n monk, the other for the
Flemish courtier. Our true critic renounces idiosyncratic whims and
partialities, striving to enter with firm purpose into the understanding
of universal goodness and beauty. In so far as he finds truth in
Angelico and Rubens, will he be appreciative of both.

Aristotle laid it down as an axiom that the ultimate verdict in matters
of taste is 'what the man of enlightened intelligence would decide.' The
critic becomes a man of enlightened intelligence, a [Greek: phronimos],
by following the line of Goethe's precepts. In working out self-culture,
he will derive assistance by the way from the commanding 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 phases of birth,
growth, decline, and death. Art, in any one of its specific
manifestations--Italian painting for example--avoids this law of organic
evolution, arrests development at the fairest season of growth, averts
the decadence 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 Italian
painting, developed under conditions of manifold diversity. Yet the
dominant law controls both equally.

It is not, however, in evolutions that we must seek 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
permanent and of universal application in the world at large. It forces
us to dwell on necessary conditions of mutability and transformation. It
leads the critic to comprehend the whole, and encourages the habit of
scientific tolerance. We are saved by it from uselessly fretting
ourselves because of the ungodly and the inevitable; from mourning over
the decline of Gothic architecture into Perpendicular aridity and
flamboyant feebleness, over the passage of the scepter from Sophocles to
Euripides or from Tasso to Marino, over the chaos of Mannerism,
Eclecticism and Naturalism into which Italian painting plunged from the
height of its maturity. This toleration and acceptance of unavoidable
change need not imply want of discriminative perception. We can apply
the evolutionary canon in all strictness without ignoring that adult
manhood is preferable to senile decrepitude, that