Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/26

 from 'objective' signs. One scene has a larger percentage than others of verses with eleven syllables. That observation requires no critical insight. Yet I do not suppose that any critic would admit that he was unable to discriminate qualities too delicate to be inferred from counting on the fingers. The point of which I am speaking corresponds to the distinction made by Newman in the Grammar of Assent between the 'Illative Instinct' and such formal reasoning as can be put into syllogisms. He illustrates it by Falstaff's 'babbling of green fields.' Some readers, he says, are certain that this was Shakespeare's phrase, while others hold that they do not recognise the true Shakespearean ring. The certitude of either side is therefore not conclusive for the other. Yet the conviction implies that each reader has so vivid a conception of certain characteristics that the verdict 'this is' or 'this is not Shakespearean' arises spontaneously at a particular phrase. 'Shakespearean,' then, must have a definite though not definable meaning. Something in the turn of thought, in the play of humour, fits in or does not exactly fit in with our image, and we must therefore have such an image—whether like or unlike to the reality.