In a book recently crowned by the French Academy, _Le Mouvement humaniste aux États-Unis_, Louis J. A. Mercier, professor of French at Harvard, restricts his account to Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and W. C. Brownell. In a broad view of the “movement” the late Mr. Brownell doubtless merits a conspicuous place. Entering criticism, like Mr. More, by way of journalism, Brownell performed valuable service through his acute non-provincial book on _French Traits_ as far back as 1888, and through his perennial insistence on high standards in literature and the fine arts. Never a humanist in the strict doctrinal sense, before his death he inclined to respond to the humanitarian optimism of America. The tendency toward humanitarianism, emotional sympathy with divine or undivine average humanity, appeared more strikingly in the post-war writings of Stuart P. Sherman. A student under Professor Babbitt, a contributor to the _Nation_ under Mr. More, Sherman became the author of two books written in a vigorous and accomplished style and permeated with humanistic principles, one on Matthew Arnold conceived as a Victorian humanist, and one _On Contemporary Literature_ conceived as a chaos of naturalism. Then, carried away by admiration of Wilsonian idealism and hatred of “Prussian autocracy,” and by an uncritical devotion to Emerson, he drifted from his humanistic position into an ever vaguer faith in the common man, and at length, as a literary journalist in New York, into a rather indulgent impressionism. In the field of the fine arts, the most humanistic writer has been Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., of Princeton. Among others who published significant books in various fields, prior to 1928, are P. H. Frye, Sherlock Bronson Gass, Robert Shafer, Percy H. Houston, and W. F. Giese. By 1928 something like a movement could indeed be discerned: books began to multiply, and periodicals were printing series of articles--the _Forum_ and the _Bookman_ in America, the _Criterion_ (edited by T. S. Eliot) and the _Nineteenth Century and After_ in England. Whether the movement will continue to develop, whether it will succumb to disunion and vagueness, or be submerged by a narrow conventionalism of one sort or other, it would be idle to predict.