Essays Speculative and Suggestive Author:John Addington Symonds Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ON SOME PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM. WHILE tracing the decline of Italian art at the end of the Renaissance period, and its partial revival under the influences o... more »f the Catholic Reaction, I had occasion to write a chapter on the Bolognese school of painting. This brought before my mind the revolution to which taste is subject, and the apparent uncertainty of critical determinations. To what extent are there principles, I asked myself, by which men eager for the truth can arrive at a sound judgment in aesthetics, steering amid the shoals and billows of opinion ? Or must we confess that literature and art are bound to remain the province of caprice and shifting fashion ? With these doubts in my mind, I wrote the following paragraphs, which I will here resume, inasmuch as they may serve to introduce further discussion. In the history of criticism few things are more perplexing than the vicissitudes of taste, whereby the idols of past generations crumble suddenly to dust, while the despised and rejected are lifted to pinnacles of glory. Successive waves of KSthetical preference, following one another with curious rapidity, sweep the established fortresses of fame from their venerable basements, and raise aloft neglected monuments of genius which lay ercwhile embedded in the quick-sands of oblivion. During the last half-century taste has appeared to be more capricious, revolutionary, and anarchical than at any previous epoch. The unity of orthodox opinion has broken up. Critics have sought to display originality by depreciating names famous in former ages, and by exalting minor stars to the rank of luminaries of the first magnitude. A man, yet in middle life, can remember with what reverence engravings after Raphael, the Caracci, and the Poussins were treated in his boyhood ; how F...« less