creased if one recalls the fact that the first chair of the history of art in America was established for Charles Eliot Norton in 1875 (seven years after Ruskin's election to the newly founded Slade professorship at Oxford), previous to which time the study of the arts had, in Norton's words, "been relegated to professional artists or to mere dilettanti, and the idea that a complete and satisfactory education could not be obtained without some knowledge of their character and history, and without such culture of the æsthetic faculties as the study of them might afford, appeared strange and inacceptable to many even of the most—enlightened thinkers on the subject of the education of youth." The number of American literary critics capable of writing a critical, historical survey of French or English or American art is not yet excessively numerous. But in France to-day, Mr. Brownell tells us in Criticism, 1914, "no literary critic with a tithe of Sainte-Beuve's authority would be likely to incur the genuine compassion expressed for Sainte-Beuve, when he ventured to talk about art, by the Goncourts in their candid Diary."
French Art traces the evolution of French painting from Claude and Poussin to Degas; and in similar fashion the evolution of French sculpture from Claux Sluters to Rodin—to whom, significantly, the book is dedicated. Neither intimate acquaintance with the galleries of Europe nor technical expertness is prerequisite to the intelligent and appreciative reading of this book. Art, as Mr.
