ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 55 



has become appreciably more catholic, open-minded, and 

 unprejudiced. 



The seeming confusion of the last half-century ought not, 

 therefore, to shake our confidence in the possibility of arriving 

 at stable laws of criticism. Radical revolutions, however 

 salutary, cannot be effected without some injustice to the 

 ideals of the past and without some ill-founded enthusiasm 

 for ideals of the moment. Nor can so wide a region as that 

 of European art be explored except by divers pioneers, each 

 biassed by personal predilections and sensibilities, each liable 

 to paradoxes of peculiar opinion under the excitement of 

 discovery, each followed by a coterie of disciples sworn to 

 support their master's utterances. 



In order to profit by the vast extension of artistic know- 

 ledge in this generation, and to avoid the narrowness of sects 

 and cliques, the main thing for us is to form a clear concep- 

 tion of the mental atmosphere in which sound criticism has to 

 live and move and have its being. ' The form of this world 

 passes ; and I would fain occupy myself with that only which 

 constitutes abiding relations.' So said Goethe; and these 

 words have much the same effect as that admonition of his, 

 'to live with steady purpose in the Whole, the Good, the 

 Beautiful.' The true critic must divest his mind from 

 what is transient and ephemeral, must fasten upon abiding 

 relations, bleibende Verhdltnisse. He notes that one age is 

 classical, another romantic ; that this generation swears by 

 the Caracci, that by Giotto. Meanwhile he resolves to main- 

 tain the truth that classics and romantics, the Caracci and 

 Giotto, are alike worthy of regard only in so far as they 

 exemplify the qualities which bring art into the sphere of 

 abiding relations. One eminent rhetorician is eloquent for 

 Fra Angelico, another for Rubens ; the former has personal 

 sympathy for the Fiesolan monk, the latter for the Flemish 

 courtier. Our true critic divests himself of idiosyncratic 

 whims and partialities, striving to enter with firm purpose 

 into the understanding of universal goodness and beauty. In 

 so far as the works of Fra Angelico and Rubens are good 



