ON SOME PEINCIPLES OF CRITICISM 57 



Tasso to Marino, over the chaos of mannerism and eclecticism 

 into which Italian painting plunged from the height of its 

 maturity. Our toleration and acceptance of inevitable change 

 need not involve the loss of discriminative perception. We 

 can apply the evolutionary canon in all strictness without 

 ignoring that adult manhood is preferable to senile decrepi- 

 tude, that Pheidias surpasses the sculptors of Pergamos, that 

 one Madonna of Gian Bellini is more valuable than all the 

 pictures of the younger Palma, and that Dosso Dossi's por- 

 trait of the Ferrarese jester is better worth having than the 

 whole of Annibale Caracci's Galleria Farnesina. It will even 

 lead us to select for models and for objects of special study 

 those works which bear the mark of adolescence or of vigorous 

 maturity, as being more perfectly characteristic of the type 

 and more important for an understanding of its specific 

 qualities. 



Nevertheless, not in evolution, but in man's soul his 

 intellectual and moral nature must be sought those abiding 

 relations which constitute great art, and are the test of right 

 aesthetic judgment. These are such as truth, simplicity, 

 sobriety, love, grace, patience, modesty, repose, health, vigour, 

 brain-stuff, dignity of thought, imagination, lucidity of vision, 

 purity and depth of feeling. Wherever the critic finds these 

 whether it be in Giotto at the dawn or in Guido at the 

 nightfall of Italian painting, in Homer or Theocritus at the 

 two extremes of Greek poetry he will recognise the work 

 as ranking with those things from which the soul draws 

 nourishment. 



The claims of craftsmanship on his attention are not so 

 paramount. It is possible to do great work in art through 

 many different styles, and with very various technical equip- 

 ments. The critic, for example, must be able to see excellence 

 both in the frigidly faultless draughtsmanship of Ingres 

 and in the wayward anatomy of William Blake. At the 

 same time, craftsmanship is not to be neglected. Each art 

 has its own vehicle of expression, and exacts some innate 

 or acquired capacity for the use of that vehicle from the artist. 

 The critic must therefore be sufficiently versed in technicalities 



