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, masculine or
feminine terminations discoverable in a given amount of verse from the
same quarter prove of much use or benefit to an adult reader of common
intelligence. What such an one requires is the guidance which can be
given by no metremonger or colour-grinder: the suggestion which may help
him to discern at once the cause and the effect of every choice or change
of metre and of colour; which may show him at one glance the reason and
the result of every shade and of every tone which tends to compose and to
complete the gradual scale of their final harmonies. This method of
study is generally accepted as the only one applicable to the work of a
great painter by any criticism worthy of the name: it should also be
recognised as the sole method by which the work of a great poet can be
studied to any serious purpose. For the student it can be no less
useful, for the expert it should be no less easy, to trace through its
several stages of expansion and transfiguration the genius of Chaucer or
of Shakespeare, of Milton or of Shelley, than the genius of Titian or of
Raffaelle, of Turner or of Rossetti. Some great artists there are of