The Secret of Charlotte Brontë / Followed by Remiiscences of the real Monsieur and Madame Heger

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Secret of Charlotte Brontë, by Frederika Macdonald
E-text prepared by Clare Graham & Laura McDonald (http://www.girlebooks.com) and Marc D'Hooghe (http://www.freeliterature.org)
AUTHORESS OF 'XAVIER AND I,' 'THE ILIAD OF THE EAST' 'A NEW CRITICISM OF J.-J. ROUSSEAU,' 'THE FLOWER AND THE SPIRIT,' 'THE HUMANE PHILOSOPHY OF ROUSSEAU,' ETC.

'And now I will rehearse the tale of Love, which I heard from Diotima of Mantineia, a woman wise in this, and many other kinds of knowledge.... '... What then is Love, I asked: Is he mortal? He is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean between the two, she replied. He is a great Spirit, and, like all spirits, an intermediate between the divine and the mortal. And what, I said, is his power? He interprets, she replied, between gods and men; conveying to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men; and to men the commands and replies of the gods. And who, I said, is his father? and who is his mother? His father, she replied, was Plenty (Poros), and his mother Poverty (Penia), and as his parentage is, so are his fortunes. He is always poor, and has no shoes, nor a house to dwell in; on the bare earth exposed he lies under the open heaven, in the streets, or at the doors of houses, taking his rest, and like his mother he is always in distress. Like his father, too, he is bold, enterprising,—a philosopher at all times, terrible as an enchanter, sorcerer, sophist. As he is neither mortal nor immortal, he is alive and flourishing one moment, and dead another moment; and again alive, by reason of his father's nature. ' ( Symposium . Plato's Dialogues . Translator, Jowett, vol. ii. pp. 54, 55.)

We live in an epoch when impressionist methods of criticism, admissible, and often illuminative, in the domains of art and of imaginative literature, have invaded the once jealously guarded paths of historical criticism, to the detriment of correct standards of judgment. Leading critics, whose literary accomplishments, powers of persuasive argument, and unquestionable good faith, lend great influence to their decisions, show no sort of hesitation in undertaking to interpret the characters and careers of famous men and women, independently of any examination of evidence, by purely psychological methods. I am not denying that, as literary exercises, some of these impressionist portraits of men and women of genius, seen through the temperament of writers who are, sometimes , endowed with genius themselves, are very interesting. But what has to be remembered (and what is constantly forgotten) is, that if these psychological interpretations of people who once really existed are to be accorded any authority as historical judgments, they must have been preceded by an attentive enquiry, enabling the future interpreter, before he begins to employ psychology, to feel perfectly certain that he has clearly in view the particular Soul he is undertaking to penetrate, with its own special qualities, and placed amongst, and acted upon by, the real circumstances of its earthly career. Where the preliminary precaution of this enquiry, into the true facts that have to be penetrated, and explained, has been neglected, no psychological subtlety, no pathological science, no sympathetic insight, can protect the most accomplished literary impressionist from forming, and fostering, false opinions about the historical personages he is judging from a standpoint of assumptions that do not allow him to exercise the true function of criticism, defined by Matthew Arnold as: 'an impartial endeavour to see the thing as in itself it really is.'