56 ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 



and beautiful, he will be appreciative of them both, without 

 feeling that the one excludes the other. 



Aristotle laid it down as an axiom that the ultimate verdict 

 in matters of taste is ' what the wise man would decide.' The 

 critic may become a wise man, a m#n of enlightened intelli- 

 gence, <poVt/xo9, by following the line of Goethe's precepts. 

 The uncertainties of private judgment will never be wholly 

 eliminated from criticism. But these will be diminished by 

 the concentration of our minds upon the whole, upon abiding 

 relations. 



In working out self-culture and attaining to a feeling for 

 the whole, the critic may derive assistance from the com- 

 manding philosophical conception of our century. All things 

 with which we are acquainted are in evolutionary process. 

 Everything belonging to human nature is in a state of 

 organic transition, passing through necessary stages of birth, 

 growth, decline, and death. Art, in any one of its grand 

 manifestations, avoids this law of organic evolution, arrests 

 development at the fairest season of growth, arrests the deca- 

 dence which ends in death, no more than does an oak. The 

 oak, starting from an acorn, nourished by earth, air, light, and 

 water, offers indeed a simpler problem than so complex an 

 organism as, say, Italian painting, developed under condi- 

 tions of manifold social and psychological diversity. Yet the 

 dominant law controls both equally. 1 



It is not, however, in evolution that we must look to find 

 the abiding relations spoken of by Goethe. The evolutionary 

 conception does not supply those to students of art, though 

 it unfolds a law which is of permanent and universal applica- 

 tion. It forces us to dwell on inevitable conditions of muta- 

 bility and transformation. It leads the critic to comprehend 

 what is meant by the whole. It encourages the habit of 

 scientific toleration and submission. By it we are saved 

 from uselessly fretting ourselves because of the unavoidable ; 

 from mourning over the decline of Pointed architecture into 

 Perpendicular aridity and Flamboyant feebleness, over the 

 passage of the sceptre from Sophocles to Euripides or from 

 1 This theory has been worked out most fully in the preceding essay. 



