Amherst College - Olio Yearbook (Amherst, MA)

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DEDICATION TO WILLIAM CRARY BROWNELL AMERICAS FOREMOST CRITIC AND ANIHERST'S LOYAI.. SON WE DEDICATE WHATEVER OF' WORTH OUR OLIO MAY CONTAIN

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8 THE OLIO: VOL. XLVII1 William,Crary Brownell, L. H. D. RO'WNEI.l,, as a Senior in Amherst, clearly and liberally furnished evidence of the critical insight and the intellectual subtlety Which, in full. development, make him the foremost American critic of our day. If anyone is disposed to chal- lenge this assertion, a comparison of his Hyde Prize Oration, delivered at graduation in 1871, with the 'l'l1ackeray in his Victorian Prose Masters will. speedily serve successfully to establish it. In them both is the same clear insight, the same sanity and serenity, and the same notable rehnement. Brownell. started right. He was born, I should say, with a potential. catholicity of taste and an intel- lectual cosmopolitanism. The l-Iebraic canopy, hung over Amherst, had rifts enough through which his young eyes beheld the Hellenic heavens. Beauty, order, measure, and the knowledge which looks out in all directions and feeds in all helds, were his ardent interest even in his callow college days. I believe he was regarded as somewhat super- cilious because he refused to kindle at the sight of the particular pig- ments which a copy of Guido's Aurora, hung in Doctor Mather's recitation room, somewhat insistently displayed. After graduation he became a journalist plying his craft in New York. II may best say here that I have no intention of telling the story of his life.J He was on the staff of the World, in the reputable days of Manton Marble, and afterward literary editor of the Nation. Two characteristic examples of the sort of work he did as a journalist I like to recall. One of them, a description of the New Trinity Church in Boston H8771 and published in the VVorld, is still a competent and discriminating, though not wholly eulogistic, criticism of the architec- ture and decoration of that building. It reveals an amount of technical knowledge of the designer's art and fi mastery of phrase which one is unable to account for in a man so young. The experiment, then novel in America, of employing a really great artist to decorate a church in- terior, very likely elicited his acute interest in the future possibilities of