A man, yet in middle life, can remember with what reverence engravings after Raphael, the Caracci, and Poussin were treated in his boyhood; how Fra Angelico and Perugino ruled at a somewhat later period; how one set of eloquent writers discovered Blake, another Botticelli, and a third Carpaccio; how Signorelli and Bellini and Mantegna received tardy recognition; and now, of late years, how Tiepolo has bidden fair to obtain the European grido.  He will also bear in mind that the conditions of his own development—­studies in the Elgin marbles, the application of photography to works of art, the publications of the Arundel Society, and that genius of new culture in the air which is more potent than all teaching, rendered for himself each oracular utterance interesting but comparatively unimportant—­as it were but talk about truths evident to sight.

Meanwhile, amid this gabble of ‘sects and schisms,’ this disputation which makes a simple mind take refuge in the epigram attributed to Swift on Handel and Bononcini,[234] criticism and popular intelligence have been unanimous upon two points, first, in manifesting a general dislike for Italian art after the date of Raphael’s third manner, and a particular dislike for the Bolognese painters; secondly, in an earnest effort to discriminate and exhibit what is sincere and beautiful in works to which our forefathers were unintelligibly irresponsive.  A wholesome reaction, in one word, has taken place against academical dogmatism; and the study of art has been based upon appreciably better historical and aesthetical principles.

[Footnote 234: 
    ’Strange that such difference should be
    ‘Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.’]

The seeming confusion of the last half-century ought not, therefore, to shake our confidence in the possibility of arriving at stable laws of taste.  Radical revolutions, however salutary, cannot be effected without some injustice to ideals of the past and without some ill-grounded enthusiasm for the ideals of the moment.  Nor can so wide a region as that of modern European art be explored except by divers pioneers, each biassed by personal predilections and peculiar sensibilities, each liable to changes of opinion under the excitement of discovery, each followed by a coterie sworn to support their master’s ipse dixit.

The chief thing is to obtain a clear conception 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 only with that 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 divert his mind from what is transient and ephemeral, must fasten upon abiding relations, bleibende Verhaeltnisse.  He notes that one age is classical, another romantic; that this swears by Giotto, that by the