and that when he called into mind the effortless ease and simplicity of Thackeray, he took compassion on the younger generation, and prayed that they might be delivered from any further developments of the Meredithian or the later Jacobean manner.
Among the critics and apostles of culture, Arnold is easily the first in his estimation—the most frequently quoted, and the most pervasively present as an invisible influence. The completeness, the roundness, and the essential rightness of his entire conception of the "good life" count for Mr. Brownell, as they count for the rest of us. We do not get far away from him in respect to fundamentals without finding ourselves going wrong. But, significantly, that which in Mr. Brownell's eyes "singularizes Arnold, personally, among the writers of his time and for his public is that, in a more marked and definite way than is to be said of any of them he developed his nature as well as directed his work in accordance with the definite ideal of reason." The high value which he attaches to the exercise of the intellectual faculty appears also in his judgment of Emerson, whose "ideal of reason" was perhaps somewhat less "definite" than Arnold's. Says Mr. Brownell, "Emerson's moral greatness—most conspicuous of all facts about him, as I think it is—receives its essentially individual stamp, aside from its perfection, from its indissoluble marriage with intellect."
For American students of culture the most in
