8 THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 



for the scientific impulse of the last half -century. Have not 

 all histories, it will be said, at all periods of the world, been 

 written in this way ? Has not all criticism proceeded upon 

 this method? I would recommend those who ask these 

 questions to peruse Tiraboschi's ^ Storia della Letteratura 

 Italiana,* one of the most solid and valuable monuments of 

 erudition ; or if that is requiring too much from human 

 patience, let them take up Hallam's 'Literature of Europe.' 

 Next I would point to the magnificent criticism, in all parts 

 instinct with genius, which our age owes to Mr. Ruskin. I 

 think it will be found that neither in Tiraboschi's conscien- 

 tious and exhaustive record of his nation's culture, nor in 

 Mr. Buskin's luminous discourse upon the principles of art 

 and the merits or demerits of particular artists, does the 

 specific note which marks the Evolutionist appear. The 

 mind of neither of these men is directed to the study of a 

 process in the past. They do not set themselves to tracing 

 and explaining what Goethe and Oken termed the morpho- 

 logy of their subject. I do not mean to assert that they 

 must be wrong, and that Evolutionary historians and critics 

 must be right. My purpose is to insist upon an important 

 difference. 



I admit that there is a danger in the exclusive application 

 of the Evolutionary method, against which both historians 

 and critics must be upon their guard. Absorption in the 

 process we are studying may blunt our sensibility to relative 

 degrees of moral and artistic excellence in the work we have 

 to estimate. We may come to think that the demonstration 

 of development is all that is required of us ; whereas it is 

 only the beginning of our task, the clue that guides us 

 through the labyrinth of research, the principle which gives 

 coherence to our exposition. We may be so interested, for 

 example, in analysing how the dying tree of Italian painting 

 put forth its final shoot in the Bolognese school, that we shall 

 not express a due sense of the relative and intrinsic inferiority 

 of the pictures produced in that decadent age. There is, I 

 repeat, a danger of sacrificing individuality and blunting the 

 edge of critical judgment if we attempt to live too resolutely 



