never mistake for the positive. They are no more unconsciously vague here than in the positive.

The sight which could probe so deeply into another race's characteristics has left little for later analysts to amend.

III

In 1902 came "Victorian Prose Masters." Among lovers of letters it excited an immediate interest; and I well remember the stimulus it was to my own imagination. Now, on re-reading it, I find that it "dates" more than the companion volume, perhaps because it is mainly concerned with figures still too august for clear discernment. Certainly, with much that is admirable, it contains judgments which time might have modified-doubtless did-and on the whole is less spontaneous and original than "American Prose Masters," which appeared in 1909. I thought at first that the diminished interest of the Victorian volume might be due to the fact that, dealing mainly with fiction, it omits all reference to the great Russian portent which was already filling the heavens. How situate Thackeray or even Balzac in those heavens without reference to the pole-star of Tolstoy's genius? But this argument falls, because to my mind at least-the "George Eliot" and the "Meredith" contain the book's best pages. The "Thackeray," strangely enough, though the most "convinced" is the least convincing. I am impressed neither by the defense of Thackeray's buttonholing manner, nor by the curious depreciation of Balzac which is employed to throw the English novelist's genius into stronger relief. I agree in the estimate of Thackeray's almost unique natural endowment, but not with the proofs adduced.

But this, apropos of George Eliot: "It is the temperament, not the thinking, of men and women, that is permanently and rewardingly interesting in

fiction". . . this, of George Meredith: "He is often heavy-handed, but always in the pursuit of deftness" -what beautiful foreshortenings they are, and how "modern," as we so oddly say in praise of things unaffected by time!

Such treasures, not rare in the Victorian volume, abound on every page of its successor. The writer's critical faculty had matured, and with it his sense of relative values. The firmness with which he situates his authors, without fear or favour, exactly where each belongs, makes the book unique in American criticism. My one quarrel with it is that a boy's happy memories of Leatherstocking perhaps give too rosy a glow to the appreciation of Cooper. But the "Hawthorne" and the "Poe" are models of serene impartiality, and yet those two were the authors most difficult for an American to judge objectively twenty-five years ago-Hawthorne because, for some mysterious reason, every old literary cliché still sprang full-armed to his defense whenever his name was mentioned, Poe because of the factitious prestige lent him by the genius of Baudelaire in the very country whose intellectual judgments were the source of Brownell's.

Of "The Marble Faun" he says: "Probably its admirers considered that the treatment poetized the moral. But a truth is not poetized by being devitalized."... Of "The House of the Seven Gables": "There is detail enough, but of singular thinness and an almost gaseous expansion"; and of the novels in general: "Hitherto, at all events among ourselves, their lack of substance has

been deemed a quality instead of a defect." And of Hawthorne himself: "He unquestionably dwelt apart, and partly, perhaps, for this reason his soul was believed to be like a star. ... His genius was a reflective one. . . Rev

ery was a state of mind which he indulged and applauded, and there can hardly be a more barren one for the production of anything more significant than conceits and fancies"

and he adds that all this is "not convincing to those who believe that the artistic synthesis of nature should be more rather than less definite than its material." (I italicize this as a singularly happy summary of a central principle of creative art.)

The "Poe" is equally remarkable. "Foreign recognition sets such traps for our naïveté that it is prudent to be on our guard. . . . The theory that the The theory that the foreign estimate previsages posterity's is open to some question' .. and this: "He had no sense of awe. The sense of awe was a plaything with him.

. . He used it as one of the tools of his trade to create his effects, to harrow his reader's nerves." "Crime undoubtedly furnishes apposite material to the novelist of character as well as to the portraitist of manners, and is a personal as well as a social factor in human life. But this aspect of it Poe, whose criminals are only criminals, completely ignores.

Though I have quoted only depreciatory passages from these two chapters it must not be thought that Brownell felt the qualities less than the defects of the authors he dealt with. But Hawthorne and Poe had been mummified by undiscerning admiration; their cult was in danger of becoming a superstition, and Brownell's fearless hand merely swept away the flummery ac

cumulated about their images. I know of nothing as honest and independent as his criticism of these two writers since the young Emerson's reverent but lucid estimate of the Lake Poets.

From the chapter on Emerson much might be quoted which would show that Brownell could praise as delicately and discerningly as he criticised; that in praise and depreciation he remained equally fearless and impartial. But

when a book forms a series of reasoned judgments, and not a mere string of detachable epigrams, the only way to do justice to it is to read it.

The same may be said of all Brownell's books, including the little volume entitled "Criticism" (1914), and the remarkable "Genius of Style" which appeared only four years ago. In all his writings he showed his essential quality: enthusiasm guided by acumen. He could not have been so great a critic had he not had so generous a nature.

IV

How can I end without one personal word of the friend who was even wiser than the critic? I wonder to how many beginners it happens to be met on the threshold by two such guides as Brownell and Edward Burlingame, his colleague in the house of Scribner? I do not think I have ever forgotten one word of the counsels they gave me. Edward Burlingame's were often lapidary; as when, in the attempt to stem the first outrush of my fiction, he said to me one day, with his exquisite gentleness: "And now, wait awhile. You mustn't run the risk of becoming a magazine bore."

Mr. Brownell would not have needed to say that; he made me feel it. As in criticism he achieved the difficult feat of setting up a standard which was

Who is he? What is it that he does, and what is his attitude toward it? Has he, perchance, any social or intellectual significance?

These questions are being asked oftener than they are answered. Advertising as we know it to-day is only about one generation old. Its pioneers are still alive, in many instances, gazing upon the modern complexity and subtlety of their simple art with mild-eyed wonder. Too close to us for proper perspective, advertising still waits for its historians, its biographers, and the curiosity of the general reader about "the man who writes the ads" grows apace.

A few years ago the Chicago office of the Associated Press sent out an amusing story which bears upon this point. The students of Northwestern University, feeling the need for a richer and more appealing background, announced that a committee of leading undergraduates had been formed to "revise" Northwestern's sacred traditions. While the method was somewhat abrupt, the intention was indubitably imaginative. The position of advertising in our economic system parallels the position of the large midland universities in our educational structure. Advertising is beginning to acquire a sense of its own significance. It is beginning to feel its background and history. With some three hundred thousand people in the United States engaged in work related to advertising, the advertisement writer is about to emerge as the professional type evolved by our industrial civiliza

tion.

The history of all pioneering in America has been the repetition of this pattern. First, a few adventurous spirits bid good-by to their relatives and cross the mountains into the trackless forest. The trees are felled, corn planted be

tween the stumps, families raised, the pioneers laid away in their last restingplace. Later come better houses, a new population, industrial cities. Then, with prosperity and leisure established, the older families begin to take an interest in their social standing, in the arts, in heirlooms, and the three brothers who came to North Carolina or Virginia or Massachusetts in 1720.

Like the native American family, every occupation too has had its early days when it was engaged in struggling up from obscure beginnings. In the eighteenth century the occupation of the investment banker was called "jobbing in stocks," and it was not intended to be a pretty or a complimentary term. The lawyer was long regarded as a noxious and parasitical growth, and it is only since the industrial revolution— indeed, only since the American Civil War, really—that manufacturing and "trade" have been considered honorable and respectable.

Advertising has been no exception, but its rise has followed a sharper arc, for the reason that it grew up as a part of our present economic order and because our civilization had already become definitely industrial by the time it appeared. But its origin was humble. enough.

Before 1900, to take an arbitrary date, the advertising man was closely related to the medical gentleman with the checkered vest and wide-brimmed hat who ran travelling shows, offering the rural districts homœopathic medicine combined with entertainment. I have not been unfair in associating advertising with quack medicine; the association was even closer than I have indicated; it was an actual business arrangement. Advertising and patent medicines rose together.

Happily that partnership has been dissolved, the efficacy of advertising having been more clearly demonstrated than that of snake-oil. And with the passing of the patent-medicine era the showman and the stagy inspirationalist were gradually crowded out of the ranks of advertising by men whose creative gifts were of a considerably different order. Advertising began to be written by writers, intellectual workers, men who in another age-the eighteenth century, say—would have hired their pen to satire and become great political pamphleteers, or have slaved as booksellers' hacks at biographies of British worthies, or, as poets and playwrights, have secured food and shelter by the adroit use of dedicatory epistles directed to wealthy peers.

But now business is the patron of the arts, and we have a new order of men of letters who produce advertising the first cultural development clearly assignable to our industrial society. It is a new order, fundamentally marked off from all other forms of creative writing by this characteristic: advertising is not a form of self-expression.

Although the art of advertisement writing is highly conscious art, its substance lies beyond the writer's control, and his own idiosyncrasy of style or manner must be rigorously excluded. Impersonality, unobtrusiveness, utter clarity-these are the mark of craftsmanlike advertising writing. Self-effacement, cruel and complete, is the certain lot of the writer. His sole task is to be persuasive and understood. Yet, like an early Christian martyr, he has his philosophy and his consolation; for in this immolation of self lies the very quintessence of professional triumph.

If advertising is different from the practice of explicitly literary craft in its

suppression of the individual, it does have points where it touches closely on literature. The advertising writer belongs in the company of the artists; he is an artist, concerned with conveying both æsthetic and intellectual material. Like the poet and painter he gives an imaginative illusion of truth and reality. But, like the book-reviewer, he cannot command the substance of his discourse, because for that he is at the mercy of chance and what it brings him. This is the bed of Procrustes upon which the copywriter is stretched. He is cut to fit the subject and the space.

In addition to the limitations of subject-matter imposed upon the advertising writer are those of technic, too, for the very style and method of advertising presentation have been developed in ways which the novelist or essayist, when he attempts them, finds strange and difficult of assimilation. Advertising, like all literature, has its conventions; some sound, some as transitory and inexplicable as Helen Wills's eyeshades.

Much has been made of the dicta of H. L. Mencken, Stuart Sherman, and other men with a weather-eye to the future, that the new American writers. are going to come out of the advertising agencies instead of the newspaper offices.

If there is anything in this, advertising style should be of considerable interest to those who feel responsible for the future of our national letters. Advertising writing is of the sparest sortsketchy, lean, quick, frequently deficient in color and emotional content; not because the writer is, but because the manufacturer whose name signs the advertisement holds such qualities under suspicion. Since the ideas and information to be conveyed are often com