Caracci.  Meanwhile, he resolves to maintain that classics and romantics, the Caracci and Giotto, are alike only worthy of regard in so far as they exemplify the qualities which bring art into the sphere of abiding relations.  One writer is eloquent for Fra Angelico, another for Rubens; the one has personal sympathy for the Fiesolan 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 Pheidias surpasses the sculptors of Antinous, that one Madonna of Gian Bellini is worth all the pictures of the younger Palma, and that Dossi’s portrait of the Ferrarese jester is better worth having than the whole of Annibale Caracci’s Galleria Farnesina.[235] It will even lead us to select for models those works which bear the mark of adolescence or vigorous maturity, as supplying more fruitful sources for our own artistic education.