"
And again: "As the growth is more and more closely watched and discerned,
we shall more and more clearly see that his metre, his words,
his grammar and syntax, move but with the deeper changes of mind and soul
of which they are outward signs, and that all the faculties of the man
went onward together. . . . This subject of the growth,
the oneness of Shakespeare . . . is the special business of the present,
the second school of Victorian students . . . as antiquarian illustration,
emendation, and verbal criticism were of the first school.
The work of the first school we have to carry on, not to leave undone;
the work of our own second school we have to do." Into this study,
thus outlined by the founder of the New Shakespeare Society,
Lanier threw himself with unabated zeal.
The fact is all the more remarkable when we compare his writing on Shakespeare
with Swinburne's book published during the same year. Swinburne has
only words of contempt for the investigations of the New Shakespeare Society,
whom he characterizes as "learned and laborious men who could hear
only with their fingers. They will pluck out the heart, not of Hamlet's,
but of Shakespeare's mystery by the means of a metrical test; and this test
is to be applied by a purely arithmetical process. . . . Every man,
woman, and child born with five fingers on each hand was henceforward
better qualified as a critic than any poet or scholar of time past."
He calls them "metre-mongers" and the "bastard brood of scribblers".
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