FERDINAND BRUNETIERE. 785 



and tangilile work of a man who was not only a writer but a pro- 

 fessor, a lecturer, and the editor of the Rrrtw, and who died at the af^e 

 of fifty-seven. He touched on criticism, history, aesthetics, sociol()<,'y, 

 ethics, pedagogics, philosoph\-, apologetics, and theology; and if he 

 did not remake thena all, he seldom left things exactly as he had found 

 them. By signs like that you can recognize the true masters. Brune- 

 tiere was probal)ly among the two or three greatest influences upon the 

 French thought of his time." 



To attempt here any detailed summary of this great though frag- 

 mentary work would be presumptuous. It is not, perhaps, presump- 

 tuous to say that Monsieur Giraud's memorable tribute to his master 

 and friend revi^-es and confirms an impression which Brunetiere 

 made on American readers and hearers during his life time. Nobody 

 was ever more French than he, in uncompromising intellectual honesty, 

 in untiring assiduity of work, in a vigor and a precision of thought 

 inexhaustible and ultimate, in fervent effort to attain and to set forth 

 the truth. Nobod^\' was ever more French, either, in what may per- 

 haps be called the limitations inevitable to precision. To see things 

 clearly, you must fix your point of view. This fixed, you may look 

 either backward, bemoaning the faded virtues of the past; or for- 

 ward, anticipating the gleaming virtues of the future; or you may 

 strive to define that inexorable process of change which the opti- 

 mism of America calls progress and complacently assumes to tend 

 heavenward. 



Brunetiere, intensely French, chose the third of these alternatives, 

 always conscious that the present is the creature of the past and the 

 creator of the future. In their passage from past to future, those who 

 love the past are apt to lament and those who love the future are apt 

 enthusiastically to hope; meanwhile, the general run of mankind are 

 content to liAC in the present, thoughtlessly accepting commonplace. 

 Now commonplace is the instinctive expression of humanity : — in 

 literature, for example, it asserts the enduring merit of works which 

 survive to be classics; in religion, it comfortably accepts the doctrine 

 of the church. Which is all very sensible; but, when asked to account 

 for its conclusions, its reasons are apt to be stupid and flimsy. A 

 rather shallow kind of conventional thought, nowadays called radical, 

 assumes that the task of intelligence is to dissipate the fog of canting 

 reasons in which commonplace assumptions are enshrouded, and 

 ingenuously believes that folly can thus be swept nowhere. A more 

 distinguished type of mind, admitting the old reasons often wrong, is 

 not willing to conclude that the old assumptions are equally so. It 



