which has any prospect of satisfaction in it. The only way, he holds, to bring our nature and our reason together—and the only "fun" which can adequately console us for what Henry James called "the long humiliation of life"—is to set our reason contriving ever more and more difficult human tasks for our nature to perform. This is the solution of a genuine, an intelligent and a cultivated intellectual radicalism as distinguished from an ignorant, an unintelligent, and a false intellectual radicalism: and in this genuine sense Mr. Brownell is an intellectual radical.

Neither an iconoclast nor a reactionary, he has been steadfastly and consistently a man of intensely contemporary sympathies and interests; he has stood unflinchingly for reason as our supreme instrument; eminent in culture, he has valued the past as it could be used in the present; a convinced democrat, he has criticized the brutality of our individualism and has commended the study of French equality and the French social instinct as the means to refine our own society and to make it more delectable; no lover of negation, the main tendency of his work is Positive and affirmative; in every field of art he has turned from academic vacuity and romantic insubstantiality to welcome the modern passion for reality; as a critic of letters he has formulated and applied stapdards which are exacting but both in-