Amherst College - Olio Yearbook (Amherst, MA)

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AMHER.9T COLLEGE 9 like experiments, if in the hands of masters like La Farge and Richard- son. His long and intimate friendship with La Farge dates from this period. The other was a literary criticism, printed as an ordinary book notice, and reads as follows: Poems, by Eliza Gwendolen Buttrick. Boston. Roberts Brothers. 187-pp. 118. 5151 net. These poems are pretty bad. This is a bit savage. But as no more poems were forthcoming from the author we may believe it was salutary. In 1879, I think, began the prolonged and fruitful residence in France. The history of these years is writ plain in French Traits and French Art. Of French Traits Taine wrote to Doctor NVilliam James of I-Iarvard, It is the best book on France ever written by one not a 'Frenchmanf' That judgment is likely to stand. The industry of those years in France was prodigious, as is attested by the wide, accu- rate and discriminating knowledge of French politics, society and art which he brought back to America for future use, a knowledge he has been able easily to increase with intelligence because the fundamental, unchanging lines along which French character consistently develops have never become blurred in his vision. The chapter on Rodin and the Institutef' added to the new edition of French Art, illustrates my point. The learning in evidence on almost every page of French Traits is amazing, yet I recall no paragraph in which erudition is lugged in. It is there because it had to be there to express adequately Brownell's thought. Very likely it is not generally known that three of the chapters of French Traits were delivered as lectures at Amherst, about 1887, I think. The undergraduates of that year will not wantonly assail me if I say that my impression is that they did not appreciate the beauty and delicate humor of those lectures. fl myself paid fifty cents for the priv- ilege of a sound sleep in the Baptist Church, in 1867, while Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered one of his immortal essays. Still I should be sor1'y to have anyone draw the inference that I am somnolent now when I read his Demonologyfj And it ought to be said-at any rate Iwill venture to say it, which is the same thing-that the lectures required for an adequate appreciation of them an amount of knowledge which no undergraduate has any business to possess. VVere these-among the opening sentences of the Hrst lecture-likely to arrest and hold the at- tention of an average college audience? As one observes the audience

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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

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10 THE OLIO: VOL. XLVIII which listens to Guignol, it seems fabulous that tl1e French ever crossed tl1e Rhine. As one notes the gaiety, the bafzhomie, the bright gracious- ness of a Parisian or provincial crowd, the Merovingian epoch seems like a myth. Is there any traceable relationship between St. Remy at Rheims and St. Augustin at Paris, between St. Jean at Lyons and the Nouvel Opera, between Saint Chapelle and the Pantheon ? The differ- ence is as vast as that between gloom and gayety, between the grandiose and the familiar, the mystic and the rational. From the Palace of the Popes at Avignon to the Marseilles Cannebiere, from the Chartres sculpture to M. Falquiere, from Plessis-les-Tours to the Tuileries, is a long way. The Pope listening to dear Father Tom's bewildering logic was not more rattled than were those young listeners to this keen, learned, cosmopolitan critic. Yet how just and natural it all is. But others beside the undergraduates were a little, or a good deal, plagued with incertitude as they heard the lecturer assert that although it is perfectly true that 'education cannot make men moral,' it is equally true that nothing but education can make mafzkimz' moral. ...... . Which best serves the cause of social morality, the Salvation Army or Girard College, Mr. Moody or Harvard College ? Somehow this did not square at once or easily with much heard in the room in which Moral Philosophy was taught. I was in the audience on the hrst night of the lectures, having run up from New York for the purpose, andl recall tl1e general indisposition to pass a frank judgment upon the utterances of this voice wholly new to Amherst. Neither Brownell nor his audience foresaw that within a decade Chautauqua would demand twenty thousand copies of that lecture and its fellows. In 1892 French Art was published. It is far more than a critical history of French painting from Poussin to Monet, of French sculpture from Jean Goujon to Roding it is a profound and luminous exposition of the art instinct, so authoritative and rational that it served as a demonstration to that section of the American people intelligently interested in art, of the rightfulness of Brownell's place as the foremost art critic in America theretofore accorded him by his intimates. And it is interesting to note that Brownellfs appreciation of Rodin, besides introducing that prodigious genius to our people, has, perhaps more than any other favorable agency, unveiled the great sculptor to his own nation. The Victorian Prose Masters is, I fancy, too well known at