intellectual business and found in it the
chief spiritual delight of my whole life, I can hardly think myself less
qualified than another to offer an opinion on the metrical points at
issue.

The progress and expansion of style and harmony in the successive works
of Shakespeare must in some indefinite degree be perceptible to the
youngest as to the oldest, to the dullest as to the keenest of
Shakespearean students. But to trace and verify the various shades and
gradations of this progress, the ebb and flow of alternate influences,
the delicate and infinite subtleties of change and growth discernible in
the spirit and the speech of the greatest among poets, is a task not less
beyond the reach of a scholiast than beyond the faculties of a child. He
who would attempt it with any chance of profit must above all things
remember at starting that the inner and the outer qualities of a poet's
work are of their very nature indivisible; that any criticism is of
necessity worthless which looks to one side only, whether it be to the
outer or to the inner quality of the work; that the fatuity of pedantic
ignorance never devised a grosser absurdity than the attempt to separate
aesthetic from scientific criticism by a strict line of demarcation, and
to bring all critical work under one or the other head of this exhaustive
division. Criticism without accurate science of the thing criticised can
indeed have no other value than may belong to the genuine record of a
spontaneous impression; but it is not less certain that criticism which
busies itself only with the outer husk or technical shell of a great
artist's work, taking no account of the spirit or the thought which
informs it, cannot have even so much value as this. Without study of his
forms of metre or his scheme of colours we shall certainly fail to
appreciate or even to apprehend the gist or the worth of a painter's or a
poet's design; but to note down the number of special words and cast up
the sum of superfluous syllables used once or twice or twenty times in
the structure of a single poem will help us exactly as much as a naked
catalogue of the colours employed in a particular picture. A tabulated
statement or summary of the precise number of blue or green, red or white
draperies to be found in a precise number of paintings by the same hand
will not of itself afford much enlightenment to any but the youngest of
possible students; nor will a mere list of double or single,