been at once the arbiter and the stimulus of excellence in French painting."
Among our younger critics at the present time it is little the custom to expend any effort on understanding what one does not admire. The current fashion is to ignore what fails immediately to please or else to mispresent it—with malice or ignorance or with both malice and ignorance. A critic who departs from this fashion and does candid justice to an adversary is at once under suspicion of having espoused his adversary's cause. Discrimination is become the Unpardonable Sin. Mr. Brownell's justice has accordingly confused many people with regard to his own position. He is, for example, nowadays commonly spoken of as a "classicist" or as "mere traditionalist," an upholder of "the academic"—of course in the bad sense. What is the evidence? Nothing but this: he has written with unquestionable insight of classical art and the disciplinary power of tradition. Hear him on the value of tradition and acquaintance with antecedent artists:
They tend to exalt the salutary, the serene, and the important principle of perfection, to keep its worship alive, to pass on its torch to the next hand. They tend to curb the violent, to restrain the exaggerated, to elevate the ignoble. In brief, the office of culture is the same in the province of art as it is elsewhere, the cultivation of the sense of perfection, the sense which nature with its incompleteness and its immense inorganic content of infinite suggestion cannot supply.
