the evolution of painting and plastic art; European social life and manners, and an acquaintance with American, English, and French literatures adequate, I should say, to qualify him for a professorial chair in any one of the three literatures. Yet his wide and various learning is always actually in service; it illuminates his "special field," the special field of all vital criticism, namely, the contemporary scene; it comes to a focus, as all sound and enduring art must, and perpetually does—no matter what the date of its origin—in the present hour.
Let us take for illustration French Traits, An Essay in Comparative Criticism. Mr. Brownell knows everything that foreigners have said about France. He also knows France. He has not studied it like Emerson, who said that Americans go to Europe to be Americanized; nor like Lowell, who made the Quais and the Rue de Rivoli "mere continuations of Brattle Street." He went to France, as Arnold went, as "a merchant of light," to discover its characteristic virtues and powers and superiorities and, so far as possible, to bring them home for the use of his own countrymen. Arnold's exploration of French culture was, however, mainly literary and educational, and his stimulating recommendation of French virtues was, except in the educational field, fragmentary. Mr. Brownell, after long and profound immersion in
