Arts and Letters

Mr. Brownell, who died July 22, 1928, in his seventy-seventh year, had been for more than twenty years a member of the Academy. He was elected on January 28, 1908, and was the first occupant of chair thirty-four. In choosing him for membership, the Academy honored for the first time a professional critic, for though Henry James, Lounsbury, Burroughs, and Higginson had all written literary criticism, it was incidental to their other work. Mr. Brownell was known in 1908 as the author of three significant volumes of criticism: French Traits, French Art, and Victorian Prose Masters. Born in New York in 1851, he had had a sound training at Amherst College, had worked for two years under Godkin on the Nation, had spent three years abroad, chiefly in Paris, studying foreign art and literature, and after his return had taken his desk with Charles Scribner's Sons, where he remained, as literary adviser, for nearly forty years.

A few members of the Academy can remember him there in the eighteen nineties. A man of fine reserve, and thought by some to be austere, he could nevertheless welcome an unknown author with gay cordiality, and the memory of his beautifully penned and witty comments on the galley-proofs of one's first books is something still to be treasured. One of Mr. Brownell's younger associates in more recent years, Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday, has written this delightful sketch of him:

The first literary adviser to a publishing house I ever beheld was W. C. Brownell. I regarded him as omniscient. The calm, unconscious nobility of his presence, the classic sculpture of his head and greying beard, the philosophic detachment of his bearing, suggested to my mind a somewhat confused blend of Socrates and Marcus Aurelius. His volumes ''Victorian Prose Masters" and "American Prose Masters" I read as the stone tablets of the law. And I have not ceased to read them now as the very wise commentary of a full, disciplined, and beautiful mind on human life. Innumerable times a day he would stroll in and out. He would move up and down the sidewalk to smoke—smoking being outlawed in the building; or stand for long periods of time gazing in at the window display. But I do not believe that at the end of the day he could have told you a thing that was in the window.

Is not that a charming portrait of a thinker?

For it was primarily as a thinker that Brownell won and held his place among American men of letters. "Criticism," he said, "is not the product of reading, but of thought. To produce vital and useful criticism it is necessary to think, think, and then, when tired of thinking, to think more." His first book, French Traits, published when he was thirty-eight, was a triumph of straight thinking. In theme it was one of those national character studies which have been familiar since Madame de Staël's Germany. He was saturated with his material; but the keenness of observation, the sympathy for the French character and the admirably vivid style are less remarkable, after all, than the clearness and orderliness of Brownell's analytic mind. He had thought his subject through, and though the book appeared nearly forty years ago, it has not been superseded. French Art, published three years later, is likewise a beautiful example of expository criticism. The clarity and plastic quality of his theme give order and movement to his thoughts, while the precision and charm of his diction, and a sort of sunlight upon every page, make this volume the most winning of all his books. It does more than convince; it persuades.

Mr. Brownell's friends were aware of those circumstances which compelled him for many years to spend his evenings in solitary reading, in search of some occupation for an anxious mind. He read endlessly, and endlessly did he reflect upon, analyze, compare, and weigh the great writers of his own time. Victorian Prose Masters (1901) and American Prose Masters (1914) were the result. It was perhaps natural that he assessed the English writers first. In 1901 the word "Victorian" had no connotation of obloquy; and Brownell owed so much to Arnold and Carlyle, he admired Thackeray so boundlessly, he was so much interested in George Eliot and Meredith, he was so sure that Ruskin ought not to have written about art at all, that he could not help writing a book about them. If it was not exactly epoch-making criticism, either in its method or in its influence, it was nevertheless dispassionate and penetrating, and it prepared his readers for the richer and more original volume, American Prose Masters, upon which Brownell's reputation with the general public may ultimately rest. For this book contributed significantly to that revival of critical interest in our own authors which has characterized the last fifteen years. The chapters are a succession of masterpieces. The one on Lowell reveals the whole of Brownell's own temperament and critical philosophy as he points out what Lowell, in spite of all his gifts, failed to achieve. How fresh and robust is the chapter on Fenimore Cooper; and with what delicacy of appreciation does he analyze Cooper's exact opposite, Henry James! The chapter on Emerson would be memorable if only for Brownell's account of his boyish memory of Emerson as a lecturer. The unimpassioned and somewhat cool examination of the substance and style of Poe and Hawthorne was resented by many admirers of these writers, and no doubt Brownell's predominating intellectualism made him indifferent to the glamor of those romantic qualities by virtue of which Poe and Hawthorne continue to weave their spell. It is true that his personal love for poetry was keen and lifelong. He carried in his pocket a copy of A Shropshire Lad until it was quite worn out, and he knew his Keats and Shelley and Swinburne and Wordsworth by heart. The poets were to him a deep source of private happiness, but as a professional critic he had not much to say at any time about poetry and the poetic imagination. The public knew him as a prose-man, a prose-man by nature and by preference; a tough-minded realist; and for all that fascinating but dubious borderland between prose and poetry, he had a refined but clear-cut contempt. One cannot "weigh," he declared, "imponderable iridescence."

Yet this very restriction of his field, though it may have limited the range of his influence, certainly heightened his authority upon those two memorable occasions when he read before the Academy and the Institute his masterly not to say magisterial addresses entitled "Criticism" and "Standards." We listened to those addresses with the keenest intellectual delight. How transparently clear it all seemed as interpreted by the voice of the author! What delicious shadings of irony, what trenchant wit! Nevertheless one captivated listener, at least, confesses his perplexity over the fact that as he reads these discourses,—and he has read them dozens of times,—he finds their style extremely difficult. One must force himself to follow the trail of Brownell's thought, if he is to understand the central issue of modern critical controversy, yet the trail lies well up above the timber-line, and it is undeniably hard going. It may be that Brownell realized for the first time that he was on the defensive,—that he must guard and qualify and distinguish and define warily,—and that his style suffered in consequence. In his French Traits he had quoted Joubert's maxim: "Make truth lovely, and do not try to arm her." But now he did arm her for a battle whose outcome seemed doubtful, and the bright face of truth peers somewhat grimly through the slits in the riveted steel.

When published in book form, these addresses were widely read by the judicious; but the injudicious, who are always in the vast majority, have so persistently misunderstood and misstated Brownell's position, that one is forced to the conclusion that few of his opponents have ever taken the pains to master what he actually said. Standards were to him neither dogmatic rules nor inherited conventions. They arise insensibly in the mind of the cultivated public. They are to be tested, however, by principles, and to examine and set forth these principles is the function of criticism. Taste must, in short, be rationalized. "In literature and art there are no longer any statutes, but the common law of principles is as applicable as ever."

If this is a fair summary of Brownell's views, it is evident that he is as far from the dogmatic critics who sit, or once sat, on the extreme right, as he is from the impressionistic critics who lounge upon the extreme left. Yet inasmuch as the very word "standards" has become obnoxious to many of our contemporaries, Brownell knew that he was challenging the present drift of a sensation-loving age. The question in which our whole discussion ends, he wrote, is this: "Are art and letters to be sentimentalized out of their established standards by the comprehensive and militant democratic movement of our time?" I doubt if he really thought that sentimentality and sensationalism would ultimately prevail, but it is certain that he did not intend to let them win without a fight, and it is equally certain that if they cannot win without answering Brownell's arguments, their victory will be long deferred.

Few shadows of this conflict, however, and singularly few of the natural shadows of old age, fall upon the pages of his last books, published when he was more than seventy, namely, The Genius of Style and Democratic Distinction in America. In his expert analysis of English prose style, Brownell exhibits his ripest qualities. In the last two chapters of his book, discussing the present day uses of style in art and letters, he draws sword once more against what our lamented colleague Stuart Sherman used to call the "Party of Nature," and lays about him with the skill of a veteran and the vigor of a boy. In the book on Democratic Distinction, which is dedicated to the memory of Stuart Sherman, Brownell had one immense advantage over most debaters of this question. He was himself a born democrat of the Jefferson and Lincoln school, and this tendency had been fixed by his long residence in democratic France. And he was likewise, and with equal naturalness, a man of distinction who believed in distinction. He had therefore no self-conscious worries about either distinction or democracy. He took them for granted. His task was to discover in our present-day American democracy the forces that are making for distinction, and he found them in abundance. Of course he chaffed the enemies of progress and ridiculed superficiality and egotism and vainglory. But the book is not an old man's Jeremiad; it is a bland, urbane, quizzical survey of the actual and hopeful American scene.

Such, all too briefly summarized, was the achievement of this thinker. He had some public honors, but not many. He was supposed to be a traditionalist; and one must admit that he was born in 1851, that he knew his Arnold and Sainte-Beuve, and that he often quoted the Bible. It is true that he understood the traditions of the elders; that was one part of his professional business. But he was not in the least a traditionalist. His mental life was not lived in the past. He was intensely modern. Like every fertilizing critic, he lived in the present and worked for the future. He spent a life-time of rare intellectual energy in the presence of beautiful objects of art and literature, striving to comprehend them in all their relations and in reference to the principles upon which they are based. He accomplished his task more fully than most men. He had the felicity, not merely of handing on the torch to the younger generation, but of filling the torch anew. The secret of his power,—one may be permitted to suspect,—is betrayed in that sentence written at the end of his life, with an eloquence all the more moving for his habitual reserve, in which he contrasts self-indulgence and self-assertion with the self-reliance "born of faith in the absolute and eternal."